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-tron-00244	Pope Francis: All Dogs Go to Heaven	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/pope-francis-all-dogs-go-to-heaven/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Pope Francis: All Dogs Go to Heaven – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-00534	A photograph shows Subtropical Storm Alberto approaching Pensacola Beach in Florida.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-this-alberto-approaching-pensacola-beach/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This an Image of Subtropical Storm Alberto Approaching Pensacola Beach?	29 May 2018	None	['Pensacola_Beach,_Florida']
-snes-05390	A 15-year-old girl named Rosemary Gullett is missing from her Portland, Oregon, home.	outdated	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/missing-child-rosemary-gullett/	None	Uncategorized	None	David Mikkelson	None	Missing Child: Rosemary Gullett	10 January 2016	None	['Oregon', 'Portland,_Oregon']
-snes-01936	Walmart placed a sign urging kids to "own the school year like a hero" right over a gun display.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walmart-sign-over-gun-display/	None	Business	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did Walmart Place a Sign Over a Gun Display Urging Students to ‘Own the School Year Like a Hero’?	9 August 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-15191	"Peachtree and Pine is one of the leading sites for tuberculosis in the nation."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2015/aug/19/kasim-reed/tb-real-concern-controversial-atlanta-shelter/	Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has made no secret of wanting to close the homeless shelter at Peachtree and Pine streets. Reed, who has been active in downtown’s post-Recession resurgence, says he’ll push for the city to acquire the property through eminent domain and turn it into a police precinct and fire station. Health concerns are a major reason for closing the Peachtree-Pines shelter, Reed said during a lunchtime speech to Atlanta’s Commerce Club on Tuesday, Aug. 11. "Peachtree and Pine is one of the leading sites for tuberculosis in the nation," he told the crowd. Reed said top officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently asked to meet with him and "laid out how tuberculosis cases, not in Georgia, but across America, are being traced back to Peachtree and Pine." Could Peachtree-Pine, billed as the largest homeless shelter in the Southeast, be a leading site for tuberculosis in the nation? PolitiFact decided to do some checking. First a little background. The homeless are prime candidates for tuberculosis because they typically have greater exposure to cold weather, are in crowded conditions when they stay in shelters and lack proper nutrition and medical care. That means shelters, such as Peachtree-Pine, have to be vigilant to avoid becoming breeding grounds for TB, which is spread person to person through the air and caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis. TB normally attacks the lungs, but also can strike the kidney, spine, brain or another body part. In most cases, tuberculosis is treatable and curable, although people can die if they don’t receive the proper treatment. Most people live with the bacteria, or latent TB infection, without feeling sick or showing symptoms. In 2014, 9,412 new tuberculosis cases were reported in the U.S., 334 in Georgia, according to the CDC. A new drug-resistant strain of TB was discovered in 2008 at the shelter at Peachtree and Pine, which is run by the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. The strain was labeled G05625 TB by the CDC. The research To fact check Reed’s statement, we reached out to Fulton County government, the CDC, the mayor’s office and the Georgia Department of Public Health, as well as shelter management. Anita Beaty, Peachtree-Pine’s executive director, rejects Reed’s assessment of the shelter and says it is "100 percent compliant" with CDC protocol for spotting, treating and avoiding the spread of TB. She said Reed and the business community have conspired for years to force the shelter to close so they can take over its prime location, just south of Midtown and in sight of the Fox Theatre. Tuberculosis has been a worry at all Atlanta and Fulton County shelters, not just Peachtree-Pine, for years. But alarm bells apparently really started going off after an uptick in TB cases last year. "At a time when the incidents of tuberculosis has been declining across the metropolitan Atlanta area and the rest of Georgia, it has actually increased in Fulton County," Brenda Fitzgerald, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, wrote Fulton County Commission Chair John Eaves in April. A month later, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were sitting down for the first of two meetings with Reed about the ongoing TB problem generally, and Peachtree-Pine specifically. "Our inability to control (the Peachtree-Pine) outbreak has led to infections in multiple other states," Philip A. LoBue and Jonathan Mermin, doctors with the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, wrote Reed after they met in May. Based on interviews, data and documents that PolitiFact reviewed, here’s a summary of the major points. -- Since 2008, new cases of the drug-resistant strain of TB that originated at the Peachtree-Pine shelter have turned up in metro Atlanta and Georgia as well as eight other states -- Alabama, California, Florida, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. (Genotype evidence, similar to a fingerprint, exists for every strain of TB, and that’s how every new case of G05625 in the state and nation can be traced to the Peachtree-Pine shelter. Similarly, that’s how the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 201, was traced back to a 2-year-old from a small village in Guinea who died in 2013 and who became known around the world as Patient Zero.) -- At Fulton County’s four shelters, the number of TB cases rose by 230 percent, from 13 in 2013 to 43 in 2014. Twenty-two of the 43 cases, or slightly more than 50 percent, were at Peachtree-Pine. (The CDC defines a large outbreak as being 10 or more cases, CDC spokesman Brian Katzowitz said.) -- The number of drug-resistant G05625 tuberculosis cases, those linked to Peachtree-Pine, grew 10-fold from 2013 to 2014, from two to 23. -- Fulton County accounted for 82 percent of all cases of that strain of tuberculosis in Georgia and 69 percent of all cases of the strain in the United States. -- At least four clients of the Peachtree-Pine shelter, according to Fitzgerald, have died of tuberculosis since early 2014. In her letter to Eaves, Fitzgerald said, public health researchers identified the homeless shelter at the corner of Peachtree and Pine Streets "as a major source of the current outbreak. "If it [tuberculosis] gains a foothold in the community, then the cost in healthcare and human suffering will be incalculable," she wrote. Jessica A. Corbitt-Dominguez, director of external affairs for Fulton County government, said Fulton health workers, in conjunction with officials from the Georgia Department of Public Health and CDC, responded to the outbreak with an aggressive campaign of education, testing and treatment. Anyone with active disease was relocated from the shelters while in treatment under the supervision of Fulton Health and Wellness. The county set up special teams that make daily visits to shelters to perform screenings and administer medicines, Corbitt-Dominguez said. In June 2015, the county health department also signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with four shelters, including Peachtree and Pine. This was considered a significant step since a lack of administrative controls and protocols is considered a likely contributor to the spread of TB. As of this month, the number of 2015 confirmed TB cases at Fulton homeless shelters is 13, Corbitt-Dominguez said. Beaty’s attorney last week provided reporters with a certificate showing the shelter is fully in compliance with the CDC’s TB protocol, and Beaty told PolitiFact "it’s ludicrous to think we wouldn’t be on it." Corbitt-Dominguez confirmed that the shelter has never been cited by the county, although Eaves has said there have been concerns about the shelter’s TB safeguards. In a letter to Fitzgerald, he wrote that the shelter’s administration "routinely exhibits sub-optimal administration of the procedures required to control the spread of this disease." Beaty said Reed’s statement makes clear he "is just not getting good information." "We have been cleared by Fulton County, which is on site every day to monitor. And we’ve got 100 percent clearance from the CDC’s requirements," she said. "We resent those easy headlines that have no basis in fact and that marginalize homeless people in our facilities." Tom Andrews, president of the non-profit Mercy Care, which operates 14 clinics, some associated with shelters, said the strain of TB originating at Peachtree-Pine has to be a major concern. Since it is medicine-resistant, it requires a more expensive and longer treatment program, Andrews said. The CDC estimates that the costs of treating a person with TB increases with greater resistance. Direct costs in 2010 U.S. dollars average from $17,000 to treat drug-susceptible TB to $430,000 to treat the most drug-resistant form, according to the agency’s website. So is it a national leader in TB? We asked the mayor’s office for evidence to back up Reed’s statement that Peachtree-Pine "is one of the leading sites for tuberculosis in the nation." Anne Torres, his spokeswoman, provided us copies of the letters from Fitzgerald and the doctors, as well as a highly technical report from the CDC. We reached out to the CDC. A spokesperson said agency officials would not comment on the mayor’s public statements. CDC officials also would not identify the states where they said the TB strain from Peachtree-Pine had spread. We were able to obtain that list from the Georgia Department of Public Health, as well as the number of cases of G05625 strain TB in each state from 2008 to 2014. The most were in Florida (14), followed by California (8) and North Carolina and Alabama (2 each). New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and South Carolina each reported one case in the five years -- for a total of 30 in the eight states in five years. But do 30 cases over a several-year period raise Peachtree-Pine to a leading site of TB in the nation? We posed that question to Philip Hopewell, a leading tuberculosis expert and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "Peachtree and Pine is clearly a major site for transmission of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and it may be one of the leading sites in the nation," Hopewell said. "However, there are not data from every such facility in the country," he added. "To say that the Atlanta facility is one of the leading sites in the country -- it probably is -- implies that there are data with which to compare the Atlanta facility. Thus, strictly speaking, what he said can't be backed with evidence. Even so, I wouldn't fault the mayor for saying this." Our ruling Mayor Kasim Reed said "Peachtree and Pine is one of the leading sites for tuberculosis in the nation." Thirty cases of a medicine-resistant strain of TB in eight states have been traced back to the shelter at Peachtree and Pine. The shelter also had a large share of the cases in a recent TB outbreak in Fulton County and four TB deaths, according to state data. CDC officials clearly believe it’s a concern, but a leading tuberculosis expert says there’s a dearth of comparative data. We rate Reed’s statement Mostly True.	None	Kasim Reed	None	None	None	2015-08-19T00:00:00	2015-08-11	['None']
-snes-02608	An increased number of men have contracted homosexuality after eating ‘pastel colored Easter eggs.’	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gays-lacing-easter-eggs/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Gays Are Lacing Easter Eggs with Homosexual-Inducing Food Colorings?	15 April 2017	None	['None']
-pose-00786	"As governor, I will implement a total gift ban for executive branch employees to send a strong signal to Georgians that we will not be subject to undue influence."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/georgia/promises/deal-o-meter/promise/817/no-gift-policy-for-himself-and-staff/	None	deal-o-meter	Nathan Deal	None	None	No gift policy for himself and staff	2011-01-06T16:27:46	None	['None']
-tron-00236	Smithsonian Admits Destroying Giant Human Skeletons	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/smithsonian-admits-destroying-giant-human-skeletons/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Smithsonian Admits Destroying Giant Human Skeletons – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01000	Caitlyn Jenner Running For Political Office?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-jenner-running-office-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Caitlyn Jenner Running For Political Office?	12:00 am, May 15, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01749	"Global warming is a hoax."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/aug/01/lenar-whitney/republican-congressional-hopeful-says-global-warmi/	Can a 10-year-old debunk "the greatest deception in the history of mankind?" One congressional hopeful thinks so. A five-minute video outlining the beliefs of Republican Lenar Whitney, a Louisiana state representative running for U.S. Congress, has been making its rounds on the Internet over the past couple of days. And what does Whitney think is a big-government "scam" and "conspiracy"? The video’s title says it all: "Global Warming is a Hoax." "Energy security is real, global warming is not. It is merely a strategy designed to give more power to the executive branch while increasing taxes in a progressive stream to regulate every aspect of American life," Whitney says in the video. The video might not have received much national attention if it weren’t for a Washington Post column in which David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report called Whitney "the most frightening candidate (he’s) met in seven years interviewing congressional hopefuls." On top of frightening, Wasserman -- who has interviewed more than 300 congressional candidates -- called her "fact-averse." Whitney is running for an open seat that represents parts of Baton Rouge. The race is attracting a large field of candidates that includes former Gov. Edwin Edwards, a Democrat who served time in prison for racketeering. We’ve lost track of how many times we’ve fact-checked climate change denial claims and found them to be False or Pants on Fire. (See here, here and here.) But given that it's still being talked about, we thought it was worth reviewing the evidence again. Whitney's video offers some specific pieces of evidence that are in need of debunking. The hoax We talked to several climate scientists who said Whitney’s claim was "laughable," "deeply misguided," "uninformed," "disgusting" and "absurd." So is there a mass conspiracy to pull the wool over the world’s eyes? It seems highly unlikely, considering the numerous studies that show overwhelming consensus among respected scientists that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is indisputable. Among climate researchers most actively publishing scientific articles, at least 97 percent believe in anthropogenic climate change, found one 2009 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a scientific journal. The study examined published scientific articles and surveyed experts. The study says that the few "contrarian" scientists are a vocal, but small, minority. They also found that those scientists denying human-caused climate change tend to have less expertise in the subject than those who believe in it. Another survey out of the University of Illinois found that 82 percent of earth scientists (out of more than 3,000 respondents) believe that global temperature shifts are human-caused. Among climate-specific earth scientists who responded, 97.4 percent said they believe in human-caused climate change. "It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes," the 2009 report said. "The challenge, rather, appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact to policymakers and a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists." Beyond the surveys, there is a consensus among the world’s premier science organizations -- such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society in London -- that human-caused global warming is real, said Riley Dunlap, an environmental sociology professor at Oklahoma State University. (Not to mention NASA, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.) Dunlap co-authored a study published in 2013 that found a strong link between conservative think tanks and climate change denial books. It also found that a growing number of these books are produced by people with no scientific training, and nearly 90 percent of the books examined did not go through a peer review process, meaning they were not subjected to scientific scrutiny. And the consensus is not limited to just scientists. For example, Admiral James Locklear, commander of American naval forces in the Pacific, told the Boston Globe last year that climate change and rising sea levels are the biggest long-term security threat to the region. Recently, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who served under former President George W. Bush, wrote a column in the New York Times urging lawmakers to take action to combat climate change for the sake of the economy. David Jenkins, president of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship, said there is no legitimate reason to doubt the severity of climate change. "A true conservative would be prudent, listen to the experts and take action to address the threat," Jenkins said. His group aims to foster understanding about the environment among conservatives. Some conservatives say global warming is real, but has not risen to levels portrayed by the Obama administration, such as Chip Knappenberger, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank. Knappenberger said that what’s questionable is how much of a threat human carbon emissions pose and whether proposed regulations will do more harm than good. Climate change skeptics’ talking points have evolved since the 1990s as the scientific evidence has grown, said Dunlap, who has been studying public opinion of climate change for 20 years. They first said the Earth wasn’t warming. Then they said the Earth was warming, but it’s not caused by human activity. Now, many agree with the science, but it’s not that big of a problem. "But in (Whitney’s) case, she’s reverting to some of the most primitive statements," Dunlap said. Her evidence? Whitney’s supporting evidence used in her video is too simplistic to be meaningful. Here's a few of her pieces of evidence: "Any 10 year old can invalidate their thesis with one of the simplest scientific devices known to man: a thermometer. The Earth has done nothing but get colder each year since the film’s release," she said, referring to former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 global warming film An Inconvenient Truth. Global temperatures have "paused" growth over the past several years, but to say this is proof global warming isn’t real is cherry-picking. As we’ve previously reported, 12 of the past 15 years have been the hottest years on record, according to NASA. Tied for the top are 2005 and 2010. (Even the source that Whitney’s campaign pointed us to agreed that there has been no significant cooling trend in the past few years.) The past 150 years have been characterized by overall warming, with intermittent periods of slowed warming or cooling, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "Fifty years from now, and assuming that carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise at current rates, the period of slower warming from the late 1990s (of 2006) to present will appear as just another blip on the overall pattern of warming," he said. Whitney also said, "Last summer, Antarctica reached the coldest temperature in recorded history." Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center did record the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth: about -135 degrees fahrenheit. But Serreze said this is one temperature taken at one location, so it has little to do with global warming. It was more a triumph of technology, because a satellite recorded the temperature remotely. And Whitney said there is "record sheet ice and a 60 percent rise of ice in the Arctic sea." Serreze said Whitney likely meant "sea ice," which has had record highs in recent years. Sheet ice refers to land-based features, like Greenland and Antarctica. But this also doesn’t disprove global warming. Ozone depletion and greenhouse gases intensifies westerly winds and drives them south, which causes sea ice in Antarctica to extend further north, wrote Guy Williams, a sea ice specialist at the University of Tasmania, in a Washington Post column last month. In the Arctic Sea, the minimum ice extent (measured in September) for 2013 was about 50 percent higher than it was in 2012, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. But 2012’s minimum ice extent was a record low in the satellite era, so even though Arctic ice extent grew, it was still far below average in 2013. Overall, sea ice (measured every September via satellite) has decreased about 13 percent each decade since 1981, Serreze said. Whitney mentions a trove of leaked emails from the University of East Anglia in England between some of the world’s leading climate scientists. She says the 2009 emails prove global warming is a "scam," and scientists faked and hid data. But several investigations concluded that there was no data manipulation, despite climate change skeptics’ claims. A bonus: Jenkins pointed out that the thermometer Whitney holds up in her video is not a weather thermometer, but a medical thermometer. Our ruling Whitney said, "global warming is a hoax." There is an overwhelming consensus among respected scientists that human-caused global warming is real, and Whitney’s supporting evidence falls flat. We rate this claim Pants on Fire.	None	Lenar Whitney	None	None	None	2014-08-01T12:08:57	2014-06-25	['None']
-pomt-00665	Says that as president, Barack Obama has not gone to the Texas-Mexico border	false	/wisconsin/statements/2015/may/13/scott-walker/scott-walker-says-barack-obama-has-never-been-texa/	During a trip through the crucial presidential state of Iowa, Gov. Scott Walker did an interview on April 25, 2015 with Caffeinated Thoughts, a website that says it looks at "culture, current events, faith and politics from a Christian and conservative point of view." When Walker was asked about his position on immigration reform, he began his answer by saying: "Number of things. Border security for sure. Unlike this president, I’ve actually gone to the border and been there with the governor of Texas," Walker said, referring to a trip he made a month earlier. Wait, what? Immigration has long been a huge national issue. Barack Obama has been president for more than six years. Is Walker right that Obama has never been to the Texas-Mexico border? Walker’s evidence AshLee Strong, spokeswoman for Our American Revival, the group Walker created in anticipation of a campaign for president, responded to our request for information to back Walker’s statement. She essentially tried to modify the governor’s claim by narrowing the time frame, saying Obama "chose not to go to the border while he was in Texas in 2014 during a humanitarian crisis" at the border. Walker, of course, made a much broader claim. But let’s start with his evidence: a July 9, 2014 CBS News report. On the day the report was posted online, Obama arrived in Texas for a previously planned two-day trip that was to involve talking to Texans about the economy and attending Democratic fundraisers. At the time, there had been a surge in the number children and teens from Central America crossing the Mexico-U.S. border unaccompanied by a parent. Many of the youths fled drug violence at home, but faced new challenges in the United States because the border patrol system wasn’t equipped to handle them, according to news reports. Changes in policy to expand legal residence opportunities in the United States for undocumented youth may have led some families to send younger family members on the journey north. Because of the crisis at the border, Obama altered his plans to include a meeting, in Dallas, with then-Gov. Rick Perry and local officials to discuss the situation at the border. But Obama -- resisting calls from lawmakers in both parties -- did not visit the border, although several senior members of his administration had done so. More to the point of Walker’s claim, however, the news report he cited also said Obama had visited the border in May 2011. We found that Obama visited El Paso on May 10, 2011. (Our colleagues rated as True his statement during his speech there that the Border Patrol had doubled the number of its agents since 2004.) A Washington Post report on the speech said Obama was "standing within sight of Mexico" and that it was his his first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border as president. That was his only visit to the border as president. Our rating Walker said that "unlike this president, I've actually gone to the (Texas) border." Obama certainly hasn’t been a frequent visitor, but as president he did go to the border once, in May 2011 to give a speech on immigration reform. We rate Walker’s statement False. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s web page. More on Scott Walker For profiles and stories on Scott Walker and 2016 presidential politics, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Scott Walker page.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2015-05-13T11:45:13	2015-04-25	['None']
-pomt-11167	Marc Molinaro "has cut taxes, his budget now is lower than it was six years ago" in Dutchess County	half-true	/new-york/statements/2018/may/24/edward-cox/race-governor-molinaros-record-taxes-and-spending/	Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro, a Republican running for governor, wants to cut state spending and reduce taxes for New York state residents. That’s something he’s already done in his county, State Republican Chairman Edward F. Cox said. "He has really done very well in each of the offices he’s held, particularly as the county executive of Dutchess County, where he has cut taxes, his budget now is lower than it was six years ago," Cox said in a radio interview. Molinaro has been the top elected official in Dutchess County since 2012. He has been a vocal critic of Medicaid and unfunded mandates from the state that drive up local property taxes. He wants the state to shoulder more of the cost for those services. At the same time, he wants to cut state spending to keep state taxes low. Is Cox right that Molinaro has already cut spending and property taxes in Dutchess County? Property Taxes A spokesperson for Cox pointed to the county’s approved budgets while Molinaro’s been in office. This year’s budget in Dutchess County reduced both the county property tax rate for residents and the tax levy for the fourth consecutive year, according to budget documents. But his first two budgets increased property taxes by about 2 percent in 2013 and again in 2014. The lower tax rates and levies don’t mean property taxes have gone down for every resident in Dutchess County. Property tax bills are a combination of taxes levied by the county and each municipality. While the county’s tax levy has gone down, some local taxes may have increased. Property taxes levied by Poughkeepsie, for example, rose by 16.5 percent in 2017. Total spending Dutchess County spending, on the other hand, has gone up every year Molinaro has been in office. Total spending increased by about 6 percent between his first budget and 2017, according to the county's budget office. Total spending for 2018 won't be known until next year. Part of that is mandated spending by the state. Budget documents show the cost of mandated services has increased by close to $3 million since 2015. Cox’s spokesperson said he was thinking about the county’s workforce when he said total spending was down in Dutchess County. Molinaro has approved cuts in the county workforce since taking office. Budget documents show the county planned to employ 1,753 full-time employees in 2018, down from 1,823 when Molinaro took office. Our ruling Cox said Molinaro has cut taxes and spending as Dutchess County Executive. He’s right that county property taxes are lower. But spending has risen more than 6 percent since Molinaro's first budget. Cox’s claim is partially accurate. On balance, we rate it Half True. EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this article used numbers from county budget documents to show changes in spending. Those numbers did not reflect the county's actual expenses, the county's budget office said. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Edward Cox	None	None	None	2018-05-24T08:27:18	2018-05-01	['None']
-snes-02180	Indiana Muslims are appalled by a billboard displaying a list of deeds by the Prophet Muhammad even though it is accurate.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/indiana-muslims-muhammads-deeds/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	Are Indiana Muslims Appalled by an ‘Accurate’ List of Muhammad’s Deeds?	19 June 2017	None	['Muhammad']
-snes-00723	Did a Daredevil Ride a Motorcycle Across Lake Como?	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/daredevil-ride-motorcycle-lake-como/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did a Daredevil Ride a Motorcycle Across Lake Como?	24 April 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-11224	"Tammy Baldwin cosponsored legislation that wanted to establish the Department of Peace and Nonviolence."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2018/may/09/kevin-nicholson/sen-tammy-baldwin-did-back-department-peace-kevin-/	While defending his criticism of military veterans who support Democrats, Kevin Nicholson also attacked Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin -- the Democrat whose job he wants. Nicholson was interviewed May 4, 2018 by Dan O’Donnell, who hosts a conservative talk show on WISN-AM in Milwaukee. Nicholson, a first-time candidate and former Marine, said: Tammy Baldwin cosponsored legislation that wanted to establish the Department of Peace and Nonviolence. That’s a fundamentally unserious answer to a serious question -- the question being, How do we keep the American people safe? She’s going to have to answer for that in this election. I’m going to make sure that she does. Nicholson made essentially the same claim about Baldwin and the Department of Peace in another Milwaukee radio interview two days earlier. Moreover, both Nicholson and state Sen. Leah Vukmir -- the two Republicans vying in the August 2018 primary to challenge Baldwin three months later -- are trying to portray Baldwin as extreme. So is an outside group -- although we rated Mostly False its claim that Baldwin "supported legislation allowing citizens to withhold funding for our troops." As we’ll see, Baldwin did back the Department of Peace legislation, which the Washington Post called the "Hope Diamond of liberal ideas: pure, breathtaking and highly impractical in the real world." But it’s important to note that Baldwin’s most recent cosponsorship was before she left the House for the Senate, and that as a senator she has backed certain national defense measures. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter: @PolitiFactWisc The legislation To back Nicholson’s claim, his campaign cited Baldwin’s cosponsorship, as a member of the U.S. House, of the 2007 version of the Department of Peace and Nonviolence Act. It was introduced by then-U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. (Baldwin for 14 years held the Madison-area House seat now held by Democrat Mark Pocan. She joined the Senate in 2013.) In 2009, Kucinich introduced a similar measure, the Department of Peace Act. Baldwin cosponsored it and she cosponsored the 2011 version. The 2012 Post article said that with the $10 billion-a-year Department of Peace: A secretary of peace would sit in the president’s Cabinet and on the National Security Council. The secretary would be given a special new role in the country’s military decisions: If a conflict was about to start, the secretaries of defense and state would have to consult the Peace secretary "concerning nonviolent means of conflict resolution." The Congress.gov summary of the bill said the department’s mission would be to: Hold peace as an organizing principle; endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; and develop policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict. The bills were referred to committee, but no other actions were taken. In response to Nicholson’s claim, Baldwin’s campaign told us the peace secretary also would have been charged with developing policies to address domestic violence and reduce incarceration; and the campaign said that one of the nation’s founding fathers, Benjamin Rush, had promoted the idea of a peace secretary. More fact checks on the Senate candidates: Kevin Nicholson Tammy Baldwin Leah Vukmir And though she is far from being a hawk, Baldwin has been out front on certain defense measures: Pressing President Donald Trump in late 2017 to fund Wisconsin-made Littoral Combat Ships. Touting her vote for the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, saying it strengthens national security. Our rating Nicholson says Baldwin "cosponsored legislation that wanted to establish the Department of Peace and Nonviolence." Baldwin did cosponsor, as a member of the House before joining the Senate, the 2007, 2009 and 2011 versions of those bills, which did not become law. But it’s important to note, in terms of Nicholson’s suggestion that the cosponsorships were Baldwin’s answer to national security problems, that Baldwin has supported some defense-spending measures, as well. We rate Nicholson’s statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Kevin Nicholson	None	None	None	2018-05-09T06:00:00	2018-05-04	['Tammy_Baldwin']
-pomt-13769	"Forty-three million Americans are on food stamps."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/21/donald-trump/trump-43-million-americans-food-stamps/	For all of the spending in Washington under President Barack Obama, the American people are not better off, Donald Trump argued in his July 21 speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination. "President Obama has almost doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing," Trump said. "Yet what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in third-world condition, and 43 million Americans are on food stamps." We wanted to fact-check his statistic about Americans using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the program formerly known as food stamps. SNAP benefits provide vouchers for groceries for qualifying low-income Americans. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, counted almost 43.6 million people in the program in April 2016, the most recent data available. So Trump is on point, numbers-wise. But there’s a dollop more to the story. The amount of people on food stamps, while considerable, is an improvement. When Obama took office in January 2009, almost 32 million people received SNAP benefits. The number increased during the Great Recession as more families turned to the program for assistance, averaging an annual high of 47.6 million participants in 2013. A report by the Food Research & Action Center, a hunger and nutrition advocacy group, applauded the 43 million figure in April as the lowest level of participants since October 2010. From April 2015 to April 2016, participation is down 1.9 million participants. We explained in a previous fact-check that it’s unclear whether SNAP sign-ups would have been just as high under a Republican president, as the economy was weakening before Obama took office. The beneficiary pool was already increasing under President George W. Bush, whose administration broadened eligibility criteria and tried to get more Americans to apply for SNAP assistance. The Republican policy platform approved at the RNC recommends breaking the SNAP program away from the USDA and the farm bill, under which funding for the program is usually negotiated in Congress. As an independent entity, SNAP would be more vulnerable to budget cuts. Our ruling Trump said, "Forty-three million Americans are on food stamps." The number of SNAP participants has been falling in recent years amid the economic recovery, but Trump is reciting the most recent participation. We rate Trump’s claim True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/6e08da4b-58b2-458b-8403-14758e05183c	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-07-21T22:42:37	2016-07-21	['None']
-pomt-09523	"We have billions in surplus."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/feb/12/rick-perry/perry-says-texas-has-surplus/	Republican Gov. Rick Perry, running for re-election, claims the "tough conservative decisions" he’s made during his tenure have been a boon to the state, resulting in surplus revenue. "Today, we have billions in surplus," he says in a TV ad that debuted Monday. Is that right? Seems like just the other day — as in last month — Republican leaders including Perry asked state agencies to suggest possible budget cuts due to an anticipated revenue shortfall. Perry’s campaign cites a Nov. 24 report by Texas State Comptroller Susan Combs forecasting the state would have $8.2 billion in its Economic Stabilization Fund by Aug. 31, 2011. The so-called rainy day fund, which voters created in 1988, held $7.6 billion as of Feb. 9. The fund is fed almost exclusively by oil and natural-gas production taxes; revenue above a certain level is automatically diverted to it. That revenue soared during the past decade, allowing billions to accumulate. So the state now has billions in reserve. But a healthy rainy day fund doesn’t always mean there’s a surplus built to last. Sherri Greenberg, a former Democratic state representative who served on the House Appropriations Committee, said that the excess oil and gas taxes are "not the same as a surplus" because they aren’t necessarily "revenues coming in that exceed what our expenditures are going to be." Greenberg, who lectures at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, noted too that it’s not easy to tap the fund. In the 2011 session, Lawmakers will legally be permitted to dip into the fund for any reason by two-thirds' votes of the House and Senate. If they're faced with revenue running short of what's needed to fund the current (2010-11) budget, they can take money from the fund by getting three-fifths' votes of each body. The same reduced threshold applies to tapping the fund if state revenue for the 2012-13 fiscal years is projected to run short of revenue that comes in during 2010-11. Other fiscal decisions take simple majority votes. Besides, experts expect lawmakers to be facing a revenue shortfall by the time they write the next two-year state budget in 2011. Factors at play include the need to continue covering the costs of a statewide school property tax cut approved in 2006 and the unlikelihood of fresh federal stimulus aid, some of which helped lawmakers balance the budget last year. John O’Brien, director of the Legislative Budget Board, which advises legislators on budget matters, recently estimated that the current pace of spending will exceed incoming revenue by $11 billion by the time the 2012 fiscal year begins on Sept. 1, 2011. State sales-tax collections are already running $1 billion behind what Combs projected they would be at this time. On Jan. 15, Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Joe Straus instructed state agencies to submit budget-reduction plans by Feb. 15 for the start of next fiscal year. As they have done in the past, lawmakers could tap the rainy day fund to reconcile the gap. Faced with a similar $10 billion revenue shortfall in 2003, lawmakers also made painful budget and program cuts, including consolidating 12 health and human service agencies into five. "The point of the rainy day fund is to have it there in case there’s a need," Perry spokesman Mark Miner said. "Just like we did in 2003, we’ll cut spending and take measures to balance the budget." The upshot: Perry’s correct for the moment in that the state has socked away billions in the Economic Stabilization Fund. But his surplus claim implies Texas is awash in cash — suggesting at least enough to continue government operations. He knows better. We rate Perry’s statement as Barely True. Update: The description above of how money can be spent from the so-called rainy day fund reflects a clarification from what we originally posted. In the 2011 session, Lawmakers will legally be permitted to dip into the fund for any reason by two-thirds' votes of the House and Senate. If they're faced with revenue running short of what's needed to fund the current (2010-11) budget, they can take money from the fund by getting three-fifths' votes of each body. The same reduced threshold applies to tapping the fund if state revenue for the 2012-13 fiscal years is projected to run short of revenue that comes in during 2010-11. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2010-02-12T20:46:31	2010-02-08	['None']
-pomt-07181	"Every year the state loses 8,000-10,000 acres of land in bear country."	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2011/jun/10/new-jersey-sierra-club/new-jersey-sierra-club-claims-state-loses-8000-100/	The ongoing dispute between the New Jersey Sierra Club and state officials goes beyond whether the state should host another bear hunt this year. It’s also about how they each define "bear country." To the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, "bear country" refers to where the December 2010 hunt took place in seven northern New Jersey counties. To New Jersey Sierra Club Director Jeff Tittel, "bear country" extends to bear habitats in points further south. The questions surrounding "bear country" stem from the Sierra Club’s recent comments regarding habitat loss. In a press release opposing another hunt this year, the Sierra Club offered a list of ways to manage New Jersey’s bear population, including "protecting habitat." "Every year the state loses 8,000-10,000 acres of land in bear country," according to a May 17 press release. "The more we build houses in the middle of the woods where bears live, the more conflict we will see between bears and humans." That estimate of acreage loss caught the attention of PolitiFact New Jersey, especially since New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the country. Whether the Sierra Club’s numbers are accurate hinges on that original question -- where is "bear country?" First, let’s start with how the Sierra Club arrived at its habitat loss figures. Tittel told us in an email that the Sierra Club’s estimate was based on annual land losses compiled through the the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis at Rutgers University. In his email, Tittel said the Sierra Club looked at the "Northern and Western Counties of NJ that have Bears." By acres lost, Tittel said he was referring to acres developed and fragmented by development, such as the impacts to the edge of a forested area. But when PolitiFact New Jersey examined the recent research done by the center, the Sierra Club’s numbers didn’t add up -- at least when looking at the seven counties where the 2010 bear hunt occurred. Between 2002 and 2007, the combined urban growth in those seven counties totaled 4,780 acres per year -- not the 8,000-to-10,000 figure cited by the Sierra Club, according to a July 2010 report from the center director and another professor. But the total impact on bear habitat goes beyond just the number of acres developed, said Rowan University associate professor John Hasse, who co-authored the July 2010 report. Each acre developed affects wildlife habitat in the surrounding area, Hasse said. The Sierra Club misfired in terms of growth where the 2010 bear hunt occurred, but Tittel told PolitiFact New Jersey that "bear country" -- there’s that phrase again! -- is larger than where the hunt took place. Tittel argued that sizable bear populations also exist in four other counties not included in the 2010 hunt. When combining the annual growth rates in those counties with the figures from the counties where the 2010 hunt occurred, the new total is 8,806 acres per year, according to the center’s report. "Bear Country is where there are (breeding) populations and good habitat, not where there is a hunt," Tittel wrote in a May 23 email. But DEP spokesman Larry Ragonese said "bear country" should be defined as where last year’s hunt occurred. The bear population has been the most predominant in northwest New Jersey, he said. Yet DEP records back up Tittel’s point that bears can be found outside of where the hunt was held. Bears can find suitable habitats in southern parts of New Jersey, and the most recent DEP statistics show bear activity in seven counties not included in the 2010 hunt. Despite the questions surrounding acreage loss estimates, the Sierra Club correctly states that habitat loss will lead to greater conflicts between bears and humans. Development creates easier access to food for the bruins, increasing their birth rate and survivability, said Larry Katz, a professor of animal sciences at Rutgers University. "We move into an area and we create more habitat," Katz said. "They’re not frightened off by us." Before we give the Sierra Club its rating on the Truth-O-Meter, let’s remember something about all that land being lost to development -- construction activity has taken a sharp downturn in New Jersey and across the country. According to a report prepared by the New Jersey Department of Labor & Workforce Development, the number of residential building permits authorized in New Jersey decreased by about 50 percent from 25,400 in 2007 to 12,396 in 2009. Back to the Sierra Club’s statement, let’s review: The environmental organization said between 8,000 and 10,000 acres annually is lost to development in "bear country," citing the research done by the Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis. But in the counties where the 2010 bear hunt was held, the center’s research pegged growth at 4,780 acres per year. When you throw in figures from other counties mentioned by Tittel, the acreage loss fits within the 8,000-10,000 range in the Sierra Club’s original statement. State records show bear activity in counties outside of last year’s hunting areas. One professor acknowledged that the loss of bear habitat goes beyond the number of acres developed. The Sierra Club’s underlying point -- habitat loss leads to more bear-human conflicts -- also is in line with the perspective of an animal sciences professor. Still, the Sierra Club’s argument about the pace of development is undercut by the decline in construction activity statewide. We rate the statement Half True. To comment on this ruling, join the conversation at www.NJ.com.	None	New Jersey Sierra Club	None	None	None	2011-06-10T05:01:00	2011-05-17	['None']
-pomt-00076	"Soros Letter Reveals Plot to ‘Take Down Borders’ with Migrant Caravan Invasions"	pants on fire!	/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/nov/01/blog-posting/2015-letter-doesnt-reveal-soros-plot-use-migration/	A viral blog post claims that billionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist George Soros has been "plotting since 2015 to use migrant caravan blitzkriegs to achieve the goal of ‘taking down national borders.' " The Oct. 21 article, posted to NewsPunch.com, shows a photo of Soros photoshopped onto a crowd of people. The article’s headline claims, "Soros Letter Reveals Plot to ‘Take Down Borders’ with Migrant Caravan Invasions," in reference to the nearly 7,000 people making their way to the United States-Mexican border that originated in Honduras two weeks ago. This story was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) The post received over 900 interactions and been shared over 280 times, CrowdTangle data show. The blog post’s author is listed as "Thomas Williams," who has also authored recent posts like, "Doctor Blows Whistle on ‘Disastrous’ Flu Shot – ‘It’s Designed to Spread Cancer,’" published Oct. 20. No contact info for Thomas Williams is displayed on the site, and a domain lookup does not reveal who the website is registered to. The article claims that, "As the Left continues to lose the battle for America’s soul, its greatest champions are going all-out in an attempt to turn the tide any way they can – even if it means destroying the country." The author cites a November 2015 Breitbart London article as proof of Soros’ goal of "wiping out all national borders." NewsPunch claims that Soros said this "following an accusation made last week" by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. NewsPunch is taking Soros’ statement from 2015 out of context. In October 2015, Orban accused Soros of being part of a group of "activists" that "weakens nation states." "These activists who support immigrants inadvertently become part of this international human-smuggling network," Bloomberg Business reported Orban saying at the time. In response, Soros emailed a statement to Bloomberg Business, defending his position. Orban’s plan, Soros wrote at the time, "treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle." In his statement, Soros doesn’t say his goal is "wiping out all national borders," like NewsPunch claims. Soros, who was born in Hungary to a Jewish family and lived through the Nazi invasion, does give financial support to organizations that provide legal assistance to immigrants seeking asylum. As a student at the London School of Economics in 1947, Soros studied the work and philosophy of Karl Popper, author of "The Open Society and its Enemies." As Soros wrote in a lecture he delivered at the Central European University in 2009 and later published as part of a book, he was attracted to the notion that the truth is not the domain of any one ideology: "Ideologies that claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth are making a false claim; therefore, they can be imposed on society only by compulsion. All such ideologies lead to repression. Popper proposed a more attractive form of social organization: an open society in which people are free to hold divergent opinions and the rule of law allows people with different views and interests to live together in peace. Having lived through both German and Russian occupation here in Hungary, I found the idea of an open society immensely attractive." That is not the same thing as supporting the destruction of national borders. The NewsPunch article is nearly identical to a Nov. 6, 2015, Natural News article titled, "George Soros letter reveals globalist plan to destroy the First World by eliminating national borders with global migrant blitzkreig invasions." However, included in the NewsPunch article is a screenshot from a video that has gone viral after being tweeted by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., on Oct. 17. 2018. The video depicts cash being handed out to people, and NewsPunch included a screenshot of it with the caption "A man pays members of the migrant caravan in cash." Gaetz claimed the footage was from Honduras and mentions Soros in his tweet, writing "Time to investigate the source!" As PolitiFact has reported, the footage is from Chiquimula, Guatemala, not Honduras, and shot outside a store that sells auto parts. Bloggers have falsely claimed that the migration was funded by Democrats. Open Society Foundations, an international grantmaking network founded by Soros in 1979, denied Gaetz’s claim that Soros or his philanthropies are funding the migration. "Neither Mr. Soros nor Open Society are funding this effort. We do support the historic U.S. commitment to welcoming people fleeing oppression and violence in their homelands," Open Society Foundations wrote in an Oct. 18 tweet. Our ruling NewsPunch claimed that Soros’ 2015 statement to Bloomberg Business in response to Orban’s accusations, "Reveals Plot to ‘Take Down Borders’ with Migrant Caravan Invasions." The blog post is conflating a three-year-old statement made by Soros with the current migration to the United States-Mexico border, attempting to draw a connection between the two that isn’t there. We rate this statement as Pants on Fire!	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-11-01T14:14:05	2018-10-21	['None']
-goop-02423	Jessica Simpson Third “Baby On Board” Claim Is Tru	10	https://www.gossipcop.com/jessica-simpson-third-baby-pregnant/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Jessica Simpson Third “Baby On Board” Claim Is NOT True	11:47 am, September 24, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-06530	"Not a single banker, a CEO from Wall Street, anyone from corporate America — nobody, (there was) not one arrest of any of these people who brought down the economy in 2008."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/07/michael-moore/no-ceos-have-been-arrested-bringing-down-economy-s/	Protests under the slogan "Occupy Wall Street" have spread from New York to cities across the United States, and their common theme is expressing anger at an unjust economic system. But Occupy Wall Street isn't your typical protest action. The group has no list of demands, and it says it has no leaders. Rather, people are organizing through social media and making decisions by consensus. Protesters say they're following the model of Egyptian protesters and others who were part of the Arab Spring. An Occupy Wall Street website proclaims, "This site has nothing to do with us." But it also states the one thing protesters have in common: "We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%." Independent filmmaker Michael Moore recently spoke to protesters in Lower Manhattan, and then discussed the movement on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now radio show. She asked Moore what he thought of police arrests of the protesters. Here's what Moore had to say: "Well, it's highly ironic that now over 100 of the protesters have been arrested and not a single banker, a CEO from Wall Street, anyone from corporate America — nobody, not one arrest of any of these people who brought down the economy in 2008. Who created schemes, financial schemes that not only destroyed the economy, but took away the future of this generation, of this young man and his children in the future. They have completely ruined it for people while they have become filthy rich. Not one of them arrested, but 100 of these people who have stood up non-violently against this madness, and they're arrested? This just boggles the mind." We read the same sentiment repeated on Twitter from people supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement's protests. We've noticed news reports before that have noted a general lack of prosecutions. But we wanted to know if Moore and others were right that not a single banker or corporate executive had been arrested. So we decided to check it out. To summarize our findings, we found a few prosecutions, but not many. And we wouldn't describe the targets as the people who were responsible for bringing down the economy. The most notable prosecutions If you're looking for arrests and prosecutions against executives associated with the biggest banks, you won't find them. And we found no arrests of execs with the firms most widely associated with the financial crisis such as Countrywide, AIG or Lehman Brothers. The highest-profile convictions we found were from Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, which was a mortgage lending firm based not on Wall Street, but in Ocala, Fla. Its former chairman, Lee B. Farkas, was convicted of directing nearly $3 billion in fraud that put thousands out of work and contributed to the collapse of Colonial Bank. The collapse was the sixth-largest bank collapse in U.S. history. A judge sentenced Farkas to 30 years in prison on June 30, 2011. Several other executives associated with the firm pleaded guilty in related cases. There were also criminal charges brought against two hedge fund managers at Bear Stearns, who were accused of lying to investors and put on trial for securities fraud. But a jury acquitted them in 2009, and the two men were mid-level managers, not top executives. There have been many other prosecutions of mortgage fraud and insider trading. The U.S. Justice Department pointed us to its StopFraud.gov website, and sent us a long list of other ongoing actions against mortgage fraud, investment fraud, insider trading and other corporate offenses. But the cases have not involved the highly prominent executives Moore described as bringing down the U.S. economy. (We contacted Moore for comment but did not hear back.) Why not more prosecutions? In reviewing the research and talking to experts about why there have not been more prosecutions associated with the financial crisis, we found several reasons. For one thing, such cases tend to be difficult, and it's not immediately clear what offenses executives could be charged with. "You can't get up in front of a jury and say, 'These guys were responsible for bringing down the economy, so please convict them of a crime,'" said Samuel Buell, a professor of law at Duke University, who studies criminal law and the regulation of corporations and financial markets. Criminal intent can be particularly hard to prove, and federal officials may be struggling to bring specific charges against individuals who believed they were following the law. Buell dismissed the idea that the Obama administration is simply indifferent to corporate crime. "There's no downside to putting a few people in prison and showing you're tough on corporate crime," he said. "You can only imagine that would be a political benefit to this administration, which makes me think the only thing holding them back is problems of proof. The last thing they would want to do is bring a big, splashy case against the banks, and then lose and be called incompetent." William Black, a professor of law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law who studies elite financial fraud, was involved in a string of successful prosecutions against savings and loan officials back in the 1980s. He said the problem now is that financial regulators are not working closely enough with prosecutors to investigate and bring charges against executives. "It is hard, and it does take resources, and it takes expertise in fraud mechanisms so you can explain it to a jury," Black said. "But this is frankly easier than the savings and loan crisis. There's nothing complicated about a liar's loan." Black said that back in the 1980s, financial regulators routinely referred information to prosecutors to prosecute savings and loan executives. That hasn't happened this time around. Earlier this year, the New York Times published a detailed report on why there have not been more high-profile prosecutions; it's the single best report we've seen on the issue. Its investigation found stark differences between how prosecutors and regulators handled the S&L crisis and how the same authorities are handling the current crisis. (See this chart comparing the two eras.) It also included a list of potential crimes suggested by legal experts outside of the federal government. As we were looking into this issue, President Barack Obama spoke about whether federal efforts have been strong enough when it comes to prosecuting crimes associated with the financial crisis. Jake Tapper of ABC News asked him to respond to the Occupy Wall Street protesters and their anger that the Obama administration hasn't been more aggressive with prosecutions. "One of the biggest problems about the collapse of Lehmans and the subsequent financial crisis and the whole subprime lending fiasco is that a lot of that stuff wasn't necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless. That's exactly why we needed to pass Dodd-Frank, to prohibit some of these practices," Obama said. (Dodd-Frank was an overhaul of the finance industry that Obama signed into law on July 21, 2010.) "The financial sector is very creative, and they are always looking for ways to make money. That's their job. And if there are loopholes and rules that can be bent and arbitrage to be had, they will take advantage of it. So without commenting on particular prosecutions -- obviously that's not my job; that's the Attorney General's job -- I think part of people's frustrations, part of my frustration, was a lot of practices that should not have been allowed weren't necessarily against the law, but they had a huge destructive impact. And that's why it was important for us to put in place financial rules that protect the American people from reckless decision-making and irresponsible behavior." Our ruling Moore said, "Not a single banker, a CEO from Wall Street, anyone from corporate America — nobody, (there was) not one arrest of any of these people who brought down the economy in 2008." Well, there have been a few arrests. Certainly the executives of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker who were arrested would qualify as "corporate America." But Moore's larger point is correct -- there have been very few arrests among executives of firms the public would associate with causing the financial crisis. Obama implied in his recent remarks that it was because many of their actions weren't criminal. Whatever the cause, we rate Moore's statement Mostly True.	None	Michael Moore	None	None	None	2011-10-07T09:39:16	2011-09-28	['United_States', 'Wall_Street']
-farg-00495	“Robert Mueller resigns after Clinton and Obama’s treachery is revealed.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/peddling-mueller-misinformation/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Saranac Hale Spencer	['fake news']	Peddling Mueller Misinformation	October 27, 2017	2017-10-27 18:47:50 UTC	['Robert_Mueller', 'Bill_Clinton', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-12571	Before the presidential campaign, "I didn't know Steve (Bannon)."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/12/donald-trump/did-he-or-didnt-he-trump-contradicts-himself-wheth/	President Donald Trump wavered in his support for White House aide and strategist Steve Bannon in an interview with The New York Post on Tuesday, following stories of a rift forming between Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. "I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late," Trump said. "I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist, and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary. "Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will," Trump said. Trump "didn’t know Steve"? That’s an altogether different story than Trump told when he first hired Bannon, a former top editor at the conservative website Breitbart, onto his campaign staff last fall. It also directly contradicts the public record. Trump announced the hiring of Bannon and adviser Kellyanne Conway as part of the Trump campaign on Aug. 17, 2016. Here’s what he said at that time: "I have known Steve and Kellyanne both for many years. They are extremely capable, highly qualified people who love to win and know how to win," Trump said. "I believe we’re adding some of the best talents in politics, with the experience and expertise needed to defeat Hillary Clinton in November and continue to share my message and vision to Make America Great Again. I am committed to doing whatever it takes to win this election, and ultimately become President because our country cannot afford four more years of the failed Obama-Clinton policies which have endangered our financial and physical security." So, in Trump’s own words he either "didn’t know Steve," or he has "known Steve … for many years." One of those claims is clearly wrong. Rebecca Berg of RealClearPolitics provides the answer. She reported the day after Bannon’s hiring by the campaign that Bannon first met Trump in 2011, when Trump was considering whether to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012. In later years, Bannon hosted a radio program in which Trump was a frequent guest, Berg reported. "As Breitbart grew, Mr. Trump was constantly in touch with Steve about news articles and doing interviews with his reporters," David Bossie, president of the conservative advocacy nonprofit Citizens United, told RealClearPolitics. The Washington Post counted nine times that Trump appeared as a guest on Bannon's radio show. That version of events is corroborated by The New Yorker. "In 2011, David Bossie, the head of the conservative group Citizens United, introduced Trump to Bannon; at the time, Trump was thinking about running against Obama. Bannon and Trump met at Trump Tower and discussed a possible campaign. Trump decided against the idea, but the two kept in touch, and Bannon gave Trump admiring coverage. Bannon noticed that, when Trump spoke to crowds, people were electrified. Bannon began to think that Trump might be "the one" who could shake up American politics." Reporters who covered the Trump campaign were puzzled by Trump's retelling of events. "Trump claiming he didn't know Bannon till late in campaign is flatly untrue," tweeted Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. Added McKay Coppins of The Atlantic: "Just for the record: Trump is pretty blatantly not telling the truth when he says he didn't know Bannon until late in the campaign." We've reached out to the White House and will update this post if we hear back. Our ruling Trump said that before the presidential campaign, "I didn’t know Steve," referring to Steve Bannon. That’s contradicted by Trump’s own words and independent reporting. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-04-12T08:46:38	2017-04-11	['None']
-snes-03508	A video showing an inconsolable protester wailing because a policeman popped her balloon.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/liberalism-summed-up-in-10-seconds/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Liberalism Summed Up in 10 Seconds	20 November 2016	None	['None']
-snes-03779	Donald Trump donated food and supplies to Lumberton, North Carolina, and other towns ravaged by Hurricane Matthew.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-lumberton-nc/	None	Politics	None	David Emery	None	Donald Trump Donated Food, Supplies to Victims of Hurricane Matthew in North Carolina	17 October 2016	None	['North_Carolina']
-abbc-00275	The ABS data was fitted by Associate Professor Olivier to a time series interrupted by the ABCC.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-15/fact-check-abcc-and-industrial-disputes-michaelia-cash/7310994	The ABS data was fitted by Associate Professor Olivier to a time series interrupted by the ABCC.	['building-and-construction', 'industrial-relations', 'unions', 'liberals', 'australia']	None	None	['building-and-construction', 'industrial-relations', 'unions', 'liberals', 'australia']	Fact check: Did industrial disputes fall under the ABCC and rise after it was abolished?	Mon 18 Apr 2016, 2:26am	None	['None']
-goop-00664	Cher Angry At Robert De Niro Over Restaurant Snub?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/cher-robert-de-niro-feud-restaurant-snub-nobu/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Cher Angry At Robert De Niro Over Restaurant Snub?	5:50 pm, July 10, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-12580	"Last month, we saw a 64 percent reduction in illegal immigration on our southern border."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/10/donald-trump/trump-illegal-immigration-down-64-percent-march-tr/	President Donald Trump says the country is continuing to make "historic progress" to curb the flow of illegal immigration along the southern border. "We inherited a full-fledged border crisis. It was a disaster," Trump said in his weekly radio address April 7. "Yet, with quick and bold steps, we have so far exceeded even the most bullish predictions for the progress we could make in so short a period of time. Last month, we saw a 64 percent reduction in illegal immigration on our southern border." It wasn’t the first time Trump claimed he inherited a mess, or that he’s turned things around at the border. He’s recently emphasized statistics to show decreases in illegal immigration. In March, he said illegal immigration was down 61 percent since Election Day (Mostly True) and down 40 percent since his first month in office (Mostly True). Is Trump’s story getting even better? What we found is that Trump is changing how he's doing the counting in a way that emphasizes progress. The ‘64 percent reduction’ To get to the 64 percent reduction, Trump isn’t looking at the decrease from February 2017 to March 2017, as he did when he talked about the decrease between January and February. Instead, he’s looking at the year-over-year reduction (March 2016 vs. March 2017), the White House told us. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show that in March 2017 border patrol made 12,193 apprehensions at the southwest border. In March 2016, there were 33,316 apprehensions. That’s a 63.4 percent decrease year-over-year. Add in people who were deemed inadmissable to the country and you reach 64 percent. But if you looked at the decrease from February 2017 to March 2017, as Trump did last month, the drop would not have been as dramatic. From February 2017 to March 2017, border patrol apprehensions dropped about 35 percent, not 64 percent. Point being, Trump picked the number that showed the biggest decrease, when last month he calculated the figure a different way. Importantly, a listener to Trump's weekly radio address would have no way of knowing Trump changed his measuring stick. Aside from the specific numbers, Trump’s rhetoric and tough immigration stance can be credited for the decreases, experts have told us. But they caution against making early conclusions about the effect Trump’s policies have had. Changes on the ground usually take longer to materialize, experts said. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Oh, Canada? While data backs Trump’s claim of decreases at the U.S.-Mexico border, the northern border has actually seen an increase in illegal immigration. "As we increasingly secure the southern border, won't that put more pressure on the northern border and other ports of entry?" Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., asked John Kelly, Department of Homeland Security secretary, during an April 5 Senate committee hearing on border security and public safety. Kelly said security concerns were not at the same level in the northern border as they are in the southern border. But that sector also needs attention, he said. "We obviously need to watch it, one of the things the Canadians recently did was to allow ... Mexicans to travel to Canada without visas and we're seeing a little bit of increase in Mexicans coming illegally into the United States from the north," Kelly said. (Since Dec. 1, 2016 Mexicans do not need a visa to visit Canada.) In all fiscal year 2016, there were 2,283 border patrol apprehensions at the northern border, compared to 408,870 at the southern border. Our ruling Trump said, "Last month, we saw a 64 percent reduction in illegal immigration on our southern border." It depends on how you define last month. The White House said Trump was speaking about year-over-year changes, from March 2016 to March 2017. Border patrol apprehensions declined 63.4 percent during that time. But if you looked at the decrease from February 2017 to March 2017, as Trump did just a month earlier, the decrease was about 35 percent. That difference would be lost on a listener. We rate Trump’s statement Half True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-04-10T18:23:43	2017-04-07	['None']
-pomt-12597	"Finally, I will continue to fight against Republicans like Martina White, who like Trump, wants to deport all of our hard working immigrant brothers and sisters and white wash America."	pants on fire!	/pennsylvania/statements/2017/apr/05/brian-sims/philly-rep-sims-martina-white-wants-deport-all-imm/	Not long after squaring off against Pa. Rep. Martina White in a Fox 29 debate over sanctuary cities last week, Rep. Brian Sims sent a fundraising message attacking her further. "Finally," the message read, "I will continue to fight against Republicans like Martina White, who like Trump, wants to deport all of our hard working immigrant brothers and sisters and white wash America." "All" immigrants? Has White ever suggested she wanted to deport every immigrant? This is a quick fact-check. In short, White has not suggested this, something Sims spokesperson Dan Siegel acknowledged in a phone conversation, admitting that White had never said it. She hasn’t introduced or supported any legislation that would lead to the deportation of all immigrants, either. White’s discussion of any policy involving immigration has mostly been limited to sanctuary cities. Last week, she reintroduced a bill that would strip hundreds of millions in state funding from Philadelphia if it continues to not fully cooperate with federal immigration officials as part of its sanctuary city status. She emphasized in a statement responding to Sims’ fundraising message she supports legal immigration and has never suggested all immigrants be deported. "I find it disgusting that Rep. Sims would try to raise money by blatantly lying about me and using such derogatory terms about a fellow legislator," she said. "The fact is that I fully support and welcome legal immigration, and - as a state Representative - I do not weigh in on federal government policy regarding undocumented immigrants presently in our country. "My concern is rogue public officials who violate federal law to further their own agendas. Perhaps Rep. Sims should spend more time focusing on protecting the people of Philadelphia and upholding the law he took an oath to follow instead of lying and playing politics." Siegel compared White to Trump, pointing out the similarities of her sanctuary cities bill and the president’s executive order threatening to slash federal funding from sanctuary cities. "I think it’s fair to say that she views an America that is very homogeneous," Siegel said, "and I think her actions have shown that she doesn’t have a whole lot of respect for folks who have come to this country and tried to build a life here." Our ruling Rep. Brian Sims claimed in a fundraising message fellow state Rep. Martina White "wants to deport all of our hard working immigrant brothers and sisters and white wash America." White has never said anything like this or supported legislation that could lead to the deportation of all immigrants. A spokesperson for Sims acknowledged White had not said this, and White said she supported legal immigration. This isn’t the first time Sims stretched the truth in a fundraising message. Last spring, while asking for donations, he claimed "right-wing extremists" were trying to take his seat, though no Republicans were running for his seat and his Democratic competitors were similarly progressive. We rule the claim Pants On Fire. Share the Facts Politifact 6 7 Politifact Rating: Pants on Fire "Finally, I will continue to fight against Republicans like Martina White, who like Trump, wants to deport all of our hard working immigrant brothers and sisters and white wash America." Brian Sims State Rep. In a fundraising message Friday, March 31, 2017 03/31/2017 Read More info	None	Brian Sims	None	None	None	2017-04-05T09:07:52	2017-03-31	['United_States', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-snes-05743	Disney animators drew Jessica Rabbit without underwear in a few frames of 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit.'	legend	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/who-stripped-jessica-rabbit/	None	Disney	None	David Mikkelson	None	Who Stripped Jessica Rabbit	6 August 1996	None	['None']
-pose-00834	Will "pool the costs of energy efficiency projects from multiple property owners to deliver special financing rates to make energy efficiency projects that save energy and money."	not yet rated	https://www.politifact.com/ohio/promises/fitz-o-meter/promise/866/promote-energy-efficiency/	None	fitz-o-meter	Ed FitzGerald	None	None	Promote energy efficiency	2011-01-20T13:56:11	None	['None']
-snes-02167	A photograph shows a group of children in South Africa giving a meerkat a bath.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/meerkat-bath-photograph/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This a Meerkat Getting a Bath?	21 June 2017	None	['South_Africa']
-huca-00016	 "The Liberals are putting the safety of all Canadians at risk by allowing (ISIL) fighters to return to Canada and proposing a 'reintegration program' and support services for them." 	a lot of baloney	https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/11/30/conservatives-dishing-a-lot-of-baloney-over-liberal-approach-to-isil-members-returning-to-canada_a_23292889/?utm_hp_ref=ca-baloney-meter	None	None	Conservative deputy leader Lisa Raitt	None	None	Conservatives Dishing 'A Lot Of Baloney' Over Liberal Approach To ISIL Members Returning To Canada	11/30/2017 09:56 EST	None	['Canada']
-pomt-04379	"I’ve got a 94 percent" career voting record in Congress while Bill Nelson has "a 92 percent voting record."	true	/florida/statements/2012/oct/19/connie-mack/connie-mack-says-his-career-voting-participation-p/	U.S. Rep. Connie Mack IV, R-Fort Myers, has been the target of attacks for missing votes while campaigning for Senate this year. In a debate against his Democratic opponent Sen. Bill Nelson on Oct. 17, 2012, Mack defended himself by saying that his career voting record was on par with Nelson’s. Mack started in Congress in 2005, while Nelson served in the House between 1979 and 1990 and then joined the Senate in 2001. Here’s what they said at the debate: Nelson: "Speaking of votes why don’t you explain how you don’t show up to work? Why don’t you explain how this year you have one of the worst voting records. I have missed one vote this year. You have missed 178...." Mack: "As far as my voting record, Senator, you should be straight with people. I’ve got a 94 percent voting record. You’ve got a 92 percent voting record." We will fact-check Mack’s claim that he’s got "a 94 percent voting record" for his career in Congress, while Bill Nelson has "a 92 percent voting record." Missed votes in 2012 This fight over voting records started earlier in the debate when Nelson claimed that he only missed one vote while Mack missed 178, which meant he has "one of the worst voting records." We ruled that claim Mostly True; we’ll briefly recap our findings. GovTrack.us tracks missed votes for members of Congress using voting information from the official websites of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. It shows that for the first three quarters of this year, Mack missed 178 votes. Nelson’s one missed vote this year was to confirm the nomination of a federal judge in Illinois, which passed 86-1 on May 14. Mack’s missed votes for this year put him in 13th place for members of Congress who have missed the most votes during the past two years, according to the New York Times’ Inside Congress database. But it’s no surprise that Mack missed more votes than Nelson this year. While Nelson had token primary opposition, Mack faced serious primary challengers. In July, Mack campaign spokesman David James said that Mack missed votes "to make sure Mitt Romney won the Florida presidential primary in January, something Connie's constituents felt very strongly about when it comes to invoking the change we need in Washington." Missed votes throughout career Looking at sheer vote numbers isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison because the House takes more votes than the Senate. So we also looked at the percentage of missed votes for Mack’s tenure and Nelson’s Senate tenure. From the start of Mack’s tenure in January 2005, he missed 6 percent of roll call votes -- that’s how Mack can claim that he has a 94 percent voting record. During Nelson’s Senate tenure starting in January 2001, he missed 1 percent. The median missed votes for all members was 2.5 percent. But Mack’s claim that Nelson had a 92 percent voting record -- or missed 8 percent of votes -- refers to his term in the House (1979-1990) plus his term in the Senate starting in 2001. Here’s why Mack likes to throw in those earlier years for Nelson: When Nelson campaigned for governor in 1990, he missed 56 percent of his votes. Mack campaign consultant Gary Maloney sent us a spreadsheet showing Nelson’s missed votes and his voting participation rate each year based on Congressional Quarterly data. According to that data, Nelson participated about 92 percent of the time. We contacted CQ directly, and they could not immediately verify the raw number of votes but did provide the percentage of missed votes each year, and that averaged out to about 92 percent, too. (Note that averaging the percentage each year isn’t a true average, because the total number of votes changed each year, but it likely provides a close approximation.) We sent our findings to the Nelson campaign and they did not dispute the numbers. Our ruling Mack said that his own career voting participation rate is 94 percent, while Nelson’s is 92 percent. The available data supports those numbers. Both candidates have political reasons for times when they missed votes: Nelson missed more than half of his votes in 1990 when he ran for governor. Mack missed about 30 percent so far this year running for Senate. So while Nelson criticized Mack for missed votes this year, Nelson has also missed votes in the past, and their career voting rates are roughly equivalent. We rate this claim True.	None	Connie Mack	None	None	None	2012-10-19T15:09:11	2012-10-17	['United_States_Congress', 'Bill_Nelson']
-hoer-00088	Straight Ticket Voting On 06 November 2012 US General Election	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/straight-party-ticket-warning.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Misinformation Regarding Straight Ticket Voting On 06 November 2012 US General Election	November 1, 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-07686	"Secretly, unbeknownst to members of Congress, over $105 billion was hidden in the Obamacare legislation."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/mar/08/michele-bachmann/michele-bachmann-charges-health-care-bill-spent-10/	Tea party favorite Michele Bachmann used a recent appearance on Meet the Press to attack the health care law for what she said was secret spending. "It is shocking the revelations of all the money that's been spent," said Bachmann, R-Minn. "There is a Congressional Research Service report that just was issued in February, and we discovered that secretly, unbeknownst to members of Congress, over $105 billion was hidden in the Obamacare legislation to fund the implementation of Obamacare. This is something that wasn't known." Just in case you missed her point, she said the number "$105 billion" seven more times, and waved a sign that said "$105,464,000,000." Readers e-mailed us immediately, asking us to fact-check whether it was true. We contacted Bachmann’s office to ask where she got the number, but we didn’t get a response. So we turned to a February report from the Congressional Research Service titled, "Appropriations and Fund Transfers in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)." The $105 billion To explain the report’s findings, we should first tell you a little bit about how federal spending works when it comes to authorizations versus appropriations. Laws can either authorize money to be spent, appropriate money, or both authorize and appropriate. An authorization means it’s legally permissible to spend money on a particular program; an appropriation actually supplies the money. The real power lies in appropriation. House members like Bachmann had hoped to stop the new health care law by simply refusing to fund it with appropriations. What they’re finding out, though, is that doing so won’t shut the money spigot entirely, since the law already included some appropriations and transfers from other sources when it passed. The CRS report detailed the programs that received funding in the bill. (Fund transfers work a little differently than appropriations, but the important thing for analyzing Bachmann’s comment is that they both provided immediate funding.) The CRS report doesn’t add up all the numbers, but we did, and we got $104 billion -- very close to Bachmann’s number. A few programs are funded contingent on adjustments for inflation, so the grand total can vary a bit. The largest chunk of funding, $40 billion, went to the state Children’s Health Insurance Program, to fund it for 2014 and 2015. (Soon after President Barack Obama took office in 2009, Democrats approved funding through 2013.) A new Prevention and Public Health Fund -- a state-based effort aimed at preventing chronic disease -- got the second biggest chunk, $15 billion over 10 years. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation got $10 billion over 10 years to test payment and service-delivery models that might reduce health care spending and improve care. The "shocking" revelation But is that $105 billion a "shocking" revelation -- something that "wasn’t known" and passed "secretly, unbeknownst to members of Congress"? Bachmann has a point if you look at the amount of media coverage the appropriations and transfers inspired. There was hardly any. Using a variety of terms to search the Nexis database, we found only one document that explained in any detail how the health care bill included appropriations and transfers -- a news release by the conservative Heritage Foundation that raised an alarm about abortion funding. The bill, Heritage said, would "directly appropriate $7 billion over five years in operating funds for (federally qualified health centers) ... funds (that) would not need to be included in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Labor and HHS." But Bachmann didn’t say that the media failed to pay attention; she went further, charging that the provisions were passed "secretly, unbeknownst to members of Congress." We find that contention questionable. We poked around the versions of the health care law that were up for consideration and found older versions that included both appropriations and fund transfers, some of which made it to the final bill. The CRS report Bachmann cited may have compiled the appropriated funding information into an easy-to-understand format, but it’s not as if the spending was approved secretly. Steve Ellis of the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense said it was no secret: the Congressional Budget Office -- Congress’ nonpartisan budget-analysis agency -- extensively detailed the spending in the bill. "I’m not saying that everybody knew everything that was in the health care bill, because it’s almost impossible to do that. But it was documented that the money was in there," Ellis said. "Shame on them if they didn’t know that." We asked experts in federal budgeting whether the health care bill’s use of appropriations in an authorizing bill was unusual. They said it was not. "Congress has routinely provided appropriations in authorization bills, for multiple years of availability, and has also routinely transferred funds from one account to another," said Roy T. Meyers, a former CBO analyst and now a political scientist at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. We should also note that versions of the health care law were posted to the Internet for 72 hours before a vote was held. That’s not a lot of time, but it’s far from a secret process, said Gabriela Schneider of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that urges greater government openness and transparency. "At the time, we commended Congress for taking an unprecedented step and Speaker Pelosi for making sure every version of the health care bill was posted online 72 hours before consideration," she said. The process worked well, Schneider said, and House Republicans have subsequently adopted the 72-hour window. "It's a bill -- the text is public!" said Alec Vachon, a former Republican congressional staffer who’s now a health care consultant. "Is Congresswoman Bachmann saying there are no House Republicans, members or staff, who can read a bill?" One final point: Contrary to the implication of Bachmann’s comments, the spending provisions in the health care bill are not written in stone. "Congress can always revisit the spending decisions, including entitlement and direct spending, of past Congresses," said Donald Wolfensberger, a former Republican aide to the House Rules Committee. Our conclusion Bachmann said that "secretly, unbeknownst to members of Congress, over $105 billion was hidden in the Obamacare legislation." She’s right that there’s about $105 billion of already approved spending in the health care bill that may be difficult to rescind. But that does not mean that the process was secret. While the pre-approved spending provisions didn’t attract media attention, they were in the plain language of the bill and did not vary dramatically from past congressional practice. And the bill was made public before the vote. On balance, we rate Bachmann’s statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Michele Bachmann	None	None	None	2011-03-08T16:17:22	2011-03-06	['United_States_Congress']
-bove-00301	Is BJP’s Claim of Having Highest Women MLAs In UP True? A FactCheck	none	https://www.boomlive.in/is-bjps-claim-of-having-highest-women-mlas-in-up-true-a-factcheck/	None	None	None	None	None	Is BJP’s Claim of Having Highest Women MLAs In UP True? A FactCheck	Mar 17 2017 9:00 am, Last Updated: Oct 18 2017 4:15 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-12207	"According to a recent study from the University of California Riverside, (sanctuary) cities with these policies have more violent crime on average than those that don’t."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/24/jeff-sessions/jeff-sessions-mischaracterizes-study-sanctuary-cit/	Attorney General Jeff Sessions told law enforcement officers that cities with policies protecting immigrants have more violent crime and attributed the conclusion to a university study. "When cities like Philadelphia, Boston, or San Francisco advertise that they have these (‘sanctuary city’) policies, the criminals take notice," Sessions said July 12 in Las Vegas. "According to a recent study from the University of California Riverside, cities with these policies have more violent crime on average than those that don’t." Local jurisdictions that limit their cooperation with federal immigration officers are commonly called "sanctuary cities." There isn’t one particular policy followed by all jurisdictions, and the extent and situations in which they restrict cooperation varies nationwide. Sessions said there were "some 300 jurisdictions" refusing to cooperate with federal immigration authorities and that they were "protecting criminals rather than their law-abiding residents." Data and research on so-called sanctuary cities and their impact on crime is limited. So we were curious about Sessions' citation of a university study. It turns out Sessions’ effort to use research to back his claim got some bad grades from the professors. Study researchers disputed Sessions’ conclusion of their work and said they were unaware of other studies supporting the attorney general’s claim. Here we will lay out the study, Sessions’ assessment and the researchers’ response. Sanctuary cities and studies on their policies President Donald Trump opposes sanctuary cities, contending they are a haven for criminal immigrants. He routinely cites as an example the death of Kate Steinle, a San Francisco woman whom authorities say was fatally shot by an immigrant in the country illegally who had been previously deported five times. Trump campaigned on a promise to cut federal funding for sanctuary cities, hoping that the threat of losing money will make them assist federal authorities. A judge has blocked Trump’s executive order toward this end, but a House bill for this measure passed in June. We’ve fact-checked many claims on sanctuary cities and public safety. Experts routinely tell us there isn’t abundant research specifically about sanctuary cities and their impact on crime. Sanctuary ordinances have been around for decades, but only until recently have social scientists studied their effect on crime rates, Elizabeth F. Cohen, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University, told us for a previous fact-check on a claim of studies showing sanctuary cities "do not lead to an increase in crime because of the presence of people that are undocumented." Study cited by Sessions Researchers from the study Sessions cited found that sanctuary policies do not affect crime rates either way. The study analyzed crime data from jurisdictions that "expressly forbid city officials or police departments from inquiring into immigration status" and analyzed it in two methods. First, researchers compared cities’ crime rate in the year before and the year after a policy’s implementation. In the second approach, they "matched each sanctuary city to a similarly situated non-sanctuary city based on relevant census and political variables," the authors explained in an October 2016 post in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog. At the end, "We find no statistically discernible difference in violent crime rate, rape, or property crime across the cities. Our findings provide evidence that sanctuary policies have no effect on crime rates, despite narratives to the contrary," said the 2016 study, titled "The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration." The researchers were from the University of California at Riverside and Highline College. Sessions, however, based his claim on one figure in the study that depicted two lines comparing violent crime among sanctuary and non-sanctuary cities between 2000 and 2014. The graph showed that violent crime was higher in sanctuary cities than in non-sanctuary cities. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com (Figure from University of California at Riverside and Highline College study on sanctuary cities.) In a statement, the Justice Department said, "The Attorney General accurately cited data from a study that clearly showed that the violent crime rate was higher in sanctuary cities versus non-sanctuary cities. That is a fact and assertions to the contrary ignore that data." But the text of the study offered a note about the figure. "If the two lines for each year cross each other at any point, then the relationship between violent crime and city-type is not statistically significant," the paper said. "While there is a mild tendency to have slightly more crime in sanctuary cities, these sanctuary cities effects are very small, and are not statistically significant." The study researchers said Sessions ignored additional information in the study. "Without consulting our paper (or piece on the Monkey Cage blog) yes, the graph does appear to show that crime is higher in sanctuary cities," Benjamin Gonzalez-O’Brien, one of the authors of the study told PolitiFact. "However, the vertical lines in the figure represent confidence intervals, which capture statistical uncertainty. Basically, the actual crime rate could be anywhere in that range, from the bottom of the vertical line to the top. Because these confidence intervals are large and overlap with those of non-sanctuary cities, it cannot be said that crime rates in sanctuaries are higher than in non-sanctuaries." The study includes another figure that shows violent crime before and after passage of sanctuary city policies. Post-implementation, some cities had higher crime rates, others had lower rates and others saw no change, according to the study. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com (Figure from University of California at Riverside and Highline College study on sanctuary cities.) "If sanctuary policies led to increased crime, then any city that passes one should have a higher crime rate following its passage. This is not the case," Gonzalez-O’Brien said. "Taken together, these two pieces of evidence suggest no relationship between sanctuary status and crime." Gonzalez-O’Brien and colleague Loren Collingwood wrote a blog post for Monkey Cage refuting Sessions’ characterization of their work. It’s headlined, "Jeff Sessions used our research to claim that sanctuary cities have more crime. He’s wrong." Sessions on July 21 also spoke about sanctuary city policies to law enforcement officials in Philadelphia. He did not cite the researchers’ study, according to a copy of the remarks provided by the Justice Department. Our ruling Sessions claimed, "According to a recent study from the University of California Riverside, (sanctuary) cities with these policies have more violent crime on average than those that don’t." Sessions’ claim is based on one figure of the study that does appear to show that violent crime is higher in sanctuary cities. But the researchers say Sessions mischaracterized the findings and failed to consider additional information in the study. Vertical lines in the figure represent confidence intervals and capture statistical uncertainty, one of the researchers said. Another figure in the study also shows that post-sanctuary policies, some cities had higher crime rates, others had lower rates and others saw no change. Overall, the study concluded that sanctuary policies had no effect on crime rates. Sessions’ statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Jeff Sessions	None	None	None	2017-07-24T10:35:26	2017-07-12	['University_of_California,_Riverside']
-tron-01255	Focus on Amber Alerts	none	https://www.truthorfiction.com/amberalerts/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Focus on Amber Alerts	Mar 16, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01362	Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt Reuniting For “Business Venture,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-jennifer-aniston-reuniting-business-venture-not-true/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt NOT Reuniting For “Business Venture,” Despite Report	12:09 pm, March 19, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston']
-pomt-02067	Says Democratic candidate for state school superintendent Alisha Thomas Morgan voted to slash funding for the preschool programs for disabled and special needs students.	half-true	/georgia/statements/2014/may/27/valarie-wilson/georgia-superintendent-candidate-criticizes-oppone/	Educators for several years have lamented state budget cuts to public schools. That’s why it’s likely no surprise that Valarie Wilson, a candidate for state school superintendent, is trying to make political hay of the fact that her opponent and fellow Democrat Alisha Thomas Morgan had a hand in those cuts. In a recent campaign flier, Wilson accused Morgan, her July runoff opponent, of, among other things, voting to slash funding in 2010 for programs to help disabled preschoolers and other special needs students. We wondered whether that was true and decided to crank up the Truth-O-Meter. Wilson, a former chairwoman of the Decatur school board, points out that candidate Morgan touts her role on the House Appropriations education subcommittee and the leverage it gave her. "I am not a legislator," Wilson said. "However, I believe that every vote cast or decision made reflects priorities and values." We scoured state budget documents and were able to confirm that Wilson is technically right. Morgan, a member of the Georgia House since 2003, voted in favor of an amended 2010 state budget that included cuts to the program for disabled preschoolers, as well to a program giving scholarships to special needs students who want to attend private schools. (The amended budget -- House Bill 947 -- passed in 2010, with 122 yes votes, including Morgan’s, and 44 no votes, so an argument could be made that the budget would have passed without Morgan’s vote.) But there’s more to the story. First of all, these cuts were made when Georgia and the nation were in the aftermath of what’s come to be known as the Great Recession. In January 2010, then-Gov. Sonny Perdue was asking lawmakers -- Morgan included -- to cut $1.2 billion out of a budget that had already been in place for six months. Revenue was bleak -- down $136 million, or 8.7 percent, just for that month. The program to help disabled 3- and 4-year-olds be better prepared for school didn’t escape the cutting. Neither did the special needs scholarship program. The $29 million budget for the preschool disabled program was cut about $2 million. About $1 million of that came from furloughing employees and cuts to employer insurance premiums --- something that was done across all of state government. Morgan’s campaign points out that the preschool budget was cut by a smaller percentage, nearly 6.9 percent, than most departments. Records show state spending to pre-school was cut less than many departments, such as Agriculture, Economic Development, Natural Resources and the Regents System. Funding for the private school scholarships was cut $4 million, and officials in the House Budget Office say that was based strictly on the state’s education funding formula. It’s true that the state budget can, in theory, be amended when it hits the floor of either the House or Senate. Rule 108.3 spells out the protocol in the House. "No amendment to any appropriations bill shall be in order if the amendment has the effect of both reducing one appropriation and either increasing another appropriation or adding a new appropriation. No amendment to any appropriations bill increasing any appropriation or adding a new appropriation shall be in order unless there has previously been adopted an amendment reducing some other appropriation so as to make funds available for such new or increased appropriation; and no amendment to any appropriations bill shall be in order which would cause the bill to violate the balanced budget requirements of the Constitution." Longtime observers say floor amendments to the budget have been tried a few times, but rarely. Michael Brewer, Morgan’s deputy campaign manager, said the claims in Wilson’s flier are "intellectually disingenuous, at best." They overlook the tough economic times and the state’s obligation to balance its budget and pay its bills, he said. "Tough choices were made to tighten the state’s belt, so to speak, without raising taxes on Georgia families during the difficult economic recession," Brewer said. "Cuts were made across the board to every state agency and department, and legislators did everything they could to reduce and stymie those cuts to education." In the 2014 state budget approved by lawmakers last year, funding for the preschool disabled program was back to $29 million, the amount it was before the 2010 midyear cuts, he pointed out. Morgan also voted in favor of that budget. In summary, Wilson is correct that Morgan voted for an amended state budget for 2010 that included cuts to the preschool disabled program and a scholarship program for special needs students. But a lot of context is needed to understand the claim. The state was in economic hard times in 2010, and cuts were being ordered across all state agencies, with sign-off from a majority of the General Assembly, not just Morgan. These programs represent a small fraction of the state’s multibillion-dollar annual budget. PolitiFact has encountered many cases where candidates accuse elected officials of supporting cuts without noting that these votes were parts of larger budget decisions. Wilson’s attack against Morgan omits key context. It is accurate but misleading. We rate the statement as Half True.	None	Valarie Wilson	None	None	None	2014-05-27T00:00:00	2014-05-14	['None']
-pomt-02305	A Koch brothers group is "going to college campuses, giving away free booze to try to bribe young folks out of getting health insurance."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/apr/01/organizing-action/organizing-action-says-koch-brothers-group-used-bo/	"This is some sick crap." So began an Organizing for Action fundraising email. The group attacked David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who support the tea party movement. "This should humiliate anyone who's ever been associated with the Koch brothers," the March 26 email continued. "One of their anti-Obamacare groups is going to college campuses, giving away free booze to try to bribe young folks out of getting health insurance." We wondered if such an education campaign, complete with free alcohol, really existed. The email referred to Generation Opportunity, a national political activist group made up of young conservatives. They’re behind the "Creepy Uncle Sam" ads you may have seen last year. Back in November 2013, the Tampa Bay Times reported on one of their 20 "opt-out" campaign stops at college campuses to educate students about alternatives to buying health insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. At a University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game tailgate, Generation Opportunity set up a DJ, beer pong tables, models and free pizza to draw students in. They handed out free gear with their logo on it -- T-shirts, beer koozies, bottle openers. The one thing they didn’t provide is the beer itself. Spokesman David Pasch said 21+college students brought their own beer to the Miami event and others. However, just off campus near several colleges, Generation Opportunity hosted happy hours where they did give out individual tickets for free drinks to 21+ attendees at places like The Crust, a Williamsburg, Va., pizza place. These events weren’t focused specifically on an anti-Affordable Care Act agenda, but there was free "opt-out swag" on hand, Pasch said. So we know Generation Opportunity did offer free booze to college-aged students at some of their events, but let’s take a closer look at the opt-out campaign. Organizing for Action claimed Generation Opportunity used the campaign to "bribe young folks out of getting health insurance." But Generation Opportunity’s events were open to everyone, Pasch said. Attendees at the tailgates and happy hours didn’t need to swear off the health care reform before snagging a free T-shirt or drink. Also, the campaign’s goal is not to encourage young Americans to go without health care. It’s to get them to look into alternative coverage options to the online marketplaces, such as private plans that still fit the Affordable Care Act’s 10 essential benefit requirements. Those plans still fulfill the law’s individual mandate, which requires everyone to have health insurance. "We never have (and never will) advocate young people forgo health insurance," Pasch said. Our ruling Organizing for Action said Generation Opportunity is "going to college campuses, giving away free booze to try to bribe young folks out of getting health insurance." The Koch brothers-backed group holds Opt-Out events to encourage young people to consider buying health insurance off the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. At some of their education campaign events near college campuses, they did offer free alcohol to entice attendees. At campus events, students brought the booze themselves. Generation Opportunity didn’t bribe students, but they did offer alcohol to young people who wanted to hear about alternatives to the health care reform’s marketplaces. We rate Organizing for Action’s statement Half True.	None	Organizing for Action	None	None	None	2014-04-01T16:06:35	2014-03-26	['None']
-tron-01995	U.S. One of Just 30 Countries With Birthright Citizenship	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/countries-birthright-citizenship/	None	immigration	None	None	['2016 election', 'donald trump', 'immigration']	U.S. One of Just 30 Countries With Birthright Citizenship	Jul 19, 2017	None	['United_States']
-pomt-14583	Regarding the Iraq War, "I was the one that said, ‘Don’t go, don’t do it, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East.’ "	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/06/donald-trump/donald-trump-overstates-his-early-opposition-iraq-/	Donald Trump says he has the temperament to be president, and his position against the Iraq War proves it. "The War in Iraq — I was the one that said, ‘Don’t go, don’t do it, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East,’ " the Republican front runner said at the Feb. 6, 2016, New Hampshire GOP debate. Several media outlets have cast doubt on Trump’s claim that he spoke out against the Iraq War, pointing out that he didn’t appear to take any public position on the war until after the March 2003 invasion. Because Trump keeps making this kind of claim, we decided to put it on PolitiFact’s Truth-O-Meter. We searched newspaper articles and television transcripts from 2002 and 2003, during the debate leading up to the Iraq War. We didn’t find any examples of Trump unequivocally denouncing the war until a year after the war began. Trump’s comments We only found one instance where Trump discussed the war before it started. On Jan. 28, 2003, just under three months before the invasion, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto asked Trump whether President George W. Bush should be more focused on Iraq or the economy. Speaking of Iraq, Trump said, "Well, he has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps, because perhaps shouldn't be doing it yet and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations, you know. He's under a lot of pressure. I think he's doing a very good job. But, of course, if you look at the polls, a lot of people are getting a little tired. I think the Iraqi situation is a problem. And I think the economy is a much bigger problem as far as the president is concerned." Trump seems to be skeptical of the mission in Iraq here, and he said the economy should be a higher priority. But he did not say anything that resembles his claim: that Bush should not proceed because a war would "destabilize the Middle East." The United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003. A week later, Trump gave differing takes. At an Academy Awards after party, Trump said that "the war’s a mess," according to the Washington Post. He told Fox News that because of the war, "The market’s going to go up like a rocket." Trump’s harshest criticism came more than a year into the war, in an August 2004 article in Esquire: "Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we're in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the country? C'mon. Two minutes after we leave, there's going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over. And he'll have weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam didn't have. "What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who've been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!" He told CNN’s Larry King in November 2004, "I do not believe that we made the right decision going into Iraq, but, you know, hopefully, we'll be getting out." Clearly Trump opposed the Iraq War in its early years. There’s no evidence, though, that he advocated against the war in the first place. Our ruling Regarding the Iraq War, "I was the one that said, ‘Don’t go, don’t do it, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East.’ " Maybe Trump felt this way privately, but he made no publicly reported comments in the lead up to the Iraq War that reflect this sentiment. We could only find one example of Trump commenting on the Iraq War before the invasion, and he seemed apprehensive but not vehemently opposed to the operation. He only started publicly denouncing the war after it started. Trump makes it sound like he stood on a railroad to try to stop the Iraq War train in its tracks. In reality, by the time he got around to forcefully criticizing the war, that train had already left the station. We rate his statement Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/0271543b-ce2b-4dc5-bce2-69d842b2d7b3	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-02-06T23:18:34	2016-02-06	['None']
-snes-01800	Only 60 of 1,566 Churches in Houston Opened to Help Hurricane Harvey Victims?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/only-60-of-1566-churches-in-houston-opened-to-help-hurricane-harvey-victims/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Only 60 of 1,566 Churches in Houston Opened to Help Hurricane Harvey Victims?	31 August 2017	None	['None']
-snes-02113	President Trump shut down American airports on 4 July 2017.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-closed-airports-july4/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	President Trump Closed U.S. Airspace for the 4th of July?	4 July 2017	None	['United_States']
-pomt-06774	Democrats failed to flip the Wisconsin state Senate because recall elections were in the "deepest red districts in the state."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/aug/19/tammy-baldwin/us-rep-tammy-baldwin-says-wisconsin-state-senate-r/	U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin doesn’t pretend that the recall elections on Aug. 9, 2011, were a big victory for Democrats, who narrowly lost their bid to flip partisan control of the Wisconsin state Senate. But the day after the elections, the Madison Democrat, who is positioning herself for a Senate bid in 2012, told a news interviewer on ABC News’ Top Line webcast that the deck was stacked against the Democrats in "deeply red" districts. "Think about the districts that these battles were fought in," Baldwin said. "These are Senate districts that were won by Republicans in 2008, which was a Democratic wave election. So we’re talking about the deepest red districts in the state." She added: "If some of these battles had been fought out in slightly less red districts we would have seen a different thing. But this wasn’t a statewide election." Baldwin’s observations fit the Democratic opinion that winning two of six seats held by incumbent Republican senators was significant progress. (Recalls also were held July 19, 2011 and Aug. 16, 2011, with three Democratic incumbents retaining their seats and leaving the chamber split 17-16 for the GOP). But Baldwin went further by saying the recall turf was "the deepest" red districts in the state. Let’s take a look at her take. Baldwin is correct that all six districts were taken or held by Republican candidates in an abysmal GOP year (2008). Indeed, the six districts, spread across the state, have long Republican traditions -- a fact pointed out by Baldwin’s office when we asked her to back up the claim. One of the districts, represented by Sheila Harsdorf in northwestern Wisconsin, went 58 percent for Republican Scott Walker in the fall 2010 governor’s race. Walker won 57 percent in three of the other recall districts, and 54 percent in a fifth. In the 2008 presidential race, in which Barack Obama swamped Republican John McCain in Wisconsin, the GOP vote in five of the six recall districts was about 5 percentage points higher than the GOP vote statewide. And in those same five districts in the 2010 governor’s race, that advantage was 4 percentage points. (These measures exclude one district that is an outlier; more on that later). So by some important measures, there’s no doubt these are Republican-oriented districts. However, Baldwin claimed these were not just Republican districts, but the "deepest" red ones. We found convincing evidence otherwise in the number-crunching by Journal Sentinel Washington Bureau Chief Craig Gilbert, whose blog, The Wisconsin Voter, regularly digs into statistics-based election analysis. There’s an elite tier of bedrock GOP Senate districts -- but arguably none of the six Baldwin referred to is in that tier, Gilbert’s reporting shows. The deepest red districts are clustered in the suburban-rural ring around Milwaukee or farther out in southeastern Wisconsin. These take in areas of Ozaukee, Washington, Waukesha, Dodge and Walworth counties -- some of the most reliably conservative and Republican sections of the state. One way to examine Senate districts is to look at McCain’s performance. He got only 42 percent statewide, but still managed to carry five districts in the Milwaukee area. That suggests those are even deeper red. And none of those McCain hot spots was among those where recalls took place. In fact, Obama won all of the GOP-recall Senate districts. That would suggest a bit of a blue tint. Or that the districts have swung back and forth over time, depending on the year and the race. Let’s look at the 2010 race between Walker and the Democratic candidate, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Five of the recall districts, as we mentioned earlier, went handily for Walker -- giving him 54% to 58% of the vote. But that’s not the whole story. Those margins in the recall districts were right around the median victory margin in GOP-held Senate districts in Walker’s comfortable victory. By contrast, that elite tier of GOP-dominated districts went for Walker by 62 percent to 74 percent, with districts represented by Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend), respectively, at the two ends of that scale. Finally, there is the "outlier" district we mentioned, the one represented by Republican Dan Kapanke of La Crosse, who fell in the Aug. 9 recall to Democratic state Rep. Jennifer Shilling. That district has voted less Republican than the state as a whole in two recent election years -- including a 61 percent showing by Barack Obama. And Democrats have broken through to represent that seat a couple times over the last half-century. Kapanke’s district split down the middle in the Walker-Barrett race. So Baldwin’s statement is even more off as it relates to that district. We could talk about the numbers until we’re, well, blue in the face. But we’ll end it here: Baldwin said on an ABC News political webcast that the battleground for the Aug. 9, 2011 state Senate recalls was the "deepest" Republican districts in the state. There’s an element of truth here, in that four of the GOP recall districts were in the top third of GOP performance in the presidential contest and governor’s race. But upon closer inspection there is an elite tier of districts that seem a much better fit for the title "deepest red." And one of the GOP-held recall seats is really closer to a toss-up district. We rate her statement Mostly False.	None	Tammy Baldwin	None	None	None	2011-08-19T09:00:00	2011-08-10	['Wisconsin', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-goop-02021	Beyonce Reuniting With Destiny’s Child At Coachella, 	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/beyonce-not-reuniting-destinys-child-coachella/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Beyonce NOT Reuniting With Destiny’s Child At Coachella, Despite Speculation	1:07 pm, December 16, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-03466	NASA Warns of 15 Days of Darkness in November 2017	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/nasa-15-days-darkness-november-2017/	None	space-aviation	None	None	['astronomy', 'NASA', 'space']	NASA Warns of 15 Days of Darkness in November 2017	Aug 21, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-05794	Says "sixty-two percent of small businesses over the last five years went under because they couldn't pay their health care bills."	false	/new-jersey/statements/2012/feb/24/bill-pascrell/bill-pascrell-claims-heath-care-bills-forced-62-pe/	If you’re a small business owner, the cost of providing health insurance for your employees may be worse than you thought. According to U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, medical bills have led about two-thirds of small businesses nationwide to close during the past five years. Pascrell (D-8th Dist.) pointed to that startling statistic during a Feb. 1 debate in the House over a bill repealing the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, or the CLASS Act. That Act was a provision of the health care reform law enacted in 2010. The CLASS Act was meant to create a new insurance program for individuals to pay monthly premiums and later receive a cash benefit to support their long-term care needs. But before the program was implemented, federal officials canceled it in October 2011, pointing to legal and financial concerns. "We have to find a way to make long-term care both accessible and affordable. These problems will not simply disappear. They're not going to go away," Pascrell told his colleagues. "This bill certainly does not fix these problems. The bill does not even provide an alternative. All it does is attack the progress made in the Affordable Care Act." Pascrell added, "Sixty-two percent of small businesses over the last five years went under because they couldn't pay their health care bills, and you stand there with no alternative whatsoever." That bill passed in a 267-159 vote, with Pascrell voting against it. But PolitiFact New Jersey found it hard to believe that 62 percent of small businesses had closed during the past five years. After reaching out to Pascrell’s spokesman, we found out why: the statement’s not true. Pascrell spokesman Paul Brubaker told us the congressman meant to say that "62 percent of personal bankruptcies in 2007 were due to health care costs." "He mistakenly said ‘small businesses’ instead of ‘personal bankruptcies’ and ‘past five years’ instead of ‘five years ago,’" Brubaker added in an email. "Congressman Pascrell stands by his overall point that personal bankruptcies have been demonstrably connected to health care costs." That’s good enough for the Truth-O-Meter. But let’s explain the basis for the statistic that Pascrell was aiming for. To back up the congressman’s point, Brubaker directed us to a report published in 2009 in The American Journal of Medicine. Following a national study, researchers estimated in that report that illness or medical bills contributed to 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 -- a significant jump from six years earlier. Many families were under-insured, leaving them responsible for large out-of-pocket costs, while others lost their private health insurance when they became too sick to work, according to the study. "Since 2001, the proportion of all bankruptcies attributable to medical problems has increased by 50%," according to the report. "Nearly two thirds of all bankruptcies are now linked to illness." As for small businesses, their numbers have declined in recent years, but that reduction is much less than 62 percent. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, the number of small employers -- defined as having fewer than 500 employees -- dropped by about 4.2 percent from 6,004,056 in 2006 to 5,749,797 in 2009, which is the latest data available. We don’t know how much medical bills contributed to that reduction, but health care costs obviously remain a significant concern for small business owners. Our ruling In a speech on the House floor, Pascrell claimed that "sixty-two percent of small businesses over the last five years went under because they couldn't pay their health care bills." But his spokesman told us the congressman made a mistake and cited the wrong statistic. Pascrell meant to say health care costs led to 62 percent of personal bankruptcies five years ago. We rate the statement False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Bill Pascrell	None	None	None	2012-02-24T07:30:00	2012-02-01	['None']
-pomt-12366	"Trump’s Top Scientist Pick: ‘Scientists Are Just Dumb Regular People That Think Dinosaurs Existed And The Earth Is Getting Warmer’"	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/jun/06/uspoln/no-trumps-reported-pick-usda-chief-scientist-did-n/	A fake news site has taken creative license by saying that a man President Donald Trump is reportedly picking to lead a top science job actually mocked scientists, calling them "dumb regular people that think dinosaurs existed." A May 20 post by USPOLN.com headlined "Trump’s Top Scientist Pick: ‘Scientists Are Just Dumb Regular People That Think Dinosaurs Existed And The Earth Is Getting Warmer’," takes aim at Sam Clovis. News reports have said that Trump plans to nominate Clovis as undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research, Education and Economics division, a position that’s been held by scientists in past administrations. Clovis is the Department of Agriculture’s senior White House adviser, but reportedly lacks a science background. He has a doctorate in public administration, has taught business, management and public policy at Morningside College in Iowa, hosted a conservative radio show and was a Trump campaign policy adviser. Has he disparaged scientists as USPOLN.com said? Facebook users flagged the post as potential fake news. We found that quotes attributed to Clovis are indeed fake. USPOLN.com calls itself a "hybrid News/Satire platform," and we’ve included it in our list of websites that deliberately post false or fake stories. A disclaimer in its "About Us" page plainly tells readers its intentions and accuracy: "USPOLN may include information from sources that may or may not be reliable and facts that don’t necessarily exist. These Articles should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney." The USPOLN.com story about Clovis heavily borrows, almost verbatim, multiple paragraphs from a May 12 report from ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit, investigative journalism website. USPOLN.com’s opening sentences: "The research section of the USDA studies everything from nutrition to climate change, and according to the 2008 Farm Bill the ‘chief scientist’ is supposed to be the leader ‘among distinguished scientists with specialized or significant experience in agricultural research, education and economics.’ President Donald Trump’s pick, Sam Clovis, doesn’t seem to have any of those credentials. He has never taken science as part of his graduate course and questions the legitimacy of climate change. Although he has a doctorate in public administration and taught business and public policy at Morningside College for ten years, he barely published any academic work. Clovis had made a reputation for himself as a conservative talk radio show in Iowa and an avid Trump supporter." ProPublica’ first few sentences: "The USDA’s research section studies everything from climate change to nutrition. Under the 2008 Farm Bill, its leader is supposed to serve as the agency’s ‘chief scientist’ and be chosen "from among distinguished scientists with specialized or significant experience in agricultural research, education, and economics. "But Sam Clovis — who, according to sources with knowledge of the appointment and members of the agriculture trade press, is President Trump’s pick to oversee the section — appears to have no such credentials. "Clovis has never taken a graduate course in science and is openly skeptical of climate change. While he has a doctorate in public administration and was a tenured professor of business and public policy at Morningside College for 10 years, he has published almost no academic work." USPOLN.com’s post takes a satirical turn when it starts "quoting" Clovis on his comments about his credentials in an assumed interview with "KYXL Radio" (searches on the Federal Communications Commission website for a radio station with those call letters yielded zero results). The satirical website said Clovis "argued that he was ‘proud’ he didn’t have any scientific credentials or education, because ‘scientists are nothing more than a bunch of mislead (sic) individuals anyway’." The post also falsely claims Clovis said he thanks God he did not make him a scientist and that he’s proud not to be one "because they believe in things like evolution and the like." USPOLN.com links as its "source" another "hybrid News/Satire" site that has the same article posted. We asked the USDA to confirm if Clovis was Trump’s pick for the chief scientist job. The department said it could not comment in advance on any nominations for Senate-confirmed positions. What about the quotes from USPOLN.com? "Completely fabricated," the department’s communications office said, linking to a Snopes review of the story deeming the comments false. The Associated Press has also reported that the quotes are not real. Our ruling Fake news website USPOLN.com said, "Trump’s Top Scientist Pick: ‘Scientists Are Just Dumb Regular People That Think Dinosaurs Existed And The Earth Is Getting Warmer’." The website borrows some information reported by a legitimate investigative journalism website, ProPublica, such as Sam Clovis reportedly being Trump’s pick for a top USDA job and details about his resume. But the post attributes false quotes to Clovis. USPOLN.com says its articles "should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney." We rate the claim Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Uspoln Website	None	None	None	2017-06-06T14:13:49	2017-05-20	['None']
-vogo-00504	Fact Check TV: The All-Tax Edition	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-tv-the-all-tax-edition/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Check TV: The All-Tax Edition	October 19, 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-11472	President Donald "Trump’s latest set of sanctions against companies and countries benefiting North Korea includes every nation but one making shipments to (North Korea). The one nation Trump exempted from his punitive ban was . . . wait for it . . . drumroll: Russia."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2018/mar/06/laurence-tribe/was-russia-exempted-latest-round-north-korea-sanct/	A few days after the United States announced stepped-up sanctions against entities doing business with North Korea, Laurence Tribe, a prominent Harvard University law professor, tweeted what he saw as an anomaly -- one that benefited the country at the heart of Robert Mueller’s investigation. "Trump’s latest set of sanctions against companies and countries benefiting North Korea includes every nation but one making shipments to (North Korea). The one nation Trump exempted from his punitive ban was ... wait for it ... drumroll: Russia. How in the world did you guess?" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com The notion that Russia might be helping North Korea evade sanctions has been widely speculated, and on March 3, the Washington Post ran a detailed story alleging that North Korea had essentially been laundering coal through Kholmsk, an obscure port in eastern Russia, for sale elsewhere. A reader asked us to take a look at Tribe’s tweet, so we did. Experts told us that Tribe has a point, but that he had garbled some aspects of his message. What the U.S. government did The sanctions are the latest round in an ongoing effort to isolate North Korea for its continued pursuit of nuclear weapons, as well as missiles to deliver them. On Feb. 23, 2018, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced what it said were "the largest North Korea-related sanctions" to date, "aimed at disrupting North Korean shipping and trading companies and vessels." Specifically, the announced sanctions targeted "one individual, 27 entities, and 28 vessels located, registered, or flagged in North Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Marshall Islands, Tanzania, Panama, and Comoros. Under the sanctions, the department said, "any property or interests in property of the designated persons in the possession or control of U.S. persons or within the United States must be blocked, and U.S. persons are prohibited from dealing with any of the designated parties." The department said the sanctions were enacted "consistent with the North Korea Sanctions Policy and Enhancement Act of 2016 as well as the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017." See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin briefs reporters about new sanctions intended to pressure North Korea, at the White House on Feb. 23, 2018. (AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) Are Russian entities included in the newest sanctions? Russia was implicated, but not sanctioned directly, in the Feb. 23 announcement. The Treasury Department designated a Taiwanese citizen, Tsang Yung Yuan, for, among other things, having "coordinated North Korean coal exports with a Russia-based North Korean broker." In 2017, the department said, Tsang and Marshall Islands-based Kingly Won International Co., Ltd., "attempted to engage in an oil deal valued at over $1 million with the Russian firm Independent Petroleum Company." The sanctions announcement also cited another suspected transaction involving Russia that involved the offloading of fuel oil from an unnamed Russian vessel. For this transaction, the Korea Samma Shipping Company, a North Korean-owned firm, and its oil tanker SAM MA 2 were specifically targeted in the new round of sanctions. So Tribe has a point that despite such allegations of Russian involvement, there were no Russia-flagged vessels or Russian-owned companies specified in this round of sanctions. However, experts offered several concerns about what Tribe tweeted. • Sanctions of these sort are issued as information allows. Just because no Russian entities are on the Feb. 23 list doesn’t mean there won’t be in the future -- or that there haven’t been in the past. "The most recent sanctions list basically contains the names of firms that U.S. intelligence knows or thinks are involved in sanctions busting activities," said Stephan Haggard, director of the Korea-Pacific Program at the University of California-San Diego. As further intelligence is gathered and confirmed, that could change. Indeed, it’s important to note that the Trump administration has previously targeted Russian firms for North Korea-related sanctions, just not in this round. The Russian company cited above -- the Independent Petroleum Company -- along with one of its subsidiaries, AO NNK-Primornefteproduct, have already been sanctioned during Trump’s tenure in the White House. They were sanctioned on June 1, 2017, for suspicion of being "involved in circumventing North Korean sanctions." Trump has also publicly expressed concern about Russian actions in regard to North Korea. Shea Cotton, a research associate at the Monterey Institute of International Studies’ James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said that one of the few times he recalls Trump saying something negative about Russia was on the topic of North Korea sanctions. "Russia is not helping us at all with North Korea," Trump said during an Oval Office interview with Reuters in January 2018. "What China is helping us with, Russia is denting. In other words, Russia is making up for some of what China is doing." • Tribe’s wording was imprecise. Tribe tweeted that Trump had "exempted (Russia) from his punitive ban," but in reality, the language of the sanctions doesn't affirmatively "exempt" Russia. "The term ‘exemption’ is wrong because the designation process goes after specific individuals, entities and ships," Haggard said. "There are no ‘exemptions.’" Indeed, this round of sanctions operated entirely below the country level. Tribe also referred to countries making "shipments to" North Korea, but many of the allegations of sanctions-busting activity has involved taking North Korean products and "laundering" them for sale elsewhere. When we reached out to Tribe, he said, "I meant ‘to or from’ and was using ‘exempted from’ to mean ‘not included in’ or ‘excluded from.’" • There may not be anything nefarious about why Russian entities didn’t make this list. Joseph DeThomas, a former diplomat and a professor at Penn State’s School of International Affairs, said that he, too, noticed the absence of Russian entities from the list. But he added that it would be wrong to assume that a desire to protect Russia is the reason why. "It could be that the cases against Russian entities were not complete yet," DeThomas said. "It could be that a diplomatic process is going on behind the scenes to get the Russians to crack down on something. It could even be that there are no new Russian entities to be sanctioned. It may turn out that there is something nefarious in the absence of sanctioned Russian entities but there are enough plausible alternatives to withhold judgment." Cotton agreed. "There are plenty of benign-ish explanations which could account for this," he said. "It could be that the administration believes it can get Russia to comply with these without the need for sanctioning Russian entities. Or perhaps it believes Russia is making a good faith effort at enforcing these domestically and believes unilaterally sanctioning Russian entities would undermine Russian cooperation. It could also be that the administration has yet to obtain firm evidence regarding which Russian entities are involved and doesn’t want to do anything until they catch someone in the act." In response, Tribe called such speculation "quite empty and says nothing I’d not already considered." Our ruling Tribe said, "Trump’s latest set of sanctions against companies and countries benefiting North Korea includes every nation but one making shipments to (North Korea). The one nation Trump exempted from his punitive ban was . . . wait for it . . . drumroll: Russia." The most recent set of sanctions doesn’t specifically target any entity linked to Russia. However, sanction lists are dependent on intelligence findings, and when the U.S. government had intelligence relevant to sanctions-busting, the Trump administration has slapped sanctions on Russian entities in the past. In addition, while this sanctions list targeted violators, it didn’t proactively "exempt" any countries (something Tribe acknowledges). Finally, experts offered a variety of potential alternative explanations beyond Trump doing this to protect Russia. We rate the statement Mostly False. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Laurence Tribe	None	None	None	2018-03-06T11:36:51	2018-03-02	['North_Korea', 'Russia']
-pomt-04706	"The first (state) budget that came out of our Republican leadership slashed funding to Planned Parenthood...It resulted in the reduction of hours, the elimination of days, elimination of access to women in my city and all over my state."	true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/sep/04/cory-booker/cory-booker-blasts-chris-christie-slashing-funding/	Newark Mayor Cory Booker didn’t mention Gov. Chris Christie by name, but the Democratic leader took a shot at his Republican governor Tuesday for cutting funding for women’s health services. Before the mayor made a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Booker appeared at a Planned Parenthood rally and blasted the GOP for denying women access to health care. "Now I want to be very clear. I come from a state where we’ve seen what Republican leadership will do to things like Planned Parenthood," Booker told the crowd, according to a video posted on YouTube. "We’ve seen it. The first budget that came out of our Republican leadership slashed funding to Planned Parenthood. "It resulted in, it resulted in the reduction of hours, the elimination of days, elimination of access to women in my city and all over my state." PolitiFact New Jersey found that Booker’s claim is on target. Christie eliminated nearly $7.5 million for family planning services in his first budget for fiscal year 2011, and has rejected efforts by the Democrat-led legislature to restore that funding. As we discovered in a previous fact-check, that reduction in funding led to the closure of six family planning clinics, including two facilities run by affiliates of Planned Parenthood. Those clinics included the following: Westampton and Brown Mills locations run by the Burlington County Health Department; Planned Parenthood of Southern New Jersey’s Cherry Hill center; FamCare, Inc.’s Millville facility; the Bayonne Women’s Health and Family Planning Center; and Planned Parenthood of Greater Northern New Jersey’s Dover site. Representatives of those clinics previously told us that state funding cuts forced the closures. On three occasions, Christie has rejected efforts by the legislature to restore those family planning dollars. The first time occurred when the governor vetoed a bill passed by the legislature in June 2010 to restore the funding. At the time, Christie said New Jersey residents have access to "comprehensive reproductive health care services" at other sites and the state can’t afford to "provide duplicative funding for family planning centers." In June 2011, the legislature included the $7.5 million in the fiscal year 2012 budget sent to the governor. Christie eliminated that funding as part of his line-item vetoes, and the legislature couldn’t secure enough votes to override that veto. Most recently, the legislature passed a bill in June to restore the funding, but Christie vetoed it. Our ruling At a Planned Parenthood rally, Booker went after Christie’s record of cutting funding for family planning services. "The first budget that came out of our Republican leadership slashed funding to Planned Parenthood," Booker said. "It resulted in, it resulted in the reduction of hours, the elimination of days, elimination of access to women in my city and all over my state." It’s true that Christie eliminated nearly $7.5 million for family planning services in the fiscal year 2011 budget, and has rejected efforts to restore that funding. That funding reduction led to the closure of six family planning clinics around the state. We rate the statement True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Cory Booker	None	None	None	2012-09-04T20:30:00	2012-09-04	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Planned_Parenthood']
-pose-00366	"Will build on America's unparalleled talent to create new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tests and to manufacture these vital products much more quickly and efficiently than is now possible."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/385/accelerate-the-development-of-new-medicines-vacci/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Accelerate the development of new medicines, vaccines, and production capabilities	2010-01-07T13:26:57	None	['United_States']
-pose-00694	"Development of a Master Property Utilization Plan that will clearly and transparently lay out a new vision for state-owned properties. This plan will conceive of the Pastore Complex in Cranston as a centrally located, mass-transit-accessible 'government services mall,' supported by three regional hubs in Blackstone Valley, Bristol County and South County."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/linc-o-meter/promise/724/develop-master-plan-for-use-of-state-owned-propert/	None	linc-o-meter	Lincoln Chafee	None	None	Develop master plan for use of state-owned property	2012-12-11T18:31:35	None	['Blackstone_Valley', 'Bristol_County,_Massachusetts']
-snes-01901	A Noah's Ark exhibit at a Christian theme park in Kentucky was destroyed by a flood.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/noahs-ark-park-flooded/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Was a Noah’s Ark Theme Park Destroyed in a Flood?	21 April 2016	None	['Kentucky']
-snes-02628	A photograph shows John Lennon playing the guitar on the hood of a truck with "Star Trek" actor Leonard Nimoy.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lennon-guitar-spock-elvis/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	John Lennon Plays Guitar for Spock?	12 April 2017	None	['John_Lennon', 'Leonard_Nimoy']
-abbc-00305	The claim: Immigration Minister Peter Dutton says Australia is not "ahead of the pack" by proposing to strip Australian citizenship from dual nationals who are fighting with terrorist groups. He says countries like the UK, US, New Zealand, France and Canada have similar laws.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-11/foreign-fighters-citizenship-around-the-world/6498920	The claim: Immigration Minister Peter Dutton says Australia is not "ahead of the pack" by proposing to strip Australian citizenship from dual nationals who are fighting with terrorist groups. He says countries like the UK, US, New Zealand, France and Canada have similar laws.	['immigration', 'terrorism', 'liberals', 'government-and-politics', 'australia']	None	None	['immigration', 'terrorism', 'liberals', 'government-and-politics', 'australia']	Fact check: How does Australia's plan to strip foreign fighters of citizenship compare to other nations?	Thu 11 Jun 2015, 8:26am	None	['New_Zealand', 'France', 'Canada', 'Australia']
-hoer-01252	Lady Gaga is Moving to Utica, New York	fake news	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/lady-gaga-is-not-moving-to-utica-new-york/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Lady Gaga is NOT Moving to Utica, New York	March 29, 2016	None	['Utica,_New_York']
-pose-00884	Will, as one of his first acts as county executive, "order a comprehensive audit of county land and building assets, identify those that are unneeded or underused, and then deliver a plan to transform those assets into job generators."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/abele-o-meter/promise/916/create-plan-to-turn-county-property-into-job-gene/	None	abele-o-meter	Chris Abele	None	None	Create plan to turn county property into 'job generators'	2011-05-11T10:21:33	None	['None']
-pomt-09885	"14,000 Americans . . . lose their health insurance every single day."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jul/24/barack-obama/obama-claims-14000-lose-health-insurance-every-day/	In his nationally televised news conference on July 22, 2009, President Barack Obama cited a dramatic statistic to emphasize the need for health care reform. He said, “If we don't act, 14,000 Americans will continue to lose their health insurance every single day.” The White House told us the number came from a report published by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and authored by researchers James Kvaal and Ben Furnas. A chart in the report was headlined, “14,000 People Became Uninsured Every Day in December and January.” We wondered about the methodology and whether the December and January numbers were out of date. We couldn't reach the authors of the study (one has since joined the White House staff). But we tracked down Urban Institute health care scholar John Holahan, whose work was cited in the Center for American Progress study. Holahan was the co-author, with A. Bowen Garrett, of the January 2009 study, “Rising Unemployment, Medicaid and the Uninsured,” published by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. That study provided the underpinning for the Center for American Progress report by estimating how many people can expect to lose their insurance when the national unemployment rate goes up. Holahan and his co-author, using a baseline of 4.6 percent unemployment in 2007, calculated that 2.6 million people would lose coverage if the unemployment rate climbed to 7 percent; 3.7 million if it went to to 8 percent; 4.8 million at 9 percent; and 5.8 million at 10 percent. The estimates took into account people who lost their jobs but then switched to a spouse’s plan or extended their coverage through COBRA, the federal law that guarantees people who lose their job can still get continued health coverage. Applying Holahan's calculations to the actual rise in unemployment from November 2008 to June 2009, we came up with 3.2 million people losing health coverage, or an average of 15,238 per day, so it is close to the 14,000 Obama cited. We asked other health care experts about Holahan’s work, and they uniformly agreed that he is a respected researcher. Only one complicating factor emerged, when we spoke with Edmund F. Haislmaier of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He noted that Holahan’s paper was written before passage of the federal stimulus package, which contains provisions subsidizing 65 percent of COBRA costs for the unemployed. If these new subsidies end up boosting the use of COBRA — the data hasn't been compiled yet — then it could reduce the number of newly uninsured Americans from the levels that Holahan had predicted and that Obama cited. Obama was very close to Holohan's calculations — in fact he was slightly low. But as Haislmaier pointed out, the stimulus COBRA provisions could reduce the numbers because more people will still be covered. We can't be sure until the data is in. So in the meantime, we find Obama’s claim Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2009-07-24T14:33:52	2009-07-22	['United_States']
-pomt-07733	Under a proposed Georgia law, "women who miscarry could become felons."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2011/mar/02/liberal-blogger/liberal-blogger-says-abotion-bill-could-affect-mis/	Republican state Rep. Bobby Franklin has made a hobby out of triggering liberal ire. And yes, he’s done it again. The Marietta legislator’s House Bill 1 rejects the authority of landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade. It bans abortion and labels it "prenatal murder," a crime punishable by life in prison or death. But that’s not what had bloggers at left-leaning publications seething. It’s that they think the bill could allow prosecutors to charge mothers who miscarry with a crime. Jen Phillips, a staffer with liberal magazine Mother Jones, wrote the bill "showed an astonishing lack of concern for women’s health and well-being." "Under Rep. Franklin’s bill, HB 1, women who miscarry could become felons if they cannot prove that there was ‘no human involvement whatsoever in the causation’ of their miscarriage," she wrote. Women who miscarry could be charged as felons? Is that true? Franklin has sponsored similar anti-abortion bills without success. This one doesn’t have much steam behind it, either. But given how this claim took off in the blogosphere, we thought it was worth a look. We called Phillips, who pointed us to a portion of the bill that defines "prenatal murder." "Such a term does not include a naturally occurring expulsion of a fetus known medically as a ‘spontaneous abortion’ and popularly as a ‘miscarriage’ so long as there is no human involvement whatsoever in the causation of such event," the bill states. The problem is the phrase "no human involvement" is so broad and the causes of miscarriage can be so complex and difficult to understand that any woman whose actions can be viewed as playing a role in her miscarriage could be prosecuted, Phillips argued. This could be a problem. Other critics we interviewed said that under this language, a woman who miscarried could be prosecuted for choosing cancer treatment, taking illegal drugs, or falling off a bicycle while pregnant. All of those situations require some "human involvement." Franklin said these objections have absolutely no merit. "[T]hose criticisms are mere smoke screens since as you know the bill does not specifically call for … those things," Franklin wrote in an e-mail. Abortion rights advocates agreed that Franklin’s legislation could criminalize miscarriage. A spokeswoman for anti-abortion group Georgia Right to Life said they have not analyzed the bill. Franklin is right that the bill does not specify that women can be prosecuted under the scenarios that critics raised. However, laws can have unexpected consequences. We therefore took a closer look at Georgia law. An existing state statute on "feticide," or the destruction of a fetus in the uterus, generally bars women from being prosecuted in the death of her fetus. Frankin’s bill does not repeal this law. But there’s an exception under Georgia’s "feticide by vehicle" statute. In a 2010 Douglasville case, a pregnant driver fled from police, leading them on a chase. The driver crashed. Her baby was delivered by emergency C-section but did not survive. Prosecutors charged the pregnant driver. While Georgia’s "feticide by vehicle" statute does not mandate mothers be charged when they cause crashes leading to the death of their own fetuses, it does not prohibit it. Research shows that nationally, women have been prosecuted for conduct affecting their fetuses, even when the law does not expressly provide for it, said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which fights anti-abortion laws. Paltrow gave us examples, which we confirmed. For instance, in a 2008 South Carolina case, a woman faced homicide charges after attempting suicide while eight months pregnant, killing the fetus. A 1997 state Supreme Court ruling decided that a fetus is considered a child if it is viable, or able to live outside the uterus. This means pregnant women can be prosecuted under state child abuse statutes. In Missouri, the law bars prosecuting a woman for "indirectly harming her unborn child by failing to properly care for herself or by failing to follow any particular program of prenatal care," but mothers have been charged with child abuse and convicted of involuntary manslaughter for substance abuse while pregnant, news accounts show. Since HB 1 does not repeal existing Georgia feticide law, it’s possible to argue its passage might not lead to the prosecution of women in the death of their fetuses. A judge might decide the earlier feticide law prevents it. However, such a ruling is no sure thing. In conclusion: Critics of Franklin’s bill say that the "human involvement" language is so vague that women could be prosecuted for miscarriages, and we agree with them. While the law does not explicitly allow for miscarriage prosecutions, and Franklin said this is not his intent, the language is so broad it does open the door for women to face felony charges if they abuse drugs, fall off a bicycle, fail to wear a seat belt, or opt for cancer treatment while pregnant. Women in Georgia and across the nation have previously been prosecuted for actions investigators think adversely affected their fetuses, even if the law does not specifically call for them to do so. However, women who miscarry might not be handled as felons. It depends on how prosecutors and judges decide to handle the law. The statement could use a little more context. We therefore rule Phillips’ statement Mostly True.	None	Liberal Blogger	None	None	None	2011-03-02T06:00:00	2011-02-23	['None']
-pomt-02939	"The number of Americans who receive means-tested government benefits -- welfare -- now outnumbers those who are year-round full-time workers."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/30/charlie-sykes/charlie-sykes-says-today-there-are-more-people-wel/	Welfare reform might have passed in 1996 but the idea of welfare remains one of the raw nerves in American politics. Conservative radio talk show host Charlie Sykes tapped into that theme during his regular morning show on WTMJ in Milwaukee. He teed it up by explaining why the American taxpayer was the "loser of the day." "According to the new census data, the number of Americans who receive means-tested government benefits -- welfare -- now outnumbers those who are year-round full-time workers," Sykes said. "Wow. We’ve been struggling, but in terms of the tipping point here, where you have more people who are on these benefit programs, these are the means-tested benefit programs, than the people who are actually working and paying the taxes." In this fact-check, we’ll look into whether today there are more people getting these benefits than there are full-time workers. By the way, means-tested applies to aid that comes only if the person is poor enough to qualify. The programs include Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), subsidized housing and several others which we’ll mention below. We asked Sykes where he got his information and he sent us a link to an article that appeared on the CNS News website. CNS News is a project of the Media Research Center, a conservative group that aims to counter what it sees as liberal bias in the media. The CNS News item accurately cited two reports from the Census Bureau. One report gave the number of 108 million people receiving at least one means-tested benefit. The other gave the number of 101 million people who work full time. The math seems simple, but those reports don’t tell the entire story. Here’s why. Census Bureau includes double counting The original CNS article links to the key Census Bureau tables. The table on recipients of means-tested aid has this note at the top. "The figures for means-tested programs include anyone residing in a household in which one or more people received benefits from the program." So, if one person receives Supplemental Security Income, a program for disabled adults, the entire household was included in the tally. As a result, it was possible for full-time workers to be counted as recipients. Another table in the same data collection gives an idea of how common that might be. Out of a total of more than 108 million recipients, there were more than 79 million households with at least one person working. The data don’t say whether that was a full-time worker but the numbers guarantee that the tally of recipients is exaggerated. Time frame Sykes said this was a situation that exists "now," but what is interesting is the article is very clear that this information is from 2011. Here’s the article’s first line: "Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau," it said. Sykes spoke about a situation that he said existed today. The economy in 2011 is not the one we have in 2013. Among other big differences, unemployment is lower by 1.4 percentage points. Updating the numbers We went to several agency websites to determine what their participation figures look like today. In every case that we could check, they had declined. Subsidized housing: The 2011 survey had 13 million. For 2012, we found 9 million. SNAP (food stamps): The 2011 survey had 49 million. For 2013, we found 47 million. Medicaid: The 2011 survey had 82 million. For 2013, we found 72 million. TANF (welfare): The 2011 survey had 5.8 million. For 2013, we found 3.7 million. In contrast, the number of full-time workers went up. The article cited 101 million. In 2013, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 142 million. We are unable to duplicate the Census Bureau method for 2013. It was based on a survey and used statistical techniques to generate its figures. So today there are generally less people receiving some type of government assistance and more people working full time. One final note: The number of recipients includes millions of children under the age of 16 and the elderly. The Census Bureau tally folds in the school lunch program. In the spring of this year, 29 million students benefited from that. About a third of the residents of public housing are over 62. By most standards, we don’t expect these people to work. To compare them to the number of full-time workers might be useful policy information but to fail to note that children and the elderly, not to mention the blind and disabled, are folded into the tally of recipients is highly misleading. Our ruling Sykes said that "the number of Americans who receive means-tested government benefits -- welfare -- now outnumbers those who are year-round full-time workers." Sykes ignored that the article he read, in its first line, described the situation in 2011, not today. In addition, current numbers look quite different from 2011 when the country was at a lower point in its slow climb back from a deep recession. The article also pointed to the original data tables where it was clear that at the very least, the numbers could have blurred the distinction between those who work and those who are counted as recipients. The failure to note the large numbers of children and elderly in the recipient group is also a significant lapse in the context of comparing them to the number of full-time workers. We rate the claim False. Correction: An earlier version of this fact-check wrongly identified the Media Research Center.	None	Charlie Sykes	None	None	None	2013-10-30T13:35:29	2013-10-25	['United_States']
-pomt-11778	"Melania Trump: 'If ISIS Lays a finger on Barron, I’ll scratch Obama’s eyes out.' "	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/nov/28/yournewswirecom/no-proof-melania-trump-said-if-isis-harms-her-son-/	No, the first lady did not really issue a threat to former President Barack Obama over the safety of her son. A headline on Yournewswire.com fabricated the quote in a clickbait headline: "Melania Trump: ‘If ISIS Lays a finger on Barron, I’ll scratch Obama’s eyes out." Facebook users flagged the Nov. 23 post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat fake news. Yournewswire.com is a fake news website. In this case, the article is not entirely fictional because it was based on a threat by an ISIS supporter. However, there is no evidence that Trump responded with her own threat against former President Barack Obama. Yournewswire.com cites an article in the Washington Free Beacon, which stated that pro-ISIS internet channels called for the assassination of the son of Melania and President Donald Trump. The Free Beacon attributed the information to the Middle East Media Research Institute, an organization that tracks jihadist propaganda. The institute found the information about the threat against Barron on Telegram, a social media network. Here’s what the group reported: On November 21, 2017, a supporter of the Islamic State (ISIS) on Telegram called for the assassination of Barron Trump, and shared the name of the school that Barron attends along with a Google map pinpointing its location. Using the hashtag "handle the son of the mule of America," the supporter, who uses the name "Dak Al-Munafiqeen," Arabic for "striking the hypocrites," wrote: "Barron Trump goes to this school in Washington." The post was followed by a photo of Barron Trump. To widely disseminate the call for assassination, several pro-ISIS Telegram channels have shared and forwarded the post. The report drew scant mainstream media attention. While Telegram is used by a lot of people worldwide, it is particularly popular with jihadis and ISIS supporters, said Steven Stalinsky, MEMRI executive director. "It's the main vehicle for ISIS and their supporters to use to communicate and put out propaganda," he said. The threat against Barron on Telegram from a supporter is not the equivalent of an official communique by ISIS, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a terrorism expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told PolitiFact. "The fact that someone on an ISIS channel said it online doesn’t make it a significant threat," he said. "Anything said by some extremist on Telegram is not exactly breaking news that most outlets pick up in any way." Where the YourNewsWire.com story really goes into fake territory is the idea that Melania Trump responded to the threat by saying "if ISIS Lays a finger on Barron, I’ll scratch Obama’s eyes out." We could not find any evidence that she responded at all. We contacted YourNewsWire.com and received a reply from the editor in chief, Sean Adl-Tabatabai, who said PolitiFact is "policing the internet as part of a a faux moral crusade on behalf of the Clinton regime." Our ruling YourNewsWire.com stated that Melania Trump said, "If ISIS Lays a finger on Barron, I’ll scratch Obama’s eyes out." We found no evidence that Melania Trump responded to an online threat against Barron at all — much less that she said she would enact revenge on Obama. We rate this headline Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	YourNewsWire.com	None	None	None	2017-11-28T10:56:11	2017-11-23	['None']
-abbc-00095	The claim: Christopher Pyne says a VIP Boeing business jet flight from Perth to Canberra taken by a group of WA Liberal MPs was probably cheaper than a commercial flight.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-20/is-it-cheaper-for-mps-to-fly-vip-jets/5086058	The claim: Christopher Pyne says a VIP Boeing business jet flight from Perth to Canberra taken by a group of WA Liberal MPs was probably cheaper than a commercial flight.	['air-transport', 'air-force', 'defence-forces', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia', 'perth-6000', 'canberra-2600']	None	None	['air-transport', 'air-force', 'defence-forces', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia', 'perth-6000', 'canberra-2600']	Is it cheaper for MPs to fly VIP jets, as Christopher Pyne claims?	Tue 26 Nov 2013, 5:10am	None	['Perth', 'Canberra']
-snes-02216	A UFO was seen disappearing into a portal over Colorado.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ufo-portal-colorado/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did a UFO Disappear Into a ‘Portal’ Above Colorado?	12 June 2017	None	['Colorado']
-snes-03846	Facebook Posts Warn Against Getting the Flu Shot	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-posts-warn-against-getting-the-flu-shot/	None	Uncategorized	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Should You Avoid Getting a Flu Shot?	8 October 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-06878	"Polls now show a majority of Catholics favor marriage equality."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2011/jul/31/steven-goldstein/garden-state-equality-chairman-steven-goldstein-sa/	Last weekend was "bittersweet" for Steven Goldstein. Same-sex couples could wed legally in New York, while Goldstein, the head of the gay rights advocacy group Garden State Equality, said New Jersey is "still denied that freedom." Goldstein, whose group filed a lawsuit this summer aiming to legalize same-sex marriage in New Jersey, argued in a July 24 column published in The Sunday Star-Ledger’s Perspective section that New Jersey’s civil union law doesn’t provide real equality. "The governor cites his faith as a basis for his opposition to marriage equality," wrote Goldstein. "But no faith is monolithic on any issue. Polls now show a majority of Catholics favor marriage equality, as does the general electorate." Do a majority of Catholics really favor gay marriage? Goldstein provided PolitiFact New Jersey with two national surveys to support his statement, and they mostly do. First, let’s note that both polls -- and another survey we found -- highlighted the views of white Catholics. Pollsters said this is done to control for race and because white Catholics are considered a swing voter group. But we’re going to look at all Catholics since Goldstein didn’t distinguish. Also, because the Catholics made up a smaller group than the poll sample, the margins of error are higher. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released in March asked 1,005 adults, "do you think it should be legal or illegal for gay and lesbian couples to get married?" It found that among those who identified themselves as Catholic, 60 percent support same-sex marriage and 38 percent oppose it, with a 7.5 percentage point margin of error. A Public Religion Research Institute poll released in May surveyed 1,007 adults. It asked respondents whether they strongly favor, favor, oppose or strongly oppose "allowing gay and lesbian couples to legally marry." It found among the Catholics surveyed, 56 percent either favored or strongly favored and 36 percent either opposed or strongly opposed, with a margin of error of 7 percentage points. It’s worth noting that in another national poll by the Public Religion Research Institute from September 2010, when Catholics were given the option of choosing civil unions, support for marriage dipped. It found that of the Catholics surveyed, 43 percent said gay couples should be allowed to marry, 31 percent said gay couples should be allowed to form civil unions but not marry and 22 percent said there should be no legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship. It’s also worth noting that in that poll, the more often Catholics said they went to church, the less likely they were to support same-sex marriage. A national Quinnipiac University poll released in July that asked 2,311 registered voters whether they "would support or oppose a law in your state that would same-sex couples to get married?" Of the Catholics surveyed, 53 percent said they would support such a law in their state and 41 percent said they would oppose, with a margin of error of 4.9 percentage points. Mark Gray, a research associate with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, pointed to his analysis of 2010 data from the General Social Survey, which found that 48 percent of Catholics either strongly agreed or agreed that "homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another" and 36 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed, with a 5.8 percentage point margin of error. "Right now at this point you can’t really say it’s a majority, you can’t really say it’s not a majority, given the margin of error," Gray said. Michele Dillon, chair of University of New Hampshire’s department of sociology, said "the actual percentage varies poll to poll, it’s either close or over 50 percent," but, "the momentum is in favor of same-sex marriage" -- both nationally and among Catholics. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said "there’s no question there’s been a movement" in favor of same-sex marriage, mostly driven by a younger generation. Young people, "including young Catholics, are far more likely to be supportive of gay marriage," he said. But, Donohue argued, "people tend to be a bit more liberal" when asked their opinion on the phone, "as opposed to the privacy of the ballot box." Back to Goldstein’s statement. Goldstein said, "polls now show a majority of Catholics favor marriage equality." We found polls generally support his claim. However, because the margins of error are so high -- enough to possibly affect the results -- we rate Goldstein’s statement Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Steven Goldstein	None	None	None	2011-07-31T05:15:00	2011-07-24	['None']
-snes-01143	President Donald Trump's 2018 budget proposal calls for cuts in benefits to highly disabled veterans	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-disabled-veterans-cuts/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Donald Trump’s 2018 Budget Proposal Cut Support for Disabled Veterans?	23 January 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04437	"There's not one Democrat who endorses" the Romney-Ryan Medicare plan.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/12/joe-biden/joe-biden-says-no-democrats-support-paul-ryans-med/	In their only face-to-face debate of the campaign, Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin challenged and chided each other’s proposals, particularly on the hot-button issue of Medicare reform. Ryan is the author of a House budget proposal that calls for substantial changes to the government health care program for seniors, including an eventual shift to "premium support" which beneficiaries could use to purchase private insurance. Romney has embraced it as a means of introducing choice and competition into Medicare. Democrats, including Biden and President Barack Obama, say it will end up costing seniors more. In the Oct. 11 debate, Ryan defended the plan as having bipartisan support: "This is a plan that's bipartisan. It's a plan I put together with a prominent Democrat senator from Oregon," said Ryan. "There's not one Democrat who endorses it," Biden interjected. "Our partner is a Democrat from Oregon," Ryan answered amid some cross-talk. "And he said he does no longer support (it)," Biden insisted. Medicare -- complex, polarizing and highly political because of the huge voting bloc of seniors who cherish it -- is center stage in the campaign. We decided to check who’s right about across-aisle-support for the Republican plan. The Ryan budgets Ryan, the Republican House budget chairman, first unveiled a budget blueprint in early 2011 that would convert Medicare to the premium support model. It also raised the program’s eligibility age from 65 to 67, called for a repeal of Obamacare and reined in other spending to reduce the federal deficit. It passed the House on April 15, 2011, but the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected it a month later. Arguments over Medicare hit a fever pitch that year, with Democrats accusing Republicans of voting to "end Medicare." Then, in December, the hope of compromise peeked through the partisan clouds. Ryan and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., joined together and offered a compromise on Medicare reform ideas. Their ideas were contained in a white paper -- never taking the form of legislation -- and were branded as marrying the best proposals from each side. The main difference from Ryan’s original plan: The new proposal left in place traditional Medicare for those who wanted it, while still offering premium support to buy private policies. "There's a lot to work with here in terms of trying to find common ground," Wyden said at the time, according to the Washington Post. "This doesn't end Medicare as we know it. People can go to bed knowing that traditional Medicare will be there for them for all time." He said the plan presented "the opportunity for progressives and conservatives to come together and address the real challenges" of the federal entitlement program: rising health costs and an aging population. Democrats were unequivocal in their criticism. The White House returned to the old party line, saying the plan would "end Medicare as we know it." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other House Democrats said it would essentially kill Medicare. Republicans, who sensed a political opportunity in the defection of Wyden, offered more open-minded reactions. Newt Gingrich, who called Ryan's original plan "right-wing social engineering," praised the Ryan-Wyden deal as "a major breakthrough." Wyden, a senator since 1996, is known as policy-driven and liberal-minded, but also a true and rare compromiser. He told the Oregonian newspaper in March 2012 that he was not being punished by Democratic leaders for partnering with Ryan, saying his biggest adversaries were special interests. "When you deal with a big issue where there are a lot of passions, you expect this," he said then. "I made the judgment that I couldn't just sit by and talk about business as usual for this program that, for me, has been sacred for three decades." He also found himself fending off suggestions by Romney that he abetted the Republicans’ Medicare plan. Wyden, according to the Oregonian, said he'd never spoken to Romney. He posted an explanation in the Huffington Post titled "Preserving the Medicare Guarantee: Why I've Been Working with Paul Ryan." He used personal anecdotes to explain his motivation to fight for seniors and warned that serious reform was needed to preserve the "guarantee to all Americans that they will have high quality health care as they get older." In the meantime, Ryan unveiled his budget proposal for 2013. It contained many of the same hallmarks as its predecessor: reduced federal spending, repeal of Obamacare. Only this one incorporated the Ryan-Wyden plan for Medicare, with premium support and the traditional option. Wyden said he was wary of the wider proposal, citing a lower limit for Medicare's spending growth and a full repeal of the health care overhaul. He also warned his Medicare white paper should not be used to anoint the whole Ryan budget as having bipartisan support. "Any person on the right who says that this is about cover -- that person is hurting senior citizens," Wyden said in a March 20 story in Congressional Quarterly Today. "I say that explicitly because they're making it tougher to get a bipartisan agreement in the future." Partners no more If the spring of 2012 showed the Ryan-Wyden romance fading, late summer was the break-up. On Aug. 11, 2012, Ryan was tapped as Romney’s running mate, and within days, Romney was hailing his VP nominee’s Medicare plan as bipartisan -- and naming Wyden. "Paul Ryan and Sen. Wyden said, 'No, we need to restore, retain and protect Medicare,' " Romney said at a campaign stop in Virginia. "That's what our party will do." The Post wrote that Wyden was "apparently displeased about his sudden prominence as a validator of the Republican ticket." "Gov. Romney is talking nonsense," Wyden told reporters, according to the Post. He explained in detail his two main objections to Romney’s proposals in an interview with Ezra Klein, who writes the Post’s Wonk Blog. Repealing Obamacare, he said, would undo changes to Medicare that are necessary to transition to premium support. Secondly, Romney has proposed turning Medicaid, the health care program for the poor and disabled, into a block grant to the states and rein in spending. That change, Wyden said, "would do enormous harm to those people whose protection was at the center of the white paper." Romney’s approach to Medicaid "completely pulls the rug out from under the poorest and most vulnerable seniors," he said. If any doubt remained following the vice presidential debate on Oct. 11 about Wyden’s position on the Republican Medicare plan, Wyden addressed it the same night on his Facebook page. "The Republican ticket knows that neither I, nor any other Democrat, would support these policies. The Romney/Ryan plan on Medicare is further proof that Mitt Romney is singularly unfit to end gridlock and bring bipartisan solutions to Washington," he wrote. Our ruling Biden said "there’s not one Democrat who endorses" the Republican proposal to fundamentally restructure Medicare. That hasn’t always been the case. Last year, Wyden and Ryan put their heads together and offered a compromise proposal for the future of Medicare. But that bipartisan bond began to crack months ago when the Wisconsin congressman put forth a second budget with provisions Wyden opposed. Their partnership dissolved in August, after Ryan joined the Romney ticket, and Wyden made a point of talking up the differences between his and the Republicans’ ideas for Medicare, not the similarities. Wyden was the only Democrat to endorse Ryan’s idea of premium support in Medicare, and his approval has clearly been revoked. We rate Biden’s statement True.	None	Joe Biden	None	None	None	2012-10-12T17:29:58	2012-10-11	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-tron-03132	Girl Scouts of America Allows Transgender Youth to Join	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/girl-scouts-of-america-allows-transgender-youth-to-join/	None	politics	None	None	None	Girl Scouts of America Allows Transgender Youth to Join	May 15, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13815	"Granite State shipbuilders . . . built the first ship that sailed into battle under a new American flag."	half-true	/new-hampshire/statements/2016/jul/15/frank-guinta/frank-guinta-says-first-ship-fly-american-flag-bat/	Along with hamburgers and hot dogs, the residents of the Live Free or Die state were served up an interesting tidbit about New Hampshire’s history this Fourth of July by Congressman Frank Guinta. In a patriotic holiday email, the 1st Congressional District Republican emphasized New Hampshire’s role in the Revolutionary War. "The colonies, with a lot of help from Granite State shipbuilders, who built the first ship that sailed into battle under a new American flag, won the Revolutionary War, created what is now the world's oldest constitutional democracy, and charted a course to freedom and prosperity," he wrote. There’s a lot to be proud of in there. But we were intrigued by the piece that we’d never heard before: New Hampshire shipbuilders made the ship that debuted a new American flag in battle. To show our American spirit, PolitiFact N.H. turned to the history books to get to the bottom of this claim. Detailing the claim Guinta’s communications director, Brendan Thomas, said it was the USS Raleigh – built at the site of the current-day Portsmouth Naval Shipyard – that first sailed into battle flying a new variant of the American flag. Thomas noted that the state celebrates this information in its online history of the state seal, which features the Raleigh. Without further explanation, NH.gov says that the Raleigh was "the first to carry the American flag into sea battle." The ship launched in 1776, at a time when the country had no official flag, and sailed until 1778, after Congress defined the first variant of today’s Stars and Stripes. Thomas couldn’t say exactly which variant it was that the Raleigh premiered, except that it was "not necessarily the Stars and Stripes" and "may have been a Union Jack surrounded by stars and stripes." That design – a Union Jack in the upper left with the rest filled out by alternating red and white stripes – is considered to be the first American flag, although unofficially, according to Marc Leepson’s 2006 book, Flag: An American Biography. It went by many names, including the Continental Colors and the Grand Union Flag. The Continental Colors The Raleigh wasn’t the first to fly the Continental Colors, according to national historical records. That flag was first flown Dec. 3, 1775, on the USS Alfred by Navy Lieutenant John Paul Jones, according to a history by the Federal Citizen Information Center. Guinta was talking about the first ship that sailed into battle under a new flag, however, not just the flag being hoisted in the harbor, so Jones’s story doesn’t fit the bill. Still, an armada led by Commodore Esek Hopkins – including the Alfred, Columbus, Cabot and Andrew Doria – marked the first overseas victory for an American flag-flying ship, again before the Raleigh launched, according to Leepson’s book. That armada set sail Jan. 4, 1776, flying the Continental Colors, and captured forts Montagu and Nassau on the eastern end of New Providence in the British-owned Bahamas on March 17, 1776. The Raleigh first launched two months later on May 21, 1776, according to the U.S. Navy. So before the Raleigh ever took to the sea, the Continental Colors were already successful in a naval battle. The Stars and Stripes If the Raleigh didn’t premier the Continental Colors, it could have been the first to go into battle flying an early version of the Stars and Stripes. The Continental Colors, according to Leepson’s book, remained the colonies’ unofficial flag until June 14, 1777. That’s when the Second Continental Congress passed the Flag Act of 1777, setting the stage for the first variant of the Stars and Stripes. According to Leepson’s book, the first ship flying the Stars and Stripes that was victorious over a foreign force was the USS Providence on Jan. 27, 1778. It captured the British Fort Nassau, seized ammunition and freed more than two dozen American prisoners. There’s a small window for Guinta’s claim to be true, if the Raleigh had sailed into battle – one that didn’t merit Leepson’s distinction of the first victory – between June of 1777 and the following January. The Raleigh’s history The Raleigh did sail across the Atlantic Ocean alongside the Alfred during that time, getting into a few scuffles with British ships along the way, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command. But there’s no record of what flags the ships were flying. The only mention of the Raleigh’s flag was on a subsequent voyage that ended in the ship’s capture on Sept. 27, 1778. A midshipman on the Raleigh "struck the Continental colors" to end a battle in Maine’s Penobscot Bay, meaning he lowered the ship’s flag in an indication of surrender, according to the U.S. Navy’s history. Notably, it was the Continental Colors – not the Stars and Stripes – that the Raleigh was flying before it was taken and adopted into the British fleet. And that’s after the USS Providence’s victory in the Bahamas in January. Historians’ take PolitiFact N.H. asked U.S. Navy Commander Chris Rentfrow, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, for his take on the claim. He wrote in an email that he’s not aware of any evidence supporting the USS Raleigh being the first to fly the American flag. He said the honor of first flying the Continental Colors goes to the Alfred. "Raleigh certainly would have flown this flag (the Continental Colors), as she was a contemporary of Hopkins' Alfred," Rentfrow wrote. "The ‘Stars and Stripes,’ as you probably know, came about in 1777. Did Raleigh fly it? Probably. She was in service until captured by the British in 1778. I'm not aware that she was ‘first’ to fly it. We teach our students that the first foreign acknowledgement of the Stars and Stripes was when John Paul Jones' ship Ranger was saluted by the French in 1778." Portsmouth shipbuilders were responsible for many prominent early vessels – including the Ranger and the Raleigh – "thanks in large part to the lobbying and persistence of John Langdon," a famed New Hampshire governor and founder, said state archivist Brian Burford. He referenced the writing of New Hampshire maritime historian Richard Winslow, who wrote in 1988 a history of Portsmouth shipbuilding between 1775 and 1815, but was unable to confirm the claim Guinta made. The French salute of the Stars and Stripes aboard the Ranger, however, may be something of a consolation prize for Granite Staters, because it, too, was built in Portsmouth. Neither Burford, the state archivist, nor Malia Ebel, a reference librarian and archivist for the New Hampshire Historical Society, could give a certain answer about Guinta’s claim. Ebel said it’s possible that the Raleigh flew an early variant of the Stars and Stripes, but "there’s sort of a dearth of information about this particular flag at this point." "He’s not necessarily wrong. We just can’t confirm what he said," Ebel said. The strongest evidence in support of the claim comes from the entry on the state’s website about the state seal, which offers only a vague, passing reference: "The Raleigh has a checkered career of adversities, while becoming the first to carry the American flag into sea battle." The website cites as its source a 1981 history written by Leon Anderson, a deceased former Monitor reporter and columnist who became a state legislative historian. Ebel said no more detailed information could be found in the manual that Anderson wrote. "Even more unfortunately," she said, "it doesn’t have a citation, so we don’t know where it came from." Our ruling Guinta said "Granite State shipbuilders . . . built the first ship that sailed into battle under a new American flag." Although the USS Raleigh sailed fewer than two years before it was captured, its service spanned two versions of the American flag. The Raleigh definitely flew an earlier variant of the American Flag, called the Continental Colors, but it wasn’t the first to do so. Experts said it likely flew the other variant, an early version of the Stars and Stripes, but there’s no evidence that it was the first to do so in battle. The gist of Guinta’s claim is true: New Hampshire shipbuilders were critical to the success of the fledgling American Navy. He could have easily pointed to the story of the Portsmouth-built Ranger carrying the first American flag that was ever saluted by a foreign nation. But there’s scant evidence to support the idea that the Raleigh was the first to sail into battle flying any variant of the American flag. On balance, we rate the claim Half True.	None	Frank Guinta	None	None	None	2016-07-15T20:45:17	2016-07-04	['United_States']
-pomt-09383	The federal health care plan "costs Texas taxpayers $2.4 billion per year."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/mar/26/david-dewhurst/dewhurst-says-states-health-care-tab-24-billion-ye/	The hot debate over health care policy boiled in the days after Congress acted to revamp the nation’s health care system. In Texas, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a Republican, lashed out at the new law, saying in a Sunday statement: "This federal plan costs Texas taxpayers $2.4 billion per year." That's a big tab; the entire general revenue fund budget for state health and human services is about $12 billion this year. Was Dewhurst on the money? First, let's stipulate that the plan signed into law this week by President Barack Obama will cost states and the federal government. There is a cost to extending health coverage to as many as 32 million uninsured Americans — and with 6.1 million people lacking health insurance, Texas has the nation's largest share (25.1 percent) of uninsured residents. Among the changes wrought by health care reform: requiring most Americans to have coverage and expanding Medicaid, the government-run health insurance program for the poor financed with federal and state dollars. Both are expected to affect state budgets. Starting in 2014, the law makes it easier to qualify for Medicaid; everyone who makes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level will be eligible. (For a family of four, that level is currently $29,327. For a single person, it's $14,404.) The Texas Health and Human Services Commission assumes that about 2 million people will sign up for the Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program because of the new federal law. The cost will be largely covered by an influx of federal aid, possibly amounting to more than $120 billion. That'll be a dramatic shift for Texas, which limits access to Medicaid more than most states. Currently, adult Texans without children do not qualify, and the vast majority of the people in Medicaid are children. Few poor parents are covered unless they're disabled or pregnant. Mike Wintemute, a Dewhurst spokesman, said the lieutenant governor was referring to a state Health and Human Services Commission analysis that estimates the health care law will cost Texas $24.3 billion over 10 years. To reach the annual figure, Dewhurst divided by 10. Dewhurst, Gov. Rick Perry and Texas House Speaker Joe Straus cited the 10-year figure in a March 19 letter to members of the Texas congressional delegation urging them to vote against the Democratic-backed health care legislation. Similarly, U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock, posted a Facebook message Thursday saying the law would "cost Texans $24.3 billion in Medicaid spending over the next 10 years." Carter erred; the state estimate doesn't cover the next 10 years. Instead, Texas based its cost estimates on the decade that begins nearly four years from now, in 2014 — the year Medicaid costs will start surging. That's not the time frame (2010-19) the federal government is using to project costs. Using different decades makes it hard to compare Texas' cost projections with others. The figure cited by Dewhurst and others is also problematic for other reasons. First, Dewhurt's total is based on the maximum sum — $24.3 billion — that can be drawn from the commission's analysis. The agency's report, issued earlier this year, specifies $15.6 billion as the baseline cost of the legislation's 10-year impact. Another $6 billion related to losses in federal aid for hospitals is listed as "possible." The remainder (less than $3 billion) relates to provisions that were not yet part of the plan. Second, the state’s cost estimate is based on an earlier version of the legislation, not the final bill. Various "fixes" to the law — known as the reconciliation measure — passed Congress this week and will also be reflected in future updates of the cost estimate. During the first few years, the federal government will shoulder 100 percent of the burden for Medicaid expansion and then scale back to about 90 percent. But much of the estimated cost of health reform to Texas is not due to Medicaid expansion per se — that is, serving people who do not yet qualify for the program — but from taking care of those who are eligible now but not signed up. The state calculates that, primarily because of the the new law's requirement that people get coverage, more than 550,000 already-eligible folks will be among the 2 million to enroll in Medicaid and CHIP in future years. When they start showing up, in what's called the "welcome mat" phenomenon, they will cost the state more than the newly qualified enrollees because the federal government will pay less of the cost to serve them. The state’s estimate puts these "welcome mat" costs at $11.4 billion — nearly half of the $24.3 billion total. The Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, an advocate for low- and middle-income Texans, has criticized the state for putting those costs in their estimate. A spokeswoman for the health commission, Stephanie Goodman, defended their inclusion, saying that no matter the reason they enter the government programs, those new enrollees will be costly. Anne Dunkelberg, the center's associate director, also questioned the "possible" $6 billion that the analysis says could be needed to replace hospital funding that might be lost because of the new law. That money goes to hospitals that treat large numbers of Medicaid patients and the uninsured. As the number of uninsured patients drops, those subsidies are expected to fall too. Dunkelberg said that cost is overstated because the federal cuts will be targeted to states that have fewer uninsured people. In fact, said Goodman, state analysts will likely reduce that $6 billion estimate, though by how much is not known. A March 20 letter from U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, to U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, refers to a Congressional Budget Office estimate that Waxman says would put the Texas share of the Medicaid expansion, including the costs of increased enrollment by people already eligible, "in the neighborhood of" $1.4 billion from 2014 through 2019. Of course, that number covers only the first five years of the Medicaid expansion. But it seems unlikely that a full 10-year analysis would ramp up the total cost as high as the state's $24.3 billion figure. So, where does that leave Dewhurst's claim that the federal plan will cost Texas taxpayers $2.4 billion per year? Basically, on squishy ground. Here's why: (1) $6 billion of the estimate was labeled by the state as a "possible" cost, and the agency has since indicated that figure is high. (2) The state estimate covers a 10-year period that does not start until 2014 and is based on an outdated version of health care legislation. (3) Nearly half of the $24.3 billion cited by Dewhurst is money the state would have to spend anyway — regardless of health care reform — if people already eligible for Medicaid and CHIP signed up now. But it's an expense that would probably not come due without the new law. We rate Dewhurst's statement as Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	David Dewhurst	None	None	None	2010-03-26T22:11:37	2010-03-21	['Texas']
-tron-02636	Bank of America in Arizona Turned Away Business With Firearms Manufacturer	disputed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bofa-mcmillan/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Bank of America in Arizona Turned Away Business With Firearms Manufacturer	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-12261	Giving a committee chair’s stipend in the New York State Senate to another member of that committee "has been, in fact, a legislative practice for decades."	false	/new-york/statements/2017/jul/10/diane-savino/stipends-vice-chairs-state-senate-new-practice-not/	A recent uproar in Albany centered on how eight New York state senators, since 2015, have been paid stipends worth thousands of dollars for committee chairmanships they do not hold. Diane Savino, a Democrat from Staten Island, called the practice business as usual in the Senate. "In Albany there seems to be an obsession with something that has been, in fact, a legislative practice for decades," Savino said in an interview on NY1, Charter's 24-hour news channel in New York City. Is Savino right that this has been going on for decades? How senators are paid Each Senate leadership position includes a stipend on top of a senator’s $79,500 salary. Stipends range from $9,000 for lower leadership posts to the $41,500 stipend collected by Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan. Committee chairs receive stipends. Vice chairs do not. A senator can receive only one stipend. Senate staffers send documents to the New York State Comptroller’s Office each year listing the leadership position for which each senator should be paid his or her stipend. PolitiFact New York obtained the documents through Freedom of Information requests for each year starting in 2006. The Comptroller’s Office keeps the documents for only five years, so it provided documents from 2012 to this year. The Senate provided documents from 2006 through 2011. The documents show the practice of giving a committee chair’s stipend to a different member of that committee did not start until 2015. The stipends went to the chairs from 2006 through 2014, unless the chair was paid for a different leadership position. The chair’s stipend was not paid to anyone in those cases. Two lawmakers were paid for committee chairmanships they did not hold in 2015 and 2016. Sen. David Valesky was paid the $15,000 stipend of Health Committee Chairman Kemp Hannon. At the time, Hannon collected a $25,000 stipend as assistant majority leader on conference operations. Sen. Andrew Lanza was paid the $18,000 stipend of Codes Committee Chairman Michael Nozzolio, who received $22,000 as the Senate’s majority whip. Valesky and Lanza were listed as vice chairs of the committees. The practice widened in 2017, when six senators were paid for chairmanships they did not hold. Each, except Sen. Patricia Ritchie, was listed as vice chair of the respective committee. Savino received the $18,000 stipend of the Codes Committee chair this year. Lanza, who now chairs the Codes committee, received a $19,500 stipend as assistant senate majority whip. Ritchie, who chairs the Agriculture Committee, was instead paid the Health Committee chair’s stipend this year — a $2,500 increase. Ritchie is listed as deputy vice chair of the Health Committee. Sen. Thomas O’Mara was paid $15,000 as vice chairman of the Transportation Committee. O’Mara otherwise would have received a $12,500 stipend as the Environmental Conservation Committee chairman. Sen. Patrick Gallivan of Elma received $18,000 as vice chairman of the Education Committee, $5,500 more than he would have been be paid for chairing the Crime Victims, Crime, and Correction Committee. Sen. Pam Helming would have received a $12,500 stipend as vice chairwoman of the Crime Victims Committee, the amount Gallivan would have been paid had he not collected the $18,000 from his Education Committee post. Helming decided not to accept the payment. Sen. Jose Peralta, in a twist, took a pay cut. He was paid $12,500 this year as vice chairman of the Energy and Telecommunications Committee. Documents show he was paid $14,500 as the Senate’s minority whip last year, a post he no longer holds. Savino’s view Savino’s spokesperson said the senator was talking about granting stipends to members in general, and not referring specifically to committee vice chairs taking the stipends left available by their committee chairs who took stipends from elsewhere. Stipends have been paid to members for decades. The Legislature started paying stipends to committee chairs in 1976. But Savino’s statement came in reply to an interviewer's question about the stipends going to vice chairs. Viewers who watched the interview could not be expected to understand her comment as her spokesperson said it was intended. Our ruling Savino said the practice of giving a committee chairman’s stipend to the vice chair in the State Senate has been "a legislative practice for decades." Records from the state Comptroller’s Office indicate otherwise. The practice did not happen any time in the last decade. It started in 2015. Records do not support Savino’s statement. We rate it False. EDITOR'S NOTE - UPDATE Savino's office issued a statement about our story after publication on July 10. "It’s amazing that an outlet which calls itself Politifact could take liberties with the truth and distort my words based on their ‘perception’ of an interview. Perception is not fact it is opinion, and the truth is that the fragment they plucked from my full statement is as true today as it was when I said it: The practice of the Senate issuing stipends to senators has been a legislative practice for decades. I never said vice chairs were, though they are certainly entitled to under the legislative law. In fact, every senator in our house is entitled to one allowance including every senator in the minority," Savino said in the statement. For context, here's a transcript of the relevant portion of the interview we fact-checked: ERROL LOUIS: For over a week now we’ve been telling you about the controversy involving stipends paid to state senators for positions they do not technically hold. Critics have denounced the practice but Republicans and Independent Democratic Conference leaders say it’s much ado about nothing. My first guest tonight is one of those senators. Democrat Diane Savino is a member of the IDC. She represents parts of Staten Island and southern Brooklyn and she got her stipend as role of vice chair of the senate codes committee. Welcome to the program, thanks for coming back down from Albany. SAVINO: Thanks for having me Errol, how are you? ERROL LOUIS: Oh I’m very good thanks. Tell me what a Vice Chair does. What’s the idea? SAVINO: Well first I want to just reflect on how you opened this. For the past week apparently the Albany press corps has been obsessed with this. When you look at what’s happening in the world, it’s almost as if the world is going to hell in a handbasket. The president is on the verge of being accused of possible crimes where they’re talking about impeachment, the stock market is collapsing today, but yet in Albany there seems to be an obsession with something that has been, in fact, a legislative practice for decades. And in fact when there was a question brought up about it, legal memos were presented and offered to the press to verify that was has been done has been consistent with legislative law and legislative practice for decades, the comptroller’s office verified that that is in fact in legislative law and has been practiced for decades. So, I am mystified as to what the obsession is. Our ruling does not change. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Diane Savino	None	None	None	2017-07-10T00:00:00	2017-05-17	['None']
-pose-00074	"Increase funding to expand community based preventive interventions to help Americans make better choices to improve their health."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/77/increase-funding-to-expand-community-based-prevent/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Increase funding to expand community based prevention programs	2010-01-07T13:26:47	None	['United_States']
-vogo-00451	Statement: “San Diego’s average tax revenue generated per business is $79, far lower than any other major California city. San Francisco, for example, averages $5,253 per business,” a summary of the Citizens Revenue Review and Economic Competitiveness Commission’s report, from The San Diego Union Tribune, Nov. 29.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-do-sd-businesses-pay-low-taxes/	Analysis: San Diego is in the middle of a financial crisis, and officials have been seeking ways to cut costs and boost revenue.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Do SD Businesses Pay Low Taxes?	January 14, 2011	None	['California', 'San_Francisco', 'San_Diego', 'U-T_San_Diego']
-tron-00624	Tom Hanks Endorses Donald Trump	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/tom-hanks-endorses-donald-trump/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Tom Hanks Endorses Donald Trump	Aug 3, 2016	None	['None']
-para-00025	"On present trends, Indonesia will be the number four economy in the world by mid-century."	mostly true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/01/tony-abbott/indonesia-climbs-economic-ladder/index.html	None	['Economy', 'Foreign Affairs']	Tony Abbott	Michael Koziol, Peter Fray	None	Northern neighbour climbs the economic ladder	Tuesday, October 1, 2013 at 7:13 p.m.	None	['Indonesia']
-goop-01921	Britney Spears Planning “Secret Wedding,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/britney-spears-wedding-plans-sam-asghari-engaged/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Britney Spears NOT Planning “Secret Wedding,” Despite Report	3:53 pm, January 2, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-05476	"The federal government owns tens of thousands of properties that are vacant or underused."	true	/georgia/statements/2012/apr/20/tom-graves/graves-tens-thousands-federal-properties-are-vacan/	Nowadays, real estate and the word "glut" come hand in hand. There’s been a glut of homes for sale. A glut in available commercial properties. There’s also a lesser-known glut in properties owned by the federal government that it no longer needs or does not fully utilize. It existed years before the economy took a tumble in the late 2000s, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. By U.S. Rep. Tom Graves’ reckoning, the federal real estate glut is serious enough to earn his vote on a bill that aims to save tax dollars by streamlining the process to get rid of those properties. "The federal government owns tens of thousands of properties that are vacant or underused," the Ranger Republican said in a March 20 press release announcing his vote. This number struck your PolitiFact Georgia scribes as high. Hundreds would be well within reason. Thousands? Sure. But tens of thousands? We asked Graves spokeswoman Jennifer Hazelton for more information. She sent us a link to a February 2011 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Federal Real Property: The Government Faces Challenges to Disposing of Unneeded Buildings." "In fiscal year 2009, 24 federal agencies including the Department of Defense reported 45,190 underutilized buildings that cost $1.66 billion annually to operate," the report stated. Underutilized buildings are those that are not being used to their fullest capacity. Some buildings owned by the federal government are even sitting empty. We cross-checked the data with the General Services Administration, which is often billed as the government’s landlord. According to its yearly property reports, the number of underutilized buildings numbered 43,360 in fiscal year 2008 and 45,190 in fiscal year 2009. These properties were valued at more than $1.6 billion. The problem of surplus buildings came to the attention of President Barack Obama, who issued a 2010 memorandum directing federal agencies to speed up the process of identifying and getting rid of unneeded space. Obama aims to save at least $3 billion by fiscal year 2012, but the GAO report raised concerns that he may be unable to meet that goal because the process of selling government buildings is tangled in red tape. The bill Graves mentioned in his press release would create a pilot program that would streamline the process. The Excess Federal Building and Property Disposal Act of 2012, or HR 665, passed the U.S. House of Representatives and is before the Senate. A congressional hearing on the issue took place March 22 -- ironically, on excess federal property. The 89,000-square-foot Cotton Annex, which is near the National Mall in Washington, has been unoccupied for about five years, according to Republicans on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Its managers said the building remains a moneymaker because the Federal Protective Service is renting it to inspect delivery trucks. Graves is right. Tens of thousands of federal properties are vacant or underused. He earns a True.	None	Tom Graves	None	None	None	2012-04-20T06:00:00	2012-03-20	['None']
-pomt-08887	Cicilline "continues to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbyist, corporate PAC and insider money to fund his campaign."	mostly false	/rhode-island/statements/2010/aug/01/bill-lynch/lynch-say-cicilline-accepts-hundreds-thousands-don/	With the September primary just six weeks away, the campaign attack machines are heating up, especially in the 1st Congressional District race to replace Patrick Kennedy. Of the four Democratic candidates, Providence Mayor David Cicilline has built by far the biggest war chest, which has -- not surprisingly -- made him the biggest target. Every day, it seems, one of Cicilline's opponents is firing a shot at him. Following a showdown at the first Democratic debate, one of the challengers in the race, former party chairman Bill Lynch, released a statement accusing Cicilline of "hypocrisy" regarding the way political campaigns are funded. The gist of his attack: while Cicilline stressed during the debate that "we will not fix Washington and what's broken in Washington until we break the connection between money and politics ...," he was accepting campaign contributions that did just the opposite. In fact, the second-quarter campaign finance reports were released just a few days after the appearance. "Mayor Cicilline wants the voters to believe he's concerned about the way campaigns are funded, yet he continues to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbyist, corporate PAC and insider money to fund his campaign," Lynch said in his statement. From the outset, we knew this would be a challenging claim to check, yet also a useful one for readers. The Lynch campaign -- though vocal in their attacks -- went silent when we asked them for a list of these lobbyists, corporate PACs and insiders. Their rationale: it is not appropriate to discuss individual Cicilline donors. But Lynch is making a serious accusation against an opponent. The burden of proof is on him. And a refusal to back up a claim doesn't buy you a pass on PolitiFact. So we elected to look at Cicilline's first- and second-quarter 2010 federal campaign finance filings, those filed since he declared his congressional candidacy in February. Since Lynch used the phrase "continues to accept, hundreds of thousands of dollars," it seemed appropriate to examine the most current reports. Because Lynch would not define what he meant by "insider money," we decided to focus on donations from lobbyists and corporate PACs. Cicilline received $1.16 million in the first and second quarters from more than 750 donors, more than half of whom gave $1,000 or more. That included donations he was able to transfer from his mayoral campaigns. Of that, roughly $44,000 came from Rhode Island and federal lobbyists. How did we arrive at that number? First, we took the contribution lists and cross-referenced them with the secretary of state's list of 2010 registered Rhode Island lobbyists. That tally came to about $41,500, including donations we could definitively attribute to registered lobbyists and people we could identify as the lobbyists' immediate family. We acknowledge that there may be others, but we only included the ones we could confirm. Next we contacted the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in Washington. The group compiles lists of contributions made by a variety of groups including Washington lobbyists. According to their data, Cicilline received $2,400 in donations from federal lobbyists during the first quarter. The center has not yet completed its second-quarter calculations. Together the donations by state and federal lobbyists totaled around $44,000, or just under 4 percent of his total contributions. Lynch also said that Cicilline received contributions from "corporate PACs." Our review showed that of the almost $35,000 Cicilline accepted from Political Action Committees this year, only about $6,000 or so came from so-called "corporate PACs," which we defined as a political committee directly associated with a corporate entity, such as a law firm. We did not include those affiliated with ideological causes such as the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, which also gave to Cicilline. Add the lobbyist and corporate PAC contributions and you get just under $50,000. That's roughly 4.3 percent of the $1.16 million he accepted this year. It's hardly the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" that Lynch talks about. But remember, that tally doesn't include the third group that Lynch rails against, the "insider[s]." Cicilline's first- and second-quarter filings clearly show he is accepting money from many well-known Rhode Island political and business leaders. These are, after all, the types of people who generally donate to candidates. The more recent filing also shows he received contributions from donors as varied as "Family Guy" creator -- and RISD graduate -- Seth MacFarlane, Patriots owner Bob Kraft and Boston event planner, Bryan Rafanelli, a Warwick native who has been mentioned lately in news reports as reportedly overseeing former first daughter Chelsea Clinton's nuptials. Does Cicilline, who stressed the need to "break the connection between money and politics," accept money from lobbyists, PACs and insiders? Yes. But Lynch's unwillingness to define what he means by "insider," makes it impossible to do an exact calculation. And based on the limited information we have now, his insistence that Cicilline continues to receive "hundreds of thousands of dollars" can't be verified. Now let's take a look at Lynch's first- and second-quarter federal filings. They reveal that of the almost $186,000 he accepted in contributions from about 160 donors (he also loaned himself $100,000), approximately $7,500 of it came from lobbyists, with all but $1,000 from Rhode Island lobbyists. It does not appear that he took any money from so-called "corporate PACS," though he did receive several union contributions. Add it all up and the sum of donations Lynch accepted from lobbyists equals about 4 percent of the total contributions he received. Cicilline's pockets may be far deeper than Lynch's, but the percentage of donations each of them received from these groups is roughly the same: 4 percent. (And by the way, it's clear that Lynch took money from well-known business and political leaders, the so-called "insider money," that he criticizes Cicilline for accepting). In the end, Lynch made serious accusations and refused to back them up. If he provides us with more information, we'll revisit this item, but for now it gets a Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Bill Lynch	None	None	None	2010-08-01T00:01:00	2010-07-15	['None']
-tron-01899	Vladimir Putin Describes President Obama	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/putin-on-obama-100513/	None	humorous	None	None	None	Vladimir Putin Describes President Obama	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Vladimir_Putin']
-pomt-08485	"Steve Southerland did not pay his taxes in '05, '06, '07, '08 or '09."	false	/florida/statements/2010/oct/11/allen-boyd/allen-boyd-campaign-ad-claims-steve-southerland-di/	In a tight race for a North Florida congressional seat, Democratic incumbent U.S. Rep. Allen Boyd has put out a TV ad accusing his opponent, Republican Steve Southerland, of being a tax scofflaw. The ad begins with a video clip from a Southerland campaign event in Marianna, Fla., on Jan. 18, 2010. Someone in the audience yells out, "Do you pay your taxes?" "That's a great question," Southerland responds. "I do pay my taxes." Then a voice-over states: "Steve Southerland did not pay his taxes in '05, '06, '07, '08 or '09. In fact, Southerland didn't pay his taxes until he ran for Congress. Now he wants to raise sales taxes by 23 percent. You just can't trust Steve Southerland." On the screen, viewers see "Delinquent on his property taxes." And the small print cites the source as the Bay County, Fla., tax collector. We were curious if Southerland is the scofflaw that Boyd suggests. First of all, county tax records indicate Southerland has paid the property taxes for his Panama City home on time and in full for all of the years cited in the ad; and public records show no liens for unpaid federal income taxes. The Boyd campaign explains that the ad is referring to business taxes that Southerland's companies failed to pay ... on time. That's right. It's not that Southerland didn't pay his businesses' property taxes. It's that he didn't pay them on time. In all of the years cited, Southerland did, eventually, pay all of the taxes due, with a penalty and interest. Southerland has an interest in several companies, including the family Southerland Funeral Homes and Machriste Inc. Online records for the Bay County tax collector show that the property taxes for some of these companies were often paid late, and with a penalty. But all of them are currently stamped in red: Paid. Southerland acknowledged they were paid late but said that he always paid the late fees and the account was settled. So why were they paid late? Southerland said it came down to a business choice: whether to pay the tax bill on time or meet obligations to pay salary and benefits to employees. "You have the option, according to the law, of paying them a month or two late" with a penalty and interest, Southerland said. "I paid for my ability to pay it late. I made the same decision small businesses have had to make all around the country." J.R. Starrett, a spokesman with the Boyd campaign, said, "This shows a continued behavior. He doesn't feel like he needs to pay his taxes on time." We spoke to Peggy Brannon, the tax collector for Bay County, who explained that if an owner is more than two months delinquent in paying property taxes, the county sells a tax certificate. The purchaser of the certificate pays the taxes due on the property -- so the county gets its money -- and then gets a share of the interest penalty charged to the owner when they square up on their taxes. That happened a couple times with Southerland's properties, she said. Paying late "is not uncommon" for business owners, said Brannon. And in every case, she said, Southerland has eventually paid his taxes with penalties and interest. "He's all paid up," Brannon said. As for the ad's claim that Southerland "now wants to raise sales taxes by 23 percent," that relates to Southerland's kind words for a plan to replace federal income taxes with a sales tax on retail sales. Supporters of the idea call it "the Fair Tax." At a May 8, 2010, campaign event, Southerland said, "I like the Fair Tax very much," and later added that he thinks the 23 percent sales tax figure often cited in Fair Tax research sounds about right. But he also added that there were some things about the Fair Tax he wasn't sold on. And at a campaign event on July 8, 2010, in Destin, Southerland said pursuing a Fair Tax would not be a "centerpiece of my positions in Congress," (though he repeated that there are "some things about the Fair Tax that I like"). That's a little squishy to be claiming in an ad that Southerland wants to raise the sales tax by 23 percent. Especially without noting the context that if he did, it would be as a replacement to the federal income tax. But our fact-check here is whether Southerland didn't pay his taxes for five years. We think the claim is awfully deceptive. In fact, Southerland always paid his federal income taxes as well as his personal property taxes -- on time and in full. As for the property taxes on some of the companies Southerland owns, he did often pay late. As a result, he paid a fine and interest in each case, and usually squared up in the same year the tax was due. In every case, Southerland eventually fully satisfied his tax obligation. The ad makes it seem like Southerland thumbed his nose at the tax collector and then squared up on five years' worth of taxes only after he'd decided to run for Congress, and that simply is not the case. Make what you will of Southerland paying late on some business property taxes. But paying late is not the same as not paying at all. We rate the ad's claim False.	None	Allen Boyd	None	None	None	2010-10-11T11:49:00	2010-09-27	['None']
-tron-02729	Ezekiel Wilekenmeyer Williams, Biological Father of Obama Daughters, Sues Obamas	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ezekiel-wilekenmeyer-williams-sues-obamas/	None	obama	None	None	['barack obama', 'conspiracy', 'fake news']	Ezekiel Wilekenmeyer Williams, Biological Father of Obama Daughters, Sues Obamas	Mar 13, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-08424	Rand Paul wants "to end all federal faith-based initiatives, and even end the deduction for religious charities."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/19/jack-conway/jack-conway-says-rand-paul-would-end-faith-based-i/	An ad unveiled Oct. 15, 2010, by Democrat Jack Conway so angered his opponent for a Kentucky Senate seat, Republican Rand Paul, that Paul refused to shake hands after a debate two days later. The primary reason for the bad blood was the charge in Conway's ad that Paul, as a college student at Baylor University, had participated in some unorthodox activities, according to an account in GQ. "Why was Rand Paul a member of a secret society that called the Holy Bible 'a hoax' -- that was banned from mocking Christianity and Christ?" said the ad's narrator. "Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up? Tell her to bow down before a false idol and say his God was 'Aqua Buddha?'" The ad provoked outrage in the Paul camp, and even some liberal commentators protested. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait called it "the ugliest, most illiberal political ad of the year" for coming "perilously close to saying that non-belief in Christianity is a disqualification for public office," an idea that Chait called "a pretty sickening premise for a Democratic campaign." Because the most salacious details of the GQ story were provided by a woman who requested anonymity, we're not going to attempt to fact-check that part of the story. But the ad does contain two policy-focused claims. We'll turn our focus on those instead. After the reference to the "Aqua Buddha" story, the ad asks, "Why does Rand Paul now want to end all federal faith-based initiatives and even end the deduction for religious charities?" We thought we'd take a look. The Paul campaign did not return a telephone inquiry, so we reviewed the sources cited in the ad. To back up the first claim -- that Paul wants "to end all federal faith-based initiatives" -- the ad cited the June 20, 2008, edition of a public-affairs television show called Kentucky Tonight. Paul was one of four guests invited to join an hour-long discussion of the Kentucky state budget. At one point -- it's about 70 percent of the way through the video -- the conversation turns to state budget cuts and the intersection of church-related charity work with state support for social services. Paul offers a note of caution. "You mentioned faith-based intermingling -- government and faith-based," Paul said. "George (W.) Bush did that, and I think it was a horrible mistake. One, I think the money sort of pollutes the mission of a purely Christian organization, or Muslim or whatever organization it is, and it obscures the church-state separation that there really ought to be. We shouldn't have tax money flowing into churches. We should let churches do charity work, and that's wonderful, but they shouldn't be corrupted with government money." This seems to be a pretty clear statement of Paul's views on the subject. The only potential complication we see with the ad's wording is that Paul's statement on Kentucky Tonight was focused on the expenditure of taxpayer dollars. It's possible to envision a partnership between the federal government and a religious group that doesn't involve money, but we think it's reasonable to assume that most would. So the ad's claim seems pretty accurate to us. On the second point -- that Paul would "end the deduction for religious charities" -- the ad cites an Associated Press account. The AP actually ran a half-dozen stories beginning on Oct. 12, 2010, that addressed Paul's support for a national sales tax. The tale gets a bit complicated, so bear with us. On Oct. 12, the AP quoted Paul saying, "The federal tax code is a disaster no one would come up with if we were starting from scratch. I support making taxes flatter and simpler. I would vote for the Fair Tax to get rid of the 16th Amendment, the IRS and a lot of the control the federal government exerts over us." The story attributed the quote to "a written statement distributed by an anti-tax group and verified by his campaign." The Fair Tax would eliminate the federal income tax, employment tax, and estate and gift taxes, replacing them with a 23 percent "national sales tax on the use or consumption in the United States of taxable property or services." Eliminating the federal income tax would also eliminate deductions such as tax deductions for donations to religious charities. Bills proposing to make that change, which have come up annually for years in Congress, have all failed to progress to a full hearing. Nonetheless, Democrats have used the Fair Tax as the basis for many ads against Republicans this year, one of which we recently rated Half True. One day later, Paul began to walk back the comment. The AP reported that "Paul, a limited-government advocate, said he supports a 'simpler tax code' but wouldn't offer specifics about his written comments to an anti-tax group supporting repeal of the 16th Amendment that created the federal income tax. 'I haven't really been saying anything like that,' Paul told reporters following a speech in Henderson as part of his Kentucky bus tour. 'I think it's probably better to go ... with what I'm saying on the campaign trail.'" On Oct. 14, the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer interviewed Paul before a rally. Paul told the paper that he is for "tax reform in general" but hasn't committed to the Fair Tax. "I'd like to flatten the income tax," Paul said. "The church doesn't ask for more than 10 percent of your income." On Oct. 15, Paul's campaign manager, Jesse Benton, told the AP that a tax reform activist -- former Paul campaign manager David Adams -- had distributed the statement that was the basis for the original AP story, and in so doing, distorted Paul's views on the Fair Tax. "Our campaign respects the Fair Taxation movement, but the Kentucky coordinator got a little overzealous promoting his cause and created a statement that does not accurately reflect Dr. Paul's views," Benton said in a statement to the AP. "Rand knows our tax code is broken and will fight for fundamental reform that both simplifies the system and reduces the financial burden for all Kentuckians. Dr. Paul will study and consider all plans that attempt to do so." The Oct. 15 AP story noted that Adams had said he distributed the statement only after receiving permission from Benton and that Benton had personally verified the statement to the AP for its initial story. Finally, on Oct. 16, the AP reported the existence of a video from a campaign event in February in which Paul told Americans for Fair Taxation volunteer Terry Schmitt, "I'm in favor of any change in the tax code that reduces the overall tax burden. That would include the Fair Tax, changing to a sales tax. One great advantage of it would be no more IRS, no more income tax, no more reams of paper that we all have to deal with." This series of explanations suggests that Paul is backtracking to avoid being associated with a policy proposal that could be unpopular among some voters. But even if he does seem ambivalent, we think there's enough evidence to justify the Conway camp's claim that Paul did support the Fair Tax, at least at one point. That said, we think the Conway ad is somewhat misleading in its description of Paul's views. We don't see evidence that Paul made the religious-charity exemption a target of his opposition. His opposition, such as it was, would have been part of his support for a broader, fundamental tax overhaul. So we think Conway's decision to focus on this narrow aspect of the Fair Tax is misleading. All told, then, Conway is close to accurate on both claims but with a slight exaggeration on the question of religious tax exemptions. Keeping in mind that we're not rating the "Aqua Buddha" portion of the ad, we rate the two policy statements Mostly True.	None	Jack Conway	None	None	None	2010-10-19T10:42:06	2010-10-15	['None']
-pomt-11508	In most states, you can buy an assault rifle with no proof of ID, but in every state, you need proof of ID to vote.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/feb/22/viral-image/fact-checking-meme-id-requirements-buying-guns-vot/	After a teenage gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., Americans of all political persuasions flocked to social media to express their views on gun policy. On the pro-gun control side of the argument, Areva Martin, an author and TV commentator, tweeted a graphic that showed in most of the country, it is harder to vote than it is to buy an assault rifle. She shared the following graphic with the comment, "Just let this sink in! #FloridaSchoolShooting #Florida #GunReformNow." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com However, a closer look at both gun policy and election law suggest some important caveats that the graphic leaves out. (Martin did not reply to an inquiry from her representative.) Where the graphic came from Unlike many viral images we see, this one provided its sourcing. It cited an article by Alex Seitz-Wald in Salon.com and the liberal Center for American Progress. The chart was put together from elements of the Salon article by Adam Peck, an editor with the website ThinkProgress, which is affiliated with the Center for American Progress. Peck told PolitiFact that the graphic was originally created to be embedded in a separate Think Progress article. The accompanying ThinkProgress article "was our opportunity to provide readers with the kind of information and nuance that simply don't work in a visual capacity," Peck said. "Obviously, the pitfall is that those graphics can be easily divorced from their companion articles, losing whatever nuance we set out to provide." Also important to note: The Salon article, the ThinkProgress article and the graphic were all published in 2013. (Seitz-Wald has been at NBC News since 2014.) So the underlying data is five years old. The meme’s re-emergence means there’s been a game of telephone, with notable context falling by the wayside. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com Student survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School gather at the capitol in Tallahassee, Fla., on Feb. 21, 2018. (AP/Mark Wallheiser) IDs to buy guns You wouldn’t know it from the graphic, but whether an ID is required for a gun sale depends on who is making the sale. Under federal law, federally licensed gun dealers, importers and manufacturers must run background checks for sales to an unlicensed buyer. Specifically, a potential purchaser must show identification, complete a federal document known as a Form 4473, and pass a National Instant Criminal Background Check System check. Where the meme has a point is that in the states that didn’t pass a tougher law, unlicensed private sellers are exempted from having to complete the background check process. Commonly, such unlicensed sellers operate from gun shows or flea markets, although a licensed dealer selling from a show would have to run the background check. "For anyone who thinks he or she might not pass a background check, or is looking to circumvent any waiting period, they can bypass both in a majority of states," said Peck, the graphic's creator. As Seitz-Wald noted in his article, states can add their own restrictions on top of these requirements. At the time the article was written, only about a third had done so. Since then, Oregon and Washington have begun requiring background checks (and thus an ID) on all gun sales, including private transfers. This distinction — between the rules for licensed sellers and for unlicensed sellers — didn’t make it into the meme. That matters. While it is possible in many states to buy a firearm without an ID by seeking out an unlicensed seller, such purchases account for a fraction of all sales. Gun shops and other types of brick-and-mortar stores — where background checks are required — account for a majority of purchases. A research paper published last year in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that of the 70 percent of gun transfers studied that were purchases — as opposed to gifts and inheritances — 53 percent were purchased from stores and 17 percent were purchased from family, friends, online or gun shows. Those percentages have increased over time. In the past two years, 64 percent were purchased at stores. In other words, it’s certainly possible to purchase a gun without an ID in many states, but in reality, a large majority of purchases are done with IDs and background checks. States requiring IDs for voting The graphic is more problematic on the point that in no state can you vote without proof of ID. It’s certainly true that a number of states have requirements for voters to hand over a government-issued photo ID in one of just a few categories, such as driver’s licenses. The strictest of these include Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Other states also have ID requirements to vote, but in many cases, they allow easier-to-obtain paperwork, including documents without a photograph in some cases. Some of the valid documents, depending on the state, include student ID cards, utility bills, bank statements, paychecks, government checks, Medicare or Medicaid cards, employer ID cards, or a bank or debit card. Finally, there are 16 states that do not currently require documents at polling booths at all. They are California, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wyoming. So the notion that every state requires an ID to vote is incorrect. If the graphic had said that an ID is required to register to vote, it would have been somewhat more accurate. Under the federal Help America Vote Act, every state must request identification when registering first-time voters who did not register in person and did not provide identification when filling out the mail-in registration form. For these voters, a wide variety of documents are accepted for registration; many states allow some of the non-photo IDs cited above to serve that purpose. Our ruling The viral image said that in most states, you can buy an assault rifle with no proof of ID, but in every state, you need proof of ID to vote. It is indeed possible to buy an assault rifle without an ID if you go to a gun show — but the graphic neglects to mention that these sales are the exception rather than the rule. A significant majority of gun purchases are made in transactions that require ID and a background check. As for the voting claim, some states have imposed strict photo ID laws at the voting booth. However, the graphic ignores that about one-third of states require no ID at all to vote, and that many of those that do require identification allow a range of documents to serve that purpose, including student IDs, utility bills and debit cards. We rate the viral image Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Viral image	None	None	None	2018-02-22T13:12:56	2018-02-18	['None']
-tron-02046	Butch and Eddie O’Hare	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/butchandeddie/	None	inspirational	None	None	None	Butch and Eddie O’Hare	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-peck-00022	How Many Rural Tanzanians Have Power?	false	https://pesacheck.org/how-many-rural-tanzanians-have-power-c60f4d89697e	None	None	None	Belinda Japhet	None	How Many Rural Tanzanians Have Power?	Sep 28, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-01763	Says Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, missed "79 percent of veterans affairs committee hearings."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jul/30/concerned-veterans-america/how-many-veterans-affairs-hearings-did-bruce-brale/	Congressional oversight of veterans affairs isn’t looking so good in light of news about the VA and delayed access to health care. Now U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, a Democrat running for Senate in Iowa, is getting bad press for missing a large number of committee hearings. Braley is running against Republican Joni Ernst for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Tom Harkin. But the television ad attacking him comes from Concerned Veterans for America, an advocacy group with funding linked to the Koch brothers. Braley "skipped an astonishing 79 percent of veterans affairs committee hearings. He even skipped an important VA reform hearing to attend three fundraisers," the ad says. That number sounded high to us, so we decided to check it out. Separately, we looked at whether he skipped a hearing to attend three fundraisers (more on that in a bit). What did he miss? Concerned Veterans said the missed meetings happened between 2011 and 2012 -- the years he was on the committee. There were 21 hearings of the full committee during those two years, according to a list maintained by the U.S. Government Printing Office. We went through all 21 transcripts and found that Braley was present for only five hearings. This means Braley missed about 76 percent of the hearings.That’s pretty close to 79 percent. This number doesn’t give quite a full picture of Braley’s participation. He’s a member of the Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity, which has hearings of its own. In the same 2011-12 time frame, there were 17 subcommittee hearings, and Braley was at 15 of them. Adding up the full committee and subcommittee hearings, Braley could have attended 38 hearings. He was present at 20 of them, which is an attendance rate of 53 percent and an absent rate of 47 percent. Why did he miss them? We asked Braley’s campaign why he missed so many meetings, and they pointed to several conflicting hearings and other responsibilities that explained his whereabouts for five of the full commitee hearings. For example, on April 5, 2011, he attended a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (of which he was also a member) on the cost of postal service workers. The hearing took place at the same time as the VA committee hearing that day. During a May 3, 2011, hearing, he was meeting with Andrew Connelly, a disabled veteran from Iowa who spoke later that day at an Economic Opportunity subcommittee hearing, where Braley was also present. And on the morning of June 6, 2012, Braley met with another wounded veteran from Iowa at Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Virginia instead of attending a hearing. The Concerned Veterans for America ad says he missed the meeting on Sept. 20, 2012, for three fundraisers, but we found that to be Mostly False. He was actually at an oversight committee hearing about Fast and Furious, in which federal agents traced weapons sold and brought into Mexico. Two of the hearings -- Aug. 13, 2012, and Oct. 3, 2012 -- only had two or three representatives in attendance. The Aug. 13 hearing took place in Orlando, and the only representatives there were Chairman Jeff Miller, Corinne Brown and Gus Bilirakis -- all from Florida. On Oct. 3, the House was not in session, so many representatives were not in Washington. Committee hearings are rarely well-attended, unless the members of Congress think it will get public attention, said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Representatives have busy schedules and have to allocate their time accordingly. They might decide that a particular hearing is not as important as another hearing, meeting with constituents or raising money for their next campaign. "Given that Braley has a high attendance rate for his subcommittee assignment, that strikes me as evidence of taking his committee responsibility seriously," Binder said. Is this normal? We wondered if it’s normal for a member of Congress to miss so many committee hearings, so we calculated the attendance ratings for all 26 members of the VA committee in 2011-12. Eleven members, Braley included, were absent for more than 50 percent of full committee hearings. The only representative with perfect attendance was Miller, the chairman. Here are the three representatives with attendance records as bad or worse than Braley’s: Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., missed 76 percent; Mark Amodei, R-Nev., missed 80 percent; Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., missed 86 percent. We compiled the attendance records for all 26 members, see them here. Braley also had the highest attendance other than the chair for the Economic Opportunity subcommittee, missing only 12 percent of those hearings. Four of the subcommittee’s nine members were absent for more than 50 percent of all subcommittee hearings. Our ruling A Concerned Veterans ad said Braley "skipped an astonishing 79 percent of veterans affairs committee hearings." When we analyzed the hearing transcripts, we found that he had missed about 76 percent of all 2011 and 2012 full committee hearings. He did, however, attend almost all of his subcommittee hearings. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Concerned Veterans for America	None	None	None	2014-07-30T18:04:53	2014-07-25	['None']
-snes-03878	A nightclub in Amsterdam is hosting a "Blood Rave" event with real blood.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blood-rave-uses-real-blood/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	Halloween ‘Blood Rave’ Uses Real Blood	5 October 2016	None	['Amsterdam']
-snes-00081	A 30-year-old woman was partially buried during a funeral service in 1915, only to be found alive inside the coffin by her grieving sister.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/essie-dunbar-funeral-discovery/	None	Horrors	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Was Essie Dunbar Discovered Alive in the Coffin During Her Funeral?	15 September 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-00143	"Canadians face major donut shortage after first day of cannabis legalization."	pants on fire!	/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/oct/25/worldnewsdailyreportcom/donuts-were-not-short-supply-after-canada-legalize/	Canadian donut sales were unlikely hurt by the legalization of marijuana. However, one blog’s claim that a Mary Jane-induced donut shortage caused Tim Hortons stores across the country to close early is laughable. Still, the story has been shared more than 100,000 times on Facebook, so we thought we’d clear the air, just in case. This story was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) On Oct. 17, 2018, Canada became the second country in the world to legalize recreational marijuana. The first was Uruguay. In the days that followed, several false news stories surfaced on social media speculating about repercussions of the legalization. The donut shortage story was published on World Daily News Report, and relied on quotes from a spokesman for Tim Hortons named James Dyke. There is no evidence that such a spokesman exists — Dyke has not been quoted in any other article and is not listed as an author on any Tim Hortons press releases. The World Daily News Report site includes a disclaimer that says all of its stories are fictional and that "all characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle." The first day of marijuana sales did result in shortages — of cannabis, not donuts. Customers in Quebec waited in lines for hours. Cannabis-selling websites glitched, sold out of product and crashed. We can’t say the same for the Canadian donut industry. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!	None	worldnewsdailyreport.com	None	None	None	2018-10-25T11:37:23	2018-10-18	['None']
-pomt-10531	"When we've got CEOs making more in 10 minutes than ordinary workers are making in a year ... then something is wrong."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/feb/28/barack-obama/certainly-steve-jobs-is/	Celebrating a primary victory, Sen. Barack Obama roused the crowd at a Feb. 19, 2008, rally in Houston, Texas, when he went after inequities in corporate America. "I believe in the free market," Obama said. "I know Texans believe in entrepreneurship. We are an independent and a self-reliant people. We don't believe in government doing what we can do for ourselves." "But when we've got CEOs making more in 10 minutes than ordinary workers are making in a year... " pause for applause from the audience, "and it's the CEOs who are getting a tax break and workers are left with nothing, then something is wrong, and something has to change." Finding information to evaluate Obama's statistic was not easy. His campaign did not respond to inquiries. And we couldn't locate any reports supporting the "making more in 10 minutes" idea. Here's what we did find: • A 2007 report from the independent Institute for Policy Studies and the independent nonprofit United for a Fair Economy, "Executive Excess 2007," that states: "CEOs of large U.S. companies last year made as much money from just one day on the job as average workers make over the entire year." So, not 10 minutes, but in the ballpark. • A 2007 report in Forbes magazine which states that the average salary for the 20 highest-paid chief executives is $145-million. Separately, in a 2007 U.S. Census report, we find that the median annual income for a full-time worker is $35,603. Assuming a 40-hour work week, with 50 work weeks a year, the 10-minute average salary of the highest-paid CEOs is $12,083. At this salary, it would take 30 minutes to exceed the annual salary for a full-time worker. • Now in the same Forbes report on CEO compensation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is listed as the highest-paid boss of America's 500 biggest companies at $646.6-million a year. Doing the math on Jobs' income, he makes $53,883 in 10 minutes. That's $18,280 more than the average worker's annual salary. So, while it's fair to say some CEOs "are making more in 10 minutes than ordinary workers are making in an entire year," Obama would be on safer ground if he qualified his statement. We rule his statement Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-02-28T00:00:00	2008-02-19	['None']
-pose-00604	"Rick Scott supports extending sovereign immunity to physicians acting on behalf of the Department of Health, as already provided to those acting as agents of the Department of Corrections, and providing some measure of indemnification to those physicians who primarily treat Medicare and Medicaid patients."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/628/protect-doctors-working-for-the-state-department-o/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	Protect doctors working for the state Department of Health from litigation	2011-12-06T11:23:07	None	['Medicare_(United_States)', 'Medicaid']
-snes-05251	Hillary Clinton is (or was) a member of Monsanto's board of directors.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-sat-monsanto-board/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Hillary Clinton Sat on the Monsanto Board?	8 February 2016	None	['Monsanto']
-pomt-11338	"Nancy Pelosi vows Democrats will raise taxes if they take back the House."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2018/apr/09/blog-posting/did-nancy-pelosi-vow-raise-taxes-if-democrats-take/	A headline popped up all over the Internet recently: "Nancy Pelosi vows Democrats will raise taxes if they take back the House." How accurate is it? Based on the accompanying article -- originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation, a conservative online publication -- as well as by additional reporting by PolitiFact, the headline outlines a scenario that’s possible but speculative. The April 5 article that accompanied the headline was prompted by a town hall on April 4 headlined by Pelosi and her fellow House Democrat from California, Ted Lieu, in Culver City, Calif. At the event, Pelosi and Lieu criticized the tax bill that passed last December, one advanced exclusively with Republican votes in Congress. At one point, the article noted, Pelosi used a Democratic talking point that we have previously rated Half True -- that "over 80 percent of the benefits go to the top 1 percent." That figure is correct for the tax law’s impact by 2027, but through 2025, the top 1 percent’s share is much smaller -- roughly 20 percent to 25 percent. However, the Daily Caller article did not specifically quote Pelosi promising to raise taxes. Rather, it offered a more nuanced scenario. Pelosi didn’t offer specifics when asked if Democrats would re-work the bill from scratch or focus on specific portions, saying instead her party would work openly with Republicans to reach a deal. "One of our complaints about what they did with the tax bill is they did it in the dark of night with the speed of light," the California Democrat said. "We’ll sit down at the table and say … what would be a tax bill that creates growth, that creates good paying jobs as it reduces the deficit?" she said. "It’s not about chipping at this piece or that piece, it’s about a comprehensive look at what our tax policy should be for the future," she added. In other words, at the Culver City event, Pelosi said she would be willing to work with Republicans on overhauling or overturning the law in an unspecified way. Any tax hikes that result would be subject to negotiation -- and the changes could plausibly include cuts compared to current law for some Americans, rather than tax increases. Other remarks by Pelosi not included in the article reiterate this point. "We can do, that we must do that, in a bipartisan way," she said. "It’s not about chipping at this piece or that piece, it’s about a comprehensive look at what our tax policy should be for the future." Meanwhile, the article cites an earlier and more specific remark by Pelosi: Pelosi’s comments Wednesday come after she said in February that Democrats would have to "replace and repeal" the GOP tax bill once retaking the House. "It may have to be a ‘replace and repeal’ — replace them and repeal the bill," Pelosi said. But even this approach doesn’t guarantee tax hikes, much less universal ones. Mark Mazur, vice president for policy at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, told PolitiFact that if you simply repeal the tax law — "which really is impossible, since some of the provisions already have had an effect" — you would raise revenue, or, in common parlance, raise taxes. By contrast, Mazur said, "if you replace it, then the character of the replacement determines whether the combined package raises or loses revenue." Pelosi's office told PolitiFact that the headline "an inflammatory misrepresentation." They pointed to a Pelosi press conference in December where she said any changes she'd seek "would be bipartisan, open, transparent, and unifying as we go forward to strengthen middle class tax cuts." Bottom line: It’s premature to say a future Democratic-led change to the tax law would definitely raise taxes. It would also be premature to say which, if any, taxpayers would see an increase under a potential Democratic bill. Democrats could vote to raise taxes in a way that keeps or expands the current cuts for lower- and middle-income taxpayers but raises taxes on the highest segment of earners. That’s an important piece of context missing from the headline. One proposal cited in the article was offered in March by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Schumer proposed raising the corporate tax rate from the newly enacted 21 percent level to 25 percent, by raising the top tax bracket back to 39.6 percent, by bringing back the alternative minimum tax, and by getting rid of the carried-interest tax loophole that benefits fund managers. The recent tax bill did not address the carried-interest provision. Each of these provisions cited by Schumer would target wealthier taxpayers. To reach the conclusion of the headline requires "a lot of reading between the lines," said Patrick Newton, a spokesman for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. One last point: It takes more than a Democratic House to make changes to tax law. President Donald Trump has hailed the 2017 tax cut bill as one of his signature achievements. It’d be highly unlikely he would sign off on any major changes, or that Congress would be able to overturn a presidential veto. In that sense, the entire discussion is somewhat academic. Our ruling A widely circulated headline in social media said, "Nancy Pelosi vows Democrats will raise taxes if they take back the House." While any change to the tax law passed last December risks raising taxes on someone, the headline does not reflect that it could also lower taxes on others. In reality, Pelosi has not specified what changes she would like to see in a replacement bill, so saying that she has vowed to raise taxes is an exaggeration. Meanwhile, if Schumer’s proposal ends up being the model that Pelosi pursues, that approach could easily keep or expand tax cuts for lower- and middle-income taxpayers while raising them on wealthier Americans. We rate the statement Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-04-09T17:03:42	2018-04-05	['Nancy_Pelosi', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-07019	"Under Gov. Rick Perry’s leadership [Texas] has created more jobs over the last decade than the rest of the states combined."	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2011/jul/06/bob-mcdonnell/mcdonnell-says-texas-under-gov-perry-has-created-h/	Gov. Bob McDonnell spends plenty of time talking about Virginia’s job climate, but he expanded his horizons in a recent op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal. The governor hailed the economic record of Texas, run by his fellow Republican, Gov. Rick Perry. "Under Gov. Rick Perry’s leadership [Texas] has created more jobs over the last decade than the rest of the states combined," McDonnell wrote. Perry has led Texas since December 2000, when he replaced then-Gov. George W. Bush, who resigned to prepare for his presidency. Perry is considering running for president next year. McDonnell’s column urged the GOP to nominate a governor for the White House, saying state executives have practical experience dealing with the economy and balancing budgets. McDonnell lauded the records of several Republican governors -- including his own. We wondered if Perry’s record on creating jobs matched McDonnell’s claim. Tucker Martin, McDonnell’s director of communications, said the statement was based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal government’s clearinghouse for employment statistics. He also cited a May report by The Business Journals that tabbed Texas as the runaway leader in job creation. Our research took us down a road traveled by PolitiFact Texas in examining various claims from Perry that most of the jobs created in the U.S. are in the Lone Star State. PolitiFact Texas has debunked several of these eye-popping claims, noting that they are based on statistics from a minority of states that have had overall job gains in recent years. According to the BLS, Texas had a net gain of 907,000 jobs between December 2000 and December 2010. The entire payroll in the U.S. grew by 1.6 million jobs during the span. That means of the 19 states that gained jobs during the first decade of Perry’s governorship, including the District of Columbia, Texas accounted for 56 percent of the gain. But McDonnell did not say it that way. He wrote that Texas "has created more jobs over the last decade than the rest of the states combined." The statistics he cites ignore any positions created in the 31 states where job losses outnumbered gains over that time, and it also fails to capture all positions added in states with job gains. Consider California, for example, which had a net loss of 340,000 jobs over the decade. Does that that mean no positions were created in California during the span? Of course not. But the figures McDonnell cites do not count any of the new jobs created at Facebook and Google because California’s overall employment dropped. By excluding all states with net job losses -- regardless of any gains in those states -- the Texas share of new jobs in the U.S. is overblown. Michael Brandl, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin’s business school, has been critical of Perry’s use of these statistics to bolster his job-creating credentials. "To say it’s misleading is to be kind," he told PolitiFact Texas in 2009. "It’s just not true." Brandl was more circumspect when we recently asked him to assess McDonnell’s claim. He told us it is risky when the Virginia governor -- or anyone -- uses one statistic to make broad inferences about the economy. "You have to be careful of using one number or data point and thinking it gives insight," he said. A broader look shows Texas has thrived over the last decade, but not at the miracle level McDonnell suggests. Texas is the nation’s second-most populous state, behind California. The Lone Star state saw a 9.2 percent increase in private-sector jobs, good for sixth-highest in the country. Utah, Montana, Alaska, North Dakota and the District of Columbia beat the Texans, with North Dakota’s private sector job levels growing by almost 20 percent in 10 years. Texas had an 8.0 percent unemployment rate in May, below the national mark of 9.1 percent, but worse than that of 23 other states. Virginia’s unemployment rate of 6.0 percent tied for 7th with Hawaii, Iowa and Wyoming. Let’s review. McDonnell wrote that under Gov. Perry, Texas "has created more jobs over the last decade than the rest of the states combined." But the Virginia governor used net job numbers. Those are different from job creation figures, which are not compiled by the BLS or other national authority. So using net job numbers and calling them job creation figures is a case of comparing apples to oranges. We rate McDonnell’s claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Bob McDonnell	None	None	None	2011-07-06T07:11:01	2011-06-25	['Texas']
-pomt-04173	"Scott Walker has even removed the 250,000 jobs promise from his website."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/dec/17/mike-tate/wisconsin-gov-scott-walker-erased-his-pledge-creat/	Gov. Scott Walker is nearly halfway through his four-year term, and has a long way to go to meet his campaign promise to create 250,000 private-sector jobs. We keep track of the promise (and many others) on the Walk-O-Meter. The most recent update, which includes the October 2012 monthly jobs report, shows the state has created 25,411 private-sector jobs under Walker’s watch -- roughly one-tenth of the total he promised as a candidate in 2010. As state Democrats look toward the 2014 election, it’s natural they would focus on this part of Walker’s record. Party Chairman Mike Tate launched an early volley in a Dec. 3, 2012 blog post criticizing management of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., which Walker chairs. The WEDC, which under Walker replaced the Commerce Department, is looking into millions in loans it made that have fallen behind or gone unpaid. "Scott Walker’s WEDC was supposed to help create 250,000 new jobs and be the symbol of his first term in office," Tate wrote, then added: "Scott Walker has even removed the 250,000 jobs promise from his website." Whoa. Has Team Walker scrubbed the top campaign promise from his website? Asked to provide backup for Tate’s claim, party spokesman Graeme Zielinski referred us to several online posts made by Walker’s campaign, including a March 2010 YouTube video on the topic. Another link was to a 2010 appearance by Walker on the "Upfront with Mike Gousha" show on WISN-TV (Channel 12) in Milwaukee, where he discussed the promise. But these videos shed no light on Tate’s claim about the promise now being gone from the website. Indeed, they are from before Walker took office. Zielinski also pointed to a change on Walker’s campaign web page, saying: "On Scott Walker's issue page there is one bullet that talks about Jobs. It's now called, Putting Wisconsin Back to Work. This is a complete different page than the one he had on his website previously, called Scott’s Plan to to Help the People of Wisconsin Create 250,000 Jobs." Fair enough. But Tate’s claim wasn’t that Walker had downplayed the promise. It was that he removed it entirely from his web page. We examined the site. The "Putting Wisconsin Back to Work" section discusses steps Walker has taken to improve employment. It makes no mention of the 250,000 jobs claim. However the promise is mentioned in the site’s "About Scott" section, where it says: "Governor Walker remains committed to helping Wisconsin's private sector create 250,000 jobs by 2015." The site might have changed, but the promise hasn’t been removed. We also did a Google search of Scott Walker. That campaign site and Walker’s official site turned up in the first screen. The governor’s official site stands behind the promise even more prominently, on the first page: "250,000 new jobs in four years -- It’s an ambitious goal, but one that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says is achievable." As we’ve followed the jobs promise, we have noted many steps the administration has taken to downplay the promise, or efforts to measure it. For instance, shortly after Walker took office, the state jobs tracking agency first celebrated each month’s jobs reports. Now, the monthly reports come with long explanations about why the month-to-month data can’t be trusted. Our rating Tate said Walker has removed the promise to create 250,000 jobs from his website. We checked the campaign website and the governor’s official state website. The promise is there, and is repeated in numerous videos and news clippings. Even a simple search leads to that conclusion. We rate the claim False.	None	Mike Tate	None	None	None	2012-12-17T09:00:00	2012-12-03	['None']
-snes-01347	Did Chuck Schumer’s Daughter Break Her Silence About Her Dad’s Affair with a High School Cheerleader?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/schumer-daughter-cheerleader/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did Senator Chuck Schumer Have an Affair with a Teenager?	10 December 2017	None	['Chuck_Schumer']
-goop-01628	Katy Perry Pressuring Robert Pattinson To Get Married?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/katy-perry-robert-pattinson-married-dating/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Katy Perry Pressuring Robert Pattinson To Get Married?	10:27 am, February 7, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-02332	Fancy paint job on American helicopter in Afghanistan?	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/mi-24/	None	military	None	None	None	Fancy paint job on American helicopter in Afghanistan?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['United_States']
-tron-00490	The Cliff Diver and Great White Shark	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cliff-diver-shark-video/	None	animals	None	None	None	The Cliff Diver and Great White Shark	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pose-00700	"Rick Scott backs Arizona's (immigration) law. He'll bring it to Florida."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/730/bring-arizonas-immigration-law-florida/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	Bring Arizona's immigration law to Florida	2011-05-06T15:29:53	None	['None']
-pomt-02577	Says "Barack Obama has gone from blaming George W. Bush to plagiarizing George W. Bush."	false	/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/29/marc-thiessen/gop-speechwriter-obama-plagiarized-george-w-bush/	Republicans might not have heard much to cheer about in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, but a former GOP speechwriter almost felt flattered. Marc Thiessen was the lead writer for President George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union speech, and he said he found the similarities between the two speeches a bit eerie. "There were lines like, ‘Our job is to help Americans build a future of hope and opportunity," Thiessen told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. "‘A future of hope and opportunity requires that all citizens have affordable and available health care, extending opportunity and hope depends on a stable supply of energy.’ All of that came from the 2007 State of the Union from George W. Bush. "So Barack Obama has gone from blaming George W. Bush to plagiarizing George W. Bush," Thiessen concluded. Plagiarism -- which is to use the words or ideas of another person as if they were your own words or ideas -- is a fairly serious charge, so we decided to look at the substance behind it. We contacted Thiessen, and he said we should look at his statement in context. "Did Obama copy Bush word-for-word? No," Thiessen told us. "But Obama clearly lifted the repeating theme of his address from Bush's 2007 State of the Union. In Obama's case, it's significant because he is abandoning a liberal theme that was not working (income inequality) in favor of a conservative theme that does (opportunity)." Thiessen said this wasn’t the first time he felt Obama borrowed heavily from Bush. He said it happened before in an Obama speech on Syria. In this case, Thiessen does well to back away from the zinger he delivered on television. Jonathan Bailey runs a consulting operation and website called Plagiarism Today. Bailey told us Obama’s speech didn’t have what Bailey would call plagiarism. "It doesn’t appear that any lines were lifted verbatim, or even very close to verbatim," Bailey said. First, Obama never said, "Our job is to help Americans build a future of hope and opportunity," or, "A future of hope and opportunity requires that all citizens have affordable and available health care, extending opportunity and hope depends on a stable supply of energy." So Thiessen is wrong on that point. Even in more isolated contexts, an accusation of plagiarism appears unjustified. On Fox News, Thiessen mentioned the phrases "hope and opportunity" or "opportunity and hope." In 2007, Bush used those phrases seven times. Obama never used either of them. In fact, Obama -- who ran his 2008 campaign on a slogan of "hope" -- didn’t use that word at all. Bush talked about affordable health care twice. Obama never used that term except when he referred to the Affordable Care Act. (Not that the mention of affordable health care should be considered plagiarism.) Bush spoke of "energy" three times; Obama eight. Both presidents also used the word opportunity -- Obama 12 times, Bush nine. The idea of opportunity belongs to both political parties, but it’s a word more typically used by Republicans, both Thiessen and Bailey said. "Much of the language in Obama’s speech took a more conservative tone, using words and terminology commonly associated with Republicans," Bailey said. That said, not everyone agrees that Obama took much of a conservative turn in his speech. According to an analysis from political scientists Benjamin Lauderdale at the London School of Economics and John Sides at George Washington University, Obama’s tone was not much different than it had been in previous years. For fun, we used the website Wordle to generate diagrams showing how many times the two presidents used certain words in their speeches. The similarities and differences are fairly obvious. In 2007, war and terrorism were more pressing than work and jobs are in 2014. In the scheme of things, both presidents invoked "opportunity" about the same number of times. Most common words in President George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address Most common words in President Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address Our ruling Thiessen said that Obama had gone from blaming George W. Bush to plagiarizing him. Thiessen himself says he didn’t mean that Obama copied Bush; rather, that Obama took the theme of opportunity from Bush. Even if Obama did emphasize a theme Republicans identify with, that in no way matches the popular, or legal, understanding of plagiarism. At PunditFact, we understand that words can be delivered for effect, but we also uphold the principle that words matter. We rate this claim False.	None	Marc Thiessen	None	None	None	2014-01-29T18:20:56	2014-01-29	['George_W._Bush', 'Barack_Obama']
-abbc-00391	The claim: Greens Higher Education spokeswoman Lee Rhiannon says the Government's plan to charge interest of up to 6 per cent on student debts constitutes a broken contract.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-27/is-charging-interest-on-existing-uni-loans-a-broken-contract/5464602	The claim: Greens Higher Education spokeswoman Lee Rhiannon says the Government's plan to charge interest of up to 6 per cent on student debts constitutes a broken contract.	['university-and-further-education', 'access-to-education', 'education', 'budget', 'greens', 'laws', 'government-and-politics', 'federal-government', 'law-crime-and-justice', 'australia', 'australian-national-university-0200', 'canberra-2600', 'university-of-new-england-2351', 'university-of-new-south-wales-2052', 'university-of-newcastle-2308', 'university-of-technology-sydney-2007', 'university-of-western-sydney-2560', 'university-of-wollongong-2522', 'charles-darwin-university-0909', 'central-queensland-university-4701', 'griffith-university-4111', 'university-of-southern-queensland-4350', 'university-of-queensland-4072', 'adelaide-university-5005', 'flinders-university-5042', 'university-of-south-australia-5000', 'university-of-tasmania-7005', 'monash-university-3800', 'university-of-melbourne-3010', 'murdoch-university-6150', 'university-of-western-australia-6009', 'bond-university-4229']	None	None	['university-and-further-education', 'access-to-education', 'education', 'budget', 'greens', 'laws', 'government-and-politics', 'federal-government', 'law-crime-and-justice', 'australia', 'australian-national-university-0200', 'canberra-2600', 'university-of-new-england-2351', 'university-of-new-south-wales-2052', 'university-of-newcastle-2308', 'university-of-technology-sydney-2007', 'university-of-western-sydney-2560', 'university-of-wollongong-2522', 'charles-darwin-university-0909', 'central-queensland-university-4701', 'griffith-university-4111', 'university-of-southern-queensland-4350', 'university-of-queensland-4072', 'adelaide-university-5005', 'flinders-university-5042', 'university-of-south-australia-5000', 'university-of-tasmania-7005', 'monash-university-3800', 'university-of-melbourne-3010', 'murdoch-university-6150', 'university-of-western-australia-6009', 'bond-university-4229']	Is the Government's plan to charge interest on existing student loans a broken contract?	Tue 27 May 2014, 4:39am	None	['None']
-goop-00560	Jamie Foxx ‘Betrayed’ Katie Holmes By ‘Flirting’ With Mystery Blonde?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jamie-foxx-katie-holmes-flirting-mystery-blonde/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jamie Foxx ‘Betrayed’ Katie Holmes By ‘Flirting’ With Mystery Blonde?	4:53 pm, July 27, 2018	None	['Jamie_Foxx']
-snes-01364	The son of a Milwaukee funeral home owner constructed a "sex doll" out of parts taken from the bodies taken to his parents' business.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sex-doll-funeral-home/	None	Junk News	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did a Funeral Home Owner’s Son Build a ‘Sex Doll’ Out of Body Parts?	6 December 2017	None	['Milwaukee']
-pomt-10083	Obama would "experiment with socialism."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/dec/03/sarah-palin/the-mccain-campaign-experiments-with-dishonesty/	(Published Oct. 27, 2008) Sen. John McCain's campaign has seized on Sen. Barack Obama's offhand remark that he wants to "spread the wealth around" to allege Obama is a socialist. Even in the context of a heated presidential campaign, that's a remarkably incendiary accusation. It's become a standard part of the McCain campaign rhetoric, uttered by surrogates and candidates alike. Gov. Sarah Palin's remarks in Springfiled, Mo., are a good example: "Senator Obama says that he wants to spread the wealth, which means — you know what that means," she said at a rally on Oct. 24, 2008. "It means that government takes your money, (handed) out however a politician sees fit. Barack Obama calls it spreading the wealth, and Joe Biden calls higher taxes patriotic. And yet to Joe the Plumber, he said it sounded like socialism. And now is not the time to experiment with socialism." She has repeated the line in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and most recently in Leesburg, Va., on Oct. 27, 2008. It consistently evokes boos and jeers from a crowd protective of the American system of government. But is Palin stoking their anger honestly? Socialism refers most commonly to a system in which the government owns the means of production and distribution of goods. That is, the state truly is responsible for creating and spreading the wealth. Let's look at the root of Palin's claim — Obama's Oct. 12, 2008, exchange with plumber Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, who has come to be known simply as Joe the Plumber — and see if that's what Obama was suggesting. Wurzelbacher approached Obama on the street in his Holland, Ohio, neighborhood, and said he was close to buying a plumbing company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year. He complained that Obama would tax him more, punishing his success. Obama responded that he was raising the top tax rate so he could decrease taxes for those who make less than $250,000. "It's not that I want to punish your success," Obama said. "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance at success too." "Seems like you would be welcome to a flat tax then," Wurzelbacher said. "You know, I would be open to it except for here's the problem with a flat tax," Obama countered. "You'd have to slap on a whole bunch of sales taxes on it. And I do believe that for folks like me who have worked hard but, frankly, also been lucky, I don't mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress who I just met over there who — things are slow, and she can barely make the rent. Because my attitude is if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's going to be good for everybody. If you've got a plumbing business, you're going to be better off if you've got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you. And right now, everybody's so pinched that business is bad for everybody. And I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." So when Wurzelbacher brought up a flat tax, Obama responded by endorsing progressive taxation – the principle of taxing those with higher incomes at a higher percentage than those with lower incomes. And it is in that context that Obama said he wanted to "spread the wealth." Progressive taxes do indeed spread the wealth a bit. But they do so much more modestly than government owning the means of production. Few serious policy makers — including McCain — consider progressive taxation socialist. In fact, on the Oct. 26, 2008 edition of NBC's Meet the Press , McCain stood by a comment he made in 2000 that "there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more" in taxes when you "reach a certain level of comfort." "You put into different, different categories of wealthier people paying, paying higher taxes into different brackets," McCain told host Tom Brokaw, as if to say progressive taxes are a no-brainer. Indeed, progressive taxation has been a cornerstone of American tax policy since the federal government first collected an income tax in 1863. It was based on the Tax Act of 1862, which President Abraham Lincoln signed, and which imposed a "duty of three per centum" on all income over $600, and five percent on income over $10,000. Obama's proposed top tax rate of 39.6 percent, (up from today's 36 percent) is considerably higher than that. But it's not particularly high in the context of modern times; as he pointed out to Wurzelbacher, it's about what top earners paid in the Clinton years. In 1987, the top tax rate was 38.5 percent. In 1944, it was 94 percent for the highest portions of high incomes. So no, Obama's tax increase on those making more than $250,000 would not represent a transformation of the U.S. system of government. His desire to "spread the wealth" through progressive taxation makes him no less a capitalist than McCain, or Lincoln. Palin's allegation that Obama wants to "experiment with socialism" seems designed less to inform than to inflame. That's Pants on Fire wrong.	None	Sarah Palin	None	None	None	2008-12-03T00:00:00	2008-10-24	['None']
-pomt-04998	"Sherrod Brown and his special interest allies in Washington are plotting to spend over $13 million" to defeat Josh Mandel.	half-true	/ohio/statements/2012/jul/19/ohio-republican-party/ohio-gop-claims-sherrod-brown-special-interest-all/	The funding sources of television ads in the U.S. Senate race between Josh Mandel and Sherrod Brown have grabbed the attention of both campaigns, which each side blasting the other for allowing special interest groups to pump millions of dollars into the race. The dispute revolves around the concept of "outside spending" – money poured into elections by groups that are not directly tied to a candidate. These groups often are unbound by campaign finance restrictions, and can accept contributions from anonymous donors. Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern recently highlighted outside money spent to attack Brown. At a July 10 news conference, Redfern claimed that $10.5 million in outside money has been spent against Brown, the Democratic incumbent, often with misleading ads. The Ohio Republican Party fought back of behalf of Mandel, the Ohio treasurer. Spokeswoman Izzy Santa emailed the following: "Sherrod Brown and his special interest allies in Washington are plotting to spend over $13 million, with no end in sight." The feisty exchange prompted PolitiFact Ohio to dig deeper, since outside spending has been an issue in this Senate race. We note here that the context in which the GOP claim was made was a discussion about money from outside special interest groups and Redfern’s criticism that more than $10.5 million had flowed into the state on behalf of Mandel. Justin Barasky, a spokesman for Brown’s campaign, said the GOP’s comparison included more than $10 million worth of ad buys purchased by Brown’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, both of which must publicly report their donors and do not qualify as "outside spending." So before further analyzing the Ohio GOP’s claim, we should provide a more clear definition of outside spending. Richard Briffault, a law professor at Columbia Law School professor who specializes in campaign finance, said there are two schools of thought. "Some people divide the campaign finance world into parts – candidate spending and everything else (‘outside spending’)," Briffault wrote in an e-mail. "Other people divide the campaign finance world into three parts – campaign spending, party spending in support of that party’s candidates, and spending by all other groups (‘outside spending’). "I put myself in the second group," Briffault continued. "Political parties are officially a part of the electoral process. Legislatures are organized by party, candidates are nominated by political parties and they run on party lines… in addition, federal campaign finance law permits party campaign committees to officially coordinate a certain amount of spending with candidates." To sum up, Briffault’s definition of outside spending would exclude candidate committees and party campaign committees, which must disclose their donors. Organizations such as super PACs and unions, however, would be considered outside spending. Those groups are not covered by the same regulations and do not face the same requirements for disclosure. With that established, let’s move back to the Ohio GOP’s claim. We asked Santa for evidence, and she provided the following list of expenditures or planned expenditures: $5.9 million by Brown’s campaign; $5.1 million by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee; $1.1 million by Majority PAC; $775,167 by Service Employees International Union; and $500,000 by the League of Conservation Voters. Santa also mentioned two outside groups that bought radio airtime to thank Brown, but she did not have any exact figures for those buys. Those figures total $13.4 million, meaning the Ohio GOP has identified enough funding sources to support the amount of spending it claimed. Brown’s campaign confirmed the figures are accurate. But the GOP’s list also supports the counterclaim from Brown’s camp that most of the spending was done by his campaign and the DSCC, and not by outside groups or special interests. Of the more than $13 million, Brown’s campaign and the DSCC accounted for about $11 million. Briffault, the Columbia law professor, said he would not consider spending by the DSCC or Brown’s campaign as outside spending. That would leave about $2.4 million in outside spending on Brown’s behalf, a figure Brown’s campaign does not dispute. So where does that leave us with the Ohio GOP’s statement? Santa, the Ohio GOP spokeswoman, said "Brown and his special interest allies" were planning to spend more than $13 million to defeat Mandel. The claim is literally true because it includes both Brown and his allies. But the context in which it was made is important, too. The dispute between the campaigns revolved around outside money, and Santa’s email, in fact, focused on outside money: "Redfern is the least credible person to be commenting on outside spending when it comes to Ohio’s U.S. Senate race. Sherrod Brown and his special interest allies in Washington are plotting to spend over $13 million, with no end in sight. It’s clear that Brown and his supporters are having to spend this type of money because Brown’s out-of-touch record has exposed him to Ohioans as a 38-year politician and Washington insider who puts politics over people." Santa said her $13 million figure is accurate because it was meant to include spending from all the players contributing to Brown’s re-election, not just outside money. But the conversation, which began with Redfern’s criticism of $10.5 million in outside spending tied to Mandel, was clearly focused on outside spending and not overall spending. (To keep Redfern honest, we asked the Ohio Democratic Party for the funding sources Redfern was talking about. The list included the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Crossroads and other groups. Neither Mandel’s campaign nor the National Republican Senatorial Committee – the GOP equivalent of the DSCC – were on the list.) Those details are important to know to be able to put the Ohio Republican Party’s claim in context. On the Truth-O-Meter, the claim rates Half True.	None	Ohio Republican Party	None	None	None	2012-07-19T06:00:00	2012-07-10	['Josh_Mandel', 'Washington,_D.C.']
-hoer-00871	Siamese Pike Photograph	unsubstantiated messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/siamese-pike.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Siamese Pike Photograph	July 18, 2013	None	['None']
-abbc-00163	In his campaign launch speech on August 25, 2013, Tony Abbott promised to give apprentices access to a $20,000 loan under a Coalition government.	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-27/apprentice-loan-promise-check/5519824	None	['education', 'apprenticeships', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'liberals', 'australia']	None	None	['education', 'apprenticeships', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'liberals', 'australia']	Promise check: Give apprentices access to a $20,000 loan	Sun 8 May 2016, 7:37am	None	['Tony_Abbott', 'Coalition_(Australia)']
-snes-05527	An video shows a woman "stealing" an item from a child shopper on Black Friday.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/black-friday-lady-steals-kid/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Does This Video Show a Black Friday Fight Over Vegetable Steamers?	27 November 2015	None	['None']
-snes-05971	Somewhere in the U.S. is a haunted house attraction so scary that no visitor has ever completed a tour of it.	legend	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chimera-house/	None	Holidays	None	David Mikkelson	None	Unfinishable Haunted House	28 May 2001	None	['United_States']
-tron-01657	Bill Gates Admits to Chemtrails	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bill-gates-chemtrails/	None	government	None	None	None	Bill Gates Admits to Chemtrails	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-00684	Did the NRA Ban Guns at Their Own Leadership Forum?	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nra-events-guns/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did the NRA Ban Guns at Their Own Leadership Forum?	1 May 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-01006	Get a Free $75 Aldi Coupon	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/get-a-free-75-aldi-gift-card-facebook-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Get a Free $75 Aldi Coupon Facebook Scam	June 11, 2017	None	['None']
-hoer-00802	359lb Louisiana Grouper	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/giant-warsaw-grouper.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	359lb Louisiana Grouper	February 2008	None	['None']
-snes-04290	It is impossible to cancel recurring donations to the Donald Trump presidential campaign.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/impossible-to-cancel-recurring-trump-donations/	None	Ballot Box	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Is it Impossible to Cancel Recurring Donations to the Trump Campaign?	8 August 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-07928	"[Tailpipe emissions rules], if fully implemented with all the regulations that go with it, they will keep the temperature from rising nearly five one-hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit. By 2050."	true	/virginia/statements/2011/jan/28/ken-cuccinelli/attorney-general-ken-cuccinelli-says-epa-auto-emis/	During a recent speech at a Tea Party rally, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli took plenty of shots at the Environmental Protection Agency. The Republican, an unabashed critic of global warming claims, called the EPA "the Employment Prevention Agency." While discussing the EPA’s endangerment finding that greenhouse gasses "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations," Cuccinelli voiced contempt for new regulations that will limit tailpipe emissions. "It turns out that they believe, that if fully implemented with all the regulations that go with it, they will keep the temperature from rising nearly five one-hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit. By 2050." As the crowd laughed and jeered, the attorney general added, "I might not be able to see my breath by then." Only 0.05 degrees by 2050? Is that really what the EPA was claiming these rules would do? Brian Gottstein, Cuccinelli’s director of communications, referred us to the EPA’s massive document on light-duty vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards. He pointed us to page 4-101, deep in the document. It said: "EPA modeled the anticipated potential effect on climate change and found that in year 2100, the rule would reduce temperature increases by 0.006-0.015 degrees Celsius." Those Celsius figures translate to a range from 0.011 to 0.027 degrees Fahrenheit. Cuccinelli had claimed there would be a 0.05 reduction in temperature increases by 2050. So he actually spoke in the EPA’s favor, overstating the expected reduction and saying it would happen 50 years faster than the agency claims. We also called the EPA and asked them to quantify any temperature reductions that could be expected under the new rules, which affect cars in model years 2012 through 2016. Spokeswoman Enesta Jones e-mailed us a response. "EPA estimated that the 2012-2016 light duty tailpipe standards would reduce the global mean temperature by 0.006 to 0.015 °C by 2100. The approach used to estimate changes in global mean temperature evaluates the impact of the rule’s emissions reductions in the context of global [greenhouse gas] emissions," she wrote. "Although the projected reductions are small in overall magnitude by themselves, they are quantifiable and would contribute to reducing climate change risks." The new EPA limits would establish in 2012 model cars the first-ever caps on carbon dioxide emissions by cars and light trucks. Over the next five years the limits would toughen by about 14 percent. The rules would also push fuel efficiency from 33.8 miles per gallon for passenger cars in the 2012 model year up to 39.5 miles per gallon in 2016. The agency says these new rules would add about $950 to the price of each new car but that the higher price would be offset by lower fuel costs over three to five years. Let’s review. The Virginia attorney general said the EPA’s new tailpipe emissions rules for cars and other light-duty vehicles would reduce temperature increases by 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit. He said this would occur by 2050. The EPA said the reductions would be between 0.011 degrees Fahrenheit and 0.027 degrees Fahrenheit and would occur by 2100. The agency’s claim is even more modest than Cuccinelli suggested. Speaking without notes at a cold outdoor rally, the attorney general came pretty close to hitting the actual EPA claim, and he actually erred in the agency’s favor by overstating the size of projected reductions. He also missed the date, but again erred in the EPA’s favor. Because his mistakes were minor and in the EPA’s favor, we rate his claim as True.	None	Ken Cuccinelli	None	None	None	2011-01-28T15:16:26	2011-01-17	['None']
-goop-01833	Kardashians Jealous Of Jennifer Lawrence’s Relationship With Kris Jenner?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kardashians-jealous-jennifer-lawrence-kris-jenner-relationship/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Kardashians Jealous Of Jennifer Lawrence’s Relationship With Kris Jenner?	5:40 pm, January 14, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Lawrence']
-chct-00208	FACT CHECK: Pelosi Says Reagan And Bush Protected More Illegal Immigrants Than Obama	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/02/08/fact-check-pelosi-reagan-bush-protected-illegal-immigrants-obama-daca-executive-order/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	4:29 PM 02/08/2018	None	['None']
-vogo-00477	San Diego's Urban Legends: Help Us Track Them Down	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/san-diegos-urban-legends-help-us-track-them-down/	None	None	None	None	None	San Diego's Urban Legends: Help Us Track Them Down	November 29, 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-07226	"It is a greater crime to have an untagged alligator than to host an open house party (for kids)."	true	/florida/statements/2011/jun/02/kathleen-passidomo/illegal-gator-trapping-vs-underage-drinking-partie/	Some Florida parents throw boozy bashes for their teenage children when they graduate from high school under the premise that underage drinking at home is safer than drinking elsewhere. During the spring 2011 session, legislators sought to toughen the penalties for allowing underage drinking. State Rep. Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, was among the legislators who voted in favor of the bill, which passed overwhelmingly. In a May 30, 2011, Naples Daily News article, she had a biting way of suggesting the penalty for the crime was too weak. "It is a greater crime to have an untagged alligator than to host an open house party (for kids)," she was quoted as saying. She wasn't the first to make such a statement. Rep. Tom Goodson, one of the bill's sponsors and a Republican from Rockledge, told Florida lawmakers: "I think it's a little bit strange that we protect an alligator more than our children," according to a March 29 St. Petersburg Times article. Goodson legislative assistant Amy Gregory said in an e-mail that Goodson was the first to use the gator comparison during his presentation to committees. Both Passidomo and Goodson made their comments before the bill -- intended to go into effect July 1 -- has been signed. The House approved it 116-0 on April 29, and the Senate passed it 38-1 on May 3. The bill has not yet been sent to Gov. Rick Scott for his signature, according to his spokesman Lane Wright. We wanted to check: Is the penalty more severe for having an untagged alligator than hosting an underage drinking party? And is that about to change? Gator statutes Florida Statute Sections 379.3751 and 379.3752 relate to requirements to take an alligator -- to capture, kill or process it -- and obtain a license. We interviewed two spokespersons at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission -- Officer Jorge Pino and Katie Purcell -- for some background on gator tagging. According to the commission's website: "Applicants who are awarded a permit must submit payment for two CITES tags and an Alligator Trapping License, or provide proof of possession of an Alligator Trapping License valid through the end of the alligator harvest season. A Florida hunting license is not required to participate in the statewide alligator hunt." The tag -- which hunters must place on the gator -- allows officials to verify that the hunter obtained the proper permit. State statute 379.409 states that anyone who illegally kills, possesses or captures an alligator faces a third-degree felony. Why a felony? "These animals were close to extinction in the early '70s," Pino said. "Because of our efforts to try to bring back the species, we have been very successful. Some people may argue we have been too successful -- there is an abundance of alligators in the state of Florida. ... We need to protect Florida's natural resources." Open house party law Now on to underage drinking: During the 2011 session, the Legislature amended statute 856.015 with House Bill 105. The staff analysis for that bill provides a summary of how the law would change: "Section 856.015, F.S., states that a person in control of a residence who allows an open house party to take place commits a second-degree misdemeanor if they know a minor has possession of or consumed any alcoholic beverage or drug at their residence and the person fails to take responsible steps to prevent the possession or consumption of the alcoholic beverage or drug by the minor. The bill also "amends present law to make a second or subsequent violation ... a first-degree misdemeanor. This bill also provides that any violation ... which results in serious bodily injury or death, will be punishable by a first-degree misdemeanor." This means that before July 1, hosting an open house party for minors could lead to a second-degree misdemeanor. After the law was passed, it became a first-degree misdemeanor in some circumstances -- note that both are lesser crimes than the third-degree felony for gator violations. Now let's compare the penalties: state statute 775.082 states that a third-degree felony is punishable by up to five years in prison. The second-degree misdemeanor carries jail time of up to 60 days, while for a first-degree misdemeanor, someone can land in jail for a year. Sen. Thad Altman, R-Rockledge, one of the sponsors, said in an interview with PolitiFact that legislators debated increasing the penalty of the open house party law to a felony but met some resistance. "Expanding the number of felonies is frowned upon'' by some legislators, he said. "This is a very measured approach.... at least it's one step in the right direction. Hopefully we will save lives of some kids." Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, a Democrat, said comparing the two laws is politically motivated. But he said most criminal laws come down to intent. When someone picks up a gun, points it at an animal and pulls the trigger, the person is intending to kill the animal. "When you host -- no matter how poorly thought out -- a party of underage teenagers where there is drinking, it's clearly not the intent of the homeowner that they get drunk and kill someone," he said in an interview. So illegal gator trapping can send someone to prison for five years while hosting an open house party can -- as of June -- send someone to jail for two months and, possibly after July 1, for a year. Manslaughter charge? But wait -- we're not done yet. If a parent hosts an underage drinking party and one of the teens winds up dead, could the host be charged with manslaughter? That would be one way of imposing a much tougher penalty. Prosecutors have tried the manslaughter route at least occasionally. But in the examples we found, they were not successful: • In May 2010, a jury found Diane Santarelli, a 52-year-old St. Johns County mother, not guilty of manslaughter in the case of two teenagers who died in an alcohol-related car crash after leaving a party hosted by Santarelli and her daughter, according to a May 21, 2010, Florida Times-Union article. The mother was convicted of two lesser offenses: hosting an open house party and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The article stated: "To be found guilty of manslaughter, the judge instructed the jurors they must determine that she was culpably negligent. Prosecutors had to prove her behavior was gross and flagrant and showed reckless disregard for human life or safety, among other qualifying factors." The article stated: "It was Florida's first manslaughter case dealing with the death of someone underage after consuming alcohol at an open house party." • In 2002, a Miami-Dade grand jury declined to charge a couple with manslaughter after a teenager who attended a party at the couple's home later died in a car crash, according to a July 20, 2005, Miami Herald article. And a jury acquitted the man of the open-house party law. But in that case, there was conflicting testimony about how long the father was present during the party. • The Florida Highway Patrol recommended manslaughter charges for an assistant baseball coach and his roommate for hosting a party in which teens drank hours before three died in a fatal Martin County car crash. But prosecutors said the evidence only supported misdemeanor charges, according to an Aug. 7, 2010, Palm Beach Post article. David "Bubba" Harper, 28, the coach, and Craig Frick, 24, pleaded no contest to the open house party charge. Our ruling Passidomo claimed that "it is a greater crime to have an untagged alligator than to host an open house party (for kids)," referring to a party with underage drinking. Possessing an untagged alligator is a felony that can land someone in prison for five years in Florida. The open house party law as of June 2011 is a misdemeanor -- and if the governor signs a revised version, it will remain a misdemeanor. However, it will move up from second- to first-degree in some circumstances, resulting in a maximum of one year in jail. We rate this claim True.	None	Kathleen Passidomo	None	None	None	2011-06-02T15:37:58	2011-05-30	['None']
-snes-04739	Recovered e-mails belonging to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton have revealed plans to seize guns from Republicans on 8 November 2016.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillarys-recovered-e-mails-reveal-republican-gun-grab-plan/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Hillary’s Recovered E-Mails Reveal Republican Gun Grab Plan	20 May 2016	None	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-05600	Says Congressman Steve Rothman voted against funding for President Barack Obama’s auto bailout and would have let automakers go bankrupt.	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/mar/29/bill-pascrell/bill-pascrell-claims-steve-rothman-voted-against-f/	One of the defining achievements of President Barack Obama’s re-election bid, the federal assistance given to U.S. automakers, is dividing two fellow Democrats mired in their own political battle in northern New Jersey. The campaign of U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell charges that U.S. Rep. Steve Rothman opposed funding for Obama’s auto bailout, and would have let the industry slide into bankruptcy. The two congressmen are preparing to face off June 5 for the Democratic nomination in the 9th Congressional District. "Rothman voted AGAINST funding for President Obama's auto industry rescue package," Justin Myers, Pascrell’s campaign manager, said in a March 19 news release, "The same guy who touts backing President Obama’s campaign did not even support singularly one of the most important policies that helped turn the economy from the brink of disaster. Just like Mitt Romney, Rothman would have ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt’." It’s accurate that Rothman voted against the funding mechanism that would later support the auto bailout, but the Pascrell campaign went too far in suggesting that Rothman did not support assisting U.S. automakers at all, PolitiFact New Jersey found. First, let’s explain the funding behind the auto bailout. The federal assistance provided to U.S. automakers came from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, created in October 2008 amid the ongoing financial crisis. Pascrell voted for the bill creating TARP, and Rothman voted against it. TARP was originally designed to assist the nation’s financial institutions, but the administration of President George W. Bush later agreed in December 2008 to use TARP funds for the distressed automakers. That policy continued under Obama. So, Rothman voted against the funding that ultimately went toward the auto bailout. But two points undercut the Pascrell campaign’s argument that "Rothman would have ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt’." First, when Rothman voted against the bill creating TARP, the money was intended to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions -- not bail out automakers. According to a September 2009 report by the Congressional Oversight Panel, "Members of Congress who debated this legislation in late 2008 believed they were debating a bill aimed at banks and the financial sector." That’s why it is wrong to interpret Rothman’s no vote as a vote against helping the auto industry. Paul Swibinski, a consultant to Rothman’s campaign, pointed to the original purpose of TARP to show that Myers’ statement is inaccurate. "The TARP bill Steve opposed clearly stated that the purpose of the bill was to purchase troubled assets of ‘financial institutions’ – it made no mention of the auto industry or any manufacturing," Swibinski said in an e-mail. "Steve had no idea that Bush would use a portion of the money for Detroit." About two months after TARP was created, Rothman voted for legislation designed to provide $14 billion in loans to the auto companies. That legislation was blocked in the U.S. Senate, leading the Bush administration to use TARP funds for the auto industry. By supporting that legislation, Rothman indicated his support for some form of federal assistance for U.S. automakers. But Pascrell spokesman Sean Darcy maintained that Rothman was not interested in providing money to rescue the auto industry. "The fact is that he voted against TARP and that money was used to save the auto industry," Darcy said in an e-mail. "So it is not ‘wrong’ to suggest that Rothman would have let Detroit go bankrupt if he got his way." Our ruling In a news release, the Pascrell campaign argued that Rothman "voted AGAINST funding for President Obama's auto industry rescue package" and "would have ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt’." It is true that Rothman voted against the bill creating TARP, which was later used to fund the auto bailout. But at the time of that vote, the program was not intended to assist the auto companies. Also, Rothman indicated a willingness to provide federal assistance for automakers through his support of a separate rescue package that was later blocked in the Senate. We rate the statement Half True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Bill Pascrell	None	None	None	2012-03-29T07:30:00	2012-03-19	['Steve_Rothman', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-03435	On gay marriage	full flop	/virginia/statements/2013/jun/24/mark-herring/mark-herring-reverses-position-gay-marriage/	Democrat Mark Herring stressed his differences with Republican Mark Obenshain during a recent debate between the attorney general candidates. But Herring said Obenshain was right on one point -- a charge that Herring had switched his stance on gay marriage. We rolled out the Flip-O-Meter to examine the extent of Herring’s change. Let’s journey back in time. In 2003, Herring unsuccessfully ran for the state Senate. He said marriage should be between a man and a woman, according to an Oct. 17 article that year in The Winchester Star. On Feb. 2, 2006, Herring was sworn in as a state senator after winning a special election in Loudoun County. Fifteen days later, he supported a resolution allowing Virginia voters to decide whether there should be a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Virginia law already defined marriage as between a man and a woman. But many referendum backers said the added constitutional amendment would shield the traditional marriage law from judicial tampering. Herring reiterated his support for the amendment during a Sept. 20, 2006, interview with Leesburg Today, saying it was consistent with Virginia’s existing marriage law. In November, the amendment was approved by 57 percent of voters. Herring sang a different tune this spring during his successful Democratic primary campaign for attorney general. On April 5, he released an "Equality Agenda" that said, "Mark Herring believes that civil marriage is a fundamental right, and he supports marriage equality for same-gender couples." Herring pledged to work "to change the current law prohibiting such marriages." Obenshain, a state senator from Harrisonburg since 2004, has been outspoken in his opposition to gay marriage. During a debate this June 15 with Herring, Obenshain said, "I believe marriage is an institution to be entered into between a man and a woman. That’s an issue upon which Mark and I, until at least a few years ago, agreed." Herring acknowledged that "almost eight years ago" he "didn’t really feel comfortable" about gay marriage. "But since that time, I’ve done a lot of thinking about it," he said. "I’ve talked to my friends, my constituents. I talked to co-workers; I talked to my family, including my children. And like millions of Americans and a lot of Virginians, I don’t believe that way anymore and I think it’s wrong. "I don’t believe anybody should be treated as a second-class citizen and I don’t believe that the state should decide who you can and cannot marry. So I support marriage equality and as we work towards marriage equality, there are very specific things I, as attorney general, can do to help protect the rights of gay and lesbian Virginians." For better or worse, Herring has done a Full Flop.	None	Mark Herring	None	None	None	2013-06-24T06:00:00	2013-06-15	['None']
-tron-00986	Facebook releasing members photos to third party advertisers	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/facebook-photo/	None	computers	None	None	None	Facebook releasing members photos to third party advertisers	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-02314	"Manufacturing wages today in America on a per-hour basis are actually a bit lower than average wages in the economy as a whole."	mostly true	/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/30/steven-rattner/rattner-manufacturing-wages-today-america-lower-av/	Former "car czar" Steven Rattner, who actually hates the nickname he earned overseeing the auto bailout, is pushing back against proclamations of a flourishing American manufacturing industry. Again. Rattner wrote an eye-catching New York Times op-ed in January calling the industry’s post-recession jobs gains a trickle, arguing "we need to get real about the so-called renaissance" partly because wages for auto workers and manufacturers dropped far more than the average private-sector worker since the end of the recession in June 2009. He revisited some of those points in a March 30, 2014, appearance on ABC’s This Week, which took a break from coverage of Russia and the missing Malaysian plane to examine the state of "Made in the USA." "We certainly want these kinds of advanced manufacturing jobs. But remember this, manufacturing wages today in America on a per-hour basis are actually a bit lower than average wages in the economy as a whole," he said. "And what I mean by that is there are lots of really good high-paying jobs in sectors like education, like IT, like health care, service sectors that are not just entry-level jobs, they are really high-paying jobs, and this is our competitive advantage." Manufacturing jobs are typically seen as a source of higher pay for people who don’t earn college degrees, and President Barack Obama put an emphasis on them in his State of the Union address. So PunditFact wondered if Rattner is right: Are per-hour wages in manufacturing a little smaller than average wages for the rest of the American economy? Rattner pointed to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees in the private sector, which make up about four-fifths of total private-sector employment. The most recent data for February 2014 shows the average hourly private-sector wage was $20.50. The manufacturing industry average was, as Rattner said, a bit lower at $19.43. Hourly wages are almost $3 higher for employees who produce durable goods, such as cars, phones and computers, than those who make nondurable goods, or things like food, gas and clothes. Weekly wages tell a different story, with manufacturers earning almost $122 more a week than the total worker average in February. The reason for the discrepancy between hourly and weekly wages is simple: Manufacturers work more hours. "Anyone can work more hours and make more money," Rattner said. But manufacturers also earn more money an hour when you factor in supervisors. BLS data for February show average hourly earnings are $24.31 for all private-sector employees and $24.72 for manufacturing employees -- the opposite of what Rattner said. Which dataset is better? The question can incite an economists’ quarrel. Dean Baker, a liberal economist and co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research, took issue with isolating a dataset that excludes supervisors, saying analysts see the distinction as arbitrary and are increasingly using the whole workforce for their research. The manufacturing industry has a lower percentage of production employees (70.1 percent) than the average for the private-sector workforce (82.7 percent), which accounts for the higher pay when using Rattner's measure, Baker said. Rattner argues viewing the data his way is more representative of the typical worker’s earnings without being influenced by the top of the pay scale. Another liberal economist and former Obama administration adviser, Jared Bernstein of the Center for Budget Policies and Priorities, faulted Rattner for excluding benefits on top of wages. Manufacturing workers often have benefits, he said. Another BLS source for wage data (yes, there are a lot of them) shows that when looking at total compensation (wages plus benefits), manufacturing workers earn $35.14 an hour, which is higher than the $28.44 average for careers in the service-providing industry and $29.63 for all private-sector workers in December 2013. "Since it's widely believed that workers trade off benefit pay for lower wages, it's a mistake to just consider wages in this sort of comparison when you're dealing with an industry that pays benefits (as opposed to say, fast food)," Bernstein said. Matthew Lavoie, National Association of Manufacturers spokesman, said 97 percent of the group’s 12,000 members provide health insurance. Rattner conceded manufacturers earn more than service-industry workers when benefits are included in his New York Times column. In our interview with Rattner, he anticipated these objections to his claim. "But my point remains the same: The perception that manufacturing jobs are ‘better’ jobs is out of date," Rattner wrote. "Note also that over the past year, per-hour wages for all industries rose by 50 cents per hour but in manufacturing, they rose by only 21 cents per hour. The trend is not manufacturing's friend, as my NYT piece pointed out." Our ruling Rattner was careful on This Week to single out data for per-hour wages when he argued manufacturers are not paid as much as the rest of workforce. His claim relies on the most recent data for production workers in the manufacturing industry, who earn about $1 less than the average of their private-sector counterparts. However, factoring in supervisors shows manufacturers make 41 cents more per hour. Adding benefits gives manufacturers more of an edge. We won’t take sides and say what dataset we think is best. What we can say is that Rattner makes an accurate point by one measure. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Steven Rattner	None	None	None	2014-03-30T18:16:06	2014-03-30	['United_States']
-snes-03736	A "daith piercing" can cure migraine headaches.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/daith-piercing-migraines/	None	Science	None	Kim LaCapria	None	‘Daith Piercing’: A New Alternative for Migraine Relief?	5 November 2015	None	['None']
-tron-01391	The Real Reason Wheat is Toxic	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/toxic-wheat/	None	food	None	None	None	The Real Reason Wheat is Toxic	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-02051	Gwen Stefani Pregnant, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/gwen-stefani-pregnancy-rumors-baby-bump/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Gwen Stefani NOT Pregnant, Despite Baby Bump “Rumors”	12:59 pm, December 11, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02015	The Israelis "gave up 1,000 terrorists in return for one sergeant."	true	/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/08/charles-krauthammer/did-israel-trade-1000-prisoners-one/	The exchange of kidnapped Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five high-risk Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay has elicited criticism of the Obama administration. Politicians and lawmakers have taken issue with the administration’s action on several grounds, including President Barack Obama’s decision to ignore a law requiring advance congressional notification and the questions surrounding Bergdahl’s original disappearance. But Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist and Fox News contributor, has come out supporting Obama’s decision to make the swap, despite concerns that Obama made Bergdahl’s release a highly public "cause for celebration." "We have long engaged -- and all other countries in the West have long engaged -- in hostage swaps where the West always comes out on the short end," said Krauthammer to Fox News host Bret Baier. "And the reason is that we put a value on an individual human life the way that the barbarians at the other end of the table don't." To demonstrate that other western countries have been on the short end of such swaps, Krauthammer cited an Israeli hostage exchange from 2011. "The best example is the Israelis, who gave up 1,000 terrorists in return for one sergeant," Krauthammer said. We decided to see whether Krauthammer’s claim was accurate. We found that it was. In 2006, the Islamic terrorist organization Hamas captured Israeli Sgt. Gilad Shalit after tunneling into Israel and attacking an army outpost. Israel’s first attempt to free Shalit, by launching a military invasion into Hamas-controlled Gaza, failed. Shalit was held captive for five years. During that time, many Israelis pleaded with their government to strike a deal for Shalit’s return. Israel had already failed to secure the freedom of Air Force Navigator Ron Arad, who had crashed his warplane in Lebanon 25 years before his death in 2008 while in the control of Shiite captors. Many Israelis worried that Shalit’s capture would end the same way. But it didn’t. Shalit returned home on Oct. 18, 2011, following Israel’s freeing of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. It's not clear that all 1,027 were "terrorists," but some were indeed terrorists serving several life sentences for killing Israeli citizens. (In addition, the definition of "terrorist" varies quite a lot depending on who is using the term.) One Israeli minister who voted against the exchange called it "a great victory for terrorism." That fear has been echoed in the wake of the Bergdahl exchange. Krauthammer took issue with such claims in an op-ed in the Washington Post. "The (Obama) administration might have tried honesty here and said: Yes, we gave away five important combatants. But that’s what you do to redeem hostages," Krauthammer wrote. As for what to do with Bergdahl, Krauthammer concludes that the right course is, "Free him, then try him." Our ruling Krauthammer said Israel "gave up 1000 terrorists in return for one sergeant." In 2011, Israel freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Sgt. Gilad Shalit, who had been held captive by Hamas since 2006. While we can't confirm that all 1,027 were terrorists, some definitely were, and the definition of "terrorist" is often fuzzy. We rate this statement True.	None	Charles Krauthammer	None	None	None	2014-06-08T11:03:20	2014-06-04	['None']
-tron-02231	Third Graders in Kansas Test Positive for Ebola	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/3rd-grader-eboal-pos/	None	medical	None	None	None	Third Graders in Kansas Test Positive for Ebola	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-03025	Terry McAuliffe has "threatened to shut down Virginia’s government if his budget plan isn’t supported."	false	/virginia/statements/2013/oct/11/ken-cuccinelli/cuccinelli-says-mcauliffe-threatened-shut-down-sta/	Amid the partial shutdown of the federal government, Virginia’s major gubernatorial candidates have been trading jabs over which one is likely to bring Washington-style dysfunction to Richmond. At a recent debate, Democrat Terry McAuliffe said GOP rival Ken Cuccinelli "tried to shut down" Virginia government in 2008 by introducing an unsuccessful budget amendment in the state senate that would have defunded Planned Parenthood. We rated McAuliffe’s claim Pants on Fire. This time, we’ll examine a Cuccinelli charge -- made in a radio ad -- that it’s McAuliffe who’s gung-ho for government gridlock. "He’s already threatened to shut down Virginia’s government if his budget plan isn’t supported," the narrator says of McAuliffe. Anna Nix, a Cuccinelli campaign spokeswoman, told us the claim refers to McAuliffe’s repeated vow that he won’t sign a budget as governor unless it provides for Medicaid expansion. An additional 400,000 low-income Virginians would be eligible for the health care program next year under an Obamacare offering. In the first three years the federal government would pay 100 percent of the new cost. After that, the share gradually declines to 90 percent, with the state paying the rest. Virginia lawmakers have not decided whether to expand the state’s program, instead opting for a commission that will recommend efficiencies to Medicaid before a final choice is made. McAuliffe says the state would be foolish to turn down the federal money. Cuccinelli and many Republican legislators oppose expanding Medicaid, saying Washington can’t be trusted over the long term to pay its promised share. Cuccinelli’s spokeswoman noted that McAuliffe said in a June 1 dinner speech to Loudoun County Democrats, "No budget gets done unless the governor signs that legislation. I will not sign a budget in Virginia unless the Medicaid expansion is included. " McAuliffe was quoted by the AARP on Aug. 29 saying he wouldn’t sign budget that doesn’t fund Medicaid expansion. During a Sept. 7 speech in Arlington, McAuliffe said, "My opponent doesn’t support the Medicaid expansion. I have asked the legislators `Please do not send me a bill’ -- because the governor has to sign the bill for the budget to come into effect -- ‘please don’t send me a bill unless the Medicaid expansion is included.’" Growing the program would certainly run into stiff opposition from Republicans in the General Assembly. But is McAuliffe’s pledge not to sign a budget that excludes Medicaid expansion tantamount to a threat to shut down government? Let’s dig deeper. If a governor does not sign a budget bill that has been passed by the General Assembly, it automatically becomes law, according to A.E. Dick Howard, a University of Virginia law professor who helped draft a revised state constitution that voters adopted in 1971. Howard pointed to Article 5, Section 6 of the state constitution, which says if the governor receives a bill while the General Assembly is in session, he has seven days to sign, amend or veto the legislation, or it becomes law. If the governor receives a bill when the General Assembly is not in session, he has 30 days to act before the measure becomes law. Any budget amendments offered by a governor can be defeated by a majority vote in either chamber. Should the governor veto a budget, the legislature can override it with a two-thirds vote of each house. McAuliffe says his budget-signing vow will never come into play if he becomes governor because he’s certain he could convince a majority of legislators to approve Medicaid expansion. "No budget will be shut down in Virginia over the Medicaid expansion," McAuliffe said during a Sept. 25 debate with Cuccinelli. "I will work in a bipartisan way to get it done…so we won’t have any government shutdown." Our ruling Cuccinelli says McAuliffe has threatened to shut down state government. He points to McAuliffe’s repeated promise not to sign a state budget that does not allow for Medicaid expansion. But McAuliffe’s vow, if carried out, would not close Virginia’s government. If a governor does not sign the budget, it automatically becomes law no more than 30 days after the General Assembly sent it to his desk. It’s striking that Cuccinelli, who has served almost four years as attorney general after an eight-year career in the state Senate, overlooked this constitutional provision. We rate his statement False.	None	Ken Cuccinelli	None	None	None	2013-10-11T10:17:37	2013-10-02	['None']
-obry-00032	In a debate on Oct. 20 at West Salem High School, the now re-elected representative for the 94th District Assembly seat, Democrat Steve Doyle, along with Republican Julian Bradley defended their stances on expanding the state voucher program. Doyle argued that the current system, which is mostly limited to the Milwaukee and Racine school districts, doesn’t need to expand because it would take away funds from quality public school districts in the process. “But we don’t have failing schools in western Wisconsin; we have good, quality schools,” Doyle said.” Are all of the public schools in western Wisconsin meeting state-level standards, as Doyle claimed? 	mostly_true	https://observatory.journalism.wisc.edu/2016/12/16/in-the-94th-district-most-schools-are-meeting-state-standards-but-not-all/	None	None	None	Max Bayer	None	In the 94th district, most schools are meeting state standards, but not all	December 16, 2016	None	['Wisconsin', 'Milwaukee', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Racine,_Wisconsin']
-tron-03320	Muslims Demand Removal of “The Perfect Man” Billboard	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/muslims-demand-removal-perfect-man-billboard/	None	religious	None	None	['free speech', 'islam', 'religion']	Muslims Demand Removal of “Perfect Man” Billboard	Aug 17, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-15294	"Although we have twice the population of Greece, the state of Florida employs three times fewer government employees."	half-true	/florida/statements/2015/jul/22/jeff-atwater/greece-employs-three-times-many-government-workers/	Florida Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater capitalized on news about the floundering Greek economy to point out a new report that said the Florida economy was doing just fine. In an "open letter to the people of Florida," Atwater said the Sunshine State had been ranked fifth in fiscal solvency by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. He then contrasted Florida’s success with the beleaguered European nation. "A country in economic peril, Greece’s priorities have historically been very different from Florida’s," Atwater wrote on July 13, 2015. "For example, Greeks depend much more on their government for employment and services. Although we have twice the population of Greece, the State of Florida employs three times fewer government employees." PunditFact previously confirmed that Greece’s economic output is comparable to Miami, but could that 3-to-1 comparison of public-sector workers be accurate? Yes, if you’re looking at Florida’s direct employees, but experts we talked to said Atwater’s comparison is deeply flawed. Greek tragedy First of all, let’s stipulate that Greece’s population is about 11 million, while the Census Bureau says Florida is now closing in on 20 million, so he’s close on that point. Comparing employment is a bit trickier, since Greece’s public-sector employment has been in flux. To adhere to what its European lenders are demanding, Greece has spent several years trying to cut down its reliance on public-sector jobs. Atwater’s office told us they used 2013 data from Greece’s Ministry of Administrative Reform and E-Governance for Greek government workers (653,746) and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics program for Florida state employees (207,008). Several sources agreed 2015 estimates put the current number of Greek public-sector employees at around 600,000. Florida’s employee numbers have stayed relatively stable in that time frame, with about 208,000 this year, so it looks like the 3-to-1 ratio Atwater cited could stand. But our experts said the CFO is really comparing oranges to olives here. Rollins College business professor James Johnson pointed out that those 600,000 Greek jobs include all government workers -- those paid by the central government and those paid by regional and municipal governments. A better way to measure the state’s government employment would be to add Florida’s 133,000 or so federal workers to Atwater’s 207,000 total, Rollins said. And even more important are the more than 730,000 workers toiling away at the local level. Also, Washington sends money to Florida that directly and indirectly affects workers at the state and local levels. Add that all up, and there are almost 1.1 million government employees on all levels across Florida at any given time. That is quite a bit more than the 600,000 or so Greek government workers. Experts also note that Greek economic woes aren’t entirely about how many people are currently employed by the government. "Greece’s problem was not so much the size of its public sector, but generous retirement benefits, including pensions," Johnson said. Greece doesn’t even top Europe in terms of highest percentage of the workforce employed by the public sector. In 2011, before Greece started cutting workers, it ranked behind Italy, Germany and France. In any event, fairly comparing a single U.S. state with a sovereign nation is largely impossible, considering the different sets of responsibilities each bears, our experts said. Atwater’s office reiterated that it was making a point that the Greek central government is wasteful and poorly run when compared to Florida, but experts told us that it’s difficult at best to draw such parallels. "It’s sort of a totally different system. It is fair to say the state of Florida is more efficient than the country of Greece, but you could say that about any other state," Jupiter-based financial analyst Tom Essaye said. "It would be much more fair to compare Florida to other states than Greece." Our ruling Atwater said, "the State of Florida employs three times fewer government employees" than Greece. Florida does directly employ about one-third as many state government workers as Greece does. But a more reasonable comparison should also include government workers at the federal and local levels -- which means Florida’s overall total of government workers would outnumber Greece’s public-sector employees. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We rate Atwater’s statement Half True.	None	Jeff Atwater	None	None	None	2015-07-22T12:30:01	2015-07-13	['Greece']
-pomt-12108	"Most people on Medicaid are kids, or seniors, or the disabled."	mostly true	/new-york/statements/2017/aug/23/sean-patrick-maloney/most-people-medicaid-are-children-seniors-or-have-/	One-third of New York state residents are on Medicaid, the federal-state program that helps pay for health care. We recently rated that claim True in a fact-check on U.S. Rep. John Faso of the Hudson Valley. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat whose district neighbors Faso’s, responded to that statement with a claim about the Republican replacement for Obamacare. "I heard [Faso] say recently that too many people are on Medicaid," Maloney said. "I'm just wondering which people he thinks we should throw off their insurance, because most people on Medicaid are kids, or seniors, or the disabled." The replacement would have reduced federal Medicaid spending increases, a measure Democrats oppose. The bill is now in limbo after failing in the Senate last month. Democrats in New York state want to preserve the Medicaid program, often citing the number of people who rely on it. But is Maloney right that most people in the program are children, seniors, or have a disability? National numbers The average monthly Medicaid enrollment in 2016 was nearly 71 million, according to the most recent estimates from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The agency’s report breaks down the numbers: • 28 million recipients were children. • 5.7 million recipients were age 65 or older. • 10.6 million recipients had a disability or were blind. • The remaining 28.1 million were adults below 65 without a disability or residents in U.S territories. A total of 44.3 million Medicaid recipients were children, seniors, or had a disability in 2016 according to the estimates. That’s almost two-thirds of the Medicaid population. Enrollment data from 2014, the latest official count, shows those groups made up about 65 percent of the Medicaid population that year. That distribution is not out of the ordinary, said Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University. "It’s because of how the program is structured and it’s because of who the people are," Rosenbaum said. "For the elderly and the disabled, Medicaid is the means by which we do long term support for services in the United States." Medicaid is used by seniors who need long term care but cannot afford a private insurance plan to supplement Medicare, which does not cover long-term care. People with a disability also rely on the program to cover continuous care. The share of children on Medicaid, meanwhile, is a reflection of how many children live in poverty, Rosenbaum said. "Families know that if your children need insurance, you turn to the Medicaid program," Rosenbaum said. New York numbers Maloney spoke in the context of national numbers, but the same claim would be true for New York state. The average monthly Medicaid enrollment was 6.1 million in New York as of April, according to the state Department of Health. • More than two million beneficiaries in New York are children. • Another 700,527 either have a disability or are blind. • Another 639,488 are people age 65 or older. • The remaining 2.8 million are adults below 65 without a disability. The three categories Maloney mentioned make up more than 3.3 million of New York’s Medicaid enrollees, or about 55 percent. Our ruling Maloney said "most people on Medicaid are kids, or seniors, or the disabled." The word "most" may mean different things to different people. Not even dictionaries are clear, where meanings vary from "the majority of" to "nearly all of." Nationally, two-thirds of people on Medicaid are either children, seniors or disabled, according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. For us, we rate two-thirds as Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Sean Patrick Maloney	None	None	None	2017-08-23T08:36:16	2017-08-03	['None']
-hoer-00874	Does Rubbing Vicks VapourRub on Your Feet Relieve Coughing?	unsubstantiated messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/vicks-foot-rub-cough-cure.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Does Rubbing Vicks VapourRub on Your Feet Relieve Coughing?	January 28, 2013	None	['None']
-vees-00270	VERAfied: A DIY guide to fact checking and fighting fake news	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/verafied-diy-guide-fact-checking-and-fighting-fake-news	None	None	None	None	international fact-checking day	VERAfied: A DIY guide to fact checking and fighting fake news	April 02, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04606	Says Romney and Ryan "both backed proposals that would outlaw abortions even in cases of rape or incest."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/19/barack-obama/obama-ties-romney-ryan-abortion-ban-rape-incest/	CORRECTION: We have corrected this item to note that Mitt Romney has said he would allow abortion when the life of the mother is in jeopardy. We had mistakenly said "health" of the mother in our original version. With women voters as a key swing group in this election, Barack Obama continues to attack Mitt Romney on abortion. The Obama campaign made abortion rights a central point at the Democratic convention and now has launched yet another television ad that casts Romney as favoring the most hardline position on abortion rights. The ad is called "Dangerous" and it says Romney and running mate Paul Ryan "both backed proposals that would outlaw abortions even in cases of rape or incest." This is different from previous claims from the Obama campaign. During the summer, the campaign attacked Romney for backing a strict anti-abortion bill with no exception for rape and incest. In fact, that claim was based on a moment in a 2007 debate when there was no mention of exceptions one way or the other and there was no actual bill. The claim was factually inaccurate and distorted Romney's explicit support for precisely those exceptions. The combination of inaccuracy and misdirection earned the Obama campaign a Pants on Fire rating. This time, the Obama team speaks of something broader -- a ‘proposal’ -- and it includes Ryan's position. Recently, the Obama camp tweeted that Ryan would ban all abortions even in cases of rape and incest. The use of the word ‘all’ earned that claim a rating of Half True. That's because Ryan favors an exception where an abortion is needed to save the life of the mother. However, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has reported, he opposes exceptions for rape and incest. The National Right to Life Committee concurs, based on information the group collected in 1998 and 2000 from Ryan as a candidate. The anti-abortion group gives Ryan a 100 percent rating. Ryan now says he will follow Romney’s policy. But the current Obama ad does away with the "all" and so its claim for Ryan stands on solid ground. On Romney, the record is murky. To be sure, he has flip-flopped on the issue, earning a Full Flop on PolitiFact's Flip-O-Meter. His current stance, as he prominently posted in the pages of the National Review in 2011, is to outlaw abortion except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape and incest. He would press to see Roe vs. Wade overturned and allow states to set their own rules on abortion. The charge that he went beyond that view rests on an interview he had with former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, on Fox television. Huckabee asked Romney about a Massachusetts law that helped cover the costs of abortion. Romney said it would take a state constitutional amendment to change that and then Huckabee asked, "Would you have supported a constitutional amendment that would have established the definition of life as conception?" Romney replied, "Absolutely." To Democrats, this was the same as if Romney had said he supported a personhood amendment. A personhood measure was on the ballot in Mississippi and had it passed, the impacts would have been profound. "It would definitely ban abortion," said Glenn Cohen, an assistant professor at Harvard Law. Cohen is co-director of the law school’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Biotechnology and Bioethics and assessed the Mississippi measure. But it is unclear if Romney was endorsing a personhood amendment because Huckabee never used the word ‘personhood’. Nor did Huckabee mention Mississippi. "Life beginning at conception is a general statement," said Anne Fox, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, a group opposed to abortion. "A personhood amendment is a specific piece of legislation." When we contacted the Obama campaign, a spokeswoman cited this interview as evidence that Romney had endorsed a personhood amendment in Massachusetts. But there is little proof that such an amendment ever existed. Neither Fox nor Cohen, two people who closely follow the legal framework for abortion in Massachusetts, have ever seen the text of a personhood amendment in their state. While there is a website to recruit activists to put such a measure on the ballot in Massachusetts, it is registered to a Keith Mason in Colorado. The home page says "The organizers that got personhood on the ballot in Colorado, would like to help in Massachusetts as well." Keith Mason is the president of Personhood USA, an amendment advocacy group. Further, Cohen argues that the legal gap between ‘life begins at conception’ and personhood is large. "Saying "life" begins at fertilization is quite different from saying "personhood" does. No one denies that fetuses or embryos are alive, but many dispute that they are persons in the sense that they have legal rights -- at least not to be destroyed without very good reason." Cohen said. Would these legal distinctions matter to every anti-abortion activist? Not necessarily. Throughout the history of this debate, the phrase "life begins at conception" has often been synonymous with banning abortions. Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, makes that connection and, as we noted, would make no exception for rape and incest. These lexical associations further muddy the meaning of Romney’s answer to Huckabee. Romney has kept specific personhood measures at arm’s length. He never endorsed the Mississippi ballot measure. Claiming a scheduling conflict, he did not participate in personhood candidate forums in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida sponsored by Personhood USA. Romney’s relations with Personhood USA have been rocky. The group accused him of "throwing a pro-life congressman under the bus" when Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin made controversial comments about rape victims and Romney said Akin should withdraw from the race. Romney refused to sign the Personhood USA pledge that mirrors the Mississippi measure. On some occasions, however, the group has spoken well of Romney. Our ruling Barack Obama said in a television ad that Romney and Ryan Romney "both backed proposals that would outlaw abortions even in cases of rape or incest." That is true for Ryan. His opposition to abortion, including in cases of rape and incest, is clear. Romney chose Ryan as his running mate and now Ryan says he’ll follow Romney’s lead. Romney has said he supports an amendment that defines life as beginning at conception. When he said that, there was no specific amendment language for him to consider. The term "life begins at conception" is strongly associated with banning abortion, and in some advocates’ view, without exception for rape and incest. But Romney has distanced himself from formal personhood amendments and he made clear in National Review that he supports exceptions for rape or incest. Still, his words and his choice of Ryan tend to blur the distinctions that he himself would emphasize. We rate the statement Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-09-19T11:51:52	2012-09-11	['None']
-snes-00294	Missouri Republicans passed a bill to lower the minimum wage in St. Louis from $10 an hour to $7.70.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/missouri-republicans-pass-law-lowering-minimum-wage/	None	Politics	None	David Emery	None	Did Missouri Republicans Pass a Law Lowering the St. Louis Minimum Wage from $10 to $7.70?	25 July 2018	None	['St._Louis', 'Missouri']
-snes-04332	Ghazala Khan wore a hijab at the DNC as a political stunt and was depicted alongside President Obama without one in an earlier photograph.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ghazala-khans-hijab-was-a-political-stunt/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Ghazala Khan’s Hijab Was a Political Stunt	2 August 2016	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Democratic_National_Committee']
-snes-06338	Photograph shows Hercules, the world's biggest dog.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hercules/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Hercules, the World’s Biggest Dog	6 April 2007	None	['None']
-pomt-14424	When Honduran children came into this country, "Secretary Clinton said send them back."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/09/bernie-sanders/sanders-said-clinton-backed-return-undocumented-ki/	At the Democratic presidential debate at Miami Dade College, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders aimed to show that he, not former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is the better friend of undocumented immigrants. Sanders said that in Vermont, he backed state driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. In New York, he said, Clinton opposed it. Sanders recalled the period in 2014 when tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors surged across the border. "One of the great human tragedies of recent years is children came from Honduras where there's more violence than in any place in this country, and they came into this country," Sanders said. "And I said welcome these children into this country. Secretary Clinton said, send them back." Clinton said that wasn’t a fair summary. The Sanders campaign said they got their information from an interview Clinton gave to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in June 2014. We looked at the full exchange about what the United States should do with the children. Amanpour: "Should they be able to stay here? It's safer." Clinton: "Well -- it may be safer but that's not the answer. I do not -- " Amanpour: "Should they be sent back?" Clinton: "Well, first of all, we have to provide the best emergency care we can provide. We have children 5 and 6 years old who have come up from Central America. We need to do more to provide border security in southern Mexico." Amanpour: "So, you're saying they should be sent back now?" Clinton: "Well, they should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who responsible adults in their families are, because there are concerns whether all of them should be sent back. But I think all of them who can be should be reunited with their families." Clinton made a couple of points in that last answer. It is not as simple as saying "send them back," but that was certainly an outcome she supported in some cases. To be precise, she said they should be sent back if the government can identify responsible adults to care for them. She allowed that it might not be possible to send all of them to their home country. But she indicated a preference. "I think all of them who can be should be reunited with their families," Clinton said. It should be noted that at the time, the administration actively pursued a policy to dissuade children and teenagers in Central America from attempting the trip in the first place. The government had open letters printed in local newspapers and paid for advertizing that dispelled any myth that these young people would be allowed to stay if they could get across the border. In July 2014, the White House signaled that it would seek funds to expedite the return of most of the children stopped at the American border. We sought comment from the Clinton campaign and had not heard back by the time we published. Our ruling Sanders said that when undocumented children were streaming across the border, Clinton said, send them back. That is a bit of an oversimplification. Clinton did not say they should be sent back no matter what. She set the condition that the government should first identify responsible adults to care for them. However, she expressed a preference that as many as possible be sent back. That message was part of the administration’s policy to discourage more young people from attempting the trip. We rate this statement Mostly True.	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2016-03-09T23:48:43	2016-03-09	['Bill_Clinton', 'Honduras']
-snes-04124	Sylvester Stallone Death	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sylvester-stallone-death-hoax-2/	None	Junk News	None	Snopes Staff	None	Sylvester Stallone Death Hoax	1 September 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-00364	Says John Cox "parroted, parroted Trump — almost verbatim — on the children’s separation issues at the border."	mostly false	/california/statements/2018/sep/12/gavin-newsom/gavin-newsoms-misleading-claim-john-cox-parroting-/	In his run for California governor, Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom has repeatedly tried to tie his Republican opponent John Cox to President Trump’s most hardline immigration policies. Newsom did just that in a recent TV interview. He claimed Cox, a San Diego businessman who Trump has endorsed, has "parroted" Trump on the president’s controversial family separation policy for those who illegally cross the border. Newsom made the assertion immediately after discussing Cox’s policies, implying that his Republican rival fully supports separating immigrant families. "Even by relatively moderate positions in the Republican party in California, he’s on the extreme of those positions," Newsom told ABC7 in Los Angeles on Aug. 17, 2018. "He can’t run away from Trump. He parroted, parroted Trump—almost verbatim—on the children’s separation issues at the border." Newsom makes his claim in the ABC7 TV interview above. We fact-checked the last portion of Newsom’s statement. Our research It’s not clear which specific words Newsom believes Cox has "parroted." That’s because Trump has made many claims about the child separation policy, some of which blame Democrats in Congress for forcing the crisis. Thousands of children were taken from their parents and sent to detention centers this spring after their families crossed the border. Though Trump eventually ended the policy, hundreds of children remain separated. Trump has also claimed the problem could be solved if people "Don't come to our country illegally. Come like other people do. Come legally." Still, the implication in Newsom’s statement is straigtforward: That Cox and Trump share the same words and viewpoints on the policy. Cox says he's opposed There’s one big problem: Cox clearly stated his opposition to separating families at a June press conference at the state Capitol. The conference and proceeding rally was organized in support of repealing the state’s gas tax increase, one of Cox’s top causes. "I'm against separating parents and children, I'm a father. I have four daughters. That's a congressional problem," Cox told reporters. "I hope we get a congressional solution very soon. He later added: "I’m about solutions. … I hope Congress solves that problem, as well, and I’ll work with it." Asked the same month on KGO Radio about the policy, Cox said: "I would certainly add my voice to try and keep parents and children together." Cox was again asked whether he supports separating children from families in an August TV interview on Bloomberg Politics. He did not offer an explicit answer, but said: "I support getting a solution." None of the responses show Cox favors the policy. To support Newsom’s claim, his spokesman Nathan Click pointed to a June Sacramento Bee article that covered Cox’s comments at the June press conference. The article begins this way: Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox on Monday backed President Donald Trump's stance on separating immigrant parents from their children at the border, saying, "that's a congressional problem." Cox is quoted later in the article saying he’s "against" separating families. In an email, Cox’s spokesman Matt Shupe wrote that Newsom’s statement is "100 percent FALSE." Who’s to blame? Setting aside the key context that Cox has opposed the policy, we examined whether Cox’s words in any other way "parrot" Trump’s, as Newsom stated. We found Cox and Trump both say that Congress must solve family separations. But even on this point, there’s a degree of difference. Trump has focused his blame mostly on Democrats in Congress, while Cox hasn’t been that specific. On May 26, Trump tweeted: Then, on June 16, Trump tweeted: PolitiFact and other news organizations have debunked Trump’s false claim that Democrats or others in Congress passed a law that forced the family separations. They have noted the Trump administration is responsible for its own policy. "There is no such law," PolitiFact National wrote in a recent fact check. "The Homeland Security Department’s longstanding policy is to separate children from their custodians when they are referred for criminal prosecution. Trump’s administration has decided to prosecute all illegal crossings. Families were rarely prosecuted under previous administrations." Our ruling Democrat Gavin Newsom recently claimed his GOP opponent for governor John Cox "parroted" President Trump on the issue of family separations at the border. His statement, made right after a discussion of Cox’s policies, wrongly implies Cox supports separating immigrant families. Cox has repeatedly stated he opposes the policy. Cox and Trump have both said Congress should solve the issue, offering one parallel between the two. But even on this point, they’re not in lock-step. Trump has falsely blamed Democrats in Congress for forcing the separations, while Cox hasn’t made that specific charge. If anything, Cox has "parroted" one of Trump’s talking points about who should solve the problem. But he hasn’t backed Trump’s policy. Newsom’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Gavin Newsom	None	None	None	2018-09-12T11:50:44	2018-08-17	['None']
-pomt-00346	Says Andrew Gillum "wants to increase Florida taxes by a billion dollars."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2018/sep/14/republican-governors-association/republican-ad-correct-andrew-gillum-wants-raise-fl/	A TV attack ad portrays Florida Democrat Andrew Gillum as so "far out" that he is on another planet. "Gillum wants to increase Florida taxes by a billion dollars. Disaster for the economy," says an ad by the Republican Governors Association showing Gillum’s headshot floating in space. The 30-second ad also attacks Gillum over his support for Medicare for All and abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But here, we’ll focus on whether Gillum wants to raise Florida taxes by $1 billion. He does, though the ad doesn’t make clear what taxes Gillum wants to raise, who would pay, and how Florida would spend the additional revenue. Gillum’s tax plan Gillum has proposed increasing Florida’s corporate tax rate from 5.5 percent to 7.75 percent to generate an additional $1 billion a year. His opponent, Republican Ron DeSantis, has signed a pledge not to raise taxes. Gillum said he would put that extra revenue toward education, including a minimum teacher salary of $50,000 and raising pay for veteran teachers to the national average. Gillum also plans to invest in early childhood education programs and vocational training. The state corporate tax currently generates about $2.5 billion a year. Most businesses, however, are exempt from paying any tax because the state exempts the first $50,000 in taxable income. Gillum’s campaign said he would keep that exemption to protect small businesses, but said he wants to close loopholes that allow other corporations to avoid paying taxes. Who ends up paying for corporate taxes Put simply, Gillum’s plan is to have Florida’s biggest corporations pay $1 billion more a year in taxes. That could affect average Floridians, experts told us. But it is difficult to put a dollar figure on it. Kurt Wenner, vice president of research at Florida TaxWatch, said that if a business is forced to pay more in taxes, it can raise prices, reduce employment, reduce costs or investment, or reduce profits. "Those outcomes would all potentially have negative impacts on residents," Wenner said. "The magnitude of those impacts would be hard to quantify, especially factoring in any economic increase from increase government spending." There’s also no way to guarantee that the full $1 billion would flow into the state’s revenues. Corporations could take legal tax planning measures to reduce their liability. That could make funding Gillum’s education priorities more challenging. At the same time, an increase in the tax rate could have negative impacts on corporations’ decisions about where to locate and whether to expand. Richard Auxier, research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said the cost of corporate taxes is shared among stockholders and, unintuitively, among a broader group of workers and investors. The Tax Policy Center assumes 80 percent of the burden is borne by investment returns (dividends, interest, capital gains, etc.), with the remaining 20 percent weighing on wages and other labor income. "Would average Floridians pay some of a corporate tax hike (in the form of lower wages and/or higher prices)? Yes. Would they pay a lot? Nope," Auxier told PolitiFact. "Would investors and managers (who are not all in Florida because multi-state companies pay the tax, too) pay a lot? Yup." Randall G. Holcombe, a Florida State University economics professor, said that a higher tax would discourage business. "Floridians who do not directly pay corporate income tax will still bear a cost of slower economic growth in Florida," he said. "They may also pay higher prices if corporations are able to pass through that tax increase to customers, but the big cost will be slower economic growth." Our ruling The Republican Governors Association said that "Gillum wants to increase Florida taxes by a billion dollars." The ad leaves out the details that voters might want to know about Gillum’s proposal. Gillum proposes raising the corporate tax rate from 5.5 to 7.75 percent, generating about an extra $1 billion from Florida’s biggest corporations to put toward education. The tax wouldn’t directly target the average Floridian, but experts say at least some of the cost could trickle down. The claim is accurate but needs additional information. We rate it Mostly True.	None	Republican Governors Association	None	None	None	2018-09-14T11:00:00	2018-09-12	['None']
-pomt-10598	Hillary Clinton wants to "wave the white flag of surrender and set a date for withdrawal."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/25/john-mccain/a-white-flag-has-a-literal-meaning-too/	John McCain has attacked Hillary Clinton, saying she wants to "wave the white flag of surrender" in Iraq. He said it again in response to a question about Iraq at the Jan. 24, 2008, Republican debate in Boca Raton. (His comments come near the end of the YouTube video, at 9:45.) It's hard to believe Hillary Clinton would say something so impolitic. Did she? It's a harsh paraphrase of what she actually said in the Jan. 21, 2008, Democratic debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Here's the full exchange: Question: "Last week, you said the next president will, quote, 'have a war to end in Iraq.' In light of the new military and political progress on the ground there in Iraq, are you looking to end this war or win it?" Clinton: "I'm looking to bring our troops home, starting within 60 days of my becoming president, and here's why, Joe. I have the greatest admiration for the American military. I serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. I've been to Iraq three times. I've met with the leaders of the various factions. But there is no military solution, and our young men and women should not remain as the referees of their conflict. "I believe what you're seeing happen is twofold. Of course the surge, the so-called surge, was able to pacify certain parts of Iraq. If we put enough of our men and women and equipment in, we're going to be able to have some tactical military success. But the whole purpose of the surge was to force the Iraqi government to move quickly towards the kind of resolution that only it can bring about. "I think what is motivating the Iraqi government is the debate in the political campaign here. They know they will no longer have a blank check from George Bush, that I will withdraw troops from Iraq. And I believe that will put even more pressure on the Iraqis to finally make the decisions that they have to make." McCain is right that Clinton is setting a time frame to start withdrawing troops, and that does imply giving up and waving a metaphorical white flag. Saying there is no military solution as she does could be seen as a form of surrender. But technically, there is no ruling army to surrender to, which is really what a white flag means. Clinton just wants the troops to come home. So McCain is right when he says Clinton is advocating withdrawal from Iraq. But he uses a highly charged term that somewhat overstates the conditions to which she's referring to end U.S. involvement in Iraq. For this reason, we rate his attack Half True.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-01-25T00:00:00	2008-01-24	['None']
-vogo-00631	Statement: “Enjoy ‘Rich and Famous’ Robin Leach’s favorite, Chef Cheng’s Mandarin & Szechwan food,” says every menu at China Too, 915 5th Ave.	determination: mostly true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-fact-checked/	Analysis: There’s nothing extravagantly glamorous about the Gaslamp Quarter restaurant called China Too. Its small tables, oriental exterior and disposable paper menus give it the typical décor of a Chinese takeout restaurant.	None	None	None	None	Lifestyles of the Rich and Fact-Checked	February 26, 2010	None	['None']
-snes-01267	Did a White House Intern Make the ‘White Power’ Hand Gesture?	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/intern-white-power-hand-gesture/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did a White House Intern Make the ‘White Power’ Hand Gesture?	4 January 2018	None	['None']
-snes-01894	The former Alabama state Attorney general, Bill Baxley, once told a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon "kiss my ass" in response to threats.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/attorney-general-of-alabama-told-the-klan/	None	Politics	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did the Attorney General of Alabama Once Tell the Ku Klux Klan to ‘Kiss My Ass’?	15 August 2017	None	['Alabama']
-goop-01698	Chris Martin “Planning” For Dakota Johnson To Meet Gwyneth Paltrow, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/chris-martin-dakota-johnson-meet-gwyneth-paltrow-wrong/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Chris Martin NOT “Planning” For Dakota Johnson To Meet Gwyneth Paltrow, Despite Reports	4:06 pm, January 29, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04365	Says U.S. Rep. Charles Bass wants to privatize Social Security.	mostly false	/new-hampshire/statements/2012/oct/22/ann-mclane-kuster/ann-mclane-kuster-accused-charlie-bass-wanting-pri/	From the day she officially entered the race, Congressional candidate Ann McLane Kuster has accused her opponent, U.S. Rep. Charles Bass of wanting to privatize Social Security. But, in a recent TV ad, she let a supporter do her talking for her. "I think Congressman Bass’ idea to privatize Social Security is a devastating idea," one voter, Janice Kelble, of Franklin, N.H., says in the ad, "Janice," which first aired on Sept. 6 on New Hampshire airwaves. "Bass just wants to risk Social Security on the stock market," Kelble suggests. "Charlie Bass just plain does not understand the middle class.’ PolitiFact has heard these claims before. The attack has been a rallying cry of sorts for Democrats since George W. Bush was in office, and candidates are pulling the card once again this election season. In fact, we checked the same claim from Kuster this summer, rating it Mostly False. But, with the charge receiving renewed airtime with the ad, we decided to see if anything has changed. Back in June, the Kuster campaign cited a 2001 House vote on then-President Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security as evidence of Bass’ support for privatization. In December 2001, the 16-member commission issued its final report, which urged Congress to incorporate a system of private accounts for personal investment. With strong opposition from Democrats, the commission’s recommendations never reached the floor of Congress. But, the House did consider a number of resolutions and amendments at the time, including H.AMDT.245, a Democratic-sponsored amendment that would have prohibited any funding of the commission’s recommendations. Bass joined each of his Republican colleagues at the time in voting against the amendment, which failed 188-238. But, analysts determined both then and now that the vote was more of a pre-emptive strike than a true endorsement of privatization. "He may have (supported privatization)," Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the conservative Cato Institute, said back in June. "Republicans generally did at that point, but this vote was certainly not a vote that could be read that way." In both the current ad and in past claims, Kuster cites a 2005 news article as further evidence of Bass’ support for privatization. In this story, printed in the Eagle Times of Claremont, N.H., Bass offered support for then-President Bush’s plan to introduce a private accounts option for Social Security beneficiaries. "I support the establishment of private savings accounts because it allows low- and middle-income workers the chance to get ahead," Bass said, according to the Eagle Times. As noted in the prior ruling, Bass further clarified his stance that year with a statement issued the night Bush outlined his plan in his State of the Union address. "I am an advocate of the President's call for Social Security reform and will work with him in the next two years to save and protect this important program," Bass wrote at the time, according to the National Journal and Project Vote Smart. Some analysts argue that Bush’s plan, to allow workers under 55 the option of directing up to 4 percent of their payroll taxes into private accounts, is as close to privatization as the debate has reached in recent years. "Virtually no one has proposed replacing all of Social Security with private accounts, Paul Van de Water, a seniors fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said in the initial Kuster piece. "Given the way the debate has evolved, being for … privatization doesn’t mean you’re for privatizing the whole darn thing." But, PolitiFact has determined in past rulings that the private accounts option does not meet the standards of full privatization. First, it would be fully optional, and secondly, beneficiaries could opt to place only a portion of their payroll taxes into private accounts, qualifying as a partial privatization plan at best. "To address this financial crisis facing the Social Security program, one such idea Congressman Bass has supported would create a program that would allow individuals to voluntarily place a portion of their money that they currently pay as part of the payroll tax and place it into a personal account," Bass spokesman Scott Tranchemontagne wrote in a June email to the Telegraph. "Saying that (Bass) supports ‘privatizing Social Security is pure political rhetoric devised by Democratic spin doctors to frighten seniors." Our ruling: Little if anything has changed since our past ruling on Kuster’s claims about Bass’ support for privatization. The statements and votes that the Democrat references in support of her claim suggest Bass supported a move toward partial privatization, not full privatization as the claim suggests. Kuster’s claim was Mostly Falsethen, and it continues to be now.	None	Ann McLane Kuster	None	None	None	2012-10-22T12:00:00	2012-09-06	['United_States']
-pomt-07666	"Our average private sector employee pays 23 percent for their health care. Our average city worker in Ohio pays 9 percent."	true	/ohio/statements/2011/mar/10/john-kasich/gov-john-kasich-cites-disparity-between-what-priva/	Republicans in Ohio have offered a variety of arguments to justify their controversial effort to overhaul the state’s collective bargaining law, which for nearly 30 years has set the ground rules for public workers and their employers to reach labor agreements. A new collective bargaining law, known as Senate Bill 5, is making is way through the state legislature with strong support from Republican Gov. John Kasich. The bill would scale back public workers’ rights at the bargaining table and has prompted unions to fight back with protests and promises to get even in the voting booth. Kasich and Republicans say the current rules have resulted in costly labor pacts that cities and other local governments can no longer afford. As an example, Kasich pointed out the relatively low price public workers pay towards their employer-supported health care plans in a recent interview with Fox News. "Our average private sector employee pays 23 percent for their health care," Kasich said. "Our average city worker in Ohio pays 9 percent." Because that’s a pretty wide disparity, PolitiFact Ohio decided to check the governor’s numbers. We started with Kasich’s claim that private sector workers contribute 23 percent of their health care premiums. Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols pointed us to a report from The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a conservative think tank, titled "The Grand Bargain is Dead." That study compared compensation paid to state workers and private sector employees and concluded that state workers’ pay is out of balance. The state could cut into its projected $8 billion budget deficit if it could find ways to reduce their pay and benefits, the study noted. One suggestion it made: force government workers to pay the same health care premiums, out-of-pocket costs for carrying health insurance, as private sector workers. "State government workers today pay roughly 17 percent of the premium costs for the health care coverage. The premium costs for private-sector workers in Ohio is 23 percent," the report said. More specifically, the report figures the average cost of family health insurance policies provided by Ohio firms is $11,425, with the employee paying $2,642. The report cites a January 2010 e-mail with a U.S. Department of Labor economist as evidence for its claim. We contacted the economist, Miranda Moore, and she pointed us to the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, which has polled nearly 470,000 private firms in Ohio in 2008 and 2009 combined. The numbers in the Buckeye Institute’s report were contained in the 2008 survey. The 2009 survey showed private sector workers in Ohio paid 31 percent of their premiums for a family policy. Moore said in an e-mail to us that the survey is a source the Employee Benefits Security Administration references often. As for the premium percentage that city workers pay for health care, Kasich relied on a State Employment Relations Board report, Nichols said. The 2010 Report on the Cost of Health Insurance in Ohio’s Public Sector aims to provide data that can be used during labor negotiations. SERB surveyed every public employer in Ohio, including the state, cities, counties, school districts and state universities, about the costs of their medical premiums. Of 1,359 surveys sent out, SERB received 1,080 back, including nearly three quarters of the cities -- 184 out of 248. SERB concluded that city workers in Ohio pay 8.1 percent of their health care coverage for single coverage and 8.3 percent for family coverage. Most of the plans include coverage for prescription drugs, but plans for dental and vision coverage typically are not included, the report said. Kasich spokesman Scott Milburn said the governor used 9 percent instead of 8 percent to be on the safe side. Kasich relied on government surveys for both parts of his statement, and the averages cited in those surveys match the numbers in his claim. We rate the statement True.	None	John Kasich	None	None	None	2011-03-10T18:20:00	2011-02-21	['Ohio']
-pomt-00659	Proposed fast-track legislation allows presidents to "easily use a future trade deal to override our domestic financial rules."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/may/14/elizabeth-warren/fact-checking-elizabeth-warren-and-barack-obama-tr/	President Barack Obama’s international trade agenda is moving forward in Congress, after facing temporary defeat by fellow Democrats in the Senate. Obama is butting heads with many Democrats over this issue, but his squabble with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has been the most public. Most recently, Warren said if Obama gets his way on trade, it could unravel Dodd-Frank -- Obama’s hallmark financial regulations enacted after the 2008 financial crisis. "In the next few weeks, Congress will decide whether to give the president fast-track authority," Warren said in May 5 remarks at the liberal Institute for New Economic Thinking. "This is a long-term problem — a six-year problem. If fast-track passes, a Republican president could easily use a future trade deal to override our domestic financial rules." Obama responded to that claim in a May 8 interview with Yahoo’s Matt Bai. "She’s absolutely wrong," he said. "Think about the logic of that, right? The notion that I had this massive fight with Wall Street to make sure that we don’t repeat what happened in 2007, 2008. And then I sign a provision that would unravel it? I’d have to be pretty stupid." So who’s right here? We decided to dig into the substance of their arguments and see if Dodd-Frank really is in danger because of the trade debate. Buckle up. Alphabet soup A lot of media coverage has conflated two distinct aspects of the trade debate. The first is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is the trade deal that Obama is currently negotiating with several countries along the Pacific. The second is Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), which is a piece of legislation that would allow trade agreements (such as the TPP) to move through Congress under special rules intended to speed up the process, thus its nickname "fast-track." Most trade deals since the 1970s have been accompanied by fast-track legislation. If the fast-track rules pass, Congress would not be able to amend or filibuster a trade agreement, which means the deal would only need 51 votes in the Senate to pass, as opposed to the 60 votes necessary without fast-track. And the rules would apply to all trade agreements before Congress for the next six years. Supporters say fast-track is necessary to bolster confidence among foreign partners that domestic politics won’t dismantle a trade agreement. Critics, like Warren, argue that this drastically diminishes Congress’ role in the process, to its detriment. It’s the fast-track bill that Warren said could allow future politicians to "easily" chip away at Dodd-Frank or any other law. This is possible in theory. Here’s how. Imagine that the next president does not support Dodd-Frank regulations. He or she could -- unlike the Obama administration -- be open to discussing Dodd-Frank as part of foreign trade negotiations. The president could bring to Congress a trade agreement that requires scaling back Dodd-Frank to comply with the agreement parameters. (Congress doesn’t vote on the agreement itself, it votes on a bill that lays out how the agreement will be implemented under U.S. law.) The administration could try to push this through without fast-track, but it would likely face opposition from members of Congress like Warren, who could try to amend or filibuster the agreement in order to maintain Dodd-Frank as is. With fast-track, the agreement wouldn’t face these hurdles. Congress’ only option would be to vote against the whole agreement -- all or nothing. If enough Dodd-Frank supporters were to decide that the trade deal is more important, the agreement could pass, watered-down regulations and all. So Warren’s prediction is possible -- not "absolutely wrong," as Obama said. However, as Obama also said, "this is pure speculation." How big of a risk exists is a much harder question to answer. Is it easy? Those who share Warren’s position argue that under fast-track, a trade deal only needs 51 Senate votes, as opposed to 60 without fast-track, and that makes a huge difference in how easy it is to move the deal through Congress. It could be a "backdoor means of undermining Wall Street reform," said Ben Beachy, global trade research director at Public Citizen, an advocacy group that sides with Warren on this issue. Beachy noted that the Trans-Pacific Partnership might hurt Dodd-Frank, because it includes certain financial parameters that mirror many of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s "pre-crisis, deregulatory rules that threaten financial regulations" and would expand them further. However, what’s actually in the Trans-Pacific Partnership remains secret, and the White House denies this claim. Even accounting for the Senate vote threshold, though, nearly every expert we interviewed said Warren exaggerated the threat that fast-track authority would "easily" allow a Republican president to dissolve Dodd-Frank. "The risks are very small, so in that sense I agree with Obama," said Bill Krist, senior policy scholar at the Wilson Center and a former trade official in the early 1980s. "But in the more literal sense of Elizabeth Warren being ‘absolutely wrong,’ I don’t." First of all, the fast-track bill currently on the table gives members of Congress other ways to object to the negotiations, said Gary Hufbauer, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a trade official at the Treasury in the late 1970s. It allows a bipartisan group of Congress to advise and serve as delegates. Relatedly, the fast-track bill gives Congress the ability to reject fast-track for a particular trade deal if it fails to meet certain congressional objectives. Additionally, trade negotiations take a long time, so it’s hard to envision a new president coming in, reversing the U.S. position on financial regulation, and finalizing a deal by 2021 (the end of the fast-track bill’s time frame). For example, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, nearing completion this year, has been in the works since 2005. "The proposition that suddenly a trade deal is going to appear and it’s inconsistent with Dodd-Frank is not going to work," said Brookings Institution fellow and international trade expert Joshua Metzler, adding that the parameters of a trade deal "are seen from miles away." It’s also important to keep in mind that future administrations could go after Dodd-Frank through the courts, by passing domestic legislation, or through regulatory discretion -- all of which would be more much more efficient than going through international negotiations, Hufbauer said. "It’s always possible that a future administration will do things in the financial area that she doesn’t like," he said. Warren argues changing regulation through trade agreements is "hardly a hypothetical possibility" -- there’s evidence of big banks on both sides of the Atlantic trying to push through Dodd-Frank reductions through a trade deal with the European Union currently in progress. U.S. officials, such as Trade Representative Mike Froman and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, have acknowledged the pressure coming from banks to consider changing financial regulations as part of the negotiating process. They have, however, staunchly avoided such discussions. Of course, as Warren said in her May 5 remarks, this attitude might not carry into the next administration. But even if a new administration thinks trade negotiations are the appropriate avenue for dismissing financial regulations, it might not be so simple to get all parties to agree. Some regulations in Europe in particular -- such as those affecting credit rating agencies, insurance companies and banker bonuses -- "are more stringent than those adopted by the United States in the financial crisis," said Chris Brummer, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and Georgetown University law professor. One final issue We wanted to briefly address the issue of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS), a form of international arbitrage in which an investor can bring a claim against a foreign government. It’s not 100 percent germane to the topic at hand, but it’s been getting mixed up in the discussions about the Obama-Warren trade dispute. As it stands, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will have this type of settlement system. Warren and others oppose the settlements for a number of reasons: the proceedings are secretive, and the court can impose a fine on the foreign government so large that it changes its domestic laws as a result. The classic example of an ISDS case is tobacco giant Philip-Morris suing nations over their domestic anti-smoking laws, claiming the laws damage their profits. But Warren’s staff told us that her beliefs about ISDS are separate from her position on fast-track -- she didn’t mention ISDS in her May 5 remarks, when she said the fast-track bill could derail Dodd-Frank, nor when she made the same point on PBS Newshour May 13. (She has mentioned it in the past.) Obama appears to have misinterpreted Warren’s most recent comments. In responding to them in the Yahoo interview, he said her argument "is based on this dispute-settlement provision I just talked about. There’s no evidence that this could ever be used in this way." That’s basically true, said Brummer, of Georgetown Law. "Virtually all trade agreements include regulatory carve-outs that limit the jurisdiction of the courts as relating to market supervision," he said, so it's highly unlikely that the Trans-Pacific Partnership or a deal with the European Union would cede authority to special arbitrators to unwind hard-fought financial reforms. "At most, one would see a process elaborated for enhanced cross-border regulatory cooperation, something you already see in some accords." In any case, in the statement we are fact-checking, Warren was not arguing that ISDS would be cause for Dodd-Frank rollbacks, something we wanted to clarify. Our ruling Warren said proposed fast-track legislation would allow presidents to "easily use a future trade deal to override our domestic financial rules." It’s not entirely far-fetched that a trade deal could impact domestic financial rules -- in fact banks and some countries are pushing to make financial regulation part of ongoing negotiations with the European Union. And fast-track legislation would remove some congressional hurdles. However, that doesn’t mean the process would be easy. Negotiations take many years, and there are other obstacles that could stop watered-down financial regulations from making it into a final deal. Additionally, it is pure speculation that this fast-track bill in particular would result in scaled-back Dodd-Frank rules. We rate Warren’s claim Half True.	None	Elizabeth Warren	None	None	None	2015-05-14T11:55:00	2015-05-05	['None']
-pomt-00345	The new Apple Watch Series 4 includes "the first ECG product offered over-the-counter directly to consumers."	false	/california/statements/2018/sep/14/jeff-williams/apple-beat-claim-about-first-ekg-consumer-product/	During the unveiling of the latest Apple watch in San Francisco this week, the company’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams made a claim that’s been described as "alternative facts" by another Silicon Valley CEO and called into question by recent news reports. Here’s what Williams said about the Apple Watch Series 4’s new built-in electrocardiogram feature, or ECG: "This is the first ECG product offered over-the-counter directly to consumers," he claimed at the Apple event on Sept. 12, 2018. Williams makes his claim in the video above. Electrocardiograms, also abbreviated as EKGs, are commonly used at hospitals to check a heart’s electrical activity, to test for poor blood flow or for a heart attack. Apple’s previous watches have included heart monitors for fitness tracking, but not for medical usage. Was Williams off-beat with his claim? We decided to check the facts. At PolitiFact we typically fact-check politicians. But we also investigate claims by media pundits from Rush Limbaugh to Joe Scarborough, along with athletes and celebrities, such as Colin Kaepernick, who wield a lot of political influence. In this case we fact-checked a California-based company that’s very influential with the goal of holding it accountable for what it says, too. Our research A spokesman for Apple declined to respond on-the-record. The company’s Apple Watch Series 4 starts at $399 and includes a model for $499. The product starts shipping later this month, though the electrocardiogram feature won’t be available until sometime later this year, according to news reports. The strongest push back against Williams’ statement comes from Vic Gundotra, CEO of Mountain View-based AliveCor. His company also produces over-the-counter ECG devices and has been doing so for several years. Specifically, it makes an FDA-cleared band for the Apple Watch, called KardiaBand, which sells for $199, as well as a version that attaches to a smartphone, called Kardia. CEO claims Apple used 'alternative facts' "We were watching [the announcement], and we were surprised," Gundotra told Business Insider on Thursday. "It was amazing, it was like us being on stage, with the thing we've been doing for 7 years," referring to AliveCor's product for detecting atrial fibrillation (AFib), a tough-to-spot heart disorder that manifests as an irregular, often quick heart rate that can cause poor circulation. "Although when they said they were first to go over-the-counter, we were surprised," Gundotra continued. "Apple doesn't like to admit they copy anyone, even in the smallest things. Their own version of alternative facts." When we asked AliveCor about the issue, a spokesman provided a toned-down statement from Gundotra: "Apple’s advances in cardiac monitoring validate the need for this mobile ECG technology -- a path which AliveCor paved with our Kardia products," the statement said. "These still stand as the first and most clinically validated over-the-counter FDA-cleared consumer ECG devices." Apple unveiled its new Apple Watch Series 4 in San Francisco this week. Associated Press file photo. Statement falls short? In addition to Gundotra’s comments, a New York Times report called out Williams’ claim. So did an article at TechCrunch.com: "While Apple loves to be first to things, that statement is false. AliveCor has held the title of first since 2014 for its KardiaMobile device, a $100 stick-like metal unit you attach to the back of a smartphone." The article links to a 2014 AliveCor press release announcing it had received federal over-the-counter clearance for the AliveCor Heart Monitor, a single-channel ECG recorder. Subtle difference? A CNBC article presents what it calls a subtle difference between AliveCor and Apple’s new product: It says: "Once a consumer buys an AliveCor device, they take an EKG reading (via a smartphone attachment or their Apple Watch band), and wait until a doctor unlocks it within 24 hours to get an initial reading on the app. Apple designed its system differently. The FDA cleared the company to provide these readings to consumers right away, allowing users to share the results with a physician if they choose." Turning back to AliveCor, the company’s website says a physician’s reading is necessary only for the first test of its product. "Due to regulatory necessity, new U.S. accounts are required to have their first EKG reviewed by a U.S. board-certified cardiologist free of charge (a $19 value within the app). You will be blocked for up to 24 hours from EKG features until the review is complete (although it is often much faster)." Our ruling Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams said the new Apple Watch Series 4 "is the first ECG product offered over-the-counter directly to consumers." That claim ignores the fact that start-up AliveCor has produced over-the-counter ECG devices for several years. The AliveCor device requires a cardiologist to review the first test, while that won’t be necessary for the Apple watch. This is a very subtle distinction and not enough to stand up Williams’ claim. We rate it False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Jeff Williams	None	None	None	2018-09-14T12:36:29	2018-09-12	['None']
-afck-00133	“I am delighted to note that since 2015 our imports of rice have dropped by 90%.”	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/nigerias-democracy-day-speech-fact-checking-government-savings-rice-imports-infrastructure-spend/	None	None	None	None	None	Nigeria’s Democracy Day speech: Fact-checking sovereign savings, rice imports & infrastructure spend	2017-06-14 11:15	None	['None']
-pomt-14403	"One would have to go back more than a century to find a scenario where a president’s nominee for the Supreme Court was confirmed by the opposition party in the Senate when the vacancy occurred during an election year."	true	/arizona/statements/2016/mar/14/jeff-flake/arizona-senator-claims-confirming-supreme-court-no/	As President Barack Obama is on the brink of selecting a U.S. Supreme Court nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Republican lawmakers have made a slew of historical statements related to vacant Supreme Court seats. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., joined the party in a Feb. 22 statement. "One would have to go back more than a century to find a scenario where a president’s nominee for the Supreme Court was confirmed by the opposition party in the Senate when the vacancy occurred during an election year," Flake said. "I'm not about to break new ground in the Senate, particularly when any nominee could so drastically shift the balance of the court." PolitiFact has researched similar claims of late: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said in February that "it’s been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year," also saying that not approving a nomination in an election year is a long tradition. It’s been 76 years, but these openings are rare, so it’s not much of a tradition. We rated Cruz’s claim Half True. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio also claimed in February that "it’s been 80 years since a lame-duck president appointed a Supreme Court Justice." President Ronald Reagan, in his second term, nominated Justice Anthony Kennedy in November 1987. He confirmed Kennedy while still in office in February 1988. We rated Rubio’s claim Mostly False. So, turning back the history book once again, we decided to look at Flake’s claim. Checks out Flake spokesman Jason Samuels emphasized that the Arizona senator’s statement included "confirmed by the opposition party" and "vacancy occurred during an election year" when we reached out. Samuels referred us to the Senate’s list of Supreme Court nominations going back to 1789. Experts we spoke with generally agreed with Flake’s claim. Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, said Flake’s statement is "technically correct." She noted that there are no 20th century examples of a Supreme Court vacancy in an election year that the opposition party in the Senate refused to consider. "The only seat left vacant was Sherman Minton's, who resigned in October 1956, one month before the election. The (Democratic-controlled) Senate had already adjourned for the elections, so (Republican) President Eisenhower gave William Brennan a recess appointment, and he was later nominated and confirmed in 1957," Binder said. A recess appointment isn’t the same as submitting a nominee, according to Russell Wheeler, an expert on federal courts at the Brookings Institution. "Eisenhower didn’t submit a nominee; he recess appointed Brennan then nominated him the following January. It helped that Brennan was a Democrat," Wheeler said. The Justice Kennedy instance aids Flake’s statement too. "Jeff chose his words very, very carefully. There have been vacancies during election years that were filled -- including Anthony Kennedy -- by an opposition Senate. But the vacancy occurred shortly before the election year," said Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Fundamental to this statement is the reality that we have not had a vacancy occurring in an election year with an opposition Senate." Our ruling Flake said, "One would have to go back more than a century to find a scenario where a president’s nominee for the Supreme Court was confirmed by the opposition party in the Senate when the vacancy occurred during an election year." He’s right. Flake’s carefully crafted statement rules out potential exceptions, such as Justice Kennedy’s 1988 election year confirmation, but 1987 nomination, or the 1950s case with President Eisenhower and a Democratic Senate in adjournment when a Supreme Court vacancy came up a month before the November election. This seems to be because a vacancy just hasn’t happened to occur under these circumstances. We rate Flake’s claim as True.	None	Jeff Flake	None	None	None	2016-03-14T14:55:01	2016-02-22	['None']
-chct-00137	Rudy Giuliani Makes A Claim About Reagan. Let's Fact-Check It	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/05/09/fact-check-reagan-pardons/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	12:19 PM 05/09/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04034	Says "the area damaged by Hurricane Sandy represents roughly 10 percent of our nation's economy."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2013/jan/31/rodney-frelinghuysen/hurricane-sandy-damaged-area-representing-about-10/	Calling on House members this month to approve federal aid for victims of Hurricane Sandy, Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen offered his colleagues a national lens to view the destruction: the damaged area accounts for about 10 percent of the nation’s economy. The Republican congressman made that point during a Jan. 15 debate that ended with the GOP-controlled House signing off on roughly $50 billion in emergency aid for Sandy victims. The bulk of that funding was based on an amendment sponsored by Frelinghuysen to provide about $33 billion in additional aid. In his speech on the House floor, the congressman argued that providing the disaster relief made economic sense. "Mister Chairman, the area damaged by Hurricane Sandy represents roughly 10 percent of our nation's economy," said Frelinghuysen (R-11th Dist.). "It makes good sense, economic and fiscal, to get our region back on its feet as soon as it can." Steve Wilson, a senior policy adviser to Frelinghuysen, told us the statement was in reference to the combined gross domestic product, or GDP, in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. We found that the combined GDP in those three states was about $1.875 trillion in 2011, marking about 12.5 percent of the national GDP, according to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The 2011 figures represent the most recent data available. But that roughly 12.5 percent figure doesn’t fully support Frelinghuysen’s statement. The congressman referred to "the area damaged by Hurricane Sandy," but the combined GDP applies to the entirety of those three states. In other words, Frelinghuysen’s figure includes parts of those states that were not damaged in the storm, including most of New York. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis does not release GDP estimates at the county level, so we can’t measure the combined GDP for the specific counties damaged in the storm. The bureau releases GDP’s by metropolitan statistical area, but they can’t be viewed as a percentage of the national GDP. In response to our findings, Wilson argued in an e-mail that "areas of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut far beyond Sandy’s ‘bullseye’ were deeply affected by the storm." "Two and a half million people in New Jersey alone lost power, many for two weeks, as did large and small businesses, municipal and county governments. A crippling fuel shortage forced the imposition of odd-even gasoline rationing," Wilson said. "New Jersey Transit, which serves tens of tens of thousands of commuters, ground to a halt. As a result, residents of undamaged areas were unable to get to their place of employment." "To ignore these facts is to underestimate Sandy’s devastating effects on residents up and down New Jersey, New York and Connecticut," Wilson added. About three months since Hurricane Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City, the Democrat-led Senate on Monday approved the roughly $50 billion in emergency aid, and President Barack Obama signed the bill on Tuesday. Earlier in January, Obama signed a bill passed by Congress to provide $9.7 billion for the National Flood Insurance Program to assist Sandy victims. Our ruling During a Jan. 15 debate over approving federal aid for Hurricane Sandy victims, Frelinghuysen said on the House floor that "the area damaged by Hurricane Sandy represents roughly 10 percent of our nation's economy." But the congressman’s figure applies to a territory much larger than what was damaged in the storm. The statistic represents the combined gross domestic product in all of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and thus includes areas that were untouched by Sandy. We rate the statement Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Rodney Frelinghuysen	None	None	None	2013-01-31T07:30:00	2013-01-15	['None']
-pose-01351	"Immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). All immigration laws will be enforced -- we will triple the number of ICE agents. Anyone who enters the U.S. illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws and to have a country."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1443/terminate-barack-obamas-immigration-executive-orde/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Terminate Barack Obama's immigration executive orders 'immediately'	2017-01-17T08:28:27	None	['United_States', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-00504	"The Civil War wasn't about slavery."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2015/jun/25/gavin-mcinnes/tweet-civil-war-was-about-secession-not-slavery/	The erratic anti-feminist and purposefully politically incorrect Gavin McInnes added his take on the Confederate flag controversy. McInnes, a frequent Fox News guest, tweeted to more than 50,000 followers on June 23, 2015, that the Confederate flag should continue to fly. Why? Because, "The Civil War wasn't about slavery," he wrote. "It was about secession." In a companion tweet, McInnes said anyone, like Northerners, who think the Civil War was about slavery should go to Google. "Look it up," said McInnes, who was born in England and grew up in Canada. So we did. We typed in "causes of the Civil War." The first hit was History.net which told us, "The burning issue that led to the disruption of the union, however, was the debate over the future of slavery. That dispute led to secession, and secession brought about a war in which the Northern and Western states and territories fought to preserve the Union, and the South fought to establish Southern independence as a new confederation of states under its own constitution." The second link on Google was to PBS and its History Detectives series. There we read, "What led to the outbreak of the bloodiest conflict in the history of North America? A common explanation is that the Civil War was fought over the moral issue of slavery. In fact, it was the economics of slavery and political control of that system that was central to the conflict." No. 3 on the Google hit parade was Americanhistoryabout.com. That page offered five main reasons and the first one was "Economic and social differences between the North and the South." And what were those differences? Well, slavery. "With Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became very profitable. This machine was able to reduce the time it took to separate seeds from the cotton. However, at the same time the increase in the number of plantations willing to move from other crops to cotton meant the greater need for a large amount of cheap labor, i.e. slaves. Thus, the southern economy became a one crop economy, depending on cotton and therefore on slavery." In fact, most of the causes listed on that page, four out of five, revolved around slavery, including the growth of the abolition movement, the fight over allowing slavery in new states, and the election of Abraham Lincoln, who was seen as anti-slavery. The fourth link on Google was from the Civil War Preservation Trust. The trust wrote "The Civil War was the culmination of a series of confrontations concerning the institution of slavery." Just in case the Internet led us astray, we also reached out to a pair of experts on the history of the Civil War. They, too, said McInnes got it fundamentally wrong. Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, used the words of secessionists themselves as proof of their intentions. "Read South Carolina's Declaration of the causes of secession," Foner said. "It is all about protecting slavery." Indeed, the first sentence refers to slaveholding states, and throughout, the institution of slavery is the pivot point around which all else turns. Historian Stephanie McCurry at the University of Pennsylvania points to Mississippi’s declaration of secession. Sentence two begins, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." So just to be clear: Slavery led to secession, which led to the Civil War. Our ruling McInnes said that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. McInnes’ preferred research method, Google, proved him wrong. In the words of the seceding states themselves, the South wanted to secede because it wanted to preserve slavery. That, in turn, started the Civil War. McInnes’ Twitter profile shows a man staring intently with eyes crossed, which captures the accuracy of tweet. We rate this claim Pants on Fire.	None	Gavin McInnes	None	None	None	2015-06-25T16:55:12	2015-06-23	['None']
-pomt-02981	Says "74 percent of small-business people believe that Obamacare is a bad idea."	false	/georgia/statements/2013/oct/21/larry-elder/claim-doesnt-pass-examination/	CNN host Don Lemon and commentator Larry Elder made for some entertaining television recently when they sparred over how small-business owners feel about the health care law. "Seventy-four percent of small-business people believe that Obamacare is a bad idea," Elder, a prominent Los Angeles-based conservative talk show host, said during a segment on CNN. "Larry, that’s not true," Lemon replied. "That’s not true." "What’s not true?" Elder asked. "Many people wanted it to be stronger when it came to single-payer," Lemon said. "It all depends on the way you ask the question." The two men talked over each other for a few seconds before Elder repeated his initial point. "I said 74 percent of the small-business people don’t like Obamacare," Elder said. So, we wondered, do nearly three-quarters of small-business owners dislike the health care law? We wondered whether Elder’s statement is correct because the host debated the accuracy of Elder’s claim. Elder’s executive producer sent us a Washington Examiner article that he used to base his claim. The article’s headline said "74 percent of small businesses will fire workers, cut hours under Obamacare." The article was based on a survey done this past summer by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The survey was done online, with 1,304 respondents who had an executive-level position in a company with less than 500 employees and annual revenue less than $25 million. About one-third of the respondents were U.S. Chamber of Commerce members. The survey, done by Harris Interactive, was said to be weighted to represent the nation’s small-business population. Most of the survey’s respondents were worried about the health care law’s employer mandate that businesses with 50 or more employees must provide insurance for those workers or face a fine. The Obama administration announced July 2 that it was delaying the mandate until 2015. Still, those who answered the survey were overwhelmingly concerned about the impact of the mandate on their businesses. Twenty-seven percent of them said they would cut hours to reduce the number of full-time employees on their payrolls, 24 percent would reduce hiring and 23 percent plan to replace full-time employees (30 hours per week or more) with part-time workers to avoid the mandate. Combined, that’s 74 percent who said they would find ways to avoid the employer mandate. That’s not exactly the same as saying they believe the entire health care law is a bad idea, as Elder said on CNN. This is not the first time someone has used this report to criticize the health care law. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., repeatedly claimed "75 percent of small businesses now say they are going to be forced to either fire workers or cut their hours" because of the controversial law. PolitiFact and The Washington Post found some flaws with the survey. First, while the survey was said to have a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points, it was not a random survey and such margins of error apply only to random samples from a population. Second, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been highly critical of the health care law and has called for it to be repealed, so an online survey in which one-third of the respondents are members may not have been the most scientific approach. Third, and most disturbing, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce acknowledged that only a small percentage of the businesses surveyed said they would be affected by the employer mandate. "A Chamber spokeswoman, who declined to be identified, acknowledged that only 17 percent of the businesses surveyed said they would be affected by the employer mandate," the Post reported. "Put another way, the poll found that 83 percent of small businesses surveyed said they would not be affected by an employer mandate that the Chamber of Commerce has said is a burden on small businesses. Harris and the Chamber highlighted the answers of only those affected by the employer mandate." PolitiFact rated Rubio’s claim a Pants On Fire! Elder said he was unaware of the criticism of the poll. "I read the methodology, the period of time when the poll was conducted, how it was conducted. Seemed legit," Elder said via email. Elder said he still believes the poll accurately reflects the feelings of small-business owners concerning the health care law. "When collectively 74 percent -- I know this number is in dispute -- say it will negatively affect hiring decisions, it is not a stretch to conclude that they deem the law a ‘bad’ one," Elder said. PolitiFact Georgia looked for additional independent polling of small-business owners concerning the health care law. We found there isn’t much out there. In May, a Gallup poll found 48 percent of respondents believe the law will be bad for business, 9 percent said it would be good for their company and 39 percent said it will have no impact. Gallup conducted telephone interviews with 603 people whose businesses had less than $20 million in annual revenue. A poll by Rasmussen Reports done in October found this breakdown among people who describe themselves as entrepreneurs concerning their impressions of the health care law: Very Unfavorable: 49 percent Somewhat Unfavorable: 6 percent Very Favorable: 16 percent Somewhat Favorable: 27 percent Not Sure: 1 percent We note that the poll does not provide more details about these entrepreneurs, such as whether they are self-employed or how many employees they have. To sum up, Elder claimed "74 percent of small-business people believe that Obamacare is a bad idea." There is no independent polling that supports his argument. The numbers that Elder used to base his claim were in response to a different question. Also, the poll that Elder relied on to make his claim is deeply flawed. Still, Elder believes the combined 74 percent of respondents in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce poll who say the health care law may impact future hiring reflects their feelings about Obamacare. Elder may have a point, but there is no concrete evidence that supports his argument. We rate his claim False.	None	Larry Elder	None	None	None	2013-10-21T06:00:00	2013-10-11	['None']
-tron-01881	Foreign toothpaste at U.S. discount stores	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dollar-toothpaste/	None	household	None	None	None	Foreign toothpaste at U.S. discount stores	Mar 17, 2015	None	['United_States']
-snes-02642	The Pentagon awarded United Airlines a contract to forcibly remove Bashar al-Assad from Syria.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/united-airlines-remove-assad/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Pentagon Awards Contract to United Airlines to Forcibly Remove Assad?	11 April 2017	None	['Syria', 'United_Airlines', 'The_Pentagon', 'Bashar_al-Assad']
-pomt-14530	Says Marco Rubio "went on Univision, and in Spanish he promised that he would not on the first day in office rescind President Obama's illegal executive action."	half-true	/florida/statements/2016/feb/17/ted-cruz/did-marco-rubio-say-spanish-univision-he-would-not/	Ted Cruz says Marco Rubio is so soft on illegal immigration that he even supports President Barack Obama’s program to allow some young people to remain in the United States. The two senators battling in the Republican presidential primary have fought over immigration policy since Rubio co-authored an immigration bill in 2013 and Cruz voted against it. Cruz’s criticism includes what Rubio has said about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals -- the program started under Obama in 2012 to give temporary legal status to people who were brought to the United States illegally as children. "He went on Univision, and in Spanish he promised that he would not on the first day in office rescind President Obama's illegal executive action," Cruz told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Feb. 15. Rubio’s campaign pushed back by retweeting several tweets that accused Cruz of mischaracterizing Rubio’s position. Cruz made a similar attack during the Feb. 13 debate in South Carolina to which Rubio replied: "Well, first of all, I don't know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn't speak Spanish." (Cruz told Fox News in 2012 that his Spanish was "lousy.") So was something lost in translation here, or has Rubio sided with Obama on the policy? We decided to check the record on what Rubio said on Univision and elsewhere. Univision interview A spokesman for Cruz pointed to an article on the conservative website Breitbart about Rubio’s April 2015 interview with Jorge Ramos of Univision. Ramos asked Rubio if he was elected president if he would keep DACA, the program launched under Obama. Breitbart wrote that "Rubio won’t reverse it himself if elected president" despite the fact that Rubio said that it would have to ultimately end. "I believe DACA is important," Rubio said, according to the initial English translation Breitbart used. "It can’t be terminated from one moment to the next, because there are already people benefiting from it. But yes, it is going to have to end. It can’t be the permanent policy of the United States, and I don’t think that’s what they’re asking either. I think everyone prefers immigration reform." The next day, Breitbart posted a second article based on the official Univision transcript and included comments by the Rubio campaign: "Well, DACA is going to have to end at some point. I wouldn’t undo it immediately. The reason is that there are already people who have that permission, who are working, who are studying, and I don’t think it would be fair to cancel it suddenly. But I do think it is going to have to end. And, God willing, it’s going to end because immigration reform is going to pass." In either translation, Rubio said DACA can’t be canceled suddenly but couldn’t be permanent policy. In an email interview with PolitiFact Florida, Rubio spokesman Alex Burgos pointed to part of the second Breitbart article that stated Rubio "discussed immigration policy, affirming his longstanding objection" to DACA and a similar program for their parents. Cruz spokesman Brian Phillips pointed to responses by the Rubio campaign and said, "So Marco says it will have to end, but punts it to the legislative process." Burgos told PolitiFact Florida, "On day one of a Rubio administration, DACA will start coming to an end by not allowing new applicants into the program and not allowing existing DACA permit holders to renew." What Rubio has said more recently about DACA Rubio has commented about DACA several other times. He told reporters in February 2015 that "eventually that program has to end. It cannot be the permanent policy of the United States. What I'm not advocating is that we cancel it right now at this moment, because you already have people that have signed up for it. They're working, they're going to school. It would be deeply disruptive." In November 2015, he said it had to end even if Congress did nothing. "DACA is going to end and the ideal way for it to end is that it's replaced by a reform system that creates an alternative," Rubio said while in Manchester, N.H in November. "But if it doesn't, it will end. It cannot be the permanent policy of the United States." One final note about Cruz’s statement: We’re not rating here whether DACA is illegal -- the future of the program is in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices are expected to review an expansion of DACA, as well as a similar program for their parents, this year based on a lawsuit initiated by Texas. Our ruling Cruz says that Rubio "went on Univision, and in Spanish he promised that he would not on the first day in office rescind President Obama's illegal executive action." That’s a reference to Rubio’s statement in an April 2015 interview about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Cruz is cherry-picking a portion of Rubio’s interview. Rubio said that he wouldn’t undo the program immediately because it would be disruptive, but he said that it would have to end eventually and could not be permanent policy. Initially, Rubio said that he hoped it would end after an immigration bill passed but then in November said it would end even if Congress fails to act. Cruz has created a misleading impression about Rubio’s statement by omitting his full comments. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2016-02-17T11:30:50	2016-02-15	['Spain', 'Barack_Obama', 'Marco_Rubio', 'Univision']
-abbc-00267	February 2009: Parliamentary joint committee inquiry into "Financial products and services", final report November 2009.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-09/fact-check-asic-royal-commission-powers/7447682	February 2009: Parliamentary joint committee inquiry into "Financial products and services", final report November 2009.	['banking', 'federal-elections', 'scott-morrison', 'liberals', 'australia']	None	None	['banking', 'federal-elections', 'scott-morrison', 'liberals', 'australia']	Fact check: Can ASIC do the same job as a financial industry royal commission?	Thu 9 Jun 2016, 2:40am	None	['None']
-snes-02367	The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built to maintain Earth’s botanical genetic diversity in the face of future calamities, flooded due to melting permafrost.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/doomsday-seed-vault-flooded/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Did the ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Flood Due to Global Warming?	23 May 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04328	Says U.S. Senate opponent Tommy Thompson "personally made over $3 million" from a federal contract granted to his healthcare company, but left 9/11 first responders "without the care they were promised."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/oct/26/tammy-baldwin/baldwin-says-thompson-got-3-million-mismanaged-fed/	In response to a 9/11 ad against her, Democrat Tammy Baldwin has launched one charging that U.S. Senate rival Tommy Thompson personally profited from a mismanaged federal contract that left Ground Zero first responders without promised care. The Baldwin ad opens by calling Thompson’s ad a "disgrace." "The truth: time and again Tammy Baldwin has supported honoring victims of 9/11," a narrator says. "And Tommy Thompson? He got a government contract to provide healthcare to 9/11 first responders, but Tommy took advantage, leaving them without the care they were promised." It concludes: "Tommy Thompson personally made over $3 million off the deal." Newspaper headlines from the New York Daily News ("Ex-health boss now cashing in on 9/11") and USA Today ("Health company slow to start treating workers") flash on the screen, along with a footnote that points to Thompson’s personal financial disclosures. Do Baldwin’s charges square with what happened? The basics Thompson was President George Bush’s secretary of Health and Human Services at the time of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. As such, he was a point of contact for New York-based members of Congress and 9/11 advocates who began a years-long push to get federal aid for health monitoring and treatment of those who responded first to the attacks. Thompson left the Bush Administration after the first term. By early 2005, he had signed on as a law partner at the Washington, D.C., lobbying firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and separately was named president of Logistics Health Inc. The La Crosse-based firm, founded in 1999, provides medical readiness and occupational health services, in part through federal government contracts. One of those was the 2008 contract for 9/11 responder care, which was awarded competitively through a division of the federal agency Thompson used to head. The contract was for $11 million for the first year. Logistics Health continues to run the national portion of what is known as the World Trade Center Health Program. The program helps pay for medical treatment and monitoring of certain conditions experienced by people who worked or volunteered on rescue, recovery, demolition, debris removal, and related services in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. Another contractor coordinates care for New York-area responders and survivors. Baldwin’s claim Let’s return to the main components of the ad’s claim: "He got a government contract to provide healthcare to 9/11 first responders." The ad’s use of the headline -- "Ex-health boss now cashing in on 9/11" -- insinuates a lot. But neither Baldwin nor anyone else we know of has presented evidence Thompson personally scored the contract or influenced his former agency to get it for Logistics Health. On the other hand, the company did get the contract. And Thompson’s value at the firm was tied in part to his connections. That’s what Logistics CEO Don Weber noted in 2006: "If I were to go in and try to get a meeting with some of the decision makers in these organizations, it would take me a lifetime," Weber told the Journal Sentinel at the time. "Tommy is able to make a phone call -- and then we get in front of people who make decisions. And when we can show them what we're all about, it expedites decisions." So that part of the claim is at least partially accurate. "But Tommy took advantage, leaving them without the care they were promised." We read various media accounts regarding the early months of Logistics Health’s work on the 9/11 contract starting. It took over the work in June 2008 from an association of health clinics. No one disputes that gaps in medical coverage and monitoring took place in those early months. At least two media outlets interviewed clients who reported problems getting coverage for prescription drugs and experiencing delays in hearing from Logistics. "A company run by an ex-Bush administration official and hired by the government to provide medical care to Sept. 11 recovery workers has been slow to take up the job, workers and advocates say," the Associated Press reported on Sept. 8, 2008. A November 16, 2008, Wisconsin State Journal story reported that five months into Logistics Health's one-year federal contract, just a fraction of eligible patients had received the required medical monitoring. The situation had attracted a sharp backlash from New York-area members of Congress who complained about Thompson’s "sweetheart deal" with his old department. Thompson and Weber did not deny the delays, a State Journal follow-up story said. They blamed the problems on the agency that awarded the contract, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. A NIOSH spokesman in 2008 offered a partial explanation: A one-month delay occurred after the agency inquired to Logistics Health about an issue on consent forms. The first State Journal story quoted Katherine Kirkland, head of the organization that was turning over the 9/11 work to Thompson’s firm, saying that Logistics officials were uncommunicative or dismissive of issues that came up during the transition. Kirkland also said the federal government didn’t allow enough time for the transition. It’s important to note here that even at the time of the November 2008 story, federal officials were saying the start-up problems had been brought under control and all patients were getting needed treatment. There was skepticism about that at the time from 9/11 victim advocacy groups, but it turned out to be true, or largely true, based on what we hear now from those groups. One example: John Feal, president of the FealGood Foundation, which pushed for federal help for first responders, told us Logistics "wasn’t ready for" the job but "for the most part kept their word" after late 2008 to fix the problems. Feal, who is no fan of Thompson, gives "above thumbs up approval" for Logistics’ work since then. NIOSH spokeswoman Christina Spring told us officials there consider Logistics’ performance very good since the delays of the early months. We went back and interviewed Judy Wolff, a nurse's aide from Holmen, Wisconsin, who has suffered from multiple health problems since volunteering at Ground Zero. Her concerns with delays in getting coverage were featured in the November 2008 State Journal piece. Back then, while waiting for Logistics to act, she was forced over several months to pay for her own drugs for various ailments deemed related to her work at the site. Today, she says her care improved a lot after the negative publicity for the company, but that paperwork hassles still trouble her. As for the "took advantage" part, it is unclear exactly what that means -- took advantage of the patients? The situation? the government? Judging by the sentence structure, the claim is that Thompson mismanaged the situation intentionally to make the firm some extra bucks. We asked Baldwin if she could explain and defend the "took advantage" allegation, and she only cited the complaints about delays in care. This part of the claim exaggerates the severity of a serious situation, leaving out the critical fact that the transition problems were mostly ironed out within six months or less, and that the government itself got some of the blame. "Tommy Thompson personally made over $3 million off the deal." Thompson did make that amount from the sale of Logistics Health in 2011. Thompson, who no longer works for the firm, said the money came from stock options. He also reported making $254,000 in salary from the firm between January 2010 and October 2011. But the ad treats that $3.1 million sum as springing directly from the 9/11 contract and entering Thompson’s pocket. Baldwin did not offer any explanation for this part of the claim when we asked her about it. The contract in question started at $11 million a year and at one point fell to $9 million. That’s real money, but a pretty small chunk of Logistics’ business: in 2008 it received $102 million just in federal contracts, according to data at fedspending.org. So this part of Baldwin’s ad is a big reach. Logistics Health did not return a phone call on the Baldwin ad. Our rating Baldwin says Thompson "personally made over $3 million" off a federal contract granted to his healthcare company, but left 9/11 first responders "without the care they were promised." The ad accurately says his firm got a contract and had problems that delayed care for some first responders. But it ignores the mixed blame for the problems as well as the short-term nature of them, while making a sensational and unsubstantiated claim that Thompson personally pocketed millions from this particular contract. And it suggests Thompson "took advantage" of first responders without any evidence to back it up. Looking at the claim as a whole, we rate it Mostly False.	None	Tammy Baldwin	None	None	None	2012-10-26T09:00:00	2012-10-24	['Tommy_Thompson', 'United_States']
-pomt-03747	Says in Chicago, "we take more guns off the streets than New York or L.A."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/apr/09/rahm-emanuel/mayor-rahm-emanuel-says-chicago-takes-more-guns-st/	New York and Los Angeles beat out Chicago as the nation’s most populous cities. But Chicago has more guns on the streets, Mayor Rahm Emanuel told CNN. That was his answer when CNN host Jake Tapper asked on April 2, 2013: With some of the nation’s strictest gun laws, why are your homicide rates still so high? Without uniform gun policies — say, in neighboring Indiana and Wisconsin — weapons still flow, Emanuel said. "We take more guns off the streets than New York or L.A.," he said. Emanuel, who formerly was President Barack Obama's White House chief of staff, is part of a group of mayors that’s fighting for stricter national gun laws. We were curious: Does America’s No. 3 most populous city take No. 1 in gun seizures? Chicago’s guns We talked with Bill McCaffrey, a spokesman in Emanuel’s office. He said the city uses the comparison with New York and Los Angeles to demonstrate that Chicago’s strict gun control rules won’t work by themselves. (Opponents of gun control measures argue the city offers evidence that such laws don’t work, period.) New York and California both have stricter gun control laws than Illinois. Guns cross into Chicago not just from Indiana and Wisconsin, but from areas right outside the city. "Chicago is not an island," McCaffrey said. In the first six months of last year, the city — not counting gun buybacks or turn-ins — seized 3,912 guns. That’s as many as New York and Los Angeles combined, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab, which got numbers from the cities’ police departments. In Chicago, police picked up illegal weapons at crime scenes and traffic stops, found them with search warrants and investigations, or heard about them when people called 911 to report a "man with a gun" or "shots fired." In the same months that Chicago recovered 3,912 guns, Los Angeles got 2,296 and New York 1,385. That wasn’t an anomaly, according to Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, who has testified before Congress in favor of strengthening federal measures to reduce gun trafficking. For several years under the Clinton administration, an effort to fight youth crime collected gun-tracing data for major U.S. cities. "I can tell you that Chicago consistently recovered more guns than any of the other cities, N.Y.C. and L.A. included," Webster said. We pulled those reports from 1998, 1999 and 2000. Chicago recovered and traced more guns than either New York or Los Angeles in all three years. In 1998, it picked up 16,222 weapons — more than the two larger cities together. Why? Webster points out that the city has a lot of gangs, and gangs and guns go together. Its police department cracks down on illegal gun possession, making arrests more likely. And Illinois gun control laws aren’t nearly as strong as those in New York and California in deterring gun trafficking into the city, he said. Webster told House Democrats in March that studies show state gun laws are undermined by gaps in federal law — people buy guns in states with the weakest laws to sell in states with the toughest laws. The same idea works for counties and cities. In Chicago, all it takes is a drive outside the city limits, the New York Times reported, such as to Chuck’s Gun Shop in Riverdale, Ill., the source of more than 1,300 weapons seized in Chicago since 2008. The same store was identified as a key source of crime guns in a New York Times piece in 1999. Our ruling Emanuel, arguing for stronger federal laws to help Chicago tamp down on gun crime, said, "we take more guns off the streets than New York or L.A." Gun seizure data gathered by the University of Chicago Crime Lab and a federal youth crime initiative show just that. We rate his statement True.	None	Rahm Emanuel	None	None	None	2013-04-09T11:16:16	2013-04-02	['Chicago', 'Los_Angeles', 'New_York_City']
-pomt-10960	"NASA prepping 17-year-old Alyssa Carson to become first human on Mars."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2018/jul/20/blog-posting/nasa-prepping-17-year-old-become-first-human-mars/	A headline from a website called Scicademy says that NASA is "prepping" a 17-year-old "to become the first human on Mars," but NASA says it has no official connection to the teen mentioned in the article. "Alyssa Carson is a name people will remember," says the story posted July 17, 2018, under the headline "NASA prepping 17-year-old Alyssa Carson to become first human on Mars." Carson certainly has her sights set on space. She has attended several space camps, according to media reports, and her Twitter name is @NASABlueberry1. Carson told the Baton Rouge, La., television station WVLA that NASA is "definitely encouraging and supportive of what I'm wanting to do, because they're encouraging of everyone who wants to become an astronaut." Carson’s father, Bert Carson, said in an article for Teen Vogue that private groups are also considering her into space. "If we can find a mission for her in the next two years, she will be the first kid in the world to go to space," Bert Carson said. "If we can get it together before she’s 20, she’ll be the first teenager." The Scicademy headline, however, goes further suggesting NASA is prepping Carson for a trip to Mars. NASA spokesman Sean Potter told us that NASA "has no official ties to Alyssa Carson." Our ruling A headline claims NASA is "presping 17-year-old Alyssa Carson to become first human on Mars." Carson certainly wants to go into space. And that may happen. But she has no official connection to NASA. We rate this claim Mostly False. Erasmo Passaro is a rising sophomore attending St. Petersburg High School who is working with PolitiFact as part of the Poynter Institute’s MediaWise program.	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-07-20T11:28:57	2018-07-19	['None']
-vees-00328	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Vote for the 2017 False Claim of the Year	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-vote-2017-false-claim-year	None	None	None	None	factcheckph,false claim of the year	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Vote for the 2017 False Claim of the Year	December 07, 2017	None	['None']
-mpws-00019	In their quest to make Minnesota a more attractive place to retire, a group of Republican state senators drafted a bill that would eliminate taxes on Social Security. To make their case, bill sponsor Sen. David Senjem, R-Rochester, said most states don’t tax the elderly or their benefits. “Thirty-eight states don’t tax us at all. Twenty-nine states of those states have by purpose eliminated the Social Security tax… Seven states, including Minnesota, do tax Social Security.” As it turns out, Minnesota is an outlier. 	accurate	https://blogs.mprnews.org/capitol-view/2015/01/poligraph-senjems-social-security-claims-correct/	None	None	None	Catharine Richert	None	PoliGraph: Senjem’s Social Security claims correct	January 23, 2015, 2:00 PM	None	['Minnesota', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Social_Security_(United_States)']
-huca-00023	 "Last week, Finance Canada actually announced that the federal government had a $7.5 billion surplus. It is the fourth time that officials at Finance Canada have actually confirmed that we left them with a surplus, and that is because of our strong fiscal management and the fact that we are prudent on balanced budgets." Conservative finance critic Lisa Raitt.	some baloney	https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/05/06/conservative-surplus-liberals-deficit-raitt-morneau_n_9856810.html?utm_hp_ref=ca-baloney-meter	None	None	the government's books were $1 billion in the black. By the time the February Fiscal Monitor was published last week	Bruce Cheadle, The Canadian Press	None	Conservative Claim About Leaving Behind Surplus Contains 'Some Baloney'	05/06/2016 10:33 EDT	and that is because of our strong fiscal management and the fact that we are prudent on balanced budgets." Conservative finance critic Lisa Raitt.	['Department_of_Finance_Canada']
-farg-00073	House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi “came out in favor of MS-13” and was “trying to find all sorts of reasons why they should be able to stay.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/05/trumps-and-pelosis-immigration-spat/	None	the-factcheck-wire	FactCheck.org	Lori Robertson	['Illegal immigration']	Trump’s and Pelosi’s Immigration Spat	May 24, 2018	2018-05-24 20:44:12 UTC	['Nancy_Pelosi']
-pomt-00717	Distracted driving such as texting behind the wheel is behind a rise in traffic deaths on Georgia roadways this year.	true	/georgia/statements/2015/apr/28/billboard-spaghetti-junction/distracted-driving-growing-factor-jump-roadway-fat/	As your Mom would tell you, you don’t have to be doing anything wrong on the road to be in danger. The heartbreaking deaths of five Georgia Southern nursing students in a pileup crash outside Savannah last week is evidence of that sad truth. But the Georgia Department of Transportation is trying also to draw attention to the number of traffic fatalities statewide and the driver behavior behind the deaths. "GEORGIA ROADWAY FATALITIES THIS YEAR: 388," flashed a DOT over I-75 in Cobb County on Thursday. "STAY ALERT. STAY ALIVE." Put in context, that’s more than three deaths every day, by the 113th day of the year. The implication of the sign suggests that driver behavior is contributing to those fatalities. But considering PolitiFact Georgia just fact-checked road fatalities in January, showing highway deaths appeared to be declining, could that trend already be reversing? And does driver behavior have anything to do with the trend? Yes and yes, according to Terri Pope, spokeswoman for the Northeast DOT region, when asked about the signs and numbers behind them. So far in 2015, traffic deaths are up 25 percent from last year, Pope said. The state is averaging 100 deaths a month on its roadways, putting it on track for 1,200 fatalities by year’s end. If that happens, it will be a 4.6 percent increase from 2014 numbers – and the first year-to-year increase in nine years. Even worse, of the year’s roadway deaths so far, only 38 percent of drivers were wearing seat belts and 69 percent failed to maintain their lane – behaviors that experts say save lives behind the wheel, Pope said. And, 60 percent of the fatalities were single-car crashes where the vehicle hit a tree, culvert or bridge or drifted into another lane. "Those statistics show that drivers, now more than ever, are driving distracted or are driving impaired," Pope wrote in an email. So the number of roadway deaths in Georgia is definitely on the rise. But has distracted driving – such as the use of a cell phone – also increased as a contributing factor in those crashes? The state DOT does not have 2015 data with that information, since local law enforcement agencies would determine causes as part of investigations that will lag behind the actual accidents. But the type of accidents – those single-car crashes into fixed objects or failing to maintain the lane – indicate the driver was distracted by something. The Governor’s Office of Highway Safety provided PolitiFact Georgia with statistics on distracted driving from 2009 to 2014. The data, with last year’s numbers still considered preliminary are: Type 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Total crashes 3,454 3,922 4,079 6,829 8,179 8,5,81 Injury crashes 862 1,102 1,022 1,800 2,091 2,275 Total injured 1,174 1,596 1,420 2,617 3,082 3,298 Fatality crashes 11 13 10 9 11 18 Total fatalities 11 23 14 9 13 19 Looking at those numbers, it’s clear the number of fatal crashes in which distracted driving was a factor jumped nearly 64 percent in five years. The increase in the number of deaths was even worse: up nearly 73 percent in the five years (though down 17 percent from a high-water year in 2010). The same factors that had been helping push down roadway deaths – safer cars, stepped up enforcement of drunken driving and roadway enhancements – are likely to have allowed for more injuries in crashes, said Harris Blackwood, director of the highway safety office. But still, the number of people injured in distracted driving crashes jumped 181 percent in the five years. "Driver error is a major factor in a lot of these crashes that have happened and in these increased fatal crashes," Blackwood said. "You’ve just got to get your focus on that road. The life you save is going to be yours." With a busy summer season of driving ahead, that is the message transportation officials hope gets through the numbers. The state DOT has begun flashing messages on Georgia roadways, indicating driver behavior is causing an increase in traffic fatalities. The numbers bear out that increase. And the kind of crashes, and data from previous years, indicates driving while distracted with texting and phone use is likewise on the rise. We rate the DOT’s claim True.	None	Georgia Department of Transportation	None	None	None	2015-04-28T00:00:00	2015-04-23	['Georgia_(U.S._state)']
-pomt-00711	Minnesota’s "advantage" in economic growth has been having "Republicans in charge of at least one part of government" for all but two years, while Wisconsin Democrats "for many years" before 2011 controlled both legislative chambers and the governorship.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2015/apr/29/scott-walker/democrats-had-total-control-state-politics-many-ye/	Republican Gov. Scott Walker had it two ways while defending his state’s economic record during a stop in Minnesota as he moves toward a 2016 presidential bid. Some media outlets interpreted his remarks as pushing back on the idea that Wisconsin’s economic recovery trails that of Minnesota, where Democrat Mark Dayton is governor. But Walker also spoke of Minnesota’s "advantage" in terms of economic growth and attributed it to politics. "For many years, when (Republican Gov. Tim) Pawlenty was in office, the state was doing quite well," Walker said. "You've had the advantage of having, other than a two-year period, Republicans in charge of at least one part of government for at least some time," Walker added, then noted. "Before we came into office, for many years there was a Democratic governor, a Democratic Assembly and a Democratic Senate." We can’t fact check Walker’s implication that Wisconsin fell behind because Democrats were running the whole show. That’s his opinion. But we can check his facts on who was in charge and when. Walker didn’t say how far back his comparison went, but his mention of Pawlenty suggests at least 2003, when Pawlenty was first elected. Here’s what we found when examining partisan control in both states: Minnesota Pawlenty served two terms, from 2003 through 2010, giving way to Dayton at the same time Walker assumed power in Madison in January 2011. So that means Republicans controlled at least one key lever for those eight years. From 2011 to present it’s been Dayton, a member of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, in the governor’s chair in St. Paul. Republicans held both legislative chambers in 2011-12, and one starting in 2015. But Democrats -- as Walker correctly noted -- ran both chambers from 2013-14 and of course had Dayton for those years as well. Wisconsin Walker confined his argument here to the years before he took office in 2011. But he misfires in saying Democrats had a total lock on power for "many years." Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle took office in Wisconsin in 2003 -- at the same time Pawlenty assumed control next door. Doyle also served eight years, then decided not to run for a third term. But Doyle only had a Legislature under total Democratic control for his last two years, 2009 and 2010. In fact, Republicans controlled the Assembly and Senate for Doyle’s first four years. Control then was split for two years before Democrats enjoyed their brief unfettered reign. Going back further, to 1995, Republicans in Wisconsin controlled at least one of the three power spots every year until 2009. The kind of single-party dominance that Walker claimed Democrats have enjoyed for many years is rare in recent Wisconsin history. Walker, though, is now in year five with Republicans gripping all three levers of authority at the Capitol. Our rating Walker said Minnesota’s "advantage" has been having "Republicans in charge of at least one part of government" for all but two years, while Wisconsin Democrats "for many years" controlled both legislative chambers and the governorship before 2011. In making the comparison, though, he overstates how long the Democrats had total control in Wisconsin. It was for a two-year period, before he took office and Republicans won complete control. The Republicans have had that status more than twice as long as the "many years" Walker said Democrats did. We rate the claim False.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2015-04-29T05:00:00	2015-04-23	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Wisconsin', 'Minnesota']
-goop-02229	Kate Middleton “Irritated” With Meghan Markle’s “Copycat Style”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-middleton-irritated-meghan-markle-copycat-style/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Kate Middleton “Irritated” With Meghan Markle’s “Copycat Style”?	9:23 am, November 9, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02222	Inventor “burns” salt water with radio waves?	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/salt-water-flames/	None	medical	None	None	None	Inventor “burns” salt water with radio waves?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-02829	Senator Barack Obama is a Moslem	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama/	None	obama	None	None	None	Senator Barack Obama is a Moslem	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-04793	Says that as Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney "condemned coal-fired plants, saying they kill people."	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2012/aug/23/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-mitt-romney-condemned-coal-fired/	Mitt Romney came to coal country on Aug. 14, standing before a crowd of miners in eastern Ohio and pledging to fight for their jobs. You could be forgiven if you thought this was much ado about 3,150 jobs -- the number employed directly by coal operations in Ohio, at least before two mines announced layoffs recently. But Romney’s greater point was about how coal fires so many power plants in Ohio and the region, and how, he says, environmental regulation from President Barack Obama’s administration threatens jobs at those plants, too. This could drive up the cost of electricity for every Ohioan, Romney said. This debate -- over the cost of electricity, the shift among power plants to natural gas, the environmental and health risks, the role the government should or shouldn’t play -- has been building for years. And after the event, the Obama campaign had a response, saying that Romney’s position on coal has changed substantially since he was governor of Massachusetts. "Immediately after becoming governor, Romney condemned coal-fired plants, saying they kill people," said an Obama campaign news release. The claim was similar to one the Obama team made in a radio ad, and Obama reelection aides backed it with specific quotes Romney made in February, 2003, when Romney was the freshly elected governor of Massachusetts. The quotes: "That plant kills people." This was in reference to the Salem Harbor power plant, in the Boston area. "I will not create jobs that kill people." This, too, was made by Romney outside the Salem Harbor plant. The Obama campaign also highlighted a Romney quote that had no lethal references but was just as strong. It came from a state of Massachusetts news releasein which Romney said: "If the choice is between dirty power plants or protecting the health of the people of Massachusetts, there is no choice in my mind. I will always come down on the side of public health." Romney made each of these statements during a Feb. 6, 2003, showdown over the future of the controversial, coal-burning Salem Harbor Power Station. In 2001, Massachusetts passed new rules to reduce power plant emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and mercury, to be phased in over several years. The mercury standard would not be finalized until 2004. Romney supported the rules, as he made clear repeatedly. Massachusetts singled out its most egregious polluters as the "Filthy Five" plants, including Salem Harbor. Public health and environmental scientists at Harvard studied the emissions from two of the plants in 2000 and concluded that Salem Harbor was responsible for 53 deaths, 570 emergency room visits, 14,400 asthma attacks and 99,000 incidents of upper respiratory symptoms -- all per year. As occurs with similar studies that health authorities cite, local residents and others who wanted to keep the Salem Harbor plant open (for jobs and tax revenue) disputed those figures, saying they resulted from unproven modeling. It turned out that the Harvard scientists had revised their figures in 2002, putting premature deaths from Salem Harbor’s pollution at 30 per year and reducing the number of emergency room visits to 400 and the asthma attacks at 2,000, according to the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. But the scientists stood by the broader conclusion -- that emissions from dirty power plants can be deadly. The Harvard methodology has now been widely replicated and is respected by health scientists, according to several environmental authorities we spoke with. Romney appeared to accept their findings, too. In the above-mentioned news release, the commonwealth of Massachusetts quoted Romney in the third person on the danger factor: "Romney said that the Salem Harbor plant is responsible for 53 premature deaths, 570 emergency room visits and 14,400 asthma attacks each year. He also pointed out that coal and oil fired plants contribute significantly more air pollution than their gas fired counterparts, exacerbating acid rain and global warming." This was in a news release issued by the governor’s aides, not some radical outside instigator. It was issued under the name of Romney, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey and Romney’s development chief, Douglas Foy. According to the Boston Globe, Romney hired Foy from the Conservation Law Foundation, or CLF, a leading environmental advocacy group in Massachusetts. The spat with Salem Harbor turned into a testy exchange that February day after Salem Harbor’s then-owner, Pacific Gas and Electric, sought an extension until 2006 to comply with Massachusetts’ emissions rules -- and plant supporters showed up to to demand that the governor back off. Romney was adamant that the company comply by 2004. His statements that day show how he felt: "That plant kills people." And to those including city officials who argued that this would cost jobs: "I will not create jobs that kill people." Based on some of the quotes, it might appear that Romney was speaking only about that single plant (which a new owner, Dominion, is phasing out, after which a subsequent third owner will build a natural gas plant there). That’s what we thought when we began looking into this. It is also what the Romney campaign told us in email. So was it accurate for the Obama campaign to imply that Romney’s words characterized his broader attitude toward coal emissions when he was governor? We kept looking, because people in the environmental community told us it was a valid claim. And the news release under Romney’s name suggested it as well. Romney spoke of plants, not just a single one, when he pointed out that coal and oil fired plants contribute significantly more air pollution than their gas fired counterparts, exacerbating acid rain and global warming. Still, to give him the benefit of doubt, what if he really just meant the Salem Harbor plant? Wasn’t that plant particularly egregious when compared with coal-fired plants under attack by federal regulators today? No, say environmentalists who include authorities from the CLF. Their claims are supported by U.S. EPA emissions data we verified independently. "When he said that ‘this plant kills people,’ he was talking about a plant that produced pollution comparable to the emissions of plants in the Midwest," said Seth Kaplan, vice president for policy and climate advocacy at the conservation foundation. Jonathan Peress, an environmental and regulatory attorney who works for the CLF and was recently chairman of the American Bar Association’s air quality committee, added in a separate interview with PolitiFact Ohio that Romney promoted Massachusetts air standards that were almost identical to those the U.S. EPA wants to enforce -- and that Romney now criticizes. "The levels of emissions that he was talking about were levels that were virtually identical to what the EPA has proposed," Kaplan agreed. "He was steadfastly standing behind emissions reductions that are the same as those currently attacked." To see if this was accurate -- that the emissions Romney decried were similar to or even weaker than those under current attack now by the EPA (whose rules Romney now attacks) -- we examined the emissions cuts that Massachusetts wanted and data on the level of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides emissions at Salem Harbor and in the Midwest. The U.S. EPA keeps the information in its extensive Clean Air Markets database. Nitrogen oxides react with sunlight to create ozone and smog. Sulfur dioxide is tied to particulate matter and is considered particularly dangerous to health, said Jonathan Walke, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund. The level of both these substances was multiple times lower at Salem Harbor, even when Romney was trying to force the plant to reduce emissions, than at Eastlake in Northeast Ohio and several other Ohio plants we checked. Our comparisons included multiple years, including Salem Harbor in 2003 with Ohio plants in 2011. To compensate for differences in electricity output, number of boilers and hours of operation at different power plants, we checked the data for emissions per megawatt-hour. The pattern held. "It’s all the same pollution, albeit in higher quantities in Ohio," Walke said. You might ask why we looked at Eastlake. It’s because FirstEnergy Corp. plans to shut down two of that plant’s boilers rather than spend heavily on scrubbers to comply with EPA rules. This is one of several coal-burning plants at the heart of the current jobs-versus-pollution debate, although Romney did not mention it specifically. It’s important to note that the rules on nitrogen and sulfur are not what is prompting the FirstEnergy shutdowns. New EPA rules on mercury and toxic metals are the cause of planned closures in Eastlake. The tougher limits won’t take effect until 2014. The EPA aims to cut mercury emissions by 79 percent. But as the Massachusetts governor, Romney supported mercury reductions in his state, too. In 2004, he signed off on a rule aiming to reduce mercury emissions by 95 percent by 2012. With Romney’s name on the letterhead, Massachusetts in May, 2004, issued a lengthy set of justifications for the mercury rule. Among them: "First, [new research] confirms and extends our understanding of mercury's harmful effects on learning, attention and other critical cognitive skills in children. Recent studies have found that children exposed to mercury levels may show signs of attention deficit disorder, impaired visual-spatial skills and poor coordination." Romney was "a champion" of those mercury regulations, said Shanna Cleveland, a staff attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation. "He was one of the reasons we got them through." Time to clean up: Romney was discussing a specific power plant, Salem Harbor, when he said, "That plant kills people." But the public record shows that his comments were part of a broad emissions-cutting program he embraced. And the power plant that he considered deadly had emissions that were no worse, and in many cases lower, than at Midwest plants that he would now wants left alone, citing the use of affordable and abundant coal. If one were to have supported the regulations Romney wanted in 2003, it’s fairly safe to assume that "one would also support such things nationally," said Jonathan Levy, an environmental scientist at Boston University and Harvard and co-author of the now heavily replicated study on the correlation between coal-burning power plants and respiratory health. The Obama campaign claimed that as governor, Romney condemned coal plants as killers. He spoke at times of a single plant, but at other times made clear that other plants also needed to cut emissions for the sake of public health. This even included new rules for mercury reductions -- the same substance from coal plants that now is prompting closures in Ohio. The debate over coal involves calculations of costs, the abundance or scarcity of natural resources, health and environmental risks, and attitudes about government regulation. It is not our role to say Romney was right or wrong at one time. But with additional information from emissions data, interviews and the public record of his governorship, the Obama campaign claim about Romney’s coal position of nine years ago is nearly as clear as a haze-free day. On the Truth-O-Meter, it rates Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-08-23T06:00:00	2012-08-14	['Massachusetts', 'Mitt_Romney']
-pomt-12125	House Bill 330 "grants immunity from liability to motorists who strike protesters."	mostly false	/north-carolina/statements/2017/aug/16/roy-cooper/cooper-says-nc-bill-gives-immunity-drivers-who-str/	As graphic images emerged from Virginia over the weekend of a car crashing into a crowd of people, some turned their attention to a proposed North Carolina law that aims to protect drivers who inadvertently injure protesters in the street. House Bill 330 was introduced in response to protests in Charlotte last fall, when some residents who were upset about the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott blocked interstate highways and other roads in the city. The N.C. House of Representatives approved the bill this spring but it hasn’t been considered by the state Senate. The bill drew renewed scrutiny after an Ohio man named James Fields, 20, allegedly rammed his car into a crowd of people protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. The car killed one woman and injured 19 others. The news sparked fears that drivers in North Carolina could hit protesters without legal repercussions. On Tuesday, Gov. Roy Cooper called for legislators to let the bill die. "The North Carolina legislature should defeat a bill that grants immunity from liability to motorists who strike protesters. That bill passed the state House and remains alive in the Senate. The Senate should kill it. Full stop. Those who attack protesters, weaponizing their vehicles like terrorists, should find no safe haven in our state." he wrote. We wondered whether the bill really "grants immunity from liability to motorists who strike protesters," as Cooper said. A ‘tightly tailored’ bill? Cooper spokesman Ford Porter elaborated on the governor’s statement in an email. "The purpose of the bill is to immunize certain drivers from findings of liability. Courts already take into consideration the circumstances surrounding an accident – this legislation adds vague new protections specifically for people who hit protesters with their cars," Porter said. "That sends the wrong message and opens the door to potentially serious consequences. Governor Cooper has been clear that our state has no business going down this path." The bill’s authors, Republican state Reps. Justin Burr and Chris Millis, released a statement saying the bill is "tightly tailored" to protect drivers as well as people who are lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. "It is intellectually dishonest and a gross mischaracterization to portray North Carolina House Bill 330 as a protection measure for the act of violence that occurred in Charlottesville this past weekend," Burr and Millis said. "Any individual who committed a deliberate or willful act, such as what happened this weekend in Charlottesville, would face appropriately severe criminal and civil liabilities." What the bill says The one-page bill, which is short by legislative standards, aims to provide legal immunity from personal-injury lawsuits to motorists who exercise "due care" when driving but injure someone who blocks traffic while participating in a protest. The bill expresses important distinctions: it wouldn’t apply to drivers who injure protesters through "willful or wanton" actions; nor would it apply to drivers who injure someone who has a permit to protest in the street. It also wouldn’t apply to someone being criminally prosecuted. And it certainly wouldn’t allow drivers to "weaponize" their cars without legal consequence. In short, the bill doesn't grant immunity to anyone who hits a protester on purpose. What it changes Attorneys and legal experts doubt that the bill would have much impact because state laws already offer broad protections to drivers who accidentally hit people who are unlawfully in the street. In North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama and Maryland, state law makes it difficult for a plaintiff to win. Other states apply the doctrine of "comparative fault." Let’s say a protester in a comparative fault state is found to be 20 percent responsible for his or her injury and a driver is found to be 80 percent at fault. State laws in those states merely limit – not block – the amount of money awarded to the protester. In North Carolina, by contrast, state laws apply the doctrine of "contributory negligence." If a defendant proves "that the Plaintiff is even 1 percent responsible for their injuries – they lose automatically," said T. Greg Doucette, a criminal defense and business litigation attorney based in Durham. Doucette said the effect of the bill is unknown because it’s untested. But, on the bill’s surface, it seems to change little about civil litigation. Proving intent If the bill were to pass, how would it play out in court? If a protester is in the street and doesn’t have a permit, but thinks a driver intentionally struck him with his car, the protester would have to prove "willful and wanton" intent. Donald Beskind, a Duke University professor who’s practiced law for more than 30 years, said juries in that kind of situation are asked to consider direct and circumstantial evidence. Most cases are clear cut, he said. "If you want to know if someone was careful, you would want to look at what they were doing at the time of the accident. If they were texting, we would infer they were not careful," Beskind said. If someone drove into protesters and "on the back side of their car there was a sign that said ‘Kill the Antifa,’ we would assume they were being willful," he added, referring to the anti-fascist political organization. Inspiring recklessness? Effectiveness or ineffectiveness aside, attorneys said the bill might inspire violent acts by people who don’t understand the laws. "While I don’t think it would make the Charlottesville thing legal by any stretch of the imagination, it could embolden someone to do something like the Charlottesville guy did," said David Stradley, a personal injury lawyer in Raleigh. "We just don’t need to be encouraging people to do something around a demonstration." Our ruling Cooper overstates what this bill would do. And legal experts say that, while untested, the bill doesn't appear to change litigation and might not offer any additional protections at all. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Roy Cooper	None	None	None	2017-08-16T16:09:44	2017-08-15	['None']
-snes-05479	Residents in Waco, Texas booed Bill Nye The Science Guy for saying that the moon reflects light from the sun.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mixture-bill-nye-booed-waco/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Bill Nye Booed in Waco?	17 December 2015	None	['Texas', 'Waco,_Texas']
-bove-00157	Modi Vs Gandhi: Twitter Analytics Reveal Fake Followers Plague Both Handles	none	https://www.boomlive.in/modi-vs-gandhi-twitter-analytics-reveal-fake-followers-plague-both-handles/	None	None	None	None	None	Modi Vs Gandhi: Twitter Analytics Reveal Fake Followers Plague Both Handles	Oct 25 2017 2:00 pm, Last Updated: Oct 25 2017 3:11 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-12391	"Due to the recent downturn in steel production, more than 13,600 Americans have been laid off and the steel industry is facing billions in losses."	true	/missouri/statements/2017/may/30/claire-mccaskill/mccaskill-mark-steel-industry/	As a candidate, President Donald Trump made trade fairness a signature issue, criticizing countries like China for "dumping" artificially cheap steel in U.S. markets and blaming the practice for a loss of American jobs. One day before Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago estate in April, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill issued a news release urging president Trump to address the issue of steel dumping. McCaskill backed up her comments by saying, "Due to the recent downturn in steel production, more than 13,600 Americans have been laid off and the steel industry is facing billions in losses." Those are some big numbers McCaskill threw out there, so we set out to see if they were accurate. What we found may be worse than what McCaskill originally thought. Jobs are going away The first part of Sen. McCaskill’s statement, "More than 13,600 Americans have been laid off," is accurate. When PolitiFact Missouri asked McCaskill’s office for the supporting data, her press secretary offered a spreadsheet from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website tracking the amount of steel mill jobs on a monthly basis. Her press secretary said the 13,600 figure was between January 2015 and May 2016. In January 2015, 153,500 Americans were employed in steel mills. By May 2016, that number had fallen to 139,900. But it’s important to note that the loss of steel jobs in America isn’t a recent trend. In fact, more than 20,000 steel jobs have been lost in the U.S. since the start of 2007. Historical data paint a grim picture of the state of steel jobs in America. According to the BLS, all "primary metals" jobs have dropped from 688,000 in 1990 to just 379,000 by March of 2017. In other words, in the past 27 years, nearly half of the metal-related jobs in America have been eliminated. Why are jobs disappearing? A common reason offered as to why steel jobs are leaving is that countries, primarily China, participate in "steel dumping." Dumping is when a country sells goods outside its home market for a cheaper rate than they are sold in the home country. Despite dumping being illegal since the 1940s, it remains an issue in the steel industry. "We’ve seen pretty significant job loss, which we believe is attributable to the global trade problem," said Kevin Dempsey, the senior vice president for public policy at the American Iron and Steel Institute. "There’s a big crisis with massive steel overcapacity. High levels of imports have led to (U.S.) steel mills being shut down." Dempsey said efforts to address the issue have been underway for some time. The issue was a hot topic at last year’s G20 summit. And a global forum on steel access capacity meets on a regular basis as it tries to stop the "underlying policy problems" facing the country, according to Dempsey. Trump is expected to sign an executive order barring steel dumping. "It’s really tough going because no country wants to bear all the pain of that," Dempsey said. "China is reluctant to make changes, but we’re going to continue on pressing to change that." What kind of shape is the steel industry in? The second part of McCaskill’s claim states: "The steel industry is facing billions in losses." While McCaskill’s press secretary did not offer data on the profit losses of the steel industry, our own research paints a dark picture. Steel dumping has crushed the profits of the U.S. steel industry. Low demand and large debt burdens are also challenging domestic producers. US Steel revenues went from $17.5 billion in 2014 to $11.5 billion in 2015. Revenue declined 13 percent at Steel Dynamics. Labor relations problems cut Allegheny Technologies’ bottom line in 2015. The list of companies that have lost significant money in the steel industry goes on and on. Our ruling McCaskill said, "Due to the recent downturn in steel production, more than 13,600 Americans have been laid off and the steel industry is facing billions in losses." Both parts of the senator’s statements have been proven accurate as forces like steel dumping have led to job cuts and billions of dollars of losses in America. We rate McCaskill’s statement True.	None	Claire McCaskill	None	None	None	2017-05-30T12:49:46	2017-04-05	['United_States']
-pomt-09172	When Roy Barnes was governor, "Georgia created 235,000 jobs."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2010/jun/04/roy-barnes/chalkboard-job-figures-dont-add/	A TV ad for the Roy Barnes gubernatorial campaign harks back to a rosier time in Georgia history -- the last recession. The ad, called "Chalkboard," says that the number of jobs in this state rose from 1999 through 2003 while Barnes was governor, even though his term included a recession that ended nationally in November 2001. Georgia struggled to add jobs until 2003. The commercial puts it this way: "Roy Barnes will make Georgia work. Again. When he was governor, Georgia created 235,000 jobs. We can do it again. And more." Georgia created jobs? Despite the recession? Barnes' statement implies that his actions led to the creation of these jobs, an assertion that is impossible to prove. Many factors encourage job creation, and many of those are outside any governor's purview. What we can do is establish whether he left Georgia's economy as healthy as he portrayed it to be. Here goes: The Barnes campaign credits the data to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collaborates with state governments to publish monthly figures on the country's economic health. Those figures show that while employment ticked up and down during Barnes' tenure, when it was all said and done Georgia was left with more than 238,000 additional jobs. In December 1998, the number of people employed was 3,925,076. By December 2002, it was 4,163,184. Generally, economists think an increase in employment is good. Yet a closer look shows that despite the growth, jobs grew tougher to get under the Barnes administration. Those same BLS figures show Georgia's unemployment rate rose a full percentage point from 3.9 percent to 4.9 percent. The number of unemployed Georgians grew by more than 52,000. We interviewed two experts who said job growth and unemployment can take place at the same time because during a recession job-seekers often give up and the labor force shrinks. As the economy picks up, the number of available jobs grows. So does the labor force. People who gave up looking for work decide to give it another shot. But until there are enough jobs to absorb the expanding labor force, unemployment grows, too. So during the end of Barnes' watch, things weren't great for job-seekers. But overall, economic data show the state's economy did grow. Georgia's overall gross domestic product grew from about $224 billion to $267 billion. Georgia's annual personal income -- the income received by all the residents of the state -- increased during Barnes' time as well. Barnes' statement was correct but gave the impression that employment conditions were stronger than they were. We therefore rate Barnes' claim as Half True.	None	Roy Barnes	None	None	None	2010-06-04T20:23:22	2010-05-21	['Roy_Barnes']
-vogo-00499	Statement: “Less than half our kids aren’t graduating” from the San Diego Unified School District, Eric Christen, executive director of Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, said on the KPBS program These Days on Oct. 14.	determination: barely true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-how-many-students-graduate/	Analysis: When we first analyzed Christen’s statement, we declared it false. He was making an argument that San Diego Unified was a poorly performing school district and our figures showed that 84 percent of students had graduated.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: How Many Students Graduate	October 26, 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-12349	The House Republican health care bill "guts protections against massive price hikes for Georgians with pre-existing conditions."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2017/jun/13/jon-ossoff/ossoff-gop-health-plan-guts-protections-pre-existi/	Health care dominated the final debate in the special election to fill Georgia’s 6th Congressional District seat. Republican Karen Handel argued that people with pre-existing conditions would do fine under the House Republican’s American Health Care Act. Democrat Jon Ossoff pushed back against the former secretary of state. "It's fine to say, madam secretary, that someone cannot be denied coverage period if they have a pre-existing condition," Ossoff said. "But if there's no limit on price discrimination and the plan is unaffordable, that is a useless protection. And it is a fact that this bill guts protections against massive price hikes for Georgians with pre-existing conditions." The treatment of pre-existing conditions has emerged as one of the thorniest issues in the health care debate. We decided to explore how the Republican bill compares with the current law, the Affordable Care Act. Some basics Both the existing Affordable Care Act and the proposed American Health Care Act require insurance companies to sell everyone a plan. If you want to buy, they must sell. That’s called guaranteed issue, but the rules under the two approaches are different. The Affordable Care Act says carriers can’t base rates on a person’s health status. That’s the default for the American Health Care Act, too, but it gives states another choice. They can get a waiver that allows companies to charge more for people with higher health care risks who have a break in their insurance coverage. The GOP’s health care bill allows states to use two different approaches that could affect people with pre-existing conditions. States could let insurance companies base rates on a person’s health status, and they could trim the list of health services that every plan must offer. The Affordable Care Act requires 10 basic services, including maternity care and mental health treatment. Those two are mentioned most often as being at risk if states decide to trim the list. The American Health Care Act sets aside $8 billion for states that get waivers to use in a number of ways. They could use a portion to help cover the costs of high-risk people. There would be additional billions for all states to write down the costs of maternity and mental health care. No one can say for sure how this would play out. Assessing the future The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan analytic arm of Congress, estimated that one-sixth of Americans would live in states that chose both to trim the list of essential health services and allow insurers to charge sicker people more. In those places, the CBO said "less healthy people would face extremely high premiums, despite the additional funding that would be available." "Over time, it would become more difficult for less healthy people (including people with preexisting medical conditions) in those states to purchase insurance because their premiums would continue to increase rapidly," the CBO said. Health policy analyst Joe Antos at the American Enterprise Institute, a market-oriented think tank, said no one knows which states will ask for waivers, much less whether Georgia would. Also unknown is how states would change the rules for insurance companies. But even if states allowed insurance companies to charge higher rates for people with pre-existing conditions who let their coverage lapse, he said the maximum number of people who would be adversely affected would be relatively small. "If they have insurance, they will try to keep it, because they know exactly that they will be big spenders and they want someone else to pay for it," Antos said. Antos said that there’s a "distinct possibility" that some people would face higher costs, but political pressure would limit how far states would go. Another mitigating actor is the billions of dollars in the American Health Care Act for states to set up high-risk pools. That money would move the most expensive patients off the private insurance rolls. Gail Wilensky, a top health care adviser to President George H.W. Bush, said that with enough funding, this could give such people better care than they get today. But Wilensky doesn’t think the current bill has set aside enough money. "Protections are greater under the Affordable Care Act," Wilensky said. "That’s why it costs as much as it does." Matthew Fielder, a health policy fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that by design, the Republican proposal gives states more latitude. "Under current law, people are completely protected against being charged a higher premium because of a pre-existing condition, no matter where in the country they live," Fiedler said. "Under the American Health Care Act, those protections could be significantly curtailed or eliminated entirely, depending on the decisions made by state officials." Our ruling Ossoff said the American Health Care Act "guts protections against massive price hikes for Georgians with pre-existing conditions." Based on the CBO report, a sixth of all Americans live in states where people with pre-existing conditions would be priced out of the market. No one knows if Georgia would be such a state, or if it were, if it would use waivers to the fullest extent. No expert we reached said the proposed American Health Care Act insulates people from higher rates as much as the current Affordable Care Act does. They differed on the scale of the impact. Ossoff has a point that the protections are weaker, but he pushed too far on the specifics for Georgia. We rate this claim HalfTrue. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Jon Ossoff	None	None	None	2017-06-13T10:26:19	2017-06-08	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-snes-00758	Donald Trump leveled the same criticisms against President Barack Obama over Syrian strikes that were later used against him.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-tweet-warnings-obama-ordering-syrian-airstrikes/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did Donald Trump Tweet Warnings About Obama Ordering Syrian Airstrikes?	16 April 2018	None	['Syria', 'Barack_Obama', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-02529	A bill backed by Sean Duffy and other House Republicans "could actually require the Internal Revenue Service to conduct audits of rape victims" who get an abortion.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2014/feb/09/state-democratic-party-wisconsin/could-gop-bill-targeting-abortion-require-irs-rape/	The Wisconsin Democratic Party combined abortion, IRS audits and rape in a fund-raising appeal it made Jan. 19, 2014. Like many fund-raising emails, this one opened by sounding many alarms: "Extreme, right-wing Republicans in Congress like Sean Duffy are doubling down on their War on Women with a completely terrifying proposal that not only makes it harder for women -- even those using private insurance -- to access safe, legal abortions, it could actually require the Internal Revenue Service to conduct audits of rape victims." If the proposal became law, could the IRS really be required to audit rape victims? The legislation The email targets the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," which was introduced by New Jersey Republican Chris Smith in May 2013. Duffy, the GOP congressman who represents central Wisconsin, was one of 167 Republican co-sponsors; there were also four Democratic co-sponsors. With the U.S. Senate controlled by Democrats, the bill stands only a 14 percent chance of becoming law, according to the nonpartisan GovTrack.us. Nevertheless, the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s email said, the bill could become model legislation for states to adopt. When the Democratic Party distributed its email, the bill included a provision that the party claims could require the IRS to audit rape victims. Nine days later, when the GOP-controlled House approved the bill, that provision had been removed. As we do with all fact-checks, we’re evaluating the Democratic Party’s claim based on the facts at the time the claim was made -- in this case, when the provision singled out by the party was still in the bill. That version would have prohibited taxpayers from claiming a medical expense deduction for an abortion, except in cases of rape or incest -- leading some critics to decry so-called "rape audits." Nothing in the text of the legislation, however, spells out any conditions under which the IRS could be required to audit women who claim a medical expense deduction for an abortion. Likewise, analyses from two nonpartisan offices -- one by the Congressional Research Service and one by Congressional Budget Office -- make no reference to audits. So, where does the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s claim come from? Party’s evidence Asked to back up the claim, Democratic Party spokeswoman Melissa Baldauff told us: "Any time someone claims a deduction on their taxes, they could be subject to verify that deduction for the Internal Revenue Service via an audit." Yes. But that’s different than the party's claim of new legislation setting up a situation in which the IRS could be required to conduct certain audits. Three articles Baldauff provided make a less-sweeping assertion. They say the bill could put women in the position of having to prove to the IRS that their medical expense deduction for an abortion was legal because their pregnancy was caused by rape. We received similar comments from two other opponents of the bill. George Washington University health policy professor Susan Wood told us that if a woman were audited for any reason, and the IRS questioned her deduction for an abortion expense, the woman might have to prove that her pregnancy was due to rape in order to show that the tax deduction was legal. American University law professor Sharon Levin, who directs federal reproductive health policy at the National Women’s Law Center, said the bill "could lead to some women having to document to IRS auditors that they had been raped if they took a tax deduction for an abortion." Let’s get a better understanding of how audits work. How audits work First of all, there are no statutes that proscribe when the IRS must conduct audits, Baker Tilly tax expert and former IRS attorney Mark Heroux told us. Rather, the IRS uses its discretion, considering various factors, in deciding which tax returns to review, he said. Secondly, when taxpayers claim medical expense deductions, the total amount of the deduction appears on their returns; the medical expenses and procedures are not itemized. As for which returns get audited, here’s how the IRS summarizes the process: When tax returns are filed, they are compared against "norms" for similar returns. The "norms" are developed from audits of "a statistically valid random sample of returns." In other words, on its first pass, the IRS flags returns that are outliers. For example, a taxpayer with modest income who claims unusually high deductions for medical expenses or charitable donations. Then a series of reviews is done to determine whether there will be an audit. Flagged returns are examined by an IRS auditor. The auditor can decide to accept the return or refer it to an "examining group." If the group doesn’t accept the return, a manager reviews it and decides whether to accept it as filed, or assign it to an auditor. Finally, that auditor accepts the return or "contacts the taxpayer to schedule an appointment." So, the IRS has considerable discretion in deciding which returns to audit. And, again, nothing in the bill targeted by the Wisconsin Democratic Party requires audits. Supporters Duffy’s office referred us to other supporters of the bill, including U.S. Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn. Speaking on the House floor in 2011 -- when essentially the same bill, including the provision criticized by the Democrats, was being considered -- Black said "a woman would not have to list on a tax form that a specific medical expense was for an abortion. That’s simply not how the process works. It’s not how it works today, nor will it be how it works if this is signed into law." Because tax returns don’t contain itemized lists of procedures such as abortions, a return wouldn't get flagged by the IRS for possible auditing just because an abortion had been claimed as a medical expense deduction. So, a rape victim who claimed a medical expense deduction for an abortion would be put in the position of having to explain the deduction to the IRS only if her return were audited for some other reason, and only if medical expense deductions came into question. We’ll note again that the provision criticized by Democratic Party was in place when the party made its claim, but was removed before the bill was approved by the House. Our rating The Wisconsin Democratic Party said a bill backed by Duffy and other House Republicans "could actually require the Internal Revenue Service to conduct audits of rape victims" who get an abortion. The version of the bill criticized by the party did not contain any audit requirements. We rate the claim False. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.	None	Democratic Party of Wisconsin	None	None	None	2014-02-09T05:00:00	2014-01-19	['Sean_Duffy', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-00259	Says Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he served in Vietnam in "Da Nang Province. Soldiers dying left and right as we battled up the hill." And "then he cried when (the press) caught him."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/04/donald-trump/donald-trumps-inventions-about-richard-blumenthal-/	At a rally in Southaven, Miss., President Donald Trump denounced Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., for his support of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Trump dubbed Blumenthal "Da Nang Richard," a reference to a battleground in the Vietnam War. "This guy lied about his service," Trump said Oct. 2. "He didn't just say ‘Gee, I was in the service.’ No, he said, ‘I was in the Marines. Da Nang province. Soldiers dying left and right as we battled up the hill.’ This went on for 15 years when he was the attorney general of Connecticut. I thought he was a great war hero." Trump continued. "Here's a guy who was saying people were dying all around him. And he was never there. And then he cried when they caught him. He cried like a baby, like a baby." In a companion fact-check, we looked at Trump’s claim that Blumenthal "lied" about his Vietnam service. (Mostly True.) Here, we look at the rest of Trump’s words, the ones about Da Nang and crying. Trump is wrong that Blumenthal spun heroic war stories, and cried when he was called out for it. Vietnam legacy Both Blumenthal and Trump avoided serving in Vietnam. Trump benefited from four student deferments in college and one medical deferment (which Trump later said was for bone spurs in his heels), before being classified 4-F, unfit to serve. While Trump never claimed to have been there, Blumenthal sometimes did. Blumenthal enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves in 1970. Until then, five deferments had kept him out of the war. Getting a coveted slot in the reserves reduced the chance of battlefield deployment. Blumenthal went through basic training and served six years in the Washington, D.C, area and Connecticut. In 2010, the New York Times reported that at a 2008 ceremony for veterans and senior citizens, Blumenthal said, "We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam." The newspaper provided another example from a 2003 event. "When we returned, we saw nothing like this," Blumenthal told military families. "Let us do better by this generation of men and women." A day after the New York Times story, Blumenthal held a news conference in West Hartford, Conn. "I routinely describe my pride at having served in the United States Marine Corps Reserves during the Vietnam era," Blumenthal said, flanked by veterans. "On a few occasions, I have misspoken about my service. And I regret that, and I take full responsibility." There were no tears. Some argued that there also was no apology. Blumenthal released a statement about a week later saying, "I have made mistakes and I am sorry." We can find no record that Blumenthal ever described being in Da Nang or any other place in Vietnam. (And for the record, Da Nang is a city, not a province, although it serves the same administrative role as a province in Vietnamese governance.) We reached out to the White House and did not hear back. Our ruling Trump said Blumenthal said he saw battle in Da Nang, and "then he cried when they caught him." Blumenthal never spoke of fighting in Da Nang or anywhere else in Vietnam. He did not cry when he acknowledged his misleading statements. Those elements are pure Trump invention. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-10-04T17:55:47	2018-10-02	['Richard_Blumenthal', 'Vietnam']
-pomt-14908	"There was never a single shred of evidence presented to anyone" that the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, were "spontaneous, and in fact, the CIA themselves understood that early on."	half-true	/florida/statements/2015/nov/04/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-portrays-hillary-clinton-liar-her-stat/	U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio portrayed Hillary Clinton as lying about the circumstances of the Benghazi attack when she said the attacks were the result of an anti-Muslim video instead of al-Qaida-like terrorists. "There was not a single person on the ground in Benghazi who believed that it was a spontaneous uprising," he said in an interview on CNN on Oct. 29, 2015. CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Rubio how it could be a lie if the CIA told Clinton it was due to a demonstration. Rubio replied: "She consistently, privately told people, over and over again, including in the early aftermath of it, that this was led by al-Qaida-like elements. There was never a single shred of evidence presented to anyone that this was spontaneous, and in fact, the CIA themselves understood that early on, irrespective of what the administration is telling you now." We wanted to fact-check what Rubio said about what the CIA understood, drawing on the seven congressional investigations that followed, as well as news articles provided by Rubio and testimony by officials that the Clinton campaign sent us. What we found is a very murky situation. It seems like there were indications early on that the attacks were not the result of simple protests. But also early on, some in the government did seem to think that demonstrations over the video were a factor. That constitutes something of a "shred," contrary to what Rubio said. Timeline of reports about what prompted the attacks To try to sort out the evidence, we created a timeline to show when information was shared about the reason for the attacks. (Other media have created their own timelines, including Factcheck.org and the Washington Post’s The Fact Checker.) Sept. 11, 2012: The attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound begins at 3:40 p.m. ET (9:40 p.m. in Benghazi); an attack on a CIA mission annex begins at 6 p.m. ET. Four Americans die in the attacks. Sept. 11, 2012: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta met with Defense Department officials a couple hours after the attack "to discuss the Benghazi attack and other violence in the region in reaction to the anti-Muslim video," according to a report from the bipartisan Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Several officials later told this committee that they believed it was a terrorist attack immediately or almost immediately. Sept. 11, 2012: Clinton issued a statement that didn’t indicate a cause for the attack but said, "Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet." At 11:12 p.m. Clinton sent an email to her daughter Chelsea saying the attack was conducted by an al-Qaida like group. Another email revealed that Clinton, during a phone call with Libyan President Mohamed Magariaf around 8 p.m. ET, said she understood Ansar al-Sharia, an al-Qaida-affiliated group, claimed responsibility for the attacks. However, 24 hours after taking responsibility for the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia retracted the claim. Sept. 11, 2012: Two alerts were issued by the State Department Operations Center to administration officials, according to the House Republican Conference report. The first said the U.S. facilities were under attack, while the second linked the attacks to Ansar al-Sharia. Neither alert mentioned a protest related to the video. Sept. 12, 2012: In the first CIA assessment of the attacks, the CIA said "the presence of armed assailants from the incident’s outset suggests this was an intentional assault and not the escalation of a peaceful protest." According to the bipartisan House Intelligence Committee report, the CIA later said the initial assessment lacked supporting evidence and was subsequently left out of reports. Meanwhile, analysts "received 21 reports that a protest occurred in Benghazi." Fourteen of those reports were issued from the Open Source Center (a CIA intelligence center), while the rest came from the CIA, the Defense Department and the NSA. However, the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found issues with the reports because they included information from early news reports, not just original intelligence. The reports were also based on intercepted communications and informants’ tips, according to the New York Times. Sept, 12, 2012: President Barack Obama, speaking in the Rose Garden, said, "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation." While he didn’t refer to the video directly, Obama did say, "We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." Sept. 15, 2012: The CIA’s chief of station in Tripoli wrote an email to the then-deputy director of the CIA saying that the attacks were "not an escalation of protests." The intelligence community "also had information that there were no protests outside the Temporary Mission Facility prior to the attacks, but did not incorporate that information into its widely circulated assessments in a timely manner," according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report. Sept. 16, 2012: United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday talk shows. She talked about the video several times and said, "We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned." She said on NBC’s Meet the Press that the current assessment was the attack was "a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo -- almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video." The administration was later criticized for the talking points fed to Rice in advance of her interviews. In an email from Ben Rhodes, the then-deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, one of those talking points stated: "Since we began to see protests in response to this Internet video, the president has directed the administration to take a number of steps." Sept. 18, 2012: The CIA and FBI reviewed video footage from the Benghazi compound that showed no protests preceding the attack. Sept. 19, 2012: Director of National Intelligence Matt Olsen said during a congressional hearing that the State Department officials in Benghazi died "in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy." Sept. 20, 2012: Clinton said during a press conference that "the video that sparked these protests is disgusting and reprehensible, and the United States government, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with it." Sept. 21, 2012: Clinton attributed the attack to terrorism during a press conference: "What happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and we will not rest until we have tracked down and brought to justice the terrorists who murdered four Americans." Sept. 24, 2012: The CIA changed its assessment of the attacks after determining that no protests occurred outside the Benghazi facility before the attacks. Sept. 28, 2012: Shawn Turner, a spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence, issued a statement that officials initially thought that the attack was spontaneous but soon concluded that terrorists were involved: "In the immediate aftermath, there was information that led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo. We provided that initial assessment to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available. ... As we learned more about the attack, we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized terrorist attack carried out by extremists." Rubio campaign evidence As for whether there was never "a single shred of evidence" presented that the attack was spontaneous despite what Clinton said, a spokeswoman for Rubio pointed to news articles in conservative media about what Clinton and the former acting CIA director Michael Morell said about the attacks. For example, in an Oct. 23, 2015, Fox News report, Charles Woods, father of Ty Woods, who died in the Benghazi attack, shared diary notes he took after meeting Clinton on Sept. 14, 2012. The two spoke at a ceremony when the victims’ bodies were flown back to the United States. "I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand. And she said we are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of my son," the entry said. In Morell’s 2015 book The Great War of Our Time, Morell wrote, "Still others might have been motivated by the video -- although I should note our analysts never said the video was a factor in the Benghazi attacks." Clinton campaign evidence Clinton’s campaign also pointed to statements made by government officials who described initial confusion. "I think that the first week after 9/11, there was significant uncertainty about what had happened and disagreement among key people who shaped opinion," State Department Office Director for Maghreb Affairs William Roebuck told the Democratic Staff Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in August 2013. Adding to the confusion was that the Benghazi attack occurred around the same time as protests over the anti-Muslim video in Cairo. "There was some confusion about have you had -- was this the same thing, were these two incidents the same, were they different?" Roebuck said. "The interagency was trying to sort that out. They were also trying to sort out the conflicting information from Benghazi itself. ... Like I said, there was a dispute among people who were looking very carefully at all of the evidence on the ground, and there was a legitimate disagreement about what had sort of been the precursor to the attack." Our ruling Rubio said on CNN, "There was never a single shred of evidence presented to anyone that this was spontaneous, and in fact, the CIA themselves understood that early on." There was some initial confusion about what sparked the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. Although investigations showed that some officials thought it was a terrorist attack immediately, there at least appeared to be some question about whether the video could have played a role. Rubio exaggerates when he said there wasn’t a "single shred of evidence." There were several suggestions that it was because of a protest. However, he has a point that much of the early evidence pointed strongly to terrorism. Overall, we rate his statement Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/d256b515-5bde-440a-9f3b-6f423cf6741c	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2015-11-04T15:46:10	2015-10-29	['Libya', 'Benghazi', 'Central_Intelligence_Agency']
-tron-02272	Popular substance in cold medications pulled from the shelves	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/phenylpropanolamine/	None	medical	None	None	None	Popular substance in cold medications pulled from the shelves	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-03509	Says President Barack Obama is trying to "pack" the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/05/chuck-grassley/barack-obama-trying-pack-dc-circuit-court-appeals/	In the Rose Garden on June 4, 2013, President Barack Obama named three nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, a pivotal moment in a long-simmering partisan fight over the nation’s second-most influential court. That prompted Republican lawmakers to sharpen their rhetoric, accusing Obama of trying to "pack" the court -- a phrase that invokes the 1937 proposal by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to increase the size of the Supreme Court by as many as five justices. It’s no small charge: FDR’s scheme was seen, then and now, as a naked power grab. By proposing to sidestep a court that had blocked much of his New Deal agenda, Roosevelt alienated many Americans, and the plan ended up in history’s dustbin. Court packing "had always had a bad name, but Roosevelt’s proposal was such a fiasco that no subsequent president has even seen it as an option open to them," said Jeff Shesol, author of Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court and a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. Several senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Mike Lee, R-Utah, have recently made the "packing" charge. In a May 16 hearing, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, used a variation of the word "pack" no fewer than six times. He repeated the charge in a news release on the eve of Obama’s announcement: "It’s hard to imagine the rationale for nominating three judges at once for this court given the many vacant emergency seats across the country, unless your goal is to pack the court to advance a certain policy agenda." Superficially, Obama’s actions don’t seem to mirror FDR’s, since Obama is seeking to fill existing vacancies, rather than creating new seats he can fill. But do the Republicans have a point? What’s the definition of "court packing"? Most historians and legal scholars offer similar definitions of "court packing." Burt Solomon, author of FDR v. The Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy, called it an effort to "expand the size of the court" to stack it with supporters. Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, agreed, saying it "indicates a departure from the ordinary process." (Roosevelt is the great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant relative of FDR.) And Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor, called it a "manipulation of court membership to achieve certain substantive results in cases the court will decide." Historical examples of court packing The highest-profile examples have come at the Supreme Court level. The Constitution doesn’t specify the number of Supreme Court seats. Starting at six in 1789, it briefly fell to five in 1801 before returning to six in 1802. It rose to seven in 1807 and nine in 1837. It rose to 10 in 1863, then shrunk to seven in 1866 before stabilizing at nine in 1869. These changes weren’t necessarily nefarious. Initially, the nation was growing geographically, which required more justices, and the increase in 1863 can be explained by the Civil War, which left the court with several justices from states in rebellion. We found three pretty clear historical examples in which one branch of government sought to change the makeup of the courts for political reasons. • The "midnight judges." In 1801, following a contentious election, the lame-duck Federalist administration of President John Adams sought to stymie the incoming Democratic-Republicans of President Thomas Jefferson by adding six new federal circuits with 16 judges, all appointed by Adams. The last-minute appointees came to be known as "midnight judges." The Jeffersonians sought to abolish the new courts, and in 1803, the Supreme Court upheld their right to do so in Stuart vs. Laird. • The post-Civil War era. After President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, a southerner, Andrew Johnson, was elevated to president. After clashing with the Republicans who controlled Congress, they shrunk the Supreme Court from 10 seats to seven, effectively denying Johnson any appointments. After Johnson was succeeded by victorious Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Congress restored the Supreme Court to nine justices. It has not varied since. • The third example, as we’ve noted, is Roosevelt’s doomed 1937 proposal. The Republicans’ arguments A spokeswoman for Grassley argued that, "just as FDR did, Obama is trying to influence the courts because neither president liked being overturned. The president and Senate Democrats have made that clear in their comments." Republican lawmakers make two main arguments. • The court is under-worked, so Obama is trying to fill unneeded seats with Democrats. "It is evident that the D.C. Circuit is the least busy court" in the nation, Grassley said at the May 16 hearing. "In fact, it ranks last or almost last in nearly every category that measures the workload of the courts." In fact, Grassley has introduced the Court Efficiency Act of 2013, which would, among other things, reduce the number of D.C. Circuit judges from 11 to eight. Grassley’s proposal is "understandable," said Ilya Shapiro, a legal scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. "The court isn’t overworked, the openings are there because of filibusters of Bush nominees, and Obama’s had five years to nominate people and hasn’t," he said. "There are lots of overworked courts out there to which these three slots could go, but he wouldn’t be making it if Obama weren’t making his political play." • Senate Democrats are threatening a structural change that would affect judicial nominations. In the Senate, a single lawmaker can hold up Senate business unless supporters can muster a 60-vote majority. Over the years, due to actions by senators from both parties, such blocking tactics have become increasingly common. Frustrated by this trend, recent Senate majorities from both parties have considered invoking the "nuclear option" -- a procedural move that would allow a minority blockage to be overcome with just 51 votes. In 2005, a bipartisan group of 14 senators successfully headed off a Republican attempt to invoke the nuclear option by pledging not to support judicial filibusters. Now, the tables have turned: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. has threatened the nuclear option to combat Republican opposition to Obama’s nominees. The Democrats’ arguments Democrats challenge both arguments. In his Rose Garden announcement, Obama cited an April report by the Judicial Conference of the United States, a nonpartisan body headed by Chief Justice John Roberts, which told Congress that the circuit should remain at 11 judges. Court observers add that caseload counts don’t account for the complexity of the circuit’s cases. Meanwhile, Democrats say they have been driven to consider the nuclear option by strenuous GOP obstructionism. Obama said on June 4 that his judicial nominees "have waited three times longer to receive confirmation votes than those of my Republican predecessor" and added that he had to withdraw the nomination of Caitlin Halligan for a D.C. Circuit vacancy earlier this year after waiting fruitlessly for confirmation since September 2010. "I recognize that neither party has a perfect track record here," Obama said. But calling the present deadlock "unprecedented," he added, "For the good of the American people, it has to stop." Who has the better of the arguments? Our experts agreed that Obama is trying to put his imprint on the court -- but they said he’s doing so within the bounds of his constitutional duty to fill court vacancies. Ironically, the experts said, Grassley’s bill comes closer to the kind of structural meddling typical of court packing than does Obama’s approach, even if Grassley’s bill would result in a shrinkage. The experts agreed with Grassley that judicial resources could be better allocated, but they added that this question is better addressed by a more politically insulated entity such as the Judicial Conference of the United States. Arguing for efficiency wasn’t enough to shield FDR from backlash, Shesol said. "Everybody knew the game," Shesol said. "The fact that he was dishonest about it was what really hurt him." The nuclear option would be a structural change, but one focused more narrowly on one branch’s procedures. This keeps the argument from being a slam dunk -- and it hasn’t happened yet "If the Democrats eliminate the filibuster, I would call that hardball," Roosevelt said. "But it’s a change to the Senate rules, so it’s not an attack on the integrity and independence of the judiciary in the way that court-packing is. It’s also something that the other side can benefit from later, which neither packing nor shrinking really is." Our ruling The claim that Obama is "packing" the D.C. Circuit Court largely runs counter to American legal and political history. Genuine court packing has involved one branch of government proposing to change the structure of the courts, either expanding or decreasing the number of judges. That's not what Obama's doing. We rate the claim False.	None	Chuck Grassley	None	None	None	2013-06-05T10:59:35	2013-06-03	['Washington,_D.C.', 'Barack_Obama']
-tron-01390	The restaurant steak contaminated by urine	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/urine-steak/	None	food	None	None	None	The restaurant steak contaminated by urine	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06541	An Environmental Protection Agency regulation that goes into effect Jan. 1, 2012, regulates dust.	false	/georgia/statements/2011/oct/05/herman-cain/herman-cain-epa-regulate-dust-2012/	It was the kind of question that any politician who opposes big government would love to field during a GOP presidential debate. "My question is, if you were forced to eliminate one department from the federal government, which one would you eliminate and why?" asked a man from Arlington, Va., via YouTube during the Sept. 22 debate in Orlando. A moderator chose metro Atlantan Herman Cain to answer it, and to the delight of the audience, he turned his hypothetical ax on a favorite target of big government foes: the Environmental Protection Agency. "Now, I know that makes some people nervous, but the EPA has gone wild. The fact that they have a regulation that goes into effect Jan. 1, 2012, to regulate dust says that they've gone too far," Cain replied. Dust? The EPA will start regulating dust in January? We contacted the Cain camp for evidence, but they didn’t reply. Fortunately, the EPA posted its reports on the issue online. Factcheck.org, a fact-checking operation similar to PolitiFact, looked into Cain’s comment as well. We found that the EPA has long regulated a category of air pollution called "particulate matter," which includes dust. There’s no new regulation scheduled for Jan. 1, 2012. Particle pollution is a floating mix of solid particles and liquid droplets. Sometimes, the particles are visible, like smoke from a power plant, haze, or the dust that Cain mentioned. Other times, they’re so small they’re invisible to the naked eye. These particulates can be made up of any number of chemicals, and can come from a variety of sources such as smokestacks, fires or construction sites. A growing body of scientific evidence links particle pollution to a variety of health problems, including respiratory issues, lung disease, heart problems and even higher death rates, according to multiple independent reviews of the scientific literature as well as the EPA. A small number of studies have even linked naturally occurring dust storms to a rise in trips to the emergency room for cardiovascular problems, according to an EPA review of scientific studies. The EPA has regulated this form of air pollution since 1971 under the Clean Air Act, and requires air monitors in areas with populations greater than 100,000, according to state and federal documents. But it does not specifically single out farm dust for regulation. Since states have to comply with the regulations or risk losing federal money, they may institute rules for farm dust to get into compliance with the law, a lobbyist for the farm industry and news accounts confirm. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA reviews its particle pollution standards every five years. And that’s where the current dust-up over dust began. The EPA released its most recent policy assessment in April. It concludes that based on the newest research, it’s worthwhile to consider tightening some standards on larger or "coarse" particulates. This category includes dust from landfills, construction sites, agriculture and industrial sources such as steel mills. The agriculture industry and other groups objected, saying this suggestion doesn’t make sense for rural areas, where tractors and pickups kick up naturally occurring dirt in the fields or on unpaved roads. But both the EPA and regulation opponents agree that no regulation is in the pipeline, and it’s certainly not coming Jan. 1. Factcheck.org’s Sept. 23 story on the debate noted that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson testified before the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture in March that it was a "mischaracterization" that the EPA is trying to "expand regulation of dust from farms." Indeed, the EPA has not formally submitted new regulations for review, an agency spokeswoman told PolitiFact Georgia. Jackson said she would make a decision on whether to tighten the rules in July, according to a Reuters news story, but she has yet to do so. Even if the EPA were to submit such regulations today, it could take a year or so for them to go into effect, said Richard Krause, a lobbyist for the American Farm Bureau Federation. The EPA would have to make any proposal available for public review and comment, a process that could take some months. So to sum up: The EPA has been regulating large particulate matter, including dust, for four decades, but does not single out farm dust or require monitoring in more rural areas. EPA staffers and scientists concluded after an assessment of the most recent science that it’s worthwhile to consider tightening current regulations, but the EPA has not formally proposed any regulation, and even if they did so today, it could take a while for it to go into effect. So, Cain does have a point. The EPA does regulate dust under the Clean Air Act. But Cain’s language was very specific, and now that the dust has settled in the wake of the Republican debate, it’s clear his specifics were incorrect. Dust is regulated, but not at all in the way that Cain described. We therefore rate his statement False.	None	Herman Cain	None	None	None	2011-10-05T06:00:00	2011-09-22	['None']
-snes-02325	Mitch McConnell said he would block the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian election interference	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mitch-mcconnell-block-russia/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Mitch McConnell Vow to Block the Appointment of a Russia Investigation Special Prosecutor?	29 May 2017	None	['Russia', 'Mitch_McConnell']
-pomt-04610	The "48, 49 percent" that supports President Barack Obama are "people who pay no income tax."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/18/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-voters-who-support-barack-obama-a/	A surreptitiously recorded video of Mitt Romney speaking at a fundraiser stirred up the presidential race on Sept. 17, 2012. The video showed Romney saying that 47 percent of the American public are "dependent on government," "believe that they are victims" and "believe the government has a responsibility to care for them." Romney also claimed that the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes are strong Obama supporters because they are so dependent on government benefits that Obama freely provides. "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what," Romney said, according to the video leaked to the liberal magazine Mother Jones. "All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. "And I mean the president starts out with 48, 49 percent … he starts off with a huge number," Romney continued. "These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the five to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful...." Almost immediately after the video hit the news, we received a flood of requests from readers asking us to check Romney’s claims. In this item, we’ll look at whether the "48, 49 percent" that supports President Barack Obama are "people who pay no income tax." We should note that Romney, during a hastily called news conference in California, called his comments "not elegantly stated," but he didn’t backtrack from their substance. What he said is "a message which I'm going to carry and continue to carry, which is, look, the president's approach is attractive to people who are not paying taxes, because, frankly, my discussion about lowering taxes isn't as attractive to them. And therefore, I'm not likely to draw them into my campaign...." In this item, we'll look at who pays taxes -- and who doesn't. Then we'll look at whether Obama supporters and Americans who don’t pay taxes are one and the same. Who pays taxes Romney’s figure is close to one from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, which found that 46 percent of tax filers pay no income tax, vs. about 54 percent of tax filers that did have some federal income tax liability. Generally speaking, the groups most likely to have no tax liability are the elderly and the poor. Anti-tax Republicans tend to focus on the federal income tax burden because it helps make their case that the federal income tax burden falls disproportionately on the wealthy. Because there is a solid basis for this number, we’ve rated it True in the past -- at least when it is described correctly. That qualifier is important. While the 46 percent figure refers to federal income tax, federal income tax is not the only tax that Americans pay. It’s not even the only federal tax people pay. An additional 28 percent will at least pay federal payroll taxes, which funds Social Security and Medicare and is deducted from every working American’s paycheck. Most of the rest are the poor and elderly. So, Romney would have been right if he said about 47 percent of all Americans don't pay federal income taxes. But he went further, arguing that those 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes are essentially all Obama supporters. And the facts don't back him up. Obama supporters It's tricky to compare taxpaying status with presidential preferences, but there are enough data points that we can poke some significant holes in Romney’s argument. • Income levels. We compared Tax Policy Center data with a recent CBS News-New York Times poll. Among households with below $50,000 in income, 68 percent owed no federal income taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center. The poll showed Obama led in this group, 58 percent to 37 percent. For households between $50,000 and $100,000, 11 percent owed no federal income taxes. Romney led in this group, 50 percent to 47 percent. And for households above $100,000, 2 percent owed no federal income taxes. Romney led in this category, 57 percent to 41 percent. So there’s a modest correlation between the likelihood of not paying income taxes and the likelihood of supporting Obama. But Romney vastly overstates the link. Obama has substantial support among households $100,000 and up, and virtually all of them pay income taxes. Put another way, Obama is expected to win millions of votes from people who do pay federal income taxes, and Romney is expected to win millions of votes from people who do not pay federal income taxes. • Senior citizens. Romney gets strong support from seniors. He led in the CBS-New York Times poll by a 53 percent to 38 percent margin, and a CNN and Opinion Research Corp. poll from around the same time had Romney leading among senior by a 53 percent to 45 percent margin. Yet being a senior is one of the biggest reasons an American would pay no federal income taxes. Among those who saw tax breaks wipe out their income-tax liability, nearly half benefited from a tax break targeted at senior citizens. • State by state data. The Tax Foundation has found some state-by-state patterns that are problematic for Romney’s claim. The foundation tallied the states that had the highest percentages of non-income-tax-paying residents. The 10 states with the highest rates of non-tax-payers are mostly ones that Romney has in the bag -- Texas, Idaho, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. And several states with the lowest rates are solidly in Obama’s camp, including Minnesota, Maryland and Massachusetts. Our ruling Romney said that the "48, 49 percent" that supports President Barack Obama are "people who pay no income tax." But the polls and income tax data don't back this up. Obama gets substantial support from people earning more than $50,000 -- and 90 percent of them, or more, do pay taxes. And Romney gets lots of support from seniors, many of whom have no income tax liability. We rate the claim False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-09-18T18:07:22	2012-05-17	['None']
-pomt-14765	The U.S. "tax rate on successful small businesses is 44.6 percent," while the business tax rate in Canada is 15 percent.	true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/dec/10/paul-ryan/paul-ryan-says-us-taxes-small-businesses-446-perce/	Shortly after his election as House Speaker, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis) spelled out his agenda for Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren. A key concern is tax reform, Ryan said during the Nov. 4, 2015 appearance on Van Susteren’s "On the Record" show. "We have to reform the U.S. tax code if we want to create more economic growth and more jobs," said Ryan, who was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee before becoming speaker. Ryan then dropped a stat that’s long been one of his key talking points, including when he was the GOP’s 2012 vice presidential candidate. "The tax rate on successful small businesses is 44.6 percent right now," Ryan said. "The tax rate on businesses in Canada is 15 percent. So we are taxing American businesses at a much higher rate than our foreign competitors are." He made a similar claim Nov. 15, 2015, during an interview on CBS News’ "60 Minutes." That seems like quite a gap. Is Ryan right? Digging into the numbers PolitiFact National looked into a version of this claim made during the 2012 vice presidential debate, when Ryan stated: "The Canadians — they (dropped) their tax rates to 15 percent. The average tax rate on businesses in the industrialized world is 25 percent." That claim was rated Mostly True. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of advanced industrialized nations, Canada’s central government corporate rate has declined from 29.12 percent to 15 percent. Businesses in Canada, however, also pay provincial taxes. The combination of the central and provincial corporate tax rates has fallen from 42.94 percent to 26.1 percent. Using the same data for the 34 countries examined, the average 2012 tax rate was slightly under 25 percent. The tax claim that Ryan made on Fox News was somewhat different. He cited the business tax rate in Canada, and compared it with the U.S. tax rate on small businesses, which he put at 44.6 percent. To support the claim, Ryan’s office cited a 2013 report by the Ways and Means Committee, "Tax Revenues to More Than Double by 2023, While Top Tax Rates Hit Highest Level Since 1986." That report puts the federal tax rate for small businesses at 44.6 percent. So Ryan’s right on that number. As for the second part of the claim, Ryan’s office pointed us to Taxtips.ca, a Canadian tax and financial information service. Tables on that web site put the federal tax rate in Canada at 15 percent, which, again, is what Ryan cited. The group says that provincial tax rates for business range from 16 percent in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island to 10 percent in Alberta. Scott Hodge, president of the Washington D.C.-based Tax Foundation, agreed that Ryan had it right, based on his group’s data. If anything, Hodge said, Ryan understated the gap between the United States and Canada. Citing Canada’s Revenue Agency, Hodge said that Ryan compared U.S. small businesses with the general business rate in Canada. "The top federal tax rate for businesses is 15 percent. However, they do have a special small business rate of 11 percent," Hodge said in an email. "Mr. Ryan was obviously referring to the main rate, not the special small business rate. That would make the differences even starker." Our rating While arguing for tax reform, Ryan compared the difference in tax rates for small businesses in the United States with the general business tax rate in Canada. He was right on both numbers. Indeed, if he used the small business rate in Canada, the gap would be even larger. We rate his claim True.	None	Paul Ryan	None	None	None	2015-12-10T05:00:00	2015-11-04	['United_States', 'Canada']
-hoer-00134	Progesterex - Sterility Date Rape Drug	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/date-rape-drug.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Progesterex - Sterility Date Rape Drug Hoax	14th April 2010	None	['None']
-snes-04569	false	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/man-assaulting-woman-device/	None	Crime	None	Brooke Binkowski	None	Man Loses Genitals While Assaulting Woman Thanks to ‘Anti-Rape Device’	22 June 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-07657	At Twin River, "we're more than competitive" with nearby casinos in slot machine payouts.	mostly true	/rhode-island/statements/2011/mar/13/patti-doyle/twin-rivers-spokeswoman-says-its-slot-machine-payo/	Earlier this month, Gov. Lincoln Chafee expressed the fear that trying to cull too much revenue from the state's slot parlors could send gamblers to other states, where the odds might be better. "They are not going to play if they are going to keep losing," Chafee said. "They'll go across the border, or go somewhere else where the odds, if you will, are more in their favor. … They know where they have a better chance of winning." In response, Patti Doyle, spokeswoman for Twin River, one of Rhode Island’s two slot parlors, said in a radio interview that her casino gives better odds. "We know from the industry standards in the industry casino world, that we're all pretty much on the same level. You know, you wouldn't be able to continue to be in business if you weren't competitive with gaming venues that are nearby. And we are. We're more than competitive," she said on radio station WPRO (630-AM). When we hear "more than competitive," we think "better." So we asked Doyle for the source of that comparison. While we awaited her response, we started our own research. On its website, RILot.com, the Rhode Island Lottery publishes a monthly list of how much cash was put into Twin River’s 4,700 slot machines, how much cash was won, and how much that represents in percentage. (It should be noted that neither Twin River, nor Newport Grand, the state’s other slot parlor, sets the payout percentages of their slot machines. They’re set by the director of the Rhode Island Lottery, Gerald S. Aubin.) Statistics for Connecticut's two casinos -- Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun -- are on the website of the Connecticut Division of Special Revenue at CT.gov/DOSR. At first glance, it looks like Rhode Island is less than competitive. During the period from January 2010 through January 2011, the highest monthly Twin River payout to gamblers was 91.529 percent, in December. The highest payout percentage at the Newport Grand, was lower: 91.171 percent in September. In contrast, the payouts at Foxwoods are listed as higher for 11 of the last 12 months. And Mohegan Sun offered a bigger payout every month, going no lower than 91.80 percent last May and as high as 92.17 in August. But George Papanier, CEO of Twin River, said the published percentages aren't comparable because states calculate the payout percentage differently. The issue is the credits that players get, also known as "free play." Rhode Island calls it Bonus Play. Mohegan lists it as eBonus Credits. In the Foxwoods report it's called Free Play. The two states account for it differently, said Papanier. Officials at the Rhode Island Lottery told us the same thing. As a result, the payout percentage for Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun is inflated, they said. In order to calculate the "Cash Won" at each Connecticut casino the same way it is calculated in Rhode Island, you must take the "handle " (the amount played, including free play and winnings replayed), subtract the "Win" amount (how much the casino wins) and subtract the value of the Free Play or eBonus coupons redeemed at the slot machines. By that formula, we discovered that, as Doyle said, Twin River’s payout percentage is better than Foxwoods’. In every month over the past year, Twin River had a higher payout percentage. The one-year averages: 91.366 percent for Twin River and 90.768 percent for Foxwoods. The story is a little different for Mohegan Sun. It beat out Twin River in 7 of the past 12 months, but the Connecticut casino's 12-month average was a hair below Twin River's, at 91.359 percent. A few tenths -- or hundredths -- of a percent may not seem consequential, but to serious gamblers, any tilt in their advantage is attractive, maybe even enough to send them to one casino over another. To double-check our numbers, we talked to Michael Janusko, chief financial examiner of Connecticut's Division of Special Revenue, who confirmed that our calculations were correct. The way Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun run their numbers, "it does overstate the payout percentage a bit," he said. Finally, Doyle sent us a copy of The Gaming Industry Observer's East Coast Slot Report that summarizes casino operations from Maine to Florida in January. Twin River ranked 13th out of 56 facilities in terms of money paid out to players, ahead of Mohegan Sun (25th), Newport Grand (26th), and Foxwoods (35th). Aubin, Rhode Island's Lottery director, said there is an important caveat to understand when considering payout. Those percentages are largely a function of the types of machines a casino has, not whether it is actually giving gamblers better odds. All other things being equal, a facility that has lots of penny slots, for example, will have a lower overall payout percentage than a casino that has none because those machines have smaller payouts. "I'm confident it would be the exact same payout throughout the country with the same game," he said. To summarize: Looking at the casinos as a whole, the way Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun calculate their payout percentages may make them look like a better bet for gamblers. But if you include player rewards to make an apples-to-apples comparison, Doyle's statement that Twin River is "more than competitive" is true for Foxwoods. Whether it applies to Mohegan Sun depends on the month. We rate her statement Mostly True.	None	Patti Doyle	None	None	None	2011-03-13T00:00:01	2011-03-02	['None']
-pomt-06869	In contrast to President Barack Obama, who "is not acting presidential," President Ronald Reagan "would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on — that's how much he revered the presidency."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/aug/01/ken-langone/wall-street-figure-ken-langone-blasts-obama-unpres/	Ken Langone, co-founder of Home Depot and a well-known Wall Street figure, took a shot at President Barack Obama during a July 28, 2011, roundtable segment on CNBC, the business-focused cable network. "Let me make it very clear, and I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of hate mail because of this, and that’s okay," Langone said. "I think our sitting president is acting so unpresidential …. He is dividing us as a nation. He is not bringing us together. He’s willfully dividing us. He’s petulant. ... "The reality is we believe in a government of three legs, all equal. So if (House Speaker John) Boehner and (Senate Majority Leader Harry) Reid -- well, Reid will do whatever (Obama) tells him -- if Boehner had said I am not coming unless you speak to me in a respectful way, I am third in line to the president, (then I won’t come). "Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on — that's how much he revered the presidency. This guy (Obama) worked like hell to be president, okay? He’s got it. Behave like a president." Langone’s comment is heavily opinionated, and at PolitiFact we make it our policy not to fact-check opinions. However, Langone used a vivid example that we think is checkable -- namely, whether it’s true that Reagan "would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on." As we look into that question, we’ll compare Reagan’s sartorial habits in the Oval Office with Obama’s to see whether Langone is justified in using Obama’s clothing choices to support his view that Obama is "not acting presidential." We began by contacting people who either worked in the Reagan White House or who covered it as journalists. Annelise Anderson said that neither she nor her husband Martin, both of whom worked in the Reagan White House, "ever saw Reagan in the Oval Office or the Roosevelt Room without a tie and jacket" and that they’d frequently heard that Reagan didn't even take his jacket off in the heat of summer. "Martin was in meetings with Reagan several times a day while he was assistant to the president for policy development," she said. "I was associate director of the Office of Management and Budget and saw the president less often, but always with coat and tie. Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, was far more casual." Andrea Mitchell, who covered the Reagan White House for NBC News and who now hosts MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, said she agrees that "Reagan was more formal than some of his predecessors or successors. My recollection is that Reagan did usually wear his jacket in the Oval Office, as did many other presidents, at least when they were photographed. But there were clearly informal moments, especially on weekends and holidays when they didn’t have outside visitors." For documentary evidence, we turned to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif. We reached Steve Branch, an audiovisual archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, who may know more than anyone else about the official White House photographs of the Reagan era. "We do have photos of President Reagan in the Oval Office without a coat and tie, but these only appear to be on weekends and I believe only for his Saturday radio addresses," Branch said. "During the regular work week, he always wore a coat and tie, which is evident from all the photos we have in our collection." As an example, Branch forwarded us contact sheets from two rolls of film that show Reagan in casual dress. Both were taken when Reagan came in to make a Saturday radio address. We found an additional image of a casual Reagan in the Oval Office in this slide show compiled by the Huffington Post. Mark Weinberg, an assistant press secretary in the Reagan White House, offered a simple explanation for why Reagan decided not to wear a jacket on weekends. "He did not want to make everyone coming into work feel like they had to dress up too," Weinberg said. "He knew that if he wore one, everyone else would, and he felt it was not fair to younger staff coming into work on weekends." So Langone is incorrect when he says that Reagan would "never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on." There’s photographic evidence showing Reagan jacket-less in the Oval Office, but there’s also ample evidence that Reagan usually wore jackets during the work week. What about Langone’s conclusion that Reagan’s dress habits in the White House stemmed from "how much he revered the presidency"? We heard, particularly from former Reagan aides, that the 40th president treated the office with reverence. "He made a point of saying the Oval Office was not his, that it belonged to the people, and he was only the custodian," Weinberg said. "I never, ever heard him refer to it as ‘my office.’" However, other experts see additional explanations for Reagan’s formality. One issue is the image-making that has shaped the modern presidency. Reagan, who polished his skills as an actor in Hollywood, has been widely hailed as a modern master of image-making. When Reagan was at his ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., he tended to wear western garb. In Washington, he tended to dress more formally. Both styles complemented and reinforced each other, helping define a clear persona of someone who was robust and in charge. "Reagan understood that the image one projects helps shape the public’s view, and I suspect it is not just generational that a president who carries himself in a more formal, dignified manner projects by that a bit more gravitas than a president who dresses and acts like he’s just ‘one of the guys,’" said Sam Donaldson, who covered the Reagan White House for ABC News. To the extent that Obama has sometimes appeared without a jacket for Oval Office meetings, his decision communicates something different, said Bronwyn Cosgrave, the author of Sample: Cuttings from Contemporary Fashion and Costume & Fashion: A Complete History. Cosgrave said Obama in shirtsleeves "projects the sense that he is actually rolling up his sleeves, getting down to business and tackling the task of running the country," The other factor has to do with the norms for a man of Reagan’s generation. Lou Cannon, an author and journalist who covered Reagan both as California governor and as president, told PolitiFact that "Reagan certainly did revere the office of the presidency, but, in my view, the fact he wore a coat and tie to work is mostly generational. He did the same in Sacramento, at least on weekdays, when he was governor. People of my father's generation -- he was born seven years before Reagan -- were taught to wear a suit and tie for formal occasions and certainly would have done so in the White House." Fashion historians agreed that it’s important to keep in mind generational shifts. "The norms for dress have changed since the Reagan years to a much more casual attire," said Joanne B. Eicher, editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and an emeritus professor of design, housing, and apparel at the University of Minnesota. "This can even be seen in what people wear for air travel, as one example, then and now." Eicher said that "many men today do not wear complete suits or even jackets with trousers to social functions as once was expected. For example, a prominent business executive I know, about 60, was attending a late afternoon wedding reception last month wearing a well-pressed long-sleeved plaid shirt, with no tie. Times have changed a lot in regard to what is acceptable." We also tried to judge how often Obama has gone jacket-less in the Oval Office. We did this by looking at the White House Flickr stream, which includes photographs taken by the official White House photographers. We found that in the great majority of Oval Office photographs during his presidency, Obama was seen wearing a suit. We did find that Obama was likelier to be jacket-less during his first 100 days in office, with 13 instances during that period. However, in the 26 months since then, Obama has sharply curtailed the number of times he has been caught on camera in the Oval Office without a jacket. We found only eight examples on weekdays during that period, or about one such occasion every three months. (We found two additional cases after the first 100 days when Obama went casual on a weekend or holiday.) We also noted that none of these eight occasions included an outsider. All showed Obama either by himself or with top aides or cabinet members. Eicher, the fashion historian, added that even when jacket-less, Obama's choice of shirts and ties is "immaculate." Most people who we interviewed for this story thought Langone had gone too far in demonizing Obama. "Reagan was a transformational president, but I don't really think the fact he wore a coat and tie to the Oval Office had anything to do with it," said Cannon, the Reagan biographer. "And while I have my criticisms of President Obama, the notion that ‘his behavior’ means ‘the end of America as we know it’ is rot. Obama dresses appropriately for the present generation, as Reagan did for his." Bruce Bartlett, an economist who worked in the Reagan White House, agreed that "Reagan was certainly more formal than Carter, but probably no more so than Nixon or Ford had been. I don’t have the impression that Obama is any different than most presidents in that regard. In any case, it is idiotic to say that he would be debasing the presidency by not wearing a jacket." So where does this leave us? Langone isn’t correct that Reagan "would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on," since he did dress casually on weekend days. But it is true that Reagan consistently wore a jacket on weekdays. That’s a stricter standard than Obama has set, though the differences between the two presidents aren’t as divergent as Langone suggests. In addition, most people we interviewed thought that he went too far when he used Obama’s patterns of dress as evidence that he is "unpresidential." Since the end of Obama’s first 100 days, Obama has been photographed without a jacket in the Oval Office only about once every three months and never with a visitor who wasn’t a senior staff member or appointee. The vast majority of photographs show Obama dressed in a jacket in the Oval Office, even though fashion experts agreed that generational norms have shifted, making jackets less essential, and less expected, in such settings. It's clear that Reagan's customary dress -- relaxed only on weekends -- was a suit and tie. But Langone's use of the word "never" overstated the case. In our rulings, words matter. So we rate Langone’s statement Mostly False.	None	Ken Langone	None	None	None	2011-08-01T16:48:03	2011-07-28	['Ronald_Reagan', 'Barack_Obama', 'Oval_Office']
-pomt-09217	California gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner, a Republican, "gave $10,000 to Al Gore's recount" effort in 2000.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/may/18/meg-whitman/california-race-whitman-says-poizner-donated-gore-/	The Republican primary to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) as governor of California has spawned a flood of ads attacking both Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, and Steve Poizner, the state insurance commissioner -- the two frontrunners for the nomination. One ad, aired by Whitman beginning in midMay, attacks Poizner's fitness to be the Republican nominee in part by charging that he gave $10,000 to the 2000 presidential recount effort of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, the Democratic nominees for president and vice president. The ad asks, "How liberal is Steve Poizner?" then answers its own question by proposing a litany of evidence, including the charge that Poizner "gave $10,000 to Al Gore's recount." The Poizner camp concedes that a federal disclosure form does indeed show that the Gore account received a $10,000 check signed by Poizner, whom the federal form identifies as an employee of the high-tech company Qualcomm. Qualcomm had earlier purchased Poizner's Silicon Vallley startup, SnapTrack Inc. Technically, the donation was made to a Democratic National Committee affiliate, but the campaign did not challenge the ad's description of the donation as being intended for the recount. However, the Poizner campaign has consistently argued that the check (as well as a separate $1,000 check made out to Gore 2000 Inc.) was written on a joint account and actually was intended to be a donation from his wife, Carol Poizner. "As Steve has made clear numerous times over the last 10 years, his wife is a Democrat," Poizner campaign press secretary Bettina Inclán told PolitiFact. "Steve’s wife supported Al Gore and contributions were made through their joint checking account. Steve voted for President Bush in 2000, worked for President Bush, and voted for President Bush again in 2004." We wondered whether this explanation might be credible, so we checked in (no pun intended) with some campaign-finance experts. Sean Parnell, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, a campaign-finance advocacy group, and Brett Kappel, a campaign-finance and ethics counsel at the Washington, D.C., law firm Arent Fox, both agreed that it's possible that it could have happened as the campaign says it did. "It's true that Federal Election Commission regulations do require that campaigns attribute checks drawn on a joint checking account to the last person who signs the check, and (the Poizners) should have specified that the check was coming from her either by making a notation on the check or in an accompanying letter," Kappel said. "But did you ever write a check for something your wife wanted? I have." At the same time, Kappel added that it's fair to fault Poizner for acting sloppily if he did that, since people with political ambitions tend to be very careful about such matters. In addition, the forms for both donations list Steve Poizner's employer -- Qualcomm in one case and SnapTrack in the other. This suggests that either Poizner filed a supplementary form explaining the donation (a step that's recommended but not required under federal campaign finance law) or that staffers for Gore looked into the donation and had a reason to attribute the donation to him, as opposed to his wife, when they filed the disclosure form. It's worth noting that Whitman -- a fellow Silicon Valley business titan -- has also fielded accusations from the Poizner camp about her own past partisan lapses. We are separately fact-checking the claim that Whitman "contributed to, and campaigned, for Barbara Boxer," California's liberal Democratic senator. It also bears mentioning that, for someone the campaign describes as still being "a Democrat," Carol Poizner has donated an awful lot of money to the GOP. Ever since she gave $2,000 to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in 2001, she has, in her own name, donated almost $90,000 to such recipients as the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the Republican National Committee and the California Republican Party. Ultimately, there is no way to prove with any certainty whether Steve Poizner was simply writing a check for his wife, as he suggests. Experts tell us it could have happened that way. But under the law, the fact that he signed the check officially makes the donation his, and the listing of his employer, rather than his wife's, on the disclosure form provides additional evidence that he was the intended donor. So while the case isn't conclusive, its strongly suggestive. We rate the Whitman campaign's claim Mostly True.	None	Meg Whitman	None	None	None	2010-05-18T18:21:07	2010-05-14	['California', 'Al_Gore', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-03599	In Cranston, it costs $5,000 to $6,000 to send out community notifications on just one Level 3 sex offender.	false	/rhode-island/statements/2013/may/12/peter-palumbo/ri-state-rep-peter-palumbo-says-it-costs-5000-6000/	Rhode Island state law requires officials to notify neighbors when dangerous sex offenders move into their community. Under a bill proposed by the attorney general’s office, the responsibility for making those notifications would move from cities and towns to the state. During an April 11 hearing on the proposal, House bill 5557, there was discussion of the current cost. (We've written about one such statement by Special Assistant Attorney General Joee Lindbeck in a separate item.) Rep. Peter Palumbo, D-Cranston, the bill's chief sponsor, said the change would save money for municipal government because their notification costs would disappear. "I know [in] the city of Cranston it's somewhere between $5,000 and $6,000, I believe, per Level 3 registered offender," he said. "That's what it's costing now to notify the people in the neighborhoods if we have a Level 3 sex offender in there." Level 3 offenders are regarded as most likely to get into trouble again. The state's website listing sex offenders shows 52 Level 3 offenders registered in Cranston. If Palumbo’s claim were true, the city must be spending a lot of money on notifications. (That doesn't mean authorities had to make 52 notifications. Police only have to warn residents, schools, community organizations and other groups when an offender moves into the area.) When we checked Palumbo’s figures with the attorney general's office, it listed Cranston as having spent just $9,137 for 2011. That would be barely enough for two Level 3 notifications if his numbers were correct. So we went to Cranston Police Chief Marco Palombo to try to reconcile the numbers. The chief sent us a detailed accounting. In 2011, the department sent out notifications for seven Level 2 and four Level 3 sex offenders at a total cost of $7,203. (The chief said the $9,137 figure included registration costs.) Based on the accounting, that averages out to $655 per offender. The costs were similar whether the offender was designated Level 2 or Level 3. So when Representative Palumbo said that it cost between $5,000 and $6,000 to notify people that a registered Level 3 sex offender has moved into a Cranston neighborhood, his estimate was about eight times too high. We rate the claim False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Peter Palumbo	None	None	None	2013-05-12T00:01:00	2013-04-11	['None']
-hoer-01135	Get a Free Pizza From Pizza Hut	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/get-a-free-pizza-from-pizza-hut-facebook-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Get a Free Pizza From Pizza Hut Facebook Scam	May 31, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-09944	"President Obama will now own 60 percent of GM, and his union buddies will own almost 20 percent."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/01/michael-steele/rnc-chairman-michael-steele-claims-government-will/	Shortly after General Motors filed for bankruptcy, a plan that will involve significant government ownership of the auto company, Republicans went into attack mode. The General Motors restructuring plan "is nothing more than another government grab of a private company and another handout to the union cronies who helped bankroll his presidential campaign," said Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele in a statement accompanying a newly minted ad. "President Obama will now own 60 percent of GM, and his union buddies will own almost 20 percent. And what do the taxpayers get? They’ll get stuck with up to a $50 billion tab for the taxpayer dollars Obama is using to pay for his takeover of GM." In its bankruptcy filing, the company said it has $172.81 billion in debt and $82.29 billion in assets — all that despite a $20 billion General Motors has already received from the government, money that was initially earmarked for buying bad mortgages from banks. Now, the company will adopt a restructuring plan that is "tailored to the realities of today's auto market," said Obama. It's "a plan that positions GM to move toward profitability, even if it takes longer than expected for our economy to fully recover; and it's a plan that builds on GM's recent progress in making better cars." So, there's no dispute that the government is invested in General Motors — it has already shelled out $20 billion in loans — but is Steele correct about the government's new financial ties to the ailing company? We assume that by referring to President Obama owning 60 percent of the automaker, Steele means that the government as a whole will own that stake under the restructuring plan. In fact, the White House was the first to state this fact, during a May 31 briefing with reporters. By the administration's own words, the RNC is correct on this point. Steele goes on to say that Obama's "union buddies will own almost 20 percent." To be exact, the United Auto Workers will get 17.5 percent of General Motor's common stock, plus cash to help pay for a $20 billion health care trust fund for retirees. Whether this is a boon to Obama's "union buddies," as Steele's statement says, is a matter of opinion. However, it's worth noting that the UAW endorsed Obama for president and spent more than $4 million to assist his candidacy, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. So Steele is right that the administration will have a 60 percent ownership in the new General Motors and that the union will have nearly 20 percent. Steele earns a True.	None	Michael Steele	None	None	None	2009-06-01T17:36:56	2009-06-01	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-06178	Since Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker took office, "we are losing jobs at rates not seen in decades."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/dec/14/kathleen-falk/potential-recall-candidate-kathleen-falk-says-job-/	Adversaries of Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pound him each time there’s news of job losses in the state. Perhaps they feel baited by his campaign promise (tracked by our Walk-O-Meter) to create 250,000 private-sector jobs during his four-year term. But Democrat Kathleen Falk-- a potential challenger to Walker should he face a recall election in 2012 -- went further in her criticism. In a Dec. 6, 2011 opinion article for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the former Dane County executive and 2002 gubernatorial candidate accused Walker of not telling the truth about what he would do as governor. She also included a series of other jabs, including one on job losses. "He said he is focused on creating jobs, but since Walker took office, we are losing jobs at rates not seen in decades," Falk wrote, "and his own administration recently admitted that he won't fulfill his promise to create 250,000 new jobs." The state Department of Revenue did project in October 2011 that Walker will fall short of the 250,000 mark, though the governor himself has not abandoned the goal. But that report also noted that jobs are up in 2011. So is it possible, as Falk claims, that Wisconsin is losing jobs at rates not seen since at least the 1990s? Falk’s evidence When we asked Falk spokeswoman Melissa Mulliken for evidence, she cited two Journal Sentinel news articles. She highlighted the first sentence of an article about job losses in September 2011: "Wisconsin shed private-sector jobs for the third consecutive month in September, while employment at government agencies and public schools registered its deepest drop in decades." The article went on to say that the loss of an estimated 11,500 jobs among city, county, state and public school employees was the "deepest single-month decline since at least 1990." (The figure has since been revised to 10,200, according to the state Department of Workforce Development, which produces the state’s monthly employment reports. That is still the largest monthly loss of public-sector jobs since at least 1990.) But Falk claimed "we are losing jobs at rates not seen in decades," without any qualification or explanation. We think to the average reader that means jobs overall -- not merely public-sector jobs-- especially since it was in the context of Walker’s 250,000-jobs pledge. Mulliken also cited an article about October 2011 job losses, which are the most recent figures available. The article said October marked the state’s fourth consecutive month of job declines -- but it said nothing about the losses being the worst in decades. Other evidence Let’s review Walker’s record on jobs during his first 10 months in office. As we’ve reported on the Walk-O-Meter, the state has added a net 20,100 private-sector jobs in 2011 through October. (The November numbers are due out Dec. 15). But as noted, public-sector jobs have dropped under Walker, so let’s get the full picture. Overall figures show the state gained jobs during each of the first six months of 2011 and lost jobs during each of the next four months. The net result? A total of 11,200 jobs have been added under Walker. That would seem to shoot down Falk’s claim. But let’s look even more closely. If you highlight the four months in 2011 where there were losses -- July through October -- the state lost 27,600 jobs, including more than 10,000 in September alone. Are either of those figures the highest in decades? No. Under Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle in 2009 -- when the state suffered a net loss of 121,000 jobs -- 84,700 jobs were lost during the first four months of the year, including 24,700 in April alone. Our conclusion Falk said that despite Walker’s claim to being focused on job creation, since he took office in January 2011, "we are losing jobs at rates not seen in decades" -- suggesting that job losses overall are the highest in decades. But the evidence she provided cites only public-sector jobs. Overall, the state has seen a net gain in jobs since Walker took office. And in the months when jobs have declined under Walker, we have to go back only two years to find job losses at a greater rate. We rate Falk’s statement False.	None	Kathleen Falk	None	None	None	2011-12-14T09:00:00	2011-12-06	['Wisconsin', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-pomt-11343	"Today, we (in Pennsylvania) have higher unemployment and lower job growth than most."	mostly true	/pennsylvania/statements/2018/apr/09/paul-mango/paul-mangos-dire-economic-portrait-pennsylvania-mo/	In his primary bid for Pennsylvania governor, Pittsburgh-area businessman and Republican candidate Paul Mango says the Commonwealth’s economy is stalled and lagging behind those in most states across the country. "Today, we have higher unemployment and lower job growth than most," Mango says in a three-minute-long online campaign video that was released in May 2017. Mango is one of three Republicans running in next month’s primary. Incumbent Gov. Tom Wolf will be on the November ballot. While it’s accurate that Pennsylvania’s economy has not rebounded as quickly as some following the Great Recession, is it true that its unemployment is higher and job growth "lower than most"? Unemployment Mango’s campaign video was released in May 2017, the same month he formally declared his candidacy for governor. At the time the ad was released, Pennsylvania’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 4.8 percent and higher than the rates in roughly 40 other states, according to data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national unemployment rate in May of 2017 was 4.3 percent. The same holds true today. Per Bureau of Labor Statistics data for Feb. 2018, Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate remained at 4.8 percent and higher than the unemployment rates of roughly 44 other states. The national rate was 4.1 percent last month. Job growth That brings us to the subject of job growth in Pennsylvania. It’s true that the Commonwealth’s economy did not rebound as quickly as some others following the Great Recession. But Antony Davies, an associate economics professor in Duquesne University’s Palumbo Donahue School of Business, said it’s also worth noting that Pennsylvania didn’t suffer as badly as many states during the recession, and therefore didn’t have as far to go in climbing out. "In 2009, unemployment nationwide was around 10 percent," Davies said by phone. "In Pennsylvania at that same time, it was around 8.4 or 8.5. We haven't improved as much as the rest of the country, but we didn’t start off as bad either." In his ad, Mango cites a 2016Philly.comarticle for his claim that Pennsylvania’s job growth remains unusually sluggish. That article says Pennsylvania job growth "has not been sufficient to keep up with the growth in the labor force." Matt Beynon, a spokesman for Mango’s campaign, said the campaign relied on news reports but also substantiated the claim with source data put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Using either total employment or non-farm employment, Pennsylvania is in the bottom half of all the states when it comes to job growth during the Wolf administration from Jan 2015-February 2018," Beynon said by email. "Additionally, it is also true that total employment in Pennsylvania has dropped each month now over the last ten months, as Pennsylvania’s economy continues to fall further behind other states." Frank Gamrat, a senior research associate with the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, a Pittsburgh-based conservative think tank, said Pennsylvania actually hasn't had a decrease to its private jobs count since May of 2010 but showed slower private employment gains than the nation did as a whole between 2016 and 2017. (Again, Mango’s ad was released in May of 2017.) And jobs continue to be added here. In February, the Current Employment Statistics (CES) monthly payroll survey reported 10,400 jobs were added in Pennsylvania and ranks that ahead of 37 other states and the District of Columbia. These same figures were cited in a release from the office of U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico and ranking member of the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee, which said Pennsylvania added 82,800 public and private sector jobs since February of last year, more than 43 other states in that time. Additionally, the Economic Policy Institute in March reported that the number of jobs added in Pennsylvania in the last 12 months is on par with the growth seen in most other states. Our ruling Mango is right that Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate remains higher than the rates of most other states, according to federal data. It’s also true that Pennsylvania job growth has generally lagged behind the national rate — although that appears to be correcting some. But his claim that Pennsylvania has lower job growth "than most" gives the impression that most states are seeing stronger job creation. The national rate and individual state rates are not the same thing. The national rate is skewed by states like California with larger populations and larger workforces than most, Davies said. It’s also important to note that some states with greater post-recession job growth suffered greater recession-era job losses than Pennsylvania, as Davies also pointed out. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Paul Mango	None	None	None	2018-04-09T06:00:00	2017-05-07	['Pennsylvania']
-snes-05879	Barack Obama and the National Anthem	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hand-over-heart/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Barack Obama and the National Anthem	27 October 2007	None	['None']
-pomt-11528	Says he has a plan for "$1 billion in tax relief for Illinois."	mostly false	/illinois/statements/2018/feb/16/bruce-rauner/does-gov-rauner-truly-have-1-billion-tax-relief-pl/	The day after unveiling a new budget blueprint for the coming fiscal year, Gov. Bruce Rauner followed that up with a televised campaign ad that portrays the re-election seeking incumbent as "leading the charge" to cut taxes for working people in Illinois. The Rauner ad takes aim at Democratic House Speaker Mike Madigan, the governor’s frequent nemesis, who gets blamed for imposing a $5 billion tax increase last summer over Rauner’s objection. At 14 seconds, the spot says: "Bruce Rauner vetoed the Madigan income tax increase, and now Rauner’s leading the charge to reverse it. The Rauner plan: More take-home pay for working families, lower taxes for job creators and $1 billion in tax relief for Illinois." Rauner didn’t actually include that tax cut in his spending plan, which ironically relies on the revenue bump from the very tax increase he assails. But he did argue in his speech to lawmakers that an overhaul to state pensions could be used to fund a "nearly $1 billion tax cut." Though Rauner rounded up, the value of the proposed tax cut is noted in the governor’s budget book as $917 million. At the same time, however, the Rauner budget did anticipate separate cost saving initiatives which, if realized, would over several years shift responsibility for more than $1 billion in expenses for teacher pensions off the state books and on to local property taxpayers. Given all that, can Rauner really lay claim as he does in his ad to having a plan for $1 billion in tax relief? We decided to take a look. Election year wish list versus realpolitik Rauner’s previous budgets have been laden with fiscal gimmicks, leading PolitiFact to twice award the governor its lowest Pants-on-Fire! credibility rating for claiming they were balanced. His latest offering appears constructed with more care. Not present, for example, was the major asterisk he slipped into his 2017 budget which attributed more than $4 billion in savings to a legislative compromise that had not been hammered out and never was. That said, the latest budget offering and tax-cut plan from Rauner has its share of difficult-to-achieve contingencies and faces challenges both in the Legislature and likely the courts as well. First, Rauner would need the Legislature to pass a pension-reform bill that upends the current formula for calculating future benefits. The governor didn’t put forward a specific proposal but he said the idea is based on a model that makes employees choose between annual salary increases and cost of living increases to pension benefits. What’s more, just months after Rauner took office in 2015 the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously struck down a sweeping pension reform plan approved two years earlier. The court found that the state Constitution says retirement benefits, once offered to public workers, can not be "diminished or impaired." At the same time, however, the court hinted that it might be possible to change the structure of pension benefits as long as employees got something of equal value in return. The concept has never been legally tested. So even if lawmakers and the governor agreed on a pension-reform fix, it almost certainly would face a court challenge with an uncertain outcome. The idea that the very difficult pension reform would be ironed out in the coming months leaves critics skeptical of Rauner’s plan. On top of that, the governor would have to convince the Democratic-controlled Legislature to then partly reverse the income tax increase it passed, with some Republican votes, last year. "It needs legislative approval on the front end and back end and a Constitutional review in the middle — other than that it’s golden," said Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago-based think tank partly funded by labor unions. Rauner’s campaign staff did not respond to questions from the BGA about the governor’s tax cut claim. Also left hanging were questions about the pension spending shift which over time could force local schools to seek significant property tax hikes. Separately, the governor’s office did issue this statement: "We don’t need pension reform to balance the budget, but if we can take that extra step we can put nearly $1 billion back in taxpayers’ pockets and begin to roll back the tax hike with a 1.4 percent tax rate cut. We look forward to working together with legislators on both sides of the aisle to pass these vital reforms and get Illinois moving in the right direction." Our ruling Rauner says he has a plan for "$1 billion in tax relief for Illinois" tied to a pension overhaul. But that statement is suspect on multiple levels — even for a campaign commercial. There is no actual plan to examine. The "plan" consists of brief mentions in a more than 550-page budget proposal and a few lines in a speech, but no details were provided to explain how the savings would be implemented or calculated. However, the tax cut was then featured prominently in a re-election campaign ad the day after Rauner unveiled his budget. What’s more, Rauner’s budget does include separate provisions to shift teacher pension costs off the state books and on to local school districts where property taxpayers would likely have to collectively pick up a tab costing more than $1 billion. Rauner’s ad highlights a vague $1 billion tax cut plan, but makes no mention of the added expense to local taxpayers that would be the practical effect of his pension cost shift. His tax cut claim should not be considered in a vacuum, which is why we rate it Mostly False.	None	Bruce Rauner	None	None	None	2018-02-16T07:00:00	2018-02-15	['Illinois']
-tron-02423	President George Bush Makes a Surprise Visit to Returning U.S. Troops	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bush-welcomes-troops/	None	military	None	None	None	President George Bush Makes a Surprise Visit to Returning U.S. Troops	Mar 17, 2015	None	['United_States']
-vogo-00375	Fact Check TV: Lifeguard Training and DeMaio	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-tv-lifeguard-training-and-demaio/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Check TV: Lifeguard Training and DeMaio	June 20, 2011	None	['None']
-vees-00346	In a speech Oct. 13 in Dumaguete City, Duterte said:	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-duterte-wrong-saying-ph-did-not-get-an	Official Development Assistance (ODA) from UN agencies amounted to $490.48 million, making up 3.14 percent of the Philippines’ total ODA portfolio in 2016.	None	None	None	Duterte,ODA,UN	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte wrong in saying PH did not get anything from UN	October 30, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-00180	Did the Mayor of Minneapolis Cancel 4th of July Fireworks But Allow a Muslim Animal Sacrifice at Vikings Stadium?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/minneapolis-mayor-muslim-sacrifice/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did the Mayor of Minneapolis Cancel 4th of July Fireworks But Allow a Muslim Animal Sacrifice at Vikings Stadium?	23 August 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-00873	Medicaid is close to 30 percent of the state budget and "the biggest expenditure at the state."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2015/mar/12/florida-chamber-commerce/florida-considers-medicaid-expansion-chamber-makes/	After rejecting Medicaid expansion in 2013, the Florida Legislature is taking a serious look at it this session. The program pays for health insurance for the very poor. On March 10, a state Senate panel approved a proposal that would allow Florida to accept $50 billion in federal dollars to expand coverage to about 800,000 low-income residents. The plan would establish a state-run private insurance exchange for residents who earn less than $16,000 a year or $33,000 for a family of four. Though the bill won unanimous support of the GOP-dominated Senate Health Policy Committee, it faces an uphill battle in the more conservative House. Also, it would require the federal government to grant Florida a waiver. The feds might object to parts of the Senate proposal that require beneficiaries to pay a monthly premium based on their salary, ranging from $3 to $25. During the Senate hearing, the Florida Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Mark Wilson said he had met with legislators to discuss the chamber’s ideas for a Medicaid proposal. "We recommended a 32 percent cap on state expenditures, we are coming close to 30 percent right now," he said. "It's the biggest expenditure at the state and we’d like to protect taxpayers with a 32 percent cap." Does Medicaid come close to eating up nearly one-third of the state budget and is it the state’s biggest expenditure? Medicaid and the state budget Medicaid is a joint state and federal program aimed at providing health insurance to the very poor. The 2010 Affordable Care Act encourages states to expand eligibility and agreed to pay 100 percent of the expansion for the first three years, declining to 90 percent in 2020 and beyond. Twenty nine states adopted the expansion -- six including Florida are considering it, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Republican Gov. Rick Scott initially opposed Medicaid expansion but switched his position in 2013 when he came out in support of it. But Scott didn’t lobby the GOP-led Legislature, which ultimately rejected the expansion. In 2014, Democratic challenger Charlie Crist attacked Scott for not pushing for it and argued it would have led to increased jobs in Florida. Edie Ousley, a spokeswoman for the chamber, sent PolitiFact Florida state budget documents, as well as information from groups such as Florida TaxWatch, to show how much of the budget is devoted to Medicaid. We also examined documents we received from the Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research. The original 2014-15 Medicaid appropriation was $23.6 billion from all state and federal funds. The total budget for all funds was about $77.08 billion, which means that Medicaid accounts for about 30.6 percent of the budget. On March 4, the state released its latest revision for how much is needed for Medicaid this year and concluded it was $23.52 billion -- about 55 percent is federal dollars and 45 percent is state money. "For all funds, Medicaid is the largest program," Amy Baker, the state’s chief economist, told PolitiFact Florida. But education programs -- including K-12 and higher education -- have received on average slightly more than 52 percent of all state general revenue appropriations since 1997-98. The second-largest policy area is human services. "Over this same period, the human services portion of the budget has grown from 25 percent to nearly 30 percent, primarily because of the state’s Medicaid program growth," Baker said. Nationwide, Medicaid accounts for about 20 percent of state general fund appropriations while K-12 accounts for about one-third, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Medicaid eats up such a large chunk of the budget due to rising health care costs and growing caseloads -- and it continues to grow at a faster rate than education spending, said Arturo Perez, fiscal affairs director for the NCSL. The National Association of State Budget Officers found that if they combined state and federal spending, on average about 26 percent of states’ budgets were for Medicaid in 2014. When combining those federal and state dollars, "there is no question it is the biggest chunk of the budget in total -- no question," said Kurt Wenner, of Florida TaxWatch. George Washington University health policy professor Leighton Ku said that as far as state-based fiscal burdens, a better measure is to focus on how much of the state general fund goes to Medicaid. That level is about 20 percent of state general fund expenditures, he said. "The general fund corresponds better to what state taxpayers contribute and takes out stuff like federal revenue. Still a lot, but much lower than 31 percent. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that Medicaid is a large component of state budgets, so there is reason for legislators to be concerned about the costs." But the majority of Medicaid costs that are paid by the federal government are not a burden to state taxpayers, but essentially an influx of federal funds to the state that promotes economic growth in the state, Ku said. "Thus, the actual ‘burden’ to state taxpayers is far less than 30 percent of their state tax dollars," he said. "In terms of state/local expenditures, education costs are always much higher." Our ruling Medicaid is close to 30 percent of the state budget and "the biggest expenditure at the state," Wilson said. There are two ways to look at Medicaid spending. The 30 percent figure is correct if Wilson counts both the state and federal dollars that go toward Medicaid, and it is the biggest expendituree. However, if we only count state dollars, then education eats up a bigger piece of the budget. It's important to understand that the federal government contributes to Medicaid, so the statement is accurate but needs additional information. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Florida Chamber of Commerce	None	None	None	2015-03-12T15:05:14	2015-03-10	['None']
-snes-04573	The movie "Finding Dory" features a transgender stingray named StingRhonda.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/finding-dory-transgender-stingray/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan Evon	None	‘Finding Nemo’ Sequel Features a Transgender Stingray	21 June 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-00380	"We saw the true danger of the FCC's net neutrality repeal when Verizon was caught throttling California fire fighters."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2018/sep/07/fight-future/could-net-neutrality-have-shielded-california-fire/	The idea that greedy corporations would screw over the average Internet user was perhaps the most vocal concern raised last year when a bundle of Internet protections, known as net neutrality, went on the chopping block. Now, three months after the regulations officially died, proponents are staking out a very different position as they work to resurrect the rules. Net neutrality must be restored, they argue, because its repeal has jeopardized public safety. "We saw the true danger of the FCC's net neutrality repeal when Verizon was caught throttling California firefighters," said digital rights group Fight for the Future. Let’s unpack that statement, starting with the California fire. Using tech to fight fires Golden State firefighters are still working to contain the largest blaze in state history. The Mendocino Complex Fire began burning in Northern California in late July, and so far has torched over 726,000 acres — more than double the size of Los Angeles. Firefighters from around the state have been called to action. Among the out-of-town responders were firefighters from Santa Clara County, located in the center of Silicon Valley, about 160 miles south of the inferno. The Santa Clara County fire department deployed a high-tech truck, known in firefighter jargon as an "Incident Support Unit," to serve as a command-and-control center. To work effectively, the trucks need a robust Internet signal. Its broadband hookup is used to power software like Google Sheets, which lets firefighters coordinate real-time responses. But in the midst of battling the largest fire in California history, the Santa Clara County truck’s Internet speed suddenly slowed to a crawl. At roughly 1/200 the original speed, firefighters would have been no worse off using a dial-up modem from the 1990s. So what the heck was happening? "(We) discovered the data connection was being throttled by Verizon," Fire Chief Anthony Bowden said in a statement filed as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the FCC. "These reduced speeds severely interfered with the unit’s ability to function effectively. "Even small delays in response translate into devastating effects," he added, "including loss of property, and, in some cases, loss of life." The throttling persisted for some time even after the firefighters complained to Verizon and told the company of their urgent need to have fast Internet restored. Verizon later apologized for the incident. The restrictions were in place because the firefighters had a contract that said excess data usage was subject to significantly slowed-down speeds. But the company said it failed to comply with its own internal policy of taking its foot off the brake during emergencies. "In supporting first responders in the Mendocino fire, we didn’t live up to our own promise of service and performance excellence when our process failed some first responders on the line, battling a massive California wildfire," Verizon said in a statement. "For that, we are truly sorry." The public relations fiasco drove Verizon to vow not to throttle west coast firefighters and some other first responders. But that olive branch had limited reach. For some, the incident was the most clear-cut demonstration of the shortcomings of industry self-policing in the post-net neutrality era. Instead of after-the-fact corporate damage control, they argue, what’s needed is to put the law back on the books. What is net neutrality anyways? So would Verizon’s conduct have been unlawful and punishable under net neutrality? That’s the main thrust of Fight for the Future’s statement. For the purposes of this fact-check, you need to bear in mind a couple of net neutrality’s key features. (See a more detailed explainer here.) A core idea behind net neutrality is that virtually all content will travel unimpeded around the same speed. "Usually, when one thinks of a net neutrality violation, one thinks of the violation of the no blocking, no throttling, and no paid prioritization rules," said Blair Levin, who served as chief of staff to the FCC chairman from 1993 through 1997. Of those three rules, we’re concerned here with only one: the ban on throttling. That rule generally prohibited Internet service providers, or ISPs, from slowing down customers’ speeds. However, to give ISPs flexibility in designing service plans that would avoid network congestion, the FCC carved out an exception. ISPs could offer plans that would allow willing customers to be throttled if they exceeded their data cap. In a sense, by signing this type of contract, customers waived their right not to be throttled. In addition to the no-throttling rule, you also need to know about net neutrality’s "general conduct" rule. That rule stopped companies like Verizon and Comcast from "unreasonably interfering" with customers’ Internet access. It also created an avenue for customers file complaints to the FCC, which could trigger an investigation into an ISP’s practices. One way to think about net neutrality with respect to ISPs is that it gave the FCC teeth. Net neutrality’s repeal, in turn, largely defanged it. So would the FCC have taken a bite out of Verizon if the old rules were still in play? The no-throttling rule The contract between Verizon and the California firefighters allowed throttling for excessive data use. In other words, the firefighters waived their right not to be throttled over their limit. Under the $37.99-per-month plan, the department would get high-speed broadband for the first 25 gigabytes. Data use beyond that was subject to speed reductions. The device installed in the California firefighter’s high-tech truck can use up to 5-10 gigabytes per day. At that rate, the firefighters quickly hit their cap. To some experts, the incident was simply the culmination of a series of mistakes — not a poster child for stronger regulation. "What really happened wasn’t a net neutrality issue," Berin Szoka, a tech lawyer and president of the group TechFreedom, wrote. "The (fire department) simply chose a data plan for their mobile command and control unit that was manifestly inappropriate for their needs." What’s clear is that because the firefighters’ service plan permitted the kind of speed restrictions that were allowed under the old rules, Verizon did not directly violate net neutrality’s no-throttling rule. "The throttling incident, while a real PR disaster for Verizon, has nothing to do with net neutrality," said Doug Brake, the director of broadband and spectrum policy at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. "The rules explicitly allowed for data plans that rate-limit or ‘throttle’ a data connection after a certain threshold." A spokeswoman for the Republican-majority FCC pointed out that the Santa Clara County fire department, which is party to a lawsuit against the FCC to restore net neutrality, does not argue the no-throttling rule was violated here. "What happened had nothing to do with net neutrality," she said. "Verizon was not discriminating on the basis of content, application, service or device." Even the group behind the claim we’re checking, Fight for the Future, conceded the narrow point about the contract falling under the no-throttling exception. Evan Greer, Fight for the Future’s deputy director, told us, "Verizon's throttling of firefighters was not a direct violation of the ‘no throttling’ rule since it related to a data cap." The ‘general conduct’ rule But there’s another rule that could have ensnared Verizon: The "general conduct" rule. This prohibited companies like Verizon and Comcast from "unreasonably interfering" with customers’ Internet access. It also created an avenue for customers to file complaints to the FCC. But the repeal of net neutrality choked off this avenue. "Under the 2015 rules, the firefighters could have filed a complaint with the FCC on grounds that the throttling was ‘unjust and unreasonable,’ " said Chip Stewart, a communication technology expert and professor at Texas Christian University. "After the current FCC repealed those rules, that is no longer an option." Gigi Sohn, who was a counselor to the FCC chairman while the net neutrality rules were written, said she believes the firefighters "could have made a persuasive case" if that option were available today. "The throttling of the Santa Clara County FPD’s broadband service was a disaster waiting to happen," Sohn wrote in an essay for NBC News. "In the absence of net neutrality rules and without strong FCC oversight, broadband providers like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T are free to run their networks as they please without regard to consumers, competition or public safety." Harold Feld, the senior vice president at the liberal Public Knowledge, said the key point comes down to whether or not there’s a process for aggrieved consumers to get a fair hearing. "It’s not just about whether Verizon behaved appropriately or not," he told PolitiFact, citing a blog post he wrote. "It’s about having clear rules and procedures in place so that when an emergency like this happens, people know what to do and can resolve the problem quickly." Some tech experts say additional oversight is unnecessary because companies are capable of policing themselves. (Verizon has promised to do so with more verve in the future, for instance.) But not all agree. "The removal of the 'cop on the beat' may have contributed to Verizon acting in ways that even it now admits was dumb," Levin said. "If there is no one watching, people act differently than if they think someone is watching." Our ruling Fight for the Future said, "We saw the true danger of the FCC's net neutrality repeal when Verizon was caught throttling California fire fighters." Under net neutrality, the firefighters could have filed a complaint against Verizon to the FCC, which at the very least would have launched an investigation, experts said. Repeal of the rules removed that avenue, thereby sidelining the FCC from serving as a "cop on the beat." However, the firefighters’ service plan permitted the kind of speed restrictions that were allowed under the old rules. So the company did not violate net neutrality’s no-throttling rule. The claim is partially accurate but leaves out important context. We rate this Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Fight for the Future	None	None	None	2018-09-07T15:09:49	2018-08-28	['California', 'Verizon_Communications']
-snes-00943	The vice president of Pfizer said human papillomavirus vaccine Gardasil is "deadly."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-pfizers-vp-blow-whistle-gardasil/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did Pfizer’s Vice President ‘Blow the Whistle’ on Gardasil?	1 March 2018	None	['Gardasil', 'Pfizer']
-pomt-03086	"I’ve been reducing the number of Democratic" Texas Senate committee "chairs since I came in" as lieutenant governor.	mostly false	/texas/statements/2013/sep/26/david-dewhurst/dewhurst-both-decreased-and-increased-texas-senate/	Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst talked up his toughness on Democrats during a Republican lieutenant governor candidate forum in Houston. Dewhurst, who presides over the 31-member Texas Senate, zeroed in on the topic in response to a question about what each candidate might have done differently to speed along anti-abortion legislation in 2013. Senate Democrats, helped by hollering spectators, kept the Republican-sought restrictions from surviving in one summer special session, though they subsequently passed into law. Dewhurst, speaking after another candidate pooh-poohed the idea of not appointing Democrats as chairs of Senate committees, said: "Now, I’ve been reducing the number of Democratic chairs since I came in." As recorded by David Jennings of the Republican-oriented Big Jolly Politics blog, Dewhurst continued: "You know how many committees we have? 17. You know how many Democratic chairs we have? Five. OK? So, I’ve been reducing them — and not one of them is one of the critical committees." He said, too, that "at the end of the day," senators turn to him when it comes to raising the Senate votes needed to advance legislation. Besides, he said, he ultimately succeeded in breaking the filibuster by Democratic Sen. Wendy Davis. We’re not getting into which committees are critical; that’s debatable. But we wondered if it’s correct that Dewhurst has been whittling Democratic committee chairs in the GOP-majority Senate since he assumed his gavel-wielding post in 2003. One of the lieutenant governor’s roles is to appoint committee rosters. That includes deciding which committees to continue or create and whom to appoint to each panel’s coveted chair and vice chair slots. By email, Dewhurst spokesman Travis Considine sent us a document indicating that Dewhurst appointed seven Democratic committee chairs in 2003 and one less in 2013. Considine said he did not have information on changes in the intervening years. To reach a comprehensive count, we scrolled through information posted online on a searchable web page overseen by the Texas Legislative Council. That information indicates that in 2001, before Dewhurst took his helm, Democrats held seven of 15 Senate committee chairmanships, or 47 percent. In 2003, according to the information, Dewhurst appointed Democrats to six of 15 committee chairmanships, or 40 percent. (Unlike Dewhurst’s campaign, we did not consider chairmanships of limited-life select committees.) And according to the same source, Dewhurst named Democrats to six of 18 committee chairmanships, or 33 percent, in 2013. And what precisely happened in the years between? Information on the council’s site indicates that Democrats were appointed to five of 15 committee chairmanships in 2005 and 2007, or 33 percent. Dewhurst named Democrats to six of 18 committee chairmanships, again 33 percent, in 2009, 2011 and 2013. On Dewhurst's watch, the number of Republican chairs has escalated, going from nine in 2003 to 12 since 2009. Our ruling Dewhurst said he has been reducing the number of Democratic Senate committee chairs since becoming lieutenant governor. He cut the number of Democratic chairs, from seven to six, in his first year in the leadership office. Then in 2005, he cut the number from six to five, a total that held in 2007. But as in 2003, Dewhurst named six Democratic chairs each regular legislative session from 2009 through 2013. Upshot: Dewhurst twice reduced the number of Democratic chairs, getting to five, but he also has bestowed chairmanships on six Senate Democrats for nearly half a decade. We rate this claim, which has an element of truth but ignores critical facts, as Mostly False. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	David Dewhurst	None	None	None	2013-09-26T06:00:00	2013-09-16	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Texas_Senate']
-pomt-10945	In 2017, ICE "arrested more than 127,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions or facing charges of breaking our nation's’ laws," and removed nearly 5,000 gang members.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/25/mike-pence/mike-pence-accurately-cites-ice-arrest-deportation/	Vice President Mike Pence countered Democratic attacks of an immigration agency by highlighting the agency’s enforcement success. Some Democrats have called for restructuring or abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, claiming it tears apart families and that it has lost its ability to effectively do its job under President Donald Trump. During a trip to Missouri to tout the Trump administration’s tax cuts, Pence chose to highlight ICE’s arrest and deportations in 2017 as signs of its effectiveness. "Last year alone, I’m proud to report to you that ICE agents removed more than 226,000 illegal immigrants from our country," Pence said. "In fact, they arrested more than 127,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions or facing charges of breaking our nation's laws, including ICE removed nearly 5,000 gang members from our streets." Readers asked us to verify Pence’s data. We found that he accurately cited ICE numbers. But data also showed that the most common charges and convictions were for traffic offenses, immigration, and "dangerous drugs." Pence’s wording could leave the wrong impression that those criminal convictions were for more serious offenses. At least 226,119 people were deported by ICE in fiscal year 2017, according to the agency. (Fiscal year 2017 started Oct. 1, 2016, so it included nearly four months of the Obama administration.) ICE deported more people the year before, at 240,255. But ICE said the proportion of removals due to ICE arrests was greater in 2017 than in 2016. ICE’s overall removal numbers account for people who were arrested by ICE inside of the country and people apprehended at the border and turned over to ICE for removal. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Pence’s number of people arrested by ICE checks out with the agency’s data — of 143,470 administrative arrests, nearly 128,000 had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. Administrative arrests are arrests of people who were either present in the country illegally or had somehow violated the terms of their entry/status, an ICE spokeswoman said. Here’s a breakdown of those arrests: • Criminal convictions: 105,736 • Pending criminal charges: 22,256 • No known criminal charges or convictions: 15,478 A criminal conviction or charge for breaking an American law covers a broad category. The majority stemmed from non-violent offenses. The most common convictions and charges were for immigration, drugs, and traffic offenses, including DUI. Among other offenses ICE listed were homicide, "public peace," "general crimes,"and "liquor." See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Pence also said nearly 5,000 gang members had been removed. ICE in fiscal year 2017 deported 5,396 gang members. ICE began tracking gang removals in fiscal year 2014, but does not track removals by specific gang affiliation. Pence’s numbers about ICE’s operations check out. So we rate his statement True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Mike Pence	None	None	None	2018-07-25T09:00:00	2018-07-19	['None']
-tron-00021	Congress is Getting a $20,000 Raise in 2018, Social Security Payments Going up $2 Per Month	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/congress-getting-20000-raise-2018-social-security-going-2-per-month/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	['congress', 'government spending', 'social security']	Congress is Getting a $20,000 Raise in 2018, Social Security Going up $2 Per Month	 Dec 19, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02005	"By the time I left" the State Department, "economic growth was up and opium production was down" in Afghanistan, while "infant mortality declined" and school enrollment rose by more than sevenfold.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jun/10/hillary-clinton/new-book-hillary-clinton-touts-quality-life-advanc/	In her book, Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton writes about her experiences as secretary of state in the Obama administration. One of the most high-profile countries in her portfolio was Afghanistan, a country that the United States had invaded in 2001 in order to oust the Taliban. In the book, Clinton took some pride in Afghanistan’s accomplishments on her watch. "By the time I left State, the Afghans had made progress," Clinton wrote. "Economic growth was up and opium production was down. Infant mortality declined by 22 percent. Under the Taliban only 900,000 boys and no girls had been enrolled in schools. By 2010, 7.1 million students were enrolled, and nearly 40 percent of them were girls." We decided to check the accuracy of her statistics. We used several sources, including the Brookings Institution’s periodic Afghanistan Index, which collects a wide range of data on the country, as well as information from the World Bank and the World Health Organization. (We won't be addressing whether she or the administration deserves credit for these improvements. The United States, as the major western military and diplomatic force in the country, clearly had an impact, but figuring out exactly how much is more art than science.) Is economic growth up? Given the multitude of challenges it faced, ranging from war to poverty, Afghanistan certainly could have done worse in economic growth than it did between 2009 and 2013. Here’s Afghanistan’s annual percentage increase in gross domestic product since 2000, according to the World Bank. 2000 ‘01 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 ‘11 ‘12 7.3 7.0 2.9 5.7 1.1 11.2 5.6 3.7 3.6 21.0 8.4 6.1 14.4 According to this data, the country’s economic growth pattern has ranged widely, but it’s certainly been growing rather than shrinking. Still, lest anyone assume that the 14-percent-plus growth in 2012 -- Clinton’s last year as secretary of state -- is the new normal, the International Monetary Fund projected that Afghanistan would grow by a far slower 3.1 percent in 2013 (lower than any year since 2004) and 4.8 percent in 2014. Is opium production down? The Brookings study found that metric tons of opium production has also undergone a zigzagging course in recent years. Whether it declined depends on what time frame you’re looking at. 2002 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 ‘11 ‘12 3,400 3,600 4,200 4,100 6,100 8,200 7,700 6,900 3,600 5,800 3,700 The data show that opium production surged in 2006, peaked in 2007, and began falling in 2008 -- before Clinton became secretary of state. During her tenure, it went down, then up, then down again. Its 2012 level was roughly on par with the amount in 2002 and 2003. During Clinton’s four years, opium production averaged 5,000 metric tons per year. That’s slightly less than the average of the four years preceding her time as secretary of state. Has infant mortality declined? Mortality rates for children under 5 has indeed declined, at least according to the World Health Organization. Here’s the WHO’s data on infant mortality rate -- deaths from birth to age 1 per 1000 live births: 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2012 120 102 94 83 74 71 The decline between 2005 and 2012 -- the closest we could get to a "before and after" for Clinton -- is a 14 percent decrease, a bit smaller than the 22 percent. Is school enrollment up sevenfold? This is the statistic for which Clinton seems most on-target -- and the one about which Afghan officials can feel most proud, assuming the data are accurate. Here are the enrollment figures in millions, according to the Brookings study: 2001 ‘02 ‘03 ‘04 ‘05 ‘06 ‘07 ‘08 ‘09 ‘10 ‘11 ‘12 ‘13 <1.0 2.0 3.0 3.7 4.7 5.2 5.6 5.9 6.5 7.1 8.3 9.0 10.0 So, for total enrollment, Clinton is exactly right. As for girls, the Brookings report says that "virtually none" of the students enrolled in 2001 were girls, a number that increased to roughly 40 percent by 2010. So she’s right about girls’ enrollment as well. Clinton is probably three-quarters accurate, said Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings scholar who helped create the Afghanistan Index. "The opium issue hasn’t been encouraging, but the other trend lines are all essentially what she writes," he said. Our rating Clinton said that over the course of her tenure as secretary of state, economic growth and school enrollment in Afghanistan was up, while opium production and infant mortality were down. Her claims about school enrollment, infant mortality, and economic growth are basically accurate, but the data on opium production suggests that her claim is somewhat exaggerated. We rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2014-06-10T17:24:46	2014-06-10	['Afghanistan', 'United_States_Department_of_State']
-pomt-02593	"John Cornyn backed his pal David Dewhurst" for the U.S. Senate over Ted Cruz.	false	/texas/statements/2014/jan/28/steve-stockman/john-cornyn-was-neutral-2012-us-senate-race-until-/	An occasionally out-of-pocket Republican challenger to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas has leveled eye-catching charges about the second-term senator, calling Cornyn liberal and also suggesting he’s been supportive of the Obamacare law that Cornyn initially voted against in late 2009. Cornyn’s campaign spokesman, Drew Brandewie, emailed us this month asking us to look into another claim by U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Friendswood. On a Stockman campaign web page, Stockman said Cornyn supported Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in the 2012 Senate election won by Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz, who started the race as a longshot. Stockman’s words: "And while John Cornyn backed his pal David Dewhurst, I back Ted Cruz." We're not sure how to pin whether Stockman now backs Cruz; the state's junior senator isn't on a ballot in 2014. We focused, instead, on whether Cornyn backed Dewhurst over Cruz in 2012. Stockman, whom we were unable to reach, did not elaborate on his claim on his website. During the 2012 race, Dewhurst, lieutenant governor since 2003, was the early favorite as an established statewide officeholder; Cruz hadn't previously run for office. And along the way there was a hint of grit between Cruz and Cornyn, whom Cruz publicly declined to endorse for a Senate party leadership post. On March 5, 2012, we rated as Half True a Dewhurst claim that Cruz had slurred Republican senators including Cornyn as "graybeards" and "spineless jellyfish." Cruz used those descriptives when talking about Republican candidates, conceivably including senators whom he viewed as insufficiently conservative. Yet it wasn’t clear Cruz was referring to Cornyn. But Brandewie pointed out news accounts indicating Cornyn was neutral in the race until Cruz won their party’s nomination. These included a news blog post by the Dallas Morning News on the night of the Senate runoff July 31, 2012, stating that Cornyn—"who remained neutral in the race, despite Cruz’s reluctance to back him in… his bid for Senate GOP whip—praised Cruz for a ‘well-deserved and well-earned victory.’" The post quoted Cornyn as saying in a statement: "This has been a hard-fought and spirited primary battle and the people of Texas would have been fortunate to have any one of these well-qualified candidates as their next U.S. senator." Separately, we spotted a July 27, 2012, news blog post by the Austin American-Statesman stating that Cornyn had cast his Senate runoff ballot that morning without announcing a preferred aspirant. The post quoted Cornyn as saying: "I’m not picking sides for a very practical reason. I’m going to have to work — it will be my pleasure to work — with whoever the Republican nominee is. We are looking forward to an ally and reinforcements to help us fight the battle for the free-enterprise system and help turn the country around." A July 29, 2012, Statesman news story noted that Cornyn that year was chairing the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which helps Republicans in Senate races. Cornyn, the story said, "has kept mum about his home state race and instead has focused on getting other Republicans elected across the country." We found no news stories saying Cornyn was backing Dewhurst in the race. Our ruling Stockman said Cornyn supported Dewhurst over Cruz for the U.S. Senate in 2012. There’s no evidence of that. In contrast, news reports say Cornyn revealed no preference before congratulating Cruz for winning the Republican nomination, making Stockman's claim False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Steve Stockman	None	None	None	2014-01-28T14:48:49	2014-01-24	['Ted_Cruz', 'United_States', 'John_Cornyn']
-pomt-08939	"Education Week rates Ohio schools in the top five in the nation."	true	/ohio/statements/2010/jul/24/yvette-mcgee-brown/lieutenant-governor-candidate-mcgee-brown-boasts-o/	In her first campaign speech as a candidate for Ohio lieutenant governor, Yvette McGee Brown, running mate of Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, highlighted Strickland’s focus on primary education during his first term in office. She noted that the governor increased school funding by 5.5 percent (a claim that we rated as false) and that he committed the state to focus on science, technology, engineering and math — or STEM. She then said this focus on education is bringing Ohio national recognition. "The critics have spoken and every Ohioan should hear what they have to say about our schools," she said. "The Education Commission of the States gave Ohio its award for the most innovative education reform plan in the nation. Education Week rates Ohio schools in the top five in the nation." Indeed, in Education Week’s Quality Counts 2010 report, Ohio’s education system was ranked fifth best in the nation, with an overall grade of B-. But a deeper look behind Education Week’s grading system reveals some less-flattering findings. To calculate the overall rankings, the trade publication graded each state on four primary areas. Ohio’s rating in some of those areas belies its lofty overall ranking: In ‘Chance for Success,’ a category that gauges how well an Ohio education prepares students for the next stages of their schooling or life, Ohio did not fare well for the number of students attending preschool and for the number of adults with two- or four-year college degrees. Rank: 25th; Grade: C+. In the ‘School Finance’ category, Ohio again rates in the middle of the pack, despite increasing spending on public education in recent years, as Brown noted. Rank: 18th; Grade: C+. Ohio rated best in the ‘Standards, Assessment & Accountability’ category, recognized for having well-reasoned and challenging learning objectives and curriculums. Rank: 3rd; Grade: A. And in ‘Teaching Profession,’ an area judging each state’s quality of teachers and strength of its educational leaders, Ohio is considered average. Rank: 14th; Grade: C+. Brown’s statement is correct about the overall ranking. But we believe it is important to add context to that overall ranking by noting that Ohio received C+ ratings, or barely average, in three of the four areas graded. We rate this statement True. Comment on this item.	None	Yvette McGee Brown	None	None	None	2010-07-24T08:00:00	2010-06-22	['Ohio']
-pomt-04202	Says that in 2011, Oregon had "the second fastest growing economy in the nation."	true	/oregon/statements/2012/dec/05/john-kitzhaber/did-oregon-have-nations-second-fastest-growing-eco/	Oregon’s economy is looking up -- and in a recent speech at the Oregon Leadership Summit, Gov. John Kitzhaber counted the ways. Unemployment is falling, our credit rating is rising, the state ranks as one of the friendliest to business and just last year, Oregon had "the second fastest growing economy in the nation." It was that last one that caught our ear. Oregon usually lags behind the country -- but when the state is hot, it’s hot, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Still we decided to check it out. We got in touch with Amy Wojcicki, the governor’s spokeswoman, and she reminded us of an article The Oregonian published last June. The story’s headline spoke for itself: "Oregon economy growing at nation’s second-fastest rate." The story cited figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics. In 2011, Oregon’s gross domestic product increased by 4.7 percent. The state was second only to North Dakota, which saw its GDP grow by 7.6 percent that year. The numbers show the governor was right. Still, we decided to dig just a little bit further because we know, when it comes to economics and statistics, nothing is ever quite as clear cut as it seems. We called up Tim Duy, a University of Oregon economist. "That's the fact -- you can certainly point to it." But, he added, "I would be wary. "I think it's important to recognize that a significant amount of those gains came from manufacturing" -- particularly microchips and related industries. All of this was covered in the original article. Indeed, manufacturing was far and away the biggest driver of growth that year. Intel alone had huge growth. So, we asked, what’s the problem with that? "It's a real effect," Duy said, "But is this the experience of the average Oregonian? I don't think the average Oregonian perceives the economy as growing at the second fastest rate in the nation." We asked Duy if he could suggest another measurement that might provide a fuller picture -- he suggested the rate of job growth. Fortunately, this just came up in the state’s most recent revenue forecast. According to that report, which based its numbers on figures from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Oregon ranks 26th overall in that category. Said another way: We’re perfectly average. In a recent speech, Gov. Kitzhaber mentioned that a year ago, Oregon boasted the second-fastest growing economy in the nation. It was just one fact of several that he referenced to make the point that the state is rebounding from a dismal recession. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the governor’s statement is accurate. We agree with Duy that most Oregonians don’t feel like they’re living in an economic boom, but that doesn’t make the governor wrong. We rate this claim True.	None	John Kitzhaber	None	None	None	2012-12-05T15:48:01	2012-12-03	['Oregon']
-tron-01673	Senate Bill 2219 to Regulate Media That Insults or Offends Islam in U.S.	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/senate-bill-2219/	None	government	None	None	None	Senate Bill 2219 to Regulate Media That Insults or Offends Islam in U.S.	Mar 17, 2015	None	['United_States']
-goop-02023	Brad Pitt Has “Moved On” To Jennifer Lawrence, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-moved-on-jennifer-lawrence-affair/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Brad Pitt Has NOT “Moved On” To Jennifer Lawrence, Despite Claim	10:36 am, December 16, 2017	None	['Jennifer_Lawrence']
-pose-01187	"After students choose a program or major, they will choose a morning or evening schedule instead of picking individual courses."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/abbott-o-meter/promise/1277/mandate-block-scheduling-two-year-associate-degree/	None	abbott-o-meter	Greg Abbott	None	None	Mandate block scheduling for two-year associate degree programs	2015-01-20T14:00:00	None	['None']
-vees-00209	THIS WEEK IN FAKE NEWS: Mark Zuckerberg will delete Facebook	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/week-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg-will-not-delete-facebook	None	None	None	None	fake news	THIS WEEK IN FAKE NEWS: Mark Zuckerberg will NOT delete Facebook	May 11, 2018	None	['Mark_Zuckerberg']
-pomt-08689	"On (Rob Portman's) watch as Bush's trade czar, our deficit with China exploded" and "as Bush's budget chief, Portman oversaw a spending spree that doubled the deficit."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/sep/09/lee-fisher/lee-fisher-hammers-rob-portman-record-bush-adminis/	As a Democrat trying to win a Republican-held Senate seat in economically distressed Ohio, it's not surprising that Lee Fisher would focus his campaign ads on the economy. In a recent ad, he attacked opponent Rob Portman's service under President George W. Bush as U.S trade representative and then as director of the Office of Management and Budget. "Congressman Rob Portman knows how to grow the economy -- in China," the ad says. "He voted for billions in tax breaks for companies that export jobs. On his watch as Bush's trade czar, our deficit with China exploded, sending 100,000 Ohio jobs overseas. As Bush's budget chief, Portman oversaw a spending spree that doubled the deficit. Outsourcing, bad trade deals, soaring deficicts. Congressman Portman -- a real economic plan, but not for Ohio." Let's get something out of the way first: The honorific in the ad aside, Portman last served in Congress in 2005. (Perhaps the Fisher camp thinks anyone associated with Congress will attract extra ire from voters.) We also won't check the jobs figure, which is an estimate over which reasonable people can disagree. Instead, we'll focus on two other claims about Portman -- that "on his watch as Bush's trade czar, our deficit with China exploded," and that "as Bush's budget chief, Portman oversaw a spending spree that doubled the deficit." To analyze the claim about the trade deficit, we turned to the Census Bureau, which tracks foreign trade statistics on a month-by-month and year-by-year basis. We looked at the time that Portman served as U.S. trade representative, which was from April 29, 2005, to May 26, 2006. We found that the trade deficit went up by almost $228 billion over that 13-month period. For comparison's sake, we looked at the 13 months prior to Portman taking the job. We found that the trade deficit with China rose by about $189 million during that period. Comparing those two numbers, the cumulative trade deficit under Portman was about 21 percent higher than it was for the equivalent time period just before he took office. We didn't see any direct disagreement on this point in the Portman camp's news release attacking the ad or in their e-mail interview with us. The release tries to deflect that ad by offering several examples of how Portman went after the Chinese on trade enforcement. But it doesn't offer an alternate way of looking at trade deficit numbers. So while the term "exploded" is a bit of an exaggeration, a 21 percent increase is nothing to sneeze at. As for the deficit, we turned to OMB historical tables. As OMB director from May 26, 2006, to August 3, 2007, Portman was deeply involved in the fiscal year 2008 budget process. (The fiscal 2007 budget would have been handled by his predecessor.) The fiscal 2008 deficit of nearly $459 billion was more than twice the fiscal 2007 deficit, which approached $161 billion. Portman's camp counters that Bush's 2008 budget mapped out a plan for a fiscal 2008 budget deficit that was actually smaller than the fiscal 2007 budget deficit, with surpluses returning by fiscal 2012. The Portman campaign blames changes made by the Democratic-controlled Congress for busting the budget. Since the president's budget is essentially a wish list that is always subject to negotiation before implementation, we don't buy the argument that Portman should simply be judged on the initial proposal in the budget process. Gene Steuerle, an economist at the liberal-leaning Urban Institute, says that the final deficit numbers owed at least as much, if not more, to decisions and events after Portman had left OMB, including Bush's economic stimulus package -- the financial bailout and the decline in tax revenues that followed the official start of the recession in December 2007. Indeed, in OMB's Mid-Session Review -- a budget document produced on July 11, 2007, shortly before Portman left OMB -- the agency projected the deficit for fiscal 2008 to be $258 billion. If we take this projection and compare it to the 2007 deficit, it's about 60 percent higher. That's less than double. This brings up the broader question of how much of the burden for these economic numbers should fall on anyone who holds Portman's former positions. The president, Congress and other cabinet officials have a say in both areas, and broader economic trends shape the patterns as well. "There's nothing a USTR can do about it when the primary cause is U.S. demand and a mercantilist Chinese exchange rate policy," said J.D. Foster, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. On the other hand, the ad is careful to say that the economic developments occurred "on (Portman's) watch," rather than that he was solely responsible for them. (That makes it safer than a prior Fisher claim that PolitiFact Ohio ruled False -- that Portman was "the one who actually sucked the jobs out of the (Mahoning) Valley and sent them to China.") So let's review what we found. The ad overstated how big the jump in both statistics was, but in both cases, the numbers did increase significantly on Portman's watch. And while we acknowledge that Portman isn't the only factor -- nor, perhaps, even the primary factor -- in the course of both economic trends, we do think that in the middle of a campaign, challenging an opponent on his record in office is fair game. On balance, we rate the item Half True.	None	Lee Fisher	None	None	None	2010-09-09T11:16:35	2010-09-07	['George_W._Bush', 'China']
-pomt-13224	When Hillary Clinton "ran the State Department, $6 billion was missing. How do you miss $6 billion? You ran the State Department, $6 billion was either stolen — they don't know."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/20/donald-trump/trump-wrongly-says-6-billion-went-missing-state-de/	At the third and final presidential debate, Donald Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton’s State Department lost $6 billion, and that the money might have been stolen. "The problem is, you talk, but you don't get anything done, Hillary. You don't," Trump said in Las Vegas Oct. 19. "Just like when you ran the State Department, $6 billion was missing. How do you miss $6 billion? You ran the State Department, $6 billion was either stolen — they don't know. It's gone, $6 billion. If you become president, this country is going to be in some mess. Believe me." Clinton responded, "Well, first of all, what he just said about the State Department is not only untrue, it's been debunked numerous times." In fact, the claim that the State Department lost $6 billion, or that it was stolen, has been debunked. Including by us. Trump’s inaccurate claim stems from a misreading of a March 2014 alert out of the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General. The alert found that paperwork for various contracts was mismanaged. These contracts were together worth about $6 billion. The money didn’t go missing; the paperwork did. The State Department Inspector General sent out an alert that summarized previous audits, which found that paperwork for over $6 billion worth of contracts from 2008 to 2014 "were incomplete or could not be located at all." The period of the audits included time before Clinton became secretary of state. A spokesman for the Office of the Inspector General told PolitiFact previously the alert speaks for itself, but many seemed to misinterpret what it actually said. The confusion prompted Inspector General Steve Linick to pen a clarification in the Washington Post. "Some have concluded based on this that $6 billion is missing. The alert, however, did not draw that conclusion," he wrote. "Instead, it found that the failure to adequately maintain contract files — documents necessary to ensure the full accounting of U.S. tax dollars — ‘creates significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the department’s contract actions.’ " In other words, the State Department was terrible at paperwork. The $6 billion figure refers to the total amount affected by file mismanagement. It’s akin to failing to get a receipt for your $20 lunch. Documentation over where that $20 went is gone, but not the $20 itself. For example, the inspector general alert notes that an audit of the Bureau of African Affairs found that the office was unable to provide full administrative files for eight separate contracts, valued at a combined $34.8 million. So the State Department under Clinton may have been financially disorganized and, according to the alert, opening itself up to fraud. But it didn’t "lose" $6 billion. Nor was there any suggestion it was "stolen." Our ruling Trump said that when Clinton "ran the State Department, $6 billion was missing. How do you miss $6 billion? You ran the State Department, $6 billion was either stolen — they don't know." The $6 billion figure comes from a State Department inspector general report that found paperwork for various contracts had been mismanaged. The $6 billion was not missing or stolen — it had been doled out in a number of contracts — but the paperwork was missing. We rate Trump’s claim Pants on Fire. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/5513387c-9761-413a-abbd-a5d048e1f79c Correction: The alert summarized previous audits of State Department contracts. A previous version of this fact-check was unclear on this point.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-10-20T00:43:55	2016-10-19	['United_States_Department_of_State', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-vees-00142	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Bato Dela Rosa 'murder' at BuCor	fake	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-bato-dela-rosa-murder-bucor-hoax	None	None	None	None	fake news,death hoax,Bato Dela Rosa	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Bato Dela Rosa 'murder' at BuCor a HOAX	July 12, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03891	Bill Clinton fathered an illegitimate, mixed-race son named Danney Williams with an Arkansas prostitute in 1985.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-clinton-illegitimate-son/	None	Conspiracy Theories	None	David Emery	None	Does Bill Clinton Have an Illegitimate Son Named Danney Williams?	3 October 2016	None	['Arkansas', 'Bill_Clinton']
-pomt-12528	"Trump looking to open up E Coast & new areas for offshore oil drilling when Congress has passed no new safety standards since BP"	true	/florida/statements/2017/apr/21/edward-markey/trump-wants-expand-oil-drilling-despite-congress-n/	On the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., attacked President Donald Trump for his stance on drilling and portrayed Congress as doing nothing in the aftermath of the 2010 explosion. "Trump looking to open up E Coast & new areas for offshore oil drilling when Congress has passed no new safety standards since BP," Markey tweeted April 20. We wanted to know what Trump’s plans were and if Congress has done nothing since the explosion. The April 20, 2010, explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig was the worst offshore drilling catastrophe in U.S. history. The explosion killed 11 workers, and 134 million gallons of oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico. We emailed a spokesman for Trump and did not get a reply; however, a spokesman for the Bureau of Ocean Management sent information about the reorganization of federal agencies that oversee drilling during the Obama administration. Trump on drilling In 2006, Congress passed a bill to ban oil drilling within 125 miles off much of Florida’s coast and up to 235 miles at some points. The ban is set to expire in 2022. There have been efforts by some Republicans to expand offshore drilling, but so far they have failed. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La, sponsored The American Energy and Conservation Act of 2016 to allow drilling 50 miles off Florida’s Gulf Shores, but the Senate rejected moving ahead on it in November. In response, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., filed a bill to extend the ban by five years, but the Senate hasn’t voted on his bill. During the campaign, Trump generally spoke favorably of expanding oil drilling, although he sounded skeptical about a proposal to allow offshore drilling closer to the Florida beaches in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times, PolitiFact’s parent company, in February 2016. "They've already got plenty in the Gulf," Trump said. "It would be a little bit of a shame (to expand drilling closer to Florida), because there's so much fracking, and there's so much oil that we have now that we never thought possible. That's an issue I'd absolutely study and do the right thing." But later in the campaign Trump endorsed more drilling and promised to "accomplish a complete American energy independence. Complete. Complete." Trump’s America First Energy Plan called for opening up onshore and offshore leasing on federal lands. A couple months into his administration in March, Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke proposed leasing 73 million acres offshore Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida for oil and gas exploration and development starting in August 2017. That was similar to the Obama administration plan. As he was leaving office, President Barack Obama banned drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans for the next five years, but allowed it in the gulf primarily in areas other than Florida. But despite Trump’s rhetoric, the industry hasn’t shown much interest in expanding drilling due to low oil prices, said Athan Manuel, who directs Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program. "Ideologically the Trump administration wants to push drilling everywhere, but companies are being cautious right now because the cost so low," he said. On March 28, Trump issued an executive order that called for a review of agency actions that "potentially burden the safe, efficient development of domestic energy resources," including oil. Regulations following explosion After BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion, lawmakers couldn’t agree on safety standard legislation. In 2010, the House approved an overhaul of safety standards, but it never got the approval in the Senate. The Obama administration took some steps to tighten rules in an effort to avoid similar spills, although the rules took several years to develop, and some environmentalists have criticized them as insufficient. In April 2015 -- five years after the explosion -- the administration unveiled a proposed rule to tighten safety standards for blowout preventers, devices that are designed to stop undersea oil wells from exploding. During the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the blowout preventer malfunctioned. The rule was finalized in March 2016. Bob Bea, an expert on risk management and a former Shell executive, told PolitiFact that little has changed in either the regulatory regime or the industrial regime in the United States. He repeatedly said during the Obama administration that the government hadn’t gone far enough in terms of risk assessment. "Yes, new government 'rules' have been enacted, and new industry 'guidelines' have been issued, but either they have not been implemented or they have not been implemented properly," he said. The Government Accountability Office reported in March 2017 that the Interior Department has struggled to successfully implement key initiatives to improve offshore oversight. For example, a risk-based facility inspection initiative was halted due to concerns about its usefulness and unclear protocols. Our ruling Markey tweeted, "Trump looking to open up E Coast & new areas for offshore oil drilling when Congress has passed no new safety standards since BP." During the campaign, Trump frequently expressed support to open up more oil drilling. Since in office, his administration proposed leasing 73 million acres offshore starting in August 2017. After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, Congress couldn’t agree on safety standards. The Obama administration took some steps to improve safety standards, though some environmentalists say that the government didn’t go far enough. We rate this claim True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Edward Markey	None	None	None	2017-04-21T16:51:11	2017-04-20	['United_States_Congress', 'BP']
-goop-00131	Scott Disick, Sofia Richie Having Baby To Get Back At Kardashians?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/scott-disick-sofia-richie-baby-kardashians/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Scott Disick, Sofia Richie Having Baby To Get Back At Kardashians?	12:00 am, October 16, 2018	None	['None']
-afck-00203	“For every one person receiving treatment [in 2000], there are 17 who have it today. That means we have increased 17 times at least, the number of people treated.”	understated	https://africacheck.org/reports/un-chief-on-hivaids-3-claims-by-ban-ki-moon-scrutinised/	None	None	None	None	None	UN chief on HIV/AIDS: 3 claims by Ban Ki-moon scrutinised	2016-07-27 10:34	None	['None']
-snes-00469	In 2017 and 2018, teenage boys widely purchased and used a urethra-covering adhesive band called the Jiftip.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jiftip-condom-penis/	None	Business	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Are Teenagers Using Adhesives to Avoid Resorting to Condoms?	12 June 2018	None	['None']
-chct-00016	FACT CHECK: Trump Flew To Wisconsin For A Rally - Here Are 3 Checks On His Claims	none	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/10/25/fact-check-trump-rally-wisconsin/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	3:04 PM 10/25/2018	None	['None']
-snes-04497	Alton Sterling was a member of the Bloods gang and had a lengthy criminal record.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alton-sterling-arrest-record/	None	Crime	None	Dan Evon	None	Alton Sterling: Longtime Criminal and Gang Member?	8 July 2016	None	['None']
-snes-05820	Musician Ringo Starr admitted that Paul McCartney passed away in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-is-dead/	None	Media Matters	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Paul McCartney Die in 1966?	2 March 2015	None	['None']
-snes-00242	John F. Kennedy posed a speculative question about what would happen if God were black.	misattributed	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kennedy-suppose-god-is-black/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did John F. Kennedy Ask ‘Suppose God is Black?’	8 August 2018	None	['God', 'John_F._Kennedy']
-tron-02340	Advanced Russian fighters found in the sand in Iraq	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/foxbat/	None	military	None	None	None	Advanced Russian fighters found in the sand in Iraq	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Russia']
-goop-02485	Scott Disick Banned From Seeing Kids Following Psychiatric Hold, 	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/scott-disick-banned-kids-hospitalized-psychiatric-hold-children-custody/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Scott Disick NOT Banned From Seeing Kids Following Psychiatric Hold, Despite Report	5:49 pm, September 7, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-03003	"No doctors who went to an American medical school will be accepting Obamacare."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/16/ann-coulter/ann-coulter-says-no-doctors-who-went-american-medi/	Conservative commentator Ann Coulter is not known for mincing words, but a recent column prompted many PolitiFact readers to contact us, seeking a fact-check. In the Oct. 9, 2013, column -- titled, "Democrats to America: We Own the Government!" -- Coulter pummels Democrats over provisions of President Barack Obama’s health care law. We were most intrigued by one claim, since we hadn’t heard it before -- that "no doctors who went to an American medical school will be accepting Obamacare." Really? We tried to ask Coulter through her speaker’s bureau if she could provide any evidence for this, but we did not receive a reply. We are sure the claim wasn't intended as a joke, because it's included in a bullet-point list of straightforward criticisms of the law. So let’s start by looking at the claim literally. Is there any provision of the Affordable Care Act that would prevent U.S.-trained doctors from accepting "Obamacare" patients -- that is, patients who secure insurance through the marketplaces that are a centerpiece of the law? We feel comfortable, both from talking to experts and from our years of reporting on the law, that there is no such provision. If there were, it would probably be ripe for challenge on constitutional grounds. In fact, when we asked experts for their reaction to this claim, their responses included words such as "outrageous," "ridiculous" and "ludicrous." "Of course there's nothing in the law that would bar any doctor from seeing any patient," said Katherine Baicker, a health economist at the Harvard School of Public Health. So, no dice on the literal reading of her claim. Still, we wondered whether there was some other tiny, buried grain of truth in what Coulter claimed. Is the idea that American-trained doctors will be pickier about accepting insurance? There is some evidence that medical practices are wary about taking patients from plans sold on the marketplace. In September, the Medical Group Management Association -- a trade group for medical-practice executives -- surveyed 1,000 physician groups that collectively employ 47,500 doctors. The survey asked, among other things, "Does your practice plan to participate with any new health insurance products sold on an ACA exchange?" Only 29 percent of respondents gave a definitive "yes." That rate is twice as high as the share that that said "no" (14 percent) but less than those that were still weighing their options (40 percent). The top reasons? A fear of bureaucratic regulations, low reimbursement rates and the need to collect payment from patients with higher deductibles. However, it’s important to remember that this study is not evidence that can be used to support Coulter’s specific claim, because it says nothing about foreign-trained doctors. In fact, the closer you look at the issue of foreign-trained doctors, the less plausible Coulter’s claim becomes. According to a 2010 study by the American Medical Association, about 26 percent of physicians in the United States were trained in other countries. This number includes both foreign-born doctors who trained overseas and Americans who received their medical education in other countries. But tough licensing requirements for foreign-trained doctors -- requirements that won’t be changed by Obama’s law -- are keeping the number of foreign-trained physicians low. A key barrier is the need to obtain a residency in the United States, even if an applicant had practiced or had a residency overseas. According to the New York Times, just 42 percent of foreign-trained immigrant physicians who applied for residencies through the leading matching service succeeded, compared to 94 percent of those who had trained in the United States. With such high barriers to entry, it’s not credible that a flood of foreign-trained doctors will suddenly swoop in and, without the help of a single American-trained doctor, serve each one of the newly insured patients who bought policies on the new marketplaces. "I haven't seen any study that would suggest that American-trained doctors would be disproportionately less likely to see the newly insured," Baicker said. And even if there were such evidence, "disproportionate is a far cry from ‘none,’ " said Gail Wilensky, the former head of Medicare and Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush. "There is no limit to the nonsense that some are saying. This borders on the absurd." Our ruling Coulter said that "no doctors who went to an American medical school will be accepting Obamacare." Nothing in the law bars American-trained physicians from treating newly insured people under Obamacare. It’s a ridiculous claim -- one with a whiff of xenophobia -- that merits a Pants on Fire.	None	Ann Coulter	None	None	None	2013-10-16T17:44:30	2013-10-09	['United_States']
-afck-00346	“We opened at least one new school a week in the Eastern Cape last year [2013] and will continue to eradicate mud schools and other inappropriate structures.”	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/2014-sona-claims-revisited-zuma-on-education/	None	None	None	None	None	2014 SONA claims revisited: Zuma on education	2015-02-10 08:55	None	['None']
-snes-00013	Rep. Maxine Waters is facing ethics violations charges for improperly setting up a meeting between officials from the Treasury and OneUnited bank.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/maxine-waters-ethics-charges/	None	Politics	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Is Rep. Maxine Waters Facing Ethics Violations Charges?	4 October 2018	None	['Maxine_Waters', 'United_States_Department_of_the_Treasury']
-tron-00773	Bob Lonsberry on Two Americas	confirmed authorship!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bob-lonsberry-two-americas/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Bob Lonsberry on Two Americas	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-01100	"January through November 2014, the year so far, were the hottest first 11 months of any year recorded."	true	/rhode-island/statements/2015/jan/12/sheldon-whitehouse/sen-sheldon-whitehouse-says-2014-track-be-warmest-/	The seasons may change, the weather may shift, but U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse keeps trying to get his colleagues to, as he puts it, wake up to the threat of climate change. As naysayers insist that global temperatures haven't warmed since around 1997, a claim that has validity only because the time around 1997 was an exceptionally warm year, Whitehouse took to the floor of the Senate on Dec. 17 to report that 2014 was shaping up as the warmest in modern history. "January through November 2014, the year so far, were the hottest first 11 months of any year recorded. So unless something dramatic changes in December, 2014 is on track to be the hottest year since we began keeping records back in 1880. That would mean that 14 of the warmest 15 years on record are the 14 years of this century." PolitiFact usually doesn't deal with predictions, but we thought we’d see if the 11-month numbers for 2014 were as Whitehouse described. When we contacted his office, spokesman Seth Larson sent us to the November "State of the Climate" report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In addition to monthly data, it looks at figures from the past three months, the year to date and levels of both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice. It reports, "The first 11 months of 2014 was the warmest such period on record, with a combined global land and ocean average surface temperature of 1.22 degrees F. (0.68 degrees C.) above the 20th century average of 57.0 degrees F. (13.9 degrees C.)." That's a land-ocean surface average of 58.22 degrees F. (The margin of error for these measurements is plus or minus 0.18 degrees F., which means the actual temperature could be as high as 58.4 or as low as 58.04. The previous record -- 58.02 degrees F. -- was set in 2010. The biggest reason wasn't the surface land temperatures, but it was the increase in the surface temperatures in the oceans, where the first 11 months of 2014 were the warmest on record. Many scientists say that a lot of excess heat from heat-trapping carbon dioxide is being stored in the oceans. NOAA hasn't released its December temperature numbers yet, but the Japan Meteorological Agency has. It has concluded that 2014 broke all records going back as far as 1891. It may not feel like global warming is a problem when below average cold is sending a collective shiver through much of the United States. But the U.S. makes up only 6 percent of Earth's land mass and less than 2 percent of its surface area. Whitehouse reported the data accurately. We rate his claim as True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Sheldon Whitehouse	None	None	None	2015-01-12T00:01:00	2014-12-17	['None']
-tron-02982	Clinton Foundation Buys $137 Million in Illegal Arms for Post Election	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/clinton-foundation-buys-137-million-illegal-arms-post-election-fiction/	None	politics	None	None	['2016 election', 'hillary clinton', 'international']	Clinton Foundation Buys $137 Million in Illegal Arms for Post Election	Oct 31, 2016	None	['None']
-goop-02331	“Survivor” Recap: Who Was Voted Out Fourth On “Heroes v. Healers v. Hustlers”?	10	https://www.gossipcop.com/survivor-recap-october-18-2017-eliminated-alan-voted-off-heroes-healers-hustlers/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	“Survivor” Recap: Who Was Voted Out Fourth On “Heroes v. Healers v. Hustlers”?	8:54 pm, October 18, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02767	First Lady Michelle Obama’s Fashion Statement at Kids Choice Awards	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/first-lady-michelle-obamas-fashion-statement-at-kids-choice-awards/	None	obama	None	None	['Trending Rumors']	First Lady Michelle Obama’s Fashion Statement at Kids Choice Awards	Apr 15, 2015	None	['None']
-wast-00181	That's legal: If you find out about somebody else's salary even if you're doing exactly the same job, you can be retaliated against" or fired.	2 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/09/15/clintons-claim-that-its-legal-for-workers-to-be-retaliated-against-for-talking-about-their-pay/	None	None	Hillary Clinton	Michelle Ye Hee Lee	None	Clinton's claim that it's legal for workers to be retaliated against for talking about their pay	September 15, 2016	None	['None']
-afck-00414	“Nearly 500 informal settlements have been replaced with quality housing and basic services over the past five years.”	unproven	https://africacheck.org/reports/a-first-look-at-president-jacob-zumas-2014-state-of-the-nation-address/	None	None	None	None	None	President Jacob Zuma’s sixth State of the Nation address fact-checked	2014-02-14 12:39	None	['None']
-snes-03446	Sen. Tim Kaine responded to news of a machete attack at Ohio State University by tweeting that he was deeply saddened by the senseless act of "gun violence."	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tim-kaine-blamed-guns-for-knife-attack/	None	Politics	None	David Emery	None	Tim Kaine Blamed ‘Gun Violence’ for Ohio State Knife Attack?	30 November 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-12172	"The number of complaints against police officers has decreased from an average when Mr. (Rick) Baker was mayor from 78 to 14."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2017/aug/02/rick-kriseman/have-number-complaints-against-police-dropped-unde/	Rick Baker won’t definitively say whether he would retain police chief Anthony Holloway if the former St. Petersburg mayor wins a third term at city hall. Mayor Rick Kriseman has been working to show voters he made the right choice in hiring Holloway in 2014, bragging about Holloway’s achievements and warning that it could disappear if Baker wins the election. Kriseman said Holloway has helped improve community-police relationships in the city. "The number of complaints against police officers has decreased from an average when Mr. Baker was mayor from 78 to 14," Kriseman said at the July 25 debate hosted by the Tampa Bay Times and Bay News 9. We wanted to know if complaints dropped by that much, and why. Kriseman’s evidence comes from the police department’s Office of Professional Standards, which investigates complaints and criminal misconduct. The complaints are broken down into citizen-initiated and department-initiated complaints. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com The figures Kriseman cites are accurate for the number of citizen-initiated complaints. The average number of department-initiated complaints also fell from Baker to Kriseman, from 76 to 39. Citizen-initiated complaints have — for the most part — been dropping since the beginning of 2001. They average number also decreased during the four-year term of Baker's successor, Mayor Bill Foster. From January 2010 to January 2014, the average number of citizen-initiated complaints was 41. Asked to explain the drop, the police department credited increased communication between residents and police. "People understand what we do and why we do it, and our sergeants and frontline supervisors have become more accustomed to explaining why things are done a certain way," said Maj. Tim Brockman, who has been the Office of Professional Standards commander for two years and with the department for over two decades. Concerns or inquiries are sometimes handled by police before a formal complaint is filed, he added. Holloway has made several moves to implement a community policing philosophy, a Kriseman campaign pledge. Holloway has encouraged officers to leave their cruisers and talk to residents, building relationships with the people the police are serving. In 2014, the department started a Park, Walk and Talks program that requires all uniformed officers to walk a patrol area at least an hour a week. Police spokeswoman Yolanda Fernandez said the department has 384 uniformed officers and in the most recent three months of 2017 (April, May and June), there were 5,809 logged walks. From the 1990s until 2006, the department's approach was different: More than 40 officers were each committed to a particular neighborhood. However, former police chief Chuck Harmon, who held the job from 2001 to 2014, said he stopped that initiative amid complaints from the department. "One of the things that I found is that community officers were engaging with just a handful of people, and those people were demanding most of their time," Harmon said. Harmon also said he became police chief at "tough time" when relationships between the police and community were strained. Before Harmon was hired, Baker had selected Mack Vines to serve as police chief. Vines was fired by Baker after he used the term "orangutan" to describe the actions of a black suspect's resistance. Finally, we'll note that law enforcement agencies don't record complaints the same way, making it difficult to compare St. Petersburg's practices to other jurisdictions. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office takes a very broad look at complaints. Any person who calls in, writes a letter or emails with a concern is counted in the data provided by the department. In 2016, 64 members were investigated by a commander within their department and 44 members were investigated by the administrative division. St. Petersburg police included investigations by the department and the Office of Professional Standards — which does not include some of the call-ins that were determined to not be a complaint. Our ruling Kriseman said, "The number of complaints against police officers has decreased on an average when Mr. Baker was mayor from 78 to 14." Those numbers check out for citizen-initiated complaints. The city attributes the decline to increased communication with the community and the police, among other factors. It’s worth noting that citizen-initiated complaints for the most part have been declining for the past decade-plus, which might not be apparent in Kriseman's wording. Kriseman’s claim is accurate but needs additional information. For that reason, we rate it Mostly True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Rick Kriseman	None	None	None	2017-08-02T16:56:31	2017-07-25	['None']
-pomt-15371	"The House of Representatives just voted 300-131 to remove ‘country-of-origin labeling’ on chicken, pork, and beef sold in the U.S."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/02/facebook-posts/canadian-hog-farmers-and-congress-want-repeal-cons/	Thanks to a little-known congressional bill, it may soon be impossible to tell whether your Fourth of July burger is all-American Angus or beef imported from the Amazon, according to a Facebook meme. "The House of Representatives just voted 300-131 to remove ‘country-of-origin labeling’ on chicken, pork, and beef sold in the United States," the meme says. "Sorry but you don’t deserve to know where your meat is coming from." What beef could the House possibly have with the consumer-friendly law? We looked into the vote in question and found an interesting story of international trade disputes, riled up Canadian hog farmers, and "jingoist fears." Meat of the matter Under the country-of-origin labeling law, or COOL, supermarkets have to tell consumers where their meat, fish, and nuts are produced with varying degrees of specificity (i.e. "Born in Canada, Slaughtered in the U.S.", "Farm-Raised in Vietnam", or simply a laundry list of all the countries the product has passed through). COOL passed in 2002 but wasn’t fully implemented until March 2009. By then, Canada already had a bone to pick with the law, saying it violated World Trade Organization agreements. A mandatory "made-in" stamp discriminated against foreign hog farmers and cattle ranchers and was too costly to boot, according to Canada. Joining Canada’s complaint were a long list of other countries. Between 2011 and 2015, the WTO ruled four times that COOL was inconsistent with trade agreements. The United States made several unsuccessful appeals, but eventually Canada and Mexico asked the WTO for permission to impose retaliatory tariffs totalling $3 billion. The WTO’s decision is pending. In May of 2015, House Agriculture Committee Chair K. Michael Conaway, R-Texas, introduced H.R. 2393, a bill to repeal the labeling requirements for ground and muscle cuts of beef and pork -- and threw in chicken for good measure. "Retaliation by Canada and Mexico will soon become a reality, meaning economically devastating tariffs on a broad spectrum of U.S. exports," Conaway wrote in Roll Call. "Ripple effects will be felt in nearly every industry, every state and every consumer’s wallet. This is why COOL for beef, pork and chicken — nothing more than a failed government experiment — must be repealed." On June 10, the House passed the repeal bill by a not-entirely partisan vote of 300-131: a third of House Democrats voted in favor of the Republican-backed bill. Saving COOL’s bacon The meme’s wording implies that the country-of-origin labeling law’s fate is sealed, but that’s a bit hammed up. The bill now awaits the Senate’s and, ultimately, President Barack Obama’s approval. In the upper chamber, COOL repeal will be more of a battle. "The politics are going to be much, much more difficult in the Senate," said Victoria Guida, a trade reporter for Politico. "Part of the reason this passed the House so easily is because so many other industries, outside of the meat world, are freaked out about retaliation. But the Senate tends to be a little more big-picture about policies, and straight repeal is expected to have a tough time." The Senate Agricultural Committee held hearings on June 25, where Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., called for repeal. In lieu of completely getting rid of the labeling law, top Democrat, Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, proposed a voluntary labeling system supported by some Republicans but rejected by Conaway. We didn’t hear back from the White House about what the president plans to do if the bill reaches his desk. If the repeal is greenlit by both the Senate and the White House, country-of-origin still won’t be prohibited from meat packaging. As per Stabenow’s proposal, it could potentially mirror the USDA’s paid grading service of beef (i.e. "prime choice" and "select"), though supporters say that’s not enough. "The (meat) industry has had plenty of time to do a COOL program, and they didn't. So we have mandatory COOL. That is the solution that provides consumers with what they’re demanding," Chris Waldrop of the Consumer Federation of America. What’s at 'steak' At its core, COOL is a consumer rights law, intended to help people make purchasing decisions -- be it supporting American ranchers or boycotting beef associated with Amazon deforestation. Yet it has provoked intense debate. While 90 percent of Americans want country-of-origin labeling, the interest doesn’t necessarily reflect in the dollars spent, says Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Oklahoma State University. "Analysis of scanner data from grocery stores shows essentially no impact of (mandatory country-of-origin labeling) when buying meat," he said. "Despite this, there are real and demonstrable costs to processors and retailers. Thus, the totality of evidence suggests that COOL does not pass a cost-benefit test." Canada and Mexico have also argued that the labeling might make people think U.S. products are safer, even when experts say there is little evidence to support or refute that point. "U.S. companies have been doing a marvelous job of poisoning us for years," said Bill Marler, a food-borne illness attorney and publisher of Food Safety News. He pointed out that Malaysia banned American apples earlier this year due to a listeria outbreak, and Mexico rejected Californian lettuce in 2006 after growers found E. coli on the crop. While Marler thinks COOL can feed "jingoist fears," he nonetheless supports it, as he believes in greater transparency in the food system. Like Marler, 283 consumer, agricultural, environmental, labor, and faith-based groups say COOL is about empowering consumers. In a letter ultimately unheeded by Conaway, they urged the House to not bow to the standard scare tactics of trade partners. "We shouldn't automatically repeal a law passed by Congress because an international trade tribunal tells us it violates trade law. We first need to look at other options aside from repeal," said Ben Lilliston of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a sustainable farming advocacy group. He added that COOL laws exist around the world, and United States has willingly paid tariffs when it’s disagreed with past WTO rulings. "Consumers have a legitimate interest in knowing where their food comes from," said Waldrop of the Consumer Federation of America. Our ruling "The House of Representatives just voted 300-131 to remove ‘country-of-origin labeling’ on chicken, pork, and beef sold in the United States," according to a Facebook meme. The bill in question seeks to repeal mandatory country-of-origin labeling or COOL from ground and muscle cuts of chicken, pork, and beef. The House passed it in June this year with a 300-131 vote, after Canada and Mexico said the consumer rights law was unfair to foreign hog farmers and cattle ranchers and threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs. The Senate has yet to decide on the labeling law’s fate and, at this early stage, there has been support for making COOL voluntary. While country-of-origin labeling isn’t quite dead meat, the House voted for repeal. We rate the claim True.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2015-07-02T11:06:44	2015-06-29	['United_States']
-pomt-04368	"Jim Renacci tried to avoid paying taxes on nearly $14 million that he made."	true	/ohio/statements/2012/oct/22/betty-sutton/betty-sutton-says-jim-renacci-tried-avoid-paying-t/	The congressional contest between Democratic Rep. Betty Sutton and Republican Rep. Jim Renacci is among the nation’s most costly and hard-fought races, and has also devolved into one of the nastiest. After Renacci placed ads accusing Sutton of "voting to raise taxes on just about everyone," Sutton fired back with an ad that claims Renacci supports tax breaks for millionaires like himself and "tried to avoid paying taxes on nearly $14 million that he made." "We play by the rules but Renacci thinks he’s above them," says a male blue collar worker shown in Sutton’s ad. On the same day that Sutton unveiled the ad that accuses Renacci of avoiding taxes, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee made a similar assertion in a different ad, which says: "Renacci tried to skip out on paying over a million in taxes.". The tax avoidance claims in Sutton’s new ad echo charges that were raised against Renacci in 2010, when he first ran for Congress and defeated Democratic Rep. John Boccieri. They stem from a dispute Renacci had with the Ohio Department of Taxation, which accused him and his wife, Tina, of misreporting their income in 2000 and assessed them nearly $1.4 million in back taxes, interest and penalties. The Renaccis filed state tax returns that claimed they had a loss of $247,336 that year, but auditors determined they actually made $13,730,440. The couple filed a tax appeal when the state dinged them for $954,650 in back taxes, $146,938 in interest and $293,876 in penalties. The quarrel was over Renacci's trust income from an "S" corporation, which wasn’t taxable for several years before Ohio's tax commissioner changed the state’s policy. S corporations permit income to be taxed at an individual rate for federal tax purposes, and avoid double taxation on corporate income. Renacci was among a group of taxpayers who fought the state decision. He contended the trust income should have been tax-free and that he had "reasonable cause" to exclude it on his tax return, tax department and court documents say. Others dropped their appeals, but Renacci continued to fight, even after a 2006 Ohio Supreme Court ruling in a similar case in which the court said the trust income was subject to taxation. In that case, the taxpayers reported their S Corporation income on their 2000 tax return and then unsuccessfully asked for a refund. A 2007 legal brief the state of Ohio filed in Renacci’s case observed that nearly all other litigants "who created grantor trusts in an attempt to shelter, i.e., exclude their S corporation income from Ohio income taxation" gave up their appeals, and that the Renaccis were "almost alone in their persistence." Court records show the Renaccis eventually sent the state more than $1.3 million, but they continue to argue that $359,822 that they paid in penalties and interest were improper. "He was proud of his fight, and to have fought till the end, along with many other Ohioans for tax fairness," Renacci spokesman James Slepian told the Plain Dealer in 2010. When asked about Sutton’s new ad, Slepian this month called her "a desperate politician who knows she’s losing and has no record to run on," and said she’s engaging in "the bogus, gutter politics of recycled personal attacks that have defined her sad career in Congress." Indeed, the charges against Renacci are somewhat recycled. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union placed a television ad in 2010 that contained a more extreme version of the charges that Sutton is making. That ad said he "cheated on his income taxes," that he "hid" more than $13 million and was forced to pay $1.4 million in back taxes and penalties. Renacci filed a defamation suit against the union after the ads began to air. Court records show he dropped the case on Feb. 3, 2011, shortly after he took office in Congress. PolitiFact Ohio found a claim in that ad to be Mostly True because Renacci could have disclosed the trust income on his state tax return, as the state warned he should, but he didn’t. He also could have paid the taxes and contested the amount, but didn’t. And he didn’t amend his return, despite an explicit 2002 warning from Ohio’s tax Department that he could face penalties for fraud and failure to pay if he didn’t. But Renacci ultimately worked within the system to resolve the case, paid the full amount that was due, and was not ever charged with tax fraud. The claim in this ad is an easier call. Reams of legal documents show that Renacci battled with the state over trust income from an S corporation, trying to avoid paying taxes on the $13.7 million at issue in the case. On the Truth-O-Meter, Sutton’s claim rates True.	None	Betty Sutton	None	None	None	2012-10-22T06:00:00	2012-10-17	['None']
-pomt-03578	Says that according to a report, "the tech sector now drives more than one-quarter of Austin’s economy."	half-true	/texas/statements/2013/may/17/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-austins-tech-sector-drives-more-/	Austin rocks, President Barack Obama indicated during his May 9, 2013, swing through the area, thanks in great part to its technology-related businesses. After listing plans by Apple, Visa and General Motors to add jobs, Obama told students and teachers assembled at the Manor New Tech High School: "According to one report, the tech sector now drives more than one-quarter of Austin’s economy. And all of this has helped to make Austin one of the fastest-growing cities in America." We know tech is big in these parts, but does it drive more than a quarter of Austin’s economy? By email, White House spokesman Bobby Whithorne pointed out a press release issued earlier in May by the Austin Technology Council, a trade association for companies working in and around technology and life sciences. The release said the council had released results of its "Technology Economic Impact Report" finding that "technology is generating billions of dollars annually and driving more than a quarter of Austin's local economy." But the May 6, 2013, report doesn’t exactly say that, though it quantifies the area’s tech boom in various ways. The report says: "While a respectable 9% of total employment is in technology (more than 100,000 jobs), more than one third of all jobs in the Austin economy are supported by the technology sector, including direct hiring and spin-off hiring activity." Reference No. 2: "The sector accounts for a whopping 21% of Central Texas’ gross regional product (GRP) and contributes $21 (billion) in direct value to the local economy." Researcher Brian Kelsey later told us by email that the government sector swept in about 12 percent of local output. The council put us in touch with Brian Kelsey, a principal at Austin-based Civic Analytics, which conducted the research behind the report. By email, Kelsey told us the president’s claim is true if one assumes he was talking about Austin tech’s share of jobs plus spin-off jobs. For the research, Kelsey said, he defined Austin’s "tech sector" starting from the "high-tech" definition in TechAmerica Foundation’s annual "Cyberstates" publication. Its list encompasses 52 industries, among them communications equipment such as radio and TV broadcasting and wireless communications equipment; software services; engineering services; computer training; and space and defense systems. Kelsey said his firm added another industry, computer and computer peripheral equipment and software merchant wholesalers, "which captures a significant portion of business activity at some of Austin's larger companies such as Dell, IBM, etc." All told, Kelsey said, the 53 industries "contribute an estimated $20.9 billion to Austin's total Gross Regional Product," meaning the economic output in the five-county metropolitan region, "of approximately $97.4 billion, or roughly 21 percent, a bit under ‘one-quarter.’" Kelsey said total estimated employment (full-time, part-time, and self-employment) in Austin's tech sector accounted for 105,667 jobs in 2012, roughly 9 percent of all jobs in Austin. "That's direct jobs--i.e. people employed in the 53 industries. If you look at the direct employment and the spin-off activity it creates in other industries (the multiplier effect), the tech sector supports an estimated one-third of total employment in Austin--so a bit more than ‘one-quarter,’" he said. He added that most of the data behind the report, including the jobs multiplier of 3.5, came from Idaho-based Economic Modeling Specialists Intl., a company that specializes in economic impact studies. Finally, we asked Jon Hockenyos, president of Austin-based TXP, Inc., an economic consulting firm, to look over the council’s study. Hockenyos said by email that the results looked accurate. Regarding Obama’s reference, Hockenyos said: "I’d say the verb ‘drives’ (which to me implies more than the direct effect) makes the president’s remark consistent with the study’s findings." By telephone, the White House’s Whithorne stood by Obama’s wording, saying it was supported by the press release announcing the study and the study itself. Our ruling Obama said a report says the "tech sector now drives more than one quarter of Austin’s economy." The cited report doesn't directly declare this, estimating instead that high-tech companies in the Austin region directly supplied about 9 percent of the area’s jobs in 2012 and accounted for roughly 21 percent of the region's economic output. Then again, the report also says jobs in the tech sector plus spin-off jobs amounted to more than a third of the region’s total jobs, which strikes us as sufficient to make Obama's claim partly accurate. We rate it as Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2013-05-17T06:00:00	2013-05-09	['None']
-vees-00115	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Website recycles report on senior citizen pensions	fake	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-website-recycles-fake-report-senior-ci	None	None	None	None	fake news,social citizen pension	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Website recycles FAKE report on senior citizen pensions	July 26, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-13721	"We moved 100 times as many people out of poverty as moved out when President (Ronald) Reagan was in office, with 40 percent more jobs."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/27/bill-clinton/bill-clinton-says-more-people-moved-out-poverty-un/	A video introducing Bill Clinton before the Democratic National Convention showcased the former president’s accomplishments during his terms in office, from 23 million jobs created to a budget surplus to the signing of the Family and Medical Leave Act. "His actions have changed millions of lives for the better," a narrator says. Clinton appears in the video saying, "We moved 100 times as many people out of poverty as moved out when President (Ronald) Reagan was in office, with 40 percent more jobs." That "100 times" feat sounded familiar. Clinton himself said it before in an October 2014 campaign stop in Milwaukee for Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also said it in July 2014 in an interview on PBS’ The Charlie Rose Show. Hillary Clinton’s campaign guided us to reports that used Census poverty data to analyze the statement. If you crunch the numbers from the presidents’ first years to their last full year in office, they support Bill Clinton’s statement. But if you look at the numbers from the year they took office (1993 for Clinton and 1981 for Reagan) to the year they left office, the ratio is a lot smaller. For context: Clinton was elected in 1992 and served from January 1993 to January 2001. Reagan, a Republican elected in 1980, served from January 1981 to January 1989. Poverty changes from first year to last full year in office When Clinton took office in 1993, there were about 39.3 million people in poverty. By his last full year (2000), there were about 31.6 million -- a difference of 7.7 million people. When Reagan stepped into office in 1981, there were about 31.82 million people in poverty, by his last full year (1988), there were about 31.74 million -- a change of 77,000 people. So, using these sets of years, it does show that 100 times as many people moved out of poverty during Clinton’s administration compared to Reagan’s. However, when we calculate for years they took office to the years they left office, the numbers don’t show a "100 times" change. For Clinton, about 6.3 million moved out of poverty, for Reagan, 294,000. That’s a difference of about 21 times. While these numbers give us an insight into how many people are living in poverty, economists have told us it’s hard to say how many people actually move out of poverty. Someone who is making just $1 above the poverty threshold may still be struggling and not feel out of poverty. Jobs created The second part of Clinton’s statement says his presidency created 40 percent more jobs than Reagan’s. During Clinton’s tenure, 22.9 million jobs were created, an increase of 21 percent over the eight-year period. When Reagan was president, 16.1 million jobs were created, or an increase of 18 percent over the eight-year period. Overall, then, Clinton’s job-creation total was 42 percent higher than Reagan’s was -- 16.1 million for Reagan vs. 22.9 million for Clinton. It’s important to note that Reagan became president as the country was in a recession, and Clinton took office as the economy was bouncing back. Our ruling On the second night of the Democratic National Convention, Clinton said, "We moved 100 times as many people out of poverty as moved out when President Reagan was in office, with 40 percent more jobs." Part of Clinton’s statement (moved 100 times as many out of poverty compared to Reagan) is accurate when analyzed from years presidents took office to last full years in office, but can be incorrect when interpreted from year they took office to the year they left. Also, there was a 40 percent increase in jobs created from Reagan’s terms to Clinton’s. We rate Clinton’s statement Half True.https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/5d3d6c3d-efb0-4574-9380-455ad4991f5d	None	Bill Clinton	None	None	None	2016-07-27T20:45:09	2016-07-26	['Ronald_Reagan']
-snes-01006	Was the Florida School Shooter a Registered Democrat?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/was-florida-school-shooter-democrat/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Was the Florida School Shooter a Registered Democrat?	16 February 2018	None	['None']
-abbc-00406	The claim: Tony Abbott says "normal international law" is that if asylum seeker boats are rescued in a country's search and rescue zone, that country has an obligation to take them.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-14/asylum-seekers-rescued-at-sea/5088168	The claim: Tony Abbott says "normal international law" is that if asylum seeker boats are rescued in a country's search and rescue zone, that country has an obligation to take them.	['refugees', 'immigration', 'abbott-tony', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia', 'indonesia']	None	None	['refugees', 'immigration', 'abbott-tony', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia', 'indonesia']	Does Indonesia have to take asylum seekers rescued by the Australian Navy?	Fri 22 Nov 2013, 9:16am	None	['Tony_Abbott']
-pomt-03749	"Right now, Texas doesn’t have an income tax and Oklahoma’s lowering their income tax rates, and guess what their severance tax is? Sky high."	true	/ohio/statements/2013/apr/08/john-kasich/john-kasich-says-oklahoma-texas-have-sky-high-taxe/	Gov. John Kasich pitched several changes to Ohio’s tax structure in his budget proposal for fiscal 2014-2015 that would, in part, allow reductions in the state’s individual income tax. Among those proposals was an increase to the state’s severance tax, a tax levied on oil and gas resources when they are extracted -- or severed -- from the ground. The change would target large producers engaged in horizontal drilling and raise an estimated $45 million in fiscal 2014 and $155 million in fiscal 2015. Kasich often has said the tax is too low. As energy companies tap oil and natural gas resources in the resource-rich Utica Shale formation in eastern Ohio, the governor has argued Ohio should reap a greater reward from nature’s bounty. While in the Mahoning Valley on March 21, the governor touted his budget plans, including the severance tax increase, to the Youngstown-Warren Regional Chamber of Commerce, and again in an interview with a Youngstown television station. "Right now, Texas doesn’t have an income tax and Oklahoma’s lowering their income tax rates, and guess what their severance tax is? Sky high," Kasich told the interviewer. PolitiFact Ohio decided to check the governor’s claim. We started with the first part of his claim about Texas and Oklahoma and income taxes. We quickly confirmed that Texas, indeed, does not have a state income tax. Oklahoma has a state income tax with seven brackets for individual incomes. The income thresholds for the brackets are grouped closely together, with the top taxing bracket kicking in for income over $15,000 a year. The median household income for the state for 2007-2011 was slightly below $44,300 a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The rate for the top bracket for tax year for tax filers this year is $395 plus 5.25 percent of the amount over $15,000. That rate reflects a tax reduction of 0.25 percent from the previous year. So Kasich appears to be correct about the state income tax rates. But what about the two states’ taxes on oil and gas resources? Are they, as the governor said, " sky high"? "Sky high" isn’t quantifiable. But we can look at how Texas and Oklahoma compare with other states, including Ohio. That picture, though, is somewhat muddied as the manner in which oil and natural gas production is taxed varies from state to state. Data from the National Conference of State Legislatures showed, though, that the taxes for 2012 in Oklahoma and Texas, while not the highest, were among the national leaders. Texas charges a 7.5-percent tax on the market value of natural gas. Oklahoma charges 7 percent on the market value, with provisions that reduce the rate if the price per thousand cubic feet (MCF) falls below $2.10. That has happened in just two months since 2000, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Texas collects a 4.6-percent tax on oil’s market value . Oklahoma collects 7 percent, with provisions for the tax to drop if the price per barrel falls below $17. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil hasn’t been that low in more than 10 years at Cushing, Okla., a major trading hub for crude oil. It has been above $90 per barrel all this year. How does that compare to other states? The NCSL data showed that gas taxes for both states are in the top 10, as was Oklahoma’s tax on oil. Texas’ oil tax was lower, but it also has the highest production, by far. In 2010, Texas accounted for nearly 26 percent of domestic oil production, more than double No. 2 Alaska. Ohio’s rates, by contrast, are much lower. Natural gas is taxed at 3 cents per MCF. The governor has proposed it be increased to 1 percent of the value of the gas extracted via horizontal wells. So, for example, if the average price is $3.35 per MCF at the wellhead, as the U.S. Energy Information Administration listed for December, the state would collect 3.35 cents per MCF, rather than the 3 cents at Ohio’s current rate. The collection would rise as the price of gas rises. Oil is taxed at 20 cents per barrel. Kasich’s proposal would increase that tax for horizontal wells to 1.5 percent of the price per barrel initially and to 4 percent after one year. So if oil commands a price of $90 per barrel, the state tax would generate $1.35 per barrel initially and $3.60 after the first year, rather than the 20 cents per barrel at Ohio’s current rate. Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said the governor’s point was that the taxes are "sky high" when compared to Ohio. And because oil and gas are exported out of those states, he said, the tax burden is also exported. "Not all oil drilled in Texas is consumed in Texas," he said. "Other states are exporting their tax costs to us. His proposal would allow Ohio to do the same." Kasich’s description of income taxes in Texas (none) and Oklahoma (reduced) was correct. As for the other part of his claim, while "sky high" is somewhat subjective, the reality of the tax structure now is that the significantly higher tax rates on gas and oil in Texas and Oklahoma, when compared to Ohio, can generate revenues that are -- well -- sky high. Texas and Oklahoma are among the leaders for natural gas, but not tops. Oklahoma also has one of the highest oil rates. And at current prices, Texas’ tax on oil, the lower of the two states, would yield more than 20 times what Ohio’s current per-barrel tax raises. On the Truth-O-Meter, Kasich’s claim rates True.	None	John Kasich	None	None	None	2013-04-08T16:47:52	2013-03-21	['Texas', 'Oklahoma']
-pomt-10913	"SHOCK REPORT: Senator McCaskill BUSTED Funneling Millions of Tax Dollars to Her Hubby."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2018/aug/01/blog-posting/misleading-headline-suggests-mccaskill-personally-/	A recent clickbait headline claimed Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., was "busted" for routing millions of tax dollars into the pocket of her husband, business investor Joseph Shepard. Affordable housing projects in which Shepard has invested have received millions in federal subsidies during McCaskill’s two terms in office. But this headline spins the narrative in a way that could mislead readers — by making Shepard’s business success appear more nefarious than what has been reported. "Shock report: Senator McCaskill busted funneling millions of tax dollars to her hubby," said a July 25 headline from Patriot Beat, a conservative website. The story quoted directly from a Breitbart News article, which in turn cited original reporting from the Kansas City Star. This story was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) "Well, well, well, with a tight election coming up, Senator Claire McCaskill does not need a ‘scandal’ to crop up," the Patriot Beat story said above its repost of the Breitbart News story. "However, that’s precisely what’s happened — and it’s a doozy … According to a new report, McCaskill has funneled her husband $131 million in federal subsidies." While the Breitbart story relies on the Kansas City Star report, the Kansas City Star’s research does not support the implications embedded in the inflammatory Patriot Beat headline. Its loaded words, such as "busted" and "funneling," paint what could very well be a total coincidence as a deliberate attempt by McCaskill to profit off of taxpayer money. Other headlines — such as the Kansas City Star’s "Businesses linked to McCaskill’s husband get $131 million in federal dollars" — were more precise. Here’s what actually happened. A July 24 analysis from the Kansas City Star revealed that businesses linked to Shepard have received approximately $131 million in federal subsidies since McCaskill took office in 2007. Specifically, government-subsidized housing projects in which Shepard has invested were awarded $62 million and $69 million during McCaskill’s first and second terms, respectively. The businesses Shepard has invested in participate in affordable housing programs through both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The USDA program subsidizes low-cost rental housing in rural areas for domestic farm laborers and low-income, disabled or elderly people. The federal subsidies compensate property owners on behalf of tenants who otherwise would not be capable of affording their full rent. Meanwhile, the HUD program contractually obligates private landlords and developers to reserve some housing units for cheap rental, and the subsidies again help to pay off part of the rent. Although Shepard gets only a fraction of each federal award as income — most of each subsidy contributes to covering operating costs for the projects — the Kansas City Star report noted that his personal income grew during McCaskill’s two terms in the Senate, from between $1,608 and $16,731 in 2006 to between $365,374 and $1,118,158 in 2017. According to the Kansas City Star’s analysis, "a growing percentage of Shepard’s personal earnings come from new businesses he has invested in that are receiving federal awards, primarily rural rental assistance through the USDA." The Kansas City Star also made clear, however, that there is "no evidence that McCaskill played any part in directing federal funds to businesses affiliated with her husband." McCaskill has voted for some omnibus spending bills that would have benefited affordable housing programs, but she has voted against others. She also does not sit on the Senate committees with jurisdiction over HUD and USDA, where she could have had more influence. Additionally, the Kansas City Star report noted that Shepard is now just a limited partner with most of the federally subsidized housing projects in which he invests. This means that he does not control day-to-day operations or the distribution of profits. The report also specified that Shepard’s investments in affordable housing predated his 2002 marriage with McCaskill. A spokesman for Shepard’s company, Sugar Creek, told the Kansas City Star that the company is involved with fewer government housing projects now than before Shepard married. Similar articles detailing subsidies provided to Shepard’s businesses also surfaced in 2012. "Claire's work in the Senate has absolutely nothing to do with her husband's business investments," said Meira Bernstein, McCaskill campaign spokeswoman. Patriot Beat did not respond to a request for comment. Our ruling A misleading headline said, "Shock report: Senator McCaskill busted funneling millions of tax dollars to her hubby." The article cited research from a credible newspaper — the Kansas City Star — showing that since McCaskill took office, her husband has seen his income increase at least in part because of federal subsidies awarded to housing projects that he has invested in. However, we found no evidence that McCaskill personally or deliberately routed any money to her husband’s businesses. The use of the words "busted" and "funneling" in the Patriot Beat headline is not supported by the Kansas City Star’s research. We rate this statement Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-08-01T09:26:38	2018-07-25	['None']
-snes-05899	A photograph captures a young Barack Obama as a Black Panther party member.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/surprise-party/	None	Politicians	None	David Mikkelson	None	Was Barack Obama a Black Panther?	16 September 2009	None	['None']
-pomt-13154	Says FBI Director James Comey’s letter about new developments in the investigation into her emails "only" went "to Republican members of the House."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/30/hillary-clinton/clinton-wrongly-says-fbi-director-sent-letter-abou/	Hillary Clinton has called on FBI Director James Comey to make public any information he has on recent developments into the agency’s investigation into her emails. Comey sent a letter to Congress Oct. 28 saying the FBI may have found new emails relevant to its probe into Clinton’s private email server that she used while secretary of state. The FBI plans to review these new emails to see if they contain classified information. Back in July, Comey said the FBI recommended that no charges be brought in this case. With just over a week to go until the Nov. 8 election, the Clinton campaign has said they are concerned that Comey’s vague letter will fuel unfounded rumors about the email investigation, so he should make available any additional information the FBI has. "We've made it very clear that, if they are going to be sending this kind of letter that is only going originally to Republican members of the House, that they need to share whatever facts they claim to have with the American people," Clinton said at an Oct. 28 press conference. "And that's what I expect to happen." Clinton was incorrect to say that the letter "only" went to Republican members of the House of Representatives. Democrat members received the letter, too. The letter was addressed at the top to the chairmen of various congressional committees, who are all currently Republican because the party controls both the Senate and the House. But the second page of the letter indicates that Comey also circulated the letter to ranking Democrats on those committees, as well. You can see the full letter for yourself here. The Clinton campaign said she misspoke. Our ruling Clinton said Comey’s letter about new developments in the investigation into her emails "only" went "to Republican members of the House." Republican and Democratic members of the House and Senate received this letter. We rate Clinton’s claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/1bf568b6-3a28-4aeb-be69-59c015b09a23	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-10-30T11:55:44	2016-10-28	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pose-01224	"Over the years the lottery funds have been diverted away from the original educational purpose. ... I’ll work to reform lottery spending and maximize our education dollars by putting a stop to legislators raiding lottery proceeds."	not yet rated	https://www.politifact.com/north-carolina/promises/coop-o-meter/promise/1315/reform-state-lottery/	None	coop-o-meter	Roy Cooper	None	None	Reform the state lottery	2017-01-04T16:00:21	None	['None']
-pose-00179	"Barack Obama and Joe Biden will convene a summit in 2009 (and regularly thereafter) of leaders of Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and other key countries to agree on implementing many of these measures on a global basis."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/193/convene-a-summit-on-preventing-nuclear-terrorism/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Convene a summit on preventing nuclear terrorism	2010-01-07T13:26:51	None	['Joe_Biden', 'United_Nations_Security_Council', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-03971	"We have a governor who's vetoed measures like increasing our minimum wage and restoring the earned income tax cut."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2013/feb/14/john-wisniewski/chris-christie-vetoed-bills-raise-minimum-wage-and/	As state Sen. Barbara Buono kicked off her campaign to unseat Gov. Chris Christie, state Democratic Party Chairman John Wisniewski said she had a record on which to run. That record, he said, belongs to the Republican governor. With supporters holding up Buono signs behind him, Wisniewski sounded off on Christie’s tenure during a Feb. 2 campaign kickoff rally at New Brunswick High School. Buono forms the "perfect contrast" to Christie, said Wisniewski, a state assemblyman from Middlesex County. "We have a governor who’s vetoed measures like increasing our minimum wage and restoring the Earned Income Tax Cut," Wisniewski said, eliciting boos from the crowd. The assemblyman’s charges are pretty solid. By different means, Christie has vetoed bills to raise the minimum wage and to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit after reducing that benefit in his first state budget. But Wisniewski’s statement ignores the fact Christie also has offered alternatives to both. First, let’s talk about the minimum wage. In late 2012, the Democrat-controlled Legislature passed a bill to increase the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 and implement annual cost-of-living increases. But on Jan. 28, Christie conditionally vetoed the legislation and recommended certain changes, including scrapping cost-of-living increases and phasing in over three years a $1 increase. Democrats have rejected that plan and vowed to ask voters in November to amend the state Constitution with a minimum wage hike tied to annual cost-of-living increases. Now, we’ll address the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income residents who work. As part of the fiscal year 2011 budget, the state tax credit was reduced from 25 percent to 20 percent of the federal amount. That reduction began with tax year 2010. The Legislature passed a bill in June 2011 to restore the credit to the original 25 percent figure, but Christie later vetoed the bill without proposing any changes. In June 2012, Christie vetoed a second bill to restore the credit. However, around the same time, he offered to restore the credit as part of a plan to provide an income tax cut That proposal was outlined in Christie’s conditional veto of a separate bill that would have raised the income tax rate on taxable income of more than $1 million. The Legislature has not acted on the governor’s proposal. More recently, Christie agreed to increase the tax credit as part of his conditional veto on the minimum wage bill. So, while it’s correct the governor vetoed two bills to restore the Earned Income Tax Credit, he also has offered at least two proposals that included increasing the tax credit. Alicia D’Alessandro, a spokeswoman for Wisniewski, said in an e-mail that the governor’s alternative proposals are not worth acknowledging. "The conditions attached to his vetoes undercut the purpose of the bills and do not even merit acknowledgement," she said. "In what world would the Democratic state chairman give credit to the Republican governor for ‘alternative measures’ that were clearly offered only for show? "Anyone who believes that would happen at a campaign rally must think this election is happening in Fantasyland." Our ruling At a campaign rally for Buono, Wisniewski said: "We have a governor who’s vetoed measures like increasing our minimum wage and restoring the earned income tax cut." Wisniewski is right about those vetoes. Christie conditionally vetoed a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage and issued absolute vetoes on two bills to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit. But the governor has offered alternatives to increase the minimum wage and restore the tax credit to its previous level. We rate the statement Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	John Wisniewski	None	None	None	2013-02-14T07:30:00	2013-02-02	['None']
-pomt-01516	"Last week's three most-viewed television programs were Sunday Night Football, Thursday Night Football and Monday Night Football."	true	/punditfact/statements/2014/sep/21/george-will/george-will-top-3-shows-us-last-week-were-nfl-game/	Not even the Ray Rice scandal could yank professional football games from the top of television viewership rankings, said conservative commentator George Will. Will participated in a Fox News Sunday political panel dissecting the NFL’s response to the video showing Rice, a former Baltimore Ravens running back, assaulting his now-wife in an elevator. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s performance has been widely criticized, but Will predicted he will survive the scandal. Why? America’s real pastime is an economic behemoth that can’t be stopped. "Last week’s three most-viewed television programs were Sunday Night Football, Thursday Night Football and Monday Night Football," he said. "And money talks and it will continue to talk. And this will pass over, and football will go on its merry way." It’s no secret that professional football has a big TV audience. We wanted to know just how big. By the numbers To check Will’s claim we looked to a top-10 ranking of shows by the Nielsen Company, which tracks consumer trends, including television viewership, from the week of Monday, Sept. 8, through Sunday, Sept. 14. It is the most-recent week available. That Monday, TMZ released a video showing Rice punching his now-wife in an elevator. On the same day, the Baltimore Ravens terminated their contract with Rice, and Goodell announced that Rice was on indefinite suspension. Later in the week, the Associated Press reported that NFL executives were supposedly aware of this video months earlier. Nielsen has separate top-10 lists for broadcast television and cable television. Because Monday Night Football appears on ESPN, we decided to combine the lists into one overall ranking. Here are the top 10 shows and their viewership (in millions) that week: 1. NBC Sunday Night Football (22.1) 2. CBS Thursday Night Football (20.8) 3. NBC Sunday Night NFL Pre-Kick show (16.7) 4. CBS NFL Thursday Night Pre-Kick show (13.9) 5. ESPN Monday Night Football - New York/Detroit (13.7) 6. CBS 60 Minutes (12.3) 7. NBC Football Night in America (12.4) 8. ESPN Monday Night Football - San Diego/Arizona (11.5) 9. CBS NFL Thursday Night Kickoff (10.6) 10. CBS America’s Got Talent (10.5) As you can see, there’s a lot of love for professional football. Americans don’t just love the games -- they love the pregame shows, too. The popularity of the pregame shows on NBC and CBS pushed the Monday Night Football game between the New York Giants and Detroit Lions to No. 5. So Will’s comment, by Nielsen’s metrics, is a tad off. Still, the point holds: Pro football games and pre- and post-game analysis dominated 8 out of 10 of the top 10 shows. Only CBS’ America’s Got Talent and 60 Minutes cracked the list. Of course, excitement for NFL games is high since the season started just a couple weeks ago, and the networks’ fall television programming hasn’t fully kicked in just yet. Even so, NFL games and analysis will continue to dominate the rankings as the season goes on, said Marc Berman, editor-in-chief of TV Media Insights, in an interview with PunditFact. When new shows begin to air, the number of "households using television" goes up, but they don’t take viewers away from football, Berman said. The popularity of the teams playing and whether the game is exciting have a bigger effect on football viewership ratings. Numerous Nielsen statistics show professional football’s seemingly permanent first-place spot. In the 2013-14 season, NBC’s Sunday Night Football was the most-watched primetime show, with 21.7 million average viewers. ESPN’s Monday Night Football was the No. 1 most-viewed cable television show in 2013. The NFL holds 34 of the 35 most-watched individual shows in the fall of 2013. (The odd one out was NBC’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade at No. 22.) And in four of the past five years, the Super Bowl has broken the record for the most-watched television event in history. Professional football stands out from other sports, said Dan Lebowitz, executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sports and Society. In football, there are only 16 games in a typical season -- as opposed to baseball’s 162 games and basketball’s 82 games -- so each game becomes a major event. The rise of fantasy football has further solidified the sport’s popularity, Lebowitz said. The scandals involving Rice and other NFL standouts can’t make even a small dent in this trend because of football’s widespread popularity and importance in American culture, Berman said. "Football will outlive all of us," he said. Our ruling Will said, "Last week’s three most-viewed television programs were Sunday Night Football, Thursday Night Football and Monday Night Football." Football games and related programming accounted for eight of the top 10 most-viewed TV programs between Sept. 8-14, 2014. Even though Monday Night Football came in fifth, not third, Will was right to say that football dominated the rankings. Experts say it will continue to do just that. We rate this claim True.	None	George Will	None	None	None	2014-09-21T18:16:41	2014-09-21	['None']
-pomt-07648	"Georgia still has one of the richest programs in terms of scholarships for students to go to college."	true	/georgia/statements/2011/mar/15/nathan-deal/deal-says-hope-revamp-still-good-students/	Gov. Nathan Deal made an interesting claim during a defense of his plan to overhaul the popular HOPE college scholarship program. "Georgia still has one of the richest programs in terms of scholarships for students to go to college," Deal said in a recent radio interview. We wondered about that, particularly as the governor is expected to sign a bill Tuesday that will make significant changes to HOPE in an effort to keep the scholarship program on solid financial footing. The program is funded through Georgia Lottery proceeds, and revenue is flat. The state spent nearly $150 million out of $1 billion reserves to cover HOPE in the 2010 fiscal year, and if no changes are made, it will need to spend more than $500 million from reserves for this fiscal year and next, according to a recent article by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Laura Diamond. Georgia Senate Democrats proposed an alternative plan that would give a full scholarship to high-achieving students whose families earn up to $140,000 a year. That plan would increase deposits to education programs by 2 percent. Democrats argued the GOP’s HOPE proposal would be unfair to poor and rural students. The Republican-led Senate voted against the alternative plan. "HOPE will be the richest program because the HOPE scholarship will only be available for the richest people," Senate Democratic Leader Robert Brown of Macon said in a statement. "These changes will help the students who need HOPE the least and hurt the students who need it the most." Deal spokesman Brian Robinson said with the changes in the plan the governor supports, Georgia would have a projected $507 million for HOPE scholarships and grants and $54 million for private college awards during the next school year. For the past 40 years, the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs has kept track of how much money each state awards in post-secondary education scholarships and grants. The association is made up of state college funding officials from all 50 states. Other organizations, such as the College Board, the post-secondary educational program that administers the SAT exam, suggested we reach out to NASSGAP to get the best data on this subject. Georgia awarded nearly $567 million in total grant aid during the 2008-09 school year, ranking fourth in the nation behind California, New York and Florida, according to the association. Divide that total by the number of students enrolled in undergraduate programs, and Georgia ranked only behind South Carolina, the most recent report found. Georgia handed out an estimated average of $1,712 to each undergraduate student. South Carolina awarded $1,916 per student. California, Florida and New York have far more undergraduate students than Georgia, while South Carolina had only half the number of students that Georgia had in undergraduate programs. California awarded $537 per undergraduate student. Florida and New York awarded $924 and $1,015, respectively, per undergraduate student. Frank Ballmann, the federal liaison for NASSGAP, said many states are facing the same sorts of financial challenges that Deal and many state leaders say necessitates the funding changes to HOPE. But even with those changes to HOPE, Ballmann believes Georgia will remain one of the leaders nationally in terms of the amount of money per student it gives out for scholarships and grants. "Generally speaking, Georgia is still doing very well," Ballmann said. "I think even with the cuts Georgia is going to be in the top five. Depending on what the other states do, Georgia may remain No. 2." The numbers here seem clear on this one. Georgia is one of the top five states in terms of awarding grants and scholarships. NASSGAP’s Ballmann believes that won’t change. Being in the top five certainly qualifies it as "one of the richest," as the governor said. We rate Deal’s claim as True.	None	Nathan Deal	None	None	None	2011-03-15T06:00:00	2011-03-02	['None']
-hoer-00151	Plastics Cancer Link Email - Freezing Plastic Bottles - Plastics In the Microwave or Car	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/plastic-cancer-link-hoax.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Plastics Cancer Link Email - Freezing Plastic Bottles - Plastics In the Microwave or Car	May 2009	None	['None']
-pomt-00373	"Miami Dolphins fire 2 kneeling players before pre-season kickoff."	pants on fire!	/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/sep/10/blog-posting/miami-dolphins-hasnt-fired-national-anthem-kneeler/	The Miami Dolphins team doesn’t have players named Horace Black or Manfred Brown on its roster. And the team didn’t fire these nonexistent athletes for kneeling during the national anthem like a fictitious story on social media claims. The article was published on us24.online with the headline "BREAKING: Miami Dolphins fire 2 kneeling players before pre-season kickoff." The text was copied from one of America’s Last Line of Defense websites, which are among the biggest sources of false news online. This story was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its newsfeed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) America’s Last Line of Defense self-identifies as a satire site. The original article’s first link goes to a photo with text that says, "This is not real." That story was filed under the category "Snopes is going to love this ‘satire.’" Us24.online did not include a disclaimer on its home page or on the story. As the NFL season kicks off, false news stories are circulating on social media related to the ongoing controversy of players protesting during the playing of the national anthem. We’ve recently fact-checked two other stories that originated on America’s Last Line of Defense websites. We rated both Pants on Fire. In 2016, Colin Kaepernick, then a San Francisco 49ers quarterback, started kneeling during the national anthem before games to protest the treatment of people of color in the United States. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Media in 2016. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder." The Miami Dolphins considered penalizing or firing players who kneeled during the anthem this summer. Shortly after the Associated Press reported on the potential penalties, the NFL and the NFL Players Association announced they would not be issuing or enforcing new rules related to the anthem. The NFL is not expected to implement a new national anthem policy this season. While several Miami Dolphins have knelt during preseason games this year, none of them share the names of the players in the article, and no one was fired or penalized. Miami Dolphins wide receivers Kenny Stills and Albert Wilson knelt during the national anthem during the Sept. 9 season opener against the Tennessee Titans, eight days after the article's claim was made. They have not been penalized as of deadline for this story. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-09-10T12:52:02	2018-09-01	['Miami_Dolphins']
-abbc-00153	The claim: Tony Abbott says over 100,000 new jobs have been created since the end of last year.	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-19/tony-abbott-new-jobs-fact-check/5730052	The claim: Tony Abbott says over 100,000 new jobs have been created since the end of last year.	['federal-government', 'liberals', 'work', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'abbott-tony', 'australia']	None	None	['federal-government', 'liberals', 'work', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'abbott-tony', 'australia']	Fact check: Have 100,000 new jobs been created this year?	Fri 19 Sep 2014, 2:27am	None	['Tony_Abbott']
-pomt-00630	"Accidents are down 50 percent and injury accidents are down 60 percent" in the rebuilt Marquette Interchange in Milwaukee.	true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/may/24/wisconsin-transportation-builders-association/accidents-cut-half-after-marquette-interchange-wor/	If you’re a regular listener to Milwaukee Brewers radio broadcasts, one oft-repeated ad may ring a bell. The radio spot by a group representing roadbuilding firms features a stat that’s a world apart from RBI or ERA or WHIP. The ad’s opening pitch says: "Improving Wisconsin’s roads and highways is critical to reducing accidents and keeping our families safe." Then the payoff pitch: "In fact, Milwaukee’s Marquette Interchange is a shining example of those successes. Accidents are down 50 percent and injury accidents are down 60 percent." All-star numbers, if true. The $800 million rebuilding of the Marquette, in the heart of downtown Milwaukee, was a huge traffic story from 2004 until the work was completed in 2008. Since then, Milwaukee has moved on to other mega-highway renovation projects, including the $1.7 billion Zoo Interchange and the re-decking of the Hoan Bridge. Statewide, a glut of highway projects has led to concern that Gov. Scott Walker’s budget seeks too much borrowing for roadbuilding. The Legislature is reviewing options. In the Marquette, the old cloverleaf was having trouble handling increasing traffic. Motorists had to crisscross lanes to reach exits. Key components were falling apart and accidents were topping 600 a year. The reconstruction didn’t solve all the design puzzles in the busy interchange. Changes were needed in 2010 to slow traffic on the long curve tying I-94 eastbound to I-43 northbound after the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office and others raised concerns about accident rates. In 2012, DOT had to make adjustments after backups and long delays plagued westbound I-794 in the Marquette. But what about the overall claim? Did the reconstruction add up to the big safety improvements claimed by the Wisconsin Transportation Builders Association? What the numbers show Pat Goss and Kevin Traas from the group pointed us to the state Department of Transportation, which collects data on reported accidents from local law enforcement agencies. The association cited a DOT chart comparing the average number of crashes annually in the three years before the rebuild (2001-2003) to the first three years after (2009-2011). It showed annual crashes down 48.2 percent, and injury or fatal crashes down 60 percent. By the numbers, that’s 365 fewer reported accidents every year, and 143 fewer per year involving injuries. So those figures generally back up the group’s claim, albeit by rounding up from 48 percent to 50 percent. Newer figures The numbers are out of date though, so we obtained five years of accident data from before and after the construction period. Those figures run through 2013. There’s a caveat: The boundaries used for the interchange were somewhat different in DOT’s five-year comparison than in the three-year comparison. But they help confirm the trends. They also show a big drop in total accidents, though not quite as sharp: 45 percent for total accidents, and 55 percent for injury accidents. The cumulative accident count from 1999-2003: 3,416. The same count from 2009-2013: 1,890. For injury accidents in the five-year comparison, there were 561 fewer in the five years after the rebuilding. Michael Pyritz, DOT spokesman for the southeast region, attributed the improvement in accident rates to several factors. The new interchange made exiting safer and improved sight lines while incorporating modern safety and efficiency designs, he said. "We expect to see the same trend when the Zoo Interchange is done," Pyritz said. As a double check on the DOT data, we got crash figures from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office, which responds to most accidents in the Marquette Interchange. That data showed somewhat smaller, but still significant, declines in accidents. For example, comparing the three years before the project (2001-2003) vs. the latest three years (2012-2014), accidents are down 45 percent and injury accidents 49 percent, according to the Sheriff’s Department. The two agencies defined the interchange somewhat differently. By another measure -- the three years before rebuilding vs. the first three years after (2009-2011) -- the Sheriff’s Office found 27 percent and 32 percent drops in total accidents and injury crashes, respectively. That same comparison using the DOT data yielded the 48 percent and 60 percent drops. There’s a large discrepancy in which the Sheriff’s Office shows far fewer injury accidents before the project than are reported in the DOT figures. Sheriff’s officials said a changeover in data collection methods, and late reporting of injuries by crash victims, likely explains some of the discrepancy. Still, even with that, both agencies show a clear drop in accidents. One final note: more traffic could also explain the higher numbers of accidents before the reconstruction. But DOT data we reviewed on its website suggests that traffic volumes were not significantly higher, if higher at all, back then. In the broad view, after 30 years of steady increases, miles traveled on state highways leveled off in 2000 and have not budged much. On I-94, which feeds the Marquette, a DOT study reported a 5 percent increase eastbound from the Brewers ballpark from 1989 to 2009. All that might suggest that volume in the Marquette after the rebuild is roughly the same or higher than it was before construction. Our rating The Wisconsin Transportation Builders Association radio ad contended that "accidents are down 50 percent and injury accidents are down 60 percent" since the redesign of the Marquette Interchange in Milwaukee. There are different ways to slice this, but the ad cites official state data that is backed up within a few percentage points by more recent figures, and is generally confirmed by local data. We rate the claim True.	None	Wisconsin Transportation Builders Association	None	None	None	2015-05-24T21:00:00	2015-05-13	['Milwaukee']
-chct-00130	FACT CHECK: Does Planned Parenthood Get Over $500 Million A Year In Government Funding?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/05/19/fact-check-does-planned-parenthood-get-over-500-million-a-year-in-government-funding/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	4:25 PM 05/19/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-06820	"George LeMieux voted against the majority of Republicans and joined with Democrats to create a 'Task Force For Responsible Fiscal Action' that looks strikingly similar to the 'Super Committee' now being set up in Washington to justify massive tax hikes."	half-true	/florida/statements/2011/aug/10/adam-hasner/adam-hasner-says-george-lemieux-voted-against-his-/	As Adam Hasner and George LeMieux debate each other's conservative credentials in the race to take on Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, Hasner's team has picked over LeMieux's brief time in the U.S. Senate looking for signs of weakness — er, uh, moderate leanings. The joys of primary politics. Thus, a Hasner news release from Aug. 8, 2011 -- the week after Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling and avoid default -- accuses LeMieux of being "for tax-raising committees before he was against them." It begins: "After weeks of equivocation and avoidance of the debt crisis in Washington, Senator George LeMieux finally tweeted his displeasure in the closing hours of the debate. But while serving as Charlie Crist's handpicked U.S. Senator, George LeMieux voted against the majority of Republicans and joined with Democrats to create a 'Task Force For Responsible Fiscal Action' that looks strikingly similar to the 'Super Committee' now being set up in Washington to justify massive tax hikes." And concludes: "Time and time again, Senator LeMieux's record shows he was willing to be a token Republican vote for the Democrats, and his vote to create a tax-raising task force proves it." Consider us intrigued. In just part of a sentence — "George LeMieux voted against the majority of Republicans and joined with Democrats to create a 'Task Force For Responsible Fiscal Action' that looks strikingly similar to the 'Super Committee' now being set up in Washington to justify massive tax hikes" — we saw three issues worth a look. • Did LeMieux vote against most Republicans and with Democrats to create a Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action? • Was that task force proposal "strikingly similar" to the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, sometimes called the "supercommittee," created by the Budget Control Act of 2011? • Is the supercommittee being "set up ... to justify massive tax hikes"? We'll note that LeMieux did indeed tweet unhappily on Aug. 1, 2011, saying the, "Debt deal offers no significant debt reduction & no fundamental reforms to solve DC's spending addiction" and linking to a short post on his website that the debt deal was "no time for celebration." Did LeMieux vote to create a Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action? LeMieux's record of support for a bipartisan committee known as the "Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action" is clear. He was one of 25 original co-sponsors of legislation in 2009 by Sens. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., that would have created the task force. When it ultimately came up for a Senate vote as an amendment to an amendment to another bill in January 2010, the roll call at Senate.gov shows he voted for it. His "Yea" vote put him with about 40 percent of Republicans. The majority of his party colleagues voted against it. That supports Hasner's claim that he "voted against the majority of Republicans and joined with Democrats" to create the task force. But LeMieux wasn't exactly a "token Republican vote for the Democrats," as Hasner's team put it. Fifteen of LeMieux's Republican colleagues joined him. The Democrats were as divided as the Republicans, though more of them supported the plan. Meanwhile, the final 53-46 Senate vote — seven votes short of the 60 required — understates earlier Republican support for the task force. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell had called it the "best hope for addressing the out-of-control spending and debt levels that are threatening our nation's fiscal future." Then antitax activists attacked it for leaving the door open to tax increases, and President Barack Obama endorsed it the Saturday before the vote. Seven Republican co-sponsors withdrew their support. McConnell also voted against it, earning a Full Flop from PolitiFact. Which left LeMieux in his party's minority — but on a proposal with strong bipartisan roots. Was that task force proposal "strikingly similar" to the supercommittee? Hasner accuses LeMieux of a flip-flop, saying he was "for tax-raising committees before he was against them." But just how similar were the committees? In some key ways, they're the same. The supercommittee is "certainly a descendant of the task force and the many other similar type(s) of special mechanisms proposed to do the hard work Congress refuses to do," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, an independent group that analyzes federal spending. "... This is not a new idea." The committee proposals both include members appointed by Democrats and Republicans, seek ideas to reduce the "fiscal imbalance of the federal government" and require Congress to fast-track recommendations to a vote with no amendments. But LeMieux's campaign points out a key difference: The 12-member supercommittee created by Congress requires just simple majority votes — for example, a single Republican could join six Democrats to endorse a plan. Meanwhile, the task force he supported required supermajority votes both by an 18-member committee and by Congress to implement its recommendations. "This would have protected taxpayers since the commission's plan would have needed the support of at least four of the eight Republicans on the commission to guarantee a vote in the House and Senate," said campaign manager Brian Seitchik. "This would make it highly unlikely that the commission's plan would be able to get sufficient Republican support if it raised taxes." So, are the committees "strikingly similar"? Yes, but arguably with enough room for LeMieux to explain why he might vote for one, but not support the other. Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction Goal To provide recommendations and legislative language that will significantly improve the long-term fiscal imbalance of the federal government, which may include expenditures and revenues To reduce the deficit by at least $1.5 trillion from 2012-21, providing recommendations and legislative language that will significantly improve the short-term and long-term fiscal imbalance of the federal government Members 18 (10 Democrats, 8 Republicans) 12 (6 Democrats, 6 Republicans) Time before committee vote on recommendations 41 weeks 16 weeks Number of members required for passage 14 of 18 (78 percent) 7 of 12 (58 percent) Fast-tracking in House and Senate Yes Yes Amendments allowed No No Votes required to pass Congress Supermajority in each chamber Simple majority Is the supercommittee being "set up ... to justify massive tax hikes"? Now we get to the crux of Hasner's campaign message, that LeMieux supported "tax-raising" committees before he opposed them. Did Congress create the supercommittee "to justify massive tax hikes"? And was raising taxes the purpose of the earlier task force that LeMieux supported? Consider this a matter of vociferous debate. Neither the task force nor the supercommittee proposals require tax increases. The earlier task force plan explicitly allowed for the possibility, saying that recommendations may include expenditures and revenues. Meanwhile, the supercommittee legislation requires a $1.5 trillion reduction in the deficit but doesn't prescribe how to get there. Spending cuts? Tax increases? It's up to the committee, which doesn't have to be named until Aug. 16, 2011. In fact, depending on whom you talk to, tax increases are guaranteed, likely — or, in the case of the supercommittee, not even possible. Hasner's campaign cited a letter from antitax activist Grover Norquist, who opposed the earlier task force proposal. Norquist said that by relying on a committee that was not explicitly barred from raising taxes, tax hikes would occur. "Every Democrat on the commission would insist on tax increases to 'balance' spending cuts in the recommendation. There is no conceivable scenario whereby the commission would issue a report that does not contain tax hikes," he wrote. George F. Will made a similar argument about the tax force proposal LeMieux supported: "Substantively," he wrote, "the task force would be a means of conscripting Republican participation in huge tax increases." Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense disagrees with the premise that either committee was designed to justify tax increases. "That's irresponsible fear-mongering, which is similar to those on the left saying the committee was established to slash Social Security or Medicare," Ellis said. He points out that only half the senators who voted against the task force proposal were Republicans. "I don't think Sen. (Bernie) Sanders, I-Vt., was voting against the committee because he was afraid it would raise taxes," he said. Meanwhile, the supercommittee vote actually spawned days of debate about whether it would allow for tax increases at all, much less "massive" ones. (You can read some here: Sort of, Yes, Maybe) House Speaker John Boehner told his caucus it would effectively be impossible for the supercommittee to raise taxes. The White House disagreed. The debate turned on a technical question: How would $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction be calculated? Some said that, because the supercommittee legislation asks for estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, it would require using CBO's typical "current law" baseline — one that assumes the Bush tax cuts will expire in 2012 — as opposed to a "current policy" or "plausible" baseline that assumes that what's true now stays in place whether that requires an act of Congress or not. Others said the committee could request a different baseline. If a current law baseline were required, Democrats wouldn't get any credit toward the $1.5 trillion for stopping or limiting the Bush tax cuts, for example, which would be presumed gone. Even if they wanted to do it anyway, increasing tax rates would get sticky. "The practical effect of this is that the bipartisan committee will be unable to make any recommendations regarding the Bush-era tax cuts," wrote Nick Kasprak of the business-backed Tax Foundation. "For example, let's say the committee proposes, among other things, raising the top marginal tax rate 3 percentage points, from 35 percent to 38 percent, which would bring in some amount of revenue that counts towards their $1.5 trillion assignment. 'Hold on,' says the Congressional Budget Office, 'According to our current law baseline, that rate is set to go up to 39.6 percent in 2013 when the Bush-era tax cuts expire, so this is actually a tax cut, and it makes the deficit worse.' " One more curveball: If the supercommittee deadlocks, or Congress doesn't pass what it recommends, the Budget Control Act includes an automatic trigger to cut $1.5 trillion across the board, split evenly between defense and everything else, and protecting just Social Security, Medicaid and veterans benefits. That's right: No deal means just cuts. The ruling Hasner's team said, "George LeMieux voted against the majority of Republicans and joined with Democrats to create a 'Task Force For Responsible Fiscal Action' that looks strikingly similar to the 'Super Committee' now being set up in Washington to justify massive tax hikes." LeMieux did vote against the majority of Republicans, joining with Democrats in an attempt to create a Task Force For Responsible Fiscal Action — though the proposal had more bipartisan support than Hasner's full news release suggests. Meanwhile, while the task force would have been substantially similar to the supercommittee just established by Congress, it's different enough that LeMieux could explain his change of support without a change of heart. Finally, it's a serious stretch to say the supercommittee was designed "to justify massive tax hikes." While tax increases are one plausible outcome, they aren't required, and depending on the baseline committee members choose, may not even be likely. On balance, the claim is Half True.	None	Adam Hasner	None	None	None	2011-08-10T13:28:18	2011-08-08	['Washington,_D.C.', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pose-00957	"Bob McDonnell will establish Virgina as a "Green Jobs Zone' to incentivize companies to create quality green jobs. Qualified businesses would be eligible to receive an income tax credit equal to $500 per position created per year for the first five years (up to 350 jobs annually).'	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/virginia/promises/bob-o-meter/promise/992/establish-tax-credit-for-green-jobs/	None	bob-o-meter	Bob McDonnell	None	None	Establish tax credit for green jobs	2011-09-09T12:56:22	None	['Bob_McDonnell', 'Virginia']
-pomt-00383	Says "Mimi Walters raised taxes on middle-class Californians."	mostly false	/california/statements/2018/sep/07/katie-porter/fact-checking-democrat-katie-porters-tax-attack-ad/	If Democrats are to retake the U.S. House, California is likely to play a big part. And near the top of any list of toss-up races is California’s 45th Congressional District, an Orange County seat held by incumbent Republican Rep. Mimi Walters. Hillary Clinton carried the district in 2016 by five percentage points, and Democrats have nominated UC Irvine law professor Katie Porter to challenge Walters this November. One big issue in the race: President Donald Trump's 2017 tax overhaul. While the tax bill, which Walters supported, cut taxes for many, Porter claimed in a recent television ad that it will actually raise taxes on "middle-class Californians." "Mimi Walters votes with Donald Trump 99 percent of the time and Mimi Walters raised taxes on middle-class Californians," Porter’s ad claims. Here, we’re focusing on Porter’s claim that Walters "raised taxes on middle-class Californians." Porter campaign manager Erica Kwiatkowski said the claim stems from Walters’ vote for the Trump tax bill. What the federal tax bill means for California The tax bill, signed into law by Trump in December 2017, cuts corporate taxes across as well as income taxes for many Americans. But residents in higher-tax states like California will be hurt by changes to the state and local tax deduction. Previously, California residents could deduct the amount they pay in state and local taxes from their federal tax bill. As part of the 2017 tax bill, deductions will be capped at $10,000. The provision is set to end after 2025. About 6.1 million Californians filed for the deduction in 2015, reducing their federal tax income by an average of $18,438, according to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, an independent group that models the effects of tax legislation. A report prepared by the Government Finance Officers Association, a group made up of government finance officers, shows similar numbers. The average deduction in California, New York and New Jersey are all over $17,000. If the state and local tax deduction were eliminated, "an average taxpayer in New York who currently itemizes SALT (state and local tax) would face a tax increase of almost $5,500." That figure wouldn’t be far off for a decent chunk of Californians. How it affects middle-class Californians First, the 1 million California taxpayers who may have to shell out more tax money next year, as seen in Porter’s ad, are not all middle class. The Sacramento Bee reported that while Californians will lose a collective $12 billion because the new law caps the state and local tax deduction, the lion’s share of that money will be paid by wealthy residents earning more than $1 million a year, with 43,000 of them paying a combined $9 billion. Still, some middle-class California families are predicted to pay more, too, according to an analysis by the state’s Franchise Tax Board. The board has been releasing reports on the tax bill in waves since it was signed into law in December. Notably, the tax board found that while most Californians should see a tax cut, about 751,000 households with incomes under $250,000 will likely owe more tax. Taken together, these taxpayers are estimated to owe an extra $1.1 billion. Regardless, it’s still hard to tell how it will affect each family as every tax return is different. And in a state with more than 39 million people, many middle-class Californians will see a tax cut — not an increase. "In general, tax situations are unique for everyone, and it's difficult to assess a broad-ranging effect on future years, without having specific information about a person's return," a spokesperson for the tax board told PolitiFact. The Los Angeles Times also reported that Walters spent weeks pushing House leaders to alter the bill to lower the burden on her constituents before deciding to support it. She told the organization that she believes the "changes to deductions" and "tweaks to the income ranges" would mean a tax cut for her constituents. "I campaigned on tax reform. I’ve always been a big proponent that we need to have tax reform in this country, and I think we have a very good package that we are presenting to the American people," she told the Times. It is worth noting that Walters’ Republican counterparts in nearby districts, Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Darrell Issa, both voted against the measure. Our ruling Porter’s ad says, "Mimi Walters raised taxes on middle-class Californians." That's misleading. While a provision in the tax bill will result in tax increases for some middle-class Californians, it won't for many more. The ad ignores all that context, along with the fact that lion's share of the tax increases Porter is talking about will be paid for by wealthy Californians. Porter's statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Katie Porter	None	None	None	2018-09-07T11:43:55	2018-09-05	['Mimi_Walters', 'California']
-pomt-08198	On high-speed rail.	full flop	/wisconsin/statements/2010/nov/23/tom-petri/tom-petri-heads-opposite-direction-high-speed-rail/	Over 31 years in Congress, U.S. Rep. Tom Petri, a Republican from Fond du Lac, has kept a pretty low profile on controversial issues. So it was a bit of a surprise to see his name on the bottom of a Nov. 17, 2010 statement that called the Madison-Milwaukee high speed rail link a "boondoggle" and declared: "This high speed rail project is a bad investment for taxpayers and our state simply cannot afford it." Especially since Petri’s name was on an earlier letter, dated Aug. 10, 2009, about the high-speed rail effort, which said in part: "This investment will strengthen the surrounding Midwest economies through new rail and construction jobs, while also increasing development and connectivity from rural to urban areas." What happened in those intervening 15 months? Well, after Republican Gov. Tommy G. Thompson and Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle spent years working with other Midwestern states on plans for high-speed rail, the Milwaukee-Madison link was one of 13 projects selected to receive federal funding -- $810 million -- in January 2010. Then Republican Scott Walker made stopping the train a central part of this gubernatorial campaign, as did Republican candidates in Ohio and Florida. Now, Walker says Congress should allow the state to use the $810 million on roads -- though many, including Petri, say that’s unlikely. Other states -- New York, North Carolina, California and, of course, Illinois -- are clamoring for the money Wisconsin is about to take a pass on. And, the state’s Republican members of Congress are, well, circling the wagons around Walker. Thus, the November statement from Petri and U.S. Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner of Menomonee Falls and Paul Ryan of Janesville. It read: "We support Governor-elect Walker's effort to put the brakes on the High Speed Rail budget boondoggle, which is why we introduced legislation, today, that would give states the ability to return federal funds obligated to high-speed rail projects, and instead use this money to reduce our nation’s $1.6 trillion deficit and $13.8 trillion debt." So, it’s time again to roll out the Flip-O-Meter. Remember, we’re not passing judgment on whether the shift was good policy or even good politics. The Flip-O-Meter measures only how much an elected official’s position has changed. Petri’s position was pretty clear in that first letter, in which he joined with U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.) and announced the creation of a congressional caucus to support high speed rail, including the network that would include the Milwaukee-Madison link. That was the letter about a strengthened economy and all that rural-urban connectivity. In many ways, the letter was in line with the views of Thompson, who was a strong backer of the high-speed network as governor and chairman of the Amtrak board. In September, Thompson did his own shift and said the state instead should ask that the money go to highways. "I was supportive of high speed trains because I believe high-speed trains has a place," Thompson said at the time. "But at this day and time and the circumstances we have right now, we can't afford it." Petri, a long-time member of the House Transportation Committee, said he was merely heeding the wishes of state leaders, first Thompson and then Doyle. "My position was to make the strongest case I could for Wisconsin to have high speed rail," Petri told PolitiFact Wisconsin. "That was successful." So, what happened since? Petri said Walker’s election indicates that sentiment has turned away from the train. And if the train is stopped here, he wants the money to go to reduce the federal deficit -- not another state’s rail project. But how do you square a statement about the project's benefits with one declaring it a "boondoggle"? Asked about the stark difference in the two letters bearing his boss’ signature, spokesman Niel Wright said Petri didn’t write the recent letter -- it came from Sensenbrenner’s office. "Sensenbrenner is hotter on this and more determined on this than Mr. Petri," Wright said. Indeed, in his interview with us, Petri sounded remarkably open to the need for a rail connection from Madison to Milwaukee and Chicago. "It probably should be considered at some point," especially as Madison continues to grow, he said. Petri also noted that the train was a "pet project" of President Barack Obama -- and that it was highly unlikely that the president would sign legislation directing the money for road work or deficit reduction. He said Wisconsin’s money could well wind up going to another state. "If that’s the choice," Petri said, "I’d say just go ahead with it." If so, the Flip-O-Meter will be back for the backflip. For now, we’ll say Petri has gone from a full-blown advocate for the high speed rail project to signing onto a statement that condemned the project. And that’s a Full Flop.	None	Tom Petri	None	None	None	2010-11-23T09:00:00	2010-11-17	['None']
-pomt-02298	The National Science Foundation awarded $700,000 to fund a climate change musical.	true	/texas/statements/2014/apr/02/lamar-smith/climate-change-musical-funded-700000-national-scie/	Republican U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, whose district stretches from San Antonio north into Austin, recently pressed an official about the government bankrolling a musical. Smith, chairman of the House Science, Space & Technology Committee, listed six National Science Foundation grants as questionable--including, Smith said at the panel’s March 26, 2014, hearing, a "climate change musical that was prepared for Broadway but I’m not sure ever was actually produced, $700,000." Smith then asked John Holdren, the White House science czar, if the foundation should justify such grants to the public, whose tax dollars fund them, the Texan reminded. Holdren replied that the foundation, which is entrusted with promoting scientific progress, already justifies its grants in online posts. "We’re going to have to agree to disagree," Smith said. We’ve noted the scientific consensus globally that the Earth is warming. We focused for this article on whether the foundation ponied up for a play about that. Grant confirmed To our inquiry, a foundation spokeswoman, Dana Topousis, said by email the grant was awarded in 2010, adding: "The Civilians, Inc., a Brooklyn, N.Y., theatre company, developed an innovative, out-of-the-box approach to exposing U.S. citizens to science. The project represents the unique cultural leverage of theater in its attempt to inspire the public’s imagination and curiosity about basic science and its relation to their everyday lives." Topousis continued: "This venture, like other more traditional NSF-funded informal science education projects (e.g., interactive science exhibits, IMAX films, science-based television programming), aims to educate through a focus on understanding the scientific method, its applications, and its unique ability to extract knowledge about our complex natural world. It presents the pursuit of fundamental knowledge through basic research in a neutral manner that does not advocate any position regarding climate change or conservation research," she said. A foundation summary of the grant award, brought to our attention by Topousis and Zach Kurz, staff spokesman for the Republican side of Smith’s committee, states that a grant totaling $697,177 was awarded in 2010 covering August 2010 through July 2014. Play description The summary describes "The Great Immensity" as a "touring play with songs and video that explores our relationship to the environment, with a focus on critical issues of climate change and biodiversity conservation." "The play has been created with a network of partners including the Princeton Environmental Institute and Princeton Atelier Program/Lewis Arts Center, which will maintain an ongoing relationship with the project," the summary says, continuing: "The play uses real places and stories drawn from interviews conducted by the artists to create an experience that is part investigative journalism and part inventive theater. Attendance at the performances is projected to be about 75,000." The summary also says: "A major goal of the project is to help the public better appreciate how science studies the Earth's biosphere and to promote an inquisitive curiosity about our place in the natural world. The initiative also intends to create and evaluate a new model for how theater can increase public awareness, knowledge, and engagement with important science-related societal issues." Also, the summary says, the project will lead to the "development and testing of online content, podcasts, and videos as well as special community education and outreach efforts in each community where the play is staged. Performances will be accompanied by post-performance panel discussions with the artists, local scientists and policy makers. After the completion of the initial tour, the play will be published, licensed, and made available to other theaters to produce independently." Tickets on sale By phone, Sarah Benvenuti, an administrator for the Civilian Theater Co., said the play is slated to run April 11-May 1, 2014, at the Public Theater’s Martinson Hall in New York, which is not on Broadway. Tickets will be $20 each, she said. Benvenuti said the play is about climate change and includes musical numbers, which one can view in online videos. "Margin of Error," for instance, shows cast members singing about poll results. (Really.) We wondered if the presentation is explicit, say, about human contributions to warming. Benevenuti didn’t say, though she stressed that the play draws on direct conversations with expert scientists. "Climate change is a real thing," she said. "We have to do something about it." The script is not published, she said, but she pointed out the Public Theater’s online description of the play as a "continent-hopping thriller following a woman, Phyllis, as she pursues her husband Karl who disappeared from a tropical island while on an assignment for a nature show. Through her search," the summary says, "Phyllis uncovers a mysterious plot surrounding the upcoming international climate summit in Paris. As the days count down to the summit, Phyllis must decipher the plan and possibly stop it in time. With arresting projected film and video and a wide-ranging score of songs," the play "is a highly theatrical look into one of the most vital questions of our time: how can we change ourselves and our society in time to solve the enormous environmental challenges that confront us?" Finally, we circled back to the foundation to ask if the musical was an unusual grant beneficiary. Topousis replied by email that while the NSF "research portfolio this falls under--Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL)--contains projects at the intersection of science and the arts, NSF’s funding this kind of project--a theatrical production--is rare." Our ruling Smith said the science foundation awarded $700,000 for a climate change musical. The NSF awarded nearly that much for a theater company to produce a musical play that focuses on climate change and biodiversity conservation. We rate this statement as True.	None	Lamar Smith	None	None	None	2014-04-02T17:24:59	2014-03-26	['None']
-hoer-00056	Nichole Morgan Friend Request Hacker	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/nichole-morgan-hacker-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Nichole Morgan Friend Request Hacker Hoax	July 31, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-09157	Halliburton defrauded American taxpayers of "hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/09/arianna-huffington/halliburton-kbr-and-iraq-war-contracting-history-s/	We have a hard time resisting when people on national television ask us to fact-check them. The latest instance began with Arianna Huffington, founder of the liberal Huffington Post, talking on ABC's This Week about the causes of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. "The truth is that right now we have precisely the regulatory system that the Bush-Cheney Administration wanted -- full of loopholes, full of cronies and lobbyists filling the very agencies they're supposed to be overseeing," she said, adding a bit later, "Right here, we have the poster child of Bush-Cheney crony capitalism. Halliburton (was) involved in this, and we haven't said (anything) about that. They after all were responsible for cementing the well. Here's Halliburton, after it defrauded the American taxpayer (of) hundreds of millions of dollars is involved again..." That's when conservative pundit Liz Cheney interrupted. "Arianna, I don't know what planet you live on ..." she said, starting interruptions and crosstalk that finally ended with this: Cheney: "Her assertion that Halliburton defrauded the U.S. government --" Huffington: "It did. It did." Cheney: "-- that it was Bush-Cheney cronyism -- these are the left's talking points --" Huffington: "It did -- hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq." Cheney: "Arianna, it is absolutely not true. It is absolutely not true." Huffington: "Okay, I'm so glad PolitiFact is going to be checking this. I'm so glad." Cheney: "Good, good." There is no dispute that Halliburton was a contractor on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which is what Huffington was alluding to when she said Halliburton was "involved" in the oil spill. Host Jake Tapper affirmed that, then Cheney indicated she was objecting specifically to the claim of fraud. So we decided to fact-check Huffington's statement that Halliburton defrauded the U.S. government of "hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq." We first want to note something not explicitly stated on the show: Former Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton before becoming vice president, and Liz Cheney is his daughter. And we'll also stipulate that there is a mountain of evidence that many American companies profited off of the government's inefficient contracting system during the rebuilding of Iraq. Dick Cheney was secretary of defense from 1989 to 1993, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. A few years after leaving office, he became chairman and chief executive officer of Halliburton, a Houston-based oil services company. He led Halliburton until 2000, when he left to run for vice president on a ticket with George W. Bush. The Iraq war began a few years later. Most of the allegations of waste involving Halliburton focus on a subsidary company that Halliburton acquired in 1962, then known as Brown & Root. A series of mergers under Halliburton's ownership led to its current name, Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR. Halliburton's KBR held one of the largest contracts given during the Iraq war effort, the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP, which was part of the trend of government outsourcing traditionally military duties to the private sector. (We're focusing on the LOGCAP contract in this report because it's the contract that has the potential for "hundreds of millions of dollars" in fraud. There have been other isolated allegations of fraud that involved significantly smaller amounts.) The history of KBR's LOGCAP contracts are documented in Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, a 2009 report prepared by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction: "Just as USAID had outsourced much of its work in the years after the Cold War, the military also had turned to the private sector to perform work once done by its own personnel. Under the LOGCAP contract, which KBR held for all but a few years since the program's inception in 1985, contractors provide services ranging from building bases to cooking food and doing laundry. LOGCAP grew out of the post-Vietnam downsizing of the armed services, reflecting the government-wide growth of outsourcing, which would dramatically affect the war and reconstruction efforts in Iraq. In World War II, one contractor was deployed for every seven soldiers. During the 2003 invasion, that number had increased to one for every 2.4. By 2006, contractors outnumbered soldiers in Iraq." The report noted that some government officials raised the concern of a potential conflict of interest because of Cheney's former position with Halliburton, but that "White House officials said the mission took priority over whatever political fallout might occur" from awarding contracts to KBR. Since winning the latest version of the LOGCAP contract in 2001, the government has ordered work from KBR worth more than $31 billion. Government officials have raised many questions about KBR's fulfillment of its contracts, everything from billing for meals it didn't serve to charging inflated prices for gas to excessive administrative costs. Government auditors have noted that KBR refused to turn over electronic data in its native format and stamped documents as proprietary and secret when the documents would normally be considered public records. Over the course of several years, the Defense Contract Audit Agency found that $553 million in payments should be disallowed to KBR, according to 2009 testimony by agency director April Stephenson before the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Commissioner Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore Law School, said that amount represents a small portion of everything that auditors examined as potentially questionable. "The DCAA is known for cautious conclusions about contracting," Tiefer said. "The large majority of those auditor findings get actually withheld from the contractor." KBR itself acknowleges it may not get paid for all of its contract services. In its most recent annual report filed with the Securities Exchange Commission, it acknowledged that the Defense Contract Audit Agency was recommending withholding $289 million in contract costs not yet paid and asking for the return of $121 million already paid. "We continue to work with our administrative contracting officers, the DCAA and our subcontractors to resolve these issues. However, for certain of these matters, we have filed claims with the Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals or the United States Court of Claims," the report states. But there is one notable allegation where KBR is being accused of fraud, that KBR "knowingly included impermissible costs" in its bills. In April 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil fraud case against KBR over the issue of using private security forces in Iraq to protect its workers and subcontractors. Private security wasn't allowed under the LOGCAP contract because the U.S. military was supposed to provide protection. The lawsuit alleges that internal documents showed KBR executives knew private security wasn't allowed but charged for it anyway. While the lawsuit doesn't put a dollar amount on those billings, the director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency said the total could come to $99 million or higher. KBR has denied wrongdoing and said in a response to the lawsuit that the government has known for years that KBR was hiring private security, and KBR only did so because its employees were being left unprotected by the military. "KBR believes the costs incurred and actions taken by the company and its subcontractors to provide support and to protect its employees and subcontractors were reasonable, necessary and appropriate under the contractual arrangement between KBR and the Army. ... The Army breached the contract by repeatedly failing to provide the necessary force protection," the statement said. "Since 2001, KBR and its employees and subcontractors have worked diligently, and at often times at great sacrifice, to support American troops serving in Iraq," it also said. We should note here that KBR workers have died in Iraq. Company officials said 74 people working on the LOGCAP III contract have died in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. Halliburton sold KBR in 2007. Halliburton officials said KBR's war contracts weren't adding much to the oil company's profits. The same year, Halliburton opened a "second headquarters" (their words) in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, to emphasize its identity as a worldwide oil services company. But Halliburton did own KBR during the height of KBR's activities in Iraq. The Department of Justice fraud lawsuit specifically stipulates that KBR was overcharging between 2003 and 2006, years that Halliburton owned the company. We asked Halliburton for comment on this report, and they sent us this statement: "Halliburton cannot comment on activity that relates to KBR's work in Iraq and Afghanistan as it would be inappropriate for Halliburton to comment on the merits of a matter affecting only the interest of KBR." The U.S. government continues to use KBR for contract work in Iraq. In fact, the U.S. Army recently granted additional work worth $568 million to KBR in May. Military officials said it would be too disruptive to change contractors at this point in the process. Indeed, one defense of KBR's work is that they take extra steps -- which some might call excessive -- to keep troops happy with extra amenities at the request of military commanders. Recently, government officials have warned that KBR is dragging its feet on withdrawing its personnel from Iraq; the company's withdrawal rate significantly lags that of the military itself. If KBR doesn't reduce its employees in Iraq quicker, the U.S. government could be overbilled by as much as $193 million in 2010, officials said during hearings held by the Commission on Wartime Spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. In evaluating Huffington's statement, we're most bothered by her use of the word "defrauded." Some of the overbilling in Iraq appears to have been done from haste or inefficiency, or even in a desire to please military officials in the field without regard for cost. Whether the waste in contracting constitutes fraud is still being examined. "It's a lot money being spent in a region of the world where we don't have a lot of infrastructure for accounting for how the money is being spent. It will take years before we fully determine how we spent the money," said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow for defense budget studies at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. In ruling on Huffington's statement, we find much in the public record to support her statement, most notably the Justice Department lawsuit. Certainly there have been hundreds of millions of dollars that Halliburton's KBR attempted to charge the government that have been denied. Government audits of KBR's work in Iraq will likely continue for some time, and we do not expect a final accounting on these fronts anytime soon. Huffington glossed over some of these points in her back and forth with Liz Cheney. There's also much evidence that makes us believe that hundreds of millions of dollars were lost to waste and inefficiency, not deceitful fraud. So we rate Huffington's statement Half True.	None	Arianna Huffington	None	None	None	2010-06-09T16:21:05	2010-06-06	['United_States', 'Iraq', 'Halliburton']
-tron-02150	“Dance of the Hillary Virus” Warnings Spread on Social Media	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dance-hillary-virus-warnings-spread-social-media/	None	internet	None	None	['2016 election', 'facebook', 'hillary clinton']	“Dance of the Hillary Virus” Warnings Spread on Social Media	Oct 11, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00175	In August 2018, "liberals" started a GoFundMe campaign to raise murder suspect Cristhian Rivera's $5,000,000 bail.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cristhian-rivera-gofundme/	None	Junk News	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did ‘Liberals’ Set Up a GoFundMe Campaign for Murder Suspect Cristhian Rivera?	24 August 2018	None	['None']
-snes-00046	Did Christine Blasey Ford Make a Sexual Assault Accusation Against Neil Gorsuch?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/christine-blasey-ford-neil-gorsuch/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Did Christine Blasey Ford Make a Sexual Assault Accusation Against Neil Gorsuch?	24 September 2018	None	['None']
-chct-00093	Bolton Says It's ‘Pretty Silly' To Ask Putin To Hand Russians Over To Mueller - Here's Why	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/07/18/fact-check-russia-constitution-extradition-mueller/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	12:58 PM 07/18/2018	None	['None']
-snes-00244	Thomas Jefferson said "When the speech condemns a free press, you are hearing the words of a tyrant."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thomas-jefferson-speech-condemns-free-press/	None	Questionable Quotes	None	David Emery	None	Did Thomas Jefferson Say ‘When the Speech Condemns a Free Press, You Are Hearing the Words of a Tyrant’?	7 August 2018	None	['None']
-vees-00451	In a Feb. 17 speech in Baguio City, before members of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) Class ‘67, Duterte said:	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-duterte-orders-anti-money-laundering-d	The president’s pronouncement has two errors, one apparent and one not so.	None	None	None	fact-check,Fact check,amlc,Wealth	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte orders anti-money laundering council to do his job	February 25, 2017	None	['Baguio', 'Philippine_Military_Academy']
-hoer-01079	Woolworths Free $300 Grocery Coupon	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/woolworths-free-300-grocery-coupon-facebook-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Woolworths Free $300 Grocery Coupon Facebook Scam	October 31, 2016	None	['None']
-goop-02206	Beyonce Did Leak Photos Of Twins To “Ruin” Kim Kardashian’s Baby Shower, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/beyonce-photos-twins-ruin-kim-kardashian-baby-shower-made-up/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Beyonce Did NOT Leak Photos Of Twins To “Ruin” Kim Kardashian’s Baby Shower, Despite Report	4:19 am, November 14, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-00388	"Fully half the people — our research is showing half the people — in (California) want to leave."	half-true	/california/statements/2018/sep/06/john-cox/john-coxs-exaggerated-claim-half-people-want-leave/	High taxes. Traffic-clogged freeways. Soaring housing costs. These are all reasons some Californians say they want to leave for less-expensive and lower-tax states from Arizona to Texas. But does half the state’s population really want to move out? That’s what Republican candidate for governor John Cox claimed in an interview on the Fox Business Network, which aired July 30, 2018. The segment centered on the state’s high cost-of-living and Cox’s promise to help the "forgotten Californians" if elected. The San Diego businessman is running against Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. Here’s the exchange between Fox host Charles Payne and Cox: Payne: "It’s so bifurcated. Either you’re seriously wealthy, very, very wealthy where plastic surgeons have hundred million dollar homes. Or you’re extraordinarily poor and the people in the middle are trying to flee if they’re not stuck." Cox: "And that’s the point, because fully half the people — our research is showing — half the people in this state, Charles, want to leave." Cox makes his claim in the video above. We decided to fact-check Cox’s claim about ‘half the people in this state’ wanting to leave. Not a new trend California’s once-rapid population growth has slowed in recent decades. More people have been leaving for other states than have been moving in for many years, according to a February 2018 study by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office. About five million people moved to California from other states, while about six million left the state from 2007 to 2016, according to the LAO report, which cited data from the American Community Survey. That doesn’t mean, however, that California’s overall population is in decline. Just the opposite: It’s grown by an average 333,000 people per year since 2010 largely due to natural births and international migration. California was home to 39.8 million people as of January 2018, according to the California Department of Finance. That included an increase of 309,000 residents in 2017 alone and nearly 2.3 million over seven years. Half the state wants to leave? To examine Cox’s claim, we reviewed two independent polls that raised a similar question. They didn’t find 50 percent of people wanting to flee. But they did find sizeable, if somewhat smaller, portions of the state at least considering it. In its September 2017 survey, the Public Policy Institute of California asked whether California’s high housing costs were making them consider moving. It found: "About four in ten Californians (44 percent adults, 41 percent likely voters) say the cost of their housing is making them seriously consider moving away from the part of California they live in now." Here’s the PPIC survey’s breakdown of where that 44 percent would consider moving to: • 33 percent outside the state; • 10 percent elsewhere in California; • 1 percent listed as "other." UC Berkeley survey A September 2017 survey by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found 56 percent of Californians had considered moving because of rising housing costs, though not necessarily out of the state. Only 25 of those surveyed said that, if they moved, it would most likely be to another state. Another 2 percent said they’d move to another country. Meanwhile, 23 percent of respondents said they would most likely move to another part of California or another place in their general area, if they relocated. Cox’s response Cox’s spokesman Matt Shupe told us the candidate was referencing the campaign’s internal polling. He provided information about June and August surveys that asked people their opinion on repealing the state gas tax increase; whether California government is on the right track; and whether the standard of living for most middle-class and working families was improving, getting worse or remaining flat. It then asked: "Over the next few years, how likely is it that you would move out of state?" The June poll showed 21 percent answered "very likely" and 29 percent "somewhat likely" for a total of 50 percent. The August survey totaled 52 percent for those answers. The internal poll was conducted online and has a smaller sample size than the independent surveys. It conducted 800 interviews, while the PPIC survey spoke with 1,700 people and UC Berkeley interviewed 1,200. Also, Cox’s internal poll and the UC Berkeley survey spoke only with registered voters. PPIC’s survey includes responses from registered and non-registered Californians. "For us, we need to represent the entire population," said Mark Baldassare, PPIC’s president and survey director. Cox’s spokesman also cited a poll by the Bay Area Council showing 46 percent of voters either somewhat or strongly feel they are "likely to move out of the Bay Area in the next few years." That poll, however, did not examine attitudes statewide. Our ruling Republican candidate for governor John Cox claimed in a recent Fox Business Network interview that "Fully half the people — our research is showing — half the people in this state … want to leave." Independent polls place that share at one-quarter to one-third of Californians. That’s still a large amount but not half. Internal polls commissioned by the Cox campaign, and using a smaller sample size, show 50 percent of those asked were either "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to move out of the state over the next few years. Cox’s statement, while it includes the caveat that "our research is showing," leaves the impression for the average viewer that it’s a settled fact that half of California wants to move out. But that’s only the case if one relies on internal figures from the campaign, and ignores results from two outside surveys with much larger samples. His claim is partially accurate, but it leaves out important details and takes things out of context. We rate it Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	John Cox	None	None	None	2018-09-06T17:19:45	2018-07-30	['California']
-snes-00766	Were Two Black Real Estate Agents Arrested for Waiting at a Starbucks?	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/philadelphia-starbucks-arrest/	None	Crime	None	David Mikkelson	None	Were Two Black Men Arrested for Waiting at a Starbucks?	14 April 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01308	"We have spent $350 million to deal with sea-level rise" in the Miami area and "hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with coral reefs."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2014/oct/29/rick-scott/florida-spending-350-million-deal-sea-level-rise/	Gov. Rick Scott has drawn criticism from environmentalists for denying in 2011 that man contributes to climate change and now dodging questions with the reply of "I’m not a scientist." The topic arose during the Oct. 21 CNN debate when moderator Jake Tapper asked Gov. Rick Scott why he was "reluctant to believe the overwhelming majority of scientists who say that man contributes to climate change." Instead of answering the question directly, Scott claimed that he had already taken action to protect the environment, including addressing sea-level rise. "We have spent $350 million to deal with sea-level rise down in the Keys, or down in the Miami area. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with coral reefs," he said. Scott made a similar claim in the debate at Broward College on Oct. 15. Scott’s claim, particularly about investing in projects to combat sea-level rise, stood out for us. Under Scott, has the state spent $350 million to deal with sea-level rise in the Miami area and hundreds of millions to protect coral reefs? Did Scott invest hundreds of millions to help coral reefs? We asked a Scott campaign spokeswoman to provide details about the spending for both projects. As for the coral reefs, Jackie Schutz told PolitiFact that the state had "$100 million spent on protecting the Keys." The money stemmed from a mandate by the state for the Keys to upgrade from cesspits and septic tanks to a modern sewer system. Improving water quality can help coral reefs. In 1999 when Jeb Bush was governor, the state required that the Keys comply with wastewater standards that would necessitate modern sewer by 2010. That deadline would later be extended to 2015. To meet that goal, when Charlie Crist, was governor the Legislature approved a bill in 2008 that allowed bonding of $50 million a year for four years for the wastewater program. The bill stated that "beginning July 1, 2010, the Legislature shall analyze the ratio of the state's debt to projected revenues prior to the authorization to issue any bonds under this section." No money was actually doled out during the Crist administration, which coincided with the recession. Scott took over as governor in 2011. The first year that the state doled out money was in 2012. But the next year Scott, along with legislative leaders, decided not to issue bonds due to concerns about the state’s debt capacity, according to an article in the Florida Keys Keynoter. In 2014, the state doled out the second $50 million. In August 2014, Scott’s campaign released a "Let’s Keep Florida Beautiful Plan," which included a promise to invest another $100 million in the Keys wastewater project. So how does the sewer system relate to coral reefs? Centralized wastewater treatment prevents nutrients and other pollutants from entering nearshore waters, said Chris Bergh of The Nature Conservancy in the Keys. Wastewater treatment kills bacteria from human waste that can cause coral disease. "It was a great boon to the Keys environment and residents, but it will not affect sea-level rise in any but the most tangential ways," Bergh said. Sea-level rise money A spokesman for Scott’s office, John Tupps, sent us a list of what he said amounted to over $350 million "to address flood mitigation and sea-level rise." The projects were administered by various state agencies and included the following, in addition to the $100 million for sewer in the Keys: • $21 million for FEMA flood map modernization; • $122 beach protection projects; • $5 million for the coastal zone management program; • $80 million for flood mitigation in Florida in coastal communities; • $25 million for the Keys wastewater revolving loan program projects. The first thing we will point out is to get to $350 million Scott counted $100 million to install a sewer system in the Keys even though the point of that project wasn’t to deal with sea-level rise. We asked environmental experts if these additional projects should be considered as steps toward combating sea-level rise. They told us that while these projects have their merits, they aren’t long-term solutions to sea-level rise. For example, better flood maps help identify properties that are vulnerable under today’s conditions to flooding, but they don’t deal with future sea-level rise, Bergh said. These are typical beach maintenance and flooding-related projects. Scott hasn’t taken steps that scientists say would address future sea-level rise such as reducing coal-fired power plants. Florida State University oceanography professor Jeff Chanton said that if the beach protection projects refer to pumping sand onto the beach, that is an "ineffective short-term temporary fix." Chanton was one of the scientists who met with Scott this summer and urged him to take action on climate change. The scientists showed Scott how two feet of sea-level rise -- projected by 2048 -- will swallow much of Miami-Dade and Monroe counties. They called on Scott to reduce or eliminate coal-fired power plants; wean the state off carbon-emitting natural gas and oil-fired power; and develop more alternative energy options. The scientists noted that sea-level rise has already caused flooding in Miami Beach at high tide. We also sought out several government officials in Broward and Miami-Dade counties as well as the cities of Miami and Miami Beach to see if they had received state money to combat sea-level rise. No one could pinpoint a specific project. "I have no idea what he's talking about. It's the first I've heard of it," said Monroe County Commissioner Heather Carruthers, who serves on the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, in an interview with the Florida Keys Keynoter. Our ruling Scott said during the CNN debate, "We have spent $350 million to deal with sea-level rise" in the Miami area and "hundreds of millions dollars to deal with coral reefs." The state has spent $100 million to help the Keys upgrade to a sewer system, which should improve water quality -- a benefit for coral reefs. Scott omits that it was under Crist that the Legislature passed a law paving the way for the money, and he's wrong to claim it's "hundreds of millions." Scott’s office also pointed to a list of projects including flood mitigation, flood maps and beach protection -- and throws in the $100 million for the sewer project -- to make his claim about $350 million to deal with sea-level rise. While these include worthy projects, experts say they aren't directly related to addressing future sea-level rise. They’re typical projects for Florida, not new measures to address climate change. We rate this claim Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/b018571a-a6da-4df3-bb12-dc2a0e1f93ed	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2014-10-29T14:38:50	2014-10-21	['Miami']
-tron-00587	Clint Eastwood Wins Appeal to Overturn “R” Rating For “The 15:17 to Paris”	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/clint-eastwood-wins-appeal-overturn-r-rating-1517-paris/	None	celebrities	None	None	['celebrities', 'entertainment', 'movies']	Clint Eastwood Wins Appeal to Overturn “R” Rating For “15:17 to Paris”	 Jan 23, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-15190	A "majority in every state favors path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/aug/19/state-democratic-party-wisconsin/wisconsin-democrats-say-path-citizenship-supported/	As two flocks of Republican presidential hopefuls debated Aug. 6, 2015, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin made a claim and posed a question about one of the debate topics. "Majority in every state favors path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants," the party tweeted. "Even @scottwalker used to. Who are these guys pandering to?" PolitiFact Wisconsin has traced Walker’s reversal of his longstanding support for legal status for undocumented immigrants. We rated it a Full Flop in March 2015. Walker attributed the change in position to discussions with border-state governors; critics said he sought to better position himself to win support from conservative voters critical to the GOP nominating process. But what about the first part? Is public opinion in all 50 states in favor of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants? Where the numbers come from Most of the independent polling on immigration is done on a national basis, with results drawn from samples of about 1,000 people; typically those polls do not break out state by state results. But a nearly yearlong telephone survey of 40,751 Americans, conducted from April 2014 to January 2015, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) featured state results on immigration and other topics. It was part of what the organization calls its American Values Atlas, an online map based on a large sample size the group says "allows analysis of specific census regions, all 50 states, and even 30 major metropolitan areas." The American Values Atlas was funded by The Ford Foundation and The Carnegie Corporation of New York. Democratic Party spokeswoman Melissa Baldauff cited the Values Atlas as proof of the claim in the tweet. The effort found that majorities in every state, ranging from 52 percent in Wyoming to 66 percent in Delaware, favored allowing immigrants living illegally in the United States a way to become citizens, provided they meet "certain requirements." Those requirements were not spelled out. In Wisconsin, 61 percent in the poll favored the citizenship viewpoint. In terms of the overall national picture, the path to citizenship viewpoint was taken by 60 percent in the survey. Republicans backed it by a slim majority (52 percent), Democrats by 68 percent. The other two choices respondents were given included allowing illegal immigrants to become permanent legal residents (but not citizens), or identifying and deporting them. Permanent legal status drew a range from 9 percent (Wyoming) to 23 percent (Hawaii). Deportation drew between 11 percent (Vermont) and 38 percent (Wyoming). More about the poll We asked nationally respected Marquette University pollster Charles Franklin to assess the American Values Atlas. He said the institute that conducted the poll has a good reputation in the polling community, uses sound methods and is transparent in its reporting. The poll uses the same methodology for all states and does not use Internet or robo-polling. Immigration opinion has been reasonably stable recently, diminishing concerns about polling over a whole year, he said. Franklin cautioned, though, that some small states have small sample sizes, reducing the precision of those results. He defined small as under 300 responses; 14 states fit that description. Wyoming, for instance, had 95 residents interviewed. In those small-sample states, the margin of error would grow to at least 6-10 percentage points in either direction, he said. (That compares to 0.6 percent in the nationwide sample). It’s worth noting, though, that in all but Wyoming, the small-sample states had majorities of at least 56 percent for a path to citizenship. Some of those states were as high as 65 percent. In Wisconsin, the Marquette Law School Poll directed by Franklin has found majorities of 52 percent to 58 percent in Wisconsin for a path to citizenship in polls conducted from 2012-14, Franklin said. State polls Question wording and timing also influence poll results, and that can lead to conflicting results at times, especially on a complicated issue. With that in mind, we searched for other independent state-level polling on immigration reform choices. In Wyoming, a November 2014 poll by the University of Wyoming found only 25 percent backed a path to citizenship. Another 39 percent supported allowing illegal immigrants to stay and work for a time, while about 37 percent backed deportation. While the wording is different than the survey cited by the Democrats in their claim, the results undermine the idea that a majority in every state favor a path to citizenship. Meanwhile, an advocacy group that seeks to discourage illegal immigration and reject "amnesty" for illegal workers has raised questions about polls on a path to citizenship. The group, Federation for American Immigration Reform, thinks deportation is politically infeasible and should not be presented as the only alternative to citizenship or legal status. Instead of a path to citizenship, the group prefers to ask people how they feel about "encouraging illegal immigrants to return home" by removing jobs and government benefits. In a 2013 survey it commissioned, the group found a majority backed either deportation or such "encouraged" departures, according to its website. Robert Jones, CEO of PRRI, the group that did the American Values Atlas, said asking about deportation was fair based on rhetoric used by key Republican leaders. Our rating A "majority in every state favors path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants," the Wisconsin Democratic Party tweeted. There’s recent backing from a respected and independent opinion research outfit for the state-by-state claim. We found one instance of a contradictory result in a somewhat similarly worded question, and small sample sizes in some states are pretty small. So the finding is not airtight. We rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Democratic Party of Wisconsin	None	None	None	2015-08-19T06:00:00	2015-08-06	['None']
-snes-03240	Sinclair Lewis said "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sinclair-lewis-on-fascism/	None	Questionable Quotes	None	David Emery	None	Sinclair Lewis on Fascism in America	29 December 2016	None	['United_States']
-pomt-01240	"No one was taken into custody" for feeding the homeless.	mostly true	/florida/statements/2014/nov/17/jack-seiler/jack-seiler-says-arnold-abbott-90-year-old-wasnt-t/	The city of Fort Lauderdale’s latest attempt to regulate outdoor homeless feedings made international news when police nabbed "Chef Arnold" -- a 90-year-old caught in the act of such a public feeding. "One of the police officers said, 'Drop that plate right now,' as if I were carrying a weapon," Arnold Abbott said, recalling his early November arrest for the Associated Press. Multiple news reports -- and Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report -- recounted the tale of Abbott’s arrest, which reignited a long-running debate about how the city should handle the homeless population downtown and at the beach. On Nov. 5, Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler issued a statement in which he said he wanted to "set the record straight" about the city’s services for homeless. He said that the media had misrepresented the facts. "Contrary to reports," Seiler wrote, "the City of Fort Lauderdale is not banning groups from feeding the homeless." Seiler said outdoor feeding is legal, but added that a new city law regulates the activity. Then Seiler addressed the situation regarding Abbott: "At two recent outdoor food distributions, citations were rightly issued for non-compliance with the process enacted to ensure public health and safety. Contrary to what was reported in the media, no one was taken into custody. ..." As the public-relations crisis escalated, Seiler gave multiple interviews to the media. On CNN Nov. 11, Seiler said Abbott "was not arrested and taken into custody." At PolitiFact Florida we agree with Seiler’s goal of setting the record straight. Was Abbott taken into custody? Fort Lauderdale’s laws about the homeless Abbott’s battle with the city has brought notoriety to Seiler, a former state representative who has been mentioned as a future statewide candidate for the Democrats. Seiler faces re-election to a third term in March. So far, no one has filed to run against him. Abbott, who founded an interfaith volunteer organization Love Thy Neighbor to help the homeless, has been battling city leaders for more than a decade. In 1999, the city tried to ban him from holding picnics for the homeless at the beach, offering him an alternative site miles away from downtown. But Abbott prevailed in court when a judge ruled that the city had violated his religious rights and that the city’s new location was too remote. Abbott resumed his feedings and resumed them in visible locations in Stranahan Park in downtown and along the beach. The battle has continued in recent years, with the commission passing a series of laws that attempted to regulate the homeless population, including a ban on soliciting for money at intersections and tougher laws against defecating in public. City officials, including Seiler, have argued that while the homeless should have access to services, including meals, they have heard complaints from some businesses and residents about the homeless population in downtown. Advocates have decried city officials for cracking down on the homeless with a series of laws. At an Oct. 21 meeting, the commission approved the ordinance about outdoor food distribution over the objection of protesters. The ordinance, approved by the Commission 4-1, codified a list of rules for outdoor food distribution, including that sites must be 500 feet away from residential areas, have bathrooms or portable toilets, equipment for hand washing and consent of the owner. The law allows indoor feedings at houses of worship. "You have to balance the interests of everybody in the community," Seiler told PolitiFact Florida. "What we always try to do is make sure everybody gets to enjoy our parks. Every single thing we have done with the ordinance is a balance." But while the law itself doesn’t technically ban outdoor feedings, it raises the bar for groups such as Abbott’s in a way that makes it almost impossible to clear. (Abbott argues that the requirement that he get a port-a-potty should be moot since a public restroom is nearby and he says volunteers wash their hands before feedings and use gloves.) At the time of Seiler’s statement, Abbott had three run-ins with law enforcement related to the outdoor feedings: on Oct. 6, Nov. 2 and Nov. 5, police reports show. (The October arrest predated the new ordinance but the city already had a separate law banning social services in the parks.) On the first two occasions, Abbott was given a warning but then continued with the feedings. The third time, Abbott agreed to end the food distribution that day, police reports say. In none of the three instances was he handcuffed or taken to jail. Instead, he was given notices to appear in court. (In one police report, it states that Abbott shook the police officer’s hand before he left.) At least one other person helping with the feedings was also arrested in a similar manner. A city spokesman told PolitiFact Florida that the case stemming from the Nov. 2 arrest has been filed in court. The city has generally avoided referring to Abbott’s case as an "arrest," but his attorney John David said that just because it’s not a "custodial arrest" doesn’t mean it’s not an arrest. For minor crimes, police use this type of arrest and give defendants notices to appear as long as the person has a connection to the area and is likely to show up in court. Nonetheless, "it's an arrest, no doubt about that," David said. "He is charged with a criminal offense." Fort Lauderdale police Capt. Rick Maglione told PolitiFact Florida that "It is similar to a misdemeanor arrest, but we do not have to take the person physically into custody and they can just show up in court and let a judge decide the case." We interviewed a few criminal defense lawyers in South Florida not involved in the case and they agreed that the police did indeed arrest Abbott. "With all due respect to the mayor, it is an arrest," said Brian Tannebaum, a Miami criminal defense lawyer. "The fact that someone is not taken into custody does not make it something other than an arrest. Misdemeanor cases are handled with promises to appear all the time. The officer has discretion to take someone into custody, but even if they don't it is still considered an arrest." City spokesman Chaz Adams told PolitiFact that although a notice to appear is technically an arrest, "the mayor has been consistent in saying that Mr. Abbott was not "arrested and taken into custody." Abbott faces up to a $500 fine and 60 days in jail for each offense. However, lawyers say it’s unlikely that a judge will throw him behind bars. "I can’t imagine anyone putting Arnold in jail," said Broward public defender Howard Finkelstein. His office is not handling the case, but he has praised Abbott. Abbott’s lawyer filed a motion in Broward court on Nov. 12 that asked a judge to enforce the injunction from the earlier case that allowed Abbott to continue the feedings. The city offered Abbott two alternative sites -- at the city’s aquatic complex near the beach, and at Church by the Sea, located near the beach -- but he rejected both. "I plan to continue my feedings at the same site I have used for the past 23 years," Abbott told PolitiFact Florida in an email. Seiler says it’s not his call what penalty Abbott faces. "We have to enforce the laws, we have to be consistent," Seiler told PolitiFact Florida. "What the courts do with Mr. Abbott -- that’s up to the courts." Seiler has defended his city’s reputation for serving the homeless, which includes working with nonprofits to provide services and allowing the county-run Homeless Assistance center to expand. The city’s police department also has a homeless outreach unit. Fort Lauderdale’s law about feeding the homeless is part of a growing national trend. Since 2007, 71 cities have attempted or enacted some type of rules related to food-sharing activities, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. "The best solution to the food-sharing issue is to have indoor meal programs available to the homeless three times a day, seven days a week," said Michael Stoops, director of community organizing National Coalition for the Homeless. "If these locations were located conveniently in Downtown Fort Lauderdale, a good number of the homeless would opt to eat inside vs. outside. However, food-sharing with the homeless in public spaces would still be needed." Our ruling Seiler said that "no one was taken into custody" for feeding the homeless. Seiler is correct that Abbott wasn’t taken into custody -- the activist was not handcuffed or taken to jail but was instead given a notice to appear in court. But his carefully worded claim glosses over the fact that Abbott was indeed arrested on more than one occasion for allegedly feeding the homeless in violation of city ordinances, something that leaves Abbott at least theoretically in peril of being sentenced to jail. Seiler’s claim is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, so we rate it Mostly True.	None	Jack Seiler	None	None	None	2014-11-17T14:58:25	2014-11-05	['None']
-tron-00582	Walmart Closes 5 Stores Because of Plumbing Issues, Speculation Ensues	truth! & unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/walmart-closes-5-stores-because-of-plumbing-issues-speculation-ensues/	None	business	None	None	['Trending Rumors']	Walmart Closes 5 Stores Because of Plumbing Issues, Speculation Ensues	Apr 20, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-01914	Picture of a U.S. soldier shaking hands with Hillary Clinton but not happy about it	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hillary-soldier/	None	humorous	None	None	None	Picture of a U.S. soldier shaking hands with Hillary Clinton but not happy about it	Mar 17, 2015	None	['United_States', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-12457	"Nobody on Medicaid" will have their benefits taken away.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/may/09/kevin-mccarthy/would-republican-health-care-bill-take-away-anyone/	Soon after narrowly passing a major health care bill, Republican House members took to the airwaves to put a positive spin on a bill that critics say will roll back coverage for America’s poorest and most vulnerable. "We’re not taking a benefit away. Nobody on Medicaid is going to be taken away," Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told CNN May 4. Compared with current law, the Republican plan is projected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by $880 billion, or 25 percent, over the next decade and reduce enrollment by 14 million, or 17 percent, according to the an analysis of an early version of the bill from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, or CBO. When we asked McCarthy’s office whether these steep cuts would cause any states to pare down their Medicaid programs, his spokesman Matt Sparks replied, "That is a decision that states will have to make." Sparks added, "Regarding Medicaid, there are no changes until 2020. Then states will continue to receive the enhanced federal match for current enrollees." Given the dramatic financing and enrollment changes contemplated in the bill, we decided to look into McCarthy’s claim, with a focus on the bill’s impact on state Medicaid enrollment. We found the changes will almost certainly result in reduced enrollment. Ending more generous federal cost-sharing A key feature of the the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, is the option for states to expand Medicaid with generous federal cost-sharing. Thirty-one states plus D.C. have opted to make Medicaid benefits more widely available to their residents. Obamacare allowed states to extend Medicaid benefits to all adults making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line. In exchange, the federal government covers 90 percent or more of the cost of newly-eligible Medicaid recipients. The portion of funding shouldered by the federal government is known as the "federal match rate." Critics have pounced on the Republican bill for choking off the Obamacare Medicaid expansion by lowering the federal match rate for those who are new to the program. Under the bill, the 90 percent federal match rate drops to its pre-Obamacare average of about 57 percent in 2020 for new applicants. The bill "grandfathers in" the higher match rate for those who enrolled under Obamacare and maintain continuous coverage. But based on historical data, the CBO estimates more than two-thirds of this group would lose coverage due to churn within two years, and that 95 percent would lose their grandfathered-in status by the end of 2024. McCarthy spokesman Sparks was careful to note that the congressman was only referring to "current enrollees." But the fact is about 10.5 million of the the roughly 11 million low-income enrollees who now enjoy enhanced federal matching would lose it by 2025. Impact on states If the House bill becomes law, expansion states would immediately face the thorny question of whether to continue expanded coverage without the federal government’s added boost -- at an average cost increase of 33 percent. Some states actually have trigger laws on the books -- that predate the Republican bill’s passage -- that say federal cuts would legally force the state to end Medicaid expansion. According to the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, lowering the federal match rate would automatically end or curtail expansion in seven states -- Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Washington. "Laws in these states either explicitly require the expansion to end if the federal Medicaid matching rate decreases, or they require the state to take action to prevent an increase in state Medicaid costs," according to a paper by the center. The group said that some 2.6 million newly-eligible adults would immediately lose coverage under this scenario. Other states might curtail coverage even without state law. Health policy experts in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New Jersey and Ohio quoted in a May 4 article in Modern Healthcare magazine predicted that their states would end their coverage expansions if the current Republican plan became law. "It's almost beyond imagination that Pennsylvania's Medicaid expansion could survive the reduction in enhanced federal funding," Andy Carter, CEO of the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, told Modern Healthcare, adding that Pennsylvania, which already faces a $3 billion budget deficit, would have to come up with $2 billion to $3 billion just to replace lost federal funding. Additionally, a chorus of governors have expressed uneasiness about the proposed changes to Medicaid, with some warning that federal cuts are tantamount to ending the Medicaid expansion. "They are going to eliminate Medicaid expansion," Ohio Gov. John Kasich told CNN May 7. "In Medicaid, you are going to knock all these people off after 2020, which is just a few years away, these people who now are getting covered across the country." Our ruling McCarthy said, "We’re not taking a benefit away. Nobody on Medicaid is going to be taken away." Technically, the bill passed in the House would not directly strip Medicaid coverage from people who currently have it. It would ultimately be up to states to take away Medicaid coverage from current beneficiaries. But the House bill, if enacted in its present form, would at the very least force some states to pull out of Medicaid expansion due to trigger laws that would go into effect if the federal contribution dries up. Blaming the states rather than the House bill for the loss of Medicaid coverage amounts to an exercise in blame-shifting. More broadly, the CBO, health policy experts and governors have warned that the federal Medicaid cuts in the Republican plan would start a domino effect that ends with millions of people covered under expanded Medicaid losing their benefits. We rate the statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Kevin McCarthy	None	None	None	2017-05-09T15:57:36	2017-05-04	['None']
-snes-05751	A video depicts Mike Brown assaulting an elderly man over a stolen backpack.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mike-brown-beating-video/	None	Crime	None	David Mikkelson	None	Mike Brown Beating Video	9 December 2014	None	['None']
-snes-02896	Does a Photograph Show Ivanka Trump with Vladimir Putin and Wendi Murdoch?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ivanka-trump-with-vladimir-putin-and-wendi-murdoch/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Does a Photograph Show Ivanka Trump with Vladimir Putin and Wendi Murdoch?	22 February 2017	None	['Vladimir_Putin']
-pomt-12299	"Remember, Obamacare created a new category of eligibility. Working-age, able-bodied adults with no dependents for the first time became eligible for Medicaid if their income is below 138 percent of the poverty level. We’re going to continue that eligibility. No one loses coverage."	half-true	/pennsylvania/statements/2017/jun/27/pat-toomey/toomey-conflates-two-things-latest-health-care-cla/	U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania has made clear he supports the Senate’s new health care bill, which is expected to be voted on this week. The Republican said on CBS’s "Face the Nation" Sunday the plan would "make permanent" Medicaid expansion and that the federal government would "pay the lion’s share of the cost." "Remember, Obamacare created a new category of eligibility," Toomey continued. "Working-age, able-bodied adults with no dependents for the first time became eligible for Medicaid if their income is below 138 percent of the poverty level. We’re going to continue that eligibility. No one loses coverage." What did Toomey mean by "no one loses coverage?" And how will the Senate plan affect coverage for people who became eligible for Medicaid under Obamacare? Steve Kelly, Toomey’s press secretary, said that when the Senator said "no one loses coverage" he was referring to federal eligibility for expanded Medicaid and was not saying no single person would lose coverage. Sara Rosenbaum, the Harold and Jane Hirsh Professor of Health Law at George Washington, said Toomey "conflates two things." She said the Medicaid eligibility category for adults below 138 percent of the federal poverty level was continued. "But of course what he glosses over is what states will continue to cover these adults once the money starts disappearing," Rosenbaum said. Under the Senate plan — similar to the House plan — the federal government will shift from paying about 90 percent of the cost for this new class of adults eligible for Medicaid to paying the state average for other classes of Medicaid recipients, about 57 percent (it would be 52 percent in Pennsylvania). The shift happens gradually, staying at the current rate through 2020 before dropping gradually: 85 percent in 2021 80 percent in 2022 75 percent in 2023 57 percent in 2024 "We think the Medicaid program is a generous partnership for states," said Theo Merkel, a Toomey legislative assistant. "They are paid well over half of the cost for these individuals, and we think that over seven years if you phase in this transition and [the federal government] is still paying over half, it’s unlikely states are going to turn around and cut eligibility for like, in the case of Pennsylvania, 700,000 individuals." Under the Obamacare expansion, about 700,000 Pennsylvanians newly enrolled in Medicaid. The Urban Institute estimates the reduction of federal enhancement money to the state average in Pennsylvania to be about $1.75 billion annually under the AHCA plan, which senior research analyst Matthew Buettgens said would be comparable to the Senate plan. Buettgens said moving a greater amount of the cost burden to states would leave them with difficult choices. To make up for the shortfall, they’d likely either have to raise taxes, pay providers less or cut Medicaid benefits. He said failure or inability to do so could lead to a loss in coverage for some individuals. "Basically if states aren’t willing to raise taxes, pay providers less or cut benefits they will have to cut enrollment," Buettgens said. Rosenbaum said some states would likely make up for the increased costs and others wouldn’t, as the CBO projected for the House health care bill. "But the notion that these people will continue to have Medicaid is just absurd," Rosenbaum said. "It rests on an assumption states will keep covering people as they are today once the enhancement money is gone." Our Ruling On "Face The Nation," Sen. Pat Toomey said, "Remember, Obamacare created a new category of eligibility. Working-age, able-bodied adults with no dependents for the first time became eligible for Medicaid if their income is below 138 percent of the poverty level. We’re going to continue that eligibility. No one loses coverage." Toomey’s staff said the senator was referring to federal eligibility for that class of adults when he said "no one loses coverage." But Toomey did not clearly state nobody would lose eligibility under the Senate plan. He said "no one loses coverage," leaving his comment open for multiple interpretations. As Rosenbaum said, "Senator Toomey conflates two things." So Toomey is correct that eligibility for a certain class of adults who qualify for Medicaid under Obamacare and previously hadn’t continues under the Senate plan. But it’s possible, even likely, individuals enrolled in Medicaid under the Obama expansion would lose coverage if states decline to cover the shortfall they’ll face after the federal government reduces its share of expanded Medicaid costs. We rule the claim Half True.	None	Pat Toomey	None	None	None	2017-06-27T11:02:31	2017-06-25	['Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act']
-thet-00074	Do one in five Scots children leave primary school ‘functionally illiterate’?	none	https://theferret.scot/one-in-five-children-dont-leave-primary-school-functionally-illiterate/	None	Education Fact check Politics 	None	None	None	Do one in five Scots children leave primary school ‘functionally illiterate’?	May 14, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-00911	The measles vaccine has killed 108 people in the last decade, while no one has died of measles.	false	/georgia/statements/2015/mar/03/naturalnewscom/vaccine-claim-misinterprets-data/	The current measles outbreak has prompted some scientific-sounding claims about the dangers of vaccines. PolitiFact Georgia already ruled Pants On Fire to an outlandish statement reviving the threat of "mercury" in childhood vaccines, particularly the MMR shot for measles, mumps and rubella. Some readers challenged that conclusion, citing the experts in our backyard, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The gist of the argument comes from a headline over a story from the same alternative-health site as our first claim, NaturalNews.com. "Measles vaccines kill more people than measles, CDC data proves," the headline reads. The story gives precise numbers: The CDC, it says, has reported no deaths from the virus in a decade, while "at least 108 deaths" have been linked to measles vaccines according to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. It would be front-page news – not to mention a flood of "I told you so" Facebook posts – if, in fact, children were more than 100 times more likely to die from measles vaccines than the disease itself. The reason it isn’t? No grand conspiracy. Just a misreading of data. First, let’s agree that the data should only include cases or deaths in the United States. After all, measles remains among the leading causes of death for young children worldwide, killing 145,700 in 2013, according to the World Health Organization. The fate of children and adults in the United States is much better. The CDC’s National Vital Statistics Report data show measles as the cause of death five times between 2004 and 2010, the last year information is available. That breaks down to two cases each in 2009 and 2010, and one in 2005. And, according to the data, only the 2005 death was that of a child. However, even that low number might be an overstatement. A spokesman for the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases said those tallies sometimes report underlying causes, which do not always represent deaths associated with acute measles infection. Officially, the CDC shows the last verifiable deaths in the U.S. from acute measles were in 2003, when a 13-year-old boy and a 75-year-old man died, according to spokesman Mike Sennett. So that puts the half of the claim in line with the CDC’s stance. The other half – about more than 100 deaths from the four different measles vaccines – is the problem. Those figures come from searches of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), an online database co-sponsored by the CDC, U.S. Food and Drug Administration and agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Significantly, anyone can file a report with VAERS: doctors, patients, family members, friends, "even if the reporter cannot be certain that the event was caused by the vaccine." That is important to know when running a search of the VAERS database for the past decade. That data reveal 105 deaths following one of the four measles vaccines. From the most common MMR vaccine, the count is 96. But remember, the system is designed to capture as much information as possible. Tallying a death that happened after a measles vaccine is not the same as confirming that the shot was the cause. (When available, causes of death after the measles vaccines range from existing heart conditions to co-sleeping to drowning.) Researchers want that information to review and study for patterns, said Dr. Walter A. Orenstein, a pediatrician and associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center who spent 16 years as the head of the CDC’s national immunization program. Government researchers constantly examine every report, on an ongoing basis. They turn over anything suspicious to outside groups, such as the Institute of Medicine, for deeper analysis. "There is a very comprehensive review to look at vaccine safety," Orenstein said. "After all, we give our own children these vaccines." The review on the measles vaccines is clear: There have been no deaths attributed to the shots. In fact, none of the measles vaccines have prompted concern. Others have, most notably a rotovirus vaccine that VAERS data suggested increased risk for bowel blockages. That vaccine was pulled from the market in 1999. It has since been replaced by two similar vaccines that more effectively keep children from being hospitalized with severe diarrhea – though the blockages called intussusception remain a slight risk. "The policy comes in, as weighing the risks and benefits of a vaccine," said Dr. Frank DeStefano, the director of the Immunization Safety Office the CDC. That is to say, the research allows for informed decision making when recommending vaccines. For the MMR vaccine, and others, there are known complications. Most common, DeStefano said, is anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction that will affect one out of every 1 million to 2 million children. Those children are usually allergic to components of the vaccine, such as gelatin or egg proteins, not the viral antigen itself. The complications from measles, meanwhile, are far more common. According to the book "Vaccines" by Peter M. Strebel, pneumonia occurs in 1 to 6 percent of cases, ear infections occur 7 to 9 percent of the time and diarrhea occurs in about in about 8 percent of cases. Encephalitis, a potentially deadly brain swelling, occurs in 1 out of every 1,000 to 2,000 kids with the disease. An almost always lethal form of encephalitis occurs years after an infection in 1 to 3 kids for every 1,000 cases. To scientists, those complications make it clear that the vaccine's benefits far outweigh its risks, and certainly outweigh the risks of a highly contagious disease. The NaturalNews site claims that at least 108 children have died from the measles vaccine in the past decade, while none have died of the disease itself. That’s wildly inaccurate. There have been reports of death in children following the vaccine, but that does not equal deaths caused by the vaccine. There are no confirmed deaths caused by the measles vaccines. The more accurate comparison, DeStefano suggests, is that big fat zero versus the 300-400 children who died annually in the United States before the vaccine was available in the 1960s. We agree. The article misreads data, to suggest that the measles vaccine is a greater threat to children than the disease. Experts, and data, show that measles is far more dangerous than the vaccine, even if some kids do have a reaction to the shot. We rate the claim False.	None	NaturalNews.com	None	None	None	2015-03-03T00:00:00	2015-02-05	['None']
-pomt-05479	Says Ellen Rosenblum "has said over and over again that this is a job where 80 percent of the job is being the government’s lawyer."	half-true	/oregon/statements/2012/apr/19/dwight-holton/did-ellen-rosenblum-say-80-percent-attorney-genera/	Oregon is likely to pick its new attorney general in May. No Republicans are running for the office. Two Democrats are running this spring and will face any third party opposition in the fall. So far it’s been a low-profile contest. But the candidates, Ellen Rosenblum and Dwight Holton, have traded several barbs. Holton, for example, says that Rosenblum has repeatedly claimed that the job of being the state’s top prosecutor is mostly being a government attorney, and not an advocate. "She has said over and over again that this is a job where 80 percent of the job is being the government’s lawyer. I just don’t believe that. This is the Oregon Department of Justice and I take that word justice very seriously," Holton said in a radio interview with 1190 KEX. Apparently Holton means it in a negative way and the Rosenblum camp takes it as such. "What Dwight is doing over and over is using that 80 percent number to inaccurately portray her as a candidate that doesn't understand the role and is just a bureaucrat," says Cynara Lilly, spokeswoman for the Rosenblum campaign. A campaign barb under protest is fair game for PolitiFact Oregon. Did Rosenblum say it? Over and over? And what was the context in which she made the statement? The Holton camp helpfully directed us to a radio interview Rosenblum conducted in January, with 620 KPOJ. The host asked her to explain the job of attorney general to audience members unfamiliar with the role. "Well I think a lot of people don’t realize that about 80 percent of the work of the attorney general is representing the government agencies, and which in essence means representing the governor …" she said in response. Rosenblum repeats the figure one more in that interview. And in response to a question on how she might distinguish herself from current Attorney General John Kroger, she said, "I would definitely want to focus on the highest quality of the advice that we give to the government agencies." There’s no question Rosenblum made the point more than once. She may have repeated the figure elsewhere, as Holton’s people suggest although Rosenblum’s people deny that. (However, Rosenblum and her spokeswoman also denied she said it in the first place, and that is inaccurate.) Still, here’s the part that really trips us up. In that same January interview, Rosenblum talked about what she would emphasize, that the public may not know: Consumer protection, financial fraud, helping district attorneys, environmental protection, small businesses, and fighting for workers, children, families. In that way, she hit the same notes as Holton. "The attorney general also is involved in so many areas and those that I would emphasize would include child advocacy," she said about two minutes in. "I don’t think a lot of people realize that about 300 employees of the attorney general’s office collect child support for those who are in arrears or on behalf of those whose exes or whoever have not kept up with their payments ." We raised the issue with the Holton campaign. Is it fair to cherry-pick one statement to pound the point that the opponent has acknowledged the job is being the state’s lawyer, which it is? "What we're talking about here is the difference in the vision of the job of attorney general," said Jillian Schoene, a Holton spokeswoman. Schoene passed along this comment from her boss: "Providing excellent legal advice is a core mission -- but in my view, if that is all you do, you've failed -- because the attorney general ought to go to work each day to fight for families, not just answer the phone and provide legal advice," he said. But that’s clearly not what Rosenblum has said or is saying. She’s not saying that’s all she’ll do. Holton’s statement is partially accurate in that Rosenblum did describe the job of attorney general as 80 percent government work. But there are important details missing: She said in the same interview that she would advocate on behalf of children, consumers, the environment and small businesses. We also think it would be impossible for Holton to wiggle out of representing state government if he is elected. We find Holton’s statement Half True.	None	Dwight Holton	None	None	None	2012-04-19T17:27:36	2012-04-04	['None']
-snes-05654	X-rays document a man in China whose body became riddled with tapeworms due to his consumption of sashimi.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauxtography-sashimi-tapeworms/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Man Gets Tapeworms from Eating Sashimi?	16 June 2015	None	['China']
-pomt-00941	Last year, "we saw the first reduction in the federal prison population in 32 years."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/23/eric-holder/federal-prison-population-drops-first-time-3-decad/	Federal prisons recently hit a notable benchmark, outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder said earlier this week. In remarks at the National Press Club on Feb. 17, 2015, Holder made the case for sentencing reform and touted the Smart on Crime initiative on his watch. That program discourages federal prosecutors from pursuing harsh minimum sentences for low-level, non-violent drug criminals. "This newly unveiled data shows we can confront over-incarceration at the same time that we continue to promote public safety," he said. "Already, in fiscal year 2014, we saw the first reduction in the federal prison population in 32 years." The federal prison population has swelled dramatically since the early 1980s, due in large part to the prosecution of drug-related crimes, so we thought we’d double-check Holder’s statistics. In 1980, the federal prison population was about 24,000. It had hovered around that number since the 1940s. By December 2013 (which came within the federal government’s 2014 fiscal year), federal prisons held about 216,000 inmates, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That was down by nearly 2,000 inmates from a peak of roughly 218,000 than the year before. That’s a tiny decline -- less than 1 percent, after a nine-fold increase between 1980 and 2013 -- but it’s still the first time the federal prison population had dropped since 1980, the BJS reports. The solid red line in this Bureau of Justice Statistics graph shows the trend: The drop may eventually grow larger. When he first announced this decline back in September, Holder said internal projections showed a drop of 10,000 federal inmates by fiscal year 2016. We’ll note a few minor quibbles. The decline is actually the first in 33 years not 32, as Holder said. And Holder refers fiscal years, but the best data we could get our hands on goes by calendar year. The reality is that the prison population fluctuates daily, so any figure used for the current period is going to vary a bit. So we won’t count these factors against Holder. Perhaps more interesting than the drop itself is the reason why. One possible factor is the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which sought to remove sentencing discrepancies between crack and powder cocaine-related crimes, and eliminated a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for crack possession. Experts said that a contributing factor to the projected future decline is the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s July 2014 decision to allow the possibility of retroactively reduced sentences for individuals incarcerated on drug charges. This potentially affects 50,000 federal inmates. Let’s also put the decline into context. In reality, the federal inmate decline isn’t putting a huge dent into the nation’s prison population. Federal prisoners made up just 12 percent of the nation’s prison population in 2013, according to the BJS report, with those in state prisons and local jails accounting for the other 88 percent. Indeed, the federal decline was actually wiped out -- and then some -- by an increase of 5,000 inmates in the state prison population. Still, the U.S. population as a whole grew faster than the inmate population, meaning that the country’s overall imprisonment rate declined in 2013. "While the national prison population suggests a modest increase in the incarcerated population, the picture in some states is more drastic," said a report out of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. A report by the Prison Policy Initiative agreed, saying, "We can’t end our nation’s experiment with mass incarceration without grappling with the wide variety of state-level criminal justice policies, practices and trends." Finally, we’ll note that, despite the decline, federal prisons remain overcrowded. Medium- and high-security facilities are operating at 40 percent and 50 percent above capacity, respectively, according to the Bureau of Prisons. Our ruling Holder said that last year, "we saw the first reduction in the federal prison population in 32 years." The statistics show that Holder is correct. While it’s worth noting that the state prison population wiped out that decline, Holder worded his claim carefully, and federal prisons are the only ones in his portfolio. So we rate it True. Correction, Feb. 24, 2015, 10:30 a.m.: An earlier version of this article said that a policy change that retroactively reduced sentences for certain prisoners convicted on drug charges played a role in the decline of the federal prison population in 2013. However, that policy change came in 2014 and is only going to affect populations in future years. The article has been updated to reflect this discrepancy. The change does not affect the ruling.	None	Eric Holder	None	None	None	2015-02-23T10:00:00	2015-02-17	['None']
-pomt-02196	The Bundy Ranch deal is all about Nevada Sen. Harry Reid "using federal violence to take people’s land in his state so he can package it to re-sell it to the Chinese."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/24/blog-posting/did-sen-harry-reid-drive-standoff-bundy-ranch-pers/	The furor over Cliven Bundy’s cows in Nevada has churned up some powerful speculation about the murky forces at play. A long-running effort by the federal Bureau of Land Management to stop Bundy from letting his cattle forage without paying any grazing fees (on land that was off-limits to grazing in any event) turned into a standoff between federal agents and Bundy’s supporters, both well armed. Out of that drama came the assertion that Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid was behind it all and the goal was personal gain. Reid publicly endorsed federal action against Bundy. A tea party website Republic Broadcasting Network out of Texas put it succinctly. "It’s very simple. Harry Reid, senator from Nevada, is using federal violence to take people’s land in his state so he can package it to re-sell it to the Chinese. That’s what the Bundy Ranch deal is all about." This claim and its cousins have been debunked before (a tip of the hat to Snopes). Here’s the gist of its flaws: The government had no interest in Bundy’s property. It wanted his cattle off government land. Reid’s son had represented a Chinese firm that had been interested in developing a solar energy array, but the deal involved land far from the Bundy property and collapsed a year ago. The Bureau of Land Management has identified a desert area for solar power development, but it is about 50 miles away from both the Bundy ranch and the federal land where he likes to graze his cattle. The habitat protections on the land Bundy wants to use were put in place in 1994, long before there was any hint of Chinese interest. Reid's accusers posted an interview with Fabian Calvo, a Los Angeles real estate agent, as evidence to back up their inaccurate claim. Calvo connected the dots between Reid, his son Rory and the Bureau of Land Management. "Reid’s son is involved with BLM customers, putting together deals right where Clive Bundy’s ranch is," Calvo said. "The federal government is ready to send armed guards in to take peoples land, unconstitutionally, illegally, over what I believe is making sweetheart deals to the Chinese." An editorial in Investors Business Daily hinted darkly that on March 14, the BLM announced support for the Western Solar Energy Plan. "Coincidentally, part of that solar energy expansion includes a plan by China's ENN Energy Group to build what would be America's largest solar energy complex," the editorial said. "The site chosen with the guidance of Reid's son, Rory, is in Laughlin, Nev. Laughlin is in Clark County, where Bundy's ranch is." Clark County covers more than 8,000 square miles. Laughlin is about 100 miles as the crow flies from Bundy’s ranch. As for the ENN Energy Group, there had been a plan to turn 9,000 acres into the nation’s largest solar array. According to press reports, Reid’s son Rory did represent the company, and Reid himself helped recruit the company during a trip to China in 2011. But the deal hinged on nailing down long-term contracts to sell the power the massive facility would generate. When the developers were unable to get those agreements, they backed out. That was in July 2013. Looking at the BLM’s efforts to use federal lands as sites for solar energy, the agency released a list of 17 designated areas in 2012. The Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone is closest to Bundy’s ranch, but that doesn’t make it his neighbor. It is about 5,700 acres large but its closest border is at least 50 miles to the west of Bundy’s property. The BLM did invite energy companies to submit proposals in mid March. This was the final step in a two-year process aimed at managing the environmental impacts of any development that might take place in these zones. That environmental assessment provides one possible link to Bundy and his cows. In order to offset the loss of natural habitat in the development zone, the government typically preserves or restores the same kind of habitat someplace else. The Dry Lake area is home to the desert tortoise, a threatened species. Mike Connor is with the Western Watersheds Project, an environmental conservation group. Connor said Nevada has four areas designated as Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) to protect the desert tortoise. One of those is Gold Butte. That’s the federal land where Bundy has been grazing his cattle. Some of Bundy’s defenders have said that blocking him from Gold Butte would make it easier to build at Dry Lake. "That really wouldn’t make any sense," Connor said. "Gold Butte was set aside as an ACEC in 1994. You can’t use the same land twice to protect the same habitat. There really is no connection between what’s going on at Dry Lake and what’s going on at Gold Butte." Our ruling The Republic Broadcasting Network said Sen. Reid was behind the use of force to take away Bundy’s land and sell it to the Chinese. There is nothing accurate about this claim. The dispute involved Bundy’s long use of federal land without a permit. The land gained protected status long before solar energy projects were on the table. The Chinese solar energy proposal no longer exists. The land where such projects might be developed are far from Bundy’s property. We rate this claim Pants on Fire.	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2014-04-24T18:16:22	2014-04-17	['Nevada', 'Harry_Reid']
-pomt-01843	Says attorney general candidate Jon Richards "went so far to say he would only enforce the laws with which he personally agreed."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2014/jul/16/brad-schimel/democratic-candidate-attorney-general-would-only-d/	"Lawlessness" was the subject of a June 26, 2014 fund-raising email that Brad Schimel, the lone Republican running for Wisconsin attorney general, sent to his supporters. He attacked President Barack Obama as well as the three Democratic candidates for attorney general, singling out one of them in particular. "Like President Obama, my Democrat opponents have no respect for the Constitution or rule of law," Schimel wrote. "In fact, one of my opponents went so far to say he would only enforce the laws with which he personally agreed." Schimel's campaign confirmed the reference was to state Rep. Jon Richards, D-Milwaukee. It’s an extreme claim. Has Richards said he would only enforce laws he agrees with? The AG race Richards and two district attorneys -- Susan Happ of Jefferson County and Ismael Ozanne of Dane County -- will compete in the Aug. 12, 2014 primary, with the winner facing Schimel, the Waukesha County district attorney, in the Nov. 4, 2014 general election. Republican incumbent J.B. Van Hollen is not seeking a third four-year term. All four candidates have stated they wouldn’t defend certain laws, saying they violate the state or U.S. constitution. That could saddle taxpayers with higher costs because private attorneys could be brought in to do that work. The three Democrats said they wouldn't defend or appeal rulings on the state's ban on gay marriage, its voter ID law, or recent abortion regulations. Schimel said he would not defend Wisconsin's domestic partnership law, which gives same-sex couples some of the rights of married couples. Those positions drew criticism from Madison lawyer Lester Pines, who supports Ozanne in the attorney general race. After social conservatives in 2009 sued to block the domestic partnership law, Van Hollen refused to defend it. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle then hired Pines to defend the law. Wisconsin's attorney general has a legal and professional duty to defend every state law unless the only arguments that can be made on its behalf are frivolous, Pines told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a June 14, 2014 article. Disliking a law or even believing a law is unconstitutional, he said, is not enough to abandon the duty to defend it. Schimel's claim Asked to provide evidence for Schimel’s claim, campaign manager Johnny Koremenos argued that Richards has two standards in deciding whether to defend a law, "the Constitution and the ‘wishes of the people.’" "This signals he will disregard the law and replace it with his perception of the ‘wishes of the people,’" Koremenos said. "It’s clear he is willing to place his own values and personal beliefs above the Constitution." Koremenos also cited several news articles. But only two of them, both from February 2014, contain comments from Richards about his personal beliefs. And in neither case does Richards say he would enforce only laws he agrees with. First, an article in the Madison weekly newspaper Isthmus -- about whether efforts to repeal Wisconsin’s ban on gay marriage could benefit Democrats in the fall 2014 elections -- noted that Richards said in a news release he would not defend the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, which voters added to the state constitution in 2006. Richards has said he believes the ban violates the U.S. constitution and that he personally favors allowing same-sex marriage. "Given Richards’ proactive stance, it's clear he doesn’t see same-sex marriage as a negative on the campaign trail," the Isthmus article stated. The article also said Richards’ political director, Andy Suchorski, did not disagree with this assessment, but that Richards’ position is "not a political thing for him. It’s something he really believes. It’s why we’re pushing it.’" That might seem like support for Schimel’s claim. But only regarding one law and only if taken out of context. Suchorski told us he had been asked a political question -- whether Richards was talking about gay marriage in the campaign because it was good for Democrats -- and had not been asked any legal questions. And the article itself is framed as a political analysis. Schimel also pointed to the first paragraph of a brief version of an Associated Press news story, which stated Richards had pledged to be "the people’s attorney general" if elected, and that he said Richards wouldn’t defend every state law if he thinks it violates the U.S. Constitution or goes against the wishes of the people. So, that’s an indication that Richards might not defend some laws if he thinks they are against the public’s wishes, but not that he would defend only laws he supports. Indeed, the full version of the AP article noted that Richards said he would defend laws with which he disagrees, though he didn’t provide an example during that particular news conference. However, despite Schimel’s claim, Richards has actually stated that he would defend laws he doesn’t support if he believes they are constitutional. Richards campaign spokesman Sachin Chheda pointed to three such occasions: In March 2014, Richards told the Waukesha Freeman newspaper: "There are going to be times when there are laws that I voted against and personally might not support but I believe are consistent with the state and United States constitution, so, of course, the Department of Justice will defend them in that situation." In January 2014 on the "Upfront with Mike Gousha" public affairs TV show, Richards was asked if he would vigorously enforce the state’s voter ID law if it is upheld in court. Richards called the law "troubling," but said: "Obviously, If the law is passed, and a court rules that it’s constitutional, we’ll uphold the law, of course. But I do think the law that’s written really needs some scrutiny." Also in January 2014, Richards was asked by WisPolitics.com if concealed carry "is the right thing for Wisconsin." Richards said several aspects of the law were "problematic" in terms of public safety, but he added: "Having said that, I mean, the law is in place and as attorney general I would certainly work to make sure that if people apply for a concealed weapons permit, that it’s handled in a professional manner, quickly and expeditiously, and that we obey the law and we get those permits issued." Our rating Schimel said Richards "went so far to say he would only enforce the laws with which he personally agreed." He provides no evidence that Richards made such a statement. On the contrary, Richards has said on multiple occasions he would enforce laws with which he doesn’t agree. We rate Schimel’s statement False.	None	Brad Schimel	None	None	None	2014-07-16T05:00:00	2014-06-26	['None']
-pomt-07798	On high-speed rail.	full flop	/florida/statements/2011/feb/18/mike-haridopolos/haridopolos-breaks-silence-high-speed-rail-then-sw/	When Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced on Feb. 16, 2011, that he would reject $2.4 billion in federal funds for a bullet train from Orlando to Tampa, many Republican and Democratic legislators immediately criticized him for acting too hastily. Some conservatives praised the governor for sticking to his anti-spending principles, and a handful of Republicans offered tepid statements that resembled support for Scott. Kind of, anyway. Then there was Republican Senate President Mike Haridopolos, a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2012. Haridopolos said -- nothing. Crickets. For two days, nothing. Finally, on Feb. 18, Haridopolos issued a written statement. He was siding with Scott. "From the beginning, I have made it clear that Florida will cut $3.62 billion in spending this year and balance its state budget without raising taxes. We will not finance our future. We have also said that under no circumstances would we use state dollars, needed to support priorities like education, to pay for high-speed rail. For Floridians, that would be unforgivable. "Florida is leading by example in keeping its fiscal house in order. We must demand the same from Washington. To President Obama and all members of Congress, I say we are far better off reducing the $1.5 trillion in proposed deficit spending by this $2.4 billion than we are to build a rail project that has a questionable, at-best, economic viability." Haridopolos' position -- against the high-speed rail project -- seemed at odds with his previous words and votes, PolitiFact Florida readers told us. So we decided to run Haridopolos' statements and position on the high-speed rail project through our Flip-O-Meter. The story for us starts in 2009, when the Legislature met in special session to consider a rail package that supporters claimed was critical to Florida winning billions of dollars in federal funds for high-speed rail. The bill that was considered, passed and signed into law by Gov. Charlie Crist included major rail components, beyond just the Tampa to Orlando line. The law created two state entities to oversee passenger rail systems across Florida. The law shifted $60 million a year to finance rail projects starting in 2014, and increased the state subsidy to the Tri-Rail commuter line in South Florida by up to $15 million from the current $27 million. It created the framework for Florida to pledge $280 million in state money to receive federal funds for the Tampa/Orlando line. And it allowed the state to purchase 61.5 miles of CSX railroad track for $432 million to construct a SunRail commuter system in the Orlando area. During the week of debate, it was the SunRail component of the legislation that was most controversial. Opponents argued SunRail was too costly, too good of a deal for CSX and not ultimately necessary to win the billions of dollars in federal aid. Another concern: liability provisions that would leave taxpayers on the hook for accidents caused by CSX, which would share the track. We checked long and hard to see what Haridopolos had to say about the legislation, and found virtually nothing. We checked with veteran reporters in the Tallahassee press corps who remembered Haridopolos for being largely silent. We found this bland tweet from Haridopolos, @MikeHaridopolos, during the debate on Dec. 3, 2009: "Interesting debate on rail issue here in Florida Senate today." And we found an editorial on Dec. 8 from the Orlando Sentinel asking "where's the leadership from Mike Haridopolos," who at the time was in line to become Senate president. But when it came down to the vote, a silent Haridopolos voted yes on the rail package. The 2010-11 state budget included $131 million to develop the Tampa/Orlando rail line. And again, Haridopolos voted yes. Haridopolos started talking more critically about rail in October 2010. He suggested that Democratic candidate for governor Alex Sink had proposed $12.5 billion in new state spending, including $9 billion for supporting a high-speed rail project from Orlando to Miami. The Orlando/Miami line was to come after the Orlando/Tampa line was completed. (We ruled the claim about Sink's spending plans False.) But then in November, a Haridopolos spokesman told the Sentinel that Haridopolos still supported the Tampa/Orlando high-speed train. Bush said Haridopolos planned to meet with then Gov.-elect Scott to "get his thoughts on high-speed rail for this state." The yo-yoing continued in January, when Haridopolos said he supported the Tampa/Orlando line, as long as the state didn't have to pay for it, and that private companies picked up the state's $280 million required share. "I think rail, or in this case, high-speed rail, is something that people would like to have," Haridopolos said. "I would make the argument … it's something that we cannot afford at this point using state dollars. If the private sector chooses to make up that last 10 percent, great." The private sector, however, will never get that chance, it appears, as Scott on Feb. 16 signaled the death of the project before bids were issued to build the 84-mile line. And then to cap it off, Haridopolos agreed with him. Haridopolos' position is a bit of a head-scratcher. He was silent and voted for the bills, and stayed silent for almost a year. Then, all of the sudden, he was worried about the cost to taxpayers (after agreeing to spend money in the state budget). Then he wanted to try to get the private sector to pick up the state's tab, but before they could try, Haridopolos agreed with Scott's decision to effectively short-circuit the process. We think there's enough inconsistency there to rate Haridopolos' position on high-speed rail a Full Flop. Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to a spokesman of Mike Haridopolos by the wrong name.	None	Mike Haridopolos	None	None	None	2011-02-18T16:37:33	2011-02-18	['None']
-pomt-09831	"Any government-run 'public' plan ... creates an entitlement that will cost another $1 trillion over the next 10 years."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/26/ginny-brown-waite/health-reform-costs-1-trillion-over-10-years/	Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite sent a mailer to constituents explaining her opposition to the Democratic health care reform plan. "Unfortunately, I believe the legislation currently being considered in the House of Representatives could spark the government takeover of health care," she wrote. "The American people will have fewer choices, rationed care and higher costs. This is the last thing we need right now." Brown-Waite, a Florida Republican, also lists bullet points for why she opposes reform: "Any Government-Run 'Public' Plan - Why it's the WRONG solution to America's Health Care Problems - Creates an entitlement that will cost another $1 trillion over the next 10 years, on top of the trillions the government is already planning to spend on health care." We found the phrasing here odd. As we've noted before , the Democratic plans for health reform leave employer-provided insurance in place. The House bill seeks to make it easier for individuals to buy health insurance on their own by creating a national health care exchange, a kind of one-stop shop for health insurance. One of the plans on the exchange will be a government-run plan that provides basic coverage at a price likely to be lower than private insurers. (For a fuller explanation of the basics of health care reform, read our story Health care reform: a simple explanation .) It's not correct to characterize the overall health bill as a "government-run 'public' plan." Rather, the government will run one of the insurance plans, and people can choose to buy it or not. Nevertheless, if we're talking about the overall bill, Brown-Waite is correct about its cost. The Congressional Budget Office has determined that the overall health care reform bill from the House would cost $1 trillion over 10 years. The bill includes cost-saving measures and tax increases on the wealthy, so its impact on the deficit would be lower: $239 billion over 10 years, according to the CBO. If you're wondering how much the public option alone would cost, we're not sure. Obama has said he wants the public option to be self-supporting through the premiums it charges its customers. But the public option would need, at a minimum, some sort of seed money to get going. The CBO estimated all the costs associated with "exchange subsidies," and that came to $773 billion, but that includes tax credits (called "affordability credits") to help people of modest means buy insurance on the exchange, and they might or might not choose the public option. We also want to address Brown-Waite's statement that the health plan "creates an entitlement." An entitlement is "a right to benefits mandated by government," and sometimes a euphemism for welfare, according to Safire's Political Dictionary . Strictly speaking, the bill creates entitlements for some people, but not for everyone. As we noted earlier, it gives tax credits to people of modest means, and it expands Medicaid for the poor. We asked Brown-Waite for the reasoning behind her claims on the mailing, but we didn't get a response. In some ways, Brown-Waite's mailer seems like a classic campaign tactic: Take your opponent's position and distort it so that it appears scary or stupid. But in this case, the mailer was paid for with tax dollars. Members of Congress get to mail their constituents without paying postage, a perk known as "franking," and Brown-Waite's mailer clearly states it was "prepared, published and mailed at taxpayer expense." Waite says that "Any Government-Run 'Public' Plan ... Creates an entitlement that will cost another $1 trillion over the next 10 years, on top of the trillions the government is already planning to spend on health care." But, to be clear, the overall health bill is not a "government-run 'public' plan. The public aspect is just a part it, which people can choose to participate in or not. She also offers a confusing way to explain the cost of the health care reform bill, and we want to be clear that $1 trillion includes all aspects of the bill. So we rate her statement Half True.	None	Ginny Brown-Waite	None	None	None	2009-08-26T18:50:05	2009-08-24	['None']
-snes-00313	A video shows a woman stabbing her partner on the dance floor.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/woman-stabs-partner-dance/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Does This Video Show a Woman Stabbing Her Partner While Dancing with Him?	20 July 2018	None	['None']
-tron-03198	Government Shutdown Was Orchestrated	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/shutdown-2013-orchestrated/	None	politics	None	None	None	Government Shutdown Was Orchestrated	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-03505	'Hamilton' actor Brandon Victor Dixon sent a controversial tweet in 2012, uncovered after he delivered an on-stage speech to Vice President-Elect Mike Pence.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brandon-victor-dixon-tweet/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	‘Hamilton’ Actor Brandon Victor Dixon Tweets About St. Patrick’s Day	21 November 2016	None	['None']
-afck-00065	“The reality is that the real matric pass rate is at 37.3%.”	misleading	https://africacheck.org/reports/verifying-key-claims-in-the-2018-state-of-the-nation-debate/	None	None	None	None	None	Verifying key claims in SA’s 2018 State of the Nation address debate	2018-02-19 02:56	None	['None']
-pomt-11602	On taxes, "if you go back and look 50 years ago, individuals paid about 7 percent of the total and corporations paid 5 percent. Fast forward 50 years: individuals still 7 percent, corporations (are) down to 2 percent."	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2018/jan/30/richard-cordray/richard-cordray-mostly-point-comparing-taxes-paid-/	Richard Cordray, a Democrat running for governor in Ohio who served under the Obama administration, described the tax bill as a "terrible deal" that helps the wealthy. Cordray is one of many competing in the Democratic primary with hopes to succeed term-limited Republican Gov. John Kasich. In a speech to the City Club of Cleveland Dec. 14, Cordray told the audience about his efforts to help consumers and fight big banks while serving as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When an audience member asked Cordray to weigh in on the federal tax bill that was in the works at the time (it later became law), he said it wouldn’t do enough to help the middle class. "If you go back and look 50 years ago, individuals paid about 7 percent of the total and corporations paid 5 percent. Fast forward 50 years: individuals still 7 percent, corporations (are) down to 2 percent. And yet we are making (it) a priority to give more tax cuts to corporations. There’s slabs for them, there’s crumbs for people like the middle-class people in our society. I think it is wrong." Cordray spokesman Mike Gwin told PolitiFact that Cordray was referring to corporate and individual income tax revenue as a share of U.S. gross domestic product, which wasn’t fully clear from Corday’s comments. We fact-checked Cordray’s historical comparison and found that he was in the ballpark, but his comment required further explanation about how businesses actually end up filing their taxes. Individuals vs. corporations payment on taxes The tax bill signed by President Donald Trump in December will significantly reduce the on-the-books corporate tax rate. The top corporate rate will fall from 35 percent to 21 percent, and the business version of the alternative minimum tax will be repealed. Gwin cited a 2017 chart by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center that shows tax receipts as a percentage of GDP dating back to 1934. The chart is based on historical tables from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Gwin said Cordray’s point wasn’t to make comparisons between individual years such as 1967 and 2017 since the numbers fluctuate from year to year, but to make a larger point that over the last 50 years individuals have contributed an increasing share of overall tax revenue, while corporations have paid a decreasing share. Since Cordray mentioned looking back 50 years, we will use 1967 and 2017 as our comparison years, though it wouldn’t change dramatically if we looked at different years in that general range. In 1967, individual income taxes accounted for 7.3 percent of gross domestic product while corporate income taxes accounted for 4.1 percent. The center’s estimate for 2017 shows that individual income taxes now represent a larger share -- 9.3 percent -- while the corporate share has fallen to 2.2 percent. Joel Slemrod, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, said the comparison is broadly accurate -- however, to get to the 5 percent for the corporate tax that Cordray cited would require going back a bit further than 50 years, to 1954. He also said that Cordray’s numbers only apply to federal taxes. Since the United States has had a high corporate tax rate, millions of mid-sized businesses that would have paid the corporate tax have instead used alternative structures to lower their taxes. That resulted in a huge amount of business income shifting from corporations to so-called pass-through entities, said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "If you look at data the past couple of decades there has been a huge rise in LLCs" and other such entities, Edwards said. "About half of all business income in the U.S. is those pass-through entities that don’t pay the corporate income tax -- they pay through the individual income tax code." The business-backed Tax Foundation compiled data showing the decrease in the number of corporations subject to the corporate income tax and the increase in S corporations paying the individual income tax. Between 1980 and 2012, the number of corporations subject to the corporate income tax fell from 2.2 million to 1.6 million. Meanwhile, the number of S corporations subject to the individual income tax increased from 0.5 million to 4.2 million, with the number of non-corporate businesses increasing dramatically as well, said Scott Greenberg, senior analyst at the Foundation. In 2012, pass-through businesses earned $1.63 trillion in net income, compared to $1.10 trillion of net income earned by C corporations -- the traditional kind of corporation that pays corporate taxes. "As a result, focusing on the corporate income tax, as an indicator for how much American businesses (or even American corporations) are paying in taxes, can be quite misleading," Greenberg said. "Because many businesses have switched away from the C corporate form, and are now taxed under the individual income tax, the comparison between corporate income tax revenue 50 years ago and today is not quite apples-to-apples." Our ruling Cordray said in a speech, "If you go back and look 50 years ago, individuals paid about 7 percent of the total and corporations paid 5 percent. Fast forward 50 years: individuals still 7 percent, corporations (are) down to 2 percent." He was referring to taxes paid as a percentage of GDP, which wasn’t clear from his remarks. And, a growing portion of the individual income tax figure he cites was effectively taxes paid by businesses as "pass-throughs" on individual tax filings. Overall, though, his numbers are in the ballpark. We rate this claim Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Richard Cordray	None	None	None	2018-01-30T09:30:00	2017-12-14	['None']
-pomt-11422	Says he didn't take "corporate PAC money."	mostly true	/pennsylvania/statements/2018/mar/17/conor-lamb/conor-lambs-rejection-corporate-pac-money-needs-co/	When Democrat Conor Lamb took the stage inside a Canonsburg ballroom brimming with supporters and news media on election night, he claimed victory in what amounted to one of the massive political upsets of the Trump Era. And he was clear that they’d managed this feat not with the financial backing of corporations, but with a grassroots network and a slew of small-money contributions. "I'm proud that you helped me refuse corporate PAC money," he said to applause. Lamb ran to fill Pennsylvania’s 18th congressional district seat, which was vacated by former U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, a Republican, late last year. The New York Times and Democrats have called the race for Lamb, though absentee and provisional ballots were still being counted as of Friday, with Lamb leading his Republican opponent, state Rep. Rick Saccone, by hundreds of votes. The darkhorse Democratic candidate raised millions in mostly small, online donations during the campaign — up to 62 percent of them from not just outside of the 18th district, but from outside of the state. But is it true that corporate PAC money played no role in his campaign? According to the Federal Election Commission, Lamb received 99 "discrete PAC contributions" from a total of 81 different PACs. Some of those PACs contributed multiple times. No corporate PAC contributions were reported by his campaign committee, per the FEC. Instead, many of these PACs belong to unions; veterans groups; advocacy groups, such as the JStreet PAC, a self-described "political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans"; and a host of Democratic leadership groups. "He mainly received money from labor PACs and Democratic leadership PACs," said Andrew Mayersohn, a committees researcher with the Center for Responsive Politics. "Labor PACs, obviously, don’t receive money from corporate PACs. Leadership PACs do (usually) take corporate PAC contributions, but I doubt that Lamb will feel indebted to Comcast just because Comcast's PAC gave to [U.S. Rep] Mike Doyle’s leadership PAC last year, and Doyle gave to Lamb’s campaign this year. More likely, he’ll feel indebted to Mike Doyle," Mayersohn said. Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia lawyer specializing in political law compliance and advocacy, said the difference between accepting money from a corporate PAC and a PAC that has received corporate funds — or funds from corporate executives and employees — is significant. "When people refer to corporate PACs, what they mean are PACs established by corporations and funded by their employees with officers and directors who decide where the funds are directed," Bonin said. In Lamb’s case, donations of $200 or less accounted for half of the money — millions of dollars in total — raised by his campaign, according to Anne Feldman, press secretary for End Citizens United, a prominent backer of his campaign. But there were also donations from PACs reliant on support from executives and employees — and their relatives — at some of America’s largest companies and conglomerates. This includes Massachusetts Sen. Joe Kennedy III’s 4MA leadership PAC, which counts individuals with ties to Goldman Sachs, Ford Motor Company, Home Depot and a slew of pharmaceutical companies among its Top 20 contributors, per OpenSecrets.org and the Center for Responsive Politics, the group behind the site. The Keystone Fund PAC, U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle’s political action committee, also donated to Lamb and has top donors with connections to T-Mobile, Comcast, Exelon and Google. Sen. Bob Casey’s Keystone America PAC, another Lamb contributor, has Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Aetna, Johnson & Johnson and Ernst & Young in its Top 20. There’s also AmeriPAC: The Fund for a Greater America, a Lamb donor with contributors tied to Coca-Cola and Boeing, OpenSecrets.org reports. Each of these PACs donated the maximum of $5,000 to Lamb’s campaign. "We group those [individual] contributions with corporate PACs when we talk about industry giving. For example, PNC Bank's PAC and PNC executives are ultimately part of the financial industry's political influence," Mayersohn said of OpenSecret.org’s lists of top PAC donors. "Since most people work for a corporation of some kind, it's pretty hard for a campaign to avoid taking contributions from ‘corporate employees or owners.’ Lamb received some contributions from PNC employees, but would not have accepted money from their PAC (if asked)." Feldman added: "When you're accepting money from a non-corporate PAC, it comes from hundreds, often thousands, of people who are concerned about issues that affect their day-to-day lives. This is very different from accepting money from corporate PACs which have a singular agenda, the corporation’s bottom line." (Of course there is the potential for overlap between corporate interests and the interests of non-corporate PACs.) Corporate executives and employees are also capable of donating — with legal limits — to Lamb directly, which some certainly did. Bruce Ledewitz, a constitutional law professor at Duquesne University, said this is neither unusual nor improper. "The question is if a rich person gives money to Donald Trump knowing Trump favors lower taxes, is that undue influence? And I say no, it is not," Ledewitz explained. "I don’t think there’s the slightest indication that campaign contributions have any influence at all. Lobbying has influence." Mayersohn said there were also no corporate PAC expenditures on mailers or ads in support of Lamb’s candidacy. "Corporate PACs almost never make independent expenditures," he said. "Sometimes trade association or industry PACs (like the American Chemistry Council or the National Association of Realtors) make independent expenditures, but not in this race." While some argue that the shunning of corporate PACs by political candidates is largely an empty gesture, groups like End Citizens United tout the Lamb campaign’s lack of corporate PAC donors as a breath of fresh air. Lamb campaign manager Abby Murphy also said Lamb will again refuse corporate PAC money when he runs in November, this time in the what would be the new 17th Congressional District under a statewide redistricting plan. Our ruling U.S. Congressional candidate Conor Lamb said, "I'm proud that you helped me refuse corporate PAC money." FEC records do not list corporate PACs as having donated to his campaign or having directly spent money in support of his candidacy. While it’s possible corporate PAC money donated to other PACs reached him indirectly, experts say that’s not the same thing. Lamb’s claim is literally accurate, but campaign finances are complicated and voters need additional information.	None	Conor Lamb	None	None	None	2018-03-17T09:00:00	2018-03-13	['None']
-pomt-04892	Says Mitt Romney did not pay taxes for 10 years.	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/06/harry-reid/harry-reid-says-anonymous-source-told-him-mitt-rom/	Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., touched off a firestorm last week after he claimed that an unnamed investor in Mitt Romney’s company, Bain Capital, told him that Romney hadn’t paid any taxes for 10 years. In a July 31, 2012, interview with the Huffington Post, Reid attacked Romney for refusing to publicly release tax returns prior to 2010. Reid said, "His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son," referring to George Romney's decision to release 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in the late 1960s. Reid told the website that about a month earlier, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office and said, "Harry, he didn't pay any taxes for 10 years." Reid continued, "He didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," said Reid. "But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look? … You guys have said his wealth is $250 million. Not a chance in the world. It's a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don't pay taxes for 10 years when you're making millions and millions of dollars." On Aug. 2, Reid repeated the allegation on the Senate floor, saying, "As we know, he has refused to release his tax returns. If a person coming before this body wanted to be a Cabinet officer, he couldn't be if he had the same refusal Mitt Romney does about tax returns. So the word is out that he has not paid any taxes for 10 years. Let him prove he has paid taxes, because he has not." And later that day, Reid tripled down on the accusation, releasing a statement that said in part, "I was told by an extremely credible source that Romney has not paid taxes for 10 years." Romney and his allies pushed back hard against the accusation, saying it was not only substantively incorrect but also ethically out of bounds. "Harry Reid really has to put up or shut up," Romney said following a speech in North Las Vegas, Nev., according to CBS News. Romney added, "Let me also say, categorically, I have paid taxes every year -- and a lot of taxes. So Harry is simply wrong. And that is why I am so anxious for him to give us the names of the people who put this forward. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear the names are people from the White House or the Obama campaign." Other Republicans leaped to Romney’s defense, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., (who told CNN’s State of the Union that "I think he’s lying") and Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who called Reid a "dirty liar" on ABC’s This Week. Outside commentators, including liberals, have slammed Reid as well. The New York Times’ Frank Bruni called Reid’s charges part of an "unbecoming, corrosive game." "Spew first and sweat the details later, or never," Bruni wrote. "Speak loosely and carry a stick-thin collection of backup materials, or none at all. That’s the M.O. of the moment, familiar from the past but in particularly galling and profuse flower of late." Many readers asked us to put Reid’s claim to the Truth-O-Meter. We conclude that Reid, despite repeating the claim on at least two occasions, has not produced any solid evidence it is true. An anonymous source? On Aug. 6, a Reid spokesman confirmed to PolitiFact that the majority leader still maintains the information came from the anonymous Bain investor. Our Truth-O-Meter guidelines say we hold officials accountable to back up their words. By those standards, Reid has not proven his allegation. Still, we wondered how likely it was that Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years. In an Internal Revenue Service study of nearly 4 million 2009 tax returns of filers reporting more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income, 20,752 of these taxpayers -- or just 0.529 percent -- had no U.S. income tax liability. About half of those did have income tax liability in other countries. But Romney’s recent income has been substantially higher than $200,000, meaning that the size of his deductions and credits would need to be even larger than for many of those included in this IRS study if his tax liability was going to fall to zero. According to the one full return he’s released, for tax year 2010, he and his wife Ann reported an adjusted gross income of $21.6 million and paid taxes of about $3 million. He's also released an estimate of his 2011 taxes, which showed income of $20.9 million and a tax payment of $3.2 million. To gauge tax patterns for even higher-income earners, the best we can do is to look at another IRS study detailing the taxes paid by the top 400 earners in the nation in 2008. To make this list, you would have to have earned roughly $109 million that year. Among those 400 top taxpayers, 30 -- or 7.5 percent -- had an effective tax rate of between 0 and 10 percent. Given how the statistics are calculated, it’s impossible to know how many paid no taxes, but it’s safe to assume it’s well below 7.5 percent. Neither study directly addresses Romney’s situation -- he falls somewhere in the middle of the two studies -- but the data does show that for earners both below and above him, it's unlikely they paid zero taxes for one year, and it’s even more far-fetched to think they did so for 10 years. Salon.com -- which is generally considered a liberal media outlet, thus no friend to Romney -- asked two tax experts whether they thought it was likely that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. They concluded, "probably not." The article quoted David Miller, a tax attorney with the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York, saying it’s "highly unlikely" that he paid nothing. "It would be easier for someone like Steve Jobs to pay zero, as most of his wealth was in company stock, which isn’t taxed until sold and may never be sold," Miller told Salon. The Salon article continued, "But Romney’s arrangement with Bain is different. He would have earned management fees, and when Bain sold the underlying companies that it invested in, Romney would have been subject to tax on his share. 'It’s possible he paid very little in taxes, but I find it hard to believe that he paid none,' Miller said." Salon also quoted Joshua Kamerman, a lawyer and CPA in New York, who said while it’s theoretically possible, it’s also "preposterous." "Charitable donations can shield up to only 50 percent of tax liability, while other means can lower the rate," the article said. "But to pay nothing, Romney would have to sustain business operating losses, Kamerman said. The IRS lets people carry over losses for up to 20 years until they make a profit from which to deduct them. But Kamerman said this is almost certainly not the case for Romney." We asked Lawrence J. White, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University, for his view, and he concurred with Miller and Kamerman. "I agree that it's extremely unlikely that Mr. Romney paid no income taxes for 10 years," White said. Our ruling Reid has said Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. It was no slip of the tongue. He repeated the claim on at least two more occasions, at one point saying that "the word is out" when in fact it was only Reid who put that "word" out. Reid has produced no evidence to back up his claim other than attribution to a shadowy anonymous source. Romney has denied the claim, and tax experts back him up, saying that the nature of Romney's investments in Bain make it highly unlikely he would have been able to avoid paying taxes altogether -- especially for 10 years. Reid has made an extreme claim with nothing solid to back it up. Pants on Fire!	None	Harry Reid	None	None	None	2012-08-06T15:43:15	2012-07-31	['None']
-goop-00992	Jennifer Garner Heartbroken Over Josh Duhamel Getting Cozy With Megan Fox?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-garner-josh-duhamel-megan-fox/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Garner Heartbroken Over Josh Duhamel Getting Cozy With Megan Fox?	11:59 am, May 16, 2018	None	['Josh_Duhamel']
-pomt-04750	"A report just came out that if we continue with President Obama's policies, we're looking at over 9 percent unemployment next year in the fourth quarter."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/29/michele-bachmann/rep-michele-bachmann-claims-report-says-presidents/	In a show of GOP unity for convention week, Rep. Michele Bachmann made her case on Fox News for a Mitt Romney presidency. She also got in her digs at the other guy. Under President Barack Obama, she said, you should expect unemployment to rise. "A report just came out that if we continue with President Obama's policies, we're looking at over 9 percent unemployment next year in the fourth quarter," Bachmann told host Sean Hannity in the Aug. 27, 2012, interview in Tampa. The unemployment rate was 8.3 percent in July, so that would mark a serious reversal. We decided to track down the report. The fiscal cliff The former presidential candidate from Minnesota said she was referring to a report from the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency with expert staff that generates projections about how laws affect the federal budget and economy. We reached out to her office for more detail, but didn’t hear back. So we checked out CBO's most recent such report, an update to the country’s economic outlook for the decade. It did include a projection that unemployment could reach 9.1 percent in the fourth quarter next year (Table 2-1). But that projection was not based on continuing "President Obama’s policies." Rather, it was CBO’s look at what would happen if current laws are left unchanged -- which is not what Obama advocates. "The policies that Rep. Bachmann refers to as 'President Obama’s policies' are in fact what would result if the Congress fails to reach an agreement with the president on how to continue economic stimulus policies which he strongly favors," said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution. (As we've noted before, Burtless contributed $750 to Obama’s campaign in 2011. However, in 2008 he provided advice on aspects of labor policy to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and he has worked as a government economist and served on federal advisory panels under presidents of both parties.) If the president and Congress can’t resolve their standoff, what results is referred to alternately as the "fiscal cliff" or "taxmageddon." Congress set some of the conditions for the cliff last year in their deal to increase the debt ceiling — the Budget Control Act. It specified that if Congress couldn’t find $1.2 trillion in budget cuts, automatic cuts would hit across the board, including defense programs. (Bachmann voted against the act; she opposed raising the debt ceiling and called the deal a "temporary fix.") So right now, current law would, for instance, impose those stiff automatic spending cuts and let major tax cuts expire. (Obama would renew the tax cuts for those earning under $250,000 and doesn’t want to see automatic cuts.) The deficit would shrink an estimated $641 billion in the next fiscal year. That would most likely lead to a recession, driving down GDP and pushing up unemployment, the CBO calculated. That’s right: Bachmann’s talking about what would happen if the deficit shrinks. It’s worth noting Obama plays a role in the standoff, even if he doesn’t endorse its result. "He could be blamed, of course, for refusing to negotiate unless Republicans raise taxes, thereby making the cliff more likely," said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. "I suppose the flip side applies as well, though." If lawmakers and the president work out a deal that keeps the tax cuts and avoids automatic spending cuts, among other things, CBO calculates that the unemployment rate will drop to 8 percent (Table 2-2) — not rise. Neither of those scenarios perfectly reflects Obama’s policy goals. But the second one, with its unemployment rate drop, is closest. Our ruling Bachmann said, "a report just came out that if we continue with President Obama's policies, we're looking at over 9 percent unemployment next year in the fourth quarter." But that jobless rate is based a projection of "current law," which would only happen as a result of a standoff between Congress and the president, not Obama’s own policy priorities. Unemployment would rise in the face of immediate deficit reduction — something that more closely resembles Bachmann’s preference than the president’s. The 9 percent unemployment figure is mentioned in the CBO study, but it is inaccurate for Bachmann to say it is under Obama's policies. We rate the claim False.	None	Michele Bachmann	None	None	None	2012-08-29T13:10:29	2012-08-27	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-00671	"Two-thirds of American families rely on the mother's income to stay above the poverty level."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2015/may/11/maria-shriver/maria-shriver-2-american-families-rely-mothers-inc/	What better way to honor moms on Mother’s Day than to mark how much they do to keep the country on even keel. On Meet the Press, NBC correspondent Maria Shriver tried to underscore the pivotal economic role mothers play. "Two-thirds of American families rely on the mother's income to stay above the poverty level," Shriver told host Chuck Todd, as a graphic highlighted the same message. That’s a powerful message -- that two in three American families would fall below the federal poverty line if it weren't for Mom. Unfortunately, it’s incorrect. Shriver botched the wording of a different stat from the Shriver Report, a regular publication focused largely on the status of women. For the 2014 edition, Shriver partnered with the liberal Center for American Progress. That report claimed that "In an era when women have solidified their position as half of the U.S. workforce and a whopping two-thirds of the primary or co-breadwinners in American families, the reality is that a third of all American women are living at or near a space we call ‘the brink of poverty.’ " That passage may sound like it supports Shriver’s point. But it doesn’t. So what's the real number? We asked Philip Cohen, who researches inequality and families at the University of Maryland, to see if he could find the actual percentage of families who rely on a mother’s income to stay above the poverty level. Using Census Bureau data from the March 2014 Current Population Survey and comparing it to poverty threshold statistics, Cohen identified 33.6 million U.S. families that included at least one child and a mother. In 6.7 million of those households, the mother’s income was vital in the way Shriver stated. That’s a shade under 20 percent -- far from two in three. "You could say 20 percent of families with mothers and children rely on the mother’s income to remain above the poverty line," Cohen said. "The rest either were poor already, 16 percent, or still wouldn’t be poor even without the mother’s income, 64 percent, because of income from the father or other family members." Cohen tried a slightly different approach and started just with the families that were not in poverty, which created a pool of 28.2 million households. That would boost the percentage of families who rely on a mother’s income to stay out of poverty to about 24 percent. "I don’t see how you can get to 67 percent, or two-thirds, as Shriver said," Cohen told us. Cohen agreed with Shriver’s main point -- that mothers in many families make a huge difference in the family’s standard of living -- but said she got the specific statistic wrong. After contacting Shriver, she tweeted a correction. Shriver wrote, "Clarifying what I said on @meetthepress: 2/3 of U.S. families rely on a mother's income that keeps many families out of poverty, but not all." Our ruling Shriver said that for two-thirds of families with children, the mother’s income keeps them out of poverty. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data, the actual figure is closer to one-fourth. The mother’s income matters, but not to the extent she said. An expert said there was a grain of truth to Shriver’s claim -- a mother’s income makes a big difference in a family’s standard of living -- but not at the percentage Shriver said. We rate her claim Mostly False.	None	Maria Shriver	None	None	None	2015-05-11T11:00:05	2015-05-10	['United_States']
-vogo-00426	Fact Check TV: NFL Stadium and New Veterans	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-tv-nfl-stadium-and-new-veterans/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Check TV: NFL Stadium and New Veterans	February 28, 2011	None	['None']
-hoer-01056	4 Scams That ALL Facebook Users Should Know About	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/4-scams-that-all-facebook-users-should-know-about/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	4 Scams That ALL Facebook Users Should Know About	December 19, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-08713	Ron Johnson is "willing to hand over the Great Lakes to the oil companies."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2010/sep/03/russ-feingold/russ-feingold-says-ron-johnson-willing-hand-over-g/	As in the Gulf of Mexico, oil just won’t disappear from the U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin. It’s a central part of an ad by U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat locked in a tough re-election battle. Not only does the ad argue that Republican Ron Johnson wants to drill for oil in the Great Lakes, it says he’s "willing to hand over the Great Lakes to the oil companies." For lake-loving Wisconsinites, the issue hits home. The charge goes back to a statement that bubbled up when Johnson sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Wispolitics.com. Johnson, an Oshkosh businessman, was asked this question: "Would you support more drilling in the U.S., continental, Great Lakes for example, if there was oil found there, and more exploration in Alaska, those kind of things?" Johnson’s answer: "The bottom line is, we are an oil based economy and there’s nothing we’re going to do to get off of that for many, many years. So we have to be realistic and recognize that fact. We have to get the oil where it is, but we need to do it responsibly, we need to utilize American ingenuity and American technology to make sure we to do it environmentally sensitively and safely." That’s where it began. This is where it wound up: The Feingold campaign issued a news release June 18 that said, "when asked if he would support drilling in the Great Lakes, Johnson said: ‘I think we have to get the oil where it is.’ " The release prompted some chatter in the blogosphere, though the issue remained low on the public radar screen. And the Johnson campaign remained silent. Then came Feingold’s TV ad. It showed a map of the United States and graphically transplanted the BP oil spill from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Michigan shores. Meanwhile, Feingold is heard saying Johnson is "willing to hand over the Great Lakes to the oil companies, threatening Wisconsin’s economy and a way of life for generations of Wisconsin families." To hear Feingold, one would think BP was ready to plop an oil rig just off the Summerfest grounds. So, we figured it was time for us to do a little drilling of our own to see if Feingold hit the mark. There is little doubt Johnson, a BP shareholder, has a "Drill, baby, drill" attitude. On Oct. 10, 2009 -- before he was a candidate -- Johnson told a tea party gathering in Oshkosh: "I want oil companies to make enough money to continue to explore, drill, refine, and deliver gas to virtually every corner of America." That would presumably include the Great Lakes. But Johnson’s campaign issued a statement July 12, four weeks after the Wispolitics.com interview, that left no wiggle room. It said: "I would reject any and all efforts to drill in the Great Lakes." That statement was issued at 3:49 p.m., the day before the Feingold ad was launched. John Kraus, senior strategist for Feingold’s campaign, said the Johnson statement was issued about an hour after the Feingold campaign made its TV buy. Coincidence, or was Johnson tipped off about the Feingold ad? You decide. Johnson quickly launched his own response ad, which said in part: "Ron Johnson opposes drilling in the Great Lakes and Russ Feingold knows it." And Johnson and his campaign later argued there’s not enough oil in the lake to make drilling worthwhile and that it was too cold to do much drilling here anyway. Finally, six weeks after his initial response Johnson said he may have not heard "Great Lakes" included in the question. In other words, it’s kind of a gooey mess. Let’s clean it all up. Feingold took an off-the-cuff statement by Johnson -- albeit one Johnson had a month to correct -- and made it the centerpiece of a TV ad that launched the day after Johnson had re-framed his views. Johnson has noted his support for more oil exploration. But the ad made a flat hand-the-lakes-over statement, ignoring Johnson’s expressed concerns for the environment. That’s not handing the lakes over to Big Oil. It was produced based on the original Johnson statement, but the ad remained on the air long after Johnson clearly said no to Great Lakes drilling. And Feingold is continuing to state on the campaign trail: "It’s kind of reasonable to think that if (Johnson) had a chance to vote for drilling the Great Lakes, he’d be first in line." We rate Feingold’s claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Russ Feingold	None	None	None	2010-09-03T16:12:28	2010-07-13	['None']
-vees-00410		none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-did-photojournalist-jes-aznar-post-liv	Was the video posted by Aznar on May 25 live?	None	None	None	Fact check,Marawi city crisis,Jes Aznar,ThinkingPinoy	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Did photojournalist Jes Aznar post live update of military operations in Marawi?	June 30, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10016	"We had bipartisan legislation that got through the Senate" that would have prevented bonuses like AIG's "and then somehow mysteriously disappeared."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/mar/18/ron-wyden/aig-bonus-wyden-snowe/	As public outrage builds over bonuses issued by bailout recipient AIG, two senators are claiming they tried to outlaw such bonuses but were thwarted by the White House and fellow lawmakers. Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, say they proposed an amendment to the stimulus bill in February that would have imposed heavy penalties on bailout recipients that refused to pay back bonuses over $100,000. Wyden made the claim during an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, and in other interviews. "Back in early February, you and Senator Snowe added an amendment to the stimulus bill that, I think, would have prevented AIG from giving out these millions of dollars worth of bonuses," Maddow said to Wyden. "That amendment was taken out of the bill. Am I right that your amendment would have stopped what we are experiencing right now?" "You are right," Wyden said. "And that's what's so sad about this situation. It simply didn't need to happen." Wyden went on to predict that a similar measure would pass now that the issue has gained so much public attention. "I think finally, we'll get it done," he said. "The tragedy is it should have been done a month ago when we had bipartisan legislation that got through the Senate and then somehow mysteriously disappeared." In a separate interview with the Huffington Post, Wyden blamed both the White House and fellow legislators, suggesting they caved to lobbyists for Wall Street who opposed the measure. Wyden and Snowe announced the amendment Feb. 4, proposing it be tacked onto another amendment to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, otherwise known as the stimulus bill. Last year's financial rescue package, commonly known as the bailout, had "left open the escape hatch of golden parachutes for top executives on Wall Street," Snowe, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said at the time. "This amendment insists on strong taxpayer protections and guarantees that no tax dollars be used to prop up Wall Street executives." The amendment required companies that received government rescue funds in 2008 to repay within four months any bonuses above $100,000 or face an excise tax of 35 percent on the portion of the bonus over $100,000. It reportedly would have raised as much as $3.2 billion, a substantial chunk of the $18.4 billion in employee bonuses paid out in 2008 by companies that received more than $274 billion of bailout funds. Wyden pressed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the amendment at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Feb. 11. "Given the fact that the president, to his credit, called these bonuses shameful, and time is short, where do you stand on getting a solution to the problem of these just-paid excessive bonuses in the economic stimulus legislation?" Wyden asked. "We've talked about that privately," Geithner said, in part, in a lengthy response. "Our staffs are working together. We'd like to work with you on how to achieve that objective." American Banker , a trade publication, reported on Feb. 12 that the banking industry "strongly opposes" the provision, "which the banking industry hopes to scale back when the House and Senate hash out differences between the stimulus bills." They appear to have succeeded. On Feb. 12, the Associated Press reported: "The provision was removed as House and Senate negotiators hammered out final details of the $789 billion economic stimulus legislation this week." There is no documentation in the public record of exactly who removed the provision. Wyden overstated the case a bit when he responded in the affirmative to Maddow's suggestion that the amendment "would have stopped what we are experiencing right now." It would not have eliminated the bonuses entirely — only that portion over $100,000 per person. And the tax that would have been imposed on companies that did not comply would have recovered just 35 percent of the excessive amount. But Wyden can legitimately claim to have taken on the issue with gusto — well before the current outrage over AIG's bonuses. We find his claim to be Mostly True.	None	Ron Wyden	None	None	None	2009-03-18T16:52:29	2009-03-17	['None']
-snes-03453	Trump arranged a deal with Carrier that kept a thousand jobs in the United States.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-brokers-deal-with-carrier-to-keep-jobs-in-america/	None	Business	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Donald Trump Brokers Deal With Carrier to Keep Jobs in America	30 November 2016	None	['United_States']
-vogo-00605	Statement: “These (are) tough economic times for the city of San Diego, where library hours have been reduced and police and fire personnel have been laid off,” Mayor Jerry Sanders said in a news release Monday.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-mayor-wrong-on-layoff-count/	Analysis: Library hours have been reduced and 23 civilian employees were laid off in the Police Department, but Sanders was wrong about fire personnel. No one in the Fire-Rescue Department was laid off because of the recent budget cuts.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Mayor Wrong on Layoff Count	April 14, 2010	None	['San_Diego']
-pomt-02398	Says President Barack Obama "is the first president we've ever had who thinks he can choose which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/mar/10/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-barack-obama-first-president-who-thi/	Critics of President Barack Obama have charged that he has regularly exceeded the powers of his office in selectively enforcing the law. Their examples include making recess appointments, issuing executive orders, delaying provisions of his health care law, refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court and declining to deport certain categories of young illegal immigrants. At the 2014 CPAC conference, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, reiterated this point to the audience of conservative activists. Referring to Obama, Cruz said, "This president of the United States is the first president we've ever had who thinks he can choose which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore." We were suspicious of this claim, because we recalled several instances in recent years of other presidents being accused of exceeding their executive authority. We checked with eight historians and legal scholars across the ideological spectrum to see whether they could point to prior examples of presidents choosing to ignore laws. They came up with a number of examples. (Cruz’s office did not return an inquiry for this story.) While Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said he believes Obama is "setting records for the number, scope, and creativity of unconstitutional and illegal behavior," he acknowledged that "Obama wasn't the first president to violate the law and won't be the last." Here’s a trip down memory lane to review just some of the instances in which presidents are believed to have acted in ways that ignored existing legal or constitutional limits: • Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War era, Lincoln "broke an assortment of laws and ignored one constitutional provision after another," according to an analysis by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Lincoln waged war without a congressional declaration of war (or even a Congress in session to declare one), spent $2 million to raise an army without congressional appropriation, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, among other actions. "Following a strategy of ‘unilateral action,’ Lincoln justified his powers as an emergency authority granted to him by the people," the Miller Center analysis concludes. "He had been elected, he told his critics, to decide when an emergency existed and to take all measures required to deal with it. In doing so, Lincoln maintained that the President was one of three ‘coordinate’ departments of government, not in any way subordinate to Congress or the courts." • Andrew Johnson. After the Civil War ended and Lincoln was assassinated, Andrew Johnson became president and almost immediately clashed with Congress over how to treat the former Confederacy. Edwin M. Stanton, who had been Secretary of War under Lincoln, retained his position under Johnson and became one of the new president’s biggest critics, asserting that the federal government should intervene more forcefully to protect freed slaves’ rights in the South. In 1867, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which required Senate approval before a president fired federal officials who had originally been confirmed by the Senate. When Johnson tried to oust Stanton, the Senate blocked him; when Johnson made a second ouster attempt, the House impeached him. (Johnson ultimately survived impeachment, Stanton resigned, and the Tenure of Office Act was repealed in 1887.) • Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On March 11, 1941, as World War II was already under way in Europe -- and while the United States was still officially on the sidelines -- Roosevelt signed a landmark law known as the Lend-Lease Act. At the time, Britain was under siege and almost out of money, so the law authorized the president to sell, lease, or lend military hardware to any country he designated as vital to American national security. However, a provision in the law would have allowed Congress to terminate the president’s powers after a certain amount of time through a "concurrent resolution." This amounted to a "legislative veto" by a simple majority and without the president’s signature. Roosevelt believed this to be unconstitutional, but he signed the bill anyway, secretly writing a memorandum to Attorney General Robert H. Jackson explaining that "the emergency was so great that I signed the bill in spite of a clearly unconstitutional provision contained in it." Jackson only made the episode public in 1953. • Harry Truman. In the midst of the Korean War, Truman had to grapple with labor disputes within the steel industry -- a sector he considered vital to the war effort. In a bid to head off a looming work stoppage, Truman in 1952 ordered his Commerce Secretary to seize the steel mills. The industry objected, and Truman’s seizure was ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. • Richard Nixon. Citing government spending as a reason for surging inflation, Nixon refused to spend nearly $12 billion of congressionally appropriated funds for 1973 and 1974. He did so under an executive action known as "impoundment" -- an action that had been used by many presidents previously, but with questionable constitutionality. Faced with Nixon’s unusually large impoundment -- and with the president bogged down in Watergate -- Congress rebelled, passing legislation to make impoundment illegal. Nixon vetoed the bill, Congress overrode his veto, and Nixon stood his ground. The administration challenged the new law barring impoundment, but a federal court sided with Congress, saying impoundment was unconstitutional. • Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s quest to fight communism suffered a setback in the middle of his first term when the Democratic Congress in 1983 passed the Boland Amendment, which restricted the CIA and the Defense Department from operating in Nicaragua. An even stronger version passed the following year. The Reagan administration diverted some of the proceeds of a secret arms sale to Iran to the anti-communist militia in Nicaragua known as the Contras, an action that directly violated the Boland Amendment. Several top advisers to Reagan were implicated in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair. While the Reagan-appointed Tower Commission said Reagan's disengagement from White House management had made the diversion possible, Reagan himself was never formally linked to the violation of the Boland amendment. • George W. Bush. While president, Bush issued 161 signing statements -- that is, official pronouncements that accompany the signing of a bill into law. In addition to commenting on the law generally, signing statements have been used to document the president’s constitutional objections to provisions contained in the law, and sometimes to announce how (or whether) parts of the law will be enforced. Bush was hardly the first to issue signing statements, but he was the most prolific. According to the Congressional Research Service, Bush issued 161 signing statements, which is a smaller number than each of his three immediate predecessors. But 79 percent of Bush’s statements -- a much higher rate -- noted a challenge or objection to the law being signed, rather than offering relatively innocuous comments. Meanwhile, many statements contained multiple reservations, making the total number more than 1,000. The American Bar Association published a report asserting that Bush’s statements were "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers" when they "claim the authority or state the intention to disregard or decline to enforce all or part of a law ... or to interpret such a law in a manner inconsistent with the clear intent of Congress." Like Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt before him, Bush "asserted the power to violate certain laws if necessary to defend the country," said Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor. "Bush’s signing statements typically said that he would interpret laws restricting executive authority, such as a law forbidding cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees, in a manner consistent with his understanding of his power as commander-in-chief. What that meant, it turned out when the memos were declassified, was that the law did not bind him if he believed certain actions were necessary to national security — the ‘commander-in-chief override.’ " Our ruling We found that at least seven presidents -- including some of the nation’s most admired occupants of the White House -- acted, at least on occasion, in ways that ignored specific laws or constitutional protections. It is not accurate to say, as Cruz does, that Obama would be "the first president we've ever had who thinks he can choose which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore." Presidents have done so frequently, and historians expect that they will continue to do so. We rate the claim False. *** EDITOR’S NOTE, March 11, 2014: After we published our story, Cruz’s office provided the following response: "Since the dawn of the republic, the president and Congress have resisted attempts from each other to encroach upon their constitutional powers. Many presidents have asserted, and have abused, executive authority. No one is arguing that President Obama is the first to make this mistake. As Sen. Cruz has detailed in three reports, a Wall Street Journal op-ed, and a brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, no president until President Obama has ever claimed the authority to ignore the explicit text of statutes passed by Congress and unilaterally replace that text with whatever the president wishes. From Obamacare to immigration, to same sex marriage, to marijuana laws, President Obama’s willingness to ignore or alter law is unquestionably outside the scope of executive power. It amounts to legislating, pure and simple." However, we don’t agree that there’s a significant distinction between "abus(ing) executive authority" and a "willingness to ignore or alter law," so we feel comfortable with the historical examples we used to analyze Cruz’s statement. We’re standing by our original ruling of False.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2014-03-10T17:00:33	2014-03-06	['None']
-pomt-14187	"Before taking executive action on immigration, President Obama stated 22 times that he does not have the authority to change immigration laws on his own."	mostly true	/virginia/statements/2016/apr/25/bob-goodlatte/goodlatte-obama-said-22-times-he-lacks-power-chang/	U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte says it should be a no-brainer for the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down President Barack Obama’s stalled program to shield millions of immigrants from deportation and allow them to work in the country legally. The high court heard arguments April 19 on whether Obama exceeded his authority in late 2014 by going around Congress and launching the program via executive order. Goodlatte, in a statement issued the day of the hearing, said the court should be guided by the past words of the president himself. "Before taking executive action on immigration, President Obama stated 22 times that he does not have the authority to change immigration laws on his own," said Goodlatte, R-6th. Obama’s program would delay deportation of immigrants who have lived illegally in the U.S. for more than five years but have children who are citizens or have green cards. If applicants pass background checks and pay a fee, they could qualify for a work permit and avoid deportation for at least three years. More than 4 million people could qualify for the program. The president announced the program Nov. 20, 2014, after House Republicans didn’t act on a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Twenty-six states, not including Virginia, have sued to stop the program and have won before a federal district court judge in Texas and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. We decided to examine Goodlatte’s claim that Obama said 22 times that he lacked the power to change immigration laws by himself. It’s a claim that’s been made by many Republicans. The source, according to Goodlatte’s statement, is a list blogged on Nov. 19, 2014, by then-House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. Let’s first discuss the problems with Boehner’s list. Four of the quotes Boehner cited do not mention immigration but were general statements Obama made as a candidate for president about limiting the use of executive orders - a power he accused his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush, of abusing. In another quote flagged by Boehner, Obama actually was talking about his inability to end the military’s now-defunct "don’t ask, don’t tell" policies on homosexuality. That leaves, by our count, 17 Obama statements on the list that go to the heart of Goodlatte’s claim. Here’s a sampling: March 28, 2011 During a town hall meeting at Bell Multicultural High School in the District of Columbia, Obama was asked if he could issue an executive order to stop deportation of undocumented high school students. The president dismissed the idea. Obama said, "With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive orders, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed - and I know that everybody here at Bell is studying hard, so you know that we’ve got three branches of government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to interpret the laws. "There are enough laws on the books that are very clear in terms of how we enforce our immigration system that for me to, simply through executive order, ignore these constitutional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president. That does not mean, though, that we can’t make decisions, for example, to emphasize enforcement on those who’ve engaged in criminal activity." Jan. 30, 2013 During an interview with Univision, a Spanish-language television network, Obama was asked if he would consider a moratorium on deportations of non-criminal immigrants. The president said, "Well, I think it is important to remind everybody that, as I said, I think, previously, I’m not a king. I am the head of the executive branch of government. I’m required to follow the law. And that’s what we’ve done. But what I’ve also said is, let’s make sure that we’re applying the law in a way that takes into account people’s humanity. That’s the reason that we’ve moved forward on deferred action. Within the confines of the law, we said we have some discretion in terms of how we apply this law. The same is true with respect to the kinds of the length of time that people have to spend outside of the country when their spouses are already here, for example." Feb. 14, 2013 Obama was asked during a Google+ Hangout, by a woman named Jackie, if he would be willing to take executive action on immigration to ensure "families are not split apart." Obama said, "Well look Jackie, this is something I’ve struggled with throughout my presidency. The problem is that I’m the president of the United States. I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed, and Congress, right now, has not changed what I consider to be a broken immigration system, and what that means is we have certain obligations to enforce the laws that are in place, even if we think in many cases the results may be tragic. "And what we have been able to do is to make sure that we are focusing our enforcement resources on criminals as opposed to someone who is just here and trying to work and look after their families. What we have tried to do is administratively reduce the burdens and hardships on families being separated, and what we’ve done is obviously passed a deferred action which made sure the dreamers - young people who were brought here and think of themselves as American are American, except for their papers - that they are not deported. Having said all that, we’ve kind of stretched our administrative flexibility as much as we can. That’s why making sure we get comprehensive immigration reform done is so important." Sept. 17, 2013 Obama was interviewed by Jose Diaz-Balart, anchor for Noticias Telemundo. The broadcaster asked the president if he would "consider unilaterally freezing deportations for the parents of deferred-action kids" - a term that generally refers to people who came to the U.S. when they were younger than 16, attend school or have graduated, and have not committed criminal offenses. Obama said, "Here’s the problem that I have, Jose, and I’ve said this consistently. My job in the executive branch is supposed to be to carry out the laws that are passed. Congress has said, ‘Here’s the law when it comes to those who are undocumented,’ and they allocate a whole bunch of money for enforcement, and what I have been able to do is make a legal argument, that I think is absolutely right, that given the resources that we have, we can’t do everything that Congress has asked us to do. "What we can do is then carve out the DREAM Act folks, saying young people who have basically grown up here are Americans that we should welcome. We’re not going to have them grow up under a cloud, under a shadow. But if we start broadening that, then essentially I would be ignoring the law in a way that I feel would be very difficult to defend legally." On Nov. 18, 2014 - two days before Obama announced his immigration program - White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the president altered his view on his executive power after conferring with the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security on "what, if any, authority he could use to try to fix some of the problems that House Republicans have refused to address." The White House argued before the Supreme Court that the 26 states contesting Obama’s program have no legal standing to sue, because immigration policy is the domain of the federal government and that no laws have been broken. The Obama administration also argued that it merely is setting policies - not establishing laws - on whom to deport. Congress, it said, provides only enough money annually to deport about 400,000 of the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. The White House says it has focused on using those funds to deport those with criminal violations. Our ruling Goodlatte said, "Before taking executive action on immigration, President Obama stated 22 times that he does not have the authority to change immigration laws on his own." Records offered by Goodlatte and other Republicans show Obama repeatedly has made such statements. But the congressman goes a little off course in trying to quantify the times the president has said so. In a handful of the instances, the president was talking in general terms about executive authority that he did not relate to immigration. So in the interest of precision, we rate Goodlatte’s claim Mostly True.	None	Bob Goodlatte	None	None	None	2016-04-25T08:00:00	2016-04-18	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-12045	"Florida Governor Rick Scott now listed as ‘critical’ after bizarre hurricane cleanup accident."	pants on fire!	/florida/statements/2017/sep/11/thelastlineofdefenseorg/claim-florida-gov-rick-scott-injured-irma-recovery/	An Internet rumor claiming that Florida’s governor was injured while helping a neighbor clear debris following the impact from Hurricane Irma is fake news. "Florida Governor Rick Scott Now Listed As ‘Critical’ After Bizarre Hurricane Cleanup Accident," reads a headline from thelastlineofdefense.org. There is nothing true about the post. In the hours after the post, Scott addressed the media in Opa-locka, Fla. He was uninjured. The post suggests Scott is from Sarasota. He is not. The post says Scott’s chief of staff is Morton Valdy. He is not. The post says Scott was taken to Mercy General Hospital in Sarasota. There is no hospital in Sarasota by that name. We’ve written about the thelastlineofdefense.org, before. The website is a well known peddler of fake news. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	TheLastLineOfDefense.org	None	None	None	2017-09-11T15:30:48	2017-09-11	['None']
-pomt-03482	Says Texas law requires state agencies to give preference to goods produced and grown in Texas.	true	/texas/statements/2013/jun/12/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-law-requires-state-agencies-give-p/	In vetoing House Bill 535, a measure dealing with how state agencies select and buy goods, Gov. Rick Perry said, "Current law already requires state agencies to give preference to goods produced and grown in Texas." Perry said in a press release May 25, 2013, the day of the veto, that "HB 535 requires state agencies, when purchasing goods, to give preference to goods ‘manufactured’ in Texas. … This bill simply does not change current law." Soon after, a reader emailed us to ask: "Is this truly in current law"? The law that the bill would have modified is in Section 2155.444 of the state's Government Code, which says that when "making purchases of goods, including agricultural products," the comptroller and state agencies "shall give preference to those produced or grown in this state or offered by Texas bidders." Next, the law says, goods from elsewhere in the United States must be considered. State law has contained Texas-first purchasing preferences for more than 50 years. According to a May 4, 1981, state attorney general opinion, the Legislature created "Texas preferences" with a 1957 law which replaced an older statute favoring "bidders who have an established local business." The 1957 law, according to the opinion, "created a preference for products produced in Texas as well as one for products offered by Texas citizens." HB 535, as filed Jan. 15, 2013, by Rep. Yvonne Davis, D-Dallas, added "manufactured" to "produced or grown" and included a definition: "‘Manufactured’ means, with respect to assembled goods, the final assembly, processing, packaging, testing, or other process that adds value, quality, or reliability." It added a requirement that the state comptroller shall "promote the purchase of" such Texas-grown or otherwise Texas-created goods. In the legislation’s final version, that definition encompassed items "produced as a result of a manufacturing process that alters the form or function of components" in a way that adds value and transforms the parts into something different from what simply assembling the parts would have produced. Both versions also added a requirement that the state comptroller and state agencies "promote the purchase of" Texas goods. Ed Sills, spokesman for the Texas AFL-CIO labor federation, which supported the vetoed proposal, told us by phone that the combined effect of requiring such promotion, emphasizing manufactured goods and encouraging agencies to "buy Texan, buy American" could have been powerful. "Current law does have preferences. It doesn’t have as robust a preference as it would have if this bill had passed," Sills said. A spokesman for the state comptroller’s office -- which counsels state agencies on purchasing -- said by email that the state interprets the current law to cover goods manufactured in Texas. R.J. DeSilva said, "Texas agencies have always considered the term ‘produced’ to include manufactured goods. Therefore, the preference for manufactured goods was already being provided." DeSilva sent us a link to comptroller procurement rules in the Texas Administrative Code stating, "Supplies, materials, and equipment are considered to be produced in Texas if they are manufactured in Texas; ‘manufactured’ does not include the work of packaging or repackaging." Our ruling Perry said, "Current law already requires state agencies to give preference to goods produced and grown in Texas." That holds up. Existing law says that when making purchases of goods, the comptroller and state agencies "shall give preference to those produced or grown in this state or offered by Texas bidders." And the comptroller operates under rules that say items "manufactured" in Texas are considered to be "produced" in Texas. We rate Perry’s statement as True.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2013-06-12T17:57:30	2013-06-25	['Texas']
-pomt-07770	Says that in some Texas communities, "our unemployment rate is still at 10 and 20 percent."	half-true	/texas/statements/2011/feb/23/garnet-coleman/garnet-coleman-says-unemployment-still-10-and-20-p/	While the Texas unemployment rate trails the national one, that doesn’t mean every part of the state is faring well, says Democratic state Rep. Garnet Coleman of Houston. In a Dallas Morning News article posted online Feb. 15, Coleman praises the state’s unemployment rate, which as of December ran about a percentage point less than the national average. But, he adds, "in some (Texas) communities, our unemployment rate is still at 10 and 20 percent. It depends on where you’re sitting and standing in Texas as to what your quality of life is." The quotation was removed when we later reviewed the article, though the original remained intact in a Coleman blog post. Get outta here--jobless rates of 10 and 20 percent in Gawd-Blessed Texas? After leaving a message for Coleman, we fetched the latest jobless statistics from the Texas Workforce Commission’s website. For December, the Texas rate was 8 percent, the national rate 9.1 percent. That’s seasonally unadjusted, meaning it doesn’t take into account perennial changes such as those associated with teaching school or working during holiday shopping seasons. A commission chart shows that the December rates for approximately 25 metropolitan statistical areas ranged from 4.9 percent in the Midland area to 12.1 percent in McAllen-Edinburg-Mission. Three other areas had jobless rates of 10 percent or more: El Paso (10 percent), Beaumont-Port Arthur (11 percent) and Brownsville-Harlingen (11 percent). At our request, TWC spokeswoman Lisa Givens isolated Texas cities with December unemployment rates of 10 percent or more. The city with the highest rate was Port Arthur, 16.8 percent, followed by Eagle Pass, 14.3 percent; San Juan, 13 percent; Baytown, 12.6 percent; Brownsville, 12.3 percent; Weslaco, 12.3 percent; Texas City, 11.3 percent; Socorro, 11.2 percent; Pharr, 10.9 percent; Lancaster, 10.6 percent; Pasadena, 10.5 percent; San Benito, 10.4 percent and Paris, 10.2 percent. Beaumont and La Porte had rates that we rounded up to 10 percent. Drawing from commission data, we sorted city-by-city unemployment data and identified several additional cities that for at least one month in 2010 experienced an unemployment rate of 10 percent or more: Beaumont, Corsicana, Mission, La Porte and Duncanville. By e-mail, Givens told us that since 2007, no Texas county has had an average annual unemployment rate greater than 18 percent, though monthly rates occasionally exceeded that. She sent a spreadsheet for 2007 through 2010 showing unemployment peaking at 20.4 percent in Starr County in January 2010. Presidio County experienced 18 percent unemployment for most of 2010, while Zavala County reached 18.7 percent unemployment in August.. Over all, 29 of the state’s 254 counties had average 2010 unemployment rates of 10 percent or more, according to the commission. Coleman’s office, responding to our inquiry, pointed to online descriptions of seven towns, with July 2007 populations ranging from 305 to 1,053, which had unemployment rates exceeding 20 percent for adults 25 or older, according to entries posted at city-date.com, which describes itself as a multi-faceted collector of information on cities. The entries do not say where the unemployment information originated or the time period the rates cover, though Cheryl Abbot, an economist with the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, told us it appears the figures originated in the 2000 U.S. census. The towns, in Hidalgo or Starr counties near the Texas-Mexico border, are Granjeno (20.9 percent); Faysville (23.3 percent); Los Ebanos (27.6 percent); Los Villareales (28.5 percent); Alto Bonito (29.2 percent); Havana (29.3 percent); and Salineno (31.3 percent). Joseph Madden, Coleman’s chief of staff, also noted information posted on the Texas Secretary of State’s website attributed to a publication by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. We found the "thumbnail" report on the reserve’s website; it says the unemployment rate in colonias -- defined by the Texas Secretary of State as border communities near Mexico that "may lack basic living necessities, such as potable water and sewer systems, electricity, paved roads, and safe and sanitary housing" -- can be more than eight times the state rate. Similarly, Madden said, a web post by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas says most studies agree that colonia unemployment sometimes reaches five or six times the state average. Jim Henson, who directs the project, told us the material was written by Henry Dietz, a UT Distinguished Teaching Professor of Government, in 2009. Next, Coleman’s office shared information from the TWC indicating that in December, 29 of the state’s 254 counties had unemployment rates of 10 percent or more, topped by the 18.7 percent rate in Starr County. We confirmed that count in our own online search, also identifying six other counties with rates that rounded up to 10 percent. Our takeaway: 14 percent of Texas counties had unemployment rates of nearly 10 to nearly 19 percent in December and more than a dozen cities had rates from nearly 10 to nearly 17 percent. In an interview, Coleman said that when he made his statement he meant to say Texas still has places with unemployment rates of 10 to 20 percent--not 10 and 20 percent. "If I had meant counties, I would have said counties. If I had meant cities, I would have said particular cities," Coleman said. "Some communities, some pockets, are experiencing high unemployment." All told, parts of Texas experienced jobless rates of 10 percent or more in December, including one county where unemployment approached 19 percent. We didn’t confirm any with 20 percent unemployment. Coleman’s statement is solid at the low end, teetery at the top. We rate it Half True.	None	Garnet Coleman	None	None	None	2011-02-23T06:00:00	2011-02-15	['Texas']
-snes-04510	President Obama plans to remove the Statue of Liberty because it is offensive to Muslims.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-to-remove-statue-of-liberty-because-it-offends-muslims/	None	Politicians	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Obama to Remove Statue of Liberty Because It Offends Muslims	6 July 2016	None	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-01906	"Gov. Deal has the worst record on education in the history of this state."	pants on fire!	/georgia/statements/2014/jul/02/matt-mcgrath/carter-camps-claim-all-smoke/	The war of words in the governor’s race has been escalating. And it recently came to this: "Gov. Deal has the worst record on education in the history of this state," Matt McGrath, the campaign manager for Carter for Governor, said in a press release June 18. A fundraising email went out the next day, repeating that statement. In previous fact checks, we’ve noted the pitfalls to calling anything the most extreme, the first or, in this case, "the worst." The main problem: How do you prove that? In this case, Republican Nathan Deal, who faces Democrat state Sen. Jason Carter of Atlanta in the November general election, is Georgia’s 82nd governor. So when you talk about the worst governor in Georgia history, you are covering a lot of territory. Remember, the state began as a prison colony, and its first chief executive took office in 1775. The governors who followed presided over a state that made almost no attempt to educate poor whites, banned education for enslaved blacks, and aided and abetted the removal of Native American children and their parents to reservations in the West. Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia and a longtime Capitol observer, said the statement by McGrath is "the kind of campaign rhetoric that is false on its face." "Obviously, someone like Gene Talmadge who did three terms as governor did less for education than Nathan Deal," Bullock said. "It used to be that the state’s budget went disproportionately for transportation; now most of it goes for education." Deal took office in early 2011 and, with his budget proposal for fiscal 2015, will have increased k-12 spending by $868.6 million in four year, we reported in a recent fact check The overall budget for education is up $930 million in Deal’s tenure, when increases for pre-kindergarten and higher education are counted, according to the state Budget Office. So what about the Carter camp’s claim? We contacted Bryan Thomas, Carter’s campaign spokesman, to ask for supporting evidence. He told us the statement reflects the Carter campaign’s "opinion." He also said McGrath’s statement was aimed at Deal’s record on education funding, though that’s not what it says. Thomas made three points to us, all dealing with the austerity cuts to education that started under Gov. Sonny Perdue in 2003, increased to more than $1 billion a year in his final two years in office and have largely continued at that level under Deal. These cuts reflect the difference in what school systems qualify for and actually receive from the state under the education funding formula, the Quality Basic Education Act of 1985. Here are Thomas’ points, as well as some state data and our research.. 1). On average, Deal has underfunded k-12 education in Georgia by more than $1 billion per year since taking office. That’s true. Austerity cuts (and we’re rounding) were $1.15 billion in fiscal 2012, $1.14 billion in fiscal 2013, $1.06 billion in fiscal 2014 and $746.6 million for fiscal 2015, which began Tuesday, state records show. 2.). After just four years in office, Deal is responsible for more than half of the total austerity cuts, or about $4.1 billion. Our research and state records show the austerity cuts total about $4.1 billion under Deal and $8.4 billion since the cuts started in 2003. 3). Between fiscal 2003 (when "austerity cuts" began) and fiscal 2011 (when Deal took office) — a period encompassing the worst years of the Great Recession — the average QBE shortfall was just $380 million per year. Nathan Deal’s average has been more than 250 percent higher than that, at just over $1 billion per year. True. Austerity cuts in Deal’s tenure are averaging $1.02 billion a year. The cuts under Perdue were $134.9 million in fiscal 2003, $283.5 million in fiscal 2004, $332.8 million in fiscal 2005, $332.8 in fiscal 2006, $169.7 million in fiscal 2007, $143 million in 2008, $496 million in 2009, $1.4 billion in 2010 and $1.1 billion in 2011, with rounding. "Find me another governor who has so incredibly underfunded education according to the state’s own guidelines," Thomas said in an email. Jen Talaber, a spokeswoman for the Deal campaign, said: "To be clear, the Carter campaign just said that Governor Deal had the ‘worst record in the history of the state’?" "The Carter campaign believes that segregationist governors had better records than Governor Deal?" Talaber said it’s important to recognize the economic conditions that existed when Deal took office. "The rainy day fund was in pitiful shape, mandated health care spending was increasing, and we were in the midst of the Great Recession," she said. "In spite of that, the governor increased education funding every year he’s been in office." Carter voted for Deal’s budget every year, except for the fiscal 2015 budget this year, Talaber said. (This is something Deal’s campaign ads point out.) Talaber said the governor "believes a strong education builds a strong economy" and has backed school choice, working for passage of the 2012 charter school amendment. His record on education also includes championing or implementing a plan to increase schools’ access to the Internet, educator training in reading and other best practices, and the health education program SHAPE, Talaber said. Deal also saved the popular lottery-funded HOPE scholarship and pre-kindergarten programs from the brink of bankruptcy, she said. (Some of the HOPE changes that ultimately were approved were brokered by a bipartisan group that included Carter.) So with the perspective of both camps, we reached out to Thomas V. O’Brien, chairman of the department of educational studies and research at the University of Southern Mississippi, for help with the long view of Deal in history. O’Brien has researched American education in the 20th century and published a book in 1999, "The Politics of Race and Schooling: Public Education in Georgia, 1890-1961." He said he believes that because of the governor’s funding cuts to education and his stance on school choice, "it is fair to say that Deal is no friend to public education." But a declaration of worst is problematic, O’Brien said. In the 1950s and 1960s, Govs. Herman Talmadge, S. Marvin Griffin and, for a time, Ernest Vandiver threatened to do away with the public schools if they were forced to integrate by race. "They also led the Georgia Legislature to put in place laws that would facilitate such actions," he said. "However, most of their concrete actions that took hold, initiated by Talmadge, were not to cut dollars for public ed, but rather to invest in public education under the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine (Plessy vs. Ferguson, 1896)." The strategy to avoid token desegregation did not work, and, when pushed, the segregationist state leadership under Vandiver kept the public schools and repealed most of the massive resistance legislation, O’Brien said. Thirty-eight Georgia governors served before the Civil War, when there was no public education to speak of, O’Brien said. It was against the law in most places to teach a slave to read, write or do math. Poor whites had no schools, and wealthy whites brought in tutors or sent their children to school in Europe or the North, he said. So where does this leave us? The Carter camp issued a statement saying "Gov. Deal has the worst record on education in the history of this state." Spokesman Bryan Thomas later said the camp was referring to his record on education funding and specifically pointed to austerity cuts during his administration. Annual austerity cuts topped $1 billion in his first three budgets, but also were that high in the last two budgets of his predecessor, Sonny Perdue. The Carter camp can’t prove that among Georgia’s 82 governors Deal’s record is the worst on education in general or on education funding in specific. The Carter campaign’s charge was incendiary -- that the sitting governor has the worst education record in Georgia’s history. And we smell smoke. We award it our lowest rating, Pants On Fire.	None	Matt McGrath	None	None	None	2014-07-02T00:00:00	2014-06-18	['None']
-snes-05341	The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is contacting taxpayers via e-mail to convey important tax return information, complete paperwork for a refund, or request payment on a balance owed.	scam	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/irs-scam-season/	None	Inboxer Rebellion	None	Kim LaCapria	None	IRS Scam Season	20 January 2016	None	['None']
-tron-03519	The Math Doesn’t Add Up in the Orlando Nightclub Shooting	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/math-doesnt-add-orlando-nightclub-shooting/	None	terrorism	None	None	None	The Math Doesn’t Add Up in the Orlando Nightclub Shooting	Jun 17, 2016	None	['None']
-vogo-00109	Statement: “We’ve become an internationally known center for seal research now because of (seal cam),” Mayor Bob Filner said at a May 22 City Council budget hearing.	determination: huckster propaganda	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/san-diego-seal-research-capital-fact-check/	Analysis: Mayor Bob Filner has been an advocate for La Jolla’s harbor seals since his early days in office.	None	None	None	None	San Diego, Seal Research Capital: Fact Check	May 28, 2013	None	['Bob_Filner']
-pomt-00996	"Scott Walker to cut $300 million from universities, spend $500 million on a pro basketball stadium."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/feb/06/tweets/scott-walker-wants-cut-college-budgets-13-and-spen/	On Feb. 2, 2015, the day before Gov. Scott Walker unveiled his state budget, Twitter lit up with this claim: "Scott Walker to cut $300 million from universities, spend $500 million on a pro basketball stadium." The tweets were a copy-and-paste of a headline on an article by Think Progress, a liberal blog, that was posted the same day. It was an eye-catching claim that went too far. The cut The first part of the claim in the tweets is on target. More than a week before formally introducing his 2015-'17 budget, Walker revealed that he would propose cutting $300 million over two years from the University of Wisconsin System. Top officials in the system, which includes the University of Wisconsin-Madison flagship and 25 other four-year and two-year schools, said the plan likely would lead to layoffs. In exchange, the system would get more control over its budget and more freedom from state rules in its operations. Walker’s proposed cut -- $150 million for each year of the biennium, for a total of $300 million -- amounts to a 13 percent reduction in state aid for the UW System. That reportedly would be the largest cut ever. It’s worth noting that state funding accounts for $1.2 billion of the system's total budget of $6 billion. Walker’s cut in state aid would amount to 2.5 percent of the total budget. We won't know until mid-2015 whether the cut ultimately becomes part of the final budget approved by the Legislature. But there is no dispute that the $300 million reduction for universities is what Walker has proposed. The arena Money for a new basketball arena is more complicated. The owners of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks are trying to assemble private and public financing to build a new arena. The total cost is projected at about $500 million. That is not the amount Walker is proposing to spend. Like the university cuts, Walker announced his arena proposal before making his official budget presentation. He offered $220 million in state bonding -- essentially a form of borrowing -- toward the cost of the arena. Debt payments on the bonds would be repaid from growth in the so-called "jock tax" -- income tax revenue from Milwaukee Bucks players, employees and visiting teams. The rest of the $500 million would come from the Bucks’ current owners, the team’s former owner -- retired U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl -- and possibly from the City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. Normally, the growth in jock tax revenue would go to the state’s general fund to help pay for things such as schools, roads and other public services. But the Bucks could leave town in 2017 if a new arena is not in place by the fall of 2017. That is a deadline set by the NBA, which could buy the team back from its owners. In other words, without a new Milwaukee arena, there might not be any jock tax revenue. So, Walker is proposing a diversion of $220 million from the state's general fund to the arena. (A footnote: Although the headline on the Think Progress article said Walker would spend $500 million on the arena, the article itself did make a reference to his plan for $200 million in bonds.) Our rating A slew of tweets claimed: "Scott Walker to cut $300 million from universities, spend $500 million on a pro basketball stadium." Walker's 2015-'17 state budget does propose cutting $300 million from the University of Wisconsin System over the two-year period. The governor also proposes, in the form of bonds, a state contribution for a new Milwaukee arena. But it wouldn't be $500 million -- the total cost of the arena -- but rather $220 million. For a statement that is partially accurate, our rating is Half True. ------ More on Scott Walker For profiles and stories on Scott Walker and 2016 presidential politics, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Scott Walker page. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s web page.	None	Tweets	None	None	None	2015-02-06T10:00:00	2015-02-02	['None']
-snes-05285	Wegmans is offering a coupon for $200 off a purchase to Facebook users who complete a short series of steps.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wegmans-facebook-coupon-scam/	None	Inboxer Rebellion	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Wegmans Facebook Coupon Scam	1 February 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-11149	A "horrible law" requires that children be separated from their parents "once they cross the Border into the U.S."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/may/29/donald-trump/trump-blames-democrat-own-policy-separating-family/	President Donald Trump wrongly blamed Democrats for his own administrator’s immigration policy. "Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there (sic) parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.," Trump tweeted. Trump recently told Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, "I know what you're going through right now with families is very tough, but those are the bad laws that the Democrats gave us. We have to break up families." But there is no law that mandates separating children from their parents. Trump’s own administration devised a policy to that effect. So what is Trump talking about? Whenever parents are charged with a federal misdemeanor (entry without inspection in this case), or awaiting trial, they are placed in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. Children cannot go to jail, so they are transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. They are then placed with relatives, juvenile detention centers or foster care. That’s a longstanding Homeland Security policy, DHS told us. Before the Trump administration, immigrants entering illegally as families were rarely prosecuted, said Sarah Pierce, an associate policy analyst of the U.S. Immigration Program at the Migration Policy Institute. Instead, immigrants were held in family detention centers until they were sent to appear before an immigration court or deported. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on April 6 the Homeland Security Department would now be referring all illegal border crossings to the Justice Department for prosecution. Facing criminal charges, parents would go to detention centers, leaving their children unaccompanied. It’s the decision to prosecute parents that is causing the separations. "That’s a choice they have made that’s largely different from what other administrations have done," said Peter Margulies, an immigration law and national security law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law. When we asked for evidence of policies separating families, the White House referred us to items determining what happens to unaccompanied immigrant minors. But none of the children in question would be deemed unaccompanied if the Trump administration did not decide to prosecute their parents. The 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, for example, calls for the release of unaccompanied minors to family members or sponsors who can care for them as their immigration case is resolved. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which Trump has wrongly called "a Democrat rule," determines that unaccompanied minors be transferred to Health and Human Services custody. The White House argued such policies encourage parents to send their children into the United States, knowing they will be promptly released. "The cruel and inhumane open borders policies of the Democratic Party are responsible for encouraging mass illegal migration, enabling horrendous child smuggling, and releasing violent MS-13 gang members into American communities," White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said in an emailed statement. The Trump administration may believe that Democrats are responsible for policies that encourage illegal border crossing, but we found no law mandating that children be separated from their parents. Our ruling Trump said a "horrible law" requires that children be separated from their parents "once they cross the Border into the U.S." There is no such law. The Homeland Security Department’s longstanding policy is to separate children from their custodians when they are referred for criminal prosecution. Trump’s administration has decided to prosecute all illegal crossings. Families were rarely prosecuted under previous administrations. We rate this statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-05-29T17:29:12	2018-05-28	['United_States']
-pomt-10629	"I took on the worst road system in the country, according to Trucker's magazine. When I left, they said it was the most improved road system in the country."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/11/mike-huckabee/the-roads-are-better-but-still-rank-near-th/	Under fire for raising taxes, Mike Huckabee is citing benefits of the extra tax money: school improvements, health care and better roads. At a debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Jan. 10, 2008, Huckabee repeated a claim he has made several times about how much Arkansas' roads improved. "I took on the worst road system in the country, according to Trucker's magazine," Huckabee said. "When I left, they said it was the most improved road system in the country." We find Huckabee glosses over some details but is right that his state made big improvements. First, we couldn't find such an article in "Trucker's magazine" ... because we couldn't find a magazine by that name. It's clear he is referring to an annual survey done by Overdrive magazine ("The voice of the American trucker"), which asks truck drivers to name the best and worst highways. When Huckabee took office in 1996, Overdrive's survey said Arkansas' roads were fifth worst in the United States. The state kept slipping in the rankings and by 2000 it was indeed the worst in the nation. The shoddy highways persuaded the Arkansas Legislature to raise gasoline and diesel taxes in 1999, which paid for major repairs to the state's road network. That helped. By 2004, Arkansas was rated the state with the most improved roads in Overdrive's annual survey. In 2006, Huckabee's last full year in office, Overdrive did not do overall rankings for the states, so it's a stretch for him to say they were most improved "when I left." However, the truckers that year listed Interstate 40 in Arkansas as the most improved road in the nation. Interstate 30 in Arkansas was No. 4 on the list. Yet despite the improvement that occurred under Huckabee, the state's roads still rate near the bottom overall. In the January 2008 issue, Arkansas is rated fifth worst – the same as when Huckabee took office. "They have done a lot of work," said Andy Duncan, a senior editor for the magazine. "Nevertheless, the consensus is that they have a ways to go." And so while Huckabee is right that the state earned the honor for the most improved roads at one point in his term, it's a stretch to say that was the case when he left office. And Arkansas still lags behind other states. So we rate Huckabee's claim Mostly True.	None	Mike Huckabee	None	None	None	2008-01-11T00:00:00	2008-01-10	['None']
-pomt-14588	Says Donald Trump's conversion to pro-life beliefs are akin to Justin Bieber's, who said in the past that abortion "was no big deal to him."	false	/punditfact/statements/2016/feb/05/sarah-palin/sarah-palin-says-donald-trump-justin-bieber-once-s/	What do Donald Trump and Justin Bieber have in common? Humongous hair? Big bucks? How about a case of abortion contortion? Sarah Palin compared their abortion stances during the Feb. 1 edition of CNN's The Lead. Jake Tapper asked the former Alaska governor and Trump supporter about Trump's turnabout on the issue of abortion. "Donald Trump is somebody who has clearly had different positions on issues that he has today," said Tapper. "He called himself very pro-choice. Now he says he's very pro-life." "I am so glad Mr. Trump has seen the light," Palin responded, saying it was sad that anti-abortion groups were giving the candidate a hard time about his switch when other people who have had a change of heart on the issue have been celebrated. She cited, as an example, singer Justin Bieber. Tapper didn't quite understand and, in essence, asked her, what do you mean? Bieber "has made statements understanding the sanctity of life but in the past said (abortion) was no big deal to him," Palin said. "He’s just one example." We wondered whether the pop star really had the same type of conversion as Trump or whether Palin had gone overboard. Trump's change of position on the abortion question is well-established. When Trump was first considering a third-party presidential run in 1999, he said on NBC's Meet the Press that although he hated the concept of abortion, "I am pro-choice in every respect." By mid February 2011, when there was talk again that he would run for president, he declared, "I am pro-life." Whether the Biebs transitioned from abortion support to abortion opposition is not as clear. We contacted Palin through her political action committee and sought comment from Bieber through the office of his manager, Scooter Braun. We didn't hear back from either. So we decided to try to find out for ourselves. No pressure. The only reference to the abortion issue we could find was Bieber's interview with Rolling Stone, published in February 2011. He was 16 at the time. "I really don't believe in abortion. I think (an embryo) is a human," Bieber told the magazine. "It's like killing a baby." When he was asked about abortion in cases of rape, his response was, "Um. Well, I think that's really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don't know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven't been in that position, so I wouldn't be able to judge that." The rape comment in particular caused some controversy at the time, and since then Bieber has shied away from the issue. He got drawn back into it peripherally when his mother, Pattie Mallette, a born-again Christian, promoted a short anti-abortion film in 2013. Mallette had previously written of the pressure she experienced to have an abortion when she was 17 and carrying the now-pop superstar. The Chicago Sun-Times said in a Jan. 21, 2013, story that it had spoken with an unnamed "longtime Bieber associate" who claimed, "I don't believe he agrees with his mom on this issue." Some might interpret that to mean that Bieber is now pro-abortion — which would signal a new position on abortion that, sorry, does not fit Palin’s point. However, PolitiFact has a policy of not relying on unnamed or secondhand sources to speak for what others believe. Our ruling Palin said Bieber "has made statements understanding the sanctity of life but in the past said (abortion) was no big deal to him." At PolitiFact, we believe it's the responsibility of the person making a claim to provide the evidence to back it up. Palin didn't respond to our query. The only reasonable conclusion at this point is that Bieber hasn’t changed his position on abortion like Trump. Nonetheless, we never say never: If on-the-record evidence of Bieber supporting abortion prior to his Rolling Stone interview turns up, we'll consider a different ruling. Until then, Palin’s claim is not substantiated. We rate her claim False.	None	Sarah Palin	None	None	None	2016-02-05T14:35:53	2016-02-01	['Justin_Bieber']
-vogo-00275	Parking Lot Silliness: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/mayor-2012/parking-lot-silliness-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	Parking Lot Silliness: Fact Check TV	February 13, 2012	None	['None']
-pose-01040	"As mayor, I will ... reestablish a community policing philosophy that emphasizes the relationship between the police officer and the neighborhood in an effort to promote trust and cooperation."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/krise-o-meter/promise/1121/re-establish-community-policing-philosophy/	None	krise-o-meter	Rick Kriseman	None	None	Re-establish a community policing philosophy	2013-12-31T12:12:48	None	['None']
-tron-00894	The WTC Survivor or WTC virus	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/wtc/	None	computers	None	None	None	The WTC Survivor or WTC virus	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-04375	The White House was built using slave labor.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/was-the-white-house-built-by-slaves/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Was the White House Built by Slaves?	26 July 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-04876	"In June, jobless ranks were higher in nearly 90 percent of U.S. cities."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/08/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-90-percent-cities-saw-unemploymen/	In an ad titled "It's Just Not Getting Better," Mitt Romney takes aim at President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy. "In June, jobless ranks were higher in nearly 90 percent of U.S. cities," the ad’s narrator says. "In July, unemployment went up again. And the president is running out of time. Under Obama’s economy, it’s just not getting better. Mitt Romney has a plan for a stronger middle class. Under the Romney plan, more jobs and more take-home pay. It’s a plan that works for America." We wondered whether it was really true that "in June, jobless ranks were higher in nearly 90 percent of U.S. cities." The article the ad relied on We found the article the ad cited as its source, an Aug. 1, 2012, Associated Press report. We immediately noticed that the ad had ignored some caution signs that were clearly presented in the story. Here’s what AP wrote: "Unemployment rates rose in nearly 90 percent of large U.S. cities in June, partly because many young people graduated from school with no firm job prospects. "Many of the cities with significant increases in their rates have large universities, where students have begun searching for jobs in recent months. Unlike the national figures, the metro unemployment data isn't seasonally adjusted for such changes. "The Labor Department says unemployment rates rose in 332 large metro areas. They fell in 29 and were unchanged in 11. That's worse than in May, when rates rose in 255 cities." The article confirms that the number used in the ad is correct, and the numbers were worse when compared to the change between April and May. However, it’s also clear that by using that number on its own, the ad is ignoring some crucial context. Between May and June, many high school and college students graduate, inflating the June unemployment numbers. A statistical process called seasonal adjustment corrects for such fluctuations, but as the article stated, the numbers quoted are not seasonally adjusted. As the Romney campaign noted when we asked for comment, post-college unemployment is a significant issue in today’s recession. But there’s a difference between acknowledging the harm of unusually high levels of post-graduation unemployment and letting a sudden influx of new job-seekers in June skew the numbers. Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, told PolitiFact that the unadjusted unemployment rate has jumped from May to June in every single year over the last three decades. But once you seasonally adjust the numbers, many of those increases disappear entirely. So, if you rely only on non-seasonally adjusted figures, then you have to believe that the labor market "has deteriorated in every single June that a Republican has occupied the White House, too" Burtless said. (PolitiFact has noted that Burtless contributed $750 to Obama’s campaign in 2011. However, in 2008 he provided advice on aspects of labor policy to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and he has worked as a government economist and served on federal advisory panels under presidents of both parties.) What would the seasonally adjusted numbers look like? So is there a better way to look at the data? We asked Tara Sinclair, a George Washington University economist, to walk us through some alternative calculations. First, we did the same calculation as the AP reported on, with one change: We used seasonally adjusted numbers. We found that just under 45 percent of the nearly 400 metro areas had a higher unemployment rate in June than they did in May. That’s half the 90 percent rate cited in Romney’s ad. Next, we asked her to do the same calculation, but limit it to just the 50 biggest cities, to eliminate from the list such small locales as Lewiston, Idaho; Palm Coast, Fla.; Danville, Ill.; Elmira, N.Y.; Kokomo, Ind.; and Longview, Wash. This time, the percentage of metro areas with rising unemployment fell to about 35 percent, or just over one-third the percentage cited in the ad. We also ran the numbers a different way, using a longer time period that diminishes the high volatility inherent in month-to-month comparisons. (While the AP story was clear about the time frame, the ad is not, and viewers wouldn’t know about the timing details without reading the story.) If you compare the figures for June 2011 to June 2012, just 7 percent to 8 percent of metro areas saw an increase in unemployment over the previous year -- almost the exact opposite conclusion as the one cited in Romney’s ad. Our rating The ad claims that "in June, jobless ranks were higher in nearly 90 percent of U.S. cities." The Romney campaign has many grim employment statistics it can legitimately cite in an ad such as this, but using this particular statistic is misleading. The data the campaign relied on was not seasonally adjusted, so unemployment levels were exaggerated by the sudden graduation of high school and college students -- a caveat that was specifically noted high up in the story that the ad cited as its source. As it turns out, even the highest seasonally adjusted calculation we made is just half the size of the 90 percent cited in the ad. And excluding volatile month-to-month figures by looking at a full year-long comparison actually leads to the exact opposite conclusion from the one drawn in the ad: Better than 90 percent of metro areas saw unemployment drop, not rise, over the previous year. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-08-08T15:37:35	2012-08-05	['United_States']
-pomt-07768	In Wisconsin, teachers make $89,000 in salary and benefits, compared to $48,000 for all other workers in the United States.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/23/eric-bolling/fox-business-news-eric-bolling-says-wisconsin-teac/	In an interview on Feb. 21. 2011, Fox Business Network anchor Eric Bolling sparred with U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NY, over the contentious teachers union battle in Wisconsin that has captured the attention of the entire nation. Rangel argued that "the benefits we enjoy as working people and our standard of living is due, in no small part, to the trade union movement," and "the whole idea that they got to tell these people that they have decided that they're against collective bargaining, you talk about democracy? You never heard anything like this..." Bolling responded by citing statistics about pay and benefits enjoyed by Wisconsin teachers compared to the rest of the working public. "We got blackboard, here it is, Wisconsin teachers make a salary of $51,000...Benefits $38,000 per year, that comes to a whopping 89,000 bucks, while the rest of us, all workers in the United States, union, non-union, etc., $38,000 is your average salary...there, $10,000 in benefits, a quarter of what you make, that you would make if you were a Wisconsin teacher, to 48 grand, almost half the amount. Yet collective bargaining says that is OK. That's not anti-free market?" Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal asks state workers to pay more for their pensions and health insurance, which reduces take-home pay. Union leaders have largely conceded to the salary and pension cuts, but Walker's plan also sets significant limits on collective bargaining power for most public sector unions, which has enraged union members and sparked protests at the state capital. Still, much of the political chatter about the Wisconsin showdown has continued to focus on salary and benefit issues, so we decided to check Bolling's numbers. Bolling was pretty close on the average salary figure for Wisconsin teachers. The latest figures from the National Education Association actually put the average salary for a Wisconsin teacher at $51,264. The $51,000 salary figure is further substantiated by district-by-district data provided by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. However, according to a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the Fox figure for Wisconsin teacher benefits -- $39,000 -- is way too high. Average benefits amount to about $25,000 a year, said Marlena Deutsch, a spokeswoman for WEAC. In total compensation, Wisconsin ranks 23rd in the nation. We couldn't find a definitive, independent state average for benefits in Wisconsin, but the data from the state Department of Public Instruction lists "fringe benefits" by district in Wisconsin. None were as high as $39,000. The median was about $25,800. OK, now to the Average Joe or Jane who works in the private sector. According to a national compensation survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the total cost of compensation to private industry employees last year came to about $58,000 ($41,000 for salary; $17,000 for benefits). So Bolling's total compensation number for Wisconsin teachers is high, and for private sector employees, it's is low. On his show the following night (Feb. 22) Bolling said in the numbers he had posted the night before, "our math was off a bit." A new graphic, he said, showed the unweighted average for Wisconsin teachers for the 2010 school year: a $51,000 salary, plus $30,000 worth of benefits (for a total of $81,000 worth of compensation). For an average private sector worker, he said, the salary in 2010 was $46,000 with $20,000 worth of benefits (total compensation $66,000). Those revised numbers are much closer to the ones we found. But many statisticians have a more fundamental issue with Bolling's comparison. In order to be a teacher in Wisconsin, you've got to have a 4-year college degree. And 52 percent of Wisconsin teachers also have a master's degree. That's much, much higher than the average education level for workers in the private sector. People with higher degrees in education typically get paid more. We found two studies that factored in such things as education level, years of experience, race, gender, etc. and found that public employees tend to make a little less than people with similar backgrounds in the private sector. A report titled "Out of Balance" by two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors for the National Institute of Retirement Security, whose board is largely composed of representatives of public employee pensions, found that when "comparable earning determinants," such as education, are considered, state employees typically earn salaries 11 percent lower than their private sector counterparts. When you consider total compensation -- salary plus benefits -- the deficit dropped to 6.8 percent (because public employees generally get better benefits packages than those in the private sector). One of the study authors, Keith A. Bender, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, said that message has largely been lost in the Wisconsin debate. As for Bollings' comparison, Bender said, "I guess you can do that if you don't want to compare like with like. But you are comparing less educated people with more educated people." Another report, by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, found that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8 percent less in total compensation than comparable private-sector workers. The study's author, Jeff Keefe, issued a policy memo on Feb. 15, 2011, titled "Wisconsin public versus private employee costs: Why compare apples to oranges?" "Inaccurate comparisons of national and Wisconsin public employee compensation with private sector compensation are circulating in Wisconsin," Keefe wrote. "These faulty comparisons, showing that public employees in Wisconsin are dramatically overpaid, seem to support legislative efforts to increase benefit contributions by public employees." "But when we compare apples to apples, we find that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8% less in total compensation than comparable private sector workers," Keefe wrote. "The comparisons—controlling for education, experience, hours of work, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and disability—demonstrate that full-time state and local public employees earn lower wages and receive less in total compensation (including all benefits) than comparable private sector employees. "Why does it appear otherwise? Both nationally and within Wisconsin, public sector workers are significantly more educated than their private sector counterparts." The Center for Union Facts, a self-described "union watchdog," said Keefe's study made two assumptions "both of which bias the results in its preferred direction." The first assumption was that state employees would otherwise be working in a large private sector business with 1,000 employees or more, the group said. And, it argues, Keefe excluded full-time, part-year workers like certain teachers. According to an analysis released by the Center for Union Facts on Feb. 22, 2011, public sector employees, on average, earn five percent more in wages and benefits than their counterparts in the private sector. We don't want to get too far into the weeds on the many ways data can be sliced to make comparisons between public and private sector compensation. We don't take too much issue with the raw numbers provided by Bolling (the clarified ones). They're pretty close to the numbers we found as well. But the comparison of compensation for Wisconsin teachers to the compensation for all private sector employees is misleading. On average, Wisconsin teachers are far more highly educated than the average worker. People with higher levels of education tend to make more. And so we rate Bollings' comparison Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Eric Bolling	None	None	None	2011-02-23T11:21:28	2011-02-21	['United_States', 'Wisconsin']
-pomt-04843	"We do know that Romney personally approved over $70 million in fictional losses to the IRS as part of the notorious 'Son of Boss' tax scandal, one of the largest tax avoidance schemes in history."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/13/barack-obama/obama-links-romney-infamous-tax-shelter/	Barack Obama expanded his assault on Mitt Romney’s business ethics with a new ad that connects Romney to dodging taxes. The ad opens with a clip of Romney in an interview. Interviewer: Was there ever any year when you paid lower than the 13.9 percent? Romney: I haven’t calculated that. I’m happy to go back and look. Announcer: Did Romney pay 10 percent? 5 percent? Zero? We don’t know. But we do know that Romney personally approved over $70 million in fictional losses to the IRS as part of the notorious "Son of Boss" tax scandal, one of the largest tax avoidance schemes in history. Isn’t it time for Romney to come clean? If you haven’t heard of it, Son of Boss was a tax dodge that swept the country in the 1990s and allowed well-heeled investors and corporations to hide billions of dollars in taxes they owed the government. We thought we should examine this new allegation and see whether Romney truly did have a hand in advancing a spurious tax shelter. Marriott International and Son of Boss The substance of this claim goes to Romney’s years on the board of Marriott International. According to Bloomberg News, he joined the board of directors in 1993 and became head of the board’s Audit Committee, a position he held for six years. By this point, Romney had already established himself as a successful fund manager. His second year on the board, Marriott took advantage of a tax reduction method that Daniel Shaviro, a tax professor at the New York University School of Law, described to us this way: "You and I purport to give each other, say $70 million. (But these cash flows are themselves largely fictional - e.g., I ‘borrow’ from you the money that I am ‘paying’ you). I then deduct the $70 million that I paid you, and don't include the $70 million that you paid me. End of story." Complex partnerships, financial securities and the occasional offshore accounts were used to mask reality. The method went by the name of Son of Boss, named after a similar discredited tax scheme called BOSS, or Bond Option Sales Strategy. It was marketed aggressively by tax accountants nationwide, including some of the largest accounting firms. The Internal Revenue Service began cracking down in 2000. In 2008, the government estimated $6 billion in taxes had gone uncollected. A series of court decisions stated that the perpetrators were guilty of "subverting the legislative purpose of the tax code by engaging in transactions that are fictitious or lack economic reality simply to reap a tax benefit." Citing court documents, Bloomberg reported that in 1994, an investment banker faxed a proposal to a senior tax attorney at Marriott. By creating new partnerships, the company could post a paper tax loss without doing itself any real financial harm. This was Son of Boss in action. Through it, Marriott reported $71 million in losses that the courts ultimately decided did not exist. By the mid-2000s, Marriott was in court defending its use of this tax shelter. In 2008 it lost; the company appealed and lost again in 2009. Romney’s role The central question is, did Romney know what was going on and did he sign off? The ad relies on the opinion of two tax attorneys, Edward Kleinbard and Peter Canellos, who wrote that "Romney approved the firm's reporting of fictional tax losses." The authors go on to express their opinion that Romney had the expertise to understand the nature of the scheme and had the fiduciary responsibility to review it. There is only one certain fact about Romney’s role at Marriott. At some point, the board would have reviewed and accepted various financial filings and audit reports that included the tax losses claimed under Son of Boss. What we don’t know is whether the board or the audit committee specifically discussed the tax shelter itself, either before it was used or when it delivered the promised tax savings. On this point, we have no outright denial from the Romney campaign. We asked the campaign if Romney approved the use of Son of Boss and they referred us to Marriott International. At Marriott, Stephanie Hampton, senior director of global corporate communications told us, "None of our directors has actively initiated or coordinated the company's tax planning strategies." But this is no denial. Initiating and coordinating are not what board Audit Committees do. The ad claims that Romney approved the deal, not that he initiated it or coordinated it. Absent a denial, we enter the hazy world of the role of corporate board audit committees in 1994. "The standards for audit committees compared to what we see now were more modest," said Joe Carcello, professor of accounting at the University of Tennessee. Carcello told us he is skeptical that company managers would have brought this transaction before the board at all. If they did, he expects the managers would have told board members, "We vetted this with the tax lawyers and they say this is a legitimate transaction," Carcello said. "Unless the audit committee had three or four tax lawyers, they wouldn’t have any reason to question it." Accounting experts seem to share this view, but tax lawyers have a different opinion. The lawyers cited by the Obama campaign say by 1994, the New York State Bar had issued warnings about tax shelters of this sort. Shaviro at New York University told us there would be ample reason to question the transaction. The company was claiming a large loss but it wasn’t actually losing any money. To Shaviro, the follow ups would be obvious: "Can this really work? Do the tax lawyers agree? Is it too good to be true?" Linda Beale, a professor at Wayne State Law School, said, "The audit committee is the place to draw the line on improper behavior." Romney seems to have taken his board duties seriously. Bloomberg cited a fellow Marriott board member, Gilbert Grosvenor, who said Romney examined the company financial statements closely. "Certainly deeper than we did as members," Grosvenor told Bloomberg. Marriott International said the company "takes prudent precautions, including seeking the advice of outside professionals, to ensure our tax strategy is consistent with Federal, state and foreign tax laws and regulations." It is important to note that in 1994, the federal government had yet to crack down on these tax schemes. Our ruling The Obama ad says Romney personally approved $70 million in fictional tax losses through the Son of Boss tax shelter. Marriott International used Son of Boss. At the time, the illegality of the scheme had not been proven in court, but the nature of it was clear to all participants. Romney was head of Marriott’s audit committee at the time. Experts disagree on whether the corporate board would have known about the deal and had the chance to question it. The company neither confirmed nor denied that the board approved the transaction. At some point, the board would have approved filings that included the fraudulent losses, but it’s unclear whether Romney specifically favored the tax move. The statement includes a measure of truth but ignores important context. We rate it Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-08-13T15:04:31	2012-08-09	['None']
-vees-00469	VERA FILES YEARENDER: Explaining the president: He says, they say	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-yearender-explaining-president-he-says-they-say	None	None	None	None	Duterte,United States,west philippine sea,drug war	VERA FILES YEARENDER: Explaining the president: He says, they say	December 23, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-11436	Rep. Pittenger is "constantly rated as one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress."	false	/north-carolina/statements/2018/mar/15/mark-harris/robert-pittenger-among-most-liberal-republican-con/	Rev. Mark Harris came within 134 votes of beating U.S. Rep. Robert Pittenger two years ago in the Republican primary for his seat, so he’s trying again this year. And to close the voting gap before the May 8 primary, Harris is questioning Pittenger’s conservative credentials. Pittenger has represented North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District since 2013, when he succeeded retiring Republican Sue Myrick. A Charlotte resident, Pittenger previously served in the state Senate and in 2008 ran unsuccessfully for Lt. Governor. In a recent newsletter, Harris criticized Pittenger for supporting a spending bill that raised the debt ceiling. "Robert Pittenger showed us yet again why he is constantly rated as one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress," the newsletter says. There are 535 voting members of Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate). Republicans control Congress with nearly 300 seats: 238 in the House and 51 seats in the Senate. The term "most liberal" is somewhat subjective. But PolitiFact wondered whether conservative watchdog groups have consistently singled out Pittenger as liberal since he won North Carolina’s 9th Congressional district in 2013. We reached out to the Harris campaign to see what ratings systems he’s referencing in the newsletter. What Harris said The primary source for the statement is a rating by Conservative Review, according to Harris campaign spokesman Andy Yates. Conservative Review is a website founded by Mark Levin, a controversial radio personality who has referred to Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell as a "dummy" and "failure." "Pittenger has a 55% F grade with them. It is the second worst grade of any NC Republican House member (McHenry is the worst)," Yates said in an email, referring to Rep. Patrick McHenry, who represents NC’s 10th Congressional district. "Pittenger has consistently graded out as an F with this group which marks him as one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress." Yates is right about Pittenger’s standing among the 10 other North Carolina Republicans in the House. Whether that puts him among the most liberal Republicans depends on how one defines "most liberal." According to Conservative Review’s scorecard, there are about 90 House Republicans – about 36 percent – who have lower "Liberty Scores" than Pittenger. Among those with lower scores than Pittenger: House Speaker Paul Ryan and majority whip Steve Scalise. Yates also cited Pittenger’s 2018 rating with FreedomWorks, which is zero. FreedomWorks is a libertarian-leaning advocacy group. The scorecard mostly covers fiscal policy, civil liberties and regulatory issues, said Jason Pye, vice president of legislative affairs at FreedomWorks. Pye referred to Pittenger as "unreliable" when it comes to reining in spending. Pittenger "generally votes with leadership, and they like to bust spending caps and bust the budget — things we’re opposed to," Pye said. Pittenger has a "Lifetime Score" of 70 with the FreedomWorks. There are about 114 House members with lower lifetime scores than Pittenger. Pittenger’s score places him slightly to the right of California Republican Devin Nunes and slightly to the left of U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, also of North Carolina. Pittenger’s lifetime ratings on FreedomWorks or Conservative Review aren’t extremely liberal (or conservative.) To get a full picture of Pittenger’s record, we consulted other sources as well. What others said Pittenger votes out-of-step with the majority of Republicans 5.5 percent of the time, according to ProPublica. The group says that’s close to the average for Republicans in Congress. He has a score of 90 percent with Heritage Action for America, a watchdog group and think tank that says it "turns conservative ideas into reality on Capitol Hill." The average score for House Republicans is 68 percent. According to a vote tracker on FiveThirtyEight.com, Pittenger’s votes are aligned with Trump 96.9 percent of the time. And there are dozens of Republican House members who vote in-step with Trump less than Pittenger. He has a perfect score with FRC Action, which advocates for conservative social issues. As of 2016, Pittenger also had an 88 lifetime rating with The American Conservative Union, another leading conservative organization. The Club For Growth, which tracks legislation that affects the economy, gives Pittenger a lifetime score of 79 percent – which is in the middle-of-the-road for House Republicans. VoteView.com, meanwhile, says Pittenger is more conservative than 68 percent of Republicans in the House. It would be one thing if Harris said Pittenger isn't taking a strong enough stance on fiscal issues, even if it means voting against the party. Harris could make a case there. But, "to make the assertion that Pittenger is one of the most liberal Republicans is a stretch too far," said Michael Bitzer, chair of the politics department at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC. Our ruling Harris said Pittenger is "constantly rated as one of the most liberal Republicans in Congress." We can’t find the results to back that up. So we rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Mark Harris	None	None	None	2018-03-15T08:57:57	2018-02-09	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'United_States_Congress']
-snes-05490	Pope Francis uploaded a selfie to the Vatican's Instagram account.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pope-francis-shares-instagram-selfie/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	FALSE: Pope Francis Shares Instagram Selfie	14 December 2015	None	['None']
-pose-00143	"Programs: Each major defense program will be reevaluated in light of current needs, gaps in the field, and likely future threat scenarios in the post 9-11 world. We must rebalance our capabilities to ensure that our forces can succeed in both conventional war-fighting and in stabilization and counter-insurgency operations."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/155/review-weapons-programs/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Review weapons programs	2010-01-07T13:26:49	None	['None']
-pomt-04887	"When I left the Senate, we were on a trajectory towards a balanced budget."	half-true	/virginia/statements/2012/aug/07/george-allen/george-allen-says-us-was-path-balanced-budget-when/	Republican George Allen says the federal budget was in decent shape when he left the U.S. Senate in January 2007. "When I left the Senate, we were on a trajectory towards a balanced budget," Allen said during a July 22 debate in Hot Springs with Democrat Tim Kaine, his opponent for the U.S. Senate. Kaine has repeatedly criticized Allen for casting votes during his term in the Senate that helped turn a budget surplus Allen inherited into deficits. We were curious whether Allen’s response -- that the nation was on a course towards a balanced budget at the end of his term -- is correct. When Allen came into the Senate in January 2001, the government was running its fourth straight fiscal year of surpluses, taking in $121 billion more than it was spending and paying down the federal debt, then valued at $3.3 trillion. In fiscal 2002, the U.S. began its current streak of running deficits. The economy slowed that year, and a number of measures that Allen backed during his term contributed to the red ink: two foreign conflicts, tax cuts and the expansion of Medicare to cover prescription costs. The deficit swelled to $413 billion in fiscal 2004 and contracted to $161 billion in fiscal 2007, when Allen left the Senate after an election defeat. The Allen campaign, in a website post, cited the steadily declining deficits from 2004 to 2007 as proof of Allen’s statement that the U.S. was heading towards a balanced budget at the end of his term. The campaign also cites budget projections released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in January 2007, shortly after Allen left office. The CBO predicted that deficits would gradually diminish and the budget essentially would be balanced in 2011 and produce a surplus in 2012 and afterwards. But there’s an important caveat that the Allen campaign glosses over. CBO projections are made with an assumption that policies currently in effect will not change. And when the CBO released the report cited by Allen, major tax cuts approved under President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 were scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. The Bush tax cuts have since been reset to end at the end of this year. Allen, in his unsuccessful 2006 campaign against Democrat Jim Webb, repeatedly called for the Bush tax cuts to be extended permanently, a position he has strongly maintained in this year’s race against Kaine. In other words, Allen’s proof that the U.S. was on a trajectory towards a balanced budget when he left the Senate relies on ending the Bush tax cuts -- an action that he has long opposed. We wondered what would have happened if Allen had gotten his way and the tax cuts were permanently extended during his term. Would the U.S. have still been on a path towards a balanced budget when Allen left the Senate? Let’s examine this through the lens of January 2007, the final month of Allen’s term. Back then, the nation was in its fourth month of a fiscal year that would produce a $161 billion deficit. The CBO was projecting improvement to a $170 billion surplus for 2012. But pivotal to the nation returning to black ink was $332.2 billion in added revenues from the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. If the tax cuts had been made permanent, the U.S. would have been heading towards a $162.2 billion deficit in 2012. The red ink would have grown to a $242.7 billion in 2016, according to CBO figures, before falling slightly to $210.7 billion in 2017. So in terms of raw dollars, the deficit would have been expected to slowly increase during the 10 years after Allen’s departure if the Bush tax cuts had been made permanent. Many economists say the best way to compare deficits through history is to measure them against the Gross Domestic Product -- the market value of all goods and services produced by a nation. The comparison to GDP provides a gauge of a country’s ability to absorb its deficit. In fiscal 2007, the U.S. deficit that was 1.2 percent of its GDP. A computation of figures in the CBO report issued that January show that if the Bush tax cuts had been made permanent, the deficit would have dropped to 0.9 percent of GDP this year, risen to 1.2 percent next year and leveled at 1.1 percent in 2014 and 2015, risen to 1.2 percent in 2016 and dropped to 1 percent in 2017. So if the Bush cuts had become permanent before Allen left the Senate, little long-term change would have been expected in size of the deficit compared to the GDP. Of course, many of the numbers bandied about in 2007 seem now rosy in the light of the $1.3 trillion U.S. budget deficit expected this year. Hindsight is perfect, and back in 2007 the CBO couldn’t predict collapses in the housing and financial markets that led to the Great Recession. Our ruling Allen, trying to refute charges he voted to run up federal deficits, said the U.S. was "on a trajectory towards a balanced budget" when he left the Senate in 2007. Allen’s campaign cites a 2007 CBO report that said Washington was on the road to budget surpluses, starting in 2012. But those projections were based on the assumption that the Bush tax cuts would end as scheduled in 2010. And Allen has maintained since at least 2006 that the tax reductions should be made permanent. Had Allen prevailed on the tax cuts, figures in the 2007 CBO report point to the deficit slowly rising in raw dollars over the next eight years. The deficit, as a percentage of GDP, would have been only a smidgen lower in 2015 than it was in 2007. So Allen is right that the U.S. was projected to be on a trajectory towards a balanced budget when his Senate term ended. But he omits a key detail that creates a different impression: the projected path towards a balanced budget required a step Allen refused to take -- ending the Bush tax cuts. We rate Allen’s statement Half True.	None	George Allen	None	None	None	2012-08-07T06:00:00	2012-07-21	['None']
-pomt-03061	"(Texas Republicans) believe in abolishing Social Security, abolishing V.A. health care."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/02/bernie-sanders/sen-bernie-sanders-says-texas-republicans-want-abo/	There have been no shortage of claims about Obamacare in the build up to the health insurance marketplaces opening on Oct. 1. On MSNBC, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called the effort by some Republicans to defund Obamacare in exchange for funding the government "nickels and dimes" in comparison with other stances they take. "What Mr. (Ted) Cruz and his Republican friends think in terms of health care is that we should voucherize Medicare, make massive cuts in Medicaid and ignore the fact 48 million Americans have no health insurance at all," he said Sept. 25. He used the Republican Party of Texas to criticize the beliefs of the entire party. "If you look at something like the Texas Republican platform, do you know what they believe in? They believe not only in getting rid of Obamacare," he said. "They believe in abolishing Social Security, abolishing V.A. (Veterans Affairs) health care." It’s not shocking that most Republicans would have differing views on these programs than Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats. But do they really call for these services to be abolished? We wanted to find out. Sanders was referring to the Republican Party of Texas 2012 party platform, spokesman Michael Briggs told PolitiFact in an email. We noticed the platform’s language called for the "privatization" of both government programs, but never mentioned the word "abolish" or anything similar. GOP Texas Chairman Steve Munisteri said the group does not support abolishment. "To me, both statements he made are grossly inaccurate," he said. Let’s delve further into each issue. Proposed Social Security changes Munisteri emphasized that the proposed Social Security changes would not affect retirees and near-retirees, who have already paid into the Social Security system. Then, for younger people, the platform calls for a "transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts." According to previous proposed privatization plans, this would entail individuals redirecting all or part of their current Social Security taxes to a personal account, which would be invested in some sort of asset, said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who specializes in Social Security policy. "They’re very different programs, but there still exists a mandatory, government-regulated retirement program," he said. "People would not be free to invest in their brother-in-law’s South American gold mining stock." Former President George W. Bush and others have proposed many Social Security privatization plans over the years, but we should note that the platform Sanders referenced doesn’t cite any specific proposal. Still, privatizing Social Security isn’t the same thing as abolishing it. Efficient care for veterans The Republican Party of Texas platform directly addresses health care for veterans, saying, "The Veterans Administration must become more responsive and more efficient by eliminating its backlog and reducing waiting times for treatment. We support the privatization of veterans' heath care." To Munisteri, the platform’s call for the privatization of health care means exploring a system in which the government would pay veterans to seek out private health care. Currently, veterans enrolled in the program seek treatment from government-funded facilities. "The current system is causing veterans to wait too long (for treatment)," he said. "We support having other options available for veterans." Kevin Bacon, a public affairs professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said abolishment of a health care system -- one that includes more than 8.7 million veterans, 150 hospitals and 80 clinics -- would not be a realistic stance. Veterans face a unique set of medical issues that need to be treated, like multiple amputations and PTSD, he said. "Privatization is one of those terms that have so many different flavors to it," Bacon said, noting the complexity of the issue. There are lots of different propositions out there to privatize health care, but no serious options call for an end to providing health care for veterans, Bacon said. Due to a host of different possibilities within the realm of privatized veterans’ care and again, a broad statement from the GOP platform, it’s unclear to us if the V.A. facilities would remain open if the system were privatized. In any case, the Oxford dictionary defines "abolish" as meaning to "formally put an end to (a system, practice, or institution)." While the privatization of either system Sanders mentioned could drastically change the way these issues are handled, the government would not be removing itself from the responsibility of providing either of these services. Generally speaking, government-funded medical treatment for veterans and retirement benefits for seniors would still exist in some form. Our ruling Sanders' claim that the Texas GOP wants to "abolish" Social Security and VA health care didn’t line up with the official 2012 party platform, which called for a "privatization" of both programs. Privatization could bring systemic shake-ups to either issue in question, but wouldn’t entirely eliminate the programs. While the state party would like veterans to get their health care through private plans and young people to direct their Social Security taxes to private accounts, we found no evidence that GOP Texans are pushing to eliminate either system entirely. We rate Sanders' claim False.	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2013-10-02T09:44:23	2013-09-25	['None']
-pose-00816	Create a "tougher law to punish human traffickers, with penalties ranging from 25 years to life."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/perry-o-meter/promise/848/toughen-law-against-human-traffickers/	None	perry-o-meter	Rick Perry	None	None	Toughen law against human traffickers	2011-01-13T12:33:38	None	['None']
-pomt-07032	Two years ago we had "the largest structural deficit ever in Wisconsin."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/jul/03/scott-walker/gov-walker-says-2-years-ago-we-had-largest-deficit/	In recent weeks, there has been a lot of talk about the state’s "structural" deficit, and how Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature eliminated it in the 2011-13 budget. During the 2010 campaign, Walker railed against the use of one-time budget maneuvers, which pushed problems into future budgets. Walker returned to the topic in a June 21, 2011, appearance as a guest host on CNBC’s "Squawk Box," touting his own approach. "We had two years ago the largest structural deficit ever in Wisconsin," Walker said. "One of the things where in many ways they were kicking the can into the future, delaying payments, pushing things off, raided transportation funds and took stimulus money." He added: "And in this budget we wiped that out and put in place structural changes." Among the changes: The controversial collective bargaining bill, which requires state workers to contribute more for their pensions and health insurance. In effect, it is a pay cut for workers, which means a savings for taxpayers. From a fiscal perspective, the change is viewed as permanent, rather than a one-time change, said Robert Lang, director of Wisconsin’s non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. But what about the claim that two years ago, under Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, the structural deficit was at its largest point? The structural deficit is a projection that measures the future imbalance between spending and tax revenue as laid out in state law. The fiscal bureau started calculating the structural deficit with the 1997-99 budget. The structural deficit differs from budget shortfalls caused, for instance, by reduced tax collections due to a poor economy. By law, the two-year budgets must be balanced when approved. But because they are based on projections, things frequently change when expenses rise (or fall) or revenue comes in lower (or higher) than anticipated. If you look back two years, the structural deficit for the 2009-11 state budget -- when Doyle was in office -- was $1.682 billion, according to a June 13, 2011 fiscal bureau report. But that’s not the largest ever measured. Rather, it’s the third highest in the 14 years that the agency has compiled the reports. The worst: a $2.867 billion structural deficit from the 2003-05 budget. We asked Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie about the governor’s statement. He referred us to the Walker’s executive budget, submitted earlier this year and had no further comment. That document includes a chart that shows -- without attribution -- structural deficits as calculated by the fiscal bureau. It takes the extra step of showing which governor was in charge for each deficit. Under the largest structural deficit is the name McCallum. That would be Gov. Scott McCallum, a Republican. So what’s the bottom line? Appearing on a national cable TV show viewed by some 269,000 people, Walker said the state’s largest structural deficit had come two years earlier, under his Democratic predecessor. He was off by seven years and a political party. We rate his statement False. Editor's note: An earlier version of this item incorrectly stated that Scott McCallum was acting governor.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2011-07-03T09:10:00	2011-06-21	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-09511	The stimulus bill "didn’t create one new job."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/18/scott-brown/scott-brown-says-stimulus-didnt-create-one-new-job/	A major theme in Republican complaints about the $862 billion stimulus program is that it didn't deliver enough jobs. Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts took that view to an extreme, claiming that it didn't create any new jobs. Here's what he said during a Feb. 4, 2010, news conference, shortly after he was sworn in. “The last stimulus bill didn’t create one new job, and in some states the money that was actually released hasn’t even been used yet,” Brown said. ABC's Jonathan Karl immediately followed up. “It didn’t create one new job?” Karl asked. “That’s correct. We lost another 85,000 jobs again, give or take, last month,” Brown responded. “And in Massachusetts, it hasn’t created one new job and throughout the country as well. It may have retained some, but it hasn’t created any new jobs." There are two ways to analyze this question -- looking at jobs created directly by the stimulus, and looking at jobs created in the broader economy since the stimulus bill took effect. We'll look first at jobs funded directly by the stimulus. According to Recovery.gov -- the Obama administration's Web site that tracks the stimulus effort -- the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created or saved 634,042 jobs between Feb. 17, 2009, and Sept. 30, 2009, and it funded 595,263 jobs between Oct. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2009. The data come from reports filed by the primary recipient of stimulus funds such as state and local governments and private-sector companies. These numbers aren't perfect. They meld bits and pieces of part-time jobs into "full-time equivalent" jobs, and the two periods use different criteria for job counting, due to a change dictated by the Office of Management and Budget in December 2009. (For the earlier of the two periods cited above, the number refers to jobs created or saved; for the later of the two periods, it refers to the number of jobs funded by the stimulus without reference to whether that funding created or saved a job.) Also, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded in November 2009 that "there are a range of significant reporting and quality issues that need to be addressed" in this reporting system. So these statistics may overstate the actual number of jobs created. But not by enough to make Brown's zero-jobs claim accurate. So there's strong evidence that the stimulus has created lots of jobs directly through federal spending. What about the economy as a whole? Economists have been estimating the impact of the stimulus on jobs by comparing two numbers: current employment statistics and an estimate of what those employment numbers would have looked like had there been no stimulus. In a report released on Jan. 13, 2010, the president's Council of Economic Advisers estimated that between 1.77 million jobs and 2.07 million jobs were created or saved by the stimulus through the fourth quarter of 2009. Separately, the council's report cited four independent analyses of the same question. These estimates were by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as well by three private-sector economic-analysis firms. Here's what those groups found: • CBO: Between 800,000 jobs (low estimate) and 2.4 million jobs (high estimate) saved or created. • IHS/Global Insight: 1.25 million jobs saved or created. • Macroeconomic Advisers: 1.06 million jobs saved or created. • Moody's economy.com: 1.59 million jobs saved or created. A couple of caveats: These estimates are based on economic models that vary somewhat from study to study, and not everyone buys the idea that it's possible to measure how the economy would have fared in the absence of a stimulus. Indeed, some economists, including many conservatives, believe that the multiplier effect from the stimulus is small or nonexistent. "Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy," writes economist Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "No new purchasing power is created; it is merely transferred from one part of the economy to another. ... Removing water from one end of a swimming pool and pouring it in the other end will not raise the overall water level -- no matter how large the bucket. Similarly, borrowing money from one part of the economy and redistributing to another part of the economy will not create new growth -- no matter how big the stimulus bill." We acknowledge that there's some dispute on this question. Still, the independent estimates we've seen have credibility, and they all agree that at least 1 million jobs have been created or saved. That, in combination with the hundreds of thousands of jobs cited on recovery.gov as being funded directly by the stimulus, contradicts Brown's assertion that the bill "didn’t create one new job." But if Brown had chosen his words more carefully, he could have scored better on the Truth-O-Meter. He's right that the economy as a whole has been losing jobs almost every single month since January 2008. According to a chart prepared by the Obama White House, there has been positive job growth in only one month during that period -- November 2009. (In his news conference comment, Brown actually underestimated the net job losses in December 2009, which was the most recent month for which data was available before he spoke; it was about 150,000, rather than 85,000.) So if Brown had said that the national economy hasn't seen any net gain in jobs since the stimulus bill was passed, he would have earned himself a True. A spokesman for Brown, Eric Fehrnstrom, made that point to us in an interview. "The fact is that we have lost jobs every month since the stimulus passed," Fehrnstrom said. "No amount of political spin can change that fact." But that's not what Brown said. He said the stimulus bill "didn’t create one new job" and, when asked to clarify, he said it "hasn’t created any new jobs." It's perfectly reasonable to question whether the $862 billion was well spent and whether it is good economic policy. But that money has clearly resulted in tens of thousands of jobs that wouldn't exist otherwise. It's preposterous to claim that no new jobs came out of it. We find his claim Pants on Fire!	None	Scott Brown	None	None	None	2010-02-18T17:47:49	2010-02-04	['None']
-snes-00623	Major General Paul Eaton said President Trump's decertification of an existing nuclear deal with Iran deal "dishonors America."	correct attribution	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/general-eaton-iran-deal/	None	Politics	None	Snopes Staff	None	Did Major General Paul D. Eaton Say Trump’s Decertifying Iran Deal ‘Dishonors America’?	9 May 2018	None	['Iran', 'United_States']
-snes-02108	A photograph shows boxer Muhammad Ali with musician Michael Jackson.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muhammad-ali-michael-jackson/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This Muhammad Ali with a Young Michael Jackson?	6 July 2017	None	['Muhammad_Ali', 'Michael_Jackson']
-tron-03522	FBI Spills Water on San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/fbi-spills-water-san-bernardino-shooters-iphone/	None	terrorism	None	None	None	FBI Spills Water on San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone	Mar 30, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-05368	Says Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell voted for a toll lane on MoPac.	true	/texas/statements/2012/may/09/brigid-shea/austin-mayoral-hopeful-brigid-shea-says-incumbent-/	In a recent Austin mayoral debate, challenger Brigid Shea and incumbent Lee Leffingwell sparred over a plan to expand MoPac Boulevard, with Shea ultimately saying that Leffingwell voted to add a toll lane to the frequently congested north-south expressway. We wondered whether Shea was right about Leffingwell’s record. First, let’s flash back to their exchange during the debate aired April 16, 2012, by KXAN-TV, Channel 36. Shea began by saying the city hasn’t done enough to ease congestion on Austin’s roads. But, she said, one approach she doesn’t support is "putting toll lanes on MoPac." Leffingwell responded that the decision to add a toll lane to MoPac (Loop 1) "has not been made" and that under the plan in progress, no existing lanes would be tolled. The new lane on MoPac "would be a high occupancy lane," Leffingwell said. "It would be reserved for bus rapid transit and express buses and for registered car pools. It would also facilitate the movement of emergency vehicles such as police, fire and EMS vehicles. There has been some discussion of placing a variable toll on that lane only, not on the rest of MoPac, which would make it usable for folks in their private automobiles to use. It would be a variable-type toll depending on the movement of traffic in that lane to make sure it moves quickly. … If the speed goes down, the toll would go up. If the speed goes up, the toll would go down. That’s under discussion right now, and hopefully, that project will begin in 2014." Shea shot back: "All the transportation experts that I’ve spoken with have said you might call it an HOV lane, but it’s really a toll lane. And the mayor has voted for it in the three-year TIP transportation plan." Shea was more blunt in a recent mailer to voters, saying: "Lee voted for a toll lane on MoPac." Over the years, various ideas have been floated to relieve congestion on MoPac, which opened in the 1970s. The current plan — to be built and operated by the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, with most of the funding from the Texas Department of Transportation — includes adding an "express lane" to each side of MoPac for the approximately 11-mile stretch from Lady Bird Lake north to Parmer Lane. At the debate, Leffingwell described the additional lanes as "high occupancy." Then again, the MoPac express lanes wouldn’t be the same as the "high occupancy vehicle," or HOV, lanes found in some urban areas. Often called "car-pool lanes," they are typically reserved for vehicles carrying more than one or two people; some allow solo drivers to use them if they pay a toll. But Central Texas never adopted the HOV strategy, according to a Jan. 30, 2012, Austin American-Statesman news article, "and the MoPac express lanes won’t change that." Instead, as Leffingwell indicated, the additional northbound and southbound lanes would be open — for no charge — to transit buses, registered vanpools and emergency and military vehicles. Everyone else who wanted to hop in the express lane would have to pay a toll, the amount of which would change minute by minute depending on the level of traffic in the lane. The article quoted Mike Heiligenstein, executive director of the mobility authority, as saying that the point of the fluctuating tolls is to keep the speeds in each express lane at 50 mph or more. While there are no MoPac toll lanes yet, construction could start as early as 2013, according to an April 2, 2012, Statesman news article. The project is expected to receive final environmental clearance from the federal government around August 2012, which would trigger a six-month period in which approval can be challenged in court. We wondered how Leffingwell factored into the toll-lane plan. Shea told us that she was referring to three votes Leffingwell cast in 2010 as a board member for the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization. That’s a regional body whose primary jobs, according to its website, are to coordinate regional transportation planning and to approve the use of federal transportation funds within the region. The 19-member CAMPO board is made up mostly of local elected officials from Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop and Caldwell counties. CAMPO director Maureen McCoy told us that Leffingwell, who was elected mayor in 2009 and was a council member before that, joined the board in 2008. To back up her claim, Shea sent us copies of the minutes of CAMPO board meetings that struck us as showing that Leffingwell did vote for toll lanes on MoPac. Let’s look closer: ** Vote No. 1: On May 24, 2010, the board voted to adopt Central Texas’ 25-year transportation plan, with Leffingwell and 16 others voting "aye." The plan, which is required under federal law, undergoes a top-to-bottom rewrite every five years. Any road or transit project that uses federal money, as most of them do, must be in the plan to qualify for that money. A May 10, 2010, Statesman news article previewing the vote said the proposed CAMPO 2035 plan contained several hundred road, rail, bicycle and pedestrian projects projected to cost nearly $30 billion. It noted that in the plan was $392 million for a new "managed lane" in each direction on MoPac from Parmer Lane in North Austin to Slaughter Lane in South Austin. The plan that the board approved in May 2010 includes the MoPac "managed lanes" project in its "priority project list." And a separate chart in the plan lists the MoPac project in a section labeled "toll roads and toll express lanes." Several months after the vote, in July 2010, state and local officials announced that the proposed MoPac project, with express toll lanes between Parmer Lane and the river, was moving forward after delays of several years, according to a July 8, 2010, Statesman news article. ** Vote No. 2: On Aug. 9, 2010, the CAMPO board voted to adopt the 2011-2014 Transportation Improvement Program, a short-term document that designates projects to be carried out over the next four years and how they will be funded. (Shea erred slightly in the debate by describing it as a three-year document.) Leffingwell was among the 16 board members who voted for the plan, which included the "managed lanes" project for MoPac between Parmer Lane and the river. In a telephone interview, we asked McCoy, the CAMPO director, whether she considered Leffingwell’s 2010 votes for the long-range plan and the TIP as votes to add a toll lane to MoPac. She said yes, saying that the projects had been discussed for some time. ** Vote No. 3: On Sept. 13, 2010, the board voted 13-4, with Leffingwell’s support, to approve the "terms and conditions" for the MoPac express lane project, as required by state law. According to a summary in the agenda for that meeting, the "terms and conditions," developed by the mobility authority and TxDOT, establish that the project would add an express lane in the Parmer-to-the-river stretch of MoPac "consistent with the CAMPO 2035 Regional Transportation Plan and the current Transportation Improvement Program." They also establish that the toll rate for the project would be "variable based on traffic demand with a minimum rate of 22 cents per mile" and that emergency, military and transit vehicles would be exempt. Finally, it notes that the toll rates would increase annually based on the "Consumer Price Index for Urban Areas." As we closed out this review, Andy Mormon, Leffingwell’s city chief of staff, said in a telephone interview that to describe the MoPac project’s "managed lanes" as "toll lanes" oversimplifies a complex traffic solution project. He also suggested that Shea’s claim leaves out critical context in that under the regional plan, drivers could continue using MoPac without paying tolls. "When you say toll lane in Austin, there’s a lot of people who get up in arms," he said. Our ruling During the debate, Shea responded to Leffingwell’s description of the plan to add a managed lane to each side of a stretch of MoPac by calling it a toll lane and saying Leffingwell had voted for it in a transportation plan. Our conclusion is that except for a select few kinds of motorists, drivers who use the new lanes would have to pay varying tolls. And Leffingwell voted for this approach thrice. Shea did not say MoPac would be entirely tolled. Her comment had the context already given at the debate by the mayor. We rate her claim True.	None	Brigid Shea	None	None	None	2012-05-09T12:21:28	2012-04-16	['None']
-tron-00096	FBI Director James Comey Received Millions from Clinton Foundation	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/fbi-director-james-comey-received-millions-from-clinton-foundation/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	['conspiracy', 'hillary clinton', 'liberal agenda', 'the clintons']	FBI Director James Comey Received Millions from Clinton Foundation	Oct 5, 2016	None	['Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation']
-pomt-10488	"Hillary (Clinton), one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/apr/11/bill-clinton/not-at-night-not-one-time-not-/	(Published April 11, 2008) Bill Clinton has been stumping nonstop for his wife, touting her accomplishments and defending her. But the former president at times appears to be marching to his own drummer. At a campaign stop on April 10, 2008, in Boonville, Ind., he mused on Hillary Clinton's false account of facing sniper fire on a trip to Bosnia, an incident the candidate would surely prefer to put behind her. And in defending her error, he made even more misstatements of his own. As reported by NBC News' Mike Memoli, Bill Clinton said: "A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me. But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995. Did y'all see all that? Oh, they blew it up." There are several factual errors here; let's take them one at a time. First, it was not "late at night." Hillary Clinton made the remarks that got her in trouble on March 17, 2008, before a speech on Iraq when she reminisced about her trip to Bosnia as first lady: "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." The speech was scheduled for 9 a.m. The campaign Web site shows that she begins the speech with, "Good morning." She also didn't make the remark one time. She said it previously on the campaign trail in Iowa. The Des Moines Register reported her saying on Dec. 30, 2007, "We landed in one of those corkscrew landings and ran out because they said there might be sniper fire. I don't remember anyone offering me tea on the tarmac there." She also didn't apologize "immediately." She said she misspoke a week later, after the video showing her landing in a calm, orderly fashion had circulated on the Internet and news stories were written about it. Finally, the trip took place in 1996, not 1995. We asked the Clinton campaign about Bill's comments. "Senator Clinton appreciates her husband standing up for her, but this was her mistake and she takes responsibility for it," said a campaign spokesman. In making her case for president, Clinton has regularly pointed to her expertise in foreign policy, noting that she visited more than 80 countries while she was first lady. It's true that she visited a lot of countries, and many of those visits were more substantive than critics want to admit. ( See our story documenting her travels here .) But we found she also embellished her accomplishments to the point of factual inaccuracy. We found her statements about China and Northern Ireland to be Half-True , her statement on Kosovo refugees to be Barely True , and her statement on Bosnia to be Pants on Fire wrong. Bill Clinton has implied that the media is biased and covers his wife too harshly. In Boonville, he seemed to lament that unfairness by warning, "And some of them, when they're 60, they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 at night, too." It seems bizarre that the former president would defend his wife's misstatements with even more of his own, but that appears to be the case. We find his rewriting of campaign history to merit his very own Pants on Fire ruling.	None	Bill Clinton	None	None	None	2008-04-11T00:00:00	2008-04-10	['Bill_Clinton']
-pomt-08886	Says the director of NASA says its main mission is Muslim outreach.	half-true	/texas/statements/2010/aug/01/michael-sullivan/michael-sullivan-says-nasa-administrator-said-main/	Texas activist Michael Sullivan spiced a July 19 Twitter post on the 41st anniversary of Apollo 11 entering lunar orbit by adding: "NASA dir says main mission is Muslim outreach." America's space agency shifts its gaze from the final frontier to Mecca; who knew? Sullivan, president and ceo of Empower Texans, which describes itself as a pro free-market group, replied to our inquiry with several Web links including one to a July 6 post on FoxNews.com stating NASA Administrator and former astronaut Charles Bolden stressed reaching out to the Muslim world in a June interview. The post says: "Bolden created a firestorm after telling Al Jazeera last month that President (Barack) Obama told him before he took the job that he wanted him to do three things: inspire children to learn math and science, expand international relationships and ‘perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering.’" The post continues: "Officials from the White House and NASA on Tuesday stood by Bolden's statement that part of his mission is to improve relations with Muslim countries -- though NASA backed off the claim that such international diplomacy is Bolden's ‘foremost’ responsibility." Again, FoxNews: "Bob Jacobs, NASA's assistant administrator for public affairs, …said that Bolden was speaking of priorities when it came to ‘outreach’ and not about NASA's primary missions of ‘science, aeronautics and space exploration.’ He said the ‘core mission’ is exploration and that it was unfortunate Bolden's comments are now being viewed through a ‘partisan prism.’" About a week later, The Washington Post quoted White House spokesman Robert Gibbs saying Bolden wasn't expected to reach out to the Muslim world. "That was not his task," a July 12 blog on the newpaper's site quotes Gibbs saying, "and that's not the task of NASA." Gibbs also is quoted saying White House officials had since spoken to Bolden and NASA about his comments. Also shared by Sullivan: A July 15 blog post by InformationWeek, a business technology site, stating that in June, Bolden visited Qatar and Egypt, "saying that the countries would collaborate with the United States in the future on science and technology programs, noting global education initiatives sponsored by NASA, and saying that NASA was looking to Egyptian scientists to help analyze astrophysics data. This is all part of a larger Obama administration effort, announced last June in Cairo by the president himself, to change U.S. relations with the Muslim world through outreach and cooperation," the post states. We launched our own review, first confirming that Bolden made his statement about Obama’s expectations, according to Al Jazeera’s video post of the interview, which aired June 30. Asked why he's in the Middle East, Bolden replies that he was there around the anniversary of President Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo vowing a new beginning in U.S. relations with the Muslim world. Bolden next lists the "three things" he says Obama charged him to do, including, "perhaps foremost," engaging much more with dominantly Muslim nations and getting "more people who can contribute to the things that we do," citing as past examples Russian and Japanese contributions to the International Space Station. "There is much to be gained by drawing in the contributions that are possible from the Muslim nations," he says. But the interview covers more ground. The four-time visitor to outer space defends his decision to focus NASA on international exploration of deep space plus his desire to use robots to deflect incoming asteroids away from Earth. Bolden said if an asteroid made of metal struck Earth, it could cause another Ice Age: "Instead of the extinction of the dinosaurs, it would be the extinction of human man." (Talk about a missed tweet.) Next, we contacted NASA. Spokesman Michael Cabbage said in an e-mail: "NASA’s core mission remains one of space exploration, science and aeronautics. Administrator Bolden regrets that a statement he made during a recent interview mischaracterized that core mission. The success of NASA’s efforts is increasingly enhanced by mutual cooperation with dozens of other countries around the world that are also committed to these efforts." Does Sullivan's Twitter post make a successful landing? Bolden said the president encouraged him to "find a way to reach out to the Muslim world" -- a goal he described as "perhaps foremost." But it was mentioned in the same context as other goals -- inspiring kids, expanding international relationships -- suggesting Bolden was speaking not about NASA's obvious scientific purpose, but other activities. The focus on space is clear in the video of the Al Jazeera interview. Sullivan's tweet says Bolden said NASA’s "main mission is Muslim outreach." That's akin to saying the agency is deserting outer space to concentrate on residents of the Nile Delta, which would be unbelievable. That said, Bolden acknowledged to PolitiFact that he mischaracterized the agency's main mission in the remark about Obama charging him to do three things. That is, he said something close to what Sullivan said he said — and wishes he hadn't. We rate Sullivan’s statement Half True.	None	Michael Sullivan	None	None	None	2010-08-01T06:00:00	2010-07-19	['None']
-tron-02901	Gordon Ramsay’s Entire Staff Takes a Knee, Refuses to Serve NFL Team	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/gordon-ramsays-entire-staff-takes-a-knee-refuses-to-serve-nfl-team-fiction/	None	politics	None	None	['National Anthem', 'nfl', 'protests']	Gordon Ramsay’s Entire Staff Takes a Knee, Refuses to Serve NFL Team	Oct 6, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-00049	Starbucks Muslim Workers Slip Feces into Coffee, Spread Tuberculosis	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/starbucks-muslim-workers-feces-fiction/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	['donald trump', 'immigration', 'refugees', 'starbucks']	Starbucks Muslim Workers Slip Feces into Coffee, Spread Tuberculosis	Aug 14, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-03594	Former Attorney General Janet Reno said "Donald Trump will never be president in my lifetime."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/janet-reno-donald-trump-never/	None	Politics	None	David Emery	None	Janet Reno Said ‘Donald Trump Will Never Be President in My Lifetime’	9 November 2016	None	['Janet_Reno', 'Donald_Trump']
-hoer-01043	Win a $1000 Amazon Gift Card Facebook Survey	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/win-a-1000-amazon-gift-card-facebook-survey-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Win a $1000 Amazon Gift Card Facebook Survey Scam	February 3, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04725	Mark Twain said that "If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it. "	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-twain-voting-quote/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	“If Voting Made a Difference, They Wouldn’t Let Us Do It”	24 May 2016	None	['None']
-snes-02412	"Adorable Drug Kingpin" Sarah Furay avoided charges due to her father's connection to the DEA.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/furay-drug-charges-father/	None	Crime	None	Dan Evon	None	Sarah Furay Let Off Drug Charges Due to DEA Father?	17 May 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04575	"Bill Nelson voted for a ban on millions of commonly owned firearms, which included many popular hunting and target rifles."	false	/florida/statements/2012/sep/25/national-rifle-association/nra-attacks-bill-nelsons-vote-gun-ban/	A National Rifle Association website fires several shots at U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s voting record. The NRA has given an "F" to Nelson and an "A" to his opponent U.S. Rep. Connie Mack IV, R-Fort Myers. One of the attacks on the website says: "Bill Nelson voted for a ban on millions of commonly owned firearms, which included many popular hunting and target rifles." In this fact-check, we wanted to explore if the NRA accurately described Nelson’s vote on a gun ban. The attack relates to a 2004 vote Nelson took in favor of extending the assault weapons ban of 1994. The vote to extend it came in the form of an amendment that passed the Senate 52-47 on March 2, 2004. The amendment was to a bill to prohibit civil lawsuits from being brought against gun manufacturers and distributors for damages from misuse of firearms. The overall bill overwhelmingly was defeated 8-90 with Nelson voting "no" in the majority -- so that meant the effort to extend the ban also failed. But did the assault weapons ban that Nelson wanted extend to millions of commonly owned firearms, including those used by hunters? Clinton signed assault weapons ban in 1994 The original assault weapons ban of 1994 prohibited the manufacture or possession of semiautomatic assault weapons and banned guns that had two listed military-style features. The law only applied to newly manufactured weapons, grandfathering in millions of guns. The bill also contained a list of more than 600 hunting or sporting shotguns or rifles that remained legal. The law expired in 2004 after attempts in Congress to renew it failed. The Violence Policy Center warned that simply renewing the ban wouldn’t be enough, because manufacturers found ways around the law by making some cosmetic changes to create "after-ban" models. The NRA declined our request to provide documentation to support their claim that the law resulted in a ban on millions of commonly owned firearms including popular hunting firearms. But the NRA did provide some documentation to PolitiFact Wisconsin that fact-checked an NRA radio ad attacking Democrat Tom Barrett, who ultimately lost his recall challenge against Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The NRA said when Barrett was in Congress, he "voted to ban 15 different kinds of guns, even a lot of common deer rifles." PolitiFact Wisconsin ruled that claim Mostly False. The NRA cited newspaper and magazine articles from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The articles showed that some deer hunters used weapons targeted by the ban, but the articles were largely anecdotal and deer hunting experts said the banned weapons were not commonly used for deer hunting when the ban became law in 1994. ATF data and experts on the ban Data from the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms about the number of guns manufactured in the U.S showed a drop during the lifetime of the ban from about 5.1 million in 1994 to 3.1 million in 2004. (Years after the ban expired, it soared to about 5.5 million in 2010.) But the ATF doesn’t have categories for guns by their intended use (for hunting versus crime, for example) but instead shows it by pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns and a smaller category for miscellaneous. During the ban the number of manufactured pistols, revolvers and shotguns dropped considerably while the number of rifles increased slightly. The other research we found focused on the impact on crime or the availability of assault weapons -- not about the impact for hunters. We interviewed experts about the assault weapons ban including Daniel Vice, an attorney at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Kristen Rand, Legislative Director for the Violence Policy Center -- two groups that fight gun violence and are often on the opposite side of the NRA. (When the assault ban came up for renewal, the Brady Center supported continuing it, while the VPC argued that the ban was flawed and didn’t go far enough.) We also interviewed Christopher S. Koper, an associate professor at George Mason University. All three of our experts disagreed with the NRA’s claim. Since Nelson’s 2004 vote was simply to extend the ban, it couldn’t have banned "millions of commonly owned firearms" as the NRA claimed, Vice said in an email. The 1994 ban "only banned the sale or possession of newly manufactured guns," not guns already owned by people. Also, the ban specifically exempted hundreds of hunting weapons by name, Vice said. Koper, the professor who wrote a report about the ban for the DOJ, said that the NRA’s claim is misleading. The purpose of the ban was to restrict weapons with multiple military-style features which were less appropriate for hunting purposes. And the list of hundreds of firearms that were exempted, "were deemed to be more appropriate for hunting." Also, gun manufacturers continued to make weapons very similar to the banned weapons by removing some or all of the military-style features, allowing sport shooters to get similar substitutes in many cases. Nelson’s response Nelson has long supported a ban on assault weapons, including while in Congress in the 1980s. In 1990, when he was running for governor, Nelson made his call for a state assault weapons ban a focus of his campaign even as he said he still supported gun rights. "I'm for the constitutional right to bear arms," Nelson said then. "I'm a hunter and so is my son." But Nelson said youngsters were taking submachine guns to school, and Colombian drug lords were buying their weapons in Florida. At campaign stops in 1990, Nelson waved an AK-47 over his head and said that a campaign aide was able to buy buy an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle in less than 10 minutes at a Miami gun store. A spokesman for Nelson’s Senate office, Bryan Gulley, cited some more recent examples of Nelson’s pro-gun votes: He voted for an amendment to permit Amtrak passengers to transport guns in checked baggage and for an amendment to allow individuals to possess firearms in the national parks in 2009. Our ruling The NRA said that "Bill Nelson voted for a ban on millions of commonly owned firearms, which included many popular hunting and target rifles." In 2004, Nelson voted to extend the 1994 assault weapons ban. Yes, some hunters used the types of firearms that were then banned. But the ban applied to newly manufactured weapons, and gun makers quickly found ways to tweak banned guns to create "after ban" guns. Hunters or sportsmen still had plenty of choices -- literally hundreds since the ban explicitly listed more than 600 weapons used for hunting that remained legal. We rate this claim False.	None	National Rifle Association	None	None	None	2012-09-25T10:30:58	2012-09-04	['None']
-goop-02022	Selena Gomez “Still Thinking” About The Weeknd?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/selena-gomez-still-thinking-about-the-weeknd-relationship/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Selena Gomez “Still Thinking” About The Weeknd?	11:24 am, December 16, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04634	Tennessee's appeals court judges "were selected by a handful of party officials in Nashville" before the system of "merit selection" was put into effect.	mostly true	/tennessee/statements/2012/sep/14/paul-summers/summers-says-appeals-court-judges-used-be-picked-h/	Paul Summers, who served as Tennessee's attorney general from 1999 through 2006, re-entered debate over how the state should select its top judges recently with an opinion article provided to newspapers that advocates continuation of the present system. While we don't argue with opinions, in the course of stating his case for the present "merit selection" of appellate court judges Summers made an assertion of fact that may be of interest as debate escalates toward decision-making time in the Legislature next year. Summers' piece, as published in the News Sentinel, begins with the adage that, "If you do not know history, you are bound to repeat it." A bit further down, he states: "Back when we had partisan elections for the judges of the appellate courts, they were in theory elected by hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans. In truth, they were selected by a handful of party officials in Nashville in January every eight years." Along the same lines: "Proponents of popular elections say that a handful of politicians should not be selecting our highest 29 judges. They say the people ought to decide. Apparently they aren't aware, or just ignore, the fact that a handful of politicians selected the appellate judges before merit selection became law in 1971." Does Summers have his history right? Asked to elaborate, Summers, the son of an appeals court judge, said in an interview that he had in mind relatively recent history and especially the process for selecting state Supreme Court judges. A bit of longer-term history may be in order, largely based on "A History of the Tennessee Supreme Court",published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2002. The book covers the period 1776-1998 From statehood until 1854, the state Legislature appointed Tennessee's top judges. In the latter year, voters approved a constitutional amendment – initiated in the Legislature a year earlier – providing instead for popular election. That remained the case until 1971, when the General Assembly approved a statute – not a constitutional amendment – setting up what was called the "Modified Missouri Plan." The system calls for prospective judges to be screened by a commission, which then submits a list of names of the persons deemed best qualified to the governor. The governor then appoints the judge of his choice. But two years later, with Republican Gov. Winfield Dunn in office and positioned to make appointments, the Democrat-controlled General Assembly repealed the new law insofar as applying to Supreme Court justices. It was left in effect for judges of the Court of Appeals and Court of Criminal Appeals. In 1994, the General Assembly voted – again by enacting a statute – to put the Supreme Court back under the commission nominating/gubernatorial appointment process, making a few other relatively minor changes and calling the procedure "the Tennessee plan." Under the plan, when a judge's term ends after an appointment, he or she goes up for reelection on a yes-no basis. If a majority of voters statewide say yes in the "retention election," the judge gets a new term. Today, the Tennessee Plan is still in effect – but possibly not for long. The Judicial Nominating Commission, which submits names to the governor, will cease to exist on June 30, 2013, unless the Legislature votes to extend its life before then. This comes with all appellate judge positions coming up in the eight-year cycle for a retention election cycle in August 2014. There are conflicting proposals – ranging from a constitutional amendment for a revised system to a return to contested elections – about what the Legislature should do next year. While the future of Tennessee judge selection is muddled, hindsight can be fairly clear. Summers says that, in writing his article, the standout case of judge selection by a "handful of politicians" came in 1990, when the state Democratic Party's 66-member Executive Committee chose a slate of five Supreme Court candidates for the party nomination. Early in that year, two of the five incumbent Supreme Court justices stepped aside, reportedly after failing to gather enough political support among party activists on the Democratic Executive Committee. The Democratic nominees wound up being the only candidates on the ballot and were elected to full eight-year terms. That was clearly a case where, as Summers states, a majority of the committee – 34 of the 66 members, or a "handful of party officials" if you will – was able to choose Supreme Court justices. But that was not always the case when partisan, contested elections were part of the picture. Eight years before the 1990 scenario, the Republican party in 1982 put up a slate of three party nominees chosen by the Republican Executive Committee. The Democrats won in all the races. In 1980, following the death of a sitting justice, then-Gov. Lamar Alexander appointed appointed George H. Brown of Memphis as Tennessee's first black member of the court. That set up a special election later in the year between Brown, as the Republican nominee, and the Democratic Executive Committee's nominee, Frank Drowota, and independent candidate Larry Parrish of Memphis, known as an anti-pornography crusader. Drowota won with 50 percent of the vote versus 38 percent for Brown and 12 percent for Parrish. Brown was one of the GOP nominees in the 1982 race, too. There had also been a contested Supreme Court election in 1974, when Republicans nominated candidates for all five positions. They all lost. With Democrats dominating the state, Republicans had apparently stopped trying in 1990. In today's political environment, Summers suggests that the Republican Executive Committee will pick the Supreme Court if there is a return to partisan elections. Summers also pointed out to us a speech by C.S. Carneyto the 1977 Tennessee Constitutional Convention, which drafted a constitutional amendment on judicial selection subsequently rejected by the voters. Carney had served as a Court of Appeals judge under the old system and won back his seat under the retention election system instituted in 1971. In the speech, Carney criticized the partisan election system, saying it was dependent on political favor and not ability. Relative to this discussion, he also said there had been no exceptions to the rule of the Democratic Executive Committee picking Supreme Court justices since 1910. In that year, though, there was an extraordinarily contested election. The Supreme Court had upheld a controversial murder conviction, only to have Gov. Malcolm Patterson pardon the killer. The ensuing uproar led to a split in Democratic ranks and qualifying a slate of "independent" Supreme Court candidates – and some for other appellate courts as well - backed by the splinter Democrats and Republicans. The independents won every seat and the related turmoil is widely credited as well for the election of a Republican, Ben Hooper, as governor. He was the last Republican to hold the office until Dunn, whose election led to enactment of the "Modified Missouri plan" in 1971. It appears then, that appellate court were mostly selected by a relatively small number of politicians when the partisan election system was in place. But not always. In 1910, in the 1970s and in the 1980s, top judicial elections were decided by voters who had a choice to override the decisions of that handful of politicians. So the voters ultimately decided in those cases, not the nominating committee. Still, that leaves party powers giving voters no choice from the years after Reconstruction – during which the judges were appointed by governors under federal oversight – up until 1910. And then again until the 1970s, as best we can tell. That leaves us viewing Summers statement as Mostly True.	None	Paul Summers	None	None	None	2012-09-14T09:41:41	2012-09-02	['Nashville,_Tennessee', 'Tennessee']
-pomt-06635	"I asked the unions to pay into their own health care insurance ... and they said I was being unreasonable. I requested that they contribute toward their own pensions ... and they screamed it was unfair."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/sep/16/scott-walker/gov-scott-walker-says-he-asked-unions-concessions-/	In a September 2011 campaign fundraising letter pegged to staving off a possible recall drive against him, Gov. Scott Walker mocked his opponents as the "old order" and "screaming protesters" blocking bold fiscal reforms. He focused sharply on labor unions, which fought legislation by Walker and Republican lawmakers to curtail collective bargaining and force public workers to contribute more toward pensions and health care. That push, which became law, attracted massive and prolonged protests in Madison. "I asked the unions to pay into their own health care insurance (just as their Wisconsin neighbors do) and they said I was being unreasonable," Walker’s letter said. "I requested that they contribute toward their own pensions (just as their Wisconsin neighbors do) and they screamed it was unfair." He added: "Obviously I made the protectors of the status quo boiling mad." Walker’s claim gets at one of the key rhetorical battles left over from the historic budget fight in Madison. Walker supporters argue it was really always about the money and that’s why organized labor fought so fiercely against Walker’s plan. Union leaders say their beef was with Walker’s sharp limits on collective bargaining and what that would mean for the future of unions. Indeed, in the heat of the standoff -- with Senate Democrats delaying action by fleeing to Illinois -- leaders of major unions proclaimed they’d accept the pension and health-insurance benefit changes if the bargaining changes were dropped. So, what about Walker’s statement -- that he had requested that change, but it was rejected as unreasonable and unfair? We’ll examine three distinct periods -- the governor’s race of 2010, the post-election period before Walker took office, and Walker’s early months as governor starting in January 2011. The timing matters. In mid-February 2011, labor was reeling over Walker’s newly announced plans to impose benefits cuts and curtail collective bargaining for most public employees. It was at that point that AFSCME Council 24 (the largest state employee union), along with the state teachers union and other labor leaders said they would be willing to trade the concessions if Walker would drop the limits on collective bargaining. AFSCME stands for American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. To be sure, not all members or unions fell in lockstep behind their leaders’ stance. In fact, on March 3 some 7,000 unionists held a "no concessions, no cuts" rally in Madison organized by National Nurses United. And the rally was officially backed by several major public sector unions in Wisconsin. Walker rejected the offer as a "hope and a prayer" and said the collective bargaining limits were also crucial to giving local government and schools the flexibility needed to balance their budgets. Unions then pointed to Walker’s reaction as proof he just wanted to gut unions. Given this whole sequence, can the governor claim unions rejected his request? That’s where the timing comes in. When we asked Walker aides for backup for the claim, they pointed us to the reactions of AFSCME Council 24 leader Martin Beil in December 2010 -- when Walker, then the governor-elect, began rolling out details of his push for benefits concessions -- and even further back, to summer 2010, when Walker aired a campaign TV ad on the theme. At the earlier points, the union had a much different reaction -- to say the least. We’ll focus on Beil’s AFSCME unit because it represents 22,000 state workers and took the public lead in reacting to Walker. Here’s a look at the sequence: June 2010: Walker, then a candidate in the GOP primary, said he would propose major wage and benefit cuts from state employees to help close a huge projected budget shortfall. Reaction: Beil’s union said Walker was propagating a myth that state workers were overpaid. "State employees for many years have taken less money in wages so they could have solid pensions that could be there when they retired. Now you've got characters like Walker saying 'We've got to violate that trust,'" Beil said. "It would be very difficult for us to easily accept this at the bargaining table." November 2010: With the election won, Walker lobbied Gov. Jim Doyle to stop negotiating labor deals on his way out of office. (The tentative agreements included no pay increases and unpaid furlough days that equalled a 3.3 percent pay cut for workers. They called for small increases in employee health premium contributions that were considerably less that Walker later sought.) Reaction: On Dec. 2, 2010 Beil told Wisconsin Eye, "What more is there? Does he want our firstborn?" If Walker wants benefit cuts, Beil said, he should give wage hikes in return. In that interview he said it could "get ugly," echoing comments he made in a Nov. 16, 2010 interview on Wisconsin Public Television: "Workers have ability to withhold labor, whether it’s legal or illegal…If pushed I believe state employees will respond by taking matters to the street." December 2010: While the lame-duck Legislature considered the Doyle-negotiated union deals, Walker upped the ante. He made clear he was considering abolishing public unions altogether -- or at least changing state law so he didn’t have to bargain with them -- in order to get more from employees on pensions and health without negotiations that could drag on. Public employees have become "haves" and taxpayers "have nots," Walker said. Reaction: "State workers and other public workers aren't about to sacrifice their benefits for some political future of a tyrant," Beil said. "This is all about Scott Walker kind of bringing back, instead of public service, it is public servitude. He's the master of the plantation and we're supposed to be his slaves; that's his philosophy here. So I think he'd be real happy if we were paid minimum wage and had no pension at all." Later, on the eve of Walker’s inauguration, Beil’s union put out a fact sheet making the case that workers were not overcompensated. This is a crucial point in time, because union critics often cite the "plantation/slave" remarks as the high point of union resistance to monetary concessions. And this is where evaluating Walker’s recent claim gets interesting. It’s clear that the biggest state employees’ union reacted negatively -- from the start -- to Walker’s push for concessions on health insurance and pensions. But during the time period Walker pointed us to, after the election, it’s also clear that union leaders were reacting at least in part to Walker’s suggestions that he might bypass union negotiations to get what he wanted. Beil’s much-quoted "slaves" remarks, for example, came a few days after Walker said he might even act to eliminate the unions altogether. Beil complained that Walker was simply "issuing mandates." There are other problems with Walker’s claim. In his fundraising letter, Walker painted himself as having "asked" or "requested" the benefits concessions. A reader unfamiliar with the history might think the governor made an actual offer to the unions in collective bargaining. Or that some talks between the two sides took place. No such offer was ever made, and there is no evidence of behind-the-scenes talks, according to both sides. Walker certainly signalled through his public statements that he would seek the concessions, but ultimately -- when it came time to deal with labor -- he chose to end-run the unions and 50 years of collective bargaining history and unveil legislation removing pensions and health insurance from negotiations. So Walker didn’t "ask" -- he told. Was there ever room to bargain? In late 2010 when labor dealt with union-friendly Doyle, a Democrat, unions agreed to no wage increase, furloughs and modest increases in payments toward health benefits -- in exchange for more say on overtime and other matters. When Walker did put the concessions into the budget-repair bill in February 2011, it was scheduled to come to a vote within a week. Negotiations were a moot point. The unions reacted by going public with statements offering to give Walker what he wanted on pensions and health if he would back off the collective bargaining limits. But it’s impossible to know how serious the offer was, or what would have happened if Walker decided to take it. Our ruling In a fundraising letter, Walker stated unions had rejected his push to pay more for pensions and health care. The immediate reaction from labor was negative -- when Walker unveiled his plan in February 2011 but also when he broached the idea during the campaign and advanced it in the period before he took office. But, soon after his concessions proposal was introduced, top labor leaders quickly said they could swallow the higher pension and health care contributions if Walker backed down on collective bargaining. What’s more, the portrayal of "asking" the unions rewrites history, leaving the misleading impression there was give and take with labor. Walker’s office argued that the union statements and actions amounted to a refusal. But by that standard, later statements from those same leaders bowing to concessions would have to be taken into account as acceptance. We rate the statement Mostly False.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2011-09-16T09:00:00	2011-09-02	['None']
-tron-01138	Muslim Protester Calls BBC’s Stacey Dooley a Naked Seductress	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hometown-fanatics-stacey-dooley/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Muslim Protester Calls BBC’s Stacey Dooley a Naked Seductress	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-15107	Says the case of a Texas judge who refused to perform heterosexual weddings exposes a double standard in the case against Kentucky clerk Kim Davis.	false	/punditfact/statements/2015/sep/14/viral-image/conservative-facebook-post-faults-lesbian-texas-ju/	Kentucky clerk Kim Davis is back on the job. The Rowan County official drew an ardent following when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. She also spent a few days in jail for failing to follow a U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing such unions. This prompted a group on Facebook called Conservative News Today to post an interesting comparison. "Lesbian judge Tonya Parker refused to perform heterosexual marriages for three years. Never reprimanded. "Christian clerk Kim Davis obeys Kentucky law and U.S. constitution. Gets thrown in jail." Here’s the image shared by at least 59,000 people: Set aside the accuracy of the statement that Davis obeyed the law. (The U.S. Supreme Court does have the final word on constitutional issues.) At the heart of this post is the claim that the case of a Texas judge who refused to perform heterosexual weddings exposes a double standard in the case against Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. That comparison falls wide of the facts. Judge Tonya Parker Parker was elected to the 116th Judicial District Court of Texas in 2010. She was the first openly homosexual person elected to a judgeship in Dallas County, and in 2012, she said in a speech that she was refusing to perform marriage ceremonies until same-sex couples gained the same rights as their opposite-sex counterparts. "I don't perform marriage ceremonies because we are in a state that does not have marriage equality and until it does, I'm not going to partially apply the law to one group of people that doesn't apply to another group of people," Parker told a meeting of the Stonewall Democrats of Dallas. Parker later explained in an email to news organizations that "I do not, and would never, impede any person's right to get married." She simply declined to conduct marriage ceremonies herself. Given that at that time, the only legal marriages in Texas were between opposite-sex couples, de facto, Parker was refusing to marry heterosexuals. We should note that she didn’t single out such couples. They were the only ones she had the opportunity not to officiate over. According to news reports, Parker faced no official sanctions as a result of her policy. Does that put her in the same boat as Davis? No. Judges and clerks play different roles The side-by-side comparison treats judges and clerks as if they play the same role in the marriage process. That's not true. While it is the responsibility of clerks to issue marriage licenses, judges do not share that obligation. Generally speaking, judges don’t marry people, said Alexandra Albright, who teaches Texas civil procedure at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. "They can perform marriages in Texas, but it’s not their job," Albright said. "Most judges I know marry people they know. It’s a thing they do for friends." Albright said a judge like Parker is expected to spend her time presiding over lawsuits brought before her. When it comes to marriage ceremonies, the Texas code authorizes a range of people to officiate. The list includes clergy, a designated officer of any religious organization, a variety of judges, justices of the peace, and retired judges and justices of the peace. In contrast, a clerk like Davis holds a unique gatekeeper position in the marriage process. "You can’t get married without a marriage license," Albright said. "There all kinds of people who can perform wedding ceremonies." Our ruling A conservative group on Facebook said the case of a Texas judge who refused to perform heterosexual weddings exposes a double standard in the case against Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. The comparison fails because a judge in Texas and a clerk in Kentucky play different official roles in the marriage process. Texas law authorizes many people, including judges, to perform marriages. Doing so is optional. In Kentucky, couples must have a marriage license issued by a clerk to get married. Davis’ refusal shut the door on marriage for same-sex couples, at least in her county. We rate this claim False.	None	Viral image	None	None	None	2015-09-14T12:03:19	2015-09-07	['Texas', 'Kentucky']
-snes-01778	An 81-year-old man named Arthur Hickenlooper competed on the show "American Ninja Warrior."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/arthur-hickenlooper-81-american-ninjaj-warrior/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did 81-Year-Old Arthur Hickenlooper Compete on ‘American Ninja Warrior?’	6 September 2017	None	['United_States']
-pomt-12059	"Computer models show Irma destroying New York City on Sept. 10."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/sep/07/blog-posting/no-irma-isnt-predicted-destroy-new-york-city/	A post on NewsPunch.com claiming Hurricane Irma will destroy New York City is fake news. The Sept. 5, 2017, post said Irma was on a path to obliterate New York City’s five boroughs and most of New Jersey, and that it was set to make landfall in New York Harbor as a Category 5 hurricane at noon on Sept. 10, 2017. The post cites a National Hurricane Center storm projection from Sept. 1, 2017. But the only projection made that day was that the storm, then a Category 2, was moving in the direction of the Caribbean, and it was too early to tell where it would make landfall. The National Weather Service's most recently issued hurricane and storm surge watches in portions of South Florida and the Florida Keys. Forecasters expect the storm to reach South Florida by Sept. 9. Florida Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency on Sept. 4. It’s too soon to tell where the storm is headed next, and the National Weather Service hasn’t made any announcements on Irma’s potential impact on New York or New Jersey or on its future wind speed, which determines its category. The post appeared on the advertising-filled site NewsPunch.com, which contains a disclaimer saying the site owners "make no representations about the suitability, reliability, availability, timeliness, and accuracy of the information." This post was tagged under "conspiracies," grouped with wild stories about the Illuminati and Earth’s impending destruction. The story’s author did not respond to our requests for comment, but clarified he was not a weather expert in the post: "As a layman, I know the models can turn out to be wrong. Sometimes even WAAAAAAAAAYYYY wrong. But if this model is right, then we in New Jersey (where I live) and folks in New York City, had better start preparing to EVACUATE within the next 7-8 days." We rate this claim Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-09-07T12:40:41	2017-09-05	['New_York_City']
-pomt-06327	President Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid support Rick Perry’s "decision to give in-state tuition to illegal immigrants."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2011/nov/10/mitt-romney/romney-video-claims-democratic-leaders-agree-perry/	To ominous background music, a video posted online by Mitt Romney’s campaign opens with a narrator asking, "Who supports Gov. (Rick) Perry’s decision to give in-state tuition to illegal immigrants?" Next, photographs of President Barack Obama, U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada appear onscreen, one after the other. That’s followed by a November 2003 video clip of Vicente Fox, Mexico’s president at the time, thanking Perry for Texas’ 2001 law enabling some illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at the state’s public colleges and universities. Fox’s thanks, which were videotaped by C-SPAN, were offered during a visit to Austin. That moment aside, we wondered if Romney, the former Massachusetts governor vying with Perry and others for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, was correct in saying that the three Democratic leaders support Perry’s action. This fall, Romney and other candidates have hammered Perry for the Texas law, which Perry has defended as giving solid students opportunities not to be drags on society. Also, Perry has accurately noted that the proposal cleared the Texas House and Senate with minimal opposition. Under the Texas law, undocumented immigrants with a Texas high school diploma or GED who have lived in Texas for at least three years can qualify for in-state tuition if they sign an affidavit saying they intend to apply for permanent residency as soon as they can. We asked Romney’s campaign staff for backup on the Sept. 29, 2011, video’s claims. Spokesman Ryan Williams pointed us to news stories and government web pages showing Obama, Pelosi and Reid backing versions of the proposed federal DREAM Act, which would provide a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, if they attend college or serve in the military. We’ll explore the DREAM Act aspect in a moment. First, we wondered whether any of the Democratic leaders have spoken explicitly about the Texas law. Romney’s material offered nothing specific about that, though it noted that as a member of the Illinois Senate, Obama co-sponsored legislation to allow undocumented immigrant students to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities. That measure became law in 2003. Like the Texas law, the Illinois act requires benefiting students to have a high school diploma or GED from an institution in the state and to sign affidavits swearing to apply for permanent legal residency. Texas requires students to have lived in the state for three years prior to receiving a diploma/GED while Illinois requires that the students attended school in-state for the three years before they received a diploma/GED. According to legislative records, Obama was one of 26 senators listed as co-sponsors of the proposal. He does not appear to have been a key advocate; none of 40 news items that we found published on the measure in 2002-03 mentions him. In interviews and by email, aides for Pelosi, Reid and Obama each said their boss had not spoken about the Texas law. We found no news accounts showing otherwise. More broadly, news reports yielded no flat endorsements by the Democratic leaders of state laws allowing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, yet also no indications that any of the three object. During a 2007 visit to Arizona, Pelosi made what the Arizona Republic described as a "reference to the effect of" a state law barring illegal immigrants from getting in-state tuition rates. The paper’s Feb. 20, 2007, news story says Pelosi described meeting a prospective student who could not prove she was a legal U.S. resident and then said: "Our country does not benefit by our depriving young people of an education." Her comment, though, falls short of calling for in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Asked to clarify Obama’s position on in-state tuition laws, White House spokesman Adam Abrams told us that he has not weighed in on the issue as president. However, Obama recently voiced a sentiment similar to Pelosi’s: Speaking in support of the DREAM Act during a May 10, 2011, address in El Paso, Obama said that "we should stop punishing innocent young people for the actions of their parents. We should stop denying them the chance to earn an education." Reid has used similar words. Romney’s campaign cites a 2007 example in which MSNBC quotes Reid arguing for the DREAM Act: "Children should not be penalized for the actions of their parents." But does the Democrats’ support for the DREAM Act — confirmed by their spokesmen — back up Romney’s claim? Most DREAM Act versions, including those pending before the U.S. House and Senate, would repeal a 1996 federal provision that some people interpret as a ban on states allowing illegal immigrants to qualify for in-state college tuition rates unless everyone legally in the U.S. can get the same benefit. The provision says: "An alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a state (or a political subdivision) for any post-secondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit (in no less an amount, duration and scope) without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident." Our ruling Obama once co-sponsored a measure like the Texas tuition law, giving Romney’s claim a thread of truth. However, none of the Democrats has aired support for Perry’s decision to sign his state’s proposal into law, which is the essence of the claim. We rate Romney’s statement Mostly False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2011-11-10T17:08:04	2011-09-29	['Nancy_Pelosi', 'Barack_Obama', 'Harry_Reid']
-snes-02109	Chumlee from 'Pawn Stars' has passed away.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chumlee-death-hoax/	None	Inboxer Rebellion	None	David Mikkelson	None	Chumlee Death Hoax	3 June 2013	None	['None']
-snes-00697	Every cell in the human body is replaced every seven years.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/does-body-replace-itself-seven-years/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Does The Human Body Replace Itself Every Seven Years?	30 April 2018	None	['None']
-tron-02778	Barack Obama Quote Against Raising the Debt Limit	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama-debt-limit/	None	obama	None	None	None	Barack Obama Quote Against Raising the Debt Limit	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01260	Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Honeymooning In Namibia?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/prince-harry-meghan-markle-honeymoon-namibia/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Honeymooning In Namibia?	6:25 am, April 3, 2018	None	['Prince_Harry']
-snes-01176	Sen. Tom Cotton's office has sent "cease-and-desist" letters to constituents ordering them not to contact him.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-sen-tom-cotton-issue-a-cease-and-desist-to-a-constituent/	None	Politics	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did Sen. Tom Cotton Issue a ‘Cease and Desist’ Letter to a Constituent?	19 January 2018	None	['None']
-snes-02343	During a 1955 speech at West Point, General Douglas MacArthur told assembled cadets: "The next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/star-wars/	None	Questionable Quotes	None	David Mikkelson	None	General Douglas MacArthur on Interplanetary War	17 August 2005	None	['Douglas_MacArthur', 'United_States_Military_Academy']
-pomt-12944	"Martin Luther King said our lives begin to end the day we become silent on things that matter."	half-true	/texas/statements/2017/jan/06/dan-patrick/half-true-dan-patrick-martin-luther-king-saying-li/	Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick opened his full-throated endorsement of Texas legislation targeting transgender access to bathrooms by quoting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Patrick, joined by the proposal’s author, state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, told reporters at the Texas Capitol on Jan. 5, 2017: "Martin Luther King said our lives begin to end the day we become silent on things that matter. "This legislation, the Texas Privacy Act, that Sen. Kolkhorst is filing today, is unquestionably one of the things that matters," Patrick said. "It’s the right thing to do. I know it, Texans know it and Sen. Kolkhorst knows it." Debate over the measure--banning transgender people from using the Texas bathroom of their choice--will play out in the 2017 legislative session. We focused on the origin of Patrick’s King quotation. Patrick offers no backup We didn’t hear back from Patrick about when and where the slain civil rights leader made the singled-out statement, which went noted in the Associated Press’s account of Patrick’s remarks and quoted by the Dallas Morning News. For our part, a web search for the quotation and "King" suggested by a professor yielded 2,980 results including books of poetry and documentation that President Clinton similarly quoted King in an April 2000 speech and Sen. Joe Lieberman did so in the Senate in June 2003. So, Patrick was in bipartisan company in crediting the words to King. On the other hand, we were unable to confirm that King made that exact declaration. Also, it’s worth noting, King probably didn’t expound on bathrooms except toward widening access to public facilities. A photo caption We started our look into this topic by trying to gauge if King said the words aired by Patrick. Right off, a web search yielded an undated New York Daily News photo of King giving a speech. The photo caption said: "King was engaged in a battle with Sheriff Jim Clark over voting rights and voter registration in Selma. On March 8, 1965, King spoke from the pulpit on courage: ‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.’" Stanford researchers can’t confirm Separately, though, King experts either said he likely didn’t make the quoted remark or if he did, it’s hard to confirm so with ease. "That would be a research project," said Clayborne Carson, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial professor of history at Stanford University and director of a research institute in King’s name. By phone, Carson told us that’s because the institute’s resources aren’t yet easily searched for a particular quotation. Put another way, he said by email, it’s "easier to prove what King said on a particular occasion than to prove that he never said the quote in question on any occasion." An institute research assistant, Ellen Ingebritsen, later responded that her search of the project’s internal database and documents culled from the institute's King papers didn’t turn up King making the statement. Then again, she said, the institute has yet to catalogue the majority of King’s work from 1965. Otherwise, she said, King letters and telegrams from that year don’t contain the words attributed to King by Patrick. A similar confirmed King statement Story over? Not quite. Other experts helped us find that King made a similar yet less direct statement in the Brown Chapel in Selma, Ala., on Monday, March 8, 1965--the same date noted in the News’s photo caption and also the day after protesters met police violence after attempting to cross a bridge on the way to Montgomery, the state capital. King, who would shortly lead a crossing of the bridge before turning around, said in part: "A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true." Here’s King’s remark in context as we found it on an East Tennessee State University web page: "Deep down in our non-violent creed is the conviction there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they're worth dying for. And if a man happens to be 36-years-old, as I happen to be, some great truth stands before the door of his life--some great opportunity to stand up for that which is right. "A man might be afraid his home will get bombed, or he's afraid that he will lose his job, or he's afraid that he will get shot, or beat down by state troopers, and he may go on and live until he's 80. He's just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. The cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. He died... "A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true. "So we're going to stand up amid horses. We're going to stand up right here in Alabama, amid the billy-clubs. We're going to stand up right here in Alabama amid police dogs, if they have them. We're going to stand up amid tear gas! "We're going to stand up amid anything they can muster up, letting the world know that we are determined to be free!" To our inquiry, Doug Burgess, chairman of the university’s history department, said by phone that he posted the excerpt some 15 years ago. Burgess also helped us track down a YouTube video in which we saw King making the remarks, which the video attributes to a Nostalgia Company recording, "The Greatest Speeches of All Time, Volume II." Separately, Carson told us his research took note of a similar King statement made Nov. 5, 1967, at his home church in Atlanta. King, exhorting parishioners to fight for what’s right, said a person’s failure to do so would amount to dying before death. "You died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice," Carson quoted King saying. We also heard back from a King biographer, David Garrow, who said by email that his sense is that King didn’t make the statement aired by Patrick. That "language does *NOT* in any way sound familiar to me as an exact quote," Garrow wrote. "I believe it is INVALID." Garrow summed up: "Your verdict on this ought to be something like 'Unproven, undocumented, & highly doubtful.’" Texas professors: Quotation out of context Asked to assess Patrick’s quotation, University of Texas historians Don Carleton and Paul Stekler each opined that Patrick presented King’s sentiment out of historical context. Stekler, who helped produce, direct and write a documentary on the civil rights movement in 1967-68, said by email that King "was in Selma to try and force federal action to ensure voting rights, a campaign that was successful with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the aftermath of the police riot on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He was advocating the expansion of rights for African-Americans in the South where they had been and were largely disenfranchised." Patrick, Stekler wrote, employed King’s purported words in support of restricting the rights of transgender people. "One use of the quote uses it in support of the expansion of rights, the other in restricting rights," Stekler said. Our ruling Per Patrick, King said our lives begin to end the day we become silent on things that matter. Patrick didn’t show nor did we confirm that King made this direct statement. Then again, Patrick didn’t specify he was quote-unquote directly quoting King while King in 1965 made a longer proclamation that might later have been paraphrased in the 14 words that Patrick and others including President Clinton ultimately attributed to the civil rights icon. On balance, we rate this claim Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/16e3bd9a-178e-4bdc-abeb-23c969f4e0cc	None	Dan Patrick	None	None	None	2017-01-06T17:57:11	2017-01-05	['None']
-tron-00089	Trump Accuser Summer Zervos Was Paid $500,000	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/trump-accuser-summer-zervos-paid-500000/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	['2016 election', 'donald trump', 'liberal agenda']	Trump Accuser Summer Zervos Was Paid $500,000	Nov 4, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-05735	The letters S-E-X are formed by a swirling cloud of dust in The Lion King.	legend	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-lion-king/	None	Disney	None	David Mikkelson	None	Is the Word ‘Sex’ Hidden in ‘The Lion King’?	31 December 1996	None	['None']
-goop-00610	Kendall, Kylie Jenner No Longer Close After Stormi’s Birth?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kendall-kylie-jenner-not-close-grown-apart-stormi-baby/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kendall, Kylie Jenner No Longer Close After Stormi’s Birth?	3:27 pm, July 19, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-11509	Says that "along the southern border of the U.S.," the government apprehends "seven individuals a day who are either known or suspected terrorists."	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2018/feb/21/mike-pence/pants-fire-mike-pences-claim-about-nabbing-7-terro/	Vice President Mike Pence says terrorists are getting caught at the U.S.-Mexico border day after day. In his Feb. 17, 2018, remarks in Dallas, Pence mentioned his visit the day before to the port inside the Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge in Hidalgo, a border town in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. "We’ve made progress but we still have work to do," Pence said. According to the White House transcript, Pence went on: "I learned yesterday at the Hidalgo border center that along the southern border of the United States, we actually still apprehend 1,100 individuals a day, who are attempting to enter this country illegally, including seven individuals a day who are either known or suspected terrorists." "So men and women, let me say, we’re going to continue to work to secure our borders," Pence said next. "We’re going to reform a broken immigration system. And make no mistake about it, we’re going to build that wall," Pence said to applause. We sought to verify Pence’s declaration that seven suspected or known terrorists are daily getting nabbed at the border. The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center says in a FAQ last updated in January 2017 that a "known terrorist" is an individual who’s been arrested, charged or convicted in the U.S. or abroad of a crime related to terrorism or terrorist-related activities--or a person identified as a terrorist or member of a terrorist organization "pursuant to statute, executive order, or international legal obligation pursuant to a United Nations Security Council resolution." A suspected terrorist, the FBI says, is an individual reasonably suspected to have engaged in or currently or about to be engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism and/or terrorist activities. Total apprehensions in border region We didn’t draw fresh information when we asked the White House about the basis of Pence’s reference to border apprehensions. Separately, Carlos Diaz, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman, suggested that we review that agency’s latest counts of individuals apprehended by the government along the U.S.-Mexico border. In January 2018, the month before Pence spoke, CBP says, 35,822 individuals were apprehended in the Southwest Border region, which takes in the more than 2,000 miles from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego. That breaks out to 1,155 apprehended people a day. No data for terrorists apprehended at border Best we could tell, though, the statistics pointed out by Diaz don’t include counts of deterred or detained terrorists or suspected terrorists--a judgment shared, when we asked for help, by Alex Nowrestah, an analyst for the Cato Institute, which published a 2016 paper finding that foreign-born terrorists who entered the country, either as immigrants or tourists, were responsible for 88 percent (or 3,024) of the 3,432 murders caused by terrorists on U.S. soil from 1975 through the end of 2015. By email, Nowrestah told us he was unaware of statistics supporting Pence’s seven-a-day statement about the U.S.-Mexico border. Generally, Nowrestah suggested we attempt our own ballpark estimate starting from a Department of Homeland Security table tallying "aliens" apprehended nationally in 2016 (the latest year of compiled data) by countries of origin--putting our focus on the number of individuals stopped from entering from countries that President Donald Trump seeks to bar U.S. visitors. Taking this approach, we found that 211 of the people apprehended in 2016 hailed from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen (with no one apprehended from another travel-ban country, North Korea)--less than a person a day. An alternate claim Another expert helped us identify a seven-a-day claim that has factual footing. By email, David Sterman, an analyst with the New America think tank, which has compiled information on terrorist activities in the United States after 9/11, pointed out that in January 2018, the Justice Department and Homeland Security released a report supporting a seven-a-day calculation. A government press release and the report itself each say that in 2017, Homeland Security "had 2,554 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watch list (also known as the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database) traveling to the United States," which breaks out to seven individuals a day. Pence made such a statement during his visit to Hidalgo, according to a McAllen Monitor news story on his visit. The story quoted the vice president saying: "Homeland Security, I am told, refuses entry to seven known or suspected individuals who may have terrorist intent in this country every day, or roughly 2,500 a year." The 2018 report says: "Where consistent with the law, such individuals are denied entry into the United States, while in some cases law enforcement authorities are notified and can take appropriate action." The report further says: "This data only includes individuals of which the United States encountered and not all of those who may have entered or attempted to enter the country undetected." Most stopped at airports? In Dallas, Pence said the seven daily apprehensions were taking place along the southern border. But in 2017, according to the report, most of the deterred individuals were stopped from entering by airplane--not necessarily at the border. According to the report, of the 2,554 individuals, 335 were attempting to enter by land, 2,170 were attempting to enter by air and 49 were attempting to enter by sea. Also by email, Sterman cautioned that being on a watch list "is not the same as being a terrorism suspect. It’s a vast architecture that includes many names for varying levels of concern. Denying entry is a low bar to clear. Which is part of the reason citing this number to defend the immigration-centric counterterrorism strategy is misleading. It’s more of a sign that a lot is already done." We sought the FBI’s comment on whether people on the watch list consists of known terrorists and suspected terrorists and didn’t immediately hear back. Our ruling Pence said in Dallas that "along the southern border of the U.S.," the government apprehends "seven individuals a day who are either known or suspected terrorists." We found no facts that back up this border-specific tally. Nationally in 2017, the federal government says, Homeland Security stopped 2,554 individuals on its terrorist watch list from entering the country, which breaks out to seven people a day. Most of those individuals tried to enter by air, the government says. We rate Pence’s claim Pants on Fire. PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Mike Pence	None	None	None	2018-02-21T17:29:33	2018-02-17	['United_States']
-snes-00071	Did Ted Cruz’s Campaign Send Fundraising Mailers That Resemble Legal Summonses?	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ted-cruz-summons-mailings/	None	Politics	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did Ted Cruz’s Campaign Send Fundraising Mailers That Resemble Legal Summonses?	17 September 2018	None	['Ted_Cruz']
-pose-00466	Will "ensure that more Metropolitan Planning Organizations create policies to incentivize greater bicycle and pedestrian usage of roads and sidewalks."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/486/will-seek-more-accommodations-of-bicycles-and-pede/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Will seek more accommodations of bicycles and pedestrians	2010-01-07T13:27:00	None	['None']
-goop-00013	Ellen DeGeneres Ready To ‘Bury The Hatchet’ With Kelly Ripa?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ellen-degeneres-kelly-ripa-feud-michael-strahan/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Ellen DeGeneres Ready To ‘Bury The Hatchet’ With Kelly Ripa?	5:00 am, November 10, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-00408	Pope Francis granted diplomatic immunity to a Vatican diplomat suspected of child pornography offenses in the United States.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vatican-diplomat-child-pornography/	None	Religion	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Pope Francis ‘Grant Immunity’ to a Vatican Diplomat Caught With Child Pornography?	26 June 2018	None	['United_States']
-tron-00567	Michael Jordan Lowers Price of Air Jordan Shoes to $19.99	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/michael-jordan-lowers-price-of-air-jordan-shoes-to-19-99-fiction/	None	business	None	None	None	Michael Jordan Lowers Price of Air Jordan Shoes to $19.99	Jan 7, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00890	Did a GOP Candidate Insult a Parkland Shooting Survivor on Twitter?	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/leslie-gibson-emma-gonzalez/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a GOP Candidate Insult a Parkland Shooting Survivor on Twitter?	15 March 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-13464	Says Donald Trump's foundation "took money other people gave to his charity and then bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/13/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-trump-foundation-took-other-peop/	President Barack Obama went to Philadelphia on Sept. 13 to campaign for Hillary Clinton, who was recovering from pneumonia. In his speech, Obama didn’t hold back in his critique of Clinton’s opponent, Donald Trump. In one particularly vivid line, Obama took a shot at Trump’s foundation, contrasting it with the Clintons’ foundation, which focuses on improving global health. The Clinton Foundation has been attacked by critics for taking money from donors who might have business before a future President Clinton. But Obama was having none of it. "You want to debate foundations and charities?" Obama said. "One candidate's family foundation has saved countless lives around the world. The other candidate's foundation took money other people gave to his charity and then bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself." Obama added, to laughter, "I mean, you know, he had the taste not to go for the 10-foot version, but…" We have previously written about how the Clinton Foundation helped 9 million people receive lower-cost HIV/AIDS medicine, as well as the foundation’s controversies. But what about Obama’s statement that Trump’s foundation "took money other people gave to his charity and then bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself"? The White House confirmed that the statement stems from a widely read Washington Post story by reporter David Fahrenthold, who’s written a series of stories about Trump Foundation and has inquired with organizations around the country to see if they actually received money from the real estate mogul. Fahrenthold provided new details of his investigations in a Sept. 10, 2016, Post article headlined, "How Donald Trump retooled his charity to spend other people’s money." Based on a review of 17 years of tax filings by the Donald J. Trump Foundation and interviews with more than 200 individuals and groups who were listed as recipients of its gifts, Fahrenthold found that "nearly all" of its money in recent years has come from people other than Trump, with his most recent personal gift to the foundation’s coffers dating from 2008. Experts told Fahrenthold that such an arrangement "is almost unheard of for a family foundation." The story by Fahrenthold includes the anecdote referenced by Obama in Philadelphia, which Fahrenthold wrote was one of two cases he found in which Trump used his money from the charity to "buy himself a gift." By doing so, he wrote, the foundation appeared to be flouting IRS rules by buying items that only seemed to be for Trump’s benefit. "In 2007, for instance, Trump and his wife, Melania, attended a benefit for a children’s charity held at Mar-a-Lago. The night’s entertainment was Michael Israel, who bills himself as ‘the original speed painter.’ His frenetic act involved painting giant portraits in five to seven minutes — then auctioning off the art he’d just created. "He painted Trump. "Melania Trump bid $10,000. "Nobody tried to outbid her. " ‘The auctioneer was just pretty bold, so he said, "You know what just happened: When you started bidding, nobody’s going to bid against you, and I think it’s only fair that you double the bid," ' Israel said in an interview last week. "Melania Trump increased her bid to $20,000. " ‘I understand it went to one of his golf courses,’ Israel said of the painting. "The Trump Foundation paid the $20,000, according to the charity that held the benefit." Fahrenthold’s article notes that the Post submitted detailed questions to the campaign but officials declined to comment. The campaign did not respond to an inquiry from PolitiFact for this article. We asked Fahrenthold whether Obama’s version jibed with his reporting. "It seems pretty accurate to me," Fahrenthold told PolitiFact. "I talked to both the charity that held the auction and the artist who made the painting. They told me Melania Trump had actually been the one bidding on the painting at the auction, which she won for $20,000 -- half went to charity, half went to the artist. But the actual check came from the Trump Foundation, of which Donald is president and Melania is not an officer of any kind." He added that the auction seems to have been held in 2006 but the check wasn’t cut until 2007, a year in which "almost all of the money in the Trump Foundation was other people’s money." Specifically, according to Fahrenthold’s reporting, the Trump Foundation began that year with $4,238 in the bank. Trump himself gave $35,000 to the foundation that year. But other donors gave $4.055 million, primarily a single $4 million gift from Vince and Linda McMahon, the founders of the WWE wrestling empire. Using the most generous calculation, Fahrenthold said, Trump’s own money accounted for less than 1 percent of the total amount that entered the foundation that year, $4,094,238. "So it was almost all other people’s money," he said. So where is the painting? That’s a bit more mysterious. Even crowdsourcing the search through Twitter hasn’t produced a verified image of the painting. "I can’t find the damn thing," Fahrenthold said. "It’s out there somewhere. Neither the painter nor the charity -- the Children's Place at Home Safe, in Boca Raton, Fla. -- have been able to provide a picture of it." Our ruling Obama said that Trump’s "foundation took money other people gave to his charity and then bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself." Fahrenthold verified the anecdote about the painting with the painter, and his reporting found that, at the time the painting was auctioned, the vast majority of funds in the foundation’s coffers were from other people, not Trump. Based on the information available, the story seems solid. We rate Obama’s statement True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2016-09-13T17:21:30	2016-09-13	['None']
-pomt-06209	The national debt increased $16,000 every second George Allen served in the U.S. Senate.	true	/virginia/statements/2011/dec/08/tim-kaine/time-kaine-says-debt-grew-16000-every-second-georg/	Democrat Tim Kaine was not offering praise when he said Americans are indebted for Republican George Allen’s former service in the U.S. Senate. The national debt increased "by $16,000 every second of the six years he served," Kaine said in a Dec. 7 debate with Allen. The two former governors are running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jim Webb, D-Va., who will not seek reelection next year. Allen served in the Senate from 2001 to 2007, narrowly losing a reelection bid to Webb. Kaine, during the debate, criticized Allen for consistently supporting Bush administration policies that Kaine said began the federal debt crisis. We were curious if the national debt really did increase by $16,000 every second Allen was in the Senate. So we unsheathed our calculators and went to work. Allen served 2,193 days in the Senate -- from Jan. 3, 2001 to Jan. 4, 2007. That’s 189,475,200 seconds. We visited a U.S. Department of Treasury website to determine the national debt on each date. Rounding off, it started at $5.72 trillion and ended at $8.67 trillion. That’s a $2.95 trillion increase during Allen’s term. The exact figure, if you’re interested, is $2,947,358,803,409.45. That means the national debt rose an average $15,555.38 each second Allen was in the Senate. You can reach Kaine’s $16,000 estimate by rounding up. There’s an issue, however, in holding Allen accountable for every appropriation from the day he entered the Senate to the day he left. The federal fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30. The first spending votes Allen cast in the Senate were for the budget that began Oct. 1, 2001 -- some nine months after he entered office. And the last ones Allen cast were for the budget that ended Sept. 30, 2007 -- almost nine months after he left office. So, the real period of influence Allen had on federal spending ran from Oct. 1, 2001 to Sept. 30, 2007. The national debt rose by $3.202 billion during that span and, as we pointed out in a Truth-O-Meter earlier this year, Allen voted for each of about four dozen appropriation bills that came to the Senate floor during his term. In other words, Allen voted for budgets that increased the debt by $16,896.68 every second he was in the Senate. That’s slightly higher than Kaine’s estimate. But before you get angry at Allen, consider this: The debt has increased by $48,994.13 a second since Barack Obama became president. And Kaine, who served as Obama’s hand-picked chairman of the Democratic National Committee for two years before resigning in April, is a staunch defender of the president. Our conclusion: Kaine says the national debt increased by $16,000 every second Allen served in the U.S. Senate from 2001 to 2007. The actual number, from the day Allen entered the Senate to the day he left, is $15,555.38 per second. Kaine reasonably rounded up. Allen voted for budgets that increased the debt by $16,896.68 a second. We rate Kaine’s statement True.	None	Tim Kaine	None	None	None	2011-12-08T12:49:40	2011-12-07	['George_Allen_(U.S._politician)', 'United_States']
-pomt-00907	"Already this calendar year, since January 1, we have had more than 20,000 people come across the border, apprehended, unauthorized."	true	/texas/statements/2015/mar/03/greg-abbott/already-year-greg-abbott-says-over-20000-immigrant/	In a nationally televised interview, the governor of Texas said the border with Mexico remains unsecured — and offered up a figure as evidence. On CBS’s "Face the Nation," Abbott predicted a Texas-led court challenge to President Barack Obama’s actions shielding millions of unauthorized immigrants from deportation would end up at the Supreme Court. Reporter Bob Schieffer then asked if Abbott thought Congress should proceed to fully funding the Department of Homeland Security rather than keep pushing a Republican-steered proposal to tie continued funding to repealing Obama’s immigration actions. Abbott replied, in part, that: "...the first thing that we want to get out of Washington, D.C., is full funding to secure the border. The reason why we're in this problem to begin with is because the federal government has not stepped up to fulfill its duty to secure the border… Already this calendar year, since Jan. 1, we have had more than 20,000 people come across the border, apprehended, unauthorized. And so we have an ongoing problem on the border that Congress must step up and solve." We were curious about the 20,000-plus count. Abbott’s office didn’t engage when we inquired, but Tom Vinger, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, separately emailed us a Feb. 18, 2015, agency document, "Texas Border Security Dashboard," including a chart stating that 21,808 "illegal aliens" had been arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol since Jan. 1, 2015, in the agency’s Texas sectors, including 14,281 in its busy Rio Grande Valley sector. Vinger said the counts were current as of approximately Feb. 18. Federal confirmation unavailable Our attempts to match those figures with information provided by the Border Patrol fell short. Spokesman Carlos Lazo said by email he didn’t have February 2015 apprehension totals. Separately, El Paso-based Border Patrol spokesman Doug Mosier emailed a chart indicating that in January 2015, 21,518 individuals were apprehended in the agency’s Southwest sector, covering Texas to San Diego, Calif. From that chart, we calculated that 13,289 people were apprehended in the Texas sectors that month, 8,427 of them in the Rio Grande Valley. Such arrests down from 2014? Uncertain Given that Abbott offered his figure as an indicator of border insecurity, we wondered how the government’s Texas apprehensions in January 2015 compared with such arrests in previous Januarys. To make that comparison, we turned to a Border Patrol presentation showing month-by-month counts from 2000 through most of 2014. Upshot: The 13,289 January 2015 Border Patrol apprehensions on the Texas side of the Rio Grande ran 5,409 behind some 18,698 apprehensions the same month a year earlier. The 2015 count was about 1,000 less than the 14,2013 apprehensions in January 2013. The January 2015 apprehensions exceeded the 10,846 and 7,779 apprehensions in Texas in January 2012 and January 2011, respectively. U.S. Border Patrol Apprehensions of Unauthorized Immigrants in Texas Region JAN. 2015 JAN. 2014 JAN. 2013 JAN. 2012 JAN. 2011 Big Bend 234 278 340 323 332 Del Rio 986 1,514 1,617 1,204 899 El Paso 875 813 1,776 625 779 Laredo 2,767 3,838 3,280 3,180 2,285 Rio Grande Valley 8,427 12,255 7,190 5,514 3,485 TOTAL 13,289 18,698 14,203 10,846 7780 Source: Chart, "Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions By Month," Fiscal 2000 through Fiscal 2014, U.S. Border Patrol (downloaded Feb. 26, 2015) We asked DPS if it had information on the significance of there being fewer apprehensions in early 2015 than the year before. Vinger emailed: "We can’t comment specifically on the Border Patrol numbers you provided." Still, he noted, fewer apprehensions occurred in the Rio Grande Valley, where the state has devoted resources to securing the border. The "dashboard" document says: "On June 18, 2014, the state Legislature and Texas leadership directed the Department of Public Safety to conduct a multi-agency surge operation in the Rio Grande Valley, which began on June 23, 2014. The goal of Operation Strong Safety is to prevent Mexican cartels, their operatives, transnational gangs, criminal aliens, potential terrorists and drugs from entering Texas between the Ports of Entry (POEs) through sustained, around-the-clock, ground, air and marine saturation patrols on the Texas/Mexico border, and in doing so, reduce transnational crime throughout Texas." Our ruling Discussing the security of the Texas-Mexico border, Abbott said since Jan. 1, 2015, "we have had more than 20,000 people come across the border, apprehended, unauthorized." State-provided figures indicate nearly 22,000 apprehensions by the Border Patrol from January through mid-February 2015. We didn't gather sufficient data to tell if that tally is down from the comparable part of 2014. We rate the statement True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Greg Abbott	None	None	None	2015-03-03T15:39:33	2015-02-22	['None']
-pomt-14512	"About 70 percent of Republicans nationwide ... don't think Donald Trump is the right guy" to take on Hillary Clinton in November.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/21/ted-cruz/do-republicans-think-donald-trump-right-candidate-/	Don’t let Donald Trump’s win in South Carolina fool you, says Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. The good majority of Republicans don’t actually support the frontrunner. Cruz made the case against Trump’s inevitability on NBC’s Meet the Press and argued that he, Cruz, was actually the best candidate for the job. "For anyone who doesn't believe that Donald Trump is the best candidate to go head to head with Hillary Clinton in November, and that's about 70 percent of Republicans nationwide who don't think Donald Trump is the right guy," Cruz said on Feb. 21. "Our campaign is the only campaign that has beaten Donald Trump and that can beat Donald Trump." This rosy forecast caught our attention (as well as the attention of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who made a similar claim on CBS’s Face the Nation). Is it true that 70 percent of Republicans "don’t think Donald Trump is the right guy?" The Cruz campaign referred us to Trump’s Real Clear Politics polling average of 34.2 percent, as of Feb. 17, 2016. This figure represents the portion of Republican primary voters who prefer Trump as the party’s nominee. "The point is, close to 70 percent of Republicans are choosing someone else," said Cruz spokesman Brian Phillips. True. But by this logic, about 80 percent of Republicans don’t think Cruz — who’s polling at an average of 20.6 percent — "is the right guy" either. Here’s a breakdown of the latest polls: Date Trump Cruz Rubio Fox News Feb. 15-17 36 19 15 NBC/Wall Street Journal Feb. 14-16 26 28 17 CBS Feb. 12-16 36 19 12 USA Today/Suffolk Feb. 11-15 35 20 17 Quinnipiac Feb. 10-15 39 18 19 The Economist/YouGov* Feb. 11-15 39 19 16 (* was not included in the Real Clear Politics aggregate) Cruz’s interpretation leaves out some nuance. Even though Trump isn’t the top pick for many Republican primary voters, a good chunk of them would be perfectly happy with him (or Cruz or Rubio for that matter) as the party’s nominee. Trump was the first or second choice for 47 percent of Republicans in a Fox News poll, for 38 percent in a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, for 44 percent in a USA Today/Suffolk University poll and for 52 percent in The Economist/YouGov poll. A similar portion of GOP voters (39 to 45 percent) named Cruz and Rubio as their top two picks. Trump is also viewed favorably by most of the party: about 62 percent of Republican voters in a Quinnipiac University poll and 62 percent in The Economist/YouGov poll. Cruz and Rubio commanded similar numbers. Conversely, in the Quinnipiac poll, more Republicans (31 percent) had an unfavorable opinion of Trump than Cruz or Rubio (23 percent). The three men clocked similar numbers in The Economist/YouGov poll. Trump does the worst when voters are asked if they could see themselves supporting him for the nomination. In a Feb. 17 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 42 percent of Republicans said no. In comparison, 33 percent could not see themselves supporting Cruz, and 28 percent said the same about Rubio. And finally, most Republicans would support any of the three men if they were the party’s nominee according to a CBS poll. But about a fifth of Republican voters said they wouldn’t back Trump (20 percent), Cruz (18 percent) or Rubio (17 percent) no matter what. Our ruling Cruz said, 70 percent of Republicans nationwide "don't think Donald Trump is the right guy" to take on Hillary Clinton in November. Cruz is referring to the polling average of 34 percent of GOP voters who say Trump is their top choice. Inverted, 66 percent of Republicans prefer someone else. That doesn’t mean, however, that the 66 percent refuse to support Trump overall. The highest estimate we found for Republicans flat-out protesting Trump is 42 percent. Cruz’s statement is largely accurate but leaves out some context. We rate it Mostly True.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2016-02-21T16:53:46	2016-02-21	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Donald_Trump', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-15185	"If I had not asked for my emails all to be made public, none of this would have been in the public arena."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/20/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-emails-wouldnt-be-public-if-i-hadn/	Hillary Clinton says her emails are now out in the open solely because she wanted them to be made public. In an Aug. 17 interview with Iowa Public Radio, Clinton told reporter Clay Masters what she thinks will come of her controversial decision to exclusively use private email while secretary of state. "I think this will all sort itself out," Clinton said. "And in a way, it’s kind of an interesting insight into how the government operates. Because if I had not asked for my emails all to be made public, none of this would have been in the public arena. But I want people to know what we did, I’m proud of the four years I was secretary of state." We know that Clinton did ask the State Department to release her emails, and they are now being released on a rolling basis. But it isn’t quite right to say that if she hadn’t made that request, her emails would not now be "in the public arena." A quick refresher on how and when this aspect of the email story unfolded: March 3: The New York Times broke the story that Clinton did not use a government email account for her entire tenure at the State Department.The story indicated it was unclear if the emails would be made public. March 4: Clinton tweeted, "I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible." March 5: Secretary of State John Kerry said in a press conference that the department was already reviewing the emails for release. Additionally, the State Department press office sent out a notice to reporters specifically responding to Clinton’s tweet that day. May 21: The State Department released the first batch of Clinton emails. The State Department’s decision to release the emails as soon as possible was a response to Clinton’s specific request. But even if she had not made that request, there were other people pushing to make the emails public. When the story broke, numerous media outlets and conservative organizations had already submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the State Department, looking for various records (including emails) connected to Clinton. Up until that point, the State Department had yet to produce the vast majority of those records. Notably, Jason Leopold of Vice filed a FOIA request in November 2014 asking for all of Clinton’s emails, among other records, and he filed a lawsuit in January 2015 because of the State Department’s slow response. The State Department’s May 2015 response to Leopold’s lawsuit said the release of Clinton’s emails would satisfy a large portion of his FOIA request. It’s reasonable to assume that these FOIA requests would have eventually made the emails public, whether or not Clinton made her own request. Her emails, at least in part, might have been made public sooner, had she not exclusively used the private email address. Until Clinton turned over her emails to the State Department in December 2014 -- at the department’s behest -- the department did not have the full set of emails in its possession. This made Clinton’s emails basically inaccessible to FOIA requests until then. This wouldn’t have been the case if she used a government email address. Take the case of Gawker: In 2013, Gawker filed a FOIA request for emails between Clinton and long-time adviser Sid Blumenthal after a hacker revealed emails that Blumenthal sent Clinton. Although the emails were already known to the public, the State Department told Gawker that no such correspondence existed. In a previous article, we spoke with several experts who said Clinton’s email setup was tailor-made to circumvent FOIA requests. Additionally, Clinton’s phrasing is disingenuous. It implies that requesting her emails to be made public was a proactive measure, in the interest of transparency and highlighting her record as secretary of state. Rather, it was reactive -- a response to the New York Times article that broke the story and its aftermath. If Clinton’s email practices hadn’t come to light, it’s possible she would never have made such a request. Our ruling Clinton said, "If I had not asked for my emails all to be made public, none of this would have been in the public arena." The shred of truth here is that Clinton’s request was the driving force behind the State Department’s decision to release the emails as soon as possible. However, multiple pending FOIA requests for her emails likely would have made some of these emails public regardless. It’s disingenuous for Clinton to treat her request as proactive transparency, when her practices protected her email from public scrutiny until she was out of office. We rate Clinton’s claim Mostly False.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2015-08-20T17:21:54	2015-08-17	['None']
-pomt-08317	"Dan Gelber: On the record against scholarships to help our needy children attend Jewish private schools."	pants on fire!	/florida/statements/2010/oct/29/committee-florida-education/group-claims-gelber-against-scholarships-jewish-sc/	Halloween inspires some eye-catching campaign mailers, including one in the race for Florida's next attorney general. An electioneering group sent a mailer in mid October 2010 with a photo of Democratic candidate Dan Gelber on the front that describes him as "Toxic to Jewish Education'' with those words written in dripping blood-red, scary-looking type. Has he been lacing kosher meals at Jewish schools with arsenic? Ordering lead paint to be used at yeshivas? Oy vey! The other side of the mailer provides more details. It states: "Dan Gelber: On the record against scholarships to help our needy children attend Jewish private schools. ... Call Dan Gelber and remind him that there is nothing pathetic about our children's right to obtain a Jewish education!" Gelber, a Jewish Democrat, is running against Republican Pam Bondi on Nov. 2, 2010. But it wasn't Bondi who distributed the mailer: it was the Committee for Florida's Education, an electioneering communication organization. Though Bondi's campaign has repeatedly been quoted in news articles denying involvement, there is a connection to her campaign. The Miami Herald reported Oct. 29, 2010, that Bondi campaign spokeswoman Kim Kirtley is married to John Kirtley, vice chairman of the American Federation for Children, a national pro-voucher group, which gave $255,000 to the Committee for Florida's Education. Mr. Kirtley is also a Tampa-based Republican fundraiser and the American Federation was the only donor to the Committee for Florida's Education. Kim Kirtley sent an e-mail to PolitiFact Florida: "In response to your questions -- I reiterate that neither the campaign, or me personally, had any knowledge of the flier. John and I are both professionals who work in the political process, but his work is his own, and mine is my own." For this Truth-O-Meter, we will research, is Gelber "on the record against scholarships to help our needy children attend Jewish private schools?" Let's note at the start that the state and the mailer call these "scholarships" though they are often referred to as vouchers. And Gelber has been a firm opponent of vouchers ever since they appeared in Florida 10 years ago. The mailer cites a handful of votes Gelber took involving school vouchers, as well as some of Gelber's quotes in newspapers during the past decade. We will examine both. School voucher background Then-Gov. Jeb Bush signed a law in 1999 starting vouchers, which he called "Opportunity Scholarships," that allowed students who attended schools that received an "F" two years in a row based on FCAT scores to transfer to private schools or higher-performing public schools. In 2001, the state started the Tax Credit Scholarship Program to allow corporate donors to give money to nonprofit scholarship-funding organizations, which then give scholarships to poor children. The companies in turn received tax breaks from the state. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court struck down the private school portion of the 1999 program, and the Legislature passed a bill to allow students who received those Opportunity Scholarships in the past to get the tax credit scholarships if they qualified based on having a low income. Today, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program gives a maximum scholarship of $4,106. For the 2010-11 school year, 524 of these vouchers are used at Jewish schools out of 29,651 -- or about 1.7 percent, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Cheryl Etters. The students must be eligible for free or reduced-price lunches to qualify. Multiple mailers about Gelber Now, back to the committee that produced the mailers. Elnatan Rudolph, chair of the Committee for Florida's Education, is a Jewish political consultant who lives in New Jersey and is a former Teaneck, N.J., council member. He would not tell us his current party affiliation but said in the past he has been affiliated with both parties. He said he has relatives in Florida, including some who attend Jewish private schools. The committee has sent seven mailers about Gelber to 50,000 South Florida voters, Rudolph said. It also sent a mailer about Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink, and did newspapers ads on Gelber, Sink and Democratic CFO candidate Loranne Ausley. One of the newspaper ads about Gelber, which ran Oct. 22 in the Jewish Press of Pinellas County, was a "Wanted" poster for "crimes against Jewish education.... Voting 'No' on funding for Jewish schools." All of the mailers and newspaper ads are about vouchers. Gelber's votes and quotes Gelber, first elected to the state House in 2000 and the state Senate in 2008, has voted several times on vouchers. The mailer cites bills that Gelber voted "no" on that ultimately made it into law: • HB 21 May 4, 2001: A bill that related to taxation, including providing credit against taxes for contributions to nonprofit scholarship-funding organization. • SB 256 May 4, 2006: In the wake of the Florida Supreme Court declaring the 1999 Opportunity Scholarships unconstitutional, this bill allowed those students receiving Opportunity Scholarships -- if they were poor -- to transfer to the tax credit scholarships. • HB 653 May 2, 2008: Expanded the corporate income tax scholarship program, including making foster care children eligible. • HB 453 April 28, 2009: Made some revisions to the scholarship program. • SB 2126 March 24, 2010: Made still more changes to the program. Let's note here that none of those bills involved Jewish schools specifically. Now a look at the newspaper clips the mailer cited: • "This program needs major reformation. It's an embarrassment." St. Petersburg Times, Sept. 24, 2003. The article was about the state education commissioner at the time, Jim Horne, calling for an investigation into the Silver Archer foundation after about $400,000 in voucher money went missing. The article doesn't quote Gelber on his views on missing vouchers money, but here is his full quote: "I don't want to prejudge Silver Archer -- I don't know what they did -- but this program was an invitation for fraud waste and abuse. This program needs major reformation. It's an embarrassment." This article doesn't support the claim in the ad -- it just shows Gelber was concerned about fraud. • "Pathetic is zealously pursuing voucher programs that are not merely unconstitutional, but that bleed resources from a school system that can't afford to lose a dime." Gelber wrote an editorial for the South Florida Sun Sentinel July 4, 2005, that listed several things he found "pathetic" in response to Bush calling the Florida Democratic Party pathetic for payroll tax lapses. • "Floridians want us to fix public schools not push some right wing agenda to privatize schools." Gelber was quoted in the Miami Herald Feb. 16, 2006, in an article about Bush calling for a constitutional amendment on private school vouchers about a month after the Florida Supreme Court tossed out the state's first voucher program as unconstitutional. • "We are funding vouchers while rolling back Bright Futures." Gelber was quoted in the Tampa Tribune March 30, 2010, in a story about the Democratic attorney general primary race. (He isn't quoted as bluntly bashing vouchers in this article although Rudolph sent us an Oct. 11, 2009, Palm Beach Post article in which Gelber and fellow Democratic state Rep. Dave Aronberg, who lost to Gelber in the August primary, clashed on vouchers. The bill expanded eligibility for tax credits to insurance companies but didn't enlarge the $118 million scholarship program, the Post wrote. Aronberg voted for the bill while Gelber voted against it.) Gelber responds Gelber disputes the claim because he said it portrays him as voting for something specific to Jewish schools, while the vouchers apply to private schools in general. "There was no vote on Jewish schools,'' said Gelber in an interview. "I don't support the voucher program." Gelber campaign manager Christian Ulvert added in an e-mail: "Dan Gelber aggressively fought for stronger accountability and for reforms in an effort to protect taxpayer dollars. And while he opposes voucher programs because they drain resources from the public school system, they are here in Florida and as such should have strong accountability measures." We asked Rudolph why he felt it was a fair statement to suggest that Gelber was "on the record against scholarships to help our needy children attend Jewish private schools" when in fact his votes related more broadly to private schools -- only a small fraction Jewish, less than 2 percent. "He voted directly against money that is going to help needy Jewish children attend Jewish day schools. There is no way to say he voted against the whole program but did not mean it for one specific group,'' Rudolph said in an interview. "He voted against a program that funds needy Jewish children being able to afford to go to Jewish day schools. ... That's a fact." Our ruling We say no, that's not a fact. While Gelber has repeatedly voted against and criticized vouchers for any students, he has no record at all of voting against Jewish education, and it's a crass twist of logic to claim otherwise. Characterizing his long opposition to the voucher program as a direct vote against needy Jewish children is flat-out wrong. We rate this claim Pants on Fire.	None	Committee for Florida's Education	None	None	None	2010-10-29T20:23:07	2010-10-18	['None']
-pomt-01755	Says three Ukrainians recently captured on a West Texas ranch are among "individuals from countries that have strong terrorist ties being apprehended" near the state’s border with Mexico.	half-true	/texas/statements/2014/jul/31/rick-perry/rick-perry-recaps-arrests-men-ukraine-its-not-coun/	Gov. Rick Perry has talked up his decision to dispatch up to 1,000 National Guard members to the Texas-Mexico border by suggesting people crossing the border are wreaking havoc. In a July 23, 2014, interview by Sean Hannity of Fox News, Perry brought up a state tally of non-citizens booked into Texas county jails who, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, have racked up thousands of criminal charges. The day of the Hannity interview, we rated as Pants on Fire Perry's claim that "illegal aliens" had committed over 3,000 homicides in six years; the posted information didn’t support that. Beyond crimes, Hannity said to Perry, the more important aspect of actions along the border "is Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria. They’re catching people from these countries crossing our border. "That concerns me," Hannity said. "That’s a national security issue. Reaction?" "As we shared with you," Perry replied, "the comptroller of public accounts, Susan Combs, who has a ranch out in far West Texas; on her ranch last week, there were three Ukraine individuals that were apprehended on that ranch. So we’re seeing, obviously, individuals from countries that have strong terrorist ties being apprehended as well as individuals who are committing crimes against the citizens of our state." Perry’s mention of arrestees from Ukraine, where a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane was shot down near the Ukraine-Russia border on July 17, 2014, and his reference to countries with strong terrorist ties made us wonder. We looked into the described arrests before checking the Eastern European country’s terrorist ties. Three men from Ukraine Chris Bryan, a Combs spokesman, said by phone that according to Combs, several individuals from Ukraine were apprehended on a neighbor’s ranch after likely walking across her ranch. Both spreads are in remote Brewster County, which borders Mexico. A June 15, 2014, Facebook post by that county’s sheriff’s office states early that Sunday, Sheriff Ronny Dodson fielded a call from a rancher saying three men, posing as lost hikers and tourists, had walked up to his house and asked to use his phone. According to the post, the men ran off after the rancher offered to call the sheriff. The chase was on, according to the post, with two men landing in custody after a "lengthy search" and the third man getting pinned in a box canyon. "It appears that all three individuals had entered into Mexico and crossed the border to gain illegal entry into the United States," the office said, adding the men were being held on several state charges. A June 16, 2014, news story posted online by Odessa’s CBS 7 quoted Dodson as saying the men were trying to reach a friend staying in Alpine who was supposed to ferry them to Seattle, Wash. "The officers were not able to apprehend the man who was their getaway," the story said. The sheriff’s office June 16, 2014, offense report on the arrests, which we obtained via an open-records’ request, said Homeland Security was contacted after it was discovered the men, ranging in age from 26 to 35, were in the country illegally from Ukraine. By phone, Dodson told us one of the men spoke English well and told him the trio hailed from Ukraine. They remain in the county jail, he said, though Brewster County doesn’t plan to press state charges. So, Perry was correct that three Ukrainians were arrested on a West Texas ranch, though he had the wrong ranch and his time frame was slightly off. Fresh charges, past convictions Next, Daryl Fields, a San Antonio-based spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office that has jurisdiction over the area, emailed us federal complaints and indictments indicating two of the men were previously deported Ukraine nationals newly indicted for re-entering the country without legal permission: Vadim Odorozhenko and Igor Yaroslavovuch Kotsiuba. According to the complaints, each man also had previously been convicted of crimes in the U.S. Odorozhenko "is an aggravated felon by virtue of his convictions for kidnapping, unlawful use of a weapon, and assault in the second degree and assault in the third degree," the complaint against him states. Our search using the LexisNexis database yielded indications Odorzhenko drew his convictions and served prison time in Oregon. By telephone, Jessica Freeburn of the Oregon Department of Corrections told us Odorozhenko was in a state prison from mid-August 2005 to Nov. 4, 2011. She said he was then paroled but records indicate he was picked up by immigration officers on Oct. 16, 2012. Separately by email, an ICE spokeswoman, El Paso-based Leticia Zamarripa, citing an "ongoing investigation," declined to say whether he was later deported. According to the complaint against Kotsiuba, he "is an aggravated felon by virtue of his convictions for the distribution of narcotics, assault and burglary." A LexisNexis search turned up nothing about him. A complaint charging Oleskii Storozhuk, the third alleged border-crosser, with entering the U.S. without legal permission was dropped, Fields said, but he "remains in custody as a material witness." Fields said by phone a fourth man, Igor Davidyuk, was charged with alien smuggling after his arrest in Washington state subsequent to the Texas arrests. Ukraine has terrorist ties? Ukraine gained its independence in 1991 after which the U.S. established diplomatic relations, according to the State Department. Of late, it’s been roiled by conflict with Russian separatists who want their Russian-speaking provinces to become part of Russia. But Ukraine isn’t among nations the U. S. considers state sponsors of terrorism nor was it listed among countries described by the government in 2013 as terrorist safe havens. Texas experts agreed Ukraine lacks terrorist ties. By email, Sergiy Kudelia, a Baylor University political scientist, said: "Generally speaking, there are no organizations or groups operating in Ukraine today that are recognized by the U.S. government (or the European Union) as terrorist organizations." After we pointed out a July 21, 2014, news report quoting Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko as saying he considers the Russian separatists to be terrorists, Kudelia said neither the U.S. or E.U. has embraced that characterization. By phone, Texas Tech University political scientist Frank Thames said he doesn’t think Russian separatists "are particularly interested in sending people to the United States through the southern border. I wouldn’t make that link." Our ruling Perry said three Ukrainians recently captured on a West Texas ranch are among "individuals from countries that have strong terrorist ties being apprehended" near the border with Mexico. This shakes out as half right. Three men from Ukraine were captured on a West Texas ranch in June 2014 (though Perry had the wrong ranch and his date was off a bit) after allegedly crossing the Rio Grande into Texas. However, Ukraine isn’t considered a country with terrorist ties. And while two of the men had prior U.S. criminal records, none has or had been charged with terrorism or related crimes. In contrast, Perry cited their arrests in the context of national security and terrorism. We rate this statement as Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. UPDATE, 3:24 P.M. July 31, 2014: This story was amended to indicate one man was imprisoned in Oregon, not Washington, and to provide additional related detail. These changes didn't affect our rating.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2014-07-31T16:00:00	2014-07-23	['Mexico']
-pomt-01348	Says Jeanne Shaheen has "voted with the president 99 percent of the time."	mostly true	/new-hampshire/statements/2014/oct/21/scott-brown/scott-brown-says-jeanne-shaheen-voted-president-99/	It’s become a go-to line of Scott Brown’s campaign to win a New Hampshire seat in the U.S. Senate -- so much so that he repeated it several times during an hour-long debate on Oct. 21, the first televised face-off of the campaign. Shaheen, Brown said just seven minutes into the debate in Concord, "has in fact voted with the president over 99 percent of the time. What does that mean to people in New Hampshire? It means she was the deciding vote for Obamacare. … She’s also voted to put in place policies where we have more and more gridlock by voting with her party over 99 percent of the time." Brown has delivered variations of this claim so frequently over the past few months that anyone in New Hampshire who’s been plugged into an electronic device has surely heard it. It’s been a mainstay of Brown’s ads in a frenzied air war -- so far in the race for U.S. Senate, more than 10,000 ads have aired costing, more than $7 million. PolitiFact New Hampshire looked into a version of this claim last March, after the New Hampshire Republican Party released a web video titled "99 Percent." It claimed that Shaheen consistently supports the president and "votes with Obama 99 percent of the time." The ad was launched before Brown had officially declared himself a candidate in the race. Here, we’ll look at Brown’s claim that Shaheen has "voted with the president 99 percent of the time." (Last year PolitiFact New Hampshire checked the claim that Shaheen was the deciding vote for Obamacare and ruled that Mostly False.) Brown’s charge carries some weight. Even though Obama won New Hampshire twice, a majority of residents (55 percent) now disapprove of his job performance, and his signature legislative accomplishment -- the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" -- is opposed by 52 percent of the people in the state, according to findings from an Oct. 10, 2014 Granite State Poll, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. Democrats across the country have faced similar critiques from Republicans; PolitiFact has frequently checked such claims and found them to have varying degrees of accuracy. Obama himself acknowledged the strategy during a speech at Northwestern University on Oct. 2, 2014. "Now, I am not on the ballot this fall," Obama said. "But make no mistake: These policies are on the ballot -- every single one of them." During the debate, Brown even quoted the president to drive home his point. Of course, most politicians fall in line with the president when their party controls the White House. Still, we decided it would still be useful to dig into Shaheen’s voting record to see whether Brown was correct. When we checked this claim previously, we asked the NHGOP for evidence. Executive director Matt Mowers pointed us toward Congressional Quarterly’s annual presidential position votes report. CQ, a news service that covers Capitol Hill, examines voting patterns for every member of Congress and sorts them in ways that allow for comparisons. One of those ways is an annual examination of presidential support -- the number of votes by each lawmaker on bills in which the sitting president has staked out a position. The 2013 CQ analysis shows that, when you look at the pool of votes in which Obama took a clear position, Shaheen’s vote matched the president’s stance 99 percent of the time. Still, there’s more to that number than meets the eye. In 2013, the Senate took 291 roll call votes. CQ registers Obama as having taken a clear stance on 108 of those votes -- about one third. WMUR political reporter James Pindell further analyzed the figures and found that 70 of those votes involved presidential nominations -- to positions that ranged from Secretary of State John Kerry to a variety of federal judgeships. The remaining 38 involved some type of public policy, including seven on immigration, four on gun policy, and five budget bills. The only time Shaheen voted against Obama in 2013 came on a bill involving an Internet sales tax, Pindell reported. We found similar figures across CQ reports since Shaheen took office, which coincided with Obama’s election to his first term. CQ put her voting with Obama at least 95 percent of the time each year. Overall, during the five years since Shaheen took office, Shaheen’s votes have aligned with the president’s position 98 percent of the time. That’s pretty close to the 99 percent figure, however, it’s important to note some limitations of judging Shaheen’s support for the president based solely on the CQ analysis. Shaheen communications director Shripal Shah noted that the senator had broken with Obama on some issues that do not come to a vote; these are not reflected in the CQ tally. For instance, Shah noted that Shaheen spoke out against a new round of military base closures, an idea the Obama administration advanced in budget proposals, and she opposed a proposal floated by the president to change Social Security benefits. There are also other ways to measure Shaheen’s voting tendencies. OpenCongress, a nonpartisan legislative tracking service, found that in 2013, Shaheen voted with the majority of Democrats 93.1 percent of the time. That’s less frequently than the average Democrat in the Senate, putting her on the bottom half of the list. Finally, in June 2013, Shaheen was featured as a "Bipartisan Champion" by the Bipartisan Policy Center for her work on energy efficiency legislation. "It's disingenuous to draw conclusions about Sen. Shaheen's record by only looking at a small number of votes," Shah said. Our ruling Scott Brown said Shaheen votes with Obama 99 percent of the time. Brown has credible support for this claim -- in 2013, Shaheen took the same position as the president 99 percent of the time when Obama outlined a clear position, based on analysis by Congressional Quarterly. That wasn’t much different than earlier years in the Senate -- overall, her votes have aligned with Obama’s 98 percent of the time since she took office. Still, the CQ ratings address a fraction of all issues facing Congress. Obama only took a clear position in about one third of the Senate votes, and in some issues that didn’t come to a vote, Shaheen broke with the President. Still, Brown’s claim about Shaheen isn’t far off. We rate it Mostly True.	None	Scott Brown	None	None	None	2014-10-21T22:22:25	2014-10-21	['None']
-snes-04687	A video shows a giant alligator walking across a Florida golf course.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/giant-alligator-florida-golf/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Giant Alligator Spotted on Florida Golf Course	31 May 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-02963	"In 45 out of 50 states, on average men are seeing their premiums double, going up 99 percent. Women up 62 percent."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/24/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-says-average-man-will-see-his-premium/	If the rollout of the Obamacare website had gone well, we likely would be closer to having an answer to the all-important question: How much are people paying for health insurance and is it more than they did before? But for now, getting reliable answers can be treacherous. Conservative talk radio and Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity waded into the discussion on his radio program. A caller voiced frustration with the lack of jobs. Here’s the conversation that followed: Hannity: You know what the biggest job killer in the country is right now? Obamacare. Caller: One thing that can't be argued is that insurance premiums are too high. Hannity: They are skyrocketing. They are skyrocketing. I mean, in 45 out of 50 states, on average men are seeing their premiums double, going up 99 percent. Women up 62 percent. That's the average. Are Hannity's numbers right? Hannity’s staff told us the numbers came from an article in Forbes that provided the analysis of some number crunching by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative New York think tank. But Hannity's on-air statement went further than the report itself and included a common mistake. He lumped in people who purchase insurance on their own with people who receive it through their employer. The study focused explicitly on the insurance rates people can expect to encounter in the online marketplaces, which makes up less than 10 percent of the total private insurance market. Of that small subgroup, Hannity also failed to acknowledge that federal government subsidies will reduce many people’s out-of-pocket expenses, at least partially offsetting higher premiums. The Manhattan Institute study The Manhattan Institute analysts went through a complex process to estimate how premiums under Obamacare compared to premiums before the marketplaces opened. It drilled down to the county level in all 50 states and used a federal government website to gather health insurance prices in 2013 (before the Obamacare rollout). It looked at rates for 27-, 40-, and 64-year-old male and female non-smokers and adjusted prices upward to account for anyone who was denied coverage or had some health problem that would increase their rates. Then, the researchers looked at the prices for plans in the marketplaces for comparable individuals. The results were daunting. "The cheapest exchange plan for the average enrollee, compared to what a 40-year-old would pay today, will cost an average of 99 percent more for men, and 62 percent for women," the study said. The Manhattan Institute analysis refers only to people buying insurance through the marketplaces, which is called the "individual market." This is in contrast to the way that most Americans, about two-thirds, get insurance. They get coverage through their employer. The number of people in the individual market is expected to grow under the new health care law but right now, they represent less than 10 percent of people with insurance. We should note that the Manhattan Institute analysis relies on knowing how much people pay for insurance today, before Obamacare. That is something that a leading health policy research center has declined to do. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt said there are several reasons not to compare cost before and after Obamacare. Part of the challenge is the new health care law requires that insurance plans include more services than many do today, such as maternity care and mental health coverage. That means the plans people will buy in 2014 are not the same as the ones they bought in 2013. And because the coverage is changing, apples-to-apples comparisons are challenging. Levitt said another major obstacle to before-and-after comparisons is that reliable data is unavailable. Insurance companies would have a key piece, but they keep it to themselves. "There is not good information about what people pay in the individual insurance market today," Levitt said. "And we certainly don’t know what types of plans people are going to choose after reform. Generally, Kaiser has predicted that premiums will be "somewhat higher" in the individual market than what they are today. The additional services come at a price. In addition, no one can be denied due to a pre-existing condition. Insuring them will tend to increase an insurance plan's costs. That might be offset if plenty of younger, healthy people also join the insurance pool, a stated goal of Obamacare but also one of the great unknowns. Federal subsidies The Congressional Budget Office, the research arm of Congress, projects that about half the people buying health insurance through the marketplaces will be eligible for subsidies in the form of tax credits. The more money you make, the less the subsidy. No subsidies are available for an individual making more than $43,000 a year, or a family of four making about $92,000 a year. The Manhattan Institute average rate increases for men and women did not factor in any subsidies. Our ruling Hannity said premiums are skyrocketing and the average man would pay twice as much, while the increase for the average woman would be 62 percent. That claim relies on a study that focused on the individual marketplaces for insurance set up under Obamacare, a subset of people who purchase insurance. Regardless of the accuracy of the analysis, it spoke to the experience of a small minority of Americans, and it did not factor in the subsidies that will cushion some people from increased premiums. Hannity overreached in his remarks on radio. That said, new rules for insurance plans will tend to push some rates up -- because the plans must provide better coverage. But by how much depends on a host of factors that several leading health policy experts say is too difficult to estimate. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Sean Hannity	None	None	None	2013-10-24T10:07:03	2013-10-21	['None']
-pomt-08280	"Georgia has the second-highest rate of childhood obesity in the United States."	true	/georgia/statements/2010/nov/08/childrens-healthcare-atlanta/hospital-says-georgias-kids-second-fattest-nation/	The news was enough to make the AJC PolitiFact Georgia scribe toss her leftover Halloween candy corn to the squirrels. "Georgia has the second-highest rate of childhood obesity in the United States," said a recent news release from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, a hospital that specializes in pediatric care. Second? Out of all the states in the union? Are Georgia kids really that hefty? Yes, we felt guilty. One PolitiFact Georgia reporter had spent a recent afternoon dressed as a witch, handing out fistfuls of sweets to trick-or-treaters. Childhood obesity can lead to diabetes, high cholesterol and other potentially deadly problems. It also places more burdens on the health care system. We called a spokeswoman for Children's Healthcare Atlanta, who pointed us to "F as in Fat," a report issued by the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit group that specializes in disease prevention. Sure enough, there Georgia was, second only to Mississippi in 2007 for obesity rates among 10- to 17-year-olds. In this state, 21.3 percent of children were obese, the report said. Mississippi's rate was 21.9 percent. The report defined an "obese" child as one with a body mass index greater than the 95th percentile for his age group. For instance, a 10-year-old boy with a height of 4 foot 6 inches and weighing 100 pounds would be obese. That's because his body mass index is 24.1, which is in the 97th percentile of his age group. Of the 10 states with the highest childhood obesity rates, nine were in the South, the report said. Children in Western states tended to be far more svelte. Eight of the 10 states with the lowest obesity rates were located in that region. The trust used figures from the National Survey of Children's Health, an effort funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The telephone survey asks parents for their children's ages, races, genders, weights and heights. Almost all the state-by-state rankings we found were based on data from that same survey. Understandably, they came up with similar results. The National Kids Count Program, run by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, used the same data to rank Georgia third in 2007. Its analysis ranked a slightly different group of kids: the number of children age 10-17 who are overweight as well as obese. Those are children whose body mass index is above the 85th percentile for their age and gender. A set of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided different results, but this survey was far from comparable. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System asks high school students in grades nine through 12 to report whether they are obese. The CDC does not rank states by high school obesity rates, but the data show that in 2009, 12.4 percent of Georgia high schoolers said they were obese. That's the 19th-highest of the states. But again, high schoolers report their own weight for this survey, and they might not be as accurate as their parents. The CDC does conduct a survey in which children are measured in person, but it doesn't break down the data by state. Why are Georgia's kids so heavy? We could locate no studies that answer that question, but there are some hints. The children who are at the highest risk for obesity are minorities or from rural areas, and they make up a large proportion of the state's child population, said Marsha Davis, a professor at the University of Georgia who studies childhood obesity. In rural areas, parents have trouble getting to supermarkets that sell fruits and vegetables. They end up feeding children with junk food they find at gas station convenience stores. For instance, the agricultural industry in South Georgia's Colquitt County ships produce across the country but sells very little locally, Davis said. The obesity rate there is extremely high. So while there is some variance in what surveys tell us, there's widespread agreement that Georgia kids are obese. And by one widely respected measure, Georgia's kids are the second-most obese in the nation. Now, that's not to say you need to throw out your kid's stash of Halloween candy. "Halloween is fun," Davis said. "The problem is we're having Halloween every day." We rate Children's Healthcare Atlanta's statement True.	None	Children's Healthcare of Atlanta	None	None	None	2010-11-08T06:00:00	2010-11-20	['United_States']
-pomt-00832	"Obama has been sending taxpayer dollars, at least $350,000 to fund anti-Likud, anti-Netanyahu groups in Israel for (the) election."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/25/blog-posting/blog-claims-us-funded-anti-netanyahu-election-effo/	Did President Barack Obama spend U.S. taxpayer dollars trying to toss Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of office? That’s a claim floating around conservative media websites in recent days. A conservative blog called Fire Andrea Mitchell was one of several to relay a Fox News report about alleged back-door funding in the recent Israeli elections. On March 16, 2015, the blogger wrote "Obama has been sending taxpayer dollars, at least $350,000 to fund anti-Likud, anti Netanyahu groups in Israel for tomorrow’s election." Fox News said a congressional investigation into the matter is underway, and presidential contender Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, along with Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., sent a letter about this to federal officials "to express our strong concerns over recent media reports." What are the facts of the matter? The basis of the claim In September 2013, the State Department funded two projects run by OneVoice, a New York nonprofit. The OneVoice mission is clear -- to advance a two-state solution in Israel and the Palestinian territories. "Through OneVoice, young grassroots activists in Israel and Palestine are equipped with the knowledge and skills to be heard as they build momentum and a constituency for the two-state solution locally and internationally," the organization wrote in its 2013 annual report. Affiliates OneVoice Israel got $233,500 from the State Department to spend in Israel and OneVoice Palestine got another $115,776 to spend in the Palestinian Territories. That adds up to a little more than $349,000. The question is: Do those contributions amount to funding "anti-Likud, anti-Netanyahu groups in Israel for tomorrow’s election"? How OneVoice says the money was spent Given that residents of the Palestinian Territories can’t vote in national Israeli elections, it’s hard to see how money spent there would influence voters in Israel. That leave us to account for $233,500. Payton Knopf, senior director of global communications for OneVoice, said the money helped fund a series of "town-hall style meetings on university campuses and provided support to the Knesset Caucus for the Two-State Solution in organizing a meeting with 300 Israeli students and (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud) Abbas in February 2014." Knopf told us the State Department money was spent by November 2014 -- nearly four months ago. OneVoice, he said, never "spent any U.S. government funds in connection with the recent elections in Israel. Claims to the contrary are simply wrong." There are two important points to unpack there. If OneVoice says it spent the money by November 2014, that would be before the Israeli elections were even scheduled. That happened in December after Netanyahu called for early elections. The State Department said in a briefing that "no payment was made to OneVoice after November 2014." That would contradict the way the claim in the blog was phrased. "Has been sending" says the money continues to flow. In this case the money was spent and disbursed months ago. Second, while Netanyahu waffled on the notion of a two-state solution in the run-up to the Israeli elections, the prime minister had been on record supporting a two-state strategy in November and the months before it. Where it gets complicated Put aside OneVoice’s explanation for a second. In January 2015, after the Israeli elections had been scheduled, OneVoice announced a partnership with V15, a new Israeli voter mobilization project. The partnership’s mission, as stated in its press release, was to "disrupt the status quo." Using methods honed from the Obama campaign, including a key staffer from the president’s 2012 field operation, V15 aimed to put a center-left coalition into power. While its leaders officially denied that they opposed Netanyahu, it was a difference without a distinction. V15 wanted a government that would do more than Netanyahu’s Likud Party to negotiate with the Palestinians. (All you have to do is read parts of V15’s statement after Netanyahu’s victory to know where the group stands: "A confusing night turned into a painful morning," the group said, according to a translation from Arutz Sheva. "It was painful not because we lost, but because we have no faith in the winners.") So the connecting of the dots goes like this. Obama’s State Department gives OneVoice money. OneVoice trains student activists. Later, OneVoice strikes up a partnership with V15, which is aided by a former Obama campaign hand. V15, a voter mobilization project, wants to "disrupt the status quo." The status quo in this case is Netanyahu. A limited money trail The connections between OneVoice, Obama and V15 may raise plenty of questions, but they don’t prove that U.S. tax dollars funded "anti-Likud, anti Netanyahu groups in Israel for tomorrow’s election." Gerald M. Steinberg is a professor at Bar Ilan University and head of NGO Monitor, a project that aims to prevent nonprofit meddling in Israeli affairs. Steinberg is suspicious that State Department dollars helped V15, at least indirectly, but he can’t know for sure based on the information available. In a draft report Steinberg shared with PunditFact, all he has are questions. "Did OneVoice use U.S. government funds to launch V15? If not, and since money is fungible, did U.S. government funds free up other OneVoice financing to facilitate V15? Full transparency on the parts of the U.S. State Department, OneVoice, and V15 is necessary to verify or disprove the allegations and claims." IRS regulations prohibit a not-for-profit OneVoice from campaigning directly for or against a candidate from office. But there are allowances when it comes to campaigning for issues (a two-state solution) or for promoting civic engagement, which would include voting. It’s worth noting that about a month before the election, the parent organization of OneVoice created PeaceWorks Action, a 501(c)4 group. That IRS designation allows it to engage in outright political lobbying. Funding OneVoice was entirely in line with the administration’s agenda. As far back as 2009, Hillary Clinton said in her Senate confirmation hearing to be secretary of state that in pursuit of a state for Palestinians "we will exert every effort to support the work of Israelis and Palestinians who seek that result." Our ruling A conservative blog claimed, "Obama has been sending taxpayer dollars, at least $350,000 to fund anti-Likud, anti Netanyahu groups in Israel for tomorrow’s election." First, there is the matter of the dollar amount. If any U.S. money was used to mobilize anti-Likud voters, it would have been in Israel. A more accurate figure would be $233,500. Next, there is a matter of the blog’s tense. "Has been sending" says the action is continuing. In this case, the money stopped flowing in 2014, before elections were called in Israel. Finally, the allegation that the money was spent to fund anti-Likud, anti-Netanyahu groups in Israel for the election is based on speculation. Yes, Obama sent money to OneVoice, a group that promoted a two-state solution. And yes that group partnered with a different group V15 that wanted Netanyahu defeated. But there is no paper trail that the money given to OneVoice was spent on an electoral ground game. It would be naive to ignore that OneVoice’s policy positions mesh well with V15’s voter mobilization, but that’s different from saying that American taxpayer dollars were spent by V15. That may change as more evidence comes to light. PunditFact’s rulings are based on when a statement was made and on the information available at that time. This claim rates Mostly False.	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2015-03-25T12:12:30	2015-03-16	['Barack_Obama', 'Israel']
-snes-04700	A National Geographic cameraman was eaten alive by a giant ocean sunfish.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cameraman-eaten-alive-sunfish/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	National Geographic Camerman Eaten Alive During Shooting	26 May 2016	None	['None']
-tron-03203	Family with Down Syndrome Child Meet McCain and Palin	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/rush-transcript-family/	None	politics	None	None	None	Family with Down Syndrome Child Meet McCain and Palin	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-abbc-00425	The claim: The Federal Government says every school in Australia will be affected by cuts planned by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-02/alp-ad-overreaches-on-coalition-school-funding-cuts/4925242	The claim: The Federal Government says every school in Australia will be affected by cuts planned by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.	['education', 'schools', 'alp', 'advertising', 'federal-government', 'federal-elections', 'australia']	None	None	['education', 'schools', 'alp', 'advertising', 'federal-government', 'federal-elections', 'australia']	Labor Party ad overreaches on Coalition school funding cuts	Thu 5 Sep 2013, 2:22am	None	['Tony_Abbott', 'Australia']
-snes-04575	Researchers have discovered that octopus genomes contain alien DNA.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/octopus-dna-origins/	None	Science	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Does Octopus DNA Come from Space?	20 June 2016	None	['None']
-tron-02003	The Statue of Liberty Was Inspired by an Arab Woman or Muslim Woman	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/statue-of-liberty-muslim-woman/	None	immigration	None	None	['donald trump', 'national monuments', 'refugees']	The Statue of Liberty Inspired by an Arab Woman, Muslim Woman	Feb 9, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-06309	Gov. Scott Walker received a $7,300 pay raise.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/nov/15/state-democratic-party-wisconsin/wisconsin-democratic-party-says-gov-scott-walker-r/	The reaction to plans by Gov. Scott Walker to freeze the pay of state workers continues to roll in. And Walker’s own pay continues to be a focal point of his opponents. On Nov. 9, 2011, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin issued a news release that attempted to fan the fire. The group, which is launching a recall against the first-term Republican governor, says Walker has given himself a pay raise -- and he should give some of it back. "The rest of Wisconsin is being asked to accept less and suffer his unemployment economy, but apparently Scott Walker thinks he deserves a $7,300 raise," state Party Chairman Mike Tate was quoted as saying in the news release. A raise when pay for others is frozen? This one sounds familiar. We looked at this same topic recently when various liberal bloggers said Walker had given himself -- along with other statewide elected officials -- a pay hike. They had misread a sloppily prepared document about the pay changes. We ruled the claim on Walker’s raise False. The state Democrats revived the topic with their news release, which took Walker to task for "whining" about his family’s loss of buying power in a TV interview. We asked party spokesman Graeme Zielinski for backup on the claim that Walker had received a raise. His reply: "Why do we have to do your homework for you? Go ask the executive office. Google. You arrive at the same conclusions regardless of whether we help you or not, and then congratulate yourself, so why should we waste our time?" OK. Here’s what state law says: Walker is not receiving a raise in January. That would violate Article IV, Section 26 of the the state Constitution. Here’s how it works. Walker took office in January and was paid $144,423. That’s $7,331 more than his predecessor, Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle. State law calls for the pay of the governor, other state constitutional officers, and members of the Legislature to be set before their terms of office begin. In Walker’s case, the higher salaries were proposed by Doyle’s administration and approved by state lawmakers in 2008. So Walker received one level of pay when he took office. Under the state constitution, that pay will not change for the duration of his four-year term. Critics have noted that Walker will be making more than Doyle (true), that as Milwaukee County Executive he gave back some of his pay (true) and that he could choose to do the same as governor (true). But that’s not what the party said. The Democrats called upon Walker to "return his $7,300 raise." Their statement continued: "As pay remains the same for Corrections Officers, Licensed Practical Nurses, Social Workers and Facilities Maintenance Employees, Scott Walker's salary increases by more than $7,331." So let’s bring this one home. Again. The state Democrats’ news release states that the governor "is set to make $143,000," and says Walker "thinks he deserves a $7,300 raise," and calls upon the governor to "return his $7,300 raise." The release states that Walker’s "salary increases by more than $7,331." That’s wrong, wrong and still wrong. The pay for Walker -- or whoever succeeded Doyle as governor in January 2011 -- was long ago established. It’s one amount -- $144,423 -- and it can’t change. Walker can’t give himself a pay raise. It’s right there in the state Constitution. We rate the statement False.	None	Democratic Party of Wisconsin	None	None	None	2011-11-15T09:00:00	2011-11-09	['None']
-snes-06372	The cross-like shape of the laminin molecule is evidence of God's hand in the creation of the human form.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/laminin-2/	None	Glurge Gallery	None	David Mikkelson	None	Laminin: Evidence of Divine Creation?	20 May 2008	None	['God']
-pomt-06909	"This past (legislative) session, we passed out of the Legislature a resolution requiring Congress to pass a balanced-budget amendment to the (U.S.) Constitution."	half-true	/texas/statements/2011/jul/25/david-dewhurst/david-dewhurst-says-2011-legislature-required-cong/	Offering himself as a fiscally conservative candidate for the U.S. Senate, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst says in his opening campaign video that his record shows he knows how to hold the line on spending. Washington, he continues, is addicted to debt. In contrast, he adds, "This past (legislative) session, we passed out of the Legislature a resolution requiring Congress to pass a balanced-budget amendment to the (U.S.) Constitution." An online news search indicated that Dewhurst, who declared his candidacy July 19, was referring to House Concurrent Resolution 18, which the House and Senate advanced in May. The House vote for the resolution was 115-17, the Senate vote 28-3. The resolution doesn’t require Congress to do anything. It states, though, that given large annual federal deficits and the escalating national debt, and the failure of Congress to forward a balanced-budget constitutional amendment to the states, "action must be taken to restore fiscal responsibility." It goes on to say that a "balanced-budget amendment would require the government not to spend more than it receives in revenues and compel lawmakers to carefully consider choices about spending and taxes; by encouraging spending control and discouraging deficit spending, a balanced-budget amendment will help put the nation on the path to lasting prosperity." The resolution closes by stating the Legislature "respectfully urges" Congress to "propose and submit to the states for ratification" a constitutional amendment providing that except during a war declared by Congress or other "national emergency," total federal appropriations in a fiscal year may not exceed the year’s estimated federal revenue. The next section calls for the resolution to be forwarded to Congress to be placed in the Congressional Record. For perspective, we contacted the resolution’s author, Rep. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who said that while no legislative resolution can make Congress do anything, "political tides have been spread by much less than a resolution backed by a legislature that represents over 25 million people." Creighton said he thinks his resolution impresses on Congress that there’s reason to bring up the amendment. "In the aggregate, state by state by state, these legislatures sending these strong statements of political will" have an effect, he said. Creighton said he’s not troubled by Dewhurst saying the resolution requires Congress to approve the amendment. "I don’t believe anybody’s interpretation is that Congress has to act on it," Creighton said, adding that even a novice observer wouldn’t conclude that a Texas-rooted resolution amounts to "an iron-clad requirement" that Congress act. "It’s kind of a gotcha that doesn’t matter," he said. By the way, Congress cannot directly amend the Constitution. Article V says an amendment can originate by two-thirds’ votes of the U.S. House and Senate, but still must be ratified by three-fourths of the states’ legislatures. Alternatively, the Constitution can be amended at a convention called by two-thirds of the states’ legislatures. In February, after the Texas Senate passed a different version of the call for a balanced-budget amendment, Dewhurst issued a statement characterizing the resolution as urging prompt action, noting that it takes ratification by three-fourths of the states for a constitutional amendment to stick. In contrast, Dewhurst’s campaign video leaves the misimpression Congress can, by itself, change the Constitution. It also misrepresents the Texas resolution by saying it "requires" Congress to affix the balanced-budget amendment. But the spirit of his message — that Texas legislators are aboard with the constitutional change — is accurate. We rate his statement Half True.	None	David Dewhurst	None	None	None	2011-07-25T06:00:00	2011-07-19	['United_States', 'United_States_Congress']
-bove-00072	News Websites, TV Channels Air Fake Suvarna News Exit Poll	none	https://www.boomlive.in/news-websites-tv-channels-air-fake-suvarna-news-exit-poll/	None	None	None	None	None	News Websites, TV Channels Air Fake Suvarna News Exit Poll	May 13 2018 1:17 pm, Last Updated: May 13 2018 1:20 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-09371	"An attack on a healthy 22-year-old homosexual man would be more protected under the law than an attack on an eight-year-old child."	half-true	/texas/statements/2010/mar/30/liberty-institute/liberty-institute-says-22-year-old-gay-man-more-pr/	Criticizing federal hate crimes law, the right-leaning Liberty Institute sniffs at extending additional legal protections to victims attacked because of their sexual orientation or gender. The group says online that a protected classes contradict equal protection under the law, adding that "many see the expansion of hate crimes laws as a tool to silence opposition to homosexuality and eventually silence pastors from speaking Biblically on the subject." "Hate crimes law put citizens in different classes of people and protect some more than others," the group says on its Web site. "For example, an attack on a healthy 22-year-old homosexual man would be more protected under the law than an attack on an eight-year-old child. Liberty Institute believes that all crimes should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law without putting citizens in classes, attempting to protect some more than others, and attempting to punish people's thoughts." Eight year olds, less protected than adults? Jonathan Saenz, the group's Austin-based director of legislative affairs, pointed to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expanded federal legal protections against violent acts motivated by sexual orientation, gender, and disability. "Hate crimes laws give more protection under law for members of the special classes of people," Saenz said. "Age is not included as a protected class for victims, sexual orientation is included as a protected class. So, an attack on a healthy 22-year-old homosexual man would be more protected under the law than an attack on an eight-year-old child." Some background: The 2009 act is named for Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who died after being kidnapped, pistol-whipped and tied to a Wyoming ranch fence in near-freezing temperatures, and James Byrd Jr., a black man who was dragged behind a car to his death the same year by three white men near Byrd's home in Jasper, Texas. The law lets the U.S. Department of Justice help states investigate and prosecute hate crimes. In the case of five states that don't have hate crime laws, federal prosecutors can prosecute the crimes independently. Congress earlier put in place a law directing government to create enhanced penalties for hate crimes — motivated by actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability or sexual orientation — that occur on federal property. The combined effect of the Shepard Act and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, adopted in 1994, means that someone who attacks a healthy 22-year-old homosexual man because of his sexual orientation could be subject to a tougher sentence than someone who attacks an eight year old. But that's just considering those federal hate crime laws, not all the other applicable state and federal laws. Bill Allison, director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, rates the Liberty Institute's comparison as bogus because various state and federal laws provide harsher sentences for a wide range of groups. Allison said: "We give extra protection and punishment to pregnant women, to police and firefighters to children under six... the list goes on and on." The Texas Penal Code, for example, increases the sentence for someone who assaults anyone 14 or younger or, conversely, 65 and older. Criminals who harm a pregnant woman's unborn child could also face additional charges. And under the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, a judge can require a convict to take a course in tolerance if arson, criminal mischief or reckless damage or destruction are proved beyond a reasonable doubt to have been committed against someone because of that person's race, color, disability, religion, national origin or ancestry, age, gender or sexual preference. Another Texas law: The minimum term of imprisonment increases to 25 years if the criminal is convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child younger than six. Why have special laws for people who are attacked because of their race, sexual orientation or gender? Trevor Thomas, deputy communications director at the Human Rights Campaign, a national organization that advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, offers this explanation: "Sentencing enhancements for hate crimes recognize that hate-crime perpetrators commit violent acts as a means of sending a message to society ... While a random act of violence is a tragic event that devastates, the enhancements reflect this understanding that hate crimes are unique in that they victimize an entire community of people." Applying hate crimes law is complicated. If a straight man and a gay man get in a fight, it's not a hate crime unless the straight man attacked the gay man because he is homosexual, Allison said. In other words, a healthy 22-year-old man wouldn't be protected under the Shepard Act unless the prosecutor can prove that he was attacked because of his sexual orientation. George Dix, the chair of criminal law at the University of Texas at Austin, said: "Clearly the law does permit prosecutors, judges and juries to impose more severe penalties where the victims of crimes are in certain classes. Insofar as the severity of penalties reflects an effort to extend greater protections to victims, I suppose to could be said that the law is making greater effort to protect persons in the specific 'classes.'" But the law does this for a great many classes, and not just those containing people, Dix said. Under a Texas theft statute, he said, someone who steals an exotic fowl could be more severely punished than if they steal a chicken. Or, stealing fuel from a gas station could be more prosecuted than stealing it from a car. So the station owner would be more protected than the owner of the affected car. "Our criminal laws are full of distinctions that result in part in extending more protections to certain classes of people. No reasonable person could argue that this is inherently inappropriate," said Dix. Dix helped us reason how someone who assaulted a gay, adult male — meaning the perpetrator intentionally and knowingly caused him bodily injury, but not serious bodily injury — might fare in court in contrast to how they'd fare if they assaulted an eight year old. Per the Texas Penal Code, the attack on the child would be a third-degree felony, Dix said, punishable by imprisonment for a term of not more than 10 years or less than 2 years. The attack on the 22 year old would, generally, be a Class A misdemeanor, he said, normally punishable by a jail term of no more than a year. Generally, hate crimes law "makes the offense punishable under the next highest category," he said. "But for Class A misdemeanors, the effect seems to be to instead impose a minimum term of confinement of 180 days. Summing up: Lots of special classes have extra legal protections — many of which existed before protections were extended based on gender, gender identity and sexual orientation. The bottom line: Under the Shepard Act, an attack on a healthy 22-year-old homosexual man could — not would, as the Liberty Institute states — be more protected than an attack on an 8-year-old. But it takes a contortion to reach that conclusion. The statement incorrectly intimates that hate crimes laws are the only ones on the books, ignoring the web of other state and federal criminal laws offering protections to vulnerable groups of people — including children. We rate the institute's statement as Half True.	None	Liberty Institute	None	None	None	2010-03-30T06:24:31	2010-03-29	['None']
-pomt-14220	"We’re the worst state in the country at moving people from welfare to work."	false	/missouri/statements/2016/apr/18/catherine-hanaway/hanaway-wrong-about-missouris-rate-moving-people-w/	At the March 17 Republican gubernatorial debate, former Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives Catherine Hanaway made a strong statement about the effectiveness of welfare in Missouri. "We're the worst state in the country at moving people from welfare to work," Hanaway said. Worst in the country is a serious indictment. We wanted to know where Hanaway found her information — and if Missouri really does rank dead last. We got in touch with Will Scharf, policy director of Hanaway for Governor, and he pointed us to a 2015 Welfare Report Card issued by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is a conservative think tank. Its report evaluates and ranks states' policies under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, the assistance program for low-income families established when Congress passed a welfare-to-work reform act in 1996. The report assigns a letter grade based on the TANF policies of each state. It awards higher grades for states with strict work requirements, shorter lifetime eligibility limits, stiffer sanctions and other features. Missouri received an F from the Heartland Institute, the lowest score in the nation. But at the debate, Hanaway didn't say we earned an F, or that our welfare policies are the worst in the country. She specifically claimed Missouri is the worst at moving people from welfare to work, and that's where things get complicated. Why people leave TANF The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tracks the reasons families stop receiving TANF benefits in each state. Employment, exceeding the time limit, receiving sanctions and voluntarily closing one's case are all possible options. In Missouri, 81 percent of families stopped receiving benefits due to employment in 2014, the most recent data. That's far from the worst welfare-to-work rate in the country — it's the highest. By comparison, the national percentage for leaving TANF for employment is just 15.8 percent. But there's a twist: The secret to Missouri's success might be the same reasons Heartland Institute gave the Show-Me state a failing grade. We spoke to Liz Schott, senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who told us that Missouri's longer lifetime limit and lighter sanctions meant fewer cases were closed for reasons other than employment. The HHS data blurs what's actually going on in another way. Schott explained that families will often voluntarily end their benefits when a family member gets a job. In this case, other states might have higher rates of cases closing due to employment, but it isn't getting recorded that way. What happens to families after they leave TANF is also rarely tracked. There is no standard federal measure, and it isn't common at the state level either. That makes it tough to evaluate the success of any given state at moving people from welfare to work and keeping them there. Missouri's new law When the Heartland report came out in March 2015, it caught the attention of Missouri Republicans. Inspired by the report, Sen. David Sater, R-Cassville, sponsored the Strengthening Missouri Families Act, which called for strict restrictions on TANF benefits and passed after an override of Gov. Jay Nixon's veto. The law, which took effect in January, cuts the lifetime limit on benefits from five years to 3 1/2, institutes sanctions that cut benefits in half if a recipient fails to complete required training and employment-seeking activities, and cuts them off completely if the requirements aren't met in ten weeks. Our ruling Catherine Hanaway called Missouri the worst state in the country at moving people from welfare to work Her source was a report by the conservative Heartland Institute. But that report assigned grades based on a state's TANF policies, not the percentage of people leaving TANF for employment. By that measure, according to federal statistics, Missouri isn't the worst state, it's the best in the country. The numbers may be a bit imprecise, but they more than show Missouri far from last place. We rate Hanaway's statement False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/5169521d-26e2-4093-93a5-9211091966cf	None	Catherine Hanaway	None	None	None	2016-04-18T10:37:04	2016-03-17	['None']
-pose-01134	"During a second term, Gov. Scott will reduce the state Communications Services Sales Tax to save Floridians more than $120 million per year."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/1220/reduce-states-communications-services-sales-tax/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	Reduce the state's communications services sales tax	2014-12-30T10:51:17	None	['None']
-pomt-05011	Says Mitt Romney had millions in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/17/barack-obama/obama-ad-says-romney-stashed-money-cayman-islands/	A snarky ad juxtaposes an off-key Mitt Romney leading a crowd singing America the Beautiful with claims on the screen saying the Republican candidate has parked millions of his personal fortune far from U.S. shores. "He had millions in a Swiss bank account," the ad says, and in "tax havens like Bermuda … and the Cayman Islands." It ends with: "Mitt Romney’s not the solution." We rated the Swiss bank account claim True. Here we’ll dig into the Cayman Islands charge. Romney has released his tax return for 2010 and an estimate for 2011 indicating that his income was $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year. His financial disclosure, which is required of all presidential candidates, shows that Romney’s personal wealth is somewhere between $85 million and $264 million, according to the Washington Post. News organizations have analyzed how Romney has invested his money, gleaned the greatest tax benefits and maximized profits at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded. The Cayman Islands is mentioned in several of the reports: * Romney utilized shell companies in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda to attract foreign investors to Bain, according to 2007 documents analyzed by the Los Angeles Times. The Times identified one such fund as BCIP Associates III Cayman. It’s listed on Romney’s 2007 financial disclosure as having paid him more than $1 million the previous year in dividends, interest and capital gains. * Early in 2012, ABC News reported that Romney "has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans." That fund, called BCIP Trust Associates III, is part of his individual retirement account and provided between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000 in income, the disclosure shows. David S. Miller, a tax attorney with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP in New York, told PolitiFact that tax-exempt entities, including IRA accounts, sometimes invest through Cayman Islands corporations to reduce their U.S. taxes. "Congress did not deliberately allow tax-exempts to reduce their U.S. taxes by investing through Cayman Islands corporations," Miller said. "However, the practice is widespread and the IRS has approved of it." Miller agreed that it’s accurate to call the Cayman Islands a tax haven. "That phrase usually refers to whether the jurisdiction imposes taxes and the Cayman Islands doesn’t," he said. Other, more nuanced advantages exist for high net-worth individuals who put their money in foreign corporations. For example, a high net-worth individual can’t deduct the management fee paid to a fund manager, but a foreign corporation can. "There are other advantages for U.S. taxpayers who invest through foreign corporations. They’re relatively subtle, but the advantages increase as the tax rates increase," Miller said. Finally, in a transcript of a conference call hosted by the Romney campaign in January 2012, the trustee for the Romney family’s financial investments -- Brad Malt of the law firm Ropes & Gray -- acknowledged the existence of the Cayman investments. "These are investments in third-party entities," Malt said, likening them to stock in Toyota. He continued: "Each of these investments is in a blind trust. … This means the decision to make the investment was made by me, not by Gov. Romney. … I should say I, in turn, have no control over where these funds are formed. … When we make an investment in a Cayman fund, we're presented with investment documents, the sponsor has already chosen where the fund is to be organized, and to be perfectly clear, the blind trusts are a tiny part of the investor base of these funds." He went on to emphasize that each of the Cayman funds files a U.S. tax return, which reports the blind trust's share of the fund income. "Every dime of that, in turn, is reported on Gov. Romney's tax returns," Malt said. When we asked the Romney campaign for a response to the Obama ad, a spokesman emphasized these same points -- that Romney has paid all taxes he owed, that investment decisions were made by the trustee and the trustee does not decide where the funds are "domiciled." Our ruling Obama’s ad says Romney had millions of dollars in the tax-friendly Cayman Islands. Romney’s trustee acknowledged investing Romney’s money in funds located there, and several are listed on his financial disclosures. Those forms indicate the value of those investments is in the millions. There's no evidence of anything illegal or improper, but it's clear that Romney had millions in the Caymans. We rate the claim from the Obama ad True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-07-17T16:30:40	2012-07-14	['Cayman_Islands']
-snes-02468	A video shows a pink volcano erupting in New Zealand.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pink-volcano/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did a Pink Volcano Erupt in New Zealand?	9 May 2017	None	['New_Zealand']
-pose-00345	"Will fight to ensure more Katrina-related recovery or reconstruction activities can be done by local residents. These measures would ensure that Gulf Coast residents, and not big corporations, will rebuild their communities...Will work to improve job training in the area as well."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/362/ensure-new-orleans-locals-can-get-recovery-jobs/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Ensure New Orleans locals can get recovery jobs	2010-01-07T13:26:56	None	['Gulf_Coast_of_the_United_States']
-pomt-10275	Says McCain "supported George Bush's policies 95 percent of the time."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/23/joe-biden/cherry-picking-mccains-record/	At a rally celebrating his selection as Sen. Barack Obama's running mate, Sen. Joe Biden invoked a line from the Obama playbook that seeks to link Sen. John McCain to President Bush. "You can't change America when you supported George Bush's policies 95 percent of the time," Biden said of McCain. Biden is guilty of some cherry-picking here. He is right that McCain voted with the Bush administration 95 percent of the time in 2007, according to an analysis by Congressional Quarterly. But he fails to mention the year, as Obama did when we gave him a True in June, and Biden conveniently leaves out other years when McCain's support for Bush was lower. The number comes from CQ's "presidential support" score, which rates how often lawmakers back or oppose the president. One caveat: McCain missed more than half the votes on which Bush had a position, as he campaigned for the White House. But repeated votes on immigration and the Iraq war — two issues on which he was closely allied with Bush — as well as the filibuster votes helped elevate McCain from one of the president's chief adversaries three years ago to one of his biggest supporters. McCain's 95 percent score was the high-water mark of his presidential support during President Bush's tenure, and was partly a reflection of the new political calculus in the Democratic-controlled Congress. But other years, McCain's rating was lower. He supported Bush as infrequently as 77 percent of the time in 2005, and backed the president's position an average of 89 percent of the time since 2001. By congressional standards, that's solidly partisan, but hardly marching in lockstep. Biden would have been right if, like Obama, he mentioned the year. But he didn't and gave a misleading picture of McCain's support for Bush. That sounds Half True to us.	None	Joe Biden	None	None	None	2008-08-23T00:00:00	2008-08-23	['None']
-pomt-05547	"As the usage [of synthetic marijuana] has dramatically increased, instances of violence, bodily harm and even death have risen with it."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2012/apr/09/nathan-deal/deal-fake-marijuana-use-rising-connected-death-vio/	Phony marijuana targeted by recent state legislation sounds worse than the real thing, if you believe Georgia’s governor. Chase’s Law strengthens a ban on "synthetic marijuana," ground-up plant material laced with chemicals that mimic marijuana. Chase Burnett, the bill’s namesake, was found dead in March in a hot tub at his Fayette County home, a packet of the drugs nearby. He was 16. The bill passed with overwhelming support. On March 27, Gov. Nathan Deal signed it into law. A press release warned of synthetic marijuana’s dangers: "As the usage has dramatically increased, instances of violence, bodily harm and even death have risen with it," it said. We’ve heard that the drug is nasty stuff. But what’s this about violence, bodily harm and death? A Deal spokeswoman sent PolitiFact Georgia news stories and poison control data to prove the governor’s point. We also talked to researchers and law enforcement officials and reviewed news stories and scientific studies. The form of synthetic marijuana that’s sparking so much concern is sold at head shops and gas stations under brand names such as "Spice" and "K2." Georgia made it a felony to manufacture and sell it in 2010. Chase’s Law tries to keep underground chemists from tweaking their recipes to get around state restrictions. There’s little scholarly research on the drug, which appears to be new to the U.S. Federal labs first detected these drugs in November 2008, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The earliest U.S. news story we found about its rising popularity appeared in a Hutchinson Kan., newspaper in November 2009. All signs suggest that synthetic marijuana use is increasing dramatically, but data is in short supply. Workers at the American Association of Poison Control Centers began tracking synthetic marijuana calls in 2010 after they noticed more inquiries, a spokeswoman told PolitiFact Georgia. In 2010, they received 2,906 calls; in 2011, there were 6,959. About 11 percent of high school seniors reported using synthetic marijuana in the past year, according to 2011 results of an annual survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It was the first time researchers asked about the drug. Existing data support Deal’s claim that reports of bodily harm have climbed. Georgia Poison Center call data show 10 users were admitted to a hospital’s critical care unit in 2010 after using the drug. Forty-five were admitted in 2011. Rapid heartbeat, agitation, drowsiness, vomiting, hallucinations and nausea were among the drug’s most common effects, researchers have found. Media accounts report drug users injured in car crashes, falls and other accidents -- some fatal. Whether synthetic marijuana is directly responsible for deaths -- and whether they’re increasing -- is a more complicated issue. We found no published studies on the drug’s lethality, but there have been "scattered reports of deaths," said Lloyd Johnston, a University of Michigan professor who conducted the National Institute on Drug Abuse survey. A count of news stories suggests there are more deadly cases. But whether the drug is a direct cause or contributing factor is not clear in some instances. Consider Burnett’s death. Toxicology tests are still in the works. Whether the official cause of death was drowning, the drug or something else is unsettled. Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman John Bankhead told PolitiFact Georgia of two other recent deaths: Two chemicals used in synthetic marijuana were found in the system of a man, 43, who died Sept. 8 in Cherokee County. The official cause of death was chronic high blood pressure. Toxicology results are pending in the Feb. 20 death of a 26-year-old Clarke County man. Police found two packages of synthetic marijuana on his bathroom sink, one partially used. We found other accounts of synthetic marijuana-related deaths. For example, a South Carolina coroner ruled that it was directly responsible for the October death of a college basketball player who collapsed during warm-up, according to multiple news accounts. PolitiFact Georgia found less support for Deal’s claim about violence. We found no published studies on the subject. News stories, however, suggest there’s cause for concern. For instance: In September, a Bulloch County man told emergency dispatchers he and his girlfriend smoked Spice and it made him act "crazy," a sheriff’s report said. When deputies arrived, they found him holding his girlfriend, who was bloody and beaten. He said he attacked her. In 2010, an 18-year-old Iowa man fatally shot himself after smoking the drug. To sum up: Evidence supports Deal’s claim that use of the drug has "dramatically increased," as has synthetic marijuana-related "bodily harm." Some evidence suggests that deaths have risen, too. The link between the drug and violence is less clear. News accounts suggest there is an increase in both, but we found so few cases it’s hard to tell. Deal’s statement could use clarification. Still, it earns a Mostly True.	None	Nathan Deal	None	None	None	2012-04-09T06:00:00	2012-03-27	['None']
-goop-02898	Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez “Wedding And Baby” Claim Tru	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-lopez-alex-rodriguez-wedding-baby-married/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez “Wedding And Baby” Claim NOT True	12:12 pm, March 29, 2017	None	['Alex_Rodriguez', 'Jennifer_Lopez']
-wast-00159	"One of the questions we asked was can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?"	needs context	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/03/16/a-coal-miners-plight-paying-for-public-broadcasting-is-less-than-a-penny-of-his-taxes/	None	None	Mick Mulvaney	Glenn Kessler	None	A coal miner's plight: Paying for public broadcasting is less than a dollar of his taxes	March 16, 2017	None	['Detroit', 'West_Virginia']
-pomt-04745	"Mitt Romney’s platform ...won't protect the mortgage interest (tax) deduction for middle-class families."	mostly false	/georgia/statements/2012/aug/29/stephanie-cutter/stephanie-cutter-said-mitt-romneys-platform-wont-p/	The Obama campaign, to no one’s surprise, is highly critical of the Republican Party’s platform. In one email, Obama’s team offered several reasons for their disapproval, such as the Republicans will turn Medicare into a voucher program, they’ll ban marriage equality and reject civil unions of all kinds. But one claim about the GOP agenda and of its standard bearer, Mitt Romney, caught us off guard, particularly since it is so divergent from a Republican Party tenet. Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter wrote in an email that Romney "won't protect the mortgage interest deduction for middle-class families if Romney enacts his tax plan, even though it helps more than 30 million middle-class families." Republicans generally support tax cuts. Could Cutter be right about this one? We contacted Obama campaign officials, who did not respond immediately respond to a request for comment. Generally, home mortgage interest is any interest you pay on a loan on your home or a second home. The loan may be a mortgage to buy your home, a second mortgage, a line of credit or a home equity loan. In most cases, you can deduct all of your home mortgage interest, according to the Internal Revenue Service. The mortgage interest deduction is a popular policy with millions of American homeowners, particularly middle-income earners. Nearly 50 percent of Americans who take advantage of the mortgage interest deduction make annual incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, according to the Tax Policy Center. As president, Ronald Reagan famously promised in a 1984 speech to the National Association of Realtors that he would "preserve the part of the American dream which the home mortgage interest deduction symbolizes." Some argue the deduction is the federal government’s way of paying Americans to buy a house. Over the years, there have been complaints that some wealthy Americans have abused the system, such as claiming deductions for yachts by claiming them as second homes. The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated in a 2010 report that the mortgage interest deduction will cost the federal government about $98.5 billion this fiscal year. Romney’s idea is that tax rates could be lowered if the tax code was scrubbed of loopholes and exemptions. That way, the government would get the same amount of tax revenue coming in. But Romney won’t say which loopholes and exemptions he would like to target. Democrats have argued that Romney’s tax plans would require him to make changes to the federal tax code, such as eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. The Tax Policy Center released an analysis of Romney’s tax plans that concluded Romney would raise taxes on middle-income Americans if he eliminated the mortgage interest deduction and ended other policies, such as the charitable deduction. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Romney said at a fundraiser that he wants to stop allowing deductions on second homes. The Romney campaign later said the candidate was floating ideas and that it was not a firm proposal. Several news outlets reported earlier this month that the GOP was not going to support the mortgage interest deduction in its party platform. There was a battle over the deduction between the real estate industry, which wanted to keep it in the platform, and some conservative activists, who desired a simpler tax code, according to those reports. The Wall Street Journal later reported there was a compromise. The Republican Party platform lays out its position in a section called "Protecting The Taxpayers: ‘No More Too Big to Fail.’ " It says at the top of Page 25 that "we strongly support tax reform; in the event we do not achieve this, we must preserve the mortgage interest deduction." That wording does not explicitly back up Cutter's point. But it leaves open the possibility that eliminating the deduction could possibly be included in tax reform. Still, it's a stretch to conclude from that wording that Romney would eliminate the deduction. Our ruling Cutter said, "Mitt Romney's platform … won't protect the mortgage interest deduction for middle-class families." Romney wants to limit some tax deductions in exchange for rate cuts, but he hasn’t said which deductions he wants to end. The platform's general wording leaves open the possibility of changes to the deduction, but specifically expresses support for it. We rate Cutter’s claim as Mostly False.	None	Stephanie Cutter	None	None	None	2012-08-29T19:30:31	2012-08-29	['None']
-snes-03673	A Hillary Clinton supporter in North Carolina voted multiple times using his friends' identities.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nc-hillary-supporter-votes-multiple-times/	None	Ballot Box	None	David Mikkelson	None	North Carolina Hillary Supporter Votes Multiple Times	29 October 2016	None	['North_Carolina', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-12620	"President Trump just told Paul Ryan, ‘You’re fired.’"	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/02/blog-posting/donald-trump-didnt-use-celebrity-apprentice-catchp/	PolitiFact Wisconsin examined the origins of this claim as part of the inaugural International Fact-Checking Day, April 2, 2017. Organizers at Poynter.org describe the day as "not a single event but a rallying cry for more facts -- and fact-checking -- in politics, journalism and everyday life." President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan have had their differences ever since Trump emerged as the frontrunner for the 2016 Republican nomination. But once Trump won the election, Ryan has generally praised the former host of "The Celebrity Apprentice" TV show. And a major clash between the two GOP leaders certainly would lead the news. Yet we don’t recall a headline like this one in any mainstream news source: "BREAKING: President Trump Just Told Paul Ryan ‘You’re Fired.’" ("You’re fired" was Trump’s catchphrase on the show.) The headline was on an article posted on TheLastLineOfDefense.org on March 14, 2017 (10 days before the Republican plan to replace Obamacare collapsed, with some conservatives blaming Ryan). The site operators describe themselves as "a group of educated, God-fearing Christian conservative patriots." The headline and article were also posted the same day on a site called usanewspost.us, which presents an overlay of photos of scantily clad women when you go to its home page. But not on any other site that we could find -- much less a reputable news source. An aside, before we dig in: Roughly two-thirds of the statements made by bloggers that have been rated by PolitiFact have received a False or Pants on Fire. That includes a handful made by TheLastLineOfDefense.org. Its site carries a disclaimer that says its articles "may include information from sources that may or may not be reliable and facts that don’t necessarily exist. All articles should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney." But you don't necessarily get that impression from any one article. In this case, the article begins by quoting a statement from "Jeff Derpinger at the WHOIP" as saying Trump "will no longer protect, defend or endorse anything the soon-to-be-former Speaker does, says or campaigns on. The betrayal of Paul Ryan and his subsequent dismissal as an advisor to the president and his upsoming (sic) loss in the election in 2018 is his own fault." We couldn’t find any connection between Trump’s White House and any person with that name or anything called WHOIP. The article, which doesn’t spell out what precipitated Trump’s alleged statement, ends by stating that Trump approached Ryan at a luncheon and told him: "Mr. Speaker, you’re fired." It goes without saying that if Trump had had such an encounter with Ryan, it would have been widely reported. One operator of TheLastLineOfDefense.org responded to our request for information to back up the statement by referring us to the site's disclaimer notice. In January 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that according to that man, identified as Zeke Wilekenmeyer, the site is "an elaborate trolling operation aimed at conservatives." Ryan press secretary Ian Martorana told us: "That headline is pure fiction." Our rating Bloggers said: "President Trump just told Paul Ryan, ‘You’re fired.’" No such statement has ever surfaced in the mainstream news media, only on a website that warns that much of its material is satirical. Our rating is Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-04-02T05:00:00	2017-03-14	['None']
-snes-05133	A photograph shows Hillary Clinton with former Ku Klux Klan member Robert Byrd.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-byrd-photo-klan/	None	Politicians	None	Dan Evon	None	Hillary Clinton Kissed by Former Klan Member	2 March 2016	None	['Robert_Byrd', 'Ku_Klux_Klan', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pose-01335	"This new tax code eliminates the marriage penalty and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) while providing the lowest tax rate since before World War II."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1427/eliminate-marriage-penalty/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Eliminate the marriage penalty	2017-01-17T09:05:06	None	['None']
-pomt-03524	Since Gina Raimondo took office, investment fees on the state's pension portfolio "have gone up from about $12 million annually to about $50 million."	half-true	/rhode-island/statements/2013/jun/02/frank-caprio/ri-treasurer-candidate-frank-caprio-says-pension-i/	How much money should you spend to make money? That question, which every investor faces, has moved to the forefront in Rhode Island since the State Investment Commission, at the urging of General Treasurer Gina Raimondo, started moving 15 percent of state pension money into hedge funds. Those funds not only charge a very high fee for managing the account, they also collect a "performance" bonus -- often 20 to 25 percent -- from the profits. Raimondo's office says that's worth the price because hedge funds protect the pension fund from the type of drastic dip in value seen when the economy fell into a recession in 2008. Critics contend that investment expenses charged by those funds, combined with the risk they pose, make them a very bad choice. One such critic is Frank Caprio, who served as treasurer from 2007 through 2010 and, after an unsuccessful run for governor, is seeking his old job back. On the May 19 edition of the WJAR-TV program "10 News Conference," Caprio said he worked hard as treasurer to reduce the fees paid by the pension fund. "And lo and behold, after I left office, a national group did a study of all the pension funds. And Rhode Island ranked at the right end, the high end of that study, paying some of the lowest fees in the country, per capita," he said. "The fee structure of hedge funds is much different than index fund managers, which are the type of managers we had a lot of money with. So the fees have gone up from about $12 million annually to about $50 million," Caprio said. That's a big increase. We thought we'd check the numbers. We turned to both Raimondo's office and to Caprio. The former treasurer sent us the July 25, 2012, edition of the Maryland Policy Report, which ranked states based on the Wall Street fees they paid. For Rhode Island, it lists management fees of $13.1 million for the 2010 fiscal year. That's an expense ratio of $2.15 for every $1,000 invested. The U.S. average was $4.09 per $1,000. Only 10 other states paid a lower ratio. Raimondo's office, along with other documents, confirmed the $13.1 million figure, which is a bit higher than the "about $12 million" cited by Caprio. When we asked Caprio for the source of the $50 million comment, he referred us to minutes from the April 24, 2013, meeting of the state Investment Commission. Stephen Nesbitt, chief executive officer of Cliffwater LLC, one of the state's management consultants, is cited as saying that with the inclusion of performance fund hedge fees, the state is paying an expense ratio of 0.58 percent. That would be $5.80 for every $1,000 invested. Because the fund had $7.78 billion on April 30, that would equal $45.1 million in annual fees being paid, Caprio said. That's a bit lower than his "about $50 million." But these numbers don't begin to tell the whole story. The year cited by Caprio touting his own performance occurred during the financial crisis, when the value of the state's pension fund was depressed. For that reason alone, investment fees (also known as management and performance fees) would be lower. (The expense was $13.1 million for 2010, but it was $20.3 million the previous year and $28.6 million the year before that. Caprio said the big 2010 reduction "was not because of market going down. My team moved over $2 billion out of active money managers who charged high fees to index funds that charge low fees.") Raimondo's office contends that such direct fees are actually lower under her current administration -- $12.7 million during the last fiscal year and $15.1 million the year before that. (Management fees cover the basic services for handling an account. They are calculated based on a percentage of what the fund is worth and paid whether the value of the fund has risen or fallen.) Yet it gets even more complicated. The direct management fees charged by traditional investments are only a small part of the actual cost of administering the state's portfolio. Other types of investments, such as those hedge funds, charge indirect fees, which are removed from the fund balance before it is reported, making them harder to compile. Hedge funds charge both an indirect management fee and an indirect performance fee, which is typically about 20 percent of the fund's profit, assessed annually. The total for the fees paid under Raimondo has tripled because the current treasurer, for the first time, has begun reporting both direct and indirect fees. It's one of only six states doing so, according to Cliffwater. How much are we talking about? In May, Raimondo's office released an accounting of all investment expenses for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2012. They totaled $46 million, including staff expenses; $32.5 million of that went for indirect fund expenses and $13.5 million for direct fees. How high were the indirect expenses during the year Caprio was paying out $13.1 million in direct expenses? That's hard to tease out because they haven't been reported, and few states do. The bottom line: Raimondo contends they were higher than Caprio stated. Caprio disagrees. We can’t determine who’s right because they weren’t reported in past years. Our ruling Frank Caprio said that since Gina Raimondo took office, investment fees on the state's pension portfolio "have gone up from about $12 million annually to about $50 million." State records show that, at first blush, the numbers were $13.1 million in 2010 and $46.0 million now. He's not on the money, but close. But it's not clear if Caprio has given a complete accounting of his expenses for fiscal 2010. Both Caprio and Raimondo say some data is unavailable for that year, so that element of truth remains unresolved. Because Caprio's comparison is partially accurate but lacks important details and elements of context, we rate it Half True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Frank Caprio	None	None	None	2013-06-02T00:01:00	2013-05-19	['None']
-pose-00842	"FitzGerald will work with the broad stakeholders in education to design and phase-in a program using all available resources to provide higher education scholarships to county residents."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/ohio/promises/fitz-o-meter/promise/874/offer-college-scholarships-to-county-residents/	None	fitz-o-meter	Ed FitzGerald	None	None	Offer college scholarships to county residents	2011-01-20T13:56:11	None	['None']
-pomt-03713	"We Really Do Have the Highest Corporate Tax Rate in the World."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2013/apr/17/tax-foundation/group-takes-senator-about-corporate-taxes/	Mid-April, despite the warmer weather, is a dreaded time for many Georgians. It’s the worst of allergy season. Pollen, go away! It’s also time to settle up with Uncle Sam. Monday was the deadline to file income taxes. Against that backdrop, PolitiFact Georgia thought it’d be worthwhile to examine an often-repeated claim about corporate taxes that again made the rounds as April 15 approached. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was recently on the HBO late-night program "Real Time with Bill Maher." The senator and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore were debating whether the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Moore: "We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, senator." Sanders: "No we do not." Moore: "Yes we do. Thirty-five percent. The Tax Foundation says the United States of America has the highest corporate tax rate." Sanders: "And who funds the National (sic) Tax Foundation?" Maher: "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" The Tax Foundation defended its research in a news release and an open letter to Sanders a few days later. "Yes, Sen. Sanders," the headline read, "We Really Do Have the Highest Corporate Tax Rate in the World." The foundation posted nearly the same message on Twitter. The foundation said that as of April 2012 the United States had the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. The U.S. rate is 35 percent, but many say it’s even higher (39 percent) once you include other factors. Japan previously laid claim to that title, the foundation and other news organizations said, but it lowered its rate last year by a few percentage points. The decrease varies, depending on the news source, but all now put Japan below the U.S.A. Here’s the foundation’s 2012 list of the top three nations with the highest corporate tax rates, excluding Japan: United States 39.1 France 34.4 Belgium 34.0 The foundation’s numbers include a weighed average of state corporate taxes. The Washington, D.C.-based, nonpartisan foundation celebrated its 75th anniversary last year. America’s high corporate tax rate was an issue during the 2012 presidential race. President Barack Obama proposed lowering the federal rate to 25 percent for manufacturers and to 28 percent for all other corporations. Republican nominee Mitt Romney wanted to lower the rate to 25 percent for all corporations. A major complaint about America’s tax system is it is too complicated. Examining corporate tax rates is complex. For example, Sanders said the U.S. may have the highest nominal tax rate, but it is not the highest effective tax rate. The effective tax rate takes into consideration deductions and exemptions. The foundation also discussed the effective tax rate in its letter to the senator. "Even when including all deductions and credits available to companies to lower their tax liabilities, the ‘effective’ tax rate of U.S. corporations is still among the very highest in the world. The most recent studies show a U.S. effective corporate tax rate of roughly 27 percent, compared to an average of 20 percent for other developed countries," the foundation wrote. A few larger corporations pay no net federal income tax at all, some research shows. PolitiFact Texas recently tackled the question when a Texas congressman said the U.S. had the highest corporate tax rate in the world in a voter’s guide. The congressman, Michael McCaul, used information from the Tax Foundation to support his claim. PolitiFact Texas, citing the various reports about effective tax rates, gave the claim a Mostly True. We asked Tax Foundation spokesman Richard Morrison whether there was any additional information or context that might be useful for our research. Morrison said the information McCaul used appeared to be up to date. To sum up, the Tax Foundation said the United States has the highest corporate taxes in the world. The organization did mention the debate about where the U.S. stands if you consider effective rates. Some say that context lowers America’s standing from Numero Uno, but not by much. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	The Tax Foundation	None	None	None	2013-04-17T00:00:00	2013-04-12	['None']
-pomt-14334	"This unit is the only one in the state that strives to implement the principles of Mother-Friendly care as outlined by the national Coalition for Improving Maternity Services Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2016/mar/27/coalition-save-memorial-hospital-birthing-center-p/memorial-not-alone-mother-friendly-births/	When Care New England announced its plan to eliminate some of Memorial Hospital’s services, including the obstetrics unit, it ignited an emotional debate about birthing in Rhode Island. The Health Department heard hours of testimony from mothers and nurses rallying around Memorial Hospital. But few voices have been stronger than those from the Coalition To Save Memorial Hospital Birthing Center. At the first hearing, held at Goff Junior High School in Pawtucket on March 13, Coalition leader Alana Bibeau, a sociology professor at the University of Rhode Island, praised the Memorial unit for its dedication to care for mothers. "This unit is the only one in the state that strives to implement the principles of Mother-Friendly care as outlined by the national Coalition for Improving Maternity Services Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative," Bibeau said in her remarks. We had never heard of the "Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative," but the title sounded official. Maybe it was the capital letters? We called Bibeau, and asked her for more information. What does it mean to be "Mother-Friendly?" Bibeau pointed us to the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services’ website. Here we found a list of 10 steps that hospitals, birth centers or home birth services can take to be more "mother-friendly." On this list are general recommendations such as allowing the mother to choose her own birth companions, and allowing her to walk around, eat and drink during labor. There are also more specific items regarding the use of IVs, membranes, and the use of analgesic or anesthetic drugs. "Birth is a normal physiological process, not a medical emergency," Bibeau said in a telephone interview. "Most hospitals view each woman as a potential candidate for surgery." All of the steps, she said, lead to the ultimate goal of natural birth, with little to no intervention by doctors. A woman should be able to identify a birth plan with her doctor and stick to it, she said. (Bibeau did acknowledge that birth can take some "very unexpected" turns, and there may be medical need to deviate from the steps). That all makes sense, but could Memorial Hospital really be the only one in the state striving toward these principles? We asked Victoria Macioce-Stumpf — a doula from Michigan who also serves as a chair of the coalition that supposedly provides this designation — if she could provide a list of all "Mother-Friendly" certified hospitals. She could not, she said, because no such list exists. The Coalition for Improving Maternity Services does not have a formal certification process for hospitals. Rather, she said facilities are only "highly encouraged" to take the steps outlined on its website. "There is a great deal of rigorous work as well as money" that must be spent to create a [certification] program of this type, she wrote in an email. "Something we have not as yet had the means or manpower to initiate." Rhode Island does not certify hospitals as "Mother-Friendly," either. Nor does the state endorse these principles for their birthing units. But "this is not to say, of course, that we don’t believe that there is merit to some of their commitments," said Joseph Wendelken, public information officer for the Rhode Island Department of Health. The Rhode Island Department of Health has licensed six hospitals for childbirth: Kent, Landmark, Newport, South County, Women & Infants and Memorial (for now). All of these facilities, Wendelken said, are "held to extremely high standards" set at the national level by The Joint Commission, a nonprofit organization that accredits hospitals. About 90 percent of Rhode Island babies are born at Care New England facilities, according to Angelleen Peters-Lewis, a chief nurse for the group. Women & Infants delivers on average 8,400 babies a year, Kent 1,200 babies, and Memorial less than 500, Peters-Lewis said. We also asked officials at Newport Hospital, South County Hospital, and Landmark Medical Center. Many had not heard of the "Mother-Friendly" standards, but they all agreed that the principles are practiced in their facilities. Jackie Toole, a staff RN at South County Hospital, said she follows these steps every day. Danika Wynn, the director of Landmark’s midwifery program, said the hospital "strives to build a maternity-care culture that mirrors Memorial’s," and in doing so, meets many of the The Coalition for Improving Maternity Services standards. Same goes for Denise Sullivan, the director of women’s health and newborn services at Newport Hospital. "We try to keep the patient in the middle of our circle," Sullivan said. "So we are trying to let the mother work with the health care team to get the kind of birth that she wants." Sullivan also pointed out that her hospital is "Baby-Friendly" certified, a UNICEF and World Health Organization distinction for taking steps to encourage breast feeding. Women & Infants is also "Baby-Friendly." Memorial Hospital has not attained that certification. We asked Bibeau about this, and she referred us to Kaeli Sutton, another leader of the coalition to save memorial hospital. "While other maternity institutions verbally state their philosophical commitment to the MFCI, the Coalition sees no credible evidence that they have committed the necessary time, financial resources, policy development and staff training necessary to claim true alignment with the Initiative," she wrote in an email. OUR RULING: Bibeau said Memorial Hospital’s birthing center is the only Rhode Island center that strives to accomplish the goals set out by the "Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative" from the national Coalition for Improving Maternity Services Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative. Bibeau said Memorial Hospital’s birthing center is the only Rhode Island center that strives to accomplish the goals set out by the "Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative" from the national Coalition for Improving Maternity Services Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative. Not only does the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services not review and certify facilities, but all of the other birthing centers in the state say these principles are standard practice at their hospitals. The Coalition to Save Memorial Hospital Birthing Center got back to us Friday. A spokeswoman said: "the Coalition sees no credible evidence that [other hospitals in Rhode Island] have committed the necessary time, financial resources, policy development and staff training necessary to claim true alignment with the Initiative." At the end of the week, the coalition changed its position from a statement of fact to an opinion about the other hospitals' "true alignment." We rate the original claim False.	None	Coalition To Save Memorial Hospital Birthing Center	None	None	None	2016-03-27T00:00:00	2016-03-13	['None']
-snes-04238	An Alabama state senator published an open letter saying that the state of Georgia shouldn't have been allowed to compete in the Olympics.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alabama-legislator-angry-that-state-of-georgia-allowed-in-olympics/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	Alabama Legislator Angry That “State of Georgia” Allowed in Olympics	15 August 2016	None	['Alabama', 'Georgia_(U.S._state)']
-goop-00215	Taylor Swift Scared Of ‘Cats’ Co-Star Ian McKellen?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-ian-mckellen-cats-movie/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Taylor Swift Scared Of ‘Cats’ Co-Star Ian McKellen?	12:17 pm, September 26, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-05767	Says "half the Americans don't pay any income taxes."	true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/feb/29/scott-garrett/congressman-scott-garrett-claims-half-all-american/	The deadline for filing one’s federal income tax return is fast approaching, but according to U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett, half of the nation won’t pay any money to the government. The Sussex County Republican claimed during a Feb. 15 interview on WOR-AM that half of all Americans don’t pay federal income taxes. After discussing the federal budget, Garrett cited that statistic when host John Gambling pointed out the economic turmoil unfolding in Greece. Garrett (R-5th Dist.) responded, "That’s the absurd situation they’ve got over there where the average person on the street relied so heavily on the government for his livelihood, for his well-being. We don’t want to be in that situation in this country, but we’re getting close to it, when half the Americans don’t pay any income taxes." PolitiFact New Jersey found that Garrett is right, according to research done by two nonpartisan groups. Both groups confirm that about half of all American households do not have to pay any federal income taxes. Our PolitiFact colleagues around the country have tackled similar statements a few times before and reached the same conclusion. First, let’s explain the data that supports Garrett’s claim. To back up the congressman’s point, Garrett spokesman Ben Veghte directed us to a July 2011 report from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. In that report, the center estimated that about 46 percent of "tax units" would pay no federal income tax for 2011 -- the most current estimate available. The center had estimated that 49.5 percent of tax units didn’t pay federal income taxes for 2010. A tax unit is an individual or married couple that either files a tax return or would have to file one if their income was high enough, Roberton Williams, a senior fellow with the center, said in an e-mail. In other words, a tax unit is roughly equivalent to a household, he said. Of the 46.4 percent of units not paying income taxes for 2011, about half was due to the fact that those units had no taxable income after subtracting the standard deduction and personal exemptions, Williams said. "The other half qualified for various exclusions, itemized deductions, special exemptions, preferential tax rates, and tax credits that wiped out any tax liability," Williams told us. That second group includes tax units benefiting from education and child credits. Now, let’s talk about the other group backing up Garrett’s statistic. In April 2011, the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan committee of Congress, released an analysis estimating that slightly more than 50 percent of all tax units would owe no federal income taxes for 2009. Of those tax units, about 22 percent would have a zero income tax liability and about 30 percent would actually get money back from the government, according to the committee. So, both groups support Garrett’s claim that roughly half of all American households pay no federal income taxes. Our ruling In a radio interview, Garrett claimed "half the Americans don’t pay any income taxes." That claim is backed up by research from two nonpartisan groups -- the Tax Policy Center and the Joint Committee on Taxation. Both groups have estimated that about half of all American households did not owe federal income taxes in recent years. We rate the statement True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Scott Garrett	None	None	None	2012-02-29T07:30:00	2012-02-15	['United_States']
-tron-03393	An Evil Sign in Dearborn, Michigan	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dearborn-sign/	None	religious	None	None	None	An Evil Sign in Dearborn, Michigan	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-03947	The modern policing system in the United States originated from patrols intended to corral escaped slaves.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in-the-united-states/	None	Crime	None	Brooke Binkowski	None	The Origins of Policing in the United States	26 September 2016	None	['United_States']
-pomt-10030	"The president campaigned against this type of legislation."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/mar/02/john-boehner/spending-bill-wasnt-candidate-obamas-type-boehner-/	Speaking on the House floor, Republican Leader John Boehner railed against a spending bill with some 9,000 earmarks, calling on President Obama to veto it and insist on one free of pet projects. "The president campaigned against this type of legislation, this number of earmarks," the Ohio Republican said on Feb. 25, "and I would hope that the president would veto this bill because Republicans in Congress will be here to uphold his veto of this piece of legislation." Several news organizations made even harsher claims. The New York Times , for example, reported that Obama would sign the bill, earmarks and all, "despite campaign promises to put an end to the practice." That's incorrect. Obama did not promise to end earmarking, only to "reform" it, and eliminate "screwy" or wasteful earmarks. Boehner, however, was more careful than the New York Times. His claim that Obama "campaigned against this type of legislation" could be read a number of ways. Boehner's spokesman, Michael Steel, said Boehner meant that Obama had broken his campaign pledges, referenced on the White House Web site , to "slash earmarks to no greater than 1994 levels and ensure all spending decisions are open to the public." That's a reasonable interpretation of what Boehner said. Obama did indeed make those pledges during the campaign. Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, pledged to eliminate earmarks and "veto every earmark pork-barrel bill," and Obama, though stopping short of that, did pledge to get tough on them. For example, here's Obama in the first presidential debate : "Absolutely, we need earmark reform. And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely." On March 10, 2008, Obama said in a statement : "We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress' seniority, rather than the merit of the project. We can no longer accept an earmarks process that has become so complicated to navigate that a municipality or nonprofit group has to hire high-priced D.C. lobbyists to do it. And we can no longer accept an earmarks process in which many of the projects being funded fail to address the real needs of our country." And here he is on Feb. 21, 2008 : "I have been consistently in favor of more disclosure around earmarks. Now, keep in mind a lot of these are worthy projects in our states, and I have actively pursued projects that I think are important. But I want to make sure that they're not done in the dark of night, that they're not done in committee, that everybody stands up and says this is the kind of spending that I think is important." The closest he came to saying he would eliminate earmarks, as far as we could find, was when he said, in the third presidential debate , "Earmarks account for 0.5 percent of the total federal budget. There's no doubt that the system needs reform and there are a lot of screwy things that we end up spending money on, and they need to be eliminated. But it's not going to solve the problem." (Given his other campaign statements on earmarks, it's clear he meant "screwy," or wasteful, earmarks should be eliminated, not all earmarks.) So the question is, is the omnibus spending bill the "type of legislation" that Obama campaigned against with respect to earmarks? That is, did it lack transparency, include earmarks based on a congressman's seniority and ones that are wasteful? And was the amount more than the 1994 level of $7.8 billion a year? The answer to most of those questions is largely yes, said Keith Ashdown, investigator for Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington watchdog group. Ashdown said the earmarking process for the omnibus bill was not any more transparent than it was when Obama was campaigning. He said seven of the top 10 earmark recipients in the Senate are on the Appropriations Committee, suggesting that access was more important than merit when it came to deciding what projects would get earmarks. And though the total cost of the earmarks in the bill, $7.7 billion, is slightly less than the 1994 level, there were another $6.6 billion in earmarks in three previous spending bills for this year that Congress passed last year. Are there wasteful projects in the bill? Ashdown said he hasn't had time to research that. "There likely is, but I just don't know," he said. He cautioned against leaping to conclusions about projects that "sound goofy." For example, some critics have mocked a $1 million earmark to control Mormon crickets in Utah — but Ashdown said the Mormon cricket, a type of katydid, is a very serious threat to agriculture. The White House has argued that Obama should not be held responsible for the earmarking process in this legislative package — which is nine of the 12 spending bills for the current budget year rolled into one — because it is "last year's business." And there's some truth to that. These are bills that Congress was supposed to pass last year. But that doesn't nullify Boehner's point that the bill is — in featuring earmarks added by senior members of Congress in a process that lacked transparency and pushed earmark spending for the year well over $7.8 billion — the "type of legislation" Obama campaigned against. We find Boehner's claim to be True.	None	John Boehner	None	None	None	2009-03-02T19:08:08	2009-02-25	['None']
-hoer-00219	Flu Remedy - Onions Absorb Viruses and Bacteria From a Room	misleading recommendations	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/onions-flu-remedy.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Flu Remedy Myth - Onions Absorb Viruses and Bacteria From a Room	February 17, 2011	None	['None']
-tron-00870	Free Windows 10 Upgrade Email	scam!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/free-windows-10-upgrade-email/	None	computers	None	None	None	Free Windows 10 Upgrade Email	Sep 11, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06261	Says Mitt Romney flip-flopped on abortion.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/nov/28/democratic-national-committee/dnc-ad-says-mitt-romney-flip-flopped-abortion/	On Nov. 28, 2011, the Democratic National Committee released two videos designed to paint Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as a serial flip-flopper. The shorter, 30-second version gives a taste of the attack, specifically citing abortion and health care, and directs viewers to a website with a four-minute version that offers alleged flip-flops on a variety of other issues. For this item, we’ll check one of the two claims from the 30-second version -- whether Romney has changed his position on abortion. We'll look at other aspects of the ad in separate items. Romney, unlike the other GOP contenders, has attracted early attention from the re-election campaign of President Barack Obama, largely due to Romney’s status as the nominal frontrunner in the GOP primary. But Romney has faced years of accusations about being a flip-flopper, most recently in a television ad by one of his primary rivals, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. We checked Huntsman’s abortion-related charges from that ad, so we’ll recap them here. First, let’s look at some of the things Romney said earlier in his career about abortion, when he was waging a losing bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts and winning the governorship a few years later. Here are two of the clearest statements of his position. • In a debate during his 1994 race against Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, Romney said, "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country." Referring to the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in every state, Romney added, "I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, it should be sustained and supported. And I sustain and support that law and support the right of a woman to make that choice." • In his 2002 campaign for governor, Romney said during a debate, "I will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose and am devoted and dedicated to honoring my word in that regard." We believe that these two comments -- made in highly public forums and eight years apart -- represent pretty solid evidence that Romney was an abortion-rights supporter during that phase of his political career. What about his views today? The "issues" portion of his website doesn’t list abortion, but Romney wrote a June 18, 2011, op-ed in the conservative National Review that lays out his abortion views pretty clearly. It was written after he risked alienating anti-abortion activists by declining to sign a pledge offered by the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group. "I am pro-life and believe that abortion should be limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. I support the reversal of Roe v. Wade, because it is bad law and bad medicine. Roe was a misguided ruling that was a result of a small group of activist federal judges legislating from the bench. I support the Hyde Amendment, which broadly bars the use of federal funds for abortions. And as president, I will support efforts to prohibit federal funding for any organization like Planned Parenthood, which primarily performs abortions or offers abortion-related services. "I will reinstate the Mexico City Policy to ensure that nongovernmental organizations that receive funding from America refrain from performing or promoting abortion services as a method of family planning, in other countries. This includes ending American funding for any United Nations or other foreign assistance program that promotes or performs abortions on women around the world. "I will advocate for and support a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion. And perhaps most importantly, I will only appoint judges who adhere to the Constitution and the laws as they are written, not as they want them to be written." Our ruling Abortion opponents may disagree on exactly where on the anti-abortion spectrum Romney falls, and questions have been raised about how fully and quickly Romney made his ideological transition after the event he cites as the spark -- a meeting with a Harvard stem-cell researcher in 2004. Still, we believe these issues are outside the scope of the claim in the DNC ad. Romney’s views on abortion are vastly different today than what he expressed in the 1994 and 2002 debates. The DNC’s claim that Mitt Romney flip-flopped on abortion rates a True.	None	Democratic National Committee	None	None	None	2011-11-28T13:59:12	2011-11-28	['None']
-pomt-08588	"If you look at the application for a security clearance, I have a clearance that even the president of the United States cannot obtain because of my background."	pants on fire!	/florida/statements/2010/sep/24/allen-west/allen-west-says-he-has-clearance-even-president-un/	During a candidate forum sponsored by the Pompano, Fla., Civic Association on Sept. 21, 2010, Allen West -- a retired Army lieutenant colonel running as the Republican nominee against Democratic Rep. Ron Klein -- made a rather striking claim. West was responding to a question about tax liens that had allegedly been placed against him -- an issue that had already inspired a hard-hitting ad by Klein. According to a video made by a Democratic Party operative who trails West at all of his appearances, the candidate told the audience, "I had a Top Secret/Security Compartmented Information classification, that is the highest you can have in the United States Army. You don’t get a security classification like that if you have financial issues like that. I still retain a Secret security clearance. And I tell you, if you look at the application for a security clearance, I have a clearance that even the president of the United States cannot obtain because of my background." We've already addressed questions about the lien (we rated Klein's ad Mostly True). But we wondered whether it was really possible for someone -- anyone -- to have a higher security clearance than the president. So we asked a few experts. First, some background on security clearances. There are three levels, in ascending order: Confidential, Secret and Top Secret. There are many subcategories, but the only one that is relevant here is an elite category of Top Secret called Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented information, or TS/SCI. It is for people who have Top Secret clearances but who may, in order to do their jobs, need to know certain information that is especially sensitive, such as sources and methods of intelligence-gathering. A TS/SCI clearance allows them to know the information they need, but it is not a blanket clearance for all extremely sensitive information. That's why it's called "compartmented." West mentioned TS/SCI in his comments at the Pompano Civic Association, though he got the name slightly wrong, calling it "Top Secret/Security Compartmented Information." To be picky, West would have had a TS/SCI clearance, rather than "classification" -- people have clearances, documents have classifications. We inquired with the Pentagon about his clearance but weren't able to get an answer Friday night. Experts we spoke to said that it was plausible for someone like West to have a TS/SCI clearance, so for the purposes of this fact-check, we'll assume he had that level. As you'll see below, his actual level wouldn't change our conclusion. Our experts also said that it's plausible that West would still have a Secret clearance today. Since retired officers can be called back to duty, and because many of them do consulting work for the military or for companies that work with the military, it's common for retired officers to maintain a security clearance. But what about him having "a clearance that even the president of the United States cannot obtain"? We see at least two ways to look at this claim. The first is that West is saying that he had a higher security clearance than someone occupying the office of president of the United States. Even if you assume that he was referring to the period in which West held a TS/SCI, our experts say he's wrong. "The president is the one who established the security clearance system by executive order," said Steven Aftergood, a national security and intelligence specialist with the Federation of American Scientists. "Therefore it is nonsensical to speak of clearances higher than what the president has. As head of the executive branch and commander in chief of the armed forces, there is no information in government that could be denied to the president for security reasons if he determined he needed access to that information." John Pike, the director of globalsecurity.org, agreed. "This is a silly statement," Pike said. "The only clearance the president needs is the mandate of the people." The statement is even more questionable if West was actually referring to what he says is his current clearance -- Secret. "A Secret security clearance is the most commonly held security clearance," Aftergood said. "Almost anyone without a criminal record or serious financial difficulties can get such a clearance if their employment requires it." There's one more possible interpretation, and when we reached the West campaign, they said this is indeed what the candidate meant at the forum. As a career military officer, West went through a rigorous screening and investigatory process in order to receive his TS/SCI clearance. President Barack Obama got his authority by virtue of a popular vote. There is no security process required before one becomes president. If, in theory, Obama was not president and decided to apply for a security clearance, there's no guarantee he'd qualify for one. He'd have to go through a painstaking process, and investigators may raise any number of questions. "The fact that (Obama) admitted to cocaine use, travel to unauthorized countries years before, and his associations with (black nationalist) Louis Farrakhan and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he probably would not have been granted a security clearance," said Josh Grodin, West's campaign manager. This argument does at least have a grain of validity to it. But we see some problems with it. During the presidential campaign, a similar claim was floated by some Obama opponents. One chain e-mail alleged that "if Barack Obama would apply for a job with the FBI or with the Secret Service, he would be disqualified because of his past associations with William Ayers, a known (and unrepentant) terrorist." We ruled it False. Pike said that the one thing in Obama's background that could raise a flag for someone doing a security check is "his unaccompanied foreign travel for an extended period of time." Still, he added, "the tender age at which Obama traveled abroad would almost certainly render this irrelevant, particularly in light of everything else he has done." To the extent that West has already been cleared by national-security vetters, and Obama has not, we think West may have a small point. Still, even using this logic, West oversteps when he says that his own clearance is one "that even the president of the United States cannot obtain." We don't believe the evidence suggests that it's an open-and-shut case that Obama would be denied the kind of security clearance West had. And that's the most plausible interpretation of West's comment. The other interpretation -- that West's clearance, either today or in the past -- was higher than any president's is ridiculously false. The president has the highest security clearance in the land. We rate West's claim Pants on Fire.	None	Allen West	None	None	None	2010-09-24T18:28:50	2010-09-21	['United_States']
-snes-05817	An 8-year-old Yemeni girl was forced to marry a 40-year-old man and then died of vaginal injuries on their wedding night.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wife-and-death/	None	Uncategorized	None	David Mikkelson	None	8-Year-Old Yemeni Child Bride Dies of Internal Injuries	11 September 2013	None	['Yemen']
-pomt-09795	Health insurance companies pay CEOs $24 million a year	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/16/health-care-america-now/health-care-advocacy-group-blasts-insurers-ceo-pay/	Supporters of health care reform have portrayed insurance company CEOs as overpaid villains. In a recent television ad, Health Care for America Now, a group supporting the Democrats' health care reform bill, takes direct aim at the CEOs. The group's ad mockingly explains "how to get rich" by showing a "book" written "by America's health insurance companies." Chapter 2 reads, "Pay your CEO $24,000,000 a year." A news release issued by HCAN attributed the assertion to the entry for Ronald A. Williams, CEO of insurance giant Aetna, in the 2008 Forbes magazine executive compensation survey. We checked Forbes , which compiles the total compensation from public filings of salaries and stock options, and the $24 million figure does indeed jibe with the entry the group cited. But we wondered whether it was fair to use Williams as an example of health insurance CEOs. So we looked through the magazine's full rankings for a bit more context. One thing to note up front is that HCAN used Forbes ' 2008 survey, even though the 2009 survey is available. Oddly, if the group had used the more recent numbers, Williams' compensation would actually have been higher: In the 2009 Forbes survey, Williams' compensation was listed as $38.125 million. That said, Williams' pay package was easily the highest in the health insurance sector, according to Forbes . Here are seven health insurance CEOs who made the 2009 Forbes list. (All lead publicly traded companies, which have more stringent disclosure requirements than private firms.) -- 22nd place among all CEOs: Ronald A. Williams, Aetna, $38.125 million -- 135th place: H. Edward Hanway, Cigna, $10.27 million -- 269th place: Stephen J. Hemsley, UnitedHealth Group, $5.035 million -- 306th place: Angela F. Braly, WellPoint, $4.07 million -- 359th place: Robert B. Pollock, Assurant, $3.14 million -- 387th place: Allen F. Wise, Coventry Health Care, $2.6 million -- 399th place: Michael B. McCallister, Humana, $2.39 million The average for the other six executives above was $3.93 million — almost one-tenth of what Williams was paid. So it's clear that HCAN has chosen the highest-paid CEO for its purposes. We should note that executive compensation is notoriously complicated to calculate, since it often includes a mix of salary, benefits, deferred compensation and stock options. Indeed, different sources reported the same CEO pay package differently. For instance, the current listing on Yahoo! Finance has Williams' salary at $3.04 million with no stock options — a number that would have made HCAN's ad highly misleading. However, for the sake of consistency, we will stick with the Forbes methodology. We won't venture an opinion on whether these CEOs' salaries are merited, but we did talk to one expert who provided some cross-industry context: Graef Crystal, a veteran consultant and analyst on executive compensation who is also a columnist for Bloomberg News. In a recent column inspired by congressional Democrats' denunciations of the health insurance sector, Crystal offered some calculations designed to gauge whether CEOs in the health insurance sector were overpaid or underpaid compared to executives in other sectors. Crystal's math is complicated, but the bottom line is that when he looked at compensation for the five biggest health insurers' CEOs in 2007 and 2008, Williams' pay package was the only one of that group that in both years was bigger than the typical compensation package for CEOs throughout all the industries Crystal studied. Most of the other health insurance CEOs were paid 15 percent to 81 percent below the typical level calculated by Crystal. In other words, Williams was the one health insurance CEO who has consistently been paid on the highest end of the scale. The ad leaves viewers with the impression that $24-million is a typical compensation for a health insurer's CEO. But in fact, it is the highest example and the average of the others is considerably lower — just under $4 million. So HCAN has certainly cherry-picked the most dramatic number. We find the claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Health Care for America Now	None	None	None	2009-09-16T18:56:49	2009-09-15	['None']
-pomt-00594	The runnerup to Caitlyn Jenner for ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Courage Award was "Army veteran Noah Galloway, who lost an arm and leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2015/jun/04/facebook-posts/no-iraq-veteran-wasnt-runnerup-caitlyn-jenner-espn/	On Monday, Vanity Fair introduced the world to Caitlyn Jenner. That same day, ESPN announced it would honor Jenner, the transgender gold medal-winning Olympian formerly named Bruce, with the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. The presentation is scheduled for July 15 at ESPN’s awards show, The ESPYs. "Bruce has received many accolades over the years for being one of the greatest Olympians of our time but The ESPYS are honored to celebrate Bruce becoming Caitlyn," said ESPN executive producer Maura Mandt. "She has shown the courage to embrace a truth that had been hidden for years, and to embark on a journey that may not only give comfort to those facing similar circumstances, but can also help to educate people on the challenges that the transgender community faces." That didn’t sit well with many people, who thought there were more deserving winners. Some thought Lauren Hill, a 19-year-old college basketball player who died of cancer, should have won. A Facebook meme, meanwhile, said the runnerup was an Iraq war veteran who lost his arm and leg defending the United States. When last we looked, it had been shared more than 100,000 times. Here it is: "Caitlyn Jenner won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award," it reads. "The runner-up was this guy: Army veteran Noah Galloway, who lost an arm and leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq, and now competes in Crossfit events, runs marathons and competed in the 58-hour Death Race." People are obviously free to debate who should have been selected, whether it’s Galloway, Hill, Jenner or any number of athletes. But the idea that Galloway was runnerup to Jenner is bunk. In a statement provided to MTV News, ESPN said there was no runnerup. There is "no such thing as a runnerup for the three major awards," a spokesman told MTV, referring to the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, the Pat Tillman Award for Service and the Jimmy V Perseverance Award. ESPN put out a follow-up statement on the Arthur Ashe Courage Award two days after announcing Jenner as the recipient. It reads: "The Arthur Ashe Courage Award is meant to honor individuals whose contributions transcend sports through courageous action. Sometimes that courage is demonstrated over the course of a lifetime and sometimes it is demonstrated in a single act that shines a light on an important contemporary issue. At all times, there are many worthy candidates. This year, we are proud to honor Caitlyn Jenner embracing her identity and doing so in a public way to help move forward a constructive dialogue about progress and acceptance." Several websites, from Snopes, to Deadspin to the Washington Post, have reached the same conclusion as PunditFact: Galloway is a real person, but this runnerup story is bogus. The claim rates Pants on Fire.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2015-06-04T14:59:31	2015-06-02	['Iraq']
-farg-00193	“We’ve achieved a historic increase in defense spending.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/07/factchecking-trumps-rally-ohio/	None	the-factcheck-wire	FactCheck.org	Eugene Kiely	['defense spending']	FactChecking Trump’s Rally in Ohio	July 27, 2017	2017-07-27 23:26:38 UTC	['None']
-pomt-12217	Says Paul Ryan "has not had a public town hall within the district for over 600 days."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/jul/21/randy-bryce/challenger-target-claim-paul-ryan-has-gone-600-day/	One of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s 2018 challengers has risen to prominence with a flurry of media interviews, a viral campaign launch video and a quick influx of small-dollar donations. In one of those interviews, Democrat Randy Bryce claimed Ryan, a Republican from Janesville, doesn’t face his constituents. Bryce, an ironworker, appeared July 9, 2017, on WISN-TV’s "Upfront with Mike Gousha," where he claimed "Paul Ryan has not had a public town hall within the district for over 600 days." With Republicans facing feisty constituents at town hall meetings across the country, has Ryan really not held such a meeting in more than 600 days? What makes a town hall? Just what is a town hall meeting? The answer in the digital age can vary. A look through Ryan’s U.S. House website indicates that the last public, in-person town hall meeting he held was on Oct. 6, 2015, shortly before he was elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Thus, Ryan has gone more than 650 days without holding a similar town hall meeting. That’s where the different definitions come in. David Keith, a spokesman for Bryce, cited a reference.com Q&A that defines a town hall as an informal, in-person meeting between citizens and public figures. "Many modern town halls are held in locations that are accessible to the public and can accommodate large crowds," the site reads. Historically, town halls are in-person, informal events where people can ask public officials unscripted questions. The Merriam-Webster and Oxford dictionaries’ definitions and usage examples both have a physical connotation. In recent years, Ryan has opted for office hours, telephone town halls and employee town halls -- those done at workplaces. Indeed, the information cited by Bryce from reference.com relies in part on the nonpartisan Congress Management Foundation, which has been looking into the effects of in-person, online and telephone town halls. The foundation conducts research into the evolving methods to host town halls and their comparative effectiveness. Ryan spokesman Ian Martorana said the speaker considers telephone and employee town halls to be forms of public town hall meetings and said telephone town halls make up a significant portion of Ryan’s interactions with constituents. Martorana said they conduct telephone town halls by calling "every household with a registered voter in the pertinent counties whose contact information we have and who reside in Wisconsin's First District." He added: "The calls are not screened, and they are answered in the order they are received." Employee town halls are another matter. These are typically hosted by private businesses where the audience is usually pre-selected, and so are their questions. The public is largely barred from these events, and reporters are usually unable to ask questions. Ryan recently held two employee town halls while Congress was on break for the Fourth of July holiday, visiting businesses in Oak Creek and Racine. Audience members offered Ryan a series of friendly questions. "If you had to make a decision between attending an October regular season Packers game or a Brewers World Series game, which one?" one person asked, according to a CBS news article. The day after he visited those businesses, Ryan took questions from reporters at the state Capitol where he said he was looking for "creative ways" to interact with constituents, instead of traditional town hall meetings. Ryan also said he was thinking of safety, trying to avoid a "screaming fest" from protesters bused into his district and that having reporters at events limits the conversation. "I find when you guys are there, people tend to clam up," Ryan told reporters on July 7, 2017. Ryan did hold a number of campaign events the day before his 2016 primary election that he billed as town halls -- though they did not match the framework of his last in-person listening session. Reports and a video from the event indicate that it was much more in keeping with the employee town halls meetings. And as campaign events, they had a different purpose than a traditional town hall. Past criticism Ryan has been criticized in the past for not being accessible to his constituents. In February 2017, the left-leaning group Forward Kenosha organized a mock town hall at a union hall where constituents posed questions to an empty chair. In May, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison) held a town hall in Ryan’s district. Martorana said Ryan’s office has issued 60,000 responses this year to constituents who have contacted the office by phone, email, fax or letter. He added that recent telephone town halls reached more than 13,000 constituents in Walworth, Rock, Kenosha and Racine counties. In contrast, U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner ( R-Wis.), the dean of the state’s congressional delegation, has not shied away from open town halls, sometimes facing raucous crowds. Sensenbrenner has held more than 80 public town halls so far in 2017, according to the calendar on his website. Our rating Bryce said "Paul Ryan has not had a public town hall within the district for over 600 days." Bryce’s claim is broad and doesn’t account for the emerging ways people can communicate with public officials, but he’s mostly on target in saying Ryan hasn’t held a traditional town hall in almost two years. We rate his claim Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Randy Bryce	None	None	None	2017-07-21T05:00:00	2017-07-09	['None']
-goop-02360	Gwen Stefani Dropped “Prenup Bombshell” On Blake Shelton?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/gwen-stefani-prenup-blake-shelton-prenuptial-agreement/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Gwen Stefani Dropped “Prenup Bombshell” On Blake Shelton?	4:42 pm, October 11, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-01580	"Federal investigators found a company that (David Perdue) ran discriminated against women -- paid them less than men for the same work."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2014/sep/09/emilys-list/emilys-list-attack-perdues-former/	EMILY’s List, a national group advocating for Democratic women candidates, has an attack ad out in Georgia’s closely watched U.S. Senate race between David Perdue, a Republican businessman, and Michelle Nunn, a Democrat and nonprofit executive. The ad focuses on a pay discrimination lawsuit filed by female managers at Dollar General while Perdue was CEO of the discount retailer. The lawsuit was settled several years later -- and after Perdue left the company -- for $18.75 million. The ad opens with a woman penning a letter to Perdue, explaining why he won’t be getting her vote. "Federal investigators found a company that you ran discriminated against women -- paid them less than men for the same work," the woman states. We decided that was a claim worth investigating. The ad, which is paid for by EMILY’s List’s WOMEN VOTE!, focuses on a 2006 lawsuit that was later expanded to cover thousands of female store managers at Dollar General. The lawsuit accused the chain of paying male managers more than females performing the same job, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963. At the time, Dollar General had about 8,000 stores and about 70,000 employees. Perdue, who was Dollar General CEO from April 2003 to July 2007, was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Dollar General did not acknowledge any liability or wrongdoing. But the settlement agreement promised some policy changes, something legal experts say is fairly routine. The ad claim is based on part of the lawsuit record -- specifically, a letter from an area director for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Jackson, Miss. to a complaining female manager. The February 2008 letter states that "available evidence establishes reasonable cause to believe" that female store managers in the district where the woman worked "were discriminated against" in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, and the Equal Pay Act. The EEOC letter goes on to say that Dollar General’s explanation for the difference in pay "is not supported by the evidence nor is it sufficient to rebut the sex-based inference established by pay differentials." Sworn statements from several female Dollar General managers said the discounter had a pay system that perpetuated stereotypes for judging men and women on their pay, performance and salary needs. Derrick Dickey, spokesman for the Perdue campaign, told us that Dollar General, from the first legal filings to the final settlement, "always maintained that it was in full compliance with the Equal Pay Act." "Years after David left, the company made a prudent decision to allow its liability insurer to cover the mediated amount instead of continue the lengthy and expensive legal process," Dickey said. We asked Charlotte Alexander and Jaime Dodge, two employment law experts, to review documents filed in the lawsuit and weigh in on several issues, including the accuracy of the ad. ----------------------------- "Available evidence establishes reasonable cause to believe that (you) and other female managers in District #374 were discriminated against in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended and the Equal Pay Act as they generally were paid less than similarly situated managers performing duties requiring equal skill, effort and responsibility." -- excerpt from the EEOC statement -------------------------- Alexander, a Harvard Law School graduate and assistant professor of legal studies at Georgia State University, said the claim in the ad "on its face is true." "It seems to track the EEOC letter," she said. That letter "could have been damaging" at trial, but would not have meant an "automatic win" for the female managers, Alexander said. A judge and jury would not be bound to follow the EEOC’s findings, she said. "They would have to make their own determination from the ground up." Alexander said the lawsuit, filed against Dollar General parent company Dolgencorp, Inc., was "pretty significant, "with 2,000 female managers signing on as plaintiffs and more than 20,000 ultimately eligible to be part of the settlement agreement. Alexander said she does not believe $18.75 million would be a "nuisance settlement." (Those are settlements in cases, often without merit, that are reached just to avoid continuing and costly legal bills.) Dodge, a Harvard graduate, former member of the Harvard Law faculty and an assistant professor at UGA’s School of Law, strongly disagreed. She said there is "strong support" for the Perdue camp’s claim that Dollar General "simply settled to avoid litigation costs." The claims raised by the female managers at Dollar General are substantially similar, though not identical, to those raised in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, she said. Wal-Mart refused to settle, but it took nearly a decade of litigation all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court agreed with Wal-Mart that a nationwide class action for pay discrimination could not be fairly litigated, Dodge said. "Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly here, the court found that the idea of implicit bias against women in the retail workplace was not supported by any reliable scientific evidence presented in court," she said. As for the settlement amount, plaintiffs' lawyers were allowed to seek up to $6.25 million, and then the named plaintiffs each had the opportunity to receive $10,000 each (and $5,000 for others), Dodge said. The class of female managers may have received less than $1,000 per person on average, Dodge said. "That number says to me, either the pay gap was really small or the plaintiffs' had substantial doubts about the merits of their case, such that they settled for a very low percentage of the alleged damages. So, the settlement number does suggest that this was a weak case, in one way or another," she said. In summary: The ad is based on a letter from an EEOC area manager in MIssissippi, which says there was reasonable cause to believe female managers in at least one district were discriminated against in pay. The case never went to trial. The company settled out of court without admitting guilt. The statement is accurate on its face, but needs further clarification. We rate it as Mostly True.	None	EMILY's List	None	None	None	2014-09-09T00:00:00	2014-09-01	['None']
-hoer-00488	'Mosque to Have Speakers That Can be Heard 15 Miles Away'	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/mosque-speakers-heard-15-miles-fake-news.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	FAKE-NEWS: 'Mosque to Have Speakers That Can be Heard 15 Miles Away'	May 18, 2015	None	['None']
-hoer-00364	'Facebook Privacy Notice'	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/bogus-facebook-privacy-notice.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Completely Pointless and Misleading 'Facebook Privacy Notice'	6th June 2012	None	['None']
-tron-02196	David Hogg Graduated in 2015, Didn’t Attend Parkland High School	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/david-hogg-graduated-in-2015-didnt-attend-parkland-high-school/	None	mass-shootings	None	None	['2nd amendment', 'conspiracy', 'mass shooting', 'schools']	David Hogg Graduated in 2015, Didn’t Attend Parkland High School	Mar 28, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-12797	Says Bill Gates tweeted, "I think Donald Trump will go down to history as one of the greatest presidents, just like Reagan."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/feb/15/blog-posting/bill-gates-did-not-compare-donald-trump-ronald-rea/	A host of websites known for circulating dubious reports say that software magnate and philanthropist Bill Gates compared President Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan, but there’s no evidence that ever happened. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com In the last few weeks, multiple outlets shared a fake tweet allegedly from Gates making the claim, "After 17 minuts (sic) phone call with President Trump, I think he will go down as one of the greatest presidents just like Reagan." The tweet, shown above, is dated Jan. 22, 2017. Facebook flagged an example from Feb. 4, 2017, as part of its efforts to winnow fake news from its users’ news feeds. It’s difficult to say where the item originated, but it’s now widespread, having been reposted as recently as Valentine’s Day. Considering the dodgy grammar and spelling, the tweet itself likely came from a website allowing people to create fake tweets featuring real accounts. It’s not all that difficult to find one. It’s also easy to see that Gates didn’t send the tweet. While he has more than 33 million followers, Gates isn’t nearly as prolific a thumb-masher as Trump. The only tweet Gates appears to have sent on Jan. 22 was to congratulate former Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes for being elected chairman of the Stanford University Board of Trustees. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com The Internet Archive doesn’t show that he tweeted anything else that day, so it doesn’t appear Gates mentioned Trump and then deleted it. He doesn’t appear to have ever tweeted about Trump at all, although he has been somewhat critical of Trump in the past. Gates did talk with Trump prior to his inauguration and did compare the real estate tycoon to a president — but it was John F. Kennedy, not Reagan. "A lot of his message has been about where he sees things not as good as he'd like," Gates said on CNBC on Dec. 13, 2016, about a phone call he had with Trump. "But in the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that, I think that whether it's education or stopping epidemics, other health breakthroughs, finishing polio, and in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that (Trump's) administration is going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and have American leadership through innovation, be one of the things that he gets behind." Gates met with the then-president-elect face-to-face in New York’s Trump Tower later that day for about an hour. "It was a good time," Gates said afterward. "We had a good conversation about innovation, how it can help in health, education, the impact of foreign aid and energy, and a wide-ranging conversation about power of innovation." But that tweet? Despite what scads of disreputable websites report, it never happened. We rate this claim Pants On Fire! Editor's note: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports PolitiFact's initiative to fact-check claims about global health and development. You can read more about that project here. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/65d5c7bd-40b4-480c-9e9a-db693cfec0b3	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-02-15T14:38:33	2017-02-04	['Ronald_Reagan', 'Donald_Trump', 'Bill_Gates']
-pomt-02376	Says President Barack Obama told a room of students, "Children, every time I clap my hands together, a child in America dies from gun violence," and then a child told him he could solve the problem by not clapping any more.	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/mar/17/chain-email/chain-email-says-child-upbraided-barack-obama-clap/	A reader recently sent us a chain email that seemed hard to believe. Accompanied by a photograph of President Barack Obama conversing with a classroom of students, the chain email included the following text: "Barack Obama, at a recent rural elementary school assembly in South Carolina, asked the audience for total quiet. Then, in the silence, he started to slowly clap his hands once every few seconds, holding the audience in total silence. Then he said into the microphone, 'Children, every time I clap my hands together, a child in America dies from gun violence.' Then, little Darrell, with a proud South Carolina drawl, pierced the quiet and said, ‘Well, dumb a--, stop clappin’!’" The reader wanted to know: Did this really happen? We didn’t hear back from the White House, but we couldn’t find any instance of such an exchange in transcripts listed on the White House website or in the Nexis news database. A Google search turned up many variations of this claim repeated in the conservative blogosphere, but none from an independent news source. Snopes.com, the website that looks into urban legends, has also seen this chain email. Back in 2008, when Obama wasn’t even president yet, an email circulated that was essentially the same, but which involved a "little feller in East Texas" named Richard Earl. Even earlier, in September 2007, Snopes found one aimed at Hillary Clinton, who was then running against Obama in the Democratic presidential primary. This time, the episode supposedly took place in North Florida, with an unnamed "young voice with a proud southern accent" saying, "Well, just stop clappin’, ya evil b----!" It’s possible that this joke is very old indeed, but Snopes tracked the inspiration for it at least as far back as a 2005 video released by the group "Make Poverty History." The video, titled "Click," shows a variety of celebrities -- including Bono of U2, Brad Pitt and George Clooney -- snapping their fingers every three seconds. The narrator, Liam Neeson, explains that a child dies unnecessarily due to extreme poverty every three seconds. By the next year, 2006, Snopes documented an email similar to the Obama email, this one with Bono the target. In this version, it’s a voice with a "thick Scottish brogue" that tells Bono, "Well stop ----ing doing it then!!" This makes it clear that the episode is a joke rather than an actual event involving Obama. Our ruling A chain email said President Obama told a room of students, "Children, every time I clap my hands together, a child in America dies from gun violence." A child then purportedly told Obama he could solve the problem by not clapping anymore. We failed to find any evidence that this happened to Obama, and the existence of earlier emails making fun of Hillary Clinton and Bono make clear that this is a joke being passed off falsely as a real anecdote. We rate the claim Pants on Fire.	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2014-03-17T14:41:56	2014-03-17	['United_States', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-15323	"Sen. Rubio’s (tax plan) would cut taxes for households making around $3 million a year by almost $240,000, which is way more than three times the earnings of a typical family."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/16/hillary-clinton/would-rubios-tax-plan-mean-big-break-millionaires/	Hillary Clinton outlined her economic vision in detail for the first time during her presidential campaign, calling for a "growth and fairness" economy in a speech at the New School in Manhattan on July 13, 2015. She also lambasted a select group Republican presidential candidates for their purportedly out-of-touch approach toward the working class. Among the targets were Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Clinton singled out Rubio’s proposed tax plan: "Another priority must be reforming our tax code. Now, we hear Republican candidates talk a lot about tax reform. But take a good look at their plans. Sen. Rubio's would cut taxes for households making around $3 million a year by almost $240,000, which is way more than three times the earnings of a typical family." We decided to fact-check the somewhat intricate claim. Rubio’s plan Clinton’s campaign directed us to a blog post from the Tax Policy Center, an independent think tank that analyzes tax policy. The article concerns Rubio’s plan in general, but the pertinent part reads, "Those in the top 0.1 percent, who make $3.3 million and up, would be in line for an average tax cut of $240,000 — a boost in after-tax income of 3.8 percent." Is $240,000 more than "three times" the earning power of a typical family? Her campaign pointed us to U.S. Census Bureau data that showed median household income as $53,046 for the period 2009 to 2013. So those numbers back up Clinton’s statement. But there is one minor complication: The article from the Tax Policy Center is based on an analysis of Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s 2013 plan, not Rubio’s plan (actually a joint venture with Lee) that was released in 2015 and is similar to the original Lee plan. Generally speaking, the Rubio-Lee plan groups people into two income tax brackets, 15 percent or 35 percent, the higher of which would kick in at an individual income of $75,000. That’s a decrease from the seven brackets currently in place. Another centerpiece of the plan is a $2,500 tax credit given to parents for each child under sixteen. That’s the broad outline, but the plan still lacks some details. "There are critical unresolved issues that make it difficult for us to do an analysis of Rubio’s current plan," said Howard Gleckman, resident fellow at the Tax Policy Center and author of the blog post. For example, Gleckman points out that the Rubio-Lee plan never specifies exactly what would happen to a personal tax credit of $2,000, a subsidy that would be available to anybody who claimed it on their tax returns. If it were included as a refundable tax credit (meaning people could get a check back), it would have a significant impact on low-income families. As of now, their incomes would actually decrease under the Lee plan, according to the Tax Policy Center’s analysis. "Qualitatively, the rough sense is a very generous tax cut for high-income people," said Gleckman, adding, "What we’re not sure about is low-income people." So low-income people might get some kind of tax break under Rubio’s plan, or they might not. The other thing to know about Clinton’s statement is that the wealthy get a tax break under Rubio’s plan because he wants tax reductions, and the wealthy pay the most taxes. "The reason why the top is getting what’s seemingly a big tax cut is that they’re already taxed at a much higher rate," said Kyle Pomerleau, an economist at the Tax Foundation, a business-backed group. Under the Rubio plan, the top tax rate would drop from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. Pomerleau added that it’s crucial to remember that the plan proposes tax cuts across all income brackets, not just the top ones, and often at higher percentages for those with lower incomes. Pomerleau, however, did say that he found Clinton’s claim plausible. Our ruling Clinton said that Rubio’s tax plan "would cut taxes for households making around $3 million a year by almost $240,000, which is way more than three times the earnings of a typical family." It is possible to take issue with the statement in some ways. The source of her claim uses an earlier version of Rubio’s plan in its analysis, and she said $3 million when she should have said $3.3 million. But the thrust of her statement is sound. An analysis of a plan extremely similar to the one put forth by Rubio would cut taxes for those making $3.3 million and more by nearly $240,000, which is more than three times the U.S. median household income of $53,046. We rate her statement Mostly True.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2015-07-16T10:00:00	2015-07-13	['None']
-pomt-15058	The tax policies of George W. Bush "created a dynamic effect of high growth."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/27/jeb-bush/jeb-bush-says-tax-policies-george-w-bush-created-d/	During his 2016 Republican presidential bid, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has periodically had to answer for the record of his brother, George W. Bush, and he had to do it again on a recent edition of Fox News Sunday. Host Chris Wallace asked Bush, "Whether it was Ronald Reagan's tax cuts or your brother's tax cuts, they did add greatly to the deficit." Bush responded, "They didn't (add to the deficit) as greatly as the static thinkers on the left think. They created a dynamic effect of high growth. And that's what we need." We didn’t recall rapid economic growth under Bush, so we thought we’d look at the past five presidents’ records in order to gauge Jeb Bush’s comments. We’ll start by noting that boiling down a president’s policies over one or two terms is tricky. For instance, in Reagan’s case, he is generally thought of as an aggressive tax-cutter, and it’s certainly true that he cut taxes sharply early in his term. But he also raised taxes. We gave a Mostly True rating to a recent claim by TV host Stephen Colbert that Reagan "raised taxes when revenues did not match the expectations." For this reason, we’ll focus here on the most straightforward measure -- overall growth rates under each president. A look at the numbers We chose three measurements for comparing the five presidents. The most important statistic is the broadest one: the average annual increase in inflation-adjusted gross domestic product. Here’s a rundown of how the past five presidents have done on that score: Rank President Average annual GDP increase, inflation-adjusted 1 Clinton 3.9 2 Reagan 3.5 3 George H.W. Bush 2.3 4 George W. Bush 2.1 5 Obama 1.4 So by this measure, George W. Bush ranks second to last, undercutting Bush’s argument. What about the other yardsticks we checked? Bush did a bit better on these, though generally in the middle of the pack. Here’s how the presidents compare when measured by their single best year of inflation-adjusted GDP growth: Rank President Best year of inflation-adjusted GDP growth 1 Reagan 7.3 2 Clinton 4.7 3 George W. Bush 3.8 4 George H.W. Bush 3.7 5 Obama 2.5 And here’s how the five presidents compare on the number of years the economy exceeded 3 percent growth on their watch. Rank President Number of years of inflation-adjusted GDP growth of 3 percent or more 1 (tie) Clinton 6 1 (tie) Reagan 6 3 (tie) George W. Bush 2 3 (tie) George H.W. Bush 2 5 Obama 0 So Bush fares better on these other two measurements, but he still trails the two clear frontrunners in economic growth, Clinton and Reagan. Comparing Bush and Obama We should note that George W. Bush’s record on GDP growth does outpace Obama’s on each score, so to the extent that Jeb Bush was using Obama -- the president Bush hopes to succeed -- as a foil, he has a point. Still, it’s an exaggeration to tout George W. Bush’s economic record as one of "high growth" when compared to the records of Clinton and Reagan, and even to Bush’s father. As for Obama’s record, we’ll note that -- as low as it is on our rankings -- it’s still a work in progress. To calculate Obama’s record, we included the first two quarters of 2015. (Data for the third quarter is set to be released in October.) Given that Obama came into office in the midst of the Great Recession and that the recovery on his watch has been accelerating since 2010 -- albeit slowly -- Obama may ultimately overtake Bush when his final tally is available. Second-quarter growth for 2015 was 3.9 percent, which could suggest continued economic improvement in the months ahead. The Bush campaign’s response When we checked with Jeb Bush’s campaign, they made the point that because Wallace’s question referred to both Reagan and George W. Bush, Jeb Bush’s response was intended to refer to both presidents. But Reagan’s record on tax cuts was far more mixed than Bush’s; Reagan signed off on several significant tax increases. The Bush campaign also told PolitiFact that George W. Bush’s record is hampered by beginning with the economic impact of the 9/11 attacks and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. However, the same argument could be made -- and made even more strongly -- with the Great Recession inherited by Obama. Allocating credit and blame Finally, we will raise an issue that’s always relevant when comparing presidents on economic growth: It’s hard to determine credit or blame for economic performance on a president’s watch, because factors outside their control, from energy-price shocks to technological changes to pure luck, can have a significant impact. In addition, it’s unclear how much a president can influence the broader economy during their first year or two in office; for that early period, the legacy of their predecessor may have a greater impact. "The economics research is mixed as to how much federal tax policies can affect economic growth," said Tara Sinclair, a George Washington University economist and chief economist at the jobs site Indeed. Our ruling Jeb Bush said the tax policies of George W. Bush "created a dynamic effect of high growth." The definition of "high," of course, is relative, but if you look at the most directly comparable examples -- the past five presidents’ records in average, annual, inflation-adjusted growth in gross domestic product -- George W. Bush ranked fourth among the five presidents, and trailed the two strongest presidents in this regard, Clinton and Reagan, by a particularly wide margin. (Reagan’s policies included both tax cuts and tax increases.) Bush has so far maintained a lead over Obama, although Obama’s tenure is not finished yet. Still, it’s always worth noting that a president’s impact on the economy is not all-encompassing. Overall, though, the evidence doesn’t show that high growth occurred in the wake of the Bush tax cuts. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Jeb Bush	None	None	None	2015-09-27T15:34:16	2015-09-27	['George_W._Bush']
-pomt-11354	After attacking Emma Gonzalez, U.S. Rep. Steve King is "facing arrest."	false	/punditfact/statements/2018/apr/05/political-thinkers/headline-falsely-says-rep-steve-king-facing-arrest/	A misleading headline on Facebook says that U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, faces arrest after attacking Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez for wearing a jacket with the Cuban flag. "Congressman just annihilated Parkland ‘victim’ in calling her out -- now he’s facing arrest!" said a March 29 headline on Political Thinkers, a conservative website. Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat online hoaxes. We found no evidence that King faces arrest. The Political Thinkers story pertains to King’s campaign Facebook post criticizing Gonzalez for wearing a Cuban flag patch on her jacket while giving a speech during the March For Our Lives rally in Washington. "This is how you look when you claim Cuban heritage yet don’t speak Spanish and ignore the fact that your ancestors fled the island when the dictatorship turned Cuba into a prison camp, after removing all weapons from its citizens; hence their right to self defense," King's post said. According to Univision, Gonzalez’s father arrived in New York from Cuba in 1968. Some media reports and U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, pushed back at King’s statements and noted that it’s common for Cuban-Americans in Miami to display the Cuban flag, which is not a sign of support for Castro. The Political Thinker website pointed to a memo by the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, which asked the House Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate King’s "unethical, xenophobic and racist Facebook post." The complaint by the anti-Trump organization drew scant media attention, and such ethics complaints often lead to no such action. Brett Kappel is a government affairs partner at the Akerman law firm who has represented members of Congress but not King. He said the Office of Congressional Ethics has dismissed roughly half of all complaints it has received since its inception. Of the 50 percent that were referred by the office to the House Ethics Committee, the vast majority were either dismissed by the Ethics Committee or the Ethics Committee took no action because the accused left the House due to resignation, retirement or to run for another office. "It would be extraordinarily rare for an OCE complaint to result in a criminal arrest, much less a conviction – but it is possible," he said, speaking in general about such cases, and not the one specifically about King. Kappel said that if the complaint is that King used campaign funds to hire family members, "that’s perfectly legal as long as the family members are paid the fair market value for the services they provide the campaign." The Office of Congressional Ethics doesn’t confirm tips it receives. However, any entity can file such requests, and the Office doesn’t need such submissions to launch an investigation. Bottom line: the fact that the group said in a memo that it asked the office to investigate King doesn’t mean that the office will investigate King. We reached out to King’s campaign and congressional office and did not get a reply for this fact-check. At a meeting hosted by a conservative club in Iowa days after his Facebook post, King said the post was intended to highlight the "irony" of a person of Cuban heritage advocating for gun control given that the communist government restricted possession of weapons. Our ruling A headline on Political Thinkers about King said that "Congressman just annihilated Parkland ‘victim’ in calling her out -- now he’s facing arrest!" While King’s comments about Gonzalez wearing a patch of the Cuban flag prompted a left-leaning group to file a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics, such complaints often lead to no action. It would be extraordinarily rare for any such complaint to the ethics office to lead to arrest, and there is no evidence that King faces arrest. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Political Thinkers	None	None	None	2018-04-05T10:16:24	2018-03-29	['United_States']
-tron-01284	Complaints Move Koran to Top Shelf at Boston University Library	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/boston-univeristy-library-koran/	None	education	None	None	None	Complaints Move Koran to Top Shelf at Boston University Library	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-12654	The GOP’s Obamacare replacement would reduce subsidies that help lower-income people buy health insurance, but also "expand the entitlement" by giving subsidies to higher-income people "that Obamacare never helped."	true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/mar/23/ron-johnson/gop-obamacare-replacement-cuts-aid-lower-income-pe/	Two days before a showdown in the U.S. House of Representatives, with House Speaker Paul Ryan lobbying his colleagues hard to vote yes, a fellow Wisconsin Republican dumped on the GOP plan to replace Obamacare. "I’ve got a lot of problems with the House bill as it’s written right now," U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said March 21, 2017 at a WisPolitics event in Washington, D.C. -- highlighting concerns over whether a top priority for Ryan and President Donald Trump can pass. Afterward, Johnson complained to a reporter about what he sees as a paradox: The replacement, he said, would reduce subsidies that help lower-income people buy health insurance, but also "expand the entitlement" by giving subsidies to higher-income people "that Obamacare never helped." Let’s see if Johnson’s right. Note: We’re fact checking Johnson’s claim based on the original GOP legislation, not on any changes that might have been made after his statement. The expected House vote on March 23, 2017 was postponed a few hours after this fact check was posted. Tax credits Johnson’s claim alludes to what are known as refundable tax credits that help people who buy their own health insurance. How they work: If a person has a federal tax bill of $2,500 and receives a $1,000 tax credit, the tax bill is reduced to $1,500. A refundable tax credit means that if the amount of the tax credit is greater than the amount of taxes owed, the taxpayer receives a refund for the difference. Both Obamacare and the GOP plan, referred to by Democrats as "Trumpcare," offer the credits. But, as Johnson indicated, they take different approaches. Obamacare: Tax credits are based on a person’s income and the cost of health insurance in the area where they live. The subsidies are available to people whose income is between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level (in 2017, 400 percent is about $47,000 per year for an individual). The subsidies are larger for people with lower incomes and for those who live in areas where health care costs are higher. GOP plan: The credits vary by age -- people in their 20s would get $2,000 a year, with credits rising to $4,000 for people in their 60s. The eligibility extends to individuals who earn up to $75,000 a year -- a significantly higher income than under Obamacare. So, what’s the upshot? The effect on people An expert nonprofit organization in health care, the Kaiser Family Foundation, summarizes the differences this way: Under the GOP plan, lower-income people generally will get reduced tax credits compared to Obamacare -- especially those who are older and live in areas where health care costs more. Meanwhile, more people with higher incomes would become eligible for tax credits. Here are the average tax credits for a 40-year-old, according to Kaiser: Annual income in 2020 Obamacare tax credits GOP plan tax credits $20,000 $4,143 $3,000 $40,000* $1,021 $3,000 $75,000 0 $3,000 $100,000 0 $500 (In Milwaukee, the estimate is that the credit would be $1,280 with Obamacare and $3,000 with the GOP plan.) Our rating Johnson says the GOP’s Obamacare replacement would reduce subsidies that help lower-income people buy health insurance, but also "expand the entitlement" by giving subsidies to higher-income people "that Obamacare never helped." The Republican plan does offer subsidies, known as refundable tax credits, that are smaller for lower-income people than they are under Obamacare. And it does offer the credits to people with higher incomes than Obamacare does. We rate Johnson’s statement True. Other fact checks on the GOP replacement for Obamacare: Mark Pocan: Gives $600 billion in tax breaks "the wealthiest" -- Half True Tammy Baldwin: Will let insurance executives "make millions off your health care" -- Mostly False Paul Ryan: Will lower premiums, report "confirms" -- Half True See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Ron Johnson	None	None	None	2017-03-23T13:41:18	2017-03-21	['Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act']
-snes-04578	The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) will be reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule 2 drug in August 2016.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-marijuana-moving-to-schedule-2/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Marijuana Is Moving to Schedule 2	21 June 2016	None	['Drug_Enforcement_Administration']
-pomt-05338	"Sources show (Connie) Mack as a resident of California, living with his wife in Palm Springs."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2012/may/14/george-lemieux/george-lemieux-says-connie-mack-california-residen/	U.S. Rep. Connie Mack represents Florida in Washington and is married to U.S. Rep. Mary Bono Mack of California. One of Connie Mack’s Republican rivals in the U.S. Senate race, George LeMieux, is suggesting that Mack doesn’t log much time in Florida. A Web ad released by the LeMieux campaign shows footage of a reporter asking Mack about the allegation that he doesn’t spend a lot of time in Florida: Mack: "You know, they’ll say that I’m never here. Well, the reality is I was in California last year maybe 11 days?" The narrator says, "Sources show Mack as a resident of California, living with his wife in Palm Springs. And they’ve been known to pop up on the red carpet. Then there is their place in Colorado. …. And court documents say Connie spent little time in the modest Florida condo. Even his ex-wife testified it was only purchased just to assist his political career. But Connie says his real home is in Florida. Do you believe him? …. Florida needs a full-time senator instead of a Half-Mack here half the time." The narrator calls for Mack to release his travel records to determine if he is really "California Connie, Colorado Connie or just modest Condo Connie." (There are two photos in the ad that viewers might assume are Mack at a ski resort or the inside of his Fort Myers condo. But a LeMieux campaign spokeswoman said they are stock art.) Mack’s campaign fought back saying that LeMieux was avoiding the issues. We can’t independently verify what percentage of Mack’s time is spent at his Florida condo. But we can put one LeMieux claim to the Truth-O-Meter: is Mack a resident of California living with his wife in Palm Springs? Residency rule It’s not uncommon for members of Congress to own or rent a residence in the Washington area. But the questions about Mack are a little different because he’s married to a member of Congress representing another state. Mack was first elected to Congress in 2004; he filed for divorce from his wife Ann in 2005. About two years later, Mack married U.S. Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., the widow of singer and Congressman Sonny Bono. After he announced his U.S. Senate bid in 2011, the Tampa Bay Times wrote that Mack had been "criticized for not spending enough time in Florida due to his wife. … Mack said he and his wife spend time together in Washington and then usually go separate ways on the weekend — the opposite situation from other lawmakers. Another incentive to be in Florida, he said: an 11-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son from his first marriage are in the state." LeMieux’s online video doesn’t suggest that Mack is violating the law, but it tries to create the perception that he isn’t spending much time in Florida. The U.S. Constitution requires Senate candidates to be a citizen of the U.S. for at least nine years and a resident of the state when elected. Florida’s election code doesn’t define residency, according to a 1993 advisory opinion by the state Division of Elections. Florida courts "have consistently construed legal residence to mean a permanent residence, domicile, or permanent abode, rather than a residence that is temporary," states the opinion. (The state elections’ division told us the opinion is still valid even though it is nearly 20 years old.) Experts on election requirements told us that there is no "bright line" test to determine residency. "The idea is that you are supposed to be related in a meaningful way to the state you represent, and you don’t just show up to run for office," said Frances Hill, who teaches election law at the University of Miami. Mack addresses residency question During a stop in Tallahassee on May 4, 2012, PolitiFact Florida asked Mack about his living situation. "The question they (opponents) try to get to is, am I spending all of my time in California? And it's just not true. As many times as I've answered that ... last year I think I spent maybe 11 days in California," he said. "What I'm saying is this, it's political fodder that my opponents like to spin. But to give you an example ... Monday I was in Miami. Tuesday morning in Miami, Tuesday afternoon in Fort Myers, Tuesday evening here in Tallahassee, then we went to Panama City, Pensacola, back here in Tallahassee, then we're going to go to Jacksonville, then we're going to Fort Lauderdale, then we go to Fort Myers, then we go to Orlando, then I go back to DC for votes." The example he gave is expected of a campaign, PolitiFact Florida noted. We asked him to elaborate on how he divides his time on a day-to-day basis. "I just gave you every day. This is my home, this is where I live, and this is a cheap political shot by my opponents that other than the press and my opponent, no one asks. It's not on their mind. They're not concerned about it. They know that this is where I am." Homes owned by Mack or his wife Here’s what we found when we looked for homes owned by Mack (whose legal name is Cornelius McGillicuddy IV) or his current wife Mary Bono Mack: Fort Myers: Mack owns a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom condo at 15081 Tamarind Cay Court in Fort Myers, Lee County property records show. Mack and his first wife, Ann, bought the condo for $166,900 in October 2003. After her husband filed for divorce in 2005, Ann stated in a September 2005 divorce court filing that Mack bought it to "solely to assist his political career" when he was running in the congressional district for the area. The Mack campaign disputes Ann’s account. After he won the election in 2004, the family moved to a 5-bedroom home in Alexandria, Va. Ann wrote that they spent very little time in the "modest" condo in Fort Myers. She argued during the divorce proceedings that he forced her and their two children to live in the "small political stake in the sand" in Fort Myers while he stayed in the home in Virginia. Mack later sold the Virginia home. Mack has a homestead exemption on his Fort Myers condo. The Tampa Tribune raised questions about Mack’s exemption because his current wife has an exemption on her California home. Under Florida state law, Mack is entitled to the exemption if he can prove his finances aren’t co-mingled with those of his wife. Mack campaign spokesman David James told the Miami Herald in February that Mack meets that criteria: "They file separate returns, do not have joint accounts, and Connie’s name is not on Mary’s home in California, and Mary’s is not on Connie’s home in Fort Myers," James said. (James also sent us similar statements from Mack’s attorney,Craig Engle.) Lee County Property Appraiser Ken Wilkinson said in February that he would research the legality of Mack’s homestead but told the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times: "I think they’ll be okay. That’s my gut feeling," Wilkinson said. "But I now have an obligation to check this out." Mack has until around mid September to submit evidence showing that their finances are separate. The homestead controversy surfaced after Mack criticized Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson for getting an agricultural exemption on a Brevard County property. Palm Springs, Calif.: Mary Bono purchased an $875,000 three-bedroom home at 64505 Via Amante in Palm Springs in 1998. The home is 5,450 square feet and worth about $1.1 million, Riverside County records show. Durango, Colo.: Mack’s 2011 financial disclosure states that he has a mortgage on a rental property in Durango, Colo., between $250,001 and $500,000 from October 2010. He also wrote that he was 16.67 percent owner in the property, which is owned by the company Mack and his wife formed, Westerfield Scotch LLC. La Plata, County records show that the two-bedroom two-bath unit is nearly 2,000-square feet and that they purchased the condo for $692,500 in October 2010. A warranty deed from October states that Mack and Bono Mack "whose legal address is 64505 Via Amante, Palm Springs...." A November 2010 warranty deed signed by Mack and Bono Mack states that "Connie Mack and Mary Bono Mack of the county of Riverside, state of California, and Westerfield Scotch, a Colorado limited liability company, whose legal address is 64505 Via Amante, Palm Springs..." The couple occasionally stays there for vacations and rent it out to others, Bono Mack’s spokesman Ken Johnson said. Her adult children are also owners. Mack’s attorney Craig Engle told PolitiFact the "document is mistaken" when it states that Mack’s legal address is in Palm Springs and that it would be wrong to interpret that document to mean that Mack is a California resident. Engle stated that the documents had to list an address for mailing purposes, and that could be why it has Bono Mack’s Palm Springs address. Arlington, Va.: Mary Bono purchased a two-bedroom condo at 3600 S. Glebe Road at the Eclipse at Center Park in Arlington, Va., for $549,313 in March 2007. She married Mack later that year. Connie Mack’s name doesn’t appear on that record, and a court land records clerk told us only Bono’s name is on the deed. The congresswoman had the condo under construction contract starting in 2005, her spokesman said. (The Web ad doesn’t mention this condo.) Conclusion LeMieux’s web ad states "Sources show Mack as a resident of California, living with his wife in Palm Springs." It’s legitimate to raise the question of how much time Mack spends in various places. And we can’t independently verify how much time he spends in California compared to his Fort Myers condo or anywhere else. But in this case, the ad’s "sources" are deeds for a Colorado condo owned by Mack and his wife that list their legal address as the Palm Springs home. While it’s unusual to have a spouse who lives in another state, both Mack and his wife work in Washington. They also owned their own homes and had professional careers in their respective states before they married. Given that context, we don’t think the deed to a vacation home in Colorado is definitive proof that Mack is living in California. One of our principles at PolitiFact is that campaigns have the burden to offer proof for what they say. In this case, the LeMieux campaign doesn’t have much. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	George LeMieux	None	None	None	2012-05-14T11:30:00	2012-05-07	['California', 'Palm_Springs,_California']
-pomt-15233	Says that Donald Trump "supported Charlie Crist."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2015/aug/07/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-donald-trump-supported-charlie-cr/	During the GOP debate, Donald Trump was grilled about his past political donations, including to Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. "You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business-related favors. And you said recently, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do," said Bret Baier, one of the Fox News moderators. "You’d better believe it," Trump said. He added, "Most of the people on this stage, I’ve given to -- just so you understand -- a lot of money." Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., then chimed in: "Not me! Not me!" After some crosstalk, Rubio added, "Actually to be clear, he supported Charlie Crist." Those are fighting words when you accuse a Republican -- one running for president, no less -- of supporting former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, a party flip-flopper. We went back to check to see if Trump supported Crist. 2010 Senate race First, a refresher on that Rubio vs. Crist battle. In 2009, former House Speaker Rubio launched what began as an uphill battle against Crist -- then the Republican governor -- for a U.S. Senate seat. Crist’s relationship with his party soured over time, and in April 2010, Crist ditched the GOP and became an independent. Rubio ended up winning the race, beating both Crist and Democrat Kendrick Meek. A couple years later, Crist became a Democrat and lost his race against Republican Gov. Rick Scott in 2014. (Now he is weighing a run for Congress in 2016 in Pinellas County.) Trump did donate to Crist in the 2010 Senate race and hosted fundraisers for him. The caveat is that Crist was still a Republican at the time. A Rubio spokesman sent us Federal Election Commission reports showing two donations Trump made to Crist’s campaign in 2009: $2,400 on Oct. 16 and $2,400 on Nov. 17. Trump hosted a fundraiser for Crist at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach on Dec. 11, 2009, and a fundraiser in July 2009 in Long Island. Both events called for at least $1,000 donations. The Broward/Palm Beach New Times wrote that the Long Island fundraiser was a party hosted by Trump as well as Jill Zarin, one of the stars of Bravo TV’s The Real Housewives of New York City and a friend of Crist’s wife, Carole Rome. "Let's hope Crist doesn't choke on his sirloin if Trump brings up any of his condo projects in South Florida," New Times wrote. "Buyers in the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Fort Lauderdale would surely be pleased to know that their governor and would-be senator is getting so much dough from the millionaire many of them are now suing." Trump also supported Crist prior to 2010. The Tampa Bay Times wrote in 2005 that Trump was slated to host a fundraiser at Trump Towers in Manhattan for Crist’s 2006 run for governor. The Times reported that Crist was introduced to Trump at a charity benefit in 1998 and then met with him in New York in May 2005 to discuss his candidacy. "He could not have been more gracious or more hospitable," Crist said at the time. "The guy cares about Florida. He has a residence in Florida and spends a lot of time in Florida." We emailed spokespersons for Trump on debate night and did not get a reply. Our ruling Rubio said Trump "supported Charlie Crist" rather than Rubio. During the 2010 Senate race in Florida, Trump gave Crist $4,800. Trump also hosted two fundraisers for Crist that year, and Crist met with Trump to huddle about a prospective campaign as early as 2005. The only caveat, in the context of an exchange about Trump’s imperfect party loyalty, is that Crist was a Republican at the time. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2015-08-07T00:50:28	2015-08-06	['Charlie_Crist', 'Donald_Trump']
-thal-00142	Claim: Hospital waiting lists have increased by 45% in the last two years	mostly true	http://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-hospital-waiting-lists-statistics-factcheck-thejournal-ie-2865706-Jul2016/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck: How much worse are hospital waiting lists getting?	Jul 7th 2016, 9:34 PM	None	['None']
-pomt-14903	On support for the Export-Import Bank	full flop	/wisconsin/statements/2015/nov/06/glenn-grothman/rep-glenn-grothman-hears-employers-changes-stance-/	As a state senator running for Congress in 2014, Glenn Grothman of Campbellsport had some strong opinions about the Export-Import Bank. Like the other conservative Republicans contending for the open seat, Grothman was against the obscure federal agency. "We do not need corporate welfare, which I guess I would say the Import-Export Bank is," Grothman said at a July 29, 2014 candidate forum. Grothman ultimately won the seat, but now sees things another way. Time to break out the Flip-O-Meter, which examines whether a politician has changed position on an issue. Remember: It does not measure whether any change is good or bad policy or politics, only whether the candidate has been consistent. The Export-Import Bank helps U.S. companies sell their goods and services in foreign countries by providing financing for export deals. Opponents echo Grothman’s "corporate welfare" line, while supporters say the bank helps level the playing field for U.S. companies competing in the global marketplace. Things looked bad for the bank’s future during the summer of 2015 after conservatives in the House of Representatives refused to reauthorize funding. The House let the charter of the bank lapse at the end of June. The Senate voted to reauthorize the bank on July 26, 2015 and in the fall efforts to revive the measure in the House gained steam as prominent business groups pressed for reauthorization. In Wisconsin, that came as General Electric Co. announced Sept. 28, 2015 it would cut hundreds of jobs in Waukesha and move the work to Canada. The company said the move was being made because of the demise of the bank. In an interview, Grothman said that as a reauthorization vote drew closer, he heard from 42 businesses in his district with officials urging him to vote to continue the bank, which he did when the matter came before the House on Oct. 27, 2015. "You add that up and you add up the fact that such a high number of manufacturing jobs are tied to suppliers," Grothman said of the calls he received. "Per capita, Wisconsin is one of the largest users of the Export-Import Bank." Grothman cited The Manitowoc Co., Caterpillar Corp. and Oshkosh Corp.’s Pierce fire engine division as among the heavy users of the bank. The congressman also said he learned more about the economy of Wisconsin’s 6th congressional district, which he represents. "This district has more manufacturing jobs than almost any other one," he said, adding: "It’s not something I dealt with in the state Legislature." As for the position he took at the debate, Grothman said he was "called upon to give an answer about the bank. Obviously, I got one side of the issue when I said I was opposed to it. You talk to the big manufacturers and you get the other side of it." Grothman is not the first state politician to switch positions on funding the bank. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) voted against the bank shortly after he took office in 2012. He joined the majority in supporting the agency in July 2015. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Johnson said he changed his mind after hearing from state employers. We rated his switch a Full Flop. Our rating As a candidate in 2014, Grothman said he was opposed to the Export-Import Bank, calling it a form of corporate welfare. A little more than a year later, after hearing from key manufacturers in his district, the congressman changed his mind and voted for the bank’s reauthorization. That’s a Full Flop.	None	Glenn Grothman	None	None	None	2015-11-06T05:00:00	2015-11-06	['None']
-afck-00083	Nearly half of the water distributed through the [Nairobi] system is non-revenue water.	exaggerated	https://africacheck.org/reports/nairobis-water-2-claims-losses-high-cost-slums-evaluated/	None	None	None	None	None	Nairobi’s water supply: 2 claims about losses & high prices in slums evaluated	2018-02-12 10:19	None	['Nairobi']
-pomt-08592	Says more than 2 million Oregonians have received important medical services because of his health plan.	half-true	/oregon/statements/2010/sep/24/john-kitzhaber/john-kitzhaber-says-2-million-people-got-health-ca/	The Oregon Health Plan is John Kitzhaber’s baby. Oregon launched his groundbreaking health plan in 1994 when the state got special waivers from the federal government to change the way it handles Medicaid, the health insurance for the nation’s poorest people. Under Oregon’s plan, the state limits the services Medicaid pays for, with an emphasis on providing preventive and ongoing medical care. By limiting what services are offered, Oregon was able to expand the number of people who were covered. Kitzhaber came up with the idea and championed it during his years as a state senator and governor. When the plan launched in 1994, about 350,000 Oregonians were eligible. According to an official history of the plan published by the state, 250,000 already had Medicaid coverage. The expansion added 100,000 Oregonians who, until then, didn’t have health insurance. Today the health plan covers 523,000 Oregonians. About 20 percent of them wouldn’t be getting health insurance if not for the plan’s expanded Medicaid provisions. But the plan has struggled because of budget constraints and over the years cut back the number of people who are covered. Kitzhaber, a Democrat now seeking a third term as governor, talks proudly of his plan. On Aug. 15, 2010, in an interview on KQEN AM in Roseburg, he assessed the plan this way: "The health plan I think in many respects has been a big success. Over 2 million Oregonians have received important medical services because of it." We wondered about the "2 million" figure in a state that today has a population of 3.8 million. Campaign spokeswoman Jillian Schoene says the number comes from the Oregon Department of Human Services, which oversees the health plan. So we checked with the folks at the Oregon Health Plan. Sean Kolmer, the deputy administrator for the health plan’s office of policy and research, says the 2 million includes people who have been enrolled in the health plan at any time since 1994. He points out many people have come into the plan and left it over the years. He says the tally doesn’t double count. "Those are unique individuals," he says. But the second part of Kitzhaber’s statement doesn’t hold up. Note that Kitzhaber told his radio listeners the 2 million health plan participants got coverage "because of it." With this cause-and-effect claim, Kitzhaber is saying the 2 million wouldn’t have received "important medical services" if his health plan hadn’t existed. And that’s not true. The majority of people in the plan would have had coverage under Medicaid anyway, and still would if the plan vanished tomorrow. How many of the 2 million would have received health coverage if the plan hadn’t existed? We asked the folks at the health plan and, at our request, they did a count. The answer: Kolmer says that 59 percent of those folks would have received Medicaid coverage anyway. That means 41 percent got coverage because of Kitzhaber’s health plan. Kitzhaber is indeed the creator of the Oregon Health Plan and -- as the records shows -- he can legitimately claim credit for expanding health coverage to about 820,000 people. Taking credit for the entire 2 million is a stretch. We find his claim Half True. Comment on this item.	None	John Kitzhaber	None	None	None	2010-09-24T11:41:24	2010-08-15	['Oregon_Territory']
-pomt-08997	Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. had "52 months of ... uninterrupted job creation" and "revenues were at an all-time high in 2007."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/13/ed-gillespie/gillespie-touts-bush-record-taxes-job-creation/	On the July 11, 2010, edition of NBC's Meet the Press, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie sought to contrast favorably economic performance under President George W. Bush to that under President Barack Obama. Gillespie -- a former top aide to Bush -- said "the fact is, under the Bush tax cuts, we did have 52 months of ... uninterrupted job creation, longest in the history of the country, and revenues were at an all-time high in 2007. The problem wasn't lack of revenue. The problem still remains today too much federal spending, and this administration's not addressing that." We thought it would be worth checking two of Gillespie's claims. • Did Bush preside over 52 months of uninterrupted job creation? Close, but not quite. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added more jobs than it lost during 50 out of 52 months between September 2003 and December 2007. The economy lost jobs over two months during that stretch -- between June 2007 and July 2007 (20,000 jobs) and between July 2007 and August 2007 (71,000). That falls slightly short of being "uninterrupted." Gillespie would have been correct if he'd said that jobs grew for 46 consecutive months. We might add that over the course of Bush's presidency -- a total of 96 months -- the economy created 1.08 million jobs. That may sound like a lot, but compared to every other post-World War II president prior to Obama, it's the lowest average annual percentage increase in jobs created. (See our calculations here.) That said, Obama's figures are worse than any of his postwar predecessors'. The economy has shed between 2.4 million and 3.1 million jobs during the 18 months he's been in office, depending on whether you start counting with the January 2009 figures or the February 2009 figures. • Were revenues at an all-time high in 2007? Strictly speaking, yes. According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, total federal tax receipts hit $2.57 trillion in 2007, before declining in 2008 and 2009, when the current recession was under way. (Tax revenues almost always sink during a recession.) The 2007 level was the highest recorded since 1934, when statistics were first collected. So on that score, Gillespie's right. But using this particular statistic neglects a key factor -- the size of the economy as a whole. Though recessions and expansions produce volatility in tax collections, as do changes in tax policy, one would expect that a bigger economy would generally produce greater tax revenues than a smaller one. And indeed, in the 57 tax years between 1951 and 2007, tax collections grew 49 times on a year-to-year basis -- a consistent trend despite frequent changes in tax rates and periodic recessions. You can easily factor out the size of the U.S. economy if you divide revenue by gross domestic product, or GDP. The Tax Policy Center has also calculated these numbers. In 2007, tax revenues represented 18.5 percent of GDP. That's high by historical standards but hardly a record. It only ties for 16th place going back to 1934, and within the 14-year stretch between 1996 and 2009 it only rises to 7th place. So if Gillespie's point is that Bush's tax cuts led to record revenues, they did -- for 2007 at least -- but that was a record aided by a the largest, non-recession economy in American history. Ultimately, Gillespie two comments are generally accurate, but they would have benefited from some additional historical context. We realize that this is not always possible during a fast-paced television show, so on balance, we rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Ed Gillespie	None	None	None	2010-07-13T21:00:47	2010-07-11	['United_States', 'George_W._Bush']
-pose-00645	Will "require the Department of Homeland Security to review all visa applications at high-risk consular posts and prevent aliens from attempting to avoid deportation after having their visas revoked."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/gop-pledge-o-meter/promise/675/strengthen-visa-security/	None	gop-pledge-o-meter	John Boehner	None	None	Strengthen visa security	2010-12-22T09:57:30	None	['None']
-pomt-10463	Denies that he said the Obama campaign "played the race card."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/apr/22/bill-clinton/yes-he-did/	Making a hard-charging statement and then denying you ever said it is a tricky proposition in the best of circumstances. It's particularly difficult when the initial statement and the denial are caught on tape and posted to the Internet. Which brings us to the case of former President Bill Clinton on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania. On April 21, 2008, Clinton gave a provocative interview to National Public Radio affiliate WHYY in which he said the Obama campaign "played the race card on me." He later denied saying that. Given the seriousness of the original charge — the ex-president claiming his wife's rival for the Democratic nomination tried to exploit racial issues to damage him — we decided to examine Clinton's denial of that charge. Did he say it or didn't he? He did. Here's how it happened: WHYY interviewer Susan Phillips asked him about the South Carolina primary, when he compared Barack Obama's January win there to Jesse Jackson's win in 1988. Phillips said at least one black leader had been offended by that comparison, saying it marginalized Obama, and switched support from Hillary Clinton to Obama. Phillips asked, "Do you think that (comment) was a mistake, and would you do that again?" Clinton gave a lengthy response, which you can hear via YouTube here . For our fact-checking purposes, the relevant passages are below: "No. I think that they played the race card on me. ... I said, if you go back to what I said. ... First of all, there was a conversation that I engaged in that included two African-American members of Congress, who were standing right there, who were having the conversation with me. And I said that Jesse Jackson had won a good campaign with overwhelming African-American support and white supporters. And this was started off because people didn't wanna — they wanted to act like, for reasons I didn't understand, that Senator Obama didn't have this African-American support, or they thought his white support was better because Jesse Jackson had blue-collar working people, and most of Senator Obama's support were upscale, cultural liberals. So it was like beneath them to be compared to Jesse Jackson. "I respect Jesse Jackson. He's a friend of mine, even though he endorsed Senator Obama. One of his sons and his wife endorsed Hillary. Their whole family's divided. But his campaign in 1988 was a seminal campaign in American history. It was the first campaign ever to openly involve gays. Hillary's chief delegate counter, Harold Ickes, worked his heart out for Jesse Jackson. I frankly thought the way the Obama campaign reacted was disrespectful to Jesse Jackson. And I called him and asked him if he found anything offensive, and he just laughed and he said, 'Of course I don't. We all know what's going on.' ... "And this was used out of context and twisted for political purposes by the Obama campaign to try to breed resentment elsewhere. And, you know, do I regret saying it? No. Do I regret that it was used that way? I certainly do. But you really gotta go some to try to portray me as a racist." So, here's where Clinton gets in trouble. The next day, NBC News' Mike Memoli asked Clinton about some of the things he had said in that radio interview. NBC: "Sir, what did you mean yesterday when you said that the Obama campaign was playing the race card on you?" Clinton: "When did I say that, and to whom did I say that?" NBC: "On WHYY radio yesterday." Clinton: "No, no, no. That's not what I said. You always follow me around and play these little games, and I'm not going to play your games today. This is a day about election day. Go back and see what the question was, and what my answer was. You have mischaracterized it to get another cheap story to divert the American people from the real urgent issues before us, and I choose not to play your game today. Have a nice day." NBC: "Respectfully sir, though, you did say ..." Clinton: "Have a nice day. I said what I said, you can go and look at the interview. And if you'll be real honest, you'll also report what the question was and what the answer was." You can read more of the exchange and watch the video here . It's hard to know what more to say on this one. Clinton was asked to explain an intriguing accusation he made against the Obama campaign and responded by saying he didn't say it. But he did. Even when we review the full context of the original radio interview, as Clinton suggests, the facts here don't budge. We say ... Pants on Fire!	None	Bill Clinton	None	None	None	2008-04-22T00:00:00	2008-04-22	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-01138	A sequel to the film "Crocodile Dundee" will be released in June 2018.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fake-crocodile-dundee-trailer/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Is a ‘Crocodile Dundee’ Sequel Being Released in 2018?	24 January 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-12106	Says "Barcelona terrorist" is cousins with former President Barack Obama.	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/23/blog-posting/barcelona-terrorist-related-barack-obama-fake-news/	A fake news story falsely claimed that one of the suspected terrorists arrested after an attack in Barcelona is actually former President Barack Obama’s cousin. "Barcelona terrorist has a cousin in the U.S. named Barack," read the headline on an Aug. 19, 2017, post on NewsConservative.com. Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to cut down on fake news. The story said Driss Oukabir, a 28-year-old Moroccan-born man arrested after terrorists killed 13 and injured more than 100 in Barcelona on Aug. 17, had toured the White House in 2009. The trip was sponsored by his first cousin, whom the story named as Obama. "Oukibir (sic) is the 7th child of the 5th wife of the brother of Barack Obama Sr., Obama’s father from Kenya," the story read. "Being first cousins, he was able to gain an audience and actually sit in the Oval Office. Eight years later he drove a vehicle into a crowd, killing at least a dozen people." In reality, Driss Oukabir is the brother of 18-year-old Moussa Oukabir, who is suspected of being the driver of a van that purposely ran into people in Barcelona. As many as three vans, including the one used in the terror attack, were allegedly rented with Driss Oukabir’s ID. Driss Oukabir turned himself into authorities after media outlets began circulating his photo in connection with the attack. He told police in the Spanish city of Ripoll, where he lived, that his identification had been stolen and that he did not participate in any terrorist activities. That's where the truth ends. The story of any relation to Obama, however, is pure bunk, and comes from an infamous fake news site. The post first appeared Aug. 17 on TheLastLineOfDefense.org, a parody site that attempts to fool conservatives with absurd stories. It’s run by a self-described liberal troll named Christopher Blair. The fake story included a photograph of Driss Oukabir, with an inset photo of a winking Obama. "Obama can’t be convicted for being a man’s cousin but he can be investigated for aiding and abetting terrorists," the story read. A note on the bottom of TheLastLineOfDefense.org noted that "everything on this site is a satirical work of fiction." Its About Us section carried a disclaimer that read, "We present fiction as fact and our sources don’t actually exist." The tale of a suspected terrorist being a cousin to Obama is entirely made up. We rate it Pants On Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-08-23T11:35:21	2017-08-19	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-15114	When it comes to classified information at the State Department, Hillary Clinton’s "the decider."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2015/sep/11/juan-williams/williams-clinton-was-decider-classified-info-state/	The ultimate impact of Hillary Clinton’s email woes is anyone’s guess, but a disclosure this week did the Democratic presidential candidate no favors. The New York Times reported that a second intelligence agency review found Top Secret material in emails Clinton received on her personal account. The majority view on Fox News’ The Five was that this proved that Clinton played fast and loose with very classified information and broke the Obama administration’s rules. The lone dissenting voice was Juan Williams, who argued that Clinton had the right to exercise her own judgment about how sensitive the material was. "When it comes to 'classified' at the State Department, she’s the decider," Williams said. This drew a chorus of you are so wrongs from the rest of the panel. We thought we’d try to sort out whether the secretary of state is the "decider," as Williams put it. Williams’ assertion is not as out-of-bounds as his fellow panelists on The Five let on. Clinton, as the head of the State Department, has the authority to classify information. The power is spelled out in President Barack Obama’s executive order on national security information. It reads: The authority to classify information originally may be exercised only by: (1) the President and the Vice President; (2) agency heads and officials designated by the President; and (3) United States Government officials delegated this authority pursuant to paragraph (c) of this section. The executive order goes on to say that an agency head, such as Clinton, can designate a deputy to oversee the classification process. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual spells things out a little further, saying that "those occupying various positions in the Department and at posts abroad have the authority to classify information originally as Top Secret. The positions include the Secretary, the Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries, and some Executive Level IV officials and their deputies; Chiefs of Mission, Charges d’affaires, and U.S. Representatives to various international organizations." Long story short, Clinton formally had a role in the classification process. But practically, the responsibility to classify information was not, or ever, solely Clinton’s. Daniel Metcalfe is professor of law at American University and former director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy. "As a practical matter, 99 percent of the time, things that came to her would have been reviewed for classification and acted on by someone lower down," Metcalfe said. "That doesn’t preclude her from saying ‘Oh my goodness, this should be classified,’ because she is the ultimate authority within the State Department. But it wasn’t her role." Nate Jones, an archivist at the National Security Archives based at George Washington University, drew attention to an additional complexity. Clinton might be the final word at the State Department, but only for material that her agency first produced. If another agency, such as the CIA, was the original author, then it had the right to slap a security label on it that the State Department would need to respect. "While I believe the other agencies' claims may very likely be dubious -- like claiming that the fact that the United States kills people in Pakistan with drones is classified -- they are allowed to bureaucratically make them despite Clinton being the agency head," Jones told PunditFact. According to the New York Times article, some of the emails in question contained Top Secret material that originated from intelligence agencies. Clinton has said that emails on her private server contained no information that was marked classified. Williams did not respond to a request for comment. Our ruling Williams said that at the State Department, Clinton was "the decider" over what was and wasn’t classified material. Formally speaking, there is some truth to the claim. But practically, it’s a stretch. The responsibility is shared among many people, and while Clinton could play a role, it wouldn’t typically be her primary or even secondary concern. Additionally, the secretary of state isn’t the arbiter of information that originated from another agency. Williams’ claim is partially accurate. We rate it Half True.	None	Juan Williams	None	None	None	2015-09-11T14:43:54	2015-09-09	['United_States_Department_of_State']
-pomt-08358	Ed Perlmutter voted for "Viagra for rapists" paid for with tax dollars.	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/26/american-action-network/viagra-sex-offenders-paid-health-care-bill-nope/	A new campaign ad makes the startling claim that the new health care law will pay for Viagra for rapists -- and that Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., voted for the measure. The ad shows two young women chatting online about the new health care bill. Here's how their conversation goes: "Hey, you have to check out the article I just sent you. Apparently convicted rapists can get Viagra paid for by the new health care bill." "Are you serious?" "Yes. I mean, Viagra for rapists? With my tax dollars? And Congressman Perlmutter voted for it." "Perlmutter voted for it?" "Yup. I mean, what is going on in Washington?" "In November, we need to tell Perlmutter to repeal it." The ad is from American Action Network, a conservative advocacy group organized as a 501(c)4, which means it does not have to disclose its donors. Its chief executive officer is Norm Coleman, a former Republican Senator from Minnesota. Its president is Rob Collins, a former chief of staff to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor. Perlmutter did vote in favor of final passage of the health care law. But did Perlmutter vote for Viagra for rapists? The short answer is no. Here's the long version: The health care law affects nearly every part of the health care system. It increases regulations for health insurance companies, reins in future costs in the Medicare program for seniors, expands the Medicaid program for the poor and creates new tax breaks so that individuals and small businesses can purchase insurance with partial government subsidies. It's this last measure that health care opponents have connected back to Viagra for sex offenders. Starting in 2014, some people will get tax credits to help them buy insurance policies. The credits are available to anyone who qualifies by having an income of between 133 to 400 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four in 2010, that ranges from $29,327 to $88,200, and for a single person, it's $14,403 to $43,320. They'll have to buy their policies through government-sponsored exchanges, which will set rules so that insurers offer standardized policies. During the final negotiations for the health care law in the Senate, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., pointed out that because anyone can qualify for the tax breaks, it's possible that sex offenders will buy insurance policies with government subsidies. And they might ask for and be prescribed Viagra. That means tax dollars will be subsidizing Viagra for sex offenders, Coburn concluded. It's actually an issue that's come up before, though in a different context. In 2005, the federal government had to direct states to make sure that sex offenders were not being prescribed Viagra while on Medicaid, the government-run health insurance program for the poor. (Press reports indicated it was happening.) During the 2010 debate, Coburn asked the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service about whether the health care law had any specific clause to prevent similar problems. The service issued a memo concluding that it did not. So Coburn offered an amendment that would "reduce the cost of providing federally funded prescription drugs by eliminating fraudulent payments and prohibiting coverage of Viagra for child molesters and rapists and for drugs intended to induce abortion." But by the time the Senate took up the amendment on March 24, 2010, it was late in the process. The bill's sponsors said any changes, no matter how small, could effectively kill the bill, so they opposed Coburn's amendment for procedural reasons. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., urged his colleagues to reject the amendment, saying, "This is a serious bill. This is a serious debate. The amendment offered by the senator from Oklahoma makes a mockery of the Senate, the debate and the American people... It is a crass political stunt aimed at making 30-second commercials, not public policy." The amendment failed, 57-42, and the president signed the law six days later. Now, nearly seven months later, the commercial has turned up. We want to emphasize that the Viagra amendment came up in the Senate. Perlmutter is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He never got the chance to vote one way or the other on the amendment. The Perlmutter campaign was not amused by the ad's claims, calling them "blatant lies." "It's so illogical it would be like saying the bill allows Martians masquerading as humans to see a proctologist," said spokeswoman Leslie Oliver in a statement. American Action Campaign e-mailed a factsheet that says by virtue of voting for final passage for the health care bill that did not include the anti-Viagra amendment, he was voting for Viagra. The ad itself flashes an editorial from the Washington Times, headlined "Obamacare's Viagra giveaway." The editorial said the Senate should have voted for the Viagra amendment and questioned whether Democrats were sincere in their procedural objections. We should note that the use of taxpayer dollars for sex-offender Viagra remains a hypothetical. While CRS concluded that there was nothing in the current law to stop it from happening, the earliest it could start is in 2014 -- so there's time for lawmakers to act or for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to write regulations to stop it from happening. Finally, whatever taxpayer subsidies for sex offenders might materialize after 2014, they would not go to all sex offenders -- only to sex offenders who get health care through the exchanges and who also qualify for subsidies. We've looked at similar claims made against U.S. senators and rated the claims Barely True. But this claim is different. The House never voted on the sex offenders amendment. Perlmutter never voted on it either. So we rate the statement the statement Pants on Fire.	None	American Action Network	None	None	None	2010-10-26T19:02:03	2010-10-21	['None']
-pomt-01680	Sen. Jeff Merkley "voted six times for more debt."	false	/oregon/statements/2014/aug/15/freedom-partners/did-sen-jeff-merkley-vote-six-times-more-debt/	Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley and his Republican challenger, newcomer Monica Wehby, are trading barbs as they head toward their November showdown. Wehby is now the beneficiary of a new television advertising campaign mounted by a group called Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce -- a political arm of conservative billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. The claim: A new 30-second advertising spot just launched this month as part of an estimated $3.6 million effort on Wehby’s behalf takes Merkley to task on spending issues. Merkley, according to the narrator "voted six times to raise the debt limit." While the narrator is speaking, though, red letters appear next to a screen shot of Oregon’s junior senator, proclaiming: "VOTED 6 TIMES FOR MORE DEBT." Did Merkley, as the screen words assert, vote half a dozen times "for more debt?" PolitiFact Oregon checked. The analysis: Wehby has said she welcomes the ad campaign but made it clear she didn’t work with the group. Doing so would violate federal election law. So we emailed Freedom Partners and received a reply from spokesman Bill Riggs. "The argument we’re making is that Sen. Merkley has repeatedly cleared the path for more debt and more spending, and it hasn’t helped Oregon," Riggs wrote. "And while there’s no question that his votes to raise the debt ceiling allowed Congress to add more to the debt, the ad should be viewed in full context." While the words on the screen say Merkley voted six times "for more debt," Riggs noted the narrator’s words: "Senator Merkley voted six times to raise the debt limit." Merkley’s office agreed the latter is accurate. In previous interviews, Merkley said the votes were necessary for Congress to pay bills it had already run up. Andrew Zucker, his deputy campaign manager, reiterated that: "In a nutshell, the Koch brothers are blatantly misleading Oregonians by attacking Jeff for voting to reopen the government after the Republican government shutdown, and preventing the government from defaulting on our obligation for the first time in history." So were Merkley’s votes to raise the debt ceiling also votes "for more debt?" According to the U.S. Treasury Department’s website, the debt limit is the "total amount of money that the United States government is authorized to borrow to meet its existing legal obligations." Those include Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds and other payments. "The debt limit does not authorize new spending commitments," the site says. "It simply allows the government to finance existing legal obligations that Congresses and presidents of both parties have made in the past." We turned to a PolitiFact National piece that checked the question, "Does raising the debt ceiling ‘increase our debt’?" The story, published Oct. 14, 2013, said President Barack Obama was on solid ground when he asserted that a vote to raise the debt ceiling is not commensurate with a vote to "increase our debt.’" The ruling: An ad campaign supporting candidate Monica Wehby, includes words on the screen saying that Sen. Jeff Merkley voted six times "for more debt." However, the U.S. Treasury, and a prior PolitiFact check, note that a vote to raise the debt ceiling does not, by itself, authorize new spending. All it does is authorize the federal government to borrow sufficient funds to pay for debt that has already been incurred. Merkley’s six votes to raise the debt ceiling were not, in other words, votes "for more debt." We rate the claim False.	None	Freedom Partners	None	None	None	2014-08-15T15:51:28	2014-08-06	['None']
-pomt-02886	Says 18 states and the District of Columbia have voted Democratic in six consecutive presidential elections.	true	/punditfact/statements/2013/nov/10/george-will/george-will-paints-dire-electoral-picture-gop-says/	The lopsided re-election of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has ignited talk about Christie’s 2016 presidential prospects. In his victory speech, Christie, eyes straight at the camera, invited the rest of the country to see what a Republican could achieve in New Jersey. Conservative pundit George Will said the prospect of flipping a blue state could be Christie’s trump card if he does decide to run for president. "He will turn to the Republicans now and say, ‘Your problem is the 18 states and the District of Columbia that have voted democratic in six consecutive presidential elections,’" Will said on Fox News Sunday. "Those 18 states, which include New Jersey by the way, have 242 electoral votes. If the Democratic presidential nominee can assume those states, he or she will spend the autumn of 2016 looking for 28 electoral votes, and he or she will find them." It’s a simple matter of going to the electoral college record to see if Will has his numbers right, and he does. While about one third of the states have moved from one party to the other over the past 24 years, Democrats have been able to hold on to a larger number than Republicans. More importantly, the Democratic states have bigger populations and thus deliver more electoral votes. Democrats can count on the two big prizes of California and New York, while Republicans can counter with just one super-sized state, Texas. The average state in the blue column delivers 13 electoral votes; the average on the red side is 8. Here’s a look at the states that have voted the same way since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 and the total number of electoral votes they now cast: Democratic since 1992 Electoral votes Republican since 1992 Electoral votes California 55 Alabama 9 Connecticut 7 Alaska 3 D.C. 3 Kansas 6 Delaware 3 Idaho 4 Hawaii 4 Mississippi 6 Illinois 20 Nebraska 5 Maine 4 North Dakota 3 Maryland 10 Oklahoma 7 Massachusetts 11 South Carolina 9 Michigan 16 South Dakota 3 Minnesota 10 Texas 38 New Jersey 14 Utah 6 New York 29 Wyoming 3 Oregon 7 Total 102 Pennsylvania 20 Rhode Island 4 Vermont 3 Washington 12 Wisconsin 10 Total 242 Source: U.S. Electoral College Other Republicans have weighed in on this Democratic advantage. A recent commentary in Red State, a self-described right-of-center website, suggested the problem is even worse than Will said. "After totaling the electoral votes in all the solid blue states, it becomes apparent that even a below average Democrat presidential candidate could begin the race with a whopping 246 advantage," the author said. "No wonder President (Barack) Obama was so confident of victory in 2012 for he knew the game was practically over before it began." University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said the hurdle for Republicans doesn't look any better if you count the underlying votes by citizens, not just the electoral results. "Democrats have also won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential contests," Sabato said. "The demographic shifts heading to mid century are all pro-Democratic." Our ruling Will said Democrats have taken 18 states and the District of Columbia in every presidential election since 1992. The record backs that up. We rate the claim True.	None	George Will	None	None	None	2013-11-10T15:25:52	2013-11-10	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Washington,_D.C.']
-pomt-01224	Scott Walker "couldn’t get his own party" to back more than a 500-student increase in Milwaukee’s school choice program, but in Indiana, "Mitch Daniels’ voucher program is approaching 30,000 students two years after opening."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2014/nov/21/joy-pullmann/joy-pullmann-says-scott-walker-couldnt-get-legisla/	Gov. Scott Walker’s re-election on Nov. 4, 2014, drew plenty of love from conservative commentators bullish about his chances to make a splash in the 2016 presidential race. "The Nation Needs President Scott Walker in 2016," shouted a headline over a story by Richard Cromwell in The Federalist, an online magazine. But not everyone on the right was leading cheers. Same magazine, different take: "Winning Re-Election Doesn’t Mean Scott Walker Is Ready For 2016." The author of that Nov. 11 piece is the managing editor of the magazine, Joy Pullmann, an education researcher at the conservative Heartland Institute based in Chicago. Pullmann has dogged Walker on several issues, including what she views as his belated shift to oppose the Common Core state standards for schools. One week after Walker topped Democrat Mary Burke, Pullmann -- a former teacher and self-described "born and raised Wisconsin farm girl" -- again was talking down Walker’s accomplishments. She argued his moves to boost private schools with public money, cut taxes and all but end public-sector collective bargaining were half measures. Aside from going after public employee unions, she argued, Walker has been too nice and too passive. In particular she cited "a pitiful 500-student increase to Milwaukee’s voucher program, the nation’s oldest, because Walker couldn’t get his own party members to back a real expansion despite full control of Wisconsin’s legislative and executive branches." She added: "Whoop de doo. In Indiana, Mitch Daniels’ voucher program is approaching 30,000 students two years after opening. He knew how to work with his legislature — and they ain’t any less ornery and squishy than Wisconsin Republicans." Did Daniels -- a Walker favorite who served two terms as governor ending in 2013 -- spectacularly outdo Walker on school vouchers despite favorable political conditions for the GOP in Madison? At first glance, the programs appear pretty similar. Wisconsin currently pays for 29,683 students to attend non-public schools. In Indiana, the figure also tops 29,000. But most of the growth in the Wisconsin program long pre-dates Walker, while Indiana has surged to Wisconsin’s level in just four years. Daniels won passage of the program in 2011, the same year Walker’s first term began in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, vouchers were born 25 years ago through a Milwaukee-only program. It was a pioneering effort nationally in the use of public tax dollars to enable parents to send their children to private and/or religious schools. It was under Walker that the program expanded beyond Milwaukee, to more than 25 municipalities. But Pullmann alludes, accurately, to the fact Daniels was able to get vouchers approved statewide right from the get-go, while Walker settled for a gradual and limited expansion even with a Republican-controlled Legislature and a 2012 recall win under his belt. She misstates some facts and undersells Walker’s record on vouchers, though, in saying he won a mere "500-student increase to Milwaukee’s voucher program." Walker did cap the increase at 500 additional students in 2013-’14. But that cap of 500 students is old news; the statewide limit went up to 1,000 new students for 2014-’15. Also left out of the equation are earlier expansions on Walker’s watch. Walker lifted Milwaukee’s 22,500 enrollment limit in 2011. He also signed the expansion of the program to Racine in 2011-’12. All these moves combined to allow more than 5,000 new students into the program annually, 10 times the amount Pullmann credits him for. By contrast, Indiana went from 0 to more than 29,000 in four years. The program there was capped at 7,500 its first year and at 15,000 in its second, but now has no cap. Wisconsin’s program outside Milwaukee and Racine is still capped at 1,000 students, though Walker and legislators have signalled they want to raise that limit in the next term. Voucher advocate Kara Kerwin, president of the Center for Education Reform, said Pullmann was right to describe Walker’s approach as incrementalism compared to the Indiana experience. But "Indiana was in a different position because others had already paved the road," Kerwin said. Both states fared very well in the Center’s 2014 state scorecard on voucher plans. Indiana ranked #1 ("a universal voucher program open to all students across the state and no limit on the number of vouchers that can be awarded.") Wisconsin tied for #2 ("a much-restricted statewide program, both in terms of income eligibility and number of available vouchers.") Finally, the political front. Walker faced the reality that some GOP senators balked at expanding the program beyond Milwaukee and Racine. He proposed a cap, but one that would expire; legislators made the 1,000-student limit indefinite. We asked Walker press secretary Laurel Patrick why the Republican governor proposed a cap on out-state enrollment. "Our office worked with the Legislature and this was the avenue that had the most support, especially due to concerns about funding and the capacity for expansion," Patrick told us. Our rating Pullmann wrote that Scott Walker "couldn’t get his own party" to back more than a 500-student increase in Milwaukee’s school choice program, but in Indiana, "Mitch Daniels’ voucher program is approaching 30,000 students two years after opening." She’s on target on the basic notion of Indiana’s speed vs. Wisconsin’s gradualism, but leaves out or muffs some important details. We rate her claim Half True.	None	Joy Pullmann	None	None	None	2014-11-21T05:00:00	2014-11-11	['Indiana', 'Milwaukee', 'Mitch_Daniels', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-snes-04222	A customer discovered a deceased and discarded baby in a Kentucky Walmart's discount DVD bin.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walmart-customer-finds-dead-baby-in-discount-dvd-bin/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Walmart Customer Finds Dead Baby in Discount DVD Bin	17 August 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-01651	"The majority of Austinites rent" the places they live.	true	/texas/statements/2014/aug/22/mike-martinez/mike-martinez-says-majority-austin-residents-are-r/	After an Austin mayoral candidate proposed to permanently cut homeowner taxes, City Council Member Mike Martinez said the idea wouldn’t benefit most residents. Martinez, also a candidate for mayor, reacted after attorney Steve Adler said the council could have created a city homestead exemption, or tax break for homeowners, years before. "We need to act," Adler said Aug. 4, 2014, according to an Austin American-Statesman news story that day. Adler called for a 20 percent exemption--as in a 20 percent cut to each home’s taxable value--at a city-estimated cost of $36 million a year. Martinez and a third mayoral aspirant, City Council Member Sheryl Cole, said Adler’s idea revealed his lack of governing experience. Martinez said: "This would be $36 million that would benefit the wealthiest Austinites the most. The majority of Austinites rent and would see no financial benefit at all." We wondered about Martinez’s statement that most Austin residents rent, rather than own, the places they live. We did not delve into his contention that renters wouldn’t benefit from Adler’s proposal. To our inquiry, a Martinez campaign spokesman, Nick Hudson, pointed out a July 31, 2014, city report including an illustration stating that 183,000 of the city’s 331,000 households in 2012 (55 percent) were renters--a proportion in keeping with trends in 2000 and 2008, the report says. By contrast, 148,000 households, 45 percent, were owners. Hudson also forwarded a web link to a city-generated chart drawing on the 2010 U.S. Census indicating 51 percent of Austin’s residents were renters that year. To get our own fix on this, we queried Lloyd Potter, the Texas state demographer, who said by email Martinez’s claim is supported by the best available resource, American Community Survey data annually gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the surveys taken from 2010 through 2012, Potter said, 418,138, or 52 percent, of an estimated 799,183 Austin residents lived in rental units compared with 381,045 residents, or 48 percent, who were owners. He said the 2012 survey alone suggests 432,400, 53 percent, of the city’s 823,340 residents were renters compared with 390,940, nearly 48 percent, who were owners, Potter said. Separately, a bureau spokesman, Robert Bernstein, responded to our inquiry by emailing a chart based on the bureau’s 2012 survey suggesting there were more "housing units" rented in Austin than units that were occupied by owners. According to the survey, 183,080 of 330,838 housing units (55 percent) were renter-occupied with 147,758 (45 percent) being owner-occupied. (We suspect these figures were the basis of the information in the report noted by Martinez’s camp.) Occupied housing units 2012 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 American Community Survey (chart received by email from Robert Bernstein of the bureau). Our ruling Martinez said the majority of Austinites rent where they live. Government surveys show slightly more than half the city’s residents rent. We rate this statement True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Mike Martinez	None	None	None	2014-08-22T06:00:00	2014-08-04	['None']
-pomt-10292	John McCain worries about nuclear waste in Arizona, but not in Nevada.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/13/barack-obama/mccain-thinks-yucca-site-will-be-more-secure/	An ad from Barack Obama zings John McCain about a proposal to store the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada, at a site called Yucca Mountain. The Yucca Mountain project is the result of a quest by the U.S. Energy Department to create a remote, long-term underground storage facility for spent nuclear material and hazardous waste generated by nuclear power plants and weapons development. It has been a controversial proposal, especially in Nevada. As you might guess, many Nevada voters oppose the Yucca Mountain project, and candidates who visit the state are regularly questioned about it. The original opening date was 1998, but opposition has prevented the project from going forward and its fate is unclear. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is a powerful opponent. Obama has urged that the project be shelved. McCain, on the other hand, supports the project. It's more dangerous, he has said, to have nuclear waste stored next to active reactors at multiple sites around the country. The Energy Department says that nuclear waste is currently stored at more than 120 sites in 39 states. The Obama ad, which is airing only in Nevada, includes a brief clip of interview footage with McCain. Here's the heart of the ad's transcript: Narrator: "Imagine trucks hauling the nation's nuclear waste on our highways to Yucca Mountain? John McCain supports opening Yucca. He's not worried about nuclear waste in our state — only in Arizona." Interviewer: "Would you be comfortable with nuclear waste coming through Arizona on its way, you know going through Phoenix, on its way to Yucca Mountain?" McCain: "No, I would not. No, I would not." Narrator: "John McCain. For nuclear waste in Nevada, just not in his backyard." The interview snippet takes only a brief portion of McCain's remarks. His full answer is, "No, I would not. No, I would not. I think it can be made safe, and again we have two options here. What people forget is the option of leaving this waste in areas outside, maybe unprotected or certainly not well protected, all over America rather than having it in a safe and secure repository for it. I prefer not having the status quo, and I think it's also a national security issue. I think these areas would be ripe for terrorist attacks." A bit of controversy has erupted in the Nevada media about the ad and its meaning. The interview is from a syndicated, privately produced news show called "Nevada Newsmakers," hosted by journalist Sam Shad. One Las Vegas columnist believes that McCain misspoke in the interview, that his full answer indicated McCain would be okay with nuclear waste being transported through Arizona. "Now why would McCain emphasize how the waste 'can be made safe' if he weren't trying to emphasize he would have no worries about the substance passing through Phoenix?" asked Joe Ralston, writing in the Las Vegas Sun. "Obviously, he thought Shad was asking him whether he felt comfortable with waste going through Arizona and answered too quickly. So the central point of the ad — that McCain would be wary of it in Arizona but not in Nevada — is simply false." Shad, who conducted the interview, disagrees with that interpretation. He said he thinks McCain was answering honestly that he opposes nuclear waste being trucked through a major metro area like Phoenix, and that McCain was simply moving on quickly to a point he preferred to make — that the Yucca Mountain proposal is better than the status quo. McCain would not want to be filmed saying that trucking nuclear waste through his hometown is fine by him, Shad said. "This is not a stupid guy," Shad said. "This is a very smart guy." Shad, though, has demanded that the Obama campaign stop airing the commercial. (As of this writing, the footage is still available and presumably airing.) Shad said he hadn't given the campaign permission to use the footage. "It's not a partisan thing," he told PolitiFact.com. "They don't just have the right. It's a copyright issue. It's my video and my audio. Who's going to want to come on the program if they find themselves in a campaign ad later?" The editing of the video makes McCain appear "glib," Shad said, when his answer was more substantive. So what do we make of all this? We asked the McCain campaign for an explanation on the transportation issue and didn't hear back. What is clear is that the Obama campaign edited the video in a way that omits the main point of McCain's statement. McCain was making a logical case for Yucca Mountain based on issues of safety and security. Whether you agree with his views or not, it's clear from the interview that he supports the project for substantive reasons that have little to do with keeping nuclear waste out of his home state. The ad makes McCain appear to support a simplistic "not in my backyard" argument, which distorts his views significantly. For these reasons, we find the statement that McCain is worried about nuclear waste in Arizona but not in Nevada to be Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-08-13T00:00:00	2008-08-09	['Arizona', 'Nevada', 'John_McCain']
-goop-00582	Miley Cyrus Deleted Instagram Photos Because She’s “Embarrassed” By Partying Past?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/miley-cyrus-deleted-instagram-photos-reason-partying-past/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Miley Cyrus Deleted Instagram Photos Because She’s “Embarrassed” By Partying Past?	12:45 pm, July 25, 2018	None	['None']
-vogo-00083	Statement: “(The San Diego Film Commission) had attracted up to $100 million in direct production company spending each year to the San Diego region,” former commission CEO Cathy Anderson wrote in an Aug. 8 op-ed.	determination: mostly true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-hollywood-spending-in-san-diego/	Analysis: The San Diego Film Commission dissolved last month after more than 35 years of coordinating with film crews and working to entice more of them to the region.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Hollywood Spending in San Diego	August 30, 2013	None	['San_Diego']
-goop-01966	Kim Kardashian Freaked Out After Surrogate Bought Junk Food?	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-surrogate-junk-food/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian Freaked Out After Surrogate Bought Junk Food?	2:01 pm, December 25, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-01812	A Navy Destroyer crashed into a building in downtown Houston after Hurricane Harvey flooded the city in August 2017.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/navy-destroyer-collides-building-downtown-houston/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Navy Destroyer Collides with Building in Downtown Houston?	30 August 2017	None	['Houston']
-snes-01527	A photograph shows insects embedded in a dog's mouth.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ladybugs-beetles-dog-mouth/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Does This Photograph Show Beetles Embedded in a Dog’s Mouth?	21 November 2015	None	['None']
-hoer-00585	Circulating Image Depicts Fisherman With Massive Catfish	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/huge-catfish-image.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Circulating Image Depicts Fisherman With Massive Catfish	February 26, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-09741	Forty-five percent of doctors "say they'll quit" if health care reform passes.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/15/glenn-beck/beck-says-45-percent-physicians-would-quit-if-heal/	Physicians are important players in the health care debate. They've been courted by both supporters and opponents of the Democratic reform plan. President Barack Obama held a Rose Garden ceremony with some of them recently. And now opponents of the Democratic health care plan are citing poll results that supposedly show that lots of doctors would be so unhappy with the reforms that they'd quit their jobs. Fox News Channel political commentator Glenn Beck mentioned this on his Oct. 12, 2009, show during a wide-ranging critique of the Democratic plan. He said that the plan could harm doctors financially and make medical students have doubts about pursuing the profession. "Do you really think that you're going to see an increase in medical students? I don't think so," Beck said. "Especially consider that the percentage of doctors who say they'll quit if this is passed is only 45 percent. No worries. Ha! You'll be able to find a good doctor. Really, you will." If true, the sudden departure of 45 percent of the nation's doctors would indeed constitute a stinging rejection of the Democratic effort by an influential health care constituency. But that number sounded high to us, so we decided to look into the statistic's origins. It came from a survey of "practicing physicians" published in mid September. The survey was sponsored by the newspaper Investor's Business Daily and was done by the firm TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics, or TIPP. The survey was conducted between Aug. 28, 2009, and Sept. 15, 2009. It was mailed to 25,600 physicians nationwide at addresses purchased from a list broker. We found several problems with the poll and the way Beck described its results: • Beck misstated what the poll asked . Beck said that 45 percent of doctors will quit. But in fact, the poll found that 45 percent of doctors said they will consider quitting. Considering quitting isn't the same thing as quitting, which makes Beck's statement a significant exaggeration. In addition, the specific question asked of respondents was, "If Congress passes their health care plan, will you ... continue your practice, [or] consider leaving your practice or taking an early retirement?" This wording leaves open the possibility that respondents are saying they might simply leave their current practice to join another practice, rather than quit. • The poll had a low response rate . According to the statistics published in IBD , 1,376 practicing physicians responded to the poll, out of the 25,600 solicited nationally. That's a 5.4 percent response rate. In one of its articles about the poll, IBD bills this as "a high rate of return, considering how difficult doctors are to get hold of." But another survey of doctors released around the same time managed to do better — much better. That other survey was conducted by Salomeh Keyhani and Alex Federman, internists and researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, who published the results in the New England Journal of Medicine . They mailed 5,157 questionnaires and got a response rate that exceeded 43 percent — nearly eight times the IBD survey's rate. In fact, Keyhani and Federman reached almost 50 percent more doctors despite sending out only one-fifth the number of inquiries. (They did not ask doctors if they would consider quitting as the other poll did.) Does a higher response rate matter? In this case, it's hard to know for sure, said Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. However, she added, "higher response rates give me more confidence in results," a point echoed by other experts we interviewed. • The sponsor was listed prominently on the survey, possibly influencing who responded . The survey was sent out on Investor’s Business Daily letterhead, and the introduction said in part, "The results of this survey will be on Investor’s Business Daily’s front page and investors.com. A press release will also be prepared. This will give doctors a voice in this key issue." This type of framing matters because IBD 's editorial page is known for its conservative stance, including opposition to the Democratic health care effort. While it’s safe to assume that not everyone who received the survey knew about IBD 's political leanings, some respondents presumably did — and among those who did, such knowledge could have made a difference in determining who responded. Liberals might have been less likely to respond, while conservatives in tune with the IBD editorials would have been more enthusiastic about responding. In such a small sample, even a modest bias of that sort could skew the results. • The wording of questions may have influenced who responded . In an interview, Mark Blumenthal, who blogs at pollster.com and has written critically of the IBD poll, said the wording of the questions could have skewed the results. He noted that, unlike telephone polls, mail polls enable the recipient to skim the entire list of questions before deciding to answer any of them. With the IBD poll, respondents might have thought some of the questions had a subtext that was critical of the Democratic proposal. One was, "Do you believe the government can cover 47 million more people and it will cost less money and the quality of care will be better?" Another was, "If Congress passes their plan, do you expect fewer students to apply to med schools in the future [or] more students to apply to med schools in the future?" A third was, "Under a government plan, do you think drug companies will have incentives to continue developing as many life saving new drugs?" (Grammatical errors in original; full survey text available here.) "Collectively, these questions imply that health care reform will mean very bad things for medicine," Blumenthal said. "I'm guessing that a proreform doctor would be inclined to ignore, and not return, a survey if the questions seem leading or biased." Could the prominence of the IBD name and the question wording have made a difference? The evidence suggests that may be true. In the IBD poll, 65 percent of the doctors who responded said they opposed "government's proposed health care plan" while just 33 percent supported it. By contrast, the Keyhani-Federman poll found that 63 percent of doctors surveyed favored giving patients a choice between public and private insurance, as congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama have advocated. Another 10 percent said they favored a single-payer health care system — a solution that is actually to the left of the president. In other words, the results of the two polls are so far apart that they are essentially opposites. The truth may actually lie somewhere in between the two surveys. It's worth noting that the Keyhani-Federman poll received financial support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which favors health care reform. Also, National Public Radio has said that "Keyhani and Federman belong to ... the National Physicians Alliance. It supports a public option, and Keyhani has spoken publicly about her own support for a public option." A campaign finance database search found that both researchers donated to the Obama campaign in 2008 — $500 from Keyhani and $300 from Federman. In addition, the initial postcard Keyhani and Federman sent to doctors included the subheading, "Congress wants to hear from doctors on health care reform" — advocacy-style language similar to what the IBD poll said. This may have produced some ideological bias in the opposite direction from IBD 's poll. (In an interview, Federman said the reason for choosing the words they did stemmed from "what the literature shows about what works to get docs to respond to surveys.") Finally, Don Dillman, an expert in mail-based polls and a professor at Washington State University, suggests another factor that could make the IBD poll results on doctors quitting vastly overstated: People don't usually make decisions about changing careers lightly. "If one is trained to be a physician, then are you going to take on another occupation?" he asks. This concern is especially relevant for younger physicians, who would likely find few new careers that would earn them enough income to pay off their debts from attending medical school. So, back to Beck's statement. First, he misstated the results of the poll. The survey didn't say 45 percent would quit; it said they would consider quitting, which is considerably different. Moreover, polling experts have raised significant questions about the poll's methodology. Of special concern are the combination of the heavy mention of IBD 's name and questions that experts said appeared to be seeking answers critical of health reform. We'd like to see an independent poll assessing doctors' views of health care reform, but neither the findings from the IBD survey nor those from the Keyhani-Federman study are fully persuasive to us. We rate Beck's statement False.	None	Glenn Beck	None	None	None	2009-10-15T16:12:17	2009-10-12	['None']
-tron-02362	President Bush Visited the Wounded After the Terrorist Attack at Ft. Hood	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bush-fthood/	None	military	None	None	None	President Bush Visited the Wounded After the Terrorist Attack at Ft. Hood	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-04231	List of double entrendres collects "the top nine comments made by NBC sports commentators during the Summer Olympics."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/olympic-games/	None	Humor	None	David Mikkelson	None	Olympic Goofs	1 September 2004	None	['None']
-snes-01048	A Spirit Airlines employee advised a young woman to flushing her emotional support hamster down the toilet in order to board a flight.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/spirit-airlines-hamster/	None	Critter Country	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Spirit Airlines Tell a Customer to Flush Her Hamster Down the Toilet?	9 February 2018	None	['None']
-vogo-00280	Trendy Regulation Talk: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/trendy-regulation-talk-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	Trendy Regulation Talk: Fact Check TV	January 30, 2012	None	['None']
-chct-00255	FACT CHECK: Did The Washington Redskins Change Their Team Name?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/12/14/fact-check-did-the-washington-redskins-change-their-team-name/	None	None	None	Kush Desai | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	11:06 AM 12/14/2017	None	['None']
-pomt-06678	Utah was "the No. 1 job creator in this country during my years of service" as governor, with a 5.9 percent increase in jobs.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/08/jon-huntsman/jon-huntsman-says-utah-was-no-1-job-creation-when-/	During the Sept. 7, 2011, Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman tried to burnish his economic credentials. Taking a swipe at Texas Gov. Rick Perry, another Republican presidential candidate, Huntsman said, "I hate to rain on the parade of the Lone Star governor, but as governor of Utah, we were the No. 1 job creator in this country during my years of service. That was 5.9 percent when you were creating jobs at 4.9 percent." We decided to check whether Huntsman was right -- and in a tale that only a statistical economist could love, we found that the answer is a lot more complicated than you might expect. When we asked the Huntsman campaign for data to back up the claim, they directed us to a blog post at National Review Online, the website of the well-known conservative magazine. The item, posted June 20, 2011, compared employment statistics for several governors. "During Huntsman’s tenure, January 2005 to August 2009, Utah had the best overall job-growth rate of any state in the nation," the item said. "In that same time frame, Perry’s job-growth rate was 4.9 percent. (Minnesota Gov. Tim) Pawlenty’s job-growth rate was negative: The number of jobs in Minnesota decreased by 1.8 percent." At PolitiFact, we always double-check data in media reports against official statistics, so we did so here as well. We turned to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the government’s official source of employment statistics. We looked at the Current Employment Statistics database for each of the 50 states and subtracted the number of jobs in January 2005 from the number in August 2009. As it happens, this period was split between an expansion (2005 through 2007) and a deep recession (2008 and 2009), so a majority of states actually lost jobs over that period. Utah was not one of the job-losing states -- but it also wasn’t No. 1 in the nation, according to this set of statistics, and it actually trailed Texas, undercutting Huntsman’s jab at Perry. Here are the four states with the fastest employment growth over the period when Huntsman was governor: 1. Wyoming: 9.5 percent increase 2. North Dakota: 7.5 percent increase 3. Texas: 6.5 percent increase 4. Utah: 4.8 percent increase So Huntsman’s claim gets a False, right? Not so fast. When we showed our math to the Huntsman camp, they stood by their numbers. They sent us to a page for the state of Utah on the BLS website that backed up the claim Huntsman made during the debate -- the number of jobs in Utah rose by 5.9 percent over the period. Using the equivalent pages for the other three states, we found that Utah exceeded them all -- Texas grew by 4.9 percent, as Huntsman indicated, while Wyoming grew by 4 percent and North Dakota grew by 3 percent. Using these figures, Huntsman was correct. So what gives? When we checked with the BLS, a spokesman explained that the way we calculated the numbers and the way the Huntsman camp calculated the numbers are different because the numbers come from different data sets. The data we used come from the Current Employment Statistics, a monthly study of the payroll data at 400,000 businesses, whereas the Huntsman campaign was using data from the Current Population Survey, which is based on a survey of about 60,000 households. Is one of these data set preferred in this context? The BLS’s answer is yes -- and the preferred method is not the one used by the Huntsman campaign. "BLS uses changes in the payroll survey to describe job gain or loss," said spokesman Gary Steinberg. One additional observation, which won’t affect our rating, but which we think is worth pointing out: Utah’s job growth during Huntsman’s tenure didn’t keep pace with the state’s population growth. Utah’s estimated population grew by 11.4 percent during the Huntsman era, more than twice the rate of job growth as measured by the Current Employment Statistics data. Texas’ population growth over that period (8.7 percent) also outpaced its job growth. However, in the two smaller states, job growth did outpace population growth -- North Dakota, with a population increase of 1.8 percent, and Wyoming, with a population increase of 7.5 percent. Then again, it’s also worth noting that 34 states lost jobs between January 2005 and August 2009, so any increase in jobs is noteworthy. Our ruling Huntsman’s campaign is able to point to government data to support its position that Utah was the No. 1 job creator in the U.S. during Huntsman’s tenure, and we see no evidence that they cherry-picked the data. Still, the BLS itself considers the data set used by the campaign to be less appropriate for the kind of comparison Huntsman is making, and, using the proper data set, Utah is fourth -- pretty high, but not first, as Huntsman said. On balance, we rate his statement Half True.	None	Jon Huntsman	None	None	None	2011-09-08T16:11:51	2011-09-07	['Utah']
-snes-01924	A group of former General Motors workers furtively produced 1957 Chevrolet automobiles on their own for ten years.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevy-duty/	None	Automobiles	None	David Mikkelson	None	Were 1957 Chevies Secretly Produced Until 1967?	1 November 2007	None	['General_Motors', 'Chevrolet']
-pomt-13128	"In many instances, (people's) health care costs are more than their mortgage costs or their rent, which, by the way, is a first in American history."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/02/donald-trump/average-donald-trump-comparison-health-care-housin/	Health care was the theme of a Donald Trump rally Nov. 1 in Valley Forge, Pa., so it was not surprising that Trump focused on the projected price increases in policies offered under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. "People all across the country are devastated. In many instances, their health care costs are more than their mortgage costs or their rent which, by the way, is a first in American history," Trump said. "This is particularly unfair to millennials and younger Americans generally who will be totally crushed by these massive health care costs before they even get started on their journey through life." We know health care costs have been going up relentlessly, even before Obamacare, and we also know that housing costs, which once made up about one quarter of a household's expenses, have been eating up a larger share of the family budget. So we wondered if Trump's characterization of the relative costs over time was accurate. The Trump campaign didn't get back to us when we asked for the source of the candidate's claim. So we asked some experts. Most pointed us to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey, which has been tracking Americans' expenses since 1984. That's the data we'll use. Housing costs made up 32.9 percent of annual expenses in 2015. Health care was just 7.8 percent. But it's more complicated than that. A lot of extra costs are packed into the housing costs — more than just mortgage and rent bills — and a lot of costs aren't included in the health care number. Here's how the numbers unpack. Housing Those annual housing costs, which average $18,409, include a lot more than mortgage payments and rent. They also fold in utilities, property taxes, repairs, furnishings, housekeeping supplies, appliances and equipment. The data don't list total mortgage bills. The BLS does list mortgage interest in charges, so for simplicity we'll focus on that. For people who own a house, the average yearly interest expense in 2015 was $8,169. (It gets a little complicated because the BLS number had to be adjusted for the fact that about 35 percent of households were made up of owners with a mortgage. In this analysis, we're not including people who own their homes outright.) For renters, who made up 38 percent of households, the average rent in 2015 was $10,005 per year, according to our adjusted BLS data. Health care Health care costs are even more complicated because many people get at least a portion of their health insurance paid by an employer or the government, and the BLS survey doesn't take that into consideration. If everyone were forced to buy their own health insurance, those costs would make up a lot more than 7.8 percent of the family budget. Nonetheless, the 7.8 percent spent per household on health care in 2015 represents a national average of $4,342 per year, $2,977 of which is spent on health insurance, $791 on medical services, $425 on drugs and $149 on medical supplies. Because Trump specifically referred to health care costs, rent and mortgage costs, here's the comparison for 2015: Health care: $4,342 Rent: $10,005 Mortgage interest (without principle): $8,169 So out-of-pocket health care costs are just 43 percent of when the average renter pays and 53 percent of what the average homeowner with a mortgage pays in interest. For recent home buyers and the self-insured under Obamacare, Dean Baker, co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington, said it's important to remember that while health costs have been rising, homeowners have been benefiting from "the extraordinarily low mortgage interest rates of the last seven years." "A 30-year mortgage at 4 percent on $200,000 (80 percent of the median house price of $250,000) would cost around $11,500 a year," he said in an email. When it comes to health insurance, "a family of four getting a silver plan without any subsidy would pay a bit over $11,000. If the mortgage rate was 5 percent, the annual cost of the mortgage (just interest and principle, no insurance or taxes) would be just under $13,000. If it was 6 percent, then the cost would be $14,400," so Obamacare would cost less. On the other hand, someone buying Obamacare now might find it far more expensive than the mortgage payment set up 20 years ago when housing prices were much lower. Historical trends Trump said this is "a first in American history." This, too, is incorrect. We took the BLS data and calculated the percentage of annual expenses for mortgage interest, rent and health care. Note that the first Obamacare plans sold through the insurance marketplaces took effect in 2014. Out-of-pocket health care costs have been rising, according to the BLS data, but they're not close to converging, even though prices have been rising steadily as premiums have gone up, deductibles and co-pays have increased, and employers have shifted more of those rising costs to their workers. From a broader perspective, and one that includes government and employee costs for health care, data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the United States is now spending significantly more on health care ($2.6 trillion in 2015) than on housing ($1.9 trillion). "The aggregate health care consumption numbers have been higher than aggregate housing expenditures for a number of years now," said Jeffrey Clemens, a professor of health economics at the University of California San Diego. Our ruling Trump said, "In many instances, (people's) health care costs are more than their mortgage costs or their rent, which, by the way, is a first in American history." This is a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. He is comparing total health care costs but not total housing costs, looking at only mortgage and rental costs. To further complicate matters, per-person health care costs far more than what most households pay because many get their health insurance subsidized by employers or the government. With those caveats in mind, the federal data show Trump is, on average, incorrect. But the candidate fudged it a bit, and given individual circumstances it's certainly possible that some households are, in fact, seeing higher health care bills than what they're paying on their rent and mortgage. So we rate this claim Mostly False.https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/4549f29a-a2e2-49dd-8fff-34d70628f2be	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-11-02T18:20:27	2016-11-01	['United_States']
-pomt-05775	"President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/feb/27/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-calls-barack-obama-snob-wanting-ever/	Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum kicked up a media storm when he slammed President Barack Obama as a "snob" at an Americans for Prosperity forum in Troy, Mich., on Feb. 25, 2012. "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college," Santorum said. "What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor that (tries) to indoctrinate them." The issue received such attention that Obama on Feb. 27 addressed the issue obliquely, telling the National Governors Association that "the jobs of the future are increasingly going to those with more than a high school degree. And I have to make a point here. When I speak about higher education, we’re not just talking about a four-year degree. We’re talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring somebody walking through the door, handling a million-dollar piece of equipment. And they can’t go in there unless they’ve got some basic training beyond what they received in high school. We all want Americans getting those jobs of the future. So we’re going to have to make sure that they’re getting the education that they need." Obama has made no secret that he encourages Americans to go to college and has pursued policies to expand access to those who want to go. But we received a number of requests from readers to see whether Obama went so far as to say that he "wants everybody in America to go to college." We didn’t hear back from the Santorum campaign, but we looked into Obama’s past speeches, using both Nexis and the White House website, to locate instances in which he broached the topic. We found 18 examples. All but three of them make clear that Obama does not expect every young American to attend a traditional four-year, bachelors-degree-granting college or university or even a community college. In three cases, Obama did say something closer to what Santorum suggested, but still not enough to justify Santorum's claim. In seven sets of remarks, Obama focused not on having every young American attend college, but rather making college a possibility for every American who wants to attend, particularly making it more affordable. Here are two that were typical (the full list is available here). • A letter by Barack Obama to his daughters, published in Parade magazine, Jan. 2009. "In the end, girls, that's why I ran for President: because of what I want for you and for every child in this nation. I want all our children to go to schools worthy of their potential—schools that challenge them, inspire them, and instill in them a sense of wonder about the world around them. I want them to have the chance to go to college—even if their parents aren't rich." • Remarks at the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables, Fla., Feb. 23, 2012. "When kids graduate, I want them to be able to afford to go to college. If they've been working hard, if they've gotten the grades to go to college, I don't want them to cut their dreams short because they don't think they can afford it." In another four speeches, Obama focused on community colleges as an alternative to the traditional, four-year college experience. Here is one example: • Remarks at a Democratic issues conference, Jan. 27, 2012. "They don't all have to go to four-year colleges and universities -- although we need more engineers and we need more scientists, and we've got to make sure that college is affordable and accessible. But we also need skilled workers who are going to community colleges, or middle-aged workers who are allowed to retrain, have a commitment to work, have that work ethic, but want to make sure that technology is not passing them by -- and so focusing on our community colleges, and making sure that they're matched up with businesses that are hiring right now, and making sure that they help to design the programs that are going to put them -- put people in place to get those jobs right away." In another four speeches, Obama was quite explicit about encouraging Americans to pursue either a college education or vocational training, apprenticeships or lifelong retraining. What he said in his first address to a joint session of Congress was typical: • Address to a Joint Session of Congress, Feb. 24, 2009. "Tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma." Judging by these 15 speeches, it’s possible to conclude that Obama favors giving all Americans the chance to get a university education if they wish, and opening up other opportunities for education beyond high school for those who do not, from community colleges to vocational training to apprenticeships. Finally, in three speeches Obama said something a little closer to what Santorum claimed he said. For instance, in remarks at a Democratic National committee fundraiser in Austin, Texas, on May 10, 2011, he said: "Our reforms are not done. I want every child in Texas and every child in America ready to graduate, ready to go to college, and actually able to afford going to college. That's how we're going to out-compete and out-educate the rest of the world. That's how America will succeed in the 21st century." Meanwhile, at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee dinner in Minneapolis, Minn., on Oct. 23, 2010, Obama said, "We've got to make sure that every young person in America is prepared for college and then can afford to go to college." And at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dinner in Rockville, Md., on Oct. 18, 2010, Obama said, "How do we make sure that every young person can go to college once they get through that high school?" Our ruling Santorum claimed that Obama "once said he wants everybody in America to go to college." We found 18 statements from Obama about people attending college. In the vast majority of the 18, Obama talked about making college a possibility or included the option of attending community colleges or vocational training instead. We found three that offered partial support for Santorum's claim, but their tenor was mainly about opening doors for people who want to go to college, not a clear desire that everyone enroll. We rate the claim False. UPDATE: Santorum backtracked on this claim during the March 4, 2012, edition of Fox News Sunday after being pressed by host Chris Wallace, the Boston Globe reported. "I've read some columns where at least it was characterized that the president said, we should go to four-year colleges," Santorum said, adding, "If it was in error, then I agree with the president that we should have options for people to go to variety of different training options for them."	None	Rick Santorum	None	None	None	2012-02-27T17:43:01	2012-02-25	['United_States', 'Barack_Obama']
-snes-05997	A mother revealed to her child in a letter after her death that she had just one eye because she had donated the other to him.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-eyes-have-it/	None	Glurge Gallery	None	David Mikkelson	None	One-Eyed Mother	9 December 2011	None	['None']
-pomt-02192	Says Cory Gardner "championed an eight-year crusade to outlaw birth control here in Colorado."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/apr/25/mark-udall/mark-udall-says-cory-gardner-championed-colorado-f/	Women, particularly single women, voted strongly for President Barack Obama and other Democrats in 2012. Hoping to replicate that success, Democrats this year are hammering Republicans on women’s health issues in the early stages of the 2014 midterm campaign season. A good example is Colorado, where Democratic Sen. Mark Udall is expected to face Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., in November. Udall recently released a 30-second ad attacking Gardner on abortion and birth control. "Congressman Cory Gardner’s history promoting harsh anti-abortion laws is disturbing," the narrator says. "Gardner sponsored a bill to make abortion a felony, including cases of rape and incest. Gardner even championed an eight-year crusade to outlaw birth control here in Colorado." Udall’s campaign said Gardner’s "crusade to outlaw birth control" stems from his support of efforts to add so-called "personhood" language that would define life beginning at fertilization to the Colorado Constitution. Opponents of personhood legislation say that giving a fertilized egg all the rights of person could make illegal several FDA-approved contraceptives. (More on that in a bit.) Anti-abortion groups successfully petitioned to get personhood measures on the Colorado ballot in 2008 and 2010. Both times it was rejected by more than 70 percent of voters. In a further complication, Gardner recently made a major about-face, saying he no longer supports the personhood movement, partly because he now thinks it could potentially impact access to certain forms of birth control. "The fact that it restricts contraception, it was not the right position," Gardner told The Denver Post. "I've learned to listen. I don't get everything right the first time." Despite this, Gardner’s camp still contends Udall’s ad is misleading because Gardner thought he was supporting an anti-abortion measure, not a referendum on birth control. Gardner’s campaign argues that it’s an exaggeration of his position to claim that he’s "championed" a "crusade to outlaw birth control." What are we to make of this? We can’t predict how the courts would interpret personhood legislation or its impact on legal birth control. Though even Gardner acknowledges that some contraceptives could be at risk if personhood passed, a lot of legal ambiguity remains. Because no state has passed a personhood measure, we don’t know how it could impact specific types of contraceptives. As we’ve noted in past articles about the debate over personhood, some legal scholars and the medical community have cautioned that it could potentially impact access to birth control. In a 2011 op-ed to the New York Times, Glenn Cohen, co-director of the Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard University, and Jonathan Will, law professor at Mississippi College, said what is considered "fertilization" is not even clear. Fertilization could mean at least four different things: "penetration of the egg by a sperm," successful combination of the genetic information from sperm and egg, activation of the genetic information, and "implantation of the embryo in the uterus," Cohen and Will wrote. Sperm penetration occurs almost immediately, but implantation can take up to two weeks. "Thus, on some reasonable readings of the amendment, certain forms of birth control ... would seem impermissible, while on other equally reasonable readings they are not." Therefore, it is difficult to know how courts would react, especially considering that past rulings have affirmed the right of access to birth control. A personhood law could present proponents an opportunity to challenge those rulings. So we’re left trying to determine whether Gardner’s past positions in support of personhood could reasonably be considered as championing a crusade against birth control. Gardner’s history In 2006, Colorado Right to Life asked all politicians running for office if they supported the Right to Life Act in Congress, "recognizing that personhood begins at fertilization." Gardner, then a first-term state representative answered yes. Udall’s campaign provided a television news story from March 17, 2008, that appears to briefly show Gardner in a room with several Republican colleagues signing on to the petition to put personhood on the Colorado ballot (around the 1-minute mark). Gardner’s campaign did not respond to questions about his support of the 2008 referendum. His campaign did, however, acknowledge that Gardner supported the referendum efforts in 2010 at a candidate forum. In a video clip from the forum, Gardner says he signed the petition and circulated it at his church. He also said the measure "backs up my support for life," but did not mention contraceptives or birth control. News stories from Colorado papers in 2008 and 2010 mention the debate over contraceptives involved in personhood legislation. In fact, Ken Buck, the 2010 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Colorado, backed away from his previous support of the personhood referendum because he said it could impact some forms of birth control. So contraception was a live issue at the time. But Cohen, the Harvard professor, told PolitiFact that "it is unclear that the Colorado 2008 and 2010 referendums were intended to ‘outlaw birth control in Colorado’ — that's what the word ‘crusade’ seems to imply. It is more clear that the language of those amendments might have outlawed some forms of birth control, whether that was the goal or not." In other words, Gardner may have been in favor of the amendment, but for reasons other than curbing contraception. Since getting elected to Congress in 2010, Gardner has co-sponsored the Life Begins at Conception Act in 2012 and 2013, which has been described as federal personhood legislation. But he was hardly alone in doing so, nor was he an early backer. In 2012, he was one of the final cosponsors of 120 lawmakers, joining a full 14 months after the bill was introduced. In 2013, the bill had 128 sponsors, with Gardner signing on four months after introduction. Gardner’s campaign notes that in 2007, he was one of five to cosponsor an anti-abortion measure in Colorado that specified that "nothing in this section shall prohibit the sale, use, prescription or administration of a contraceptive measure, device, drug or chemical." This bill, his campaign said, demonstrates that while Gardner is pro-life, he is not anti-contraceptive. Udall’s campaign, though, noted Gardner also voted against the "Birth Control Protection Act" in 2009, a response to the 2008 personhood ballot referendum, which became law. Our ruling Udall’s ad said Gardner "championed an eight-year crusade to outlaw birth control here in Colorado." It’s clear Gardner has supported personhood in the past, and it’s hard for him to claim ignorance about the measure’s threat to contraception, given the media attention that aspect of the law attracted at the time. Gardner also voted against a bill that would have legally protected birth control. Still, the effort is probably more accurately described as a crusade against abortion than against birth control, and "championed" is also a strong word to describe Gardner’s role, since it implies that he was a leader in the cause. Udall’s ad is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True.	None	Mark Udall	None	None	None	2014-04-25T15:11:26	2014-04-21	['Colorado']
-pomt-03421	Says Delaware County has more waterfront property than any other county in the state of Ohio	true	/ohio/statements/2013/jun/27/kris-jordan/ohio-sen-kris-jordan-says-delaware-county-lays-cla/	Ohio’s northern shore along Lake Erie provides a coastal connection to the Great Lakes, a series of inland seas that collectively hold the greatest supply of freshwater in the world. So it got PolitiFact Ohio’s curiosity going when we heard a claim that state Sen. Kris Jordan, a Republican from Delaware County, made during budget debates in the Ohio Senate. "Delaware County actually has more lakefront property and waterfront property than any other county in the state of Ohio," Jordan said. PolitiFact Ohio decided to see if Jordan’s claim held water. After all, Ohio’s north shore stretches hundreds of miles through eight different counties. Delaware County, meanwhile, is landlocked in the center of the state. First, let’s put Jordan’s remark in context. The senator made his claim while speaking in support of some provisions in the budget bill that targeted the city of Columbus. Columbus maintains a buffer strip around two reservoirs that extend into Delaware County, and Jordan’s district, and supply water to the city. Adjacent property owners have, in the past, clashed with the city over use of the buffer strips. Some, for example, have been cited for mowing grasses that the city says help with filtration of runoff water that enters the reservoir. The budget bill included restrictions to bar the city from penalizing property owners for doing what Jordan described as "basic maintenance of their property." He urged they be left in the legislation. Those reservoirs are part of the reason Delaware County has the most shoreline, Jordan said. PolitiFact Ohio checked with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to see what data it could provide. It has a website link with information about the Lake Erie shoreline that includes mileage for each of eight counties -- Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Erie, Lake, Lorain, Lucas, Ottawa and Sandusky. Ottawa County, which includes most of the Lake Erie islands, has the most lakefront property among those eight, with total shoreline of 94 miles. Next was Erie County with 68 miles. Sandusky County had the least among the eight with just 13 miles of lakeshore. But Ottawa’s shoreline wasn’t nearly the greatest in Ohio. ODNR experts from the Division of Coastal Management and Division of Soil and Water Resources used data from geographic information systems to calculate shorelines for Ohio’s other counties, coming up with estimates that took into account waterfront along inland lakes and waterways. Ottawa cracked the top five at No. 4. The others in the top five are inland counties that are home to large lakes or reservoirs. And Delaware was indeed No. 1. It has about 140 miles of shoreline, according to ODNR. Delaware County is home to O’Shaughnessy and Hoover reservoirs, two large man-made lakes that are a key part of Columbus’ water supply. Alum Creek Lake and Delaware Lake, two other man-made bodies of water, also are in Delaware County. Each is home to a state park. Jordan’s claim was that Delaware County had more waterfront property than any other in the state of Ohio. ODNR’s experts, using computer data to prepare the estimates, would agree. On the Truth-O-Meter, his claim rates True.	None	Kris Jordan	None	None	None	2013-06-27T06:00:00	2013-06-06	['Ohio']
-tron-03416	Boycott Whole Foods Market Because They Support Hamas	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/whole-foods-boycott/	None	religious	None	None	None	Boycott Whole Foods Market Because They Support Hamas	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01837	Courteney Cox, Johnny McDaid Did Get Engaged Again In Restaurant, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/courteney-cox-johnny-mcdaid-not-engaged-again-restaurant/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Courteney Cox, Johnny McDaid Did NOT Get Engaged Again In Restaurant, Despite Report	11:10 am, January 14, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-00060	Angelina Jolie, Justin Theroux Dating, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-justin-theroux-not-dating-jennifer-aniston/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie, Justin Theroux NOT Dating, Despite Report	10:02 am, October 31, 2018	None	['Angelina_Jolie']
-pomt-14720	"Here in Wisconsin, we've put in previous budgets more money into mental health services than any governor has in the last 25 years."	true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/dec/23/scott-walker/scott-walker-says-he-put-more-funds-mental-health-/	On Dec. 3, 2015, Gov. Scott Walker was asked by a Wisconsin reporter for his reaction to the gunslaying of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. the previous day. That was before authorities had determined that the husband-and-wife shooters had discussed jihad and martyrdom. Walker responded by talking about mental illness. "We don’t know enough about this instance. But for others like that, what we’ve found is one of the common denominators in many of these cases are people who’ve slipped through the cracks when it comes to chronic mental illness," the governor said. "That’s why I’m proud that here in Wisconsin, we’ve put in previous budgets more money into mental health services than any governor has in the last 25 years." Two longtime mental health advocates told us that Walker’s funding boost was exceptional. "We were hard pressed to think of anything quite as significant," said Shel Gross, senior policy associate at Mental Health America of Wisconsin. So let’s see whether Walker put into the state budget more money for mental health than any governor in the last quarter-century. Walker’s evidence Walker announced in February 2013, in the wake of mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and at a Sikh temple and a spa in suburban Milwaukee, that he would raise spending on mental health services by $29 million in his 2013-’15 state budget. The six initiatives included $12.6 million to open two units at the Mendota Mental Health Institute, a state-run psychiatric hospital in Madison for patients who have been committed, and $10.2 million for expanding community-based care programs for people with severe mental illness. When Walker made his formal budget presentation later that month, he said only half of all Wisconsin adults with "serious psychological distress received mental health treatment or medication" -- a claim we rated Mostly True. We noted that the Wisconsin chapter of National Alliance on Mental Illness had praised the spending boost, but criticized Walker for rejecting a proposal under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid, saying his decision "reflects a shallow understanding" of "crucial means to affordable mental health care for Wisconsin residents." Mental health benefits in private-sector insurance plans are generally less comprehensive than those provided by Medicaid. But that is separate from the amount of state funds Walker put into the state budget. To back the governor’s claim, a spokeswoman provided us a February 2013 email from Walker’s Department of Administration that said there had not been a mental health funding boost in "general purpose revenue" since the creation of what was known as the "community aids" program in the mid-1970s. Walker’s office also had his Department of Health Services provide us more detail in restating that his investment was the largest since the ‘70s. Separately, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau confirmed to us that the $29 million increase in state funding budgeted for mental health services in the 2013-15 state budget was the largest increase in at least 25 years, and that no other increases during that time were nearly as much. A final note: Charlie Morgan, a program supervisor for the fiscal bureau, told us that the total amount the state budgets for mental health services "is not easily answered." That’s because funding for those services is provided through many programs, including: inpatient services provided by the state's mental health hospitals, community-based mental health services that are budgeted as distinct programs; and funding the state provides to counties, including for programs that provide mental health as well as substance abuse services. But it’s clear the additional $29 million added by Walker is the largest such increase in at least 25 years, he said. Our rating Walker said: "Here in Wisconsin, we've put in previous budgets more money into mental health services than any governor has in the last 25 years." It’s worth noting that Walker refused a federal expansion of Medicaid that would have provided more mental health services to Wisconsinites. But on putting state money into the state budget for mental health, he is correct. We rate the statement True.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2015-12-23T05:00:00	2015-12-03	['Wisconsin']
-goop-00170	Demi Moore Pushing Daughters To Get Pregnant, Wants To Be A Grandma?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/demi-moore-daughters-pregnant-grandma/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Demi Moore Pushing Daughters To Get Pregnant, Wants To Be A Grandma?	2:00 am, October 6, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-10684	"We've got some 37-million of our fellow citizens who are living in poverty; about 12-million or 13-million are children."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/13/chris-dodd/poverty-numbers-are-right/	Sen. Chris Dodd must have had the U.S. Census Bureau's 2005 report in his notes, because he quotes it very precisely. "In 2005, 37.0-million people were in poverty, not statistically different from 2004," it says. "In 2005, the number in poverty remained statistically unchanged from 2004 for people under 18 and people 18 to 64 years old (12.9-million and 20.5-million, respectively)," it goes on. Dodd even says "about 12-million or 13-million are children," not looking too flashy by quoting the precise number of 12.9-million. The U.S. Census Bureau's 2006 report, released in August 2007, is "not statistically different from 2005," although it lists the number of people living in poverty as 36.5-million and the number of children living in poverty as 12.8-million. Either way, we rule Dodd's statement True.	None	Chris Dodd	None	None	None	2007-12-13T00:00:00	2007-12-13	['None']
-snes-01352	A photograph shows a "new hand sign" that is being used by teenagers to signal that they wish to buy or sell drugs.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/new-hand-sign-used-teens-acquire-drugs/	None	Crime	None	Dan Evon	None	Is a New Hand Sign Being Used by Teens to Acquire Drugs?	8 December 2017	None	['None']
-hoer-00899	Smell the Candle Robbery Warning	unsubstantiated messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/candle-robbery.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Smell the Candle Robbery Warning	6th February 2006	None	['None']
-tron-01508	A General Mattis Christmas Story	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/general-mattis-christmas-story/	None	government	None	None	['donald trump', 'national security', 'patriotism']	A General Mattis Christmas Story	Dec 5, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01280	The Riddle That 80% of Kindergartners Got Right but Stumped Stanford Seniors	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/nothing-harvey/	None	education	None	None	None	The Riddle That 80% of Kindergartners Got Right but Stumped Stanford Seniors	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-02197	"Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Mary Fallin signed a new law which makes you pay a special fee. It will essentially fine people for the crime of using solar power."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/24/rachel-maddow/rachel-maddow-unleashes-oklahomas-sun-tax-misses-c/	Rachel Maddow sharply criticized Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin on her MSNBC show Monday for imposing a "sun tax" on residents who install solar panels or wind turbines to conserve energy and save on their electric bill. But Maddow’s searing attack is misleading, says even a solar energy trade association. Maddow topped her April 21 broadcast with the story of SB 1456, connecting the "sun tax" law to conservative-driven efforts in other states to dial back state-approved benefits for utility customers who use alternative energy sources like small wind turbines and solar panels. (In Oklahoma, wind turbines are more prevalent than solar panels, for the record.) "Tonight Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Mary Fallin signed a new law which makes you pay a special fee," she said. "It will essentially fine people for the crime of using solar power. If you want to use the sun for electricity instead of your local coal fire power plant, the redder-than-red state Oklahoma government has figured out a way to make you pay for that crime." But the law mandates no special fee or fine as Maddow says. What SB 1456 does is crack open the door for Oklahoma’s utility companies to apply to charge future "distributed generation" customers (the ones who invest in solar and wind energy devices on their properties) a tariff, surcharge, fee, or whatever you want to call it. But that fee or "fine" could only come after extensive court-like hearings before a state regulator, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. And there are questions if that will happen. In signing the proposal into law, Fallin released an executive order that repeatedly stressed the bill does not mean a fee or surcharge is the only way to deal with the concern of utility companies. Fallin "specifically said the bill does not mandate an increase for solar customers," said Bryan Miller, president of the pro-solar group Alliance for Solar Choice. While Miller opposes a fee or surcharge should one come, he said Maddow’s segment missed the mark. Miller called Fallin’s executive order "a tremendously positive step for the future of Oklahoma in promoting distributed generation." "Even without the executive order, it was a very misleading story," Miller said. MSNBC spokeswoman Lauren Skowronski said the show stood by its reporting. "The order declares the governor’s recognition that renewable energy is important, but it does not, in any codified way, meaningfully change what the new law does," Skowronski said. "The law was opposed by advocates of solar power for the very reason that it is designed to impede the expansion of solar usage among Oklahoma consumers, and the governor’s executive order does not change that." We’ll unpack all of this a little more for you. Oklahoma’s explanation SB 1456 moved quickly through the Republican-led Oklahoma Legislature. State Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican whom Maddow mocked during her April 21 show for proposing an all-out ban on marriage, was the primary House sponsor of the bill. He introduced it on the Oklahoma House floor this way: "Members, this bill effectively allows our senior citizens as well as our lower-income individuals in this state to no longer bear the cost of the way that we do accounting." That’s not a very detailed or transparent explanation for what SB 1456 is really about, but no one asked questions before passing it on an 83-5 vote. (One lawmaker asked Turner a question privately as members voted, and Turner could be heard saying, "This doesn’t raise, it’s not what people think.") Turner told PunditFact he was not acting at the behest of utilities, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council or Koch brothers by supporting the Senate bill, as Maddow suggested during her broadcast. Still, a pro-solar Republican group went against him for sponsoring the bill in a video ad suggesting he turned on conservative principles by "taxing solar." "It’s not a tax," Turner told PunditFact of his bill. "You have to be a willing customer." A self-described opponent of subsidies, Turner says Oklahoma’s 350 or so customers who use wind, solar or other alternative energy devices are being subsidized by other utility customers under current law. Here’s his argument. Most people who have wind- and solar- energy devices are not completely off the grid. They access the grid on cloudy or low-wind days, utilities say. Like most states, Oklahoma has a net-metering law that allows ratepayers who install solar panels and microturbines to sell excess energy they generate for use by their nearest neighbor. The utility, compelled by federal law, must buy back this energy at the retail rate, so the "seller" is charged only for their net energy use (what they sell minus what they use). Before Turner’s bill became law, utility companies could not charge solar customers for extracting the excess energy with their infrastructure. Turner says solar panel customers fail to compensate the utility companies for harnessing the extra power. As a result, that additional cost is picked up by other customers. Spokespeople for the state’s two largest utility companies, Oklahoma Gas and Electric and the Public Service Company of Oklahoma, say the current system is giving an unfair break on grid "maintenance costs" to customers who use solar or wind power. "What we credit them for energy they generate greatly exceeds the value of that energy," said Stan Whitehouse, Public Service Company of Oklahoma spokesman. "Distributed generation is no longer in its infancy, and as potential for growth grows, the subsidization will only increase." This bill could fix that inequity, the utilities say, by letting the state utility regulator "set up a new rate for distributed generation that would be very clear about here is what you owe to cover the cost of the grid maintenance and here is the amount of electricity you use," said Oklahoma Gas and Electric spokeswoman Kathleen O’Shea. Practically speaking, the fee would eat into the credits solar and wind customers accumulate from selling excess energy back to the electrical grid -- a concept that pro-solar groups, including Miller’s Alliance for Solar Choice, oppose. To Maddow, that’s a tax. To Turner, it’s eliminating a subsidy. The law, which goes into effect Nov. 1, says utilities would have to get new charges approved by the end of 2015. What SB 1456 does Specifically, the law modifies a 1970s-era law that prevented utilities from increasing rates or imposing a surcharge because a consumer installed a solar energy device. The change would not affect existing customers. The law says a higher fixed charge for new customers with energy-saving equipment is "a means to avoid subsidization." Emphasis on "a," Miller said. "It says you can have a fee, but it doesn’t say you have to have a fee," he said. The practical effect of the bill for future solar and wind customers is unclear until the state’s utility regulator starts the process of reviewing a fee request from a utility. Arguments for and against would be reviewed by an administrative law judge, who would make a recommendation to Oklahoma’s three-person Corporation Commission. The commission could approve the fee or surcharge, reject it, or order additional review. To approve the fee -- and this is important -- the Corporation Commission would need to conclude solar and wind customers are being subsidized by other energy users. Alternative energy users would still save money by selling their excess energy, they’d just save less. The law does not just affect solar users. Mike Bergey, Bergey WindPower Co. president and CEO, sent a letter to Fallin expressing profound disappointment for signing the law because uncertainty about a fee will hurt microturbine sales by dissuading customers interested in investing in a nascent industry. Oklahoma does not offer state incentives for residents who install small-scale solar and wind devices, so "it’s a rare customer" who is willing to take the investment leap. A federal tax credit defrays some of the cost of a small $65,000 wind system, but extra utility fees would extend the payback period that customers usually recoup from reduced bills. "Certainly the utilities will make a strong case for additional charges," said Bergey, who said he will fight a proposed utility tariff. "What the industry is concerned about is they’ll play up the cost ... and ignore the benefits." Some observers look to what happened in Arizona as a sign of what could come next. There, a utility proposal backed by conservative groups to charge solar customers $50-$100 per month was whittled down to about $5 by the commission. And that executive order? Fallin’s executive order insisted the bill "does not mandate tariffs or other increases for distributed generation customers." Fallin told state agencies to implement the bill in accordance with her energy plan, "which promotes wind and solar power as important forms of clean energy," and for the commission to "consider the use of all available alternatives, including other rate reforms such as increased use of time-of-use rates, minimum bills, and demand charges." The executive order isn’t binding, but it provides guidance to the Corporation Commission. Commissioners are elected statewide while vacancies are filled by the governor. "This will be given all the attention that any changes in rates are given," said Mike Skinner, the Corporation Commission spokesman. Still, Fallin’s order is music to solar advocates’ ears. "Even without the executive order, the bill is just ambiguous and does not mandate any charge," Miller said. "But the executive order lends a lot of clarity to that." We checked in with TUSK, or Tell Utilities Solar won’t be Killed, a pro-solar group led by Republicans Barry Goldwater Jr., a former California congressman, and Tom Morrissey, former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party. TUSK consultant Jason Rose called Fallin’s executive order indicative of "Republican adults" who support customers’ rights to use solar to defray electric costs. "Do I think (Maddow’s) assessment of the legislative effort was accurate? Yes, I do," Rose said. "Was she unaware, or were her producers unaware, of the executive order that neutered the legislation? Yes." Our ruling Maddow said, "Oklahoma's Republican Gov. Mary Fallin signed a new law which makes you pay a special fee. It will essentially fine people for the crime of using solar power." The law does not make you pay a special fee for using solar power, as Maddow said. What it does do is open the door to a potential fee -- if utility companies can prove that solar and wind customers are being subsidized by other energy consumers. We’re a ways from knowing whether the utilities can make their case and what fee might be assessed. The law does not affect the ability of Oklahoma solar and wind customers to sell excess energy they produce to lower their monthly bill, and even advocates of solar energy say Maddow’s segment missed news in Fallin’s executive order, which stressed "this bill does not mandate tariffs or other increases" for people who generate alternative energy. Maddow’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.	None	Rachel Maddow	None	None	None	2014-04-24T18:12:29	2014-04-21	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Oklahoma']
-pomt-01263	"We've created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/nov/09/barack-obama/obama-2009-us-has-created-more-jobs-every-other-ad/	America’s labor market is creeping back to pre-recession levels, and President Barack Obama says its growth has surpassed that of every other advanced country combined. Obama appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation Nov. 9 in an interview with host Bob Schieffer. When asked about the Democrats’ midterm election losses, Obama said the big takeaway is that Americans don’t think Washington is working -- even though the economy is getting better. "The economy has improved significantly. There's no doubt about it," Obama said. "We had a jobs report for October that showed that once again over 200,000 jobs created. We've now created more than 10 million. The unemployment rate's come down faster than we could have anticipated. Just to give you some perspective, Bob, we've created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office." By many metrics, the United States has bounced back from the recession better than other advanced countries. (For the record, the 10-million-jobs-added figure Obama cited is just private-sector jobs and excludes much of Obama's first year in office.) But we wondered if, in the past six years, U.S. job growth has surpassed other leading economies by such a wide margin. By the numbers We turned to the International Monetary Fund for economic data. The IMF classifies 36 countries as "advanced economies" -- and seven of those countries as "major advanced economies." We looked at total average annual employment from 2009 (Obama’s first year in office) through 2014. Using an average helps isolate against monthly fluctuations and is a better way to compare jobs pictures across countries. Country or group 2009 employment 2014 employment, est Absolute growth Percent growth United States 139.9 million 145.9 million 5.98 million 4.27 percent IMF: 36 advanced economies (except U.S.) 326.5 million 332.8 million 6.28 million 1.92 percent IMF: G7 major advanced economies (except U.S.) 196.1 million 200.8 million 4.72 million 2.41 percent (For all the data, check out this Google spreadsheet.) So, according to the IMF, the number of people employed in the United States has grown by roughly 6 million people. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the figure at about 5.7 million.) Neither figure is literally more than all of the other 35 countries labeled an advanced economy, as Obama said, but it’s fairly close. But it is clearly more than the other G7 countries -- Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom -- combined. There is one wrinkle with the IMF's list. The IMF’s advanced economies list includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, which are not recognized as independent countries but added more than 1 million jobs. If you chose to exclude them from the IMF's list, Obama would be correct, Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel told us. (Though Obama said "advanced economy" not country.) Some caveats So you could make a case that Obama is right. But you can also say that he's off. There are some other obvious caveats to point out. For starters, the United States is the most populous of these countries -- more than twice the population of Japan, which is the next most populous advanced economy (China, Russia and India do not make this list). So it’s logical that there will, in general, be higher job gains in absolute numbers compared to smaller nations. Looking at the percentage growth rate instead of the absolute number of jobs helps to account for the population differences among these advanced nations. And by that measurement, the United States’ growth rate is lower than quite a few nations on this list, including: Australia, Austria, Canada, Estonia, Germany, Iceland, Israel, South Korea, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The country with the highest job growth rate was Singapore, with a rate of more than 18 percent. Also, the number of jobs in the United States has just this year returned to a point near pre-recession levels. The United States hemorrhaged jobs in the last months of 2008 and the first few months of 2009. This means that Obama hasn’t had non-stop job growth throughout his presidency. There have been months of overall job loss, particularly in that first year, amidst the recession. Tara Sinclair, a George Washington University economist, noted that this job growth is likely not attributable to any of Obama’s actions, even though the economic recovery happened to start soon after he took office. "Overall these sorts of comparisons mean little because employment outcomes have more to do with the economic environments more generally rather than specifically the president's policies," Sinclair said. Our ruling Obama said, "We've created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office." Using a straight definition of advanced economic nations from the International Monetary Fund, Obama is slightly off. The United States has added less jobs than a group of 35 other advanced economic nations combined, not more. However, you can make the argument that two countries on the list -- Hong Kong and Taiwan -- should be excluded. What’s equally and perhaps more noteworthy is that when you look at the rate of job growth, which accounts for population differences, the United States trails other advanced nations. Overall, we rate Obama's claim Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2014-11-09T18:00:08	2014-11-09	['United_States']
-pomt-14309	Says Ted Cruz distributed the ad showing a nude Melania Trump on a rug.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/31/donald-trump/donald-trump-has-no-evidence-ted-cruz-was-responsi/	Call it the war over the wives. An ad suggesting that Donald Trump's wife, Melania, might not be modest enough to be first lady started a series of nasty exchanges between Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz that have been the talk of the campaign for more than a week. CNN's Anderson Cooper grilled Trump about the ad during a March 29 interview in Wisconsin, questioning Trump about his accusation, made in a March 22 tweet, that Cruz was responsible for the picture. "I did not start this," Trump told Cooper seven days after the tweet. "He sent out a picture and he knew very well it was a picture ... " "He didn't send out a picture," Cooper interrupted. "It was an anti-Trump super PAC." When Cooper asked Trump if he had any proof that Cruz was behind the ad, Trump said, "No. Everybody knows he sent it out. He knew the people in the super PAC. He knew. I would be willing to bet he wrote the phrase," a reference to the words that accompanied the nude photograph of Mrs. Trump, a model, posed on a rug. "Meet Melania Trump, your next first lady," the ad said. "Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday," a reference to the March 22 Utah primary. "I didn't send the photo to everybody in the state of Utah. He did," said Trump. "It was his people, who were his friends." For this fact-check, we'll look at whether Trump is correct that Cruz distributed this Facebook ad containing a nude photograph of Trump's wife. Federal law says political ads must clearly identify their source, and this one lists the source as a political action committee called Make America Awesome. Such groups are called super PACs because they can spend limitless amounts of money advocating for or against a candidate or a point of view. Super PACs have one major restriction: They can't coordinate their efforts with a candidate's official campaign, which is restricted in its spending. If Cruz did arrange for the ad under the auspices of the super PAC, it would be a serious violation of federal law. The super PAC says . . . "The Cruz campaign had nothing to do with this ad whatsoever. We didn’t get the image or the idea for the ad from them," said Republican strategist Liz Mair, who is behind the super PAC. Make America Awesome, based in Virginia, was founded in December and reports $20,752 in contributions through February, with most of the money that it spent going to small purchases of air time in nine states, according to the Federal Election Commission website. "I would guess that including money that has come in since our last filing, we have raised about $35,000," said Mair. There's also no evidence that the PAC is a front for the Cruz campaign. When we checked the PAC's YouTube page, we found four commercials, only two of which are the standard length for broadcast. The Jan. 20 "Buyer Beware" commercial, obviously made on a shoestring budget, includes a light-hearted rundown of nine Republican presidential candidates as breakfast cereals. They include Jeb Bush ("Good source of experience and wonkiness. The brand you know."), Ben Carson ("With extra nice guy doctorness."), Chris Christie ("100% RDA of telling it like it is.") and Ted Cruz ("Two Scoops of Conservatism!"). In the ad, the shopper buys the Trump cereal ("Guaranteed success and a free 'Screw the Liberal Establishment!' voucher inside") and ends up regretting the purchase. Mormon women targeted "The only ads we've run in favor of any candidate are the three Facebook ads we ran targeting Mormons in Utah and Arizona, of which the Melania one was one, and the one with the least money put behind it (about $300, maybe even less than that, honestly)," Mair wrote in an email. The Melania ad, she wrote, "was targeted only to Mormon women of (if I recall correctly) ages 45-65 living in Utah and Arizona who self-identified as moderate, conservative or very conservative. "The shot we used was chosen because of the presence of handcuffs, which was particularly bothersome to the target audience," Mair said. "However, there are definitely racier shots of her out there that would no doubt be considered more scandalous by a lot of voters across the entire political spectrum — too racy for us to use in Facebook ads, candidly." Although the ads urge voters to support the Texas senator, he was only one of two viable alternatives to Trump currently on the ballot in those states. Picture purchased? In a March 27 interview with ABC News, Trump claimed Cruz or his campaign bought the rights to the Melania photo and gave it to the super PAC. There's no evidence that Cruz, the campaign or Mair's group purchased rights to the photo, taken when she was Trump's girlfriend. "The image was, at the time we concepted out and then created the ad, already republished all over the Internet at numerous sites," Mair told us in an email. The photographer who took the image for the 2000 photo spread in British GQ, Antoine Verglas, told our friends at FactCheck.org that nobody contacted him to buy rights to the picture. The magazine reprinted that photo, along with other pictures from the shoot, online March 4 under the headline, "The Future First Lady? Sexy Melania Trump's Nude Photo Shoot." "As for Cruz himself," Mair said, "I think I've met him at gatherings attended by many people maybe once or twice in my life (and it will have been some time ago), and I have never spoken to him privately." We contacted the Trump campaign but didn't get a response. Our ruling Trump said Cruz was responsible for the racy ad questioning whether people wanted Melania Trump to be first lady. One of the tenets of PolitiFact is that the person making the claim is responsible for substantiating it. Trump said on CNN that he has no real proof. And all the evidence we found points to the ad being the work of a political action committee whose goal has been to block Trump's nomination. There’s no proof of Cruz working with that committee, which would be illegal. We rate Trump's claim as False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/0c9f8bb8-bbff-4c6b-8ec6-c489e2fbab41	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-03-31T17:29:23	2016-03-29	['Ted_Cruz']
-goop-02776	Kirsten Dunst Did Have “Breakdown” On Cannes Red Carpet, 	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/kirsten-dunst-crying-cannes-film-festival-red-carpet-breakdown-premiere/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kirsten Dunst Did NOT Have “Breakdown” On Cannes Red Carpet, Despite Report	12:38 pm, May 26, 2017	None	['None']
-hoer-01244	Nicolas Cage is Dead	fake news	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/nicolas-cage-is-not-dead-fake-death-message-opens-scam-websites/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Nicolas Cage is NOT Dead Fake Death Message Opens Scam Websites	July 25, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01716	WTHR Investigates Illegal Migrant Workers Taking Advantage of Additional Child Tax Credit	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/illegal-alien-tax-loophole/	None	government	None	None	None	WTHR Investigates Illegal Migrant Workers Taking Advantage of Additional Child Tax Credit	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-08686	"When these same Republicans –- including Mr. Boehner –- were in charge, the number of earmarks and pet projects went up, not down."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/sep/09/barack-obama/obama-says-republican-congresses-used-lots-earmark/	President Barack Obama has been making a case against Republicans in Congress, hoping to help Democrats in the midterm elections. One of his points is that the Democrats' policies on the economy are better than the Republicans. "Along with tax cuts for the wealthy, the other party's main economic proposal is that they'll stop government spending," Obama said. "Of course, they are right to be concerned about the long-term deficit -– if we don't get a handle on it soon, it can endanger our future. And at a time when folks are tightening their belts at home, I understand why a lot of Americans feel it's time for government to show some discipline too. "But let's look at the facts. When these same Republicans –- including Mr. Boehner –- were in charge, the number of earmarks and pet projects went up, not down." "Mr. Boehner" is Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader. Obama mentioned him by name about half a dozen times in his speech on Sept. 8, 2010. We knew earmarks had gone up during the Bush administration, but we weren't sure how they tracked Republican majorities in Congress. Republicans held control of Congress for most of the period from 1995 to 2006. (In 2001, Democrats briefly re-took control of the Senate but lost it again in 2003.) So we decided to check it out. Generally speaking, earmarks are spending that individual members of Congress request for particular programs or projects. Earmarks usually don't go through the normal vetting processes to make sure the projects are worthy. They're often considered a perk for members of Congress to fund their favorite projects. We turned to Taxpayers for Common Sense, an nonpartisan advocacy group that fights wasteful spending in Congress. The group opposes earmarks because they circumvent normal budget processes, crowd out funding for merit-based projects and invite corruption. We asked vice president Steve Ellis whether earmarks went up, not down, under the Republican-controlled Congresses. "Totally true," Ellis said. "Certainly under the Republicans there was a big rise in earmarks." The high mark was fiscal 2005, the last fiscal year before Democrats won control, when Congress passed bills with approximately 16,000 earmarks, Ellis said. We were able to find other sources that agreed with Ellis. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service documented increasing earmarks in different parts of appropriations bills in its report Earmarks in Appropriation Acts: FY1994, FY1996, FY1998, FY2000, FY2002, FY2004, FY2005. The conservative Heritage Foundation included a striking chart on earmarks in its Federal Spending by the Numbers 2010 report. It reported a slightly different number of earmarks, at approximately 14,000 earmarks in 2005. But that was the largest number of earmarks between 1991 and 2010, and a significant increase from 1994, when there were fewer than 2,000. We asked Ellis why earmarks increased so steadily during the years Republicans controlled Congress, and he said there were several factors at work. Prior to Republican control, Ellis said, Democrats reserved earmarks for committee chairman and other powerful leaders. Under Republicans, more rank-and-file members of Congress were allowed to insert earmarks into bills. The Republicans allowed Democrats to insert earmarks as well, so Democrats were not so quick to criticize what the Republicans were doing, he said. Finally, special interests got better at lobbying members of Congress, using new technology like cell phones and Blackberrys to communicate with members as legislation was being put together. That new technology, though, also allowed citizens to document and share information about earmarks, which led to widespread outrage that resulted in earmark reforms when Democrats won control of Congress in 2006, bringing more transparency to the process. "The more people could look at earmarks and analyze them, the more they could see what Congress was doing and criticize it," Ellis said. But transparency on earmarks doesn't mean earmarks have gone away. During the campaign, Obama promised to reduce earmarks to $7.8 billion a year, what they were at in 1994. Here at PolitiFact, we rated that Promise Broken. The last budget for fiscal year 2010 included 9,499 earmarks worth $15.9 billion, according to an analysis from Taxpayers for Common Sense. We should note that earlier this year, House Republicans voluntarily agreed to a one-year moratorium on earmarks. House Democrats agreed to a ban on earmarks that benefit for-profit companies but not on earmarks for local government projects or nonprofit projects. Senators of both parties continue to earmark. And finally, it's important to note that other Republicans may like earmarking, but Boehner is not among them. In 2009, we fact-checked his statement, "I don't do earmarks. I've never done one," and rated it True. He hasn't taken an earmark since he was elected to Congress in 1990. Boehner's staff also pointed out that Boehner was not in leadership for all of the years Republicans controlled Congress; he did not have a leadership position between 1998 and 2006. And in 2006, the year Boehner was majority leader, earmarks declined from the 2005 high, they said. Getting back to our rating, Obama said that "When these same Republicans – including Mr. Boehner – were in charge, the number of earmarks and pet projects went up, not down." Earmarks increased dramatically between 1995 and 2006, so we find Obama's statement that earmarks went up, not down, to be correct. But he also singles out Boehner by name, when Boehner didn't take any earmarks and wasn't in leadership for most of those years. So we rate Obama's statement Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2010-09-09T19:20:55	2010-09-08	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'John_Boehner']
-pose-00589	"Reduce the statewide property tax [Required Local Effort] by $1.4 billion (from 5.29 mills to 4.29 mills, a 19 percent reduction). Savings from other key components in my 7-step plan will be used to replace those funds so that not $1 is shifted away from our schools."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/613/reduce-property-tax-required-local-effort-by-1-m/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	Reduce property tax (Required Local Effort) by 1 mill	2010-12-21T09:36:20	None	['None']
-pomt-01085	Milwaukee "incarcerates 1.2% of white men" and has "incarcerated over 50% of black men in their 30s."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/jan/15/facebook-posts/huge-disparity-jailing-black-and-white-males-milwa/	For years, Milwaukee has made national headlines for being one of the most segregated urban areas in America. In 2011, we rated Mostly True a Rev. Jesse Jackson claim that Milwaukee is the nation’s most-segregated city. We found that the white-black segregation is worst in metropolitan Milwaukee, if not in the city itself. Now there’s an Internet meme that has been liked, shared or commented on more than 18,000 times on Facebook. It makes a two-part claim about Milwaukee and putting whites and blacks behind bars. Milwaukee, the posting says, "incarcerates 1.2 percent of white men" and has "incarcerated over 50 percent of black men in their 30s." "Pass this along for the millions of people who say racism is not an issue. Cure them of their ignorance," the group said in posting the meme. The black-white gap between the two percentages caught our attention. But so did the fact that the percentages measure two different things. Behind the meme The meme was posted Dec. 31, 2014 on Facebook by US Uncut, a loose network of local groups that coordinates nationally through the Internet. The Daily Beast has described the group as the "tea party for the left." Its Facebook page has more than 932,000 likes. The group, formed in 2011, says it has "mobilized thousands of people against corporate tax dodging and austerity." But it has also addressed racial issues. We connected via phone and email with Mark Provost of Manchester, N.H., who describes himself as a meme maker for US Uncut. He said the two statistics cited in the meme came from a study published in 2013 by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (That study garnered news coverage from the BBC, among others.) First part of the claim The first part of US Uncut's claim is 1.2 percent of white men in Milwaukee are incarcerated. But what the UWM study says is 1.2 percent of white men in Wisconsin were incarcerated in state prison or local jails -- there is no such figure in the study for Milwaukee. That was as of April 2010, when U.S. Census Bureau conducted its most recent decennial count of Wisconsin residents. Provost acknowledged that that part of the study deals only with Wisconsin, and that he doesn't have a figure for Milwaukee. It’s worth noting the study did find a much higher rate of African-American men in Wisconsin -- 12.8 percent -- were incarcerated at the time. That was the highest such rate in the nation, according to the study (Oklahoma was second at 9.7 percent). Second part The second part of the claim is Milwaukee has incarcerated more than 50 percent of black men in their 30s. An important point here is that the first part of the claim was about incarceration at one point in time. This part of the claim covers more than two decades. The UWM study estimated based on state correctional records that over half of black men in their 30s in Milwaukee County (rather than the city) were incarcerated in state correctional facilities between 1990 and January 2012. The difference between the city and the county doesn’t appear significant. Lois Quinn, one of the researchers who did the study, told us the study doesn’t have city of Milwaukee figures on this statistic. "But given the concentrations of African-Americans residing in the city and the maps of those incarcerated, I believe that it would be accurate to expect" that over half of black men in their 30s in the city have been or were incarcerated during that period, she said. The study did not, however, attempt to make the same incarceration estimate for white men in their 30s. In any case, placing the two side by side amounts to mixing apples and oranges. The first figure is for people incarcerated at a given moment in time. The second is for people who have ever been incarcerated, which clearly skews the comparison. Our rating The left-wing activist group US Uncut says in a Facebook meme that Milwaukee "incarcerates 1.2 percent of white men" and has "incarcerated over 50 percent of black men in their 30s." But the way the claim is structured overstates the disparity, based on the university study it relies on. On the first part of the claim (which should refer to Wisconsin, rather than Milwaukee), 1.2 percent of white men were incarcerated as of the latest census, versus 12.8 percent of black men. That is, at a given point in time. The second part of the claim essentially quotes the study accurately -- more than 50 percent of black men in their 30s in Milwaukee County were or had been incarcerated. But there is no corresponding figure for white men. For a statement that is partially accurate but leaves out important details, our rating is Half True. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s web page.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2015-01-15T05:00:00	2014-12-31	['None']
-pomt-10102	Says Obama wants to redesign the American flag "to better offer our enemies hope and love."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/25/chain-email/the-coke-theme-song-and-more-ridiculous-allegation/	We've seen a lot of groundless and ridiculous chain e-mails during the 2008 campaign. There was the one that fabricated Bible verses to suggest Barack Obama fit the profile for the Antichrist; there was another that falsified a list of books that Sarah Palin supposedly sought to ban; and there was our all-time favorite, which falsely claimed Obama wants the national anthem to be I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing . We always liked that song when it was the Coca-Cola theme, and the chain e-mail provided a fun excuse in April to watch the commercial on YouTube. So it was a treat when several readers sent us a new e-mail that includes the national anthem quote along with some other equally ridiculous ones. (You can read the full e-mail here .) The e-mail has been widely circulated and posted on dozens of blogs because it has a few elements that make it look authentic. It says that Obama made the remarks "on Sunday's Televised 'Meet the Press,' " and the account appears to be written by Dale Lindsborg of the Washington Post . And unless you are a keen student of cola advertising, you might miss the satirical suggestion about the song. So let's put the Coke song on the turntable as we examine the new e-mail. It begins, like so many chain e-mails attacking Obama, with a subject line that invokes patriotism: "Meet the Press - read this if you're an American." It says the account is "a narrative taken from Sunday Morning's televised 'Meet the Press', and the author is employed by none other than the Washington Post." It says that on the Sept. 7 show, Obama was asked by "General Bill Ginn' USAF (ret.)" why he doesn't follow protocol when the national anthem is played. (That question is based on a photograph of Obama standing with his hands folded at his waist while Sen. Hillary Clinton and others have their hands over their hearts. It has been misinterpreted in many chain e-mails as an indication that Obama refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which we addressed with this article .) During the Meet the Press appearance, Obama is said to have replied, "As I've said about the flag pin, I don't want to be perceived as taking sides. . . .There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression. And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, the bombs bursting in air and all. It should be swapped for something less parochial and less bellicose. I like the song 'I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing.' If that were our anthem, then I might salute it." Obama, it says, continued: "We should consider to reinvent our National Anthem as well as to redesign our Flag to better offer our enemies hope and love. It's my intention, if elected, to disarm America to the level of acceptance to our Middle East Brethren. If we as a Nation of warring people, should conduct ourselves as the nations of Islam, whereas peace prevails. Perhaps a state or period of mutual concord between our governments. When I become President, I will seek a pact or agreement to end hostilities between those who have been at war or in a state of enmity, and a freedom from disquieting oppressive thoughts. We as a Nation have placed upon the nations of Islam an unfair injustice." It then abruptly shifts gears to his comments about his wife Michelle: "My wife disrespects the Flag for many personal reasons. Together she and I have attended several flag burning ceremonies in the past, many years ago. She has her views and I have mine. Of course now, I have found myself about to become the President of the United States and I have put aside my hatred. I will use my power to bring CHANGE to this Nation, and offer the people a new path of hope. My wife and I look forward to becoming our Country's First Family. Indeed, CHANGE is about to overwhelm the United States of America." It is signed "Dale Lindsborg, Washington Post." It would be difficult to tally the many, many ways this e-mail is false, but we'll start with the obvious ones. First, Obama was not on Meet the Press on Sept. 7. The guests were Joe Biden and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Nor was Gen. Bill Ginn on the show. Ginn is indeed a retired Air Force general and not a fan of Obama. In an interview with PolitiFact, Ginn cited Obama's association with Weather Underground co-founder William Ayers, the group ACORN and his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as just a few examples why he does not want Obama to be president. But Ginn said the Meet the Press account was fabricated and that he had never spoken to Obama. Ginn said his name might have gotten attached to the e-mail because of a message he sent to a friend expressing concern about Obama not putting his hand over his heart during the national anthem. Neither is Dale Lindsborg a reporter at the Washington Post . Anne Kornblut, a real political reporter from the Post , said in an online chat that she checked the paper's directory and couldn't find anyone by that name. And, Obama's quote is fabricated. It seems to be a mashup from at least two sources. The anthem part comes from a satirical column published on the Web in October 2007 by Arizona writer John Semmens that produced the original bogus e-mail that we checked last spring. We couldn't determine the origin of the part about redesigning the American flag "to better offer our enemies hope and love," but a search of the Project Vote Smart database of Obama's speeches indicates he has not uttered the phrase. He also has not made the remark about his wife disrespecting the flag, according to the Vote Smart database. This chain e-mail, like most that we've checked, is false. In fact, it's so ridiculously, maliciously false, that it sets the Truth-O-Meter ablaze. Pants on Fire.	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2008-10-25T00:00:00	2008-10-25	['United_States']
-goop-01093	Brad Pitt Going Back To School To Impress Neri Oxman, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-neri-oxman-school-wrong/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Brad Pitt NOT Going Back To School To Impress Neri Oxman, Despite Late And Wrong Claim	2:55 pm, April 30, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01592	Angelina Jolie Quitting Hollywood For Politics?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-politics-quitting-hollywood/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie Quitting Hollywood For Politics?	1:25 am, February 13, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04605	"Under Obama, families have lost over $4,000 a year in income."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/19/mitt-romney/romney-ad-faults-obama-falling-incomes/	Mitt Romney says President Barack Obama is failing American families with policies that have led to less income and more debt. Less family income, that is, and more national debt. "Under Obama, families have lost over $4,000 a year in income, says the narrator of a new campaign ad. "And the national debt is now $16 trillion and growing." The ad then shows clips of Romney promising to reverse those trends. Here, we’ll check what has happened to household incomes under Obama. Tracking median incomes The Romney ad cites an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, which argues that Obama’s presidency has "done enormous harm to middle-class households." The editorial, in turn, points to data from a private group, Sentier Research. Last year, Sentier initiated a new statistic based on U.S. Census Bureau data -- a "household income index" that tracks upticks and downticks in median income and reports it monthly. What did Sentier find? In January 2009, the month Obama took office, median household income was $54,893. In June 2012, it was $50,881, a drop of almost $4,000. (We used inflation-adjusted figures from a spreadsheet provided to us by Sentier. The Wall Street Journal cited slightly different figures, but the difference is just a few dollars.) To create Sentier’s index, principals Gordon Green and John Coder take data from the Bureau’s monthly household survey, the one used to determine the national unemployment rate. This census survey reaches approximately 50,000 households and 130,000 household members each month, asking a variety of questions, including the sum of income earned by household members during the previous 12 months. That’s very similar to how the census produces its report called the Current Population Survey -- Annual Social and Economic Supplements. That survey also asks households about income, but over a given calendar year. The census’ Current Population Survey was just released for 2011. The median income: $50,054. Green told us the comparable figure in his work is Sentier’s January 2012 index because it asked respondents about their income for the previous 12 months. In that case, those months are calendar year 2011. Sentier’s median income for that period: $50,020, a difference of just $34. That would indicate that Sentier's methodology produces a number very close to the official census number. Sentier’s index is a new measuring stick, and not time-tested, but Green and Coder are both retired from the census, and their work has been widely cited in the media. "The Census Bureau is the source of official statistics," Green said. "What we do is fill it in with the monthly data." Other factors This brings us to the dicey issue of blaming Obama for the trend, whatever it is. At PolitiFact, we don’t only assess the accuracy of statistics cited in political claims, but whether it’s valid to say a certain politician is responsible. We asked Dean Baker, co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, for his take. "There is always a problem in attributing outcomes to presidents based on their terms, since there are a large number of erratic factors over which they have no control. This is especially the case with President Obama, who inherited an economy that was falling off a cliff," Baker said. He added that a better question is what Romney or anyone else would have done that would have produced better results. "Romney seems to be saying that a big tax cut would have done the trick with little or no money to help the states or for any of the other spending components of the stimulus. That doesn't seem very plausible to me, but that is the question that we should be asking," Baker said. Plus, a look back at incomes over several years shows that incomes track the state of the overall economy. According to the census, the median income hit an all-time high in 1999 (when you adjust for inflation), reaching $54,932. It decreased each year through 2004, hitting $52,788. It then climbed again until 2007 -- the beginning of the recession -- to $54,489, and has been on the way down since then. Sentier’s research also reflects steady increases with small dips and peaks over the past decade. Dan Mitchell, a scholar with the libertarian Cato Institute, had this to say about the blame factor: "That drop started before Obama took office, so I don't think he deserves full blame for everything after Jan. 20, 2009," Mitchell said. "But this has been a very weak recovery, so clearly he should be held responsible for some of the bad news." Our ruling Romney’s ad says that "under Obama families have lost over $4,000 a year in income." That figure comes from a new but well-respected index created by Sentier Research, which tracked a decline in the median family income from the month Obama took office through June 2012. It’s tricky to compare that data with census data because they represent different time periods. But where it is possible to compare Sentier with the census, the results are within a few dollars of each other. But the ad’s claim runs into trouble by overtly blaming Obama. The economy was on a downward track before he took office, and a president has limited control over those forces. To the extent he should be held responsible, Mitchell told us, the slow recovery has all been on his watch. Romney’s ad cites trustworthy figures but oversimplifies the issue by assigning blame to Obama. We rate it Half True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-09-19T11:57:58	2012-09-17	['None']
-snes-04374	A video shows a suicide bomber exploding after falling off a skateboard.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/skateboarder-explodes/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Suicide Bomber Explodes After Falling Off Skateboard	26 July 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-13328	Says Donald Trump, in his campaign announcement speech, "also said, ‘And many of them (Mexicans) are good people. You keep leaving that out of your quote."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/05/mike-pence/mike-pence-tidies-donald-trumps-quote-about-mexica/	During the vice presidential debate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence found himself having to defend past statements made by his ticket-mate, Donald Trump, again and again. At one point, Tim Kaine, a Virginia senator, lit into Pence by saying, "When Donald Trump says women should be punished, or Mexicans are rapists and criminals…" After some crosstalk, Pence responded, "Senator, you've whipped out that Mexican thing again." Kaine continued to press his case, saying, "Can you defend it?" Pence: "There are criminal aliens in this country, Tim, who have come into this country illegally who are perpetrating violence and taking American lives." Kaine: "You want to use a big broad brush against Mexicans on that?" Pence: "He also said, ‘And many of them are good people.’ You keep leaving that out of your quote." Unfortunately for Pence, his memory was a little faulty. The exchange centered on comments Trump made last year in the speech at Trump Tower in New York City when he kicked off his presidential campaign. Here’s the relevant portion of what Trump said: "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Pence has a point that there was more to Trump’s comment than just that "Mexicans are rapists and criminals," as Kaine said during the debate. In fact, we have previously taken Kaine to task for oversimplifying Trump’s Trump Tower comment. In August, we gave Kaine a False for saying that Trump had said that "all Mexicans are rapists." But Pence went too far in downplaying the severity of Trump’s original comment. According to Pence, Trump said that "many" Mexicans are "good people." In reality, Trump said "some" rather than "many," which doesn’t sound as magnanimous. And Trump further undercut that sentiment by adding a grudging, "I assume." Our ruling Pence said that Trump, in his campaign announcement speech, "also said and many of them (Mexicans) are good people. You keep leaving that out of your quote." Pence is right that Kaine left that part of the comment out of the quote. But the part Kaine left out is not quite as benign as Pence indicates. Trump said "some," rather than "many," and he prefaced that by saying, "I assume." The statement partially accurate but leaves out important context, so we rate it Half True.	None	Mike Pence	None	None	None	2016-10-05T17:02:50	2016-10-04	['Mexico']
-pomt-14409	"Americans haven’t had a raise in 15 years."	mostly true	/iowa/statements/2016/mar/11/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-ad-points-out-its-been-15-years-am/	As Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pledged to "root out" several barriers to progress in a TV ad that aired ahead of the South Carolina primary in February, she offered one specific statistic to underscore the challenges facing average Americans. "Americans haven’t had a raise in 15 years," she says in the 30-second ad, which aired more than 150 times on four networks in the Columbia, S.C., TV market beginning on Feb. 20 and lasting through the Feb. 27 Democratic primary. The spot was captured by the Political Ad Archive, a database maintained by the nonprofit Internet Archive. Incomes are obviously highly variable among individuals, and many people have seen their wages increase since 2001. But economists and federal agencies keep data on aggregate income growth that can tell us, on average, whether Americans’ incomes are rising. To evaluate Clinton’s claim, we’ll start by looking at inflation-adjusted median household income, which takes into account rising prices when comparing average income levels across time. According to an analysis of U.S. Census Data performed by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, median household income dropped from $57,843 in January, 1999, to $53,657 in January, 2014, the most recent period for which statistics are available. That’s a 7 percent drop, and supports Clinton’s assertion that Americans haven’t seen their incomes rise over the last decade and a half. (These figures account for inflation by expressing income from both years in 2014 dollars.) Another way to measure whether Americans have "had a raise" would be to look at a narrower slice of the population: full-time workers over the age of 16. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis draws on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data to show median usual weekly earnings for these workers. In January, 2000, the average worker earned $334 a week. By January, 2015, that figure was $341 – a 2 percent increase. ($334 a week equates to $17,368 a year, while $341 per week is $17,732. These inflation-adjusted figures are expressed in 2015 dollars.) As we’ve explained before, we could judge Clinton’s claim on this second figure, since it captures people who are employed full-time on a wage and salary basis and who could receive a "raise" as that term is commonly understood. That said, median household income is the broadest measure of income growth, and arguably the more appropriate one to use in this context. Many households receive at least a portion of their income from government transfer payments, such as Social Security, or from investments – income that isn’t reflected in wages or salary data alone. Because median household income encompasses a wider range of income sources, it’s reasonable for Clinton to base her statement on that measurement. Our ruling Clinton’s campaign ad claims, "Americans haven’t had a raise in 15 years." Inflation-adjusted median household income has indeed dropped 7 percent over that period, while earnings for wage and salary workers have increased a modest 2 percent. We rate Clinton’s statement Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/90f91331-9cee-4c32-903f-f5b27803d730	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-03-11T12:15:55	2016-02-20	['United_States']
-pomt-12170	"The border is down 78 percent. Under past administrations, the border didn’t go down -- it went up."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/aug/03/donald-trump/false-trumps-claim-about-illegal-immigration-under/	President Donald Trump, in a speech about the brutality of MS-13 gang members and his administration’s resolve to deport criminal immigrants, claimed it wasn’t until he came along that border crossings went down. "You know, the border is down 78 percent. Under past administrations, the border didn’t go down, it went up. But if it went down 1 percent, it was like this was a great thing. Down 78 percent," Trump said in New York on July 28. "And, in fact, the southern border of Mexico, we did them a big favor -- believe me. They get very little traffic in there anymore, because they know they're not going to get through the border to the United States. So that whole group has been incredible, led by General (John) Kelly." Trump congratulated Kelly for doing "an incredible job" as secretary of Homeland Security, and at a July 31 Cabinet meeting — the first for Kelly as Trump's new chief of staff — reiterated his pride for reductions in illegal immigration. "As you know, the border was a tremendous problem, and they’re close to 80 percent stoppage. And even the president of Mexico called me — they said their southern border, very few people are coming because they know they’re not going to get through our border, which is the ultimate compliment," Trump said. Based on past statements Trump has made, his remarks that "the border is down 78 percent" refer to apprehensions of immigrants trying to enter the country illegally. But calculations of different time periods do not show a 78 percent decline. The claim that under past administrations apprehensions did not go down is not accurate. ‘The border is down 78 percent’ Trump uses different timeframes to make a case that illegal immigration is down. He has looked at year-over-year March border apprehension data to say there’s been a 64 percent decline; compared February 2017 numbers to the election month, November 2016, to say it’s gone down 61 percent; and said there was a 40 percent decline from January, the month he was inaugurated, to February. Where does the 78 percent come from? We asked the White House but did not get a response. From June 2016 to June 2017, apprehensions at the southwest border went down 53 percent. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data also show that from November to June (latest available figures), apprehensions by border patrol agents declined about 66 percent. From January to June, it declined 49 percent. From Trump’s first full month in office, February, to June, it went down 14 percent. And though they remain low, the number of apprehensions actually picked up in May and in June. As the Washington Post’s Fact Checker noted, Trump’s claim of apprehensions nearing 80 percent is clearer when comparing cherry-picked figures: the highest point in fiscal year 2017 (November) to the lowest point (April). That yields a 76.4 percent decline. ‘The border didn’t go down, it went up’ Trump also claimed, "Under past administrations, the border didn’t go down, it went up. But if it went down 1 percent, it was like this was a great thing." In fact, apprehensions have gone down under past administrations. Unauthorized immigration also fell dramatically during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said Christopher Wilson, deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center. Analyses of monthly and annual apprehension statistics show declines for both Bush and Obama’s administrations. "No matter how you look at it, Trump is far from the first U.S. president to preside over big drops in unauthorized immigration," Wilson said. Apprehension rates at the southern border have plummeted since the 1980s. In 1986 there were 1.6 million apprehensions – about 1.2 million more than in 2016. The decline hasn’t been as steady, however, as there have been increases and decreases over the years. During the 1980s, there was an annual average of 1 million border patrol apprehensions at the southwest border. During the Obama administration, the average was below 500,000. FactCheck.org also pointed out that apprehensions declined 75 percent from fiscal years 2000 to 2016. Our ruling Referring to border apprehensions, Trump said, "The border is down 78 percent. Under past administrations, the border didn’t go down, it went up." Calculations of the latest figures available from U.S. Customs and Border Protection do not show a 78 percent decline in apprehensions. The closest number to that would be based on cherry-picked numbers of the highest number of apprehensions in November to the lowest number, in April. Though there have been fluctuations over the years in the number of apprehensions, they certainly have gone down under past administrations. We rate Trump’s claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-08-03T10:00:00	2017-07-28	['None']
-pomt-07842	Four state Assembly Democrats "scored a death blow to northeast Wisconsin’s economy" by killing hundreds of jobs at a potential Bass Pro Shops near Green Bay.	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/13/scott-suder/majority-leader-scott-suder-says-letter-four-assem/	The potent combination of the Green Bay Packers, jobs and the great outdoors formed a fine kettle of fish in Madison. The Journal Sentinel revealed Jan. 13, 2011, that outdoors retailer Bass Pro Shops was part of a development that businessman John Bergstrom was planning for a small piece of land near Lambeau Field in Green Bay. That proposal, however, was hung up because part of the site had been designated a wetland. Environmental groups had raised objections, prompting an administrative review that could tack months onto the process. As the Jan. 13 story noted, Gov. Scott Walker stepped in and had drafted an unusually specific piece of legislation that exempted the parcel from the environmental review. As a vote neared, four Democratic members of the state Assembly sent a letter Jan. 26, 2011, to Bass Pro Shops founder Johnny Morris asking for a compromise on the project that would protect wetlands and the state’s fish population. Two days later, Bass Pro Shops issued a short statement that said the company does not build stores on wetlands. A spokesman said the chain had held discussions with Bergstrom but said there was no deal. All pretty straightforward. Later that afternoon, Rep. Scott Suder (R-Abbotsford) let fly with two statements on the topic -- a news release and an e-mail blast. The headline on the news release said "Dems Kill Hundreds of Jobs in NE Wisconsin." The release went on to say: "Liberal Democrats in Madison scored a death blow to northeast Wisconsin's economy by winning a battle for the far left agenda." That gives a lot of credit to the out-of-power Democrats, who were using the old tactic of writing a letter -- and releasing it to the media -- to gain attention. So, did the letter from the Dems scare off a national retail chain with 50 stores in 26 states? We asked Suder for evidence that the company had made its decision -- essentially overnight -- in response to the letter. "Certainly, the letter that was sent caused Bass Pro Shops to hesitate," Suder said, though he acknowledged he had no contact with the retailer about the matter. Let’s fish out some details on the project: The project has been around for more than a year. Environmentalists raised the wetlands concerns about the would-be Bass Pro Shops parcel months ago and their challenge was pending before the letter was written. Bass Pro Shops was first reported to be involved in the project on Jan. 13, 2011. The company had not publicly expressed a commitment to the project development, seen as a "gateway" to Lambeau Field. Local Department of Natural Resources staff in Green Bay objected to the project, but superiors in Madison had already said it should be allowed to proceed. The author of the letter was state Rep. Brett Hulsey (D-Madison). He said he had met Morris -- the Bass Pro Shops founder -- years ago, when Hulsey worked for the Clinton administration. "I could not imagine Johnny Morris and Bass Pro building on a wetlands because of the company’s core conservation principles," said Hulsey. He said a Bass Pro Shops executive called him the day after the letter was sent and said the company was interested in Wisconsin but did not build on wetlands. Despite the company’s position, the Legislature passed the bill exempting the parcel from the water quality review and Walker signed it Feb. 3, 2011. Walker said that in the past the "bureaucracy got in the way" and his administration wanted to send the message: "You can conserve and protect wetlands while having an economic project move forward." However, some believe the action will make the location less desirable, at least from a public relations point of view. Said Hulsey: "It’s been contaminated by this bill." Indeed, the fact wetlands were an issue may have had a special impact with Bass Pro Shops, which has no Wisconsin locations. "For an outdoor retailer, that’s a more sensitive subject than for another one," said Neil Stern, senior partner with McMillan Doolittle, a company that advises retailers. His firm previously worked for Cabela’s, a Bass Pro Shops competitor. "They want an arm’s length from any controversy," he said of Bass Pro Shops. In its statement, Bass Pro Shops noted the company "has a long and proud tradition of our conservation efforts and is a very conservation minded company. We have been recognized many times by conservation organizations across America for those conservation efforts. We were unaware of any wetlands issues and have not and will not be in favor of doing anything to harm wetlands wherever they might be." Let’s return to Suder’s statement, which said the letter by the Democrats torpedoed hundreds of jobs and was the death knell for the region’s economy. That’s a huge overreach. Had the store opened it would have created about 300 retail jobs. State records show that the Green Bay area in December had about 161,000 jobs. And the region is a much broader area than that. OK, let’s pull this fish into the boat and see what we’ve got. Suder charges that by sending a letter to Bass Pro Shops, four Democrats killed the project -- and with it, hundreds of jobs in Green Bay, dealing "a death blow to northeast Wisconsin’s economy." That’s one heck of a poison pen. But there was no agreement between the developer and Bass Pro Shops and the wetlands objections had been raised by DNR staffers and environmentalists long before the Democratic lawmakers weighed in. Indeed, Walker and the Legislature were already moving to address the concerns about the wetlands issue slowing the project even before the letter. What’s more, the number of jobs in question -- welcome as they would be -- certainly doesn’t rate as a death blow to an entire region’s economy. Suder’s pen is filled with red, flame-colored ink. Pants on Fire.	None	Scott Suder	None	None	None	2011-02-13T09:00:00	2011-01-28	['Wisconsin', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Bass_Pro_Shops']
-snes-02935	Did President Trump Announce a $612 Credit for 'Deserving Americans'?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/612-credit-for-deserving-americans/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	President Trump Announced a $612 Credit for ‘Deserving Americans’?	15 February 2017	None	['None']
-snes-00423	Justin Trudeau said that Canada didn't need produce from American farmers because they have their own grocery stores.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-trudeau-canada-american-farmers/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Canada’s Prime Minister Say Canadians Don’t Need American Farmers Because ‘We Have Grocery Stores’?	22 June 2018	None	['United_States', 'Justin_Trudeau', 'Canada']
-goop-02855	Tyga Getting “Revenge” On Kylie Jenner With Reality Show, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/tyga-revenge-kylie-jenner-reality-show/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Tyga NOT Getting “Revenge” On Kylie Jenner With Reality Show, Despite Report	11:04 am, April 16, 2017	None	['None']
-bove-00252	Has India Benefited From The Launch Of E-Tourist Visas In Nov 2014? A FactCheck	none	https://www.boomlive.in/has-india-benefited-from-the-launch-of-e-tourist-visas-in-nov-2014-a-factcheck/	None	None	None	None	None	Has India Benefited From The Launch Of E-Tourist Visas In Nov 2014? A FactCheck	Jun 06 2017 7:03 pm, Last Updated: Jun 16 2017 7:26 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-11132	"We are the only metropolitan area in the country that’s losing population."	mostly false	/illinois/statements/2018/jun/01/lori-lightfoot/no-chicagoland-isnt-only-metro-area-losing-residen/	A Chicago mayoral hopeful vying to represent the city’s progressive wing recently leapt into the race with a talking point about population drain. Lori Lightfoot, an attorney who previously headed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s police board, joined the growing crowd of potential candidates seeking to unseat him in May. In multiple media appearances following the announcement of her candidacy, Lightfoot argued high tax burdens under Emanuel are driving families of modest means out of the city. "The fact that we are the only metropolitan area in the country that’s losing population ought to be a sense of urgency," Lightfoot said during a WGN radio interview. "To me, it’s the proverbial canary in the mine shaft." The city of Chicago’s population drain is well-documented. Chicago lost residents in 2017 for the third year in a row, the latest Census data show, and its population has been on a mostly uninterrupted decline since peaking at 3.6 million in 1950. Even so, at 2.7 million residents today, Chicago remains the nation’s third largest city. But the "metropolitan area" extends far beyond the city of Chicago, not just in colloquial terms but in those clearly recognized by the nation’s official head-counters at the U.S. Census Bureau. So the claim that the Chicago metropolitan area was the only one out of hundreds in the U.S. to lose population struck us as a demographic head-scratcher worth checking out. The meaning of ‘metropolitan area’ The Census assesses population change in metropolitan areas along officially designated lines that include counties with close ties to a core urban area. Almost a quarter of those 391 defined metropolitan areas experienced population loss between 2016 and 2017, according to Census data. The Census defines the Chicago metropolitan area quite expansively, taking in not just Chicago and Cook County but eight other counties in Illinois as well as four in Indiana and one in Wisconsin. The Chicago metro area is among the nation’s 10 largest, and Census estimates found that none of the other nine lost population in 2017. That said, some other still sizable metropolitan areas, including those surrounding Pittsburgh, Pa., and Rochester, N.Y., did shrink. "Chicago technically is a place," explained Chicago demographer Rob Paral. "It is different than a metro area." That distinction might be chalked up to a slip of the tongue by Lightfoot had she not repeated the phrase "metropolitan area" in campaign talking points on at least three occasions. A Lightfoot spokeswoman said in an email that while the candidate is saying "metropolitan area," she is only referring to the city of Chicago itself. In comparison to the nation’s other largest cities, the spokeswoman said, Chicago was the only one to experience a decline in 2016, the latest year for which city-specific data was available at the time Lightfoot made her claim. "Lori is running to become the next mayor of Chicago and when she addresses population loss, she's referring to the fact that we are on a radically different trajectory than other major metropolitan cities like Los Angeles, New York, Boston or Philadelphia," the spokeswoman said. While the Lightfoot campaign is correct that Chicago was the only one of the nation’s biggest cities to see losses, it was far from the only city to slip. And the candidate’s original comments did not reference cities at all, let alone distinguish between major cities or otherwise. Paral, the independent demographics researcher, also took issue with the Lightfoot campaign’s characterization of Chicago’s population trajectory as "radically" different from other large cities. None of the major cities her spokeswoman cited, for instance, gained population by even a full percentage point last year, while Chicago fell by just 0.14 percent, and the gap between them the year prior was not much greater. That makes the difference in their rate of change relatively nominal. Making it in Chicago We also asked Paral about Lightfoot’s broader argument that taxes were responsible for driving low- and middle-income residents away. "I think the jury is out on that," he said, adding that the correlation between tax rates and population change "isn’t that strong." Lightfoot does seem to find more solid ground in highlighting how an income gap may be playing a role in which Chicago-area residents decide to stay or go. A recent analysis by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning found the number of people living in the Chicago region making less than $25,000 shrank between 2006 and 2016, while the number of residents making $75,000 or more grew. "The loss of low-income residents in the region suggests that we’re not being so inclusive," said Aseal Tineh, the policy analyst who wrote the report. But the planning agency says it has not conducted research into links between population loss and taxes, which is the connection Lightfoot is trying to make. Our ruling While arguing that high taxes are pushing lower-income earners out of Chicago, Lightfoot said: "We are the only metropolitan area in the country that’s losing population." Lightfoot has used the "metropolitan area" phrase repeatedly in the opening days of her campaign for mayor, though a spokeswoman now says when she uses the word "metropolitan" we should really insert the words "major city."’ It could be tempting to cut Lightfoot some rhetorical slack in her quest for the mayoralty. After all, the original Mayor Richard Daley got so routinely tongue-tied that his exasperated press secretary famously admonished reporters: "Don’t write what he says, write what he means." In Lightfoot’s case, however, it's not clear exactly what she means. She keeps repeating an incorrect statement that is wrong whether taken literally or figuratively. The Chicago metropolitan area is far from the only one in the country to lose population last year, according to the Census. And the city of Chicago by itself is far from the only city to lose population--though as the spokeswoman later pointed out, it is the only one among the nation’s very biggest cities. Experts also cast doubt on the existence of any evidence to back up the other beat of her claim, that lower-income Chicago residents were leaving because of high taxes. Lightfoot’s comments use a precise term imprecisely to make an unproven argument about population loss. We rate her claim Mostly False.	None	Lori Lightfoot	None	None	None	2018-06-01T07:00:00	2018-05-20	['None']
-tron-02313	President Obama Failed to Attend D-Day Ceremonies at Normandy	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama-no-show-d-day/	None	military	None	None	None	President Obama Failed to Attend D-Day Ceremonies at Normandy	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-00979	"Over 200 years ago, the United States had declared war on Islam, and Thomas Jefferson led the charge!"	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/11/chain-email/barbary-wars-did-us-declare-war-islam/	Ask most Americans about the details of the Barbary wars, and you’re likely to get blank stares. But the obscure, early 19th century wars between the newly established United States and a group of north African powers has become evidence for a chain email that lectures about the present-day dangers of radical Islam. Here are excerpts from the chain email. "Most Americans are unaware of the fact that over 200 years ago, the United States had declared war on Islam, and Thomas Jefferson led the charge! "At the height of the 18th century, Muslim pirates were the terror of the Mediterranean and a large area of the North Atlantic. They attacked every ship in sight, and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. Those taken hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart breaking letters home, begging their government and family members to pay whatever their Mohammedan captors demanded. "These extortionists of the high seas represented the Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers -- collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American Republic. ..." "Islam, and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of their prophet and their god, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply. America had a tradition of religious tolerance. In fact, Jefferson himself, had co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam was like no other religion the world had ever seen. "A religion based on supremacism, whose holy book not only condoned but mandated violence against unbelievers was unacceptable to him. His greatest fear was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even greater threat to the United States." This excerpt offers a lot to chew over (and the full text includes even more), but for this fact-check we’re going to focus on the opening claim -- that "over 200 years ago, the United States had declared war on Islam, and Thomas Jefferson led the charge!" Some background on the Barbary Wars The Barbary wars aren’t entirely forgotten -- they are the source of the lyric "to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marine Hymn, among other things. But they did occur more than two centuries ago, so they offer fertile ground for questionable claims. The wars -- the first fought between 1801 and 1805 and a second in 1815 -- followed centuries of piracy in the Mediterranean by semi-autonomous outposts of the Ottoman Empire, including Tripoli and Algeria. Historians describe these actions as a well-developed protection racket. Countries paid hefty monetary "tributes" to the north African powers in order to get free passage for their ships. Countries that refused would risk being boarded, with crew members held hostage and cargo confiscated. (Technically, this was not "piracy," which is committed by non-state actors; the proper term for such government-backed privateering is "corsairing.") Over the years, many seafaring European nations concluded that payment of tribute was the lesser of two evils, so they complied. During the era of the American colonies, American merchant vessels received protection by virtue of being of being British; the British were among the countries that paid tribute. Then, during the American Revolution, an alliance with France protected American ships. But full independence brought an end to that. Initially, the United States decided to pay tribute. But American leaders, including Jefferson, seethed at having to do it, saying it would only inspire more and more outrageous financial demands. On July 11, 1786, Jefferson wrote to John Adams, "I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace thro' the medium of war." The following month, he wrote to James Monroe that the Barbary powers "must see the rod; perhaps it must be felt by some one of them." After Jefferson became president in 1801, he rejected Tripoli's demand for payment. The pasha of Tripoli countered by declaring war on the United States. Jefferson sent forces to the Mediterranean, and after sporadic combat, hostilities ended four years later with a negotiated settlement in which the United States paid a smaller tribute than had initially been demanded. The era of Barbary corsairs effectively ended a decade later, when, after the U.S. Navy, battle-hardened from the War of 1812, won a quick victory against Algiers, effectively ending all tribute payments. The role of Islam in the Barbary wars Not only did the United States never officially "declare war" (as the email puts it) against any of the Barbary powers, but historians of the period also say that religion was not a significant factor in the Barbary wars. To be sure, the Barbary powers were Muslim, and mentions of Islam and Christianity do pop up at times in the historical record. But historians say it was more like fighting the mafia than religious zealots. As early as 1797, the United States made clear in a treaty with Tripoli that "as the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims) and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan (Mohammedan or Muslim) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries." The experts we contacted agreed that the email vastly overplays the available evidence. "Very little of this had to do with Islam," said Adrian Tinniswood, author of Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean. "It had much more to do with trading opportunities and economics." "We didn't attack them out of matters of faith," said Lance Janda, a military historian at Cameron University. "The wars were all about freedom of the sea and protecting the U.S. flag." Robert C. Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, went so far as to slam the email as "so riddled with errors, bad logic, and innuendo that I have to wonder why you feel called upon to critique it." Our ruling The chain email said that "over 200 years ago, the United States had declared war on Islam, and Thomas Jefferson led the charge!" The Barbary powers were Muslim, and religion sometimes crops up in the historical record. But historians agree that the overriding motivation of American military action against the Barbary pirates was to secure a vital national interest, namely protecting the U.S. merchant fleet and its ability to conduct international trade. They see no evidence that Jefferson or his contemporaries were undertaking a religious holy war. So we rate the claim False.	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2015-02-11T16:45:32	2015-02-09	['United_States', 'Islam', 'Thomas_Jefferson']
-pomt-15275	Under Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin "projected a $1 billion (budget) surplus and it turns out to be a deficit of $2.2 billion."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2015/jul/28/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-under-scott-walker-wisconsin-bud/	On July 25, 2015, the day after news that a Scott Walker ally had called him a "dumb-dumb," Donald Trump delighted in dumping on the Wisconsin governor during a campaign speech in Iowa. "I read this horrible statement from his fundraiser about Trump. I said, ‘Oh, finally, I can attack,’ " the New York businessman said to laughter in Oskaloosa. "Finally, finally." Trump -- second to Walker among Republican presidential contenders in an Iowa poll earlier in the week -- criticized him on several fronts. Then he made a claim about the fortunes of Wisconsin’s finances. "Wisconsin’s doing terribly. First of all, it’s in turmoil," Trump said. "The roads are a disaster because they don’t have any money to rebuild them. They’re borrowing money like crazy. They projected a $1 billion surplus and it turns out to be a deficit of $2.2 billion." Let’s focus on that last part. Is Trump right that a projected $1 billion surplus became a $2.2 billion deficit? Trump is partly on the money, but he’s mixing apples and oranges, and his use of the word deficit is problematic. The rules By law, Wisconsin’s two-year budgets must be balanced -- revenue equalling expenditures. So, unlike the federal government, Wisconsin can never run an actual budget deficit by borrowing money that piles up as debt. That being said, the state does various projections of what revenues and expenditures will be for the upcoming two-year budget cycle. Those projections can show a surplus or a deficit -- although "deficit" is more accurately termed a projected shortfall, since there is no actual red ink. Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to our requests for evidence to back his claim. But the two figures he cited were projections that received plenty of attention when they were made. And we have dealt with them repeatedly in the past. The two figures In January 2014, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau projected Wisconsin would see a surplus of about $1 billion by June 30, 2015 -- the end of the 2013-’15 budget cycle. At the time, revenues were coming in higher than expected. Walker and the GOP-run Legislature adopted a series of tax cuts later in 2014, making good on a Walker promise to return such surpluses to taxpayers, but drawing criticism for not using the money for other purposes, such as boosting the state’s rainy day fund. Along the way, however, tax collections grew at a slower pace than had been projected. By November 2014, there was a reversal of fortune: Walker’s own Department of Administration projected a $2.2 billion shortfall for 2015-’17. Once again, that figure was not an actual deficit. Indeed, even as a projected shortfall it was overstated. That’s because the standard for projections made in the months leading up to the next budget cycle is to include all the funding requests made by state agencies -- even though, in reality, those requests always get trimmed. That serves to temporarily inflate the actual picture. In the end, the 2015-’17 budget approved by the Legislature and signed by Walker in July 2015 was balanced -- just as every other Wisconsin state budget is. Our rating Mixing apples and oranges, Trump said that under Walker, Wisconsin "projected a $1 billion (budget) surplus and it turns out to be a deficit of $2.2 billion." There was in early 2014 a projection of a $1 billion surplus heading into the 2015-’17 budget period. Late in 2014, there was a projection of a $2.2 billion shortfall -- the difference between expected revenues and the amount of money being requested by state agencies. But the shortfall was never a deficit -- and some of the surplus was consciously spent by Republicans, as tax cuts. For a statement that contains only an element of truth and ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, our rating is Mostly False.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-07-28T10:00:00	2015-07-25	['Wisconsin', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-snes-01457	President Donald Trump called Philippines lawmaker Antonio Trillanes IV a "little narco".	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-trump-call-trillanes-little-narco/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did President Donald Trump Call Senator Antonio Trillanes IV Trillanes a ‘Little Narco?’	9 November 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04101	Video shows a woman being hit by a car after fleeing her home from a prank intruder.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/exhibit-b-5/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Exhibit B-5: Girl Gets Hit By Car After Prank Goes Wrong	25 November 2012	None	['None']
-hoer-00915	Warning Violin Spider Inside Kettle Kills Family Of 6	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/bogus-warning-violin-spider-inside-kettle-kills-family-6/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Bogus Warning Violin Spider Inside Kettle Kills Family Of 6	July 15, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-14595	China is "practicing how to blow up our satellites."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/04/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-china-practicing-how-blow-our-sat/	The 2016 presidential campaign has inspired discussion of plenty of scary foreign-policy scenarios, from ISIS attacks to cyber warfare. But at a Feb. 3 town hall in Manchester, N.H., Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio offered one we hadn’t heard much about – the possibility that China could blow an American satellite out of the sky. China, Rubio said, is "practicing how to blow up our satellites." Experts told PolitiFact that Rubio is basically right. "Regrettably true," Michael Krepon, a space-policy expert and co-founder of the Stimson Center, said of the claim. Most spectacular was an incident on Jan. 11, 2007, when a six-foot-long Chinese weather satellite flew over China and was blasted to smithereens by an 18,000-mile-per-hour missile launched by China. "And then it was gone, transformed into a cloud of debris hurtling at nearly 16,000 mph along the main thoroughfare used by orbiting spacecraft," as Popular Mechanics magazine put it. China’s destruction of its own missile inspired "a great deal of international rebuke," said Laura Grego, a senior scientist with the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In addition to bringing up the touchy notion of the militarization of space, the satellite destruction created a sizable debris field in its heavily trafficked band around the earth, potentially causing secondhand damage to other nations’ satellites for the foreseeable future. There are about 1,300 active satellites, according to Scientific American. The technology China used, known as "hit-to-kill," doesn’t technically "blow up" the satellite, as Rubio had said. No explosives are involved, only the force of impact of a missile-launched "kill vehicle." "This is the same technology that the U.S. missile defense systems are based on," Grego said. "In fact, the U.S. used the Aegis ship-based missile defense system to destroy the USA 193 satellite just over a year after the Chinese test." Which brings up a point worth noting: China isn’t the only one playing this game. Russia and the United States have been testing anti-satellite technology since the 1960s. In fact, when the United States, a year after China destroyed its satellite, destroyed one of its own, cables released by Wikileaks suggest was a mission with military significance. "Russia and the United States either have experimented with or deployed similar technologies" as China, said Theresa Hitchens, a senior research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. "Indeed, the Chinese are actually behind both Russia and the United States regarding development of these technologies. Nothing China has tested is anything that the U.S. has not tested before." A further complication: Technologies that can be used to destroy satellites can also be used for benign purposes. Ballistic missiles can destroy satellites – or they can be used legitimately for missile defense. And satellites themselves can be maneuvered to damage or destroy nearby satellites – or they can be maneuvered for repair or refueling, Hitchens said. This is known as "dual-use" technology. This makes it hard to discern motives. In fact, China has "officially said its tests are not aimed at any other country, and it has been a longtime proponent of trying to manage this issue using space arms control," Grego said. But it’s difficult to prove a purely defensive motive when dealing with such dual-use technologies, Hitchens said. "We see them doing dual-use experiments and assume it’s for nefarious purposes, and they see us doing dual-use experiments and assume nefarious purposes," she said. This kind of thinking can produce an arms race. Still, experts said it was fair for Rubio to point out China’s development of technologies that can be used to attack satellites, since it’s a threat to national security even if we’re working on much the same thing. "The reality is that satellites are increasingly valuable to civil, economic, scientific, and military operations, yet they are physically quite vulnerable, since launch mass is at a premium and no one armors their satellites, and satellite positions are predictable," Grego said. Our ruling Rubio said China is "practicing how to blow up our satellites." For years, China has been pursuing technologies that can be used to destroy satellites (as well as legitimate things). In fact, the Chinese destroyed one of their own satellites in 2007, in a move that was roundly condemned internationally. While the United States and Russia have also been developing similar technologies, and in one case destroyed an actual satellite, that doesn’t undercut Rubio’s statement. We rate it True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2016-02-04T19:46:07	2016-02-04	['China']
-pomt-14947	Says Marco Rubio opposes abortion "even in the case of rape and incest."	mostly true	/punditfact/statements/2015/oct/25/jennifer-granholm/liberal-pundit-marco-rubio-opposes-rape-incest-abo/	The struggles of Jeb Bush have pundits rethinking who will emerge as the Republican establishment alternative to 2016 outsiders like Ben Carson and Donald Trump. A name that keeps surfacing: Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Rubio is the "candidate who seems to be in the cat-bird’s seat right now," said ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos asked liberal pundit and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm if Rubio has Democrats worried. Not really, Granholm said. "He’s one of the most extreme," she said. "For example, he doesn’t agree with a woman’s right to choose even in the case of rape or incest," Granholm said. We previously looked into some of Rubio’s statements and votes regarding abortion. Does he oppose abortion in the case of rape or incest? Rubio’s debate comments Rubio discussed his position on abortion during the first Republican presidential debate, Aug. 6, 2015, in Cleveland. We’ll show you the exchange between Rubio and moderator Megyn Kelly. Kelly: "You favor a rape and incest exception to abortion bans. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York just said yesterday those exceptions are preposterous. He said they discriminate against an entire class of human beings. If you believe that life begins at conception, as you say you do, how do you justify ending a life just because it begins violently, through no fault of the baby?" Rubio: "Well, Megyn, first of all, I'm not sure that that's a correct assessment of my record. I would go on to add that I believe all --" Kelly: "You don't favor a rape and incest exception?" Rubio: "I have never said that. And I have never advocated that. What I have advocated is that we pass a law in this country that says all human life at every stage of its development is worthy of protection. In fact, I think that law already exists. It is called the Constitution of the United States." The exchange is noteworthy for two reasons. First, Rubio bristles at the suggestion that he favors abortion exceptions for rape and incest. But, he also never definitively answers Kelly’s question about his position. NBC’s Chuck Todd tried to get clarity a few days later on Meet the Press. The takeaway: Rubio supports legislation that makes abortion more rare whether or not exceptions for rape and incest are included. So that means he’ll support legislation that reduces abortion even if it includes exceptions. But that also means he doesn’t necessarily believe that an exception should be included in every piece of abortion legislation. "I'll support any legislation that reduces the number of abortions, so that means a 20-week abortion ban. At five months, a child -- you'll recognize it as a human being in an ultrasound image. And I'll support that. That doesn't obviously cover the whole gamut, but it reduces the number of abortions," Rubio said. "I'll support any legislation that reduces the number of abortions and there are those that have that exception in it. What I've never done is said I require that it must have or not have exceptions." Granholm’s office pointed us toward several news accounts highlighting Rubio’s position and the exchange between Kelly and Rubio. The articles largely reach the same conclusion: Rubio will support anti-abortion legislation that includes an exception for rape and incest, but he prefers that the procedure be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. "I personally believe you do not correct one tragedy with a second tragedy. That's how I personally feel very strongly about," Rubio said Aug. 7, 2015, on CNN. "I believe all human life irrespective of the circumstances in which it came into being is worthy of the protection of our laws. I recognize this is a tough question. It's a very difficult question. And I understand that. Believe me, I do. But by the same token if I have to weigh the two equities here, I'm always going to err on the side of life." Rubio’s record on abortion Rubio, for the record, has supported legislation in the Senate that includes exceptions for rape and incest. In November 2013, Rubio was one of 40 co-sponsors of a Senate bill entitled "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act." Several GOP presidential candidates backed the bill, including main sponsor Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and co-sponsors Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky. The bill bans abortions at 20 weeks or greater but includes exceptions, including rape and incest. Graham sponsored a similar version in 2015 -- and again Rubio is listed as one of dozens of co-sponsors. The 2015 version also has a rape exception, although the language differs. It requires adult women to obtain counseling or medical treatment for the rape 48 hours before the abortion, with separate criteria for minors about reporting the rape to law enforcement. Rubio has long been an opponent of abortion rights, and his record bears that out. National Right to Life gave him a 100 percent rating for the 112th and 113th congresses. In both sessions, the ratings were based on five votes, such as cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood, repealing or defunding the Affordable Care Act and protecting free speech. The Family Research Council also gave Rubio a 100 percent rating for 13 votes in 2013-14. And NARAL, a group that supports abortion rights, gave Rubio a zero every year between 2011 and 2014. "I personally and deeply believe that all human life is worthy of the protection of our laws, I do," Rubio said in his Meet the Press interview. "And I believe that irrespective of the conditions by which that life was conceived or anything else, and for me to be consistent on that belief, that's why I feel so strongly about it. "That being said, I recognize that in order to have a consensus on laws that limit the number of abortions, a lot of people want to see those exceptions and that's why I've supported those laws in the past, as has every pro-life group in America." Our ruling Granholm said Rubio opposes abortion "even in the case of rape and incest." The record suggests Rubio has staked out a slightly more nuanced position. Rubio is staunchly anti-abortion and has suggested he personally opposes abortion in cases of rape and incest, but he has supported abortion legislation that include those exceptions. Rubio says he supports legislation that makes abortion more rare. Granholm’s statement is accurate but needs clarification. We rate it Mostly True.	None	Jennifer Granholm	None	None	None	2015-10-25T18:19:39	2015-10-25	['Marco_Rubio']
-pomt-01137	"We're spending millions for each individual" held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/dec/21/barack-obama/obama-were-spending-millions-each-individual-held-/	On his second day in office in 2009, President Barack Obama ordered that the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be closed within a year. But it remains open nearly six years later, largely because of a difficulties figuring out what to do with the detainees who remain there. On CNN’s State of the Union Dec. 21, 2014, host Candy Crowley asked Obama if the detention facility will be closed by the end of 2015. "I’m going to be doing everything I can to close it," Obama said. "It is something that continues to inspire jihadists and extremists around the world, the fact that these folks are being held. It is contrary to our values, and it is wildly expensive. We’re spending millions for each individual there." We wondered: Are American taxpayers spending millions of dollars per year for every detainee held in Cuba? In 2002, the United States established a detention camp on the 45-acre naval base on Cuba’s south east coast to hold suspects in the war on terror. More than 750 people have been detained in total over the past 13 years, with 132 current detainees. About 2,100 people work there. So how much does it cost? For fiscal year 2014, the total cost of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility is $397 million, according to a Department of Defense report drafted for the Senate Intelligence Committee. This includes money spent on maintenance, personnel, contracted work, military commissions and Department of Defense-funded studies. Spread out among the 155 people detained over the course of 2014, that’s about $2.6 million per detainee. In 2013, with a similar-size budget but more detainees, the cost worked out to about $2.7 million per detainee. For comparison, inmates at high-security federal prisons cost about $34,000 per year on average, as of 2012. Part of the reason holding detainees at Guantanamo is so much more expensive than other prisons might be transportation costs, said Madeline Morris, a law professor and director of Duke University’s Guantanamo Defense Clinic. Most people, food and supplies have to be brought in by air, which is an enormous cost. The number of detainees is going down, but the facility may face extra costs in the future. In August 2014, the New York Times reported that an estimated $200 million in maintenance will be necessary in coming years to keep the detention facility functioning. The infrastructure was originally built to be temporary. One aspect of Guantanamo that doesn’t cost very much is the land. In 1903, then-President Theodore Roosevelt secured the area from Cuba for $2,000 a year, paid in gold -- worth about $4,085 today. The American government continues to pay the rent each year, but the Cuban government reportedly refuses to cash the checks. Our ruling Obama said, "We’re spending millions for each individual" detained at Guantanamo. The Pentagon has reported that Guantanamo’s cost comes down to about $3 million per detainee per year -- just under 100 times the average annual cost of a federal prisoner. We rate Obama’s claim True. Editor's note: After this item was published, the Pentagon provided additional information showing Guantanamo's actual costs for 2014, whereas the article previously cited projections. The article has been updated to reflect the new information, which does not affect the ruling.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2014-12-21T17:46:49	2014-12-21	['Cuba']
-tron-00282	Claims about “Dhimmitude” in Obamacare and Muslim Exemptions	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/claims-about-dhimmitude-in-obamacare-and-muslim-exemptions/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Claims about “Dhimmitude” in Obamacare and Muslim Exemptions – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-14855	Says income tax rates under Eisenhower were as high as 90 percent.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/15/bernie-sanders/income-tax-rates-were-90-percent-under-eisenhower-/	U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wouldn’t reveal just how high he’d raise income taxes on the rich during the Iowa presidential debate, but he guaranteed it wouldn’t be as much as it has been in the past. In order to pay for making college tuition-free for Americans, Sanders said that Wall Street owed the middle class for bailing it out during the recent financial crisis. He said he would demand "that the wealthiest people and the largest corporations, who have gotten away with murder for years, start paying their fair share." "Well, let’s get specific, how high would you go?" CBS News moderator Nancy Cordes asked. "You’ve said before you’d go above 50 percent. How high?" "We haven’t come up with an exact number yet, but it will not be as high as the number under Dwight D. Eisenhower, which was 90 percent," Sanders answered. Was the top income tax rate under Eisenhower an astronomical 90 percent? We decided to check the ledgers on that figure. Before we go further, let’s review what the marginal tax rate means. It’s the tax rate that’s applied to the last dollar earned. The U.S. tax system is based on brackets. The top marginal tax rate applies to the highest bracket. Income is taxed at higher rates as more is earned. We turned to the Tax Foundation’s federal income tax rates history, which documents figures going all the way back to 1913, when the income tax began with the ratification of the 16th Amendment. During the eight years of the Eisenhower presidency, from 1953 to 1961, the top marginal rate was 91 percent. (It was 92 percent the year he came into office.) What does it mean, though? For the duration of Eisenhower’s presidency, that rate affected individuals making $200,000 or more per year or couples making $400,000 and above per year. In 2015 dollars, that's roughly $1.7 million for an individual and $3.4 million for a couple. Today the tax brackets are adjusted for inflation, but are exceptionally lower than in Eisenhower’s day. The top rate in 2015 is 39.6 percent, applied to single people making $413,200 or more per year, or married couples filing jointly making $464,850 or more annually. If we went back to 1954, single people making the equivalent of $413,200 would be in a 72 percent tax bracket, while a couple making $464,850 would end up in a 75 percent bracket. What’s the highest income tax bracket ever put in place? In 1944-45, during World War II, couples making more than $200,000 faced an all-time high of 94 percent. Our ruling Sanders said income tax rates under Eisenhower were as high as 90 percent. A look through the records shows that top earners in the eight years of Eisenhower’s presidency paid a top income tax rate of 91 percent. It was even a bit higher before he took office. We rate Sanders’ statement True.	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2015-11-15T00:28:42	2015-11-14	['Dwight_D._Eisenhower']
-pomt-08160	"This town (Wilmington, Ohio) hasn’t taken any money from the government. They don’t want any money from the government."	pants on fire!	/ohio/statements/2010/dec/03/glenn-beck/glenn-beck-paints-beleaguered-wilmington-ohio-real/	Radio host and Fox News personality Glenn Beck loves to tell a story with dramatic flair. And he’s latched onto one this holiday season that’s familiar to many Ohioans. It’s the story of Wilmington, a town of 13,000 people in Southwest Ohio that has lost about 8,600 jobs since DHL Express, it largest employer, pulled out in 2008. The job losses the small town has suffered since DHL’s departure have been the subject of presidential campaign stops, celebrity charity events and numerous media reports, including two from CBS’s vaunted 60 Minutes. In Beck’s version of the story, Wilmington is real life Bedford Falls, the fictitious town in the holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. Wilmington, Beck said on his Nov. 22 radio show, is ground zero of the recession, and its people – like those in Bedford Falls -- are pulling together to save the town through self reliance and prayer. What makes the Wilmington really special, he continued, is that Wilmington refuses government assistance, a key tenet of the political philosophy he espouses on his shows. "It went from the No. 1 most up-and-coming city, and a city everybody wants to live in, to ground zero. And this town hasn’t taken any money from the government. They don’t want any money from the government," he said on the show. Beck then noted how Wilmington area churches are working together to provide food for the citizens and asking God -- not the state or federal government -- to fill its food pantries. To highlight his Wilmington story, Beck will hold a show titled "America’s First Christmas" at city’s Murphy Theatre on December 15. The proceeds will be donated to a charity in the city. "I’m going there because I think this town needs to be highlighted," he said. "I think this town is going to help the rest of the country, not the other way around." With such a large spotlight headed shining on the small town, Politifact Ohio decided to review Beck’s storyline that Wilmington shuns government assistance. We asked for Beck’s sources, but our e-mails to his producer went unanswered. So, we looked ourselves. We quickly found Beck’s story full of holes. The city of Wilmington itself has received federal assistance, including money from the federal stimulus bill that Beck often rails against. Government and social service agencies that serve residents of Wilmington and surrounding Clinton and Clark counties have received state and federal money. Development agencies and companies in Wilmington have received state aid or pledges of state aid. Unemployed residents of the town and county are receiving unemployment and other jobless benefits. Immediately after DHL announced the closing of its Wilmington air hub, elected officials at the city, state and federal levels began seeking help for DHL workers. The federal government awarded a $3.87 million national emergency grant to Ohio in November 2008 specifically to provide job training and other aid to DHL workers in Wilmington and the surrounding area. It was administered through the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. The area has since received a second national emergency grant worth $4.1 million. Wilmington and Clinton County benefited handsomely from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the stimulus bill, that was passed in February 2009. The tracking website for the stimulus program allows anybody, including Beck, to search by ZIP code to find the total money spent within the postal district. Using Wilmington’s zip code – 45177, which includes the surrounding county – the site shows that the area received $7,009,811 in stimulus money through September. The figure includes money that went to the Wilmington city schools, Clinton County Department of Jobs and Family Services and the Clinton County Community Action Group, a non-profit organization that aids the poor in in the region and provides free weatherization to residents. The city of Wilmington received a $79,231 stimulus grant to provide programs designed to prevent and control crime; a $167,392 grant for investment in rural public transit vehicles, and about $4 million to replace roads, curbs and sidewalks, typically replaced by residents. In addition, the Ohio Department of Development is extensively involved in the community. It has provided money to Clinton County Port Authority to help redevelop the Wilmington air park. It’s also offering Airborne Maintenance and Engineering Services, a new company operating at the air park, more than $5.2 million in state assistance to grow its business there. Wilmington Mayor David Raizk, who cited several other sources of federal assistance flowing to the city, said he’s chasing any government help he can get. "I’ve beat on more doors than I can count," he says. "Not because we are looking for hand out - but we are looking for a hand up. My job is to get whatever assistance I can get for the citizens here and to help create jobs for them." So where does all this leave Beck’s premise that Wilmington is a place that shuns government help? Beck took enough literary license in his holiday tale to make Frank Capra blush. His statement isn’t just false. It’s also ridiculous enough to earn a Politifact rating of Pants on Fire.	None	Glenn Beck	None	None	None	2010-12-03T05:00:00	2010-11-22	['Ohio', 'Wilmington,_North_Carolina']
-goop-02209	Brad Pitt Dating “Princess” Charlotte Casiraghi, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-charlotte-casiraghi-princess-dating/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Brad Pitt NOT Dating “Princess” Charlotte Casiraghi, Despite Report	12:57 pm, November 13, 2017	None	['None']
-bove-00092	Cambridge Analytica – Facebook Fallout: Time For BJP & Congress To Come Clean	none	https://www.boomlive.in/cambridge-analytica-facebook-fallout-time-for-bjp-congress-to-come-clean/	None	None	None	None	None	Cambridge Analytica – Facebook Fallout: Time For BJP & Congress To Come Clean	Mar 22 2018 7:41 pm, Last Updated: Mar 22 2018 11:07 pm	None	['None']
-snes-02987	John Lennon said in 1981 that the "only way out of the messes we've created" is to elect a businessman.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/john-lennon-anticipate-donald-trump/	None	Questionable Quotes	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did John Lennon Anticipate the Election of Donald Trump?	6 February 2017	None	['John_Lennon']
-pomt-00309	Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, "we lost millions of jobs."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/sep/24/donald-trump/did-nafta-kill-millions-jobs-donald-trump/	In an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity in Las Vegas, President Donald Trump went back to a favorite rhetorical target: the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Trump talked about trade negotiations with Mexico and how he believes he can create a new deal that is fair for both countries. "NAFTA was a disaster. We lost thousands of plants," Trump said. "We lost millions of jobs. NAFTA was a disaster." On several occasions, we’ve looked at the tricky question of how to tally the employment impacts of the trade deal between the United States, Canada and Mexico enacted in 1994. In this case, Trump exaggerates the highest available estimate of lost jobs as a result of the deal. "We lost millions of jobs" Estimates of jobs lost from NAFTA ranges widely, but we have not seen any estimate as high as "millions." The biggest number comes from a report by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which receives support from labor unions. A 2014 report from the group found that from 1993 to 2013, "the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and Canada increased from $17 (billion) to $177.2 billion, displacing 851,700 U.S. jobs. All of the net jobs displaced were due to growing trade deficits with Mexico." But this isn’t the only estimate that’s been offered. And as you’ll see, the numbers vary widely. Business groups argue that trade deals actually boost employment, pointing to a 2010 report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The chamber found that the 14 trade deals in place in 2008 supported 5.4 million jobs, with the lion’s share of those jobs stemming from NAFTA. Assessments not aligned with either business or labor have generally suggested that the trade deal had a modest overall impact on jobs, though with certain industries — such as cars and electronics — suffering more than others. NAFTA "had particularly heavy, negative impacts on employment in the auto and parts industries, and a few others, such as electric appliances," said Robert Scott, who authored the EPI report. He added that the upper Midwest suffered disproportionately, though some of the production was moved to non-union locations in the South. The Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan policy arm of Congress, concluded that "the net overall effect of NAFTA on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest." A similar review published by the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reached the same conclusion. It’s also worth noting that assigning blame for job losses is not always clear. The U.S-China Business Council and the Financial Times have argued that the loss in manufacturing jobs were not due to trade with China so much as gains in technology and productivity, as well as the result of a more sophisticated economy. And during the last year of his presidency, Bill Clinton signed legislation granting China permanent normal trade relations. From 2000 on, this had an enormous impact on trade between the two nations — and it overlaps with about half the period when analysts have tried to gauge the effect of NAFTA. This complicates any analysis of NAFTA’s specific impact. For all its faults, Scott said, NAFTA’s impact pales compared to the job losses from expanded trade with China. The Economic Policy Institute has estimated that the United States has lost 3.2 million jobs between 2001 and 2013 to trade with China, so it’s possible that Trump was conflating NAFTA and trade with China. "Trump’s intense focus on renegotiating NAFTA, and his claim that under NAFTA ‘millions of jobs were lost,’ is not only wrong, but a vast overstatement, and a misleading misstatement of the principal sources of our trade problems," Scott said. The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article. Our ruling Trump said that under the North American Free Trade Agreement, "we lost millions of jobs." We did not find any study that estimates that NAFTA alone cost "millions" of jobs. The largest estimate is about 800,000, and other studies show smaller negative, and sometimes positive, impacts. We rate the statement False. Editor's note, Sept. 24, 2018: PolitiFact has joined an effort with other North American fact-checkers to examine statements about trade and tariffs. Poynter.org is documenting the project; see its report for links to other fact-checks. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-09-24T06:00:00	2018-09-20	['None']
-hoer-00054	Crying Baby Serial Killer	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/crying-baby-hoax.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Crying Baby Serial Killer Hoax	August 30, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-08434	"We haven't yet taken out a negative ad."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/18/christine-odonnell/christine-odonnell-says-she-hasnt-run-negative-ad/	The day after their nationally televised debate on CNN, Democrat Chris Coons and Republican Christine O'Donnell -- two candidates vying for an open Senate seat in Delaware -- faced off in a second live debate at a Wilmington Rotary Club meeting. During that Oct. 14, 2010, event, a questioner asked both candidates, "What qualities do you most respect and admire in your opponent?" Coons responded first, praising the civil tone of the debate, adding that O'Donnell had shown "remarkable persistence" and "passionate commitment" to the conservative cause. Then it was O'Donnell's turn. "I do respect my opponent in his ability to debate and his ability to thoughtfully answer a question," she said. "So I respect him, I respect him for standing up on the issues. But I would say that when he made the remarks about not going dirty, I do want to point out that we haven't yet taken out a negative ad. So I would ask you to stand on that pledge and ask that the negative ads, the slanderous ads against me, stop." When we saw the clip replayed on ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour, we were struck by O'Donnell's comment that "we haven't yet taken out a negative ad," given that we had spent the better part of a day dissecting an ad from O'Donnell that all but portrayed Coons as the protagonist in a horror movie. The minute-long ad, featuring dark visuals and spooky music, portrays Coons -- the county executive of Delaware's populous New Castle County -- as a roving psychopath that she dubs "The Taxman." Coons, the narrator intones, "is taxing everything out here." The ad -- along with an explanatory website that uses similar visuals -- was unveiled on Oct. 11, at which point it gained wide media attention due to the public fascination with the race. (O'Donnell, a tea party favorite, had come from behind in the GOP primary to beat a long-serving establishment Republican, Mike Castle, turning a likely Republican seat into a likely Democratic seat.) PolitiFact weighed in on two parts of the "TaxMan" ad on Oct. 13 -- a full day before O'Donnell's reference to not taking out negative ads in the debate. So it seemed pretty obvious to us that O'Donnell was wrong. The "TaxMan" ad was "paid for and authorized by" Friends of Christine O'Donnell, which by all indications is an offshoot of her campaign. On O'Donnell's campaign website, the "Donate Now" page says it was paid for by Friends of Christine O'Donnell. And Friends of Christine O'Donnell was also the sponsor of her famous "I'm You" ad. So when O'Donnell said that "we haven't yet taken out a negative ad," she was wrong -- and had been wrong for at least two full days. We don't necessarily think negative ads are inherently bad; campaigns are about contrasting one candidate to another, so negative ads can play a valuable role, as long as they're accurate. We're not knocking O'Donnell's use of a negative ad here; we're knocking her decision to use a negative ad and then deny that she did. We rate her claim Pants on Fire.	None	Christine O'Donnell	None	None	None	2010-10-18T14:12:54	2010-10-14	['None']
-pomt-14840	The federal government is sending refugees to states with governors who are "Republicans, not to the Democrats."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/18/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-obama-administration-pushing-ref/	As growing numbers of governors were expressing opposition to the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their state, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump raised the ante in an interview with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. Trump charged that the Obama administration is deliberately trying to resettle Syrian refugees in states with Republican governors while sparing states that have Democratic governors. "They send them to the Republicans, not to the Democrats, you know, because they know the problems," Trump said on Nov. 17, 2015. "In California, you have a Democrat as a governor (Jerry Brown). In Florida, you have Rick Scott (a Republican). So you know they send them to the Republicans because you know why would we want to bother the Democrats? It's just insane. Taking these people is absolutely insanity." Is the administration sending refugees to Republican-led states but not Democratic ones? In a word, no. Syrian refugee resettlement by state Before we delve into the numbers, it’s important to note that the Republicans currently have a commanding lead in governorships -- 31 states held by the Republicans compared to just 18 held by the Democrats. (The governor of Alaska is an independent.) Given this imbalance, it would not be surprising to find Republican-led states ending up with more refugees overall than Democratic-led states. So we will look at not just the raw totals per state but also the average number of resettlements per state for each party. According to numbers compiled by the Associated Press, states with Republican governors have accepted 1,219 Syrian refugees since Jan. 1, 2015, compared to 605 for states with Democratic governors. That works out to an average of 39 refugees per Republican-led state and 34 refugees per Democratic-led state. Note that the Democratic-led states have not been spared refugees, as Trump claimed. On a per-state basis, Republican-led states have accepted more Syrian refugees so far in 2015, but not dramatically more. Indeed, only one state accepted more than 200 refugee resettlements -- California, which is led by Brown, a Democrat. We also looked at State Department data for the most recent month, October 2015. According to these numbers, Republican-led states accepted 117 Syrian refugees, while Democratic-led states accepted 70. That works out to 3.8 refugees per state for Republicans and slightly more -- 3.9 refugees per state -- with Democratic governors. So Trump is wrong that Democratic-led states are avoiding resettlement of Syrian refugees. During the most recent period, they are actually accepting more per capita than Republican states are. Who decides where refugees go? Even if Trump had been right on the numbers, experts in refugee resettlement said partisan politics plays no role in determining where refugees end up. Put simply, "the decision on refugee placement is based first on where the refugee might have family ties or other connections, and then largely on the capacity of voluntary agencies to provide case-management services," said Bill Frelick, director of the Human Rights Watch Refugee Rights Program. Mark Hetfield, the president and CEO of HIAS (originally known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), said that at the beginning of each fiscal year, the State Department works with nine national voluntary agencies -- six faith-based, three nonsectarian -- to allocate the number of refugees per agency. The nine groups are the Church World Service, the Ethiopian Community Development Council, Episcopal Migration Ministries, HIAS, the International Rescue Committee, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services, and World Relief. "The capacity at the local level is determined in consultation with local municipalities and state refugee coordinators, who are state officials, along with other community stakeholders," Hetfield said. "The states do not have veto power, but they are very much consulted in the process." Every Wednesday, Hetfield said, the nine agencies meet to decide which agency will take which newly approved refugees. Files on each refugee household approved for resettlement by the Department of Homeland Security are reviewed with an eye to the size of the household, the gender and age distribution, the educational and employment backgrounds of adult members, whether family members or friends are already living in the United States and are willing to help, and whether there are special considerations, such as a serious health problem. If an agency has a pre-existing relationship to the household -- such as having resettled other family members in the United States -- the case will typically be assigned to that agency, said Susan Martin, a professor of international migration at Georgetown University. Otherwise, the agency will attempt to allocate new refugee households according to numbers of people the agency feels capable of handling, she said. For instance, an agency will consider whether a local affiliate has adequate language resources available for the newly arrived refugees. In other words, the agency -- not the administration -- allocates the refugees to a particular city. "The administration does not try to influence the process," Hetfield said. Some states tend to get higher rates of refugee resettlement because family links are taken into account, Hetfield said. "That is why Michigan has so many refugees resettled there -- it is where Iraqis and Syrians have expressed a preference, due to family or other community links," he said. According to the AP data, Michigan has accepted 195 Syrian refugees this year. So this, and not the fact that Michigan has a Republican governor, is why the state ranks relatively high in refugee resettlement, he said. Our ruling Trump said the federal government is sending refugees to states with governors who are "Republicans, not to the Democrats." The numbers show that Democratic-led states recently received almost as many refugees as -- and by some calculations, even more refugees than -- Republican-led states on a per capita basis. Beyond that, though, Trump is wrong to say that refugees are resettled as a form of partisan political vendetta. People who have taken part in the process say that the administration leaves it up to private groups, mostly faith-based groups, to determine where refugees should go, with the decision based on family links, the availability of language resources locally and the ability of local groups to handle the new workload -- not politics. We rate his statement Pants on Fire.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-11-18T16:36:53	2015-11-17	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-bove-00006	CLAIM: A video showing people walking on a strip of land with the sea on either sides is viral on social media with many claiming it is the Ram Setu, a bridge which is said to have been built by Hindu deity Ram to go to Lanka and fight another deity Ravana.	rating: false	https://www.boomlive.in/video-of-a-sand-bed-at-keralas-ponnani-beach-shared-as-ram-setu-bridge/	FACT: The natural phenomena shown in the viral video is a sand bed created at Ponnani beach in the northern district of Malappuram, Kerala.	None	None	None	None	Video Of A Sand Bed At Kerala’s Ponnani Beach Shared As Ram Setu Bridge	Oct 05 2018 6:57 pm, Last Updated: Oct 05 2018 7:12 pm	None	['Ravana', 'Sri_Lanka']
-pomt-07921	In September, the Department of Business and Consumer Services enacted a sudden 39% workers' compensation premium assessment by rule with little notice to the public.	mostly false	/oregon/statements/2011/jan/31/oregon-senate-republicans/did-oregons-worker-compensation-rate-rise-whopping/	Earlier this month, Oregon Senate Republicans called for a two-year halt on agency rule-making. The thinking is that Oregon businesses, struggling to survive the downturn, don’t need the hassle and expense of burdensome new regulations. The minority caucus gave a number of examples of state agencies trying to strangle employers, including this one: "In September, the Department of Business and Consumer Services enacted a sudden 39% workers' compensation premium assessment by rule with little notice to the public." Lots of facts to check out in that one claim. Was it indeed sudden? Did the increase amount to 39 percent? And was the public shut out of the process? In other words, was this massive insurance increase rammed down our collective throats by a heavy-handed agency gone wild? To assess that, PolitiFact Oregon delved into the wonky world of workers’ compensation. Almost all employers are required tobuy this insurance, which pays for the medical care and wages of a worker who has been hurt on the job. The Workers' Compensation Division, within the Department of Consumer and Business Services, oversees the program. In September, as it does every year, DCBS announced new insurance premium costs for 2011. The average cost of $1.48 for every $100 of payroll is the same as last year’s. (It’s an average because costs differ based on type of business.) There are three components to the cost. The largest portion -- called the "pure premium" -- is set by an outside group and the agency usually adopts its recommendation. For this year, the pure premium dropped 1.8 percent to $1.27 per $100 on average. A second, far-smaller portion pays for return-to-work and other worker-benefit programs; this rate is set by the agency and for 2011 remained unchanged at 11 cents per $100. Now, the third portion is the controversial part. The "premium assessment" pays to administer the workers’ compensation system. The agency, which sets the rate, increased the cost from 4.6 percent of premiums last year to 6.4 percent this year -- a 39 percent increase. The increase is from 7.6 cents to 10.4 cents per $100 of payroll. Republicans don’t like it because it was proposed by the agency director in September and adopted two weeks later with one public hearing. DCBS spokeswoman Lisa Morawski doesn’t dispute the two-week open comment period, but she says stakeholders had earlier notice. Also, she said that DCBS had no choice, given an ongoing decline in revenue. Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli, R-John Day, acknowledged the premium they cited was indeed part of an overall figure -- but argued the size of the increase is so large it deserves to be singled out. "Anything that goes up by more than the rate of inflation is killing people who have to pay these fees," he said. "You don’t mark up cars like that; you don’t mark up groceries like that." Still, businesses actually saw no overall increase because the extra revenue from the premium assessment -- $17 million -- should balance out the reduction in pure premium. So how accurate is the statement? The numbers don’t lie. There was a 39 percent increase in the assessment portion. But the money involved is pennies on the dollar, literally: the average goes from 7.6 cents to 10.4 cents per $100. For most people unfamiliar with workers’ compensation lingo, they might think the overall rate went up 39 percent. And that’s not correct. We think the statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Barely True. Comment on this item. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Oregon Senate Republicans (The Leadership Fund)	None	None	None	2011-01-31T06:00:00	2011-01-20	['None']
-hoer-01256	Jim Morrison Has Been Found Alive in a Paris Retirement Home	fake news	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/no-jim-morrison-has-not-been-found-alive-in-a-paris-retirement-home/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	No, Jim Morrison Has NOT Been Found Alive in a Paris Retirement Home	March 21, 2016	None	['None']
-hoer-00383	'Thomas Romany's Stuff' Warning Message	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/thomas-romany-warning.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	'Thomas Romany's Stuff' Warning Message	16th February 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-13601	Legal prescription drugs "statistically kill 100,000 people a year, (but) there are no documented deaths due to marijuana."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/16/gary-johnson/gary-johnson-claims-marijuana-cant-kill-and-prescr/	Gary Johnson, the libertarian 2016 presidential candidate, recently assailed strict federal regulations on marijuana, saying that the drug causes far less harm when compared with legal drugs. Johnson was asked about the potential public health dangers of marijuana in states where it was recently legalized, during a CNN libertarian town hall on Aug. 3, 2016. He responded by arguing that the drug hasn’t actually killed anyone, and that prescription drugs are far more dangerous. "I just think that so much research and development needs to take place that hasn't taken place. And that marijuana products deal -- or compete directly with legal prescription drugs that statistically kill 100,000 people a year, and there are no documented deaths due to marijuana." Johnson later repeated the claim during an Aug. 10 interview with On Point with Tim Ashbrook, a call-in radio show. Many supporters of marijuana legalization like to say that the drug poses no grave risks to a person’s health, but how does it actually compare with prescription drugs in terms of death statistics? We decided to dive into the data to find out. Clearing up the contextual smoke One immediate problem with Johnson’s claim is that it leaves out important context about how a drug can actually kill someone. Drugs directly kill people through toxic overdoses, but they can also indirectly kill people by causing accidents. We’ll look at both cases for marijuana. (The Johnson campaign did not respond to requests for clarification.) We decided to look at direct overdose deaths first. It’s very difficult to overdose on marijuana’s active ingredient. A review study comparing the acute lethal toxicity of commonly abused drugs shows that the lethal dose for marijuana (around 15 grams or above) is at least 1,000 times greater than the effective dose (15 milligrams), or the dose required to achieve a noticeable effect. In contrast, alcohol can become lethal at only 10 times the effective dose. Additionally, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration drug sheet for marijuana reports that no deaths from marijuana overdose have ever been recorded. However, marijuana has played an indirect role in fatalities. Experts that we talked with agreed that the drug itself doesn’t cause major acute health problems and is far safer than other medications. However, they said that it can still dangerously inhibit someone’s ability to make safe decisions. Dr. Ryan Vandrey, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in the behavioral effects of marijuana, stressed that looking only at deaths from direct overdoses is a narrow way of examining a drug’s health effects. "Too often individuals cite that individuals haven’t died from cannabis -- I don’t think that’s true. It certainly can be argued that cannabis use has contributed to the deaths of individuals, such as due to impairment during driving," he said. Dr. Jerome Avorn, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told us, "The main risk from marijuana is from the risky or stupid things people do after using it, such as driving, rather than from any toxic effects of the substance itself, which is remarkably safe." A 2013 literature review article noted that higher levels of THC in the blood are associated with substantial driving impairment and a higher risk of accidents, especially when combined with moderate alcohol consumption. However, the authors emphasized that more research needs to be done on the issue. Other accidental deaths involve marijuana users who seemingly became out of touch with reality and took reckless actions. A report from 2015 detailed the case of a 19-year-old male who jumped off a balcony after consuming multiple servings of a marijuana cookie. The study suggests that a high enough dose of THC can result in a greater risk of "adverse psychological effects." In summary, it appears that marijuana doesn’t directly cause overdose deaths, but there are documented cases where it likely led to accidental fatalities.The exact number of marijuana-related deaths that occur annually is difficult to pin down. One more caveat: synthetic marijuana has been attributed to overdose deaths. However, the experts we talked with told us that these drugs have nothing to do with marijuana and are a completely different class of substances. How about prescription drugs? As with marijuana, Johnson was unclear about whether he was referring to only prescription drug overdoses or to all deaths associated with prescription drugs, such as though allergies or deadly complications. Deaths from prescription drug overdoses are very common in the United States. The National Institute of Drug Abuse’s website shows that approximately 25,000 people died from prescription drug overdoses in 2014. Around 19,000 of these deaths came from prescription opioid pain relievers such as methadone and oxycodone. But Johnson said that prescription drugs, "statistically kill 100,000 people every year." Where is he getting his data from? There’s a study from 1998 that showed there were over 100,000 fatal "adverse drug reactions" in hospital patients in the U.S. However, the study is 18 years old, and the National Institute for Drug Abuse told us that the study was based on invalid calculations that overestimated the number of deaths. Dr. Avorn emphasized that counting all deaths from prescription drugs is "horrendously complicated," and that estimates vary wildly. A recent article in the New York Times pointed out how the interplay between a large number of potential causes of death makes it difficult to determine how many people die from improperly administered prescription drugs or other "medical errors." Although Johnson’s claim is difficult to verify, the data show that at least tens of thousands of people do die from prescription drugs yearly. Our ruling Johnson said that marijuana competes with "legal prescription drugs that statistically kill 100,000 people a year and there are no documented deaths due to marijuana." Marijuana is far less toxic than many prescription painkillers, which kill tens of thousands of people every year. Marijuana has never killed anyone through overdose, but Johnson’s vague claim leaves out the crucial fact that marijuana has played a role in accidental deaths. And the number of prescription drug deaths isn't estimated to be as high as Johnson said. The claim is partially accurate but leaves out important context. We rate his claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/455541b7-e999-4df3-be01-918edecb86ec	None	Gary Johnson	None	None	None	2016-08-16T16:07:57	2016-08-03	['None']
-pomt-01773	"Having an active father makes children 98 percent more likely to graduate from college."	half-true	/florida/statements/2014/jul/29/marco-rubio/active-father-98-percent-more-likely-graduate-coll/	In defending traditional marriage, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said in a speech about values at Catholic University that fathers play a vital role in their children’s success. Rubio cited statistics about the number of children born to unwed mothers and what that means for their chances to climb out of poverty and go to college. After getting an education, finding a good job and getting married, "The final element of the success sequence is raising children in a married, two-parent home," Rubio said July 23, 2014. "Even in my own family, of course, I have examples of children raised by one parent who have gone on to successful lives. But we also know that having an active father makes children 98 percent more likely to graduate from college and complete the first step of the success sequence." We decided to fact-check the 98 percent statistic. Study of teenagers A spokeswoman for Rubio pointed to a research brief about the role of fathers in college success by Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. The brief was published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute where Wilcox is a visiting scholar. Wilcox used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a respected study of a representative sample of teenagers in grades 7–12 during the 1994–95 school year. The survey asked teenagers 11 questions about activities they did with their dads -- for example, whether they received homework help from them. He found that by looking at the answers, Wilcox categorized 18 percent as having fathers who were not involved. For the remainder, he divided the fathers into three groups: somewhat involved, involved, or highly involved fathers. "Compared to teens who reported that their fathers were not involved, teens with involved fathers were 98 percent more likely to graduate from college...," Wilcox wrote. Wilcox also found that involved fathers played more of a role in their children completing college if those children had mothers who completed at least high school or college. He found that only 15 percent of teens with a high-school educated mom and an uninvolved dad graduated from college, compared to 30 percent of teens with an involved dad and a high-school educated mom. Wilcox’s research wasn’t exclusively about married, biological or straight fathers; it looked at all fathers regardless of their marital status or if they lived with their children or sexual orientation. However Wilcox found that, "adolescents are much more likely to report an involved or highly involved father if their biological parents are married." Other experts weigh in We interviewed seven experts about Wilcox’s research and Rubio’s statement. Wilcox’s findings align with social conservatives, which opens him up to some scrutiny from the left. That said, the experts we interviewed raised several nonpartisan points about Wilcox’s findings. Professors noted that Wilcox’s research brief doesn’t carry the same weight as a peer-reviewed journal article. Also, they argued that Wilcox didn’t prove that fathers’ involvement caused their children to complete college -- instead he showed a correlation. Ohio State University sociologist Kristi Williams told PolitiFact that Rubio’s claim that having an active father "makes" children 98 percent more likely to graduate from college "implies a causality that Professor Wilcox's study does not establish. (He) shows a correlation but does not establish this causality." When we told Wilcox that professors raised concerns about causation, he pointed us to a paper written by other researchers in the Annual Review of Sociology about the causal effects of father absence. But that paper indicated there were studies that showed more of an effect on high school graduation. "There was weak evidence for effects on college attendance and graduation, with only one of four studies finding significant results," the paper said. Lots of studies show that father involvement is helpful only when the fathers are competent parents and maintain a good relation to the mom, married or not, said Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families and an Evergreen State College professor. "Still, other research suggests that a better predictor of kids’ educational achievement than family structure is the mother’s education and educational aspirations for her children," Coontz told PolitiFact. "Which suggests we might want to prioritize upping that, instead of trying to marry such women off to low-income men whose chronic economic stress and insecurity very often erodes their functioning as partners and parents." The experts we interviewed didn’t dispute the concept that active fathers could play a role in their children completing college. However, they said there can be additional factors at play, especially income. "Kids from well-off families don’t have to combine work and study to the degree that poorer kids do," George Washington University professor Michael Wiseman said. "The question for Sen. Rubio should be, ‘Exactly what policies do you recommend for encouraging fathers to commit to their families and to marry the mother of their children?’ Talk about fatherhood is cheap. Ideas seem to be in short supply." Our ruling Rubio said, "Having an active father makes children 98 percent more likely to graduate from college." Rubio was citing a research brief that looked at a survey of 11 different measures of fathers’ involvement with their children and whether the children graduated from college. But when Rubio used the word "makes" he implied that having an active father causes their children to graduate from college, and the research doesn’t prove causation. Other researchers said there could be other reasons for the disparities in college graduation. Rubio’s statement requires further explanation and relies on one piece of research only. We rate this statement Half True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2014-07-29T11:36:36	2014-07-23	['None']
-pomt-09483	Says he "never" donates to Democrats while Paul Workman "contributes to Democrat Kirk Watson and other Democrats running against Republicans."	half-true	/texas/statements/2010/feb/26/david-sewell/sewell-says-he-doesnt-donate-democrats-workman-con/	Among three Republicans from southwest Travis County running for a seat in the Texas House, lawyer David Sewell calls himself "the true conservative." Need an indicator? In a campaign flier that hit mailboxes Feb. 22, he claims to "never" donate to Democrats while accusing his opponent, businessman Paul Workman, of padding Democratic warchests. "Paul Workman contributes to Democrat Kirk Watson and other Democrats running against Republicans," the flier states. Them's fighting words. Does Sewell have it right? Let's start with the attack on Workman. Chad Wilbanks, a consultant for the Sewell campaign, pointed us to the Texas Ethics Commission's campaign finance reports that show Workman made contributions to state Sen. Kirk Watson, former state comptroller and U.S. Senate candidate John Sharp, former Texas House Speaker Pete Laney, and state Reps. Patrick Rose and Dawnna Dukes — all Democrats. Eric Bearse, a consultant for Workman's campaign, said that in each instance, Workman gave to Democrats who had "no or nominal Republican opposition." We looked at how much Workman donated to the aforementioned Democrats and which Republicans they were running against at the time. Watson: According to campaign finance reports, Workman donated $350 to his campaign before the 2006 November election. Watson was unopposed in the Democratic primary and faced Libertarian Robert "Rock" Howard in the general elections. No Republicans joined the race, which Watson won with 80 percent of the vote. Workman donated another $250 in 2007, less than a year into Watson's four-year term. Sharp: Workman donated $200 to his campaign in 2002 before the former state comptroller lost a November bid for lieutenant governor to Republican David Dewhurst. Rose: In 2006, Workman donated $100 to Rose's campaign. Rose won re-election to his House seat with 60 percent of the vote, swamping Republican Jim Neuhaus and Libertarian Tom Gleinser. In 2008, Workman gave $250 to Rose, who went on to beat Republican Matt Young and Gleinser with 59 percent of the vote. Dukes: Workman gave $100 to her campaign in 2006. She won re-election to her House seat after winning 85 percent of the vote against Independent Richard Wedeikes. Laney: Workman donated $250 to Laney's campaign in 2000 when Laney was unopposed in November for re-election to his House seat. Clearly, Workman made donations to Democrats — Sharp and Rose — who ran against Republicans. Next, let's check Sewell's claim that he never donated to Democrats. Our search of campaign finance reports filed with the ethics commission didn't find any donations to Democrats by Sewell. Yet we found that Stahl, Bernal & Davies, the law firm where Sewell is a partner, has contributed to Democrats, notably donating at least $5,000 to Democratic judges since Sewell started working at the firm as a clerk in 1998. Among other contributions during the past decade, the firm gave $800 before the 2000 general election to Democrat Woodie Jones, who lost to Republican David Puryear for the Third Court of Appeals. Before the 2008 election, the firm gave $750 to Jones who wound up besting Republican incumbent Ken Law for a seat on the Third Court of Appeals. Wilbanks said a portion of money that the firm's partners make each year is diverted to a company account from which each partner can independently spend money on political contributions in the firm's name. "David does not support contributions to Democrats from the firm," said Wilbanks, his campaign consultant. We couldn't confirm Wilbanks' claim; the law firm declined to comment. Where does that leave us with the declarations in Sewell's mailer? Workman donated to Democratic candidates at least seven times leading up to general elections. Republicans were challenging the Workman-backed Democrats in three of the races. But Watson was never running against a Republican when he donated to Watson, as Sewell's claim implies. As for Sewell, we found no evidence that he has contributed to Democrats in his own name. Still, his firm has contributed to Democrats — running against Republicans — throughout Sewell's time there. We rate Sewell's statement as Half True.	None	David Sewell	None	None	None	2010-02-26T17:56:36	2010-02-22	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-13109	"I have tremendous support from women."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/04/donald-trump/trump-wrongly-claims-tremendous-support-women/	Donald Trump’s resurgent campaign has narrowed the polling gap between himself and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In the toss-up state of Florida, Trump said people of all stripes appreciate what he has to offer. And he mentioned one group in particular. "I think I have tremendous support from women," Trump said in a Nov. 3, 2016, speech in Jacksonville, Fla. "Tremendous support." We wondered what the polls tell us about female sentiment toward the Republican candidate. Trump has garnered headlines for video of him boasting about groping women, and more than 10 women have said Trump forced himself on them. Here’s a scan of the latest polling results. The CBS News/New York Times poll from Nov. 3, 2016 found 50 percent of women back Clinton and 36 percent support Trump. In a new poll from ABC News/Washington Post, Clinton gets 52 percent of the women compared to 41 percent for Trump. The Los Angeles Times/USC poll finds women favor Clinton by an 8-point margin, 49 percent to 41 percent. The Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP election tracker also gives Clinton an edge among women by 51 percent to 38 percent. The Trump campaign cited this survey, saying it shows Trump gaining support from women. A few days earlier, Trump enjoyed the backing of 34 percent of women. The Los Angeles Times/USC poll also shows Clinton’s numbers among women slipping by a few points in recent days. However, the average across the four most recent polls shows women choosing Clinton over Trump by an 11-point margin. This is consistent with the gap pollsters have seen going back several months. How do Trump’s numbers compare to past Republican nominees? Not so well, said Christina Wolbrecht, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame. "The exact figure depends on your data source, but the reliable sources all put the percent of women voting for GOP nominees at the low to upper 40s since 2000," Wolbrecht said. An American National Election Studies survey found women backing the Republican candidate by 44 percent in 2000 (George W. Bush), 47 percent in 2004 (Bush re-election) and 43 percent in 2008 (John McCain). According to Gallup, Mitt Romney also garnered 43 percent of the woman vote in 2012. Trump’s best number in the recent polls is 41 percent and two put him below that, at 36 and 38 percent. His average across four polls is 39 percent. Political science professor Kathleen Dolan at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said one sub-group of women leans toward Trump -- white women without college degrees. And he does lead among Republican women. But Dolan said that comes with a caveat. "Even among Republican women, a group he should be carrying, he only has about 79 percent of them," Dolan said. "This is compared to the 92 percent of Republican women who voted for Romney in 2012." Susan Carroll, a senior scholar at the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said, " ‘Tremendous’ is a clear exaggeration if compared with how Republican nominees have fared in the exit poll results in previous elections." Our ruling Trump said that he has "tremendous support from women." His campaign pointed to a poll that shows him gaining ground with women, but on average, he lags behind Clinton by 11 percentage points. And even the poll cited by his campaign finds he still faces a 13-point gap. His best performance shows that 41 percent of women support him, but his polling average is 39 percent, appreciably lower than the fraction that have backed previous Republican candidates. That doesn’t seem to meet the common definition of "tremendous." We rate this claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/ff7283d3-87b1-41e0-ba0c-9b417b759980	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-11-04T11:55:33	2016-11-03	['None']
-goop-02878	Perrie Edwards Dissing Selena Gomez And “13 Reasons Why,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/perrie-edwards-not-dissing-selena-gomez-13-reasons-why-feud/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Perrie Edwards NOT Dissing Selena Gomez And “13 Reasons Why,” Despite Clickbait Claim	4:16 pm, April 8, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-03950	Says wrestling was a favorite sport of Abraham Lincoln.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/feb/18/donald-rumsfeld/donald-rumsfeld-says-abraham-lincoln-loved-wrestli/	Last week's recommendation by the International Olympic Committee executive board to drop wrestling from the 2020 summer games prompted an outcry from lovers of the sport, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The IOC has been overcome by "kumbaya" thinking and should restore wrestling to the 2020 lineup, wrote Rumsfeld in a Washington Post op-ed. Rumsfeld was a wrestler at Princeton University who tried unsuccessfully to make the U.S. Olympic squad in 1956. In making his case, Rumsfeld noted that wrestling "once was a favorite of Abraham Lincoln’s." We didn't realize the 16th president had been a wrestler, so we decided to check it out. It didn't take long: We found Lincoln was so good that he's enshrined in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, which says he recorded only one defeat in a dozen years. Lincoln "was an impressive physical specimen, thin but wiry and muscular, strengthened by hard work in the fields and towering to a mighty 6-feet, 4-inches in height," says an article on the Hall of Fame's website. His most famous bout was against Jack Armstrong, a local bully and wrestling champion in New Salem, Ill. There are differing accounts of that bout, but the consensus is that Lincoln held his own against the "local tough." Lincoln "sure was the big buck of this lick," said one spectator. His wrestling skills were celebrated in a TV ad for Diet Mountain Dew in which Lincoln strips off his shirt during the Lincoln-Douglas debates and begins throwing people off the stage. The tagline: "FACT: Lincoln's favorite sport was wrestling." Sports Illustrated notes that Lincoln was not our only wrestling president. Other grapplers who made it to the White House include George Washington (school champ at the Reg. James Maury's Academy in Fredricksburg, Va.), Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft, who "mastered a wicked move called the Flying Marc that savagely flipped an opponent to the ground." Rumsfeld said wrestling was a favorite sport of Lincoln's. We found lots of documentation of his wrestling prowess, and it's a reasonable inference to assume he enjoyed it. We rate the claim True.	None	Donald Rumsfeld	None	None	None	2013-02-18T15:43:03	2013-02-17	['None']
-pomt-01491	"Greg Abbott and his surrogates have referred to women who have been the victims of rape or incest as though somehow what they are confronting is a minor issue."	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2014/sep/25/wendy-davis/wendy-davis-catches-fire-incorrect-claim-about-gre/	Democratic gubernatorial nominee Wendy Davis, who has been pressing Republican candidate Greg Abbott to say if he opposes abortion in all circumstances, told reporters Abbott should disavow a supporter’s comment about rape and incest. According to video posted online by KXAS-TV, NBC5 in Fort Worth, Davis said Sept. 23, 2014: "It is not acceptable that Greg Abbott and his surrogates have referred to women who have been the victims of rape or incest as though somehow what they are confronting is a minor issue. And I am calling on them to disavow those statements and to show their respect for women in this state who have undergone the horrific and heinous crimes of rape and incest and demonstrate their respect for what those situations have placed them in, the trauma that they’ve dealt with and step away from the idea that they, not these women who may be impregnated in these circumstances, somehow are in a better place of knowing how women should handle that situation." Davis, a Fort Worth state senator, was asked if Abbott should be accountable for a comment by someone who doesn’t work for him. She replied that Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak, whose comments she was questioning, has "been a surrogate voice for Greg Abbott and the Greg Abbott campaign. And I think that most telling is the fact that Greg Abbott has not come forward to disavow Matt Mackowiak’s characterization of women who have been victimized by rape and in cases of incest as though somehow they’ve suffered a minor issue." Mackowiak (who has his own Truth-O-Meter report card) took exception to Davis’ characterization of his comments and urged us to check whether whether Abbott or his "surrogates," as Davis said, referred to victims of rape or incest as if they’d experienced minor events. At issue is Mackowiak’s appearance on the Sept. 21, 2014, episode of KXAS-TV’s "Lone Star Politics" during which he and Davis advocate Matt Angle offered conflicting takes on how Abbott, the state attorney general, and Davis had fared in their first debate Sept. 19, 2014. On the show, Dallas Morning News reporter Gromer Jeffers asked Angle, "Matt, do you think Wendy Davis picked up any women voters?" "Absolutely," Angle replied, saying Abbott made it clear he plans to continue defending the state against school districts who say the funding system is unconstitutional. "And also," Angle said, "he again defended his position, his extreme position, that even in cases where women are victims of rape or incest that he would impose himself and others like him in the government to decide what they do with that pregnancy." Next, Jeffers asked Mackowiak if abortion remains a tough issue for Davis in conservative-leaning Texas. Mackowiak replied: "It is, that’s right. Wendy Davis didn’t use the word ‘abortion’ in her announcement speech when she announced for that office and that’s for that reason. Look, Wendy Davis filibustered a bill that would have outlawed, that did outlaw, late-term abortion after five months. That is the law of the land. Texas is a pro-life state. "We can get into minor issues that are 1 percent or 2 percent of the problem. But ultimately, Texas is a strongly pro-life state. Abbott would love to fight this campaign on that issue alone from here on out, but Wendy knows that that’s not strategically wise. Angle: "That’s the first time I’ve heard rape or incest called a minor issue." Mackowiak: "It’s minor in terms of the percentage of the cases, that’s all I’m saying." Angle: "A victim of rape and incest is not a minor problem." Mackowiak (nodding his head): "OK. All right. Great. Right." The day after Davis made this claim, Mackowiak emailed us a statement saying he’s not an Abbott surrogate and had never claimed to be. "I do not believe rape or incest is a minor issue and never said that," he told us. "For any victim of rape or incest, that brutal crime is a major and life-changing issue and the crime deserves to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Rather, I said that rape and incest are a small percentage of abortions." Abbott campaign spokeswoman Amelia Chasse told us by email that Mackowiak hasn’t been employed or paid by Abbott’s campaign. By email to our queries, Davis campaign spokesman Zac Petkanas said: "Any Republican who goes on television to do post-debate spin, uses their talking points and defends their positions is an Abbott surrogate." Petkanas said he was not aware of other Abbott surrogates making the rape-incest claim described by Davis. Our ruling Davis said Abbott and his surrogates "have referred to women who have been the victims of rape or incest as though somehow what they are confronting is a minor issue." Davis got this wrong various ways given that the individual in question, a Republican consultant who doesn’t work for Abbott, immediately clarified on the air he was saying few abortions occur after incidents of rape or incest. Also on the air, Mackowiak agreed with the Democrat criticizing him that rapes and incest aren’t minor things. Davis’ camp also identified no other people who declared incest and rapes to be minor things nor is there evidence Abbott said anything of the sort. Pants on Fire! PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Wendy Davis	None	None	None	2014-09-25T18:01:15	2014-09-23	['None']
-tron-03405	Comments about Islam by Attorney General Ashcroft?	disputed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ashcroft/	None	religious	None	None	None	Comments about Islam by Attorney General Ashcroft?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-14743	"Since 2004, more than 2,000 suspected terrorists have legally purchased weapons in the United States."	mostly true	/california/statements/2015/dec/17/mike-thompson/data-backs-claim-watch-list-questions-linger/	Every year, millions of average Americans legally buy guns in this country. But have thousands of people on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List also legally purchased guns, and other weapons, on U.S. soil? That’s the claim Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, made following the terrorist attack in San Bernardino. Thompson and others in Congress called for a ban on weapons purchases by anyone on the watch list. The U.S. Senate struck down a bill that sought to accomplish that earlier this month. "Since 2004, more than 2,000 suspected terrorists have legally purchased weapons in the United States," Thompson said on floor of the House of Representatives on Dec. 7, urging passage of the bill. Was this true? We decided to fact-check the eye-opening statement. But first, we wanted to learn more about the list itself. The list, which includes the smaller No Fly List, is a database comprising information about "those known or reasonably suspected of being involved in terrorist activity," according to the FBI. National security officials consider it a key tool in preventing future attacks. Civil liberty groups and some elected leaders have called it unconstitutional, citing a lack of due process and vague standards for inclusion on the list. It’s caused headaches at airport security checkpoints for people with similar names to those on the list, including the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove. The database is believed to include hundreds of thousands of individuals, including roughly 10,000 Americans. But being on the list as a "suspected terrorist" does not mean the person has a criminal record, or has ever been charged with a crime. It just means they’re "reasonably suspected" by a federal official of being involved in terrorist activity. Our Research We know it’s legal for suspected terrorists to buy weapons — specifically, guns — because that’s the right Thompson and even President Obama have said they want to take away. But how are purchases by suspected terrorists tracked? And how can anyone know for certain that "more than 2,000" have legally bought weapons over the past decade in the U.S.? Enter the FBI. The federal agency conducts instant criminal background checks on people seeking to buy firearms at licensed gun stores. In 2004, these checks began examining whether an applicant was on the terrorist watch list. Photo by Andrew Nixon/Capital Public Radio In March, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published an analysis of FBI data showing that from February 2004 through December 2014, 2,043 out of 2,233 weapons applications by people on the terrorist watch list were allowed to proceed. Nearly all applications were for firearms. Three were for explosives, all of which were approved. When we contacted Thompson’s office, a staffer pointed us to the GAO analysis to back up the congressman’s claim. The GAO found an average of about 200 successful weapons purchases by the group of people on the list, each year, during the timeframe. Experts we spoke with told us there’s no way of independently verifying information on the list, as it’s not public. They referred to the GAO analysis as the best estimate available. "I have no means of independently confirming who is a reasonable suspect even if I knew the names. I imagine this is true of most average persons. We have to go on trust," Martha Crenshaw, Stanford University political science professor and expert on terrorism, said in an email. The FBI has declined to comment on the watch list’s current size, but we found an estimate on a 2011 FBI fact-sheet that put it at 420,000 individuals. Of those, only about 8,400 were American citizens or legal residents. Current estimates of the number of people on the list -- foreign and American combined -- now hover around 700,000. A 'plausible number' Two experts who helped oversee the watch list told us the congressman’s claim of "more than 2,000" suspected terrorists legally buying weapons over 10 years is realistic. "That’s certainly a plausible number," said Martin Reardon, former chief of the FBI Terrorist Screening Center’s operations branch. The screening center maintains the watch list. Reardon, who now works for an intelligence consulting firm, estimated the number of Americans on it is currently no more than 10,000. Another expert knowledgeable about the list agreed. "Two thousand, over such a long period of time -- 10 years -- does not actually strike me as being overly large because there are a lot of people in this country that are purchasing firearms," said Timothy Edgar, who oversaw civil liberties and national intelligence issues, including the terrorist watch list, under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. "So it’s not surprising that there’s been a fairly substantial number of encounters with people who are on that terrorist watch list for one reason or another, over the past decade." The data show weapons applications, not the number of individuals making those requests. So presumably, the same person could have made multiple applications. Even so, the experts said, the number cited by Thompson could be much higher. Suspected terrorists could have legally bought weapons at gun shows, where transactions are not subject to federal background checks. Faulty list? While there’s data to back up Thompson’s claim, it’s also important to consider the accuracy of the names on the terror watch list. How do we know, for example, that the people on the list really are "suspected terrorists?" In 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released an audit that found that 35 percent of the identities on the watch list at the time were "associated with FBI cases that did not contain current international terrorism or domestic terrorism designations." Many of the records were for people who had originally "been appropriately watchlisted but should have been removed from the watchlist after the case had been closed," the audit said. The American Civil Liberties Union has repeatedly criticized what it calls the "unconstitutionally vague" standards for inclusion on the terror watch list. It repeated a call earlier this month for major reforms of the database. Edgar and Reardon both acknowledged the list is "not perfect." Edgar added, however, that many of the early problems with the list, which caused some people with the same name as a suspected terrorist to be stopped at airports, have been resolved. Even if a large chunk of the names on the list are outdated, we presume a majority truly are "suspected terrorists," based on our research and that of the experts we spoke with. Our Ruling Rep. Mike Thompson said recently on the House floor that: "Since 2004, more than 2,000 suspected terrorists have legally purchased weapons in the U.S." He backed up his claim with FBI data that show 2,043 people on the agency’s terror watch list successfully applied for weapons at licensed gun shops over the past decade. There’s no way to track how many people on the list legally bought weapons at gun shows, as those transactions aren’t subject to federal background checks. But it makes sense to assume some did. The congressman left out the fact that a federal audit in 2009 found 35 percent of the identities on the list had no ties to current terrorism cases. The audit said many of the names remained on the list when they should have been removed. But given the large size of the terror watch list — with perhaps 10,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of foreigners — it’s reasonable to assume that 200 or more on the list made legal weapons purchases each year over the past decade. We rate the claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Mike Thompson	None	None	None	2015-12-17T00:00:00	2015-12-07	['United_States']
-tron-00545	History of the Car Radio	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/history-car-radio/	None	business	None	None	['commentary', 'legend']	History of the Car Radio	Mar 23, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-09005	Rhode Island voters are moving away from the Democratic party to non-affiliation	false	/rhode-island/statements/2010/jul/12/anthony-gemma/gemma-says-democrat-ranks-are-thinning-voters-shed/	Anthony Gemma, one of four Democrats running for the 1st Congressional District seat being vacated by Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, was vying for the party's endorsement on June 28 when he spoke about the percentage of registered Democrats and suggested that the party's share was declining. "What's at stake for the Democratic party in the upcoming election and beyond? Today 41 percent of Rhode Islanders are registered Democrats. Forty eight (percent) are unaffiliated. It is the common political wisdom that the trend away from the Democratic party to non-affiliation will continue and intensify. But I have the courage to be your congressman. I will lead the fight to reverse that trend, to reinvigorate [the] populism that has never left the heart of the Democratic party." It certainly seems that more voters are unwilling to sign up with a party these days. But is the trend really there? So we checked with the secretary of state's office. The numbers provided to us by spokesman Chris Barnett seem to show that Gemma misspoke a bit. He should have said that 41 percent of registered voters are registered as Democrats. Not all Rhode Islanders are registered to vote. The actual percentage as of June 18: 40.9 percent of the 701,180 registered voters are declared Democrats. Unaffiliated voters make up 48.6 percent and Republicans have 10.4 percent. (The Moderate Party had 312 registered voters, or 0.044 percent.) But we were interested in the trend. Barnett supplied numbers going back to Sept. 12, 2006. Looking at those, it's hard to see where Democrats have been losing ground. On Sept. 9, 2008, Democrats essentially made up the same percentage of voters: 40.8 percent. The percentage of unaffiliated voters was also a bit lower than today, at 48.2 percent. Two years before that, on Sept. 12, 2006, 35.2 percent of the voters declared themselves as Democrats, a significantly lower ratio. The unaffiliated made up 54.5 percent of the voting population, higher than today. So, if anything, the popularity of the state Democratic party has grown since 2006 and the share of unaffiliated voters has declined. When we asked the Gemma campaign about the claim, spokesman Ray Rickman, who served as deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2002, said Gemma's staff was harking back to an earlier era. "Two or three of us have been around forever and we remember when 60 percent of everybody, or even higher, were Democrats and the number of unaffiliated was 12 percent, or whatever," he said. He said the campaign was unable to find earlier numbers, a problem Barnett in the secretary of state's office had also brought up. Until the last several years, "they didn't collect it because it changes almost weekly," Rickman said. "And people only wanted to know what the vote was, not what the registration was." The only way to get such numbers would be to compile historical records from all 39 municipal canvassing boards, which would be cumbersome, he said. So we dug a little deeper, and found a Providence Journal story from March 7, 2000, reporting that then-Secretary of State (and now Congressman) James Langevin tracked the number of eligible voters going back to 1970. The story included a breakdown of the 2000 numbers by party. The data: fewer than 9 percent were Republicans, 56 percent were unaffiliated (far higher than today) and 35 percent were Democrats (significantly lower than today). Gemma is citing a trend that doesn't exist -- not in recent history, not going back 10 years. So we rate his statement as False.	None	Anthony Gemma	None	None	None	2010-07-12T06:00:00	2010-06-28	['Rhode_Island', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-04841	Says Joe Garcia "voted to raise our utility rates."	half-true	/florida/statements/2012/aug/13/gloria-romero-roses/gloria-romero-roses-says-congressional-candidate-j/	Democrats are battling in a primary to take on U.S. Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, who remains the subject of a federal investigation into undisclosed payments from the Flagler Dog Track to his mother's company. One of the top Democratic contenders is Joe Garcia, who lost two previous congressional races, including one against Rivera in 2010. This year Garcia jumped late into the race after Democrats recruited political newcomer Gloria Romero Roses. They are the top two Democrats competing in the newly drawn District 26, a closely split Republican-Democratic district that stretches from Miami-Dade to Key West. Romero Roses attacked Garcia in a mailer: "Trading on his cozy relationship with energy lobbyists to raise tens of thousands of dollars for his failed campaigns -- after he voted to raise our utility rates." The mailer is referring to Garcia’s tenure as a commissioner from 1994 to 2000 on the Florida Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities and sets electric rates. A footnote cites multiple newspaper articles most of which overlapped with Garcia’s commissioner tenure. We wanted to check if Garcia "voted to raise our utility rates." For this claim accusing Garcia of raising utility rates, Romero Roses’ campaign sent us a list of what they said were multiple examples of rate hikes. First, some background on the Public Service Commission. The governor appoints members to the commission who must be approved by the Senate. When utilities -- electric, natural gas, water, and wastewater -- want a rate hike, they must get the commission’s approval. The commission has to set rates that allow investors an opportunity to earn a reasonable return. The commission does not set rates for publicly owned or cooperative utilities. We interviewed J.R. Kelly, the public counsel who serves as the public’s advocate for utility related matters. Kelly said he couldn’t speak to Garcia’s votes while on the commission, because Kelly started at the Office of the Public Counsel about five years ago -- many years after Garcia’s tenure ended. But he spoke to us in general about the commission. The commission usually grants some percentage of the increase that utilities seek, he said. The utilities have the burden to prove that they warrant the increase. Electrical utilities can also get an increase to pay for rising fuel costs which is separate from any rate hike on base rates. If a utility meets the burden of proof for the rate increase, "the commission is pretty much bound to approve what they are asking for." Rate increase votes We aren’t going to dissect here all the votes cited by the Romero Roses campaign. However, we did review the meeting minutes and news articles the Romero Roses campaign provided about those votes. We sent the list to Garcia’s campaign and they generally didn’t dispute the votes but raised some caveats, and we found some of our own caveats. • One vote was a fuel surcharge -- not a base rate increase: When gas prices rise, electric companies are entitled to a fuel surcharge to cover their costs, according to state law. The Tampa Bay Times wrote that millions of Floridians would see their electric bills go up between $2.67 and $4.39 a month for the typical household in 2000 that used Florida Power and Light, Tampa Electric or Florida Power Corp. The minutes show he wasn’t participating in that vote though at some point he was at the meeting. Romero Roses' campaign obtained the minutes while our factcheck was underway and agrees Garcia didn’t participate in that vote. • Many were increases only in certain areas of the state or had a limited scope. One vote in 2000 was a pilot prepaid electricity program for low-income customers designed to help them avoid service charges. A newspaper article said it would raise rates 8 percent but a commissioner described the program as "optional." The Fort Pierce News wrote that Garcia was in favor of the pilot: "That extra cost needs to be borne by those who are going to use it..." There were two votes to raise rates for City Gas Company that served Miami-Dade and Broward counties -- one was an interim increase approved in August 1996 and the other was an increase approved in October 1996. Business Wire wrote that the interim hike equaled a 4.8 percent average increase while the Miami Herald wrote the October vote would raise rates on average $2.34 a month. Customers had a temporary 4.8 percent increase and then when the increase later became permanent it went up to 5.8 percent. A 1997 vote allowed Florida Power to raise rates for 1.3 million customers by 40 cents a month for the average customer. Florida Power sought the increase to pay for a legal settlement. The commission’s vote sheet shows that Garcia voted in favor. Romero Roses’ campaign said that would have applied to the Miami area. Garcia’s campaign said it was cheaper for the customers to have the case settled and pay a small increase rather than Florida Power continue the litigation. • Not every vote was technically a vote to raise rates: The commission voted in 1995 to direct Southern State Utilities to include three additional counties in its rate hike request. The utility had planned on excluding them. The Tampa Bay Times wrote in 1996 that the impact of a rate increase would vary -- some customers would pay about $30 more a month while others would experience a decrease. The Times wrote that Southern State Utilities was the state’s largest water utility and served customers between the Panhandle and Naples. Garcia says he cut rates We sent Garcia’s campaign a list of his commission votes cited by Romero Roses. Garcia did vote in favor of raising rates while a commissioner, said his spokesman, Jeffrey Garcia. But the campaign argues those votes do not provide a full picture of his actions on the commission -- including his 1999 vote in favor of a $1 billion settlement with FPL. "At the time that was the largest decrease ever by far and it outweighed any increases that took place during the previous six years," Jeffrey Garcia said. In May 1999, the PSC unanimously voted in favor of the $1 billion settlement reached by the public counsel at the time, Jack Shreve. The settlement translated to a monthly average savings of $5 a month for three years. Joe Garcia told PolitiFact that people paid less on utility bills in 2000 when he left the commission compared to 1994. "By the time I was done, utility rates had gone down," he said. "Peoples’ phone bills had gone down. Peoples’ gas bills had gone down. Particularly in the gas and telecommunication area we opened up competition so peoples’ rates automatically went down.’" Garcia didn’t have documentation to prove that the $1 billion FPL cut washed out votes for increases, but he pointed to Miami Herald editorials in 2000 that described him as consumer friendly. "Mr. Garcia was committed to consumer protection, yet admirably even-handed in balancing the diverse, competing telecommunications interests of the region," the Miami Herald wrote in one editorial in 2000. Another 2000 Miami Herald editorial praised Garcia as the "consumer friendly" head of the commission and said he repeatedly sought legislative funding to promote a federal program to help provide poor families with telephones. State Sen. Mike Fasano, a Republican from Pasco County who long battled a water utility, said it's wrong to claim that the $1 billion cut for Florida Power and Light would wipe out other utility increases everywhere in the state. "For them to suggest let’s balance it off because he voted for a rate cut for FPL, how does that help people in Pasco County?" Fasano said, because Pasco consumers aren’t served by FPL. "It doesn’t." Our ruling Romero Roses said Joe Garcia "voted to raise our utility rates." He did take votes in favor of utility rate increases while serving on the Public Service Commission between 1994 and 2000. The role of commissioners is to review rate increases and determine if they are warranted and if so grant them. But Garcia’s tenure on the commission can’t be boiled down into a simple sentence. Some of those increases contain caveats -- for example, they were limited to only part of the state or to certain customers. Garcia also voted in favor of a $1 billion settlement for consumers who used FPL. Whether all of Garcia’s votes for increases or decreases add up to on average less or more for a consumer could vary depending on where that consumer lived at the time. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Gloria Romero Roses	None	None	None	2012-08-13T18:24:38	2012-07-18	['None']
-hoer-00409	Cardiff City Football Club Refused to Donate Club Shirt for Fallen Soldier's Coffin	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/cardiff-club-shirt-donation-protest.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	False Claim - Cardiff City Football Club Refused to Donate Club Shirt for Fallen Soldier's Coffin	24th November 2011	None	['None']
-pomt-04975	Stimulus dollars paid for "windmills from China."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/23/mitt-romney/stimulus-windmills-china-romney-ad/	In the 2010 mid-term elections, Republicans won a lot of seats by running against government spending and especially the stimulus. The Romney campaign revived that theme in an ad that asks ‘Where did all the money go?’ The answer in the ad is not subtle. Image after image of dollar bills go up in flames. "So where did the Obama stimulus money go? Windmills from China," the ad says. It also mentions cars from Finland, which we dealt with in a separate fact-check. For this one, we’ll focus on whether stimulus money paid for windmills from China. Windmills from China have something of a history when it comes to political messaging. PolitiFact looked into Sarah Palin’s claim that nearly all of the renewable energy stimulus dollars went to Chinese turbine makers. We rated that False. A version came up again this year in the Ohio federal Senate race. PolitiFact found that the Republican making the charge believed that a large wind project in Texas would have purchased 300 Chinese turbines. In fact, that project never got off the ground. The concern over foreign beneficiaries of taxpayer money is not exclusively Republican territory. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has raised a stir about the fraction of money for renewable energy going to foreign businesses. The Romney campaign sent us supporting documents for the ad’s claim. Among the reports and articles they cite, one refers to that massive project in Texas that was never built and will never receive stimulus money. Others stem from the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit journalism project at American University. The Investigative Reporting Workshop’s report backs up the ad’s claim but paints a murkier picture than the Romney campaign would have you think. The author tallied $2.6 million in stimulus money going to Chinese makers of wind turbines. However, the reporter, Russ Choma, also says that none of the farms used turbines entirely built in China. Additionally, he couldn’t say for sure how much stimulus money made its way to China. "Some money definitely did, but it is safe to say more money went to creating jobs in the U.S. and Europe," he wrote. A Challenging Money Trail Federal support for renewable energy projects came through the 1603 tax credit program. So far, this program has paid out about $5.2 billion to wind farms nationwide. Once a project is on line and delivering power, that program pays money to the project developer -- as much as 30 percent of the project cost. Along the way, the developer pays the companies that provided the materials. Following the money becomes complicated because wind turbines are about as intricate as airplanes. To choose an example, let’s look at a wind farm going up in Alaska. The lead contractor is General Electric, the world’s third-largest supplier of wind turbines and an American firm. But according to the Anchorage Daily News, "The blades are made in Brazil, the units that contain the generator come from Southern California, the connecting hubs from the Florida Panhandle and the towers are made in China." This $65 million project isn’t eligible for the 1603 money until it begins producing power. When it does, it could receive as much as $20 million from Washington. More detailed information would be needed to assign those funds to the manufacturers. We called the American Wind Energy Association, an industry trade group, to see if they knew of any Chinese turbines paid for with American stimulus dollars. They said they did. Their best guess is the number is six -- five in Texas and one in Iowa. But "that might not be exactly right," said Liz Salerno, director of industry data and analysis. "Because some of the blades and towers in Texas might have come from American firms." If it is six, that represents a tiny fraction of all the turbines installed with stimulus dollars. Salerno says the program funded more than 12,000 turbine installations over three years. Chinese components might have shown up in various places, but if one is counting complete Chinese "windmills," then they account for less than 1 percent of the total. Elsewhere, we have reported that due to the limited size of the American wind energy industry, most of the stimulus money to expand wind power went to foreign companies or their American-based subsidiaries. That does not mean that every dollar left the country. Some foreign companies built manufacturing plants in the U.S., for example. That created jobs for American workers. The U.S. Energy Department estimates that the 1603 program went to projects that involved between 95,000 and 155,000 jobs. Those estimates cover all kinds of renewable energy generation work, but wind projects got over 80 percent of the funds. Manufacturing jobs in the wind industry began growing in 2005, and that trend continued through 2011. They now number about 30,000, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Our ruling Mitt Romney’s ad said that stimulus dollars paid for windmills from China. By depicting dollars going up in flames, the ad suggests that the U.S. gained nothing from the stimulus spending, and the money largely went to countries such as China. In reality, many American firms connected to the wind industry expanded during the years of the stimulus. Only a small fraction of the money spent on wind energy went to China. This statement contains a grain of truth but ignores other information. We rate it Mostly False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-07-23T16:26:33	2012-07-18	['China']
-pomt-06154	"Wisconsin election officials to accept Mickey Mouse, Hitler signatures" on recall petitions.	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/dec/18/maciver-institute/conservative-group-says-wisconsin-allow-mickey-mou/	The Government Accountability Board, which oversees Wisconsin elections, met Dec. 13, 2011 to discuss petitions that are being circulated to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Later that day, the conservative MacIver Institute posted a video report with a provocative headline: "Wisconsin election officials to accept Mickey Mouse, Hitler signatures." Sounds daffy, even uber daffy. But similar reports appeared across the nation on sites such as Politico.com and FoxNews.com. Moreover, the Madison think tank’s video included a clip from the meeting in which Government Accountability Board members and staff talked about Disney’s most famous character and history’s most famous dictator. Would their signatures really be accepted on Walker recall petitions? A pivotal word here is accept. MacIver’s statement suggests that such signatures not only will be accepted by the state but also counted toward the more than 540,000 signatures needed to force a recall election in 2012. Indeed, the narrator in the video claimed the board had said all signatures listed with a Wisconsin address "will be counted." Two points emerged from the video’s clip of the discussion between a Government Accountability Board member and board staffers: 1. A signature with a name that does not include a Wisconsin address would automatically be stricken. A staff member noted that the name of Adolf Hitler was stricken from a petition submitted in the state Senate recalls in the summer of 2011 because the address listed was Berlin, Germany. 2. A signature bearing a name such as Mickey Mouse would not automatically be stricken if it is listed with a Wisconsin address -- but it would be "flagged" for additional review. The board has said each signature will initially be reviewed by two people -- staff members of the board or temporary workers hired to review the petitions. But, as we reported in a recent item about signing recall petitions multiple times, the board has said it will only do a general review of the names and that for a signature to be stricken it must be formally challenged by Walker. Walker and two tea party groups are assembling teams to review petitions for possible challenges. Some conservatives, however, fear it will be difficult to detect duplicate signatures and signatures for bogus but common-sounding names. (Two days after the video posting, Walker and the Republican Party of Wisconsin sued the board over its procedures, asking a judge to order the board, which is composed of six former judges, to look for and eliminate duplicate signatures, clearly fake names and illegible addresses.) We asked MacIver Institute spokesman Brian Fraley if he had evidence beyond the video to back the group’s claim. He said he did not. So, Mickey Mouse and Hitler signatures listed with an address in Wisconsin would be accepted in the sense that they would not be immediately rejected if spotted by GAB workers. But such signatures would actually be counted only if the apparently fictitious signatures went undetected -- by board workers, Walker representatives and other petition reviewers. Once detected, Walker could ask the board to strike those signatures. The board would decide the challenges at a public meeting. News reports about Mickey Mouse and Hitler signatures led the Government Accountability Board to issue a statement the next day about its process for handling "potentially fictitious" names. Two key points from the statement: 1. Recall committees have an incentive to strike fictitious names before submitting their petitions to try and ensure they have collected enough valid signatures. To be valid, a signature must be from a person who is qualified (though not necessarily registered) to vote in Wisconsin. Graeme Zielinski, spokesman for the state Democratic Party, has saidthe recall committees will strike obviously fictitious names. 2. In challenging signatures, Walker can submit evidence to back the challenges. And the Government Accountability Board can use resources such as voter registration lists in deciding whether to strike a signature. Our conclusion The MacIver Institute said "Wisconsin election officials to accept Mickey Mouse, Hitler signatures" -- suggesting such signatures would automatically be counted toward the number needed to force Walker into a recall election. For such signatures to actually be counted, they would have to pass undetected through petition circulators, the recall committees, a pair of Government Accountability Board reviewers, Walker’s representatives and other groups that review the petitions. If such signatures were found, Walker could formally challenge them to the board to get them stricken. There’s an element of truth in MacIver’s statement in that fictitious signatures listed with Wisconsin addresses would be accepted -- but only for review. The statement, however, ignores critical facts -- namely that the signatures would have to pass through several layers of review to actually be counted. That’s our definition of Mostly False.	None	MacIver Institute	None	None	None	2011-12-18T09:00:00	2011-12-13	['Wisconsin', 'Mickey_Mouse']
-tron-01623	Social Security benefits to legal and illegal Mexican immigrants?	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/totalization/	None	government	None	None	None	Social Security benefits to legal and illegal Mexican immigrants?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Mexico']
-goop-00362	Sofia Richie, Scott Disick On The Rocks?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/sofia-richie-scott-disick-on-the-rocks-splitting/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Sofia Richie, Scott Disick On The Rocks?	2:10 pm, August 29, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04835	Says Mitt Romney "wants to end tax credits for wind producers."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/14/barack-obama/obama-says-romney-would-end-wind-power-tax-credits/	President Barack Obama raised concerns about the future of wind power at a campaign event in Colorado, a state that has done well with wind energy. Over 6 percent of its power comes from wind and a Danish turbine maker recently built a manufacturing plant there. But the industry is fragile and Obama played to that when he said, "At a moment when homegrown energy is creating new jobs in states like Colorado and Iowa, my opponent wants to end tax credits for wind producers." Obama was referring to Renewable Energy Production Tax Credits. The president says Mitt Romney wants to get rid of them -- and the Romney campaign agrees. A Romney spokesman, Ryan Williams, says when the tax credits expire at the end of this year, Romney has no plans to renew them. "Wind energy will thrive wherever it is economically competitive," Williams said. It's worth noting that Romney's position on the tax breaks for wind energy is a major issue within the wind power industry. These tax credits have been part of American energy policy since 1992. For every kilowatt hour of power from wind, the government gives the producer a tax credit worth 2.2 cents. If the average price of electricity is around 8.5 cents, as it was in Colorado in 2010, then the tax break can make wind power more competitive. The tax credit has come and gone over the years. Investment analyst, Aris Karcanias, managing consultant at Navigant BTM, says as the tax credit goes, so goes the wind industry. "The Production Tax Credit remains the largest driver of industry growth in the United States," Karcanias said. "And uncertainty over its renewal has historically been accompanied by repeated ‘boom and bust’ cycles of growth." The past few years have been one of the "boom" times. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that wind projects created at least 52,000 jobs between 2009 and 2011. The Congressional Research Service reports that the country will add a record 10 to 12 gigawatts of capacity by the end of 2012. After the policy runs out, new construction is expected to plummet. But the congressional analysts don’t say that extending it would necessarily lead to an upswing. They say that competition from cheap natural gas and a limited rise in the demand for power will tend to put a damper on the industry regardless of federal tax policy. Our Ruling Barack Obama said Mitt Romney plans to put an end to tax credits that benefit the wind power industry. Romney agrees. We rate the statement True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-08-14T18:15:56	2012-08-09	['None']
-thal-00010	FactCheck: Did Sweden shut down a music festival because of attacks carried out by migrants?	none	http://www.thejournal.ie/factcheck-sweden-music-festival-migrant-sex-attacks-4086852-Jun2018/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck: Did Sweden shut down a music festival because of attacks carried out by migrants?	Jun 22nd 2018, 6:21 PM	None	['Sweden']
-farg-00231	Claimed as a “fact” that “President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”	unsupported	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/03/examining-trumps-wiretap-claim/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Donald Trump	Eugene Kiely	['Russia']	Examining Trump’s Wiretap Claim	March 6, 2017	[' Twitter – Saturday, March 4, 2017 ']	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-03440	"People want the minimum wage, they want marriage equality, they want women’s health care. There’s issues that actually that really do matter, social issues that matter to the people of this state. So I know Barbara would support those issues, I know the governor hasn’t. You’ve seen the actions he’s taken on them."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2013/jun/23/stephen-sweeney/steve-sweeney-claims-chris-christie-doesnt-support/	When it comes to rallying support for minimum wage, marriage equality and women’s health care, Gov. Chris Christie is very far apart from Democrats on those key issues, according to state Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-Gloucester). Sweeney emphasized the divide in a recent interview during the June 1 episode of ‘On The Record with Michael Aron’ on NJTV. "People want the minimum wage, they want marriage equality, they want women’s health care," Sweeney said. "There’s issues that actually that really do matter, social issues that matter to the people of this state. So I know Barbara would support those issues, I know the governor hasn’t. You’ve seen the actions he’s taken on them." Sweeney last week endorsed Barbara Buono, a Democratic state senator from Metuchen, in November’s gubernatorial contest with Christie. For this fact check we’re looking only at the claim that Christie doesn’t support these issues -- concerns that PolitiFact New Jersey has addressed previously. What we have determined is that while Christie sees these issues differently than Democrats, it’s not quite true that he doesn’t support them at all. Let’s look back at claims on each topic, starting with minimum wage. In January Christie vetoed a Democratic proposal raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50 an hour, with future increases tied to inflation. So he didn’t support the Democrat proposal -- but he offered an alternative that Democrats reject: phase in a $1 increase over three years and eliminate automatic hikes. Next, marriage equality. Christie, a Catholic, has said repeatedly that same-sex marriage goes against his beliefs, but has said he supports civil unions and ensuring that same-sex couples have the same legal protections as married couples. Back in February, Christie conditionally vetoed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage and suggested a referendum on gay marriage for the Nov. 5 general election. That suggestion drew fire after several lawmakers, including Sweeney, said same-sex marriage is a civil rights issue and doesn’t belong on a ballot. Finally, let’s look at where Christie stands on women’s health care. State Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen) in May 2011 claimed that six of New Jersey’s 58 family planning centers closed after Christie stripped $7.5 million in funding for the centers from his first budget for fiscal year 2011. Representatives of those clinics previously told us that state funding cuts forced the closures. Christie has since rejected at least three efforts by the Legislature to restore the family planning funding that he cut, noting on several occasions that New Jersey residents have access to "comprehensive reproductive health care services" at other sites and the state can’t afford to "provide duplicative funding for family planning centers." The centers that closed were in rural parts of South Jersey. To recap, the governor proposed an alternative to the Democrats’ proposal on minimum wage that would mean a smaller hike for low-income earners; opposes same-sex marriage personally but suggested it be a matter for public referendum; and cut funding for women’s health care, saying family planning services were available elsewhere. "That’s 100 percent accurate in terms of the distortions and outright misrepresentations of the Governor’s positions that have been repeated over and over by the Buono campaign and its allies," Christie for Governor campaign spokesman Kevin Roberts said in an e-mail. "Unfortunately it’s not a surprising tactic from an increasingly desperate campaign that continues to fall further and further behind." Senate Democrats spokesman Chris Donnelly could not be reached for comment. Our ruling Sweeney said, "People want the minimum wage, they want marriage equality, they want women’s health care," Sweeney said during the June 1 episode of ‘On The Record with Michael Aron.’ "There’s issues that actually that really do matter, social issues that matter to the people of this state. So I know Barbara would support those issues, I know the governor hasn’t. You’ve seen the actions he’s taken on them." We’ve determined that Christie appears to support a minimum-wage hike, albeit one that is quite a bit smaller than the one supported by Democrats; opposes gay marriage, but supports civil unions and letting voters decide the matter via referendum; and cut funding for that women’s health care that closed six family planning centers in the state. We rate Sweeney’s claim Mostly True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Stephen Sweeney	None	None	None	2013-06-23T07:30:00	2013-06-01	['None']
-pomt-12300	There "are not cuts to Medicaid" in the GOP health care proposals.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jun/26/kellyanne-conway/does-senate-health-care-bill-cut-medicaid/	Politics and math don’t always get along, and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway raised a common complaint about how people talk about the future of Medicaid spending under the Senate Republican health care bill. In an interview Sunday, ABC news host George Stephanopoulos brought up the bill’s projected $800 billion in Medicaid savings and asked Conway if that undermined the president’s campaign promise to spare Medicaid from cuts. "These are not cuts to Medicaid, George," Conway said on This Week on June 25. "This slows the rate for the future." Conway was weighing in on a long-running debate over what qualifies as a cut. And on one level, she has a point, we at PolitiFact found. Future savings are not always "cuts." But in the case of the GOP health care bill, there are indeed cuts that go beyond dollars spent. The math on Medicaid To first vet Conway’s statement that there are no cuts to Medicaid, we need to begin with a few basic numbers. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that under current law, from 2018 through 2026, the federal government would spend about $4.62 trillion dollars on Medicaid. For the Senate bill, the CBO estimated that total Medicaid spending would be about $770 billion less. But you can also compare how much Washington spends in 2018 — the first year a health care bill would take effect — and what it would spend in 2026. If things stay as they are, spending goes from $415 billion to $624 billion. Under the Senate Republican bill, spending goes from about $403 billion to about $460 billion. Point being, spending increases under either scenario, it just increases at a far slower rate under the Senate bill. This graph from the CBO shows the trajectories for both. The GOP changes The Senate bill takes several steps to restrain Medicaid spending. It rolls back who is eligible. Before Obamacare, Medicaid covered low-income children, pregnant women, elderly and disabled individuals, and some parents, but excluded other low-income adults. Under the Affordable Care Act, 31 states and the District of Columbia exercised the option to make Medicaid available to anyone making up to 133 percent of federal poverty. For a family of three, that would be about $27,000 a year. The Senate bill eliminates that option as of January 2018. This shuts out the Medicaid option for over 2.5 million people in states that didn’t expand eligibility. The bill also makes federal payments to expansion states less generous. Under Obamacare, Washington covers at least 90 percent of the cost of covering people in the expansion group. That’s a better deal than the regular match, which can be anywhere from 50 to about 70 percent. The Senate bill phases out the higher rate for expansion states and by 2024, the match falls back to the regular rate. The bill further ends Medicaid’s days as an open-ended promise to cover a certain percentage of a state’s costs. Instead, the bill shifts the program to a capped amount. The cap might apply on a per-person basis, or states might opt to take their money as a block grant. In either case, the amount would rise each year, but using a lower inflation factor than is used today. Rhetoric: Medicare and Medicaid It’s the specific nature of those changes that are more important than the total dollars spent. When Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, it included less money for Medicare over the years. In a mirror image of today’s debate, Republicans, notably House Speaker Paul Ryan, accused Democrats of cutting a vital health care program for the elderly. Democrats argued back that spending increased. We did a series of fact-checks about the back-and-forth and generally rated the Republican attacks Half True. Then, Democrats reduced payment levels to health care providers. Now, Republicans propose reducing payments to states. But at least in terms of the money trends, both situations follow the same general outlines -- with one key difference: The Democrats didn’t change the eligible population, and the Republicans do. That’s a cut. Fewer people will have access to Medicaid no matter how much money is spent. Conway, in fact, highlighted the Republican goal. "Medicaid's imperative, its founding was meant to help the poor, the sick, the needy, the disabled children, some elderly women, particularly pregnant women," she said on ABC. "We are trying to get Medicaid back to its original moorings." Our ruling Conway said that Republicans are not cutting the Medicaid program. The Republican health care proposals would slow the rate at which Medicaid spending increases, but spending would still increase. However, the proposals include policy changes that will leave fewer people eligible for Medicaid. That’s a cut. Conway’s claim has an element of truth but leaves out critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate the claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Kellyanne Conway	None	None	None	2017-06-26T17:43:14	2017-06-25	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-10003	The Employee Free Choice Act mandates the "elimination of the secret ballot."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/mar/27/arlen-specter/secret-ballots-would-be-rare-not-eliminated/	Business groups and other opponents of a bill to make union organizing easier contend that the measure would eliminate the secret ballot in union elections. This is point one from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce , which is leading the opposition. Rush Limbaugh discussed the topic on March 10 and said "you cannot vote in private" under the bill. And Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who dealt a severe blow to the bill's prospects when he announced his opposition March 24, cited the issue as his primary concern. "On the merits, the issue which has emerged at the top of the list for me is the elimination of the secret ballot, which is the cornerstone of how contests are decided in a democratic society," Specter said on the floor of the Senate. Here's how union elections work now: Union organizers try to get employees in a particular business or unit of a business to sign cards indicating they want the union to represent them in negotiations with the employer. The employer is not permitted to see the cards before they are turned in to the National Labor Relations Board — or often even after that — or engage in any other kind of surveillance to try to discern which employees are union adherents and which are not. If more than 30 percent of the employees sign, the union can ask the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election. If more than 50 percent sign, the employer must either accept the union or ask the board for an election. Most employers ask for an election. It takes place a few weeks later at the employer's place of business. It's a secret-ballot election and is run by the National Labor Relations Board. If a majority votes for the union, the union wins. Here's what would happen under the Employee Free Choice Act: Just like before, if unions got more than 30 percent of the employees to sign cards, they could ask for a secret-ballot election. But if they got more than 50 percent, the union would win automatically. The employer would no longer have the right to insist on a secret-ballot election and would have to negotiate with the union. "Decertification" elections, where the employees vote on whether to cease being represented by their union, are currently secret-ballot elections, and would continue to be under the Employee Free Choice Act. As a practical matter, secret-ballot elections would be far less frequent if the Employee Free Choice Act were passed. But they would still take place under certain circumstances: during decertification contests, or on the occasions where unions won the support of more than 30 percent but less than 50 percent of the employees (but unions don't generally ask for elections unless they have the support of more than half). There would also continue to be secret-ballot elections in instances where a majority of employees say they want one. That is, where more than 50 percent of the employees sign cards requesting a vote on unionization rather than cards saying they want a union to represent them. So we find Specter's claim to be Mostly True.	None	Arlen Specter	None	None	None	2009-03-27T14:02:03	2009-03-24	['None']
-pomt-10094	"In April, Sen. McCain came out against helping women earn equal pay for equal work."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/29/barack-obama/mccain-opposed-law-for-equal-pay-lawsuits/	In a direct appeal to women voters, a recent Obama campaign television ad features a handful of female supporters taking shots at Sen. John McCain. Borrowing from a common theme on the campaign trail, one of the women, Sherri Kimbel, calls out McCain on the issue of equal pay for women. "In April, Sen. McCain came out against helping women earn equal pay for equal work," Kimbel said. So we’re clear, McCain did not make some sort of public pronouncement in April that he is against helping women earn equal pay. To the contrary, McCain has repeatedly stated that he is for equal pay for equal work. Kimbel is referring specifically to McCain’s opposition to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a law designed to make it easier for women to sue their employer over unequal pay. The law was named after Lilly Ledbetter, a former 19-year supervisor at a tire plant in Alabama who sued the company after discovering several months before her 1998 retirement that, for years, she was being paid less than her male counterparts. Ledbetter was awarded more than $3-million by a jury. But the Supreme Court overturned that judgment in March 2007, ruling 5 to 4 that a 180-day statute of limitation for her to file a lawsuit had started from the first instance of discrimination, meaning that her suit about more than a decade of discrimination was untimely. Numerous women’s rights activists decried the ruling, arguing that it was unfair to expect that a woman would know within six months after her hiring or promotion that she was getting unequal pay. A handful of like-minded officials in Congress quickly drafted legislation so that the 180-day window to file a suit could start with each new discriminatory paycheck, rather than when the person was hired or promoted. The bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate after a 56-42 vote fell short of the needed 60 votes for the legislation to proceed and overcome a filibuster. The vote came down largely along party lines, and Obama took time out of his campaign to vote for it. Republicans who opposed it argued the proposal to ease the filing deadlines would prompt a rash of lawsuits and unfairly burden companies with litigation over outdated cases. Although McCain was campaigning in New Orleans and not present for the vote, he told reporters at the time that he opposed it. "I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems," McCain said. McCain echoed that stance when Obama highlighted the legislation during the final presidential debate. "That law waived the statute of limitations, which you could have gone back 20 or 30 years," McCain said. "It was a trial lawyer’s dream." That’s not entirely accurate. The law would have started the 180-day clock on filing a discrimination lawsuit from the time "an unlawful employment practice" occurs, and would have included each time compensation is paid. The law stated that a person could seek relief including recovery of back pay for up to two years. Back in August, PolitiFact ruled on a statement from Sen. Hillary Clinton that McCain "still thinks it’s okay when women don’t earn equal pay for equal work." We ruled the statement False, noting that opposing that one bill was not the same as thinking it’s okay if women don’t get equal pay for equal work. We also noted that Clinton’s assertion was flatly contradicted by public statements McCain has made. On April 23 he said he is "all in favor of pay equity for women," then said in July, "I’m committed to making sure that there’s equal pay for equal work." The claim in the recent Obama campaign ad is more carefully worded, however. It includes a small print reference to the Ledbetter bill, and could reasonably be said to be a comment about McCain's position on that one bill. So its truth lies in the extent to which you believe MCain's position was "against helping women earn equal pay for equal work." That’s certainly the view of the National Organization for Women, which has endorsed Obama for president. Equal pay laws have been fairly stable for decades, NOW president Kim Gandy told PolitiFact, and the Ledbetter bill was the most important piece of legislation in years to gauge congressional support for it. "It’s disingenuous to say ‘I support equal pay for equal work’ but then not support any way to enforce it legally," Gandy said. The wording of the claim in the ad makes our ruling tricky. Interpreted broadly, one might be led to believe that McCain made a decision to oppose any help for women getting unequal pay. And that would be misleading, because we are only talking about McCain's opposition to a single piece of legislation that would have eased the statute of limitations for bringing a lawsuit over unequal pay — weighed against McCain's numerous pronouncements of support for equal pay for equal work. On the other hand, one could argue that the woman is simply stating an opinion about McCain's vote on the Ledbetter bill. McCain did oppose it. And one could certainly argue the bill was designed to help women get equal pay for equal work. And so we rule the statement Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-10-29T00:00:00	2008-10-20	['None']
-snes-03371	A landline disengaged from its cradle will eventually self-dial 911.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/will-landlines-eventually-dial-911-or-emergency-services-if-left-off-the-hook/	None	Technology	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Will Landlines Eventually Dial 911 or Emergency Services if Left Off the Hook?	12 December 2016	None	['None']
-snes-01722	Florida residents affected by Hurricane Irma can receive $197 in food stamp benefits, but only if they can show that their homes lost power for more than two hours.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-food-stamps-power-cut/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Floridians Can Obtain Food Stamp Benefits If Their Power Went Out During Hurricane Irma?	15 September 2017	None	['None']
-pose-00129	"Build up our special operations forces, civil affairs, information operations, engineers, foreign area officers, and other units and capabilities that remain in chronic short supply."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/136/increase-special-operations-forces-and-civil-affai/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Increase special operations forces and civil affairs	2010-01-07T13:26:49	None	['None']
-pomt-14627	"I never once asked that (Megyn Kelly) be removed" as a debate moderator.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/29/donald-trump/donald-trump-falsely-claims-he-never-once-asked-me/	If you read the news, Donald Trump’s boycott of the Fox News/Google debate is the result of his ongoing war with anchor Megyn Kelly. Trump, however, says that’s not true. He says a biting Fox News release is why he pulled the plug. "Well, I’m not a person that respects Megyn Kelly very much. I think she’s highly overrated. Other than that, I don’t care," he told CNN an hour before the debate. "I never once asked that she be removed. I don’t care about her being removed. What I didn’t like was that public relations statement where they were sort of taunting. I didn’t think it was appropriate. I didn’t think it was nice." His assertion that he "never once" asked for Kelly’s removal piqued our interest. We took a look at Trump’s public comments over the past couple of days. Contrary to what Trump said on CNN, he had been calling for Kelly’s exclusion for days before the debate and the "taunting" Fox statement. Here’s the timeline: Jan. 23: This latest chapter of the Trump-Kelly spat started when Trump voiced his disapproval a few days before the debate on Twitter. "Based on @MegynKelly's conflict of interest and bias she should not be allowed to be a moderator of the next debate," Trump tweeted Jan. 23 and made similar comments in a campaign rally in Iowa the same day, Fox responded, "Megyn Kelly has no conflict of interest. Donald Trump is just trying to build up the audience for Thursday's debate, for which we thank him." Trump repeated his position that Kelly "should recuse herself from the upcoming Fox News debate," according to Boston Globe reporter James Pindell. Jan. 24: According to New York, Trump began to threaten a boycott a day later and toy with the idea of holding his own event. "Let’s see what happens," Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told the magazine. "It’s fair to say Mr. Trump is a significant ratings driver for these debates. If we aren’t on stage for some reason, they wouldn’t have the record 24 million viewers and would be back with 1-2 million people." Jan. 25: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Trump if he’ll show up given his beef with Kelly. Trump gave conflicting responses but doubled down in his Kelly criticism. "I’ll see. If I think I’ll be treated unfairly, I’ll do something else," he said. "I think she’s very biased and I don’t think she can treat me fairly, but that doesn’t mean I don’t do the debate. I like doing the debates." Fox responded, "Sooner or later Donald Trump, even if he's president, is going to have to learn that he doesn't get to pick the journalists — we're very surprised he's willing to show that much fear about being questioned by Megyn Kelly." Trump’s indecision was echoed by Lewandowski, who told New York, "We haven't said he'll be there, and we haven't said he won't be there. The bottom line is Megyn Kelly shouldn't be rewarded for her media bias." Jan. 26: Two days before the debate, Trump polled his Twitter followers, asking,"Should I do the #GOPDebate?" (Of over 150,000 responses, 56 percent were "Yes.") In the tweet, Trump posted a link to an Instagram video, in which he said, "Megyn Kelly is really biased against me. She knows that, I know that., everybody knows. Do you really think she can be unbiased in a debate?" Trump also retweeted several attacks on Kelly including one that claimed, "Fox will drop Kelly if it means no Trump." Fox News released two statements in response. "We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings," the network wrote. "Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist, and the entire network stands behind her — she will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night," Fox News CEO Roger Ailes told Mediaite. Later that night, Trump hosted a press conference announcing that his boycott and veterans rally as a response to to the network "playing games." "See, the point is with me they’re dealing with somebody that is a little different. They can’t toy with me like they toy with everybody else. So let them have their debate and let’s see how they do with their ratings," he said. "I came here to do the debate. When they sent out the wise guy press releases done a little while ago, done by some PR person along with Roger Ailes, I said ‘bye bye,’ okay?" Trump denied that he was afraid to debate, pointing out his participation and past performance, and reiterated his distaste for Kelly. "This to me isn’t a reporter. This to me is just a lightweight. Megyn Kelly shouldn’t be in the debate. I don’t care about Megyn -- when Megyn Kelly didn’t ask me a question, she made a statement last time, I thought it was inappropriate," he said. Fox, in turn, responded with another statement emphasizing Trump’s agenda against Kelly and alleging that Lewandowski had personally threatened the anchor: "We’re not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing – Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage." Jan. 27: Trump took to Twitter to rebut claims that Kelly was why he pulled out: "It was the childishly written & taunting PR statement by Fox that made me not do the debate, more so than lightweight reporter, @megynkelly." He emphasized to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly that it was ultimately the network’s disrespectful statements that led to his decision: "I was not treated well by Fox. They came out with this ridiculous P.R. statement, it was like drawn up by a child. And there was a taunt. And I said, you know, "How much of this do you take?" I have zero respect for Megyn Kelly. I don't think she's very good at what she does. I think she's highly overrated. And, frankly, she's the moderator, I thought her question last time was ridiculous." Our ruling Trump said, "I never once asked that (Megyn Kelly) be removed" as a debate moderator. This statement greatly downplays Trump’s comments ahead of the debate, even if his absence really had more to do with a mocking Fox News release in the end. Trump mused about skipping the debate because of Kelly for a couple days before that news release. He went so far as to say Kelly "should not be allowed" to moderate, that she "should recuse herself," and she "shouldn’t be in the debate." We rate Trump’s claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/01d87b8c-fc53-4442-ab4a-fa192a82d35f	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-01-29T00:53:56	2016-01-28	['None']
-pomt-08303	"Liberal out-of-state special interests are spending millions on 5 and 6 to change the way Florida draws its congressional and legislative districts."	half-true	/florida/statements/2010/oct/31/protect-your-vote/opponent-amendments-5-6-claims-liberal-out-state-d/	The group fighting a proposal to change how the state Legislature draws state and congressional district boundaries says in a new TV ad that the issue is being funded and supported largely by liberal, out-of-state special interests. Amendments 5 and 6, which will appear on the Nov. 2, 2010, ballot, seek to amend the state Constitution so that districts are compact, contiguous and rely on existing city, county and geographical boundaries. The group backing the changes, Fair Districts Florida, says the changes to the Constitution would prevent elected leaders from drawing legislative boundaries to benefit incumbents or one political party. But opponents, including the group Protect Your Vote, say the changes create standards that are impossible to meet and may actually make preserving minority representation more difficult. Instead, the opposition group — funded primarily by the Republican Party of Florida — characterizes the amendments as "designed to elect more Democrats." A new ad by the group says: "Take a close look at Amendments 5 and 6. They are a con job and a power grab. "Liberal out-of-state special interests are spending millions on 5 and 6 to change the way Florida draws its congressional and legislative districts so they can elect more liberals to support the Obama-Pelosi agenda. "More taxes, more spending, more debt, more job loss. "How can the same liberal groups that helped bring America to its knees put Florida back on its feet?" The "liberal, out of state special interests" claim is accompanied by symbols of the AFL-CIO, SEIU, the American Trial Lawyers Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Below the symbols is text that says "Spending on 5 & 6 ... $5,786,364." In this claim, we're checking that "liberal, out-of-state special interests are spending millions" supporting Amendments 5 and 6. For the record, here are official summaries of the two amendments. They are almost identical, with 5 applying to the state Legislature and 6 to Florida’s congressional districts. Amendment 5 — Legislative districts or districting plans may not be drawn to favor or disfavor an incumbent or political party. Districts shall not be drawn to deny racial or language minorities the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice. Districts must be contiguous. Unless otherwise required, districts must be compact, as equal in population as feasible, and where feasible must make use of existing city, county and geographical boundaries. Amendment 6 — Congressional districts or districting plans may not be drawn to favor or disfavor an incumbent or political party. Districts shall not be drawn to deny racial or language minorities the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice. Districts must be contiguous. Unless otherwise required, districts must be compact, as equal in population as feasible, and where feasible must make use of existing city, county and geographical boundaries. Through Oct. 8, Fair Districts Florida had raised $6.9 million, more than two-thirds of which came in large donations of $25,000 or more. We’re looking at contributions before Oct. 8 because new reporting Oct. 28 wasn’t taken into account for Protect Your Vote’s ad. It’s well-covered ground that "liberals" — or at least groups that traditionally support Democrats — are dominant contributors to Fair Districts Florida. The Orlando Sentinel and other news organizations characterize the issue as one of incumbents vs. those out of power, since Republicans will draw the new lines in 2012 based on fresh data from the 2010 census. Republicans also drew them 10 years ago, since they had gained control of the state Legislature after a redistricting effort led by Democrats the previous decade had been redrawn by the courts. The resulting congressional delegation had 15 Republicans and 10 Democrats even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state. The Orlando Sentinel analyzed campaign contributions and concluded in an Oct. 20 article that "Democrats and their traditional allies have provided more than $5.7 million of the $6.9 million raised by Fair Districts Florida." But what about the part of the claim that says "out of state?" Campaign contributors provide an address, so it’s easy to separate contributions inside Florida from those outside it. PolitiFact Florida removed contributions from Florida addresses (ignoring a handful of small contributions that didn’t come with an address), and came up with $2.2 million in outside funding, with large contributions from the liberal group America Votes and labor union the National Education Association. That $2.2 million is about 32 percent of Fair District Florida’s funding through Oct. 8. PolitiFact Florida also wondered about contributions from the groups whose logos appeared in the ad along with the amount "$5,786,364." How much had they contributed? We confirmed that SEIU contributed $625,000; Florida ACORN, $25,000 (back in 2007); and AFL-CIO chapters more than $18,000. But we were unable to find contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association or the American Civil Liberties Union. We contacted Ryan Duffy of public relations firm Ron Sachs Communications, who had provided us with a link to the ad and a four-page document supporting its claims. Did the Protect Your Vote campaign also come up with $2.2 million in out-of-state contributions and zero campaign cash from the ATLA and ACLU? On the "out-of-state" question, he responded that according to Politico, America Votes had contributed $500,000 to the Florida Watch Ballot Committee, which in turn handed the money to Fair Districts Florida — making it out-of-state money that merely looked like in-state money. The same was true of a Florida Education Association donation of $500,000 after it received the same-sized donation from the National Education Association, he wrote. He added: "These findings suggest the possibility that even more money than this is being filtered through local organizations that has yet to be uncovered." Meanwhile, he acknowledged that the American Trial Lawyers Association and American Civil Liberties Union were not direct contributors to Fair Districts Florida. Rather, he said, they were included in the ad because donations from attorneys amounted to $1.2 million and 18 percent of the total contributions made to Fair Districts Florida, while the ACLU used its own money to organize rallies, distribute campaign literature, issue news releases and send out e-mail alerts in support of Amendments 5 and 6. "Thus while the ACLU does not show up as a donor, it is clear that both the Florida and national organizations have contributed numerous resources (e-mails to their mailing list, organization of rallies, promotion on their website etc) to Fair Districts Florida," Duffy wrote. What does the Truth-O-Meter make of all this? When it comes to the phrase "Liberal, out-of-state special interests are spending millions on 5 and 6," the Protect Your Vote group does reasonably well. PolitiFact Florida identifies $2.2 million in out-of-state money — though it’s not immediately possible to confirm all 230 contributions are from "liberal" donors or "special interests." Many donations come from individuals. But arguments from Duffy about the Florida Watch Ballot Committee and National Education Association hold some weight, providing an additional $1 million that fits the "out-of-state special interests" category and tipping the claim closer to true. But this claim wasn’t made in isolation: The words appeared just as five logos and a number flashed on the screen for viewers. The AFL-CIO, SEIU, American Trial Lawyers Association, American Civil Liberties Union and ACORN logos appear above text that says: "Spending on 5 & 6 ... $5,786,364." We know two of those organizations didn’t contribute directly to Fair Districts Florida, and the rest contributed less than $669,000 combined. Also, the number on the screen represents "liberal" donations to Fair Districts Florida — not just those from out of state. Anyone watching without other background could fairly conclude that nearly $5.8 million had been contributed by "liberal, out-of-state special interests," with significant contributions from the organizations on the screen. That’s simply not the case. Meanwhile, it’s not clear that the message itself came from a partisan group — the top six donations to Protect Your Vote come from the Republican Party of Florida: $750,000 as of Oct. 8, and $1.9 million since then. "Liberal, out-of-state special interests" is the claim we’re checking, and there are clearly more than $1 million in donations that fit that category, and possibly more. But the mix of group logos and dollar figures is misleading. Not all those groups contributed money directly. Those who did contributed less than $1 million combined. And the number dramatically overstates "liberal, out-of-state special interests" since it represents all "liberal" donations from both inside and outside the state. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Protect Your Vote	None	None	None	2010-10-31T14:54:03	2010-10-28	['None']
-pomt-11569	Georgia "has the lowest minimum wage in the country."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2018/feb/05/stacey-evans/does-georgia-have-lowest-minimum-wage-country/	Stacey Evans, a Democrat running to be Georgia’s next governor, claims workers are at an economic disadvantage in part because of the state’s minimum wage. "I want Georgia to be the best place to work, live, and raise a family. Right now, it isn’t," Evans said on her campaign website. "Georgia is 40th in income inequality, 40th in high school graduation, and has the lowest minimum wage in the country." We wondered if Georgia in fact has the lowest minimum wage in the nation. It does, but it’s not alone (tied with Wyoming), and most of hourly wage employees are paid above the state’s minimum wage: at least $7.25, which is also the federal minimum wage. Georgia’s minimum wage and how it compares to the rest of the nation Georgia’s state law sets the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour, but the federal Fair Labor Standards Act still applies, meaning most employees are covered under the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Wyoming, which equally has a $5.15 minimum wage, also says that when the federal minimum wage is higher than the state’s, the federal minimum wage applies to most workers. "Like Georgia, Wyoming also has a $5.15 minimum wage, the lowest in the country. And while, thankfully, many Georgians are protected by a federal wage floor, many Georgians are not," said Adam Ney, research director for the Evans campaign. "The fact remains that Georgia has the lowest minimum wage in the country and that we must increase it because everybody deserves a fair day’s pay for a hard day’s work." Who doesn’t get the federal minimum wage? There are exemptions in the law for certain farm workers, seasonal workers, health aides, and workers who receive tips. In 2016, Georgia had about 2.3 million workers paid hourly rates, and 51,000 of them (or 2.2 percent) were paid below the federal minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. An estimated 90,000, or 3.9 percent, were paid at or below the federal minimum wage. Overall, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina had the highest percentages of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage, at or about 5 percent, BLS said. Georgia is one of seven states that have either a lower state minimum wage than the federal standard, or no state minimum wage at all, said Wesley Tharpe, research director at the left-leaning think tank Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. "In practice, the vast majority of workers in every state are subject to the federal requirement of $7.25 an hour," Tharpe said. Tipped workers, including servers, are also paid a lower hourly rate in most states including Georgia, Tharpe said. "Some evidence suggests their tips don’t always sum to get them about the required $7.25 federal rate," he said. Our ruling Evans said Georgia "has the lowest minimum wage in the country." Georgia’s minimum wage of $5.15 per hour is the lowest in the nation, but Wyoming also has the same minimum wage. Also, most of Georgia’s workers paid hourly rates earn the federal minimum of $7.25. Evans’ statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate it Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Stacey Evans	None	None	None	2018-02-05T10:12:53	2018-01-26	['None']
-snes-02732	Fourteen teenaged girls went missing in Washington, D.C., within 24 hours.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/washington-dc-girls-missing/	None	Crime	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did 14 Washington, D.C., Girls Go Missing Within a 24-Hour Period?	24 March 2017	None	['Washington,_D.C.']
-tron-00159	The last picture from atop the World Trade Center	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/lastpic/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	The last picture from atop the World Trade Center	Mar 23, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-05222	Vice President Joe Biden said that 'no ordinary American cares about their constitutional rights.'	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-constitutional-rights/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Joe Biden Say ‘No Ordinary American Cares About Their Constitutional Rights’?	12 February 2016	None	['United_States', 'Joe_Biden']
-pomt-04485	U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse "rewarded Wall Street executives with millions in bonuses."	pants on fire!	/rhode-island/statements/2012/oct/07/barry-hinckley/us-senate-candidate-barry-hinckley-says-incumbent-/	Republican Barry Hinckley's latest advertisement, released as part of his effort to unseat Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, is a study in contrasts. The first half focuses on Hinckley with color images, pleasant music, and a message of trust, hard work and job creation. In the second half, the music turns ominous, the images are black and white, and the allegations roll like thunder. "Whitehouse voted to bail out Wall Street and then rewarded the Wall Street executives with millions in bonuses," a female narrator says. Black and red lettering gives a similar message. Here we will focus on the part about bonuses, which provoked outrage when they were disclosed. PolitiFact Ohio looked at a similar claim last spring when Josh Mandel, a Republican, accused Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown of giving "huge bonuses" to executives, ruling it Pants on Fire. Other fact-check organizations have looked at variations on the same theme and come to similar conclusions. When we watched the Hinckley commercial, titled "Trust," it struck us right away that there was something else amiss in Hinckley’s attack on Whitehouse. The ad talks about two different actions Whitehouse supposedly took -- voting to bail out Wall Street and THEN rewarding executives. Yet the source the ad cites for both alleged actions is the same, "H.R. 1, CQ Vote #64." Both in the same vote? Hinckley campaign manager Patrick Sweeney told us that the attribution for the bailout vote was listed incorrectly. So noted. To look at the real issue, let's look at the chronology of the Wall Street bailout and the subsequent stimulus bill, in which executive bonuses were among the issues. We'll start with 2008 and legislation commonly known as the Wall Street bailout. With stocks falling, the mortgage market in chaos and talk of a run on bank investments, the Bush administration proposed spending $700 billion to stabilize financial institutions. They included the mortgage lending agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which the feds took over on Sept. 6, 2008); financial institutions such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America; corporations such as Chrysler and General Motors; and one of the world's biggest insurance companies, American International Group (A.I.G). The federal government took over A.I.G. with an initial $68 billion loan, also in September 2008. More payments to A.I.G. would follow. To say that the law, known as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and enacted on Oct. 3, 2008, was designed to bail out Wall Street is a fair characterization. To do that, the law set up a fund under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP. Now let's step forward to 2009, with a new president and new Congress. H.R.1, referred to in the Hinckley ad, is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, known to most people as the stimulus bill. It was designed to create as many jobs as quickly as possible in an attempt to stimulate an economy hobbled by the financial manipulations that led to the recession, particularly the subprime mortgage debacle. On Feb. 10, 2009, the Senate approved the bill and, in one provision, put a limit on executive bonuses. It banned any company receiving TARP money from paying bonuses to its 25 highest-paid employees. But the restriction didn't stay in. Because the House and Senate passed two different versions, a committee of Senators and House members, all Democrats, met behind closed doors to work out the differences. At the request of the White House and the Treasury Department, the language banning such bonuses was modified to allow bonus payments that had been negotiated before the law was enacted. The Obama administration, at the time, feared that a ban would be the subject of legal challenges, and might discouraging financial institutions from accepting bailout money. The stimulus was signed into law by President Obama on February 17, 2009 after mostly-party line votes in the House and Senate. Then came the brouhaha over bonuses. A.I.G., which was promised $180 billion in assistance from the federal government, announced that it had paid out $165 million in retention bonuses, including more than $1 million each to 73 employees. Almost all of them were "employees in the financial products unit responsible for creating the exotic derivatives that caused A.I.G.'s near collapse and started the government rescue to avoid a global financial crisis," according to the New York Times. Outrage ensued, fueled in part by the fact that, at the time the bonuses were awarded, the federal government owned nearly 80 percent of the company. Whitehouse, who had complained about lavish executive salaries among companies getting bailout money before the stimulus bill was approved, responded to the A.I.G. bonuses by calling on the Obama administration to "abrogate the contracts between A.I.G. and its executives under which these payments were made." Sweeney, Hinckley's campaign manager, looks at it differently. "The bonus controversy became inevitable the second that TARP passed the Senate and rescued A.I.G.," he said in an e-mail. The bonuses, he said in the e-mail, "were a predictable result of corrupt and rushed 'crisis' legislation that Whitehouse supported. If he didn't do enough research to know the likely result, it simply proves that he is a bad (out of touch?) legislator -- and THIS is our claim." But that's not the claim the commercial made, nor is it the claim we're checking here. Our ruling Barry Hinckley's commercial claims that Sheldon Whitehouse "rewarded the Wall Street executives with millions in bonuses." Whitehouse voted for the law that provided for the bailout of big financial institutions such as A.I.G. but the law did not call for any bonuses. Whitehouse subsequently voted for a stimulus bill that limited executive bonuses in companies that accepted bailout money, a provision watered down when Democrats in the House and Senate hammered out a compromise. The bailout may have given the institutions the resources to pay bonuses -- as impolitic as that was -- but in this case it was A.I.G., not the senators, that did the deed. The bailout money was never intended to provide bonuses and neither Whitehouse, nor any other member of Congress, voted to approve any bonuses. The notion that Whitehouse worked to reward anybody who caused the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system isn't just false, it's ridiculous. For that reason we rate that part of Hinckley’s commercial Pants on Fire! (Get updates from PolitiFact Rhode Island on Twitter: @politifactri. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Barry Hinckley	None	None	None	2012-10-07T00:01:00	2012-09-27	['United_States', 'Wall_Street']
-thal-00033	FactFind: Is it actually a crime to download movies without paying?	none	http://www.thejournal.ie/factfind-downloading-3801797-Jan2018/	None	None	None	None	None	FactFind: Is it actually a crime to download movies without paying?	Jan 20th 2018, 10:00 PM	None	['None']
-snes-02021	A waste company will be offering curbside dead body pickup service to offset “TrumpCare."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/waste-management-body-pickup/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Waste Management to Offer Dead Body Pickup Service in Response to Proposed Health Care Changes?	23 July 2017	None	['None']
-tron-00500	Deaths From Soda Cans Contaminated With Rat Urine	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/raturine/	None	animals	None	None	None	Deaths From Soda Cans Contaminated With Rat Urine	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-11792	"‘The largest bust in U.S. history’ 412 Muslims arrested from Michigan!"	false	/punditfact/statements/2017/nov/21/freshmedianewscom/misleading-headline-says-412-michigan-muslims-bust/	Hundreds of Muslim doctors in Detroit were arrested by the federal government in a record-breaking bust, stated an article on Facebook. "The largest bust in U.S. history: 412 Muslims arrested from Michigan," stated a headline we saw in November on Fresh Media News. Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat fake news. While the headline is fake, because it describes all of the suspects as Muslims from Michigan without evidence, a key element of the story is based on real events: The federal government did charge 412 people nationwide in a health care bust in July. Fresh Media News calls itself a website that provides "daily updates of the hidden things." We found no disclaimer or contact information on the website and sent a message via Facebook and did not get a reply. Similar articles ran on other websites in July. The article portrays Michigan Muslims as rampant criminals. "The state of Michigan is clearly turning into a Sharia swamp, thanks to the reckless immigration policies of Obama over the last 8 years," stated the article. Fresh Media News claims that federal officials made a bust in a $1.3 billion fraudulent scheme involving Medicare fraud, ripping off insurance companies and prescribing opioids. Some of the basic details are muddled -- the headline says the 412 suspects were from Michigan while part of the article says officials arrested 412 people nationwide. Here is what actually happened: On July 13, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the "largest health care fraud takedown operation in American history." Federal authorities charged 412 defendants across about two dozen states, including doctors, nurses and other licensed medical professionals, for their alleged participation in health care fraud schemes involving approximately $1.3 billion in false billings. Thirty-two of the defendants were from the Eastern District of Michigan. Fresh Media News cited some accurate details in the case, including that the FBI raided medical offices in Detroit’s historic Fisher building and named one of the actual Michigan defendants: Mashiyat Rashid. Prosecutors allege that Rashid ran a conspiracy starting in 2008 that involved six other defendants and various companies in which they recruited homeless people as patients and sent phony bills to Medicare, according to The Detroit News. The Detroit News described Rashid as a "Muslim businessman, who moved to the United States from Bangladesh and is a U.S. citizen." While Fresh Media News wrote without evidence that the 412 suspects were Muslims, nothing in the federal documents we reviewed, including Sessions’ remarks, mentioned the religion of the defendant. We contacted Sessions’ press office and did not get a reply. It’s not surprising that a fake news story would target Muslims in Michigan. The Muslim population has been growing in Michigan for decades and is now about 2.75 percent of the state’s population as of 2015, according to a report by Muslims for American Progress, a project by the Institute for Policy Studies and Social Understanding that aims to educate the public about Muslims. (A Pew study estimates that Muslims comprise about 1 percent of the U.S.) Michigan Muslims comprise more than 15 percent of the state’s medical doctors and more than 10 percent of the state’s pharmacists. Our ruling Fresh Media News wrote in a headline " ‘The largest bust in U.S. history’ 412 Muslims arrested in Michigan!" The federal government announced the bust of 412 people in a health care fraud scheme in July, but the suspects were from across the nation. We found no evidence that all the suspects are Muslims. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Freshmedianews.com	None	None	None	2017-11-21T15:06:10	2017-11-06	['United_States', 'Michigan']
-snes-05115	A photograph shows a newly hatched baby dragon.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-baby-dragon-photo/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Photograph Does Not Show A Newly Hatched Dragon	4 March 2016	None	['None']
-snes-02671	An Illinois janitor collected $20 million in life insurance benefits on policies placed on teenagers who were then murdered.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/janitor-teens-life-insurance/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a Janitor Collect $20 Million in Life Insurance on Dead Chicago Teens?	6 April 2017	None	['Illinois']
-snes-02596	Did a Cleveland Fox Affiliate Label a Black Murder Suspect 'Dark White'?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wjw-dark-white-steve-stephens/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a Cleveland Fox Affiliate Label a Black Murder Suspect ‘Dark White’?	17 April 2017	None	['None']
-snes-05014	Easter Bannies	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cadbury-banned-easter/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Cadbury Candies Eliminate the Word ‘Easter’?	24 March 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-10225	Sarah Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/04/mike-huckabee/hes-wrong-even-without-counting-all-the-votes/	Since being chosen as Sen. John McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has taken some heat for her rapid rise from small-town mayor to a national election. So proponents have sought to amplify her achievements to date, which is what led former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to say this at the Republican National Convention: "She got more votes running for the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States," Huckabee said Sept. 3, 2008. He made the same remark earlier that day to Florida Republicans at the Airport Marriott in Bloomington, Minn. Biden dropped out of the presidential race in January, after an unimpressive finish in the Jan. 3 Iowa Democratic caucuses. Because of the nature of the caucus process, which involves people gathering and regathering in groups in high school gyms and living rooms across the state to signal their candidate preferences, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get a fix on how many Iowans supported Biden. According to a Jan. 4 article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, the Associated Press calculated "state delegate equivalent numbers" that showed Biden got perhaps 2,329 votes across the state. CNN reported essentially the same number, 2,328. It's not clear whether Huckabee was referring to Palin's 1996 election, or her re-election in 1999 — so let's use both numbers. Palin got 651 votes in Wasilla's 1996 election. She did a little better in her 1999 re-election bid, picking up 909 votes. According to Wasilla's deputy clerk, Jamie Newman, the city population now stands at 7,025. Although the precise Iowa tally isn't available, Biden's support as reported by AP and CNN exceeds Palin's 1,560-vote combined total. And it seems likely, based on those projections, that at least 910 actual Iowans supported him, which would mean that as an active candidate, Biden exceeded Palin's single most successful mayoral race. But Biden kept picking up votes even after he dropped his presidential bid. Biden got 638 votes in New Hampshire's Jan. 8 primary. On Super Tuesday in February, he got 3,788 primary votes in Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, and 4,321 primary votes in Hillary Rodham Clinton's home state of New York. If Huckabee is going to compare a small-town mayoral election to a national presidential race, then it's only fair to look beyond the single, hard-to-quantify caucus for which Biden was an active candidate. Iowa aside, his combined 8,109-vote total in Obama's and Clinton's home state primaries alone is bigger than Wasilla's entire population. Pants on Fire is our ruling.	None	Mike Huckabee	None	None	None	2008-09-04T00:00:00	2008-09-03	['United_States', 'Joe_Biden', 'Sarah_Palin', 'Alaska', 'Wasilla,_Alaska']
-goop-02923	Kim Kardashian “Hysterical” Watching “KUWTK” Robbery Episode, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-crying-robbery-keeping-up-with-kardashians-reaction-kuwtk-episode/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian NOT “Hysterical” Watching “KUWTK” Robbery Episode, Despite Report	2:39 pm, March 20, 2017	None	['Kim_Kardashian', 'Keeping_Up_with_the_Kardashians']
-snes-06062	Scammers place phone calls to hotel rooms to dupe guests into giving up their credit card info.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hotel-room-credit-card-phone-call-scam/	None	Fraud & Scams	None	David Mikkelson	None	Hotel Room Credit Card Phone Call Scam	27 April 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-13538	"None of the polls being conducted right now have us on the top line. None of them. It's always Trump and Clinton and then second question, third question. ... If we were included in the top line, as Johnson/Trump/Clinton, we'd be at 20 percent."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/29/gary-johnson/johnson-questions-pollsters-he-tries-join-clinton-/	The only poll that matters, dealers in political cliches tell us, is the one taken on Election Day. For third party candidates, the Committee on Presidential Debates has imposed another consequential metric: they must reach 15 percent in a select set of polls if they want access to the debates and the attention and credibility that are attached. Right now, it looks like Clinton and Trump will be alone on stage come debate season. But if the polls were just conducted differently, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson has suggested he would easily meet that requirement. "None of the polls being conducted right now have us on the top line. None of them. It's always Trump and Clinton and then second question, third question, ‘Well, what if you add Johnson-Weld?’," Johnson told CNBC on August 22. In a couple of other cases Johnson specified how well he thinks he’d be doing if he were listed as an option in pollsters’ first horse-race question: 20 percent, more than enough to qualify for the debates. "I think if we were included in the top line, as Johnson/Trump/Clinton, we'd be at 20 percent. A lot of that has to do with how polarizing the two of them are. But that's the issue right now. We need to be top line on the polls," Johnson said in another CNBC interview on Aug. 11. This would be quite a swing. Theodore Roosevelt was the last third-party presidential candidate to register more than 20 percent of the vote on Election Day, running as a Bull Moose in 1912, and Ross Perot reached 18.9 percent in 1992. We decided to look at whether the polls are really being conducted the way Johnson says, and if it really has such a dramatic impact. We looked at 25 national polls conducted in July and August, chosen off of a list compiled by FiveThiryEight.com. Based on this list, we can say that Johnson is certainly wrong that every poll asks about Clinton and Trump before adding his name in a later question. Eleven of the polls we looked at -- close to half -- included Johnson in their first or only question about the presidential horse-race. None of these polls vaulted Gary Johnson to 20 percent. In fact, he did slightly worse, on average, when he was included in the first horse-race question. Johnson’s average in the 25 polls was 9 percent. When he was listed in a later horse-race question, his average performance was slightly higher than that average. In the polls where he was listed in the first or only horse-race question, Johnson did slightly worse on average. Some of his best performances -- 12 percent in polls conducted for Fox News and International Business Daily and 13 percent in a poll conducted for CNN -- were in polls that listed him in a later question. We ran Johnson’s theory by several academics who study polling. While research hasn’t been done on the specific question Johnson addresses, they told us that question order could have an effect on polling results. All of them were, however, skeptical that the effect could be as large as Johnson suggested. "It's not a totally crazy notion to think that including him in the first round versus not might affect his support. As a researcher, I would ask how big an effect that would have to be to get the kind of outcome he said. … You would have to have an effect of about 12 percent shift, which to me is just implausible," Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at MIT. Even if there was some sort of bias introduced by the question order, it wouldn’t necessarily be in his favor. "(Trump and Clinton) have the lowest favorability ratings of presidential candidates in recent memory. So I could spin a story that would suggest if you first ask about Clinton or Trump without Johnson, you kind of prime people to think ‘I don’t really like either of these folks.’ And then you include the question with him in it, and they say, ‘Oh, there’s another option," Berinsky said. When reached for comment about this article, Johnson communications director Joe Hunter wrote in an email that, "As far as the issue of whether a third candidate is included in the first ballot test question, or added to a subsequent question, we believe it does, indeed, make a difference, and pollsters with whom we work agree." Since Johnson’s likely to appear on the ballot in all 50 states, it's worth considering why any pollster puts forward a horse-race question without including his name. Support for third party candidates tends to flag down the stretch, with many of their supporters leaving for one of the major party options. Questions that only offer those candidates allow pollsters to get a sense of how people currently registering support for third parties might break if that happens. It's worth noting that Johnson seems to be bucking this trend, according to a recent article by the polling analysts at 538. Based on current polling, 538’s polls-plus general election forecast, which adjusts for economic factors and historical trends, expects Johnson to earn a bigger percentage of the vote than any third-party candidate since Ross Perot in 1992. Our ruling Johnson said that polls ask about a straight Clinton/Trump race first, cueing them to ignore his name when it appears later. He said that including his name in the first questions pollsters asked about the horse-race could increase his support to 20 percent. Many polls do include Johnson’s name in their first horse-race poll, and Johnson does not do better in these polls. Experts say the jump Johnson is talking about is implausible. We rate the claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/5b71a65b-45a3-4b7b-bb80-9222bc73ff4e	None	Gary Johnson	None	None	None	2016-08-29T12:06:39	2016-08-22	['Bill_Clinton']
-goop-00360	Kylie Jenner, Travis Scott Faking Relationship For Fame?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kylie-jenner-travis-scott-faking-relationship-fame/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kylie Jenner, Travis Scott Faking Relationship For Fame?	3:41 pm, August 29, 2018	None	['None']
-faly-00007	Claim: More than 19 crore people have been insured against life and accident risk or ensured pension.	true	https://factly.in/fact-checking-government-claims-on-jan-suraksha/	Fact: 5.3 crore people under PMJJBY, 13.5 crore under PMSBY and 1.08 crore people under APY have been covered. Hence, the claim is TRUE.	None	None	None	None	Fact Checking Government claims on Jan Suraksha	None	None	['None']
-pomt-03577	Says President Barack Obama’s proposed budget includes two new tax increases that would collect about $14 billion.	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2013/may/17/tom-price/price-takes-obama-task-budget-proposals/	U.S. Rep. Tom Price of Georgia has some specific concerns about President Barack Obama’s proposed budget. A post on the Roswell Republican’s Twitter page summarized his objections. "POTUS’ budget adds 2 new tax increases to IRA & 401(k) savers. A total tax increase of $14billion. #ObamaTaxHike," it read. POTUS is an acronym for president of the United States. A PolitiFact Georgia Twitter follower was skeptical about whether Price had his facts right and asked us to investigate. Price spokesman Ryan Murphy explained the congressman’s claim. Price was referring to two changes in the proposed budget. The first would require some beneficiaries of individual retirement accounts to take their inherited distributions over a five-year stretch. The second change would limit the accrual of tax-favored retirement plans. It would cap how much money people could accumulate in tax-deferred retirement accounts at $3.4 million. "The total revenue impact comes to $14.253 billion over ten years," Murphy said via email. A White House report Murphy forwarded us detailed Murphy’s claim. The report includes both proposed changes that Murphy mentioned. It also contains a table that says changing the rules for beneficiaries would bring in an additional $4.9 billion in revenue to the federal government over 10 years. By creating the cap, the chart shows the federal government would pocket an additional $9.3 billion over 10 years. Together, it’s slightly more than $14 billion, as Murphy said. The White House communications department asked us to send our questions in writing. We did so twice and did not get a response. Grover Norquist, the outspoken leader of Americans for Tax Reform, wrote about these proposed changes in a list of the top 10 tax increases in Obama’s budget. Some experts say the percentage of Americans who would be affected by these changes is small. Less than 1 percent of IRA and 401(k) account holders have more than $3 million in their portfolios, one study shows. Eric Toder, an expert at the Tax Policy Center in Washington, agreed these changes would affect a small number of Americans. Toder said by limiting the beneficiary withdrawals to just five years, "you are going to be paying more taxes." Tax experts say the five-year requirement makes recipients withdraw a larger sum of money, but it could also put that person into a higher tax bracket and make him pay more in income taxes. Currently, there’s no limit on how much you can accumulate in a retirement account. If approved, investors would have to put more money in taxable accounts once they exceed the limit, Forbes.com says. Toder said there’s been some discussion on Capitol Hill about limiting the accrual, but he doesn’t think there’s much interest in Congress to make either one of these changes. Still, is it accurate to label these as tax increases since they’re not typical changes in a tax rate? Toder compared it to changing the mortgage interest deduction on income taxes, an idea that was discussed during last year’s presidential race. For homeowners, he said, such a change would be a tax increase. "Technically, they are tax increases," he said of the proposed changes. William McBride, the chief economist at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation in Washington, agreed with Price’s assessment. "Yes, these count as increases," McBride said via email. To sum up, Price claimed on Twitter that the president’s budget includes two new tax increases that would total $14 billion. The changes could add that much money to Uncle Sam’s coffers over a 10-year period. Calling them tax increases is a matter of semantics. That could imply it would affect large numbers of people who got Price’s tweet. The changes would affect a very small percentage of account holders, studies show. That’s important context that is missing. We rate Price’s claim Mostly True.	None	Tom Price	None	None	None	2013-05-17T06:00:00	2013-05-01	['None']
-pomt-06646	Says "Rick Perry doubled spending in a decade."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2011/sep/14/keep-conservatives-united/pro-bachmann-group-says-texas-spending-has-doubled/	A group favoring U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota for president posted an ad online this month suggesting Gov. Rick Perry, the leading hopeful for the Republican presidential nomination, isn’t a fiscal conservative. In the spot, targeted at South Carolina voters, the narrator says Perry "doubled state spending in a decade." That claim by the Keep Conservatives United super PAC immediately rang a bell with us. In August 2010, Texas Democratic gubernatorial nominee Bill White said the state budget had gone up over 80 percent under Perry, the governor since late 2000. We rated White’s statement Mostly True. Between 2000-01 and 2010-11, spending from all sources including federal and local aid increased nearly 79 percent, from nearly $101.8 billion to almost $182.2 billion. Then again, we noted, there are ways to analyze the increase that whittle the growth percentage. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, spending increased 18.2 percent over the period. Also, expenditures of state general revenue — the money most directly influenced by legislators and the governor — decreased by 4.5 percent, according to the state’s advisory Legislative Budget Board. The pro-Bachmann group offers as backup for its claim data from two comprehensive annual financial reports issued by the Texas state comptroller’s office which account for state finances in accord with standards set by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board. Counting spending from general revenue (basically state tax dollars), special revenue (meaning income restricted to specific programs), capital projects and debt service, the reports show spending of nearly $45 billion in the fiscal year that ended Aug. 31, 2000, and $90.4 billion in the year that ended Aug. 31, 2010, — an increase of nearly 101 percent. So, there’s a way to stake the "doubling" claim. We wondered how spending looks based on the actual state budgets adopted on Perry’s watch. At our inquiry, budget board staff provided revised figures for 2000 through 2010 and added information from the 2011 budget year and 2012-13 state budget that Perry signed into law in June. Interestingly, the 2000-01 and 2010-11 expenditures from all sources have changed since our 2010 fact check; the updated figures indicate an 86 percent increase in raw spending over the period, which drops to 22 percent if adjusted for population growth and inflation. Between 2000 and 2010, the years singled out by the pro-Bachmann group, spending from all sources increased 86 percent, or 21 percent adjusted for inflation and population growth, according to the board’s figures. Spending from state general revenue rose 44 percent, though that was actually down 6 percent in 2010 from 2000 when adjusted for inflation and population growth — as noted in a Sept. 1, 2011, Perry campaign email challenging the ad. When we delved into spending growth for our 2010 fact check, Dale Craymer, president of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, suggested that any comparison of the 2000-01 budget and the 2010-11 budget take into account two factors in the latter budget that weren't at play in 2000-01. First, Perry and state lawmakers agreed several years ago to cover reductions in school property taxes with state revenue; that's costing $14 billion in the 2010-11 budget. Craymer said that commitment doesn't translate to an increase in government spending; it's a shift in which level of government is doing the spending. Second, the 2010-11 budget included about $12 billion in one-time federal stimulus aid. Remove the combined $26 billion out of the comparison and the state budget increase since 2000-01 falls to 53 percent. In a recent follow-up interview, Craymer stuck with his 2010 caveats. He also cautioned against reaching conclusions based on the state’s annual financial reports which, he said, have to account for far more than actual spending in a fiscal year. He said the best source for comparisons of spending under any governor would be the state budgets they signed into law as tracked by the budget board. In an interview, Billy Hamilton, the state’s former deputy comptroller, aired a similar view, noting that major debt decisions reflected in the financial reports were approved directly by voters in amendments to the state constitution. Those reach the ballot without the governor having a say. Researcher Bob Harris, the pro-Bachmann group’s treasurer, told us in an interview: "I wanted to get the whole picture ... This was the comprehensive report." R.J. DeSilva, spokesman for the comptroller’s office, said by email the report each year "aggregates the state's assets, liabilities, revenues and expenses and presents a broader accounting scope that includes more than the allocation of general revenue funds through the state's budgeting process. For example, accounting principles dictate the depreciation of a state vehicle has to be shown as part of expenses in the (report), although it is non-cash activity which is not included in the budget process." Asked to elaborate, DeSilva replied: "Another example would be higher-education spending of local funds (like tuition revenue). That spending is included in the (report), but it’s not part of budget appropriations by the Legislature." All told, we can see the appeal of using a financial report with "comprehensive" in its title. And the financial reports, piling in all kinds of spending factors, seemingly back up the "doubling" claim. However, we’re not convinced the reports are the best way to check spending under gubernatorial sway. It’s why we tend to hew to figures in the state’s budgets. And according to the latest updates of budgeted spending, spending from all sources increased 86 percent over the years analyzed by the group, 21 percent once population growth and inflation are counted. Budgeted spending the governormost affected, of state general revenue, went up 44 percent, though that decreased 6 percent once inflation and population growth are weighed. We rate the statement Mostly False.	None	Keep Conservatives United	None	None	None	2011-09-14T15:38:26	2011-09-01	['None']
-pomt-03953	The United States does "not have a system through which growers and dairies can bring a workforce legally into the U.S."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2013/feb/18/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-us-farmers-have-no-way-bring-work/	Sen. Marco Rubio says that one of the reasons we need immigration reform is to help farmers who don’t have a way to legally hire workers. Rubio, R-Fla., and a bipartisan group of senators have put forward a major proposal on immigration, and Rubio has been defending it to conservative audiences, including in a Jan. 30 column on RedState.com. Rubio wrote that the country needs "a stable and affordable domestic supply of food. ... Agriculture has always required a significant workforce from abroad, but we do not have a system through which growers and dairies can bring a workforce legally into the U.S." Rubio called for a "modernized agricultural worker program" that "allows our growers to contract the seasonal and year round labor they need legally." In a related fact-check, we explored his broad claim that "Agriculture has always required a significant workforce from abroad." Here we research whether the U.S. has a system for farmers to legally import foreign workers. The H-2A seasonal visa process The United States does have a system to allow farmers to hire seasonal workers. It’s called the H-2A visa program. But the H-2A visa program has several restrictions and has been widely criticized as inadequate. We turned to a 2013 Congressional Research Service report to explain the process. Farmers apply for certification from the Labor Department to ensure that U.S. workers are not available; the majority of these requests are granted. (Florida ranks fifth for the number of granted certifications.) Employers then submit a petition to the Department of Homeland Security to bring in foreign workers. If that application is approved, foreign workers can go to a U.S. embassy or consulate and apply for the visa from the State Department. Employers must meet a list of requirements, including providing workers with housing, transportation, and other benefits, such as workers’ compensation insurance. No health insurance coverage is required. The number of H-2A visas have soared from about 6,500 in 1992 to a high of about 64,400 in 2008. There were about 55,400 H-2A visas issued in 2011, based on preliminary data. However, despite that growth, the program is small relative to total farm employment. For example in 2007, (the most recent Census of Agriculture from the USDA) there were about 2.6 million hired farm workers and about 50,800 H-2A visas granted. "Critics of the H-2A program cite the low levels of participation as evidence of the program’s inadequacy to meet the needs of U.S. agricultural employers," the Congressional Research Service said. "Others, however, attribute the program’s low utilization to the availability of unauthorized workers, who are willing to work for lower wages than legal workers." Many farm groups and a bipartisan group of senators, including Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., have complained that the process is too difficult and doesn't provide enough workers. The program requires that workers be temporary or seasonal. Many agriculture jobs -- for example livestock or dairy farms -- require year-round labor, and a coalition of farm groups is pushing for an 11-month a year guest worker program. "There is a legal program," said Debby Wechsler, executive secretary of the North Carolina Strawberry Association. "It is considered by agriculture to be broken and needing to be fixed. Rubio is definitely wrong when he says there is no program now, but he is right when he says something needs to be done." Ervin Lineberger, who owns a North Carolina blackberry and grape farm, told PolitiFact that he looked into using the H-2A program a couple of times and concluded that it wouldn’t work for him. One problem was that he would have to supply housing, and he only does that now for four workers, though he hires 50 -- mostly Mexicans -- during the season. Last year he turned to unemployed U.S. citizens, and of the 15 he hired, "only one was with me when we finished the season." Some were too out of shape for the farm work or didn’t want to work on weekends, he said. "There is a need for a process where, especially the Mexican workers, can come here legally and go home legally," he said. Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, which calls for low-immigration, said that the H-2A program works well for some and not others. "The key question is, are farmers so used to paying low wages for long hours that it is the H-2A worker protections they don't like, or is the program really too cumbersome? One reason to be skeptical of farmers claims of not enough workers is that there has seldom been a time when they had enough workers, at least from their point of view." Camarota questions the claim of a labor shortage because he says if that was the case, wages would be rising more rapidly. We asked Rubio to explain his claim, since there is a legal system for at least some farmers to bring in foreign workers. A spokeswoman pointed us to the data showing the small number of farm workers who get the H-2A visa. She also cited a report done for the Migration Policy Institute which raised concerns about the future supply of farm labor and noted the bureaucratic hassles in the H-2A process. While farm owners complain the visa program is "broken and bureaucratic," the paper stated, some worker advocates say that farmers are bypassing U.S. workers. Our ruling Rubio said the United States does "not have a system through which growers and dairies can bring a workforce legally into the U.S." There actually is a system for growers to legally hire foreign workers, so Rubio is wrong on this basic point. However, many farmers have complained that the visa program is inadequate, cumbersome and in dire need of a makeover. Also, the H-2A visa program is only for temporary seasonal labor. Rubio specifically mentioned dairies, and that is a type of farm that needs year-round workers. We rate his claim Mostly False.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2013-02-18T12:11:35	2013-01-30	['United_States']
-pomt-11393	Says Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting, ripped up a copy of the U.S. Constitution	pants on fire!	/florida/statements/2018/mar/26/viral-image/doctored-image-shows-parkland-school-shooting-surv/	Images on the Internet of Parkland school shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez ripping up the U.S. Constitution gained lots of traction on social media, but the pictures were manipulated. Gonzalez 18, has been the target of many conspiracy theories since the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 people dead. The latest example came as hundreds of thousands of people rallied at March for Our Lives events March 24 in Washington and other cities around the country. Facebook groups such as Gun Owners of Merica and Twitter accounts circulated images and GIFs of Gonzalez tearing down the middle of the U.S. Constitution. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Twitter users, including Don Moynihan, a professor of government at University of Wisconsin-Madison, quickly pointed out that the images and GIFs were doctored. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com The original image was taken from a video by Teen Vogue that appeared alongside an op-ed written by Gonzalez entitled "Why This Generation Needs Gun Control." In the real video, Gonzalez is ripping up a gun-range target poster. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com One of the accounts sharing the fake images — "Linda the NRA Supporter" — was suspended sometime after the posts. But multiple other Twitter accounts (including Adam Baldwin from the tweet above) have shared the posts in the name of political satire. Gab, "A free speech social network," tweeted the doctored GIF of Gonzalez ripping what looks like the Constitution, and then declared it was clearly "satire" shortly after. Despite this admission, the original post from Gab was retweeted more than 1,500 times and liked over 3,000 times. These fake images of Gonzalez ripping up the U.S. Constitution are doctored. We rate this Pants on Fire! See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com	None	Viral image	None	None	None	2018-03-26T12:40:38	2018-03-24	['None']
-pomt-09209	"Sue Lowden gave Harry Reid's campaigns a thousand dollars in five different elections, helping his Senate dreams come true."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/may/20/danny-tarkanian/nevada-gop-senate-candidate-says-rival-was-democra/	Sen. Harry Reid may be the Democratic Senate majority leader, but that doesn't mean he's a shoo-in for re-election in 2012. In fact, several potential Republican candidates outperform Reid in recent polls, suggesting Nevada voters are none too pleased with Reid. Republicans are vying against each other to challenge Reid, and the primary appears to have several front-runners: Sue Lowden, a casino executive and former state party chairperson; Danny Tarkanian, a businessman and former college basketball star; and Sharron Angle, a former state representative with support from the Tea Party Express, a national group associated with the movement. The Republican primary is set for June 8. The ads we've reviewed from the primary contest have similar themes: Government is too big, Washington can't be trusted, and only a true conservative should get the Republican nomination. Tarkanian's ad "Insiders' Game" sounds these themes in fairly dramatic fashion, using ominous music and flashy graphics, and manages to attack Lowden and Reid simultaneously. "Washington power was always Harry Reid's dream. That's why he needed to be stopped. Sue Lowden? She helped Harry Reid rise to power." Lowden is then shown in a video clip, saying, "I supported Harry Reid early on." "Sue Lowden gave Harry Reid's campaigns a thousand dollars in five different elections, helping his Senate dreams come true. Today Harry Reid's got his power, and Sue Lowden's worth millions. It's always an insiders' game," the ad concludes. We couldn't get a response to our questions from the Lowden campaign, but we did call the Federal Election Commission to find out about Lowden's contributions. She did donate to Harry Reid -- back in the 1980s. She gave him $2,000 in 1984, $1,000 in 1986, and $2,000 in 1989. The ad counts that as "five different elections," because in 1984 and 1989, Lowden made donations of $1,000 each for the primary and the general. Her husband, casino executive Paul Lowden, also contributed $8,000 between 1982 and 1995. She told the Nevada media that she and her husband supported Reid at one time, but not anymore. "Early on in the '80s when he was independent, we did feel that he was representing Nevada," she said last year. The ad implies -- but doesn't say explicitly -- that Lowden benefited from her support of Reid. The Tarkanian campaign points to a letter of recommendation that Reid wrote to the Illinois Gaming Board in 1992, expressing support for the Lowdens' casino operations, describing Reid's interactions with them during his time as chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission from 1977 to 1981. "I have found them to be great assets to the state, and I have found them to be honest in all their dealings with me. I highly recommend Paul Lowden and his company," Reid wrote. (You can read the letter via the Las Vegas Sun website.) Jon Ralston, a reporter and commentator on Nevada politics, pointed out in his own analysis of the ad that the Lowdens were wealthy before contributing to Reid's campaign, and that Reid raised plenty of money from other people. Here, we're checking the statement from the Tarkanian campaign, that "Sue Lowden gave Harry Reid's campaigns a thousand dollars in five different elections, helping his Senate dreams come true." The campaign is counting primary and general election contributions as donations for separate elections. You could argue that this was actually support for three elections, not five. The ad also implies that this support helped Reid's "rise to power," and obliquely hints that there was some sort of mutual benefit. There's not much in the record to support that. Still, because the statement we're checking here is about Lowden's campaign contributions, which are a matter of public record, we're rating this Mostly True.	None	Danny Tarkanian	None	None	None	2010-05-20T21:21:53	2010-05-05	['Harry_Reid']
-pomt-01091	"I belong to the AFL-CIO."	true	/texas/statements/2015/jan/13/rick-perry/rick-perry-i-belong-afl-cio/	Suggesting Republicans should reach out to traditionally resistant voters such as union members, departing Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared himself a union member during a "policy orientation" held in Austin before the 2015 Texas legislative session. Perry, appearing with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at the Jan. 9, 2015, gathering hosted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, eased toward his declaration by saying the Teamsters union had supported him for governor. Reaching out to it would work, he said, "not because I’m a dyed-in-the-wool AFL-CIO member -- which I am." Perry then addressed a mentor in the audience, former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, saying: "You didn’t know that, did you?" Amid laughter, Perry went on: "Not only did I used to be a Democrat, senator, I belong to the AFL-CIO. Got the card in my pocket," Perry said, acting as if to reach for it, "and they probably hate it that I pay my dues every quarter." Ed Sills, spokesman for the Texas AFL-CIO, commented on Perry’s declaration in the union’s email news distributed later the same day, writing: "If any reader of this newsletter wants to own up to Perry's membership in their union, please send word. "But I kid," Sills wrote. "The more, the merrier. The labor movement wants to be a big tent and we do proudly represent a minority of Republican members, many of them of the rock-ribbed, partisan variety. The AFL-CIO does not have a loyalty test." Like Sills, we wondered if Perry, who entered politics as a Democratic Texas House member before switching parties and winning his first statewide race (for agriculture commissioner) in 1990, is a union member. To our inquiry, gubernatorial spokesman Felix Browne pointed out by email the Dallas Morning News described Perry’s membership in a Feb. 22, 2010, news story. That story said: "The governor became a member of the Screen Actors Guild after he appeared in the Tommy Lee Jones movie Man of the House. In the movie, he played the governor of Texas." The day after Perry mentioned the membership, Breitbart.com, the conservative news site, quoted a former Perry aide, Kris Heckmann, saying Perry continued to pay his union dues after the making of the 2005 movie. At our request, Browne provided a photo of Perry’s membership card for the SAG-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which we edited for this photo solely to remove his membership number: A web page on the union’s history says the union, bringing together the guild and AFTRA, has about 160,000 members. "A proud member of the AFL-CIO, SAG-AFTRA partners with our fellow unions in the U.S. and internationally to seek the strongest protections for media artists throughout the world," the page says. A SAG-AFTRA spokeswoman, Pamela Greenwalt, told us by phone the union does not reveal whether anyone is a member. Footnote: Sills said in his item on Perry’s announcement that as governor, Perry had not been a backer of Texas AFL-CIO policies. "He has opposed a minimum-wage increase, has rejected on ideological grounds tens of billions of dollars in federal funds that would expand Medicaid coverage, has chipped away at the ability of laid-off workers to receive Unemployment Insurance benefits, and has presided over a public school system that a state judge found to be unconstitutionally inadequate," Sills wrote. Our ruling Perry said he’s a member of the AFL-CIO. Since 2006, Perry has been a member of the Screen Actors Guild, which is part of the AFL-CIO. We rate his claim True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2015-01-13T17:10:23	2015-01-09	['None']
-snes-01560	Is This Melania Trump's Body Double?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/melania-trump-body-double/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This Melania Trump’s Body Double?	19 October 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-06493	"The Tax Foundation figures Rhode Island as the 10th highest state for state and local tax burden per capita in the country. We're the 6th worst in the country for the business tax index. We're the 3rd highest per capita in the country for all taxes."	mostly false	/rhode-island/statements/2011/oct/14/peter-palumbo/ri-rep-peter-palumbo-misses-marks-when-reporting-w/	It's widely known that Rhode Island doesn't rank well in national comparisons showing how much residents pay in taxes. During an Oct. 5, 2011, rally protesting Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s positions on illegal immigration, state Rep. Peter Palumbo cited the rankings of one research group to argue that Chafee should be focusing instead on tax issues. (The rally followed a decision by the state Board of Governors for Higher Education making undocumented Rhode Island students eligible for in-state tuition at the state’s colleges and university, a policy Chafee supported. Chafee has also raised the possibility of creating a driver’s license for undocumented immigrants.) "The Tax Foundation figures Rhode Island as the 10th highest state for state and local tax burden per capita in the country," Palumbo told the crowd of about 500. "We're the sixth worst in the country for the business tax index. We're the third highest per capita in the country for all taxes." We wondered whether the rankings are really that poor. The Tax Foundation is a nonpartisan, business-backed tax policy group based in Washington, D.C. It regularly ranks states on various tax issues. Their reports can be seen at TaxFoundation.org, where we found the latest numbers. Let's break them down. State and local tax burden: The latest study, compiled from 2009 data and released in February 2011, ranks Rhode Island as the fifth worst in the country, not the 10th, as Palumbo told the crowd. By the Foundation's assessment, things are even worse than he asserted. Business tax index: This is actually the "State Business Tax Climate Index," in which the foundation uses various measures to come up with a score. For the 2011 fiscal year it ranged from a high of 7.43 in South Dakota (which scored well, in part, because it has no corporate or individual income tax) to a low of 3.96 in New Jersey, which was ranked as having the worst state business tax climate. Rhode Island ranked as the ninth worst, not sixth, as Palumbo asserted. The state has been gradually improving in the rankings since 2006, when it ranked worst. In addition, the Foundation, in its latest report, predicted that Rhode Island will rank significantly higher in its next analysis once changes to the state's income tax code have taken effect. All taxes: The Foundation has what it calls its Tax Freedom Day, which is the number of days that must pass in a year before the average resident has earned enough to pay his or her federal, state and local taxes. For Rhode Islanders, in 2011 that day fell on April 13. Rhode Islander had the 13th highest total tax burden. We didn't rank third, as Palumbo reported. (Mississippi residents were the first to pay them off; their Tax Freedom Day was March 26. Residents of Connecticut, had to work the longest -- until May 2 -- to earn enough. Nationally, the Tax Freedom Day was April 12.) When we asked Palumbo for the source of his numbers, he told us in an e-mail that, "knowing that I was going to be fact-checked, I made sure that the information I had was backed up!" His source: the Foundation's 2010 Facts and Figures booklet, which is outdated. He said it had been mailed to legislators. When we found that booklet online, we discovered that he correctly reported the state and local tax burden from that outdated booklet, but made a common math error in stating the business tax index ranking (when you rank 44th you're seventh from the bottom, not sixth). However we couldn't find any indication, even in the older report, that "we're the third highest per capita in the country for all taxes." In the 2010 report it says we ranked 10th. The only measure by which Rhode Island ranked third was in state debt per capita. The 2011 version is also available online. Our ruling Palumbo spoke with authority, cited specific numbers from a specific source and gave the impression that the numbers were both correct and current. His overall point -- that Rhode Islanders are taxed well above the national average -- is supported by the Tax Foundation's rankings. But he misread the Tax Foundation report in one -- and possibly two -- of the rankings. And those numbers don't accurately reflect Foundation data that have been available at least since the end of March. As a result, we rate his statement as Mostly False. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Peter Palumbo	None	None	None	2011-10-14T06:00:00	2011-10-05	['None']
-snes-01359	A 29-year-old San Diego Zoo intern was arrested and charged with attempting sexually assault a gorilla.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zookeeper-arrested-molest-gorilla/	None	Junk News	None	David Emery	None	Was a Zookeeper Arrested for Molesting a Gorilla?	7 December 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02072	"Jeff Merkley was the deciding vote on Obamacare, which in Oregon has been an unmitigated disaster."	false	/oregon/statements/2014/may/23/monica-wehby/was-jeff-merkley-deciding-vote-obamacare/	The race for a U.S. Senate seat representing Oregon is shaping up to be one of the most-watched political contests of the 2014 election. The race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley and Republican Monica Wehby could well play a pivotal role in whether Democrats maintain their Senate majority. The lead-up to the May 20, 2014, primary proved rockier than expected for Wehby, a political newcomer and pediatric neurosurgeon, when police reports surfaced detailing domestic incidents involving her former husband and an ex-boyfriend. The claim: The day after the primary, Wehby’s campaign put out a news release that appeared aimed at turning the conversation back to the topic she had focused on for weeks -- health care. "Jeff Merkley was the deciding vote on Obamacare," the release stated, "which in Oregon has been an unmitigated disaster." This is hardly the first time a politician has been accused of casting the pivotal vote for the controversial Affordable Care Act. Even so, we thought we’d check to see whether circumstances surrounding Merkley’s vote differ from those of his Democratic colleagues. The analysis: PolitiFact National has checked a slew of claims that different Democratic senators were "the deciding vote." Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s former attorney general and candidate for governor, said in November 2013, for instance, that U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., cast the deciding vote on the Affordable Care Act. In Florida, an ad made the claim about U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, while others repeated the assertions about Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Udall, both Democrats from Colorado. Checks in those cases found that none of the senators cast the "deciding" vote. A little history: The first Senate vote relevant to the issue occurred on Dec. 23, 2009. It was needed to overcome a filibuster and end debate on the bill, to bring it to a vote for final approval. Senate rules require 60 senators to approve such a motion. The vote to defeat the filibuster came in on the number, with Merkley voting with the rest of his party. But his vote was no more vital than any other, especially since his support was not in doubt. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., by contrast, did need late arm-twisting, agreeing to back the bill only after 13 hours of negotiations, according to news reports at the time. His was the critical 60th vote. Votes on two other bills were needed for the ACA to win final approval. The first, which passed the original version of the Affordable Care Act, needed only a simple majority, making its passage easier. The next was a vote taken March 25, 2010, that officially approved the bill after it had been passed by the House. Merkley joined 56 other senators, making it impossible to say whether his was the vote that sent the ACA to Obama’s desk for signing. We asked Wehby’s campaign to defend the claim. In an email, campaign manager Charlie Pearce replied, "Thanks to Jeff Merkley’s yes vote on Obamacare, 150,000 Oregonians had their health insurance plans canceled. If Jeff Merkley would have had the courage to vote no on that bill, Obamacare would not have passed, and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars would not have been wasted on the fiasco that was Cover Oregon." The ruling: Wehby’s campaign, fresh off her win in the GOP Senate primary, sent out a news release pinning responsibility for passage of the Affordable Care Act on her Democratic opponent. "Jeff Merkley was the deciding vote on Obamacare," it said, "which in Oregon has been an unmitigated disaster." The assertion is just the latest to identify a particular Democratic senator as having cast the "deciding" vote for Obamacare. Similar checks have all found the claim to be either Mostly False or False. Wehby’s campaign, asked to defend the claim, sent an email that omitted any mention of Merkley’s "deciding" vote. Her assertion that Merkley’s vote resulted in 150,000 Oregonians having their health care plans canceled is a check we’ll leave for another day. Merkley did join his Democratic colleagues in voting for the bill, but it was a senator from Nebraska who provided the needed 60th vote. We rate this claim False.	None	Monica Wehby	None	None	None	2014-05-23T16:25:51	2014-05-21	['Oregon', 'Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act']
-pomt-03409	"Not one tax has been raised since I've been governor."	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2013/jun/30/chris-christie/chris-christie-claims-there-have-been-no-tax-incre/	If Chris Christie is sure about one thing, it’s the lack of any tax increase in New Jersey since he’s been governor. So confident is the governor that he pointed out his achievement during Wednesday’s monthly "Ask The Governor" radio call-in program on New Jersey 101.5 FM. It’s a claim he’s made before. "Not one tax has been raised since I've been governor," Christie said during a brief portion of the show where he compared his fiscal actions as governor with those of state Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex), who is challenging him in the Nov. 5 gubernatorial contest. Previous Truth-O-Meter rulings have determined this claim isn’t entirely accurate. And PolitiFact New Jersey remains as confident as the governor in that fact. Let’s begin by reviewing the major taxes in New Jersey. It’s true that rates for income, sales and corporation business taxes -- the state’s three biggest revenue generators -- have not gone up under Christie. But tax increases have resulted when Christie cut funding for tax-credit programs, according to several experts who have told us that those reductions are essentially tax increases. "For practical purposes, decreasing tax credits is the same as a tax increase. The person's effective tax rate goes up," David Brunori, a research professor of public policy at The George Washington University, explained in an e-mail. "Still, most people think of tax increases as rate hikes." Rates haven’t increased, but the reduced tax credits mean some homeowners and certain low-income individuals are receiving less money to offset their tax bills. The Earned Income Tax Credit is one example. New Jersey scaled back the EITC during Christie’s first year in office. The state Treasury Department website has explained that the EITC "reduces the amount of New Jersey tax you owe and may also give you a refund, even if you have no tax liability to New Jersey." In addition to that reduction, Christie cut spending for two property tax relief programs. Budget analyses from the state’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services showed that homeowners who qualified for one of those programs, now called the Homestead Benefit program, received an average rebate of more than $1,000 in fiscal year 2010. Now, the average credit is less than half that amount. State Treasury Department officials have argued that the tax credit programs are payments from the state, and reductions in credits do not represent tax increases. Bill Quinn, a Treasury Department spokesman, has said that the EITC in most cases actually represented a subsidy to low-income people and noted that more than 75 percent of people getting the credit in 2010 owed no New Jersey tax. Still, Dennis J. Ventry, Jr., a professor at University of California Davis School of Law, said that a reduction in a tax credit is "absolutely a tax increase." "Tax credits reduce tax liability for eligible claimants. Thus, cutting, restricting, or repealing a tax credit for an otherwise eligible individual or business would -- absent other changes to the tax system such as a reduction in rates -- result in higher taxes owed," Ventry said. Richard Pomp, a law professor at the University of Connecticut and state taxation expert said debate about the issue is semantics. "To someone who has had a benefit cut that is less money they have to spend," whether you call it a tax increase or a spending cut. However, Joseph Henchman, vice president of legal and state projects at the Tax Foundation, a business-backed group, said it’d be wrong to equate reductions in tax credits as tax increases or spending cuts. "They have elements of both and are strictly neither," he said. Our ruling Christie said on a radio program, "Not one tax has been raised since I've been governor." The governor is correct that the major taxes in New Jersey that generate revenue have not increased. But he doesn’t acknowledge that cuts he’s made to tax-relief programs have resulted in tax increases for certain segments of the population. Several experts we talked to agreed that reductions in tax-relief programs can result in higher taxes owed for some people. That amounts to an increase, and that’s why this claim is rated Half True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Chris Christie	None	None	None	2013-06-30T07:30:00	2013-06-26	['None']
-pomt-04611	"Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/18/mitt-romney/romney-says-47-percent-americans-pay-no-income-tax/	Mitt Romney told wealthy donors gathered at a high-dollar campaign fundraiser that there’s a group of voters he believes he can never win over: people who pay no taxes. Video of Romney speaking at the event, held in Boca Raton, Fla., was leaked to the liberal magazine Mother Jones on Sept. 17, 2012, stirring up controversy in the heated presidential race. In his remarks, Romney used broad strokes to characterize millions of people who he said solidly support President Barack Obama. "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what," Romney said in the video. "All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. "And I mean the president starts out with 48, 49 percent … he starts off with a huge number," Romney continued. "These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." We’re checking several claims from his remarks at the May 2012 event. Taxes are a contentious issue in the presidential campaign, and the statistic Romney mentioned was sure to pique the attention of the ostensible 1-percenters in his audience. As for his claim that 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax at all: Guess what? He’s right. Who pays It's clear Romney is referring to federal taxes and his figure mirrors one from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, which found that in 2011, 46 percent of tax filers paid no income tax, vs. about 54 percent of tax filers that did have some federal income tax liability. In 2009, the Tax Policy Center estimated the proportion who paid no taxes was 47 percent. About half of people who don’t pay income taxes are simply poor, and the tax code explicitly exempts them. "For example, a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax this year because their $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each reduce their taxable income to zero," Roberton Williams, a scholar with the Tax Policy Center, wrote last year. "The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax." The remaining Americans who owe no federal income taxes are benefiting from tax breaks, the center found. "Three-fourths of those households pay no income tax because of provisions that benefit senior citizens and low-income working families with children. Those provisions include the exclusion of some Social Security benefits from taxable income, the tax credit and extra standard deduction for the elderly, and the child, earned income, and child care tax credits that primarily help low-income workers with children," he wrote. PolitiFact Oregon examined a claim similar to this one last year, citing research by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a bipartisan committee of Congress. The committee found that for 2009, roughly 22 percent of "tax units" ended up without any tax liability. Another 30 percent got all their tax money back from the government, through mechanisms such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, which encourages low-income Americans to work by refunding money to them through the tax code. By contrast, the committee found just 49 percent of Americans owed anything to the government. Put another way, 51 percent of taxpayers in 2009 had zero liability, according to the committee’s research. Our ruling Romney said at the fundraising event that "47 percent of Americans pay no income tax." He didn’t specify federal income tax, and many states do levy their own income taxes. But since Romney was referring to a sector of the entire American population, we think it’s clear he was talking about federal taxes. Research by the Tax Policy Center supports his claim. The think tank found that many Americans are so poor that they owe no taxes, and others qualify for enough breaks and exemptions to reduce their liability to nothing. Another report by the Joint Committee on Taxation from 2009 found an even larger share of Americans who owed nothing. We rate Romney’s statement True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-09-18T18:06:41	2012-05-17	['United_States']
-tron-00522	House Democrats Draft Bill Making Eating at Chick-fil-A a Hate Crime	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/house-democrats-chick-fil-a-hate-crime/	None	business	None	None	['christianity', 'congress', 'liberal agenda', 'religion']	House Democrats Draft Bill Making Eating at Chick-fil-A a Hate Crime	Jun 13, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-01926	Fukushima scientists have warned that fish in the Pacific Ocean will never again be safe for human consumption due to radioactive contamination	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fukushima-officials-never-eat-pacific-fish-again/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Did Fukushima Officials Warn that Humans Should Never Eat Fish Again?	10 August 2017	None	['None']
-snes-05845	Facebook is overloaded and is about to cancel the accounts of users who don't like or share a particular message:	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-cancellation/	None	Computers	None	David Mikkelson	None	Facebook Cancellation Notice	5 July 2000	None	['None']
-tron-00326	The Priest and Leonardo	none	https://www.truthorfiction.com/priest-davinci/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	The Priest and Leonardo	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-00291	A 2,000-year-old carving of a figure riding a modern bicycle was found inside an ancient temple in India.	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bicycle-2000-year-old-temple/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Was a Carving of a Modern Bicycle Found Inside an Ancient Temple?	25 July 2018	None	['India']
-hoer-01107	Bora Bora Vacation Facebook Prize	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/bora-bora-vacation-facebook-prize-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Bora Bora Vacation Facebook Prize Scam	September 2, 2016	None	['None']
-peck-00015	How Much Has Kisumu County Received In Transfers From The Treasury Since 2013?	false	https://pesacheck.org/how-much-cash-has-kisumu-county-received-from-the-national-government-in-the-last-3-years-c1eac0166b26	None	None	None	George Githinji	None	How Much Has Kisumu County Received In Transfers From The Treasury Since 2013?	Jun 16, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04194	"The five economic indicators that the federal government tracks - for the first time since August 2006 - were positive this October."	true	/rhode-island/statements/2012/dec/09/lincoln-chafee/rhode-island-governor-lincoln-chafee-says-five-eco/	"Are we there yet?" Anyone who has driven the family to a vacation on Cape Cod has heard that question rise up from the back seats, a plaintive cry for progress as the traffic crawls toward the Bourne Bridge. After four straight years of unemployment over 9 percent, Rhode Islanders wonder how long their road to economic recovery is going to be. Governor Chafee made the case earlier this month that, though it’s been slow going, the state is making progress. In a Dec. 1 interview with The Providence Journal about his plans for the state Economic Development Commission, Chafee said the state isn’t getting enough credit for the progress it has made on the economy, particularly this year. "We're seeing unemployment going in the right direction, for the last six months," he said. "The five economic indicators that the federal government tracks -- for the first time since August 2006 -- were positive this October." We weren’t sure which indicators he was talking about or whether they were actually all in positive territory, so we decided to check. The state and federal governments track the labor market through a variety of statistics. The most commonly watched by the public is the unemployment rate. But other indices are used too. The numbers don’t always move in the same direction. Improvement in one can be offset by setbacks in another. For example, if the size of the workforce goes down but the number of unemployed stays the same, the unemployment rate will go up. Chafee was touting the five indicators for the month of September (they were released in October, hence his reference to them as October numbers), because the bad numbers (concerning unemployment) all fell and the good numbers (employment) all rose, and all at the same time. Laura Hart, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Labor and Training, said the five federal categories Chafee was referring to are the same key indicators the state tracks, through data approved by the federal Department of Labor. Here are the indicators for Rhode Island, and how they changed from August to September, as reported by the state DLT: - The unemployment rate dropped from 10.7 to 10.5 percent - The number of unemployed people dropped from 59,221 to 58,663 - The number of employed people (at jobs in Rhode Island and nearby states) increased from 495,480 to 499,480 - The total work force (the number of people available to work) went up from 554,701 to 558,143 - The number of in-state jobs went from 456,000 to 459,500 . The last time those five indices all went in the right direction was from July to August of 2006, when the unemployment rate went from 5.1 to 5 percent. So Chafee was right. DLT spokeswoman Laura Hart cautioned that the month-to-month figures are extrapolations from polling of residents and employers and could be revised in March, when employers file tax information. She compared it to the difference between a poll and an election. Chafee is not alone in seeing some movement, however slow, in the state’s economic recovery. University of Rhode Island economics Prof. Leonard Lardaro has commented on the underappreciated progress the state is making, but noted that it seems to come in fits and starts. "While Rhode Island’s economy remained in a recovery, the magnitude of which almost nobody in this state seems to fully comprehend, the pace of that recovery tapered off a bit in September following a very strong August," Lardaro wrote in his Rhode Island economics blog Nov. 12. In a report prepared for the Dec. 6 Fall Economic Outlook Conference hosted by the New England Economic Partnership at Bryant University, Edward M. Mazze, a former dean and current business professor at the University of Rhode Island, and Edinaldo Tebaldi, associate economics professor at Bryant, noted the state’s sluggish recovery rate, predicting that Rhode Island’s unemployment rate may not fall below 7 percent until 2016. Our ruling Governor Chafee said five economic indicators tracked by the federal government went up in October, the first time they’ve done so in the same month in six years. Regardless of whether you believe the state has finally turned the economic corner, he got the facts right. We find his statement True. (If you have a claim you’d like us to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Lincoln Chafee	None	None	None	2012-12-09T00:01:00	2012-12-01	['None']
-pomt-04071	"The governor does not have any power to veto a referendum [on same-sex marriage] that would be a constitutional amendment."	mostly true	/rhode-island/statements/2013/jan/23/christopher-plante/christopher-plante-says-rhode-islands-governor-can/	As the debate over same-sex marriage heats up again in Rhode Island, there is talk of allowing voters, rather than the legislature, to decide the issue. Gov. Lincoln Chafee has said he would veto such a proposal if it were passed by the General Assembly. He has called on the legislature to approve same-sex marriage, which would make it legal in Rhode Island, as it is in the other five New England states. [The House Judiciary Committee passed it Tuesday; the full House of Representatives is expected to pass it this week. It faces a less certain fate in the Senate.] During a Jan. 13 interview on WLNE-TV, former Providence Mayor Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci Jr. raised the referendum question with Christopher Plante, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage-Rhode Island, which opposes same-sex marriage. Cianci asked Plante what he thought of Chafee's promise to veto a referendum. Plante said Chafee couldn't do that. "The governor does not have any power to veto a referendum that would be a constitutional amendment," he said. This is a case in which context is especially important. First, let's just consider Plante's statement without its context. If a referendum on same-sex marriage were drafted as a constitutional amendment, Plante would be correct. Although Chapter IX, Section 14 gives the governor the ability to veto any legislation passed by the General Assembly, it specifically excludes proposed constitutional amendments, which must always go before the voters. (The governor also gets no veto over General Assembly votes that involve in-house matters such as the decision to adjourn.) Now let's consider the context. Cianci didn't ask the question in the framework of a constitutional amendment. While all proposed constitutional amendments must be placed on the ballot, all ballot questions aren't constitutional amendments. Sen. Frank A. Ciccone, a Providence Democrat who opposes same-sex marriage, has said he would propose an amendment, but that's unlikely to pass both chambers. The legislation now before the House simply proposes changing the law, not the state Constitution. If the legislature instead voted to put it on the ballot, its decision would be subject to a gubernatorial veto. Plante, in e-mails, acknowledged that Chafee would have veto power if same-sex marriage was put to the voters as a non-constitutional question. But he said he always answers the question the way he did because he believes same-sex marriage SHOULD be a constitutional question, a point he subsequently raised in the interview with Cianci. "That's what we would be looking for because, if anything's going to happen with marriage, it should happen by the people," he said. "We voted on whether we should change the name of the state. We voted on casinos. How much more important is the institution of marriage?" Our ruling Christopher Plante said Gov. Lincoln Chafee "does not have any power to veto a referendum that would be a constitutional amendment" on the issue of same-sex marriage. It's true, as Plante said, that the governor has no veto power over constitutional amendments proposed by the General Assembly. But the question wasn't posed that way, and Plante's answer might have given some viewers the false impression that Chafee has no say if the General Assembly decides to send the question of same-sex marriage to the voters. Because his statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, we rate it Mostly True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Christopher Plante	None	None	None	2013-01-23T00:01:00	2013-01-13	['None']
-thal-00095	Claim: Fine Gael is responsible for the decline in the number of primary home mortgage arrears since 2013, which has left nearly 61,000 people “more secure”.	mostly false	http://www.thejournal.ie/fine-gael-mortgages-in-arrears-decline-facts-3094518-Nov2016/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck: Is Fine Gael right to claim the credit for a fall in mortgages in arrears?	Nov 23rd 2016, 7:59 PM	None	['None']
-pomt-15129	"Twenty-three million Americans suffer from addiction, but only 1 in 10 get treatment."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/04/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-says-23-million-americans-suffer-a/	Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently announced a $10 billion proposal for treating drug and alcohol addiction. While addiction and treatment has not traditionally been a top-tier issue in presidential races, it has attracted concern in key caucus and primary states this year, including New Hampshire, where Clinton announced her proposal in an op-ed in the New Hampshire Union-Leader. In explaining why an assertive policy response was necessary, Clinton wrote in the op-ed, among other claims, that "23 million Americans suffer from addiction, but only 1 in 10 get treatment." We wondered if her figures are accurate. On the ratio, Clinton is close. The most recent data from the federally sponsored National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 22.7 million Americans needed treatment for a drug alcohol problem but only about 2.5 million received treatment "at a specialty facility." That means 11 percent of people who conceivably could have needed treatment at a specialty facility received it, or one out of every nine. This ratio has held steady over the years, said Arthur Robinson Williams, a fellow in the division on substance abuse in Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry. "The 2013 survey was consistent with prior findings and estimates," Williams said. Still, we wondered about the survey’s use of the term "specialty facility." What does that mean? We found the definition: It refers to "treatment received at drug or alcohol rehabilitation facilities (inpatient or outpatient), hospitals (inpatient services only), and mental health centers; it excludes treatment received in an emergency room, private doctor's office, self-help group, prison or jail, or hospital as an outpatient." Among the forms of treatment not counted are groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Not everyone agrees that AA is effective (or effective for everyone), and it is perhaps most helpful as reinforcement to other types of treatment led by clinicians. Still, the number of participants is hardly trivial: AA counted 1,283,704 members in the United States as of Jan. 1, 2015, plus an additional 35,349 in correctional facilities. Thousands more attended Narcotics Anonymous and other 12-step groups. As for excluding private doctor visits, the distinctions "are likely true, but largely irrelevant," said David Rosenbloom, a professor of health policy and management at the Boston University School of Public Health. "Treatment in doctor’s offices is a relatively recent development, as medication-assisted addiction treatment through the medical care system has achieved regulatory approval." While "many people with addiction could be treated in the regular medical care system," Rosenbloom said, "the delivery mechanism to get from here to there isn’t in place yet." Allowing for some definitional concerns about the numbers, Clinton "is mainly right," said Arthur L. Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at the New York University Langone Medical Center. Our ruling Clinton said that "23 million Americans suffer from addiction, but only 1 in 10 get treatment." To be fully accurate, the claim needs some modest tweaks. The actual ratio is about one of nine, not one in 10, and it’s worth noting that the treatment statistics include only the most intensive methods, leaving out such widely used approaches as Alcoholics Anonymous. Still, experts said Clinton’s claim is close to accurate. We rate it Mostly True.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2015-09-04T09:25:58	2015-09-01	['United_States']
-pomt-12650	"The vast majority of marketplace enrollees have experienced no average premium hike at all."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/mar/23/barack-obama/obama-no-premium-hike-vast-majority-covered-govern/	On the day House Republicans had scheduled a vote to repeal and replace Obamacare, the man whose name became synonymous with the sweeping health care law touted its accomplishments. Marking the seventh anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama released a statement saying that after a century of talk, "we finally declared that in America, health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for everybody." "Reality continues to discredit the false claim that this law is in a ‘death spiral,’ because while it’s true that some premiums have risen, the vast majority of Marketplace enrollees have experienced no average premium hike at all," he wrote. We decided to vet the assertion that on average, the vast majority of people who signed up on a federal or state marketplaces saw no premium hike at all. Government numbers back that up, although the meaning of "vast majority" lies in the beholder. And it’s not as though premiums didn’t rise. They did, but most people purchasing health care through the marketplace didn’t feel it. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, about 12.2 million people signed up through a federal or state-based marketplace, also called an exchange. Of those, 7.8 million, about 64 percent, qualified for tax credits to reduce how much they personally would pay for coverage. Thanks to the tax credits, the average monthly bill for insurance stayed at $106 from 2016 to 2017, as the government chart below shows. The light blue represents the monthly premium paid by customers out-of-pocket. The darker blue represents the tax credit. "Premiums went up, but a lot of people were protected from that," said Katherine Hempstead, director of health insurance coverage at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropy and research group based in New Jersey. The Congressional Budget Office underscored that dynamic in its most recent report on health care legislation. The analysts wrote that many people "are largely insulated from increases in premiums because their out-of-pocket payments for premiums are based on a percentage of their income; the government pays the difference." On average, premiums rose about 32 percent. The government data on the actual premiums people pay isn’t 100 percent complete. Details on about 3 million people who signed up through state-based exchanges are missing. But Hempstead said in the past, people in both groups had similar experiences. "The only place you can get the subsidy is through the exchanges, so for both the federal and the state exchanges, most of the enrollment is from people who qualify for the subsidies," Hempstead said. It’s worth noting that as premiums rise, so does the price tag for Washington. The death spiral debate Obama was rebutting fears about a death spiral. That concern lies outside this fact-check, but we’ll summarize the arguments on both sides here. A death spiral takes place when costs rise so fast, healthy people begin opting to pay a tax penalty rather than pay for health care. With sicker people making up a larger percentage of those left in the health insurance pool, the average cost of care rises dramatically. White House press secretary Sean Spicer took on Obama’s statement during his daily press briefing. "Enrollment is nowhere near expectations and this year is actually declining," Spicer said. "Insurers are fleeing the exchanges, and one in three counties only has one insurer." A 2016 summary from Mark Farrah Associates, a private analytic service, reported that insurers who left the exchanges cited "significant losses on Marketplace business" due in part to lower numbers of healthy enrollees. As for enrollment overall, according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, sign-ups fell by about 4 percent from 2016 to 2017. Outside analysts such as Hempstead say that’s not enough to spell trouble. "Enrollments are largely holding steady," she said. "There is no death spiral." The Congressional Budget Office largely agreed. Comparing the Affordable Care Act with the Republican health care bill, the CBO wrote that "the nongroup market would probably be stable in most areas under either current law or the legislation." Our ruling Obama said that on average, the "vast majority" of people who have insurance through Obamacare experienced no premium increase. The actual numbers are that about 64 percent of enrollees saw their out-of-pocket premiums stay the same. So in terms of their personal experience, the former president is correct. However, premiums did rise. The reason many people didn’t feel it is because the government subsidies increased to insulate them. Obama was largely correct, but he brushed over the reality of rising premiums. We rate this claim Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2017-03-23T16:57:11	2017-03-23	['None']
-pomt-10962	On maintaining Medicaid expansion in Ohio as part of the Affordable Care Act	full flop	/ohio/statements/2018/jul/20/mike-dewine/ohio-republican-mike-dewine-changed-medicaid/	Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, the Republican running for governor, announced July 11 that he supports keeping Medicaid expansion, leading Democrats to accuse him of flip-flopping. "The DeWine-Husted Administration will need to keep extended Medicaid coverage for adults," DeWine said during a press conference where the Ohio State Medical Association PAC endorsed his campaign. "We will also reform the program. This is consistent with what we have been saying." DeWine’s Democratic rival Richard Cordray pushed back on DeWine’s statement that he had been consistent on Medicaid expansion. "This is such an enormous flip-flop that it's more likely a belly flop!" Cordray tweeted. About 700,000 Ohioans have Medicaid due to the expansion under the Affordable Care Act. We will examine DeWine’s statements on our Flip-O-Meter, which measures if politicians’ have flip-flopped and to what extent. Some voters see flip-flops as a sign of hypocrisy while others may view them as a politician evolving on an issue. We found that for years DeWine has opposed the Affordable Care Act, which included Medicaid expansion. At times he has been vague when pressed to give a yes-or-no answer on Medicaid expansion, and he’s repeated a talking point that he wanted to reform the program. In July, he came out in support of the expansion. DeWine on Medicaid expansion before the 2018 campaign On DeWine’s first day in office as attorney general in 2011, he authorized Ohio to join the multistate lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. His statement called the law a "huge federal overreach" and criticized the individual mandate. The lawsuit challenged a few core provisions of the law, including Medicaid expansion, which came with an implied threat that the government would withhold funding unless states complied. When DeWine spelled out what he thought were the sins of the law in an op-ed in the Washington Times in 2012, he included Medicaid expansion, although Ohio had not yet signed on to expansion. "Obamacare is, quite simply, the federal version of Romneycare," DeWine wrote the day after the lawsuit was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. "All of the problems that we have seen unfold in Massachusetts -- doctor shortages, Medicaid expansion and escalating health insurance costs -- are already starting to take place across the country as Obamacare is implemented." The Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate and ruled that states would have a choice about expanding Medicaid. The next year, Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich expanded Medicaid. In 2017, DeWine refused to take sides in the battle between Kasich and the GOP-controlled General Assembly about expansion. DeWine’s talking point about a third option on Medicaid When DeWine launched his campaign for governor in June 2017, he was asked at a forum if he would end Medicaid expansion. "I’m against Obamacare; this is part of Obamacare," he said. In June 2017 DeWine said in a TV interview that the Medicaid expansion "has done a lot of good for people who do have an addiction." DeWine said that "smart sheriffs" are helping inmates enroll in Medicaid when they leave jail. "We don’t want that to go away," he said. During the primary, DeWine avoided giving a yes-or-no answer to whether he would maintain Medicaid expansion although he said that it was "financially unsustainable." His talking point was that he would pursue a "third way," which included seeking a waiver from the federal government to change the program. Ohio already has a pending waiver with the federal government to add work requirements. DeWine announces support for Medicaid expansion On July 11, the Ohio State Medical Association announced that DeWine had gained it's backing in part because he agreed to keep the Medicaid expansion. At the press conference, DeWine emphasized that he wanted drug addicts to continue getting treatment through Medicaid expansion. He vowed to "keep extended Medicaid coverage for adults" as well as to reform the program to encourage able-bodied adults to work. DeWine said that "there is no change" to his Medicaid policy. "What we said all along is it had to be reformed," he said. Our conclusion When DeWine came out in support of Medicaid expansion, his critics accused him of flip-flopping. For years, DeWine has opposed the Affordable Care Act, which included Medicaid expansion. DeWine's position has evolved, though. During the primary he said that the program was financially unsustainable and needed reform, but he's also said that Medicaid expansion helped drug addicts pay for treatment. On July 11, DeWine announced that he would keep Medicaid expansion. The change of positions has happened over the course of several years, but it is a distinct change. We rate this a Full Flop. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Mike DeWine	None	None	None	2018-07-20T10:00:00	2018-07-11	['Ohio']
-faly-00036	Claim: Acid attack victims have been included in the list of people considered as disabled.	true	https://factly.in/rights-of-persons-with-disabilities-act/	Fact: Under the new act, acid attack victims are considered physically disabled. Hence the claim is TRUE. It should also be noted that ‘acid attack victims’ as a category was not included in the original bill introduced by the UPA.	None	None	None	None	Fact Checking Government Claims on the ‘Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act’	None	None	['None']
-snes-00369	A photograph shows Gareth Southgate wearing a waistcoat with the words "It's Coming Home" repeatedly written on it.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gareth-southgate-waistcoat/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Gareth Southgate Wear an ‘It’s Coming Home’ Waistcoat?’	6 July 2018	None	['None']
-snes-05847	Photographs show a suspect who was decapitated by a wrought-iron fence while fleeing from police.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wrought-iron-fence-decapitation/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Man Decapitated by Wrought Iron Fence	3 March 2003	None	['None']
-pomt-02469	"Oregon and the federal government now have more than one million acres of burnt land and millions of trees are being left to rot."	half-true	/oregon/statements/2014/feb/21/gordon-challstrom/do-oregon-and-federal-government-have-more-1-milli/	The timber wars of the 1980s and the lawsuits they spawned brought logging on Oregon’s public lands almost to a halt. Even now, annual timber harvests are a fraction of what they were several decades ago. The issue of how much timber should be cut has flared up again as Congress wrestles with a plan, unveiled by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that could double harvests on more than 2 million acres of federal forests across western Oregon. The Claim Medford businessman Gordon Challstrom, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, wants harvest levels far higher than they are now. In a recent website statement, Challstrom wrote, "Oregon and the federal government now have more than one million acres of burnt land and millions of trees being left to rot." One million acres of burnt land? Millions of trees left to rot? We took a look. The Analysis We called Challstrom and asked how he arrived at his figures. He directed us to an online map managed by the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center that lets people click on areas that have burned in recent years. A box pops up displaying the name of the fire, when it started and how many acres it consumed. Although Challstrom’s claim included no time frame, he told us he arrived at his figure by adding acreage totals of fires larger than 10,000 acres. Going back as far as initial salvage efforts in the wake of the giant Southern Oregon Biscuit Fire in 2002, he came up with 2.7 million acres. Since 51 percent of Oregon’s land is owned by the federal government, he said, he applied that to the 2.7 million acre number and ended up with the 1.4 million acres he’s characterizing as "burnt land." (The Congressional Research Service puts federal ownership of lands in the state at 53 percent.) Here’s how Challstrom got to his final 1 million figure: "I tried to be fair," he said. "I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they’ve logged on 400,000 acres, but I really doubt it." The assertion that "millions of trees" are being left to rot on that acreage, he added, "only stands to reason." We added up totals from the interactive map and arrived at about the same 2.7 million acre figure Challstrom did. But we had questions about the way he came up with his 1 million acre total for "burnt land." We called Isaiah Hirschfield, intelligence officer at the interagency coordination center, which tracks long-term fire information. He said Challstrom’s methodology assumed that fires would break out evenly across the state, thus allowing him to come up with his 1 million acre figure by dividing total lands burned by the acreage owned by the federal government. "That’s not an effective way to come up with that calculation," he said. Even so, Hirschfield added, Challstrom’s figure turns out to be in the ballpark. Citing agency statistics, he said an average of 250,000 acres have burned each year going back a decade. "Cumulatively," he said, "that’s 2.5 million acres, so he’s still pretty close." Hirschfield pointed out an important caveat -- a portion of those burns, including a couple very big ones, were on both publicly and privately owned rangeland east of the Cascades. So while those blazes charred a lot of grass, they didn’t touch many trees. Challstrom’s claim did say "more than" one million acres. And while areas that burned a decade ago are more than likely covered with new vegetation by now, according to experts we talked to, it’s still true that more than one million acres of land burned in Oregon during the combined 2012 and 2013 fire seasons, according to U.S. Forest Service statistics. Verifying the second part of the claim -- the "millions of trees left to rot" -- is more difficult. For additional perspective, we called Paul Barnum, executive director of the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, an agency established by the Oregon Legislature in 1991 to gather and provide information about forest management. Forests west of the Cascades average 200 to 400 trees per acre, he said, while their eastside counterparts have sometimes ended up crammed with as many as 4,000. That occurred, he said, because of historic fire-suppression efforts. Some forests are so overgrown that a spark can result in a catastrophic wildlife. "What’s true is that there never should have been that much biomass per acre in eastern Oregon," Barnum said. "With that noted, it could very well be true that there are millions of trees left in those areas. But without walking every acre, there is really no way of verifying that." John Bailey, silviculture and fire professor in Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, agreed. "This would be nearly impossible to check," he wrote in an email. "This analysis has been done for a few individual fires such as the much studied 2002 Biscuit Fire in southwest Oregon, but I don’t know anyone who has consolidated this data for all fires in the past decade." To arrive at a reasonable estimate, you would need to know not only the number of acres burned in each fire, but also how many trees per acre there were, what percent were killed in the fire and how much salvage logging was done, according to Bailey. The Ruling Challstrom, as part of his 2014 gubernatorial campaign, said Oregon, as a result of forest fires, has "more than one million acres of burnt land and millions of trees left to rot." The first part of the claim is easily verified by simply adding up total acres burned in forest fires over the past decade or so. The second part, according to two forestry experts, is impossible to pin down. As for Challstrom’s claim, part of it is accurate, even if he used some faulty analysis to arrive at it. The second part is nearly impossible to verify but, according to one expert "could very well be true." We rate Challstrom’s claim Half True. Return to OregonLive.com/politics to comment on this ruling.	None	Gordon Challstrom	None	None	None	2014-02-21T16:46:05	2014-01-15	['None']
-pomt-07713	Says Michelle Obama has 43 people on her staff; Nancy Reagan had just 3.	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/mar/04/glenn-beck/glenn-beck-says-first-lady-michelle-obama-has-43-h/	Glenn Beck rekindled a falsehood about the size of Michelle Obama's staff last week, comparing the first lady to Marie Antoinette, and citing her large staff as evidence that the Obamas are "out of control." On his radio program on Feb. 25, 2011, Beck asked a researcher to find out how many people are now on Michelle Obama's staff. Beck then immediately supplied his own estimate. "It's like 43," Beck said. And, Beck said, "They just hired a personal shopper who is going to coordinate all of her purchases and look for discounts if they're available." "Forty-three people!" Beck added. "I think Nancy Reagan may have been the one who had the most people on the staff. She had three. Three!" "The first lady's office needs 43 people? For what? These people are out of control. It is really Marie Antoinette." Allegations that Michelle Obama has an excessively large staff compared to other first ladies is nothing new. In 2009, FactCheck.org and Snopes.com debunked the claim circulated in a chain e-mail that Michelle Obama had an "unprecedented" number of staffers, with 22. Here, Beck has upped the alleged number of staffers to 43. And he claims that when Nancy Reagan was first lady, she had just three. We went first to the 2010 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff, the latest online data, and did a search for anyone with the words "first lady" in their title. That turned up 15 staffers. We also searched "social" and found three more on Michelle Obama's staff. But titles don't give the full picture. Myra Gutin, an expert on first ladies and politics at Rider University in New Jersey, said that as of 2009, Michelle Obama had 22 people on her staff. Gutin didn't have any more recent tallies, but she highly doubts it nearly doubled to the 43 cited by Beck. Catherine McCormick-Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Michelle Obama, told us via e-mail that Michelle Obama's staff is now closer to 25 people. How does that stack up? "First lady Michelle Obama’s staff is no different in size than that of her predecessor, Laura Bush -- around 25 people -- and is based on a similar staffing model," said McCormick-Lelyveld. "So suggestions that our staff is larger are wrong. While every first lady approaches the job differently, the responsibilities of the office of the first lady have grown over the years to include planning and hosting hundreds of events at the White House and across the city of D.C., planning and supporting domestic and foreign travel with and without President Obama, receiving, cataloging and responding to thousands of pieces of mail, and supporting the first lady’s active schedule in support of the President -- hence the staff size for both Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Obama." The size of a first lady's staff fluctuates year to year. First ladies typically have several staff members each handling correspondence, press, social engagements and projects. At 25, Michelle Obama's staff is similar in size to her immediate predecessors. According to an Associated Press story on October 6, 2009, Laura Bush had a staff of between 24 and 26 by the end of President George W. Bush's term in 2009, citing Anita McBride, Laura Bush's chief of staff. And according to the Clinton Presidential Library, the size of Hillary Rodham Clinton's staff fluctuated from 13 in October 1993 to 19 by March 2000, the AP story said. Beck singled out Nancy Reagan, and claimed she had just three employees on her staff. Our first stop to check that was the Ronald Reagan Library, where Archivist Kelly D. Barton forwarded us a list -- based on the internal Executive Office of the President phone books -- of all the full-time staffers who worked in the first lady's office. In all, that came to 53 employees. But they weren't all serving at once, of course. So we turned to Sheila Tate, vice chair of the Washington, D.C., communications firm Powell Tate, who was Nancy's Reagan's press secretary. By Tate's off-the-top-of-the-head count, there were 15 people on First Lady Nancy Reagan's staff. That includes four on the press team (including Tate); two in the projects office; two in the advance office; three in the social office; a personal secretary and her assistant; and the chief of staff and his assistant. There are other people who worked in the East Wing, Tate said, including a large social and calligraphy staff that has nothing to do with changes in administrations. Tate's not sure what jobs Beck counted to get his number for Nancy Reagan's staff (and our efforts to reach his show were unsuccessful), but by any measure, she said, the claim that Nancy Reagan had only three on her staff is "clearly wrong." Stacy A. Cordery, a history professor at Monmouth College who serves as bibliographer for the National First Ladies' Library in Ohio, said the role of first ladies has expanded over the decades, and so has the size of the staffs. "Edith Roosevelt hired the first social secretary, Isabelle Hagner," Cordery told us via e-mail. "Ever since 1901, first ladies have had assistance carrying out their duties--duties which are not defined in any job description nor laid out in any part of the Constitution. The first lady's correspondence is massive and her obligations as the 'hostess' of the White House have not decreased over time. Once first ladies took on causes (there were some before Eleanor Roosevelt, but she fundamentally changed Americans' expectations of the first lady) then their need for help increased. Modern first ladies like Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalyn Carter, Betty Ford, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan, have all used many more staff people than three." And Beck's comment that Michelle Obama "just hired a personal shopper" also is wrong. The claim appears to have its roots in a Feb. 21, 2011, Washington Post report that, "according to several people with knowledge of her White House arrangement," Chicago boutique owner Ikram Goldman's role as "shopper in chief" has been taken over by Michelle Obama's longtime personal assistant, Meredith Koop. "There has been no recent addition of a personal shopper," said McCormick-Lelyveld. "Like previous first ladies, Mrs. Obama has a personal aide who is part of the residence staff and who provides general support for the first lady, including purchasing clothes when necessary." So to summarize, Michelle Obama has a staff of 25, not 43 as Beck claimed. Nancy Reagan had a staff of about 15 (not 3, as Beck claimed). The size of Michelle Obama's staff is similar to that of her immediate predecessors. And she did not just hire a new personal shopper. In short, Beck's outrage is based on numbers that are wildly off the mark. We rate his claim Pants on Fire.	None	Glenn Beck	None	None	None	2011-03-04T09:12:59	2011-02-25	['Nancy_Reagan', 'Michelle_Obama']
-mpws-00026	For months after a rocky roll out of the federal and state health insurance exchanges, Democrats distanced themselves from the Affordable Care Act. Now, they’re using it to throw barbs at their Republican opponents. In Minnesota, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is criticizing 8th Congressional District Republican candidate Stewart Mills for saying he would scrap the law, including parts that both sides support. “Millionaire Stewart Mills III has taken thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the health insurance industry, and now he wants to put the insurance companies back in charge to deny care to people with-pre-existing conditions and kick kids off their parents’ plans,” a DCCC press release states. 	false	https://blogs.mprnews.org/capitol-view/2014/08/poligraph-dccc-mills-claim-half-wrong-half-right/	None	None	None	Catharine Richert	None	PoliGraph: DCCC Mills claim half wrong, half right	August 29, 2014, 2:00 PM	None	['Minnesota', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'United_States_Congress']
-goop-00069	Sacha Baron Cohen, Isla Fisher Living Separate Lives?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/sacha-baron-cohen-isla-fisher-marriage-problems-separate-lives/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Sacha Baron Cohen, Isla Fisher Living Separate Lives?	2:52 pm, October 29, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-01877	Second Degree Chemical Burns from Huggies Diapers	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/huggies-diaper-burns/	None	household	None	None	None	Second Degree Chemical Burns from Huggies Diapers	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-08741	"We spend more money on health care per capita in the United States than any other country in the world. Of the 30 developed countries in the world, we spend 2 1/2 times more than the average. Of the country that spends the second most per capita, Switzerland, we spend 175 percent more."	half-true	/texas/statements/2010/aug/31/david-dewhurst/lt-gov-david-dewhurst-says-united-states-spends-mo/	Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst opposes the health care overhaul carried into law by Democrats this spring, but he agrees that something needs to be done because "we spend more money on health care per capita in the United States than any other country in the world," Dewhurst said during an Aug. 25 meeting with the Austin American-Statesman editorial board. "Of the 30 developed countries in the world," he said, "we spend 2 1/2 times more than the average. Of the country that spends the second most per capita, Switzerland, we spend 175 percent more." Dewhurst didn't respond to our requests for back-up on his statement, which was similar to a remark he made to the Texas Tribune in May. Seeking authoritative international perspective, we turned to health statistics from the Organization for Economical Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group that represents 32 advanced, industrialized nations, mostly in Europe, Asia and North America. Though experts warned PolitiFact that there are variations from country to country in how statistics are reported, the OECD's data is widely considered the most reliable way to compare the U.S. to its international peers on a variety of economic and social metrics. We found a table comparing total health costs per capita of 31 OECD countries, plus three more — Estonia, Israel, Slovenia — that were awaiting admission to the OECD at the time the data was released, on June 29. (Slovenia has since made the cut.) The OECD's most recent figures, for 2006-2008 (the year varies by country), shows the U.S. spent the most: $7,538 per person. Norway had the second highest cost per person, at $5,003, followed by Switzerland ($4,627). Turkey spent the least — $767 per capita. The only other countries where per capita health care expenditures exceeded $4,000 were Luxembourg and Canada. This isn't a new No. 1 for the United States. We reviewed the OECD's statistics for the past two decades; the United States leads in spending each year. In 1990, we spent $2,810 per person, followed by Switzerland ($2,028) and Germany ($1,764). The OECD's data starts in 1960, when the United States was second in health care costs per capita at $148 to Switzerland's $166. As of late, the average health care cost per capita of all OECD countries: $3,000. So Dewhurst is correct that we spend 2 1/2 times more than the average per capita. However, the statistics suggest, Switzerland doesn't spend the second most per capita — Norway does. Another departure from Dewhurst's statement: we only spend about 50 percent more than Norway and 63 percent more than Switzerland, not 175 percent more, as Dewhurst says. Dewhurst was speaking off the cuff; perhaps he meant to say that we spend 175 percent of Switzerland's health care costs per capita, which translates into spending 75 percent more — much closer to the 63 percent figure. PolitiFact.com in Washington covered similar ground in March when it rated True former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's statement that "the lifespan of the average American is less than that of people in nations that spend far less" on health care. "To put it bluntly, we spend more and die sooner," Romney said. Recap: As far as we can tell — and keeping in mind that Dewhurst didn't respond to our queries for backup — he was spot-on in saying the United States spends more money on health care per capita than the rest of the world, and he's right that we spend two-and-a-half times more than the average cost of all the OECD countries. He erred in his Switzerland comparison. We rate his statement as Half True.	None	David Dewhurst	None	None	None	2010-08-31T06:00:00	2010-08-25	['United_States', 'Switzerland']
-pomt-02075	Cap and trade legislation "was originally a Republican idea."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2014/may/23/debbie-wasserman-schultz/cap-and-trade-legislation-was-originally-republica/	U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a GOP presidential contender, made waves about climate change in a May 11 interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on This Week. "I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it," Rubio said. "And I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it. Except it will destroy our economy." One of Florida’s other nationally watched politicians -- Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- criticized her fellow Floridian’s stance. After a May 13 speech at Daemen College in upstate New York, an audience member asked her how to get "Congress unstuck in stomping on science." Wasserman Schultz suggested that voters stop electing tea party-aligned politicians -- and then she turned her sights on Rubio for disagreeing with the scientific consensus that climate change is man-made. Wasserman Schultz, who represents parts of Broward and Miami-Dade counties, said rising sea levels and flooding will make part of her district uninhabitable in the future. She called for politicians to reach across the aisle in search of solutions, singling out a cap and trade plan as an area where the parties could agree. "That was originally a Republican idea. It was developed in the 1970s when the Clean Air Act was initially adopted." We decided to check Wasserman Schultz’s claim that cap and trade was originally a Republican idea. Cap and trade The idea of cap and trade is that the government sets a limit (the cap) on how much carbon individual companies -- typically electric utilities and manufacturers -- can emit. The government then issues permits to companies and allows them to buy and sell the permits as needed (the trade). If the policy works as planned, overall emissions decline, companies determine for themselves the best way to lower emissions, and the free market rewards those who lower emissions most effectively. Wasserman Schultz started the clock ticking in the 1970s. Her spokesman, Sean Bartlett, told PolitiFact Florida that "the 1977 Clean Air Act amendments were the first time federal law used the concept of offset mechanisms that ultimately became the ‘cap and trade’ systems." That law included precursor ideas, such as providing industry with flexibility to meet limits, rather than simply imposing controlling regulations, said Eric Pooley, a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund and author of The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan used a cap and trade system to phase out leaded gasoline, noted MIT economics professor Richard Schmalensee and Harvard Kennedy School government professor Robert Stavins. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush proposed the use of a cap and trade system to cut by half sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants and consequent acid rain, they wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed in 2010. "An initially resistant Democratic Congress overwhelmingly endorsed the proposal," the professors wrote. "The landmark Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 passed the Senate 89 to 10 and the House 401 to 25." Bush not only accepted the cap, but he sided with environmentalists who wanted a larger cut than his own advisers, according to Smithsonian Magazine, in a report that detailed how the Environmental Defense Fund worked with Bush’s White House to make cap and trade a reality. "George H. W. Bush does indeed deserve enormous credit for being the champion of the cap and trade program for sulfur dioxide, a major cause of acid rain," Pooley said. "That has led many over the years to refer to it as a Republican idea." But Pooley said that Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell -- a Democrat -- also deserves credit for leading the legislative charge that ultimately passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority. "So if pressed, I would call it a bipartisan idea that was championed by a Republican president," he told PolitiFact Florida. In 2005, the EPA under President George W. Bush issued the Clean Air Interstate Rule, which aimed to achieve "the largest reduction in air pollution in more than a decade" using cap and trade, wrote Stavins and Schmalensee. They noted the contributions under Reagan and both Bushes to argue that cap and trade should be embraced by Republicans as well as Democrats. "After all, these policies were innovations developed by conservatives in the Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations (and once strongly condemned by liberals)," they wrote. In 2003, McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, then a Democrat from Connecticut, introduced the "Climate Stewardship Act," which would have used a similar cap and trade approach to reduce carbon pollution linked to global warming. Versions of the bill were reintroduced in 2005 and 2007. That was the first time legislation was introduced to use cap and trade for carbon emissions, Pooley told PolitiFact. "The enormous economic costs of damage caused by air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions to the environment and human health are not factored into the price of power produced by fossil-fueled technologies," McCain said in a floor speech to mark the bill’s 2007 introduction. "Yet, it’s a cost that we all bear, too often in terms of ill-health and diminished quality of life." McCain’s 2007 version was co-sponsored by Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama. And both McCain and Obama had cap and trade programs in their presidential platforms. In June 2009, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed a cap and trade bill, by a razor-thin margin, 219-212. But the bill failed to survive in the Senate amid Republican opposition. In 2011, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has taken a firm stand against a cap and trade bill. "A full-blown fleecing of the middle class, it would raise electricity prices, increase gasoline prices, and ship American jobs to countries like China and India," wrote John Boehner, now the Speaker of the House, about the bill in June 2010. Our ruling Wasserman Schultz said that cap and trade legislation "was originally a Republican idea." Experts who have followed the history of the environmental policy focus on the fact that emissions trading to address acid rain became part of the Clean Air Act of 1990 under Bush. The legislation ultimately passed with bipartisan support under a Republican president. More recently, another prominent Republican -- McCain -- co-sponsored cap and trade legislation. Democrats did support cap and trade legislations at different points along the way. But we found a strong tradition of support from Republican presidents for cap and trade, which uses markets to try to reduce pollution. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Debbie Wasserman Schultz	None	None	None	2014-05-23T10:19:41	2014-05-13	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-14264	Says 80 journalists have been killed in Mexico in the last decade.	half-true	/texas/statements/2016/apr/08/jorge-ramos/jorge-ramos-echoes-count-80-journalists-killed-mex/	Before moderating the March 9, 2016 Washington Post-Univision Democratic presidential debate, journalist Jorge Ramos, a Univision news anchor who works out of Miami, met with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, to talk about "Take A Stand," his book recounting his experiences as a journalist. During the interview, Ramos commented on differences between being a reporter in the United States and Latin America. He noted the safety concerns of what it’s like to interview U.S. presidents versus presidents or dictators in Latin American countries. "When you have 80 journalists who have been killed in Mexico, for instance, in the last decade, yeah, you realize how lucky we are here in the United States in which you can go to the White House, talk to the president and go back to your house," Ramos said. "And then you can take a bike ride and go to the supermarket and no one is going to kill you. No one is going to do anything against you. That's a huge difference." It’s no secret: Mexico can be unsafe for journalists, including Americans. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists two cases of American journalists dying in Mexico in connection with their jobs. In 2006, Bradley Will, a freelance journalist, was shot while covering a protest. Before that, in 1998, San Antonio Express-News’ Mexico City correspondent Philip True was killed on a trail between remote villages while reporting on Huichol Indians. So, was Ramos right about the number of journalists lately felled in Mexico? That depends on who’s counting and if (or how) deaths are confirmed as work-connected. Ramos offers backup To our inquiry, Ramos said by phone that he mainly relied on nonprofits that gather such data such as the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which promotes press freedom as it tracks journalist deaths, and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, which works for press freedom and tallies journalist deaths. We shortly learned that pinning down deaths in Mexico as journalism-related can be slippery. For starters, a person who declined to give her full name on the Reporters Without Borders’ Latin America desk emailed a list of 52 journalists it says it confirmed as killed in Mexico from 2006 into 2016 in connection with their work. Then again, Emmanuel Colombié, the head of Reporters Without Borders’ Latin America desk, said in an email that the group has previously gotten to a count of 80 deaths by counting all journalists killed in Mexico -- including those whose deaths weren't proved as work-related. Meantime, a list posted by the Committee to Protect Journalists indicates 62 journalist killings in Mexico from March 9, 2006 through Feb. 20, 2016. However, the committee says only 24 deaths were confirmed as occurring because of the victim’s work as a journalist. In those cases, the group says, they are "reasonably certain that a journalist was murdered in direct reprisal for his or her work; was killed in crossfire during combat situations; or was killed while carrying out a dangerous assignment such as coverage of a street protest." The other 38 deaths had unconfirmed motives, the committee says, meaning "it is possible that a journalist was killed because of his or her work." Carlos Lauría, the group’s New York-based Americas program coordinator, said by phone its "motive confirmed" estimates are likely more conservative than others, due to the group’s vetting. "I think that the complexity of the crisis in Mexico is so profound," Lauría said. "There are so many factors involved in some of these cases." Lauria said some such factors include things like whether the journalist was only working as a journalist and not holding other jobs or participating in activities that could cause a threat to his or her safety, if the reporter was working on issues that would put him or her at risk. Ramos also pointed to articles he’d seen with numbers around 80. One, published by Univision on Dec. 23, 2012 , says 82 journalists have been killed in the country since 2005, citing the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH), Mexico’s national human rights commission. Others from CNN Mexico and El Universal, a newspaper in Mexico, both citing Reporters Without Borders, put the count at or over 80 – though we noticed these reported figures didn’t reflect the group’s lower tallies as of April 2016. Other analyses Our hunt for additional research yielded a couple lists delivering a total close to what Ramos declared. But counts vary. To get started, we turned to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas where Teresa Mioli guided us to recommended organizations offering counts suggesting 60 to 89 journalists had been killed in Mexico since 2006. By email, Mioli advised that variations in counts reflect different filters used by groups to classify deaths. "For example," Mioli wrote, "some organizations only count journalists who were killed because of their work, while others also include journalists killed during protests or in combat. Some also count journalists who are in car accidents on their way to cover a story or who are killed while at work. "The numbers may also vary," Mioli wrote, "because one organization only counts journalists, while another counts all media workers. And finally, sometimes it's difficult to determine if the journalist was killed because of their investigations or opinions, for a reason unrelated to their work or if they are a random victim of a crime, especially in countries where violence is more rampant." Generally, it’s worth noting, the definition of journalist includes reporters, broadcasters, editors, photographers and others involved in news-gathering: On the high end, the International Federation of Journalists, a group that "monitors press freedom violations" and releases an annual report on journalists and media staff killed, says there were 89 journalist deaths in Mexico from March 9, 2006 through Feb. 9, 2016, as well as the 2007 death of a driver. The group says it looks at cases that "include targeted killings, crossfire lethal incidents as well as work-related accidents which result in loss of life." Artículo 19 Mexico, a group that says it promotes and defends freedom of expression, pointed us to its own infographic identifying 76 journalists killed in Mexico, possibly in connection with their work, from January 6, 2006 through Feb. 20, 2016. Single-year highs of 10 were killed in both 2006 and 2008 with fewer felled in other years; as few as three were taken down in 2007 and the first part of 2016, according to the graphic. Sandra Patargo, deputy officer of the Protection Program of Artículo 19 Mexico, explained by phone that the group requires at least three sources – such as a family member, a boss or coworkers – to confirm a death was related to the victim's work as a journalist. The International Press Institute, a network of global media professionals, produces a yearly "Death Watch" of journalists "deliberately targeted because of their profession." We sifted the lists and counted 62 deaths of journalists in Mexico from March 9, 2006 through May 2, 2015, the latest date shown for Mexico. UNESCO identifies 60 journalists killed from March 14, 2006 through Feb. 20, 2016 when, it says, a radio "presenter," Moisés Dagdug Lutzow, was killed. Source of Tally Journalists Killed in Mexico International Federation of Journalists 89 March 9, 2006 to Feb. 9, 2016 Artículo 19 Mexico 76 Jan. 6, 2006 to Feb. 20, 2016 International Press Institute 62 March 9, 2006 to May 2, 2015 UNESCO 60 March 14, 2006 to Feb. 20, 2016 Committee to Protect Journalists (Death related to job confirmed) 24 Oct. 27, 2006 to Jan. 21, 2016 Committee to Protect Journalists (Death related to job unconfirmed) 38 March 9, 2006 to Feb. 20, 2016 Reporters Without Borders (Death related to job confirmed) 52 March 9, 2006 to Feb. 20, 2016 SOURCES: Emails, telephone interviews and lists and reports posted online (received, conducted and accessed by PolitiFact Texas March-April 2016) Merging lists Next, we made a run at merging the lists, bringing together every name to find there may have been more than 100 journalists killed in Mexico from 2006 into the first part of 2016. We’d caution, though, that we didn’t judge how many died in connection with their work. We lack that expertise. When we circled back to Ramos, he agreed some of the published counts didn’t match his declared "80." We noted that all told, there may be considerably fewer journalist deaths over the decade confirmed as work-related. By email, Ramos replied: "The fact is that Mexico is an incredibly dangerous country to be a journalist." Whatever the exact count, we’re not discounting any of the enumerated deaths. A little perspective: According to CPJ, three journalists were killed in the U.S. from 2006 through 2015 in connection with their work. Our ruling Ramos, expressing safety concerns about Mexico, said 80 journalists were killed there in the last decade. Our merger of lists from watchdog groups suggests that more than 100 people connected to journalism (not all of them journalists) died in the country from 2006 into 2016. But Ramos was clearly speaking to journalists killed at, or due to, their work. Apply that filter and the count diminishes to as few as 24 deaths confirmed as related to reporting work though we also gathered counts of 52 to 89, perhaps an indication different groups take considerably different approaches. No doubt, journalists in Mexico can face peril. But a decade-long count of killings is not as straightforward as Ramos’ figure would suggest. We rate his statement Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Jorge Ramos	None	None	None	2016-04-08T18:53:42	2016-03-09	['Mexico']
-goop-02871	Sandra Bullock Leaving Hollywood, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/sandra-bullock-leaving-hollywood-retiring-quitting-moving/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Sandra Bullock NOT Leaving Hollywood, Despite Report	3:56 pm, April 12, 2017	None	['Sandra_Bullock', 'Cinema_of_the_United_Kingdom']
-pomt-09870	"The John McCain Twitter account has more than 1.1 million followers. The official White House Twitter account has only about 830,000."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/04/john-king/cnns-king-doesnt-provide-full-count-obama-twitter-/	Flash back to the 2008 campaign and you might recall a technology gap between Barack Obama and John McCain. Obama was portrayed as the youthful candidate of change whose campaign harnessed the Internet in ways no candidate had before. McCain was the senior statesman, a veteran senator and former POW . . . but not someone who was checking his BlackBerry 24/7. The Obama campaign poked fun at McCain with an ad titled "1982" that portrayed him as an out-of-touch old guy. "Things have changed in the last 26 years. But McCain hasn't," the announcer said as the screen flashed images flash of a record player and a Rubik's Cube. "He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer, can't send an e-mail," the announcer said. We rated that claim Mostly True because it was based on McCain's comments in an interview with journalist Mike Allen. So imagine our surprise when we heard John King of CNN say in an interview with McCain that the Arizona Republican actually has more Twitter followers than the Obama White House. Here's the exchange: KING: "I'll close with this one. The John McCain Twitter account has more than 1.1 million followers. The official White House Twitter account has only about 830,000 as of last count. Is it time to replace the Electoral College with the Twitter count?" MCCAIN: "It is a phenomenal way of communicating." We checked the Twitter pages and found King is correct about those counts. McCain's page, @SenJohnMcCain (A recent tweet: "Fighting to remove two more pork barrel projects totaling $24.5 million - we will probably lose, again, because it's business as usual in DC") had 1,128,161 followers. The White House account, @whitehouse , had 860,835 (Recent tweet: "Don't believe everything you see on the web about health insurance reform . . . "). But there's a significant caveat to King's statement: Obama has a second Twitter account that was created during the campaign and is now handled by the Democratic National Committee. That one, @barackobama , had 1,902,667 followers. So add them together and Obama has nearly triple McCain's followers. One of King's producers correctly noted the caveat in an article on the CNN Web site, but King did not mention it during the interview. So King is correct with his claim that McCain beats the official White House Twitter account, but viewers might be misled to think that's the total count for Obama when in fact it's just one of his two accounts. So we'll take King down a notch and give him a Mostly True.	None	John King	None	None	None	2009-08-04T17:29:57	2009-08-02	['None']
-pomt-02512	"Six people in Florida die as a result of (not expanding Medicaid) every day."	half-true	/florida/statements/2014/feb/12/charlie-crist/charlie-crist-says-six-floridians-die-day-due-lack/	Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, now running for his old position as a Democrat, has attacked Republican Gov. Rick Scott for his tepid support for Medicaid expansion last year. Scott had said he would support it, but he didn’t lobby for it, and ultimately the state Legislature rejected the expansion. In a Feb. 7 interview on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown, Crist said that means "about 1 million of my fellow Floridians are not getting health care today, and I’m told by my friends at (the Service Employees International Union) that means that six people in Florida die as a result of that every day." Is Crist’s diagnosis correct? Do six Floridians die a day because the Legislature rejected Medicaid expansion? The Health Affairs study Crist’s claim comes from a study released in late January on the blog of the health-policy journal Health Affairs. It was authored by researchers from Harvard University and the City University of New York. The researchers looked at states that had opted out of Medicaid expansion, including Florida, where about 1.27 million people would have been eligible. Researchers then used prior studies about the effects of expanding insurance to estimate a low-end number and a high-end number of deaths for each state that didn’t expand Medicaid. In Florida, the study concluded, the number of deaths would range from 1,158 to 2,221. The only state with more projected deaths was Texas. Crist arrived at his six-deaths-a-day figure for Florida by using the high end of the range cited in the study -- 2,221 deaths divided by 365 days a year works out to six deaths a day. If he had used the low-end figure, it would have worked out to three deaths per day. So what were the underlying studies? They were: • The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a comparison of about 6,000 patients who got a slot in a 2008 Medicaid expansion and about 6,000 who didn’t. The study tracked factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, depression, and out-of-pocket medical spending. (PolitiFact has previously written about the mixed results of the health outcomes found in the Oregon study.) • A study by Harvard researchers Benjamin D. Sommers and Katherine Baicker compared three states that expanded Medicaid -- New York, Maine and Arizona -- with neighboring states that didn’t expand it. This is what the Harvard/CUNY researchers used to calculate their high estimate of deaths and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2012. The sample consisted of adults who were observed five years before and after the expansions, from 1997 through 2007. • A study by Harvard researchers about health insurance and deaths. This produced the low-deaths estimate. The study was published in 2009 in the American Journal of Public Health; it followed indivduals over 16 years. (Two of the authors of this study are also authors of the new Harvard/CUNY study.) The Harvard/CUNY study arrived at the death figures by looking at the number of individuals with depression, the number of patients on diabetic medications, the number of women who had a mammogram or pap smear in the past year and the number of people who had catastrophic medical expenses in the past year. We interviewed two of the authors of the study, including Harvard professor Danny McCormick. The lack of Medicaid expansion will mean that patients nationwide won’t get certain diagnostic tests or take certain medications. "Cumulatively, that amounts to vast numbers of deaths," McCormick said. We asked McCormick how researchers can know that the differences in the death rates between the Medicaid expansion states and the states that didn’t expand were as a result of Medicaid. "We don’t know absolutely because we didn’t do a randomized control trial with long-term followup on millions of people," McCormick said. "For $10 billion we could do that study." Experts weigh in on study We asked a variety of health policy experts their opinion about Crist’s claim. Many experts told PolitiFact that denying Medicaid to poor Floridians will harm their health. But placing a precise figure as to how many will die per day, they added, is difficult. "There is strong consensus in the public health community that this is a very harmful policy," said Harold Pollack, who told PolitiFact he is a "liberal health policy wonk" at the University of Chicago. However "the most difficult aspect of that policy to investigate is its effect on mortality." Pollack said Crist is on solid ground to point out that the lack of Medicaid expansion causes serious harm. However, "I personally believe that these mortality estimates were on the high side of an inherently difficult calculation." Pollack pointed to a 2009 study by Richard Kronick, then a University of California San Diego medical professor who later went to work for the Department of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration. His study concluded that the risk of mortality is no different for uninsured respondents than those covered by employer-sponsored group insurance. Uninsured individuals can still get some health care, but they use fewer services than the insured, which increases their risk, said Jonathan Oberlander, who studies health care politics and policy at the University of North Carolina. "There are different estimates in the literature of how much uninsurance increases mortality (and at least one significant study that doesn’t confirm that claim)," Oberlander told PolitiFact. "But in general I’d say that former Gov. Crist is on solid ground in saying that Florida's decision to not expand Medicaid could lead to more deaths from uninsured Floridians, which could have been reduced if the state expands Medicaid. However, getting an exact number is difficult. There are estimates, and the Health Affairs study is just one estimate." Some of the criticisms we heard focused on shortcomings of the underlying studies. George Washington University professor Leighton Ku said that the Sommers/Baicker study looking at the mortality in a few states was "relatively rigorous" but warned that it came with caveats. The authors wrote acknowledged that it may not be possible to generalize its findings to other states. Also the study states that it "cannot definitively show causality." "It makes sense to believe that giving low-income people Medicaid health insurance coverage will lead to improved health access and improved health and could eventually reduce mortality," Ku told PolitiFact in an email. "But it is important to recognize that it might take a number of years before such an effect is realized." Ku said that the new Medicaid death study "is somewhat speculative, but plausible. It did not go through the more rigorous peer review that would normally be required to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. I think there is pretty good evidence that Medicaid saves lives, but how many and how long it takes is a little harder to say." Other scholars are more critical of the study. Duke University professor Chris Conover, an adjunct scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the study of three states only found a statistically significant decrease in mortality in New York and that the New York benefits are more generous than most states. The study, he said, doesn’t prove that the reasons for the differences between mortality in New York (which expanded Medicaid) and Pennsylvania (which didn’t) result from differing approaches to expanding Medicaid. "If people are willing to overlook the study’s clear methodological limitations to claim it ‘proves’ Medicaid saved lives in New York, then they have to be prepared to concede that Maine and Arizona’s Medicaid programs evidently had no impact on mortality," Conover wrote in his blog. Baicker, author of one of the underlying studies, said that the new study is "a blog post (rather than a refereed article), so I really can't speak to the quality of methods they use." "The point of most studies like this is to take estimates of the effect of a particular program and forecast what would happen to a population overall based on those estimates," Baicker said. "All such estimates come with uncertainty, and don't point to the specific individuals or, for example, specific times of death." Our ruling Crist said that Florida’s decision not to expand Medicaid means that "six people in Florida die as a result of that every day." The statistic is based on a recent study, but experts note a few caveats. First, Crist used the study’s high-end figure; using the low-end figure cuts the number of deaths to three a day. Second, experts caution about uncertainties about the studies upon which the new study was based. And third, while many experts agree that it’s plausible to assume that the lack of Medicaid coverage could lead to deaths, they were careful to add that it is difficult to pinpoint a number as precise as the one Crist offered. On balance, we rate this claim Half True.	None	Charlie Crist	None	None	None	2014-02-12T11:50:00	2014-02-07	['None']
-snes-01096	A 400-pound woman sued a Paris zoo after an escaped hippo tried to rape her.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/400-pound-woman-sue-paris-zoo-escaped-hippo-tried-rape/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did a Woman Sue a Paris Zoo After an Escaped Hippo Tried to Rape Her?	30 January 2018	None	['Paris']
-pomt-05759	"We have 395 inmates pushed into triple-bunked cells intended for two inmates and bunked in classrooms and areas supposed to be designated for inmate labor."	false	/oregon/statements/2012/mar/01/ken-allen/are-there-395-oregon-prisoners-triple-bunked-cells/	Oregon’s budget writers tossed around the idea of closing the Santiam Correctional Institution south of Salem to balance the budget. State leaders agreed to leave the prison alone, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fact check a statement made by labor leader Ken Allen in a guest column submitted to The Oregonian. Allen is executive director of Oregon Council 75 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the union that represents most corrections employees. He said closing the prison would send 440 minimum-security inmates to other prisons, overcrowding an already overcrowded situation. "We have 395 inmates pushed into triple-bunked cells intended for two inmates and bunked in classrooms and areas supposed to be designated for inmate labor," he wrote. "We have units that were designated for 80 inmates with 120 inmates, with only one corrections officer supervising these inmates. We have units with blind spots, including no sightline to the bathroom, with only one corrections officer supervising 80 to 100 inmates." Oh wow. That sounded pretty dire. Was Allen being alarmist? Or are Oregon’s prisons that stuffed? There are lots of details in the column, but we zeroed in on the 395-inmate figure: Are there 395 inmates pushed into triple-bunked cells intended for two people and bunked in classrooms or work spaces? The Department of Corrections confirmed there are 395 emergency beds currently in use, but the beds are not in standard sized cells meant for two people. Also, those beds are not currently in classroom or work areas, although there were plans to do just that should Santiam close. "We do not put three inmates into the standard-sized cell," said Jennifer Black, a spokeswoman for the agency. We asked Corrections to break down the location of the 395 beds, and in the process, we learned quite a bit about prison housing in Oregon. Inmates are housed in cells or in open sleeping areas much like camp. A standard-sized cell is about 8 feet by 10 feet, or 80 square feet, and designed to hold two inmates. Mill Creek: There are 50 emergency beds here, 25 each added to two large dorms. Columbia River: There are 40 emergency beds, added to different dorm housing units. Snake River: There are 80 emergency beds scattered among minimum-security and medium-security open dorm rooms. Deer Ridge: There are 116 emergency beds, divided among four minimum-security dorm units. Each unit used to hold 108 beds; now each unit holds 137 beds. Eastern Oregon: There are 52 emergency beds, with roughly half in open dorm rooms. The individual rooms at this former mental health facility are larger, which is why you can squeeze in more beds. Eight individual rooms that are 7 feet by 19 feet, or 133 square feet, got a third bed. Eight more rooms that are 7 feet by 24 feet, or 168 square feet, each received two extra beds. Coffee Creek: There are emergency 57 beds, added to three minimum-custody open dorm areas. So that adds up to 395 beds. Nathan Allen, budget and planning administrator for the agency, said he did not know of any of those beds in current classroom or work areas, although such spaces have been converted in the past into housing units. "It’s inaccurate because none of the 395 meet that picture, that scenario," said Guy Hall, administrator of the Office of Population Management. Next, we turned to AFSCME. Tim Woolery is the union’s staff representative for Corrections. Before that, he was a Corrections employee for 18 years and in that time has seen cots lined up in unimaginable spots when the population ran high. Woolery said they can’t add any more beds without compromising security or safety. "We’re at the precipice." Still -- and this is important -- Woolery acknowledged that he doesn’t know where the 395 beds are located. Don Loving, spokesman for AFSCME, said he doesn’t know how else to prove the case other than what they’ve seen themselves or what they’ve been told by officers. "It is hard for us to ‘prove’ some things because the DOC is never going to publicly admit anything that contradicts its official position," Loving said. Are there safety issues? Yes. Adding bunks to units could interfere with the line of sight for guards. Has Corrections housed inmates in work areas in the past and could it in the future? Yes. Nathan Allen said that the next wave of emergency beds could use classroom space at one of the prisons. Had Santiam closed, one of the options was to put beds into a recreation area at Deer Ridge. At Two Rivers, there is an 88-bed unit in a space that could have been used for work training. The statement gives the impression that trios of inmates are crammed into tiny cells. That is not true. Allen states that the 395 inmates have spilled into work areas and classroom space. That also is not true, with respect to this batch of 395 beds. We give Ken Allen and AFSCME credit on the broader issue of inmate housing. Work areas have been converted into housing in the past. The closure of Santiam would have prompted more conversions. There may be more teaching and work space converted to housing in the future. And a handful of beds -- 24 -- were added to rooms that typically house two inmates. But none of those reasons mitigate the fact that those 395 beds are not located in work areas, and the small number of third and fourth beds are not in cells designed to hold only two people. We rate the statement False.	None	Ken Allen	None	None	None	2012-03-01T03:00:00	2012-02-16	['None']
-pomt-09510	In the stimulus, "$15 million dollars went to 'build a bigger, better airport' for the town of Ouzinkie, Alaska, population 165."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/19/john-boehner/boehner-claims-15-million-stimulus-going-alaskan-a/	In an address on the anniversary of the economic stimulus, President Barack Obama boasted that despite the massive and rapid spending in the $862 billion package, you're not hearing about money being misspent. "I was still concerned -- Joe (Biden) and I were just talking in the back -- when this thing passed we said $787 billion -- somewhere there’s going to be some story of some money that ended up being misspent; $787 billion spent out over 18 months, that's a lot -- that's a lot of money," Obama said. "And it is a testimony to Vice President Biden and his team that, as Joe puts it, the dog, so far at least, hasn't barked." On the same day Obama made his speech, House Republican Leader John Boehner issued a press release saying the stimulus is "chock-full of wasteful government spending." And he attached a list of 19 "real world" examples. We looked at several of the items on this list to see if they were as billed. Here, we will examine the claim that "$15 million (in stimulus) dollars went to 'build a bigger, better airport' for the town of Ouzinkie, Alaska, population 165." This project landed in the national spotlight when it was singled out in a CBS Evening News report on July 13, 2009. "That's roughly $90,000 dollars per resident," the report said. "Consider that Los Angeles International doesn't have the money to install critical taxiway warning lights," the CBS report states. "And a third of the nation's largest airports -- 11 of the 30 biggest, handling over one-fourth of the nation's passenger traffic -- have substandard safety areas for when planes veer off the runway." A lengthier story three days later in the Kodiak (Alaska) Daily Mirror included some defense of the project. To put the project in perspective, some locals said, you have to understand Ouzinkie, and the importance of air travel. Ouzinkie is a small, island village peopled predominantly by Native Alaskans called Alutiiq. Or as ProPublica.org put it in an article titled Tiny Airports Take Off With Stimulus: "The village of Ouzinkie is one of the remotest outposts in the United States — home to a mere 165 people on an island off another island off the coast of Alaska. There are no stores, no gas stations and no stoplights." Because of its remoteness, villagers depend on its airport as a lifeline for mail, medical evacuations and supplies. The location of the existing airport, local officials told the Kodiak Daily Mirror, is exposed to fierce crosswinds that often make it impossible for planes to take off and land, and the site does not meet FAA-mandated runway length. The new project includes a runway, taxiway, airport lights, a snow removal equipment building and 2 miles of access road. "I’m sorry the airport has to cost so much, but essential services are essential air services," Ouzinkie Vice Mayor Tom Quick told the Kodiak Daily Mirror. "They are essential, whether you’re talking about five people or 5,000." Quick also said planes have been much more convenient in transporting the dead, who otherwise were transported via skiff. "I feel this is very necessary in case somebody needs to get a medevac out," added Jill Boskofsky, vice president of the Ouzinkie Tribal Council and environmental director. "I feel it's for the safety of our community." In an opinion piece for the Anchorage Press, Krestia DeGeorge called the CBS report "sensationalizing" and told people to "quit picking on Ouzinkie." Airports in Alaska are a more important part of the basic transportation system than they are elsewhere, she wrote, and, "The point is that we should think carefully about what’s really involved before criticizing something. ... Otherwise (things) such as Ouzinkie’s lifeline will continue to be someone else’s taxpayer waste." On this one, Boehner has his facts straight. It's worth noting that the one-sentence synopsis of the project leaves out important contextual information, such as how important a lifeline an airport is to this small island community. But Boehner is right. And so we rule his statement True.	None	John Boehner	None	None	None	2010-02-19T17:36:57	2010-02-19	['Alaska']
-goop-02766	Rihanna Pregnant With Drake Or Chris Brown’s Baby, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/rihanna-pregnant-drake-chris-brown-baby/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Rihanna NOT Pregnant With Drake Or Chris Brown’s Baby, Despite Speculation	3:00 pm, May 29, 2017	None	['Chris_Brown', 'Rihanna', 'Drake_(rapper)']
-snes-05694	Account reports instances of customers being cheated by malfunctioning gas pumps.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cheating-at-the-gas-pump/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Cheating at the Gas Pump	4 May 2008	None	['None']
-snes-00636	Packaged vegetables from Mann Packing are being recalled due to concerns about listeria.	outdated	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mann-packaged-vegetable-recall/	None	Food	None	David Mikkelson	None	Does a Nationwide Listeria Outbreak Affect Vegetables from Walmart, Safeway, and Trader Joe’s?	8 May 2018	None	['None']
-abbc-00024	On June 8, Labor released its economic policy for the election, which it calls the "10 Year Plan for Australia's Economy".	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-24/fact-check-labors-economic-plan/7512106	Mr Bowen is wrong. History shows that since the defeat of the Liberal-National opposition led by John Hewson in 1993, the trend has been for oppositions to provide ever decreasing levels of detail in their pre-election policies. In 2016, Labor continues that trend. Labor's document, the "10 Year Plan for Australia's Economy", has only around 15 pages of policy content. Even taking into account Labor's separately released policies on the areas touched on by the document, such as those on education, negative gearing and tax, Labor's plan is not in the same league as Mr Hewson's notoriously detailed Fightback! plan from the 1993 election, which spanned around 650 pages (not including the other opposition election policies). Labor has produced an attractively designed booklet about its economic intentions for government but however you look at it, its "10 Year Plan on the Economy" is not the most comprehensive economic plan by historical standards.	['budget', 'economic-trends', 'alp', 'chris-bowen', 'australia']	None	None	['budget', 'economic-trends', 'alp', 'chris-bowen', 'australia']	Fact check: Is Labor's economic plan the most comprehensive in living memory?	Thu 23 Jun 2016, 11:23pm	None	['Australia', 'Australian_Labor_Party']
-pomt-05471	"President Obama's suggested reduction in spending for next year: $0."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/apr/20/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-barack-obamas-suggested-reduction/	In an effort to relate the federal budget to a typical family’s budget, the Mitt Romney presidential campaign posted an explanatory graphic on April 17, 2012. It concludes with this claim "President Obama's suggested reduction in spending for next year: $0." We decided to see whether that’s accurate. As its source, the graphic pointed to Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2013. This document, produced annually, is usually considered an opening volley rather than a final set of numbers, particularly when the president and Congress are controlled by different parties. Congress typically gives little deference to the president’s budget request. Still, as a summary of the president’s fiscal priorities, it’s reasonable for Romney to use it in the way it did. The question is whether Obama did propose no net reduction in spending for 2013 compared to 2012. Indeed, Romney has a point. According to Obama’s proposal, overall federal outlays would increase from $3.796 trillion in fiscal year 2012 to $3.803 trillion in fiscal 2013. That’s an increase -- though a modest one. It’s a rise of two-tenths of 1 percent of all federal outlays, which is likely to fall well short of the inflation rate. But an important detail is missing: Obama doesn't have much control over the parts of the budget that are increasing -- the "mandatory spending" and net interest. Mandatory spending includes entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Their annual costs are determined by automatic formulas rather than congressional appropriations. Meanwhile, net interest is what the nation pays on its outstanding debt. Collectively, mandatory spending and net interest account for about 65 percent of federal outlays in 2012. The remaining 35 percent is considered discretionary spending -- funds that are appropriated by Congress and signed by the president on an annual basis. This part of the budget includes all the other functions of government that aren’t determined by a formula. Under the president’s budget, mandatory spending plus net interest -- the costs that are largely set by formula and debt commitments -- are poised to rise from $2.477 trillion to $2.541 trillion between 2012 and 2013, an increase of about 2.5 percent. But discretionary spending -- again, the part he has more control over -- would actually decline from $1.319 trillion to $1.261 trillion, a drop of 4.3 percent. So by this measure, Obama is suggesting cuts in his budget proposal. Our ruling Romney claims that the president’s "suggested reduction in spending for next year" is zero. Romney's claim ignores the detail that Obama proposed cuts in the discretionary portion of the budget, which he has more control over. The increases come from mandatory spending and net interest. Still, Obama could propose cuts in mandatory spending if he wanted. The statement is accurate but needs clarification. We rate it Mostly True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-04-20T17:42:50	2012-04-17	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-14468	"Since (welfare reform) was signed into law, the number of families living in extreme poverty has more than doubled."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/02/bernie-sanders/sanders-welfare-reform-more-doubled-extreme-povert/	One thing that sets Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders apart from opponent Hillary Clinton is that he opposed a 1996 law known widely as welfare reform. The Vermont senator said the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which both Democratic President Bill Clinton and a bipartisan Congress supported, contributed to poverty today. "What welfare reform did, in my view, was go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country," Sanders said at a Feb. 24 press conference in South Carolina. "During that time, I spoke out against so-called welfare reform because I thought it was scapegoating people who were helpless, people who were very, very vulnerable. Secretary Clinton at that time had a very different position on welfare reform. ... Now what happened as a result of that so-called welfare reform bill? Since legislation was signed into law, the number of families living in extreme poverty has more than doubled from 636,000 to 1.6 million." We wondered if the number of families living in extreme poverty — defined as households living on less than $2 in cash per person per day — has more than doubled, and we also wanted to know if the 1996 legislation caused that trend. We found that the best estimates show Sanders’ numbers are right on, and there is some well-regarded research that ties welfare reform to the rise in extreme poverty. The numbers Sanders’ campaign pointed us to figures from the Census’ Survey of Income and Program Participation, which researchers Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer examined in their 2015 book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. When welfare reform passed in 1996, there were about 636,000 American households living on $2 per person per day or less. As of mid 2013, that figure has more than doubled, to about 1.5 million such households, with about 3 million children living in these circumstances. That’s a 130 percent growth in families in extreme poverty, compared to just about 20 percent growth in the population as a whole. This data has some shortcomings, acknowledged by Edin and Shaefer, professors at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan, respectively. For example, there are concerns that survey respondents misreport how much cash assistance they receive from the government, which could mean that some of these households actually have cash income higher than $2 a day. Additionally, SIPP only counts cash income, so it doesn’t capture whether these families receive in-kind government benefits like food stamps, Medicaid, child day care or subsidized housing. Even if the SIPP data isn’t perfect, Edin and Shaefer found that the general trend was consistent with corresponding data, such as an increase in those reporting zero income among people receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known colloquially as SNAP or food stamps. In any case, by a reasonable measure, Sanders’ figures are correct. The causes What was welfare reform? The bipartisan legislation sought to encourage the poor to join the workforce and stay there. It responded to a sense that welfare recipients were choosing government cash over getting a job. The law put a five-year lifetime limit on receiving welfare cash, established as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and it established workforce participation requirements. The previous program had no such requirements. Welfare reform, combined with earned income tax credit expansions and a booming economy, benefited the working poor, experts told us. But the instability of the low-wage market revealed the program to be an ineffective safety net for people who weren't able to find and keep work, Edin and Shaefer found. They aren’t able to maintain a stable earned income, and as a result they cannot reap the benefits of a work-based safety net and the earned income tax credit. "We believe a lot of families are better off as a result of the package of changes made during the 1990s, in particular the EITC," Shaefer told PolitiFact. "Those who are able to maintain employment, buffer against the instability, receive more assistance than ever before. It’s those at the very bottom that we argue are doing worse." Just 23 out of every 100 people living in poverty receive welfare cash, as of 2014, and that ratio has dropped nearly every year since 1996 when it was 68 out of 100, according to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. People living in extreme poverty might not be taking advantage of welfare cash benefits because of the stigma, lack of confidence in the program, or the work requirements and time limits, contributing to some families’ extremely low cash income. Welfare reform put TANF administration into the hands of the states in the form of block grants. This means that states can use the funding for cash benefits or for administering programs intended to increase employment, like childcare or job training. But there is wide variation between the states as a result. For example, in 2013, 78 out of 100 impoverished families in Vermont received cash benefits, but just 4 out of 100 did in Louisiana. Shaefer said some states use these block grants to pay for programs they would have paid for absent the federal funds, leading to less cash in the hands of individuals. Certain states and the 1996 legislation for structuring welfare in such a way are both responsible for these state-level shortcomings, said Ron Haskins, who was involved in crafting welfare reform and is now codirector of the Brookings Center on Children and Families. There are other factors affecting this upward trend in extreme poverty, including broader economic trends affecting low-wage employment and housing stability, Edin and Schaefer note. But there’s no doubt that welfare reform played a role. "I think welfare reform was one major factor driving the increase in extreme poverty and probably the biggest single factor, although it’s harder to be sure about the second claim," said Christopher Jencks, professor of social policy at Harvard University. Though acknowledging extremely poor people who are unable to maintain a job would have been better off under the pre-reform system, Haskins said Sanders is ignoring all the positive benefits of welfare reform. For example, poverty among single-mother households, which were most affected by by welfare reform, is lower than what it was prior to welfare reform, even during the Great Recession. "Sanders is onto something, but he only told half the story," Haskins said. Our ruling Sanders said, "Since (welfare reform) was signed into law, the number of families living in extreme poverty has more than doubled." Sanders is talking about a very specific and small percentage of American households living on less than $2 cash income per person per day. That figure has more than doubled from 636,000 to 1.5 million since 1996 when Bill Clinton signed welfare reform. The data isn’t a perfect capture of how much these people receive in government benefits, and only so much blame can be placed on welfare reform legislation. But experts told us the law did play a significant role in this trend. We rate Sanders’ claim Mostly True.	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2016-03-02T17:30:34	2016-02-24	['None']
-pomt-13747	"An analysis showed that Bernie Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination if it were not for the Super Delegates."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/25/donald-trump/no-donald-trump-bernie-sanders-wouldnt-have-won-ev/	Donald Trump fired off a series of tweets about Bernie Sanders over the weekend, at times commiserating with the senator over their shared disdain for the "rigged" political system and at others attacking Sanders for giving into it by endorsing Hillary Clinton. The Republican nominee commented on Wikileaks’ release of Democratic National Committee emails in which officials appear to have, among other things, mused over questioning Sanders’ religion and attacked campaign manager Jeff Weaver. "An analysis showed that Bernie Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination if it were not for the Super Delegates," he tweeted. This last Trump tweet piqued our interest. Would it really be Sanders accepting the nomination this week at the DNC if not for superdelegates? Superdelegates, if you’ll remember from our primer, are the party officials and bigshots who make up about one-sixth of the delegates in the Democratic Party’s system. Under the rules that governed this year’s primaries, the superdelegates weren’t bound to the voting results in their state and could vote for whomever they wish. Many superdelegates backed Clinton before voting even began, and she commanded a disproportionate lead in superdelegates throughout the primaries, eliciting many cries of unfairness and cronyism from voters and Sanders supporters. But Trump is wrong. Sanders would not have won the primary without these party insiders. The Trump campaign didn’t get back to us, but the "analysis" he may have been referring to could be a blog post on Gateway Pundit, a conservative newsblog. The post’s headline is "NOTE TO SANDERS SUPPORTERS: Bernie Would Have Won If Not for Super Delegate System!" It makes a flawed argument that Sanders would have nabbed the nomination if all of the Clinton superdelegates backed him instead. That math checks out on paper, but it is nonsensical in reality. The post offers no rationale for why the superdelegates should flip their votes against the popular vote (Clinton won 3.8 million more than Sanders). Experts told PolitiFact Florida that superdelegates could have played a difference if the race was closer. And to top it off, Sanders himself repeatedly advocated for superdelegates to follow the will of their state’s voters. In other scenarios, such as binding superdelegates to their state’s vote proportionally or taking them out of the system all together, Sanders would have still been unable to reach the magical 2,383-threshold of delegates needed to capture the nomination and would still trail Clinton. Here’s a breakdown of how many superdelegates Clinton and Sanders would have received under different primary systems, based on Green Papers’ superdelegate count. Clinton Total (superdelegates) Sanders Total (superdelegates) Without superdelegates (Trump suggestion) 2,200 1,831 With unbound superdelegates (current system) 2,771 (571) 1,875 (44) With winner-take-all superdelegates 2,721 (521) 2,019 (188) With proportional allocation of superdelegates 2,590 (390) 2,150 (319) (A note about our delegate methodology: Delegate counts vary from publication to publication, so we used Real Clear Politics and Green Papers, sources listed by the Gateway Pundit blog post. While RCP offers a superdelegate count, it does not offer state-by-state breakdowns so we referred to Green Papers for its superdelegate breakdown.) The bottom line: Binding the superdelegates to the winner of their state’s primary or caucus would have closed the delegate gap between Clinton and Sanders, but it wouldn’t have been enough for Sanders to win. Our ruling Trump tweeted, "An analysis showed that Bernie Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination if it were not for the Super Delegates." This does not check out. Sanders would have still lost without superdelegates in the mix, because Clinton won a majority of the popular vote and pledged delegates. On the contrary, the only way for Sanders to have won is he would have been able to persuade more superdelegates to switch their votes from Clinton to him. We rate Trump’s claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/9cef5e9e-9758-42ad-845d-6f13189a554e	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-07-25T15:43:46	2016-07-24	['Bernie_Sanders', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Superdelegate']
-pomt-12708	The GOP health care plan gives "$275 billion in tax breaks for the top 2 percent, people earning $250,000 a year or more."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/mar/09/bernie-sanders/sanders-gop-health-care-plan-gives-wealthiest-275-/	Sen Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., put a different spin on the Republican House’s plan to overhaul the health care system. Speaking on MSNBC, Sanders said the House plan isn’t really a health care plan at all. It’s a tax cut package, he says, that overwhelmingly helps the wealthy. "Look at it as a tax plan with $275 billion in tax breaks for the top 2 percent, people earning $250,000 a year or more," Sanders said on All In With Chris Hayes March 8. He said the change amounted to a transfer of wealth from working families to the wealthiest. Is that true? Sanders’ office told us they got their tax numbers from the Joint Committee on Taxation, a congressional committee that lawmakers rely on for core fiscal data. The committee estimated the impact of repealing two taxes on the wealthy in the Affordable Care Act. One is a 0.9 percent payroll tax on earnings and the other is a 3.8 percent tax on net investment income for individuals with incomes over $200,000 and couples with incomes over $250,000. In the decade between 2017 and 2026, the committee said dropping both measures would cut taxes by $274.9 billion. The Tax Policy Center, a joint fiscal analysis project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, confirmed Sanders’ number for the total tax cut. Two caveats First, Sanders’ fixation on the top 2 percent is not quite right. According to the latest survey from the U.S. Census Bureau, households making $250,000 and above accounted for the top 4.4 percent. Sanders’ office cited an op-ed from two advocacy groups that asserted that those making that much fell into the top 2 percent. Second, Gordon Mermin, a senior research associate at the Tax Policy Center, said Sanders left out a couple of "nuances." The House Republican plan includes other forms of tax relief that will benefit a broader swath of Americans. "Repealing ACA taxes delivers small tax cuts to most people throughout the income distribution," Mermin said. Plus, he added, removing the tax penalty for failing to buy insurance would benefit people regardless of income, though for low and moderate income families, "the overall average impact is small," Mermin said. Our ruling Sanders said that the Republican House health care plan would cut taxes on the wealthiest 2 percent by $275 billion. While Sanders didn’t specify the time frame, that is a 10-year estimate from a neutral congressional committee. Estimates that look a decade ahead are typical in budgeting circles. The one point where Sanders erred most was in labeling the affected taxpayers as the "top 2 percent." According to government data, a more accurate number is 4.4 percent. But that’s still a small sliver of the population. We rate this claim Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2017-03-09T15:48:02	2017-03-08	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-snes-05016	As President Obama departed Cuba, dozens of prospective refugees clung to the wings of Air Force One.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cuban-refugees-clinging-to-air-force-one/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Hundreds of Cuban Refugees Clinging to Air Force One on Flight Back to U.S.	24 March 2016	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Cuba']
-pomt-10060	Democrats compare the infrastructure programs in the stimulus to the Eisenhower interstate program, "but he proposed a $500 billion highway system, and they're going to put $30 billion" into roads and bridges.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jan/28/john-mica/mica-correct-roads-and-bridges-are-small-part-stim/	In making their case for the economic stimulus bill, President Obama and Democrats in Congress have been saying the bill will make an investment in the nation's infrastructure similar to President Eisenhower's creation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. When Obama gave an initial outline of the stimulus plan in a radio/YouTube address on Dec. 6, 2008, he said it would include a significant investment in the highway system. "We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s," he said, referring to the interstate system launched by President Eisenhower. "We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a rule — use it or lose it. If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money." Obama also invoked Eisenhower during a Dec. 19, 2008, news conference in Chicago: "Our economy boomed in the 20th century when President Eisenhower remade the American landscape by building the interstate highway system. Now we need to remake our transportation system for the 21st century." The Ike comparisons have irked Rep. John Mica of Florida, the top Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. In a comment to the Washington Post published Jan. 28, 2009, Mica complained that the highway portion of the stimulus was small change compared with the cost of the 1950s program. Mica said the proposed infrastructure spending was "almost minuscule" in the $825 billion stimulus bill and said he was disappointed the transportation portion was not based on an ambitious goal such as building high-speed rail lines. "They keep comparing this to Eisenhower, but he proposed a $500 billion highway system, and they're going to put $30 billion" in roads and bridges, Mica said. "How farcical can you be? Give me a break." So let's check Mica's numbers. First, Mica is correct that the highway portion of the stimulus is $30 billion, according to the House Appropriations Committee summary of the bill. As for the Eisenhower system, the number went up as the system grew. When Ike proposed the program in 1955, he wrote Congress that, "Our unity as a nation is secured by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods." (The original letter provided to reporters gives an entertaining glimpse into White House press relations 50 years go. It is typed on a manual typewriter and tells reporters that it "MUST BE HELD IN STRICT CONFIDENCE and no portion, synopsis or intimation may be given out or published UNTIL RELEASE TIME.") Eisenhower estimated the interstate portion of his plan would cost $25 billion over 10 years ($198 billion in today's dollars). That's significantly lower than the number Mica cited, even in current dollars. But the ultimate cost is in line with what Mica said: The total cost is now roughly $445 billion in today's dollars, according to a 1996 report for the American Highway Users Alliance. Another estimate , on the Web site What it Costs.com, puts the number right at $500 billion. So Mica is right on the $30 billion for the current stimulus bill, but the $500 billion interstate cost he cites is the ultimate cost, not the original proposal from Eisenhower. His underlying point is still correct, however, that the highway portion of the stimulus bill is small compared with Ike's plan. So we find his statement Mostly True.	None	John Mica	None	None	None	2009-01-28T09:23:28	2009-01-28	['Dwight_D._Eisenhower', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-09826	"All the really great programs in American history, Social Security, was done without Republicans. Medicare was done without Republican support until the last vote where they realized they had to get on board."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/28/howard-dean/dean-claims-social-security-and-medicare-were-pass/	With virtually no Republican support for the health care reform bill, some Democrats believe they will have to go it alone. But Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, isn't worried about the political repercussions. When asked about the risks of abandoning efforts for a bipartisan bill, Dean had this to say: "All the really great programs in American history, Social Security, was done without Republicans. Medicare was done without Republican support until the last vote where they realized they had to get on board," Dean said on the Aug. 25, 2009, episode of The Rachel Maddow Show . "So a lot of the things that have been done that have helped seniors in particular have been done without Republican support at all and there's not going to be any political penalty. The only political penalty will be suffered is if we don't pass a bill and the Republicans know that. And that's why they're not interested in helping pass the bill." Our recollection about the votes on Social Security and Medicare was a little rusty, and we wondered whether Dean was right that both bills passed with no Republican support. To find out, we had to turn back the clock to 1935 — the height of the Great Depression — when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, an insurance program funded through taxpayer dollars meant to support retirees. The legislation was controversial for a number of reasons, including its perceived effects on the labor market and whether its benefits favored working white men. Nevertheless, on Aug. 8, 1935, the conference report — the final version of the bill that melds together changes made in the House and in the Senate — passed in the House 372-33, with 81 Republicans voting in support. The next day, the bill was passed in the Senate 77-6, with 16 Republicans supporting the legislation. So Social Security did pass with Republican support. Thirty years later, a significant number of Republicans voted in favor of the Medicare bill. The House adopted the conference report on July 27, 1965, 307-116, with 70 Republicans supporting it. And on July 28, the Senate adopted the final version of the bill by a vote of 70-24, with 13 Republicans in favor of the bill. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law on July 30, 1965. But is Dean correct that the Republicans didn't support Medicare until the end? Donald Ritchie, the associate historian in the U.S. Senate, told us that the Republican support wasn't just a last-minute phenomenon. During the discussion of both bills, "There were always progressive Republicans and liberal Republicans, some of whom supported Roosevelt and Johnson," Ritchie said. Johnson had the political muscle to pass Medicare because the 1964 elections ushered in 42 new Democrats to the House of Representatives, giving the party a two-thirds majority overall and a larger majority on the Ways and Means Committee, where the legislation would originate. Up until then, many members of the committee, including its Democratic chairman, Wilbur D. Mills, opposed the idea of government-funded health care. In fact, Mills proved a tough sell in 1965 until some of his own pet proposals were added to the legislation. One of those — the addition of a voluntary, supplemental health care plan — had its roots in a Republican alternative bill. In the House, no Republicans voted for the bill until it reached the floor. It passed the Ways and Means Committee by a party-line vote of 17-8, although the panel's GOP members endorsed some of the bill's non-health care related provisions, according to the 1965 Congressional Quarterly Almanac . Likewise, all four Republicans on the House Rules Committee — the panel that sets the boundaries of debate on all bills that come to the House floor — voted against the bill. In the Senate, however, there was Republican support in the Finance Committee. When the panel cast its final vote, the bill passed 12-5, with four of the committee's eight Republicans supporting it. (President Barack Obama would probably love to get even that much GOP backing.) So we find Dean is glossing over the details and exaggerating the partisan split. Both Social Security and Medicare were indeed championed by Democrats, but passed with the help of Republican votes. And while some GOP members waited until the last minute to support Medicare, it was backed by half the Republicans on the Senate committee. So we find Dean's statement False.	None	Howard Dean	None	None	None	2009-08-28T16:52:13	2009-08-25	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'United_States', 'Medicare_(United_States)', 'Social_Security_(United_States)']
-tron-01520	John Kerry: Media Should Cover Terrorism Less So People Don’t Know What’s Going On	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/john-kerry-media-cover-terrorism-less-people-dont-know-whats-going/	None	government	None	None	['international', 'liberal agenda', 'media', 'terrorism']	John Kerry: Media Should Cover Terrorism Less So People Don’t Know What’s Going On	Sep 6, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-05992	"I didn't inherit money from my parents."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/20/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-he-didnt-inherit-money-his-parent/	Multimillionaire GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he built that wealth himself, "the American way." Romney, the son of a corporate CEO, made his own fortune leading private equity firm Bain Capital. But as the product of a wealthy Michigan suburb, private prep school and ultimately Harvard, Romney still faces accusations of silver-spoon privilege. "I know the Democrats want to go after the fact that I've been successful," Romney said at a Republican presidential debate in Charleston, S.C. on Jan. 19, 2012, as he explained why he would wait to release his tax returns. "I'm not going to apologize for being successful." His father, George Romney, who led Detroit automaker American Motors Corp., was a three-time governor of Michigan and himself ran for president in the 1960s. "I could have stayed in Detroit like him and gotten pulled up in a car company," Romney said at the debate. "I went off on my own. I didn't inherit money from my parents. What I have, I earned. I worked hard, the American way." We were curious. Did Romney, the last of George and Lenore's four children, receive no inheritance on his path to wealth? Romney's words We asked Romney's campaign about his claim. "Mitt Romney's success is based on his 25-year career in business and the fact that he founded and led one of the most successful private equity companies in the world," spokesman Ryan Williams said. That wasn't as helpful as, say, a copy of his father's will. Nor was there any information about George Romney's financial legacy in the many obituaries for the Michigan luminary, who died in 1995 at age 88. But Mitt Romney has addressed the question himself, it turns out, in an interview with C-SPAN in 2006. Host Brian Lamb asked him why his father hadn't given him an inheritance. Romney answered, "Well, he didn’t have as much as I think some people anticipated. And I did get a check from my dad when he passed away. I shouldn’t say a check, but I did inherit some funds from my dad. But I turned and gave that away to charity. In this case I gave it to a school which Brigham Young University established in his honor. ... And that’s where his inheritance ended up." According to a short history of the George W. Romney Institute of Public Management at BYU, the family provided an endowment in 1998, within a few years of George Romney's death. So, in Romney's own words, he did "inherit some funds" from his dad. But he gave them away. Why? "I figured we had enough of our own," he said. He probably did. By 1995, Romney had already led Bain Capital for more than a decade, where shrewd investments made him millions. He stepped down in 1999. He now says he's worth somewhere between $190 million and $250 million. How Romney got rich "I went off on my own," Romney said at the debate. "... What I have I earned. I worked hard, the American way." So while he didn't ultimately benefit from an inheritance, we wondered: Had Romney's parents' wealth helped build his own fortune? There's no evidence we saw that Romney's parents helped buy him a business career. But there were certain advantages to Romney's comfortable upbringing. Romney started college at Stanford, where his "allowance" was big enough for frequent plane tickets to sneak home to Michigan see his girlfriend, Ann, according to a recently published book by two Boston Globe journalists, "The Real Romney." After a two-year missionary trip to France, where he lived sparely as he proselytized door-to-door, he finished his undergraduate studies at BYU, where he married Ann in 1969. He was 22, his wife 19. His parents' wedding gift? A car. Meanwhile, the students — who started a family a year later — lived in a modest, $62-a-month basement apartment, Ann later told the Boston Globe. But they didn't have to work. "We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time," she said. When the couple moved to Boston so Romney could study business and law at Harvard, his parents helped them buy a house. It's not clear who paid for his education, but Romney wasn't exactly a struggling student: enough cash for plane tickets, a car as a wedding gift, stock that kept him from having to work, help buying a home. What about that hard work he mentioned? When he got back from his mission trip to France, he wanted to "accomplish things of significance," according to a quote from The Real Romney. "I said, 'Boy, I want to do something with my life if I can.' So when I came home, I was a much better student." At BYU, he graduated with highest honors and gave a speech at graduation. He got accepted to a recently created dual-degree program in law and business at Harvard. Of hundreds of Romney's law and business school classmates at Harvard, just 15 earned the dual degree — which packed courses required for the two degrees into less time than earning them separately. Romney didn't just earn the degree. He graduated with honors from the law school and in the top 5 percent of his class in the business school, according to The Real Romney. His mere presence among the elite MBA/JD earners got him heavily recruited by Boston Consulting Group. So while he passed the Michigan bar in case he needed to go back to his dad's state to work near the car industry, it wouldn't be necessary. "(Romney) was an outstanding recruit with exceptional grades, and he was the very charming, smooth, attractive son of a former presidential candidate. So everybody was bending over backward to get their hands on him," said Charles Faris, who was with Boston Consulting Group, according to the The Real Romney. When he started work with Boston Consulting Group, "he worked his butt off," Faris said. The young father worked nights, weekends and traveled often, including frequent trips to Europe, the book says. He got hired away by Bill Bain at consulting company Bain & Co., who ultimately tapped him to launch Bain Capital in 1984. There, he made the deals that dramatically increased his wealth. Our ruling Mitt Romney, making the case that he made his own wealth, said, "I didn't inherit money from my parents." Indeed, he was already a wealthy man by the time his father, George, died in 1995. He did receive an inheritance but says he gave it away. We don't have independent confirmation of that. But a family-funded endowment at BYU started in 1998 to support the George W. Romney Institute of Public Management, bolstering Romney's claim. Did Romney's career benefit from having well-to-do parents? It certainly eased his way, with their financial help allowing him to focus on his studies. But there's good evidence he also worked hard to make his own success, graduating with honors at BYU and Harvard, and building a reputation at Boston Consulting Group and Bain that ultimately catapulted him to wealth. Romney wasn't entirely clear about the inheritance he gave away when he said he "didn't inherit money" from his parents. But he's right that such a gift wasn't key to his success. We rate his claim Half True. CORRECTION: An earlier version of this item gave the wrong decade for George Romney's presidential run. He ran in 1968.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-01-20T19:09:48	2012-01-19	['None']
-para-00070	"There is no difference between Kevin Rudd and myself when it comes to school funding."	half-true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/13/tony-abbott/differences-emerge-between-labor-and-coalition-sch/index.html	None	['Budget', 'Education']	Tony Abbott	Michael Koziol, Peter Fray	None	The unity ticket that goes only so far: differences form down the track	Tuesday, August 13, 2013 at 10:21 a.m.	None	['Kevin_Rudd']
-hoer-00905	Carbon Monoxide Poisoning by Candle Email Warning	unsubstantiated messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/candle-death.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Carbon Monoxide Poisoning by Candle Email Warning	2004	None	['None']
-goop-00855	Sofia Richie “Miserable” On Date Night With Scott Disick, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/sofia-richie-scott-disick-date-miserable/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Sofia Richie NOT “Miserable” On Date Night With Scott Disick, Despite Report	4:17 pm, June 8, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01178	Kanye West ‘Dissing’ Tristan Thompson With Lamar Odom Tribute, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kanye-west-tristan-thompson-lamar-odom-tribute-diss/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kanye West NOT ‘Dissing’ Tristan Thompson With Lamar Odom Tribute, Despite Claim	11:17 am, April 16, 2018	None	['None']
-wast-00088	Heitkamp's talk of deficits is pure speculation and none of it takes into account the economic growth the Trump pro-growth agenda is delivering.	4 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/06/18/a-campaign-fact-checking-website-promotes-false-claim-on-cbo-estimates/	None	None	Kevin Cramer	Glenn Kessler	None	N.D. Republican's Senate campaign \xe2\x80\x98fact-checking' website promotes false claim on CBO estimates	June 18	None	['None']
-abbc-00054	Before the 2013 federal election the Coalition repeatedly promised to despatch a Customs vessel to monitor whaling in the Southern Ocean.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-07/customs-vessell-whaling-promise-check/5695220	None	['whaling', 'conservation', 'environment', 'mammals---whales', 'animal-science', 'science-and-technology', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'liberals', 'australia']	None	None	['whaling', 'conservation', 'environment', 'mammals---whales', 'animal-science', 'science-and-technology', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'liberals', 'australia']	Promise check: Send a Customs vessel to the Southern Ocean to monitor whaling	Sun 8 May 2016, 7:41am	None	['None']
-snes-04933	A law in Iowa forbids people from kissing for more than five minutes.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/iowa-kiss-five-minutes-law/	None	Legal	None	Dan Evon	None	Law Limits Kisses to Five Minutes in Iowa	12 April 2016	None	['None']
-snes-02573	A teen boy died of "orgasmic shock" after masturbating 46 times in a row.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/teen-boy-46-times/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a Teen Boy Die After Pleasuring Himself 46 Times?	20 April 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02109	David Beckham’s proposed soccer stadium at Miami’s Port "threatens the 207,000 jobs and $27 billion economic impact tied to the cargo and cruise industries."	false	/florida/statements/2014/may/14/miami-seaport-alliance/david-beckhams-proposed-soccer-stadium-port-threat/	In late 2013, soccer superstar David Beckham splashed onto the scene of Miami-Dade stadium politics when he announced his pitch for a $250 million stadium. While politicians were intrigued by the idea of Beckham bringing major soccer to Miami, one of the main sites under consideration quickly drew fire: PortMiami. Some county commissioners balked at the idea of transforming part of a major economic hub for the county into a soccer stadium. Opponents, led by Royal Caribbean Cruises, created the Miami Seaport Alliance and took out ads on television, radio and in newspapers arguing that a stadium threatens the port’s livelihood. A full-page ad in the Miami Herald in April stated, "A soccer stadium is being proposed at PortMiami. The Miami Seaport Alliance opposes any development that threatens the 207,000 jobs and $27 billion economic impact tied to the cargo and cruise industries. All jobs are important for the future of Miami, but we cannot risk full-time, well-paying PortMiami jobs like crane operators, truckers and cargo loaders, for a few, part-time concession jobs like peanut sellers and ticket takers." Beckham’s investors responded with their own full-page ad in the Herald, vowing that a soccer stadium would achieve the port’s goals of creating jobs and revenue. At PolitiFact Florida, we are quite familiar with half truths about stadiums. It is a challenge to fact-check a prediction, but we decided to explore the evidence about whether a soccer stadium at the port would threaten the existing 207,000 jobs and $27 billion economic impact. Is the Alliance bending the truth about Beckham? Royal Caribbean leads opposition Beckham wants to rent a county-owned 12-acre site near the port to build a 25,000 seat stadium with an open roof. Beckham has said he will privately finance the construction and apply for a state sales tax subsidy, hoping to open the stadium in 2018. Port officials had planned to build a new 7 million square foot commercial district on the site, because it’s too shallow to accommodate ships. Beckham’s group says the stadium would still leave room for about a 1 million square foot commercial development. The port site isn’t the only one under consideration, though it appears to be one of Beckham’s favorites. At Mayor Carlos Gimenez’ request, Beckham is also considering filling in a boat slip in downtown, though that site also has challenges. Many of jobs ‘tied’ to the port aren’t at the port The spin in the ad begins with the number of jobs cited. The number cited -- 207,000 jobs -- comes from a study done for the port to measure its current economic impact. Martin Associates, a Pennsylvania-based firm, interviewed 485 cruise-related businesses in the Miami-Dade County area in 2012 and released the report last year. The report adds up various types of jobs, including direct port workers and suppliers. The study also accounts for "induced jobs," which includes jobs generated by spending by port workers. The largest category of jobs, though, is what the study calls "user jobs," which are importers or exporters in Florida that ship or receive cargo through the port. For example, if an Orange grove in Orlando ships a portion of their oranges through Miami, then the study translates that portion of the grove’s business -- including orange pickers in Orlando -- into a number of user jobs connected to PortMiami. The study concluded that port activity "supported" 207,804 jobs in the state of Florida. The vast majority -- 80 percent -- were "user jobs." The user jobs wouldn’t disappear from Florida if PortMiami wasn’t available. "These importers/exporters would divert their cargo through other ports," the study states. Similarly, most of the $27 billion in economic activity includes a lot of business that takes place far away from the port site in Miami. So hypothetically speaking, if the soccer stadium were to create such a morass that cargo and cruise companies jumped ship and fled Miami, those jobs and economic impact dollars wouldn’t vanish into thin air -- much of it would just move to other ports in Florida. Will stadium threaten existing port jobs? We sent the port report to a few economists, and several raised concerns about the jobs number in the context of the ad opposing the soccer stadium. Temple University economics professor Michael Leeds said that the "user jobs" category is a red herring. "It essentially counts a lot of people and money that will never come anywhere near Miami," he said. Those user jobs and the user income number leads to an exaggeration of the total numbers, said Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson. "That being said, in this case it doesn't matter whether the report is correct or not," said Matheson, a critic of public financing of stadiums. "Whether the port generates 20,000 jobs or 200,000 jobs, the question is whether Beckham will interfere with those jobs, and I just don't see a significant disruption." Cruise officials said the stadium could hurt the port, though. John Fox, president of the Miami Seaport Alliance, who lobbies on behalf of Royal Caribbean, pointed to a Moody’s report which downgraded the port’s credit rating in May. But the report didn’t mention the soccer stadium as a factor. Fox said that the stadium could scare away carriers who now operate out of Miami, sending them to other ports. Any other port could "sell their port over the Port of Miami due to real perceptions that delays will be a common issue and that this community is not serious about being in the commercial port business of being a port," Fox said. Bruce Rubin, a spokesman for Beckham, says the port’s plan for 7 million square feet of commercial development "would create far more traffic conflicts with cargo and cruise operations than would our plan for a professional soccer stadium" and the smaller adjacent commercial development. Rubin said the stadium will host about 25 large events per year and "a number of other activities." The 17 home games largely would occur on Saturday evenings which doesn’t coincide with the typical times for the arrival and departure of cruise passengers or cargo operators. Stadium supporters haven’t yet finished their study about projected jobs, but Rubin estimated that it would include 2,000 to 3,000 construction jobs. Economic experts weigh in on impact of stadium at port We sent a summary of the soccer battle to professors who study the economics of stadiums. Rick Eckstein, a sociology Professor at Villanova University who has studied stadium financing and criticized deals, told PolitiFact Florida, "Both groups are wildly exaggerating the economic impact of their respective plans." "Sports stadiums have a lousy record of spurring economic impact. Soccer stadiums, with but 19 games a year drawing about 20,000 visitors each, might be the least able to spur development. Conversely, I don’t think a soccer stadium would hurt development in that area. It would simply have no effect," he said. Matheson, a major critic of subsidies for sports stadiums, said that the stadium will cause some traffic disruptions during matches, but they would likely be minor. "It is hard to see how 20 days of extra traffic, most which will be on weekends, will have any significant impact on the port, especially if some decent traffic management is utilized," he said. "I don't find the port's objections particularly convincing. Do be concerned about traffic. Do be concerned about hidden costs of a privately financed stadium. But don't reflexively torpedo any type (of economic development) just because one industry doesn't like it." Bruce Seaman, a Georgia State University economist, said that the arguments by cargo and cruise industries "are nearly absurd. Even given the self-serving perspective they clearly represent, it is hard to imagine even pure rent-seekers bothering to make such weak arguments opposing that project." One professor we interviewed -- University of South Florida economics professor Philip Porter, a major critic of financing of sports stadiums -- said the anti-stadium side has a point. "If the soccer stadium project means the 7 million square foot commercial development would be compromised, Miami loses," Porter said. "One thing we’ve come to realize is that sports -- with such infrequent activity -- cannot compete with commercial activity in creating jobs and generating income." Our ruling The ad said that David Beckham’s proposed soccer stadium at Miami’s port "threatens the 207,000 jobs and $27 billion economic impact tied to the cargo and cruise industries." The numbers come from a study which states that the jobs related to the port are all over Florida. The ad is somewhat careful in the wording about the jobs because it states the jobs are "tied" to cargo and cruise industries, but then it talks about jobs at PortMiami such as crane operators who could be replaced by stadium peanut sellers -- which could create the impression that these are all direct jobs at the port, and that’s not the case. A soccer stadium at the port would certainly lead to some changes at the port -- and cruise operators are concerned about how that could change their operations. But at this point, there isn’t evidence that a stadium would threaten the port jobs or economic activity. We rate this claim False.	None	Miami Seaport Alliance	None	None	None	2014-05-14T09:37:51	2014-04-24	['David_Beckham']
-wast-00124	One of my goals as U.S. senator will be to ditch \xe2\x80\x98Cocaine Mitch.'	4 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/04/the-kooky-tale-of-cocaine-mitch/	None	None	Don Blankenship	Salvador Rizzo	None	The kooky tale of \xe2\x80\x98Cocaine Mitch'	May 4	None	['United_States']
-snes-05955	Medical research has established a causative link between root canals and cancer mortality.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/worse-than-a-root-canal/	None	Medical	None	Snopes Staff	None	97 Percent of Terminal Cancer Victims Had Root Canals?	31 October 2014	None	['None']
-snes-03631	An image shows Hillary Clinton addressing a campaign rally attended by fewer than 25 people.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russians-hacked-my-crowd/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Emery	None	Clinton: Russians Hacked My Crowd!	4 November 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-03240	"Why didn't (uninsured Americans) buy insurance? Because of the expense."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/15/rand-paul/rand-paul-daily-show-says-cost-biggest-barrier-uni/	During a recent appearance on The Daily Show, guest host John Oliver and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., engaged in a lively exchange on health insurance. One of the issues they discussed was the high cost of health insurance. Paul, an eye surgeon, is strongly opposed to President Barack Obama’s health care law. During the interview, Oliver pressed him on how to get more Americans signed up for insurance. Paul told Oliver that according to the most recent statistics, "85 percent of people had insurance, so 15 percent didn't. So what you need to do is look at who are the 15 percent, and why don't they have insurance? Of the 15 percent who didn't have insurance, half of them made more than $50,000 a year. Why didn't they buy insurance? Because of the expense. They were young healthy people." In this fact-check, we’ll check whether the cost of insurance is the biggest barrier to uninsured Americans. In a separate report, we’ll look at his claim that half of the uninsured made more than $50,000 a year. Survey data consistently shows that cost is the biggest barrier to uninsured Americans obtaining coverage. When the Kaiser Family Foundation’s June 2013 health tracking poll asked uninsured respondents for the main reason they didn’t have health insurance, a plurality of 40 percent cited cost. The second-biggest factor, at 26 percent, was related to employment, such as being unemployed or having a job that doesn’t offer health insurance. These two reasons aren’t mutually exclusive -- someone could have told the pollster that their lack of a job was the biggest reason but also find cost to be a barrier to obtaining insurance. The only answer in the poll that suggests the respondent doesn’t face a cost obstacle is "doesn’t need insurance," which was the answer of only 11 percent. In another survey, the 2011 National Health Interview Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers asked, "Which of these are reasons you stopped being covered or don’t have health insurance?’’ Respondents were allowed to choose more than one reason. In this survey, too, a plurality -- 42 percent -- cited cost. Three other reasons cited are compatible with cost being an obstacle -- a lost job or a change in employment (26 percent), an employer that didn’t offer insurance (11 percent) and ineligible due to age or leaving school (9 percent). Just 6 percent cited "other," which included "didn’t want or need coverage," among other answers. "The cost of insurance is a major reason why people are uninsured -- Sen. Paul is right about that," said Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. "People without access to employer-sponsored coverage have a hard time affording it on their own, and that accounts for most of the uninsured." Our ruling Paul asked, "Why didn't (uninsured Americans) buy insurance? Because of the expense." Survey data supports him. A plurality of respondents in major surveys of the uninsured specifically cite cost as a barrier, and relatively few indicate that going uninsured is a voluntary choice. We rate Paul’s claim True.	None	Rand Paul	None	None	None	2013-08-15T15:11:52	2013-08-12	['United_States']
-snes-02984	Girl's unusual medical condition leads to the discovery that the boy she's been intimate with has been having sex with (or eating) corpses.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/morgue-and-stanley/	None	Risqué Business	None	David Mikkelson	None	Romantic Encounter with Necrophiliac/Cannibal	8 May 2001	None	['None']
-pomt-04800	Tim Kaine supported "higher energy costs for families."	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2012/aug/21/us-chamber-commerce/us-chamber-commerce-says-tim-kaine-supported-highe/	When it comes to economic policies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says Tim Kaine, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, is on the wrong track. A television ad by the Chamber puts the viewer on the front of a train, roaring past billboards proclaiming Kaine’s shortcomings. Among its claims: that Kaine, as governor, supported "higher energy costs for families." As proof, the chamber sent us Kaine’s testimony before a U.S. Senate hearing on climate change and the Chesapeake Bay in 2007. Kaine warned that rising temperatures and sea levels would damage the bay and the Hampton Roads region, and he urged the Senate to take action. "I support legislation that includes a cap-and-trade program for emissions of all greenhouse gases, imposes economy-wide controls rather than singling out a particular sector, and accounts for state efforts to standardize methodologies to record and measure greenhouse gas emissions through the Climate Registry," he said. Soon after his testimony, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, at the time a Democrat from Connecticut, and Sen. John Warner, R-Va., introduced a bill to implement a cap-and-trade system. Previous cap-and-trade bills were introduced in 2003 and 2005. Kaine did not say that he specifically supported a particular bill. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who introduced the legislation in 2003, said when the 2007 bill was put in the hopper, "The enormous economic costs of damage caused by air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions to the environment and human health are not factored into the price of power produced by fossil-fueled technologies. Yet, it’s a cost that we all bear, too often in terms of ill-health and diminished quality of life." Under cap and trade, the government would limit the allowable emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses. Companies that emit carbon dioxide, such as electric utilities, would either have to reduce emissions by using cleaner technology, or obtain credits from the government - either given or sold through an auction - to exceed limits. The government could use the revenues in any number of ways, including paying for general expenses, developing new energy-efficiency programs and giving rebates to ratepayers. In the 2007 bill, the national cap on carbon dioxide declined gradually from 5,775 million metric tons in 2012 to 1,732 million metric tons in 2050. The cost to consumers was analyzed by several government and non-government entities. The Energy Information Administration concluded that the 2007 legislation would cause gas prices to go up by 22 to 49 cents a gallon in 2020. And that would increase to 41 to 101 cents per gallon higher in 2030. Meanwhile, depending on the development of technology to capture and store carbon emissions, the average annual cost of household energy bills would increase by between $30 to $325 in 2020, and between $76 to $723 in 2030. Although the EIA does not make estimates beyond 2030, it says the costs would continue to escalate. The Environmental Protection Agency ran its own numbers. It said mandates to manufacture cleaner fuels would cause gas prices to rise by 53 cents a gallon in 2030 and by $1.40 a gallon in 2050. The EPA also projected that electricity prices would increase 44 percent in 2030 and 26 percent in 2050. Kaine spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine said that equating support for cap-and-trade legislation with support for "higher energy prices for families" is "ludicrous." She said Kaine supports cap and trade as part of a "package of larger reforms" that would "reduce our dependence on carbon-heavy energy sources and encourage the development of alternative energy and conservation." She noted that some cap-and-trade proposals would have funneled proceeds from auctions back to consumers in rebates. Under a 2009 bill backed by President Barack Obama, the CBO said those in the lowest 20 percent of earners would save about $40 in 2020, a statistic Hoffine cited. But the CBO also said other households would pay more for electricity, averaging $175 more and up to about $340 more, because they would receive smaller rebates and use more electricity than low-income families. Hoffine also pointed to a study about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a 10-state compact for a cap and trade system. The system was put into place in 2009 and was evaluated after three years. The Analysis Group found that consumers saved a net of $1.1 billion compared to what the grid systems would have been without the cap-and-trade system, primarily because the states put auction proceeds toward energy efficiency programs. But ratepayers actually spent about 0.7 percent more for electricity up front. "In general, it is true that controlling carbon emissions or other pollution from energy will raise the cost of energy relative to not controlling that pollution," Adele Morris, fellow and policy director in climate and energy economics at The Brookings Institution, said in an email. But "the cap and trade approach is a substitute for other, more costly, ways to regulate greenhouse gases. Right now, because cap-and-trade didn't pass, the EPA is pursuing regulation of those emissions under its existing Clean Air Act authority, which means command and control approaches to regulation." The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, the successor to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, has issued fact sheets on several proposals for cap-and-trade legislation and programs. "Others have claimed that the bill will have no cost impact, but this ignores the very real economic costs of shifting to a clean energy economy," the center said of the 2009 bill. The Lieberman-Warner bill in 2007 proposed to auction some of the credits to pay for renewable technologies, workforce training and low-income energy assistance, while giving the rest to states and other recipients. The legislation was replaced by a companion bill in 2008, which died in the Senate that year. Our ruling The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says in a TV ad that Kaine supported "higher energy costs for families." It’s clear, as the Chamber notes in small print, that Kaine backs the concept of cap-and-trade legislation, but there’s no record of his support for a specific bill or proposal. Analyses of two measures that have been before in Congress in recent years concluded that cap-and-trade carries a cost for most consumers. At least one cap-and-trade program in place has resulted in an average lower cost for consumers through energy efficiency and rebates. And cap-and-trade legislation is one of the least expensive options for controlling greenhouse gases, experts said. So the assertion that cap and trade leads to higher energy prices is reasonable but depends on the specifics of a plan. The chamber cannot point to an instance where Kaine directly supported a particular measure that would raise energy bills, which is necessary context. There is an element of truth and a great deal of hyperbole in the chamber’s claim that Kaine supported higher energy bills for families. We rate it Mostly False.	None	U.S. Chamber of Commerce	None	None	None	2012-08-21T15:30:59	2012-07-26	['None']
-snes-04949	Facebook has not one, but two filtered message inboxes where Messenger messages may not be easily seen.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebooks-hidden-inbox/	None	Computers	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Facebook’s Hidden Other Inbox	7 April 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-05206	The United States has experienced "40 straight months of unemployment at 8 percent or higher."	true	/tennessee/statements/2012/jun/11/diane-black/tennessee-congresswoman-diane-black-says-jobless-r/	When the government’s jobs report for May offered a bleak picture of the economy, with employers adding just 69,000 jobs in May, U.S. Rep. Diane Black, R-Gallatin, and other lawmakers expressed their frustrations, often in very partisan terms. The report said the unemployment rate edged up slightly to 8.2 percent, from 8.1 percent in April, and Black issued a press release that among other things said the prospects for unemployed or underemployed Americans finding full-time work are not very good "after 40 straight months of unemployment at 8 percent or higher." We know the unemployment has remained stubbornly high, but has it really been at 8 percent or higher for 40 straight months? For the purposes of this ruling, we're only going to look closely at the statistics Black cited and stay out of the political blame game. Suffice to say, it’s not hard to find Republicans blaming Democratic policies and Democrats blaming Republican obstruction for the inability to move the economy closer to full employment. We called Black’s office and asked them to back up the claim. Her spokeswoman, Allison Huff, pointed us to a chart compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the gold standard for unemployment statistics. According to the bureau, the last time unemployment was below 8 percent was in January 2009, when it was 7.8 percent -- it then spiked quickly to 8.3 percent in February of 2009 and to 9.4 percent by May before topping out at 10.0 percent in October of 2009. It dropped gradually from there, and the May report listing unemployment at 8.2 percent marked the 40th consecutive month it has been at 8 percent or higher. As dismal as that may be, it’s not the record. "The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression," the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported in a study in February 2012. In the Great Depression era, unemployment topped 15 percent annually for six straight years, from 1931 to 1936, and never fell below 8.7 percent over 12 years, according to estimates adopted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In four consecutive years, unemployment exceeded 20 percent a year. Our colleagues at PolitiFact National cited those figures when they rated as False a claim by Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who said, "We have unemployment that rivals the Great Depression." There is a qualifier, though. The Depression-era unemployment data counted those age 14 and up, not 16 and up (the standard that began in 1948). In addition, monthly unemployment statistics were not kept until 1948 as well. Thus, all statistics during the Great Depression were on an annual basis. Our ruling Rep. Black did not go as far as some other Republicans and claim that unemployment is as bad as during the Great Depression. She merely said it has been at 8 percent or higher for 40 straight months. Based upon the government’s own data, we rate her statement as True.	None	Diane Black	None	None	None	2012-06-11T06:00:00	2012-06-01	['United_States']
-pomt-00314	Says "Claire McCaskill receives the second-most contributions from insurance companies in the entire Senate."	mostly true	/missouri/statements/2018/sep/21/josh-hawley/fact-checking-josh-hawley-video-highlights-insurer/	In Missouri’s high-profile U.S. Senate race, voters are seeing dueling ads from the two candidates. The first volley came when incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill released an ad (embedded here) that challenged her Republican opponent, state attorney general Josh Hawley, over health care. In the ad, McCaskill discusses her own struggle with breast cancer and warns that a lawsuit Hawley has signed onto threatens provisions within the Affordable Care Act that enable people with pre-existing conditions to get health insurance. Then, on Sept. 19, Hawley’s campaign took a portion of that ad and threw it back on McCaskill. The Hawley camp released a 15-second video that begins with McCaskill talking to the camera, saying, "The insurance companies already have too many senators on their side." A narrator responds: "What a hypocrite. Claire McCaskill receives the second-most contributions from insurance companies in the entire Senate." We found the Hawley campaign has a point about McCaskill's support from insurers, but it requires some caveats so voters have the full picture. A look at the data The visual in the video showing McCaskill at No. 2 on the contribution list comes from this page in the OpenSecrets.org database, a widely cited money-in-politics resource published by the Center for Responsive Politics. It shows the top recipients of donations from the insurance sector among senators in the 2017-18 campaign cycle. By the time we looked at the OpenSecrets page, it had been updated with new data that pushed McCaskill down by one slot to third. We won’t quibble with a third-place ranking as opposed to a second-place ranking; the underlying claim is that McCaskill ranks high among all senators. Some caveats However, a closer look at the methodology that went into creating the list in question brings up a couple of important points to note. • The OpenSecrets data for donations doesn’t just include health insurers; it includes all insurers, including life, property and car insurance companies. The Hawley camp argues that the video uses McCaskill’s exact language — "the insurance companies" — and that she did not specify health insurance companies. However, we believe anyone who sees the first three-quarters of McCaskill’s ad would clearly believe she was referring to health insurers, because that’s what the entire ad is about. • Because the 2018 list represents a snapshot in time, it doesn’t support the notion that McCaskill leads "the entire Senate" in donations from the industry. Generally speaking, senators take in significantly more money from donors during the one-out-of-three election cycles in which they are up for reelection, as McCaskill is now. This essentially shrinks the pool of incumbents actively raising money for an election. Yes, there are 100 senators, but there are only 35 seats up for election this November, and 32 incumbents running. Why does that matter? Of the top 10 senators on the OpenSecrets list, all are up for re-election except one, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho. In addition, McCaskill’s contributions from insurance companies have varied depending on what time period you look at. If you look at the 2014 and 2016 campaign cycles, McCaskill didn't rank in the top 20 either time. Even in her prior reelection cycle, 2012, McCaskill ranked 19th among senators, and if you add in non-incumbents running for the Senate that cycle, she fell out of the top 20 entirely. Meanwhile, McCaskill’s haul so far cycle — $295,338 — is a fraction of what four Republicans received in the 2016 cycle (Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania) and what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., received from the industry in the 2014 cycle. • Much of the money used to determine the 2018 rankings doesn’t come from "insurance companies." Donors on the OpenSecrets list don’t only include political action committees but also individual donors who have listed an employer. So a donation from a low-level employee or their spouse would count in this tally as coming from "the industry." Are there more revealing figures? If you look at related campaign-finance data, both sides can claim some vindication. When we asked the Center for Responsive Politics if they could drill down further to look only at health insurers’ donations, they told us that from 2013 to 2018, McCaskill received a combined $413,528 from donors related to the "accident and health insurers" category as well a separate category, health maintenance organizations. By contrast, Hawley, who was not a federal candidate for much of that time span, received just $5,400. On the other hand, if you look at the percentage of donations McCaskill received from the "insurance category," it’s pretty modest. She has received $295,338 from all insurance sources in the 2018 campaign cycle, but she’s raised in excess of $20 million from all sources as of this writing. So insurance-related donations account for just 1.4 percent of her contributions, casting doubt on Hawley’s implication that she’s controlled by the industry. Our ruling Hawley said that "Claire McCaskill receives the second-most contributions from insurance companies in the entire Senate." This isn't a perfect reflection of her standing among senators in terms of health insurance contributions. This ranking is based all types of insurers, not just health insurers. But with current contributions, she ranks third among current senators for insurance-related donations during the 2018 campaign cycle. We rate the statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Josh Hawley	None	None	None	2018-09-21T16:29:23	2018-09-19	['None']
-pomt-11826	Says the Republican tax plan "helps families" like one in which a woman lost her job and then lost her life savings fighting her husband’s cancer.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/nov/13/american-action-network/how-would-gop-tax-bills-affect-families-strapped-b/	A conservative group is spending $3 million on a television ad campaign in 35 congressional districts -- including districts in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin -- arguing that a family that was nearly ruined financially by the father’s bout of cancer would benefit from a Republican tax proposal. The series of ads -- run by the American Action Network, which describes itself as a center-right group advocating policies based on freedom and limited government -- features Kendra Sroka, a working mother living in Michigan with her husband and two children, according to the group. One version of the ad, targeted to constituents of Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and tweeted by the group, features this narration: "Shortly after my husband got cancer, I lost my job. We were lucky to make it through. But we spent our life savings just to get by. So we’re glad Congress has released a plan that helps families like ours by cutting middle-class taxes. An independent analysis shows a typical family saves $1,200, and the plan closes loopholes while keeping tax rates the same for the rich. That’s fair. So thank Elise Stefanik. She has a plan to cut taxes for middle-class families like mine." See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com We wondered whether the ad was justified in saying that the Republican tax bill would help a family that suffered such a serious health scare. Tax experts we checked with were skeptical. That’s because whatever you may think the Republican tax bill may provide in tax cuts -- a question of some dispute -- it also includes a provision that would strike the medical expenses deduction, which is almost perfectly tailored for a situation like the Sroka family’s. (Asked for this article whether the family had used the medical expense deduction, Sroka referred us back to the American Action Network; the group declined to provide further information about the family's past tax decisions.) See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com In general, more Americans would benefit from the tax changes than not, as we’ve noted -- just not every American. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, 61 percent would see a tax decrease of at least $100 in 2019, and another 31 percent would see a tax change of less than $100 in either direction. That leaves 8 percent of tax filers, or roughly 14 million Americans, seeing a tax increase of at least $100. By 2027, 46 percent would see a decrease and 34 percent would see a change of less than $100, while 20 percent, or close to 40 million Americans, would see a tax increase. So it’s conceivable, even likely, that a family of four like the Srokas could come out ahead if you set their medical situation aside. But their medical situation is a focal point of the ad, so we felt that aspect deserved a closer look. About 9 million households, or 6 percent of tax filers, take the medical expense deduction, Gordon Mermin, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, told the Associated Press. The Treasury Department estimates that the tax break costs $7.9 billion a year overall, while the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the figure to be $10 billion. To take advantage of the medical expense deduction, a taxpayer has to itemize rather than take the standard deduction, which for a married couple reduces taxable income by $12,700. Medical expenses can only be deducted once they exceed 10 percent of the household’s income. (The portion of medical expenses accounting for that first 10 percent of household income can’t be deducted; the amount above that first 10 percent can be.) Many taxpayers choose to take the standard deduction because they don’t have enough items they can deduct to reach the standard threshold. But one type of family that would have good reason to itemize is one that faces a lot of unreimbursed medical expenses, which is the situation the Sroka family was in, judging by Kendra’s comment that "we spent our life savings just to get by" after the cancer diagnosis. The ad doesn’t say how much the family spent battling cancer, but if the family earned $60,000 -- a mid-range income for a four-person household -- they could deduct every dollar over $6,000 in unreimbursed medical expenses they had that year. So, if the family had medical expenses of $18,700, they would benefit from itemizing. (That’s equal to the first $6,000 non-deductible expenses they’d need to qualify, plus the $12,700 they would have gotten automatically from the standard deduction.) They could also reach that threshold of $18,700 with a lower amount of medical expenses if they also had other deductions to rely on, such as the state and local tax deduction. And non-cancer-related medical expenses they would have counted as well. All told, it’s not inconceivable that the Srokas, facing a diagnosis as serious as cancer, could have been hit with expenses in that ballpark. According to the AARP, citing IRS figures, the average medical expenses claimed by taxpayers with incomes below $75,000 ranged from just below $10,000 to almost $15,000. The ad’s claim is "a very questionable statement," said Gary McGill, director of the Fisher School of Accounting at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business. "Medical expenses could have wiped out most of their income so that they would have owed no income tax, especially if she lost her job too. So the scenario in the ad is not plausible. It doesn’t pass the smell test." The American Action Network told PolitiFact that the point of the ad was not to focus on the medical expense aspect of the family’s situation, but rather on the broader point that having another $1,200 would "unambiguously help a family’s budget, and in particular, those facing adverse circumstances" of any kind. The group also touted the potential for the tax bill to expand the economy more generally. One important caveat: Two days after the American Action Network launched its ad campaign, the Senate released its version of the tax bill and -- unlike the House version -- it would preserve the medical expense deduction. Our ruling The American Action Network ad said the Republican tax plan "helps families" like one in which a woman lost her job and then lost her life savings fighting her husband’s cancer. There’s a good chance that, if you ignore their medical situation, a family of four like the Srokas would have come out ahead under the Republican tax bill. However, it’s conceivable that the expenses they incurred fighting the cancer diagnosis could have enabled them to reduce their taxes even more -- an option that the House bill would take away. That would not be a factor in the Senate version of the bill, however. On balance, we rate the statement Half True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	American Action Network	None	None	None	2017-11-13T13:06:31	2017-11-07	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-09171	Turkey is an Arab country.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/06/markos-moulitsas/daily-kos-founder-admits-slip-calling-turkey-arab-/	During the June 6, 2010, edition of ABC's This Week, Markos Moulitsas, who publishes the liberal blog Daily Kos, joined a roundtable discussion that touched on Israel's decision earlier this month to send commandos to board a flotilla carrying aid and activists in defiance of an Israeli blockade of Gaza. The commandos clashed with some of those on board, and the raid ended with nine people dead. Moulitsas said, "I mean, the fact is whether Israel had the right to do what it did or not, they handled it so poorly that they basically alienated much of the world. They alienated an important Arab ally in Turkey, and they put the United States in a really difficult position." Shortly after the show ended, Moulitsas sent this Twitter message: "I got one for PolitiFact -- I slipped and called Turkey an 'Arab' country. I knew it as I said it. I meant 'Muslim.'" His Twitter correction was right: Turkey is not an Arab country. "Arabs and Turks are distinct peoples, separated by language, ethnicity, and geography. Although Turkey is adjacent to the Middle East, it is not generally considered part of that region," said Amy Hawthorne, executive director of the Hollings Center for International Dialogue. The Hollings Center operates in both Washington, D.C., and Turkey, and Hawthorne is a trained specialist in Middle East and Arab affairs. In Turkey, the predominant language is Turkish, while in Arab countries, the main language is Arabic. The Arab League has 22 members, and Turkey is not among them. And between 70 percent and 75 percent of Turkey's population is ethnically Turkish, with 18 percent Kurdish and the remainder smaller minorities (including a modest number of Arabs). The one thing that Turkey has in common with the Arab world is religion: An estimated 99.8 percent of the Turkish population is Muslim. "I knew I was wrong as I was saying it," Moulitsas told PolitiFact in an e-mail. "But everything moves so fast that everything had moved on before I could say, 'Boy that was dumb -- I meant 'predominantly Muslim country.'" Moulitsas has graciously copped to his error (and even invited us to ding him), but the Truth-O-Meter doesn't cut any slack for confessions. So we rate his statement False.	None	Markos Moulitsas	None	None	None	2010-06-06T18:19:58	2010-06-06	['None']
-pose-01268	“Under my presidency, we will accomplish a complete American energy independence. Complete. Complete."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1359/achieve-energy-independence/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Achieve energy independence	2017-01-17T09:13:53	None	['United_States']
-pomt-08301	Members of Congress did not have three days to read the bill "when the stimulus was rushed into law."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/31/john-boehner/john-boehner-says-stimulus-bill-was-rushed-passage/	During his last Saturday radio address before the Nov. 2, 2010, elections, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio -- the likely speaker of the House if the Republicans take over -- made a closing argument for his party that included a call for greater congressional transparency. "There’s a third thing we need to do to help our economy, and that’s change Congress itself," Boehner said. "The American people are in charge of this country, and they deserve a Congress that acts like it. Americans should have three days to read all bills before Congress votes on them – something they didn’t get when the ‘stimulus’ was rushed into law. We should put an end to so-called ‘comprehensive’ bills that make it easy to hide wasteful spending projects and job-killing policies. Bills should be written by legislators in committee in plain public view – not written in the Speaker’s office, behind closed doors." We wanted to see whether Boehner was right that lawmakers or the public didn't get three days to pore over the stimulus prior to passage. The bill in question is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or H.R. 1. We should first point out that the bill went through more than one iteration, and Boehner didn't specify which one he meant. The bill was first passed by the House, then passed by the Senate with amendments, then went to a joint House-Senate conference committee to iron out differences. Then the final bill was passed in turn by the House and the Senate before going to President Barack Obama for his signature. According to THOMAS, the official legislative-tracking website of the Library of Congress, the bill was officially introduced in the House on Jan. 26, 2009 -- just six days after Obama was sworn in. By 6:11 pm on Jan. 28, after various procedural hurdles were cleared, the House approved this initial version. While THOMAS doesn't specify the exact hour the bill was introduced, the records indicate the vote took place less than three days after the bill was introduced. At this point, the bill went to the Senate. It was officially transmitted to the Senate on Jan. 29, and on Feb. 2, the Senate officially took up its own version along with a slew of amendments, and they were under consideration from Feb. 2 until Feb. 7. However, as this was going on, a bipartisan group of moderate senators, led by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., was trying to craft a scaled-down version of the bill that could win the support of the required 60 Senators. They succeeded, and on Feb. 7, the new Senate version was introduced. After moving through a series of steps, the Senate passed the measure at 12:27 p.m. on Feb. 10. So for the Senate version, the chamber and the public did have roughly three days to consider the bill, which was very similar to the initial version. Because the versions passed in each chamber were different, leaders in the two chambers quickly established a conference committee -- a panel of House and Senate members charged with hammering out a compromise. This conference committee officially filed its new bill at 10:25 p.m. on Feb. 12. It was less than 24 hours before the House acted on the conference report, passing it at 2:24 p.m. on Feb. 13. The Senate quickly followed suit, passing the measure at 5:29 p.m. the same day. Four days later, on Feb. 17, the president signed it. To summarize: The first version clearly passed the House less than three days after it was introduced, while the centrist compromise version passed the Senate roughly three days after it was formally introduced. Meanwhile, both chambers passed the conference report -- the final version that became law -- within 24 hours of the bill's filing. So in all except cases except the main Senate vote, it's clear Boehner is correct. And in the case of the Senate version, he's cutting it close because it was right at three days. All in all, that's strong support for his claim, so we rate it True.	None	John Boehner	None	None	None	2010-10-31T17:10:27	2010-10-30	['United_States_Congress']
-pomt-14035	"Hypocrisy at the Clinton Foundation: Top male staff made on average $218,029 while top female staff made $153,014 from 2010-2014."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may/27/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-clinton-foundation-pays-top-wome/	Donald Trump is calling Hillary Clinton a hypocrite when it come to gender pay equality, charging that her husband’s Clinton Foundation doesn’t walk the walk when it comes to paying women and men equally. Trump recently shared a post on his Instagram account that sought to highlight pay disparities at the Clinton Foundation. The foundation was founded by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton has worked for the foundation in periods when she wasn’t serving in government or running for president. "Hypocrisy at the Clinton Foundation: Top male staff made on average $218,029 while top female staff made $153,014 from 2010-2014," Trump posted on May 24, 2016, to his 1.6 million followers. Clinton has been the target of these types of charges before in her time as a U.S. senator. Sean Hannity’s claim that Clinton "actually paid female staffers a lot less than men" rated Mostly False. We wondered if this attack was more accurate. A general warning about these types of claims Democrats and Republicans often spin the facts about the gender pay gap, and small changes in how you phrase a claim can make a big difference. For years, we have fact-checked claims by Democratic politicians decrying the gender wage gap, which has been in the neighborhood of 77 cents on the dollar, with slight ups and downs over the years. When politicians simply state the existence of this wage gap, we generally rate those claims Mostly True. What keeps it from a full True is that this gap does not stem entirely from discrimination. The statistic in question doesn’t say that women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man does in the same job. Indeed, that’s a claim we have consistently rated as Mostly False. Rather, the 77 cent figure refers to the overall difference between what men make and what women make. That difference can be shaped not just by discrimination but also by voluntary choices, such as the specific careers men and women pursue and whether they decide to take time off to raise children. Once you genuinely compare men and women in an apples-to-apples comparison -- that is, in an equivalent job, with similar experience, tenure and achievements -- the wage gap doesn’t disappear, but it does shrink significantly. Academics differ on exactly how much, but the 77 cent figure is a much more powerful data point, so it’s the one Democrats and their allies have traditionally turned to. We suggest you read our PolitiFact Sheet to learn more. The number behind Trump’s claim Trump’s claim includes spin we’ve seen before. He’s looking at only a small number of foundation employees while ignoring the central point of the equal pay argument -- which is whether the employees are doing the same work and being compensated differently because of their gender. Though the Trump campaign did not respond to an inquiry, we’re fairly certain his data comes from the Clinton Foundation’s IRS form 990 -- the tax form that nonprofit groups are required to file annually. The forms -- which are available for public inspection on the foundation’s website -- require the organization to list the compensation for its highest-paid officials. For the Clinton Foundation, that has typically been in the range of eight to 12 officials per year. We couldn’t reverse-engineer the specific figures cited in Trump’s post -- there are various ways to calculate the compensation figures listed -- but the numbers we did come up are in line with the ones Trump cited. Trump’s calculation has female top officials at the foundation earning, on average, 70 cents for every dollar that the average male top official at the foundation earned. If you look at the total compensation reported, which includes fringe benefits, our calculations showed that women earned 67 cents for every dollar earned by a man. If you look instead at the salary column only, the figure was 66 cents on the dollar. If you remove the compensation for the officials identified as CEOs during that period, the ratio improves, but still climbs only to 77 cents. And if you use the median amount rather than the average -- which statisticians usually prefer because it gives less emphasis to extreme data points -- the figure still improves to only 76 cents on the dollar. Any way you look a it, among those eight to 12 high-ranking foundation employees, the men consistently earned more than women. (For what it’s worth, an analysis of the Trump campaign’s financial-disclosure forms reported in the Huffington Post and Slate.com found the same trend applied to Trump.) Why these figures don’t prove gender discrimination The salaries of eight to 12 executives do not prove the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton are hypocrites when it comes to equal pay. The number of salaries included in Trump’s comparison accounts for just a fraction of all employees in the organization -- and even of senior management at the foundation. The foundation told PolitiFact that there are "several hundred" employees in the United States alone. Experts say this is too small a sample to say much about the foundation’s overall compensation practices. "I’m not sure I would draw too much from such a small number of employees," said Linda Babcock, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. In addition, the types of jobs disclosed in the tax form run the gamut from CEO to information technology director to senior fellow to human resources director. Few organizations would pay the CEO the same as an IT director, so finding differences doesn’t necessarily mean much without a much deeper analysis of the employer’s hiring practices. "The Clinton Foundation could argue it has paid equitable wages to both men and women, notwithstanding the fact that its high-paid men earned higher salaries than its high-paid women," said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution. In fact, experts say that evidence of gender pay discrimination is most discernible at the lower end of the pay scale. Top-level positions are usually filled by people who have specific credentials and career experiences. Because these factors are in high demand in the broader employment marketplace and often hard to find in a single candidate, the compensation level tends to be tailored to the specific candidate, whether a man or a woman. "Compensation is influenced by one's alternative pay options," said Hannah Riley Bowles, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. "Dramatic differences could be explained by one's market value in the private sector, which is likely to vary substantially looking at senior professionals with public-interest careers." In a statement, the foundation told PolitiFact that at the end of 2014, the senior leadership listed publicly on their website included nine women and nine men, and those women earned 91 cents for every dollar a man earned. The foundation also said that at the end of 2014, 64 percent of its U.S.-based employees were women. "Pay equity is an important and difficult issue that many large organizations grapple with, and we take it seriously at the Foundation," the foundation said. Our ruling Trump’s post said, "Hypocrisy at the Clinton Foundation: Top male staff made on average $218,029 while top female staff made $153,014 from 2010-2014." If you allow some leeway on what accounts for top staff, Trump is close on the numbers. But the statistical pool is too limited and the methodology is too crude to demonstrate evidence of hypocrisy. Trump is guilty of ignoring the nuances of gender-based wage disparities, just as Democrats often over-simplify the meaning of the 77-cent figure. The statement is partially accurate but takes things out of context, so we rate it Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/ba673130-73fe-4886-9d2d-d3a5f79b4428	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-05-27T16:38:03	2016-05-24	['Clinton_Foundation']
-pomt-04388	"Regulations have quadrupled. The rate of regulations quadrupled under this president."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/18/mitt-romney/federal-regulations-quadrupled-under-obama/	During the town hall presidential debate, Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of strangling small businesses with too much regulation. That's been a popular theme with Republicans and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who have complained about a "tsunami" of new regulations under Obama since 2010. Asked by one of the town hall participants about outsourcing, Romney gave his prescription for keeping jobs in the United States. First he spoke about the corporate tax rate, which he believes is too high and prevents job creation. Then he turned to regulations. "Regulations have quadrupled," Romney said. "The rate of regulations quadrupled under this president." We decided to check Romney’s numbers and see if he was right. Romney’s quadruple regulation claim The Romney campaign told us the basis for the statement was research by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. An ongoing study by Heritage documents regulation activity by the federal government. Its latest update said President George W. Bush’s administration adopted 28 "major regulations" that increased burdens on the private sector in its first three years, compared with 106 by the Obama administration. But viewers of the debate didn’t hear the caveats that should have been attached to Romney’s statement. First, he was referring only to "economically significant" regulations, which are those with a cost estimate of $100 million or higher. Second, the Heritage report doesn’t account for all regulations. It only looks at regulations that Heritage researchers said would "limit activity or mandate activity by the private sector." James Gattuso, an author of the Heritage report, said Romney’s use of the phrase "rate of regulations" seemed to be an effort to distinguish between all regulations and new regulations approved under a president. "Rate" implies a time frame. Heritage made comparisons about regulations over a three-year period. But we find Romney was not clear about which time frame he was using during the debate. Other data contradict Romney Since Heritage looked narrowly at high-cost regulations that it judged to be harmful to businesses, we sought other research about regulations and found little to support Romney's claim. The annual number of regulations approved under the Obama administration is about the same as other administrations in the past 18 years, according to OMB Watch, a left-leaning group that advocates for transparency in the Office of Management and Budget, better known as the OMB. In a September report titled "The regulatory tsunami that wasn’t," the group used records from the OMB to evaluate charges that the Obama administration was imposing more regulations than other recent presidents. In fact, the most up-to-date figures show about 8.5 percent fewer regulations in Obama’s first 46 months than in the same time frame for Bush. That tally comes from the Office of Management and Budget. The chart below comes from the OMB Watch report, comparing regulations and economically significant regulations under presidents Bill Clinton, Bush and Obama. "The story is much more of continuity than radical change," said Michael Livermore, executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. Since 1994 the number of regulations approved per year has ranged from 228 to 371, the group found. Between 2009 and 2011, the Obama administration approved an average of 297 regulations per year, comparable to yearly figures for the past 18 years. (In 1992 and 1993, the numbers were much higher, exceeding 1,000 regulations both years.) Even among the economically significant regulations, Obama is nowhere near quadrupling them: For the first three years of the Obama and Bush administrations, Obama is about 24 percent higher. (The numbers on the OMB Watch chart differ from Heritage because the conservative group only looked at economically significant regulations that it deemed to be harmful to the private sector, a subset of the total number. Also, Heritage relied on records from the Government Accountability Office, which includes regulations from independent agencies in addition to those in the executive branch.) Although Republicans have criticized Obama for over regulation of business, his former "regulatory czar" Cass Sunstein received widespread criticism for not enforcing several high-profile rules, such as a tighter ozone pollution standard and rules on coal ash disposal. In a May editorial, The New York Times called the attacks about too much regulation "absurd" because "the administration has a mediocre record when it comes to curbing dangerous practices by industry." Our ruling Romney said that regulations and the rate of regulations quadrupled under Obama. He was basing that on the Heritage study, but he did not include important caveats about how the study was conducted. And more importantly, the actual data on regulations show Obama's rate of regulations is no different from the past 18 years. This is a broad claim describing its own evidence inaccurately. False. UPDATE: We've updated this item with a fuller description of OMB Watch.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-10-18T16:53:23	2012-10-16	['None']
-bove-00073	FactCheck For Tripura CM Biplab Deb: Tagore Gave Up Knighthood Not Nobel	none	https://www.boomlive.in/factcheck-for-tripura-cm-biplab-deb-tagore-gave-up-knighthood-not-nobel/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck For Tripura CM Biplab Deb: Tagore Gave Up Knighthood Not Nobel	May 11 2018 6:28 pm, Last Updated: May 11 2018 6:39 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-15101	Says history suggests sports will "quickly subsume a lot of the attention span of the country" in the presidential primary.	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2015/sep/16/hugh-hewitt/hugh-hewitt-says-fall-sports-sap-public-interest-/	Fox News crushed past audience numbers with the first Republican presidential debate. Now CNN has its shot to match or beat the 24 million viewers that tuned in for round one. Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt will be part of the CNN panel firing questions at the candidates, and Hewitt argues that they’d better do well now before the American public begins tuning out. "Someone needs to break out of the pack if they're going to catch up to Donald Trump," Hewitt said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sept. 13, 2015. "So, they got to throw some long balls. The NFL starts this weekend. It's going to quickly subsume a lot of the attention span of the country. So, this is really the last opportunity for the 10 not named Donald to try and make themselves the alternative to Donald Trump." In an op-ed titled "Why Wednesday’s GOP presidential debates will matter," Hewitt made a similar point. "The arrival of tailgating and of fall temps will also drop the temps of the campaign rhetoric," he wrote. "Competition sets in for the Trump Show, and it won’t come from Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker. It will come from SportsCenter." We wondered if fall sports really does drive down interest in politics. We ran the question by Hewitt, live on his radio show, and he said it stands to reason that interest in politics will suffer because people have a finite amount of time to consume media. "If we look at the fact that the NFL is by far the most popular sport, the ratings for the World Series, especially when they feature the Cleveland Indians are very very high, therefore it must stand to reason that there is less time for politics because we spend so much time on sports," Hewitt said. "My proposition, and it’s merely my argument, is it has to be true that Americans have less time to spend on politics between now and Christmas then they have had up until this point." In terms of hard information, however, the polling data undermines Hewitt’s assertion. Going back to 2007, the Pew Research Center has been asking people if they follow various news stories "very closely, fairly closely, not too closely, or not at all closely." One of the stories the interviewers list is the election. They would do this nearly every week, with a hefty sample of over 1,000 people. Here are the trends in 2007 and 2011 (at this point in the election cycle four and eight years ago) for people who said they followed election news very or fairly closely: Source: Pew Research Center via Roper Center for Public Opinion Research There are some ups and downs by a handful of percentage points, but overall, about 45 to 55 percent of the public (depending on the year) said they were following the election, with perhaps a slight increase through the season. The surveys took place in slightly different weeks but both years saw dips during October. The one in 2011 happened to coincide with the World Series (the St. Louis Cardinals won in the seventh game). In 2007, it was around the period of the American League Championship Series. Whatever might explain the sudden drops, interest recovered immediately. Hewitt discounted the Pew data because it gets at his point indirectly. "Unless they ask the specific question, ‘Does your political consumption go down as your football consumption goes up’, you are guessing," he said. We couldn’t find a political scientist who specifically studied whether football and baseball reduce Americans’ appetite for politics. One analyst of public polling, Thomas Holbrook at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said he has no hard data, but he’s skeptical of the premise. "I do doubt, however, that football is going to knock the presidential contest off the front page, to use an archaic reference," Holbrook said. "If nothing else, we have had baseball and summer vacation during the most recent period, neither of which seemed to diminish the importance of the campaign." John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, said there’s some evidence that public engagement remains robust through the fall. "There is precedent for lots of poll movement after this point," Sides said. "There was certainly some in 2011, including surges for (Herman) Cain and (Newt) Gingrich." Sports and election viewing is not a zero sum game In our interview, Hewitt assumed that there is a finite time for consuming media and that football must compete with politics. Put simply, if you’re watching sports, that’s less time for you to pay attention to the election. But, of course, it is possible to give up time spent on another activity, such as washing the car, to watch football. Also, the importance Hewitt places on football and baseball viewership assumes that those people would otherwise have been paying attention to the primaries. But it’s likely at least some of those diehard sports fans didn’t follow election coverage in the first place. (Remember, only about 50 percent of respondents say they are closely following the election news.) Our ruling Hewitt said fall sports pull voters away from paying attention to the presidential primaries. The polling data from 2007 and 2011 shows that voter interest in election news held steady at about the 50 percent mark. There were brief dips in October that coincided with the American League Championship one year and the World Series the next, but both were only momentary interruptions. The data don’t measure the precise trade-off between politics and sports, but the stability of the audience for election news shows no impact of any external factor, whether it’s sports, weather or anything else. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Hugh Hewitt	None	None	None	2015-09-16T19:12:33	2015-09-13	['None']
-pomt-02127	Wendy Davis raised money for a U.S. House Democrat who is a member of a Democratic socialists group.	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2014/may/09/greg-abbott/abbott-claim-wendy-davis-raised-money-member-socia/	Republican Greg Abbott says Wendy Davis raised money far from Texas for a U.S. House Democrat who doubles as a member of a socialist group. In a press release headlined "Sen. Davis Has A Lot To Answer For," Abbott said Davis, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, campaigned with U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Chicago, a liberal initially elected to Congress in 1998. Abbott’s campaign manager, Wayne Hamilton, said in the release: "Sen. Davis’ fundraising on behalf of an extreme liberal Chicago congresswoman – a member of the Democratic Socialists For America no less – is merely the latest in a series of questions Sen. Davis has refused to answer about her ethics and her judgment." It’s not unheard of for someone to assert a foe is a socialist. But such claims haven’t held up in our past fact checks and Abbott’s statement ultimately lacked confirmation as well. In 2011, we rated as Pants on Fire a claim that U.S. Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston and Eddie Berniece Johnson of Dallas were among Socialists in Congress. At the time, a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America said no members of Congress were members of its party. The next year, PolitiFact in Washington, D.C., gave the same rating to a claim by Gov. Rick Perry that President Barack Obama was a socialist. Abbott’s May 6, 2014, release pointed out that a May 5, 2014, Chicago Sun-Times news blog post said Davis, who had raised money for her own campaign in Chicago May 4, was going to be among featured guests for Schakowsky’s annual "Ultimate Women's Power Lunch" at midday along with Lizz Winstead, co-creator of the Daily Show, and Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, Sweet wrote. Abbott’s offered basis for the socialist claim was an Oct. 16, 2010, National Review blog post on "The Corner," a National Review Online blog that describes itself as a "web-leading source of real-time conservative opinion." The 2010 post, by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics & Public Policy Center, said Kurtz had earlier come across "documentary evidence" that Schakowsky was a member of the the Democratic Socialists of America (not the Democratic Socialists For America) at the start of her political career. Kurtz’s post closed by saying the "idea of socialist politicians working openly or quietly within the Democratic Party is not a wild impossibility but a real phenomenon." No documents were included in the blog post to back up his claim that Schakowsky had been a member of the socialist group. So we followed up with Kurtz, who said by email that Schakowsky was an "active member" of Chicago’s DSA chapter in the 1980s, a conclusion he said he based on chapter newsletters from 1983 and 1986 that he said he viewed in archives at New York University. "I do not know how long" Schakowsky "remained a member of the DSA," Kurtz wrote. After we published this fact check, Kurtz told us by email that he sent Breitbart Texas copies of the relevant newsletter pages. The February/March 1983 issue of the Chicago Socialist, published by the Chicago chapter, credits Schakowsky as the author of an article recapping a meeting of the Illinois Public Action Council, a mix of progressive groups. A June 1986 newsletter item, headlined "DSAers on the move," states that on the local political scene, Schakowsky’s bid "for Cook County Board got a boost when she drew 2nd ballot position among 14 candidates." The Cook County Board of Commissioners is the county’s legislative body. By email, Bob Roman, secretary of the Chicago DSA chapter, told us the posted newsletter excerpts were authentic. Schakowsky’s House spokesman, Lee Whack, referred us to her campaign political director, Alex Armour, who didn’t engage. By telephone, Maria Svart, the national director of the DSA, noted the group is an activist and educational group and not a political party. She also reaffirmed what a predecessor in that role, Frank Llewellyn, told us in 2011. To join the group, a person must fill out a form and pay dues, Llewellyn said, adding that the last member of Congress who was a card-carrying member was California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums, who served 28 years in the House until leaving in 1998. Svart also said that while the group doesn’t announce its members, as far as she knows, Schakowsky isn’t a member and never was. Separately, we spotted a web post by the Chicago chapter of the DSA showing Schakowsky spoke at the group’s May 13, 2011, Eugene V. Debs-Norman Thomas-Michael Harrington dinner celebrating union organizers and other activists on the left. A May-June 2011 DSA recap said Schakowsky told guests that despite Democrats being the House minority, she was optimistic in that conservatives in Congress had over-reached. A DSA web page on the history of the annual dinner lists Schakowsky as the 2000 dinner’s honoree. That listing led to another web post detailing why Schakowsky was honored, touching on her actions as a consumer advocate and state and federal legislator. It didn’t speak to her membership (or not) in the DSA. By phone, Roman said Schakowsky is "not somebody that we claim as a member." He also said he generally doesn’t comment on whether anyone is current or former member. "Once you say ‘so and so’ is a member, was a member or was never a member, then you open yourself to queries about any single person who has ever been a member," Roman said. To our inquiry, Davis campaign spokesman Zac Petkanas emailed us a copy of the invitation to the Schakowsky event attended by Davis. The invitation lacks mention of Davis--and lists Winstead as the star attraction. Petkanas also provided what he described as the prepared text of Davis’ remarks at the event, which do not include an appeal for donations to Schakowsky’s political kitty. "Davis stopped by the event to talk about Texas and give an update on her campaign," Petkanas said. Our ruling Abbott said Davis raised money for a member of a socialist group. Davis appeared at a Chicago fund-raiser for Schakowsky, who may have once participated in the Chicago chapter of the DSA and has been saluted by it. Abbott didn’t provide, nor did we find, evidence of Schakowsky being a current member of the group. We light a match when a statement lacks factual backup and seems ridiculous. Pants on Fire! PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. UPDATE, 6:18 p.m., May 12, 2014: This article was updated to include detail about the newsletter excerpts relied upon by an author to conclude Schakowsky was a DSA member in the 1980s. This addition did not change our rating of Abbott’s reference to Schakowsky as a current DSA member.	None	Greg Abbott	None	None	None	2014-05-09T13:13:45	2014-05-06	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'United_States']
-snes-04563	Musician Hank Williams Jr. has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hank-williams-jr-endorses-hillary-clinton/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Hank Williams, Jr. Endorses Hillary Clinton	23 June 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-03788	"Very few men outlive their own fertility."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/mar/28/charles-cooper/attorney-same-sex-marriage-case-says-very-few-men-/	Kids are at the center of marriage, argue supporters of California’s same-sex marriage ban. But infertile opposite-sex couples can get married, opponents point out — so why not same-sex pairs? Men stay fertile till their deathbeds, said an attorney arguing against rights for same-sex couples. Confused? Consider the actual debate before the Supreme Court on March 26, 2013, in Hollingsworth vs. Perry. Justice Elena Kagan compared a ban on marriage licenses for couples over age 55 with a ban on marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Couples over 55 are unlikely to produce children, she pointed out. Yet it would be unconstitutional to deny them a marriage license. So, she asked, what’s the difference between that couple and a same-sex couple that can’t naturally conceive? Attorney Charles Cooper, arguing in favor of California’s ban, said, "With respect to couples over the age of 55, it is very rare that … both parties to the couple are infertile." A bit later, he clarified: "Very few men outlive their own fertility." He explained that the state’s interest in marriage extends to older couples, because preserving the "marital norm" — with its obligations of fidelity and monogamy — discourages "irresponsible procreative conduct outside of that marriage." (He meant old guys having affairs with young mistresses.) It’s settled science that most women over 55 can’t naturally conceive. But we wondered — apart from what it may mean for the constitutionality of same-sex marriage — what does science say about men’s fertility in their declining years? Do "very few men outlive their own fertility"? What studies say — and don’t say We spoke with a range of fertility experts, combed through their research, and can tell you this: Science doesn't yet tell us how many old men can make babies. Especially if we’re talking about natural conception of the variety that might take place if a 70-year-old is seeing a 25-year-old on the side. The kind that requires, you know, sex, and enough sperm that move vigorously enough to reach and penetrate an egg. (One expert told us some couples who visit fertility clinics don’t realize sex is required to make babies. We’re going to assume here that you generally get how this process works.) We do know that roughly 10 to 20 percent of couples generally are infertile, with the man’s fertility a factor in about 40 percent of those cases. But evidence is tricky when it comes to fertility as men age. Cooper’s office sent us links to two studies that note men make sperm late into life. But one happens to document age-related decline in sperm quality and the other notes that studies suggest men contribute to reduced fertility beginning in their early 40s. Here’s a roundup of points on both sides. Signs of late-life fertility: • There’s no "cliff" as with menopause around age 50 in women, where fertility drops off dramatically. • Most men still make sperm into old age, studies say. (This is different from women, who are born with all the eggs they will ever have — no making fresh ones.) • Sperm count, one of the most important measures of male fertility, isn’t as sensitive to age as other factors, said Andrew La Barbera, scientific director for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. • We’ve all heard of guys old enough to be great-grandfathers fathering kids. Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia joked in court, about the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who fathered four children in his late 60s and early 70s. Points that give pause: • While there’s no menopause-like fertility cliff for men, sperm quality, amount of semen and fertility do appear to decline with age. Older men may be more likely to make sperm that’s strangely shaped and doesn’t swim well. "These data suggest that men may become progressively less fertile as they age," said a 2003 study cited by Cooper’s office. • The timing of fertility decline may vary dramatically from person to person — but there’s a need for more research to explain the variation. • There’s no clear research that shows how many older men may be capable of impregnating a woman in a year of regular sex, the clinical definition of fertility. "We don’t have data on men as they age ... not men who are in their 60s and 70s," said Harry Fisch, clinical professor of urology and reproductive medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and author of The Male Biological Clock. "Very few men in these studies are older." "If it’s true, then let me ask you: Where’s the data?" That point was echoed by researchers who explained the limits of current studies. "It is rather difficult to give a precise estimate of (men’s) fertility by age because very few are still trying to have children beyond 60 or 65 years," said Henri Leridon, an expert in human reproduction who headed research at France’s National Institute for Demographic Studies. An Israeli fertility researcher, Eliezer Girsh, told PolitiFact that not only does fertility decline in men after age 50, but that just 20 to 40 percent of men are "still fertile in advanced age." Other experts said that, frankly, there’s a need for more research. But anecdotes sometimes overshadow the lack of data. The oldest scientifically documented case of fatherhood: a 94-year-old. Our ruling Cooper argued before the Supreme Court that "very few men outlive their own fertility." Experts we consulted generally agree that men — or at least some men — may still father children well into their advanced years. But whether that’s most men or a minority isn’t yet supported by research. Meanwhile, emerging studies document declining fertility as individual men age, and studies don’t yet confirm how many men remain fertile their entire lives. Given the sweeping nature of Cooper's claim, and the lack of unequivocal evidence, we rate it Half True.	None	Charles Cooper	None	None	None	2013-03-28T17:24:16	2013-03-26	['None']
-snes-00124	A man accidentally burned down his home while attempting to set his Nike shoes on fire in protest over the company's ties with Colin Kaepernick.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/house-fire-nike-shoes-burn/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did a Man Accidentally Burn His Home Down After Lighting Nike Shoes on Fire?	7 September 2018	None	['None']
-bove-00155	Fact Vs Fiction: Mersal’s Claims On GST, Modi-Rahul Twitter War	none	https://www.boomlive.in/fact-vs-fiction-mersals-claims-gst-modi-rahul-twitter-war/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Vs Fiction: Mersal’s Claims On GST, Modi-Rahul Twitter War	Oct 27 2017 5:33 pm, Last Updated: Nov 03 2017 5:47 pm	None	['None']
-snes-00406	The bluegill fish is related to the piranha and is one of the most dangerous fish in North America, responsible for more than 500 deaths in the United States every summer.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bluegill-dangerous-fish/	None	Critter Country	None	David Emery	None	Is the Bluegill One of the Most Dangerous Fish in North America?	26 June 2018	None	['United_States', 'North_America']
-pomt-08169	On banning earmarks.	full flop	/florida/statements/2010/dec/01/bill-nelson/bill-nelson-talks-one-way-earmarks-votes-another/	Florida's U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson joined 32 Republicans and six other Democrats on Nov. 30, 2010, in unsuccessfully pushing for a moratorium on earmarks for the next three federal budget years. But that's not the position Nelson staked out just two weeks prior. Speaking to reporters on Nov. 15, 2010, after meeting with Florida U.S. Sen.-elect Marco Rubio, Nelson said earmarks were an important part of creating jobs and growing Florida's economy. (Rubio supports a moratorium on federal earmarks). Nelson said he gave Rubio "the example of bringing a nuclear aircraft carrier to Mayport (and) the necessary earmarks that take place over five years. It's a request by the Department of Defense, but if I didn't attend to that appropriation, the Virginia delegation was going to eliminate a carrier going into Florida." Nelson then talked about ports in Miami and Jacksonville needing millions of dollars to deepen their channels so that ships using the Panama Canal could dock there -- and how getting an earmark to pay for the work is critical. "That is huge to Florida -- to trade, to jobs, to economic activity, that all of those big cargo ships coming through the Panama Canal come to Florida instead of going to Savannah and to Charleston," Nelson said. "Those are the hard realities when we talk about the appropriations we call earmarks. So if you tie them to jobs in your local economy, that seems like that's a defining way." Yet on Nov. 30, 2010, he was one of 39 senators to support waiving Senate rules to consider an earmark moratorium for fiscal years 2011, 2012 and 2013. The measure failed 56-39. That Nov. 30 vote also stands in contrast to a vote Nelson cast eight months earlier, according to Senate records. On March 16, 2010, Nelson was one of 68 senators to table a motion to ban earmarks for fiscal years 2010 and 2011. The motion was tabled by a vote of 68-29. Asked about the switch in positions by the St. Petersburg Times' Alex Leary, Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin said: "These are unusual (economic) times. ... Going forward Sen. Nelson will keep looking for ways to cut spending, while also fighting to make sure Florida gets its fair share of federal funding for things like ports, military bases and major projects that bring new jobs." Without a formal ban, Nelson -- who is up for reelection in 2012 -- is free to continue to pursue earmarks. But his Nov. 30 vote is an about-face from an earlier vote and his comments to reporters. So it's an easy call for our Flip-O-Meter. We say Full Flop.	None	Bill Nelson	None	None	None	2010-12-01T12:09:02	2010-11-30	['None']
-pomt-06464	The 9-9-9 plan "does not raise taxes on those that are making the least."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/18/herman-cain/herman-cain-says-9-9-9-plan-does-not-raise-taxes-t/	Herman Cain has offered what he calls a simple tax plan to take the place of the current tax code, which he says is too complicated. Cain, a Republican candidate for president, touts a 9-9-9 plan: a 9 percent income tax, a 9 percent sales tax and a 9 percent business tax. Cain’s plan has gotten more attention in recent days -- and more criticism. At the debate for the Republican nomination in Las Vegas on Oct. 18, 2011, moderator Anderson Cooper of CNN summarized those concerns. "Mr. Cain, a lot of prominent conservatives now are coming forward saying that your 9-9-9 plan would actually raise taxes on middle-class voters, on lower-income voters," Cooper said. "The thing that I would encourage people to do before they engage in this knee-jerk reaction is read our analysis. It is available at HerrmanCain.com," Cain said. "It was performed by Fiscal Associates. And all of the claims that are made against it, it is a jobs plan, it is revenue-neutral, it does not raise taxes on those that are making the least. All of those are simply not true." Here, we wanted to check Cain’s answer to Cooper’s question, that the plan "does not raise taxes on those that are making the least." We’ve been looking at Cain’s plan as part of our ongoing work fact-checking the Republican nomination contest. Based on what Cain and his campaign have said about the plan, the only exemptions on the income tax will be for charitable deductions and for undefined "empowerment" zones that would encourage development in inner cities. The 9 percent sales tax would apply to all new goods but not to used goods. Payroll taxes on workers would go away. If you pay no income tax currently -- and about half the country doesn’t -- Cain’s plan means you would pay more income tax. The day of the debate, a new analysis was published examining Cain’s tax plan. The analysis was published by the Tax Policy Center, an independent policy analysis group that includes tax analysts who have worked in both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Tax Policy Center analyzed Cain’s plan using the same type of models it has used to examine other national tax proposals. The analysis found that Cain’s tax plan would result in tax cuts for many of the wealthiest tax payers and tax increases for the poorest tax payers. The center found that 83.8 percent of tax filers would get a tax increase under Cain’s plan, compared with current tax policy. On the other hand, most of the tax filers who make more than $1 million would get a tax cut under the Cain plan, about 95.4 percent of this high income group. And the average tax cut for millionaires would be $487,300. The center also offered analysis of Cain’s plan by income level compared with current tax policy. Most people earning lower incomes would see a tax increase. Cash income Percentage of filers with a tax increase Less than $10,000 84.1 $10,000 to $20,000 97.8 $20,000 to $30,000 97.3 $30,000 to $40,000 94.9 $40,000 to $50,000 92.1 $50,000 to $75,000 83.7 We should note that the Tax Policy Center said it had to make a few assumptions about Cain’s plan in order to analyze the plan according to its standard economic model. So it’s possible Cain may release more details that could cause these estimates to change. Cain said the 9-9-9 plan "does not raise taxes on those that are making the least." But it would raise income taxes on people who now have low tax burdens due to exemptions and deductions. The Tax Policy Center analysis adds more detail and found that high percentages of lower-income tax filers would see tax increases. It’s true that Cain’s campaign may release more details on his plan that could change this picture. But knowing what we know now about the plan, we rate Cain’s statement False.	None	Herman Cain	None	None	None	2011-10-18T23:57:22	2011-10-18	['None']
-snes-00640	Was the Obama Administration Unable to Arrange the Release of Three Hostages in North Korea?	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-administration-unable-arrange-release/	None	None	None	Bethania Palma	None	Was the Obama Administration Unable to Arrange the Release of Three Hostages in North Korea?	7 May 2018	None	['None']
-goop-02792	Kate Middleton Pregnant Report “Official,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-middleton-pregnant-not-official-fake-news/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kate Middleton Pregnant Report NOT “Official,” Despite Tabloid Cover Claim	1:38 pm, May 17, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02953	"We’re second only to Boston in college students per capita."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2013/oct/27/chris-abele/chris-abele-says-milwaukee-area-trails-only-boston/	Chris Abele says he’s "one of the most unapologetically proud Milwaukeeans," pointing to things such as the lakefront festivals, Milwaukee Art Museum and the new Milwaukee Rotary Centennial Arboretum along the Milwaukee River. In an Oct. 1, 2013 speech to the Rotary Club of Milwaukee, the Milwaukee County executive had plenty more for the list. "We’re second only to Boston in college students per capita," Abele said. "We have low labor turnover, low absenteeism, low loan default, incredibly high volunteerism, and some industries that are placed in really strategic places." All sounds great. But what about those college students? In April of 2013, the Journal Sentinel reported the Milwaukee metropolitan area ranks about average in the share of residents with college degrees. All told, 31.4 percent of adults have degrees. But the area has more than 100,000 college students, from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to Marquette, Cardinal Stritch to Carroll, Alverno to the Milwaukee School of Engineering, the tech colleges and for-profits such as Bryant & Stratton College and DeVry University. The list goes on. Is it possible that the area ranks behind only Boston as a student hub? When we asked Abele for backup, his office said he was referring to 1996 data cited in a McGill University study of student concentrations in the 30 largest metro areas in the United States and Canada. However, Abele could not locate the actual study, which involves data from 17 years ago. We couldn’t either, nor could McGill officials. The closest we found was a Journal Sentinel story from 2000, when the study came out. It said the McGill study ranked the Milwaukee metro area sixth overall and fifth among U.S. metros in college students per capita. Boston was first in the United States (though it trailed Montreal in North America), followed by Denver, Minneapolis-St.Paul and Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News. So, Milwaukee certainly ranked high, but Abele’s memory was off on Milwaukee’s specific rank. Around the same time, the Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education found that Milwaukee ranked 13th among the top 50 largest metro areas. In any case, both studies are very outdated, and Abele’s claim was that Milwaukee ranks that high today. Here is a look at some more recent research: Middle among mid-size metros: Milwaukee ranked in the middle -- 16th of 30 -- among "mid-size metros" for student concentration in the 2013-’14 version of the American Institute for Economic Research’s annual "College Destinations Index." When looking at 229 metro areas with more than 15,000 students, Milwaukee ranked 134th in student concentration, the group’s spokesman Jon Sylbert said, quoting from statistics set for official release in late 2013. Abele, of course, could not have seen these rankings because they were not public. But last year’s AIER study was much the same story, ranking the Milwaukee metro area 14th among mid-size metros, and 123rd in the broader group. The latest AIER study used 2011 US Census data on enrollment. The Census defines college students as people attending a 4-year or 2-year college, university, or professional school, full time or part time, in courses that may advance the student toward a recognized college or university degree. Middle among top metros: Milwaukee ranked 23rd among the top 50 metro areas for student concentration, according to Kevin Stolarick, research director at The Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. San Diego led, followed by Austin, Sacramento, Boston and San Jose, said Stolarick, who has studied student concentration and is a colleague of demographics expert Richard Florida. He also uses census data and definitions, but measures the number of college students against only the 15 and older population of an area. More broadly, Stolarick found that Milwaukee ranked 153rd of the 374 largest metro areas and 269th among 955 metros and smaller areas. So, the current research puts Milwaukee pretty far down the list. Behind the numbers Obviously such rankings can change depending on whether you include small "college towns" such as Ames, Iowa, home to Iowa State University, which had the highest student concentration according to the AIER study. The 2000 McGill study -- the one that cannot be located -- sought to eliminate those small college towns from the equation. But even if you take that approach with the more recent data, the Milwaukee metro area was nowhere near the top in concentration of students even among very large metro areas. For example, using the data from AIER, Milwaukee trails Boston, Miami, Richmond, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Raleigh, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore, San Diego and others. So, what to make of the McGill study cited by Abele, and this area of research in general? Even Mark Michaud, an official in the office at McGill University that produced the study cited by Abele, urged caution. He told us he would question any rankings claims of this nature "since all it takes is some creative definition for either the numerator (who exactly are college students?) or the denominator (what exactly is a city’s population?)." Abele’s office also cited media accounts of growth in the number of college graduates moving to Milwaukee. But that doesn’t bear on Abele’s claim about current student enrollment. Our rating Abele said, "We’re second only to Boston in college students per capita." The county exec relies on decade-and-a-half-old data from a study that is no longer available and, in any event, does not back up his claim. A second dated study we found from 1996 put Milwaukee at 13th of 50. More recent research ranks the area far from the head of the class. We rate his claim False.	None	Chris Abele	None	None	None	2013-10-27T05:00:00	2013-10-01	['Boston']
-pomt-04724	In his first TV interview as president, Obama said we "should talk to Iran."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/31/mitt-romney/obama-first-interview-talk-iran/	The only good thing Mitt Romney had to say about President Barack Obama’s foreign policy record was he "gave the order, and Seal Team Six took out Osama bin Laden." From that point in Romney’s speech accepting the Republican Party presidential nomination, he quickly pivoted to zinging Obama for his policies on Israel, Cuba, Russia, Poland and, possibly worst of all, Iran. "On another front, every American is less secure today because he has failed to slow Iran's nuclear threat," Romney said on Aug. 30, 2012. "In his first TV interview as president, he said we should talk to Iran. We're still talking, and Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning." Here, we’re fact-checking whether Obama said we should "talk to Iran" in his first TV interview. Obama’s first interview as president came on Jan. 27, 2009, with Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya. The Dubai-based network is considered less radical than Al Jazeera. News organizations from the New York Times to the Washington Post to MSNBC billed it as his first formal TV interview in the White House. Obama, who pledged a much different approach with the Middle East than his predecessor, was coming off selecting former Maine Sen. George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East. He made calls on his first day in the Oval Office to Arab and Israeli leaders, we’ve noted in a previous fact-check. "My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy," the network quoted Obama as saying. The question about Iran’s nuclear status was the last one in the interview. Obama stressed diplomacy while frowning on Iran’s threats against Israel and its pursuit of a nuclear weapon that "could potentially set off an arms race in the region." Here is the full exchange, pulled from Al Arabiya’s 2009 story: Melhem: Will the United States ever live with a nuclear Iran? And if not, how far are you going in the direction of preventing it? Obama: You know, I said during the campaign that it is very important for us to make sure that we are using all the tools of U.S. power, including diplomacy, in our relationship with Iran. Now, the Iranian people are a great people, and Persian civilization is a great civilization. Iran has acted in ways that's not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region: their threats against Israel; their pursuit of a nuclear weapon which could potentially set off an arms race in the region that would make everybody less safe; their support of terrorist organizations in the past -- none of these things have been helpful. But I do think that it is important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress. And we will over the next several months be laying out our general framework and approach. And as I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us. Again, we’re not evaluating in this fact-check whether Obama’s policies on Iran have worked to slow Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. But Obama said in his first presidential interview that we should "be willing to talk to Iran." Romney’s characterization of that interview is very close. We rate his claim True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-08-31T00:32:11	2012-08-30	['Barack_Obama', 'Iran']
-snes-04529	The Muslim community donated $87,000 to the family of the man responsible for the shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muslim-community-donates-87000/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Muslim Community Donates $87,000 to Family of Orlando Shooter	29 June 2016	None	['Orlando,_Florida']
-snes-02195	Did Alexandria Shooter James Hodgkinson Hold a Sign With a Rand Paul Tweet?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alexandria-shooter-james-hodgkinson-protested-with-sign-rand-paul-tweet/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Alexandria Shooter James Hodgkinson Hold a Sign With a Rand Paul Tweet?	16 June 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-14021	Say video "shows massive alligator strolling across Florida golf course."	true	/florida/statements/2016/jun/01/blog-posting/massive-alligator-spotted-roaming-florida-golf-cou/	If you’ve seen the viral video of a giant alligator strolling across a Florida golf course, then you’ve probably had the same reaction we did: Can that be real? The video, originally posted by Charles Helms on his Facebook page Wednesday, May 25, shows a large alligator meandering across the fairway at Buffalo Creek Golf Course in Palmetto. The alligator is so big (some have estimated it to be around 15 feet), one of the watchers suspected it might be "two guys in an alligator suit." "I didn't know if we were being punked or something," Helms later told reporters. Helms’ video has since traveled the globe with similar expressions of shock and disbelief. It has been picked up by several news outlets including Golf.com, Time and The Guardian. The video posted on Golf.com’s YouTube account has 6.1 million views as of this writing. Someone even mashed up Helms’ video with scenes from Jurassic Park. So, is it real? We went to the Manatee County golf course to find out. Our hunt took us to Ken Powell, regional manager for Pope Golf. Powell oversees the 18-hole golf course. Powell said the video -- and the gator -- are indeed real. Powell, who moved to Florida five years ago, said the gator can most often be found roaming around holes 3, 8 and 14. You might see him several days in a row, or not at all for weeks, Powell said. "He could be there," Powell said. "He could not. You’re never going to know." He offered us a ride on a golf cart to try and spot the elusive beast. Ken Powell points to the reservoir where the alligator is often seen. (Photo by Allison Graves) As we traveled along the edges of the bodies of water, we kept our eyes peeled for alligators of any kind, and especially for the ragged back of the now-famous reptile poking out of the water. Powell pointed out where he’s seen the gator and noted that it often follows a path, from a creek near Hole 8 to the lake. Sometimes, the alligator hides in the nearby black culvert pipe feeding into the lake, Powell said. We opted not to poke our head in. The 150-acre golf course is home to many wildlife species and plant life. Powell estimates there are around 37 bird species and more than 150 plant and tree species. The golf course is open every day except Christmas, open to the public and costs about $25 to play in the summer. Estimates of the gator’s length vary. Helms told ABC Action News in Tampa that it was around 14- to 15-feet long. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Florida record for a gator is 14 feet, 3.5 inches. We drove around the 8th hole and to the 3rd and the 14th. No gator. We stared off into the lake looking for him, but we only saw a pack of vultures and a few unique birds that hung out near the water holes. Cool. But not what we were after. After a thorough search, no luck. Powell showed a video he took from a different perspective, which shows the gator crossing a golf cart path, which he said is around 6 feet. He said the gator's tail was around 7 to 8 feet in total, and the entire gator could be double the length of the tail. Powell said he doesn’t want to get any closer to say for certain. He also added that the golf course may have a contest to name the alligator. Frank Mazzotti, a professor and investigator for "The Croc Docs" at the University of Florida, said that a large Florida gator would typically stretch 10 to 12 feet. In his estimation from watching Helms’ video, Mazzotti said the gator was around 12 to 14 feet long. He said he doesn’t think it meets record size. Mazzotti also noted that the angle of the image could significantly alter how one measures it. Countering disbelievers arguing that the alligator is not real, Mazzotti pointed to its gait — a "high walk" — as characteristic of a large gator. "An alligator moving from pond to pond — large alligators will typically engage in that behavior," he said. "They will get up in all fours and walk in what I would call a stately fashion for an alligator, just dragging its tail a bit." Saddened not to see the mammoth gator, we prepared our goodbyes to Powell and thought about our drive home. Then, on our way out, right in front of the golf course, we spotted a darkish tail sitting in a shallow pond. Could it be? Could we have found it? As we inspected the water, the alligator outline became clear. We grabbed our phones, readied our camera. But it was just 2 feet long or so. Nothing worth writing about. Our ruling Bloggers went crazy over a viral video of a massive alligator on a Manatee County golf course, with many expressing skepticism about the video’s authenticity. After speaking with the course’s regional manager and a University of Florida gator expert (and seeing additional video of the gator), we can say this video holds up. We rate this claim as True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/e08e2288-592d-478b-bf29-54b23a8da7a2	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2016-06-01T16:48:29	2016-06-01	['None']
-pomt-07891	Under Hosni Mubarak's rule, "Egypt received more American dollars than any country besides Israel."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/04/ross-douthat/egypt-got-more-foreign-aid-anyone-besides-israel-s/	Hosni Mubarak may have ruled Egypt with an iron fist since 1981, but he's been an important ally for the United States in the fight against terrorism -- or so the thinking goes. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, though, questioned whether Mubarak has been as helpful as some believe. Mubarak, after all, led a regime that tortured political dissidents. "By visiting imprisonment, torture and exile upon Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Mubarak foreclosed any possibility of an Islamic revolution in his own country. But he also helped radicalize and internationalize his country's Islamists, pushing men like Ayman Al-Zawahiri — Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant, and arguably the real brains behind Al Qaeda — out of Egyptian politics and into the global jihad," Douthat wrote. Douthat credited the book The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, for documenting that history. "At the same time, Mubarak's relationship with Washington has offered constant vindication for the jihadi worldview," Douthat wrote. "Under his rule, Egypt received more American dollars than any country besides Israel. For many young Egyptians, restless amid political and economic stagnation, it's been a short leap from hating their dictator to hating his patrons in the United States." Douthat concluded his column by noting that a different government in Egypt might not necessarily be a good thing. "The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse. There are devils behind every door," he wrote. We were interested in Douthat's statement about aid to Egypt. He is correct based on the most recent statistics. If you don't count Afghanistan ($8.9 billion) and Iraq ($7.5 billion) because of the ongoing U.S. military operations, then Israel ($2.4 billion) is indeed the top recipient, followed by Egypt ($1.5 billion). That's followed by Russia ($1.3 billion), Sudan ($1.2 billion), Tanzania ($1.1 billion), Ethiopia ($1 billion), Pakistan ($963 million), Colombia ($888 million), Jordan ($833 million), and Mozambique ($799 million). We found these ratings in the U.S. Census 2011 Statistical Abstract, which compiled 2008 military and economic aid. Foreign aid includes things such as money for economic development, agriculture or children's health. In Egypt's case, most of the money in recent years has gone to military aid, particularly heavy equipment such as tanks, helicopters and fighter planes. We should note that Egypt will likely slip a place when the official 2010 figures are released, according to a report in the Boston Globe. Haiti is expected to receive more aid, because of the earthquake that occurred there in 2010. The Globe also reported that much of the aid the U.S. sends to Egypt comes back to the United States when Egypt purchases weapons from U.S. defense manufacturers. Still, Douthat wrote that Egypt has received more money than any country besides Israel "under his rule." That would mean the 30 years since Mubarak came to power in late 1981. We turned to the same source the Statistical Abstract used, the U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants data as collected in the "Greenbook." The Greenbook, which is compiled by the U.S. Agency for International Development, provides "a complete historical record of United States' (U.S.) foreign aid to the rest of the world by reporting all loans and grants authorized by the U.S. Government for each fiscal year," according to its site. We obtained aid data by country, calculated in inflation-adjusted 2009 U.S. dollars, from 1982 to 2009. This time, Israel ($117.6 billion) was number one, followed by Egypt ($83.7 billion) at number two. Rounding out the top 10 were Iraq ($54.4 billion), Afghanistan ($35.2 billion), Russia ($18.1 billion), Pakistan ($18 billion), Turkey ($16.7 billion), Jordan ($11.2 billion), Sudan ($10.3 billion), and Colombia ($10.3 billion). For our ruling, we wanted to know if Douthat was correct that under Mubarak's rule, Egypt received more American dollars than any country besides Israel. Douthat is right. We rate his statement True.	None	Ross Douthat	None	None	None	2011-02-04T17:05:33	2011-01-30	['United_States', 'Egypt', 'Israel', 'Hosni_Mubarak']
-tron-02986	Amish Community Throws Support Behind Donald Trump, Guaranteeing Victory	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/amish-community-throws-support-behind-donald-trump-guaranteeing-victory/	None	politics	None	None	['2016 election', 'donald trump', 'hillary clinton']	Amish Community Throws Support Behind Donald Trump, Guaranteeing Victory	Oct 27, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-10572	"George Bush sent people to war without body armor."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/feb/04/hillary-clinton/50000-started-war-without-body-armor/	In the Democratic debate in Los Angeles on Jan. 31, 2008, Sen. Hillary Clinton criticized the Bush administration for failing to give American soldiers in Iraq the resources they require. She leveled this accusation: "We had to fight to get body armor. You know, George Bush sent people to war without body armor." The issue of body armor — who gets it and whether it's the right kind — has been a source of intense scrutiny nearly from the start of the war in Iraq. A March 7, 2005, story in the New York Times by reporter Michael Moss detailed a deadly miscalculation by the military near the start of the war in April 2003. Army Gen. Richard A. Cody decided to stop buying bulletproof vests after a determination that some 50,000 soldiers not on the front lines could do without them. In the following weeks, Moss wrote, "Iraqi snipers and suicide bombers stepped up deadly attacks, often directed at those very soldiers behind the front lines." Cody quickly ordered bulletproof vests for every soldier. But it took 167 days to start getting those vests to soldiers due to production and paperwork delays. Some soldiers waited months more. Many soldiers heading to Iraq bought their own body armor despite assurances from the military that it would be provided. In April 2005, the Government Accountability Office reported on shortages of critical force protection items, including individual body armor. The problems were caused, the report concluded, due to materials shortages, production limitations and distribution problems. But by and large, everyone eventually got body armor. In ensuing years, the issue became whether the military was using the right kind. In January 2006, the New York Times cited a secret Pentagon study that found that as many as 80 percent of the Marines killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had body armor that reached a soldier's shoulders, sides and torso. In March 2007, Clinton and fellow Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia sent a letter to the Comptroller of the United States, calling on him to initiate a GAO investigation to reassess the body armor systems used by the military. The following month, the GAO issued a report, which concluded that "Army and Marine Corps body armor is currently meeting theater ballistic requirements and the required amount needed for personnel in theater, including the amounts needed for the surge of troops in Iraq." Nevertheless, with emerging technology and debate over the best type of body armor, the GAO is reassessing body armor, said Roger Charles, vice chairman of the nonpartisan Soldiers for the Truth Foundation, which has been at the forefront of the body armor debate. Clinton's comment about troops heading into war without body armor, while it wasn't true for all, was true for some soldiers at the beginning of the war. So we rate Clinton's comment Mostly True.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2008-02-04T00:00:00	2008-01-31	['None']
-snes-02280	An official report has confirmed that fidget spinners contain a deadly amount of lead.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fidget-spinners-unsafe-lead/	None	Medical	None	Dan Evon	None	‘Fidget Spinners’ Can Kill Your Child?	3 June 2017	None	['None']
-tron-00867	Shred Your Airline Boarding Passes	truth! & misleading!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/shred-your-airline-boarding-passes/	None	computers	None	None	None	Shred Your Airline Boarding Passes	Jan 22, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01091	Cops Post “Welcome to Baltimore” Billboard	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cops-post-welcome-to-baltimore-billboard/	None	crime-police	None	None	['Trending Rumors']	Cops Post “Welcome to Baltimore” Billboard – Truth! & Fiction!	May 6, 2015	None	['Baltimore']
-pose-01004	"We should review in detail the factors driving the costs of incarceration and look for smarter, more cost-effective systems and procedures."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/tennessee/promises/haslam-o-meter/promise/1072/explore-cost-effective-alternatives-to-prison/	None	haslam-o-meter	Bill Haslam	None	None	Explore cost-effective alternatives to prison	2012-01-18T15:26:36	None	['None']
-chct-00315	FACT CHECK: Did Mnuchin Cost Taxpayers $25K To Fly A Military Jet?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/09/25/fact-check-did-mnuchin-cost-taxpayers-25k-to-fly-on-a-military-jet/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	5:24 PM 09/25/2017	None	['None']
-tron-02605	Lebanese Woman Speaks Out Against Terrorism and Defends Israel At Duke University	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/brigitte-gabriel-duke/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Lebanese Woman Speaks Out Against Terrorism and Defends Israel At Duke University	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01400	David Beckham, Victoria Had “Biggest Fight Ever” Over His “Wandering Eye”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/david-beckham-victoria-fight-marriage-problems-not-true/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	David Beckham, Victoria Had “Biggest Fight Ever” Over His “Wandering Eye”?	1:21 pm, March 13, 2018	None	['David_Beckham']
-pomt-10447	Tax rates were significantly higher "in the '40s, the '50s, and the '60s."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/may/02/hillary-clinton/rates-were-a-lot-higher-back-in-the-day/	In a free-wheeling interview on the Fox News Network, Bill O'Reilly and Hillary Clinton mixed it up over gas prices, health care, and taxes. On taxes, Clinton and O'Reilly argued about what tax rates were like when their fathers were working. Clinton: "You were growing up on Long Island. I was growing up outside of Chicago. You know, my dad got up every day. He was a small business man. He worked his head off, but he didn't feel like the deck was stacked against him. He thought, OK, I'm going to be treated fairly if I do my part." O'Reilly: "Here's where you're wrong. In my neighborhood, Levittown, there was no income distribution at all. There was earning money. And you kept most of it because taxes were really low." Clinton: "That is not true. Look at the tax rates in the '40s, the '50s, and the '60s." O'Reilly: "For the wealthy they were high, but not for my dad." Clinton: "Well, so why don't we go back to what we had in the '50s and the '60s then? Go back to 70 percent..." O'Reilly: "Because there were no wealthy people then. There were very, very few." Clinton: "When President Kennedy made that dramatic announcement he was going to cut the top rate from 90 percent to 70 percent, people stood up and cheered. All I want to do is get back to what worked in the '90s." We wondered who was right in this exchange and what the tax rates were when Clinton and O'Reilly were young. Today, tax rates range from 10 percent for lower incomes to 35 percent for the highest incomes. (See a chart of tax rates over time from the Tax Foundation here .) Kennedy urged tax cuts that went into effect in 1964. Prior to that, tax rates started at 20 percent for the lowest bracket and went up to 91 percent for the highest bracket. The rates were similar throughout the 1940s and 1950s. We looked at incomes and tax rates in 1963, then adjusted for inflation and looked at today's tax rates. We found: * A person making $2,500 a year in 1963 was taxed at 22 percent. Today that would be $17,445, taxed at 15 percent. * A person making $5,000 a year in 1963 was taxed at 26 percent. Today that would be $34,890, taxed at 25 percent. * A person making $10,000 a year in 1963 was taxed at 34 percent. Today that would be $69,780, taxed at 25 percent. * A person making $15,000 a year in 1963 was taxed at 47 percent. Today that would be $104,670, taxed at 28 percent. * A person making $25,000 a year in 1963 was taxed at 59 percent. Today that would be $174,450, taxed at 33 percent. The 1963 rates are higher than today's rates. It's true that the tax code is substantially different today, with many credits and rules that didn't exist then. But on the question of income tax rates, we find that Hillary Clinton has her history right. We rate her statement True.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2008-05-02T00:00:00	2008-04-30	['None']
-pomt-11623	"Bill Clinton’s hitman confesses on his deathbed."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/jan/23/patriot-report/fake-news-says-hitman-bill-clinton-confesses/	A fake news story says that former President Bill Clinton’s hitman has carried out more than 60 murders at the request of Clinton and his wife "Killary." "Bill Clinton’s hitman confesses on his deathbed," stated a Jan. 8 headline on The Patriot Report. Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat fake news. We found that this story, which has circulated on multiple websites, lacks any evidence and is filled with ridiculous, made-up statements. The story’s only source is an alleged intern -- unnamed -- who interviewed the alleged hitman on behalf of Fox News’ Sean Hannity. The story said that the hitman who operated under the alias Wilshire Williams (but was actually named Terrence Wilekenmeyer) was a low-level runner for the mafia until he was sold to Clinton in exchange for 12 cases of confiscated Arkansas moonshine. But now dying of pancreatic cancer with one week left to live, the hitman wanted to come clean and told his story to the Fox News intern. The intern allegedly told The Patriot News that the hitman "put three bullets in Vince Foster and two in Seth Rich. He tied up more loose ends than any other hitman in history." Foster was the former White House counsel who committed suicide in 1993. Rich was the Democratic National Committee worker who was murdered in 2016. Both deaths have been the subject of conspiracy theories. We noticed that the supposed real name of the hitman -- Terrence Wilekenmeyer -- was the same last name as Ezekiel Wilekenmeyer, a pen name used by one of the biggest purveyors of fake news, Christopher Blair. A Fox News spokeswoman Jaclyn Giuliano said that Hannity had no involvement whatsoever in the story alleging a Clinton hit man confessed on his deathbed. The Patriot Report’s website claims that it offers "solid conservative perspective on the issues of the day" and aims to "to equip the current generation of American Patriots with the right information" to support and defend the unalienable rights of man. We find that the website posts fake news. We sent a message to The Patriot Report on Facebook and did not hear back. A headline said that "Bill Clinton’s hitman confesses on his deathbed." There is no evidence that such a confessing hitman exists. We rate this story Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	The Patriot Report	None	None	None	2018-01-23T13:19:49	2018-01-08	['None']
-pose-00068	"Allow Americans to buy their medicines from other developed countries if the drugs are safe and prices are lower outside the U.S."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/71/allow-imported-prescription-drugs/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Allow imported prescription drugs	2010-01-07T13:26:47	None	['United_States']
-snes-01332	Did a Surgeon Who Exposed ‘Clinton Foundation Corruption’ in Haiti Die a Suspicious Death?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/surgeon-clinton-foundation-corruption-haiti/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Did a Surgeon Who Exposed ‘Clinton Foundation Corruption in Haiti Die a Suspicious Death?	14 December 2017	None	['None']
-vogo-00042	Statement: “The analysis that we have seen, the studies and research that we’ve seen, is that 80 percent of small businesses already pay better than the minimum wage,” City Council President Todd Gloria said at a June 16 press conference.	determination: mostly true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/city-council/fact-check-small-businesses-bigger-paychecks/	Analysis: City Council President Todd Gloria and others pushing a minimum wage hike say they want to ensure fair wages for workers – not endanger small businesses.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Small Businesses, Bigger Paychecks	June 27, 2014	None	['None']
-snes-03706	Two scientists who analyzed 2.5 million stars have concluded that the signals coming from a small fraction of them are “probably” caused by aliens.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/strange-signals-are-probably-extraterrestrial/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Scientists Say Strange Signals Are ‘Probably’ Coming from Extraterrestrial Intelligence?	25 October 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00210	A video shows a group of refugees looting a café in Spain.	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/spanish-cafe-video/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Does This Video Show Refugees Looting a Café in Spain?	16 August 2018	None	['Spain']
-pomt-13691	"Only five Texas counties account for almost 90 percent of the (state’s) cattle industry."	false	/texas/statements/2016/jul/29/jeannette-vaught/researcher-rounds-wrong-figure-texas-cattle/	From the citrus of the Rio Grande Valley to the peaches of the Texas Hill Country, many crops flourish across the vast expanse of the Lone Star State. Ask just about anybody about Texas agriculture, however, and the first offering that often comes to mind is beef. In a May 4, 2016 op-ed article in the Austin American-Statesman, University of Texas lecturer Jeannette Vaught suggested that’s not coincidental. Her dissertation on the same subject is being published as a book. She argued that the promotion of beef culture, in part by politicians such as the Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, means it’s recognized as the epitome of Texas agriculture. Even though, she writes, it hails predominantly from one part of the state and economically benefits a small region. This obscures the actual diversity of agricultural production in Texas, she said. Vaught wrote that only five counties out of the state’s 254 account for almost 90 percent of the state’s cattle industry. With almost any drive beyond the state’s urban areas incomplete without a few cow sightings, we wondered if the state’s beef cattle are concentrated in just a few counties. Vaught, asked to provide factual backup, said she relied on Texas statistics posted by the National Agricultural Statistics Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "It's arresting," Vaught said by email, "because cows are visible everywhere! But they are super concentrated in feedlots in the counties surrounding Lubbock." Feedlots are designated lots of land where cattle are given a specific type of feed before slaughter. We sought to check on the data on the NASS Quick Stats website, learning that the agency annually surveys some 38,000 cattle producers to gauge the state of the country’s cattle industry by mail, phone, online and in face-to-face interviews. For the 2015 survey behind Vaught’s claim, producers were asked to report cattle inventories based on Jan. 1, 2016 counts. To our inquiry, Michael Klamm, a cattle statistician with NASS, walked us through the database to those latest counts. Separately, we reached out to the Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, the largest and oldest livestock association in the state, to see if Vaught’s claim sounded familiar. Laramie Adams, director of public affairs for the group, told us by phone that the NASS data is the complete source for cattle data. We checked back with Klamm at NASS, who wrote back that the inventory category we used included all cattle, both dairy and beef cattle. From our analysis, the five counties with the largest cattle counts (Deaf Smith, Castro, Parmer, Hartley and Hansford), as of January 2016 had a total of 1,980,000 head of cattle out of a total 11,700,000 in the state, or 16.9 percent. While those counties lie in the state’s Panhandle region, at most a three-hour drive from Lubbock, the counties don’t account for anywhere close to the 90 percent Vaught tied to just five counties. By our calculation, the federally collected counts place 90 percent of Texas cattle across 157 counties, spread from regions that include the Panhandle, Blackland Prairies and Cross Timbers region in north and central Texas, to name a few. We circled back to Vaught with our findings. When she checked the NASS state facts, she advised, she misread a map that mapped out cattle counts by county and, Vaught said, "neglected to break down the math step by step, and made a terribly under-informed estimate that supported my initial assumption that feedlots in North Texas concentrated cattle at rates far higher than the rest of the state." Still, Vaught said, five counties accounting for 16.9 percent is "still significant, given that there are 254 counties in Texas, each one reporting cattle inventory." Our ruling Vaught wrote that only five Texas counties account for 90 percent of the state’s cattle industry. However, after checking with the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service and looking at the most recent inventory, we found the percentage to be far lower. We rate this claim False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Jeannette Vaught	None	None	None	2016-07-29T18:09:31	2016-05-04	['Texas']
-pose-00551	Will "remove arbitrary barriers like residency requirements that keep qualified teachers out of struggling districts."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/walk-o-meter/promise/574/remove-residency-requirement-for-teachers/	None	walk-o-meter	Scott Walker	None	None	Remove residency requirement for teachers	2013-10-22T20:53:50	None	['None']
-pomt-05825	"The Republicans just voted last year to end Medicare."	false	/new-jersey/statements/2012/feb/19/steve-rothman/congressman-steve-rothman-claims-republicans-just-/	Fact-checkers across the country have debunked the claim numerous times over the last year, but that didn’t stop U.S. Rep. Steve Rothman from shouting these nine words during a recent debate on the House floor: "The Republicans just voted last year to end Medicare." Democrats have been making similar claims since the Republican-controlled House signed off in April 2011 on a Medicare reform proposal advanced by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin). Rothman (D-9th Dist.) made that accusation -- and then repeated it -- during a Feb. 8 debate about extending the payroll tax cut. But repeating a falsehood still doesn’t make it right, Congressman. PolitiFact New Jersey found that Ryan’s plan would dramatically restructure Medicare, but it wouldn’t eliminate the program. Also, the proposed changes would not affect current Medicare beneficiaries or others who turn 65 years old before 2022. Our PolitiFact colleagues have issued False or Pants on Fire rulings to versions of this Medicare claim in nine separate fact-checks, ultimately designating it as the 2011 Lie of the Year. Two other fact-checking groups -- FactCheck.org and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker -- also said the claim was inaccurate. Rothman spokesman Aaron Keyak said in an email that the congressman stands by his statement. "Right now, every senior citizen is guaranteed comprehensive medical care under Medicare," Keyak wrote. "The Republican plan authored by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), and approved by the House Republican Majority on April 15, 2011, would end this guarantee for everyone under age 55 and replace it with a voucher system that would cover only a portion of the cost of buying health insurance." Let’s explain how the Ryan proposal would change Medicare. Under the traditional Medicare program, which is available to anyone 65 or older, the government pays health care providers directly for services. Beneficiaries must bear the cost of deductibles and coinsurance. Ryan called for converting the Medicare program to a privatized system, starting with people who turn 65 years old beginning in 2022. Under that system, the government would provide "premium support payments" to help beneficiaries purchase private health insurance. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, most beneficiaries would pay more for health care through the proposed program than under the current Medicare system. In April 2011, the House approved a budget resolution containing Ryan’s proposal, but the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate later rejected it. Now, let’s point out two problems with Rothman’s claim. First, Ryan’s proposal would not affect current Medicare beneficiaries or people who were at least 55 years old by the end of 2011 and later sign up for Medicare. Secondly, Medicare would still exist under the proposal, just in a very different form. Federal dollars would still be subsidizing people’s health care. The Ryan plan "would potentially have major changes in how Medicare operates and who bears the financial costs of the program, but it would not literally do away with the program," Thomas Oliver, a professor of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said in an email. Joel Cantor, director of the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers University, agreed that the Ryan plan would maintain a Medicare program, but told us the proposal "would end the government program that most people think of when we say ‘Medicare.’" "Bottom line, in my view, is that the quote from Cong. Rothman is hyperbole, but has (a) thread of truth," Cantor said in an email, later adding that the congressman’s "comment is an over-statement of the impact of the Ryan plan on Medicare." Our ruling In a speech on the House floor, Rothman repeated a claim that’s been debunked many times before: "The Republicans just voted last year to end Medicare." Republicans approved a dramatic restructuring of the Medicare program, but that plan would not "end Medicare." The program would remain in existence, and the proposed changes would not affect current beneficiaries or others who turn 65 years old before 2022. We rate the statement False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Steve Rothman	None	None	None	2012-02-19T07:30:00	2012-02-08	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Medicare_(United_States)']
-pomt-11917	"In the eight years that I was mayor, (there was a) nearly 50 percent drop in violent crime, gang crime — crime went down because we grew our police department, we focused on constitutional community policing, we did some of the most innovative prevention, intervention, job re-entry programs in the nation."	mostly true	/california/statements/2017/oct/18/antonio-villaraigosa/did-las-violent-crime-drop-nearly-half-during-vill/	During his time as mayor of Los Angeles and now in his campaign for California governor, Antonio Villaraigosa has repeatedly highlighted the city’s drop in violent crime. Villaraigosa, one of the top Democrats vying to succeed Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018, spoke in detail in a late July interview on MSNBC about LA’s reduction in violent crime and the steps he claims led to that result. "In the eight years that I was mayor, (there was a) nearly 50 percent drop in violent crime, gang crime — crime went down because we grew our police department, we focused on constitutional community policing, we did some of the most innovative prevention, intervention, job re-entry programs in the nation." Villaraigosa makes his claim on MSNBC at about the 0:50 minute mark here. He made a similar claim on Capital Public Radio on October 4, 2017. "When I was mayor of Los Angeles … we reduced our violent crime rate by 49 percent." We wanted to know whether Villaraigosa’s claim about this big drop in violent crime stood up to the facts. We also wanted to know whether there was evidence supporting his explanation that growing the police force and focusing on community policing really led to the decline. We set out on a fact check. Our research To support the claim, Villaraigosa’s campaign pointed us to crime statistics and past news articles discussing the former mayor’s crime initiatives. We started by reviewing FBI crime data. Here’s what we found: According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, the LAPD reported the violent crime rate per 100,000 people declined from 820.6 in 2005 -- the year Villaraigosa took office -- to 426 in 2013, the year he left office. That represents a 48 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, homicide, rape, robbery and assaults. That matches with his claim of a "nearly 50 percent drop in violent crime" made on MSNBC in late July. It also tracks with his more recent statement on Capital Public Radio. In addition to looking at the violent crime rate, we also reviewed the raw number of reported violent crimes over Villaraigosa’s tenure. That total was nearly cut in half from 31,767 in 2005 to 16,524 in 2013, LAPD statistics show. Beyond the numbers Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine, reviewed Villaraigosa’s claim at our request and told us "the numbers do check out." Kubrin added, however, that the more difficult challenge is determining how much of an impact Villaraigosa’s initiatives had on crime. "It’s noteworthy that violent crime was going down well before 2005," Kubrin said. "So there’s some question as to whether these are continuing trends or there’s something new about the time period he went into office." For some perspective, violent crimes in LA dropped nearly 50 percent in the decade before Villaraigosa was elected mayor. They totaled nearly 73,000 in 1992 and had decreased to less than 38,000 by 2002. Who gets credit? Robert Stern, former president of the Los Angeles-based Center for Governmental Studies, said Villaraigosa should get some credit for his successful push to hire hundreds of new LAPD officers. But, Stern said, "The main credit has to go to the police chief Bill Bratton. And also the fact that what we saw across the country was a reduction in crime in almost all the major cities. So, it was a trend that LA participated in. But I think the mayor can claim some credit at least for increasing the police force." Violent crime rates fell by 50 percent nationwide from the early 1990s through 2015, according to an analysis of data compiled by the Pew Research Center. Looking at another large city, New York, during the specific period of Villaraigosa’s tenure, we found only a 7 percent decline in the violent crime rate. But looking at a broader period, from 1995 through 2013, New York saw a nearly 60 percent decline. Breaking from the long-term trend, California and the nation saw an increase in violent crime rates in 2016 and 2015, according to state and national figures. Criminologists credit factors from the economy to demographic changes to incarceration rates for driving crime trends nationally and in California. As mayor, Villaraigosa had limited influence over many of these factors. Kubrin said Villaraigosa’s expansion of the police force, by itself, was probably not the main driving force behind the crime reduction. Instead, she cited the strategy executed by the police as a more important element. The LAPD’s focus on community policing and crime prevention and intervention during Villaraigosa’s tenure likely helped reduce crime, Kubrin said. Researchers have found those police strategies are likely to reduce crime, the professor added, though their impact is limited. Praise from LAPD chief Villaraigosa’s campaign additionally pointed to praise from current LAPD Chief Charlie Beck in a 2013 Los Angeles Daily News article. Beck was paraphrased in the article as saying the violent crime drop during Villaraigosa’s tenure was "unprecedented." Beck "attributed it largely to the outgoing mayor’s steadfast commitment — even during the Great Recession — to expand the LAPD during his tenure," the article said. Beck said the mayor’s public safety strategy was effective, the article continued, "because it also included diverting at-risk youth from gangs; recruiting gang members to prevent conflicts between rival gangs from flaring up; and handing out grocery store gift cards in exchange for guns." LAPD statistics on gang crime during Villaraigosa’s tenure were not immediately available. In his statement on MSNBC, the former mayor specifically cited gang crime as one category of violent crime that had dropped. News articles generally back up this statement. An investigation by VICE News in 2015, however, sheds light on a more nuanced change in LA gang crime in recent years. It found that while "gang crime is down in the city, many experts cautioned that gangs haven't disappeared." "Gang members and gangs altogether have gone underground, pure and simple," Jorja Leap, a UCLA professor who researches gangs and criminal justice, told VICE News. She noted that social media has allowed gang members to retreat indoors, and that they have become more involved in lucrative illicit activities such as human trafficking. "They have not disappeared but become more knowledgeable." Our ruling Villaraigosa’s claim about a nearly 50 percent drop in violent crime during his time as LA mayor is backed up by LAPD crime statistics. His explanation for why this drop in crime took place is more difficult to evaluate. Experts we spoke with noted that violent crime had been falling well before Villaraigosa took office. They also said that key factors that drive crime trends, such as the economy, changing demographics and incarceration rates, are largely out of the control of a mayor. Villaraigosa’s statement does not include this context. Still, the mayor’s successful push to hire hundreds of new LAPD officers and focus on community policing is generally accepted as having, at the very least, some impact on reducing crime in the city. Additionally, the current LAPD chief has praised Villaraigosa's strategies for reducing gang violence, saying they helped reduce violent crime. We rate Villaraigosa’s claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. Governor’s race Villaraigosa is among several prominent Democrats competing to succeed Jerry Brown in the 2018 California governor's race. Others include California Treasurer John Chiang; Delaine Eastin, the state’s former superintendent for public instruction; and Gavin Newsom, the state’s current lieutenant governor. Republican candidates include John Cox, a businessman from San Diego County and Travis Allen, an Orange County state assemblyman. PolitiFact California is fact-checking claims in this race. See our "Tracking The Truth" governor’s race fact-checks here. Tracking the Truth: Hear a claim you want fact-checked? Email us at politifactca@capradio.org, tweet us @CAPolitiFact or contact us on Facebook.	None	Antonio Villaraigosa	None	None	None	2017-10-18T17:22:46	2017-07-31	['None']
-tron-00519	Watch a Video-Donate to Autism	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/autismspeaks/	None	appeals	None	None	None	Watch a Video-Donate to Autism	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-03217	An Alaskan Fishman’s Commentary About Governor Sarah Palin	confirmed authorship!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/palin-whetsell-commentary/	None	politics	None	None	None	An Alaskan Fishman’s Commentary About Governor Sarah Palin	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-03377	Diets tailored to one’s specific blood type are capable of reducing myriad ailments, improving digestion, enabling weight loss, and providing increased energy.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blood-type-diets-actually-rooted-science/	None	Medical	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Are ‘Blood Type Diets’ Actually Rooted In Any Science?	9 December 2016	None	['None']
-snes-05918	Jingle Bells was written as a Christmas song.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jingle-bells-thanksgiving-carol/	None	Holidays	None	Dan Evon	None	Jingle Bells: A Thanksgiving Carol	16 December 2014	None	['Christmas', 'Jingle_Bells']
-pomt-14556	"Don't believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment. The number's probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/11/donald-trump/donald-trump-repeats-pants-fire-claim-unemployment/	During his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump repeated a claim he’d made several times before. "Don't believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment," Trump said. "The number's probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent." Actually, Trump’s the one who shouldn’t be believed. Numbers that high are not even close to accurate. To understand why, let’s start by discussing how the official unemployment rate is calculated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a federal agency, uses surveys and statistical sampling to calculate how many Americans do or don’t work. To calculate the unemployment rate, the agency divides the number of people who are out of work (counting only those who have recently looked for work) by the sum of the job-seeking and job-holding population. During the most recent month -- January 2016 -- the unemployment rate was 4.9 percent, its lowest level since February 2008. Not factored into this calculation, however, are people who are not currently looking for work. This is a longstanding concern for economists, because at least some of those people who aren’t looking for work right now might prefer to be looking for work but don’t feel they have a shot in the current job market. To ease such concerns, the bureau also produces a statistic with a more expansive definition of what it calls "labor underutilization." This statistic is known by the wonky shorthand "U-6." The U-6 rate includes both those who are officially "unemployed" and those who are working part time for economic reasons and those who are "marginally attached" to the work force, meaning they want to work but have not looked for work recently enough to count as being actively in the labor force. Currently the U-6 rate is 9.9 percent, about double the official unemployment rate. But that’s also its lowest level since May 2008. It’s possible to argue that the U-6 rate offers a fairer way of encapsulating the unemployment picture; some mainstream economists are sympathetic to that argument. But where Trump goes off the rails is in suggesting that the "real" unemployment rate is somewhere between 28 percent and 42 percent. Why? He’s including a ton of Americans not expected to be working. Let’s explore this point further. The source of Trump’s 42 percent figure appears to be a column by David Stockman, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s budget director. Stockman calculated that there are currently 210 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 68 -- what he calls a "plausible measure of the potential workforce." If you assume that each of those people is able to hold down a full-time job, he wrote, they would offer a total of 420 billion potential working hours. However, during 2014, Stockman noted, only 240 billion working hours were actually recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you run the numbers, "the real unemployment rate was 42.9 percent," Stockman wrote. Economists say Stockman’s way of looking at the question -- using actual hours worked divided by a theoretical maximum that could have been worked, rather than determining whether individual people are employed or unemployed -- is provocative. But they say this raw measurement has serious flaws. Indeed, in his column, Stockman acknowledges that this figure is imperfect, even though his tone is flip when he does so. "Yes, we have to allow for non-working wives, students, the disabled, early retirees and coupon clippers," he wrote. "We also have drifters, grifters, welfare cheats, bums and people between jobs, enrolled in training programs, on sabbaticals and much else." Snark aside, economists say this caveat is crucial. Stockman’s calculation "treats people voluntarily working part-time hours as partly unemployed, even if they have excellent reasons for wanting to hold only a part-time job, such as rearing children, attending school or college, being disabled, or transitioning into retirement," said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution. "A lot of the shortfall between full-time and part-time employment is perfectly reasonable, as is a potential worker’s decision not to work or look for paid work at all." In other words, Trump’s faith in the accuracy of the 42 percent figure is misplaced. So is there a plausible calculation that can get us to 42 percent? The short answer is no. To see why, let’s start with the number of Americans age 16 and up who are not either (1) employed, (2) unemployed, (3) in the military or (4) institutionalized. That gives us 94 million "non-working" Americans. We then subtracted the number of people who have good reasons not to be working or looking for work. • People age 16 to 19 who are not in the labor force: Subtract 10.8 million • People age 65 and up who are not in the labor force: Subtract 38.4 million • Students, age 20-24: Subtract 8.7 million • Students, age 25-29: Subtract 2.9 million • Students, age 30-34: Subtract 1.4 million • Stay-at-home moms: Subtract 10.4 million • Stay at-home dads: Subtract 2 million • Those receiving disability checks: Subtract 8.9 million So what remains? By this calculation, there are 10.5 million Americans who do not have obvious reasons for not working. If you were to use these numbers to create a new type of "unemployment" rate -- call it "U-7" if you like -- it would come out to 15.6 percent. That’s higher than the U-6 rate of 9.9 percent, but it’s only a fraction of the 42 percent Trump claimed. This isn’t a perfect calculation. There’s probably some double-counting, and there could be good reasons why some of those 10.5 million Americans aren’t working, such as being a full-time student between the ages of 34 and 65, undergoing job training, or being affluent enough to be able to forgo work or retire early. Some might argue that students shouldn’t get off so easy because they should be able to handle a job along with their studies, or that we should set a higher retirement-age cutoff than 65. Quibble with the numbers if you like, but this is a solid enough back-of-the envelope calculation to show how wildly inaccurate Trump’s claim is. And remember, we are deliberately stretching the numbers here as an intellectual exercise; we are not saying that 15.6 percent is a more accurate unemployment rate than the official one of 4.9 percent. There’s even a silver lining to the current state of affairs, Burtless said. Most of those suffering from being "out of work" by Trump's definition can actually be seen as benefiting from their membership in an affluent, technologically advanced society. The fact that millions of adults are what Trump would term "jobless," he said, "is not a marker of economic failure -- it is an indicator of a very prosperous society that can afford to permit the old and disabled to retire, that can invest in young adults so they can improve their skills, and that can keep some adults in the home where they can care for children or attend to other non-paying pursuits." Our ruling Trump said, "Don't believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment. The number's probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent." While economists say that there are other, more expansive calculations of unemployment or under-employment, none of the official ones are currently higher than 9.9 percent, and the highest credible number we could calculate was 15.6 percent. That’s far, far lower than 42 percent -- or even 28 percent. We rate the claim Pants on Fire.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-02-11T18:33:01	2016-02-09	['None']
-pomt-07877	The city building code violations on my properties only involve exterior issues; "within the households, it’s fine."	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/07/lee-holloway/milwaukee-county-board-chairman-lee-holloway-says-/	The condition of rental property owned by Milwaukee County Board Chairman Lee Holloway has become an issue in the race for county executive. Indeed, Holloway says media coverage of the issue has diminished his chances to win the contest. Holloway and his wife, Lynda, own 15 parcels in the city, including several apartment buildings on the near north side. Some of the buildings have been the subject of numerous and repeated building code violations. Holloway was ordered to Milwaukee Municipal Court because a large batch of the violations have not been corrected. That hearing, involving dozens of long-standing violations, is set for March of 2011. Beyond that, a security guard at one building faces misdemeanor charges for accusing him of threatening a tenant who was at odds with Holloway; another tenant faces charges of trashing that same tenant’s apartment; and reports show more than 800 police calls to Holloway-owned buildings in the past two years. So ears perked up at a candidate forum at the Marquette University Law School when Holloway -- who was serving as acting county executive at the time -- was asked about his record as a landlord. He compared the dire economic situation facing some of his tenants with the economic woes facing the state and county government, then described the problems. "The code violations are primarily storm windows," Holloway said, adding "which we take and provide plastic which is better than storm windows." He added: "And it has to do with tuckpointing, which is all complete." And he said: "Within the households, it’s fine." Finally, he declared: "I’m saying I have resolved these problems. We are working to resolve these problems." This one is easy enough to check. We looked at the city’s online database available through the Department of Neighborhood Services. Each violation for each property is listed. We counted, and then counted again. At the time he made the statement, Holloway had 200 outstanding violations on eight of his 15 properties. Some of the violations were new -- and written up on Jan. 21, 2011, the same day as the candidate forum. Do they all relate to exterior issues, such as brickwork, as Holloway claimed? No. Some examples of properties and violations listed: 2061 W. Atkinson Ave.: Fire extinguishers, door security hardware, faulty intercom, smoke detectors, carpeting, and damaged ceiling plaster. Other violations for the building include tuckpointing, parking lot repair, windows, screens and downspouts. 2041 W. Atkinson Ave.: Roaches, exit signs, ceiling plaster, floor covering, electrical fixtures, toilet, bathtub replacement. 2021 W. Atkinson Ave.: Fixtures, floor coverings, shower door. 2022 W. Atkinson Ave.: Windows, screens, outdoor canopy, downspouts, handrails and porch issues were cited. And this mention was included: "Restore ext. door frame to rodent proof condition." Let’s return to Holloway’s statement. Facing a date in Municipal Court, Holloway told a forum audience -- including those who watched on TV and YouTube -- that the building code violations still at issue involve the exterior of the properties. "Within the households," he said, "it’s fine." But inspection records paint a different picture: Roaches, exit signs, smoke detectors, ceiling plaster. All of those -- and more -- are interior issues. There’s even a note about faulty fire extinguishers. That seems appropriate. We rate Holloway’s statement Pants on Fire.	None	Lee Holloway	None	None	None	2011-02-07T09:00:00	2011-01-21	['None']
-pomt-10285	"It (Georgia) was one of the earliest Christian nations. The king of then-Georgia in the third century converted to Christianity."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/19/john-mccain/mccain-hits-the-mark-on-georgian-history-more-or-l/	Sen. John McCain, trying to make a case at a church forum that Americans should feel protective of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, cited its significance in Christian history. "I am very saddened here to be with you and talk about Russian re-emergence in the centuries-old ambition of the Russian Empire to dominate that part of the world," McCain told the Rev. Rick Warren at Saddleback Valley Community Church in California on Aug. 16, 2008. "Killings, murder, villages are being burned, people are being wantonly ejected from their homes. The latest figures from human rights organizations — 118,000 people in that small country. It was one of the earliest Christian nations. The king of then-Georgia in the third century converted to Christianity." McCain characterized Georgia similarly on other occasions. "Georgia is an ancient country, at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion," McCain said in a campaign statement on Aug. 11, 2008. It is true that what is now Eastern Georgia, then known as Kartli, adopted Christianity quite early. St. Nino , the Apostle of Georgia, introduced Christianity to the country in the 300s, converting King Marian III in 314, according to Ronald Suny, a professor of history at the University of Michigan and author of the 1988 book The Making of the Georgian Nation. "When the king converted he forced everyone else to become Christian," Suny said. "That's the year before the Roman Empire became Christian." So yes, Georgia was indeed an early adopter of Christianity. Note, however, this did not happen in the third century as McCain said. The first century lasted through the year 100, the second through 200, and the third through 300. Georgia became a Christian state in 314, which was the fourth century. Also, scholars quibble with McCain's use of the word "nation." In common parlance and under some dictionary definitions, a nation can be any territorial division. But a more subtle understanding is a group of people who believe they are entitled to some form of political representation, and thus give authority and legitimacy to a government. This concept arose in the 18th and 19th centuries. Prior to that, there were empires, dynastic states, theocracies, kingdoms and so forth, but not nations. "To claim that whatever entity 'Georgia' may have been in the third century was a 'nation' is factually anachronistic," John Pilch, a professor of biblical literature at Georgetown University told us in an e-mail exchange. (Furthermore, he said, the word "Christian" was not fashionable at the time of the Georgian king's conversion — Christians at that time might have referred to themselves as "followers of the Way.") These are quibbles though. A fair reading of the thrust of McCain's claim is that the place we call Georgia was an early adopter of Christianity, and that's true. He didn't use the word "nation" perfectly and he flubbed his centuries, but his claim is still Mostly True.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-08-19T00:00:00	2008-08-16	['Christianity', 'Georgia_(country)', 'Christian']
-faan-00016	 “We’ve got just as many young girls in our caucus as any.”	factscan score: false	http://factscan.ca/don-plett-diversity/	Women make up a smaller number and share of Conservative senators than other groups in the Senate. The Independent Senators Group has the largest number and share of women.	None	Don Plett	None	None	None	2017-06-18	mber 23, 2016	['None']
-pomt-12159	"United Nations Resolution is the single largest economic sanctions package ever on North Korea. Over one billion dollars in cost to N.K."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/aug/06/donald-trump/trump-claims-un-sanctions-cost-north-korea-over-1-/	President Donald Trump applauded a new resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions against North Korea and labeled it as the largest economic punishment yet on the nation. "The United Nations Security Council just voted 15-0 to sanction North Korea. China and Russia voted with us. Very big financial impact!" Trump tweeted Aug. 5. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com He detailed the impact in a follow-up tweet: "United Nations Resolution is the single largest economic sanctions package ever on North Korea. Over one billion dollars in cost to N.K." See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Trump has sought China’s help to deal with security threats from North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and has called on other nations to join the United States in implementing sanctions against North Korea. On Aug. 5, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution to prohibit certain exports from North Korea, among other economic restrictions. We wondered if Trump accurately assessed the resolution and its impact. We found that Trump was largely right about the resolution’s provisions, but experts cautioned that the true financial impact of the sanctions depend on future enforcement by member nations. We reached out to the White House but did not hear back. U.N. Resolution 2371 On Aug. 5, the 15 nations that make up the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2371 (2017) to place new sanctions on North Korea. The resolution comes after North Korea’s most recent ballistic missile launches, in violation of a ban on nuclear and missile tests. The new U.N. resolution says: • North Korea shall not supply, sell or transfer coal, iron, iron ore, seafood, lead and lead ore to other countries; • UN Member States shall not increase the number of work permits for North Korean nationals (unless approved by the Security Council Committee), based on concerns that their earnings support North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs; • States shall prohibit the opening of new joint ventures or cooperative entities with North Korean entities and individuals, or the expansion of existing joint ventures through additional investments. The resolution also identified nine individuals and four entities that would become subject to a travel ban and asset freeze. The asset freeze extends to the Foreign Trade Bank, a state-owned bank that serves as North Korea’s primary foreign exchange bank. Provisions in the resolution could reduce North Korea’s revenue by about $1 billion, according to statements from delegates in the Security Council. The ban on exports from North Korea will prevent it from earning "over a $1 billion per year of hard currency that would be redirected to its illicit programs," said a resolution fact sheet from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. The east Asian nation earns about $3 billion per year from export revenues, the fact sheet said. Trump’s tweet on the gravity of the sanctions echoes what Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said after the resolution passed. "This resolution is the single largest economic sanctions package ever leveled against the North Korean regime," Haley said Aug. 5. "The price the North Korean leadership will pay for its continued nuclear and missile development will be the loss of one-third of its exports and hard currency. This is the most stringent set of sanctions on any country in a generation." The United Nations has passed multiple other resolutions against North Korea in condemnation of its ballistic missiles tests. A November 2016 resolution restricted exports of coal from North Korea and banned copper, nickel, silver, and zinc exports. That resolution estimated cuts of at least $800 million per year to North Korea’s revenues. Whether the Aug. 5 sanctions have the weight Trump and Haley professed depends on enforcement by other nations, experts told us. The latest sanctions "could be the biggest economic sanctions resolution imposed on North Korea, measured in the amount of hard currency provided to the regime — IF enforced," said Bonnie Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia and director of the China Power Project for Center for Strategic and International Studies. The claim that the United Nations sanctions would cost North Korea more than $1 billion is based on the assumption of "full and perfect" enforcement by all member states, said Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, associate scholar at Foreign Policy Research Institute and co-editor of North Korean Economy Watch. "Judging by previous sanctions rounds (and sheer logic) this is virtually impossible and extremely unlikely because China tends to be lax in enforcement even of resolutions against North Korea that it votes in favor of," Katzeff Silberstein said. In a post for North Korean Economy Watch, Katzeff Silberstein noted that if a previous resolution had already been implemented in full, "North Korea’s export revenues would already have been badly hit." Our ruling Trump tweeted, "United Nations Resolution is the single largest economic sanctions package ever on North Korea. Over one billion dollars in cost to N.K." The United Nations Security Council on Aug. 5 passed a resolution to sanction North Korea in response to its ballistic missile tests. The resolution bans the country’s export of coal, iron, iron ore, seafood, lead and lead ore to other countries; freezes assets of certain entities and individuals; and prevents other nations from increasing the number of work permits to be issued to North Korean nationals. Overall, the sanctions could represent about $1 billion in costs to North Korea — but experts say that greatly depends on other nations’ full enforcement of the sanctions. Trump’s statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate it Mostly True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-08-06T17:26:29	2017-08-05	['North_Korea', 'United_Nations_resolution']
-obry-00006	Congressman Mark Pocan recently responded to a letter that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wrote to President Donald Trump supporting the president’s “aggressive actions to secure America’s southern border.” The Wisconsin Democrat Pocan wrote that, “President Trump is not sending troops to the southern border to stop the flow of drugs from Mexico. It is clear that his goal is to apprehend migrants, many of whom are children fleeing violence in their home countries.” While we are unable to accurately assess Trump’s motivations, The Observatory decided to check the claim that many of the people coming across the southwest border who are unauthorized are children and that they are fleeing violence in their home countries. 	mostly_true	https://observatory.journalism.wisc.edu/2018/05/02/drug-dealers-vs-children-who-is-crossing-u-s-mexico-border-and-why/	None	None	None	Pawan Naidu	None	Drug dealers vs. children: Who is crossing U.S.-Mexico border and why?	May 2, 2018	None	['Wisconsin', 'Mexico', 'Donald_Trump', 'United_States', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-pomt-05080	Says Dow Chemical decided to build a plant in Saudi Arabia rather than Oklahoma due to the impact of environmental regulations on the supply of natural gas.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/03/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-dow-chemical-chose-saudi-arabia-o/	Mitt Romney likes to draw a straight line between environmental regulations and the jobs they cost. That was the thrust of his statement at a Frankenmuth, Mich., campaign event on June 19, 2012. Romney said Oklahoma lost out on a plant that Dow Chemical ended up building in Saudi Arabia. Citing a conversation he'd had with a person from Dow, Romney told his audience at a business roundtable, "They said they couldn't rely on the natural gas here given the environmental regulation and whether it would be an abundant supply and reliable or not." We dug into the history and found the decision was actually made years ago. In 2007, Dow announced it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the oil giant Saudi Aramco to build a "world-scale chemicals and plastics production complex" in Saudi Arabia. This $20 billion joint venture would be the largest of its kind in the world. But Romney wasn’t highlighting a Dow project by itself. He was saying it could have happened in Oklahoma. We asked the Romney campaign to back up the claim that Dow had picked Saudi Arabia over Oklahoma for reasons related to the natural gas supply. We never heard back. We asked Dow if Oklahoma had ever been in the running as a possible location for that facility. The company never responded to that direct question. Instead, a spokesman released a statement that said Saudi Arabia was a good fit for the company’s goals of being able to serve growing markets, to develop new product lines and to operate in places where the costs give the company an advantage. On the subject of the natural gas supply, Dow said supply issues did matter in the days before natural gas from shale began flooding the market. Until then, "the climate for investment in the U.S. was increasingly challenging, resulting in decisions to preferentially invest in geographies with more stable, competitive energy and (natural gas) costs." The Dow statement went on to say that situation has changed. What it calls the "shale gale" has made the U.S. "a place where we can once again invest and grow." In April of this year, Dow announced it would build an ethylene production plant in Freeport, Texas, creating about 150 permanent jobs and about 2,000 construction jobs. That investment is part of a larger U.S. investment plan by the company in Texas and Louisiana that could add some 35,000 jobs nationwide. The company says this activity notwithstanding, the "need for regulatory reform remains critical." But still, nothing about Oklahoma. We searched the Dow Chemical website, reviewed the company’s past annual data books -- the ones it packages for investors -- and checked with a variety of trade publications for any mention of Oklahoma as a potential location for Dow’s future plants. No luck. We called the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. The deputy general counsel, Don Hackler, also drew a blank. "That doesn't sound familiar," Hackler said. "I don't remember it coming up." Hackler added that if Dow had been interested, his department would have likely heard, if for no other reason than the state offers incentives to companies who invest in Oklahoma. Al Greenwood who covers Dow for ICIS, an international news service for the petrochemical industry, said the assertion that Oklahoma was under serious consideration sounds like a stretch. "You don’t produce these compounds out of thin air," Greenwood said. "Dow needs feedstocks (of natural gas) and in the U.S., the feedstock hubs are in Texas and Louisiana. I don’t know why they would ever consider Oklahoma." Greenwood added that the Saudi Arabian investments put manufacturing closer to the boom markets of China and India and came with another important benefit -- ready access to propylene. Many of the products Dow wants to make in Saudi Arabia require a lot of propylene. Propylene is in short supply in the U.S. because it is most readily derived from oil, not natural gas. As is often noted, Saudi Arabia has plenty of oil. Oklahoma offers Dow no advantage in either market access or raw materials. Our ruling Mitt Romney said that a Dow official told him that the company opted to build a plant in Saudi Arabia rather than Oklahoma due to the state’s limited supply of natural gas thanks to environmental regulations. If that's case, no record of it appears to exist, Romney's campaign didn't offer any evidence to back it up and neither did Dow. We rate this claim False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-07-03T11:13:53	2012-06-19	['Oklahoma', 'Saudi_Arabia']
-vees-00193	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online post about Duterte 'rejecting' Robredo's proposal to 'legalize' drugs rehashed	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-online-post-about-duterte-rejecting-ro	None	None	None	None	war on drugs,Leni Robredo	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online post about Duterte 'rejecting' Robredo's proposal to 'legalize' drugs rehashed, FAKE NEWS	May 29, 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00717	Sam Bish Prayer Request Email	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/sam-bish-prayer-request.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Sam Bish Prayer Request Email	22nd August 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-03345	Portland Bureau of Transportation "barely break(s) even" ticketing motorists.	half-true	/oregon/statements/2013/jul/20/portland-bureau-transportation-pbot/does-portland-break-even-enforcing-parking-regulat/	PolitiFact Oregon suspects there are stages a motorist experiences upon finding a yellow parking ticket envelope stuck to their windshield: Disbelief. Shame. Anger at those meanies at the city trying to squeeze every dime out of you, just to rack up revenue. Well, Dylan Rivera, a spokesman at the Portland Bureau of Transportation, told the Portland Mercury that "generally we barely break even" in parking enforcement. In other words, the city does not make revenue off errant motorists. A curious reader asked us to find out if that is true. Does revenue collected from parking fines cover the cost of enforcing parking rules? We sent an email to Rivera and to his colleague at PBOT communications, Diane Dulken. They confirmed what was stated in the Portland Mercury. "It’s a balancing act," said Dulken. "It’s not a cash cow; it’s not intended to raise revenue." Of course we asked for numbers to back up the claim. Here they are, in millions of dollars:: Year Revenue Expenses Direct Expenses Indirect Expenses 2009-10 $4.4 $5.5 $3.4 $2.1 2010-11 $5.1 $5.5 $3.4 $2.1 2011-12 $5.6 $7 $4.2 $2.8 2012-13 $6.6 $8.1 $4.8 $3.3 2013-14 $7.4 $8.7 $5.3 $3.4 You can see that expenses -- including both direct and indirect costs -- outstrip revenue collected. Direct costs are for salaries and equipment. Indirect costs are for overhead, such as phones, office space, public information officers and other administrative costs sprinkled throughout the bureau. The numbers for 2012-13, the budget year that ended June 30, are estimates. Dulken explained that the numbers increased because the city hired three new enforcement officers last year, bringing the total to 50. We also should remind readers that the city raised fines for some parking violations in February 2013. The projected numbers for this year exclude revenue and costs associated with a plan for new meters in Northwest Portland. If you count both indirect and direct expenses, PBOT isn’t breaking even. Instead, it appears the parking enforcement program has been losing money. (Why even enforce parking rules, you ask? Well, the city does get money from meters, and needs to maintain parking turnover for retailers. Plus, whom do you call when a stranger is blocking your private driveway? PBOT, apparently, is what stands between us and a disorderly parking free-for-all.) But here’s the deal. Like you, PolitiFact Oregon is highly suspicious. We don’t want to take a government employee’s word for it. We want to know how the budget for parking enforcement is presented to others. We pored through previous budgets, found online. We learned that the costs of parking enforcement in 2010-11 was $3.4 million; in 2011-12 it was $4.2 million; and in 2009-10 it was $3.4 million. In other words, the budgets use direct costs to convey the cost of the parking enforcement program. Indirect costs are not included. What’s up with that? We got on the phone with Rivera, who acknowledged that there are different ways to view costs. But the bottom line, he said, is that "our impression has been, and this inquiry has confirmed, that we’re not writing citations for the purpose of funding the transportation" bureau. Fair enough. We adore a reasonable and upfront response from government. Readers now have more information to assess how parking ticket money works in the city of Portland. There are different ways to look at the statement that ticket revenue matches costs. The city’s share of ticket revenue does not cover the fully loaded costs of providing enforcement services, according to the bureau. On the other hand, ticket revenue does cover the direct salary and equipment costs of writing tickets, according to public budgets. We’re not in a position to audit the bureau’s books. All we know is that indirect costs are not details readily available to the public. Direct costs are what the public can ferret out when assessing parking enforcement. To us, those are important details missing from a statement that can be accurate looked at one way, not accurate looked at another way. We rate the statement Half True.	None	Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT)	None	None	None	2013-07-20T06:00:00	2013-06-26	['None']
-tron-00061	People Mark Anniversary of ‘Killdozer’ in Colorado	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/anniversary-killdozer-granby/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	['facebook', 'protests', 'states']	People Mark Anniversary of ‘Killdozer’ in Colorado	Jun 9, 2017	None	['None']
-abbc-00351	On August 18, 2013, Tony Abbott formally announced his signature paid parental leave policy.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-27/paid-parental-leave-promise-check/5423690	None	['parenting', 'family', 'family-and-children', 'family-law', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'liberals', 'australia']	None	None	['parenting', 'family', 'family-and-children', 'family-law', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'liberals', 'australia']	Promise check: Provide mothers with 26 weeks paid parental leave	Sun 8 May 2016, 7:37am	None	['Tony_Abbott']
-pomt-04944	"Diane Black voted to fund Obamacare."	false	/tennessee/statements/2012/jul/27/lou-ann-zelenik/gop-challenger-zelenik-says-diane-black-voted-fund/	More than two years after they became the law of the land, President Barack Obama’s health-care reforms are still providing fodder for congressional candidates across the country. One place where that is especially true is in Tennessee’s 6th Congressional District, where U.S. Rep. Diane Black, R-Gallatin, is embroiled in a Middle Tennessee slugfest with her GOP challenger, Lou Ann Zelenik. The race, a rematch from two years ago, is once again among the most closely watched political contests in the state. Both candidates oppose the health reforms. But Zelenik has not only questioned Black’s commitment to the cause, she and her aides have even suggested in campaign appearances, ads and news releases that Black has been deceptive about her record on health reform. "Diane Black voted to fund Obamacare, then she voted to repeal it. I guess she was for it before she was against it," Zelenik says in a radio ad. Zelenik’s campaign says the claim is based on Black’s votes on a series of short-term funding measures, known as "continuing resolutions," which keep the government running at current funding levels. Zelenik’s campaign manager, Jay Heine, noted that two other outspoken opponents of health-care reform -- U.S. Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Steve King, R-Iowa -- have voted against the continuing resolutions on the grounds that they would allow the health-care funding to continue. "We are criticizing our opponent for not joining them and voting against these bills," Heine said. By voting in favor of the resolutions, Black is allowing "the status quo" to happen and funding for the health reforms to continue, Heine said. "Our opinion," Heine said, "is that the status quo is not acceptable." Black’s campaign spokeswoman, Jennifer Baker, countered that the first-term congresswoman has voted numerous times to cut off funding for the health-care reforms. Baker provided us with a list of more than two dozen amendments and bills that Black has supported that would either repeal the health-reform law in its entirety, dismantle parts of it or block mandatory funding for the law. Black was not even in Congress when the House gave final approval to the health-reform bill in March 2010. Yet Zelenik is "leaving voters with the impression that Diane Black has actively voted to fund Obamacare," said Baker, who calls such a claim ridiculous. At the heart of the dispute is how the health-care law was funded. The law includes two kinds of budgetary provisions for the new entities created by or through the legislation, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service noted in a report on July 18, 2012. The law bypassed the normal appropriations process and provided nearly $105 billion in mandatory funding, or "direct spending" as it’s known in budget parlance, over a number of years for some of the new programs. Put simply, that means money for the programs is included in the law and that it must be spent on those programs. Other provisions authorized appropriations for the new programs but did not provide the money directly. In these cases, funding must be provided through subsequent congressional votes during the annual appropriations process, when specific budgetary resources being provided are determined. That is how the appropriations process usually works. The $105 billion in mandatory funding is automatic and cannot be stopped unless Congress specifically votes to end it. King offered an amendment to do just that in February 2011, but the GOP-controlled House Rules Committee concluded the measure violated the rules for spending bills. The committee blocked the bill from receiving a vote on the House floor. Bachmann has since offered legislation to convert the mandatory spending to an authorization, which would allow Congress to stop it. Black is one of 96 cosponsors of that legislation, which has not yet received a vote on the House floor. Unlike Bachmann and King, Black did vote for series of short-term "continuing resolutions" to fund the government at existing levels. But is a vote in favor of the "continuing resolutions" really tantamount to voting to fund Obamacare? The resolutions are not a direct vote on the health-reform funding. In fact, we could find no mention of the health reforms anywhere in the resolutions. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute watches Congress very closely and he said Zelenik’s claim is "not credible." "I find the charge absurd," he wrote in an email. "Voting to keep the government running -- which means keeping DOD (Department of Defense) in operation, keeping the Social Security checks coming, keeping the air traffic system operating, and so on -- is not tantamount to voting for health care. It is a huge stretch." Zelenik’s campaign insists that since the short-term "continuing resolutions" allow funding for all government programs, including those created and funded under the health-reform law, Black is guilty of failing to block funding. "Our standpoint is Congress has the ability to defund or fund anything – that is where the spending authority from the federal government originates from," Heine said. "Our standpoint is our opponent needs to take a stronger stance on this and work to defund it." PolitiFact has looked at claims that a vote for a state budget that included stimulus funding was tantamount to approving "Obama stimulus spending." One such recent claim in a Republican congressional primary in Florida resulted in a Pants On Fire! ruling for Congressman John Mica. Our ruling The public record shows Rep. Black has voted more than two dozen times to repeal President Obama’s health-care reforms and defund them. In claiming Black has actually voted to fund the health reforms, Zelenik and her aides point to Black’s votes on short-term spending measures that continue funding at current levels for all government programs. But was Black really very specifically "voting to fund Obamacare" or was she voting to keep the government from shutting down? Black has strongly opposed the health-care laws and Zelenik’s claim is a distortion designed to deliberately mislead voters about Black’s record. We find it False.	None	Lou Ann Zelenik	None	None	None	2012-07-27T09:49:52	2012-07-26	['None']
-snes-00802	Did Donald Trump Say Community College Is '13th Grade' for 'Dummys'?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-trump-say-community-college-13th-grade/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Donald Trump Say Community College Is ’13th Grade’ for ‘Dummys’?	6 April 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-14769	In Texas, "we've had three ISIS-related incidents already."	half-true	/texas/statements/2015/dec/09/greg-abbott/abbotts-claims-isis-incidents-texas-three-facts-ke/	After the recent terrorist attacks in France, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was among governors declaring they would not accept Syrian refugees because of a potential for terrorism. Abbott appeared on "The Real Story," a Fox News program, on Nov.17, 2015, to explain his stance on keeping refugees out of Texas because of security concerns. "We've had three ISIS-related incidents already and now with the possible connection of one of the Syrian refugees being involved in the terrorist attack in Paris," Abbott said, "Texas is saying 'no more.’ " We wondered whether Texas was really the site of so many ISIS plots. Abbott spokesman John Wittman pointed us to a letter from Abbott to Obama dated Nov. 16, 2015, which said: "The threat posed to Texas by ISIS is very real. ISIS claimed credit last May when two terrorist gunmen launched an attack in Garland, Texas. Less than two weeks later, the FBI arrested an Iraqi-born man in North Texas and charged him with lying to federal agents about traveling to Syria to fight with ISIS." The letter went on to say that "in 2014, when I served as Texas attorney general, we participated in a Joint Terrorism Task Force that arrested two Austin residents for providing material support to terrorists -- including ISIS." To determine if Abbott got his facts straight, we looked at each of the incidents. An Austin-area arrest and conviction Some of this was old ground for us. In September 2014, when Abbott was the state attorney general also running for governor, he claimed he’d been "involved in prosecuting a terrorist member of ISIS." We found that claim False; Abbott offered no evidence to back up his declaration aside from a press release crediting a range of agencies including the attorney general as well as the Killeen Police Department and Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. Abbott’s statement also relied on a broad definition of "terrorist" and "ISIS member." A federal complaint indicated Michael Todd Wolfe of Austin may have sought to be those things. But the complaint didn’t confirm he’d become a terrorist or ISIS member. In the case in question, Wolfe and Rahatul Khan of Round Rock, Texas, were charged with attempting to provide material support to terrorists. Wolfe had tried to board an international flight out of George Bush Intercontinental Airport that would take him to the first stop on a planned journey to Syria. In June 2015, Wolfe was sentenced to seven years in prison for attempting to provide material support to terrorists. According to the criminal complaint, Khan attempted to recruit an undercover FBI agent to a terrorist cell over the Internet. He was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. The pipeline was affiliated with al-Shabaab — the al-Qaeda-linked Somali militant group behind the mass slaying of Christian students at a Kenyan university earlier this year—not ISIS. Abbott’s second described incident In his 2015 letter to Obama, Abbott also referenced concerns about Bilal Abood, the "Iraqi-born man in North Texas." Court documents show Abood migrated to the United States in 2009, and offer the following account of his subsequent movement and activities: On March 29, 2013, FBI agents prevented Abood from boarding a flight at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. He told them he was planning to visit family. Interviewed a second time five days later, Abood said his intent was to join the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the struggle against Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria. Later in April 2013, Abood travelled to Turkey via Mexico, "on or about" April 29. Agents again interviewed Abood upon his return to the United States on Sept. 16, 2013. He admitted he had travelled to Syria and stayed in an FSA camp, but denied financially supporting any terrorist group. A search of Abood’s computer in July 2014 found that he had tweeted a pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, on June 19, 2014. He later denied pledging allegiance to ISIS and was arrested for making "a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement and representation, in a matter within the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." Abbott’s letter mischaracterizes the nature of Abood’s offense; he wrote that Abood was charged with "lying to federal agents about traveling to Syria to fight with ISIS," not lying about a tweet. Shootings in Garland The third incident referenced by Abbott was the Garland, Texas, shooting scheme attempted by Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi on May 5, 2015. According to a criminal complaint the FBI later filed against a Florida man who claimed to have encouraged the attack, the two planned to shoot attendees at a contest centered around cartoons of the prophet Muhammad (drawing the prophet Muhammad is forbidden in Islam). However, they were shot and killed outside the event by police. This incident is the only foiled attack included in a Department Homeland Security analysis of all ISIS-related arrests on United States soil from January 2014 to September 2015 (the other cases were unsuccessful and successful attempts to travel to fight with ISIS, provide material support to ISIS, and engage in early stage "aspirational" attack planning). In the aftermath of the shooting, ISIS claimed credit. However, by the time Abbott made his claim, investigators had yet to issue any statement characterizing the Garland attack as having been ordered by members of ISIS. Simpson was involved in terrorist causes before ISIS even split off from Al-Qaeda. He was arrested by the FBI in 2010 after discussing jihad and potential travel to Somalia with an informant the previous year. Allison Mahan, an FBI spokeswoman in Dallas, told us via email, "The Garland attackers were ISIS-inspired and the investigation is ongoing." ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks are much more common than attacks directly ordered by members of the group, according to an analysis published in the October 2015 issue of the Terrorism Research Initiative’s Perspectives on Terrorism. The TRI is an international consortium of scholars founded in 2007 to facilitate security studies research. Our ruling In his opposition to resettlement of Syrian refugees in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said he was concerned about potential terrorism from devotees to the Islamic State. In Texas, Abbott said, "we've had three ISIS-related incidents already." Abbott is on solid ground with one Islamic State-related incident — the Garland shooting plot. In other Texas arrests related to the group, he uses the term "incident" to cover things including lying about a tweet and trying to travel to Syria. We rate this statement Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Greg Abbott	None	None	None	2015-12-09T15:23:59	2015-11-17	['Texas']
-vogo-00113	An Ethical Violation: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/an-ethical-violation-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	An Ethical Violation: Fact Check TV	May 6, 2013	None	['None']
-thet-00040	The Scottish Government’s £500m Growth Scheme – announced a year ago - is still to distribute a single penny.	true	https://theferret.scot/tory-scottish-government-growth-scheme/	None	Fact check Finance 	Ruth Davidson	None	None	Tory claim that Scottish Government growth scheme has not paid out is True	November 8, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02773	"The most popular name is no longer John or Steven. It's Jose, Camilo and Maria."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2013/dec/09/jorge-ramos/univisions-ramos-names-jose-camilo-and-maria-are-m/	Sandwiched between jokes on the Dec. 5, 2013, episode of the Daily Show, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos offered a factual claim that even had Daily Show host Jon Stewart asking, "Really?" Ramos was documenting the growth of the Hispanic population in the United States. Hispanics are the country’s largest ethnic minority group at 53 million people, and by 2060, the Hispanic population is expected to reach nearly 130 million. That would equal about a third of all Americans. Already, there are signs of a shift, Ramos said. "The most popular name is no longer John or Steven," Ramos told Stewart. "It's Jose, Camilo and Maria." Like Stewart, we wondered if Ramos’ claim was correct. We got in touch with Ramos, and he clarified that when he talked about names, he had states like California and Texas in mind, not so much the entire United States. And he thought he was talking about which names were more popular (as a comparison), not the most popular overall. The ultimate source on baby names is the Social Security Administration, which conveniently provides a database that allows you to slice and dice the information by year, state and name. We found that in certain states, Ramos is partly right. In the five states with the highest portion of Hispanic residents, Jose is more popular than both John and Steven. We looked at other states that have some of the largest numbers of Hispanics and found that there is a break point. When the Hispanic population is above 27 percent of the total, Jose outranks John. Below that line, John is more popular. State % Hispanic population Jose - rank among baby names John - rank among baby names New Mexico 46.7 28 56 California 38.1 25 55 Texas 38.1 6 36 Arizona 30.1 28 53 Nevada 27.1 41 57 Florida 22.8 73 39 Colorado 20.9 89 38 New Jersey 18.1 91 20 New York 18 100 26 Illinois 16.1 76 26 United States 17 72 28 Source: Social Security Administration So Ramos has a point when it comes to Jose and even more so for Steven, which fails to make the top 100 in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. Ramos’ batting average falls for the rest of the names he gave. Camilo barely ranks in the top 1,000 nationwide. Maria is more popular but never does better than its rank of 58 in Texas. We should give a nod to the creativity or maybe just the flexibility of American parents. Since 2000, the popularity has fallen for every name Ramos mentioned, except Camilo. Nationally, Jose fell from 34 to 72, John went from 14 to 28, Steven dropped from 54 to 112, and Maria from 41 to 101. Camilo only shows up in the top 1,000 starting in 2009 and its rank moved from 901 to 837. If you were wondering, the most popular names in 2012: Jacob and Sophia. Our ruling Ramos said that the most popular names are no longer John or Steven, but Jose, Camilo and Maria. Afterward, Ramos said he was thinking of states with large Hispanic populations. With that caveat, he has a bit of a point. In states with the highest percentage of Hispanics, Jose beats out John and Steven. Camilo and Maria are not really contenders. None of these names are the most popular in any state. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Jorge Ramos	None	None	None	2013-12-09T13:59:51	2013-12-05	['None']
-goop-02575	Angelina Jolie Lying About Cooking For Kids, 	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-cooking-kids-lying-classes-lessons/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie NOT Lying About Cooking For Kids, Despite Report	10:50 am, August 15, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-06432	A private club (the only place in the park where alcohol is served) is housed in Disneyland's New Orleans Square.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/questions-disneylands-club-33-answered/	None	Disney	None	David Mikkelson	None	Questions About Disneyland’s Club 33, Answered	13 December 1996	None	['None']
-snes-04757	A woman gave birth to twins in a casket after her husband buried her alive.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/woman-buried-alive-twins/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Woman Gives Birth to Twins in Casket After Husband Buries Her Alive	17 May 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-05360	Says "Schaufler was the only Democrat who voted to stop" the state’s health care reform plan.	mostly false	/oregon/statements/2012/may/10/oregon-league-conservation-voters/was-rep-mike-schaufler-really-only-dem-vote-agains/	Rep. Mike Schaufler is facing a tough primary challenge in his re-election bid for House District 48. Much of the criticism being lobbed his way paints him as a Democrat in name only, one who has a tendency to side with Republicans on high-profile issues. One particularly damning mailer comes from the Oregon League of Conservation Voters. Schaufler’s face is shown alongside former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s. "Mike Schaufler Stands with Tea Party Republicans," the mailer reads. What was the mailer’s basis for tying Schaufler to Republicans? A vote he took on health care legislation during the February 2012 session. "When a bill to implement Governor Kitzhaber and President Obama’s health care reform plan came up for a vote in Oregon, Schaufler was the only Democrat who voted to stop it." February wasn’t that long ago -- and this particular vote stood out pretty clearly in our minds. We thought we ought to take a look at just how accurate the accusation is. The mailer cites its source -- "Check the Facts" -- as an article from The Oregonian headlined "A Democrat defects in the Oregon House, stalls insurance bill." The story is easily found online. Here’s how reporter Harry Esteve describes the day’s events: "An Oregon House Democrat broke ranks Monday and helped Republicans stall a key health insurance bill, throwing into question the delicate balance of power at the Legislature. "Rep. Mike Schaufler, of Happy Valley, provided the sole Democratic vote that sent a bill setting up health insurance exchanges back to committee and to an uncertain future." Explaining his vote to stall the bill, Schaufler said, "We need to create jobs. We shouldn't do anything this session until we do that." He also pointed out, the story said, that "he has been making almost daily speeches on the House floor about the need to free up timber and water for job creation, and said no one should be surprised by his action Monday." Now, this all went down on Feb. 13. Let’s fast-forward a few weeks to March 2, when the bill managed to get back to the floor for a final vote. That day, Schaufler (and, it should be noted, 25 Republicans) voted with every single Democratic House member to pass the legislation. The Senate followed suit three days later and the legislation became law. We called the Oregon League of Conservation Voters to see what they had to say about this second vote. Doug Moore, the executive director, said the second vote had nothing to do with the mailer. "We’re talking about a specific vote," he said. "We cite that specific vote." But what of the overall impression that he voted to kill the bill? "We didn’t say he voted against it. We didn’t say he voted to kill it. We said he voted to stop it," Moore argued. "Campaign communications are about talking to voters and there’s not an obligation to tell both sides of the story when sending out mail pieces." Yes, but that both-sides-of-the-story issue can be relevant in determining what’s true and determining truth is why we at PolitiFact Oregon have jobs. We agree that Schaufler certainly voted to stall the bill initially -- and he ticked off a lot of his fellow Democrats in doing so. But he didn’t vote to kill it, which the ad implies -- even if it uses the word "stop." Whether Schaufler’s actions were justified, we can’t say, but it seems pretty obvious to us that he stalled the bill to get action on other bills and not for reasons pertaining to the legislation itself. What’s more, Schaufler ultimately gave his blessing to the bill. In truth, it didn’t face much partisan opposition at all. It passed just five votes shy of a unanimous endorsement. The Oregon League of Conservation Voters is trying to make Schaufler seem out of touch with his Democratic base. That’s not our call. We’re concerned with whether he was really "the only Democrat who voted to stop" the health care legislation. Yes, he voted to stall the legislation. The statement has an element of truth. But it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, namely that in the end he voted to pass it. That’s why we rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Oregon League of Conservation Voters	None	None	None	2012-05-10T17:35:36	2012-05-08	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-12423	"More (people) die from indoor air pollution than from malaria, HIV/AIDS and TB combined."	mostly true	/global-news/statements/2017/may/18/james-rockall/yes-indoor-air-pollution-kills-more-hivaids-malari/	Emphasizing the need to bring clean fuel to the world’s poor, James Rockall, CEO of the World LPG Association, recently said that "more (people) die of indoor air pollution than malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis combined." Rockall’s statement showed up in a tweet from Stanford Energy, a research group at Stanford University, after he spoke there May 9. Rockall confirmed that he did make this claim, and we decided to check it out. Public health researchers have known for some time that in many poorer nations, fumes from dirty cooking stoves pose a health threat. Rockall’s group represents the interests of the liquified petroleum gas industry, but that self-interest aside, there’s no question that gas burns more cleanly than wood or coal. Rockall told us he got his numbers from the World Health Organization. He took a 2016 report on deaths from indoor air pollution and compared that to 2015 estimates of death from HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. The indoor air pollution deaths, however, were based on 2012 data. To keep the comparison fair, we looked at 2012 mortality estimates for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. We consulted three different sources -- UNAIDS, WHO and the Global Burden of Disease Study -- and used the highest available estimate. Here’s what the numbers show: Deaths in 2012 HIV/AIDS 1.6 million Malaria 0.8 million TB 1.3 million Total 3.7 million Indoor air pollution total 4.2 million As you can see, the total mortality from the three diseases comes to 3.7 million in 2012, less than the 4.2 million people estimated to have died from diseases attributable to indoor air pollution. Rockall used different underlying estimates to reach a total of 2.9 million deaths due to the three diseases. Our total is higher, but we found no estimates from any source that undercut his basic point. Deaths from indoor air pollution are higher than the sum of deaths from the world’s major leading infectious diseases. A note of caution Counting deaths from indoor air pollution is more complicated than tracking deaths from HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Mark Wilson, professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, said it is easier to identify someone who has HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. "Much more difficult is defining how one dies from indoor air pollution because it will never be the sole immediate cause of death," Wilson said. "Rather, a variety of physiological, immunological and toxicological processes would compromise someone’s health, such that the cause might be defined as some sort of respiratory insufficiency, asthma, heart disease, etcetera." The WHO study made various assumptions to link diseases such as lung cancer, pneumonia, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and ischemic heart disease to indoor air pollution. Our ruling Rockall said more people die of indoor air pollution than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. We compared 2012 estimates of indoor air pollution deaths to a range of estimates for the three infectious diseases for 2012 and later. No matter how we did it, the deaths due to indoor air pollution trumped those due to HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. But an epidemiologist offered the caveat that the indoor air pollution study relied on assumptions that introduce a greater chance of uncertainty than counts of deaths from the leading infectious diseases. For that reason, we rate this statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	James Rockall	None	None	None	2017-05-18T15:41:04	2017-05-09	['HIV/AIDS']
-tron-02114	Mysterious woman on the road	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/womanontheroad/	None	inspirational	None	None	None	Mysterious woman on the road	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-07084	In the Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, none of the candidates mentioned the "middle class" or "education."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/24/jay-carney/democrats-say-republican-presidential-candidates-d/	To illustrate that the Republican presidential candidates are out of touch with ordinary Americans, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney cited two things that he said the candidates failed to mention during a two-hour CNN debate from New Hampshire: education and the middle class. Flying to Puerto Rico on Air Force One on June 14, 2011, Carney told reporters: "I was struck by the fact that over the course of two hours, the phrase ‘middle class’ and the word ‘education’ did not pass anyone’s lips that I heard, which was striking to me because the middle class is obviously, to our mind, the primary focus of everything that we do in terms of the economic policies we pursue and the concerns we have. The middle class not only suffered tremendously during the great recession and is suffering as we emerge from it, but was under a great deal of pressure even prior to the recession. While incomes were growing rapidly under the previous administration and the economy was expanding, middle-class incomes were flat, stagnant, and even dropping. So that was one observation. "And another is that . . . as the president talks about a lot, education could be the key, the defining element of whether or not the United States of America can compete globally in the 21st century -- compete and win. We think it’s a high, high priority. And I was struck by the absence of attention to that very key issue last night." Carney's comment was a Democratic talking point on the day after the debate. The Democratic National Committee issued a Web video called "What in the world are they talking about?" that made the same point. So were Carney and the DNC right? We checked the debate transcript and found that Carney is technically correct that the words "middle class" and "education" did not appear in the 21,798-word debate. But it's important to look more broadly and see whether the candidates used other words with the same meaning. And indeed, we found the candidates made several references to middle-income Americans — they just used different words: ● Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty referred to America’s "middle-income and modest-income people" when WMUR political reporter Josh McElveen questioned him on his plan to "right the housing ship." "Well, the first thing we need to do is get the government out of crony capitalism," Pawlenty said. "We have this alliance between big government, big unions and certain big bailout businesses. And as Congressman Paul said a few minutes ago, we had politicians in Congress trying to micromanage the housing market, and they created a bubble and they created the mess. And now we have all these innocent bystanders, the good people of the United States of America, many middle-income and modest-income people, who've been devastated by this." ● Pawlenty also mentioned "blue-collar communities" as he cited his upbringing in a "meat packing" and "manufacturing" town with a father who worked as a "Teamster truck driver" for much of his life. Speaking about a plan to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., Pawlenty said, "I understand what it's like to see the blue-collar communities and the struggles that they've had when manufacturing leaves. So I've seen that firsthand. But No. 1, we've got to have fair trade, and what's going on right now is not fair." ● We counted three references to the middle class by former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who spoke of the "broad middle of America." "I always am from Pennsylvania," Santorum said. "We still make things there, and I represented the Steel Valley of Pittsburgh when I was in the Congress. And what I learned from growing up in Butler, Pa., steel town is that the broad middle of America was a broad middle of America when we had lots of manufacturing here because that's how the wealth from those who create the jobs get down. … We want to encourage people to set up jobs here in America. Take that R&D credit, make it permanent, take that innovation and then invest that money here to create that broad middle of America and have that wealth really trickle down." On education, however, Carney was correct. We couldn't find any reference to the subject during the debate. Still, it's important to note that the candidates didn't choose the topics for questions. That was done by CNN host John King, New Hampshire journalists and voters. They chose not to ask about education. In fact, King started the debate reminding candidates of the rules, saying, "We've also asked the candidates to answer the questions that they're asked, rather than the question they might have wished to be asked." Our ruling Carney was technically correct that education and the middle class were not mentioned in the debate. But several times candidates made references to middle-income people using other terms. And they never got asked about education. We rate the claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Jay Carney	None	None	None	2011-06-24T15:03:26	2011-06-14	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-para-00085	"The Government said that 3 per cent was emergency levels. So, if the Reserve Bank keeps cutting beyond that, understand this — it's because they're worried about the Australian economy."	half-true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/07/joe-hockey/emergency-crisis-slowdown-Hockey-e-word/index.html	None	['Economy']	Joe Hockey	Peter Martin, Peter Fray	None	Emergency, crisis or slowdown? Hockey takes the e-word	Wednesday, August 7, 2013 at 11:11 a.m.	None	['Australia']
-pomt-07481	"By the end of this decade, the interest we owe on our debt could rise to nearly $1 trillion."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/14/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-us-interest-load-will-hit-nearly/	During his April 13, 2011, speech on his vision for America’s fiscal future, President Barack Obama offered a striking statistic about the future burden of interest on the national debt. "Even after our economy recovers," Obama said, "our government will still be on track to spend more money than it takes in throughout this decade and beyond. That means we’ll have to keep borrowing more from countries like China. And that means more of your tax dollars will go toward paying off the interest on all the loans we keep taking out. By the end of this decade, the interest we owe on our debt could rise to nearly $1 trillion. Just the interest payments." We thought we’d check whether Obama was correct that "by the end of this decade, the interest we owe on our debt could rise to nearly $1 trillion." We turned to figures published by the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’ nonpartisan arbiter of fiscal statistics and projections. Specifically, we looked at CBO’s analysis, published in March, of Obama’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. In that report, CBO offered two different projections for what the interest burden would be by the end of the decade. One of the projections looks at what would happen under Obama’s proposal. The other projection is known as the "baseline" budget. The baseline budget estimates what needs to be spent to maintain current services. It includes the effects of inflation, and it assumes that current law will continue indefinitely. Baselines can be a useful measure, but they are not perfect. Adhering to current law requires the assumption that Congress will let a number of policies expire, including the Bush tax cuts, periodic adjustments to limit the impact of the Alternative Minimum Tax and delays to scheduled Medicare reimbursement cuts to physicians. There’s no certainty that Congress and the president will follow through with these phase-outs, given the political support for them, so the baseline budget likely underestimates the size of future deficits. Despite such imperfections, we thought that both scenarios were relevant for judging the president’s statement, so we’ll offer the figures for both. We’ll also offer figures for both 2019 and 2020, since we couldn’t come up with an answer to the question of what year constitutes the "end of this decade." Let’s look first at the president’s budget proposal. CBO says that during 2019, net interest costs will reach $794 billion. By 2020, the number reaches $866 billion. Now, we’ll look at the baseline budget. CBO says that during 2019, net interest costs will reach $710 billion. By 2020, the number reaches $762 billion. None of these four estimates reaches $1 trillion. The closest number is off by 13 percent, and the lowest is off by 29 percent. Marc Goldwein, policy director for the centrist Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said the president is not far off, especially given the high degree of uncertainty about what the law will be a decade from now. Other experts we spoke to said the White House had to stretch to reach the flashy $1 trillion figure. Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, said that "$710 billion or $762 billion is a lot of money, but it's not ‘nearly $1 trillion.’" The White House pointed us to a third possibility -- the interest burden in 2021. Why 2021? That’s the final year of the decadelong "budget window." CBO estimated interest in 2021 to be $931 billion -- closer to $1 trillion than any of our other numbers, and possibly enough to justify Obama’s wording of "nearly $1 trillion." Still, we think most listeners wouldn’t immediately assume the president is talking about budget windows when he says "by the end of this decade." Using the figures for 2019 or 2020 instead, Obama’s numbers are off by anywhere from 13 percent to 29 percent. Obama’s underlying point is still sound -- the United States will have hundreds of billions of dollars of debt on the books -- but we think the most obvious numbers fall short of "nearly $1 trillion." On balance, we rate the statement Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2011-04-14T15:56:46	2011-04-13	['None']
-pomt-03021	Bill Gunter would "drain millions from local public schools, and give our tax dollars to private, for-profit schools run by out-of-state corporations."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2013/oct/12/florida-democratic-party/campaign-mailer-says-bill-gunter-would-cut-funding/	The race to succeed Mike Fasano in the state House is producing a glut of attack ads, including two recent mailers that stand out. One claims that Democrat Amanda Murphy is out of touch with average voters and wouldn't be available, literally, because she'll be at her "Cancun vacation home." The other says Republican Bill Gunter would "drain millions" from public education and give the money to for-profit schools. With the House District 36 election set for Oct. 15, 2013, PolitiFact Florida decided to test the accuracy of these noteworthy mailers. Here, we'll examine the ad targeting Gunter's view on public education, which showed up in mailboxes a couple weeks ago. (We'll look at the attack against Murphy in a separate fact-check.) "Gunter would drain millions from local public schools, and give our tax dollars to private, for-profit schools run by out-of-state corporations," the ad says. The Florida Democratic Party financed the mailer. It cites aTimes article, a preview of the Republican primary, published Sept. 13. In the story, three Republicans seeking the nomination weighed in on whether funding to public schools should be increased. Gunter said he opposed increased state funding for education and suggested the private sector play a larger role, a statement he alluded to at least twice before: at a Sept. 4 candidates debate and in a questionnaire, where he stated: "Money isn't the issue. . . . Highest per pupil spending districts are some of the worst in the nation." None of his statements referenced "for-profit schools run by out-of-state corporations." Joshua Karp, spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party, said freezing educational spending at its present level would result in cuts to Pasco schools to offset rising expenses. Also, diverting state funding to the private sector, or charter schools, takes away money from public schools, he said. Olga Swinson, chief financial officer for Pasco schools and the past president of Florida School Finance Officers Association, said a state funding freeze might result in budget cuts if costs for salaries, pensions, insurance, utilities, maintenance and other services go up at the same time. Many of those costs have indeed increased in recent years, leading to cuts. "With every fund that we have, we would have to make do or we would have to start cutting programs," she said. Whether those cuts would amount to "draining millions" from the district is debatable, but Swinson wouldn't rule out the possibility and explained that the depth of cuts would depend on how much insurance, maintenance, pensions and other costs increase. Enrollment levels and local revenue streams would influence spending as well. Additionally, there's little evidence to the Democrats' claim that earmarking state funds to charter schools would enrich "for-profit schools run by out-of-state corporations." Most of the seven charter schools operating in Pasco are locally owned. The Imagine Charter School of Land O'Lakes is owned by a Virginia-based company. The ad makes broad assumptions that district costs would swell by millions of dollars, leading to cuts, that local revenues wouldn't keep pace and that charter schools owned by out-of-state companies would get tax money. That's a lot of assuming. Still, history shows that education costs are consistently on the rise. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Florida Democratic Party	None	None	None	2013-10-12T11:09:21	2013-10-09	['None']
-clck-00012	climate models have overestimated the amount of global warming and failed to predict what climatologists call the warming ‘hiatus’	incorrect	https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/daily-wire-article-incorrectly-claims-climate-models-have-overestimated-warming/	None	None	None	None	None	Daily Wire article incorrectly claims climate models have overestimated warming	[' The Daily Wire, 19 Sep. 2017 \xa0 ']	None	['None']
-vees-00319	VERA FILES YEARENDER: Explaining the president, the 2017 edition	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-yearender-explaining-president-2017-edition	None	None	None	None	Duterte,Harry Roque,ABELLA,harryroquedutertespokesman	VERA FILES YEARENDER: Explaining the president, the 2017 edition	December 21, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02155	Says gubernatorial candidate Clay Pell "hasn't spent a dime on advertising."	pants on fire!	/rhode-island/statements/2014/may/02/robert-walsh/neari-executive-director-robert-walsh-jr-says-cand/	During an April 20, 2014, interview on WPRI-TV's "Newsmakers," Robert A. Walsh Jr., executive director of the National Education Association-Rhode Island, was asked about the likelihood that Clay Pell would win September's Democratic primary and, ultimately, the November election. Walsh downplayed the importance of the latest polls showing little support among Democrats for Pell, the gubernatorial candidate supported by the union. (Pell was favored by 9.4 percent in an April 11 Brown University poll and 15 percent in a February Providence Journal / WPRI survey.) "Poll numbers in April for a relatively new candidate are meaningless," Walsh said. "What is he? Mid-teens or something right now? But he hasn't spent a dime on advertising or done anything else. He's getting out there meeting people. When he meets people he converts them to his cause and his message." Hasn't spent a dime on advertising? That didn't make cents to us. Immediately after Pell's announcement on Jan. 28, 2014, it was almost impossible to go online and not see ads for Pell popping up on nearly every website you’d visit -- even those featuring General Treasurer Gina Raimondo, one of Pell’s Democratic opponents. Those ads cost a lot of dimes, so we called Walsh to see if he could justify his claim. He responded by email: "Of course the reference was to the traditional television buys that accompany campaigns (since I was on TV when I mentioned it)," he wrote. That's not a distinction he made during the program. Exactly how much has Pell spent on advertising? On April 23 we began an effort to get that information -- even a rough estimate. Pell's campaign promised to get back to us, but despite repeated follow-up calls and emails, we couldn't get our questions answered. A week later, on April 30, the Pell campaign, as required by law, filed its quarterly finance report for the first three months of 2014. It showed that Pell, who began his campaign by loaning himself a million dollars, has now invested another million dollars of his own money in his campaign and spent $311,547 in January, February and March. It also showed that on Jan. 7, Pell spent $36,530 on advertising and media production through a media company in Washington, D.C. The firm got another $7,880 on March 10. (The other two items listed as advertising expenditures were $200 for an ad with the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society and $800 for a full-page ad in the program book of this year's Providence Newspaper Guild Follies, run by unionized workers at The Journal.) Our ruling NEARI executive director Robert Walsh said candidate Clay Pell "hasn't spent a dime on advertising." At the time, the Pell campaign had already spent 444,100 dimes, or $44,410, on advertising through a Washington media firm. We know the public has seen at least some of that money because we were inundated with online Pell ads soon after his announcement. To suggest that Pell hasn't spent a dime -- or a quarter, or a dollar -- on advertising is not only short-changing the truth, it's ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire! (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Robert Walsh	None	None	None	2014-05-02T00:01:00	2014-04-20	['None']
-hoer-00382	Three Headed Snake Image	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/three-headed-snake-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Fake Three Headed Snake Image	2nd March 2012	None	['None']
-snes-00771	Fortnite Games announced on Twitter that it is ending "Battle Royale" due to a copyright infringement lawsuit from a competitor.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fortnite-battle-royale-ending/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Is ‘Fortnite: Battle Royale’ Ending?	13 April 2018	None	['None']
-goop-00053	Mario Lopez ‘Gunning’ For Ellen DeGeneres’ Talk Show Job, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/mario-lopez-ellen-degeneres-talk-show-job-host/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Mario Lopez NOT ‘Gunning’ For Ellen DeGeneres’ Talk Show Job, Despite Report	1:43 pm, November 1, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-00904	Halle Berry Wants To Date Chadwick Boseman?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/halle-berry-chadwick-boseman-dating/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Halle Berry Wants To Date Chadwick Boseman?	3:36 pm, May 31, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-07482	Says "Congressman Eric Cantor wants to eliminate Social Security."	pants on fire!	/virginia/statements/2011/apr/14/campaign-americas-future/liberal-groups-say-eric-cantor-wants-eliminate-soc/	A new television ad taking aim at U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor’s position on Social Security gives us a sense of deja vu. The Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal advocacy group, has aired the television ad this month in Cantor’s 7th District saying the congressman is a threat to the retirement dreams of Americans younger than 55. "Congressman Eric Cantor wants to eliminate Social Security," the narrator intones in the 31-second spot, based on a comment the majority leader made in a March 21 appearance before the conservative Hoover Institution. The ad supports the claim with an audio snippet of Cantor’s response to a question from the audience. Speaking about entitlement programs such as Social Security, Cantor said it’s important to protect benefits for those 55 and older. "But for the rest of us, listen, we’re going to have to come to grips with the fact that these programs cannot exist if we want America to be what we want America to be," Cantor said. In recent weeks, scads of liberal politicians, organizations and bloggers have been pouncing on the same statement to argue it’s evidence the GOP is showing its true intentions to end Social Security. One of groups, Americans United for Change, used the comment to argue Cantor wanted to eliminate Social Security and Medicare. In an April 1 Truth-O-Meter, PolitiFact national rated that claim False, pointing out that in other public appearances Cantor has called for changing, not abolishing entitlement programs like Social Security. Seconds after making the Hoover statement that sparked the frenzy, Cantor added: "We’re going to have to accept some changes as far as the rest of us, and what we’re saying is for those 55 and older (they) do not have to worry about changes in benefits, but for the rest of us we will," Cantor said. There are other statements showing Cantor envisions a future with Social Security: *In a Feb. 19 op-ed in Politico, he said the country’s entitlement programs "will not be available for our children unless they are modernized and reformed." *In a March 16 interview with CNBC, he said, "If you look at these entitlement programs, what we’ve got to admit to ourselves is they’re not going to be around in their current state unless we significantly alter who we are as a country." He said that for workers 54 and younger, Republicans were going to insist on dealing "with the fact that if these programs are going to be around, they’re going to have to look a lot different." *In the April 13 Richmond Times-Dispatch, Cantor again said if programs like Social Security are to remain viable, they must change for those under 55. "We want them to be around because we care about those who need our help," Cantor said. "We want a safety net in place that actually is there for people who need it, not for those who don’t." Robert L. Borosage, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, sent us an email insisting Cantor does want to end Social Security and saying his comment at Hoover isn’t the only proof. Borosage sent us a link to a portion of an April 10 appearance Cantor made on Fox News Sunday. While talking about the Republican 2012 budget plan and entitlements, Cantor said "I know those programs are not going to be there for me when I retire, just like everyone else 54 and younger. They can’t. We can’t sustain that kind of trajectory." But a review of the full interview on Fox showed that as Cantor talked about the House GOP 2012 budget, he also said Republicans are "talking about changing the way that the entitlements work in this country for the future while protecting today’s seniors." Cantor has been short on specifics about how he would reform Social Security. Let’s recap: The Campaign for America’s Future used part of a comment Cantor made at the Hoover Institution to argue the congressman wants to eliminate Social Security for those under 55.. But Cantor had a made a number of statements, previous to the ad, which show that is not his position. The Majority Leader has said the program must be changed to remain viable, not eliminated, even though he has been short on specifics about how he would reform Social Security. It would have been easy for the Campaign for America’s Future to find those statements before they ran the ad. Instead, they cherry-picked a Cantor comment and gave it no context. We rate their statement Pants on Fire.	None	Campaign for America's Future	None	None	None	2011-04-14T11:04:04	2011-04-08	['Eric_Cantor']
-afck-00191	We are proud of the increase in life expectancy from 60 years in 2012 to 62 years in 2014.	mostly-correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/zumas-anc-birthday-speech-6-claims-fact-checked/	None	None	None	None	None	Zuma’s ANC birthday speech: 6 claims fact-checked	2017-01-12 09:06	None	['None']
-hoer-00842	Giant Feral Pig Photograph	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/giant-feral-pig.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Giant Feral Pig Photograph	August 2006	None	['None']
-pomt-00564	The film and TV industry supports more than 24,000 direct jobs and pays local workers more than $1.68 billion in wages in Georgia.	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2015/jun/12/motion-picture-association-america/federal-data-backs-claim-about-movie-and-tv-jobs/	Georgia’s lucrative tax credits for movie and TV production generate more than just the chance to spot Betty White and Chris Evans noshing in restaurants around Atlanta. The industry also supports more than 24,000 jobs and pays more than $1.68 billion in wages to those workers, according to a press release this week from the Motion Picture Association of America. That’s the equivalent of the entire population of the city of Decatur working in an industry that in 2013 saw $261 million spent on location in shoots in Georgia, according to a 2013 report from a nonprofit that tracks English-language film production worldwide. So, PolitiFact Georgia thought those numbers seemed high but plausible – especially if you count the hordes of zombies needed every week in "The Walking Dead." We decided to check it out. First, it’s worth knowing that the MPAA released its data for Georgia and other states as part of a hard push of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), in which Congress defines negotiating priorities for trade agreements. In this case, the Senate has approved but the House has yet to vote on providing "fast track" authority for President Obama to speed a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (TPP) through Congress. In other words, the deal would expand trade and access for Atlanta’s zombies – not to mention "The Hunger Games" franchise and the Evans’ now-filming "Captain America: Civil War" – to much of the Asia-Pacific region, said MPAA spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield. "The movies made in Georgia are reaching a global audience, and it’s important we can access those markets with as little friction as possible," Bedingfield said. "The jobs grown in Georgia are dependent on being able to market those products easily overseas." Georgia has heavily incentivized the industry in recent years to lure projects. Production companies can earn a 20 percent income tax credit on in-state costs of projects worth at least $500,000. Another 10 percent credit is given for using a Georgia logo in production credits. The MPAA used the federal government’s own data, compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, in calculating the total job and wage estimates. The BLS data broad categories of motion pictures and broadcasting show an annual average of 20,869 employees and total annual wages of $1.55 billion in 2013. But the MPAA drills down deeper into those broad categories and others, excluding the recording artists covered in the broad category but captures jobs from other categories – such as payroll workers and electricians – it can show work in the film or TV industry, said Julia Jenks, the vice president of research for the MPAA. In some of those more specific groups, such as cable TV production, all of the jobs and pay count toward the MPAA tally. Others, such as costume rental and wardrobe, are counted based on U.S. Census or research calculations that tell what proportion of those jobs work in the industry. The MPAA calls that its adjustment factor on the government figures. "It’s our best estimate, and a very conservative estimate," Jenks said. Using those parameters, the BLS counts 48,539 jobs but the MPAA tally for Georgia is 24,162: Job Code Description BLS total Adjustment MPAA total 334614 Audio/Video Reproduction 152 68.7% 104 512110 Motion Picture Video & Production 3,864 100% 3,864 512120 Motion Picture & Video Distribution 22 100% 22 512191 Teleproduction, Other Post Production 148 42% 62 512199 Other Motion Picture & Video 59 100% 59 532220 Formal Wear/Costume Rental 623 3% 19 532490 Other Machinery Rental, Leasing 1,349 6% 81 541214 Payroll 15,739 30% 4,722 561311 Employment Placement 6,198 1% 62 711510 Independent artists, writers 1,291 23% 297 423990 Prerecorded Video Wholesale 1,738 12% 209 512131 Movie Theaters (except drive-ins) 3,348 100% 3,348 512132 Drive-in Theaters 45 100% 45 515120 Television Broadcasting 7,138 100% 7,138 515210 Cable & Subscription Programming 3,670 100% 3,670 519130 Internet Publishing & Broadcasting 2,778 3% 83 532230 Video & Disk Rental 377 100% 377 Using the BLS tables, PolitiFact Georgia was able to replicate all of the job figures, except in three categories. The 2013 quarterly census shows 303 jobs in audio/video reproduction – exactly double the MPAA’s count. And, the official BLS data does not have an annual average for jobs in the one category few think of as a movie industry gig: working in movie and drive-in theaters, economist Timothy Ewing said. A nine-month average is available for those jobs, which have high turnover. But that means they are comparable to the yearly figures in other categories. Ewing could not comment on the adjustments the MPAA made in categories, other than to note it would create more conservative estimates. So, using the BLS-confirmed data, and the MPAA’s own adjustments, the total number of jobs drops to 20,873. But the MPAA is conservative in other ways. It does not include at all freelance workers common in production, who provide contract work in, say, makeup or construction. PolitiFact Georgia recently showed that Tyler Perry’s new studio planned for Fort McPherson will alone create between 2,000 to 6,000 of those jobs. It is reasonable to think the MPAA could easily reach its 24,000 jobs figure if it counted contract work on the 23 movies or 39 TV series filmed in Georgia in 2013. The question remains if those jobs, and their pay, are truly Georgia jobs. The state incentive allows movie companies to get credits on what they pay stars, and accountants, for the time they work in the state. Our ruling The MPAA released data this week to bolster its lobbying to fast-track a trade deal that would open more of Asia to its content. It claimed the industry supported 24,000 direct jobs and paid workers more than $1.68 billion in the Peach State in 2013. Federal data confirms nearly all of the job figures and payroll, many of which have been reduced from the official headcount. The MPAA overreaches in deciding movie theater workers such as ushers are industry workers, versus retail employees. But those jobs would likely be outweighed by freelance workers on production sets, which the MPAA did not count in its tally. We rate the group’s claim Mostly True.	None	Motion Picture Association of America	None	None	None	2015-06-12T00:00:00	2015-06-08	['None']
-pomt-09713	"One-third of the health care dollar goes to no such thing as health care; it goes to the insurance companies."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/30/patrick-kennedy/insurance-companies-national-health-spending/	Rep. Patrick Kennedy gave a strong defense of Democratic plans for health reform on the House floor, attacking Republican opponents as defenders of insurance companies. "The other side talks about the health care reform bill costing a lot of money," Kennedy said. "Right now, consumers in America are spending millions and millions of dollars paying that to the insurance companies. One-third of the health care dollar goes to no such thing as health care; it goes to the insurance companies. That's why the Democratic proposal restricts the amount of money that insurance companies can spend on bureaucracy." The idea that insurance companies get a third of all health spending in the country struck us as suspicious. And sure enough, our research showed that Kennedy was mixing up his statistics. To start with, every health insurance company is different, and there are different ways to count administrative expenses. Generally speaking, the most efficient insurers cover large groups of employees, while the least efficient sell policies to individuals. Nevertheless, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal agency, publishes national health expenditure data, which include a breakdown of "The Nation's Health Dollar." The most recent data for 2007 show that private insurers get a little less than 7 percent of the nation's health care spending. The 7 percent number also includes some of the administrative costs of government health insurance programs and charity programs, but the center said most of that is for private insurers. We reviewed another study done by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It looked at administrative costs from a different angle, trying to focus on what percentage of health insurance premiums went to patient costs. Keep in mind, spending on private health insurance premiums is less than all national health care spending, which includes government spending for Medicare and Medicaid, and other expenditures. The CBO included a bunch of things under administrative costs: marketing; claims processing; managing contracts with doctors and hospitals; quality assurance; regulatory compliance; information technology expenses; general overhead; profits and taxes. It found that the percentage of premiums going to all these activities was 12 percent. We asked Kennedy's office about his statement, and staffers said Kennedy meant to say that he was talking about administrative expenses throughout the health care system. They sent us a study from the New England Journal of Medicine that examined administrative costs for doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, home care agencies and employers who provide insurance. The study found total administrative costs for all those groups accounted for 31 percent of health care expenditures in the United States. Still, that's not anywhere close to what Kennedy said. He said that "One-third of the health care dollar goes to no such thing as health care; it goes to the insurance companies." The actual number is about 7 percent. We rate Kennedy's statement False.	None	Patrick Kennedy	None	None	None	2009-10-30T17:35:02	2009-10-27	['None']
-pomt-14443	"When you're white ... you don't know what it's like to be poor."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/07/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-wrong-say-when-youre-white-you-dont/	During the Democratic debate in economically distressed and racially diverse Flint, Mich., CNN’s Don Lemon asked both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders the same question: "In a speech about policing," Lemon said, "the FBI director, James Comey, borrowed a phrase saying, ‘Everyone is a little bit racist.’ What racial blind spot do you have?" When it was Sanders’ turn to answer, he began by talking about several specific examples of racial discrimination. He then drew a contrast with what whites experience. "When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or you get dragged out of a car," Sanders said. Several readers asked us to take a closer look at Sanders’ comment that "when you're white ... you don't know what it's like to be poor." Sanders' point was that white people haven’t had to contend with racism based on skin color. But when he moves into the subject of whites’ experience with poverty, he’s on weak ground. Sanders’ suggestion that white Americans haven’t experienced poverty is undercut by statistics calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau. Since the 1960s, the Census Bureau has tracked the numbers and percentages of Americans by race who have an income level that puts them at the poverty line. Here’s the most recent data, for 2014: Category Number in poverty Poverty rate Americans of all races 46.7 million 14.8 percent White 19.7 million 10.1 percent African-American 10.8 million 26.2 percent Hispanic 13.1 million 23.6 percent Asian-American 2.1 million 12.0 percent By this measure, Sanders was certainly wrong to suggest that whites haven’t experienced poverty. In 2014, there were actually more white Americans in poverty -- 19.7 million -- than members of any other group. Part of the reason, of course, is that there are more white Americans than there are members of minority groups overall. (Whites account for 62 percent of the population.) Still, even though whites have a lower poverty rate than other groups -- roughly 10 percent -- even that percentage is hardly trivial. The numbers are similar if you raise the income level slightly. At 125 percent of the poverty level, the number of white Americans rises to about 26.5 million. That’s a lot of white people who are in or near poverty. "This was a misstatement. A lot of white people know what it’s like to be poor," said Julia Isaacs, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. If you look at the poor as a group, minorities are disproportionately represented. Still, the white population is large enough that the majority of the people in poverty are white. That’s been the case since at least 1970. We calculated the racial and ethnic makeup of the population at the poverty line in roughly 10-year intervals, using data for the four categories above. Census data is available back to 1990 for all four groups, and they exist for all but Asians back to about 1970. Year Percentage of people in poverty who were white Percentage of people in poverty who were black Percentage of people in poverty who were Hispanic Percentage of people in poverty who were Asian 2014 54 19 23 4 2010 54 19 24 3 2000 56 21 20 3 1990 57 25 15 2 1980 62 27 11 NA 1970 64 28 9* NA * Data is for 1972 It’s easiest to grasp the scope of white poverty when using the following graphic, which was provided to us by Christopher Wimer, a research scientist at the Columbia University Population Research Center. It’s similar to the chart above, except that it uses a more precise, though still experimental, measurement of poverty that is adjusted for geography, government benefits and other factors not captured in the traditional poverty measurement. The share of whites in the population of Americans in poverty is shown in purple. As the chart indicates, the white share has fallen, but it’s still the largest of any of the four groups studied. Sanders said the day after the debate that he misspoke, telling reporters, "What I meant to say is when you talk about ghettos traditionally, what you talk about is African-American communities. There is nobody on this campaign … who's talked about poverty, whether it's in the white community, the black community, the Latino community, more than I have." Our ruling Sanders says that "when you're white ... you don't know what it's like to be poor." On the contrary -- the most recent figures show that nearly 20 million white Americans are experiencing poverty. While that’s smaller as a percentage than it is for other racial and ethnic groups, that’s still a lot of people. In raw numbers, it’s actually more than any other group. We rate his claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2016-03-07T17:01:11	2016-03-06	['None']
-pomt-00147	Says Tony Evers will "raise the gas tax by as much as a dollar a gallon."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2018/oct/24/scott-walker/tony-evers-open-raising-gas-tax-scott-walker-one-s/	In a video ad that appears on screens mounted on 3,000 gas pumps across Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker attacks his Democratic challenger, state schools superintendent Tony Evers, over the state gas tax. Wearing a Milwaukee Brewers jacket, Walker says in the 15-second spot released Oct. 9, 2018: "Hi, it’s Scott Walker. Good thing you’re filling up, because if Tony Evers wins, he’ll raise the gas tax by as much as a dollar a gallon." Walker has focused on the gas tax for months ahead of the Nov. 6, 2018 election. A week after the gas pump ad came out, he repeated the $1 claim about Evers in a TV ad. And the $1 claim is also made in a previous TV ad by Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin. All our Tony Evers and Scott Walker fact checks in the governor’s race. We’ve already been down this road. And what Walker says at the pump goes too far. Previous fact check When Walkers claimed Evers will "raise property taxes, raise income taxes and raise gas taxes by as much as a dollar a gallon," our rating was Half True. The claim was more accurate on some taxes and less on others. All our Tammy Baldwin and Leah Vukmir fact checks in the U.S. Senate race. What we found regarding the gas tax: On Aug. 15, 2018, the day after Evers won the primary election, Walker said Evers might be willing to quadruple the state’s 32.9 cents-per-gallon state gas tax because Evers hadn't said how much he would be willing to increase it. Later that morning, a reporter asked Evers about Walker’s comment and whether he would raise the gas tax by $1. Evers responded more generally by saying: "I would support looking at anything, whether it’s removing tax credits, whether it’s slimming down state government, whether it’s gas taxes. Everything is on the table." But by the afternoon, Evers said Walker was lying about his views on the gas tax. "The only thing I ever said about that," Evers declared, "is that every possible revenue source is on the table." Evers has also said, in speaking about road funding, he "has no range" in terms of how high of an increase in the gas tax he would consider. And he has said that a $1 increase is "ridiculous." So, saying Evers will raise gas taxes by up to $1 per gallon, when he has only said he would consider raising the tax some amount, goes too far. And when we asked Walker’s campaign to back Walker’s gas-pump statement, the campaign didn’t cite anything new Evers has said since our earlier fact check. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter: @PolitiFactWisc. Our rating Walker says Evers will "raise the gas tax by as much as a dollar a gallon." Evers has said he is open to raising the tax, which is now 32.9 cents per gallon, but the $1 figure comes from Walker. While Evers has said he "has no range" of how large an increase he would consider, he has called a $1 increase "ridiculous." For a statement that has an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, our rating is Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2018-10-24T19:33:04	2018-10-09	['None']
-pomt-05566	Says Barack Obama has played over 90 rounds of golf as president.	true	/texas/statements/2012/apr/04/david-dewhurst/david-dewhurst-says-barack-obama-has-played-over-9/	David Dewhurst, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate, looks past other hopefuls from his party in an online video contrasting the state of the U.S. economy and -- fore! -- Barack Obama’s enjoyment of golf. The video from the Texas lieutenant governor shows Obama golfing or riding a golf cart along with snippets of others speaking about the nation’s economic troubles. The advertisement’s money moment, though, lies in these claims that appear in red letters next to video of Obama, in shorts, golfing: "6.4 million more Americans living in poverty under President Obama" and "over 90 rounds of golf." We’re separately analyzing Dewhurst’s charge about American poverty. But is he right that Obama has played over 90 rounds of golf, meaning as many as 1,620 holes? Many presidents have played golf, including 15 of the 18 presidents before Obama, according to a January 2009 Golf Digest article,The magazine ranked John F. Kennedy as the best previous presidential golfer, and his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, as second-best; Eisenhower, the article says, had a putting green outside the Oval Office. As Dewhurst’s backup for the Obama claim, his campaign pointed us to a January 2012 Washington Post blog post noting that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had bemoaned Obama’s "90 rounds" at the Jan. 23, 2012, GOP presidential debate in Tampa. According to the debate transcript, Romney said: "We have to have a president who understands how to get an economy going again. He does not. He plays 90 rounds of golf when you have 25 million people out of work." He later brought up the 90 rounds again at a Michigan campaign event, according to a Feb. 14, 2012, article in the Detroit News. Dewhurst spokesman Matt Hirsch also offered as backup a Dec. 27, 2011, blog post by Tina Korbe on the Hot Air website, which describes itself as "the leading conservative blog for breaking news and commentary covering the Republican primary, the 2012 election, politics, media, and culture." Korbe’s post states, in part: "Not only did Barack Obama golf on Christmas day, but he hit the links yesterday, too — and that round marked the 90th of his presidency." Korbe’s post linked to a Dec. 26, 2011, blog post by White House correspondent Keith Koffler, whose website is WhiteHouseDossier.com. Koffler’s post said: "After an hour of hiking, President Obama Monday got down to the serious business at hand, heading out to golf for the second day in his first three days of vacation. He was back on the course at Marine Corps Base Hawaii. With this one, Obama reaches a new milestone, having gone golfing 90 times in less than three years as president." His summary also says that this was "the 32nd time he’s been on the links this year, a record for the president. His 32 outings eclipses the 2010 mark of 30 and is far ahead of his 2009 tally of 28 rounds as president." By email, we asked Koffler about those figures. He replied that as of April 4, 2012, the president had taken in 93 golf outings, counting one in 2012 and 34 in 2011. We wondered how the frequency of Obama’s golf outings compared to such expeditions by other presidents. Koffler replied: "I don't have a comparison to other presidents, though (George W.) Bush stopped in 2003." Bush said in a May 2008 interview with Politico and Yahoo News that he decided to forgo golf after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights. "I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life," Bush said, according to Politico. "I was playing golf — I think I was in Central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it any more to do.’" We didn’t immediately hear back from the White House about how often Obama has gone golfing. Separately, CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller, who tracks each president’s activities, responded to our inquiry by pointing out that he said on Twitter April 2, 2012, that Obama had just played his first round of golf of the year, spending five hours on a course the day before. Knoller told us by email that the round was Obama’s 93rd as president. We rate Dewhurst’s claim as True.	None	David Dewhurst	None	None	None	2012-04-04T18:20:55	2012-04-04	['None']
-pose-01043	"Before taking office and with the cooperation of the outgoing mayor and city council, I will appoint community leaders who are well prepared to lead a thorough but expedited process."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/krise-o-meter/promise/1124/appoint-community-leaders-new-pier/	None	krise-o-meter	Rick Kriseman	None	None	Appoint community leaders for new pier	2013-12-31T12:13:20	None	['None']
-snes-01164	A televangelist disclaimed Donald Trump's alleged affair with a porn actress as "sharing the gospel."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jim-bakker-trump-porn-star/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did Jim Bakker Say ‘Trump Was Merely Sharing the Gospel with That Porn Star’?	21 January 2018	None	['None']
-snes-06362	E-mailed list features Dave Barry's "16 Things It Took Me Over 50+ Years to Learn."	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dave-barrys-16-things/	None	Humor	None	David Mikkelson	None	Dave Barry’s 16 Things	23 February 2007	None	['None']
-hoer-01100	Toyota 4Runner Facebook Giveaway	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/toyota-4runner-facebook-giveaway-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Toyota 4Runner Facebook Giveaway Scam	September 22, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-01907	Anonymous seized the domain of white supremacist site Daily Stormer and announced its imminent demise.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anonymous-daily-stormer/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Anonymous Bring Down The Daily Stormer?	14 August 2017	None	['None']
-pose-00557	Will "sponsor an annual event to bring national association meeting planners and Wisconsin businesses together. I will make this (Conference of Tourism) a key component of both my tourism and economic development agenda."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/walk-o-meter/promise/580/sponsor-annual-event-aimed-at-convention-and-meeti/	None	walk-o-meter	Scott Walker	None	None	Sponsor annual event aimed at convention and meeting planners	2010-12-20T23:16:36	None	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-00785	"We have towns in West Texas that are out of water, that are having to truck in water."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2015/apr/08/sid-miller/sid-miller-says-we-have-towns-west-texas-are-out-w/	At a March 2015 symposium on water in Texas, the state’s agriculture commissioner was asked about his agency’s actions in that realm. Sid Miller, a former legislator who took office in January 2015, replied that just that week he’d signed off on water wells being drilled in two West Texas communities with less than 180-day water supplies. Miller, a Republican, continued: "We have towns in West Texas that are out of water, that are having to truck in water." We were familiar with occasional past shortages. But is that happening again? When we requested Miller’s backup information, Agriculture Department spokesman Bryan Black sent us web links to news reports. One was a January 2012 NPR news report on Spicewood Beach, a Burnet County town northwest of Austin, having to truck in water. Then again, conditions there were expected to rebound, according to a June 2013 Austin American-Statesman news story, thanks to new water wells drilled near Lake Travis and a new water treatment plant. Black also pointed out a June 2013 Texas Tribune news story on the West Texas town of Barnhart, which was then out of water. To gauge Barnhart’s conditions of late, we reached John Nanny, an Irion County commissioner who serves on the board of the Barnhart Water Supply Corp. By phone, Nanny said drinking water last had to be trucked in during July and August 2014 — at quite a cost, he said. "We can’t afford to do that," he said, adding that a second well was dug, helping to shore up supplies to about 50 customers. Black didn’t specify communities that had no water when Miller, um, piped up. Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Next, we reached out to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. By email, spokesman Terry Clawson said that as of March 12, 2015, the agency wasn’t aware of any public water systems hauling in water. That said, Clawson wrote, the Berry Oaks Water Company in Comal County, between Austin and San Antonio, intermittently hauls water because of summer shortfalls. Clawson emailed us a chart indicating the water system is building a well and water plant, to be up and running, Clawson said, by mid-May 2015. Clawson said the chart represents the agency’s weekly updated High Priority Water System List, which reflects water-supply conditions self-reported to the commission — meaning it shouldn’t be read as all-inclusive. "There may be systems that have either not reported their status or are not aware of their conditions," Clawson said. In a follow-up note, Clawson specified 11 public water systems previously reported as having to haul (or truck) in drinking water due to persistent drought. He attached a chart describing each instance. In another email, Black mentioned most of the same systems. The commission chart listed five water systems located somewhere on the vast west side of Texas, specifically ones in Burnet County, northwest of Austin; Barnhart in Irion County, west of San Angelo; Medina County, west of San Antonio; Hood County, southwest of Fort Worth; and Tom Green County, whose county seat is San Angelo. Then again, in each event, according to the chart, the Texas Department of Agriculture or the water system itself funded improvements restoring supply. Our ruling Miller said: "We have towns in West Texas that are out of water." In recent years, towns around Texas occasionally ran dry until new wells or water plants met needs. But Miller named no towns out of water of late nor did we identify any. We rate the statement Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Sid Miller	None	None	None	2015-04-08T10:00:00	2015-03-10	['None']
-hoer-00591	Photos of Old Car Collection Found in Portugal Barn	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/barn-cars.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Photos of Old Car Collection Found in Portugal Barn	July 22, 2014	None	['None']
-pomt-05920	"Federal, state and local governments have subsidized the production of the Volt to the tune of estimates between $50,000 and $250,000 per vehicle sold."	half-true	/ohio/statements/2012/jan/31/jim-jordan/jim-jordan-says-subsidy-volt-averages-out-much-250/	Political charges were in the air at a Jan. 25, 2012, congressional hearing on the Chevrolet Volt chaired by Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, a staunch critic of the Obama administration’s intervention in the General Motors bankruptcy. Jordan, from Ohio’s Champaign County, said he called the hearing to explore whether the government’s involvement in General Motors swayed how the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration informed consumers about crash tests that caused fires in the hybrid electric vehicles’ batteries. At the hearing, his committee released a report titled: "Government Motors: A Preliminary Report on the Effects of Bailouts and Politics on the Obama Administration’s Ability to Protect American Consumers." He opened the hearing with a statement that outlined some of his beefs with the government’s role in GM, including tax subsidies to the Volt. "Total federal, state and local governments have subsidized the production of the Volt to the tune of estimates between $50,000 and $250,000 per vehicle sold," said Jordan. That number seemed shocking for a car with a low-end retail price of $31,645, so we asked Jordan’s office where it came from. His spokeswoman said his statement relied on a Dec. 21 study from Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy - which estimated that each of the 6,000 Volts sold up until that date has received between $50,000 and $250,000 in subsidies. Its analysis tallied up nearly $3 billion worth of state and federal assistance it said were offered for the Volt’s development and production. It cited 18 tax credits and government subsidies for General Motors and its suppliers - such as a $105.9 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to the General Motors plant in Brownstown Township southwest of Detroit, a $106 million state job retention credit for its Detroit-Hamtramck plant and up to $100 million in refundable battery credits for a Volt battery supplier called Compact Power. The biggest slice of that money - $1.5 billion - comes from a $7,500 tax credit that the IRS offered to the the first 200,000 buyers of the Volt, or other electric cars from GM. Similar credits are available to buyers of other manufacturers’ electric vehicles. When author James Hohman compiled his statistics, roughly 6,000 Volts had been sold. By the time Jordan held his hearing, GM said the vehicle’s sales were around 8,000. "GM has estimated they’ve sold 6,000 Volts so far," said Mackinac’s report on Hohman’s work. "That would mean each of the 6,000 Volts sold would be subsidized between $50,000 and $250,000, depending on how many government subsidy milestones are reached." The report said it didn’t include subsidies that could boost the level of government aid, such as the land for one of the GM assembly plants being acquired through eminent domain by General Motors. Hohman said the Volt "might be the most government-supported car since the Trabant," a car that was made by the formerly communist state of East Germany. Mackinac’s data was attacked immediately. An analysis in The Street on Dec. 22, 2011, criticized its methodology of dividing $1.5 billion in subsidies by the 6,000 cars sold to reach his $250,000 per vehicle number. The Street, a digital financial media company established in 1996, said the author would have reached a very different statistic if the study had been done at the end of 2012 - when GM projects it will have made 60,000 of the cars. It said that technology from the car will be used in roughly 60 million vehicles over the next in 25 years, which would make for a subsidy of roughly $25 per car. "The absurdity of the math used can be further shown by asking what the study would have yielded if it had been done six months ago or a year ago," said The Street. "Six months ago, 3,000 Volts had been sold and therefore the implied subsidy was $500,000 per car - half as many cars, twice the subsidy per car. One year ago, the first Volt was sold and therefore this one car must have cost $1.5 billion, according to the reasoning by the people who wrote the headlines around this study." General Motors spokesman Greg Martin said Mackinac’s study "is not even in the same area code as accurate." He said the study compiled "every conceivable" energy battery subsidy over the past several years, whether or not it had anything to do with the Volt, added it up and "came up with this outrageous $250,000 subsidy per Volt." For example, five of the tax credits and loans cited in Mackinac’s report, totaling more than $388 million - went to a battery maker called A123 that has nothing to do with the Volt, Martin said. He says it’s fair to question the wisdom of of subsidies and consumer incentives for vehicle purchases, but a serious debate "should not be clouded and distracted by fun and games with numbers." In an emailed response to questions about his study, Hohman said its high-end $250,000 estimate includes the A123 money that GM disputes "because, at the time the incentives were being awarded, both government policy makers and the company itself were unsure about the suppliers." "However, with the Volt in mind as the standard bearer for the idea of a mass produced American-made EV, it was unlikely that a lot of these deals would have been approved--or certainly approved at the levels offered -- without the Volt." Hohman’s email said. Although Hohman says a number of Volt-associated projects got local government assistance in addition to federal and state aid, he excluded those incentives from his calculations because they were inconsistently reported. Hohman said he felt that calculating the maximum amount of assistance offered to the Volt added valuable context to discussions about the vehicle. He said the federal and state entities that awarded incentives to the project "never got together to try to figure out just how much each car would receive." He said The Street was correct to assert that the per-vehicle subsidy he calculated would decrease as more vehicles are sold, but said that’s a "clear implication from how we describe the calculations." Ernest Goss, an economist at Nebraska’s Creighton University who is critical of tax incentives to large companies, said such incentives often lead to construction of projects that would not be built otherwise and may be mistakes. He said he believes the Chevrolet Volt "is very costly to the taxpayer and probably not worth the subsidy," but the scope of government subsidies can be difficult to gauge. "The question is, what subsidies do you count?" says Goss. "There is no doubt there have been significant subsidies going to GM, which is problematic, given that GM was bailed out and taxpayers still own a significant share of GM." So, where does that leave Jordan’s assertion? Jordan’s claim is partially accurate. He stated it as fact, relying on the study from the Mackinac Center. That study did estimate the Volt has received between $50,000 and $250,000 in aid per vehicle, although its tally did not include local government aid, as Jordan said. And his underlying point is true -- that there has been much subsidy directed toward development of the Volt. But the claim leaves out important details that are need to fully understand the truth. Mackinac’s numbers seem inexact and fluid and designed to make headlines at the expense of accuracy. They include money that went to a company that doesn’t supply the Volt. And the per-vehicle tally considers all aid awarded at a time when Volt sales are just beginning. That figure will fall dramatically -- a point the study’s author concedes -- as more Volts and cars that use its technology are sold, with one analysis citing a figure of $25 per car if projected out over the next 25 years. On the Truth-O-Meter, Jordan’s claim rates Half True.	None	Jim Jordan	None	None	None	2012-01-31T06:00:00	2012-01-25	['None']
-pomt-14106	Says Hillary Clinton "wants to abolish the Second Amendment."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may/11/donald-trump/donald-trump-falsely-claims-hillary-clinton-wants-/	Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of coming after your guns and your right to them. "Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment," Trump said May 7 at a rally in Washington. "Hillary Clinton wants to take your guns away, and she wants to abolish the Second Amendment." We asked the Trump campaign for evidence for this claim, but they didn’t get back to us. The Clinton campaign vehemently denied it. "Of course Hillary Clinton does not want to repeal the Second Amendment," Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin said. We found no evidence that Clinton has ever advocated for repealing or abolishing the Second Amendment. Schwerin’s comments are largely consistent with what Clinton has said in the past few years about the right to bear arms. However, gun rights advocates argue that it’s reasonable to infer from a few of Clinton’s comments that she wants to roll back the Second Amendment as it’s currently interpreted. Straight shooting on the campaign trail In both her 2008 and 2016 White House bids, Clinton has called for stronger background check requirements all the while affirming her support for the right to bear arms. Clinton does want to keep guns out of the hands of "people we all agree shouldn't have them — domestic abusers, violent felons, and dangerously mentally ill people," said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Violence. But Trump’s charge exaggerates the controls she wants to put in place and ignores what she has said on the record. "I believe in the Second Amendment. People have a right to bear arms. But I also believe that we can common-sensically approach this," she said in a January 2008 Democratic presidential debate. In response to the on-air murders of a news crew in Virginia in August 2015, she said, "We are smart enough, compassionate enough to balance legitimate Second Amendment rights concerns with preventive measures and control measures, so whatever motivated this murderer ... we will not see more needless, senseless deaths." More recently, she tweeted in April 2016, "We can protect our Second Amendment rights AND take commonsense steps to prevent gun violence. It’s just a question of whether we choose to." Setting aside the bulk of Clinton’s comments on protecting the Second Amendment (examples here, here, here, here, here and here), we’ll now go over two points that some gun rights advocates and experts say gives Trump’s charge some credence. Two smoking guns? Clinton riled the gun lobby with two eyebrow-raising comments last fall. Clinton said in October 2015 that a national gun buyback program like Australia’s compulsory program was "worth looking into." After a gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996, Australia banned semiautomatic and automatic weapons and enacted a mandatory buyback of the newly prohibited guns. That program is "incompatible with private ownership of guns," said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dave Kopel, a pro-gun rights attorney and research director of the conservative Independence Institute in Denver, equates her musing about Australia’s program as "wanting to abolish the Second Amendment." (The NRA shares this view.) The full context of Clinton’s response, however, suggests she may have misspoken or not fully understood Australia’s program, as she also evoked voluntary buybacks as potential models for a U.S. program. "Communities have done that in our country. Several communities have done gun buyback programs. But I think it would be worth considering on the national level if that could be arranged," she said, before comparing the buybacks to Cash for Clunkers, the Obama administration’s voluntary vehicle trade-in program. Second, Clinton said she disagrees with the the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller. In a 5-4 decision, the Court struck down Washington’s handgun ban and recognized that the Second Amendment applies to the individual’s right to bear arms. "The Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment," she said in a leaked recording of a private fundraiser. Volokh called the comment "a smoking gun" that bolsters Trump’s charge. Reversing Heller, said Kopel, would be a huge blow to the individual right to bear arms They both pointed out that former Justice Department officials under President Bill Clinton and his appointees Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued in Heller that gun regulations do not violate the Second Amendment because it primarily pertains to a well-regulated militia and not the individual right to bear arms. Put both comments together, and Trump is correct, said NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter. UCLA Second Amendment expert Adam Winkler, meanwhile, said that the accuracy of Trump’s charge depends on Clinton’s grounds for rejecting Heller. (According to news reports from the 2008 election, she supported Washington’s handgun ban.) "If she thought the reasoning was wrong, but the result right, then she would fit in with a number of strong pro-gun advocates," he said. "If, however, she thought there should be no protection for gun rights, then Trump's claim comes closer to the truth." The Clinton campaign told us Clinton "believes Heller was wrongly decided in that cities and states should have the power to craft common sense laws to keep their residents safe." This suggests Clinton disagrees with the court declaring the district’s ban on handguns unconstitutional, not necessarily the individual right itself — a position that’s more or less in line with the George W. Bush administration’s position on Heller of recognizing the right but allowing reasonable curtailment. Our ruling Trump said, "Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment." We found no evidence of Clinton ever saying verbatim or suggesting explicitly that she wants to abolish the Second Amendment, and the bulk of Clinton’s comments suggest the opposite. She has repeatedly said she wants to protect the right to bear arms while enacting measures to prevent gun violence. Gun advocates say Trump’s claim is backed up by Clinton’s openness to a gun buyback program and her disagreement with a Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment. But whether or not these two cherry-picked comments actually reveal Clinton’s intentions is a matter of interpretation. For this claim to hold water, the support for Second Amendment abolition needs to be more direct. So we rate it False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/132d21e9-e2e0-4082-b319-0d67d30341e8	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-05-11T16:45:56	2016-05-07	['None']
-goop-01429	Brad Pitt Obsessed With Margot Robbie?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-margot-robbie-movie-obsessed/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Brad Pitt Obsessed With Margot Robbie?	6:07 pm, March 7, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-06428	Text transcribes a press conference given by actor and former Marine R. Lee Ermey.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ermey-press-conference/	None	Soapbox	None	David Mikkelson	None	R. Lee Ermey Press Conference	25 July 2005	None	['None']
-pomt-00330	"Myrtle Beach man who shot at Hurricane Florence dies after bullet ricochets." ​	pants on fire!	/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/sep/19/blog-posting/no-one-died-shooting-hurricane-florence/	More than 34,000 people marked themselves as "going" to a Facebook event called "Shooting guns at Hurricane Florence to scare it away." The description of the Facebook event includes a disclaimer: "Do not actually discharge firearms into the air. You could kill someone and you cannot frighten a hurricane. I cant believe I actually have to write this." However, one website pointed to the event and claimed it led to tragedy when a "Myrtle Beach man" did just that: shot a gun at a hurricane. "The 33-year old is believed to have fired a large calibre (sic) weapon earlier this afternoon; however, the bullet ricocheted and ended up entering the man’s head," the post said. "It’s believed he died instantly." This story was made up. It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) Partway through the story, the "Myrtle Beach man" is identified as a man from Florence, which is the name of the hurricane as well as a South Carolina city further inland. Myrtle Beach’s local newspaper, Myrtle Beach Online, contacted police departments in both Florence and Myrtle Beach, and neither was aware of such an incident. "I have not heard a a single call in any way, shape or form about anything like that," a police corporal in Myrtle Beach told the newspaper. "The only thing I’ve heard about that was a satirical group on Facebook," Florence Police Department Lt. Mike Brandt told PolitiFact. "There were no reports of shooting at the hurricane in the city limits of Florence." The story was published on CGC News, a blog that was created Sept. 9, 2018 according to whois.com, which tracks website domains. No credible news outlets covering the storm have picked up this story. This isn’t the first time Facebookers have somewhat jokingly declared they’d shoot at an incoming storm. The joke Facebook event is similar to one that popped up last year: "Shoot At Hurricane Irma." The creator was a bored 22-year-old who said at the time that the joke became "something a little out of my control" after more than 43,000 people RSVPed. While the Facebook event "Shooting guns at Hurricane Florence to scare it away" has generated its fair share of interested attendees, there is no credible evidence that anyone died trying to square off against the hurricane. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-09-19T14:33:23	2018-09-13	['Myrtle_Beach,_South_Carolina']
-snes-00120	Do Nike Factory Workers in Vietnam Earn 20 Cents Per Hour?	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nike-workers-pay-kaepernick/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Do Nike Factory Workers in Vietnam Earn 20 Cents Per Hour?	7 September 2018	None	['None']
-snes-00198	Two police officers cooked a meal and washed the dishes for a group of children after their mother was taken to the hospital.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/officers-cook-dinner-children/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Two Police Officers Cook Dinner for Children After Their Mother Was Taken to the Hospital?	20 August 2018	None	['None']
-tron-02278	Savannah Foraker-forward emails to help with her medical costs	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/antoniaforaker/	None	medical	None	None	None	Savannah Foraker-forward emails to help with her medical costs	Mar 16, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01173	Jimmy Fallon “Caught” Drinking At Baseball Game, 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/jimmy-fallon-drinking-beer-baseball-game-alcohol-problem-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jimmy Fallon NOT “Caught” Drinking At Baseball Game, Despite Sensationalized Claim	12:12 pm, April 17, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01037	Jennifer Lawrence Wants To Date David O. Russell?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-lawrence-david-o-russell-dating-romance-false/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Lawrence Wants To Date David O. Russell?	10:53 am, May 8, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01757	"The House of Representatives has never sued a sitting president in all of U.S. history."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jul/31/nancy-pelosi/nancy-pelosi-says-us-house-has-never-sued-sitting-/	The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to sue President Barack Obama for allegedly overstepping the powers of his office. While the suit raises thorny legal questions about the limits of presidential power, it’s also being used by both sides to fire up their base in advance of the midterm elections. The suit, spearheaded by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was approved largely along party lines. Democrats argued that it’s an example of the Republican majority playing politics rather than tackling urgent policy issues, such as immigration. Indeed, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., used the looming vote to approve the suit in a recent fundraising pitch, as reported by NBC News. "Boehner is planning a vote to sue the president," Pelosi wrote. "The House of Representatives has never sued a sitting president in all of U.S. history. And if they do it, impeachment may very well be the next step." We wondered whether Pelosi is correct that "the House of Representatives has never sued a sitting president in all of U.S. history." We found that she’s right the House as a whole has never sued the president. However, we think it’s worth noting that individual lawmakers and groups of lawmakers have sued the president in the past -- frequently. In fact, we found at least 14 instances in the last four decades alone. This doesn’t make Pelosi’s carefully worded claim inaccurate, but it's worth adding important context. We should note that these challenges to presidential authority generally failed, particularly challenges over whether Congress or the president has the right to initiate military action. Often, the suits’ Achilles heel was the courts’ determination that the lawmakers lacked the "standing" -- basically, a demonstrable injury -- to file such a suit. This succession of negative rulings for Congress has presented the plaintiffs against Obama with an uphill legal climb, analysts say. Here’s a rundown of the 14 lawsuits we found: • Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities vs. Nixon (1974). This was one of the Watergate-era cases involving what evidence President Richard Nixon had to turn over to investigators that heightened the pressure on Nixon to resign. • Drummond vs. Bunker (1977). William R. Drummond, a citizen of the Panama Canal Zone, sued President Jimmy Carter to stop his administration from negotiating about handing over the then-U.S.-held canal zone to Panama, arguing that only Congress possessed that right. Six members of Congress intervened in the case alongside Drummond, arguing that the executive branch was depriving them of their constitutionally protected vote. • Goldwater vs. Carter (1979). Several lawmakers, led by Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., sued Carter, arguing that the president had bypassed Congress by ending a defense pact with Taiwan. • Crockett vs. Reagan (1982). Sixteen senators and 13 House members asked a federal court to rule that the dispatching of several dozen U.S. military personnel to El Salvador by President Ronald Reagan contradicted Congress’s war powers and the Foreign Assistance Act. • Sanchez-Espinoza vs. Reagan (1983). Twelve House members joined with 12 Nicaraguan citizens and two American citizens seeking damages and a declaration that Reagan had violated war powers restrictions by pursuing the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. • Conyers vs. Reagan (1984). Eleven House members sued Reagan, arguing that his use of military force in Grenada had usurped Congress’s war powers. • Lowry vs. Reagan (1987). Ten House members sued Reagan on war powers grounds, this time over the president’s approval of escort operations for reflagged Kuwaiti tankers in the Persian Gulf. • Dellums vs. Bush (1990). One senator and 53 House members sued President George H.W. Bush to stop him from attacking Iraq without approval from Congress during the run-up to what became the Persian Gulf War. • Raines vs. Byrd (1997). Six members of Congress who had voted against giving the president the authority to veto individual items in bills -- rather than just entire bills -- sued over the act’s constitutionality. • Chenoweth vs. Clinton (1999). Four House members sued President Bill Clinton over his creation by executive order of the American Heritage Rivers Initiative, saying it exceeded his authority as president. • Campbell vs. Clinton (2000). Thirty-one members of Congress sued Clinton on war powers grounds for his decision to send military forces to participate in a NATO-organized campaign of airstrikes in the former Yugoslavia. • Kucinich vs. Bush (2002). Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, sued President George W. Bush over the administration’s unilateral withdrawal from an anti-ballistic missile treaty, arguing that the executive branch could not do that without Congress’ consent. • Doe vs. Bush (2003). Twelve House members joined with several dozen servicemembers and their families to sue Bush on war-powers grounds, seeking to stop a United States-led invasion of Iraq. • Kucinich vs. Obama (2011). Kucinich also sued Bush’s successor, Obama, on war-powers grounds, saying that his intervention in Libya was unconstitutional. Drew Hammill, a spokesman Pelosi, said her statement is "accurate" because "she is clearly referring to the ‘House of Representatives,’ not individual members of Congress." Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed that Pelosi has some justification for singling out a lawsuit by the whole House. Having a majority of the House on board "suggests the grievance may be more legitimate," Roosevelt said, though he added that this scenario also "suggests that the House should be able to use the powers the Constitution gives it -- our familiar system of checks and balances -- rather than trying to enlist the judiciary in a political struggle." Still, while Pelosi’s claim is literally accurate, legal observers suggested that her careful wording selectively downplays a long history of clashes between the two branches of government. Elizabeth Slattery, a legal fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, agreed, saying that Pelosi’s statement is "technically accurate," but "misleading" "Typically, suits are brought against other executive branch officials, rather than the president directly," she said. Stan Brand, a veteran Washington attorney who served as general counsel to the U.S. House under the late Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, D-Mass., said, "It may be that the House as an institution has never sued a president, but undoubtedly there have been cases where challenges to presidential actions have occurred. I am not impressed by the claim that this is the first such suit, because it elevates form over substance. The much more interesting issues for me are the jurisprudential separation-of-powers implications of such litigation." Our ruling Pelosi said "the House of Representatives has never sued a sitting president in all of U.S. history." We did find a long record of skirmishing between the legislative and executive branches over the limits of each branch’s power, including at least 14 suits over the past four decades filed by individual lawmakers or groups of lawmakers. But Pelosi said "the House of Representatives," and in her narrowly crafted claim, she’s right. We rate her statement True.	None	Nancy Pelosi	None	None	None	2014-07-31T11:34:58	2014-07-29	['United_States']
-pose-00521	Will "require increased transparency and accountability by requiring annual audits of our fish and wildlife accounts to ensure that we are prioritizing expenditures an getting maximum value for our sportsmen and women."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/walk-o-meter/promise/542/require-annual-audits-of-fish-and-wildlife-account/	None	walk-o-meter	Scott Walker	None	None	Require annual audits of fish and wildlife accounts	2010-12-20T23:16:36	None	['None']
-snes-00226	Does This Video Show Six Antifa Members Beating Up a Person During an August 2018 Rally?	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/six-antifa-beatup-video/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Does This Video Show Six Antifa Members Beating Up a Person During an August 2018 Rally?	13 August 2018	None	['None']
-snes-04485	Actor Nicolas Cage died in a motorcycle accident in July 2016.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nicolas-cage-death-hoax/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Nicolas Cage Death Hoax	10 July 2016	None	['Nicolas_Cage']
-snes-00472	A viral photograph posted in June 2018 shows "the whole of London" protesting on the streets in defense of jailed far-right activist Tommy Robinson.	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tommy-robinson-protest-photo/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did ‘the Whole of London’ Protest in Support of Far-Right Activist Tommy Robinson?	12 June 2018	None	['London']
-pomt-07308	"You can't give a child an aspirin in school without permission. You can't do any kind of medication, but we can secretly take the child off and have an abortion."	true	/florida/statements/2011/may/17/steve-oelrich/state-senator-claims-school-nurses-cant-give-aspir/	In a show of Republican muscle, Florida lawmakers passed several bills relating to abortion during this year’s legislative session. One proposal awaiting the signature of Gov. Rick Scott requires young women who want a judge to waive the parental-notification requirement to obtain the waiver in a circuit court closer to their home rather than a wider-reaching appeals court. Opponents insist HB 1247 violates the privacy of young women who live in small communities and know most people in their area, including people who work at the courthouse. But supporters say it prevents teens from crossing the state to find a sympathetic judge in order to get an abortion without their parents’ knowledge. Sen. Steve Oelrich, a Republican from Gainesville and cosponsor of the Senate version, had an interesting take during a May 5, 2011, debate on the Senate floor. "You can’t give a child an aspirin in school without permission," he said. "You can’t do any kind of medication, but we can secretly take the child off and have an abortion. We should support it (HB 1247) with all our hearts and souls if parental responsibility means anything to us." Oelrich’s claim left us wondering: Is it really that hard for students to get over-the-counter medication at school? We should explain that we're not ruling on Oelrich's statement that young women can "secretly" have abortions. We already know this is legal in certain cases under Florida law. Implementation of HB 1247 would limit which courts can make the decisions for women who seek waivers of the parental notification law, not strip their ability to have secret procedures. Florida law The Florida Statutes have straightforward directions for handling prescription medication at school. The law requires a student’s parent to submit a written statement with the medicine that permits a trained school official to administer a dose. The note must also explain why the medicine must be taken during the school day. The prescription medicine must be administered at school by a qualified official and then be counted, stored in the original container, and kept in a secured place. Beyond that, the law does not address the use of over-the-counter medication. The statutes leave that decision up to local school districts. We set out to check each one to learn if Oelrich's claim is true. We tracked down policies for 62 of 67 counties. Most were available online. It took time to be sure, but Oelrich is right. Every district requires parental consent for non-prescription medication, sometimes in writing and sometimes by phone. Notifying a parent is the minimum step for many other districts, including Charlotte, Baker and Miami-Dade. These districts require a physician's note, too. "We don’t administer anything in Charlotte County without doctors' orders," said Gail Buck, supervisor of the county’s school health services. "No cough drops, no Tylenol." Aspirin warnings There's another part to this claim: Oelrich specifically invoked aspirin on the Senate floor. Some of the school nurses we interviewed practically shuddered at the word. The reason? Aspirin use among children is linked to the development of Reye's Syndrome, a lethal disease that sets in after a viral infection and affects all organs of the body, according to the National Reye's Syndrome Foundation. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are among entities that recommend not using aspirin, or combination medicine containing aspirin, for children under 19 during fever-causing illnesses. "We stay away from all aspirin products and stuff," said Catherine Reckenwald, student health specialist for Citrus County Schools. "You don’t know if a child has an allergy, so you need to have very specific instructions for each student." Reckenwald said Tylenol is more appropriate for children, but she does not keep a supply in her clinic. This is standard practice at most of the school health centers we contacted. "We do not have what is called 'standing orders,' " said Janice Karst, St. Lucie County School Board director of communications. In case you were wondering, students are allowed to self-administer epinephrine auto-injectors, metered dose inhalers, pancreatic enzyme supplements and diabetic supplies if they have a doctor's note and parental consent. Our ruling The thrust of Oelrich's point is correct: You can’t give a child an aspirin in school without permission. To administer any non-prescription medication, school officials must have approval from the parent. And in some cases, the schools also need a note from a doctor -- even for cough drops. While Oelrich is right about the permission part, he specifically mentioned aspirin so we should add that giving aspirin to children is considered risky because of the medicine's connection to a deadly disease. But that wasn't exactly Oelrich's point in a debate over abortion and a minor's right to privacy. We rate his claim True.	None	Steve Oelrich	None	None	None	2011-05-17T13:31:58	2011-05-17	['None']
-vogo-00038	Statement: “Do you know what we’re No. 1 at? We’re No. 1 in America in poverty. Twenty-four percent of Californians – you take the low income and the high cost of living – 24 percent of Californians today are living in poverty,” GOP gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari said at Voice of San Diego’s Politifest on Aug. 9.	determination: mostly true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-kashkaris-big-claims-about-californias-poverty/	Analysis: When Neel Kashkari joined us on the Politifest stage, he was eager to point out problems facing California and how he’d fix them if elected governor. At the top of his list: lack of quality education and not enough good jobs.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Kashkari's Big Claims About California's Poverty	August 20, 2014	None	['United_States', 'California', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Neel_Kashkari']
-snes-01223	Harry Potter' Show Coming to Netflix?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harry-potter-show-coming-to-netflix/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan Evon	None	‘Harry Potter’ Show Coming to Netflix?	11 January 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-11445	Says the U.S. steel and aluminum industry is "a fraction of what it once was."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/13/donald-trump/donald-trump-right-aluminum-steel-industries-have-/	President Donald Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum, a move that Trump argued would protect an American metals industry beleaguered by foreign imports. "We’re doing tariffs on steel. We cannot lose our steel industry. It’s a fraction of what it once was. And we can’t lose our aluminum industry. Also a fraction of what it once was," Trump said March 6, two days before the tariffs were officially signed. We decided to take a closer look at how these industries have fared over time. Lower employment numbers Trump is correct that employment numbers for metals have fallen sharply. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Steel and aluminum employment is significantly lower today than decades past. According to an analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. steel employment peaked around 650,000 jobs in the 1950s, compared to around 140,000 today. An analysis by Bloomberg shows some 50,000 aluminum production jobs have disappeared since 1990, a roughly 46 percent reduction. As of December 2017, there were roughly 59,000 aluminum production jobs, according to Bloomberg. Experts cited a number of reasons why the metals industry has shed jobs, from improved factory logistics to the diminished power of unions to protect even unproductive workers. But the consensus view is that the biggest cause has been technological advances. "In terms of employment, the big story is automation across the board," said Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which generally supports free trade. So how many of these jobs were squeezed out by foreign imports? J. Bradford Jensen, a professor of international business at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told us that "imports did have something to do with the loss of employment in steel and aluminum, but the more important factor is technological change and productivity growth." "Tariffs won't change that, much like relaxing regulations on coal and pollution will not bring back many coal-mining jobs," he said. In short, compared with decades past, the U.S. metals industry can now do more with less. "If you want to know why the steel industry employs so fewer workers than in decades past, there is the answer," wrote Daniel Griswold, a senior researcher at the free-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University. So Trump is correct that employment levels in the the metal industry are a fraction of what they once were, though it’s worth noting experts tended to attribute this more to automation than foreign imports. Steel output Evaluating Trump’s statement is trickier when it comes to steel and aluminum production. The United States produced about 82 million tons of raw steel in 2017, according to a U.S. Geological Survey estimate. As the chart below shows, that’s well below the peak 137 million tons of steel produced in 1973. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Steel production was certainly higher during the 1960s and 1970s. However, other than these two decades, U.S. steel output has occupied a fairly narrow band in the post-war era, and current output levels far exceed production levels from before 1940. Experts we spoke to said it’s important to look at these numbers in context. Looking only at metric tons of production would not reflect improvements in product quality, for example, or declines in demand. Some noted that the primary metals industries now make up a smaller share of the modern economy than they did in the past. Aluminum output Aluminum is also a bit tricky because there are multiple ways to measure production. One method, known as primary production, involves producing aluminum from raw materials. U.S. primary production of aluminum rose steadily from the post-war era until around 1980, when it began a steady decline. That same period saw increased use of the secondary production, a manner of making aluminum from recycled scrap. Secondary production increased from 22 percent of aluminum production in 1980, to 64 percent of domestic production in 2016, according to the Commerce Department. Due to its robust aluminum recycling industry, the United States now leads the world in secondary aluminum production, according to the Commerce Department. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com "The recycling part is interesting in that it makes the point of declining need to worry about imports," said Michael J. Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University. "Use of aluminum is rising, but we aren’t extracting as much from the ground as we used to, in part because almost all the nation now recycles metals." Our ruling Trump said the U.S. steel and aluminum industry is "a fraction of what it once was." Trump is correct that employment levels in the metal industry are a fraction of what they once were, though experts attribute this more to automation than foreign imports. Steel output is also not the highest it’s ever been, though experts said it’s important to consider steel production in a broader context that includes improvements to steel as well as how output has responded to declining demand. While the amount of aluminum made from raw materials has declined since the early 1980s, the output of aluminum made from recycled materials has fairly steadily climbed since WWII, and the United States now leads the world in secondary aluminum production. We rate this Mostly True.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-03-13T15:07:09	2018-03-06	['United_States']
-hoer-00958	Yet Another Win a Ford Raptor	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/yet-another-win-a-ford-raptor-facebook-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Yet Another Win a Ford Raptor Facebook Scam	July 27, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-04117	Republican nominee Donald Trump called President Barack Obama a "lying n*****r" during a confrontation.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-called-president-obama-a-lying-nr/	None	Junk News	None	Bethania Palma	None	Donald Trump Called President Obama a ‘Lying N****r’?	1 September 2016	None	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Barack_Obama', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-06779	Virginia has made "no progress on jobs" since Bob McDonnell took office.	false	/virginia/statements/2011/aug/18/democratic-party-virginia/virginia-democratic-party-claims-bob-mcdonnell-has/	The Virginia Democratic Party has not let up on its criticism of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s jobs record. Their latest salvo is a web video attacking McDonnell’s performance. "Despite the governor’s slick photo-ops and self congratulatory press releases, the reality is we have made no progress on jobs since he took office," the Virginia Democratic Party said in an August 5 statement about the video. So the commonwealth’s jobs picture hasn’t brightened at all since McDonnell took over? We wanted to see if that was true. To back up that assertion, Democrats pointed to a statement from the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, a Richmond think tank that said Virginia had made "no real progress" on job creation since the end of the recession in June 2009. The think tank examines economic issues facing low and moderate income residents. The group’s president, Michael Cassidy, noted in a July 22 statement that Virginia had more than 3.6 million jobs back in June 2009 and had about the same amount in June 2011. But McDonnell didn’t take over as governor until the middle of January 2010. His first full month in office was February 2010 -- at which time the number of jobs was a bit lower. In February 2010, there were 3,595,600 jobs in the state, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In June 2011, the latest month for which figures were available, that had risen to 3,643,800. That means that since McDonnell has been governor, the state’s job rolls have increased by 48,200. The June 2011 employment numbers showed a drop of roughly 14,000 jobs from the previous month’s job figures, a fall-off that Cassidy noted had erased 23 percent of the jobs gained since February 2010. But even with that decline, there were still nearly 50,000 jobs gained overall since McDonnell took over. Democrats have used overall job counts to argue the employment situation has at least gotten somewhat better under President Barack Obama. In an August 5, 2011 news release, the Democratic National Committee noted that 2.4 million private sector jobs have been created over the past 17 months. The news release noted that the "pace of recovery isn’t fast enough, but 2.4 million families are now better able to make ends meet." Nationwide figures from the BLS show that from February 2010 to July 2011, private sector jobs rose 2.2 percent ending at 109.2 million. The total number of all jobs in the U.S. -- including government positions -- rose 1.5 percent during the same period ending at 131.2 million. Brian Coy, a spokesman for the Virginia Democratic Party, also pointed out that the percentage of the state’s working age population with a job is at the same point it was in February 2010. In February 2010, there were 3,891,279 people in Virginia who were employed, which was 64.3 percent of the state’s working age population of 6,049,306, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In June 2011, the number of people in Virginia with a job had grown to 3,951,327, but the size of the working age population also rose to 6,141,503. That meant the state still had the same 64.3 percent of its working age population employed. "If you define progress as putting a greater percentage of our population to work (which seems like a fair definition to me), we haven’t made progress since Bob McDonnell took office," Coy said in an e-mail. Terry Rephann, a regional economist with the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, said the percentage of people with jobs can stay constant even if there’s job creation in a state. A state like Virginia, for example, is a fairly typical southern state where the population is growing faster than in the northern states, he said. As a result, the number of people with jobs has to increase even faster to keep up with that relatively higher rate of population growth, Rephann said. Rephann said that the jobs environment in Virginia has improved a bit since the early part of last year. But Rephann also said that the number of jobs created since McDonnell took office isn’t very impressive. "Even 40,000 in a (state) economy of this size is not really enormous job growth," Rephann said. "But that’s the nature of the economic recovery that we’re in." Virginia’s unemployment rate was at a peak of 7.2 percent at the start of McDonnell’s term. The number has consistently declined, and it was 6 percent in June 2011. The commonwealth’s jobless rate is one third lower than the 9.1 percent national unemployment rate. Virginia is tied with Hawaii and Iowa for the eighth lowest statewide unemployment rate in the country. Virginia’s percentage of working age residents with a job also compares favorably on a national stage. Nationwide, 58.2 percent of the country’s working age population was employed as of June 2011. We’ll also point out, as we often do with these stories, that economists repeatedly tell us governors take too much credit and receive too much blame for short-term performance over their state economies. A governor’s ability to affect brief business cycles is limited, economists say. To sum up: The state Democratic party said there has been "no progress" on creating jobs since McDonnell took office. While the Dems are correct that the percentage of the state’s working age population with a job was the same in June 2011 as it was when McDonnell took office, there is no getting around the fact that the state added 48,200 jobs. Or that the unemployment rate has dropped during his term. That it contradicts the Democrats’ blanket assertion that there has been no progress. We rate the claim False.	None	Democratic Party of Virginia	None	None	None	2011-08-18T11:45:21	2011-08-05	['Bob_McDonnell']
-snes-04749	Retailers T.J. Maxx and Marshall's sell counterfeit salon products.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chi-products-tj-maxx-marshalls/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Fake CHI Products at T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s	17 May 2016	None	['None']
-goop-00763	Kardashians “Boycotting” Khloe’s Wedding To Tristan Thompson?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/kardashians-boycotting-khloe-tristan-thompson-wedding/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kardashians “Boycotting” Khloe’s Wedding To Tristan Thompson?	4:54 pm, June 23, 2018	None	['Boycott', 'Keeping_Up_with_the_Kardashians']
-tron-00642	Tom Hanks’ Father a Member of The Diamonds	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/tom-hanks-father-a-member-of-the-diamonds/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Tom Hanks’ Father a Member of The Diamonds	Feb 5, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-05161	Barack Obama has "provided guns to Mexican drug cartels."	half-true	/texas/statements/2012/jun/18/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-obama/	Addressing the Republican Party of Texas convention, Gov. Rick Perry said the country erred in 2008 by electing the wrong person as president. "Three and a half years, and nearly 100 rounds of golf into his presidency, Barack Obama has exploded the federal debt, passed a failed, budget-busting stimulus package, socialized health care, and provided guns to Mexican drug cartels," Perry said June 7, 2012. "Admit it, America -- 2008 was our national ‘oops’ moment!" We recently confirmed Obama had played nearly 100 rounds of golf as president. And PolitiFact reporters have previously explored claims about the debt, the success of the stimulus package and whether the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act amounts to socialized health care. Perry’s claim that Obama "provided guns to Mexican drug cartels" struck us as novel. Is it correct? Perry spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told us by email that Perry was referring to the botched federal gun trafficking investigation on the U.S.-Mexico border known as Fast and Furious in which federal agents lost track of hundreds of firearms they were letting flow into Mexico from Arizona as part of an effort to build cases against Mexican drug cartels. The multi-agency federal arms-trafficking investigation took place from late 2009 to early 2011 -- during Obama’s presidency -- under the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an agency of the Justice Department. In the operation, agents purposely allowed weapons to be illegally purchased and circulated on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, as the Los Angeles Times said in a Dec. 8, 2011, news story. Two of the weapons turned up after a U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed in southern Arizona, the paper said, though for a January 2012 fact check, we found no information supporting a claim that ballistics tests confirmed that the found weapons killed the agent. The Times said scores of other guns in the operation were reportedly used in violent crimes in Mexico, adding: "While the aim of Fast and Furious was to track weapons, instead it ended up significantly arming the Mexican drug cartels." And did Obama have a hand in the endeavor? We looked for indications. In a March 22, 2011, interview with Univision, posted online by CBS News, Obama said neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder authorized Fast and Furious and pointed out that the operation was under internal investigation. "We don’t have all the facts," Obama said. Asked if he was informed about the operation, Obama replied: "Absolutely not. This is a pretty big government, the United States government. I’ve got a lot of moving parts." He added: "Our policy is to ramp up the interdiction" or capture "of guns flowing south, because that’s contributing to some of the security problems that are taking place in Mexico." In an interview the same day with CNN Español and an October 2011 interview with ABC News, Obama said he learned of Fast and Furious from news reports. He further said to CNN: "We have to make sure that we are interdicting the flow of guns and cash to the south. It's not enough just to interdict drugs flowing north. And so, we've actually initiated a whole range of measures to make sure that we're reducing that southbound flow." Noting that Holder had launched the internal investigation into Fast and Furious, Obama told ABC "it is not acceptable for us to allow guns to go into Mexico... So it's very upsetting to me to think that somebody showed such bad judgment that they would allow something like that to happen and we will find out who and what happened in this situation and make sure it gets corrected." We looked for other signs of Obama’s role in the operation, finding nothing to contradict his accounts. In 2011, staff to the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, issued two Fast and Furious reports. The June 14, 2011, report covers Fast and Furious accounts of ATF agents. The July 26, 2011, report explores the impact of Fast and Furious on Mexico. The reports do not gauge Obama’s involvement. A January 2012 report by House Democrats says the strategy of permitting illegal guns to flow to cartels in Mexico in hopes of building cases against vital figures originated with federal law officers in Arizona in 2006, which was when George W. Bush was president. "Unfortunately, this strategy failed to include sufficient operational controls to stop these dangerous weapons from getting into the hands of violent criminals, creating a danger to public safety on both sides of the border," Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, told colleagues in a Jan. 30, 2012, letter summarizing the report. His letter says Fast and Furious was the fourth federal operation since 2006 in which gun-walking occurred. Finally, we reached the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who has been critical of Fast and Furious. Grassley spokeswoman Jill Gerber provided a partially redacted document that appears to be a Jan. 8, 2010, briefing paper on Fast and Furious originated by federal authorities based in Arizona. Its bullet point No. 13 opens: "Currently our strategy is to allow the transfer of firearms to continue to take place, albeit at a much slower pace, in order to further the investigation and allow for the identification of additional co-conspirators who would continue to operate and illegally traffic" firearms to Mexican drug trafficking organizations "perpetrating armed violence along the Southwest Border." Informed of Perry’s statement, Gerber said by email: "It’s more accurate and complete to say the ‘Obama administration’ provided guns to Mexican drug cartels rather than" to "say President Obama himself did so." Our ruling Fast and Furious, intended to send guns to Mexican drug cartels toward building cases against key figures, took place on Obama’s watch. However, unlike the other results bemoaned by Perry at the convention -- growth in the federal debt and the passage of Obamacare and the stimulus -- we see no indication Obama had an influential role in the border operation. That is, there is no sign that Obama either initiated or approved the deliberate flow of guns to cartels. We rate Perry's claim as Half True.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2012-06-18T15:10:31	2012-06-07	['Mexico']
-pomt-04685	Says Charlie Crist "was pro-life, pro-gun and vehemently anti-tax."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2012/sep/06/george-lemieux/charlie-crist-was-pro-life-pro-gun-and-anti-tax-sa/	After former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist endorsed President Barack Obama and secured a speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention, Republicans pulled out the Crist files to highlight how much the Republican-turned-independent Crist had changed in just four years. George LeMieux, a Republican and a former Crist chief of staff, wrote a biting op-ed about Crist’s former stances. "He never met a tax increase he liked. ... The Charlie Crist I knew idolized Ronald Reagan and embraced Reagan's view of limited government. He was pro-life, pro-gun and vehemently anti-tax. He believed big government was the enemy of success, and that when government taxed it took ‘your money.’" In this fact-check we will explore whether Crist was "pro-life, pro-gun and vehemently anti-tax." First, we will note what Crist said of himself in February 2010: "I am pro-life, I’m pro-gun, I’m pro-family and I’m anti-tax. And I always have been." He made those claims at a Christian Family Coalition breakfast while running for U.S. Senate as a Republican. He would ditch the GOP label for no-party about two months later as he was struggling in his primary bid against Marco Rubio. "Pro-life" Crist’s stance on abortion over his political career is too complex to boil down to a sound bite -- even if Crist tried to do that himself at times. When he was running for the U.S. Senate in 1998, Crist said in a questionnaire for the Tampa Bay Times that he was pro-choice, but not pro-abortion. "I believe that a woman has the right to choose, but would prefer only after careful consideration and consultation with her family, her physician and her clergy; not her government," he said. Crist said in a debate during that campaign that he would not support a constitutional ban on abortion. In 2006, when he was running for governor, Crist said he was pro-life. But he would not support repealing Roe vs. Wade and opposed a 24-hour waiting period. "I don't think that politicians ought to put themselves in the place of physicians, and I think it's very important to respect the medical profession," said Crist, whose father is a doctor. In 2010, as a Republican U.S. Senate candidate, Crist said he would "fight for pro-life legislative efforts." But later in 2010, after leaving the Republican Party, Crist vetoed a bill that would have required women seeking abortions to get an ultrasound. He said he found the requirement that women pay for the procedure "punitive" and that the measure was "almost mean spirited." "Pro-gun" When Crist was running for U.S. Senate in 2010, we reviewed a claim that he "never wavered in his support of the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms." We ruled that claim True and will briefly review what we found for that article. In one of his first high-profile gun battles, then-state senator Crist blasted Gov. Lawton Chiles' last-minute effort to require criminal background checks and a waiting period for purchases made at gun shows in 1998. The legislation proposal died. As attorney general, Crist nominated Marion P. Hammer, former president of the National Rifle Association, to the Florida Women's Hall of Fame, and she was inducted in 2004. Hammer is also the longtime president of the state’s NRA affiliate Unified Sportsmen of Florida. In his 2006 primary against Republican rival Tom Gallagher, Crist ran an ad calling Gallagher "anti-gun" and highlighting Crist’s endorsement from the NRA. As governor, Crist signed into law legislation that allowed 500,000 concealed weapons permit-holders to bring their guns to work as long as the weapons remained in their vehicles. "Anti-tax" To examine Crist’s actions about taxes, we reviewed multiple reports from Florida TaxWatch and newspaper articles. We also interviewed staff at Florida TaxWatch as well as Amy Baker, the state’s chief economist. Here are some highlights from his tenure as governor: 2007: Crist repeatedly promised Floridians that their taxes would "drop like a rock." Crist and the Legislature attempted to deliver that through a question put to voters, Amendment 1, which increased the homestead property tax exemption. Voters approved it in January 2008. Kurt Wenner, vice president of tax research at Florida TaxWatch, said that taxes didn’t really drop like a rock but "there was some reduction in them." But much of that happened due to the decline in property values. In his first proposed budget in 2007, Crist called for continuing sales tax holidays and reducing the communications services tax. 2008: Crist’s budget proposal suggested dealing with a drop in revenues by using reserves and trust funds. He recommended two more sales tax holidays, one for hurricane preparedness and one for back-to-school, a savings to taxpayers of $36 million. 2009: Crist’s budget didn’t call for general tax hikes, but he did ultimately support a $1 a pack cigarette tax hike and surcharge on other tobacco products. That tax hike added up to about $1 billion a year, said Dominic Calabro, president of Florida TaxWatch. Crist also signed a budget that included new fees including a package of increased and new Highway Safety Fees for about $1 billion in recurring dollars. The Miami Herald quoted Crist as saying: "The cigarette tax is appropriate and I really view it more as a health issue than I do as a tax issue.'' If Crist had vetoed the cigarette tax, the state would have lost nearly $2 billion in federal Medicaid matching funds. The Tampa Bay Times wrote that Crist would call taxes the "T-word" as if it was an obscenity but would warm up if called a "user fee." 2010: TaxWatch wrote that Crist’s budget proposal in January 2010 called for $2.7 billion in increased spending and $100 million in tax cuts by relying on federal money, Seminole gambling Compact and raiding trust funds. Calabro said that Crist could have done more to reign in spending during his tenure. But Wenner said that "generally throughout his career (Crist) was in favor of reducing taxes for the average Floridian." Our ruling LeMieux said that Gov. Charlie Crist "was pro-life, pro-gun and vehemently anti-tax." Crist did describe himself in similar language in 2010 while he was still a Republican and running for U.S. Senate. And we agree that he was consistently for gun rights. His record on abortion was more mixed. At different times, he called himself "pro-life" and he called himself "pro-choice." And even when he called himself "pro-life" in 2006, he said he would not support overturning Roe vs. Wade. In 2010, he earned cheers from abortion rights supporters when he vetoed a bill that would force women who are getting abortions to undergo an ultrasound. Crist portrayed himself as anti-tax and generally avoided tax increases, although he did support the cigarette tax hike and other increases in fees. On the whole, we rate this claim Mostly True. PolitiFact Florida is partnering with 10 News for the election. See video fact-checks here.	None	George LeMieux	None	None	None	2012-09-06T13:22:22	2012-08-29	['Charlie_Crist']
-pomt-00344	Says Leah Vukmir was "just about the only legislator who stood with the insurance companies" and "voted against oral chemotherapy."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2018/sep/14/tammy-baldwin/insurers-leah-vukmir-opposed-wisconsin-law-forcing/	A TV ad by U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin attacks Leah Vukmir, her Republican rival in the Nov. 6, 2018, election, over oral chemotherapy and insurance companies. The ad from the Wisconsin Democrat, unveiled Sept. 10, 2018, features a Manitowoc woman who says: I’m 44 and I just finished my last chemo for a brain tumor. It was oral chemo, the only chemo for my kind of cancer. So, I’m glad that Republicans and Democrats made the insurance companies in Wisconsin cover oral chemo. Who would say no to that? Leah Vukmir. She was just about the only legislator who stood with the insurance companies instead of the people. Leah Vukmir, you ought to be ashamed. At one point, a photo of Vukmir is shown with these words on the screen: "Voted against oral chemotherapy." The references are to votes by Vukmir, who is a state senator, on a bill that was later signed into law. Let’s see if Vukmir was "just about the only legislator who stood with the insurance companies" and "voted against oral chemotherapy." All our fact checks in the U.S. Senate race. The law The law, signed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker in April 2014, makes it easy for cancer patients to afford oral chemotherapy, such as the pills the woman in the ad took. It prohibits health insurance plans from charging higher copayments, deductibles or coinsurance for oral chemotherapy than they do for injected or intravenous chemotherapy. Before the law, health plans typically covered oral chemotherapy under prescription drug plans that could have high copays; for some health plans, those copays could run into many thousands of dollars. In contrast, chemotherapy administered at a hospital or clinic was covered as part of a health plan's standard medical coverage — with no additional cost to the patient after the deductible was reached. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter: @PolitiFactWisc. Vukmir’s votes Vukmir was one of two Republican senators to come out vocally against the bill and in support of insurers. She said at the time: "I have a consistent record of opposing insurance mandates. A state mandate would only impact the insurance companies regulated by Wisconsin and not those regulated at the federal level, creating an uneven playing field and driving up costs for consumers." The bill was opposed by the Wisconsin Association of Health Plans, an HMO trade group, as well as another trade group, the Alliance of Health Insurers, and individual insurers. Insurers said the measure would drive up costs on insurance premiums and make it harder for employers and consumers to afford coverage. When the measure came to a vote in the Senate, Vukmir and GOP Sen. Paul Farrow cast the only no votes. The measure passed, 30-2. After changes were made to the bill in the Assembly, the Senate approved the bill again, 26-7. Vukmir again voted no because of her opposition to putting mandates on insurers; the other six senators said the changes weakened the bill. So, Vukmir was nearly alone in her opposition to an oral chemotherapy bill that was opposed by insurance companies. Her campaign told us that "when government mandates price structures, providers eliminate coverage options and fewer people end up with quality care." But to be clear, her vote wasn’t against oral chemotherapy, per se. Rather, the law requires that insurers treat oral chemotherapy like traditional chemotherapy when it comes to how much patients must pay. Our rating Baldwin says Vukmir was "just about the only legislator who stood with the insurance companies" and "voted against oral chemotherapy." On the main vote on a chemotherapy bill, Vukmir aligned with insurance companies that opposed the bill and was one of two state senators to vote no. That said, Vukmir’s vote wasn’t against oral chemotherapy. It was against stopping insurers from charging patients higher deductibles, copayments or coinsurance for oral chemotherapy than they would pay for traditional chemotherapy. For a statement that is accurate but needs clarification, our rating is Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Tammy Baldwin	None	None	None	2018-09-14T12:52:55	2018-09-10	['None']
-pomt-10107	On which team he's rooting for in the World Series.	half flip	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/21/barack-obama/almost-a-phanatic/	In one of most biting attacks this political season, Sen. John McCain accused Sen. Barack Obama of pandering to his audience by flip-flopping on his rooting interest in the World Series. On Oct. 21, 2008, in Bensalem, Pa., solid Philadelphia Phillies territory, McCain told a small audience, "Now, I’m not dumb enough to get mixed up in a World Series between swing states. But I think I may have detected a little pattern with Sen. Obama. It’s pretty simple really. When he’s campaigning in Philadelphia, he roots for the Phillies, and when he’s campaigning in Tampa Bay, he ‘shows love’ to the Rays." There’s nothing so ugly as a flip-flopper on sports team loyalties. So we better get to the bottom of this. Here’s the facts: Obama in Dunedin, Fla., on Sept. 24, prior to the postseason: "Congrats for the Rays. But I’m a White Sox fan, and we’ll see you in the playoffs." Obama in Philadelphia, on Oct. 11, after the upstart Rays took out his White Sox in the first round of the American League playoffs: "I am a White Sox fan. But since the White Sox are out of it, I’ll root for the Phillies now." Obama in Tampa, Fla., on Oct. 20. Fresh off their ALCS win over the Boston Red Sox, a small group of the Rays attend Obama's rally and rookie pitcher David Price introduced the nominee. Said Obama: "I’ve said from the beginning that I am a unity candidate, bringing people together. So when you see a White Sox fan showing love to the Rays — and the Rays showing some love back — you know we are on to something right here." Obama also joked that he had considered getting a mohawk as a show of solidarity with the Rays (that’s what hard-core Rays fans do these days). "But my political advisers said they weren’t sure how that would play with swing voters," Obama said. In the days before the Internet, it may have been possible to get away with pandering to sports enthusiasts in competing towns. No longer. Bloggers quickly pounced when Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin told a New Hampshire audience that "Red Sox fans know how to turn an underdog into a victor." The previous week, Palin sought to connect with a Tampa Bay crowd using nearly the same line. "How about those Tampa Bay Rays?" Palin said. "You know what that tells me? It tells me that the people in this area know a little something about turning an underdog into a victor." Insert groan here. But Obama’s the one on the hot seat here. At no time has Obama wavered in his primary allegiance to the White Sox. Any movement on that front would be inexcusable. But his team is gone, and now whom is he pulling for? A statement released by Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, quoted on a New York Times politics blog, sought to make things clear. "Senator Obama said he’s rooting for the Phillies. Yesterday he said nice things about the members of the team who came out to support him, but that doesn’t change the fact that Tampa Bay bounced his White Sox out of the playoffs." In the complex hierarchy of determining fan loyalty, we are left to weigh whether "showing love" for the Rays equates to "rooting for" the Phillies. No, these aren't equivalent. But if you're rooting for the Phillies, you sure don't show love for the Rays at a Tampa rally. Is it shameless pandering? Of course. But is it a flip-flop? Not quite. We call it Half Flip.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-10-21T00:00:00	2008-10-21	['None']
-pomt-08171	Low-flow toilets "can cost homeowners up to $1,000 each."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2010/dec/01/elaine-boyer/dekalb-commissioner-says-low-flow-toilets-can-be-c/	Thanks to The Dunwoody Crier, the minds of your AJC PolitiFact Georgia scribes are in the toilet. An op-ed by DeKalb County Commissioner Elaine Boyer derided what she called "the toilet tax," which was passed in response to the region's drought. "Two years ago, the commission unnecessarily started mandating that low-flush toilets had to be installed in older homes for sales to get to the closing table," Boyer wrote in the Oct. 27 issue. "Those toilets can cost homeowners up to $1,000 each." Toilets? For $1,000? We were, ahem, bowled over. Does a commode really cost that much? We researched the ordinance and called plumbers to find out. A 2008 DeKalb ordinance requires that newly purchased buildings have low-flow toilets and other water-saving fixtures installed before the county turns on water service. The ordinance applies to residential and commercial properties built before Jan. 1, 1993, in the county's unincorporated areas. The Department of Watershed Management performs free inspections to certify a building is compliant. Buildings that will be torn down, foreclosed, or transferred between spouses or from a parent to a child are exempt. If the switch costs more than $1,000 per toilet for a residential property, you can get a financial hardship waiver. DeKalb County offers a rebate program to defray the cost. Water customers can purchase from a list of eligible toilets and receive up to $100. After a quick search, AJC PolitiFact Georgia found a $160 toilet on the online list. A Boyer spokeswoman emphasized the toilet ordinance was not the main focus of the commissioner's article. Her target was DeKalb's recently instituted foreclosure registry, which requires banks and other owners of foreclosed homes to register them online. She tried to tank the proposal, but it passed in July. The spokeswoman also referred us to Robert Broome, a lobbyist with the Atlanta Board of Realtors. Broome told us that the group supports water conservation but opposes DeKalb's rule because it ties the installation of those fixtures to real estate transactions. The change can be expensive, Broome said. He's been told of cases where homeowners have had to rip up dry wall or old plumbing to comply. Broadly speaking, toilets can cost just about anything. Consider the porcelain throne of rock royalty John Lennon. It sold in an August auction for about $15,000. Lee Krinsky, general manager of Plumb Works Inc. in Atlanta, recalled a toilet that cost $13,000, excluding the $1,000 seat. It was hand-painted with a floral design. The seat, which was inlaid with gold, was fashioned in the shape of a seashell. A more typical low-flow toilet can range from $500 to $800, Krinsky said. This includes the cost of purchasing the toilet, picking it up from the supplier, installing it, and hauling the old one away. If installation goes smoothly, and most do, a plumber can be in and out of the bathroom in an hour-and-a-half, Krinsky said. Given the high cost of water, the toilet will easily pay for itself. For another opinion, we talked to Ellen Whitaker, executive director of the Plumbing and Mechanical Association of Georgia. The trade organization once opposed low-flow ordinances but switched positions after the drought. Plumbers in Whitaker's group were reluctant to give a price range for the job. Variables such as the condition of the old toilet and plumbing can make it hard to predict, she said. Consider the toilet flange, Whitaker said. The ring connects the toilet to a drain pipe and stops smells from seeping up through the commode. If the flange is stuck in place, a plumber might spend extra hours removing it. This means $1,000 "can be a good price," Whitaker said. Of course, you could install the toilet yourself. If you purchased that $160 toilet we found online, hauled it home yourself, got the $100 rebate, and encountered no unusual problems, your grand total would be $60, plus tax. A low-flow toilet can cost as little as dinner and a movie or as much as a Toyota Corolla. The cost of professional installation varies, but can often fall in the $500 to $800 range. Do-it-yourselfers can spend less than $100, thanks to DeKalb's rebate program. If the job costs more than $1,000, you can get a waiver. Very strictly speaking, Boyer's right. Installing a low-flow toilet "can" cost up to $1,000. But in many cases, it will cost much less. Boyer's claim could have used more explanation and context, but much of it holds water. We therefore rule it Half True.	None	Elaine Boyer	None	None	None	2010-12-01T06:00:00	2010-10-27	['None']
-pomt-02204	"Americans will spend more on taxes in 2014 than they will on food, clothing and housing combined."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/apr/23/tax-foundation/do-americans-pay-more-taxes-food-clothing-and-hous/	With the April 15 tax deadline a fresh memory, Americans have seen an uptick in social media posts about taxes. One reader saw a Facebook post and forwarded it to us, asking whether it was accurate. "Americans will spend more on taxes in 2014 than they will on food, clothing and housing combined," the post said, and it included a chart showing that the combination of state, local and federal taxes exceeded the amount spent on food, clothing and housing. The post was credited to the Tax Foundation, a think tank that generally has a pro-business leaning. The claim sounded familiar to us -- in 2011, we checked a statement by Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus that "Americans will pay more in taxes in 2011 than they will spend on groceries, clothing and shelter combined." We rated that claim Half True. Experts told us that our previous analysis was generally applicable to the new claim as well, but it’s been three years since we checked it -- and the claim is still circulating on social media -- we thought it would be worth taking a second crack at it. First, we’ll note that no one knows for sure how Americans will allocate their money in 2014, since more than half the year hasn’t happened yet. The best we can do is extrapolate from previous years. Given the data available, the last year for which we can do it fully is 2013. We began our analysis by measuring expenditures on groceries, clothing and shelter. For this, we turned to the same source the Tax Foundation did -- the Bureau of Economic Analysis, an office within the U.S. Commerce Department. In a data series known as National Income and Product Accounts, the bureau tracks how Americans spend their income. For 2013, Americans spent more than $884 billion on food and beverages consumed at home, and an additional $737 billion on restaurant meals and beverages. For clothing, the figure was $363 billion, and for housing and utilities, it was $2.083 trillion. Total expenditures: $4.067 trillion. For taxes paid, we also turned to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The amount of federal taxes collected in 2013 was $3.041 trillion, and the amount of state and local taxes collected in 2013 (minus transfer payments from the federal government to the states) was $1.54 trillion. Combined, that’s $4.581 trillion. This makes the Tax Foundation correct in saying that the aggregate amount of taxes paid exceeds the aggregate amount spent on food, clothing and housing. It’s possible to quibble with both sides of this comparison -- the tax figure includes corporate taxes, while the expenditures side includes such items as alcoholic beverages -- but generally speaking, the tax figure is modestly higher than the expenditures on food, clothing and housing, giving the claim a solid grounding in the numbers. (We should note that taking out corporate taxes doesn't make much of a difference; taxes on individuals alone would still outstrip the other category.) This is not the only way to calculate it, however. While the Tax Foundation’s method shows that Americans as a whole pay more for taxes than for food, clothing and shelter, there are wide variations in what individual Americans pay. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, taxpayers in the aggregate spent 3.2 percent of their consumption on clothing, 14.1 percent on groceries and restaurants, and 18.1 percent on housing and utilities. Combined, that’s a little over 35 percent of individual income. Because our tax system is progressive, people with lower incomes typically don’t pay 35 percent of their income in taxes. According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, American households earning under $200,000 a year don’t pay more than 20 percent of their cash income in federal taxes. The rate rises to 31 percent for those earning more than $1 million a year. Once you add in state and local taxes, Americans $200,000 and up may well see 35 percent or more of their income going to taxes, depending on the state and locality where they live. But for those near the bottom of the income scale, the tax burden is much lower. The federal tax burden doesn’t hit double digits until $30,000 in household income, and for those earning between $75,000 and $100,000, the rate is a bit over 17 percent. Even adding in state and local taxes, most taxpayers in these categories are not going to be paying 35 percent of their income in taxes. And remember that there are two parts to this equation. While Americans on average pay 35 percent of their income for food, clothing and housing, some pay more than that, and some pay less. We couldn’t find statistics on consumption patterns for different income classes. But generally speaking, the poorer you are, the higher a share of your income you’ll pay for these basics of life, and the richer you are, the smaller a share of your income will go to food, clothing and housing. So richer Americans may well pay 35 percent of their income in taxes even as they pay a much smaller fraction on food, clothing and housing. For these people, the Tax Foundation’s claim is correct. But poorer Americans will tend to pay a far higher share of their income for food, clothing and housing, and they won’t pay very much in taxes. For them, the foundation’s claim isn’t true in many cases. It’s hard to say whether the Tax Foundation’s claim is true more often than not, but there’s reason to think it may not be true in most cases. That’s because, according to the Tax Policy Center, upper-income groups account for a smaller share of the population. Households earning $114,484 or more -- a group that includes households most likely to pay more in taxes than in the three basic necessities -- account for just one-fifth of the population. By contrast, households earning less than $66,998 -- which include many households that will pay more for the necessities than for taxes -- account for 60 percent of the population. This doesn’t mean that the Tax Foundation calculation doesn’t have value. "We are very clear that America as a whole -- not the average American -- pays more in taxes than food, clothing, and housing combined," said Tax Foundation economist Kyle Pomerleau. "We are giving Americans a vivid illustration of what the total cost of government is. We hope taxpayers ask: Are the services we receive as a nation worth $4.5 trillion." Still, Roberton Williams, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said the numbers should be taken with a big grain of salt. "I don't doubt the aggregate numbers cited, but those numbers say little about what happens to particular people," Williams said. Our ruling The Tax Foundation post said that "Americans will spend more on taxes in 2014 than they will on food, clothing and housing combined." While a minority of Americans probably does pay more for taxes, the numbers suggest that there are many more Americans whose food, clothing and shelter expenses exceed their tax burden. We rate the claim Half True.	None	The Tax Foundation	None	None	None	2014-04-23T17:36:51	2014-04-23	['United_States']
-pomt-00376	"Every state that has put in a graduated income tax, the middle class always pays more."	false	/illinois/statements/2018/sep/09/bruce-rauner/rauner-falsely-claims-graduated-income-taxes-alway/	A recurring theme of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner’s re-election campaign is to paint Democratic challenger J.B. Pritzker as a big taxer. To that end, Rauner has seized on Pritzker’s advocacy for replacing Illinois’ current flat-rate income tax with a graduated system used by most states and the federal government that imposes higher rates on those with higher income. Pritzker, however, has been vague about what sort of rates he would like to set, and that has given Rauner a big opening to try to fill in the blanks. During a recent radio interview with the Bloomington-Normal based WJBC-AM, Rauner claimed Pritzker was being cagey because middle class voters were bound to get hammered by any switch. "The truth is, every state that has put in a graduated income tax, the middle class always pays more," Rauner said, echoing what’s become a frequent talking point. "That’s what Pritzker doesn’t want known, that’s the truth and we’ve got to get the truth out." Last fall, we rated Mostly False a claim from Rauner that the graduated system Pritzker supports would necessarily result in a tax hike on Illinois’ middle class. Because Pritzker has so far refused to propose rates, no one can say for sure whether the plan he might ultimately unveil would be worse or better for middle-income taxpayers. But Rauner’s recent claim paints the issue with an even broader brush, flatly declaring it "the truth" that all 32 states that tax income at graduated rates penalize the middle class. That’s a tall order, so we decided to see if we could find "the truth" about Rauner’s "truth." Rauner wrong on rates In Illinois, the rich as well as the not-so-rich all pay the same 4.95 percent tax rate on their income. We asked Rauner spokesman Justin Giorgio to explain how middle-class taxpayers are worse off in all states with graduated taxes, and he sent us a list of 26 states in which a single filer making $59,000 would be taxed at a higher rate than the one currently in effect in Illinois. There are glaring problems with that response. Giorgio’s list omits six states with graduated taxes where such a taxpayer would pay less even though Rauner was adamant that his claim applied to all such states. Then there’s the question of that $59,000 benchmark, which is what the U.S. Census pegged as the median household income in the nation for 2016, the latest year for which such data is available. The household number is typically an aggregate of the incomes of two or more wage earners living under the same roof — not individuals. In 2016, the Census measured the median income for the category of people that most closely approximates single filers at slightly more than $35,700. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Setting aside the Rauner camp’s sloppy metrics — not to mention the lack of any consensus definition for the middle class — we looked up the tax impact in each of those 32 graduated tax states when applied to that hypothetical single filer making the national median $35,700. Under that scenario, the number of states that would tax her income at lower rates than in Illinois grows from six to 11. In several of those graduated tax states, the rate advantage over Illinois would be substantial. In North Dakota, for instance, her income would be taxed at just over 1 percent. Overall tax burdens Comparing tax policies between the states is fraught with complications because no two do it alike. But the Rauner camp doesn’t just compare apples to oranges. More like apples to an entire fruit basket. Rates alone don’t necessarily tell us who pays more. Many graduated tax states do indeed impose rates for most income brackets above Illinois’ single rate. But that doesn’t always mean an individual’s tax burden will be higher there. At a different campaign event on the same day as his radio appearance, Rauner pointed to four graduated tax states with what he described as "stunningly high" rates: Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. What he failed to point out, however, is that several of those states also offer a generous menu of exemptions and deductions that significantly mitigate costs for middle- and low-income taxpayers. Individual taxpayers in Connecticut earning over $10,000, for instance, are faced with nominal tax rates higher than Illinois’ flat one. But a single filer in Connecticut also receives a personal exemption worth seven times more than that offered in Illinois. And in New York, rates higher than Illinois’ set in on every dollar earned by an individual above $11,700. But the standard deduction is worth four times the $2,175 personal exemption in Illinois, which does not have a standard deduction. It’s important to note that a multi-rate structure doesn’t necessarily guarantee a state’s income tax will be exceptionally progressive. Missouri, for example, has a ten-tiered rate structure but the highest rate kicks in after just $9,072 in income. That said, Missouri taxpayers also benefit from a standard deduction even more generous than that in New York. And because graduated systems impose tax rates in escalating steps on different portions of income, people in those states aren’t paying top rates on every dollar they earn. In Iowa, for instance, that means taxpayers still get to pay lower rates than they would in Illinois on their first $14,382 of income, regardless of how much they earn beyond that. Graduated rates, by their very nature, are designed so lower-income earners pay less on a greater share of their income. "It doesn’t take a tax policy analyst to say that you could create an income tax with rates both below and above [4.95 percent] at different levels of income and that the majority of middle-income taxpayers would pay less as a result of that," said Richard Auxier, a research associate with the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. "To argue that going to a progressive income tax is bad for low- and middle-income families is kind of missing the point of why you would have a progressive rate structure in the first place," he added. Our ruling Rauner said that in "every state that has put in a graduated income tax, the middle class always pays more." But 11 of the 32 states that tax income at graduated rates would tax an individual earning the national median at lower rates than Illinois. In some of those states, the rate would be significantly lower. What’s more, tax rates tell only part of the story. Many states, including some with much higher rates, also offer taxpayers generous exemptions and deductions, significantly reducing their actual tax burden. Rauner’s claim that graduated systems inevitably lead to higher taxes on the middle class is not even close to accurate. We rate it False.	None	Bruce Rauner	None	None	None	2018-09-09T15:00:00	2018-08-22	['None']
-snes-03532	Three million non-citzens voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/three-million-votes-in-presidential-election-cast-by-illegal-aliens/	None	Ballot Box	None	David Emery	None	Three Million Votes in Presidential Election Cast by ‘Illegal Aliens’?	16 November 2016	None	['None']
-wast-00131	"The trouble I had with the Obama [stimulus] program was it was all spending."	4 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/04/19/larry-kudlows-claim-that-the-obama-stimulus-was-all-spending/	None	None	Larry Kudlow	Salvador Rizzo	None	Larry Kudlow's claim that the Obama stimulus was \xe2\x80\x98all spending'	April 19	None	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-01651	Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said that President Trump's tax returns were being kept "underneath President Obama’s college records" and "his passport application" where nobody would find them.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sarah-sanders-trump-tax-returns-obama-conspiracy-theories/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Sarah Sanders Give This Snarky Response About Trump’s Tax Returns?	28 September 2017	None	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-03686	Coverage under Obamacare can costs more than $1,200 a month for a family of four.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/health-insurance-under-the-affordable-care-act-costs-hundreds-or-thousands-per-month/	None	Politics	None	Bethania Palma	None	Health Insurance Under the Affordable Care Act Costs Hundreds or Thousands Per Month?	27 October 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-01926	"The government -- not the armed forces -- is stockpiling hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition for domestic use."	false	/oregon/statements/2014/jun/27/james-buchal/government-stockpiling-hundreds-millions-rounds-am/	Do Americans need to worry about the government stockpiling ammunition and assault rifles to quell coming uprisings? A number of political bloggers think so. A slew of chain emails and articles on conservative-leaning websites going back a year or more claim that the government’s stockpile of ammunition reaches into the billions of rounds. The claim: James Buchal, an Oregon Republican challenging Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., clearly has concerns. His campaign website includes a photograph of an ominous-looking armored vehicle below copy in which Buchal says part of his campaign will "focus on raising awareness of the threat to America’s future posed by an out-of-control total surveillance state." He adds, "The government -- and not the armed forces -- is stockpiling hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition for domestic use." Is the government stockpiling that much ammunition? PolitiFact Oregon checked. The analysis: We emailed Buchal, who pointed to a Government Accountability Office report released Feb. 12, 2014. The report, "Ammunition Purchases Have Declined Since 2009," was produced in response to questions from U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. In a letter dated Nov. 13, 2012, Coburn wrote to Janet Napolitano, then the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security: "It has been reported that DHS has recently purchased large amounts of ammunition, as much or more than 1 billion rounds according to some estimates." Some claims put the figure at 1.6 billion rounds. Another set had it at 2.7 billion. Still others fretted about the alleged retrofitting of more than 2,700 heavily armored military vehicles that were going to be turned over to domestic police forces. The GAO report found that as of October 2013, DHS had about 159 million rounds -- enough to meet the training and operational needs of its firearm-carrying personnel for about 22 months, it said. The agency has more than 70,000 armed personnel, the most of any federal agency, according to the report. The Department of Justice is second with 69,000 armed personnel. The DOJ reported its ammunition inventory as enough to last from 13 to 20 months. The report did not translate that to specific figures but provided other information that enabled it to calculate a range of about 90 million to about 138 million rounds. Together, those two agencies represent 80 percent of federal armed personnel, and together they have roughly 250 million to 300 million rounds of ammunition on hand. That may be on the low end of the figure that pops to mind when someone says "hundreds of millions," but Buchal’s claim is accurate on the amount of ammunition the government has on hand. Then we looked at the thrust of Buchal’s claim, that the government is "stockpiling" the ammunition for some later use. DHS’s 159 million inventory in October was down from 178 million rounds in April 2013 and 193 million in November 2012, the GAO report found. We emailed DHS’s press office, which provided a statement saying DHS purchases dropped to 93 million rounds in fiscal 2012 and are projected at 75 million for fiscal 2014. Further, the GAO reported that DHS’ use of ammunition over the past six years has roughly equaled the amount it bought. In 2009, the agency bought 133 million rounds and dipped into reserves to use a total of 141 rounds. In 2013, the agency used 89 million rounds compared with new purchases of 84 million rounds. The report noted that DOJ purchasing trends and usage rates are similar. It also said DOJ’s inventories are below DHS’s. How is the ammunition used? The report noted that new federal officers go through 2,000 to 5,000 rounds a year, most of that in training and certification programs. Experienced officers use about 600 rounds a year. The email from DHS concluded, "Although a small reserve in terms of the overall ammunition is usually kept by the component law enforcement agencies, most do not have the capability to store large amounts of ammunition. There is not an ammunition stockpile." Buchal acknowledged the report’s assertion that purchases have declined but added, "The available information is not sufficient, at least to me, to demonstrate that the levels of ammunition purchases are appropriate." When asked, he did not make a distinction between an "inventory" and a "stockpile." In a final email, Buchal said the distinction may be beside the point. "Bottom line, in all likelihood, the ammunition will only be used for training purposes, but engaging in such broad-scale training is itself a problem," he wrote. "We don’t need SWAT teams to deal with student loan fraud, and training up vast quantities of SWAT teams to deal with such issues is itself a sign of a growing divide between the government and the people." The ruling: On his campaign website, U.S. House candidate James Buchal claims that the government "is stockpiling hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition for domestic use." A government report indicated that the federal Department of Homeland Security, as of October 2013, had an estimated 159 million rounds in inventory, down from 178 million rounds in April 2013 and 193 million in November 2012. The report also found that DHS and Department of Justice -- which employ 80 percent of the federal government’s armed personnel -- have steadily decreased ammunition purchases since 2009. Projected purchases by DHS for this year will be the lowest in more than five years. Estimated ammunition inventories for both agencies also continue to fall. With inventories and purchases going down, and usage roughly equaling purchases, the government is clearly not "stockpiling" ammunition. And while Buchal is correct in his assertion that the government has "hundreds of millions" of rounds on hand, even he later acknowledged that "in all likelihood," those rounds are being used for training purposes. We rate the claim False. Return to OregonLive.com/politics to comment on this article.	None	James Buchal	None	None	None	2014-06-27T15:22:00	2014-06-16	['None']
-tron-03164	The President Ordered the Firing of “Cattle Guards”	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cattleguards/	None	politics	None	None	None	The President Ordered the Firing of “Cattle Guards”	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01769	Sofia Richie “Morphing” Into Kourtney Kardashian, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/sofia-richie-morphing-kourtney-kardashian-scott-disick/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Sofia Richie NOT “Morphing” Into Kourtney Kardashian, Despite Report	2:39 pm, January 21, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01370	Sandra Bullock Secretly Married?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/sandra-bullock-married-bryan-randall-secret-wedding/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Sandra Bullock Secretly Married?	4:36 am, March 18, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-10274	Says McCain once said that on "the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/23/joe-biden/thats-what-mccain-said-in-2005/	It didn't take long for Sen. Joe Biden to adopt the Obama campaign talking points linking Sen. John McCain to President Bush. At a rally in Springfield, Ill. celebrating Biden's selection as Sen. Barack Obama's running mate, the Delaware senator offered polite praise of McCain — "He served our country with extraordinary courage and I know he wants to do right by America" — but then criticized McCain for embracing Bush's policies. "And these are John's words, (on) 'the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush.' Ladies and gentlemen, that's what he said," Biden told the crowd. The quote comes from a June 19, 2005, McCain appearance on NBC's Meet the Press in which host Tim Russert asked the senator about an article in the Arizona Republic that explored how McCain differed from Bush on many issues. "The fact is," Russert said, "you are different than George Bush." "No. No," McCain replied. "The fact is that I'm different, but the fact is that I have agreed with President Bush far more than I have disagreed. And on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush." McCain continued, "So have we had some disagreements on some issues, the bulk — particularly domestic issues? Yes. But I will argue my conservative record voting with anyone's, and I will also submit that my support for President Bush has been active and very impassioned on issues that are important to the American people. And I'm particularly talking about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, national security, national defense, support of men and women in the military, fiscal discipline, a number of other issues. So I strongly disagree with any assertion that I've been more at odds with the president of the United States than I have been in agreement with him." The interview makes interesting reading today because several of Russert's questions are based on comments from another senator who had just returned from Iraq in June 2005 — Biden. And the interview actually focuses more on McCain's differences with Bush (on issues such as global warming, judicial nominees and stem cell research) than it does on topics they agree about. But Biden is right that McCain said it. We rate his claim True.	None	Joe Biden	None	None	None	2008-08-23T00:00:00	2008-08-23	['George_W._Bush']
-pomt-05528	Says the United States "actually exports more gasoline, diesel and other fuels than it imported in 2011 for the first time since, I think, 1949."	true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/apr/11/robert-menendez/robert-menendez-claims-us-oil-exports-surpassed-im/	Drill it in the United States, keep it in the United States. U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez made that argument during his "Twitter Town Hall" on March 28, while noting how the United States exported more fuel products than it imported last year for the first time in more than six decades. "In fact, you know, according to the Energy Department though, the United States – this is something that I found out, I found it pretty amazing – actually exports more gasoline, diesel and other fuels than it imported in 2011 for the first time since, I think, 1949," he said. The Democratic senator later added, "If we keep that here, we can create downward pressures on the prices of gas and diesel, and in doing so, of course help all of our families and help our economy. So I believe drill it in the U.S, keep it in the U.S., and that’s not something that’s happening right now." PolitiFact New Jersey discovered that the senator’s claim is backed up by findings released last month by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the statistical and analytical agency within the U.S. Department of Energy. According to a March 7 article on the agency’s website, "The United States in 2011 exported more petroleum products, on an annual basis, than it imported for the first time since 1949." Last year, the United States exported nearly 2.9 million barrels per day, surpassing imports by about 440,000 barrels per day, according to the agency. Now, let’s explain what’s fueling this increase in exports. The biggest contributing factor was the increase in foreign purchases of distillate fuel, which includes diesel fuel and heating oil, the agency said. U.S. exports of distillate fuel have been on the rise during the past decade, driven by a global increase in diesel consumption, according to the agency. Between 2006 and 2011, exports of distillate fuel increased by about 297 percent, according to agency data. The growth in distillate fuel exports has been mainly driven by deliveries to the Netherlands -- where many products are later directed to other countries -- as well as to Mexico and Central and South America, the agency has said. The Netherlands was the largest importer in 2011 at 145,000 barrels per day, followed by Mexico with 102,000 barrels per day, according to agency data. The proximity of Mexico, and Central and South America to oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast has contributed to the export growth, according to the agency. Also, Europe requires a certain type of diesel fuel that cannot be produced in many refineries outside the United States, according to the agency. "The primary factor behind the change in Europe has been the switch by light-duty vehicle consumers from gasoline-powered vehicles to diesel-powered vehicles," according to an October 2010 report by federal officials. "The move has been driven by European tax incentives on both vehicles and fuel to encourage the use of more energy-efficient diesel-fueled vehicles." Our ruling During his Twitter Town Hall, Menendez claimed the United States "actually exports more gasoline, diesel and other fuels than it imported in 2011 for the first time since, I think, 1949." Based on findings released last month by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that statistic is accurate. Driven by demand for distillate fuel -- which includes diesel fuel and heating oil -- exports of petroleum products in 2011 exceeded imports by about 440,000 barrels per day, according to the agency. We rate the statement True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Robert Menendez	None	None	None	2012-04-11T07:30:00	2012-03-28	['United_States']
-goop-01590	George Clooney Rented Private Island For Amal Clooney Birthday?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/george-clooney-amal-birthday-private-island/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	George Clooney Rented Private Island For Amal Clooney Birthday?	10:18 am, February 13, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-06740	"As we near the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we should not forget that some of the hijackers used New Jersey driver’s licenses to board those aircraft."	false	/new-jersey/statements/2011/aug/28/kevin-otoole/state-sen-kevin-otoole-claims-some-911-hijackers-u/	Nearly 10 years after 19 hijackers took over four flights on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, state Sen. Kevin O’Toole wants to remind people of what some of those terrorists used to carry out the attacks: a New Jersey driver’s license. O’Toole (R-Essex) provided that history lesson in an Aug. 21 opinion piece in the Times of Trenton about the need for technology upgrades in the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission. A computer failure in July affected commission offices and other state agencies. "Updating the technological capabilities of the MVC is of critical importance and should not be used for political gain," O’Toole wrote. "As we near the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we should not forget that some of the hijackers used New Jersey driver’s licenses to board those aircraft." But PolitiFact New Jersey found that the 9/11 hijackers did not have New Jersey driver’s licenses. According to reports by the FBI and the 9/11 Commission staff, the hijackers had gathered driver’s licenses and state identification cards from five states, but not New Jersey. First, let’s explain the documents cited by O’Toole as the basis for his claim. The senator referred us to 13 documents, including news articles and columns. Two of the documents appear on websites of organizations focused on opposing illegal immigration, and two columns were written by conservative author Phyllis Schlafly. Another document appears on the website for Free Republic, which bills itself as the "Premier Conservative Site on the Net!" The news articles included items published in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The only government document cited by O’Toole was a portion of the 9/11 Commission report, which states "several (hijackers) also obtained new photo identification, first in New Jersey and then at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles." But that section only states hijackers obtained "photo identification" in New Jersey, not driver’s licenses. A separate report entitled "9/11 and Terrorist Travel," which was released in August 2004 by the commission’s staff, provides a breakdown of the identification documents of the 9/11 hijackers. According to that report, the hijackers collectively obtained driver’s licenses from Arizona, California and Florida, and state identification cards from Florida, Virginia and Maryland. Those same findings were presented in FBI reports in 2003. Janice Kephart, former counsel to the 9/11 Commission and an author of "9/11 and Terrorist Travel," confirmed to PolitiFact New Jersey that it is wrong to claim any of the hijackers had New Jersey’s driver’s licenses. Kephart suggested the misunderstanding about the driver’s licenses may stem from the fact that some hijackers obtained USA identification cards in New Jersey. A USA identification card does not represent any state or the U.S. government, Kephart said. "They don’t mean anything," Kephart said in a phone interview. "It’s meant to be deceptive." Less than two years before the 9/11 Commission completed its work, the FBI had already debunked the myth about New Jersey driver’s licenses being used on Sept. 11. The story about the licenses became so widely accepted that the administration of former Gov. Jim McGreevey used the claim to boost support for its plans to overhaul the motor vehicle agency. But in December 2002, the FBI said a lengthy investigation found no evidence that any of the hijackers had New Jersey licenses, according to a Star-Ledger article at the time. The McGreevey administration backed off from using the hijackers to tout its proposal. "As a result of the discrepancies raised, we no longer have sufficient confidence to say that there were New Jersey driver’s licenses involved," Eric Shuffler, chief of staff for state Transportation Commissioner Jamie Fox, said at the time. Some of the documents cited by O’Toole were published before the Star-Ledger revealed the results of that FBI investigation -- and before the 9/11 Commission did its job. The ruling In an opinion piece about Motor Vehicle Commission upgrades, O’Toole claimed "some of the hijackers used New Jersey driver’s licenses to board those aircraft." To back up his point, the senator provided various sources, some of which had a conservative bias and/or were published before the 9/11 Commission completed its investigation. But the claim has been refuted by research done by the FBI and the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 hijackers obtained driver’s licenses and state identification cards from five states, but New Jersey wasn’t one of them. We rate the statement False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Kevin O'Toole	None	None	None	2011-08-28T05:15:00	2011-08-21	['New_Jersey']
-tron-03140	Hillary Clinton’s horse-thief ancestor	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/rodhamancestor/	None	politics	None	None	None	Hillary Clinton’s horse-thief ancestor	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-09382	"The spillover violence (from Mexico) in Texas is real and it is escalating."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/mar/27/john-cornyn/cornyn-says-spillover-violence-texas-real-and-esca/	After a pregnant American consulate worker and her husband were murdered in Ciudad Juarez this month, the U.S. senators from Texas wrote President Barack Obama urging him to address the "escalating violence" along the state's southern border. "The spillover violence in Texas is real and it is escalating," Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn state in a March 17 letter requesting federal attention to the safety of border communities. Spillover violence on the rise in Texas? Do the senators have that right? When a reporter asked for evidence of spillover during a telephone press conference Cornyn hosted on the day the senators' letter went to Obama, Cornyn initially seemed to backpedal. "As far as the Texas border is concerned, to my knowledge, we have not had spillover violence, per se ... I should have said the threat of potential spillover violence," he said. Cornyn continued: "We have had American citizens die in Mexico, and I've been to ... Laredo and visited with families of Americans who have lost loved ones in Nuevo Laredo, some of whom have been kidnapped and others have not been heard from again. And, of course, the latest killings in Juarez raise this specter of security of American citizens who are visiting Mexico." So which is it: real violence or the threat of it? Kevin McLaughlin, Cornyn's spokesman, told us later that Cornyn misspoke during his press conference. McLaughlin said: "There are instances of spillover violence occurring in Texas along the border." McLaughlin sent us nearly 20 news articles and editorials from 1999 into 2010 reporting incidents that could indicate the increasing bloodshed in Mexico is trickling into Texas. For example, Santiago Salinas, a man connected to a Mexican drug cartel was shot and killed in a Houston hotel in 2006. In 2008, a Mexican citizen and a distant relative of Rep. Silvestre Reyes' wife was kidnapped in Juarez and released after her family, who lives in the United States, paid some $32,000 in ransom. In September, Sergio Saucedo, who authorities say was connected to a Mexican drug cartel, was kidnapped at gunpoint from his home in Horizon City in El Paso County. His mutilated body was found in Juarez. In May, a member of the Juarez drug cartel was fatally shot outside his home in El Paso. In January, authorities linked a grenade used in an attack on a bar in Pharr, where three off-duty police officers were, to a drug cartel in Mexico. And in March, two men were kidnapped from the parking lot of a McAllen Wal-Mart and non-fatally shot in connection with a cartel. Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an alert warning El Paso law enforcement that the Barrio Azteca gang in El Paso might retaliate after officers arrested 54 members and associates of the gang the week before. The warning was based on "uncorroborated information" that the gang might authorize its members to murder officers in the El Paso area. Other reminders of violence near the Mexico-Texas border include the sighting of a Mexican military helicopter flying over Zapata County, the Texas Department of Public Safety warning spring-break revelers to avoid Mexican border towns and a recent inflow of Mexicans from El Porvenir seeking political asylum in Fort Hancock after members of a Mexican drug cartel threatened to kill residents and torch their homes. Earlier, in September, the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College closed for several days after stray bullets from a shootout along the Matamoros levee hit a car and building on campus. Last year, 79 Americans were murdered in Mexico, according to the U.S. State Department. From 2003 to 2008, the annual homicide toll ranged from the low 30s to the high 40s. Murders of people in Juarez increased from 1,609 in 2008 to 2,657 in 2009, according to the Texas Department of Safety. This year, more than 550 people have been killed in Juarez. Still, it seems the definition of "spillover violence" may depend on where you're viewing it from. The Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan agency that provides research analysis to Congress, recently found that no data exists that can definitively answer whether there has been significant spillover violence from Mexico, and anecdotal reports have been mixed. "Currently, U.S. federal officials deny that the recent increase in drug trafficking-related violence in Mexico has resulted in a spillover into the United States, but they acknowledge that the prospect is a serious concern," the service reported Feb. 16. According to the service, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration defines "spillover violence" as "violence targeted primarily at civilians and government entities — excluding trafficker-on-trafficker violence" though other experts and scholars have recognized such in-fighting as central to spillover, according to the report. Testifying before the U.S. House Appropriations Committee in March 2009, Joseph Arabit, the special agent in charge of the administration's El Paso division, said: "We are all tempted to paint the problem with a very broad brush and react emotionally to violent incidents inside the United States involving Mexican drug traffickers and their victims. But it is crucial, in order to address the problem with the appropriate programs, resources and operations, that we understand the difference between "terrorist" acts — the murder of a U.S. law enforcement agent, or the bombing of a U.S. government building, for example — and actions that are characteristic of violent drug culture, such as the killing of an individual who owes a drug debt to the organization." The Texas Department of Safety defines spillover violence as "Mexican cartel-related violence that occurs in Texas, including aggravated assault, extortion, kidnapping, torture, rape and murder. The victims of these crimes include illegal immigrants being smuggled into the U.S., Mexican or U.S. citizens working with the cartels or their innocent family members, and those who are not associated in any way with the cartels or transnational gangs." Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Safety, said there's "no question" spillover violence is growing in Texas. When we asked McCraw about the federal government's definition of spillover violence, he said: "We don't care how they define it. For obvious reasons, it doesn't matter — it's either a violent act or not a violent act." "We've got ongoing kidnapping investigations, we've got murder investigations, without question, related to cartel activities," he said. The Texas department said it doesn't yet have statistical breakdowns of spillover violence, though McCraw listed 12 incidents since 2008 that the department considers related to Mexican cartels and transnational gangs. Among them: — In February, an illegal immigrant connected to a cartel was found murdered near Mission, at 10 Mile Line and Western Road. The same month, a Mexican Mafia member tried to run over a trooper in Laredo . — In August, border patrol agents near Laredo were pinned down by gunfire across the border, and a U.S. Border Patrol agent was run over by an ATV during a smuggling attempt. — In October 2008, a Donna man was kidnapped and taken to Reynosa, Mexico, where he was killed. Two months earlier, a Weslaco convenience store owner and drug dealer was kidnapped for ransom and taken to Reynosa and then shot, dismembered and burned. Also, the DPS said Adan Mondragon, who Austin police fatally shot after he fired an assault rifle in November 2008, was linked to a Mexican drug-trafficking organization. Still, other published news reports and our interviews with law enforcement officers suggest that officials closest to the border see little evidence of spillover violence. Deputy Sheriff Jesse Tovar of El Paso County told us spillover violence "remains to be seen." Tovar said he considered Saucedo's kidnapping and the El Paso homicide last year two "direct spillover" incidents, but he called that kind of violence "nothing new." "Statistically speaking, the streets are pretty safe," he said, but "there's a war zone going on across the river." With that in mind, Tovar said the sheriff's office has operation plans in place "in case something happens," but declined to elaborate for security reasons. For Terrell County Sheriff William McDonald, so far the only spillover from Mexico has been smugglers, who have been breaking into homes in his jurisdiction more frequently since violence escalated in Juarez. (Terrell County is east of Brewster County, home to Big Bend National Park.) Cliff Harris, sheriff for Pecos County, whose southern border lies about 20 miles north of the border, said that there's a threat of spillover violence but that "so far we haven't seen anything." This month, The Texas Tribune reported that neither Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino or Laredo Mayor Raul Salinas were aware of any spillover violence. Monica Weifberg-Stewart, a retailer from McAllen and chair of border security and immigration for the Texas Border Coalition, which advocates for security on the Texas-Mexico border, said: "(Do) we have the shootings, the kidnappings, all that violence, similar attacks of war? Absolutely not... Now, are there bad people everywhere that want to do bad things? Absolutely. We have that all across the United States." She said, "I go to work every day, I feel no different than I did before escalation of violence happened on the Mexican side. So if that's the definition of spillover violence, there is no spillover here." Vince Perez, Rep. Reyes' press secretary, said Texas hasn't experienced violence like Mexico, noting that even though Juarez is just across the Rio Grande, El Paso is still the second-safest city in the country, after Honolulu. "We're trying to be very careful in terms of what we characterize as spillover violence," he said. But Don Reay, executive director of the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition, said concerns about spillover are widespread. Reay said: "It does affect the community. The threat is there, continually, day by day, up and down the border." But Reay — who represents 20 sheriffs who belong the coalition, which lobbies for border security funding — said acts of violence north of the border remain "mostly isolated incidents," though "the threat is constant." The University Medical Center in El Paso, for example, often treats victims of shootings in Mexico in the U.S., Reay said. And the threat of cartel members showing up at the hospital to kill the wounded has caused law enforcement to beef up security. However, Margaret Althoff-Olivas, director of public affairs for the University Medical Center of El Paso, said there is "no sense of encroaching violence" at the hospital and that law enforcement hasn't taken extra security measures there since June 2008. On three occasions, beginning in January 2008 when a wounded law enforcement official from Chihuahua State was treated at the hospital, authorities temporarily restricted hospital entrances and required all visitors to enter through metal detectors. Others likewise say they're not aware of spillover violence. Arturo Saruhkan, Mexico's ambassador to the United States, told the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio-Express News: "The term 'spillover' would, at least in my eyes, seem to be a bit of a false dilemma. You speak of ‘spillover' as if you had the pristine waters of Alaska contaminated by the spill of the Exxon Valdez. That is, there was nothing there before the Exxon Valdez created the accident ... To assume that in Texas there are no distribution networks, drug traffickers don't have safe houses, they don't have banks, they don't launder money, is disingenuous or naive at the least. "So, 'spillover'? They're already there." Sarukhan added that more violence in Texas was possible "if the drug trafficking syndicates decide to use San Antonio as their hub and local law enforcement step up their efforts to shut them down." Where does all this leave us with the senators' claim of escalating spillover violence? No one denies the omnipresent threat of spillover violence along the border. Yet officials including law officers closest to the border say there is no surge spilling over. Using its own measure about a year ago, the U.S. DEA similarly said there was no spillover violence. Then again, the Texas DPS says spillover violence, especially related to cartels and gangs, is a statewide problem on the rise. Mindful there's not yet an independent gauge of spillover violence, the authoritative CRS threw up its hands at this issue. For now, we're going with the officials who live closest to the border. There have been violent acts. They are sporadic. They aren't yet measurably increasing. We rate the senators' statement to Obama as Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	John Cornyn	None	None	None	2010-03-27T22:00:00	2010-03-17	['Mexico', 'Texas']
-pomt-12005	"Republicans want to restore #gunrights to felons"	mostly true	/new-york/statements/2017/sep/22/jose-serrano/are-republicans-trying-allow-convicted-felons-own-/	Rep. José Serrano, D-Bronx, said legislation he’s against would allow convicted felons to own guns. That’s not allowed under federal law for most people with a felony. Serrano said a proposed amendment could change that. "Now Republicans want to restore #gunrights to felons - something they lose after criminal conviction - CJS bills have prevented for 24 years," Serrano said in a tweet. Serrano was referring to a bill that allocates funds to the U.S. Departments of Justice, Commerce and other agencies. He explained his position when the amendment came up for a vote in the House. "I rise in strong opposition to this very misguided amendment," Serrano said. "This amendment would allow felons and other dangerous individuals to try to regain the ability to own guns by sending an application to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives." The amendment was agreed to by a voice vote so there’s no record of who voted which way. The bill it’s tied to has passed the House, but not the Senate. Democrats and Republicans are typically divided when it comes to gun control. But would a Republican amendment allow felons to buy guns? The amendment Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colorado, sponsored the amendment. The amendment would give the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives funding to review applications from people who want to own a gun but legally can’t under federal law. People who have served more than a year in prison are among that group. A felony conviction typically comes with a minimum prison sentence of one year. Anyone convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence charge or received a dishonorable discharge from the military is also not allowed to own a gun. The ATF has the power to restore gun rights to those people. Federal statute says the bureau may do so if they believe the applicant "will not be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety and that the granting of the relief would not be contrary to the public interest." But Congress has denied the bureau the funding for such a program. Congress since 1993 has said no funds given to the agency "shall be available to investigate or act upon applications for relief from Federal firearms disabilities." That’s the legal term for someone who is not allowed to own a gun. The amendment would allow the agency to dip into federal funds to consider those applications. What it means The amendment does not give people with criminal convictions free access to firearms. Each person would be evaluated individually by the ATF. There’s no guarantee that an applicant would be granted gun rights. If someone was convicted of a violent crime, for example, the agency may consider the person to be dangerous to public safety and deny the request. Other criminal convictions may be seen as a lesser threat to public safety. Someone convicted of embezzlement in the past may be judged differently than someone with a violent felony conviction. "Congressman Buck’s amendment allows the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to once again process petitions from citizens for the restoration of their Second Amendment rights," said Kyle Huwa, Buck’s spokesperson. "This petition process is already established under federal statute. The amendment makes no determination on the substance of the petitions." Our ruling Serrano said Republicans want to restore gun rights to felons. An amendment proposed by a Republican congressman would allow people who have been stripped of their gun rights by the government to ask for them back. That’s not limited to people with a felony and it’s not guaranteed they will be approved. Serrano’s statement is accurate but needs clarification. We rate it Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	José Serrano	None	None	None	2017-09-22T08:22:56	2017-09-12	['None']
-goop-02516	Beyonce, Jay-Z Fighting Over Where To Raise Kids?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/beyonce-raising-kids-los-angeles-living-la-jay-z-fight/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Beyonce, Jay-Z Fighting Over Where To Raise Kids?	1:40 pm, August 31, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-07652	"We now work the longest hours of any people around the world."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/mar/14/bernie-sanders/sen-bernie-sanders-says-americans-now-work-longest/	It was Friday, and frankly, it had been a long week. So when a Twitter follower asked us to check a claim from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, that Americans work longer hours than any other people in the world, we were inclined to agree. But as a March 10, 2011, column from the New York Times' David Brooks so eloquently pointed out, Americans often perceive themselves as better than they are. So we thought we'd better check. Sanders made his comment on C-SPAN's Washington Journal program on March 8, 2011, in response to a caller who said federal programs like welfare have taken away Americans' incentive to work. Sanders responded that while there are certainly people out there who exploit the system, "I think the number of those people is much overrated." "We are the hardest working people in the world," Sanders said. "A few years ago, we had the dubious distinction, I think, of surpassing the Japanese in terms of the number of hours our people worked. We now work the longest hours of any people around the world." We asked Sanders' office for backup and they forwarded us a press release from the International Labour Organization, a London-based United Nations agency that oversees international labor standards. The release ran under the headline, "Americans work longest hours among industrialized countries, Japanese second longest." According to the story, "US workers put in the longest hours on the job in industrialized nations, clocking up nearly 2,000 hours per capita in 1997, the equivalent of almost two working weeks more than their counterparts in Japan where annual hours worked have been gradually declining since 1980, according to a new statistical study of global labour trends published by the International Labour Office." This fact-check seemed like a slam dunk until we checked out the date of the press release: Sept. 6, 1999. And it was based on 1997 data. We contacted the International Labour Office for more recent statistics. They provided a spreadsheet of the latest available data, from 2008, which shows the U.S ranked eighth (out of 28) when it comes to the annual number of hours actually worked per person. Who worked longer? Topping the list was Greece, where people logged an average of 2,120 hours. Also working longer hours: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Iceland and Italy. The U.S., where people worked an average of 1,792 hours, did nudge out Japan, where people worked an average of 1771 hours. That has been consistently true for more than a decade. We also checked with the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a group of 32 large, industrialized democracies, which tracks these kinds of statistics as well. Their report showed a nearly identical number of hours worked by Americans in 2008, 1,796. But in the OECD report, which tracked more countries, the U.S. ranked 12th (out of 35). In addition to the ILO list of countries working more hours, the OECD listed Korea, the Russian Federation, Estonia and Israel. According to the OECD report, Americans worked about 32 more hours a year than the average for all OECD countries. And they worked slightly longer than workers in Japan. A spokesman in Sanders' office stressed the fact that Sanders was correct about the U.S. surpassing Japan in the number of hours worked. And Sanders is correct about that. But we were more interested in the idea that Americans now work longer hours than any other people in the world. The data shows Americans work longer hours than the average for industrialized nations. But the number of hours worked by Americans has been gradually declining (though only slightly) over the last decade. And according to the ILO, we no longer work the longest hours. In fact, that hasn't been true for over a decade. And according to OECD statistics, the U.S. hasn't even cracked the Top 10 in over a decade. There's another caveat. The lists don't include most developing nations. According to a 2003 ILO report, "In all developing Asian economies where data were available, people historically worked more than in industrialized economies. This is a typical sign for developing economies as they often compensate for the lack of technology and capital with people working longer hours." In other words, in addition to those countries listed earlier, there are many more developing countries where people work more hours than Americans. Sanders said "We now work the longest hours of any people around the world." That may have been true when compared to other industrialized nations in 1997. But it's not true now, and it's not true when you consider any country, as Sanders said. We rule his statement False.	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2011-03-14T11:27:44	2011-03-08	['None']
-pomt-14205	"Ted Cruz is mathematically out of winning the race."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/20/donald-trump/trump-largely-accurate-cruz-has-been-mathematicall/	Donald Trump said his landslide win in New York destroyed Ted Cruz’s chances of getting the GOP nomination through the primary process. With 60.5 percent of the votes in the Empire State, the Republican frontrunner is projected to nab 89 delegates, while Cruz picked up none. (Ohio Gov. John Kasich got three.) This means that it is impossible for Cruz to secure the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination on the first ballot, according to Trump. "Ted Cruz is mathematically out of winning the race," he tweeted April 20. "Now all he can do is be a spoiler, never a nice thing to do. I will beat Hillary!" Does Trump’s math stack up? The answer is more complicated than you’d expect. It boils down to how you interpret some state rules and whether or not you count unbound delegates. We explained the delegate process in-depth here, but here’s a brief overview. To win the Republican nomination, a candidate has to clinch the support of a majority of 2,472 delegates. Most, but not all, are obligated to vote for the candidate who won their congressional district’s or state’s nominating contest. But if no one gets to the 1,237 threshold on a first vote, many delegates are "released" to vote for whomever they want on second and third ballots. So Cruz (or Kasich or really anyone) does have a path forward in this sense. But Trump’s statement is about that first ballot. So far, 41 states and territories with a total of 1,798 delegates have already held primary or state conventions. Fifteen contests with 674 delegates are still up for grabs. We looked at estimates for how many delegates Cruz has won from major outlets like the Associated Press, the New York Times and 538.com (Fox News uses the AP’s counter) and two popular blogs that track delegate math. The figures reported range from 542 "hard" delegates (meaning they’re bound to Cruz on the first ballot) to 559 "soft" delegates (including those who aren’t bound but have said they’d vote for him). This means that Cruz would need at the very least 678 more to get the nomination, so 100 percent of the remaining delegates plus four more. And if we don’t count the unbound delegates from Pennsylvania (54) and West Virginia (three), he’d need 110 percent of the remaining bound delegates. Seems mathematically impossible, right? But here’s the catch: Cruz could fish for more supporters among the 1,798 delegates from states that have already held primaries. At least 45 of them will arrive at the Republican National Convention not committed to any candidate (three from Colorado, five from the Virgin Islands, 8 from Guam, one from American Samoa and 28 from North Dakota). "I suppose if every unpledged delegate broke for him, maybe," said Seth Masket, a political science professor at the University of Denver. Of course, winning 100 percent of the remaining delegates and retroactively recruiting more is a tall feat. Masket pointed out that it’s pretty unrealistic. And a handful of states that award delegates proportionally — for example, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington — make it near impossible, according to Josh Putnam, a government professor at the University of Georgia and founder of Frontloading HQ. "The key is that mathematically (Cruz) can't get there through the allocation process. He would have to lean on some large share of the small sliver of first-ballot unbound delegates," Putnam said. For the record, not even Cruz himself thinks he'll get to 1,237. "We are headed to a contested convention. At this point, nobody is getting 1,237," Cruz told Philadelphia radio host Chris Stigall on April 20. "Donald is going to talk all the time about other folks not getting to 1,237. He's not getting there, either." Our ruling Trump said, "Ted Cruz is mathematically out of winning the race." Cruz would need at the very least 678 more delegates to win the race. It’s impossible for him to reach that number in the remaining primaries, given that there are just 674 delegates left to win. However, he could conceivably find more supporters in the states who’ve already held primaries, given that a few dozen are thus far uncommitted. Trump’s statement is largely accurate but needs additional information. We rate it Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/614c5bc7-e903-4c05-9fc7-352f789fed99	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-04-20T16:28:39	2016-04-20	['Ted_Cruz']
-afck-00169	“A total of 173 inappropriate [schools] have been eradicated since 2011.”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/facts-alternative-facts-zumas-10th-state-nation-address-checked/	None	None	None	None	None	Facts or alternative facts? Zuma’s 10th State of the Nation Address checked	2017-02-10 07:12	None	['None']
-pomt-14833	The New York Police Department used to have "surveillance going on in and around mosques in New York City. ... Our mayor totally cut that out."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/20/donald-trump/trump-says-nypd-used-spy-mosques/	Following the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed more than 120 this weekend, 2016 presidential candidates are debating how to prevent another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Republican front-runner Donald Trump, in an interview for MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Nov. 16, 2015, said he would consider surveillance of mosques as a protective measure against radical Islam -- an idea similar to that recently proposed by French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve. "You’re going to have to watch and study the mosques, because a lot of talk is going on at the mosques," Trump said. "In the old days, meaning a while ago, we had great surveillance going on in and around mosques in New York City. And I understand our mayor totally cut that out... I’m not sure it’s a fact." Well, the Donald’s sources have part of the story -- the New York Police Department used to have a squad dedicated to spying on Muslim communities, and the team was disbanded in 2014. Other aspects of the story, however, aren't so clear. Mapping out Muslims In 2003, the CIA helped the New York Police Department create a squad dedicated to surveilling Muslim communities, called the Demographics Unit, as part of broad policy changes following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Demographics Unit typically consisted of a dozen members, and it focused on identifying places where potential terrorists might be able to blend in with the rest of society. The police essentially mapped out Muslim communities inside and outside the city, detailing where people in traditional Islamic clothes ate, worshipped, shopped and more. According to the New York Times, "plainclothes detectives looked for ‘hot spots’ of radicalization that might give the police an early warning about terrorist plots." The result of the surveillance operations: a rift between the Muslim community and law enforcement, two ongoing federal lawsuits and a failure to generate any terror cases. The Demographics Unit wasn’t the only Muslim-focused surveillance effort in New York. Informants for the NYPD also collected the personal information of members of Muslim student groups on college campuses. Analysts also kept tabs on influential Muslim figures and scholars through college websites and email groups. Police also investigated mosques in the city and labeled certain locations as "terrorism enterprises," which supposedly allowed the police to collect license plate numbers in parking lots, video worshippers and secretly record sermons. None of this surveillance ever led to charges that those mosques or Islamic organizations were related to terrorism. Shutting it down The program was kept under wraps until the Associated Press published an investigation into the police department’s intelligence operations in 2011. Following the AP’s report, John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, said he was "aware of things that NYPD has been doing, in an exceptionally good way, to protect the citizens of New York City on a daily basis." The NYPD received enormous backlash from civil rights groups over the new details on the Demographics Unit, but the surveillance program remained active until January 2014, when newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio took office and appointed William J. Bratton as police commissioner. In April 2014, members of the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC), a New York-based coalition, met with Bratton and other police officials to discuss shutting down the Demographics Unit. The surveillance squad was officially disbanded the next week. "The meeting resulted from a request by police reform and civil rights advocates, and the participants used the opportunity to articulate how the NYPD’s dragnet has harmed American Muslim communities and why it must come to an end," according to a MACLC press release. The move to shut down the Demographics Unit could have been political. But whether or not de Blasio himself "totally cut out" the surveillance program is debatable. According to the New York Times, the move was viewed as a sign that the new police commissioner was distancing himself from the sometimes controversial post-Sept. 11 intelligence practices under former mayor Michael Bloomberg. That’s not to suggest de Blasio wasn’t involved in the discussions surrounding the spying program. While running for mayor in 2012, de Blasio said he believed the surveillance program was legal and was created in good faith to protect New Yorkers. When the program was shuttered in 2014, de Blasio seemed to flip on the issue. "Our administration has promised the people of New York a police force that keeps our city safe, but that is also respectful and fair," de Blasio said in a press release. "This reform is a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve, so that our cops and our citizens can help one another go after the real bad guys." Shutting down the Demographics Unit didn’t necessarily mean the NYPD stopped keeping tabs on the Islamic community. The New York Times reported that after the surveillance program was disbanded, the police continued to recruit Muslims to be informants for the department. While police officials said the interviews to recruit informants were voluntary, some of the Muslims who were probed said they were "shaken." One person whom police tried to recruit told the New York Times that an officer told him, "You just go to the mosque and the cafe and just say to us if somebody is talking about anything, anything suspicious." We should note that it is unclear if or how the New York Police Department is still surveilling Muslims, especially after new terrorist threats against New York City. Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the police have not shuttered its entire surveillance program related to Muslims. "The NYPD has not, to my knowledge, stopped spying on mosques," Patel said. De Blasio has continued to defend the Demographics Unit amidst renewed public attention and federal lawsuits. While a federal judge in New Jersey dismissed a lawsuit over the surveillance last year, a U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia revived the case in October. Finally, Trump said the surveillance program was "great," but not everyone feels that way. Critics of the program have argued that the Demographics Unit only further alienated the Muslim community following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The Demographics Unit created psychological warfare in our community," Linda Sarsour, a member of the Arab American Association of New York, told the New York Times. "Those documents, they showed where we live. That’s the cafe where I eat. That’s where I pray. That’s where I buy my groceries. They were able to see their entire lives on those maps. And it completely messed with the psyche of the community." When we reached out to the mayor’s office, de Blasio praised the NYPD’s anti-terrorism efforts but didn’t directly address the now-shuttered Demographics Unit. "First and foremost, we always will abide by the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits discrimination against religions," de Blasio wrote in a statement. "Mosques don't commit acts of terrorism. People do." Our ruling Trump said the New York Police Department used to conduct "surveillance in and around mosques in New York City. Our mayor totally cut that out." While Trump doesn’t paint the full picture, there is evidence that supports his point: the New York Police Department used to spy on Muslims. The program actually went further than just surveilling mosques -- detectives mapped out entire Muslim communities, tracked Muslims’ daily activities, investigated Muslim college students and more. The project was shut down, but it was the police commissioner, not the mayor, who officially closed the program. The commissioner is the mayor’s appointee and in all likelihood acted with the mayor’s approval. We can’t say with certainty what kind of surveillance the police department conducts now. But Trump is right that a high-profile program was shuttered. We rate this statement Half True.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-11-20T14:17:32	2015-11-16	['New_York_City', 'New_York_City_Police_Department']
-goop-00353	Kanye West Did Ask Caitlyn Jenner “Girlfriend” Sophia Hutchins To Become Yeezy Model, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kanye-west-caitlyn-jenner-sophia-hutchins-yeezy-model-not-true/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kanye West Did NOT Ask Caitlyn Jenner “Girlfriend” Sophia Hutchins To Become Yeezy Model, Despite Claim	10:56 am, August 31, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-01386	Vitamin-C and Shrimp are a poisonous combination	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/vitaminshrimp/	None	food	None	None	None	Vitamin-C and Shrimp are a poisonous combination	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-02125	The Pell bridge "is a tourism bridge essentially and not a commuter bridge."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2014/may/11/nicholas-mattiello/rhode-island-house-speaker-nicholas-mattiello-says/	The debate continues over whether there should be a toll on the new Sakonnet River Bridge, one of three bridges motorists can take to get to Newport, R.I. A temporary 10-cent toll on the bridge was supposed to be replaced May 16 with new rates of up to $3.75 per crossing. But that change was put on hold, as legislators debate whether to eliminate the toll entirely and find another way to pay for maintaining the bridge. During an April 6, 2014, appearance on WLNE-Channel 6’s "On the Record With Buddy Cianci," Nicholas Mattiello, Rhode Island's new speaker of the House, was asked about the contentious issue. He said people objecting to a toll on the Sakonnet "have a point. There would be the one bridge in the state other than the Pell Bridge, which is a tourism bridge essentially and not a commuter bridge (with a toll). There's a big difference between the two. So that would be the only commuter bridge in the state that would be tolled." On that same day, WPRI-TV aired an interview with Mattiello in which he again characterized the Pell Bridge, which connects Jamestown to Newport, as "a tourism bridge." We'll let others debate the merits of tolling a bridge depending on whether residents or visitors use it. But, given all the Rhode Island license plates we see on the Pell Bridge, we wondered whether it was accurate to call it a tourism bridge. There's no formal definition of a tourism bridge. But in our mind, it’s one that is primarily used by tourists. We contacted Mattiello's office to ask whether he had any data to distinguish the two. His spokesman, Larry Berman, said Mattiello "considers the Pell Bridge a 'tourist bridge' or a 'destination bridge' because Newport is a world-renowned attraction for tourists," including Rhode Islanders. In 2013, the monthly vehicle count on the Pell Bridge went from 537,000 in February to 722,000 in August, the peak of the tourist season, Berman said. Yet even if those extra 185,000 trips in August were all tourists, that means tourists made up only 26 percent of the traffic during the peak visitor season. That doesn't exactly make it a tourist bridge. But there are other complicating factors. When we asked the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority to weigh in on the question, David Darlington, who was chairman at the time but has recently stepped down for health reasons, said its traffic consulting firm was estimating that "on an annual basis 24 hours per day 7 days per week, only 20 percent of the trips on the Pell Bridge would be considered tourists." That's because many of the people traveling the bridge in the summer aren't tourists, but seasonal workers commuting to restaurants, hotels and shops in Newport. In addition, road traffic tends to go up on all roads in the summer, not just those feeding tourist spots. Darlington said a comparable average for Sakonnet would be 18 percent. In addition, when a bridge is used primarily by tourists, fewer drivers tend to have an E-ZPass electronic toll device, said Richard Gobeille, national toll and finance unit manager, at Jacobs Engineering Group, the authority's traffic consultant. "The Pell Bridge is one of the highest in the country" when it comes to its frequency of E-ZPass customers, he said. But we wanted to look at the numbers ourselves. We were able to examine monthly crossing figures in several different ways using data that included how many trips involved in-state and out-of-state E-ZPasses. Every way we ran the numbers, we couldn't prove Mattiello right. For example, even if you took the biggest tourism month of the year and assumed every non-E-ZPass user, every out-of-state E-ZPass user and every Rhode Island E-ZPass user who made fewer than eight trips across the bridge that month was a tourist, tourists trips made up a minority of the vehicle crossings. If you just look at E-ZPass users, Rhode Islanders made nearly 700,000 crossings that month compared with 164,000 trips by out-of-state users. Our ruling House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello said the Pell Bridge "is a tourism bridge essentially and not a commuter bridge." But the people who oversee the bridge say only 20 percent of the traffic is from tourists. And our own analysis of the numbers suggests that the majority -- and by some estimates, the vast majority -- of users aren't crossing as tourists. We rate the claim as False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Nicholas Mattiello	None	None	None	2014-05-11T00:01:00	2014-04-06	['None']
-tron-02057	Stop To Salute-a Memorial Day Tribute written by a U.S. Army Captain	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/stoptosalute/	None	inspirational	None	None	None	Stop To Salute-a Memorial Day Tribute written by a U.S. Army Captain	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-01812	Amnesiac Wakes From Coma Speaking Only Ancient Hebrew	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/amnesiac-wakes-from-coma-speaking-only-ancient-hebrew/	None	health-medical	None	None	None	Amnesiac Wakes From Coma Speaking Only Ancient Hebrew	Sep 21, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-04545	President Obama is giving food stamp recipients a bonus $1,000 per month for three months.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/president-obama-is-giving-1000-per-month-to-food-stamp-recipients/	None	Politicians	None	Kim LaCapria	None	President Obama is Giving $1,000 per Month to Food Stamp Recipients	27 June 2016	None	['Barack_Obama']
-tron-00434	Giant hogs killed by hunters in Georgia	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hogzilla/	None	animals	None	None	None	Giant hogs killed by hunters in Georgia	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-vogo-00390	Statement: Chula Vista has the fewest police officers per capita in San Diego County, Chula Vista Taxpayers Association president Larry Breitfelder told Channel 10 for a May 3 story about laying off police officers.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-chula-vistas-dwindling-police-ranks/	Analysis: Just five years ago, police officers were flocking to Chula Vista from cash-strapped cities like San Diego that couldn’t afford better pay or benefits. The housing boom fueled Chula Vista’s coffers while the pension crisis placed more pressure on San Diego’s.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Chula Vista's Dwindling Police Ranks	May 10, 2011	None	['San_Diego_County,_California', 'Chula_Vista,_California']
-abbc-00202	The claim: Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane says Australia is set to become the world's second largest or largest exporter of LNG.	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-14/macfarlane-lng-exports/5014018	The claim: Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane says Australia is set to become the world's second largest or largest exporter of LNG.	['oil-and-gas', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia']	None	None	['oil-and-gas', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia']	Can Australia become the world's leading LNG exporter?	Mon 21 Oct 2013, 3:07am	None	['Ian_Macfarlane_(economist)', 'Australia']
-snes-04346	Hillary Clinton said in 2000 that she believed marriage was "always between a man and a woman."	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-marriage-is-always-between-a-man-and-a-woman/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Hillary Clinton: ‘Marriage Is Always Between a Man and a Woman’	30 July 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00632	A meme reproduces Donald Trump's explanation of why Abraham Lincoln succeeded as a president.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-lincoln-success/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Donald Trump Explains Why Lincoln Succeeded	8 May 2018	None	['Abraham_Lincoln', 'Donald_Trump']
-vees-00375	At the closing ceremony of the 26th Mindanao Business Conference in Cagayan De Oro on Sept. 9, Duterte said he would “like to pursue the talks” with Moro liberation forces in Mindanao.	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-duterte-gets-bangsamoro-peace-process	Contrary to Duterte’s claim, “talks” between the Philippine government and both the MILF and the MNLF have already been concluded.	None	None	None	Duterte,Bangsamoro	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte gets Bangsamoro peace process wrong	September 12, 2017	None	['Cagayan_de_Oro', 'Mindanao']
-tron-00322	Starbucks makes rescue workers buy water for survivors of the WTC collapse	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/starbucks/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Starbucks makes rescue workers buy water for survivors of the WTC collapse	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-05589	"Obama tells Russia that he'll turn over America's defense system to them if re-elected."	pants on fire!	/georgia/statements/2012/apr/02/eric-johnson/interpretation-obama-gaffe-needs-better-defense/	President Barack Obama tried to make fun of his open-mic gaffe with his Russian counterpart during a recent meeting. But some critics thought there was nothing to laugh about. They quickly accused Obama of behind-the-scenes deal-making with the Russians. The Washington-based news organization Politico carried an article about conservatives concerned about what Obama has in mind when he asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for "space" until his presumed re-election in November, when Obama would have "more flexibility" on objections to America’s missile-defense plan. Obama was unaware the microphone between the two men was still on. "This is my last election," Obama said. "After my election, I have more flexibility." Both men nodded. Medvedev said he would pass along Obama’s message to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who will become Russia’s president in May. While some wondered what Obama was talking about, former Georgia state Sen. Eric Johnson, now a lobbyist at the state Capitol, made it clear what Obama’s plans were in a Twitter post. "Obama tells Russia that he’ll turn over America’s defense system to them if re-elected," Johnson wrote a day after the comments were reported. "Was he bowing when he did this? Unbelievable!" This was news to us. There have been no news reports that Obama wants to turn over the nation’s defense system to its one-time Cold War foe. Johnson is well-known in Georgia politics. The Savannah Republican ran for governor in 2010. He was once the Georgia Senate pro tem and remains involved in politics. Johnson maintained his position with us, saying Obama was "up to something" that could hurt U.S. allies such as South Korea if there is no missile defense system and that nation is attacked by its Communist neighbor, North Korea. "I think I heard the same thing South Korea heard, that [Obama] is going to throw us under the bus," Johnson told PolitiFact Georgia. The U.S. Defense Department has a Missile Defense Agency that is conducting research and developing technology to counter ballistic missiles of all ranges that may threaten the nation or its interests. The United States has cooperative programs on missile defense with a number of allies, including Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland and the United Kingdom, according to the MDA website. Here’s how Bloomberg News described the missile system: "In 2007, the U.S. started preparations for a missile defense system -- ostensibly against an Iranian attack -- with its front legs in Europe. The forward radar for the system was to be in the Czech Republic, and Poland would host the missiles that would shoot down any long-range ballistic missiles Iran might let fly. Russia, however, saw the shield as a naked Cold War power play by the U.S. and was mad as hell." A day after his comments to the Russian leader, Obama said he’s committed to reducing nuclear stockpiles. A national security adviser said the White House will continue to implement the missile-defense system. "The United States is committed to implementing our missile-defense system, which we’ve repeatedly said is not aimed at Russia," Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said in a statement, The Washington Post reported. "The two presidents agreed it was best for technical experts to spend time determining their respective positions and provide space on missile-defense cooperation going forward." Vice President Joe Biden also didn't signal that the Obama administration is planning to turn over America’s missile defense system, saying Sunday on Face The Nation that it also helps Israel. Johnson is not buying the White House line. "I think there’s evidence of [Obama] doing everything to weaken America abroad," he said. Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney called Obama’s comments "alarming." Romney said he wanted details about what the two leaders were discussing. Johnson, however, took the rhetoric several steps further. His claim seems way off base from anything we’ve seen and read. Johnson said he likes PolitiFact Georgia’s fact-checking. But he vowed to to stick with his interpretation of Obama’s off-script moment. PolitiFact Georgia didn’t see or hear anything about Obama turning over the nation’s missile defense system. We say "nyet" to Johnson’s statement. This one gets our lowest rating, Pants On Fire.	None	Eric Johnson	None	None	None	2012-04-02T06:00:00	2012-03-26	['Russia', 'United_States', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-10969	"The three wealthiest people" own "more wealth than the bottom half of the American people."	true	/wisconsin/statements/2018/jul/19/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-bill-gates-jeff-bezos-warren-buffet/	Do three Americans really have more wealth than half the country? It’s a claim made by the runner-up for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president, Bernie Sanders. Campaigning on July 14, 2018 for U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Sanders told a crowd in Eau Claire: "The three wealthiest people" own "more wealth than the bottom half of the American people." The U.S. senator, an independent from Vermont, previously made the claim on Facebook and repeated it three days after his Wisconsin appearance in a column in USA Today. What we found is the wealth lead enjoyed by the three billionaires is even larger than what Sanders said. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter: @PolitiFactWisc. A study Before we dig in, an important note about the nation’s wealth gap: Many Americans make a good income, have some savings and investments, and own a nice home; they also have debt, for a mortgage, credit cards and other bills. The result is, even some people with relatively healthy incomes, as well as many poorer people, have a negative net worth. To back Sanders’ claim, his campaign pointed us to a November 2017 news article in Forbes. The business magazine reported on a study published that month by the Institute for Policy Studies, which the article described as a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. The study, which advocates for reducing wealth inequality, also gained news coverage from USA Today and The Guardian. And its authors wrote opinion articles about it for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times. The numbers The study used data from Forbes’ 2017 ranking of the 400 richest Americans; and data for the rest of the country from the 2016 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, which the study says has become widely accepted as the most comprehensive government dataset documenting household wealth. PolitiFact has also relied on this Fed survey in our wealth fact checks. The first finding the study reported was this: The three wealthiest people in the United States now own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 160 million people. Those individuals and their source of wealth are, according to the study: 1. Bill Gates, Microsoft: $89 billion 2. Jeff Bezos, Amazon: $81.5 billion 3. Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway: $78 billion That’s a total of $248.5 billion. The wealth of the bottom 160 million was $245 billion, the Institute for Policy Studies' Josh Hoxie told us. That’s a gap of $3.5 billion. Hoxie, a former a aide to Sanders, also pointed out that the wealth of the three billionaires has ballooned to $330 billion, according to Forbes’ latest estimate. We don’t have an updated estimate for the bottom 160 million American, as the Fed survey is done only once every three years. But Hoxie said it’s nearly impossible that the wealth of Americans at the bottom has grown nearly as much as that of the three billionaires. For the 160 million people at the bottom of the scale, by the way, the study used the net worth figure reported by the Fed and then subtracted automobiles and other "durable goods" such as electronics, furniture, and household appliances, from that figure. Subtracting durable goods from net worth "offers us a more accurate depiction of household wealth as these items are not easily sellable and neither appreciate nor hold constant their value," the study says. Other viewpoints More fact checks on wealth inequality Michael Moore, in 2011: "Just 400 Americans -- 400 -- have more wealth than half of all Americans combined." True. One Wisconsin Now, in 2013: "The Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, controls a fortune equal to the wealth of the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined." True. Starbucks, in 2015: "White people control almost 90 percent of the nation's wealth." True. The study’s methodology is sound and its conclusion cited by Sanders is accurate, according to Abdur Chowdhury, an emeritus economics professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, and economics professor Emmanuel Saez, director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California, Berkeley. As an aside, we’ll note that Saez also said Sanders’ claim is "somewhat meaningless." "The meaningful thing to say," Saez told us, "is the bottom half of the U.S. families owns essentially no wealth on net, because debts cancel out whatever small assets they may have, on average." Our rating Sanders says: "The three wealthiest people" own "more wealth than the bottom half of the American people." The wealth of Gates, Bezos and Buffett exceeded that of the 160 million at the bottom of the scale, according to a 2017 study. And more recent estimates indicate the wealth of the three has since grown dramatically, widening the gap even more. We rate Sanders’ statement True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2018-07-19T06:00:00	2018-07-14	['United_States']
-pomt-09981	In Iraq, "civilian deaths, incidents of bombings, etc., remain very low relative to what was going on last year."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/apr/30/barack-obama/obama-correct-civilian-deaths-and-bombings-are-dow/	In a news conference on April 29, 2009, President Barack Obama was asked if recent violence in Iraq would affect his strategy or timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops. Earlier in day, three car bombs killed at least 51 people in markets in Baghdad. Obama responded by saying the recent violence should be seen in context. "Well, first of all, I think it's important to note that although you've seen some spectacular bombings in Iraq that are a legitimate cause of concern, civilian deaths, incidents of bombings, et cetera, remain very low relative to what was going on last year, for example," Obama said. "And so you haven't seen the kinds of huge spikes that you were seeing for a time. The political system is holding and functioning in Iraq." We checked with the Defense Department and other sources to see if Obama was correct about declining rates of civilian deaths and bombings. The short answer is that he is. The number of civilian deaths and bombings in Iraq peaked during 2007, and has steadily decreased since a surge of forces was approved by President George W. Bush. Obama specifically said civilian deaths and bombings have decreased "relative to what was going on last year." So we compared recent numbers with early 2008. According to a report from the Defense Department based on information from coalition forces and the Iraqi government, civilian deaths in Iraq ranged from 600 in January 2008 up to 950 in April. The number of civilian deaths in early 2009 have been markedly lower: 270 in January, 230 in February and 260 in March. That's dramatically lower than late 2006 and early 2007, when civilian deaths were about 3,500 a month. As for bombings, those too hit a peak in early 2007, with about 130 in February of that year. By early 2008, they were down to 40 to 60 explosions per month. The recent report to Congress noted that current levels of bombings were lower than at any time since the spring of 2004, but added that al-Qaida "retains the intent and capability to carry out spectacular attacks." Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a spokesman for the Defense Department, told PolitiFact that in addition to fewer bombings, there has been a shift in targets. At the height of violence in years past, he said, most bombings were aimed at U.S. military and Iraq military and security forces. Recent attacks have targeted mosques, markets and other "soft targets" in an attempt to incite sectarian violence. That suggests opposition resources are more limited than in the past, Ryder said. The nonpartisan Brookings Institution also puts out something called the Iraq Index that keeps monthly tabs on security and reconstruction in Iraq. The detailed reports track the number of multiple-fatality bombings (more than a third of them from suicide bombings), as well as the number of people killed and wounded in those bombings. Both also back up Obama's contention. We note that Brookings bases much of its data on information from the U.S. government, but also gets information from press reports and other sources. So information from coalition forces in Iraq, the Iraqi government and press reports all back up Obama's statement. We rule it True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2009-04-30T17:32:22	2009-04-29	['Iraq']
-tron-00983	Forward an mail for Victoria’s Secret and get a gift certificate	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/victoriassecret/	None	computers	None	None	None	Forward an mail for Victoria’s Secret and get a gift certificate	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-05106	"Obamacare adds trillions to our deficits and to our national debt."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/28/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-obamacare-adds-trillions-deficit/	How is it that a law can raise taxes and cut spending, but also add trillions to the deficit? That was Mitt Romney’s claim after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the core of the health care law on June 28, 2012. "Obamacare raises taxes on the American people by approximately $500 billion. Obamacare cuts Medicare -- cuts Medicare by approximately $500 billion," Romney said. "And even with those cuts and tax increases, Obamacare adds trillions to our deficits and to our national debt, and pushes those obligations on to coming generations." Here, we’re fact-checking Romney’s claim that "Obamacare adds trillions to our deficits and to our national debt." It’s a topic we’ve researched before. We asked the Romney campaign for their evidence for this statement, but we didn’t hear back. For claims about laws that are not yet fully enacted, our go-to source is the Congressional Budget Office. It’s a nonpartisan, widely respected agency with an expert staff that generates projections and reports about how proposed laws affect the federal budget. The Congressional Budget Office is not always right in its projections. In recent years, for example, it overestimated how much it would cost to cover prescription drugs for seniors in Medicare. The program actually came in under projections. But for claims about deficits, we consider the Congressional Budget Office, often called the CBO, to be the standard by which we fact-check claims. The CBO said this about the health care law back in 2010: It lowers the deficit, by about $124 billion over 10 years. And in 2011, when Republicans offered a bill to repeal the health care law, the CBO said that increased the deficit, by about $210 billion over 10 years. Now, is the CBO infallible? Certainly not. And good questions have been raised about some of the CBO’s methods in accounting for the health care law’s effects. We reported on some those concerns in great detail in a fact-check of statement from U.S. Rep Paul Ryan, R-Wisc. He said the law was "accelerating our country toward bankruptcy." We rated that Mostly False. The CBO itself acknowledges the uncertainty surrounding its estimates. Its reports regularly warn that uncertainty increases as it makes projections farther into the future. And, the Supreme Court ruling may change certain elements of the health care law’s costs, especially as it affects Medicaid spending. Medicaid is the joint federal-state health insurance program for the very poor. A statement on the CBO website on the day of the ruling said, "CBO is in the process of reviewing the Supreme Court’s decision related to the Affordable Care Act to assess the effect on CBO’s projections of federal spending and revenue under current law. We expect that this assessment will probably take some time." Still, we find no factual basis for Romney’s claim that the law "adds trillions to our deficits and to our national debt." We rate his statement False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-06-28T17:25:55	2012-06-28	['None']
-pomt-15300	Says John McCain "has done nothing to help the vets."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/21/donald-trump/after-not-war-hero-remark-donald-trump-says-john-m/	Facing a continuing maelstrom over his remark that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is "not a war hero," billionaire businessman and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to shift the focus from McCain’s service record to his track record. McCain may talk a lot about supporting American troops, Trump insisted on ABC’s This Week, but he doesn’t walk the walk. "I'm very disappointed in John McCain, because the vets are horribly treated in this country. I'm fighting for the vets. I've done a lot for the vets," Trump said on July 19. "He's done nothing to help the vets. And I will tell you, they are living in hell." He echoed the point that same day in an editorial published in USA Today. Trump wrote: "Thanks to McCain and his Senate colleague Bernie Sanders, their legislation to cover up the VA scandal, in which 1,000+ veterans died waiting for medical care, made sure no one has been punished, charged, jailed, fined or held responsible. McCain has abandoned our veterans. I will fight for them." Is Trump correct that that McCain -- a Vietnam prisoner of war and current chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee -- hasn’t helped his fellow veterans? The Trump campaign never got back to us, but McCain’s office did, and, not surprisingly, they begged to differ. They provided a wide variety of examples of things McCain has done for veterans during his nearly three-decade congressional career. Here are a few of the most recent ones: • Military families. In June 2015, McCain co-sponsored an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016 to cover the travel costs for the family of troops killed in overseas missions. The amendment was adopted by the Senate by unanimous consent. • Veterans health. McCain introduced the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act in early 2015 to increase access to mental health support for veterans. It has become law. • Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2014, McCain -- along with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a Democratic presidential candidate -- led efforts to address the scandal over secret waiting lists at VA hospitals by pushing the The Veterans’ Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act all the way to enactment. In 2015, McCain co-sponsored a bill to increase accountability at the department. • Non-legislative support. McCain’s office employs five caseworkers solely dedicated to helping veterans who are running into problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs. A spokeswoman told us McCain’s office has handled more than 2,000 veterans-related cases in 2015 alone. We also reached out to veterans groups. Even those who have taken issue with McCain’s record on veterans disagreed with Trump that McCain has "done nothing" for vets. Decorated veteran Brandon Friedman, a former Obama administration official and vice chairman of the progressive VoteVets PAC, detailed McCain’s history of failing veterans in 2008, but rejected Trump’s characterization. " ‘Nothing’ is a strong word," Friedman told us. "He hasn't been great on veterans issues. That being said … the senator doesn't deserve that." Groups that gave McCain failing grades during his 2008 White House bid agreed with Friedman. Though McCain voted with Disabled Veterans of America about 20 percent of the time in 2008, the group praised McCain in 2014 "for putting partisan politics aside to quickly pass bipartisan legislation in response to the current VA health care crisis." Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America also gave McCain a grade of D in 2010, but pointed to a specific example of McCain’s recent support. "I have had the honor of working with Sen. McCain on key veterans legislation, including the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act," CEO Paul Rieckhoff wrote in the New York Daily News. Other groups also rushed to McCain’s defense. "Donald Trump also revealed that he has no idea what he is talking about with regards to reforming and fixing the VA. If he did, he would have known that Senator McCain has been a leader in fighting to give veterans more health care choices and to hold the VA accountable for its failures," Concerned Veterans for America wrote in statement Navy Vice Adm. Norb Ryan, president of the Military Officers Association of America, said in a press release that McCain has a been a "champion" for troops and veterans, arguing that no one has visited American troops more than McCain. "We can disagree with some of Sen. McCain’s positions at times, but we can never say he has abandoned the troops," Ryan wrote on July 20. "We should acknowledge the facts: John McCain cares deeply about our men and women in uniform, and through his actions, he has made a real difference for our troops. Mr. Trump owes Sen. McCain and all veterans an apology." Our ruling Trump said that McCain "has done nothing to help the vets." While many veterans’ groups have had their differences with McCain over the years over specific legislation and his general approach to veterans’ issues, that’s not the same as saying he’s done "nothing" for veterans. In fact, just within the past two years, McCain has sponsored and helped enact several major provisions to help veterans. He also devotes a significant portion of his office staff to offer veterans on casework. We rate Trump’s claim False.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-07-21T14:33:31	2015-07-19	['None']
-pomt-05952	Says Mitt Romney "was one of the first national Republican leaders to endorse" Marco Rubio.	half-true	/florida/statements/2012/jan/25/marco-rubio/was-mitt-romney-one-first-endorse-marco-rubio/	The battle for Hispanic voters in the Republican primary is turning ugly, and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio is trying to tamp down some of the rancor. Rubio stepped in when Newt Gingrich went so far as to compare Republican rival Mitt Romney with -- prepare yourselves! -- Charlie Crist. "We discovered last night that Mitt Romney has picked up Charlie Crist's campaign people," said Gingrich at a campaign stop in St. Petersburg on Jan. 24, 2012. "That sort of tells you everything you needed to know about this contest." Gingrich’s mention of Crist drew yelps and boos from the crowd at the Tick Tock Restaurant. Florida Republicans remember well that Crist left the party in 2010 to run as an independent for the U.S. Senate. The race between Gingrich and Romney has been inflamed by Spanish-language radio ads, web ads on the Drudge Report website and news reports on the conservative website Newsmax that said Romney was using Crist’s former campaign staff. Rubio was concerned enough about the attacks that he released a statement the same day. (Rubio has said he will not endorse in the race.) "Mitt Romney is no Charlie Crist," Rubio said. "Romney is a conservative, and he was one of the first national Republican leaders to endorse me. He came to Florida, campaigned hard for me and made a real difference in my race." Rubio’s comments caught our attention, because our memory was that Romney endorsed relatively late in the race for U.S. Senate. We decided to dig into the archives to see if Romney was in fact "one of the first national Republican leaders" to endorse Rubio. To understand the full web of endorsements at work here, we’ll go back to the Republican presidential primary of 2008. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was then challenging U.S. Sen. John McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for the nomination. In that race, Rubio endorsed Huckabee relatively early, in 2007. (Rubio was then speaker of the Florida House.) Crist, meanwhile, waited until just before the Florida primary in early 2008 to endorse McCain. McCain beat Romney in Florida and went on to win the nomination. In 2009, Rubio was widely considered a long-shot against Crist for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. Party leadership got behind Crist early that year, while Rubio secured early endorsements from Huckabee and U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., a tea party favorite. Rubio built up his campaign through 2009. By spring of 2010, Rubio gained endorsements from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. In March 2010, Romney was on book tour in Florida and was asked regularly about endorsing in the Crist-Rubio race. Romney said several times that he was undecided and generally didn’t endorse in primaries. By April, though, Crist’s campaign was in serious trouble. Polls showed he would likely lose. Crist further angered Republicans with a veto of a bill limiting teachers tenure on April 15. The news broke the next day that Romney was endorsing Rubio, and the official endorsement came April 19. When he made his endorsement, Romney was certain enough of Rubio’s position in the primary that he publicly urged Crist to stay in the Republican Party and accept a loss. Rubio went on to a decisive victory over Crist and Democrat Kendrick Meek. We contacted representatives for both Romney and Rubio about this fact-check. Rubio’s staff said his comments spoke for themselves. The Romney campaign sent us the following statement: "Sen. Marco Rubio is an outstanding advocate for fiscal responsibility and a principled voice for conservative values in the United States Senate. Gov. Romney was proud to support Senator Rubio in 2010 and honored to have campaigned with him across Florida." Our ruling Rubio said that Romney was "one of the first national Republican leaders to endorse me." Romney did endorse Rubio before Crist dropped out of the primary in 2010. But it was clear at the time that Rubio would have thumped Crist in a primary if Crist hadn’t dropped out. The main point of Rubio’s comments was to lower the temperature in the Republican race. But it bears noting that Romney’s endorsement of Rubio was something less than a pioneering stand. We rate Rubio’s statement Half True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2012-01-25T18:06:12	2012-01-24	['Marco_Rubio', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-vees-00157	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Old photos, claims with no basis used in story vs clergy	false	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-old-photos-claims-no-basis-used-false	None	None	None	None	false news	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Old photos, claims with no basis used in FALSE story vs clergy	June 26, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01218	Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart Going On Secret Dates?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/robert-pattinson-kristen-stewart-secret-dates-not-true/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart Going On Secret Dates?	5:59 pm, April 9, 2018	None	['None']
-pose-00666	"Consider taking all these commemorative moments and special honors, and handle them during special orders and one-minute speeches... With all the challenges facing our nation, it is absurd that Congress spends so much time on naming post offices, congratulating sports teams, and celebrating the birthdays of historical figures. Now, I know the drill: members get good press opportunities back home and leaders get cover while stalling on the people’s priorities. But often these resolutions are poorly drafted, or duplicative of previously considered bills. And under both parties they’ve received little or no oversight. It’s my view that we should consider taking all these commemorative moments and special honors, and handle them during special orders and one-minute speeches"	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/gop-pledge-o-meter/promise/696/handle-commemorative-moments-and-special-honors-du/	None	gop-pledge-o-meter	John Boehner	None	None	Handle commemorative moments and special honors during special orders and one-minute speeches	2010-12-22T09:57:30	None	['United_States_Congress']
-afck-00312	“The percentage of persons aged 20 years and above with no formal education or highest level of education less than Grade 7 within each gender group decreased from 19.3% to 16.2%.”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/has-president-jacob-zumas-government-done-a-good-job/	None	None	None	None	None	Has President Jacob Zuma’s government done ‘a good job’?	2015-03-23 07:37	None	['None']
-pomt-09788	Families are paying $900, on average, "in higher premiums because of uncompensated care."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/20/barack-obama/uninsured-cost-shifting-debated-experts/	President Barack Obama went on the Sunday news shows to make the case for health reform. This Week host George Stephanopolous questioned Obama on his support for an individual mandate, which requires everyone who can find affordable coverage to purchase health insurance. Obama defended the matter as a fairness issue to people who now have coverage. "Here's what's happening," Obama said. "You and I are both paying 900 bucks on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now, what I've said is that, if you can't afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn't be punished for that. That's just piling on. "If, on the other hand, we're giving tax credits, we've set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool. We've driven down the costs, we've done everything we can, and you actually can afford health insurance. But you've just decided, 'You know what? I want to take my chances,' and then you get hit by a bus, (then) you and I have to pay for the emergency room care." Health policy experts call this dynamic "cost-shifting." The idea is that hospitals treat uninsured patients for free or for below their costs, then make up for it by charging insured patients more. The hospitals bill the insurance companies at artificially higher rates, and the insurance companies pass the cost to customers through higher premiums. Obama said for family coverage, the shift is $900. That's supported by a 2005 study by Families USA, a liberal advocacy group, which found the cost shift to people with insurance was $922 for a family policy and $341 for an individual policy. Perhaps Obama was recalling this figure from the presidential campaign, though, because Families USA — a consumer-oriented nonprofit that advocates for better health care — commissioned a study released this year that found cost-shifting was higher. Insured people paid $1,017 more for a family policy and $368 more for an individual policy due to cost-shifting, according to the report. But here's where things get a bit tricky. In 2008, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report questioning the methodology of the Families USA study and hypothesizing that cost-shifting is not that significant. Let's step back and explain what the experts are counting. They use federal data on medical expenditures to calculate the total amount spent on care for the uninsured. Then they subtract whatever the uninsured themselves paid for care, then what government and charities paid. The remainder of the cost is what people with insurance are paying for through higher premiums, according to Families USA. When Kaiser looked for what the government was paying for uninsured care, it found a lot more than Families USA. To give you an idea of how technical this can get, we'll quote from the Kaiser study about the additional government spending it found. It found "a share of Medicare IME, a portion of Medicaid supplemental payments made through upper payment limit (UPL) provisions, and federal and state direct service programs (community health center grants, maternal and child health grants, Ryan White CARE Act funds, the National Health Service Corps, Indian Health Service, and the Veterans Health Administration)." The Kaiser study documented fluctuations in private premiums over many years, and the data don't seem to correlate with costs for the uninsured. Rather, cost-shifting is "more strongly related to fluctuations in payments by Medicare and Medicaid," the Kaiser study said. The Kaiser study did not set a per-policy number the way the Families USA study did. But Kaiser did say that cost-shifting might account for 1.7 percent of all private premiums. So who is right? We reviewed the three studies and we don't see any obvious problems or conflicts. Families USA advocates for consumers, but its 2005 study was conducted under contract by Dr. Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, a well-respected health care policy expert. Barring new evidence, this seems like a genuine disagreement between experts on a complex issue. President Obama said "You and I are both paying 900 bucks on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care." That's an accurate citing of older data. But another study found that cost-shifting for the uninsured was not significant. Because there's major disagreement on this issue, we rate Obama's statement Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2009-09-20T19:14:10	2009-09-20	['None']
-goop-00347	Nicole Kidman Filing For Divorce From Keith Urban?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/nicole-kidman-keith-urban-divorce-filing-splitting/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Nicole Kidman Filing For Divorce From Keith Urban?	2:32 pm, August 31, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-02717	Paula Abdul “Relapse” Fears Tru	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/paula-abdul-relapse-fears-not-true-eating-disorder/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Paula Abdul “Relapse” Fears NOT True	4:26 pm, June 24, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-07030	"One of the reasons that Budweiser stayed in New Jersey is the money they got from RGGI to put solar on their roof to save on their energy costs."	false	/new-jersey/statements/2011/jul/04/jeff-tittel/new-jersey-sierra-club-president-jeff-tittel-says-/	The "King of Beers" has reigned in Newark for more than half a century. But according to Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, Anheuser-Busch’s Budweiser brewery may have been seeking a new home. Soon after Gov. Chris Christie announced plans to pull New Jersey out of a regional cap-and-trade program, lawmakers, state officials, business leaders and environmental leaders debated the merits of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, during a state assembly committee hearing. In response to testimony that RGGI, known as "Reggie," was one of the reasons businesses were leaving the state, Tittel said, "When we talk about businesses, and I know this from first hand, one of the reasons that Budweiser stayed in New Jersey is the money they got from RGGI to put solar on their roof to save on their energy costs." RGGI caps the amount of carbon dioxide power plants can emit in 10 states. Credits can be bought or sold if plants need to release more or less carbon dioxide. Proceeds from the sales help participating states fund clean energy initiatives. PolitiFact New Jersey questioned whether the St. Louis-based beer company had ever considered abandoning its throne in the Garden State and if a reduction in energy costs from solar panels funded by RGGI was one of the reasons that convinced them to stay. Neither was true. First, let’s note that Anheuser-Busch’s Newark brewery had solar panels installed on its roof. A May 17, 2010 news release issued by Anheuser-Busch announcing the installation said more than 3,000 photovoltaic solar panels, covering 65,000 square feet, would be capable, at peak production, of "covering nearly five percent of the brewery's electricity demand." Orion Energy Systems installed and operate the solar panels, according to the release. Anheuser-Busch officials quoted in the release talked about how the installation is an example of the company’s commitment to alternate energy sources. There is no mention of the solar panel project swaying the company to stay in New Jersey. So the brewery had solar panels installed on its roof, but did the beer company receive RGGI funds for the project? Tittel said his statement was based on a conversation he had with Al Komjathy, a lobbyist with the firm Komjathy & Stewart, which represents Anheuser-Busch, among other companies. But Komjathy said he never spoke with Tittel about the issue. "I never had that discussion with him," he told PolitiFact New Jersey. And Anheuser-Busch told us in a statement: "Our Newark brewery did not receive funding from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the solar panel project and there were no plans to relocate the brewery." It’s worth noting that Anheuser-Busch applied for funding for a cogeneration power plant at its Newark brewery through the Clean Energy Solutions Capital Investment initiative, a financing program funded by RGGI proceeds and controlled by the state Economic Development Authority. Laura Jones, a spokeswoman for the state Economic Development Authority, said the agency approved Anheuser-Busch’s request, but that the beer company never used the funding. Tittel said at the time he made the claim about the solar panels, "I thought it was accurate." Now, he said, "most of what I said was accurate but not 100 percent." Most? Try little to nothing. The only thing Tittel got correct in his statement is that solar panels were installed on the roof of Anheuser-Busch’s Newark brewery. Funding for the project did not come from RGGI and the company said it was never considering leaving the state. Tittel tried to argue that although the brewery did not receive funding through RGGI, legislation, often called "the RGGI law," helped the project. As part of the project, PSEG Power agreed to purchase solar renewable energy certificates produced by the solar panels, according to PSEG spokesman Fran Sullivan. Tittel said he was referring to Section 13 in "the RGGI law" -- the section allows electric and utility companies to charge ratepayers for investments they make in energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. However, a spokesman for the state Board of Public Utilities told us that because PSEG Power is not regulated, Section 13 does not apply. Let’s recap. Tittel claimed one of the reasons Anheuser-Busch’s Budweiser brewery in Newark stayed in New Jersey is because they received funding through RGGI to install solar panels, thereby reducing their energy costs. Anheuser-Busch told us they weren’t planning on relocating the brewery and that they did not receive funds through RGGI for the solar project. We rate Tittel’s claim False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Jeff Tittel	None	None	None	2011-07-04T05:00:00	2011-06-13	['New_Jersey']
-pomt-09621	Says approximately 70 percent of jobs created in the United States in November 2007-2008 were in Texas.	false	/texas/statements/2010/jan/12/rick-perry/perry-claims-texas-accounted-70-percent-new-jobs-2/	Gov. Rick Perry frequently celebrates the Texas economy for out-performing those of other states. His message that Texas could be a model for other states has been picked up in articles by Investors Business Daily, Trends Magazine and The Weekly Standard — all of which are touted on Perry's campaign Web site. The articles repeat the claim Perry made in a Jan. 15, 2009 press release stating: "Approximately 70 percent of the jobs created in the U.S. from November 2007-2008 were in Texas." We wondered if this eye-popping claim -- posted online by Perry's office and later echoed by State Comptroller Susan Combs, a fellow statewide officeholder -- was true. Perry's office pointed us to the Texas Workforce Commission, where number crunchers said they started their analysis by adding up the total jobs created in states, including Texas, that had job gains during the one-year period. There were 13 other job-gaining states, plus the District of Columbia. The other gaining states were Oklahoma, Maryland, Louisiana, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Iowa, Virginia, Alaska and Nebraska. Texas's 221,000 new jobs amounted to 71 percent of the 310,000 jobs gained among those states and D.C. The state's economy was "really kicking," said Ann Hatchitt, the commission's director of communications. But the commission's conclusion comes with a big wrinkle. Hatchitt said the commission did not take into account the new jobs created in 36 other states where job losses overall outnumbered gains. Veronica Sanchez Downey, who analyzes data for the commission, said she'd feel comfortable summarizing the commission's conclusion about Texas job gains this way: "Of all the states that gained jobs in the U.S. including the District of Columbia, Texas accounted for" 67.2 percent of the added jobs from November 2007 to November 2008. The 67.2-percent figure reflects adjustments of the data since the initial research. Perry, of course, didn't say it that way. Two outside experts said the governor's 70-percent claim overstates the Texas share of jobs created nationally. Michael Brandl, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business, said the commission's method of calculating the percentage wasn't correct. By excluding all states with net job losses -- regardless of any job gains in those states -- the Texas share of total new jobs in the U.S. was overblown, even "laughable," he said. "To say it's misleading is to be kind," Brandi said. "It's just not true." Douglas Hall, director of the Economic Research and Analysis Network at Washington's non-partisan Economic Policy Institute, agreed that Perry's summary was inaccurate. The institute focuses on the economic needs of low- and middle-income Americans. Hall stressed that employment estimates, based on monthly surveys of employers, are frequently adjusted anyway: "On an annual basis, the numbers are revised significantly and what can often happen is that six of the previous 18 months get changed not just in their magnitude but sometimes even in their direction, highlighting the fact that one must always take these numbers with somewhat of a grain of salt." We find Perry's conclusion to be incorrect and highly misleading, especially because the agency that made the calculation quickly pointed out an accurate -- though less dramatic -- way of summarizing its finding. We rate Perry's statement as False.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2010-01-12T15:51:05	2009-01-15	['United_States', 'Texas']
-pomt-07516	On bipartisan redistricting.	full flop	/virginia/statements/2011/apr/08/thomas-norment-jr/sen-thomas-norment-now-says-he-opposes-bipartisan-/	Redistricting is an ugly process, one that almost always leaves bruised feelings among the minority party. And that’s playing out in both chambers of the General Assembly this week. Republicans control the House of Delegates and have eliminated the district of Minority Leader Ward Armstrong, D-Henry. Democrats control the Senate and are drawing four Republican incumbents into two districts. Senate Minority Leader Thomas K. Norment, Jr., R-James City, was especially upset with the Democratic proposal. "Senate Democrats have crafted an outrageously partisan redistricting plan that will go down as one of the most notorious examples of gerrymandering in history," Norment said in a press release. The Senate plan, drawn primarily by Sen. Janet D. Howell, D-Fairfax, would squeeze GOP Sens. Frank W. Wagner and Jeff McWaters, both of Virginia Beach, into the same district. It also would lump Sen. Stephen D. Newman, R-Lynchburg, into the same district as Sen. Ralph K. Smith, R-Botetourt County. Ten years ago, when Norment was Senate majority leader, he did the same thing. With Republicans holding 22 seats to the Democrats’ 18, the Senate drew election maps, Norment’s party cramped Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple, D-Arlington, into the same district as Sen. Leslie L. Byrne, D-Fairfax. Sen. Madison E. Marye, D-Montgomery, was grouped with Sen. Malfourd "Bo" Trumbo, R-Botetourt, with the Marye’s seat moving to Northern Virginia. The moves created a pair of GOP-leaning open seats, designed for and won by Republicans who were then serving in the House of Delegates. The gerrymandering left Byrne furious and complaining that Republicans were unfairly singling out Democratic women. Norment was unsympathetic, sarcastically replying that "subtlety is lost" on the Democrat. The next day, Norment said the 2001 map was far less extreme than those drawn in 1991, when Democrats held the Senate. Norment said redistricting is "a political process." Norment isn’t the only senator to change his redistricting tune. Ten years ago Howell called the GOP’s Senate plan "absurd." On April 5, she said the 2011 map she drew for the Democratic majority followed the same principles as the 2001 GOP plan, including the use of a 2 percent population deviation for districts. Howell also noted that her plan splits 43 localities into different districts, quite similar to the 41 cleaved in the 2001 map. Norment now complains that Senate Democrats are pushing "one of the most notorious examples of gerrymandering in history." But to our eyes, Howell’s plan uses many of the same criteria Norment endorsed 10 years ago. Just as two Democrats stood to lose their seats in 2001, two Republicans are out of luck in 2011. Norment has done a Full Flop!	None	Thomas Norment, Jr.	None	None	None	2011-04-08T11:37:01	2011-03-29	['None']
-pomt-00312	Says "Rep. Ann Wagner, a three-term incumbent, has never held a town hall in the Second District."	mostly true	/missouri/statements/2018/sep/21/cort-vanostran/has-ann-wagner-held-any-town-halls-her-district/	Is it true that one congresswoman has never held a "town hall" with her constituents during the three terms she’s served? In a press release on Aug. 21, Democrat Cort VanOstran called out Republican Rep. Ann Wagner for not responding to his demands to have a debate and tied it in with her unavailability to constituents: "Rep. Ann Wagner, a three-term incumbent, has never held a town hall in the Second District." VanOstran is trying to unseat Wagner in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses much of St. Louis County and stretches as far out as O’Fallon. Given the use of the word "never," we found VanOstran’s contention surprising — three terms is a long time to have never held a town hall. We decided to see if this was true. We began by looking at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition for "town hall." It states that a town hall is "an event at which a public official or political candidate addresses an audience by answering questions posed by individual members." We reached out to VanOstran’s campaign for their evidence. Campaign manager Claire Botnick said the VanOstran camp simply called Wagner’s camp to ask about it, and a representative from her office said Wagner has never held a public in-person town hall. The Wagner campaign declined an offer to comment on the record, so we examined the information we could find on our own. Wagner has held multiple town halls conducted via telephone (known as tele-town halls), according to her social media accounts, coverage in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Public Radio and an email exchange with one of her constituents. However, finding in-person town halls conducted by Wagner was more difficult. A quick search of the term "town hall" on both Wagner’s Facebook and Twitter accounts showed eight events where Wagner described herself at a town hall. But all of these events were held by private companies, where she was speaking to employees. We asked whether the events were public or private and whether Wagner addressed questions from the audience as described in the Merriam-Webster definition. According to company spokespersons and social media posts: • In five cases, Wagner held ask-and-answer meetings for employees only: at Monsanto, MetLife, Express Scripts, Charter Communications and RGA. • At Maritz Global Events, Wagner didn’t take questions, meaning the company event doesn’t fit the definition of a town hall. • Equifax couldn’t confirm whether questions were asked, but a news release noted a "town hall session" with Wagner after a ribbon-cutting. It is unclear whether that event was open to the public. • United Health Group didn’t respond to PolitiFact. Beyond social media, we scrolled through articles about public events attended by Wagner that might have resembled town halls. We found no examples of events that fit the traditional definition of town halls. Bottom line: We could not find evidence of an in-person, public town hall where Wagner took questions from constituents. At most, she has held town halls that were limited to a private group of employees at a specific company. University of Alabama political scientist Joe Smith told PolitiFact Texas that he doesn’t view closed-to-the-public events with a company’s employees to be genuine town halls. The employees who attend "know that their employer has arranged for and endorsed the visit, and that therefore assertive questions are not welcome," Smith said. Duquesne University professor Mike Dillon agreed. "The term ‘town hall’ implies an event is open to the entire community and that competing ideas will be welcomed and discussed," Dillon said. Our ruling VanOstran said Wagner has never held a town hall in the 2nd District during her tenure as congresswoman. She has held telephone-based town halls, as well as private events for particular companies’ employees. But experts say that a town hall traditionally involves a public official inviting any constituent to gather in a public space and ask him or her questions. So VanOstran has a point. We rate the statement Mostly True.	None	Cort VanOstran	None	None	None	2018-09-21T21:36:45	2018-08-21	['None']
-pomt-02334	Says Marco Rubio believes the earth is 9,000 years old and that humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction; says Rand Paul believes the earth is 10,000 years old and God removed dinosaurs "to make space for humans."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/mar/25/facebook-posts/facebook-meme-claims-rand-paul-and-marco-rubio-hav/	A new Facebook meme paints two leading Republicans as anti-science because of their alleged views of the age of the Earth. The Facebook group Being Liberal posted a picture March 10, 2014, featuring side-by-side images of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., looking somewhat sheepish. Bolded text under the images describes the senators’ views on the age of the Earth and the extinction of the dinosaurs. According to the meme, Rubio "believes Earth (is) 9,000 years old," and "humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction." Paul, the image proclaims, says the Earth is 10,000 years old and believes "God made dinosaurs disappear to make space for humans." The post received about 5,500 likes and was shared more than 4,000 times. Upon seeing this, we couldn’t resist digging in and finding out just what these two senators believe about the age of the Earth and the demise of the dinosaurs. Rubio It seems the backing for the claim about Rubio comes from a November 2012 interview with GQ magazine, when Michael Hainey asked, "How old do you think the Earth is?" Rubio didn’t directly answer the question, instead saying, "I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians, and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States." He later called the planet’s age "one of the great mysteries." The comment drew criticism around the Internet, sparking a string of opinion pieces from blogs and mainstream news organizations alike. Commentators specifically wondered about Rubio’s answer because of his position on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. Rubio clarified his answer in another interview, this time with Politico on Dec. 5, 2012. "First of all, let me tell you about the answer I gave. The answer I gave was actually trying to make the same point the president made a few years ago, and that is there is no scientific debate on the age of the Earth. I mean, it’s established, pretty definitively. It’s 4 and a half… at least four and half billion years old. I was referring to a theological debate, which is a pretty healthy debate," Rubio said. So, Rubio didn’t actually peg the age of the Earth at 9,000 years in the GQ interview, and even gave the widely accepted scientific answer in the later interview with Politico. Paul We had to go all the way back to 2010 to find a statement from Paul about the age of the Earth. It turned out to be even more vague than Rubio’s answer to GQ. In June 2010, Paul gave a speech at a Christian Homeschool Educators of Kentucky meeting, after which he took questions from the audience. One audience member asked the then-candidate for Senate, "Was there a point in life that you became Christian that you recognized? And also, how old is the world?" Paul joked at first, saying he was only taking "easy questions," and then described the origins of his faith. He then said he would "pass" on the question concerning the age of the Earth. Other than that, Paul hasn’t made public comments on his opinions about when the Earth came to be. Our ruling Being Liberal’s Facebook post claimed Rubio and Paul believe the Earth is 9,000 and 10,000 years old, respectively. While both men have made vague statements concerning their beliefs about the age of the Earth, neither has publicly cited the figures claimed in the post, and Rubio has even given the widely held scientific answer to the question. As for the senators’ views on the fate of the dinosaurs, we’ll take a page from Rubio’s playbook and call it one of the world’s great mysteries, because it doesn’t appear either has said anything in public regarding the issue. So there are no public statements to back up the Facebook post’s claim, and Rubio has even said the direct opposite. We rate this claim Pants on Fire.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2014-03-25T15:35:20	2014-03-10	['Rand_Paul', 'Marco_Rubio', 'God']
-hoer-00530	'Texas to Legalize Marijuana Use'	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/fake-news-texas-legalizing-marijuana.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	FAKE-NEWS - 'Texas to Legalize Marijuana Use'	September 22, 2014	None	['None']
-pomt-13392	Says Donald Trump "publicly invited Putin to hack into Americans’ (emails)."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/26/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-claims-donald-trump-invited-russia/	Hillary Clinton said that Donald Trump gave Russian president Vladimir Putin the thumbs up to hack away at U.S. emails. Putin has "let loose cyber attackers to hack into government files, to hack into personal files, hack into the Democratic National Committee," Clinton said during the first general election presidential debate at Hofstra University. She continued: "But we will defend the citizens of this country, and the Russians need to understand that. I think they've been treating it as almost a probing, how far will we go? How much will we do? And that's why I was so shocked when Donald publicly invited Putin to hack into Americans. That is just unacceptable." We will fact-check whether Clinton is right about what Trump said about Putin and the emails. Trump’s comments about Russia hacking Clinton’s emails A Clinton campaign spokesman pointed us to Trump’s comments at a press conference at Trump National Doral golf course July 27. "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said to a room full of TV cameras as well as reporters from the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press." He also said: "By the way, they hacked -- they probably have her 33,000 e-mails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you'd see some beauties there. So let's see." Clinton’s lawyers had turned over work-related emails but deleted thousands that she said were about personal matters. FBI Director James Comey said earlier that month that Clinton should have known that some of the emails stored on private servers in her New York home were classified, but concluded there wasn’t enough evidence that she intentionally mishandled classified information. Although the Justice Department declined to prosecute, Trump continued to hammer Clinton for the email controversy: "That gives me a big problem," Trump said in Doral. "After she gets a subpoena! She gets subpoenaed, and she gets rid of 33,000 emails? That gives me a problem. Now, if Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean, to be honest with you, I'd love to see them." When Katy Tur, an NBC reporter, asked Trump whether he was encouraging a foreign country to hack into emails, Trump snapped back: "Be quiet. I know you want to save (Clinton)." Trump also attacked the DNC over thousands of leaked emails published by WikiLeaks in July. Those emails showed its leaders — including party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of South Florida — favored Clinton over rival Bernie Sanders. Two days later Wasserman Schultz, a U.S. representative, announced she would step down from her party post. As for any invitation to Russia to hack emails, a Trump campaign spokesman told PolitiFact that Trump said he was being "sarcastic" in an interview that Fox News posted the next day. Trump told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade, "You have to be kidding. His client, his person, deleted 33,000 emails illegally. You look at that. And when I’m being sarcastic with something ..." Asked by Kilmeade if he was indeed being sarcastic, Trump snapped, "Of course I'm being sarcastic." Our ruling Clinton says Trump "publicly invited Putin to hack into Americans’ (emails)." Trump said at a press conference in South Florida that he hoped Russia was able to find "the 30,000 emails that are missing." That was a reference to Clinton’s emails, not Americans’ emails more broadly. We rate this claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/45bfa5b9-82bb-4547-93dc-eb59d3b3a25c	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-09-26T23:24:08	2016-09-26	['United_States', 'Vladimir_Putin']
-pomt-01534	"57% of the jobs created" in Austin "from 2009 to 2013 do not pay families a living wage."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2014/sep/17/steve-adler/steve-adler-says-57-percent-jobs-added-2009-2013-d/	Austin isn’t as affordable as it needs to be, mayoral aspirant Steve Adler says on his campaign website, adding: "Our children cannot afford to live in the Austin where they grew up when they graduate and leave home. Even during a time of historic job growth, 57% of the jobs created from 2009 to 2013 do not pay families a living wage." We wondered about that percentage. By email, Adler’s campaign manager, Jim Wick, said Adler saw the figure in an April 26, 2014, Austin American-Statesman news analysis by Dan Zehr citing data compiled by Idaho-based Economic Modeling Specialists International, which analyzes workforce-related data. That story said that while the Austin metro area had gained thousands of jobs in recent years, inflation-adjusted earnings had fallen. Then came the declaration that drew Adler’s attention, which didn’t speak generally to families or to jobs in Austin alone. "From 2009 to 2013," the article said, "almost 57 percent of the newly created jobs in the area paid less than the living wage for a single parent with one child ($19.56 per hour), according to data from EMSI and the oft-cited living wage calculator created by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." That living-wage figure, identical for Travis and Williamson counties, appears on web pages overseen by Amy Glasmeier, an MIT professor of economic geography and regional planning. According to the entries, the living wage is "the hourly rate that an individual must earn to support their family, if they are the sole provider and are working full-time (2,080 hours per year)." To our inquiry, Zehr provided a spreadsheet he built based on increases or decreases in jobs across more than 730 professions in the Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Statistical Area, also showing the estimated median hourly wage for each of the professions. By email, EMSI spokesman Joshua Wright said its median hourly wage data came from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and that information was benchmarked to the firm’s own industry-by-industry data drawn from agencies like the BLS and U.S. Census Bureau. By our calculation, some 53,315 of the 92,620 net jobs added in the Austin area from 2009 to 2013, or 58 percent, had a median hourly wage less than the living wage for a single parent with one child. These lower-wage jobs encompassed 394 types of jobs including positions in oil, gas and mining as well as loan interviewers and clerks, pest control workers, skin-care specialists and medical secretaries, according to the spreadsheet. In reviewing these details, we also wondered if the outcomes for Austin workers were as dire as Adler said. For instance, the MIT website presents lower living wages including, for Travis and Williamson counties, $18.51 an hour for two adults and a child; $14.88 for two adults only; and $9.43 for one adult alone. If you focus on earnings at a lower living wage, in turn, you’re going to conclude more workers fared better. According to the spreadsheet, for instance, 40,560 of the 92,620 net jobs gained from 2009 to 2013, or 44 percent, had median hourly wages less than $14.88; 15,099 of the net jobs gained, 16 percent, had median hourly wages less than $9.43. It also occurred to us the median wage might not be a perfect way to gauge who exactly is earning enough to get by. That is, the median wage in each occupation is the boundary between the highest paid 50 percent and the lowest paid 50 percent of workers. It stands to reason, then, that some workers in the 57 percent still made more than the living wage for a single parent with a child. But it’s also so that some of the other 43 percent made less than the same living wage. The limits of public wage data evidently make it difficult to calculate a precise percentage. Next, for an independent look at this claim, we turned to Cynthia Osborne, a University of Texas associate professor and director of the Child and Family Research Partnership at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. By email, Osborne told us the 57 percent figure might be right, but she’d need more information -- particularly the variations in wages around each median -- to reach a conclusion. EMSI’s Wright told us he didn’t have that type of information, but could share the wages for each occupation at specific points along the wage curve. Daniel Dillon, a research associate for the partnership, later said three interpolations drawing on this added detail basically confirmed about 57 percent of the jobs added in the Austin area didn’t pay the living wage for an adult with one child. Our ruling Adler said: "57% of the jobs created from 2009 to 2013 do not pay families a living wage." To be precise, that’s the estimated share of net jobs added in the multi-county Austin area (not Austin alone) pegged as having median wages less than the living wage for an adult with one child. Families vary in size, though, as do related living wages. We rate this statement, which lacks clarification, Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Steve Adler	None	None	None	2014-09-17T11:28:51	2014-09-03	['Austin,_Texas']
-pomt-08504	"I said no to these big bank bailouts."	true	/texas/statements/2010/oct/07/lloyd-doggett/us-rep-lloyd-doggett-says-he-voted-against-bank-ba/	In a TV ad that started airing Oct. 4, small-business owners applaud U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, who boasts about his vote against the bank bailout package that has haunted some incumbents seeking re-election. When the U.S. House passed the legislation Oct. 3, 2008, most Democrats voted for it while a majority of Republicans said no. In the ad, Doggett says: "I said no to these big bank bailouts. We need to focus our resources on helping Central Texas, not Wall Street." We ran his claim through the Truth-O-Meter after a reader urged us to check it out. First, the big picture: In 2008, after a housing boom, the bubble burst when securities backed by risky mortgages contaminated the greater financial system. The markets tanked and the government scrambled to pick up the pieces. In September of that year, the government seized control of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which had funded more than two-thirds of recent home loans, investment bank Lehman Brothers went under, and the government swooped in to rescue insurance company American International Group. Amid uncertainty, and with the stock markets nosediving, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke proposed a sweeping $700 billion plan to bailout financial institutions. President George W. Bush and presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain supported Paulson's proposal, which called for the launch of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, described as an effort to stabilize the economy by authorizing the treasury secretary to buy toxic assets, largely comprised of shaky mortgage-backed securities — essentially bad debts. Over the next three months, Paulson bolstered banks with $350 billion, according to an evolving summary of the credit crisis by The New York Times. Last month, the Times reported that the TARP bailout "could conceivably earn taxpayers a profit." However, "a final accounting of the government's full range of interventions in the economy, including the bailouts of the mortgage financial giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is years off and will most likely remain controversial and potentially costly." At the time, constituents weren't keen on bailing out big banks and other financial institutions. "For most voters, TARP remains a four-letter word," according to the Times. Distrust was also simmering in Congress. On Sept. 30, 2008, the Austin American-Statesman reported that the day before, "three of the four U.S. House members from the Austin area broke with their party leaders Monday and voted against the rescue plan for the financial markets." Doggett joined Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, and John Carter, R-Round Rock, in voting to defeat the rescue plan. San Antonio Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican who represents part of Travis County, voted for the legislation. "In a sign of just how little weight President Bush carries in even his home state these days, just four of the 19 Texas Republicans in the House voted for his bailout plan," the Statesman reported. "Five of the 13 Texas Democrats voted for it. The local lawmakers voting no all said they wanted Congress to spend more time looking at different solutions to the financial crisis." Doggett had been meeting with William Isaac, who was chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. under President Ronald Reagan, according to the Statesman. Isaac had suggested that the administration could mollify the markets by raising the limit on the amount of deposits insured by the FDIC, among other measures. Doggett said: "It strikes me that these are sensible steps that would address market concerns without such a huge cost to the taxpayer." A Statesman editorial published the same day observed that "you know a bill is in trouble when conservative Republican John Carter of Round Rock and liberal Democrat Lloyd Doggett of Austin both vote against it." The House killed that measure, 228-205, and the stock market further spiraled. Then, two days later, the Senate voted 74-25 in favor of a modified $700 billion bailout plan. The crux of the legislation was intended to stabilize the economy and prevent further disruption to the economic system by giving the government authority to purchase and insure certain types of troubled assets. At the time, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said on Fox News that the Senate bill had a "much better chance" of making it through the House, according to an Oct. 2, 2008, Los Angeles Times news story. "I do think that the big (stock market) drop on Monday really had a chilling effect on a lot of our members and a lot of our constituents," he said. The Dow had plunged 800 points, according to a timeline of the crisis by The Washington Post. Doggett wasn't won over. "The Senate measure has changed my position from 'no' to 'heck no,'" he said, according to the Times. On the floor of the House Oct. 3, Doggett suggested the bailout was a rash, irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars. "What Bush demands on this subrprime lending debacle is for taxpayers to reward Wall Street with what is essentially the biggest subprime loan in American history," he said. "We cannot afford to give almost unlimited discretion to one man to determine what toxic securities to buy and on what terms. We should not bail out the entire world." The Senate approach cleared the House Oct. 3, 2008 by 263-171. In the Texas delegation, nine Democrats and six Republicans voted yes, while four Democrats and 13 Republicans voted no. The Texas delegates who switched votes between versions of the bailout — going from "no" to "yes" — were Al Green, D-Houston, Mike Conaway, R-Midland, Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, Solomon Ortiz, D-Corpus Christi, and Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo. Doggett was quoted in the Oct. 3 American-Statesman saying: "When markets are poisoned, you demand the best antidote to that poison ... not yield to President Bush's take-it-or-leave-it demand." So, Doggett twice voted against the TARP measure, the plan since widely called a "bailout." We rate his statement as True.	None	Lloyd Doggett	None	None	None	2010-10-07T18:10:21	2010-10-04	['None']
-pomt-07302	"Wisconsin is one of the few states in the country that do not currently require a photographic identification" to vote.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/may/18/terry-moulton/state-sen-terry-moulton-says-wisconsin-one-few-sta/	As the Wisconsin Legislature took up a strict photo ID requirement for voting, Republicans responded to concerns that the bill was one of the most restrictive in the United States. Most didn't dispute that fact, saying it was a necessary anti-fraud measure. We previously rated as True a claim from Milwaukee Ald. Milele Coggs that "In its current state, this bill is the most restrictive voter ID legislation in the nation." Republicans did, however, make several changes that put in doubt whether it's still the most restrictive, or just one of the most restrictive. But in the weeks before the state Assembly approved the amended measure May 11, at least one photo ID backer in the state Senate put Wisconsin’s status in a totally different light. (The Senate was poised to give final approval to the bill on May 19, 2011.) State Sen. Terry Moulton, R-Chippewa Falls, answered constituent concerns with a letter that made this claim: "Wisconsin is one of the few states in the country that do not currently require a photographic identification." We heard from two Moulton constituents -- Gail Halmstad of Chippewa Falls and Jim Dunning of Eau Claire -- who said they received those Moulton letters between late March and mid-April. Both said they question the need for a photo ID mandate at the polls. Others, including state Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, have made similar statements. "I think most people just want to get the issue off the table and say, yeah, we should have an ID in order to vote. Most states have an ID for voting," Darling told a WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) reporter for a May 11, 2011 story. Darling didn’t say "photo" ID, so her statement can’t be equated with that of Moulton. But that’s what the bill requires and what she supports, so her comment may have left the impression with viewers that she meant most states have photo ID for voting. Moulton’s statement was simple and straightforward. So is our evaluation, since we have been down this road before. The definitive source for up-to-date information on state-by-state requirements for voter identification is the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures’ online guide, "Voter Identification Requirements." So is it true that Wisconsin is one of the few states that lacks a photo ID rule for voting? Actually, it’s the opposite. Only eight states currently request or require a photo ID to vote, according to the group. A ninth state, Kansas, will require photo ID as of 2012, we found. (The Wisconsin law would take effect in 2012 as well, barring a court injunction.) Another 18 states require some form of identification, but it does not have to include a picture. That tally will move to 19 in July 2011 when Oklahoma election officials begin requesting photo ID, according to the group. These numbers could change more in the months ahead. According to Brennan Center for Justice research, 37 states including Wisconsin are considering or have considered voter ID and/or proof of citizenship legislation in recent months. But currently Wisconsin is in a very large group of states that do not require photo ID to vote -- not "one of the few" who do not. Most states do not ask or mandate photo ID. Moulton’s office told us they inadvertently erred in the constituent letter and have omitted the claim in letters that have gone out recently. Elise Nelson, an aide to Moulton, gave us a copy of the revised letter she said went out on May 10, and it does not include the earlier claim. But it does not correct it either, so recipients may still have the impression the earlier claim is fact. Nelson said she did not know where Moulton’s office came up with the original claim. The bottom line? As Wisconsin was on the verge of enacting a photo ID requirement for voting, Moulton said the state was one of only a few without one. But as senators prepared to cast their final vote, most states still do not require photo ID to vote. Moulton’s claim to constituents, as his office notes, was well off target. We rate it False.	None	Terry Moulton	None	None	None	2011-05-18T14:28:45	2011-04-28	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-00064	Says Scott Walker ‘cut $800 million from our schools.’	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2018/nov/02/tony-evers/democrat-tony-evers-misfires-education-spending-cl/	Schools have been front and center throughout the race for Wisconsin governor, which pits the state schools superintendent against a Republican governor who famously took on teachers’ unions. In one volley, Democrat Tony Evers zeroed in on school spending under Gov. Scott Walker. "Do you trust Scott Walker on education?" asks the TV ad, released Sept. 25, 2018. "He’s the politician who cut $800 million from our schools." That’s very similar to an Evers claim we fact-checked in April -- that Walker "has taken over a billion dollars from the public schools." We rated that Mostly False. Does the reduced figure change things? State aid dollars short of $800 million figure Evers’ team said the number in the ad referred to cuts in 2011-’13, under Walker’s first budget. Though much of that funding has since been restored, Evers spokesman Sam Lau argued that doesn’t make the claim less true -- and doesn’t lessen the impact of the reduction. "Each and every year of a student's education matters," Lau said in an email. "Scott Walker's $800 million cuts to Wisconsin's public schools were devastating and continue to be felt today." The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau provided numbers for our April fact check on this topic, and we’ll rely on those again. The chart below has a lot to take in, but we’ll focus on a couple numbers we’ve designated with asterisks. This looks at general purpose revenue (GPR) routed to schools, which includes per-pupil aid, equalization aid and other categorical aids. It starts with the 2010-’11 budget, the last one under Gov. Jim Doyle. That’s the baseline for the comparison. State fiscal year GPR school aids Change to prior year Change to 2010-’11 Cumulative change to 2010-’11 2010-’11 $5.27 billion 2011-’12 $4.85 billion -$426.5 million -$426.5 million -$426.5 million 2012-’13 $4.91 billion +$68.9 million -$357.6 million -$784.1 million* 2013-’14 $5.03 billion +$119.8 million -$237.8 million -$1.021 billion 2014-’15 $5.19 billion +$160.5 million -$77.3 million -$1.1 billion 2015-’16 $5.2 billion +$3 million -$74.3 million -$1.17 billion 2016-’17 $5.4 billion +$197.3 million +$123 million -$1.05 billion 2017-’18 $5.58 billion +$176.9 million +$299.9 million -$750.6 million 2018-’19 $5.84 billion +$267.1 million +$567 million -$183.6 million* The numbers do show a large drop when Walker first took office. The state had GPR school aid of $5.27 billion the last year under Doyle. The "cuts" Evers alleges come from comparing actual funding in the following two years to what funding would have been if it remained at that $5.27 billion level annually. The GPR school aids dropped by $426.5 million in 2011-’12 and then rose by $68.9 million in 2012-’13. Taken together, that reduced school aid by $784.1 million in the two-year budget. That’s in the ballpark of Evers’ claim, but it leaves out a lot of information. The missing pieces It’s critical to note the 2011-’12 funding reduction did not happen in isolation. Act 10, enacted in 2011, required public employees to pay more toward their pensions and decreased their collective bargaining power. That allowed schools to save money that would have gone toward employee pensions and to charge employees more for health insurance. When all districts were tallied in 2012, they spent $451.5 million less on employee benefits than in 2011, according to a study by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, now the Wisconsin Policy Forum. In 2013, benefits were $433.6 million less than in 2011. So across the two years where state funding was cut by nearly $800 million, school districts saved nearly $900 million in benefits. And that savings would be higher if you assume costs would have continued to rise from the 2011 levels (likely about 4.3 percent per year, according to the study). Another important factor: The Evers ad does not say it is referring to a funding change made more than five years ago in a single budget. Thus, viewers might assume school spending is $800 million less today than when Walker began. In reality, after the initial cuts, Walker has increased GPR school aids every year, hitting a high of $5.84 billion this year. That’s above the last year of Doyle’s term, though that doesn’t account for inflation. Those increases mean most of that $784 million in cuts has been returned to the budget. The right-hand column of the chart shows the difference between actual funding and what it would have been cumulatively if the schools budget remained $5.27 billion every year since 2011. That gap was more than $1 billion at one point but now is down to $183.6 million. Our rating In the ad, Evers claims Walker cut $800 million from schools. He did cut close to that ($784 million), in raw dollars in a single two-year budget. But that ignores changes made through Walker’s Act 10 that saved districts money. And the ad does not make clear that it’s referring only to cuts from 2011-’13, so viewers wouldn’t know that subsequent funding increases have made up most of that reduction. Our definition for Mostly False is "The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression." That fits here.	None	Tony Evers	None	None	None	2018-11-02T12:00:00	2018-09-25	['None']
-hoer-01287	Fake Water Bottles Airport Drug Smuggling Warning	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/true-fake-water-bottles-airport-drug-smuggling-warning/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	TRUE Fake Water Bottles Airport Drug Smuggling Warning	August 31, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01321	Katy Perry Told By ‘American Idol’ Producers To Stop Being “Raunchy”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/katy-perry-american-idol-producers-raunchy-flirting/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Katy Perry Told By ‘American Idol’ Producers To Stop Being “Raunchy”?	2:06 pm, March 25, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03981	Brad Pitt died of suicide shortly after Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from him in September 2016.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brad-pitt-death-hoax/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Brad Pitt Death Hoax	21 September 2016	None	['Brad_Pitt', 'Angelina_Jolie']
-snes-03966	A photograph shows Donald Trump using an umbrella to keep only himself dry, while another image shows President Obama giving his umbrella to Michelle Obama to keep her dry.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-and-trump-use-umbrellas/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Obama and Trump Use Umbrellas	23 September 2016	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Michelle_Obama', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-12514	"We're experiencing a net outflow of illegal, undocumented workers from America back to Mexico."	true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/26/ron-kind/yes-experiencing-net-outflow-illegal-undocumented-/	Candidate Donald Trump pledged to build a wall on the Mexican border, and he has taken steps to make that a reality as president. The push implies droves of outsiders are clamoring to make their way to America, but one Wisconsin congressman says a basic assumption behind that effort is wrong. "We're experiencing a net outflow of illegal, undocumented workers from America back to Mexico," U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-La Crosse, said Feb. 16, 2017 on Wisconsin Public Radio. "To build a wall now would be locking them in this country." Are there really more illegal Mexican immigrants going than coming? Research backs up claim There are no perfect statistics when it comes to illegal immigration — it’s inherently impossible to track accurately. But U.S. and Mexican government data analyzed by the Pew Research Center shows the immigration trend reversed in the last decade. The estimated number of Mexicans in the United States illegally rose steadily for many years, from 2.9 million in 1995 to a peak of 6.9 million in 2007. But the number began dropping in 2008 and has fallen more since, reaching 5.8 million in 2014, the latest year for which Pew analyzed data. If the number is falling, that means more illegal Mexican immigrants are leaving the United States than entering it. The numbers include both immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally and those who overstayed their visas. According to Pew, key factors in the decline are the Great Recession, which meant U.S. job losses in construction and other sectors where Mexican immigrants are likely to work; a rising number of deportations; and increasing numbers of U.S. Border Patrol agents. Immigration experts from a variety of think tanks said Pew’s research on illegal immigration is well respected and saw no reason to doubt its methodology. The change in migration patterns is also reflected in the number of apprehensions on the Mexican border by the U.S. Border Patrol. About 191,000 Mexicans were apprehended along the southern border in the 2016 fiscal year. At the peak of Mexican immigration in 2007, the Border Patrol apprehended 809,000 Mexicans. Overall, illegal immigration was largely static from 2009 to 2014, as the drop in Mexican immigration was mostly offset by an increase from other areas, such as Central America and Asia. (In 2014 the two regions combined for an estimated 3.2 million illegal immigrants, just over half the total from Mexico.) The overall number of illegal immigrants in the United States — from all countries of origin — held steady from 2009 to 2014 at around 11 million, Pew estimates. In 2014, the Border Patrol apprehended more non-Mexicans than Mexicans for the first time in at least 60 years, Pew reported. Mexicans still accounted for about 52% of illegal immigration in 2014, though. Our rating Kind said more unauthorized Mexican immigrants are returning to Mexico than coming into the U.S. Immigration data gathered by a respected group shows that is an accurate synopsis of the trend since 2007. We rate Kind’s statement True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Ron Kind	None	None	None	2017-04-26T05:00:00	2017-02-16	['Mexico', 'United_States']
-farg-00461	"BREAKING: Federal Judge Nullifies PA Election Results For ‘Wide-Scale Voter Fraud’."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/03/a-judge-hasnt-invalidated-pa-election-results/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Angelo Fichera	['special election']	A Judge Hasn’t Invalidated PA Election Results	March 16, 2018	2018-03-16 20:55:13 UTC	['None']
-pomt-01992	Americans "invented the automobile."	false	/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/13/laura-ingraham/did-americans-invent-car-ingraham-says-so/	Americans have a reputation for ingenuity -- but it can be tempting to give more credit than is deserved. In a recent radio show, conservative talk-radio host Laura Ingraham responded to a caller who noted that in some jobs, immigrants outperform Americans. Ingraham sought to reframe the issue. "Americans won the war with our allies in World War II," Ingraham said. "Americans developed some of the most groundbreaking pieces of technology that the world has ever seen. We invented the automobile. We invented the airplane. Americans can do those jobs." There’s no doubt that the Wright brothers invented the airplane, and Henry Ford was a major player in making the car a global commercial success. But a listener to Ingraham's show was pretty sure that she was off the mark when she said Americans invented the automobile. The listener asked us to look into it, so we did. When we contacted University of Dayton automobile historian John Heitmann, he said the car’s roots are in Europe. "The automobile is European by birth, American by adoption," Heitmann said. "German inventors and French entrepreneurs led the way." The first patent for an internal combustion powered car -- a two-seater -- was filed on Jan. 29, 1886 by Karl Benz in Germany. Benz’s names lives on in the Mercedes-Benz brand. We also checked with John Lienhard, a professor of technology at the University of Houston. In a radio series on innovation, Lienhard said a few people actually built powered vehicles before Benz. For instance, Austrian engineer Sigfried Marcus invented the carburator for his first gas-powered car in 1864. Marcus built a second prototype sometime between 1875 and 1888. The car is owned today by the Austrian Automobile, Motorcycle and Touring Club in Vienna. Reportedly, it still runs. (A side note: When Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the Nazis tried to expunge all records of Marcus because he was Jewish. His car was hidden behind a false brick wall and "re-discovered" in 1949. Like a scene out of the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, it started up and was driven at the break-neck speed of about 3 mph.) Steam-powered cars date back even earlier -- to 1769 in France. Lienhard told PunditFact he shudders at having to figure out the question of who was "first," since the path to what we know today as the car included many zig-zags, incremental improvements and dead ends. He wrote a book, How Invention Begins, about the many efforts that ultimately produced the car we know today. Still, he offered a rule of thumb: Look at who had the first commercial success. By that standard, the nod goes to Benz. "He built a little three-wheeled car in 1885 and sold his first one two years later," Lienhard wrote. "He went into production with a four-wheeled model in 1890." We should note that America was not too far behind Benz. According to the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, William Morrison constructed an electric carriage that he drove through Des Moines, Iowa, in 1891. In 1893, Frank Duryea exhibited a motorized truck, using an internal combustion engine. The first sales to the American public took place in 1896. "Once we got into the game, we moved very fast," Lienhard said. "Our role in the development of the automobile was huge." Ingraham show producer Julia Hahn told us Ingraham was thinking of Americans’ early work in engine design. Our ruling Ingraham said that Americans invented the automobile. If we look at internal combustion-powered vehicles, all of the first examples come from Europe, and the first commercial enterprise emerged in Germany. America played a major role in automobile production, but Ingraham spoke specifically about an earlier stage -- invention. We rate the claim False.	None	Laura Ingraham	None	None	None	2014-06-13T11:42:34	2014-06-12	['United_States']
-bove-00118	How Lower Negative Votes Pushed PM Modi’s Ranking In Gallup International’s Poll	none	https://www.boomlive.in/how-lower-negative-votes-pushed-pm-modis-ranking-in-gallup-internationals-poll/	None	None	None	None	None	How Lower Negative Votes Pushed PM Modi’s Ranking In Gallup International’s Poll	Jan 13 2018 3:08 pm, Last Updated: Jan 15 2018 7:13 pm	None	['None']
-tron-00706	Charleton Heston speech at Harvard Law School	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/heston-harvard/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Charleton Heston speech at Harvard Law School	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-10619	Says he passed a bill to stop a military requirement that wounded soldiers pay for meals and phone calls.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/16/barack-obama/his-bill-was-more-narrow/	During the Democratic debate in Las Vegas on Jan. 15, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama complained about "callousness" for wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. "I went to Walter Reed to talk to the wounded warriors who had come back to discover that they were still paying for their meals and their phone calls while in Walter Reed, while rehabbing, which I could not believe," Obama said, referring to his April 2005 visit to the Washington, D.C., hospital. "And I was able to gain the cooperation of a Republican-controlled Senate at the time and pass a bill that would eliminate that." Obama is correct that his bill passed, but he gives the impression its scope was broader than it really was. It was actually Beverly Young, the wife of U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young of Indian Shores, Fla., who two years earlier called attention to the meal rules at Walter Reed. In the summer of 2003, she learned that the government was requiring wounded soldiers who were staying in the hospital to reimburse the government $8.10 per day for their food. The rule was based on a philosophy that soldiers would be double-dipping if they ate food at the hospital and got to pocket the $8.10. She and Rep. Young raised a fuss about the rule and said it was wrong to charge wounded soldiers for hospital food. Rep. Young said it was especially silly to charge because "the food probably isn't that good." The Youngs paid a $210 bill on behalf of Marine Staff Sgt. Bill Murwin, the first case the Youngs heard about, and Rep. Young introduced a bill to permanently end the rule. It passed in October 2003. Young's law applied to inpatient care at Walter Reed. In January 2005, the month that Obama joined the Senate, Salon.com published an article that said soldiers who were visiting Walter Reed for outpatient care were also being required to pay for their meals. About four months later, Obama visited Walter Reed and then introduced an amendment to a defense bill that expanded the definition of "hospitalized" soldiers to include those undergoing medical recuperation and therapy. Obama noted that the number of soldiers affected was "small" — about 4,000. His amendment passed the Senate in May 2005 with bipartisan support: Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was one of the co-sponsors and it passed when Republicans controlled Congress. The meal portion was included in a final conference report that passed both chambers that month. Obama is correct that his bill passed and that it had Republican support. But at the Las Vegas debate, he gave the impression that its scope was broader than it was. Indeed, the main problem had been fixed two years earlier. So we find his statement Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-01-16T00:00:00	2008-01-15	['None']
-pose-00556	Will "use my experience as (Milwaukee) County Executive to work with the private sector to reopen these centers and make them self-sufficient. During my tenure, we were able to partner with the private sector to increase support for our parks and attractions."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/walk-o-meter/promise/579/reopen-tourism-visitor-centers-closed-under-gov-j/	None	walk-o-meter	Scott Walker	None	None	Reopen tourism visitor centers closed under Gov. Jim Doyle	2012-12-19T13:16:17	None	['Milwaukee']
-goop-02836	Brad Pitt ‘Terrified’ Angelina Jolie’s Casting Voodoo Spells Against Him, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-voodoo-spells-brad-pitt-fake-news/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Brad Pitt NOT ‘Terrified’ Angelina Jolie’s Casting Voodoo Spells Against Him, Despite Fake News Story	11:40 am, April 27, 2017	None	['Brad_Pitt', 'Angelina_Jolie']
-goop-00246	Jennifer Lawrence Angry At Bradley Cooper For Casting Lady Gaga In ‘A Star Is Born’?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-lawrence-bradley-cooper-lady-gaga-star-is-born/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Lawrence Angry At Bradley Cooper For Casting Lady Gaga In ‘A Star Is Born’?	9:51 am, September 20, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-00313	Kendall Jenner, Ben Simmons Getting Married?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kendall-jenner-ben-simmons-married-engaged/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kendall Jenner, Ben Simmons Getting Married?	4:30 pm, September 6, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01151	Justin Bieber Did Dine With “Bevy Of Girls” After Church, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-bieber-dinner-girls-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Justin Bieber Did NOT Dine With “Bevy Of Girls” After Church, Despite Claim	11:33 am, April 19, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02082	Says Hillary Clinton opposed an individual mandate and favored an employer mandate back in 1993.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/may/21/bobby-jindal/was-hillary-clinton-against-individual-mandate-dur/	Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal still thinks the Affordable Care Act is unworkable and he found an unlikely ally to help him criticize the law: Hillary Clinton. Before you stop the presses or get Wolf Blitzer ready in the Situation Room, there’s an important twist: Jindal was quoting Clinton from 1993. In an op-ed for Politico, Jindal rehashed his opposition to the individual mandate that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance, a key tenant of President Barack Obama’s health care law. And he noted that Clinton was once against it, too. "It is a well-known fact that Clinton came to strenuously support an individual health insurance mandate in her 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama," Jindal wrote. "Less well-remembered, however, is that Clinton considered an employer mandate — not an individual mandate — the best way to achieve ‘universal coverage’ in her health care task force’s ill-fated 1993 proposal, put forth while she was first lady." Twenty years have passed since the Clintons’ unsuccessful attempt at health care reform, but hey, we live in the days when hologram Michael Jackson performs on stage. So maybe what’s old is new again, and a trip to the ’90s is just what we need. The Clintons go to Washington In 1993, Hillary Clinton led a task force created by her husband, President Bill Clinton, with the goal of reforming the health industry and providing care for most of the population. On Sept. 22, 1993, President Clinton gave a speech where he laid out his proposal based off the task force’s findings. Universal coverage, he said, could be achieved by requiring all employers to provide insurance to workers. First Lady Clinton then testified on the Hill for several days to explain and defend the plan before a handful of congressional committees. Clinton said that the administration settled on an employer mandate, rather than instituting a broad-based tax similar to Medicare, or an individual mandate, which a handful of Republicans had offered as a means of achieving universal coverage. We listened to several hours of Clinton’s testimony and read many news accounts from 1993. We can say with confidence that Jindal is right: Clinton opposed delivering universal coverage entirely through an individual mandate and supported an employer mandate instead. But Jindal also picks out a couple of Clinton’s concerns and tries to tie them to current events, as though her comments in 1993 foreshadowed Obamacare’s impact on the health care industry. Perhaps Clinton’s misgivings are relevant to today’s debate, but not how Jindal portrayed them. For example, as Jindal notes, Clinton testified she thought employers may see the individual mandate as an opportunity to forgo providing their employees insurance and push them instead to the new individual market. Jindal tries to link this comment to the millions of individuals who had their policies canceled last year due to minimum requirements in Obamacare (which, he notes, contributed to PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year). Clinton’s concerns, though, have nothing to do with what happened to those people. The millions who had their policies canceled or changed last year bought plans from an independent provider, not through their employer. Clinton also thought employers might feel pressure under an individual mandate to keep wages low so employees would qualify for government-paid subsidies to purchase insurance on the private market. Jindal wrote, "That sounds a lot like what the Congressional Budget Office concluded in February: that Obamacare will reduce the labor force by the equivalent of 2.3 million workers, because employers will not raise wages and individuals will choose not to work in order to retain access to government insurance subsidies." That’s not what exactly what the CBO said, as we’ve noted on multiple occasions. People aren’t leaving jobs as part of a ploy to make themselves eligible for subsidies. Rather, the CBO said that the availability of affordable insurance would make it possible for individuals to voluntarily cut back hours or quit jobs they stayed in only for the health insurance (like someone with a pre-existing condition who previously could not get coverage on the private market and was working just for the insurance). It’s worth noting, too, those weren’t Clinton’s only concerns. She also said that the existing private insurance system was heavily reliant on employer-provided coverage and an employer mandate would be the "least disruptive" and most familiar to people. Over the last two decades, though, fewer individuals are receiving health care benefits from their employer. It’s still a plurality of Americans, but it has dropped steadily. In 1997, nearly 65 percent of individuals bought their insurance through their employer; in 2010 it was 56.5 percent, the U.S. Census said, and continues to decline. Kaiser Family Foundation, the non-partisan health experts, estimates it’s down to 48 percent of the population. Clinton also worried that government couldn’t create a system to pull off the individual mandate. She had "great concerns about how the administrative structure to track the individual contribution, to collect it and to then connect it with health insurance would be set up." Such a system, she said, would be "extremely complicated and bureaucratic." The technology the Obama administration utilized (eventually) to create a new market for buying and selling private health insurance is inconceivable to anything Clinton could have imagined back when the World Wide Web was an infant. That may have assuaged some of her concerns about the bureaucratic and logistical hurdles. Though, as Obama can attest, even with the technology, it hasn’t been easy. Finally, we noticed Clinton wasn’t all that down on the individual mandate, an idea promoted by moderate Republicans like Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I. She said it was "in the same ballpark" as her plan because it was a means to universal coverage. It just wasn’t her prefered pathway. She was more critical of alternatives offered by conservative Democrats that did not include any mandates at all. Our ruling Jindal said that in supporting an employer health insurance mandate in 1993, Clinton opposed an individual mandate. We think readers would be wise to review the red flags we raised surrounding Jindal’s characterization of Clinton’s comments and how they apply to the current state of affairs. But when it comes to reciting history, Jindal is largely accurate. Clinton had serious misgivings about an individual mandate to buy health insurance, and strongly preferred an employer-based model. On that point, we give Jindal a Mostly True.	None	Bobby Jindal	None	None	None	2014-05-21T05:59:00	2014-05-13	['None']
-pomt-03177	Americans spend more than $160 billion and 6 billion hours per year complying with the tax code.	true	/georgia/statements/2013/sep/04/tom-price/call-tax-overhaul-cites-high-cost-money-time/	How much time did it take you -- or your tax preparer -- to complete your taxes last year? A couple of hours? A few days? How about 6 billion hours! According to Georgia Congressman Tom Price, Americans spend that vast amount of time complying with the tax code each year. Not only that, he said, but the cost to comply with the tax code is also astronomical. In a couple of Twitter posts recently, Price, a Republican from Roswell, used the eye-popping figures to push for an overhaul of the tax code. "Americans spend $160+ billion per yr complying with the tax code. Visit http://TaxReform.gov & share your ideas to fix a broken tax code," one Price post said. It was followed by a second post:: "Americans spend 6 billion hrs per yr complying with the tax code. Follow @simplertaxes & join the fight for a simpler, pro-growth tax code." We know taxes and the federal tax code are tough and take time to understand. But 6 billion hours and $160 billion for compliance? Those numbers seemed extreme, and we decided to check them out. Tax reform has become a talking point that almost everyone can agree on, sort of like the declaration that ice cream is yummy. Politicos on both sides of the aisle have called for an overhaul of a tax system that many say is too complex and onerous for businesses and individuals. The broad goal is to simplify the code by eliminating or reducing tax breaks and using the additional revenue to lower tax rates across the board. Price is a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, the chief tax-writing committee in the House. He has been part of a Republican bloc that has argued for overhauling the tax code to not only lower tax rates but also broaden the tax base and eliminate loopholes. To illustrate the obstacle that the tax code has become, Price and several other politicos have used the figures the congressman used in his Twitter posts. For example, PolitiFact Oregon checked similar statements made by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who used the figures to promote his plan for simplifying the tax code. Wyden’s statement was rated True. The numbers cited by Price and Wyden can be traced to the Internal Revenue Service’s independent ombudsman, known as the National Taxpayer Advocate. The ombudsman, currently Nina E. Olson, is described as the voice of the taxpayer before the IRS and Congress. Olson leads the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent organization within the IRS, in helping taxpayers resolve problems with the IRS, as well as working for change in the agency and in the federal tax code. In a 2010 annual report to Congress, Olson said that taxpayers -- individuals and corporations -- spend about $163 billion annually to comply with the tax code, a sum equal to 11 percent of all the revenue the federal government collected. The cost of compliance was based on 2008 figures. The NTA says there is no correct methodology for quantifying the costs of compliance with the tax code. The $163 billion figure is based on what was spent on personal and business income taxes (5.6 billion hours) multiplied by the average hourly cost of a civilian employee ($29.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The calculations did not include time spent complying with requirements for employment, estate and gift, excise, and exempt organization taxes. The annual compliance cost estimate based on 2010 requirements grew to $168 billion, according to the NTA’s 2012 annual report. That 2012 annual report found that individual taxpayers and businesses spend about 6.1 billion hours a year complying with the filing requirements of the Internal Revenue code. That figure does not include millions of additional hours taxpayers spend responding to IRS notices or audits. Olson’s office arrived at that figure by multiplying the number of copies of each form filed for tax year 2010 by the average amount of time the IRS estimated it took to complete each form. The IRS estimates the average time burden for all taxpayers is 13 hours, with an average cost of $210 per return. This average includes four hours for actual tax form completion, six hours for recordkeeping, two more hours for tax planning and a miscellaneous hour. The authors of the NTA report admit that the figure for time spent complying with the tax code is difficult to accurately measure because the IRS has not kept up with technology improvements that have made the process more efficient. Since 2001, Olson’s office has found, Congress has made nearly 5,000 changes to the tax code, an average of more than one a day, and the code has reached almost 4 million words. "Individual taxpayers find return preparation so overwhelming that few do it on their own. Nearly 60 percent of taxpayers hire paid preparers, and another 30 percent rely on commercial software, with leading software packages costing $50 or more," Olson wrote. "In other words, taxpayers must spend money just to figure out how much money they owe." If tax compliance were an industry, Olson said, "it would be one of the largest in the United States." To sum up, U.S. Rep Tom Price said Americans are spending more than $160 billion and 6 billion hours each year complying with the federal tax code. The figures have been repeated by multiple interests seeking a comprehensive overhaul of the tax code. Prices’ figures, used in two Twitter posts, can be traced to the IRS’ independent ombudsman. Those figures, while difficult to quantify, have become the accepted standard for calculating compliance time and costs. We rate Price’s claim True.	None	Tom Price	None	None	None	2013-09-04T10:16:49	2013-08-14	['United_States']
-tron-00523	Bush’s Baked Beans Issues Recall	outdated!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bushes-baked-beans-issues-recall-outdated/	None	business	None	None	['consumer safety', 'recalls', 'social media', 'warnings']	Bushes Baked Beans Issues Recall	Jun 12, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-06346	An American Airlines pilot penned an essay about Muslims entitled "You Worry Me."	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/you-worry-me/	None	September 11th	None	David Mikkelson	None	You Worry Me	19 August 2002	None	['American_Airlines']
-tron-00954	Tax Refund Notification From IRS	virus!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/irs-virus-2013/	None	computers	None	None	None	Tax Refund Notification From IRS	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-11400	"For the sixth straight year, we have secured record funding for K-12 and state universities."	half-true	/florida/statements/2018/mar/23/rick-scott/rick-scott-says-k-12-state-university-funding-high/	Gov. Rick Scott bragged that his final state budget continues a trend of record funding for education. "For the sixth straight year, we have secured record funding for K-12 and state universities to ensure every student has the opportunity to receive a world-class education in Florida," Scott wrote in a letter to Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner on March 16. Scott’s claim is at odds with Democrats and state educators who say the education budget doesn’t go far enough to cover classroom needs. The 2018-19 budget includes specific allotments for school safety and mental health programs in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. Given the heated debate, we wanted to take a closer look at Scott’s claim. As we’ve concluded in similar fact-checks, the state’s total K-12 education budget has indeed increased in raw dollars every year for the last six years. However, Scott is overstating the value of those dollars. The K-12 education budget has not topped pre-recession levels when adjusted for inflation. Breakdown of K-12 education funding The main source of money for K-12 education is the Florida Education Finance Program, or FEFP. By law, it’s a combination of state and local funding that is sometimes tweaked based on tax receipts and enrollment counts. Scott spokeswoman Kerri Wyland said the "record funding" for K-12 education is only in reference to the state contribution, not the total funds that factor in local contributions. But that was not clear from Scott’s comment. For the 2018-19 school year, the K-12 total budget is about $21.1 billion, or about $7,408 per student. (The state’s share is a little more than half of the total at $11.9 billion.) That’s the highest it’s ever been, and a jump of almost $500 million from the previous year. School officials around the state have not been pleased, however, because their hands are tied about how to spend most of it. A good chunk of the increase is dedicated for school safety and mental health initiatives. "The Legislature is touting ‘record’ funding for schools by counting money slated for safety and mental health, not for education," said superintendents from some of Florida’s largest school districts in a joint column for the Tampa Bay Times. "Their ‘record’ funding is all funneled into categorical funds and can only be used for certain purposes." With that point in mind, we dove into the budget and per-pupil spending trends (the past six years are in bold): Fiscal year Total K-12 state share Total K-12 funds K-12 enrollment Per-pupil spending 2007-08 $9.7 billion $18.7 billion 2.63 million $7,126 2008-09 $8.6 billion $17.9 billion 2.62 million $6,846 2009-10 $8.1 billion $18 billion 2.63 million $6,846 2010-11 $8.91 billion $18.2 billion 2.64 million $6,897 2011-12* $8.71 billion $16.6 billion 2.67 million $6,217 2012-13 $9.5 billion $17.2 billion 2.7 million $6,376 2013-14 $10.5 billion $18.3 billion 2.705 million $6,769 2014-15 $10.7 billion $18.9 billion 2.74 million $6,915 2015-16 $10.93 billion $19.7 billion 2.77 million $7,105 2016-17 $11.3 billion $20.2 billion 2.8 million $7,196 2017-18 $11.6 billion $20.6 billion 2.82 million $7,307 2018-19 $11.9 billion $21.1 billion 2.9 million $7,408 * Scott’s first budget. In sheer dollars, Scott’s claim about K-12 schools is accurate. Overall, state and per-pupil funding has increased every year since fiscal year 2013-14 in K-12 schools. Per-pupil spending is a crucial measure, because it shows how much is spent on each student. It would be expected, then, that overall spending would increase with the number of students. There are approximately 200,000 more K-12 students today then six years ago in fiscal year 2013-14. Scott’s boast of record funding, however, does not hold up when adjusted for inflation. Using the federal Consumer Price Index calculator, we found per-pupil spending is not as high as it was before the recession crippled state tax revenues. K-12 per-pupil spending would have to be more than $8,726 in 2018-19 to match the 2007-08 level. Instead it is more than $1,000 short. State university funding Scott’s boasts of education spending over the years have not usually included state funding for universities. Scott’s office provided the total operating budgets for state universities in the six years he mentioned, but we were unable to find per-pupil and enrollment totals for the more recent school years. The university budgets grew each year, from $3.48 billion in 2013-14 to $4.37 billion from 2018-19. During that time, the system also added more students. The Board of Governors, which oversees the State University System, offered enrollment totals and per-pupil spending for this period, using a slightly different methodology to calculate the overall operating funds. The spending totals reported by the board are slightly less than the figures cited by Scott. (One explanation could be that the governor’s data includes tuition assistance.) Still, they speak to the trend of increased record spending. The same caveats we found with K-12 education also apply: Per-pupil spending in 2018-19 would have to be roughly $14,346 to match the 2007-08 level. We did not find a per-pupil spending for 2018-19, but it’s safe to say that the per-pupil amount would be very close to the spending power in 2007-08. Fiscal year General revenue and lottery subtotal Enrollment Per-pupil spending 2007-08 $3.04 billion 259,528 $11,716 2008-09 $2.9 billion 259,972 $11,407 2009-10 $2.9 billion 268,052 $11,015 2010-11 $3.1 billion 276,376 $11,324 2011-12* $2.9 billion 293,660 $10,162 2012-13 $2.9 billion 294,005 $9,906 2013-14 $3.5 billion 293,517 $11,957 2014-15 $3.8 billion 294,785 $12,764 2015-16 $3.9 billion 299,486 $13,047 2016-17 $4.1 billion 305,690 $13,459 2017-18 $4.28 billion 311,430 $13,752 2018-19 $4.3 billion* No data No data Source: Board of Governors, State Funding History for the SUS *Governor’s office estimate Our ruling Scott said, "For the sixth straight year, we have secured record funding for K-12 and state universities." Scott has a point in terms of sheer dollars. However, Florida's K-12 education funding hasn’t kept up with pre-recession numbers. We don't have a complete view of state university spending, but it's likely per-pupil spending is roughly the same as pre-recession numbers. And the bulk of this year’s K-12 education budget increase is strictly for school safety and mental health, which won’t leave a lot of money left over for classroom needs. We rate this Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2018-03-23T11:28:08	2018-03-16	['None']
-pomt-02826	"Under Mayor Cicilline, [Providence] was a sanctuary city."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2013/nov/24/john-depetro/talk-show-host-john-depetro-says-providence-was-sa/	Though it isn’t generating the political heat it did five years ago, immigration is still a hot-button talk radio issue. It resurfaced Oct. 21, 2013, when WPRO talk show host John DePetro was interviewing Brett Smiley, who plans to run for mayor of Providence. DePetro asked Smiley what he’d do as mayor about the number of "illegal aliens" in the city, and then said that "under Mayor [David] Cicilline, it [Providence] was a sanctuary city. He and the chief at the time, Dean Esserman, they wouldn’t cooperate with ICE regarding illegals in the city." The sanctuary city charge has been aimed at Cicilline, now a U.S. representative, before. Brendan Doherty, Cicilline’s Republican opponent in the 2012 congressional election, claimed during that campaign that Cicilline "espoused" Providence as a sanctuary city. We found no evidence that Cicilline ever took that position and ruled Doherty’s claim False. We wondered whether DePetro’s phrasing was more on the mark. DePetro said he based his statement on what he views as Providence’s begrudging-at-best cooperation with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. He said a prime example of that was the handling of a 2008 rape by Marco Riz, a Guatemalan man who was in the country illegally. Riz, who kidnapped a woman in Warwick and assaulted her in Providence’s Roger Williams Park, is serving a 30-year sentence. The Providence police had picked Riz up on a misdemeanor charge months before the rape and released him, even though he had previously been ordered deported by an immigration judge. In news accounts at the time, the Providence police and ICE each found reason to blame the other for the mistake. Providence police said they’d checked a national warrant database and found no warrants for Riz. They said they’d faxed a copy of his arraignment form to ICE and the agency never responded. ICE officials said Providence police should have contacted the agency’s Vermont office to check Riz’s status, and if they had, they’d have found about about the deportation order. (Now, instead of faxing reports, Providence police electronically transmit arrested suspects’ fingerprints to the attorney general’s office, which automatically adds them to national databases that ICE monitors, said Providence police spokeswoman Lindsay Lague and attorney general spokeswoman Amy Kempe .) So what about DePetro’s claim? The phrase "sanctuary city" gets tossed around a lot when immigration policy is being discussed, but even experts have a hard time defining it. During a congressional hearing in 2007, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff observed, "you know, people use the term sanctuary city in different ways, so I’m never quite sure what people mean." Some have applied the term to cities such as New Haven, Conn., where the city issues its own identity cards regardless of immigration status, cards that can be used to get city services or open bank accounts. Or Takoma Park, Md., where residents who are not citizens of the United States have been allowed to vote in local elections since 1993. Or San Francisco, where the city and county have ordinances that specifically forbid city employees from helping ICE unless ordered to by federal or state law or a warrant. Or Cook County, Ill., where the county commissioners voted not to honor ICE requests to hold prisoners unless ICE was willing to pay for their incarceration. It also ordered that, absent a criminal warrant, county law enforcement personnel were not to expend time responding to ICE inquiries. Providence had none of those measures under Mayor Cicilline, nor does it now. In 2007, then-City Councilman Miguel Luna proposed an ordinance that would have specifically declared Providence a "sanctuary city." It never made it out of the Ordinance Committee for a vote. While Cicilline was mayor, however, the city resisted then-Gov. Donald Carcieri’s efforts to enlist municipalities in immigration enforcement. But Providence continued to notify federal ICE officials when it arrested suspected illegal immigrants and was never cited for failure to cooperate by the federal government. Our ruling John DePetro said that under Mayor David Cicilline, Providence "was a sanctuary city." While there is no legal definition of "sanctuary city," in the eight years that Cicilline was mayor Providence had not taken any of the measures adopted by other cities often identified by that label. We rule DePetro’s statement False. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	John DePetro	None	None	None	2013-11-24T00:01:00	2013-10-21	['None']
-tron-01313	Japan’s Damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor Falling into Ocean	mostly fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/japans-damaged-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-reactor-falling-ocean/	None	environment	None	None	['international', 'nuclear']	Japan’s Damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor Falling into Ocean	Feb 7, 2017	None	['Japan']
-pomt-13260	"In exchange for five minutes with Bill Clinton, the government of Qatar was going to give $1 million to the Clinton Foundation."	mostly true	/global-news/statements/2016/oct/16/mike-pence/did-qatar-promise-clinton-foundation-1-million-fiv/	Mike Pence, emphatically denying allegations of sexual assault against Donald Trump, protested that the media hasn’t applied the same scrutiny to Hillary Clinton. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Pence said the media has paid more attention to the "unsubstantiated" charges against Trump than the real revelations about Clinton’s wrongdoings at the State Department. "The national media is ignoring an avalanche of real, hard evidence of corruption during the years of the Clinton administration. The New York Times just a few minutes ago posted a story about — in exchange for five minutes with Bill Clinton, the government of Qatar was going to give $1 million to the Clinton Foundation," Pence said Oct. 16, 2016. We wanted to fact-check Pence’s claim about Qatar and its $1 million donation. We found that Pence is largely accurate in his description of the New York Times account. The New York Times article, published Oct. 15, details an email to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, obtained by Wikileaks. (The Clinton camp has yet to confirm or deny the leak’s authenticity.) Amitabh Desai, the Clinton Foundation’s foreign policy director, emailed three Clinton Foundation employees and Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s personal aide on April 16, 2012, about his meetings with ambassadors from Qatar and a few other foreign countries. Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. "Qatar — Would like to see WJC (William Jefferson Clinton) for ‘five minutes’ in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promises from WJC’s birthday in 2011," Desai wrote. "Qatar would welcome our suggestions for investments in Haiti — particularly on education and health. They have allocated most of their $20 million but are happy to consider projects we suggest. I'm collecting input from CF Haiti team." So the government of Qatar was going to give the Clinton Foundation $1 million as part of a five-minute meeting, according to this email. But Pence could have been more accurate in his description. Pence said Qatar "was going to" make a $1 million donation in exchange for a five-minute meeting. But according to Desai’s email, Qatar had promised the check for Bill Clinton’s birthday the previous year. The meeting was to present the check. Second, it’s not clear if the Qatari ambassador ever got his "five minutes" with the former president. Foreign government contributions to the Clinton Foundation have been the subject of much criticism lobbed against the Clintons. While they are legal, questions have been raised over possible conflicts of interest for Hillary Clinton while she was serving as secretary of state. As part of a memorandum of understanding between the Clinton Foundation and the Obama administration, the foundation agreed to (among other things) disclose material increases from foreign donors and roll back foreign donations altogether to its global health initiative. A State Department spokesperson told the New York Times that it does not have "a record of submission" from the Clinton Foundation on a 2012 donation from Qatar. A Clinton Foundation spokesman told us the 2012 donation was disclosed on its website. The Qatari government has given cumulatively between $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation from 2002 to 2016. The country is controversial for its treatment of women and the LGBT community, and has been accused of being a sponsor of terrorism. Our ruling Pence said, "In exchange for five minutes with Bill Clinton, the government of Qatar was going to give $1 million to the Clinton Foundation." The New York Times story shows that Qatar had promised $1 million to the Clinton Foundation for Bill Clinton’s birthday in 2011, and the Qatari ambassador requested five minutes with Bill Clinton to present the check the following year. It’s unclear of the meeting ever took place. We rate Pence’s claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/74868afb-8f25-47e7-88d8-79eba63ec8ef	None	Mike Pence	None	None	None	2016-10-16T17:00:00	2016-10-16	['Clinton_Foundation', 'Bill_Clinton', 'Qatar']
-pomt-07715	"We have lost 600,000 jobs over the period of the last 10 years. Only Michigan and California have done worse."	true	/ohio/statements/2011/mar/04/john-kasich/gov-john-kasich-says-only-california-and-michigan-/	Jobs were the leading issue in Ohio's 2010 election campaign, and the issue has lost none of its importance or utility to officeholders. Gov. John Kasich brought it up twice in two days in interviews on CNN. The first-term Republican cited the state's loss of jobs among the reasons he backed Senate Bill 5, which would eliminate collective bargaining rights for state employees. "We have lost 600,000 jobs over the period of the last 10 years," Kasich said. "Only Michigan and California have done worse." We thought that was worth checking, especially because employment figures are estimates, measured several different ways. The Current Population Survey (CPS) is based on household interviews conducted each month by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It counts employed individuals, and its data is used in calculating unemployment. The monthly Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey uses payroll records and counts unique jobs. Normally the headline jobs figure, it is preferred by the Congressional Budget Office and Bureau of Labor Statistics for measuring job growth. According to the CES survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 5,002,900 jobs in Ohio in December 2010. Ten years earlier, in December 2000, the number was 5,613,000. That's a loss of about 610,000 jobs -- and the decline is even larger from the peak level of 5,638,100 jobs in May 2000. Kasich had Ohio's number right. But was it the nation’s third worst? California, which had 13,897,100 jobs in December 2010, lost 803,000 jobs from December 2000, and 1,305,500 jobs from the state’s peak level of July 2007, according to the CES survey. Michigan had 3,831,500 jobs in December 2010, a loss of 832,800 from December 2000. Kasich was correct that both states lost more jobs than Ohio from the start to the finish of the decade ending last December. No other states lost more by that measure. But there’s a footnote we’ll also add about boom-or-bust Florida, which qualifies as both a gainer and a loser. The state gained about 30,000 jobs from December 2000 to December 2010, when it had 7,193,900 in the CES survey. From its peak level of March 2007, however, Florida has lost 876,500 jobs -- more than any state except California. But for purposes of the Truth-O-Meter, words matter. Kasich’s statement was that over the last 10 years, Ohio lost 600,000 jobs and that only Michigan and California have done worse. And in terms of net change over the decade, he’s right on the money. We rate his statement as True.	None	John Kasich	None	None	None	2011-03-04T06:00:00	2011-02-22	['Michigan', 'California']
-pomt-12408	"Donald Trump praises Colonel Sanders for his service in the Civil War."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/may/23/theredshtickcom/trump-calling-kfcs-col-sanders-civil-war-hero-was-/	A story that said President Donald Trump praised Kentucky Fried Chicken’s founder for saving Civil War troops from starvation at Valley Forge flunks the truth test. Let’s do our own history lesson here: A May 2, 2017, post at TheRedShtick.com carried the headline, "Donald Trump praises Colonel Sanders for his service in the Civil War." The story was flagged by Facebook as being potentially fake, as part of the social media site’s efforts to combat fake news. The story played off a controversial comment Trump made on May 1 about former President Andrew Jackson, whom Trump readily admires. During an interview on Sirius XM’s P.O.T.U.S. channel, Trump told the Washington Examiner's Salena Zito, "I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later you wouldn't have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said, 'There's no reason for this.' " Trump drew criticism for the incident because his words neglect the fact that Jackson was a slave owner. TheRedShtick.com used an excerpt from a May 1 New York Times story about the flap, then went off on its own invented tangent. The post said Trump told their intern, Dave Robicheaux, that Col. Harland Sanders, the founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain, was a "tremendous Civil War hero." "Trump, a noted fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken, explained how Col. Sanders took five loaves of Evangeline Maid bread and two chickens, added his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, and turned these humble ingredients into delicious meals that lasted an entire winter," the post read. "Robicheaux attempted to explain to Trump that Col. Sanders was born 25 years after the end of the war, that The Donald seemed to be confusing the food incident with a Biblical story about Jesus feeding the multitudes, and that Valley Forge was neither an encampment nor a battle site during the Civil War." It should be pretty obvious that this story is more than a bit contrived, starting with the name of the post’s author, Manny Schewitz. (For the record, Trump does like the occasional KFC bucket.) People coming to the story would certainly realize the post is fake if they visited the web pages’ About Us section. It says TheRedShtick.com is "a bold and engaging source of satire and irreverent humor." It said the site is a digital descendant of the defunct Red Shtick Magazine, formerly "the only print satirical publication in Louisiana’s capital city" of Baton Rouge (French for Red Stick). The print magazine ended in 2012, the site said. There is a RedShtickMagazine.com, that carries similar graphics to TheRedShtick.com, but the two sites post different content. The magazine site appears to carry unrelated, intermittent blog posts about Thailand-centric issues and events, as far as we can tell. Neither site makes its registration information public, but TheRedShtick.com publisher Jeremy White told us the publication once used the magazine’s domain name, but gave it up after going digital. As for the Sanders story, White said that it should be obvious that it’s fabricated, but these days satire can be difficult to distinguish from reality. "We earnestly endeavor to distinguish ourselves from peddlers of fake news — devoid of any real humor or any attempt to speak truth to power — who publish their fiction under the guise of satire," White said. "They only muddy our national discourse in the pursuit of easy clicks." Either way, Facebook readers should flag TheRedShtick.com as a satirical website and avoid it as a news source. We rate it Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	TheRedShtick.com	None	None	None	2017-05-23T16:42:34	2017-05-02	['Donald_Trump']
-snes-05511	Talk show host Oprah Winfrey is pregnant with her first child at 61.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/oprah-winfrey-pregnant-61/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	FALSE: Oprah Winfrey Pregnant with First Child at 61	9 December 2015	None	['Oprah_Winfrey']
-vees-00235	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online posts claiming Robredo camp orders burning of pro-Marcos ballots	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-online-posts-claiming-robredo-camp-ord-1	None	None	None	None	Fact check	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online posts claiming Robredo camp orders burning of pro-Marcos ballots has NO BASIS	April 27, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02030	Says Hillary Clinton "laid the groundwork" for getting chemical weapons out of Syria.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jun/04/claire-mccaskill/claire-mccaskill-says-hillary-clinton-secretary-st/	Despite a rocky past with the Clintons, Sen. Claire McCaskill was one of the first Democrats to jump on the 2016 Hillary for President bandwagon. And she sits on the Senate Armed Services and Homeland Security committees. So when Fox News Sunday was looking for someone to defend Hillary Clinton’s record as Secretary of State, who better than the Missouri Democrat? Host Chris Wallace contended that Clinton has a less-than-impressive resume from her time at the State Department. Wallace said Clinton "defended Syria President Bashar al-Assad as a possible reformer at the start of that country’s civil war." (Our partners at PunditFact rated that Half True.) McCaskill later retorted that Clinton actually played a key role in the Syrian conflict. "We're getting the chemical weapons out of Syria," McCaskill said. "She laid the groundwork for that." The agreement the United States reached with Assad to turn over Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons came in September 2013 — seven months after Clinton stepped down as Secretary of State. As we suspected, McCaskill’s claim is rather dubious. Civil war Antigovernment protests in Syria began in March 2011. At the time, Clinton was Secretary of State. In the early stages of the conflict, Clinton and the administration called for a peaceful transition to democracy, and in August 2011, Obama said Assad should step down. But the Syrian conflict continued to escalate into an all-out civil war. Throughout the crisis, the United States was concerned about the chemical weapons in Syria — not only Assad’s use of them on his own people but protecting them from falling into the wrong hands if Assad should be overthrown. In August 2012, President Barack Obama spoke to reporters in the White House and first used the term "red line" regarding Assad’s chemical weapons. "A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized," he said, later adding there would be "enormous consequences." McCaskill’s office noted that Clinton met with Russian and United Nations officials in December 2012 about the conflict. Before the meeting, she spoke with reporters and said "we’ve made it very clear what our position is with respect to chemical weapons," reiterating Obama’s red line. McCaskill spokesman John LaBombard added that "the current efforts to remove chemical weapons benefited from her hard work." That "may or may not be true," said Anthony Arend, cofounder of the Institute for International Law & Politics at Georgetown, "but, in any case, it's not the same as laying a foundation for the current agreement." The December 2012 meeting with Clinton and Russia did not result in any accord with Syria, nor did her negotiations prevent Assad from using chemical weapons. She left two months later in February 2014, when Sen. John Kerry won confirmation for the position from the Senate. And a lot happened after Clinton’s departure that make it hard to link her to the eventual weapons deal, experts told us. For starters, the administration’s position on what the "red line" actually meant continued to change after Clinton left office. When he first said it, Obama did not explain what the "enormous consequences" would be. In April 2013, the White House first told senators that the international community had evidence of chemical weapons use. By June, the Obama administration concluded Assad’s regimes used chemical weapons and authorized the military to provide light arms and ammunition to Syrian rebels. It wasn’t until Aug. 31, 2013, that Obama, citing Assad’s use of chemical weapons, called for congressional authority to take military action against Syria. "If anything, this red line that the Obama administration proclaimed was very fluid. It kept moving," said Danny Postel, associate director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. "It wasn’t until the critical weeks of the big chemical weapons attack that finally triggered the Obama administration to threaten actual military strikes on the Assad regime. Hillary Clinton was already gone by this point." It was that policy shift and threat of military action that ultimately seemed to move Assad to take action. The accidental agreement Experts also noted how quickly and spontaneously the deal to remove Assad’s chemical weapons was reached between the U.S., Syria and Russia. In many ways, Kerry almost "stumbled" into the agreement, said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Oklahoma University and author of the Syria Comment blog. During a visit to London, a reporter asked Kerry about Assad’s interview with PBS’ Charlie Rose, where the leader would not even admit to having chemical weapons. "Is there anything at this point that his government could do or offer that would stop an attack?" the reporter asked. Kerry responded: "Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn't about to do it, and it can't be done, obviously." A State Department spokesman even said later that day that the offer was made "rhetorically." But within hours of Kerry’s remarks, Russia responded that Syria was receptive to such an agreement. On Sept. 10, Syria admitted to its chemical weapons stockpile and four days later joined the Chemical Weapons Convention and agreed to eliminate its weapons. About 90 percent of those weapons have been turned over since then. We took this analysis to McCaskill for rebuttal but they didn’t respond on the record. A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment, and Clinton’s spokesman did not respond to repeated emails. Our ruling McCaskill said Clinton "laid the groundwork" to remove Syria’s chemical weapons. The connection to the eventual deal seems to be Clinton’s ongoing discussions with Russia, who eventually helped broker the agreement, and the administration’s red line on chemical weapons, which eventually led to the threat of military action that forced Assad’s hand. Experts we spoke with said that was a pretty flimsy case. Obama’s red line changed meaning from Clinton to Kerry. At first it was a rather ambiguous threat. Later, crossing it meant helping rebels obtain weapons and finally the announcement of military action. Further, the eventual agreement itself came quickly and almost unintentionally after Kerry made a rhetorical offer that Russia and Assad accepted. Clinton had been out of the Secretary of State job for seven months at that point. Prior to Kerry’s offer, an agreement seemed out of reach. Given all of that, we rate McCaskill’s statement Mostly False.	None	Claire McCaskill	None	None	None	2014-06-04T17:26:18	2014-06-01	['Syria']
-pomt-01537	"More than three women per day lose their lives at the hands of their partners."	true	/punditfact/statements/2014/sep/16/james-brown/cbs-sports-james-brown-more-3-women-day-are-killed/	Advocates for victims of domestic violence say the one good thing to come out of the Ray Rice scandal is more Americans are aware of just how big of a problem this is -- and it’s not limited to the NFL. CBS Sports announcer James Brown touched on this in a 90-second monologue directed to all men during the Sept. 11 pregame broadcast of Thursday Night Football, which coincidentally featured Rice’s former team, the Baltimore Ravens, against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Brown urged men to learn "what healthy, respectful manhood is all about" and to "give help or to get help, because our silence is deafening and deadly." Then he pulled out a stirring statistic. "Consider this: According to domestic violence experts, more than three women per day lose their lives at the hands of their partners," Brown said. "That means that since the night Feb. 15 in Atlantic City (the night Ray Rice hit now-wife Janay Rice on the elevator) more than 600 women have died." The figure is used across several outreach group websites, including Futures Without Violence, the Domestic Abuse Shelter of the Florida Keys, the National Network to End Domestic Violence and the Arkansas Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Experts say the claim is accurate. While the veracity of crime statistics in general can be questioned due to underreporting by victims and mislabeling by the investigating officer, murder statistics are reliable, experts say. The biggest repository for national crime statistics is the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, which is based on data collected from local law enforcement agencies. Callie Rennison is a University of Colorado Denver public affairs professor who analyzes crime trends. Crunching federal figures, Rennison found 3.3 women died at the hands of their intimate partners per day in 2010. To get that figure, she divided the number of intimate partner homicides with female victims (1,192) by the number of days in the year. More than three days a day is alarmingly high, but it’s also down from a recent high of 4.2 deaths per day in 1993. Rennison did not run a similar calculation for the most recent years available, 2011 and 2012, but the trend holds. Of course, this is a daily average and not an exact representation of how many women are killed by their current or former partners. "So strictly scientifically speaking, it is a risk to estimate how many people have been killed in domestic violence incidents since Feb. 15," said Mary Koss, University of Arizona public health professor. "However, doing so is not fundamentally wrong and crime experts do it frequently." Because the number of male victims in intimate partner homicides is much lower, so too is the daily average. There were 305 of these deaths in 2010, which amounts to a daily average of 0.84. James Fox, a Northeastern University criminology professor, sliced the data differently for his own count of intimate partner homicides. He factored in unsolved homicide cases believed to have involved intimate partners. The result: slightly higher deaths per year. Using his numbers,the daily average of female deaths was 3.84 in 2010, 3.61 in 2011, and 3.68 in 2012. Brown could have been a touch more precise with his wording by saying "partners and former partners" instead of just "partners," but Rennison says that level of distinction is probably more important to academics. "Generally when we talk in our field (about FBI or Bureau of Justice Statistics figures), we’re talking about current or former spouse, girlfriend or boyfriend, and it can include same-sex partners as well," she said. Our ruling Brown implored the NFL community and beyond to consider a shocking statistic: "According to domestic violence experts, more than three women per day lose their lives at the hands of their partners." He went on to estimate how many women have been killed by their partners since the day Rice attacked his now-wife in an elevator -- a practice experts said isn’t scientifically precise but is a common practice. As for the three-deaths-a-day figure itself, experts said it is accurate. By some measures, the daily average is actually closer to four deaths. There are some ways that Brown could have been more precise, but they do not obscure his point. So we rate his claim True.	None	James Brown	None	None	None	2014-09-16T16:40:08	2014-09-11	['None']
-snes-01323	Three poll workers were arrested for voter fraud during Alabama's special election in December 2017.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-alabama-state-police-arrest-poll-workers/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Alabama State Police Arrest Three Poll Workers in Birmingham?	17 December 2017	None	['Alabama']
-hoer-00764	First Communion on the Moon	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/communion-on-the-moon.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	First Communion on the Moon	October 2009	None	['None']
-pomt-01685	Says Charlie Crist rode on a jet that "belongs to a serial polluter with a history of environmental violations fined nearly $2 million for polluting water."	true	/florida/statements/2014/aug/15/republican-party-florida/charlie-crist-used-jet-owned-serial-polluter-rpof-/	Gov. Rick Scott’s campaign has focused on painting the Republican incumbent as a friend of the environment, which means attempting to show Democratic challenger Charlie Crist isn’t. A Republican Party of Florida commercial released Aug. 7, 2014, lambasts Crist for taking a supporter’s personal aircraft to a press event. "On his way to an event about -- get this -- green issues, Crist cruised in on a private jet," the narrator says. "That’s rich. What’s richer? The jet belongs to a serial polluter with a history of environmental violations fined nearly $2 million for polluting water." That certainly sounded like fodder for headlines, but was it true? PolitiFact Florida attempted to pull the permits on this one and find out what happened. Campaign development The state GOP told PolitiFact the commercial stemmed from a plane ride Crist took from Gainesville to Tallahassee on July 25. While Scott uses his personal jet to attend events and has been criticized for a lack of transparency surrounding its use, Crist has often used private planes to help him get to events around the state. This time the Scott campaign took a photo of the 2005 Cessna 560XL’s tail number and traced its ownership. The owner turned out to be James Finch, a Lynn Haven contractor who owns Phoenix Construction Services Inc., a company previously fined for environmental infractions. That was especially problematic for the flight in question, since Crist was attending a climate change lecture by Florida State University oceanography professor Jeff Chanton. Finch, a former NASCAR team owner, has a long history of political donations, giving tens of thousands of dollars to the Republican Party of Florida and John McCain’s presidential campaign. He also has a history of facing fines from the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. While neither agency responded to PolitiFact Florida’s requests for documentation of Finch’s penalties, we were able to do a little digging on our own. On two occasions, in 1984 and 1996, he was cited for backfilling the bayou at his home. No action was taken on the first instance, but he was forced to pay a penalty and do restoration work on the second. A 1998 complaint about destruction of seagrass and another notice about a potential sewage spill at a Millville wastewater treatment plant were withdrawn for lack of evidence. His company Phoenix Construction Services was fined $23,000 by the EPA after filling in wetlands at a Panama Beach park against the terms of the project’s U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit in 1999. Fill dirt is considered by law to be a pollutant in "navigable wetlands." The Army Corps of Engineers issued a noncompliance notice after the company installed a portion of a sewage pipeline across St. Andrew Bay above ground against permitting guidelines. Finch’s company was cleared when the work was corrected per DEP guidelines by 2005. The truly epic saga, however, was Phoenix’s botched work at the Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport, which opened north of Panama City in 2010. Crist in 2007 called the airport "a national model for economic transformation and environmental preservation." Environmental groups had complained in 2009 that because of poor construction methods, the site was resulting in "pollution in Burnt Mill Creek, Crooked Creek, West Bay and the surrounding wetlands." Later that year, Phoenix was fined $1.7 million by the DEP for environmental permit violations. The agency concluded the contractor did not follow stormwater runoff plans or erosion stabilization methods, allowing improperly filtered water to flow into nearby wetlands. As costs wildly overran, Phoenix and the airport authority first sued each other, then banded together to sue other parties working on the project before settling in 2012. Phoenix did not return PolitiFact Florida’s request for comment. Phoenix continued to do work for the local government, though. The Bay County Commission in 2013 gave Phoenix a $25 million contract to build the county a water pumping station. The Crist campaign said the former governor didn’t know about the environmental fines against Finch. They said Crist hasn't used the plane since July 27. The Scott campaign shouldn't be too quick to point fingers at Finch for pollution fines, however. Finch worked on the airport with Charles W. "Chuck" Roberts III, a Panhandle paving contractor whose company was accused of improperly building a parking lot in that project. The airport authority was eventually blamed for not securing the proper permit. C.W. Roberts Inc. plants in several counties have been cited for leaking or improperly storing chemicals or being in disrepair. Many of the company’s infractions did not result in penalties. What is Roberts doing now? In 2011, Gov. Scott appointed him to a seat on the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Our ruling The Republican Party of Florida said Crist rode on a jet that "belongs to a serial polluter with a history of environmental violations fined nearly $2 million for polluting water." The plane’s owner, Bay County contractor James Finch, has been fined in the past for filling in wetlands or allowing unfiltered runoff to flow into waterways, in violation of environmental permits. That’s a legitimate definition of polluting, and there’s no doubt Finch has been fined almost $2 million over the years. It’s hypocritical of the state GOP to call out Finch when one of his subcontractors has benefited from a relationship with Gov. Scott. But that doesn’t change the facts. We rate the statement True.	None	Republican Party of Florida	None	None	None	2014-08-15T11:06:34	2014-08-07	['Charlie_Crist']
-pomt-15376	Says U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson "voted to cut $700m from Medicare."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2015/jul/01/moveon/moveonorg-says-ron-johnson-voted-cut-700-million-m/	Medicare has long been considered one of the third-rail issues of politics. Touch it, and the chances of recovery are slim. So it should be no surprise that political rivals depict their opponents as being on the wrong side of a high-voltage issue like Medicare funding. MoveOn.org, a political organizing group that endorsed Democrat Russ Feingold in May, put it bluntly June 11, 2015 in a Facebook post about U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, the man Feingold hopes to unseat in 2016: "Senator Johnson just voted to cut $700m from Medicare." Below the headline, the post indicated the cuts were part of a vote on legislation to give President Barack Obama additional latitude to negotiate trade deals. Let's start at the beginning. Medicare and international trade? The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which aims to open trade between the United States and several countries, including Chile, Singapore, New Zealand, Vietnam, Canada and Mexico, would leave some American workers unemployed as a result of the increased competition from abroad. To compensate for that, a second bill would temporarily reinstate a program called Trade Adjustment Assistance, or TAA, to help retrain and provide temporary benefits to those who become unemployed because of the trade measure. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill would cost $2.7 billion between 2015 and 2025. The cost of the program would be offset with user fees, cuts to tax credits, changing where Medicare recipients get some kidney treatments and a $700 million reduction to Medicare’s budget a decade from now, in 2025. Johnson was one of 62 senators who voted for the legislation, which the House passed June 25, 2015, sending it to Obama. For his part, Johnson argues it is not a cut at all. "The senator feels MoveOn’s statement is patently false," his communications director Melinda Schnell wrote in an email. A closer look With a budget of $505 billion in Fiscal Year 2014, Medicare is the federal government’s second-largest program, behind only Social Security. Between 2016 and 2025, the federal government is expected to spend a total of $7.3 trillion on Medicare. And the program is expected to grow -- even when the $700 million reduction is factored in. In 2025, when the $700 million budget reduction would go into effect, the federal government is expected to spend $981 billion on Medicare. Johnson's campaign points to a budget projection from the Congressional Budget Office that estimates what the federal government spends on Medicare will grow by 13.3 percent, or $115 billion, between 2024 and 2025. Even with a $700 million reduction, spending on the program will grow by about $114 billion, or 13.2 percent between 2024 and 2025. In other words, spending will increase, just by a smaller amount. The shoe was on the other foot in 2014, when Republicans argued that Democrats who voted for the Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare -- voted for a $700 billion cut to Medicare. PolitiFact National checked numerous variations of that statement, rating them Half True of Mostly False, depending on how they were worded. The Affordable Care Act reduced the expansion of Medicare by $700 billion over 10 years, while still allowing Medicare to grow. It just grew at a slower rate than it would have without the law. That's essentially what is happening here. The twist (and a primary source of complaint): In the new scenario, the Medicare money would go toward something not related to health care. Our rating Moveon.org criticized Johnson, saying he voted to cut $700 million from Medicare. But the $700 million budget reduction would not go into effect until 2025 and to say Medicare is being cut when it is still expected to grow by hundreds of billions of dollars is misleading at best. Our definition of Mostly False is "The statement contain some element of truth, but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression." That fits here.	None	MoveOn.org	None	None	None	2015-07-01T05:00:00	2015-06-11	['United_States']
-para-00197	"The bible ... says that slavery is a natural condition."	mostly true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/04/kevin-rudd/does-bible-say-slavery-natural-condition/index.html	None	['Religion', 'Same-sex marriage']	Kevin Rudd	Flynn Murphy, Peter Fray	None	Is Rudd right about the Bible's position on slavery?	Wednesday, September 4, 2013 at 8:43 p.m.	None	['None']
-pomt-06068	As a result of welfare reform, "poverty levels went down to the lowest level ever for ... African-American children."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/09/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-says-welfare-reform-deserves-credit-/	Fresh off his near-win in Iowa, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum held a town hall meeting in Brentwood, N.H., with voters on Jan. 4, 2011. He covered many topics, including one of his favorites: welfare reform. Santorum, who actively pushed for welfare changes as a member of Congress, talked about the effects of the 1996 reform law, telling the audience, "Guess what happened? Poverty levels went down to the lowest level ever for ... one of the areas that had the highest level of poverty historically, which is African-American children." We looked into the statement and found that Santorum is right that poverty rates declined after the reform’s passage. But opinions differ on the primary cause. What the reform did Santorum was first elected to the House in 1991 and helped write the Republicans’ Contract with America, which proposed a major overhaul to the federal welfare system. President Bill Clinton had been elected promising to "end welfare as we know it." The legislative battle over just how to do that spanned several years. In 1996, Santorum had moved on to the Senate, helping win passage of a law that transformed welfare from an entitlement -- guaranteeing cash for needy people -- to a temporary assistance program with dollar caps and time limits on what beneficiaries could receive. It shifted most of the administrative work to the states and required recipients to move toward work and financial independence. The idea was that people on welfare -- who were still poor because benefits did not exceed the poverty line -- would be motivated to seek job training and full employment and end up being better off financially. For backup to his claim about the reform’s positive effect on black child poverty, Santorum’s campaign pointed us to a 2006 report by the conservative Heritage Foundation. It argued that poverty rates declined following reform and have stayed low even through fluctuations in the economy. The report’s author, Robert Rector, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee that "in the quarter century prior to welfare reform, the old welfare system failed to reduce poverty among black children. Since welfare reform, the poverty rate among black children has fallen at an unprecedented rate from 41.5 percent in 1995 to 32.9 percent in 2004." We found this U.S. Census chart, which presents slightly different figures for poverty among African-Americans under age 18: 41.5 percent in 1995 but 33.4 in 2004. The general trend, however, is the same. Rector’s report includes a chart showing that even previous periods of economic expansion did not lead to a significant drop in welfare cases. "How was the economic expansion of the 1990s different from the eight prior expansions?" the report asks. "The answer is welfare reform." In an interview, Rector said those patterns have held true even through the current recession. "There was a sort of structural shift downward around the period of welfare reform," he said. "It really has remained at a substantially lower level, although recessions have an effect." Other perspectives While Rector maintains that the economy played only a secondary role in reducing poverty, other groups says it’s the main driver. After all, welfare reform became law during the longest period of economic growth in U.S. history. "While there was a decrease in poverty overall in the economic boom of the late 1990s, it was not a result of welfare reform but due to the strength of the broader economy," said Liz Schott, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "There was an increase in labor market participation by single mothers during these years, but much of that increase was lost when the economy weakened." And Austin Nichols wrote in a 2006 report for the Urban Institute that improvements in the low-wage job market, especially for less-educated workers, benefited black children more than others because their parents tend to have less education. "We still have welfare reform, but as the low-wage job market weakened, child poverty shot back up," Nichols said in an e-mail. The Census put the child poverty rate for African-Americans at 35.3 percent in 2009. Rector said it’s about 38 percent today. And a 2011 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private charitable organization that describes its goal as "helping build better futures for disadvantaged children in the United States," said that the last decade has been especially damaging for poor children. "The official child poverty rate, which is a conservative measure of economic hardship, increased 18 percent between 2000 and 2009, essentially returning to the same level as the early 1990s," the report stated. Our ruling Santorum credited welfare reform for driving poverty down to the lowest level ever for African-American children. He’s right that the poverty rate did reach historic lows following the reform’s passage, but the reason why is not so clear cut. There’s good evidence that the policy changes took more people off the welfare rolls by requiring them to work. And working, it follows, makes people better off than reliance on relatively low levels of public assistance. But the booming economy of the late 1990s had a lot to do with former welfare recipients gaining employment, as there were ample jobs to be had. Experts say the law and the healthy employment picture combined to help lift people out of poverty. And recently, as the economy has weakened and unemployment increased, poverty rates have risen, too. On balance, we rate Santorum’s claim Half True.	None	Rick Santorum	None	None	None	2012-01-09T16:39:37	2012-01-04	['None']
-pomt-03301	Government subsidies for renewable energies such as wind and solar are 100 times greater than those given to gas and coal, and 50 times greater than what the nuclear industry enjoys.	half-true	/georgia/statements/2013/jul/31/tom-fanning/energy-subsidies-claim-needs-more-context/	In recent months, the benefits of expanding the use of solar energy in Georgia have been picked apart by grass-roots activists and others like a good bowl of Brunswick stew. For example, PolitiFact Georgia recently examined a claim by one group that electricity rates are 40 percent higher in states that have required utility companies to use a certain amount of renewable energy such as solar power. We rated that claim Half True. Last month, the man who runs Georgia’s largest public utility offered up some statistics concerning federal government subsidies for renewable energies such as solar. His comments prompted us to measure their accuracy on the Truth-O-Meter. Government subsidies for renewable energies such as wind and solar are 100 times greater than those given to gas and coal, and 50 times greater than what the nuclear industry enjoys, Southern Co. CEO Tom Fanning said, according to one account. The Georgia Sierra Club disputed Fanning’s account and asked PolitiFact Georgia to determine whether he is correct. The debate on renewable energies took on added importance when the state’s Public Service Commission voted 3-2 on July 11 to require Georgia Power, which is owned by Southern Co., to commit to using a certain amount of solar in its long-term plan. A Southern Co. spokesman supplied us with information to back up Fanning’s claim, but others with expertise on energy subsidies say Fanning cherry-picked his data. The company supplied us with a chart from the U.S. Energy Information Administration that shows how much money the federal government gave out in subsidies for various sources of energy in 2010. The chart contained numbers that were similar to the most recent EIA data concerning energy subsidies. The energy source that received the largest amount of subsidies was biofuels, at about $7.7 billion. Much of the gasoline in the United States is blended with a biofuel -- ethanol. Biofuels are considered a renewable energy. Wind energy was a distant second, at just under $5 billion. Solar energy received slightly more than $1 billion, which was less than oil and gas ($2.8 billion), and coal ($1.35 billion). The subsidies for most renewable energies were greater than other sources, but not 100 times greater or even 50 times greater. These numbers, though, weren’t what Southern Co. focused on in its response to us. The chart, based on reports by two federal agencies, shows how much money various forms of energy received in subsidies in comparison with each barrel of energy consumed. That’s the better way to make a comparison, Southern Co. says. Here’s a breakdown: Solar $59.60 Wind $31.33 Biofuel $10.46 Nuclear $1.71 Coal $0.38 Oil and gas $0.27 According to these numbers, solar energy’s subsidy was nearly 157 times greater than coal. Wind was 116 times greater than oil and gas. Nuclear was six times greater than oil and gas. "This data illustrates the disproportionate amount of federal subsidies renewables are receiving compared to other energy resources," Southern Co. spokesman Tim Leljedal said. Leljedal added: " While we are continuing to expand our renewable energy resources in a manner that makes sense for customers, we recognize that the subsidization of wind and solar at current levels is not sustainable." Elias Hinckley, an attorney who teaches energy policy at Georgetown University and has done work for Georgia Power, believes Fanning’s claim needs considerable context. Hinckley said comparing the support for newer energy resources such as solar and wind with coal and gas is akin to measuring the popularity of Coca-Cola in Atlanta against Pepsi. "Comparing young technologies to old, established, regulatory-protected assets is silly if you're working on a unit of energy used basis -- the point of subsidies is (or at least should be) to create a fair playing field where an unnatural advantage exists," said Hinckley, a partner at Sullivan & Worcester LLP, based in Washington. Hinckley added: "Coal, for example, has had the benefit of free emissions for a century (longer if we go beyond electric production to thermal/steam use), which has never been, and can't on a retroactive basis, be properly priced." Mark Thurber, an author and scholar on the economics of energy, agreed that wind and solar receive more in government subsidies. But Thurber, an associate director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University, questioned the validity of such comparisons for some of the same reasons mentioned by Hinckley. We followed up with Southern Co. concerning the criticism. We also wondered whether Fanning’s comparison is fair since the federal government boosted subsidies for renewable energies in the 2009 economic stimulus package. Leljedal noted that no one disputes subsidies for renewable energies are higher than other forms of energy. Leljedal added: "While the amount of subsidies can vary from year to year, that fact remains that subsidies are required to make renewable energy cost-competitive with other generation resources." To sum up, Southern Co. CEO Tom Fanning claimed government subsidies for renewable energies such as wind and solar are 100 times greater than they are for older forms of energy such as coal and oil, and 50 times greater for nuclear energy. One chart backs up Fanning’s claim on solar and wind, but not nuclear. Another report does not. Some experts noted that renewable forms of energy haven’t been developed as long as others and need the help. Coal and natural gas have been receiving subsidies for far longer than solar energy, wind and nuclear energy, which is an important point. Fanning’s general point that renewable energies are getting substantially greater financial support from Uncle Sam at this point in time is on target. But the specific numbers he used aren’t entirely correct, and his claim needs some context to be fully understood. Our rating: Half True.	None	Tom Fanning	None	None	None	2013-07-31T00:00:00	2013-06-17	['None']
-hoer-01065	Get Free JetBlue Air Tickets Facebook Survey	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/get-free-jetblue-air-tickets-facebook-survey-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Get Free JetBlue Air Tickets Facebook Survey Scam	November 30, 2016	None	['None']
-faly-00066	Fake News Alert: AICTE has not issued any Circular scrapping the 75% Attendance rule for Engineering	none	https://factly.in/fake-news-alert-aicte-not-issued-circular-scrapping-75-attendance-rule-engineering/	None	None	None	None	None	Fake News Alert: AICTE has not issued any Circular scrapping the 75% Attendance rule for Engineering	None	None	['None']
-goop-02072	Caitlyn Jenner Doing “Dancing With The Stars” Athletes Edition?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-jenner-dancing-with-the-stars-athletes-edition-dwts/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Caitlyn Jenner Doing “Dancing With The Stars” Athletes Edition?	9:50 am, December 7, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-01785	Deadly Klebsiella Plague from China Poses Public Health Threat to U.S.	mostly fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/deadly-klebsiella-plague-china-poses-public-health-threat-u-s-mostly-fiction/	None	health-medical	None	None	['china', 'medical', 'outbreak', 'public health', 'warnings']	Deadly Klebsiella Plague from China Poses Public Health Threat to U.S.	Mar 5, 2018	None	['United_States', 'China']
-snes-04673	James Dobson said that parents should shoot transgender individuals if they use the "wrong" restroom.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/james-dobson-transgender-fathers-shot/	None	Crime	None	Dan Evon	None	James Dobson Urges Parents to ‘Protect’ Children from ‘Tyrant Obama’ and ‘Transgender Bathrooms’	2 June 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-06670	"The academic achievements of our student-athletes are mentioned in the same breath and spirit as Notre Dame and Stanford."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2011/sep/09/donna-shalala/shalala-says-ums-athletes-are-mentionned-same-brea/	As news spread that a convicted Ponzi schemer said he plied University of Miami football players with everything from booze to prostitutes, university president Donna Shalala tried -- as best she could -- to spin the story away from the troubling allegations. "Let us not forget who we are," Shalala said in a video posted on the university's website Aug. 29. "Nationally the academic achievements of our student-athletes are mentioned in the same breath and spirit as Notre Dame and Stanford. This is because we are first and foremost an academic institution." Notre Dame. Stanford. And ... UM. Really? PolitiFact Florida felt compelled to tackle (pun intended) this question about academic excellence. Shalala relied on two sources of data to back up her claim -- graduation rates for student-athletes and a measure crafted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the NCAA, to measure the progress of student-athletes. For the 2009-10 year, UM student-athletes had what the NCAA calls a "graduation success rate" of 86 percent. That means that 86 percent of student-athletes who started between 2000-03 graduated within six years. According to NCAA statistics, UM ranks 7th in the 12-school Atlantic Coast Conference (Duke and Boston College graduated 97 percent of their student-athletes, for instance) and well behind the graduation rates at Notre Dame (99 percent) and Stanford (94 percent). The other measure Shalala cited -- specifically when it comes to the football program -- is called "academic progress rate." The APR measures, as its title suggests, progress -- not academic achievement; students get points for being academically eligible and staying in school. To the APR, a student-athlete who scores all C's in music therapy would "look" the same as one who scores A's in organic chemistry. And by that measure, the most recent scores for the three schools' football programs are close -- 979 for UM, 977 for Stanford and 971 for Notre Dame. That's good -- a 1,000 is a perfect score -- but not that uncommon. On the NCAA's website, we found about 28 university football programs that have APR scores between 971 and 979 and an additional 20 schools with better scores. So Notre Dame, Stanford and UM share the spotlight with Wofford, Appalachian State and the University of North Dakota. But Shalala's pointing to a very limited source of information about student-athletes. Mark Nagel, a professor in sport management at the University of South Carolina, described the APR as a "public relations mechanism" created by the NCAA. "What APR is telling you is that the students are remaining eligible and retained on campus," Nagel said. "It is not telling you their majors, educational outcomes or what they are learning." And the APR rates certainly don't indicate if students are, as one professor described it, taking "rinky-dink courses." A 2006 New York Times article showed that the Auburn University football team performed phenomenally on APR -- even finishing ahead of academically stout Duke. It turned out that many of the Auburn athletes were taking the equivalent of an independent study from the same sociology professor. Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College economics professor who has written about the business of sports, says APR doesn't measure the quality of students' progress or learning -- just simply that they aren't dropping out. "I would never compare the academic quality or achievement at two universities on the basis of drop-out rates,'' he said. "It seems to me the educational process is deeper and richer and more complex. But, by the same token, the APR is not a meaningless number." APR also doesn't measure how rigorous (or not) the courses are or whether they are relying on tutors, Zimbalist said. "It's kind of shocking (Shalala) would consider APR to be a valid comparative measurement or the most important measure of academic achievement," he said. (We should note that in our research we found that Stanford had some academic achievement blemishes of its own. Athletes had access to a list of classes known as easy A's such as "Beginning Improvising" and another in "Social Dances of North America III." That list has been discontinued.) We're not the only ones to pick on Shalala's claim here -- Inside Higher Ed, an online publication, concluded that she "engaged in some hyperbole." Anyway, back to what Shalala said, which was: "Nationally the academic achievements of our student-athletes are mentioned in the same breath and spirit as Notre Dame and Stanford." This is a case where there is not a lot of evidence to back Shalala up. She cites graduation rates -- which are significantly lower for UM compared to Notre Dame and Stanford -- and the NCAA-developed "academic progress rate." But that measure awards points to students for remaining academically eligible and enrolled in school. If that's your definition of "academic achievement," we'd like to know where we can sign up for classes. Nagel, the sport management professor from South Carolina, summed it up best: "I have a sneaking suspicion that the only time those three schools are discussed in the same (breath) and spirit is within the halls of the University of Miami’s administrative offices." We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Donna Shalala	None	None	None	2011-09-09T12:09:00	2011-08-29	['None']
-tron-00925	Request from Whatsapp to Forward Messages to Friends	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/whatsapp-fwd-request/	None	computers	None	None	None	Request from Whatsapp to Forward Messages to Friends	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-farg-00498	“San Juan City Council votes unanimously to impeach Trump-hating mayor.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/san-juan-mayor-wasnt-impeached/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Saranac Hale Spencer	['fake news']	San Juan Mayor Wasn’t Impeached	October 18, 2017	2017-10-18 17:37:11 UTC	['None']
-snes-00768	A new study published in the Lancet has officially declared that fluoride is a neurotoxin.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/new-study-officially-declare-fluoride-neurotoxin/	None	Medical	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Did a New Study Officially Declare That Fluoride Is a Neurotoxin?	13 April 2018	None	['The_Lancet']
-pose-00398	"Will insulate the Director of National Intelligence from political pressure by giving the DNI a fixed term, like the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Obama and Biden will seek consistency and integrity at the top of our intelligence community -- not just a political ally."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/418/limit-term-of-director-of-national-intelligence/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Limit term of director of national intelligence	2010-01-07T13:26:58	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Joe_Biden', 'Director_of_National_Intelligence', 'Federal_Reserve_System']
-snes-02937	Betsy DeVos said that a 40 percent approval rating meant that President Trump had the support of more than half the country.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/devos-40-percent-more-than-half/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Betsy DeVos Say ’40 Percent’ Means ‘More Than Half’?	14 February 2017	None	['None']
-chct-00027	FACT CHECK: Trump Says Median Household Income Has Reached An All-Time High	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/10/16/fact-check-median-household-income-record-high/	None	None	None	Brad Sylvester | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	5:51 PM 10/16/2018	None	['None']
-snes-02942	A list collects statements about rape made by Republican politicians.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/personal-foul/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did Republicans Actually Say These Things About Rape?	27 February 2014	None	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-06062	"At my first ‘Let’s Get to Work Day’ … we sold out;" more than 240 dozen doughnuts by 8:30 a.m.	mostly false	/florida/statements/2012/jan/10/rick-scott/rick-scott-talks-doughnuts-2012-state-state-addres/	Like many Americans, Florida Gov. Rick Scott finds it hard to pass over a good doughnut. Or a doughnut story. Scott started his career running a pair of doughnut shops in Kansas City in the 1970s. He returned to his doughnut roots in 2011, spending a day working at Nicola’s Donuts in Tampa. In a black hat that he clearly didn’t like wearing and a matching black shirt, Gov. Scott baked and then sold fried pastries by the dozen to customers. You can read all about his day, the first of Scott’s "Let’s Get to Work Days", here. Or you can just listen to Scott tell the story himself -- which he did during his second State of the State address on Jan. 10, 2012. With owner Rachel Waatti listening on from the House chambers, Scott went on about doughnuts. He joked about how you don’t have to worry about employees eating too many doughnuts (they’re just too rich) and how Waatti complained that Scott was spending too much time with the media and not enough time working. He then touted the accomplishments of his day back in the doughnut business. "We sold out; more than 240 dozen by 8:30 a.m.," he said. Your humble fact-checker happened to be tailing Scott that day and can report, the doughnut man-turned-governor is creating a bit of doughnut lore. The doors to Nicola’s opened at 6 a.m. and doughnuts were being snatched off the shelves (Your fact-checker knows, because he purchased a dozen himself to share with his hungry colleagues.) By 8:30 a.m., the store had already run out of doughnuts and had to grab another 15-or-so dozen doughnuts from Nicola’s second location. How many doughnuts were sold by the time Scott left? Waatti and workers told PolitiFact Florida the number was definitely above the 65 dozen they originally baked for the shop and was probably around 80 dozen. That’s probably at least 240,000 calories of breakfast, but it’s not the "more than 240 dozen" Scott bragged to legislators about. Shortly after Scott’s speech, Waatti spoke to David DeCamp of the Tampa Bay Times. She said the 240-dozen figure includes all of the doughnuts sold at both Nicola’s locations throughout the entire day Scott worked at the bakery. But she also reconfirmed that the shop Scott worked at sold about 80 dozen while he was there. At PolitiFact Florida, we’re almost as serious about our doughnuts as we are our fact-checks. We rate Scott’s "240 dozen" claim Mostly False. Now can somebody pass a maple glazed?	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2012-01-10T13:59:46	2012-01-10	['None']
-pomt-02019	"Sen. McConnell says it's not his job to bring jobs to Kentucky."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jun/06/alison-lundergan-grimes/alison-lundergan-grimes-charges-mitch-mcconnell-sa/	President Barack Obama's recently announced plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants 30 percent by 2030 isn’t going over so well in coal states. Both senate candidates in Kentucky -- the country’s third-largest coal producer -- are speaking out against the plan and the danger it poses to Kentucky jobs. Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes jumped at the opportunity to remind voters of a comment by her opponent, incumbent and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., about bringing jobs to Kentucky. In a 60-second radio ad, Grimes first chastises Obama for the emissions plan, then turns to her competitor. "Coal supplies 92 percent of our state's electricity," the narrator says. "(Obama's) new regulations will lead to severe rate increases, shortages of power and the loss of even more coal jobs. Kentucky already has the fifth-highest unemployment rate in the country. It's bad enough we've lost 18,000 jobs since Mitch McConnell became senator. It's even worse that Senator McConnell says it's not his job to bring jobs to Kentucky." With jobs and unemployment the most important issues for many Americans -- and with Kentucky experiencing 7.7 percent unemployment, which is well above the national average -- we wondered whether McConnell really said this. It turns out that the claim references an interview McConnell gave to The Beattyville Enterprise, a weekly newspaper in Lee County, Ky., with a circulation of about 1,200 and no website, back in April. The six-paragraph-long story ran with the headline, "McConnell says not his job to bring jobs." The Grimes campaign pounced on the headline and ran, giving the comment far more attention than the paper’s original circulation. Here’s the full text of the story: U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell said Friday that it is not his responsibility to bring jobs to Kentucky. Appearing in Beattyville, McConnell was asked by The Beattyville Enterprise what he was going to do to bring jobs to Lee County. "Economic development is a Frankfort issue," McConnell said. "That is not my job. It is the primary responsibility of the state Commerce Cabinet." Asked about public works projects, McConnell said he is interested in bringing public works to the state. "Most comes from the state, though," he said. He did say that he is responsible for protecting jobs by "pushing back" against the Obama Administration's restrictions on the coal industry. "Oil and gas are big here," he said of Lee County. "They (the Obama Administration) are making it hard on them, too," he said. In an interview with PolitiFact, Edmund Shelby -- the reporter, as well as the paper’s editor and general manager -- said the interview was quick, taking place in a hallway before McConnell spoke at a luncheon at the town's community center. McConnell’s point, Shelby said, was that the responsibility for creating Kentucky jobs lies with the state government in Frankfort and the Commerce Cabinet (which is actually now known as the Cabinet for Economic Development). So, while McConnell did say the phrase, "that is not my job," in response to a question about bringing jobs to his home state, he said his comments were taken out of context. At a May press conference, McConnell said he thought Shelby was asking him about specific industries in Lee County that are "obviously a job of the state Commerce Department." "This April, I visited Lee County to talk about a top priority of mine: jobs," McConnell said in an April statement. "Unfortunately, it seems my message got lost in translation, and I was surprised to see a headline about my visit that sent the exact opposite message to the one I was trying to convey." Shelby didn't electronically record the exchange, and he didn't stay for the luncheon -- where McConnell made remarks about the economy and jobs. However, Shelby stands by his story and said it is impossible that the comments were taken out of context because the interview was only long enough for the questions included in the article. The Grimes campaign has shrugged off McConnell’s "out of context" defense and has sought to make hay of what McConnell was reported to have said. "Clearly McConnell made a major error and used the ‘lost in translation’ excuse to blame a local news editor for accurately reporting on his comments," the Grimes campaign said. However, the "not my job" statement isn’t the only comment McConnell makes in the piece. His later comment that part of his responsibility is to protect Kentucky's jobs from the threat of over-regulation from the federal government and the Obama administration is an argument he often makes in his campaign. "In my travels across the Commonwealth, I hear too often how government is blocking job creation," he said in the April statement. "It’s up to all of us -- at the federal, state and local levels -- to fix that. We must ensure that our utility and tax rates remain low and we must enact a right to work law. The better the atmosphere the state sets for job creators, the more effectively Kentucky can compete against other states to add and retain jobs." Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, said McConnell can point to a record to support his view. McConnell has a "long history of doing earmarks and other legislation that helps create and preserve jobs in the state," he said. McConnell spokesman Don Stewart pointed to several pieces of job-protecting legislation that McConnell has sponsored or supported, such as the 2013 Freedom to Fish Act, which supported tourism and hospitality jobs in the Barkley Lake region, which he said brings in $3 million in fishing-related tourism to the state each year. In fiscal year 2010, McConnell was one of the top-10 solo earmarkers in the Senate, securing more than $60 million for 38 projects, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based advocacy group. Congress banned earmarks soon after the 2010 election. Grimes has used McConnell’s Beattyville Enterprise comments to promote her own jobs plan, in which she devotes significant attention to criticizing McConnell’s record. Shelby said he thinks McConnell was saying what he actually thought. It’s possible that McConnell thought he was talking to a "small-town, bumbling editor," which Shelby is not, he said. "In my opinion, Sen. McConnell committed the cardinal sin of career politicians by giving an honest answer to a reporter," said Shelby, a former president of the Kentucky Press Association. Our ruling Grimes said, "Sen. McConnell said it’s not his job to bring jobs to Kentucky." She took this comment from a brief interview McConnell gave to a small-town newspaper in April. We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the news report, but while the Grimes campaign has a point that McConnell used that particular phrase, they are glossing over some nuances in what he said by selectively quoting the report. McConnell also told the paper that he has a responsibility to protect jobs, and that some of his work in Congress has led to job creation in Kentucky. In addition, McConnell’s legislative record shows a concern for local employment. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Alison Lundergan Grimes	None	None	None	2014-06-06T13:33:57	2014-06-03	['Kentucky']
-vogo-00256	Four Claims About Scooter Pay: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/mayor-2012/four-claims-about-scooter-pay-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	Four Claims About Scooter Pay: Fact Check TV	April 2, 2012	None	['None']
-hoer-00956	4 Free Six Flags Tickets Hitting Facebook	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/4-free-six-flags-tickets-scam-hitting-facebook/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	4 Free Six Flags Tickets Scam Hitting Facebook	August 9, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08532	The Chilean "privatization scheme" that Sharron Angle supports "has resulted in hidden fees, fewer benefits, and millions of people with no coverage."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/04/patriot-majority-pac/patriot-majority-pac-conjures-chilean-dictator-att/	It isn't often that U.S. campaigns venture into Latin American retirement policy, but the knock-down, drag-out battle for a Nevada Senate seat has done just that. It came up in an ad run by the Patriot Majority PAC, an obscure Washington-based group that appears to be spending big money on campaign advertising this year, primarily against Sharron Angle, the Republican who's challenging Senate Majority Harry Reid, D-Nev. The ad seizes on a comment made by Angle about Social Security privatization during an Aug. 12, 2010, interview with KLAS-TV. Here's the narration: "How does Sharron Angle plan to phase out Social Security? (Video of Angle saying, "Chile has done this.") Chile? The country once led by Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator and human rights violator? Chile's privatization scheme has resulted in hidden fees, fewer benefits and millions of people with no coverage. (Angle: "Chile has done this.") Privatize? Phase out? Pinochet? (Angle: "Chile has done this.") Another day, and another bad idea from Sharron Angle. What's next?" We were somewhat caught off guard by the ad sponsor's effort to use Angle's pension-policy positions to link her to a "military dictator and human rights violator," complete with footage of goose-stepping Chilean soldiers on parade. But that connection, tenuous though it may be, didn't strike us as checkable in our conventional sense. Instead, we'll focus on whether the ad fairly describes the nuts and bolts of Chilean retirement security. Is the ad justified in saying that "Chile's privatization scheme has resulted in hidden fees, fewer benefits and millions of people with no coverage"? For many years, the Chilean system has been an inspiration to free-market advocates in the U.S. and elsewhere, so it's not surprising that Angle would have cited it. Here's some background on the system. Chile created its first Social Security-style programs in the 1920s, a decade or so before the United States did. But the government under Pinochet made a big change in 1981, transitioning all new workers -- as well as beneficiaries of the old, defined-benefit system who were willing to make the switch -- to a pension plan based on individual accounts run by private-sector investment managers. By now, almost all Chileans are enrolled in the post-1981 system. The program details have changed somewhat over the years, most recently due to a major round of changes in 2008. But the general outline has remained the same. Ten percent of workers' income is automatically deducted to fund their retirement, disability and survivor insurance, plus an additional charge for administrative costs. Employees can choose from among several government-approved private pension management companies, each of which offers five varieties of funds with varying degrees of risk. The funds and their approaches have been reviewed by a government regulator. Total assets in the system by the end of 2009 reached $107 billion in U.S dollars, or about 65 percent of Chile’s gross domestic product. Because the Chilean system has been a trendsetter, it has been studied extensively. Independent analyses suggest that over the long term, the level of support for retirees under Chile's system has been close or better than that in similar countries. But the Chilean system has also faced its share of criticism. Some of that criticism echoes what the ad says. Here's a closer look at the three issues raised in the ad. • Hidden fees. High fees have been a longstanding concern about the Chilean system. Due to lack of competition among private-sector money managers that participate in the system, these management companies' profits have been much larger than profit margins in other sectors of Chile’s financial services industry, wrote U.S. Social Security Administration researcher Barbara E. Kritzer in one paper. Over a full career contributing to the system, workers pay around 15 percent for administration, according to the International Organization of Pension Supervisors. This is in the middle of six Latin American countries and below five Eastern European countries with a Chilean-style individual accounts system. Several experts said that a series of government reforms in 2008 helped lower fees. In our reporting, we found that even supporters of the system acknowledged that fees have been a problem. But are they "hidden," as the ad says? None of the handful of experts we spoke to said so. In fact, fees are more obvious to contributors in Chile than in other countries because they are levied on top of the mandatory contribution to private pensions. So while the ad is on track in its criticism of fees, it is wrong to say they are hidden. • Fewer benefits. Most studies have shown a long-term rate of return in the Chilean system of roughly 10 percent, which is high by international standards. But even if those rates of return are optimistic going forward -- whether because they were boosted by a period of unusually strong returns or because of insufficient participation by Chilean workers in the plan -- experts we spoke to agreed that for Chileans, the current system is preferable to the pre-1981 system. In fact, Pinochet's system remained in place after the transition to democracy and was retained by the socialist administration of Michelle Bachelet. (Bachelet lost power in March 2010.) Mauricio Soto of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has written that the old pension system was "in crisis" prior to 1981 -- paying more in benefits than it was receiving in contributions, with a projected actuarial imbalance greater than the country's gross domestic product. In addition, the patchwork system was "poorly administered and inefficient" and led to discrepancies in which "white-collar workers could comfortably retire in their 40s, while blue-collar workers had to wait until their 60s to qualify for minimum retirement benefits." There's no question that the current investor-based pension system carries risks, being subject to markets that can go up or down. But Chile's old system simply wasn't sustainable. "It was unfunded and essentially a fantasy," said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, a longtime champion of the Chilean system. So to suggest, as the ad does, that switching to a private system in 1981 resulted in "fewer benefits" is at best misleading. • Millions of people with no coverage. This charge is true -- but misleading for a couple reasons. Though the proportion of Chileans participating in the system has varied over time, the percentage has hovered around two-thirds, a rate similar to under the pre-1981 system. This is clearly less than the nearly universal coverage provided by the U.S. Social Security system. But Chile is also not nearly as rich as the U.S. Several experts we spoke to agreed that the coverage gaps have at least as much to do with the nature of the Chilean economy as with the design of the country's retirement system. Soto notes that low-income Chileans working in the underground economy account for about 30 percent of the workforce. These workers are typically not covered by the pension system unless they have previously worked in a legitimate business. Meanwhile, participation by the self-employed was for many years voluntary (and very low), though mandatory participation is being phased in by the 2008 reforms. Even among workers in traditional jobs, participation rates have usually topped out around 80 percent, with the percentage taking part at any given time even lower, since workers do not always keep up their contributions due to unemployment or a failure to comply with the law. This is a serious issue. As Kritzer notes, "only a small portion" of workers with less-than-perfect participation histories "would have enough contributions to qualify for the guaranteed minimum benefit at retirement." The 2008 reform addressed coverage concerns by introducing a universal pension paid to all Chileans over the age of 65 regardless of their contribution history. In addition, workers with small pensions from their individual accounts will have them topped up by the government. While we think it's fair for the ad to note that the Chilean system has holes, it's important to note that the pre-1981 system had holes too -- and that the nature of the Chilean economy plays at least as big a role in causing this problem as the retirement system itself. So where does this leave us? The ad demonizes the Chilean system in ways that we think are exaggerated. Fees are a problem, but they are not hidden. Rather than offering smaller benefits, the system has provided strong returns and is almost certainly sounder today than prior to 1981. And the coverage gaps that exist now are not unique to the privatized system and have a lot to do with specific factors at play in Chile. The ad does have a point that the Chilean system, at least if it's implemented without major differences, would likely be seen by most Americans as inferior to Social Security. The size of the coverage gaps in Chile's system, while understandable given Chile's economic situation, would be unacceptable to many, if not most, Americans. But this reasonable point is undercut by the ad's overheated rhetoric ("human rights violator"), imagery (the goose-stepping soldiers) and exaggerations about the substance of the Chilean plan. On balance, we rate the ad Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Patriot Majority PAC	None	None	None	2010-10-04T13:31:21	2010-08-17	['Chile', 'Sharron_Angle']
-snes-00611	The Boy Scouts of America lost 425,000 members in May 2018, in response to a decision to integrate more girls into the organization, and to give the "Boy Scouts" program a new, gender-neutral name.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/boy-scouts-mormons/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did the Boy Scouts Lose 425,000 Members Because of a Gender-Inclusive Name Change?	10 May 2018	None	['Boy_Scouts_of_America']
-pomt-09805	"Nothing in any of the Democrat bills would require individuals to verify their citizenship or identity prior to receiving taxpayer-subsidized benefits."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/10/house-republicans/house-republicans-back-heckler-saying-health-bill-/	The issue that drove Rep. Joe Wilson to become a heckler during President Barack Obama's health care address on Sept. 9, 2009, was the question of whether illegal immigrants would receive coverage from Democratic health care reforms. On the night of Obama's speech, we ruled that Wilson's outburst — shouting "You lie!" after Obama said that health reform would not insure illegal immigrants — was False. Since then, many Republicans have said there's nothing in the bill that ensures people would have their citizenship verified before getting coverage, a claim that we will explore with this item. In a "myth vs. fact" statement responding to the president's address, the House Republican Conference quoted President Obama saying, "There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally." The Republican conference then says, "Fact: Nothing in any of the Democrat bills would require individuals to verify their citizenship or identity prior to receiving taxpayer-subsidized benefits, making the President's promise one that the legislation itself does not keep.'" To explore that, we first need to explain that there are two kinds of benefits in the bill that can be considered taxpayer-subsidized: tax credits and access to the public insurance option. Democrats say the main health care bill, HR 3200, explicitly prevents illegal immigrants from getting "affordability credits" — tax credits for low-income people to buy health insurance on a national health insurance exchange. While illegal immigrants would be able to buy insurance just as a qualifying legal resident could, they would have to pay for it themselves without the "affordability credit" subsidy. (If you want to check, it's on page 132, section 242.) That's essentially keeping the status quo, in which illegal immigrants are able to buy private insurance on their own dime. Critics of the health care bill, however, cite a couple of possible loopholes. We'll address the one cited by the House Republican Conference, which has also been noted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization critical of illegal immigration. Both groups contend that the Democratic bills lack verification procedures to make sure that illegal immigrants aren't signing up for the affordability credits. Such safeguards, FAIR says, were included in the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. From our examination of the House bill, we don't see any verification system, either. The Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan research arm of Congress, agrees. In a report issued Aug. 25, 2009, CRS wrote that "HR 3200 does not contain a mechanism to verify immigration status." (We also noted that in our original item when we checked Wilson's heckle, here .) FAIR notes that the House Ways and Means Committee rejected an amendment that would have required those seeking affordability credits to verify eligibility with two databases used to check it for federal benefits such as Medicaid. But there are two caveats that keep the Republican assertion from being fully accurate. The first is if the tax credits are administered through the Internal Revenue Service, there would be built-in scrutiny. For instance, if a system were set up for taxpayers to declare insurance expenses and then receive a refund or a rebate, illegal immigrants couldn't obtain coverage, "because illegal immigrants do not have legitimate Social Security numbers," said Marc Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, a group that is generally proimmigration. "Screening out illegal immigrants through the tax system would prevent them from obtaining health care-related subsidies." The second caveat is that language in the House bill does provide clear authority for the new government official who will run the exchange to set up that verification, as the CRS report notes. Rosenblum concurs. "The commissioner could enforce these restrictions in one of two ways: through document- and database-based screening requirements as in the Medicaid system, or by reimbursing health care expenses through tax refunds," he said. Because the House Republican Conference assertion referred to "any" of the Democratic bills, we also looked through the bill reported by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The bill is generally more vague on these issues, but we did find the following passage, which seems to grant similar authority as the House bill passage cited earlier. "The Secretary (of Health and Human Services), in consultation with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, shall develop interoperable, secure, scalable, and reusable standards and protocols that facilitate enrollment of individuals in Federal and State health and human services programs. ... The Secretary shall facilitate enrollment of individuals in programs ... through methods which shall include (i) electronic matching against existing Federal and State data to serve as evidence of eligibility and digital documentation in lieu of paper-based documentation; (ii) capability for individuals to apply, recertify, and manage eligibility information online, including conducting real-time queries against databases for existing eligibility prior to submitting applications; and (iii) other functionalities necessary to provide eligible individuals with a streamlined enrollment process." Now for the second issue: access to the public option. FAIR and many Republicans have argued that while the bill bars illegal immigrants from getting the affordability credits, it still permits them to take part in the public option. We believe that reading is correct. But FAIR asserts that the public option is "taxpayer-funded," something Democrats insist is not true. They say the public plan will be self-supporting through its participants' premiums. Obama reiterated that point in his speech. "I have insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects," he said. Nothing we've seen so far has persuaded us that the public option will provide subsidized care. So let's recap. There is explicit language in the House bill that says illegal immigrants should not receive the subsidized benefits. But we find the Republican conference is right that the legislation does not directly mention verification procedures and, for that reason, it's possible that illegal immigrants who are determined to beat the system might be able to get around the ban. But it's likely that the IRS would, at least indirectly, help to police that. And, the health choices commissioner would have the authority to set up a verification system. On balance, we rate the Republican claim Half True.	None	House Republican Conference	None	None	None	2009-09-10T17:20:55	2009-09-09	['None']
-farg-00334	"We've started building the wall" at the Mexico border.	not the whole story	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/04/has-the-border-wall-begun/	None	askfactcheck	FactCheck.org	Robert Farley	['border wall']	Has the Border Wall Begun?	April 13, 2018	2018-04-13 14:01:12 UTC	['Mexico']
-pomt-09095	"If the Republicans were the majority, (Rep. Barton) would have actually the gavel and the chairmanship."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/23/rahm-emanuel/emanuel-says-bp-apologist-rep-barton-would-be-chai/	With many Republican leaders distancing themselves from Rep. Joe Barton’s apology to BP (including Barton), Democrats have been quick to point out that Barton isn’t any old congressman. He’s the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee that oversees the oil industry. Imagine, some Democrats have warned, what would happen if Republicans won control of the House in midterm elections. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel alluded to that on ABC's This Week on June 20, 2010, when he warned "the ranking Republican (Barton) would have oversight into the energy industry, and if the Republicans were the majority, would have actually the gavel and the chairmanship." Three days earlier, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs made a similar claim via Twitter: "Who would the GOP put in charge of overseeing the energy industry & Big Oil if they won control of Congress? Yup, u guessed it - JOE BARTON." Well, not so fast. While congressmen who are a minority party’s ranking member on a committee often rise to the chairmanship if their party regains majority control, that’s not always the truth. As Politico's Jonathan Allen pointed out, "Barton has somewhere between zero and no chance of being the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman next year, according to Republican rules and sources." Here’s why. Back in 1995, House Republicans under Speaker Newt Gingrich’s leadership imposed term limits on their own committee and subcommittee chairmen. Under those rules, a chairman or ranking member must step down after three terms. Rep. Barton’s third term heading the Republican contingent on the Energy and Commerce Committee will end at the conclusion of this Congress. Exceptions have been made over the years, and Barton could seek a waiver from the Steering Committee. But Michael Steel, spokesman for House Republican Leader John Boehner, told us such waivers will only be considered in "extraordinary circumstances." For the record, Boehner’s hard line on term limits for committee leadership predates the Barton apology controversy. Back on Feb. 3, 2010, Boehner announced that the Steering Committee decided it would adhere to the term limits policy, even if Republicans were to regain control of the House. That wasn’t a popular decision with the ranking members of some committees who lamented that their leadership window would be eaten up by years serving as a relatively powerless ranking member of the minority party. Barton, R-Texas, was among those who complained the loudest. "Don’t ask me to do a good job in the minority and make a rule that says you can’t continue to do a good job as chairman," Barton told Politico back in February. Although some Republicans called for his ouster as the ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce panel, the Washington Post reported that Barton offered another apology to Republican colleagues on June 23, 2010, and that Republican leaders have decided to keep him in that seat through this Congress. Again, exceptions to the term limit rule can and have been made in the past. In practice, Republican leadership can make exceptions whenever it wants. Given the Republican leadership’s rebuke of Barton’s comment, and the fact that Democrats have clearly seized on it as a potential wedge issue in the upcoming mid-term elections (Emanuel called it a "political gift") it’s hard to imagine Barton would be likely to win such an exception. A literal reading of Emanuel's comments leaves ambiguous whether he is saying if the Republicans were the majority right now, then Barton would be chair, or if he's predicting what could happen if Republicans were to regain control of the House in the midterm elections. If Republicans were in the majority right now, then Barton would be chair. But they are not. We think in the context of talking about Barton's comment as a political gift, Emanuel is raising the specter of what would happen if the GOP wins a House majority in the midterm elections. The fact is, even if Republicans were to win a majority in the House, it appears unlikely Barton would have assumed chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee next year anyway. Possible? Yes. But at the very least, it was far from a given, as Emanuel and Gibbs suggested. And so we rate Emanuel’s comment Half True.	None	Rahm Emanuel	None	None	None	2010-06-23T16:54:42	2010-06-20	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-chct-00218	FACT CHECK: Could Nassar Get A Lower Sentence Because Of Judge Aquilina’s Comments?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/01/26/fact-check-could-nassar-get-a-lower-sentence-because-of-judge-aquilinas-comments/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	4:56 PM 01/26/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02426	"Over the past three years, ‘deep poverty’ has reached its highest level on record."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/mar/04/paul-ryan/paul-ryan-releases-report-saying-percentage-americ/	Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives recently released a study that critiqued the current mix of federal anti-poverty programs and suggested a new way forward. The report, titled "The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later," was released by the House Budget Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Ryan was Mitt Romney’s running mate in the 2012 election and is considered a possible presidential contender in 2016. The report, released March 3, 2014, argues in part that there are too many overlapping and ineffective programs designed to help poor Americans. At one point, the authors overseen by Ryan tried to give a sense of how far-reaching the problem of poverty remains, despite the investment of countless taxpayer dollars over the course of several decades. "Over the past three years, ‘deep poverty’ has reached its highest level on record," the report said. A footnote noted that a household living in "deep poverty" is defined as one that "makes less than 50 percent of the poverty line." (The report isn't the first to use the term "deep poverty" -- other researchers have as well.) We wondered whether this was correct, so we turned to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the official source of federal statistics on poverty. We found a table -- "Percent of People by Ratio of Income to Poverty Level" -- that breaks down those who earned various percentages of the poverty line. The smallest of those ratios was half the poverty line -- the "deep poverty" statistic the report cited. The federal poverty level is actually a matrix of different dollar amounts. It depends on the size of the family, with larger families having a higher threshold. For one person in 2014, the poverty level is $11,670, and 50 percent of that works out to $5,835. For a family of four, the poverty level is $23,850, and 50 percent of that is $11,925. The most recent data available is for 2012. That year, the Census Bureau found that 6.6 percent of Americans earned 50 percent or less of the poverty line. It was also 6.6 percent for 2011, and it was 6.7 percent for 2010. The table includes data going back to 1975, and the percentages were never as high as they got beginning in 2010. The highest percentage before 2010 was 6.3 percent in 2009; prior to that, it was 6.2 percent in 1993. That percentage was likely higher prior to the mid-1960s, since the poverty rate as a whole between 1959 and 1965 was between 17.3 percent and 22.4 percent, well above today's 15 percent. But before 1975, the statistic was not calculated, so we can’t know the answer for 50 percent of the poverty line for sure. Not surprisingly, the percentage tends to rise after recessions, which explains the recent spike as well as the one in the early-1990s as well as another in the early 1980s. Prior to the most recent recession, the rate of Americans at 50 percent of poverty was 5.2 percent in both 2006 and 2007. Our ruling Ryan, through his committee’s report, said that over the past three years, the percentage of Americans living in "deep poverty" -- making less than 50 percent of the poverty line -- "has reached its highest level on record." The past three years -- 2010 to 2012 -- clearly produced the highest percentage since the statistic has been calculated in 1975. While it’s possible the rate was higher prior to 1975, we don’t have statistics to prove that, so there’s no data "on record." So we rate the claim True.	None	Paul Ryan	None	None	None	2014-03-04T09:00:38	2014-03-03	['None']
-snes-03700	A statement reproduces Hillary Clinton's response when asked to identify her major accomplishments as Secretary of State.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stating-the-oblivious/	None	Uncategorized	None	David Mikkelson	None	Hillary Clinton Describes Her Major Accomplishments as Secretary of State	30 July 2014	None	['None']
-tron-01688	ObamaCare Enforces Mandatory Home Inspections by Government Workers	disputed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obamacare-home-visitation-progam-082013/	None	government	None	None	None	ObamaCare Enforces Mandatory Home Inspections by Government Workers	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-obry-00010	In September 2017, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, released a statement about the Parental Choice Programs in Wisconsin, which are voucher programs that allow low-income students to attend selected private schools. Fitzgerald claimed that students in Parental Choice Programs across Wisconsin are outperforming their peers on the ACT, a college preparedness exam taken by all 11th graders in the state. Fitzgerald made this claim after the state Department of Public Instruction released the results for learning assessments administered during the 2016-17 school year. 	unobservable	https://observatory.journalism.wisc.edu/2018/04/23/fitzgerald-choice-schools-outperform-peers-experts-say-picture-is-mixed/	None	None	None	palmby	None	Fitzgerald: ‘Choice’ schools outperform peers; experts say picture is mixed	October 17, 2018	None	['Wisconsin', 'Scott_L._Fitzgerald']
-snes-05036	A photograph shows two children holding a 'F*CK Donald Trump' sign at a Chicago rally.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-protest-sign-children/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	Controversial Anti-Trump Sign	21 March 2016	None	['Chicago']
-hoer-00776	Help Identify Two Year Old Tsunami Victim Email	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/lost-tsunami-child.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Help Identify Two Year Old Tsunami Victim Email	March 2009	None	['None']
-pomt-08045	"We have the highest (corporate tax rates) in the world right now."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jan/03/pat-toomey/pat-toomey-says-us-has-highest-corporate-tax-rates/	On the Jan. 2, 2011, edition of NBC's Meet the Press, Sen.-elect Pat Toomey, R-Pa., cited a striking statistic in urging the United States to lower its corporate tax rates. Asked by host David Gregory about possible areas where President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans can work together, Toomey suggested several areas, including taxes. "I think tax policy is a possible area, one with plenty of landmines but plenty of opportunities," Toomey said. "Simplify the code, lower rates. We should be lowering corporate tax rates because we have the highest in the world right now." (Later in the roundtable discussion, Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter repeated the statistic, but we'll check Toomey's quote here.) We wondered whether the U.S. really has the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Using the most straightforward definition of "corporate tax rates," Toomey is right. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 32 large, industrialized democracies, ranks the "combined corporate income tax rate" in its member nations. That means the highest tax bracket for general corporate income, excluding taxes levied on specific products or services. For 2010, the U.S ranks second to Japan by a fraction of a percentage point -- 39.54 percent for Japan to 39.21 percent for the U.S. But that figure is already outdated: Japan has recently moved to cut its rate for 2011 by 5 percentage points, leaving the U.S. with the highest corporate tax rate among OECD nations. But before we declare Toomey's statement True, let's dig a little deeper. The OECD rate is the "statutory" rate -- that is, the top corporate tax rate on the books. But many companies pay considerably less than that, due to deductions and other exclusions. Adjusting for these factors produces a statistic called the "effective tax rate." The World Bank has assembled data from 183 nations and made a series of statistical adjustments to produce a full international comparison of effective tax rates. By this measurement, the U.S. rate is considerably lower than the published rate -- 27.6 percent. But in a comparative sense, that's still pretty high: Among larger international economies, only Japan, New Zealand and Thailand produced a higher effective rate in the World Bank study. And Japan's number should fall by the time next year's study comes out. The World Bank also produces another -- and broader -- statistic. This measure factors in not only the corporate profit tax but also a range of other taxes paid by businesses, including the cost of employee taxes borne by the employer. When the World Bank ranked countries from the lowest level of taxes to the highest, the U.S. ranked 124th out of 183 -- meaning corporate taxes were relatively high. A number of other large and/or democratic countries were higher, including Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Hungary, India, Italy, Spain and Sweden. This last measure provides a wider snapshot of U.S. tax policy toward businesses, but it also introduces some complications. Factoring in the employer-paid portion of labor taxes makes the corporate tax rate seem higher in countries that provide higher benefits such as pensions or health care through business taxes, while making the rate seem lower for countries that provide less generous benefits through the tax code. So making apples-to-apples comparisons can be tricky. There's also broader context that Toomey doesn't get into. In a previous item, we noted that when all taxes, including those such as personal income taxes and property taxes -- not just corporate taxes -- are taken into account and compared to gross domestic product, the U.S. doesn't rank near the top of the OECD table in total tax burden. Still, if you rate Toomey on his specific wording by looking at "corporate tax rates," he's right that the U.S. does now have the highest corporate tax rates on the books, at least among the biggest industrialized democracies, which is most economists' typical yardstick. So we rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Pat Toomey	None	None	None	2011-01-03T16:50:19	2011-01-02	['None']
-goop-01267	Mila Kunis Had Ashton Kutcher’s ‘The Ranch’ Co-Star Fired From Show Over Jealousy?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/mila-kunis-ashton-kutcher-elisha-cuthbert-ranch-fired-show-jealous/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Mila Kunis Had Ashton Kutcher’s ‘The Ranch’ Co-Star Fired From Show Over Jealousy?	7:08 pm, April 1, 2018	None	['Ashton_Kutcher']
-pomt-03280	A judge took the Star Scientific tax case away from Ken Cuccinelli	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2013/aug/05/terry-mcauliffe/mcauliffe-says-judge-removed-ken-cuccinelli-star-s/	Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe has repeatedly sought to link GOP opponent Ken Cuccinelli to Jonnie Williams, the CEO of the troubled Star Scientific dietary supplement company. In a recent debate, McAuliffe cited a series of gifts Cuccinelli received from Williams -- including stays at the CEO’s Smith Mountain Lake home and a catered turkey dinner. McAuliffe argued those gifts swayed the Republican attorney general's conduct in a 2011 lawsuit that Star Scientific brought against the state over an assessment on property the company owns in Mecklenburg County. The company has told investors it would owe $1.7 million in taxes and penalties if it loses the case, according to the Associated Press. The Democrat accused Cuccinelli of ignoring the case, rather than taking the company to court -- a charge Cuccinelli vehemently denied, but McAuliffe continued. "Finally a judge took the case away from him because of a conflict of interest," McAuliffe said. We asked Josh Schwerin, McAuliffe’s campaign spokesman for proof that a judge removed Cuccinelli from the case. Schwerin cited a May 6, 2013 order from Mecklenburg Circuit Court Judge Leslie M. Osborn that moved the case from Cuccinelli’s office to two attorneys at the Richmond-based Troutman Sanders law firm who are representing the state on a pro bono basis. Technically, McAuliffe has a point in that a judge did take the case away from Cuccinelli. But McAuliffe’s campaign omits a major point -- the fact that the judge did that at the request of the attorney general’s office. In a motion that was signed by the pro bono attorneys -- Stephen D. Rosenthal and William H. Hurd -- Virginia assistant attorney general Elizabeth B. Myers requested that outside counsel handle the case. The motion granting that request makes no reference to whether the attorney general has a conflict of interest. It’s merely a pro forma order granting the request to switch counsel. Cuccinelli asked to be removed from the case after Democrats accused him of a conflict of interest in representing the state in the case involving Williams -- who had given Cuccinelli $13,000 in gifts. Cuccinelli later disclosed that he received an additional $5,000 in gifts. Cuccinelli also disclosed -- belatedly -- his sale of Star Scientific stock because he said he hadn’t realized its value had crossed the $10,000 threshold above which the state requires disclosure. In a prepared April 5 statement, Cuccinelli explained his decision to remove the attorney general’s office from the case and appoint outside attorneys to handle it. "To be clear, there was absolutely no conflict of interest with the attorney general’s office," Brian Gottstein, a spokesman for the attorney general said in the statement. "But in an abundance of caution, and to move past what has become an unnecessary distraction for the office and the attorney general, the case was given to outside counsel." Gottstein went on to say Cuccinelli was not personally involved in the tax case and that the attorney general’s office had filed all of its required pleadings within court deadlines. But In a March 22 article, the Associated Press quoted Paul Campsen, a private Norfolk attorney who specializes in tax litigation saying the attorney general’s previous connection to the case "isn’t just the appearance of a conflict, it is a conflict of interest." Our ruling McAuliffe said a judge took the Star Scientific tax case away from Cuccinelli. There is a grain of truth in McAuliffe’s claim, because a judge did indeed grant a motion removing the attorney general from the case. But McAuliffe’s statement is misleading because it ignores some crucial information -- the fact that the attorney general’s office was the one that requested to be removed from the case. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Terry McAuliffe	None	None	None	2013-08-05T06:00:00	2013-07-20	['None']
-pomt-04103	"Even if you took literally every single ounce of platinum in the world, it still wouldn’t add up to enough needed to pay down our nation’s debt."	true	/new-hampshire/statements/2013/jan/14/national-republican-congressional-committee/nrcc-compares-nations-debt-all-words-platinum-take/	According to the National Republican Congressional Committee, President Barack Obama, U.S. Rep. Ann McLane Kuster and other Washington Democrats have a platinum target on their backs. That's because some economists and legal scholars say Obama -- and, by extension,other Washington Democrats could solve the nation’s debt limit problem by taking advantage of an obscure law to mint platinum coins, which Obama could use to offset the debt and avoid a standoff with House Republicans over spending cuts. Under this theory, as little as an ounce of platinum could be used to mint a coin with a denomination of $1 trillion. Neither the White House, nor Kuster, the target of a recent attack by the GOP congressional group, have commented on the matter. But, according to the Republican campaign committee, not even all the platinum in all the world could solve America’s spending problems. "Heard of that trillion-dollar platinum coin Democrats want?" the congressional committee said in a press release issued Wednesday, January 9. "Well, even if you took literally every single ounce of platinum in the world, it still wouldn’t add up to enough needed to pay down our nation’s debt," the release stated."Yet President Obama and Washington Democrats like Ann McLane Kuster continue to support policies that bankrupt our country." The NRCC's point is a bit silly because that's not what economists are proposing. But just for fun -- and a chance to leaf through the pages of "A History of Platinum" -- we decided to check it out. To be clear: We are not making a Truth-O-Meter ruling on whether Obama can do it or whether the strategy would succeed. We are simply addressing the NRCC's comparison of the total amount of platinum to the federal debt. Is the NRCC right? We decided to check the scales. First, let’s get a few calculations out of the way. As of January 9, the date of the NRCC statement, the national debt stood at $16.432 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. That same day, the price of platinum was listed at $1,583 per troy ounce, according to Platinum Today, a website (Troy ounces are the unit of measurement used to measure precious metals). By those numbers, it would take approximately 10.38 billion troy ounces of platinum to pay off the debt. So, has the world produced that much platinum? We decided to check the records. According to the Platinum Metals Review, a publication by Johnson Matthey PLC, a London-based precious metals company, 130,715 million troy ounces were supplied between 1975, the first formal records available, and 2006. And more recently, mines supplied 36.935 million ounces from 2007-2012, company records show. That brings the total of platinum mined since 1975 to 167.65 million ounces -- less than 1/60th of the 10.38 billion needed to pay off the debt. Numbers prior to 1975 are harder to track. Johnson Matthey, the industry group, didn’t keep formal records on platinum production before that time. Thankfully, historians Donald McDonald and Leslie B. Hunt offered some thoughts on the matter in their book, "A History of Platinum." According to the book, referenced on the Johnson Matthey website, two countries -- Columbia and Russia -- supplied most of the world’s platinum through most of the 19th Century. But, in 1888, explorers discovered platinum deposits in the ore mines of in Ontario, Canada. Between 1902-1919, companies mined about 33,000 ounces of platinum from the mines. And by 1929, that number increased to about 300,000 ounces per year of platinum, along with the five other metals known as the Platinum Group Metals. Elsewhere in the world, explorers discovered the Merensky Reef in South Africa in 1924, and over the years it became the world’s largest source of platinum. By 1938, the amount produced from the Merensky Reef reached 25,000 ounces per year, and by 1955, that number reached 200,000 per year, and in 1973, it exceeded 1 million ounces, according to the Platinum Metals Review. This steady increase in production makes the numbers difficult to track. But, for argument’s sake, let’s use some very generous numbers and say all the mines across the globe combined to supply 1 million ounces of platinum each year back to 1902 -- far more than most estimates. That would add 72 million ounces to the total 167.65 million tracked between 1975-2012, and the total production dating back to 1902 would then reach 239.65 million troy ounces. That total, priced at the $1,583 per ounce, the Jan. 9 rate, would equal about $379.365 billion in value -- still less than 1/40th of the $16 trillion debt figure. Even doubling the 167.65 million figure from 1975-2012 (335.3 million ounces) would leave the total value of platinum at $530.779 billion -- still less than 1/30th of the debt. And pricing that 335.3 million ounces total by $2,280, the market’s 20-year high from March 2008, the total ($764.484 billion) would still fall more than $15 trillion short. Our ruling: There are no formal counts of platinum production dating back before 1975, but based on recent records and historical accounts, there is no evidence to suggest the value of the world’s total platinum supply comes within reach of the national debt. Records from Johnson Matthey PLC, an industry leader, show that 167.65 million troy ounces were supplied between 1975-2012, and historical records indicate that number far exceeds the amount mined in the years prior. Even by the most generous counts, the total value of the the world’s platinum supply is only a fraction of the national debt. We rate this claim True.	None	National Republican Congressional Committee	None	None	None	2013-01-14T10:06:48	2013-01-09	['None']
-pomt-10503	Obama spent "40 percent of the PAC money, 43 percent to be exact, on Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina politicians."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/mar/27/bill-clinton/424-percent-by-our-calculations/	In a March 16, 2008, interview with a group of college journalists, former President Bill Clinton stated that an inordinate amount of money distributed by Sen. Barack Obama's leadership PAC, Hopefund, went to elected officials in states with early primaries. It was a key point in Clinton's argument that Obama has not been true to his pledge not to accept lobbyist or PAC money in his run for president. Leadership PACs are political action committees established by members of Congress to support other candidates. Members use the committees to solidify relationships with other members of Congress who might later support them in a run for a leadership post within Congress or in a bid for higher office. Most politicians shelve their leadership PACs once they formally announce their candidacy for president. But Obama didn't. In the months after Obama announced his candidacy on Feb. 10, 2007, Hopefund distributed more than $400,000 to federal and state political candidates and parties. Said Clinton: "In the beginning, he spends 40 percent of the PAC money, 43 percent to be exact, on Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina politicians. Those states constitute 3.7 percent of America's population, after he is a political candidate. And this money did come from lobbyists and special interest groups. "Now, he can say that this is just a blind coincidence, although he admitted that his political action committee consulted with his campaign about how to spend that money out." A PolitiFact analysis of the political contributions made by Obama's Hopefund after Obama officially announced his candidacy found that $185,000 went to Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina (the overwhelming majority went to Iowa, $95,500, and New Hampshire, $82,000). Another $251,000 went to candidates or state parties in 26 other states, according to a review of Hopefund disbursements listed at Opensecrets.org. That means 42.4 percent of Hopefund disbursements were spent in the four states. So Clinton is dead on there. And Clinton rightly notes that these states constitute just 3.7 percent of America's population, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The implication is that the money was spent only to curry favor with politicians in early-voting states that could give Obama's campaign a boost. "You are building your political clout, so you can call in favors in the future," said Paul Ryan, an attorney for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that specializes in analyzing campaign finance. In December, the Clinton campaign called on Obama to close Hopefund and contended that the disbursements after Obama announced his candidacy violated election laws. Though no laws specifically require candidates to close their leadership PACs, Ryan said, it is a legal gray area and most politicians shelve them just to be sure. Obama and his staff maintained then that they did nothing improper. The line was muddied some with a Washington Post story on Nov. 30, 2007, that quoted a campaign source acknowledging that Obama's presidential campaign was consulted by Hopefund officials about how to disburse its remaining funds. One can argue whether leadership PAC disbursements to other candidates count as presidential campaigning, or whether the inordinate amounts of money going to states with early primaries proves it — we think they probably do. But we're evaluating Clinton's statement about how much PAC money Obama spent in the early-primary states. And Clinton is pretty much on target when he says 43 percent went to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. We rate his claim True.	None	Bill Clinton	None	None	None	2008-03-27T00:00:00	2008-03-16	['Nevada', 'South_Carolina', 'New_Hampshire', 'Iowa', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-08488	Says the Texas Department of Agriculture seeks to purchase up to 300,000 promotional stress balls.	true	/texas/statements/2010/oct/11/hank-gilbert/hank-gilbert-says-texas-department-agriculture-cou/	Bounciest Democrat on November's statewide ballot? It might be Hank Gilbert, making his second hard charge for state agriculture commissioner versus Todd Staples, the Republican who topped him four years ago. Gilbert, ever prowling for issues, recently trumpeted that the Texas Department of Agriculture is looking at buying thousands of stress balls -- squeezable toys. He said in a Sept. 24 press release: "Make no mistake, Texans love their balls: footballs, baseballs, basketballs, and soccer balls. But 300,000 stress balls? It seems a little extreme, but that's the quantity of grape, barbell, and book-shaped polyurethane stress balls the Texas Department of Agriculture could be spending taxpayer dollars on..." Really? To our inquiry, Gilbert's campaign provided Web links to the agriculture agency's June request for bids as well as a September post on a state website indicating that a $99,000 contract to provide promotional materials was awarded to a Massachusetts company, Oceans Promotions. We downloaded the June 29 bid-request package from a site for state requisitions overseen by the state comptroller's office. The package shows the department was seeking bids to provide up to 300,000 stress "relievers," which we're guessing are not balls because they're not round. Precisely, the package says, the agency sought bids to make "promotional items with logo imprints to follow through on (the) TDA Food and Nutrition Texans Bring It Campaign," with the items to include grape-shaped stress relievers with "Texans Bring It" written on them or "Eating Right," which would be made of polyurethane and be two inches high by three inches wide. The package says a second set of stress relievers, each one called "Dumbbell," would be imprinted "Texans Bring It" and "Exercise" and be five inches high by 1.8 inches in diameter. A third stress reliever would be imprinted "Book" and "Texans Bring It," according to the bid package, while other promotional items would include pencils, buttons and bumperstickers. The package says the bids were sought for various quantities, starting from 2,500 and topping out at 100,000 each. It electronically links to a Branders.com site showing what the agency wanted the stress relievers to look like (our interpretation: bunches of purple grapes). Is all this a real deal? To our inquiry, Bryan Black, Staples' spokesman, replied via e-mail: "An invitation for bid was issued for these federally funded educational items to reduce the $5.8 billion avoidable health care expenditures, paid by taxpayers, associated with overweight and obesity health problems." We followed up with Black, asking if it's accurate to conclude that up to 300,000 of the stress relievers are being purchased. We also wondered why the purchase was being made. Black said he'd limit his comment to his e-mailed statement. Surely the agency would pipe up if Gilbert got its purchase plans wrong. We rate the statement True.	None	Hank Gilbert	None	None	None	2010-10-11T06:00:00	2010-09-24	['None']
-pomt-02636	The General Assembly "has no explicit constitutional authority to impose income, sales, estate and the myriad of other taxes upon us."	true	/rhode-island/statements/2014/jan/19/nicholas-gorham/former-ri-rep-nicholas-gorham-says-state-general-a/	Former state Rep. Nicholas Gorham made a surprising claim last month in a commentary in The Providence Journal. "The fact is that we have a General Assembly that has no explicit constitutional authority to impose income, sales, estate and the myriad of other taxes upon us, yet it taxes the people as if there were no limitations on its authority to tax the people," he wrote in the piece, published Dec. 30. The legislature can’t legally levy taxes? This called for a PolitiFact audit. First, a history lesson. When King Charles II granted a royal charter to the colony in 1663, the document, preserved in a metal and glass case at the State House, established "a form of pure government by an elected assembly presided over by a nearly powerless, elected governor," according to an account on the General Assembly’s website. The Assembly’s supremacy continued when Rhode Island became a state, and was reaffirmed in the state’s first Constitution, adopted in 1842. Article VI, Section 10 spelled it out, saying "the General Assembly shall continue to exercise the powers it has heretofore exercised, unless prohibited in this Constitution." The state Supreme Court consistently interpreted that to mean the power of the General Assembly was unlimited unless authority to do something was specifically given to another branch of government. Things changed in 2004, when the General Assembly, responding to pressure from good government groups, passed "separation of powers" legislation, a set of proposed amendments to the state Constitution. The amendments made it clear the government is divided into three separate branches, banned legislators from serving on any executive-branch boards or commissions, and gave the governor power to appoint members of agency boards. And they eliminated the catch-all Section 10. Voters approved the amendments 2-to-1. So is Gorham right that, because of 2004 vote, the General Assembly lost its "explicit" authority to tax? On a literal level, yes. The only reference to setting taxes in the current Constitution is a section that says that the Assembly can set the manner in which property valuations are conducted. But legal experts say on a practical level, implicit can be as good as explicit. Former state Supreme Court Justice Robert G. Flanders Jr., who stepped down in early 2004, says that although much was changed by the 2004 amendments, much abides. From the days of Parliament and the English kings, he said, the power to levy taxes has rested in the legislative body, a legal tradition that was carried on in England’s colonies in the Americas. "Inherent in the legislative power is the power to tax," Flanders said. "You wouldn’t need an explicit grant." Richard Raspallo, legal counsel to House Majority Leader Nicholas A. Mattiello, agreed, saying there are several examples of legislative power that is assumed despite a lack of specific language in the Constitution. "Where is it explicitly stated in the Constitution that the General Assembly has the authority to require Rhode Island citizens to follow traffic rules, or have a license, or grant people the right to marry, or require people to have certain educational standards in order to work in certain fields?" he said. "At some point, the General Assembly has been granted power by the people to legislate for the common good," he said. "That includes the imposition of taxes to pay for the welfare of the citizenry." Gorham indirectly acknowledged that, but said the ambiguity shows the need for a state constitutional convention to settle the matter definitively. (Voters will be asked in November whether a convention should be convened.) As he wrote in his commentary: "Of course, I plan to pay my taxes, but you really have to wonder sometimes. If the people really wanted to get taxes — and, yes, borrowing — under control and on the people’s terms, the Constitution, just the way it is, would be a great place to start. Let the revolution begin!" Our ruling Nicholas Gorham said the Rhode Island General Assembly ‘‘has no explicit constitutional authority’’ to levy taxes. History tells us he’s right. Had he suggested that the lack of explicit language meant no one had to pay taxes, we’d view his claim in a far different light. But he didn’t, so we rule it True. (If you hear a claim you'd like us to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Nicholas Gorham	None	None	None	2014-01-19T00:01:00	2013-12-30	['None']
-pomt-11225	"Melania Just Hit Donald Trump With Shocking Announcement He Never Saw Coming"	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/may/08/blog-posting/website-falsely-claims-melania-trump-made-shocking/	A website called RealTimePolitics posted a deceptive headline saying First Lady Melania Trump made a "shocking" announcement to her husband, President Donald Trump. "Melania Just Hit Donald Trump With Shocking Announcement He Never Saw Coming," said a realtimepolitics.com headline that failed to deliver. The story is a mixture of gossip and opinion with references to tweets and events related to the Trumps, but does not mention or reveal a "shocking announcement" from Melania Trump. The misleading headline capitalizes on rumors about the couple’s dynamic to trick people into clicking the link. Facebook flagged this story as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook's News Feed. You can read more about our partnership with Facebook here. "Donald does his best to play nice with his wife when the cameras are rolling, but everyone knows that his marriage is on the rocks and that their marriage essentially enslaves Melania," said the May 6 story on realtimepolitics.com. The post claimed that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, "threw the nation a major curveball when he contradicted the president’s story in an interview with Fox News," and that Giuliani "tried to clean up the mess by claiming that Donald was only trying to protect his marriage by burying the false allegations against him." Realtimepolitics.com, which likely is hoping to confuse people with the legitimate website realclearpolitics.com, alludes to remarks Giuliani made on May 2 and May 3 interviews, which PolitiFact looked into, exploring whether a $130,000 payoff to adult film star Stormy Daniels was a campaign expenditure. (Here’s a timeline of Trump’s explanations for the Stormy Daniels payment.) "Will Melania resist being seen with Donald publicly as she did after the first time Donald’s affair with Daniels stole headlines?" said the realtimepolitics.com post. "What is your reaction?" Realtimepolitics.com’s headline is false, pure click-bait and completely misleading. We rate it Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-05-08T11:48:27	2018-05-06	['None']
-para-00113	Red tape is responsible for an Australian mine now waiting three years for approval, compared with just 12 months five years ago.	half-true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/11/tony-abbott/tony-abbott-says-red-tape-suffocating-mines-delayi/index.html	None	['Economy', 'Mining', 'Regulation']	Tony Abbott	Chris Pash, Su-Lin Tan, David Humphries	None	Tony Abbott says red tape suffocating mines, delaying approvals	Thursday, July 11, 2013 at 4:47 p.m.	None	['Australia']
-pomt-06128	"Our tax code is . . . 80,000 pages."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2011/dec/27/barry-hinckley/us-senate-candidate-barry-hinckley-says-nations-ta/	Every year brings another report that the United State's tax code has become so complicated that even the people who work for the Internal Revenue Service don't know what's in it. Part of the reason may be its size. Republican Barry Hinckley, who is running against incumbent Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, offered a sense of the scope of the code during a Dec. 4 appearance on the WPRI program "Newsmakers." When Rhode Island Public Radio political reporter Ian Donnis asked about the refusal of most Republicans to consider any tax increase, Hinckley said, "Our tax code is desperately broken. It's 80,000 pages. So in my opinion, any effort to continue to tweak something that's broken is a fool's errand to begin with. So trying to raise more money through a busted tax code, I think, is the wrong way to go." Hinckley repeated the 80,000-page claim a few minutes later. It also shows up in a Warwick Beacon story on the candidate. Is the tax code really that long? A lot of estimates can be found on the Internet, ranging from a few thousand pages to more than a million, if you believe the claims of one blogger. But as any student knows who has tried to lengthen a sparse book report by writing with big letters, the number of pages isn't the best gauge. It's the number of words. We went to The Tax Foundation, a pro-business Washington-based research organization that regularly examines the tax burden. They directed us to a report from the Taxpayer Advocate's Service (TAS), an independent organization within the Internal Revenue Service. The service took the Feb. 1, 2010, version of the tax code, written by Congress and formally known as Title 26, copied it into Microsoft Word, and used the "word count" feature to discover that it had 3.8 million words. (The actual length is a bit less because this count includes cross references, captions and descriptions of amendments that don't have the force of law.) So we did the math -- 3.8 million words spread over 80,000 pages would be 48 words per page. That's either really big print or a huge waste of paper. (For a sense of scale, this paragraph contains exactly 48 words and would fill one of those hypothetical pages.) The 3.8 million words produced 11,045 single-spaced pages in Word, which makes Hinckley's estimate more than seven times too high. And if the code were published in a reference book, that would allow for smaller type and more words per page. The government doesn't publish just the code so we went to CCH, a company that specializes in tax law research. Its tax code book, published a year ago, runs 5,368 pages, according to the version we found on Amazon.com. Even that number is too high. CCH spokeswoman Leslie Bonacum said if you strip out indexes and other material that is not part of the code itself. That "leaves us with 5,084 pages of the Internal Revenue Code, as amended, along with amendment notes (written by CCH staff) that details all legislative changes to the code and their effective dates." We wondered if the IRS rules and regulations might increase the total to 80,000 pages. No such luck. CCH's printed copy of the rules and regs, covering six volumes, is listed at 13,880 pages. So the code and regulations combined is fewer than 20,000 pages. (By extrapolation, if you downloaded both and printed them with Word, as the TAS did, it would run to about 40,000 pages, still half of what Hinckley says.) So where did Hinckley get the 80,000-page figure? His spokeswoman sent us links to a Fox Business article and a commentary on a New Jersey website. We found plenty of other references that also used the 80,000-page figure. They simply state it as fact. One source of confusion may be CCH itself. The Hinckley spokeswoman directed us to a colorful chart by CCH that shows how the number of pages in one of its publications, "CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter," has increased over the years. Its 2011 edition has 72,536 pages. But that publication isn't just the tax code. "That includes the code, regs, annotations to court cases, revenue rulings, explanatory material, other things that come out of the IRS that are not regulations," said Mark Luscombe, principal analyst for the tax and accounting group at CCH. "But some politicians and media have picked that up and called it the code, which is not correct." For example, the website Political Calculations miscalculates by taking the CCH chart and incorrectly presenting it as the number of pages in the tax code itself. That's akin to including everything the Vatican has written about Scripture and using it to claim that the Bible itself (about 1,100 pages) is hundreds of millions of pages long. Our ruling Unlike the U.S. tax code, we'll be brief. Republican U.S. Senate candidate Barry Hinckley said the code is 80,000 pages long, an assertion he made twice on "Newsmakers" and his spokeswoman defends by citing some Internet sources. In reality, it's about 11,000 pages on Microsoft Word and less than half that size in book form. Adding in the IRS's rules and regulations still doesn't bring it close to the length Hinckley says. Only when you include all types of ancillary materials does it begin to approach that legendary length. If Hinckley, whose campaign informed us in an email that the code was 3.7 million words in 2009, had done the math, they would have realized that the code couldn't cover that many pages unless you put fewer than 48 words per page. A few minutes searching Amazon.com would also have uncovered real books -- and page counts -- that were more accurate. The U.S. tax code may be ridiculously long, maddeningly convoluted and overly complex, but Hinckley's count is way off the mark. We rule his claim False. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Barry Hinckley	None	None	None	2011-12-27T06:00:00	2011-12-04	['None']
-pose-00588	"Partner with universities... State economic development grants will always include partnerships with universities to develop research strengths into unique clusters."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/612/include-universities-in-state-economic-development/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	Include universities in state economic development grants	2010-12-21T09:36:20	None	['None']
-pomt-04302	"There is no war on coal. Period. There are more coal jobs and more coal produced in Ohio than there were five years ago, in spite of the talking points and the yard signs."	true	/ohio/statements/2012/oct/31/sherrod-brown/sherrod-brown-says-coal-jobs-and-coal-production-b/	There is a war on coal, Republicans are telling the public. The story line took center stage during a mid-August campaign stop for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Belmont County. With coal miners standing behind him, Romney attacked the Obama administration saying the Democratic president was developing alternative energy at the expense of the coal industry and heavy-handed in regulating the energy resource. Charges that Democrats have hurt the coal industry have spread to Ohio Senate's race, too. During a U.S. Senate debate held by the City Club of Cleveland on Oct. 16, a questioner asked incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown how he could support jobs and cheaper energy in Ohio while backing a president that has declared war on coal. Brown fired back saying the "war on coal" rhetoric is empty. "There is no war on coal. Period. There are more coal jobs and more coal produced in Ohio than there were five years ago, in spite of the talking points and the yard signs," he told the audience. Has coal production and the number of coal mining jobs in Ohio really gone up during the time Obama has been in office? PoltiFact Ohio got out the pickaxes and started digging for facts. First, we turned to Brown's campaign to find out the source of Brown's information. Brown campaign spokesman Justin Barasky sent us some information from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources annual coal reports showing that production in 2010 was 28,364,000 tons compared to 22,283,072 tons in 2007. Those same ODNR-produced reports show the monthly employment average for coal mining jobs in Ohio in 2010 was 2,879, compared to a monthly average of 2,204 in 2007. With the 2011 state coal report due out any day, ODNR spokeswoman Heidi Hetzel-Evans was able to tell us that the 2011 report will show that Ohio produced about 27,929,089 tons of coal--a slight drop from the 2010 data that Brown was basing his comment on. Coal mining jobs in Ohio in 2011 were up over the previous year with an average of 2,995 a month, and obviously, both are well ahead of 2007 figures. PolitiFact Ohio also checked with the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which provided a second source of data with even more recent numbers. The EIA estimates coal production for every state on a weekly basis and the October 13 report showed Ohio coal production so far this year up about 1.9 percent over last year. For the most recent 12 months, from October 13, 2011, to October 13, 2012, Ohio has produced about 28,456,000 tons of coal. That matches up fairly closely with the ODNR reports and certainly shows that there hasn't been any fall off in coal production in Ohio in recent months. We also looked for a second source on the coal mining jobs numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps a Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages which tracks job numbers in specific industries. For Ohio, the census data showed an average of 2,570 coal mining jobs statewide in 2011. That's almost 30 percent higher than 2007 when the bureau showed only 2,010 coal mining jobs in Ohio. Counted in those statistics are jobs related to the actual mining of coal as well as developing coal mining sites and preparing the coal such as cleaning and screening the coal to be sold. So why has production of Ohio's high-sulfur coal increased in the last few years? Coal industry analysts generally attribute the jump in coal production to an increase in exports to overseas markets such as China and India, which need coal for cheap energy and to use in the steel-making process. So after mining for facts what are we left with? In defending the Democratic record on coal during a debate, Sherrod Brown said coal production and coal jobs in Ohio are up compared to five years ago. After consulting with state and federal statistics, it appears that jobs and coal production in Ohio have increased compared to 2007 levels by every measurement we could find. On the Truth-O-Meter, Browns' statement rates True.	None	Sherrod Brown	None	None	None	2012-10-31T06:00:00	2012-10-16	['Ohio']
-pomt-00310	Says "Texas U.S. Rep John Culberson voted to let insurance companies charge people 50 and over five times more than younger people."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/sep/24/lizzie-pannill-fletcher/texass-fletcher-tries-hit-culberson-obamacare/	Affordable health care is a salient issue in the 2018 congressional elections, and an ad from a Houston Democrat has a familiar ring. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, hoping to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. John Culberson in Texas’s 7th Congressional District, says her opponent "is taking a wrecking ball" to a system that needs improvement, not demolition. It’s an ad with a particular appeal to older voters, because Fletcher says in it that "Culberson voted to let insurance companies charge people 50 and over five times more than younger people." Maybe you’ve heard similar claims before. Democrats across the country are using them against their Republican opponents, and PolitiFact has checked out many of them. But we went a little local on this one. Let’s dig in. No discounts for age Fletcher and other Democrats are basing this claim on provisions in the American Health Care Act, passed by the House of Representatives along party lines on May 4, 2017. The bill was rejected in the Senate. The legislation was important for several reasons, but chiefly because it would have changed — and not simply repealed, as earlier bills had attempted — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, also known as Obamacare. The new bill would have allowed insurers to charge certain customers over age 50 -- those buying policies in individual and small-group markets -- up to five times as much as they charge their youngest customers. Age has always factored into the price of insurance for the simple reason that older people tend to use more health care services. But the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, limited the age-to-premium ratio: The oldest insurance buyers in the individual and small group markets could be charged no more than three times the premiums as the youngest buyers. Say that premiums for a 20-year-old were $100 a month. A 60-year-old could be charged no more than $300 a month for the same policy under the ACA. Prior to Obamacare, "premiums for older adults were typically four or five times the premiums charged to younger adults," the Kaiser Family Foundation said in a March 2017 report. So the Republican House bill would have lifted the age-permitted ratios closer to where they were before the Affordable Care Act. Gaming this out There were ifs, ands and buts concerning this proposed change. But before we get to them, let’s look at how the age change might have played out if the House bill had become law. We are able to do this because the Kaiser Family Foundation developed a data and mapping tool that allowed for illustrative comparisons of insurance policy costs under the existing and the proposed new laws. This was strictly for people buying policies on the individual market, not for employer-sponsored insurance. We ran scenarios comparing premiums for a silver-tier, or average plan, covering a 27-year-old and a 60-year-old living in Harris County, Texas — the Houston area. As commercials say, actual results might vary, and it’s worth noting that just because the law allows something, it doesn’t mean every situation will match it. In the Kaiser model, premiums for the 27-year-old were $3,340 a year on the individual market under the ACA. Premiums for a 60-year-old were $8,660. That means the 60-year-old’s premiums were about 2.6 times higher than the 27-year-old’s. Under the House bill that Culberson supported, the 60-year-old’s premiums would have jumped to $11,630, while the 27-year-olds would have shrunk to $3,080. That means that in this example, the 60-year-old’s premiums would have been nearly 3.8 times as high as the 27-year-old’s. This illustration shows premiums before accounting for taxpayer subsidies, or "premium tax credits," that many buyers use to offset their costs. The ACA subsidies are based on overall income, but they also take into account federal guidelines for the maximum share of income someone should have to pay for health insurance and the cost of a benchmark plan in his or her area. The House bill that Culberson supported would have changed the subsidy system, basing it solely on age, although subsidies regardless of age would phase out when incomes exceeded $75,000. A number of analyses, including one from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said such a change would generally benefit younger buyers and force older buyers to pay more out of pocket for their premiums. Using the Kaiser Family Foundation data tool, we looked again at Houston scenarios for a 27-year-old and a 60-year-old each earning $40,000 a year. The 27-year-old currently doesn't qualify for a subsidy because his income is too high -- relative to the cost of his health coverage -- under the ACA. But under the 2017 House bill, he would have qualified for a $2,000 age-based subsidy. That would have reduced his out-of-pocket costs for premiums to $1,080. A 60-year-old with that same income now qualifies for a $4,580 subsidy. Under the bill Culberson supported, the age-based subsidy would be $4,000. That would put the 60-year-old’s net premiums, after subsidies, at $7,630, seven times more than the 27-year-old’s. Remember, the new law would limit the difference in base premiums, not the amounts due after accounting for subsidies. Would things have played out like this for sure? It depends on the moving parts. This example showed a narrower difference than five-to-one before subsidies, but actual differences change not only by region of the country but sometimes also by county. Nationally, AARP said on the day of the House vote that under the bill, unsubsidized premiums for 60- to 64-year-olds would average almost $18,000 per year, while 20- to 29-year-olds were expected to see average unsubsidized premiums of $4,010 per year. That would make the older group’s premiums 4.5 percent higher than the younger group’s. Our ruling Fletcher was accurate in saying that Culberson voted to "let insurance companies charge people 50 and over five times more than younger people." But she did not mention that the ACA already lets them charge three times more. Her ad also could give the impression that this would have applied to everyone over 50, whereas it only would have affected the individual and small-group markets. It would not have affected large employer plans. And the Republican bill would not have affected people 65 and older because they are covered under Medicare, the national program for seniors. We rate Fletcher’s claim Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Lizzie Pannill Fletcher	None	None	None	2018-09-24T05:50:00	2018-09-19	['United_States', 'John_Culberson', 'Texas']
-tron-03637	Boycott Exxon and Mobil?	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/exxon-mobil-boycott/	None	warnings	None	None	None	Boycott Exxon and Mobil?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Exxon', 'Mobil']
-hoer-01119	British Airways 100 All Inclusive First Class Trips	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/british-airways-100-all-inclusive-first-class-trips-facebook-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	British Airways 100 All Inclusive First Class Trips Facebook Scam	July 27, 2016	None	['None']
-hoer-00939	Legoland Pages Duping Facebook Users	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-legoland-pages-duping-facebook-users/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Fake Legoland Pages Duping Facebook Users	October 10, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02635	Action by the Milwaukee County Board will "provide the County Executive with the same level of security as the Governor and the Mayor of Milwaukee while saving taxpayers $300,000."	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2014/jan/19/david-cullen/cullen-says-abele-security-detail-equals-those-gov/	Sometimes it seems everything’s a fight at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. During last fall’s budget battle, even County Executive Chris Abele’s request for a personal security detail provided by a private firm or local law enforcement touched off a tussle. Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.’s reaction was basically no way: "I won't spend one penny of taxpayer money on Abele's self-importance exercise." Supervisor Jason Haas said Abele was wealthy enough to pay for his own security. Others noted Scott Walker had no security when he had Abele’s job. Abele said he’d received threats. The County Board ultimately carved 75% from Abele’s plan for $400,000 worth of protection and assigned the duty to -- who else? -- Clarke’s office, then overrode an Abele veto to make it happen. After tempers cooled, County Supervisor David Cullen portrayed the outcome as a victory for Abele and the taxpayers. "The County Executive also requested $400,000 for his personal security," Cullen wrote in his year-end 2013 newsletter to constituents. "The Board allocated $100,000 from the Sheriff's budget for this purpose. This will provide the County Executive with the same level of security as the Governor and the Mayor of Milwaukee while saving taxpayers $300,000." We can’t say what the appropriate level of spending is. But let’s check that last statement by the county supervisor. Did the move provide the same level of security, while saving money? How spending compares For the record, Abele believes the County Board-approved plan is inadequate. His spokesman, Brendan Conway, said Milwaukee Police officials privately estimated -- based on what it costs to protect Mayor Tom Barrett -- that it would cost $400,000 to protect Abele. MPD spokesman Mark Stanmeyer told us that the $400,000 figure (it’s $500,000 including overtime) includes police presence in the entire municipal complex, not just for protecting and driving Barrett to events. Officers are stationed at the Treasurer’s office, for instance. It’s clear, though, from what police tell us that a significant chunk of the $400,000 covers Barrett, and that multiple officers are part of the team that protects and escorts him. By contrast, the county plan is limited to $100,000 and county supervisors say they were told the funds would cover salary and benefits for the equivalent of one full-time deputy. In addition, Conway said Clarke so far is talking about an on-call system, not a body attached to the exec’s office. In addition, Abele would only be escorted when outside the Courthouse. That would be different than the City Hall setup, where police provide security for Barrett both while working in his office and outside City Hall at various functions. As for Walker, who was elected governor in 2010, it’s clear that his security costs greatly exceed $100,000. Factors include a large increase in threats he and his family reported receiving in the wake of his Act 10 collective bargaining law, and the fact that his two sons lived at home in suburban Milwaukee during the height of the protests over the law. The governor has maintained separate residences in Madison and Wauwatosa. The costs of the governor's security detail totaled $611,400 over the 10 months from Walker's election in November 2010 to the end of August 2011, the Journal Sentinel reported at the time. That also covers the lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch. That was more than twice as much as it cost to protect then-Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle over the comparable 10-month period from November 2009 to August 2010. We could not get updated figures. In 2013, a state transportation spokesperson told the Capital Times that the State Patrol unit responsible for providing security for the governor, lieutenant governor and visiting dignitaries has doubled its staffing from five to 10 since Walker took office. As is readily evident to the public, a State Trooper squad is a fixture in the driveway of the Walkers’ home in Wauwatosa. In light of these facts, we asked Cullen about his newsletter claim that Abele would get "the same level of security" as Barrett and Walker. He told us he "may have chosen my words inartfully," explaining that he meant only that professional law enforcement would protect Abele just as it does Walker and Barrett. "I wasn’t necessarily arguing it was the same level of man hours the governor or mayor gets," Cullen said. A day later, Cullen said it was possible the county and city security could be more comparable than at first blush. The comparison is not as straightforward as it seems, he said, because the county figure ($100,000) doesn’t include spending on the security checkpoints at the public entrances to the Courthouse. Those checkpoints, staffed primarily by security-trained county facilities employees and lately with help from sheriff’s deputies, give the Courthouse a security dimension lacking at City Hall. True, but it’s hard to get past the fact that Barrett gets close personal attention inside and outside City Hall, while Abele would only have escorts outside the Courthouse -- and possibly only on an on-call basis. In sum, we think Cullen’s claim would read to most people as comparable security presence for Abele and the other two officials, and it falls way short of that. Is it a savings? What about the $300,000 savings Cullen claimed from the County Board’s action? He bragged about it in his newsletter under the headline, "County Board Adopts a no-tax increase Budget While Protecting Core Services." While it’s true the board slashed Abele’s security request by that amount, the money was not used for tax relief. Instead, the money went for new spending: The County Board shifted the $300,000 through a budget amendment to beef up the county’s existing support of emergency homeless shelters. Finally, what will happen now that Abele and Clarke -- bitter personal and political rivals -- have to work out a security plan? Clarke told us he’s still angry that Abele eliminated the sheriff’s department’s dignitary protection unit in the 2012 election year, opening Clarke to criticism about not fully participating in security when President Obama visited the area. "Now in his narcissistic way (Abele) feels his security should be funded without question as to cost," Clarke told us. Conway’s response: Clarke has made clear he has the authority to provide whatever function he wants. Clarke, who is certified in dignitary protection work, declined to discuss how the department would arrange protection for Abele, citing the need to keep such details secret for safety reasons. He called it a "gross breach of security" for Conway to discuss it with the media. Last fall, an Abele aide told county supervisors Abele would want to hand-pick the sheriff’s deputy assigned to him. We’ll have to stay tuned to see if he picks the sheriff for the job. Our rating Cullen said action by the Milwaukee County Board will "provide the County Executive with the same level of security as the Governor and the Mayor of Milwaukee while saving taxpayers $300,000." There are major problems with the claim, which Cullen acknowledges was poorly phrased. Cullen emphasized how much the County Board’s action would save taxpayers, but there is no real savings. It actually costs taxpayers more money. Abele’s personal security would fall far short of the governor’s and also appears to be less intense than that accorded to Mayor Tom Barrett. Cullen now says he meant only that Abele would have law enforcement security as do those two officials. But his newsletter said "same level." For these reasons, we rate his statement Pants on Fire.	None	David Cullen	None	None	None	2014-01-19T05:00:00	2014-01-01	['None']
-pomt-10638	"Mike Huckabee raised taxes on dog groomers!"	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/07/spike-romney-attack-dog/barking-up-the-right-tree/	Who sends a dog to do their bidding? A cute, ribbon-in-its-hair Yorkie named Spike, at that? Mitt Romney. Yes, in his latest round of yapping with rival Mike Huckabee, Romney sent Iowa voters a mailer that assails Huckabee's tax record and, more notably, features many adorable pictures of Spike: "Dear Iowa Republican ... " it begins, "At the risk of making Chuck Norris angry, I must disagree with his endorsement of Mike Huckabee for President. (Please stick with me here. If putting Chuck Norris in a television ad makes sense, a dog responding in a mailing makes just as much sense.)" It's signed: "Bow wow, Spike" with a paw print. Now we know Iowa is passe, but given New Hampshire's antitax climate, we wouldn't be surprised to see this attack ad in a few Nashua mailboxes. And we can't help but give Romney points for humor. This is the joke attack ad style the Hillary Clinton campaign missed out on when it dug up quotes from Sen. Barack Obama's kindergarten teacher to prove he's been aiming for the White House longer than he admits. (True!) But, back to Spike. He attacks Huckabee for "all the different taxes" he raised as governor of Arkansas, including the one that really gets him: the tax on dog groomers. (We checked Huckabee's record on the other tax increases here. ) "Sales tax. Gas tax. Groceries tax. Even the tax on nursing home beds. Fine," Spike writes. "But he went too far when he taxed the people who make me beautiful!" Would you believe Spike is barking up the right tree? A number of services were made subject to the Arkansas state sales tax with Act 107 of the 2003 legislative session. Wrecker and towing services. Body piercing, tattooing and electrolysis services. Locksmith services. And, pet grooming and kennel services. As of July 1, 2004, charges for those services and nine others named in the legislation are subject to a 6 percent state sales tax, all part of an effort to generate revenue to balance the budget in the face of a dramatic projected budget shortfall. "Like most states at that time, revenues were dropping, so they levied (additional taxes)," said Tom Atchley, excise tax administrator for the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration. Act 107 became law on Feb. 12, 2004, without a signature from then-Gov. Huckabee, who has said he had little choice but to accept the tax increases because Arkansas state law requires a balanced budget. Still, no bones about it, Spike makes a solid case. And Romney scores a funny jab. If you'd like to see the mailer, which is worth a peek, it's posted at the Washington Post blog "The Trail" here. But because Huckabee didn't sign the law, we can't say Huckabee himself put a tax on dog groomers. But he didn't stop it either, so we rule Spike's statement Mostly True.	None	Spike the Romney Attack Dog	None	None	None	2008-01-07T00:00:00	2008-01-02	['Mike_Huckabee']
-goop-00778	Jennifer Lopez Refused To Get In Pool For Music Video?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-lopez-music-video-pool/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Lopez Refused To Get In Pool For Music Video?	10:17 am, June 21, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-01005	sircam@mm Virus	none	https://www.truthorfiction.com/sircam/	None	computers	None	None	None	sircam@mm Virus	Mar 14, 2007	None	['None']
-snes-03612	The Clinton campaign paid Beyonce and Jay Z $62 million to perform a concert in Cleveland.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-paid-beyonce-and-jay-z/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Clinton Campaign Paid Beyonce and Jay Z $62 Million for Cleveland Concert to Secure Black Votes	7 November 2016	None	['Cleveland', 'Bill_Clinton', 'Beyoncé', 'Jay-Z']
-goop-00151	Nicole Kidman Pregnant With ‘Miracle Baby,’ 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/nicole-kidman-pregnant-miracle-baby-keith-urban/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Nicole Kidman NOT Pregnant With ‘Miracle Baby,’ Despite Report	10:15 am, October 11, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-15106	Georgia’s CRCT "set some of the lowest expectations for student proficiency in the nation."	true	/georgia/statements/2015/sep/15/richard-woods/woods-claim-backed-reports-crct-wasnt-challenging-/	The state announced the first round of the Georgia Milestones tests on Sept. 3 and, as predicted, scores were low. Only 10 percent of students who took a language arts or science course at any grade level finished in the top category of distinguished learners. In math, 60 percent of all Georgia students scored as beginning or developing learners. State School Superintendent Richard Woods said the new test sets standards that are higher, more comparable nationally and essential if students are to be college- and career-ready. "Our previous assessment, the CRCT, set some of the lowest expectations for student proficiency in the nation, and that cannot continue," Woods said in the press release announcing the results. The Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, or CRCT, is infamous for being central to the Atlanta Public Schools test-cheating scandals. Dozens of teachers and administrators risked careers and criminal prosecution changing CRCT scores to avoid losing bonus pay, even jobs. More than 20 educators pleaded guilty to reduced charges in the scandal. Eleven others were convicted in April on racketeering and other charges, receiving sentences from probation to three years in prison. Some are appealing. With all that said, did the CRCT really set some of the nation’s lowest expectations for student proficiency, as Woods suggests? ( Keep in mind that an easy test can still be failed.) First a little background about the CRCT. It stood as one of the primary measures of student achievement in Georgia from 2000 until it was retired in Summer 2014. The multiple-choice tests also were used to determine whether schools made adequate yearly progress (AYP), the benchmark of success under the federal No Child Left Behind law. The A-Plus Education Reform Act of 2000, pushed by former Gov. Roy Barnes, required all Georgia students in grades 1 to 8 to take the CRCT in reading, English/language arts and math. Students in grades 3 through 8 also were tested in science and social studies. A writing test was required in grades 3, 5, 8 and 11. Passing the CRCT was required for promotion to the next grade for students in grades 3 (reading) and 5 and 8 (reading and math). Who knew? Answer: Many Woods, who became state superintendent in January, isn’t saying something about the CRCT that hasn’t been said for years by some parents, teachers and certainly educators and education researchers/advocates. What was the tell-tale sign that the test was too easy? It was the wide gulf between passing rates on the CRCT and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), considered the gold standard of tests. The Education Trust in Washington D.C. raised a red flag back in 2006. The non-profit pointed out, for example, that 87 percent of Georgia fourth-graders were considered "proficient" in reading on the CRCT, but only 26 percent of a sampling of those same students were proficient on the 2005 NAEP reading test. (If the two tests had the same expectations, there should be a minimal gap. Wide disparities in results on the state and national test are referred to as the "honesty gap.") State officials at the time said the report findings could lead to a strengthening of the test. If that happened, it doesn’t appear to have shown up in the data. A subsequent report from the group, relying on 2011 data, showed about the same results. Nearly 90 percent of students met standards on the CRCT, but only 32 percent did so on NAEP. It wasn’t a state secret either Our research turned up a report from the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, "A Snapshot of K-8 Academic Achievement in Georgia." The report said that performance on the CRCT had improved modestly between 2009-10 and 2012-13. But it said a comparison with national tests showed that Georgia set a low bar for proficiency on the CRCT and still ranked in the bottom half of national comparisons on NAEP. The report pointed out that a recent Education Next study found Georgia had the lowest mathematics and reading cut scores in the nation. (Georgia students had to answer fewer test questions right to pass the test, or be classified as proficient. About 50 percent was standard.) For 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, here's what a NAEP Mapping Study showed: (This study uses NAEP as a common scale to compare one state’s expectations of what their students should know and be able to do in order to be considered "proficient" on their state assessments to other states.) -- Georgia had the lowest numeric 4th grade reading expectations in the nation (Proficiency by NAEP standards was a scale score equivalent of 238 or better. But researchers found Georgia classified students who scored 167 or above, as proficient. No other state had that low a bar.); -- Georgia was third from the bottom on 4th grade math expectations (Georgia's NAEP scale score equivalent of 210 was numerically better than Maryland's and Alabama's; top was Texas at 256); -- Georgia was last in 8th grade reading expectations (Georgia had a NAEP scale score equivalent of 199 and was a distant last at that, with Idaho the next lowest at 217. Best was New York at 282 out of possible 500); -- and Georgia numerically ranked third from the bottom in 8th grade math expectations. (The state's NAEP scale score equivalent was 245, which is tied with Alabama, 245, and was followed by Connecticut, 244. Best was New York at 304, out of a possible 500.) "Too many students were labeled as proficient when, in reality, they had not fully mastered the standards and needed additional support," Woods said recently. "That hurt our kids who need to be competitive with others across the country and hurt our teachers by making it difficult for them to have a true picture of the academic strengths and weakness of their students." Our ruling There’s ample evidence that, for years, Georgia’s CRCT "set some of the lowest expectations for student proficiency in the nation," as research has repeatedly shown and State Superintendent Richard Woods stated last week. We rate Woods’ statement True.	None	Richard Woods	None	None	None	2015-09-15T00:00:00	2015-09-02	['None']
-snes-01594	Trump Mocks Trudeau For Celebrating Thanksgiving Six Weeks Early?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-mocks-trudeau-celebrating-thanksgiving-six-weeks-early/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Trump Mock Trudeau for Celebrating Thanksgiving Six Weeks Early?	13 October 2017	None	['None']
-wast-00203	"Yesterday for the first time she said she wants to renegotiate trade agreements."	4 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/08/trumps-false-claim-that-clinton-only-recently-pledged-to-renegotiate-nafta/	None	None	Donald Trump	Glenn Kessler	None	Trump's false claim that Clinton only recently pledged to renegotiate NAFTA	August 8, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01388	Bananas from Costa Rica infected with flesh eating bacteria	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bananas/	None	food	None	None	None	Bananas from Costa Rica infected with flesh eating bacteria	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Costa_Rica']
-pomt-05959	"Right now in Georgia, nearly one in three leaving our prisons are re-convicted within three years."	true	/georgia/statements/2012/jan/25/nathan-deal/deal-makes-arresting-claim-about-ga-prisons/	Crime may not pay, but it sure costs Georgia a lot of money. In some cases, too much, says Gov. Nathan Deal. During his second State of the State address earlier this month, Deal said Georgia has one of the biggest prison populations in the nation. Housing those prisoners costs money, which troubles state leaders as Georgia wades through an uncertain economy. Still, Deal said far too many of these inmates are former Georgia inmates who are committing crimes and being sent back to prison. "[H]istory has shown that offenders simply return to the prison population," the governor said. "Right now in Georgia, nearly one in three leaving our prisons are re-convicted within three years." One in three are re-convicted within three years? We decided to fact-check this claim. Criminal justice reform will be one of the top items on the menu for state lawmakers to chew on this legislative session. Georgia currently spends about $1 billion a year on corrections, state officials say. That is more than double the $492 million the state spent on correctional services in 1990. The growth in corrections spending is second behind Medicaid, state officials said. Many believe it is unsustainable. During the past two decades, Georgia’s prison population has more than doubled to 56,000 inmates despite a decrease in crime rates in the past 10 years, according to a state report released in November. "If current policies remain in place, analysis indicates that Georgia’s prison population will rise by another 8 percent to reach nearly 60,000 inmates by 2016, presenting the state with the need to spend an additional $264 million to expand capacity," the report said. Last year, the Pew Center on the States released a widely reported study on recidivism rates. In 1999, nearly 17,000 people were released from Georgia state prisons, the study reported. Thirty-eight percent of those released were incarcerated again within three years, Pew found. In 2004, about 19,000 men and women were released from state prisons in Georgia. About 35 percent of them were back in prison by 2007, Pew found. Those numbers seemed dated, so PolitiFact Georgia searched for some more recent information. The Georgia Department of Corrections website’s most recent data is through fiscal year 2008. The recidivism rate within three years for state prisons, where the largest percentage of Georgia prisoners is held, was 27.5 percent, the state’s website says. The recidivism rate in most of the other categories of prisons ranged from 22 to 25 percent. Probation boot camps were the only types of prisons with a recidivism rate of one-third. In Georgia, most of the people who were sent back to prison went for a technical violation, according to the Pew report. Georgia’s probation sentences -- about seven years -- are almost twice the national average, the state report found. In 2010, state courts sent more than 5,000 lower-risk drug and property offenders to prison who had never been to prison before, accounting for 25 percent of all admissions, according to the state report. The state report suggested giving judges more sentencing options -- such as probation -- for low-level, nonviolent drug possession offenders -- which might reduce the recidivism rate. "This option would reduce the growth of the prison population by approximately 300 to 900 additional beds," the state report said. The Pew report on recidivism is more than one-third, which helps any argument that Deal would make that his statement is correct. The most recent state data shows the recidivism rate is slightly less than one-third. The governor said in his speech that the rate was "nearly" one in three. We believe all of the numbers we saw support his statement. Our rating: True.	None	Nathan Deal	None	None	None	2012-01-25T06:00:00	2012-01-10	['Georgia_(U.S._state)']
-pomt-05691	"A clear majority of Americans support removing the cost-sharing requirement for prescription contraceptive coverage."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/mar/12/rush-holt/rush-holt-claims-clear-majority-americans-support-/	U.S. Rep. Rush Holt says the federal mandate requiring most health care plans to offer free contraceptive coverage makes sense. And he claims a majority of Americans agree with him. Fierce debate on the issue erupted when guidelines issued by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department that required insurance plans to cover birth control as preventive services, without co-pays or deductibles, were made final without exemptions for some employers with religious affiliations. On Feb. 10, President Barack Obama announced a compromise: if a religious-affiliated employer objected to providing contraceptive coverage, the responsibility would fall on the insurance company. In a Feb. 24 e-mail newsletter explaining his support for Obama’s decision, Holt (D- 12th Dist.) said: "Nearly all American women, including women of faith, have used contraception sometimes, and a clear majority of Americans support removing the cost-sharing requirement for prescription contraceptive coverage." Our colleagues at PolitiFact national recently ruled on a claim that addressed the first half of Holt’s statement. A White House official said: "Most women, including 98 percent of Catholic women, have used contraception." That claim earned a Mostly True. With the birth control plan still under fierce scrutiny, we questioned Holt’s other claim. Despite all the rancor, do Americans favor the plan? Holt’s spokesman, Thomas Seay, pointed to a February health tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation that found that 63 percent of respondents support the "new federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control" and 33 percent oppose it. The margin of error was 3 percentage points. But that’s just one poll of 1,519 adults. We found seven other surveys that asked respondents about their views on requiring health care plans to cover birth control. Five support Holt’s claim. A CBS News/New York Times poll found an even larger majority of Americans -- 66 percent -- support the plan requiring private health insurance plans to cover the full cost of birth control. About a quarter of respondents opposed the plan, with a margin of error of 3 percentage points. When asked specifically about the same requirement for employers with religious affiliations, support decreased slightly, with 61 percent in favor and 31 percent opposed. A recent Fox News poll found 61 percent of respondents supported "requiring employer health plans to cover birth control for women" and 34 percent opposed. The poll had a margin of error of 3 percentage points. A survey by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling conducted on behalf of Planned Parenthood and a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute both found majorities in support of employers providing health care plans that would cover the cost of birth control. Another poll conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found 53 percent of respondents favored the requirement and 33 percent opposed it, with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. That’s a majority, but one that could possibly be affected by the margin of error. Two of the polls we reviewed found opposition to providing free birth control coverage. A Quinnipiac University poll with a margin of error of 1.9 percentage points found a split of 47 percent in support of requiring private employers to offer free birth control coverage and 48 percent opposed. A poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports -- widely considered Republican-leaning -- found 46 percent opposed the plan and 43 percent supported it. The survey had a margin of error of 3 percentage points. Our ruling Holt said "a clear majority of Americans support removing the cost-sharing requirement for prescription contraceptive coverage." We found eight polls that recently asked respondents whether they supported or opposed requiring health care plans to cover the cost of birth control. In six of those surveys there was majority support, only one of which could be impacted by a margin of error. Two others polls showed more opposition than support. Still, Holt’s claim is backed by most of the polls we reviewed. Overall, this claim is Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Rush Holt	None	None	None	2012-03-12T07:30:00	2012-02-24	['United_States']
-snes-00647	An arms dealer advertised a weapon for its ability to fit into a small backpack.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/weapon-advertised-ability-fit-backpack/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Was a Weapon Advertised For Its Ability to Fit in a Backpack?	7 May 2018	None	['None']
-afck-00057	“Local government receives an average of 9% from the national fiscus”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/verifying-key-claims-in-the-2018-state-of-the-nation-debate/	None	None	None	None	None	Verifying key claims in SA’s 2018 State of the Nation address debate	2018-02-19 02:56	None	['None']
-pomt-02658	"Sens. Isakson’s, Chambliss’ Votes Against Unemployment Insurance Were Votes to Kill Nearly 6,000 Georgia Jobs."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2014/jan/14/americans-united-change/group-claims-georgia-jobs-risk-if-benefits-not-ext/	When lawmakers returned to Congress after the new year, Democrats and Republicans went back to their corners and began sparring over whether to extend unemployment benefits. Georgia’s two U.S. senators, Republicans Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, both opposed a Democratic-led $6.4 billion proposal to extend the benefits, which expired Dec. 28. Americans United for Change, a liberal advocacy group, promptly sent out a press release decrying the senators’ votes. The group included a claim about the economic impact to Georgia about extending those benefits that put PolitiFact Georgia and its Truth-O-Meter to work. "Sens. Isakson’s, Chambliss’ Votes Against Unemployment Insurance Were Votes to Kill Nearly 6,000 Georgia Jobs," Americans United for Change wrote in the headline. Is that true, we wondered? Georgians now are eligible for a maximum of 18 weeks of state-based unemployment insurance, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Congress typically enacts extended federal benefits during recessions, and the expired benefits ran for a maximum of 47 additional weeks. Chambliss and Isakson have supported a GOP proposal to pay for a $6.4 billion long-term unemployment insurance extension and to restore $6 billion in cost-of-living increases for early military pensions. They would pay for that by preventing illegal immigrants from claiming a tax credit for their children. Americans United for Change based its claim on a report on the White House website pushing the extension. Called "The Economic Benefits of Extending Unemployment Benefits," the report outlines how many jobs would be saved in 2014 by continuing the insurance. In Georgia, the total was 5,876. Nationally, the impact is 240,000 jobs, the report says. The report was written by the U.S. Labor Department and the Council of Economic Advisors. Without the additional unemployment insurance, many of those jobless workers would seek help from other federal programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as the food stamp program. White House officials pointed to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to support the claim. The CBO released a report in December that concluded extending unemployment benefits through the end of 2014 would add about 200,000 jobs nationwide. That estimate is slightly lower but pretty close to the report on the White House website. The CBO and White House reports use the amount of money spent in each state from unemployment insurance and estimate how many jobs it will create or save. Unemployment benefits have a trickle-down effect on the economy, some say. The money those unemployed recipients receive in benefits is used to buy groceries and other services that keep others employed or can create additional jobs. "Who provides goods and services? Workers," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a generally left-leaning, Washington-based nonprofit that supports extending the benefits. The institute has done its own research on the topic. It concluded 310,000 jobs would be created. Shierholz, who co-wrote the report, said her group used federal data and added a multiplier to come up with its estimate. Shierholz said the Obama administration report used what she described as "standard" methodology to come up with its estimate. "Their overall numbers make sense," Shierholz told us. University of Georgia professor Jeffrey Dorfman was not so convinced about the effectiveness of extending the benefits. He said if you believe that deficit spending will boost the economy, "then the methodology used is correct and reasonably well done." "I personally think these models far overstate the benefits of deficit spending because they do not account for the cost of the lost spending by whoever would have borrowed the money if the government hadn't borrowed it first," Dorfman said via email. "We see the benefits of the government spending but do not see the jobs that would have been created in the private sector instead." He also questioned the logic of extending the benefits. "Extended unemployment payments are currently scored at $6.5 billion for a 3 month extension. If we figure $26 billion for the whole year versus the 240,000 jobs that the White House says will be ‘saved or created’ by that spending, that works out to $108,333 per job," Dorfman said. "Clearly, we would be better off if the federal government just randomly picked 240,000 long term unemployed people and gave them government jobs at say $40,000 per year." To sum up, Americans United for Change claimed extending unemployment benefits would save nearly 6,000 Georgia jobs this year. The claim was based on a federal report. Other nationwide estimates suggest the jobs number in the report is on target. But it is still an estimate that’s based on economic projections. And the overreaching point by American United for Change neglects the fact that Isakson and Chambliss back a GOP plan that would also extend jobless benefits. With those caveats, we rate this claim Half True.	None	Americans United for Change	None	None	None	2014-01-14T00:00:00	2014-01-14	['None']
-pomt-03150	"We've seen priests beheaded by the Islamic rebels on the other side. We've also seen an Islamic rebel eating the heart of a soldier."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/10/rand-paul/rand-paul-syrian-rebels-behead-priests-and-eat-hea/	A major conundrum facing the United States in Syria is the prevalence of Islamic extremists, some with links to al-Qaida, among the rebel forces. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said Syrian President Bashar Assad is probably a war criminal but some of his opponents are equally dangerous. "We've seen priests beheaded by the Islamic rebels on the other side," Paul said on the inaugural edition of CNN’s relaunched Crossfire. "We've also seen an Islamic rebel eating the heart of a soldier." These are dramatic and gruesome claims that have great staying power on the Web, so we decided to see if we could verify them. The short answer is that rebels gunned down a priest but didn’t behead him. And a rebel commander made a show of cutting organs from a dead Syrian soldier but denies actually taking a bite. The Franciscan priest A California-based news service called Catholic Online was one of the first to report the beheading of Francois Murad, a priest at a monastery in northern Syria. The killing took place on June 23, 2013, and the article appeared on June 30. There was graphic video of three men kneeling on the ground. As a crowd cheers, rebels cut their heads off. The early reports claimed the Vatican confirmed the death of the priest and took that to be confirmation that he was beheaded. The Blaze, the website of conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, carried an item of its own on June 30. The headline couched the claim as "allegedly" but the first line of the article was slightly less reserved with "Syrian Catholic priest Francois Murad killed last weekend by jihadi fighters was beheaded, according to a report by Catholic Online, which is linking to video purportedly showing the brutal murder." The Blaze article garnered nearly 41,000 re-postings on Facebook. Other websites followed with their own versions on July 1. But a more accurate account was available within hours of the original report. On June 30, an editor for the British newspaper The Telegraph, initially linked to the story of the beheading, and then issued this correction: "I need to update and correct reports that Fr. Francois Murad, a Franciscan friar, was beheaded last week. The priest was actually shot inside his church, it seems – and the video of a beheading, which went viral, does not depict him. The Vatican was widely quoted as confirming the beheading, but an investigation by the Telegraph's Ruth Sherlock has established that this attribution was false." We found no dispute that a jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, conducted the attack. Murad was shot eight times. A fellow Franciscan collected his body, and he was buried in a nearby village. By July 2, CNN also aimed to set the record straight. An article emphasized that the rebels had killed but not beheaded the priest. The next day, two other news operations followed up with their own corrections: the right-leaning CNSnews.com ("Syrian Rebels Did Not Behead Franciscan Priest--They Shot Him 8 Times") and the New York Daily News ("Catholic priest NOT among three beheaded on video by Syrian rebels, says head friar") . Nevertheless, as recently as this past week, a columnist for the conservative website Townhall had the headline "Syrian rebels attack Christian village, behead priests." A heart or other organ Paul’s second example hews more closely to the facts. On May 12, Time reported on a video that its reporters had seen earlier but was posted anonymously on the Web that day. In the video, a rebel cuts open the body of a dead Syrian soldier and removes two bloody masses. The rebel, who has taken the nom de guerre, Abu Sakkar, says to the cell phone camera, "I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog." His men shout "Allahu akbar (God is great)." Sakkar then lifts one of the lumps of flesh to his mouth. Multiple news organizations carried the story and an edited version of the video. Time interviewed Sakkar via Skype on May 14. He did not deny what he had done. He explained that he felt his behavior was justified because his men had found a cell phone on the dead man with him abusing three naked women, a mother and her two daughters. "We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there," Sakkar told Time. Two months later, a BBC reporter spoke face-to-face with Sakkar. Sakkar at that time said, "I didn't bite into it. I just held it for show." However, days after the video went public, he had told the BBC that he had taken a ritual bite. The video available to us makes it impossible to tell for sure. It is also unclear what body parts he was holding. Sakkar told the BBC it was a lung; a doctor who saw the video told the BBC that’s what it looked like to him. Sakkar is the founder of the Omar al-Farouq brigade, a group of about 60 men. According to Time, the man who posted the video described him as affiliated with al-Qaida. How close he actually is to al-Qaida is unclear. The person who put the video online added the caption, "These are the freedoms they want to import to our country." Time reported that graphic videos of this sort have become familiar among combatants on both sides of the Syrian civil war. "Footage of rape, torture and amputations are passed like trading cards," said Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch. There is no question that such videos travel widely. Beck featured the video of Sakkar on his radio program as a clear warning against being drawn into a war in the Middle East. Beck urged viewers to share it with their friends and to contact their representatives in Congress. Paul's office sent us a statement that read, in part, "To get caught up in the specifics of which organ was eaten or how, or the manner in which an innocent priest was murdered is to miss the truth to argue over the details: that atrocities have been committed by both sides of this civil war." Our ruling Paul said Islamic rebels have decapitated priests, and one was seen eating the heart of a Syrian soldier. News reports show that Islamic rebels gunned down a priest but did not behead him. The murder of a priest speaks to religious warfare and that carries great weight. However, thousands of innocent people have died from gunfire in this civil war. The claim is evocative in part due to the beheading, and that aspect is plainly inaccurate. In addition, the truth has been widely available for two months and Paul had ample opportunity to know better. Paul’s claim about a rebel eating a heart is more accurate, but the details are sketchy. Both the focus on a heart and the idea of cannibalism push strong emotional buttons. But it might not have been a heart, and there might not have been an actual bite. Still, a rebel carved up a dead Syrian soldier, boasted about it as he did so, and at the very least, spoke and acted as though he were eating the dead man’s liver and heart. The first statement is flawed, and the second is largely on the mark with some weak points. Together, we rate them as Half True. Editor's note: This report had been updated to include a response we received from Paul's office shortly after our initial publication.	None	Rand Paul	None	None	None	2013-09-10T17:49:02	2013-09-09	['Islam']
-pomt-03874	Says the Georgia Dome would need up to $350 million in work over the next five to seven years.	half-true	/georgia/statements/2013/mar/08/kasim-reed/would-new-stadium-be-cheaper-dome-rehab-depends/	To build new or to renovate the old? PolitiFact Georgia has examined the question before in the case of the proposed $1 billion Falcons stadium. The issue then was a claim by Atlanta’s chief operating officer about how much upfront public money is typically invested in these types of projects. The debate continues. This time we examine a claim made by Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed about construction costs. Reed, a staunch supporter of a new stadium, has said that renovating the 21-year-old Georgia Dome, where the Falcons currently play, is a bad idea. Reed said the renovation would cost more than the upfront public funding portion of a new stadium. Reed says the Dome would need up to $350 million in work over the next five to seven years, based on information from the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, the Dome’s owner. Politifact Georgia decided to investigate the estimates for a renovated Georgia Dome. We wanted to know how those renovations compare with construction of a new stadium. Under the deal that was reached this week, the Falcons would contribute $800 million toward the proposed $1 billion stadium. Team owner Arthur Blank sits on the board of directors of Cox Enterprises, which owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The publicly funded portion of the new retractable-roof stadium would be $200 million in bonds issued by the city and backed by hotel-motel tax revenue. The Falcons would assume responsibility for $50 million in infrastructure costs. The Blank Family Foundation would invest $15 million in projects for neighborhoods around the stadium; the city’s economic development agency would commit another $15 million. The deal also calls for at least 31 percent minority and women business participation in the design and construction work. The Atlanta City Council would have to approve a funding deal. The Falcons want a new stadium in time for the 2017 football season, when their lease expires at the Georgia Dome. PolitiFact Georgia asked Reed’s office about his source for the renovation figures. It pointed us to a 2010 master plan study of the Dome commissioned by the GWCCA. That study examined what a new NFL stadium program would look like and the costs for getting the Dome to that level. That study included the following expanded/renovated Dome budget: New additional area: $118,100,000 (369,000 square feet) Major renovation: $145,600,000 Minor renovation: $ 23,200,000 Seating Bowl/Field: $ 25,000,000 Replace Roof Fabric: $ 30,000,000 Soft Costs, fees, etc (15%): $ 51,300,000 Total: $393,200,000 The total does not include year-to-year cost increases, parking lots and garages, or land. It also does not include an optional $200 million retractable roof. The commissioned studies were completed by Kansas City, Mo.-based Populous, one of the largest stadium builders in the nation. The company is now a finalist in the GWCCA’s selection process for a lead architect. Populous was not asked to itemize specific work under the "major" and "minor" renovation categories, said a spokeswoman representing the GWCCA. With updated features and arrangements, the study allows for a seating capacity of 65,000 seats with the possibility for expansion to 75,000 seats.The Georgia Dome currently has 71,250 seats Another GWCCA-commissioned report, released in February 2011, focused on a new open-air stadium, but it also examined continued maintenance and improvements at the Georgia Dome over the next 20 years. That study found that from 2011 to 2020, $44.5 million in maintenance work would be needed to retain the Dome at "today’s level of quality. An additional $35 million to $70 million in capital improvements -- such as a new roof, plumbing and technology upgrades and food service equipment -- would also be needed during the same time period to keep the Dome a competitive venue over the next decade, the report said. Over the past 16 years, combined maintenance projects and improvement projects at the Dome have equaled $71,430,000, according to the report. Initially, the 2010 budget document sent to us from the mayor’s office and included in the 2010 report listed an incorrect figure for a cost sub total. Politifact Georgia caught the error while doing our own math on the numbers, and Populous revised the document. Depending on your assumptions, it’s easy to inflate the costs of an old facility, said Neil deMause, an author and blogger who monitors -- and has been critical of -- sports facility deals across the country. "Are your stated costs just to maintain (the facility), doing some upgrades or completely gutting it and making it look like a new facility?" he said. "The Falcons are playing in the Dome now, and it doesn’t look like it’s falling down. Could you spend less than $100 million and upgrade it? I don’t know, nobody has asked that question." The argument for stadium upgrades across the nation has been met with mixed results lately. As part of a stadium extension deal approved late last year, the Buffalo Bills will receive $94 million in public funds as part of a $130 million renovation. This week, North Carolina’s governor denied the use of public money for renovation of the Carolina Panthers’ Bank of America Stadium. The team had asked for $62.5 million as part of a $250 million renovation deal. Also this week, senators in Miami are proposing a referendum be approved before hotel-motel taxes are used to fund renovations at the Dolphins’ stadium. And although arbitrators sided last month with the St. Louis Rams for $700 million in renovations at the Edward Jones Dome, some officials think the money would be better spent on a new facility. Rodney Fort, co-director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Sports Management said the idea a stadium renovation would be more expensive than building a new facility is difficult to contemplate. But if you cannot get the same flow of value no matter how you renovate, then you’re comparing apples to oranges, he said. Ultimately, we return to the original question: To build new or to renovate? The mayor says the (Georgia) Dome would need up to $350 million in work over the next five to seven years. That amount is more than the cost of the upfront public money ($200 million) that could be needed for a proposed $1 billion Falcons stadium. Reed cites figures from a 2010 study that puts the Dome’s renovation costs at about $393 million. Those renovations would include 369,000 square feet of additional space, a roof replacement and upgrades to the seating bowl/field area. Using these figures, the renovations would be more than the $200 million public investment in the proposed deal for a new stadium. A study the following year, completed by the same company, lists maintenance and capital costs to keep the Dome at "today’s" levels between $79.5 million and $114.5 million. Those costs would include basic renovation items such as technology and plumbing upgrades, along with a new roof. Using these figures, the renovation cost would be less than the $200 million public investment into the proposed new stadium deal. The difference lies with which style of renovations is chosen: the exclusive Rolls-Royce level of renovations or the cheaper, base model Honda level of renovations. Reed’s statement is partially accurate but needs a lot of additional information and context. We rated the statement Half True. Staff writer Karishma Mehrotra contributed to this story.	None	Kasim Reed	None	None	None	2013-03-08T06:00:00	2013-02-13	['None']
-pomt-10952	"The price of soybeans has fallen 50% since 5 years before the election. A big reason is bad (terrible) trade deals with other countries."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/24/donald-trump/donald-trump-falsely-blames-trade-deals-lower-soyb/	Midwestern farmers are among those taking the brunt of President Donald Trump’s strategy to win trade concessions from China. After Trump hit China with about $34 billion in tariffs, China responded in equal measure. Among its targets – soybeans. Prices quickly fell by about 20 percent. Trump went to Twitter to argue that the fight is worth it. "Farmers have been on a downward trend for 15 years," he wrote July 20. "The price of soybeans has fallen 50% since 5 years before the Election. A big reason is bad (terrible) Trade Deals with other countries. They put on massive Tariffs and Barriers. Canada charges 275% on Dairy. Farmers will WIN!" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com It’s clear that what is so far a mini-trade war has hurt prices. Have trade deals done the same? Trump focused on soybeans, so we took a look. Key takeaways Soybean prices have fallen since 2012, but the main driver has been weather. A drought that year cut production. Lower supply led to higher prices. Good weather followed, which boosted yields and pushed prices down. Trump tied falling prices to "terrible" trade deals, but that’s misleading. China is far and away the largest importer of American soybeans, buying about $12.3 billion worth last year, triple the amount in 2005. This has happened in the absence of a U.S.-China trade deal. The ups and downs of soybeans Trump looked back to "five years before the election." We asked the White House to clarify and didn’t hear back. 2012 was the highwater mark for soybean prices. They topped out at $17.70 a bushel in early September 2012. At the end of 2017, the price was $9.55. Corrected for inflation, prices dropped over 50 percent. Here’s how the futures market for soybeans has performed since 2000. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Several forces drove soybean markets, but the leading one has been weather. A drought in 2012 pushed down yields, which in turn, drove up prices. Since then, the reverse happened. "In the past five years, we have had very good weather, " said Aaron Smith, agricultural economist at University of California-Davis. "Yields have been higher and that means prices go down." Between cooperative weather and new growing techniques, the yield per acre went up about 25 percent since 2012, Smith said. Smith noted that before 2012, soybean prices rose thanks to the ripple effects of the growing use of ethanol. Corn is a major raw material for ethanol, and with rising demand, farmers shifted more acres from soybeans to corn. That kept soybean production in check and with fewer bushels of soybeans than there would have been, prices headed up. But to understand soybeans sales, Smith said you need to look to Asia, and primarily China. "The demand from China has tripled in the past ten years or so," Smith said. The USDA statistics paint a clear picture. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com While the sales numbers bounce around a bit, China’s appetite for soybeans has been strong for the past 15 years. And that has been good for American farmers. Andrew Muhammad, a trade economist at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, said trade deals could not have been a factor here. "China is our number one soybean export market, and we have no trade deal with China," Muhammad said. In the 1990s, Congress granted China Most Favored Nation status. That boosted trade between the United States and China, but Most Favored Nation sets broad rules, in contrast to micro-level details that get hammered out in formal trade treaties, such as the one with Colombia, one of the most recent agreements. The United States does have a trade agreement with Mexico. Mexico is not as big of a buyer as China, but sales have gone up since 2000 and largely held steady since 2012. The North American Free Trade Agreement might present issues in other areas of trade, but soybeans isn’t one of them. Our ruling Trump said soybean prices have fallen since 2012 and a big factor was bad trade deals. Trump’s link between trade deals and falling prices is misplaced. Experts who know agriculture say it comes down to supply and demand. On the supply side, weather is the single most important factor, followed closely by more productive growing techniques. On the demands side, look to China. American farmers have benefited from current trade rules. Their largest buyer is China, where sales to China have tripled since 2005. The United States has no trade deal with China. It does have a trade deal with Mexico, where sales gradually increased and plateaued in recent years. Trump is correct that soybean prices have fallen, but his point about trade deals ignores the real drivers. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-07-24T09:00:00	2018-07-20	['None']
-goop-02846	Caitlyn Jenner Posing Nude, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-jenner-not-posing-nude-daily-mail-naked-photo-shoot/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Caitlyn Jenner NOT Posing Nude, Despite Daily Mail Claim	5:24 pm, April 20, 2017	None	['None']
-pose-01085	As governor, Gina will: Establish the Rhode Island Innovation Institute (RI II), a center dedicated to taking the good ideas coming out of our colleges and universities and turning them into products that we make right here in Rhode Island.	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/gina-meter/promise/1168/establish-rhode-island-innovation-institute-ri-ii/	None	gina-meter	Gina Raimondo	None	None	Establish the Rhode Island Innovation Institute (RI II)	2016-01-13T00:00:00	None	['Rhode_Island']
-snes-00757	In a leaked e-mail, Hillary Clinton said "we must destroy Syria for Israel."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-clinton-say-syria-israel-leaked-e-mail/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Hillary Clinton Say ‘We Must Destroy Syria for Israel’ in a Leaked E-Mail?	16 April 2018	None	['Syria', 'Israel']
-farg-00074	Claimed former intelligence director James Clapper said, “Trump should be happy that the FBI was SPYING on his campaign."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/05/trump-misquotes-clapper-on-fbi-spy/	None	the-factcheck-wire	FactCheck.org	Eugene Kiely	['Russia investigation']	Trump Misquotes Clapper on FBI ‘Spy’	May 23, 2018	2018-05-23 19:42:19 UTC	['Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation', 'Espionage']
-goop-01211	Margot Robbie’s Husband Fears Leonardo DiCaprio Is Out To Steal Her?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/margot-robbie-leonardo-dicaprio-husband-tom-ackerley/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Margot Robbie’s Husband Fears Leonardo DiCaprio Is Out To Steal Her?	4:37 pm, April 10, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01305	"Scott Walker opposed a plan to help Wisconsin students refinance their student loans."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2014/oct/29/greater-wisconsin-political-fund/did-scott-walker-oppose-proposal-refinancing-stude/	Financial aid for college has gotten its share of attention around Wisconsin during 2014, and moreso in the days leading up to the Nov. 4, 2014 gubernatorial election. When U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., said college students on average are graduating with $30,000 in student loan debt, we rated her claim Half True. Some reliable data indicated the figure is accurate, but other figures suggested it might be lower. And when U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., claimed the affluent are taking advantage of student loans at the expense of middle-class families, our rating was Mostly False. He overstated the problem on both ends. In the governor’s race, Democratic challenger Mary Burke has said easing student loan debt is one of her priorities. Her claim that there are 41,000 people on a waitlist for financial aid for Wisconsin technical colleges and universities earned a Mostly True. The number wasn't totally firm, but pretty solid. Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Scott Walker has touted his tuition freeze at University of Wisconsin System schools rather than discussing college financial aid. But on Oct. 27, 2014, the liberal Greater Wisconsin Committee, which has run TV ads criticizing Walker, released another ad making this claim: "Scott Walker opposed a plan to help Wisconsin students refinance their student loans." Let’s see. Refinancing proposals It turns out the Greater Wisconsin Committee doesn’t have any proof that Walker opposed a state proposal to help students refinance student debt. Rather, the group contends that since Walker didn’t speak, or take action, in favor of the plan proposed by Democrats, he opposed it. Walker "has had every opportunity to show support for this legislative proposal. He specifically chose not to express support and has instead avoided the topic altogether," the group’s executive director, Rich Judge, told us in an email. Judge referred to legislation announced in October 2013 to create a state student loan refinancing authority. Legislative committee hearings were held on the proposal in February 2014. But no votes were ever taken by a committee or the full Legislature, so the issue never reached Walker’s desk. Judge also noted that Walker refused an April 2014 request from Democrats to hold a special session of the Legislature. But he noted that request was to take up not only the refinancing proposal but a number of other bills, as well. Finally, Judge cited a September 2014 news article in the Green Bay Press-Gazette about a Walker campaign appearance. Walker did not speak specifically about student loan debt during the stop, but did say he prefers controlling tuition over government-subsidized financial aid, the newspaper reported. Walker was quoted as saying: "We know it's not just about providing more financial assistance, it's about providing a great price for a UW education that's low to begin with." But none of the above shows opposition by the governor to the refinance proposal. We found another September 2014 news article, in the Racine Journal Times. That article reported that Walker said he would be willing to look at measures like the refinancing bill, but questioned whether the proposal is "more than just politics" because Democrats had not enacted it when they controlled the Legislature and the governor’s office prior to his election in 2010. "If it was a good idea, I’m sure they would have passed it four years ago when they controlled the Assembly and the Senate and the governorship," Walker was quoted as saying in response to questions from reporters. "They not only did not do it then, they presided over a state government that saw 5.5 percent average annual increases in tuition." Walker certainly isn’t declaring support for the refinancing authority, but he isn’t stating opposition, either. Our rating The Greater Wisconsin Committee says Walker "opposed a plan to help Wisconsin students refinance their student loans." The group acknowledged it has no evidence that Walker opposed a 2013 Democratic proposal to create a state student loan refinancing authority. Walker may not support the idea, but he hasn’t fought it, either -- as the group claimed. We rate the statement False.	None	Greater Wisconsin Committee	None	None	None	2014-10-29T15:33:11	2014-10-27	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-10376	Barack Obama "extended health care for wounded troops who'd been neglected."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/24/barack-obama/he-helped-but-wasnt-a-major-player/	In one of his first ads since winning the Democratic nomination for president, Sen. Barack Obama speaks directly to the camera about his life story and his legislative accomplishments. "America is a country of strong families and strong values," the ad begins. "My life's been blessed by both. I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. We didn't have much money, but they taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up." Later in the ad, Obama says, "I passed laws moving people from welfare to work, cut taxes for working families and extended health care for wounded troops who'd been neglected." For his statement that he "extended health care for wounded troops who'd been neglected," the campaign points to a couple of pieces of legislation. In 2008, Obama and Sen. Claire McCaskill contributed key portions to the National Defense Authorization Act that required postdeployment mental health screenings and a national study on the needs of Iraq veterans. We looked into the legislative history of the bill and found that Obama and McCaskill can at least take some credit for developing the list of requirements. It's not a major extension of benefits, however. Another problem for Obama is that he missed the final vote on the bill because he was campaigning. Republican nominee John McCain missed it, too. The bill passed overwhelmingly, 91-3. The other piece of legislation the campaign points to is an amendment Obama passed that picked up the tab for meals and phone calls for Iraq veterans receiving outpatient treatment. We looked at this legislation previously when Obama talked about it at a debate in Las Vegas in early 2008. Obama closed a loophole for outpatient veterans; hospitalized veterans were already covered. So in fairness, this was a tweak to previous legislation. If Obama had said he had helped extend health care for wounded veterans who'd been neglected, we would have given him a better rating. But he phrased his accomplishment to take more of the credit than that. Missing the vote on the 2008 bill does not help his case. For all of these reasons, we find his statement Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-06-24T00:00:00	2008-06-12	['None']
-vees-00096	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: De Lima applied as ICC counsel	false	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-de-lima-did-not-apply-icc-counsel	None	None	None	None	false news,false	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: De Lima DID NOT apply as ICC counsel	August 21, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04502	Says the United States has the "highest corporate tax rate in the world."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/oct/04/joseph-kyrillos/joe-kyrillos-says-united-states-has-highest-corpor/	Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Joe Kyrillos said increased revenues are needed to deal with the national debt, but the path to that goal isn’t paved with tax hikes. Rather, Kyrillos said, he wants to lower taxes to stimulate growth. "Well, we're going to have to raise revenue and I want to do it through growth. I want to lower tax rates. I want to make sure that America doesn't have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, which is what we have now, and lower the rates for everybody," Kyrillos said during a debate tonight with his Democratic rival, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, that aired on NJTV. Are corporations in the United States subject to the highest tax rate in the world? The statutory rate for businesses is the highest among industrialized nations. But for the rate businesses actually pay -- what’s called the effective tax rate -- the United States ranks among the highest, but not at the very top, according to studies. We checked a nearly identical claim that Kyrillos made during an Aug. 20 interview on WOR-AM. Then he said, "we've got the highest corporate tax rate in the world." We rated that statement Mostly True. At that time, a spokeswoman for Kyrillos cited the nation’s top statutory corporate tax rate of 39.2 percent. That rate is a combination of federal, state and local tax rates before any tax breaks are factored in. Japan used to have a higher statutory rate than the United States. But in April, Japan reduced its rate and the U.S. took first place among industrialized nations, according to the Tax Foundation, a business-backed group. So on that point, Kyrillos is right. Since businesses receive a number of tax breaks, the effective tax rate for corporations in the U.S. isn’t the world’s highest, but it’s still up there. More than a dozen of the most recent studies on effective corporate tax rates across the world found businesses in the U.S. paid an effective rate between 23 percent and 34.9 percent, according to a September 2011 report from the Tax Foundation. The effective rate varied between the studies the Tax Foundation looked at because of different methodologies. In those studies, the U.S. never ranked first in the world. But in 10 of the studies, the nation’s effective corporate tax rate ranked among the top five highest. It’s worth noting that an analysis by the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice along with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, found that 30 Fortune 500 companies, including General Electric, didn’t pay any federal corporate income taxes over the 2008-2010 period. As for what is the better measure -- statutory rates or effective rates -- we found mixed views. Scott Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation, told PolitiFact New Jersey in August that because statutory rates are fixed they make for better comparisons, whereas effective rates are unpredictable and vary across different industries. But Joseph Rosenberg, a research associate at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, said "effective tax rates provide the best measure of comparison for overall tax burdens." Then Aparna Mathur, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said in an e-mail that "both are equally valid measures of looking at the burden of the corporate income tax." Our ruling Kyrillos repeated a claim he made before that the United States has the "highest corporate tax rate in the world." That’s true for the nation’s statutory corporate tax rate among industrialized nations. When Japan lowered its statutory rate, the United States moved into first place. Even when accounting for various tax breaks, the effective rate is still among the highest. On the Truth-O-Meter, we rate this statement Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Joseph Kyrillos	None	None	None	2012-10-04T22:45:00	2012-10-04	['United_States']
-pomt-00406	"Evidence is mounting that marijuana legalization reduces opioid addiction numbers."	mostly true	/new-york/statements/2018/aug/31/nathan-mcmurray/mcmurray-advocates-marijuana-legalization/	Nathan McMurray, a Democrat running in New York’s 27th Congressional District in Western New York, supports legalizing marijuana. He says doing so can help alleviate opioid addiction and financially benefit rural areas. "Evidence is mounting that marijuana legalization reduces opioid addiction numbers," it says on McMurray's campaign website. The Grand Island town supervisor has called for an end to the "failed war on drugs" by passing federal legislation that legalizes cannabis products. McMurray said he supports the Marijuana Justice Act bills (H.R. 4815 / S. 1689) that are currently in U.S. House and Senate committees. The proposed legislation would remove cannabis from the Federal Controlled Substances Act, and expunge federal marijuana use and possession crimes. McMurray says the legalization and taxation of cannabis in farming districts like NY-27 can benefit the local economy and generate tax revenues for the treatment of serious addictions. There is no way to know if lawmakers would use the tax revenue for opioid addiction treatment. But would legalizing marijuana reduce opioid addiction? Marijuana and opioid addiction Several studies have examined a possible link between marijuana legalization and opioid use. The outcomes were mixed. An October 2014 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that "states with medical cannabis laws had a 24.8 percent lower mean annual opioid overdose rate compared with states without medical cannabis laws." Medical marijuana laws reduced opioid overdose deaths over time, according to the study, which studied medical cannabis laws and opioid overdose mortality from 1999 to 2010 from all 50 states. In 2018, the same journal published a study of Medicare Part D patients, which found that in places where medical marijuana is legal, prescriptions for opioids decreased. "Medical cannabis laws are associated with significant reductions in opioid prescribing in the Medicare Part D population," researchers wrote. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, however, cautioned against reaching conclusions from the various published studies, some of which the institute funded. "Some studies have suggested that medical marijuana legalization might be associated with decreased prescription opioid use and overdose deaths, but researchers don't have enough evidence yet to confirm this finding," the institute states. The studies "are population-based and can’t show that medical marijuana legalization caused the decrease in deaths or that pain patients changed their drug-taking behavior." What's more, a study published in September 2017 in the American Journal of Psychiatry offered a contradictory finding. Researchers at the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that "cannabis use appears to increase rather than decrease the risk of developing nonmedical prescription opioid use and opioid use disorder." The researchers relied on data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. More than 43,000 American adults were interviewed in 2001-2002 and follow-up interviews were done with 34,000 of them in 2004-2005. The researchers found that although most adults who used marijuana did not develop an opioid use disorder, using marijuana significantly increased the risk of developing an opioid use disorder, according to a Columbia University release. The National Institute on Drug Abuse acknowledges studies that show legally protected medical marijuana dispensaries, not just medical marijuana legalization, are associated with decreases in opioid prescribing, self-reports of opioid misuse, and treatment admissions for opioid addiction. The institute is continuing to study the relationship between legalized marijuana and opioid use, as well as marijuana’s possible use in treatment of opioid use disorder. Our ruling McMurray said "evidence is mounting" that marijuana legalization reduces opioid addiction. He did not call it a proven fact, which may have led to a different ruling. There is evidence that in places where marijuana is legal, there are fewer opioid deaths and fewer opioid prescriptions. It's important to keep in mind that the change in number of prescriptions cannot be presumed to be a change in how many people overdose. Besides, overdoses from prescribed opioids is only one part of the crisis. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has raised some red flags about drawing sweeping conclusions from the research and advises more studies are needed. McMurray's statement is accurate but needs additional information like what the institute provided, so we rate his statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Nathan McMurray	None	None	None	2018-08-31T17:04:59	2018-08-18	['None']
-goop-02033	Taylor Swift Got “No Love” From “Girl Squad” On Birthday?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-birthday-girl-squad/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Taylor Swift Got “No Love” From “Girl Squad” On Birthday?	1:13 pm, December 14, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-14515	The Arizona State Board of Education’s "failure to report teachers whose certifications have been revoked or suspended ... resulted in the death of a student."	mostly true	/arizona/statements/2016/feb/19/diane-douglas/arizonas-schools-chief-links-2009-murder-boards-fa/	State Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas recently lobbied against a bill that would allow the state Board of Education to hire and fire its employees, arguing that the board can’t handle the business it currently has. Douglas, who oversees K-12 education across the state, has a rocky history with the board, including trying to fire two board employees last February. Douglas mentioned an extreme example of board negligence to make her case against SB 1416 on Feb. 4 during a state Senate Education Committee meeting. "We presented a report to the board on (teacher discipline) that showed their abject failure to report teachers whose certifications have been revoked or suspended to the national database," she said. "And in one instance, because of that failure to report, it resulted in the death of a student." Her accusation was striking, so we wanted to fact-check whether the board failed to report a teacher’s history and if it resulted in a student’s death. The board erred Douglas was referring to former high school math teacher Tamara Hofmann. She taught at Marcos de Niza High School in Tempe. In November 2006, Chandler police found Hofmann and one of her students, Sixto Balbuena, together in her car. Both denied sexual relations when questioned by police. The incident immediately spurred an internal school investigation. Hofmann was removed from the classroom, but her provisional secondary teaching certificate remained valid until it expired on Jan. 5, 2007. Typically, a teacher needs to teach for three years on a provisional certificate before the state issues them a standard one. The process is usually automatic as the state Department of Education vets a teacher’s experience before issuing the certificate. However, only the state Board of Education can take action on a certificate, whether it's revoking or suspending an existing certificate, or denying a new certificate. The state board took no action on her provisional certificate. On Jan. 18, the school closed its investigation. She appealed the discipline — 10 days unpaid suspension and a letter of reprimand — before it was denied and imposed in February. The state board admitted that they recorded the investigation internally, but a clerical error did not show anyone outside the board that she was under investigation. If reported correctly, anyone could search for a teacher and whether or not they have any discipline using the state’s website. The state Department of Education, in turn, did not see that Hofmann was under investigation before they issued her a standard teaching certificate on Jan. 29, 2007. "There was nothing to flag it," Department of Education spokesman Charles Tack said. "That never got into the system." Hofmann returned to school in March 2007, working in the district’s office away from students. Hofmann continued to work in the district office until her contract ended in May. El Dorado High School in Chandler hired Hofmann the following summer. Like the department, they did not see past discipline for Hofmann visible on the state’s web site. It was there Hofmann met another student, Samuel Valdivia. In April 2009, Hofmann’s alleged lover, Sixto Balbuena, walked in on Hofmann with Valdivia at her apartment. Balbuena stabbed and killed Valdivia. It was only after the murder that Hofmann surrendered her certificate instead of going through a state board hearing. The board launched a complaint against the certificate in November 2009 and approved her surrender in January 2010. As for the "national database," Douglas was referring to the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification. It is an oversight board for all state education departments. Reporting Hofmann's discipline at Marcos de Niza to the association would have provided another red flag to El Dorado before they hired her. Association CEO Phillip Rogers said a teacher with a valid certificate could still have discipline reported to the database. States decide on their own what to report to the database, he said. "In some states a reprimand where the educator retains his/her certificate might be reported, and in other states it would not," Rogers said. The one entry in the national database on Hofmann is from Jan. 27, 2010 — two days after she surrendered her teaching certificate. Our ruling Douglas said, "We presented a report to the board on (teacher discipline) that showed their abject failure to report teachers whose certifications have been revoked or suspended to the national database," she said. "And in one instance, because of that failure to report, it resulted in the death of a student." Let’s be clear: There is not a straight line between the actions of the Board of Education and the death of a student. But the actions -- or, really, lack of action -- by the Board of Education prevented a school district from seeing red flags that might have prevented Hofmann’s hiring. Without those flags, Hofmann was rehired. And that’s how a student ended up in a position that ultimately resulted in his death. Douglas’ claim is accurate but requires that fuller description of events. So we rate it Mostly True.	None	Diane Douglas	None	None	None	2016-02-19T12:00:00	2016-02-04	['None']
-tron-02881	MADD-sponsored email petition for the president of the U.S.	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/madd/	None	pleas	None	None	None	MADD-sponsored email petition for the president of the U.S.	Mar 16, 2015	None	['United_States']
-tron-01215	Deandre Joshua Was Murdered over Grand Jury Testimony	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/deandre-joshua-murdered/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Deandre Joshua Was Murdered over Grand Jury Testimony – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06715	"The ratio of corporate profits to wages is now higher than at any time since just before the Great Depression."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/01/robert-reich/robert-reich-says-ratio-corporate-profits-wages-hi/	In an Aug. 29, 2011, column, Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary under President Bill Clinton and a frequent liberal commentator, offered a number of statistics to back up his call for worker protests rather than parades on Labor Day. "Labor Day is traditionally a time for picnics and parades," Reich’s column began. "But this year is no picnic for American workers, and a protest march would be more appropriate than a parade." One of the statistics Reich offered was this: "The ratio of corporate profits to wages is now higher than at any time since just before the Great Depression." A reader asked us to check this out, so we did. We turned to statistics compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the federal office that calculates official statistics about the economy. We found numbers for corporate profits as well as for two measures of worker income -- wage and salary disbursements, and total employee compensation received. We then divided corporate profits by both of the income measurements, all the way back to 1929. (Here are the full statistics from 1929 to 2011 as we calculated them.) For wages, we found that Reich was essentially correct. The ratio in 2010 -- the last full year in the statistics -- was .281, which was higher than any year back to at least 1929, the earliest year in the BEA database. The next highest ratio was in 2006, at .265. (We didn’t find pre-1929 data, so the one part of Reich’s statement that we can’t prove is that the ratio was higher "just before the Great Depression.") We also looked at total compensation, since the portion of worker compensation delivered outside of wages has grown significantly since 1929. The numbers were slightly different, but the general pattern still held. The ratio in 2010 was .226, which was matched or exceeded in only four years -- 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1950. To capture the most up-to-date trends, we also looked at the ratios for the last six quarters. For both wages and compensation, the ratio has risen steadily over that year-and-a-half period. For wages, the ratio has climbed from .274 in the first quarter of 2010 to .290 in the second quarter of 2011. For compensation, the ratio has risen from .220 in the first quarter of 2010 to .234 in the second quarter of 2011. So numerically, there’s little question that Reich is essentially right. (Or, at least for now he is. Economists note that statistics about corporate profits and wages are often revised after the fact.) A more interesting question is what this trendline actually means. First, we’ll note that the ratio has been remarkably steady over the time we studied. In 2010, corporate income was 168 times what it was in 1929, and wages were 124 times what they were in 1929. But despite the dramatic increases for both measures individually, these two numbers have grown pretty much in tandem. While corporate profits have grown faster, they haven’t grown dramatically faster. Over the eight-decade period, the ratio between corporate profits and wages -- at least prior to 2010 -- almost always hovered between .150 and .235, a pretty narrow range, all things considered. Within this range, the ratio has regularly zigzagged up and down. The ratio has peaked during World War II, the early 1950s, the mid1960s, the mid1990s and the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. The 2010 high broke with this history, making the statistic Reich is talking about all the more striking. And as the quarterly data shows, the spike from 2010 has continued into 2011. This spike has its roots in basic mathematics. The ratio can rise for either of two reasons -- because corporate profits rise, or because wages stagnate. To a greater degree than in past recessions, both of these developments have happened simultaneously in 2010 and 2011. That’s the immediate reason for the ratio’s sudden increase. The ratio was well within historical norms as recently as 2009, the second year of the recession. Today, "indicators favorable to workers are either absolutely dreadful, like the percentage of the adult population that is employed, or else improving at a not-very-robust rate, like real compensation per hour, while indicators favorable to business owners, such as record profit levels measured in billions of current dollars, are very delightful indeed," said Gary Burtless, an economist at the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution. There are any number of explanations for why businesses are so reluctant to invest their profits today. For instance, Dan Mitchell, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the pattern of low corporate investment that we’re seeing today has to do with "a climate of economic uncertainty, largely thanks to the threat of more taxes and regulations." But the explanation that seems to mesh best with our numbers has to do with economic cycles. While the ratio Reich points to is exaggerated today due to an unusually deep recession and an especially sluggish recovery, the general pattern follows that of other recent recessions, said J.D. Foster, an economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation. Typically, businesses initially lose ground during a recession, while workers suffer somewhat less, in part due to "sticky wages" -- the tendency for worker pay to increase or stagnate rather than fall, even in hard times. This pattern tends to decrease the ratio of corporate profits to wages. However, when the recovery begins, the reverse becomes true -- businesses tend to gain ground faster than workers do, since soft labor markets prevent workers from reaping the rewards of improved productivity. This pushes the ratio of profits to wages higher. Since the current recovery is particularly weak, the increase in the ratio has been even stronger than normal. The hopeful news for workers, Foster says, is that once a recovery gathers steam and new capital-labor equilibrium is reached, workers tend to accelerate their gains. "Once a strong recovery is under way and labor markets return to normal, total labor compensation tends to catch up, as employers bid for employees out of the extra profit margin they accumulated during the recovery," Foster said. "So once we start heading toward full employment, we can expect total labor compensation to rise very rapidly relative to total income." So where does this leave us? On the numbers, Reich’s claim is essentially correct. And in his analysis, Reich doesn’t over-promise on what the data indicate. Amid evidence that these numbers could turn out to be a temporary spike, he resists the temptation to label it the culmination of a long-term trend. We find Reich’s formulation both factually supportable and appropriately cautious in its interpretation. We give it a rating of True.	None	Robert Reich	None	None	None	2011-09-01T12:05:52	2011-08-29	['None']
-vogo-00512	Statement: “The San Diego Padres began the season with the 29th-highest payroll in baseball, at just under $38 million — or about two-thirds of what the Yankees spent on the left side of their infield,” The New York Times reported on its baseball blog, Bats, Oct. 3.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-the-thrifty-padres/	Analysis: The Gray Lady took a look at the Padres’ uncertain future following their disappointing season-ending loss on the final day of the 2010 season. The team that few people gave any chance of competing this year came within one game of playing for the National League’s Western Division championship and nearly made the playoffs.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: The Thrifty Padres	October 5, 2010	None	['San_Diego_Padres', 'New_York_Yankees', 'The_New_York_Times']
-tron-02027	Photo Shows What Tick Eggs Look Like	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/tick-eggs-photo/	None	insects	None	None	['facebook', 'insects', 'social media', 'ticks', 'warnings']	Photo Shows What Tick Eggs Look Like	May 3, 2018	None	['None']
-abbc-00271	A panel of experts has agreed to advise ABC Fact Check for its work on economic issues.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-18/fact-check-did-the-govt-triple-the-deficit/7407538	A panel of experts has agreed to advise ABC Fact Check for its work on economic issues.	['budget', 'federal-elections', 'alp', 'australia']	None	None	['budget', 'federal-elections', 'alp', 'australia']	Fact check: Did the Government triple the deficit and is debt $100b higher?	Wed 18 May 2016, 9:08am	None	['None']
-pomt-07665	Tampa mayoral opponent Bob Buckhorn "supported forcing police officers to keep their guns locked in the trunks of their cruisers."	false	/florida/statements/2011/mar/10/rose-ferlita/rose-ferlita-says-bob-buckhorn-wanted-police-lock/	In a new television advertisement airing March 10, 2011, Tampa mayoral candidate Rose Ferlita's campaign claims Bob Buckhorn jeopardized police officers' lives by supporting a requirement that they keep their guns locked in the trunks of their cruisers. This claim has come up in two previous political campaigns in Tampa, though this is the first time it has been attached to Buckhorn. Police and officials involved in the decision have twice said it is false. Asked for the source of the statement, Ferlita campaign consultant Anthony Pedicini e-mailed PolitiFact Florida excerpts from several St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune newspaper articles. They included a 1990 profile of Buckhorn that described his close relationship with then-Mayor Sandy Freedman, for whom he worked as a special assistant, and a 1996 article that quoted Freedman saying a political opponent’s claim about the guns-in-the-trunk issue was false. None of the news accounts mention Buckhorn in connection with the issue. The first time the guns-in-the-trunk issue came up was February 1995, when Dick Greco raised it during his successful campaign to return to the mayor's office. Greco said at the time that police didn't like having to keep their shotguns locked in their trunks, but want them within easy reach in the passenger compartment. The shotguns-in-the-trunk policy dated to the early 1990s, when Freedman was mayor. But city officials have said it was not the mayor's work. A safety committee made up of Tampa police officers and police management recommended that officers store shotguns in the trunks of their cruisers, then-city public safety administrator Bob Smith told the St. Petersburg Times in 1995. "The placement of a shotgun in a police car has never been a political issue, and I don't think it should be," Smith said in the Feb. 11, 1995 article. "The placement is based on safety and efficiency for the officer." Police cruisers had gotten smaller with each new model the city bought, and 1990s-era computers and bulky radio equipment were taking up much of the passenger area. The shotguns also couldn't obstruct either the driver- or passenger-side airbags, and officers didn't want them behind their heads, Smith said. That left little room but the trunk, Smith said. The policy concerned only shotguns. Police still carried 9mm semiautomatic handguns. In 1996, the issue came up again when Freedman and then-state Rep. Jim Davis faced off in a Democratic primary for a seat in Congress. In a campaign mailing, Davis said putting the shotguns in the trunks of cruisers had endangered the lives of officers. Freedman was not named in the mailer, but a Davis aide confirmed at the time that the flier targeted her. Then-Tampa police spokesman Steve Cole said in August 1996 that Davis incorrectly repeated a false rumor that blamed Freedman for making Tampa officers keep shotguns in their trunks. "The mayor has nothing to do with the shotguns," Cole told the Times in the Aug. 29, 1996, article. "There have always been rumors that Mayor Freedman ordered the shotguns in the trunk. . . . As far as (then) Chief (Bennie) Holder knows, that was never an order that was given. It was a rumor." Far from taking tools away from police, Cole said in 1996, it was Freedman who authorized the purchase of bulletproof vests and 9mm Glocks at the request of police officials, who said they were under-equipped with their .38-caliber revolvers. Freedman said at the time she didn't even know about the shotgun-in-the-trunk policy until Greco raised it. She said on March 10 that neither she nor Buckhorn had anything to do with it. "That’s an urban legend about the shotguns," said Freedman, who supports Buckhorn's bid for mayor. "What happened is, we went to a different kind of car and they didn’t fit." Still, Freedman did make some decisions that upset officers. In 1988, she rescinded the policy that allowed officers to drive their cruisers home to save the city on expenses such as gas and insurance. In 1996, Greco made good on a campaign promise and reinstated the take-home cars. Taking away officers' take-home cars -- like the shotguns in the trunk -- was an instance when Buckhorn took "tools away from police" while he was an aide to Freedman, Pedicini, Ferlita's campaign consultant, said on March 10. "Those were all policies that he and Sandy worked on together." Pulling the plug on the take-home car program left officers frustrated, angry and bitter. But Freedman said the city faced a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall, and discontinuing the take-home car program saved money that she put into police raises and adding officers. And she said Buckhorn had nothing to do with her decision on the take-home cars. "Was Bob the police chief and I missed it?" she said. "Bob was opposed to me taking the cars, but he wasn’t one of the principals making the decision." Ferlita’s ad says "Buckhorn supported forcing police officers to keep their guns locked in the trunks of their cruisers." Buckhorn worked for Freedman, yes, but the record shows that the shotgun-in-the-trunk policy came from police themselves, not from the mayor's office. Also, the policy in question concerned shotguns, not all guns. And officials have twice refuted this claim. As a result, we rate this statement False.	None	Rose Ferlita	None	None	None	2011-03-10T19:44:50	2011-03-10	['Bob_Buckhorn']
-pomt-08767	The United States is "50th in life expectancy" in the world.	mostly true	/florida/statements/2010/aug/25/alan-grayson/rep-alan-grayson-says-us-50th-life-expectancy/	Instead of talking about whether President Barack Obama is a Muslim, lawmakers -- especially Republicans -- should do more to address challenges like unemployment and lagging performance in United States schools, U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Orlando, told Cenk Uygur, guest host for the MSNBC's The Ed Show, on Aug. 18, 2010. "It‘s sad. Look, we really are cheating ourselves. This can be a heaven on Earth. This could be an outstanding place to live, the very top in the entire world. Instead, we‘re 50th in the world -- 50th in life expectancy, just below Albania. We are dead last in math test scores. And believe me, the math is the same in Seoul, Korea, as it is in here. It‘s the same math," Grayson said. Is the U.S. really that low on the life expectancy scale? We decided to find out. Todd Jurkowski, Grayson's press secretary, directed us to the 2009 life expectancy estimates in the CIA World Factbook. The United States is, indeed, No. 50. But the CIA has since updated those estimates. In 2010, Macau had the highest life expectancy at birth -- 84.36 years. The United States comes in at No. 49, with an average life expectancy of 78.11 years. Still, that's only slightly off from the figure that Grayson cited. But we quickly found that other sources paint a different picture. The World Health Organization maintains its own life expectancy data. In 2008, the latest year for which the numbers are available, people in the U.S. had an average life expectancy of 78 years. That put us in a tie with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Costa Rica, and Chile. The figures are all rounded to the nearest whole number, which means that numerous countries were tied. There are 30 countries that had higher life expectancy than the United States. Then there is the U.S. Census Bureau Statistical Abstract. In 2010, the United States came in at No. 50 with an average life expectancy of 78.2 years. Macau, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), came in first, with 84.4 years. The United Nations Statistical Division provides a gender breakdown of life expectancy at birth. For men, Iceland came at the top, with 81 years. The United States was No. 18 (78 years). Again, due to whole-number rounding, the U.S. tied with the Netherlands, Malta, Austria, Ireland, Cyprus, the United Kingdom, Germany, Luxembourg, Greece and Belgium. For women, Japan dominates -- the average life expectancy is 87 years. The U.S. came in 34th (82 years). Finally, 2010 data from the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit research institute in Washington D.C., put the United States at No. 41. We're tied with Reunion (an island in the Indian Ocean), French Guiana, Cuba, and Kuwait. And that brings us to an important caveat with virtually all of the rankings. While it is technically true that the United States ranked 49th in the latest CIA World Factbook, consider some of the countries that had a higher ranking. Macau, for example ranked first, but it's less than one-sixth the size of Washington, D.C. San Marino, a state nestled inside Italy, came in at No. 11, but it has a population of only slightly more than 30,000 people. You get the picture -- some of the "countries" that ranked higher than the United States are, well, countries in name only. To a get a better picture of where we stand, we wanted to see how the United States compares with its peers (that is, generally large, industrialized democracies). We consulted statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The latest year for which data are available for all 31 countries is 2007. Japan ranked first, with average life expectancy of 82.6 years. The United States came in at No. 25, with 77.9 years. So among large industrialized democracies, the U.S. is on the lower end of the spectrum. Grayson claimed that the United States ranks 50th in the world for life expectancy. We found a few sources that show that we're actually a bit higher. The Population Reference Bureau put us at No. 41, while data from the World Health Organization indicate that we may be in the low 30's. Still, we think that Grayson's underlying point that the U.S. isn't as high in life expectancy as one would think is valid, so we rate this Mostly True.	None	Alan Grayson	None	None	None	2010-08-25T14:59:08	2010-08-18	['United_States']
-vees-00443	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Then and now: How these lawmakers stand on the death penalty	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-then-and-now-how-these-lawmakers-stand	None	None	None	None	fact-check,Fact check,death penalty	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Then and now: How these lawmakers stand on the death penalty	March 27, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-01313	A New York City man made a million dollars selling altered Chuck E. Cheese tokens as "Bitcoins".	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chuck-e-cheese-bitcoin/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a Man Sell Chuck E. Cheese Tokens as ‘Bitcoins’?	21 December 2017	None	['New_York_City']
-pomt-03521	"A bag of Cheetos costs less to buy than an apple," and in some Milwaukee neighborhoods "good luck trying to find an apple or a banana or some sort of healthy option"	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2013/jun/02/mike-tate/mike-tate-says-cheetos-cost-less-apple-some-milwau/	On a recent radio talk show, Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman Mike Tate gently criticized a widely discussed Republican bill mandating that food stamp recipients buy mostly healthy foods from a state-approved list. In doing so, Tate framed the debate around a certain orange-colored, cheese-flavored snack and a fruit grown in every state in the continental U.S. Tate spoke after one-third of Democrats in the state Assembly joined Republicans in approving the bill, which aims to cut down on junk food purchases seen as contributing to poor health in low-income families participating in the state’s FoodShare program. "I’ll be honest with you, I think that having nutritional standards is an important thing," Tate told liberal radio talker John "Sly" Sylvester of Monroe’s WEKZ-FM on May 14, 2013. "I think there is a need for government to play a role in the marketplace and having healthy, nutritious food be available for people on FoodShare that can’t have access to it. " Tate defended those who voted for the bill as well-intentioned in trying to ease an obesity problem that is worse in Milwaukee and other urban areas, but said the legislation may not have been the best mechanism to do it. Tate also unpacked some specific claims about urban areas, specifically Milwaukee. "You know, I think that it’s a problem that a bag of Cheetos costs less to buy than an apple," he said. "You go around some neighborhoods in Milwaukee and, good luck trying to find an apple or a banana or some sort of healthy option." Milwaukee Common Council President Willie Hines Jr. made a similar statement in a recent opinion piece in the Journal Sentinel, saying that "it’s generally a lot easier to reach for the less expensive Cheetos, doughnuts and Suzy Q’s than the more pricey veggie chips, granola bars and almonds." Is Tate right? To check out the two parts of Tate’s claim, we reached out to local food experts, but also fueled up a car to test the food market in some of Milwaukee’s poorest north-side neighborhoods. In all we made purchases at 11 stores, ranging from full-line groceries to corner convenience stores and gas-station marts, mostly in Milwaukee but a few in neighboring suburban communities. The first thing that jumped out at us: At 2-for-$1, a single serving bag of Cheetos Crunchy (170 calories, 18 percent of recommended daily fat allowance) is hard to beat on price for a snack. In fact, many stores offer a whole range of chips at 50 cents a bag. By comparison, when we sought out single apples at the lowest per-pound or individual price available, we paid less than half a buck only once. At the top end, we paid $1.21 and $1.20 for an apple at two full-size markets and 65 cents and 99 cents at two convenience stores. Still, we were able to beat or match the Cheetos price, finding apples for 37 cents at a major Milwaukee supermarket, and for 50 cents at two city convenience stores as well as a supermarket in bordering Wauwatosa. Not every store had apples and not every store had single apples. That was just for snack-sized purchases. Bulk packaging, of course, drops the cost. We found 5-packs of gala apples (estimated 79 calories each, 0 from fat) at a small grocery in Milwaukee for the equivalent of 40 cents a piece, give or take a penny. And a chain supermarket near the edge of the city, in Shorewood, had bags of apples that averaged about 45 cents a piece. A chain store had them for 38 cents apiece in bulk. But Cheetos can drop even lower, to as little as 24 cents cents a bag, in 50-bag packs in combination with other snack chips, we found at one supermarket in Milwaukee. It was clear from our limited check that Cheetos are often cheaper than apples -- though not always. Prices, of course, can vary widely depending on quantity, timing, sales and other factors. And individual appetites can skew comparisons -- a 3.75-ounce bag of Cheetos Crunchy Flamin’ Hot is advertised as four servings but we’re guessing it doesn’t always go down that way. That bag will set you back $1.49 -- or about 37 cents a serving if you can stop after 21 pieces. Seeking fruit We sought out expert opinion on the larger issue Tate raised -- on the availability of healthy food options. Sherrie Tussler, executive director of the Hunger Task Force in Milwaukee, told us that many FoodShare recipients rely at least in part on convenience stores because they lack transportation to reach supermarkets that can offer fresher and sometimes less expensive products. Hunger Task Force, which opposes the state legislation as too expensive and complicated, closely tracks food availability in the city and plans to create a corner market emphasizing healthy foods. Residents in Milwaukee’s lowest socioeconomic-status group have more than twice the saturation of small food outlets as in higher-status neighborhoods, the Milwaukee Health Report 2012 study found. The annual report, by the Center for Urban Population Health, examines health disparities by socioeconomic status. "There is strong evidence that access to supermarkets rather than smaller grocery/convenience stores correlates with lower prevalence of overweight, obesity, and hypertension," the study said. The report said obesity rates in Milwaukee -- which easily top the Wisconsin average -- are highest in lower-economic status populations. The Health Report study found that inadequate consumption of fruits and vegetables is prevalent across all economic groups, but somewhat better at higher levels. "A lot of it is because you can afford it and you can find it," said Geoffrey Swain, medical director for the Milwaukee Health Department and a co-author of the Health Report study. A close observer of convenience stores in town commented recently that corner convenience stores are the main food source for Milwaukee’s poor. "Some stores do have fruits and vegetables, but are likely to be more expensive and of poorer quality, mainly because our nation’s produce distribution system is not geared to service the small mom-and-pop corner stores," Young Kim, executive director of the organization behind the north-side’s Fondy Farmers Market, wrote in May 14 column for Urban Milwaukee. Tate points to Kim’s piece as part of his argument on the difficulty in getting access to fresh fruit. Kim told us that fruit "just isn’t nearly as readily available" as some of the snack foods. "Cheetos and a lot of those snack foods get delivered" to small stores, in contrast to fruit, which small-store owners have to buy from larger stores and then mark up, he noted. Kim opposes the state legislation for singling out low-income people. In our spot check at five small stores, we, too, found that you can get some limited amounts of fruit at some corner stores -- as well as, of course, a full selection at the few larger food markets on Milwaukee’s north side. And we found that fruit quality was very mixed at the small stores, ranging from excellent to very poor. We learned that programs run by the Fondy Food Center and the Walnut Way Conservation Corp., among others, are working to try to put more fresh goods into local stores and educate people on healthy choices. The city of Milwaukee Health Department, through grant funding from the Healthier Wisconsin Partnership Program of the Medical College of Wisconsin, has provided funds for produce coolers in several convenience stores in the Lindsay Heights neighborhood on Milwaukee’s north side. At one store, Eagle Foods at N. 14th and W. Centers streets, we found fruit in a large and prominent display near a cooler stocked with take-out servings of cut fruit and vegetables, as well as mangoes and tomatoes. At the Families First store, 1845 N. 12th St., candy bars are behind a caged cashier, and a small stock of large Golden Delicious apples are front and center. There were a few tomatoes in the cooler, but overall the produce stock was very limited. Nobody’s suggesting that better access is a panacea for changing people’s dietary decisions. Consumer education is another key, Hines and other say. But experts told us that providing more choices is a necessary first step toward improvement. But there’s a steep hill to climb in terms of making good quality produce widely available. A 2008 study by the Neighborhood Health Alliance in Lindsay Heights, for example, found that more than 65% of the neighborhood retail food outlets offered no fresh produce. "Residents indicated that key concerns were: poor food quality, poor access to quality fresh produce and healthy food options, and a lack of transportation," the study found. "I don’t want to call it a ‘food desert,’" Eric Gass, the Health Department’s public health research and policy director, said of Lindsay Heights. "Food is available. It’s just not good food. There’s a term I’ve heard for that: a ‘food swamp.’" Residents in the Amani neighborhood, near Lindsay Heights, who lack vehicles or can’t get a ride have to figure out how to cover a mile and a half or more to find a full-service store on the city’s north side, Tussler said. Buses are an option. "Think bus fare," Tussler said in an email to us. "Then how much can you carry? Then think once a month you pay for a taxi. You buy case goods because they don't spoil. You freeze meat and buy Wonder Bread because it doesn't mold. Then you get milk at the corner store." While access to good quality, healthier foods has improved only marginally on the north side in recent years, Tussler said, "the south side has been a big winner." She noted the expansion by local El Rey markets and the addition of large stores such as the Pick ‘N Save at S. 19th St. and W. National Ave. Overall, on this part of Tate’s claim, we heard -- and saw for ourselves -- that fruit is for sale on the north side, but not necessarily in the kind of quantities that make it as affordable or as fresh as in some other neighborhoods. And getting to the store that has what a family needs can be a challenge for some. The legislation, meanwhile, was pending in the state Senate as of late May 2013. The city of Milwaukee took no position on the bill. Our rating Tate, the Democratic Party official, decried the lack of healthy and affordable food options in some Milwaukee neighborhoods. "A bag of Cheetos costs less to buy than an apple," Tate said, and "good luck trying to find an apple or a banana or some sort of healthy option" at stores there. He’s mostly right on the price comparison, and is partially accurate in suggesting it’s very difficult to locate fresh fruit. While fresh fruit can be found at big and some small stores, it’s more available in some low-income areas more than others, and getting there, finding it worth eating and paying for it are a challenge for some, according to experts and residents. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Mike Tate	None	None	None	2013-06-02T20:36:55	2013-05-14	['Milwaukee']
-pomt-14799	"Twenty-five percent of our kids in foster care are there because their parents are involved in drugs."	true	/missouri/statements/2015/nov/30/vicky-hartzler/hartzler-was-modest-connection-between-drugs-and-f/	U.S. Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler, R-Missouri , visited ABC 17’s "This Week" on Oct. 9, and was asked about "Take Back The District," an anti-drug initiative she was launching. Hartzler said drugs posed a significant problem in her district. Employers, she said, tell her they cannot find an employee to fill a position because applicants can’t pass a drug test, while military recruiters say they have to turn away otherwise exceptional recruits because of drug use. Hartzler talked about her years teaching at-risk teenagers and cited a widespread drug problem in the United States and one of its most sobering effects: the displacement of children into foster care. "Twenty-five percent of our kids in foster care are there because their parents are involved in drugs," Hartzler said. Certainly drug use by parents can lead to state intervention, but is the number of reported cases really this high? Foster care According to the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, there are 397,122 children living in the foster system without permanent families. Hartzler has long been an advocate for the advancement of foster care, even co-publishing an article on its problems. Kyle Buckles, Hartzler’s communications director, pointed us toward the Green Book. Each year, statistics are compiled into the House of Representative’s Green Book, which is used to provide background material and data on the programs run by the Ways and Means Committee, including foster care. Foster care statistics Circumstance of Removal FY2010 FY2011 FY2012 FY2013 Drug abuse (parent) 26.1 26.2 28.5 28.1 Alcohol abuse (parent) 7.6 6.3 6.3 5.6 Without considering alcohol, drug use by the parent was above 25 percent from 2010 through 2013, for which data is available. When alcohol is factored in, this number is more than 30 percent. Drug use is the second largest cause of the removal of children from their parent’s custody. The most prevalent circumstance for removal is neglect, which is present in over half of the cases in the United States — but it is important to remember that more than one factor may be cited in a particular case. For example, a child may be removed from his parents’ custody for neglect, parental drug abuse and child drug abuse. The problem appears to be getting worse. A 2009 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that between the years 2002 and 2007, 12 percent of children between the ages of six to 11 were living with a parent who abused drugs or alcohol. Take Back the District Hartzler’s initiative has since met once to discuss the district’s drug issues. Her goal was to bring together law enforcement, parents, school officials, community leaders and citizens. The program met early on Oct. 19, where Hartzler, speakers and guests discussed the issuesand possible solutions to the problem and then diverted to a "Faith-Based Rehabilitation and Ministry" panel discussion. Our ruling Hartzler claimed that a quarter of children in foster care were there because of their parent’s drug abuse. Her claim is a modest estimation of the issue, according to reliable data kept by Congress. Drug abuse by parents is the second most prevalent reason for a parent losing custody of a child to foster care services. We rate this claim to be True.	None	Vicky Hartzler	None	None	None	2015-11-30T10:09:27	2015-10-09	['None']
-pomt-14726	Says the Obama administration invited "Russia into Syria."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/21/chris-christie/chris-christie-mostly-wrong-barack-obama-invited-r/	The multi-sided conflict in Syria had already been bedeviling policymakers and diplomats for years by the time Russia began launching airstrikes there on Sept. 30, 2015. But did the United States "invite" Russia to pursue this sudden escalation? That’s what New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said during the Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas. "I'll tell you what reckless is," Christie said during the debate on Dec. 15, 2015. "What’s reckless is is calling Assad a reformer. What reckless is allowing Russia to come into Crimea and Ukraine. What reckless is is inviting Russia into Syria to team with Iran. That is reckless. And the reckless people are the folks in the White House right now. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the reckless people." This statement includes a lot of charges by Christie. But for this fact-check, we’ll zero in on Christie’s claim that the Obama administration invited Russia into Syria. Russia’s airstrikes The situation in Syria is complex, but we’ll start by trying to offer a concise summary. Syrian rebels -- some considered moderates, some considered extremists -- have been trying for several years to topple Bashar Assad whose family has run the country in authoritarian fashion for decades. The chaos has contributed to the rise of ISIS, which has effectively seized control of portions of Syria, including Raqqa, the city ISIS is using as its "capital." Most of the world has no love for the Assad government, but Syria has long relied on two countries for support -- Iran and Russia. Russia’s ties to Syria include a leased naval base, which is Russia’s only Mediterranean port and thus a crucial geopolitical asset. Russia has generally supported Assad, but until recently, Russia’s military role in Syria had been fairly low-profile. By contrast, since the ISIS threat became clear, the United States -- along with a coalition of more than 60 countries -- has been taking an active military role in Syria. For the United States and a few other allies, that has meant launching airstrikes against ISIS targets. The longstanding U.S. position regarding Russia and Syria has been to convince Russia to forgo its support for Assad. For instance, in a Sept. 11, 2015, town hall at Ft. Meade in Maryland -- about two and a half weeks before Russian airstrikes began -- Obama took note of Russia’s efforts to send military advisers and equipment to Syria. "That won't change our core strategy, which is to continue to put pressure on ISIL in Iraq and Syria, but we are going to be engaging Russia to let them know that you can't continue to double-down on a strategy that’s doomed to failure," Obama said. "And if they are willing to work with us and the 60-nation coalition that we've put together, then there’s the possibility of a political settlement in which Assad would be transitioned out and a new coalition of moderate, secular and inclusive forces could come together and restore order in the country." White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest echoed that in a press briefing on Sept. 24, less than a week before Russia began its airstrikes. Earnest was asked by a reporter, "Where do we stand in terms of possible U.S.-Russian military cooperation on Syria?" Earnest responded, "President Obama will make clear once again that Russia doubling down on their support for the Assad regime is a losing bet. The likely consequence of them doing so is only to deepen and expand the ongoing crisis in that country that doesn’t serve the interests of either the Russian people or the American people. President Obama will encourage President Putin to consider constructive contributions to the ongoing counter-(ISIS) effort. There are more than 60 nations that are involved in implementing a strategy to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL, and we’d like to see the Russians make a constructive contribution to that ongoing effort." If you squint, it’s possible to see an "invitation" for Russian military intervention in Earnest’s comment. However, the administration has couched this "invitation" in diplomatic terms, focusing on a broad effort to promote a peaceful end to the crisis rather than a desire for Russia to start bombing away. Moreover, the immediate aftermath of the first airstrikes suggests that the administration was not happy -- at all -- to learn about the escalation to airstrikes ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Shortly after the airstrikes became public, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter called Russia’s move tantamount "to pouring gasoline on the fire." The same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work told members of the House Armed Services Committee that the United States was "alarmed" by the beginning of Russian airstrikes. He called it "an aggressive action by Russia." Immediately after the Russian airstrikes began, Earnest said the United States was continuing to encourage "constructive" moves by Russia but expressed skepticism about its recent military actions. "If Russia is willing, we would welcome their constructive contribution to this effort," Earnest said in his Sept. 30 briefing. "The fact that they have not decided to make a constructive contribution to our counter-(ISIS) effort means that Russia is not doing exactly what we would like them to do in Syria, and that’s not unusual in the relationship between our two countries. … Obviously, we would like to see Russia do something different. I’m not trying to suggest to you that this is what we would like to see Russia do." What the experts say When we checked with diplomatic and regional experts, they generally agreed with the White House that Christie’s words -- if taken literally -- were inaccurate. "Russia decided to intervene in Syria on its own. There was no U.S. invitation," said Barnett R. Rubin, director and senior fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. "No, Obama did not invite Russia into Syria. Just wrong," said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, agreed. "It isn't true," Landis said. "The United states tried to oppose Russia moving aircraft and weaponry into Syria. The U.S. government convinced Greece and other countries to close its airspace to Russian planes. Russia flew over Iran and Iraq, which allowed the Russian resupply planes to overfly them. The U.S. could have attacked the Russian planes and ships and did not. I presume Chris Christie is confusing that with an invitation." The Christie campaign doesn’t contest the idea that Christie’s claim isn’t literally true. Instead, the campaign argues that the administration’s fault was one of omission rather than commission. "The governor was suggesting that the president's actions or lack thereof invited Putin to fill the vacuum left by a lack of leadership, not that he sent a written invitation," said Mike DuHaime, a senior strategist with the Christie campaign. At least one expert said DuHaime’s argument has some validity. "I don’t think Christie meant it to be taken literally," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "Obviously we did not invite Russia in. But what I think he’s very clearly referring to is a weakness that led to Russia coming in. The fact that the administration has had an awful Syria policy has moved beyond a matter of opinion." The Christie campaign also pointed us to a comment Christie made to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Oct. 8 in which he explains that by the "invitation" he means the cooperation between the United States and Russia on removing chemical weapons from Syria in 2013. Obama "invited Putin in to broker an agreement with Assad to give up his chemical weapons, which Assad has not done," Christie told Tapper. "Once you invite Putin in for that part of it, you can't then pick and choose given the Obama approach what you do. So he did invite him in, Jake. And it was wrong." Our ruling Christie said the Obama administration "invit(ed) Russia into Syria." We found wide agreement that the statement, if taken literally, is inaccurate. However, another interpretation -- that the Obama administration’s policy failures created a vacuum that Putin filled militarily -- has some validity, experts say. We rate the statement Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/57ffb42c-34aa-4359-b2ca-90dd626043f3	None	Chris Christie	None	None	None	2015-12-21T15:23:57	2015-12-15	['Russia', 'Syria', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-14368	The Trump Winery near Charlottesville, Va. is the "largest winery on the East Coast."	false	/virginia/statements/2016/mar/21/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-virginia-winery-largest-east-coa/	Donald Trump is no stranger to superlatives. During a news conference after his victories in the Michigan and Mississippi primaries in early March, the billionaire presidential candidate burnished his business credentials by pointing to an array of products that bear his name, including bottles of Virginia-made wine from Trump Winery, just south of Charlottesville. "It’s the largest winery on the East Coast," Trump said. The Republican frontrunner added that he owns the winery "100 percent." Trump did purchase the 1,300-acre vineyard in 2011 where the winery is based and turned over the management to his son, Eric. A legal disclaimer on the winery website says the GOP presidential candidate doesn’t own the winery. The venture is a limited liability corporation, and its owners are not a matter of public record. That point aside, let’s move to the focus of this Truth-O-Meter: Is the winery really the largest on the East Coast, as Trump claimed? We emailed his campaign three times seeking backup for the statement but didn’t hear back. So we began our own investigation. First, we contacted the Virginia Wine Board, a panel created by the Virginia General Assembly to promote state wineries and vineyards. Annette Boyd, the board’s director, said Trump Winery has planted 200 acres of vines. By that measure, called "acres under vine," Boyd said Trump Winery has the largest vineyard in Virginia. The Trump Winery website, citing the same 200-acre figure, also says it’s the largest vineyard in the state. It additionally claims that it’s the largest "vinifera vineyard" on the East Coast, referring to a species of grape. But the website never goes as far as Donald Trump did in making an unconditional claim that the winery is the largest on the East Coast. He’s made that statement a number of times. Several wine industry analysts told us that when calculating a winery’s size, the best measure is not the acreage of vines that have been planted - it’s the volume of wine produced. By that standard, wine experts told us there’s no way Trump Winery is the biggest on the East Coast. "That’s not correct," Michael Kaiser, spokesman for the National Association of American Wineries, told us about Trump’s claim. In fact, by that measure Trump Winery is not even the largest in Virginia. The Trump Winery produces about 36,000 cases of wine each year, according to Boyd. The top producers in the state are the Williamsburg Winery and Chateau Morrisette in Floyd County -- each making about 60,000 cases a year, Boyd said. Barboursville Winery in Orange County, meanwhile, makes about 37,000 cases a year, Boyd said. It’s not hard to find wineries along the East Coast that make even more. Duplin Winery in Rose Hill, N.C., produces about 390,000 cases of sweet wine a year, Dave Fussell Jr., Duplin’s president, told us in an email. Duplin, on its website, claims to be the "largest winery in the South." Its grapes come from more than 1,000 acres, the vast majority from farmers who grow them off-site. The Biltmore Winery in Asheville, N.C., says on its website that it produces about 150,000 cases of wine a year. Lastly, we wondered whether there are wineries on the East Coast that have more grapes than Trump Winery’s 200 acres of vines. The answer is yes. The Wagner Vineyards Estate Winery in the Finger Lakes region of New York says it cultivates 250 acres of grapes (and makes 50,000 cases of wine a year). The vineyard manager at Pindar Vineyards on New York’s Long Island said in a November 2015 interview that its vineyard has more than 300 acres of grapes. Pindar says it makes 70,000 cases of wine a year. Our ruling Trump said that Trump Winery is the "largest winery on the East Coast." It’s not, regardless of whether you measure it by acreage of vines or the production of wine. We rate Trump’s statement False. Share The Facts Donald Trump Presidential candidate The Trump Winery near Charlottesville, Va. is the "largest winery on the East Coast." At a news conference – Tuesday, March 8, 2016 Share Read more Embed	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-03-21T06:00:00	2016-03-08	['Virginia', 'East_Coast_of_the_United_States']
-pomt-11207	Says Dean Heller "has voted for a GOP bill that funded efforts to revive Yucca Mountain."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/may/14/jacky-rosen/rosen-misleads-heller-yucca-mountain-vote/	Yucca Mountain is a hot-button issue in Nevada. The idea of storing up to 110,000 metric tons of highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power plants has few fans inside the state. President Donald Trump supports the plan and put $110 million into his proposed budget to move it forward. With broad bipartisan support, the House voted overwhelmingly May 10 to have the Energy Department plan and build out the storage site. Democrat Jacky Rosen’s Senate campaign fired off a press release tying incumbent Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., to the House vote. "Heller couldn’t even stop his close friend of more than a decade, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, from bringing the Yucca Mountain bill to the floor for today’s vote," the press release said. "Heller has voted for a GOP budget that funded efforts to revive Yucca Mountain, and he voted to confirm President Trump’s pro-Yucca budget director last year." We decided to look at the statement that Heller voted for a Republican budget that advanced the Yucca Mountain waste repository. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com The 2011 vote The Rosen campaign’s press release linked to an April 12, 2011, article in the Las Vegas Sun. The story said a House budget provision that would have revived the Yucca Mountain proposal had died in the Senate. There’s a lot of history here. With the prospect of waste building up at nuclear power plants across the country, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. In 1987, it amended the act to make Yucca Mountain the only option for Energy Department planning. Jump forward to 2009. The site had met the safety requirements of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but the Obama administration, citing broad opposition in Nevada, put things on hold. In 2011, House Republicans added a rider to their budget that barred the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from doing anything to close the Yucca Mountain site. The formal text was: "No funds ... may be used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to conduct closure of adjudicatory functions, technical review, or support activities associated with the Yucca Mountain geologic repository license application." So, while the bill didn’t specify any particular sum to open the site, this rider denied money to roll back the planning process. A big budget bill The rider was part of an appropriations package that reached virtually every government agency. The bill funded defense, health and human services, agriculture, and more. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the total price tag was $1.3 trillion. Heller, then a House representative, voted for the bill, which passed pretty much down straight party lines. Every Democrat and only three Republicans voted against it. The Rosen press release singles out the element related to Yucca Mountain, but as is always the case with budget bills, they are about much more than just one issue. It’s also true that Heller tried to remove the Yucca Mountain rider. He offered an amendment that would have prevented any money going toward the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. That amendment failed on a voice vote. Stewart Boss with the Rosen campaign said they stand by their press release. "When a partisan budget bill with a controversial Yucca Mountain funding provision came to a vote in 2011, Senator Heller weakly tried and failed to remove the funding," Boss said. Heller is on the record as opposing the facility. In 2017, he testified before a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee, saying "This ill-conceived project would not only cause significant harm to the well-being of my home state and all Nevadans, but also poses a national security risk that is too great to ignore." Heller has continued to argue against Yucca Mountain funding in letters to appropriators, including this one in April. Our ruling The Rosen campaign said that Heller "has voted for a GOP bill that funded efforts to revive Yucca Mountain." The GOP bill that got Heller's vote didn’t provide money so much as it barred the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from spending money to roll back the licensing process for the waste repository site. Heller floated an amendment that would have barred spending any money on the site at all. Offering an amendment is not the same as waging a knock-down, drag-out fight, but Heller’s amendment would have stymied the intent of the Republican language. Back then and today, Heller’s official policy is to oppose the Yucca Mountain plan. All of this took place in the context of a massive spending measure. To focus on a single element in a $1.3 trillion bill amounts to legislative cherry-picking. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Jacky Rosen	None	None	None	2018-05-14T09:00:00	2018-05-10	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository']
-pomt-08977	As a Congressman, J.D. Hayworth was an avid earmarker who supported such pork as "$220,000 to renovate a Maine Blueberry farm" and "$5.8 million for a Vermont snowmobile trail."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/16/john-mccain/john-mccain-labels-jd-hayworth-avid-earmarker/	Sen. John McCain has long been known as a flag-carrier for earmark reform. And his hard line against pork projects has often put him at odds with fellow Arizona lawmakers trying to make sure that Arizona got its fair share. But McCain's principled stance also makes for rich campaign ad material. In a McCain attack ad on J.D. Hayworth, his Republican opponent in the Arizona primary, an announcer says that while McCain "wages a determined battle against pork barrel spending," J.D. Hayworth as a U.S. Congressman from Arizona from 1995 to 2007 was "described as an 'avid earmarker,' and supported thousands of earmarks worth billions of dollars before we voted him out of office." The ad then runs a list of earmarks contained in bills that Hayworth voted for, and that McCain voted against. We picked two of them to put this issue into some context: * $220,000 to renovate Maine blueberry farm * $5.8 million for Vermont snowmobile trail The first earmark was part of a $375 billion Omnibus appropriations bill passed by Congress in 2004. According to a conference report attached to the bill, it did indeed include, "$220,000 for the University of Maine (Jonesboro and Orono), Blueberry Hill Farm to renovate the blueberry research facility." The shorthand in the McCain ad is perhaps one part hyperbole -- calling it money for a blueberry farm rather than money for a university-run blueberry research facility. But it's close enough. The bill passed the House 242-176; and Hayworth voted for it. The bill passed the Senate comfortably as well, 65-28. McCain voted against it and was very clear that it was because of the hundreds of earmarks it contained. "It appears that the big spenders in this body have all but stolen the credit card numbers of every hard-working taxpayer in America and have gone on a limitless spending spree for parochial pork-barrel projects, leaving Americans to pay and pay," McCain said from the floor of the Senate at the time. The second project, for the snowmobile trail, was tucked into a $286 billion highway and mass transit bill that passed in 2006. In addition to paying for the interstate highway system and other federal highway programs, the bill included more than 6,000 earmarks (including the now infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska) worth a total of about $24 billion. According to a committee report attached to the bill, it included $5.8 million for "construction of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail for the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers." The bill passed overwhelmingly: 412 to 8 in the House (Hayworth voted for it); and 91 to 4 in the Senate. McCain, who voted against it, called the bill a "monstrosity" and added, "It would seem that this Congress can weather any storm thrown at it, as long as we have our pork lifesaver to cling to." So there's no question Hayworth voted for bills that included the two earmarks from McCain's campaign ad. But is it fair to call Hayworth an "avid earmarker" (a moniker given to Hayworth in a Feb. 21, 2010, opinion piece from the Arizona Republic's Robert Robb) and to say that he supported those particular projects? Hayworth addressed the ad's claims via a video response on his campaign website. Hayworth said the McCain campaign is "playing a cynical Washington game." "They took an appropriations bill in a huge area, let's say for example in an area like transportation, and they highlighted controversial provisions in that appropriations bill," Hayworth said. "Now understand, when you serve in the U.S. Congress or the Senate, you don't have the luxury of saying, 'Well, I like this particular provision but not the other one.' In other words, you vote for that transportation bill either up or down." Hayworth is right that those particular earmarks -- for the blueberry farm and snowmobile trail -- never came up for an up or down vote on their own merits. They were included in massive appropriations bills and represented a minuscule fraction of the overall bills. While it's impossible to say whether Hayworth supported the particular earmarks cited in the McCain ad, it is fair to say he was okay with the process. A July 29, 2005, press release issued by his congressional office boasts that "Rep. Hayworth was able to earmark millions of dollars in the (transportation) bill for specific projects in his district, as requested by local elected officials and state transportation officials." A March 31, 2004, story in the Arizona Republic detailed $52.5 million worth of earmarks for Arizona folded into a $275 billion transportation bill. And Hayworth defended them. "Call it earmarks, call it authorized projects, call it pork or whatever," Hayworth told the Arizona Republic. "The fact is, these projects reflect the priorities of local and state officials to help our transportation infrastructure keep pace with the extraordinary growth we are experiencing in the East Valley." Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan Washington advocacy group that tracks earmarks, said voting for the appropriations bills was an endorsement of the process, and therefore all the earmarks in them. "At the end of the day, if you have to hold your nose and vote for a bill, then you have to deal with the fallout," Ellis said. "If everybody just goes along to get along, the status quo remains," Ellis said. "If enough people stand up and fight, that's how you effect change." We think it is misleading to suggest that Hayworth specifically supported the blueberry farm and snowmobile trail projects in those massive appropriations bills. In fact, we doubt he even knew those particular projects were even in the bill. But Hayworth knew the bills contained billions in earmarks, and he even boasted in a press release about some of the earmarks he included for Arizona. From where we sit, if you boast to constituents about the earmarks you brought to your home state, then you've got to live with the earmarks other legislators brought to theirs. And those projects listed in the McCain ad were among them. We rate the ad's claims Mostly True.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2010-07-16T16:44:57	2010-05-26	['None']
-hoer-01282	Tall Tale Bad Little Boys Threatening Letter to Santa	fake news	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/tall-tale-bad-little-boys-threatening-letter-to-santa/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Tall Tale Bad Little Boys Threatening Letter to Santa	December 10, 2013	None	['None']
-tron-02571	Single Volcano Erased Years of Carbon Dioxide Reduction Efforts	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/plimer-volcano/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Single Volcano Erased Years of Carbon Dioxide Reduction Efforts	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-00727	Did Attorney Michael Cohen Advertise His Services as ‘The Fixer?’	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/michael-cohen-the-fixer-ads/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Attorney Michael Cohen Advertise His Services as ‘The Fixer?’	23 April 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08919	"For every dollar we put in unemployment, it pays back about $1.60."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/27/jeanne-shaheen/lawmaker-claims-unemployment-benefits-boost-econom/	Extending aid to the unemployed is not only the "right" thing to do, it is also one of the best ways to stimulate economic growth. That, at least, is what has become a frequent talking point, especially among Democratic lawmakers. New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen reiterated the argument during a recent MSNBC interview. "This is one of the best things we can do to help stimulate the economy, because for every dollar we put in unemployment, it pays back about $1.60. And we know that people who are on unemployment are going to go out, and they're going to spend that money, they're going to pay for groceries at their local grocery store, they're going to buy gas in their car." Using a dollar to make $1.60 sounds like a dream come true, so we decided to look into it. Shaheen's office told us that the number comes from Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody's Economy.com and a former adviser to John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign. During testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on April 14, 2010, Zandi called on lawmakers to provide emergency benefits to individuals who have lost their jobs. "No form of the fiscal stimulus has proved more effective during the past two years than emergency UI benefits," Zandi said, using the abbreviation for unemployment insurance. Specifically, he calculated that for every dollar spent in benefits, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grows by $1.61 one year later. Next, we looked at a report issued in January 2010 by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the official nonpartisan number-cruncher for Congress. In its discussion of increasing unemployment aid, the report noted that the proposal is "both timely and cost-effective in spurring economic activity and employment." For every dollar spent, the CBO wrote, the GDP would increase by anywhere from $0.70 to $1.90 per year from 2010 to 2015. What accounts for such a large variation? Till von Wachter, an associate professof of economics at Columbia University, told us that this sort of a range "is typical in this kind of empirical analysis." He said that one possible reason is "because different estimation methods or specifications give slightly different results." David Card from the University of California-Berkeley added that the uncertainty "presumably illustrates the sad state of knowledge in the field." So, Shaheen is right on target if we go by Zandi's numbers, but she picked a number that's in the upper range of CBO's estimated range. Still, there is more to the story. For one, there is considerable question among academics about the accuracy of the unemployment benefits' "multiplier effects." Robert Barro, a Harvard economist, pointed out that before spending on unemployment benefits goes up, the GDP goes down, which makes it difficult to come up with a "serious estimate" of the impact of unemployment benefits. Lawrence Katz, also from Harvard, said that he has "many qualms with these standard macro forecasting models." Still, Katz also pointed out that the current models are "the best we have right now to make such forecasts." Alan Reynolds, an economist from the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute, wrote in a January 29, 2010 blog post that Zandi's econometric model relies on assumptions that are contradicted by contemporary academic research. There are also some researchers who maintain that not only does increased spending on unemployment provides minimal economic boost, but also that it may decrease output in the long run, in part because the government will have to recoup money paid out in benefits through increased taxes. In a November 2008 report, scholars Karen Campbell and James Sherk from the conservative Heritage Foundation argue that existing studies on the subject are flawed, because they do not take into account that unemployment insurance reduces workers' incentives to work. The pro-benefits studies also assume that every dollar of spending funds new consumption, they said. Many studies since the 1970s "have concluded that unemployment insurance plays at best a small role in stabilizing the economy," the report argued. Campbell added, however, that though she does not believe that economic stimulus is a good argument for extending benefits, welfare arguments could be made for doing so. To recap: Sen. Shaheen said that "for every dollar we put in unemployment it, pays back about $1.60." The CBO said that the increase is actually anywhere from $.70 to $1.90, so she picked a number that's on the high end of that estimate. She's right on target if we go by Mark Zandi's economic study, but many of the scholars we spoke with are critical of attempts to accurately estimate the effect that spending on unemployment insurance has on the GDP. We rate this Half True.	None	Jeanne Shaheen	None	None	None	2010-07-27T13:18:05	2010-07-20	['None']
-pomt-08970	Russ Feingold "voted against the law that protected our lakes" and "was the only Great Lakes senator to vote no."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/19/ron-johnson/ron-johnson-campaign-ad-blasts-russ-feingold-recor/	The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is at the top of the news, but the political ripples are being felt far and wide. In Wisconsin, Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold and Republican challenger Ron Johnson have gotten into a bit of mudslinging over who would be better at protecting the Great Lakes from drilling. Feingold started the war of words by charging in a 30-second ad that Johnson "is willing to hand over the Great Lakes to the oil companies, threatening Wisconsin’s economy, and a way of life for generations of Wisconsin families." Johnson quickly shot back with a statement saying in part, "I would not support any efforts to overturn the provision which outlaws drilling in the Great Lakes as Wisconsin’s next U.S. Senator. Let me repeat: I would reject any and all efforts to drill in the Great Lakes." Johnson drove home that theme in a 30-second television ad. In the ad, viewers see a car spinning its wheels in the mud. "Twenty-eight years in politics and Russ Feingold’s stuck in the mud," the narrator says. "Feingold started his campaign slinging mud at Ron Johnson. Ron Johnson opposes drilling in the Great Lakes, and Russ Feingold knows it. Drilling is already illegal in the Great Lakes, and Feingold knows that too. Because he voted against the law that protected our lakes. That’s right. Feingold was the only Great Lakes senator to vote no. Feingold played politics. Partisan politician Russ Feingold. Stuck in the mud." In this item, we won't get into the question of whether Johnson opposes drilling in the Great Lakes. But we thought we'd sort out whether Feingold had indeed voted against a bill to ban Great Lakes drilling. The bill that Johnson's ad refers to is the Energy Policy Act of 2005. A provision of that law -- Section 386 -- reads, "No Federal or State permit or lease shall be issued for new oil and gas slant, directional, or offshore drilling in or under one or more of the Great Lakes." A check of the Senate roll call vote on the final version of that bill confirms that Feingold voted "nay." Case closed? Not quite. The claim requires several caveats. • Feingold wasn't voting against the bill because of the drilling ban. The bill in question was championed by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, most congressional Republicans and some Democrats. Nineteen Democrats, six Republicans and one independent voted against the bill, which passed, 74-26. At the time, Feingold cited several reasons for voting against the bill. "This bill digs us deeper into a budget black hole," Feingold said, according to his home state newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "It fails to decrease our dependence on foreign oil. It rolls back important consumer protections. And finally, it undermines some of the fundamental environmental laws that our citizens rely upon." He also cited the bill's repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act, its changes to the Clean Water Act and its exemption of hydraulic fracking -- a controversial technique for retrieving underground natural gas -- from the Safe Drinking Water Act. He most certainly didn't vote against it because it included a Great Lakes drilling ban. Quite the contrary: Feingold's camp points out that in 2001, the senator was an original co-sponsor of the Great Lakes Water Protection Act, which directed the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator to conduct a study on known and potential environmental effects of oil and gas drilling on land beneath the water in the Great Lakes. (The bill did not advance.) Feingold also sponsored or supported numerous other bills to protect the Great Lakes specifically and clean water generally. The Johnson camp told PolitiFact that "our ad never insinuates Sen. Feingold did not support a 2001 bill regarding Great Lakes or make any other statement about whether or not he supports drilling in the Great Lakes." But we think a reasonable person could come away with the ad wondering whether Feingold is somehow opposed to a ban on Great Lakes drilling. And that would be incorrect. That said, congressional bills often have hundreds or thousands of provisions. Most of the time, lawmakers who vote yes on a bill don't agree with everything in it, and when they vote for it because of the many things they do agree with, they must be prepared for critics to point out the discrepancies. So we think Johnson deserves some leeway for legitimately catching Feingold voting against something he says he supports. • There wasn't just one law that curbed drilling in the Great Lakes. The ad says that Russ Feingold "voted against the law that protected our lakes." That makes it sound like there was one law that accomplished that purpose, and that Feingold missed his chance to support it. That's incorrect. There were actually four, one of which was permanent -- the one cited in the ad -- and three of which were temporary. All did essentially the same thing. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, "Congress had enacted a temporary ban on any new federal and state permits for drilling under the Great Lakes in 2001 (P.L. 107-66; Title V, §503) and extended it to 2007. This temporary ban was in addition to several state bans on drilling in or under the Great Lakes." So we looked up the 2001 law to see whether Feingold voted for it. He did. (The bill passed overwhelmingly, 96-2.) Specifically, it was the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act of 2002, which included a provision that said that "during the fiscal years 2002 and 2003, no federal or state permit or lease shall be issued for new oil and gas slant, directional, or offshore drilling in or under one or more of the Great Lakes." We also looked up the extension for 2004 and 2005, which passed as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Resolution of 2003 -- a massive federal spending bill. In this case, Feingold voted no. Finally, we looked up the law that extended the ban through 2006 and 2007. It was the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2005. Feingold voted no on that one too. So Feingold actually voted for one temporary ban and voted against three (two of them temporary, one permanent). All were buried in much broader bills, and his camp says he opposed those bills despite the drilling ban provision, not because of it. At the same time, even though he only batted one for four, Feingold has a right to say that in one case, he voted for a "law that protected our lakes." • Feingold was not the only Great Lakes senator to vote no on the 2005 bill. Johnson cited yes votes by senators from Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But he excluded New York state, which borders Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Both New York senators at the time -- Democrats Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer -- joined Feingold in voting no. The Johnson campaign told PolitiFact that "including or excluding two New York City senators as Great Lakes senators is subjective, and many government and academic sources do not group New York in the Great Lakes region." They cited the Great Lakes Regional Water Program University of Wisconsin Extension (which defines the Great Lakes Region as "Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin"), the Bureau of Economic Analysis (which defines the Great Lakes Region as "Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin"), and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (which defines the Great Lakes Region as "Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin"). But we think the implication that Clinton and Schumer somehow forfeit their right to represent residents on Lake Ontario and Lake Erie is ridiculous. In addition, if the campaign was going to use these three alternate groupings as gospel, they should have also eliminated Pennsylvania, which does not appear in any of the three they cite. But they didn't: The Johnson campaign's backup sheet for the ad cites Pennsylvania, but not New York. This strikes us as cherry picking. We find no good rationale for excluding New York, so on this count, we find Johnson's ad clearly inaccurate. So let's sum up. Feingold did vote against a bill that included the permanent ban on Great Lakes drilling, and also voted against two of the bills with temporary bans, though for reasons unrelated to the drilling ban provision. As a result, Johnson has some justification for saying that Feingold "voted against the law that protected our lakes." But the ad ignores that Feingold supported one of the temporary bans, and that he has a long record of protecting the environmental quality of the Great Lakes, including championing at least one bill that dealt directly with drilling. Meanwhile, we don't buy the campaign's rationale for excluding New York from the list of Great Lakes states. That fundamentally undercuts the ad's claim that Feingold was the only Great Lakes senator to vote against the 2005 bill. On balance, we rate the ad Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Ron Johnson	None	None	None	2010-07-19T11:48:42	2010-07-14	['Russ_Feingold']
-pomt-05640	President Barack Obama is "ending Medicare as we know it."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/22/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-barack-obama-ending-medicare-we-k/	Mitt Romney is trying to turn the tables on President Barack Obama by using a favorite Democratic line against him, accusing Obama of "ending Medicare as we know it." That's been a trusty line for the Democrats, with variations used in campaign commercials and press releases over the past couple of years. It was used to criticize Republicans who supported Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to dramatically change Medicare and was uttered so often that we chose it as 2011 Lie of the Year. But this time, it's coming from a Republican against the Democratic president. The Romney campaign used it in a news release that listed five questions, each beginning with "Why is President Obama ending Medicare as we know it..." • "by allowing it to go bankrupt in less than 15 years?" • "by funding Obamacare through $500 billion In Medicare cuts for today’s seniors?" • "by creating an unaccountable board to ration care for today’s seniors?" • "by destroying Medicare Advantage for today’s seniors?" • "by ending access to care for today’s seniors?" Scaring senior citizens about Medicare has long been a part of both parties' playbooks. But we hadn't heard of any plan from President Obama to dramatically alter the senior health care plan, so we thought it worthwhile to check the claim. It's important to note that Obama's plan for Medicare hasn't been as big and sweeping as Ryan's. It has involved cutting the growth of future spending, particularly in the Medicare Advantage program and establishing a board to make recommendations about future savings. But he has not outlined a dramatic, structural overhaul or a fundamental redefinition of the program. We found that Romney was stringing together a series of flimsy and often contradictory facts to justify an over-the-top statement. Let's take Romney's points one by one: Is Medicare going bankrupt? As PolitiFact Georgia has written -- and as Medicare’s government trustees declare every year -- Medicare does have big financial problems. Medicare is funded by two separate trust funds run by the federal government. According to the most recent annual report of the Medicare trustees, the trust fund for Medicare Part B, which covers doctors visits and outpatient costs, and part D, which covers prescription drugs, is in reasonably good shape, though not without longer-term worries. The other trust fund, covering inpatient hospital care, home health care and services at skilled nursing facilities and hospices, is under greater fiscal stress. Tax income and dedicated revenues "are expected to fall short" of expenditures "in all future years," the trustees wrote. The fund doesn't meet overall benchmarks for fiscal balance in either the short or the long term. The fund is expected to be exhausted by 2024, or possibly as soon as 2016 in a worst-case scenario. Still, not even this grim outlook translates into Obama "allowing (Medicare) to go bankrupt in less than 15 years," as the Romney memo claims. First, it is a significant exaggeration to blame Medicare's situation entirely on the incumbent president. Decisions over nearly 50 years by many presidents and members of Congress have put the program on an unsustainable path. You could just as easily substitute the name of a Republican president or a GOP congressional leader who would have to share at least some responsibility for the financial situation. The Medicare trustees don’t use the word "bankrupt" in their report, and it’s not clear that Medicare’s situation fits the two definitions of "bankrupt" we’ve used in the past -- to be "declared in law unable to pay outstanding debts" or "reduced to a state of financial ruin: impoverished." Medicare is a government program; the government will have the ability to pay its bills, however financially painful that may become. Meanwhile, only one of the funds is considered in fiscal peril, and that peril could be headed off through benefit cuts or higher taxes. Historically, Congress has intervened when funds appeared to be running out. "Almost from its inception, the (Part A) trust fund has faced a projected shortfall," the Congressional Research Service has written. In 1970, the insolvency date was 1972. For the next 16 years, trustees expected its funds to be exhausted by the 1990s. Congress repeatedly acted to lower fund spending and keep it from going dry. Overall, we find it is a ridiculous exaggeration to say that Obama is personally responsible for Medicare's financial woes. Is Obama funding his health care law by $500 billion in Medicare cuts? First off, we’ll note that this argument is an odd contradiction. In the first point, Romney argued that Obama is responsible for Medicare's financial peril. This one criticizes him for ... cutting its costs. We previously checked a virtually identical claim by Romney, that "Obamacare takes $500 billion out of Medicare and funds Obamacare." We ruled it Half True, though other times we’ve given different ratings to this general topic due to variations in how the claim was worded. The health care reform law made several changes to Medicare. In a few cases, it actually increased Medicare spending to provide more benefits and coverage. The law added money to cover preventive services and to fill a gap (or "doughnut hole") for enrollees who purchase prescription drugs through the Medicare Part D program. Other provisions are designed to reduce future growth in Medicare spending, to encourage the program to operate more efficiently and to improve the delivery and quality of care in ways that include reducing hospital re-admissions. The bill doesn't take money out of the current Medicare budget but instead attempts to slow the program's future growth in provider payments, combined with premium hikes for higher-income beneficiaries and administrative changes. Medicare spending will still increase, however. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects Medicare spending will reach $929 billion in 2020, up from $499 billion in actual spending in 2009. Romney is right that future savings from Medicare are planned to offset new costs created by the law -- especially coverage for the uninsured -- so that the overall law doesn't add to the deficit. However, the way Romney phrases it gives the impression that the law takes money already allocated to Medicare and uses it to fund the new health care law. Instead, the law uses a number of measures to try to reduce the rapid growth of future Medicare spending -- something that, paradoxically, would help ease the concerns laid out in Romney’s previous claim, that Medicare could "go bankrupt in less than 15 years." So that doesn't support the sweeping claim that Obama is "changing Medicare as we know it." He's changed it, but not drastically. Does the health care law create an "unaccountable board to ration care"? The Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, with 15 members who are political appointees, is charged with identifying $15.5 billion in Medicare savings. PolitiFact and its affiliates have checked similar claims and typically found they were significant exaggerations. Here, we’ll first ask: Is IPAB unaccountable? The answer is: No. Members are chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The board would not issue edicts. It would make recommendations. If Congress does not act on its recommendations within a set time, the recommendations are automatically implemented. But Congress has other opportunities to intervene. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, the full House and Senate may consider amendments that change or repeal the board's recommendations as long as those changes meet the same fiscal criteria as the board itself uses. Congress is even granted a one-time opportunity to introduce legislation to dismantle IPAB permanently. This would require approval between January 2017 and Aug. 15, 2017, with the support of three-fifths of the members of the House and Senate. So Congress has multiple ways to intervene. This negates the argument that its actions are "unaccountable." Second, would IPAB ration care? No. The law specifically bars it from doing that. The panel is forbidden from submitting "any recommendation to ration health care," according to Section 3403 of the health care law. The types of recommendations the board is permitted to make are also sharply limited. It may not suggest raising premiums for Medicare beneficiaries or increase deductibles, coinsurance or co-payments. The board also may not urge changes to Medicare eligibility, the scope of benefits or initiatives to raise revenue. Instead, what it is permitted to do is reduce how much the government pays health-care providers for services, for instance, by reducing payments to hospitals with high rates of re-admissions or recommending innovations to cut wasteful spending. The Romney campaign argues that IPAB’s actions will have the effect of rationing care. If the reimbursement rate for mammograms is cut low enough, the campaign argues, doctors would face the choice of continuing to provide the same services for diminishing payments or else stop providing the services entirely. But as we’ve argued before, if that’s rationing, then it’s not substantially different from the type of unofficial rationing that existed before passage of the health care law (and continues to exist today, before much of it is in force). People who couldn't get health insurance due to a pre-existing condition or their financial situation felt like there was already rationing. And even for those with insurance, not every type of care was covered. "Everyone hates the word rationing," Katherine Baicker, a health economics professor at Harvard University, told us in 2009. "From an economics perspective, there's no way around rationing. Some care is being rationed now. Everyone isn't getting everything." So, IPAB doesn’t break any new ground in "rationing," and the board is still accountable to Congress. Is Obama destroying Medicare Advantage? The health care law includes $136 billion in projected savings that would come from changes to the Medicare Advantage program -- a privately run, Medicare-funded plan akin to managed care health insurance. The Romney camp points to a study that supports the argument that these changes will destroy Medicare Advantage. It projects that "nationwide, compared to what would have been the case under prior law, by 2017, when the changes are fully phased-in, enrollment (in Medicare Advantage) is projected to be 50 percent lower, the average would-be beneficiary will lose $3,700 in benefits (accounting for both those who remain in MA and those who leave) and the number of choices available in the average county will be reduced by about two-thirds." We don’t have any contrary data, but we’ll note that the report was written by Robert A. Book, a former scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Michael Ramlet, the director of health care policy at the American Action Forum, a group whose board includes a long list of Republican stalwarts. So we think the report is worth taking with a grain of salt. There’s no question that Medicare Advantage is taking a disproportionate share of the cuts made by the new law. But "destroying" is too strong a word -- few doubt that Medicare Advantage will continue to exist and draw beneficiaries. And these savings need to be taken in some context. "The Affordable Care Act reduces payments to Medicare Advantage plans," Jonathan Oberlander, health policy professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, told us in 2011. "They’re overpaid by quite a lot -- excess payments above and beyond what it costs to treat people," he said. "As a result of that, there are projections that some of those (plans) are going to trim some of the extra benefits." Those could include benefits for vision or dental care, he said, but "it doesn’t affect the core benefits, the required Medicare benefits." And once again, we’ll point out that if Romney is concerned about Medicare possibly going "bankrupt" in the future, it’s paradoxical to simultaneously argue against lowering reimbursements to a portion of Medicare that is already paid higher-than-average amounts. Is Obama ending access to care for today’s seniors? This is a stunningly sweeping claim, with virtually nothing to back it up. Are Medicare beneficiaries really being left without any doctors or hospitals to go to? The campaign points to a projection by Medicare’s actuary that one provision in the law could squeeze health care reimbursements so much that about 15 percent of health care providers "could find it difficult to remain profitable and, absent legislative intervention, might end their participation in the program (possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries)," the actuary wrote. Coming from an independent federal official, this assessment seems credible. But health care experts -- while acknowledging the risks of squeezing providers -- caution against concluding that many of Medicare’s providers will flee the program. One reason is Medicare’s market dominance. "If hospitals don’t serve Medicare patients, who exactly are they going to care for?" Oberlander asks. "Same goes for most physicians. Without Medicare patients, they would have very empty waiting rooms." History backs up this view, said Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology health care policy specialist who has advised both Romney and Obama in the past. "We have seen major cuts in Medicare reimbursement in the past, most notably for hospitals in 1997, where there were cuts that were much larger than those in" Obama’s law, yet none resulted in widespread defections, Gruber said. It’s also worth noting that the new law is not the only source of cost adjustments that could squeeze margins for providers. The most notable is Medicare’s Sustainable Growth Rate, which (at least theoretically) caps physician reimbursement in the program based on a formula. We say "theoretical" because Congress has always acted to head off its implementation before the required cuts took effect. And that's been going on since it was first put into law in 1997. "This would have been a problem regardless of whether the ACA ever became law, so connecting it to ‘Obamacare’ is just false," Oberlander said. Summing up We’ll evaluate Romney’s claim in two steps. First, how accurate are his five claims? And second, do they collectively indicate that Obama is "ending Medicare as we know it"? The claim that Obama is funding his health care law by $500 billion in Medicare cuts has the most merit, but three of the other claims greatly exaggerate a nugget of truth. Medicare has serious financial challenges in its future, but saying it will go "bankrupt" in less than 15 years is highly misleading. Meanwhile, Obama’s law certainly targets Medicare Advantage for cuts, but it’s not at all clear that those cuts will "destroy" the program. And Medicare’s fiscal pressures and the possibility of reduced payments to providers do pose challenges for Medicare’s ability to keep physicians and hospitals in its network, but its sheer size gives it market power that make it difficult for physicians to leave. As for Romney’s claim about IPAB, we see little if any truth in it. Our ruling Overall, then, the Romney news release is a talking point in search of facts. It takes some shreds of truth and combines them with worst-case-scenario speculations, then deploys overheated language. Even if each of his five claims were true, it would be a stretch to say that they added up to "ending Medicare as we know it." But given their degree of inaccuracy, the memo doesn’t have a leg to stand on. We interpret "ending Medicare as we know it" to mean a fundamental, structural change to the program, one so significant that it is almost unrecognizable as a result. Romney’s charge that Obama would "end Medicare as we know it" is at least as overheated as the Democratic charge that the Ryan plan would "end Medicare." Under Obama’s approach, Medicare would still be a large, single-payer, federally run health care program for seniors -- slimmer in some areas, more generous in others, with a smattering of different rules. That’s not "ending Medicare as we know it," which is just the latest line in a long history of political attempts to scare seniors. We rate Romney’s claim Pants on Fire.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-03-22T17:42:48	2012-03-12	['Barack_Obama', 'Medicare_(United_States)']
-pomt-06850	"I cut more as a percentage out of government than any state in the country this past decade. And where is Michigan in terms of its economic growth? Cutting did not result in economic growth."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/aug/04/jennifer-granholm/jennifer-granholm-says-massive-government-cuts-mic/	During the July 31, 2011, edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, Jennifer Granholm -- a Democrat who served as governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011 -- was asked to bring her own experience to bear on the debate over the federal debt ceiling. "Clearly the entitlement question has to be addressed," Granholm said, referring to the rising cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which is a major contributor to the growing federal debt. However, Granholm told host David Gregory that she was skeptical about whether such cuts would be a boon for the economy at large. "I can tell you, David, I cut more as a percentage out of government than any state in the country this past decade," Granholm said. "And where is Michigan in terms of its economic growth? Cutting did not result in economic growth. What results in growth is making sure you've got a good business climate for businesses to grow and prosper. And so we've got to cut where we can in order to invest where we must in order to grow the economy. And it's that investment side that I worry that those who are affiliated with the tea party or who are on the far right don't realize that other countries are co-investing with businesses in order to create jobs in their countries. "If we do nothing more than just cut," she continued, "that will continue to accelerate the lack of growth in (gross domestic product). So we've got to realize that the strategy here must be very specific. Yes, you've got to reform entitlements, but you've got reform entitlements and invest in order to grow because the quickest way to take down your deficit is through growth." We wondered about three elements of Granholm’s comments: whether she "cut more as a percentage out of government than any state in the country this past decade," how poor Michigan’s economic growth has been over the same period and whether spending cuts to state government hampered economic growth. (Separately, we’re looking at a comment from the same show by Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, in which he accused Granholm of supporting "the highest tax increases in the history of Michigan," which helped push unemployment "from 6.8 percent to 15.3 percent.) We’ll take up the three claims in order. Did Michigan cut more from its government than any state in the country? To answer this question, we turned to The Fiscal Survey of States, a twice-annual publication of the National Association of State Budget Officers that offers fiscal data for the 50 states going back to 1979. We determined that the most appropriate data to use were figures for annual expenditures from the 50 states’ general funds. We’ll acknowledge up front that this is not the only measure that could be used to compare how much state governments have been cut. In fact, Michigan’s state revenues flow into two accounts, the general fund and the school-aid fund, and the numbers we looked at only take into account the general fund. However, fiscal experts told us that the general fund offers a reasonable yardstick for state spending, and it also turned out to be the same measurement Granholm used, according to a spokeswoman. (Then there’s the eternal statistician’s lament: When comparing all 50 states across a period of nearly a decade, you take the statistics you can get.) We calculated the change in general fund expenditures for all 50 states between fiscal year 2003 and fiscal year 2010 -- the closest approximation we could get to the start and end dates of Granholm’s tenure. And by this measure, Granholm is right. Every state but two saw their general-fund expenditures increase over that period (without taking inflation into account). The two that didn’t? Georgia, which saw its general fund expenditures fall by $54 million over that period, and Michigan, which saw its general fund expenditures fall by more than $1 billion. If they’d been adjusted for inflation, the decrease would be even more severe. Using another measure, Carole Polan, a spokeswoman for Granholm, added that from 2000 to 2008, the number of state employees fell by about 11,000 -- a 17 percent decline. That was a more rapid decline than in private employment, which fell in the state by 12 percent over the same period, Polan said. We’ll address the causes of these declines in a moment, but for now, we can say that by this measure, Granholm is right that spending on government declined faster in Michigan than in any other state between 2003 and 2010. How poor was Michigan’s economic growth during Granholm’s tenure? To answer this question, we looked at gross domestic product data for Michigan as published by the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. (Just as the bureau calculates the national gross domestic product, it does the same for individual states.) Once again, we compared Michigan’s GDP for 2003 and 2010. By this measure too, Michigan performed worst in the nation. Its gross domestic product rose by 6 percent over that period (again, not adjusted for inflation). That may sound okay, but it’s not. It’s only about one-third the rate of the next worst-performing state -- Ohio, at 17 percent growth. And it’s less than one-fifth of the increase of the nation as a whole, which was 31 percent. So where economic growth is concerned, Granholm is right again: Michigan’s performance during her tenure was uniquely poor among the 50 states. Did spending cuts to state government hamper Michigan’s economic growth? The cuts to government almost certainly hampered Michigan’s economy. But experts say that they weren’t the primary cause of the state’s poor economic performance. Long-term troubles in the automotive industry, the national recession and raising taxes on businesses and individuals "were all partially to blame," said Patrick L. Anderson, an economic analyst in East Lansing, Mich., who wrote a report released by Granholm's successor elected in 2010, Republican Rick Snyder. Charles Ballard, an economist at Michigan State University and author of Michigan's Economic Future: A New Look, added that even before the national economic crisis of 2008, "the auto industry limped along for much of the decade, with General Motors, Ford and Chrysler losing market share steadily. In Michigan, we don’t have Honda plants -- we have GM, Ford and Chrysler plants. Two of those companies went into bankruptcy. For better or for worse, we are home to the portions of the industry that did the worst." Meanwhile, Ballard added that Michigan’s tax structure -- which doesn’t tax most services or Internet sales and mail-order -- exacerbated the fiscal impact of these economic problems. If the sectors that aren’t taxed are growing faster than those that are, "the sales tax applies to an ever-shrinking portion of the economy," Ballard said. "So if you put the tax law on autopilot, the portion of your economy going to tax revenues shrinks every year." In fact, "Michigan’s revenues peaked in 2000 and are not projected to return to peak until 2020," said Arturo Perez, a state budget analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures. "No other state has had a similar revenue situation." Given this backdrop, a more appropriate way of thinking about it is that a poor economy in Michigan caused a drop in state tax revenue, which in turn forced Granholm to cut government services -- not the other way around. Declining tax revenue is a much more urgent factor for state governments than for the federal government, since most states are constrained from using deficit spending. (Michigan is one, though "unavoidable deficits" may be resolved in the next fiscal year.) This means that tax revenues play a more direct role in determining spending levels than they do at the federal level. "The plain fact is that state economic growth rates are in the short run linked to the demand for products that are produced in the state -- products like autos in Michigan, oil in Texas, sunny vacations in Florida and gambling holidays in Nevada," said Gary Burtless, an economist with the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution. "Demand for these products can have booms and busts that are completely unrelated to a state’s typical tax rate or spending level. In the short run, when demand for a state’s products plummets, its state tax revenues fall, forcing the state to trim state spending or increase state tax rates." Our ruling There’s strong evidence supporting two of Granholm’s statistical claims -- that government spending has fallen faster in Michigan than in any other state, and that the state’s economic performance has been especially poor compared to other states. However, in the Meet the Press interview, Granholm was trying to use her experience as a governor to make a larger point about how cutting government "did not result in economic growth." She's probably correct that government cuts hampered her state's recovery, at least in the short term, but Michigan’s experience over the last decade suggests that the reverse is an even bigger factor -- that is, poor economic growth hurts tax revenues and, in turn, forces government cuts. This doesn’t mean that Granholm’s point is inaccurate, but in trying to apply a state lesson to a federal problem, she’s ignored a key factor in how state fiscal policy works. On balance, we rate her statement Mostly True.	None	Jennifer Granholm	None	None	None	2011-08-04T16:04:47	2011-07-31	['Michigan']
-snes-00779	In 1999, Donald Trump lobbied against mandatory sprinklers for apartment buildings in New York, including his own Trump Tower.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-sprinklers-apartment-fire/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Donald Trump Once Fight Against Installing Sprinklers in New York Apartment Buildings?	11 April 2018	None	['New_York_City', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-10691	"The oddest thing is he doesn't want to do for America what he did for Massachusetts. He did mandate health care for Massachusetts, which is HillaryCare, and he doesn't want to do that for America."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/10/rudy-giuliani/romney-wants-a-different-prescription-for-the-nati/	There are several pieces to this, so we'll take them one at a time. First, Massachusetts: As governor, Mitt Romney oversaw a major rewrite of the state's health care program in 2006 that featured a mandate on individuals. Everyone in the state must enroll in a plan or face tax penalties. It's true that Romney vetoed the teeth behind part of the mandate — a charge to companies that didn't offer coverage to employees — which was later overridden by the state Legislature. So, Giuliani is correct that Romney enacted a "mandate" plan, though Romney has sought to avoid that term. Giuliani also is correct that the program in Massachusetts shares some things with the health care proposal put forward by Sen. Hillary Clinton. Both expand upon the current private-public system. Neither forces changes for those who like their current employer-provided insurance. Both aim to provide coverage for all, with subsidized private plans. And both mandate coverage by penalizing those who can afford to buy a plan but don't. Now, does that mean the Massachusetts program is "HillaryCare"? We'll take a pass on judging that one. Giuliani's other point is that Romney isn't proposing a national plan similar to what he did in Massachusetts. That's true, too. Romney has argued that population demographics vary so much by state that a universal plan can't be applied across the country. Instead, he has proposed changing the way federal dollars are made available to states — which is what Massachusetts was able to do — so states are free to draw up plans that suit themselves. Add it all up and Giuliani's got it right.	None	Rudy Giuliani	None	None	None	2007-12-10T00:00:00	2007-11-26	['United_States', 'Massachusetts', 'Clinton_health_care_plan_of_1993']
-pomt-05659	By the time Obama took office, "The Bush administration had given the car companies $13 billion and the money was now gone."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/19/barack-obama/obama-campaign-movie-says-auto-bailout-money-had-r/	In a new 17-minute campaign movie highlighting President Barack Obama’s accomplishments in office, narrator Tom Hanks walks viewers through the major challenges of the last four years and how the president has handled them. Osama bin Laden. Iraq. Health care. The collapsing auto industry. On the subject of Detroit, car company CEOs appear onscreen asking for money in Washington, followed by pictures of empty factories and dire news headlines. The movie talks about the financial pressures on the new president and the unpopularity with the public of more bailouts. But Obama, Hanks says, acted anyway to help American workers. "He decided to intervene, but in exchange for help the president would demand action. The Bush administration had given the car companies $13 billion, and the money was now gone," Hanks says. Then President Bill Clinton appears onscreen to lend his voice. "He didn’t just give the car companies the money, and he didn’t give the UAW the money," Clinton says. "He said you guys gotta work together and come up, and everybody’s gotta have some skin in the game here. You gotta modernize the automobile industry." Chrysler and GM got their first billions in December 2008 under President George W. Bush and received billions more under Obama. So here, we’re checking the movie’s claim that the first round of loans ran out before the second was extended -- that when Obama took office "the Bush administration had given the car companies $13 billion, and the money was now gone." Bailout primer In early December 2008, Chrysler and GM were dangerously close to collapsing. With global credit markets frozen, the companies turned to the federal government for an emergency infusion of money. More than a million jobs were at stake. Bush authorized initial loans to Chrysler and GM (and their respective financing arms) before leaving office, using money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Chrysler initially received $4 billion, and GM got $13.4 billion in bridge loans meant to keep the companies afloat for a little longer. Early in 2009, Obama convened a task force to study the companies’ viability. Both were required to submit plans for getting back to solvency, but both failed, the task force determined. In the meantime, they were running short of money again. A report from the Congressional Oversight Panel details the chronology of the spending, including an additional $6.36 billion that GM received between March and May 2009. Both companies ended up going through structured bankruptcies, Chrysler in April and GM in June. The Obama administration was instrumental in the manner in which the reorganizations proceeded. Some debt holders were forced to take losses, while the autoworkers union health care trust, which was owed billions in health benefits, took an equity stake, as did the federal government. Details on the money The Obama campaign responded to our inquiry with citations of several news stories about when the first loans were disbursed. * $5 billion to financing arm GMAC on Dec. 29, 2008 * $4 billion to GM on Dec. 31, 2008 * $4 billion to Chrysler on Jan. 2, 2009 * $884 million to GMAC on Jan. 16, 2009 * $100 million to financing arm Chrysler Financial on Jan. 16, 2009 Obama was inaugurated Jan. 20, 2009. So that adds up to almost $14 billion in auto bailout money before he took office. Details on the spending The campaign also sent us reports from early 2009 on where the money was going. Sean McAlinden, chief economist for the Center for Automotive Research, told the Detroit News in January that "GM and Chrysler are insolvent. Without federal funding they are bankrupt." He added that Chysler needed $6 billion at the time to pay its suppliers for the previous quarter's auto parts, and he said he suspected the full $4 billion loan went towards those payments, the story said. (We reached out to McAlinden for our story but didn’t hear back.) A Detroit Free Press story noted that GM was spending $7.5 billion per month on car parts at the time the government bailed it out. The Obama campaign pointed out that just a single month’s expenses exceeded the amount GM received from the Treasury by $3.5 billion. ABC News published a story in April 2009 quoting Neil Barofsky, the TARP inspector general, saying that Chrysler Financial had asked for more funds because "they had basically used up the $1.5 billion that was lent to them." Some context We ran this statement by Steven Rattner, who headed Obama’s task force through the bailouts. He said it’s accurate that the funds were exhausted. "It got used up before we really were in the saddle," he said. But he also pointed out that none of the parties involved -- not the Bush administration, the incoming Obama administration or the car companies -- thought it would be enough to bring the automakers back to solvency. "Nobody thought it was going to solve the problem. This was a interim financing," Rattner said. "This was all something we anticipated." A New York Times story from the time said the Bush loan "gives the companies a few months to get their businesses in order but hands off to President-elect Barack Obama the difficult political task of ruling on their future." We also think it’s worth mentioning the implication in the video that the Bush administration did not put enough restrictions on the money. "He decided to intervene, but in exchange for help the president would demand action," narrator Hanks says just before mentioning the Bush loans. Obama himself has previously said the Bush team handed out billions and asked nothing in return, a statement we rated False. Keith Hennessey, a former Bush administration official, wrote on his blog in June 2009 about the many restrictions tied to the loans, including that the car companies pay down debt, limits on executive compensation and negotiated reductions in wages and benefits for autoworkers. And remember the companies’ viability plans reviewed by Obama’s task force? They were required under the terms of the Bush loans. Our ruling The Obama campaign movie says, "the Bush administration had given the car companies $13 billion and the money was now gone." It's important to note that the $13 billion was provided as loans, not as grants, as the wording might suggest. Referring to the time Obama took office, January 2009, GM and Chrysler by then had received almost $14 billion in bailout money. News reports also reflect that the money was basically used up. So, that much is correct. But the movie ignores the fact that this was not unexpected. The Bush administration’s loans were always just a temporary lifeline, meant to keep the companies operating so the new president would have time to decide what to do long term. This is important information left out of the movie’s extensive discussion of the auto bailouts. That the $13 billion was gone when Obama arrived was no surprise. We rate the statement Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-03-19T15:55:22	2012-03-15	['Barack_Obama', 'George_W._Bush']
-pomt-13079	"I was the first member of Congress to contribute to Donald Trump."	true	/texas/statements/2016/nov/11/lamar-smith/lamar-smith-first-member-Congress-donate-Trump-Don/	A re-elected U.S. House member from Texas offered congratulations to Donald Trump while laying claim to a financial first with the Republican president-elect. U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, said in a Nov. 9, 2016, web post that voters chose a president who won’t expand government control. "They have rejected bad trade deals, open borders, heavy-handed regulations, Obamacare, a liberal Supreme Court, political correctness, and business as usual in Washington," Smith wrote. Smith went on: "When I learned I was the first member of Congress to contribute to Donald Trump, I didn't know whether to smile or frown. Now I realize that few actions have given me as much satisfaction. The walk-on quarterback has won the Super Bowl!" Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science & Technology, joined several fellow Republican House committee chairs in endorsing Trump’s candidacy on May 14, 2016. Was he also the first member of Congress to make a contribution to the New York businessman? Smith reported donations starting in May 2016 We emailed Smith consultant Jordan Berry seeking Smith’s factual backup. Then we called the Federal Election Commission, repository for candidate finance reports, where Julia Queen helped us ascertain that Smith’s campaign committee, Texans for Lamar Smith, reported giving the Donald J. Trump for President committee $2,000 on May 27, 2016. Our searches of FEC-posted summaries of Trump’s campaign finance filings show too that Trump reported fielding $1,913 from Smith’s campaign on Oct. 5, 2016. Trump’s campaign also listed $5,000 received Oct. 5, 2016, from the Maryland-based Longhorn PAC, a "leadership PAC" affiliated with Smith, according to a PAC filing with the FEC. Trump’s finance report also states "excess to be refunded" from the $5,000, without elaboration. Our request for research help from the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign contributions and spending, drew an email from spokeswoman Viveca Novak noting the Smith-led Longhorn PAC earlier reported giving Trump’s campaign $3,000 on May 27, 2016 According to the FEC-posted summary of the Longhorn PAC’s donations to campaigns, the group also gave $1,000 on June 14, 2016 to a Massachusetts-based Trump Victory group. Even earlier, the Smith-steered group donated $5,000 in May 2015 to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. All told then, Smith’s campaign and his Longhorn PAC reported making three Trump campaign donations totaling $6,000 from May 27, 2016 into October 2016. Trump’s campaign reported $6,913 in two Smith-connected contributions in October 2016. A wrinkle: The contributions reported by Smith didn’t show up in the FEC-posted summaries of Trump’s reports, far as we could tell, nor did some of what Trump reported getting from Smith’s committee or leadership PAC appear in Smith’s filings. Significantly, though, Berry told us by email that Smith’s records show the May 2016 Smith campaign committee and leadership PAC checks made out to the Trump campaign were each cashed in mid-June 2016. Other members of Congress? So, how about other members of Congress ponying up for Trump? Our review of Trump’s FEC list of other campaigns giving to his effort didn’t turn up other House members making donations prior to July 2016. Starting that month, five other Republican House members made donations from respective campaign funds. Listed among more than 60 contributions from other political committees reported by Trump up to Oct. 18, 2016: --The Lone Star Leadership PAC, affiliated with Texas Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Flower Mound, gave two donations totaling $10,000 on July 21, 2016, the same day Burgess’ campaign gave two donations totaling $4,000. --A $2,000 donation from Rep. Ken Calvert of California on Sept. 9, 2016. --Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana donated $2,000 on Sept. 26, 2016. --Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina gave $1,994 in multiple in-kind donations in October 2016. --Rep. Tom McClintock of California gave $2,000 on Oct. 5, 2016. Trump’s campaign otherwise reported that a former House member, Dan Burton of Indiana, made two contributions totaling $2,700 in July 2016 and Todd Wilcox, a former Florida U.S. Senate aspirant, donated $2,000 in October 2016. The center’s Daniel Auble said by email that for candidate committees and leadership PACs, Smith was the first sitting member of Congress to contribute to Trump’s bid. But in 2017, Smith will be sworn in with a new member of Congress who gave even earlier to Trump. Paul Mitchell, a Michigan Republican, made a $292 in-kind donation to Trump’s campaign in February 2016, Auble said. No personal donations by Smith We also explored whether Smith put personal money, not campaign funds, into Trump’s cause. Our search on the FEC website for Trump donors whose names include "Lamar" didn’t reveal personal Lamar Smith contributions to the presidential hopeful. Across Texas, according to the FEC, Trump’s campaign reported accepting 135 contributions totaling $45,253 from September 2015 through Oct. 19, 2016. Those donors in 2016 included three San Antonio Smiths, Trump’s committee reported, none named Lamar. And did other House members make personal donations to Trump before Smith’s campaign chipped in? We didn't close in on this ourselves but Auble said his "quick scan" of individual donations posted by the FEC didn’t turn up anyone. Our ruling Smith said: "I was the first member of Congress to contribute to" Trump for president. Corroborating records appear to be imperfect. But Smith reported contributions to the Trump cause in May 2016 and we didn’t find any sign of other members of Congress donating to Trump before July 2016. We rate this statement True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/e1c6e749-beca-48a4-b19a-5678ba871cf3	None	Lamar Smith	None	None	None	2016-11-11T15:06:53	2016-11-09	['United_States_Congress', 'Donald_Trump']
-tron-00851	Monica Lewinksy Found Dead, Murdered in Attempted Burglary	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/monica-lewinksy-found-dead/	None	clintons	None	None	['bill clinton', 'conspiracy theories', 'the clintons']	Monica Lewinksy Found Dead, Murdered in Attempted Burglary	Jun 5, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-08214	The Florida Supreme Court has "no express authority in the Florida Constitution" to remove questions from the ballot proposed by the Legislature.	mostly false	/florida/statements/2010/nov/18/dean-cannon/dean-cannon-says-state-supreme-court-lacks-express/	In 2010, the Florida Supreme Court removed three proposed constitutional amendments from the Nov. 2 ballot. Florida House Speaker Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, a lawyer, bashed the court for doing so on Nov. 16, 2010, in his first speech as House speaker during the Legislature's one-day organizing session. "As an attorney and an officer of the court, I believe fervently in a judicial branch that is strong and independent and fully empowered and equipped to fulfill its constitutional duties. But for the judiciary to be independent, it must also be impartial and apolitical. It must respect the co-equal executive and legislative branches, and it must protect their unambiguous constitutional powers, and it must practice the restraint that is built into our federal and state constitutions. And yet, over the past year three times we saw the work of a three-fifths super majority of this legislative branch, the elected representatives of over 18 million Floridians, demolished by five unelected justices of the Florida Supreme Court. This was done notwithstanding the fact that there is no express authority in the Florida Constitution for their doing so." For this Truth-O-Meter we will explore, is there "no express authority in the Florida Constitution" for the state Supreme Court to remove amendments placed on the ballot by the Legislature? First, some background on the amendments in question that we gleaned from a Sept. 1, 2010, article in the Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times. In a 5-2 ruling on Aug. 31, 2010, the Supreme Court struck three amendments from the November 2010 ballot: • Amendment 3: To grant extra tax breaks to first-time home-buyers. • Amendment 7: To "clarify" redistricting Amendments 5 and 6, which did remain on the ballot. • Amendment 9: To prohibit Florida from participating in a health insurance exchange that forces people to buy insurance, which was in reaction to the new federal health care law. First, we asked Cannon spokesperson Katherine Betta to provide proof that the Florida Supreme Court lacks "express authority" in the state Constitution to remove the ballot items. "He has the text of the Constitution… express authority means authority that is expressly written into the Constitution,'' Betta wrote in an e-mail. "The Constitution doesn’t provide express authority for the judicial branch to remove amendments placed on the ballot by the Legislature. It only provides authority to remove those placed by citizen petition." These three ballot items were placed on the ballot by the Legislature, she wrote. We sent Cannon's claim to four professors who are experts in Florida constitutional law -- Joseph Little, Timothy McLendon and Jon Mills at the University of Florida and Donald Jones at the University of Miami. We also interviewed three lawyers who have argued amendment cases in Florida: Mark Herron, Barry Richard and Ronald Meyer. Most of the legal experts agreed that there is no "express authority" in the state Constitution -- no blunt, direct language that says the Supreme Court should review ballot items written by the Legislature. But most also said that doesn't matter. The Supreme Court clearly has jurisdiction, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise. First, let's look at the legal documents that the professors cited -- the Florida Constitution and state statute 101.161. The state Constitution in Article 4 Section 10 expressly directs the Supreme Court to review amendments headed to the ballot that were written by citizens -- not the Legislature: "The attorney general shall, as directed by general law, request the opinion of the justices of the supreme court as to the validity of any initiative petition circulated pursuant to Section 3 of Article XI. The justices shall, subject to their rules of procedure, permit interested persons to be heard on the questions presented and shall render their written opinion no later than April 1 of the year in which the initiative is to be submitted to the voters pursuant to Section 5 of Article XI." But the Constitution in Article 11 Section 1, also allows the state Legislature -- by a three-fifths vote -- to put an amendment on a ballot. That section makes no mention of the Supreme Court. "There is a distinct difference between citizen petitions and the Legislature’s express constitutional authority to place amendments before the people," Betta wrote. "The Constitution does not provide express authority for courts to remove questions placed on the ballot by the Legislature, as Rep. Cannon discussed in his speech." That's what Mills concluded about Cannon's claim: "I think he is right. The only provision in the Constitution dealing with judicial review relates to (citizen) initiatives." But the Supreme Court still has authority to review such legislative-proposed amendments. After the Legislature agrees to place a question on the ballot, someone can file a challenge at the trial court level, which can work its way to the appeals court and then the state Supreme Court. That's what happened in the case of the three legislative amendments in 2010. Several lawyers said the basis on which the Florida Supreme Court removed the Legislature's proposed amendments in 2010 was state law 101.161, which requires that such amendments be "printed in clear and unambiguous language" among other requirements. That statute doesn't directly state that the Supreme Court can review amendments for that purpose, but the lawyers said it doesn't have to -- individual statutes don't have to mention the court's jurisdiction. Meyer told us in an e-mail that the Supreme Court has the jurisdiction to review such a decision due to Article 5 Section 3 of the Constitution, which states that the Supreme Court: "may review any order or judgment of a trial court certified by the district court of appeal in which an appeal is pending to be of great public importance, or to have a great effect on the proper administration of justice throughout the state, and certified to require immediate resolution by the Supreme Court." Meyer also wrote: "For nearly a century, the Florida Supreme Court has exercised its constitutional power to review proposed amendments." Here is the full text of what Meyer wrote to us. "You could say there is nothing red in the sky that allows the Supreme Court" to review amendments, and that would also be true, Meyer said sarcastically in an interview. Richard, who has argued several amendment cases, said technically he agrees with Cannon that the Constitution lacks express authority for the Supreme Court, but the court can review amendments if a lawsuit is filed at the trial court. (It bears repeating: That's exactly what happened with these three amendments that angered Cannon.) "Most Supreme Court authority isn't spelled out,'' Richard said. "If you say that it has to be 'express authority' then the Supreme Court wouldn't be able to review any statutory provisions. You need to take the next step. He is correct that there is no express authority, I agree, but most of the authority of the Supreme Court isn't express -- it is inherent in its nature as the high court in this state." We also sent Cannon's claim to the Florida Attorney General's office, which sometimes represents the Legislature in amendment challenges. Spokeswoman Sandi Copes sent back a link to the the 2000 Armstrong decision, which tossed out a death penalty amendment due to misleading ballot language after it was approved by voters in 1998. That ruling included this statement: "Although the Constitution does not expressly authorize judicial review of amendments proposed by the Legislature, this Court long ago explained that the courts are the proper forum in which to litigate the validity of such amendments." Let's look at what two professors wrote to us in e-mails: "The Florida courts possess jurisdiction, upon proper complaint having been filed, to ascertain whether the Legislature’s prescribed standards have been satisfied," Little wrote. "The statute does not exempt proposals adopted by the Legislature from review. Hence, although it is true that the Florida Constitution does not include express language on this point, it is well within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to review the questions of law that arise under (state law.)" The state Constitution, Little wrote, "does not have express words pertaining to most of the other myriad issues the court considers. By contrast, the Supreme Court does have express authority to review constitutional amendments proposed by citizen initiatives. I do not disagree that the authority is not 'express.' I do disagree that the Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction." And Jones wrote: "The law is not always what is written down. What is express or written down can never be the limit of the law in a democracy. If that were so, most of the law of the 20th century including Brown v. Board of Education would be void." (That's a reference to the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation case.) Let's summarize: There is no sentence in the Florida Constitution that bluntly states, as UF's McLendon told us, "Oh by the way the Supreme Court can review these amendments and kick them off the ballot.'' So technically, Cannon is correct that there is "no express authority" in the Constitution. But let's look at the context of Cannon's remarks: "And yet, over the past year three times we saw the work of a three-fifths super majority of this legislative branch, the elected representatives of over 18 million Floridians, demolished by five unelected Justices of the Florida Supreme Court. This was done notwithstanding the fact that there is no express authority in the Florida constitution for their doing so." Cannon is clearly raising questions about whether the Supreme Court overstepped its bounds here, implying that it lacked authority for its action and that it failed to respect the legislative branch. The legal scholars and lawyers we interviewed agreed that the Supreme Court does have jurisdiction to review those amendments. Or to put it in non-legal terms, big whoop that it lacks "express authority" in the Constitution -- the Supremes have every right to rule here. We rate this claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Dean Cannon	None	None	None	2010-11-18T17:50:55	2010-11-16	['None']
-pomt-04303	Says he "opposed $716 billion cut to Medicare."	half-true	/florida/statements/2012/oct/30/cw-bill-young/bill-young-says-he-opposed-716-billion-medicare-cu/	U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young, the Indian Shores Republican incumbent of 42 years, touts his credibility with seniors in a TV spot clearly aimed at the 65-plus crowd. An ensemble of older men and women, and even former Gov. Jeb Bush, praise Young for being there for seniors. "Florida seniors couldn’t have a bigger champion than Congressman Bill Young," Bush says. Amid the endorsements are claims about Young’s record on Social Security, the Medicare prescription drug program, support for a balanced budget amendment, and, of course, Medicare. "Young opposed $716-billion cut to Medicare," bold text shows. Below that text is a citation: "House Roll Call Vote 165 - 3/21/2010." It’s the House vote on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which Young voted against. Does that mean he rejected "the $716 billion cut to Medicare?" We also checked a dueling Medicare claim from his challenger, Democratic lawyer Jessica Ehrlich, over whether he voted for the Ryan budgets that "end the current Medicare system." The $716 billion cut You could say we’ve heard this line a time or two. This attack line is a viral one in the political world, used by Mitt Romney against President Barack Obama, Rep. Connie Mack against Sen. Bill Nelson, and in many, many, many other races across the country. It’s not a "cut" in the traditional sense. Medicare is an open-ended entitlement program with a growth problem that threatens its future viability. Both parties agree changes should be made. Obama did not propose a cut to Medicare’s budget in his health care law. Rather, the law made several changes to slow the growth of Medicare costs. These changes primarily affected insurance companies and hospitals -- not beneficiaries. The government, for example, will pay hospitals less if they have too many readmissions or fail to meet new benchmarks for care. The law also deals with Medicare Advantage, which is a subset of Medicare plans run by private insurers started under President George W. Bush with the goal of reducing costs through marketplace competition. The plans have actually proven more expensive than traditional Medicare in recent years, so the health care law aims to reduce payments to private insurers as a way to rein in costs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office determined in 2011 that the federal health care law would reduce Medicare outlays by $507 billion between 2012 and 2021. In a more recent estimate released this year, the CBO looked at the years 2013 to 2022 and determined the health care law affected Medicare outlays by $716 billion. It’s worth pointing out Young could not have known he was specifically voting against $716 billion in Medicare "cuts," as that had not been tabulated in time for the health care vote that happened two years earlier. Still, it was known at the bill’s passage that there were major reductions in store for Medicare service providers, said economist Gail Wilensky, senior fellow at the international health foundation Project HOPE and Medicare director under President George H.W. Bush. A tricky point for Young’s claim is that he also voted for the budget blueprint of Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. -- twice, actually. The budget is a congressional resolution that does not carry the force of law, and Ryan’s ideas have not been turned into detailed legislation. Even so, Ryan has said his most recent budget factors in the same $716 billion in reductions in Medicare spending. Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter made this point on Face the Nation in August, saying Ryan "protected those cuts in his budget." PolitiFact rated her statement True. The Romney campaign responded to Cutter’s remark with a statement that Romney intended to repeal the health care law and end the Medicare "raid." Ryan said he factored the $716 billion savings in his budget it "was already in the baseline," the Wall Street Journal reported. "We would never have done it in the first place." However, his budget assumed reversal of other Obama spending decisions, the Journal pointed out. A month later, former President Bill Clinton reprised the attack in his Democratic National Convention speech, quipping, "it takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did." We rated it True. Ehrlich’s position Ehrlich is in an interesting spot here. She, too, opposes this "cut." Even though she supports the health care law, she told the Tampa Bay Times, "I am against the $500 billion cuts to Medicare in both the Affordable Care Act and the Ryan budget. I also oppose the Independent Panel Advisory Board in the Affordable Care Act and would support legislation to overturn that provision." She has attacked Young for voting for the Ryan budgets that reshape how Medicare works. When we asked her to elaborate on her position in an interview, she said she wanted to keep Medicare "fully funded." "I think we have to maintain the integrity of the program, make sure that it’s fully funded, and not advocate for cutting until we look at the budget as a whole," she said. She did not provide specifics for reducing the program’s spending. Young said she could not have had it both ways if she were a member of Congress at the time of the vote. "If you voted for the bill, you voted for the Medicare cut," he said. Our ruling Young’s ad says he voted against the controversial $716 billion Medicare cut. What he voted against was the Affordable Care Act, which implements an estimated $716 billion reduction in payments to hospitals and private insurers in effort to reduce the program’s ever-increasing costs. He could not have known the amount would be $716 billion, as that estimate came two years after the health care vote. Meanwhile, the Republicans have their own plan for reducing future Medicare spending, by bring more private insurance companies into Medicare and offering voucher-like premium support. The claim excludes several points. We rate it Half True.	None	C.W. Bill Young	None	None	None	2012-10-30T18:59:24	2012-10-17	['None']
-snes-03018	Chant Whose?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muslims-chanting-on-video/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Media Blackout of Video Showing Muslims Chanting ‘Death to America’?	8 March 2016	None	['None']
-snes-05772	The Susan G. Komen breast cancer organization gives only 20% of their donations to cancer research and pays their CEO $684,000 per year.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/komen-ceo-salary/	None	Business	None	David Mikkelson	None	Komen Research and CEO Salary	15 October 2014	None	['Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure']
-snes-00218	An animator for the "My Little Pony" cartoon series was arrested for child pornography, proving that the PedoGate conspiracy is real.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/my-little-pony-animator-arrested/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Bethania Palma	None	Was a ‘My Little Pony’ Animator Arrested for Possession of Child Pornography Part of ‘#PedoGate’?	14 August 2018	None	['None']
-vogo-00201	Statement: “Projected take-offs and landings are expected to increase to as much as 260,000 a year by 2015 — 30 percent more than today,” the San Diego Airport Authority said in a brochure explaining the need for a new airport, which became a failed ballot initiative in 2006.	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/the-airport-authoritys-exaggerated-warning-fact-check/	Analysis: The warnings sounded dire. Even worse, they sounded certain. For five decades, politicians and studies had cried wolf about the inadequacy of San Diego’s one-runway, 661-acre downtown airport.	None	None	None	None	The Airport Authority's Exaggerated Warning: Fact Check	August 28, 2012	None	['None']
-tron-03269	Vice President Biden’s Two Night Trip to London and Paris Cost Over $1 Million	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/biden-million-trip-2013/	None	politics	None	None	None	Vice President Biden’s Two Night Trip to London and Paris Cost Over $1 Million	Mar 17, 2015	None	['London']
-snes-02665	Did President Obama 'Stiff' the 'Wrong Waiter'?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-stiff-waiter-tip-lawrys/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did President Obama ‘Stiff’ the Wrong Waiter?	7 April 2017	None	['None']
-mpws-00024	Another week, and another ad on the airwaves in the 8th Congressional District. There, Republican Stewart Mills is running against incumbent DFL Rep. Rick Nolan in one of the hottest races in the country. Mills is getting a lot of help from National Republican Congressional Committee, which targets Nolan for being “dangerously liberal” in its newest ad. “Nolan voted to cut funding for the fight against Al Qaeda. Veterans aren’t receiving health care, yet Nolan voted against funding the veteran’s health administration. And hardworking Minnesotans are just trying to make ends meet. Nolan voted against work requirements for welfare recipients.” 	accurate	https://blogs.mprnews.org/capitol-view/2014/09/poligraph-two-hits-and-a-miss-on-nrccs-latest-ad/	None	None	None	Catharine Richert	None	PoliGraph: Two hits and a miss on NRCC’s latest ad	September 12, 2014, 2:00 PM	None	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Minnesota_Democratic–Farmer–Labor_Party', 'Al-Qaeda', 'Congressional_district', 'Minnesota', 'Republican_National_Committee']
-goop-02730	Kim Kardashian Did Try To “Steal Beyonce’s Twin Thunder,” 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-not-steal-beyonce-twins-thunder-babies-born-dog/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian Did NOT Try To “Steal Beyonce’s Twin Thunder,” Despite Claim	3:01 pm, June 19, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-01260	Maryland, Michigan and Arizona Allow Muslims Students to Pray in Schools	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/maryland-michigan-arizona-allow-muslims-students-pray-school-truth-fiction/	None	education	None	None	['church and state', 'islam', 'schools']	Maryland, Michigan and Arizona Allow Muslims Students to Pray in School	Apr 19, 2017	None	['Michigan', 'Maryland']
-pomt-05686	President Barack Obama’s policies have forced "many parts of the country to experience rolling blackouts."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/13/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-says-many-parts-country-experience-r/	On March 10, 2012, Rick Santorum published an op-ed on his website titled, "Why Energy Policy Matters to Americans." In it, he took a series of shots at President Barack Obama’s energy policies. "This president’s agenda doesn’t just stop with oil and gas," Santorum wrote. "President Obama has also discouraged new electricity generation -- forcing many parts of the country to experience rolling blackouts. That means that millions of Americans will live with a power grid that is second-rate, like a Third World country." We hadn't noticed the lights cycling off, so we wondered: Are many parts of the country really experiencing "rolling blackouts"? Before we go any further, let's define our terms. A "rolling blackout" occurs when a utility intentionally "shuts off the power to an area, turns it back on, and then shuts the power off in a different area," with outages in any given area typically lasting 60 to 90 minutes, according to the California Energy Commission. A utility would do this as a last resort, in order to avoid an even worse situation -- a total power blackout. A rolling blackout is distinct from two other electrical problems. Brownouts are temporary reductions in current, intentional or unintentional, which may or may not be noticeable to a customer. An uncontrolled outage occurs when power is disrupted without warning, often by weather or accidents. Rolling blackouts typically occur during 3 to 7 p.m., hours of peak use, when demand for electricity begins to exceed the local utility's available supply, the commission explained. "These controlled or planned blackouts help prevent ‘uncontrolled’ electrical power outages during the peak periods, which assures your electricity supply remains continuous and with minimal interruptions." Typically, utilities will try to forestall rolling blackouts by first issuing calls for customers to limit their power use and then by activating a system under which certain customers have agreed to limit their power uptake on high-demand days. So how often do rolling blackouts occur today? The Santorum campaign didn’t get back to us, but from what we can tell, it’s not all that often. We found data from Eaton Corp., a private power management company that publishes an annual "Blackout Tracker." (It can be downloaded here, free with registration.) Overall, in 2011 Eaton counted 3,071 power outages affecting 41.8 million Americans. That’s a modest decrease in outages from the previous year, but a big increase in the number of Americans affected; in 2010, 17.5 million Americans were affected. The difference is partly due to Hurricane Irene, which cut power to 6 million people, following two relatively quiet years for hurricanes. Weather is the principal cause of power outages in the U.S., according to Eaton. Here's the company's breakdown of what caused blackouts in 2011, where causes could be determined: Weather: 1,229 Faulty equipment or human error: 767 Vehicle accident: 245 Animal: 208 Planned: 138 Theft or vandalism: 28 Rolling blackouts would be "planned" outages, so at most, just 5 percent of these power outages might have been rolling blackouts. For comparison, that’s about as many power outages as were caused by squirrels in 2011. Really. Eaton tracked that in another chart. A range of experts we spoke to said they knew of no epidemic of rolling blackouts in the United States in recent years. "The Electric Power Research Institute is not aware of any rolling blackouts cascading throughout the country," said Clay Perry, the senior media relations manager for EPRI, a research group on the generation, delivery and use of electricity. "Do share if you can find any." As for Santorum's suggestion that Obama is to blame for the non-existent widespread rolling blackouts, it’s worth noting the limits of Obama’s power on the electric power supply. While Obama has pushed for improvements to the electrical grid, "political decisions about power generation and distribution are largely a state regulatory matter," with additional roles played by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is an independent federal agency, and various regional grid reliability councils, said Stephen Brown, a fellow with Resources for the Future and adjunct professor in energy management at the University of Colorado. There was at least one high-profile case of rolling blackouts in 2011 -- in early February in Texas, when the state, shivering in an unusual cold snap, imposed rolling blackouts for just the second time in more than two decades. The blackouts "left nearly 1 million homes dark and without heat for up to an hour, caused some schools and businesses to shut and spurred traffic snarls as some traffic lights stopped working," Reuters reported. According to the Houston Chronicle, Trip Doggett, the CEO of the state's main grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said the rolling blackouts were not caused by a failure to predict demand accurately or to keep enough plants online but by a widespread mechanical failure of more than 50 power generating units across the state. There was no single reason for the failures and no particular location, plant operator or type of power plant behind the problem, Doggett said. Critics of Obama seized on the Texas rolling blackouts as evidence that the president’s policies were endangering the nation’s energy future. The impact of Obama’s policies on energy supplies is a topic of heated disagreement, but that’s not what we're checking here. Rather, we’re checking whether such policies are already "forcing many parts of the country to experience rolling blackouts" -- and the data and expert opinions don't back that up. Our ruling Santorum’s said that Obama’s policies have forced "many parts of the country to experience rolling blackouts" -- evoking images of Third World countries. But neither Santorum nor experts offered any evidence that widespread rolling blackouts have occured. Arguably, squirrels are as much a threat to the power supply today. We rate the claim Pants On Fire.	None	Rick Santorum	None	None	None	2012-03-13T16:47:19	2012-03-10	['None']
-pose-00607	"Our schools should provide to all parents a concise easy to understand financial statement about how much resources the school received and how the money was spent and what the academic outcomes were for the year. To make it even more relevant the data will be compared with other schools in the district and with other schools across the state."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/632/provide-parents-with-annual-financial-reports-on-s/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	Provide parents with annual financial reports on schools	2011-12-02T14:36:20	None	['None']
-pomt-00669	"Ben Carson is running for president to ‘eliminate dependency on government.’ But he doesn’t mention that he grew up in public schools, got public housing and food stamps, got free glasses from a government program, was helped by Affirmative Action, and got Pell Grants for college."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/may/11/occupy-democrats/does-ben-carson-want-eliminate-dependency-governme/	With Ben Carson officially in the ring of Republican presidential contenders, Democratic social media activists are using his famous scraps-to-scalpel narrative against him. Carson, 63, was raised in a single-parent, impoverished household in Detroit and went on to become a Yale University-educated neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Carson, in 1987, was the first doctor to separate twins conjoined at the head. The Facebook group Occupy Democrats accuses Carson of wanting to take away some of the very same government benefits that helped support Carson’s family. The Facebook meme shared May 4, 2015, says, "Tea party icon Dr. Ben Carson is running for president to ‘eliminate dependency on government.’ " "But he doesn’t mention that he grew up in public schools, got public housing and food stamps, got free glasses from a government program, was helped by Affirmative Action, and got Pell Grants for college. "Hypocrisy, much?" A reader asked us to look into Carson’s biography and see if the facts align with the meme’s claims. The meme is rather thinly sourced to a blogpost that links back to another post that links to another post (as memes do). So we’ll deal with the claims line by line. ‘Grew up in public schools’ This checks out. Raised by a single mother with a third-grade education, Carson grew up very poor and attended public schools in Detroit, including Higgins Elementary School, Wilson Junior High School, Hunter Junior High School and Southwestern High School, where he graduated third in his class. In his 1990 autobiography Gifted Hands, Carson describes how he briefly attended fourth grade at a small private church school when his mother, Sonya, moved him and his older brother, Curtis, to live with relatives in Boston after the Carsons’ father moved out. His mother thought the boys would get a better education there than at the public schools. She was wrong. "Though Curtis and I both made good grades, the work was not as demanding as it could have been, and when we transferred back to the Detroit public school system I had quite a shock," Carson wrote. ‘Got public housing’ The details here are a little thin. When Carson’s mother divorced his father, she received their "modest house" in the settlement. Carson described it as the size of most modern garages, less than 1,000 square feet. But as the family’s financial situation deteriorated, they were forced to "move into the Boston tenements" with his aunt and uncle. It seems likely from his words that the tenements were for very poor families likely receiving government assistance, perhaps even for the homes. Carson describes "armies of roaches," "hordes of rats" and omnipresent "winos and drunks." When Sonya Carson saved enough to move back to Detroit, the family moved into a multifamily dwelling in Detroit in an "upper lower-class neighborhood," he wrote. Carson doesn’t outright describe the houses as Section 8 or federally funded projects. Other examinations of his life have, such as a Success.com article that described this second Detroit home as in "Detroit’s downtown housing projects" and "the ghetto." Eventually his mother saved enough to return to the Carsons’ original home in a better neighborhood. Got ‘food stamps’ This claim checks out. In his autobiography, Carson recounted the humiliation he felt using food stamps from his mom to pay for bread and milk. He would hide from classmates in the grocery store until it was safe to check out unnoticed. As hard as his mother worked in various domestic jobs, it wasn’t enough to keep the family completely off of public assistance, he wrote. "By the time I went into ninth grade, Mother had made such strides that she received nothing except food stamps," he wrote. "She couldn't have provided for us and kept up the house without that subsidy." ‘Got free glasses from a government program’ This, too, is correct. An eye exam in the fifth grade proved life-changing for Carson. In the fourth chapter of Gifted Hands, he says it wasn’t until he failed to read letters on a chart on the wall that he realized his eyesight had deteriorated over time, contributing in part to his struggles at school. "The school provided glasses for me, free," he wrote. Carson counts his glasses as a significant reason for his improvement in school because he could finally see the chalkboard. ‘Was helped by affirmative action’ This claim is unproven. Carson wanted to go out of state for college, even though the University of Michigan in his home state "actively recruited black students" and was willing to waive application fees for low-income students, he wrote. He narrowed his sights on either Harvard or Yale, and decided to go with Yale after an impressive win against Harvard on College Bowl on TV. He started classes at Yale in 1969 and received a 90 percent scholarship, he wrote. Were affirmative action policies to thank for his admission? Carson’s resume was impressive — he was third in his class, advanced so high within ROTC that he was offered a scholarship to West Point, and had high test scores. Still, Carson says he knew his minority background was valuable, saying "most of the top colleges were scrambling to enroll Blacks." "The school reps flocked around me because of my high academic achievements, and because I had done exceptionally well on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), ranking somewhere in the low ninetieth percentile--again, unheard of from a student in the inner city of Detroit," he wrote. After graduating from Yale with a degree in psychology, Carson was accepted into the University of Michigan Medical School, which he chose because it was in his home state, meaning lower tuition, and it was highly rated. In 1976, he applied for his residency in neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, which he said took only two interns a year. The school chose Carson, who said he made an impression on his interviewer by sharing a love for classical music. "Years later Dr. Udvarhelyi told me that he had made a strong case for my being accepted to Dr. Long, the chairman," he wrote. " ‘Ben,’ he said to me, ‘I was impressed with your grades, your honors and recommendations, and the splendid way you handled yourself in the interview.’ " Carson remained convinced that their exchange over a classical music concert gave him an edge. He did not, however, mention his race. ‘Got Pell grants for college’ This claim, too, is unproven and in many ways the weakest claim tracing Carson’s life story. Carson definitely received financial assistance to pay for college, but he does not offer details about the grants, at least not in Gifted Hands or to reporters in the last two decades. He also worked during the summers to help pay for other costs during school. The only mention of "Ben Carson" and "Pell Grants" in a LexisNexis search is in the context of his criticism of Obama’s proposal to offer free community college. "First of all, it is only free if no one has to pay for it. It is not free if we rob Peter to pay Paul," Carson wrote in a February column. "Secondly, Pell grants already exist to pay for community college expenses for needy students. For those who are not needy, there is an old-fashioned remedy that is very effective called work. In fact work might even be beneficial for those who are needy. It certainly provided some very valuable experiences for me." The article the meme holds up as support for its claims references a since-deleted post from a Facebook user who said Carson "benefited from affirmative action to enter college; used federal loans and Pell grants in undergrad school; benefited from affirmative action to enter medical school," and "med school paid for with grant from USPHS." We contacted the author about where he got this information via Facebook. We’ll update the story if anything becomes of it. Comparing Carson’s life story and his political platform The meme, of course, is trying to accomplish more than just recounting Carson’s biography. It’s also suggesting Carson would end many of the programs he benefited from growing up. That is the most difficult allegation to prove of all. Carson directly addressed this criticism May 4, 2015, the day he announced his run for president. "Many people are critical of me because they say, ‘Carson wants to get rid of all the safety nets and welfare programs even though he must have benefited from them,’ " he said, according to a Politico account. "This is a blatant lie. I have no desire to get rid of safety nets for people who need them. I have a strong desire to get rid of programs that create dependency in able-bodied people." This is similar to his response to a question about how he would get his message to minority voters at February’s 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference. "I’m not interested in getting rid of the safety net," he said. "I’m interested in getting rid of dependency, and I want us to find a way to allow people to excel in our society, and as more and more people hear that message, they will recognize who is truly on their side and who is trying to keep them suppressed and cultivate their votes." Carson’s campaign website does not mention specific reforms to the safety net, but his rhetoric indicates he indeed wants to eliminate government dependency. What’s not clear is if that would involve axing the same programs that helped his family get by decades ago. For the record, we could not locate the exact quote referenced in the meme "Eliminate dependency on government," though that language wouldn’t be out of character for Carson. Carson spokeswoman Deana Bass said Carson’s "family did receive benefits briefly when he was growing up in Detroit," but didn’t answer our specific questions about whether he used Pell grants or grew up in public housing. Our ruling A popular liberal Facebook meme aims to hold up Carson’s past reliance on public assistance against him as he calls for eliminating government dependence in high-profile speeches. The meme gets many details of Carson’s biography right, though it also jumps to some conclusions in a few places. More complicated is the comparison between Carson’s past and his plans if elected president. Carson has said he wants to eliminate government dependency, but he also has made clear he intends to maintain programs public safety nets for people who need them. Carson hasn’t elaborated what programs fall into what category, and how those he benefited from would be treated. Overall, the meme is partially accurate but leaves out important details and takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.	None	Occupy Democrats	None	None	None	2015-05-11T16:33:18	2015-05-04	['None']
-pomt-09984	On torture.	half flip	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/apr/28/newt-gingrich/gingrich-has-moderated-tone-torture/	When we hear charges of "most bitter hypocrisy," we know it's time to pull out our Flip-O-Meter. Such was the case when we saw MSNBC host Keith Olbermann attacking Newt Gingrich, a Republican who was House speaker in the 1990s. "Imagine being Newt Gingrich and looking into that mirror this morning and seeing that vast terrain of hypocrisy looking right back at you," Olbermann said on April 27, 2009. At issue: Gingrich's comments on torture. Olbermann said Gingrich was being hypocritical because his 2009 comments on interrogations conducted by the United States on terrorist extremists were not consistent with his comments from 1997 on torture in China. Gingrich then: In 1997, Gingrich was House speaker when Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited the United States. Gingrich was concerned about the persecution of religious minorities in China, and broached the topic in a meeting with Jiang. He then released a statement about the meeting: "Republican leaders made explicitly clear our unwavering commitment to human rights and individual liberty. I believe it was vitally important that we used this opportunity to address the basic lack of freedom — speech, liberty, assembly, the press — in China. ... As I said in China this spring, there is no place for abuse in what must be considered the family of man. There is no place for torture and arbitrary detention. There is no place for forced confessions. There is no place for intolerance of dissent. "While we walked through the Rotunda. I explained to President Jiang how the roots of American rule of law go back more than 700 years, to the signing of the Magna Carta." Gingrich now: Gingrich appeared on the Fox News Channel show On the Record with Greta Van Susteren on April 26, 2009, and said he wasn't sure whether waterboarding was torture. "I honestly don't know," Gingrich told Van Susteren. "I think it's debatable. Lawyers I respect a great deal say it is absolutely within the law; other lawyers say it absolutely is not in the law." Whether it's considered torture or not, Gingrich said waterboarding was "something we shouldn't do." Gingrich explained that it might be warranted in extreme situations. "I am exactly where Sen. (John) McCain was. Sen. McCain said there are very rare circumstances where extreme measures should be used. And those circumstances should be personally signed by the president as commander in chief. And a good example is if you pick up somebody who has planted a nuclear weapon in Washington or New York or Los Angeles or Atlanta and you're trying to find out in the next three hours, where is the nuclear weapon, the president of the United States may well authorize remarkably tough measures because 100,000 or a half million lives are at stake." (Finally, we should note that Gingrich's view that torture is sometimes acceptable is shared by many Americans. A recent Pew poll found that only 25 percent of respondents said that torture is "never" justified. Seventy-one percent felt that torture was justified rarely, sometimes or often.) So, to measure the flip-flop: Gingrich in the past took a more absolute posture on prisoner treatment, saying that "there is no place for abuse in what must be considered the family of man." Now he appears to say that it is okay in extreme cases. If Gingrich had argued, like former Vice President Dick Cheney has, that "enhanced interrogation" is an effective technique and should be used without hesitation, we would be inclined to give him a Full Flop rating. But Gingrich seems to say that torture should be used only in special cases. So we'll give him a Half Flip.	None	Newt Gingrich	None	None	None	2009-04-28T19:49:06	2009-04-24	['None']
-pomt-04474	Eric Cantor "took $5 million from Sheldon Adelson," a Las Vegas casino owner.	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2012/oct/08/wayne-powell/wayne-powell-says-eric-cantor-took-5-million-casin/	In a recent debate, Democrat challenger Wayne Powell accused U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor of receiving a fortune in contributions from a a billionaire Las Vegas casino owner. "You took $5 million from Sheldon Adelson," Powell said. Cantor denounced the accusation as "untrue." We checked Powell’s claim that the House majority leader received $5 million from Adelson, chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. casino empire who is making massive contributions to Republican political action committees this year. Adelson is chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition, an organization that is trying to get Jews to support GOP candidates. Cantor is a member of the coalition. Powell’s campaign cited a July 15, article in Politico about how Adelson and his wife, Miriam, donated $5 million to the YG Action Fund, a super PAC that Politico said is "backed" by Cantor. The story said the couple together had also given another $5 million in February to another Republican super PAC -- the Congressional Leadership Fund -- "backed" by Cantor and other House leaders. We verified the contributions through records through a database kept by the Center for Responsive Politics of political contributions reported to the Federal Election Commission. It showed Adelson and his wife each gave $2.5 million to the YG Action Fund on April 30 of this year. The super PAC, as Politico noted, had been lagging in fundraising before the Adelsons stepped in, collecting just $55,000 for the first three months of the year. YG gets its name from the "Young Guns" label given to a triumvirate of House Republican leaders: Cantor; vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan; and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Ca. The three co-authored a 2010 book titled, "Young Guns: a New Generation of Conservative Leaders." On its website, the super PAC said it is "dedicated to supporting conservative candidates to elected office who hold true to the Young Guns movement." Two former Cantor aides play key roles in the super PAC. John Murray, the House majority leader’s former deputy chief of staff, is president and treasurer. Brad Dayspring -- also a former deputy chief to Cantor -- is an advisor to the super pac, according to a synopsis from Center for Public Integrity. Super PACs arose in the wake of a 2010 Supreme Court decision that allowed unlimited corporate and union spending on elections. Super PACs can raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations, unions, and individuals and spend it to advocate for or against political candidates. But under law, super PACs are not allowed to coordinate their spending with any particular campaign or candidate. They are barred from giving directly to political candidates. Powell’s campaign also pointed to a Politico article that said Cantor’s former aides who run the super PAC still provide the House Majority Leader with messaging advice. Every Republican is Crucial (ERIC) PAC, controlled by Cantor, contributed $5,000 to the YG Action Fund on March 28 -- a month before the Adelsons’ big donations. In early March, Cantor irritated many Republicans by taking sides in a GOP primary in which two House incumbents from Illinois were forced to run against each other because of redistricting. Cantor endorsed freshman Rep. Adam Kinzinger over 10-term Rep. Don Manzullo. Three weeks later, the YG Action Fund paid $52,000 to air a pro-Kinzinger radio commercial. So is donating to YG the tantamount to giving money to Cantor, as Powell says? Ray Allen, Jr., a Cantor adviser, said no. The super Pac and Cantor’s congressional re-election fund are "distinctly different and legally separate entities." "Just as people do not confuse donating to the Republican Party with donating to Cantor for Congress, people understand the difference between donating to the YG Action Fund and donating to Cantor for Congress," Allen said in an e-mail. Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, offered a different take. "Cantor is technically correct that he didn’t accept the money, but in the big picture, Adelson has gained influence with Cantor by donating $5 million to the Young Guns," he said. "Does Cantor personally call the shots at the YG Action Fund? No. But if Eric Cantor wanted some candidate to be funded by the YG Action Fund, you can rest assured that would happen." Since 2001, the Adelson’s have contributed $30,800 to Cantor’s re-election campaigns and $15,000 to Eric PAC. Our ruling Powell said Cantor "took $5 million from Sheldon Adelson." That’s not correct. Adelson and his wife gave $5 million to the YG Action Fund. Cantor has close ties to the super PAC, which is run by two former senior advisers to the majority leader. The group takes its name from "Young Guns," the title of a book Cantor co-authored. Powell would have been correct in saying a super PAC closely tied to Cantor took $5 million from the Adelsons. But he exaggerated when he said Cantor took the money; the YG Action Fund is required to operate independently of Cantor. So we find an element of truth in a largely inaccurate statement. We rate Powell’s claim Mostly False.	None	Wayne Powell	None	None	None	2012-10-08T12:51:54	2012-10-01	['Las_Vegas', 'Sheldon_Adelson', 'Eric_Cantor']
-snes-06015	Wrestler Hulk Hogan has passed away after being shot in the head.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hulk-hogan-death-hoax-2/	None	Computers	None	Snopes Staff	None	Hulk Hogan Death Hoax	7 August 2014	None	['None']
-pomt-12817	"Tanzania farmers face 12 years in prison for trading seeds thanks to foreign aid."	mostly true	/global-news/statements/2017/feb/10/danielle-nierenberg/do-tanzania-farmers-face-prison-terms-trading-seed/	It’s a story of foreign aid doing more harm than good. Money from western governments intended to lift farmers out of poverty has inadvertently opened a pathway to imprisonment in Tanzania, according to Danielle Nierenberg, president of the advocacy group Food Tank. Nierenberg said on Twitter that Tanzania farmers face 12 years in prison for trading seeds thanks to foreign aid. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com The link between the aid and the prison terms is more indirect than the tweet suggests, but Nierenberg is right that a development program spurred (apparently unenforced) policy changes in Tanzania that includes jail time. Let’s parse it out. A questionable alliance Nierenberg told us her source was a December 2016 article in Mondiaal Nieuws, a Flemish magazine. According to the article, Tanzania passed intellectual property rights legislation on seeds as a condition for receiving aid through the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. Spearheaded by the White House in 2012, the New Alliance brings together G8 countries, African governments, development partners, corporations and local businesses. It aims to lift 50 million people out of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa by 2022. Under the alliance, G8 countries (France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, Canada, and Russia) and the European Union committed to providing funding, and hundreds of companies promised investments. Simultaneously, the 10 participating African nations agreed to enact policies to advance agriculture and reduce hunger. But food and poverty advocacy groups say the alliance benefits big agricultural businesses at the expense of small-scale farmers. Seed law reform, in particular, "raises serious concerns that governments will prioritize the adoption and enforcement of strict intellectual property protections of companies over the rights of small-scale producers to develop, save, re-use, exchange, and sell seeds," according to Oxfam. All participating African countries, except Benin, committed to reform seed laws in their cooperation frameworks. Nigeria and Mozambique agreed to comply with seed standards set by regional development organizations. Tanzania, meanwhile, stands out for its even more stringent seed protection goals. The East African country committed to updating laws to align with the International Union for the Protection of New Variety of Plants (UPOV). Members of UPOV, most of which are developed countries, agree to international intellectual property standards for protecting new plant varieties. Under the most recent convention, UPOV 1991, small farmers are no longer able to save, sell or exchange farm-saved seeds, according to Intellectual Property Watch’s Catherine Saez. In 2014, Tanzania enacted a Plant Breeders’ Rights Act — to the objection of farmers’ organizations and civil society organizations. The new breeders’ rights law "disregards the contributions of small-scale farmers, marginalizes their varieties and adversely impacts on their interests and livelihoods as it severely restricts farmers from engaging in their customary practices of freely sharing, exchanging and selling seed/propagating material," 10 organizations wrote in a letter. The legislation protects the intellectual property rights of plant varieties new to Tanzania, and penalizes violators with a fine of 2 million to 10 million Tanzanian shilling (about $900 to $4,500) or up to three years imprisonment, or both. Tanzania also amended its 2003 Seed Act to align with the 1991 UPOV convention and became a member state a year later — to the objection of farmers’ organizations and civil society organizations. The amended seed act imposes a fine of 100 million to 500 million Tanzanian shilling (about $445,000 to $225,230) or between five to 12 years imprisonment, or both, for selling or trading any certified seeds. That being said, we weren't able to find any instances of the fines or prison terms actually imposed on any farmer. Ebe Daems, the author of the Mondiaal Nieuws article Nierenberg cited, told us she wasn't aware of the law being applied either. "The government was claiming the law wasn't intended to be used against small farmers," she said. "NGO's were lobbying to add an explicit exception for small farmers to the law. I don't know if they got anywhere with that by now." Cash with strings? Under the New Alliance, Tanzania received $897 million in funding from developed countries (including $315 million from the United States) and hundreds of millions in investments from corporations. But it’s unclear if this aid was contingent upon Tanzania agreeing to enact more stringent seed protections. Heidi Chow, a food campaigner at the U.K.-based Global Justice Now, characterized the policy update as a conditional for receiving the money. "Big agribusinesses have identified the African continent as the last frontier with the most untapped market potential. What this aid scheme is doing is facilitating that process," Chow said. "The whole UPOV agenda is being very heavily pushed in Africa." Kate Van Waes, policy director of the One campaign, was more skeptical. She pointed out that the seed protections also limited government control on prices and distributions of the seeds. "How the policies that were decided upon got put into place was mostly between governments," she said, adding that the policy provisions aligned with each African nation’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme plans. "I think privatization of the seed sector was something that has been going on for a while. Whether there were conditions, I don’t know." Most advocates agree that the New Alliance lacks transparency and input from farmers and citizens, but there’s disagreement on whether corporations should be playing a role at all. "Sometimes there’s a tendency when you hear privatization is involved (to assume) it’s under the big bad Monsanto thing," said Van Waes. "There’s no way for donor governments or African countries to do it on their own. You have to pull in the private sector." African governments actively welcomed the New Alliance to attract investments to their countries, Chow said, but this led to policies that ceded control of food systems to agribusinesses and protected their investments. "We’re using state money, taxpayer money to change to the African countries’ laws to create a structure that structurally benefits the corporations," she said. "Aid should be aid. You can’t tie it up around policy changes." Our ruling Nierenberg tweeted, "Tanzania farmers face 12 years in prison for trading seeds thanks to foreign aid." Under the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, Tanzania received millions in aid and investments from Western governments and businesses. At the same time, it enacted stronger intellectual property rights for seed varieties that included a maximum sentence of 12 years for violations. So the penalty is an indirect effect of the aid, but whether the sentence was a condition for it is unclear. Futhermore, the government doesn't appear to be enforcing the law. We rate Nierenberg’s claim Mostly True.	None	Danielle Nierenberg	None	None	None	2017-02-10T12:50:10	2017-01-09	['None']
-pomt-05814	Says Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz "opposes the DREAM Act, which is supported by 85% of Latinos."	true	/texas/statements/2012/feb/21/texas-democratic-party/texas-democratic-party-says-ted-cruz-opposes-dream/	In a Feb. 3, 2012, press release, a Texas Democratic Party spokeswoman charged Republicans with using the Latino community "as a wedge to gain support from the extreme wing of their party." Among the examples of what the release sarcastically calls "GOP Latino-outreach efforts" is this statement: "Ted Cruz forcefully opposes the DREAM Act, which is supported by 85% of Latinos." The DREAM Act — which stands for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors — would provide illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children a path to permanent residency if they attend college or serve in the military. The Democratic Party’s statement led us to a two-part fact-check. Let’s start with how Cruz, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, stands on the cited act. We didn’t have to look far. In a transcribed interview with blogger Sonja Harris of Conservatives in Action that Cruz has on his campaign website, the candidate says: "I do not support the DREAM Act and categorically oppose amnesty. I categorically oppose amnesty, and I strongly support legal immigration for those that have followed the rules and come here to pursue the American dream." In December 2010, the U.S. House, which then had a Democratic majority, approved a version of the act. The proposal did not make it through the Senate. Critics of the plan, including many Republicans, say it amounts to amnesty for some illegal immigrants. So, Cruz opposes the act. But is it supported by 85 percent of Latinos? Fortunately for us, PolitiFact Florida recently looked into a similar claim in an ad from the left-leaning political group Presente Action. Concentrating on polls, our colleagues found many national ones that looked at general public opinion on issues such as the DREAM Act, and those polls included Latino respondents. But polls on the opinions of Latinos as a group must have enough Latino respondents to be statistically valid, and most general polls do not meet this standard. However, PolitiFact found two major polling groups that focus on Latinos: Latino Decisions and the Pew Hispanic Center. In its 2011 National Survey of Latinos, the Pew Hispanic Center found that 91 percent favored the DREAM Act when asked this question: "Thinking about immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States illegally when they were children … would you favor or oppose a law that would let these young adults become legal residents if they go to college or serve in the military for two years?" The most recent national poll from Latino Decisions, conducted in January 2012 with Univision News and ABC News, asked: "Do you support or oppose the DREAM Act, which would provide undocumented immigrant youth a path to citizenship if they attend college or serve in the U.S. military?" It found that 66 percent strongly supported the law and an additional 19 percent somewhat supported the law, for a total of 85 percent. In each poll, the margin of error was about 4 percentage points. When we asked the Texas Democratic Party for backup information, spokeswoman Rebecca Acuña also pointed us to a February 2011 national poll by Latino Decisions, with impreMedia, publisher of Spanish-language newspapers in Texas, California, New York and other states. Respondents were asked about the DREAM Act in a section of the survey that began: "In December 2010, Congress considered a number of different policies. For each policy that I read, please tell me whether you approve or disapprove and how strongly." The poll described the DREAM Act as providing "undocumented immigrant children a path to citizenship if they attend college or serve in the U.S. military." The results: 67 percent of respondents said they strongly approved of the legislation and 18 percent said they somewhat approved, for a total — again — of 85 percent. (The margin of error was about 4 percentage points.) Our ruling Cruz said in an interview that he does not support the DREAM Act, and three polls over the past 13 months have shown at least 85 percent of Latinos favoring the legislation. We rate the Texas Democratic Party’s statement True.	None	Texas Democratic Party	None	None	None	2012-02-21T06:00:00	2012-02-03	['Ted_Cruz', 'United_States', 'Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans']
-pomt-09783	"Recent census data shows that the average American family spends over $13,000 a year for health care coverage."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/22/bruce-braley/iowa-democrat-says-families-spend-13000-year-healt/	One of the biggest skirmishes in the health care debate has been over how much ordinary Americans pay for coverage — either under the current system, as Democrats like to point out, or under the new Democratic proposals, as Republicans regularly emphasize. In a Sept. 16, 2009, speech on the House floor, Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley of Iowa argued in favor of the House health care bill, H.R. 3200, by asserting that the status quo is financially unsustainable. "Recent census data shows that the average American family spends over $13,000 a year for health care coverage," Braley said. "And if we don’t change what we are doing right now, in 10 years the average American family will be spending over $25,000 a year on health care coverage. That’s why the time to act is now, and H.R. 3200 does that by expanding access to quality, affordable coverage and bringing true health care reform to the American people." For this item, we'll focus on the assertion that the average American family spends over $13,000 a year for health care coverage. We called Braley's office, and staffers acknowledged that Braley misspoke when he said the numbers come from the Census Bureau. In fact, the numbers come from a study released the day before Braley spoke — a survey of employer-provided health care undertaken annually by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust, an affiliate of the American Hospital Association. The Kaiser/HRET study found that the average annual premium for family coverage under an employer-based plan is $13,375. To come up with that figure, the study used data from 3,188 randomly selected employers with three or more employees. But there's a problem: It's not accurate to say, as Braley does, that "the average American family spends over $13,000 a year for health care coverage." It's true that Kaiser/HRET found the total cost of health care premiums for a family to be $13,375 — but that is not the amount the average family pays out of its own pocket. This is not a trivial distinction. For employer-based health care, which was the only kind Kaiser/HRET studied, the employer pays nearly three-quarters of the freight — $9,860 to be exact, compared with $3,515 for the employee. Now, there are legitimate concerns about health care costing $13,375 per family per year. It's a substantial economic burden for companies to pay so much for their workers' health care, and doing so probably holds down employee wages and economic growth. But Braley didn't say that the high premiums are an economic burden on the economy or on companies. He specifically said that $13,000 is what "the average American family spends." And that's not correct. The Kaiser/HRET estimate of the family share being $3,515 is in the same ballpark as others. The Consumer Expenditure Survey, produced by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that household health care expenditures — which go beyond just health insurance premiums — were $2,853 in 2007, the last year for which data are available. (Only Americans with employer-sponsored health care are included in the Kaiser/HRET survey, which accounts for much of the difference between the two surveys.) A third study, brought to our attention by Braley's staff, was by Milliman Inc., a health care and benefits consulting firm. A study of 2009 health care costs found that the average cost for a family of four is $16,771. The number is a bit higher than Kaiser/HRT's because it also includes family out-of-pocket costs rather than just the cost of insurance premiums. Calculating it this way does increase the size of the employee share of all health care costs. According to the Milliman study, employees paid $4,004 for health premiums and $2,820 out of pocket, for a total of $6,824. (The employer contribution was $9,947.) So, Milliman has employers paying a larger dollar amount than what Kaiser found, but the family portion is still well short of the $13,000 Braley cited. As was the case in a number of other recent PolitiFact items we deemed False (including this one and this one ), Braley would have been correct if he'd simply tweaked what he said. If he'd cited data showing that "the annual health care premiums for the average American family are greater than $13,000," he would have been right. But by adding confusion to the debate, Braley has muddied some already murky waters. In a Sept. 20, 2009, column prompted by the Kaiser/HRET study, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post summarized why misconceptions about the cost of health care matter. "Imagine if people who touched a hot stove felt only a small fraction of the pain from the burn," Klein wrote. "That's pretty much what's happening in our health care system. It hurts enough that we would prefer it to stop, but the urgency is lost. That's the dilemma for Washington wonks trying to fix this mess: They look at the numbers and see health care costs crushing our economy, overwhelming our government, swallowing our wages. But the public isn't feeling it. Virtually no one cuts a $13,375 check for health care. Most pay 27 percent of it, or even less." Jeff Giertz, the communications director for Braley, acknowledged PolitiFact's interpretation of the data, but added, "Regardless of how you measure it, the costs are high and getting higher — there’s certainly no disputing that." Still, even inadvertently glossing over the meaning of these numbers gives the false impression that American families are paying approximately four times as much as they actually are for health care. We rate Braley's statement False.	None	Bruce Braley	None	None	None	2009-09-22T18:39:43	2009-09-16	['United_States']
-pomt-09358	"With this reform, every insured American gets valuable consumer protections, and every uninsured American can become insured."	true	/texas/statements/2010/apr/02/lloyd-doggett/rep-lloyd-doggett-says-health-care-reform-has-cons/	Days before President Barack Obama signed the health care reform bill into law, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, delivered a speech on the House floor saying "you can certainly sum up our many, many pages with four words: 'You've got health care.' "With this reform," Doggett said March 21, "every insured American gets valuable consumer protections, and every uninsured American can become insured." We wondered if Doggett accurately characterized those many pages of the law. Let's start with his proclamation of consumer protections. Sarah Dohl, Doggett's communications director, pointed to 11 consumer protections in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that Obama signed on March 23, plus the House reconciliation bill he signed March 30. This year, for starters, adult children can stay on their parents' health insurance policies until they turn 26. Second, insurers are prohibited from rescinding coverage except in cases of fraud. Third, insurers can't refuse coverage for children for a particular illness — say, asthma — if the child is accepted into a plan or is currently covered on a plan. There's more: Insurers can no longer place lifetime caps on how much they'll pay out. Consumers in private plans will have access to an independent appeals process to contest decisions made by their insurers. Also, insurers won't be able to deny coverage or charge higher premiums because of a person's gender or pre-existing medical conditions. What about Doggett's statement that every uninsured American can now become insured? Keeping in mind that "can" is not the same as "will" and that some parts of the new law will take years to kick in, more people do stand to be insured. Today, some 83 percent of Americans — excluding illegal immigrants — have coverage either through their employer, the private market or government programs such as Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. The new law is expected to increase the share of insured Americans to 94 percent by 2019, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. As of June, people with pre-existing medical conditions can get coverage from a temporary national high-risk pool set to last until 2014 when insurers will be barred from denying coverage to anyone for any reason. Also starting in 2014, most people will be required to have health insurance. There are a handful of exceptions, but individuals who aren't exempt and refuse to sign up with a plan will be required to pay an annual penalty of the greater of $695 per person, up to a maximum of $2,085 per family, or 2.5 percent of household income, whichever is greater. Other aspects of the new law are aimed at easing access to insurance. In 2013, the federal government will create the "consumer operated and oriented" plan to foster the creation of nonprofit, member-run health insurance cooperatives in each state and the District of Columbia. Come 2014, individuals and small businesses with up to 100 employees can purchase coverage administered by a governmental agency or nonprofit organization. That year, Medicaid will be open to anyone under 65 making up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level — which this year is $14,404 for an individual and $29,327 for a family of four. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which has analyzed all the major health care proposals: "This expansion will create a uniform minimum Medicaid eligibility threshold across states and will eliminate a limitation of the program that prohibits most adults without dependent children from enrolling in the program today." Per current law, undocumented immigrants won't be eligible for Medicaid. Another future change, according to Kaiser: Individuals whose incomes are greater than 133 percent of the poverty level who don't have access to affordable coverage through their employer will be able to purchase it through a state-based exchange by 2014. 2014 is the year when Doggett's characterization will prove true. John Greeley, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Insurance, told us that every Texan can already obtain insurance if they choose to do so. Greeley pointed to the Texas Health Insurance Risk Pool, a high-risk pool created by state lawmakers to provide health insurance to residents who lose coverage under a group plan or who can't obtain coverage from an insurer on the private market because of a pre-existing medical condition. (Texas is one of 34 states that have such high-risk pools.) But Stacey Pogue, senior policy analyst at the left-leaning Center for Public Policy Priorities, noted that access to insurance is not always a cinch. An individual may not qualify for coverage, she said, or may not be able to afford it. Per the Texas Insurance Code, the pool's premiums rates are double the rates premiums offered by private insurers,in the private market, to avoid competition with them. As of March, 26,564 Texas residents were insured through the pool, and 6.1 million residents were uninsured, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Now, where does that leave us with Doggett's floor statement? He's right about the law introducing consumer protections. Also, the law is expected to ease access to coverage, though not everyone benefits immediately. Still, starting in 2014, every American will be able to sign up for insurance. We rate Doggett's statement as True.	None	Lloyd Doggett	None	None	None	2010-04-02T17:57:22	2010-03-21	['United_States']
-pose-00316	"Will expedite the development of the Shuttle's successor systems for carrying Americans to space so we can minimize the gap. This will be difficult; underfunding by the Bush administration has left NASA with limited flexibility to accelerate the development of the new systems."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/333/speed-up-development-of-the-next-generation-space-/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Speed up development of the next-generation space vehicle	2010-01-07T13:26:55	None	['United_States', 'George_W._Bush']
-pomt-13186	Says Donald Trump is "the first person running for president, Republican or Democrat, who refused to say that he would respect the results of this election."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/25/hillary-clinton/trump-first-ever-candidate-not-say-hell-accept-ele/	Politicians and commentators on both sides of the aisle have expressed shock at Donald Trump’s refusal to say he’ll accept the outcome of the Nov. 8 election. Many have said Trump’s comments, as well as his baseless accusations that the election is "rigged," are unprecedented in modern politics. That includes his opponent, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. "During that debate, Donald said something — well, he said a lot of things that were troubling. But he said something truly horrifying: He became the first person running for president, Republican or Democrat, who refused to say that he would respect the results of this election," Clinton said at an Oct. 24 rally in New Hampshire. "Now that is a direct threat to our democracy." We wondered if Trump really is the first presidential candidate in American history who would not say that he’ll accept the election results. It’s difficult to prove a negative. But historians and experts in campaign rhetoric told us that while campaigns have challenged results after Election Day, they are unaware of any prior presidential candidate casting so much doubt about an election before it even happens. Before we get into the historical context, let’s take a quick look at Trump’s exact words from the final presidential debate Oct. 19. Moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would "absolutely accept the result of this election." "I will look at it at the time," Trump said. "I'm not looking at anything now. I'll look at it at the time." "But, sir," Wallace said, "there is a tradition in this country — in fact, one of the prides of this country — is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign that the loser concedes to the winner. Are you saying you're not prepared now to commit to that principle?" Trump responded, "What I'm saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense. Okay?" The fact that Trump has to answer a question like this is a first, said Tammy Vigil, a Boston University professor who researches campaign rhetoric. There’s no precedent for a major party candidate being so publicly skeptical of an upcoming election. "Most major party candidates do not make contesting the results an issue; it is simply assumed that they will accept the outcome of the vote," Vigil said. "For that reason few candidates are ever asked the question in as direct a manner as Trump was asked it in the debate. The fact of him having to answer a direct query makes it unusual, and so his answer is unusual." Historical context Trump is certainly not the first candidate in recent memory to question whether there will be voter fraud. In 2008, Republican nominee John McCain said the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Acorn, was "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." McCain's statement and others like it, though, are not equivalent to saying they might not accept the final results. Historians pointed out several examples of elections in the 19th and 20th centuries when the popular vote or electoral college vote was so close that the final results were controversial. But in none of those cases did the presidential candidate challenge the election before it took happened. Take the most recent example: the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the results of which eventually came down in a Supreme Court decision. In that case, it wasn’t until after Election Day that Gore requested the recount in Florida. After an exceptionally close race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960, some Republicans called for a recount, but Nixon distanced himself from them. In the 1800s, several elections fell into the hands of Congress. In those cases, the political parties questioned whether the final results — not the popular vote but the pending congressional decisions — would be legitimate, said Alex Keyssar, a Harvard University professor and expert in voting history. However, he added that the candidates themselves did not question the legitimacy of the outcome before the election took place. And eventually, they conceded, said Brian Rosenwald, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. "Even in 1800, 1824 and 1876, where resolutions took almost until Inauguration Day, we had an outcome accepted, if grudgingly and with concessions, from both parties," Rosenwald said. "People on the losing sides in these elections, as well as 1960 and 2000, often went to their graves believing that they’d had an election stolen from them, but they didn’t move to start or encourage a rebellion." Also notable is the 1860 race. In the lead-up to that election, politicians in several southern states plotted to secede if Abraham Lincoln were to win, said Daniel Feller, a professor of mid 19th century history at the University of Tennessee. Lincoln won, the southern states seceded, and the country descended into civil war. But none of the four presidential candidates that year advocated on the campaign trail for secession if Lincoln were to win, Feller said. Additionally, the South viewed the election results as legitimate and as confirmation that the northern states wanted to stifle their way of life. "Have other presidential candidates announced beforehand they would not accept the results of the election? Not to my knowledge," Feller said. "But has there been a case when enough Americans rejected the results of the election to disrupt the system? Yes." Our ruling Clinton said Trump is "the first person running for president, Republican or Democrat, who refused to say that he would respect the results of this election." There are examples of presidential campaigns challenging elections or raising concerns about corruption after Election Day. But historians and experts cannot point to an example of a presidential candidate himself refusing to say he would accept the results before the election even happens. We couldn't find one, either. If an example of a past presidential candidate saying something equivalent to Trump comes up, or if we find additional information to support Clinton's claim, we’ll update our story. But with the information we have available, for now we rate Clinton’s claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/075ca508-d586-4024-b79e-5c4d637ae144	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-10-25T16:28:07	2016-10-24	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-tron-02763	Top Admiral Fired for Exposing Obama’s Dubai Mansion Purchase	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/top-u-s-admiral-fired-for-questioning-obamas-purchase-of-dubai-mansion/	None	obama	None	None	None	Top Admiral Fired for Exposing Obama’s Dubai Mansion Purchase	Jan 11, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-07727	The high-speed rail project would create "60,000-plus jobs for Floridians."	false	/florida/statements/2011/mar/02/corrine-brown/rail-proponent-says-high-speed-rail-creates-60000-/	Critics of Florida Gov. Rick Scott's refusal of $2.4 billion in federal money for high-speed rail often knock his decision for its apparent hypocrisy: Shutting down the project will cost tens of thousands of jobs, they say, a move that goes against the governor's oft-referenced No. 1 priority. One pro-rail member of Congress, Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, put the jobs estimate higher than any projection we've seen -- about three times as high. "We are going to continue to work for those 60,000-plus jobs for Floridians," Brown told Orlando's WESH-TV on Feb. 17, 2011, the day after Scott announced his intent to reject the money. "With unemployment at 12 percent, we've just got to work this out for the people of Florida." Brown made the 60,000-jobs claim in several news releases, and repeated the figure on March 1 in comments from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Is Scott turning his back on 60,000 jobs -- a little less than 10 percent of the 700,000 jobs he promised to create -- by nixing the Tampa-to-Orlando high-speed rail line? To find out, we turned to the Florida Department of Transportation, which has managed the state's high-speed rail plan since 1991. FDOT's application for federal rail money included predicted economic benefits to the Tampa-Orlando corridor, including the creation of 23,600 direct jobs, like construction and design, and 26,300 indirect jobs, like those created for equipment suppliers. FDOT calculated these jobs in something called "job-years," which, in short, refers to the number of jobs that will be funded each year. Job-years are not how you'd probably think of a job. So let us explain. In the first year of rail construction, 2011, FDOT estimated the project would require a total of 2,100 construction workers and an additional 700 workers providing engineering services. Another 3,400 spinoff workers would be created in the first year, FDOT estimated. That's a total of 6,200 jobs. Construction would then ramp up in 2012 -- ballooning the work force from 6,200 to 21,600, an increase of 15,400 workers. On the surface, most people would say the rail project created jobs for 21,600 people -- some having a job for one year, others having a job for two. But in "job-years," the actual number is 27,800. Here's how FDOT comes up that: They start with the 6,200 jobs from 2011, then add the 21,600 jobs from 2012. The number of jobs created in the final two years of construction decreases. In 2013, a total of 18,900 direct and indirect jobs would be needed to service the construction of the rail line. In 2014, the number drops to 2,100. A report by the Central Florida Partnership, an Orlando-area economic development group, explained it more bluntly: peak rail employment would occur between fall 2012-14 and require about 10,000 workers. That excludes indirect jobs. After the rail line is up and running, FDOT said it will create 600 permanent jobs to operate the 84-mile line and 500 permanent spinoff jobs. In the most optimistic terms, that's 49,900 "job-years" created over a five-year window, including 1,100 permanent jobs. That's short of 60,000 -- the figure cited by Brown -- and that's without even factoring in the jobs vs. job-years part of the claim. Really, the best way to look at the rail project is to say that it would employ directly or indirectly 6,200 workers in 2011, 21,600 workers in 2012, 18,900 workers in 2013, 2,100 workers in 2014 and then 1,100 workers thereafter. But to count job-years, FDOT is adding each year's job count to one big number: 49,900. David Simon, a spokesman for Brown, said he has seen different job numbers for the high-speed rail project, and was not sure where Brown got her 60,000-job figure. He believed it may have come from the state, but noted that the state's high-speed rail website has been taken down and is no longer accessible. Whatever the number, he said, people should be asking Scott why he wants to kill the jobs created by the high-speed rail project. Maybe so. But we're here simply to examine Brown's numbers. In the media, in press releases, and on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Brown said the Tampa-to-Orlando high-speed rail project would create 60,000 jobs. That number is too high. In reality, the project would create construction and construction spinoff jobs for parts of four years. The number of the jobs varies depending on the year of construction, but peaks at a total of 21,600 jobs in the second year of work. Once the high-speed rail line is operational, the state anticipates the creation of 1,100 permanent direct and indirect jobs. Yes, the project creates jobs. But not to the extent Brown suggests. We rate this claim False.	None	Corrine Brown	None	None	None	2011-03-02T18:22:22	2011-02-17	['None']
-para-00223	As health minister Tony Abbott "took $1 billion out of hospital funding for the states".	false	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/16/kevin-rudd/abbott-blamed-cut-never-happened/index.html	None	['Budget', 'Health']	Kevin Rudd	Peter Martin, Flynn Murphy, Peter Fray	None	The $1bn question: did Abbott do it?	Friday, August 16, 2013 at 9:30 a.m.	None	['Tony_Abbott']
-pomt-06358	Repealing the health care law "would save $95 billion in 2016."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/nov/04/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-repealing-obamacare-would-save-95/	Mitt Romney has recently been emphasizing one of the favorite themes of the tea party movement: cutting government spending. He’s been getting pretty specific about some of his ideas, both in an op-ed in USA Today and in speeches on the campaign trail. His plans include ending subsidies for Amtrak, stopping funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and eliminating foreign aid to countries "that oppose America’s interests." He also wants to save money by rolling back President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. He made the point in the USA Today op-ed, suggesting he would "repeal ObamaCare, which would save $95 billion in 2016." We were surprised by his suggestion. As we remembered the health care negotiations, Democrats took pains to make sure the 2010 health care law was projected to reduce the deficit, and they bragged repeatedly about their numbers. We contacted the Romney campaign, which referred us to an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the agency that independently calculates the cost of laws proposed by both parties. In February 2011, the CBO published an analysis of a Republican measure to fully repeal the health care law. The analysis was for H.R. 2, "the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," a simple repeal bill that House Republicans approved on Jan. 19, 2011. Keep in mind, though, that repealing the health care law doesn’t only cut spending. The law had many moving parts, some of which were revenue sources to offset the spending and reduce the overall federal deficit. The law spent money on providing tax subsidies to help people buy insurance and by expanding the Medicaid health insurance for the very poor. But it offset those additional costs by slowing the growth of future spending on Medicare, the health insurance program for Americans over age 65. And, it generated revenues for the government by creating new excise taxes on high-cost health insurance plans (the "Cadillac" plans); adding new Medicare taxes on people with high incomes; and charging new fees to health insurance companies and health care manufacturers. In other words, if you fully repeal the law, you would also be repealing things that reduce the deficit, such as cost reductions and higher taxes. Romney cited a reduction of $95 billion in 2016, but that number only counts what the law spends that year. Most of the spending is for subsidizing coverage for the uninsured. That same year, the law also is projected to raise revenues of $78 billion, largely through new taxes on the wealthy and new fees on the health care industry. So according to the CBO analysis, a full repeal of the bill would reduce the deficit by $16 billion in 2016, much less than the number Romney cited. And then there’s the broader picture: When the CBO looked at the first 10 years of repeal, from 2012 to 2021, it found that repeal added $210 billion to the deficit. So the deficit would actually be lower if the law is not repealed. Finally, we should note that a repeal of the law would not necessarily be "easy. "Romney would need to have solid Republican majorities in Congress, including 60 members in the Senate to block filibusters. If Romney had only criticized the law as an expansion of government spending, he would have been on firmer ground. Instead, he asserted that a repeal of the law would save significant money -- $95 billion. In fact, the law included new taxes and cost reductions so that the actual savings for the year he cited would be much smaller -- $16 billion. And, over the long haul, repealing the law actually adds significantly to the deficit. So we rate his statement False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2011-11-04T17:47:44	2011-11-04	['None']
-pomt-14749	Says Marco Rubio "is the one for an open border."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/15/rand-paul/rand-paul-said-marco-rubio-open-border/	U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has been a target of some of his fellow GOP presidential candidates for his leadership on trying to change immigration laws in 2013. During the CNN debate in Las Vegas Dec. 15, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said that Rubio has opposed border security: "He thinks he wants to be this ‘Oh I am great and strong on national defense,’ but he is the weakest of all the candidates on immigration. He is the one for an open border that is leaving us defenseless." Is Rubio for an open border? In a word, no. An open border allows people to travel freely or with very few restrictions between two countries. Rubio wasn’t for an open border in 2013, nor does he support it this year while running for president. 2013 immigration law In 2013, Rubio and seven other senators (dubbed the Gang of Eight) crafted bipartisan legislation that passed the Senate. The bill required more border security before unauthorized immigrants could pursue legal status -- a path that included significant hurdles. As for border security, the bill included billions for border enforcement over a decade, for new surveillance equipment and fencing along the Mexican border, as well as adding 20,000 border agents. GOP Sens. John Hoeven of North Dakota and Bob Corker of Tennessee introduced the compromise amendment that included the beefed up security measures. The senators said that the additional border agents -- which would have doubled the number at the time -- would have cost $25 billion. At the time, Rubio told Fox News, "If you look at what’s being proposed here, this is a dramatic expansion and improvement in border security that I hope will allow finally for this legislation to have the support it needs." The Hill reported that Corker and Hoeven said Rubio played an active role in negotiating the amendment. In an interview on June 20, 2013, about a week before the Senate vote, Fox News’ Martha MacCallum asked Rubio if the bill would protect the border. "Well, it’s a dramatic improvement in border security," Rubio said. "It’s a major surge in border enforcement, and I think it’s important to explain why that’s necessary. Look, as I said before, America’s a special country, so special that people are willing to come here no matter what. Even some people are willing to risk their lives and do it illegally. And we’re compassionate about that, but we’re also a sovereign country. We have a right to protect our borders, every sovereign country does, and that’s why this is so critical." The bill died after House leadership refused to bring the bill to a vote. Rubio still supports changing immigration laws, but on the campaign trail he has called for a piecemeal approach and emphasized that he thinks border security must be beefed up before other changes to immigration laws. During the debate, he repeated many of those points when CNN’s Dana Bash asked Rubio if he still supports a path to citizenship. Rubio said that Americans won’t trust the federal government to change immigration laws until illegal immigration is under control. "We know what it takes to do that," Rubio said. "It takes at least 20,000 more additional border agents. It takes completing 100 miles of fencing. It takes a mandatory E-Verify system and a mandatory entry exit tracking system to prevent visa overstays." A spokesman for Rubio pointed to this statement when we asked about Paul's claim. Paul's team pointed to Rubio's work on the Gang of Eight bill as support for Paul's statement. But that legislation did not create or even suggest open borders. "If Sen. Rubio was really for open borders, the Gang of Eight bill wouldn't have been 1,198 pages long while doubling the size of border patrol," said Alex Nowrasteh, an expert on immigration at the libertarian Cato Institute. Steven Camarota, at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for low levels of immigration, said that "open borders is always an overstatement." But the bill would have dramatically increased immigration, he said. Our ruling Paul said that Rubio "is the one for an open border." An open border allows people to travel freely or with very few restrictions between two countries. Rubio doesn’t support anything like that. He was one of the authors of a 2013 bill that included billions for border security and more border agents. After that bill died in the House, Rubio has repeatedly said that the border must be secured before the Senate can revisit changing immigration laws. The idea that Rubio supports an open border is inaccurate and ridiculous, so we rate Paul’s statement Pants on Fire.	None	Rand Paul	None	None	None	2015-12-15T23:39:48	2015-12-15	['None']
-goop-00502	Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher Headed For Divorce Over “Cheating Secrets,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/mila-kunis-ashton-kutcher-divorce-cheating-secrets/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher NOT Headed For Divorce Over “Cheating Secrets,” Despite Report	11:39 am, August 8, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08090	Sen. Jim Webb "persists on negating" Sen. Mark Warner’s votes	false	/virginia/statements/2010/dec/15/george-allen/george-allen-says-sen-jim-webb-negates-votes-sen-m/	Former U.S. Sen. George Allen is taking aim at a rival who took away his seat in 2006, Sen. Jim Webb. In a Dec. 9 news release, Allen criticizes Webb for breaking with Virginia's junior senator, Democrat Mark Warner on two recent votes. Webb opposed banning earmarks and backed an unsuccessful effort to advance legislation that would give police and firefighters’ unions collective bargaining rights. Allen, a Republican, is considering a 2012 rematch with Webb. He says Webb, a Democrat, "canceled out Senator Warner’s" votes and "denied our commonwealth a voice in the Senate." Allen writes: "No one expects both of our Senators to agree all the time, but when one persists on negating the other, the will of a vast majority of Virginians is ignored, and the Commonwealth is bumped from a leadership role and onto the sidelines." We looked at Allen’s assertion that Webb "persists on negating" Warner’s votes. The Oxford Dictionary offers this definition for the verb persist : "Continue firmly or obstinately in an opinion or a course of action in spite of difficulty, opposition, or failure." Has Webb really established a pattern of parting with his fellow Virginia senator and party mate? We went to the voting records. According to Open Congress’s head-to-head comparison, the two senators have voted together 727 times time since Warner took office in January 2009, or 87 percent of the time. That’s 2 percentage points shy of the average voting similarity for Democrat senators -- 89 percent. So it seems hard to support the assertion that Webb "persists on negating" Warner while voting with him almost nine times out of 10. "Webb votes far more often with his fellow Democrat Warner than not, said Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University. "Picking a few issues of differences does not prove that the senators are marching in opposite directions." "But so what if they disagree some times?" he added. "Allen's argument is frankly silly. Are two senators supposed to vote as a unit on each issue merely because they are from the same state? Our electoral system never anticipated unity of state delegations. Let's say the House delegation from Virginia goes 6-5 on some issue. Does that mean that 10 members canceled each other out and only one mattered?" Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, agreed. "It is highly misleading to suggest that Webb ‘persists’ in negating Warner," he said. "The Senate’s roll call records clearly show this is not true." Republican Senators vote together 78 percent of the time on average, according to Open Congress. So it would seem that there’s even more "negating" occurring on the other side of the aisle. Democrat and Republican senators average a 46 percent voting similarity. "The unusual twist here is that this is a tactic most often employed in a state when one senator is a Republican and the other senator a Democrat," Sabato said of Allen’s attack. "The irony is that the charge would almost certainly be accurate if the two Virginia senators were named Mark Warner and George Allen." Sabato’s point : If Allen were elected to replace Webb in 2012, the chances are nearly 100 percent that Warner and Allen would cancel out each other’s votes on the Senate floor far more often than do Warner and Webb. Just as point of interest, Webb votes with his party 85 percent of the time while Warner votes with party 91 percent of the time. So it’s clear that Allen is wrong to say that Webb persists in negating Warner based on total voting records. But maybe he’s pointing to a more recent trend. Since Congress reconvened in November after a recess, the two Virginia senators have both voted on 22 measures, differing on four of them (two of which are the basis for Allen’s claim). They agreed 82 percent of the time. That’s lightly lower than their average, but hardly a persistent disagreement. What about key votes? The senators voted together on health-care reform, the 2009 Stimulus bill, the Pay-As-You-Go Act increasing the statutory limit on the public debt, the HIRE Act, or Senate jobs bill, and most recently on the National Defense Authorization Act for FY11 (including the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) and the Dream Act. Not a lot of division on big issues. How about the suggestion that casting a differing vote is "negating" Warner’s, thereby robbing the Commonwealth of a voice? Couple problems there. 1) Why is Webb the one negating Warner? Couldn’t Warner just as easily be negating Webb? 2) Oxford defines "negate" as "nullify; make ineffective." Is a vote nullified or made ineffective just because one senator voted another way? Of course not. Virginia is not a sovereign federal entity in which legislation only affects the commonwealth if both of the state’s senators agree. "The constitutional framers created two senators from each state and staggered election cycles in part to ensure there would be different voices, which leads to better representation," Rozell noted. "Without independent judgment by each senator, why not just have one senator from each state?" Sabato said. "The assertion that one vote ‘negates’ the other is simplistic, obviously, since the real goal is to achieve 51 votes (most floor measures) or 60 votes (to shut off a filibuster and proceed to a vote) or 67 votes (treaties and impeachment convictions), depending on the circumstances." Let’s recap: On the basis of two votes upon which Virginia’s two senators differed, Allen claims that Webb has established a pattern of canceling out Warner’s votes, thereby neutralizing Virginia’s voice in the Senate. The argument is deeply flawed. Webb and Warner vote together 87 percent of the time, and rarely differ on key votes. Were a Republican to replace Webb, that percentage would undoubtedly plummet. Disagreeing doesn’t deny Virginia a voice in the Senate, it merely offers two opposing ones. We find the claim to be False.	None	George Allen	None	None	None	2010-12-15T10:30:00	2010-12-09	['Jim_Webb', 'Mark_Warner']
-pomt-13234	"It’s possible that non-citizen voters were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina."	pants on fire!	/north-carolina/statements/2016/oct/19/donald-trump/trump-wrongfully-says-immigrants-voting-illegally-/	In his ongoing mission to claim that the presidential election is being rigged against him, Donald Trump said there have been real-world instances of stolen elections. We have already ruled Trump’s claims of "large scale voter fraud" nationwide this year to be Pants On Fire, but on Monday night Trump made a much more specific claim during a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. "It’s possible that non-citizen voters were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina," Trump said. North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes hardly would have made 2008 Republican nominee John McCain the president – Obama won 365 votes in the Electoral College to McCain’s 173. But this claim of an illegitimate victory is still a pretty shocking accusation coming from the current Republican nominee. We wondered if it could be true. Could illegally cast ballots have handed North Carolina to Obama in 2008? North Carolina figures to be a toss-up again this year, after it narrowly went for Mitt Romney in 2012. A RealClearPolitics average of polling from the first half of October showed Hillary Clinton with a 3-point lead over Trump in the Tar Heel State. Evidence of illegal voting? Elections expert Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC-Irvine, said Trump is wrong. "I don’t think it’s possible," said Hasen, who runs the ElectionLawBlog.org website. But what do Trump and his campaign say about the statement? After Trump’s speech Monday, his campaign’s co-chairman Sam Clovis defended Trump’s argument in an interview with a radio show affiliated with the Boston Herald newspaper. "I don’t think it’s irresponsible," Clovis said. "I think it raises an issue." That issue, he said, is some states have made it easier for immigrants living here illegally to get driver’s licenses – and, he said, that makes it easier for them to vote. However, North Carolina does not allow such immigrants to get licenses at all, so it’s unclear why Clovis brought that up. Nevertheless, we did some digging and found what Trump or his speechwriters seemed to be citing – a 2014 op-ed from one of the newspapers Trump once banned from his rallies, the Washington Post. In it, two political science professors said they had studied how often immigrants – here legally or illegally – might vote in U.S. elections. Trump quoted from their study almost verbatim in his speech, although he did not mention that there are serious concerns over its validity. Significant statistical errors? On the Washington Post website, above the op-ed about the study, you see an editor’s note that the study has earned at least three separate rebuttals, as well as a peer-reviewed article saying the data the study used doesn’t provide evidence of what the study claimed. The original study’s authors have defended their work, but we have to ask: Is Trump citing a debunked study? The main issue deals with sourcing and sampling. The authors of the study didn’t do the survey work themselves but instead pulled it from data collected by the Harvard-affiliated Cooperative Congressional Election Study. However, two weeks after the study was first published in 2014, the CCES wrote a response that has advised researchers not to use its data in that way – because its data on non-citizens drew from a very small sample size of 339 respondents nationwide. The CCES furthermore said that it wasn’t specifically surveying non-citizen voting habits, so it didn’t correct for errors in that portion of its survey – and that it believed 16 or 17 percent of the respondents mistakenly reported they were non-citizens, either because they were confused or simply clicked the wrong box on the online survey. The CCES researchers repeated those concerns in another op-ed for the Washington Post, published this week after Trump resurfaced the old study that relied on their work. Among the 339 supposedly non-citizen respondents, 38 (11.3 percent) said they voted. The researchers in the study that Trump cited were unable to confirm 33 of those votes, leaving them with five verified votes (1.5 percent). Like the political scientists who have called this study into question, we have a hard time using five (or even 38) anecdotes to extrapolate a scenario for the entire country, involving millions of people. But for the sake of argument, we’ll put that apprehension aside and look at the data. There were approximately 650,000 immigrants in North Carolina in 2008, about a quarter of whom were citizens. That means there were approximately 487,500 non-citizen immigrants. Surely they weren’t all adults, but let’s pretend they were. If 1.5 percent of them voted, that would mean 7,313 non-citizens voted in North Carolina in 2008. Obama won the state by about 14,000 votes, so even if every single one of them had voted for Obama, their illegal voting would not have been enough to sway the election. So even using the widely criticized study’s findings, in order to come up with a result that influenced the election you would have to: 1. Double their verified rate of voting, 2. Assume that no immigrants are under the age of 18, and 3. Assume that McCain received 0 percent of the non-citizen vote. We simply don’t think that’s likely, and neither does at least one federal appeals court. Hasen, the election law expert, wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week that "the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded last month than only a "tiny fraction" of voters are non-citizens and that there is no evidence it is a serious problem." Actual allegations in North Carolina are few and far between We also checked with the N.C. Board of Elections, which said in a statement: "We have no indication that thousands of non-citizens voted in the 2008 elections, and we don’t believe that amount of potential voter fraud would have gone unnoticed or unchallenged." In 2008, North Carolina reported 23 allegations of non-residents either voting or registering to vote. Elections board spokesman Pat Gannon said while the office currently tracks such allegations after referring them to the courts, it did not in 2008, so it’s unclear how many of those 23 reported cases were actually illegal. Scott Huffmon, a political science professor at Winthrop University, said the 23 allegations could include immigrants (legal residents as well as those living here illegally) as well as U.S. citizens from other states. He also that, in general, it would make no sense for an immigrant living in the U.S. illegally to try to vote. "Would any rational person put themselves in jeopardy of being deported for the virtual zero probability of influencing an election?" Huffmon said. Our ruling Trump said "it’s possible" that Obama won North Carolina in 2008 because of non-citizens voting illegally. There is no evidence to support that theory, and that’s not for a lack of attention. A federal appeals court has looked into it, as has the N.C. Board of Elections, and both found nothing of concern. Political scientists also disagree with Trump. And even if the study Trump was citing is valid – although many say it's not – it still doesn’t back up Trump's claim. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/96c8274a-cbbd-4be5-b9dd-1afe2d6d2e19	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-10-19T18:39:20	2016-10-17	['Barack_Obama', 'North_Carolina']
-pomt-06657	"In writing his book, Gov. Perry pointed out that … by any measure Social Security has been a failure."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/12/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-rick-perry-believes-social-securi/	At a Republican presidential debate in senior-rich Florida, Mitt Romney took Rick Perry to task on Social Security. "In writing his book, Gov. Perry pointed out that … by any measure Social Security has been a failure," Romney said in the CNN/Tea Party Express debate in Tampa on Sept. 12, 2011. Here's the full quote: WOLF BLITZER: "Gov. Romney, you said that Gov. Perry's position on Social Security is, quote, unacceptable and could even obliterate the Republican Party. Are you saying he could not, as Republican nominee, beat Barack Obama?" MITT ROMNEY: "No, what I'm saying is that what he just said, I think most people agree with, although the term Ponzi scheme I think is over the top and unnecessary and frightful to many people. But the real issue is in writing his book, Gov. Perry pointed out that in his view that Social Security is unconstitutional, that this is not something the federal government ought to be involved in, that instead it should be given back to the states. "And I think that view, and the view that somehow Social Security has been forced on us over the past 70 years that by any measure, again quoting book, by any measure Social Security has been a failure, this is after 70 years of tens of millions of people relying on Social Security, that's a very different matter." Romney's source? Perry's 2010 book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. We pulled out our copy and found the correct passage. (Read more from PolitiFact about Perry's book.) Five pages into a section called, "Runaway Entitlement Spending," on Page 62, Perry writes: By any measure, Social Security is a failure. As author Jim Powell points out in FDR's Folly, one pro-FDR historian justified Social Security not on its merits but as an important "symbolic gesture to demonstrate that Roosevelt's heart was in the right place." This sounds a lot like justifying the current administration's policies because well-meaning politicians want to provide "hope." Now, if you say Social Security is a failure, as I have just done, you will inherit the wind of political scorn. Seniors might think you want to cut the benefits they have paid for. Politicians will seek to take advantage, stirring up fear about benefits that will be lost if you elect another "heartless Republican." I get it. That's why only retired senators chair entitlement commissions. We are told that no politician has the courage to raise these issues, even if avoiding them puts us on the fast track to financial run. But by remaining quiet, politicians are really saying they think the American people won't understand it if we share the grim details of our financial future, and that voters will simply kill -- or vote against -- the messenger in order to continue to receive an underfunded benefit that robbed them of the tens of thousands of dollars they should have made. Is that how we should respect our fellow citizens? So indeed, Perry said Social Security "is a failure;" he even acknowledged that doing so means he will "inherit the wind of political scorn." What did Perry mean by "the tens of thousands of dollars they should have made"? In the same section of the book he says payroll taxes would have been better left in workers' pockets: "If only the New Dealers had been kind enough to allow workers to make their own choice about whether to participate. As we know from experience, individuals would have done better on their own." He points out that "many private pension plans return 8 percent per year, compared to Social Security's paltry 2 percent or less." Then he offers the example of three Texas counties that opted out of Social Security for a private option before that door was shut in 1983. "Employees in those private plans, having exercised their liberty at Washington's sufferance, are reaping the benefits." He doesn't address Social Security's other roles, such as disability insurance and survivor's benefits, nor what he believes should happen to low-income workers who under Social Security draw more in retirement benefits then they're able to contribute in payroll taxes. Does Perry stand by his 2010 book? Less than a month ago he told a reporter in Des Moines, "I haven't backed off anything in my book. So read the book again and get it right." On Sept. 11, 2011, he clarified for USA Today, "As I said at the Reagan Library recently, Social Security benefits for current recipients and those nearing retirement must be protected. For younger workers, we must consider reforms to make Social Security financially viable." But Romney made it clear he was quoting from Perry's book. He said "In writing his book, Gov. Perry pointed out that … by any measure Social Security has been a failure." And indeed, in Perry's book, Fed Up!, he touts the benefits of private plans and says: "By any measure, Social Security is a failure." We rate Romney's statement True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2011-09-12T20:54:54	2011-09-12	['None']
-vees-00109	The 58-minute Aug. 2 video, a spliced version of which trended over the weekend and caused social media uproar, opens with her co-host, Drew Olivar, chanting “Pepe-dede-ralismo,” punning “federalism” and the Filipino words for female genitals and breasts.	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-mocha-uson-video-blunders-federalism	Of the three countries mentioned in the video, only the U.S. has a federal form of government. France and Singapore have unitary governments.	None	None	None	Mocha Uson,federalism	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Mocha Uson video blunders on federalism	August 06, 2018	None	['None']
-afck-00034	“For the first time, 30% of the budget was earmarked for capital expenditure”	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/buharis-2018-democracy-day-speech-7-main-claims-under-scrutiny/	None	None	None	None	None	Buhari’s 2018 Democracy Day speech: 7 main claims under scrutiny	2018-05-29 01:51	None	['None']
-pomt-07609	The coalition of Arab states against Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi is the biggest coalition against a fellow Arab leader since the Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/mar/22/robin-wright/robin-wright-says-coalition-against-gadhafi-wides/	Shortly after the launch of air and missile attacks against Libya by an international alliance that included the United States, journalist Robin Wright sought to provide television viewers with some context for understanding the coalition of nations opposing Moammar Gadhafi, the alliance’s target. During a roundtable segment on the March 20, 2011, edition of ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour, the host asked Wright -- a veteran diplomatic correspondent who’s now a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace -- whether Gadhafi is "crazy" and how secure his hold on power is. "He could prolong this for a very long time," Wright said. "This is not a man who plays by international rules, nor is he a man who thinks like even many of his counterparts in the Arab world, and that's why I think you've seen a great deal of unity in the Arab world against him. …" Amanpour interjected, "Which is really unusual, to have such a big Arab coalition against a fellow Arab leader." Wright agreed, saying, "And we haven't had one like this since the Iraq war back in 1990-1991. And that's what's, in fact, given the international community the legs. Without that, we probably would not be engaged." We wondered whether Wright was correct about the scope of Arab support for these alliances. So we looked into it. The Persian Gulf War The Persian Gulf War was waged to eject Iraqi troops from Kuwait, which had been invaded by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in August 1990. Thanks in large part to the diplomacy of then-President George H.W. Bush, a broad, international coalition was brought to bear against Hussein, and by the end of February 1991, allied troops had succeeded in pushing Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Troops from several Arab states took part in ground combat, notably Egypt, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Several smaller states along the Persian Gulf also took part in the war either in combat roles or by providing logistics or base support -- Bahrain, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The main exception among major Arab states was Jordan, which sided with Iraq. The Iraq War The next major conflict involving an Arab leader was the Iraq War, launched in 2003 by President George W. Bush with the aim of toppling Hussein, who had remained in power despite the 1990-1991 war. This conflict proved much more controversial internationally, and the Bush administration had little success signing up Arab support. Scott Althaus and Kalev Leetaru of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have recorded in great detail the shifting membership of the "coalition of the willing" -- the younger Bush’s list of Iraq War supporters, but we could only find one Arab nation on the list, Kuwait. Libya Following a wave of popular uprisings against entrenched leaders across the Arab world, rebellion sprang up in Libya, which had been ruled for decades by Gadhafi. The rebels scored some quick victories, but by mid March, forces loyal to Gadhafi began to gain back lost territory. Fears of wider bloodshed rose, and international diplomacy kicked into high gear. On March 12, 2011, the Arab League -- a group of nearly two dozen Arab nations that recently suspended Libya’s membership -- urged the United Nations to establish a "no-fly" zone aimed at crippling Gadhafi’s ability to strike the rebels from the air. On March 17, 2011, the U.N. Security Council complied, and the U.S., France and the United Kingdom drew up military plans. Attacks began on March 19. In addition to the Arab League’s support for the mission, at least two Arab nations -- Qatar and the United Arab Emirates -- have reportedly pledged tangible military assistance. On March 21, Al Jazeera reported that a French military spokesman had said that four Qatari jets were expected to take part in operations against Gadhafi. In addition, there are unconfirmed news reports that Egypt is letting arms shipments into the rebels in neighboring eastern Libya, but the Egyptian government -- which is in a transitional status following the ouster of longtime leader Hosni Mubarak in a popular revolution earlier this year -- has not made any official pledges of military support. Our conclusion Wright is correct that the Libya campaign represents the largest alignment of Arab states against a fellow Arab leader since the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991. However, the significance of this fact is the subject of some debate. For starters, support for the Libyan situation is in flux. Just days after calling for the no-fly zone, the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, backtracked somewhat by expressing reservations about the risks of civilian deaths in the initial round of attacks. Later, in comments to reporters in Cairo, he reaffirmed support for the coalition’s efforts. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether more Arab nations will join the effort individually -- and whether troops take as significant a role in the Libyan operations as Arab troops did during the Persian Gulf War. In other words, it’s very early in the process, and Arab support could dissipate. On the other hand, even if the extent of military assistance by Arab states proves to be limited, experts told PolitiFact that the political and diplomatic consequences so far are by themselves notable. "I think Robin’s point is that Arab states have not lined up together, militarily or politically, against a fellow Arab leader like this since 1991," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch. "They could have done so in other cases – in Sudan over Darfur, for example, or against Gadhafi at various points in the past, or even against Mubarak earlier this year. But they didn’t, and now they have. And I wouldn’t say that’s trivial." Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, agreed, saying that the difference between the lack of Arab support for the Iraq War and the support for the situation in Libya is "extremely significant." The full history of this episode remains to be written. But at this early stage, we rate Wright’s statement True.	None	Robin Wright	None	None	None	2011-03-22T09:56:48	2011-03-20	['Muammar_Gaddafi', 'Libya', 'Gulf_War']
-pomt-12968	"Since the Sandy Hook tragedy, more than seven children PER DAY have died from gun violence."	mostly true	/california/statements/2016/dec/27/jackie-speier/examining-claim-7-children-day-die-gun-violence/	U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, is one of California’s most prominent advocates for gun control -- and one of the few members of Congress to personally experience and survive gun violence. Speier was shot five times at point blank range in 1978 on a trip accompanying Rep. Leo Ryan to Jonestown, the remote commune in Guyana where 909 people died from cyanide poisoning and other means. Speier was a legal adviser to Ryan, who along with four others were shot and killed in an ambush near the compound. Speier was rescued a day later. Since then, she’s spent much of her career in politics leading the call for gun safety. It was no surprise Speier spoke out against gun violence on Dec. 14, 2016, the fourth anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The shooter killed 20 students, ages six and seven, along with six adult staff members in what’s considered the deadliest mass shooting at a school in U.S. history. On the anniversary, Speier posted an image on Twitter of herself holding a card reading #EndGunViolence. Above the image she claimed: "Since the Sandy Hook tragedy, more than seven children PER DAY have died from gun violence." We wanted to know whether the startling and somber statistic was true. We set out on a fact check. Our research A spokeswoman for Speier cited the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence as the source of the statistic. She said the campaign used information from an online database of fatal injury reports maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We did not hear back from a spokesman for the Brady Campaign. But we found a similar statistic on the organization’s website: "Every day, 7 children and teens die from gun violence." The website notes that it crunched CDC data for children and young people through age 19. The federal agency is considered a leading authority on mortality and injury statistics. It includes data through 2015. To examine Speier’s claim, we searched the database for the number of young people who died in connection with guns from the start of 2013 through 2015. Those are the most recent available years following the Sandy Hook shooting. We found 7,838 deaths in connection with firearms for people ages 0 through 19. That works out to 7.15 deaths a day during this three-year period -- which matches Speier’s claim of "more than seven" per day. These include all types of gun deaths from accidents to homicides to suicides. About 36 percent resulted from suicides. Some might take issue with Speier lumping in 18 year-olds and 19 year-olds as children. Gun deaths for these two ages accounted for nearly half of the 7,838 young people killed in the two-year period. Here’s a look at the breakdown of deaths by age group: 0-4 years: 247 5-9 years: 218 10-14 years: 847 15-19 years: 6,526 The National Institute of Justice, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, has stated that young people aged 15 to 24 are the group most at risk for gun violence. If considering only elementary school aged children, the total who die in connection with guns would be roughly one every four days -- still a tragic number, but not close to seven per day. We interpreted Speier’s use of the word children, however, to include a broader group of young people, including teenagers. Our ruling California Congresswoman Jackie Speier recently claimed: "Since the Sandy Hook tragedy, more than seven children PER DAY have died from gun violence." Speier’s claim is backed up by the CDC’s fatal injury report data, which shows an average of 7.15 young people per day, aged 0 to 19, died in connection with firearms between 2013 and 2015. It’s important to note these include all types of gun deaths: accidents, homicides and suicides. All gun deaths are violent, but Speier’s statement could be interpreted as only including homicides or accidents. Finally, Speier’s claim might also lead some to think she’s talking about young school aged children, given that she invokes an elementary school shooting. The data show teenagers and young adults make up the vast majority of deaths due to guns in America, while elementary aged children account for a small fraction. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the source Speier relied on, offers a more complete look at this statistic on its website. It notes that children "and teens" are included in the seven deaths per day. Speier’s statement is on the right track. But it could have used some clarifications. We rate it Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/423277eb-4cab-4fc1-8ab5-357f808c343d	None	Jackie Speier	None	None	None	2016-12-27T10:00:00	2016-12-14	['None']
-chct-00354	FACT CHECK: Does The U.S. Have The 'Highest Employment Numbers We’ve Ever Had'?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/08/16/fact-check-does-the-us-have-the-highest-employment-numbers-weve-ever-had/	None	None	None	Kush Desai | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	2:07 PM 08/16/2017	None	['None']
-snes-01700	Did a Buffalo Wild Wings Worker Turn Down the National Anthem Because It Is 'Divisive'?	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/buffalo-wild-wings-anthem/	None	Business	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did a Buffalo Wild Wings Worker Turn Down the National Anthem Because It Is ‘Divisive’?	20 September 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-12957	"An estimated 8 million children worldwide live in orphanages or residential institutions. Shockingly, 80 percent of these children are not orphans."	half-true	/global-news/statements/2017/jan/04/lumos/jk-rowlings-charity-wants-end-orphanages-heres-why/	The good majority of orphans in institutions are not actually parentless, according to the charity founded by author J.K. Rowling. "An estimated 8 million children worldwide live in orphanages or residential institutions. Shockingly, 80 percent of these children are not orphans," says Lumos, a group dedicated to ending the institualization of children by 2050. "Children need families, not orphanages." Is it true? Well, maybe. The data Lumos relies on comes from credible sources, but the reality is the information available is outdated and, to some extent, unreliable. The number of orphans living in some institution -- the 8 million figure -- has been floating around for decades. It seems to originate from a 1985 report by Defence for Children International. A more recent tally by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) pins the number at 2 million, but UNICEF cautions that this is likely to be severely underestimated due to underreporting as "many institutions are unregistered, and many countries do not regularly collect and report data on children in institutional care." The claim that 80 percent of children living in an institution are not orphans, meanwhile, comes from a 2009 estimate from Save the Children, an international children’s rights charity. The charity claims that "four out of five children in institutional care have one or both parents alive." These children are placed in orphanages despite having at least one living parent because of poverty or social exclusion (i.e. gender or disability discrimination). Neither figure can be verified without more comprehensive statistical studies than currently available, said Jedd Medefind, the president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans. Most studies are conducted on a local level and "these numbers vary greatly by individual orphanage as well as by region of the world," Medefind aid. UNICEF reports, for example, that 77 percent of more than 11,000 children in orphanages in Cambodia in 2009 had at least one living parent. In Sri Lanka, that number was 90 percent in 2007. On the low end, 39 percent of orphans in Zimbabwe had least one parent Here’s a map from Lumos that illustrates the regional differences. So what exactly is so troubling about having children with parents living in orphanages? Decades of research show that children, especially younger children, placed in institutional care are more likely to experience poor health, developmental delay and emotional attachment disorders. So rather than supporting institutions that have poor track records, UNICEF and virtually all children’s rights groups favor helping destitute families and communities provide care. While not all orphans can be returned to families or relatives, "we can say with confidence that a portion of the children currently living in orphanages could be returned to live with relatives with certain supports and appropriate oversight," Medefind said. In the United States, there were over 415,000 children in foster in 2014, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Our ruling Lumos said, "An estimated 8 million children worldwide live in orphanages or residential institutions. Shockingly, 80 percent of these children are not orphans." Both figures are plausible though not verifiable. A UNICEF report estimated 2 million institutionalized orphans but noted that this is likely severely underestimated. Local studies on the number of institutionalized orphans with at least one parent, meanwhile, range from 30 to over 90 percent. We rate this claim Half True. Share the Facts Politifact 2 6 Politifact Rating: "An estimated 8 million children worldwide live in orphanages or residential institutions. Shockingly, 80 percent of these children are not orphans." Lumos Children's charity in a factsheet Wednesday, January 4, 2017 -01/-04/2017 Read More info	None	Lumos	None	None	None	2017-01-04T13:49:41	2016-12-19	['None']
-goop-00392	Britney Spears Memory Loss Worrying Friends And Family?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/britney-spears-memory-loss-forgetting/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Britney Spears Memory Loss Worrying Friends And Family?	10:04 am, August 24, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-05424	Photograph depicts the removal of Bill Cosby's Hollywood "Walk of Fame" Star.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-cosbys-star-removed/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Was Bill Cosby’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Removed?	1 January 2016	None	['Bill_Cosby', 'Hollywood_Walk_of_Fame']
-vees-00144	VERA FILES FACT SHEET: Impeachment and the judiciary in the ‘Federal Republic of the Philippines’	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-sheet-impeachment-and-justice-federal-republ	None	None	None	None	impeachment,Federal Philippines,Federal Judiciary	VERA FILES FACT SHEET: Impeachment and the judiciary in the ‘Federal Republic of the Philippines’	July 10, 2018	None	['None']
-chct-00305	FACT CHECK: ‘The Vast Majority of Mass Shootings Have Not Taken Place With Automatic Weapons’	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/10/04/fact-check-the-vast-majority-of-mass-shootings-have-not-taken-place-with-automatic-weapons/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	3:09 PM 10/04/2017	None	['None']
-snes-00924	Coca-Cola and Nestle are negotiating with the Brazilian government to privatize the Guarani Aquifier in South America.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nestle-coca-cola-trying-to-privatize-guarani-aquifer-in-south-america/	None	Politics	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Are Nestle and Coca-Cola Trying to Privatize a South American Aquifer?	6 March 2018	None	['Brazil', 'South_America', 'Coca-Cola']
-snes-06433	Photographs show watermelons that have been grown in such a way as to force them into square shapes.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/square-watermelon/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Square Watermelon	20 August 2007	None	['None']
-pomt-11610	"Road projects across the state are staying on track or getting done sooner thanks to the good work of the team at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2018/jan/26/scott-walker/checking-gov-walkers-claim-state-dot-ahead-game/	Given the perpetual orange barrels and accompanying traffic delays on Milwaukee area highways, drivers could be forgiven if they pounded the steering wheel after a recent tweet from Gov. Scott Walker. "Road projects across the state are staying on track or getting done sooner thanks to the good work of the team at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation," the governor tweeted Dec. 18, 2017. Responses from the Twitterverse showed not everyone was in the same lane: "Apparently the 94/45 interchange isn’t part of the state." "#WI: worst roads between the Rockies and Atlantic Ocean" "When is that zoo interchange supposed to be done again? 2018? 2019? 2020? . . . and counting." Let’s give this one a spin. Walker’s evidence Walker communications director Tom Evenson noted the governor’s tweet directly followed the announcement that the State Highway 441 project in the Fox Valley will be finishing in 2019, a year ahead of the previous expected date. "By combining projects on the WIS 441 project into a larger package for construction to bid, WisDOT anticipates more competitive bids, greater contractor efficiencies during construction and estimated saving of $9 million in project costs," Evenson said in an email. In addition, Evenson said, in April 2017, the governor announced that the Transportation Department freed up more than $100 million for additional projects to be advanced. This was a result, he said, of $65 million in savings over the course of the state fiscal year – due to lower gas prices and more competitive bids -- and an additional $38 million in available revenues to add to the Transportation Fund’s FY18 opening balance. Rebecca Kikkert, director of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation Office of Public Affairs, pointed PolitiFact Wisconsin to an April 13, 2017, state DOT announcement of the $38 million savings. "With let savings, WisDOT is able to do additional projects and move scheduled projects ahead advancing them, which enables the completion date for these projects to move ahead and get completed sooner," Kikkert said in an email. Putting on the brakes Craig Thompson, executive director of the Transportation Development Association of Wisconsin, a Madison-based group with a primary mission of outreach to the public, media, and decision-makers about the importance of an integrated transportation network, didn’t disagree with the evidence the Walker administration provided. However, Thompson cited a list of delayed projects, with several major ones among them: I-94 North-South between Kenosha and the Mitchell Interchange. Original scheduled completion: 2016. The completion date if the state receives an applied-for $246 million federal grant: 2021. The completion date without the federal grant: 2032. The state is still waiting to hear whether it will receive all, some or none of its request. I-94 East-West. The safety and congestion problems that prompted state transportation officials to plan the reconstruction and widening of I-94 between 16th and 70th streets in Milwaukee will not be dealt with now that the project has been abandoned. I-43 North-South (Silver Spring Drive. to Wis. 60), Glendale to Grafton - Milwaukee and Ozaukee counties. "This project has been put on hold until further notice," according to an October 2015 announcement on the Wisconsin Department of Transportation website. I-94 between U.S. Highway 12 and State Highway 65 (St. Croix County). Work on the federally-designated truck route between the Twin Cities and St. Croix County was included in the 2017-'19 budget by lawmakers, but vetoed by Walker. To be sure, Walker’s team highlighted cases where -- once contracts have been issued -- work was completed earlier than expected, while Thompson noted delayed by broader funding issues. That said, Walker’s tweet did not make such a distinction clear. It was a broad claim. And -- as many of the Twitter responses indicated -- that’s how many people understood it. Ex-DOT secretary waved caution flag Then-DOT Secretary Mark Gottlieb told state lawmakers at a December 2016 hearing that the conditions of Wisconsin’s highways would worsen if funding trends continue. Under Walker’s budget at the time, 21 percent of Wisconsin’s highway system was projected to be in poor condition by 2018, he said. By 2027, that number would grow to 42 percent. Gottlieb had at times called for increasing taxes and fees to pay for highways. Walker has said he won’t raise gas taxes or vehicle fees unless an equivalent cut is made in other taxes. Gottlieb stepped down less than a month after he told lawmakers Wisconsin’s roads would worsen under Walker's plans. In September 2017, Walker signed the two-year, $76 billion budget. It borrows $402 million for transportation infrastructure, far less than included in recent budgets. The plan delays work on Highway 15 in Outagamie County and the north leg of the Zoo Interchange in Milwaukee County and puts off the reconstruction of I-94 between the Zoo and Marquette interchanges. The reduction in funding for interstates in southeast Wisconsin did a U-turn with the announcement of Foxconn locating in southeast Wisconsin. The state is pinning its hopes for the expanded freeway and related work on a $246.2 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation that would pay for about half the remaining cost. Our rating In a tweet, Walker said "Road projects across the state are staying on track or getting done sooner thanks to the good work of the team at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation." A spokesman said Walker was referring to the early completion of the State Highway 441 project. But that was not specified in the tweet, and a wide range of other projects -- including major ones -- have been delayed. For a statement that is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context, we rate the claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2018-01-26T06:00:00	2017-12-18	['None']
-pomt-01649	Congress is on "vacation."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/aug/22/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-congress-was-going-vacation-eve-/	Last week, PolitiFact Texas gave a Mostly False rating to a claim by Gov. Rick Perry that Congress is "on a five-week vacation," noting that even if lawmakers take some days off, they continue to attend to their districts by holding town halls and other meetings. Not long after that fact-check appeared, a reader wrote in to ask us why we hadn’t taken President Barack Obama to task for using the same terminology to describe the congressional recess. We missed Obama’s comment the first time around, so we’ll check it here. In his weekly address on Aug. 2, 2014, Obama touted recent job gains and urged Congress to act on some of his proposals, including spending on infrastructure, raising the minimum wage, student-loan reforms, equal pay and paid leave. Such initiatives have been stalled in the House, currently controlled by the Republicans, and to an extent the Senate, where the GOP minority has tools it can use to block legislation. So Obama sought to paint congressional Republicans as being derelict in their duty by leaving town for the summer recess. "House Republicans actually got together this week and voted to sue me for taking actions on my own," Obama said. "And then they left town for the month without settling a bunch of unfinished business that matters to working families across America. … And when they return from vacation next month, instead of trying to pass partisan bills on party lines, hopefully we can come together with the sense of common purpose that you expect. And in the meantime, I will never stop doing whatever I can, whenever I can, not only to make sure that our economy succeeds, but that people like you succeed." The White House used the word again in the introduction to the transcript it sent to reporters, saying that "Congress is about to go on vacation." While Perry was referring to a different issue -- border security -- he expressed equal disgust at Congress leaving Washington. "Congress shouldn’t be on a five-week vacation," Perry said. "I can assure you that drug cartels and gangs are not on vacation." We don’t see any significant differences in the context of the two politicians’ uses of the word "vacation," so we’ll recap here what PolitiFact Texas found when it talked to congressional experts and apply it to Obama’s comment. (The White House did not respond to our inquiry for this article.) A 1970 law mandates annual recess The annual August break is required by law, according to an Aug. 6, 2014, Wall Street Journal blog post by Linda Killian, a senior scholar at the Wilson Center, a think tank. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, she wrote, directs the House and Senate to recess for the month of August, until after Labor Day. The act says that unless Congress provides otherwise, the House and Senate shall adjourn no later than July 31 of each year or so and, it looks to us, to remain adjourned to the second day after Labor Day. (It does say the mandate shall not be applicable in any year there’s a state of war as declared by Congress as of July 31.) This year, Congress started its five-week summer recess on Aug. 1, 2014. Is the recess a vacation? It’s one thing not to be in session, but is that the same as taking a vacation? First, there’s the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of vacation: a "period of time that a person spends away from home, school, or business usually in order to relax or travel." Just because it’s called a recess doesn’t mean congressional leaders are taking a break. "Business still goes on," Senate Historian Don Ritchie told Time magazine. "There’s just no action on the floor." Scant business goes on, we suspect, though an official House calendar listed a few hearings scheduled during the 2014 recess — an Aug. 6 hearing of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs on health care access in rural America, hosted by panel Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla.; an Aug. 7 hearing of the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations about combating the Ebola threat; and an Aug. 14 hearing, also by the veterans affairs panel, on rural health care and infrastructure needs. Time’s story said: "Especially because this is an election year, many members will be campaigning, visiting offices and town halls in their home states and holding town meetings. Offices will stay open to receive mail and calls from constituents. Members who aren’t up for reelection might enjoy family time or a vacation," the story said. PolitiFact Texas found many members who held or planned to hold official appearances, outreach sessions with voters and the like during the recess period. The American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein, a longtime congressional observer, said that during recesses, most senators and House members "use this time to travel to trouble spots or to go back and campaign or do meetings in their home districts or states. They are not laying back in the sun, but working. I would prefer more time in Washington legislating, and less time back in the district. But calling this a five-week vacation is a distortion." Obama’s own vacation Meanwhile, we’d be remiss if we didn’t note that Obama himself hasn’t exactly been huddled, monk-like, in the Oval Office this August. He left with his family for a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., on Aug. 9, then returned to Washington for about 48 hours before resuming his vacation. The Obamas’ time away came during an unusually intense news period that included unrest in Ferguson, Mo., the launch of U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic extremist group ISIS, the beheading of American journalist James Foley by ISIS, and the spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa -- pairings that were not lost on many of the president’s critics, as well as some of his supporters. For instance, the New York Times quoted Jim Manley, a veteran Democratic strategist, saying, "As a general rule, I think that he’s right that you can’t be held hostage to the news cycle — the man deserves a bit of downtime," said. "But in this particular instance, I think a lot of Democrats flinched a little bit. … (The video of the beheading) was just so shocking that the idea that he was going to immediately run to the golf course was just a little too much for folks. It was tone-deaf." For the record, CBS White House reporter Mark Knoller, the unofficial chronicler of presidential travels, reports that Obama has taken 19 vacations totaling 125 days so far while in office. That’s far fewer than George W. Bush’s 65 combined trips to his Texas ranch and his parents’ home in Kennebunkport, Maine, which totaled 407 days at the same point in his presidency. A president, Knoller tweeted, "is never really on ‘vacation.’ The job and responsibilities go with him wherever he is." This suggests that Obama should know better than to label Congress’ August recess with the broad brush of "vacation." Our ruling Obama said Congress is on "vacation." Hypocrisy aside -- Obama was about to go on vacation himself just a week later -- he’s stretching it on the terminology. During Congress’ August recess -- mandated by a 1970 law -- lawmakers aren’t debating matters on the floor of the House or Senate. But even if they take some dog days off, the recess isn’t a no-work vacation. Lawmakers continue to attend to their districts by holding town halls and other meetings, and many also campaign. On balance, we rate Obama’s claim the same as Perry’s -- Mostly False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2014-08-22T13:54:56	2014-08-02	['None']
-snes-00682	Paul Ryan nominated televangelist Joel Osteen as the new House Chaplain.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-ryan-osteen-house-chaplain/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Paul Ryan Nominate Joel Osteen for House Chaplain?	1 May 2018	None	['Joel_Osteen', 'Paul_Ryan']
-hoer-00238	Disney Still A Favourite Target for Facebook Scammers	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/disney-favourite-target-facebook-scammers.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Disney Still A Favourite Target for Facebook Scammers	May 13, 2015	None	['None']
-vogo-00218	The Budget Ax that Didn’t Fall: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/the-budget-ax-that-didnt-fall-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	The Budget Ax that Didn’t Fall: Fact Check TV	July 16, 2012	None	['None']
-tron-00702	Rock-rapper Kid Rock is country Singer Hank Williams Jr.’s son	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/kidrock/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Rock-rapper Kid Rock is country Singer Hank Williams Jr.’s son	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-chct-00272	FACT CHECK: Bernie Sanders Video Downplays Health Care Wait Times In Canada	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/11/12/fact-check-bernie-sanders-video-downplays-health-care-wait-times-in-canada/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	9:13 PM 11/12/2017	None	['None']
-tron-00619	NFL QB Colin Kaepernick Converts to Islam, Refuses to Stand for National Anthem	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/nfl-qb-colin-kaepernick-converts-to-islam-refuses-to-stand-for-national-anthem/	None	celebrities	None	None	['criminal justice', 'islam', 'patriotism', 'sports']	NFL QB Colin Kaepernick Converts to Islam, Refuses to Stand for National Anthem	Aug 30, 2016	None	['Islam']
-pomt-08203	"Over the course of one four-year term, it costs taxpayers more than $1 million simply to operate" the governor’s mansion.	true	/wisconsin/statements/2010/nov/21/bob-wirch/state-sen-bob-wirch-says-it-costs-wisconsin-taxpay/	The governor’s mansion -- a kingly abode for the governor and his family, right? Don’t think like a peasant. It is so much more. "Executive residences," as the National Governors Association calls them, are "regarded as an important symbol of the state’s culture and heritage. As state treasures, executive residences provide an appropriate setting for official state entertaining and are often highly valued as a venue for community functions." Oh. The NGA goes on: "Given the critical role executive residences play in official state and cultural activities, considerable care is required in managing, staffing and maintaining the executive residence." Gee, sounds like that could get kinda expensive. Just how much does it cost taxpayers to run the Wisconsin governor’s mansion -- ahem, executive residence? Too much, says state Sen. Bob Wirch, a Democrat from Pleasant Prairie in Kenosha County. Echoing a call he made in 2002, when Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle was elected, Wirch wants Republican Governor-elect Scott Walker to sell or lease the 34-room manor. "Over the course of one four-year term," Wirch claimed in a news release Nov. 15, 2010, "it costs taxpayers more than $1 million simply to operate." Wirch also noted Walker’s own call to citizens for ideas on how to make state government run more efficiently. After all, with a structural deficit, lost revenue because of a state Supreme Court decision and other issues, the new governor faces a projected shortfall of $3 billion for the 2011-’13 budget. "It is hard to set a good example," Wirch said in his statement, "if you are living in a mansion." Walker, who will be inaugurated Jan. 3, 2011, plans to move with his family from Wauwatosa into the residence, said his spokesman, Cullen Werwie. He said Walker has no comment on Wirch’s recommendation to sell or lease the mansion, which is perched on the shores of Lake Mendota. The home’s "replacement value" is $1.63 million, according to the state Department of Administration. But Wirch believes that with its 3.7 acres of land, the estate is worth more than $2.5 million. Perhaps, like us, you’ve never been to the mansion (although you can see it in pictures). Well, according to the Department of Administration, the state Historical Society and the office of first lady Jessica Doyle, it: Is a three-story, 21,000-square-foot (including basement) Georgian Revivalin Maple Bluff, a village northeast of Madison. Was built in 1921 for Madison industrialist Carl A. Johnson and became home to governors after being purchased by the state in 1949. Has 13 bathrooms, seven bedrooms, seven fireplaces and seven garden areas. Nice. So, who takes care of it? Seven employees, according to Vicki Heymann, the mansion’s residence director. Full-timers include Heymann, a chef, a gardener and a "facilities maintenance specialist." The part-timers are a housekeeper, a "laundress and flower arranger," and the head of the waitstaff, who has worked at the mansion for more than 32 years. OK, now let’s get to Wirch’s claim that operating the mansion costs more than $1 million during a four-year term. Wirch’s office said the state Legislative Fiscal Bureau put the operating costs at $265,000 per year. That would come to $1.06 million over four years. The senator’s per-year number is a touch high, but his four-year figure of more than $1 million is on target. The fiscal bureau told PolitiFact Wisconsin that the mansion’s operating expenses are budgeted at $262,500 in 2009-’10 and the same amount for 2010-’11, nearly all of which is salaries. That’s a total of $1.05 million over four years. In fact, actual expenditures are running higher, according to the state Department of Administration. They were $290,462 in 2008-’09 and $273,340 in 2009-’10. If that were carried out over four years, the total would be $1.13 million. Wisconsin is one of 44 states that provided a governor’s residence as of 2004, according to the most recent survey done by the National Governors Association. Here’s how three of the other six treat their governors: Rhode Island doesn’t have a mansion -- and probably doesn’t need one. You can drive across the state in an hour, said Amy Kempe, spokeswoman for the governor. Idaho had a governor’s residence, then didn’t, then did again when one was donated by a billionaire potato magnate. Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter had been receiving a monthly housing allowance of more than $4,000. But Otter stopped taking the money in March 2009 when the 7,400-square-foot Idaho House became available and he opted to continue commuting from his ranch, his spokesman said. California’s governors are on their own, because the state doesn’t provide a residence or a housing allowance, said Joe Wolfenden, senior guide at the California Governor’s Mansion. Now a state park destination, the mansion was last used by a governor in 1967, when Ronald Reagan lived there for three months before moving to a home that had been purchased by friends. OK, let’s bring all this mansion talk home. In calling on Governor-elect Scott Walker to save taxpayer dollars, state Sen. Bob Wirch said selling or leasing the governor’s mansion would enable the state to cut more than $1 million over four years on the cost of operating the mansion. Based on the latest budget and expenditure figures, the operating costs do exceed $1 million over four years. We rate Wirch’s statement True.	None	Bob Wirch	None	None	None	2010-11-21T09:00:00	2010-11-15	['None']
-afck-00338	“Nearly 500 informal settlements have been replaced with quality housing and basic services over the past five years.”	unproven	https://africacheck.org/reports/2014-sona-claims-revisited-zuma-on-service-delivery/	None	None	None	None	None	2014 SONA claims revisited: Zuma on service delivery	2015-02-12 08:38	None	['None']
-snes-06378	Scammers dupe victims into paying "security keeping fees" to receive courier parcels supposedly containing large checks or other valuables.	scam	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/courier-parcel-scam/	None	Crime	None	Snopes Staff	None	Package Pick-Up Scam	11 December 2008	None	['None']
-vees-00164	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Corpses of foreigners found in Boracay	fake	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-corpses-foreigners-found-boracay-fake	None	None	None	None	fake news	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Corpses of foreigners found in Boracay FAKE NEWS	June 22, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03583	Police assuaged the feelings of millennials protesting Donald Trump's victory by distributing participation trophies.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/police-calm-millennial-protesters-by-handing-out-participation-trophies/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Police Calm Millennial Protesters by Handing out ‘Participation Trophies’	10 November 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-12004	"Roy Moore fought for pay increases for politicians while courts had to shut down because of lack of funding."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/sep/22/luther-strange/did-roy-moore-fight-pay-raises-politicians-during-/	Sen. Luther Strange, R-Ala., claims his opponent Roy Moore sought pay raises for politicians while the Alabama courts shut down due to a budget shortfall. "FACT: Roy Moore fought for pay increases for politicians while courts had to shut down because of lack of funding," reads a claim on the Strange for Senate website. Strange and Moore face off in a Sept. 26 runoff vote for the Republican nomination to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general. Is it a fact that Moore fought for pay increases for politicians while courts shut down? We delved into the recent history of Alabama’s court system to find out. Did Moore fight to give pay raises to two staffers? The Strange for Senate website contains a footnote saying the pay raises went to "two of (Moore’s) top political staffers." The website also cites an Associated Press article from April 26, 2002, when Moore served as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, an elected position. "Chief Justice Roy Moore gave pay raises to two of his top administrators this year as the state court system headed toward financial problems resulting in 170 layoffs," reads the article, which goes on to identify the pay raise recipients by name: Moore gave state court administrator Rich Hobson a 5 percent merit raise from $99,538 to $104,587 annually. Scott Barnett, a lawyer who acts as spokesman for the court system, got a 2.5 percent merit raise in January that boosted his pay from $72,103 annually to $73,881, according to records kept by the Retirement System of Alabama. Both men were appointed by Moore after he was elected chief justice in November 2000. When we reached out to Barnett, now an Alabama attorney in private practice, he disputed the notion that Moore was personally involved in giving him a pay raise in 2002. Barnett said it was a department head — not Moore — who recommended his merit raise. "Judge Moore was not, to my knowledge, personally involved in decisions to grant merit pay raises to Administrative Office of Courts employees," Barnett said. "The Alabama Administrative Office of Courts has its own personnel department that manages such issues." Barnett said that given the chief justice’s role as the administrative head of the state's judicial system, it’s unrealistic to think Moore would become involved in granular details like pay raises for individual court employees. Barnett added that, to the best of his knowledge, Moore would not even have needed to approve his pay raise. We contacted two employees at Alabama’s Administrative Office of Courts who corroborated Barnett’s belief that Moore would not have needed to approve his pay raise. "The chief justice would not have to approve a pay raise given to an employee, including a staff attorney, of the Administrative Office of Courts," Nathan Wilson, the assistant administrative director of courts and legal director of Alabama’s Administrative Office of Courts, said in an email. (Officially, Barnett was staff attorney with the Alabama Administrative Office of Courts.) While Barnett received a 2.5 percent pay increase, he was eligible for 5 percent. This raises the question: If Chief Justice Moore had in fact "fought for" Barnett’s raise, as Strange alleges, why did Barnett receive less than the full 5 percent increase? Barnett said he took issue with the amount at the time, and chalked it up to differences of opinion with his boss, the court’s legal director — a position which we’d note is subordinate to the chief justice. With regard to Hobson, the other pay-raise recipient in question, court officials said his raise would have been approved by Moore. We contacted Hobson, who now works as a consultant for Moore’s Senate campaign. He said that while his pay raise did require Moore’s approval, merit-based raises were "standard operating procedure for deserving employees" across the whole of Alabama’s state government, which had some 34,500 employees in 2002, including some 2,500 judicial branch employees. We found that nearly half of Alabama state government employees received a raise in 2002. That year, more than 15,000 state employees received a 5 percent merit raise, while another 1,300 received 2.5 percent merit raises, according to the Associated Press. Hobson called it a distortion to say Moore "fought" to give him a pay raise. "It’s just not true," he said. "I got a raise like everybody else who deserved one got a raise that year." Were the pay raise recipients 'politicians'? We contacted several election law experts and political scientists to ask if court employees like Hobson and Barnett are considered "politicians." The answer? A resounding "no." "My understanding of a politician is someone who either holds or runs for elected office, or is an official of a political party," said James A. Gardner, a law professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School. "I would not count civil servants as ‘politicians.’ Court administrators are civil servants." Richard Fording, a political science professor at the University of Alabama, said "no reasonable person would refer to them as politicians." Alabama court officials told us appointees of the Administrative Office of Courts are considered "state employees." Both Barnett and Hobson told us they considered themselves court employees, not politicians. Did the pay raises coincide with the court shutdown? The Strange for Senate website states that Moore fought for the pay raises during a court shutdown. (As an aside, we’d note the differing language in the website footnote, which says Moore fought for the raises "while budget difficulties confronted the courts.") To analyze this element of the claim requires some stage-setting. In 2002, a budget battle over Alabama court funding pitted the state’s Democratically-controlled legislature and governor against Moore. As the administrative head of the state's judicial system, Moore had requested $124.7 million from Alabama lawmakers. Instead, they approved $122 million, $2.7 million shy of Moore’s request. The legislature ended its regular session on April 17 without appropriating the extra money Moore sought. The next day, Moore’s staff announced cost-cutting measures, including the curtailment of jury trials for five months. Notably, the Associated Press reported around this time that Moore "told judges to continue merit raises promised through April 19," even as he ordered spending cuts. However, Alabama court officials said judicial branch merit raises were frozen after April 19. We asked the Strange campaign if its claim applied to other pay raises than those given to Hobson and Barnett; a campaign aide indicated their claim concerned only those two employees. On May 2, Moore ordered jury trials to resume, saying $500,000 in emergency funding provided by the governor would suffice. Jury trials resumed in June, according to the Birmingham News. (For his part, Hobson said he doesn’t recall any jury trials actually being suspended, though we weren’t able to independently verify this.) Either way, to the extent that Alabama courts were "shut down," as the Strange campaign claims, it would have been from late April to some time in June 2002. Both Barnett and Hobson say their pay raises came in January of that year, months before the budget fight reached a crescendo in spring. A spokeswoman for the Moore campaign backed up Hobson’s claim that his pay bump came in January, though we were not able to independently verify the timing. An Associated Press article, citing records from the Retirement System of Alabama, corroborated Barnett’s claim that his raise came in January. Our ruling The Strange campaign said, "Roy Moore fought for pay increases for politicians while courts had to shut down because of lack of funding." Of the two pay raises at issue, Moore only needed to approve one. The notion that he needed to fight for these raises is undercut by the fact that nearly half of Alabama state government employees got raises that year. In any event, experts we spoke to unanimously agreed the two pay raise recipients were not "politicians." To the extent that Alabama courts experienced a shutdown in 2002, it occurred months after at least one of the raises had been approved, and after Moore had publicly advocated for more funding for courts. We rate this False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Luther Strange	None	None	None	2017-09-22T11:51:37	2017-08-29	['None']
-snes-00267	Demi Lovato Death	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/demi-lovato-death/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Demi Lovato Death Hoax	2 August 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02582	"25% of human trafficking victims are located in Texas."	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2014/jan/29/john-cornyn/john-cornyn-claim-misinterprets-outdated-human-tra/	U.S. Sen. John Cornyn recently wrote: "January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, a sobering reminder that even as we enter the year 2014, people around the world continue to be victims of slavery and human trafficking. "Tragically, these horrendous crimes are occurring at an alarming rate in our own state," the Texas Republican said. "25% of human trafficking victims are located in Texas." The email went on to mention Cornyn’s introduction of legislative proposals to "help law enforcement track down and prosecute these criminals, and provide support for the victims of these crimes." Merriam-Webster defines human trafficking as "organized criminal activity in which human beings are treated as possessions to be controlled and exploited (as by being forced into prostitution or involuntary labor)." Are one in four of all trafficking victims located in Texas? Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cornyn, who seeks election to a third term, told us by email that the senator relied on an undated "fact sheet" from the Texas Sex Trafficking Obliteration Project, overseen by the conservative Concerned Women of America, and a Sept. 16, 2009, report by Texas-based Children at Risk, a nonprofit focused on the "root causes of poor public policies affecting children." The sheet says: "25% of all human trafficking victims are in Texas," attributing that without elaboration to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ‘Certified’ victims only The Children at Risk report gives detail, stating: "In the last quarter of 2007, 30% of the calls received by the National Human Trafficking Hotline originated in Texas and 25% of all international victims certified by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services were located in Texas. As of the date (of) publication, the National Human Trafficking Hotline receives more calls from Texas than from any other state." According to the report, Texas is a "hub for international human trafficking because of its many busy interstate highways, international airports, bus stations, the shipping commerce through the Gulf of Mexico, and its shared border with Mexico… Texas is also a hotspot for domestic human trafficking because cities such as Dallas, Houston and Austin have many runaway and homeless youth." By email, Dawn Lew, a staff attorney for Children at Risk, told us the reference to the last quarter of 2007 applied only to the hotline calls and said the 25 percent reference reflected the percentage of all international trafficking victims "certified" by the HHS who were located in Texas from April 2004 through January 2006. Also, Lew pointed us toward a web page for the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, dated Oct. 2, 2012, stating that under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, adult victims of severe forms of trafficking in the country from another place can become eligible for federal and state services otherwise offered to refugees. To qualify, individuals must be "certified" as trafficking victims by HHS, according to the web page, meaning they must: be a victim of a severe form of trafficking; be willing to assist in every reasonable way in the investigation and prosecution of severe forms of trafficking or be unable to cooperate due to physical or psychological trauma; and have cleared immigration paperwork hurdles. Child victims do not need such certification, the page says. Lew subsequently noted a July 2012 federal report stating that in 2002, certification letters for 99 individuals were sent to benefit-issuing offices in 14 states. The report said: "The largest concentrations of victims were located in Texas (31.3%), Florida (19.2%), and California (14.1%)." Another Children at Risk official called and said Cornyn’s statement could have been worded differently. The official, Mandi Kimball, later said by email that Cornyn’s 25 percent reference was in the context of talking up his legislation targeting trafficking within the United States. "We have no idea how many people are being trafficked in Texas or any state for that matter," Kimball wrote. "We do know that 25% of the" foreign "victims located and certified in the country from April 2004-January 2006 were located in Texas. Cornyn is not saying that 25% of the victims were being trafficked in Texas, he stated that they were located in Texas. This is the 25% number that people are going by, because it is the only concrete data and number we have to go by, and this data is from" HHS. Do these counts add up? Generally, Lew said earlier, states are under-estimating trafficking victims. "This is because it is difficult and nearly impossible to quantify the true number of victims," Lew said. "Why? Because victims often don’t self-identify as victims, some are misidentified and charged as criminals for related offenses (drugs, criminal trespass, etc.), and others, due to the clandestine nature of human trafficking, are hiding in plain sight and may never encounter law enforcement or social service providers," Lew wrote. "In addition, although human trafficking has always existed, until recently, not all states even had a state law on human trafficking, which contributes to the lack of information at the state level on the number of victims identified, traffickers convicted, etc.," Lew said. "Certification numbers are some of the only concrete data that we have with respect to the number of human trafficking victims in each state, and it’s clear that many of the victims are being certified from Texas. Again, keep in mind that certification only captures a percentage of international victims, and does not include domestic victims at all. So the problem in Texas, as in most every state, is larger." At Lew’s suggestion, we reached Maria Trujillo, executive director of the Houston Rescue and Restore Coalition, which says its mission is educate the public, train professionals and empower the community to act toward identifying, rescuing and restoring trafficking victims to freedom. By phone, Trujillo said the Cornyn-cited statistic may have held up in 2006--though then solely for adult victims from outside the United States, since certification does not sweep in citizen-victims. Also, she said, the government has not released figures since then that would bring the estimate up to date. After 2006, Trujillo said, the government stopped estimating the number of certified adult victims on a state-by-state level, though national figures continued to be available. Kenneth Wolfe, spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families, which is an HHS agency, told us by email that it is unable to calculate how many victims of human trafficking are in the United States or within any state. Wolfe said the agency has not lately reported which states got the most letters certifying international victims "because the information might be misinterpreted as the location of the trafficking, which is often not the case." Nationally in the fiscal year that ran through September 2011, he said, such letters were provided to victims or their representatives in 38 states. Certified victims, he said, came from 55 countries. Texas vs. the world We were curious to see how the scope of trafficking in Texas stacks up with other places in the world, some of them notorious for human trafficking. Cornyn’s statement, after all, said that 25 percent of trafficking victims are in Texas just one sentence after he said that "people around the world continue to be victims of slavery and human trafficking." Globally, Trujillo said, the only recent estimate of trafficking victims that she recommends came from the International Labour Federation, a United Nations agency, which estimated there were nearly 21 million victims in 2012. "I am comfortable with that figure, I am comfortable with their research," Trujillo said. "... It is still an estimate. No one can ever know the true number because it is such a covert crime." A U.N. report published in December 2012 describes the organization’s estimate of 20.9 million individuals in forced labor, including for sexual exploitation. "While it is not known how many of these victims were trafficked, the estimate implies that currently, there are millions of trafficking-in-persons victims in the world," the report says, further specifying that per U.S. State Department figures, there were 449 adults and 92 children from foreign countries certified as U.S. victims of trafficking in the fiscal year that ran through September 2010. The U.N. agency’s executive summary describes the survey-based methodology for its estimate, also saying that Asia accounts for 56 percent of the estimated global total with Africa accounting for 18 percent of victims. "Developed economies" including the United States, the summary says, account for 1.5 million, or 7 percent, of the victims. Informed of the unavailability of recent estimates and the fact that the original estimate was limited to certified victims from outside the country, Mitchell of Cornyn’s office said by email that his statement relied on the "most recent Texas-specific data available." Our ruling Cornyn said 25 percent of trafficking victims are located in Texas. This claim seemingly draws on an outdated percentage for a subset of the planet’s trafficking victims, that is, "certified" adult victims from outside the U.S. described some five years ago as located in Texas from April 2004 through January 2006--and that calculation did not account for U.S. citizen-victims. We did not find an estimate of the share of the world’s trafficking victims located in Texas, though the 2012 U.N. estimate seems to show that Texas is not home to a huge share; victims are more prevalent in Asia and Africa than in the developed world, the report said. All told, this claim shakes out as incorrect and ridiculous. Pants on Fire! PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	John Cornyn	None	None	None	2014-01-29T10:33:24	2014-01-10	['Texas']
-pomt-10849	"John Kerry was at 4 percent in the polls in December of 2003...and he ended up becoming the nominee of the party."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/sep/07/chris-dodd/cherry-picked-numbers-dont-tell-full-story/	In a discussion about his endorsement by the International Association of Firefighters, Dodd likened himself to John Kerry in the 2004 campaign to suggest that Dodd could still win the nomination: "John Kerry was at 4 percent in the polls in December of 2003, two points behind Al Sharpton and 22 points behind Howard Dean. And he ended up becoming the nominee of the party," he said Wednesday, August 29, 2007, on CNN's The Situation Room. We find it's not a fair comparison. Dodd is not only understating Kerry's strength in the polls, but overstating his own. First, his subtraction was off, which the Dodd campaign acknowledged in an e-mail to us last week. Dodd was citing a Dec. 10-13, 2003, CBS/New York Times poll. It showed Kerry at 4 percent, behind Al Sharpton at 6 and Dean at 23 (The subtraction error was that Kerry was 19 percentage points behind Dean, not 22 points as Dodd said). Dodd chose to cite polls that showed Kerry at an especially low point — 4 percent. Indeed, there were four polls showing Kerry at that level. But other polls that same month showed Kerry with more support. There were other polls that had him between 5 and 8 percent, and two that had him at 10 percent. Dodd's biggest stretch is his attempt to liken his poll standing to Kerry. In most polls conducted this year that include him, Dodd registers at 1 percent. He's topped out at 2 percent about five times. Even Carol Moseley Braun polled better in 2004. And anyway, does Dodd really want to be comparing himself to Kerry? Refresh our memory here, but didn't the senator from Massachusetts ultimately — what's that word again? — lose?	None	Chris Dodd	None	None	None	2007-09-07T00:00:00	2007-08-29	['None']
-tron-02025	Claims About the Federal Government’s “Operation Wetback”	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/claims-about-the-federal-governments-operation-wetback/	None	immigration	None	None	None	Claims About the Federal Government’s “Operation Wetback”	Aug 31, 2015	None	['None']
-vogo-00232	Campaign Cash and Polls: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/mayor-2012/campaign-cash-and-polls-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	Campaign Cash and Polls: Fact Check TV	June 4, 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-14202	"When I withdrew in June of 2008, polls were showing that at least 40 percent of my supporters said, oh, they weren't going to support Sen. Obama."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/21/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-history-shows-win-bernie-sanders/	As the list of states that haven’t voted yet dwindles, Democrats are pondering how Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will be able to unify their supporters in advance of November’s general election. Party strategists have worried that aggressive sparring during the New York primary is fraying relations between Clinton, Sanders, and their respective supporters. Polling evidence suggests that there may be reason for such a worry: An April McClatchy-Marist poll found that 25 percent of Sanders supporters said they would not back Clinton as the Democratic nominee, compared to 69 percent who said they would support her. Another 6 percent were unsure. Clinton addressed this during an April 21, 2016, town hall with ABC’s Good Morning America, comparing it to her 2008 primary bid against Barack Obama. "When I withdrew in June of 2008, polls were showing that at least 40 percent of my supporters said, oh, they weren't going to support Sen. Obama," Clinton said at the televised town hall. In other words, Clinton argued, if Obama can come back from even sharper divisions to win the presidency, then she can, too. We looked into the polling archive to see if she has a good argument. We found two polls taken in June 2008 that asked primary supporters of Clinton who they would support with Obama as the Democratic nominee. Here’s the summary: Pollster Month Will support Obama Will support McCain Won’t vote/ Other McCain support plus won’t vote/other CNN/Opinion Research June 60 17 22 39 ABC News/ Washington Post June 62 25 13 38 So Clinton has a point: In both polls, roughly 60 percent of former Clinton supporters backed Obama, while 40 percent didn’t, either through a vote for Republican nominee John McCain or a vow to do something other than voting for Obama. This means Clinton can take heart that she is already doing about 10 points better securing the backing of Sanders voters than Obama was doing securing support from Clinton backers. We have one small caveat: While the polls from 2008 and 2016 are similar in topic, their wording is slightly different. The 2016 Marist poll uses terminology that’s a bit vague -- the choices are "support her" or "not support her." By contrast, the 2008 CNN poll was more specific, looking at whether people would vote for Obama, vote for Republican nominee John McCain, or wouldn’t vote at all. Subsequent polling data showed Obama did eventually win the support of Clinton backers. By August 2008, polls showed that Obama was winning 70 percent to 76 percent of Clinton supporters. And of course, Obama went on to win in November. Our ruling Clinton said, "When I withdrew in June of 2008, polls were showing that at least 40 percent of my supporters said, oh, they weren't going to support Sen. Obama." The wording of polls makes exact comparisons a bit tricky, but in general, Clinton is right about the scale of Obama’s 2008 problem with dissident Democrats -- and correct that Obama had a harder road then than she seems to have now. We rate the statement Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/53ab6eae-7c0b-47c8-b2f6-d6c89e991bf9	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-04-21T16:46:04	2016-04-21	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-10760	"Fifty-six percent decline in overall crime. A 73 percent decline in motor-vehicle theft. A 67 percent decline in robbery. A 66 percent decline in murder. This is way beyond what happened in the nation during this period of time.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/26/rudy-giuliani/hes-got-his-numbers-right/	At a speech to the Manhattan Institute in New York City with Louis Freeh, the former director of the FBI, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani bragged, as he often dows, about his crime-fighting prowess. "Fifty-six percent decline in overall crime. A 73 percent decline in motor-vehicle theft. A 67 percent decline in robbery. A 66 percent decline in murder. This is way beyond what happened in the nation during this period of time." During his eight years in office, federal records do show that rates of violent and property crime in New York dropped as sharply as he claims. It is also true that those rates of decline outpaced national averages, and that New York boasted a low violent crime rate compared to the biggest big cities, like Los Angeles and Houston. But his claims do come with some caveats: Numerous studies have failed to show that the politicies of Giuiliani and his police commanders were directly responsible for the decline in crime. Crime rates dropped nationwide during those years, 1994-2001, and most large cities saw significant declines; San Francisco, in fact, enjoyed the steepest drop in violent crime. And, significantly, violent crime rates in New York City had been falling for three years before he took office.	None	Rudy Giuliani	None	None	None	2007-10-26T00:00:00	2007-05-31	['None']
-pomt-03327	"Gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/24/newt-gingrich/newt-gingrich-says-gangs-have-increased-40-percent/	More than a week after a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin, CNN’s State of the Union hosted a roundtable that included a discussion of crime and race in America. Among the panelists was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker from Georgia. "Gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected," Gingrich said. "There is no federal program to stop it. No one wants to have an honest conversation about it." It wasn’t the first time Gingrich had made this point. In an op-ed, Gingrich wrote, "Although the president does not acknowledge the gangs' role as a major cause of the epidemic of violence, the FBI does. The FBI estimated in 2011 that there are roughly 1.4 million active gang members in the U.S., an astonishing 40 percent increase from 2009. These gangs, the FBI says, are responsible for ‘an average of 48 percent of violent crime in most jurisdictions, and much higher in others.’ " We were able to locate the FBI study Gingrich referred to in the op-ed -- the 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment. Gingrich accurately quoted the report, which said, "Approximately 1.4 million active street, (outlaw motorcycle) and prison gang members, comprising more than 33,000 gangs, are criminally active" in the United States, which "represents a 40 percent increase from an estimated 1 million gang members in 2009." (The 1 million figure came from the 2009 edition of the same FBI study.) Because Gingrich’s 40 percent figure comes from federal statistics, we agree that it has some credibility. But we will raise two issues of concern. Uncertainty about the statistics Because gang activity is illegal, it’s difficult to get solid numbers. So the FBI estimated as best it could. To do this, the FBI used a combination of data from a survey of law enforcement agencies by the National Drug Intelligence Center, along with additional interviews with law enforcement officials. The survey the FBI used randomly sampled roughly 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies to gauge how prevalent gangs are in their jurisdiction. This is a reasonable approach to tackling a challenging question, but it’s not gospel. Criminologists warned PolitiFact to be wary of several factors. • The survey is not just an estimate -- it’s an estimate of estimates. All surveys are subject to sampling error -- that is, the possibility that the people being surveyed aren’t actually random, thus biasing the results. But at least many surveys sample something that the respondent will find easy to quantify -- say, whether they approve of the job President Obama is doing, or how many cars they own. The survey the FBI used, however, has uncertainty not just about whether the sample was truly random, but also about whether the answers given are actually accurate. The report itself "acknowledges that there may be some duplication or underreporting of gang members" because of how each state and local law enforcement agency measures gang activity in their area. • The smell test. A jump of 40 percent in just two years is an enormous increase, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. "If there were really a 40 percent increase in two years, you would see a big impact on crime statistics generally, but we haven’t," he said. "Crime rates are fairly level." • Who counts as a gang member? There’s no universal definition of who counts as a gang member. "Actual gang members can deny membership, and wanna-bes can claim membership," said Eugene O’Donnell, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "In both cases it is difficult to discern for sure." • Institutional bias. Local law enforcement officials have an interest in overstating -- or at least not understating -- the number of gang members in their jurisdiction, since a bigger gang problem can help them secure more federal assistance, O’Donnell said. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem for the soundness of the data if an independent assessment was also factored in, but none is. The estimate is based solely upon the opinions of state and local law-enforcement officials. All in all, O’Donnell said, "there are multiple grounds for being skeptical" about the estimate. Making significant public policy decisions based on them would be manifestly unsound." Does Obama deserve blame? Gingrich said, "Gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected." If he had said "between 2009 and 2011," we wouldn’t have addressed the issue of whether he was blaming the president. But Gingrich chose to use Obama’s presidency to mark time. The Gingrich camp firmly disagrees that the former House speaker was blaming Obama for an increase in gang activity. They point to previous op-eds -- including the one we mentioned earlier -- as evidence that Gingrich was simply saying that crime issues that inspire a lot of media attention -- such as mass shootings and the Martin case -- obscure a more far-reaching crime concern, gangs. "Newt mentioned Obama to make that contrast – in other words, ‘Is a Trayvon Martin-type occurrence really what is most important to be focused on when it comes to the personal safety of African-Americans?’" said Joe DeSantis, a spokesman for Gingrich. "After all, the president had just held a press conference to talk about the Martin verdict. Newt did not say that Obama was to blame for the increase in gang violence." The Gingrich camp is correct that he has made that argument in previous op-eds, but we didn’t see him mentioning it in the CNN discussion. And because a CNN viewer most likely wouldn’t have read Gingrich’s past op-eds, we think it’s fair to rate him in part for bringing Obama into the discussion of gang growth. There are, in fact, some things that an administration can do to bolster law enforcement generally and gang activity specifically. Contrary to Gingrich’s claim that "there is no federal program to stop" gangs, the Justice Department does have an Organized Crime and Gang Section, which was established under Obama in late 2010 as a consolidation of several existing offices. However, while federal funding and technical assistance can help, Fox said that "there’s relatively little that the president can do to discourage a 12-year-old from joining a gang." Most gang activity is handled by local law enforcement departments, and both demographics, including the number of young people in an area, and economic conditions are important drivers of gang membership. "Gangs are always hiring, even when legitimate employers aren’t because the economy is in bad shape," Fox said. And in recessions, he added, "younger, inner-city people are hit especially hard." Our ruling Gingrich said that "gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected." Gingrich deserves credit for using statistics from a credible federal agency, but it’s important to note that methodological difficulties make it hard for anyone, even the FBI, to determine how many gang members there are in the United States. Criminologists express skepticism about whether gang membership could have jumped 40 percent in just two years, saying that broader crime statistics don’t show any sign of it. In addition, despite the Gingrich camp’s insistence that he did not mean to cast blame on Obama for the rise in gang membership, we think that a reasonable viewer of the discussion could have made such an inference. On balance, we rate the claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/682949c8-0c99-4bd5-959a-cf2953e8cfce	None	Newt Gingrich	None	None	None	2013-07-24T17:01:45	2013-07-21	['None']
-tron-00264	Hunters Kill 185-Year-Old Alligator in Mississippi	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hunters-kill-185-year-old-alligator-in-mississippi/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Hunters Kill 185-Year-Old Alligator in Mississippi	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-07243	"Most of your serial killers, most of your people who commit domestic violence, they start off by abusing animals."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2011/may/31/ej-finocchio/rhode-island-society-prevention-cruelty-animals-ch/	The Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wants the legal system to impose harsher sentences in animal cruelty cases. During a discussion on the issue on WJAR's "10 News Conference," which aired April 24, RISPCA President E.J. Finocchio said animal abusers are allowed to plead "no contest" and make a donation to the court instead of paying a fine, a practice that allows them to escape a formal conviction. It's important to take animal violence seriously, he said. "Animal cruelty and domestic violence go hand in hand," he said. "Most of your serial killers, most of your people who commit domestic violence, they start off by abusing animals, the weakest of our society -- children, elderly, animals, women -- so there is a direct correlation statistically nationwide that animal abuse and domestic violence go hand in hand." We were intrigued by the possibility that animals might be a sort of "gateway victim" for most domestic violence perpetrators or serial killers, or that animal abuse might be a harbinger of murder and domestic violence. When we asked Finocchio for supporting evidence, he sent us the society's winter 2009 newsletter, which mentioned five serial killers and the way they had harmed animals. He also suggested we check a June 2009 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that examined whether animal cruelty is a "red flag" for family violence (more about that later). In addition, we consulted with other experts. The consensus was that there is a link, but it's complicated. "Animal abuse is strongly associated with a whole host of antisocial behavior running from violence against people to parking ticket violations. It lights up the board," said Arnold Arluke, a professor of sociology at Northeastern University. "The study we did compared animal abusers to people who were not animal abusers. The abusers were five times more likely to have a history of violence toward people, four times more likely to commit a property crime and three and a half times more likely to commit a drug-related offense," he said. The problem, he said, is that animal violence "is not really a strong predictor or causal agent [of violence toward people]. There's a lot of people who commit animal abuse who do not go on to commit any other violence." Among those who do, the animal violence is usually "up close and personal" (such as when an animal is strangled), the animal is typically known to the abuser, and there has been more than one instance of abuse. "But," said Arluke, "most cases aren't like that." In his statement, Finocchio talked about "most" serial killers and "most" people who commit domestic violence. Let's consider them separately. SERIAL KILLERS: We contacted Ann Burgess, a professor of psychiatric nursing at Boston College who coauthored the 1988 book "Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives." The book is based on interviews with 36 serial murderers. She and her colleagues found that 13 (or 36 percent) had a history of animal cruelty. "So you can't say most," she said, referring to Finocchio's claim. "The FBI did a study of serial killers and they found fewer than 50 percent had a known history of animal abuse. In fact, some were known as the animal lovers in the neighborhood," said Arluke. The idea of a link between animal abuse and serial killers "becomes one of the expressions that people who champion [animal protection] like to throw around. It's smart politics because we don't want more serial killers," he said. "But the minute you start to look at every instance of animal abuse as essentially predictive of every person who's going to be a serial killer, if that were the case, we would have tens of thousands of serial killers, and we don't, thank God." DOMESTIC VIOLENCE PERPETRATORS: Once again, there is good evidence that animal abuse and domestic violence go hand in hand. The question is whether most abusers harmed animals first. Surveys of women seeking help at domestic violence shelters have found that 46 to 71 percent report that their male abuser had harmed or threatened to harm a pet, according to the "Red Flag" study Finocchio referred us to, which was coauthored by Sarah DeGue of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and David DeLillo of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. People who engage in domestic violence are known to use pets to intimidate, coerce or control the victimized partner, DeGue and others told us. (In fact, Finocchio's organization serves as a safe haven for the pets of people victimized by domestic violence.) But women who end up in a shelter constitute a very select group. After all, they aren't the only victims of domestic violence. And such studies don't show whether animal abuse came first. DeGue and DeLillo said researchers, advocates and policy makers often assume that there's an overlap between animal abuse and domestic violence (including child mistreatment). Yet "little evidence exists to support this contention." In their study of 860 college students they found that "the majority (73.2 percent) of family violence victims overall did not report any exposure to animal abuse." So only 27 percent of the victims of domestic and/or child abuse had seen or engaged in animal abuse as well. That's far from a majority, even if you assume that, in all these cases, the abuser started off harming animals. "I'm not aware of any reliable research studies that have examined animal abuse perpetration as a precursor to domestic partner violence," said DeGue, now a behavioral scientist in the division of violence prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We actually found a number of cases that were the reverse, where people were first violent toward people and then subsequently became violent toward animals," said Arluke. In short, there IS a link between domestic violence and animal abuse because violent people are, well, violent. If Finocchio had simply stuck with his assertion that "animal cruelty and domestic violence go hand in hand," our ruling would be different. Instead, he made the provocative assertion that there's a progression of violence because "most of your serial killers, most of your people who commit domestic violence, they start off by abusing animals." The experts we consulted -- including one Finocchio sent us to -- said the best evidence shows that a majority of serial killers and domestic assailants do not have a history of animal abuse. The evidence supporting the idea that their first victims are animals is even slimmer. So the judges unanimously ruled that his statement is False. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	E.J. Finocchio	None	None	None	2011-05-31T00:01:00	2011-04-24	['None']
-snes-01764	The 2005 movie Category 7: The End of the World predicted the arrival of hurricanes named Harvey and Irma.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/category-7-harvey-irma/	None	Science	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did a 2005 Movie Feature Hurricanes Named Harvey and Irma?	8 September 2017	None	['None']
-pose-00784	"By June 30, 2011, Nathan Deal and a team of leaders will come up with possible improvements to better fund public education."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/georgia/promises/deal-o-meter/promise/814/create-an-education-funding-plan/	None	deal-o-meter	Nathan Deal	None	None	Create an education funding plan	2011-01-25T16:59:46	None	['Nathan_Deal']
-hoer-01151	Fake Dan Bilzerian CEO Facebook Page	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-dan-bilzerian-ceo-facebook-page-is-a-like-farming-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Fake Dan Bilzerian CEO Facebook Page is a Like-Farming Scam	March 31, 2016	None	['None']
-goop-01364	Angelina Jolie Adopting Baby With New Husband?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-adopting-baby-new-husband/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie Adopting Baby With New Husband?	1:40 am, March 19, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-10885	"I'm for a three-state political solution in Iraq. (Romney) is not."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/jul/10/sam-brownback/a-fair-account-of-romneys-position/	Indeed, Brownback teamed up with Sen. Joe Biden to propose a plan to partition Iraq into three states for the Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunnis with a central government to see to common interests. Brownback fairly characterizes Romney's position. Romney has not endorsed the plan and published an essay in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs saying he was opposed to the concept. "Today, the nation's attention is focused on Iraq," he wrote. "All Americans want U.S. troops to come home as soon as possible. But walking away now or dividing Iraq up into parts and walking away later would present grave risks to the United States and the world. Iran could seize the Shiite south, al Qaeda could dominate the Sunni west, and Kurdish nationalism could destabilize the border with Turkey. A regional conflict could ensue, perhaps even requiring the return of U.S. troops under far worse circumstances."	None	Sam Brownback	None	None	None	2007-07-10T00:00:00	2007-06-08	['None']
-snes-01779	The Trump administration announced it would be spending 90 percent less on advertising a shortened open enrollment period for Obamacare in 2018.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-obamacare-advertising-enrollment/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Donald Trump Cut Funding for Obamacare Enrollment Publicity?	6 September 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-14948	Because of Obamacare "people’s premiums ... are going up 35, 45, 55 percent."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/25/donald-trump/trump-obamacare-health-care-premiums-going-35-45-5/	Donald Trump won’t apologize to Ben Carson for questioning the neurosurgeon's religion, but he agrees with Carson’s thoughts on health care. Trump, who is trailing Carson in new polls in Iowa, suggested on the campaign trail that Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist faith wasn’t "down the middle of the road." Appearing on ABC’s This Week, Trump said he "didn’t say anything bad" about Carson, called Carson’s proposal for personal health savings accounts a "very good idea," and took the opportunity to knock down a different opponent. "People’s — I don’t know if you have been watching lately over the last couple of weeks — people’s premiums, George, are going up 35, 45, 55 percent," Trump said on Oct. 25. "Their deductibles are so high nobody’s ever going to get to use it. So ... Obamacare is turning out to be a bigger disaster than anybody thought." On average, premiums have risen by about 5.8 percent a year since Obama took office, compared to 13.2 percent in the nine years before Obama. Is it true that we’ll see insurance plans jacked up 35 to 55 percent in 2016? We reached out to the Trump campaign but didn’t hear back. Experts we talked to and the data show that while there are examples of premium increases that large, they’re not the norm. Double digits for some plans Let’s begin with a brief primer on premium hikes. Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers planning to increase their rates by more than 10 percent have to submit their proposals for federal review. In many states, the companies also have to negotiate their prices with a state insurance commissioner. Generally, the finalized premiums will be equal to or lower than the proposed rates, according to Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading nonpartisan health policy research center. With five days left before open enrollment begins on Nov. 1, rates are likely already approved or amended, but not all them have been publicized. Trump has a point that some insurers have requested increases that hit high double digits. "Yes, some people in some plans through some carriers in some states are, indeed, looking at rate hikes of ‘35 to 50 percent’ if they stick with those plans in 2016," said Charles Gaba, who runs the popular blog ACAsignups.net, which tracks Obamacare enrollment. "This is not completely off the wall. Many of the popular plans requested high increases," said Gail Wilensky, a health economist and the head of Medicare and Medicaid under George H.W. Bush. "Those hikes will affect more people than some may think." She pointed out that Blue Cross Blue Shield, a prominent insurer with a significant amount of enrollees, proposed rate hikes of 14 to 38 percent in Illinois and 50 to 65 percent in New Mexico. But that’s not telling the entire story either, according to the data. Much lower average Just 7 percent of all plans in the federal exchange had a proposed rate hike of 30 percent or higher, estimates Agile Health Insurance, which bills itself as "an affordable alternative to Obamacare." That translates to average increases at far lower levels than what Trump said. Looking at finalized rates for the lowest and second-lowest cost marketplace plans in the silver category — which are the basis for federal premium subsidies and chosen by 68 percent of enrollees — the average increase is nowhere near 35 to 55 percent. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that the cost of a benchmark silver plan will be 4.4 percent more expensive on average across major cities in 13 states and Washington, D.C. (Again, that is a smaller annual increase than what had been occurring before Obamacare became law.) According to Kaiser, enrollees in Minneapolis will see the biggest premium increase at 28.7 percent. On the other end of the spectrum, plans will actually decrease by 10.4 percent in Seattle. If we look at both finalized and requested rates across the board, Trump’s figure is still too high. ACASignups.net projects a national weighted average 12 to 13 percent increase across 49 states and Washington, D.C. (there’s no data for Wisconsin). That’s consistent with the Associated Press’ estimates, which project increases in the high single-digits to the low teens. By Gaba’s estimates, just three states are hiking near the level Trump is claiming: Alaska, Hawaii and Minnesota. "I don’t see any plausible way of the average rate hike being anywhere close to 35 percent, and certainly not any higher than that," Gaba said. No such thing as typical All the experts we spoke to warned us that there’s significant variation from plan to plan, from region to region, and from insuree to insuree. That’s why neither Trump’s claim nor averages tell the whole story. The disparity in rate increases are more likely adjustments insurers are making, rather than evidence that Obamacare is a "disaster," as Trump says. After all, 2016 is the first year that insurers are looking at actual claims data instead of "essentially guessing at what their costs were," said Levitt of the Kaiser Foundation. "Some insurers guessed better than others, which leads to variations in premium changes." Enrollment figures are different from state to state, which affects the risk pool and the premium changes. Premium rate increases can also be unique to an individual’s circumstances, not necessarily reflective of a national average. "A number of factors can result in a consumer’s premium differing from the average rate change, including changes in: age, tobacco status, geography, benefit design, family status, and subsidy eligibility," according to a brief by the American Academy of Actuaries. To really get a sense of what the typical rate increase is, we not only have to wait for the final rates to come out but the enrollment figures as well. "You need to have a weighted average so we’ll only know after the fact," Wilensky said. In the meantime, experts recommend everyone check their own rates. Our ruling Trump said, "People’s premiums … are going up 35, 45, 55 percent." Some insurance plans in the federal exchange will see price hikes at the levels that Trump is suggesting. But he’s cherry-picking the high end of premium changes to come. Estimates for the national average are far below Trump’s figures, ranging from 4.4 percent to 13 percent. Trump’s claim is partially accurate but takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-10-25T18:17:02	2015-10-25	['None']
-snes-03042	Mary Anne MacLeod, President Donald Trump’s mother, illegally immigrated to the United States in 1929.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trumps-mother-illegal-immigrant/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Was Donald Trump’s Mother an Illegal Immigrant?	30 January 2017	None	['United_States']
-hoer-01286	Dog Capitn Sleeps At Owners Grave	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/dog-capitan-sleeps-at-owners-grave/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Dog Capitn Sleeps At Owners Grave	September 25, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01911	Kim Kardashian “Freaking Out” Over Arrival Of Baby #3, 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-freaking-out-baby-number-three/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian NOT “Freaking Out” Over Arrival Of Baby #3, Despite Report	8:33 pm, January 3, 2018	None	['None']
-afck-00402	“The number of children attending Grade R has more than doubled, moving from about 300 thousand to more than 700 thousand between 2003 and 2011.”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/a-first-look-at-president-jacob-zumas-2014-state-of-the-nation-address/	None	None	None	None	None	President Jacob Zuma’s sixth State of the Nation address fact-checked	2014-02-14 12:39	None	['None']
-pomt-00763	Says Rand Paul denied that he "put forward a bill ... to zero out foreign aid and specifically spoke about Israel."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/14/kirsten-powers/powers-paul-denied-he-put-forward-bill-cut-aid-isr/	Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has acknowledged that he might need to temper his style during interviews. Paul had several testy encounters in his first week as a presidential candidate. But even the most pleasant demeanor in Washington won’t end the questions about policies he pushed for in the past. Speaking on Fox News Sunday on April 12, columnist and former Democratic operative Kirsten Powers said his views on money for Israel are entirely fair game and she focused on his conversation with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. "She was asking normal questions, and he actually was lying to her," Powers said. "He's put forward a bill basically saying, I'm going to zero out foreign aid and specifically spoke about Israel, and he's acting all self righteous that he's being asked about it." In this fact-check, we look at what Paul said during that NBC interview, and whether Powers is correct in saying Paul denied having a bill that would eliminate foreign aid and directly mentioned Israel. The interview Paul’s session with Guthrie got contentious when she asked him about his policy shifts, especially on Israel. Guthrie: "You have had views on foreign policy that are unorthodox, but you seem to have changed. You said Iran was not a threat and now you say it is. You once proposed ending aid to Israel, and now you support it, at least for the time being. And once offered to drastically cut --" Paul: "Well, before we go, before we go --" Guthrie: "Wait, wait. Once wanted to drastically cut defense spending --" Paul: "Before we go into a litany of --" Guthrie: "-- and now you want to increase it 16 percent. So I just wondered if you mellowed out?" Paul: "Why don’t we let me explain instead of talking over me, okay?" When things settled down, Paul gave this response on Israel. Paul: "My opinion has been we shouldn't borrow money from China to send it to any country. Pakistan, Israel or any other country. But I also realized that things will have to be done gradually and if we are going to try to eliminate or reduce foreign aid, why don’t we start with the countries that hate us or burn our flag. And the one thing that is true is that Israel doesn’t burn our flag. So I haven’t proposed removing aid from Israel, but I still agree --" Guthrie: "But you once did." Paul: "-- with the original precept. Let me answer the question. I agree with my original statement from years ago that ultimately, all nations should be free of foreign aid." A tale of two budget proposals We dug into the question of Paul and money for Israel about a year ago and we can see the two-month period in 2011 when Paul changed his stance. In the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we found a 65-page budget proposal released by Paul’s office in March 2011. Citing a pattern of squandered and unwise spending on foreign governments, the report offered a straightforward bottom line on foreign aid: "Eliminate all international assistance." The section on Israel says this: "While this budget proposal does eliminate foreign aid to Israel, it is not meant to hurt, negate, or single out one of America’s most important allies. This proposal eliminates all foreign aid to all countries. Israel’s ability to conduct foreign policy, regain economic dominance, and support itself without the heavy hand of U.S. interests and policies, will only strengthen the Israeli community. The elimination of all foreign aid, including provisions to Israel, is not necessarily a new idea. In 1996, during an address before the U.S. Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that his nation would eventually wean itself from dependence on U.S. foreign aid. Prominent Israeli politicians and economists alike have called for the end of foreign aid. Among them is economist Amon Gafney, who served as governor of the Bank of Israel from 1970 to 1981. He pointed out that foreign aid has caused Israel to suffer from ―Dutch Disease, a situation in which a generous gift brings short-term benefits but impairs a country’s long-term competitiveness." This was not some trial balloon. Paul put his plan into writing within weeks of arriving at the Senate in January 2011, and he defended his position to eliminate aid to Israel in at least four separate interviews: On Jan. 26, 2011, on CNN, Feb. 3, 2011, with ABC, Feb. 8, 2011, on Fox News and in an interview with Slate, published Feb. 18, 2011. Paul was well aware that his view was unpopular. He told several interviewers that out of the $500 billion budget reduction he proposed, he was hearing the most complaints about the money for Israel. "The cuts to that one particular country were three-fifths of 1 percent of it," he told ABC. Later, he said on Fox News, "I support Israel as our greatest ally in the Middle East, but at the same time, we can't give them money that we don't have." You won’t find that proposal on Paul’s official website. By May 2011, Paul had a new budget plan, which we also found via the Internet Archive. Here are the title pages of both. The new proposal scrapped the section on Israel in its entirety. Indeed, Israel isn’t mentioned anywhere in the 65-page document. Also, Paul’s new bottom line for foreign aid wasn’t to cut it to zero. Rather, the proposal said, "Freeze foreign aid funding at $5 billion." Though the report doesn’t say so explicitly, that would have been enough to cover the outlays for Israel. That plan was the one that came up for a vote in the Senate where it was rejected 90-7. Paul has since said that he favors continuing aid for Israel. The problem with Powers’ statement is that she said Paul had "put forward a bill" that cut all aid to Israel. The language there is sloppy. Paul put forward a concurrent resolution which is a way to capture the sense of the senators. Unlike a bill, if passed, such a resolution would never go before the president and would not have the force of law. Also, Paul changed his budget plan before he submitted it as a resolution. Powers told PunditFact that she was thinking of Paul’s first proposal and "used the wrong terminology." "I don't know why I said bill when I knew it was a proposed budget plan," Powers said. Our ruling Powers said that Paul denied having a bill that would cut all foreign aid and specifically mentioned Israel. In Paul’s NBC interview, he said he hadn’t proposed removing aid from Israel. Actually, Paul put forward a budget proposal that cut aid to Israel and stood by it for at least three months before quietly dropping the idea. The concurrent resolution that Paul proposed and that the Senate voted on did not cut aid to Israel. Powers is correct that Paul denied his effort to cut aid to Israel but she mischaracterized the form of his proposal. We rate the claim Half True.	None	Kirsten Powers	None	None	None	2015-04-14T14:01:40	2015-04-12	['Israel']
-pomt-02775	Even after collective bargaining reforms, most Wisconsin public employees "are still paying about 12 to 13 percent" of their health insurance premiums, while most state residents who work in the private sector "pay 20 to 25 percent."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2013/dec/09/scott-walker/most-public-employees-wisconsin-now-pay-12-13-thei/	Less than a month after his inauguration in January 2011, Gov. Scott Walker drew a bead on state employees and what they pay toward their health insurance premiums. Even if what most of the workers paid were doubled, Walker said in his first "state of the state" speech, they would still only being paying half the national average. We rated that claim True. State workers were paying about 6 percent of their premiums, so doubling would put that at 12 percent; meanwhile, the national average -- for public and private employees -- was 29 percent. Nearly three years later, the Republican governor, on a higher platform as an author and potential presidential candidate, made a similar assertion. In a Nov. 27, 2013 interview on Wisconsin Public Radio about his new book, Walker reflected on Act 10, the law that made most state -- as well as local -- government employees pay more for benefits. It also erased most of their collective bargaining powers. "In the end, do public employees -- including me and my family -- pay a little bit more for pensions and health care? Absolutely," Walker told host Joy Cardin. "But still far less than what our counterparts pay outside of government. Most people in this state pay 20 to 25 percent, for example, of their health insurance. Most of our public employees are still paying about 12 to 13 percent." Let’s hit the ledgers again. Act 10 and state workers When we contacted Walker spokesman Tom Evenson about Walker’s new claim, he insisted that when the governor said public employes, he was referring only to state employees; Evenson also said "state employees" and "public employees" are synonymous. But that certainly would not have been clear to listeners. In the radio interview, Walker referred twice in quick succession to public employees, which would include not only state workers -- who number about 70,000 -- but some 200,000 local government and school employees, as well. Indeed, Act 10, the focus of Walker’s remarks, applies to that much larger group of public employees (except for police and firefighters, who were exempted from the law). Walker signed the innocuously labeled budget-repair bill, known formally as Act 10, in March 2011, after unprecedented protests in and around the state Capitol. The law did double, from 6 percent to 12 percent, what the vast majority of state employees pay toward health insurance premiums. That also applies to nearly 13,000 local government workers who get health insurance through the state. But Act 10 does not determine how much the vast majority of local public employees pay toward their premiums. Other public workers Local schools employ 99,000 full-time-equivalent employees statewide. Before Act 10, school workers who got health insurance through school districts paid an average of 4 percent to 5 percent of their premiums, according to school districts responding to a 2010-’11 survey by the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. Now, the average is 10 percent. The association’s data is by district and isn’t broken down to indicate what percentage most school employees pay. But the average figure show goes to Walker’s point that school employees are paying significantly less than private-sector workers. There are no such surveys for employees of cities, villages, towns and counties. Dan Thompson, executive director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, said Walker’s claim of 12 percent to 13 percent might be a little high, but is a reasonable estimate as an average of what city and village employees around the state pay toward their premiums. So, that figure also helps Walker make his case. The municipalities group had no hard number. Nor did the Wisconsin Counties Association or the Wisconsin Towns Association. So, Walker’s figure of 12 percent to 13 percent is accurate for state employees and a significant number of other public employees are paying that rate or less. Private sector As for the second part of Walker’s claim, Walker’s spokesman pointed us to 2012 figures from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for Wisconsin residents working in the private sector. They show employees paid 22 percent of the cost of the health insurance premiums for single coverage and 24 percent for family coverage. We posed Walker’s claim to Dave Jensen, editorial director of HCTrends, a Milwaukee health care research organization. He cited the same federal figures, known as the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Jensen pointed out that the federal figures include public- as well as private-sector employees. But he said the proportion of public employees is so small that the federal figures still provide a solid estimate of how much private-sector employees are paying for health insurance. Our rating Walker said that even after his collective bargaining reforms, most Wisconsin public employees "are still paying about 12 to 13 percent" of their health insurance premiums, while most state residents who work in the private sector "pay 20 to 25 percent." The available figures indicate many if not most public employees are paying at or less than 12 percent and Walker was right on the private-sector workers part of his claim. We rate his statement Mostly True. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2013-12-09T05:00:00	2013-11-27	['Wisconsin']
-snes-05168	President Obama signed an executive order to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia with Rashad Hussain.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-executive-order-hussain/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Obama Signs Executive Order to Replace Supreme Court Justice Scalia?	23 February 2016	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Rashad_Hussain']
-pomt-03682	The election bill "allows persons to correct an absentee ballot if they did not sign it and requires an extra two hours a day for early voting. Everything else in this bill is discretionary."	half-true	/florida/statements/2013/apr/23/christopher-l-smith/chris-smith-elections-bill-two-required-changes/	Florida lawmakers are poised to pass voting law changes after being mocked for long lines and delayed results during the 2012 presidential election. But in the waning days of the legislative session, Senate Democrats are criticizing the plan as not going far enough to address the problems at the polls last year. "This bill mandates only two things that will address concerns from the last election," wrote Sen. Chris Smith, the Senate Democratic leader from Fort Lauderdale, in a column in the Sun-Sentinel April 21. "It allows persons to correct an absentee ballot if they did not sign it and requires an extra two hours a day for early voting. Everything else in this bill is discretionary. Under SB 600, Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, Duval, Orange, Hillsborough, Jackson, Franklin, Dixie and all the rest of our 67 counties can do exactly what they did in 2012, with the exception of just two more hours per day for early voting. Nothing else is mandated. Nothing else is changed." The column left readers with the impression that the bill changed little for the better. Smith called it "an opportunity lost." Democrats and Republicans are split on some provisions of the bill, so there are varying perspectives as to what "concerns" came up after the last election. We wanted to fact-check Smith’s claim that the election bill "allows persons to correct an absentee ballot if they did not sign it and requires an extra two hours a day for early voting. Everything else in this bill is discretionary." Inside the elections bills First, some quick history. In 2011, the GOP-dominated Legislature passed an elections law that reduced the amount of days for early voting from 14 to eight. The new law gave supervisors a choice of offering between between six and 12 hours of early voting each day. So local elections supervisors had the choice to offer between 48 hours and 96 hours of early voting over eight days. Gov. Rick Scott signed the 2011 elections bill but distanced himself from it after Florida’s 2012 election drew national ridicule. Scott announced his own recommendations for reform that echoed proposals from the state elections supervisors association. On April 16, the Florida Senate reworked the House elections bill, HB 7013. The Senate is scheduled to take a final vote on its version of the bill on April 24, after which it will go back to the House. We read the bill and interviewed elections officials, lawmakers involved in crafting the bill and Senate staff to analyze what the bill will and won’t do. Let’s look at the two changes Smith mentioned. Absentee ballot signatures: The bill gives voters a second chance if they forgot to sign their absentee ballot. The bill says they would have until 5 p.m. the Sunday before Election Day to correct it. Adds early voting hours: Currently, the law for early voting requires eight days and between six to 12 hours a day for a combined 48 to 96 hours. The proposed law would create between 64 hours (eight days, 8 hours each) and 168 hours (14 days, 12 hours each) at the discretion of elections supervisors. Smith said the law would mandate an extra two hours a day of early voting. That’s true -- counties that had six hours would now have to increase it to at least eight. Still, Smith wants elections supervisors to offer 168 hours, even though many said that would be too demanding and unnecessary, especially in smaller counties and primary elections. Smith wants voters in all counties to have the same access to the polls. "I dont give a damn. This is voting. This is a fundamental right," Smith told PolitiFact Florida. "This is what people have died in the streets for, this is what people are dying overseas for. Just because an elected official doesn't want to do their job, maybe they shouldn't be supervisor of elections." The elections supervisors’ association wrote a letter endorsing SB 600 as "an excellent election reform bill." The association had two top priorities of equal weight: reducing the ballot length and expanding options for early voting sites and hours. Smith’s claim that the bill only mandates an extra two hours a day of early voting is factually correct, but it doesn’t tell the whole story, said Brian Corley, Pasco County’s elections supervisor and leader of the association’s legislative affairs this year. (Corley is a Republican; his association includes supervisors from both parties.) The association was not seeking a one-size-fits-all mandate to expand hours because large counties may need more hours than smaller counties, he said. "Do you think (Palm Beach supervisor Susan) Bucher or (Broward supervisor Brenda) Snipes in Broward for a major presidential or gubernatorial election is really going to have 64 hours?" he said. "The answer is obviously no." Let’s look at some of the other provisions that would change in election law: Early voting sites: The bill says supervisors "may" offer early voting at fairgrounds, civic centers, courthouses, community centers and stadiums. The supervisors don’t have to offer early voting at these places, so it’s not a mandate. Current law allows for early voting only at libraries, city halls and elections offices. Election preparation report: Every supervisor must submit a report three months before Election Day about staffing and equipment. Declaring elections supervisors noncompliant: The Senate added a controversial amendment that allows the state to place elections supervisors in "noncompliant status" if they miss deadlines or violate election rules. Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, R-Miami, sponsored that amendment, which appears to be aimed at counties deemed "underperforming" in the 2012 election by the state including Miami-Dade and Broward. Supervisors declared noncompliant would lose their "special qualification salary" -- the extra $2,000 supervisors can earn if they meet certain criteria. Most of a supervisor’s salary is based on a population formula. About half of the supervisors are currently eligible to receive the $2,000. Voter assistance/ballot brokering: One of the more contentious additions to the bill limits the number of voters a volunteer can assist in an election to 10 people. Further, the voter must know the person assisting him or her before casting a ballot. The bill also limits the number of absentee ballots that paid campaign workers and other solicitors can accept for nonfamily members to two. Voter rights groups attacked the changes as disenfranchising the elderly, disabled voters and non-English speakers. The proposal follows an election in which paid ballot brokers in Miami-Dade, known as boleteros, were arrested. Length of ballot items: Republicans included a 75-word limit on ballot summaries of proposed constitutional amendments that come from the Legislature. Supervisors are pleased this language is in the proposed overhaul. Democrats are displeased because the 75-word limit disappears if the Florida Supreme Court rejects the wording of the ballot summary. Democrats wanted an amendment that limited the summaries to 75 words on all attempts, but Republicans said no. Corley is not worried. He said, "Could there be a scenario where the Attorney General goes above 75 words in a rewrite? Sure it could, logistically. But I don’t see 650 words." Sunday voting: Smith’s column doesn’t mention that the bill would allow voting on the Sunday before Election Day, known as "Souls to the Polls" drives in some black communities. Current law bans early voting on that Sunday. Before the 2011 law, supervisors could offer an aggregate of eight hours for early voting on the Saturday and Sunday before the election. Just 10 of 67 counties offered voting on Sunday in the 2010 general election for no more than four hours, including Pinellas and Miami-Dade. The new proposal allows -- but doesn’t mandate -- eight to 12 hours of early voting on this Sunday. The law contains other mandates for supervisors, including requiring them to notify electors the reason their absentee ballot was rejected and to upload early voting and absentee ballots the day before Election Day (but not publicly post it). Smith told PolitiFact Florida in an interview that his comment referred to "things that affect voters and their time in line." He called the measures that affect supervisors and canvassing boards "inside baseball." Our ruling Smith wrote that the election bill "allows persons to correct an absentee ballot if they did not sign it and requires an extra two hours a day for early voting. Everything else in this bill is discretionary." The bill does mandate those two changes. But Smith omits that some of those discretionary changes in the bill are a big deal and are expected to change how elections are operated in large counties. Elections supervisors in at least some counties are likely to restore early voting on the Sunday before Election Day and they are likely to add more early voting sites and go beyond the mandated minimum hours. Plus, we found a few provisions that are not discretionary and would affect voters. We rate Smith’s claim Half True.	None	Christopher L. Smith	None	None	None	2013-04-23T18:16:04	2013-04-21	['None']
-pomt-09256	Late changes to the Arizona immigration law "lay to rest questions over the possibility of racial profiling."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/may/04/jan-brewer/arizona-immigration-law-rewrite-lays-rest-worries-/	The controversy over a hard-line immigration law signed by Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on April 23, 2010, shows no signs of ebbing, despite a last-minute change to the law's language designed to placate some of the laws' critics. Generally speaking, the law, which would go into effect in 90 days, makes being an illegal immigrant a state crime and requires legal immigrants to carry papers that confirm their legal status. One of the key questions to emerge during and after its passage has been what standard law enforcement officers will need to use before questioning individuals about their immigration status. Drawing special attention is the role played by "racial profiling" -- that is, the use of racial or ethnic characteristics as a justification for police questioning. Critics had said that the original version of the law permitted racial profiling. But the changes signed by Brewer on April 30 were intended to blunt those charges. The new version of the law says: "A law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may not consider race, color or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution." The prior version had said that an official "may not solely consider race" in such circumstances. The change appears to limit the scope of the law. The previous wording left open the possibility that race could be used as a factor -- just not the sole factor -- in deciding to stop someone. In a news release issued after signing the changes to the law, Brewer said, "These changes specifically answer legal questions raised by some who expressed fears that the original law would somehow allow or lead to racial profiling. These new amendments make it crystal clear and undeniable that racial profiling is illegal, and will not be tolerated in Arizona. I am proud that the Arizona Legislature has listened carefully to everyone’s concerns, and, in a gesture of statesmanship, acted swiftly and appropriately to lay to rest questions over the possibility of racial profiling." We wanted to judge the accuracy of Brewer's statement that the new wording will "lay to rest questions over the possibility of racial profiling." This is our second attempt in a week to analyze the Arizona law. We first addressed the law in a pair of rulings on April 28, 2010, before the most recent changes were made. We'll now attempt another pair of rulings -- this one on the question of racial profiling, and a separate item on whether police need to suspect or witness something illegal before proceeding to ask someone about their immigration status. While the new phrasing on racial profiling seems straightforward -- and while the new language will provide opponents of racial profiling a useful weapon in court -- legal experts we spoke to said that it's not "crystal clear and undeniable" that racial profiling will be impossible under the law. Rather, the Arizona law, even in its revised version, sets up a clash of constitutional principles that could be fought over in the courts for years to come. Indeed, the law almost demands court involvement by expressly authorizing police to consider race "to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution" -- something that is far from nailed down. A big reason for uncertainty is that there is Supreme Court precedent for allowing racial profiling under similar circumstances to those envisioned in the Arizona law. In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case called United States vs. Brignoni-Ponce. In that case, a roving unit of the U.S. Border Patrol stopped a vehicle near the Mexican border and questioned the occupants about their immigration status. In this case, the court wrote, "the only ground for suspicion is that the occupants appear to be of Mexican ancestry." In a 9-0 decision, the court ruled that "because of the important governmental interest in preventing the illegal entry of aliens at the border, the minimal intrusion of a brief stop, and the absence of practical alternatives for policing the border, an officer, whose observations lead him reasonably to suspect that a particular vehicle may contain aliens who are illegally in the country, may stop the car briefly, question the driver and passengers about their citizenship and immigration status, and ask them to explain suspicious circumstances; but any further detention or search must be based on consent or probable cause." In the majority opinion, Justice Lewis Powell continued, "The likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor," even though "standing alone it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens." In other words, racial factors can be legitimately used in profiling, just as long as they are not the only factors -- language that's similar to the Arizona law's original wording. Complicating matters further, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals -- the federal court that includes Arizona -- has issued a more restrictive ruling than the Supreme Court on the use of race in profiling. Unlike the Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit ruled that consideration of Hispanic appearance in a stop is impermissible, said Jennifer Chacon, law professor at the University of California-Irvine. This tracks closely the new language added to the law. Legal experts we spoke to said that, at a minimum, this difference of opinion sets up a judicial conflict that needs to be sorted out. In the meantime, even if racial profiling is officially banned, the new Arizona law continues to permit non-racially based profiling, such as profiling based on clothing or behavior. Yet many legal experts we spoke to saw a hazy, and perhaps unenforceable, line between permissible profiles and illegal ones. Kevin Johnson, dean of the law school at the University of California-Davis and a specialist on immigration law, said he worries that local police inadequately trained in immigration law could engage in profiling, either unwittingly or intentionally. "My fear is that, with the new addition to the law or not, racial profiling will result, with untrained local law enforcement officers – perhaps unconsciously – relying on racial and/or class stereotypes" when determining whether there's "reasonable suspicion" about one's immigration status. For defendants who feel they were stopped unfairly due to racial profiling, "it may be virtually impossible to show, at least for many months if not several years" that the police made their decision illegally on racial or ethnic grounds, said Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University. Brewer's office did not respond to a request for comment. Ultimately, the late changes do bolster Brewer's contention that the law prohibits racial profiling. But our legal experts say that it is far from the done deal that she suggests. There are simply too many legal loose ends to be settled in court to be able to say that the late changes to the law will "lay to rest questions over the possibility of racial profiling," as Brewer put it. We rule Brewer's statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Jan Brewer	None	None	None	2010-05-04T13:26:29	2010-04-30	['Arizona']
-goop-02945	Iggy Azalea Warning Khloe Kardashian That Tristan Thompson Will Cheat On Her, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/iggy-azalea-not-warning-khloe-kardashian-tristan-thompson-cheat/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Iggy Azalea NOT Warning Khloe Kardashian That Tristan Thompson Will Cheat On Her, Despite Report	6:02 pm, March 10, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-01617	In 2012, there were nearly 12.2 million arrests and only 410 "uses of deadly force" by police in the United States.	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2014/aug/29/edward-flynn/fatal-police-shootings-occur-tiny-percentage-arres/	In the wake of the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn was interviewed for nearly an hour on Wisconsin Public Radio about the incident and its implications. At one point during the Aug. 20, 2014 interview, Flynn told host Kathleen Dunn "there are many reasons why (police) uses of force are dramatically down, and the main one is training." Then, alluding back to Ferguson, the chief added: "It's an extraordinarily rare event. But the fact is, (in) 2012, there were 12,197,000 arrests in the United States, OK? And there were 410 uses of deadly force. Now that is, I think, three-thousands of a percent. So, it’s still an extraordinarily rare event." In the comparison Flynn uses, there is one police killing in 0.00003 percent of all arrests -- an even tinier fraction than he suggested. But expressed another way, the 410 is an average of more than one police killing per day. So, what about the two figures themselves: Are they accurate and do they account for all of the people who are killed by police? Renewed focus Around the country, attention to the use of deadly force by police was heightened after Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, was shot to death on Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb. In Milwaukee, residents held rallies to raise questions about the Brown case and about the April 2014 death of Dontre Hamilton, a 31-year-old who was shot multiple times by a police officer during a struggle in Red Arrow Park in downtown Milwaukee. (In Milwaukee, there was one police killing of a citizen in 2012, four in 2013 and two through late August of 2014, the Police Department told us.) PolitiFact National rated Half True a claim by conservative talk show host Michael Medved that "more whites than blacks are victims of deadly police shootings." The claim ignored the fact that there are more than five times more whites than blacks in America. And our colleagues rated as False a statement that an unarmed black person is shot by a police officer every 28 hours. The report that had been cited by CNN pundit Marc Lamont Hill looked at all deaths, not just those of unarmed individuals. And it rolled in some deaths that did not involve police officers. Flynn’s claim Flynn, who headed the police departments in Arlington, Va., and Springfield, Mass., before becoming Milwaukee’s chief in 2008, is known nationally for his use of data. When we asked for evidence for Flynn’s claim, a Milwaukee police spokesman cited two FBI reports. Both are from 2012, the most recent full-year statistics available. There were 12,196,959 arrests across the country in 2012, which means the figure Flynn used -- 12,197,000 -- was rounded up only slightly. The highest numbers of those arrests were for drug abuse violations, driving under the influence and larceny-theft. There were also 410 cases of justifiable homicide in 2012, according to the FBI, which defines justifiable homicide as the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty. For example: A police officer responding to a bank robbery alarm who shot a suspect after the suspect fired at the officer. But that doesn’t taken into account all police killings of citizens. FiveThirtyEight.com, a news website devoted to data analysis, recently reported that the 410 is a minimum figure. The numbers are self-reported by local police agencies and not audited, not all police agencies report those figures to the FBI and the number doesn’t include homicides that weren’t ruled justifiable. The FBI totals are likely an undercount for another reason, criminologists told us. Researchers who examine police killings of citizens within large metropolitan police departments often find that the number of such incidents recorded by the departments are higher than the number of justifiable homicides reported by the FBI. But the criminologists also noted Flynn’s comparison is one legitimate way to measure the frequency of police killings. Our rating Flynn said that in 2012, there were nearly 12.2 million arrests and "410 uses of deadly force" by police in the United States. The Milwaukee police chief correctly quotes official FBI statistics on arrests and justifiable homicides by law enforcement officers, although it appears the 410 is an undercount of the number of people killed by police. We rate his statement Mostly True. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website.	None	Edward Flynn	None	None	None	2014-08-29T05:00:00	2014-08-20	['United_States']
-pomt-05978	"When I was speaker, we had four consecutive balanced budgets."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/23/newt-gingrich/newt-gingrich-repeats-claim-he-balanced-federal-bu/	During the Jan. 23, 2012, Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Newt Gingrich repeated a claim he’s made about his record in balancing the budget as House speaker. "When I was speaker, we had four consecutive balanced budgets, the only time in your lifetime, Brian, that we've had four consecutive balanced budgets," Gingrich said. "Most people think that's good." We’ve checked this -- such as during the Dec. 15, 2011, Republican presidential debate in Sioux City, Iowa -- and never found it to be accurate. Gingrich was speaker from January 1995 to January 1999, when he was a Republican congressman from Atlanta’s suburbs. The federal budget runs on a fiscal year calendar that begins October 1 and ends September 30. During fiscal years 1996 and 1997 -- the first two that Gingrich helped shape as speaker -- there were deficits: $107 billion in 1996 and about $22 billion in 1997. By fiscal year 1998, the federal budget did reach a surplus of $69 billion. And in fiscal year 1999 -- which Gingrich can claim some responsibility for, even though he was out as speaker for most of the fiscal year -- it was in surplus as well, to the tune of $126 billion. But that’s only two balanced budgets he can plausibly claim credit for. The federal government did run four consecutive surpluses, but for the last two of those -- fiscal years 2000 and 2001 -- Gingrich was no longer serving in the House. It’s also worth noting that even the two balanced budgets for which Gingrich can claim some credit were collective accomplishments by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. Our ruling Gingrich was off-base with this claim -- again. The budget was indeed balanced for four years, but it’s a stretch for him to take credit for anything more than two of those years. We rate Gingrich’s claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/638b4582-eb6f-4e7e-b410-2bfdee9e7dd5	None	Newt Gingrich	None	None	None	2012-01-23T21:58:15	2012-01-23	['None']
-pomt-12765	"Abortion providers like Planned Parenthood do little other than provide abortions."	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2017/feb/24/sean-duffy/sean-duffys-base-claim-about-planned-parenthood-an/	U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wausau) wants states to be able to refuse Medicaid funds to health centers that provide abortions, so in January 2017, the Wisconsin Republican reintroduced legislation to do just that — a bill called the Women’s Public Health and Safety Act. Federal dollars currently cannot go toward abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or risk to the mother’s life. But providers that offer abortions can still receive Medicaid dollars for other medical services, such as tests for sexually transmitted diseases and cancer screenings. In a Jan. 24, 2017 news release announcing the legislation, Duffy claimed: "New evidence reveals that abortion providers like Planned Parenthood do little other than provide abortions." It’s an intriguing statement: The bill hits on a divisive issue in American politics — abortion — and Duffy’s news release provided no supporting information to back-up the claim. When we asked Duffy for details, spokesman Mark Bednar cited a video that an anti-abortion group released in January 2017 asserting, in short, that few Planned Parenthood facilities offer prenatal care. (Planned Parenthood, which has about 650 health centers across the country, including 21 in Wisconsin, disputes the video’s conclusions.) Bednar also provided estimates of Planned Parenthood's U.S. market share for abortions and how much money the group makes by performing abortions. We reviewed everything Duffy’s team supplied and none of it came close to justifying the claim that "new evidence reveals that abortion providers like Planned Parenthood do little other than provide abortions." So let’s take a closer look. Calculating abortions At the outset, we note that Planned Parenthood provides a wide variety of health services, not just abortions, according to the group’s 2014-2015 annual report, the most recent one available. Those other services include contraception, hormone therapy, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy tests, cancer screenings and prevention procedures, as well as smoking cessation assistance. To fully evaluate Duffy’s claim, though, we need to get a sense of the relative frequency of the abortions Planned Parenthood provides and how it compares to other services, and there are different ways of measuring that. Planned Parenthood performed nearly 324,000 abortions in the 12-month period between October 2013 and September 2014, according to the group’s annual report. That’s out of a total 9.4 million services provided to patients in the same time period, including: -- 4.2 million tests and treatment procedures for sexually transmitted infections; -- 2.9 million contraception services; -- 1.1 million pregnancy tests; -- 682,000 cancer screening and prevention procedures; -- 95,800 other health-related services; -- 17,400 prenatal services. The upshot is that abortions accounted for about 3 percent of all Planned Parenthood’s procedures and services, the annual report states. Critics and some observers have questioned whether the 3 percent figure accurately reflects the proportion of abortion services at Planned Parenthood centers. That’s because the calculation used to arrive at the number doesn’t distinguish between types of services, their cost or complexity. In other words, one abortion is counted the same as providing a contraceptive or pregnancy test. But there is a second, perhaps more objective way of assessing Duffy’s claim: look at patients. Planned Parenthood had about 2.5 million patients in the 12-month period covered in its annual report, from October 2013 to September 2014. About 13 percent of patients had abortions in that time frame, according to Elizabeth Clark, director of health media for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Put another way: 87 percent of patients visited Planned Parenthood for non-abortion needs. We recognize, of course, that Planned Parenthood has self-reported these figures from their affiliates. Still, the numbers are independently audited, Clark said, and we are not aware of any other sources that can reliably provide the same kind of information. It’s also worth pointing out that because federal dollars generally can’t be used for abortions, Duffy’s bill and other legislation aimed at restricting public funding for Planned Parenthood are themselves an acknowledgment of sorts that the organization does more than provide abortions. Indeed, Planned Parenthood’s single-largest share of revenue in fiscal year 2015 — $553 million, or 43 percent — came from government grants and reimbursements, according to the annual report. Our rating Duffy said, "New evidence reveals that abortion providers like Planned Parenthood do little other than provide abortions." But that is far from accurate. Planned Parenthood’s most recent annual report covering a 12-month span between October 2013 and September 2014 states that abortions accounted for 3 percent of services the organization provided. About 13 percent of Planned Parenthood patients had abortions in the same period, a spokeswoman said. What’s more, Duffy’s own measure to defund Planned Parenthood underlines how inaccurate this claim is. Federal money generally can’t be used for abortions, so the money he and others want to eliminate goes to pay for, well, things other than abortions. For a claim that’s false and ridiculous, we have one rating: Pants on Fire. Share the Facts Politifact 5 6 Politifact Rating: "Abortion providers like Planned Parenthood do little other than provide abortions." Sean Duffy U.S. representative, R-Wis. In a news release Tuesday, January 24, 2017 01/24/2017 Read More info	None	Sean Duffy	None	None	None	2017-02-24T05:00:00	2017-01-24	['None']
-pomt-05053	"I've never supported a payroll tax."	false	/texas/statements/2012/jul/09/david-dewhurst/david-dewhurst-says-he-never-supported-texas-payro/	Questioning his opponent for the state's Republican U.S. Senate nomination, attorney Ted Cruz asked David Dewhurst: "Did you support a payroll tax -- yes or no -- and is that a good idea?" "No and no," Dewhurst replied in their June 22, 2012, debate hosted by Dallas’s KERA-TV, Channel 13. Cruz: "You did not support a payroll tax?" Dewhurst: "No, I’ve never supported a wage tax and I’ve never supported a payroll tax." We previously rated Pants on Fire a claim by Cruz that Dewhurst has a record of promoting a Texas income tax. No Texas leader has come close to such a pitch since a Dewhurst predecessor as lieutenant governor, Democrat Bob Bullock, floated the prospect in 1991. And is Dewhurst correct that he has never supported a payroll tax? Everyone is familiar with the federal payroll tax, meaning the taxes taken from paychecks of employed Americans, primarily to fund Social Security and Medicare. But Texas has no state payroll tax. End of story? No, because a payroll tax feature was debated in Texas in 2004 and 2005, when Dewhurst was in his first gavel-wielding term overseeing the Texas Senate. At the time, lawmakers were looking at ways of revising the state’s outdated business franchise tax and also generating revenue to cover sought reductions in school property taxes. According to news stories we corraled via Nexis, Dewhurst steered clear of supporting a payroll tax during a spring 2004 special session called by Gov. Rick Perry toward tackling the franchise tax and lowering school property taxes. The Texas House removed a payroll tax element from its proposal before sending its revised plan to the Senate, which advanced no counter-proposal before the session ended, according to a May 18, 2004, Houston Chronicle news article. The next year, lawmakers tried again. As the 2005 regular legislative session began, Dewhurst joined Perry and House Speaker Tom Craddick in vowing to lower school property taxes. The trio did not commit to a particular finance plan, according to a Jan. 11, 2005, Austin American-Statesman news article, though; the story says Perry "reaffirmed his opposition to a payroll tax and questioned whether an increased gross-receipts tax or business-activity tax could jeopardize job growth." A Jan. 18, 2005, San Antonio Express-News report says that two days into the 140-day session, a Senate plan presented by Dewhurst called for expanding the franchise tax to all businesses except sole proprietorships. The story says senators had discussed setting the rate at less than 2 percent of each firm's net income plus its payroll, minus a deduction for each employee. So, the initial Senate plan of 2005 had a payroll element. In March 2005, the House approved a revenue package that offered companies a choice of paying the existing franchise tax or a 1.15 percent payroll tax on salaries up to $90,000 a year. Dewhurst aired misgivings about the House’s payroll element, according to a March 16, 2005, Express-News news article. The story quotes Dewhurst saying: "I've said over and over and over again that I think a broad-based, low rate that's based upon revenue and income is fairer than a payroll tax" which hurts firms with lots of workers. The story says House leaders had said they got around that difficulty by offering companies a choice of which type of tax to pay. An April 28, 2005, Dallas Morning News news article, headlined "Dewhurst lays out tax swap," says Dewhurst had "laid out a preliminary tax swap plan" offsetting some $4.5 billion in school property tax reductions with various tax increases including a revamped franchise tax extended to virtually all businesses, which would pay about 1.35 percent on after-tax earnings plus, the story says, employee compensation. But by May 2005, the Senate voted to answer the House with a plan allowing companies to choose the lower of two business taxes, as long as they generated more money than a minimum tax of 0.25 percent of gross receipts -- and the adopted plan retained payroll elements. The details are a bit eye-glazing. But as described in a May 12, 2005, American-Statesman news article, the first option for businesses was to pay 2.5 percent of the sum of their net taxable income plus payroll, though they could deduct from the tax base either half of their payrolls or $30,000 per employee plus the cost of some health benefits. The second option in the Senate plan would have required companies to pay a 1.75 percent payroll tax, capped at $1,500 per employee. After the Senate acted, Dewhurst issued a press release praising the action, as Cruz’s campaign has pointed out. Dewhurst’s release includes a paragraph summarizing the tax measure, House Bill 3. "By closing loopholes, the plan broadens the franchise tax base, and extends a lower rate to all Texas businesses—effectively treating all businesses equally under state tax law. Texas businesses will have a choice of paying either a low-rate revised franchise tax or a payroll tax," the release says. In that session and a summer session, however, the House and Senate did not reach a compromise, leaving the overhaul of the franchise tax to be resolved in a different way in 2006. For outside perspective, we shared the description of the 2005 Senate-approved plan with Richard Pomp, a University of Connecticut law professor who has written extensively on state and local taxation. By telephone, Pomp said he would say the first option in the Senate plan had a payroll tax element, while the second option was a pure payroll tax. "It doesn’t get any less ambiguous than that, does it?" Pomp said. We contacted Dewhurst’s campaign about this topic and didn’t hear back. Our ruling During the state’s mid-decade tax debates, the Senate under Dewhurst’s leadership -- and to his praise -- incorporated payroll taxes in a proposal to replace the existing business franchise tax. No payroll tax passed into law. Still, it’s incorrect to say Dewhurst never supported a payroll tax. We rate his debate claim as False.	None	David Dewhurst	None	None	None	2012-07-09T14:20:48	2012-06-22	['None']
-thet-00057	SNP claim of 2500% increase in child food bank use is Mostly True	none	https://theferret.scot/snp-food-bank-children-conservatives/	None	Fact check 	None	None	None	SNP claim of 2500% increase in child food bank use is Mostly True	July 23, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-01151	The home-mortgage deduction is widely thought to be "a middle-class benefit. It's not -- 73 percent of it goes to people making a quarter-million dollars or more a year."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/dec/17/tom-coburn/coburn-says-73-percent-benefits-mortgage-deduction/	Not long before he was to officially retire from the U.S. Senate, Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn appeared on CNN to discuss the Senate’s report on alleged CIA torture of detainees. But the Dec. 11, 2014, interview, eventually turned to an issue Coburn is better known for -- cutting government spending. Coburn aimed his comments at tax breaks given to people who, he suggested, don’t really need them. "We're going to spend $5 trillion over the next five years in terms of tax benefits to selected groups of people that may not necessarily be (helpful in) growing and creating new jobs," Coburn said. He continued, "Home mortgages -- everybody said that's a middle-class benefit. It's not -- 73 percent of it goes to people making a quarter-million dollars or more a year. So, that's not middle class. That's upper class." We wondered if Coburn’s numbers were accurate, so we took a closer look. Pretty quickly, we were able to find where the 73 percent figure came from. It stems from a report by the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan number-crunching arm of Congress. The May 2013 report attempts to classify which classes of Americans benefit from "tax expenditures." What’s a "tax expenditure"? It’s Washington jargon for a preference written into the federal tax system -- basically, a tax break -- that reduces the amount of revenue the government brings in. Typically, such tax breaks provide financial assistance to identifiable groups of people -- homeowners, in the case of the mortgage-interest deduction. The provision in question allows homeowners to deduct the amount of the mortgage interest they paid during the year when figuring out how much they need to pay in federal taxes. Coburn’s concern was that the deduction disproportionately benefits richer homeowners, rather than middle-class homeowners. It would seem to make sense that richer homeowners would benefit from this deduction more than less-well-heeled homeowners would, if only because the richer you are, the more expensive your house will likely be, and, therefore, the more you will tend to pay in interest. But Coburn’s statistic inflates the degree by which the richest Americans benefit from the tax break. CBO found that 73 percent of the benefits from the mortgage-interest deduction went to the top quintile of Americans, as measured by their pre-tax income. ("Quintile" refers to the top one-fifth of the income spectrum.) The CBO report doesn’t specify the income cutoff to make it into the top quintile. But other data shows that it’s well below the $250,000 Coburn cited. Census Bureau figures for 2012 found that only 2.4 percent of American households earned at least $250,000. This suggests that the top quintile starts somewhere between $100,000 and $125,000. That estimate is backed up by calculations from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, which found that the top quintile starts at a little over $100,000. Even more persuasively, the Tax Policy Center looked at the exact question Coburn raised. The center didn’t specifically break out incomes above $250,000, but it found that those with incomes above $200,000 took 45.2 percent of the benefits from the deduction. That means that those earning $250,000 would be taking somewhere between 35 percent and 40 percent of the benefits. Thirty-five to 40 percent is certainly a disproportionate share -- those earning $200,000 or more accounted for just 6.3 percent of all taxpayers -- but it’s still only about half of Coburn’s 73 percent share. Coburn "is way off," said Roberton Williams, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center. Coburn’s office clarified the discrepancy by saying that he had been referring to CBO’s average household income for the top quintile in 2011. That was $234,700, or within shouting distance of a quarter million dollars. However, the $234,000 figure is the average income of all households in the top quintile, meaning that many of the households in that grouping earned less than that. We believe the lower figure -- the top-quintile entry threshold of a little over $100,000 -- more accurately reflects the point Coburn was making. Our ruling Coburn said 73 percent of the benefits of the mortgage-interest deduction "goes to people making a quarter-million dollars or more a year." In reality, 73 percent of the mortgage-interest deduction benefits go to those making a little over $100,000 a year, not $250,000 a year. That’s still a large amount of the benefit going to a relatively high-income group, but it’s not as high as Coburn indicated. In reality, 73 percent of the benefits are sent to the top-earning 20 percent of taxpayers, rather than to top 5 percent, as Coburn suggested. We rate the claim Half True.	None	Tom Coburn	None	None	None	2014-12-17T10:52:19	2014-12-11	['None']
-snes-01534	Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote an opinion piece entitled "The Enemy Among Us" alleging that former President Barack Obama was creating a "shadow government" through his nonprofit Organizing for Action.	misattributed	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charles-krauthammer-the-enemy-among-us/	None	Questionable Quotes	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Charles Krauthammer Write an Op-Ed Called ‘The Enemy Among Us?’	24 October 2017	None	['Charles_Krauthammer', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-14617	"It is rare that a retirement grade determination is conducted for an officer previously retired from the U.S. armed forces."	true	/rhode-island/statements/2016/jan/31/jack-reed/reed-and-mccain-make-case-save-gen-petraeus-pensio/	From their seats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jack Reed and John McCain had a front row vantage point on the rise of Army General David Petraeus, the legendary military leader who authored the counterinsurgency campaign known as "The Surge." Both senators visited Petraeus in Baghdad, received testimony from him in Washington and greatly admired the general’s leadership of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reed and McCain, former military officers and the Republican and Democratic leaders of the committee, repeatedly voted for Petraeus’ various postings, including his appointment as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2011. Then in 2012 the roof collapsed on Petraeus’ career after a scandal involving an extra-marital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, prompted his resignation in 2012 and eventually led to his misdemeanor criminal conviction for inappropriately handling classified information. Now, in a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, the two senators have come to the defense of the disgraced four-star general, whom they called "brilliant." Carter is considering retroactively demoting the retiree, which could take away one of his stars and slash his annual pension from about $220,000 to as low as $170,000, according to recent media reports. The senators’ Jan. 20 letter says a retroactive review of Petraeus’ retirement, coming one year after the general admitted his guilt and apologized, would be "manifestly unreasonable and unfair." "It is rare that a retirement grade determination is conducted for an officer previously retired from the U.S. armed forces," says the letter, which is signed by both senators. The statement made us wonder, is it rare? Petraeus can’t be the only former military officer convicted of a crime. What happens in other cases? First, let’s look at the Petraeus case. After returning from Afghanistan during the summer of 2011, Petraeus held onto eight black notebooks that contained classified information such as the names of covert officers, war strategy and other intelligence matters, according to an admission he made at his plea hearing. "On or about" Aug. 28, 2011, says the court record, Petraeus provided the notebooks to his biographer. He retired on Aug. 31, and he retrieved the notebooks on or about Sept. 1. Later, in October 2012, while Petraeus was serving as CIA director, he spoke to two FBI agents and admitted his involvement in an affair with Broadwell, telling them their relationship began after he left the military. He denied providing classified information to Broadwell, which was a knowing and deliberate false statement, according to an admission he would make later in court. In November 2012, he resigned as CIA director. FBI agents recovered the notebooks from Petraeus’ home, where he had kept them in violation of the law. In March 2015, he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor. In the U.S. Army, a process called grade determination" governs the rank an officer retires at and also affects retirement pay. Such determinations "are normally accomplished at the time of retirement" and remain "fixed" thereafter, according to Army regulation 15-80. But the Army can lower the grade of a retired officer if any misconduct while on active duty is documented by a conviction in the wake of the officer’s retirement, says the regulation, which also talks about "substantial new evidence" triggering a review if it’s "discovered within a short time following separation." Reed and McCain argue that too much time has passed for such action. The specific sequence of events that might lead the Army to retroactively demote a retiree are quite rare to begin with, according to Anita Gorecki-Robbins, a lawyer and former Army Judge Advocate General officer who represents members of the military in grade determination proceedings. First of all, she said, the officer’s active-duty misconduct -- or lawbreaking -- must stay off the radar prior to his or her retirement. Then after retirement someone must tell the Army’s review board about it. During her 15 years of experience, she’s never encountered such a case. We asked both senators to substantiate their claim that such retroactive grade determinations are rare. Reed’s spokesman, Chip Unruh, consulted the Department of Defense and the Army and told us both entities confirm there has been only one case in the last decade involving the retroactive demotion of a retired three star or four star general. Looking at the officers’ corps at large, it’s rare for anyone to advance to the rank of three-star general and it’s rarer still for an officer of such a lofty rank to be criminally charged. And then consider the circumstances of the Petraeus scandal, involving a storied war leader and former CIA director. As Gorecki-Robbins says: "This is truly a unique set of facts." Our Ruling In their letter, McCain and Reed told the defense secretary, "It is rare that a retirement grade determination is conducted for an officer previously retired from the U.S. armed forces." That claim is True. That’s our ruling. But we feel compelled to point out that the procedure itself is rare and it’s rarer still to see an American military officer rise so high and fall so far.	None	Jack Reed	None	None	None	2016-01-31T00:00:00	2016-01-20	['United_States']
-pomt-07205	"We had (a bill) in Florida where we now are prohibiting doctors to talk -- particularly pediatricians -- to talk to their patients about gun safety in the home."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2011/jun/06/bob-graham/bob-graham-says-hardball-florida-bill-prohibits-do/	Former Florida Democratic governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham says current Gov. Rick Scott is upending years of progress in the state created by both Republicans and Democrats, and his abysmal poll numbers are evidence that Floridians don't like it. Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball program on June 1, 2011, Graham said Scott is "out of the mainstream of Florida." (Scott's current approval rating is 29 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.) "Remember, Florida has had Republican governors for the last 12 years. We have had Republican Legislatures for most of that time. And now we have a supermajority Republican Legislature," said Graham, who appeared on the show with former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, also a Democrat. "So when the governor vetoes a budget and describes -- or line-item vetoes -- and describes things as frivolous and not in the public interest, he is not pointing at Democrats. He is pointing at his own party." "What happened with these Republicans?" Matthews asked. "People wanted to see some restraint on spending. They're worried about the economy. And these guys went in there and picked up on the old Republican agenda of labor bashing, of going after public employees -- I guess they are going after the trial lawyers next -- just the old Republican agenda that they could have done (in) any administration, and they are just out of touch with the people. What do you think, Governor Graham?" Graham answered. "Chris, I think you are absolutely right that what the people are really concerned with today are jobs and those things that are going to contribute to long-term economic well-being, such as an investment in education, protecting our environment," he said. "And these governors have gotten off onto a very bizarre agenda of issues. We had one in Florida where we now are prohibiting doctors to talk -- particularly pediatricians -- to talk to their patients about gun safety in the home. That's how far out of the mainstream our state government has gotten." The talk about a gun bill passed in Florida got laughter from Matthews, and then this response: "Gun safety is a no-no, huh? You can't talk about that even with mothers." Because it was a focal point in the interview, we wanted to see if it was true. About the gun bill We've written about the bill in question, HB 155, twice before. The bill passed the Legislature and was signed into law by the governor on June 2. The original version of the bill created a firestorm -- and fodder for national television -- because it sought to punish doctors with imprisonment or fines up to $5 million for asking a patient or a patient's family about gun ownership and gun habits. House sponsor Rep. Jason Brodeur, R-Sanford, said the bill was drafted partly as a reaction to American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, which encourage physicians to counsel parents on creating a safe home environment and offering advice to avoid preventable accidents. The recommendations include mainly innocuous tips like "Keep plastic bags and balloons away from your children," and "NEVER place an infant in front of an air bag." Physicians also are encouraged to tell parents to remove guns from places where children live and play. In another case, Brodeur said an Ocala woman was turned away from her pediatrician after she refused to say whether she owned a firearm. The multimillion-dollar fines and possible prison time were stripped from the bill, and the final language was watered down as part of a compromise between the Florida Medical Association and the National Rifle Association. Under the bill that ultimately passed: * Health care providers cannot enter gun ownership information into a patient's medical record "if the practitioner knows that such information is not relevant to the patient's medical care or safety, or the safety of others." * Health care providers cannot ask questions to patients or their families about whether they own a gun, unless the provider "believes that this information is relevant to the patient's medical care or safety, or the safety of others." * Health care providers cannot discriminate against patients because they own firearms. * Health care providers should "refrain from unnecessarily harassing a patient about firearm ownership during an examination." The penalties for violating the new rules could cost a doctor his or her license. Or they could face a fine up to $10,000. While the Florida Medical Association supported the legislation, other groups of doctors -- including pediatricians remained in opposition, saying the law violates the free speech rights of doctors and "also deprive patients of potentially life-saving information regarding safety measures they can take to protect their children, families and others from injury or death resulting from unsafe storage or handling of firearms." (A group of doctors has since said they plan to sue over the law). But the question for this fact check is whether the bill prohibits doctors from talking to their patients about gun safety in the home, as Graham said. The answer is not explicit. The law prohibits -- in many cases -- a doctor from asking their patient or their family if they own a firearm. But the bill does not prevent doctors from discussing firearm safety. So a pediatrician could counsel patients that if they own a gun, they should keep it stored away from small children. But they couldn't specifically ask if the patient owned a firearm, unless a doctor believed the information was relevant to the patient's medical care. They also could not "harass" a patient about gun ownership, according to the law. The law doesn't define "harassing" or detail scenarios when a doctor is allowed to ask about gun ownership -- and that has some doctors worried. "The law would virtually guarantee that some health care professionals who are simply following established protocol by informing patients of the lethal risks of firearms will be brought before a disciplinary board if a patient categorically objects to any discussion or inquiry on the subject of household firearms," attorney Bruce Manheim wrote in a letter to Scott urging his veto on behalf of the Florida Chapters of the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Family Practitioners and the American College of Physicians. "Consequently, beyond imposing express prohibitions on protected speech, the legislation is also so vague, and its sanctions are so severe, that health care professionals will be chilled from freely engaging in speech with their patients." Graham said in an interview with PolitiFact Florida that the chilling effect generated by the bill could stop doctors from even talking about guns. "I'm a hunter, have guns, etc., but I don't think you need to deny parents professional information about how to keep their children safe," he said. "This law is an over-extension of what constitutes proper respect for people's Second Amendment rights." Graham also had us speak to a Tallahassee pediatrician who has been fighting the law, Dr. Louis St. Petery. St. Petery told us that pediatricians have a long list of potential hazards they want to discuss with patient's families. That's why asking if a gun is important, because it helps focus discussions during the limited time doctors and families have. As a result of this law, St. Petery said pediatricians will withdraw from asking about or discussing guns. That will result in an increase in gun-related injuries and deaths, he said. "Sen. Graham is 100 percent correct," St. Petery said. Brodeur, the bill sponsor, provided the counter argument. He said HB 155 "doesn't prevent the safety conversation at all," in a posting on Twitter. Our ruling On MSNBC's Hardball, Graham said the Florida Legislature had passed a bill "prohibiting doctors to talk -- particularly pediatricians -- to talk to their patients about gun safety in the home." The bill doesn't go that far. HB 155 creates restrictions for doctors wishing to ask their patients (or families) if they own a gun, and says health care officials should "refrain from unnecessarily harassing a patient about firearm ownership during an examination." Doctors remain able to address gun safety in general, though some say the threat of getting in trouble may hinder or prevent that discussion from taking place. The difference here is asking about gun ownership versus talking about gun safety. We rate this claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Bob Graham	None	None	None	2011-06-06T11:35:36	2011-06-01	['None']
-para-00216	Says Australians subsidise the car industry by $18 per head — well below the United States and Germany.	mostly true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/20/kevin-rudd/memo-anti-car-industry-flat-earth-society-please-n/index.html	None	['Tax']	Kevin Rudd	Chris Pash, Peter Fray	None	Memo to Anti-Car Industry Flat Earth Society: We subsidise the car industry by only $18 per head	Tuesday, August 20, 2013 at 2:42 p.m.	None	['United_States', 'Germany']
-goop-01291	Angelina Jolie Still Moving To England With Brad Pitt’s Kids, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-moving-england-brad-pitt-kids-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Angelina Jolie Still NOT Moving To England With Brad Pitt’s Kids, Despite Claim	10:16 am, March 29, 2018	None	['England']
-snes-03806	New research suggests that Marmite helps combat premature ejaculation.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marmite-cures-premature-ejaculation/	None	Food	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Marmite Cures Premature Ejaculation?	13 October 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-01639	Points of Light is "the world’s largest volunteer organization."	mostly false	/georgia/statements/2014/aug/26/michelle-nunn/nunns-ad-claim-misses-mark/	President George H. W. Bush spoke at his inauguration in 1989 of "individuals and community organizations spread like stars through the nation doing good." Out of that vision came the nonprofit Points of Light. And out of Points of Light came Michelle Nunn, a Georgia native with a do-gooder resume, political pedigree and desire to be the state’s next U.S. senator. In a new television ad, Nunn, a Democrat, criticizes the business tactics of millionaire David Perdue, her Republican opponent in the race to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss. The TV ad begins by introducing Nunn as "CEO of the world’s largest volunteer organization." That line gave pause to a PolitiFact reader, who contacted us to say he was pretty confident that the international Red Cross, not Points of Light, holds that distinction. We truthfully had no idea but promised to investigate. First, a little on the very different work undertaken by the two nonprofits. The Red Cross, the world’s largest humanitarian organization, is best known for promoting blood donations and for being on the scene when disaster strikes with food, clothing and temporary housing assistance. Points of Light, President Bush’s brainchild, mobilizes volunteers through a network of 250 volunteer action centers worldwide, through its programs for youth and national service alumni and through its partnerships with thousands of companies and nonprofits. Nunn, daughter of former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, has been its CEO since 2007, when it merged with the Hands on Network, a nonprofit she helped create and ran. She’s on leave from Points of Light while campaigning. On its website, Points of Light says it had 4 million volunteers worldwide in 2012. By contrast, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, shows a volunteer force worldwide of about 17 million, including 501,208 in North America. (We got that data by adding up country-by-country data we found on its website.) Benoit Matsha-Carpentier, a spokesman for the organization in Geneva, Switzerland, confirmed the accuracy of our math. He provided a Red Cross powerpoint presentation, showing the organization had 17.1 million volunteers around the globe in 2012. So how can Points of Light claim to the "world’s largest volunteer organization?" Points of Light routinely provides a much more nuanced description of its work, although the campaign pointed us to at least two instances -- one in 2007 and one in 2012 -- where the nonprofit did refer to itself as the "world’s largest volunteer organization." Currently, on its web site and elsewhere, Points of Light is identified as "the largest organization in the world dedicated to volunteer service." It’s a title the group is confident it can claim. "We are unaware of any other organization solely dedicated to volunteer service that is using such a wide range of assets to increase the number of volunteers in the world and the impact of the work they do," Stefanie Weiss, Points of Light spokeswoman, said in an email. "We say that 'Points of Light is the largest organization in the world dedicated to volunteer service.' We work with millions of people and tens of thousands of partner organizations to increase the number of volunteers in the world and the impact of the work they do." Tom Pollak, senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center for Nonprofits and Charitable Organizations, said the ad’s description of Points of Light "doesn’t strike me as patently disingenuous or deceptive." But he said Points of Light’s description of itself as the "the largest organization in the world dedicated to volunteer service" seems more accurate and "a little less subject" to being misconstrued. Data on volunteerism should be viewed with some skepticism, Pollak said. That’s because some people can be involved in long-term volunteering. Others may be involved in a single event, such as a weekend helping to build a home for a needy family, and the organization may not be keeping careful track of the number of participants, he said. Relying on data reported by non-profits on their federal tax forms, Pollak was able to provide us with a list of the 25 nonprofits reporting the highest number of volunteers, nationwide. No. 1 was the American Heart Association with 22 million volunteers, followed by the Muscular Dystrophy Association Inc. with 15 million. Pollak said he wasn’t aware of information available to do a similar comparison on a worldwide scale. And the Red Cross’s 17.1 million volunteers doesn’t appear to be a record just based on the numbers U.S. organizations use. So where does that leave us? Points of Light has a unique mission carved out by President Bush -- mobilizing volunteers around the world. Nunn has used her stewardship of the non-profit to burnish her leadership credentials in the race against businessman Perdue. But her political ad undercuts how Points of Light describes itself on its website -- as "the largest organization in the world dedicated to volunteer service." That’s substantially different from the world’s largest volunteer organization. .We rate the ad statement as Mostly False.	None	Michelle Nunn	None	None	None	2014-08-26T00:00:00	2014-08-07	['None']
-pomt-10585	"Let's not blame President Bush for all of this. We've got a Congress who sat around on their hands and done nothing but spend a lot of money ... leaving us $9-trillion in debt that we're passing on to our grandchildren."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/31/mike-huckabee/congress-delivered-but-after-bush-asked/	Responding to a question about whether Americans are better off than they were eight years ago, Mike Huckabee tried to deflect some of the blame for the nation's economy away from President Bush and onto Congress, which he portrayed as fiscally reckless. "We've got a Congress who sat around on their hands and done nothing but spend a lot of money and they're spending, leaving us $9-trillion in debt that we're passing on to our grandchildren," he said during a Jan. 30, 2008, Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Library. Huckabee is correct there is a $9-trillion debt — actually, it's $9.2-trillion — and that it will be left to future generations to repay. And he's right about federal spending; it rose a cumulative 53 percent between 2000 and 2007. Because taxes and other receipts didn't rise as fast, the debt soared. But the former Arkansas governor overlooks the fact that President Bush asked for most of the changes that drove up spending, most notably the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that were not fullly offset by spending cuts and the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, which drove up entitlement costs. There also were national security spending increases after 9/11 and the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republican-controlled Congresses delivered on each of these high-priority items, and Bush signed them into law. So at a minimum, the president and Congress share the blame for the fiscal policies Huckabee cites in the eight-year time frame. For that reason, we rate his statement Half True.	None	Mike Huckabee	None	None	None	2008-01-31T00:00:00	2008-01-30	['United_States_Congress', 'George_W._Bush']
-pomt-14466	"An economic impact study found that for every $1 invested in pre-K in Pennsylvania, a total of $1.79 is generated in total spending within the state."	half-true	/pennsylvania/statements/2016/mar/03/jim-kenney/would-each-dollar-pre-k-spending-generate-179-loca/	Universal pre-K is one of Mayor Jim Kenney’s top priorities the next four years. He hopes to expand kindergarten to 10,000 more children by 2020, calling it the most important investment Philadelphia can make to change schools’ academic outcomes. To help convince business leaders they can benefit from pre-K as well, he made this claim during a speech given to the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce: "An economic impact study found that for every $1 invested in pre-K in Pennsylvania, a total of $1.79 is generated in total spending within the state." Kenney has used the statistic before, and David L. Cohen, senior executive vice president of Comcast, also cited it in a recent editorial. Is it legitimate? Kenney’s communications director, Lauren Hitt, said Kenney got the statistic from the Economy League, which used a study from ReadyNation/America’s Edge, an organization with a goal of strengthening business "through better policies for children and youth." Cohen specifically mentioned the same study in his editorial. The study examines the total dollar effect of $1 in pre-K spending on the state’s output. Using a tool called the IMPLAN model, it theorizes that the money spent on pre-kindergarten would lead to new learning centers and new teachers and staff. Those new learning centers would spend locally on supplies and other resources for the pre-K programs, and the teachers would spend the money on food, clothes, restaurants and whatever else they’d need. The businesses would in turn hire more people to meet the increased demand. The estimated economic effect would be an additional 79 cents generated in the economy per dollar spent on pre-k for a total of $1.79. Tim Bartik, author of "Investing in Kids: Early Childhood Programs and Local Economic Development" said the study’s estimate of an additional 79 cents generated per dollar of spending is probably high because it doesn’t take possible tax increases into account, which is the way many early childhood education programs are financed. Kenney hopes to fund the annual $60 million to fund pre-K through a soda tax. Bartik said the likely effect of $1 on pre-K spending, given a tax increase, would be the dollar spent for pre-K and perhaps a little extra. "I could imagine it being greater than a dollar," said Bartik, who is also a senior economist for the Upjohn Institute and has received a research grant from ReadyNation. "How much greater I couldn’t say. It would be a lot of work to get the right answer." He said the estimated impact of an extra 79 cents for every dollar spent was not likely unless the pre-kindergarten program was privately financed. Steve Doster, the Pennsylvania director for ReadyNation/America’s Edge, confirmed the study did not take into account how each $1 spent on pre-K would be raised, such as through an increase of taxes. "When this report was generated it was generated looking at significant public investment from Pennsylvania," Doster said. This doesn’t mean expanded pre-K couldn’t have major benefits. In fact, Bartik said the total economic impact from $1 of pre-K spending could be as much as $3 to $5. But that estimate would include benefits from freeing the time of parents of pre-kindergarten students who could work more hours or gain more skills, the possibility of increased earnings of pre-kindergarten students years down the line and the spillover effects from both of those scenarios. The study being referenced by Kenney and Cohen -- and that would be of most interest to the business community -- is about the short run, the total dollar impact of one dollar spent on pre-kindergarten on the state output. Ron Haskins said there hasn’t been much other research to back the estimates laid out in the ReadyNation/America’s Edge study but reaffirmed what Bartik and several other studies have pointed out in terms of overall economic benefits. No matter what kind of positive economic effect is being predicted, the total would depend on the unknown: the quality of the program. For pre-kindergarten to pay off for businesses or children, it must provide a good education across the board. "I want to emphasize," Haskins said. "Without quality, forget the 79 cents." Our ruling Mayor Jim Kenney cited a study saying every dollar spent on pre-k education in Pennsylvania would yield $1.79 for the state economy. Comcast’s David L. Cohen noted the same study in an editorial. While studies and experts agree the economic impact of quality pre-kindergarten programs could be substantial, the study pointed out by Kenney is about shorter-term effects on the state’s output. Taxes required to pay for the pre-K program could lessen the economic effect, adding up to less than an extra 79 cents per dollar spent. But research and expert opinion illustrate quality pre-K likely will have a substantial, positive effect on the local economy. We rule the claim Half True.	None	Jim Kenney	None	None	None	2016-03-03T10:48:28	2016-02-17	['Pennsylvania']
-pomt-13263	"In 67 different ways, Governor McCrory has raised taxes on middle income families."	half-true	/north-carolina/statements/2016/oct/14/roy-cooper/roy-cooper-says-pat-mccrory-raised-taxes-middle-cl/	At Tuesday’s debate for the North Carolina governor’s race, Democratic challenger Roy Cooper attacked Republican Gov. Pat McCrory for pushing tax reforms that mostly helped the wealthy. Republicans gained a majority in both chambers of the General Assembly in 2011. After McCrory became governor in 2013, the state passed sweeping changes to tax law. The new GOP leaders cut personal and business income taxes and paid for it in part by expanding the sales tax base and ending some income tax deductions. "The governor promised people a tax cut," Cooper said. "He came through for the corporations and for those at the top, but everyday working people got tax increases. In 67 different ways, Governor McCrory has raised taxes on middle income families. And literally we’re talking about, literally, from birth to death." We wondered if it was really true that the state’s Republican leaders, who so often tout their record on tax cuts, actually raised taxes in 67 different ways. Cooper’s campaign provided us with an itemized list of the increases it was citing from McCrory’s tenure as governor. They do include instances from birth to death — higher fees for screening newborn babies, and a new tax on tombstone installation. Many came earlier this year, in a large expansion of the sales tax base that went into effect in March bearing McCrory’s signature. It created dozens of new sales taxes applied to services and labor. Auto repair shops have long charged sales taxes on parts. Now they must also charge sales tax on their labor. There are new 43 service taxes, all listed here by the Department of Revenue. Cooper’s campaign also pointed us two dozen other instances of laws McCrory has signed since 2013 that increased taxes, created new taxes or reduced or eliminated tax breaks, incentives, deductions and exemptions. So the number is right. In fact Cooper said 67, and his campaign’s list includes 69 examples. A few of them don’t really affect middle class families, like the state’s tax credits for filmmakers that were allowed to expire, or a law that capped the sales tax refund for nonprofits at $45 million — hardly a level the local PTA has to worry about surpassing. However, nearly all of the 69 examples the campaign pointed to do directly affect middle class families. We won’t list them all, but notable examples include: --Ending the annual tax-free weekend for back-to-school shopping. --Ending deductions for contributions made to college savings accounts. --Eliminating a $4,000 deduction for government retirement income and a $2,000 deduction for private retirement income. --Taxing forgiven mortgage debt as income. "The next time you go to a movie or you get your car repaired or you buy school supplies at a back to school weekend, you look at that receipt and the taxes are a courtesy of Governor McCrory," Cooper said at the debate. Cooper is right that McCrory raised taxes 60-plus ways that could affect middle class families. But that’s not the whole story. And we’ve lowered our Truth-O-Meter ratings in the past when politicians have made claims about taxes that left out important context, like this one. And our friends at the Washington Post gave Three Pinocchios to a 2014 claim that the state’s tax changes raised taxes for most North Carolinians. Does Cooper's claim face a similar fate? The GOP tax reforms Before the tax cuts, North Carolina had a three-tier system for individual income taxes, ranging from 6 to 7.75 percent. With the GOP-led changes, the income tax rate dropped to a single flat rate of 5.8 percent, and then dropped again to 5.75 percent this year. The Tax Foundation, a group that advocates for low tax rates, has frequently praised North Carolina for its income tax cuts. So has the libertarian Cato Institute think tank. In 2014 one its budget analysts wrote that "McCrory and the legislature’s plan passed one of the most impressive tax reform packages in any state in years." Earlier this month, McCrory was named one of just five governors with an A on the Cato Institute’s annual report, "Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors." The cuts, combined with a higher standard deduction – it more than doubled for married couples filing jointly, from $6,000 to $15,000 – could lead to hundreds of dollars of savings each year for a typical middle class family. The state’s median household income is around $50,000. It’s harder to estimate, however, just how much extra the typical middle class family will be paying due to the dozens of tax increases and/or lost deductions that Cooper mentioned. That’s because many of them won’t apply to most families, or aren’t very uniform in their cost. Plumbing, vehicle repairs, car washes and tire services are pretty ubiquitous, but even there the labor costs can vary wildly from business to business. And plenty of the new tax increases – like on boat repairs, shoe shining, jewelry cleaning, bullet reloading and fire extinguisher recharging – won’t apply to most people very often, if ever. There was one tax credit that was eliminated that many people used and we can count easily – the Earned Income Tax Credit. It ended in 2014. In 2011, more than 900,000 households in North Carolina claimed the EITC and got an average of $116 in savings, according to a 2013 study from the liberal Budget and Tax Center. Many families saved more than $116 when their income tax rates were cut. But when you start adding in the additional taxes on services, the other lost credits and deductions, and more? It’s possible some people might be paying more now than they were before the tax cuts – especially on the lower end of the income scale. A 2015 study from the liberal groups Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) and The Budget & Tax Center found that the bottom 20 percent of North Carolinians paid taxes equivalent to 9.2 percent of their income, while the top 1 percent paid taxes equivalent to 5.3 percent of their income. We here at PolitiFact also looked into North Carolina’s tax reforms in 2014 and ruled it Mostly True that the state’s tax changes "overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy." And that was before any of the dozens of new sales taxes were enacted. Those have shifted the tax burden away from the wealthy even more, since sales taxes are regressive in nature. Our ruling Cooper said that "in 67 different ways, Governor McCrory has raised taxes on middle income families." We find his tally of the tax increases to be correct, yet many of them will affect only small groups of people in any given year. And Cooper cherry-picks by leaving out the substantial reduction in the income tax rate, which applied broadly to people at all income levels, even though it did mostly help the wealthy. We rate his claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/813496b5-36a6-4835-af57-1d9dc2393194	None	Roy Cooper	None	None	None	2016-10-14T18:08:02	2016-10-11	['None']
-pomt-14679	Says President Barack Obama "appointed Eric Holder as attorney general. Eric Holder said he viewed his mission as brainwashing the American people against guns."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/15/ted-cruz/did-former-attorney-general-eric-holder-say-he-vie/	During the Republican presidential debate in North Charleston, S.C., Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, re-litigated the background of President Barack Obama’s former attorney general, Eric Holder. One of the debate moderators, Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network, asked Cruz for "the answer" to stopping mass shootings and violent crime. "The answer is simple," he said. "You prosecute criminals. You target the bad guys. You know, a minute ago, (co-debate moderator Neil Cavuto) asked, ‘What has President Obama done to illustrate that he wants to go after guns? Well, he appointed Eric Holder as attorney general. Eric Holder said he viewed his mission as brainwashing the American people against guns. He appointed Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, someone who has been a radical against the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms." We raised our eyebrows at Cruz’s mention of Holder and what he said. Is Cruz right? Let’s go to the videotape from back in 1995, a time when there really were such things as videotapes. In January 1995, Holder -- then the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia -- gave a speech announcing a plan to curb gun violence in the city of Washington, D.C. Here’s a portion of the speech, recorded by C-SPAN. "What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes," Holder said. He later added, "We have to be repetitive about this. It’s not enough to have a catchy ad on a Monday and then only do it Monday. We need to do this every day of the week, and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way." So there’s video proof that Holder did indeed say what Cruz said he did. That said, we’ll offer two caveats. First, the way Cruz phrased his statement might lead listeners to believe that Holder had talked about "brainwashing" during his tenure as attorney general or shortly before he was nominated by Obama for the post. That’s not the case -- the remark in question came a full 14 years earlier. Second, Cruz leaves out the context in which Holder was speaking. As the top federal law enforcement official for the District of Columbia, Holder was speaking at a very particular time about a very particular place. At the time, drug-related crime and gun murders in Washington were a serious concern, both locally and nationally. A few years before, D.C. had been dubbed the "murder capital of the world." In other portions of the speech, Holder can be heard referring specifically to youth violence in the nation’s capital and referencing local officials such as once-and-future mayor Marion Barry. This D.C. focus by Holder is supported by a Jan. 13, 1995, Washington Post article that preceded the speech but which laid out a general overview of Holder’s initiative. "U.S. Attorney Eric H. Holder Jr. said yesterday he is completing the details of a massive law enforcement effort to get guns off Washington's streets," the article says. "It will target people carrying and selling firearms in the city's most violent neighborhoods." In addition to tougher law enforcement, Holder was proposing efforts to change " ‘romanticized’ perceptions about guns and violence, especially among young black men." Holder -- the first African American to serve as U.S. attorney in Washington -- was planning to unveil the speech on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. "As a people, did we fight, did we sacrifice, did we die simply to inherit and then bequeath to our children this kind of America where crimes run rampant and fears stalk our citizens?" Holder wrote in a draft of the speech, according to the Post. Holder told the Post that the goal of the effort was designed to reduce violence in Washington by the end of the decade to levels prior to 1986, when crack cocaine sent homicides and shootings soaring. "I believe that if you can really change the way young people, especially young black men, view the possession and use of guns ... you can have a significant impact on the quality of life in this city," Holder told the Post. This is a nuance that Cruz’s statement ignores. Our ruling Cruz said Obama "appointed Eric Holder as attorney general. Eric Holder said he viewed his mission as brainwashing the American people against guns." Holder unquestionably said the word "brainwash." But Cruz leaves out some important context -- how long ago the comment was made, and the fact that it was targeted toward youth during a high-crime era in Washington, D.C., not the overall American public. We rate the claim Half True.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2016-01-15T00:34:56	2016-01-15	['Eric_Holder', 'United_States', 'Barack_Obama']
-goop-00045	Orlando Bloom ‘Betrayed’ Katy Perry By ‘Getting Handsy’ With Other Women?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/orlando-bloom-katy-perry-betrayed-flirting-women/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Orlando Bloom ‘Betrayed’ Katy Perry By ‘Getting Handsy’ With Other Women?	1:55 pm, November 2, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-01531	An image shows Jimi Hendrix covered in tattoos while riding a dune buggy.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-a-tattooed-jimi-hendrix-ride-a-dune-buggy/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did a Tattooed Jimi Hendrix Ride a Dune Buggy?	24 October 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02343	Good news from Baghdad	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/beautifulbaghdad/	None	military	None	None	None	Good news from Baghdad	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-00728	Is Planned Parenthood Using $30 Million in Taxpayer Funds to Influence the Midterm Elections?	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/planned-parenthood-midterm-elections/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Is Planned Parenthood Using $30 Million in Taxpayer Funds to Influence the Midterm Elections?	23 April 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01652	Wisconsin is "38th in the country in terms of proficiency standards" in student testing.	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2014/aug/22/mary-burke/wisconsin-ranks-low-expectations-school-testing-sc/	Much attention is paid to how well Wisconsin schoolchildren score on standardized tests -- what percentage of them are proficient, for example, in reading or math. But states define proficient differently. So just how rigorous are Wisconsin’s standards? Mary Burke, the Democratic challenger to Gov. Scott Walker, raised that issue in response to a question posed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a news article published Aug. 11, 2014. The Journal Sentinel asked: "Common Core: Should Wisconsin scrap or modify these academic standards for students? If so, should the state cover the costs of doing so for schools?" Burke replied by saying, in part: "Common Core is an opportunity, if implemented correctly, to make sure our young people are ready for the workplace or college. Students will have the critical thinking skills needed to compete with students in any state or any country. We absolutely need higher standards in Wisconsin –- we are currently 38th in the country in terms of proficiency standards –- and implementing Common Core correctly will do just that." Let's see if, on a national scale, Wisconsin’s standards are relatively weak. Federal statistics One authority on proficiency standards is the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which does "mapping studies." States develop their own assessments and set their own standards as to what it means for a student to be proficient. What the mapping studies do is compare each state's standard for proficient performance by placing the various state standards onto a common scale. The latest mapping study was done in 2011, based on data from 2009. Results from testing of fourth- and eighth-graders on reading and math were used. The study found that the proficiency standards set by most states are at or below what the U.S. Department of Education defines as Basic. Basic is defined as "partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade." There was no ranking of how states and the District of Columbia fared overall. But there was a ranking by grade and subject. Here are Wisconsin's rankings: 4th grade reading 39th--behind bordering states of Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa 4th grade math 30th--ahead of Illinois and Michigan 8th grade reading 43rd--behind all four bordering states 8th grade math 37th--ahead of Illinois and Michigan Burke’s evidence To back Burke’s claim, her campaign cited a slightly different and newer ranking from a September 2013 article in the Education Next journal. The lead author was Paul E. Peterson, the journal’s editor and director of Harvard University's Program on Education Policy and Governance. Peterson uses a different methodology than the mapping study and used more recent data, from 2011. Peterson also utilizes the fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math testing, but gives the states an overall rank, as well as a letter grade. Here’s how Wisconsin and its neighboring states fared among the 50 states and the District of Columbia: State Rank Grade Minnesota 8th B Wisconsin 38th C-minus Iowa 41st D-plus Illinois 46th D Michigan 48th D-minus The three top-ranked states -- Massachusetts, Tennessee and Missouri -- were the only ones that earned an A. The article emphasized that the rankings list states in terms of how high their expectations are, not in terms of what percentage of the students are proficient. Another comparison In July 2010, the Washington, D.C.-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which works to reform education, compared standards in the various states to those of Common Core, the voluntary English and math standards that Wisconsin and nearly every other state has adopted. The study ranked Wisconsin based on the standards it had in place before adopting Common Core. For English standards, the institute gave Wisconsin a grade of D, saying the standards "are generally clearly written and presented, and include some rigorous content. Unfortunately, their failure to provide grade-specific expectations creates critical gaps in content that leave teachers without the guidance they need to drive rigorous curriculum, assessment and instruction." For math standards, Wisconsin received an F. The math standards "are scant," the institute said. "They are provided only for the end of fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades, and very few standards are provided for each grade band." Peterson, the professor who ranked Wisconsin 38th, told us that since Wisconsin has adopted Common Core, its future ranking could change once it administers tests with the new definitions for proficiency. But those rankings won’t be done for a few years, he said. Our rating Burke said Wisconsin is "38th in the country in terms of (school) proficiency standards." The ranking she cites is from a respected national source and is the latest available, although it is based on 2011 data. Wisconsin has since adopted the new Common Core standards, which could change the state’s ranking in the future. For a statement that is accurate but needs additional information, we give Burke a Mostly True.	None	Mary Burke	None	None	None	2014-08-22T05:00:00	2014-08-11	['None']
-snes-01773	Are Hotels Required to Accept Pets During Natural Disasters?	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hotels-accept-pets/	None	Critter Country	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Are Hotels Required to Accept Pets During Natural Disasters?	7 September 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04968	Bernie Sanders wants to tax churches at a rate of 90 percent.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bernie-sanders-plans-to-tax-churches/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Bernie Sanders Plans to Tax Churches?	1 April 2016	None	['Bernie_Sanders']
-goop-00795	Meghan Markle Did Make “$500 Million Deal” With Queen Elizabeth, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/meghan-markle-queen-elizabeth-500-million-deal-prenup-wrong/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Meghan Markle Did NOT Make “$500 Million Deal” With Queen Elizabeth, Despite Report	3:00 am, June 19, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-14536	Since January 2015, the "majority of our" Austin City Council "meetings have extended past 10 p.m." and "many of our meetings have gone past midnight."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2016/feb/15/sheri-gallo/sheri-gallo-incorrectly-says-majority-austin-city-/	Just after 10 p.m. during a January 2016 Austin City Council meeting, a council member suggested the governing body was too often meeting for way too long. That particular meeting had convened at 10:21 a.m. Jan. 28, according to city records, and members didn't adjourn until after 2 a.m. Jan. 29 (though they had a 90-minute dinner break). The length was mostly due to hours of public testimony about proposed regulation of the Uber and Lyft ridesharing services and proposed changes to how the city regulates rental properties. Council Member Sheri Gallo made her claim after falling on the losing end of a 10-1 council vote to extend the meeting. City code requires a council vote if a Thursday meeting needs to stretch past 10 p.m. Gallo declared: "I think the majority of our meetings have extended past 10 p.m. … Many of our meetings have gone past midnight." She added: "I really think it's a disservice to our community, a disservice to our city staff, it's a disservice to the council members, … We just need to figure out another way to handle this so that our meetings are being completed at a reasonable hour." It wouldn’t be a shock if the council has had at least a few extra-long meetings. Before voters moved to elect 10 council members from districts with only the mayor elected citywide, the previous council (consisting of six members and the mayor, all elected citywide) ordered a study of its meetings running late. A resulting December 2014 report from the city auditor, Corrie Stokes, said that from October 2013 through September 2014, council meetings had lasted an average of 9 hours, 31 minutes – three times longer than such meetings in comparable cities like San Antonio, Phoenix and Oklahoma City. Together, she reported, eight peer cities clocked in with average council meeting lengths of 3 hours, 24 minutes. The study also said Austin had been holding fewer council meetings than its peer cities with council members tackling more items per meeting. A vow not to go so late When Mayor Steve Adler was sworn in with the new council in January 2015, he vowed to end late-night meetings. "You won’t have to be at City Hall at 3 a.m. just so your elected leaders can hear your voice," Adler said in his inauguration speech on Jan. 6, 2015. Part of Adler’s council-backed solution was to meet more frequently. A new 10-committee system, replacing six previous committees, launched in March 2015 with the goal of members vetting issues and hearing public testimony before items reached the full council. An October 2015 Austin American-Statesman analysis revealed the new council and its committees had spent 664 hours in meetings from January through September 2015; the previous council and its committees had spent 337 hours in public meetings during the comparable portion of 2014. Gallo’s backup We asked Gallo how she reached her conclusion about the majority of council meetings running past 10 p.m. By phone, she said her statement came from her recollection of how many times the council had voted to extend a meeting past 10 p.m. Meeting videos To our inquiry about meeting lengths, Thomas Grauzer, in the city clerk’s office, said we could gauge the length of council meetings over any time period by checking beginning and end times on city-posted meeting videos. From the videos on the city’s council meeting website, which includes transcripts of many city meetings, we determined that from Gallo’s Jan. 6, 2015, swearing-in through Jan. 28, 2016, the council met one way or another more than 100 times -- counting regular meetings, work sessions, budget meetings, discussions and special called meetings. But we zeroed in on the council’s regular meetings, usually held on two or three Thursdays a month, mindful that historically those gatherings most often ran long. Upshot: Of the council’s 28 regular meetings from January 2015 through Jan. 28, 2016, the mayor banged a dozen --a little less than half -- to a close after 10 p.m., videos show. And of those late-nighters, five ended after midnight (only one of those occurring before July 2015). And what drove the late-nighters? Hotly contested topics, it appears, including changes to the city’s short-term rental ordinance, regulations for transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft, taxicab permitting and increasing the city’s homestead tax exemption. These divisive issues garner a lot of public testimony, where citizens sign up to speak for or against issues. The latest-running meeting of the new Council, on Nov. 12, 2015, extended until 2:25 a.m. The Jan. 28, 2016 trailed directly behind that, ending at 2:17 a.m., after nearly 200 people signed up to speak on short-term rentals, according to the city’s transcript. SOURCE: Website, "Austin City Council," City of Austin (accessed Feb. 3, 2016) Longtime observer David King, vice president of the Austin Neighborhoods Council, told us he’d been to almost every city council meeting since 2014 and had spoken as a private citizen on many issues through the years. By phone, King speculated that having 11 council members increased debate; more members mean more people piping up. "I do think, too, that because we have this new 10-1 system, more people are showing up at the meetings," King said. "And that’s a good thing." Gallo, informed that 12 of 28 meetings in her term have extended past 10 p.m., or less than a majority, said by email that's still too many. "We made a promise to the citizens of Austin to eliminate late-night meetings," Gallo said. "I think any meeting that lasts past 10 p.m. is one too many." Our ruling Gallo said that since January 2015, the "majority of our" Austin City Council "meetings have extended past 10 p.m." and "many of our meetings have gone past midnight." There has, of late, been a pile-up of late-running meetings. Yet the big picture is that 12, or 43 percent, of the 28 council's major meetings since January 2015 ran past 10 p.m. with five, 18 percent, stretching past midnight. We rate this claim, which has an element of truth, Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Sheri Gallo	None	None	None	2016-02-15T10:00:00	2016-01-28	['None']
-tron-00779	Dr. Charles Krauthammer comments about President Obama	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/charles-krauthammer/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Dr. Charles Krauthammer comments about President Obama	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Charles_Krauthammer']
-hoer-01074	Free $275 Aldi Grocery Coupon	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/free-275-aldi-grocery-coupon-facebook-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Free $275 Aldi Grocery Coupon Facebook Scam	November 5, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00781	Is This a Photograph of 'Liberals' Protesting Against Donald Trump?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/liberals-protesting-trump-photo/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This a Photograph of ‘Liberals’ Protesting Against Donald Trump?	10 April 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-13777	Says as Indiana governor, he has made "record investments in education."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/21/mike-pence/mike-pence-stretches-claim-record-education-spendi/	Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence joked at his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that most people don’t know who he is. So he offered up his record as Indiana’s governor, an office he’s held since January 2013. Pence claimed that Indiana has "the highest credit rating in the nation." In a separate fact-check, we rated that Mostly True. He also boasted that he oversaw "record investments in education." "In my home state of Indiana, we prove every day that you can build a growing economy on balanced budgets, low taxes, even while making record investments in education and roads and health care," Pence said in his July 20 remarks. We were curious whether Pence, currently in his third year as Indiana’s governor, really has passed "record investments in education." Well, it depends on how you count it. In raw dollars, Pence’s claim holds up. But when adjusted for inflation, education spending at its highest point under Pence is still lower than it was in 2010 and 2011, before Pence took office. We got some help from Larry DeBoer, a professor of agricultural economics at Indiana’s Purdue University who has compiled state budget data. Prior to Pence, Indiana education spending for K-12 and higher education combined peaked at $9.3 billion in 2011, according to DeBoer’s data. Not adjusting for inflation, education spending has surpassed that peak every year from 2014 on. Estimated spending in the current fiscal year tops $10 billion. But adjusted for inflation, estimated spending for the current fiscal year is about 1.1 percent less than it was in 2011. The graph below shows raw dollar spending in blue and inflation-adjusted spending in red. (For calculating the inflation-adjusted spending, DeBoer used 1982-84 dollars according to the Consumer Price Index.) While education spending under Pence is certainly on the rise, the pace of that increase proves not to be so dramatic when adjusted for inflation. Also, the graph appears to show a huge jump in spending leading into 2010. DeBoer noted that this reflects a big change in the spending structure among the state and localities, so it’s not useful to compare education spending today to pre-2010. One more way to put the state’s education spending in context is to look at its size compared with the Indiana economy. Education spending as a share of total Indiana income has been on a consistent decline since 2010, but it is becoming a bigger share of the state budget overall, DeBoer noted. Our ruling Pence said that as Indiana governor, he has made "record investments in education." In raw dollars, Pence’s statement is accurate. However, when adjusted for inflation, education spending at its highest point under Pence is still lower than it was in 2010 and 2011, though only marginally so. Pence’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/b0b5816d-36f3-4049-99a0-04214ec03408	None	Mike Pence	None	None	None	2016-07-21T01:39:32	2016-07-20	['Indiana']
-goop-01028	Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt “Having Baby” Together?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-brad-pitt-baby-not-true/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt “Having Baby” Together?	11:48 am, May 9, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston', 'Brad_Pitt']
-hoer-00086	Check Your Receipts - Cash Back Scam Warning Email	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/cash-back-scam-warning.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Check Your Receipts - Cash Back Scam Warning Email	November 22, 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-03916	In a budget deal struck in 2011 "a trillion dollars of cuts went into effect immediately, and then a special committee was set up ... to get agreement on another $3 trillion of cuts."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/feb/25/bill-nelson/sen-bill-nelson-says-2011-budget-deal-included-imm/	As Washington wrangles over how to avoid the sequester, Florida Sen. Bill Nelson spoke with a Central Florida news station to help explain the issue — and now viewers question his accuracy. Anchor Ybeth Bruzual had asked Nelson, a Democrat, about mandatory budget cuts set to go into effect March 1: "How did we get to this point?" Here’s what he told viewers of Central Florida News 13, a partner of PolitiFact Florida: "Well, a year and a half ago, when the country, in order to pay its bills, (and we) had to raise the artificial statutory debt ceiling so the country could pay its bills, a deal was struck: a trillion dollars of cuts went into effect immediately, and then a special committee was set up. They were to get agreement on another $3 trillion of cuts. "Hanging over their head was a meat cleaver called the sequester, that was going to be, across the board, over a trillion dollars of additional cuts, but without a scalpel — a meat cleaver. Nobody ever expected the sequester to go into effect. It was never supposed to. It was the onerous alternative that would force the super-committee to come to agreement." Nelson’s right that the sequester’s across-the-board cuts don’t allow for much fine distinction. But was Nelson correct that the 2011 budget deal included "a trillion dollars of cuts went into effect immediately, and then a special committee was set up ... to get agreement on another $3 trillion of cuts"? Budget Control Act of 2011 Some viewers argued the cuts Nelson described as going into effect "immediately" were limits on future growth, hardly immediate. Here’s the deal: In summer 2011, the federal government was reaching its legal debt limit, which meant Congress had to authorize a higher level for borrowing to cover its spending. House Republicans insisted that spending cuts go along with an increase to the debt limit. After rancorous debate, lawmakers passed the Budget Control Act of 2011. The law set up caps on future discretionary spending that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would reduce spending by about a trillion dollars between 2012 and 2021, compared with what it would have been if annual appropriations grew at the rate of inflation. The cuts weren’t specified, but would be carried out by lawmakers during the annual appropriations process, with a trigger for across-the-board cuts if they busted the caps. (There were exceptions for certain kinds of spending, such as for war or disasters.) That’s not exactly the same as "a trillion dollars of cuts went into effect immediately." The law also established a Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the "special committee" that Nelson mentioned. The Budget Control Act required a 12-member panel, half from each party, to suggest legislation to reduce the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years. If that process failed — and it did — the law required the sequester. That’s what happens March 1 if Washington does nothing. Nelson said "$3 trillion of cuts" -- not $1.2 trillion. His press secretary, Ryan Brown, noted "there was no specific amount the committee had to cut in the legislation, or a limit to how much they could cut." That’s true if you mean cuts in spending, rather than cuts in the deficit — the law required the committee to achieve at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, not necessarily spending cuts. Raising taxes would also reduce the deficit. Brown explained that Nelson had hoped the committee "would do another $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion in deficit reduction." But that’s not what Nelson said. He told TV viewers the committee was set up "to get agreement on another $3 trillion of cuts," as though that were part of the deal reached by lawmakers in the Budget Control Act. There was a $3 trillion proposal floating around at the time. It was a deal offered to the deficit reduction committee in October 2011 by congressional Democrats. Even that proposal, as it was described in news accounts, didn’t include $3 trillion in spending cuts, Rather, it was a package that included cuts, tax increases and new spending that would have trimmed $3 trillion from federal deficits over a decade. Republican House Speaker John Boehner rejected the offer. Our ruling Nelson said the 2011 budget deal included "a trillion dollars of cuts went into effect immediately, and then a special committee ... to get agreement on another $3 trillion of cuts." Nelson missed some things here. The trillion dollars in savings in the Budget Control Act take place over 10 years (not immediately), and must be implemented by lawmakers through the annual appropriations process. Meanwhile, the committee charged with further cutting the deficit had to reduce it by $1.2 trillion to avoid the sequester, not get agreement on $3 trillion in cuts, as Nelson said. He’s partially accurate, but misses some important details. We find his statement Half True.	None	Bill Nelson	None	None	None	2013-02-25T07:58:44	2013-02-21	['None']
-pomt-01214	A sign in Dearborn, Mich., for the Advancement of Islamic Agenda for America says, "Allah be praised. America we will kill you all and nothing you can do to stop it."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/nov/24/facebook-posts/viral-meme-says-islamic-group-posted-threat-kill-a/	A reader recently sent us a meme circulating on social media that purports to be a threat by radical Muslims to mass-murder Americans. The meme was pasted into an email with the subject line, "A sign in Dearborn, Michigan." (Dearborn has an unusually large Muslim population.) Headlined, "This is what liberalism will buy you," the meme features a photograph of a sign with removable letters, purportedly advertising a group called the Advancement of Islamic Agenda for America. The sign reads, "Allah be praised. America we will kill you all and nothing you can do to stop it. Allah be praised." The meme concludes with the line, "Still think they are kidding." (The question mark for that last sentence was mysteriously missing.) A pretty scary sign if true. But is it? Hardly. We searched for a group called Advancement of Islamic Agenda for America on the Web and found no trace of it. More importantly, the sign comes from a template on the website Church Sign Maker. The site allows people to create photos of church signs conveying any message they choose. The site allows users to "create your own funny photos and graphics -- simply type in some text and choose from a few simple options. You can create your own church sign, make an official seal, have your own fire or police badge, and more." In this particular meme, the threat is a custom message that uses the site’s "Classic Design #5." The backgrounds of the template and the Facebook meme are identical. (Snopes.com has also debunked this claim.) Some notable text on the main page of the Church Sign Maker page: "Note: these church signs aren't real, they don't exist in the real world." Our ruling The meme claims that a sign in Dearborn, Mich., purportedly hung by a group called the Advancement of Islamic Agenda for America says, "Allah be praised. America we will kill you all and nothing you can do to stop it." However, nothing about this sign is true. It doesn’t exist; it was created using a freely available web tool. We rate it Pants on Fire.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2014-11-24T10:00:00	2014-11-20	['Michigan', 'United_States', 'Allah']
-vogo-00008	Statement: “City Council candidate Georgette Gomez is currently under investigation by the Fair Political Practices Commission for failure to disclose her financial interests, as required by state law.” – A campaign mailer sent by a group opposing District 9 City Council candidate Georgette Gomez called Public Safety Advocates	determination: misleading	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/politics/fact-check-investigation-name/	Analysis: There are watchdog government agencies across the country created to investigate complaints of wrongdoing. They exist for very good reason but, come election time, their work is often exploited by political operatives.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: An Investigation in Name Only	October 25, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-00918	Bitstrips App a Secret Spyware for NSA	fiction! & satire!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bitstrips-app-nsa/	None	computers	None	None	None	Bitstrips App a Secret Spyware for NSA	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-afck-00189	There has been no load-shedding since August last year.	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/zumas-anc-birthday-speech-6-claims-fact-checked/	None	None	None	None	None	Zuma’s ANC birthday speech: 6 claims fact-checked	2017-01-12 09:06	None	['None']
-pomt-12626	In New York state, "you cannot charge an older person even one dollar more than a younger person" for health insurance.	true	/new-york/statements/2017/mar/31/chris-collins/new-york-law-prohibits-higher-health-insurance-pre/	Democrats in Congress say the Obamacare repeal and replacement bill would have allowed health insurance companies to charge older Americans more for coverage. The American Health Care Act -- pulled from the House floor last week after it became clear the plan would be defeated -- would have allowed insurance companies to charge older Americans up to five times more for health coverage than younger Americans. Rep. Chris Collins, R-Clarence, addressed the issue during a town hall-style event on CNN before Republican leaders pulled the bill. "In New York under our state insurance commissioner, we have what we call a one to one," Collins said. "You cannot charge an older person even one dollar more than a younger person." The Affordable Care Act remains the law. While insurance companies are still allowed to charge older Americans up to three times more for coverage under that law, Collins says that’s not the case in New York state. Is he right that New York state residents pay the same price for insurance regardless of age? New York state law New York state has had what’s called a "community rating" model of health insurance since 1993. It requires health insurance companies to charge the same price for coverage in select regions regardless of age, gender, occupation or health status. The bill, sponsored in 1992 by Assemblyman Pete Grannis, a Democrat from New York City, passed with bipartisan support from both chambers and then-Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. The bill changed the state’s insurance law from the federal model, which allows different pricing based on age, and guaranteed "the premium for all persons covered by a policy or contract form is the same … without regard to age, sex, health status or occupation." It remains on the books today and now includes the same protection for tobacco users. Although the price is the same for different ages within each region, the regions are allowed to have different prices statewide. There are eight regions in the state. Vermont is the only other state that requires the same health insurance price for all ages. What about federal law? Experts we spoke to said New York state’s model works with the Affordable Care Act and would not have changed under the American Health Care Act. "Federal law preempts state law, but sometimes it creates a floor instead of a ceiling for actions that can be taken by the states," said Rachel Morgan of the National Conference of State Legislatures. "You must also consider that states until recently were the principal regulators of the business of insurance and instituted requirements that best served their markets." The floor, in this case, is the federal cap on age-based health care premiums. New York state’s law stands because its added restriction does not change federal law but supplements it. Our ruling Collins said in New York "you cannot charge an older person even one dollar more than a younger person" for health insurance. Collins is right. New York state has barred insurance companies from pricing based on age for more than two decades. Experts say the Affordable Care Act did not impact that law, and its would-be Republican replacement would not have either. We rate his claim True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Chris Collins	None	None	None	2017-03-31T10:47:51	2017-03-16	['New_York_City']
-pomt-10525	"We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/mar/05/barack-obama/straight-talk-twisted/	The Democratic candidates and groups that oppose John McCain have been quoting the Arizona senator as saying the United States could be in Iraq for 1,000 years. "John McCain says it's okay with him if the U.S. spends the next thousand years in Iraq," Rose Forrest, an Iraq war veteran, says in an ad for VoteVets.org that aired in Washington, D.C., in late February and is still available on the Web. "That's some commitment to the Iraqi people, Sen. McCain." A YouTube video known as "John He Is" uses humor to make the same point. It spoofs a pro-Obama music video called Yes We Can . The parody has grainy footage of McCain saying, "I don't think Americans are concerned if we're there for a hundred years or a thousand years or 10,000 years" and ends with these words on the screen: "IRAQ WITHDRAWAL DATE: 12,008 . . . . GOOD LUCK WITH THAT IN NOVEMBER." (We're not putting the parody to the Truth-O-Meter, but it's worth checking out to see a funny perspective on McCain's comments.) Sen. Barack Obama made a similar charge (but without the catchy music) during the Democratic debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on Feb. 26, 2008, when he said, "We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years." The videos and Obama's statement made us wonder about the full context of McCain's remarks and whether the comments were portrayed accurately. We've previously addressed Sen. Hillary Clinton's claim about the 100-year remark with this item, but McCain has elaborated since then. So in this article, we will examine the new claims. It's well known that McCain has been a strong supporter of the Iraq war, even when his position harmed his presidential campaign. At a town hall in Derry, N.H., on Jan. 3, 2008, McCain was glib about the need for a long-term U.S. commitment: QUESTION: "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years — " McCAIN: "Make it a hundred." Q: "Is that — " McCAIN: "We've been in South Korea . . . we've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that's fine with me. I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaida is training and equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day." Three days later, he was asked about the remark on CBS's Face the Nation. He likened the future U.S. role in Iraq to other nations where the United States has a military presence: "My point was and continues to be, how long do we have to stay in Bosnia? How long do we have to stay in South Korea? How long are we going to stay in Japan? How long are we going to stay in Germany? All of those, 50-, 60-year period. No one complains. In fact, they contribute enormously, their presence, to stability in the world," McCain said. "The point is, it's American casualties. We've got to get Americans off the front line, have the Iraqis as part of the strategy, take over more and more of the responsibilities. And then I don't think Americans are concerned if we're there for 100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years. What they care about is a sacrifice of our most precious treasure, and that's American blood. So what I'm saying is look, if Americans are there in a support role, but they're not taking casualties, that's fine." When McCain was asked about the remark Jan. 9 on ABC's Good Morning America, he said the U.S. presence could last 1-million years: "Could be 1,000 years or a million years," he said. "We have bases in Kuwait right now. We have bases in South Korea and Japan, Germany. I mean (the allegation by critics is) a straw man. It's a fallacious argument by people who don't understand that it's not American presence, it's American casualties. If we can get American casualties down and eliminate them, Americans are not concerned — in fact, they may be glad we have a secure base in that part of the world as we do in Kuwait." The interviews show McCain is not advocating that the war in Iraq continue for a thousand years (or a million). But once combat ends and U.S. casualities dwindle, he expects the United States could have troops in Iraq similar to the presence in South Korea and Germany. That presence could continue for many years. Clinton correctly described the first remark by saying "Sen. McCain said the other day that we might have troops (in Iraq) for 100 years." We gave that a True. But Obama twisted McCain's words in the Cleveland debate. He said, "We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years." As we explain above, McCain was referring to a peacetime presence, not the war. So we find Obama's statement False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-03-05T00:00:00	2008-02-26	['None']
-pomt-13775	Says Rep. Tammy "Duckworth has been a staunch supporter of expanding the spending, size and reach of the IRS."	false	/illinois/statements/2016/jul/21/mark-kirk/congresswoman-tammy-duckworth-staunch-supporter-ir/	Does U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth want more Internal Revenue Service auditors coming after taxpayers? As U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, a Wilmette Republican, ratchets up his first re-election campaign, he recently suggested his Democratic opponent in one of the nation’s most competitive Senate contests was strongly in support of expanding the Internal Revenue Service. In a campaign website press release, the Kirk campaign called Duckworth "a staunch supporter" of expanding the federal agency that collects taxes and audits taxpayers, businesses and organizations. We wondered if the suburban Democrat really did want more taxing, collecting and auditing out of the IRS. The context The IRS came under majority Republican fire in recent years for what the GOP said was the tax agency targeting conservative-leaning nonprofits. In 2013, IRS division head Lois Lerner apologized and acknowledged the agency had targeted certain groups for audits of their tax-exempt status. In response, Republicans offered several pieces of legislation designed to rein in the agency taxpayers love to hate. U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Wheaton, sponsored legislation that came up for a vote last April called the "Preventing IRS Abuse and Protecting Free Speech Act." His proposal was one of four cited by Kirk campaign spokeswoman Eleni Demertzis to support the claim that Duckworth was a strong supporter of expanding the IRS reach. According to the federal government website Congress.gov, Roskam’s bill would prohibit the IRS from requiring tax-exempt organizations to include details about their contributors in annual returns. Party-line votes Duckworth was one 182 Democrats who opposed what was, primarily, a party-line vote. Kent Redfield, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Illinois-Springfield who specializes in campaign finance, said the Roskam bill was more focused on political donors and freeing nonprofit groups from having to disclose to the IRS who was funding them. To suggest the bill is about IRS expansion is "a mischaracterization of what the bill is about," Redfield said. "There’s a policy argument there about how much transparency you need, but it isn’t about protecting taxpayers." Roskam’s bill was opposed by the Center for Responsive Politics and other groups that favor campaign funding transparency, Redfield said. "That’s just too broad," he said. "It’s a mischaracterization of the issues and the intent of what the legislation was. It’s painting with too broad a brush." Three other IRS-related bills were cited by the Kirk campaign to back up his claim: HR 4890, HR1206 and HR 4885. HR 1206 would ban the IRS from hiring new employees if any current workers had serious federal tax debt. It would require the agency to certify its employees didn’t owe back taxes. HR 4885 required the tax agency to deposit fees into the treasury and prohibited it from spending without congressional approval. The last bill, HR 4890, would have stopped the IRS from giving employee bonuses until the treasury secretary submitted to Congress a customer service improvement plan. John Frendreis, a Loyola University political science professor, explained the federal government has something called a senior executive service in which some managers give up some civil service protections and in place of that get bonuses. Duckworth’s opposition to a bill that would restrict bonuses could be seen as a vote to increase IRS spending. Still, Frendreis said it’s important to keep in mind the Republican-controlled Congress has been progressively shrinking the IRS budget in recent years. "It’s really incorrect to say she’s trying to expand the power of the IRS. She’s simply trying to maintain the level of resources necessary for the IRS to do its work." "It’s technically true, but not totally true," he added. "The rest are really strong distortions." And while Duckworth voted against a bill to ban bonuses and against one that curbed IRS hiring, in both cases, Duckworth Deputy Campaign Manager Matt McGrath noted, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analyses of the bills concluded that, overall, they could boost IRS spending by as much as $2.5 million. So, it also could be argued Duckworth’s opposition represented votes to contain the IRS budget. In the case of HR 4885, the bill to require the IRS deposit fees and get legislative approval for spending, the CBO concluded the bill Duckworth opposed would not actually reduce costs at the tax agency. McGrath also pointed to three bills Duckworth supported in 2014 and 2015 that cut IRS spending or held it flat. All four votes cited by the Kirk campaign to back up their claim about Duckworth resulted in partisan roll calls with most Democrats opposing them and most Republicans supporting them. "It does look like all of these are party-line votes," noted David Yepsen, executive director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. "There's a lot of hyperbole in this description. There are a lot of subjective phrases and words there." "This is an unpopular agency," Frendreis said. "It’s an easy target. The purpose of these bills in the first place is to establish this campaign narrative." Our ruling Kirk called Duckworth a staunch supporter of expanding the spending and sweep of the nation’s tax agency. The record shows Duckworth joined most Democrats in opposing four GOP efforts to restrict the agency’s information collection and boost congressional oversight. But independent experts and Congress’ own nonpartisan budget analyst said some of the GOP bills actually would boost spending or would not cut it. Duckworth also has voted for large spending bills that did trim IRS budgets. We rate this claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/e1a9b559-5061-4c2f-ad2f-e9add8a6ea43	None	Mark Kirk	None	None	None	2016-07-21T19:57:35	2016-06-15	['None']
-pomt-15213	"Every poll said I won the debate."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/11/donald-trump/fact-checking-donald-trumps-claim-every-poll-said-/	Donald Trump loves to call people losers. So it’s no surprise that, when commenting on his own performance in the Aug. 6 Republican presidential debate, he declared himself the clear winner. During an Aug. 9 interview on CBS’ Face the Nation, Trump, the current frontrunner for the GOP nomination, told host John Dickerson, "Most polls, every poll, said I won the debate, which is fine. And I'm sure you have heard that, too. And I think I did win the debate. Some of the candidates told me I won the debate. But I had by far the toughest question. It was not even a contest." Trump has a point, but we also found bad news for him in some of the polls. We’ll explain. (Trump’s camp did not respond to an inquiry.) We’ll start by noting that instant polls pegged to events like debates tend to be trickier to rely on than the traditional random-dial telephone polls. Anyone can cast their vote in such polls, which means that they do not represent a valid cross-sample of the electorate. That said, Trump would have a point if he were to cite a trio of instant polls taken right after the debate. One, which asked DrudgeReport.com readers who won the debate, found 45 percent of more than 585,000 votes cast went to Trump, triple the 14 percent amassed by the second-place finisher, Ted Cruz. Trump achieved similarly buoyant results in smaller polls sponsored by Time magazine (47 percent) and Slate.com (39 percent). However, at least one other post-debate poll undercuts his claim. A more traditional survey of 904 registered Republicans by Gravis Marketing conducted immediately after the debate on behalf of One America News Network found that Trump finished second, though within the poll’s margin of error. Ben Carson won 22 percent of the vote, compared to 19 percent for Trump. That’s a virtual tie, given the poll’s 3 percentage point margin of error. Interestingly, Gravis also asked survey respondents who they thought lost the debate -- and on this question, 30 percent of respondents cited Trump, a percentage second only to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., with 34 percent. Full results below: In other words, the same poll showed many more voters -- all registered Republicans, in fact -- saying that Trump lost the debate than said he won. In producing sharply polarized responses toward Trump, the Gravis poll wasn’t an outlier, either. On the same morning Trump made his comments, NBC released a post-debate poll conducted with Survey Monkey. The survey had an unusual methodology -- it included responses from 3,551 adults drawn from the nearly 3 million people who take surveys with Survey Monkey. However, the results have some degree of credibility, since the data was weighted for factors such as age, race, sex, educational attainment and region. These results suggest that the general public showed the same degree of polarization about Trump’s performance as can be seen in Gravis’ poll of Republicans. In the NBC-Survey Monkey survey, 22 percent of respondents said that former CEO Carly Fiorina did best in the debate, compared to 18 percent for Trump. But 29 percent of respondents thought Trump did the worst in the debate -- a percentage twice as high as Paul, his nearest competitor, with 14 percent. Here’s the full rundown: Finally, a Suffolk University poll of Iowa Republicans was released on Aug. 11, after Trump's comments. It asked people which candidate was most impressive, and Trump's performance was rated fourth-best, behind Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Carson and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. The poll also asked if people felt more or less comfortable with Trump as a candidate after watching the debate; 55 percent said they felt less comfortable. Our ruling Trump said that "every poll said I won the debate." He has a point that at least three instant polls -- from the Drudge Report, Time and Slate -- showed him with better showings than any of his rivals, though the non-random design of these polls means they should be taken with a big grain of salt. More problematic for his claim is that the methodologically superior Gravis poll showed him finishing second to Carson, and found more respondents saying he did the worst in the debate than the number who said he did the best. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-08-11T14:36:45	2015-08-09	['None']
-pomt-14428	"As governor, Kasich delivered the largest tax cut in the nation."	mostly false	/ohio/statements/2016/mar/09/john-kasich/john-kasichs-tax-cut-largest-nation/	The Ohio primary is a do-or-die moment for presidential hopeful John Kasich, which means it’s time for lots of new political ads. In this one, folksy music plays under a voiceover reminiscent of a Jeep commercial. "Twenty million Americans are out of work. That’s unacceptable. But John Kasich won’t stop until that number is zero. As governor, Kasich delivered the largest tax cut in the nation, and over 400,000 new jobs have been created through his leadership. As president, Kasich will cut taxes, freeze new regulations and reshore American jobs. So punch the clock. Take that to the bank. America, let’s go to work." Ohio is among the states that come up in discussions about big tax cuts. But was Kasich’s truly the largest in the nation? "There are at least half a dozen reasons why there has to be an asterisk after that sentence," said Carl Davis, research director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank. "The ones that come to mind are Kansas and Ohio, and to a lesser extent, North Carolina, Texas, maybe even Florida," said Davis. "But it’s complicated, because tax changes are often enacted in stages, and in some cases are accompanied by tax hikes, like on cigarettes in Kansas and Ohio. Trying to gauge what the revenue of a state would have been without the tax cuts is really difficult." Kasich’s spokesman, Rob Nichols, provided us with a table showing a summary of the governor’s net tax reductions from 2012 through 2017. It shows the net total reductions as $4.9 billion, which the campaign rounds up to $5 billion. Yet Kansas, not Ohio, consistently rises to the top of searches for "largest tax cut." A fellow with the Show-Me Institute, Andrew Wilson, called Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax reduction "the biggest tax cut of any state, relative to the size of its economy, in recent history," in a June 2015 article in The Week. (The Show-Me Institute is a right-leaning think tank in Missouri.) Shawn Sullivan, the director of budget and business processes for the state of Kansas, provided data on Brownback’s tax cuts. The Kansas state budget office projects that between 2014, when Brownback’s tax cuts fully went into effect, and 2019, the cumulative tax reduction will be $3.9 billion. At face value, it would seem that Ohio’s tax cuts under Kasich, at $5 billion, are larger. But the major hurdle that makes the numbers difficult to get a handle on, Davis says, is consideration for population differences between states. Kansas and Ohio certainly aren’t apples-to-apples. The 2014 U.S. Census pegged Kansas’ population at 2.9 million. Ohio’s population in 2014 was 11.6 million -- nearly four times more people. Then there are those who argue that Kasich’s tax cuts weren’t really tax cuts. A spokesperson with the Ohio Democratic party, Kirstin Alvanitakis, told us, "We would argue very strongly that Kasich’s tax cut was actually more of a tax shift. The state’s cuts to local governments have resulted in local tax hikes." The president of the Ohio Association of Professional Fire Fighters, Mark Sanders, likewise complained that fire and ambulance services statewide have had to ask voters to step up their local tax levels, as decreased revenue from state income taxes slashed budgets for emergency services between 2011 and 2013. Davis, with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said that by some estimates, Kansas’ tax cuts cost over $1 billion per year. "If you adjust for population, that would certainly seem to exceed anything enacted in Ohio under Governor Kasich," Davis said. Kasich’s not-so-humblebrag about his tax cuts rings even less true considering that it was the Legislature that added in a tax cut larger than what Kasich’s 2015 plan originally proposed, by more than double. "He did sign them," Davis concedes, "but his original proposal would have been a lot smaller." Our ruling The Kasich campaign ad says that "as governor, Kasich delivered the largest tax cut in the nation." The ad exaggerated in claiming that Ohio's tax cut topped every other state. While Ohio’s cuts are significant, when you factor in state population and economic size, Kansas’ reduction may be larger over time. Ohio’s shifting of the tax burden, from individual income tax to taxation on consumption, is what some consider more of a tax shift than a tax cut, and forces local governments to raise taxes in turn. Plus, the size of the tax cut wasn’t entirely Kasich’s idea, since it was the Legislature that made it bigger than he first proposed. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	John Kasich	None	None	None	2016-03-09T20:27:25	2016-02-24	['John_Kasich']
-pomt-14155	If Austin voters reject Proposition 1, a "completely new City-run" criminal background check "process will cost millions in processing fees, additional staff, and bureaucracy" with taxpayers getting "the bill."	false	/texas/statements/2016/apr/30/ridesharing-works-austin/claim-about-millions-dollars-costs-bill-going-taxp/	Austin taxpayers are in for millions of dollars in regulatory costs if voters decide not to change what the city requires in background checks of drivers for ride-hailing services, a pro-proposition group says. Ridesharing Works for Austin says in a mailer to voters: "A completely new City-run" criminal background check "process will cost millions in processing fees, additional staff, and bureaucracy." The mailer, which came to our attention from a reader, is headlined: "Keep Taxpayers From Having to Pay." Proposition 1, which landed on the May 7, 2016, ballot after a petition drive led by Ridesharing Works for Austin, centers on whether to require fingerprinting of drivers for popular services, like Uber and Lyft, that enable customers to summon a ride using a mobile app. Vote "yes" and company-provided name-based national criminal background checks would continue -- without a fingerprinting element. Vote "no" and driver fingerprints would be gathered and run through the FBI. Rejecting the proposal, the mailer suggests, gives "the City a blank check to fund a takeover" of background checks "and sends taxpayers the bill." So, hide your pocketbook? Not so fast, we found. Council member: Taxpayers not on barrel Before we saw the mailer, an Austin City Council member disputed the notion that taxpayers will be charged for fingerprinting drivers. An April 19, 2016, Austin American-Statesman news story quoted Ann Kitchen, sponsor of the ordinance the proposition would repeal, saying the council agreed to levy a 1 percent fee on the ride-hailing companies’ gross local revenue to go to a city fund to "assist and incent drivers to become compliant" with the new rules. Then again, according to an April 22, 2016, commentary by Ben Wear, the American-Statesman’s transportation writer, that’s to be charged only if companies fail to take certain steps to get drivers fingerprinted as quickly as possible. The incentive fee was created to help allay ride-hailing drivers’ concerns about the costs of the fingerprint check — expected to be nearly $40 per driver, city spokeswoman Alicia Dean told us by email. Dean added: "This is what it costs for checks we do for other driver background checks for other vehicles for hire." We asked if the city or council had decided to cover the costs. Dean replied: "No." There’s also a separate 1 percent fee, to be in place if the proposition passes or not, "to cover the city’s administrative costs and infrastructure needs," the Statesman reported. Upshot: Ride-hail companies could be paying up to 2 percent of gross local revenue to the city though another April 2016 American-Statesman news story says ride-hail companies aren’t expected to owe any general fees until at least the end of 2016. The same story quoted a former council member, Chris Riley, saying that when the council approved its first ride-hail regulations in August 2014, the intent was that any such fees cover city administrative costs. Of course, all this not-so declamation comes from city-connected officials. We were curious how Ridesharing Works for Austin arrived at its millions-of-dollars’ conclusion. To our query, spokesman Travis Considine pointed out by email that prospective-driver fingerprints are to be run through the FBI, according to the ordinance adopted by the council in December 2015. Specifically, the ordinance authorizes the city or an approved "third party" to submit each driver-applicant’s fingerprints to the Texas Department of Public Safety for a search of state criminal records and to forward the fingerprints to the FBI for the national check. "The results of the FBI check will be returned to the DPS," the ordinance says, "which will disseminate the results of state and national criminal history checks to the City." Next, the ordinance says, the department shall use each result to determine if the applicant is prohibited from driving for a Transportation Network Company, as in ride-hail service. Not that the city expects all of this in a hurry. During a phase-in, the ordinance says, the city’s Transportation Department is to implement procedures to help drivers obtain fingerprints and background checks with each company expected to have 99 percent of its drivers checked by February 2017 or be subject to financial penalties. Considine suggested city reviews of each completed check will entail massive upticks in staff and spending to process thousands of reports coming back from the DPS. The services currently conduct name-based checks on their own. Uber lobbyist: 50,000 background checks will burden city Considine also put us in touch with Adam Goldman, an Austin lobbyist for Uber, who said by phone the few city workers who currently review applications for chauffeur licenses can’t possibly be expected to handle the surge in applications likely to come from ride-hail drivers seeking to fulfill the city’s requirements. If voters say "no" to the proposition, Goldman said, city staff stand to see fingerprint-fueled checks submitted for 50,000 drivers -- a figure he said reflects the number of Austin-area residents who have driven at least once for Uber. Hold that count. An Uber spokeswoman, Jaime Moore, previously told us it has 15,000 Austin-area drivers though that total fluctuates. Moore, informed of Goldman’s 50,000 figure, replied by email that nearly 50,000 Austin-area people went through the Uber screening process in the last year -- though many of them didn’t make it through. Still, Moore suggested we put stock in the "50,000" because Goldman didn’t consider Austin-area Lyft drivers. So, Moore said, "we would expect the number" of individuals whose background checks would require the city’s final review "to be much higher than 50,000." Goldman didn’t offer a calculation to back up the predicted "millions" in city costs. But Considine, asked for an equation behind the group’s claim, suggested multiplying 50,000 times the possible $40 charge per background check, which plays out to $2 million. Alternatively, we noted, if you go with the low-end count of 10,000 drivers, you get $400,000 in possible costs. We asked Considine if it’s fair to consider either total a city cost in that the city, far as we can tell, hasn’t said it’s funding the checks. He didn’t reply. It also occurred to us there might be fewer ride-hail drivers if the proposition fails; some might resist fingerprinting. Considine agreed, saying by phone: "That is what happened in Houston. Uber in Houston is different than Austin; the wait times are longer, the surge pricing," pricing at peak travel times, "is higher." Houston official: No spike in taxpayer-funded costs It made sense to us to consider Houston’s experience. The Bayou City has required fingerprint-driven background checks of ride-hail drivers since November 2014, also demanding drug tests, physicals and vehicle inspections. So we reached out to the city’s Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department to ask if administrative costs spiked. By phone, spokeswoman Lara Cottingham said the city experienced an "enormous spike" in applicants after Uber agreed to comply with the city’s security requirements. However, she said, the department didn’t add staff for its final reviews; as before Uber arrived in Houston, a single employee looks over 200 to 300 driver background checks a day. If a background check shows any offense disqualifying a person for a license, the application is denied, Cottingham said, but the city also sets up a hearing for the driver to seek reconsideration, in accord with state law, she said. "There’s been no real change other than she’s a lot busier than before," Cottingham said. Cottingham said driver-applicants are allowed to get fingerprinted by a designated private vendor or may visit the DPS in Austin to be fingerprinted. Generally, Cottingham said, fees paid by Uber, the amount of which she said the company doesn’t consider public information, more than cover city costs. Austin official: Staff can 'flex' Next, we asked Austin’s Transportation Department if the pro-proposition group’s cost claim comports with its expectations. We sought elaboration about flexing up; Dean replied that the department has 12 employees including about eight "administrative personnel" who could process such applications plus at least five professional staff who "could be flexed to review reports." Gordon Derr, an assistant director in the department, earlier said by email: "Possibly, the number of staff may need to increase to handle large numbers of applications, but the activities overseeing vehicles-for-hire are funded by the enterprise fund for the city." That’s not tax revenue, we recognized. By email, a department spokeswoman, Cheyenne Krause, said the ride-hail fees authorized by the council would go into the department’s enterprise fund which to date brings together parking revenue and fees paid by ground transportation service companies and drivers, funding department staff and administration. Derr earlier said: "Possibly, the number of staff may need to increase to handle large numbers of applications, but the activities overseeing vehicles-for-hire are funded by the enterprise fund for the city," which applies to programs generally funded from fees, not taxes. "Costs would not be paid from the general fund," which supports tax-backed activities, "therefore the costs would not be billed to the taxpayers," Derr said, adding: "It has yet to be determined who would be responsible for paying for background checks." Derr said the city has "engaged" a DPS contractor, Morphotrust, to take fingerprints from prospective drivers. Once prints are taken, he wrote, "Morphotrust works through DPS to process the background checks through DPS for the state background check and the FBI for federal background checks." Next, Derr said, the DPS sends results to the city where staff review them. Generally, Krause later told us by email, staff don’t know "what will be required and cannot speculate as to the number of background checks that the City will review or the resources that will be required to review the checks. Any potential costs to the City are purely speculative." Our ruling The Ridesharing Works group said that if voters reject Proposition 1, a "completely new city-run" criminal background check "process will cost millions in processing fees, additional staff and bureaucracy" with taxpayers getting "the bill." This claim isn’t backed up by Houston’s avowed experience or available facts about Austin’s approach. What happens next does seem a bit unsettled. For instance, it's up in the air who’s going to pay for each background check reviewed by the city. We also found no authoritative cost estimate for the city’s oversight. Additional staff might be needed, we learned, yet the relevant department also advises it can lean on existing staff. However, we neither fielded nor found evidence the city’s contemplated reviews of background checks will cost millions. Significantly too, taxpayers aren't poised to get the bill; city costs are to be covered from a fee-backed fund, not tax revenue. We rate this statement False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/25a93054-0729-4f6a-b46d-b20268e6c6ec	None	Ridesharing Works for Austin	None	None	None	2016-04-30T12:50:26	2016-04-26	['Austin,_Texas']
-pomt-04560	"Barack Hussein Obama will ... force courts to accept Islamic Sharia law in domestic disputes."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/26/government-not-god-pac/pac-claims-obama-would-force-sharia-law-courts/	President Barack Obama is a Christian, but a political action committee called Government is not God says his religious sympathies lie elsewhere. The group paid for ads in newspapers across Florida and Ohio that warned, among other things, that if Barack Hussein Obama is re-elected, he "will move America to force courts to accept Islamic sharia law in domestic disputes." We asked the man behind this ad, William Murray, to provide some supporting evidence. Murray cited an item from an anti-sharia group that claimed that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan is "pro-sharia." The evidence was Kagan's encouragement of Islamic legal studies at Harvard. None of Murray's sources referred to the issue of courts and domestic law. Murray also said he was making a prediction and that it is impossible to fact check a prediction. But we are not checking the accuracy of his crystal ball. We are fact-checking whether Obama has said he would force courts to accept Islamic sharia law -- and whether such action is even possible under the U.S. Constitution. Last January, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals shot down an Oklahoma law that blocked state courts from considering or using sharia law. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines sharia law as "Islamic law based on the Koran." The circuit court held that the Oklahoma measure discriminated among religions and thus was unconstitutional. The other item we found was in a Kansas divorce case. The husband in the case, who was Muslim, wanted the property divided according to a marriage contract in keeping with sharia law. In neither case did we find any evidence of action by the Obama administration. Other legal experts confirm this. Glenn Hendrix is managing partner in the Atlanta-based law firm of Arnall Golden Gregory and past chair of the American Bar Association’s section on International Law. Hendrix said there’s no substance to the ad’s claim. On top of that, he said it suffers from a fundamental legal flaw related to the separation of powers. "Even if the administration were somehow pushing sharia law -- and of course it’s not," Hendrix said, "the executive branch cannot force courts to accept any particular law." Hendrix said the Constitution and court precedent trump religious law and cited a bar association report on religious law. "Our courts (both state and federal) have more than sufficient legal tools to permit them to reject foreign or religious law and refuse to enforce foreign judgments that do not meet our fundamental standards of fairness and justice. Constitutional rights (such as those contained in the Bill of Rights) protect everyone in the United States, and all courts throughout the country are bound to respect them. Under our Constitutional order, these rights cannot be infringed, even where foreign or religious law has been chosen by the parties." Hendrix said the only time that a court might rely on sharia law is if it needs to determine the validity of a marriage and the marriage was conducted in an Islamic country. Our ruling The ad from the Government is not God PAC said Obama "will move America to force courts to accept Islamic sharia law in domestic disputes." The PAC offered no evidence -- and we couldn’t find any either. The idea itself runs counter to the constitutional separation of powers and individual protections defined in the Bill of Rights. We rate the statement Pants on Fire.	None	Government is Not God PAC	None	None	None	2012-09-26T17:53:30	2012-09-23	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-05613	The actor who played Stuart Minkus on the television series Boy Meets World become the actress Chanel West Coast.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/minkus-became-chanel-west-coast/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Stuart Minkus Become Chanel West Coast?	20 July 2015	None	['Boy_Meets_World']
-tron-00712	A French woman got one of Princess Diana’s kidneys in a transplant	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dianakidney/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	A French woman got one of Princess Diana’s kidneys in a transplant	Mar 17, 2015	None	['France']
-hoer-01046	2017 Range Rover Giveaway	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/2017-range-rover-giveaway-facebook-scams-now-appearing/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	2017 Range Rover Giveaway Facebook Scams Now Appearing	January 20, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-07330	Virginia ranked near the bottom of the nation 50 years ago in per capita income but is in the top 10 today. It had a "very low" rate of higher education attainment but is now above the national average.	half-true	/virginia/statements/2011/may/12/tim-kaine/tim-kaine-says-virginias-higher-education-record-h/	Shortly after former Gov. Tim Kaine announced his U.S. Senate campaign, he spoke about how far Virginia has come over the past half century. "I’m passionate about the Virginia economic story," Kaine, a Democrat, said in an April 21 interview with WAVY -TV in Portsmouth. "We were near the bottom of the nation 50 years ago in per capita income. We’re top 10 now. We were very low in higher ed attainment rate 50 years ago. We’re greater than the national average now." We wondered whether Kaine was right. Let’s start with his statement on per capita income. It’s true the state now ranks in the top 10 in that measure. The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis found in a March 23, 2011, report that Virginia’s per capita personal income in 2010 was $44,762 - the seventh highest in the U.S. Where did the state rank five decades ago? Figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show Virginia had a per capita income of $1,906 in 1960, making it the 34th among the 50 states. In 1961, Virginia’s per capita income was $1,975 -- the 17th lowest. So 50 years ago, Virginia was the top state in the lower third of the country in terms of the level of its per capita income. One could argue that being 15 or so spots away from last place doesn’t rank the state "near the bottom" as Kaine said. Let’s turn to Kaine’s comments on how Virginia’s level of higher education attainment has grown in the last half-century. U.S. Census Bureau estimates from 2005 to 2009 show that 33.4 percent of Virginians age 25 and older had a bachelor’s or a higher degree. That was above the national average of 27.5 percent in the age group who had attained at least a bachelor’s degree. So Kaine is right that Virginia outpaces the nation on this measure. The Old Dominion had the sixth highest percentage of people 25 and older who have received a bachelor’s degree or higher. Now for some historical perspective: A U.S. Census Bureau report examining higher education attainment found that in 1960, 8.4 percent of Virginia residents age 25 or older had earned at least a bachelor’s degree. That may seem like a small number, but it was actually higher than the national average of 7.7 percent that year. Among states, Virginia had the 16th highest percentage of residents 25 and older who received a bachelor’s degree or beyond. In short, Virginia’s level educational attainment 50 years ago wasn’t as dire as Kaine made it out to be. In fact it was pretty good compared to the rest of the country. To sum up: Kaine was absolutely right in assessing how Virginia ranks today in per capita income and higher education attainment. But his claims about where the Old Dominion stood 50 years ago have problems. Virginia’s per capita income was indeed lower than most of its peers five decades ago, but there were about 15 states that had lower income levels than Virginia. It’s a bit of stretch for Kaine to say Virginia was "near the bottom.," Virginia was closer to the middle than the bottom. On higher education attainment, Virginia 50 years ago outpaced the national average and most other states in the percentage of its residents earning a bachelor’s degree or higher. So Kaine’s statement that the state had a "very low" rate of higher education attainment 50 years doesn’t pan out. Kaine was right about the present, wrong about the past. Putting the parts together, we rate his claim Half True.	None	Tim Kaine	None	None	None	2011-05-12T12:27:52	2011-04-21	['None']
-wast-00188	"Republican presidential nominees usually aren\'t bold enough to go into communities of color and take the case right to them."	3 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/30/trump-campaigns-claim-that-republicans-usually-arent-bold-enough-to-do-black-community-outreach/	None	None	Kellyanne Conway	Michelle Ye Hee Lee	None	Trump campaign's claim that Republicans \xe2\x80\x98usually aren't bold enough' to do black community outreach	August 30, 2016	None	['None']
-hoer-00577	Country Music Legend Merle Haggard Has Died	true messages	http://www.hoax-slayer.net/true-country-music-legend-merle-haggard-has-died/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	TRUE Country Music Legend Merle Haggard Has Died	April 7, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-09431	"Bill White spent his city billions of dollars into debt (and) saw crime rates soar while he backed gun control."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/mar/14/cathie-adams/cathie-adams-chair-texas-gop-says-bill-white-spent/	In a February fund-raising letter, the Texas GOP’s chairwoman, Cathie Adams, calls Democratic gubernatorial nominee Bill White an extreme liberal with the kind of record only a Chicago politician — like President Barack Obama — could admire. Her letter levels six charges against the former Houston mayor, too many for us to cover in a single PolitiFact Texas item so we've split them into three Truth-O-Meter rulings. For this one, we'll focus on the opening part of Adams' blast: "Bill White spent his city billions of dollars into debt (and) saw crime rates soar while be backed gun control." Goodness. That's enough to make one wonder how he thrice won election. Is her fusillade on target? Through an aide, Adams said she based her characterization of White spending the city of Houston billions of dollars in debt on an October memo distributed by a group whose leaders include Bob Lemer, a retired CPA. The memo states the city is broke as a result of overspending and the national recession, and raises the specter of imminent bankruptcy. The city's director of finance and its former director countered in November that the city is not broke and "there is no potential for bankruptcy." Assets exceed liabilities by $1.7 billion, they said, and the city's general fund balances increased from $136 million in 2004 to $332 million in 2008. But the city’s debt load did increase on White’s watch. According to the city, the outstanding debts for all municipal entities totaled $9.9 billion as of Dec. 31, 2003, about when White began his first term. The total exceeded $12.8 billion by Dec. 31, 2009, toward the end of his third term. Over the years, debt went up $2.9 billion, or 29 percent. The subset of debt payable from property taxes — as opposed, say, to income from the airport or other city services — increased at a faster clip. That total was $2 billion as of the end of 2003 and reached $3.3 billion at the end of 2009 — a 65 percent increase while White was mayor. These include $625 million in bonds approved by voters in 2006. Two can play the debt blame game: White has said the state's debt load went up 100 percent on GOP Gov. Rick Perry's watch. We've rated that statement as True. What about crime? Earlier, we Texas rated as True a White statement about Houston’s crime rates dropping to the lowest levels in 25 years on his watch. The rate reached a 29-year low in 2008, though there was an uptick in violent crime in 2005, the year Hurricane Katrina sent thousands of people fleeing to the Houston area. Houston's total crime rate as calculated by the Texas Department of Public Safety fell through most of White's first five years as mayor; finalized figures for 2009, his last year in the office, aren't yet available. Houston had 7,054 criminal offenses per 100,000 residents in 2003, the year before White took office, according to the DPS. The rate increased to 7,186 offenses per 100,000 residents in 2004 before dropping through each of White's next four years as mayor, reaching 6,053 offenses per 100,000 residents in 2008. We also wrote: "These days, few public officials can legitimately take credit for reducing crime locally" because crime rates have been trending down all across the country for decades. The GOP told us that Adams’ claim of soaring crime rates reflects the Houston Police Department reclassification of several deaths as murders after Houston's KHOU-TV reported that nearly 30 violent deaths in 2005 and 2006 should have been listed as homicides. We found no mention of soaring crime in a Wall Street Journal recap of the series. The series is no longer posted on KHOU-TV's Web site and the station's news department declined to comment on the record. Next, the GOP pointed to several news articles in The Houston Chronicle. The most recent, published in August, also does not say crime rates were soaring. But it states that Houston had a higher rate of violent crime than any other Texas city, ranking 8th nationally with 1,105 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, based on the newspaper's analysis of FBI crime data in the 25 most populous U.S. cities. Violent crime includes murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, the newspaper said. To make its case for White backing gun control, the Republican Party said White is a member of a national group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which says it advocates stricter enforcement of gun laws to keep criminals from unlawfully acquiring handguns. White resigned from the group in late July after being a member since June 1, 2006, the group's spokesman, Jason Post, told us. We asked White why he had remained in the group through the years. White said he agreed with the group's position that authorities need to do better in "tracking down people who steal guns and sell them to people who cannot legally buy guns." White said he quit after his name was listed among many others in an ad funded by the group's political fund urging the U.S. Senate to vote down an amendment (to a Department of Defense measure) offered by South Dakota Sen. John Thune. The amendment, which did not pass, would require all states to recognize concealed-gun permits issued in other states. White said he supported Thune's amendment and doesn't support new restrictions on guns. Generally, the National Rifle Association gives White a "B" grade, meaning that the individual is a generally "pro-gun candidate," the association says online, but may have opposed some pro-gun reform or supported some restrictive legislation in the past. NRA spokeswoman Alexa Fritts told us she wouldn't classify White as anti-gun, especially since he quit the mayors' group, which she called "unfriendly" on Second Amendment issues. The NRA and the group have tangled on tighter regulation of gun shows and making information on gun buyers more widely available. Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who faces White on the November ballot, has an NRA grade of "A," Fritts said, because "he has an incredible track record on Second Amendment issues." So how does Adams' salvo shake out? She's right that White was mayor while the city's debt increased by billions. She misfires with her claim that crime rates soared under White. Her description of White favoring gun control is based entirely on his past membership in the mayors' group and is weakened by the NRA's generally favorable view of White. White himself says he favors no fresh gun restrictions. We rate Adams' three-part fusillade as Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Cathie Adams	None	None	None	2010-03-14T05:40:30	2010-02-20	['None']
-pomt-03512	Says first eight chosen to draw Austin City Council districts are seven Democratic primary voters and one Republican primary voter.	true	/texas/statements/2013/jun/04/derek-ryan/derek-ryan-says-first-8-chosen-draw-austin-city-co/	When Austin announced the first members of a commission that will draw new City Council districts, Republican political consultant Derek Ryan offered quick analysis. Eight names were drawn May 22, 2013, and within a couple of hours Ryan, a voter data specialist and former research director for the state Republican party, tweeted, "Seven are D primary voters, only one has voted in an R primary." Some might think that 88 percent Democratic sounds about right for Austin, the "blueberry in the tomato soup" of Texas politics. In fact, 70 percent of recent voters in party primaries in Austin voted exclusively in Democratic primaries from 2006 through 2012, with 22 percent participating exclusively in Republican primaries, according to numbers that Democratic pollster Jeff Smith of Austin ran for us. Voting in a primary election doesn’t necessarily prove someone’s political lean, though in Texas it’s the closest signal available from voting records. Texans do not register to vote by party affiliation; anyone can vote in either primary, even switching from election year to election year. In Austin, where many down-ticket races field no Republican opposition, sometimes the only way a voter can affect the outcome is by choosing between Democratic candidates in the primary. In the same way, it often makes sense for voters in, say, Midland, to commit to the county’s Republican primary. Council races in Austin are nonpartisan, and while city ordinance says the commission should have "diversity by race, ethnicity, gender and geography," it doesn’t specify any restrictions on members’ politics. But we looked into whether Ryan got the commission members’ votes right. In November 2012, Austinites voted to switch the council from seven citywide members to 10 district representatives and a mayor, starting with the November 2014 election. Some 550 people applied to be on the 14-member commission that will draw the new districts’ maps by Dec. 1, 2013. A panel narrowed the pool to 60 finalists, then city staffers drew names at random, according to the city’s website. The new members will choose six more from the pool of finalists to round out the group. Ryan told us by email, "When the eight were announced, I did a quick check on those individuals," looking at records from the 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012 primaries. Afterward, he said, he got curious about the other eligible applicants and calculated that 55 percent voted in the 2012 Democratic primary and 24 percent voted in the Republican primary. He started his research, Ryan said, with information from the commission applications the city posted online. Then he matched each applicant’s information to his own voter database, which he said he compiled from information kept by county clerks’ offices and the Texas secretary of state, the state’s chief elections officer. The applicants whose names were drawn for the commission were Magdalena Blanco, Mariano Díaz-Miranda, Rachel Farris, Phil Hewitt, Carmen Llanes Pulido, Art Lopez, Anna Saenz and Maria Solis. All except Llanes Pulido were registered Travis County voters from 2006 through 2012; according to Smith’s records, Llanes Pulido was registered in Travis from 2007 through 2012. If she voted in the 2006 primary somewhere else, Smith said, it probably was not in Texas, because his records showed no voting history for her before the 2007 general election. At our request, Travis County Tax Office spokeswoman Tiffany Seward looked up each new commission member’s 2006-2012 primary voting record and emailed us the results. 2006 2008 2010 2012 Magdalena Blanco D D R R Mariano Diaz-Miranda No vote D D D Rachel Farris No vote D D D Phil Hewitt D D D D Carmen Llanes Pulido Not registered in Travis D D D Art Lopez D D D D Anna Saenz No vote D No vote No vote Maria Solis No vote D D D We sought to speak with all eight for their views and reached everyone but Saenz, although Blanco, Farris, Hewitt and Lopez declined to comment. Farris, incidentally, writes the MeanRachel.com blog, where she is identified as a Democratic activist who also writes for the Huffington Post. Three commissioners who voted in the latest three Democratic primaries said by telephone that voting records did not tell the whole story and party politics won’t bear on the commission’s job. Llanes Pulido told us, "I consider myself politically independent; I do not consider myself a Democrat." She dislikes how primaries cause voters to identify themselves with a party, she said, and as an elections judge had asked voters, "In which primary would you like to participate?" rather than "Are you a Democrat or a Republican?" Party leanings are not germane, she said, "because the Austin City Council is a nonpartisan council and the elections are nonpartisan elections." Díaz-Miranda said Ryan’s tweet wasn’t relevant. "The job we’re doing is to try to bring more people to feel represented," he said. He considers himself independent, he told us. "I’ve also voted Republican here," he said; as an example, he said, he voted for Terry Keel for Travis County sheriff (a post Keel held from 1992 to 1997 before serving as a Republican state representative from Austin). Solis said, "I’m not going to give you an opinion about my politics because that’s not what this is about. … I think I’m a well-informed, balanced person that will vote on what we’re supposed to be doing and not on my party preference." The commission’s job, she said, is to give voters representation that is "hopefully more within their own area, and hopefully they will know the people that they are voting for." Our ruling Ryan said the first choices to draw Austin’s council districts are seven Democratic primary voters and one GOP primary voter. Records show that six of the eight members voted in the three Travis County Democratic primaries from 2008 through 2012, and two of the six also voted in the county’s 2006 Democratic primary. One commissioner voted in the 2008 Democratic primary and didn’t vote in any others. One voted in two Democratic primaries and two Republican primaries since 2006. We rate his statement as True. CLARIFICATION, 11:30 am, June 5, 2013: We revised this story to clarify that 70 percent of recent voters in party primaries in Austin cast ballots exclusively in Democratic primaries. The original version said 70 percent of Austinites had recently voted exclusively in those primaries. This revision did not affect our rating of the claim.	None	Derek Ryan	None	None	None	2013-06-04T19:28:45	2013-05-22	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-tron-00998	Family Tree Maker version 9 genealogy software Is spyware	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/familytreemaker9/	None	computers	None	None	None	Family Tree Maker version 9 genealogy software Is spyware	Mar 16, 2015	None	['None']
-thet-00050	The SNP could not have allowed public sector bid for ScotRail	none	https://theferret.scot/snp-scotrail-franchise-public-ownership/	None	Fact check 	None	None	None	The SNP could not have allowed public sector bid for ScotRail	September 1, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-01966	NASA will hire someone (with a secret security clearance) to ensure alien life doesn't make its way to Earth.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nasa-planetary-protection-officer/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Is NASA Hiring Someone to Protect Earth from Aliens?	3 August 2017	None	['None']
-snes-06451	Photograph shows school buses caught in a flooded New Orleans parking lot because no one ordered them to be deployed to evacuate residents ahead of Hurricane Katrina.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/school-buses/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	School Buses	6 September 2005	None	['New_Orleans', 'Hurricane_Katrina']
-chct-00207	FACT CHECK: Is ‘Praise Be To God’ Etched Into The Washington Monument?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/02/09/fact-check-is-praise-be-to-god-etched-into-the-washington-monument/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	11:09 AM 02/09/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-05415	Wisconsin women "are paid 81 cents to the dollar of a man doing the same job."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/may/02/kathleen-falk/gubernatorial-hopeful-kathleen-falk-says-women-wis/	Continuing to accuse Gov. Scott Walker of waging a "war on women," Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Falk posted a YouTube video that highlights her opposition to the repeal of a workplace discrimination law. Walker’s signature on a Republican-backed bill repealed the right of discriminated workers to sue in state court for compensatory and punitive damages. Asked why the right to sue in state court was needed, Falk told the Oshkosh Northwestern newspaper on April 17, 2012 it was because Wisconsin women "are paid 81 cents to the dollar of a man doing the same job." The key phrase here, which Falk also used in a speech three weeks earlier, is same job. Is she right? We’ve done several items related to the 2009 law, passed when Democrats controlled state government, and its April 2012 repeal three times. Most recently, we gave Falk a False for saying the repeal left women with no options to fight pay discrimination (They could still pursue the claims through other avenues, including federal court) and Walker a Mostly False for saying the old law was "kind of a gravy train" for lawyers (no lawsuits had been filed while it was in place). When we asked Falk campaign spokesman Scot Ross for evidence to back the 81 cents vs. $1 claim, he cited an April 2012 report by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy think tank and the Wisconsin Women’s Council, a state government board that advocates for women. The report says that in 2009, Wisconsin women earned, on average, 81 cents for every dollar earned by men. That’s the same figure Falk cited -- but it measures something quite different. Falk said Wisconsin women earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by men for "doing the same job." What the report says is that -- considering all Wisconsin women and men in the workforce working all sorts of jobs -- women earn 81 cents for every dollar men earn. The report underlines that point by saying that one reason Wisconsin women earn less than men on average is they are concentrated in occupations that pay lower wages, including in retail, services, education, nonprofits and health care. Laura Dresser, associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, confirmed that the report does not say what Falk said it did. We could say case closed, but we wondered whether there are statistics measuring the pay of Wisconsin men and women who work in the same job. Dresser said she didn’t know of any such studies, but suggested we contact the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington, D.C. think tank. The institute provided us an April 2011 report it did on women in Wisconsin. The D.C. think tank examined a slightly different population -- adults who worked full time year round in 2009. Its report found that Wisconsin women earned 75 cents for every dollar earned by men. But, again, that figure is for all occupations, not women and men working in the same job; and the D.C. think tank, like the Wisconsin groups in their report, noted that women tended to work in lesser-paying occupations. We did find evidence on the national level that women tend to be paid less than men in many occupations. According to the D.C. institute, among 111 occupations for which weekly median wage data could be estimated for 2010, men earned more than women in all but four occupations. The largest gap was among personal financial advisors, with women on average earning 58 cents for every $1 earned by men. But in relation to Falk’s claim, those figures are national and apply to types of occupations, not to men and working the same job. Our rating Falk said Wisconsin women "are paid 81 cents to the dollar of a man doing the same job." To be sure, as a group women are paid less than men and they are in many individual instances. But she misquoted the report she relied on. What the report said is that, among all working men and women in Wisconsin working all sorts of jobs, women earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by men. We rate Falk’s "same job" statement False. (You can comment on this item on the Journal Sentinel's web site)	None	Kathleen Falk	None	None	None	2012-05-02T09:00:00	2012-04-17	['None']
-pomt-11014	"I have watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/09/donald-trump/did-ice-liberate-towns-donald-trump-claimed-have-w/	President Donald Trump argued against calls by some Democrats to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying he’s watched the agency "liberate" towns from the violent MS-13 gang. "The Democrats are making a strong push to abolish ICE, one of the smartest, toughest and most spirited law enforcement groups of men and women that I have ever seen. I have watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13 & clean out the toughest of situations. They are great!" Trump tweeted June 30. (Read more about the growing calls to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.) Trump repeated the message in a July 5 tweet, "Every day, the brave men and women of ICE are liberating communities from savage gangs like MS-13. We will NOT stand for these vile Democrat smears in law enforcement. We will always stand proudly with the BRAVE HEROES of ICE and BORDER PATROL!" We wondered: Has ICE freed towns from MS-13’s dominion, as Trump claimed? Trump’s tweet did not say which towns had been liberated, or when. ICE referred PolitiFact to the White House for comment. The White House did not respond to repeated requests for clarity. We searched for facts to support the statement but did not find any. ‘A gross exaggeration if not a fabrication' MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, operates in at least 40 states with an estimated 10,000 U.S.-based members. The street gang "has a large presence" in New York, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, the U.S. Justice Department has said. The FBI does not have a breakdown of their presence by state or location, said FBI spokeswoman Nora Scheland. Trump’s use of "liberate" suggested that towns had been under the rule or full control of MS-13. But neither the White House or ICE have named such towns. Experts on sociology and gang research told PolitiFact they were unaware of U.S. towns wholly controlled by the gang, and that Trump’s wording sounded like political hyperbole. "This is hyperbolic and misleading language," said Jorja Leap, an adjunct professor of social welfare and director of the Health and Social Justice Partnership at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. "Liberation is usually the terminology of military forces — as in, the Allies liberated France from the Nazis." "The claim is sort of outrageous and rather difficult to support since no U.S. government or state government has identified a city over which we lost sovereignty or control," said Fulton T. Armstrong, a research fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. "MS-13 in certain cities have made inroads, in certain neighborhoods and schools, but to say entire towns have been under MS-13 control, that simply has never been substantiated," Armstrong added. "In the absence of any evidence, one would have to say it's either a gross exaggeration if not a fabrication, because we've never known that." It would be a major accomplishment if a town got rid of MS-13’s presence, said David C. Pyrooz, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "But most gang crackdowns or raids only temporarily improve the condition of communities by reducing crime and fear, since the underlying factors giving rise to gangs and violence go unchanged by these police practices," Pyrooz said. MS-13 targets immigrant communities News outlets have reported on MS-13’s brutal violence, its recruitment efforts, and the fear its members instill largely in immigrant communities and minors who come to the United States illegally without a parent or guardian. MS-13’s primary target is the immigrant community, though there have been cases where non-immigrants have also been victims, said Joseph Kolb, executive director of the Southwest Gang Information Center, which accumulates and shares gang-related information and training with law enforcement at local, state and federal level. MS-13 gang members have been charged in the 2016 murders of New York teenagers Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens, who were walking together in their hometown. "MS-13, they don’t control towns, but they control niches in towns," Kolb said. MS-13, like any ethnic or racial gang, have higher levels of crime in certain areas and flourish in the communities that they live in, Kolb said. Trump generally omits the fact that MS-13’s main targets are immigrants. ICE not only agency involved in MS-13 efforts Hundreds of gang members from MS-13 and others have been arrested in ICE-led operations over recent years. It’s worth noting that ICE isn’t necessarily the only law enforcement unit going after gang members. Established in 2005, Operation Community Shield is ICE’s anti-gang enforcement initiative that works with other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. "Gang-related enforcement activity is much more effective in areas where the partnership between ICE (Homeland Security Investigations) and local law enforcement is strongest," ICE’s website said. A six-week ICE-led gang operation that ended in May 2017 resulted in the arrest of 1,378 people (1,095 confirmed as gang members and affiliates). The majority of the arrested were U.S. citizens. And of the 1,378 arrested, 104 were MS-13 gang members, according to ICE. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division arrested nearly 800 MS-13 gang members in fiscal year 2017 and 405 in the first-quarter for fiscal year 2018, the agency previously told PolitiFact. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in October 2017 also said he was designating MS-13 as a priority for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces. The coalition includes ICE, the FBI, Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. Department of Labor Inspector General, and others. "Large gang crackdowns, especially those involving violent gangs, often include multiple agencies," Pyrooz said. "It would be rare, although not necessarily impossible, for a raid to occur without the assistance of local police, owing to the ground-level intelligence that police have on the gang dynamics in a city." Our ruling Trump tweeted, "I have watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13." Neither ICE nor the White House identified towns that had been under MS-13 rule and were then liberated by ICE. Experts said the gang targets niches or immigrant communities within larger jurisdictions, and did not have entire towns within its violent grasp. Raids by law enforcement temporarily improve the safety of communities, but usually do not act as permanent solutions because the underlying circumstances of gang violence remain. With no evidence to support it, Trump’s statement rates False. ' See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-07-09T16:00:39	2018-06-30	['None']
-tron-02227	Johns Hopkins Scientist Questions Flu Vaccine	authorship confirmed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/johns-hopkins-flu-shot/	None	medical	None	None	None	Johns Hopkins Scientist Questions Flu Vaccine – Authorship Confirmed!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-00647	"Austin is the only city in an arid landscape in the western United States dependent on a single source of water."	half-true	/texas/statements/2015/may/18/sharlene-leurig/water-expert-says-austin-only-city-arid-western-us/	Austin’s not the only city in the midst of drought that’s grappling with long-term questions about its water supply. Still, could it be more vulnerable than others? Sharlene Leurig, who directs the sustainable water infrastructure program at the Boston-based nonprofit Ceres, recently called Austin’s dependence on the Colorado River for water a "critical vulnerability." Leurig went on at a Feb. 9, 2015, Austin City Council workshop: "Austin is the only city in an arid landscape in the western United States dependent on a single source of water." Leurig’s caveat Austin all alone? We sought elaboration from Leurig, who replied by email with a caveat: "Of the top twenty major cities by population, Austin is the only city in an arid climate with a single source of water. Of course if you looked at all the cities west of the Mississippi, this isn’t true, but for major cities, it is." Leurig, who chaired the city’s water resource planning task force in 2014, added by phone she’s never explicitly researched the question, but she’s become familiar with water systems nationally through her job advising investors who buy water utility debt. Austin has enjoyed abundant water for decades, Leurig said, thanks to the chain of dammed lakes breaking up the Colorado River. Meanwhile, she said, other cities west of the Mississippi have diversified their supplies because existing water wasn’t abundant or in reaction to "stress events." For instance, she said, the Dallas-Fort Worth region was motivated by the historic 1950s drought to build reservoirs farther east, in wetter parts of Texas. In contrast, she said, Austin faced its first comparable crisis with the Texas drought that started in 2008. Leurig was correct about Austin drawing all its drinking water from one source, the Colorado River. To be precise, river water is pulled from Lake Travis and Lake Austin, which are both part of the seven-member Highland Lakes system. There’s a long-term reason for this dependence. In 1999, the city prepaid $100 million to the Lower Colorado River Authority to guarantee water to Austin from the river through at least 2050. The authority manages a 600-mile stretch of the Colorado River in Texas and the Highland Lakes by Austin. Two of the lakes, Buchanan and Travis, have had historically low inflows of water in the drought, leading Leurig and others, such as Mayor Steve Adler, to say Austin’s long-term rights to water matter not if there isn’t enough water in the lakes--and that it’s time for Austin to look at diversifying its sources. Nature Conservancy scientist For another take on Austin’s unusual reliance on a single water source, we turned to Rob McDonald, a senior scientist of urban sustainability at the Nature Conservancy, who worked on a project mapping the water sources of 220 U.S. cities plus 534 cities outside the U.S. (A Google search led us to the map; a Nature Conservancy spokesman connected us to McDonald.) McDonald pointed out that if all western cities are considered, Austin likely wouldn’t be the only one to use a single water source. According to McDonald’s map and city websites, some smaller towns--as close to Austin as Killeen 70 miles northwest or as distant as Billings, Montana--rely on just one source. Also, McDonald said, numerous cities essentially rely on a single source because they draw 80 to 90 percent of the water supply from one surface source like a river or lake, McDonald said. He pointed to Las Vegas as an example; the Las Vegas Valley Water District’s website says southern Nevada gets almost 90 percent of its water from that state’s Colorado River; 10 percent comes from groundwater. It’s also not always clear, McDonald said, whether a particular body of water should be counted as one or two sources. Yes, Austin draws its water from the Colorado River, he noted, but water from the Edwards Aquifer flows into the river. Asked about this point, an Austin Water Utility spokesman, Jason Hill, agreed that various "tributary creeks and rivers, runoff, and springs" flow into the Colorado River. But, Hill said by phone, it’s a "stretch" to consider the Edwards Aquifer a city water source. That’s because the city doesn’t pump water directly from the aquifer, Hill said. All the water the city uses, all the water the city has rights to, is in the river, Hill said. Checking city water supplies We endeavored to test Leurig’s claim for ourselves by fetching a U.S. Census Bureau list of the top 20 U.S. cities by population as of July 2013. Then, we mapped out those cities and narrowed the list to the ones west of the Mississippi River: Austin (of course), Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco. Next, we contacted each city’s main water supplier, in many cases the city’s utility. Each of the 10 other populous cities reported more than one source for water though our hunt proved a little muddy in that cities varied in how they defined a "water source." Who knew? By phone, Leurig said that in her view, a source is "hydrologically distinct." For instance, a river and its tributary are not hydrologically distinct, but two rivers that don’t merge are, Leurig said. Separately, to our inquiries, representatives of the American Water Works Association and the Texas Water Development Board each advised there isn’t a standard definition of a water source, leaving this aspect unsettled. Houston: As of 2015, the Bayou City was getting 75 percent of its drinking water from the San Jacinto and Trinity rivers. The remaining 25 percent came from the Chicot and Evangeline aquifers, city spokesman Alvin Wright told us by email. San Antonio: Officials with the San Antonio Water System told us the utility taps seven water sources, topped by the underground Edwards Aquifer, which provided 77 percent of the water in 2014. (The system serves most of Bexar County, which is home to San Antonio, and other nearby areas). A report emailed to us by water system spokeswoman Anne Hayden showed that in the year, other water sources were: Edwards Aquifer water pumped out of the aquifer and stored in the Carrizo Aquifer (8 percent) Groundwater from the Carrizo Aquifer in southern Bexar County (4 percent) Surface water from Canyon Lake, which is part of the Guadalupe River system (4 percent) Groundwater from the Carrizo Aquifer in Gonzales County (3 percent) Groundwater from the Trinity Aquifer (2 percent) Groundwater from the Carrizo Aquifer in Guadalupe and Gonzales counties, and surface water from Lake Dunlap, which is part of the Guadalupe River system (2 percent) Hayden said by phone the water system previously drew water from Medina Lake, which is fed by the Medina River, but recently stopped after its level sank. Though the San Antonio Water System clearly has more than one source of water, we wondered if the system overcounts. After all, some of the listed sources appear to originate from the same place, such as the Carrizo or Edwards aquifers, or the Guadalupe River. Hayden and Darren Thompson, the director of water resources for the San Antonio Water System, said by phone there are key differences between those sources, such as who regulates the water. For instance, the city pulls some of its water directly from the Edwards Aquifer under a permit from the Edwards Aquifer Authority, Thompson said. Once that water is put into the Carrizo Aquifer and later taken out, it doesn’t fall under the authority’s regulations. Different bodies regulate different supplies from the Carrizo Aquifer, Hayden said. Thompson also pointed out that the city draws from different points of the expansive underground source in three counties: Bexar, Guadalupe and Gonzales. The water can have different characteristics, such as mineral level, depending on where in the aquifer it is taken, Thompson said. Phoenix: This city’s hydrologically distinct sources as of 2015 were the Salt River, the Verde River, the Colorado River and groundwater from the Salt River Valley Aquifer. Just over half of the city’s water was coming from the Salt and Verde rivers, a little less than half from the Colorado River and the rest is from the aquifer. Kathryn Sorensen, water services director for Phoenix’s water services department, said by phone the city has "roughly 100 legally distinct supplies." For instance, the city’s rights to water from the Salt and Verde rivers have different priority levels depending on what date the water was first put to "beneficial use," she said. Priority matters, because the lower the priority, the sooner the water will be cut off when river flows slow. Phoenix's access to Colorado River water - which also has different priority levels - comes through subcontracts with the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, settlement agreements approved through the U.S. Congress, and leases with various Indian communities in Arizona. Dallas: In 2020, according to Dallas Water Utility projections, about 47.5 percent of the city’s water will come from the Trinity River, with the Sabine River and its tributary making up 52.5 percent, Denis Qualls, a senior program manager with the Dallas Water Utility, told us by phone. Fort Worth: As of 2015, about 80 percent of the city’s water was coming from the Cedar Creek and Richland-Chambers reservoirs, said Mary Gugliuzza, spokeswoman for the city’s water department. Cedar Creek is fed by Kings Creek while Richland-Chambers is fed by Richland Creek and Chambers Creek - all of which are separate from the Trinity River, said Chad Lorance, spokesman for the Tarrant Regional Water District, by phone. The Trinity River provides the rest of the city’s water, Gugliuzza said. El Paso: As of 2015, El Paso Water Utilities was getting 70 percent of its water from the Mesilla Bolson and Hueco Bolson aquifers, utility spokesman Javier Camacho said by email. Another 4 percent of its water consisted of brackish Hueco Bolson water treated in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Facility. The remaining 26 percent was coming from the Rio Grande and is stored about 120 miles north in Elephant Butte, New Mexico. San Diego: As of 2015, the city got nearly all its water--85 to 90 percent--from two sources, city spokesperson Arian Collins said by email, namely the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta with 10 to 15 percent coming from rainfall runoff captured in reservoirs. The delta, where the rivers merge to flow to the Pacific Ocean, provided water to two-thirds of Californians, according to the California Department of Water Resources. Los Angeles: On average in 2009-14, the city got a little more than half its water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the Colorado River; 34 percent from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, fed by snowpack from the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains; and 12 percent from the San Fernando Valley Aquifer, a source mostly replenished with stormwater, Michelle Figueroa, city water and power department spokeswoman, told us by email. San Jose: John Tang, a spokesman for the San Jose Water Company, said that as of 2015, the company served about 80 percent of the city and was pulling 40 percent of its water from the Santa Clara Groundwater Basin. Another 50 percent was coming from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, Tang said, with the rest consisting of rainfall captured in a reservoir in the Santa Cruz mountains. San Francisco: As of 2015, most of the city’s water, 85 percent, was coming from the Hetch Hetchy watershed in Yosemite National Park, originating as snowmelt and running into the Tuolumne River, said Paula Kehoe, director of water resources for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Some 15 percent of the city’s water came from the Alameda and Peninsula watersheds, where reservoirs captured rain and runoff and also stored Hetch Hetchy water, Kehoe said. Less than 1 percent of the city’s water was coming from groundwater from the Sunol Filter Galleries. Our ruling Leurig said Austin is the only city in an arid landscape in the western United States dependent on a single source of water. That’s not so, as she acknowledged to us, and even if you limit the focus to big cities, some of those--such as San Francisco and arguably San Antonio, which seems to overcount its sources--get more than four-fifths of their water from a source. On balance, we find this claim Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Sharlene Leurig	None	None	None	2015-05-18T15:02:18	2015-02-09	['United_States', 'Austin,_Texas']
-pomt-06609	Says the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world with 2.3 million inmates, and the majority of Americans are imprisoned because they sold small amounts of drugs.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/22/gary-johnson/gary-johnson-says-us-prisons-are-packed-small-time/	Presidential candidate Gary Johnson, a longtime advocate of legalizing marijuana, says U.S. prisons are packed with too many small-time drug dealers. In a meeting with the editorial board of The Telegraph in Nashua, N.H., the former New Mexico governor explained some of the reasoning for his controversial position: "We now have 2.3 million people behind bars in this country, we have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world," Johnson said. "The majority of those people behind bars are there because they sold small amounts of drugs." We'll examine his claim in two parts: Is the U.S. really a global leader in incarcerating citizens? And are small amounts of drugs such as marijuana really to blame? Johnson’s New Hampshire Communications Director Matt Simon pointed us to some sources behind Johnson’s claim, citing data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and World Prison Brief, a publication of the International Centre for Prison Studies at the King's College School of Law in London. We checked the Bureau of Justice Statistics figures and confirmed there were 2.3 million prisoners in local jails and state and federal prisons at the end of 2009. The World Prison Brief lists prison population rates per 100,000 residents of each country. The U.S. tops the list with 743 prisoners per 100,000 residents, followed by Rwanda with 595, the Russian Federation with 559, Georgia with 547 and the Virgin Islands (USA) with 539. So Johnson is right with the first part of his claim about the total and the top ranking. But do small-time drug dealers make up the majority of U.S. prisoners? It depends whether you consider local, state or federal inmates, according to Tracy Snell, a statistician with the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. The Bureau of Justice Statistics only investigates information regarding offense types every 5-7 years through inmate surveys, Snell said. So we had to go back to 2002 and 2004 for the most recent data that included the three levels of incarceration to determine what percentage of inmates were held for selling drugs. The data reveal: * Local level: 12.1 percent, which is far short of a majority. * State level: 14.6 percent, also far short of a majority. * Federal level: 50 percent. Because the overwhelming majority of all prisoners are held at the state and local level, the number imprisoned for drug offenses is significantly short of a majority. Also, those numbers include all drug sales under the category drug trafficking. The percentages would likely be even smaller if they were limited to sales of small amounts of drugs the way Johnson suggested. In our correspondence with Johnson’s campaign, Communications Director Simon admitted the error. "After communicating with a few experts, I can now confirm that the third claim is inaccurate," Simon said. "I believe the real number of those incarcerated for all drug-related crimes is closer to 25 percent of the overall population of incarcerated persons. "Johnson may have been thinking specifically of the federal inmate population when he made the statement, and although there's difficulty in defining ‘small amounts,’ the statement is closer to being true if applied to inmates in federal prisons." Gov. Johnson also admitted his need to clarify, Simon said. "I just spoke with Gov. Johnson about his error and he said, ’I stand corrected, thanks!’ so I'm sure he won't repeat this claim," Simon said. So Johnson was correct to say that the U.S. has highest incarceration rate in the world, with an estimated total of 2.3 million inmates,but he was wrong that the majority of those imprisoned are being held for selling small amounts of drugs. We rate Johnson’s claim Half True.	None	Gary Johnson	None	None	None	2011-09-22T17:50:55	2011-09-19	['United_States']
-pomt-11200	"Official: Rudy Giuliani officially resigns, Trump’s legal team on it's last leg."	false	/punditfact/statements/2018/may/15/political-voice/no-rudy-giuliani-didnt-quit-trump-legal-team/	President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani quit, a headline would have readers believe, but the headline isn’t clear about which job Giuliani actually quit. "Official: Rudy Giuliani officially resigns, Trump’s legal team on it's last leg," said a May 12 headline on The Political Voice, a website that includes many articles critical of Trump. Facebook flagged this story as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook's News Feed. You can read more about our partnership with Facebook here. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com ' placeholder text in the ruling comments. Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, has been in the news since he spoke to Fox News’ Sean Hannity on May 2 about money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Giuliani said that Trump had repaid Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen to silence Daniels who alleges she had an affair with Trump in 2006. While the clickbait headline by The Political Voice could create the impression that Giuliani resigned from Trump’s legal team, that’s not the case. The story said that Giuliani resigned from his law firm, Greenberg Traurig. Giuliani took an unpaid leave of absence from the firm’s New York office in April and then in May resigned to focus on his work as one of Trump’s personal lawyers on the Russia investigation. Richard A. Rosenbaum, executive chairman of Greenberg Traurig, confirmed in statements to the media that Giuliani resigned. "After recognizing that this work is all-consuming and is lasting longer than initially anticipated, Rudy has determined it is best for him to resign from the firm," he said. A headline said "Official: Rudy Giuliani officially resigns, Trump’s legal team on it's last leg." That headline creates the misleading and inaccurate impression that Giuliani quit Trump’s legal team. In reality, he quit the Greenberg Traurig law firm to devote more time to his work for Trump. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	The Political Voice	None	None	None	2018-05-15T16:44:45	2018-05-12	['Rudy_Giuliani']
-snes-00487	A Florida man was arrested after rounding up pedophiles and burning them alive on a barbecue.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/arrest-barbecuing-pedophiles/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Was a Man Arrested for ‘Barbecuing’ Pedophiles to Death?	9 June 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-05950	"For the first time in 13 years, our dependence on foreign oil is below 50 percent."	half-true	/ohio/statements/2012/jan/26/barack-obama/barack-obama-campaign-says-us-dependence-foreign-o/	Good news, America: The country is no longer importing the majority of oil it needs. You might have heard about this from a television commercial sponsored by President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, the first commercial the president’s team has run in the 2012 race. Obama for America launched the ad Jan. 18 in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Virginia, Wisconsin and North Carolina. "For the first time in 13 years, our dependence on foreign oil is below 50 percent," the announcer says on the ad. Obama repeated the claim Jan. 24 in his State of the Union address, too. In the ad, the Obama team listed its source right on the screen: The U.S. Energy Information Administration, in a report dated May 25, 2011. Since the ad was placed in Ohio and we have to fill our gas tanks like nearly everyone else, PolitiFact Ohio decided to check the facts. About the ad: It wasn’t only about oil. It also touched on "secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama" -- a reference to ads placed by an outside group, Americans for Prosperity, backed by billionaires David and Charles Koch. The Obama reelection ad also mentioned Obama’s "unprecedented record on ethics," and this country’s expanding clean-energy industry. Other fact-checkers have weighed in on some of these already, with FactCheck.org noting that some of the 2.7 million jobs in the clean-energy sector (a boast on the screen) were gained long before Obama took office, although his policies have added to the gains. The president’s commercial cited PolitiFact as its source for saying that Obama "kept his promise to strengthen ethics rules," but the ad failed to mention that PolitiFact later gave a "Promise Broken" rating to a related ethics promise, concerning lobbying and the revolving door for former government officials. But what about the oil? The Obama campaign is correct that U.S. oil dependence is below 50 percent. According to his own source, the energy administration, it was 49.3 percent in 2010. That’s down from a high of 60.3 percent in 2005. There are several ways to measure foreign oil dependency, the agency adds, and some of the other measures also show a decline but still have U.S. dependence above 50 percent. But we are writing for the general public, not petroleum engineers and economists, and the energy agency itself, staffed by professional analysts, not politicians, certainly includes the broadest measure (net crude and oil product imports as a share of U.S. total demand). Yet this decline in dependence has occurred since 2005. Team Obama is correct in saying dependence only recently -- in 2010 -- fell below 50 percent, but the commercial suggests that the current president deserves credit. The problem with that is apparent when looking at the year--to-year drop, because it mirrors the recession, with the biggest annual decline in 2009. Yes, Obama was president then, serving in his first year. But we’ll let his own source, the energy agency, speak to this. As it says in the very report cited in the commercial: "This decline partly reflects the downturn in the underlying economy after the financial crisis of 2008. Not surprisingly, demand has bounced back somewhat from a low of 18.8 million barrels per day in 2009, when the U.S. economy bottomed out. But the downward trend in consumption started two years before the 2008 crisis and reflects factors such as changes in efficiency and consumer behavior as well as patterns of economic growth." These other factors include increases in domestic biofuels production, natural gas liquids and refinery gains, as well as growth in ethanol production that helped displace traditional hydrocarbon fuels and reduced the need for petroleum imports. And then there were "strong gains in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico and the Bakken formation," ending decades of contraction in domestic oil production. In fact, domestic crude oil production is expected to grow by more than 20 percent in the next decade, according to the energy administration’s latest annual outlook, that was released Jan. 23. Domestic crude oil production should reach a level in 2020 not seen since 1994, the report says. But as PolitiFact has reported before, deep-water production comes after years of exploration and preparation. It does not happen over night and gains made during Obama’s term so far have roots in previous administrations and economic difficulties that have had factories and households paring back. So does that mean Obama deserves no credit at all? Well, no. The energy agency says it expects moderating trends in import reliance to continue even as the economy improves and consumption rises. Energy efficiency, "driven in part by tighter fuel economy standards, will prove increasingly important," the report says. And Obama has, in fact, promoted fuel efficiency, alternative fuels and even offshore drilling, though not as broadly as the energy industry would like. In its new annual report, issued Jan. 23, the energy administration said that the United States will produce far more natural gas and oil by 2035, reducing imports to 36 percent of liquid fuels. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry trade group, said that’s great -- but falls short of what could occur with different regulations and policies. That’s a debate for the industry and environmentalists. We’re sticking with the facts, and the fact is that part of Obama’s claim is correct: Our dependence on foreign oil is below 50 percent. But fully evaluating the accuracy of the claim also means looking at the context in which it is made. Obama clearly claims credit in the commercial; and his own source for the claim makes clear that a number of factors, including the poor economy and gains from drilling -- which began before his administration -- are among them. These are important details. Without them, the claim in the ad -- made specifically to boast of Obama’s accomplishments -- lacks context. And when factually accurate claims leave out such important context, the Truth-O-Meter’s dial turns to Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-01-26T06:00:00	2012-01-18	['None']
-snes-00555	The experienced many times more school shootings between 2009 and 2018 than 27 other countries combined.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/school-shootings-us-vs-world/	None	Crime	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Does the U.S. Experience Far More School Shootings Than Any Other Country?	23 May 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08073	Says the University of Wisconsin football program is spending almost all of its Bowl Championship Series payout on a Rose Bowl junket for politically connected officials	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2010/dec/21/charlie-sykes/charlie-sykes-says-university-wisconsin-will-spend/	Taking hard shots at the world of academia is nothing new for conservative Charlie Sykes, who wrote a scathing book about university professors back in the 1980s. Sykes, the longtime WTMJ-AM (620) talk radio host, was at it again recently when he riffed on the University of Wisconsin Badgers and the team’s upcoming trip to the Rose Bowl, the team’s first to the Pasadena, Calif., event since 2000. His target: UW’s plan to pay trip costs for outgoing Gov. Jim Doyle, UW Chancellor Carolyn "Biddy" Martin, members of the UW Board of Regents and other university officials as part of the official Rose Bowl traveling party. "Jim Doyle is getting one last junket out of it," Sykes said on the air Dec. 15, 2010. Sykes mocked UW’s $2.2 million Rose Bowl budget, suggesting it was inappropriate when deficits loom over the state budget. He read aloud from a Journal Sentinel story on the trip costs, reciting that the $2.2 million would cover expenses for players, coaches and the UW band -- plus an estimated 43 people in the "official" traveling group including Doyle. He then noted that UW expected to get a $2.7 million payout from bowl games, including the Bowl Championship Series, of which the Rose Bowl is a part. Sykes then made a leap worthy of Badgers wide receiver Nick Toon: "So basically," he said, "they are using almost all the payout for a junket for the politically well connected types." Sykes then moved on to another topic. But this one is interesting in its own right. And PolitiFact doesn’t just look at politicians or elected officials. It will take on anyone who speaks up in the civic discourse, even if their radio station is owned by the same company (Journal Communications Inc.) that owns the Journal Sentinel. So, is Big Red really blowing most of its bowl take on well-connected suits? In a word: No. When we asked Sykes for support for his claim -- a standard first stop in the items we do -- he quickly backed off. "The only politically connect(ed) hack I know is going is Jim Doyle (and maybe some of the regents)," Sykes wrote in an e-mail that he also posted on his SykesWrites blog. "My ‘evidence’? Absolutely none." Sykes went on to label his remark "an off-hand wisecrack" -- "You know, humor, hyperbole, joke." UW Athletic Department officials weren’t amused. They said it was way off to suggest that most of the bowl money would pay for officials and high rollers. They are still formulating the trip budget and don’t have precise figures, but it will closely mirror last year’s trip to the Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando, according to Justin Doherty, an assistant athletic director. For that trip, some 700 people were involved, about 100 players and 275 band members, plus spirit squad members, coaches, trainers, security, support staff and family members. Various UW administrative officials also were in that group. Doyle did not go. To be sure, that’s a huge crew for a football game -- and this year’s group will likely swell because the Rose Bowl requires a bigger band. So let’s say it’s 750 for Pasadena, of whom 43 are officials from the regents, the UW Athletic Board, the chancellor’s office and elsewhere. That means the "official" traveling party is about 6 percent of the total group, which would translate into about $132,000 of the Rose Bowl budget of $2.2 million. It’s a rough calculation, but by anybody’s math that’s not close to burning up the Badgers’ $2.2 million Rose Bowl budget, much less the larger bowl-game payout from the Big Ten. And that amount may even far more than those Sykes cited. He narrowed his attack to "political types" on the Doyle-appointed Board of Regents (12 are signed up to go) and the governor himself. Plus the suits will not be in Pasadena as long (four nights) as the jocks (eight or nine nights). Sykes’s remarks also suggested taxpayers would suffer because of the "junket." But the Rose Bowl funds flow from revenue generated by bowl games that feature teams from the Big Ten conference -- not tax dollars. Here are the X’s and O’s on the money flow: Eight Big Ten teams made it to the postseason this year. That’s expected to generate $44.5 million for the conference, according to Scott Chipman, the conference’s assistant commissioner of communication. The Rose Bowl alone brings $21.2 million. From that $44.5 million pot, the Big Ten will pay the bowl schools -- collectively -- $14 million in traveling expenses. (Bucky gets $2.25 million for Rose Bowl expenses, a figure that’s set by the Big Ten). Split the remaining $30.5 million among all 11 conference teams and that means each team gets about $2.77 million over and above their expenses. That means that between the $2.77 million and the expenses of $2.25 million for the Rose Bowl, there is $5 million coming in from bowl-related payments. So the Badgers could clear $2.77 million from the bowl season, unless they blow their budget. That has happened before -- at UW’s 1999 Rose Bowl appearance, when the athletic department shelled out $200,000 due to cost overruns. Then-Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, a Republican, UW officials and alumni were part of the entourage that year. Normally we sum up before turning loose the Truth-O-Meter, but it hardly seems necessary in this case. Sykes told his listeners and followers of his blog Friday that he thought the Journal Sentinel would have bigger fish to fry than a "tidbit" on the Rose Bowl. But he didn’t fight the facts, or lack thereof. "Politifact busts me (sort of)" Sykes posted on Twitter. And he cheerfully e-mailed us to have at it: "All I want for Christmas is a "Pants on Fire!" in my stocking!" Your Christmas wish is granted, Charlie. The Truth-O-Meter is glowing Badger red. Pants on Fire.	None	Charlie Sykes	None	None	None	2010-12-21T09:00:00	2010-12-15	['University_of_Wisconsin–Madison', 'Rose_Bowl_(stadium)']
-pomt-02603	"The minimum wage is mostly an entry-level wage for young people."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/26/mitch-mcconnell/mitch-mcconnell-says-minimum-wage-young-people-ent/	President Barack Obama is expected to take another stab at raising the minimum wage when he delivers his State of the Union speech this week. But Republicans appear ready to stymie that proposal once again. The topic came up Jan. 26, 2014, on Fox News Sunday during a discussion between host Chris Wallace and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "Isn't it reasonable that somebody who's working full time, 40 hours a week, should be able to live above the poverty line?" Wallace asked McConnell, referring to Obama’s calls to hike the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. "Yeah. But of course, the minimum wage is mostly an entry-level wage for young people," McConnell replied. "We have a crisis in employment among young people right now." McConnell went on to say that he believes raising the minimum wage will hurt employment and "we ought to be doing things that create more jobs." But what about McConnell’s characterization of minimum wage workers? Is it a workforce mostly made up of young folks? We’ll stick to the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25, since that’s the topic up for debate. As it stands, 21 states and the District of Columbia have set their minimum wage higher than the federal level. A spokesman for McConnell pointed us to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, "Characterizations of Minimum Wage Workers," released in February of last year. We’re familiar with it, having written a couple of fact-checks recently on the minimum wage. According to the report, of the 75 million people making hourly wages in 2012, about 1.6 million earned the minimum wage while another 2 million earned less than $7.25 an hour. (How does one earn less than the minimum wage? Certain exceptions are carved out for "vocational education students," "full-time students employed by retail or service establishments, agriculture, or institutions of higher education," and those "impaired by a physical or mental disability.") The underlying data in the report largely backs up McConnell’s claim. In fact, the report even says "Minimum wage workers tend to be young." How young? Only 20 percent of individuals earning hourly wages are ages 16-24, but that demographic makes up half of all individuals earning at or below the minimum wage. About a quarter of those individuals are teenagers ages 16-19 and another 25 percent are 20 to 24 years old. Broadened to include 25-29 year olds, and nearly two-thirds of all workers making at or below the minimum wage are younger than 30. The older you get, the more likely you’re making more than $7.25. Age bracket Percent of workers making the minimum wage Percent of workers making less than the minimum wage Percent of workers making at or below the minimum wage 16-24 55.0 47.1 50.6 25-34 15.5 24.0 20.3 35-44 9.8 11.8 10.9 45-54 10.5 10.3 10.4 55-64 6.4 4.5 5.4 65+ 2.8 2.2 2.5 But McConnell also described minimum wage jobs as "entry-level." That’s a characterization with which some may take an issue. Entry-level jobs typically indicate positions that, while at the bottom of the totem pole, have potential for growth. Young adults take entry-level jobs at companies hoping to climb the career ladder. And while wages are lower, there is potential to see considerable salary increases and/or career advancement. A majority of minimum-wage jobs don’t really fit that description. According to the report, two-thirds are part-time, and half of all minimum wage jobs are in the leisure or hospitality industry. This includes food service jobs like waiters and cooks, hotel employees or movie theater workers, among other jobs. While many of those jobs are traditionally held by young people, they don’t typically lead to careers in those industries. The same can be said for retail jobs, which make up another 16 percent of all minimum wage-or-less positions. Our ruling McConnell said "the minimum wage is mostly an entry-level wage for young people." The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that indeed half of all workers making a minimum wage are 16 to 24, and another 20 percent are in their late 20s or early 30s. That’s a large chunk of the minimum wage workforce, though about 30 percent of people making the minimum wage are 35 and older. McConnell also goes a bit too far in calling these jobs "entry-level." For most young people, these are part-time jobs in the food or retail businesses or similar industries with little hope for career advancement. We rate McConnell’s statement as Mostly True.	None	Mitch McConnell	None	None	None	2014-01-26T15:44:30	2014-01-26	['None']
-chct-00230	FACT CHECK: Was Obama Not Briefed By His CIA Director Every Day?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/01/13/fact-check-was-obama-not-briefed-by-his-cia-director-daily/	None	None	None	Kush Desai | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	1:25 PM 01/13/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-05789	Says "in Oregon only 41 percent of adults have ever been tested" for HIV.	true	/oregon/statements/2012/feb/24/alissa-keny-guyer/have-only-41-percent-oregon-adults-ever-been-teste/	The Oregon House recently took up a bill that would change the way in which health care providers get consent to test patients for HIV. Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer, the House’s newest member, was one of the carriers of the legislation. She gave a moving floor speech, invoking the memory of her father who passed away from complications due to AIDS in the 1980s. "Much has changed in the past 24 years," she said. "Treatment has reduced transmission." Indeed, she noted, a study last year found that those who were being treated for HIV were 96 percent less likely to pass the infection on to their partners. "The problem is that too many people still go undiagnosed," Keny-Guyer said. Testing rates remain stagnant. But, she said, these new guidelines could boost the numbers of those getting tested in Oregon. "Nationally, 21 percent (of those with HIV) are undiagnosed," she told colleagues. "And in Oregon, only 41 percent of adults have ever been tested." We thought the second figure was a little surprising, especially given that the Centers for Disease Control recommends routine screening for all patients between the ages of 13 and 64 and annual screening (at least) for "high risk" individuals. According to the CDC website, high risk patients include "injection-drug users and their sex partners, persons who exchange sex for money or drugs, sex partners of HIV-infected persons, and MSM (men who have sex with men) or heterosexual persons who themselves or whose sex partners have had more than one sex partner since their most recent HIV test." Pregnant women are also encouraged to get screened as part of their routine prenatal tests. The CDC doesn’t keep track of testing rates, but its website does link to Kaiser State Health Facts, a huge database supported by the Kaiser Family Foundation. According to that website, the testing figures for Oregon are slightly lower than what Keny-Guyer reported. Less than 37 percent of Oregonians between the ages of 18 and 64 have been tested for HIV. The national average is 40 percent. If you’re talking in the last year, the figures are even lower -- 18 percent in Oregon, 21.5 percent nationwide. The numbers were off slightly from what Keny-Guyer reported on the House floor, so we talked to an aide in her office to see if there was another source we weren’t considering. The aide told us that the representative used numbers from the previous year (2009 rather than 2010) and forwarded us the latest statistics -- the ones we’d already found. We wanted to do our due diligence, so we called up two additional organizations. Michael Kaplan, the executive director of Cascade AIDS project, said Kaiser’s site was the best he could come up with. "I couldn’t give you a better statistic than they have there," he said. Karynn Fish, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Health Authority, told us the same thing. Anything the state had, she said, would be older and less accurate. With that, we turn to our ruling. While speaking about a bill that seeks to raise the rate of HIV testing in Oregon, Keny-Guyer told colleagues that "only 41 percent of adults have ever been tested." The most recent statewide number is actually a bit lower -- 37 percent. But Keny-Guyer used a correct statistic, it was just a year old. We don't consider that significant enough to downgrade our ruling. We rate the statement True.	None	Alissa Keny-Guyer	None	None	None	2012-02-24T16:06:38	2012-02-21	['Oregon']
-pomt-07979	Under federal law, Jared Loughner "would not have been able to buy a gun" had he been identified as mentally ill.	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2011/jan/20/sherrod-brown/sen-sherrod-brown-laments-system-failure-allowed-j/	Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old Tucson man accused of killing six people and injuring 13 others including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, scared community college classmates even before his alleged rampage. He should have been diagnosed, treated and kept in a mental health institution as long as he was a danger to others, or so goes the national conversation. But that never happened. And the shameful irony is that under a bill that President George W. Bush signed, "if he had been identified with this mental illness, he would not have been able to buy this gun," U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown said in a discussion of the mental health safety net during an appearance on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" program. "I mean, the laws were there, but he fell through the system, he fell through the cracks, because he wasn’t identified because when he left the community college, nobody approached him, apparently." The system’s failure will be discussed by others for some time, but Brown, an Ohio Democrat, caught our attention for his other point on the Jan. 11 TV segment -- that "laws were there" already to prevent Loughner from buying a firearm, if only he had been diagnosed. So we checked with the FBI, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the Ohio attorney general’s office, a group called Legal Community Against Violence and the Buckeye Firearms Association, a pro-Second Amendment group. There was no disagreement: A federal law passed in 1968 made it illegal to possess a firearm if you had been found by a court or legal authority to be a "mental defective." The prohibition also applied to anyone involuntarily committed to a mental institution. Enforcement was strengthened with the Brady Handgun Protection Act of 1993, which established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, to conduct electronic background checks when individuals purchase guns. Another measure, signed by President George W. Bush, improved the reporting system as it pertained to mental health issues after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007. Individuals may be released from the federal gun ban if they have deemed rehabilitated and are discharged from all monitoring. Under Arizona law, it would not have been hard to get Loughner committed, according to reviews by news organizations. "Arizona has one of the least restrictive laws when it comes to detaining apparently mentally ill people against their will," Reuters, a wire service, reported on Jan. 13. "Under the state's broad involuntary-commitment statute, the government can mandate in-patient treatment for anyone determined to be ‘persistently or acutely disabled.’ That could include a broad range of seemingly troubled individuals." But the federal gun law has exceptions. The big one: Those who voluntarily get institutional treatment and bypass the need for court action aren’t barred from gun ownership, according to the groups with which we checked. That means that if community college officials, counselors or Loughner’s parents had convinced Loughner to check in on his own, he still would have qualified to buy a gun. "Just being mentally ill is not going to be the triggerer" for the prohibition, said Becca Knox, the Brady Center’s director of research. For reasons that most agree are good, this country doesn’t keep a registry on mental illness. Mental illness is stigmatized enough already, and the majority of people who seek treatment "will never commit a crime," said Jim Irvine, chairman of the Buckeye Firearms Association. "We have talked about this and looked at it, and none of us at Buckeye have come up with a good solution. I don’t know how you deal with it, because you will have problems on all sides." Yet there’s another problem, gun control advocates say. Some people who have been forced into psychiatric treatment by state courts -- and therefore have a record at the state level -- still don’t show up in the NICS system. Only 26 states have statutes authorizing or mandating that their mental health adjudications be sent to the federal system, according to the Legal Community Against Violence. Arizona does not have such a law, but it is one of nine states that provide the information to NICS anyway, said Robyn Thomas, executive director of Legal Community Against Violence. Ohio, too, provides the information voluntarily -- but it didn’t until the state passed a concealed carry law that took effect in 2004, according to Toby Hoover, executive director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence and a Brady Center board member. This was confirmed by Lisa Peterson Hackley, spokeswoman for Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine. The bill that Bush signed provided financial incentives for all states to participate, but no federal laws make participation mandatory. So we come back to Brown’s claim that if Loughner "had been identified with this mental illness, he would not have been able to buy this gun." Brown’s statement was generally correct. We’ll concede that Brown was speaking as a guest on a fast-moving TV program where four other people were jumping in with opinions -- not exactly a forum for discussing the nuances of federal gun law. Nevertheless, his statement lacked the caveat that if Loughner had been diagnosed but had committed himself voluntarily and was not adjudicated by a court, he still could have bought a gun legally. That’s a point of clarification important for a full understanding of his statement. We rate his claim Mostly True. Comment on this item.	None	Sherrod Brown	None	None	None	2011-01-20T06:00:00	2011-01-11	['None']
-snes-04103	When asked by Hillary Clinton why she thought the U.S. hasn't had a female president yet, Mother Teresa answered, "Because you probably aborted her."	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mother-teresa-hillary-clinton-abortion/	None	Politics	None	David Emery	None	Did Mother Teresa Teach Hillary Clinton a Lesson on Abortion?	4 September 2016	None	['Mother_Teresa', 'United_States', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-13898	Says Hillary Clinton "filibustered legislation to reform" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/28/donald-trump/trump-wrongly-says-clinton-filibustered-fannie-mae/	Responsibility for the 2008 housing crisis is at stake in a new attack launched by Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. "Hillary Clinton filibustered legislation to reform Fannie and Freddie Mae – institutions at the center of the Great Recession – which have been funneling hundreds of thousands to Hillary Clinton's campaign and Foundation," a statement from the Trump campaign said on June 21. Republican changes to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regulation never faced a cloture vote, the most clear-cut procedural sign that a filibuster has occurred. (The statement calls mistakenly calls them Fannie and Freddie Mae). Without a cloture vote, the question of whether the bill was filibustered becomes "a gray area," according to one expert in congressional use of the filibuster. If a filibuster did occur, it's even harder to say that Clinton was responsible. Trump’s statement presumably refers to a Republican-backed attempt in 2005 to bolster regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two huge government-backed mortgage finance companies. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment, but the statement itself cited a CNBC opinion piece. The Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 passed out of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs on a party line vote. It was never brought before the full Senate. After the mortgage collapse revealed the vulnerability of America’s housing market, some pointed to the bill as evidence of Republican foresight and Democratic obstruction. Experts disagree on the role Fannie and Freddie played in causing the financial crisis, but they certainly experienced its results: billions were spent bailing out the companies. Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska introduced the bill, and every committee Republican voted to move it out of committee. The question, then, is why Republican leadership did not introduce it on the floor of the full Senate, where they also had a majority. One possibility is that they suspected that Senate Democrats, including Clinton, would oppose the bill as a bloc, as the Democrats on the committee had done. Democrats had enough votes to sustain a successful filibuster if they had wanted to, and the then-Senate minority leader Harry Reid expressed his opposition when the bill passed out of committee. Experts are divided on whether even an explicit threat of a filibuster by the majority should be counted as a use of the filibuster power. The only mention of a filibuster in contemporary coverage of the bill’s progress is a quote from Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut. "The word ‘filibuster’ is nowhere near the horizon," Dodd, a leading opponent of the bill, told reporters after the bill passed out of committee. Democratic and Republican senators both expressed optimism that a compromise version of the bill would go forward. Some accounts of the bill’s progress suggest that Dodd later blocked the bill by telling Sen. Richard Shelby, the head of the committee that passed the bill, that he planned to filibuster it. Democratic opposition was more widely expressed, but some Republican senators may have been reluctant as well. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lobbied some Republican senators to oppose the bill, the Associated Press reported. Without a vote or a public statement, it is impossible to see where individual senators who did not vote on the bill in committee, like Clinton, stood on the issue. Clinton never voted or publicly took a position on the bill. In contemporary reporting about the bill’s progress, her name is not mentioned. Three political scientists we spoke to had different standards for determining when a filibuster occurred, but all agreed that without specific evidence that she took some action to block it, it did not make sense to say Clinton filibustered the bill. "In the absence of clear evidence, I’m not sure how you ascribe it to Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat," Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University, said. Clinton’s campaigns and the Clinton Foundation have both taken large donations from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s employees and an associated Political Action Committee. In 2008, Clinton was the fourth highest recipient of donations from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s employees and PACs. Our ruling In an attempt to assign responsibility for the financial crisis to Clinton, Trump’s campaign accused her of filibustering legislation that would have changed how two government-backed mortgage giants were regulated. Republican leadership chose not to bring the bill before the whole Senate after it passed out of committee. It is possible that they thought Democratic senators would filibuster, but based on the evidence available, we found no evidence that Clinton herself took any action in relation to the bill. We rate this claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/a6493279-98a7-436c-85c6-c0d1a1955bd5	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-06-28T16:47:44	2016-06-21	['Freddie_Mac', 'Fannie_Mae']
-pose-01087	As governor, I will: (Create a) Rhode Island School Building Authority (to) sustainably and affordably rebuild our schools.	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/gina-meter/promise/1170/create-rhode-island-school-building-authority/	None	gina-meter	Gina Raimondo	None	None	(Create a) Rhode Island School Building Authority	2014-12-19T07:05:33	None	['None']
-pose-01196	Texas' current constitutional spending limit "must be strengthened." Imposing a tougher limit would require lawmakers to send voters a proposed constitutional amendment.	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/abbott-o-meter/promise/1286/impose-stricter-constitutional-spending-cap-based-/	None	abbott-o-meter	Greg Abbott	None	None	Impose a stricter constitutional spending cap based on population growth and inflation	2015-01-20T14:00:00	None	['None']
-pomt-03056	On support for Common Core education standards	half flip	/georgia/statements/2013/oct/04/john-barge/candidate-barge-superintendent-barge-sometimes-dif/	State School Superintendent John Barge -- along with Dalton Mayor David Pennington -- has joined the race for governor, challenging GOP incumbent Nathan Deal. Barge is campaigning hard on what he knows best: education, which he sees as economic development. During his two-year tenure as the state’s schools chief, Barge has presided over implementation of the controversial Common Core standards in Georgia’s schools. As superintendent, Barge has supported the national standards despite opposition from some Republican lawmakers and tea party and advocacy groups. So when we saw Barge’s stance on Common Core posted on his campaign website, we were puzzled. In an item he wrote and posted Sept. 12, Barge says he wished Georgia would have realized that its existing educational standards were at the college and career-ready level, "rather than changing them for the second time in a few short years" and adopting Common Core. Had Barge moved away from his prior position of supporting the educational standards in hopes of appealing to a certain group of voters? We decided to do some research. In July 2010 the state Board of Education voted to have Georgia adhere to the Common Core standards. The standards are designed to better prepare students for college and careers, and they ensure that students in all states learn the same academic concepts in the same grades. Creating the standards was a national state-led effort championed by Republican Sonny Perdue when he was Georgia’s governor. And they rolled out in Georgia school districts during the 2012-2013 school year. With many people calling for Georgia to pull out of the national standards, Barge said in the website statement that a measured review of Common Core is necessary. "I definitely want to avoid the type of rushed, hasty and un-vetted decision that got us into this situation in the first place," he wrote. Our Atlanta Journal-Constitution colleagues covering the governor’s race also reviewed Barge’s statement and noted that Republican opposition to the standards has put Deal and Barge on the defensive. And a few days after Barge’s column caught the attention of the AJC, state Sen. Fran Millar -- a past chairman of the Senate’s Education Committee -- took to Facebook to air his feelings on the issue. "This reminds me of (Barge’s) flip flop on the charter school amendment. Ironic how his professional staff are all in favor of Common Core. Trying to get primary votes? So much for principles," Millar’s Facebook post said. We examined some of Barge’s comments about Common Core over the past few years. In discussing the shortfalls of the state’s integrated math curriculum last summer, Barge touted the upcoming Common Core implementation. "As we move to the Common Core Georgia Performance Standards, students will get the high-level skills in algebra and geometry necessary to be successful in college and careers," he said. In April 2012, Barge highlighted the standards as one initiative to help improve Georgia’s graduation rate. "The Common Core will toughen standards for our students and let us compare Georgia student achievements with students across the country," Barge wrote in an AJC op-ed. In September 2011, he highlighted the "consistent framework" Common Core would provide. We then reviewed Barge’s statements about Common Core before becoming state superintendent. In two posts from his "On the Campaign Trail with John Barge" blog, the-then candidate questioned Common Core’s rigor and alleged secrecy in developing the standards and the state’s rush to implement them. "I submit to you that it is not at all really about this phenomenal new curriculum that is the silver bullet fix for educating our children. It is about the current federal administration wanting to control the education of your children, including what goes into the textbooks," Barge wrote in a blog post titled "Common Core Standards - Why the Rush?" Barge also criticized Common Core’s connection to Race to the Top grant funds from the federal government, which included stipulations for implementing a merit pay system for teachers. In an interview with PolitiFact Georgia, Barge stood behind his Common Core record and comments. And, as he has previously done, noted that the standards were already approved for the state when he took office. Barge was elected as the state’s education chief in November 2010. Before that he was director of secondary curriculum and instruction for the Bartow County School System. "When Common Core came out we were all in shock. So no, I wasn’t for Common Core then, not because I didn’t think the standards were good, but I wasn’t for rolling them out on top of standards we had just implemented," Barge said. "Once I was elected and Common Core was already adopted and set for implementation, I didn’t want to pull back and put in place another set of standards on teachers. I’m not recommending any pullback from Common Core standards." The Georgia School Boards Association said Barge has remained consistent on his support for Common Core. The group noted that Barge inherited Common Core and has supported rigorous standards for Georgia We asked Millar, a Dunwoody Republican, whether Barge had flip-flopped on the issue. "No, I’d call it a lot of waffling," he said. "(Barge) initially said he was in favor. I think he wants to be to the right of Deal on this issue. These standards are not perfect, but it’s a way to try to improve things." So did Barge flip-flop on his Common Core position? Barge said himself that he was critical of Common Core before becoming superintendent but was more supportive after taking the job because the standards had already been adopted by the previous administration. He gets some credit for being put in a predetermined situation, but he did change his position on support for Common Core. We rate his position as a Half Flip.	None	John Barge	None	None	None	2013-10-04T00:00:00	2013-09-12	['None']
-goop-00765	Brad Pitt Using Custody Negotiations To Get Back Together With Angelina Jolie?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-custody-negotiations-back-together-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Brad Pitt Using Custody Negotiations To Get Back Together With Angelina Jolie?	1:13 pm, June 23, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-06028	Native Americans provided NASA with a cryptic message to take to the moon.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/native-sun/	None	Humor	None	David Mikkelson	None	Native Sun	12 January 2003	None	['None']
-abbc-00046	The claim: Prime Minister Tony Abbott says the Government cannot change the GST without the agreement of the states and territories, and consensus in the federal parliament.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-02/fact-check3a-do-the-states-and-territories-need-to-agree-to-ch/6359212	The claim: Prime Minister Tony Abbott says the Government cannot change the GST without the agreement of the states and territories, and consensus in the federal parliament.	['federal---state-issues', 'tax', 'liberals', 'abbott-tony', 'australia']	None	None	['federal---state-issues', 'tax', 'liberals', 'abbott-tony', 'australia']	Fact check: Do the states and territories need to agree to change the GST?	Wed 15 Jun 2016, 1:35am	None	['Tony_Abbott']
-pomt-09398	Florida's cost for the Medicaid expansion will be $1.6 billion a year or more.	half-true	/florida/statements/2010/mar/23/bill-mccollum/mccollum-cites-top-estimate-medicaid-expansion/	The day after Congress passed major health care reform, Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum said he would challenge the law's constitutionality in court, in part because of its expansion of Medicaid, a government-run health insurance program for the poor. The new law "manipulates the states into doing things that the states simply can't afford," McCollum said. He said that the new law would cost Florida at least $1.6 billion a year, and likely more. But it appears those numbers are based on reports that don't reflect the final version of the health care reform law. His numbers were first questioned by a news report from the Web site Health News Florida. "The AHCA folks, the Agency for Health Care Administration in Tallahassee, that pays out Medicaid, estimates that it will be at least $1.6 billion more a year in costs to the sate of Florida, just for what they do," McCollum said. We wanted to look into McCollum's numbers, and how the Medicaid expansion works. Medicaid is a joint state-federal, government-run health care program for the very poor. (Its cousin, Medicare, is for senior citizens of any income level.) To get into Medicaid, you have to be not only poor, but also disabled, elderly, pregnant or a child. The new law changes that, opening up Medicaid to all of the poor, setting the limit at people who make less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Currently, that means a single person who makes $14,404 or less, and a family of four that has income of less than $29,327. Medicaid is actually a voluntary program, so states do not have to participate. But all states do, because the federal government puts up much of the money for the program. In Florida, the federal government was scheduled to pick up 55 percent of the the tab for Medicaid this year. But thanks to the stimulus, the federal government picked up even more, paying for 68 percent of the program for this year and next. But even though the federal government is paying for the majority of the program, it still represents significant spending for the state of Florida. Medicaid here serves about 2.8 million people at a cost to the state of $19 billion. That's about 28 percent of the state's entire budget going to health care for the very poor -- a group that doesn't employ lobbyists or make many campaign contributions. McCollum is correct that the new law will cost the state money, but much of that cost will be shouldered by the federal government. The federal government plans to pick up 100 percent of the tab for the expansion of Medicaid for the first few years, but after that, the percentage declines. McCollum said during his press conference announcing the lawsuit that the $1.6 billion was based on modeling developed by Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration. But the agency based that analysis on older versions of the legislation that weren't as generous to the states as the version that actually became law. The agency released a new analysis that is based on the actual bill President Barack Obama signed on Tuesday. The newer report calculated that Florida's share of increased costs would range between $149 million in 2014 and $1.1 billion in 2019, significantly less than what McCollum said. In 2019, by the way, about 1.5 million people previously uninsured would be covered, according to the report. But it's still possible that Florida's contribution will be less than that. Congress is currently working on a reconciliation bill to modify the law Obama signed on; House Democrats demanded the bill with a number of changes as a condition for passing the bill Obama signed. We can't say for sure that the reconciliation bill will become law, but if it does, it could decrease states' Medicaid contributions even more because the federal government would pick up even more of the tab for the Medicaid expansion. Here's a chart that shows the difference in those potential contributions: Federal contribution, current law Federal contribution, with reconciliation 2014 100 percent 100 percent 2015 100 percent 100 percent 2016 100 percent 100 percent 2017 92 percent 95 percent 2018 91 percent 94 percent 2019 90 percent 93 percent AHCA said that the plan's cost of $1.1 billion could potentially grow to $1.6 billion in 2019. Spokesperson Tiffany Vause said the agency was working on a new estimate that would include another $300 million to pay for a required increase in payments to primary care physicians who see Medicaid patients, and another $100 million to $200 million for unspecified administrative costs that "will incur to implement and manage all aspects of the new regulations." The attorney general's office said they agreed with AHCA's conclusion. McCollum is also a Republican candidate for governor; his campaign staff referred the request to the attorney general's office because they said it was a matter of official state business Getting back to our ruling, McCollum said that it would cost Florida $1.6 billion or more to expand Medicaid. He is correct that Florida will have to pay more money into Medicaid to insure more of the poor. But the feds pick up most of the tab for the expansion in the early years, at a much lower cost than $1.6 billion. It only hits close to that top figure in 2019, and still have questions about the unspecified implementation costs. We find his claim Half True. Update: This report has been updated to include comment from the attorney general's office received after our original publication.	None	Bill McCollum	None	None	None	2010-03-23T18:52:51	2010-03-22	['None']
-hoer-00710	Pen PC - Pen Shaped Miniature Personal Computer	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/pen-computer.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Pen PC - Pen Shaped Miniature Personal Computer	8th October 2010	None	['None']
-chct-00098	Trump Flew To Montana For A Rally - Here Are 3 Checks On His Claims	none	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/07/06/fact-check-trump-montana-rally/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	1:14 PM 07/06/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-10667	"As governor, Mike Huckabee supported higher income taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, grocery taxes, tobacco taxes, beer taxes, Internet taxes, nursing home bed taxes."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/26/club-growth/he-supported-tax-hikes-to-balance-budget/	For months, the antitax group Club for Growth has been targeting Mike Huckabee for supporting tax hikes when he was governor of Arkansas. With just a week before the January 2008 Iowa caucuses, the group has bought $175,000 in air time for an ad that tries to use Huckabee's own words against him. The ad begins with images of Democratic congressional leaders and says that "to stop massive tax hikes, conservatives have to be united. But listen to Mike Huckabee, when he was Arkansas governor ..." It cuts to Huckabee giving a speech to the Arkansas Legislature in May 2003: "There's a lot of support for a tax at the wholesale level for tobacco, and that's fine with me. I will very happily sign that. Others have suggested a surcharge on the income tax. That's acceptable; I'm fine with that," he says. "Others have suggested perhaps a sales tax. That's fine. Yet others have suggested a hybrid that would collect some monies from any one or a combination of those various ideas, and if that's the plan that the House and Senate agree upon, then you will have nothing but my profound thanks." Words on the screen say "As governor, Mike Huckabee supported higher income taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, grocery taxes, tobacco taxes, beer taxes, Internet taxes, nursing home bed taxes." The video has been cited by many Huckabee critics and was even used last week in a parody of Huckabee's Christmas ad. (It showed Huckabee in a red sweater in front of a Christmas tree, offering to raise taxes.) We have addressed some of the Club's attacks on Huckabee with our previous article "Taking stock of 'Tax-hike Mike,' " so here we will focus on the TV ad. To understand Huckabee's comments, it's important to include the context for his speech. He delivered the remarks during a 2003 special session that was called to balance the state's budget in the face of a projected shortfall of more than $60-million. Lawmakers were divided over how to make up the shortfall; some wanted to use tobacco taxes while others preferred increases to income or sales taxes. Huckabee said in the speech that the state had already cut $380-million from the budget and that tax increases were inevitable to pay for vital state services. "We're no longer talking about merely shaving some excess. We're talking about amputating valuable and vital limbs, if we don't come up with necessary funding to meet the needs of those who depend on it," Huckabee said. In the clip, Huckabee is trying to address the lack of consensus in the Legislature by indicating his willingness to be flexible and consider different types of tax increases. But the Club for Growth ad lacks that context. It uses 40 seconds of Huckabee's speech to suggest he supports "massive tax hikes." The Huckabee campaign has said he had little choice but to support a tax increase because Arkansas state law requires a balanced budget. "Unable to resort to deficit spending – as other candidates are able to do – the Arkansas Legislature was forced to raise taxes to pay for infrastructure repair, conservation efforts, court-mandated education expenditures, and unfunded federal mandates," his campaign said Dec. 26, 2007, in a statement. As for the specific taxes cited in the ad, the Club is correct that Huckabee supported increases in income taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, tobacco taxes, Internet taxes and nursing home bed taxes. He also opposed the repeal of grocery and beer taxes, which the the Club says indicates he supported "higher taxes." Overall, we find the Club for Growth ad to be technically correct because Huckabee did support the tax hikes cited or opposed repeals of the others. But the ad is misleading because it takes his comments out of context given the financial crisis he was dealing with in Arkansas and the mandate to balance the budget. And so we find the Club's claim to be Half True.	None	Club for Growth	None	None	None	2007-12-26T00:00:00	2007-12-26	['Mike_Huckabee']
-pomt-00124	Kathy Manning gave "nearly $1 million to liberals"	mostly false	/north-carolina/statements/2018/oct/26/ted-budd/budd-relies-mannings-husband-claim-about-her-donat/	Many political candidates try to portray their opponents as more radical than they really are. Republicans portray Democrats as left-wing and Democrats portray Republicans as right-wing. In North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District, incumbent Republican Ted Budd has accused Democrat Kathy Manning of being a "left-wing political insider" who was "hand-picked" by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Budd, a first-term congressman from Davie County, has focused on Manning’s donations to Democrats. He has accused Manning of donating "nearly $1 million" — but his claims have varied. In an interview for a McClatchy story published earlier this month, Budd said "nearly $1 million (of Manning’s money) has been given to Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein." In the Spectrum News debate on Oct. 23, Budd said "Over the last 10 or so years, she and her husband donated nearly $1 million to Nancy Pelosi." And on Oct. 24, Budd announced his launch of a TV ad that on the screen accuses Manning of donating "nearly $1 million to liberals." The actors say she gave "big money" to Pelosi and Clinton. So which is it? The candidates’ math Has Manning given "nearly $1 million" to Pelosi? What about Pelosi, Boxer and Feinstein? Overall, has she donated nearly $1 million to liberals? PolitiFact reached out to the Budd campaign for clarification on the claim. Budd’s claim relies on donations from Manning’s husband, Randall Kaplan, to get to what they consider to be nearly $1 million. Together, they say Manning and Kaplan have given a combined $887,053 to liberal candidates and causes. Manning has given $307,428, they say, while Kaplan has given $579,625. Meanwhile, the Manning campaign says she’s given $256,550. And Manning’s campaign opposes the notion that she and Kaplan’s respective donations should be counted together. But we’ll get back to that later. What do campaign finance records show? What records show Donations are difficult to track to the exact dollar. Donors don’t always use the exact name when they sign a check — they may sometimes use a middle initial and sometimes not — and there’s sometimes more than one donor with the same name. But a PolitiFact review of donations on the Federal Election Commission website and data provided by OpenSecrets.org, run by a nonprofit that tracks money in politics, found that each of Budd’s claims falls short. To Pelosi specifically, FEC records show Manning and her husband have given a combined $3,000. Manning has given $1,500 — $1,000 in 2004 and $500 in 2002. Kaplan gave $1,000 in 2006 and $500 in 2002. To former Sen. Boxer and Sen. Feinstein, the couple has given a combined $2,250. Obviously, the couple’s donations to that trio of Democrats comes nowhere near $1 million. So what about total donations? The Center for Responsive Politics, which runs OpenSecrets.org, found that the couple has donated a combined $545,500 to federal candidates and political action committees. Manning has donated $196,950, while Kaplan has given $348,550. For donations to state-level candidates and committees, PolitiFact consulted the N.C. Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement website. At the state level, the couple has donated a combined $224,021. Manning has given $46,796, while Kaplan has given $177,225. Separate donations Manning’s campaign opposes the notion that she and Kaplan’s respective donations should be counted together. Manning is successful independent of her husband and their political interests don’t always align, said Hailey Barringer, spokeswoman for Manning. Manning went to Harvard, then Michigan Law School and practiced immigration law in Greensboro before starting her own firm. In some cases, they’ve shared the same political goals. Each has donated thousands to national and state party organizations. Each donated to Gov. Roy Cooper, Attorney General Josh Stein and former U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan. But Kaplan has made donations to some candidates that Manning didn’t help and vice-versa. Candidates that got money from Kaplan but not Manning include congressional candidate Ryan Watts, former NC Senate leader Marc Basnight and former Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton. Candidates that got money from Manning but not Kaplan include U.S. Rep. Alma Adams and the late Republican U.S. Rep. Howard Coble. In total, the OpenSecrets.org and NC elections board data shows the couple has given a combined $769,521 in federal and state-level donations. Manning has given $243,746 and Kaplan has given $525,775. Our ruling Budd says Manning has given "nearly $1 million to liberals." That math relies on contributions by her husband. She hasn’t given anywhere close to that, doesn’t need to rely on her husband’s money to give to candidates, and their varied donations show they can have separate political interests. We rate this claim Mostly False. This story was produced by the North Carolina Fact-Checking Project, a partnership of McClatchy Carolinas, the Duke University Reporters’ Lab and PolitiFact. The NC Local News Lab Fund and the International Center for Journalists provide support for the project, which shares fact-checks with newsrooms statewide. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Ted Budd	None	None	None	2018-10-26T17:26:09	2018-10-23	['None']
-pomt-13944	Says the unemployment rate for African-American youths is 59 percent.	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2016/jun/20/donald-trump/trump-misleadingly-puts-black-youth-unemployment-r/	Donald Trump recently told Richmonders that he was amending his campaign theme, "Make America Great Again," to strike an inclusive note. "I’ve added a couple of things," he said during a June 11 rally at the Richmond Coliseum. "I’m adding ‘Make America Great Again,’ and I’m adding ‘For Everyone,’ because it’s really going to be for everyone. It’s not going to be for a group of people; it’s going to be for everyone. "If you look at what’s going on in this country, African-American youth is an example: 59 percent unemployment rate; 59 percent," Trump said. "If you look at what’s going on with Latinos, Hispanics - tremendous unemployment rates. You look at what’s going on with so many groups. We’re going to make it great for everyone. We’re going to bring jobs back to our country." The 59 percent unemployment rate for black youths caught our attention. We wondered if Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is right. The latest figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged the unemployment rate for blacks, ages 16 to 19, at 27.1 percent in May. So where did Trump come up with the eye-popping 59 percent? We can’t say with certainty, because Trump’s campaign, as usual, didn’t respond to our question. But Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University, offered a clue. Sinclair told us Trump’s percentage probably comes from a Bureau of Labor Statistics statistic called the "employment-population ratio." This is a figure that gauges employed people, age 16 and older, as a percentage of the entire population of adults. In May, the bureau said the employment-population ratio for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 41.5 percent. Flipped over, that would mean that the unemployment ratio - although such a statistic is not published by the bureau - would be 58.5 percent. That’s pretty close to the 59 percent figure Trump cited, Sinclair noted. But there are differences between the ratio and the widely used unemployment rate, which Trump used in citing the percentage. The unemployment rate reflects the number of jobless people who are actively seeking work as a percentage of the available workforce - defined as those who have jobs or trying to find one. The May unemployment rate for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 18.7 percent. The rate for whites in the same age group was 9.1 percent. The employment-population ratio is a far broader measure that counts all civilians in its equation - even those who don’t work and aren’t looking for a job. In the 16- to 24-year-old category, it includes high school and college students who are not employed or seeking jobs. As we said, 58.5 percent of blacks in this age group weren’t working in May. That compares with 48.3 percent of whites. The percentages decrease as people get older. In other words, someone is far more likely to be working at 24 than he is at 16 or 17. A historic chart of the ratio shows that the percentage of blacks ages 16 to 24 who weren’t working from 2003 to 2007 hovered at 60 percent, roughly the same as today. In between, the percentage rose to nearly 70 percent in late 2010, during the aftermath of the Great Recession, and then slowly subsided. Roughly 40 percent of whites in the age group had jobs from 2003 to 2008. That dropped to about 50 percent in 2009 and has hovered around that point since. Our ruling Trump says the unemployment rate for black youths is 59 percent. The unemployment rate is a widely used term with a specific definition: It refers to the percentage of jobless people in the workforce who are actively seeking employment. In May, the unemployment rate for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 18.7 percent, or less than one-third of Trump’s claim. Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to our question about where the candidate got his 59 percent figure. But it appears likely it comes from a computation of all 16- to 24-year-old blacks who aren’t working and may not even want a job, including high school and college students. Clearly, black youths have a harder time finding work than whites. But Trump exaggerates the issue through his misleading use of statistics. We rate his statement Mostly False.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-06-20T00:00:00	2016-06-10	['None']
-afck-00243	“The unemployment rate amongst our youth is more than twice that of adults.”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/fact-checking-the-sona2016-debates/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact-checking the #SoNA2016 debates	2016-02-16 02:07	None	['None']
-goop-00566	Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid Were Secret Lovers?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kendall-jenner-bella-hadid-secret-lovers/	None	None	None	Alejandro Rosa	None	Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid Were Secret Lovers?	3:21 pm, July 27, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-11416	"There are no provisions in here that substantially affect or advantage the big Wall Street bankers."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/20/heidi-heitkamp/senate-banking-bill-win-advantage-wall-street/	The Senate just passed what may become the first rewrite of the financial reform law that followed the 2008 financial crisis, and lawmakers are sending mixed messages about its contents. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the bill’s biggest critic, described it as a gift to big banks. "Give me a break," Warren said in a floor speech. "This bill is about goosing the bottom line and executive bonuses at the banks that make up the top one half of 1 percent of banks in this country by size. The very tippy-top." Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., countered in an interview, "There are no provisions in here that substantially affect or advantage the big Wall Street bankers." So who’s right? There are a few provisions that affect the big banks, but Heitkamp has a point in saying they’re not as substantial as they may seem. Warren has a point that regulations on big banks could be relaxed, but she downplays the fact that the Federal Reserve will still have substantial powers to rein them in. Wall Street The financial reform law, called Dodd-Frank after its congressional sponsors, didn’t directly define Wall Street, but it did create regulations for banks of different asset sizes. The largest banks, those deemed "systemically important," were defined as those with assets above $50 billion. Some banks made the case, though, that even though they have more than $50 billion in assets, they’re not really "big banks." In an effort to lift the regulatory burden of those credit unions and community banks, the bill raises the threshold to $250 billion in assets. Banks like Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo have well above $250 billion in assets, but experts fear that the little banks exempt from tough regulations aren’t so little anymore. Former U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., an architect of the original law, told us that $50 billion had been too low, but $250 billion went overboard. "My personal view was that it should have been $125 (billion)," Frank said. "But the importance of this bill is that it makes no changes to the most important pieces of Dodd-Frank. As far as the larger banks are concerned, they got none of what they were looking for." Jeremy Kress, a finance professor at the Ross School of Business and a former attorney at the Federal Reserve, agreed that some of the small banks aren’t so small. "While the affected regional banks, like SunTrust and Fifth Third, may not technically be ‘Wall Street,’ history suggests that banks of this size may be systemically important and should therefore be subject to heightened regulation," Kress said. Liquid assets and custodian banks There are provisions in the bill that directly affect banks with over $250 billion in assets. Heitkamp suggests these provisions aren’t substantial. Let’s take a look. Dodd-Frank mandated that banks hold a minimum amount of ready-to-sell assets, like cash or something easily redeemed for cash, which would provide a buffer in the case of a financial meltdown. This bill allows certain municipal bonds to count toward this stockpile. Experts fear these thinly traded, not very liquid bonds will make it easier for the bigger banks to satisfy liquidity requirements while taking on greater risk. The Wall Street Journal reported that provision was championed by Citigroup and other large banks. Dodd-Frank also mandated a ratio of bank asset size to capital (assets minus liabilities), as a safeguard against a financial crisis. This rewrite allows banks that are "predominantly engaged" in safeguarding a firm or a person’s financial assets (as opposed to lending) to exclude central bank deposits and be categorized as smaller banks. The definition fits three banks particularly well: the Bank of New York Mellon, State Street and Northern Trust. While not considered Wall Street banks, Bank of New York Mellon and State Street both qualify as global systemically important banks. And interpretation of the language may allow Citigroup and J.P. Morgan, which also perform custodial activities and have combined assets worth $4.4 trillion, to qualify for this exemption. The Congressional Budget Office estimated a 50 percent chance of such an interpretation. Stress tests Stress tests measure a bank’s ability to weather a potential economic crisis. Under this bill, banks with asset sizes between $50 billion and $100 billion will be exempt from these tests, while banks between $100 billion and $250 billion will be subject to "periodic," as opposed to annual, tests. Critics argue the language will allow the frequency of tests to decrease, although Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said it would be the Fed’s intent to have "meaningful, strong, regular, periodic stress tests" for this asset size range. The two stress tests mandated by Dodd-Frank and the Federal Reserve carried out by the Fed would remain annual for banks with asset sizes above $250 billion, although stress tests carried out by banks on themselves would change from annual to periodic. Tailoring language One of the more subtle aspects of the bill is that big banks could ask for special consideration called "tailoring." The bill language says that the Federal Reserve "shall," rather than "may," tailor its rules based on the size, complexity and "other risk-related factors" of the banks. This won’t actually change much, as the Federal Reserve already tailors regulations to different banks. But critics fear mandating tailoring opens a door for Wall Street banks to challenge regulations. "While tailoring is a laudable goal, ‘risk-related factors’ is a legal landmine," Kress said. "It's the exact statutory language that MetLife cited last year when it won a court order overturning its designation as a systemically important firm." Our ruling Heitkamp said, "There are no provisions in here that substantially affect or advantage the big Wall Street bankers." The bill raises the bar of what is considered a big bank five-fold, which effectively relaxes the standards for large regional banks. Experts warn this also could open a door for bigger Wall Street bank giveaways. The bill also has a few provisions affecting banks above $250 billion in assets. However, the effects would largely depend on the Federal Reserve’s interpretation of the law. The biggest banks might be able to get relaxed regulations, but then again, they might not. Heitkamp is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate this statement Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Heidi Heitkamp	None	None	None	2018-03-20T13:47:47	2018-03-14	['None']
-goop-01405	Lionel Richie Trying To “Break Up” Sofia Richie And Scott Disick, 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/lionel-richie-sofia-scott-disick-break-up-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Lionel Richie NOT Trying To “Break Up” Sofia Richie And Scott Disick, Despite Report	1:55 pm, March 12, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-00981	Trojan Virus Has Infected Over Half a Million Macintosh Computers	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/apple-mac-flashback-trojan/	None	computers	None	None	None	Trojan Virus Has Infected Over Half a Million Macintosh Computers	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13932	"Because of Obamacare, you have so many part-time jobs."	false	/arizona/statements/2016/jun/22/donald-trump/donald-trump-wrongly-claims-there-are-more-part-ti/	Criticizing the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, remains a top talking point for Republicans. Donald Trump railed against the law at a June 18 rally in Phoenix, saying he would "terminate" the law completely. "Because of Obamacare, you have so many part-time jobs," Trump said. "Companies are taking people that have been with them 20 years and more, 'I'm sorry, I love you, you're great, I have to make you part-time...' They want to get away from those horrendous Obamacare rules and regulations." This is far from the first time PolitiFact has heard about the Affordable Care Act creating a glut of part-time jobs: In 2013, PolitiFact rated a claim False that "as a result of Obamacare, we are becoming something of a part-time employment country." That fact-check concluded that there is anectdotal evidence that some companies are or will reduce the hours of some employees. But those individual instances fail to make a case of moving to a "part-time employment country." In January 2015, Carl's Jr. CEO Andy Puzder said the Affordable Care Act has caused millions of full-time jobs to "become part-time." Hundreds of thousands of workers may have seen their hours cut, but millions couldn’t be substantiated. We rated it Half True. And in January 2016, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz called the health care law the nation's "biggest job-killer," forcing millions into part-time work. Government data showed no evidence of that. We rated it Pants on Fire! In this case, we wondered whether Trump’s version of this claim holds any merit. What the law requires While Trump did not respond to our request for comment, claims like these are usually rooted in the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that certain employers offer their employees health care or pay a penalty. According to the law, businesses with at least 50 employees are required to offer health care insurance to people who work 30 or more hours per week. Not doing so results in a financial penalty. Critics of the law say businesses may artificially keep employees under the 30-hour threshold so they can avoid the costs associated with providing them health care. Little to no evidence Is that happening? Anecdotally, there are examples critics of the law can point to. Some universities, for instance, have capped the number of hours a student can work on a university job below the Obamacare threshold. The trouble with this evidence, however, is it's unclear how many students or employees are affected. Or in the case of students, if they ever really were considered full time. In the macro, there is little evidence of a large-scale migration to part-time work. In April 2010, the first full month under the Affordable Care Act, there were almost 9.2 million part-time workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS defines part-time as working 34 hours or less. Through May 2016, there are actually far fewer part-time workers, not more. According to BLS, there were 6.4 million part-time workers in May -- an almost 30 percent drop compared to April 2010. There also is still a decrease in part-time workers comparing the current figure to when the employer mandates under the health care law took effect, in January 2015 and January 2016, respectively. Now BLS data isn't perfect for answering this question. The BLS threshold in hours per week for "full-time" employment is different than it is for the Affordable Care Act. In addition, BLS counts someone who works two 20-hour-a-week part time jobs as one full-time worker. Both of these factors complicate any calculations using BLS data. But the data is largely corroborated by scientific research. An August 2015 study from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, for instance, concluded that there is no increase in part-time work because of the law. "There is little evidence that the ACA has caused the shift across hours categories, or led to an increase in part-time employment," the study concluded. "However, the ACA could cause a shift towards part-time work in the future as the mandate takes effect. " "The truth is, it doesn’t show up in the data yet," said co-author and American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Aparna Mathur. A January 2016 study published in Health Affairs, "Little Change Seen In Part-Time Employment As A Result Of The Affordable Care Act,"reached the same basic conclusion with the exception of a possible rise for people with little education and those between 60-64 years old. And whether it will ever show up in the data is debatable, according to Bowen Garrett, an economist at the Urban Institute, a Washington D.C. economic research non-profit. He argues in a February 2016 blog post that workers could be "equally influenced" by the Great Recession. "We’ve been in a labor market recovery. We’re not becoming a nation of part-time workers," Garrett said. Vanderbilt University public policy professor Carolyn Heinrich co-authored a study published in June 2016 looking at the Affordable Care Act’s effect on part-time workers who want to work full-time in the retail and food service sectors. The study uses Hawaii as a control group, noting that the state has required employers to provide health insurance to employees who work more than 20 hours per week since 1974. Based on the findings, the study estimates a 2 to 3 percent increase in part-time work associated with the Affordable Care Act. Trump’s "suggestion that many people previously had full-time jobs and have now been pushed into part-time jobs is also greatly exaggerated," Heinrich said. "The people who are working less since Obamacare were more likely to be working hours close to the 30-hour threshold (that defines full-time work under the ACA), or less than 40 hours per week." Our ruling Trump said, "Because of Obamacare, you have so many part-time jobs." While some research suggests a small uptick in the number of part-time jobs as a result of the Affordable Care Act, Trump’s claim goes too far. Neither the data nor the experts (on the right and left) say Trump’s claim is accurate. We rate Trump’s claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/26f81290-72f4-4dea-ac40-ab595a476385	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-06-22T17:00:00	2016-06-18	['None']
-pomt-02986	"Local law enforcement . . . will have access to the [Obamacare] Data Hub’s treasure trove of personal info."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2013/oct/20/evan-feinberg/activist-says-local-police-will-have-access-obamac/	Part of the campaign to thwart the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare, has involved discouraging people from signing up for health insurance, available for small businesses and individuals through federal and state marketplaces. One group behind the push is Generation Opportunity, which created the ads showing "Creepy Uncle Sam" poised to play doctor. Its president, Evan Feinberg, warned in an Oct. 1 commentary in The Providence Journal that people who sign up will become part of the Federal Data Services Hub, "an enormous database of every participant’s private medical records, tax and financial info, legal history, and other intimate information." "Local law enforcement, insurance companies, and innumerable federal agencies and low-level bureaucrats will have access to the Data Hub’s treasure trove of personal info," he said. It's not surprising that some of these people would have access to the data. After all, low-level bureaucrats are processing the application and you are, after all, buying insurance from an insurance company. But the part about local law enforcement caught our eye. Would signing up for Obamacare really give our local police the ability to know how much money we make, the terms of our divorce and when our Viagra prescription is due for refill? PolitiFact National examined an element of the question last May when Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., received a Pants On Fire for saying the IRS is going to be "in charge" of "a huge national database" on health care that will include Americans’ "personal, intimate, most close-to-the-vest secrets." PolitiFact found that the IRS isn't in charge and it's not a health care database. The hub pulls limited data from other agencies to verify eligibility and determine how much an individual will actually pay for an insurance plan on the exchanges. For example, the Social Security Administration is asked to verify a person's Social Security number. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is asked to verify immigration status. The IRS confirms financial data to see if a person is eligible for a subsidy. It's the same system that allows Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program "to query the government databases used today in the eligibility processes for many state and federal programs," said Brian Cook, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. What kind of data does it collect? Rhode Island's marketplace, HealthSource RI, sent us a copy of the application form. It asks for a lot of financial information that, one would think, the data hub should be able to simply get from the IRS, such as how much money applicants have earned from investments, a pension or Social Security, or how much they are paying in alimony or student loans. (A shorter application is available for people who are not seeking a tax break to pay for their coverage.) The system doesn't ask for -- and the database doesn't collect -- a person's medical records. The only medical information sought is whether an applicant is blind, disabled and, if pregnant, the due date. The only legal history information is a question about whether applicants are in jail and, if so, when they expect to be released. So the "treasure trove" of information isn't as rich as Feinberg asserts. (The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services even insists that it's not a database, but we'll leave that for another fact check.) But the key question is whether local law enforcement would have access to the information. When we contacted Feinberg's office to ask for the source of that claim, spokesman David Pasch sent us to a section of the Federal Register that gives the government the right to release information to "any state or local governmental agency ... that has the authority to investigate potential fraud, waste or abuse" so such cases can be prosecuted. The federal rules do not give local law enforcement unfettered access to the database. When we raised the issue with Pasch, he acknowledged that the regulations didn't say that local police would have free access to the database and argued that Feinberg "did not say all contractors could look at whatever they want, whenever they want." We disagree. Saying that law enforcement will have access to a "treasure trove" of personal information suggests that police would have broad access to that information, not just basic facts that the government would give to law enforcement to conduct a fraud investigation. Patti Unruh, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said, "Local law enforcement would only receive access to personally identifiable information after submitting a specific request for such information to CMS and after CMS rigorously evaluated the request for information to ensure that it is legally permissible and is reasonably necessary to investigate, prosecute or combat fraud, waste or abuse." Our ruling Evan Feinberg of Generation Opportunity said, "Local law enforcement ... will have access to the Data Hub’s treasure trove of personal info" in a database with "private medical records, tax and financial info, legal history, and other intimate information." Not only is he making a huge stretch when he says the treasure trove includes private medical records and legal history -- with financial data, not so much -- he is stretching further to suggest that local police will have anything close to routine access to the data in the Hub. Thus, the contention that signing up for Obamacare will allow a prying police chief to view your latest mammogram is False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Evan Feinberg	None	None	None	2013-10-20T00:01:00	2013-10-01	['None']
-pomt-00051	"Mayor Andrew Gillum says he’s indefinitely suspending his campaign for governor in light of a fatal shooting in Tallahassee at a yoga studio on Friday."	false	/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/nov/03/blog-posting/democratic-florida-gubernatorial-candidate-andrew-/	A viral blog post claims that Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee and Democratic nominee in the Florida governor race is "indefinitely suspending his campaign for governor in light of a fatal shooting in Tallahassee at a yoga studio on Friday." The article, posted to the site The Grio on Nov. 3, notes Gillum’s response to Friday’s shooting. "I’m deeply appreciative of law enforcement's quick response to the shooting at the yoga facility in Tallahassee today. No act of gun violence is acceptable. I'm in close communication with law enforcement officials and will be returning to Tallahassee tonight," Gillum tweeted Friday night. This story was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) The blog post does little to justify its misleading headline and lead paragraph. The Grio article doesn’t cite any source for Gillum’s announcement to suspend his campaign "indefinitely," but does outline what took place during Friday’s shooting where Scott Paul Beierle killed two people and wounded five in a yoga studio in Tallahassee before killing himself, according to the Guardian. The Grio post notes that the gunman "reportedly had a history of arrests for grabbing women," and links to a USA Today article published Nov. 3 that digs into Beierle’s background. Emails sent to The Grio Saturday all bounced back. An email sent to the author of the article and messages sent to Gillum’s campaign were not immediately returned. Gillum’s tweet from Friday is quoted in the article, along with remarks the Tallahassee Democrat reported he made near where the shooting occurred. The Grio’s post is similar to the Nov. 2 New York Daily News article with the headline, "Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum suspends campaign after 2 dead in Tallahassee shooting." The Guardian wrote in its Nov. 3 article that Gillum "tweeted that he was leaving the campaign trail to return to Tallahassee." However, there’s no evidence that Gillum is "indefinitely suspending his campaign for governor" following Friday’s shooting like The Grio’s post claims. In fact, Gillum is still campaigning. On Saturday afternoon, Palm Beach Post political reporter George Bennett tweeted photos of Gillum at a Jimmy Buffett concert being held to garner support for Gillum and Sen. Bill Nelson. The concert in West Palm Beach was being held "to rally voters before Election Day on Tuesday," according to a Nov. 1 Miami Herald article announcing the concert. Bennett tweeted pictures of Gillum with Norman Lear and Nelson, noting that both Gillum and Nelson "went with the khaki/blue shirt combo" for the rally. Gillum also retweeted Bay News 9 and News 13 Florida capitol reporter Troy Kinsey’s Nov. 3 tweet that showed Gillum onstage speaking to the crowd in West Palm Beach. Similarly, the Orlando Sentinel reported Nov. 2 that Gillum was scheduled to join other politicians and celebrities at the University of Central Florida to rally students Saturday. In campaign press releases sent Saturday, Gillum’s campaign said campaign events would be taking place throughout the day. "On Saturday, November 3, the Gillum for Governor ‘Bring It Home’ bus tour will continue with stops across South and Central Florida. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam will campaign for Mayor Gillum in Lake Worth, followed by a "Get Out the Vote" event at UCF and concluding the day at a Jimmy Buffett GOTV concert in West Palm Beach," a campaign email sent at 12:06 a.m. on Nov. 3 said. According to the email, Gillum was scheduled to speak in both Orlando and West Palm Beach Saturday. Gillum’s campaign also touted endorsements from politicians and sent out notices about more campaign events in additional emails Saturday. A Nov. 3 Spectrum News 13 story also showed what Gillum was up to Saturday, with time stamped updates. Our Ruling A post from The Grio claimed that Gillum is "indefinitely suspending his campaign for governor in light of a fatal shooting in Tallahassee at a yoga studio on Friday." While Gillum did leave the campaign trail to return to Tallahassee and met with some of the victims, he is not ending his campaign for governor because of the shooting. We rate this claim False.	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-11-03T18:53:37	2018-11-03	['Tallahassee,_Florida']
-pose-00421	Will "reduce oil consumption overall by at least 35 percent, or 10 million barrels of oil, by 2030."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/441/reduce-oil-consumption-by-35-percent-by-2030/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Reduce oil consumption by 35 percent by 2030	2010-01-07T13:26:58	None	['None']
-pomt-05478	"In 1993 the Republicans embraced a health platform that proudly features an individual mandate as its main component."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/apr/19/facebook-posts/facebook-post-says-republicans-embraced-individual/	We recently noticed a Facebook post that took Republicans to task for flip-flopping on the individual mandate, the key issue in the Supreme Court case on President Barack Obama's health care law. "In 1993 the Republicans embraced a health platform that proudly features an individual mandate as its main component," the Facebook post says. "(Newt) Gingrich argued for individual mandate in 2008. (Mitt) Romney urged Obama to embrace individual mandate in 2009. But now that it’s a Democratic health plan the Republicans want to vilify, decry, demonized this very thing that they invented." The post, by a group called Americans Against the Tea Party, includes photographs of four Republican senators from that era, with favorable quotes about the individual mandate, the requirement that individuals and families buy health insurance. The four senators pictured are John Chafee of Rhode Island, Robert Dole of Kansas, Kit Bond of Missouri and Don Nickles of Oklahoma. The post makes a number of claims, but we decided to focus on this one: "In 1993 the Republicans embraced a health platform that proudly features an individual mandate as its main component." That would be remarkable because the Republicans have focused much of their opposition on the mandate, portraying it as a dramatic expansion of government by bureaucracy-loving Democrats. To find out if that's true, we have to go back to the early 1990s, when President Bill Clinton was trying to get Congress to pass an overhaul of the health care system. Legislative proposals As we noted in an earlier item, the Clinton plan included a different kind of health insurance mandate -- one on employers requiring they provide coverage for their workers. That approach worried some Republicans and conservative Democrats, and some of the critics instead backed alternatives to the Clinton option. In 1993, Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I., introduced the Health Equity and Access Reform Today (HEART) Act of 1993, which included a requirement that individuals purchase health insurance. That provision was to take effect on Jan. 1, 2005 -- more than a decade after the bill would have been enacted. The bill never made it even to the hearing stage. But Chafee continued to push for an alternative to the Clinton option. In mid 1994, he and a fellow member of the Senate Finance Committee -- conservative Democrat John Breaux of Louisiana -- worked on a new version that also would have required all Americans to buy insurance. According to a New York Times account, the bill would have imposed an individual mandate in 2002 only if "other methods to spread health insurance had not led to either 95 percent or 96 percent of the American people's being insured." We did not find the Chafee-Breaux bill in the THOMAS database of congressional legislation, so it apparently did not receive a formal vote. (Clinton, it should be noted, also failed to win passage of his plan.) How widespread was Republican support? So yes, there was legislation that included a mandate -- a bill by Chafee and a subsequent proposal by Chafee and Breaux. But was the support extensive enough to say, as the Facebook post does, that "the Republicans embraced a health platform" that featured the individual mandate? The HEART Act attracted 19 Republicans as sponsors or co-sponsors, including Chafee, Bond and Dole, who was then the Senate minority leader, plus a number of ranking Republicans on Senate committees -- Mark Hatfield of Oregon (appropriations), Pete Domenici of New Mexico (budget), John Danforth of Missouri (commerce), Orrin Hatch of Utah (judiciary) and Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas (labor and human resources). Nineteen Republicans is not a trivial number, and the fact that many members of the Senate Republican leadership signed on is noteworthy. Still, 19 represented less than half of the GOP conference at the time, and the list of co-sponsors includes many of the party’s moderates. The idea was less popular among conservatives in the party. For instance, Nickles, one of the four pictured in the Facebook post, was not a co-sponsor. The Times, in a June 23, 1994, story on the later Chafee effort, called it the "moderates’" proposal. The newspaper reported that Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, one of the GOP’s leading conservatives, said that any plan that "got his support and that of most Republicans" would not "guarantee anything." And not having a guarantee of coverage would have meant not having an individual mandate. This jibes with the recollections of Gail Wilensky, a health care economist at Project HOPE, an international health foundation. Wilensky directed Medicare and Medicaid from 1990 to 1992 and served as a senior health adviser to President George H.W. Bush. "I do not remember Republicans, especially conservative Republicans, embracing individual mandates," Wilensky said. Did the Chafee proposal "proudly" feature the individual mandate "as its main component"? This part is doubtful. As indicated, the mandate didn't start until at least eight years years after enactment -- double the four-year lag in Obama’s law. And while Obama’s mandate is envisioned as a permanent feature of the law, the Chafee/Breaux version was seen as a tool that may never need to be used at all. It would only come into effect if other mechanisms failed to insure a target percentage of the U.S. population. As the Times reported, "Breaux said he believed that the individual mandate might never come into effect, because a commission to administer the plan would make regular recommendations on how to increase the number of Americans with health insurance. As a result, he said, it would not be necessary to rely on a mandate." Role reversal Further complicating the Facebook post’s one-sided story line is that some of the individual mandate’s biggest opposition at the same time came from … Democrats. "The idea of requiring people to buy their own health insurance drew criticism from liberal Democrats," the Times wrote. "Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota said it did little to help people who lacked the money for insurance. In the House, Representative Vic Fazio, the Californian who heads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, sent a memorandum to other House Democrats today criticizing what he called the Republican idea of the individual mandate. Mr. Fazio urged Democrats to work against the individual mandate and in favor of a bill requiring employers to insure their workers. He said they would be rewarded in the November elections once voters saw that Republicans were more interested in helping business and the wealthy and were ‘selling out the middle class.’" All told, there’s "lots of hypocrisy to go around in terms of consistency of positions today with those of 20 years ago," said Mark V. Pauly, a professor of health care management at the Wharton School of Business who has informally provided advice on health care policy to the administrations of both Obama and George H.W. Bush. Our ruling It would be accurate to say that a number of Republicans -- including several high-profile senators -- supported a bill or a subsequent proposal that included an individual mandate provision. But the Facebook post exaggerates when it says that "the Republicans embraced" the idea, a phrasing that suggests widespread support inside the party. Less than half the Senate Republican conference went public in support of Chafee’s bill, most of them from the party’s more moderate wing. The Facebook post also stumbles when it says the proposals in question "proudly" featured the individual mandate "as its main component." The mandate was a mechanism that would have taken effect from eight to 11 years after enactment, and only if other policies failed to expand insurance coverage enough. Breaux, the bill’s co-sponsor, suggested that it may never need to be put into effect at all. On balance, we rate the claim Half True.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2012-04-19T17:42:51	2012-04-19	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-11293	Says North Korea has "agreed to denuclearization."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/apr/22/donald-trump/trump-wrongly-says-north-korea-has-agreed-denuclea/	President Donald Trump fired off a frustrated tweet about North Korea after a Sunday political news show. "Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd of Fake News NBC just stated that we have given up so much in our negotiations with North Korea, and they have given up nothing. Wow, we haven’t given up anything and they have agreed to denuclearization (so great for World), site closure, and no more testing! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com NBC Meet the Press host Todd drew Trump’s ire for saying that a more positive tone for negotiations was in the air, but not more than that. "We don’t have a release of any of those Americans that they’ve held captive," Todd said April 22. "We don’t have a pledge of denuclearization as the ultimate goal." See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Trump’s tweet insisted that North Korea indeed had agreed to denuclearization, so we looked at the record. In terms of what North Korea itself has said, Trump has gotten ahead of events. The North’s latest statement North Korea announced April 20 that it would shut down its northern nuclear test site. A translation of a broadcast from North Korea’s state news agency said North Korean President Kim Jong Un unveiled the decision at a Workers’ Party Central Committee meeting. "The northern nuclear test ground of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will be dismantled to transparently guarantee the discontinuance of the nuclear test," the newscaster said. Kim also reiterated the promise to conduct no weapon or missile tests while talks were under way. He added that tests were no longer needed because the country had met its goal of developing its weapons capability. Denuclearization talk So far, North Korea has yet to officially commit to scrapping its nuclear program. It has left it to other countries to put that possibility on the table. Most recently, South Korean President Moon Jae-in told dozens of South Korean media executives April 20 that North Korea was "expressing its commitment to complete denuclearization." Moon said North Korea is not demanding the withdrawal of American troops from bases in South Korea. That would be a significant shift, but as the Korean newspaper Dong-a Ilbo reported along with Moon’s comments, "there is still a considerable gap between Washington’s demand of the North’s denuclearization in a minimum period of time and Pyongyang’s calls for progressive and synchronous measures for denuclearization." Denuclearization has been in the air since Kim made a rare trip to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The official Chinese news service Xinhua reported March 28 that Kim said, "It is our consistent stand to be committed to denuclearization on the peninsula." Trump also tweeted about his Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo’s meeting with Kim. "Mike Pompeo met with Kim Jong Un in North Korea last week, Trump tweeted April 18. "Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed. Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!" So, no direct statements from North Korea on denuclearization, but the word has been in play and not refuted by North Korea. Beware of shifting headlines The White House pointed to an opinion piece in the Washington Times as support for Trump’s latest statement. The April 19 headline said, "North Korea agrees to ‘complete denuclearization,’ says South." That op-ed cited an NBC News report that had the headline, "North Korea willing to accept 'complete denuclearization' without conditions, Moon says." The NBC News post repeated a Reuters report from April 19 that said, "South Korea's Moon says North seeking 'complete denuclearization'." In the nuances of diplomacy, the transition from "seeking" to "agrees to" is a big deal. "North Korea has agreed to talk about it (denuclearization), not to do it," said Frank Jannuzi, president of the Mansfield Foundation, a group that funds work on U.S.-Asian policy. Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton sounded unimpressed with what North Korea has promised so far, even with the closure of its test site. "I think this announcement on Friday is better than continued testing, but it's not much better than that," Cotton said on CBS’s Face the Nation April 22. "It's an easily reversible decision, and they made no announcement about their medium- or short- range ballistic missiles that threaten hundreds of thousands of Americans in Korea and Japan just like it threatens our allies there." South Korean skeptics of the North’s intentions have noted that denuclearization has been central in previous high-level negotiations without producing tangible results. Jannuzi said North Korea often speaks of denuclearization as the dying wish of Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung. "They always said he wanted that the peninsula be denuclearized," Jannuzi said. "All we have from the North right now is basically what’s always been there." Our ruling Trump said that North Korea had agreed to denuclearization. While North Korea has promised to halt testing and close a weapons test site, it has not officially said that it is committed to denuclearization. Other leaders have made that statement on their behalf, and even in that case, the only promise is that they are willing to talk about reaching that point. That is not the same as agreeing to do it. We rate this claim False See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-04-22T16:32:08	2018-04-22	['None']
-tron-00992	According to a new law, email Spam is okay	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/spam/	None	computers	None	None	None	According to a new law, email Spam is okay	Mar 16, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-04656	Scientists have created a human-gorilla hybrid called Hurilla.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/human-gorilla-hybrid/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Human/Gorilla Hybrid Infant Born in India	4 June 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-10396	Obama's plan to raise the capital gains tax "hurts the middle class."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/11/republican-national-committee-republican/mostly-higher-incomes-pay-capital-gains-tax-/	In a new Web ad, the Republican National Committee attacks Sen. Barack Obama for his position on capital gains taxes. Obama advocates raising the long-term capital gains tax above its current 15 percent rate, a rate that is below most current income-tax rates. "After just three years in the Senate, Barack Obama demonstrates his poor grasp of basic economic principles," a narrator says. "While families face tough times his ideas to raise taxes are out of touch. His promise to nearly double the capital gains tax hurts the middle class," it states. The ad is right that Obama wants to raise the capital gains tax. He has said he wants to raise it as part of an overall strategy of asking wealthy people to pay more taxes. Depending on the circumstances, he would raise it no higher than 28 percent, the current rate for the top income-tax bracket. But would raising the capital gains tax hurt the middle class? We conclude the answer is largely no: Only a small percentage of middle-class taxpayers pay capital gains taxes, no more than 11 percent. On the other hand, among higher-income taxpayers, about 51 percent pay the capital gains taxes. Walk with us into a thicket of data from the Internal Revenue Service (C'mon ... It'll be fun!) and we'll show you how we came to these conclusions. We looked at data from 2005, the most recent year for which the IRS has released detailed data. First, we had to decide which taxpayers are "middle class." Based on the data brackets, we counted everyone who reported income of less than $200,000, which we think is fairly generous to the RNC's point. Two categories of income are subject to capital gains taxes: taxable net gains and capital gains distributions (typically profits from mutual funds that are not part of a retirement plan). A taxpayer can report income in one or both categories, although most file in the first category. We're counting both categories as different taxpayers because we can't know how many people report income in both categories. For this reason, our numbers are going to be slight overestimates. Again, this will favor the RNC's point. Next, we added up the number of taxpayers who reported income in those two categories, so we could find out how many taxpayers were subject to capital gains taxes in 2005. Among tax filers making $200,000 or less, about 14.3-million of 130.8-million filers reported income subject to capital gains taxes. That's about 11 percent. Among tax filers making more than $200,000, about 1.8-million of 3.6-million filers reported income subject to capital gains taxes. That's about 51 percent. So only 11 percent of what we're calling middle-class people report capital gains, while 51 percent of wealthier people report it. If we removed people reporting income of less than $25,000, that percent would drop to 8.5 percent. And if we also decided we were too generous with our definition of middle class, and only counted people making under $100,000, that percentage would drop further, to 6 percent. "The capital gains tax largely affects very high-income people," said Eric Toder, a tax policy expert with the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., which both liberal and conservative economists consider credible. The ad then says the tax will hurt 100-million Americans who own stocks, a claim we looked at previously. We found that raising capital gains taxes would not directly affect most working people saving for retirement . Tax-exempt retirement accounts like 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts (IRAs) are not subject to capital gains taxes. Most home sales are not subject to the capital gains tax either, an issue we've written about previously . The ad says that Obama's plan to raise capital gains taxes "hurts the middle class," but it's hard to see how that's true of a tax that directly affects — at most — 11 percent of a very generous definition of the middle class. Are there a few middle-class people who pay the tax? Sure. But on the whole, capital gains taxes are disproportionately paid by higher-income brackets. We find the RNC's claim to be Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Republican National Committee	None	None	None	2008-06-11T00:00:00	2008-05-18	['None']
-tron-00709	John Denver an Army Sniper?	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/denver-sniper/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	John Denver an Army Sniper? – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-00418	Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie’s Daughter Shiloh Planning Divorce Tell-All?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-daughter-shiloh-divorce-tell-all/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie’s Daughter Shiloh Planning Divorce Tell-All?	5:17 pm, August 20, 2018	None	['Brad_Pitt', 'Angelina_Jolie']
-goop-01104	Katie Holmes Pregnant, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/katie-holmes-pregnant-baby-bump-wrong-jamie-foxx-date-night/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Katie Holmes NOT Pregnant, Despite Speculation About “Date Night Photo”	3:47 pm, April 27, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-04025	World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein bought terrorism insurance two months before 9/11, then collected double its value on the grounds that there were two attacks.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wtc-terrorism-insurance/	None	September 11th	None	David Emery	None	Did a WTC Leaseholder Buy Terrorism Insurance Just Before 9/11?	14 September 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-12736	"The various offices of state government have purchased more than $11 million in vehicles, not counting leases, for use from the Governor on down during the last two years."	mostly true	/illinois/statements/2017/mar/02/susana-mendoza/mendoza-correct-about-state-spending-vehicles-inco/	Facing attacks from the Illinois Republican Party over the purchase of a $32,000 used car amid the state’s dire financial situation, Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza’s office claimed government agencies have spent millions of dollars on vehicles since Gov. Bruce Rauner took office in January 2015. Mendoza’s office issued a statement, stating "Every state vehicle is paid for with taxpayer funds, including the bigger fleet in which the Governor’s security detail drives him – and all the state agencies controlled by the Governor. The various offices of state government have purchased more than $11 million in vehicles, not counting leases, for use from the Governor on down during the last two years." Given that Illinois remains embroiled in an unprecedented budget impasse that has caused the unpaid bill backlog to swell to nearly $12 billion, we checked into Mendoza’s claim to verify the $11 million figure. The comptroller’s statement also comes with a not-so-subtle implication that the governor himself authorized the $11 million in vehicle purchases, which we looked into as well. Checking the comptroller’s checkbook The Chicago-Sun Times first reported Mendoza’s office purchased a used 2016 Ford Explorer with about 16,500 miles from a central Illinois dealership to replace an old vehicle that was "in need of many expensive repairs before it would be safe to drive," according to spokesman Abdon Pallasch. One of the more notable parts from the comptroller's response was the amount of money state agencies have spent on vehicles during most of the budget stalemate. Jamey Dunn, deputy director of communications for the comptroller’s office, clarified that the last two years referred to in the press release are from January 2015 — when Rauner took office — to February 2017. Mendoza’s statement also notes all state vehicles are paid for with taxpayer dollars, including those purchased by "all the state agencies controlled by the Governor," which suggests the Rauner administration is responsible for all the vehicle spending by the various departments. In response to the comptroller’s statement, Rauner’s director of communications, Brad Hahn, said comparing the comptroller’s small fleet of vehicles to other larger, state agencies is "completely different." Mendoza is the keeper of the state’s checkbook and records of expenditures are readily available on the comptroller’s website. We used the comptroller’s Ledger database to search for expenditures on the official category of "passenger automobiles" by state agency as well as by month. In fiscal year 2015, state government spent $10.23 million on vehicles, with the Illinois State Police accounting for $6.1 million, or about 60 percent of the total. During the time Rauner was in office that fiscal year — between January and June 2015 — state spending on vehicles was $7.09 million. That includes lapse period spending, which allows state agencies to use the previous year’s spending authority to pay for that year’s bills during the first two months of the current fiscal year. According to the Department of Central Management Services, ISP purchased more than 100 vehicles in FY2015 as part of critical update to its fleet. About half of the total amount spent — $3.05 million — occurred under Rauner. However, Hahn said the governor doesn’t sign off on new cars bought by ISP or other state agencies. After Rauner took office in the second half of FY 2015, CMS spent more than $2.9 million, which was used to purchase vehicles for the departments of juvenile justice, corrections, human services and the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. Expenditures decreased significantly during fiscal year 2016 to $3.19 million. Eighty-six percent of that spending came from the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, which purchased more than $2.3 million in vehicles in February 2016, the same month state procurement records show the agency awarded a contract for 63 light-duty trucks that were to be "outfitted with a wide array of emergency lighting, radios, arrow and/or message sign boards, lift gates, and other enhancements to meet the Tollway’s requirements." Spending in the current fiscal year totaled $1.8 million as of March, with the Illinois Department of Transportation purchasing more than $874,000 in vehicles and nearly $528,000 by the Secretary of State’s office. Kelsea Gurski, bureau chief of communication services for IDOT, said the department purchased 56 light-fleet vehicles such as sedans and minivans to update its existing, "depleted" fleet, but that the purchases did not increase the size of the fleet. "These purchases were part of a much-needed update to our agency’s depleted fleet; many of our older vehicles required repairs that exceeded their value or had rust-related damage that made them unsafe to drive," Gurski said. "IDOT’s light-fleet vehicles are used for transportation for technical staff to worksites, meetings, seminars and training." Added together, the total amount state government has spent on vehicles since Rauner has been in office and at the time of the comptroller’s statement is $11.91 million. Our rating After being criticized by the Illinois GOP for purchasing a $32,000 used SUV, Comptroller Susana Mendoza issued a statement noting the various offices of state government have purchased more than $11 million in vehicles since Rauner became governor in January 2015. A search of expenditures through the comptroller’s Ledger database shows state agencies have spent more than $11 million on cars during Rauner’s time in office and throughout much of the budget impasse. But after being attacked herself by the Illinois Republican Party, Mendoza incorrectly implies that Rauner had a direct role in the more than $11 million in vehicle purchases by the state government since he took office. We rate Mendoza’s claim Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Susana Mendoza	None	None	None	2017-03-02T17:21:04	2017-02-19	['None']
-snes-00340	Donald Trump broke royal protocol by arriving late to meet Queen Elizabeth, failing to bow, and walking in front of her.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-protocol-queen-elizabeth/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did President Trump Break Protocol in His Meeting with Queen Elizabeth?	16 July 2018	None	['Donald_Trump']
-tron-01186	San Antonio Theatre Shooter Stopped by Off Duty Sheriff Deputy	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/san-antonio-theatre-shoote/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	San Antonio Theatre Shooter Stopped by Off Duty Sheriff Deputy	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-abbc-00386	The claim: The budget papers say the Government will achieve $80 billion in savings from hospitals and schools. Bill Shorten says this is a cut. Tony Abbott says it isn't.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-03/does-the-federal-budget-cut-80-billion-from-schools-hospitals/5562470	The claim: The budget papers say the Government will achieve $80 billion in savings from hospitals and schools. Bill Shorten says this is a cut. Tony Abbott says it isn't.	['education', 'schools', 'health', 'liberals', 'alp', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'bill-shorten', 'australia', 'act', 'nsw', 'nt', 'qld', 'sa', 'tas', 'vic', 'wa']	None	None	['education', 'schools', 'health', 'liberals', 'alp', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'bill-shorten', 'australia', 'act', 'nsw', 'nt', 'qld', 'sa', 'tas', 'vic', 'wa']	Fact check: Does the federal budget cut $80 billion from hospitals and schools?	Thu 3 Jul 2014, 1:58am	None	['Tony_Abbott', 'Bill_Shorten']
-pomt-14794	Says there are "ample means" to "tell when someone is a Christian in the Middle East ... by name, by where they’re born, their birth certificates."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/01/jeb-bush/identifying-middle-eastern-christians-can-be-harde/	Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has said the United States should give preference to Christians fleeing the bloodshed in the Middle East. While many Americans and lawmakers view Muslims with suspicion, Bush argued this should not impede providing shelter to people of various Christian sects. This raises the question of how resettlement workers would be able to verify that the person who claims to be a Christian actually is one. In an interview on radio station WGIR in New Hampshire, Bush said there are many telltale signs. "You can tell when someone is a Christian in the Middle East, I can promise you that," Bush said on NH Today. "By name, by where they’re born, their birth certificates. There are ample means by which to know this." We thought we’d explore the markers of Christian identity in the Middle East. The Bush campaign did not provide more details, so we turned to specialists in Middle Eastern religion and society. Lucas Van Rompay, a professor of religious studies at Duke University, said it would not be easy to tell. "Some Christians do have specifically Christian names, but many don’t," Van Rompay said. "In addition, the Qur’an knows the biblical names of Abraham, Joseph, Jesus, Mary, etc. so these names may be found among Muslims. The place where people are born may be relevant in some cases, such as some entirely Christian villages in northern Iraq, but most Christians live in cities or areas which have a mixed population." Father Patrick Ryan, a Jesuit priest and professor of religion and society at Fordham University echoed those points, noting that many Arabs deliberately choose "ambiguous names so you won’t be able to identify them religiously." Ryan added that whether a woman is veiled is also unreliable. "Many (non-Muslim) women in the Middle East cover their heads and necks," Ryan said. On the other hand, he noted that some Coptic Christians have distinctive tatoos. Many refugees do have their birth certificates, and ones from Syria list the person’s religion. Still, Van Rompay said truly verifying that a person is what he says he is can take a long time. Middle Eastern Christians tend to be well integrated into their communities. "Even sitting down with someone and having a conversation about some of the tenets of Christianity or some basic prayers (Our Father, the Creed) would be problematic," Van Rompay said. "Middle Eastern Christians are as diverse as Western Christians are, and some will be much more knowledgeable than others, and much more able to express themselves than others." Our ruling Bush said there are ample ways to determine if a Middle Eastern refugee is a Christian and suggested that names, birthplace and birth certificate would be key. The experts we reached agreed that there are many ways to verify that a person is a Christian, but they warned that it would be far more complicated than Bush presented. For many Christians, neither their names nor where they were born confirms their religion. A birth certificate could prove helpful, but if one doubted its authenticity, a more arduous verification task lies ahead. Based on what the experts said, Bush misrepresented the power of the indicators he mentioned and the effort needed to go beyond them. We rate this statement Half True.	None	Jeb Bush	None	None	None	2015-12-01T17:52:03	2015-11-24	['Middle_East']
-pose-01067	"Terry McAuliffe proposes … creation of the Virginia Biotech Startup Program. Designed to supply critically needed startup funds to entrepreneurs, inventors, or scientists hoping to prepare an idea to attract private capital, this program would receive an initial capitalization of between 2.5 and 5 million dollars (depending on budget conditions) and would then be replenished as loans are repaid."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/virginia/promises/macker-meter/promise/1149/create-biotechnology-startup-loans/	None	macker-meter	Terry McAuliffe	None	None	Create biotechnology startup loans	2014-01-17T12:39:15	None	['None']
-vees-00163	THIS WEEK IN FAKE NEWS: Aquino family destroyed Marcos mansion	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/week-fake-news-aquino-family-did-not-destroy-marcos-mansion	None	None	None	None	Marcos,fake news,Aquino	THIS WEEK IN FAKE NEWS: Aquino family DID NOT destroy Marcos mansion	June 22, 2018	None	['None']
-pose-00891	"The first year ... Bob will modernize land development codes to incorporate New Urbanism concepts and form based zoning in order to encourage the development of our urban neighborhoods."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/buck-o-meter/promise/923/incorporate-new-urbanism-concepts-in-land-developm/	None	buck-o-meter	Bob Buckhorn	None	None	Incorporate New Urbanism concepts in land development codes	2011-05-18T14:33:25	None	['None']
-pomt-04920	"Foreign Chinese prostitution money is allegedly behind the groups funding Congressman Scott DesJarlais's (TN-04) Republican Majority."	pants on fire!	/tennessee/statements/2012/aug/01/democratic-congressional-campaign-committee/desjarlais-taking-money-linked-chinese-prostitutio/	Fourth District Congressman Scott DesJarlais, a Jasper Republican who is expected to face Democratic state Sen. Eric Stewart on the November ballot, is already on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's target list in emailed press releases – many of them similar to criticism aimed at other Republican lawmakers elsewhere in the nation. Perhaps the most striking recent example is a missive earlier this summer that seeks to link DesJarlais' campaign financing to Chinese prostitution money. Says the opening paragraph: "Foreign Chinese prostitution money is allegedly behind the groups funding Congressman Scott DesJarlais's (TN-04) Republican Majority." Almost identical news releases – except for the names – were used by the DCCC against Republican U.S. Reps. Jim Renacci in Ohio and Sean Duffy in Wisconsin. Our Politifact colleagues in Ohio and Wisconsin have sized up the DCCC claims and given them a "Pants On Fire" rating. A Tennessee echo is in order. The DCCC contention rests on billionaire casino operator Sheldon Adelson, who has given a lot of money to Republican campaign funds that are supporting DesJarlais and other GOP congressmen. Adelson, meanwhile, is facing a lawsuit from a former employee that includes allegations that Adelson approved of prostitution at a casino in Macau, a former Portuguese colony near Hong Kong that is now part of China. The DCCC release cites media reports on the lawsuit contentions and a comment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that Adelson is "injecting millions of dollars in Chinese 'foreign money' " by contributing to Republican campaigns. "What will Congressman Scott DesJarlais do when his Chinese prostitution money comes from billionaire Sheldon Adelson?" said Jesse Ferguson of DCCC in the release. "House Republicans like Congressman DesJarlais are fighting tirelessly to protect billionaires like Sheldon Adelson who make fortunes overseas and Adelson is now the largest single donor to Congressman DesJarlais's Republican Majority. It's past time for Congressman DesJarlais to reject the support of these groups funded by foreign money from a Chinese prostitution strategy." Here's what Politifact Ohio reported on the matter: "The DCCC release noted that Adelson and his wife gave $5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund Super PAC, which is backed by House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders. FEC records indicate that Super PAC hasn’t spent anything so far. "Adelson and his wife, Miriam, also gave more than $60,000 to the Republican counterpart of the DCCC, the National Republican Congressional Committee, during the past election cycle. "A spokesman for the Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands, issued a statement that said Adelson has always ‘maintained a strong policy against prostitution on our properties and any accusation to the contrary represents a blatant and reprehensible personal attack on Mr. Adelson’s character.’" In a July 9 interview with Forbes magazine, Adelson said there’s not a "shred of evidence" to back his former employee’s charges, and "says the fact that he and his wife (a physician who specializes in treating addiction) have given millions of dollars to set up clinics around the world to treat people with drug addictions (many of them prostitutes) makes the … claims even more preposterous." Adelson also told the publication that promoting prostitution could cost him his gaming licenses in Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau. Basically, then, the charge by a disgruntled former employee is adamantly denied by Adelson. DCCC has nonetheless seized upon the questionable claim, extrapolated and exaggerated it to taint all of Adelson's political donations with prostitution earnings. If stopped there, perhaps this could arguably fall into the realm of standard political hyperbole. But to carry that on down a convoluted line to Scott DesJarlais and talk about "his Chinese prostitution money?" Yep, that sounds like Pants On Fire to us, too.	None	Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee	None	None	None	2012-08-01T10:23:57	2012-07-11	['China']
-peck-00033	Is Half Of Tanzania’s Deaf Population Illiterate?	true	https://pesacheck.org/is-half-of-tanzanias-deaf-population-illiterate-847dea18f6c2	None	None	None	Belinda Japhet	None	Is Half Of Tanzania’s Deaf Population Illiterate?	Nov 15, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-01579	Priests Weren’t Allowed to Say Mass During Government Shutdown	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/priests-werent-allowed-to-say-mass-during-government-shutdown/	None	government	None	None	['Trending Rumors']	Priests Weren’t Allowed to Say Mass During Government Shutdown	Apr 25, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01478	Brad Pitt Fears Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie Oscars “Showdown”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-jennifer-aniston-angelina-jolie-oscars-showdown/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Brad Pitt Fears Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie Oscars “Showdown”?	4:06 pm, February 28, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston', 'Brad_Pitt']
-thal-00058	FactFind: Is Shane Ross right to say his drink-driving bill could save 35 lives?	none	http://www.thejournal.ie/shane-ross-drink-driving-ban-road-deaths-facts-3333397-Apr2017/	None	None	None	None	None	FactFind: Is Shane Ross right to say his drink-driving bill could save 35 lives?	Apr 14th 2017, 10:00 PM	None	['None']
-pomt-04852	Rhode Island has "the most burdensome level of health-insurance mandates in the nation."	half-true	/rhode-island/statements/2012/aug/12/mike-stenhouse/ri-center-freedom-and-prosperity-ceo-mike-stenhous/	As part of its laundry list of what's wrong with Rhode Island, the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a conservative think tank that focuses on tax policy and business climate, has a report card that gives the state poor grades on a variety of measures. Chief Executive Officer Mike Stenhouse, who formerly ran the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, invoked those comparisons in a July 29, 2012, Providence Journal commentary that urged residents to take action. He cited problems such as high unemployment, bad business climate, dangerously high pension liabilities. He also talked about health care, saying, "We have the most burdensome level of health-insurance mandates in the nation, yet the Chafee administration is pushing us towards even more government control of our personal health-care decisions." In his commentary, he didn't specify how he defined burdensome. But in a subsequent e-mail, he made it clear: "Given that we see mandates as burden, and given that R.I. has the highest number of mandates, yes, I stand by my quote that R.I. has the most burdensome level of health-insurance mandates." We know of several such mandates. They cover everything from expensive infertility treatments and hearing aids to Lyme disease treatment and wigs for people undergoing chemotherapy. We’re not going to weigh in on whether such mandates are burdensome or not. That’s a matter of opinion. But we can analyze how many health-care mandates we have in Rhode Island and how that compares nationally. As we found out, it depends on who is counting and how they do it. A question of categories The source for Stenhouse's assessment was a 50-page report, "Health Insurance Mandates in the States 2010," by the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, an association of insurance carriers. The report looked at 136 mandate categories in each state, from requirements that adopted children be covered by an insurance policy (44 states) to requirements that policies cover HIV testing and/or treatment (10 states). When we contacted the council, Victoria Craig Bunce, its research and policy director, said, "we send out data to the [state] each year and they review it for accuracy." The office of Rhode Island Health Insurance Commissioner Christopher Koller confirmed that it supplied data on the mandates to the council, and that it gave a positive response to 69 out of the 136 categories. But not everyone categorizes the mandates the same way. Koller's office sent us a May 2012 report done for his office by KeriAnn Wells, of the University of California at Berkeley. Part of the report documents 24 mandates in Rhode Island law, not 69. A comparison of the two reports revealed that the council’s number is higher because it uses more categories, such as listing mammograms and pap smears separately. The mandates on its list also include whether insurance plans must cover services from practitioners such as psychologists and nurse practitioners, and whether persons such as adopted children must be covered. The Wells list doesn't tally those categories. The advantage to using the council’s data is that it uses the same method for all the states, allowing a comparison across the country. According to the council’s count, Rhode Island ranks first with 69 mandates. Maryland is second with 67, followed by Minnesota, Texas and Connecticut. But then we found another source that gave a different story. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association has its own 2011 state-by-state count of mandates. Its list indicates that Rhode Island is 17th, with 43 such mandates. In short, the ranking depends on who has done it. Proof of burden So are all these mandates burdensome, as Stenhouse says? Stenhouse explained in an e-mail that the mandates are a problem because "mandates generally raise the cost of health insurance products, making it less affordable for those who do pay. [It's] a cost burden for employers and consumers, both." In addition to increasing costs, "mandates also mean that some people will pay for insurance protection for services they would never utilize," he said in his e-mail. "In the end, we believe it is best if the consumer, not the government, chooses what coverage any specific individual should have." Karen Pollitz, senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, acknowledged that "every time health insurance covers more, it's going to cost more." "However, it's important to pool risks so we all pay the same when we're healthy and we all have the same protection when we get sick. But insurance doesn't do that today," she said. "There's a lot of cherry-picking going on" as companies try to sign up the healthiest customers, leaving the sick to buy policies that become disproportionately expensive. Mandates bring some equity to the system, she said. One final note: After our analysis of the 2010 CAHI report, Stenhouse sent us an updated mandates list from the organization. In its 2011 survey, Rhode Island was tied in the top spot with Virginia with 70 mandates each. Our ruling Mike Stenhouse of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity said Rhode Island has "the most burdensome level of health-insurance mandates in the nation." We'll leave it to others to decide whether laws requiring health insurers to cover things such as mental health problems, infertility and wigs for people who have lost their hair during chemotherapy create a burden Rhode Island needs to correct. Although Stenhouse cites a national study that lists Rhode Island as being in first place in 2010 -- and tied for first in 2011 -- a Blue Cross tally shows that Rhode Island is in 17th place, not even in the top third nationally. We rate his statement as Half True. (Get updates from PolitiFact Rhode Island on Twitter: @politifactri. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Mike Stenhouse	None	None	None	2012-08-12T00:01:00	2012-07-29	['None']
-pomt-01382	If Florida expanded Medicaid, "some studies indicate it would create about 120,000 jobs."	half-true	/florida/statements/2014/oct/15/charlie-crist/charlie-crist-says-medicaid-expansion-could-lead-1/	Democrat Charlie Crist has criticized Republican Gov. Rick Scott for the state’s failure to expand Medicaid. During the second governor’s debate, which was held on Oct. 15, 2014, at Broward College, Crist said of Medicaid expansion, "In addition to the $51 billion it would bring to the state over the next 10 years, some studies indicate it would create about 120,000 jobs. That's the right thing to do." That’s nearly double the number of new jobs that Crist cited this summer. If Florida expands Medicaid, would that lead to 120,000 more jobs? Studies about Medicaid and jobs Medicaid is a joint state and federal program aimed at providing health insurance to the very poor. The 2010 Affordable Care Act encourages states to expand eligibility, with the federal government paying 100 percent of the expansion for the first three years, declining to 90 percent in 2020 and beyond. The expansion would have led to 800,000 to 1 million additional Floridians signing up for Medicaid. (That’s mostly due to new Floridians who would be eligible and also because some who are already eligible but haven’t signed up would enroll for the program after publicity.) Scott initially opposed Medicaid expansion but switched his position in 2013 when he came out in support of it. But Scott didn’t lobby the GOP-led Legislature, which ultimately rejected the expansion. He hasn’t talked about it much on the campaign trail. Studies predicting job growth are based on the idea that as states expand Medicaid, new patients will access medical services they haven’t used in the past. Extra revenue will allow health care facilities to hire new workers. But the number of jobs predicted in each study varies depending upon the methodology. We only found one study that went as high as the 120,000 number Crist cited in the debate. And that study was conducted by a supporter of the expansion. Crist was citing the Florida Hospital Association’s 2013 analysis that predicts about 120,000 jobs. The association commissioned the study done by University of Florida researchers. During the debate, Crist didn’t specify any time frame. Direct jobs accounted for about one-third of the jobs, while the remainder included suppliers or secondary spending, such as when a doctor buys a new house or car. Other studies cited much lower figures for job growth. For example, Moody’s, a financial analysis firm that doesn’t have a position on the health care law, last year predicted Medicaid expansion would create 10,000 to 30,000 jobs over 10 years in Florida. The White House Council of Economic Advisers projected 63,800 jobs between 2014 and 2017 in Florida. That study was part of the Obama administration’s promotion of the Affordable Care Act. The White House study relies in part on the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, in which some residents got Medicaid through a lottery. Research showed people in Medicaid got preventative tests such as mammograms, cholesterol screening and pap smears compared to the control group. The White House predicts that Medicaid expansion would allow tens of thousands of Floridians to get those preventative tests. Experts weigh in on studies So why the massive differences on the job predictions? The numbers vary based on different economic models used and other assumptions. PolitiFact Florida interviewed several experts on the studies after the first debate, held on Telemundo, when Crist made a similar claim about new jobs from expanding Medicaid. Dan White, the senior economist who authored the Moody’s study, said that the hospital association study appears to assume that everyone who signs up under the Medicaid expansion will generate new spending. But at least some of those people who would have signed up for Medicaid were already accessing some medical services -- albeit inefficiently in emergency rooms. "They are treating all the money coming into Medicaid expansion as new medical spending in Florida, but some of those people are already spending money," White said. "The crux of our analysis is shifting who is paying for it. It might be true that those people support 120,000 jobs, but maybe 10,000 to 30,000 are new jobs." Some experts on Medicaid expansion told PolitiFact Florida that an infusion of federal dollars for Medicaid expansion would lead to some job growth, but they questioned pinpointing a specific number. "Pumping federal dollars into the state is likely to be stimulative, but an exact job calculation (given the many concurrent policy changes) is difficult," Harvard professor of health economics Katherine Baicker told PolitiFact Florida. Michael Tanner, a health care expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, said it’s impossible to make a jobs prediction. "I would guess there would be some short-term employment gains, but the long term would be more problematic as bills become due," he said. "But even in the short term, I am skeptical of both the size and precision of this estimate." Though most of the experts we interviewed agreed that there would be some job growth, University of Chicago economist Casey B. Mulligan argues that increasing Medicaid will reduce employment because people will no longer need to work full-time to get health insurance. "Medicaid makes it less painful to have a low income, so people have less incentive to take actions to prevent their incomes from getting low," he previously told PolitiFact. "Not everyone acts that way, but enough do that a Medicaid expansion would depress employment nationally." Our ruling Crist said "some studies indicate" expanding Medicaid would "create about 120,000 jobs." Crist was referring to one study done for the Florida Hospital Association, a supporter of Medicaid expansion. That study predicted about 120,000 new jobs. There have been several studies that predict job growth related to Medicaid expansion, with one study putting the figure as low as 10,000 jobs. Crist cherry-picked the study with the highest statistic and omitted that it was done for an association that supports the expansion. Most economists and Medicaid experts say that it’s likely that the infusion of federal cash would lead to some jobs, but it is difficult to pinpoint the number. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Charlie Crist	None	None	None	2014-10-15T20:56:08	2014-10-15	['None']
-snes-05174	California has passed a law allowing undocumented residents to vote.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-motor-voter-act/	None	Ballot Box	None	Dan Evon	None	Did California Pass a Law Allowing Undocumented Immigrants to Vote in Federal Elections?	22 February 2016	None	['California']
-tron-02337	Hillary Clinton inconvenienced U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hillary-afghanistan/	None	military	None	None	None	Hillary Clinton inconvenienced U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan	Mar 17, 2015	None	['United_States', 'Afghanistan', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-13418	Says Ann Kirkpatrick walked out "on constituents when questioned" on the Affordable Care Act.	half-true	/arizona/statements/2016/sep/21/john-mccain/john-mccain-claims-democratic-challenger-walked-ou/	Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., won his Aug. 30 primary and has since shifted jabs to his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick of Flagstaff, ahead of November’s general election. A recent political advertisement attempts to portray Kirkpatrick as dishonest -- noting that she mostly votes along party lines (a pro-McCain PAC made this same claim, we rated it Mostly True) -- and turned her back on the state. "Kirkpatrick betrayed Arizona on Obamacare, walking out on constituents when questioned about it," the ad, which was published Sept. 6, says, showing Kirkpatrick walking out of an Aug. 6, 2009, meeting in Holbrook, Ariz. We wondered -- did Kirkpatrick really walk out on constituents who had questions about the Affordable Care Act? The event in question was pegged as one of several "Chats with Ann." A press release before the event notes that these chats, held at Safeway grocery stores, were meant for people who wanted to "discuss their concerns and issues." McCain campaign spokeswoman Lorna Romero pointed out that Kirkpatrick said in a subsequent interview with the White Mountain Independent that the chat was to give folks a chance to talk about "health insurance reform and getting our economy back on track." But why did Kirkpatrick walk out? Politico reported that the event was overrun by protesters, noting that conservative interest groups had organized opposition to similar events across the country. Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, an anti-health care reform group, did have the Kirkpatrick’s event listed on their website. The same White Mountain Independent article also notes people were upset because "she wasn’t addressing the crowd as a whole." "Ann was trying to answer questions, and was shouted down," Kirkpatrick spokesman D.B. Mitchell said. We were unable to find a full video from the 2009 chat, but an extended clip does appear to show several people shouting. Other members of Congress faced similar disruptions across the country in August 2009. NPR reported that some congressional town halls ended in "fistfights, arrests, and even hospitalizations." The ad fails to mention that Kirkpatrick went back to Holbrook for a town hall meeting on health care a month later. "I think a key component is competitiveness and choice, but I also think we need to take personal responsibility for our health," Kirkpatrick said during the town hall. From The Associated Press: "Kirkpatrick returned to Holbrook weeks after she walked out of a one-on-one ‘Chat with Ann’ event at a local grocery store. Protesters had urged her to make it more of a public forum and called her a ‘nitwit’ as she left." Our ruling The ad claims, "Kirkpatrick betrayed Arizona on Obamacare, walking out on constituents when questioned about it." While Kirkpatrick did walk out of the Holbrook grocery store, the ad fails to mention the protesters -- and that she returned for a health care town hall a month later. On balance, we rate the ad’s claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/01289094-4b0e-48d1-a2a4-2c778cdee694	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2016-09-21T12:00:00	2016-09-06	['None']
-pomt-02583	On sharing power with Republicans	full flop	/virginia/statements/2014/jan/29/virginia-senate-democratic-caucus/senate-democrats-u-turn-power-sharing/	Democrats’ views on power sharing in the state Senate have come a long way. Each political party controls 20 seats in the state Senate, just like they did two years ago. But the the Democrats senators’ view has hardened now that they have the tie-breaking vote. Let’s go back to November 2011 elections when Republicans gained two Senate seats, splitting the partisan count in the chamber down the middle and setting the stage for GOP Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling to cast tie-breaking votes on legislation. A few weeks later, Republicans decreed that Bolling’s tie-breaking vote also applied to Senate rules and that with his support, they would they would push through a reorganization that would give the GOP chairmanship of all committees. Democrats protested, saying Bolling’s tie-breaking powers did not give him a say in establishing the internal rules of the Senate. Sen. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, said "Bolling is not a member of the Senate," and unsuccessfully asked a judge to stop the reorganization. McEachin, the chairman of the chamber’s Democratic caucus, denounced the GOP’s reorganization as "an arrogant power grab." Sen. Richard L. Saslaw, a Fairfax County Democrat who stood to lose his post as majority leader, agreed. "Virginians elected 20 senators of each party, and it’s only right the power in the Senate is divided equally," Saslaw told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "The Republicans are trying to overrule the will of the people and claim a majority they did not earn." On Jan. 11, 2012, Senate Republicans, with Bolling’s support, pushed through a resolution giving their party chairmanships of all the committees and majority membership on the major panels. The measure passed on a 21-20 vote. "It’s grossly unfair to the citizens of Virginia who voted for a 20-20 Senate," said Sen. John S. Edwards, D-Roanoke, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "I think the citizens of Virginia want the Senate of Virginia to engage in a power-sharing agreement." But Republicans were not sympathetic. Sen. Tommy Norment, who was poised to become the new majority leader, said the reorganization was a "rearticulation of Senate rules" that the GOP found "appropriate." Now, let’s flash forward. In November 2013, Democrat Ralph Northam was elected lieutenant governor. And this Monday, Democrat Lynwood Lewis was declared the winner of a special election to take Northam’s seat in the Senate. On Tuesday, Lewis was sworn in, giving Democrats a 21-20 edge with Northam’s tie-breaking vote. That allowed the Democrats to push through their own reorganization on a series of 21-20 votes. Democrats gave themselves the leadership of all committees -- although it should be noted they agreed to share the chairmanship of the powerful Finance Committee with Republican Walter Stosch, a bipartisan gesture the GOP was unwilling to make two years ago. Echoing Republican actions of 2012, the Democrats gave themselves majorities on all committees but two: Local Government; and Rehabilitation and Social Services. Republicans, perhaps mindful of their actions two years ago, did not call on the Democrats to share power or contest the lieutenant governor’s right to break the tie votes. But they did complain about several new precedents the Democrats set, including one that would empower the Rules Committee to kill Senate bills that are "significantly amended" by the Republican-led House of Delegates. In the past, House amendments to Senate bills were considered by the full Senate. The Democrats’ reorganization plan was authored by McEachin -- the same person who called the GOP takeover two years ago "an arrogant power grab." McEachin said his change of view this year is rooted in the GOP’s actions two years ago. During debate, he frequently repeated Norment’s 2012 line about "a rearticulation of Senate rules." Saslaw, in a written statement after the vote, said time have changed. "We now have a majority and we have a responsibility to use that majority to work on the issues voters care about," he wrote. No doubt, the Senate Democrats have U-turned on power sharing. We rate it a "Full Flop." Correction: A comment made by Sen. Richard Saslaw was incorrectly attributed to Sen. Donald McEachin in an earlier version of this story. The attribution has been corrected in this updated post.	None	Virginia Senate Democratic Caucus	None	None	None	2014-01-29T08:54:10	2014-01-28	['None']
-farg-00055	"West Virginia is second in the nation in the percentage increase of GDP."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/07/trump-overstates-west-virginia-gains/	None	the-factcheck-wire	FactCheck.org	Robert Farley	['GDP']	Trump Overstates West Virginia Gains	July 6, 2018	2018-07-06 20:52:59 UTC	['None']
-vees-00351	In a speech Oct. 12 in Malacañang, Duterte urged the “Yellow” and the “Reds” to unite against him. Yellow is a color associated with the Liberal Party, red with communist groups.	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-duterte-says-yellows-and-reds-should-m	Duterte’s claim that communists and the Liberal Party “share the same” ideology does not hold water when one considers recent political history.	None	None	None	Duterte,liberal party,communists	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte says ‘Yellows’ and ‘Reds’ should merge; that doesn’t make sense	October 19, 2017	None	['None']
-goop-00930	Khloe Kardashian Wants $1 Million Engagement Ring, September Wedding With Tristan Thompson?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/khloe-kardashian-tristan-thompson-engagement-ring-wedding/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Khloe Kardashian Wants $1 Million Engagement Ring, September Wedding With Tristan Thompson?	10:50 am, May 26, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-01211	Did the Media Ignore Obama Calling Libya a ‘Shit Show’?	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-called-libya-a-sht-show-and-media-was-silent/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did the Media Ignore Obama Calling Libya a ‘Shit Show’?	15 January 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02929	Ken Cuccinelli would "take money away from public schools to fund private schools."	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2013/nov/01/terry-mcauliffe/mcauliffe-says-cuccinelli-would-use-public-school-/	Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe says Ken Cuccinelli, his Republican rival, is no friend to public education. "On education, he’d take money away from public schools to fund private schools," the McAuliffe campaign says in a TV ad that began airing Oct. 16. The claim -- according to Josh Schwerin, a McAuliffe spokesman -- centers on Cuccinelli’s plan to empower parents whose children attend what the state deems to be a failing school. Under the proposal, a majority of parents could vote to change the leadership of such a school, close it, transform it to a charter school, or put their children in their choice of public or private schools. Cuccinelli would have the state compensate parents for additional costs they incurred by changing their child’s school. He would establish a scholarship fund for children who switched public schools. And he would seek legislation allowing Virginia to provide the parents with tax credits to defray tuition at nonsectarian, private schools. Cuccinelli also wants to offer the tax credits to failing-school parents who want to send their children to religious academies. This would require voters to approve what he called a "narrowly drafted" amendment to the state constitution, which bans state aid for K-12 sectarian education. Cuccinelli has not put a pricetag on the tax break. Anna Nix, a spokeswoman for the campaign, said the total cost would vary based on how many parents opt for the tax credit choice and how much it costs to educate a child in those private venues. McAuliffe's ad says the plan would force localities to raise property taxes to compensate for lost state aid to public schools. Seeking a bottom line, we came up with our own estimate of the cost of the tax credit. Cuccinelli would define a failing school as one that was denied state accreditation because of chronically low student achievement. There are six such schools this year: three in Norfolk, two in Petersburg and one in Alexandria. According to state Department of Education figures, total enrollment at those schools was 3,335 last school year. Based on per-pupil allocations to each of the cities housing a failing school, the state spent $16.9 million educating those students. So the maximum cost of the tax credit -- assuming every student at every failing school would up being privately educated -- would be about $16.9 million this year. That’s about three-tenths of 1 percent of the nearly $5.2 billion in general funds the state will spend on public education. Nix said Cuccinelli "will not touch education" to pay for the tax credit. But Democrats have long argued that it’s impossible to cut income taxes without affecting the long-term money available to public schools. That’s because income taxes are the largest revenue source for the state’s general fund -- now at $17.4 billion -- which pays for education, health programs and public safety. About 30 percent of the general fund is traditionally allocated for public education. Our ruling McAuliffe says Cuccinelli would "take away money from public schools to pay for private schools." Cuccinelli’s K-12 plan opens that possibility by proposing tax credits for the parents of children in failing public schools to defray their cost of switching to private education. The program, if passed by the General Assembly, would have enormous symbolic meaning because it would crack Virginia’s tradition of not directly aiding private schools. McAuliffe’s statement, however, lacks perspective. It doesn’t note that Cuccinelli’s program would be very small. This year, only six of Virginia’s 1,828 public schools are failing. They are attended by 3,335 of the state’s 1.27 million students. In the unlikely scenario that every failing-school parent switched their children to private schools, Cuccinelli’s tax credit would have cost about $16.9 million this year -- one-third of 1 percent of the state’s public education budget. Cuccinelli says he would not cut the K-12 budget to pay for his plan. But in the long run under other governors, the revenues available to fund public education would be reduced -- very marginally -- to support the private school tax break. So there’s a sliver of accuracy to McAuliffe’s statement, but it creates a misleading impression of Cuccinelli’s education platform. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Terry McAuliffe	None	None	None	2013-11-01T06:00:00	2013-10-16	['Ken_Cuccinelli']
-pomt-07731	"Most federal employees do not have collective bargaining for benefits, nor for pay."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/mar/02/scott-walker/wisconsin-gov-scott-walker-says-most-federal-emplo/	In an interview with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, NBC's Meet the Press host David Gregory zeroed in on the issue at the heart of the union showdown. "What's so wrong with...collective bargaining?" Gregory asked. Walker began with a comparison to federal employees. "Well, our proposal is less restrictive than the federal government is today," Walker said. "Under Barack Obama, he presides over a federal government where most federal employees do not have collective bargaining for benefits, nor for pay. So what we're asking for is something less restrictive than what the federal government has." Whether Walker's proposal is less restrictive than what the federal government has today is a matter of opinion (and we'll explain why later), but we were curious whether Walker's was correct that most of the roughly 2.8 million federal workers do not have collective bargaining rights to negotiate pay and health or pension benefits. We turned first to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) which represents 600,000 federal government workers in 65 agencies, including the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Social Security, and the Environmental Protection Agency. It is the largest federal employee union. It's true, said Beth Moten, legislative and political director for AFGE, that most federal employees don't have collective bargaining rights over pay and benefits. "So what's the point?" Moten asked. "Should employees in Wisconsin be treated as badly as federal employees are?" There are some exceptions to this rule. Air traffic controllers, for example, can bargain over wages under a 1996 law that granted full bargaining rights to a number of federal workers covered under the Federal Aviation Administration, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor expert at Cornell University. Some also point to the U.S. Postal Service, which has nearly 600,000 career employees, most (but not all) of whom have collective bargaining rights for pay and benefits. But theirs is a somewhat different situation. Although the U.S. Postal Service reports to Congress, it is an independent agency of the United States government. Unlike the private sector, explained U.S. Postal Service spokesman Mark Saunders, postal employees cannot strike, nor can management lock them out. Walker said "most" federal employees. And by that measure, he is correct, Bronfenbrenner said. "Unlike all the other state, county and municipal workers in the country who have collective bargaining rights, federal workers have their pay and benefits set by Congress," Brofenbrenner said. "But federal workers can bargain over terms and conditions of employment besides pay and benefits. "This has not created stable labor relations in the public sector by any means," she said. "Instead it has meant that senators and congressional representatives with large numbers of federal employees in their districts end up fighting to have money put into bills for federal workers in their districts the same as if they were lobbying to get money for a large federal contract. Thus, instead of being done in the very open transparent process of state and local public sector bargaining it is all done at a higher level, mostly behind closed doors, but the money still is getting there, just not as equitably as it would if there were collective bargaining." Moten, of the American Federation of Government Employees, also stressed that federal employees do have collective bargaining rights over working conditions. And that's an important right. It affects vacation time, work hours, safety issues -- all sorts of things important to workers. Under Gov. Walker's plan, collective bargaining for state workers would be limited to base pay rate (and raises would generally be limited by the rate of inflation). In a fact-check our colleagues at PolitiFact Wisconsin did regarding limiting labor negotiations to only wages, they quoted Candice Owley, president Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, who said wages are only part of what’s important to nurses when they negotiate with hospitals. "We spend very little time these days on wages and a whole lot of time on working conditions," she said, such as seniority, schedules, the length of shifts, and what happens when a nurse is assigned to a different department. Said Owley: "We bargain every kind of working condition imaginable." Bottom line, negotiations over working conditions are important, and so Walker's larger point -- that he is asking for "something less restrictive than what the federal government has" -- is debatable. But in saying that most federal workers don't have collective bargaining rights to benefits and pay, though, Walker is accurate. Although there are some federal workers who have collective bargaining rights for benefits and pay, "most" do not. And so we rate his comment True.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2011-03-02T10:56:02	2011-02-27	['None']
-pomt-12853	Says North Carolina gives taxpayer dollars to private schools, but "we really don’t know what these schools are doing or how they are performing."	half-true	/north-carolina/statements/2017/feb/02/roy-cooper/nc-gov-roy-cooper-says-private-school-vouchers-lac/	North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper says that even though the state gives millions of dollars to hundreds of private schools, it has no sense of how students at those schools are performing. And the day lawmakers returned to Raleigh to start crafting the state budget, Cooper said he would like to see funding for private school vouchers re-routed to public schools. "I am very concerned and have opposed vouchers because of the lack of accountability," Cooper said at a breakfast with education leaders Wednesday. "We really don’t know what these schools are doing or how they are performing. Instead, we need to invest in our public schools." The state began offering "Opportunity Scholarships" for families to leave public schools for private schools in 2014. In this school year North Carolina will spend $45 million on the program. Legislators plan to triple that in the next decade, to $145 million by 2027. The state’s public school budget in 2015-16, for comparison, was $8.9 billion. Cooper was critical of vouchers throughout his campaign for governor. And he was endorsed by the powerful teachers group N.C. Association of Educators, which also opposes vouchers. But vouchers are popular with supporters of the school choice movement and with Republican politicians, who have the final say in the state budget. What are vouchers? North Carolina allows qualifying parents to receive up to $4,200 annually in state funds per child for private school tuition. It’s one of 13 states (and the District of Columbia) with such a program. Qualifications include being disabled, being from a low-income family, living in a foster home or having a parent in the military. Supporters say it gives many students an option that was previously reserved for wealthier families. Critics question its accountability, or point to the many religious schools that receive taxpayer dollars (which was found constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002). In North Carolina last year, more than 90 percent of voucher money went to Christian or Islamic schools. Regulations and accountability Darrell Allison, president of the pro-voucher Parents For Educational Freedom in North Carolina, said Cooper is wrong. "When you hear critics say ‘They don’t have accountability; they don’t have testing,’ what they're really saying is ‘They don’t have the same accountability and testing,’" Allison said. An expert in education policy agreed with him, at least in part. "There is some accountability attached to the opportunity scholarship program," said UNC-Chapel Hill professor Eric Houck. For instance, every voucher student has to take a standardized test and have the results reported to the state. But Houck said Cooper also has a good argument in his favor, in part because the overall results don’t have to be made public – and many of the traditional accountability measures on public schools don’t apply to voucher schools. "Accountability is a big word," Houck said. "If the governor is talking about accountability in the way that the General Assembly has been talking about accountability since the 1980s, he's right. But there are other ways of defining accountability." Accountability was one factor in a North Carolina Supreme Court case that challenged the constitutionality of the voucher program. The plaintiffs in the case, arguing against vouchers, made a claim similar to the one Cooper is making now. They were backed up by a group of education scholars who filed a brief saying the voucher program "has virtually no accountability system whatsoever." However, the Supreme Court was not swayed by those and other arguments and allowed vouchers to continue. So let’s look at the program as it stands now. Testing Public schools must use standardized tests to gauge if students are at grade level. Private schools only have to give standardized tests to students attending on vouchers. They also must use a nationally standardized test, not a state test. Allison said the state will use the results to measure academic gains or losses of voucher students compared to students from similar backgrounds in public schools. But Houck said due to the differences between the tests we’ll eventually know how voucher students compare to their peers in other states, but not whether they’re reading at North Carolina’s definition of grade level or know the content required of public school students. Performance data The test results must be sent to the state. A legislative committee must then use the data to make recommendations "regarding improving administration and accountability." But the results aren’t automatically made public, as public schools’ test results are. And furthermore the oversight committee isn’t expected to give the General Assembly its 2015-16 report until this fall, Allison said. By that time the legislature will already have approved the state budget for the next two years. So Cooper is correct that state leaders don’t have performance data. It’s also worth noting the data for these few hundred private schools is lagging behind the state’s thousands of public schools, which published their 2015-16 testing data in November 2016. Comparing schools While the statewide data isn’t public, some of the largest individual recipients of vouchers will have to make their performance results public. But the law applies an enrollment cutoff that meant, in 2015-16, that more than 90 percent of the schools were exempt. The opposite is true of the public school system, where almost every school makes its results public. Allison said the cutoff that keeps most individual schools’ results secret is in place to keep from releasing information that might identify individual students. However, public schools use a cutoff of 5 students, while voucher schools use a cutoff of 25. In terms of non-academic accountability, voucher schools also fall short of public schools in several ways. Only three schools that received vouchers in 2015-16 received enough to trigger a financial review. The hundreds of other, unaudited schools accounted for 95 percent of the $25 million spent that year. Public schools also have stricter measures for how much education teachers must have, and for conducting employee background checks. And that’s despite the fact that North Carolina’s public schools received an "F" in a 2016 USA Today report on teacher background checks. Our ruling Cooper said, regarding private schools receiving public funds, "we really don’t know what these schools are doing or how they are performing." While private schools do have much less oversight and accountability than public schools, it isn’t entirely lacking. Schools do have to give voucher students standardized tests and report the results to the state for oversight. But there are many areas in which voucher recipients don’t face the same oversight and public reporting requirements as public schools, or have a lesser standard. We rate this claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/088bcd03-e7cf-4e20-9c7d-690b64ce562e	None	Roy Cooper	None	None	None	2017-02-02T15:16:29	2017-01-25	['None']
-goop-02465	Kris Jenner, Caitlyn Jenner Hooking Up?!	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kris-jenner-hooking-up-caitlyn/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kris Jenner, Caitlyn Jenner Hooking Up?!	4:11 pm, September 13, 2017	None	['Kris_Jenner']
-pomt-13335	Says Philando Castile "had been stopped by police 40 or 50 times before that fatal incident."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/05/tim-kaine/kaine-police-stopped-slain-minnesota-driver-over-4/	Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine brought the tense intersection of law enforcement and race into the center of the vice presidential debate. Kaine accused Pence of being afraid to confront the issue of bias in police, but Pence denied that he was afraid. Kaine pressed the issue with the story of Philando Castile, the Minnesota man shot to death by a police officer during a traffic stop for a broken tail light. The gruesome incident was streamed live on a Facebook video by Castile’s girlfriend. "They called him Mr. Rogers with Dreadlocks in the school that he worked," Kaine said. "The kids loved him. But he had been stopped by police 40 or 50 times before that fatal incident. And if you look at sentencing in this country, African-Americans and Latinos get sentenced for the same crimes at very different rates." We know the larger point Kaine was making and we’ve checked that before (True). But we wanted to vet his number for how many times police stopped Castille. According to the Associated Press, Kaine is correct. The AP reported on June 9, 2016, that Castile "had been pulled over at least 52 times in recent years in and around the Twin Cities and given citations for minor offenses including speeding, driving without a muffler and not wearing a seat belt." The report also found that about half of the charges against Castile had been dismissed. A similar investigation by NPR found 46 stops. And NPR noted "Of all of the stops, only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car — things like speeding or having a broken muffler." Minnesota offers a rare glimpse into broader patterns of law enforcement and race. In 2001, the Legislature commissioned a study by the Institute on Race and Poverty, a center overseen by a University of Minnesota law professor. That study ultimately included 65 jurisdictions. The results published in 2003 showed several disturbing patterns. Law enforcement officers stopped black, Latino, and American Indian drivers at greater rates than whites, searched them at greater rates than whites, but the rate of actually finding illegal goods was less for minorities than for whites. In a press release, the lead study director Gavin Kearney said, "The pattern for blacks and Latinos existed in nearly every participating jurisdiction." Shortly before Castile was shot, he had told the officer that he had a permit to carry a weapon. Our ruling Kaine said Castile was stopped by police 40 or 50 times before the time when he was fatally wounded. According to multiple independent press reports, that is accurate. Police had stopped Castile at least 46 times. A study commissioned by the state legislature found that local police were more likely to stop and search minority drivers. We rate the claim True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/fea7f5b7-a00f-4b1f-a9d7-1b27fc60eda0	None	Tim Kaine	None	None	None	2016-10-05T01:08:57	2016-10-04	['None']
-pomt-07583	Says a Lubbock terror suspect’s alleged plan "to use baby dolls to conceal chemical explosives" is similar to a 1995 plot "to blow up 12 jumbo jets over the Pacific Ocean."	true	/texas/statements/2011/mar/28/michael-mccaul/us-rep-michael-mccaul-says-khalid-ali-m-aldawsari-/	Shortly after a Saudi man who attended college in Lubbock was accused of attempting "to use a weapon of mass destruction," U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, issued a statement about his "likely" connection to an international terrorist network. Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari’s "intent to use baby dolls to conceal chemical explosives is a rare, little-known method used by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef in the 1995 Bojinka plot in which they planned to blow up 12 jumbo jets over the Pacific Ocean," McCaul, a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in his Feb. 28 statement. We won’t rule on Aldawsari’s intent or his guilt — that’s for the court to decide. But we wondered about McCaul’s statement that baby dolls figured into both his case, and the 1995 plot linked to Mohammed, who has described himself as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Yousef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. First, some background on the Aldawsari case: Federal agents arrested the 20-year-old former Texas Tech chemical engineering student on Feb. 23 after a search of his home and computer. According to an Associated Press story, federal authorities said he had purchased explosive materials online and planned to hide them in dolls and baby carriages to blow up dams, nuclear plants and former President George W. Bush's Dallas home. Aldawsari was indicted in federal court on March 9 and if convicted, could be sentenced to life in prison and fined $250,000, according to the AP. He plans to plead not guilty, according to a Feb. 25 New York Times article quoting his lawyer, Rod Hobson. Hobson did not respond to our queries. Responding to our request for more information about the congressman’s claim, McCaul spokesman Mike Rosen sent us a Feb. 23 affidavit submitted by FBI agent Michael Orndorff to secure the arrest warrant for Aldawsari. According to the affidavit, the FBI launched its investigation after the Carolina Biological Supply in North Carolina, suspicious about an attempted purchase of chemicals by Aldawsari, reported him Feb. 1. According to the affidavit, Aldawsari had "made numerous Internet searches related to infants and babies. He viewed photos of realistic-looking newborn and infant dolls. In addition, numerous websites were viewed that are related to baby accessories, including strollers, baby clothes and diapers. Aldawsari also viewed doll photos that appeared to be altered in the neck area, with what may have been a pipe and wires visible." Based on his "training and experience," Orndorff says in the affidavit that he "believes this web activity could indicate Aldawsari’s consideration of the use of a realistic doll to conceal explosives or other weapons." Under a section titled "research of targets by Aldawsari," the affidavit says that on Feb. 6, he e-mailed himself Bush’s Dallas address with the subject line: "tyrant’s house." We contacted the Justice Department for more information about the Aldawsari case. Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the national security division, told us that the agency couldn’t talk to the media about it because the federal judge presiding over the case had issued a gag order. What about the 1995 terrorist plot that McCaul referenced? Did Mohammed and Yousef plan to use baby dolls packed with explosives to blow up planes? Rosen told us that he didn’t have documentation for that part of McCaul’s statement but that McCaul learned about the doll plan while he was serving as chief of counterterrorism in the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of Texas prior to joining Congress. Separately, we found a September 1996 Los Angeles Times news article reporting that a federal jury had found Yousef and two co-defendants guilty of planning to blow up 12 U.S. jetliners over the Pacific. According to a 2006 New York Times story, Yousef worked with Mohammed, his uncle, to hatch the plot. The Times story says: "Mohammed code-named the operation Bojinka, which was widely reported to have been adopted from Serbo-Croatian, meaning big bang. But Mr. Mohammed has told his CIA interrogators interrogators that it was just a ‘nonsense word’ he adopted after hearing it when he was fighting in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviet Union, according to the 9/11 Commission Report." Next, we consulted Stratfor, an Austin-based global intelligence company. According to a September 2009 article on aviation security by Stratfor Vice President Scott Stewart, the Bojinka plot involved using baby dolls to smuggle explosives onto the planes. The article says: "The baby-doll device was successfully smuggled past security (in Manila, Philippines) in a test run in December 1993 and was detonated aboard Philippine Air Flight 434," although it failed to bring the plane down. The Bojinka plot unraveled when Yousef accidentally set his apartment on fire while making another bomb, the Stratfor article says. In a Feb. 24 report, Stratfor said accounts that Aldawsari had "images of dolls apparently manipulated into (explosive devices)" on his computer hearkens back to Yousef’s attempt to use dolls in the Bojinka plot. Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence, was involved in Yousef’s 1995 arrest in Pakistan as a special agent for the U.S. State Department. In a Sept. 17 Web video posted on YouTube, Burton says: "We were able to go in and capture Ramzi Yousef at a hotel and recover a whole bunch of improvised explosive devices that had been made to look like baby doll bombs that he intended to use to blow up airplanes around the world." Yousef is serving a life sentence in maximum-security prison in Colorado, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Mohammed has been held in the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for four 1/2 years, according to a list of detainees on the New York Times. Summing up: An FBI investigation suggests that Aldawsari could have been considering using a doll to conceal explosives in attacks on U.S. targets, including Bush’s Dallas home. Other reports also indicate that Mohammed and Yousef planned to use baby dolls to conceal explosives in a 1995 plot. We rate McCaul’s statement as True.	None	Michael McCaul	None	None	None	2011-03-28T06:00:00	2011-02-28	['None']
-hoer-01003	Fancy a New Range Rover? Me Too, But Liking and Sharing on Facebook Wont Get you One!	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fancy-a-new-range-rover-me-too-but-liking-and-sharing-on-facebook-wont-get-you-one/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Fancy a New Range Rover? Me Too, But Liking and Sharing on Facebook Wont Get you One!	June 16, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-14010	Says he never told anyone he hated the U.S. Senate.	mostly true	/florida/statements/2016/jun/03/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-didnt-say-he-hated-us-senate-was-defin/	Marco Rubio has yet to bow to pressure to reconsider his decision against seeking re-election to the U.S. Senate. But he is pushing back hard against the suggestion that he didn’t like his job in the upper house of Congress. "Flashback to another article quoting a ‘longtime friend’ saying I ‘hate’ Senate. Words I have NEVER said to anyone," Rubio tweeted on May 16, 2016. The tweet linked to a Washington Post article put online on Oct. 25, 2015, that quoted an anonymous Floridian friend of Rubio’s as saying the gridlock in the Senate had worn out the freshman senator. "He hates it," the source said. "I don’t know that ‘hate’ is the right word," Rubio told the newspaper at the time. "I’m frustrated." Rubio described in the story the plodding pace of the Senate after he was elected in 2010. He said he was forced to "slow-dance and wait" for the Senate to gain a majority in 2012 and 2014 in order to accomplish anything. He said he was then told in 2015 that, "We gotta wait to elect the president" to get any bills passed. The story said that was when Rubio essentially gave up on being a senator. But was Rubio correct in tweeting months later that he had never said he hated the Senate? Obviously we can’t check what he may have said in private conversations, so we’ll have to take him at his word there. And we don’t know the name of the source quoted by the Post, so we can’t learn more about that context. But Rubio has made comments that showed he sometimes was less than thrilled about working on Capitol Hill. What Rubio did say Rubio’s disenchantment with the Senate looks to have started early — he told a newspaper he was stymied by his first year in office. Dec. 18, 2011, South Florida Sun Sentinel: "I can't think of a single real high point. By and large, this has been a highly dysfunctional Congress, particularly in the Senate. It seems like the entire year has just been one big staged event, trying to get political advantage in the next election. You look at the major issues facing this country, and few if any of them have been confronted." But it wasn’t until he announced in April 2015 he was running for president and faced criticism for missing a third of his votes that his feelings about the Senate became a subject of discussion. Billionaire Rubio donor Norman Braman, a South Florida auto dealer, told National Review in April 2015 that Rubio was "frustrated with the fact that the Senate doesn’t do anything." And Rubio said on several occasions that he sought the White House because the Senate was ineffectual. Sept. 16, 2015, GOP presidential debate in Simi Valley, Calif.: (Donald Trump said during the debate that Rubio had the "worst voting record there is today," a statement we rated Mostly True.) "I'm proud to serve in the United States Senate. … In my years in the Senate, I've figured out very quickly that the political establishment in Washington, D.C. in both political parties is completely out of touch with the lives of our people. … That's why I'm missing votes. Because I am leaving the Senate, I'm not running for re-election, and I'm running for president because I know this: unless we have the right president, we cannot make America fulfill its potential." Sept. 17, 2015, Fox & Friends: "I’ve never missed a vote where my vote would make a difference. ... So when there’s a vote that’s meaningful and serious, we are there doing our job." Sept. 30, 2015, Hannity: "Yes, I've worked in the Senate for four years, but I'm not of the Senate. I work in the Senate, I’m proud to represent Florida in the Senate. But let’s remember why I went there to begin with. I went to the U.S. Senate because I didn’t like the direction of this country, and I didn’t think either party was doing a good job in that regard. And that’s the same reason why I’m not running for re-election, and instead I’m running for president." Oct. 6, 2015, Today: "The majority of the job of being a senator is not walking on to the Senate floor and lifting your finger on a non-controversial issue and seeing which way you’re going to vote. The majority of the work of a senator is the constituent service to committee work, that continues forward unabated." Oct. 7, 2015, New Hampshire TV interview: "These votes that are happening in the Senate, we’re not going to be able to make a difference unless we have a new president, and a better president and that’s why I’m running for president." Post-Post story The same day the Post article was put online, Rubio addressed his voting record on CNN. He said that Senate votes were effectively pointless. Oct. 25, 2015, State of the Union with Jake Tapper: "I'm not missing votes because I'm on vacation. … I'm running for president so that the votes they take in the Senate are actually meaningful again. A lot of these votes won't mean anything. They're not going to pass, and even if they did, the President would veto it. " The Post story and Rubio’s comments led to an outcry in Florida media, with several outlets criticizing Rubio for not fulfilling his legislative duties. The Sun Sentinel wrote a scathing editorial calling for Rubio to resign, leading to the subject coming up in a debate. At the Oct. 28, 2015, GOP debate in Boulder, Colo., CNBC anchor Carl Quintanilla asked Rubio about the editorial and whether he hated his job. Rubio only called the editorial "evidence of the bias that exists in the American media today." He said prior presidential candidates Barack Obama, John Kerry and Bob Graham all had missed many Senate votes while campaigning for president, a claim we rated True. The issue dogged Rubio through the rest of the campaign. At a Jan. 5, 2016, town hall in Iowa, Rubio again said senators were basically powerless. "I have missed votes this year. You know why? Because while as a senator I can help shape the agenda. Only a president can set the agenda," he said. "We’re not going to fix America with senators and congressmen." He kept up his insistence that only a good executive can help in a Jan. 26 tweet of a campaign ad that said, "Washington is broken and both parties are to blame." Rubio dropped out of the race March 15 after coming in a distant second to Trump in Florida’s GOP primary. A month later, on April 14, Rubio excoriated the Senate in a floor speech for refusing to allow a vote on an amendment he introduced that would have curbed automatic welfare benefits for Cuban refugees. "They’re saying we can't do it, and no one will tell you why we can't do it except some procedural internal Senate thing," Rubio said. "This is ridiculous. This is why people are angry." More recently, after insisting for months Trump would not be the Republican nominee for president, he has pledged support to the real estate mogul. Meanwhile, GOP leaders have started asking him to seek re-election to the Senate in an already crowded Republican field. Our ruling Rubio said he never told anyone he hated the U.S. Senate. Private conversations notwithstanding, we couldn’t find any evidence that he ever used the word "hate" (or any version of it) while discussing the Senate in a public forum. But it’s pretty clear Rubio harbored some disdain for the tedium of the political process, calling the Senate dysfunctional and votes meaningless. The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate his statement Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/3e1ff830-5626-4757-8ba8-c647b39c3557	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2016-06-03T14:03:16	2016-05-16	['None']
-pomt-13264	Says over 90 percent of Travis County’s eligible residents have registered to vote.	true	/texas/statements/2016/oct/14/bruce-elfant/bruce-elfant-says-90-plus-percent-eligible-travis-/	Nearly every voting-eligible Travis County resident ended up registering to vote in advance of the November 2016 elections, a local official declared. Bruce Elfant, the county’s tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, told reporters: "Since the 2012 election, we’ve added over 80,000 registered voters, which helps us get over our 90 percent voter registration goal," set in January 2016. As of Oct. 10, 2016, Elfant specified, his office had counted 713,871 registered voters, which he described as about 89.9 percent of the county’s citizens eligible to vote. At that time, Elfant said, another 11,000 applications had yet to be processed while more applications would come in before the voter registration deadline of Oct. 11. Elfant says he started from federal research Wondering about Elfant’s 90-percent-plus figure, we asked him to share his math. By email, Elfant replied that he started from a U.S. Census Bureau estimate indicating that in 2015, the county was home to 778,077 citizens of voting age and then adjusted that figure to get to an updated estimate. To reach the new estimate, Elfant said, he assumed the number of voting-age citizens in the county increased the same amount from 2015 to 2016 that it did, according to the bureau, from 2014 to 2015--or 18,551. But, he said, he reduced the 18,551 figure to cover just the stretch of 2016 preceding the mid-October registration deadline--getting an estimated gain of 16,232 voting-age citizens. Elfant said he then added the partial-year estimate to the bureau’s 2015 estimate of 778,077 voting-age citizens, reaching his October 2016 estimate of 794,309 voting-age citizens. Finally, Elfant said, he divided the 713,871 people registered to vote in the county as of mid-October 2016 into his estimate of voting-age citizens, getting the 90 percent result. When we heard back from Elfant a couple days later, he said the county’s tally of registered residents had reached 717,694, or 90.4 percent of voting-eligible residents by his analysis. On Oct. 14, 2016, Elfant emailed: "With at least 17,000 voter registrations still unprocessed, it is likely that 91% or even 92% are actually registered to vote but we won’t have a final tally for another week." Census Bureau surveys We sought to check the census bureau figures, hearing back from a bureau spokeswoman, Jewel Jordan, who pointed us to a bureau web page containing Elfant’s cited estimates of voting-age citizens in the county in 2014 and 2015. Jordan said by email the bureau nationally estimates voting-age citizens through its American Community Survey, which in 2015 entailed interviews of residents of more than 2 million U.S. households. Each person’s survey included a request for each resident’s birth date and: "Is the person a citizen of the U.S.?" Outside experts say estimates at play To our inquiries, experts called Elfant’s methodology sound even though he depended on estimated counts of voting-age citizens. Brian W. Smith, a St. Edward’s University political scientist, and James Henson of the University of Texas each pointed out by email that the bureau figures employed by Elfant to reflect citizens eligible to vote are estimates, not to-the-person counts. Smith said that outside of the government’s decennial census, "population surveys are always estimates which include a margin of error. It is not a precise measure because the population is always changing because of deaths, migration, undercounts etc. For example, if Travis County grew at a much faster rate than the estimates, the results could be under 90%, but we cannot be certain," Smith said. That said, Smith wrote, it’s reasonable to speculate that 90 percent of eligible residents has registered because some 86 percent appear to have done so in 2014 and that was a "low salience mid-year election." Smith reached the 86 percent figure by comparing the county’s 655,056 registered voters as of Nov. 4, 2014 to the bureau’s 2014 estimate of 759,526 county residents eligible to vote. Smith elaborated: "The county had two years to increase the voter registered rate by 3.8% and a lot of events in their favor" such as competitive March 2016 party primaries including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as a candidate; an antic general-election campaign period; and a surge in voters registering statewide. Days after Elfant spoke, Texas Secretary of State Carlos Cascos said a record 15 million-plus Texas citizens had registered to vote--or 78 percent of the state’s estimated voting age population of 19.3 million though that count included non-citizens. Peck Young, who oversees the Austin Community College Center for Public Policy & Political Studies, said: "It is clear that this year 90+" percent "of the Citizen Voting Age Population of Travis County has been registered." Texas state official We also asked Alicia Pierce of the secretary of state’s office to assess Elfant’s claim; she emailed us a spreadsheet tallying registered Texas voters by county and showing Travis County with 720,186 registered voters. That count breaks out to 90.7 percent of the county’s citizens eligible to vote as estimated by Elfant. By phone, Pierce advised that the state sticks to calculating registration rates using only voting-age population estimates--rather than working from estimates of citizens of voting age. In part, she said, the agency relies on the less precise metric to ease historical comparisons. The voting-age population estimates, Pierce said, come from the Texas Demographic Center located at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Our ruling Elfant said that over 90 percent of Travis County’s eligible residents registered to vote in advance of the November 2016 elections. Comparing the more than 713,871 voters registered at the time Elfant spoke to the county’s estimated 794,309 voting-age citizens--a figure rooted in 2015 household surveys--gets you to 90 percent. Folding in registrations tallied after Elfant spoke drives the result to a bit more than 90 percent. We rate this claim True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/2e803387-3a35-4bf7-9901-e8025335a28a	None	Bruce Elfant	None	None	None	2016-10-14T16:21:30	2016-10-10	['None']
-chct-00276	FACT CHECK: Did The Clinton-DNC Agreement Only Apply To The General Election?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/11/07/fact-check-did-the-clinton-dnc-agreement-only-apply-to-the-general-election/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	1:03 PM 11/07/2017	None	['None']
-pomt-01584	Obamacare "cuts seniors’ Medicare."	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2014/sep/08/ed-gillespie/gillespie-says-obamacare-cuts-seniors-medicare/	GOP Senate candidate Ed Gillespie says Obamacare won’t help you grow old. "It’s a law that cuts seniors’ Medicare," Gillespie said in a campaign email listing reasons why he opposes the health care law. This is a well-traveled claim that PolitiFact has met frequently over the years. Paul Logan, Gillespie’s campaign spokesman, backed up the statement, in part, with blurbs from fact checks written by our colleagues in two other PolitiFact bureaus. He pointed to a 2013 PolitiFact National article examining a claim by Scott Brown -- the Republican U.S. Senate nominee in New Hampshire -- that Obamacare "raises taxes and cuts Medicare." PolitiFact rated the two-pronged statement Mostly True, saying the law "definitely raises taxes," to help pay for its costs. But our colleagues also said the claim that Obamacare cuts Medicare is a complicated issue that undercut the accuracy of Brown’s full claim. PolitiFact has looked askance at bare statements that Obamacare cuts Medicare, rating them either Half True or Mostly False depending on how they are worded. Obamacare, to help cover its costs, also imposed a series of savings. Among them are measures that will reduce the increase in Medicare by $716 billion from 2013 to 2022, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate. It’s important to note that Medicare spending will continue to rise, but at a slower pace than they it would have without the law. And the savings are focused on lowering payments to hospitals and insurance companies -- not beneficiaries. Gillespie’s says that Obamacare cuts "seniors’ Medicare." That suggests the law isn’t just reducing Medicare spending but is actually slicing Medicare benefits. To support that line of reasoning, Logan pointed to a couple of PolitiFact articles in which experts suggested that the reduced payments the law calls for could affect patients’ access to services. PolitiFact Wisconsin noted in October 2012 concerns that slowing growth in Medicare payments might discourage some health care providers from accepting Medicare patients. One area of concern is the Medicare Advantage program, which is run by private insurers and offers greater benefits than traditional Medicare for things such as dental care, free eye glasses and gym memberships. About 30 percent of the 54 million Medicare beneficiaries in the U.S. are enrolled in those plans, according to Kaiser Family Foundation estimates. Those privately run plans cost more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare, and Obamacare seeks to even out those costs. Some health care analysts have said the law’s Medicare Advantage cost savings might lead to its enrollees’ paying higher premiums or losing some of their extra benefits On the other hand, Gillespie does not mention that the health care law actually adds some new services: It gradually closes that gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage known as the "doughnut hole," funds illness prevention benefits and expands preventative care benefits. Logan also referred us to statements issued by for former U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. In March 2010, Webb said said Obamacare would make "dramatic cuts in Medicare" and lamented the reductions in Medicare Advantage. Here’s a quick note on the timing of Gillespie’s email. Logan told us it was originally sent in January and was resent by the campaign on Aug. 25 after the Daily Press in Newport News -- which published a weekly PolitiFact Virginia digest --signed up recently to get automated email updates from the campaign. "Unless you want to single out that particular signup, it would be more accurate to refer to it as a January email rather than an Aug. 25 email," Logan said. Because the email is part of the campaign’s ongoing communications about Obamacare -- one that the Gillespie campaign feels free to resend -- we think it’s fair to judge it as a current line of attack from Gillespie’s campaign on the law. Our ruling Gillespie says Obamacare "cuts seniors’ Medicare," a statement that implies the law is reducing benefits across the board. There’s debate among analysts over how the law’s cost savings measures will impact some beneficiaries, particularly seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans run by private insurers. Some of those seniors -- who comprise about 30 percent of Medicare recipients -- may lose some of the extra benefits they had before the law or could see higher premiums. Overall, the health care law slows Medicare’s growth, but spending will still rise significantly and some new services for seniors were added. So we rate Gillespie’s statement Mostly False.	None	Ed Gillespie	None	None	None	2014-09-08T10:42:01	2014-08-25	['Medicare_(United_States)']
-pomt-07645	"2008: Unions Spent $400 Million to Elect Obama."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/mar/15/republican-national-committee-republican/rnc-said-unions-raised-400-million-obama-2008/	An ad from the Republican National Committee says that unions that supported President Barack Obama should stop fighting a budget deal in Wisconsin. "Obama and the union bosses are standing in the way of economic reform," the ad says, adding "Stop Obama and his union bosses today." Onscreen, the ad shows the words, "2008: Unions Spent $400 Million to Elect Obama." There’s no doubt that unions strongly supported Obama over Republican John McCain in the last election. But was it to the tune of $400 million? We decided to check it out. The ad cited Politico and the Wall Street Journal as its sources, so that’s where we went first. Both reported in March 2008 that liberal groups said they hoped to raise $400 million to spend in 2008. About $300 million would come from unions, and the rest from non-union advocacy groups, including MoveOn.org, ACORN and Emily’s List. So the part attributed to unions was $300 million, not $400 million. We also noticed that both the Wall Street Journal and Politico repeated the number in other news stories without attributing the information to a specific source. So we started looking around for evidence of whether the unions had succeeded at raising the hundreds of millions they said they would in March 2008. Keep in mind, the most detailed reports mentioned the number as a goal, not an amount that had already been raised. Our attempts at independent confirmation were difficult, because unions do not have to report all of their campaign spending to the Federal Election Commission, according to independent campaign finance experts. The unions do have to report direct contributions to candidates and parties and some of their independent expenditures. But they do not have to report internal communications to membership, and they don’t have to report get-out-the-vote efforts, even if the efforts are focused on heavily Democratic areas. We contacted the staff at the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign spending. They told us that it would be impossible to account for all union spending during the 2008 cycle; the law doesn’t require that level of disclosure. But in the data required to be reported, the center found $75 million in direct contributions from unions and union members to candidates and parties, of which over $68 million went to Democrats. It also found $86 million in outside spending by labor in the 2008 cycle, which largely benefited Democrats. It also identified an additional $52.7 million in spending from labor groups in 527 organizations, tax exempt organizations that seek to influence elections. Add it up, and you get $206.7 million. The $400 million discussed in March might have been aspirational and not actually achieved, said Eric S. Heberlig, a political scientist who studies the labor movement at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. "The pressure to empty their coffers to help Obama out was less when they saw he was easily able to raise that amount of money elsewhere," he said. Indeed, Obama raised an unprecedented amount of cash on his own. Public disclosures showed he raised $745 million, compared with John McCain’s $368 million. The RNC said the unions "spent $400 million to elect Obama." We do want to acknowledge that independent publications have reported that number to be the case. But when we looked into the sources for that number, we found that it was the unions themselves discussing what they hoped to raise in the 2008 election. Furthermore, the reports said they wanted to raise $300 million, not $400 million, and it was a goal, not something they had yet achieved. When we looked at the public disclosures after the election, we found the unions reported $206.7 million in spending for all Democrats. It's clear that the unions raised additional money for get-out-the-vote activities, but we don't know how much more -- nor does the RNC. Finally, all that money went to support Obama and other Democrats, not just Obama alone. In short, we don't see the evidence to support that unions spent $400 million to elect Obama. So we rate the statement False.	None	Republican National Committee	None	None	None	2011-03-15T11:31:02	2011-02-24	['None']
-goop-02477	Pink “Pushed To The Brink” Over Carey Hart’s Drinking?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/pink-drinking-carey-hart-boozing/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Pink “Pushed To The Brink” Over Carey Hart’s Drinking?	10:18 am, September 11, 2017	None	['None']
-hoer-01196	Facebook Page Violation of Terms	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/facebook-page-violation-terms-phishing-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Facebook Page Violation of Terms Phishing Scam	March 4, 2013	None	['None']
-pose-00215	"Will use the power of the presidency to fight for an independent watchdog agency to oversee the investigation of congressional ethics violations so that the public can be assured that ethics complaints will be investigated."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/231/seek-independent-watchdog-agency-to-investigate-co/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Seek independent watchdog agency to investigate congressional ethics violations	2010-01-07T13:26:52	None	['None']
-pomt-12297	"When you throw 23 million people off of health insurance -- people with cancer, people with heart disease, people with diabetes -- thousands of people will die. … This is study after study making this point."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jun/27/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-projection-thousands-added-deaths-g/	During an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., didn’t hold back in his criticism of Republican efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act: He said such legislative efforts will literally be deadly. "What the Republican proposal (in the House) does is throw 23 million Americans off of health insurance," Sanders told host Chuck Todd. "What a part of Harvard University -- the scientists there -- determine is when you throw 23 million people off of health insurance, people with cancer, people with heart disease, people with diabetes, thousands of people will die." Sanders continued, "I wish I didn't have to say it. This is not me. This is study after study making this point. It is common sense." Even if it seems like common sense that insurance would save lives, would it be on the scale of "thousands," as Sanders said? And would legitimate studies show that? Studying the studies When we contacted Sanders’ office, spokesman Josh Miller-Lewis cited two sources. One is the "Harvard study" Sanders mentioned -- published on June 22, 2017, by the liberal Center for American Progress. It was co-authored by a Harvard professor of social epidemiology; two medical students who graduated from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and two policy specialists at the Center for American Progress. To come up with their estimates, the authors of the Harvard-Center for American Progress report adapted the results of a peer-reviewed 2014 study of the Massachusetts state health care law -- a law that was a model for the Affordable Care Act. The 2014 study was lead-authored by Harvard professor Benjamin D. Sommers. The Harvard-Center for American Progress study projected that there would be one excess death for every 830 people who lose coverage as a result of the AHCA. Using Congressional Budget Office projections of the impact of the House version of the bill, the authors estimated an additional 217,000 deaths over the next decade, or 21,700 per year. The second piece of evidence Sanders’ office cited was an op-ed by yet more health policy specialists who are affiliated with Harvard -- David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, who are professors of public health at Hunter College-City University of New York as well as lecturers at Harvard Medical School. The op-ed -- published on Jan. 23, 2017, well before either chamber’s Republican health care bill was introduced -- used as its basis a different study lead-authored by Sommers. This 2012 study tracked what happened after states expanded Medicaid. Adapting the findings of the 2012 study to a scenario in which 20 million Americans lost coverage -- which turned out to be lower than what the CBO found for the House bill -- Himmelstein and Woolhandler estimated that there would be 43,956 deaths annually due to the GOP’s health policy changes. It’s worth noting, however, that both of these projections come from the ideological left. As we noted, the Center for American Progress is a liberal think tank. And Himmelstein and Woolhandler are founders of Physicians for a National Health Program, a group that advocates for single-payer national health insurance -- a proposal that is even further to the left than the Affordable Care Act. So can Sanders’ assertion be supported by the peer-reviewed literature alone? What prior studies say In our previous fact-checking of this issue, we found at least seven academic papers that detected a link between securing health insurance and a decline in mortality. Here’s a rundown. • In 2002, a panel of more than a dozen medical specialists convened by the federally chartered Institute of Medicine estimated that 18,000 Americans had died in 2000 because they were uninsured. In January 2008, Stan Dorn, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, published a paper that sought to update the IOM study with newer data. Replicating the study’s methodology, Dorn concluded that the figure should be increased to 22,000. • A 2009 American Journal of Public Health study concluded that a lack of health insurance "is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths in the United States, more than those caused by kidney disease." • Three studies looked at state-level expansions of Medicaid and in each case found "significant" improvements in mortality after such expansions of coverage. These include a 2012 New England Journal of Medicine study of New York, Maine, and Arizona by Harvard researchers, and a 2014 study of Massachusetts by researchers from Harvard and the Urban Institute. (These were the two articles that formed the basis of the analyses cited by Sanders’ staff.) • A 2014 study published by the blog of the health policy publication Health Affairs looked at states that, at the time, had declined to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. It estimated that the 25 states studied would have collectively avoided between 7,000 and 17,000 deaths. • A 2014 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found improved survival rates for young adults with cancer after securing insurance under the Affordable Care Act. • A 2017 study in the journal Medical Care looked at a provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows young adults to be covered under a parent’s policy. The study found a decline in mortality among this population from diseases amenable to preventive treatment. (Mortality from trauma, such as car accidents, saw no decrease, as would be expected.) We found two papers with results that were more equivocal. • A paper published in April 2009 in HSR: Health Services Research. In it, Richard Kronick of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California (San Diego) School of Medicine, raised questions about the conclusions of the seminal Institute of Medicine study from 2002. Kronick’s study adjusted the data -- as the IOM had not -- for a number of demographic and health factors, including status as a smoker and body mass index, and found that doing so removed the excess number of deaths found in the original study. • A 2013 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine co-authored by Katherine Baicker of Harvard University compared about 6,000 patients in Oregon who got coverage through a 2008 Medicaid expansion and about 6,000 who didn’t. While the study found improvements in out-of-pocket medical spending and lower rates of depression among those who got coverage, key benchmarks for physical health -- including blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar -- did not improve in such patients. But even the two lead authors of the more equivocal studies have told us that the scholarly record demonstrates that having health insurance saves lives, and that not having insurance can lead to additional deaths. We asked several of the authors of these papers whether they believe Sanders’ assertion of "thousands" of deaths is generally supported by the scholarly evidence. We heard back from three of them. " ‘Thousands’ is completely fair," Dorn said. Baicker agreed. "It is of course difficult to pin down an exact number of deaths that would be caused by a specific new policy," she said. "But a number like ‘thousands’ does not seem unreasonable, based on the available evidence." And Sommers -- whose work formed the indirect basis of the studies cited by Sanders -- concurred. "I agree that it’s challenging to pin down an exact number on this," Sommers said. But overall, the academic evidence "certainly gets you into the range of thousands of deaths per year." Our ruling Sanders said, "When you throw 23 million people off of health insurance -- people with cancer, people with heart disease, people with diabetes -- thousands of people will die. … This is study after study making this point." Sanders’ statement on Meet the Press was phrased generally enough to be defensible. We found ample evidence in the academic literature to suggest that legislation on the scale of the House bill would produce "thousands’ of additional deaths. That said, we can’t say with any specificity how many deaths will occur. It’s important to note that the studies provide estimates only, and each study found a slightly different result. On balance, we rate the statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2017-06-27T12:17:30	2017-06-25	['None']
-bove-00287	Fake News Police: ‘Firdaus We Ascend’ Islamic State WhatsApp Hoax Goes Viral	none	https://www.boomlive.in/fake-news-police-whatsapp-message-islamic-state-group-fake/	None	None	None	None	None	Fake News Police: ‘Firdaus We Ascend’ Islamic State WhatsApp Hoax Goes Viral	Apr 12 2017 7:52 pm, Last Updated: Apr 18 2017 6:01 pm	None	['None']
-vogo-00378	Statement: “It was just after midday in San Diego, California, when the disruption started. In the tower at the airport, air-traffic controllers peered at their monitors only to find that their system for tracking incoming planes was malfunctioning. At the Naval Medical Center, emergency pagers used for summoning doctors stopped working. Chaos threatened in the busy harbour, too, after the traffic-management system used for guiding boats failed. On the streets, people reaching for their cellphones found they had no signal and bank customers trying to withdraw cash from local ATMs were refused,” New Scientist magazine wrote March 6, 2011.	determination: misleading	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-mysterious-outage-unleashes-s-d-chaos/	Analysis: New Scientist, a magazine based in Great Britain, seemed to have uncovered a major incident in San Diego, one that received no local media attention at the time. According to the magazine, a global positioning system outage happened because the Navy accidentally jammed GPS signals in downtown San Diego.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Mysterious Outage Unleashes S.D. Chaos?	June 10, 2011	None	['San_Diego', 'California', 'New_Scientist', 'Walter_Reed_National_Military_Medical_Center']
-snes-06217	Legislation passed by the U.S. government allows horses to be slaughtered for food in that country.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/horse-of-a-diffident-choler/	None	Critter Country	None	David Mikkelson	None	Horse Slaughter for Food	30 November 2011	None	['United_States']
-goop-01351	Julia Roberts Snubbing “Pretty Woman” Musical?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/julia-roberts-pretty-woman-musical-broadway-snub-false/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Julia Roberts Snubbing “Pretty Woman” Musical?	5:50 pm, March 20, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-06027	Bananas on a fishing boat are unlucky.	legend	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/banana-ban/	None	Superstition	None	David Mikkelson	None	‘Bananas on a Boat’ Superstition	13 November 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-14495	Says Ted Cruz "said I was in favor in Libya. I never discussed that subject."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/25/donald-trump/donald-trumps-pants-fire-claim-he-never-discussed-/	At the GOP debate in Houston, Donald Trump pushed back at a claim from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that Trump was in favor of the United States helping Libyans oust dictator Muammar Gaddafi. "He said I was in favor in Libya," Trump said, sounding perplexed. "I never discussed that subject. I was in favor of Libya? We would be so much better off if Gaddafi would be in charge right now." Oh, Trump discussed it. And thanks to BuzzFeed, we have the video. (All the hat tips to Andrew Kaczynski.) It comes from 2011, on Trump’s video blog. "I can’t believe what our country is doing," Trump said, according to a BuzzFeed transcript. "Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: It’s a carnage." Trump continued. "You talk about things that have happened in history; this could be one of the worst," Trump said. "Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives. This is absolutely nuts. We don’t want to get involved and you’re gonna end up with something like you’ve never seen before." And then ... "But we have go in to save these lives; these people are being slaughtered like animals," Trump said. "It’s horrible what’s going on; it has to be stopped. We should do on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives." The U.S. military, working with NATO, spent about $2 billion and several months backing the Libyan uprising against Gaddafi, who had held power for decades. The uprising -- part of the Arab Spring -- toppled Gaddafi in August 2011, and rebel forces killed him the following October. Our ruling Trump tried to claim during the Houston debate that he never discussed supporting U.S. intervention in Libya. That’s patently inaccurate, as Trump’s own words show. This claim rates Pants on Fire!	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-02-25T23:05:23	2016-02-25	['Ted_Cruz', 'Libya']
-pomt-04806	"Days after the (Osama bin Laden) raid, Hollywood was invited into the White House so that they could receive a briefing" that revealed intelligence sources and methods.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/20/special-operations-opsec-education-fund/group-says-obama-revealed-secret-information-holl/	A new group of former special forces soldiers and CIA officers has produced a video that accuses Barack Obama of revealing sensitive intelligence information for cheap political gain. Calling itself Special Operations OPSEC (short for Operations Security), the group’s 20-minute video spends a great deal of time on the administration’s actions after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The group says it favors no candidate, but the frequent images of Obama (each time they say the word 'politician') leave no doubt that he is the target. At one point, a voice says, "The politicians turned that victory into an intelligence disaster." Among other failings, the video says the release of operational details of the raid would tip off the enemy and make future missions more risky. Fred Rustman, a retired CIA officer, voices particular disdain for the access granted to filmmakers who moved quickly to turn the raid into a movie. "Days after the raid, Hollywood was invited into the White House so that they could receive a briefing on exactly how the raid took place," Rustman says. "What kind of sources we had. What kind of methods we used. All for the purpose of making a Hollywood movie." As Rustman speaks, there’s a picture of a cheerful Obama standing at the front of the White House theater entertaining a group of smiling celebrities. For this fact-check, we'll explore whether it's true that the White House invited the filmmakers to a special briefing about the raid that revealed intelligence sources and methods. The movie in question is Zero Dark Thirty, which is scheduled for release in December and is billed as "The story you think you know … this is how it happened." The Hollywood connection The filmmakers, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, had been working on a bin Laden film before he was killed. Obama announced the death of bin Laden on May 1, 2011. Less than three weeks later, Boal met with two people at the CIA, the chief of staff and the director of public affairs. We know this, and many other details of Boal’s dealings with Washington insiders, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, a conservative organization that often sues to get access to government documents. Judicial Watch unearthed a trove of emails and other documents. They don’t necessarily prove the point made by the OPSEC group, but they show how a well-connected writer with battlefield experience was able to move with great speed and get at least some cooperation from the nation’s defense and national security agencies. And they reveal the thinking of the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House, as officials decided how they would deal with filmmakers working on a story the officials wanted to see told. Many people in those agencies already knew Boal -- or at least knew of him. He and Bigelow had won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker, the story of bomb disposal experts in Iraq. It was based on Boal’s time as a reporter for Playboy when he was embedded with U.S. forces in 2004. On May 1, Boal and Bigelow had begun shooting a movie about the 2001 battle at Tora Bora and the hunt for bin Laden. They pivoted quickly to make the movie about the final raid. By June 6, Boal had spent two hours at the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center. A CIA public affairs officer encouraged others to cooperate, saying, "As he did with The Hurt Locker, he’s very concerned about operational security and will take any of our concerns into account." So from the start, that begins to contradict the group's claim that sensitive sources and methods were revealed. On June 9, a Pentagon staffer made exactly the same point in an email to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Michael Vickers. A few days later, Vickers sent an email to the Pentagon’s head of public affairs to make sure everyone was on the same page. He notes, "At the direction of Director (Leon) Panetta, CIA is cooperating fully (not, obviously, giving away anything they shouldn't, but answering questions, such as 'How did you feel at that point'?)" That email reveals a Pentagon very intrigued with this project. Vickers wrote that he spoke to Adm. Eric Olson, a Navy SEAL who rose to become commander of the Special Operations Command, which oversees the SEALs and other special forces. "They are thinking it over," Vickers writes. "They would like to shape the story to prevent any gross inaccuracies, but do not want to make it look like the commanders think it's okay to talk to the media. They may want to offer up an (Team) 6 SEAL, who played a key planning role and knows the operators and story well." The potential offer to speak to a Navy SEAL planner is critical. It would represent extraordinary access for the filmmakers, but that access didn’t start with the White House. It started at the top of the military, and the Navy SEALs themselves. On June 15, two emails moved through the bureaucracy. One came from a key aide to Vickers who aimed to clamp down on leaks to the press about the bin Laden operation. All contacts had to be approved. "Even the simplest of comments, taken out of context or as an accumulation of information, can be extremely damaging to OPSEC," the aide wrote. (In this reference, "OPSEC" is referring to actual operations security, not the group running the video against Obama.) That same day, Douglas Wilson, the Pentagon’s head of public affairs moved to put Boal and Bigelow in a very different category from the others seeking access. He sent an email to the one of the White House deputy national security advisers and spoke highly of the filmmakers and the trust they enjoyed around the CIA and the Pentagon. He noted that Defense Secretary Robert Gates admired their work. He asked for guidance on what to do next and suggested a phone call that included the president’s head of counterterrorism. Boal had worked his way from the CIA, to the Pentagon and now got at least some cooperation with the White House. We checked the White House visitor log and found that Boal had meetings there on June 30 and July 2, 2011. A later memo quotes Boal saying he "spoke to the WH and had a good meeting with Brennan and McDonough." This likely refers to John O. Brennan, chief counterterrorism advisor and Denis McDonough, deputy national security advisor at the White House. The emails show the filmmakers spent time in "the vault," a room in the CIA building where some of the tactical planning for the raid took place. The emails also show the Pentagon’s head of public affairs trying to arrange to have a drink with the filmmakers at Ris, an upscale restaurant in Washington adjacent to the Ritz-Carlton hotel. The emails also have references to Boal’s dinners with CIA Director Panetta. Meeting with a SEAL? A telling meeting took place between the filmmakers and Vickers. In a transcript from July 15, Vickers offered the filmmakers a chance to talk to a Navy SEAL tactician. The dialogue is intriguing: Vickers: "Well the basic idea is they'll make a guy available who was involved from the beginning as a planner; a SEAL Team 6 Operator and Commander." Boal: "Are you talking about [name redacted]?" Vickers: "A guy named [redacted]. And so he basically can give you everything you would want or would get from Adm. Olson or Adm. McRaven." Boal: "That’s dynamite." Bigelow: "That’s incredible." Tom Fitton, head of Judicial Watch, called naming a Team 6 member "an egregious breach of public trust" and "a violation of any sensible effort to protect the names of those who participated in the raid." For Fitton, this leaves "no doubt it was a PR push and that involved access to the planner." But it is interesting that Boal already knew or at least thought he knew a SEAL Team 6 member. We should also note that while Vickers made the offer, the Pentagon later withdrew it, and according to the department’s assistant press secretary Carl Woog, the interview never took place. Woog emphasized that "the department has repeatedly stated, and the secretary has testified, that no classified information was presented to the producers." The National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor, told us the individual was a planner, not an actual member of SEAL Team 6. As for the filmmakers’ access to high-level officials at the White House, Vietor said the nature of the raid made that necessary. "Very few people were part of that decision-making process," Vietor said. "So we tried to make some of those individuals available to journalists, authors and filmmakers to help them understand the process and the president’s thinking." The claim and the facts The OPSEC group's video paints a picture of an administration eager to claim glory and willing to reveal sensitive operational details to Hollywood producers. The image of Obama in the White House theater suggests the president himself regaled his visitors from Hollywood with the story of the raid. But we find the video is very misleading, suggesting Obama himself took part when there is no evidence of that. The photo comes from an event a year earlier when the president had a special screening of a television mini-series celebrating the American soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater during World War II. The OPSEC group claims that sources and methods were revealed, but we see no proof of that. The internal emails at the CIA and Defense department emphasized that officials would not share anything that might jeopardize future missions. They knew Boal and Bigelow and judged that they had proven they could be trusted. One email says Boal promised to provide officials with the screenplay for their vetting. Still, approval for the filmmakers’ interviews did come from the very top. The first to engage was Panetta, then-director of the CIA. The final approval came from the national security advisers in the White House. It is worth noting that the Pentagon has decades of experience of working with filmmakers. During the Iraq War, defense officials in the George W. Bush administration played a major role in making a movie about the mission to rescue Army soldier Jessica Lynch, who was captured by an Iraqi unit. In particular, the Pentagon has been generous in sharing many details about the methods of the Navy SEALs and their counter-terrorism methods. In an effort to boost recruitment, the Navy’s Special Warfare Command commissioned the feature film Act of Valor, which used actual SEALs as actors and was based on real-life missions. Our ruling The Web video by the group Special Operations OPSEC says "Days after the (Osama bin Laden) raid, Hollywood was invited into the White House so that they could receive a briefing" that revealed intelligence sources and methods. There is an element of truth to the claim because the producers did indeed visit the White House, met with national security officials and clearly got some cooperation from top brass at the Pentagon and CIA. However, we find no evidence for the main point of the claim, that the Obama administration engineered this and revealed intelligence sources and sensitive methods. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund	None	None	None	2012-08-20T14:49:28	2012-08-15	['White_House', 'Osama_bin_Laden']
-snes-01903	A U.S. War Department film from the 1940s warns Americans that political rhetoric condemning minorities and foreigners is a precursor to fascist movements like Nazism.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dont-be-a-sucker-film/	None	History	None	David Emery	None	Did a 1940s U.S. War Department Film Compare Anti-Minority Hate Speech to Nazi Propaganda?	14 August 2017	None	['United_States', 'Nazism', 'United_States_Department_of_War']
-snes-00243	John F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote in 1999 that Donald Trump would be "would be an unstoppable force for ultimate justice.'	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jfk-jr-trump-unstoppable/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did JFK Jr. Write in 1999 That Trump ‘Would Be an Unstoppable Force for Ultimate Justice’?	23 July 2018	None	['Donald_Trump', 'John_F._Kennedy']
-snes-05713	Two people in Florida were arrested for selling golden tickets to heaven.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/golden-ticket-arrest/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Was a Couple Arrested for Selling Golden Tickets to Heaven?	2 April 2015	None	['None']
-tron-01764	The Slavery Tax Refund	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/slaverytaxrefund/	None	government	None	None	None	The Slavery Tax Refund	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-03509	How Did Black Friday Get Its Name?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/black-friday-2/	None	Holidays	None	David Mikkelson	None	How Did ‘Black Friday’ Get Its Name?	1 December 2013	None	['None']
-snes-03556	Former Monty Python member John Cleese penned a satirical piece announcing the revocation of America's independence for failure to elect a competent president.	misattributed	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/revocation-of-independence/	None	Soapbox	None	David Mikkelson	None	John Cleese’s Letter to the USA	21 April 2003	None	['United_States', 'John_Cleese', 'Monty_Python']
-snes-00601	A photograph captures undocumented immigrants lining up to vote in Battsville, Arizona.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/illegals-lining-vote-battsville-arizona/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Are ‘Illegals’ Lining Up to Vote in Battsville, Arizona?	14 May 2018	None	['Arizona']
-pomt-01500	Social Security and Medicare are "a Ponzi scheme."	false	/florida/statements/2014/sep/24/carlos-curbelo/nod-rick-perry-carlos-curbelo-calls-social-securit/	Congressional candidate Carlos Curbelo sided with Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s depiction of Social Security and Medicare as a "Ponzi scheme" in a talk with college Republicans. "I speak about both of these programs as one because they both suffer from the same long-term insolvency, meaning that they won't be around for us, meaning that we're paying into a system that, you know, is a Ponzi scheme," he told college students at George Washington University in Washington on Sept. 18 . "Rick Perry said that. That's one of the few things I think Rick Perry contributed when he ran for president last time -- and I worked for him, so I can say that." The Miami Herald’s Naked Politics blog wrote about Curbelo’s comments captured by a tracker when he was in Washington fundraising. (Many of the students who heard Curbelo speak are from Florida.) Curbelo faces U.S. Rep. Joe Garcia, D-Miami, in a district that includes many seniors from Miami to Key West so his comments drew a lot of attention. PolitiFact has rated several claims about whether Social Security is a Ponzi scheme including two we rated False by Perry leading up to the 2012 presidential election. We found some similar problems with Curbelo’s claim about Medicare. Social Security differs from Ponzi schemes We asked Curbelo’s campaign spokesman for evidence showing the programs are Ponzi schemes. Wadi Gaitan emailed us a statement that Curbelo was using "a figure of speech" and wants to preserve the programs for current and future generations. He provided no evidence that the programs are Ponzi schemes. Curbelo has made some broad suggestions for reform, including indexing benefits to life expectancy, (which already happens in part in Medicare) and changing how the cost of living adjustment is calculated. But first, what is a Ponzi scheme? The term originates with Charles Ponzi, a Boston swindler who conned investors out of millions in 1920 by promising returns of up to 100 percent in 90 days on investments in foreign postal coupons. After first-round investors harvested those profits, others flocked to Ponzi, unaware his "profits" consisted of money paid in by other investors. That strategy is unsustainable. In contrast, Social Security is more like a "pay-as-you-go" system transferring payroll tax payments by workers to retirees. A 2009 Social Security Administration online post stated: "The American Social Security system has been in continuous successful operation since 1935. Charles Ponzi's scheme lasted barely 200 days." Mitchell Zuckoff, a Boston University journalism professor who has written a book on Ponzi, noted three critical dissimilarities between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme. We will summarize Zuckoff’s comments from an earlier fact-check: • "First, in the case of Social Security, no one is being misled," Zuckoff wrote in a January 2009 article in Fortune. "Social Security is exactly what it claims to be: A mandatory transfer payment system under which current workers are taxed on their incomes to pay benefits, with no promises of huge returns." • Second, he wrote, "A Ponzi scheme is unsustainable because the number of potential investors is eventually exhausted." While Social Security faces a huge burden due to retiring Baby Boomers, it can be and has been tweaked, and "the government could change benefit formulas or take other steps, like increasing taxes, to keep the system from failing." • Third, Zuckoff wrote, "Social Security is morally the polar opposite of a Ponzi scheme. ... At the height of the Great Depression, our society (see 'Social') resolved to create a safety net (see 'Security') in the form of a social insurance policy that would pay modest benefits to retirees, the disabled and the survivors of deceased workers. By design, that means a certain amount of wealth transfer, with richer workers subsidizing poorer ones. That might rankle, but it's not fraud." Michael Tanner, an expert on Social Security at the libertarian Cato Institute says that Social Security and Ponzi schemes share some characteristics -- for example, in the early stages there is a huge windfall while those later on get smaller returns. However, Ponzi didn’t have the power of the federal government. "In the end the Ponzi scheme collapses and can’t make people continue to give him money, but Social Security can always force people to pay," Tanner said. "In theory Social Security can always go out and raise taxes to keep benefits flowing." Medicare Medicare, which pays for medical care for senior citizens, as well as for younger people with certain disabilities, covers 51 million people. (You can read more detail in a fact-check of U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan’s claim that Medicare is going broke which PolitiFact Wisconsin rated Mostly False.) Medicare has two main components and they are funded differently. The primary source of financing for Part A, Hospital Insurance, is the FICA payroll withholding. In other words, it’s pay-as-you-go: the contributions of current workers (and their employers) finance the care for current beneficiaries. Most of the costs for Part B, which helps pay for doctor, outpatient and other services, are covered by the government’s general fund and, to a lesser extent, premiums paid by beneficiaries. Part B also has a trust fund, but it’s different from Part A in that whenever expenditures exceed revenue, the difference is automatically covered by transfers from the general fund. There is also a Part C -- Medicare Advantage, which is a private-insurance alternative to Part A and has no trust fund. And there is Part D, a prescription drug benefit included in Part B. Both Social Security and Medicare face a huge burden in the future and are susceptible to problematic demographic trends as the number of workers supporting every retiree has declined dramatically over decades. However, budget experts say neither are Ponzi schemes. The programs face shortfalls in part because the number of new workers paying into the system grows more slowly than seniors receiving benefits. But both programs get funds from general revenues to bridge the gap, said Edward Lorenzen, senior advisor at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. "While a Ponzi scheme is by its nature inherently unsustainable, the Medicare and Social Security programs can be made sustainable with changes in benefits and taxes," Lorenzen said. However, "the longer we wait to make those changes, the magnitude of the changes that will need to be made will be greater." Josh Gordon, policy director at the Concord Coalition, a group that advocates for balanced budgets, said. "The only difference with Medicare is that on its face it is even less ‘like’ a Ponzi scheme because for Medicare part B and D the system is designed to have general revenues (not dedicated taxes) pay for 75 percent of costs -- just like any other government program is paid for by the general revenue pool." Our ruling Curbelo said that Social Security and Medicare are "a Ponzi scheme." A Ponzi scheme is by definition an illegal crime and an unsustainable set-up that crashes very quickly. Social Security and Medicare, which have been around for decades, are not criminal schemes. Both programs face the massive challenge of fewer workers paying for the benefits of current retirees, and budget experts say Congress could make changes to make them more sustainable in the future -- though many politicians are reluctant to gamble with the support of current senior voters. Curbelo raises a legitimate point about the need for reform, but that’s entirely different than calling these programs "Ponzi schemes." We rate this claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/d7b36257-5440-4096-9e67-6efaaec92f5b	None	Carlos Curbelo	None	None	None	2014-09-24T11:47:28	2014-09-18	['None']
-tron-02055	The weight of a prayer	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/weightofaprayer/	None	inspirational	None	None	None	The weight of a prayer	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-02237	VA Destroyed Records to Reduce Backlog	disputed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/va-system-redesign/	None	medical	None	None	None	VA Destroyed Records to Reduce Backlog	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-14755	"Three or four countries" out of roughly 60 in the anti-ISIS coalition "are providing military force."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/13/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-appears-right-only-3-or-4-countries-ar/	The United States has taken a leading role in the military fight against ISIS. But how much help is the U.S. getting from its allies? According to Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, not enough. "Listen, I mean, there's three or four countries that are providing military force. And the rest are signed on on paper but are not contributing significantly to the cause," Rubio said in a Dec. 12 interview for NBC’s Meet the Press. "The truth is the most important countries that need to be contributing, including men on the ground to fight, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, other Gulf kingdoms, are not." We decided to look at whether Rubio is correct that only "three or four countries" out of more than 60 in the anti-ISIS coalition "are providing military force." We previously fact-checked a statement by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders that focused specifically on Saudi Arabia’s efforts in the fight against ISIS. He said, "Instead of fighting ISIS, (the Saudis) have focused more on a campaign to oust Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen." We rated that True, noting that since September 2014, Saudi Arabia has deployed just four F-15 fighter jets and an unspecified number of Typhoon combat jets against ISIS. (Saudi state media trumpeted the participation, releasing photos of pilots who flew in the strikes and highlighting that the son of King Salman was among them.) Rubio’s statement is more broad. To get a sense of the bigger picture, we looked at data compiled by a group called Airwars.org, which tracks the international air war against ISIS using information released by the U.S. military and other sources, including coalition nations. Clearly, the United States has been doing the vast majority of operations against ISIS in Syria and the lion’s share in Iraq. In the most recent month, other allies have accounted for just 6 percent of the airstrikes in Syria and 30 percent in Iraq. Such data is consistent with Rubio’s statement, though determining the exact number of U.S. allies taking a significant role in "providing military force" is tricky due to a lack of transparency among some of the countries that belong to the coalition. The Pentagon only publicly breaks down the data into U.S. and non-U.S. strikes in Syria and Iraq — not further by individual nation. In Syria, the list of U.S. partners has included Australia, Bahrain, Canada, France, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, while in Iraq the list has included Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, said David Weinberg a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "However, some of those are only symbolic or largely out of date," Weinberg said. Weinberg pointed out a recent CNN report that quoted a U.S. military official as saying the Saudis and Emiratis are only launching about a strike a month, Bahrain hasn't dropped an airstrike since sometime in the autumn, and Jordan hasn't done so since August. Weinberg added that Canada "has been in the process of pulling out, Belgium suspended its strikes in July for some time, and Denmark suspended its involvement from September 2015 until sometime mid-next year." The non-U.S. countries with the best case for having taken a "serious" role in the air war, he said, include France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Australia. Based on media reports and other evidence he’s pieced together, each has conducted more than 1,000 sorties against ISIS, or several hundred air strikes. Most of these have been in Iraq rather than Syria, he said. The only additional countries that might qualify for this most-active category are Canada and Turkey, but both of these countries come with asterisks. In Canada, the newly elected government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged during the campaign to terminate its involvement in anti-ISIS airstrikes, though it’s unclear whether that phase-down has been fully carried out. As for Turkey, it has been launching a large number of airstrikes in Syria since the summer, but many of those were against Kurdish rebels and not against the Islamic State, Weinberg said. Chris Woods, the director of Airwars.org, cautioned that some other members of the broader coalition, including some with only modest militaries, have been providing auxiliary assistance that may technically fall beyond Rubio’s definition but are nonetheless valuable to U.S. interests. "Italy provides vital in-air refueling for strike aircraft, for example, while Germany has just committed six Tornados for valuable aerial reconnaissance," Woods said. "At sea, the Belgians are helping protect the French carrier Charles de Gaulle. And on the ground, a significant number of nations, such as New Zealand and Portugal, are helping train Iraqi forces." To read more, see this summary from the Pentagon. Woods added that allied strikes have risen over time. Woods said there were more non-U.S. strikes in Syria between Nov. ,30 and Dec. 6 — 19 strikes — than in any week in the preceding year. By comparison, he said, there were 50 U.S.-only strikes in Syria that week. It’s also worth noting that Russia has been increasingly active in the air war, though it isn’t a member of the U.S.-led coalition. In addition, the extent to which it’s targeting ISIS rather than opponents of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is unclear. Putting it all together, Weinberg said, "it's true that a only a handful of countries other than the United States are launching airstrikes in Syria and Iraq on any sort of significant scale, but it's extremely hard to confirm for certain whether it's precisely only three or four at the current moment." Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and head of its Intelligence Project, agreed. Rubio’s statement, he said, "is correct if the question is who is putting boots on the ground or air power in Iraq and Syria against ISIS." Our ruling Rubio said that only "three or four countries" out of roughly 60 in the anti-ISIS coalition "are providing military force." The available government data and media reports suggest that Rubio is close to accurate. However, a lack of transparency in the operational data leaves a measure of doubt, and stating it the way he did glosses over the contributions from other nations that are taking important support roles even if they aren’t contributing much in the way of airstrikes. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2015-12-13T09:42:30	2015-12-13	['None']
-snes-04717	Donald Trump stated he would declare war on Americans or people inside the U.S. if elected President.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-plans-to-declare-war-on-americans/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Donald Trump Plans to Declare War on Americans?	24 May 2016	None	['United_States', 'Donald_Trump']
-snes-02648	There is a proven natural cure for cancer called sour honey, but pharmaceutical companies and politicians are trying to keep it under wraps for financial gain.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sour-honey-cure-cancer/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	“Sour Honey’ is a Cure for Cancer?	10 April 2017	None	['None']
-snes-05132	Thieves can obtain your home address, banking details, e-mail address, phone number, and other personal details from discarded boarding passes.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/never-throw-boarding-pass/	None	Crime	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Is Discarding Your Boarding Pass Dangerous?	2 March 2016	None	['None']
-snes-04327	A photograph shows the Clintons posing with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clintons-arafat/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	For All Jews Voting for Hillary	2 August 2016	None	['Yasser_Arafat', 'Bill_Clinton', 'State_of_Palestine']
-tron-03475	Saturn Will Be Closest to Earth in May than Ever Before	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/saturn-will-closest-earth-may-ever/	None	space-aviation	None	None	None	Saturn Will Be Closest to Earth in May than Ever Before	Apr 27, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-06069	An inattentive janitor caused several deaths in a hospital when he disconnected patients' life support systems to plug in a floor polisher.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/polished-off/	None	Horrors	None	Snopes Staff	None	Floor Polisher Hospital Deaths	16 January 2001	None	['None']
-pomt-09039	John McCain "began his career in Washington as a lobbyist when he was appointed in 1976 as the Navy's liaison to the United States Senate."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/05/jd-hayworth/hayworth-claims-mccain-was-lobbyist-too-us-navy/	The primary isn't until Aug. 24, 2010, but the two Republicans facing off in this fall's U.S. Senate race -- John McCain, the incumbent, and J.D. Hayworth, the former House member who's challenging him -- are already engaged in bare-knuckled combat in their campaign ads. It all began in June, when McCain produced an ad that hits Hayworth for serving as a lobbyist. "J.D. Hayworth says he's an outsider, but after he was voted out of Congress he became a registered lobbyist," the narrator intones in the McCain ad. "Hayworth was paid thousands by a Florida corporation to lobby the very committee he used to serve on." When we analyzed the ad, we found disclosure forms filed with Congress that confirmed that Hayworth served as a lobbyist, so we ruled the statement True. In response, the Hayworth camp tried to label McCain as a onetime lobbyist, too -- a charge that McCain proceeded to attack in a second ad. In this item, we'll check the charge made by the Hayworth camp that was cited in McCain's second ad. McCain's second ad revolves around footage showing an unnamed Hayworth spokesman saying, "Sen. McCain started out as a lobbyist in Washington when in 1976 he was the liaison for the Navy to the United States Senate." We tracked down a similar quote from Hayworth spokesman Mark Sanders in a June 8, 2010, Associated Press report. Sanders told the AP that McCain "began his career in Washington as a lobbyist when he was appointed in 1976 as the Navy's liaison to the United States Senate. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black." So the question before us is whether someone holding the position of Navy liaison -- as McCain did for several years in the 1970s -- should be considered a lobbyist. There's evidence to back up both sides. In Hayworth's favor, Washington insiders do informally call the position a lobbyist for the Navy. The first mission listed on the home page of the Navy's Office of Legislative Affairs -- the office that includes the position McCain once held -- is to "plan, develop, and coordinate relationships between representatives of the (Department of the Navy) and Members of the United States Congress and their committee staffs, which are necessary in the transaction of official government business, except appropriations matters, affecting (the Department of the Navy)." That does sound a lot like the job description of a lobbyist employed by a private-sector company. A 2008 New York Times account of McCain's tenure in that position solidifies the notion that McCain did many of the same things that private-sector lobbyists do. "One of several military liaisons assigned to the Senate as advocates for their services and escorts for official travel, McCain quickly emerged as the senators' favorite," the Times' account said. "He had a thick head of hair as white as his dress uniform and he showed a natural politician's gift for winning over an audience. He excelled at leavening official business with a spirit of fun -- telling deadpan stories about his years 'in the cooler' (as a prisoner of war), playing marathon poker games on flights overseas or surprising senators at a refueling stop in Ireland with a side trip to Durty Nelly's, a 17th-century pub. He was the epitome of cool, one senator's son recalled, with a pack of Marlboros in one hand and Theodore White's memoir 'In Search of History' in the other. He relished the push-and-pull of legislative battles, eventually even plunging into defense budget fights with a personal agenda that was sometimes at odds with the Carter administration's Secretary of the Navy. He built personal friendships and professional collaborations across ideological divides, a hallmark of his later Senate career. And he applauded the Senate's leading hawks as they waged what they considered an epic struggle with the Carter administration over America's place in the post-Vietnam world." But McCain also has a point when he draws a distinction between what he did and what private-sector lobbyists do. For starters, there's a very specific legal definition of a lobbyist that is narrower than the more informal one sometimes applied to the Navy liaison. According to the most recent version of the Lobbying Disclosure Act, a lobbyist is "any individual (1) who is either employed or retained by a client for financial or other compensation (2) whose services include more than one lobbying contact; and (3) whose lobbying activities constitute 20 percent or more of his or her services’ time on behalf of that client during any three-month period." Typically, lobbyists fall into one of two categories. One is a free agent who represents one or more clients before the government, usually from a position within a law firm or a specialized lobbying firm. Usually these types of lobbyists are paid a monthly or yearly retainer, though sometimes they may represent a client on a volunteer basis. The other is an in-house employee at a corporation, labor union, trade association, university, membership group (like the AARP or the National Rifle Association) or other interest group. These lobbyists are typically full-time, salaried employees who lobby only for their employer. Neither describes the position McCain held. McCain was a federal employee, representing the Navy, and he was paid a federal-scale salary. The Lobbying Disclosure Act didn't exist in the 1970s, but the people occupying McCain's old job today are not required to register as lobbyists. We should also note that lobbying is not the only aspect of the liaison job. The home page of the Navy's Office of Legislative Affairs also lists non-lobbying responsibilities, including replying to requests for information by lawmakers and "supporting and hosting congressional visits and travel." Finally, we think it's reasonable to look at the implication of Hayworth's charge that McCain was a lobbyist. Even if McCain was in some informal sense a "lobbyist" for the Navy, the position he held diverges in significant ways from the popular perception of lobbyists. Unlike an experienced lobbyist in the private sector, McCain would not have been highly paid or had a substantial expense account. If anything, as a federal employees, particularly career military officials, operate under stricter restrictions on partisan activities than a typical private-sector lobbyist would. All told, the Hayworth camp isn't entirely wrong to describe John McCain in his old position as a lobbyist. In many ways, the advocacy duties he carried out in that position are quite similar to what private-sector lobbyists do. On the other hand, the impression created by labeling his old position as a lobbying job is misleading, since in-house federal lobbyists are neither lobbyists by official definition nor are they able to rely on the same tools as private-sector lobbyists can, especially deep pockets. So we rule the Hayworth camp's claim to be Half True.	None	J.D. Hayworth	None	None	None	2010-07-05T09:00:00	2010-06-14	['Washington,_D.C.', 'United_States_Senate', 'John_McCain']
-snes-00023	A photograph shows the Arch of Baal erected on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/arch-of-baal-judiciary/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Was the Arch of Baal Erected in Washington Before Christine Blasey Ford’s Testimony?	2 October 2018	None	['Washington,_D.C.', 'National_Mall']
-vees-00195	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte, Calida give conflicting versions of West Philippine Sea arbitral tribunal ruling	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-duterte-calida-give-conflicting-versio	None	None	None	None	Duterte,west philippine sea,calida	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte, Calida give conflicting versions of West Philippine Sea arbitral tribunal ruling	May 28, 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-01212	FDA Find Coors Light Beers Laced With Cocaine	fake news	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-news-fda-find-coors-light-beers-laced-with-cocaine/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	FAKE-NEWS FDA Find Coors Light Beers Laced With Cocaine	March 27, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-01501	Congressional Black Caucus Proposes White Tax	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/congressional-black-caucus-proposes-white-tax/	None	government	None	None	['congress', 'race relations', 'taxes']	Congressional Black Caucus Proposes White Tax	Feb 21, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04443	Chris Christie was so angry at Donald Trump for picking Mike Pence over him as a running mate that he refused to retrieve Trump's dry cleaning.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/furious-christie-refuses-to-pick-up-trumps-dry-cleaning/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Furious Christie Refuses to Pick up Trump’s Dry Cleaning	15 July 2016	None	['Donald_Trump', 'Chris_Christie', 'Mike_Pence']
-snes-00675	Is This the First Caravan Member to Be Granted Asylum in the United States?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-this-first-caravan-member-asylum/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Is This the First Caravan Member to Be Granted Asylum in the United States?	2 May 2018	None	['None']
-para-00145	"27 businesses close their doors every day under Labor."	half-true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/19/liberal-party-australia/liberal-party-says-27-business-close-each-day-unde/index.html	None	['Economy']	Liberal Party of Australia	Chris Pash, Su-Lin Tan, Peter Fray	None	Liberal Party says 27 businesses close each day under Labor	Wednesday, June 19, 2013 at 5:48 p.m.	None	['None']
-bove-00133	Old Tornado Video From Sri Lanka Shared As Cyclone Ockhi	none	https://www.boomlive.in/old-tornado-video-from-sri-lanka-shared-as-cyclone-ockhi/	None	None	None	None	None	Old Tornado Video From Sri Lanka Shared As Cyclone Ockhi	Dec 01 2017 6:40 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-06450	Slot machines in Miami-Dade and Broward counties have generated 20 percent of the promised $500 million per year for schools.	mostly true	/florida/statements/2011/oct/20/no-casinos/no-casinos-group-claims-slots-tax-revenues-are-pal/	Floridians have been duped by sky-high promises from the gambling industry in the past, says No Casinos. And that's why residents should be wary of any promises related to a new proposal for a massive casino in downtown Miami, suggests the group. Resort operator Genting has proposed a $3 billion project on the current site of the Miami Herald that would include an 800,000-square-foot casino in addition to more than 50 restaurants and bars, hotel rooms, shops and other features. An Oct. 11, 2011, press release from No Casinos picks apart a bill in the works by two South Florida legislators -- Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, R-Fort Lauderdale, and Rep. Erik Fresen, R-Miami. The press release states that it's a myth that "legalizing casino gambling will generate new tax revenue to meet important state needs…" "In fact, the last time voters trusted gambling interests, they were promised $500 million per year for schools from taxes on slot machines in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. Promoters even signed a contract, saying that if the Legislature did not tax slot machines, they would cut a check directly to the school boards. So far, they have generated a paltry 20 percent of this figure – and recently they successfully lobbied the Legislature for a 30 percent reduction in their tax rate. Like the lottery, another promise broken." In this fact-check, we're not going to wade into whether casino gambling generates enough new tax revenue to meet the state's needs. Instead, we'll check what No Casinos calls a fact: that machine proponents promised "$500 million per year" for schools and only delivered about 20 percent of that. The root of the $500 million figure In November 2004, voters statewide voted to allow Miami-Dade and Broward counties to put questions on the ballot about adding slot machines at facilities. The tax revenue from the machines would then go to schools statewide. On March 8, 2005, Broward voters approved the measure. Miami-Dade voters rejected slot machines in 2005 but approved them in 2008. Then the Legislature, under the anti-gambling Gov. Jeb Bush, had to set the rules. The Legislature couldn't reach an agreement in the regular session and some GOP leaders, including Bush, talked about asking voters to repeal the amendment allowing slot machines. But in a special session in December 2005, the Legislature voted in favor of a bill that established the rules for slot machines. The source of the $500 million figure comes from 2004, when the state was moving toward putting the question on the ballot. The state's Office of Economic and Demographic Research prepared an analysis of the revenue that would be generated from slot machines. State officials gathered information about slot machines in other states in addition to information from proponents. EDR wrote in a financial impact statement in 2004 that: "If the Legislature also chooses to tax slot machine revenues, state tax revenues from Miami-Dade and Broward counties combined would range from $200 million to $500 million annually." A more detailed financial information statement from EDR stated that, "It is estimated that by the third year of activity, the range of tax revenues raised would be from $250 million to $600 million, assuming that both counties pass the referenda, and that the Legislature taxes the activity at a typical tax rate between 30 percent and 50 percent...Should only Miami-Dade County pass the referendum, the estimated increase would be between $70 million and $200 million. If only Broward County passes the referendum, the estimated increase would be between $100 million and $300 million." That paragraph alone provides several warning signs: For starters, it explains that the tax revenues would hit the range of $250 million to $600 million by the third year. It also notes that revenues will be on the lower end if it only passed in one county. But gambling proponents often just used the higher figures in describing the financial benefit. Jim Horne, a former state education commissioner who became a consultant for a pro- slot-machine group, stated that the revenues would be "roughly $500 million a year" in a September 2005 Florida Times-Union article or in the Sun-Sentinel in 2004 "$438 million after the first year alone." A series of ads by pro-slots group Floridians for a Level Playing Field urging voters to support Amendment 4 also used the $500 million figure: * This ad portrayed a woman as a school teacher saying "Florida schools could get an extra $500 million a year." * This ad stated that the amendment "could generate $500 million a year for all Florida schools" from seven facilities. * This ad stated that it was a fact that seven facilities "could provide $500 million a year to supplement not replace school funding statewide." Some articles raised skepticism about the $500 million a year claim. The Orlando Sentinel editorial board wrote Feb. 17, 2005 that although gambling interests said schools could reap up to $500 million, "until the Legislature acts, those claims are pure fabrications." A St. Petersburg Times editorial on Feb. 22, 2005, stated that slots supporters were "wildly" promising up to $500 million for education "In fact, nothing has been decided. If South Florida voters approve the referendum, the Legislature will determine how many slot machines are allowed, hours of operation, how much the gambling is taxed and how the revenue is distributed." The revenues that were actually generated The state's Department of Business and Professional Regulation tracks parimutuel revenues. The slot machine revenue is combined with net proceeds of the Florida Lottery and the Legislature annually appropriates the funds to education programs in school districts, state colleges and universities. Here is how much in net slot revenue (rounded) was actually transferred to the state Department of Education: 2006-07: $49.6 million (This wasn't a full year -- facilities opened part way through the year.) 2007-08: $120.6 million 2008-09: $103.8 million 2009-10: $138.1 million 2010-11: $125.1 million 2011-12 (July - Oct. 2): $31.5 million The tax rate started at 50 percent but the Legislature approved dropping the rate to 35 percent starting July 1, 2010. Looking at the first five years, the revenues add up to about $536.7 million -- or an average of $107.34 million per year. That's close to 20 percent of $500 million a year. If we discount that first year since the facilities were only operational part of the year and look at the next four years starting with 2007-08, it works out to about $122 million a year -- or about 24 percent of $500 million. So what happened? Dan Adkins, chairman of the Amendment 4 campaign Floridians for a Level Playing Field, and vice president of the parent company that owns Mardi Gras casino, told PolitiFact that the revenues were not as high as anticipated due to the tax rates, fees and restrictions set by the Legislature. "Gov. Bush looked me in the eye and said 'you may have won a campaign. I'm going to make sure you fail,'" Adkins said. "The Legislature and the governor wanted us to fail and they were almost successful. ... We were smacked with every possible restriction you can have." Revenues also were lower because only five facilities opened, not the seven that were planned. Adkins says slots proponents made a promise on a percentage -- that the parimutuels would provide 30 percent of their gross revenues to local schools -- but not on actual dollars. "How could you make a promise not knowing what the Legislature would do?" Adkins said. "That's why we entered an agreement based on the percentage." But what about the repeated claims that the machines could generate $500 million? "We said under a 30 percent tax plan this is what we could generate based on two counties passing referendums and seven facilities under operation." Our ruling No Casinos claimed that slot proponents promised the voters $500 million per year for schools and have generated a "paltry 20 percent of that figure." The ads that we saw stated that slot machines "could" generate $500 million a year. But at times Jim Horne, a key slots proponent, said it more strongly: "we're talking roughly $500 million a year for our schools" and "Amendment 4 will inject public education with $438 million after the first year alone. This funding will increase to $2.3 billion over the next five years." In reality, the amount of projected revenue at the time was more complicated and depended upon how many facilities added slots and whether it was in one or two counties and the rules set by the Legislature -- and proponents certainly didn't make those caveats clear in the ads we viewed although they did couch it with "could." The amount of revenue generated is about 20 percent a year of the $500 million. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	No Casinos	None	None	None	2011-10-20T10:44:20	2011-10-11	['Miami-Dade_County,_Florida']
-abbc-00104	The claim: Clive Palmer says the economy would be better off if Australian companies were not forced to pay tax in instalments.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-16/palmer-tax-instalments/4951312	The claim: Clive Palmer says the economy would be better off if Australian companies were not forced to pay tax in instalments.	['business-economics-and-finance', 'tax', 'clive-palmer', 'federal-government', 'minor-parties', 'australia']	None	None	['business-economics-and-finance', 'tax', 'clive-palmer', 'federal-government', 'minor-parties', 'australia']	Clive Palmer's economic stimulus claim improbable	Thu 19 Sep 2013, 9:43am	None	['Australia']
-pomt-06859	Says more than eight countries lead the United States in the percentage of college graduates.	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2011/aug/03/cory-booker/newark-mayor-cory-booker-claims-united-states-trai/	Newark Mayor Cory Booker said he was disgusted and angry. With federal officials mired in debate over raising the nation’s debt ceiling, Booker appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on July 24 to discuss political gridlock in the nation’s capital. The generation of the Great Depression built the Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building at that time of crisis, but now "Rome, our capital, is fiddling with itself while the nation is burning," Booker said. Booker then pointed out how the United States has fallen behind other countries in the percentage of college graduates it produces. "We are a nation that, in that generation said, you know, ‘We're going to go to the moon. And we're going to do math and science and make sure that our kids are prepared to go there.’ But right now what's happening?’" Booker said. "Nations are passing us in droves. Over eight different countries now have a higher proportion of people graduating from college than we do." PolitiFact New Jersey discovered that Booker’s claim about the country’s college graduation rate was mostly right. In terms of young adults with the equivalent of an associate’s degree or higher, the United States is tied for ninth among the 36 countries analyzed by the Paris, France-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. First, let’s talk about how Booker received his numbers. The mayor’s spokeswoman referred us to an Oct. 19, 2010 speech by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in which he said: "Today, in eight other nations, including South Korea, young adults are more likely to have college degrees than in the U.S." U.S. Department of Education spokeswoman Jane Glickman provided statistics from "Education at a Glance 2010: OECD Indicators," which compares countries based on 2008 data. The OECD includes 34 member countries and works with other partner countries. According to that 2010 report, the United States ranked ninth in the percentage of people between ages 25 and 34 to achieve an associate’s degree or higher. At 42 percent, the United States was tied with Israel, Belgium and Australia, according to the report. The eight countries leading the United States in that age group were South Korea at 58 percent, followed by Canada, Russian Federation, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Ireland and Denmark, according to the report. Older generations in the United States have fared better than in its OECD counterparts. The United States ranked higher in the percentage of adults between ages 35 and 64 who have college degrees, according to the report. "Not too long ago we ranked at or near the top in the world, and while our rate has grown very slowly, other countries have experienced rapid increases and overtaken us," Glickman wrote in an email, adding "we must sit up and take notice, especially since a degree is increasingly important for job opportunities in a changing economy." So Booker was right about young adults being more likely to have college degrees in eight other countries. But Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD's Indicators and Analysis Division in the Directorate for Education, said in an email that one should not put too much emphasis on small differences between countries, because of the varied educational systems. Large proportions of young people in Germany and Austria enter apprenticeship arrangements, instead of higher education, Schleicher said. Russian Federation’s high graduation rate is related to short-term engineering studies that may not exist in other countries or only at the upper secondary level, which is comparable to high school in the United States, he said. "A range of factors may affect the figures including the organization of the education and training system and government policies regarding education," Schleicher said in the email. Alan Ruby, a senior fellow in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, said four of those eight countries leading the United States don’t make for good comparisons because of their smaller sizes. But why does the United States rank below some of the other countries? Schleicher suggested the tuition fees in the United States -- the highest in the OECD -- affect participation rates. Ruby said some young people falsely believe there aren’t benefits to attending college. Let’s review: Booker said the United States trails "over eight different countries" in college graduates. The mayor shouldn’t have included the word "over" in his statement, but he’s on target when it comes to the younger generation of college graduates. But since each country may have different educational policies affecting the overall rankings, we rate the statement Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Cory Booker	None	None	None	2011-08-03T05:15:00	2011-07-24	['United_States']
-abbc-00170	The claim: David Manne says independent evidence clearly shows that Cambodia is engulfed in a human rights crisis.	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-26/is-cambodia-engulfed-in-human-rights-crisis/5446002	The claim: David Manne says independent evidence clearly shows that Cambodia is engulfed in a human rights crisis.	['world-politics', 'unrest-conflict-and-war', 'federal-government', 'immigration', 'law-crime-and-justice', 'rights', 'australia', 'cambodia']	None	None	['world-politics', 'unrest-conflict-and-war', 'federal-government', 'immigration', 'law-crime-and-justice', 'rights', 'australia', 'cambodia']	Is Cambodia engulfed in a human rights crisis?	Mon 26 May 2014, 1:52am	None	['Cambodia']
-goop-01528	Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton Did Put Baby, Wedding Plans On Hold, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/gwen-stefani-blake-shelton-baby-wedding-plans-hold-wrong/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton Did NOT Put Baby, Wedding Plans On Hold, Despite Report	10:01 am, February 21, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-06276	Says "we’re losing one voter every 13 minutes."	mostly true	/oregon/statements/2011/nov/23/our-oregon/could-we-really-be-losing-one-voter-every-13-minut/	The next general election for president is almost a year away. But given that the Republican presidential hopefuls are already meeting for weekly debates, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that Our Oregon, a progressive political organization, is already laying the way for its get-out-the-vote effort. Our Oregon’s website makes a call to arms: "The need for voter registration is constant, especially in Oregon. With our vote-by-mail system, the people least likely to be registered to vote (young people, low-income people) are the ones most likely to get knocked off the rolls each year." Then they put that need in perspective. According to Our Oregon, overall voter registration is down by more than 119,000 voters from the peak in November 2008. "That’s like losing a voter every 13 minutes," the site concludes. That statistic caught our eye. Could Oregon, which traditionally has high voter participation, really be hemorrhaging one voter every 13 minutes? We gave Our Oregon a call and they told us they’d simply compared the number of voters registered in November 2008 to the most recent registration figures. These can all be found on the Oregon Secretary of State’s website. We followed suit. According to monthly statistics, there were 2,154,288 voters on our rolls back in November 2008. (It’s important to note here that this number represents active voters. If a ballot gets kicked back to the county with an incorrect address, the voter is deemed inactive. That doesn’t mean those voters aren’t registered, just that they need to update their info with the state before their next vote.) Anyhow, back to our analysis: The most recent voter statistics come from September, showing 2,034,589 registered voters. (Again, of the active variety.) Take the latter from the former, and about 119,000 voters have slipped off the registers. There were about 1,060 days separating Election Day 2008 and the end of September 2011. If you put that into the number of missing voters, you get about 113 fewer registered voters each day. Take the number of minutes in a day -- 1440 -- and divide it by 113 and you do, in fact, get 13 minutes. Now, the figures seem to hold up. But one of the things we love to do with PolitiFact is offer up some context. When we thought about the dip in the number of registered voters, it occurred to us that registration a year before a presidential election is probably always a little anemic. (Observant, right?) So we pulled the figures and compared November 2007 to November 2008. We found that registers grew by more than 210,000 over that year. Same for November 2003 and 2004. During that period, registration actually grew by more than 260,000. Just to make sure we got the whole picture, we also checked the percent of eligible voters who were actually registered. During the 2010 election, an estimated 72 percent of eligible voters were registered, according to our secretary of state. That was down 5 percent from the 2008 presidential election. But even that dip seems fairly standard. In November 2006, the registration was down to 73 percent. But in November 2004 it had been 82 percent. This is all to say that during presidential election years, registration surges. We’re not saying Our Oregon got its math wrong. We are saying that the current drop isn’t anything special. For the last word on all of this we talked to Barry Pack, Oregon’s deputy secretary of state. He said that the figures Our Oregon cited were all accurate, but that it’s important to remember that there are many reasons why the number of registered voters might decline. According to a state analysis comparing registration in November 2008 and 2010, about 70 percent of the 250,000-voter decline is attributable to voter inactivity for two federal elections. The other loss came from voter death, ineligibility, moving and other reasons. Many of the folks in that 30 percent, Pack said, "are not an indication of lack of civic engagement." We circled back with Our Oregon and talked with spokesman Scott Moore, who said he didn’t think our research negated the point that the organization was trying to make, which is that registration needs to get ramped up -- as always. That brings us to our ruling. Our Oregon said we’ve lost about 119,000 since November 2008 -- one every 13 minutes -- and official figures back them up. The thing is, without the context that this is a pretty cyclical happening, that statistic sounds pretty dire. We think it needs context, so under PolitiFact rules, we’ll give it a Mostly True. What do you think? Head back to OregonLive and share your thoughts.	None	Our Oregon	None	None	None	2011-11-23T10:19:18	2011-11-14	['None']
-vees-00432	Responding to China’s concern about his orders, Duterte brought up the possibility of selling the contested islands and reefs when the country is wealthy enough.	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-can-philippines-sell-its-islands-china	Lighthearted or not, can the president sell the islands and reefs at the Kalayaan Island Group to China or any other country?	None	None	None	Spratlys,fact-check,Fact check,Kalayaan Island Group	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Can the Philippines sell its islands to China?	April 17, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-05200	Virginia "is home to more veterans per capita than any state in America."	false	/virginia/statements/2012/jun/11/bob-mcdonnell/bob-mcdonnell-no-1-state-veterans-capita/	Gov. Bob McDonnell -- who spent 21 years in the U.S. Army and Reserves and is the son of career Army officer -- is proud to talk about the large military bases in Virginia and the current and past service of many who live here. On Memorial Day, he addressed 2,000 at the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond. His speech, on the cost of freedom, included the claim that Virginia "is home to more veterans per capita than any state in America." The governor has made that statement several times and we wondered if he were correct. So we checked the state veteran counts listed on website of the Department of Veterans Affairs, which are from 2010, and compared them to state population tallies in the 2010 Census. The VA calculated there were 22.7 million veterans in the U.S. They made up 7.3 percent of the nation’s 308.7 million people. Virginia had about 822,300 veterans in 2010 and a census of 8,001,024 people. Veterans made up 10.28 percent of Old Dominion’s population. But three states topped Virginia’s veteran population per capita: *Alaska had a 10.84 percent veteran population. It had an estimated 77,000 veterans and a population of 721,523. *Maine had a 10.43 percent veteran population. It had an estimated 138,600 veterans and a population of 1,333,074. *Montana had a 10.31 percent veteran population. It had an estimated 102,000 veterans and a population of 989,415. We asked McDonnell’s office for the governor’s numbers and got a tally that was similar to ours. It was based on a 2011 VA estimate of veterans and the Census’ 2011 population estimate. Under that data, Virginia ranked third, with 10.17 percent of the population formerly in military uniform. The leader was once again Alaska, with a 10.7 percent population of veterans, followed by Maine, at 10.27 percent. Montana slipped to No. 4, at 10.11 percent. Gubernatorial spokesman Jeff Caldwell said McDonnell meant to say Virginia is "one of" the states with the highest per capita veteran populations and made a mistake while speaking extemporaneously. The governor made the same mistake on May 29, the day after Memorial Day, during his monthly broadcast on WTOP radio in Washington. With little effort, we found two other occasions where he made the erroneous claim. In case you’re wondering, Virginia has the seventh largest veteran population in the nation, according to the VA. Here’s a list of the top seven and their estimated 2011 veteran populations: California, 1,918,073; Texas, 1,683,237; Florida, 1,617,248; Pennsylvania, 933,404; New York, 913,489; Ohio, 867,240; Virginia, 823,348. Our ruling McDonnell’s office acknowledges the governor erred on Memorial Day when he said Virginia has the most veterans per capita of any state. Virginia was No. 4 in 2010 and moved up to No. 3 in 2011. We rate the governor’s claim False.	None	Bob McDonnell	None	None	None	2012-06-11T13:35:46	2012-05-28	['United_States', 'Virginia']
-farg-00077	"The federal government has spent over $150,000, just the Secret Service alone, for the privilege of renting Donald Trump golf carts to protect Donald Trump on his rounds."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/05/schiff-shanks-trump-golf-cart-story/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Adam Schiff	Eugene Kiely	['golf']	Schiff Shanks Trump Golf Cart Story	May 17, 2018	[' CNN – Tuesday, May 15, 2018 ']	['Donald_Trump', 'United_States_Secret_Service']
-snes-02898	Did Pat Robertson Say 'Staring' at Melania Trump 'Can Heal Gays'?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pat-robertson-melania-cure/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Pat Robertson Say ‘Staring’ at Melania Trump ‘Can Heal Gays’?	21 February 2017	None	['None']
-vogo-00322	Statement: “You have to understand, Diann’s testimony took place at a public hearing on the problems with the pension system. The city manager was proposing certain solutions that really weren’t that great. But it was at a public hearing. This was not hidden at all,” former Mayor Dick Murphy, said in an interview on KPBS radio on Oct. 5.	determination: huckster propaganda	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-murphys-comeback-tour-goes-astray/	Analysis: More than six years after resigning as mayor, Dick Murphy has returned to the public eye with a new book. He says he wants tell his story, make sure history is accurate and lay out his vision for a better San Diego.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Murphy's Comeback Tour Goes Astray	October 11, 2011	None	['None']
-hoer-01242	Miley Cyrus is Dead	fake news	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/miley-cyrus-is-not-dead-bogus-death-posts-lead-to-clickbait-fake-news-website/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Miley Cyrus is NOT Dead Bogus Death Posts Lead to Clickbait Fake-News Website	September 6, 2016	None	['None']
-farg-00130	Getting rid of the filibuster “would be the end of the Senate as it was originally devised and created going back to our Founding Fathers.”	spins the facts	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/01/durbin-filibuster-myth/	None	the-factcheck-wire	FactCheck.org	Eugene Kiely	['cloture']	Durbin and the Filibuster ‘Myth’	January 23, 2018	2018-01-23 22:53:50 UTC	['None']
-snes-00433	Stephen Miller — a principal architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy — is the descendant of asylum seekers who escaped anti-Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stephen-miller-descendant-asylum-seekers-fled-anti-semitic-violence/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Is Stephen Miller a Descendant of Asylum Seekers Who Fled Anti-Semitic Violence?	20 June 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08540	Jobs incentive program "created over 1,200 high-wage jobs since 2009."	false	/florida/statements/2010/oct/03/tammy-hall/lee-commissioner-tammy-hall-says-jobs-program-brou/	A campaign advertisement mailed in late September for Lee County Commission District 4 incumbent Tammy Hall touts efforts to "RECOVER JOBS," citing "FIRST INITIATIVE — Economic incentive program created over 1,200 high wage jobs since 2009." Hall, a Republican, is seeking re-election in the Nov. 2, 2010, general election and is challenged by Debbie Jackow, who is running with no party affiliation. Hall says she is pleased with local government efforts to boost Lee’s economy in southwest Florida, and her campaign piece spotlights that effort along with other claims. So what about job creation efforts? In September 2008, Lee commissioners -- including Hall -- approved a plan to set aside $25 million from county reserve funds for economic development efforts. That fund came to be known as the Financial Incentives for Recruiting Strategic Targets -- or FIRST -- Initiative by the county’s Economic Development Office. But, has that effort really created 1,200 high wage jobs in about two years as Hall’s campaign message, sent the week of Sept. 27, claims? Commissioners have voted to award money from the fund to four companies to expand operations here: • April 2009: Gartner Inc. -- a technology research and advisory company -- received $350,000 from FIRST fund and $1.5 million from other state and local incentive programs. Gartner plans to hire 200 people, starting in 2011 and continuing through 2015. The jobs are expected to have an average annual wage of $60,000. • June 2009: Paramount Transportation Logistics Services Inc. was given $300,000 from the FIRST fund and $300,000 from other local and state programs to create 100 jobs with an average wage of $48,500 by 2012. About 36 people had been hired by the end of June, the most recent data available. • July 2009: Source Interlink Cos. -- a magazine publisher and distributor -- receives $1 million from the FIRST fund as part of plan to add 350 jobs by 2011, but the hiring schedule has been revised. The company now expects to begin hiring this year, adding about 50 jobs. The added jobs will have an average annual wage of $65,000. • February 2010: Algenol Inc. was awarded $10 million in FIRST funds to build a biofuel research facility off Alico Road in south Lee County. Unlike the other incentive agreements, the deal with Algenol is not tied directly to job targets, but the company now employs 67 people. About 30 of those employees have transferred from Baltimore. The center expects to eventually employ more than 100, with an average annual wage of $85,000. Those numbers add up to about 750 jobs to be created through 2015, but just more than 100 people have been hired so far, according to the latest information from Lee’s Economic Development Office. So where did Hall get the 1,200 number? "If you look at the county’s information, those are the jobs being created," Hall said. But not just by the FIRST funds. Hall said she asked the Economic Development Office for information on the projects funded through FIRST. She said the numbers she got back apparently reflect all job incentive programs. "I guess they put everything together," Hall said. "It’s misspoken to say it is all from FIRST, but the numbers are correct." Lee County constructs incentive agreements using a variety of programs, including the Lee County Job Opportunity Program, which can pay up to $6,000 per full-time job and a similar Florida program, the Qualified Targeted Industry Refund Program, which pays tax refunds of up to $3,000 for each full-time job. If you include incentive agreements using those programs, the county has announced agreements that total 1,048 jobs through 2015. About 189 people have been hired so far. Is a job pledged the same as a job created? "We are creating those jobs under contract," Hall said. "We are very proud of the progress we have started to achieve. "I think the message is that we are out there, doing our part as government to allow those jobs to accumulate," she said. Does "FIRST INITIATIVE -- Economic incentive program created over 1,200 high wage jobs since 2009" accurately convey that message and the facts? The number of jobs created is overstated by about 38 percent and most remain unfilled now. Also, the FIRST INITIATIVE program isn’t the only source of incentive money being used. So we rate this claim False.	None	Tammy Hall	None	None	None	2010-10-03T05:57:54	2010-09-27	['None']
-pomt-07131	"This is the slowest job recovery since Hoover."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-were-slowest-job-recovery-hoover/	During a visit to the Buddy Brew Coffee shop in Tampa on June 16, 2011, presidential candidate Mitt Romney became the latest Republican to invoke the Great Depression while discussing today’s economy. Taking a shot at the economic record of President Barack Obama, Romney said, "It's been a failure in the last several years to get America back on track again. It's taken longer to get Americans back to work than it took during the Great Depression. This is the slowest job recovery since Hoover. It breaks my heart. I want to get us back to work." (By Hoover, Romney meant President Herbert Hoover, who held office from 1929 to early 1933 and presided over the early years of the Great Depression.) We thought we’d check Romney’s history. We turned to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal government’s official source for employment figures. We believe there are two ways to analyze his claim, either by judging the number of jobs created or by tracking how much the unemployment rate decreased. The former is a pretty straightforward number, while the latter is shaped in part by how many people are looking for a job rather than dropping out of the labor market. But while the two statistics aren’t exactly parallel, either one can serve as a reasonable measure of a job recovery. We also decided to compare recessions by looking at the first 23 months after a given recession officially ended (which is when the recovery officially begins). We chose that period because the last recession ended 23 months ago. Doing it this way provides an equal baseline for comparing all recessions. The question of when to start counting jobs in a recovery is a point of some debate among economists. The issue came up in an earlier PolitiFact item. However, we’re taking Romney at his literal word, and he said "the slowest job recovery," which is the period after the recession has ended and the recovery has begun. We used the quasi-official arbiter of recessions -- the National Bureau of Economic Research -- to determine the start and end dates for recessions. We weren’t able to go further back than World War II, since that’s how far back monthly BLS data goes. Viewers can see how our numbers stacked up for each recovery here. But here’s the gist: Job creation. We compared the number of employed Americans at the start of the recovery to the number employed at the end of the 23-month period. Then we calculated the percentage increase (or decrease) in employment over that time period. By this measure, there were two recoveries weaker than the one we’re currently experiencing -- the one from November 2001 to October 2003, under President George W. Bush, and the one from July 1980 to June 1982, under presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The George W. Bush recovery is especially striking, since the economy actually lost more than 700,000 jobs during the first 23 months after the recession ended. So by this measure, Romney’s claim that "this is the slowest job recovery since Hoover" is incorrect. It’s the third slowest. Unemployment rate. We compared the unemployment rate at the end of the 23-month period to what it was at the beginning of the period. By this measure, too, the current recovery is not the weakest. Three recoveries actually saw an increase in the unemployment rate after 23 months (ones under George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Carter/Reagan), while another (under President Richard Nixon) produced a smaller decline in the unemployment rate than the current recovery has. (Because a budding recovery can entice discouraged workers back into the labor force, it’s not unusual for the unemployment rate to rise in a recovery.) So, depending on the measure you use, there are either two or four recoveries since Hoover that were weaker than the current one. None of this is to suggest that the current recovery is robust. It isn’t. Measured by jobs created, it has been exceeded on a percentage basis by 10 out of the 12 recessions we looked at. Part of this likely stems from the severity of the recession (which most experts agree is the worst since the Great Depression) and part stems from a long-term trend toward relatively jobless recoveries. The first seven recoveries on our list averaged a jobs bounceback of more than 8 percent; the final five averaged 2 percent. And the latter figure would have been even lower -- half a percent -- had it not been for the unusually strong recovery that started under Reagan in November 1982. We asked the Romney campaign for a comment, but they did not immediately respond. Where does this leave us? Romney has a point that the current recovery is relatively weak by historical standards. But it’s inaccurate to say that "it’s the slowest job recovery since Hoover." Depending on what yardstick you use, it’s either the third worst or the fifth worst recovery since World War II. That’s not a great accomplishment for the Obama Administration, but we’re checking Romney here, and he chose to make his point in a way that isn’t accurate. So we rate the claim False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2011-06-16T16:22:04	2011-06-16	['None']
-hoer-01138	Southwest Air Tickets to Anywhere in the World	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/southwest-air-tickets-to-anywhere-in-the-world-facebook-prize-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Southwest Air Tickets to Anywhere in the World Facebook Prize Scam	May 24, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-03672	President Obama has cancelled all upcming appearances at campaign events for Hillary Clinton in October 2016.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-house-cancels-all-obama-appearances/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	White House Cancels All Obama Appearances at Hillary Campaign Events	29 October 2016	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-00122	On spending growth under Gov. Andrew Cuomo: "Despite the fact that you continue to suggest that you’ve been able to hold the two percent, you haven’t."	true	/new-york/statements/2018/oct/26/marcus-molinaro/molinaro-says-cuomos-spending-not-good-he-claims/	Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his Republican rival, Marc Molinaro, argued about the condition of New York state’s finances during their only one-on-one debate of the campaign. Molinaro pushed back against Cuomo’s claim that he has increased spending by only 2 percent per year, lower than it has been in modern political history. "Your budgets have increased spending at about an annual rate of 4 percent each year," Molinaro said. "So, despite the fact that you continue to suggest that you’ve been able to hold the two percent, you haven’t." Since taxes and spending are a hot topic for New Yorkers, we decided to check Molinaro’s claim. Cuomo has said that he would keep spending increases to 2 percent every year. This is a voluntary cap, and is not part of state law. In 2016, PolitiFact New York checked Cuomo’s claim that he had kept spending increases to 2 percent, and found his claim to be True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com But in the last two years, the rate of state spending has changed, according to experts. The state Division of Budget and independent budget analysts have agreed that when evaluating Cuomo’s pledge to keep state spending growth at 2 percent, expenditures in the State Operating Funds should be considered. Those funds are for state operations, funded by state resources. They exclude federal funds, which the state does not control, and capital spending. Spending included in State Operating Funds go beyond the state’s General Fund, however, and also includes things such as state-funded special revenue funds and some debt service. The independent Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization, analyzes state budgets and found that the 2018-19 budget, which began April 1, calls for increased spending of 4.5 percent. The commission found that, despite state leaders’ proclamations that spending growth had stayed at 2 percent, "after adjusting for shifts of certain types of spending out of state operating funds or across fiscal years, the budget actually increases 4.5 percent from fiscal year 2018." A commission analysis of the 2017-18 budget found that spending would rise by 3.7 percent, despite the administration’s claim that it would rise by only 2 percent. The administration moved spending around to other funds or other years in order to maintain 2 percent growth, according to the commission. The author of both of those reports, David Friedfel, spoke about the governor’s record on spending increases during a post-debate podcast from the commission and Gotham Gazette. For the first six years of his administration, Cuomo is right to say that he kept spending growth at 2 percent, said Friedfel, director of state studies at the commission. But in the last year and in the current year, that’s not the case, he said. "The 2 percent certainly isn’t accurate, and to continue to push that is problematic, just from a transparency perspective," he said. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli had similar findings. DiNapoli, who is independently elected and whose staff analyzes every budget, reports that increases in spending in the 2018-19 budget is more than double Cuomo’s state spending cap. DiNapoli’s budget analysis, released in July, stated that though the Cuomo administration had claimed that it stuck to a spending increase of 2 percent, when budget management actions are accounted for, such as taking $1.4 billion in spending for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority off-budget, "the Office of the State Comptroller estimates State Operating Funds spending growth at more than 5 percent." For the 2017-18 budget, DiNapoli found that after adjusting for budget actions that allowed the administration to claim only a 2 percent increase, that spending was actually set to increase by "approximately 4 percent." Our ruling Molinaro said that state spending under Cuomo has increased beyond the 2 percent cap, despite Cuomo’s claims. Cuomo has been in office since 2011. In the first six years, as PolitiFact New York and others have pointed out, Cuomo kept the growth in state spending to 2 percent. But in the last two years, state spending has increased beyond 2 percent, though the Cuomo administration has shifted spending in the budget to make it appear as if the 2 percent cap has been honored, according to experts. We rate Molinaro’s claim True.	None	Marc Molinaro	None	None	None	2018-10-26T18:06:12	2018-10-23	['None']
-goop-02705	Beyonce, Jay Z Did Spend $10 Million On Twins, 	3	https://www.gossipcop.com/beyonce-spent-10-million-twins-jay-z/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Beyonce, Jay Z Did NOT Spend $10 Million On Twins, Despite Report	12:42 pm, June 29, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-00342	"Couple Arrested For Selling ‘Golden Tickets To Heaven."	pants on fire!	/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/sep/17/blog-posting/florida-couple-not-arrested-selling-golden-tickets/	Golden tickets to heaven? You know that’s too good to be true, even in Florida. "Couple Arrested For Selling ‘Golden Tickets To Heaven," reads a headline on City World News. This story was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) The story, in circulation since 2015, said Jacksonville residents Tito and Amanda Watts were selling wooden slabs spray-painted with gold paint on the street for $99.99. "I don’t care what the police say," the story quoted Tito Watts as saying. "The tickets are solid gold… it ain’t cut up two by fours I spray painted gold." The story even quoted an unnamed Jacksonville Police Department spokesman. It said the police confiscated over $10,000 in cash, five crack pipes and a baby alligator. Just like tickets that reserve a spot in heaven, the story is a fabrication. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s office found no records of such a case. The story would have likely made headlines; but we found no coverage by local newspapers of the event, either. The picture of Tito Watts isn’t real; it was snagged off a website with mugshots of people arrested in their Halloween costumes. The photo dates back to 2011. We rate this statement Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-09-17T12:54:28	2018-09-13	['None']
-pomt-04252	"Every American now is $51,000 in debt. That’s money I owe, that’s money my children owe before they even go to kindergarten, that’s their check to the federal government right now."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/nov/15/caroline-casagrande/caroline-casagrande-says-every-american-owes-feder/	Pity the poor children of the United States – they, along with their parents, are already in hock to the federal government for thousands of dollars. Assemblywoman Caroline Casagrande (R-Monmouth) made that claim Oct. 26 during an interview with Michael Aron on NJTV’s "On The Record." "Every American now is $51,000 in debt," Casagrande told Aron. "That’s money I owe, that’s money my children owe before they even go to kindergarten, that’s their check to the federal government right now." Casagrande’s number is solid, but she doesn’t have to worry about whipping out her checkbook or debit card any time soon, some federal budget experts say. Let’s start by reviewing the two commonly cited forms of national debt -- debt held by the public and total debt. Debt held by the public is money borrowed from investors outside of the federal government. The total debt represents debt held by the public as well as money the federal government owes itself, including for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Now let’s look at the numbers in Casagrande’s claim. The U.S. Government Debt website on Nov. 6 – the date we started looking into Casagrande’s clam -- listed the national debt at $16,295,297,196,000. If that’s divided by 314,719,484 -- the total U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau, each American owes the federal government $51,777.21. So, Casagrande’s number is accurate. But should Americans actually expect to pay that bill? Not necessarily. Gary Burtless, a senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution who has worked as a government economist and served on federal advisory panels under presidents of both parties, explained that what the nation owes each year on the national debt is annual interest and principal payments. "Do grandma and the grandkids have to pay off the national debt, as Assemblywoman Caroline Casagrande seems to suggest? No, they do not," Burtless wrote. "Our grandkids’ great grandparents did not pay off the federal debt; neither did their parents or grandparents. There is no rule that the national debt has to be paid off in one generation, three generations, or even ten generations. Taxpayers do not face the possibility that they will receive a $51,000 bill in the mail anytime soon." An invoice might not be in the mail but Casagrande’s statement is fair, according to spokespeople for the conservative Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute. "We’re not even going to pay off the debt, we’re going to pay down the interest," said Matt Jensen, a research associate in Economic Policy Studies at the AEI. " Under no proposal that I’ve seen is someone paying down the debt in real dollars. What we’re really talking about is paying the interest on the debt, forever. You’ll pay the interest, your children will pay the interest." Our PolitiFact colleagues in Virginia and New Hampshire also looked into similar claims in their states and found that the amount of debt cited by their lawmakers was largely accurate. Virginia Rep. Randy Forbes in January said the national debt amounted to $48,700 for every American or $128,300 for every U.S. Household. Our colleagues rated the claim True. In August, PolitiFact New Hampshire rated Mostly True a claim by Rep. Frank Guinta that every child in the United States has a $50,000 share in the national debt. Guinta received a Mostly True because that would mean each of the nation’s nearly 74 million children would owe $216,102. Guinta’s figure was accurate, however, when the debt was spread across the entire population. Our ruling Casagrande said in a television interview, "Every American now is $51,000 in debt. That’s money I owe, that’s money my children owe before they even go to kindergarten, that’s their check to the federal government right now." A simple mathematical calculation confirms that every American technically owes the government $51,777.21 toward the national debt. But will youngsters have to suddenly start handing over their allowances to pay down the federal deficit? Not likely. We rate the statement Mostly True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Caroline Casagrande	None	None	None	2012-11-15T07:30:00	2012-10-26	['United_States']
-pomt-08960	Maurice Ferre says Kendrick Meek "has voted 98.6 percent of the time with the Democrat party."	true	/florida/statements/2010/jul/21/maurice-ferre/ferre-meek-hews-democrat-votes/	In a meeting with the South Florida Sun Sentinel editorial board on July 1, 2010, U.S. Senate candidate Maurice Ferre blasted Democratic rival Kendrick Meek for, basically, having a consistent voting record. In the words of Ferre, a former Miami mayor, Meek has voted 98.6 percent of the time with his political party. Ferre's point is to distinguish himself from his Democratic rival, whom he accuses of leaning too far from the political center. "I think the Democrat party needs to be a centrist party," Ferre tells an off-camera audience from a wooden table. The interview was recorded and posted on YouTube in a 7:12-minute clip. "In the case of Kendrick Meek, Kendrick Meek, in the Washington Post's view of each of these candidates, has voted 98.6 percent of the times with the Democrat party," Ferre said. Seconds later, Ferre compares Meek's voting record to that of other Florida Democrats -- namely, Sens. Bill Nelson, Bob Graham and the late Lawton Chiles. "None of them has voted 98.6 percent of the time with the Democrat party," Ferre said. The percentage is so high and so specific, to the tenth of a decimal point, we decided to look into it. Ferre refers to a Washington Post online database that shows how members of the U.S. Congress have voted since 1991. It indeed reveals that in the current session of Congress, Meek has voted with a majority of his Democratic colleagues slightly below 98.6 percent of the time -- 98.4 percent, to be exact. That's based on 1,355 votes and does not include votes in which Meek did not vote. For comparison, 79 other House members, all Democrats, voted with their party at the same percentage or an even higher level in the current session. All Democrats combined voted with their party 92.3 percent of the time, and all Republicans voted with their party 88.4 percent of the time. As expected, a high level of party allegiance is common for most members. We next looked at OpenCongress.org, run by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, which also tracks votes by party. That site too put Meek at 98 percent for the current session. Meek's current figure largely mirrors his record in earlier sessions, according to the Washington Post database. In the 108th Congress (2003-2004), Meek voted 94.2 percent of the time with the Democratic party. In the 109th Congress (2005-2006) and 110th (2007-2008), he voted with a majority of his Democratic colleagues 98.4 percent of the time. But what about the other three Democrats Ferre mentions? Did they vote fewer times with their party? Nelson voted with a majority of his Democratic colleagues 92.7 percent of the time during the current Congress, according to the Washington Post database. Nelson was at 85.5 percent and 91.8 percent in two previous sessions. Similarly, Graham's percentages between 1991 and 2002 ranged from 81.8 percent to 92.9 percent. The Washington Post database keeps records back until 1991. Chiles left the U.S. Senate in 1989. The only issue with Ferre's claim is the minor difference between 98.6 and 98.4 percent. And so we rate his statement True.	None	Maurice Ferre	None	None	None	2010-07-21T11:56:27	2010-07-01	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Maurice_Ferré']
-pomt-13834	African-Americans don't use drugs at a higher level than whites but "wind up going to prison six times more."	mostly true	/punditfact/statements/2016/jul/13/van-jones/van-jones-claim-drug-use-imprisonment-rates-blacks/	After two black men died at the hands of police, CNN commentator Van Jones tried to make a case for institutional racism in law enforcement with panelist Harry Houck, a former New York Police Department detective, during the July 7 edition of Erin Burnett Outfront. "The statistics don't lie about the excessive numbers of stops," said Jones, who is black. "Let's not talk about traffic stops. Let's take something tough like drugs. African-Americans don't use drugs (at a) higher level than whites. (It's) about the same percentage; about 12 percent. But we wind up getting arrested, not 50 percent more. We wind up going to prison six times more because there seems to be some institutional bias. Doesn't that bother you?" Houck's response: "That doesn't show any institutional bias." We were interested in Jones' statement that blacks don't use drugs at a higher level than whites, yet they the wind up going to prison six times more often. We fact-checked a similar statement in February 2016, when presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton declared that "African-Americans are more likely to be arrested by police and sentenced to longer prison terms for doing the same thing that whites do." We rated that statement True. But Jones' comment was less generic, dealing specifically with drugs. When we contacted him, he said he was going away for a while and couldn't remember the source off the top of his head. So we went looking for information. Jones may have been referring to data contained in the 2014 National Research Council report on "Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences." Pages 60 and 61 focus on drug crimes. We'll talk about drug use first. The report says, "The prevalence of drug use is only slightly higher among blacks than whites for some illicit drugs and slightly lower for others; the difference is not substantial. There is also little evidence, when all drug types are considered, that blacks sell drugs more often than whites." We checked the overall data from the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Here's the breakdown for all illicit drugs. There are racial differences in the types of drugs being abused, according to surveys by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Blacks, for example, are far less likely to have used marijuana, cocaine and hallucinogens in their lifetime than whites, but — at least in the case of marijuana — whites are more likely to give it up over time. With that backdrop, the National Research Council report says, "In recent years, drug-related arrest rates for blacks have been three to four times higher than those for whites. In the late 1980s, the rates were six times higher for blacks than for whites." Here's the drug arrest rate trend: But Jones was talking about the rates of imprisonment for drug crimes, not arrest rates. Those numbers turned out to be harder to find. We turned to Nazgol Ghandnoosh, a research analyst for The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group in Washington. She pointed us to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reporting on the number of people going to state prison for drug offenses and numbers from the United States Sentencing Commission on the racial makeup of drug offenders going to federal prison. Those numbers aren't perfect for our comparison. For example, the state prison data only lists inmates based on their most serious offense, so someone convicted of a drug crime may not be listed in that category if that person was given a longer sentence for assault. Adjusting for the number of blacks and whites (another approximation because many Americans are of mixed race), the black imprisonment rate for drug offenses is about 5.8 times higher than it is for whites. That's very close to what Jones said. It should be noted that these numbers vary from source to source. The NAACP's Criminal Justice Fact Sheet asserts that "five times as many whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites." It doesn't list a source. Spokeswoman Raquel Coombs said the ratios may be out of date. We noted in the BJS data that the racial disparity has decreased significantly since 1991. That NAACP 10 percent imprisonment statistic appears to be based on 2003 data analyzed in 2009 by Human Rights Watch. (We also note that the drug-use statistic is easy to misread. Whites aren't five times more likely to use drugs. Five times more whites are using drugs because there are about 5.5 times more whites in the U.S. population than blacks.) We wondered why so many more blacks are going to prison for drug offenses. They're more likely to get caught selling drugs, as Michael Tonry, professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told us back in February. "Whites are more likely to sell to people they know, and they much more often sell behind closed doors. Blacks sell to people they don't know and in public, which makes them vastly easier to arrest." Blacks arrested for drugs are more likely to be sent to jail because they're more likely to have had a previous run-in with the law. Police tend to patrol high-crime areas more aggressively, which tend to be the poor areas, which have a higher proportion of minorities. Thus, they're more likely to be stopped for something and have a rap sheet once a drug charge comes along. As we found in our previous fact-check, their sentences also tend to be longer. Our ruling Jones said that African-Americans don't use drugs at a higher level than whites but wind up going to prison six times more. African-Americans use drugs at roughly the same levels as white Americans, although overall illicit drug use among blacks has been marginally higher than for whites, with some differences in the types of drugs used, according to a national surveys. Jones' bigger point was about the disparity in sentencing, and the rate of African-Americans' incarceration for drug offenses is very close to what Jones said. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Van Jones	None	None	None	2016-07-13T13:52:44	2016-07-07	['None']
-vogo-00179	Statement: “Actually, the (tax) that you pay is small compared to what you pay total for gas. That is, it’s 10 percent,” said state Sen. Juan Vargas in a recent Univision interview.	determination: mostly true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/the-taxes-you-pay-at-the-pump-fact-check/	Analysis: State Sen. Juan Vargas recently called for an investigation into the state’s record-high gas prices. In a related Oct. 9 interview on Univision 17, Vargas said taxes on gas are minimal compared with the average total ticket price for unleaded gas, which hit a startling $4.73 in San Diego earlier this month. Vargas was speaking in Spanish during the interview. The statement we’re examining — “Realmente, los impuestos que pagan es poco en comparacion de cuanto pagan por el gas. Es decir, es el diez por ciento” — is a translation.	None	None	None	None	The Taxes You Pay at the Pump: Fact Check	October 16, 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-13387	"The only years that anybody's ever seen" of Donald Trump’s tax returns "showed he didn't pay any federal income tax."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/27/hillary-clinton/debate-hillary-clinton-tax-claim-ignores-years-whe/	Hillary Clinton is continuing to make an issue of the fact that Donald Trump has refused to release his tax returns, and at the first presidential debate, she suggested that one reason for his reluctance may be that Trump doesn't pay federal taxes. "Maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax," she said. Trump retorted that not paying taxes "makes me smart." In reality, neither Clinton nor Trump have their talking points correct. We looked at a nearly identical claim by Clinton previously and found it to be Mostly False. The truth is none of the tax returns she is talking about have ever been released, and she's ignoring other returns examined by New Jersey gambling regulators showing that Trump did pay taxes. The evidence is in a 1981 report that analyzed Trump's finances as part of his efforts to get a casino license for a proposed casino-hotel complex. The report, on Page 33, details Trump's income and federal tax payments for 1975 through 1979. The report states that Trump paid federal taxes for three of those five years to the tune of $71,932 on reported income of $219,334. (In current dollars, that would be a $296,121 paid in taxes on $910,319 in reported income.) In the final two years he did not pay federal income taxes because, according to tax rules, he lost money each year — more than $3.8 million then, or about $12.8 million today. New Jersey's Division of Gaming Enforcement verified his income, losses and deductions. The division said Trump's losses came from the operation of his various properties. But the report offers no specifics. We asked both the Clinton and Trump campaigns if they had any additional information since our original check. We didn't hear back. Our ruling Clinton said, "The only years that anybody's ever seen" of Trump’s tax returns "showed he didn't pay any federal income tax." Those records, covering five years of returns, report that in three of the five years Trump did pay federal income taxes. In two years he did not. The tax returns themselves remain secret. Clinton’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/6adfa4d3-c309-41e1-940d-dd06448c5548	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-09-27T01:29:38	2016-09-26	['None']
-snes-04200	Mark Zuckerberg is David Rockefeller’s Grandson?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-zuckerberg-is-david-rockefellers-grandson/	None	Junk News	None	David Emery	None	Is Mark Zuckerberg David Rockefeller’s Grandson?	22 August 2016	None	['Mark_Zuckerberg']
-pomt-04329	Says "Tammy Baldwin had the opportunity to vote to honor the victims of 9/11 and she voted against it."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/oct/26/tommy-thompson/thompson-says-baldwin-voted-against-resolution-hon/	Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Thompson uses military veterans, images of the fallen twin towers and pictures of 9/11 victims to criticize Democratic rival Tammy Baldwin in a new television ad. The ad opens with a female Air Force veteran stating: "Tammy Baldwin had the opportunity to vote to honor the victims of 9/11 and she voted against it." Images of the battered towers and victims memorial pass by. Two other veterans chime in with statements including: "It’s a slap in the face to every one of their families and anyone who has ever served in the United States military. Tammy Baldwin’s extreme far left approach leaves this country in jeopardy." And this: "It’s a very dangerous path Tammy’s leading us on." The ad concludes with a veteran stating: "What would you do if these were your children? How would you feel?" Let’s look at the core claim in this ad: That Baldwin, a U.S. House member from Madison, voted against a tribute to Sept. 11 victims. The claim stems from a Sept. 14, 2006, vote on a resolution commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Baldwin was one of 22 House members -- 21 Democrats and one Republican -- to vote against the resolution. Thompson campaign spokeswoman Lisa Boothe said the matter was pretty cut and dried. "It is simple, she was one of 22 members that voted against it, an incredibly small margin. This was a near unanimous vote." So there is some truth in Thompson claim. But that’s far from the entire story. At the time, Baldwin delivered a speech on the House floor denouncing Republicans for adding language to the routine commemoration that she did not agree with. According to the Congressional Record, here’s what she said Sept. 13, 2006: "Mr. Speaker, on the fifth anniversary of the worst attack on American soil, my Republican colleagues have disgracefully politicized what should have been a solemn and sincere resolution. "This week we are mourning the tragic losses of innocent lives as well as commemorating the unsurpassed heroism that was on display that day. "We are expressing our gratitude to our nation’s law enforcement officers for their tireless dedication to make our country safer; and we are reaffirming our nation’s resolve to combat terrorism and secure our homeland. But rather than offering a bipartisan resolution that unites us on this solemn occasion, the Republican leadership converted the bill into an endorsement of the Patriot Act, punitive immigration bills, and other highly controversial measures, which many of my constituents oppose. "This bill was cynically transformed from a memorial resolution to an endorsement of President Bush’s failed policies. The Republicans show enormous disrespect to the 9/11 victims and families by playing election year politics with something as solemn as the fifth anniversary of 9/11; I will vote against the bill." The publication CQ Weekly, which covers Congress, described the resolution this way in a Sept. 18, 2006 piece: "But this year’s version was different. Taken up 54 days before one of the most pivotal elections in a decade, the measure afforded Republicans and Democrats a platform from which to argue about which party is more determined to prevail in the war on terror." The story added: "Republicans stuffed the bill with references to GOP-crafted measures that they say improve national security. Democrats, who voted for some of the bills listed in the resolution, wanted no references to new laws, and complained that framing the resolution that way made it too much of a political document." Thompson’s ad shows a portion of a Sept. 14, 2006, headline from Baldwin’s hometown Capital Times -- "Baldwin rejects 9-11 tribute" -- but not the entire headline, which read: "Baldwin rejects 9/11 tribute, saying it insults victims, families." The Baldwin campaign notes that she has voted in favor of a similar resolution honoring 9/11 victims nine times -- in 2001, ‘02, ‘04, ‘05, ‘07, ‘08, ‘09 ‘10 and ‘11. The campaign also points out that one day before the 2006 vote, Baldwin voted in favor of a resolution calling for "establishing a national memorial at the World Trade Center site to commemorate and mourn the events of February 26, 1993, and September 11, 2001." Our rating Thompson said his Democratic challenger voted against a resolution honoring 9/11 victims. Technically he’s correct. Baldwin voted against the measure in 2006 -- and criticized Republicans for adding in references to the Patriot Act, immigration bills, and other controversial matters. But Baldwin has voted nine times in favor of similar resolutions and the day before the vote in question supported creation of a memorial at the World Trade Center site. Thompson’s statement contains an element of truth, but leaves out critical information that would give a different impression. That’s our definition of Mostly False. (Editor's note: On Oct. 31, 2012, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Daniel Bice reported Baldwin had actually missed one of the nine votes her campaign cited -- a fact the campaign acknowledged, saying she was sick that day. )	None	Tommy Thompson	None	None	None	2012-10-26T08:50:00	2012-10-23	['Tammy_Baldwin']
-pomt-11908	Says "80 percent of the tax breaks in" President Donald Trump’s tax-cut "proposal go to the top 1 percent, that is, people making more than $730,000 a year."	half-true	/texas/statements/2017/oct/20/lloyd-doggett/lloyd-doggett-says-80-percent-republican-sought-ta/	A Texas Democrat told congressional colleagues that President Donald Trump’s outlined plan to cut taxes would hugely--and mostly--benefit America’s wealthiest. U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin, whose district runs south into San Antonio, said in his Sept. 30, 2017, House floor remarks: "Eighty percent of the tax breaks in this proposal go to the top 1 percent--that is, people making more than $730,000 a year." Doggett made his claim three days after Republicans issued a framework outlining a proposed tax system with just three tax brackets, at tax rates of 12 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent, down from the current seven tax brackets. For personal income-tax filers, the framework calls for doubling the standard income-tax deduction while repealing most itemized deductions, including personal exemptions for dependents. The framework further says that the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee "will work on additional measures to meaningfully reduce the tax burden on the middle-class." Put another way, the legislation itself had yet to debut. The framework also lists big intended changes in business taxation including a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 20 percent. Doggett points to news story Doggett, asked the basis of his claim, pointed to an Associated Press news story citing a preliminary review of the framework that was issued Sept. 29, 2017, by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. According to the AP report, the center found "that about 80 percent of the tax benefit would go to the top 1 percent — with income above $730,000 annually — by 2027." We confirmed that’s what the center’s analysis, "A Preliminary Analysis of the Unified Framework," concluded for the year 2027. However, the center pegs the top-1-percent income figure for 2027 at $912,100 in 2017 dollars; it separately lists $730,000 as what the top 1 percent would earn in 2018 when about half the benefits would flow to the top 1 percent, the analysis says. Generally, experts told us that no other reports on the plan’s effects on taxpayers came public before Doggett spoke. A few days later, though, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy -- a research group that partners with Citizens for Tax Justice, which advocates for the tax interests of middle- and lower-class families -- predicted that in all but a few states, at least half the framework’s tax cuts would flow to the wealthiest 1 percent of residents. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation plans to issue a detailed impact analysis once the tax legislation firms up, an official there told us by phone. "As an organization, we decided that the unified framework was not yet detailed enough," Scott Greenberg said. He noted that among unsettled variables were the size of a revised standard deduction and an increased child tax credit. Center’s preliminary analysis Let’s get to details in the center’s analysis. For starters, the center’s estimates presume that the plan takes effect in 2018 and would decrease federal revenue by $2.4 trillion over 10 years. "In 2018," the analysis says, "all income groups would see their average taxes fall, but some taxpayers in each group would face increases. Those with the very highest incomes would receive the biggest tax cuts." According to the center’s estimates, the top 1 percent of Americans would get 53 percent of the plan’s benefits at the start--though reap 79.7 percent of the benefits in its 10th year, 2027. That is, in 2018, 53 cents of every dollar in tax savings would go to the nation’s wealthiest 1 percent of residents and in 2027, nearly 80 cents of every dollar in savings would accrue to the top 1 percent, the center estimates. A pause: Chris Edwards, a tax expert for the libertarian Cato Institute, cautions against solely considering the share of tax reductions potentially enjoyed by the super-wealthy. His nudge: Folks should be aware that the same Americans consistently account for a great deal of tax revenue. In 2014, according to IRS data posted by the Tax Foundation, the top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes, 39.5 percent, than the bottom 90 percent combined, 29.1 percent. The same year, per the government, the share of personal income earned by the top 1 percent of taxpayers rose to 20.6 percent. The center’s analysis of the Republican framework says: "Between 2018 and 2027, the average tax cut as a share of after-tax income would fall for all income groups other than the top 1 percent." In 2027, it says, the overall average tax cut would be smaller than in 2018, increasing after-tax incomes 1.7 percent. That year, the center says, about "80 percent of the total benefit would accrue to taxpayers in the top 1 percent, whose after-tax income would increase 8.7 percent," the analysis says. Under the plan, the center says, the number of taxpayers paying more in taxes would generally rise over time. "This is because the plan would replace personal exemptions, which are indexed for inflation, with additional credits for children and non-child dependents that are not indexed for inflation," its analysis says. "In addition, indexing tax brackets and other parameters to the slower-growing chained Consumer Price Index means that over time more income is subject to tax at higher rates," it says. A center researcher, Joe Rosenberg, advised by phone that the conclusion that the wealthiest Americans would reap more of the tax benefits in the tenth year traces to other Americans bearing more tax losses as a result of losing itemized deductions, especially deductions for paying state and local income taxes. Rosenberg also singled out the proposal to end the personal exemption, indexed for inflation, with a child tax credit not indexed for inflation. Rosenberg said the center did not analyze the "distributional" effects of the outlined plan for other years, meaning there are no projections of the degree of benefits absorbed by any subset of earners for years other than 2018 and 2027. After the center posted its analysis, a White House adviser, Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, questioned the validity of the projections given multiple assumptions made by the center. Rosenberg, asked about that critique, pointed out that the center’s analysis says up front that many aspects of the framework "were unspecified or left to be determined by the tax-writing committees in Congress." Doggett stands by statement We informed Doggett that he didn’t say in his claim that he was speaking solely about 2027 and he also gave the wrong figure for what the top 1 percent are projected to earn that year. Doggett replied by email: "In my remarks, I specifically noted that the tax breaks would go to those making ‘more than’ $730,000 a year. You correctly note that the number increases (more than), not decreases (less than) in future years, which further bolsters my point that the benefits go to the very wealthy few. Since if anything, I understated how inequitable this proposal is, I am pleased you are focusing on the inequity." Doggett also said that last he checked, the AP news story he shared with us (posted online by the Austin American-Statesman) hadn’t been updated to the 2027 dollar amount. Our ruling Doggett said "80 percent of the tax breaks in" President Trump’s frameworked tax-cut "proposal go to the top 1 percent, that is, people making more than $730,000 a year." The analysis Doggett referenced indeed indicates benefits will accrue to the very wealthy over time. Yet in the first year of changes, the top 1 percent are projected to draw a little over half the tax savings. The threshold of 80 percent going to the top 1 percent is projected for the tenth year. Also, Doggett’s stated figure for incomes is too low; it ties to the first year of implementation. We rate Doggett’s floor statement Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Lloyd Doggett	None	None	None	2017-10-20T12:00:46	2017-09-30	['None']
-pose-00051	"Create a new Small Business Health Tax Credit to provide small businesses with a refundable tax credit of up to 50 percent on premiums paid by small businesses on behalf of their employees. To be eligible for the credit, small businesses will have to offer a quality health plan to all of their employees and cover a meaningful share of the cost of employee health premiums."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/54/create-a-small-business-tax-credit-to-help-with-he/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Create a small business tax credit to help with health premiums	2010-01-07T13:26:46	None	['None']
-tron-03539	Picture of Palestinian baby dressed as a suicide bomber	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/babybomber/	None	terrorism	None	None	None	Picture of Palestinian baby dressed as a suicide bomber	Mar 30, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-08001	Says 15,000 IRS employees "have to be added to administer ‘ObamaCare’ and look at the tax implications."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/jan/14/jeff-fitzgerald/wisconsin-assembly-speaker-jeff-fitzgerald-says-ir/	Days before becoming speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, Jeff Fitzgerald was given a national platform to lay into the federal health care reform law that he and other critics call "ObamaCare." On the Dec. 27, 2010, edition of PBS Newshour, the Horicon Republican claimed that "from the IRS standpoint, 15,000 new employees have to be added just to, you know, administer ObamaCare and look at the tax implications." That’s a big, round number, so let’s check Fitzgerald’s math. Since President Barack Obama signed the reforms into law in March 2010, attacks by opponents have increased. In January 2011, Wisconsin moved to join 20 other states in a federal court lawsuit in Florida that seeks to overturn the law. To assess Fitzgerald’s claim, we asked his spokesman, former Milwaukee radio personality John Jagler, for the source of the 15,000 jobs figure. Jagler said it came from the Thomas More Law Center in Michigan. The public-interest law firm, which says it represents Christians and their religious beliefs, filed a suit in federal court in Michigan that is similar to the Florida case that Wisconsin wants to join. After a Michigan judge upheld the health care reforms law -- in a ruling the law center is appealing -- law center president Richard Thompson issued a statement. It said the health reforms will "add an estimated 16,000 to 20,000 additional IRS agents to monitor tax returns and records to determine compliance with the new regulations." So, Fitzgerald was slightly more conservative with his 15,000 claim. We checked with the IRS, which said it has not settled on a number or even done its own jobs estimate. So any number out there presented as fact is problematic. Back to the Thomas More Law Center number. Thompson arrived at his 16,000 to 20,000 estimate after reviewing articles by conservative think tanks and news outlets, according to law center spokeswoman Kate Lynch. Those articles cited a March 2010 Republican report from the House Ways and Means Committee, she said. That report didn’t use numbers as high as Thompson’s. It said the IRS "may need to hire as many as 16,500 additional auditors, agents and other employees to investigate and collect billions in new taxes from Americans" in connection with the health care reform law. The Republican report’s estimate was based in part on a November 2009 financial impact estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The budget office projected that administering the law will cost the IRS between $5 billion and $10 billion over 10 years. The nine-page Republican report cited the 16,500 jobs figure five times. However, as our colleagues at PolitiFact National pointed out, the report also hedged its estimate, saying in a footnote that the number of additional IRS jobs likely will be between 11,800 and 16,500. Let’s circle back. Fitzgerald claimed that 15,000 IRS employees "have to be added" to manage the health care reform law, as if it’s a settled point. There’s little question more IRS workers will have to be added, but the agency has not set a number. And there is no evidence that 15,000 will be the final number, though it is within the range of one government estimate, albeit one done for House Republicans. We rate Fitzgerald’s statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Jeff Fitzgerald	None	None	None	2011-01-14T09:00:00	2010-12-27	['None']
-pomt-12039	The mobilization of the military in response to the storms in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands "is the largest ever mobilization of our military in a naval and marine operation" and an Air Force carrier there "was the first-ever as well."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2017/sep/14/tom-bossert/has-military-taken-unprecedented-action-response-h/	President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser Tom Bossert said that the military has taken unprecedented steps in response to Hurricane Irma. By the time of this briefing Sept. 11, Hurricane Irma had weakened to a tropical storm as it made its way up the Florida peninsula. "The mobilization of our military in response to the storms in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands is the largest ever mobilization of our military in a naval and marine operation, and we now have an Air Force carrier deployed in this effort; this was the first-ever as well," Bossert said. Was the military’s response to Irma the largest naval operation ever and the first time an aircraft carrier has been deployed after a natural disaster? For one, the Navy actually operates aircraft carriers, not the Air Force. More to the point, it is too soon to say that the U.S. response to Irma was the largest response to a hurricane, and it definitely was not the first time an aircraft carrier was deployed for that reason. Military response to Hurricane Irma is significant, but it’s too soon to say it’s the largest ever Hurricane Irma struck the U.S. Virgin Islands as a Category 5 storm and skirted along Puerto Rico’s coast with 185 mph winds. The storm continued on a track towards Florida, where it hit the Keys as a Category 4 hurricane in the Florida Keys and then again on Marco Island as a Category 3. The storm caused major, widespread damage from Miami to Naples to Tampa and Jacksonville. In response to Irma, the Defense Department said on Tuesday that it had dispatched 10,000 service members to the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, and 20,700 in the eastern United States. The National Guard reported Sept. 12 that it had deployed more than 15,500 guardsmen in response to Irma. In addition to service members, the Pentagon has deployed nine ships and the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier controlled by the Navy. These numbers could change as the department assesses what is needed. Still, by numbers alone, the response to Irma at the time of this claim doesn’t quite stack up against the Pentagon’s response to Hurricane Katrina. By Sept. 7, 2005, nine days after Katrina made landfall, operations included 17,417 active-duty troops, 42,990 National Guardsmen, 20 U.S. ships, 360 helicopters and 93 military planes, according to a Congressional Research Service report. "Whether the Irma efforts become the largest deployment of U.S. military forces after a natural disaster remains to be seen, but it’s worth noting that more than 12,000 Department of Defense personnel assisted with Unified Assistance, and thousands were deployed after Hurricane Katrina," said Lance Janda, a military historian at Cameron University. More broadly, if you consider all naval and Marine operations (not just hurricane relief), then Bossert’s claim is even more inaccurate. "Clearly this was nowhere near the biggest naval/Marine operation ever—it was dwarfed by big wartime operations from World War II and the Korean war and even Operation Desert Storm," said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Is this the first time the United States has deployed an aircraft carrier? The Navy Office of Information confirmed that this was not the first time an aircraft carrier has been deployed to help hurricane recovery efforts. After Hurricane Katrina, the USS Harry S. Truman deployed for rescue and recovery operations. In addition, the USS Saipan was deployed after Hurricane Hazel in 1954. And it’s not only hurricanes. In 1959, the USS Kearsarge deployed to Japan to help with relief efforts related to Typhoon Vera. The USS Abraham Lincoln was also sent to Sumatra to provide support for Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Our ruling Bossert said the Defense Department had put together "the largest-ever mobilization of our military in a naval and Marine operation." He also added that for the first time ever an "Air Force carrier" had been deployed in the effort. Bossert misspoke when he said "Air Force" carrier, but it’s still not the first time an aircraft carrier has been used after a natural disaster. Most importantly, it is too soon to say that the military response to Hurricane Irma was the largest ever. At this point, the response to Irma doesn’t quite stack up against the Pentagon’s response to Hurricane Katrina. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Tom Bossert	None	None	None	2017-09-14T11:07:34	2017-09-11	['Puerto_Rico', 'United_States_Virgin_Islands', 'United_States_Air_Force']
-pomt-03744	"The vast majority of our public school students are receiving less state support than their private voucher peers."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2013/apr/10/sondy-pope/rep-sondy-pope-says-most-public-school-students-ge/	Even before Gov. Scott Walker unveiled his plan to expand school choice, a leading Democratic voice on education warned against spending more on "unproven and unaccountable" voucher schools. On a per-pupil basis, state backing for choice programs in Milwaukee and Racine already exceeds state funding for the average public school pupil, said state Rep. Sondy Pope (D-Cross Plains). "Last session Republicans chose to protect and expand private school vouchers and that came at the expense of public education," Pope said in a Jan. 30, 2013 news release noting the GOP-approved cuts to state school aid for public districts. Now, Pope said, "the vast majority of our public school students are receiving less state support than their private voucher peers." She offered statistical proof: "The average public student receives roughly $4,900 of state general aid while choice students are guaranteed $6,442 in state aid. Over 80% of school districts now receive less than the voucher guaranteed amount." Legislators are reviewing Walker’s 2013-’15 budget plan to increase funding to choice schools while capping overall public school revenue. As debate heated up on his plan, Walker contended that even after that increase, choice schools would be getting about half the funding per pupil that public schools get. We rated that Half True, noting problems with his math and methodology. Now let’s examine Pope’s claim that the vast majority of public school students are receiving "less state support than their private voucher peers." Pope's equation In evaluating Pope’s claim, one key phrase is "state support." Pope excludes non-state funding such as local property tax support and federal funding, which typically make up about half of public school district revenue. And she specifically defines "state support" as general aid distributed under the state’s equalization formula. We found numbers from credible sources that back up her specific claim, but also some problems inherent in the comparison. Based on figures reported by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau and the state Department of Public Instruction, just over 81 percent of Wisconsin’s public school districts received less in general state aid per-pupil than the $6,442 amount guaranteed to choice schools if they spend that much. The figures are for 2012-’13. Those districts encompass more than 75% of all public school students. Pope’s decision to zero in on state general aid fits with her talking points about restoring state general aid cut in the last budget session. And talking about general aid allows for a direct comparison with state aid to choice schools because in both cases the aid is unrestricted -- it can be spent on anything in the educational program. General aid is by far the largest source of state aid to schools. But her claim gave us a vague feeling of deja vu. Let’s go back to that Walker claim, that choice schools would get about half the funding that public schools get -- even after the increases in his budget in per-pupil aid to choice. Walker picked the largest possible revenue figure for public schools, one including federal funds, all state aid and local property taxes. Pope, by contrast, uses a much narrower -- if commonly used -- revenue figure for public schools. This explains why their conclusions are so starkly different. But some of the same cautions apply to both claims. Apples and oranges Researchers told us clean comparisons were difficult between the two types of schools. But they thought a better way was to compare public school revenue from state general aid and property taxes vs. the choice school guarantee of $6,442. The results of a comparison using that method would be dramatically different than Pope’s way. Statewide, public districts get an average of $9,884 from property taxes and general state aid. In fact, in the Walker item, we found that choice school revenue is about 25% lower than the public-school funding amount on average. (Important disclaimer: a complete comparison is currently impossible.) It’s important to note that Pope made clear she was concentrating on the state general aid payments that lawmakers cut, and was not discussing how schools compare when all funding sources are considered. However, there are more cautions and caveats even with that approach. On top of general aid, public schools also receive state funds for specific programs such as special education and class-size reduction. It’s known as "categorical aid." If you included that categorical funding, fewer public districts would fall below the $6,442 level. About 67 percent of public districts -- not the claimed more than 80 percent -- are below the choice aid level even with categorical aid included, based on calculations by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. The Milwaukee comparison Milwaukee Public Schools, we should note, is not one of the "vast majority" of districts where public students get less under Pope’s comparison -- or the broader view of including categorical aid. Students in Milwaukee Public School in 2011-’12 got $6,442 in general state aid -- the exact same amount of state-guaranteed aid paid out to voucher students there. Milwaukee is home to most of the nearly 25,000 voucher students in the state. Finally, there’s a nuance that affects the comparison Pope uses. Pope sets up a comparison of "state support" to choice and to public schools. But the choice funding of $6,442 per pupil really is a hybrid of state aid and local property taxes. It gets paid out 100 percent in state funds, and the state by law is on the hook for that amount (if schools spend to the maximum), so the $6,442 figure is often cited as "state support." But in reality, property taxes levied by Milwaukee Public Schools are estimated to support 34.7 percent of the $154.6 million Milwaukee choice program in 2012-’13. Racine property taxpayers also contribute a big chunk to that city’s choice program. Here’s how it works: The state offsets a big part of its costs by reducing general aid to Milwaukee and Racine, and in turns allows them to make up the difference by raising local property taxes. MPS officials say, given the size of the reduction, they are compelled to raise the tax to protect education. This property tax component is fiercely debated, because Milwaukee Public Schools levies for those funds but by law is not allowed to count those students for purposes of the state’s aid formula. The effect is a shift onto Milwaukee property taxpayers due to the lost state aid. The bottom line -- when you take the property taxes into account -- is the state’s estimated share of choice costs for 2012-’13 is $4,207 -- not the full $6,442, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau said in a March 6, 2013 letter to state Sen. Paul Farrow. If you use $4,207 as a comparison point, Pope’s result flips -- only 33 percent of public districts get less general aid than that. Our rating Pope said the "vast majority of our public school students are receiving less state support than their private voucher peers." As was the case in Walker’s diametrically opposed claim, Pope accurately cites funding figures to make a point. But the narrow way she sets up the comparison is both a virtue and a vice, creating a technically accurate statement that leaves too little room for important details necessary to explain such a complex comparison. We rate her claim Half True.	None	Sondy Pope	None	None	None	2013-04-10T09:00:00	2013-03-30	['None']
-pomt-08614	"Under Tom Barrett’s leadership, violent crime in Milwaukee has decreased by over 20% -- to its lowest levels in more than 20 years."	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2010/sep/22/tom-barrett/tom-barrett-says-milwaukee-violent-crime-lowest-po/	Long before he entered the race for governor, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett trumpeted the work of Police Chief Edward Flynn, who rode into town in January 2008 with the mayor’s strong backing. Indeed, every quarter seems to bring an announcement that the city’s violent crime rate -- a precise measure of certain crimes set by the FBI -- has fallen again. Barrett, a Democrat running against Republican Scott Walker, on his campaign website highlights those crime trends as good news of historic proportions. "Under Tom Barrett’s leadership, violent crime in Milwaukee has decreased by over 20% -- to its lowest levels in more than 20 years," the website reads. "He has worked with law enforcement, community groups and residents to develop proactive strategies, and empowered the city's police department with strong leadership and the tools it needs to get the job done." The claim of a big drop and a 20-year-low caught our attention, so we put it to the test. And it failed. When we asked the Barrett campaign to back up the claim, campaign spokesman Phil Walzak cited a Journal Sentinel story from Jan. 21, 2010, "Crime in Milwaukee continues to decline." The article compared 2009 figures to those from 2007. Of course, Barrett was elected mayor and took office in April 2004, so the clock on his leadership started ticking three years earlier. So, why start with 2007? In an e-mail, Walzak said the campaign started there "because those are the figures that most closely measure the work of Chief Flynn, whose appointment as MPD Chief Tom supported and who Tom has worked closely with to implement new crime-fighting tactics." The campaign goes even further back -- all the way to the tenure of Police Chief Robert Ziarnik -- for its claim that violent crime hasn’t been lower in more than 20 years. For its index of violent crime, the FBI looks at four specific types of crimes: Homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. It is part of the Uniform Crime Reporting program, which includes a separate measure of nonviolent crimes. These are the statistics Flynn and Barrett cite each quarter when they tout the improvement in the city’s violent crime numbers. Walzak, though, says for the 20-year measure they are looking strictly at homicides. So, we’re already off on a bad track -- the campaign cherry-picked two years of data, not all the years of Barrett’s tenure. And it used homicides as a stand-in for all violent crime. To be sure, homicides attract the most attention. But Flynn and Barrett have regularly cited the broader number, with experts saying the murder rate alone can distort the picture. (Of the 6,446 violent crimes reported in 2009, 72 were homicides) Here’s what we found when we crunched the numbers: When you compare 2004, the year Barrett took office, with last year, reported violent crime incidents were 36 percent higher in 2009 than 2004. (Even if you make Barrett’s first full year in office, 2005, the baseline year, violent crime was still 5 percent higher last year.) If you look strictly at homicides, there was an 18 percent drop from 2004 to 2009. But the Barrett campaign talks about all violent crimes -- then it morphs the homicide number into the crime rate number and carries the comparison back decades. Homicides are at their lowest point in at least two decades. But the high-water mark in terms of all violent crime since 1990 actually came during Barrett’s tenure, in 2006. What’s going on here? When Barrett came into office on April 20, 2004, violent crime was at its lowest point during the past 20 years, thanks to a seven-year period when the numbers plummeted (see chart with this item). Barrett’s second full year, 2006, was marked by a surge to the highest point since 1990. Indeed, the city was among the national leaders in a spike in violent crimes. Since then, violent crime has fallen considerably, but reported incidents were still well above the 2004 level. National trends factor in. Crime experts have said the decline in violent crime that began in the 1990s was part of a long-term pattern. They cited falling crack cocaine use, a strong economy and other societal factors, with some citing tougher police strategies. Likewise, the subsequent jump was attributed to many factors. In 2007, Barrett himself cited a decline in federal funds for the community-oriented policing service program and the need for responsible gun legislation. Whatever the reasons behind the trends, the Barrett campaign is playing loose with its words and the numbers. The campaign defines its bragging about what has happened "under Tom Barrett’s leadership." But it cherry-picks the best two years to highlight, ignoring the full picture for his time in office. Then the campaign goes beyond Barrett’s time in office to say violent crime is at a 20-year low. This time it picks the pit out of the cherry, using the homicide rate as a stand-in for all violent crimes. In truth, the 20-year high point for violent crime was in 2006, two years into Barrett’s term. All that cherry-picking leaves voters with a false impression -- and leaves us with a sour taste. We rate the statement Pants on Fire. Note (Sept. 23, 2010): In response to this item, the Barrett campaign changed the statement in question to make it accurate.	None	Tom Barrett	None	None	None	2010-09-22T09:00:00	2010-09-21	['Milwaukee', 'Tom_Barrett_(politician)']
-para-00204	The government can cut tax by 15% and "get back the same amount of tax anyway".	false	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/31/clive-palmer/palmernomics-pudding-unpalatable-real-world-menu/index.html	None	['Tax']	Clive Palmer	Peter Martin, Peter Fray	None	Palmernomics: pudding of an idea unpalatable for real world menu	Saturday, August 31, 2013 at 5:52 p.m.	None	['None']
-snes-00819	A trail cam in Alabama snapped a photograph of an unknown creature's horrifying feet in March 2018.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/monstrous-paws-alabama/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Were These Monstrous Paws Photographed in Alabama?	2 April 2018	None	['Alabama']
-snes-05258	Is This Donald Trump’s Cousin’s Obituary?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trumps-cousins-obituary/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This Donald Trump’s Cousin’s Obituary?	5 February 2016	None	['None']
-snes-01361	Is ‘LGBT’ Adding a ‘P’ for Pedosexuals?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lgbtp-adding-letter/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Is ‘LGBT’ Adding a ‘P’ for Pedosexuals?	7 December 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-13030	"Black Lives Matter, who are attacking law enforcement officers" -- Barack Obama "had them to the White House."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2016/dec/02/sean-duffy/donald-trump-backer-sean-duffy-links-attacks-polic/	Nine days after the presidential election, a discussion about protests against Donald Trump led a Wisconsin congressman to lash out at Black Lives Matter and President Barack Obama. The attack was made on the Nov. 17, 2016 edition of "The O’Reilly Factor" talk show by Republican Sean Duffy, a Trump transition team member who has been mentioned as a potential challenger to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin in 2018. Fox News Channel’s Eric Bolling, who was filling in for host Bill O’Reilly, asked whether Obama should take "a more forceful stand" on demonstrations over Trump’s victory that, in some cities, such as Portland, Ore., turned violent. Duffy responded by saying that Obama "might not be instigating these rallies, but he’s not shutting them down." Then he shifted to Black Lives Matter, which formed after a Florida jury in 2013 found George Zimmerman not guilty of murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teen. "And frankly, Eric, you know, Black Lives Matter, who are attacking law enforcement officers, he (Obama) had them to the White House. You have to recognize what President Obama is doing by not shutting down the violence that’s coming from the left-wing extremists in his party." So, Duffy is saying that Obama, in "not shutting down violence," invited members of Black Lives Matter to the White House even though members of the group "are attacking law enforcement officers." Attacking officers Duffy’s congressional office referred us to news reports on two incidents. August 2015: More than a year before Duffy made his statement, protesters in a Black Lives Matter march in Minnesota were captured on video yelling "pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon." September 2016: A Dallas police officer filed a lawsuit against Black Lives Matter, Obama and others, alleging they "incite people to violence and cause violence" against law enforcement officers, including including five Dallas officers killed in an ambush two months earlier. Duffy spokesman Mark Bednar told us: "To incite violence, especially against a specific group of people -- in this case, law enforcement officials -- is a form of attack." There have been isolated incidents of physical attacks against officers at Black Lives Matter events. Here are three examples from July 2016: Chicago: A well-known activist was charged with striking a police commander and trying to disarm another during a Black Lives Matter protest of fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. St. Paul, Minn.: 21 officers were injured after protesters blocked I-94. A Black Lives Matter St. Paul leader said the protesters throwing things at police were not from his community. But Black Lives Matter Minneapolis posted on Facebook: "We shut down 94 for Philando," a reference to Philando Castile, who was shot dead days earlier by a suburban Minneapolis officer. Baton Rouge, La.: A police officer said he sustained injuries during a protest and in turn he filed a lawsuit against a prominent Black Lives Matter activist. He accused the activist of having "incited the violence," but did not allege that the activist was the one who attacked him. So, there have been isolated incidents of attacks on officers during Black Lives Matter events, but it’s not always clear who is responsible. Visit to the White House The second part of Duffy’s claim refers to a forum Obama held at the White House in July 2016 involving three dozen people. News reports said Obama met for more than four hours with the group, which included two Black Lives Matter leaders, other activists, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and other elected officials, law enforcement officials and community leaders. So, this wasn’t a personal audience with the president for leaders of Black Lives Matter -- it was a large gathering of people representing diverse interests. Moreover, Obama, while defending the Black Lives Matter movement, has condemned those who advocate violence. For example, while in Madrid in July 2016, he said: "Whenever those of us who are concerned about fairness in the criminal justice system attack police officers, you are doing a disservice to the cause." Our rating In saying Obama is "not shutting down violence," Duffy claimed: "Black Lives Matter, who are attacking law enforcement officers" -- Obama "had them to the White House." There have been isolated incidents of law enforcement officers being attacked during Black Lives Matter demonstrations, although it’s not always clear whether members of the movement are responsible. Two leaders of the movement were at a White House event with Obama, but so were some three dozen other people representing a wide variety of organizations. And Obama, while defending Black Lives Matter, has condemned attacks on police officers. For a statement that has an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, our rating is Mostly False. Duffy fact checks from 2016 presidential campaign ➤ "One of George Soros' companies has provided some of the (voting) machines" for some states. Pants on Fire. ➤ Says Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has "ties to the Muslim Brotherhood." False. ➤ "Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have left us with $19 trillion in debt." Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/3fabe9a4-89ab-440d-bba6-55c96d6e09a5	None	Sean Duffy	None	None	None	2016-12-02T06:00:00	2016-11-17	['White_House', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-11162	"USA: Mysterious Nazi submarine from WWII discovered in Great Lakes!"	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/may/24/blog-posting/no-german-submarine-wasnt-just-discovered-great-la/	A headline would have readers believe that a ship discovered at the bottom of Lake Ontario by the Coast Guard is a German submarine, but this is fake news that has circulated for years. "USA: Mysterious Nazi submarine from WWII discovered in Great Lakes," said a May 22 headline on Cvikas. A similar story has appeared on various websites since 2016. Facebook flagged this story as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook's News Feed. You can read more about our partnership with Facebook here. The story said that amateur scuba divers first spotted the boat in January and contacted authorities. Then, the story went, archaeologists associated with Niagara University and master divers from the U.S Coast Guard determined that they were dealing with a German submarine that sank during World War II and recovered it. But we found no legitimate news articles stating that such a sunken ship was recently discovered. The story included a photo of a rusted submarine. Snopes found in 2016 that the photo was an unrelated image of a rusting, decommissioned Russian submarine from the Cold War era. The story quoted Mark Carpenter, a supposed professor at the Niagara University. Thomas Burns, a spokesman for the university, said they do not have a professor by that name. The Coast Guard told PolitiFact that the story about a recent discovery of a Nazi submarine in the Great Lakes is false. However, something similar has happened in the past. "Years ago the Navy brought a WWII submarine onto the Great Lakes and at some point sank the submarine. So there is a WWII submarine sunken in the Great Lakes, but the Coast Guard didn’t work with Niagara University to recover a sunken WWII German submarine," the Coast Guard said in a statement. ABC 7 Eyewitness News in Chicago reported in 2013 about the history of a sunken German submarine in Lake Michigan. The German mine-laying sub U-C 97 was brought to the midwest on tour in the summer of 1919. "The U-Boat was on tour. It was kind of a post-war, 'we won' tour, and so people got to go on to it and see it, and then as a condition of the armistice, it had to be sunk," Pritzker Military Library CEO Ken Clarke told ABC news. In June of 1921, the sub was sunk by the military. But in this case, the story declaring that a mysterious Nazi submarine from WWII was discovered in Great Lakes is made up. We rate this statement Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-05-24T10:34:03	2018-05-22	['United_States', 'World_War_II']
-pomt-08968	Transporting drugs "is the price of admission" for people crossing the border illegally.	pants on fire!	/rhode-island/statements/2010/jul/20/john-loughlin/loughlin-says-carrying-drugs-price-people-have-pay/	John Loughlin, a Republican running for Congress in the 1st District, echoed a controversial claim about illegal immigration when he appeared July 9 on WHJJ's Helen Glover Show. Loughlin, fresh from a trip to Arizona, said that it's common for people crossing the border illegally to be carrying drugs for drug traffickers. "That's the price of admission," Loughlin said. "So if you want your family to go -- you, your wife, your kids, you know -- 'Here's a backpack full of drugs.' That's how you're going to get across the border." At another point in the conversation, he said, "And these are folks that come across the border and in many cases they're human traffickers. And in order to get passage across the border you gotta carry a knapsack full of 80 pounds of drugs. And if you get tired in the middle of the desert, they take the drugs off your back and leave you for dead. They found many of them just left for dead in the middle of the desert." Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer made a similar claim June 25, when she asserted that "The majority of people that are coming to Arizona and trespassing are now becoming drug mules." PolitiFact National examined Brewer's claim and, on June 30, judged it as False. PolitiFact concluded that while most experts agree that there is growing overlap between drug smuggling and human smuggling, the evidence shows that only a small percentage of those crossing the border illegally are carrying drugs. Even Brewer backed off her initial statement, issuing two clarifications. The second one said, in part: "The simple truth is that the majority of human smuggling in our state is under the direction of the drug cartels, which are by definition smuggling drugs." So, by her logic, if you're being helped by a drug smuggler, you're a drug smuggler, even if you're not carrying drugs. We alerted Loughlin's campaign to the previous PolitiFact story and asked for the source of the candidate's statements on the Glover show. Loughlin's campaign manager, Cara Cromwell, responded by noting that Loughlin never specifically said the majority of illegal immigrants were transporting drugs. But his words and the context of his comments clearly gave the impression that carrying drugs is now the price of admission for getting into the United States illegally. Cromwell also released a statement from the candidate saying that he got his information from law enforcement officials in Arizona, and she gave us a phone number for the Pinal County sheriff's office. "While the information is anecdotal, it is nevertheless a sad but true fact," Loughlin said in the statement. So we called, and then emailed, the Pinal County sheriff's office and asked how many people they had arrested for crossing the border since Jan. 1, and how many of those had been charged with drug offenses. Spokesman Tim Gaffney said that from Jan. 1 to May 18, their office turned over 100 people to the U.S. Border Patrol for being in the country illegally, of which 41 were charged with marijuana smuggling. So far so good. But it turns out that Pinal County is about 70 miles from the border, and those 100 people, said Gaffney, were picked up for a variety of reasons, not as they were crossing the border. "None of them are from that. They're all just from officer contacts, from citizens calling in the individuals," Gaffney said. "Almost all of them are traffic stops or citizens calling in regarding fights in progress or suspicious behavior where we get called to it." He referred us to the U.S. Border Patrol for broader numbers. We then called Steven Cribby, spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, who pulled statistics for the Tucson sector, which covers 262 miles of Arizona border, from the New Mexico state line to Yuma, Arizona. It's also the biggest and busiest sector. The 100 people (about 22 per month) picked up in Pinal County turns out to be a drop in the bucket. From Oct. 1, 2008 through Sept. 30, 2009, the border patrol apprehended 241,673 people (20,000 per month), Cribby said. How many of the 241,673 cases involved drugs? Cribby said the Border Patrol logged 1,602 apprehensions in "drug-related events" for that period. We did the math. That's less than 1 percent (0.66 percent) of all the apprehensions from that Border Patrol sector. But Cribby stressed that not everyone who is apprehended in a drug-related event is actually involved with drugs. "It just means they were apprehended in the same event," he said. So the actual percentage could be even lower. "For the most part, the people who are bringing drugs across, they're getting very heavily coached that as soon as you sense that the Border Patrol is coming to run away as quickly as possible" back to Mexico, said Tucson sector agent Colleen Agle. "And a lot of them try to come north with the intention of just hiding the load so that somebody who is already in the United States can come and pick that up. So they're trying to hide it and run back." So they're not even interested in staying in the United States. This seems to confirm what PolitiFact found in June when it received data from the Department of Homeland Security showing that, in March 2010, drug and drug-trafficking charges accounted for just over 5 percent of immigrations and customs prosecutions while simple immigration violations accounted for almost 89 percent. By saying that carrying drugs has become the price of admission for getting across the Arizona border illegally, Loughlin falsely created the impression that most immigrants sneaking across the border are being forced to pay this price. After we informed the campaign that the drug mule claim had been questioned (and sent along the June 30 PolitiFact item outlining its problems), Loughlin acknowledged that he was using anecdotal information from the law enforcement people he spoke with, yet still characterized his "price of admission" comment as "a sad but true fact." But anecdotes are not the best evidence. The not-so-anecdotal numbers from Customs and Border Protection show that his fact is sad but not true. We rate his claim as Pants on Fire.	None	John Loughlin	None	None	None	2010-07-20T00:00:01	2010-07-09	['None']
-hoer-00857	'Door-to-Door Salesman Stealing Dogs'	unsubstantiated messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/door-to-door-salesman-stealing-dogs-rumour.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	UNSUBSTANTIATED - 'Door-to-Door Salesman Stealing Dogs'	April 24, 2014	None	['None']
-pomt-13067	Financial conflict-of-interest "laws don't apply to the president, right? So, the president doesn't have to have a blind trust."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/16/rudy-giuliani/giuliani-president-trump-will-be-exempt-conflict-i/	How President-elect Donald Trump will handle his extensive businesses and financial holdings — and the potential conflict of interest that comes with them — when he gets into the Oval Office remains an open question. Trump has said his children will manage his business dealings. Many presidents in the past have put their assets in a blind trust, which is when an independent trustee manages another person’s assets without the person’s input. But Trump doesn’t actually have to do any of this because the financial conflict-of-interest laws don’t apply to him as president, said former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who is reportedly on the short list for a seat on Trump’s cabinet. "Well, first of all, you realize that those laws don't apply to the president, right?" Giuliani told CNN’s Jake Tapper Nov. 13. "So, the president doesn't have to have a blind trust. For some reason, when the law was written, the president was exempt." Giuliani has the law pretty much right. Trump, as president, has no legal obligation to detach himself from his businesses and financial interests. The law at issue is Title 18 Section 208 of the U.S. code. It says federal executive branch employees can’t participate in government matters in which they or their immediate family has a financial interest. Because of this law, some federal employees put their investments in a blind trust. This allows them to sidestep the regulation and participate in a matter that might otherwise pose a conflict of interest. But the president and the vice president, despite being executive branch employees, are exempt. According to the law’s definitions, Title 18 Section 208 does not apply to them, nor does it apply to members of Congress or federal judges. "It appears that presidents have mostly escaped the normal web of ethics and conflict-of-interest laws," said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government accountability watchdog. Amey added that presidents are allowed to accept gifts in many cases, too. It’s been this way since at least 1974, when the Justice Department issued a letter saying Title 18 Section 208 did not apply to the president. Congress expressly codified the exemptions in 1989. In the 1974 letter, the Justice Department said the legislative history of this conflict-of-interest provision indicated that it was never intended to apply to the president. Additionally, the Justice Department said placing conflict-of-interest laws on the president could constrain him in a potentially unconstitutional manner, though it did not give specific examples. "As the head of the executive branch, the president may not be able to — and arguably under the Constitution it might not be possible to require the president to — recuse from government decisions," said Richard Briffault, a professor of legislation at Columbia Law School. While Title 18 Section 208 is the primary conflict-of-interest provision, there are other relevant rules, including a couple that don’t exempt the president. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence will have to disclose their finances, which is required of all high-level federal employees, Briffault said. But the disclosures are not as detailed as federal tax returns, which Trump has not released. Then there’s the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bans U.S. government employees from accepting presents or compensation from foreign governments, noted Kathleen Clark, an expert on legal ethics and a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. The Trump Organization has numerous foreign ties, including several overseas real estate deals with possible foreign government connections. In 2012, for example, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended a ribbon cutting ceremony for Trump Towers Mall in Istanbul. "If any of Trump’s business arrangements involve the receipt of payments from foreign governments, I believe that he, or his entities from which he receives money, would have to forgo those payments, or he would have to detach from those entities," Clark said. But it's not fully clear that presidents are bound by the Emoluments Clause, and no court has weighed into answer this question. The way the clause is constructred — that it doesn't specify the president, unlike other provisions in the Constitution, for example — and the fact that President George Washington himself took gifts from the French government without asking Congress for permission, together make a good case that it doesn't apply to presidents, said Seth Barrett Tillman, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland who has studied the clause. Our ruling Giuliani said financial conflict-of-interest "laws don't apply to the president, right? So, the president doesn't have to have a blind trust." The president is, in fact, exempt from the primary conflict-of-interest provision in the U.S. code. So presidents do not have any legal obligation to put their financial holdings in a blind trust or to detach themselves from their financial interests in any way. As president, Trump will have to comply with financial disclosure requirements, however, and it's possible he is constrained by a clause in the Constitution regarding income from foreign governments. We rate Giuliani’s claim True. Update Jan. 12, 2017: We have updated this story to add more information about the Emoluments Clause. Our rating remains unchanged. Share the Facts Politifact 6 6 Politifact Rating: True Financial conflict-of-interest "laws don't apply to the president, right? So, the president doesn't have to have a blind trust." Rudy Giuliani Former New York Mayor In CNN's State of the Union November 13, 2016 2016-11-13 Read More info	None	Rudy Giuliani	None	None	None	2016-11-16T11:00:00	2016-11-13	['None']
-snes-01528	A photograph shows an owl experiencing an orgasm.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-this-owl-having-an-orgasm/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This Owl Having an Orgasm?	7 November 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-06955	Says Planned Parenthood provides about 140 visits for prenatal care in each state.	false	/new-jersey/statements/2011/jul/18/michael-doherty/sen-michael-doherty-claims-planned-parenthood-only/	When Democrats and Republicans met on the floor of the New Jersey Senate on July 11 to discuss overriding vetoes handed down by Gov. Chris Christie, the debate ultimately turned to whether $7.5 million for family planning services should be reinstated -- some of which would go to Planned Parenthood centers. Democrats touted the importance of that funding for New Jersey families. Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen) said of the clients served: "They are women who come for prenatal and postnatal health services so that they do have healthy families." But Republican Sen. Michael Doherty argued that the organization doesn’t provide much prenatal care. "There's a lot of talk about prenatal care and the fact is that Planned Parenthood just does not provide many prenatal visits. It's about 140 visits for each state in the entire country," said Doherty, who represents Warren County and parts of Hunterdon County. "So we’re talking (about) an organization we’re supposed to be sending people we care about to get top-notch care for prenatal visits and it turns out that they don’t really see a lot of patients." A resolution to override that veto failed in a 25-14 vote. PolitiFact New Jersey found that Doherty, a conservative, was right about prenatal care representing a small part of the services offered by Planned Parenthood, but he is wrong about there being about 140 visits in each state. Using the senator’s own reasoning, the number would actually be around 800 visits per state. First, let’s explain where Doherty received his information. Doherty referred us to a fact sheet prepared by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., showing that 7,021 prenatal clients were served nationwide in 2009. Based on that figure, Doherty determined there were, on average, about 140 prenatal patients per state. Here’s the problem: the fact sheet said "clients," but Doherty referred to "visits" on the Senate floor. Clients refers to people. Visits refers to the numbers of times a client goes to Planned Parenthood. When we checked with Michele Jaker, executive director of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of New Jersey, she said Planned Parenthood centers provided a total of 40,489 prenatal visits across the country in 2009, which is the latest data available. Using the same formula that Doherty did, that number equates to about 809 visits per state. Jaker could not provide the number of visits in New Jersey, but said 581 prenatal clients were served in the Garden State in 2009. "His number right off the bat is wrong," said Jaker, referring to Doherty. Jaker added in an email that Doherty’s approach -- dividing the number of prenatal patients by 50 states -- was not an accurate assessment, because several states "only have one health center and don't have the facilities to provide prenatal care." Told about our findings, Doherty said: "I think you’re splitting hairs." But for his overall argument that Planned Parenthood sees few prenatal patients, Doherty is right. According to the same fact sheet, "other women’s health services," which includes prenatal care, only accounted for 10 percent of all services provided by Planned Parenthood nationwide in 2009. According to figures provided by Jaker, prenatal clients represented about 0.6 percent of the 91,617 patients served by New Jersey centers in 2009. Jaker said the number of prenatal clients served by Planned Parenthood is due to limited funding and the needs of the community. If a center cannot provide prenatal care to a woman, it will refer her to another resource in the community, she said. "If there are enough providers who do prenatal care for low income women, it may not be a service we need to provide," Jaker wrote in an email. "We could cover the needs of our patients through referrals." Pointing out how many pregnancies may go unnoticed, Dr. Donald Chervenak, president-elect of the New Jersey Obstetrical and Gynecological Society, noted how Planned Parenthood is helpful in providing pregnancy testing. Through earlier prenatal treatment, other medical problems can be addressed sooner, Chervenak said. Back to Doherty’s statement: The senator said Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide many prenatal visits, saying the figure was "about 140 visits for each state in the entire country." That figure is way off, because Doherty was using the number of clients. The actual number would be more like 800 visits per state. Figures provided by Planned Parenthood confirm that prenatal care represents a small part of the services offered, but since the senator’s figures were inaccurate to such a large degree, we rate the statement False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Michael Doherty	None	None	None	2011-07-18T05:15:00	2011-07-11	['None']
-snes-04041	A photograph shows a group of sheep squeezing through a gate, despite no fence hemming them in.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sheep-walking-through-gate/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Sheep Walking Through Gate	13 September 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00760	Said he will cut the corporate income tax for new small businesses in their first decade	not yet rated	https://www.politifact.com/georgia/promises/deal-o-meter/promise/790/initially-exempt-some-startup-businesses-from-corp/	None	deal-o-meter	Nathan Deal	None	None	Initially exempt some startup businesses from corporate income taxes	2011-01-06T16:27:46	None	['None']
-pomt-00461	"Texas is one of the most gerrymandered states in the union."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2018/aug/16/beto-orourke/texas-one-nations-most-gerrymandered-states/	During a visit to HBO’s "Real Time with Bill Maher," Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke brought up the issue of gerrymandering -- the drawing of district lines to benefit a particular party or group. "Texas is one of the most gerrymandered states in the union," O’Rourke said during the episode. (It’s at about 2:58 in this video.) Is that correct? We found that this is more of a fuzzy issue than a precise one, but the evidence suggests that it was not unreasonable for O’Rourke to make this declaration. "By most objective statistical or mathematical measures, Texas is one of the most gerrymandered states in the U.S.," said Daniel McGlone, a senior analyst with Azavea, a Philadelphia-based firm that has studied congressional district line-drawing. Michael Li, senior counsel with the Democracy Program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, agreed. "At the congressional level, it’s fair to say Texas is one of the most skewed" based on partisan bias, Li said. The hardest part of analyzing O’Rourke’s statement is sorting through countless measurements that can be used, experts said. "Does he mean gerrymandered by party? By race? Does he mean that the districts don't conform to traditional geographic criteria? You have to define what is meant by ‘gerrymandered’ before you can rank every state on a single scale," said Eric McGhee, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. (O’Rourke’s staff did not respond to an inquiry for this article.) Into the void have rushed "legal experts, mathematicians, data scientists and other experts suggesting various metrics or combinations of metrics to score and judge whether a district or plan is gerrymandered," McGlone said. A 2017 analysis by Azavea used a method called the "efficiency gap," a statistic developed by McGhee and Nicholas Stephanopoulos of the University of Chicago Law School in 2014. It measures how many votes a party "wastes" in a small number of districts. If the district lines had been drawn more efficiently -- essentially, more equitably -- these "wasted" votes could have been used to make other districts more competitive. Using this method, Azavea ranked Texas as the fifth-most gerrymandered state, behind North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York. Another 2017 analysis, by the liberal Brennan Center, found that the three states with the strongest partisan bias in their district lines were Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, followed by a second tier that included Florida, Ohio, Virginia -- and Texas, placing O’Rourke’s state in the top seven in this analysis. A third analysis, from December 2015, was undertaken by Christopher Ingraham, a data specialist previously with the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center and now with the Washington Post’s Wonkblog section. Ingraham’s calculation placed Texas seventh, behind California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, North Carolina and Virginia. (All three of these studies looked at Pennsylvania's district lines before they were overturned and redrawn in 2018) Ranking Azavea Brennan Center Ingraham 1. North Carolina Michigan California 2. Pennsylvania North Carolina Pennsylvania 3. Michigan Pennsylvania Ohio 4. New York Florida * New York 5. Texas Ohio * North Carolina 6. 21-state tie Texas * Virginia 7. -- Virginia * Texas 8. -- Not specified Michigan 9. -- -- Florida 10. -- -- Indiana * Study did not distinguish ranking spots among these states So in these studies, Texas consistently places somewhere between the fifth and seventh most gerrymandered states. Each of these three analyses were derived from both geographical and political factors, taking into account both linear geometry and voting patterns. That makes these studies the most useful ones for analyzing O’Rourke’s comment, since he used the term "gerrymandering," placing the remark in a political context. A few other studies have taken a more limited look, focusing only on how complicated the district lines are, typically using the yardstick of "compactness." A perfect square or circle is compact; an octopus-shaped district is the opposite. A more complicated district border may be a sign that the line-drawers in the state legislature drew the map with partisan factors in mind. In compactness-only analysis, the congressional lines in Texas also rank as pretty non-compact, but not as high on the list of states as in the studies that take into account partisan voting history as well. One Azavea study used four different mathematical methods to calculate a district’s compactness. Texas ranked between 11th and 15th least compact in these four measurements. And Brian Kurilla, a North Carolina-based cognitive psychologist who writes the Geek Psychologist blog, found that Texas ranked 12th lowest in compactness. These studies are less helpful in analyzing O’Rourke’s remark, since there may -- or may not -- be a connection between byzantine district borders and partisan biases. "There are many reasons why a district might be non-compact, only one of which is partisan intent," said William T. Adler, a computational research specialist at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. Others could be patterns of population settlement or natural geographical features, for instance. A third way to look at the question involves racial disparities enforced through congressional line-drawing. This is a harder-to-quantify factor, but Texas has been enmeshed in race-based redistricting lawsuits for years, suggesting that it would rank high if this metric were used instead. "Texas is a persistent offender" on race-based redistricting, said Sam Wang, a neuroscience professor who heads the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. "Texas' redistricting shenanigans are never-ending." Our ruling O’Rourke said, "Texas is one of the most gerrymandered states in the union." There are many ways to analyze this question, and depending on the method, the rankings vary a bit. But studies that look at the intersection of geographical compactness and partisan voting history consistently place Texas between fifth and seventh on the list of most gerrymandered states in the nation. Since O’Rourke called Texas "one of the most" gerrymandered states, such studies support his point. We rate his statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Beto O'Rourke	None	None	None	2018-08-16T13:58:29	2018-03-16	['Texas']
-tron-01565	Unemployed Mothers Will Be Sent to Jail Under New Law	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/unemployed-mothers-will-be-sent-to-jail-under-new-law/	None	government	None	None	None	Unemployed Mothers Will Be Sent to Jail Under New Law	Aug 5, 2015	None	['None']
-hoer-00115	Phone Numbers Now On Facebook	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/phone-numbers-facebook-warning.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Overblown Warning - Phone Numbers Now On Facebook	18th February 2011	None	['None']
-snes-05010	The FDA classified walnuts as drugs.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fda-classified-walnuts-drugs/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	The FDA Classified Walnuts as Drugs?	24 March 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00537	Will shift some of the sales tax collected on vehicle sales to the transportation fund, beefing up that account. "We need to diversify our funding," Walker said. Currently, sales tax money is used for general state operations.	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/walk-o-meter/promise/560/shift-sales-tax-money-into-road-building-fund/	None	walk-o-meter	Scott Walker	None	None	Shift sales tax money into road building fund	2010-12-20T23:16:36	None	['None']
-snes-01538	Representative Frederica Wilson has never supported a bill intended to help military veterans.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/frederica-wilson-veterans/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Has Representative Frederica Wilson Never Supported Pro-Veteran Legislation?	23 October 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-12415	"You can see visits to Moscow made during the campaign by (Paul) Manafort and others."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/may/19/maxine-waters/rep-waters-exaggerates-trump-associate-moscow-trip/	The Justice Department’s appointment of a special counsel to probe Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and any possible Russia-Trump campaign connection reaffirmed the belief of Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., that impeachment is in the offing. Waters is confident that the special counsel and the congressional investigations will uncover proof of collusion. "I really do believe that much of what you saw coming out of Trump's mouth was a play from Putin's playbook," Waters said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe May 18. "I think you can see visits, you know, to Moscow made during the campaign by (Paul) Manafort and others." Waters went as far as to say that the "lock her up" chant aimed at Hillary Clinton was "developed strategically with people from the Kremlin, with Putin." While we have reported on the ties of Manafort -- Trump’s former campaign chairman -- to Russian interests, we wondered about Waters’ claim that he and others visited Moscow during the campaign. We found one clear example. There is no public record that Manafort went at all. Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page did go to Moscow in July 2016. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn also went to Moscow, but at a time when he wasn't part of Trump's team. The Center for American Progress, a Democratic policy group, has a webpage it calls the Moscow Project where it compiles information on ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Democratic group lists no travel to Moscow by Manafort. Trump named Manafort to manage the Republican National Convention and by May 2016 elevated him to campaign chairman. Manafort stepped down in mid August. Manafort had dealings with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian operative with reported ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik came to the United States twice during the campaign, but so far as we could tell, Manafort didn’t reciprocate with a trip of his own. The travels of Page provide the clearest support for Waters’ statement. Page founded an investment company with business in Russia. In March 2016, Trump mentioned Page as one of a group of advisers on foreign policy. In July, Page went to Moscow and spoke at a university graduation. After the election, he went to Moscow again. Page called the suggestion that he was a back channel between the campaign and the Russians a "witch hunt." The only other publicly known trip to Russia’s capital by a Trump insider was Flynn’s visit in December 2015 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of RT (Russia Today), a government media operation. Flynn reportedly was paid for giving a speech at the event. According to one account, Flynn went to Trump Tower at some point in the fall of 2015 to advise Trump on the Islamic State and Iran. In February 2016, he was reported to be someone Trump turned to on foreign policy. Flynn said he was advising multiple candidates at the time. It took until June before Flynn was openly praising Trump over Clinton. We reached out to Waters’office and did not hear back. Our ruling Waters said that Manafort and others with ties to the Trump campaign went to Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign. From what’s on the public record, Manafort didn’t go at all, and Page went once. Flynn went after Trump announced, but before there is any report of a strong and exclusive tie to the candidate. The various investigations underway might resolve whether there was collusion, but the travel itineraries of Trump’s associates don’t appear to be fertile ground at this point. Waters made it sound like this was a regular occurrence. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Maxine Waters	None	None	None	2017-05-19T12:58:03	2017-05-18	['None']
-tron-00665	Rose O’Donnell Got an ISIS Tattoo	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/rose-odonnell-got-an-isis-tattoo/	None	celebrities	None	None	['Trending Rumors']	Rose O’Donnell Got an ISIS Tattoo	Apr 23, 2015	None	['None']
-pose-00939	"The McDonnell administration will expand loan forgiveness and scholarship programs for health care professionals with an emphasis on placing health care professionals in rural areas."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/virginia/promises/bob-o-meter/promise/973/expand-incentives-for-rural-health-care-profession/	None	bob-o-meter	Bob McDonnell	None	None	Expand incentives for rural health care professionals	2011-09-09T12:56:22	None	['None']
-snes-04347	Donald Trump tweeted an opinion that America never should have "given Canada its independence."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-claims-america-should-never-have-given-canada-its-independence/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Trump Claims America Should Never Have Given Canada Its Independence	30 July 2016	None	['Canada', 'United_States', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-05159	"In 2011, NJ economy ranked 47th--at the bottom with Alabama, Mississippi & Wyoming. Under Christie, NJ is falling behind."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/jun/19/lou-greenwald/chris-christie-targeted-democrats-over-new-jersey-/	Gov. Chris Christie has been touting New Jersey’s economic success in appearances across the country, but back at home, Democrats recently jumped on a statistic to prove the Republican governor wrong. Between tweets, news releases and a YouTube video, Democrats have countered Christie’s "Jersey Comeback" theme with the claim that, under his watch, the Garden State ranked 47th in the nation for economic performance in 2011. "In 2011, NJ economy ranked 47th--at the bottom with Alabama, Mississippi & Wyoming. Under Christie, NJ is falling behind," Assembly Majority Leader Lou Greenwald (D-Camden) wrote June 6 in one of a few related tweets. On June 11, the New Jersey Democratic State Committee released a YouTube video that includes that statistic as a way of showing similarities between Christie and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. For this fact-check, PolitiFact New Jersey is examining two issues -- whether that 47th ranking is correct and how much Christie can be held responsible for it. Here’s what we found: the statistic is on target, but blaming Christie ignores other factors behind the lackluster economic activity. Tom Hester Jr., a spokesman for the Assembly Democrats, argued that the "burden of proof here is on Governor Christie" for touting and taking credit for the "Jersey Comeback." "The governor is laying claim to economic growth that doesn't exist," Hester said in an e-mail. "When legitimate figures show New Jersey ranking 47th in real GDP growth, then the governor needs to be held accountable for his own claims." First, let’s discuss that 47th place finish. On June 5, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released data on real gross domestic product in 2011 and preceding years for each state and Washington, D.C. Real GDP is an inflation-adjusted measure of a state’s economy. Between 2010 and 2011, real GDP in New Jersey declined by 0.5 percent, leaving that change in 47th place among the 50 states, according to the bureau. Only six other states saw a drop in real GDP, including Alabama, Mississippi and Wyoming, the bureau said. Still, it’s worth noting that, according to the bureau, real GDP in New Jersey increased by 1.5 percent between 2009 and 2010. That means during 2010 and 2011 -- the first two years of Christie’s tenure -- there was a net increase of 1 percent. Now, we’ll address whether it’s fair to blame Christie for the state’s economic performance in 2011. After reaching out to a few experts, it appears that the Democrats’ criticism is overblown. A governor can impact economic growth in a state, but there are several other factors at play, some experts said. James Alm, chair of the Department of Economics at Tulane University in New Orleans, La., told us "states (and state governors), while not powerless by any means to affect state growth, are also largely at the mercy of broader national trends, and even state trends that are outside their own control/influence." Phillip Swagel, professor in International Economic Policy at the University of Maryland, School of Public Policy, noted how New Jersey is considerably affected by the economic fortunes of Philadelphia and New York City. "Governor Christie likely has limited control over this, let alone over national economic trends," Swagel said in an e-mail. "This is not to say that the Governor’s policies would have no impact on the state economic situation, but just that there are many factors." Bruce Yandle, an adjunct economics professor at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia, added in an e-mail: "It takes a miracle worker as governor to enter office and somehow magically cause the workforce and employment to expand immediately, and cause productivity to rise." Our ruling In a series of tweets, Greenwald blamed Christie for New Jersey ranking 47th in the nation for economic performance in 2011. With a 0.5 percent decline in real GDP in New Jersey, that ranking is accurate. As for Christie’s role, experts told us a governor can impact a state’s economic growth, but there are various other factors, including national and regional conditions. We rate the statement Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Lou Greenwald	None	None	None	2012-06-19T07:30:00	2012-06-06	['Alabama', 'New_Jersey']
-snes-05886	Photographs show a USAF airman marshaling a jet in a non-standard, revealing outfit.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/flight-briefing/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Airman Directs Jets in His Underwear	27 June 2007	None	['None']
-afck-00401	“The matric pass rate has gone up from around 61 percent in 2009 to 78 percent last year and the bachelor passes improve each year.”	misleading	https://africacheck.org/reports/a-first-look-at-president-jacob-zumas-2014-state-of-the-nation-address/	None	None	None	None	None	President Jacob Zuma’s sixth State of the Nation address fact-checked	2014-02-14 12:39	None	['None']
-goop-02554	Khloe Kardashian Demanding Kris Jenner Tell Truth About O.J. Simpson, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/khloe-kardashian-oj-simpson-kris-jenner-truth-relationship/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Khloe Kardashian NOT Demanding Kris Jenner Tell Truth About O.J. Simpson, Despite Report	12:28 pm, August 22, 2017	None	['O._J._Simpson', 'Kris_Jenner']
-goop-00274	Caitlyn Jenner, Kris Jenner Got Back Together?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-kris-jenner-back-together/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Caitlyn Jenner, Kris Jenner Got Back Together?	11:26 pm, September 13, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02625	"And we’ve constantly been the lowest unemployed county in the state."	false	/oregon/statements/2014/jan/21/bob-terry/does-washington-county-constantly-have-oregons-low/	Former Oregon Congresswoman Elizabeth Furse filed two weeks ago for the District 4 seat on the Washington County Board of Commissioners. In doing so, she became the first to take on first-term incumbent Commissioner Bob Terry. Oregon Public Broadcasting contacted Terry to get his reaction to Furse’s announcement. In a brief interview, the Fisher Farms nursery owner said the county already is heading in the right direction, noting that the reserve fund is healthy and that the county carries little to no debt. He added this: "And we’ve constantly been the lowest unemployed county in the state." That’s impressive, if true. PolitiFact Oregon decided to check. We called Nick Beleiciks, a state employment economist, who walked us through a website containing the annual average unemployment rates by county. The data go back to 1990. Before that, only statewide figures were tracked, Beleiciks said. "Washington County had the lowest (or tied for the lowest) annual average unemployment rate in 1990, 2000, and 2006," he wrote in a follow-up email. "Washington County generally has the third or fourth lowest unemployment rate among Oregon’s counties. The county’s worst rank for unemployment rate was 9th lowest in 2009." So the county registered the lowest average annual unemployment rate in Oregon only three times in the past 23 years. The most recent figures, from November 2013, show Benton County’s 5.7 percent rate as lowest in the state. Hood River is second at 5.7 percent, with Washington County third at 6 percent. We called Terry to get his response. "There are two ways of interpreting that," he said. "When I was asked that question, I was thinking of the four-county region (Washington, Multnomah, Clackamas and Clark counties). Among those, it has consistently been the lowest. If you look at the entire state, which is what I actually did say, the proper word would be one of the lower. I’ll be more careful about how I state that in the future." He added, "You need to look at the population bases of the counties we’re talking about. None of them is anywhere near as big as we are. We are a leading contributor to the coffers of the state of Oregon." Washington County has long touted its economic vitality, with good reason. It’s home to some of the state’s biggest and most successful businesses, such as Nike, Intel, Tektronix and Columbia Sportswear. "Washington County does, in fact, have a very important place in Oregon’s economy," said Tim Duy, senior director of the Oregon Economic Forum at the University of Oregon. "Clearly, it has a large employment base with relatively high salaries." Mark McMullen, Oregon state economist, told us that the county’s computer and electronic producers alone account for more than 20 percent of overall Gross State Product, and the majority of GSP growth in recent years. Sliced another way, the county over the past four years has been responsible for one-third of all statewide wage and job gains, McMullen said. Terry is correct in talking about Washington County’s large jobs base. Its 260,900 jobs as of November 2013 dwarf, say, Hood River County’s 11,030 jobs. But those figures, while impressive, don’t support Terry’s statement about Washington County "constantly" leading the state in low unemployment rates. Statewide, Washington County has ranked third behind Benton and Hood River counties since November 2012, according to state data. Even looking just at the four-county metro area, to which Terry said he should have limited his comments, Clackamas County has had a lower annual unemployment average than Washington County five times since 1990. Twice, in 1999 and 2002, the counties tied. Terry noted, in follow-up comments, that Washington County has had and continues to have a significant role in powering the state’s economy. Two state economists and a wealth of data support that idea. But his claim to OPB was that the county has "constantly been the lowest unemployed county in the state." The county has led or tied for the lead in that category only three times in the past 23 years, though it has often had the third- or fourth-lowest rate. By saying "constantly," "lowest" and "in the state," Terry left himself no wiggle room. The numbers don’t bear out his initial claim. We rate it False.	None	Bob Terry	None	None	None	2014-01-21T17:09:31	2014-01-08	['None']
-hoer-00568	Did Samsung Pay a $1 Billion Fine to Apple in 5 Cent Coins?	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/samsung-apple-five-cent-coins.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Did Samsung Pay a $1 Billion Fine to Apple in 5 Cent Coins?	July 1, 2013	None	['None']
-tron-02583	Birthday Cards for Danny Nickerson	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/danny-nickerson/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Birthday Cards for Danny Nickerson	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-02060	Former Haitian official Klaus Oberwein died in a suspicious suicide days before he was scheduled to testify against either Hillary Clinton or the Clinton Foundation.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/klaus-eberwein/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a Former Haitian Official Commit Suicide Before Clinton Testimony?	17 July 2017	None	['Clinton_Foundation', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-afck-00387	“Under the DA, the matric science pass rate went from 53% to 73%. The maths pass rate went from 65% to 73%.”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/is-the-das-western-cape-story-a-good-story-to-tell-we-examine-the-claims/	None	None	None	None	None	Is the DA’s Western Cape Story a ‘good story to tell’? We examine the claims	2014-03-28 05:02	None	['None']
-goop-02546	Gwyneth Paltrow Engaged, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/gwyneth-paltrow-not-engaged-engagement-ring-photos-avengers-set-brad-faklchuk/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Gwyneth Paltrow NOT Engaged, Despite Ring Photos On “Avengers” Set	3:34 pm, August 23, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-03278	The federal deficit is "growing."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/05/eric-cantor/eric-cantor-says-federal-deficit-growing/	During an interview on Fox News Sunday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., took aim at red ink in the federal government. Cantor said, "What we are trying to do is fund the government and make sure also that we take away the kinds of things that are standing in the way of a growing economy (and) a better health care, and all the while keeping our eye focused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit." There’s one problem: The federal deficit isn’t "growing." At least not now. First, a refresher on what a deficit is. If revenues are bigger than spending, you have a surplus. If spending is bigger than revenues, you have a deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal deficit -- the amount by which the government has been spending more than it has been taking in -- has been declining since peaking in 2009: Fiscal year Deficit Deficit as percentage of GDP 2008 $459 billion 3.2 percent 2009 $1.413 trillion 10.1 percent 2010 $1.294 trillion 9.0 percent 2011 $1.296 trillion 8.7 percent 2012 $1.089 trillion 7.0 percent 2013 (projected) $ 642 billion 4.0 percent So, the deficit trendline has been generally downward, both in raw dollars and as a percentage of gross domestic product. And the CBO projects that the deficit will continue to go down for two more years: Fiscal year Deficit Deficit as percentage of GDP 2014 (projected) $560 billion 3.4 percent 2015 (projected) $378 billion 2.1 percent If CBO is on target, then by 2015, the deficit will be roughly a quarter of what it was in 2009. In other words, Cantor is wrong about what has been happening to the deficit, and what is projected to happen in the near future. After 2015, however, Cantor has a point -- the deficit begins growing again, according to CBO projections: Fiscal year Deficit Deficit as percentage of GDP 2016 $432 billion 2.3 percent 2017 $482 billion 2.4 percent 2018 $542 billion 2.6 percent 2019 $648 billion 3.0 percent 2020 $733 billion 3.2 percent 2021 $782 billion 3.3 percent 2022 $889 billion 3.6 percent 2023 $895 billion 3.5 percent "The current baseline has deficits growing again in 2016, and even with his proposed tax increases, deficits are set to begin growing again in the out-years under President Obama’s own budget proposals," said Rory Cooper, Cantor’s spokesman. Cantor, he said, "is equally concerned with this long-term deficit trend" as he is with the shrinkage of the deficit in recent years. We should also note that, despite the recent progress in shrinking the deficit, the federal debt continues to grow -- just more slowly than before. The debt refers to the accumulation of all prior yearly deficits, offset by any yearly surpluses. So until there’s a surplus -- and there hasn’t been one since fiscal 2001 -- the debt keeps growing. The public debt is projected to grow from $11.3 trillion in fiscal 2012 to higher than $19 trillion in 2023. As a percentage of GDP, the rise is more modest, from 72.6 percent of GDP in 2012 to 72.9 percent in 2023, according to CBO. Our ruling Cantor said that the federal deficit is "growing." Annual federal deficits are not growing right now, and they are not projected to grow through 2015, a point at which the deficit will have shrunk by three-quarters since 2009. By this standard, Cantor is wrong. However, unless policies are changed, deficits are projected to grow again in 2016 and beyond, according to the CBO. On balance, we rate his claim Half True.	None	Eric Cantor	None	None	None	2013-08-05T16:47:59	2013-08-04	['None']
-pomt-14046	It "is Hillary Clinton's agenda" to "release the violent criminals from jail. She wants them all released."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may/26/donald-trump/donald-trump-wrong-hillary-clinton-wants-release-a/	Donald Trump didn’t mince words about Hillary Clinton’s criminal justice agenda when he addressed the National Rifle Association’s national convention on May 20, 2016. "President Obama pushed for changes to sentencing laws that released thousands of dangerous drug trafficking felons and gang members who prey on civilians," Trump said. He continued, "This is Hillary Clinton's agenda, too, to release the violent criminals from jail. She wants them all released." We think most observers would agree that releasing every violent criminal in American prisons would amount to political suicide, not to mention bad policy. But we thought it was worth checking Clinton's actual policy prescriptions. What Trump said is far off-base. (The Trump campaign did not respond to an inquiry.) Existing criminal-justice reform efforts Trump said Clinton wants to continue Obama’s release of "thousands of dangerous drug trafficking felons and gang members." But Trump overreaches both on the substance of the policy and on Obama’s personal role in enacting it. In recent years, liberals and conservatives have increasingly found common ground over criminal justice reform. Many on the left, center and right -- including the libertarian Koch brothers and the generally more liberal American Civil Liberties Union -- have come to agree that many tough-on-crime policies instituted between the 1970s and the 1990s were misguided. They argue that policies such as mandatory minimum sentences and tough prosecution of low-level drug offenders have led to overcrowded prisons and exacerbated racial injustices. Obama has taken some steps to unwind these policies. Using his pardon powers, Obama has commuted the sentences of more than 200 inmates who had been convicted of drug crimes, though it’s important to note -- as Trump does not -- that all of them have been considered nonviolent under Justice Department guidelines. In addition, during Obama’s tenure, the Justice Department has approved the release of 6,000 federal inmates, about two-thirds of them to halfway houses or home confinement and about one-third who are expected to be deported. Unlike the commutations, these releases were prompted not by Obama but by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent body. In unanimously approving the changes, the panel estimated that the reduced sentencing guidelines could eventually qualify 46,000 of roughly 100,000 drug offenders in federal prisons for early release, according to the Washington Post. (It does not affect the larger pool of offenders in state prisons.) And federal judges must approve all early releases. Though applicants for early release typically have a connection to drug trafficking, the releases are not intended to free drug-traffickers and gang members who have a record of violence, as Trump contends. Obama’s then-Attorney General Eric Holder actually proposed excluding convicts who had used weapons or had significant criminal histories, but the commission put its trust in judges to weigh those factors on a case-by-case basis, the Post reported. The commission submitted the proposal to Congress in April 2014, and Congress did nothing to stop the proposal from taking effect six months later. What Clinton supports Clinton does support criminal justice reform, but we found no evidence that her plan includes the release of "violent criminals," much less "all" of them. For starters, we should note that the Sentencing Commission’s action is now a done deal. Short of calling on the commission to reverse itself -- which the panel, being independent, could simply ignore -- or passing a law through Congress, there isn’t really anything Clinton (or Trump) could easily do to stop the forthcoming early releases. And of course, federal judges, not the president, are the ones who must sign off on applications for early release. More broadly, we looked at Clinton’s stated proposals for criminal justice policy and found that she focused her initiatives only on "nonviolent" offenders. The Clinton campaign said Trump’s comment is a misrepresentation of her views. On the criminal justice reform page of her website, Clinton summarizes her key proposals as follows: • "End the era of mass incarceration, reform mandatory minimum sentences, and end private prisons." • "Encourage the use of smart strategies — like police body cameras — and end racial profiling to rebuild trust between law enforcement and communities." • "Help formerly incarcerated individuals successfully re-enter society." It’s worth noting that Clinton focuses more on what happens before prison (such as sentencing of people not currently incarcerated) and after prison (especially reintegrating ex-convicts into society after they are released) than actually releasing current inmates. "Clinton has not focused on early release," said John H. Laub, a professor in criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland. For a politician, this is a canny omission, because it sidesteps difficult questions about who should be released early. "There is little consensus about releasing violent criminals from prison before their terms end," said Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "Then there is the question of who is ‘violent.’ Someone who has a prior record for a violent crime but whose current charge is for a nonviolent crime. or only those with a current charge for violence?" But even if Clinton is sidestepping a thorny issue by remaining largely silent on which, if any, inmates deserve early release, that position does throw a wrench into Trump’s accusation that it’s her stated "agenda" to "release" violent criminals. If anything, Clinton’s policy page bends over backward to focus her attention on "nonviolent," rather than violent, offenders. Proposals specify "nonviolent" offenders no fewer than seven times. This consistent focus on nonviolent offenders undermines the notion that Clinton wants to release violent offenders at all, much less to do so willy-nilly. Our ruling Trump said it "is Hillary Clinton's agenda" to "release the violent criminals from jail. She wants them all released." It would be preposterous for any politician who wants to win an election to propose freeing every violent criminal from jail. Like many political figures today on the right, center and left, Clinton supports something much more modest — easing how the criminal justice system treats nonviolent offenders. That’s a far cry from saying Clinton is poised to set free everyone from Charles Manson to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. We rate Trump’s claim Pants on Fire! https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/b0b07924-eba6-416e-ae30-fb221f79ebbc	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-05-26T11:40:52	2016-05-20	['None']
-pomt-06592	"The water quality in the ocean is perfect. It’s been tested up and down every ocean shore in New Jersey."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2011/sep/25/chris-christie/gov-chris-christie-says-jersey-shore-water-quality/	There’s a strip of coastline in the United States where the quality of the water is better than good, according to the governor. "The water quality in the ocean is perfect," Gov. Chris Christie said during a Sept. 2 press conference at Point Pleasant Beach, days after Hurricane Irene blasted through. "It’s been tested up and down every ocean shore in New Jersey." PolitiFact New Jersey found that while test results show the water is the best it’s been in years, some environmental experts disagree with Christie’s assessment. First, let’s look at how New Jersey reviews water quality. The state Department of Environmental Protection, in collaboration with local health departments, tests the water from Sandy Hook to Cape May each week from mid-May to mid-September, according to department spokesman Larry Ragonese. Water samples from swimming areas are tested for fecal coliform and other types of bacteria connected with sewage, stormwater runoff, and other pollutants, he said. The results, Ragonese said, have come back clean consistently since at least 2006, ranking Jersey shore waters above the 99th percentile of cleanliness on a scale of 100 percent. "There’s really been a concerted effort to really, really stress the importance of clean beaches," Ragonese said. In fact, New Jersey ranked second in the nation, behind New Hampshire, for ocean water quality in 2010, according to a June report by the National Resources Defense Council. The weekly tests check the levels of enterococcus, a bacteria normally found in the feces of people and many animals. Any level above 104 enterococci per 100 milliliters of sample is considered too high, according to state standards. PolitiFact New Jersey reviewed test results for beaches in Atlantic, Cape May, Monmouth and Ocean counties dating to 2005. We found that in most cases, water quality results have been their best since 2008, with the level of enterococci well below the state’s threshold. If a test sample exceeds acceptable bacteria levels twice, the beach is closed until the bacteria level falls into normal range, Ragonese said. Jill Lipoti, director of the Division of Water Monitoring and Standards for the DEP, said three beaches were closed all along the shore this summer. Still, three environmental groups challenged Christie’s claim of "perfect" water quality. Trenton-based Environment New Jersey pointed to low oxygen levels in the ocean and questioned the health of the water for marine life. Pollution in Barnegat Bay and beach closures due to pollution also are a concern, said Dena Mottola Jaborska, executive director of Environment New Jersey. "I think the governor does a disservice to citizens in the state when he makes statements like that," Jaborska said. "There are lots of issues with the ocean." Larry Levine, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City, also said the Jersey shore’s water quality is not perfect. "Every coastal state has some degree of issues with water pollution at beaches," in part due to stormwater runoff from urban and suburban areas where raw sewage and overflow can combine in the same pipe en route to a sewage treatment plant, Levine explained. When heavy rains are more than the treatment plants can handle, an untreated mixture of sewage and runoff can be released into waterways that lead to the coast. "That’s an issue nationwide, not just in New Jersey," Levine said. Clean Ocean Action of Monmouth County also wouldn’t qualify the water as perfect, but credited New Jersey for taking steps toward improvement. "The ocean’s much better off than it has been in a decade and while some individual pollutants may still be low, we have taken in this state with the Legislature and the governor’s office many impressive first steps that are long overdue," said Sean Dixon, coastal policy attorney for Clean Ocean Action. "There’s always more to be done." Our ruling Encouraging people to return to the Jersey shore, Christie claimed the water quality is "perfect," and that frequent test results have been favorable up and down the coast. While test results show that the shore’s waters are better than in past years, some environmental organizations disagree with the governor’s assessment. We rate this claim Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Chris Christie	None	None	None	2011-09-25T05:15:00	2011-09-02	['New_Jersey']
-snes-01642	Did Nike Cut Ties With the Dallas Cowboys Over National Anthem Protests?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nike-cowboys/	None	Sports	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Nike Cut Ties With the Dallas Cowboys Over National Anthem Protests?	2 October 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-11627	"Soros, Obama and the Dems Ordered the Shutdown to Stage a Coup"	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jan/22/reaganwasright/fake-news-claims-obama-coup-behind-government-shut/	A fake news story is claiming that the government shutdown is the result of a Democratic order to stage a coup against President Donald Trump. The Jan. 20 headline by a website called Reagan Was Right reads, "Soros, Obama and the Dems Ordered the Shutdown to Stage a Coup." Facebook users flagged this story as possibly providing false information, as part of the social network’s effort to combat fake news. The story accuses a number of Democrats of organizing an overthrow of the White House during the federal government shutdown. A supposed report from the Secret Service stated the possibility of a military coup against Trump. The article quotes Secret Service spokeswoman Sandy Batt as saying: "The leaked report is no different from the dozens of others we act on everyday. The sources have been identified and we will deal with the situation if it arises. The President is safe." The story also claims four dozen snipers have roosted on the White House roof, and the D.C. airspace is shut down to all military and civilian aircraft with the exception of normally scheduled flights to Dulles and Marine 1. None of this, however, is true. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel are still reporting to work, and the Federal Aviation Administration has continued air traffic control. Flight delays are not expected, and FAA safety inspections will continue. The story claimed Sandy Batt as the spokesperson for the Secret Service, but there is no one by the name of Batt who speaks for the Secret Service. It also said that D.C. airspace is shutdown, but flights are running as normal. Reagan Was Right, the site behind the story, describes itself as a "whimsical playland of conservative satire." It’s other disclaimer reads: "Everything on this website is fiction." The site is affiliated with Christopher Blair, a Maine man behind who we’ve written about previously. Blair told us his websites are carefully curated social experiment designed to "feed the Hoverounders their daily need for hate and their undying urge to blame everything in the known universe on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama." They’re also a vehicle to make money. The point, of course, is to get someone on Facebook to click on the post thinking it is real. "I discovered that Facebook following plus blog plus ads equals income," Blair told us previously. We rate this headline Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Reaganwasright	None	None	None	2018-01-22T17:13:11	2018-01-22	['Barack_Obama', '[59', '4', '"Coup_d\\\'état"']
-pomt-06856	"One of the biggest polluters in our country is the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/aug/03/jim-sensenbrenner/rep-jim-sensenbrenner-says-milwaukee-metropolitan-/	As a handler of human waste -- which it periodically dumps into Lake Michigan untreated -- the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District is less popular among some people than mosquitoes. But is the taxpayer-funded agency one of the nation’s largest polluters? On July 24, 2011, U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., held a town hall meeting in Whitefish Bay, a Milwaukee suburb. A woman told the 33-year congressman she was "appalled at the continued gutting of good government regulation and awarding corporations who pollute and not holding them accountable," according to Patch.com, a website that covers community news. Sensenbrenner said corporations are not the only ones to blame, adding: "I get sick and tired of people saying that people are dumping sewage in our water when one of the biggest polluters in our country is the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District." Sensenbrenner later called MMSD a "disgrace," prompting applause as well as objections from the audience, based on a video clip posted on YouTube. But was the criticism on target? We’ll first point out that the sewerage district doesn’t generate the pollution in question; its job is to treat it. But sometimes the district is treated like other polluters. Federal and state regulators have taken action against MMSD and other sewerage districts when they dump more untreated sewage and storm water than their government permits allow. With $3.5 billion in capital assets to treat sewage and help control flooding, MMSD serves 1.1 million customers in 28 communities in southeastern Wisconsin. In 2011, the agency has budgeted $242 million in property tax money for capital projects and $82 million in sewer service fees for operations. Most people probably give the sewerage district little thought -- until heavy rainstorms bring news that MMSD has allowed millions of gallons of untreated sewage and storm water to flow into Lake Michigan and rivers. Large rainfaills lead to the so-called combined overflows because the agency closes the gates to its $1.3 billion deep tunnel when the accumulated water nears the tunnel’s 521-million-gallon capacity. The most recent episode occurred over two days in June 2011, when the sewer district said an estimated 170.5 million gallons of untreated waste water overflowed following storms. Overflows pose potential health risks. A 2010 study published by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin, the Great Lakes WATER Institute and the Children’s Research Institute found an estimated 11 percent increase in the number of emergency room visits by children for acute gastrointestinal illness four days after rainfalls. That study cited untreated sewage releases as only one potential link to the illnesses. However, a 2007 Medical College of Wisconsin study concluded that such untreated waste water releases were "potentially harmful" because, in two of six releases examined, the number of children who went to emergency room for diarrhea "increased significantly." Sensenbrenner has been critical of MMSD in the past. In 2003, he lambasted the EPA for giving MMSD a "clean water partner" award not long after the sewerage district had been reprimanded for dumping. In 2005, when Sensenbrenner requested $68 million in federal flood control funds for MMSD, he emphasized that the agency had dumped "billions of gallons of waste into Lake Michigan" over the previous 10 years. We asked Sensenbrenner’s spokeswoman, Amanda Infield, for evidence to back her boss’ claim about MMSD as a polluter and she he made three points. We asked Bill Graffin, MMSD’s spokesman, to respond and did our own research. MMSD’s dumping Infield said that from 1994 through late July 2011, MMSD dumped 24.2 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water into Lake Michigan. Graffin said that accurately quotes MMSD’s own statistics, which show that annual combined overflows have been as high as 4.38 billion gallons since 1994. That is down from overflows ranging from 7 billion to 9 billion gallons per year from 1990 through 1993. Graffin said three other Midwestern cities, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Chicago, all have larger annual overflows than Milwaukee, such that they are being forced to make major treatment upgrades because of enforcement action by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Documents show that MMSD’s counterpart in Cleveland, which releases nearly 5 billion gallons of untreated sewage per year, agreed in December 2010 to spend $3 billion; and the City of Indianapolis agreed in 2006, when overflows were nearly 8 billion gallons per year, to spend $1.73 billion. That figure was reduced in December 2010 to save Indianapolis $444 million. In Chicago, MMSD’s counterpart is under fire for its sewage dumping into the Chicago River. According to a New York Times article, in May 2011 the EPA ordered state regulators to impose stricter water quality standards on the river; environmental groups filed a lawsuit charging that Chicago’s waste water agency regularly violates the federal Clean Water Act; and an environmental group named the Chicago River one of the "most endangered rivers" in the country. Conversely, MMSD was last part of a legal stipulation in 2001. The agency finished making upgrades to its facilities required under the stipulation in 2010, Graffin said. Graffin also cited a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article on a 2006 study by the Sierra Legal Defense Fund, a Canadian conservation group. The article said Milwaukee was far from the worst polluter in the Great Lakes. The study gave Milwaukee a C-plus rating, ranking it in the top half of the 20 Great Lakes cities evaluated for sewage management. Milwaukee was at the top of all the large cities surveyed, according to the article. So, while MMSD sometimes does dump untreated waste water into Lake Michigan, Sensenbrenner provided no evidence comparing MMSD to other polluters. It’s also clear that in the Great Lakes area alone, Milwaukee is far from being the worst polluter. BP comparison Sensenbrenner’s spokeswoman said the amount of waste water MMSD dumped into Lake Michigan in one week was 10 times the amount of oil spilled by BP in the disastrous Gulf of Mexico spill in April 2009. She cited a news report from WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) in Milwaukee that said 2.1 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water were dumped into Lake Michigan following storms that caused flooding in July 2010. That amounted to about 75 percent of the overflows for the year. The 2.1 billion gallons is more than 10 times the 170 million gallons of oil spilled by BP in the Gulf of Mexico. But measurements don’t tell the whole story. One important difference: What MMSD dumps includes contaminants, but it is mostly water; BP spilled oil. A presidential commission that investigated the BP incident said in a January 2011 report that the spill was the largest accidental marine oil spill in U.S. history. The spill was so massive, the report says, that it will take decades just to assess the environmental damage, leaving aside the tens of billions of dollars in economic damage caused. So, aside from noting the difference in volume, Sensenbrenner provided no evidence to establish that one MMSD overflow was somehow worse than what is regarded as one of the nation’s worst environmental accidents. Spoiled beaches Sensenbrenner’s spokeswoman said southeastern Wisconsin has some of the most polluted beaches in the nation. She cited a 2011 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental action group. The report labeled 13 beaches in seven states as "repeat offenders" for having high bacteria levels from 2006 through 2010. Two of the beaches were in southeastern Wisconsin, including one -- South Shore in Milwaukee -- that is in MMSD’s service area. The report does not mention the sewerage district but seems to implicate the agency, saying "chronically high bacteria counts indicate that the beach water is probably contaminated with human or animal waste." The Great Lakes WATER Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee says, however, that sewage overflows are not the primary cause of beach advisories and closings. The main causes at many Milwaukee-area beaches are waste from gulls and storm water runoff, according to the institute. In addition, the EPA said in a 2007 report to Congress that sewer overflows were the source of pollution in only 3 percent of the beach advisories and closings in Milwaukee County from 2000 to 2004. So, like the other points, that one does not stand up to scrutiny. We wondered whether there were rankings of the nation’s worst water polluters, but Josh Mogerman, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he was not aware of any. We did find a June 2011 report about MMSD by the Public Policy Forum, a government watchdog and research organization in Milwaukee. The report focused on the sewerage district’s financial condition. But it also found that, according to national data, MMSD’s "sewage and treatment capacity offers greater protection from sewage overflows than most other districts." So where does all of this leave us? Upset about how much untreated waste water goes into Lake Michigan, Sensenbrenner called the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District "one of the biggest polluters in our country." He cited the amount of dumping MMSD has done, but provided no evidence that it ranks among the nation’s top polluters. To be sure, MMSD does dump untreated sewage -- along with collected rainwater -- in the lake when its system reaches capacity. But Sensenbrenner’s claim was one of magnitude, comparing the district to all other polluters nationwide. We found evidence indicating that MMSD is not even among the worst sewerage district polluters in the Great Lakes region. We rate Sensenbrenner’s statement False.	None	Jim Sensenbrenner	None	None	None	2011-08-03T09:00:00	2011-07-24	['None']
-pose-00244	"When I am president, we'll fight to make sure we are once again first in the world when it comes to high school graduation rates."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/260/improve-high-school-graduation-rates/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Improve high school graduation rates	2010-01-07T13:26:53	None	['None']
-snes-04247	Ron Wayne was a third Apple co-founder, who in 1976 sold his 10% share in the company for $800	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/third-apple-cofounder/	None	Business	None	Bethania Palma	None	Third Apple Co-Founder Sold Share Now Worth Billions for $800	14 August 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-10757	"We had a No Child Left Behind — a similar piece of legislation in our state a number of years ago, well before the federal law. And it's had a big impact here. It's improved schools."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/30/mitt-romney/mass-schools-did-improve/	The former Massachusetts governor made his comment in response to a question about Fred Thompson's opposition to the No Child Left Behind Act. Romney supports the federal accountability law, and has for some time. Why? Because he has seen the effects of holding schools accountable through testing and standards in his own state. He refers specifically to his state's landmark 1993 Education Reform Act, which put such measures in place nine years before No Child took effect. Romney said the law has had a "big impact." And he's right. In 1998, just 7 percent of high school sophomores were scoring at the "advanced" level on the state's math exam. By 2007, 41 percent of sophomores could make that claim. Over the same period, the percentage of sophomores failing the English exam dropped from 28 percent to 6 percent, with corresponding increases in the top ratings. In 2005 and again in 2007, the state ranked first, or tied for first, in all four test categories for a widely respected exam commonly known as "the nation's report card." The categories are math and reading for fourth and eighth grade. No state had ever done that well across the board. "In some respects, I would say you can track our success in Massachusetts to the fact that there was this issue of equity in education in the early 1990s," said Matt Militello, an assistant professor of educational policy at the University of Massachusetts. But the achievement gap persists. David Driscoll, the state's education commissioner in 2005, wrote that the state's performance gaps between white, black and Hispanic students remained unchanged since 2003. In 2007, the state's interim commissioner, Jeffrey Nellhaus, noted again that while the scores of white students were rising, those of black and Hispanic students were flat. Robert Costrell, Romney's former chief economist and education adviser, doesn't dispute the achievement gap. But he said that doesn't change the overall improvement. "The gaps are still quite significant and of great concern. But there absolutely was a closing of those gaps," said Costrell, now a professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas. Ultimately, Romney claims the state made strong progress in education after it passed an accountability law similar to No Child Left Behind, and the test scores back him up. We rate Romney's comment True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2007-10-30T00:00:00	2007-09-14	['None']
-snes-00925	Did Pope Francis Forgive 4,444 Pedophile Priests in Australia?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pope-francis-pedophile-priests/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Pope Francis Forgive 4,444 Pedophile Priests in Australia?	6 March 2018	None	['None']
-wast-00062	Trump has spent 123 days golfing, or 1/5 of his term, at a cost to taxpayers of $72,181,957 - and still hasn\'t visited troops in a war zone.	3 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/07/27/have-u-s-taxpayers-spent-72-million-on-trumps-golf-outings/	None	None	VoteVets	Glenn Kessler	None	Have U.S. taxpayers spent $72 million on Trump's golf outings?	July 27	None	['None']
-pomt-09619	"The attorney general requires that rape victims pay for the rape kit."	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2010/jan/12/barbara-ann-radnofsky/radnofsky-says-attorney-general-requires-rape-vict/	In her campaign to become the next attorney general of Texas, Democratic candidate Barbara Ann Radnofsky is using a crime-victim issue to attack her opponent, GOP incumbent Greg Abbott. In a video on her Web site, Radnofsky makes the provocative claim that "the attorney general requires that rape victims pay for the rape kit" — a reference to forensic examinations given to victims of sexual assault. We wondered whether Radnofsky's statement was true. This is what we found: Under current state law, sexual assault victims in Texas should never have to pay for their forensic exams, which are done by medical professionals to collect physical evidence for the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault suspects. Local law enforcement agencies are responsible for paying hospitals for rape kits in cases in which the victims report the crimes. Those agencies can seek reimbursement of up to $700 through the Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund, which is administered by the attorney general’s office. If a victim chooses not to report the crime, the Texas Department of Public Safety is responsible for paying for the exam and getting reimbursement from the fund. When asked about Radnofsky’s statement in the video, Torie Camp, deputy director of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, a victims advocacy organization, said, "That’s not true, and if any rape victims are paying for rape kits, that shouldn’t happen. State law is very clear on this issue, and the attorney general can’t trump state law to make rape victims pay for rape kits." But Texas law hasn't always read that way. In the past, rape exams were done by medical professionals and then paid for by law enforcement agencies only if sexual assault victims reported the crimes. The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2006, gave states three years to eliminate such reporting requirements so that all victims could obtain free forensic medical exams. In 2009, the Texas Legislature finally changed the law, directing the Department of Public Safety to cover the cost of a rape kit for any victim who chooses not to report. For Radnofsky, that change took too long. She says that Abbott could have -- and should have -- acted earlier to bring administration of the victims' compensation fund into compliance with the federal act. A spokesman for Abbott's office says the attorney general did not have the authority to change a policy that was mandated by state law. When asked if she knew of any instances when victims had paid for their own rape kits, Radnofsky said she did not. But she isn't the first person to wade into this gnarly issue. In May, a Houston television station aired a report, picked up by CNN, that caused an uproar in the advocacy community because it implied that sexual assault victims were being billed for forensic exams, Camp said. In response, both the attorney general’s office and TAASA issued public statements that termed the TV story inaccurate and misleading. The attorney general's office said that as of Jan. 1, the office had paid for 57,702 rape exams since December 2002 and had not denied any requests for reimbursements for the kits from law enforcement agencies. TAASA said the TV report implied that billing victims for their rape kits "was a common practice in Texas despite being told by several sources … that this was not the case. … The problem is there isn’t really a problem." Officials from other organizations that deal directly with sexual assault victims, including SafePlace and the Austin Police Department’s sex crimes unit, also said that they were not aware of any large-scale problems with victims receiving bills for forensic exams. That leaves this question: Before the Texas law was changed, did sexual assault victims who did not want to report a crime have to pay for their forensic exams? No, according to officials contacted for this story. In those cases, victims were not given the exams to begin with, so payment was not an issue. However, hospitals have sometimes mistakenly sent bills to victims for their forensic exams, according to the attorney general’s office. But none of the officials we contacted knew of any data on how often that happens. Summing up: Regardless of whether Abbott took the initiative on this issue and regardless of whether some sexual assault victims have been mistakenly billed on occasion, Radnofsky’s claim is wrong. The attorney general does not require rape victims to pay for rape kits and never has. That's why we give Radnofsky a Pants on Fire.	None	Barbara Ann Radnofsky	None	None	None	2010-01-12T15:52:21	2009-10-22	['None']
-snes-01736	Did the Red Cross Serve This Meal to Hurricane Irma Victims?	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/red-cross-hurricane-meal/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did the Red Cross Serve This Meal to Hurricane Victims?	13 September 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-05753	Says Rick Santorum "funded Planned Parenthood."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/01/ron-paul/ron-paul-ad-claims-rick-santorum-voted-fund-planne/	Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum says he’s the only consistent conservative in the Republican presidential field, but a new Ron Paul campaign ad says the label is phony. Paul’s ad calls Santorum a "counterfeit conservative" who, among other sins, "funded Planned Parenthood." We decided to check whether Santorum, well known for his opposition to abortion and even contraception in some instances, supported government funding of the controversial women’s health provider. A look at the funding When we contacted Paul’s campaign for backup, his spokesman provided us a list of votes that Santorum -- and Paul -- made on large appropriations bills for the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal departments. The bills including funding for something called Title X. According to the Health and Human Services website, Title X provides "comprehensive family planning services." With an emphasis on serving low-income Americans, the services are defined as "contraceptive services and related counseling" as well as "preventive health services such as: patient education and counseling; breast and pelvic examinations; breast and cervical cancer screening according to nationally recognized standards of care; sexually transmitted disease (STD) and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) prevention education, counseling, testing and referral; and pregnancy diagnosis and counseling. By law, Title X funds may not be used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning." Despite the ban on using federal funds for abortions, critics (including Paul) say the funds are "fungible," meaning even though government dollars don’t pay for abortions directly, the funding frees other money that can be used for abortions. The bulk of Planned Parenthood’s work involves routine women’s health care -- pelvic exams, STD testing and counseling and contraceptives. It is also the country’s biggest abortion provider and a significant recipient of Title X funds. Santorum’s votes The list Paul’s campaign sent us shows votes on appropriations bills from 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. In each case, Santorum voted for the bills, and Paul voted against. Looking closely at the bill from 2006, Santorum’s last HHS appropriations vote in the Senate, the $142.5 billion spending package allocated money for everything from the human genome project to aging services, from the black lung disability trust fund to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As for Title X: "$285,963,000 shall be for the program under title X of the Public Health Service Act to provide for voluntary family planning projects." Santorum’s response We didn’t hear back from Santorum’s campaign for this story. But he has spoken on the topic in interviews and debates, explaining that while he personally opposes the use of contraceptives, he supports their availability as a matter of public policy. Talking to CBS on Feb. 17, 2012, Santorum said, "It’s funny that I’ve been criticized by Governor Romney and by Ron Paul for actually having voted for something called Title X, which is actually federal funding of contraception. … My public policy beliefs are that this contraception should be available. Again, I’ve supported Title X funding. I’ve also supported abstinence-based education because I believe that is a healthier alternative." During a debate in Arizona on Feb. 22, 2012, Santorum struggled to explain his position of having voted for the funding while declaring opposition to it: "As Congressman Paul knows, I opposed Title X funding. I've always opposed Title X funding, but it's included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things, including the funding for the National Institutes of Health, the funding for Health and Human Services and a whole bunch of other departments. It's a multi-billion-dollar bill. "What I did, because Title X was always pushed through, I did something that no one else did. Congressman Paul didn't. I said, well, if you're going to have Title X funding, then we're going to create something called Title XX, which is going to provide funding for abstinence-based programs, so at least we'll have an opportunity to provide programs that actually work in -- in keeping children from being sexually active instead of facilitating children from being sexually active. And I pushed Title XX … to accomplish that goal. … As president of the United States, I will defund Planned Parenthood; I will not sign any appropriation bill that funds Planned Parenthood." Our ruling Paul’s ad says Santorum funded Planned Parenthood. His campaign points to Santorum’s yea votes in the Senate on massive appropriations bills for funding the federal government. Title X funding, which funnels family planning dollars to health care providers including Planned Parenthood, was in those spending measures. Santorum has been unclear about where he stands on Title X, saying in one instance that he supports Title X and in another that he opposes it. In any event, he did not vote separately for Title X but for omnibus multi-billion dollar appropriations measures that funded many other activities. Saying, as the ad does, that he "funded Planned Parenthood," makes it sound like he played a larger role than being one of many votes in favor of a broad-based appropriations bill. In 2006, for instance, he was joined by all but two of his Senate Republican colleagues in voting for the bill. Paul's statement is partially accurate but it leaves out that important context. We rate the claim Half True.	None	Ron Paul	None	None	None	2012-03-01T17:57:48	2012-02-28	['Rick_Santorum']
-vogo-00649	Fact Check TV: The Shadow Inventory	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-tv-the-shadow-inventory/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Check TV: The Shadow Inventory	February 1, 2010	None	['None']
-tron-01339	Halos Cuties Are Grown Using Toxic Waste Water	disputed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/halos-cuties-grown-using-toxic-waste-water/	None	food	None	None	None	Halos Cuties Are Grown Using Toxic Waste Water	Mar 10, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01983	Gas Rationing because of Hurricane Katrina?	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hurricane-rationing/	None	natural-disasters/hurricane	None	None	None	Gas Rationing because of Hurricane Katrina?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01166	Taylor Swift, Katy Perry Both Moving To London?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-katy-perry-london-moving/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Taylor Swift, Katy Perry Both Moving To London?	11:02 am, April 17, 2018	None	['Taylor_Swift', 'London']
-pomt-10266	"More than 12,500 service men and women have been discharged on the basis of sexual orientation since the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was implemented, at a cost of over $360 million. Many of those forced out had special skills in high demand, such as translators, engineers, and pilots."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/25/democratic-national-committee/a-claim-on-"dont-ask-dont-tell"-stands-up/	The Democratic Party's draft platform , entitled Renewing America's Promise, promises to repeal the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. That policy grew out of a furious political battle in the early days of President Bill Clinton's administration, when he considered lifting the Pentagon's longstanding ban on gays in the military. Under a compromise that took effect in 1994, the military would not ask about servicemembers' sexual orientation, and gay persons could serve as long as they were silent about that aspect of their lives. The DNC platform says "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" wastes money and disqualifies valuable personnel. Under the heading, "Allow All Americans to Serve," the platform says: "We will also put national security above divisive politics. More than 12,500 service men and women have been discharged on the basis of sexual orientation since the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy was implemented, at a cost of over $360 million. Many of those forced out had special skills in high demand, such as translators, engineers, and pilots. At a time when the military is having a tough time recruiting and retaining troops, it is wrong to deny our country the service of brave, qualified people. We support the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and the implementation of policies to allow qualified men and women to serve openly regardless of sexual orientation." Since the DNC justified its position with statistics, we want to see if those statistics hold up. The claim that "more than 12,500 service men and women have been discharged on the basis of sexual orientation since the 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' policy was implemented" seems to be accurate. The Pentagon was unable to provide us promptly with its count, but a February 2005 Government Accountability Office report said 9,488 servicemembers had been ousted for homosexual conduct between the start of the policy in 1994 and the end of fiscal year 2003. When we asked the Democratic National Committee where the number came from, they referred us to the Obama campaign, which in turn sent us to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an advocacy group for gay servicemembers. The group's spokesman, Adam Ebbins, said it files Freedom of Information Act requests each year to get the most recent number, and that the last count, as of the end of fiscal year 2007, was 12,342 members discharged, with no response from the Coast Guard. "At this point we are confident that the number of discharges has exceeded 12,500," Ebbins said. He said the military documents supporting that number were too cumbersome to provide promptly, but by our count the GAO report suggests a discharge rate of 2.6 service members per day, which would place the current total well over 12,000. So the defense network's number is quite plausible, and we see no reason to question it. Onto the DNC's claim that "many of those forced out had special skills in high demand." The GAO report said 757 of those discharged for homosexuality, or 8 percent, held "critical occupations," meaning jobs worthy of selective reenlistment bonuses, and of those 322 had some skills in important foreign languages such as Arabic, Farsi or Korean. So yes, that qualifies as "many," and the claim was accurate. The third aspect of the party's claim – that the policy cost more than $360 million – is less clear. It seems odd to us that a debate of this sort would bog down over money; we suspect those who feel strongly on either side of this debate believe it should be decided on issues such as equality or military readiness, not cost. Nevertheless, volumes have been written on the cost of the policy, so let's have at it. In its 2005 report, the GAO said that over the 10-year period it "could have cost" the Department of Defense $190.5 million to recruit and train replacements for servicemembers lost due to the policy. But the office cautioned that "the total costs of DOD's homosexual conduct policy cannot be estimated because DOD does not collect relevant cost data on inquiries and investigations, counseling and pastoral care, separation functions, and discharge reviews." A year later the Michael D. Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote a competing financial Analysis of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" , and concluded that the policy cost at least $363.8 million between 1994 and 2003. The DNC used that number. The California commission comprised former Secretary of Defense William Perry, a former assistant defense secretary, two former military officers, a military law expert, and six professors (including two from West Point and two from the Naval Postgraduate School). It had its research design and report reviewed and vetted by Mary Malina, a professor at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate school, and an expert in cost accounting, management control systems and managerial accounting practice. The commission found that the GAO overestimated one aspect of the cost of the policy – adding the cost of replacing those fired for being gay but failing to offset that with the value recovered through the time served by the replacement. In two other respects, though, the GAO underestimated the cost, the commission found. It did not include the cost of training officers who were discharged for homosexuality, and for enlistees, it used an inaccurate estimate of training costs per person. Bottom line: the California commission came up with a cost 91 percent higher than the GAO's. The GAO fired back, critiquing the commission's report in July 2006. It said 90 percent of the gap between its estimate and the commission's was due to differing estimates of enlistee training costs. "Our estimate focused largely on the direct and incremental training costs associated with the specific occupations of servicemembers," the GAO wrote. "The Commission based its estimate on average training costs for all occupations indexed for inflation." The office defended its estimated in other respects as well, and stood by its number. The California commission chair, University of California associate political science professor Aaron Belkin, answered back in September 2006 with a critique of the GAO's critique of his critique of their report. Still with us? Belkin said that in its defense of its estimate the GAO did not "acknowledge the implications of its failure to obtain length-of-training data" and "misrepresents its own training cost data." We're getting way into the weeds here, and as Belkin said in an interview, "With any accounting story you have multiple truths because accounting can be calculated in different ways." That said, two factors compel us to approve of the DNC's claim that the policy has cost over $360 million. For one thing, both the GAO and the California estimates are now five years out of date, and even the GAO's methodology would yield an estimate much higher than $190 million today – it might well even reach $360 million. Secondly, the GAO acknowledged in its 2005 report that it was not trying to provide a complete estimate – in fact, the title of its report was "Financial Costs and Loss of Critical Skills Due to DOD's Homosexual Conduct Policy Cannot Be Completely Estimated." The California commission did endeavor to provide a complete estimate, and it drew on extensive expertise to do so. Therefore, its estimate is the best available measure of the cost of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." So we find the Democratic Party's claim to be True.	None	Democratic National Committee	None	None	None	2008-08-25T00:00:00	2008-08-13	['None']
-pomt-12477	Says the Republican plan to replace Obamacare, "absolutely does not eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions."	mostly false	/north-carolina/statements/2017/may/04/robert-pittenger/does-new-version-ahca-protect-coverage-pre-existin/	One of the key sticking points over U.S. House Republicans’ plan to repeal and replace Obamacare is what will happen to people with pre-existing health conditions if this new plan passes. North Carolina Republican Rep. Robert Pittenger supports the bill. He said Tuesday that people still would be able to buy health insurance even if they already have cancer, heart disease, diabetes or some other type of health issue. One of the biggest changes in the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was a requirement that insurers cannot reject people on the basis of pre-existing conditions or charge them exorbitant rates for their premiums. "The American Health Care Act absolutely does not eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions," Pittenger said. However, that is misleading. It’s an issue that affects many people, too. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, more than one in four Americans between 18 and 64 has a pre-existing condition – including more than 1.6 million people in Pittenger’s state of North Carolina. Of those, 86,000 North Carolinians with pre-existing conditions buy their insurance through the Obamacare marketplace, according to Avalere, a Washington, D.C, health care consulting company – as do nearly 2.3 million people nationwide. President Donald Trump made a similar claim to Pittenger’s, saying on April 30 that "pre-existing conditions are in the bill." PolitiFact rated that Mostly False. Pittenger made his claim two days later. However, nothing changed in that time regarding the AHCA’s proposed rules for protecting people with pre-existing conditions. So Pittenger’s claim misses the mark, too. Weakening current protections The AHCA does keep the requirement that people with pre-existing conditions must be offered health insurance. But it would drop Obamacare’s rules capping how much extra those people can be charged. The part of the AHCA dealing with pre-existing conditions is the MacArthur Amendment, named after Republican Rep. Tom MacArthur of New Jersey. (See PolitiFact’s full analysis of the amendment here.) Compare two of the amendment’s key provisions: See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com So it appears people wouldn’t pay wildly different rates due only to their gender, which is also the case under Obamacare. But by contrast, insurers would only have to provide access to coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. It says nothing about the rates of that coverage. That means if the AHCA passes, it would allow for people with pre-existing conditions to be charged more per year for their insurance coverage – possibly to the tune of thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars more per year, some studies have found. The exact amount might differ regionally, since some states might not allow the higher rates. Pittenger said that if the AHCA passes and people want better health insurance, they could move to a different state. How the changes work Matt Fiedler, a health care analyst for the Brookings Institute, said the AHCA would force people with a pre-existing condition to choose between two different pools of insurance coverage, both with "a very high premium." "In either case, people with serious health conditions would lack access to affordable insurance options," he said. The AARP opposes the AHCA for that reason. So does the nation’s largest group of doctors, the American Medical Association, which said the AHCA will do "serious harm to patients and the health care delivery system." Upton amendment and high-risk pools For people with pre-existing conditions, states could allow insurers to charge more if they set up a high-risk pool or participate in a new federal invisible risk-sharing program. Medical professionals question the quality of care those pools would provide. "The history of high-risk pools demonstrates that Americans with pre-existing conditions will be stuck in second-class health care coverage – if they are able to obtain coverage at all," said Dr. Andrew Gurman, president of the American Medical Association. Ten groups that advocate for patients – including the American Cancer Society and American Heart Association – also issued a joint statement in opposition. They said in the past, high-risk pools "resulted in higher premiums, long waiting lists and inadequate coverage." One of Pittenger’s fellow Republicans, Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, initially said the AHCA "torpedoes" pre-existing condition protections. But Upton changed his mind Wednesday after House leadership set aside an extra $8 billion, spread over five years, to subsidize people whose premiums skyrocket. However, there's disagreement as to whether the money is enough. And it’s not clear who would be eligible to receive subsidies, how much they could receive or how much they would be required to pay on their own. Our ruling Pittenger said that the Republican AHCA health care plan "does not eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions." While insurers technically would still be required to offer coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, the AHCA would weaken protections for those people. Insurers would be able to charge people significantly more if they had a pre-existing condition like heart disease, cancer, diabetes or arthritis – possibly requiring people to pay thousands of dollars extra every year to remain insured. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Robert Pittenger	None	None	None	2017-05-04T14:16:30	2017-05-02	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act']
-pomt-00751	"The elimination of essentially every automobile would be offset by one volcano exploding."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2015/apr/17/mike-huebsch/new-wisconsin-utility-regulator-says-volcanos-wors/	Questions about climate change shouldn’t have been a surprise at the confirmation hearing for Michael Huebsch to join the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. After all, the state agency regulates electricity prices, power plant construction and the development of wind and solar power. All play a role in the amount of carbon emissions that utilities generate in Wisconsin. Huebsch, a former Republican state lawmaker, served as secretary of the Department of Administration under Gov. Scott Walker, who appointed him to the PSC. The question came up during the end of Huebsch’s April 7, 2015 appearance before the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy. State Sen. Mark Miller (D-Monona) asked Huebsch for his views about "whether or not our activities in terms of energy generation are contributing to climate change?" Huebsch responded that humans have can have an impact on climate change, but said he didn’t believe it is "anywhere near the level of impact of just the natural progression of our planet." He added: "You know, the elimination of essentially every automobile would be offset by one volcano exploding." That one, well, erupted on social media. Critics questioned the science behind the claim, which has been repeated numerous times by those who do not believe human activity is causing the planet to warm. When we asked Huebsch for his evidence, he responded by forwarding us an email he had sent to Miller after the hearing. "I answered a question you put to me inaccurately and I want to set the record straight," Huebsch wrote. "To your question regarding global climate change I indicated global volcanic activity can equal the emission output by the automobiles in the United States. That is inaccurate and I apologize for the error." He added: "While the scientific community recognizes the natural impact on climate change due to carbon (CO2)and sulfur (SO2) emissions from volcanic activity, those emissions do not equate to the annual emissions from United States automobiles and other fossil fuel based transportation. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused." Oh. All that said, let’s take a closer look the comparison. Volcanoes: A frequently cited 2011 report by Terrance Gerlach, a volcano expert with the United States Geological Survey, compared carbon emissions from volcanoes and all human activity -- not just motor vehicles. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 was one of the largest ever recorded. That event sent about 0.05 gigatons into the atmosphere. Vehicles: According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles in the United States amount to 27 percent of all sources of greenhouse gases, second only to electric power generation. Gerlach’s report says that vehicles worldwide contributed 3 gigatons a year in greenhouse gases. The EPA estimate puts the U.S. share of that at just under 2 gigatons. By either measure, that’s far, far more that a volcanic eruption. The Gerlach report contained this conclusion: "Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, ‘No.’" Our rating Huebsch, the latest appointee to the agency that regulates utilities in Wisconsin, testified that "the elimination of essentially every automobile would be offset by one volcano exploding." When we asked about his comments, Huebsch issued an email saying his answer to the climate change question was wrong, and apologized. We rate his claim False.	None	Mike Huebsch	None	None	None	2015-04-17T14:02:34	2015-04-07	['None']
-tron-01135	Black Friday Originally Referred to Slave Trade	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/black-friday-slave-trade/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Black Friday Originally Referred to Slave Trade – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-05949	The mayor of Ath, in Belgium, refused to remove pork from school canteens in the face of pressure from Muslim parents.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/belgians-dont-waffle/	None	Religion	None	David Mikkelson	None	Belgian Mayor Refuses to Ban Pork in School Cafeterias?	29 September 2014	None	['Belgium', 'Islam']
-tron-00336	Statement about Hitler By Muhammad Ali at ground zero	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/muhammadali/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Statement about Hitler By Muhammad Ali at ground zero	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Muhammad_Ali', 'Adolf_Hitler']
-pomt-06166	"I balanced the budget for four straight years, paid off $405 billion in debt."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/dec/16/newt-gingrich/newt-gingrich-repeats-claim-about-his-record-balan/	During the Dec. 15, 2011, Republican presidential debate in Sioux City, Iowa, Newt Gingrich touted his record when he was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Gingrich’s comment came after moderator Bret Baier said that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney "just yesterday said you're an unreliable conservative. Now, obviously, he's your opponent. … But even Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad said today he respects you greatly, but he openly questioned whether you had the discipline and focus to be president." Gingrich responded, "Well, those are two different questions. .... I have a 90 percent American Conservative Union voting record for 20 years. I balanced the budget for four straight years, paid off $405 billion in debt. Pretty conservative. … I think on the conservative thing, it's sort of laughable to suggest that somebody who campaigned with Ronald Reagan and with Jack Kemp and has had a 30-year record of conservatism, is somehow not a conservative?" The claim that Gingrich "balanced the budget for four straight years (and) paid off $405 billion in debt" sounded familiar. It turns out that we originally fact-checked it when Gingrich made it on May 11, 2011, when he released a video to launch his presidential campaign. In that video, he said, "for four years, we balanced the budget and paid off $405 billion in debt." With soft music in the background, Gingrich said with a smile, "We’ve done it before. We can do it again." Gingrich was speaker from January 1995 to January 1999, when he was a Republican congressman from Atlanta’s suburbs. First, the balanced budget. The federal budget runs on a fiscal year calendar that begins October 1 and ends September 30. During fiscal years 1996 and 1997 -- the first two that Gingrich helped shape as speaker -- there were deficits: $107 billion in 1996 and about $22 billion in 1997. By fiscal year 1998, the federal budget did reach a surplus of $69 billion. And in fiscal year 1999 -- which Gingrich can claim some responsibility for, even though he was out as speaker for most of the fiscal year -- it was in surplus as well, to the tune of $126 billion. But that’s only two balanced budgets he can claim credit for. The federal government did run four consecutive surpluses, but for the last two of those -- fiscal years 2000 and 2001 -- Gingrich was no longer serving in the House. Now for Gingrich’s comments about the debt. The national debt was slightly above $4.8 trillion when Gingrich became House speaker in January 1995. By the time he left the position in January 1999, the debt was more than $5.6 trillion. That’s an increase, not a decrease. If you look just at the two years Gingrich can claim credit for where the federal government was in surplus -- fiscal years 1998 and 1999 -- the government did pay down about $200 billion in debt. But that would be cherry-picking, because over the full four years of his speakership, the debt rose by about $800 billion. A final note: It’s PolitiFact’s policy not to focus solely on the accuracy of the numbers in political attacks (or, as in this case, efforts to claim political credit) but also to determine whether blame or credit for the results is justified. With this statement, even if Gingrich’s numbers had been correct, his language suggested that he deserved sole credit for the achievement, when in fact it was a collective accomplishment with a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. That further downgrades the accuracy of his claim. Our ruling Gingrich was off on both claims concerning the budget. The budget was indeed balanced for four years, but it’s a stretch for him to take credit for more than two of those years. As for paying off $405 billion in debt, the data we found shows the debt actually increased during Gingrich’s four-year tenure as speaker by more than $800 billion. We rate Gingrich’s claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/322a0d22-442b-41c1-9415-76fe52d38a5e	None	Newt Gingrich	None	None	None	2011-12-16T08:21:18	2011-12-15	['None']
-pomt-14489	"Our community (Tampa Bay) is one of the 10 most threatened by the sea level rise in the world."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2016/feb/26/sierra-club/tampa-bay-among-top-10-regions-most-threatened-cli/	The head of Tampa Bay’s Sierra Club chapter warned the Hillsborough County Commission that building more roads will only make global warming’s consequences worse for the entire region. Chapter chairman Kent Bailey told commissioners in a Feb. 22, 2016, letter that the Sierra Club would not be supporting a proposed half-cent transportation sales tax referendum known as Go Hillsborough. Bailey said the measure doesn’t set aside enough money to pay for expanding mass transit. He argued that adding more roads and more cars to an already congested system will only make matters worse by increasing carbon pollution. "Our community is one of the 10 most threatened by the sea level rise in the world," Bailey wrote. He added that the Tampa Bay area will be among the first to suffer from flooding caused by climate change. There’s no doubt the oceans are rising, and Tampa Bay will feel the effects. But is the region among the most endangered in the world? Let’s just say that we found the bay area has a lot to lose. Flooding vs. sea level rise There are a bunch of ways to measure how climate change will affect the world’s cities. People will be displaced, economies will be ruined, or you may end up with not enough water (or too much). These are all issues Tampa Bay faces, so buckle up. When we asked Bailey how he came up with his ranking, he said he was referring to potential property losses, mostly in terms of real estate. "We can move our people. But our fixed assets are a different story," he said. He cited several sources, including a report from global-warming researchers Climate Central, and a Scientific American article that said St. Petersburg was in particular danger from sea level rise. He also pointed to a 2008 paper from the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The study focused on the effects of climate extremes on port cities — particularly storm surge. Coastal flooding is different than sea level rise, but experts told us Bailey is using a fair benchmark for comparison. Vulnerability to storm surge and sea level rise often are conflated in discussions on climate change, they said. "They are related, but not exactly the same," said Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate impacts at Climate Central. In general, sea level rise can make a big impact on flooding, and will assuredly make storm surges and flooding worse in the future. David Hastings, a marine science professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, said storm surges are especially dangerous in Tampa and St. Petersburg because of the relatively shallow offshore shelf in the Gulf of Mexico. Higher sea levels will make surges even more dangerous. But back to the OECD study: Economists examined 136 port cities and found that Tampa and St. Petersburg together were among the 10 cities with the most property at risk to wind damage and coastal flooding from storm surge. And that’s for right now, let alone after sea levels increase. "The top 10 cities in terms of assets exposed are Miami, Greater New York, New Orleans, Osaka-Kobe, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Nagoya, Tampa-St. Petersburg and Virginia Beach," the paper read. Those rankings could get better if steps were taken to mitigate flooding, the study said. But they could also get worse, as cities grow and gain more people. The effects of subsidence (the physical earth below the city changing or sinking, which is a major issue in Tampa Bay) and the changing climate could magnify the risk, too. Many of the same economists revisited the rankings in a 2013 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Tampa-St. Petersburg came in as the seventh-most at risk of flooding. If you’re looking for a price tag for how much Tampa Bay stands to lose, the OECD has one: In a catastrophic, once-in-100-years flood, losses to the region currently could be $49.6 billion. University of South Florida oceanography professor Gary Mitchum noted real estate losses are only part of the story. As the oceans rise permanently, the region’s tourism-based economy will suffer extensively. Many people who can afford to simply move away probably will, but low-wage workers dependent on disappearing service industry jobs will be stuck. Of course, the region’s property loss ranking may change some as population, planning and even geography shift. But these are from economists, considering economic impact. If we examined this another way — say, how many people will be permanently displaced by the eventual coastal floods that won’t recede — other places will have it much worse than Tampa Bay. Even the OECD researchers said their rankings would be different by that measure. Cities in China and southeast Asian countries, like Bangladesh and Vietnam, will be much more affected that way. It’s much harder to quantify how the human toll will affect regions because you can’t easily attach a dollar amount to it. "The social impact of this is much more complicated," Mitchum said. "The result that you get depends on how you assess it." Our ruling Sierra Club's Bailey said, "Our community (Tampa Bay) is one of the 10 most threatened by the sea level rise in the world." He cited credible research that showed the region is among the most at risk of property damage from coastal flooding. He’s conflating that research with the effects of sea level rise, but several experts told us the problems are related. It's striking that Tampa Bay is already in great danger when it comes to potential property loss, but Bailey should have been more specific. There are other ways to measure the consequences of rising oceans beyond real estate. When we consider some of these factors, other major cities could be considered worse off than Tampa Bay. The statement is accurate but needs clarification. We rate it Mostly True.	None	Sierra Club	None	None	None	2016-02-26T14:24:38	2016-02-22	['None']
-farg-00494	“Muslim judge rules Muslim man can marry 9-year-old girl in Montana.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/11/no-muslim-child-marriage-montana/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Saranac Hale Spencer	['fake news']	No Muslim Child Marriage in Montana	November 6, 2017	2017-11-06 18:55:16 UTC	['Montana', 'Islam']
-pomt-00755	"When the Constitution was written, (only) 20 to 25 percent of the people in the country could vote."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/apr/16/mark-pocan/mark-pocan-says-less-25-percent-population-could-v/	U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, earned a True on the Truth-O-Meter in 2013 when he declared that "Nothing in the Constitution explicitly guarantees our right to vote." He was right that there is no affirmative right to vote spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, though several amendments aim to prohibit discrimination based on race, sex and age. Pocan is back again seeking a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to vote, in hopes of making it more difficult for states to impose rules on voting, such as having to present a photo identification in order to cast a ballot. And he got our attention again during an April 19, 2015 news conference where he explained his thinking on the need to update the Constitution. "If you think about it, when the Constitution was written, 20 to 25 percent of the people in the country could vote," Pocan said. "White male property owners over 21 is a very small subset of the country." Is Pocan is accurately describing the state of voting eligibility in 1787, when the founding document was signed? Opening the history books Pocan directed us to excerpts from "The Suffrage Franchise in the Thirteen English Colonies in America," an oft-cited 1905 book by Albert McKinley. Like many other sources, the book describes the difficulty in pinning down the size of the pool of potential voters in part because states set their own rules. After all, the constitution had not been signed, so there were no national standards. "In Pennsylvania the tax-list figures give only potential voters, but they show about eight per cent of the rural population qualified for the suffrage, and only two per cent in the city of Philadelphia," McKinley wrote. "In Rhode Island the freemen or potential voters numbered only nine percent of the population." The potential voters seem to vary from one-sixth to one-fiftieth of the population," he concluded, after warning that "these figures are entirely too few, and too scattered in time and territory, to justify any accurate generalization from them." Several experts we turned to for help said Pocan’s estimate was in the right range. Voting in the late 18th century was restricted to males and generally based on landownership, and did not extend to slaves who were a fifth of the population, said Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, a University of Virginia historian and vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. The proportion of men who could vote rose in the early nineteenth century as voting restrictions were eased. By early in the century, on average probably 50 percent to 60 percent of white adult males could vote, which would be around 20 percent of the total white population, he said. Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, put the voting pool at about 18 percent of the adult population. He based his view on evidence cited in "The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States," authored in 2000 by Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard University historian. Keyssar, too, told us that Pocan’s claim is roughly accurate. "It should also be noted that not all states had property requirements," Keyssar said. "In a few, there were tax requirements, and Vermont had no financial qualification for voting." Mintz has written that leading colonists associated democracy with disorder and mob rule, and felt that only property owners or taxpayers "were committed members of the community and were sufficiently independent to vote." "Many colonies imposed other restrictions on voting, including religious tests," Mintz wrote. "Catholics were barred from voting in five colonies and Jews in four." On the other hand, O’Shaughnessy said in an interview with writer Ed Crews that by 18th century standards, "Americans enjoyed considerable voting rights," and that even in Britain, with its elections and representative government, voting practices tended to be unfair, uneven, corrupt, and far more restrictive than America's." Our rating Pocan said, "When the Constitution was written, 20 to 25 percent of the people in the country could vote." Pocan’s estimate is defensible based on a variety of sources, with the caveat that this is tough territory for statistical precision. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Mark Pocan	None	None	None	2015-04-16T10:40:51	2015-04-09	['None']
-pomt-07787	"75 percent of the jobs created in the state of Ohio are created in small business. They are not created by huge corporations and those who are very wealthy."	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2011/feb/21/bill-batchelder/ohio-house-speaker-william-g-batchelder-says-small/	The term "small business" covers a range of seven different size categories, ranging from a two-person mom-and-pop grocery store to a factory with nearly 500 employees. Which is why researchers at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics chuckled when we asked them about a statement Ohio House Speaker William G. Batchelder made about small businesses creating new jobs. Appearing on WCPN 90.3 FM’s "Sound of Ideas" program, Batchelder noted the importance of small businesses in Ohio’s economy. "Seventy-five percent of the jobs created in the state of Ohio are created in small business. They are not created by huge corporations and those who are very wealthy," Batchelder said. PolitiFact Ohio thought that sounded interesting and we put the Truth-O-Meter to work. We started by contacting the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Researchers there cited statistics that showed 99 percent of all private sector companies in the United States are considered small businesses, according to the definition used by the Small Business Administration. It categorizes any firm that employs 499 or fewer people as a small business. Traditionally, the number of people employed by small businesses has been about the same as the number who work for businesses of 500 people or more, said Brian Headd of the SBA’s Office of Advocacy. That category would include large factories, like auto plants and steel manufacturers. As of last year, the majority of workers had tipped toward small businesses, which employed just under 55 percent of the nation’s workforce, the BLS’s most recent statistics showed. We also checked with Batchelder’s office about the source of the speaker’s statement. Spokesman Mike Dittoe gave us two: The National Federation of Independent Business’s Ohio office in Columbus, and a March 2010 report prepared by Headd titled, "An Analysis of Small Business and Jobs." Roger Geiger, NFIB/Ohio’s executive director, both confirmed Batchelder’s statement and also referred us to the Headd report. Headd also echoed Batchelder’s sentiment that small businesses are important to the nation’s economic health. He points out how one in five employees at small firms work part-time, and how a greater percentage of Hispanics, high school students, disabled, elderly, and rural employees work at small businesses. Headd also noted that more than half of all companies start out small, stay small and close after a few years, accounting for 85 percent of job turnover in the country -- which is not necessarily a bad thing. Headd considers the hefty job changes experienced in small businesses to be beneficial and a natural outgrowth of a healthy economy. "Although job turnover can be an emotional roller coaster for individuals, small firm job flows are a boon to the economy," Headd wrote in his report. "This churning represents the economy’s constant evolution from outmoded processes and industries to more productive ones," a process he calls "creative destruction." Headd sees small businesses as key to the nation’s recovery from the recession of 2009. "With the labor market struggling in recent years, small businesses are a logical group to look to for job recovery as they have such a large role in net job creation," he wrote. BLS researchers confirmed that their most recent statistics indicated that 75 percent of all new hires nationwide were made by small businesses in the second quarter of 2010. Over the past eight years, small businesses made 65 percent of all new hires in the United States, they said. And of small business job creation, nearly three out of four new workers were hired at companies with less than 20 employees. But what about Ohio? Do the state’s small businesses mirror the national trend? Benjamin Johnson of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services had data from the federal government on the most recent statewide breakdown, by county, of the total number of workers employed in Ohio, but could not provide specific information to verify Batchelder’s claim that "75 percent of the jobs created in the state of Ohio are created in small business." Geiger, in the Ohio office of the National Federation of Independent Business, didn’t have Ohio-specific data either. And the BLS told us they didn’t track that data, either. But researchers there made a point of saying they were sure Batchelder’s statement was essentially correct. As one pointed out: 99 out of 100 employers are classified as small businesses, so saying 75 percent of all new jobs in Ohio are created by small businesses is hardly different than saying ALL businesses create ALL jobs. So the experts who deal with labor statistics back up Batchelder’s claim, but we also note that the absence of specific data on Ohio jobs is a point that provides clarification. On the Truth-O-Meter we rate Batchelder’s statement as Mostly True.	None	William G. Batchelder	None	None	None	2011-02-21T11:45:00	2011-02-04	['Ohio']
-pomt-02945	In Massachusetts, "half of the primary care doctors are not accepting new patients."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/29/john-fleming/gop-rep-john-fleming-says-massachusetts-half-prima/	As the fallout from President Barack Obama��s health care law takes center stage, some critics are raising concerns about how much access Americans will have to insurance and physicians in the future. On CNN’s State of the Union, Rep. John Fleming, R-La., a physician and a critic of Obamacare, and Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy specialist at the University of Pennsylvania who supports the law, faced off. At one point, they debated the situation in Massachusetts, where a law similar to Obamacare was signed in 2006. As evidence that the federal law won’t work, Fleming said that in Massachusetts, "half of the primary care doctors are not accepting new patients." His point was that even if you have insurance, you won’t necessarily be able to see a doctor. We decided to check Fleming’s statistic to see if it’s correct. The statistic comes from an annual survey by the Massachusetts Medical Society, a professional association founded in 1781 that, among other things, publishes the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. The 2013 edition of the society’s "Patient Access to Care" survey -- which was based on 1,137 phone interviews with Massachusetts physicians -- found that 51 percent of family medicine practitioners in the state were accepting new patients. As Fleming indicated, almost exactly half are not. We will point out a few caveats, none of which seriously undercut Fleming’s claim. • While "family medicine" is certainly one type of "primary care doctor," there are others. One type, internal medicine doctors, had a lower percentage (45 percent) accepting new patients, but another, pediatricians, had a higher percentage (70 percent). • There is substantial regional variation even within Massachusetts. The largest county in the state, Middlesex, had more doctors accepting new patients, at rates five to eight percentage points higher than the state as a whole. Other counties, such as Suffolk, had rates well below the state average. • Your likelihood of being accepted as a new patient depends heavily on what kind of insurance you have. Family medicine doctors accept 90 percent of new Medicare patients and 70 percent of patients with MassHealth, the state’s vehicle for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program. The 2013 survey did not look at new-patient acceptance rates for those who had private insurance or for patients with Commonwealth Care or Commonwealth Choice, the programs created under the 2006 law to insure those who previously had no insurance. However, data from the society’s 2011 survey does show a danger sign for those worried that doctors will be unwilling to take patients newly insured by the national health care law. The 2011 survey found that family medicine physicians were significantly less likely to accept new patients with Commonwealth Care or Commonwealth Choice -- 56 percent and 44 percent, respectively -- than they were new Medicare and Medicaid patients. Equally striking, the survey found, the percentage of family doctors taking new patients with any type of insurance has fallen since 2007 from 70 percent to 51 percent. That said, determining whether Massachusetts is out of line on any of these benchmarks is tricky, since comparable data for other states is virtually nonexistent, and the available national data is calculated differently and is several years old. Our ruling Fleming said that in Massachusetts, "half of the primary care doctors are not accepting new patients." That number is supported by a credible annual survey of Massachusetts doctors. While this doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing will happen on the national level, the statistic is solid. We rate it True.	None	John Fleming	None	None	None	2013-10-29T15:41:59	2013-10-27	['Massachusetts']
-goop-01313	Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston Share “Secret Hideout” In The Hollywood Hills?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-jennifer-aniston-secret-hideout-house-hollywood-hills/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston Share “Secret Hideout” In The Hollywood Hills?	11:53 am, March 26, 2018	None	['Brad_Pitt']
-snes-02188	A driver drove into a wall painted to look like a tunnel in a manner similar to Looney Tunes' Road Runner cartoons.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/road-runner-tunnel-crash-rumor/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Road Runner Tunnel Crash	25 March 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-10996	Say "Pope says that the rights of Muslim migrants trump any safety concerns that you might have with them in your country."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2018/jul/12/blog-posting/blog-post-twists-popes-words-about-migrants-and-na/	Did Pope Francis say that the rights of Muslim migrants are more important than any country’s safety concerns about them? That’s what a largely plagiarized story on the website opreminfo.com claimed. But what he said was more nuanced. Facebook flagged this story as part of the company’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) So we decided to investigate. It turns out that a large part of the article is copied, word-for-word, from a 2017 Reuters article titled, "Pope says migrants’ rights should override national security concerns." The only differences between the two are that the opreminfo.com article omits the final two paragraphs of the Reuters story, and it also has a different headline singling out Muslim migrants. Reuters is a reputable source, and a 2017 Guardian article corroborates much of their story. But this recently posted article has a few problems. First, there's an issue of timing. The story begins with the statement, "Pope Francis urged political leaders on Monday to defend migrants." The Reuters article began with those same words, but it was published in August 2017, and was referring to a message the pope put out that same month, ahead of the Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees. In it, the pope reiterates an earlier address and says, "Our shared response may be articulated by four verbs: to welcome, to protect, to promote and to integrate." He then goes on to describe the task of "welcoming" as follows: "Once again, I want to emphasize the importance of offering migrants and refugees adequate and dignified initial accommodation … The principle of the centrality of the human person, firmly stated by my beloved predecessor, Benedict XVI, obliges us to always prioritize personal safety over national security … The situation of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees requires that they be guaranteed personal safety and access to basic services. For the sake of the fundamental dignity of every human person, we must strive to find alternative solutions to detention for those who enter a country without authorization." The opreminfo.com article, published July 10, 2018, refers to that message. However, it says the pope "urged political leaders on Monday," even though the pope’s remarks were published nearly a year ago. Secondly, the Reuters article makes no reference to "Muslim migrants." Rather, it mentions that the pope called for "broader options for migrants and refugees to enter destination countries safely and legally." We didn’t find any reference to Muslim migrants in the pope’s message. Our ruling An article on Facebook claimed, "Pope says that the rights of Muslim migrants trump any safety concerns that you might have with them in your country." The pope discussed ensuring all migrants' "personal safety over national security." But this article cherry-picked a subgroup of migrants to make it seem like he was only talking about Muslims. In addition, the text of the article is copied from a 2017 Reuters article, even though it is framed as though the speech happened recently. For a partially accurate claim that takes things out of context, we rate this headline Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-07-12T11:56:13	2018-07-10	['Islam']
-pomt-10544	He's been endorsed by "every major newspaper here in the state of Texas."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/feb/22/barack-obama/they-like-him-in-texas/	At the Democratic debate in Austin, Texas on Feb. 21, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama responded to criticism that he was little more than a good speaker by saying that he had broad support from voters and newspapers. He said he has received many endorsements, "including every major newspaper here in the state of Texas." He's right. We checked and found he has been endorsed in the primary race against Sen. Hillary Clinton by the seven largest newspapers in Texas. Here are samples of what they said: Houston Chronicle: "Obama vows to reach out to independents and Republicans with a message of inclusion and cooperation. He offers a historic opportunity to elevate national political dialogue to a higher ground. Those who insist on vitriol and obstructionism would be marginalized." Dallas Morning News: "Americans are tired of divisive, hard-edged politics. Democrats would inspire a refreshingly new approach by choosing Mr. Obama as their 2008 candidate." Austin American-Statesman: "His optimism, unifying vision and ability to inspire are the kind of healing balm the country needs at this moment in history." San Antonio Express-News: "America needs a president that tries to create unity out of diversity, marshalling all the forces — red, blue or purple — that make this country great. Sen. Barack Obama is the Democratic candidate that offers the best chance to reach that lofty objective." Fort Worth Star-Telegram: "Obama might be shorter on detail, but he is by far longer on inspirational spirit, charisma and an ability to energize previously unengaged Americans in the voting process, particularly the usually unengaged up-and-coming generations on whose shoulders America's future rests." Corpus Christi Caller-Times: "The Editorial Board endorses Sen. Barack Obama because it believes that he offers the kind of inspirational leadership the country is hungry for." El Paso Times: "A weary America, tired of the status quo, fed up with business as usual, is longing for a positive change — and Barack Obama is that change."	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-02-22T00:00:00	2008-02-21	['Texas']
-pomt-05776	"Amniocentesis, does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortion."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/feb/27/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-says-amniocentesis-does-fact-result-/	Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum opposes requiring insurers to pay for a type of invasive prenatal testing called amniocentesis, saying it results "more often than not in this country in abortion." The test, which doctors offer as an option to pregnant women, uses a long needle to remove a small amount of fluid from the sac that surrounds a fetus. While the test carries a less than 1 percent risk of miscarriage, it can be used to diagnose gene and chromosomal disorders, neural tube defects, blood disorders and infections. Santorum told Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer that it’s used to "recommend abortion." "Amniocentesis does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortion," he explained during the CBS News interview on Feb. 19, 2012. We wondered, does the diagnostic test "result more often than not in this country in abortion"? We reached out to government agencies, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Guttmacher Institute, the March of Dimes and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations. There’s no national source any of these groups knew of that tracks amniocentesis procedures and their outcomes. But there’s good evidence Santorum overstated his case. The interview In Santorum’s Face the Nation interview, host Schieffer referred to a comment Santorum had made on the campaign trail in Columbus, Ohio. Schieffer said, "You sound like you're saying that the purpose of prenatal care is to cause people to have abortions, to get more abortions in this country. … Any number of people would say that's not the purpose at all." Santorum responded, "Well, Bob, that's simply not true. The bottom line is that a lot of prenatal tests are done to identify deformities in utero, and the customary procedure is to encourage abortions. … You said prenatal care. I didn't say prenatal care shouldn't be covered. We're talking about specifically prenatal testing, and specifically amniocentesis, which is a procedure that actually creates a risk of having a miscarriage when you have it and is done for the purposes of identifying maladies of a child in the womb. In many cases, and in fact most cases physicians recommend, particularly if there's a problem, recommend abortion. We know, Bob, that 90 percent of Down syndrome children in America are aborted." After mentioning his daughter Bella’s diagnosis with the serious chromosomal disorder Trisomy 18, Santorum added: "We had a sonogram done there and they detected a problem. And yes, the doctor said, you know, you should consider an abortion. "This is typical, Bob, this is what goes on in medical rooms around the country. And yes, prenatal testing, amniocentesis, does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortion. That is a fact." Separately, we checked Santorum’s statement from the same interview that "90 percent of Down syndrome children in America are aborted." (We found that Half True — some regional studies bear him out, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it’s difficult to generalize for the entire nation.) Here, we’re focusing on his statement, "Amniocentesis, does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortion." The data We asked Santorum’s campaign for support for his claim, but didn’t hear back. We would have appreciated some guidance, because as we mentioned, no government agency or major professional group we found tracks amniocentesis and parents’ choices afterward. We checked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, who referred us to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. "Our scientific staff notes that there is no national source that tracks amniocentesis procedures, and the NIH does not have any information on the proportion of cases in which amniocentesis is performed and which subsequently end in pregnancy termination," Robert Bock of the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development told us. The Guttmacher Institute, which does research on sexual and reproductive health, including abortion, doesn’t keep data on parents’ choices after amniocentesis. Neither does the March of Dimes, which offers information about genetic disorders and birth defects. That left the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a professional group with 52,000 members. It doesn’t collect data on amniocentesis procedures, either. But a spokesman did refer us to an expert in prenatal diagnosis. The researchers That means checking this claim comes down to individual studies and researchers who study parents’ responses to prenatal diagnosis. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists suggested we speak with Mark Evans, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He’s also president of the Fetal Medicine Foundation of America, president of the International Fetal Medicine and Surgery Society Foundation and past president of the Central Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. He noted something that other experts we talked with also quickly pointed out: More than 90 percent of the time, the results of amniocentesis are normal, and parents go on to have healthy children. So, based on that, Santorum is incorrect. Meanwhile, when doctors do find a problem, only about half of patients choose to end their pregnancies, Evans said — and there’s a direct relationship between the severity of the problem and parents’ choice. There’s also a direct relationship between the region parents live in and the choices they make — something we pointed out in our rating about Down syndrome. "In liberal areas such as New York, probably 80 to 90 percent of parents with severe abnormalities do choose to terminate when legal to do so. In conservative areas, the proportion of termination is much lower — perhaps as little as 10 percent," Evans said. So Santorum might have been right if he had focused only on amniocentesis that results in diagnosis of a severe abnormality in liberal regions of the U.S. But his statement was much broader. Evans argues, in fact, that prenatal diagnosis allows for more healthy babies, both because accurate diagnoses help doctors treat fetuses with problems (he’s helped pioneer such in utero procedures as a stem-cell transplant for a fetus with a severely compromised immune system), and because accurate testing helps parents at high risk for passing on serious genetic abnormalities to confidently continue their pregnancies. "These are women who would not have otherwise gotten pregnant," he said. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists points out that in the case of a definitive diagnosis of a chromosomal abnormality, such as Down syndrome, the doctor and family have information to plan ahead for the rest of the pregnancy, labor and delivery. (That’s something former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who chose to have an amniocentesis, has said she was grateful for before the birth of her son, Trig.) Meanwhile, experts we spoke with disagree with Santorum that doctors "encourage" abortions. Prenatal diagnosis itself is an optional procedure, pointed out Miriam Kupperman, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and epidemiology at University of California at San Francisco. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists merely recommends that testing be offered as an option to every pregnant woman. Invasive procedures, such as amniocentesis, are typically only conducted after screening such as a blood test shows a fetus is at higher risk. After diagnosis of an abnormality, abortion would be presented among a parent’s options, along with any possible treatment. Gene Rudd, an obstetrician/gynecologist and senior vice president of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, said that day-to-day reality doesn’t always bear out such even-handed counseling — either before patients choose invasive procedures such as amniocentesis or afterward. "I just don't think they are being properly informed," he said. "It's just so routine that when patients these days are given the option of giving the blood test, it's almost like it's not presented as an option. … Once that test is positive, the knee-jerk reaction is, you need an amniocentesis." Like Santorum, Rudd said he’s concerned about mandating free coverage for amniocentesis because of its small risk of miscarriage and the fact that parents may choose to end their pregnancies based on a diagnosis. Still, the test can provide useful information in some cases when parents want to keep their pregnancies, he said. "There are a few conditions where the prenatal diagnosis can be important," he said. "There are some preparatory things that make good sense. People can rationally choose to have amniocentesis for that. … I think that's admirable when people want to choose to do that." Our ruling Santorum told Face the Nation, "Amniocentesis does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortion." While no agency or organization we spoke with keeps national statistics, researchers and reports we consulted show that more than 90 percent of amniocenteses result in normal diagnoses — and thus often healthy babies. Meanwhile, perhaps half of parents whose fetuses are diagnosed with abnormalities — mostly those with the most severe, untreatable problems — may go on to end their pregnancies. So by the best evidence available, perhaps less than 5 percent of parents who choose amniocentesis choose to end their pregnancies. Santorum’s statement isn’t accurate, and we rate it False.	None	Rick Santorum	None	None	None	2012-02-27T17:26:00	2012-02-19	['None']
-snes-01832	A touching transcript reproduces a Russian soldier's last words before he ordered an airstrike on himself to kill ISIS members in Syria.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russian-soldiers-last-words/	None	Uncategorized	None	Brooke Binkowski	None	Russian Soldier’s Last Words	4 April 2016	None	['Russia', 'Syria']
-snes-02540	An orangutan raped an Irish tourist in Indonesia.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tourist-assaulted-orangutan/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Was an Irish Tourist ‘Savagely Raped’ by a Huge Orangutan?	26 April 2017	None	['Indonesia']
-snes-00285	Does This Photograph Show the Water Filtration Power of Oysters?	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/water-filtration-oysters/	None	Fauxtography	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Does This Photograph Show the Water Filtration Power of Oysters?	30 July 2018	None	['None']
-pose-00049	Create a "National Health Insurance Exchange to help Americans and businesses purchase private health insurance."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/52/create-a-national-health-insurance-exchange/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Create a National Health Insurance Exchange	2010-01-07T13:26:46	None	['United_States']
-hoer-00747	Missing Child Alerts - Ashley Lewis Missing From Kannapolis North Carolina	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/ashley-lewis-missing.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Missing Child Alerts - Ashley Lewis Missing From Kannapolis North Carolina	6th January 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-14889	"Our state has no major rivers to produce big hydropower."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2015/nov/10/tim-echols/wading-question-hydropower-georgia/	Anyone who has ever visited Niagara Falls has a very clear idea of the power of water. But the same might be said about the Chattahoochee River for anyone who has ever decided to explore some of the whitewater. So a recent claim made by one member of the Georgia Public Service Commission, in touting the state’s commitment to nuclear power, caught our attention. "Our state has no major rivers to produce big hydro power," Commissioner Tim G. Echols wrote in Power Engineering, a magazine that covers the power generation industry. "What we do have is nuclear power, and it enjoys widespread support." No major rivers? And what is "big" hydro? PolitiFact Georgia decided to check Who decides? We reached out to Echols, who cited both state and federal reports to back up his claim. The 2014 Georgia Energy Report by the Georgia Environmental Finance Authority said that hydroelectric generated 2 percent of power generation and 5.5 percent of capacity in 2012, Echols said. And a 1998 report for the U.S. Department of Energy evaluated "undeveloped hydropower potential" and found Georgia’s undeveloped hydropower potential was between about 613 megawatts and 1,137 megawatts of power. Large-scale hydropower is more than 30 megawatts in size. Each of the two nuclear units being built at Plant Vogtle, which we will get to in a moment, will generate about 1,117 megawatts each. "So, if we extracted every last megawatt of potential hydropower that has been identified in Georgia, we would equal the output of a single nuclear reactor under the most favorable interpretation," Echols said. "In a more realistic scenario, we could generate roughly 60 percent of that." Rivers run through it Part of whether the statement makes sense falls on whether Georgia has any "major" rivers. As any elementary school student can tell you, many towns and cities developed alongside rivers throughout the nation’s history, with the waterways serving as transportation for people as well as goods. The Chattahoochee, Savannah and Suwannee are the major rivers in Georgia. The Hooch is the state’s longest, flowing about 435 miles. There are 13 dams along the Chattahoochee, designed to both regulate flow and generate hydropower. By comparison, 56 dams built exclusively for hydropower sit in the Columbia River Basin, which stretches for 1,240 miles. Hydropower supplies about half of the electricity used in the Northwest - about 8,664 megawatts a year. So, Georgia may have major rivers, by our own state standards, but those rivers may not necessarily be major in terms of water-power electric generation. Peach State energy Georgia, like many states, is in the midst of a big shift in how it generates that electricity. The move has been away from coal as the primary fuel and into cleaner, greener options. Years ago, Georgia Power committed to building two new nuclear reactors at its Vogtle site south of Augusta. The project is years behind schedule and well over budget but, once done, will allow nuclear to grow beyond the 9 percent of capacity it accounted for as of the third quarter this year, according to Georgia Power. Nuclear is small in capacity terms, especially compared to the 32 percent capacity from coal and 49 percent from natural gas. But it’s almost double the 5 percent capacity from hydropower, the electricity generated from 18 plants Georgia Power operates across the state. Capacity versus energy From that perspective, neither hydropower nor nuclear appears "big" energy generators. (In hydropower’s case, it’s not big relative to other regions of the country). But experts look not only at the capacity, or how much could be provided, but at energy, or what is actually generated to meet the need. Looking at it that way, hydro appears even smaller, accounting for 5 percent of capacity but just one percent of energy, said Georgia Power spokesman John Kraft. Nuclear, meanwhile, accounts for 9 percent of capacity but generated 19 percent of the energy in the third quarter. And, as we mentioned, Georgia Power has put its money behind nuclear. The company has not sought to build a new hydroelectric facility since the mid-1970s and last brought two units online in 2005 as upgraded replacements for long-used plants, Kraft said. "Many of the prime hydroelectric generation locations in Georgia are now in use. In addition, the rivers that flow through Georgia originate in Georgia, therefore, their drainage basins are relatively small," Kraft said. "The really large river systems such as the Columbia, Ohio and Tennessee include multiple states in their drainage basins and have much larger hydropower potential." Outside view It’s not just the company that thinks so. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is one of the world’s largest suppliers of hydroelectric power. By the Corps calculations, Georgia Power has about 340 megawatts of capacity on the Chattahoochee and some smaller power generation elsewhere in the state. The Corps has another 350 megawatts of capacity on the Chattahoochee, too. But those plants are usually the "last on, first off" resources to meet demand. Nuclear plants operate continuously, making direct comparisons difficult, said spokeswoman Lisa Parker. "I feel that Georgia does have major rivers that have been developed by USACE and GPC for peak hydropower," Parker said. "It does not have major rivers that could support large base load hydropower, such as the Columbia River." Still, the U.S. Department of Energy’s updated hydropower assessment found in 2014 that the south Atlantic-Gulf region, including Georgia, had untapped potential for another 2,561 megawatts of power. Our ruling In explaining Georgia’s support of nuclear energy, Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols wrote in a trade publication that the state has no "major rivers to produce big hydropower." In the most simple terms, Georgia does have major rivers where hydroelectric plants are a key part of the mix in meeting the state’s energy demands. As a percentage of power generation, hydropower is destined to remain a relatively small part of that mix given the limitations of our rivers compared to massive waterways in places such as the Pacific Northwest. There is some room for growth in hydroelectric, which Echols’ statement ignores, even if other energy sources will always dominate. We rate Echols’ statement Mostly True.	None	Tim Echols	None	None	None	2015-11-10T00:00:00	2015-10-26	['None']
-pomt-02013	The Obama administration "went to court to keep one of these five in jail at Guantanamo just three years ago because he was such a huge risk."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/08/stephen-hayes/conservative-columnist-says-obama-fought-keep-tali/	The merits of the prisoner exchange that resulted in the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from his Taliban captors continued to be a point of contention on this week’s political Sunday shows. On Fox News Sunday, panelists debated the potential political fallout in the midterms and the 2016 elections from President Barack Obama’s decision to swap five high-level Taliban officials from the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for Bergdahl. Stephen Hayes, a columnist for the conservative Weekly Standard, said he thought Obama’s maneuver would be "politically problematic." "I think at a very base level, people who aren't following politics day in and day out, are looking at this Guantanamo five and saying, ‘Why in the world would we do this?’" Hayes said. "And the conflicts that we're hearing within the administration's own story. The administration went to court to keep one of these five in jail at Guantanamo just three years ago because he was such a huge risk, such a risk to U.S. national security. And now they're letting him walk. Those are the things you don't have to have a Ph.D. in national security studies to understand." Did Hayes find an example of the administration insisting one of the detainees was a risk, and then letting him walk free? (PolitiFact looked at the five freed prisoners in more detail here.) We asked Hayes to make the case to us. He showed us a recent column he wrote on Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa, one of the five men released to Qatar in the Bergdahl deal. He also sent us a link to a 2011 court case where he said the United States argued for continued detainment of Khairkhwa, a former Taliban governor, spokesman and Minister of the Interior. But this wasn’t Obama’s Justice Department going to court to keep Khairkhwa in jail because he was "such a huge risk," as Hayes said. Actually, Khairkhwa, captured in 2002, was appealing for his release, saying he was being held illegally. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainees had the right to challenge the legality of their confinement. At question wasn’t whether the Obama administration considered Khairkhwa a risk. They didn’t have to prove that. In fact, the court makes that clear in its ruling: "The government's authority to detain an enemy combatant is not dependent on whether an individual would pose a threat to the United States or its allies if released." This stemmed from a 2010 court decision, Awad vs. Obama, in which Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, a Yemeni national, argued that he was no longer a threat to the United States and therefore his detention was unlawful. But the court said that wasn’t an issue. Rather, the Obama administration simply had to prove that, under the Authorization for Use of Military Force granted by Congress, Khairkhwa was a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida or associated forces at the time of his capture. The United States had ample evidence to make their case. Khairkhwa was part of the Taliban’s highest governing body and was a known associate of Osama bin Laden. Therefore, most of the administration’s case against Khairkhwa is centered on his past ties to the Taliban. There is no discussion of the risk he may or may not pose if he returned to Afghanistan. "It’s fair to say whoever said that hasn’t read the decision," said Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University who has represented multiple Guantanamo Bay prisoners. "It doesn’t say that it’s the U.S. trying to keep them here, it’s the U.S. defending the standard that someone is a lawful enemy combatant." "The hearing (for Khairkhwa) took six years, and it concluded that he was a combatant for the Taliban, not that he was a terrorist," he added. "They didn’t even need to find out if he had attacked Americans." That’s not to say the government did not view Khairkhwa as a risk. There were varying opinions on that from within the administration. In documents released by Wikileaks, the Department of Defense labeled Khairkhwa as "high risk" and warranted continued detention. Khairkhwa, according to Wikileaks documents, was highly intelligent and may have known more about "the inner workings of the Taliban than any other detainee held." The administration, however, also once considered releasing Khairkhwa, who is a friend of Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, in an effort to bring peace between the Taliban and the new Afghanistan government. The military considered him "as more of a civilian than a military figure," according to Reuters. Our ruling Hayes said the Obama administration "went to court to keep one of these five in jail at Guantanamo just three years ago because he was such a huge risk." We’re not assessing whether the Obama and the Pentagon viewed Khairkhwa as a "risk" if he was released. We’re looking at the rationale Hayes offered as to why the Obama administration went to court. Hayes said a 2011 court case was evidence of a "conflict" in the administration’s story. Actually, that court case had nothing to do with Khairkhwa's risk level. In fact, the court explicitly said assessing whether Khairkhwa was a threat if released wasn’t a factor at all. Instead, the administration was simply confirming that Khairkhwa was tied to the Taliban after he claimed that he was being held illegally. Hayes is right that the Obama administration argued to keep Khairkhwa in Guantanamo, but he misrepresented why they did so. We rate his statement Half True.	None	Stephen Hayes	None	None	None	2014-06-08T18:35:13	2014-06-08	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-12609	"Muslims get their way--Illinois will permit wearing burqas in driving licenses photos"	pants on fire!	/illinois/statements/2017/apr/02/blog-posting/fake-news-claims-muslims-can-wear-burqas-drivers-l/	We came across a headline and provocative photo on the truetrumpers.com website that suggested Illinois officials would permit Muslims to have photo IDs taken for driver’s licenses with their faces completely covered by burqas. We decided to check out the claim as part of International Fact-Checking Day. "Muslims get their way--Illinois will permit wearing burqas in driving licenses photos," the headline reads. PolitiFact Illinois examined the origins of this claim as part of the inaugural International Fact-Checking Day, April 2, 2017. Organizers at Poynter.org describe the day as "not a single event but a rallying cry for more facts - and fact-checking - in politics, journalism, and everyday life." Dave Druker, spokesman for Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, whose office administers driver’s license testing and issues Illinois IDs, quickly dismissed the claim. "That is not the case and the face must be exposed," he said. In fact, Druker noted, it’s now standard procedure, whenever a resident seeks to renew their driver’s license, that their old license picture is scanned and run through facial recognition software in an attempt to determine they are who they say they are and that they are not wanted for any serious crimes or listed on any terrorism watch lists. Muslims may cover the tops of their heads when their pictures are taken for state IDs, Druker said, but faces must be exposed. "The face has to be exposed," he said. "You can have your head covered. The top of your head. The face must be exposed. An orthodox Jew could wear a skull cap. A nun could wear the habit, but the face must be exposed." Druker said he was asked about the same fake news claim from a site about a year ago. This claim came from a website called TrueTrumpers.com that is not a credible news media site. It includes several posts that fuel fake claims about President Donald Trump, former President Barack Obama and Muslims, in particular, as well as click-baiting claims about porn stars and secret tricks for weight loss and whiter teeth. Unlike some other fake news sites, this one does not include any disclaimer that its reports are not factual or satirical. Clicking on many of the stories on this website will cause a pop-up window to open that suggests software is out of date on your computer while encouraging you to download and open a file that could contain malware. Our ruling A fake news website said Illinois was going to allow Muslims to obtain driver’s licenses with their faces covered. A spokesman for the office that issues state identification said the claim was false. We rate this Pants on Fire. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/01815fb3-e4f0-4381-8a43-0ba5e590c466	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-04-02T10:18:51	2017-03-17	['Illinois']
-vogo-00266	Statement: “Fifty-eight percent of Latino students in San Diego Unified aren’t reading at grade level,” mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher wrote in an editorial published by U-T San Diego on Feb. 25.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/mayor-2012/racial-gap-in-test-scores-fact-check/	Analysis: In editorials recently published by U-T San Diego, each of the city’s high-profile candidates for mayor outlined their ideas to improve schools. Education hasn’t been a major issue under Mayor Jerry Sanders, but it’s become a constant theme of debate surrounding his successor.	None	None	None	None	Racial Gap in Test Scores: Fact Check	March 6, 2012	None	['U-T_San_Diego']
-pomt-00007	"#Broward elections department has a history of violating the law."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2018/nov/12/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-broward-elections-office-has-hist/	As Florida headed toward multiple recounts, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., went on a Twitter tear directed at Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes. Rubio took aim at the supervisor in on of Florida’s blue bastions as the county was still tabulating ballots more than 40 hours after the polls closed. Big races for U.S. Senate, governor and state agriculture commissioner hung in the balance. "#Broward elections department has a history of violating the law," Rubio tweeted Nov. 8, linking to Politico articles about two lawsuits filed against the office since 2016. Hours later, there was yet another lawsuit filed against Snipes, this time from Gov. Rick Scott, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate. A Broward judge ruled in Scott’s favor and found Snipes was in violation of Florida public records laws for not fulfilling a record’s request by Scott’s campaign. Is Rubio right about Broward’s past of election problems? Former Gov. Jeb Bush appointed Snipes, a former school principal, to replace Miriam Oliphant. Oliphant was removed from office amid mismanagement in 2003 following a string of problems in the 2002 primary election. Snipes initially drew praise for cleaning up the office and has repeatedly won re-election. But in recent years, she has faced scrutiny about her competence amid a series of lawsuits, errors and sluggish vote counting. Broward’s left-leaning electorate is key in statewide races because it has the second-largest number of registered voters with nearly 1.2 million, behind Miami Dade. Lawsuits filed against Broward Supervisor of Elections The lawsuits that Rubio cited were filed in 2017. Snipes lost both lawsuits and has appealed them. One lawsuit was filed by Tim Canova after he lost a Democratic primary to U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in 2016. Canova, concerned about the integrity of the election, wanted to inspect the paper ballots after he lost. He said she refused to comply, and he sued. Snipes testified that her office had destroyed the ballots after she signed an order Sept. 1, 2017 to authorize destruction of boxes. But under federal law, ballots are supposed to be preserved for 22 months. Broward Judge Raag Singhal ruled in May against Snipes, finding "premature destruction of the records unlawful and in violation of the Public Records Act." Following the ruling, the state announced it would send election experts to monitor her office. The other lawsuit was filed by the Republican Party of Florida in 2017 and pertained to Snipes’ procedures for opening mail-in ballots. GOP poll watchers said in 2016 her office opened mail in ballots in private. In August before the 2018 primary, Singhal issued a declaratory injunction that prevented Snipes from opening the ballots before the county’s Canvassing Board met. However, Singhal wrote that the lawsuit pertained to handling of ballots in future elections, and not whether Snipes violated state law in past elections. We sent the judges’ findings in both lawsuits to experts on elections law and government. Chris Sautter, a recount expert and adjunct lecturer at American University, said that in the Canova case, "destroying ballots clearly violates federal law." With respect to the Republican Party of Florida case, declaratory injunctions are a common remedy courts use to compel public officials to perform duties they are not performing, Sautter said. Nova Southeastern University law professor Bob Jarvis said that Singhal’s injunction was issued to prevent future violations. "That’s what injunctions typically do – they prevent further law-breaking," he said. Other times in court, Snipes prevailed. In 2016, a Broward judge found no harm done to a handful of voters who initially received absentee ballots that omitted an amendment to legalize medical marijuana. Snipes offered replacement ballots to those voters. In April, a federal judge sided with Snipes in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Rights Union, a conservative group. The judge concluded that Snipes made reasonable efforts to purge ineligible voters from the rolls. Some other Broward elections problems didn’t result in litigation, such as when the county election website posted results about 30 minutes before the polls closed in the 2016 primary. VR Systems, a contractor for the elections supervisor, took responsibility. Broward prosecutors declined to file charges, finding essentially that it was a mistake. Snipes did not respond to a request for comment. Our ruling Rubio said the Broward elections department "has a history of violating the law." Rubio’s tweet linked to a lawsuit in which a judge found Snipes prematurely unlawfully destroyed ballots. In the other case Rubio cited, the judge issued an injunction preventing Snipes from opening mail-in ballots before the canvassing board convened. It is worth mentioning, though, that Snipes has also won two cases in which she was sued: one related to a handful of ballots that omitted an amendment question and another which pertained to removing ineligible voters. We rate this statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2018-11-12T15:12:56	2018-11-08	['None']
-farg-00110	"FBI did not disclose who the clients were — the Clinton Campaign and the DNC."	misleading	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/trumps-spin-democratic-memo/	None	the-factcheck-wire	FactCheck.org	Eugene Kiely	['Presidential Election 2016', 'Russia investigation']	Trump’s Spin on Democratic Memo	February 27, 2018	2018-02-27 21:43:58 UTC	['Democratic_National_Committee', 'Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation', 'Hillary_Clinton_presidential_campaign,_2008']
-hoer-00440	Queen Elizabeth Set to Retire in Feb, 2017 and Pass Crown to Prince William	statirical reports	http://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-news-queen-elizabeth-set-to-retire-in-feb-2017-and-pass-crown-to-prince-william/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	FAKE-NEWS: Queen Elizabeth Set to Retire in Feb, 2017 and Pass Crown to Prince William	October 13, 2016	None	['None']
-goop-02427	Selena Gomez Going To Be “American Idol” Judge, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/selena-gomez-not-american-idol-judge/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Selena Gomez NOT Going To Be “American Idol” Judge, Despite Report	12:47 pm, September 23, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02568	Virginia is "the No. 1 recipient of federal dollars."	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2014/jan/31/terry-mcauliffe/mcauliffe-says-virginia-receives-most-federal-mone/	The federal government has long been a gravy train for Virginia’s economy, but Gov. Terry McAuliffe is worried Washington is cutting the tracks. During his first address to the General Assembly in January, McAuliffe cited a list of natural attributes and state policies that have helped Virginia flourish. "Much of the success I just described results from Virginia being the number one recipient of federal dollars," he said. McAuliffe said federal defense cuts and a 16-day government shutdown last year "dealt a severe blow to our economy and our confidence in the future." He said Virginia must diversify and become less dependent on U.S. largesse. We wondered whether Virginia really is No. 1 on Uncle Sam’s spending list. Brian Coy, a McAuliffe spokesman pointed us to figures from the Center for Effective Government, a liberal non-profit group that tracks U.S. spending. They show that in fiscal 2011, companies located in Virginia had federal contracts totaling $88.7 billion -- tops in the nation. California companies were second with $62.4 billion in contracts followed by Texas, with $45.2 billion. Data published by USA Spending.gov, a web site established by the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, shows Virginia has been tops in federal contract receipts during each of the last four fiscal years. A large reason is that Virginia -- home to world’s largest Naval base in Norfolk and the nation’s largest shipbuilder in Newport News -- receives more federal defense dollars than any other state, according to a 2011 analysis by Bloomberg Government. But contracts are only part of federal spending. Washington sends states grants, direct payments for programs and pays salaries to federal employees scattered across the nation. To fully assess McAuliffe’s claim that Virginia is "the No. 1 recipient of federal dollars," we needed data that computed all of the federal dollars disbursed in Virginia. The U.S. Census Bureau used to tally the total amount of federal money flowing into each state in its Consolidated Federal Funds Report. Results from the final study showed that in fiscal 2010, Virginia ranked sixth among states in receiving federal largesse. Here’s a list of the leaders: California, $333.8 billion Texas, $225.7 billion New York, $202.3 billion Florida, $186.7 billion Pennsylvania, $145.9 billion Virginia, $136.1 billion. Our ruling McAuliffe, in his maiden address to the General Assembly, said Virginia is "the No. 1 recipient of federal dollars." The governor’s office backs the statement by citing statistics showing Virginia is tops in receiving federal contracts. But McAuliffe, in his speech, never defined his terms and federal dollars come to states in many ways, including salaries, grants and payments for Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. When it’s all put together, the most current data ranks Virginia sixth in receipt of federal funds and second when the largesse is broken down to an average per citizen. We don’t dispute McAuliffe’s gist that Virginia’s economy heavily relies on federal spending, but he illustrated his point with inartfully. Virginia leads the nation in receiving a few types of payments from Washington. Overall, Virginia is near the top of the list, but it’s not No. 1. So we rate McAuliffe’s statement Mostly False.	None	Terry McAuliffe	None	None	None	2014-01-31T00:00:00	2014-01-13	['None']
-snes-04588	A California pastor praised the Orlando nightclub shooting, saying that it's a tragedy more homosexual "predators" and "pedophiles" didn't die.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-pastor-praises-orlando-massacre/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	California Pastor Praises Orlando Massacre	18 June 2016	None	['California', 'Orlando,_Florida']
-snes-01919	House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was seriously injured in a drunk driving collision.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-nancy-pelosi-critical-drunk-driving-accident/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	Is Nancy Pelosi in Critical Condition After a Head-On Drunk Driving Accident?	11 August 2017	None	['Nancy_Pelosi']
-pomt-03139	Says he "opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq" in 2003.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/13/john-kerry/secretary-state-john-kerry-says-senator-he-opposed/	Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent comment on MSNBC that in 2003 he "opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq" has summoned old battles from his 2004 presidential campaign. Even then, political opponents accused him of trying to have it both ways on the war — voting in October 2002 to give President George W. Bush authorization to use force, then criticizing the March 2003 invasion from its beginning as a "failure of diplomacy." MSNBC host Chris Hayes suggested in a Sept. 5 interview that the United States might be committing itself to escalating involvement in Syria if it decided to strike and then Bashar Assad used chemical weapons again. Kerry responded, "I disagree. And, first of all, let me make this clear. The president — and this is very important, because I think a lot of Americans, all of your listeners, a lot of people in the country are sitting there and saying oh, my gosh, this is going to be Iraq, this is going to be Afghanistan. Here we go again. "I know this. I’ve heard it. And the answer is no, profoundly no. You know, Sen. Chuck Hagel, when he was senator, Sen. Chuck Hagel, now secretary of defense, and when I was a senator, we opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq, but we know full well how that evidence was used to persuade all of us that authority ought to be given." Both Kerry and Hagel voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. So what was Kerry talking about when he said he "opposed the president’s decision"? We’ll start on Oct. 9, 2002, the day Kerry spoke on the Senate floor in support of authorizing Bush to use force in Iraq. He urged the president to work through the United Nations Security Council and said that if Bush walked away from that effort, he would "vigorously oppose the president doing so." He explained his expectation that the president would consider war "the last option to address this threat, not the first," saying: "In giving the president this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days — to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out." In March 2003, with an invasion imminent, Kerry accused the president of failing to work effectively with American allies, as he had urged in October. The Boston Globe reported March 19 that Kerry blamed "a failure of diplomacy of a massive order" by the Bush administration. "It's the way they have conducted the diplomacy that has compounded this problem, split the U.N., split the NATO, left the world wondering with questions, engaged in a more pre-emptive effort than was necessary," Kerry said. "We could have moved from a position of strength, in my judgment, and I think it represents a failure of diplomacy of a massive order, and that is what war is: War is the failure of diplomacy." The Boston Herald quoted him the same day saying, "President Bush has clumsily and arrogantly squandered the post-9-11 support and goodwill of the entire civilized world in a manner that will make the jobs ahead of us — both the military defeat (of Saddam) and the rebuilding of Iraq — decidedly more expensive in every sense of the word." Another Herald story March 19 noted the senator said "he won't back off his criticism of Bush's handling of the war, despite the fact that troops probably will be in battle this week." Strategists for Democratic presidential rival Howard Dean accused Kerry of "trying to duck responsibility for his war authorization vote," the Herald reported. Kerry defended himself a few days later, saying after a speech that his position on Iraq "has never varied," the Herald reported March 24. The Kerry-Dean sniping continued. On March 29, a Herald headline blared, "Dean blasts Dem rival Kerry for 'wobbly' war stance." "To this day I don't know what John Kerry's position is," Dean said in Iowa, the Herald reported. "If you agree with the war, then say so. If you don't agree with the war, then say so. But don't try to wobble around in between." ABC News host George Stephanopoulos highlighted the dispute with his very first question at the Democratic presidential debate on May 3, 2003: "Sen. Kerry, the first question goes to you. On March 19, President Bush ordered Gen.Tommy Franks to execute the invasion of Iraq. Was that the right decision at the right time?" Kerry said, "George, I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him." In March 2004, the Washington Post noted that "Kerry ended up voting for the 2002 resolution, but warned he would not support the war if Bush failed to win the support of the international community in the absence of an imminent threat. The argument has allowed Kerry to suggest he favored the war at the time of the vote — but also later become a critic of Bush's handling of the conflict." In August 2004, the Post published a story headlined, "In Hindsight, Kerry Says He'd Still Vote for War," which quoted him saying, "I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have." Our ruling Kerry said recently that he "opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq." In 2002, he voted to give the president the authority to attack, with a stern warning that Bush ought to exhaust diplomatic channels first. In 2003, as the president invaded, Kerry accused him of a "failure of diplomacy." As a Democratic presidential primary unfolded in which the war was unpopular, Kerry kept up his criticism of Bush’s handling of the war. But he still said at a 2003 debate that he thought it was "the right decision" to disarm Hussein and that "when the president made that decision, I supported him." In 2004, he said he would vote to authorize force all over again. It’s clear Kerry opposed the president’s handling of the war, and perhaps the president’s decision to "go into Iraq" militarily at the time he did. He suggested diplomatic opportunities were squandered. But he did vote to authorize force, and he said later he supported the president’s decision to disarm Hussein. It was a nuanced position — one too nuanced to be summarized accurately by a claim as blunt as having "opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq." These are critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate Kerry’s claim Mostly False.	None	John Kerry	None	None	None	2013-09-13T14:06:11	2013-09-05	['Iraq']
-pomt-14242	In every ethics case that has resulted in a formal sanction, "there's been an investigative subcommittee that's been established first."	half-true	/florida/statements/2016/apr/13/alan-grayson/us-rep-alan-grayson-downplays-potential-punishment/	U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson waved off a recent congressional report on his alleged ethics violations, arguing that the findings mean he’s practically in the clear. The Office of Congressional Ethics on April 5, 2016, released a report recommending that a House committee keep investigating Grayson. The Orlando Democrat, who is running for Sen. Marco Rubio’s soon-to-open seat, has been accused of improperly managing a hedge fund, not disclosing all his finances and conducting business deals with the federal government that would be conflicts of interest. So far, the House has not formed a new subcommittee to keep looking into the allegations. Grayson said in a conference call with reporters that is a sign he likely won’t have to face serious repercussions. "In every single instance where there's been any formal sanction -— an expulsion, a reprimand or a censure of any member — in every one of those cases since the Office of Congressional Ethics was established, there's been an investigative subcommittee that's been established first," he said. He added that if the House Ethics Committee doesn’t form one of these panels, it usually will dismiss the complaint. "What this does very likely represent is the end of the road regarding this particular inquiry," he said. We wondered whether Grayson was right that formal sanctions have only followed the creation of an investigative subcommittee. We found that Grayson has a point on the most severe types of punishments, but it doesn’t mean investigations (or potential penalties) have reached "the end of the road." There may yet be mileage to cover here. House rules Let’s look at how ethics investigations work. The Office of Congressional Ethics is an independent body in charge of reviewing misconduct charges by House members and their staffs. The House created the office in March 2008 after criticism that its own self-policing wasn’t working very well, and the new office began reviewing cases in February 2009. The office investigates complaints, then makes recommendations to the House Ethics Committee. The committee can act upon the office’s reports, and still has the power to start investigations on its own. Grayson cited as "formal sanctions" — expulsion, reprimand and censure — but those are punishments that Congress rarely metes out, to begin with. Expulsion is what it sounds like: A member is removed from the House by a two-thirds vote. It has only happened five times in the history of the chamber, all before the Office of Congressional Ethics was created. The last time was in 2002, when Rep. James Traficant, D-Ohio, was expelled after taking campaign funds for personal use. Pennsylvania Democrat Michael Myers was expelled in 1980 for accepting a $50,000 bribe during the FBI’s Abscam sting, and three other members were kicked out after the Civil War started, for disloyalty to the Union. Next is censure, when a majority of the House votes to admonish a member’s behavior. Usually this includes a public shaming of sorts, during which the censured member must stand in the middle of the House chamber while a resolution is read aloud. The most recent example is Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., who was censured in 2010 for 11 ethics violations. Those violations included misusing his office resources to solicit funds and not paying taxes on a vacation home. It was the 23rd time a member had been punished with a censure. Rangel’s censure did have an investigative subcommittee in the House Ethics Committee, because procedure in this case required it. The same is true for the formal reprimand, also decided by House vote following an investigation. According to a 2013 Congressional Research Service report, "reprimand" and "censure" were essentially interchangeable until "reprimand" was defined as a lesser punishment in 1976. Unlike a censure, there is no public humiliation component of a reprimand. In 2012, California Democrat Laura Richardson was reprimanded for making congressional staff work on her campaign. Her punishment included a $10,000 fine. It was the 10th formal reprimand since 1976. We’ll note the Office of Congressional Ethics doesn’t factor in here, because the House Ethics Committee started its own investigation into Richardson, without a referral from the office. Again, the committee did empanel an investigative subcommittee, because that’s the procedure. Craig Holman, a lobbyist with government watchdog Public Citizen, said Grayson "is painting a false picture" of how members of Congress are disciplined. The formal punishments outlined above require an investigative subcommittee, but House rules outline scads of other punishments that can be levied. These other actions include fines, restitution, amending errant financial reports, removal from committees, loss of privileges or seniority or "any other sanction determined by the Committee to be appropriate." Holman said there’s been more than 20 of these cases since the OCE started. The House Ethics Committee is not necessarily bound to begin an investigative subcommittee in these cases. And even then, as sometimes happens in these cases, members can leave office rather than face an investigation (the committee only holds sway over House members). In 2011, Ohio Republican Jean Schmidt was ordered to repay $500,000 for free legal help without the House Ethics Committee starting an investigative subcommittee. She was not found guilty of knowingly violating House ethics rules. She repaid less than $50,000 before losing her re-election primary. There also isn’t always a set time limit for action, as Grayson implied. Instead of dismissing the complaint, the House Ethics Committee cited rule 18(a) in its conclusion to the OCE report on his case. That means the committee will keep the case open and may start an investigative subcommittee later. Sometimes that can mean much later. For example, the committee invoked rule 18(a) in August 2012 for Rep. Rob Andrews, D-N.J. An investigative subcommittee didn’t come until six months later, in March 2013. Andrews resigned the following year, with the investigation still open. We also found one other exceptional case that’s important to note. South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson was formally reprimanded in 2009 for interrupting President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address by shouting, "You lie!" That was through a resolution, not an ethics investigation. Wilson refused to formally apologize on the House floor after already apologizing to Obama personally. The Democrat-led House voted 240-179 for the reprimand over his "breach of decorum." The vote was largely seen as a political maneuver, not an outright ethics violation. Our ruling Grayson said that in every ethics case that has resulted in a formal sanction, "there's been an investigative subcommittee that's been established first." The formal sanctions he cited were expulsion, censure and reprimand, all of which are exceedingly rare punishments. There are only three examples to pick from since the Office of Congressional Ethics materialized in 2009. In one case — the case of Wilson yelling "you lie!" — a formal reprimand came via a largely party-line resolution, not an ethics investigation, so no subcommittee was established. More importantly, Grayson omits that there are many other ways to discipline a member of Congress beyond formal sanctions. He also downplays that the House Ethics Committee kept his case open and could convene an investigative committee later. We rate his statement Half True.	None	Alan Grayson	None	None	None	2016-04-13T12:16:35	2016-04-05	['None']
-pomt-12022	"U.S. comedian Kevin Hart in critical condition after gory car crash."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/sep/19/nydailynews-tvcom/kevin-harts-confession-real-car-crash-report-fake-/	A fake news post that said comedian and actor Kevin Hart was injured in an auto accident augmented its made-up post with true details about his personal life. "Breaking: U.S. comedian Kevin Hart in critical condition after gory car crash," read the headline on an undated post on NYDailyNews-TV.com. Facebook users tagged the story as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to fight fake news. The article said Hart, 38, lost control of his car in Summerlin, Nev., on Monday night, corresponding to the first time we saw the post on Sept. 18, 2017. Summerlin is a planned community west of Las Vegas. The post said Hart had been exceeding the 25 mph speed limit and went off the road, hitting a guardrail. Hart was allegedly taken to MountainView Hospital, a real hospital in Summerlin, and remained in critical condition. This accident never happened, mind you, because the post is fake. The photo the website used was of a 2010 accident in Montana, in which a college student had fallen asleep and hit a guardrail that speared his car but missed the driver by inches. There have been no reports that Hart was in any car accident, let alone was injured. He has been posting on social media accounts since then, which the fake post actually used in its writeup of the bogus crash. The second half of the NYDailyNews-TV.com post went on about how Hart had confessed online the day prior about how he had made a "bad error in judgment" that had affected his family and made him a target of extortion. Hart had posted an Instagram video on Sept. 16 with the caption, "Sending so many apologies to my wife & kids. I gotta do better and I will. I'm not perfect and have never claimed to be ...I love you all." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Gossipy outlets reported that the extortion involved a "sexually suggestive" video of Hart and another woman. NYDailyNews-TV.com, meanwhile, is not a website for a TV news station or any other legitimate media outlet. It’s another fake news site, without any contact information, posing as a real news source, like others we’ve encountered. While it tries to capitalize on the name recognition of the tabloid New York Daily News, that real newspaper’s website is actually NYDailyNews.com. The story evoked a real celebrity scandal to bolster a completely fake car accident to draw traffic to a website masquerading as a well-known newspaper. We rate this claim Pants On Fire! See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	NYDailyNews-TV.com	None	None	None	2017-09-19T15:00:08	2017-09-18	['United_States']
-hoer-00571	Texas Town Adds Sugar to Water Supply	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/sugar-water-supply.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Hoax - Texas Town Adds Sugar to Water Supply	November 14, 2012	None	['None']
-pose-01298	“The insurance companies are getting rich off health care and health insurance and everything having to do with health. We’re going to end that. We’re going to take out the artificial boundaries, the artificial lines. We’re going to get a plan where people compete, free enterprise.”	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1390/get-congress-allow-health-insurance-across-state-l/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Get Congress to allow health insurance across state lines	2017-01-17T09:08:54	None	['None']
-abbc-00058	The claim: Peter Dutton says it's a fact that 170 people per week today are being diagnosed with dementia, but in a number of years it'll be 7,500 a week.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-13/peter-dutton-dementia-facts-flawed/5734256	The claim: Peter Dutton says it's a fact that 170 people per week today are being diagnosed with dementia, but in a number of years it'll be 7,500 a week.	['federal-government', 'liberals', 'diseases-and-disorders', 'alzheimers-and-dementia', 'health', 'australia']	None	None	['federal-government', 'liberals', 'diseases-and-disorders', 'alzheimers-and-dementia', 'health', 'australia']	Fact check: Health Minister Peter Dutton's dementia facts flawed	Mon 15 Sep 2014, 3:38am	None	['None']
-snes-04110	The CDC has proposed a new rule enabling the agency to "apprehend and detain anyone, anywhere, at any time, without Due Process or any right of appeal" and "administer forced vaccinations."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cdc-forced-vaccinations/	None	Conspiracy Theories	None	Kim LaCapria	None	CDC Announces Plan to Detain Americans for Forced Vaccinations?	2 September 2016	None	['None']
-snes-01717	Did Daisy the Dog Rescue Hundreds of 9/11 Survivors?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/daisy-dog-rescued-911-survivors/	None	September 11th	None	Snopes Staff	None	Did Daisy the Dog Rescue Hundreds of 9/11 Survivors?	6 November 2001	None	['None']
-goop-00262	Angelina Jolie Using “Higher Power” To “Heal Rift” With Brad Pitt?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-heal-rift-brad-pitt-false/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Angelina Jolie Using “Higher Power” To “Heal Rift” With Brad Pitt?	12:50 am, September 16, 2018	None	['Angelina_Jolie', 'Brad_Pitt']
-farg-00006	“I was accused by four or five women who got paid a lot of money to make up stories about me.”	no evidence	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/trumps-distorted-attacks-on-his-accusers/	None	the-factcheck-wire	FactCheck.org	D'Angelo Gore	['sexual assault']	Trump’s Distorted Attacks on His Accusers	September 28, 2018	2018-09-28 22:23:30 UTC	['None']
-pomt-09312	Florida teachers are "already paid $5,000 below the national average."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2010/apr/19/dan-gelber/gelber-says-florida-teacher-salaries-5000-lower-na/	In the heated debate over the teacher pay bill that Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed, opponents of the bill often said that Florida teachers were underpaid. They warned that the bill -- which would have linked teacher pay increases to student performance -- would only make matters worse. Dan Gelber, a Democratic candidate for Florida attorney general and an opponent of the bill, wrote in a letter to Crist posted on his campaign blog that, "the problem with the bill is it assumes the best way to weed out bad teachers is to assume all teachers are bad. While other states are addressing teaching tenure by simply modifying the number of years it takes to obtain tenure, Florida would take the drastic step of eliminating tenure and forcing teachers to work on year-to-year contracts. For a profession that, in our state, is already paid $5,000 below the national average, this will be demoralizing in the extreme." We have no illusions that teachers enter the profession in hopes of becoming millionaires, but is the problem really as acute as Gelber makes it out to be? We contacted Gelber's campaign to ask about the source of his claim. A spokesman sent us a copy of the 2008 teacher compensation survey from the National Education Association, a teachers union. The report shows that in the 2007-2008 school year, the average teacher salary in Florida was slightly more than $5,000 below the national average. But we discovered the 2008-2009 numbers that Gelber's campaign provided are estimates that are now outdated. The most recent report shows that the actual national average in the 2008-2009 school year was $54,319, compared with $46,921 in Florida. That's a difference of more than $7,000. So Gelber could have used newer numbers that would better bolster his point that Florida teachers are underpaid. Besides the NEA, we found two other widely recognized data sets on teacher salaries. These come from the American Federation of Teachers, another teachers union, and the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency. AFT's data is for the 2006-2007 school year. The average teacher salary was $51,009 in the U.S., and $47,219 in Florida, a difference of about $3,800. The federal agency's data only looked at seven states, so it doesn't provide a full national picture for comparison. We should note some caveats about making state comparisons of teacher salaries. The Florida Department of Education notes that surveys may not account for cost-of-living differences and factors such as states with higher percentages of teachers with masters' degreees. We also spoke with Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, an independent education policy think tank. Silva told us that "more important than comparing salaries to national average is considering total compensation (such as benefits and pensions) and cost of living." Unfortunately this data is hard to come by, which makes meaningful comparisons difficult. Still, Gelber said "paid," which to most people means just salary and there's enough for us to assess his claim that Florida teachers are paid $5,000 below the national average. The most recent data from the National Education Association, the source he cited, show that his estimate was actually on the low side and that the disparity is greater that he claimed. But a survey from the American Federation of Teachers suggests the difference isn't as great as he claimed. Still, both surveys support his underlying point that Florida teachers lag behind the national average. So we find his claim Mostly True.	None	Dan Gelber	None	None	None	2010-04-19T12:55:25	2010-04-08	['None']
-vees-00132	Issues in the draft Constitution of Duterte’s Con-Com	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/issues-draft-constitution-dutertes-con-com	None	None	None	None	federalism,Federal Philippines,federal charter	Issues in the draft Constitution of Duterte’s Con-Com	July 18, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-03424	U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey wants public schools to teach women to "stay in their place."	pants on fire!	/georgia/statements/2013/jun/26/lauren-benedict/fundraising-email-puts-words-gingreys-mouth/	Before the U.S. Supreme Court decides the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act, U.S. House members made their case for upholding the law during a round of floor speeches last week. During his roughly five-minute speech, Marietta Republican Phil Gingrey affirmed his support for traditional marriage, suggested some value-teaching methods for young people, and outraged some of his critics all at the same time. Georgia’s WIN List, a political action committee that helps recruit and train Democratic women for political office, sent out an email the day after Gingrey’s comments. The email message was sent as part of a fundraising plea and signed by the PAC’s chairwoman, Lauren Benedict. "Rep. Phil Gingrey is promoting the teaching of gender stereotypes in elementary schools. He wants public schools to teach women to ‘stay in their place,’ " the email said. "Your gift of $50, $100, or $250 will help us show these men that a woman’s ‘place’ is in the House and in the Senate!" the message ends. "Stay in their place" and "place" were in single quotes in the email. Gingrey, one of four major Republican candidates running in Georgia for the Senate, has already made a name for himself in the questionable statements category. Earlier this year, he said Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri was "partly right" that a woman’s body has a way of shutting down if she’s raped to prevent pregnancy. We wondered whether Gingrey had again made controversial statements about women. Did he really say schools should teach them to "stay in their place?" We decided to take a closer look. A day after Benedict’s PAC sent out its anti-Gingrey email, Better Georgia -- a left-leaning political group -- sent out its own email/fundraising message opposing conservative Georgia congressmen. That group said that the men, including Gingrey, want to be sure that women "know their place." But what exactly did Gingrey say? A review of the tape shows that Gingrey spends part of his time talking about Father’s Day and his own family. He admits that the old family model that was illustrated in television classics like "Father Knows Best" are outdated, but he holds firm to his belief that families need a mother and a father to work well. "You know, maybe part of the problem is we need to go back into the schools ... and have a class for the young girls and have a class for the young boys and say ... what’s important," Gingrey said. "This is what a father does that is maybe a little different, maybe a little bit better than the talents that a mom has in a certain area. And the same thing for the young girls, that ... this is what a mom does, and this is what is important from the standpoint of that union which we call marriage." Record of his comments quickly made headlines and were picked up by several news outlets, including Fox News and the Huffington Post. PolitiFact Georgia reviewed a video of Gingrey’s remarks several times. And we found that he never used the phrase about women that they should "stay in their place" or "know their place." We asked Benedict about the PAC’s claim. In an email to us, Benedict -- who is also a member of the Macon City Council -- said the use of single quotes around the phrase was for emphasis and not intended to be a direct quote of Gingrey’s comments. She says Gingrey’s recommendation for the gender classes presents a 1950s view of marriage. "What else, other than the desire for women to stay in their place, can be inferred from these statements and Gingrey’s desire to have separate classes to teach traditional gender roles," Benedict wrote. Gingrey’s spokeswoman, Jen Talaber, provided us with a statement similar to what was provided to another Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter last week. She did not address specific questions about the criticism and it being used in fundraiser statements. "Phil is a strong supporter of traditional marriage and believes strong male and female role models are essential in a child’s development. Phil was speaking theoretically to emphasize his point that kids learn different things from their mothers and fathers," the statement said. Political parties send out this type of "red meat" rhetoric to solicit funds and energize their party base, their most loyal voters, said Kerwin Swint, a political science professor at Kennesaw State University. "Both parties will try and make the other look as extreme as possible," he said. "In this case, they are making the case for extremism against women." So, does the Democratic PAC’s claim measure up? In an email, a leader at Georgia’s WIN List said that Gingrey wanted public schools to teach women to "stay in their place." The group said that the phrase "to stay in their place" was for emphasis and not a direct quote from Gingrey. Video of the congressman’s comments show that he did not use this phrase. Gingrey did make statements about gender roles that some critics found offensive. But Benedict quotes Gingrey as mouthing specific words that he did not utter. We rate her statement Pants On Fire.	None	Lauren Benedict	None	None	None	2013-06-26T10:39:35	2013-06-19	['United_States']
-hoer-00437	Usain Bolt in Critical Condition After Car Accident	statirical reports	http://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-news-usain-bolt-in-critical-condition-after-car-accident/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Fake News Usain Bolt in Critical Condition After Car Accident	October 17, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01240	Communist Group Backs Black Lives Matter Protests	truth! & misleading!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/communist-group-backs-black-lives-matter-protests/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Communist Group Backs Black Lives Matter Protests – Truth! & Misleading!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-10774	"Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock Concert Museum."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/19/john-mccain/yes-clinton-played-lead-for-woodstock-museum/	The full quote from a debate in Orlando, Fla. on Oct. 21, 2007. : "In case you missed it, a few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock Concert Museum. Now, my friends, I wasn't there. I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event...I was tied up at the time." McCain's claim is accurate. The Senate Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Committee Appropriations Report shows that Clinton and fellow New York Sen. Charles Schumer did lobby for a $1 million earmark for the Bethel Performing Arts Center in Liberty N.Y. Clinton and Schumer intended to use the earmark for a museum located at the Performing Arts Center that would commemorate the 1969 Woodstock music festival in their state. The Woodstock museum -- officially called the Museum at Bethel Woods -- is due to open in the spring of 2008, but without the federal money. According to a statement on Clinton's website, the $1 million in federal funds was to be used for purchasing and borrowing exhibits at the non-profit museum as well as the audio-visual presentations, computer interactive displays and films. The senator's website says the exhibits will focus on the "post-WWII period and cultural, political, social, and significant historic events during this period including, in particular, the period of the 1960's and its continuing legacy." When Clinton announced the $1 million earmark for the museum on June 22, 2007, she said: "These funds will help the for the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts continue to promote education, the arts, culture and tourism in the region." The New York senators were successful at including the money when the bill passed the Appropriations Committee. But the full Senate then approved an amendment introduced by Tom Coburn, R-Okla., that stripped the money for the Bethel museum and instead redirected it to the Health Resources and Services Administration for the maternal and child health services program. During Senate debate, Clinton did not defend the Woodstock project, but Schumer strongly stood up for the Bethel project as an asset for an economically struggling county. UPDATE: McCain's campaign used his remark for a TV ad that began airing in New Hampshire a few days later. The ad begins with psychedelic music (the Doors?) and a swirl of colors to invoke memories of Woodstock. It then shows McCain's statement from the debate interspersed with a shot of him in a North Vietnamese prison when he says he was "tied up at the time."	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2007-10-19T00:00:00	2007-10-21	['Bill_Clinton']
-pomt-13849	"There are approximately 18,000 (police) departments in the United States."	mostly true	/punditfact/statements/2016/jul/10/charles-ramsey/how-many-police-departments-are-us/	Is there a link between police killing people during routine patrols and the sheer number of police departments in the country? Former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey argued that there is. A traffic stop for a broken taillight in Falcon Heights, Minn., left Philando Castile dead. Falcon Heights only has about 5,500 residents and contracts its police service from the not much larger city of St. Anthony, population about 8,500. Ramsey, co-chair of a recent presidential policing task force, teased out the connections between law enforcement and race with Meet the Press host Chuck Todd on July 10, 2016. Todd said major urban police departments have been taking steps to ease racial tensions and asked Ramsey if the smaller departments had the same kind of resources. Ramsey painted a picture that went well beyond core funding. "There are approximately 18,000 departments in the United States," Ramsey said. "I would try to cut the number in half in the next 10 years or so, because you're always going to have these kinds of issues as long as you have this many departments with different policies, procedures, training and the like." The numbers back Ramsey up on the number of departments. The final report from the task force he led said there are 17,985 U.S. police agencies. But that includes everything from college campus patrols, to sheriffs, to local police, to federal agents. For strictly local law enforcement, police and sheriff departments with armed officers, the total is closer to 15,400, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Those are the kinds of departments involved in some of the more prominent deadly encounters with police in the past few years. Still, 15,400 is a big number, and half of those departments have fewer than 10 officers. These smaller units face some real challenges. David Weisburd, executive director of the Center for Evidence-based Crime Policy at George Mason University, said while some do fine work, the quality ranges widely. "There is little consistency in training or procedures across them," Weisburd said. "There are many departments that simply poorly train and lead their officers." Turnover is a common complaint. The police chief in Canon City, Colo., wrote in a 2013 article that the combination of rising suburban crime and limited budgets meant "agency personnel are stretched in many cases beyond the breaking point, making retention of quality personnel increasingly challenging." The biggest urban agencies demand more education for their officers. About 30 percent of the very largest departments require at least a two-year college degree. In the smallest communities, only 10 percent do. The shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., produced a scathing report on the dangers that come when each small town boasts its own police department. Community leaders invited the Police Executive Research Forum, a leading national policy group, to take a look at the issues with the policing system across the wider St. Louis area. The report said fragmentation led to unprofessionalism and widespread mistrust of the police. About a third of the departments served territories of less than one square mile. Inefficiency was rife, and "just one-quarter of the police departments in St. Louis City and County are accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies." The task force Ramsey co-chaired highlighted the testimony of criminologist Lawrence Sherman, who said "so many problems of organizational quality control are made worse by the tiny size of most local police agencies." Our ruling Ramsey said that the country has about 18,000 departments that conduct some sort of policing. In the broadest sense, that is accurate. If you include every college campus security department, tribal land unit, sheriff office, local police department, state police, and every federal agency, you get to 17,985. In terms of the most common local law enforcement agencies, that is sheriff and local police departments, the number is about 15,400. These are the ones where the issue of deadly encounters between police and citizens is front and center. Ramsey was making the case that when it comes to policing, small often is not beautiful, and plenty of evidence backs that up. But for the problem facing the country, the smaller number is most applicable. We rate his statement Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/04e30a17-b5ca-460d-a7d5-2d973bc58c35	None	Charles Ramsey	None	None	None	2016-07-10T18:26:14	2016-07-10	['United_States']
-pomt-06945	"I've created over 40,000 jobs."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2011/jul/19/craig-miller/former-ruths-chris-ceo-craig-miller-says-he-create/	Usually when politicians claim that they created jobs, they are talking about jobs created by the private sector while they held public office. And we're skeptical. But when that politician is a former Ruth's Chris Steak House chief executive running on his business credentials, well, we're curious. If a CEO can't take credit for job creation, who can? Craig Miller, a Republican who jumped into politics with a 2010 primary run for an Orlando-area congressional seat (he finished third), announced in July 2011 that he would run for the U.S. Senate. That made him a relative newcomer facing Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos, former U.S. Sen. George LeMieux, former state House Majority Leader Adam Hasner and former U.S. Army Col. Mike McCalister. (Haridopolos thinned the field by dropping out less than a week later.) Miller, 61, explained his decision to "take on the career politicians" in a four-paragraph essay on his website. Here's the third paragraph: "Those that have had a chance to lead have failed us. The politicians we have trusted to represent us are the ones who have gotten us into the mess we now face. The time for new leadership is now. I'm a businessman. I've been fortunate enough to live the American Dream, starting in the dish room and working my way up to the board room. Along the way, I've created over 40,000 jobs and I've spent my career in the restaurant industry balancing budgets and meeting payroll. I know the kind of pro-growth and pro-job environment we need to get our economy moving again. My life experiences have prepared me to go to Washington and take on the career politicians and entrenched interests that only know how to spend your money." We saw the same number in a campaign news release a day later and wondered: Did Craig Miller, restaurant executive, create 40,000 jobs? Here's how Miller told us he did the math. He explained that he started his executive career with the company that owned Red Lobster in 1973, back when the restaurant chain was only in the Southeast. (The company was called General Mills Restaurants, before General Mills spun it off as the behemoth Darden Restaurants in 1995. Heard of Olive Garden? LongHorn Steakhouse? Yeah, them.) Red Lobster's extraordinary growth — hundreds of new restaurants while Miller was there — meant lots of new jobs. In 1984 Miller joined Uno Restaurant Corp., helping transform pizza joint Pizzeria Uno into Uno Chicago Grill, where he landed his first CEO gig in 1996. By the time he left in 2001, Uno Chicago Grill had grown by more than 180 restaurants, creating yet more jobs. After a quick stint at already troubled Furr's Restaurant Group, he took on a higher-profile role at what became Ruth's Hospitality Group, where he was chief executive from 2004 to 2008. Before he left, he said, the high-end Ruth's Chris had added about 30 steak houses. So, to him, the math is simple: More than 700 new restaurants opened during his career, multiplied by an average number of about 60 new employees per restaurant, for more than 40,000 jobs. (For his specific estimates, see box.) Miller said his job claim did not include a National Restaurant Association stat-booster that says every restaurant job supports almost a full position elsewhere in the economy, which he figured would have put his job creation total "somewhere north of 80,000 or 90,000." "I tried to be conservative, because I come from a financial analysis background," he said. "I wanted to make sure we don't overstate what I've done." With Miller's calculus in hand, we started our own search, chatting with folks and digging through old news clips and earnings releases to piece together the numbers — and Miller's role in them. We'll accept the average-employees-per-restaurant figure of 62.5 that Miller used in making his claim — after checking with experts and industry data. And his estimates for the numbers of restaurants that popped up during his tenure at a handful of companies, while not exact, were generally close when we spot-checked them against business stories and earnings reports from the time. As for his role: Certainly, the guy has a reputation as a growth machine. Chris Muller, the dean of hospitality administration at Boston University, was an expert in chain restaurants at University of Central Florida when he met Miller. He named Miller UCF's restaurateur of the year in 2000 and featured him at a European food service conference. He also invested in Ruth's Chris when Miller took it public in 2005. He described Miller's approach as "very aggressive" as the head of Uno, which grew from just 10 to 15 restaurants when he joined as a vice president to nearly 200 when he left as CEO, and said he was similarly expansion-focused at Ruth's Chris, where he took the company public, creating additional pressure for growth. "So he does have a history of creating positions for people," Muller said. Of course, that growth also meant Ruth's Chris was stretched thin as the economy started to flail, and its stock price dove. The board asked Miller to leave in 2008. Miller's expansionist style had its "positives and negatives," Muller said, but you couldn't deny he was a "growth-oriented CEO." But what about his role before he was a head honcho? Miller's campaign manager pointed us to Bill Bridges, who worked with Miller for most of the 1970s, starting at General Mills as director of personnel the year before Miller came on board. He recalls a bright, hard-working guy who analyzed sites for expansion and made presentations to the executive committee about where to build. "From that perspective, he was integral to the growth of the company," he said. Miller's own two-page biography says he held positions at General Mills in finance, planning and analysis, development, real estate, corporate growth and purchasing. But he was there for over a decade. We had to know: Did he jump in with both feet, spawning Red Lobsters from his first months at General Mills in his early 20s? And that's when part of the story got off track. In 1996, when Miller was named CEO of Uno Restaurant Corp., the Boston Business Journal wrote a profile. It told of Miller's journey from high-school dishwasher to Vietnam Air Force veteran to accounting major at Florida State University. Then it described his start with General Mills in Tallahassee, after he wrote the company a letter asking about positions at Red Lobster. He didn't yet have his business degree, but "in 1973 became a part-time auditor of the local restaurant." Later, the article says, he was asked to audit the books of another Red Lobster in Central Florida. He finished his degree at University of Central Florida in 1974, it says, and started working in payroll. Eventually he became vice president of finance. Which means Miller claims to have created jobs at restaurants that sprang up as he was a 20-something part-time auditor and then a payroll employee. It's not clear how long it took for him to reach management. The claim gets even murkier when you look closely at his own bio. General Mills Restaurants' success was led by the blockbuster growth of Red Lobster, which by 1983 — just 15 years after the first restaurant opened — had 350 locations in 36 states and had started to reach into Japan, according to New York Times article at the time. But while Craig Miller's General Mills career started with paper-pushing, the last part focused on a chain with a far less impressive legacy than Red Lobster. As a finance guy, Miller had helped General Mills put together the acquisition of small Mexican food chain Casa Gallardo, according to the Boston Business Journal. His biography notes that after that deal in 1979, his "primary duties" were as vice president of the Mexican chain. Starting with just a handful of restaurants — one, according to his bio, or five, according to the Business Journal — Miller and Ramon Gallardo took the Casa Gallardo chain to 34. The goal, said an article at the time, had been 100. Not long after Miller had moved on to Pizzeria Uno, General Mills dumped the chain, which by then numbered just 25. It had been profitable for General Mills, just not profitable enough. "We didn't get it all put together with the speed that enabled us to capitalize," company spokesman Dean Belbas told Minneapolis-St. Paul City Business shortly after the sale. Why does any of this matter? Well, in Miller's back-of-the-napkin math, new Red Lobsters made up nearly half the jobs he claimed credit for. But those include new Red Lobsters while he was a part-time auditor. New Red Lobsters while he worked in payroll. New Red Lobsters while he worked in finance. New Red Lobsters as he built Casa Gallardo. His campaign's response? "He was the top financial and economic adviser to the CEO and was directly involved in all aspects of the company's business, even while serving as vice president of Casa Gallardo," campaign manager Paul Ciaramitaro said. "Craig had a vital hand in the company expansion and job creation at General Mills during the 1970s and into the 1980s." But was Miller ultimately responsible? More so than Red Lobster's founder, Bill Darden, or the man who followed in his footsteps, former Darden Restaurants chairman and CEO Joe Lee? Joe Lee did tell the Boston Business Journal in 1996 he considered Miller "one of the industry's top leaders." (We attempted to reach him at home, unsuccessfully.) But we would dare to speculate he wouldn't credit Miller with every job at every restaurant General Mills added from 1973 to 1984. Where does this leave us? Several folks told us that Miller's a respected restaurateur. Like Herman Cain, a former president and CEO of the National Restaurant Association, he served in leadership there as chairman of the board. Companies grew dramatically under his corporate leadership. But to reach 40,000 jobs created, Miller takes credit for thousands of jobs he wasn't in a position to create. Growth at Red Lobster, early in his career, accounts for 46 percent of his estimate — and it's a stretch to credit him for even half of that. He also counts job gains only and not losses — something any politician relying on net job creation numbers can't do. And we can't know how many jobs he actually added to communities — for every Casa Gallardo, a local mom-and-pop may have closed or had layoffs — though in strong economies, every job may have indeed added to the overall total. Make no mistake, our reporting shows Miller was a gung ho restaurant CEO who stressed expansion and by extension, job creation. A lower jobs number may have rated higher on the Truth-O-Meter. But 40,000 jobs? He just hasn't proved it. We rate this claim Barely True. Jobs math Here's how Craig Miller breaks down his career job creation, with Red Lobster representing nearly half of the total: Ruth's Hospitality Group (2004-08) Miller's role: Joined as president and CEO; from Sept. 2006, also chairman of the board Restaurants added by company during tenure: 37 Estimated jobs created: 2,313 Uno Restaurant Corp. (1984-2001) Miller's role: Joined as vice president for administration responsible for development and franchising, became executive vice president/chief operating officer, then in 1996 president and chief executive officer Restaurants added by company during tenure: About 185 Estimated jobs created: 11,563 General Mills Restaurants (1973-84) Miller's role: Joined as part-time auditor before earning college degree; moved to payroll; held positions in finance, planning and analysis, development, real estate, corporate growth and purchasing; after acquisition of Casa Gallardo in 1979, primary duties were as vice president of Casa Gallardo Restaurants added by company during tenure: Casa Gallardo, about 30; Red Lobster, about 325; other brands, about 125 Estimated jobs created: 30,000 Total: 43,876 Sources: Craig Miller campaign, Boston Business Journal Notes: Restaurants added don't include acquisitions. General Mills Restaurants became Darden Restaurants in 1995. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Craig Miller	None	None	None	2011-07-19T14:56:14	2011-07-12	['None']
-pomt-01660	"Before I was state treasurer, my Rhode Island business helped create over 1,000 jobs."	true	/rhode-island/statements/2014/aug/21/gina-raimondo/gina-raimondo-says-her-former-company-helped-creat/	In her "Back To Work" campaign ad, General Treasurer Gina Raimondo, one of four Democrats running for governor, stated that her former venture capital firm, Point Judith Capital, helped create more than 1,000 jobs when she was partner. She made the same claim while campaigning for treasurer in the 2010 election. (Raimondo left the firm the day she took office; her investments there are held in a blind trust. The company has been relocated to Boston.) The ad shows Raimondo at Nabsys, a biomedical company in Providence. "Before I was State Treasurer, my Rhode Island business helped create over 1,000 jobs, including here at Nabsys, a biomedical company," Raimondo said. "As governor, I’ll use this as a model for how we create manufacturing jobs. I’ll bring colleges and industry together to develop new products in marine science, green technology, and medical devices, and to train our workers to fill those jobs … We need to get Rhode Islanders back to work." This week, Raimondo reiterated that claim in a new TV ad about how she helped bring back Narragansett Beer, originally brewed in Rhode Island until the brewery closed for good in 1983. ("I helped create over a thousand jobs, from high tech to making beer …") Before we get started, let’s be clear about one thing. Venture capital firms such as Point Judith are not in the business of creating jobs. Their mission is to make money for their investors -- and themselves. They do so by raising money from entities such as private investors and public pension funds, and then investing it in startup companies, hoping for a big return if those companies take off. If the companies succeed and grow, they add jobs. But that’s not the goal of the venture capitalists. To support her claim, Raimondo sent us a list of 21 companies that Point Judith Capital invested in and how many jobs those investments -- and the company’s efforts -- helped create during the time she was a partner. They add up to 1,063. The list was produced by Point Judith Capital in late 2010, in preparation for her run for treasurer. We also interviewed Raimondo. She described Point Judith Capital’s role as an early-stage investor. "Typically, you sit on the board of the company, provide a lot of hand-holding and strategic advice, you help recruit people, and get the bank loan. It’s hands-on. That’s why we say "helped create’" those jobs. "We had to have invested money in the company, which means we had an ownership stake in the company … In every case we either had a board seat and additionally were just very involved in building the business, writing the business plan, helping to get customers. Raimondo said, "In these cases, we invested millions of dollars." Initially she said that was "more than two million in each of those companies." On Wednesday, Raimondo campaign manager Eric Hyers said Raimondo had misspoke. The investments were all at least six figures; they ranged from roughly $400,000 to $2 million or more. Raimondo noted that many of the companies have expanded and added jobs since then. Next, we attempted to call all 21 companies. Many were from out of state. Some had been bought out, and we were unable to reach the principals who worked there when Point Judith Capital was involved. At least one appears to have since closed. Of the representatives of seven companies we reached, all essentially confirmed Raimondo’s claims, representing roughly 480 jobs. In one case, the job number appeared to fall slightly short; in another, a CEO gave Raimondo credit for more than the number of jobs she cited. We spoke with Mark Hellendrung, president of Narragansett Brewing Co. The company is based in Providence. Hellendrung said the beer is now brewed in Rochester, N.Y., Pawcatuck, Conn., Westport, Mass. Test batches have been brewed locally in Rhode Island. Raimondo claimed Point Judith helped create 10 jobs there, and invested more than $1 million. Hellendrung confirmed that Point Judith Capital helped launch the company (which put the famous Narragansett lager beer back on the shelves) with "slightly less than" $2 million venture capital nine years ago, and active involvement. "We’ve got over 10 full-time people, and routinely we’ve got over 20 part-time people that work promotions and events … It’s been a labor of love and a ton of fun and Gina was very helpful in that process," Hellendrung said. We spoke with Michael O’Neil Jr., founder and CEO of GetWellNetwork, a health care technology company headquartered in Maryland. Raimondo claimed Point Judith Capital helped create 121 jobs there. "She’s totally correct," O’Neil said. "Gina and I met just as the company was getting started. Her leadership helped us get off the ground and helped get hundreds of jobs." Those included software engineers and project managers; others were on the services side, O’Neil said. Donna Dooley, chief financial officer at MedOptions, said that the 185 jobs that Raimondo credits Point Judith Capital with helping to create "sounds accurate." Dooley joined MedOptions in 2011, the year after Raimondo left Point Judith Capital, "and by then it was about 250" employees, she said. MedOptions provides behavioral health services in southern New England and the Mid-Atlantic. "I know that Point Judith Capital and another investment company put money in … I do think it’s fair to say that there was a fair amount of job creation" at that time, Dooley said. Steven J. Tallarida, cofounder of the former Spirus Medical, said Raimondo "probably sold herself short" by listing nine as the number of jobs Point Judith Capital helped create at that medical device company. "It was probably around 20," Tallarida said in a phone interview. Those included research and development, manufacturing and sales jobs. Point Judith Capital invested "a couple of million." Raimondo sat on the board, "and she would give governance on how to do things," Tallarida said. (The Massachusetts-based company was sold in 2011 to the Tokyo-based Olympus Corp.) Genevieve Thiers, who cofounded Sittercity, wrote in an email that Point Judith Capital "put in $2.5 million and led our Series A round. Due to them and the other $2.5 million … we were able to grow from 20 employees to about 80." (Raimondo credited her former company with helping to create 80 jobs at Sittercity, a nationwide babysitter-matching website). Thiers added, "That money did not start the company but it was needed for a pivotal stage in growth." Thiers has since left the company but remains on the board. Dr. Barrett Bready, Nabsys cofounder and CEO, said in an email that Point Judith Capital "was the first venture capital firm to invest in the company, and the firm has continued to invest in subsequent financing rounds." Raimondo formerly held a board seat. Nabsys currently has 40 employees: the number Raimondo credits her former company with helping to create. Bob Lentz, founder of the former PermissionTV, in Waltham, Mass., wrote in an email that Point Judith Capital was actively involved." Raimondo said her firm helped create 40 jobs there. Lentz wrote, "It’s been a few years but the numbers sound right." (PermissionTV has been relaunched as VisibleGains). Our ruling: Gina Raimondo said her former firm, Point Judith Capital, helped create more than 1,000 jobs when she was a partner there. She produced a list of 21 companies and a precise number of jobs. We reached representatives of seven companies -- most of them cofounders and/or CEOs. They confirmed that Point Judith capital invested several million dollars - give or take - in each case; held board positions and as such, helped create jobs. The jobs numbers added to roughly 480 at those companies. While we were unable to reach all the companies Raimondo listed, the responses from the companies we did reach supported her qualified claim that Point Judith "helped create" 1,000 jobs. We rate Raimondo’s claim True. (If you have a claim you'd like us to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Gina Raimondo	None	None	None	2014-08-21T00:01:00	2014-08-07	['Rhode_Island']
-pomt-00249	"Some of the Democrats have been talking about ending (coverage for) pre-existing conditions."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/05/donald-trump/donald-trumps-pants-fire-claim-about-democrats-pre/	Democrats across the country have been saying on the campaign trail that the Republicans’ longstanding push to overturn the Affordable Care Act threatens insurance protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. The law was passed in 2010 by a Democratic-controlled Congress and signed by President Barack Obama; no Republican voted for it. Republicans used popular dissatisfaction with the law to make significant congressional gains in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, but the pattern has shifted in 2018, after unsuccessful Republican efforts to repeal the law. The Wesleyan Media Project recently found that health care was the most common subject of Democratic congressional campaign ads, the New York Times reported. But in a rally in Rochester, Minn., on Oct. 4, President Donald Trump sought to flip this narrative on its head. He argued that it’s actually the Republicans who are the champions of pre-existing condition protections, and Democrats who are trying to kill them. "We will always protect Americans with pre-existing conditions," Trump said around the 34:00 mark. "We’re going to take care of them. Some of the Democrats have been talking about ending pre-existing conditions. And some people have -- you know what I say? We'll get a little more money from China. It'll be just fine. It'll be just fine. We'll be just fine." We have previously written that a pending lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act by Republican attorneys general would, if successful, end protections for pre-existing conditions. (Such protections could be reinstated by new legislation if the courts do strike down the law, but health policy experts say the mechanics of achieving this result in a way different from the Affordable Care Act would be tricky; the decades-long fight to protect patients with pre-existing conditions does not provide much optimism for a quick legislative fix.) For its part, the Trump administration has decided not defend the law against the attorney generals’ suit, effectively siding with those who want to overturn the law. The second part of Trump’s assertion, however, was new to us. Is he right that "some of the Democrats have been talking about ending pre-existing conditions"? We found zero evidence of this. For starters, Trump’s assertion is illogical given the Democrats’ role in passing the law and Democratic efforts to hammer Republican candidates over pre-existing condition protections on the campaign trail. Here are examples from Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., and Ohio Democratic candidate for governor Richard Cordray. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said there is no such chatter among Democratic officeholders or candidates. We also asked independent health-policy experts whether they had heard any Democratic messages — or even whispers — about getting rid of pre-existing condition protections. They said they had not. "I find President Trump’s comments surprising," said Christine Eibner, a health policy specialist at the Rand Corp. "I can’t think of any," said Gail Wilensky, who headed Medicare and Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush. "No — how bad can this (rhetoric) get?" asked John Holahan, a health policy specialist at the Urban Institute. "Unbelievable," said Linda Blumberg, who also studies health policy at the Urban Institute. "No." The White House did not reply to an inquiry seeking examples. Neither did the office of the Senate majority leader or the House speaker. Our ruling Trump said, "Some of the Democrats have been talking about ending (coverage for) pre-existing conditions." We can’t find any examples of what Trump claimed Democrats were saying. A Democratic proposal to end pre-existing conditions would run 100 percent counter to Democrats’ own history with the Affordable Care Act and would undercut one of the Democrats’ most powerful messages on the campaign trail this year. We rate the statement Pants on Fire. UPDATE: Shortly after publication, we lengthened the excerpt of Trump's remarks, so readers could read his complete thought.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-10-05T15:50:11	2018-10-04	['None']
-snes-03621	Hillary Clinton's first name was spelled "Hilliary" on election ballots printed for use in Lonoke County, Arkansas.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/liar-in-hillary-clintons-name/	None	Ballot Box	None	David Emery	None	Arkansas Ballot Typo Puts ��Liar’ in Hillary Clinton’s Name	5 November 2016	None	['Arkansas']
-snes-04969	Hillary Clinton was arrested by the FBI on 1 April 2016.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-arrested-fbi-hoax/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	Hillary Clinton Arrested by FBI	1 April 2016	None	['Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation']
-pomt-00391	Says "Michael Jordan resigns from the board at Nike-takes ‘Air Jordans’ with him."	pants on fire!	/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/sep/06/blog-posting/michael-jordan-isnt-parting-ways-nike/	Michael Jordan and his Air Jordans haven’t gone anywhere. The claim that Jordan is leaving Nike and taking his shoes with him is just another false story circulating the internet in the wake of Colin Kaepernick’s new deal with the company. Nike made Kaepernick one of the faces of its "Just Do It" campaign, in its 30th anniversary, and debuted the first ad Sept. 3. Kaepernick confirmed the new deal on social media, generating a mixed response of praise and boycotts. Then a San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Kaepernick started kneeling during the national anthem before games in 2016 to protest the treatment of people of color in the United States. He’s been without an NFL contract for more than a year-and-a-half and has filed a collusion complaint that claims NFL owners have kept him off the field because of his protests, not because of his football ability. CharlottePost.site posted a fictitious article two days later with the headline, "BREAKING: Michael Jordan resigns from the board at Nike-takes ‘Air Jordans’ with him." This story was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) Jordan’s supposed spokesman is quoted in the article saying Jordan is "completely against the hiring of a traitor and is taking his shoes elsewhere." The spokesman’s name is Art Tubolls, an anagram of "Busta Troll." Busta Troll is a pen name for Christopher Blair — the man who runs the America’s Last Line of Defense websites, which are among the biggest sources of false news online. The false CharlottePost.site story was copied from one such website, which self-identifies as a satire site. CharlottePost.site did not include a disclaimer on its home page or on the story. CharlottePost.site — a month-old stream of anonymous clickbait — should not be confused with The Charlotte Post, a newspaper that has covered minority communities in North Carolina and South Carolina for nearly 140 years. We have checked two other fake news stories this week that were copied from America’s Last Line of Defense and then touted as factual. They were not. We rated both Pants on Fire. This copy-paste job is no exception. We rate the claim Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-09-06T13:58:07	2018-09-05	['None']
-pomt-01070	Says Mitt Romney "pays less tax than the guys who installed his car elevators."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2015/jan/18/jennifer-granholm/former-michigan-gov-romney-pays-less-tax-guys-who-/	Count on hearing a lot about federal taxes this week. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama will lay out his plan to raise billions of dollars from the wealthiest people and the biggest financial institutions to make community college more affordable and pay for middle class tax cuts. And if that were not enough, we have the return of the 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Romney’s announcement that he’s seriously assessing a third White House bid has revived a conversation topic that bedeviled him the last go around -- that he’s too steeped in cash to connect with the struggles of the average American and benefits from a lopsided tax code. On Sunday, former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich., gave a sign of what Romney can expect. Romney had told a gathering of Republicans in San Diego a couple days before that under Obama, "the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse, and there are more people in poverty than ever before." Granholm said in sticking up for the little guy, Romney had an "authenticity problem." "You know, he pays less tax than the guys who installed his car elevators," Granholm said on ABC News’ This Week. We decide to look into that claim. Echoes of 2012 What car elevators, you might ask? In the spring of 2012, the public learned that Romney’s plans for a multimillion dollar beach house in La Jolla, Calif., included an elevator to move cars from the basement to street level. Think of it as a way to get more than one car into a one-car garage. This add-on costs about $55,000 fully installed. (Construction on the site is underway, and we don’t know if the elevators are done yet.) Needless to say, this was an unwanted, if minor, distraction for the Romney campaign, which was already dealing with calls to be more transparent about the governor’s financial assets. As part of his presidential campaign, the former Massachusetts governor released two years of income tax returns. They showed that in 2010, he paid 13.9 percent of his reported income in federal taxes and in 2011, 15.3 percent. Those rates were a bit less than the national average. We don’t have all the details on his tax bills. The 2011 return was incomplete, and there was the possibility that Romney’s actual tax rate would be less. With that caveat, these are the best numbers we have. Granholm’s comment mirrored a running theme from the 2012 election that the tax code treats income from work and income from investments differently. Above a certain point, income from work is taxed at a higher rate than income from the stock market. Billionaire Warren Buffett memorably distilled this down to the line that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary thanks to the favorable treatment of capital gains. Elevator installers Assessing whether the men who installed the elevators paid more in taxes than Romney is difficult. We reached out to Granholm and did not hear back. We take her words to refer to tax rates, not the total tax amounts. Romney made about $22 million a year and paid millions in taxes both years. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we see that in the San Diego metro area, the average elevator installer earned $83,460 in 2013. What an installer paid in taxes varies based on a number of factors, including family situation. If the installers were single with no children, then a simple tax calculator gives them an effective federal income tax rate of 17 percent. If they were married and had a child, and had no other income, the rate would fall to 8.4 percent. However, not only is that a bare-bones estimate, it fails to include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. These payments represent a substantial portion of taxes paid by the average worker. The Tax Policy Center, a project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, uses a complicated tax simulator to estimate the total tax burden. The Tax Policy Center table for 2014 gives a total effective tax rate of 15.7 percent for households making between $75,000 and $100,000 a year. Take this number only as a rough guide. It includes various kinds of income, as well as a range of tax effects, and it blends together single as well as married filers. Comparing tax rates The point is, Granholm's claim could be right or wrong -- it just depends on a person's individual circumstances. A single, childless elevator installer with wages at the higher end of the scale might be paying at a higher rate than Romney did in 2011. That person's, even before payroll taxes, could be as high as 17 percent compared to Romney’s 15.3 percent. On the other hand, someone married and caring for a child could be paying as little as 8.4 percent. Our ruling Granholm said that Romney paid less tax than the guys that installed his car elevator. On the most literal level, we don't even know if the car elevators have been installed. And we don't know anything about the people who did the work. In a broader sense, what elevator installers pay in federal taxes depends on their personal circumstances. They could be taxed at a higher -- or lower -- rate than Romney has been. This statement is partially accurate. We rate it Half True.	None	Jennifer Granholm	None	None	None	2015-01-18T18:23:12	2015-01-18	['None']
-pose-00819	Make the abolition of our sanctuary city rules an emergency item when our legislature meets this next January.	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/perry-o-meter/promise/851/declare-repeal-of-houstons-sanctuary-city-rules/	None	perry-o-meter	Rick Perry	None	None	Declare repeal of Houston's "sanctuary city" rules to be emergency	2011-01-14T14:30:57	None	['None']
-snes-06010	A megalodon capsized a South African charter vessel in April 2013.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/megalodon-the-monster-shark-lives/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives?	5 August 2013	None	['South_Africa']
-tron-01895	Cards Against Humanity Has a Secret Card	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cards-against-humanity-has-a-secret-card/	None	humorous	None	None	None	Cards Against Humanity Has a Secret Card	Nov 27, 2015	None	['None']
-pose-01182	Public school students should be allowed to take any Virtual School Network course even if it's offered in person at their school. Also, the state cap of three VSN courses per student should be repealed.	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/abbott-o-meter/promise/1272/repeal-limits-students-taking-online-classes/	None	abbott-o-meter	Greg Abbott	None	None	Repeal limits on students taking online classes	2018-06-19T14:58:22	None	['None']
-goop-00133	Britney Spears Being Urged Back To Rehab?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/britney-spears-rehab/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Britney Spears Being Urged Back To Rehab?	12:21 pm, October 15, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-11270	Says Florida Gov. Rick Scott "just signed a bill that could make most of Florida’s beaches private."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2018/apr/26/our-future-florida/did-gov-rick-scott-sign-bill-could-make-most-beach/	Confusion about what a new law means for Florida beaches is prompting fears and political attacks. Advocacy group For Our Future Florida used HB 631 as a wedge in the U.S. Senate race, where Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson is facing a challenge from Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who signed the bill into law in March. "On #EarthDay, we want to thank @SenBillNelson who has always fought for and defended the health of Florida’s coastlines and environment, while @FLGovScott just signed a bill that could make most of Florida’s beaches private," For Our Future Florida tweeted April 22. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Please pause before cancelling your summer vacation. This claim needs a fact-check. In reality, more than half of Florida beaches are already privately owned. The new law, opposed by many environmental groups, affects the procedure for local governments that want to make private beaches public. Starting July 1, any city or county that wants to enact an ordinance to make private beaches public will have to go through the courts. The sound bite from For Our Future Florida rests on the notion that private beach owners will use the law to limit public access. But we don’t know how those owners will react. What HB 631 will change The law Scott signed isn’t going to turn beaches that are public now over to private ownership. What it will do is make it harder to guarantee public access on beaches that were already privately owned. Before the new law, local governments could adopt ordinances guaranteeing the public’s access to privately owned beach property. Those ordinances stemmed from a legal principle known as "customary use." "Customary use" refers to the public’s historic access to the dry sand portion of the beach that may belong to a private property owner. "The idea and custom goes all the way back to ancient Rome and falls under the same set of ideas as the sea belongs to everyone and all have an equal right to use it," said David Cullen, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, which opposed the bill. For example, the owners of an oceanfront estate in South Beach may decide they do not like that beachgoers are setting up camp on the shoreside portion of their property. They install a fence and "no trespassing" signs to tell the public to stay away. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that if a private property owner tries to do this, then the local government could enact an ordinance guaranteeing the public’s use of that land under "customary use," following their usual notice and hearing process. If landowners wanted to challenge the ordinance, they would have to sue the local government. Lawmakers drafted HB 631 to put more of the onus on the government and to establish a uniform process that includes all the stakeholders. A situation in the Panhandle’s Walton County, which passed ordinances based on this "customary use" doctrine in 2016, illustrates why some lawmakers supported the bill. After the ordinance was passed in Walton County, some beach property owners filed lawsuits to overturn it. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida upheld the county’s ordinance, but landowners appealed that decision. "Without the courts involved on the front end, individual property owners could and did sue to challenge county ordinances around the state," said Rep. Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast, in a letter to the editor for the Palm Coast Observer website. "The taxpayers were on the hook for legal fees to defend every individual case against the county and pay any damages awarded if the county got it wrong." What HB 631 means for beach access Starting July 1, local governments that seek to adopt an ordinance that is premised on customary use rights must first notify all the owners of land that might be implicated, and then file a proceeding in court. The court will decide the question of whether the public has customary use rights in that specific area. The Sierra Club’s Cullen predicts the law will embolden people to stick fences and "no trespassing" signs on their properties. If that happens, local governments will have a bigger legal hurdle to clear before guaranteeing the public’s access to that area. That said, the new law does not affect any property or beach use rights. It doesn’t affect the rights the public had to use the dry sand beach before it was enacted, nor does it affect landowners’ rights. Law experts and leaders in the beach communities emphasized that the public should not feel compelled to change patterns of historic beach usage as a result of the law’s passage. "If the public has customary use rights in a given area, the statute doesn’t change that in any way," said Alyson Flournoy, a University of Florida Levin College of Law professor. "Those common law rights exist, whether or not there is an ordinance and whether or not there has been a judicial decision. The rights may be contested, but that doesn’t mean they are any more or less valid after July 1, 2018." Our ruling For Our Future Florida said that Scott "just signed a bill that could make most of Florida’s beaches private." The law does benefit private beach owners in a way. But this is a poor explanation that obscures critical facts. The law Scott signed would not result in turning more public beaches into private ones. In reality, when the law takes effect, it will make it harder for local governments to guarantee public access to beaches that are already private by throwing in a new judicial obstacle. It’s unclear at this point how the law will change private beach access, because that depends on the actions of local governments and private beach owners. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	For Our Future Florida	None	None	None	2018-04-26T13:34:08	2018-04-22	['None']
-snes-02454	Pastor Rick Scarborough asserted that breast cancer is caused by women's "dirty" thoughts.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pastor-scarborough-cancer/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Pastor Scarborough Blame Women’s Impure Thoughts for Breast Cancer?	10 May 2017	None	['None']
-goop-02101	Travis Scott Getting Pregnancy Advice From Kanye West?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/travis-scott-advice-kanye-west-pregnancy-kylie-jenner/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Travis Scott Getting Pregnancy Advice From Kanye West?	2:39 pm, December 2, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04278	Marijuana dealers are using the popular game app Pokémon GO to hook children on drugs.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/weed-dealers-pokemon-go/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	‘Weed Dealers’ Using Pokémon GO to Hook Children on Drugs	10 August 2016	None	['None']
-vees-00029	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Report claiming 45% of Filipinos believe Robredo has 'mental problems'	fake	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-report-claiming-45-filipinos-believe-r	None	None	None	None	Leni Robredo,SWS survey,Duterte's health	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Report claiming 45% of Filipinos believe Robredo has 'mental problems' FAKE	October 10, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-02165	Orlando Bloom Warned Robert Pattinson To Stay Away From Katy Perry?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/robert-pattinson-orlando-bloom-katy-perry-feud/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Orlando Bloom Warned Robert Pattinson To Stay Away From Katy Perry?	4:30 am, November 22, 2017	None	['None']
-goop-00861	Gwyneth Paltrow Threatened By Matthew McConaughey’s Wife’s Lifestyle Site?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/gwyneth-paltrow-matthew-mcconaughey-wife-camila-alves-lifestyle-site/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Gwyneth Paltrow Threatened By Matthew McConaughey’s Wife’s Lifestyle Site?	1:15 pm, June 7, 2018	None	['None']
-pose-00471	"I will report to the American people every year on the State of our Energy Future."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/491/provide-an-annual-report-on-state-of-our-energy-f/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Provide an annual report on "state of our energy future"	2010-01-07T13:27:00	None	['United_States']
-pomt-00073	"Democrats let him (cop killer Luis Bracamontes) into our country," and "Democrats let him stay."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/nov/01/donald-trump/donald-trumps-pants-fire-claim-democrats-let-cop-k/	In his final push before the midterms, President Donald Trump promoted a political video that says Democrats are responsible for letting a murderer stay in the country illegally to kill people. Trump tweeted a campaign-style video Oct. 31 about two California sheriff officers who were shot to death by an immigrant in the country illegally. The video opens with courtroom footage of a smiling Luis Bracamontes. Superimposed are the words, "Illegal immigrant, Luis Bracamontes, killed our people!" As Bracamontes boasts about killing the two officers and saying he would kill more if he could, new text says, "Democrats let him into our country." That’s quickly followed with, "Democrats let him stay." The video continues with footage from the caravan of Central Americans moving north in Mexico. At the end, it returns to Bracamontes’ smirking face and asks, "Who else would Democrats let in?" The final text says, "President Donald Trump and Republicans are making America safe again." Was Bracamontes in America because Democrats let him in? Not for his most recent entry. And did lax policies under Democrats let him stay? He evaded discovery, despite increasing efforts to track down criminal and immigration law offenders. The slayings Bracamontes in April was sentenced to death for the killings in California of Detective Michael Davis, Jr., and Deputy Sheriff Danny Oliver. Davis, of the Placer County Sheriff’s Office, responded in October 2014 to a call of a suspicious vehicle occupied by a man and a woman. Davis was shot as he got out of his car and later died in the hospital. Authorities said that before shooting Davis, Bracamontes also shot and killed Oliver, of the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, when he was investigating a suspicious vehicle in a motel parking lot that same day. Authorities said Bracamontes shot Oliver in the forehead and then fled. Bracamontes was convicted of the killings in February 2018; he is currently in California's San Quentis State Prison. His wife, Janelle Monroy, was convicted of assisting Bracamontes and sentenced to nearly 25 years in prison, the Sacramento Bee reported. Tracking Bracamontes’ path Bracamontes comes from Mexico, and his adult life followed a pattern of sneaking across the border, being deported, and sneaking back in. He was arrested for drug possession in Arizona in 1996. That was in Maricopa County, the home of then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Federal authorities deported him in 1997. He was arrested in Arizona again in 1998, turned over to immigration authorities, but apparently not deported. Another arrest on drug and weapons charges followed in 2001, and he was deported again. (There’s one report of another arrest in Maricopa County later in 2001.) Sometime after 2001, Bracamontes moved to Utah and began using an alias. Utah court records show that between 2003 and 2009, he had 10 driving violations. But none were serious enough to require fingerprints, according to the New York Times. In 2010, Utah entered into an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to assist the agency in immigration enforcement. Enforcement under Democratic and Republican administrations Bracamontes’ time in America up to the killings spanned three administrations. He was arrested and deported once under Democratic President Bill Clinton, but there was a failure to deport him in 1998. He was arrested and deported again in 2001, this time under Republican President George W. Bush. He came back that same year, and was arrested again in 2001. After that, Bracamontes apparently evaded deportation through the time of his 2014 killing spree during the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama. So for eight years, from 2001 through 2008, you could argue a Republican administration failed to identify and definitively deport him. For five years, from 2009 to 2014, a Democratic administration similarly failed. (And if you want to give blame to Congress for not passing stricter laws or dedicating more resources, the two different parties shared control of Congress during the timeframe in question.) Immigration enforcement tools strengthened after 9/11 with the subsequent creation of the Department of Homeland Security, said Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. The Obama administration ramped up efforts to track down felons who were in the country illegally. It expanded the Secure Communities program launched under Bush. The program fostered information sharing among federal agencies and local jails. Immigration enforcement priorities during Obama’s first term were just as broad as they are now, with people being deported for things such as traffic violations, Capps said. Immigrant advocates in 2014 famously dubbed Obama the "deporter-in-chief." Overall, research shows that the crime rate among immigrants, including those here illegally, is lower than in the general population, Capps said. "The implication of this video is that there’s a large number of criminals in the unauthorized population, which isn’t true," Capps said. "That’s the fundamental point of this commercial, and it’s wrong." It’s not the first time that Trump has brought up Bracamontes in his narrative about illegal immigration. Trump invited the officers’ family members to his first address to a joint session of Congress in 2017, where he highlighted crimes by immigrants in the country illegally. Trump attempts to link caravan to Democrats Trump’s tweet included footage of migrants walking north to the United States, of some attempting to push through a fence at the Guatemala-Mexico border, and of a Fox News interview of a man in the caravan saying he wanted to ask for pardon. A woman translating in the video says the pardon he’s seeking is for attempted murder. Trump’s tweet suggests Democrats would let in murderers into the United States. Democrats are not telling caravans to come in, as Trump has falsely claimed. They’ve said people who seek asylum should be allowed to go through that legal process. But asylum applicants would need to be screened by Trump’s administration before being granted the immigration protection. Our ruling Trump tweeted a video that said "Democrats let him (cop killer Luis Bracamontes) into our country," and "Democrats let him stay." The reality is that Bracamontes’ last illegal entry was under Bush, a Republican president. The majority of his time going undetected was also on the Republican watch, though some of it was on the Democrats’ watch, too. Democratic and Republican administrations deported Bracamontes, but also failed to keep Bracamontes out of the United States. We found no evidence that he was proactively allowed to stay. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. Clarification: Federal immigration enforcement was reorganized after 9/11, and subsequently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, received its current name. This report has been updated to remove references to the name ICE prior to 2003. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-11-01T17:10:00	2018-10-31	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-04964	"Obamacare" is the "biggest tax increase in American history."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/jul/25/mark-neumann/biggest-tax-hike-us-history-obamacare-says-gop-us-/	Among Republicans, if there’s a topic as hot as the record-breaking heat of the summer of 2012, it’s President Barack Obama’s health care reform law. "I think it's the worst piece of legislation that's been passed in my lifetime," former Republican Wisconsin congressman Mark Neumann said. "It's stopping business from growing and creating jobs. It's the biggest tax increase in American history, likely to bankrupt this country by spending $2.6 trillion; $500 billion taken out of Medicare; the list just goes on and on and on." Neumann, who is running in the August 2012 primary for the U.S. Senate, went on at some length about his first TV ad -- which hits "Obamacare" -- during a July 10, 2012 interview with WTMJ-AM’s Charlie Sykes, a conservative talk show host in Milwaukee. But we’ll zero in on the boldest claim made by Neumann -- that the law is "the biggest tax increase in American history." Neumann’s evidence Neumann campaign manager Chip Englander cited a July 2010 article by FactCheck.org, a project based at the University of Pennsylvania. It concluded that "as measured by the rather useless yardstick of raw dollars, with no adjustment for inflation," the Affordable Care Act could be the largest tax hike in U.S. history. At $76.8 billion in 2014, the law would be the largest one-year tax increase in raw dollars since 1968, FactCheck.org said, using U.S. Treasury data. But Neuman ignores what the article goes on to say: "that attack is misleading, and the raw-dollar measure is a poor way to measure the size of a tax increase." The reason is the simple fact of inflation, which means a dollar today is worth less than one years ago. Adjusting for inflation, a 1982 tax hike under GOP President Ronald Reagan is the largest tax increase ($85.3 billion), and Obama’s health reform law drops to fourth ($71.7 billion), FactCheck.org found. And using what it called the best yardstick -- the amount of revenue raised in one year as a percentage of gross domestic product -- the health law ranks as the seventh-largest tax hike since 1968. The article’s conclusion: "There’s no way the ACA’s tax and other revenue increases come close to being the largest in U.S. history." Englander also cited a Forbes opinion column that claims the reform law is the largest tax increase if both the premiums people pay for health insurance and the penalties paid by those who don’t get insurance are considered taxes. But premiums paid to insurance companies obviously are not the same as taxes paid to the government. (On July 24, 2012, Neumann claimed a new Congressional Budget Office analysis found the law will increase taxes by $100 billion "more than anticipated." But the analysis focused on the June 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the law, which had effects on Medicaid, but didn’t make major changes to tax provisions. The new analysis found, according to the National Journal, that the law is $84 billion cheaper and that repealing it would worsen the federal deficit by $109 billion over 10 years.) Other evidence Before the FactCheck.org article was published, our colleagues at PolitiFact National also did some digging in rating as Pants on Fire an even bolder claim by Rush Limbaugh -- that the reform law is "the largest tax increase in the history of the world." They found that the health law is tied for fifth among the largest tax hikes between 1968 and 2006 as a percentage of gross domestic product. That includes the law’s penalty for not having insurance. That makes Obama’s health law a big tax increase, but not biggest. Our rating Neumann said "Obamacare" is the biggest tax increase in American history." But even the article he uses as evidence states flatly that the health care reform law is not the biggest, and that to cite raw dollars, as Neumann does, is misleading. More reliable measures put the law among the largest tax hikes, but not at the top. We rate Neumann’s statement False. Editor's note (July 25, 2012): The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the health reform law (rather than the repeal of it) would add an estimated $109 billion to the deficit.	None	Mark Neumann	None	None	None	2012-07-25T09:00:00	2012-07-10	['United_States']
-pomt-14622	Says U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson wants to put 100,000 troops, including 25,000 Americans, "into the area where ISIS is."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2016/jan/29/russ-feingold/ron-johnson-wants-100000-troops-iraq-syria-fight-i/	With the 2016 campaign getting more contentious, Democrat Russ Feingold responded to a question about President Barack Obama's performance on foreign policy by pivoting to his opponent, Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. The question was posed by host Mike Gousha at a Jan. 26, 2016 forum at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee. Feingold, who lost the Senate seat to Johnson in 2010, commented on Obama’s record in the international arena. Then he turned to terrorism, saying "no one in Washington has taken" threats from foreign extremists "as seriously as they should, and now we have to deal with it. "But those who say the way to handle it is to go put 100,000 troops into the area where ISIS is -- which is what Senator Johnson wants to do -- how does this work?" Gousha interjected, saying Johnson has talked about only 25,000 of the troops being American, with the rest coming from an international coalition. Feingold responded by asserting that Johnson said there should be 100,000 troops total, including 25,000 Americans. So let’s sort out what Johnson has called for. Johnson’s general position As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has reported, Johnson is among the most aggressive voices in his party in proposing a ground invasion to drive the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria out of those two countries. As early as October 2014, he called for "boots on the ground," a position in line with that of most of the 2016 GOP candidates for president. But Johnson has not been so clear about the numbers of troops. Feingold’s evidence In backing Feingold’s claim, his campaign spokesman said the former senator was referring to comments Johnson made to Gousha during a television interview in November 2015. The campaign also cited a Huffington Post article about that interview that carried this headline: "GOP senator wants a coalition of 100,000 troops in Iraq and Syria." But the headline goes further than what Johnson actually said. Here’s the exchange, with Gousha pressing Johnson for a number of American troops: Gousha: Senator, you've said on a number of occasions that you favor U.S. troops as part of this coalition going in to these countries to help move ISIS out of its safe areas. How many American troops would you support sending overseas to accomplish this mission? Johnson: Well, I'm not a military expert. The model I use is what George H.W. Bush did when Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait …. Gousha: And I know you're not a military guy, but is it 10,000? Is it 20,000? Give us some idea of what you're talking about in terms of an American presence overseas. Johnson: I've been told by military experts that ISIS -- in terms, militarily -- is not particularly capable … militarily, it really would not be that difficult. Probably it wouldn't take anywhere near the effort that the first Gulf War did. I've been hearing 25,000 troops, a total coalition of maybe 100,000. I really don't know the exact numbers, but we have to be committed to the goal …. So, Johnson didn’t commit to a number. And he hasn’t in other interviews. The previous month, Johnson said he didn’t know how many U.S. troops would be needed in Syria, although that was in reference to responding to a refugee crisis. And the following month, Johnson indicated to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he was open to the numbers of American troops that were being discussed. Asked if it would take more than 20,000 to 25,000 U.S. troops to retake and hold the territory now held by ISIS, he responded: "What’s the alternative? … This is a real and growing threat." But also in December 2015, Johnson said experts have talked about the need for 10,000 American troops, something he said he would support if Obama committed to an effective strategy. In contrast, Republican U.S. senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina called specifically for 100,000 foreign troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Graham also called for 10,000 American troops. Our rating Feingold said Johnson wants to put 100,000 troops, including 25,000 Americans, "into the area where ISIS is." Johnson favors sending foreign and American troops to Iraq and Syria in an effort to defeat ISIS there. He’s said he has heard experts say the effort would require 100,000 troops, including 25,000 from the United States. He indicated he might support those levels, or perhaps 10,000 American troops, but didn’t go so far as to call for any particular numbers. For a statement that is partially accurate but leaves out important details, our rating is Half True.	None	Russ Feingold	None	None	None	2016-01-29T14:16:01	2016-01-26	['United_States']
-afck-00161	“Today, we have doubled the numbers of expectant mothers delivering under the care of skilled medical attendants to over 1.2 million by the end of 2016.”	unproven	https://africacheck.org/reports/fact-checked-kenyattas-2017-state-nation-address/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact-checked: Kenyatta’s 2017 State of the Nation Address	2017-03-17 08:39	None	['None']
-snes-04261	The United States has approved plans to crossbreed animals and humans.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/crossbreeding-humans-with-animals-approved-in-the-united-states/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Has Crossbreeding Humans with Animals Been Approved in the United States?	11 August 2016	None	['United_States']
-goop-01068	Caitlyn Jenner, Sophia Hutchins Doing Reality Show?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-jenner-sophia-hutchins-new-reality-show/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Caitlyn Jenner, Sophia Hutchins Doing Reality Show?	10:25 am, May 3, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-02107	The Incredible Story of the Protection of the Bulgarian Jews	mostly truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bulgaria/	None	inspirational	None	None	None	The Incredible Story of the Protection of the Bulgarian Jews	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-02768	Beyonce Demanding Silent Delivery Room, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/beyonce-silent-delivery-room-birth-twins/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Beyonce NOT Demanding Silent Delivery Room, Despite Report	1:28 pm, May 28, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-05542	"The average age of members of the House of Representatives is 57 years old."	true	/tennessee/statements/2012/apr/09/weston-wamp/25-year-old-congressional-candidate-weston-wamp-sa/	Age equals wisdom, or so the saying goes. So what do you do if you’re a young guy running for Congress? Weston Wamp, a 25-year-old Republican candidate for the U.S. House in Tennessee’s 3rd Congressional District, is trying to convince voters that his youth will be an asset in a Congress where seniority rules. Wamp is running for the House seat held for 16 years by his father, Zach Wamp, who retired from Congress in 2010 after an unsuccessful run for governor. Weston Wamp’s campaign web site portrays him as a "young entrepreneur" and a member of the "debt-paying generation" who has a broad understanding of the world and business. He also says he knows a thing or two about politics, having grown up "at the feet" of many national leaders in politics and business during his father’s congressional career. One of his underlying campaign themes seems to be that there’s a serious need for some new blood in Washington. "Of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, only two were born in the 1980s," noted a recent press release from his campaign. "The average age of members of the House of Representatives is 57 years old." We knew firsthand that both the House and the Senate are filled with gray-hairs, but we wondered if the average age in the House is really that high. We contacted Wamp’s spokeswoman, Bonnie Brezina, and asked for the source of that information. She said she wasn’t sure, but she’d get back to us. She didn’t, so we did a little digging of our own. Turns out, young Wamp is correct. The average age of U.S. House members is 57.44, according to Congressional Quarterly, a publication that provides news and analysis about Congress. "That takes into account the current makeup of the House – not when it convened in January," said David Meyers, CQ’s managing editor of member information and research. Three of the 435 House seats are currently vacant, so the average age could go up or down slightly once those three seats are filled. The average age of the Senate’s 100 members as of January 2011 was 61.5, according to the Senate Historical Office. Wamp also was right on another front: Only two House members – U.S. Reps. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., and Justin Amash, R-Mich. -- were born in 1980 or later. Schock is 30; Amash is 31. Other publications have noted the advanced age of Congress. When President Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, USA Today reported that Obama – one of the nation’s youngest presidents – would be working with the nation’s oldest Congress. When Obama took the oath of office, the average age was 57 in the House and 63 in the Senate, the paper said. In each case, it was the highest on record. Our ruling We won’t attempt to fact-check the argument that age equals wisdom. But on Wamp’s claim that the average age of House members is 57, the young Republican is correct and earns a True rating on the Truth-o-Meter.	None	Weston Wamp	None	None	None	2012-04-09T14:54:14	2012-04-03	['None']
-pomt-01127	"We've caught Iran cheating on the interim (nuclear) deal."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2014/dec/31/stephen-hayes/hayes-iran-cheated-interim-nuclear-deal/	As the pundits look ahead to 2015, they know that time is running out for the United States to reach a permanent deal with Iran over its nuclear program. The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — along with Germany, have until mid March to come to terms on a deal with the Islamic republic. If all goes the way the United States hopes, a signed agreement will keep Iran out of the nuclear weapons club. For now, the two sides are operating under an interim agreement, which rolls back Iran’s stock of enriched uranium and freezes the country’s capability to produce nuclear materials that could be used to make a nuclear bomb. In exchange, Iran can sell its oil more freely and gain access to millions of dollars in frozen assets. On Fox News Sunday Dec. 28, 2014, Stephen Hayes of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine spoke skeptically about what lies ahead. Hayes believes a final deal is likely, but he doubts the Obama administration will drive a hard bargain. "They want the deal for the sake of having the deal," Hayes said. "We basically caught -- we've caught Iran cheating on the interim deal and rather than saying, ‘Look, we're done, you've proven that you're not an effective partner, that we can't trust you,’ they say, ‘We'll give you more time because we're going to get to a deal.’ " We decided to check whether Iran was caught cheating on the interim agreement. Hayes told us he had two violations in mind. The one most tightly tied to Iran’s nuclear program had to do with Iran’s work with a new model of centrifuge. Centrifuges are key to enriching uranium and enriched uranium is key to making a bomb. The other violation had to do with Iran selling more oil than it is allowed. In our research, we found a third possible violation involving Iran buying parts for its heavy water reactor in Arak. What we discovered is that while Iran isn’t squeaky clean, no point is definitively in violation of the interim agreement. Importantly, the International Atomic Energy Agency has reported no violations with the Joint Plan of Action. We’ll deal with each potential violation in turn. Work with a new model of centrifuge One of the pillars of the interim agreement, the Joint Plan of Action, was to freeze Iran’s centrifuge facilities. It could keep the tens of thousands of centrifuges it has and could repair any that were broken, but it couldn’t expand its capacity. As part of the agreement, Iran could continue some limited research and development work. A problem emerged in November when the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that in the "R&D area," Iran "has been intermittently feeding natural UF6 (uranium fluoride) into the IR-5 centrifuge." Agency inspectors said that no enriched uranium emerged because the Iranians recombined everything back together at the end of the run. This set off red flags because, until then, the Iranians had not fed uranium fluoride into that particular centrifuge. "Iran was caught red-handed engaged in centrifuge activities," Hayes said. "When confronted by the State Department, Iran stopped feeding the IR-5." Hayes relied on an assessment from the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based group that aims to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. In November, the institute initially said, "The feeding of the IR-5 centrifuge is an apparent violation of that commitment to freeze centrifuge R&D activities." Hayes told us that he took an "apparent violation" to be the equivalent of cheating. But David Albright, the institute’s president, said that after a closer look, it wasn’t that cut and dried. "It’s hard to say definitively one way or the other on the question of a clear violation," Albright told PunditFact. Albright and his group’s latest assessment is that the Joint Plan of Action didn’t specifically allow the Iranians to feed the uranium into the IR-5 centrifuge. But it’s not clear if that constitutes a violation. Albright said that an administration official told him that the action was "inconsistent with the United States’ understanding of the Joint Plan of Action." That could be a diplomatic way of saying there had been a violation, or it might mean that the original agreement was unclear, a lawyer told Albright. What is clear: The Americans asked Iran to stop, and Iran did. Adam Mount, a nuclear security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said as far as anyone can tell, the interim agreement has achieved what it set out to do. "There is no publicly available evidence that Iran has violated the terms of the Joint Plan of Action," Mount said. "Progress on the Iranian nuclear program is frozen and in some of the most important areas, it has been rolled back." Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a group that hopes to see a final nuclear agreement with Iran, said it would have been better if Iran hadn’t fed the uranium into the IR-5 centrifuge. "Was it useful or helpful?" Kimball asked. "No. Was it specifically prohibited by the Joint Plan of Action? Also no. There is a big difference between the Iranians have been caught cheating, and a dispute about the one centrifuge." In sum, the weight of the evidence says that it would have been better if Iran had not fired up that IR-5 centrifuge, but doing so didn’t rise to the level of violating the interim agreement. Iran sold too much oil Hayes’ second contention is that Iran sold more oil than allowed as part of the interim agreement. "Iran violated the terms of the Joint Plan of Action by exporting more crude than the agreement allowed, specifically to China, India, Japan and South Korea," Hayes told us. For evidence, Hayes pointed us to a Reuters article that reported that in the first nine months of 2014, sales to those countries had risen nearly 20 percent from the year before, to about 1.14 million barrels per day. But again, things aren’t so cut and dried. The Joint Plan of Action says that the five Security Council countries and Germany would stop trying to reduce the amount of oil that Iran could sell. It also says that countries can continue to buy "their current average amounts of crude oil." There are no specific caps, however, and no clear explanation of what would constitute a violation. We spoke to Mark Dubowitz, who is executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that monitors enforcement of sanctions against Iran. Dubowitz said he believes both Iran and the countries that bought its oil skirted the deal. But ultimately, Dubowitz said we can’t know for sure whether Iran’s oil sales violate the terms of the agreement because we lack access to a critical piece. Behind the public summary of the Joint Plan of Action is a much more detailed implementation agreement. Only people with a certain level of security clearance can see it. "We don’t know what that says," Dubowitz said. "Iran’s sales might be a violation. Or they might not." Also, several of the countries that are buying Iran’s oil, such as India, Japan and South Korea, didn’t sign the interim agreement and thus wouldn’t be bound by it. And lastly, while the United States has set limits on the amount of oil Iran can sell, those are not written into the Joint Plan of Action. Buying parts for a heavy water reactor Some analysts we reached thought Hayes might have been thinking of another potential problem with Iran. According to some reports, it has continued to buy parts that could be used in its heavy water reactor, which is another means to produce fuel for a nuclear bomb. However, even if those reports are accurate, the activity falls outside the interim agreement. Matthew Kroenig is a professor of international relations at Georgetown University. Kroenig would not call these purchases a violation of the Joint Plan of Action. On the other hand, Kroenig said that shouldn’t make anyone feel any better. "It is in violation of U.N. sanctions prohibiting Iranian procurement of sensitive nuclear technology," Kroenig said. "It also might reveal something about how sincere Iran is about shutting down or converting the reactor as part of a final deal." Our ruling Hayes said Iran had been caught cheating on the interim deal to rein in Iran’s nuclear program, called the Joint Plan of Action. First, the International Atomic Energy Agency has reported no violations with the Joint Plan of Action. That said, there are some actions by Iran that certainly cut near the boundaries of the terms of the agreement. Iran has worked with a new kind of centrifuge that, while perhaps not a formal violation, does seem to contradict the United States’ understanding of the deal, an expert told us. When confronted on the matter, Iran stopped its work. Also, there is some question about the amount of oil Iran is exporting. But an expert said we just don’t have enough information to determine whether that constitutes a violation of the agreement or not. Hayes said we caught Iran cheating. You can say some allege that, and you can say there’s some evidence that might suggest that. But we found no hand in the cookie jar. As such, we rate this claim Mostly False. Consider helping fund PolitiFact's Kickstarter to live fact-check the 2015 State of the Union and GOP response.	None	Stephen Hayes	None	None	None	2014-12-31T10:58:11	2014-12-28	['Iran']
-pomt-03490	Says Democratic Party created Planned Parenthood	false	/virginia/statements/2013/jun/10/stephen-martin/state-sen-stephen-martin-says-democartic-party-cre/	In defending controversial statements by the Republican Party’s candidate for lieutenant governor, State Sen. Steve Martin made some of his own. Martin, R-Chesterfield, attended a May 23 fundraiser for E.W. Jackson, the GOP nominee for the No. 2 spot. A Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter asked Martin to weigh in on a video from last fall in which Jackson denounced the the Democratic Party, the Ku Klux Klan and Planned Parenthood in the same breath. "The fact is that both the KKK and Planned Parenthood are creations of the Democratic Party," Martin said. We recently gave a False rating to Martin’s claim that the Democratic Party started the KKK. In this Truth-O-Meter, we’ll look at his contention that the party started Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger began her crusade for birth control access through a magazine called "The Woman Rebel" that she started in 1914. Sanger was subsequently arrested and charged with mailing obscene materials because the magazine championed birth control, which was illegal, and published information on sex. But the Democratic Party was not involved in her trials nor her opening of clinics in Brownsville, N.Y., in 1916 or in Harlem in 1923, according to the book "Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion." The book’s author, Jean H. Baker, sent us an email saying Sanger "abstained from any political commitments." The book says Sanger was angered by politicians from both parties who refused to back birth control programs, including Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Baker attributed the opposition to the doctrine and power of the Catholic Church rather than any political party creed. Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. Members during its first decade were typically upper-middle-class women of childbearing age, according to the book "Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America." The author, Ellen Chesler, wrote that of the members of the league willing to to list their party affiliation, "just over half said they were Republicans, while 8 percent identified themselves as Socialists, reflecting the movement’s, and Margaret’s own, idiosyncratic histories." Sanger resigned in 1928 as president of the league, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1940. Is there any evidence the Democratic Party created Planned Parenthood? When we asked Martin, he told us he phrased his claim poorly and should have said the Democratic Party has "sustained" Planned Parenthood. Soon after our conversation, Martin released a statement saying he "regretted the carelessness and inaccuracy" of his comments." Although it’s not the purpose of this article to examine whether the Democratic Party has "sustained" Planned Parenthood, we should note that Martin’s substitute claim needs qualification. Congress did not start funding birth control efforts until 1967 -- 46 years after Sanger founded the organization that would become Planned Parenthood. For a long time afterwards, there was strong bipartisan support for funding birth control organizations. Only in 2011, with abortion debate heating up, were there partisan floor votes in which the GOP sought to strip federal money from Planned Parenthood and the Democrats insisted on preserving it. House Republicans have introduced another bill this year to end taxpayer funding for the organization. Planned Parenthood reported receiving $524 million from the U.S. government in grants and payments during the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30 -- roughly 45 percent of the organization’s revenues. Our ruling Martin said that Planned Parenthood was created by the Democratic Party. There’s no evidence to support that claim. Biographers of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, say she shunned political commitments and was critical of presidents from both parties. Recognizing that Martin has since expressed regret for his words, we rate his statement False.	None	Stephen Martin	None	None	None	2013-06-10T13:00:00	2013-05-23	['None']
-tron-00180	Taxpayers Receive IRS Form 990 Security Alert after Hack	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/taxpayers-receive-irs-form-990-security-alert-after-hack/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Taxpayers Receive IRS Form 990 Security Alert after Hack	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-04490	Says President Obama has "doubled" the deficit.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/05/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-barack-obama-has-doubled-deficit/	During the first presidential debate in Denver, Mitt Romney took President Barack Obama to task for his record on the deficit. "The president said he’d cut the deficit in half," Romney said. "Unfortunately, he doubled it." We already ruled the first half of this statement True, noting that Obama said on Feb. 23, 2009, "Today I am pledging to cut the deficit we inherited in half by the end of my first term in office." But what about Romney’s second claim, that Obama "doubled" the deficit he inherited? Romney is way off. The final Congressional Budget Office baseline deficit projection before Obama took office -- noted in table 5 in this January 2009 CBO report -- showed a fiscal year 2009 deficit of $1.19 trillion. That figure doesn’t account for any of Obama’s own spending initiatives, such as the stimulus bill. But the deficit grew quickly under Obama: The fiscal 2009 deficit rose to $1.41 trillion and has remained above $1 trillion annually ever since. But compared to what Obama inherited, the annual deficit has gone down slightly. CBO projects that for fiscal 2012, which has just ended, the fiscal 2012 deficit will be $1.09 trillion. So, far from doubling the deficit, Obama (along with, it should be noted, some Republican help in Congress) has instead reduced the deficit by about 8 percent. The only way to get to doubling is to use a different starting point, which is what the Romney campaign does. His campaign compares the current deficit to the final fiscal 2008 deficit of $458.6 billion. But we don't find that to be the correct starting point. Romney was referring to a statement Obama made on Feb. 23, 2009, so the correct comparison would be the deficit at that point. The 2008 deficit covered a fiscal year that ended about four months before Obama took office -- and which was also a period of rapid economic deterioration that affected the scale of CBO’s deficit projections. So CBO’s January 2009 figure offers a much more accurate indication of what Obama "inherited" -- which, we should repeat, is the word Obama used in his broken promise of February 2009. Romney would still have been off if he had said the federal debt, rather than deficit, had doubled on Obama’s watch. The debt held by the public -- one of two key measures of federal debt -- rose from $6.3 trillion on Jan. 20, 2009, to $11.3 trillion on the day of the debate, an increase of 79 percent. The total federal debt, which includes debt the government holds itself, rose by a smaller amount over that period, 53 percent. Our ruling Romney said that Obama has "doubled" the deficit. In reality, using the most appropriate comparison, he and Congress have actually decreased the deficit slightly. We rate Romney’s statement False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-10-05T16:37:08	2012-10-03	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-04155	Photographs show 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick shortly after he converted to Islam.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/colin-kaepernick-converts-to-islam/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Colin Kaepernick Convert to Islam?	29 August 2016	None	['Islam']
-pomt-04038	"Today, about 40 percent of guns are purchased without a background check."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jan/30/kirsten-gillibrand/gillibrand-says-40-percent-guns-sold-today-escape-/	Gun control advocates are lining up behind President Barack Obama’s call for a law requiring universal background checks on gun purchases. "The background checks bill is vitally important," New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said in an interview on MSNBC Jan. 24, 2013. It’s "going to basically say you can’t buy guns without getting a background check. Today, about 40 percent of guns are purchased without a background check." If the figure sounds familiar, it’s because gun control advocates are citing it with abandon. Obama mentioned it in the White House ceremony outlining his slate of new gun restrictions. A white paper by researchers at Johns Hopkins University asserts it without qualification. Indeed, it’s a powerful claim: that 40 percent of guns are bought and sold in America with no paper trail, no fingerprint of the hands they fall into. Gillibrand is right that federal law does not require background checks on all gun purchases, contrary to what polls show most Americans support. It’s the 40-percent figure that’s the sticking point. We have examined this claim before at PolitiFact, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in July 2012, "There's a loophole where you can sell guns without a background check … 40 percent of guns are sold that way" at gun shows and over the Internet. At the time we rated the claim Mostly True. But since the Newtown, Conn., school shooting, we’ve heard the statistic repeated again and again, plus seen criticism of its use. So we’ve decided to take another look. We have since re-rated the Bloomberg fact-check to Half True. The 1997 study The original source of the 40 percent figure is a 1997 National Institute of Justice study by researchers Philip Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago, who examined data from a 1994 telephone survey about gun ownership. The survey, which sampled 2,568 homes, asked owners an array of questions, including how many guns were in the house, what they were used for, how they were stored and how they were obtained. But it’s important to note that of the 2,568 households surveyed, only 251 people answered the question about the origin of their gun. But in those answers, Cook and Ludwig found that 35.7 percent of respondents reported obtaining their gun from somewhere other than a licensed dealer. (That has been rounded up to 40 percent.) Some people answered "probably" and "probably not" if they weren’t entirely sure whether the seller was a licensed dealer. In some cases, where the respondent skipped the question about whether the gun came from a licensed dealer, the researchers made a judgment call. Ludwig said in an email that they mined answers to other questions (such as whether the gun was a gift) to guide them. "Our approach ... was to be conservative in estimating what fraction of sales are in the primary market," Ludwig wrote. "Primary market" refers to guns sold by dealers in retail stores or pawn shops. The "secondary market" includes gun shows and other transactions where a background check is not required. Some critics find fault with the 40 percent figure because it includes guns that are inherited or won -- in other words, transactions that could reasonably be assumed not to involve a background check. The NRA, arguably the loudest voice of opposition to tighter gun controls, referenced the study in a recent blog post. The group does not dispute the method or findings of the study but says the 40 percent claim is a misinterpretation by gun control advocates. We’re confident that the study, conducted by respected researchers using the best available evidence, was reliable in its time. What’s less clear: how reliable it remains today. ‘I have no idea’ We asked Cook, the other study author, what he thought about the 40 percent figure being referenced so frequently since gun control lurched back to the forefront of the national debate. "I’ve been amazed at how much interest there’s been in it. It’s been lying there dormant for 20 years," he said. So is it still a current, reliable estimate of secondary market gun sales? "The answer is I have no idea," Cook said. "This survey was done almost 20 years ago. … It’s clear there are a lot of transactions that are not through dealers. How many, we’re not really clear on it. … We would say it’s a very old number." Other scholars had similar views. "I don’t see how anyone could know that number," said James Jacobs, Center for Research in Crime and Justice at New York University School of Law. Paul Blackman is a retired criminologist and former research coordinator for the NRA Institute for Legislative Action. "Personally, I think your safest bet is to say that no one knows, but that the vast majority of crime guns come from some other source than gun shows," he told us. One expert, David Kopel at the University of Denver law school, said he doesn’t think the figure was ever accurate because of what the survey actually asked. "The study did not say whether there was a background check on the sale. It asked the buyer, do you think there was? So some buyers may have known, some may not have known," Kopel said. "All it measured was buyer perception, not whether a check actually occurred." A stable market We looked but couldn’t find any more recent studies like Cook’s and Ludwig’s. Some gun control advocates blame a federal freeze on funding gun research for the lack of new data. But even absent that, some experts argue that little has changed about the gun market in the decades since the study was conducted. "It’s a fairly stable market. That is to say, gun stores have had their part, police supply stores have had their part, and then there are the gun shows and private dealings about which we know very little," said Robert McCrie, of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "To be sure, there has been this bump up in gun purchases, which we know from reports from gun stores and the companies like Smith & Wesson. There’s the knowledge that the market has been more vigorous and probably that higher vigor has been reflected in gun shows and private sales in tandem." His take: "The 40 percent seems about right." Jay Corzine has attended and studies gun shows in Florida. The University of Central Florida professor says that based on his observation, no more than 15 to 20 percent of sales at gun shows happen without a background check. But when you add in other private sales -- neighbors selling to neighbors, ads in the paper, etc. -- the 40 percent figure is "probably accurate" and "a very good figure to use." Gary Kleck, whose research has provided the foundation for less restrictive concealed carry laws, agrees that conditions in the gun market haven’t changed much. "I know of no affirmative reason to think that the methods of acquiring guns has significantly changed in recent decades, or that conditions have changed such that private (non-dealer) transfers have become more (or less) important. The laws regulating gun sales have not gotten significantly more (or less) strict since the 1994 Brady Act, so there's no strong basis for expecting fewer dealer sales or more non-dealer sales as a result of legal changes," Kleck, a professor at Florida State University, wrote in an email. Kleck says the 40 percent estimate is "probably still reasonably valid today." But he further argues that this fact shouldn’t guide new policy, because the problem is not how legal, background-checked purchasers are obtaining guns, but how criminals are. Our ruling Gillibrand claimed that "today, about 40 percent of guns are purchased without a background check." She, and other gun control advocates who have cited that figure, correctly repeated the findings of a well-respected study about gun ownership. There’s no question that many guns are bought and sold in America without the oversight of a background check. But is 40 percent true "today," as Gillibrand said? Even the author of the original study says nobody knows. By mentioning the statistic as if it is current and accurate, Gillibrand revealed nothing of the fact that the figure is almost 20 years old. That’s an essential detail that people engaged in the gun debate should know. All this leads us to rate her statement Half True.	None	Kirsten Gillibrand	None	None	None	2013-01-30T11:39:02	2013-01-24	['None']
-pomt-11398	"The state is set to recapture an additional $500 million in Robin Hood payments from taxpayers and not one penny of it will go to public education in Texas."	false	/texas/statements/2018/mar/23/mike-collier/mike-collier-says-pending-robin-hood-funds-wont-fu/	For the sake of equity, state law since the 1990s has required Texas school districts with lucrative property-tax bases to share revenue with the state to help balance funding for less fortunate districts. In 2018, according to the state, the so-called Robin Hood or "recapture" system resulted in 185 districts sending $2 billion to the state. In raw dollars, the biggest givers were the Austin, Houston and Plano districts; the Austin district’s contribution exceeded $544 million. And that money gets spent on education, right? Not so in the state’s next budget year, Mike Collier of Houston, the 2018 Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, declared. In a March 18, 2018 tweet that made us wonder, Collier said: "The state is set to recapture an additional $500 million in Robin Hood payments from taxpayers and not one penny of it will go to public education in Texas. Instead, the state government is confiscating our property tax dollars to pay its own bills." That $500 million figure, Collier later told us by email, ties to how much more the state budget written by the 2017 Legislature takes from wealthy districts in the budget year beginning Sept. 1, 2019 compared to the amount so budgeted for the previous year. In fact, the budget shows the upcoming recapture total of $2,521,000,000 running $471.1 million ahead of the $2,049,900,000 budgeted for the previous 12 months. Money coming to the state from that increase "does not go to any school," Collier said in a statement emailed by Scott Spiegel of his campaign. Collier further noted that the state budget shows education aid drawn from state tax collections decreasing by $1.6 billion, from $19.1 billion in fiscal 2018 to nearly $17.5 billion through August 2019. "So despite higher recapture payments, overall funding is down," Collier said. "The only way anyone could argue that $500 million increase in recapture payments was staying in schools would be to show an overall increase in school funding by $500 million," he said. Checking figures, state law Collier overlooked some spending; the education part of the budget lists more than a dozen revenue sources including proceeds from the state’s lottery and federal aid. All told, the budget shows, lawmakers voted to spend $28.2 billion on public education in fiscal 2018 with that commitment dropping to $27.2 billion the next year. Meantime, experts including R.J. DeSilva, staff spokesman for the Legislative Budget Board, which advises lawmakers on fiscal matters, indicated it’s not legally possible for recapture funds not to support education. State law specifies that recapture "receipts shall be deposited in the state treasury and may be used only for foundation school program purposes," meaning the state’s primary way of funding schools. To our inquiries, school advocates said Collier made a solid point about local property values reducing pressure to spend state revenue on education. By email, Joe Wisnoski, a former Texas Education Agency official who lobbies for districts, called Collier’s tweet "false to the extent that it implies recapture funds are directly spent on functions of state government other than public education." Yet Wisnoski and Tom Canby of the Texas Association of School Business Officials each noted that any escalation in recapture amounts, influenced by increases in local property values, enables lawmakers to pony up less state revenue toward delivering each district the aid it’s entitled to receive based on state formulas rooted in changes in enrollment and its mix of students. Wisnoski wrote: "State aid earned by school districts is based on formulas set in statute, and the amount of recapture in and of itself does not impact those formulas directly. Recapture is a method of finance for the appropriation for the Foundation School Program, so increased recapture means the state needs to draw less money from other sources to total up to the amount of Foundation School Program state aid, like state general revenue." By phone, Josh Sanderson of the Equity Center, which says it advocates for "chronically underfunded" districts, similarly agreed that by law all recaptured dollars go to fund education. But when local property values are expected to increase, the state can budget fewer state tax dollars to fulfill its commitments, Sanderson said. He pointed out that the 2018-19 state budget presumes that local property values, and related tax collections, will increase 7.04 percent through August 2018 and by 6.77 percent the next tax year. "Any property value increases essentially serve to offset the state’s share" of formula-set funding, Sanderson said. He called Collier’s statement sort of correct and sort of incorrect, elaborating: "He’s incorrect in saying that Robin Hood payments don’t go to benefit public education. However, he’s correct in saying it’s effectively reducing what the state puts in." We also asked the Texas Education Agency to appraise Collier’s claim; we didn’t hear back. Our ruling Collier said Texas state government is set to take $500 million more from taxpayers in certain school districts "and not one penny of it will go to public education in Texas." This claim waves at a general truth that lawmakers can spend less state revenue on education provided local property values escalate. But by law, the $471 million more in recapture funds set to flow from districts to the state this next budget year must be deposited in the state treasury to be used only to fund education. This statutory reality makes Collier’s claim False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Mike Collier	None	None	None	2018-03-23T12:05:52	2018-03-18	['Texas']
-pomt-08777	U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) refuses to return $37,000 in "dirty" campaign contributions from U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.)	half-true	/georgia/statements/2010/aug/23/national-republican-congressional-committee/marshall/	Republicans are raising questions about a controversial campaign contributor to a Democratic Georgia congressman. The National Republican Congressional Committee put together a recorded telephone message that it said went to residents on Aug. 10 in Democrat Jim Marshall's congressional district in Middle Georgia. The message said U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, who is in a heap of ethics trouble, made $37,000 in campaign contributions to Marshall. Rangel, a Democrat from New York City, is facing 13 ethics charges largely surrounding whether he used his office for personal gain. Rangel admits to belatedly reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in income and assets. But Rangel insists he's not corrupt. The RNCC urges Marshall in the message to give the money back. "So far, Congressman Marshall's fellow Democrats have returned almost $640,000 in dirty campaign money from Rangel," the unidentified voice in the message says. "Yet, Congressman Marshall refuses to return $37,000." Is a New York congressman who is under an ethics cloud helping fund the campaign of a Middle Georgia congressman running for re-election? AJC PolitiFact Georgia contacted Marshall's office about the NRCC allegation. Our initial search of federal campaign contributions from Rangel for Congress showed the congressman sent just $9,000 to Marshall. Marshall's spokesman Doug Moore said the GOP has included money from a political action committee Rangel is involved with called "National Leadership PAC." In all, Moore said Marshall has received $38,000. But that money arrived before Rangel's ethics problems, Moore said. A leadership PAC is a fundraising device politicians to back other candidates. National Leadership PAC is Rangel's PAC. It collects money that is then doled out to other Democrats running for office. Moore called it a "technicality" to say the money from the National Leadership PAC is from Rangel. Moore argued the message is misleading because all of contributions were made by 2007, a year before the ethics allegations surfaced. Marshall has since refused to accept contributions from Rangel or the PAC, Moore said. Marshall represents Georgia's 8th Congressional District, which includes Macon and much of Middle Georgia. It's considered a swing district that Republicans are eager to seize this fall in their attempt to win control of Congress. Marshall has won several close races in recent years. Linking him to Rangel, a liberal with ethics issues, could damage Marshall this election cycle, experts say. "(Republicans) are trying to say this guy might be dirty like the rest of them," said Emory University associate political science professor Michael Leo Owens. Marshall is trying to distance himself from such comparisons. He told PolitiFact Georgia in a statement that "if Rangel is indeed guilty of the charges, he should have resigned a long time ago." Anthony Corrado, an expert in campaign finance laws, said it is common practice for members of Congress to give money from their PACs to fellow members facing tough re-election battles. The National Leadership PAC donated $899,000 to various Democratic candidates in 2008, said Corrado, a government professor at Colby College in Maine. National Leadership is probably one of the top 10 PACs in terms of donations, Corrado said. Corrado said candidates return money to someone or an organization that becomes politically liable. However, he said that Rangel giving money to Marshall during the last election cycle does not carry the same weight as if the contributions were made after Rangel's ethics allegations went public. "It's not the same," he said. Kennesaw State University political science professor Kerwin Swint agreed with Owens that the RNCC is smart to attempt to link Marshall with Rangel. However, Swint said the robocall is "slightly misleading" because it does not mention that contributions were made before the ethics allegations emerged. "That's politics," Swint said. "All is fair." So is the NRCC's message correct? The total amount of money was off by $1,000. But a point that concerned us more is that the contributions were made before the allegations surfaced. Anyone who hears the message would not know from it when the contributions were made, which made a difference to every expert we spoke with. We believe the statement does contain some truth. But it leaves out important details and takes some things out of context. On our Truth-o-Meter scale, that rates as Half True.	None	National Republican Congressional Committee	None	None	None	2010-08-23T06:00:00	2010-08-10	['United_States', 'Charles_B._Rangel']
-pomt-07214	Oil companies are able to sell oil that costs no more to produce today than it did one year ago.	mostly true	/oregon/statements/2011/jun/04/jeff-merkley/jeff-merkley-says-oil-production-costs-are-flat-ye/	For all of you who’ve watched the spinning numbers at the gas pump, PolitiFact Oregon offers a new challenge -- calculating the cost of finding oil and bringing it to the surface. Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley believes he’s cracked the code. He claimed as much in a May 16, 2011, speech on the Senate floor in which he urged his colleagues to pass legislation that would strip $2 billion in annual tax subsidies from the five biggest oil companies. (The bill failed.) "So the companies are able to sell oil that costs no more to produce today than it did one month ago, no more to produce today than it did three months ago, when oil was much lower, no more expensive to produce today than one year ago, when it was $3 a gallon," he said, noting that the price of oil as he spoke was $100 a barrel. With the economics of oil in constant flux, we will focus on the last part of Merkley’s assertion, that oil is "no more expensive to produce today than one year ago." The ultimate price is derived from a complicated -- and dense -- synthesis of fixed costs, the financial markets, geopolitical developments (Libya, for example) and global economics. That includes actual fixed costs such as transporting and refining oil in addition to a highly fluctuating value added by commodity traders. That’s why members of Congress, including Merkley, have been asking so many questions of late about the role of market speculators who by some estimates can add $20 or more to the cost of a barrel of oil. To back up his claim, Merkley cites a report by Democrats on the Finance Committee that finds production costs roughly the same from year to to year. That number, however, includes oil from old and very large fields that is much cheaper than oil from new and smaller deposits. He also points to testimony by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to the Senate Finance Committee on May 12, 2011. Tillerson, who was actually responding to a question about the impact of speculators, seemed to corroborate Merkley’s suggestion that the production cost has been stable. Noting that it’s hard to judge, Tillerson estimated the cost at $60 to $70 a barrel. That includes all production costs, but not the additional costs added by the financial markets. John Felmy, the chief economist for the oil industry’s trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, argues that Merkley is "flat out wrong." The costs fluctuate, he says, based on location, competition for crews and equipment and a host of other factors. There’s also this: The true cost of finding oil and bringing it to the surface, which is known as the "lifting cost," is directly tied to the size of the deposit. The bigger the reserve, the lower the cost. That’s a problem these days,Felmy says, because oil "is getting progressively harder to find," which means the deposit is usually smaller and the overall cost higher. Tillerson also raised the point that the costs of finding oil and bringing it to the surface increase as supplies dwindle. But he said that the industry has become more efficient and used improvements in technology to keep costs lower, making total production costs roughly the same. It’s also worth noting that the "finding costs" are only a fraction of the total cost of a barrel of oil. The Energy Information Administration, a federal department that independently collects and synthesizes data about energy production and costs, also shows production costs roughly the same from 2006 to 2009. Those are the most recent years for which data has been collected and published. While the total price of oil is known each day, EIA economist Neal Davis said, data on the production of oil lags more than a year behind. For that reason, he said, it’s impossible to conclusively say whether Merkley’s assertion is correct or not. He also said that costs vary from year to year so it is difficult to draw conclusions on future costs based on a previous year. Because no absolute answer can be given until new data is available, we think Merkley’s statement needs clarification. But his fundamental point -- that total production costs haven’t changed much in recent years -- is largely correct. Even Exxon CEO Tillerson says total production costs are relatively stable. We rate Merkley’s claim: Mostly True. Comment on this item.	None	Jeff Merkley	None	None	None	2011-06-04T06:00:00	2011-06-16	['None']
-pomt-00075	"The Democrats want to invite caravan after caravan of illegal aliens into our country. And they want to sign them up for free health care, free welfare, free education, and for the right to vote."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/nov/01/donald-trump/donald-trump-falsely-says-democrats-invite-migrant/	President Donald Trump is rallying support for Republican candidates in the midterm elections with sweeping rhetoric about Democrats looking out for waves of "illegal aliens" over the interests of Americans. "The Democrats want to invite caravan after caravan of illegal aliens into our country," Trump said Oct. 26 at a campaign rally in Charlotte, N.C. "And they want to sign them up for free health care, free welfare, free education, and for the right to vote." A caravan of Central American migrants is in southern Mexico trekking north to the Mexico-U.S. border. Some are fleeing gangs in Central America and plan to request asylum in the United States. Others say they are migrating due to poverty in their home countries. (Here’s what we know about the caravan, and here’s a round-up of misinformation about it.) The White House did not provide an on-the-record response to back Trump’s claim. Democrats have said immigrants should be allowed the legal right to ask for asylum, but that’s not the same as inviting caravans to come to the United States. They also haven’t said they want to "sign them up" for benefits or to vote illegally, or to go beyond existing laws. No Democratic invitation for caravans Democrats have largely remained silent about the caravan, focusing instead on Republicans and health care as the Nov. 6 Election Day nears. Some Democrats have said that immigrants seeking asylum should be allowed to go through that legal process, but that’s not necessarily extending an invitation. CNN’s Jake Tapper in an Oct. 23 interview asked Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to address the Democratic Party’s message about the caravan and whether they’d be allowed to "come in and apply for refugee status." "We are a nation of laws, and the laws that are on the books deal with issues of refugee and asylum status, and those are the laws that have always applied," Perez said. "It's a humanitarian issue of significance, and our laws require that people be treated with dignity and given that process." Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., made a similar statement. "Our strength has always been that we are a tolerant country, that we are welcoming in particular those who have fled harm," Harris said Oct. 22 in Iowa, according to CNN. "The idea that we're vilifying any one group, and the fear-mongering — that's not in the best interest of our country." House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer in an Oct. 20 joint statement said Trump was "desperate to change the subject from health care to immigration because he knows that health care is the number one issue Americans care about," adding that Republicans "are making a mess of our health care system." Pelosi reiterated that message in another statement: "Despite Republicans’ fear-mongering, this group of families may not even make it to the U.S. border, and those migrating for economic reasons will not qualify for asylum." Caravan members are also not "illegal aliens," said Stephen Legomsky, a professor emeritus at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, who served as chief counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Obama administration. "Of course the U.S. isn’t obligated to grant asylum to everyone who applies," said Legomsky, "but upon reaching the border they have a legal right, explicitly granted by Congress, to apply for it." "Sign them up for free health care, free welfare, free education, and for the right to vote" Democrats aren’t saying they want to sign up caravan members for perks upon arrival, much less the right to vote without being U.S. citizens. PolitiFact has repeatedly debunked Trump’s claims of mass voter fraud. Even if some caravan members were granted asylum and became citizens, it would take several years before they are able to vote for candidates for federal office. (A small number of jurisdictions allow noncitizens to vote in local races.) "The only caravan members who might one day become eligible to vote would be those who are found to meet all the legal requirements for asylum, later acquire green cards, and then eventually become naturalized citizens," Legomsky said. A person must be a green card holder for at least five years and meet certain other requirement before applying for U.S. citizenship. If granted asylum, immigrants do become eligible for Medicaid and other forms of government assistance, Legomsky said. Federal law bars immigrants in the country illegally from most public assistance programs. However, they can receive free school lunches, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and emergency medical care. "Concern over illegal immigrants placing significant demands on public service is well founded," said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors low immigration levels. "But it is not some moral defect on their part, rather it reflects the very low education levels of this population and resulting low income and them needing services." A 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case also said that immigrants, regardless of immigration status, are allowed free elementary and secondary education. "But immigrant children can’t access that right if they are detained waiting for their asylum hearings, except in a few family detention centers," said Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell Law School. If caravan members get into the United States and receive emergency medical care, go to public school and get free school lunch, it wouldn’t necessarily be because Democrats "sign them up," it would be because it’s permitted under law. If they eventually obtain U.S. citizenship, they’d be allowed to vote. Our ruling Trump said, "The Democrats want to invite caravan after caravan of illegal aliens into our country. And they want to sign them up for free health care, free welfare, free education, and for the right to vote." A top Democrat said immigrants should be allowed go through the asylum application process, which is available under law. But it’s a stretch for Trump to say that’s an invitation for caravans to come to the United States. Immigrants granted asylum become eligible for Medicaid and other forms of government assistance. Immigrants in the country illegally can receive emergency medical care and limited access to programs, such as free school lunch and free public education. That wouldn’t be because Democrats "want to sign them up," but because it’s allowed by law. Trump’s claim also falsely implies Democrats want to rush caravan members in to vote in the midterm elections. Trump’s claim is inaccurate and a distortion of the facts. We rate it False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-11-01T14:17:13	2018-10-26	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-06914	Says the state budget "doubled property tax credits for seniors and middle class New Jerseyans" and had "no tax increases for any New Jersey family for the second year in a row."	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2011/jul/24/chris-christie/gov-chris-christie-says-new-jersey-budget-doubled-/	Gov. Chris Christie recently took the budget battle to the airwaves, touting his $29.7 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2012 as a model of fiscal responsibility. In a radio spot sponsored by the New Jersey Republican State Committee, Christie said the budget "doubled property tax credits for seniors and middle class New Jerseyans" and included "no tax increases for any New Jersey family for the second year in a row." PolitiFact New Jersey found that the new budget is projected to double the average Homestead property tax credit. The question of tax increases is not as clear-cut, however: the state’s major tax rates have stayed the same, but tax credit programs, including Homestead, were reduced last year. First, let’s tackle the Homestead credits. The governor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A Republican Party spokesman cited the Homestead program to back up the governor’s claim. According to a budget analysis by the state’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services, Christie is right that Homestead credits are set to double under the state budget for fiscal 2012. The fiscal 2012 budget increased funding for the Homestead program from $268.2 million in fiscal 2011 to $458 million. According to OLS, the "$189.8 million funding increase is slated to pay for a doubling in (fiscal) 2012 of homestead credits beneficiaries received in (fiscal) 2011." The analysis, citing estimates from the governor’s office, said the average credit for 938,500 homeowners would increase to $476 in fiscal 2012 from $238 in fiscal 2011, when credits were cut significantly. So, Christie technically doubled credits in fiscal 2012. However, the average Homestead benefit would still be less than half of the $1,035 average in fiscal 2010, according to OLS estimates. Also, in fiscal 2012, Christie is maintaining the eligibility requirements for homeowners set by his predecessor -- up to $150,000 in income for senior and disabled homeowners and up to $75,000 in income for all other homeowners. But the fiscal 2011 reduction in the Homestead credits work against the governor’s argument that there have been no tax increases for two consecutive years. It is true that the rates for the state’s three major taxes -- gross income, sales and corporation business -- have not increased under Christie. But it’s also true that the state has reduced funding for some tax credits, which could leave people with less money to offset their tax bills. Between fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2011, the state reduced funding for the Homestead and senior freeze programs as well as the State Earned Income Tax Credit. Individuals can receive the earned income tax credits even if they don’t owe taxes. Senior freeze provides additional property tax relief for senior citizens and the disabled. Four experts with different political persuasions and a Rutgers University professor told us that cutting one or all of those payments could be considered tax increases. Josh Barro, a fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, said a reduction in the earned income tax credit was not a tax hike, because it’s a welfare payment through the tax code. But reducing the property tax credits could be considered tax increases, since they’re meant to offset property tax burdens, Barro said. Curtis Dubay, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said a reduction in the earned income tax credit could force a recipient to pay more taxes if his credit still falls short. For example, an individual may owe $1,000 in income taxes and then receive a credit for $800, but still owe $200 in taxes, Dubay said. But Alan Berube of the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program said in an email that a reduction would affect earned income tax credit recipients with no remaining income tax liability. "For all, it will increase their total tax bill when you consider all state and local taxes together (i.e, not just income taxes)," he wrote. Andrew Pratt, a spokesman for the state Treasury Department, argued in a series of emails that the earned income tax credit is just a payment to low-income individuals, not a tax break. Pratt pointed out that nearly 75 percent of recipients in 2010 did not owe income taxes. Individuals don’t have to file income tax returns if they earn less than $10,000 annually for single filers or less than $20,000 for married couples filing jointly. Pratt added, "The Senior Freeze and Homestead credits are payments from the Treasury. You cannot classify a reduction or a freeze in the payment or eligibility as a tax increase, unless you are doing so to score political points." Let’s recap: Christie said in a radio ad that the fiscal 2012 budget doubles property tax credits and includes no tax increases for the second consecutive year. The governor’s right about the property tax credits being doubled, even though they’ll remain below the fiscal 2010 average. It’s true that the rates for the state’s three major taxes have remained the same. But three tax credit programs were reduced in fiscal 2011, and several experts said at least one of those reductions could represent a tax hike. We rate the statement Half True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Chris Christie	None	None	None	2011-07-24T05:15:00	2011-07-12	['New_Jersey']
-afck-00329	“[T]he situation is more promising on the jobs front. Two days ago, Stats SA released the employment figures for the last quarter of 2014. The report shows that there are now 15.3-million people who are employed in South Africa. Jobs grew by 203,000.”	mostly-correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/sona-2015-key-claims-fact-checked-part-1/	None	None	None	None	None	SONA 2015: Key claims fact-checked	2015-02-13 03:07	None	['South_Africa']
-pomt-04489	Says 50 million people would lose their health insurance if Obamacare is repealed.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/05/barack-obama/obama-says-50-million-lose-coverage-if-obamacare-r/	Both President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney say they want more Americans to have affordable health insurance. That’s about where their agreement ends. In the first debate of the general election, the candidates sparred about how best to improve the health care system, with Romney calling for a repeal of Obamacare, and Obama defending the reform law. "Gov. Romney says we should replace (Obamacare)... But the problem is, he hasn't described what exactly we'd replace it with, other than saying we're going to leave it to the states," Obama said. "But the fact of the matter is that some of the prescriptions that he's offered, like letting you buy insurance across state lines, there's no indication that that somehow is going to help somebody who's got a pre-existing condition be able to finally buy insurance. In fact, it's estimated that by repealing Obamacare, you're looking at 50 million people losing health insurance." It’s that last line that grabbed our attention: 50 million people losing their health coverage if Obamacare is repealed. We decided to check it out. The two plans Obama’s health care law seeks health coverage for every American by requiring most Americans to obtain coverage or face a fine. To help people meet that requirement, it expands Medicaid for the poor, provides subsidies for people of modest means to buy insurance and requires businesses to provide employee insurance. It also creates exchanges where individuals and businesses can purchase private policies. Government analysts predict that as the law is implemented, the number of uninsured Americans will decline. Opponents argue that it imposes new taxes on families and businesses and could discourage hiring. Romney has pledged to repeal the law. He has offered a general outline of what he would replace it with, though with few specifics. His campaign website says he will limit requirements on private insurance and Medicaid, encourage "flexibility" in the market and convert Medicaid to a block grant program administered by the states. In speeches, he has also said he would provide an income tax deduction for the cost of purchasing insurance. The projections If Romney wins the election and acts to repeal Obamacare on Day 1, there is no accounting that shows 50 million people losing their insurance right away. Obama didn’t say so, but his statement referred to projections out to 2022. That said, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obamacare will reduce the number of uninsured. Without the law, the CBO says there will be a total of 60 million uninsured Americans by 2022. With the law, that number will be only 30 million. So if Obamacare is repealed, that’s 30 million people without insurance as a result. The remainder of Obama’s 50-million number originates with a study gauging the impact of Romney’s plan. Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said Romney has suggested converting Medicaid, the health program for the poor, to block grants, with a cap on federal funding of inflation plus 1 percentage point. That’s similar to the budget proposed by vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, versions of which passed the House this year and last. (We should note that any move to turn Medicaid into a block grant would require new legislation passed by Congress.) Both proposals, Park said, fall short of Medicaid’s current growth rate. "We’re talking a big gap between what Medicaid would be scheduled to grow at vs. what it would be under the block grant," Park said. The Ryan budget, he said, cuts $810 billion from the program over 10 years. (Campaign finance records show that Park has donated $350 to the Obama campaign.) The Urban Institute, a think tank that studies health policy and social programs, determined that the cuts will force states to tighten eligibility for the program, leading to between 14 million and 27 million people being dropped. Another study, written for the liberal organization FamiliesUSA, also concluded that Romney’s plan for Medicaid would end up pushing people out of the program. To estimate how many, author Jonathan Gruber, who was an architect of both Romney’s health plan in Massachusetts and of Obamacare, said he assumed in the study that states would find a way to absorb 25 percent of the cuts (by becoming more efficient, cutting down on overhead, etc.) but that the rest would have to be made up by tightening eligibility and dropping Medicaid recipients. He found that by 2022, 18 million more people would be uninsured. In a second study, Gruber assumed greater savings by the states -- 50 percent -- in absorbing the Medicaid cuts before dropping people, and determined that 12 million more people would lack health insurance. "The bottom line is it depends on assumptions you make, but no matter what you do it’s going to be a huge difference in the number of uninsured," Gruber said. The counter arguments Yuval Levin, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, said the studies fail to account for the Medicare cuts, tax increases, and increased premium costs in Obamacare, "and so presents a description of the law’s effects on the health care system that is badly skewed." With Medicaid, Levin said it’s "high implausible" that states would drop people upon implementing the block grant, which will also create unaccounted for savings. "This all leads them to the implausible conclusion that Romney’s extensive efforts to expand insurance coverage (through purchasing pools, the transformation of the tax treatment of coverage, purchasing across state lines, co-insurance, expanded health savings accounts, protections for people with pre-existing conditions, etc.) would result in less rather than more coverage," Levin said. (Campaign records show he donated $2,467 to the Romney campaign and $200 to the Republican National Committee.) Joseph Antos, a scholar with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he found flaws with the assumptions about Obamacare’s impact. "FamiliesUSA assumes that all states fully expand Medicaid, despite the Supreme Court ruling that they cannot be penalized by losing all federal funds if they do not do it. Obviously, the poorer states won’t expand in that case—that 100 percent fed funding disappears in a few years, and the states then begin paying, and many haven’t figured out how to cover teachers pensions yet," Antos said in an email. "They also assume that states will fully implement the exchanges on time. That is also not going to happen. Some will, some won’t." "Conclusion: far fewer than 32.9 million will be covered by Obamacare." Our ruling Obama said in the debate that by repealing Obamacare, "you're looking at 50 million people losing health insurance." He didn’t say so, but that figure is based on projections for a decade down the road, and it applies to people who don't have insurance now. If Romney repeals the health care law, some of those people will not have actually gotten coverage. And, only about 30 million to 32.9 million people would lose coverage by 2022 if Obamacare was simply repealed. An additional 18 million people might lose coverage if Romney achieves his plan of converting Medicaid to a block grant, according to some studies. Obama’s number assumes the worst about the possible effect of Romney’s plan, whose stated purpose is to get more people covered. And some critics say the promise of Obamacare is inflated -- that not so many people will gain coverage, therefore not so many would lose it if the law is repealed. Obama is right that repealing the health care law will result in millions losing coverage, but his statement is an oversimplification of long-term projections and includes more than just a simple repeal of the 2010 law. On balance, we rate Obama’s statement Mostly False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-10-05T17:47:47	2012-10-03	['None']
-tron-00123	General John J. Pershing Dipped Bullets in Pig’s Blood	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/general-john-j-pershing-dipped-bullets-in-pigs-blood/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	General John J. Pershing Dipped Bullets in Pig’s Blood	Feb 22, 2016	None	['None']
-bove-00244	2002 Gujarat Riots Image Used For 2017 ‘Save Bengal’ Protest	none	https://www.boomlive.in/2002-gujarat-riots-image-used-for-2017-save-bengal-protest/	None	None	None	None	None	2002 Gujarat Riots Image Used For 2017 ‘Save Bengal’ Protest	Jul 09 2017 11:36 am, Last Updated: Jul 10 2017 3:25 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-04225	The "error rates" for the Fulton County elections department are "well below the average."	false	/georgia/statements/2012/nov/26/emma-darnell/no-evidence-found-back-fulton-commissioners-claim/	Fulton County election officials have been the subject of much scrutiny from state officials and some news outlets for problems many voters had at the polls on Election Day. Annoyed by the criticism, County Commissioner Emma Darnell defended the staff at a recent meeting. "I did some checking on my own to see what are the error rates for elections departments as large as this one. You’re well below the average," Darnell said during the County Commission’s meeting Nov. 7. PolitiFact Georgia was curious to determine whether Fulton’s error rates were below average, but we encountered a roadblock. Darnell said she respects the work of PolitiFact Georgia but wouldn’t discuss anything related to the election department. She complained about biased media coverage on the subject, particularly by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The commissioner did suggest we examine Fulton and compare it with other Georgia counties. Since Fulton is Georgia’s highest-populated county, we also thought a fair comparison would be to examine Fulton against other counties across the nation with similar populations. Without knowing exactly what the commissioner meant by "error rates," we sought ways to examine mistakes by election officials at the polls. In Georgia, most voters cast their ballots on touch screens that are recorded on cards. Other states use other methods to record votes, so there is not a uniform way to measure errors. One uniform method to count votes, though, is provisional ballots, which appeared to be a problem for Fulton on Election Day. The greatest complaint about Fulton came from people who said they were told their names weren’t on the county’s voter rolls. In such cases, the person is given a provisional ballot and the county then works to verify that person is registered to vote. According to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, 9,575 provisional ballots were cast on Nov. 6 in Fulton. That was more than twice the total of provisional ballots cast in Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties combined, state data show. More than 100 people who tried to vote in Fulton have filed complaints to the state about the Nov. 6 election, the AJC reported. Fulton elections officials were still printing and delivering supplemental voter lists to precincts hours after the polls opened, the AJC has reported. Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp called the situation a "debacle." Fulton officials have made some mistakes in recent years administering elections. In 2008, the county sent absentee ballots late to as many as 2,500 voters, the AJC reported at the time. The result: Some voters were unable to cast ballots in that year’s presidential election. In April 2009, state records show some Fulton election workers tossed thousands of voter registration cards in a Dumpster, violating proper procedure. They also failed to retain absentee ballot applications. The State Elections Board ordered Fulton to pay a $120,000 fine, plus costs associated with an investigation, a remedial plan and other penalties. Nearly 400,000 people voted in Fulton in the November 2012 general election, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s website. The county has 567,174 registered voters, state records show. Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used 2008 federal elections data to compare the percentage of provisional ballots used by Fulton and nearly three dozen other U.S. counties with 400,000 to 800,000 voters. Other experts on elections also suggested we contact Stewart. In 2008, slightly more than 400,000 Fulton residents voted in the presidential election. About 4,100 ballots were cast using provisional ballots. That’s a 1 percent rate, which was about average among those 35 counties, Stewart said. Fulton’s 1 percent was twice as high as that in Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. There were nine smaller Georgia counties with a higher percentage of provisional ballots than Fulton, Stewart found. Those provisional ballots still needed to be checked to determine whether the vote should be counted. Nearly 1,500 of those provisional ballots in Fulton were rejected, Stewart said, which amounts to an acceptance rate of nearly 64 percent. The average acceptance rate for U.S. counties similar to Fulton was about the same, Stewart said. Stewart looked at the number of provisional ballots cast in Fulton in the Nov. 6 election and compared it with all the people who voted. "If there are 11,000 provisional ballots this year out of 400,000 cast, that’s a 2.8 percent rate, which is quite a bit higher than 2008," Stewart said. Let’s recap. Fulton Commissioner Emma Darnell said the number of errors by the county’s elections staff was "well below the average." She declined to provide details to back up her claim. Research shows Fulton was in the middle among U.S. counties of comparable size when it came to provisional ballots rejected in 2008, the last presidential election. That year, twice as many provisional ballots were cast in Fulton than there were in some of Georgia’s largest counties. From the evidence available, the county’s recent history and the high number of provisional ballots cast in this month’s election, there’s not much evidence to back up Darnell’s claim that Fulton was "well below the average." We rate her claim False.	None	Emma Darnell	None	None	None	2012-11-26T06:00:00	2012-11-07	['None']
-snes-00769	Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor have agreed to fight a rematch, to be fought under modified mixed martial arts rules.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-conor-mcgregor-and-floyd-mayweather-sign-for-a-rematch/	None	Sports	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather Sign for a Rematch?	13 April 2018	None	['Floyd_Mayweather,_Jr.']
-tron-03185	Members of Obama Administration are Related to People in the Mainstream Media	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/white-house-media-relations-052013/	None	politics	None	None	None	Members of Obama Administration are Related to People in the Mainstream Media	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-05641	Says "we got a chance to pass what I think is Oregon's first human trafficking bill which has increased by 66 percent the calls to the human trafficking hotline."	mostly false	/oregon/statements/2012/mar/22/jefferson-smith/did-human-trafficking-bill-lead-dozens-hotline-cal/	Last November Portland mayoral candidate and state Rep. Jefferson Smith sat down with Portland Monthly magazine to talk about his candidacy and the future of the city. He opened the discussion with a list of some of his legislative accomplishments, including this one: "We got a chance to pass what I think is Oregon's first human trafficking bill, which has increased by 66 percent the calls to the human trafficking hotline." Smith was referencing a bill that passed in the February 2010 special session. Essentially the law asked the Oregon Liquor Control Commission to send out a letter highlighting the issue of human trafficking with each license renewal notice. The letter included a sticker that bar owners and others could post directing people to a hotline run by the National Human Trafficking Resource Center. The bill was a start, but we wondered if it really had the effect of increasing calls to the hotline by 66 percent. We called the OLCC first to get a handle on just how the law ended up playing out. Spokeswoman Joy Spencer told us the organization sent notices to just over 10,000 licensees between April 2010 and March 2011. The program has since ended. Next, we checked with the hotline to see how Smith’s numbers panned out. Thankfully, the Polaris Project, which runs the hotline, made this pretty easy for us. The project publishes yearly statistics on the hotline, which has been up and running since 2007. The statistics are incredibly comprehensive. They show where the calls are coming from -- down to the county level -- along with the caller’s language, profession if disclosed, and the way they learned about the hotline. We did some quick math and found Smith was right. Between 2009 and 2010, the number of calls coming from Oregon increased 66 percent, jumping from 95 to 158. Even more impressively, that trend continued into 2011, when the hotline received 191 calls. That’s a 20 percent increase from the previous year. The figures, though, are always the easy part. Smith was clearly claiming a causation between the increase in the calls and the bill he helped pass. For that, however, there wasn’t much evidence. As Megan Fowler, spokeswoman for the Polaris Project pointed out, the hotline has been seeing the same trend nationwide. Between 2009 and 2010, the number of calls nationally rose from 7,637 to 11,874, a 55 percent increase. In 2011, the number hit 19,427 -- a 63 percent increase. What’s more, if you look at where most people in Oregon found the hotline number, the biggest sources are the Internet or "prior knowledge." Few people came by ways of posters or other materials. A number of callers -- 24 percent in 2010 and 33 percent the following year -- didn’t specify where they got the number. However, that seems to run somewhat counter to Fowler’s experience with Texas where, she said, the Legislature made a law mandating that establishments put up a poster referring people to the hotline. There, she said, a huge number of callers cited "posters" as their informational source. "We definitely encourage actions like" Oregon’s law, Fowler said. "We do see greater success when the bill is a mandatory posting. But I wouldn't want to dissuade people from putting the hotline number out." We called Smith to check in with him on the statement. He immediately said that to draw a direct relationship between the hotline gains and his bill was an overstep on his part. He also pointed out that in more recent references, he’s been more humble in what the bill accomplished. Part of the reason, Smith said, is that since the discussion in November he’s had more time to look at the figures and realized the connection wasn’t as strong as he initially expected. "I don't think that (the quote) accurately reflects the way we typically talk about it." Smith followed up by sending us a few copies of a list of legislative achievements he’s since distributed. Here’s how he usually plays the human trafficking law: "Chief Co-sponsor of the Human Trafficking Hotline bill -- one of Oregon’s first pieces of human trafficking legislation. Chief Co-sponsor of HB 4146, providing for the expungement of sex trafficking victims. Calls from Oregon to the national hotline have reportedly increased by 66-68%." "I try to be very careful not to say ‘because’ -- because I rarely can be confident of ‘because,’" Smith wrote. It’s true that in his more recent statements, Smith doesn’t make an explicitly causal relationship. But even so, it’s implied. That brings us to our ruling. The number of calls to the hotline has increased significantly over the past couple years -- even more so than the 66 percent Smith cites if you consider the 2011 figures. That said, there’s not much evidence that Oregon’s "hotline law" was the driving force. Nationally, the figures are up by about the same degree and most callers don’t report that they found out about the hotline by way of a poster or other such material. We rate this claim Mostly False -- there’s a grain of truth, but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.	None	Jefferson Smith	None	None	None	2012-03-22T16:02:07	2011-11-21	['Oregon']
-pomt-15161	"Our companies are moving into Mexico more than almost any other place right now."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/27/donald-trump/trump-says-us-companies-moving-mexico-more-almost-/	Among Donald Trump’s most talked-about immigration policies is his proposal to make Mexico pay for a border wall. Trump laid out the rationale for why Mexico would agree in an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo. "You know what, because they make a fortune with us," Trump explained on Aug. 19. "Our companies are moving into Mexico more than almost any other place right now. We are losing our industry. We're losing our business to Mexico." We were curious about Trump’s claim that more U.S. companies are relocating south than almost any other place in the world. (China, anyone?) His campaign didn’t get back to us, but given the context of Trump’s claims, we’ll assume he’s talking about outsourcing production overseas, rather than companies packing up their headquarters and moving abroad for good (a practice known as corporate inversion, which often takes place in the Bahamas). Experts told us there’s no official tally of the number of companies closing plants in the United States and moving production abroad. "Outsourcing is hard to measure," explained Gene Grossman, a professor of international economics at Princeton University. "Only rarely can we see a firm close a plant in one place and open a new one someplace else doing the same thing. So, we use proxies." We’ll look at three different proxies: the amount of imports from other countries, the number of U.S. companies operating in different countries, and the amount of money U.S. companies are investing in firms abroad (known as foreign direct investment). Our southern neighbor doesn’t top the list by any of these metrics, but Trump has a point when he says Mexico is near the top. It’s No. 3 in import value, No. 7 in number of U.S. firms (out of 189 countries), and No. 15 (out of 171 countries) in foreign direct investment. If Trump really wanted to name a country as the top outsourcing destination, experts agreed that it would be China, not Mexico. It’s No. 1 in import value and No. 6 in number of U.S. companies. (Europe dominates foreign direct investment.) "He’s mistaken. More companies are moving to China than Mexico," said Robert Scott, who studies trade at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. "China, in particular, has been a favorite location for many U.S. businesses, often due to the lure of the vast and growing Chinese market," added James Jackson, an international trade analyst for the Congressional Research Service. Much of outsourcing to China is indirect, according to Scott. He pointed to Apple Inc. as a prime example of a U.S. company letting someone else do the manufacturing (their most notable contractor is the controversial company Foxconn). Mexico, however, is certainly competitive and will remain an important outsourcing destination -- thanks to its proximity to the United States and particularly when it comes to making cars and car parts, experts said. While there’s no official tracking, there are plenty of anecdotes of automakers moving south, cited by Trump himself. Yet some experts contend that while his claim has some truth to it, these relocations and outsourcing are not signs of the U.S. "losing" businesses or jobs to Mexico. Rather, these developments are typical of a dynamic economy. "Moving jobs to Mexico has not been the major reason for the decline in manufacturing jobs in the U.S.," said Martin Baily, a senior economics fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Manufacturing jobs as a share of total jobs have been declining in the U.S. for over 50 years, same is true in all other advanced economies." Our ruling Trump said, "Our companies are moving into Mexico more than almost any other place right now." There’s no direct measure of how many companies are moving plants from the United States to Mexico. When we look at outsourcing through official metrics (imports, foreign direct investment, and the number of U.S. business housed in a certain country), Mexico places near the top but not at the top. Experts said China was the top outsourcing destination. Trump used the qualifier "almost," which makes his statement partially accurate, but it still needs additional context and information. We rate it Half True.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-08-27T12:58:38	2015-08-19	['Mexico']
-pomt-06826	The debt-ceiling bill "doesn’t cut the debt. It will add about $7 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/aug/08/jim-demint/jim-demint-says-debt-ceiling-bill-wont-actually-cu/	After the agonizingly drawn-out negotiations to raise the federal debt ceiling, Americans may be forgiven for thinking that the enacted legislation will actually result in lower federal debt. But Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., says that such a view is mistaken. "This bill doesn’t cut the debt," DeMint, a leading fiscal conservative, told The State newspaper. "It will add about $7 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years on the backs of our children and grandchildren. This bill doesn’t stop deficit spending. It locks in trillion-dollar spending deficits for years to come." A reader asked us to check DeMint’s claim that the bill "doesn't cut the debt," so we did. In the big picture, we found that the bill does slow the rate of growth in the debt. But we also found that the debt still rockets upward in absolute terms due to a tide of prior spending commitments. But we'll also note that arithmetic is only part of it: DeMint's phrasing is also somewhat off-base. He attributes the increase in the debt over the next 10 years to the bill itself, when, in fact, it is a result of the bill's inaction in curbing spending commitments already set in motion. A fine point, perhaps, but one that we think is worth pointing out. We'll return to this issue in a moment. First, let's take a look at the numbers. Doing so is tougher than it sounds, since budget experts said there is no debt estimate for 2021 that you can simply point to -- you have to estimate it from scratch. With the help of Marc Goldwein, policy director of the centrist Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, we were able to navigate the spreadsheet jungle and put together these calculations, some of which we rounded for simplicity. First, here's our starting point for measuring the debt in 2021 We start with a Congressional Budget Office’s estimate from March -- long before the debt deal was signed -- of the "baseline" for publicly held debt in 2021, in table 1-5 of this CBO document: About $18 trillion. (All the figures we are listing here assume a 10-year extension of the policies listed.) Next, we adjust for other policies that are expected to reduce or increase that debt figure over the next decade • Subtract the approximate savings from the appropriations bill passed in March ($122 billion) plus interest savings (more than $24 billion), listed on the final page of this CBO document: Reduction of about $150 billion, leaving $17.85 trillion. • Subtract savings from the military draw-down in Iraq and Afghanistan, including interest savings, listed in table 1-7 of this CBO document: Reduction of about $1.37 trillion, leaving $16.48 trillion. • Add the cost of extending the George W. Bush tax cuts and adjusting the Alternative Minimum Tax ($3.82 trillion) plus interest ($795 billion), listed in table 1-7 of this CBO document: Addition of $4.62 trillion, making the running total $21.1 trillion. • Add the cost of avoiding scheduled reductions in Medicare physician reimbursements, commonly known as the "Doc Fix" ($298 billion for a 10-year freeze) plus interest ($60 billion), in row one of table 3 of this CBO document: Addition of approximately $360 billion, making the running total -- or how much the debt was expected to grow before the debt deal -- roughly $21.5 trillion. Next, we subtract the 2011 debt DeMint was talking about how the debt would increase over "the next 10 years," which is from 2012 to 2021. Take the running total of $21.5 trillion -- the estimated debt in 2021 -- and subtract the debt for 2011 ($10.4 trillion), as listed in table 1-5 in this CBO document, meaning that the increase in debt from 2012 to the end of 2021 is an estimated $11.1 trillion. Finally, we determine how much the debt deal changed this number Subtract the savings from the debt ceiling deal that are slated to accrue between 2012 and 2021 ($2.12 trillion), leaving roughly $9 trillion. So by this calculation, DeMint actually underestimates the growth in the debt over 10 years -- it could be as much as $9 trillion in additional debt rather than $7 trillion. And that only strengthens DeMint’s point that "this bill doesn’t cut the debt." We should note some caveats with our estimate. Most notably, Congress and the president could decide to cut back more aggressively than the deficit deal requires -- for instance, through a bigger military draw-down or allowing the upper-income Bush tax cuts to expire in 2012. That would reduce the additional debt accrued -- but even if that happens, DeMint still has a nice cushion for his estimate. We should also explain that the cuts envisioned in the debt-ceiling deal are real -- they just won’t make that much of a dent in a debt that’s growing rapidly due to increases in spending on items such as Social Security and Medicare, as well as interest for previously accrued debt. So DeMint’s numbers are actually a cautious estimate -- our math suggests that the debt could continue to grow by as much as $9 trillion. Since the senator’s main point was to warn people that the debt-ceiling deal "doesn’t cut the debt," even his low-ball estimate amply supports his point. However, as we noted, there’s a problem with how DeMint phrased his statement. Technically, the debt that will be added is not a result of the debt ceiling bill itself, as DeMint indicated. The bill didn’t "add about $7 trillion in new debt," as he put it -- instead, it fails to stop that debt from being added. We understood what DeMint’s point was -- and thought it was a valid one -- but at PolitiFact, one of our guiding principles is that "words matter." In this case, DeMint was wrong to say that the debt ceiling bill itself added to the debt, but he was right in his point that, despite passage of the bill, debt will continue to grow. For that reason we rate his statement Mostly False.	None	Jim DeMint	None	None	None	2011-08-08T14:56:16	2011-08-03	['None']
-wast-00047	"A study shows that corn, soybean and wheat farmers across the U.S. have already lost $13 billion because of the administration's trade war. We need trade policies that make sense for North Dakota, protect farmers and ranchers, and open up markets.	2 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/08/13/both-sides-of-the-aisle-stretch-the-truth-in-the-soybean-debate/	None	None	Heidi Heitkamp	Meg Kelly	None	Both sides of the aisle stretch the truth in the soybean debate	August 13	None	['United_States', 'North_Dakota']
-pomt-12586	"Two liberal Democrat congressmen arrested for planning Trump’s assassination."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/apr/07/blog-posting/pair-fake-democratic-congressmen-were-not-arrested/	A fake news post that said two Democratic congressmen were caught plotting President Donald Trump’s death was actually a repurposed article from a website known for trolling conservatives. A story from March 21, 2017, carried the headline "2 liberal Democrat congressmen arrested for planning Trump’s assassination." Facebook users flagged it as potentially fake, as part of the site’s efforts to winnow fake news from users’ news feeds. The post said Rep. Harold Spunkmeyer, D-Ill., and Rep. Johnathon Leominster Jr., D-Mass., plotted to ambush Trump during a trip to Florida. The story quoted a federal agent as saying "there was enough evidence when presented to the president for him to order us to take them as terrorism suspects." You don’t have to be from Illinois or Massachusetts to be able to quickly confirm that there are no members of Congress named Harold Spunkmeyer or Johnathon Leominster Jr. There also has been no record of any such arrests of other lawmakers, because the story isn’t real. We emailed ProudLeader.com to see if they knew that, since there’s no disclaimer on the link, but never heard back. We’ve seen the same post pop up on some other websites, but its origins are a familiar source: TheLastLineOfDefense.org, which posted the original story on Feb. 23. The parody website has been the source of several fake news stories that we’ve previously checked. TheLastLineOfDefense.org fabricates posts keyed to topics designed to inflame conservatives. The articles quite often end up being passed around on multiple websites, often without an indication that they are fake. TheLastLineOfDefense.org doesn’t immediately indicate that any of its stories are fake, but its About Us link notes that "all articles should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney." This claim, too, is total baloney. We rate it Pants On Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-04-07T10:00:00	2017-03-21	['None']
-pomt-00257	Sen. Joe Manchin "stands with Hillary Clinton and D.C. Dems on gun control, higher taxes, amnesty, and Planned Parenthood."	half-true	/west-virginia/statements/2018/oct/04/patrick-morrisey/fact-checking-patrick-morrisey-positions-held-joe-/	In his battle to unseat U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Republican state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is working hard to paint Manchin as a captive of his party even though West Virginia voters strongly back President Donald Trump. In a tweet on Aug. 31, Morrisey said, "On life, guns, tax cuts, and coal, I stand with President @realDonaldTrump and West Virginia. Meanwhile, lying liberal Joe Manchin stands with Hillary Clinton and DC Dems on gun control, higher taxes, amnesty and Planned Parenthood. The choice could not be more clear. #WVsen." See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com In this fact-check, we’ll look at whether Morrisey had a point about Manchin’s stances on guns, taxes, immigration and Planned Parenthood. Guns Manchin once received strong support from the National Rifle Association. But that’s not the case any more. In 2004, when Manchin was running for governor, he received an A-plus rating from the NRA and received the group’s endorsement when running for governor. And in 2010 and 2012, when Manchin was running for a U.S. Senate seat, he was endorsed by the NRA and received an A rating. "Joe Manchin is committed to protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms guaranteed to all Americans," Chris Cox, chairman of the NRA Political Victory Fund, wrote in 2012. But Manchin’s relations with the NRA soured in 2013 after he and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., proposed legislation that would have enacted tighter background checks for certain gun purchases. Manchin and Toomey framed the bill as a compromise, but the NRA saw it as the first step down a slippery slope and opposed it. (It never became law.) This year, the NRA gave Manchin a D and said it was airing ads on behalf of Morrisey in the Charleston and Bluefield markets. "Contrary to what Joe Manchin says in West Virginia, he has supported the agenda of Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer by voting in favor of gun control in Washington, D.C.," Cox wrote this year. In an interview on CBS news in March 2018 — in the wake of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. — Manchin defended his position as "not gun control. It’s gun sense. … This bill of ours, the Manchin-Toomey bill, should be the base bill they work off of." He also has signaled support for banning bump stocks and raising the legal age of purchasing assault rifles. Manchin added that he would not support a ban on AR-15s. When he was asked about the possibility of the ban, he said, "I don’t have any friends that own the gun right now, I don’t know anyone who’s committed a crime with it, so I wouldn’t take their gun away." "Joe Manchin supports protecting West Virginians’ Second Amendment rights," said Manchin spokesman Grant Herring. "Manchin is a lifetime NRA member. Manchin opposed banning assault weapons and sponsored and voted for legislation allowing concealed-carry reciprocity." Taxes The biggest tax vote in recent years came in December 2017, when the Senate considered a bill backed by President Trump and the GOP-controlled House that made major tax cuts and enacted other changes to the tax code. Manchin, like the chamber’s other Democrats, voted against passage, but the bill received enough Republican support to become law. Manchin’s vote against the bill isn’t exactly a vote for "higher taxes" — it was a vote to keep the status quo on taxes — but he did pass up the opportunity to lower taxes for many Americans, so this charge has some validity. Previously, we’ve reported that in 2012, Manchin voted for the "Buffett Rule," which would have imposed a minimum effective tax rate for high-income taxpayers. He also supported legislation offered by the Bowles-Simpson commission, which was an attempt to balance the budget in a way that included tax increases as well as spending cuts. Immigration policy In 2013, Manchin voted in favor of the "Gang of Eight" bill that, among other things, would have set up a path to legal status and an eventual opportunity for citizenship. The "Gang of Eight" refers to a bipartisan group of eight senators — four Democrats and four Republicans — Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., and John McCain R-Ariz. It was endorsed by former President Barack Obama. The bill passed the Senate, 68-32, with 14 Republicans joining 54 Democrats and Democratic-caucusing independent senators in voting for it. (The bill did not get a hearing in the House and never became law.) Manchin was one of the Democrats who voted for it. But did it amount to amnesty? As we’ve concluded in the past, defining "amnesty" is tricky. Some view it as blanket permission for undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States, while others view amnesty as any measure that is favorable to any undocumented immigrants, even if it includes a list of tough measures they have to meet. Republicans who supported the legislation, along with most Democrats, argued that the bill did not offer amnesty. At the time, we concluded that the bill did not offer blanket legal residency to unauthorized immigrants. It mandated fines, background checks and waiting periods and was tougher than a 1986 law that was more in line with a traditional definition of "amnesty." "This bill includes numerous punishments for unauthorized immigrants who broke the laws, including paying fines and other legal sanctions," Alex Nowrasteh with the libertarian Cato Institute told PolitiFact in 2013. "If it was amnesty they would be legalized immediately with no punishment, no process. They would just be forgiven and handed a green card." Since then, Manchin has sought to find a middle ground in the Senate. However, facing a tough reelection campaign in a solidly pro-Trump state, he has often emphasized his stance on toughening border security. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com In a press release from February 2018 — after the Senate failed to reach agreement on legislation protecting undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, along with new investments in border security — Manchin said, "I share the president's commitment to border security. That’s why I voted for his plan." Herring, his spokesman, added that Manchin "also supports Kate's Law, which would increase penalties for criminals who re-enter the country illegally." Planned Parenthood The national health and family-planning clinic network has been a longtime target of anti-abortion groups because it provides abortion services. By law, federal money cannot be used to pay for abortion services, but federal dollars do flow to Planned Parenthood for other purposes — something that rankles opponents of abortion, who say that money is fungible. We have previously looked at what Manchin has said and done about Planned Parenthood. Critics pointed to photos Manchin took with constituents carrying pro-Planned Parenthood signs, although he has also taken photos with supporters carrying anti-Planned Parenthood signs. Manchin has said that he’s personally anti-abortion but supports federal funding for Planned Parenthood as long as the funding comports with existing federal law. In a statement to PolitiFact, Herring said that Manchin "has always been pro-life. Planned Parenthood doesn’t receive taxpayer money for abortions. The only Planned Parenthood in WV provides basic health care services and screenings, and Sen. Manchin doesn’t want to take away health care from women." Our ruling Morrisey said Manchin "stands with Hillary Clinton and DC Dems on gun control, higher taxes, amnesty, and Planned Parenthood." We’re not entirely sure what Hillary Clinton has to do with this, but Morrisey can point to some evidence to support Manchin’s loyalty to Democratic orthodoxy in each of these four areas. That said, Morrisey glosses over important nuances. On guns and immigration, for instance, Manchin has often worked with Republicans to find common ground, rather than taking a strong Democratic line. On taxes, Manchin did vote against the Trump-backed tax bill, but his position would have left the tax code the same, rather than imposing "higher taxes." And Morrisey ignores Manchin’s personal anti-abortion position in focusing on Manchin’s support for Planned Parenthood; Manchin supports the status quo on federal funding, which is to provide it only for non-abortion services. We rate the statement Half True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Patrick Morrisey	None	None	None	2018-10-04T22:08:30	2018-08-31	['Planned_Parenthood', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-snes-01097	A sign posted on a public beach by the city of Melbourne, Australia tells visitors to refrain from consuming of pork and alcohol and to be respectful during Islamic prayer times.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/multicultural-beach-sign-melbourne/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Emery	None	Does a ‘Multicultural Beach’ Sign in Melbourne Prohibit Pork and Alcohol?	30 January 2018	None	['Australia', 'Melbourne', 'Islam']
-snes-01378	Roy Moore Authored a Textbook Which Argued That Women Shouldn't Hold Political Office?	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/roy-moore-authored-a-textbook-which-argued-that-women-shouldnt-hold-political-office/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Roy Moore Author a Textbook That Argued Women Shouldn’t Hold Political Office?	4 December 2017	None	['None']
-tron-00758	Comedian Red Skelton Explains the Pledge of Allegiance	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/red-skelton-pledge/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Comedian Red Skelton Explains the Pledge of Allegiance	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-08778	"Over 81 percent of the babies that are born at LBJ Hospital right here in Houston are born of women who are not here legally."	false	/texas/statements/2010/aug/23/debbie-riddle/debbie-riddle-says-more-81-babies-born-houston-hos/	State Rep. Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball, has long expressed concerns about illegal immigration. She sounded that theme anew Aug. 10 during an appearance on CNN, telling host Anderson Cooper that mothers who are illegal residents routinely have babies in the United States to "anchor" their families in this country. "The fact is it is documented," Riddle said. "Over 81 percent of the babies that are born at LBJ Hospital right here in Houston are born of women who are not here legally. It is well-known that women come over here, cross the border in order to have the babies here because once they get here and once that little American citizen is born and becomes an anchor baby — look, I'm a grandmother of 10, I love children, but the fact is this is breaking the back of the taxpayers of Texas and the United States." Eighty-one percent? Documented, well-known? We decided to check Riddle's claim, remembering that PolitiFact recently rated as Half True South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham's statement that people come here to have babies and then leave. While there's ample evidence that many illegal immigrants give birth in the U.S. every year, PolitiFact's research found that the incentive for illegal immigrants to come here is based more on economic hopes than quickie citizenship for U.S.-born babies. Cooper grilled Riddle after she claimed that pregnant women were entering the U.S. as tourists to give birth to their children "with the nefarious purpose of turning them into little terrorists who will then come back to the U.S. and do us harm." Riddle didn't offer Cooper evidence to back up the claim, and when we contacted her, Riddle told us in an e-mail that she shouldn't have talked about the "terror babies," as they've come to be known. "I demand proof when my opponents challenge my viewpoints, and it's reasonable to expect me to do the same," she said. "That doesn't mean the things I said aren't true; it just means that I shouldn't assert them as fact unless I'm prepared to show you the facts." So what are the facts on the babies born at Houston's Lyndon Baines Johnson General Hospital to mothers who are not here legally? Jon English, Riddle's legislative chief of staff, said she based her claim on an opinion article by state Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, published in the April 30 Houston Chronicle. Noting that Texas bears a cost from illegal immigration, Patrick wrote: "In recent years, 81 percent of babies born at the LBJ General Hospital were born to mothers who were here illegally." Patrick's chief of staff, Logan Spence, told us that Patrick heard the 81 percent number from officials at the Harris County Hospital District, which oversees LBJ Hospital. However, six years of delivery data from the district did not confirm that statistic. Melinda Muse, a spokeswoman for the district, told us that Patrick's figure may have also included mothers who are legal immigrants as well as deliveries at Ben Taub General Hospital, the other hospital in the district that delivers babies. In a search of newspaper stories, we found an Aug. 8, 2010, Dallas Morning News article which reported that 82 percent of the births at LBJ and Ben Taub in 2009 were to women who were not U.S. citizens. The article relied on Texas Health and Human Services Commission information derived from an emergency Medicaid program that reimburses hospitals for delivering the babies of poor women who lack U.S. citizenship. But Stephanie Goodman, a spokeswoman for the commission, said that information included births to both legal and illegal immigrants. She said that the state doesn't know how many of the Medicaid mothers were undocumented. We also found a September 2006 Houston Chronicle story on the rising number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America coming to South Texas to give birth. The article quoted Shannon Rasp, then a spokeswoman for the hospital district, as saying that "using anecdotal information provided us by our staff, statistics from other public hospital systems and our patient demographics, we believe that approximately 70 to 80 percent of our obstetrics patients are undocumented." The best information we found to assess Riddle's statement was the district's six years of delivery data. A caveat: Delivery statistics refer to the number of women who give birth, not the number of babies born, which Riddle and Patrick were talking about. Deliveries of multiple children, like twins and triplets, mean that there are more babies than mothers in any given year. About 85 percent of the 8,974 deliveries at Ben Taub and LBJ in fiscal 2010 — March 1, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010 — were to noncitizens, which include both legal and illegal immigrants. Forty percent of those were at LBJ. Of those, 2,418 were to undocumented mothers. That means that in fiscal 2010, 63 percent of total deliveries (3,818) at LBJ hospital were to undocumented immigrants. For fiscal 2009, that figure is 59 percent. Previous years saw higher percentages — 71 percent in 2008, 73 percent in 2007, 70 percent in 2006 and 69 percent in 2005. Remember, those statistics are for mothers only. When we asked the hospital district for data that links babies born at LBJ with the immigration status of their mothers, Muse said the district doesn't keep that information. "Since all babies who are born in the hospital are American citizens, we don't link them to either documented immigrant or undocumented immigrant mothers," Muse said. That means it is unlikely that Patrick accurately cited how many babies were born to undocumented immigrants because the hospital district doesn't have those figures. And Riddle was relying on Patrick's newspaper column when she made her claim. In an e-mail, Patrick told us that if he was off "by a few percentage points, the big picture is still the same. The fact that the number ranges from 58 to 72 percent over the last several years at LBJ reinforces my message that the state of Texas cannot control its economic or cultural destiny until the border is secured." Close but no cigar? According to the latest statistics at LBJ hospital, the proportion of deliveries to illegal immigrant mothers was 63 percent, not 81 percent. The average over the past six years: 68 percent. If Riddle had said those deliveries constitute a clear majority, she'd be on solid ground. But that's not the claim she made on national TV. As PolitiFact has noted before, numbers matter — and when it comes to issues as fractious as immigration and so-called "terror babies," politicians have an obligation to be scrupulously accurate. We rate her statement as False.	None	Debbie Riddle	None	None	None	2010-08-23T06:00:00	2010-08-10	['Houston']
-pomt-07924	"Last year, out of the 500,000 (in) population growth we had in the state of Texas, about 250,000 of the 500,000 came to Texas... from the other 49 states."	half-true	/texas/statements/2011/jan/29/david-dewhurst/david-dewhurst-says-last-year-250000-people-moved-/	Texas is a bastion of opportunity that attracts newcomers, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said in his Jan. 18 inaugural address. "Last year, out of the 500,000 (in) population growth we had in the state of Texas, about 250,000 of the 500,000 came to Texas, voted for Texas, with their feet," Dewhurst said. "They came from the other 49 states--and it wasn’t because of our weather." That was more dramatic than his prepared remarks, which read: "Last year, more than 200,000 people moved to Texas from the other 49 states." Either way, that’s a lot of volunteer Texans. We zeroed in on what Dewhurst actually speechified. Asked for back-up information, Dewhurst spokesman Mike Walz pointed us to the state demographer, Lloyd Potter of San Antonio. Potter said there are no published figures yet on the state’s population gains in 2010 due to migration from other states. However, Potter singled out a U.S. Census Bureau estimate covering July 2008-July 2009, which says the population of Texas increased by 478,012, or 2 percent, to 24.8 million over those 12 months. During the period, net migration from other states--the number of people who moved to Texas minus those who left Texas for other states--was 143,423. The net migration of residents who moved to Texas from outside the U.S. was 88,116. That is, the state’s population increased by nearly 480,000 with the 143,423 new residents hailing from other states accounting for about 30 percent of the increase. At the bureau, Dallas spokeswoman Suzee Privett guided us to a different collection of data estimating new Texans. According to the bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey, Texas enjoyed a net gain of 128,137 residents coming from other states in 2009. Robert Bernstein, a Maryland-based bureau spokesman, said the two census estimates differ because they cover different time periods--July 2008-July 2009 compared to calendar year 2009--and use different data-gathering approaches. The former estimate draws on government records including birth and death certificates, he said, while the survey is based on samplings of households across the country. Potter said it’s possible that Dewhurst’s reference to 250,000 people moving here from other states included those from other countries, which is a common misunderstanding. We shared the 2009 estimates with Walz. He replied by e-mail that Dewhurst was trying to show that roughly half of the state’s population growth is from migration, with the other half due to natural increases, in-state births minus deaths. But we’re left weighing what Dewhurst actually said: that half the growth Texas experienced -- 250,000 out of 500,000 additional residents last year, he said -- was due to residents moving in from other states. Not quite. First, the census data for 2010 hasn’t been released yet. And the most generous census estimate prior to last year indicates net migration from other states equaled 143,000 people from July 2008 to July 2009, accounting for less than a third of the state’s population increase in the period. However, looking at Texas population growth in terms of people moving here "with their feet" versus people born here, Dewhurst pegged the ratio correctly -- about half-and-half. We rate his claim Half True.	None	David Dewhurst	None	None	None	2011-01-29T06:00:00	2011-01-18	['Texas']
-pomt-11076	Says Sen. Tim Kaine "approves of and even applauds his son's participation in a known terrorist organization, #Antifa."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jun/20/corey-stewart/corey-stewarts-comments-sen-tim-kaine-and-antifa/	Corey Stewart, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia, promised a ruthless campaign against incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine. A day after securing his party’s nomination, he tweeted one of his first attacks. "Virginia's sitting senator approves of and even applauds his son's participation in a known terrorist organization, #Antifa," Stewart wrote June 13, 2018. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Kaine’s son, Linwood Michael "Woody" Kaine, has indeed attended protests affiliated with Antifa, a far-left collection of autonomous anti-fascist groups that are spread throughout the country and share several causes, including the resistance of white supremacist movements. Because Antifa is an umbrella term for many different groups, it does not have an official website or membership. When asked for evidence to support the tweet, Stewart campaign spokesman Noel Fritsch pointed to an article in The Federalist, a conservative website, about Woody Kaine’s arrest for counter-protesting at a pro-Donald Trump rally held in the state Capitol in Minnesota on March 4, 2017. According to local reports, Woody Kaine was one of six counter-protesters arrested by St. Paul Police. He was part of a group of approximately 100 counter-protestors, some of whom set off smoke bombs and fireworks inside the building. Witnesses reported seeing Antifa flags in the crowd of counter-protestors. Though peaceful during the rally, police said the younger Kaine tried to run when approached by an officer and that he had to be restrained. A judge sentenced him to a year of probation and ordered him to pay $236 in fines and fees for resisting arrest. Other counter-protestors were charged with felonies for using tear gas. "While some were charged for disruptive activity at the rally, Woody behaved peacefully there and faced no such charges," said Kaine spokeswoman Miryam Lipper after the sentencing. "He has pled guilty to a misdemeanor in connection with actions during an arrest after leaving the rally." Fritsch said another statement issued jointly by the senator and his wife shortly after the arrest showed that Kaine approves of his son’s Antifa participation. "We love that our three children have their own views and concerns about current political issues," the couple said via a spokesperson. "They fully understand the responsibility to express those concerns peacefully." But elsewhere, Kaine has been more forceful in his condemnation of non-peaceful protests. In a Sept. 8, 2017, letter sent to constituents inquiring about Antifa, Kaine wrote, "I condemn all violence at any political demonstration, including any violent activities by members of Antifa." (We obtained a copy of the letter from Ian Sams, communications director for Kaine’s re-election campaign). "I have spent my whole life fighting for people and causes I care about, but always peacefully," Kaine said. "Whether in the form of civil discourse or peaceful protest, Americans should continue to have frank discussions with each other and with their leaders." Sams noted that Kaine also expressed his preference for civil discourse in an op-ed published to CNN. "We must always balance that popular activism with a requirement to be peaceful — violence has no place in civic discussion," he wrote. "We cannot tolerate violence by anyone, of any political viewpoint, if we truly embrace the principles expressed in the Constitution." "Peacefully protesting at a rally does not equate to being a member of Antifa," Sams said. For the record, characterizations differ as to whether Antifa qualifies as "a known terrorist organization." According to a 2017 Politico report, the Department of Homeland Security formally classified Antifa activities as "domestic terrorist violence" in 2016. The Southern Poverty Law Center, by contrast, does not recognize Antifa as a hate group because "antifa groups do not promote hatred based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity," even if it does display a "propensity for violence." It is also worth noting that the image Stewart quote-tweeted was doctored to show Kaine presenting before Congress with a poster board of his son’s face. (A hammer and sickle is plastered in the top corner.) In the real photo, Kaine was presenting beside a poster-sized image of a Trump tweet. Sams noted that this is not the first misleading image Stewart has shared in support of the same claim. In August 2017, Stewart tweeted a photo of Antifa — and said Kaine’s son was pictured — that had previously appeared in a Swedish blog more than a year before the Minnesota rally. This was also not Stewart's first misleading tweet related to Kaine's son. In May 2018, for example, he tweeted that Woody Kaine "attacked elderly people entering a Trump rally." Our ruling Kaine has encouraged his son and others to peacefully express their political views. But Stewart’s statement that Kaine "approves of and even applauds his son’s participation in a known terrorist organization" implied that Kaine has indicated he would be okay with his son’s participation in the violence at Antifa protests, as well. Kaine’s statements tell a different story — namely, that he approves of his son’s Antifa-related protests only when they are peaceful. Kaine has more than once advocated for peaceful protest, and he has also condemned the violence that has driven some to label Antifa as a terrorist group. We rate Stewart’s statement Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Corey Stewart	None	None	None	2018-06-20T12:00:00	2018-06-13	['Anti-fascism']
-pomt-00793	"You know how many children in the history of the United States have died in a fire (at school)? Zero."	false	/florida/statements/2015/apr/06/greg-steube/debate-school-gun-bill-legislator-says-there-have-/	By next school year, some school workers may be allowed to pack heat. A bill that has received approval by some legislative panels would allow superintendents to designate certain K-12 employees to carry concealed firearms. State Rep. Greg Steube, R-Sarasota, a sponsor of the bill, said the measure makes a lot of sense considering school shootings of recent years. Here’s what he said during a Florida House judiciary committee hearing April 2: "Right now our schools are required to do two or three fire drills a year. You know how many children in the history of the United States have died in a fire? Zero. You know how many have died because of a school shooting? Quite a few, but the state doesn’t require them to do any type of training. So this would require them to do, every year two times, school safety training as it relates to active shooters to work out these type of details that need to be worked out." The committee voted in favor of the bill -- as did two other House panels in March. We were alerted to Steube’s statement about the lack of fatal school fires by Associated Press reporter Gary Fineout who tweeted about it. So we decided to check it out. Data on school fires Steube told PolitiFact Florida that he "definitely misspoke" about school fires. "I was talking about Florida," said Steube, who first proposed such legislation in 2013 after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. "There has never been in the history of Florida a child who died in a school fire." Steube said the point he was trying to make is that Florida schools are required to do fire drills, but not lockdown drills. (Staff analysis of the bill states that schools must develop procedures for hostage and weapons situations; Steube’s bill inserts language that requires schools to do drills for active shooter/hostage situations.) Some school districts already do lockdown drills including in Broward, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade Pasco and Pinellas counties. We drew information about fatal school fires from the National Fire Protection Association. The association lists school fires with 10 or more deaths. Most of the fires go back to the first half of the 20th century. We will summarize a few of the fires: Consolidated School in New London, Texas: This school fire has the largest number of fatalities documented by the association. A gas explosion in March 18, 1937, led to the deaths of 294 students and teachers at the school which was next to an oil refinery. A teacher turned on a sanding machine in an area filled with a mixture of gas and air, which set off the fire. "Immediately the building seemed to lift in the air and then smashed to the ground. Walls collapsed. The roof fell in and buried its victims in a mass of brick, steel, and concrete debris," states history from a museum that memorializes the fire. Lakeview School in Collinwood, Ohio: A suburban Cleveland elementary school caught fire and killed 173 children and three adults on March 4, 1908. A furnace set fire to wooden supports, and the conflagration quickly spread throughout the building. Our Lady of the Angels school, Chicago: On Dec. 1 , 1958, fire broke out at the foot of a stairway in the school, killing 90 pupils and three nuns. A student smoking might have been the cause. Thankfully, those types of fires are no longer common due to modern safety standards. "In recent years, the very few deaths that do occur in schools tend to be either adults or juvenile firesetters who set a fire in the school," said Marty Ahrens, who works for the association. In recent decades, the association has collected fire data through the federal government’s National Fire Incident Reporting System and its own survey. Between 2007-11, U.S. fire departments responded to an estimated average of 5,690 structure fires in educational properties including day cares, K-12 schools and colleges. These fires caused an annual average of 85 civilian fire injuries and $92 million in direct property damage. In search of fires at schools in Florida Since Steube told us that he meant to say there had been no children who died in fires at Florida schools, we asked state experts if they could recall any. A spokeswoman for the state fire marshal said there were no fire-related fatalities in K-12 schools between 2000 and 2014, which includes all available incidents in the fire marshal’s database. We did find a case of a 4-year-old girl dying in a fire at a day care center in Tallahassee. A malfunctioning fan caused a fire at Stepping Stones child care center in Tallahassee in 2008. The day before the fire, a problem with a bathroom exhaust fan was noted on a repair sheet. A "floater" teacher assigned to the girl and her class that day had not yet been trained on what to do in a fire and was scheduled to be trained that day, the Tallahassee Democrat reported. We also found records of a dormitory fire in 1914 that killed six children and two staff members at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, the infamous reform school in Marianna (although that was a penal institution and not a traditional school). The school’s superintendent and staff were on a "pleasure bent" in town when the fire started. The superintendent was dismissed after facts were presented to a grand jury. The school was shut down in 2011 after a bleak history full of rape, torture and unreported child deaths. Our ruling When talking about a bill to designate certain people in K-12 schools to carry firearms, Steube said "You know how many children in the history of the United States have died in a fire (at school)? Zero." There have been at least eight school fires with 10 or more deaths in the United States, though the most recent one was in 1958, according to a national association that tracks such fatal fires. None on that list were in Florida. Steube admitted that he misspoke -- he meant to say no children died in school fires in Florida. We rate this claim False.	None	Greg Steube	None	None	None	2015-04-06T17:45:22	2015-04-02	['United_States']
-goop-00425	Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher Fighting Over Third Child?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/mila-kunis-ashton-kutcher-fight-third-child/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher Fighting Over Third Child?	11:59 am, August 19, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-00364	In July 2018, a Disney spokesperson indicated that the company was planning to open a theme park in Escanaba, Michigan.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/disney-park-escanaba/	None	Disney	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Disney Announce It Was to Open a Theme Park in Escanaba, Michigan?	9 July 2018	None	['Michigan', 'The_Walt_Disney_Company']
-pomt-04773	The state government workforce grew when Tim Kaine was governor.	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2012/aug/27/george-allen/george-allen-says-state-government-workforce-grew-/	Republican Senate candidate George Allen scoffed when his Democratic rival Tim Kaine said in a July debate that he undertook a series of budget cuts as governor. "You talk about budget cuts," Allen said to Kaine during a July 21 debate at Hot Springs. "But Virginia, at the end of your term, had a larger state workforce than at the beginning of your term." Politifact Virginia previously checked a claim from Allen that the state workforce declined substantially while he was governor from 1994 to 1998 and rated it Mostly True. We wondered if it was true that Virginia’s workforce saw a net increase while Kaine was governor. The Allen campaign, on its website, backs Allen’s claim by pointing to U.S. census tables showing the full-time equivalent employment for Virginia’s state government. Those tables show that from March 2006 to March 2010, the number of full-time-equivalents rose from 122,634 to 124,709. But those census tables only look at a state’s employment levels as of March of each year. Kaine was sworn into office on Jan. 14, 2006, and left office on Jan. 15, 2010. So Allen’s campaign is looking at a time period that starts about two months after Kaine was inaugurated and ends two months after Kaine left office. The census numbers also include jobs in the judicial branch of government, over which a governor has limited control. Seeking tallies more closely aligned with Kaine’s tenure and control, we turned to the website for the Virginia Department of Human Resource Management, the agency that keeps tabs on the size of the state workforce. Anne Waring, a DHRM spokeswoman, said the department does not keep records of the workforce size on every single day. But the agency does count the size of the state’s staff as of the last day of every month. As in our previous story about Allen, we examined tallies of full-time equivalent workers in the executive branch, since that’s the part of the bureaucracy employs about 96 of workers and over which the governor has the most control. There are two logical points to start counting. One is to compare the size of the workforce on Dec. 31, 2005 -- two weeks before Kaine took office -- and compare that to Dec. 31, 2009, two weeks before Kaine left office. Between those dates, the total number of full-time-equivalent employees in the executive branch fell from 116,334 to 113,425. That’s a drop of about 2,909, or 2.5 percent. By this measure, Allen’s statement is wrong. But since Kaine was inaugurated in the middle of January, we also looked at figures from Jan. 31, 2006, to Jan. 31, 2010. Between those dates, the number of workers rose from 111,917 to 112,212 -- an increase of 295 employees, or one-fourth of 1 percent. That makes Allen’s statement right, but not by much. One reason the shift in the number of employees is so dramatic is because between the end of December 2005 and the end of January 2006, the number of temporary workers -- those paid on an hourly basis -- fell from 19,579 to 15,060. Waring explained that temporary employees at colleges and universities who were counted in December were on winter break in January and, therefore, not counted as working that month. Finally, we looked the DHRM numbers from March in 2006 and 2010 to see if they showed an increase in state employment that was similar to the census figures cited by Allen for those two months. They did not. The census figures Allen uses show Virginia’s payroll increased by 2,175 employees from March 2006 to March 2010. DHRM data shows a decrease of 828 full-time equivalent workers in the executive branch over the four-year span. Our ruling Allen said the state workforce expanded during Kaine’s governorship. But there are no records that tabulate the number of executive branch employees on the mid-January day when Kaine took office in 2006 and the day he left four years later. Allen backs his claim by using U.S. Census data that only allows a comparison of numbers in March 2006 -- two months after Kaine entered office -- to March 2010 -- two months after Kaine left. The Census data also includes workers in the judicial and legislative branches, over which a governor has limited control. Better information is available from Virginia’s government, which counts the number of state employees at the end of every month. Determining the increase or decrease in the workforce under Kaine depends on when you start counting. If you compare Dec. 31 figures from 2005 to 2009, the executive workforce -- controlled by the governor -- dropped by 2,909 full-time equivalents. The decrease appears largely because of the number of temporary employees on Virginia’s payroll at the close of 2005. If you compare Jan. 31 figures from 2006 to 2010, the state staff increased by 295. Contrary to the Census numbers cited by Allen, state records show that the bureaucracy under the governor’s control shrank by 828 full-time equivalents between March 2006 and March 2010. So Allen’s information does not come from the best source: The state government. Using state numbers, Allen is barely right by one measure and wrong by two others. Allen’s statement, while containing an element of truth, ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.	None	George Allen	None	None	None	2012-08-27T06:00:00	2012-07-21	['None']
-tron-03462	Tree in cemetery looks like popular images of Jesus	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/shepherdtree/	None	religious	None	None	None	Tree in cemetery looks like popular images of Jesus	Mar 14, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-00437	Under Armour garments are more flammable than other garments of their type.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/armour-garments-flammable/	None	Business	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Are Under Armour Garments Flammable?	20 June 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02673	Marriage "decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/09/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-marriage-decreases-probability-ch/	On the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement of the War on Poverty, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., gave a speech at an event titled, "Income Mobility and the American Dream," sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. During the speech, Rubio made a claim about the relationship between marriage and poverty. "Until at least a few decades ago, our economy proved sufficiently dynamic and innovative to replace old jobs with new ones, but that hasn't been happening in recent years," Rubio said. "Social factors also play a major role in denying equal opportunity. The truth is that the greatest tool to lift people, to lift children and families from poverty, is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent. But it isn't a government program. It's called marriage." He continued, "Fifty years ago today, when the War on Poverty was launched, 93 percent of children born in the United States were born to married parents. By 2010, that number had plummeted to 60 percent. It shouldn't surprise us that 71 percent of poor families with children are families that are not headed by a married couple." A reader asked us to investigate whether Rubio is correct that marriage "decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent." So we did. The claim appears to come from this article by Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Rector wrote, "According to the U.S. Census, the poverty rate for single parents with children in the United States in 2009 was 37.1 percent. The rate for married couples with children was 6.8 percent. Being raised in a married family reduced a child’s probability of living in poverty by about 82 percent." We concur that the Census Bureau data Rector cited -- from this table -- supports Rubio’s point. However, we have a couple of quibbles. First, there’s more recent census data, covering 2011. And second, there’s a bit of a mismatch between what Rubio said and what Rector wrote about. Rector was comparing female-headed single-parent households that include kids to married households that have kids. But Rubio didn’t specify that he was talking only about female-headed households that have kids. About one of every five single-parent households is headed by a man. If you use 2011 data and include single-parent households headed by either sex, the numbers come out a bit differently. The data show that 37.2 percent of single-parent households are in poverty, compared to 10.9 percent for married families with kids. That’s a 71 percent decrease in the likelihood of poverty, rather than 82 percent. In addition, these statistics are calculated by counting all the people, adult or child, living in households that include children, noted Michael Wiseman, a public policy professor at George Washington University. In other words, the numbers Rubio cited don’t speak directly to the likelihood of a child being in poverty, which was how he worded his claim. We should note that some critics have taken issue with the implications of the statistic Rubio cited. Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, wrote on his blog, "By the same logic, (Rubio) should have said, ‘The greatest tool for lifting children and families out of poverty is getting a job, which increases your income by $40,000 per year’ — because the median weekly earnings of full-time, year-round workers is $771 per week, which is $40,000 per year more than people with no jobs earn." Meanwhile, the liberal group Think Progress pointed to a blog post from a few days earlier by the Council on Contemporary Families, a group of academics that study family policy, that said a "nationally representative study of more than 7,000 women found that approximately 64 percent of the single mothers who married were divorced by the time they reached age 35-44. More importantly, single mothers who marry and later divorce are worse off economically than single mothers who never marry." These may be valid points. However, in his comments, Rubio did not suggest that government pursue any specific government policies to directly promote marriage. He also said that being a two-parent family "decreases the probability of child poverty," which sounds to us like a mathematical analysis of the existing data, rather than a suggestion that changing policies to encourage marriage will actually reduce poverty that already exists. For this reason, we are analyzing the mathematics that underlie his comment question, not the conclusions that can, or can’t, be drawn from the statistic. "We take issue much less with the basic numbers than with the implication that marriage per se is what’s driving these differences in poverty," said Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Our ruling Rubio said that marriage "decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent." Our research suggests that a more current and more accurate statistic to back up his claim would be a decrease of 71 percent. That’s lower, but not dramatically so. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2014-01-09T17:47:15	2014-01-08	['None']
-tron-01052	Ann Coulter Arrested For Using Women’s Bathroom	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ann-coulter-arrested-using-womens-bathroom/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Ann Coulter Arrested For Using Women’s Bathroom	May 17, 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00572	Pay "competitive market-based salaries for corrections staff."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/595/pay-competitive-market-based-salaries-for-correcti/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	Pay competitive market-based salaries for corrections staff	2010-12-21T09:36:20	None	['None']
-pomt-01325	Four members of the Rhode Island General Assembly "went to vote in 2010 and were told they had already voted."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2014/oct/26/john-carlevale/john-carlevale-says-four-ri-legislators-were-victi/	In the race for Rhode Island Secretary of State, Republican John Carlevale and Democrat Nellie Gorbea are sharply divided on the state’s voter ID statute, which was passed into law three years ago. Gorbea doesn’t see the need for the statute and questions whether it may be disenfranchising legitimate voters. Carlevale calls it a well-crafted law that is helping to stamp out voter fraud in the Ocean State. During an Oct. 19, 2014 debate on "10 News Conference," Carlevale responded to criticism from Gorbea by trying to illustrate the scope of the problem with fraudulent voting before the legislature, in 2011, passed the controversial law, which requires voters to show photo identification. "Let’s talk about the four members of the General Assembly who went to vote in 2010 and were told they already voted," Carlevale said (at the 5:40 mark in the video). "They were disenfranchised." That caught our attention. If four state legislators were victims of voter impersonation in a single election, that would indicate voter fraud would have been pretty widespread. We called Carlevale who told us that the legislators testified about their first-hand experience with voter impersonation when the ID bill was being debated at the State House. But he said he could remember the name of only one of the legislators: Rep. Anastasia P. Williams, a Providence Democrat. He said she would probably recall the other names and recommended we call her. We tried to contact her repeatedly by phone and by email but couldn’t reach her. We checked news reports on the 2011 legislative session and found references in several Journal stories to an allegation made by Williams that she was a victim of voter fraud in 2006. No details were included in those initial stories. In a subsequent PolitiFact Rhode Island item on voter fraud, Williams provided more details, saying that "she and her daughter went to their polling place in 2006, only to discover that two other people had used their names." She spoke about her claim again in interviews in 2012 with reporters for The New Republic and The Providence Phoenix. According to The New Republic story, Williams said that "in 2006 her vote was stolen by an illegal alien who was promised a passport by a state official." A more detailed account was included in the Phoenix story. (Additionally, according to the New Republic story, "during the 2010 elections, [Williams] says she saw a Hispanic man vote twice at the same polling place, wearing a different outfit each time. "What caught my eye was [he] was a hottie," she told the reporter.) Williams never filed a complaint with the Board of Elections about any alleged instance of fraud. The only other legislator named in news reports who spoke of specific cases of voter fraud was Sen. Harold Metts, who sponsored the ID bill in the Senate. According to those stories, Metts said that over the course of 20 years, constituents had told him about fraudulent voting practices at the polls, including one occasion when a man identified himself but couldn’t spell his own name correctly. Metts, however, never said that he had been a victim himself. When we called him, he confirmed that was the case. He also could not recall any members of the General Assembly apart from Williams who said they had been impersonated at the polls. (The Phoenix story on voter fraud also included anecdotes from Sen. William Walaska and Rep. J. Patrick O’Neill in which they alleged voting irregularities, but not impersonation.) We checked recordings of the debates on the House and Senate floor before the ID bill was passed. In the House session, Williams said that she and her daughter had been victims of voter fraud without offering further details. She also made reference to seeing two men each vote twice in one election. Then-Rep. Leo Medina implied that people voted illegally in an election he lost in 2004, but nobody else talked of being impersonated at the polls. In the Senate session, Metts recounted anecdotes of fraud from constituents and repeated the claim Williams made about being impersonated, but no senators said that they had been victims of fraud. We called Robert Kando, executive director of the Rhode Island Board of Elections, who said that in the nine years that he has been at the board there has never been a confirmed case in which one voter has tried to impersonate another. Robert Rapoza, the board’s elections director, said that he has not come across a confirmed case in his 17 years at the board. Kando said that Anastasia Williams was the only legislator he could recall who alleged being a victim of voter fraud during the 2011 debate about the ID bill. He confirmed that she never filed a complaint. A database compiled by students at Arizona State University of voter fraud cases across the nation between 2002 and 2012 found only five complaints in Rhode Island. None involved voter impersonation. In addition, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola University Law School who tracks voter impersonation cases, has found only 44 credible cases around the country since 2000. None were in Rhode Island. When we shared what we found with Carlevale, he said: "There was a report that I read somewhere, that there were two or three additional members of the General Assembly who had a similar experience to Anastasia [Williams.]" But he said he couldn’t immediately locate it. Our ruling John Carlevale said that four members of the Rhode Island General Assembly "went to vote in 2010 and were told they had already voted." Carlevale’s statement, which he’s made in at least one other debate, is dramatic and specific. He’s saying that on multiple occasions in one election people impersonated legislators at the polls. The claim hints at a wider problem. Legislators are presumably well-known and recognizable in their districts. If their votes were stolen, then many others must have been too. But we could find only one legislator who made a public claim along those lines: Rep. Anastasia Williams, who says she was impersonated at the polls -- in 2006. She never filed a complaint. We rule Carlevale’s statement False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	John Carlevale	None	None	None	2014-10-26T00:01:00	2014-10-19	['None']
-goop-01603	Cher Doesn’t Like Broadway Musical About Her Life?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/cher-broadway-musical-life/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Cher Doesn’t Like Broadway Musical About Her Life?	4:48 pm, February 11, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03334	A group of Muslims tore down a Christmas tree in Italy.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muslim-migrants-tore-down-a-christmas-tree-in-italy/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	‘Muslim Migrants’ Tore Down a Christmas Tree in Italy?	15 December 2016	None	['Italy']
-snes-00988	Congresswoman Maxine Waters tweeted that there was no reason for anyone to own a gun because she has an armed security detail.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/maxine-waters-guncontrolnow-tweet/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This Maxine Waters #GunControlNow Tweet Real?	20 February 2018	None	['Maxine_Waters']
-tron-00586	Willie Nelson Falls Ill, Son Eddie Nelson Requests Prayers	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/willie-nelson-falls-ill-son-eddie-nelson-requests-prayers-fiction/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Willie Nelson Falls Ill, Son Eddie Nelson Requests Prayers	May 8, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-00744	Kim Kardashian Helping North West Become A “Brand”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-north-west-brand-famous/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kim Kardashian Helping North West Become A “Brand”?	5:57 pm, June 26, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01704	Kim Kardashian, Kanye West Fighting After Kris Jenner Suggested Selling Baby Chicago Pictures?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-fight-sell-baby-pictures-chicago-kris-jenner/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Kim Kardashian, Kanye West Fighting After Kris Jenner Suggested Selling Baby Chicago Pictures?	1:17 pm, January 28, 2018	None	['Kim_Kardashian', 'Kris_Jenner']
-pomt-09618	"A number of the national publications have put this race in a tossup race between Democrats and Republicans. They don't know who's going to win this race."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2010/jan/12/kendrick-meek/fla-democrat-calls-us-senate-race-toss-/	With Republicans Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio dominating news coverage about Florida's U.S. Senate race, Democratic U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek would like you to know he's running, too. "A number of the national publications have put this race in a tossup race between Democrats and Republicans," Meek said in an interview with Bay News 9 and the St. Petersburg Times that aired Jan. 10, 2010. "They don't know who's going to win this race." Meek, a Miami congressman serving his fourth term, is seeking the Senate seat originally held by Sen. Mel Martinez and now held by Sen. George LeMieux, both Republicans. Meek is facing former Miami Mayor Maurice Ferre in the Democratic primary. Crist, the Florida governor, and Rubio, former speaker of Florida's House, are among the Republican candidates. When it comes to November, are national prognosticators putting Democrats like Meek on equal footing with the GOP? Congressional Quarterly's map lists Florida as "Likely Republican." Stuart Rothenberg, an oft-quoted political analyst, currently has Florida's Senate race as "Clear advantage for incumbent party," or in this case Republicans. Another familiar name in political speculating, the Cook Political Report, lists the Florida race as "Likely Republican." Larry Sabato at the Center for Politics: "Likely Republican." Ken Rudin at National Public Radio: "Republican favored." A group called Intrade says Republicans have a 78.45 percent chance to keep their Florida Senate seat. New York Times: "Likely Republican." At the Washington Post, The Fix's Chris Cillizza does not list Florida among his 10 Senate seats most likely to switch parties. At FiveThirtyEight.com, Florida ranks as the 13th-most likely seat to switch hands in November. Struggling to find the word "tossup" anywhere associated with the Florida Senate race, we asked the Meek campaign for help. They referred us to a blog post from the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 6, 2010. The post, entitled "2010 Tossups: A Rundown of the Most-Competitive Senate Races," includes Florida among 11 other races. About Florida, Susan Davis writes: "So much of the focus in this race has been on the Republican primary between Gov. Charlie Crist and former state House Speaker Marco Rubio that it's important to remember that either candidate still has to win a general election. Crist — back when Crist was seen as inevitable — was regularly leading likely Democratic nominee Rep. Kendrick Meek in the polls. But the evolving nature of the GOP primary, and what it says about the party and state, means that the Florida race is shaping up to be one of the more interesting and entertaining contests of the midterms." That's the only example Meek's campaign provided and we didn't find any others on our own. Meek spokesman Adam Sharon says the ratings may change based on the shifting dynamics of the Republican primary, where Crist is quickly losing his front-runner status, but we're checking Meek's statement based on current predictions. Meek says a number of national publications consider Florida's Senate race this fall a tossup. That number, however, appears to be just one. The overwhelming majority of pundits who attempt to predict election outcomes all have Republicans favored in the Sunshine State. Maybe the ratings will change. But they haven't yet. We rate Meek's claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Kendrick Meek	None	None	None	2010-01-12T16:48:24	2010-01-10	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-goop-02762	Megyn Kelly “Hiding” A “$1.4 Million Plastic Surgery Transformation,” 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/megyn-kelly-plastic-surgery-not-hiding-transformation-makeover/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Megyn Kelly NOT “Hiding” A “$1.4 Million Plastic Surgery Transformation,” Despite Report	3:47 am, June 1, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-02843	An image shows two Disney animated characters sharing the studio's first same-sex kiss.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/disney-gay-kiss/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan Evon	None	Does a Disney Cartoon Feature the Studio’s First Gay Kiss?	3 March 2017	None	['None']
-snes-05987	Photographs show giant mutant spiders produced by government DNA experiments in Missouri.	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mutant-spiders-in-missouri/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Giant Mutant Spiders in Missouri?	15 September 2014	None	['Missouri']
-tron-02087	“Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” Was Written To Comfort a Grieving Daughter	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/rudolph/	None	inspirational	None	None	None	“Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” Was Written To Comfort a Grieving Daughter	 Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-05363	A photograph shows a baby great white shark.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/baby-great-white-photo/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Photo Does Not Show Baby Great White Shark	14 January 2016	None	['None']
-pose-01061	Q: Name three policies pushed by Mayor Bill Foster during his administration that you support and would advocate continuing. Name three others that you would want to change. A: "I will utilize red light cameras at the most dangerous intersections for the purposes of public safety, not revenue."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/krise-o-meter/promise/1143/utilize-red-light-cameras-most-dangerous-intersect/	None	krise-o-meter	Rick Kriseman	None	None	Utilize red-light cameras at most dangerous intersections for safety, not revenue	2013-12-31T12:19:10	None	['None']
-pomt-03720	Says "a pack-a-day smoker who quits because of the tax increase will save about $1,650 a year."	true	/oregon/statements/2013/apr/15/nancy-nathanson/would-pack-day-smoker-save-1650-year-if-they-quit-/	Lawmakers in Salem are taking a look at the state’s cigarette tax and floating the possibility of allowing counties to add their own tax on top of the the current $1.18 per pack. Advocates spend a lot of time talking about how a higher per-pack price would cut the number of youth smokers -- and the various health benefits that would come with never starting. But Rep. Nancy Nathanson, D-Eugene, took a slightly different tack during a House floor speech earlier this month: Not only would an increased tax save some lungs, but if smokers quit as a result of the increase, their wallets would thank them, too. "A pack-a-day smoker who quits because of the tax increase will save about $1,650 a year to spend on other essential household goods and services, a not insubstantial number for that family," Nathanson said. We started thinking about everything we’d buy with that $1,600 -- some shoes, maybe, definitely a few new records, a new computer even. Then we remembered nobody at PolitiFact Oregon smokes. Still, we couldn’t help but wonder if Nathanson’s math added up. We gave her office a call and they told us the figures came from a study done by the Multnomah County Health Department. The department found that a pack ran between $4.37 to $4.97 with brands ranging from Marlboro, Lucky Strike, American Legend and Newport. That meant a pack-a-day smoker would save between $1,600 and $1,800. Nathanson’s $1,650 figure came from the cost of L&M cigarettes at WinCo, which was $4.51 a pack. The report’s figures came from this March and April but PolitiFact Oregon likes to do a little independent research for any given claim. We set out on our own and hit up a Safeway in downtown Portland for a price survey of our own. Cigarettes at Safeway do not come cheap. A pack of Marlboros came in at $6.20 and you’d have to fork over $8 for American Spirits. That’d put you at a yearly savings of anywhere between $2,250 and $2,900. (We’d buy two computers with that bonus.) We were about to check on the price of a carton of cigarettes because our moms taught us to shop in bulk, when the kind woman behind the counter said we ought to just walk a block to the nearest Plaid Pantry. There, you could get a pack for anywhere between $4.98 and $6.25. A carton of Marlboro reds came in at $50 for 10 packs, which seemed about right. The ruling: Nathanson said that a pack-a-day smoker would save $1,650 a year. Her numbers were based on a report from the Multnomah County Health Department, but it turns out that’s a pretty conservative estimate, at least for Portland. Still, her point is that quitting will save a hefty chunk of change and we rate that claim True.	None	Nancy Nathanson	None	None	None	2013-04-15T16:37:40	2013-04-04	['None']
-snes-04996	Singer Kehlani was found dead in her home of an apparent suicide on 28 March 2016.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kehlani-found-dead/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	Singer Kehlani Found Dead in Home Bathroom; Apparent Suicide	29 March 2016	None	['None']
-snes-02698	The last time Republicans controlled the presidency and Congress was in 1928, and the U.S. sunk into the Great Depression within a year.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/republicans-1928-control/	None	Ballot Box	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Republicans Last Controlled U.S. Government in 1928 and Depression Followed?	11 November 2016	None	['United_States', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'United_States_Congress', 'Great_Depression']
-goop-01970	Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern Feuding, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/reese-witherspoon-laura-dern-feud-big-little-lies/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern NOT Feuding, Despite Report	8:11 am, December 24, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02663	Report of meeting with the President from author Max Lucado	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/maxlucado/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Report of meeting with the President from author Max Lucado	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-02889	Joe Kennedy’s Home Surrounded by a Wall, Proving His Hypocrisy	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/joe-kennedys-home-surrounded-wall-proving/	None	politics	None	None	['congress', 'donald trump', 'kennedy family', 'presidencies']	Joe Kennedy’s Home Surrounded by a Wall, Proving His Hypocrisy	Feb 2, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03179	Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price rented his house in order to make ends meet after taking a $900,000 pay cut and raising the minimum salary at his company to $70,000.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gravity-payments-ceo-rent-house/	None	Business	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price Have to Rent His House to Make Ends Meet?	9 January 2017	None	['None']
-snes-05407	Hippopotamuses are the only animals that produce naturally pink milk.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-hippopotamus-milk-pink/	None	Critter Country	None	Dan Evon	None	Is Hippopotamus Milk Pink?	6 January 2016	None	['None']
-goop-00504	Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Douglas Marriage In Trouble Over Michelle Pfeiffer?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/catherine-zeta-jones-michael-douglas-michelle-pfeiffer-marriage-trouble/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Douglas Marriage In Trouble Over Michelle Pfeiffer?	6:04 pm, August 7, 2018	None	['Catherine_Zeta-Jones', 'Michelle_Pfeiffer']
-vogo-00510	Statement: “I am the only council member with a direct city e-mail and telephone,” Carlsbad City Councilman Keith Blackburn wrote in candidate statements in support of his bid for mayor.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-the-accessible-politician/	Analysis: Blackburn is running for mayor of Carlsbad this November against three competitors. They are Glenn Bernard, Matt Hall and Walt Meier.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: The Accessible Politician	October 6, 2010	None	['None']
-tron-01648	Barack Obama Co-Sponsored a “Stand Your Ground” bill as a Senator in Illinois	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama-stand-your-ground-072413/	None	government	None	None	None	Barack Obama Co-Sponsored a “Stand Your Ground” bill as a Senator in Illinois	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-02939	Angelina Jolie Does Have “New Man,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-new-man-boyfriend/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Angelina Jolie Does NOT Have “New Man,” Despite Report	10:29 am, March 13, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-11579	"Texas is home to more feral pigs than any other state — an estimated 50 percent to 75 percent of all feral swine in the nation."	half-true	/texas/statements/2018/feb/01/southwest-farm-press/more-feral-hogs-texas-than-any-other-state-but-not/	Texas happens to be home to most of the nation’s feral pigs, according to a publication focused on farmers and ranchers in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Southwest Farm Press declared in a January 2018 news story that while 39 states have reported wild pig problems, "Texas is home to more feral pigs than any other state — an estimated 50 percent to 75 percent of all feral swine in the nation." Really all of that for Texas by its lonesome? We wondered. Texas No. 1 in feral hogs? From our previous feral-hog investigations, we already suspected that Texas, with its vast open spaces and habitat-friendly Gulf Coast, was home to more of the pesky animals than any other state. Our attempts to verify that part of the publication’s claim led us to a South Carolina expert, Jack Mayer, Ph.D., who responded by emailing us his 2014 paper finding Texas to be home to the most wild hogs. According to the paper, 99 percent of U.S. wild pigs live in 10 states: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. "As an individual state, Texas had the largest numbers," the paper says, accounting for 30 percent (1.8 million) up to 41 percent (3.4 million) of the nation’s total depending on which estimates are chosen. States with the next-most feral hogs, the paper suggests, were Georgia and Florida. Then again, there’s at least one other way to judge population differences. In that vein, we adjusted the average estimate of feral hogs in each of the 10 high-hog states for the state’s 2014 human population. By this metric, Oklahoma led with nearly 13 hogs per 100 residents with Texas landing fifth with a little under 10 hogs per 100 residents. Up to three in four feral hogs live in Texas? We separately asked Southwest Farm Press the basis of its finding that Texas was home to "50 percent to 75 percent" of U.S. feral hogs. By email, Eric Braun responded with an explanation attributed to the story’s author, Logan Hawkes. "Fair question, tough topic," Hawkes wrote, adding that every count offered of feral hogs is an estimate. Hawkes specified that he reached his finding that 50 percent to 75 percent of U.S. feral hogs reside in Texas drawing on information from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Texas A&M Agrilife Extension Service. Hawkes said that "if the U.S. population is estimated as much as 6 million feral swine (USDA-APHIS), and the Texas population is as much as an estimated 4 million feral swine (Texas Agrilife), then I believe my percentage would be on target. If we take the lower estimated figures instead of the highest, then that percentage would, of course, be less. Again, the range is wide and all numbers are estimated. I should have pointed that out in retrospect." Braun pointed out that Gail Keirn of the APHIS National Wildlife Research Center was quoted in February 2017 saying that there are likely between 5 million and 6 million invasive wild pigs in at least 35 states. More recently, Braun noted, the inspection service has said the national count exceeds 6 million. Per feral pigs in Texas, Braun pointed out that Texas Agrilife said in a 2012 report that Texas was home to 1 million to 4 million feral hogs. Counting Texas feral hogs But that 2012 report, we found, presents the described estimate of 1 million to 4 million feral hogs in Texas (in the past tense) before declaring a lower estimate. The report initially states: "Often, the number of feral hogs are reported from 1 to 4 million in Texas. These estimates are not based on scientific studies." But the authors subsequently describe their efforts to gauge feral hog concentrations in different parts of Texas and to adjust for suitable hog habitats before reaching their own estimate. "By multiplying the density estimate to the total potential suitable feral hog habitat," the report says, "we estimated the number of feral hogs statewide to be between 1.8 and 3.4 million, with the average being 2.6 million." We also connected with the USDA’s Keirn, who agreed by email that Texas has one of the country’s largest "feral swine populations." Yet Keirn said the state’s share of U.S. feral hogs probably runs closer to 30 percent to 50 percent. Nationally, Keirn told us, the feral hog population is "currently estimated at over 6 million and is rapidly expanding. Range expansion over the last few decades is due to a variety of factors including their adaptability to a variety of climates and conditions, translocation by humans and a lack of natural predators." Keirn similarly noted the 2012 Texas report suggesting an average of 2.6 million feral hogs statewide while she said that the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department estimates there are more than 1.5 million feral swine in the state. "The accurate estimation of wildlife populations is difficult and requires considerable investment of resources and time," Keirn wrote. When we reached out to TPWD about its hog estimate, Steve Lightfoot responded by emailing us a September 2017 document presenting 42 feral hog questions and answers written by a Texas A&M professor emeritus, Billy Higginbotham. The document says there are no U.S. estimates of the feral hog population based on scientific data but guesstimates suggest a national population of 8 million to 9 million. In Texas, the document says, "we estimate 2.6 million head based on several population studies." Another Higginbotham answer says a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension survey of landowners made in 2010 "estimated that we are removing approximately 761,000 pigs from our 2.6 million population annually, which accounts for only 29% of the population. We estimate that in Texas we need to be removing 66% of the wild pigs annually just to hold the population steady." We asked Higginbotham about the accuracy of the Southwest Farm Press claim. By email, he replied that it’s most likely that feral hogs in Texas comprise 20 percent to no more than 33 percent of the U.S. population. Mayer, the South Carolina expert, later advised by phone that he’s part of a research team drawing on improved hog-density research to devise fresh counts. As of 1982, Mayer said, a little more than half the nation’s feral hogs resided in Texas. Mayer said the team’s yet-to-be completed paper will say that in 2016, some 2.5 million Texas feral hogs accounted for nearly 37 percent of 6.9 million U.S. feral hogs. Texas’s reduced share, Mayer said, can be attributed to hog populations surging elsewhere. We shared some of what we’d gleaned about U.S. feral hogs in Texas with Southwest Farm Press. By email, Braun replied that its story would be corrected. The story was shortly amended to say: "Texas is home to more feral pigs than any other state — an estimated 30 percent to 50 percent of all feral swine in the nation, according to USDA." Our ruling The publication said: "Texas is home to more feral pigs than any other state — an estimated 50 percent to 75 percent of all feral swine in the nation." Texas remains home to the most feral hogs, we confirmed, though several states topped by Oklahoma lately have more hogs per 100 residents. It looks otherwise like Texas accounts for about one third of the nation’s feral swine--considerably short of 50 percent to 75 percent. We rate this since-modified claim Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Southwest Farm Press	None	None	None	2018-02-01T16:27:42	2018-01-22	['Texas']
-pomt-12345	"NASA confirms Earth will experience 15 days of darkness In November 2017."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/jun/14/blog-posting/its-fake-nasa-never-said-earth-will-go-dark-15-day/	A long-lived claim that NASA is warning the planet will be covered in darkness for more than two straight weeks continued to live on across the Internet but is completely made up. A June 2, 2017, post on NewsForMeToday.com said that the Earth will go dark later this year with the headline, "NASA confirms Earth will experience 15 days of darkness In November 2017." Facebook users flagged the article as possibly being fabricated, as part of the social media site’s efforts to identify fake news stories. "NASA confirms what’s been circling the web recently – our planet Earth will experience total darkness for 15 days in November 2017 starting from November 15 to November 29," the post read. Specifically, the event "will start on November 15 at 3:00 am and will most likely last until November 30, 4:45 pm." The post also quotes NASA administrator Charles Bolden as saying the so-called "blackout event" will raise the Earth’s temperature up to 8 degrees, but should have no lasting effects. "This event would be similar to what Alaskans experience in the winter," Bolden is quoted. For the record, Bolden resigned on Jan. 20, 2017. There also was something in there about the alignment of Venus and Jupiter and a hydrogen explosion in space, but that doesn’t matter, because the story is a persistent Internet concoction that isn’t true. The NewsForMeToday.com post doesn’t link to any official source, a sure warning sign of an unreliable news report, but does cite a Jan. 12, 2017, post on ReflectionofMind.org. That site, in turn, links back to a now-defunct page on GlobalRevolutionNetwork.com, which the Internet Archive told us was originally dated Oct. 24, 2016, and warned of the event happening in November of that year. This unfounded rumor goes back to at least 2015, and has been posted time and again. Dates and details may change (one version said a solar storm would darken the Earth for six days in December), but none of them were correct. We couldn’t find any evidence of NASA making such an announcement, of course. We contacted NASA about the possibility an inky fortnight of celestial shenanigans, but didn’t immediately hear back. The fake story about Earth going dark has been around for some time, but it’s time we bring this hoax to light. We rate it Pants On Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-06-14T12:33:22	2017-06-02	['None']
-pomt-01581	Says on contraception, his plan is "cheaper and easier for you" than Sen. Mark Udall’s	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/sep/08/cory-gardner/cory-gardner-says-his-plan-contraceptives-namely-p/	Democratic Sen. Mark Udall has consistently attacked his Republican challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner, for supporting anti-abortion measures like personhood legislation. But Gardner is on the offensive with a new ad airing in the Colorado Senate race about women’s health issues. "What’s the difference between me and Mark Udall on contraception?" Gardner says. "I believe the pill ought to be available over the counter, around the clock, without a prescription. Cheaper and easier for you. Mark Udall’s plan is different. He wants to keep government bureaucrats between you and your health care plan. That means more politics and more profits for drug companies. My plan means more rights, more freedom and more control for you." Udall’s "plan" is essentially the Affordable Care Act, which requires health insurance companies to provide access to FDA-approved contraceptives without cost sharing, meaning the consumer pays nothing for their prescription at the pharmacy. Gardner, who has repeatedly voted to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law, says he believes a "cheaper and easier" alternative is to allow the pill to be sold over the counter, meaning without a prescription. Gardner’s campaign said his plan has two parts: Allow the pill to be sold over-the-counter and "ensure that women can be reimbursed for those through insurance." His campaign said both can be accomplished without the Affordable Care Act. If the Affordable Care Act is not repealed, though, Gardner wants to allow insurance providers to cover the pill over-the-counter without a prescription. Udall’s campaign said he supports allowing over-the-counter sales of the pill as long as insurance companies are still mandated to cover it without any cost sharing. So we’re left comparing the Affordable Care Act to Gardner’s position, which is repeal the ACA and replace its contraceptive component with his proposal. Which contraceptive plan is "cheaper and easier"? We found that even the groups that advocate making the pill available over the counter — like Jessica Arons, president and CEO of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project and Dan Grossman, vice president for research at Ibis Reproductive Health — did not believe it was a cheaper alternative for consumers than requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptives without cost sharing. Gardner’s campaign pointed us to a study by the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, an advocacy group for the consumer health care products industry. The study looked at savings from several different drugs becoming available over-the-counter, but not the pill. The group estimated that each dollar spent on over-the-counter medicines saves the health care system up to $7, which comes to $102 billion annually. About $25 billion of those savings come in the form of reduced drug costs. But the bulk of the savings is actually from avoiding trips to the doctor to get a prescription, the association found. (Imagine going to the doctor every time you had a cold to get a prescription for Sudafed or for Claritin when your allergies flared up. Those visits add up.) However, under the Affordable Care Act, women’s preventive health care must be covered without cost-sharing, meaning a trip to the doctor to get a prescription for birth control would not have any out-of-pocket costs. So a big chunk of the alleged savings from moving the pill over-the-counter would not be realized; it’s already not costing consumers anything. It’s also speculative for Gardner to insist that his plan is cheaper. As far as we can tell, there hasn’t been a study that looks specifically at the cost benefits of moving the pill over-the-counter, and a spokesperson for the Consumer Healthcare Products Association told us that they "can't speak to any specific product or ingredient." That’s not to say that providing birth control without cost-sharing, as the Affordable Care Act does, is free to the healthcare system. When insurance companies are required to cover birth control or doctor visits without asking for a co-payment, those costs are baked into the monthly premium. You may not have to pay anything at the pharmacy, but you may pay for it in other ways, especially if you previously chose not to purchase insurance and suddenly are forced by the law to buy a policy. Some grandfathered plans may also choose to not cover these services and it does not address the millions of individuals who would remain uninsured under the law. Zack Cooper, a health policy and economics professor at Princeton University, said it’s possible that if the pill was reclassified as over-the-counter, consumers would have more options, sales volume would go up and competition would increase between drug companies. These factors can all lead to prices going down. But he said it’s also possible that it has a negative effect, since suddenly consumers are paying for birth control at the point-of-purchase instead of getting it at no cost. "When you make something even a little more expensive, use goes down," Cooper said. "That means more women get pregnant, and babies cost a lot more than birth control. You can argue it would actually increase the cost of insurance and the government will be on the hook for more federal subsidies." So there’s a lot of uncertainty as to which would actually be cheaper. We would also like to see more details from Gardner on how he would "ensure that women can be reimbursed for (the pill) through insurance," but so far he has not produced legislation or a detailed summary. And Gardner’s plan only applies to one particular birth control: the pill. While the pill is the most common form of birth control, it’s not the only method. About 27 percent of female contraceptive users reported that the pill was their prefered method, meaning three-quarters use another option (though this survey included male condoms and vasectomies, which aren’t covered by the law and make up a big chunk of contraceptive use). Other birth control methods may be more effective or more preferable for certain patients, but they are also a lot more expensive at the point of purchase, said Alina Salganicoff, vice president and director of Women’s Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Like intrauterine devices, which can cost $500 to $1,000 without insurance. So when Gardner asks "what’s the difference between me and Mark Udall on contraception," but only provides a plan for the pill, he’s leaving out a lot of people who medically cannot use the pill or chose another option. Absent the Affordable Care Act, these other methods would undoubtedly be more expensive for consumers. Similarly, it would definitely be "easier" for a lot of individuals to obtain the pill over-the-counter instead of going to a doctor first to get a prescription, especially those who live in rural areas where a doctor’s office is not nearly as close as the corner pharmacy. But this again does not address all contraceptives, just the pill. Gardner’s campaign also noted that the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued an opinion in 2012 expressing medical support for over-the-counter access to oral contraceptives. However, the group also maintained its support for the Affordable Care Act provision that provides women access to the pill without cost-sharing, noting that "numerous studies have shown that even small cost-sharing requirements can limit use of needed preventative care." Our ruling Gardner said his plan on contraceptives is "cheaper and easier for you" than Sen. Mark Udall’s plan. This is based on his support for a plan to allow for over-the-counter sales of the pill. Gardner’s plan is lacking in concrete details that would allow a thorough evaluation. There’s some evidence that health care costs generally go down when drugs are made available over-the-counter, but those studies did not look specifically look at the pill. There is a lot of uncertainty and experts — from advocates to economists — question whether Gardner’s proposal would be cheaper to most consumers or the health care system compared to the Affordable Care Act. And Gardner’s plan would only address one type of contraceptive, meaning the many people who choose other methods of birth control would see higher costs. We rate the statement Mostly False.	None	Cory Gardner	None	None	None	2014-09-08T16:59:48	2014-09-02	['None']
-snes-04994	Most refugees are young adult males.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/refugee-invaders-meme/	None	Politics	None	Brooke Binkowski	None	Are Refugees Overwhelmingly Young and Male?	29 March 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-14540	Says state Supreme Court candidate Joe Donald twice "supported" incumbent Justice Rebecca Bradley.	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2016/feb/14/joanne-kloppenburg/one-state-supreme-court-candidate-once-backed-cand/	The first TV ad run by state Appeals Court Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg in the Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign criticizes Justice Rebecca Bradley, who was appointed to the high court by Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Then the ad turns quickly to Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Joe Donald, who is the third candidate in the Feb. 16, 2016 primary for Bradley’s seat. The two candidates who get the most votes will face off in the April 5, 2016 general election. "Joe Donald," the narrator says in Kloppenburg’s ad, which was released Feb. 8, 2016, "he supported Rebecca Bradley, Walker’s choice, twice." At the same time, these words are shown on the screen: "Donald twice supported Walker appointee Bradley," with the quote attributed to a blog. Kloppenburg, who is running from the left, is associating Donald with the candidate who is clearly on the right. As we’ll see, Donald’s support for Bradley was explicit for one judicial post, but split for another. The candidates Kloppenburg, of Madison, ran for the Supreme Court once before, in 2011. Then an assistant state attorney general, she lost to Justice David Prosser in a race so close it went to a recount. Kloppenburg won election to the Madison-based District 4 Court of Appeals in 2012. Bradley, of the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa, was appointed to the Supreme Court by Walker in October 2015 after the death of Justice Patrick Crooks, and is now running for the seat for the first time. Bradley had also been appointed by Walker to the Milwaukee-based District 1 Court of Appeals in May 2015 and before that to the Milwaukee County Circuit Court in 2012. Donald, of Milwaukee, was appointed to the Milwaukee County bench in 1996 by GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson and has won election to the court four times, without opposition. He is also running for the high court for the first time. The Milwaukee County court is the link between Bradley and Donald. Given her incumbency and her position on the ideological scale, Bradley is expected to advance to the general election, which means the real race in the primary is between Kloppenburg and Donald. Kloppenburg’s evidence On Kloppenburg’s claim that Donald twice supported Bradley, let’s look at the instances cited by Kloppenburg’s campaign. Both were first reported by WisPolitics.com. 1. Donald specifically endorsed Bradley in 2013 in her first run for the Milwaukee County Circuit Court. She had been appointed the year before by Walker to the seat, and defeated two challengers in the election. It is common for sitting judges to support one another in elections, something Donald’s campaign itself has said in explaining Donald’s backing of Bradley. Donald, though, has also said he got "bamboozled," telling WisPolitics: "I really thought (Bradley) was about being a trial court judge. It became apparent that it had nothing to do with it, that this was clearly a process to put her in place to put her on the Supreme Court." 2. Donald gave his name as a reference when Bradley applied to fill the 2015 vacancy on the state appeals court -- but he also recommended that Walker choose another candidate. Bradley’s application letter to Walker lists Donald as one of four references, noting that Donald had previously served as presiding judge of the Milwaukee County Children’s Court. Bradley served there after being appointed to the Milwaukee court by Walker. Donald’s campaign acknowledges that Donald consented to Bradley listing him as a reference for her appeals court application. But the campaign also cites a letter Donald wrote to Walker in which Donald recommended that Walker choose Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Timothy Dugan for the slot. So, in contrast to the first instance, when Donald’s support for Bradley was unilateral, his support in the second instance was split. Our rating Kloppenburg says Donald twice "supported" Bradley. Donald explicitly endorsed Bradley in a 2013 election for the Milwaukee County Circuit Court. When there was a vacancy on the state appeals court in 2015, Donald supported Bradley by allowing her to use him as a reference in her application, although he also recommended that the governor choose a different applicant for the post. For a statement that is accurate but needs additional information, our rating is Mostly True.	None	JoAnne Kloppenburg	None	None	None	2016-02-14T05:00:00	2016-02-08	['None']
-abbc-00032	"Tonight... there are 30,000 women — that's more women than all of the soldiers in the regular Australian Army — who are sleeping rough on the streets of Australia. There are another 100,000 men who are sleeping rough," Australian of the Year David Morrison said on the ABC TV's Q&A on February 1.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-11/fact-check-do-women-sleeping-rough-outnumber-army-soldiers/7132982	Mr Morrison's claim is wrong. According to the 2011 census, the total number of homeless Australians was 105,237. Of those, 45,813 were women and 59,424 were men. However, these figures include six categories of homelessness of which sleeping rough is only one. In the sleeping rough category, women numbered 2,180 and men 4,633. Experts contacted by Fact Check said these were the best figures available and far fewer men and women were sleeping rough on the streets of Australia than Mr Morrison said. There were 29,193 soldiers in the Regular Australian Army on June 30, 2015. Whilst there are more homeless women in total than there are soldiers in the Regular Army, there are fewer women sleeping rough than the number of soldiers. Homeless men in all categories do not number 100,000, let alone men sleeping rough.	['defence-forces', 'housing', 'homelessness']	None	None	['defence-forces', 'housing', 'homelessness']	Fact check: Are 30,000 women and 100,000 men sleeping rough on the streets of Australia?	Wed 10 Feb 2016, 11:22pm	None	['Australia', 'Australian_Army']
-pomt-12283	"U.N. official John Ashe set to testify against the Clintons may not have died by accident."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jun/30/blog-posting/blogger-falsely-ties-death-un-official-clintons/	A self-described conservative blog revived a rumor from the Clinton body count archives. The blog Conservative Politicus had the stirring headline "U.N. official John Ashe set to testify against the Clintons may not have died by accident after all," on June 17. This has the essential ingredients to meet the appetite of any conspiracy fan: Clintons, a legal case and a dead man. That doesn’t mean those elements are on the money. Yes, Ashe died in 2016, and yes, there was a criminal case. But no, he wasn’t going to testify against either Bill or Hillary Clinton. Now, for the back story. John Ashe represented Antigua and Barbuda at the United Nations and at one time served as president of the General Assembly. In October 2015, the FBI accused Ashe of receiving at least $500,000 in bribes to benefit a Chinese businessman named Ng Lap Seng. Ng isn’t a household name today but back in 1998, a Senate report identified him as the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars funneled through an Arkansas restaurant owner to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton-Gore campaign in the mid 1990s. Ng visited the White House 10 times. That is the known extent of any Clinton connection. In June 2016, the rumor-busting website Snopes asked the office of the U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of New York if their case involved either Clinton. A spokesman said not at all. The complaint against Ashe makes no mention of the Clintons. Ashe wasn’t scheduled to testify against the Clintons. He was slated for what the spokesman described to Snopes as a standard pre-trial meeting. As for Ashe’s death, he died at home in June 2016 when a barbell crushed his throat. That happened near the time he was scheduled to meet with prosecutors. The death was ruled an accident. Several conspiracy-minded posts emerged soon after his death. One about a month afterward included Ashe’s name with two others who allegedly died under mysterious circumstances. The one common thread was a tie to the Clintons. Our ruling A conservative blog revived a year-old rumor that a UN official died shortly before he was going to testify against the Clintons. While the man did die and he was scheduled to meet with prosecutors, that’s the extent of the accuracy here. Prosecutors said Ashe had received at least half a million dollars in bribes, and he was headed for trial. The case had no connection to the Clintons, except that the man who allegedly provided the bribe had illegally given to Democrats about 20 years earlier. The official autopsy found he died in an accident and no evidence suggests otherwise. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-06-30T11:29:58	2017-06-17	['Bill_Clinton', 'United_Nations']
-snes-06444	You can tell which day a loaf of bread was baked by the color of its plastic twist tag.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bread-tag-code/	None	Food	None	David Mikkelson	None	Bread Tag Code	30 April 2001	None	['None']
-pomt-04085	Kohl’s Department Stores in 2012 "announced the creation of 3,000 new jobs."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2013/jan/19/scott-walker/citing-his-accomplishments-gov-scott-walker-says-b/	In his "state of the state" speech on Jan. 15, 2013, Gov. Scott Walker said Wisconsin is improving as a place for doing business, then boasted of a job-creation coup. "Employers feel good about our state," the Republican governor said, reflecting on the first half of his four-year term. "During the past year, Kohl’s Department Stores worked with us and announced the creation of 3,000 new jobs." In a state with unemployment well above 6 percent, having 3,000 jobs set to come online would be huge news. But that’s not the headline we remember. Indeed, no ground has yet been broken on a second corporate headquarters for Kohl’s that was announced in 2012, although planning is well under way. When it comes to employment, there are jobs and even promised jobs. Then there are potential jobs. Saying Kohl’s "announced the creation of 3,000 new jobs" is different than saying Kohl expects or hopes to hire that many people. Where does this one stand? Growth of Kohl’s The first Kohl’s department store opened in 1962 next to a Kohl’s grocery store in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield. Both the department store chain and the now-defunct grocery chain were started by Max Kohl, the father of Herb Kohl, who served for 24 years as a U.S. senator from Wisconsin before deciding not to seek re-election in 2012. Kohl’s is now a chain of more than 1,100 family-oriented department stores in 49 states, selling Jennifer Lopez, Princess Vera Wang and other lines of clothing, as well as a variety of home goods and other items. With $18.8 billion in sales in 2011, the publicly traded company -- which is no longer connected with the Kohl family -- ranked 20th on the National Retail Federation’s 2012 list of the nation’s top 100 retailers. In December 2011, news surfaced that Menomonee Falls-based Kohl’s, which has 4,900 corporate employees in the Milwaukee area, might be close to announcing a decision on where to build a second headquarters building. Milwaukee was competing with Menomonee Falls, its suburban neighbor, for the $250 million corporate expansion. Three months later, Kohl’s said it had decided against downtown Milwaukee and in July 2012, the company announced its chosen site in Menomonee Falls. Walker’s evidence When we asked Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie for evidence to support Walker's claim, he provided us a news article and a news release from the governor. Like a number of other news articles during the year, the four-paragraph November 2012 news item in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said the new headquarters was expected to create 3,000 jobs over 12 years. The Walker news release was issued on the day Kohl's announced the Menomonee Falls site. Walker said in the release that Kohl's would receive up to $62.5 million in state tax credits over 12 years, but the actual amount "will be completely dependent upon the number of newly created jobs and the amount of Kohl’s capital expenditure." The state Economic Development Corp. said that under the deal, Kohl’s must retain 4,500 jobs, create 3,000 jobs and invest $250 million in new and existing facilities to get the full amount of the tax credits. So, even news releases from Walker’s office and one of his state agencies talk about the possibility of 3,000 jobs, not a certainty that they had been or would soon be created. Indeed, in a Milwaukee Business Journal article published the same day as Walker’s news release, Kohl’s chairman and chief executive officer Kevin Mansell said "up to 3,000 jobs could be added" over 12 years. That’s a projection that, even if well founded, doesn’t amount to a commitment to create that many jobs. And there’s no way to know whether economic conditions over 12 years will enable Kohl’s to reach its hiring goal. Our rating Walker said that in 2012, Kohl’s Department Stores "announced the creation of 3,000 new jobs." What Kohl’s announced is it would build a new headquarters and expected to create 3,000 jobs, over 12 years -- not that 3,000 jobs were a certainty. For being partially accurate but leaving out important details, we rate Walker’s statement Half True.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2013-01-19T09:00:00	2013-01-15	['None']
-pomt-13919	As a result of Roe vs. Wade, "America’s maternal mortality rate dropped dramatically."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/24/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-pregnancy-related-deaths-dropped-a/	Hillary Clinton says her opponent Donald Trump wants to take the country back to a time that was bad for women’s reproductive health. "When Donald Trump says ‘let’s make America great again,’ that is code for ‘let’s take America backward.’ Back to a time when opportunity and dignity were reserved for some, not all," she said in June 10 remarks at a Planned Parenthood event. "Back to the days when abortion was illegal, women had far fewer options, and life for too many women and girls was limited. Well, Donald, those days are over." Clinton went on to note significant moments in history for women’s health, notably the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, Roe vs. Wade. "So young women were no longer dying in emergency rooms and back alleys from botched, illegal abortions," she said. "And this is a fact that is not often heard, but I hope you will repeat it: America’s maternal mortality rate dropped dramatically." We decided to look into Clinton’s factoid: that Roe vs. Wade resulted in a decreased number of women dying as a result of pregnancy complications. Maternal mortality rates, which are the number of deaths per 100,000 live births, were already declining rapidly in the years prior to the January 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, according to the Vital Statistics of the United States, maintained by the Centers for Disease Control. This is also true looking just at mortality rates related to abortion. In 1965, about 32 women for every 100,000 live births died as a result of pregnancy complications, including abortions. It fell steadily every year leading up to Roe in 1973, when the rate was 15.2. The rate continued to decrease in the years after, to 9.6 in 1979. You can see in the graph that there is a slightly bigger drop than previous years in maternal mortality rates between 1972 and 1973, during which the Supreme Court decided Roe. The same pattern is visible for abortion-related deaths, with a rate of 6.3 in 1965, falling to fewer than 1 in the years after Roe. Both overall maternal mortality and abortion mortality were declining in the years leading up to Roe due to better antibiotics, blood banks and other medical advancements, said David Grimes, a clinical professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. However, the decline in abortion related-deaths accelerated when abortion started to become legal. It’s also worth noting that before abortion became legal, the number of abortions — and thus the number of abortion-related deaths — were likely underreported. While Roe is a focal point, the decline in maternal mortality as a result of legalized abortion took place over about a decade — from the time states began to legalize abortion on their own in 1966 to when the rest transitioned to complying with the Supreme Court ruling in the late 1970s, said Johanna Schoen, an expert in reproductive rights history and professor at Rutgers University. By the time the court decided Roe in 1973, New York, Alaska, Hawaii and Washington legalized abortion in nearly all cases, while about 13 other states legalized it in some cases, such as in the case of rape or incest. Legalizing abortion gave medical professionals the okay to conduct the procedure out in the open and to research safer methods, which helped bring overall maternal mortality rates down. So not only were women moving from less-safe illegal abortions to legal ones, the legal abortions were becoming safer. In fact, receiving an abortion now carries a lower mortality risk than moving forward with a pregnancy. "With the legalization of abortion and the simultaneous introduction of medical equipment to perform first trimester abortions with vacuum aspiration machines, a previously clandestine and dangerous procedure became safe, quick, and inexpensive almost overnight," Schoen wrote in her book, Abortion after Roe. The fact that legalizing abortion was able to affect overall maternal mortality rates is a testament to how many women were having abortions at the time, Schoen told PolitiFact. In a stark turn of events, maternal mortality rates are currently on the rise in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. This sets the United States apart from its peer countries, which have generally seen continued declines. Researchers hypothesize that the increase has to do with women getting pregnant while suffering from a chronic illness like diabetes, more women giving birth via higher-risk cesarean sections, or hospitals are getting better at reporting maternal deaths. Our ruling As a result of Roe vs. Wade, "America’s maternal mortality rate dropped dramatically." Rates of women dying as a result of pregnancy complications were already on the decline when the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade. But experts told us that a primary reason behind this trend was legalizing abortion nationwide, which took place over a decade, with Roe as a focal point. So Roe solidified this improvement in maternal mortality rates. We rate Clinton’s claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/f5af5bca-127a-4301-ab1f-202b4c15c8ed	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-06-24T10:00:00	2016-06-10	['United_States']
-tron-02191	#DontJudgeChallenge Goes Wrong, Teen’s Face Stained Black	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dontjudgechallenge-goes-wrong-teens-face-stained-black/	None	internet	None	None	None	#DontJudgeChallenge Goes Wrong, Teen’s Face Stained Black	Jul 23, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-00097	Jennifer Garner Leaning On Brad Pitt Amid Ben Affleck’s Struggle With Sobriety?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-garner-brad-pitt-ben-affleck-sober/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Garner Leaning On Brad Pitt Amid Ben Affleck’s Struggle With Sobriety?	1:48 am, October 24, 2018	None	['Ben_Affleck', 'Brad_Pitt', 'Jennifer_Garner']
-snes-05219	Mark Cuban said that Millennials will probably vote for a Democrat in 2016, "because they fact-check everything."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-cuban-millennials-quote/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Mark Cuban Said Fact-Checking Millennials Will Vote for Democrats?	14 February 2016	None	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-goop-00990	Mila Kunis Quitting Hollywood To Have Third Baby With Ashton Kutcher?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/mila-kunis-ashton-kutcher-third-baby-quitting-hollywood/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Mila Kunis Quitting Hollywood To Have Third Baby With Ashton Kutcher?	3:31 pm, May 16, 2018	None	['Mila_Kunis', 'Cinema_of_the_United_Kingdom']
-goop-00462	Justin Bieber, Hailey Baldwin Breaking Up?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-bieber-hailey-baldwin-breaking-up/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Justin Bieber, Hailey Baldwin Breaking Up?	8:41 pm, August 13, 2018	None	['Justin_Bieber']
-pomt-00551	"In just 17 years, spending for Social Security, federal health care and interest on the debt will exceed ALL tax revenue!"	mostly true	/virginia/statements/2015/jun/16/dave-brat/brat-says-entitlement-and-debt-payments-will-consu/	The day of financial reckoning is near, says U.S. Rep. Dave Brat. "In just 17 years, spending for Social Security, federal health care and interest on the debt will exceed ALL tax revenue!" Brat, R-7th, wrote in a May 29 Facebook post. That would mean no money for defense or domestic programs unless Uncle Sam wanted to put these items on his already overburdened credit card. "Continuing down this path of rampant federal spending and debt expansion is not an option," Brat wrote. "It will push us ever closer to fiscal crisis. Getting our spending under control and working to balance our budget must begin now." We wondered whether the 17-year warning -- also being sounded by the Republican leadership on the House Budget Committee, on which Brat serves -- is accurate. Brian Gottstein, a spokesman for Brat, said the claim is based on figures published by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in its "2014 Long-Term Budget Outlook," issued last July. It contains two scenarios that could happen if Congress doesn’t take strong action to reduce deficits. The first one assumes that all the major U.S. budget laws in July 2014 will remain in effect. That means Congress will continue sequestration which sets limits on defense and domestic spending, allows a buffet of popular tax cuts to expire as scheduled and doesn’t adjust tax brackets to soften inflationary increases in workers’ earnings. Under these assumptions, the CBO says spending on Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and debt interest will top tax revenues in 2044. As bleak as that might seem, there’s an alternative scenario that’s even gloomier. This is the one Brat embraces. It essentially assumes that Congress will lack the courage to continue unpopular budget policies and, as a result, spending will go up and many taxes will do down. The alternative scenario supposes that Congress will abandon sequestration and continue to extend tax cuts that are scheduled to expire -- most notably tax breaks on research and development, first-year capital investments costs and income gained through foreign corporations in nations with high tax rates. Under these assumptions, the CBO says spending on Social Security, federal health care and debt interest would exceed taxes in 2031. That’s 16 years from now. Is it fair for Brat to focus on the worst scenario? Two analysts told us yes, noting Congress already has a history of relenting on deficit-reducing policies. For example, Congress voted in 2013 to permanently extend the bulk of income tax cuts that were approved during the presidency of George W. Bush. The cuts were originally slated to expire in 2010. "The alternative fiscal scenario understands how some of the tough choices Congress needs to make conflict with promises members have made to their constituents," said Eugene Steuerle, an economist at the Urban Institute. "Most people who would have to pick between the two scenarios would say Congress would most likely use the alternative one." Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, called Brat’s statement "credible." A major point in the CBO report is that the day of reckoning is avoidable if Congress can break its standoff between Republicans, including Brat, who oppose tax increases, and Democrats who oppose cuts to entitlement programs. The report says, "To put the federal budget on a sustainable path for the long term, lawmakers would have to make significant changes to tax and spending policies: reducing spending for large benefit programs below the projected levels, letting revenues rise more than they would under current law, or adopting some combination of those approaches." Our ruling Brat says that under the current U.S. path, "In just 17 years, spending for Social Security, federal health care and interest on the federal debt will exceed all tax revenue." A CBO report concludes that, in a worst-case scenario in which Congress resumes its old habits of cutting taxes and raising spending, this could happen in 2031 -- 16 years from now. Under a somewhat rosier scenario, in which current budget policies are kept in effect, the U.S. would hit bottom in 2044. Brat’s focus on the bleaker outlook is defensible because Congress this century has not shown great fiscal discipline. We’re dealing with scenarios, however, and Brat’s statement would have been more accurate if he acknowledged from the outset that the U.S. "could" run out of tax money for many major programs instead of saying it "will." No doubt, however, the U.S. is on a risky fiscal path. We rate Brat’s statement Mostly True.	None	Dave Brat	None	None	None	2015-06-16T10:41:06	2015-05-29	['None']
-goop-02189	Justin Bieber Following “Love Bible” With 10 Commandments For Dating Selena Gomez?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-bieber-love-bible-10-commandments-selena-gomez/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Justin Bieber Following “Love Bible” With 10 Commandments For Dating Selena Gomez?	9:54 am, November 17, 2017	None	['None']
-bove-00042	Did Vijay Mallya Donate Rs 35 Crore To BJP Before Leaving India?	none	https://www.boomlive.in/did-vijay-mallya-donate-rs-35-crore-to-bjp-before-leaving-india/	FACT: The cheque is a fabricated one and does not belong to Vijay Mallya.	None	None	None	None	Did Vijay Mallya Donate Rs 35 Crore To BJP Before Leaving India?	Jul 18 2018 8:54 pm, Last Updated: Jul 19 2018 10:48 am	None	['None']
-pomt-08772	"Joe Sestak ... even wants to bring back the death tax, letting the IRS take half of your savings when you die."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/aug/24/pat-toomey/pat-toomey-hits-joe-sestak-estate-tax-leaves-out-s/	In his Senate race against Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., former Republican Rep. Pat Toomey is using a favorite GOP issue: taxes. In an ad, Toomey charges that "Joe Sestak ... even wants to bring back the death tax, letting the IRS take half of your savings when you die." Before we look at the substance of the ad, let's first take a closer look at what Toomey calls the "death tax" and what others call the "estate tax." According to the IRS, the decades-old estate tax was levied until recently on "your right to transfer property at your death. It consists of an accounting of everything you own or have certain interests in at the date of death," including such items as cash and securities, real estate, insurance, trusts, annuities and business interests. Various factors reduce the gross amount subject to the tax, such as mortgages and other debts, amounts passed to surviving spouses and a credit that shields upwards of $1 million per person, and double that for a couple. Unless Congress and the president act to eliminate it permanently, the estate tax won't exist at all for exactly one year -- 2010. This oddity came about as a result of the passage of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, which was one of the tax cuts proposed and signed by President George W. Bush. The 2001 law slowly ratcheted down the estate tax's rates and ratcheted up the amount excluded from the tax, concluding with a total elimination of the tax for 2010. At the end of 2010, the estate tax would return to its levels in the early part of the decade -- a $1 million exclusion and a 55 percent top rate -- though many expect that Congress would either act before then to set new levels or eliminate the tax entirely. We see two questions to ask in evaluating in Toomey's ad. The first is whether Sestak "wants to bring back the death tax." The second is whether it's accurate to say that the tax "(lets) the IRS take half of your savings when you die." On the first question, both Toomey and Sestak have points to make. Toomey's camp points to votes Sestak took in Congress that supported continuation of the estate tax. In one of them, on Dec. 3, 2009, Sestak voted with 225 other Democrats (and no Republicans) to pass the Permanent Estate Tax Relief for Families, Farmers, and Small Businesses Act of 2009. This legislation -- which passed the House but stalled in the Senate -- would have established the top estate tax rate at 45 percent and set the exclusion rate at $3,500,000 per person or $7 million per couple. (This happens to be the Obama administration's proposal as well.) Immediately prior to that vote, Sestak voted against a GOP-backed "motion to recommit" that would have asked lawmakers to go back to the drawing board and permanently eliminate the tax. When we spoke to Sestak's camp, they confirmed that their candidate continues to support the position he voted for in the 2009 bill. However, they took issue with Toomey's characterization of his position as one that would "bring back" the tax. A Sestak spokesman noted that it was actually the 2001 bill -- which Toomey himself voted for -- that is the reason why the estate tax is set to pop back to life in 2011 (and at a higher tax rate and lower exclusion level than what Sestak supports). We accept the Sestak camp's point, but we believe it's ultimately a bit of semantics. Toomey's main point is that, one way or another, Sestak, unlike Toomey, wants there to be an estate tax of some sort after the tax's disappearance in 2010, and the Sestak camp confirms that he stands by the estate tax parameters he voted for in 2009. Now to the second question -- the ad's claim that the tax "(lets) the IRS take half of your savings when you die." On the surface, what the ad says is close to true -- that is, unless Congress and the president agree to new terms before Dec. 31 of this year, the new top estate tax rate in 2010 would be 55 percent, which is slightly over the "half" indicated by the ad. However, the ad glosses over three pieces of context that are important. The first is that the ad says a reinstated tax would "(let) the IRS take half of your savings when you die," giving the impression that many of those watching would be subject to it. Yet the reality is that in any given year, very few families would pay the tax, and all of them would be quite wealthy. According to calculations by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, the 2009 proposal Sestak voted for would levy the tax on 6,400 estates nationwide in 2011 -- about three-tenths of one percent of all those who die that year. (By comparison, the estate tax that would apply in 2011 without any congressional action would levy the tax on 44,200 estates -- still only 2 percent of deaths that year, but about seven times higher that what Sestak voted for.) The second problem is that even those families that do pay the tax would not pay it on half their savings, as the ad states. Because of the exclusions, the "effective" tax rate -- that is, the tax levied divided by the total amount of assets considered under the tax -- averages around 20 percent, according to the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The last problem is that Sestak supports setting the estate tax rate at 45 percent. Even ignoring the much lower "effective" tax rate due to the $3.5 million-per-person exclusion, that top tax rate falls short of the "half" that Toomey's ad indicates. Advocates of eliminating the estate tax defended the ad's distillation of a complicated subject. "In politics, as opposed to policy writing, you have a very brief time to get across any message, so I don't think it is realistic for candidates to include all the caveats," said Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. "So I would view Toomey's ad as kosher, much as I would feel it would be acceptable if Sestak were to run an ad about Toomey wanting to 'put people's retirement incomes at the mercy of Wall Street.' It's Sestak's job to criticize Toomey's ad, just as it's Toomey's responsibility to to go after Sestak when his positions get caricatured." To recap, while there is some truth to Toomey's claim because Sestak supports reviving the estate tax, Toomey exaggerates the scope of the tax, incorrectly implying that it would apply to far more taxpayers, and that it applies to their entire estates. In fact, only the wealthiest Americans would pay the tax under the proposal that Sestak supports, and the proposal would exclude $3.5 million per person and $7 million per couple. On balance, then, we rate the ad Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Pat Toomey	None	None	None	2010-08-24T13:59:24	2010-07-14	['None']
-snes-04273	Ronald Reagan said he felt like he was shaking the President's hand when he met Donald Trump.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/reagan-trump-handshake/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Ronald Reagan Predict a Trump Presidency?	10 August 2016	None	['Ronald_Reagan', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-00800	Say Apple’s Tim Cook "will not do business with Indiana."	false	/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/02/erick-erickson/redstate-editor-decries-apple-chief-not-doing-busi/	Some social conservatives have had it with backlash directed at Indiana over its Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In a column for conservative grassroots site RedState.com, editor-in-chief Erick Erickson criticized business owners and people on the left who say the law will allow anyone to cite religious belief in refusing to serve gays and lesbians. Erickson’s opening sentence hones in on Apple chief executive Tim Cook for what he sees as hypocritical business practices. "To recap: Tim Cook (please, please click this link) and the left are happy to do business in countries that stone to death or otherwise jail gay people, but will not do business with Indiana," Erickson wrote, "which merely passed a law insisting that the ‘free exercise’ clause of the first amendment be on the same legal footing in courts as the ‘free speech’ clause of the first amendment." Erickson would not respond to our requests for more information, but his point is fairly evident: Apple will do business in countries where being gay is illegal (there were more than 70 such countries as of 2013) but won’t do business with Indiana. That turns out to be putting words in Apple’s mouth. What Cook said Cook, who has been Apple’s CEO since 2011, started speaking out against Indiana’s religious freedom law with a couple of tweets March 27, the day after Republican Gov. Mike Pence signed the measure into law. Cook wasn’t done criticizing the law. In a March 29 Washington Post op-ed, Cook, who is gay, warned that the legislation in Indiana and other states allows people to cite personal religious beliefs as a reason not to serve a customer based on sexual orientation. (Some experts say such refusals along these lines under Religious Freedom Restoration Acts would not win out in court, but the law may lead some people to think they have that right.) "Our message, to people around the country and around the world, is this: Apple is open," he wrote. "Open to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love. Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination." Cook also said, "on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges." Strong words, yes. But like his tweets, the op-ed said nothing about the company no longer doing business with Indiana. We searched and found no other instance of Cook, or Apple, making comments about Indiana’s law or suggesting they would not do business in, or with, the state. Erickson did not respond to us via our email, phone or Twitter queries. Instead, he posted a blog on RedState saying "Seriously. Sometimes a tweet is just a tweet." (Erickson’s post was not a tweet, it was a column.) Erickson isn’t alone among bloggers in the right-wing blogosphere who hold up the company’s Middle East presence in criticizing the CEO’s stance toward Indiana. Apple has locations in predominantly Muslim countries where some states or sects under sharia law punish homosexuality with death, including Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Qatar. As for Indiana, the state is home to two Apple retail stores in malls in Indianapolis and Mishawaka. Both were still in operation April 2, 2015, when we called. An Apple spokesman offered no additional comment. Our ruling In trying to call out Apple’s Cook for clashing business practices over gay rights, Erickson said Cook "will not do business with Indiana." That is not true based on Cook’s public remarks on Twitter and in an op-ed. Cook has been outspoken in his position against the law and others like it across the country, but Apple stores remain open in Indiana and iPhones, iMacs and everything else is still being sold. Erickson’s claim rates False.	None	Erick Erickson	None	None	None	2015-04-02T17:14:27	2015-03-31	['Indiana', 'Tim_Cook']
-vogo-00416	Fact Check TV: State Workers and Train Safety	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-tv-state-workers-and-train-safety/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Check TV: State Workers and Train Safety	March 28, 2011	None	['None']
-pose-00390	Obama "will also provide tax incentives to make it easier for new farmers to afford their first farm. Obama will increase incentives for farmers and private landowners to conduct sustainable agriculture and protect wetlands, grasslands and forests."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/409/give-tax-incentives-to-new-farmers/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Give tax incentives to new farmers	2010-01-07T13:26:57	None	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-11571	"Incredibly, some Tallahassee politicians want to make Florida a sanctuary state."	half-true	/florida/statements/2018/feb/02/richard-corcoran/do-tallahassee-politicians-want-make-florida-sanct/	A dramatic new ad for tougher immigration policies by Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran’s political committee has drawn national attention and criticism from Democrats. Since Corcoran’s Watchdog PAC released the ad in late January, it's been aired hundreds of times on Fox News channels and garnered more than 30,000 views on YouTube. The 30-second video features a white woman walking down the streets of a suburban neighborhood when a supposed illegal immigrant, dressed in jeans and a hooded jacket, turns around to shoot her. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Corcoran says the situation mirrors the fatal shooting of Kate Steinle, who was shot in July 2015 while walking with her father on a San Francisco pier. Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant, was charged with the crime. Prosecutors argued that Zarate intentionally killed Steinle. But, Garcia Zarate’s lawyers argued that her death was unintentional. They said Garcia Zarate, a homeless man, found and picked up a cloth-wrapped gun and that it accidentally fired, the shot ricocheting and traveling about 78 feet before hitting Steinle in the back. He was acquitted of murder and involuntary manslaughter charges in December 2017, but Republicans, including President Donald Trump, cite the case when criticizing sanctuary city policies throughout the nation. "This could have happened to any family, anywhere," Corcoran says in the voice-over. "Incredibly, some Tallahassee politicians want to make Florida a sanctuary state." We wanted to sort out Corcoran’s claim that some Tallahassee politicians support statewide sanctuary-city policies. There is no specific legal definition of sanctuary cities, but the term generally describes jurisdictions that to some extent limit their cooperation with federal immigration officials. Typically, these cities don't honor federal requests to detain illegal immigrants in their custody who they would otherwise release. These policies are generally set at the local levels and are enacted by police department and sheriff’s offices. Watchdog PAC’s communication director Taylor Budowich gave PolitiFact Florida a factsheet for the ad. It included two news articles. One was about Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and the other was about Democratic lawmakers who introduced legislation in 2017 that would have protected sanctuary cities in Florida. We’ve looked at whether Gillum wants to make Florida a sanctuary state before and we rated it Half True. We found that the claim was extrapolated from Gillum's vows to fight back against Trump's attack on sanctuary cities. Budowich also pointed to a news article which talked about Gillum’s response to President Donald Trump’s January 2017 executive order to penalize cities that don't comply with federal immigration agents by withholding federal funds. After the executive order was announced, Gillum took to Twitter and posted a lengthy statement to attack Trump’s decision as "inconsistent with our highest values," adding the United States can "protect national security interests and have a secure border without criminalizing people who are here undocumented." Gillum’s campaign said as governor he would support an approach like in Tallahassee that emphasizes immigration enforcement as a federal responsibility, not a local one. But Gillum has not offered a specific statewide policy for not cooperating with detainer requests from immigration enforcement officials, so his position is murkier than what Corcoran’s is describing. "Mayor Gillum regularly talks about how illegal immigrants should not be ‘criminalized’ based on being in the country illegally," Budowich said. "So, call it sanctuary cities or wholesale amnesty, it's equally as wrong and defies the rule of law." As for the other Tallahassee politicians, the factsheet cites a 2017 bill (HB 1407) that was sponsored by Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, and Rep. Al Jacquet, D-Lantana. The bill died in the Criminal Justice subcommittee in May, but it would have prohibited local law enforcement officials from "making an inquiry or recording information concerning the immigration status of certain persons." In the article, Smith explained that the bill was meant to garner trust between local law enforcement and sanctuary communities. "This important legislation strengthens those critical local relationships and creates trust to keep all of our communities safe," Smith said in the piece. One final note. The ad implies that undocumented immigrants could murder a family member "any family, anywhere." There is no national database or study tracking how many people have been killed by undocumented immigrants or the nationality of the victims, but numerous studies have found that immigrants are not more likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. Our ruling Corcoran said, "some Tallahassee politicians want to make Florida a sanctuary state." Corcoran’s ad was referring to Gillum and Democratic politicians, who sponsored legislation in support of sanctuary cities. Gillum was critical of Trump’s executive order threatening to suspend funding, but he has not offered a specific statewide policy for not cooperating with detainer requests from immigration enforcement officials. Last year, Florida Democrats sponsored legislation that emphasized immigration enforcement as a federal responsibility, not a local one, but that bill died in committees. With everything considered, we rate this claim Half True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Richard Corcoran	None	None	None	2018-02-02T12:26:11	2018-01-29	['None']
-vogo-00138	The Future of Plaza de Panama: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/the-future-of-plaza-de-panama-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	The Future of Plaza de Panama: Fact Check TV	February 19, 2013	None	['None']
-snes-00946	Suave brand shampoos and conditioners contains thioglycolic acid and cause hair loss.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/does-suave-shampoo-cause-hair-loss/	None	Medical	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Does Suave Shampoo Contain an Ingredient That Causes Hair Loss?	1 March 2018	None	['None']
-snes-05462	A deceptive photograph shows a man perilously hanging by his feet from the edge of a high cliff.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/photograph-cliff-hanger-isnt-quite-seems/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Photograph of Cliff Hanger Isn’t Quite What It Seems	21 December 2015	None	['None']
-goop-00771	Ariana Grande Pregnant With Pete Davidson’s Baby, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ariana-grande-pregnant-pete-davidson-baby-not-true/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Ariana Grande NOT Pregnant With Pete Davidson’s Baby, Despite Report	10:09 am, June 22, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-00205	A video shows a man surviving a tumble down a long flight of stairs, only to be hit by a car in the street.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/man-falling-down-stairs-video/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This Video of a Man Falling Down a Flight of Stairs Real?	17 August 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-13606	"50% of Hispanic students count on Pell Grants to pay for college."	true	/texas/statements/2016/aug/15/ruben-hinojosa/texas-democrat-says-half-hispanic-college-students/	Proposed education appropriations legislation from the Republican-controlled U.S. House would cut Pell Grant funding in fiscal 2017 by $1.3 billion to $21.1 billion. Despite the overall funding cut, Pell Grant maximum amounts are due to rise in the 2016-2017 award year to $5,815 from $5,775 in the 2015-2016 award year. Pell Grants, started by Congress in 1972, are awarded to financially needy students who haven’t yet earned a bachelor’s or professional degree. The proposed funding "cut" is because some -- like Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who chairs the House subcommittee that drafted the legislation -- says the Pell Grant program has been running a surplus for years and that money would be better spent elsewhere. Yet the proposal drew rebukes from education groups and more than 100 Democratic members of Congress. While there is a $7.7 billion surplus in Pell dollars, Kelly McManus of the Education Trust, a Washington-based group focused on academic achievement by students that has registered opposition to the proposed reductions, said that money should be devoted to providing grants to more students. Opponents of the proposed cuts include retiring U.S. Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, D-Mercedes, who tweeted in June 2016: "50% of Hispanic students count on Pell Grants to pay for college: 1.usa.gov/1WNY90D #ProtectPell https://twitter.com/USRepRHinojosa/status/743577402299777024" We wondered if Hinojosa got it right that half of Hispanic students lean on Pell Grants for college. Emails to his office went unanswered. But a web search led us to a 2011 report by Mark Kantrowitz, author of "The Distribution of Grants and Scholarships by Race," a report tracking Pell Grant distributions by race and ethnicity based on data collected for 2003-04 and 2007-08 about how students and their families paid for postsecondary education. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) is conducted every three to four years by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which draws on administrative records plus parent and student interviews At the time of Hinojosa’s tweet, Kantrowitz told us by email, the most recent available data were from 2011-2012. Otherwise, Kantrowitz advised, data covering 2015-16 will available in 2017. So, what do the latest numbers show about the share of Hispanic students getting Pell grants? According to the 2011-2012 NPSAS data, 50 percent of Hispanic undergraduates received a Pell Grant that year; the average award to those students was $3,500. At our request, Kantrowitz did his own analysis of the 2011-2012 counts of grant recipients using race/ethnicity -- setting aside foreign students -- and looking at all recipients of a federal Pell Grant during 2011-2012. Kantrowitz told us: "50.8% of students in the Hispanic or Latino category received federal Pell Grants, compared with 33.7% of students in the White category and 62.7% of students in the Black or African American category. If I group together all the minority students, 53.7% of minority students received Pell Grants." In recent years, the share of Hispanic students drawing the grants has surged, according to a custom report compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics for PolitiFact that showed Hispanics, excluding Puerto Rico, had sat in the mid- to high-20s for percent with Pell Grants through the 1990s. The biggest jump was between 2007-2008 and 2011-2012, when the number of Hispanics receiving the grants increased from 35.7 percent to the 50 percent mark. Wondering why the percentage of Hispanic students getting grants has surged, we reached out to Deborah A. Santiago with Excelencia in Education, a D.C.-based nonprofit organization that says it "accelerates Latino student success in higher education." Santiago said by email that the increase in Hispanic students receiving grants tracks with a 30 percent increase in Hispanic enrollment in higher education between 2008 and 2012. That spurt, Santiago said, included a 4 percent uptick in Hispanic enrollment in four-year institutions, which are typically more costly to attend than two-year schools. Santiago agreed too that the Great Recession helps explain the increase "since incomes decreased and more who could not find jobs enrolled in higher education," she said. And did other ethnic groups experience similar spikes? Black students did. Per the NSPAS data, nearly 62 percent of such students got grants in 2011-12 compared with 46 percent in 2007-2008. The figures show that in 2011-2012, 33.5 percent of white students received Pell Grants valued at an average of $3,300, while 61.9 percent of black undergraduates received Pell Grants at an average of $3,400 per scholarship. About 34 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander undergraduates had Pell Grants at an average of $3,800 each -- but they also had the highest average price of attendance at $20,000. But Hispanic Pell Grant recipients had the lowest rate of student loans, with only 50.1 percent having student loans compared to 64.7 percent of white Pell Grant recipients and 65.8 percent of black grant holders. Our ruling Hinojosa said "50% of Hispanic students count on Pell Grants to pay for college." According to federal figures, 50 percent of Hispanic undergraduates received the grants for 2011-2012, the latest year for which figures were available. We rate this statement True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/7758e89e-1c31-4343-a227-1b065826032f	None	Ruben Hinojosa	None	None	None	2016-08-15T16:21:06	2016-07-16	['None']
-pomt-03236	Many uninsured Americans are "young."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/16/rand-paul/rand-paul-says-young-people-are-major-part-uninsur/	During a recent appearance on The Daily Show, guest host John Oliver and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., engaged in a lively exchange on health insurance. In the interview, Paul said many of the uninsured are young people. Paul, an eye surgeon, strongly opposed President Barack Obama’s health care law. During the interview, Oliver pressed him on how to get more Americans signed up for insurance. Paul told Oliver that according to the most recent statistics, "85 percent of people had insurance, so 15 percent didn't. So what you need to do is look at who are the 15 percent, and why don't they have insurance? Of the 15 percent who didn't have insurance, half of them made more than $50,000 a year. Why didn't they buy insurance? Because of the expense. They were young healthy people." In this item, we’ll check whether the uninsured are predominantly young. In separate items, we’ll look at whether cost of insurance is the biggest barrier to uninsured Americans and whether half of the uninsured made more than $50,000 a year. We’ll start by noting that it’s tricky to interpret Paul’s phrasing. One interpretation is that he said uninsured Americans making at least $50,000 are primarily young. Another is that he means that uninsured Americans are disproportionately young, regardless of income level. We didn't get an answer from Paul's staff about which of these he had intended, so we’ll look at both scenarios. Before doing that, we’ll note that the age of uninsured Americans is important because young people have particular insurance needs that are distinct from those of middle-aged and older Americans. Since young people tend to be healthy, they are more likely to be tempted by the option of not buying insurance, particularly if they do not work for a company that offers subsidized insurance. Many young people are averse to paying for the kind of comprehensive coverage attractive to middle-aged Americans and those with families, since young, healthy people aren’t necessarily going to the doctor very often. And this makes it harder to devise policies that push younger people into buying insurance. As Paul put it in the interview, "They don't need low deductibles. They need very high deductibles. They need insurance for catastrophes, because young people are unlikely to get ill. They need it for the rare occasion, not the everyday occasion." Are higher-income uninsured Americans mostly young? According to Census Bureau data, uninsured Americans with family incomes above $50,000 break down as follows: Children up to 18: 17 percent of all uninsured Americans with incomes above $50,000 Ages 19 to 29: 27 percent of all uninsured Americans with incomes above $50,000 Ages 30-39: 17 percent of all uninsured Americans with incomes above $50,000 Ages 40-64: 38 percent of all uninsured Americans with incomes above $50,000 (Anyone 65 and older automatically gets Medicare and thus cannot be uninsured. This census data was calculated and provided to PolitiFact by the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.) So about one-quarter of the better-off uninsured are age 19 to 29 -- the age range most people probably think of when they hear the phrase "young" in the context of health insurance. Using a broader age range -- from 19 to 39 -- the share rises to 44 percent. That’s a significant percentage, but it’s short of a majority. Are uninsured Americans overall mostly young? Here’s how uninsured Americans break down by age, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of Census Bureau data: Age 0-18: 15.9 percent of all uninsured Americans Age 19-25: 17.3 percent of all uninsured Americans Age 26-34: 21.4 percent of all uninsured Americans Age 35-44: 17.5 percent of all uninsured Americans Age 45-54: 16.4 percent of all uninsured Americans Age 55-64: 11.5 percent of all uninsured Americans So, the percentage of the uninsured who are between ages 19 and 25 is 17.3 percent, while the percentage of the uninsured who are between 19 and 34 is 38.7 percent. That means that "young" Americans comprise a significant minority of the uninsured population, though still not a majority. That said, younger people are statistically more likely to be uninsured than either children or middle-aged Americans. Here are the percentages of people in specific age ranges who are uninsured: Age 0-18: 9.7 percent of people in this age range are uninsured Age 19‐25: 27.9 percent of people in this age range are uninsured Age 26‐34: 27.8 percent of people in this age range are uninsured Age 35‐44: 21.2 percent of people in this age range are uninsured Age 45‐54: 17.9 percent of people in this age range are uninsured Age 55‐64: 14.6 percent of people in this age range are uninsured In other words, if you’re a young person, you are more likely to be uninsured than children or middle-aged Americans are. However, if you look at uninsured Americans in the big picture, young people are not the biggest part. Children and middle-aged Americans, combined, account for a larger share of the uninsured population. Our ruling Paul said that many uninsured Americans are "young." He’s right that significant numbers of young people lack insurance, and that young people are statistically more likely to be uninsured than either children or middle-aged Americans are. However, it’s worth noting that within the universe of uninsured Americans, young people are not close to a majority. Collectively, children and the middle-aged account for a greater share of the uninsured. On balance, we rate Paul’s comment Mostly True.	None	Rand Paul	None	None	None	2013-08-16T11:45:47	2013-08-12	['None']
-tron-00847	Hillary Clinton Met with Manchester Bomber’s Father	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hillary-clinton-met-manchester-bombers-father/	None	clinton	None	None	['foreign leaders', 'hillary clinton', 'terrorism']	Hillary Clinton Met with Manchester Bomber’s Father	May 30, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-11963	"The crowd (in Las Vegas) fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer ..."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/04/hillary-clinton/no-gun-silencers-wouldnt-have-worsened-las-vegas-s/	In the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, Hillary Clinton suggested gun silencers could have amplified the bloodshed. "The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get," Clinton tweeted. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com A silencer is the popular name for a suppressor, a canister attached to a gun muzzle that reduces (but doesn’t entirely silence) the sound produced by a gunshot. Some members of Congress have been pushing for legislation that would make it easier for gun owners to use suppressors. The Hearing Protection Act, introduced in the House of Representatives in January, would lower the restrictions on buying suppressors. As it stands, there is an approximately nine-month approval process and a $200 tax stamp. Act proponents want to streamline purchases to match regular firearm purchases. We wondered whether introducing suppressors to the Las Vegas shooting would have indeed increased casualties. Our research shows that a suppressor would not have made a difference in the Las Vegas case, because of the positioning of the weapons and because of the distance of the shooter from the crowd. Clinton’s staff provided no evidence to suggest a different outcome. How much quieter would it have been? A shooting weapon produces two sounds. One is the crack of the bullet, which can be heard on most video recordings of the shooting and is produced by the bullet traveling faster than the speed of sound. This is unaffected by suppressors. Suppressors instead work on the muzzle blast, or the sound the gun barrel produces when it fires. A typical gunshot is around 150-160 decibels, a level that can cause hearing damage. Suppressors can reduce that sound by around 20-30 decibels, depending on the gun, ammunition, temperature and even humidity. That’s just below the threshold for instant hearing damage. Experts compared the suppressed sound levels to a jackhammer and a jumbo jet on the tarmac 100 yards away. That’s still fairly loud. It’s important to note that suppressors are intended to lower the sound for the shooter, not the target. Jeremy Mallette, who has researched suppressors for Silencer Shop, estimated the sound of suppressed gunfire would go up 10 to 15 decibels downrange -- making the impact of the suppressor even lower for those on the receiving end. Could it have helped in locating the shooter? The gunman shot at the crowd out of windows on the 32nd floor of the hotel and positioned the guns so that they shot outwards. If the shooter’s aim was to lower the sound emissions, the room could have better trapped the noise, according to Tom Satterly, the director of development for Asymmetric Solutions, a firearm training firm based in Missouri. "If you hang your weapon outside of your window the muzzle blast is going outside," Satterly said. "If you back in -- a foot or farther -- a lot of that sound is absorbed into the room. That’s what snipers do when they’re trying to hide their position." Suppressed or not, Mallette said adjacent hotel rooms would have heard the sound very loudly. Marty Langley, a gun-control advocate and a senior policy analyst at Violence Policy Center, pointed to claims from the silencer industry that if the suppressor masks the sound of the gunshot, then the person being shot at can only hear the ballistic crack after it has whizzed by, causing them to think the fire is coming from the opposite direction. However, Satterly, an Army veteran with combat experience in Somalia, said that neither he nor his colleagues had ever been able to pinpoint the direction the sound originated from -- an effect that is amplified in a loud, urban area like the Las Vegas strip. "It’s nearly impossible to tell where someone shot you from in an urban environment unless there’s visual cues," Satterly said. Which brings us to our next point: Langley also pointed out claims from the industry that silencers make shooters less detectable in the dark. The flash hider that comes with a silencer is designed to minimize the flame the shooter sees coming out of the barrel, which can blind night vision goggles for a couple of seconds. But while it minimizes the flash, it doesn’t eliminate it altogether. What’s more, it’s a function that can be performed by tools that are already on the market without the same barriers to purchase as suppressors -- and that many rifles are already equipped with. Langley also pointed out industry claims that silencers can improve accuracy and enable quicker follow-up shots by reducing recoil. That is, they can decrease the barrel’s rising produced by the pressure and gas of the bullet. Experts agreed a suppressor can slightly improve accuracy, but the effect would have been minimal in the indiscriminate shooting seen in Las Vegas. Our ruling Hillary Clinton suggested gun silencers would have worsened the Las Vegas attack in a tweet. It’s certainly possible that silencers or suppressors could make some shootings worse than they would be otherwise. But the specifics of the Las Vegas shooting don’t fit that scenario. Experts told us it’s highly unlikely a silencer would have made the Las Vegas shooting even more deadly, because of the distance of the shooter from the crowds and because of the crowded, urban environment where the victims were targeted. Gun silencers can slightly lower the visual and sound impact of a shooter, but experts agreed the impact would have been negligible in the case of Las Vegas. We rate this statement False. Clarification: After this report was published, we added language to clarify that Langley was pointing to industry claims about the characteristics of suppressors. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2017-10-04T11:32:41	2017-10-02	['Las_Vegas']
-pomt-04481	"When Congressman Langevin took office, gas was around $1.70 per gallon, and now it is near $4 per gallon."	mostly false	/rhode-island/statements/2012/oct/08/michael-riley/michael-riley-blames-rep-james-langevin-helping-ga/	It's an informal tradition in politics that if you're running for national office, you blame the incumbent for everything except the weather. (Although in these days of debate over climate change, the weather might be an issue of contention as well.) Republican Michael Riley followed that tradition in a Sept. 30, 2012, news release attacking incumbent U.S. Rep. James Langevin, a Democrat. Headlined "Langevin Does Nothing to Lower the Price of Gas in Rhode Island," it blames Langevin for taking votes that led to higher gasoline prices, such as opposing "completion of the Keystone Pipeline." (For the record, the pipeline, even if it had been approved as proposed in 2008, wasn't going to be completed until 2013, so it would have had no effect on current gasoline prices.) "When Congressman Langevin took office, gas was around $1.70 per gallon, and now it is near $4 per gallon," the Riley release says, contending elsewhere in the statement that Langevin is "in part" to blame. First, we checked Riley's numbers. According to the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, when Langevin took office on Jan. 8, 2001, the average price of a gallon of self-service gasoline was about $1.54. The Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the January 2001 price at $1.53. That's not $1.70. Riley got that wrong. On Sept. 30, 2012, when Riley issued his news release, the Rhode Island price was about $3.93, nearly $4, as the candidate said. He got that part right. When looking at claims such as this, we also ask ourselves whether it's accurate to ascribe blame. Riley says in his news release that Langevin is partly to blame because of his energy votes. We called and e-mailed the Riley campaign on Oct. 2 to find out how much blame he was talking about. We asked: "How much responsibility does Langevin bear for the gas prices going from $1.70 when he took office to close to $4 now? 100%? 50%? 10%? 1%? 0.1%?" We never got a response. In fact, oil is a world commodity and gasoline prices are influenced by a wide variety of factors beyond the control of a single politician, and Langevin is one of 535 voting members of Congress. The impact of the pipeline, to cite one of Riley's issues, is debatable. While the company behind the project has said it would reduce prices by 3.5 to 4 cents per gallon, a March Business Week story concluded that building the pipeline wouldn't bring down gasoline prices. Another analysis predicted that the pipeline could actually raise prices by 10 cents per gallon. Analysts whom PolitiFact and other news organizations have consulted over the years have repeatedly said that office holders, including the president, have little impact on gasoline prices at any particular time. Our ruling Michael Riley blames Rep. James Langevin "in part" for skyrocketing gasoline prices, saying, "When Congressman Langevin took office, gas was around $1.70 per gallon, and now it is near $4 per gallon." Langevin was first elected to Congress nearly a dozen years ago, when the price was closer to $1.53, not $1.70. But Langevin's role in the global oil and gasoline market is so small to be almost inconsequential. Because Riley's statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, we rate it Mostly False. (Get updates from PolitiFact Rhode Island on Twitter: @politifactri. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Michael Riley	None	None	None	2012-10-08T00:01:00	2012-09-30	['None']
-snes-05067	Kentucky has passed a bill banning interracial marriages.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kentucky-banning-interracial-marriages/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Is Kentucky Banning Interracial Marriages?	14 March 2016	None	['None']
-snes-05945	Ongoing tetanus vaccine campaigns in Kenya are a ruse to sterilize women of childbearing age.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tetanus-vaccine-sterilization/	None	Medical	None	David Mikkelson	None	Is Tetanus Vaccine Spiked with Sterilization Chemicals?	10 November 2014	None	['Kenya']
-pose-00126	"Implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade -- investments to Israel's security that will not be tied to any other nation."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/133/provide-30-billion-over-10-years-to-israel/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Provide $30 billion over 10 years to Israel	2010-01-07T13:26:49	None	['Israel']
-snes-03984	A small business in Canada is offering jobs and free land to Americans looking to relocate in the event of a Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton presidency.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/canadian-business-offers-land-to-relocating-americans/	None	Immigration	None	Dan Evon	None	Small Canadian Town Will Give You a Job and Land to Relocate	21 September 2016	None	['Canada', 'United_States', 'Donald_Trump', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-03807	"Q: What do these ‘Patriotic' Americans have in common? A: They are all Draft Dodgers."	pants on fire!	/new-jersey/statements/2013/mar/24/liberals-are-cool/liberal-group-claims-mitt-romney-dick-cheney-donal/	It’s a Vietnam-era insult that still stings in 2013. Draft dodger – the term conjures up images of Americans unwilling to serve their country and sneaking off to Canada to avoid being drafted for military service. A group called Liberals Are Cool applied that term in an Internet meme - an idea or concept shared via social media - to six well-known Republicans – Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, Ted Nugent, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. "Q: What do these ‘Patriotic Americans’ have in common? A: They are all Draft Dodgers," according to the meme received March 17 by PolitiFact New Jersey. Draft dodging is a serious accusation, but in Liberals Are Cool’s case, theirs lacks any shred of accuracy. Let’s explain how the draft worked during the Vietnam era, which the Selective Service System defines as August 1964 through December 1972. Men who received a draft notice in the mail had about three weeks to return paperwork requesting a hearing for a deferment, Selective Service System spokesman Pat Schuback said. A local draft board then decided whether to grant the waiver. "For the Vietnam war and World War II, any time there was a draft, there were classifications of deferments," Schuback said. "If you were eligible for it, you were entitled to claim that deferment." That’s what happened to the men targeted by Liberals are Cool, according to military classification histories that the Selective Service System shared with us, as well as other public records and published reports. The six each applied for and received education deferments because they were students when their names came up for military service. Romney also received a religious deferment during the time he was doing Mormon missionary work. Romney and Trump also had very high draft numbers, meaning that although they were eligible for military service, their numbers were never called. The first draft lottery for Vietnam occurred on Dec. 1, 1969. Cheney received an additional deferment when he became a father. A federal law at the time exempted a parent from military service for reasons of "extreme hardship on dependents." Schuback didn’t have Nugent’s and O’Reilly’s classification histories available but numerous published reports – including ones from Snopes.com and TheSmokingGun.com indicate that both received education deferments. Both websites use public documents for fact-checking. Limbaugh and Nugent were ultimately disqualified from service for medical reasons, according to Snopes.com and TheSmokingGun.com. Education deferments were not unusual, Schuback noted. In fact, millions of Americans received them. During the Vietnam era there were 26,800,000 men in the United States. Of those, 2,215,000 were drafted. The number of deferments during that time was 1,541,000 – more than 50 percent of the population eligible for military service, according to the book "I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force," by Bernard D. Rostker that was put out by the RAND Corporation. So what is a ‘draft dodger’? It’s not someone who received a legitimate and legal deferment from military service, Schuback said. "A draft dodger is someone who got drafted and has then fled, or it also might be a person who made a statement by not registering (for the draft)," he explained. "I’m not a draft dodger," Schuback added, citing himself as an example. "I got a deferment because I was pursuing a college degree. Calling that a draft dodger is not correct. They can use it a different way but it’s not correct." Liberals Are Cool did not respond to our request for comment. Our ruling A Liberals Are Cool meme claims "Q: What do these ‘Patriotic Americans’ have in common? A: They are all Draft Dodgers," referring to Romney, Trump, Cheney, Limbaugh, Nugent and O’Reilly. Liberals Are Cool doesn’t acknowledge that the six registered properly for the draft, then applied for and received legal deferments so they could complete their education – an opportunity given more than half the men eligible for the U.S. draft during the Vietnam era. Liberals Are Cool may not like that these men didn’t face combat, but calling them ‘draft dodgers’ is wrong – and ridiculous. As a result, we’re cranking up the heat for this ruling: Pants on Fire! To comment on this story, go to NJ.com. To see a list of military classification codes from the U.S. Selective Service System, and the military classification histories for Romney, Trump, Cheney and Limbaugh, click here.	None	Liberals Are Cool	None	None	None	2013-03-24T07:30:00	2013-03-17	['United_States']
-pomt-11796	"The elimination of income and sales taxes in New York is equal to 9 percent of taxable income, meaning that if you make $100,000 a year you lose $9,000"	false	/new-york/statements/2017/nov/20/brian-higgins/not-all-state-and-local-tax-deductions-eliminated-/	Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, claimed the House Republican tax reform bill could slash middle-class incomes as much as 9 percent. New York state taxpayers would lose money if Congress decides to end the federal deduction of state and local taxes, he said. "The elimination of income and sales taxes in New York is equal to 9 percent of taxable income, meaning that if you make $100,000 a year you lose $9,000," Higgins said at a hearing. "If you make $50,000 a year, you lose $4,500." About 3.3 million people in New York state take advantage of the state and local tax deduction, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a tax policy and research organization. More than half of those who take the deduction make $100,000 a year or less. Is Higgins right that those taxpayers could lose as much as $9,000? Explaining the SALT deduction The current tax code allows taxpayers to deduct their state and local taxes from their federal taxes. About one-third of filers do this in New York state. That helps residents in states like New York where property taxes are higher. Filers can also deduct either their state income tax or sales tax, but not both. The House Republican tax plan would cap the maximum property tax deduction at $10,000 and end the deduction for state income and sales tax altogether. About two-thirds of filers choose instead to take the standard deduction, a fixed amount set each year. Where’s the number from? What Higgins said is different from what he meant to say, said Theresa Kennedy, the congressman’s spokeswoman. He meant to say filers would no longer be able to deduct $9,000 -- not lose $9,000 outright. Higgins supports that claim with data from the Government Finance Officers Association. The group said the average state and local tax deduction in New York state is equal to 9 percent of a filer's income. That's where Higgins get the $9,000 figure from. Nine percent of $100,000 is $9,000. That’s in the ballpark. People making between $75,000 and $100,000 deduct $9,949 on average in state and local taxes, according to data from the Tax Policy Center. "How much they'll actually save depends on the tax rate," said Frank Sammartino, a senior fellow at the center. Couples making $100,000 are currently taxed at 25 percent. That wouldn’t change under the Republican plan. A $9,000 tax deduction could save that couple $2,250 in tax, according to the IRS. One caveat Even if Higgins had said deduction in his statement, he would still be wrong. Higgins made his claim after House Republicans decided to keep the deduction for property taxes. The deduction would be capped at $10,000. If someone’s property tax bill is more than that amount, the difference could not be deducted. The Senate bill does not include that proposal. Sammartino said Higgins’ claim would hold up if there isn’t a compromise. "Nine thousand would be true if it was a complete repeal," Sammartino said. "But it would be something less than that" with the deduction for property taxes. The average property tax deduction is $6,522 for someone making between $75,000 and $100,000 in New York. That falls below the cap. "People would be protected to some degree," Sammartino said. Kennedy, the spokeswoman for Higgins, said the bill still affects residents in his district, regardless of the final numbers. "We can debate the exact numbers which will be different for each taxpayer, but the bottom line is that hardworking Western New Yorkers have a lot to lose in both the Senate and House legislation which continues to change by the minute," Kennedy said. Our ruling Higgins said New York state taxpayers could lose as much as 9 percent of their taxable income if state and local tax deductions end. Higgins meant to say residents would no longer be able to deduct 9 percent of their income from their federal taxes, not that they would lose that money outright. But even if he said what he meant, that would still be inaccurate. House Republicans came to a compromise on property tax deductions that refute the numbers in his statement. We rate the claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Brian Higgins	None	None	None	2017-11-20T14:42:52	2017-11-03	['New_York_City']
-hoer-00661	'Buddha' Shaped Pears	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/buddha-shaped-pears.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	'Buddha' Shaped Pears	July 23, 2012	None	['None']
-pose-00709	Will create "a fair and meaningful teacher/administrator evaluation tool linked to student performance and growth."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/oregon/promises/kitz-o-meter/promise/739/create-teacher-evaluation-tool-linked-to-student-p/	None	kitz-o-meter	John Kitzhaber	None	None	Create teacher evaluation tool linked to student performance	2011-01-04T21:58:42	None	['None']
-snes-00239	Did Major News Networks Ignore a Story About Korean War Remains Coming Home?	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/korean-war-remains-news-coverage/	None	Media Matters	None	David Emery	None	Did Major News Networks Ignore a Story About Korean War Remains Returning to the U.S.?	9 August 2018	None	['None']
-tron-02766	Michelle Obama Caught Texting During the Pledge of Allegiance	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/michelle-obama-caught-texting-during-the-pledge-of-allegiance/	None	obama	None	None	None	Michelle Obama Caught Texting During the Pledge of Allegiance	Aug 19, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-11460	"China, my understanding is, supplies 4 percent of the steel in the U.S."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/08/angus-king/does-much-steel-does-us-import-china/	President Donald Trump said his administration would slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to the United States, the latest in a series of moves to reorder the country’s trade arrangements along lines Trump believes are more favorable to American interests. The Trump administration has long criticized China for flooding the U.S. market with cheap commodities, and the 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum Trump announced March 1 seemed calculated in part to rein in what the administration considers unfair Chinese trade practices. But some critics, like Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, have charged that a steel tariff would do more harm to U.S. allies like Canada, and American small businesses, than it would do to China. Following Trump’s announcement, King said he heard complaints from constituents who run steel-reliant small businesses. King said one business owner reported an 8 percent increase in steel costs, and another worried about cost increases on steel imported from a nearby Canadian partner. While Trump may have a point about unfair trade practices, King said, Beijing would hardly bear the brunt of an import tax on steel, given its relatively small U.S. market share. "China, my understanding is, supplies 4 percent of the steel in the U.S," King said during a March 4 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. So how much does China account for U.S. steel imports? We decided to mine for answers. Transshipment of Chinese steel Measuring U.S. steel imports by country is not as straightforward as it might seem. The American steel industry has argued that China has a backdoor to U.S. markets through a practice known as transshipment, whereby countries buy Chinese steel and modify it before exporting to the United States. Trump drew attention to this practice during March 6 remarks at the White House. "If you talk China, I’ve watched where the reporters have been writing 2 percent of our steel comes from China. Well, that’s not right. They transship all through other countries," Trump said. "It doesn’t look good when it all comes out of China, so they send it through other countries, and it comes to us. And it’s putting our steel mills out of business." Experts we spoke to said there’s no hard data on transshipment, which makes the scale of this practice difficult to gauge. Edward Alden, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted the Commerce Department was unable to quantify the problem in a recent investigation — known as a Section 232 report — that probed the effect of steel and aluminum imports on U.S. national security. The report said only that an "unknown portion" of Chinese steel is further processed in third-party countries before entering the United States. "It’s at least fair to say that the president is making a strong claim without solid evidence to back that claim up," he said. Alden added that the biggest targets of Trump's steel tariff would be the European Union, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and Korea. (The White House is reportedly considering granting an exemption Canada and Mexico.) "Except for Korea," he said, "none of the others seems to be a transshipment concern." Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the amount of Chinese steel that enters the United States through transshipment is not enough to call into question the reliability of the Commerce Department’s import data. He also pushed back on how Trump characterized transshipment. "China sells raw and semi-finished steel to other countries, which then make more highly valued products. (But Trump's use of) the word 'transshipment' implied that the same piece of metal arrives, for example, in Veracruz and then is shipped to Houston with no transformation," Hufbauer said. "This is Trump’s imagination." So let’s set the issue of transshipment to one side and focus on the steel products the Trump administration has eyed for tariffs. According to Chad P. Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the only steel imports subject to Trump's proposed tariffs are those which have been identified by the Commerce Department. The department measures U.S. steel imports in two ways: quantity and U.S. dollar value. Under each yardstick, China’s share is relatively small. China's share of U.S. steel imports In terms of quantity, China accounts for just over 2 percent of U.S. steel imports, according to 2017 data. That’s far behind traditional U.S. allies like Canada (roughly 18 percent), the European Union (about 21 percent) and South Korea (nearly 10 percent). Expressed another way, the United States imported 740,126 tons of steel from China last year, compared to nearly 5.7 million tons from Canada and just over 5 million tons from European Union countries. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com China’s share is slightly larger in terms of dollar value, but still relatively small. The United States imported just shy of $1 billion in Chinese steel in 2017, or 3.35 percent of the United States’ nearly $30 billion annual steel import market, according to Commerce Department data. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com An aide to King pointed us to an interview with Bown, of the Peterson Institute, from September 2017, in which Bown said 4 percent of U.S. imports of steel come from China. But its proportion of U.S. steel imports, relative to other countries, has shrunk since then. In any case, he wasn’t too far off China’s 3.35 percent market share in 2017, in terms of dollar value. Experts largely backed up his broader point about the limited impact of steel tariffs on China. "The numbers show that the tariffs will hurt trading partners — which are allies — much more than China," said Mac Destler, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. Tom Orlik, chief Asia economist at Bloomberg in Beijing, wrote that China’s total exports of steel and aluminum are equal to about 0.5 percent of GDP, with most of that from steel. "Relative to fears from Trump’s campaign trail rhetoric, in which he threatened an across-the-board 45 percent tariff on all imports from China, these measures are extremely limited," Orlik wrote of Trump’s proposed tariffs. Our ruling King said, "China, my understanding is, supplies 4 percent of the steel in the U.S." There are different ways to measure U.S. steel imports by country. In terms of dollar value, Chinese steel made up 3.35 percent of the United States’ nearly $30 billion annual steel import market in 2017. But in terms of quantity, China accounted for just over 2 percent of U.S. steel imports that year. King’s claim tracks closely to one of two measures. But in either case, King does not stray too far from the Commerce Department’s 2017 data. We rate this Mostly True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Angus King	None	None	None	2018-03-08T09:30:00	2018-03-04	['United_States', 'China']
-pomt-00868	"Here, we have Thanksgiving, we have Christmas, we have the 4th of July. Every year in Iran, they celebrate Death to America day."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2015/mar/13/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-iran-annually-has-death-america-holi/	Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, expressed concerns about Iran coming closer to having nuclear weapons should the United States reach a deal permitting Iran to have nuclear fuel. Problematically, Cruz said, President Barack Obama’s administration doesn’t recognize the religious zealotry of Iran’s leaders. Talking to conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Cruz said that zealotry has been cemented into the country’s calendar. Indeed, Cruz said, "every day, or every year, rather, Iran celebrates as a holiday what they call death to America day. That’s an actual holiday in Iran. Here, we have Thanksgiving, we have Christmas, we have the 4th of July. Every year in Iran, they celebrate death to America day, which is the anniversary of Iran in the 1970s taking Americans hostage." We wondered if there is such a holiday. Cruz’s backup To our inquiry, Cruz spokesman Phil Novack emailed that every November, Iranians celebrate the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy. He pointed out a November 1987 Associated Press news story stating Iran’s leaders had just declared a national holiday to mark the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran "and called on their people to take to the streets and make ‘America tremble in fear.’" Tehran Radio had dubbed the special date, Nov. 4, 1987, ''Death to America Day,'' the story said. That date was eight years to the day of students taking over the embassy and holding 52 hostages who remained captives to the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency in early 1981. The AP story said, too, the date marked the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, founder of Islam, and the 25th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's expulsion from Iran to Turkey by the Shah of Iran, who fled in January 1979; weeks later, Khomeini triumphantly returned. More recently, according to an October 2013 New York Times news story also noted by Novack, "hard-liners" in Iran planned to mark Nov. 4, 2013, as a ‘Grand Day of Death to America.’" The same story said, though, the chant "Death to America" was falling out of routine use; Iran’s newly elected president, Hassan Rouhani, was saying the country no longer needed slogans. Other news stories Our search for news stories in the Nexis database yielded a Nov. 1, 2014, news report from BBC Worldwide Monitoring quoting from the "Iranian conservative, privately-owned Fars News Agency website" and saying: "Since the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iranians have been celebrating the occasion every year by holding rallies on the anniversary and marking it as the National Day against the ‘Global Arrogance.’" Four days later, a BBC summary of programs aired Nov. 4, 2014, by Iranian Fars Province TV news mentioned a video report on "the anniversary of the U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran in 1979 marked on 13 Aban (4 November) dubbed as ‘Day of fighting arrogance.’ Video shows archive footage of the embassy's seizure in Tehran." And The (Glasgow) Herald newspaper printed a photograph Nov. 5, 2014 with this description: "Thousands of Iranians have attended a major anti-U.S. rally marking the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The gathering outside the former embassy compound came days before a key meeting between the two nations’ senior diplomats over Iran’s nuclear programme. The crowds chanted ‘Down with America’ and ‘Death to Britain,’" the newspaper said. So it seems that at least in Tehran, Nov. 4 is marked every year. Next, we looked for confirmation the anniversary date is a national holiday akin to Christmas or the 4th of July called, as the senator said, Death to America Day. A list of Iranian holidays posted online by Iran’s office in Washington, D.C., doesn’t show a special designation for Nov. 4. But that list might only cover days Iran’s American office is closed. Separately, we spotted a list of public holidays in Iran posted by Columbus Travel Media, a company that describes itself as "dedicated to the provision of objective, accurate, informative and reliable travel content." Its list doesn't show any November holidays in Iran. Academic authorities And when we queried specialists on Iran, they responded there are annual demonstrations marking the 1979 embassy takeover, but the date is not a national holiday nor is it called Death to America Day. Gary Sick, a scholar at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute, said by email "Death to America" is an Iranian revolutionary slogan shouted or chanted "at most events related to the revolution. I am sure that it would be heard at the Nov. 4 demonstrations, but I am unaware that it is the formal name of the day or event. This slogan is shouted every Friday at the weekly prayer services held across Iran." Similarly, Alex Vatanka of the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Institute, said annual Nov. 4 events are a "regime-orchestrated show of anti-Americanism" and not a national holiday. "That said, the regime's history of spewing anti-Americanism is rich," Vatanka emailed. Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a Syracuse University political scientist, called the claim incorrect, saying by email: "There are celebrations on Nov. 4 which is the anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy" but "no such thing as a death to America national holiday." John Limbert, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and former Iranian hostage, said by email that Nov. 4 "is marked with demonstrations and speeches, although former President" Mohammad "Khatami (1997-2005) limited those events while he was in office. I have never heard it referred to as ‘Death to America’ day. Nor, as far as I am aware, does it have the status of ‘national holiday’ during which presumably offices and schools would be closed." Shahin Gerami, a specialist in Persian Studies at San Jose State University, called us back by phone the annual demonstrations are "highly orchestrated" by Iran’s government, like some such celebrations in Russia, she suggested. Stores, offices and banks don’t close, she said, because it’s not a holiday. She said she’d not previously heard anyone refer to Nov. 4 as Death to America Day. Cruz's response We alerted Cruz’s office to much of what we were hearing. Cruz spokeswoman Amanda Carpenter replied by email that the annual marking of Nov. 4 "fits the working definition of a holiday. St. Patrick’s Day is an upcoming event that most Americans recognize as a holiday, although it is not considered a federal holiday. Just because Iran has not similarly designated 'Death to America Day' as a formalized holiday does not mean Sen. Cruz's characterization was wrong or the occurrence of these routine celebrations is any less disturbing." Our ruling Cruz said that every year, Iran has a holiday like Thanksgiving, Christmas and the 4th of July called Death to America Day. Every year, demonstrations in Tehran mark the Nov. 4 anniversary of students taking over the U.S. embassy in 1979 and taking hostages. But that date doesn’t appear to be akin to the special American days Cruz singled out. In fact, it’s not a holiday on the calendar at all nor is it formally designated Death to America Day. We rate this claim, which has a strand of truth but ignores critical facts, Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/1d8e2d9a-3a10-42bf-98da-9231275df481 MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2015-03-13T15:24:10	2015-03-11	['United_States', 'Iran', 'Christmas', 'Thanksgiving']
-pomt-10371	"When he was asked a few years ago whether he could see himself lifting the cap on the payroll tax, (McCain) said, 'I could.' But today he's attacking me for holding the very same position."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/26/barack-obama/mccain-flipped-on-payroll-taxes-if-only-once/	What politicians have said on TV often comes back to haunt them. Sen. John McCain knows that feeling after Sen. Barack Obama recalled a past statement McCain made about Social Security solvency on a Sunday morning news show. In a June 13, 2008, speech to senior citizens in Columbus, Ohio, Obama outlined his plan to require those earning $250,000 or more to contribute more in payroll taxes while keeping all other tax levels constant. Then Obama dropped this line: "There was a time when John McCain thought this wasn't such a bad idea. When he was asked a few years ago whether he could see himself lifting the cap on the payroll tax, he said, 'I could.' But today he's attacking me for holding the very same position." McCain never put specific salary parameters to the issue, but he did tell Tim Russert on a Feb. 20, 2005, edition of Meet the Press that he would consider increasing the Social Security payroll tax to help keep the system solvent. Here's the relevant material from the transcript: Russert: Sen. McCain, there's a big debate in your Republican Party about whether or not, as part of the solution to Social Security's solvency problem, that you lift the cap so that you would pay payroll tax, Social Security tax, not just on the first $90,000 of your income, but perhaps even higher. Could you support that as part of a compromise? Sen McCain: As part of a compromise I could, and other sacrifices, because we all know that it doesn't add up until we make some very serious and fundamental changes. (At the time, the cap stood at $90,000. In January 2008, it rose to the current level of $102,000.) Reacting to Obama's assertion, McCain's advisers told reporters in a June 2008 conference call that he would not "under any imaginable circumstance" consider raising the payroll tax. During the conference call, campaign advisers didn't address McCain's 2005 statement on Meet the Press. Neither McCain's campaign nor the Obama camp returned calls seeking more information. But the record is clear in verifying Obama's statement. We rule it True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-06-26T00:00:00	2008-06-13	['None']
-pomt-14538	"It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year. There is a long tradition that you don't do this in an election year."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/14/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-supreme-court-nomination-tradition/	Republicans running for president say President Barack Obama should let the next president nominate someone to replace U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said on Meet the Press on Feb. 14 that it is a "long tradition" that a president in his final year in office should let his successor fill a spot on the nation’s highest court. Meet the Press Host Chuck Todd asked Cruz if the Senate had an obligation to at least consider a nominee from Obama. Cruz said "not remotely." "It has been 80 years since a Supreme Court vacancy was nominated and confirmed in an election year," Cruz said. "There is a long tradition that you don't do this in an election year." Cruz is correct in that it’s rare for a president to nominate and have confirmed a Supreme Court justice in an election year. But that’s more because of the rarity of filling Supreme Court slots than some "long tradition." The Senate’s list of Supreme Court nominees shows precious few nominees and confirmations in the years when America elects a president. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated two people in 1968, his final year in office. One would have elevated sitting Justice Abe Fortas to the Chief Justice position vacated by Earl Warren. Fortas hit strong opposition in the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the face of a filibuster, he asked that his name be withdrawn. (The hearings uncovered questionable speaking fees Fortas received, and he resigned from the court in 1969.) Johnson nominated Homer Thornberry in 1968 and was forced to withdraw that nomination, too. So neither Thornberry nor Fortas was nominated and confirmed in the same year. The next election-year nomination was in 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt put forward Frank Murphy on Jan. 4, 1940. The Senate confirmed Murphy 12 days later on Jan. 16, 1940. That took place 76 years ago, not 80 as Cruz said, but it’s pretty close. Cruz chose his qualifying words carefully. By including both nominated and confirmed, he avoided the case of Justice Anthony Kennedy. President Ronald Reagan nominated Kennedy on Nov. 30, 1987, and the Senate confirmed him on Feb. 3, 1988. To be clear, presidents decide when to nominate, and the Senate decides when to confirm. Often, the administration gets a read on where the Senate stands before putting someone forward, but formally, the timing for the first step is up to the person in the Oval Office. The experts we reached did have an issue with Cruz’s use of the word "tradition." "This is entirely a matter of circumstance," said Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University. "Certainly not a norm or tradition by presidents refraining from nominating in a presidential election year or by senators refusing to consider such nominations." In Cruz’s 80-year time frame, there were only two instances when vacancies coincided with presidential elections -- 1940 and 1968 as we just mentioned. Both times, the sitting presidents nominated a replacement. Going back further, there were opportunities in 1932, two in 1916, and one in 1912. In every one of those cases, the president nominated someone and the Senate voted to confirm. Editor Amy Howe wrote on SCOTUS Blog, "The historical record does not reveal any instances since at least 1900 of the president failing to nominate and/or the Senate failing to confirm a nominee in a presidential election year because of the impending election." Russell Wheeler is an expert on the courts at the Brookings Institution and former deputy director of the Federal Judicial Center. Wheeler told us that in the post-WWII period, the limited opportunities for election-year nominations lies primarily with the justices who exercise the choice to step down. "Justices rarely leave active service in an election year, because they know, at least in the modern era of contentious confirmation battles, that their colleagues will be short staffed because of the unlikelihood of an election-year confirmation of a successor," Wheeler said. "Justices in the modern era rarely die in office." Since the end of World War II, only four justices, including Scalia, died while serving. Wheeler said Scalia is the only justice who died in a presidential election year. Our ruling Cruz said there’s a long tradition stretching back 80 years of not nominating and confirming a Supreme Court justice in an election year. A Supreme Court justice hasn’t been both nominated and confirmed in a presidential election year since 1940, 76 years ago. But the notion that this is a "long tradition," is misguided. The fact is, vacancies in an election year are rare, especially in Cruz’s time frame. As such, it’s hard to argue that there is any tradition in filling seats. Cruz’s statement is partially accurate but takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2016-02-14T16:16:04	2016-02-14	['None']
-snes-01933	Mennonite Biker Gangs Clash with Hells Angels at Sturgis?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mennonite-biker-gang-hells-angels-sturgis/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Mennonite Biker Gangs Clash with Hells Angels at Sturgis?	10 August 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-05306	On the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)	no flip	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/18/mitt-romney/did-mitt-romney-flip-flop-tarp/	The Troubled Asset Relief Program -- the "TARP" program that was supposed to stabilize the financial markets -- has not been popular with conservatives. During the Republican presidential primary, most candidates attacked it. But the Democratic National Committee says Mitt Romney has flip-flopped on it. On Nov. 28, 2011, the DNC released two videos -- a 30-second version and a four-minute version -- that said Romney flipped on several issues, including TARP. About three minutes into the four-minute version, the word "TARP" appears on screen. Then Romney is shown in a split-screen view with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto. "TARP got paid back and it kept the financial system from collapsing," Romney says. "So you feel it was well worth it?" Cavuto asks. "Well, it was the right thing to do," Romney answers. Cut to another video clip, and we hear Romney say, "TARP ought to be ended." Rewind, then again, "TARP ought to be ended." Sounds contradictory, right? We checked it out. We’ll start by noting that the Flip-O-Meter rates politicians' consistency on particular topics from No Flip to Full Flop. The meter is not intended to pass judgment on their decisions to change their minds. It’s simply gauging whether they did. A fact sheet provided by the DNC tells us the source of the video clips. The first thing to note is that the statement in which Romney appears to support TARP was made after his "ought to be ended" clip. So does that mean Romney was originally against TARP, and then he was for it? Not exactly. We researched what Romney has said about TARP over the last four years and found that his position has largely remained unchanged. • In March 2009, Romney told Reuters, "The TARP program, while not transparent and not having been used as wisely it should have been, was nevertheless necessary to keep banks from collapsing in a cascade of failures. You cannot have a free economy and free market if there is not a financial system. … The TARP program was designed to keep the financial system going, to keep money circulating in the economy, without which the entire economy stops and you would really have an economic collapse." • A December 2009 clip shows how the DNC plucked the "TARP ought to be ended" quotation and distorted his position. His complete statement, in answer to a question by CNN’s John King about how to get the economy going, was, "And by the way, TARP has served its purpose. TARP ought to be ended. We've got hundreds of billions of dollars there that is being used as a slush fund by Secretary (Timothy) Geithner and the Obama administration. Stop the TARP recklessness at this point and get ourselves back to creating jobs by encouraging businesses to grow, expand their capital expenditures and hire." • In January 2010, Romney appeared on Fox and had even more positive things to say about TARP: "That was an investment made to try and keep a collapse of our entire financial system from occurring," • In a Republican primary debate in October 2011, Romney said, "My experience tells me that we were on the precipice, and we could have had a complete meltdown of our entire financial system, wiping out all the savings of the American people. So action had to be taken. Was it perfect? No. Was it well implemented? No, not particularly. Were there some institutions that should not have been bailed out? Absolutely. Should they have used the funds to bail out General Motors and Chrysler? No, that was the wrong source for that funding. But this approach of saying, look, we're going to have to preserve our currency and maintain America -- and our financial system is essential." Our ruling The DNC portrayed Romney as having flip-flopped on his support for TARP. But the statements the DNC chose for the ad echo what Romney has said on the topic all along -- that a Wall Street bailout was necessary to prevent a financial calamity, but the way the money was administered was poor. We rate it No Flip.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-05-18T17:03:31	2011-11-28	['Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program']
-goop-01626	Prince Harry Invited Ex Cressida Bonas To Meghan Markle Wedding?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/prince-harry-cressida-bonas-meghan-markle-wedding-invite/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Prince Harry Invited Ex Cressida Bonas To Meghan Markle Wedding?	4:47 am, February 8, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01871	"If you're a Mexican, you get sent back. ... But if you're from a noncontiguous country like the Central American countries" then you can stay in the United States.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jul/10/henry-cuellar/rep-texas-says-immigrant-minors-countries-dont-bor/	Why are so many children pouring across the southwest U.S. border? The answer is partly U.S. law, said a Texas congressman on CNN’s State of the Union on July 6, 2014. Candy Crowley, CNN’s host, asked Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, "Why are they coming in such numbers? What do you think prompts these numbers right now?" Cuellar answered, "If you're a Mexican, you get sent back. Mother, kids, adults, you're sent back, but if you're from a noncontiguous country like the Central American countries, then the law says that you are going to be held, (and) Health and Human Services, they're going to place you. That’s the law that we need to change right now." We looked into the claim and found that Cuellar wasn’t crossing any lines. With an influx of about 52,000 child immigrants at the border since October, the conversation has shifted to explanations. Which brings us to the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. Some have cited it as the catalyst for the increase in illegal immigration. President George W. Bush signed the law on Dec. 23, 2008; it received bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate as a measure to combat human trafficking worldwide. The law was never intended to encourage mass immigration from noncontiguous countries. But the law’s Section 235 did change the policies and procedures for handling unaccompanied alien children. Section 235, entitled "Enhancing Efforts to Combat the Trafficking of Children," requires humane treatment of minors crossing the border from foreign nations. It also mandates "safe and secure placements," calling for careful consideration when placing unaccompanied minors in residences within the United States. The law lays out one procedure for child immigrants from contiguous countries, like Mexico and Canada, and another for children from noncontiguous countries, like El Salvador or Honduras. Child immigrants from contiguous countries are processed for immediate return to their home country. In all other cases, the children are placed under the responsibility of the Secretary of Health and Human Services. These children are placed with family or in other residences while they await their immigration court date. Long story short, they get to stay in the United States. The law seems to assume that alien children from noncontiguous countries were likely to be the victims of human trafficking, and it guarantees these minors access to legal counsel and child advocates. Experts said Cuellar was right, and the law was never intended to allow immigrant children from Central America to remain in the United States. "Representative Cuellar's characterization is mostly right," said Dan Cadman, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. The law "has actually fueled an industry in the smuggling of minors. Contrary to intent, it has proven to be an inducement to wholesale smuggling of minors from noncontiguous countries." The House GOP task force, assembled by speaker John Boehner to address the immigration crisis, issued a statement this week calling for changes to the law. "We agree with the president that (these children) must be returned to their home countries in the most humane way possible and that will require a revision of the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act." On July 9, 2014, Cuellar said that he is introducing legislation to make the repatriation of minors from noncontiguous countries easier and faster by revising the law. Our ruling Cuellar said that unaccompanied alien children from contiguous countries are "sent back" no matter what, but the law calls for the placement of minors from "a noncontiguous country like the Central American countries" in a residential setting. Cuellar correctly characterizes the law. The law was passed as a measure to combat human trafficking worldwide. As a result, certain parts of the legislation allow unaccompanied minors from noncontiguous countries to stay in the United States. Lawmakers are now contemplating changing the law. We rate this statement True.	None	Henry Cuellar	None	None	None	2014-07-10T18:17:00	2014-07-06	['United_States', 'Mexico', 'Central_America']
-snes-05502	Middle Eastern men purchased dozens of burner cell phones at Walmarts in and around Lebanon, Missouri (ostensibly to carry out terror attacks); at the same time, multiple stores reported propane tank thefts.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lebanon-mo-walmart-cell-phone-rumor/	None	Crime	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Large Cell Phone Purchase Rumor	11 December 2015	None	['Lebanon', 'Missouri', 'Middle_East', 'Walmart']
-tron-01536	Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill Drives KKK Members to Suicide	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/harriet-tubman-20-bill-drives-kkk-members-suicide/	None	government	None	None	None	Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill Drives KKK Members to Suicide	Apr 22, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-01875	A student mistook examples of unsolved statistics problems for a homework assignment and solved them.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-problem/	None	College	None	David Mikkelson	None	The Unsolvable Math Problem	4 December 1996	None	['None']
-pomt-09175	"For now, we are still below average in the metro region."	true	/georgia/statements/2010/jun/04/francis-kungu/dekalb-water-bills-inexpensive-comparison-region/	DeKalb County water officials made the case to their Board of Commissioners at a May 19 meeting that they need to raise water and sewer rates to pay for the system's aging infrastructure. The argument was the time-honored claim used by elected officials, plumbers and mechanics: We're cheaper than the other guys. "Over the next several years, everybody else will be adjusting rates," said Francis Kung'u, director of the DeKalb County Watershed Management Department. "But for now, we are still below average in the metro region." We were curious about his claim that DeKalb's rates are "below average" and decided to check it out. DeKalb officials gave the commissioners a thick packet of information that included how much money 15 nearby counties and the city of Atlanta charge per month for water and sewer use. DeKalb based its comparison on 6,000 gallons a month. That's the average amount of water homeowners use each month, officials in several areas said. The monthly bill for DeKalb customers who use 6,000 gallons a month is $51.34, county officials said. DeKalb's chart shows the county with about the lowest water and sewer rates among metro counties and Atlanta. So was DeKalb right? We first focused on six of the largest water systems in the metro area: Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties and the city of Atlanta. DeKalb is the state's third-highest-populated county. Its Watershed Management Department has a $227 million annual budget, which ranks among the highest in the state. Atlanta's rates were the highest, more than twice the monthly cost of those in DeKalb County. The city approved two sets of rate increases in the past decade to help fund its ongoing $4 billion effort to overhaul its sewer system and improve water quality. The average monthly cost is nearly $121. (Brace yourselves, Atlanta homeowners, the monthly rate is scheduled to rise by an additional 12 percent on July 1.) City officials say Atlanta's rates may be the highest in the nation. The other water systems were more in line with DeKalb. They ranged from Cobb's $53.88 a month to Gwinnett's $69.44 monthly charge for the average customer. We also checked with 10 water and sewer systems in smaller cities and counties that DeKalb used to base its report. Most of them range between $65 to $70 a month. The average monthly charge in Walton County is $44.85, but it doesn't charge for sewer service. Again, the reason DeKalb wants to increase the rates is because its system is getting old. DeKalb's population grew faster than many of its neighbors, thus its infrastructure has more wear and tear. The county has a $1.79 billion repair list. Could that be why DeKalb's rates are lower? Perhaps, said Sally Bethea, executive director of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a group that has monitored Atlanta's efforts to fix its sewer system. "They may have not yet made the kinds of investments Atlanta has made," she said. If you focus solely on the larger counties or all 16 governments that DeKalb studied, the numbers do show DeKalb's rates for the average customer are below the metro average. We rate the county's claim as True.	None	Francis Kung'u	None	None	None	2010-06-04T20:21:53	2010-05-19	['None']
-pomt-01124	"We're now the No. 1 producer of oil in the world. We've surpassed Saudi Arabia."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jan/04/amy-klobuchar/klobuchar-says-us-worlds-no-1-oil-producer/	Considering the United States’ strength in energy production, the debate over building the Keystone XL pipeline has become a symbolic one, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. On NBC’s Meet the Press on Jan. 4, 2015, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said the new Republican Congress’ first priority in 2015 will be to pass a bill approving construction of the oil pipeline, which would stretch from Canada to Steele City, Neb., where it would connect with an existing pipeline that goes to the coast of Texas. Klobuchar responded by saying the project "has merit" but that the decision to build the pipeline should rest with President Barack Obama, not Congress. She said the debate has become a "symbolic" one that ignores America’s healthy energy market. "We're now the no. 1 producer of oil in the world," she said. "We've surpassed Saudi Arabia." We decided to check out the data and see if in fact the United States is the world’s top oil producer. As it turns out, the United States passed over Saudi Arabia about two years ago. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which tracks global energy production and consumption statistics, the United States has produced more oil than Saudi Arabia since the fourth quarter of 2012. American oil production surpassed Russia in 2011. Here’s a chart showing the trend from the Energy Information Administration: In the third quarter of 2014 -- the most recent available data -- the United States produced 14.2 million barrels of oil per day; Saudi Arabia produced 11.7 million per day; and Russia produced 10.5 million per day. Together, that’s about 40 percent of total global production. This production growth has contributed to the United States’ ability to produce more oil than it imports for the first time in about 20 years. The Energy Information Administration expects American production to continue to grow in 2015, despite recent lower crude oil prices. Total oil production figures include crude oil, natural gas liquids and other liquid energy products. On top of oil, the United States produces significantly more natural gas than Saudi Arabia. According to the Energy Information Administration, United States energy production is about evenly split between petroleum and natural gas. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, primarily produces petroleum. The majority of the United States’ oil production growth is concentrated in four regions: Bakken, N.D., Eagle Ford, Texas, the Niobrara region in the Upper Midwest, and the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico. North Dakota and Texas together comprise almost 50 percent of all crude oil production in the United States -- compared to 2010, when the two states combined produced just 26 percent of all United States crude oil production. In 2013, energy markets consultant group PIRA Energy published a report that said shale production is one of the driving forces behind the country’s production growth. Shale oil and gas are commonly associated with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which is the process of using water pressure to fracture a rock to release natural gas and oil. The United States is the world leader in shale gas production. There is at least one piece of context to keep in mind when looking at the United States’ oil production compared to Saudi Arabia, noted Leonardo Maugeri, an associate at Harvard University’s Geopolitics of Energy project. Saudi Arabia has a higher capacity than the United States to produce oil, but it chooses not to use it all -- so as not to inundate the global oil market. "In other words, if Saudi Arabia produced at full capacity -- as the U.S. does -- its production would be higher than the U.S.," Maugeri said. Our ruling Klobuchar said the United States is "now the No. 1 producer of oil in the world." The latest global oil production statistics back up Klobuchar’s claim. The United States has been the world’s largest oil producer since late 2012. We rate her statement True. Help fund PolitiFact's Kickstarter to live fact-check the 2015 State of the Union and GOP response.	None	Amy Klobuchar	None	None	None	2015-01-04T18:37:38	2015-01-04	['Saudi_Arabia']
-hoer-00592	Flip Flops From China Skin Reaction Warning - Hawaiian Sandals Rash Images	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/flip-flops-china-rash.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Flip Flops From China Skin Reaction Warning - Hawaiian Sandals Rash Images	June 5, 2014	None	['None']
-snes-05679	Canine Carry Outs dog treats contain anti-freeze and are dangerous to dogs.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/canine-carry-outs-anti-freeze-warning/	None	Critter Country	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Canine Carry Outs Anti-Freeze Warning	31 March 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-11197	"I am roughly being paid $53 a day to educate your child."	false	/north-carolina/statements/2018/may/15/stokes-county-school-teacher/nc-teacher-i-make-53-day-records-show-hes-wrong/	For the hottest debate in North Carolina politics, look no further than teacher pay. Gov. Roy Cooper often talks about the need for higher teacher pay. Meanwhile, Republicans in the GOP-controlled legislature brag about raising teacher salaries each of the past five years. Now, with teachers scheduled to rally in Raleigh on May 16 to raise awareness about the need for more education funding, one teacher’s story has gained traction in the politisphere. Nick Cols, a teacher from Western North Carolina, posted on Facebook that his "take home pay" for April was $1,715 after insurance and child-care and taxes were deducted. "I am roughly being paid $53 a day to educate your child," he posted. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com PolitiFact usually sticks to fact-checking politicians, pundits, fake news sites and prominent organizational leaders. But this claim quickly gained traction not only in North Carolina news but across the country. His story was shared by Cooper and others to emphasize their position that state lawmakers aren’t properly funding education. With that in mind, PolitiFact found it necessary to review his claim. We reached out to the teacher for comment on specifics of his salary, but didn’t hear back. He also deleted the post. So we then reached out to the public school system in Stokes County, where he works. What records show Wage information for public school teachers — and all government employees — is public record. So Melisa Jessup, executive director of human resources for Stokes County Schools and the district’s lead spokeswoman, provided PolitiFact with the teacher’s information. The teacher — whose full name is Nicholas Brandes — works at North Stokes High School and has been a teacher for nine years and eight months, Jessup said. That means, under the state’s salary schedule for teachers with bachelor’s degrees, he qualifies for an annual salary of $40,550 from the state. (A first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree would receive a $35,000 salary, which would jump above $40,000 after 10 years, $45,000 after 15 years, and $50,000 after 23 years.) North Carolina’s public school teachers also receive supplements from their county governments. In Stokes County, that means Brandes gets about 4 percent of his annual state salary added to his pay from the county. That would mean a teacher with his level of experience makes about $42,172 per year before taxes. On top of that, Brandes is currently an assistant coach for the football and wrestling teams. So he receives an additional $2,300 for each year that he coaches those teams. How his pay compares So that puts his annual salary at $44,472 before taxes, health insurance and childcare costs are taken out. That $44,472 salary is slightly higher than the most recent median income calculated for Stokes County — $42,489 — but lower than the most recent median income calculated for all North Carolina residents, $48,256. The average salary for North Carolina teachers across the board (including all levels of experience) is $51,214. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Some teachers choose to only accept checks during the school year, which runs from mid August to early June. Brandes chose to have his salary spread out over 12 months, so his monthly income is about $3,706. And, according to Jessup, his deductions for "optional supplemental insurances and various other pre-tax deductions, as well as health insurance costs" come out to about $954 a month. That includes childcare. That leaves him with about $2,752 a month. Now let’s look at weekly and daily pay. Excluding holidays or days off, there are typically four five-day work weeks in a month. A monthly $2,752 paycheck spreads out to $688 a week and $137 a day. Checking the check Rather than speak hypothetically, let’s return to the $1,715 paycheck Brandes posted on Facebook. There appear to be problems with the teacher’s math. To arrive at the $53-per-day figure for April, Brandes would’ve had to divide $1,715 by 32 days. However, there were 30 days in April. More importantly, the school system told PolitiFact that Brades worked approximately 21.5 days in April. So his check for that month — $1,715 — divided by 21.5 equals $79.76 per day. That difference of $26.76 per day doesn’t sound like much. But extrapolated over 21.5 days, there’s a $575 difference between what readers might think Brandes earned in April versus what he actually made. Apply the same math ($575 times 12) over a year and there’s a difference of $6,906 between what Brandes could be taking home annually compared with what could be derived from Facebook and in the media. Our ruling A teacher in western North Carolina said he makes $53 a day, spurring politicians to use his claim to support their position that teachers across the state are underpaid. The difference between what the teacher claimed and what the records show is about $26.76. In other words, his daily pay in April was about 50 percent higher than he claimed it was. What teachers make is an important debate — one that should be won or lost on solid numbers. There are many ways of illustrating a correct number, but the $53/day is not the poster child it was made out to be. We rate this statement False. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Stokes County school teacher	None	None	None	2018-05-15T20:35:08	2018-05-10	['None']
-tron-02671	Help Find Branson Perry of Skidmore, Missouri	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/branson/	None	missing	None	None	None	Help Find Branson Perry of Skidmore, Missouri	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-02020	Former senator Alan Simpson hypocritically referred to modern Americans as "the greediest generation."	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-greediest-generation/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did Alan Simpson or Dick Durbin Call Americans ‘The Greediest Generation’?	7 March 2011	None	['United_States', 'Alan_K._Simpson']
-pomt-03750	"The financial penalties imposed" on gay couples "can cost us more than $300,000 compared with married heterosexual couples over a lifetime."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2013/apr/08/nadine-smith/equality-florida-director-nadine-smith-says-gay-co/	First comes love, then comes marriage ... then comes the potential savings of a joint tax return. That’s the story for opposite-sex couples, but not necessarily for same-sex couples. Gay couples aren’t entitled to some of the money-saving benefits available to opposite-sex married couples. But how much lost money is it for a gay couple? Equality Florida, a group that advocates on behalf of the gay community, raised that topic as the U.S. Supreme Court heard two cases related to gay marriage in March: a challenge to California’s Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, and a challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that defines marriage as between a man and a woman. (For more on the cases read PolitiFact’s primer.) The DOMA case stems from a financial issue involving Edith "Edie" Windsor, who lived with Thea Spyer for 44 years; they married in Canada in 2007. After Spyer’s death in 2009, Windsor had to pay $363,000 in taxes on her spouse’s estate rather than inheriting it outright, as mixed-gender married couples routinely do. Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, wrote in a press release on March 27 that she was hopeful the Supreme Court would move to end the federal ban on same-sex marriage: "If observers are correct, gay married couples including my wife and I will not be faced with tax forms that require us to lie and deny the existence of our spouse. The financial penalties imposed because we are considered legal strangers can cost us more than $300,000 compared with married heterosexual couples over a lifetime. In a stroke, this financial burden will be erased." We wanted to research how Smith concluded that gay couples can pay $300,000 more than heterosexual couples over a lifetime. Cost estimates for gay couples In response to our questions, Smith sent us media reports that mentioned various higher costs for gay couples ranging from taxes, to renting a car to divorce. The most in-depth analysis came from the New York Times, which spent two months in 2009 calculating the added costs of being a gay couple over a lifetime, including taxes, health insurance, pensions, having a child and other expenses. For the tax portion, the New York Times received assistance from Roberton Williams of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The analysis created a fictitious couple in New York, gave them two kids and assumed one parent would stay home for five years to take care of them. The analysis took factors into account based on three states with large gay populations: Florida, New York and California. (The New York Times provided 25 pages of details on how they arrived at the calculations.) The newspaper calculated two separate scenarios, both starting when the couples were 35. In the first scenario, one partner earned $110,000 and the other $30,000; in the second, each earned $70,000. The conclusion: the worst-case scenario over a couple’s lifetime was $467,562. But that fell to $41,196 in the best-case scenario, for a couple with better health insurance and lower taxes. The numbers varied depending on income and other factors. "For wealthy couples with a lot of assets, on the other hand, the cost of being gay could easily spiral into the millions," the New York Times wrote. One of the reporters who wrote the story, Tara Siegel-Bernard, and two of the experts consulted for that story told PolitiFact Florida that the dollar figures in 2009 would change in 2013. But without thoroughly redoing the analysis, it was hard to assess by how much. One key factor that has changed since then is that in 2011, New York passed a law allowing same-sex marriage. The couple could now file a joint state income tax return, which may or may not save a gay couple money. There have also been some health insurance changes. Even if the Supreme Court strikes down DOMA, it won’t erase all the financial and legal hurdles for gay couples, the New York Times wrote. For example, many couples would still have to travel to another state to get married. "It is hard to present any sort of average -- people are in very different situations for all the reasons you noted," said Lee Badgett, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts who has studied gay marriage. We sent Equality Florida’s claim to the the National Organization for Marriage, a group that opposes gay marriage. The group’s political director Frank Schubert also noted that the New York Times analysis was built on multiple assumptions. Schubert disagreed with some assumptions. "For example, in one of the scenarios the New York Times assumed that the same-sex couple would not receive any health coverage for one of the partners for the entire duration of their 50-year relationship. Many companies already provide health coverage for domestic partners, and this percentage is growing rapidly. Policy makers could address this issue without redefining marriage. Similarly, the analysis was conducted before New York redefined marriage, which makes the state tax calculations moot." We asked Smith in an email why she cited the $300,000 figure. "I guess I could have said more than $400,000 but I was being conservative. Edie Windsor was forced to pay $363,000 because her marriage was not recognized, so it is number that is familiar to the general public. In addition, Florida is the least hospitable of the three states used in the modeling: Florida, New York and California." Parenting among gay couples is more common in the South than other regions of the country, "so we are seeing the additional costs add up," wrote Smith, who along with her wife is raising a son. (They married in Vermont.) Our ruling Nadine Smith, the director of Equality Florida, said, "The financial penalties imposed" on gay couples "can cost us more than $300,000 compared with married heterosexual couples over a lifetime." Smith said "penalties" are "imposed" on same-sex couples. Actually, it's more accurate to say that they don't have access to the same benefits as opposite-sex couples. On the question of numbers, is it possible that for some gay couples, the cost would add up to $300,000 over a lifetime? The key here is that word "can." It is difficult to come up with an average because the taxes, health insurance and expenses vary from couple to couple depending on where they live and other factors. The most extensive analysis we saw from the New York Times calculated a range between about $41,196 and $467,562 in 2009. The $300,000 cited by Smith falls within that range but requires some explanation. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Nadine Smith	None	None	None	2013-04-08T12:05:23	2013-03-27	['None']
-snes-05780	Cosmetic companies Avon, Mary Kay and Estée Lauder have resumed testing their products on animals after previously abandoning the practice.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-company-for-cruelty/	None	Critter Country	None	David Mikkelson	None	Animal Testing Resumes for Avon, Mary Kay, and Estée Lauder?	31 March 2015	None	['Mary_Kay']
-hoer-00194	Social Media Messages Misinterpret Red Bull 'Gives You Wings' Class Action	misleading recommendations	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/red-bull-sued-does-not-give-you-wings.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Social Media Messages Misinterpret Red Bull 'Gives You Wings' Class Action	October 9, 2014	None	['None']
-vogo-00255	Statement: City law already requires a two-thirds vote by the City Council to approve negotiated pay increases, opponents of Proposition B wrote in their ballot argument.	determination: barely true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/the-mythical-pay-boost-hurdle-fact-check/	Analysis: Proposition B is the high-profile pension reform initiative slated for San Diego’s June election. It aims to freeze employee pay for the next five years and replace pensions with 401(k)s for most new city workers.	None	None	None	None	The Mythical Pay Boost Hurdle: Fact Check	April 4, 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-08104	"A 5 percent increase in domestic production would increase the world supply by less than 1 percent and do almost nothing to our dependence on foreign oil. This would also have virtually no effect on the price of gas at the pump."	true	/florida/statements/2010/dec/13/debbie-wasserman-schultz/wasserman-schultz-says-expanding-drilling-would-ha/	On Dec. 1, 2010, Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar announced that the Obama administration would not allow oil and gas drilling through 2017 in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. That decision reversed one by the administration weeks before the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon explosion. December's announcement prompted cheers from U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat who represents Congressional District 20 in South Florida. In a Dec. 1 press release, Wasserman Schultz wrote: "A 5 percent increase in domestic production would increase the world supply by less than 1 percent and do almost nothing to our dependence on foreign oil. This would also have virtually no effect on the price of gas at the pump, which is something every consumer really cares about. Adding a fraction of a percent to the global oil supply will not lower gas prices and ignores the critical need to develop alternative energy supplies that finally break our addiction to fossil fuels." The Truth-O-Meter has examined several claims about oil drilling and gas prices. But we wanted to know for this Truth-O-Meter, is Wasserman Schultz right? Would a 5 percent increase in domestic production increase the world supply by less than 1 percent, and why did she choose that 5 percent number anyway? Was she correct that such production would do almost nothing to our dependence on foreign oil and have virtually no effect on price at the pump? We pulled background about oil drilling and gas prices from a June 2008 Truth-O-Meter ruling on U.S. Sen. and then-presidential candidate John McCain, who used the high price of gas as part of his argument to expand drilling. PolitiFact ruled False on his claim: "We must deal with the here and now and assure affordable fuel for America by increasing domestic production." Background on drilling and gas prices PolitiFact wrote: The political momentum for offshore drilling has always risen and fallen along with gas prices. But while there are strong arguments that can be made in favor of offshore drilling, reducing the cost of gas "here and now" isn't one of them, according to oil experts and economists -- many of whom support the plan. For starters, the lead time for oil exploration takes years. Even if offshore drilling areas opened up tomorrow, experts say it would take at least 10 years to realize any significant production. And even then, they say, the U.S. contribution to the overall global oil market would not be enough to make a significant dent in the price of gas. "Drilling offshore to lower oil prices is like walking an extra 20 feet per day to lose weight," said David Sandalow, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of Freedom from Oil. "It's just not going to make much difference." It takes years to bring new oil wells online, said Mike Rodgers, a leading oil expert with PFC Energy in Washington. Companies need to drill exploratory wells, then discovery wells around the exploratory wells that show promise. Shipyards that build platforms, a two- to three-year job, are already booked solid. "It's foolish to sell it as a short-term solution to high gas prices," Rodgers said. "Opening off-shore drilling would have no impact whatsoever on gas prices today." Warning! Math starts here Now back to Wasserman Schultz's claim. We asked her spokesman Jonathan Beeton for background information and he sent an e-mail with links to the documents Wasserman Schultz used. We're warning you now: This documentation includes lots of math. For starters, Beeton pointed us to a map from the U.S. Department of Interior attached to a March 31, 2010, press release which shows that drilling in the Eastern Gulf could increase production by .274 millions of barrels a day. The chart also states that in 2007, U.S. domestic production was about 5.07 million barrels of oil a day. That translates to about 5.4 percent increase -- that's why Wasserman Schultz uses a 5 percent increase. Beeton then turned to the Energy Information Administration, which provides statistics and analysis to the U.S. Department of Energy and Congress. The EIA showed that the U.S. consumes 19.5 million barrels per day as of 2008. EIA also states that global consumption of oil is about 85.46 million barrels a day (look for the world total on the bottom of the same chart for 2008.) Then Beeton did some math: Divide the amount that drilling in the Eastern Gulf could increase daily production -- .274 millions of barrels -- by global consumption of oil -- 85.46 million barrels a day -- and you get .32 percent increase to the world supply. That is less than 1 percent. With current U.S. production of 5.07 millions of barrels a day, and U.S. consumption of 19.5 millions of barrels a day, then we produce 26 percent of what we consume, Beeton wrote. Increasing production to 5.344 (5.07 + 0.274) millions of barrels a day, would increase that number to 27.4 percent -- or a decrease reliance on foreign oil by 1.4 percentage points. The experts weigh in We ran Wasserman Schultz's claim by Jamie Webster, a senior consultant with PFC Energy, which tracks oil production and demand globally and whose clients are governments, including the United States., and oil and gas companies. We also heard from Daniel J. Weiss, who has written extensively about oil prices and policy and is a senior fellow and director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, which describes itself as a progressive think tank. Both Webster and Weiss agreed with Wasserman Schultz. A 5 percent increase would produce around 200,000 to 300,000 barrels of oil a day while the world produced about 85 million barrels a day this year, Webster said. "An increase like that would be one-third of a percent," Webster said. "It could feasibly back up some potential imports but it would be almost a rounding error." As for prices at the pump, "it wouldn't budge the market at all. We would still need to import gasoline; it would not have any impact. You wouldn't notice it at all." Weiss pointed to a chart from the Energy Information Administration, which shows projections of gas and oil costs in 2020 and 2030. "Her point that it's going to make no difference in supply, no real difference in price, is correct," Weiss said. Let's review: Wasserman Schultz's math adds up -- Gulf drilling does indeed represent about 5 percent of current domestic production, and a 5 percent increase would barely register in terms of the world supply. And the experts we found for this Truth-O-Meter as well as ones cited in the past about McCain's claim agree that expanding drilling now would have little effect at the pump any time soon. We rate this claim True.	None	Debbie Wasserman Schultz	None	None	None	2010-12-13T11:35:12	2010-12-01	['None']
-pomt-02429	"We are seeing dramatic rate cuts" to Medicare that will affect seniors’ ability to keep their doctor, hospital and prevention services.	mostly false	/florida/statements/2014/mar/03/rick-scott/rick-scott-says-medicare-rate-cuts-will-affect-sen/	Seniors (particularly voters), listen up: Medicare cuts have arrived -- and the way Gov. Rick Scott tells it, they’re going to lead to some sickening results. In an online ad created by Scott’s campaign, he speaks in a testimonial style to the "wonderful seniors in our state" who depend on Medicare. Scott, and his likely Democratic opponent former Gov. Charlie Crist, will compete for the senior vote in the November election. Here’s part of the script: "We already know that 300,000 people in our state were told they are going to lose their insurance, but now under Medicare we are seeing these dramatic rate cuts. It’s going to have a devastating impact on their ability to one, get the doctor, look they rely on their doctor, get to go to the hospital that they trust, make sure they get prevention services that they deserve. These Medicare cuts that the president has caused are the wrong thing for Florida seniors." PolitiFact has previously fact-checked claims about those 300,000 Floridians who are losing Florida Blue plans but are being transitioned to other ones. Here, we wanted to fact-check Scott’s claim about whether dramatic rate cuts to Medicare will result in a "devastating impact" on seniors' ability to keep their doctor, hospital and get prevention services. In response to Scott’s ad, the Florida Democratic Party issued a press release that accused Scott of overseeing "the largest Medicare fraud in the nation's history." We rated that claim Mostly True. Announcement of cuts Scott’s ad posted a few days after the Obama administration announced a proposed rate cut to Medicare Advantage -- but Scott didn’t specify in his ad that he was referring to only those seniors on that particular type of Medicare. Nationwide, nearly one-third of Medicare recipients are on Medicare Advantage, or about 16 million. The proportion is about the same in Florida, where about 1.4 million are on Medicare Advantage, and roughly 4.4 million are in traditional Medicare. On Feb. 21, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a proposed cut to Medicare Advantage Plans for 2015. While CMS describes it as a 1.9 percent cut, some insurers say the actual cut could be higher when taking into account other health care law changes. America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry group, says the cut is about 5.9 percent and will lead to a loss of benefits and choices for people on Medicare Advantage. The amount is expected to be finalized April 7, and industry groups and a bipartisan group of senators have started to lobby against it. The health care law tries to bring down future health care costs of Medicare largely by reducing Medicare Advantage, a subset of Medicare plans that are run by private insurers. President George W. Bush started Medicare Advantage in hopes the increased competition would reduce costs. But those plans are actually costlier than traditional Medicare. So the health care law reduces payments to private insurers. Advantage plans are required to offer basic health benefits that are at least as rich as original Medicare. But many offer extras, such as rebates on premiums, routine dental care, gym memberships and rides to the doctor, in order to compete for business. Scott campaign spokesman Greg Blair pointed to articles in the Washington Post and Kaiser/USA Today about insurers cutting doctors from Medicare Advantage. (Both articles were written several weeks before the actual rate cut was proposed.) Reuters stated that insurers said they would only maintain benefits if there was no cut. "Thousands of primary-care doctors and specialists across the country have been terminated from privately run Medicare Advantage plans, ...." the Post wrote. "Insurers say they must shrink their physician networks because they face billions of dollars in government-payment cuts over the next decade — reductions that are being used partly to fund insurance coverage for millions of people under the federal Affordable Care Act." The Post wrote that medical associations describe the dismissals as the largest in the program’s history and that the American Medicare Association called for the cuts to be reversed. The Kaiser/USA Today December article states that the cut of thousands of doctors includes Florida, where "UnitedHealthcare has dropped the state’s only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer treatment facility, the Moffitt Cancer Center and its 250 physicians in Tampa." Experts say we don’t yet know full impact We interviewed several health care experts to ask if the Medicare Advantage cuts will result in seniors losing access to their doctors, hospitals or preventative services. Many experts said it could be several months until we get a better picture of what the rate cut means for patients -- and that the answer could vary state by state, or county by county. Lowell Richard works for a contracting agency, Adcahb Medical Coverages, that sells Medicare plans, including Medicare Advantage in Florida. "There will be some fallout -- absolutely," said Richard, vice president of training and education. However, "it’s going to vary from county to county. It’s really way too early to tell." Any company that decides to pull out of Advantage or make changes would have to file plans with CMS this summer, he said. Will the results be "devastating" in Florida as Scott said? "That depends where you live," said Richard, who is based in Broward County. In a smaller county with only a few types of plans, the result might mean the senior has to switch to another type of Medicare plan and the costs could go up. Some doctors will no longer be on certain Advantage plans. Though they will be replaced by others, it could mean some seniors will lose their particular doctor, Richard said. "There is no way to know how plans will respond to the proposed reductions in payments for 2015," said Tricia Neuman, director of the Kaiser Foundation’s Program on Medicare Policy. "The plans could choose to stay the course or reduce their costs in ways that would affect beneficiaries. The response could vary among insurers, and by county. The plans could choose to raise premiums, raise cost-sharing, tighten their provider networks, or even withdraw from the Medicare program altogether, but we won’t know the lay of the land until next fall." Margaret Murphy, attorney and associate director Center for Medicare Advocacy, said that Medicare Advantage plans have always had a limited network of preferred providers and that changes in networks can happen every year. (Traditional Medicare has no networks, so participants can go to any Medicare eligible provider.) "We are seeing (Medicare Advantage) plans change their business plans already although it’s difficult to know which changes are due to ordinary business reasons and which are the result" of the health care law, she said. Robert Moffit, a health care expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that we have already seen an impact because insurers including UnitedHealthcare have let go of thousands of physicians. That includes cutting an entire hospital -- Yale New Haven Hospital -- from its Medicare Advantage network. "I can’t speak personally with regard to Florida, but yes, the projections are you will see significant reductions in payments over 10 years," Moffit said. Medicare has a broader provider network than many Advantage plans, "so even if plans cut benefits and caused someone to go back to traditional Medicare their access to doctors likely would not erode and might actually improve," said Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy professor at the University of North Carolina. Medicare requires plans to cover all Medicare-covered benefits, which means if a prevention benefit such as a mammogram is covered by traditional Medicare, it would also be covered by an Advantage plan, Neuman said. However, Advantage plans could cut the extras which aren’t covered by traditional Medicare such as a gym membership. Our ruling "We are seeing dramatic rate cuts," to Medicare that will have a "devastating impact" on seniors’ ability to get their doctor, their hospital and prevention services, Scott tells seniors in an online campaign ad. Scott omits that the recently announced rate cuts were for Medicare Advantage plans, a subset of Medicare. Those plans represent about one-third of Medicare plans in Florida and nationwide. The proposed rate cut won’t be finalized until April, and if it is, health care experts say we won’t know the full impact for a few months. That means it’s too soon to predict if the rate cut will have a "devastating impact" on seniors' ability to keep their same doctor and hospital. It is possible that some seniors on Medicare Advantage will lose or have to change doctors, but the impact could vary from county to county. Seniors on traditional Medicare are not affected by the cuts. Scott’s ad is a scare tactic that omits several caveats. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2014-03-03T16:38:52	2014-02-26	['None']
-snes-02868	Children who watch at least 30 minutes of “Peppa Pig” per day have a 56 percent higher probability of developing autism.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/peppa-pig-causes-autism/	None	Uncategorized	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Does Peppa Pig Cause Autism?	21 October 2016	None	['None']
-abbc-00146	The claim: Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs says in the first months of the Coalition Government the time children spent in immigration detention "was reaching quite exceptional levels".	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-23/triggs-detention/6083476	The claim: Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs says in the first months of the Coalition Government the time children spent in immigration detention "was reaching quite exceptional levels".	['immigration', 'government-and-politics', 'australia']	None	None	['immigration', 'government-and-politics', 'australia']	Fact check: Triggs correct on the length of time children spent in detention	Mon 23 Feb 2015, 11:57pm	None	['None']
-pomt-07121	The Medford Water Commission was fined $279,000 for dumping plain drinking water into a stream.	half-true	/oregon/statements/2011/jun/18/doug-whitsett/out-control-oregon-deq-levying-fines-no-reason/	Recently, state Sen. Doug Whitsett, R-Klamath Falls, excoriated the Department of Environmental Quality at a legislative budget hearing. He called the agency "out of control" and cited the following as one small example of DEQ’s lack of common sense: "In Medford, the Medford Water Commission has been fined $279,000 for the egregious offense of dumping drinking water in Lone Pine Creek. This is a practice that the, Lone Pine Creek is a highly urbanized stream, the Medford Water Commission has been doing this for decades. When it was determined by DEQ that this was some kind of offense, the Medford Water Commission agreed to stop doing it. They were fined almost $300,000 anyway." Whitsett’s implication is that DEQ trumped up a charge against the Medford Water Commission, which was just doing what it has done for years and causing no problem to anyone. And even after the commission agreed to stop doing what it thought was legal, DEQ remained unreasonable. We wanted to know if that was indeed the case. The facts: On Nov. 30, DEQ issued a $278,794 civil penalty against the Medford Water Commission for dumping chlorinated drinking water into Lone Pine Creek. (The commission sends extra water into the creek in the rainy season, when people don’t need as much water.) The water is OK for human consumption, but toxic to fish unable to tolerate the chlorine used to make the water drinkable in the first place. So the agency issued a fat fine, much of it based on the $13,000 annual cost the commission avoided for roughly a dozen years by not dechlorinating the water. The commission in its appeal basically claimed that it did nothing wrong, and in the alternate, that it didn’t know it was doing anything wrong. The appeal is pending. "It was plain drinking water," said Larry Rains, manager of the Medford Water Commission. "We're just arguing we thought we were following the rules, (and there is) a disagreement on how those rules are interpreted." On the face of it, it looks like a clear violation by the water commission: You can’t divert chlorinated drinking water into fish habitat. But then we put in a call to Sen. Whitsett, who said that the water commission never considered the creek a stream; it was a storm drain. "The rules have been that if you discharge chlorinated drinking water into a stream, it has to be dechlorinated. If it’s a storm drain, there has to be sufficient time for" the chlorine to dissipate before it reaches fish habitat, Whitsett said. "DEQ decided to call it a creek, and not a storm drain." So we checked with the department. Jeff Bachman with the agency’s Office of Compliance and Enforcement said there’s no way that Lone Pine Creek is a storm sewer. It’s an "urbanized stream," he said. A "storm sewer" or "storm drain" is a human-made system of channels, conduits, pipes or a mix of the above to control and carry storm water to a waterway. Bachman said Lone Pine Creek runs underground in a pipe, in a concrete channel through the Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport and in a natural stream channel. But, he added, even with storm drains you can’t just dump in chlorinated water: "The Department's policy on disposal of chlorinated water states that such water may be discharged to a storm sewer only if there is no other feasible alternative, such as dechlorination, and if the sewer is long enough such that the chlorine can dissipate during the time it takes the chlorinated water to travel to a water of the state." Again, we’re left to think that DEQ had every right to fine the water commission, although we can see where the confusion may lie. So we called Sen. Alan Bates, D-Ashland, who may be considered more friendly to environmental regulation than Whitsett. But Bates was just as ticked off at the agency as his Republican colleague over Lone Pine Creek. "It’s never been clear in anyone’s mind what it is," Bates said. "If you think of it as a pristine little creek, that’s sorely not the case. On the other hand, we’re trying to clean up these kinds of areas." Bates said it was fine for DEQ to point out the problem so the commission could fix it. But assessing a fine that dates back to 1997? He didn’t get that at all. "DEQ over-reached. They’ve lost their mind and put this huge fine on people." Whitsett’s statement is partially true, but lacking an important detail. He’s absolutely right about the amount of the fine, but he left out the fact that the water was chlorinated and unfit for fish habitat. We understand why he would, since he disputes Lone Pine Creek is a stream. On the other hand, as DEQ points out, people can’t just dump chlorinated drinking water into storm drains either. We rate the statement as Half True. As for whether the agency is justified in assessing such a large fine, well, we leave that question to you. Return to OregonLive to comment on this ruling.	None	Doug Whitsett	None	None	None	2011-06-18T06:00:00	2011-06-03	['None']
-snes-05649	Did the FDA Find Thousands of Coors Light Beers Laced with Cocaine?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coors-beer-cocaine/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did the FDA Find Thousands of Coors Light Beers Laced with Cocaine?	10 September 2014	None	['None']
-snes-00805	Officials in the village of Deerfield, Illinois passed an ordinance banning assault weapons.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/deerfield-assault-weapons-ban/	None	Politics	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did an Illinois Suburb Enact a Ban on Assault Weapons?	5 April 2018	None	['Illinois', 'Deerfield,_Illinois']
-pomt-07823	"Our debt to GDP ratios, our deficit to GDP ratios are quickly approaching the countries we have been reading about for the last year and a half. We are not far behind Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain and all these countries we have been reading about."	half-true	/ohio/statements/2011/feb/16/jim-jordan/rep-jim-jordan-compares-us-debt-troubled-european-/	As the newly-elected chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan of Urbana has become one of the most vocal budget cutters in the U.S. House of Representatives. Just before he introduced "Spending Reduction Act" legislation to cut the federal budget by $2.5 trillion over ten years, Jordan delivered a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation that focused on fiscal discipline. "Our debt to GDP ratios, our deficit to GDP ratios are quickly approaching the countries we have been reading about for the last year and a half," he warned. "We are not far behind Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain and all these countries we have been reading about." Everyone knows the United States government is in debt, but is the situation really as bleak as it is for countries that teeter on the brink of insolvency? Politifact Ohio decided to take a look. The Central Intelligence Agency has compiled a table that compares the ratio of public debt to the gross national product of more than 130 countries, including all those cited by Jordan. According to the CIA, in 2010, Zimbabwe had the world’s highest public debt as a percentage of its annual gross domestic product: a whopping 241.6 percent. Japan was next at 196.4 percent. Greece was fourth on the list, at 144 percent, Ireland was 11th, at 98.5 percent, Portugal was 15th, at 83.2 percent, and Spain was 27th at 63.4 percent. The United States clocked in at 37th, with a debt to GDP ratio of 58.9 percent, slightly higher than the world average of 58.3 percent. Countries including Canada, France and Germany – which aren’t generally listed among the globe’s festering fiscal fiascos – all have debt to GDP ratios that exceed the United States’. Federal bean counters at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and at the Congressional Budget Office predict the nation’s public debt to GDP ratio will climb to about 77 percent in the next 10 years, which exceed’s Spain’s current ratio and approaches Portugal’s. "With such a large increase in debt, plus an expected increase in interest rates as the economic recovery strengthens, interest payments on the debt are poised to skyrocket over the next decade," the CBO said in a recent report on the federal deficit. Is that level of debt likely to cause problems along the lines of those experienced by Greece, Ireland and other countries deemed fiscally unsound? Economists are divided on that question, although a study released last year suggests problems are most likely to arise after public debt reaches around 90 percent of gross domestic product. University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith notes that many countries with higher debt to GDP ratios than the United States, like Japan, Italy and Belgium, aren’t in a financial crisis. He says Jordan’s numbers are correct, but the comparisons he makes are "meaningless and therefore misleading." He says Japan and the United States are insulated from the default issues that plague other countries because they control the currencies in which they issue debt. Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal all have their debt in euros, so they need euro balances on hand to pay their debts. "Greece has to draw on a euro account at a bank in order to make payments," Galbraith explained in an email. "If the euros are not in the account, Greek government checks could bounce. In this respect, Greece is much more like, say, the state of Illinois; the European Central Bank is not obliged to honor its checks." On the other hand, he said the United States government makes all payments by marking up numbers in a computer -- the electronic equivalent of printing money. It doesn't get the dollars from anywhere -- it just sends a signal to the bank. He says U.S. Treasury Department checks can’t bounce, so there’s no default danger. "As should be obvious, the markets know this, and so made the U.S. into a major beneficiary of the crisis of Greece et al.," Galbraith said. "As Mediterranean eurozone bond yields rose, U.S. treasury yields fell. Why? Because investors sold Greece (and the others) and bought U.S. The markets thus recognize what Mr. Jordan does not: the U.S. public debt position is large and invulnerable, and actually opposite to that of the small, vulnerable eurozone nations." Boston University’s Laurence J. Kotlikoff is among those who predict dire consequences if the nation doesn’t get its fiscal house in order. He envisions massive benefit cuts for retired baby boomers, "astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save," and the government "simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills." Poverty and inflation are other problems he foresees. "You print a lot of money, prices go up and people get hurt because money they had before you did this goes down in value in terms of what it can buy," Kotlikoff said in a TV interview. So what to make of Jordan’s statement? While the United States hasn’t yet reached the debt-to-GDP levels of the countries he cited, it’s on on its way there. But it’s not clear that attaining those debt levels would cause the catastrophic economic damage he implies. Other countries with high debt-to-GDP ratios haven’t imploded, but specifically citing nations like Ireland and Greece implies that disaster is near for the United States economy. In reality, the United States, with its ability to control its own monetary supply, has lots more going for it than Ireland or Greece. Those are important details needed to put Jordan’s statement in proper context. On the Truth-O-Meter, we rate Jordan’s claim as Half True.	None	Jim Jordan	None	None	None	2011-02-16T06:00:00	2011-01-20	['Spain', 'Greece', 'Portugal', 'Republic_of_Ireland']
-pomt-11969	"San Juan Teamsters didn't show up for work to distribute relief supplies" because they went on strike.	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/oct/03/blog-posting/fake-news-posts-blame-puerto-ricos-truck-drivers-r/	Conservative news outlets have been spreading a false story online that wrongly says aid to Hurricane Maria victims isn’t being distributed in Puerto Rico because union truck drivers have gone on strike. The headline on a Sept. 30, 2017, post on The Gateway Pundit read, "San Juan Teamsters didn’t show up for work to distribute relief supplies — U.S. aid rotting at ports." Facebook users flagged the story as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to curb fake news. Similar headlines appeared on several other links that users questioned. The post claimed that while the "liberal media" is attacking President Donald Trump’s response to the humanitarian crisis, the real issue is that "the Teamsters Union drivers did not show up to work. Only 20 percent of drivers arrived at the ports to distribute the relief supplies," The Gateway Pundit said. The other posts all shared the same sentiment, and often included "proof" from more social media posts claiming to know all about the problem. But they aren’t right to blame union truckers for the lack of movement. It turns out the blog posts are delivering misinformation about this problem. Sites are picking and choosing details The Gateway Pundit pointed to another Sept. 30 post from TheConservativeTreehouse.com, which cited a Sept. 29 Huffington Post interview with U.S. Air Force Col. Michael A. Valle. Valle was born in Puerto Rico and was leading Maria relief efforts. The Conservative Treehouse post included a passage from the interview that said supplies are being sent to Puerto Rico, but not being moved across the island. "It’s a lack of drivers for the transport trucks, the 18 wheelers," the website quoted Valle as saying. "Supplies we have. Trucks we have. There are ships full of supplies, backed up in the ports, waiting to have a vehicle to unload into. However, only 20 percent of the truck drivers show up to work. These are private citizens in Puerto Rico, paid by companies that are contracted by the government." Valle did say in the Huffington Post interview that there was a lack of drivers, but he also went on to add the drivers deserved "zero blame:" "They can’t get to work, the infrastructure is destroyed, they can’t get fuel themselves, and they can’t call us for help because there’s no communication. The will of the people of Puerto Rico is off the charts. The truck drivers have families to take care of, many of them have no food or water. They have to take care of their family’s needs before they go off to work, and once they do go, they can’t call home." The Conservative Treehouse also posted a video of CNBC’s Contessa Brewer reporting from San Juan as proof of the problem, but ignored the part where Brewer said transportation problems are not the drivers’ fault. "You’re looking at truck drivers who can’t be reached by their businesses by cell phone, they don’t have the gas to get to work, and then even when they do get to work, their semi-trucks don’t have fuel," Brewer said. "The problem is the supply chain." She added that Crowley Puerto Rico, a shipping and logistics company, said that getting drivers to the port and back out again was proving to be a challenge. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com There has been a definite problem moving supplies that have arrived. On Sept. 29, the same day Valle’s interview was published, the Teamsters sent out a press release asking union truck drivers to volunteer to go to Puerto Rico to help transport supplies. The release warned that it wouldn’t be easy, but fellow union workers needed help. "At this time, it is unclear if there are trucks available to move the containers, fuel to operate the trucks or road access to the distribution centers," the release read. "However, the labor movement is working on the ground in Puerto Rico to bring volunteers to meet specific needs." There’s no mention of strike in the press release, and nothing in Valle’s interview about labor unions, so where did the The Conservative Treehouse get that? From an interview with a trucker not affiliated with the Teamsters union. The blog turned to a Spanish-language interview for Lo Sé Todo on Wapa.tv with Victor Rodriguez, identifying as "the boss of a very sketchy (corrupt and violent) Puerto Rico trucker’s union called Fente Amplio." Dozens of subsequent posts online identify Frente Amplio (note the different spelling) as the local Teamsters union, which Teamsters spokesman Galen Munroe told us is incorrect. Rodriguez represents the independent Frente Amplio de Camioneros de Puerto Rico (Broad Front of Truck Drivers of Puerto Rico), which is not affiliated with the Teamsters. TheConservativeTreehouse.com egregiously misrepresented Rodriguez’s interview, translating it to claim that Rodriguez said truck drivers are refusing to work as part of a plan to show up Puerto Rico’s governor. "Since the country doesn’t care about truckers, the truckers won’t help," TheConservativeTreehouse.com quoted Rodriguez. It credits the reporter with getting Rodriguez to admit his defiance. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com In truth, Rodriguez is saying the opposite, that despite a disagreement over a law signed by Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló concerning truck permitting, drivers should help in any way they can. Truckers called off a planned strike because of Hurricane Irma three weeks prior, he said. Rodriguez did take a swipe at Rosselló, saying long lines are partly his fault, and noted that truckers can’t come down when they are in regions with impassable roads. But by and large, Rodriguez said that truckers are working and doing what they need to do to deliver goods. He even cuts off the reporter at one point for suggesting they are refusing to work. In response to all the false stories online blaming Teamster drivers, the union released a statement on Oct. 2 that said their members have been working since Maria passed over the island. The statement blamed "online, anti-union sources" for spreading an inaccurate story. "These viral stories spreading across the internet are nothing but lies perpetrated by anti-union entities to further their destructive agenda," Teamsters president Jim Hoffa said in the release. "The fact that they are attempting to capitalize on the suffering of millions of citizens in Puerto Rico that are (in) dire need of our help by pushing these false stories, just exposes their true nature." Our ruling Bloggers said that "San Juan Teamsters didn't show up for work to distribute relief supplies" because they went on strike after Hurricane Maria. The widespread accusations trace back to a post that selectively edited and mistranslated interviews to make it look like union truckers were being greedy and lazy. But there’s no strike, and union truck drivers have been trying to move aid shipments across Puerto Rico. There are multiple logistical problems slowing down transport, not the least of which is that some drivers simply can’t get to the port, or drive on impassable roads. Bloggers are misrepresenting a real humanitarian crisis by blaming trade unions. That drives this rating to Pants On Fire! See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-10-03T14:27:39	2017-09-30	['None']
-abbc-00047	The claim: NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley says the Coalition Government has cut $3 billion from health.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-26/fact-check3a-did-the-nsw-libs-cut-243-billion-from-health3f/6301402	The claim: NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley says the Coalition Government has cut $3 billion from health.	['government-and-politics', 'elections', 'health', 'alp', 'nsw']	None	None	['government-and-politics', 'elections', 'health', 'alp', 'nsw']	Fact check: Did the Coalition Government cut $3b from the NSW health budget?	Thu 3 Mar 2016, 5:56am	None	['None']
-pomt-01238	Georgia has some of the highest gas taxes in the Southeast but one of the lowest taxes on gasoline for transportation in the nation.	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2014/nov/18/ed-lindsey/gas-tax-comparison-mostly-target/	Transportation trumped all other issues in a recent survey of the 10-county Atlanta region. Some lawmakers float the idea of hiking the state’s gasoline tax almost annually, but now leaders under the Gold Dome have signaled they may consider the move to tackle some of the traffic woes in the region and state. But the political will to increase one tax may hinge on the ability to lower, or eliminate, another. Specifically, former state Rep. Edward Lindsey, R-Atlanta, said the state may need to revoke local governments’ ability to levy sales taxes for nontransportation services such as education. "The following two statements are both true: We have one of the lowest taxes on gasoline for transportation purposes in the country," he said. "And we have some of the highest taxes on gasoline in the Southeast." How can that be? We decided to check it out. First breaking the claim into two pieces, does Georgia have one of the nation’s lowest gas taxes? Yes, according to state motor fuel tax data from the Federation of Tax Administrators. Georgians pay $19.3 cents in state taxes for every gallon of gasoline. That includes a 7.5-cent excise tax – or a special fixed tax paid on the purchase of specific items such as gasoline, alcohol and tobacco products. The rest comes from a 4 percent sales tax the state levies on gasoline. As of January, that 4 percent sales tax translated into 11.8 cents. Only 14 states had lower state tax rates, including both excise and state sales taxes. Three of them are our neighbors: South Carolina (16.75 cents per gallon), Florida (17.1 cents) and Alabama (18 cents). Motorists in our other two neighboring states paid more, 37.75 cents in North Carolina and 21.4 cents in Tennessee. So far, so good. Georgia does in fact have some of the lowest taxes earmarked for transportation in the nation. But to Lindsey’s point, the state collections do not include the local sales taxes that drive up the cost at the pump but do not always end up fixing roads. That’s because Georgia state law allows all counties to levy a 1 percent special purpose local option sales tax, or SPLOST, for specific projects ranging from transportation to education. Voters must approve a SPLOST by referendum. Although some jurisdictions, such as Forsyth County, have successfully included road projects in their referendums, voters in metro Atlanta and some other regions in the state defeated a penny sales tax for transportation two years ago. That is part of what has left roads, bridges and rails without enough money for repairs and growth – and why a study committee of politicians and business leaders is slated to recommend a new proposal by year’s end. Lindsey, who serves on that committee, unofficially known as the Plan B Committee, said he hopes drawing attention to the local sales taxes will show the state should wean local governments off those funds while simultaneously increasing the state collections, specifically for transportation projects. "When we put a tax or a fee on gasoline, the average voter probably thinks those taxes are going to transportation and they’re not," Lindsey said. But are Georgians really paying some of the highest gas taxes in the region – and could therefore afford such a shift? That’s where the numbers get tricky. An October breakdown of motor fuel taxes by the American Petroleum Institute -- including fees and local taxes -- pushes what Georgians pay to 27.49 cents per gallon. Those local taxes and fees have a dramatic effect in Florida, as anyone who has trundled down to Disney World can attest. The API shows motorists there pay a state average of 36.02 cents per gallon. North Carolina motorists pay even more, 36.75 cents per gallon, according to the API data (although less than what the Federation of Tax Administrators’ data show). Wes Clarke, a senior associate at the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia, co-wrote a 2010 study that showed Georgia had one of the lowest gas taxes in the nation, The API data, he said, show that Georgia still ranks third-highest of its neighbors (and all other Southern states, except Kentucky) when it comes to gas taxes. The ranking is misleading, though. Based on the API data, Georgia could increase its gas tax by 8 cents a gallon – more than doubling the current excise tax – and remain in third. In fact, the Fiscal Research Center in 2010 recommended a somewhat smaller increase to the excise tax – a penny a year for six years – to help solve Georgia’s transportation woes. That would bring Georgia up to the national average on excise taxes, without changing its ranking among neighboring states, said Peter Bluestone, a senior research associate at the Fiscal Research Center. That would result in less than a 0.3 percent increase at the gas station. "Even if you add in the local taxes, we’re in the middle," Bluestone said. "We do recommend an increase that would keep us there." So that means Lindsey is right in saying that Georgia has one of the lowest state tax rates in the nation. Other data show that, factoring in local taxes, Georgians still pay the third-most in the region when it comes to filling up at the pump. Lindsey errs in thinking a third-place ranking means the state is on par with the top two, which are among the highest in the nation. He undercuts his larger point about local gas taxes by ignoring Georgia falling a distant third in the region on what motorists pay for gasoline. But looking at rankings alone, Georgians do pay among the highest at the pump for the region but the lowest in the nation. We rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Edward Lindsey	None	None	None	2014-11-18T00:00:00	2014-11-10	['None']
-hoer-00168	Mike Conalley - M.O.B Screen Name Warning	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/mike-conalley-screen-name-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Mike Conalley - M.O.B Screen Name Warning Hoax	January 2007	None	['None']
-afck-00350	Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters: “In 1995, unemployment was 15% and now, at this moment, it is at 25% or 36%, with an expanded definition. Seventy percent of this demographic are the youth.”	mostly-correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/sona-unemployment-claims-unpacked/	None	None	None	None	None	SONA unemployment claims unpacked	2014-06-26 06:16	None	['Julius_Malema']
-pomt-05017	The health care law "adds around $800 billion of taxes on the American people. It does not discriminate between rich and poor."	false	/florida/statements/2012/jul/16/marco-rubio/rubio-says-taxes-health-care-law-do-not-discrimina/	It’s not news that Republicans predict the health care overhaul will spell devastation for business. But Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is taking it further. He warns the law will "hurt everyone." "Obamacare is bad policy that adds around $800 billion of taxes on the American people," he wrote in a July 8 opinion-editorial in the Orlando Sentinel. "It does not discriminate between rich and poor. It hurts everyone." We wondered where he got his $800 billion tax total, as well as the validity of the idea that the law does not "discriminate between rich and poor." So we decided to check it out. $800 billion in new taxes? Rubio pulled the figure from a 2011 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. It was commissioned by Republican House Speaker John Boehner to estimate the cost of repealing the health care law. Repealing the law would result in $813 billion in lost revenues for the government between 2012 and 2021, the report found. Where do those come from? To pay for the overhaul, the federal government created a series of new revenue sources -- some are clearly taxes, some are changes to tax rules -- that include the controversial tax penalty for people who do not have their own health insurance and a tax on indoor tanning. (We looked at more than a dozen revenue sources and whether they were actually taxes in a January PolitiFact report.) Whether each revenue source is technically a tax does not matter to Rubio. Here, he equates all money raised from Americans as a tax. Also, Rubio’s number doesn’t account for the tax breaks that are in the law, especially the tax credits that some people of modest means will receive to help them buy insurance. We consulted several experts, who disagreed on the best way to account for the law’s tax increases. A couple experts said Rubio’s $800 billion figure is valid, even if it is out of date and does not account for billions in tax credits. "It's just stating what the tax bill is," said Joseph Henchman, of the business-backed Tax Policy Foundation. "Most people don't expect you to net out benefits." Not so fast, said Chapin White, a former CBO staffer who is now a senior health researcher at the Center for Studying Health System Change, a health research group founded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. White said it’s important to subtract the law’s $519 billion in refundable tax credits and subsidies for health insurance, among other things. All told, the more appropriate net "tax increase" over 10 years is about $20 billion, he said. No difference between rich and poor? Rubio spokesman Alex Conant declined to elaborate on what Rubio meant when he said the law does not "discriminate between rich and poor," saying he did not want to parse his words. The best we can infer from Rubio’s claim and the context around it is the health care law affects the rich and the poor the same, tax-wise. And that’s off base. The point of the law was to expand health coverage to those who don’t have it -- including people who don't have jobs or have low income. To make that happen, the law provides tax credits to low- and moderate-income families, and it includes more taxes on the wealthy and an individual mandate requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance. Two of the biggest taxes in the law are geared toward taxpayers with higher incomes. People whose incomes exceed $200,000 ($250,000 for couples filing jointly) will pay 0.9 percentage point more on Medicare payroll taxes in 2013. These people would also pay a new 3.8 percent tax on investment income. Plus, the law includes a 40 percent excise tax on people who have high-premium health insurance plans starting in 2018. Also known as "Cadillac plans," these premiums are usually obtained by people in the middle- to upper- class, and are expected to bring in $111 billion through 2021. Democrats, of course, take a different view than the Republicans. The Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate Finance Committee released a compilation of tax breaks available to individuals, middle-class families, and small businesses, thanks to the law. The total? $828 billion in "tax cuts" over 10 years. Most of that comes from tax credits and subsidies for families with low- to moderate-level incomes. The law creates exchanges through which consumers can shop for the best plans. People who qualify can supplement the cost of an insurance plan with a government subsidy, which will be based on income. A break is also extended to certain small businesses with low-income workers who employ fewer than 50 people and offer health insurance to them. Now for the individual mandate, which requires most everyone to have health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty to the Internal Revenue Service. You could argue it doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor because it applies to most everyone. But the penalty is linked to income. Individuals who go uninsured and who aren't exempt from the mandate will have to pay an annual penalty of at least $95 per adult in 2014, rising to $325 in 2015 and $695 in 2016. After 2016, the amount would be indexed to inflation and could be higher -- 2.5 percent of household income, if that’s greater than the amount written into the law. The nonpartisan federal researchers at CBO and JCT have estimated that about 4 million uninsured Americans, including dependents, will have to pay up in 2016, amounting to $4 billion in revenue per year from 2017 to 2019. Probably most relevant to our fact-check is the fact that the mandate includes a hardship exemption for people who cannot afford to buy health insurance. Our ruling Rubio cherry-picks the highest number he can find -- $800 billion in new taxes -- to garner opposition to the recently upheld health care law. He doesn’t tell readers anything more about the figure, including the fact that these "taxes" would be garnered over 10 years. His statement also indicates that rich and poor people will feel the effects of the law’s various revenue-raising provisions with the same degree of pain. But that’s not true. The law taxes wealthier Americans to a greater degree to provide more services for the poor. We rate this False.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2012-07-16T11:04:30	2012-07-08	['United_States']
-pomt-05926	Says with "Gov. Chris Christie and bipartisan reformers" New Jersey had "the most job growth in 11 years."	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/jan/30/committee-our-childrens-future/chris-christies-record-touted-video-ad-committee-o/	A new ad depicts Trenton officials as a group of rowdy children who have marred their house with gummy carpets and chalk-strewn walls. But then Gov. Chris Christie arrives and straightens the place up in the 30-second spot released by Committee for Our Children’s Future, a nonprofit group that supports the governor. "For years, politicians have run amok in Trenton and cleaning up their mess hasn't been easy, but [with] Gov. Chris Christie and bipartisan reformers: the most job growth in 11 years, millions in new education funding, two budgets balanced," the narrator says in the ad released Jan. 25. "Christie and reformers are working to strengthen our economy, improve education and cut income taxes for all New Jersey families. Join our reform movement, because cleaning up is never easy, but it's worth it." PolitiFact New Jersey has addressed two of these claims previously: the governor increased education funding this year and he’s balanced two budgets, as he’s required to do. Now, we’re checking the claim that with Christie and bipartisan reformers, New Jersey had the "most job growth in 11 years." Brian Jones, a spokesman for Committee for Our Children’s Future, first sent us a Jan. 15 Asbury Park Press article to support the claim. It states that job growth last year "put the state on pace for its best year since 2000, when it added 77,100 jobs." But PolitiFact New Jersey’s analysis of the most recent state data, which is still subject to revision, doesn’t support that conclusion. Let’s look at job growth in the Garden State. In 2011, New Jersey gained 39,400 private-sector jobs and lost 3,000 government jobs. The net gain, then, was 36,400 jobs. In 2004, the state added 37,700 jobs of which 14,700 were from the public sector Prior to that, New Jersey had the most job growth in 2000, with an overall increase of 77,100 jobs. So, last year New Jersey had the highest total employment growth in seven years. When we reached back out to Jones, he said the statement in the ad was referring to private-sector employment, which grew more last year than in 11 years. "There’s been bloated government in Trenton for too long. Governor Christie’s policies are working to trim the fat, while growing private-sector jobs," he said. Joseph Seneca, a professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, said it’s more appropriate to compare private-sector job growth now. In 2011, the state was purposefully "trying to reduce public-sector employment and the public sector in general," he said. "Whereas in 2004 it was sort of the Wild West, 40 percent of the total growth that year was in the public sector." As we’ve noted in previous rulings, it’s generally wrong to assign full credit or blame for job growth or job losses to specific individuals. While the governor and bipartisan reformers may have had a hand in creating more jobs other factors are at work, including the nation’s recovery from a job-destroying recession. Our ruling A group that supports the governor released a video ad that said with Christie and bipartisan reformers, New Jersey had "the most job growth in 11 years." The state gained more jobs overall last year than in seven years -- not 11 years. In 2004, the state added 37,700 jobs. In 2011, we added 36,400 jobs. Public-sector growth boosted job gains in 2004, while last year the state added jobs despite a decrease in government employment . The ad doesn’t make a distinction in the types of jobs gained, but a spokesman said it was referring to private-sector employment. Last year, New Jersey had the most private-sector job growth in 11 years. Overall, we rate this statement Half True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Committee for Our Children's Future	None	None	None	2012-01-30T07:30:00	2012-01-25	['Chris_Christie', 'New_Jersey']
-vees-00385	In an Aug. 11 speech during an open house at the Southern Philippines Medical Center Children’s Cancer Institute in Davao City, Duterte said:	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-three-things-duterte-got-wrong-about-r	All three of Duterte’s claims are wrong.	None	None	None	Rappler,Duterte and media	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Three things Duterte got wrong about Rappler	August 31, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-03617	FBI director Jim Comey placed a "Trump/Pence 2016" sign in front of his home.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fbi-director-james-comeys-trump-sign/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	FBI Director James Comey’s Trump Sign	7 November 2016	None	['None']
-vogo-00389	Fact Check TV: Cops and Libraries	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-tv-cops-and-libraries/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Check TV: Cops and Libraries	May 16, 2011	None	['None']
-pomt-07833	"There is nothing in the current state public records law that prohibits sensitive or confidential business information from being just that, confidential."	true	/ohio/statements/2011/feb/15/matt-lundy/state-rep-matt-lundy-says-state-records-laws-alrea/	New Gov. John Kasich has made it clear his top priority while in office is to bring jobs to Ohio and turn the economy around. JobsOhio, a publicly funded, private nonprofit corporation, is Kasich’s big idea to attract businesses here and create jobs. The nonprofit corporation will act as a privatized version of the Department of Development’s economic development efforts. Yet the transition of this public agency, which Kasich has described as sluggish and ineffective, to the private sector has raised concerns about transparency and accountability. Kasich, a Republican, wants JobsOhio to be exempt from Ohio’s public records and open meetings laws. The corporation would be audited annually to show the public its spending. But Democrats have loudly criticized the exemptions, saying they would keep the corporation’s operations under wraps and out of the public view, inviting scandal and a misuse of taxpayers’ dollars. Kasich and other Republicans say the exemptions are needed to help JobsOhio "move at the speed of business." Public disclosure could disrupt business negotiations, they argue. State Rep. Matt Lundy, a Democrat from Elyria, is not convinced JobsOhio needs to be shielded from public records laws, and he has introduced legislation to subject the corporation to those rules. "There is nothing in the current state public records law that prohibits sensitive or confidential business information from being just that, confidential," Lundy said in a Feb. 7 news release announcing his legislation, which he called the Taxpayer’s Right to Know Act. Republicans control the Ohio House of Representatives, so Lundy’s bill is unlikely to get much attention. But since his effort highlights ongoing concerns about JobsOhio, PolitiFact Ohio decided to check out Lundy’s claim and examine how Ohio’s public records laws treat the state’s interactions with outside businesses. Ohio’s public records law, section 149.43 of Ohio Revised Code, establishes the public availability of records kept by public offices, whether its a city hall or local school district or the governor. The law also includes numerous exceptions, which range from a police officer’s home address to adoption records. These exceptions also apply to certain business records. Sensitive business records often fall within the "trade secrets" exception to Ohio’s public records law, said David Marburger, an attorney for Baker Hostetler in Cleveland and counsel for the Ohio Coalition for Open Government. Marburger, who often represents The Plain Dealer on issues of public access to government, called the trade secrets exception "extremely broad." Ohio Revised Code section 1333.61 defines a trade secret as any information, including business information, financial information, technical information, formulas, names addresses and telephone numbers, of actual or potential economic value. Marburger said the trade secret exception is a nearly impenetrable shield when a government entity and a business share sensitive or confidential information. Kent State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication professor Tim Smith agreed. He also cited the trade secrets exception when asked about Lundy’s statement. "From my knowledge about the open records law, Lundy’s statement is accurate," said Smith, a former managing editor for the Akron Beacon Journal. Kasich’s administration and Republicans in the House of Representatives, which already has approved the JobsOhio plan, have offered a cross-section of scenarios in which public disclosure would impede JobsOhio’s mission. (The Republican-controlled Ohio Senate is still reviewing the plan.) For example, if communication between JobsOhio and a sought-after company was public record, another states could use that information to trump Ohio’s offer. PolitiFact Ohio is not rating whether JobsOhio should be exempted from public records laws. Regardless of the advantages or disadvantages, Lundy’s statement that Ohio’s public records law includes exceptions that protect sensitive and confidential business information is correct. On the Truth-O-Meter it earns a rating of True.	None	Matt Lundy	None	None	None	2011-02-15T06:00:00	2011-02-07	['None']
-pomt-09616	"More than 1,000 people ... move to Texas every day."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2010/jan/13/rick-perry/perry-says-1000-people-move-texas-daily/	Gov. Rick Perry touts Texas as a model state that escaped the recession with few battle scars and a lot of jobs, if you're looking for one. An unemployment rate significantly below the national rate is one reason folks are coming here — 1,000 people daily, according to Perry. "I am pleased to receive the endorsement of the Southwest Movers Association, which plays a key role in supporting the more than 1,000 people who move to Texas every day," he said Dec. 29. "As our state continues to grow, I look forward to working with members and stakeholders of SMA to ensure that Texas remains a top destination for job seekers." Matthew Thompson, a senior writer and editor at the Office of the Governor, said the governor's staff divided the state's annual population growth by 365 days to estimate how much the population swells daily. The statistics came from the U.S. Census Bureau. Between July 1, 2008 and July 1, 2009, Texas gained 478,012 more people — more than any other state (California, still boasting the biggest population overall, was second with 381,000 new people). That's about 1,300 people per day, by Thompson's calculation. But 478,000 is the net population change. It includes births as well as people relocating to Texas, after accounting for deaths and people leaving the state. So, what part of that net figure represents newcomers? With help from the U.S. Census Bureau, we learned that about 635 people come to Texas every day, on average. A census official based that number on average daily net migration from other states (393) plus average daily net migration from other countries (242). A separate estimate of the actual number of people entering the state comes from the Internal Revenue Service, which tracks the addresses of people who file taxes each year, and reports that information to the Census Bureau. The IRS found that 493,840 people switched their residence to Texas between the time they filed in 2007 and when they filed in 2008 — that's about 1,353 people each day. (The IRS' data are slightly older than the figures Perry cites as evidence for his claim.) In the end, Perry came close to getting it right, though he didn't take into account in-state births or people moving away. Statistically speaking, of course, a set number of people aren't moving to Texas every day because that number varies. But if you rely on IRS data collected in 2007 and 2008, more than 1,300 people on average were relocating here during that time frame. We rule Perry's claim Mostly True, even if he wasn't using the right data as evidence.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2010-01-13T16:00:11	2009-12-29	['Texas']
-snes-05447	You're a Racist, Charlie Brown?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-brown-racist-franklin/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan Evon	None	You’re a Racist, Charlie Brown?	24 December 2015	None	['None']
-goop-02286	Cate Blanchett, Andrew Upton Split Report Tru	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/cate-blanchett-split-andrew-upton-divorce-not-true/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Cate Blanchett, Andrew Upton Split Report NOT True	9:25 pm, October 27, 2017	None	['None']
-goop-01746	Caitlyn Jenner Joining ‘Dancing With The Stars,’ 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-jenner-dancing-with-the-stars-not-true-dwts/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Caitlyn Jenner NOT Joining ‘Dancing With The Stars,’ Despite Reports	2:06 pm, January 24, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08096	"One in 19 Americans today get SSDI or SSI. That's one in 19 Americans (who) are disabled."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/dec/14/tom-coburn/tom-coburn-says-one-every-19-americans-gets-ssdi-o/	At a Dec. 1, 2010, meeting of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform -- the Simpson-Bowles commission that was tasked with finding a solution for soaring deficits -- one of the panel's members, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., cited disability payments as an example how government spending has gotten "out of control." "We've created dependency," Coburn said. "And one great example is one in 19 Americans today get SSDI or SSI. That's one in 19 Americans (who) are disabled, and when the law says you're only disabled if there's no job in the economy you can perform, and we don't address that issue in this plan." We won't take sides on the question of whether SSDI and SSI should be cut or modified -- as Coburn and other critics have suggested, citing both cost and allegations of fraud by applicants -- but we were intrigued by the idea that more than 5 percent of Americans receive payments from one program or the other. We'd bet that most Americans who don't receive SSDI or SSI benefits are only dimly aware of these programs. Yet, if Coburn is right, these programs cover more than the percentage of Americans who are of Asian-American heritage (4.5 percent), more than double the number of American Jews (approximately 2 percent) and five times the number of American Indians (1 percent). So we decided to see if Coburn was right. First, some background on the two programs, both of which are run by the Social Security Administration. Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is funded by Social Security taxes paid by workers, employers and the self-employed. To be eligible for SSDI, a worker must have earned sufficient credits as a worker paying into the Social Security system. Typically, a worker will receive disability benefits if he or she becomes blind or disabled, or if a now-deceased spouse earned SSDI. Payments are based on the insured worker's Social Security earnings record. The program is set to pay out almost $124 billion in benefits this year. By contrast, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is financed through general revenues rather than by taxes specifically paid into the Social Security system. SSI disability benefits are payable to adults or children who are disabled or blind, have limited income and resources and meet certain requirements on living arrangements. The monthly payment varies up to the maximum federal benefit rate, and it may be supplemented by state payments or decreased by other income. The federal government appropriated almost $46 billion for its share of benefits this year. Supporters say the programs provide needed support to the most vulnerable members of American society. But the programs have their share of critics, many of whom point to the steady increase in the programs' cost and the risk of abuse by people who are not truly too disabled to work. For purposes of consistency, we looked at the 2009 annual reports for each program, because both offered statistics for the same month -- December 2009. For that month, SSDI benefits were paid to 8.9 million recipients. SSI paid benefits that same month to 7.7 million people. Combined, that works out to 16.6 million people receiving benefits from one of the two programs in December 2009. If you divide that figure by the total United States population in 2009 of 307 million people, it works out to be 5.4 percent, or just slightly more than one out of every 19 Americans. But before we declare Coburn completely correct, let's look at how many people collect both SSDI and SSI. We couldn't find those numbers for December 2009, but for November 2010, the overlap was about 1.8 million people. If you assume that the number was roughly similar for December 2009, then 4.8 percent of the U.S. population receives either SSDI or SSI -- or one out of every 20.7 people. That makes Coburn very close, so we rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Tom Coburn	None	None	None	2010-12-14T15:58:58	2010-12-01	['United_States']
-pomt-00072	"Mark Harris has said he would cut Social Security and Medicare."	half-true	/north-carolina/statements/2018/nov/01/dan-mccready/mccready-half-right-about-harris-wanting-cut-entit/	Seniors are among the most consistent election participants in part because they’re reliant on the largest U.S. safety net programs. So it would be politically risky for a candidate to declare his desire to cut Medicare and Social Security. And yet, Democrat Dan McCready recently accused Republican Mark Harris of admitting just that. Harris and McCready are running for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, which stretches from Charlotte to south-central North Carolina. It’s currently held by Robert Pittenger, who Harris beat in the Republican primary. There are 116,000 people in the 9th district over 65 (the age at which most people become eligible for Medicare and full Social Security benefits) and about 100,000 more who stand to collect Social Security benefits within the next 15 years, NC political expert Michael Bitzer recently told the Charlotte Observer. In a debate on Oct. 10, things got heated between Harris and McCready after a moderator asked about how they’d continue to pay for Social Security. "Mark Harris has said he would cut Social Security and Medicare," McCready said. The full debate is available on the Charlotte Observer website, and McCready made this claim around the 12-minute mark of the video. Harris said he was offended by McCready’s accusation. "I have never said that. That is a lie that’s being perpetrated throughout the campaign and throughout the district," Harris said. "I have always said we’ve got to keep Social Security solvent, we’ve got to make sure that it’s a promise made and a promise kept. And we will continue to do that." Harris then accused McCready of wanting to raise taxes to support those programs. He continued: "I do think we need to look at a graduated system that keeps the promise we’ve made to those that are retired and are heading toward retirement. I think when you get further back in the younger years, we need to have a graduated program that may involve options." McCready’s argument McCready then presented a three-pronged argument for how Harris has indicated intentions to cut Medicare and Social Security. "You supported a $1.9 trillion tax bill that takes $25 billion out of Medicare," McCready said to Harris. "You’ve said you would join the Freedom Caucus, whose stated purpose is to reform Social Security as we know it," McCready said. "And you said in 2014 at the Lake Norman debate that younger people would be the big loser under your plan." Harris responded by saying, "I’ve never expressed an overall plan except to make the point that younger people today who do not see Social Security being there when they reach it need to have some kind of options in place." Contacted by PolitiFact, McCready’s campaign emailed video of a 2014 U.S. Senate primary debate Harris participated in, a link to an online voter guide Harris filled out for this year’s primary and two news stories — by the Washington Post and Reuters — about how Republicans want to cut entitlement programs to compensate for revenue losses from the recent tax cut. The tax cuts and Freedom Caucus The Republican tax cuts are projected to shorten the life expectancy of the programs, as PolitiFact has previously reported. The tax law trimmed a year of solvency from the primary Medicare trust fund and had a negative effect on the Social Security trust fund, PolitiFact reported in a fact check of President Donald Trump. But it’s unfair for McCready to say that, because Harris supports the tax cuts, he by extension supports further cuts to Medicare. PolitiFact couldn’t find evidence that Harris has explicitly said he wants to cut Medicare, and McCready’s camp didn’t provide any. As for the Freedom Caucus, Harris has said he’d join the conservative group. Mark Meadows, a Freedom Caucus leader, says on his website that "Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must be at the center of any serious proposal to return spending to sustainable levels." However, Meadows adds, "I do not support seriously proposing radical changes to current or soon-to-be retirees’ benefits. But if we are to continue providing these safety-nets for Americans in need we must renegotiate expectations with younger Americans. This could include increasing the retirement age for those just starting their careers, raising or eliminating the cap on payroll taxes for higher wage earners and creating incentives for personal retirement and health care savings." What has Harris said? Now let’s look at the 2014 debate and the voter guide. In the video of the debate, Harris sounds a lot like Meadows. Harris says everyone currently over 50 should be guaranteed that they will get Social Security when they retire, but younger people shouldn’t receive that same guarantee. "There may be a way that we’re able to scale back for others that are under 50. I’ll soon be 48, and … my generation may very well be the big loser in Social Security, but we may be able to say that at least I took care of my parents and my grandparents with what I paid into it." He continued: "I would rather, quite frankly, have you make the adjustment on me as a man about to turn 48, and free my children – age 25, 24, and 22 up – instead of continuing to tax them and put money into a system that they will never, ever see a dime out of it. So we’ve got to come up with a solution that will hit those generations and it’s got to be thoughtful and it’s got to be productive, but it is something that we can, we can work on and fix." Harris’ response to iVoterGuide.com — completed for the Republican primary in this race — is similar. Harris wrote that Social Security is "in a death spiral" and "needs to be overhauled." "However, we must honor our promises to existing retirees and those nearing retirement age keeping the current system in place for those folks," Harris wrote in the guide. "In order to sustain a system that resembles Social Security, the system will need to operate in a balanced manner meaning that individuals only receive what they pay in, supplemented if desired by a government budget that should be based not on the whims of political gain but economic sensibility." Our ruling McCready claimed Harris "has said he would cut Social Security and Medicare." PolitiFact couldn’t find an example of Harris describing a plan for changing Social Security and Medicare benefits for the people who get them now or stand to get them soon. On Medicare, McCready has failed to prove that Harris said he wants to cut the program at all. But on Social Security, it’s clear from his past and recent statements that his hopes for reform include changes that would limit future government payouts. Harris has used the word "overhaul" and said he’s open to scaling back Social Security for people under 50. However, he’s consistently said his desired reforms wouldn’t affect people who are in the program or stand to benefit from it in the next decade or so. We rate this claim Half True. This story was produced by the North Carolina Fact-Checking Project, a partnership of McClatchy Carolinas, the Duke University Reporters’ Lab and PolitiFact. The NC Local News Lab Fund and the International Center for Journalists provide support for the project, which shares fact-checks with newsrooms statewide. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Dan McCready	None	None	None	2018-11-01T20:08:30	2018-10-10	['None']
-snes-01299	In the year 2018, all twelve days on which the month and day share common ordinal values falls on a Sunday.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/2018s-amazing-calendar/	None	Inboxer Rebellion	None	David Mikkelson	None	2018’s ‘Amazing’ Calendar	26 December 2017	None	['None']
-vogo-00564	Statement: The San Diego County Grand Jury “does the normal duties of recommending indictments as well as reporting on local governments and special districts,” Bloomberg News columnist Joe Mysak wrote June 15.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-a-tale-of-two-grand-juries/	Analysis: Some grand juries across the country recommend criminal indictments and report on public affairs, but that’s not the case in San Diego County. It has two kinds of grand juries with separate purposes: one criminal and one civil.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: A Tale of Two Grand Juries	June 22, 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-09475	"Charlie Crist was the only prominent Republican in the country to campaign with Barack Obama before the stimulus passed, on behalf of the stimulus."	half-true	/florida/statements/2010/mar/01/marco-rubio/crist-only-republican-campaign-obama-stimulus-rubi/	We've noticed a pattern in Marco Rubio's charges about Gov. Charlie Crist. Sometimes he criticizes Crist for supporting the stimulus. Other times, he criticizes Crist for supporting the stimulus and mentions that Crist hugged a Democrat who supported the stimulus (the president). And sometimes, he criticizes Crist for supporting the stimulus, mentions that Crist hugged a Democrat who supported it, and says Crist took the legs out from under Republicans who were pushing for an alternative. We suspect Rubio might repeat the attack one or two more times before the August primary. Here's a typical Rubio claim, from his Feb. 17, 2010 appearance on Fox News. "Charlie Crist was the only prominent Republican in the country to campaign with Barack Obama before the stimulus passed, on behalf of the stimulus," Rubio told interviewer Martha MacCallum. Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly called the stimulus, Feb. 13, 2009. The president signed the bill into law four days later at an event in Denver. (You can read PolitiFact's work about the stimulus here.) And as most everyone in Florida knows by now, Crist supported passing the stimulus, lobbied members of the state's congressional delegation to vote for it, and appeared at a town hall meeting with Obama in Fort Myers on Feb. 10, 2009. Crist earned our Pants On Fire rating for claiming that he "didn't endorse" the stimulus. In the Fox interview, Rubio attempted to set some pretty specific boundaries to his claim. The key phrases for us are "prominent Republican," "campaign with," and "before the stimulus passed." So by Rubio's logic, while California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did support the stimulus, and continues to defend it, he never physically campaigned with Obama to drum up support for the bill. Connecticut Republican Gov. Jodi Rell also supported the stimulus -- she along with Schwarzenegger, Crist and Vermont Republican Gov. Jim Douglas signed a letter urging its passage -- but like Schwarzenegger, Rell did not appear at a rally with Obama. We're not sure if it's completely fair to exclude those Republicans, but as we chew on that, let's see what else is out there. Before the stimulus passed Congress on Feb. 13, Obama held five campaign-style events: Two events in Illinois on Feb. 12; An event in Springfield, Va., on Feb. 11; The Fort Myers event; A town hall meeting in Elkhart, Ind. on Feb. 9. We scoured the transcripts for each event looking for signs of Republican support. One of the Illinois events included Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman. But LaHood is Obama's transportation secretary, so he really doesn't count. That event also included Republican U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock. But Schock voted against the stimulus bill. Indiana's town hall included Michigan GOP Rep. Fred Upton, but like Schock, he voted against the stimulus. That leaves Crist's appearance with Obama in Fort Myers. "I want to give a special thanks to your Governor, Charlie Crist, for joining us here today," Obama said at the Fort Myers rally. "The thing about governors is they understand our economic crisis in a way that maybe sometimes folks a little more removed don't understand. They're on the front lines dealing with the economy every single day. They're having to make choices about the budget every single day. They know what it means to balance a budget when revenues are short and more and more people are asking for help. And Governor Crist shares my conviction that creating jobs and turning this economy around is a mission that transcends party. And when the town is burning, you don't check party labels -- everybody needs to grab a hose. And that's what Charlie Crist is doing right here today." But that's not the only campaigning Obama did. On Feb. 2, 2009, Obama hosted Vermont's Douglas at the White House to discuss the stimulus. Before the meeting, Douglas and Obama spoke briefly to reporters. Here's part of what Douglas had to say: "The House of Representatives has passed a bill, and we look forward to working with your administration, with the senators and members of the House to fashion a piece of legislation that fulfills the goals that we have articulated. "I know there are some differences of opinion on some of the elements. And if I were writing it, it might be a little different. If you were writing it, it might be a little different. But the essence of a recovery package is essential to get our nation's economy moving." Douglas' comments were carried on cable news channels and included in an Associated Press story and later were picked up by the New York Times in a front-page article. (You can watch the interaction here. Sorry, no hug.) Douglas recently talked about his support for the stimulus with CNN. "What I said then is what I think most governors believe, that we might like it a little different," he told CNN's Candy Crowley. "Frankly, I was hoping there would be a little more for infrastructure, but -- but it was a package of relief that the states need urgently at a time when our state budgets were collapsing and we were facing the prospect of drastic cuts in state services or increases in taxes that wouldn't be fair or sustainable. So a recovery package was appropriate to stimulate the economy at that time last year." That prompted Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who was on the same same show with Douglas, to jump in. "Jim (Douglas) was -- Jim was great on this," Patrick, a Democrat, said. "As was Governor Crist -- very, very helpful." And that brings us back to Rubio's boundaries. Is Douglas prominent? As one of 24 Republican governors, Douglas certainly qualifies. Did he campaign with Obama? They held a media availability that was broadcast on CNN and CNBC. Was it before the stimulus passed? No doubt about it. We should note that Maine's two Republican senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins , announced their support for the stimulus on Feb. 6, 2009, a week before the bill was passed. But they, like Schwarzenegger and Rell, did not attend any of the five campaign-style events. Yes, Republicans overwhelmingly opposed the federal stimulus bill. Not one House Republican voted for it. And at least five Republican governors -- including Sarah Palin of Alaska and Rick Perry of Texas -- urged the bill's defeat. But Rubio is stretching the truth by portraying Crist as a lone wolf. Four Republican governors announced their support of the stimulus, and three Republican senators (the third being then-Republican Arlen Specter) voted for the bill. The distinction with Crist is that Obama decided to hold a rally in Florida and not California. Rubio said Crist was the "only prominent Republican in the country to campaign with Barack Obama before the stimulus passed, on behalf of the stimulus." But Obama met with Vermont's Republican governor who then promoted the stimulus in nationally televised remarks. So while Rubio is right that Crist was an unusual Republican leader in endorsing the stimulus at a public event, he is wrong to say Crist was the only one. We rate his statement Half True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2010-03-01T19:12:50	2010-02-17	['Charlie_Crist', 'Barack_Obama', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-09189	The federal government only ordered BP to pay "to do one of those six segments" of sand barriers for Louisiana.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/01/bobby-jindal/jindal-slams-feds-over-skepticism-about-louisianas/	Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal lamented the federal response to the state's plans to erect sand barriers to keep oil out of marshlands in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Jindal talked about a meeting he had had with President Obama where Jindal explained what the state wanted from the feds. "The area we spent the most time was on our plan, the state's plan, to build sand booms to keep this oil out of our wetlands. Now, we have said for weeks now we'd much rather fight this oil on a sandy barrier island than fighting inside our wetlands. We've got miles and miles of these islands that have been eroded by Katrina, by storms, and over time. We proposed a plan, 24 segments, to rebuild, to refortify these islands. After weeks -- and if they'd approved this when we first asked, we could have built 10 miles, 10 miles of sand barriers." Host Jake Tapper interjected here: "The president says that more is not always better, and the Army Corps of Engineers took the request seriously, evaluated it, decided it was okay for certain areas, but they didn't necessarily think immediately the plan that was suggested was the right plan. Is that not a fair response?" "Yesterday, the Army Corps of Engineers approved 6 segments out of 24, over 40 miles out of 100," Jindal replied. "But here's where our concern was: The federal government only ordered BP to pay for to do one of those six segments. That's 2 miles out of 100. Our message to the president today was: Make BP pay for this. The federal government shouldn't be making excuses for BP. This is their spill, their oil. They're the responsible party. Make them responsible." We wanted to check Jindal's claim that the federal government only ordered BP to pay "to do one of those six segments." The Obama administration has said over and over that the oil company BP will pay for the clean up, and we wondered how to reconcile that with Jindal's statements. It turns out that Jindal is right about BP paying for one of six segments of sand barriers, but there's more to the story. As Tapper's comment suggested, the feds aren't so keen on the idea of building sand berms. Federal agencies are chiefly concerned that they can't be constructed quickly enough to intercept the oil, and that they will divert money and attention from other efforts. Nevertheless, on Thursday, May 27, 2010, U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said the government would give permission for the construction of six barriers and authorize BP to pay for one, as a test to see if the barrier plan is feasible. That one barrier would cost $16 million and be paid for by BP or the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. "Louisiana's original proposal called for the dredging of more than 92 million cubic yards of material over a six to nine month period to build temporary barrier islands," said a statement issued by the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command. The group approved a more limited project because "implementation of the proposal in all areas approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, in the midst of an active spill, would not be prudent or provide effective protection—especially considering the complications of a major construction project occurring in the midst of a response encompassing more than 20,000 personnel and 1,300 vessels." The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers listed 33 separate conditions that had to be met, including protections for navigation channels and wildlife. Allen said the approval was meant as a test case. "There are a lot of doubts whether this is a valid oil spill response technique, given the length of construction and so forth," he said. "But we're not averse to attempting this as a prototype." Some environmentalists also criticized initial proposals for dredging sand for the barriers too close to shore, according to a report in the Times-Picayune newspaper. After changes were made to address those concerns, the cost estimates for the barriers rose from $250 million to $350 million. The state government could move to build the barriers with state money, but Jindal has rejected that idea without a guarantee of reimbursement. So Jindal is right that the federal government has authorized payment for only one of six barriers. But he leaves out the fact that the government has doubts about the plan and whether it will work or not, and the first barrier is meant as a test case. We rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Bobby Jindal	None	None	None	2010-06-01T10:23:57	2010-05-30	['Louisiana']
-snes-05405	Michele Bachmann said that solar power drains the sun of heat.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/michelle-bachmann-solar-power-quote/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	FALSE: Michele Bachmann on Solar Power	6 January 2016	None	['Michele_Bachmann']
-pomt-04554	Says Ted Cruz "has pledged to eliminate" the U.S. Department of Education, which would end federal aid to college students.	half-true	/texas/statements/2012/sep/27/paul-sadler/paul-sadler-says-ted-cruz-pledges-shut-down-depart/	Paul Sadler, the Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat from Texas, casts his Republican opponent, Ted Cruz, as stumping on extremist ideas. And in a Sept. 26, 2012, press release, Sadler zeroed in on what he called Cruz’s desire to eliminate federal aid to college students. The release says Cruz has pledged to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, "which would result in the loss of many programs used by Texas students." In the release, Sadler says: "The Department of Education includes federal student aid. If we eliminate it, then we truly make college education unaffordable for a large segment of our population in every single country, every single city, every single town." After asking Sadler spokeswoman Donna McDonald for the basis of Sadler’s claim, we looked for evidence of Cruz wanting to kill the agency, including its oversight of federal college student aid. Cruz has often called for eliminating several agencies including the education department. As noted in a May 6, 2012, Houston Chronicle news article, Cruz said at the Texas Capitol that day: "We need to eliminate unnecessary and unconstitutional agencies like the Department of Education ... the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the National Endowment of the Arts. ... I would most like to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service." Later, in an Aug. 5, 2012, interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, Cruz did not object when Wallace said, "You want to abolish (the) Education, Commerce and Energy departments" as well as the Transportation Security Administration and IRS. And in an interview posted Sept. 2, 2012, by the Daily Caller, a conservative-leaning news website, Cruz said: "I think we should shrink the size and power of the federal government by every and any means possible. What does that mean? That means eliminating unnecessary or unconstitutional agencies. The first agency I would eliminate would be the U.S. Department of Education. I think education is far too important to be governed by unelected bureaucrats in Washington. I think it should be at the state level, or even better, at the local level where parents have direct influence over the education of our kids." So, Cruz wants to wipe out the department, which originated in 1867 but did not become a Cabinet-level agency until 1980. And what does the agency do? It "establishes policy for, administers and coordinates most federal assistance to education," according to information on a department website. In 2007-08, department expenditures affected approximately 55 million students (pre-K through grade 12) in some 100,000 public schools and 34,000 private schools, the agency says, while providing grant, loan and work-study assistance to about 10 million undergraduate students. By telephone, Sadler told us Cruz’s saying he’d eliminate the department naturally means he would abandon all its functions -- including student aid. Sadler also pointed out a Sept. 25, 2012, El Paso Times news article quoting Cruz as saying he favors shutting down the agency and others. But it also quotes Cruz as saying that vital department functions such as teacher training would be pulled into other agencies. Minutes after we interviewed Sadler, he called us to point out a fresh news post by the Dallas Morning News on its Trailblazers blog. According to the Sept. 26, 2012, post, Cruz had just dismissed Sadler’s contention that eliminating the education department would jeopardize college student loan programs. "Of course not," the News’ post quotes Cruz as saying. "Student aid is critically important. … In my life, education opened doors for my parents and for me that never would’ve been opened." According to the post, Cruz said federal aid for college students should be wrested from the department and sent to the states as block grants. "We should take the funding, give it to the states and put the states in the position to make the decisions how to have the greatest impact in their communities," Cruz said. It would be unfair to consider information that came to light after Sadler made his claim. We won’t do so. Unfortunately, we failed to find any previous accounts of Cruz speaking to the department’s role in college student aid. To our inquiry, Cruz campaign spokesman James Bernsen told us by email that Cruz has "repeatedly made clear that he would not eliminate the funds to support a federal student loan program," preferring to give states "more freedom to adopt policies at the local level." More broadly, Bernsen said, the "elimination of a federal (agency) does not mean that critical divisions of the agency must be eliminated." We asked for evidence of Cruz’s repeated clarity about student financial aid, as described, and fielded none. Our ruling Sadler said Cruz wants to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and that federal college student aid would vanish as a result. Cruz has been clear about wanting the agency gone -- and we also see the rationale behind saying, or speculating, that killing the department would end all its functions, including the provision of college aid. However, there is no record of Cruz confirming or even discussing that desire before the day Sadler issued this press release. Also, Cruz was recently quoted as saying he would preserve vital department functions such as teacher training, an indication he doesn’t favor dropping everything the agency does. We rate Sadler’s claim as Half True.	None	Paul Sadler	None	None	None	2012-09-27T15:53:29	2012-09-26	['Ted_Cruz']
-goop-01052	Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux In Prenup “Battle”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-justin-theroux-prenup-divorce-fake-news/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux In Prenup “Battle”?	1:15 pm, May 5, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston']
-pose-00854	"It is essential that the current efforts to establish a regional crime lab be brought to a successful conclusion."	not yet rated	https://www.politifact.com/ohio/promises/fitz-o-meter/promise/886/create-a-regional-crime-lab/	None	fitz-o-meter	Ed FitzGerald	None	None	Establish and enhance the regional crime lab	2011-01-20T13:56:11	None	['None']
-vees-00269	Cayetano made the claim March 14 in a GMA News interview when asked how he would reconcile Duterte’s refusal to apologize for his use of vulgar language:	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-contrary-cayetanos-claim-all-govt-offi	The Administrative Code of 1987, which lists 30 grounds for disciplinary action including discourtesy and disgraceful conduct, does not make distinctions among public officials based on their roles.	None	None	None	Alan Cayetano,Code of Conduct	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Contrary to Cayetano’s claim, all gov’t officials, even presidents, are bound by law to be respectful	April 04, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-00894	A so-called "Church of Lucifer" has opened in Colombia.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/church-of-lucifer-colombia/	None	Religion	None	David Emery	None	Did a Church of Lucifer Open in Colombia?	14 March 2018	None	['Colombia']
-snes-01185	New U.S. Army medics will be treating battlefield injuries with "alternative medicine" such as homeopathic dilutions and prayer beads.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/new-army-holistic-medics/	None	Humor	None	David Mikkelson	None	Are New Army ‘Holistic Medics’ Treating Gunshot Wounds with Crystals and Essential Oils?	18 January 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02345	The United States stopped plans to build a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe "as a gift to Russia."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/23/mitt-romney/romney-obama-stopped-missile-defense-shield-gift-r/	President Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign for calling Russia "our No. 1 geopolitical foe." Now, as the country’s relationship with Russia worsens over Ukraine, Romney is getting the chance to take a few political swipes himself. Romney appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday and said Obama has been naive about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions all along. Romney said Putin has blocked Iran from harsher sanctions, stood with dictators in Syria and North Korea, and provided Edward Snowden a safe haven. Romney said he would have handled things differently. "For instance, you reconsider putting in our missile defense system back into the Czech Republic and Poland, as we once planned," Romney said of steps he’d take if he were in the White House. "And as you recall, we pulled that out as a gift to Russia." PunditFact has heard several Republican politicians and pundits bring up the missile defense system in recent weeks, so we wanted to look back into the program and why it was scrapped. The missile defense system The missile defense issue represented the first significant break from President George W. Bush administration policy in Obama’s first year in office, so it attracted a lot of attention. Bush, taking advice from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, pushed for an initiative to install 10 interceptor missiles on the ground in Poland and an advanced radar system in the Czech Republic to fend long-range missiles from Iran. American officials saw the Europe-based plan as improving their ability to deflect long-range missiles launched by Iran (not Russia) to Europe or the U.S while strengthening military partnerships with countries in Eastern Europe. Some interceptors had already been built on America’s West Coast to protect against nuclear attacks from North Korea. The interceptors in Europe would not be ready until at least 2017, Gates later wrote. The interceptors couldn’t do much against Russia’s nuclear weapons, experts said, but Russia still saw them as a threat to its arsenal and NATO-Russia cooperation. Russian defense minister Sergei Ivanov told a Belarus newspaper in 2006, "The choice of location for the deployment of those systems is dubious, to put it mildly," according to the New York Times. Enter Obama, who explained he supported the missile shield to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly during the 2008 campaign. He gave himself wiggle room, however, by saying, "I want to make sure it works, which is actually one of the problems we've got." He ordered a review. Washington’s relationship with Moscow was icy at the time following Russia’s war with Georgia. Obama took office in 2009 talking about hitting the "reset" button with Russia. Then, three years after Bush announced his missile defense proposal, Obama changed course. On Sept. 17, 2009, Obama announced that the United States would pursue a new missile defense policy focused on knocking out short- and medium-range missiles from sites closer to Iran. Russian concerns about the previous program were "entirely unfounded," Obama said. "Our clear and consistent focus has been the threat posed by Iran's ballistic missile program, and that continues to be our focus and the basis of the program that we're announcing today," Obama said. "In confronting that threat, we welcome Russians' cooperation to bring its missile defense capabilities into a broader defense of our common strategic interests, even as we continue to -- we continue our shared efforts to end Iran's illicit nuclear program." A ‘gift’ to Russia? Russians cheered the decision, though Russian officials said they didn’t promise anything in return. Putin called Obama’s move on the missile defense shield "correct and brave." Bush allies and congressional Republicans thought Obama caved. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. (who is now governor of Indiana), and Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, released statements along the lines of Obama is soft and let down American allies. Pundits like John Bolton, whom Bush appointed as ambassador to the United Nations, said Russia and Iran came away as "big winners" in a "bad day for American national security." Meanwhile, Israel and most NATO countries in Western Europe approved of the move, news stories show, as they thought the missile system provoked Russia. Initial reactions from Polish and Czech leaders were not thrilled. Obama delegated explaining the decision to an interesting source: Gates, the same official who recommended the missile defense plan to Bush in 2006 to combat the growing threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. Gates explained why he urged Obama to change course in a 2009 New York Times op-ed and in his 2014 book Duty, in which he described the new strategy as necessary due to changing times, technology and threats. (And in which he said some not-so-nice things about Obama.) "It was neither the first nor last time under Obama that I was used to provide political cover, but it was okay in this instance since I sincerely believed the new program was better -- more in accord with the political realities in Europe and more effective against the emerging Iranian threat," he wrote. Gates wrote that Defense Department officials realized the Iranian government was putting more stock into building short- and medium-range missiles over long-range ones. The agency wanted to uproot the old plan to better counteract that threat, and the new tactic Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to Obama was not only cheaper, but the sea-based missiles could be more easily and quickly produced. "While there certainly were some in the State Department and the White House who believed the third site in Europe was incompatible with the Russian ‘reset,’ we in Defense did not," Gates wrote in Duty. "Making the Russians happy wasn’t exactly on my to-do list." Lost in the GOP fury, Gates wrote, was that Russians found Obama’s new approach to be an even bigger problem than the Bush-era plan as they worried about future adjustments that could make the short- and medium-range missiles a bigger threat to Russia. "How ironic that U.S. critics of the new approach had portrayed it as a big concession to the Russians," Gates wrote. "It would have been nice to hear a critic in Washington -- just once in my career -- say, Well I got that wrong." Lance Janda, chairman of the Department of History and Government at Cameron University, told us Romney’s comments are partially accurate. Yes, Obama ended the missile shield planned in Poland and Czech Republic, but the U.S. will address the ballistic missile threat with Aegis missiles in Eastern Europe by 2018, he said by email. "While our decision to cancel the sites in 2009 eased tensions with Russia -- which DEEPLY opposed the sites -- we also had legitimate security reasons for not moving forward and in that sense it's not like we were really doing Putin a ‘favor,’ " Janda said. "And we're certainly not leaving Poland or the Czech Republic exposed. They're covered by the rest of NATO and will get the Aegis system ... soon." We reached out to Romney through CBS and a press contact on MittRomney.com but did not hear back. Our ruling Romney said, the United States stopped plans to build a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe "as a gift to Russia." Romney’s impression about Obama’s decision to end the program is certainly shared by GOP politicians and pundits, and Obama took office with a vow to reset relations with Russia. Russia found Bush’s missile defense program in neighboring countries offensive and was pleased to see it go (though Gates asserts they dislike the new policy more). But Romney’s comments do not reflect the whole story. Gates, the Bush official who recommended the plan in 2006, acknowledged he drove the change in policy because of improved American intelligence of what the Iranians were working on -- not solely to be nice to the Russians. Plus, new defense systems are still planned. We rate the claim Half True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2014-03-23T17:27:06	2014-03-23	['Russia', 'United_States', 'Eastern_Europe']
-pomt-02607	In the past three years, state legislatures have "enacted more of these restrictions (on abortion) than in the previous 10 years combined."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/24/patty-murray/more-state-abortion-restrictions-were-enacted-last/	Forty-one years ago this week, the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade, the landmark case that expanded women’s abortion rights. Fast forward to today, and access to abortion is still a hotly debated issue. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., defended abortion rights in a statement on her website for the case’s Jan. 22 anniversary. "In 2013, our nation saw yet another record-breaking year of state legislatures passing restrictive legislation barring women’s access to abortion services," she said. "In fact, in the past three years, the United States has enacted more of these restrictions than in the previous 10 years combined." We wanted to zero in on the numbers of state abortion restrictions to see whether the number of restrictions skyrocketed over the last three years. Murray’s office didn’t return our requests for comment, but we found data compiled by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that promotes reproductive health and and abortion rights. The group first outlined the differences in abortion restrictions by year in a report released Jan. 2, 2014. Counting different provisions in the same bill independently, the group tallied 205 new abortion restrictions during the period 2011 to 2013, compared to 189 during the 10 years through 2010. Now, out of the 205 restrictions, there are 25 not currently in effect, either because a court struck them down or a court case is pending. Guttmacher tracked these all 205 restrictions in 10 categories, four of which accounted for nearly half of the restrictions from the last three years: abortion bans, regulations on abortion providers, abortion medication, and private insurance coverage for abortion. (Using the Guttmacher data, the Washington Post made their own handy breakdown of abortion restrictions by state.) For perspective, in 2000, Guttmacher considered the two most restrictive states to be Utah and Mississippi, both of which had restrictions on the books in five of the institute's 10 categories. By 2013, 22 states had five or more restrictions. Louisiana had restrictions in all 10 categories. Methodological differences mean there’s room for debate over the exact number of restrictions, even among abortion-rights groups. While Guttmacher reported 205 abortion restrictions over the last three years, the Center for Reproductive Rights counted approximately 130, said Amanda Allen, the center’s state legislative counsel. That’s because the Center for Reproductive Rights counted each bill just once, regardless of how many different provisions it may have included. The center hasn't been tracking the legislation since 2000, so they don't have a comparable number to pit against Guttmacher's 189 from that decade. While both groups that compiled the numbers are pro-abortion-rights, their figures aren’t being contested by the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group. A spokeswoman for the Susan B. Anthony List told PolitiFact that the Guttmacher study "certainly appears to be accurate." Our ruling Murray said there have been more state-level abortion restrictions in the past three years than in the 10 years before that. A Guttmacher Institute report counted 205 restrictions from 2011 to 2013, compared to 189 from the previous decade. It's worth noting that 25 of those aren't currently in effect, but Murray specifically referred to restrictions enacted, not restrictions currently enforced. Both abortion-rights advocates and anti-abortion advocates told PolitiFact that they concur with Guttmacher's data. We rate her claim True.	None	Patty Murray	None	None	None	2014-01-24T15:51:38	2014-01-22	['None']
-goop-01086	Caitlyn Jenner Marrying Sophia Hutchins, 	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-jenner-sophia-hutchins-marry-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Caitlyn Jenner NOT Marrying Sophia Hutchins, Despite Report	11:33 am, May 1, 2018	None	['None']
-faly-00067	Fact Check: Was the Winter Session of Parliament postponed during UPA rule?	none	https://factly.in/fact-check-was-the-winter-session-of-parliament-postponed-during-upa-rule/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Was the Winter Session of Parliament postponed during UPA rule?	None	None	['None']
-goop-00693	Angelina Jolie Calling Off Brad Pitt Divorce Amid Custody Battle, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-divorce-custody-battle/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie NOT Calling Off Brad Pitt Divorce Amid Custody Battle, Despite Report	10:20 am, July 5, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-09838	"If you're over 65 years old in America today, you have no choice but to be in Medicare. Even if you want out of Medicare, you have to forfeit your Social Security to get out of it."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/24/dick-armey/dick-armeys-claim-about-medicare-and-social-securi/	To demonstrate how much control the government already has over our health care system, former House Republican Leader Dick Armey made this comment about Medicare on a recent episode of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer : Senior citizens "see this as a hostile government takeover of all health care, where they will be forced into a government-run program, and their health care lives will be managed by the government, just as today's the case in Medicare," Armey, currently chair of FreedomWorks, a conservative activist group, said on the Aug. 13, 2009, episode. "If you're over 65 years old in America today, you have no choice but to be in Medicare. Even if you want out of Medicare, you have to forfeit your Social Security to get out of it." We wondered if the rules for Medicare were are rigid as Armey described, and, as usual with government programs, we found it's more complicated than we expected. First, we wanted to find out how Medicare enrollment works. According to the Social Security Web site, anyone who files for Social Security benefits at the age of 62 is automatically enrolled in Medicare Part A and B — coverage for hospital and doctor's visits, respectively — at the age of 65. Patients must enroll independently for private coverage or prescription drug benefits. In some cases, people never sign up for retirement benefits and therefore they must enroll in Medicare on their own, said Dorothy Clark, spokeswoman for the Social Security Administration. Either way, "Medicare is a voluntary program," said Clark. No one is ever required to sign up for government health benefits, nor are they required to keep them. Nevertheless, Armey is right that beneficiaries collecting Social Security will lose those payments if they drop Medicare Part A — so long as they were enrolled in both programs in the first place, Clark said. We were curious why Social Security and Medicare are linked, and when we asked, we found that the issue is the matter of a lawsuit that was brought against the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services in 2008. Among the plaintiffs is none other than Dick Armey. The plaintiffs argue that, under the Medicare Act signed in 1965 and under the Social Security Act, there are no rules requiring enrollment in Medicare Part A to receive retirement benefits. Rather, a series of subsequent policy statements have linked the two programs, which are illegal because the two departments did not follow the traditional procedure to write the new rules, according to a press release issued by the plaintiffs on Oct. 9, 2008. The policy essentially traps retirees into participating. We asked the plaintiff's lawyer, Kent Masterson Brown, why the government had done this and he had a simple answer: power. "That's the curiosity here," Brown said. "[The departments] want to control every body." It turns out the NewsHour got a few viewer inquires angry that host Judy Woodruff did not do enough to challenge Armey on that point, according to Michael Getler, PBS ombudsman. Instead, Woodruff asked the other guest, Richard Kirsch with the liberal advocacy group Health Care for America Now, to challenge Armey's claim, but he didn't offer a specific rebuttal, leaving Armey's claim up in the air. So, back to Armey's claim. He's wrong that Medicare is required for everyone over the age of 65, but he's correct that those who want out of the program will lose their Social Security benefits as well. To us, that's a clear-cut Half True.	None	Dick Armey	None	None	None	2009-08-24T14:35:11	2009-08-13	['United_States', 'Medicare_(United_States)', 'Social_Security_(United_States)']
-pomt-05054	"75 percent of the Obamacare tax falls on the middle class."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/09/facebook-posts/facebook-post-says-75-percent-obamacare-tax-falls-/	In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision upholding President Barack Obama’s health care law, many readers asked us to check a claim circulating on Facebook that "75 percent of the Obamacare tax falls on the middle class." The claim concerns the amount to be paid by Americans who decline to pay for health insurance under a provision of the health care law known as the individual mandate. Starting in 2014, individuals who do not buy insurance and who aren't exempt from the mandate (say, for cases of hardship or religious belief) will have to pay an annual penalty of at least $95 for an individual in 2014, rising to $325 in 2015 and $695 in 2016. After 2016, the amount would be indexed to inflation and could be higher -- 2.5 percent of household income, if that’s greater than the amount written into the law. The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation -- two nonpartisan federal offices -- have estimated that about 4 million uninsured Americans, including dependents, will have to pay up in 2016, amounting to $4 billion in revenue per year from 2017 to 2019. The individual mandate was at the heart of the legal challenge to the law, and the two parties have sparred over whether the sum to be paid by those who don’t get health insurance amounts to a penalty or a tax. (We ruled that the Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate acts like a tax but stopped short of explicitly calling it a tax.) The Facebook post that readers sent us was created by the Tea Party Patriots, but it appears to originate from a comment made by Steve Moore, a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, in a Fox News interview. "We found that about three-quarters of whatever you want to call them -- taxes, fines, penalties -- … will fall on the backs of families that make less than $120,000," Moore said in an interview on the show Fox and Friends. This number comes from the same CBO report cited above, in a table on page 73. So we delved into the numbers. CBO projected that 76 percent of people paying the tax penalty in 2016 will have a household income of 500 percent of the federal poverty level or below. By 2016, CBO expects the federal poverty level to be $24,000 for a family of four, so 500 percent of that would be $120,000, which is just as Moore said. So there is a grain of truth to this number. But there are a number of issues worth considering. First, the claim requires us to call a family of four earning $120,000 in 2016 "middle class." Is that reasonable? We looked at projections from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center for what the federal income distribution will look like in 2016. A chart from the center estimates that the threshold for entering the top 20 percent of the income distribution in 2016 will be $123,970. So the Facebook post is essentially defining "middle class" as the bottom 80 percent of the income scale. Because there is no standard definition of "the middle class" -- and because politicians typically use the term broadly -- we won’t quibble with defining it this way. However, we do think it’s worth noting that this definition includes poor Americans as well as ones that can be defined as "middle class." The second concern is more problematic. CBO offers another measurement that is probably a more appropriate yardstick for the Facebook post’s claim -- a tally of dollars paid rather than the number of households that have to pay. CBO projected that 46 percent of the tax dollars collected as a result of the individual mandate will come from the bottom 80 percent, compared to 55 percent that will come from the top 20 percent. This presents a very different picture of how the financial burden of the mandate will be borne. There’s a big difference between the "middle class" carrying 75 percent of the burden rather than 46 percent of the burden. Two tax experts -- Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center and William McBride of the Tax Foundation -- agreed with our analysis. They also indicated that, given the phrasing of the Facebook post, it’s more appropriate to use dollars paid than the number of households that have to pay the penalty. "It's a complete misinterpretation of what CBO said," Williams told PolitiFact. Third, while we think it’s pretty clear from the context of Moore’s interview that he’s talking about the individual mandate alone, the Facebook post doesn’t carry over that nuance. The Facebook post could be interpreted to mean all taxes stemming from the health care law. Collectively, these new taxes are a lot bigger than the individual mandate tax -- and two of the biggest of them are specifically geared toward upper-income taxpayers. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation: • Starting in 2013, Medicare payroll taxes increase 0.9 percentage points for people with incomes over $200,000 ($250,000 for couples filing jointly). Also, people at this income level would pay a new 3.8 percent tax on investment income. The 10-year cost: $210.2 billion. • Starting in 2018, a new 40 percent excise tax on high-cost health plans, so-called "Cadillac plans" (over $10,200 for individuals, $27,500 for families), kicks in. That's expected to bring the government a total of $32 billion in 2018 and 2019. For other newly imposed taxes in the law, it’s less clear how the burden will fall. These taxes include a fee for pharmaceutical manufacturers and importers ($27 billion over 10 years); an excise tax on manufacturers and importers of medical devices ($20 billion over 10 years); an annual fee on health insurance providers begins ($60.1 billion over 10 years); a higher floor for medical expense deductions on itemized income tax returns ($15.2 billion over 10 years); and an excise tax on indoor tanning services ($2.7 billion over 10 years). Our ruling The Facebook post said that "75 percent of the Obamacare tax falls on the middle class." While it’s true that 75 to 80 percent of the households paying the individual mandate penalty might be described as "middle class," those households will only foot 45 percent of the bill -- a big difference. In addition, the Facebook post is worded vaguely enough to suggest that 75 percent of all the taxes in the health care bill will fall on the middle class. And that would be wrong. We rate the statement False.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2012-07-09T11:09:35	2012-07-03	['None']
-pomt-05386	The U.S. economy is "recovering slower than Europe "	false	/virginia/statements/2012/may/07/bob-mcdonnell/bob-mcdonnell-says-us-trails-europe-economic-recov/	Gov. Bob McDonnell recently added a new argument to his contention that President Barack Obama’s economic policies have failed. "We’re recovering slower than Europe and other Western countries because I think our policies for jobs and energy are just anemic with this White House," McDonnell said in an April 21 interview on Bloomberg TV. The economic news from abroad is hardly inspiring these days: crushing Greek debt; 24 percent unemployment in Spain; Britain falling back into recession. So we wondered whether the United States’ recovery really is trailing Europe’s. We asked the governor’s office for proof of McDonnell’s European claim and asked it to identify the "other Western countries" he referred to. Spokeswoman Taylor Thornley sent us an email with no answers, but saying, "Unemployment is too high. The national debt is out of control. And too many people are out of work." So we turned to data tables. Economists told us a standard way to examine the pace of the economy is to examine growth in gross domestic product -- the value of all goods and services produced in a country. At the time McDonnell made his statement, quarterly GDP figures through the end of 2011 were the latest ones available. Tables from the European Union’s economics statistics office show the 27 countries in the European Union, on average, were growing faster than the U.S. in the first quarter of 2011 and that trends evened out in the second quarter. In the second half of last year, U.S. GDP was rising at a faster clip than Europe. In the EU, GDP rose 1.1 percent in the third quarter of 2011 and but dropped 1 percent in the fourth quarter. The U.S., saw its economic output rise 1.8 percent in the third quarter and 3 percent in the fourth quarter. Only five of 33 European nations grew faster than the U.S. in the second half of 2011: Poland, Iceland, Slovakia, Latvia and Lithuania. Iceland is not a member of the EU. In the weeks and days before McDonnell made his statement, international organizations that track the global economy released growth projections for the U.S. and Europe for this year. Figures released on April 17 by the International Monetary Fund show that U.S. GDP in 2012 is expected to grow 2.1 percent in 2012. That’s a bit quicker than the 1.7 percent increase the U.S. saw through all of 2011. Throughout Europe, GDP grew 2 percent in 2011, but that is expected fall to 0.2 percent this year. On March 29, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group representing three dozen developed nations, released its projections for GDP growth in the first half of 2012. "Our forecast for the first half of 2012 points to robust growth in the United States and Canada, but much weaker activity in Europe where the outlook remains fragile," Pier Carlo Padoan, the OECD’s chief economist said in a news release. Figures in the report show that U.S. GDP growth at the end of 2011 was outpacing the major economies in Europe -- Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom -- which were shrinking or barely growing. Through the first half of 2012, U.S. growth was expected to outpace all those European nations. Desmond Lachman, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said McDonnell is off base when he asserts Europe is recovering faster than the U.S. "The United States, while its growth has not been spectacular, it certainly is growing modestly," Lachman said. "Europe has just moved into recession. The last two quarters in Europe, many of the countries, you had negative growth." Only four European nations -- Poland, Iceland, Turkey and the Slovak Republic -- are expected to see their GDP rise at a faster clip than the U.S. this year, according to IMF data. We also looked at unemployment rates in the U.S. and the European Union. We were unable to make an exact comparison because not all European nations define unemployment the same way as the U.S. This much is clear, however: The unemployment rate in European Union Nations rose from 9.4 percent in March 2011 to 10.2 percent in March 2012. During the same two months, the U.S. rate fell from 8.9 percent to 8.2 percent. Our ruling McDonnell said the U.S. recovery is slower than Europe’s. But looking at the continent as a whole the opposite is true. U.S. economic growth gained steam during the second half of 2011 while Europe’s started to flag. This year U.S. GDP is expected to grow at a higher pace than last year while Europe’s growth, is expected to be flat. Only five outpaced the United States in economic growth during the last half of 2011. Only four are expected to outperform the U.S. this year. This information was available before the governor made his comment. We rate McDonnell’s statement False.	None	Bob McDonnell	None	None	None	2012-05-07T06:00:00	2012-04-21	['United_States', 'Europe']
-pomt-05897	Says Gov. Scott Walker "made more than $70 million in cuts to job training programs through (Wisconsin’s) technical colleges."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2012/feb/05/fred-clark/democratic-state-rep-fred-clark-says-gov-scott-wal/	In the wake of six straight months of job losses, Republican Gov. Scott Walker put a priority on training workers to fill existing jobs in his Jan. 25, 2012, state of the state speech. Two weeks earlier, Walker had announced a new council to brainstorm ways to get students better prepared for jobs. Not surprisingly, Democrats weren’t buying what Walker was selling. In the weekly Democratic Party radio address released Feb. 1, 2012, state Rep. Fred Clark of Baraboo pointed to the lackluster jobs numbers and criticized Walker’s policies on education. He said students are "already experiencing the effects of Governor Walker’s damaging cuts to our universities and our technical colleges." Clark continued: "Governor Walker’s talk about job training rings very hollow after he made more than $70 million in cuts to job training programs through our technical colleges." We’ve heard plenty about Walker’s budget as it relates to public schools and the state university system, but little about the state’s technical college system, which quietly serves 375,000 students. Did Walker cut technical college job training programs by $70 million? Walker’s budget, approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature, did cut more than $70 million from general state aid to the technical college system. Precisely, it was $35.8 million each year for two years, or $71.6 million, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. After years of steady state funding, Walker’s plan amounted to a 30 percent reduction in state aid over two years. The reduction put the state aid at 1989 levels, according to tech college officials. The state budget also froze for two years the amount colleges could levy in property taxes for their budgets. That added to the budget challenge for administrators. But there are some key additional facts to put this into context. The state money is only about 12 percent of the revenue base for the colleges. Property taxes provide two-thirds of their budgets, and tuition and fees about one-fifth. So, it was a 30 percent cut of that narrow portion of their overall budget. And there is another set of numbers, unmentioned by Clark, that is important here. Most of the officials we spoke with acknowledged that another Walker budget move -- the collective bargaining changes that resulted in greater public employee contributions to state-paid health insurance and pensions -- had partially offset the aid cuts. Statewide, across the colleges, an estimated 60 percent of the aid cut was offset by those cost-cutting moves, according to Morna Foy, vice president of policy and government relations for the Wisconsin Technical College System. She noted the impact varied widely depending on the timing of labor contracts and other factors. So the impact of the $70 million aid cut was significantly offset. Additionally, Clark described the budget move as "more than $70 million in cuts to job training programs." The tech system’s primary mission is largely "job training" through specialized coursework. But that’s not all those schools do. They also provide general education, career counseling and skills training for already employed workers, among other services. So it’s impossible to say the $70 million all came from job training programs. Because nobody has catalogued the college-by-college impact of the aid cuts, we can’t rule on whether the state aid cuts have damaged tech college education, as Clark said. But our interviews with a sample of the 16 technical college districts found a modest but significant list of program cutbacks officials attributed to the state aid cut: Northeast Wisconsin Technical College lost about 5 percent of its workforce, including eight instructors, made some class sizes bigger and cut back on counseling for students and extra help for students who struggle, said Karen Smits, vice president of college advancement. Waukesha County Technical College discontinued two course programs, said Kaylen Betzig, executive vice president. Milwaukee Area Technical College consolidated a majority of classes at its downtown campus, according to Kathleen Hohl, spokeswoman for the college. Officials with the state tech system officials found that closing class sections and reducing the number of instructors was a common budget-balancing tactic, as was dipping into reserve funds, said Foy. Several officials mentioned waiting lists to get into programs such as nursing, and said the cuts have thwarted plans to try to get more students into class. In tough economic times, demand for tech classes rises, officials said. They also said Walker’s budget spurred extraordinary numbers of retirements, causing the loss of experienced teachers. But officials said the overall impact on classrooms was pretty modest or negligible. "Students were able to get the experience in classroom we have always offered," Smits said, emphasizing that outside the classroom, the guidance cuts did mean less service. Our conclusion Clark correctly quantified Walker’s budget as having made more than $70 million in cuts to the technical college system. But it was a cut in general aid, not specifically to job training programs. And some of the cut was significantly offset by other changes in the budget, as was evident when officials told us the impact of the cuts was relatively modest. We rate Clark’s statement Half True.	None	Fred Clark	None	None	None	2012-02-05T09:00:00	2012-02-01	['Wisconsin', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-bove-00286	FactCheck Alert: From Banks’ 5-Day Week To Just Rs 61,000 FDI In Defence	none	https://www.boomlive.in/factcheck-alert-from-banks-5-day-week-to-just-rs-61000-fdi-in-defence/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck Alert: From Banks’ 5-Day Week To Just Rs 61,000 FDI In Defence	Apr 13 2017 11:42 am, Last Updated: Apr 15 2017 3:04 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-04716	At Bain Capital, "we helped start an early childhood learning company called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/31/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-michelle-obama-praised-bain-compa/	Mitt Romney said one of his Bain Capital companies has been so successful it's been praised by First Lady Michelle Obama. Romney’s Aug. 30, 2012, speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa extolled Bain Capital, the private equity and venture capital firm that fueled his wealth, as "a great American success story." "Some of the companies we helped start are names you know you've have heard from tonight. An office company called Staples, where I'm pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping. "The Sports Authority, which of course became a favorite of my boys. "We helped start an early childhood learning company called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised. "And at a time when nobody thought we'd ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and build one in the cornfield in Indiana. Today, Steel Dynamics is one of the largest steel producers in the United States. These are American success stories." What did Michelle Obama say? Let’s Move! We asked Romney’s campaign, and did some searching of our own. The first lady didn’t offer a blanket endorsement of Bright Horizons, a major provider of employer-sponsored child care that’s been named one of Fortune magazine’s "100 Best Companies to Work for in America." Rather, she singled them out for a mention in a June 2011 speech in Washington, D.C., as a new partner for her healthy-kids initiative, Let’s Move. Her comments were publicized a year later in a Daily Caller article headlined "Michelle Obama praised Bain Capital-backed child care company," as well as by ABC News and Fox Business News with Neil Cavuto. She was "singing the praises of a company called Bright Horizons last year" saying it was "it was beyond just first-rate," Cavuto said. The coverage focused on a YouTube video that showed the first lady mentioning Bright Horizons . She had visited a child care center — not one managed by Bright Horizons, but rather an unrelated center called CentroNia — to announce "Let’s Move Child Care." Providers such as Bright Horizons had agreed to sign on with Partnership for a Healthier America to focus on nutrition and exercise in their centers. Michelle Obama said: "The Partnership for a Healthier America is working with private providers like Bright Horizons. That’s the nation’s second largest private child care provider, and they’re going to implement this checklist at nearly 600 child care centers across the country. So we already have commitments that are going to affect hundreds of thousands of children today. Again, that’s why we’re excited to be able to launch this. That's why these partners here today are so important, because we wouldn't have this announcement if we didn't have the folks ready to step up and invest and get the ball rolling and be the models, as CentroNia is, to show that we can do this, and it can work." In a related Bright Horizons news release, she was quoted as saying, "If our kids get into the habit of getting up and playing, if their palates warm up to veggies at an early age, and if they’re not glued to a TV screen all day, they’re on their way to healthy habits for life. That’s why I’m so excited about Let’s Move Child Care – because I know that childcare facilities and home-based providers can be a real building block for an entire generation of healthy kids." Our ruling Romney said the first lady "praised" Bright Horizons. She did say that she was "excited" to launch an initiative that included the child care provider, calling Let’s Move partners "so important." Those are favorable comments about the company. We rate his claim True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-08-31T17:18:50	2012-08-30	['Bain_Capital']
-pomt-14248	Florida’s regulations on the payday lending industry are "stronger than almost any other state."	false	/florida/statements/2016/apr/12/patrick-murphy/patrick-murphy-praises-floridas-payday-law-stronge/	Consumer groups have attacked Florida members of Congress, including Patrick Murphy, for defending a payday lending bill that they say traps the poor in a cycle of debt. Murphy, a Democrat who represents the Treasure Coast and is running for U.S. Senate, disagrees with those consumer advocates. "The regulations on the (payday lending) industry are some of the strongest here in Florida, stronger than almost any other state," Murphy said in a conference call with reporters April 6. The position of Democratic lawmakers on payday loans has been a hot topic in Florida. We will fact-check Murphy’s claim that Florida’s payday lending law is "stronger than almost any other state." We found that consumer groups, independent researchers at Pew Charitable Trusts and the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have raised multiple criticisms of Florida’s law. No expert we interviewed consider Florida’s law to be "stronger than almost any other state." Florida’s payday lending law Payday loans are small, short-term loans that borrowers promise to repay out of their next paycheck at a high rate of interest. About three dozen states have their own payday laws, including Florida. President Barack Obama took a step toward regulating payday lenders when he signed a bill in 2010 that included the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bureau released an outline of payday loan rules in 2015 and will release a more complete proposal this year. The bureau’s goal is to make sure consumers have the ability to repay their loans -- something experts say Florida’s law fails to do. (The bureau can’t cap rates -- something only Congress or states have the authority to do.) Nearly all of Florida’s congressional delegation, including Murphy, signed a letter in April 2015 asking the bureau to use Florida’s law as a model. U.S. Rep. Dennis Ross, a Florida Republican, filed a bill in November which would give precedence to state laws. Murphy is one of 24 cosponsors on the bill, which hasn’t had a hearing yet. Murphy’s Democratic primary opponent for the U.S. Senate, U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, signed the April letter but now says he will oppose the bill in its final version because it contains a waiting period on federal regulations. Consumer groups, researchers criticize Florida’s law Consumer advocates say that Florida’s payday law is no model. More than 200 consumer or civil rights groups -- including the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Consumer Federation of America -- wrote a letter to Congress arguing that the "industry-backed Florida law" would hurt consumers. Among nine groups from Florida fighting the law is the Florida Alliance for Consumer Protection. In Florida, "In exchange for minimal regulatory requirements, the industry was permitted to issue predatory loans, extracting millions in exorbitant fees each year from the Floridians that can least afford it," stated the group in May 2015. Florida’s 2001 payday loan law included protections that were intended to help the poor. But the loans leave consumers stuck on a debt treadmill in Florida, where they have racked up $2.5 billion in fees since 2005, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. The center obtained data from the state Office of Financial Regulation to examine payday transaction data for a 10-year period. The average Florida payday loan had an annual rate of 278 percent in 2014-15, the center found. Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent organization, has researched payday laws for five years, including interviews with borrower focus groups. Borrowers consistently say they want small installment payments, lower prices and certainty of quick approval. Florida has quick approval, but otherwise doesn’t meet those benchmarks, said Alex Horowitz, senior officer with the small-dollar loans project. Colorado is the only state that achieves all three. "Colorado has by far the best model for payday loans in the country," Horowitz said. In Florida, loans are due back in a lump sum by the borrower’s next payday that take up on average 35 percent of a borrower’s paycheck. "That is much more than they can afford," Horowitz said. Colorado’s 2010 law led to more affordable loan payments, fewer defaults, and lower prices, according to Pew. A spokesman for Murphy, Joshua Karp, pointed to a 2014 analysis by Pew that placed states into three categories: 15 states have no payday laws, 27 states have permissive laws and nine states are "hybrids," with requirements such as lower limits on fees or longer repayment periods. "Florida's law is stronger than 27 of 35 states that allow payday lending," Karp said. But Horowitz said that in most cases there is insufficient research to know if the restrictions in the nine states improve consumer welfare. The Center for Responsible Lending doesn’t consider Colorado to be a national model because it allows high interest rates, said Diane Standaert, the center’s director of state policy. The best practice is a rate cap of 36 percent, which exists in 14 states but not Florida, she said. "The data from Florida is it has some of weakest provisions in the country," she said. The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Richard Cordray, disagreed with Ross, a Florida congressman, when Ross called Florida’s law the "gold standard" during a congressional hearing on March 16. In Florida, "these loans are still being made above the 300 percent, and they are being rolled over on average nine times," Cordray said. Of course, Florida’s law could always be worse. For example, eight states including Wisconsin and Texas have no fee limits, while in Florida it is $35 to borrow $300 for two weeks. However, no academic or consumer expert we interviewed argued that Florida’s law should be considered any sort of national model. "One can’t say across the board Florida is a state that has somehow reined in payday lenders in comparison with other states," said Auburn University professor James Barth who wrote a paper on payday lending. Our ruling Murphy said Florida’s regulations on the payday lending industry are "stronger than almost any other state." Consumer advocates, Pew researchers and the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have several criticisms of Florida’s law, including the high interest rate. Pew, an independent organization, says that Colorado has the best model law in the country. The Center for Responsible Lending points to 14 states -- not including Florida -- that cap interest rates at 36 percent as a better practice. There are ways in which Florida’s payday law is better than some other states, but there is not evidence that it’s stronger than almost any other state. We rate this claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/94d22922-2180-41a8-aba1-7b81e25f833f	None	Patrick Murphy	None	None	None	2016-04-12T14:18:07	2016-04-06	['None']
-goop-01969	Kim Kardashian Pushing Kylie Jenner To Announce Pregnancy, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-kylie-jenner-announce-pregnancy-third-child/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Kim Kardashian NOT Pushing Kylie Jenner To Announce Pregnancy, Despite Report	10:33 am, December 24, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04958	A photograph shows a horse with markings on its coat depicting an image of a wolf.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/horse-markings-wolf/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	‘Wolf’ on Horse’s Coat	5 April 2016	None	['None']
-tron-03158	Letter to the people of France about anti-Semitism from Senator Joe Lieberman	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/leiberman-france/	None	politics	None	None	None	Letter to the people of France about anti-Semitism from Senator Joe Lieberman	Mar 17, 2015	None	['France']
-snes-01140	Did the NFL Admit to Rigging Games?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nfl-admits-to-rigging-games/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did the NFL Admit to Rigging Games?	24 January 2018	None	['None']
-vogo-00002	Statement: “The county of San Diego is holding over $100 million in unspent Mental Health Services Act funds,” state Sen. Ben Hueso said at an Oct. 12 press conference where Democrats and labor leaders called on county supervisors to spend more to combat the region’s homelessness and hepatitis A crises.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/government/fact-check-100m-mental-health-sitting-bank/	Analysis: Democrats and homeless advocates have long called on the county to invest more of its ample cash in programs to aid San Diegans struggling with homelessness and mental illness.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: More than $100M for Mental Health Is Sitting in the Bank	November 3, 2017	None	['San_Diego', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-10677	"The estate tax, which came into being by Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and others ... is there for a real simple reason: In America, we've never liked the idea of massive inherited wealth."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/18/hillary-clinton/need-not-wealth-prompted-estate-taxes/	To justify her plan to use estate tax revenues for universal retirement accounts, Hillary Clinton told a voter in New Hampshire that history was on her side. "People disagree about this, but the estate tax, which came into being by Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and others, and has been part of our tax system for a very long time, is there for a real simple reason: In America, we've never liked the idea of massive inherited wealth," she said during a town hall forum in Derry. "Part of the reason why America has always remained a meritocracy where you have to work for what you get ... is that we never had a class of people sitting on generation after generation after generation of huge inherited wealth." Clinton's historical account, and dig at Republicans, shows selective memory. Estate taxes — a tax on the property passed forward and received at death — were first levied in 1797 under President John Adams, a Federalist. In that case, the revenue went to cover the cost of raising a Navy. The two subsequent times it was enacted, in 1862 and 1898, it paid for military conflicts (first the Civil War and then the Spanish-American War), before being repealed again. Clinton is correct that Republican Theodore Roosevelt advocated renewing the estate tax. On Dec. 4, 1906, he told Congress, "The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government." But Roosevelt left office before it became law in 1916 — under President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, who used the tax to help pay for World War I. Another Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, raised rates twice, in 1934 and 1935, to help fund federal programs during the Great Depression. At that time, he said, "The transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people." Since then, the estate tax has continued to increase as have the number and size of the exemptions. Under tax cuts passed by President Bush, it is being phased out by 2010. Clinton wants to abolish the tax cuts she said only help the wealthy and use the estate tax to fund a new retirement system. While her sentiment closely resembles FDR's, her statements don't represent the full history behind the tax. We rule her statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2007-12-18T00:00:00	2007-10-10	['United_States', 'Theodore_Roosevelt', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-chct-00003	FACT CHECK: Are 1,500 To 1,700 Illegal Immigrants Stopped At The Border Every Day?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/11/02/fact-check-1500-illegal-border-crosser-every-day/	None	None	None	Shane Devine | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	6:13 PM 11/02/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-12739	Says former NRA president Jim Porter said, "It’s only a matter of time before we can own colored people again."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/mar/02/blackinsurancenewscom/claims-former-nra-president-talked-about-owning-co/	A fake story accusing former National Rifle Association president Jim Porter of making a racist statement is another example of a years-old article from a joke site becoming resurgent on social media. "‘It’s only a matter of time before we can own colored people again’ says NRA President Jim Porter," read the headline on a Feb. 27, 2017, post on BlackInsuranceNews.com. The site describes itself as a source of insurance industry news for minority communities. The story, which is made up as well as outdated, says Porter called President Barack Obama a "fake president" and referred to the Civil War as "the War of Northern Aggression." In addition to the quote in the headline, the post claims Porter also said, "I don’t want my grandkids growing up taking orders from a colored man. It’s our God-given right to keep them as property and keep them in line." The Associated Press described Porter in 2013 as having "a penchant for bold statements." He told NRA supporters before officially taking office that they were part of a "culture war" that was bigger than just gun rights. Porter was succeeded as NRA president in 2015 by Allan Cors. The BlackInsuranceNews.com post was flagged by Facebook as possibly being fake as part of the social media company’s efforts to weed out fake stories in its news feeds. The BlackInsuranceNews.com story was very popular on Facebook. It’s been shared more than 68,000 times since being posted Monday, according to Facebook. But it actually originates from a joke site called FreeWoodPost.com, which first posted the story on May 5, 2013, the same week Porter was installed as NRA president. FreeWoodPost.com makes no secret that its contents aren’t serious. The site’s slogan is "News that’s almost reliable," and each post (including the one about Porter) notes beneath the text that "this story is satire, folks." The site also has a disclaimer that says FreeWoodPost.com "is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways." The articles "are fiction, and presumably fake news," it says. BlackInsuranceNews.com, meanwhile, carries no such disclaimer. The site did not respond to our request for comment. While some people in the site’s comments section appear to realize the article is not real, the vitriolic responses from others show its manufactured roots are not abundantly clear. We rate the claim Pants On Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	BlackInsuranceNews.com	None	None	None	2017-03-02T13:41:49	2017-02-27	['None']
-pomt-12789	"If Governor Cooper's proposed bill for repealing HB2 becomes law, it will create a state-sanctioned 'Look But Don't Touch' policy in our bathrooms."	pants on fire!	/north-carolina/statements/2017/feb/16/dan-forest/ncs-dan-forest-wrongly-claims-gov-roy-cooper-will-/	After Gov. Roy Cooper introduced a proposal repealing House Bill 2, one of the law’s biggest supporters spoke up. Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest – who has already announced he wants to run for governor in 2020 – said Cooper’s strategy to repeal HB2 "will risk the safety of our people to achieve a radical social policy agenda." HB2 said people can only use the bathrooms of their birth gender (not their gender identity), and it banned cities and counties around North Carolina from creating rules related to bathroom access or discrimination protections for LGBT people, or raising the minimum wage. We previously found that there’s no real history of safety problems associated with transgender-friendly bathroom rules. However, Forest’s claim doubled down on such concerns. "If Governor Cooper's proposed bill for repealing HB2 becomes law, it will create a state-sanctioned 'Look But Don't Touch' policy in our bathrooms," Forest said in a written statement. "Heterosexual men will be able to access women's showers and bathrooms by simply posing as a transgender individual. They will be able to watch women and children shower, or shower next to them. As long as the man doesn't touch them, assault them or film them, no legal protection would be afforded the offended woman or child. Nothing." That’s a shocking claim. We found it’s also not based in reality. What happens if HB2 gets repealed We should note one thing right off the bat: Forest issued his statement on Cooper’s bill before the bill was filed, basing his claim simply off what Cooper said in a press conference. That means we won’t use the bill itself to examine Forest’s claim. Instead, we’ll use the facts that existed at the time – including that Cooper had proposed repealing HB2 and strengthening criminal penalties for certain crimes committed in bathrooms. His statement implies Cooper proposed letting transgender people use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify. That’s not true. In reality, Cooper suggested a return to the status quo that North Carolina used for centuries, in which there were no laws about bathroom access. We asked Forest spokesman Jamey Falkenbury if Forest thought that North Carolina had a "state-sanctioned ‘Look But Don’t Touch’ policy" for all that time. Falkenbury said Forest was instead making the assumption that, once HB2 is repealed, cities and counties will rush to pass transgender-friendly bathroom rules. We can’t see the future, and neither can Forest, although Falkenbury did correctly point out that "with HB2 repealed there would be no legal mechanism to block those ordinances." Yet even if that did happen the decision is up to local governments, and the rules would only apply locally. That’s hardly a "state-sanctioned" policy, contrary to Forest’s claim. Law enforcement doesn’t lack power We looked into legal protections for two different possibilities: What powers law enforcement will have under the situation Cooper actually proposed, as well as under the situation Forest believes might happen. That first one is easy. There are a number of laws the state can use to protect people from the kinds of acts Forest described. There might be more, but at least six could apply: Trespassing, stalking, breaking and entering, indecent exposure, secret peeping and sex offender restrictions. And since HB2 contains no civil or criminal penalties for violations, repealing it wouldn’t take away any legal protections. If the sexual predators in Forest’s scenarios are also convicted sex offenders, the state has laws to give them additional punishments for re-offending, or even for simply being near places kids go – including pools, schools and other places with the kind of shared facilities Forest is worried about. And in 2015, before HB2 passed, UNC-Chapel Hill law professor Jeff Welty wrote about what could happen to people go into the wrong bathroom. Welty said there’s "a strong argument" for trespassing and "a reasonable argument" for breaking and entering. He also cited a 2008 trial in which a 15-year-old boy in Greenville was convicted of trespassing for barging into his school’s girls’ locker room. The boy was also charged with secret peeping but wasn’t convicted, as he was anything but secretive in causing a scene. So all that debunks one of Forest's concerns, of a man watching women undress with no legal consequences if HB2 is repealed. There absolutely would be legal protections. And Forest’s more extreme scenario, of men being able to undress or shower with women, is even more ludicrous. North Carolina’s indecent exposure law would apply, and would lead to felony charges if children were present. Trying to see the future But what about if a city took advantage of the HB2 repeal and allowed transgender people to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify? Let’s examine the possibilities. We began by asking why Forest ignored Cooper’s proposal for stronger penalties for bathroom crimes. That was intended as an olive branch to Republicans; it also caused the liberal, pro-LGBT groups Human Rights Campaign and Equality NC to oppose Cooper’s proposal. Falkenbury said it’s because Forest believes those laws would become meaningless. If a man claimed he was feeling like a woman at that particular moment in time, Falkenbury said, the law would be powerless to stop him. Again, we should point out Cooper never proposed allowing transgender people into restrooms based on their gender identity – and he has refused to publicly support other Democrats’ proposals to do so – but we’ll look into it anyway. Forest can’t possibly have any North Carolina-specific proof, since nowhere in the state has ever had transgender-friendly bathroom rules (Charlotte tried to, but HB2 became law first). But Falkenbury did point to an incident in Seattle, which does have transgender-friendly bathroom rules, in which a man walked into a women’s locker room at a pool. People complained, and he was kicked out of the locker room by pool staff despite claiming he had the right to be there. But that example actually goes against Forest’s point, since the man was removed. And the Washington Human Rights Commission, a part of the state government, reaffirmed the decision to kick him out. "If a business has a reasonable belief that a person is in the wrong place, there is no rule that states that the person cannot be questioned and required to leave," the commission said. The man in that situation was never charged with any crimes, but neither we nor Forest can say what might happen in a similar case in North Carolina. There’s simply no precedent here. But Forest’s more worrisome scenario, in which a man undresses or showers with women consequence-free, is clearly implausible. Even in a hypothetical North Carolina city with a transgender-friendly bathroom rule, that would absolutely be illegal. The state law against indecent exposure gives only one exception: If the nudity occurs someplace where it's incidental (like a locker room) and it happens in front of only people of the same sex. Since local ordinances can’t override state law, no city’s bathroom rules could change that fact. The law only cares about anatomy, not gender identity. Our ruling Lt. Gov. Dan Forest said that Cooper’s HB2 repeal bill, if it passes, "will create a state-sanctioned 'Look But Don't Touch' policy in our bathrooms" with no laws in place to protect women from predatory men. In reality, there are at least half a dozen laws protecting people from the type of scenarios Forest wrongly said would become consequence-free. Cooper even suggested creating stronger penalties for some of them. Forest defended his claim by saying cities would start letting transgender people in bathrooms of the gender with which they identify. That's not what Cooper proposed, however. And even if it does happen, it’s a local government decision, not a "state-sanctioned" policy. And even in that case, one of Forest’s hypothetical concerns is clearly baseless, and the other is unclear at best. We rate this claim Pants On Fire! https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/5d9e3ebd-b408-425a-853a-f416f13ab457	None	Dan Forest	None	None	None	2017-02-16T19:33:32	2017-02-14	['None']
-pomt-12190	There were 2,761 auto thefts in 2006 under Rick Baker and 1,095 auto thefts in 2016.	mostly true	/florida/statements/2017/jul/27/rick-kriseman/taking-closer-look-auto-theft-problem-st-petersbur/	Whose epidemic is it anyway? The leading candidates in St. Petersburg’s mayoral race are trading blows over the city’s issue with automobile theft ahead of the Aug. 29 primary. Former Mayor Rick Baker told a Tampa Bay Times reporter that auto theft is "now at epidemic proportions" under Mayor Rick Kriseman. Kriseman defended himself on Twitter and Facebook with a graphic showing the problem appeared worse during Baker’s time in office. According to Kriseman’s post, there were 2,761 auto thefts in 2006 under Baker, compared with 1,095 auto thefts in 2016 under Kriseman. With our colleagues at the Tampa Bay Times investigating the juvenile car-theft problem, we wanted to look at the trend under both mayors. The numbers Kriseman reported from the St. Petersburg Police Department checked out for those years. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Baker was mayor from April 2001 to January 2010. Kriseman’s campaign plucked the worst year to make its counterpunch. The year 2006 was the highest point for auto thefts since 2000 — although most other years were higher than any point in Kriseman’s three full years since taking office in 2014. Choosing to compare raw numbers from Baker's 2008 and Kriseman's 2015, though, could leave a different impression, with 1,461 and 1,523 thefts, respectively. What does the bigger story tell you? The rate of car thefts in St. Petersburg remains far higher than the national and state average, shown below, regardless of who was mayor. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com "The number of auto-thefts, the number of auto burglaries, it’s something you need to watch and something that’s important, but the impact of the activity is more important than anything else," Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said. And in recent years, the impact of automobile thefts, specifically juvenile auto thefts, has been a priority for the department. The Tampa Bay Times documented the automobile theft issue, finding that children in Pinellas County were arrested more for stealing cars than anywhere else in Florida. Gualtieri said 2015 was "ground zero" for the juvenile auto-theft problem and said that’s when the department really started noticing the trend of young kids stealing cars. In early 2016, three teenage girls drove a stolen car into a cemetery pond and drowned. At the time, Gualtieri called the incident "unacceptable." "Solutions need to come deep from within the community," Gualtieri said at the time. "Kids need to know there are consequences. This is a systematic and complex problem." Automobile thefts became a priority for police in 2015 and 2016 — leading to a year-over-year drop. Law enforcement officials consider juvenile auto thefts a countywide problem; a drop in St. Petersburg doesn’t necessarily mean the problem is over. Detective Paul Etcheson, who’s been with the police department for almost nine years and works in the property crime unit, described automobile theft in St. Petersburg as a "revolving door." "The reason the numbers have fallen in the previous months is because we have juveniles placed in programs, or on 21-day hold or something," he said. "As soon as they get back, they’re right back at it." As we said, 2006 was a high point for auto theft. We wanted to understand why. Police officer Mark Williams, who has been with the deparment for over a decade, said cars were simply easier to steal in 2005 and 2006 like the Dodge Ram 1500. Older cars could be broken into with a screwdriver or a pair of scissors, he said. Williams said automakers have done a better job of eliminating access points on cars. For instance, key holes are only on the driver side rather than on all doors. In response to Kriseman’s image, Baker said, "I’ve been to 50 neighborhood organizations in the last six months and if Rick Kriseman thinks he doesn’t have an auto theft problem, he needs to get out more." Kriseman’s campaign emphasized the mayor is still concerned about automobile thefts, and said the image was meant to undermine Baker’s remark that automobile theft is at "epidemic proportions." Our ruling Kriseman pushed back against Baker calling the auto-theft problem an "epidemic" with a graphic that said there were 2,761 auto thefts in 2006 under Baker and 1,095 auto thefts in 2016. Those numbers are accurate, but more information is needed to understand the full story. Kriseman cherry-picked the year of Baker’s two terms with the highest amount of theft and compared it with his lowest year. To his overall point, the automobile theft per capita in St. Petersburg has been significantly higher than the national and state rates, regardless of who was in office. We rate this claim Mostly True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Rick Kriseman	None	None	None	2017-07-27T14:21:17	2017-07-23	['None']
-pomt-12676	Says Republican legislators in North Carolina raised the average teacher's pay "by more than 15 percent in just three years."	mostly false	/north-carolina/statements/2017/mar/16/phil-berger/north-carolina-teacher-pay-has-been-rising-not-nea/	Responding to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s "State of the State" speech Monday night, one of North Carolina’s top Republican leaders said his party has given the average teacher a substantial raise in recent years. Part of Cooper’s speech highlighted his proposal to give every teacher an extra $150 to buy textbooks for his or her classroom, since he said that their "paychecks (are) stretched too thin already." Republican Sen. Phil Berger, the president pro tem of the senate, gave the official response to Cooper’s speech. On the matter of education, Berger said he and his fellow Republicans deserve credit for giving teachers large raises. Berger told viewers to imagine a political party that had promised to "raise average teacher pay by more than 15 percent in just three years." He spoke about a few more issues, then concluded: "That is exactly what House and Senate Republicans have accomplished in our state." Actually, they did not. What he gets wrong In total, since the GOP took over control of the N.C. General Assembly in 2011, the average teacher’s pay has not risen 15 percent. It has risen about half that much. And that’s in the span of six years, not three. So Berger’s claim citing a three-year period ignores half the budgets passed by Republican lawmakers. But still, we asked which three years Berger was talking about. His office told us it’s the period from the 2014-15 school year until now. For reference, below is the average teacher pay in North Carolina for the last decade. Every budget starting in 2011-12 has been written and passed by Republican legislators. 2007-08: $47,354 2008-09: $48,648 2009-10: $46,850 2010-11: $46,605 2011-12: $45,933 2012-13: $45,737 2013-14: $44,990 2014-15: $47,819 2015-16: $47,985 2016-17: $49,837 Teacher pay began falling in 2009-10, under Democratic leadership. It continued falling in the next four budgets, three of which were written and passed by Republican legislators. Berger didn’t want to talk about those three budgets, just the most recent three. Nevertheless, his claim is still wrong. As the data shows, the raises in each of the last three years have taken the average teacher's salary from just under $45,000 a year to just under $50,000. One of those years, as we found in a previous fact check of Republican House Speaker Tim Moore, was the nation's biggest. But it still wasn't enough to make Berger's claim accurate. There has been a 10.8 percent raise, not a 15 percent raise. So how does he explain the difference between his claim and reality? Any proof? Berger’s office pointed us to a document from the state legislature that tracks pay changes for teachers and state employees each year since the 1970s. Amy Auth, Berger’s deputy chief of staff, said it backs up his claim. At first glance, it does appear to show that the raises since 2014-2015 add up to 15.5 percent. But there are several caveats to that number. Part of that was a bonus teachers received last year, which didn’t change their base pay and wasn’t repeated again this year. In other words, it wasn’t actually a raise. Also, in 2014 the state got rid of annual longevity bonuses for veteran teachers. At the same time, those teachers’ base salaries went up. For that reason the state counted the change as a raise – yet the loss of longevity pay gave the raise an inflated value, and some veteran teachers actually would’ve made more money if the change hadn’t happened, The News & Observer reported at the time. But even if you take the full 15.5 percent statistic at face value, it still only counts the state’s portion of teachers’ salaries – which is only about two-thirds of the total. The rest comes from supplements paid by 108 of the state’s 115 local school districts. So while some of the blame or credit for teacher pay will always rest outside the responsibility of legislative leaders like Berger, that doesn’t change the fact that his claim isn’t true. Furthermore, Berger in the past has frequently touted estimates that the state raised teacher pay to $50,000 this year. That would require counting the local supplements. His claim Monday also would have to include those local supplements, since he talked about the average salary. Yet his evidence ignored that, instead focusing only on the state’s base salaries. Our ruling Berger said Republicans in North Carolina promised to raise teacher pay "by more than 15 percent in just three years," and "that is exactly what House and Senate Republicans have accomplished in our state." The average teacher's salary in the last three years has risen 10.8 percent. And over the entire time Republicans have been in charge of the state budget, the total raise has been even smaller than that, since teacher pay fell during the first three years of GOP control. Berger’s office pointed to numbers for just the state’s portion of teachers’ salaries. But there are some issues with the accounting there, and that’s also not what Berger actually talking about. Pay has been rising for North Carolina teachers recently, but not by nearly as much as Berger claims. We rate this claim Mostly False. Correction: Teachers have received a 10.8 percent raise over the last three years, not over the last four years as a previous version of this article said. There also has been a 4.2 percent increase in the last two years. This does not change our ruling.	None	Phil Berger	None	None	None	2017-03-16T18:59:15	2017-03-13	['North_Carolina']
-pomt-11733	A Colgate toothpaste is subject to "recall."	false	/punditfact/statements/2017/dec/12/shared/story-misleads-about-fd-triclosan-and-toothpaste/	A headline warns consumers about triclosan, an ingredient in some consumer products: "If you are using this toothpaste .... throw it away immediately!" Facebook users flagged the Nov. 28 story on Shared This as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat fake news. The article could leave readers with an inaccurate picture about actions the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took with respect to triclosan, but it also contains some factual information. Shared This wrote that the FDA issued a warning "this week" that it will ban triclosan, a common antibacterial agent used in soaps, detergents, toys, cosmetics, and toothpaste. "Apparently, the chemical poses a high-degree of health risks and side effects. Colgate Total is just one of many products that list triclosan as an active ingredient," wrote Shared This. The website included an image of the word "recall" and a photo of Colgate toothpaste showing that it contains triclosan. That could give readers the false impression that the FDA banned triclosan in toothpaste -- and that’s not the case. Here’s what actually happened: Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit in an effort to force the FDA to take action related to triclosan. In September 2016 the FDA issued a new rule banning the use of triclosan in antibacterial soaps. "That rule was specific to consumer hand washes," Sandy Walsh, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A. told PolitiFact. That means the ban doesn’t apply to toothpaste. Colgate Total Toothpaste was approved in 1997 as a toothpaste containing fluoride and triclosan, which was shown to be effective in reducing plaque and gingivitis. "Based on the scientific evidence, the balance of benefit and risk has been shown to be favorable for this product," Walsh said. The New York Times reported in September 2016 that triclosan remained in toothpaste because Colgate Total convinced the FDA that the benefit of triclosan outweighed the risks. Colgate Total is the only toothpaste in the United States that contains triclosan. A spokesman for Colgate-Palmolive, Thomas DiPiazza, told the New York Times that Colgate’s product had a far more rigorous safety review than other toothpastes. When the company sought approval to use triclosan in 1997, it conducted a comprehensive evaluation of human safety. The original FDA submission for Colgate Total included more than 100 toxicology studies. DiPiazza directed PolitiFact to a statement on Colgate’s website which cited a 2013 review of 30 studies by Cochrane Oral Health Group. The review concluded that there were benefits including reduction in plaque, gingivitis and bleeding gums in using a triclosan/copolymer fluoride toothpaste when compared with one without the ingredient. "There was no evidence of any harmful effects associated with the use of triclosan/copolymer toothpastes in studies up to three years in length," Cochrane reported. But a debate about triclosan has continued. Several months after the FDA’s September 2016 rule was published, an article by 200 scientists and medical professionals published by Environmental Health Perspectives raised multiple concerns about triclosan. The authors concluded that the ingredient has detrimental effects on aquatic organisms, overuse may contribute to antibiotic/antimicrobial resistance, and that potential implications for human reproduction and development merit further study. The authors recommended that people avoid the use of triclosan except if there is an "evidence based health benefit (e.g., physician-prescribed toothpaste for treating gum disease) and there is adequate evidence demonstrating they are safe." Colgate-Palmolive and the FDA however continue to stand by the use of triclosan in Colgate Total toothpaste. "It has been approved as safe and effective through the U.S. FDA rigorous New Drug Application process," DiPiazza said. Shared This is a website that posts articles about health, beauty, news and other topics. We sent a message to the website on Facebook and did not get a reply. Our ruling Shared This stated that the FDA issued a ban on triclosan, which is an ingredient in soap, toothpaste and other products. The article included photos of Colgate toothpaste and uses an image of the word "recall." In reality the FDA’s ban in September 2016 only applied to antibacterial soaps and not Colgate Total toothpaste. We rate this statement False.	None	Shared This	None	None	None	2017-12-12T11:22:12	2017-11-28	['None']
-tron-02659	Cicret Bracelet Turns Skin into Touchscreen	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cicret-bracelet-turns-skin-into-touchscreen/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Cicret Bracelet Turns Skin into Touchscreen – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-12946	"Asia ... has less freshwater per capita than any other continent, except Antarctica."	mostly true	/global-news/statements/2017/jan/06/brahma-chellaney/yes-asia-most-water-strapped-continent/	Americans are up to their eyebrows in water, relatively speaking. Other parts of the world aren’t as fortunate. A prominent Indian analyst, Brahma Chellaney, has been sounding the alarm for many years about the tightening competition for water in Asia. "Averting water-related conflicts is actually a major challenge across Asia, which has less freshwater per capita than any other continent, except Antarctica," Chellaney wrote in a Dec. 28 op-ed. "This reality has helped promote growing interstate and intrastate disputes over shared water resources." We wanted to verify that, indeed, the average Asian has less water at hand than the residents of other continents. Aquastat, a project of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, is the go-to source for information on how much water is potentially available for human use. In Aquastat’s 2016 summary, Asia had about 2,000 gallons per day available for each person. The project website states, "Asia is the continent with the lowest volume of renewable freshwater resources per person." The Asian average compares to 14,700 gallons per person per day in North America, 22,900 gallons per person per day in South America, and 5,400 gallons per person per day in Australia. Aquastat, unfortunately, has no summary data for Europe or Africa. We used another UN data source for a back-of-the-envelope calculation. It supports Chellaney’s essential point about relative scarcity in Asia. A 2008 report from the United Nations Environment Program provides estimates of the freshwater that exists on each continent. (It too has gaps. It has no estimate for surface water in South America and estimating groundwater in Australia is tricky because much of that water is infused with salt.) We divided the totals by population estimates based on Population Reference Bureau data. Asia still comes in last, at least among continents that have year-round residents. But contrary to Chellaney’s assertion, Antarctica is flooded with freshwater. The problem is, it’s all frozen. The UN Environment Program said Antarctica had over 30 million cubic kilometers of freshwater locked up in its glaciers and ice. And aside from about 1,000 researchers who spend time there, it has no people. So technically, Antarctica has more freshwater per capita than anywhere. Practically speaking though, comparing continental water supplies is always a bit misleading because the water that’s actually available varies hugely from place to place within each continent, and often within each country. Southern China has plenty of water, while the north is dry. For India, the northwest is much drier than the eastern sections of the country. Plus, as the staff at Aquastat note, estimates of total water supply don’t mean that the water is "fully exploitable and available." Some is in remote locations, the amount can swing widely between wet and dry seasons, some might need to be reserved to sustain the environment, and often, technical challenges put the water out of reach of pumping stations and other infrastructure. Asia’s looming water problems have drawn increasing attention in recent years. A 2016 projection from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that "there is a high risk of severe water stress in densely populated watersheds by 2050." The MIT group compared a number of scenarios and determined that most of the pressure stemmed from a growing population and increasing demands from a rising economy, rather than climate change. By 2050, they estimated about 1 billion people could be pressed to meet their daily water needs. "Without assertive water policies in these regions, water limitations could be harmful to the health and well being of the people in these regions, as well as the environment," they wrote. Our ruling Chellaney said that Asia has less freshwater per capita than any other continent, except Antarctica. Technically, he’s wrong about Antarctica, which has plenty of freshwater in its glaciers, but practically speaking, he’s correct. The UN’s primary project on water statistics reports that Asia has the lowest amount of freshwater resources per person. We used an alternative data set and while the numbers differed, Asia still ranked last among places where people actually live. We rate this claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/35f9e7a4-9ead-4d2e-9d8e-6da1c0bd139a	None	Brahma Chellaney	None	None	None	2017-01-06T13:00:00	2016-12-28	['Asia', 'Antarctica']
-pomt-08211	Says Oregon ranks 30th in the nation with regard to its incarceration rate.	true	/oregon/statements/2010/nov/19/crime-victims-united-oregon/anti-crime-organization-says-oregon-ranks-30th-inc/	When Oregon legislators set out to evaluate the state’s budget in the coming months, they’ll take a keen look at the state’s prison system. For the 2007-09 budget period, public safety accounted for nearly 15 percent of what the state spends, and, by one measure, the state’s prison system takes nearly one dime out of every dollar in the general fund. Naturally, there’s a lot of talk about how the state can make that slice of the dollar smaller. That talk then turns to the subject of minimum sentences and how the measures that Oregonians have approved over the years might be contributing to the large cost. (Most recently, voters said "yes" to Measure 73, which mandated longer sentences for repeat drunken drivers and sex offenders.) Pushing back on this line of reasoning, Oregon Crime Victims United offered a little context in a piece online that then got picked up by another tough-on-crime group called the Oregon Anti-Crime Alliance. In the statement, Crime Victims United argues that the cost of corrections is sometimes used as proof that Oregon has gone too far on incarceration. "However," the statement says, "costs have risen far faster than incarceration. Oregon still ranks just 30th in incarceration rate. We have not gone overboard with incarceration." There’s a lot there to consider, but what jumped out at us was the statement that Oregon ranks "just 30th in incarceration rate." We decided to check the number out. We spoke with Howard Rodstein, the group’s number cruncher. He e-mailed us a link to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report that compares all 50 states’ incarceration rates. According to this report, "imprisonment rate is the number of prisoners sentenced to more than 1 year per 100,000 U.S. residents." Under that definition, Oregon scored 371 for 2008 and did, in fact, come in at 30th place. As a comparison, the national number was 504 prisoners per 100,000 residents.. We went to the source of that report, and asked spokeswoman Kara McCarthy whether the Bureau of Justice Statistics had any newer numbers. She said it did not. To make sure we did our due diligence, we checked in with Tony Green, spokesman for the Oregon attorney general. Green said he didn’t have any other numbers to provide, but pointed us to the state Department of Corrections. We dialed them up, too. There, spokeswoman Jeanine Hohn was able to provide fresh numbers. She sent us another report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that showed Oregon with an incarceration rate of 375 midway through 2009. That put Oregon in 28th place. That indicates some slight movement upward. Hohn also got Michael Wilson, an economist with the Criminal Justice Commission, on the phone with us. Wilson said that the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports are pretty much the standard measurement. "For the most part, it's what people use because it's the best that's out there," he said. Oregon’s incarceration rate did increase faster than the national rate from the early ‘90s through 2005 or so, he said, but -- with help from population growth -- has leveled off since then, keeping our rate below the national average. Before we get to the ruling, we want to point out one final piece of context: While Oregon ranks near the middle when it comes to U.S. incarceration rates, the United States happens to be a world leader in this area. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College London, the United States’ incarceration rate far outpaces most other countries’. Now, back to the issue at hand. Oregon Crime Victims United said that Oregon ranked 30th in state incarceration rates. Newer numbers show that to be off, but only slightly. Because not even the spokeswoman for the Bureau of Justice Statistics knew about the fresher numbers, we won’t fault Crime Victims United for the slight discrepancy. We find this claim to be True.	None	Crime Victims United of Oregon	None	None	None	2010-11-19T06:00:00	2010-11-12	['None']
-pomt-00408	"A few months ago, it hit where West Virginia is, on a per capita basis, one of the most successful (gross domestic product) states in our union."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/aug/31/donald-trump/donald-trump-mostly-incorrect-about-wva-economic-g/	Like many politicians, President Donald Trump often refers to economic growth to gauge the success of his policies. And one of the most common yardsticks politicians use is gross domestic product, which is the sum of all economic activity in a geographical unit, such as a country or a state. At a rally in Charleston, W.Va., on Aug. 21, Trump said, "When I came here originally, West Virginia, frankly, was down and out. It was not doing exactly well. One of the last. Do you know that a few months ago, it hit where West Virginia is, on a per capita basis, one of the most successful G.D.P. states in our union?" Does he have a point? We took a closer look. Looking at quarterly GDP growth This isn’t the first time Trump has claimed success in revitalizing West Virginia's economy. A little over a year ago, he said at a different rally in the state, "3 percent growth in West Virginia. … West Virginia, you’re leading the average." At the time, PolitiFact found that assertion to be well-grounded. During the first quarter of 2017, West Virginia’s economy grew by exactly 3 percent, according to the data available at the time. (This figure was subsequently updated with new data, as is the standard procedure.) That was the second-fastest rate of any state in the country at the time. It was well above the national average for the first quarter, which was 1.2 percent. However, as we noted at the time, that was only one quarter’s worth of growth. How well has The Mountain State done since then? It’s been a bit of a roller coaster, according to data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. Here are the figures for annualized GDP growth for West Virginia on Trump’s watch. They are the most recent figures available, including updated data for the previous quarters. Quarter Annualized GDP growth for West Virginia 1st quarter 2017 6.6 percent 2nd quarter 2017 -1.1 percent 3rd quarter 2017 10.2 percent 4th quarter 2017 1.0 percent 1st quarter 2018 1.3 percent This chart shows that while West Virginia has had some highs in GDP growth during Trump’s tenure -- specifically, in the first and third quarters of 2017 -- the state’s GDP actually shrank during the second quarter of 2017, and in the most recent two quarters, it has grown only modestly, by 1 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively. In fact, during the most recent quarter for which data is available, West Virginia’s growth rate ranked as only the 37th best in the nation. That paints a different picture than the one Trump was offering at the rally. Looking at GDP per capita There’s another way to look at Trump’s assertion -- to compare gross domestic product per capita for West Virginia to the other states in the union. This statistic is calculated by dividing the state’s GDP by the state’s population. Measuring it this way makes Trump’s statement even less accurate. For 2017 -- the most recent full year for which data is available -- West Virginia ranked 47th nationally in GDP per capita, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The only states that ranked lower were Arkansas, Idaho and Mississippi. Finally, we’ll note that economists say presidents don’t deserve either full credit or full blame for employment trends on their watch. The president is not all-powerful on economic matters; broader factors, from the business cycle to changes in technology to demographic shifts, play major roles. Our ruling Trump said, "A few months ago, it hit where West Virginia is, on a per capita basis, one of the most successful (gross domestic product) states in our union." Judging by quarterly GDP growth -- a measure Trump has used accurately in the past to talk about West Virginia -- the state chalked up two quarters of rapid growth but three quarters of stagnation. In the most recent two quarters, West Virginia was mired around 1 percent growth, ranking in the bottom half of states. Alternately, using GDP per capita, Trump is way off, as West Virginia ranks 47th among the states in this measure. The statement contains an element of truth but ignores evidence that would give a different impression, so we rate the statement Mostly False.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-08-31T00:30:34	2018-08-21	['None']
-abbc-00231	Underpinning the Coalition's re-election pitch is its assertion that it is the party best equipped to manage the budget by keeping a lid on spending.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-01/fact-check-spending-growth-under-the-coalition/9800624	Mr Turnbull is close to the mark. Annual spending growth is indeed running at its lowest average rate since at least the early 1970s. However, the verdict is subject to three qualifications. First, in calculating average spending under this government, Mr Turnbull has included the budget's projections out to 2021-22. As experts contacted by Fact Check noted, there is a big difference between predicted and actual spending. Past history demonstrates that budget predictions for spending cannot be used as a reliable estimate for actual spending. Second, in calculating its average annual spending growth (1.9 per cent), the Government has shared responsibility 50:50 with the former Labor government for a spending surge in 2013-14 (the financial year when it came to power). Experts have questioned this methodology, particularly as the Coalition was in power for approximately three-quarters of the 2013-14 financial year, during which it made some significant spending decisions, including providing the Reserve Bank with $8.8 billion and Victoria with $1.5 billion for the now-defunct East West Link road project. Finally, as the experts noted, low spending should not be regarded as a political virtue in its own right, or a benchmark of political success. Rather, spending levels should reflect the economic circumstances of the time. For example, a dramatic spending surge in 2008-09 was an arguably justifiable response to the global financial crisis. An alternative method for calculating the average, based on advice from experts, found the growth in real annual spending is running somewhat faster under the current Coalition Government than the level identified by Mr Turnbull. Nevertheless, under this alternative calculation, spending remains at its lowest average level for about 50 years, and indeed below the level that prevailed when Mr Costello was treasurer.	['economic-trends', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'turnbull-malcolm', 'australia']	None	None	['economic-trends', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'turnbull-malcolm', 'australia']	Fact check: Is the growth in government spending under the Coalition the lowest in 50 years?	Thu 12 Jul 2018, 2:21am	None	['None']
-pomt-06960	Says recent polls show Americans agree with Republicans that the federal debt ceiling should not be raised and the debt and deficit should be dealt with mostly by cutting spending.	mostly true	/texas/statements/2011/jul/16/josh-trevino/josh-trevino-says-polls-show-americans-aligned-rep/	Josh Treviño, spokesman for the conservative Austin-based Texas Public Policy Foundation, suggested in an MSNBC appearance that Americans are aligned with Republicans in Washington in opposing an increase in the federal debt ceiling and wanting to attack the federal deficit with budget cuts. Treviño, referring to polling by the Gallup organization, told interviewer Al Sharpton July 13 that "it’s pretty clear that the American people, or at least a plurality of them, are on (Senate Minority Leader Mitch) McConnell’s side and on the House GOP’s side as well. "Yesterday," Treviño said, "we saw Gallup release a poll that had 42 percent of Americans, a plurality, opposed to raising the debt ceiling. And today we had a Gallup poll showing 50 percent versus 11 (percent) on the other side thinking that the debt and the deficit should be dealt with by mostly spending cuts. So the Republicans are on the side of the American people here, and I think that’s pretty clear." A reader asked if Treviño accurately replayed the poll results. As we looked for the relevant results, Gallup spokeswoman Lydia Saad told us there’s only one poll at issue. In the telephone poll of 1,016 adults taken July 7-10, 42 percent of respondents said they wanted their House member to vote against raising the debt ceiling, while 22 percent said they preferred a favorable vote; 33 percent were unsure. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Gallup said respondents who identified themselves as Republicans were more unified in opposition to raising the debt ceiling (60 percent opposed, 11 percent in favor) than Democrats were supportive of raising it (39 percent in favor, 21 percent opposed). Independents tilted against raising the ceiling, 46 percent to 18 percent, with 36 percent having no opinion. "Despite intense lobbying of Congress by President Obama, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and others in the administration about the economic urgency for raising the nation's debt limit," the poll results’ summary says, "fewer than one in four Americans favor the general idea of raising it." Treviño’s other point — that Americans favor mostly budget cuts to deal with the deficit — didn’t poll as neatly as his recap suggests. Asked how they’d prefer members of Congress to address the deficit, 20 percent said only by cutting spending and another 30 percent said mostly with spending cuts. Four percent favored solely tax increases, while 7 percent said they’d prefer to tackle the deficit mostly by tax hikes. Still, 32 percent said they’d support a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Put another way, at least 43 percent indicated some support for tax increases — most of them also backing budget cuts. "Americans' preferences for deficit reduction clearly favor spending cuts to tax increases," Gallup sums up, "but most Americans favor a mix of the two approaches." Its write-up closes: "A key question to be answered in the days ahead is whether an agreement to raise the debt ceiling will include any tax increases. This is something many Republican members of Congress oppose, but most Americans do not seem to share this view." We rate Treviño’s statement Mostly True.	None	Josh Treviño	None	None	None	2011-07-16T06:00:00	2011-07-13	['United_States', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-10522	"We've won twice as many states. We've won a greater share of the popular vote."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/mar/10/barack-obama/a-slight-lead-in-popular-vote/	After losing the Texas and Ohio primaries March 4, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama tried to downplay the losses by emphasizing that he leads Sen. Hillary Clinton in delegates and the popular vote. "The bottom line is, we've won twice as many states. We've won a greater share of the popular vote," he said. The first part is easy to assess. At the point when he made this comment, Obama had won primaries or caucuses in 25 states (including the District of Columbia), while Clinton had won 14 states (not counting Florida and Michigan). Obama's math is off, but he's in the ballpark. Still, he would have been more accurate if he said he had won nearly twice as many states. The second part is a little trickier because some states that held caucuses — Iowa, Nevada, Washington and Maine — have not released popular vote totals. They've only released the percentage of the vote and the number of delegates won. Also, the election results from Florida and Michigan are in limbo because the Democratic National Committee has not recognized the results from those states because they defied the DNC schedule. It's further complicated by the fact that Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan. Adding up vote totals from the other contests, PolitiFact finds Obama to be ahead (as of March 7, 2008) by 13,002,527 to 12,413,052 if Michigan and Florida are not counted. He's also ahead by 13,578,741 to 13,284,038 if Florida is included but Michigan is not. The only scenario in which Clinton is ahead is if Michigan is also included. She has 13,612,347 to Obama's 13,578,741. We have to give thanks to RealClearPolitics.com, which tracks popular vote totals and provides links to results on state Web sites. We went to those individual sites and tallied the numbers on a spreadsheet. Keep in mind, some states are still adding up votes and these numbers will change. Also, we completed these calculations before the March 8, 2008, Wyoming caucus, so those results are not included. Back to Obama's claim: We find he has it mostly right. On the first part, he'd be better off hedging his claim on winning twice as many states as Clinton. But on the matter of popular vote, Obama is accurate. Though, to be fail-safe, he should have specified that he was excluding Michigan. Overall, we find his claim to be Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-03-10T00:00:00	2008-03-05	['None']
-snes-03562	Donald Trump announced that his "first order" as President would be to make flag burning a treasonous act.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trumps-first-order-flag-burning/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Trump’s First Order: Anyone Burning an American Flag to Be Charged with Treason	12 November 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-10448	"His true name is Barak Hussein Muhammed Obama."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/may/02/chain-email/no-muhammed-or-mohammed-in-obamas-name/	A chain e-mail that originates with a letter from American missionaries working in Kenya warns about Sen. Barack Obama's ties to Kenya and its opposition party, encouraging readers "not to be taken in by those that are promoting him." Among the many allegations is one about Obama's name: "By the way. His true name is Barak Hussein Muhammed Obama. Won't that sound sweet to our enemies as they swear him in on the Koran! God bless you." The e-mail reads like a bad game of "telephone," its claims drawn from assorted people and sources that have been stitched together. And yet, because it is signed by real people, who have a life in Africa, it somehow carries more credence than your average blog posting — and it's spreading rapidly. ( Read the e-mail here. ) Let's be clear: The senator from Illinois who is running for president of the United States is named Barack Hussein Obama Jr. His campaign has insisted that is his full name (no Muhammad). We've checked this before and found it to be blatantly wrong. But since the rumor persists, we decided to dig deeper. We have now searched every public record we can access and find nothing to support the notion that Obama has a second middle name of "Muhammed" or "Mohammed." Only in the ether of chain e-mails does this allegation fly. We have a copy of Obama's marriage certificate from the Cook County Bureau of Vital Statistics in Illinois. Barack H. Obama married Michelle L. Robinson on Oct. 3, 1992, in Chicago. (And, yes, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. officiated.) We looked at Obama's driver's license record in the state of Illinois, and the name reads: Barack H Obama. (Senator, just a reminder that your license is up for renewal this year). We searched property records for Obama and found listings under the names Barack Hussein Obama and Barack H Obama. We also found Obama's registration and disciplinary record with the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois. ( You can see it here. ) Barack Hussein Obama was admitted as a lawyer by the Illinois Supreme Court on Dec. 17, 1991. (By the way, Obama has no public record of discipline.) We tried to obtain a copy of Obama's birth certificate, but his campaign would not release it and the state of Hawaii does not make such records public. (UPDATE: On June 12, 2008, the Obama campaign e-mailed to PolitiFact a copy of the senator's birth certificate. It confirms our findings. See it for yourself here.) Loren Davis, whose wife Celeste wrote the e-mail, says he can't substantiate the claim. "That was what we heard there (in Kenya)," Davis said in an interview with PolitiFact. He says they've lived and worked in Kenya for the past 12 years and this was a personal letter "never intended to be forwarded or sent out to the Web." Regardless, it's time to ground this charge once and for all. His name is Barack Hussein Obama. There is simply no evidence anywhere to support the allegation that his name is something else. We're going to rule the way we have before. Pants on Fire!	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2008-05-02T00:00:00	2008-04-18	['None']
-tron-00787	NBC Refusing to Promote Jamie Foxx Special?	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/jamie-foxx/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	NBC Refusing to Promote Jamie Foxx Special?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13519	"And while (Ted) Strickland proposed cuts for services for children, he wasted over $250,000 remodeling his bathrooms at the governor’s mansion."	pants on fire!	/ohio/statements/2016/sep/01/national-republican-senatorial-committee/pro-republican-pac-smears-ted-strickland-potty-pol/	It must be some kind of election-year hazing ritual: the first ad that dunks an opposing candidate in the toilet. The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s ad, "Flush," targets Democratic Senate candidate Ted Strickland in Ohio. In it, they attack Strickland’s fiscal management during his term as Ohio’s governor against a background of a flushing commode. "And while Strickland proposed cuts for services for children," the voice-over claims, "he wasted over $250,000 remodeling his bathrooms at the governor’s mansion." Did he or didn’t he? We’ll start with the first claim. Cuts for children Multiple calls to the National Republican Senatorial Committee went unreturned, so we are left to assume that the reference to Strickland cutting funds for children’s services is about his proposed budget in 2009. As governor from 2007 until 2011, the worst years of the national economic downturn, Strickland was faced with a $3.2 billion budget hole. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Strickland’s 2009 budget proposal "would cut out state aid to food pantries, slash funding to community health centers, abolish the state preschool program for poor youngsters and reduce eligibility for state-subsidized child care." The planned cuts were met with instant backlash, the Dispatch reported. In its final form, the budget resulted in less funding for services for low-income families, the disabled, Medicaid recipients and public libraries. But thanks to federal stimulus money, funding for education actually increased. It also allocated state funds for schools to provide all-day kindergarten. $250,000 bathroom remodel The "Flush" ad states that Strickland wasted a quarter of a million dollars remodeling his bathrooms at the governor’s mansion in suburban Bexley, Ohio, outside Columbus. But as it turns out, those toilets weren’t for Strickland or his family at all. They were built in the carriage house that borders the Heritage Garden on the property, apart from the main residence. According to an Associated Press story in the Logan Daily News, the new public toilets were constructed to serve the busloads of tourists who come to see the mansion -- an estimated 20,000 visitors a year. "They are funded by private donations and $263,000 in taxpayer money," the paper reported. The expenditure wasn’t initiated by Strickland, but was set aside in 2006 under the administration of Strickland’s predecessor, Gov. Bob Taft. Taft’s capital budget allocated $912,000 for "Governor’s Residence Renovations" which included "additional slate roof renovations, window well drain repairs, concrete porch replacement, and driveway and parking area surface replacement." PolitiFact Ohio contacted James Miller, the former state of Ohio project manager who oversaw the governor’s residence, its staff, and all capital improvement projects, including the bathroom renovation in the carriage house. (Miller, retired after 30 years of managing government properties, now charters fishing tours on Lake Erie.) Miller said that before the five unisex bathrooms were constructed, tourists had to go into the main house and wait in line to use the restroom, often after long bus trips. The construction of the bathrooms included "green" features like solar panels and geothermal piping, and were built to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act for handicapped access, Miller said. More than half of the price tag for the restroom renovation -- $171,840 -- came from funding through the Americans with Disabilities Act. The other $95,695.70 was from the fund Taft established for governor’s residence improvements. Miller laughed at the picture the "Flush" ad paints of Strickland frittering away money on luxuries because he knew him as a "real frugal man" who got rid of the chef who worked at the governor's mansion. Strickland did change one part of the master bathroom in the governor’s residence, Miller said. He painted it. "He did it himself," Miller said, "believe me." Our ruling An ad by the National Republican Senatorial Committee says that while governor, Strickland "proposed cuts for services for children" and "wasted over $250,000 remodeling his bathrooms at the governor’s mansion." Strickland did propose budget cuts in the midst of the national economic downturn, many of which affected services for low-income families. But the ad suggests that the money used to renovate the restrooms at the governor’s residence could have been used to fund those services. In reality, the funding sources -- the Americans with Disabilities Act, and residence-specific dollars reserved by Strickland’s predecessor -- would not have been available for shoring up programs affected by budget cuts. The ad calls the bathrooms "his," as in Strickland’s. But they weren’t -- they were for public visitors of the governor’s residence and surrounding property. The ad flushes the facts, so we rate it Pants on Fire! https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/db8e211a-122c-49d7-a5ad-4d0ead6b78e4	None	National Republican Senatorial Committee	None	None	None	2016-09-01T16:53:03	2016-08-18	['None']
-pomt-09493	The Democratic health care plan is a "government takeover of our health programs."	pants on fire!	/florida/statements/2010/feb/24/cw-bill-young/bill-young-claims-house-plan-was-government-takeov/	Many Republicans have said the Democratic health care plan is a "government takeover" of the nation's health system. The phrase has appeared in at least 700 newspaper articles in the past six months, according to a Nexis search. It's been a powerful weapon for the GOP opposition because it conjures images of a sluggish, state-run bureaucracy. So when 20-term U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young announced he was running for re-election in a speech to Pinellas County Republicans on Feb. 20, 2010, he mentioned his opposition to the health plan and other Democratic initiatives. "I voted against the bailout, and I'm going to do it again," the Indian Shores Republican said to applause. "I voted against the stimulus, and I'm going to do it again," he added. "I voted against the government takeover of our health programs, and I'm going to do it again." We should note that he was referring to the original Democratic health plan that passed the U.S. House last fall, not the one the White House unveiled on Feb. 22. But we suspect it wouldn't make much difference. The problem is, it's wrong. By any reasonable definition, there's no way that the Democratic plan could be considered a government takeover. Indeed, its primary approach is to set up new systems to encourage private health insurance companies to provide more coverage and better services. The cornerstone of the Democratic program is actually the status quo. The majority of Americans would continue to get health coverage the way they do now -- from private insurance companies. That coverage would be paid for the same way it is now -- by private employers and individual premiums. That's not a government takeover. The biggest new element in the Democratic plan is a health care exchange that is supposed to provide coverage for Americans who have trouble getting it now -- people who are self-employed or work for small companies. The government (or the states) would create the exchanges, which would be virtual marketplaces where people could shop for the best coverage. It's envisioned that most providers in the exchange would be private insurers, but the version of the bill that passed the House includes a "public option," a government-run program. That's been the most controversial element of the Democratic proposal. Some Republicans think it could be a stalking horse for a future expansion of the government's role. But still, the exchanges rely primarily on private insurers, so it's incorrect to call them a government takeover. (The new Obama plan appears to abandon the idea of a public option.) The other element of the plan that would increase government's role in providing coverage is the expansion of Medicaid. Under the House bill, Medicaid would be expanded to cover anyone at or below 150 percent of poverty level. According to one estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, that would add 11 million people to Medicaid (on top of the roughly 60 million now in it), which would account for about an 18 percent increase. Harry Glenn, a spokesman for Young, said Young was stating an opinion. But given the congressman's wording, we believe it was stated as fact. And once again, we are faced with over-the-top rhetoric about the health care plan. It's perfectly legitimate to raise questions about the plan and the government's role, but it's wildly incorrect to label it a government takeover. Yes, the plan would expand the government's role, but it primarily would continue to rely on private insurers for the vast majority of Americans. And, for people who have trouble getting coverage, it would create a marketplace so people could shop for coverage from private insurers. It's ridiculously false to call that a government takeover. For this one, we need to strike a match and set the meter ablaze. Pants on Fire!	None	C.W. Bill Young	None	None	None	2010-02-24T19:48:49	2010-02-20	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-snes-00440	President Donald Trump said that Canadians "smuggle" shoes out of the United States after altering them to make them "look old."	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-president-trump-say-canadians-smuggle-shoes/	None	Politics	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did President Trump Say That Canadians Smuggle Shoes Out of the United States?	19 June 2018	None	['United_States', 'Canada', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-00571	Georgia residents file the most insurance claims for lightning strikes in the country.	true	/georgia/statements/2015/jun/10/state-farm-insurance/georgia-leads-nation-lightning-claims/	Florida leads the nation in deaths from lightning strikes. But State Farm, one of the nation’s major insurers, says it is Georgia residents who file the most claims for lightning strikes in the country, WSB-TV reported Friday, June 5. PolitiFact Georgia was intrigued and decided to dig a little deeper. We began by contacting Justin Tomczak, a State Farm spokesman. He sent us data showing Georgia was No. 1 in 2014 for lightning-related claims both in number (3,709) and total dollar value ($16.3 million). Texas was second, Alabama at third, Louisiana at fourth and Illinois at fifth. STATE Reported Count Paid Indemnity Georgia 3,709 $16,301,952 Texas 2,201 $14,160,258 Alabama 1,902 $10,930,264 Louisiana 1,707 $10,930,264 Illinois 1,669 $8,030,507 . "This is the third year in a row that Georgia has been ranked No. 1," Tomczak said. Most of the lightning claims were surge- or power-related, the spokesman said. Damages generally resulted from power surges in electrical wiring, TV cable or phone lines in homes or businesses, he said. As to why Georgia has the most claims, Tomczak said, "there is no simple answer. However, many of the lightning claims are concentrated in the Southeastern United States, and Georgia has one of the highest populations in this area." John Jensenius, lightning safety specialist with the National Weather Service, said the population density in metro Atlanta may be a factor in Georgia’s high claim rate. The denser the population the more likely lightning will strike a house, Jensenius said. The Insurance Information Institute, in conjunction with State Farm, compiles a list each year of the top 10 states for homeowners insurance lightning losses by number of claims. In 2013, the institute listed Georgia as highest with 11,184 lightning-related insurance claims from homeowners. Its 2014 report is due out within days, a spokeswoman said. (Georgia was No. 1 for 2012 with 3,844 claims totalling $21.5 million and for 2013 with 2,969 claims totalling $14.9 million, according to State Farm). Nationwide, lightning strikes cost about $674 million in homeowners insurance losses in 2013, down 30.5 percent from 2012, according to the institute. From 2007 to 2011, local fire departments across the country responded to an average of 22,600 fires a year that were started by lightning, according to the National Fire Protection Association. These fires caused an average of $451 million in direct property damage and nine civilian deaths a year, an NFPA analysis shows. Lightning deaths Florida led the nation for lightning deaths in 2014 with six, followed by Wisconsin with three. Georgia, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado and Massachusetts each had two deaths. Seven additional states -- California, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Texas -- reported one lightning death in the year. The 26 lightning deaths in 2014 followed a record low of 23 set in 2013. The National Weather Service said deaths from lightning strikes averaged 33 a year from 2004 to 2013 and, going back over the last 30 years, an average of 51 people died each year after being hit by lightning. The significant decline in lightning deaths has been attributed to fewer farmers working in the fields, technological advances, improved safety standards and protection. As of the June 1, 2015 there have been six lightning fatalities, two in North Carolina and one each in Iowa, Florida, New Mexico and West Virginia, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). WSB-TV meteorologist Brian Monahan said lightning strikes occur most often in Georgia during the summer months when the high pressure area out in the Atlantic around Bermuda pumps in warm, humid air, creating those all-too-familiar afternoon and evening thunderstorms. A secondary spike of lightning strikes also occurs in the severe weather seasons of March to early May and around October and November, when the air is still warm and humid enough to support storms, Monahan said. Our ruling State Farm says Georgia residents file the most claims for lightning strikes in the country. There’s evidence this has been the case last year and the two previous years. We rate the statement as True.	None	State Farm Insurance	None	None	None	2015-06-10T00:00:00	2015-06-05	['None']
-vees-00290	Ex-health chief Garin DID turn against Aquino	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/week-fake-news-ex-health-chief-garin-did-not-turn-against-aq	None	None	None	None	fake news	THIS WEEK IN FAKE NEWS: Ex-health chief Garin DID NOT turn against Aquino	February 16, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-00325	A man named Shawn Kilums was arrested in Florida for tranquilizing and raping alligators.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alligator-rape-arrest/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Was a Florida Man Arrested for Tranquilizing and Raping Alligators in the Everglades?	18 July 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04855	Says Ron Saunders "made the choice to stand with Rick Scott" on expanding school vouchers, restricting scholarships and giving tax breaks to the wealthy.	false	/florida/statements/2012/aug/10/tomorrows-vision-florida/group-linked-state-rep-dwight-bullard-says-state-r/	Nothing says kiss of death in a Democratic primary like a candidate looking cozy with Republican Gov. Rick Scott. And that’s what a recent mailer attacking state Rep. Ron Saunders does in a competitive South Florida state Senate battle. The mailer shows a cartoon image of Saunders, the House’s Democratic minority leader from Key West, grinning and shaking hands with Scott as if they are best buds. "As a state representative, Ron Saunders made the choice to stand with Rick Scott. Now he’s asking you to send him back to Tallahassee as your state senator. When you see Ron Saunders, tell him that supporting Rick Scott was the wrong choice." The mailer also states that Saunders "has helped" Scott to: • "Take money from public schools by expanding vouchers" • "Make college less accessible by restricting Bright Futures scholarships" • "Give extra tax breaks to the wealthiest Floridians while so many families are struggling" Saunders is running in a crowded Democratic state Senate primary that includes state Rep. Dwight Bullard of Miami. Bullard comes from a political dynasty: His mother Larcenia Bullard is a state senator and his dad Edward is a former state legislator. The newly drawn District 39 spans Miami-Dade, Monroe, Collier and Hendry counties. The mailer was sent by Tomorrow’s Vision of Florida, an electioneering communication organization formed by Edward and Larcenia Bullard in July. We made multiple attempts to reach Dwight, Edward and Larcenia Bullard and did not hear back. For this article, we will check if Saunders voted as the mailer claims. And we will also explore whether those votes mean Saunders "made the choice to stand with Rick Scott." "Take money from public schools by expanding vouchers" The mailer cites two votes for this claim. • SB 2126: This 2010 bill made changes to Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship program, which allows corporate donors to fund private-school scholarships for poor children in return for tax breaks. It passed the House 95-23 on April 8, 2010 -- months before Scott was elected governor. Saunders voted with the majority in favor, while Rep. Dwight Bullard voted against it. Gov. Charlie Crist approved the bill, which expanded the program by increasing the pool of eligible families and raising the cap on tax credits. • HB 859: This 2012 bill also made some changes to the same tax credit program, by again increasing the cap and removing the requirement that foster care students meet certain income requirements. Saunders voted in favor with the majority when it passed the house 92-24 on March 7, 2012, and it became law. Rep. Dwight Bullard voted no on this bill. A note of irony here: Sen. Larcenia Bullard voted yes in the majority when this passed the Senate. She’s now vice president of the committee criticizing Saunders for voting the same way. With the tax credits, the state doesn’t technically write the check: A business writes a check to a nonprofit for the scholarship and then the business gets a tax credit -- money that would have otherwise gone to state coffers, including some for education. Saunders said the scholarships, which he supports, cost less than the per pupil funding for public schools, so he argues that it saves money. The Collins Center for Public Policy concluded in a 2007 report that the tax credit program "did not have a negative impact upon K-12 General Fund Revenues for public education" and saved the difference between the value of the scholarship and the value of K-12 per pupil revenue. "Make college less accessible by restricting Bright Futures scholarships" The mailer cites one vote, on HB 5201. This postsecondary education funding bill included several changes for Bright Futures, the college scholarships designed to keep students at Florida schools. Among the changes were reducing the scholarship by $1 per credit hour and tightening eligibility requirements in an effort to save money amid a budget shortfall. The bill passed the house 93-26 on April 30, 2010 -- a few months before Scott was elected governor. It passed the Senate and Crist approved it. But here’s the interesting part: Both Saunders and Bullard voted no. "Give extra tax breaks to the wealthiest Floridians while so many families are struggling" The mailer cites two votes: • HB 913: This bill passed April 6, 2010, a few months before Scott was elected governor. This bill gave a tax break for the purchase of airplanes by fractional owners. There were approximately 385 Florida owners of fractional airplane interests in 2006. This passed the House 109-7 with Saunders voting "yes" with the majority, and Rep. Dwight Bullard voting no. What made it into law was an economic development bill, SB 1752, that included the aircraft provision and that passed the House and Senate unanimously. • HB 7185: This vote made some changes related to corporate income taxes. It passed the Senate unanimously on May 3, 2011, and then two days later passed the house 110-5. Saunders voted in the majority -- as did Bullard. (About a week earlier they split their vote on a version of the bill, with Saunders voting yes and Bullard no.) The bill updates the Florida Income Tax Code to reflect changes made by Congress. Florida businesses with taxable income of less than $25,000 will not have to pay any tax, staff analysis stated. The Tampa Bay Times wrote that the bill resulted in a tax break of $1,100 a year on average for 15,000 small businesses as first step in effort to cut the state's annual $2 billion corporate tax. Neither of these bills were partisan in nature or unique to Scott’s agenda; both passed with overwhelming majorities in both chambers. Saunders response The biggest weapon in this mailer is the overall theme of telling Democratic primary voters that Saunders stands with Scott and helped him achieve legislative victories. That message isn’t true, Saunders argued. As the Democratic leader, it's Saunders job to bash Scott’s proposals, as he did in his responses to Scott’s State of the State addresses in 2011 and 2012. Saunders also said that he -- and Bullard -- were recognized by the liberal group Progress Florida as being among the 27 "middle class champions" in 2012. These champions voted against bills that would hurt the middle class including "Gov. Scott's anti-middle class budget (which) continues to dramatically underfund Florida's public schools," Progress Florida wrote. Our ruling An electioneering communication organization headed by state Rep. Dwight Bullard’s father said that one of his son’s opponents, State Rep. Ron Saunders "has helped Gov. Rick Scott." Let’s review their evidence for each one: "Take money from public schools by expanding vouchers": This is the only part of the mailer that comes anywhere close to truth. The mailer cites two votes Saunders took to expand tax credits. But the mailer omits any explanation about the minimal impact on public school funding. "Make college less accessible by restricting Bright Futures scholarships": The mailer cites a vote that trimmed Bright Futures, which Saunders voted against. So the mailer fails to support this argument. "Give extra tax breaks to the wealthiest Floridians while so many families are struggling": Saunders voted to provide a tax credit for people who share airplanes, but this was a very narrow tax break for a tiny group of people. He also voted to reduce the state’s corporate income taxes. What is most misleading about this ad is the broader message that Saunders made a choice to "stand" with Scott. Did Saunders vote for some bills that Scott signed into law? Yep -- but that doesn’t mean he supports Scott’s overall agenda. It’s a ridiculous idea that the Democratic minority leader is "supporting" Scott and "helped" the Republican governor in any concrete way. It is that overall message here and the images of Saunders and Scott shaking hands -- not the nitty gritty votes in small print -- that will catch voters’ eyes. For that misleading characterization, and the criticisms we noted about the bills cited, we rate this claim False.	None	Tomorrow's Vision of Florida	None	None	None	2012-08-10T16:19:25	2012-08-06	['None']
-pomt-06435	Says there's $4 billion in private investment along the streetcar.	mostly false	/oregon/statements/2011/oct/22/sam-adams/mayor-sam-adamas-city-say-streetcar-attracted-4-bi/	Elected officials love to talk about private sector investments in public infrastructure. It’s a way to show that they are on the job, promoting development and growth and jobs for other people. A prime example is Portland’s streetcar system, which opened in 2001. In August, Portland Mayor Sam Adams gathered with others to toast the streetcar’s 10th anniversary. Adams highlighted the thousands of jobs created by the building and operating of the streetcar, not to mention the "jobs created by that $4 billion in private investment" along the streetcar line. A news update posted to the mayor’s website, again, mentioned "roughly $4 billion in private investment along the current line." (The post has been updated.) We were curious to know how the mayor got his figure, and whether it truly was $4 billion in private money. Some background: The city broke ground in 1999 for a streetcar loop from Northwest Portland to downtown. In 2001, the line opened, later extending to South Waterfront. Next year, service is scheduled to start on the east side. We asked the mayor’s office and Portland Streetcar Inc., the nonprofit that operates the system for the city, for figures to back up the $4 billion assertion. In return, we received an April 2008 document that lists $3.5 billion of development within three blocks of the streetcar. It’s a widely disseminated figure used to pitch streetcars in Oakland and in Tucson. Portland Streetcar Inc. then produced a list of projects since 2008 that add up to $735 million, bringing the total estimate to $4.2 billion. These include projects along the unfinished line; some have been started, and some have not. It’s true that many of the projects on the development lists are private, such as the $300 million Brewery Blocks in the Pearl and the $150 million twin Meriwether condos in South Waterfront. But there are others that definitely are not private. For example, Oregon Health & Science University’s Center for Health and Healing in South Waterfront cost about $140 million, and a number of long planned projects at Portland State University were estimated at $217 million. That’s $357 million right there that probably shouldn’t be listed as private-sector investment. Also, the $295 millionLife Sciences Building is a joint venture between OHSU and the Oregon University System, and is financed with state bonds, the medical university and university fundraising. Again, we consider that public support, even with fundraising by the university. More than half of the $50 million Bud Clark Commons comes from urban renewal dollars -- in other words, from taxpayers -- so that’s pretty much a public project as far as we’re concerned. The same goes for Tamarack, a$50 million mixed-use affordable housing complex in South Waterfront on track to open next year. Let’s say, conservatively, a combined $50 million should be knocked off the estimate. The list also includes $31 million for Memorial Coliseum, $17 million of which would come from urban renewal funds. Again, that’s not private development money. So where does that leave us? Well, we’ve counted at least $700 million in public investment. We’re also going to knock off $96 million because one project was counted twice, so really the $4.2 billion is closer to $3.4 billion. Perhaps you think us nitpicky, but this is the kind of inflating that drives PolitiFact Oregon nuts. Public officials shouldn’t hype private development to help justify taxpayer spending, in this case, on a transit system that has its share of critics. While we’re on the topic of inflating, we’re also not sure it’s fair game to include projects that probably would have been built anyway, such as the $65 million Fox Tower in downtown, half a block from a Max line. The list also includes more than $200 million in other projects constructed before 2001 downtown and in the Pearl -- two areas the city long had plans to revitalize. So it’s hard to say whether that much investment would have happened without the streetcar. A study by the Federal Transit Administration analyzed Portland’s system and found that: "Anecdotally, the initial stage of the system is credited by the operator with stimulating accelerated development of condominiums and specialty retail in the Pearl District, an area that was already undergoing some urban revitalization before the streetcar, as part of Portland’s urban renewal process. This area garnered substantial press in the late 1990s, when a major developer who had promoted the streetcar concept agreed to build higher densities when streetcar funding was finalized." To be absolutely clear, there have been hundreds of millions of private dollars invested along the line, resulting in more retail space and housing. We can’t say definitively how much of that development is there because of the streetcar. But we can knock off at least $800 million from the estimated $4.2 billion in private investment -- and that doesn’t even include projects that may be near the streetcar even if the streetcar isn’t the reason why the development is there. We presented our findings to Amy Ruiz, a spokeswoman for the mayor. She said in an email that he should have referred to "$4 billion in public and private investment, or simply in investment," and that the online posts have been corrected. Adams spoke of thousands of "jobs created by that $4 billion in private investment" along the current line. There may have been that much money total -- although it’s still not clear how much is directly attributable to the streetcar -- but it wasn’t all private. We rate the statement Mostly False: It contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Return to OregonLive to comment on this ruling.	None	Sam Adams	None	None	None	2011-10-22T10:00:00	2011-08-12	['None']
-pomt-11664	"Delta Force raids Obama stronghold in Thailand."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/jan/08/someonesbones/fake-news-military-raided-obamas-compound-thailand/	A fake news story said that President Donald Trump greenlit a pre-dawn raid on a mansion and compound owned by former President Barack Obama in Thailand. "Delta Force raids Obama stronghold in Thailand," said a Dec. 27 headline on the website Someonesbones.com. Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat fake news. The photo of the alleged Obama compound in Thailand is actually a resort, and a Pentagon spokesman told PolitiFact that the story was false. Someonesbones describes itself as "primarily dedicated to exploring the Nibiru realities and exposing scientific and govermental corruption." (Yes, the website can’t spell "government" and says that the government and mainstream media are liars.) The story by Someonesbones has no actual evidence and quotes an anonymous source who said that Obama owns real estate and shadow companies across the globe. The story said that Obama, by proxy through the Solyndra Corporation, owned a mansion and a 400-acre estate in Thailand. Solyndra was a solar company that received money as part of the stimulus package. The U.S. Department of Energy invited Solyndra to apply for money in 2006 before Obama took office. The collapse of Solyndra in 2011 became political fodder leading up to the 2012 election. In Someonesbones’ made-up raid, Delta Force seized several encrypted laptops and over 200 million dollars in gold bullion, in addition to dozens of crates containing Chinese-manufactured firearms and explosives. (The only truthful part of that is Delta Force is an actual elite counter-terrorism unit.) Another sign that this is fake news: the story identified the prime minister of Thailand as Nik Bukharin while the actual prime minister is Prayuth Chan-ocha. (Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin was a Soviet political leader who died in 1938.) The story had green and black images of what appeared to be military officers in night vision goggles. We searched the photos on Google images and one appeared to be similar to an image used in a 2013 story about the movie Zero Dark Thirty, which was about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. The photo of the fictitious Obama compound in Thailand is actually Villa Rak Tawan, a luxurious estate in Phuket used for vacations and weddings. Someonesbones.com said "Delta Force raids Obama stronghold in Thailand" but we found no evidence that such a raid occurred. We rate this headline Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Someonesbones	None	None	None	2018-01-08T15:18:29	2017-12-27	['Thailand', 'Barack_Obama']
-pose-01022	"The President will offer states committed to reform relief from the worst mandates of No Child Left Behind like incentives to teach to the test so they can craft local solutions."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/1102/offer-states-waivers-no-child-left-behind-if-they-/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Offer states waivers to No Child Left Behind if they meet requirements	2013-01-20T06:00:00	None	['None']
-pomt-10591	Said he's the only Republican candidate "who's actually turned around a government economy."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/28/rudy-giuliani/a-real-turnaround/	Rudy Giuliani has run his campaign on two basic themes – leadership on 9/11, and the turnaround of New York City. At the Republican debate at Florida Atlantic University on Jan. 24, 2008, he made the turnaround of New York a point of contrast with his opponents. "I'm the only one who's actually turned around a government economy," he said. "And the reality is, when I became mayor of New York, the economy of New York was in very, very bad shape. Tremendous deficits, 10.5 percent unemployment, 300,000 jobs gone. We turned that around, cut unemployment by more than half, brought in 450,000 new jobs, and we cut taxes by 17 percent." And if you look at their records, at least in the fairly specific set of economic measures Giuliani listed, he is right. Two other Republican candidates held political offices that let them be compared on their "turnaround" ability: Mike Huckabee, who was governor of Arkansas for 10 years, and Mitt Romney, who was governor of Massachusetts for four years. Both men left office in January 2007. Giuliani was mayor of New York for eight years, 1994-2001. Sen. John McCain has never held an executive position and thus has no record of economic turnaround. The turnaround in New York is widely known. (We addressed it with this look at his luck with the budget deficit and this look at his claim of cutting taxes.) Giuliani had the wind at his back nationally: His years as mayor coincided with one of the longest national economic booms in American history, with the Wall Street boom was one of the headline stories of the era. Yet Giuliani clearly imposed greater financial discipline, and the economic measures support his claim that New York City outperformed the national boom during his years in office. It is hard to argue that New York did not enjoy a substantial turnaround during the Giuliani years. Whether Giuliani deserves as much credit as he claims has been widely debated. The specifics of his claims have been evaluated before. He did not inherit a "tremendous" deficit any more than he left one. City budgets are required to be balanced, and Giuliani's budget directors have argued that budgets routinely show deficits at midyear (when mayors take office) but are resolved by year-end. Giuliani likes to decry the "deficit" he inherited from his predecessor, but dismisses the one he left for his successor by the same accounting. It's worth noting, in all the talk of how they cut taxes and balanced budgets (all of their governments required balanced budgets, unlike the federal government), none of the former government executives is saying he'll produce a balanced budget in Washington. In Massachusetts, it is perhaps noteworthy that Romney's book called "Turnaround" is not about his governorship but his tenure as CEO of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics of 2002, a job he took at the beginning of 1999 when the Olympics had endured an ethics scandal and was projecting a substantial deficit. The measures Giuliani picks as indicators of turnaround in New York don't look so good for Romney's four years as governor – which is probably one reason Giuliani picked them. Giuliani's unemployment rate, for example, fell from 8.8 percent in 1994, his first year as mayor, to 6 percent his last year, though it held stubbornly around 9 percent for most of his first term. Romney, taking office a year after Giuliani left office, saw his unemployment rate fall from 5.7 percent to as low as 4.8 percent and then return to 5.3 percent. Employment hit a cyclical bottom a year after Romney came into office. In the South Carolina debate on Jan. 10, Romney said, "I'm very proud of the fact that after many, many months of declining job growth, I took over the state and helped turn that around. And in my years as governor, we kept adding jobs every single month after we saw that turnaround." The turnaround, though, started only after a loss of well over 20,000 jobs his first year in office. The tax burden in Massachusetts, for state and local governments combined, grew under Romney from 10 percent of personal income to 10.6 percent. Romney fought for a reduction in the income-tax rate, but the Democratic-controlled state legislature wouldn't go along. Giuliani claims he more or less bludgeoned New York's Democratic city council into becoming tax cutters. The tax burden fell in New York City – by nearly 20 percent, in Giuliani's calculation. (We evaluated that calculation in a previous story, here, and found it to be solid.) (Giuliani prefers to focus on the magnitude of change, rather than on national comparisons, because he says New York has traditionally underperformed the nation on many such economic measures.) Northeastern University's Center for Market Studies, looked at the economy three years into Romney's tenure and found it "lackluster," trailing national performance on a number of measures. One was job growth: It had none after three years under Romney. It had just gotten back to even with where he started. Now, for Huckabee, the story is a bit different. His tenure in Arkansas continued on through the much tougher economy of the last four years. Huckabee has spent a lot of effort trying to persuade people he cut taxes ("93 times," in his famous claim) when in fact the overall tax burden in Arkansas went up. If he talked more about turning around under-performance in the state's schools and roads, which he did to some extent and occasionally discussed, he might have claimed a different kind of "turnaround" mantle. Huckabee used a gas tax to rehab Interstate 40 through Arkansas – once designated as the worst stretch of road in the country by a survey of truckers – and a sales tax to reform an inefficient and unfair system of schools. Giuliani, on the other hand, did not significantly increase his city's investment in infrastructure. Giuliani's claim about being the "only turnaround" candidate does not incorporate the concept of additional investment and additional "return" in the form of better services. Comparing Arkansas and New York City "turnarounds" is almost imponderable. Huckabee, however, doesn't describe his tenure as a turnaround era in Arkansas. Giuliani's budget discipline did not allow for substantial new spending on infrastructure. Whether Huckabee's "investment" of higher taxes for better services was a good move is not is not a turnaround category Giuliani lists. It has to be kept in mind that the economic circumstances each chief executive faced were very different. Giuliani can't match Romney in the corporate turnaround business. And Giuliani's view of what constitutes a turnaround doesn't consider everything, but Giuliani clearly has clear accomplishments when it comes to a government turnaround. We find his claim Mostly True.	None	Rudy Giuliani	None	None	None	2008-01-28T00:00:00	2008-01-24	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-goop-02212	Miley Cyrus, Liam Hemsworth Did Get Married On Tybee Island, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/miley-cyrus-married-liam-hemsworth-tybee-island-wedding/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Miley Cyrus, Liam Hemsworth Did NOT Get Married On Tybee Island, Despite Report	10:05 am, November 13, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-00351	A new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services task force is charged with identifying naturalized citizens who cheated on their applications and seeking the revocation of their citizenship, a process known as "denaturalization."	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/denaturalization-task-force/	None	Politics	None	David Emery	None	Has the Trump Administration Launched an Immigrant ‘Denaturalization’ Task Force?	12 July 2018	None	['United_States']
-hoer-00619	Mexican Drug Money Photos	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/mexico-drug-money-photos.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Mexican Drug Money Photos	August 26, 2013	None	['None']
-tron-00942	Internet Explorer Bug Opens Computers to Hackers	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ms-explorer-bug-warning/	None	computers	None	None	None	Internet Explorer Bug Opens Computers to Hackers	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-03548	Hostage Kayla Mueller’s Death “Deserves No Tears” Because She Supported Terrorism	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hostage-kayla-muellers-death-deserves-no-tears-because-she-supported-terrorism/	None	terrorism	None	None	None	Hostage Kayla Mueller’s Death “Deserves No Tears” Because She Supported Terrorism – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-01028	There were more people on welfare than working in 2013.	false	/punditfact/statements/2015/jan/28/terry-jeffrey/are-there-more-welfare-recipients-us-full-time-wor/	One of the turning points in the 2012 presidential campaign was Republican nominee Mitt Romney privately saying that 47 percent of the population -- supporters of President Barack Obama, he said -- were people who are "dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it." The 2012 election is long over, but this theme -- sometimes framed as "makers" vs. "takers" -- is an enduring topic in American politics. Recently, the widely read conservative website TownHall.com posted a column by Terry Jeffrey, editor of the conseravative news service CNSNews.com, in which he compared Americans "on welfare" to those who are "full-time year-round workers." Specifically, Jeffrey wrote, there were more people on welfare than working. He wrote: "In 2013, according to the Census Bureau, there were 105,862,000 full-time year-round workers in the United States -- including 16,685,000 full-time government workers. These full-time workers were outnumbered by the 109,631,000 whom the Census Bureau says were getting benefits from means-tested federal programs -- e.g. welfare -- as of the fourth quarter of 2012. "Every American family that pays its own way -- and takes care of its own children whether with one or two incomes -- must subsidize the 109,631,000 on welfare." A reader asked us to take a closer look at Jeffrey’s column, so we did. We found that the numbers he cited are real, but his descriptions of those numbers, and thus his interpretation, were off base. (Jeffrey did not return an inquiry for this article.) The number 109,631,000 does, as Jeffrey wrote, refer to the Census Bureau’s figure for the number of Americans receiving benefits from means-tested federal programs. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ figure for full-time workers was pretty close to his stated 105,862,000 for 2013, although not all of these workers necessarily worked all year. But his comparison is a case of apples and oranges. We found three broad concerns about Jeffrey’s characterization, which we’ll take in order. The term 'welfare' is being used at its most expansive. The word "welfare" has different meanings for different people. Many think it refers to cash payouts to people who aren’t working; others think it includes anyone who receives government assistance of any type. Jeffrey has chosen to use the most expansive definition. The number Jeffrey cited includes the "traditional" type of welfare, such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF, but also programs such as Medicaid and food stamps. In fact, the beneficiaries in the Census Bureau’s accounting who received TANF and other cash-based payments were dwarfed by those who received Medicaid, food stamps and the food program called Women, Infants and Children, or WIC -- the three most widely used categories in the agency’s accounting. Jeffrey isn’t wrong to frame it that way, but it’s worth noting that the definition he’s used broadens the universe of recipients. The number includes many children and senior citizens. Jeffrey doesn’t take into account that the Census Bureau arrived at its figure by counting "anyone residing in a household in which one or more people received benefits from the program." This means the agency would count an entire family of four as receiving means-tested benefits as long as one individual within the family received such benefits. On its own, this definition is defensible. If one person in a household qualifies for food stamps, then the food purchased with those funds will likely be shared among all family members. However, the problem arises when Jeffrey compares this number to the number of full-time workers. He’s not comparing the number of households with a means-tested beneficiary to the number of households with a full-time worker. That would have been an apples-to-apples comparison. Rather, he’s comparing the number of households with a means-tested beneficiary to the number of full-time workers. This matters because it juices the numbers, effectively increasing the number of people on the welfare side of the comparison. Children and senior citizens can be counted as receiving means-tested benefits, but children cannot legally work, and many senior citizens may be retired or physically unable to work due to age. The difference isn’t trivial. In 2013, more than half of Medicaid recipients -- 51 percent -- were children, and another 5 percent were over 65, according to the Census Bureau. This pattern skews the comparison Jeffrey is trying to make. The number of 'welfare' recipients actually includes many workers. Just because you’re receiving means-tested benefits doesn’t mean you’re not working. According to 2012 Census Bureau data, roughly 23 percent of households with at least one working adult received means-tested benefits. For Medicaid, 28 percent of recipients between the ages of 18 and 64, worked full time, according to the Census Bureau. (Another 15 percent of recipients in that age group worked part time.) Other means-tested benefits show considerable overlap with the population of working adults. Roughly 60 percent of food stamp recipients who were of working age and weren’t disabled were employed while receiving benefits, according to a Census Bureau sample calculated by the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. This matters because working recipients of means-tested benefits would be counted on both sides of the comparison, casting doubt on the notion that there’s a strict divide between people who work and people who are on welfare. Our ruling Jeffrey said that in 2013, there were 109,631,000 Americans "on welfare," outnumbering the "105,862,000 full-time year-round workers in the United States." While the claim is based on real numbers, it’s a fundamentally flawed, apples-and-oranges comparison. The number of "welfare" recipients -- unlike the number of workers -- is enlarged by the inclusion of children and senior citizens. The comparison also ignores that many "welfare" recipients actually work, so trying to separate the two categories creates a false dichotomy. We rate the claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Terry Jeffrey	None	None	None	2015-01-28T10:23:35	2015-01-21	['None']
-farg-00319	"17 million taxpayer dollars have gone to settling sexual harassment claims against Congress members.”	distorts the facts	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/10/a-misleading-17-million-hush-money-claim/	None	askfactcheck	FactCheck.org	Angelo Fichera	['Congress']	A Misleading $17 Million Hush Money Claim	October 5, 2018	2018-10-05 19:01:16 UTC	['United_States_Congress']
-snes-02423	Photographs show a pregnant woman named Paola Lynn who was raped by a Muslim refugee in Michigan.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pregnant-woman-rape-michigan-refugee/	None	Racial Rumors	None	Dan Evon	None	Was a Pregnant Woman Raped by a Muslim Refugee in Michigan?	16 May 2017	None	['Michigan', 'Islam']
-pomt-12178	Says Dontre Hamilton "was shot 14 times by police for resting on a park bench in Milwaukee."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/aug/01/gwen-moore/case-dontre-hamilton-did-milwaukee-police-shoot-ma/	On the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on June 29, 2017, U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, declared: Dontre Hamilton "was shot 14 times by police for resting on a park bench in Milwaukee." Is that what happened? The incident can be viewed in at least two different ways. Literally speaking, Hamilton was not killed simply for resting on a bench. He was shot after striking an officer with the officer’s baton. But in making a rhetorical point, Moore is correct that Hamilton had done nothing to attract the attention of police but fall asleep in a park. And the fatal shooting occurred after two other officers had twice observed Hamilton and determined he was doing nothing wrong. Moore’s comments Moore took to the House floor to promote a bill she introduced three days earlier. Under the measure, states and localities receiving certain federal grants would have to require their law enforcement officers to undergo training on "de-escalation techniques to assist in reducing the need for the use of force" by officers. She made her claim about Hamilton after arguing that her bill should be made law before summer ends, saying: We know that kids are out of school and that the tensions in our streets are high. Police on alert, and far too many of us are distrustful of the police due to the painful and frightful memories of how many deadly encounters have dominated headlines -- close to a thousand in one year. How can this Congress recess for the summer and not take up this bill? Yes, the Affordable Care Act is a big issue here before us in Congress. But if you live in communities of color around the country, the immediate health care issue for you is being shot by a police officer who has been sworn to protect you. If you die at age 12, like Tamir Rice, who was shot by police for playing with his sister on a playground in Cleveland, how can you be concerned with the Medicaid? If you’re killed at 31 years old like Dontre Hamilton, who was shot 14 times by police for resting on a park bench in Milwaukee, nursing home care is not your priority. You won’t have the fortune of living that long. Her office did not respond to our requests for information for this fact check. The Hamilton incident Hillary Clinton injected the Hamilton incident into the 2016 presidential campaign. At a Democratic debate with Bernie Sanders in Milwaukee, she said Hamilton was "unarmed" when he was killed. Our rating was Mostly True. Hamilton, a 31-year-old diagnosed with schizophrenia, had a history of contacts with Milwaukee police, but no convictions for any violent crimes. He was shot to death by Christopher Manney, a Milwaukee officer who worked in the downtown area, on April 30, 2014. Manney was fired -- not for the fatal shooting itself, but for the way he approached Hamilton, which led to a scuffle. Here’s a summary of the incident from our Clinton fact check, based on a report by the Milwaukee County district attorney: First call: Shortly before 2 p.m., an employee at the Starbucks located in Red Arrow Park downtown called police about Hamilton, who was sleeping in the park. The call was classified as a "welfare check" -- in other words, to check if Hamilton was OK. A desk sergeant called Manney’s cell phone and left a voicemail message, saying he wanted Manney to go to the park about "a homeless guy sleeping" there. Two officers respond: Because Manney didn’t immediately respond to the voicemail, the Starbucks call was referred to a dispatcher, who then dispatched two other officers to the park. They found Hamilton lying on his back with his eyes closed. They nudged Hamilton, he got up and provided identification and said he was taking a nap and was all right. The officers left. Second call: About 2:10 p.m., another call to police about Hamilton came from Starbucks. The two officers returned and told the employees that Hamilton was not doing anything wrong. The officers left shortly before 3 p.m. Manney responds: Just before 3:30 p.m., about 90 minutes after the first call, Manney listened to the voicemail. He called dispatch and asked if there was an assignment for Red Arrow Park. Told there was not, Manney asked "that he be recorded as responding to a trouble with subject" call, and he went to the park. He apparently was not aware the other officers had preceded him. Fight occurs: Manney approached Hamilton, who was lying down, helped him up and then began to pat him down. Hamilton resisted. Witnesses told police that Manney, who was yelling commands at Hamilton, struck Hamilton one or more times with his baton before Hamilton took the baton and struck Manney with it one or more times. Manney shoots Hamilton: The witnesses said Hamilton was holding the baton -- one said menacingly -- when Manney fired his service weapon. He fired 14 times, resulting in 15 gunshot wounds to Hamilton. In announcing Manney’s firing, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn said Manney decided Hamilton was dangerous "based solely on observations of apparent mental illness, absent any overt actions on the part of Mr. Hamilton." Our rating Moore says Hamilton "was shot 14 times by police for resting on a park bench in Milwaukee." Two officers twice responded to calls about Hamilton sleeping in the park and allowed him to continue sleeping there and left. He was still resting there when a different officer later and arrived and began patting him down. That triggered a physical altercation, with the officer hitting Hamilton with his baton and then Hamilton taking the baton and striking the officer. The officer then fatally shot Hamilton 14 times. In short, Hamilton was not shot simply for resting on a park bench. But the shooting occurred only because of a physical altercation that was sparked by the way the third officer began patting Hamilton down -- after two officers who came to the park twice decided Hamilton wasn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, the officer was fired for the way he approached Hamilton. For a statement that is accurate but needs additional information, our rating is Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Hamilton shooting aftermath Manney fired: In October 2014, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn announced he had fired Manney -- not for use of excessive force when he shot Hamilton, but because he did not follow department rules for dealing with emotionally disturbed people in the moments leading up to the shooting. $2.3 million settlement: In May 2017, more than three years after Hamilton’s death, the Milwaukee Common Council approved paying $2.3 million to Hamilton’s young son to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit. Use of deadly force fact check: Flynn said in June 2016 that Milwaukee police use deadly force at a rate that is "among the lowest" in the country. Our rating was Half True. The best data available then showed Milwaukee police killed one person in 2015. But 2015 was the only full year for which data were available on a national level, so it wasn’t known how Milwaukee’s rate would compare in prior years.	None	Gwen Moore	None	None	None	2017-08-01T05:00:00	2017-06-29	['Milwaukee']
-pomt-15235	Illegal immigration "wasn’t a subject that was on anybody’s mind until I brought it up at my announcement."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/07/donald-trump/trump-illegal-immigration-wasnt-anyones-mind-he-en/	Donald Trump’s signature self confidence was on full display at the first Republican debate. He was the sole candidate on the stage who refused to pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee. When Fox News moderator Chris Wallace challenged him to provide evidence to back up his claim that the Mexican government is intentionally sending criminals across the border, Trump had this rebuttal. "If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even be talking about illegal immigration, Chris," Trump said. "You wouldn’t even be talking about it. This wasn’t a subject that was on anybody’s mind until I brought it up at my announcement." In light of the prominent role immigration has played in the Republican Party, that is a bold assertion. We decided to see what the record says. We attacked this in two ways. Since Trump directed his comment at Wallace, we looked at the transcripts from Wallace’s show, Fox News Sunday. We also cast a wider net by searching the Nexis database of major newspaper articles. Both approaches show Trump has an exaggerated sense of his role in the Republican primary. Chris Wallace Trump made his presidential announcement speech on June 16, 2015. In the seven broadcasts of Fox News Sunday before that day, immigration policy came up in five shows. Wallace himself raised the issue with Republican candidates Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, and in the context of a discussion about former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Substitute hosts for Wallace also talked about immigration policy. In the seven broadcasts after Trump’s announcement speech, immigration policy again came up five times. In fairness to Trump, often this was in reference to the billionaire from New York. For example, when Wallace had another GOP contender on his show, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, he asked him this: "You have done more than just fire back on Trump on the issue of immigration. You devoted a major speech to Donald Trump in which you accused him of a, quote, ‘toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense.’ " So Trump has been a focus of conversation, but on Wallace’s show, the topic of immigration reform came up just as often before Trump announced as afterward. Major newspapers We used the Lexis-Nexis database to count the number of times illegal immigration or undocumented immigrants came up in major newspapers in the days before and after Trump’s announcement on June 16. For the curious, it has been 51 days since Trump jumped into the race for the White House. We compared the number of mentions in that period to those during the 51 days prior to his announcement. This table shows the tally for mentions of two terms -- "undocumented" and "illegal immigrant" -- within 10 words of the word "president." Date range Search term Number of articles April 25 to June 15 Undocumented 65 June 16 to Aug. 6 Undocumented 42 April 25 to June 15 Illegal immigrant 60 June 16 to Aug. 6 Illegal immigrant 79 Source: Lexis-Nexis So, the topic of undocumented immigrants came up more often before Trump announced his run through this lens.Articles using the term "illegal immigrant" appeared slightly less often before he gave his speech, but mentions were still relatively common -- and certainly not zero. Our ruling Trump said that if it weren’t for him, Wallace in particular and the media in general wouldn’t be talking about illegal immigration. The numbers tell a very different story. For Wallace and his Fox News show itself, the topic came up just as frequently before Trump announced as afterward. For mentions in major newspapers, the pattern is somewhat mixed, but mentions were common before Trump announced. There’s no doubt Trump’s bombastic comments brought additional attention to the issue, but the issue was on the minds of the media -- and politicians -- before Trump entered the fray. But Trump stated that the topic would not be on the table at all if not for him. That is clearly not the case. We rate this claim False.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-08-07T00:17:51	2015-08-06	['None']
-tron-02305	Mass Re-enlistment on July 4th	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/massreenlistment/	None	military	None	None	None	Mass Re-enlistment on July 4th	Mar 18, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-02664	Lisa, the rejected young woman who killed herself	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/lisa/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Lisa, the rejected young woman who killed herself	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-06173	Cards for Recovering Soldiers	outdated	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cards-for-recovering-soldiers/	None	Holidays	None	David Mikkelson	None	Cards for Recovering Soldiers	6 November 2007	None	['None']
-pomt-09316	"The bill reported out of committee sets up a $50 billion slush fund that, while intended for resolving failing firms, is available for virtually any purpose that the treasury secretary sees fit."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/apr/16/richard-shelby/sen-richard-shelby-overlooks-safeguards-financial-/	Now that the health care debate has come to a close, lawmakers are prepping their talking points for the next looming battle: financial institution reform. Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on his chamber's Banking Committee, aired his grievances in a March 25, 2010, letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The letter was largely prompted by Shelby's concern that in a recent speech Geithner mischaracterized the senator's support for financial regulation. Shelby also took the opportunity to point out several ways that he believes the legislation his committee recently approved is flawed. "The bill reported out of committee sets up a $50 billion slush fund that, while intended for resolving failing firms, is available for virtually any purpose that the treasury secretary sees fit," Shelby wrote on March 25, 2010. "Nonetheless, the mere existence of this fund will make it all too easy to choose bailout over bankruptcy. This can only reinforce the expectation that the government stands ready to intervene on behalf of large and politically connected financial institutions at the expense of Main Street and the American taxpayer. Therefore, the bill institutionalizes 'too big to fail.' " We wondered whether Shelby is correct about a fund that can be used for whatever purpose the treasury secretary sees fit. First, the details of the bill. On March 22, 2010, the Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Sens. Christopher Dodd and Shelby, approved the overhaul by a party-line vote of 13-10. Highlights include new government authority to regulate over-the-counter derivatives and hedge funds, a new consumer financial product regulator within the Federal Reserve, and a process for dissolving institutions that are teetering on collapse. The "Orderly Liquidation Fund" is the technical term for the $50 billion pot of money Shelby is concerned about. Only the largest firms would be required to pay into the fund. If a "systematically significant" firm is teetering on collapse, the Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve would have to agree to use the fund to liquidate the firm. A panel of three bankruptcy judges would have to convene and agree within 24 hours that the company is insolvent. The fund is not meant to replace the bankruptcy process, but rather to provide a sort of emergency mechanism for the government to deal with very large, economically significant institutions. So, the bill provides quite a bit of structure around how the government would decide which firms should be dissolved. Shelby is clearly correct on his first point that there is a $50 billion fund in the bill (we'll leave the debate over the definition of "slush fund" for another day) that's "intended to resolve failing firms." The second part of his claim is that the fund is available for "virtually any purpose that the treasury secretary sees fit." First -- because we like to split hairs -- we should note that, while the bill says that the fund will be established in the Treasury Department, it will be administered by the FDIC, an independent branch of government, not the Treasury Department. Whether the money can be used for anything the government wants is another matter. The legislative language is pretty clear that the money must be used to dissolve -- meaning completely shut down -- failing firms. Here's what Sec. 206 of the bill says: "In taking action under this title, the (FDIC) shall determine that such action is necessary for purposes of the financial stability of the United States, and not for the purpose of preserving the covered financial company; ensure that the shareholders of a covered financial company do not receive payment until after all other claims and the Fund are fully paid; ensure that unsecured creditors bear losses in accordance with the priority of claim provisions in section 210; ensure that management responsible for the failed condition of the covered financial company is removed (if such management has not already been removed at the time at which the FDIC is appointed receiver); and not take an equity interest in or become a shareholder of any covered financial company or any covered subsidiary." The fund cannot be used to keep faltering institutions alive. What about bonuses? "It certainly cannot be used for bonuses or salaries going forward," said Dana Chasin, legislative and policy liaison for the Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of generally left-leaning groups in support of financial regulatory reform. By definition, the fund would be used to dissolve companies all together; management would be summarily forced out in the process. However, it is possible that "costs associated with liquidation could involve claims'' for prior compensation agreements held by the company, which could involve bonuses, Chasin conceded. "There are certain kinds of contracts that may or may not be repudiated," he said. James Gattuso, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says he's concerned about how the money might be used, but the bigger issue may be limited standing for anyone to file a suit to prevent misuse of the fund. "A similar problem developed under the TARP legislation -– under which GM and Chrysler got funding although no serious analyst argued that they were 'financial institutions,' as required under TARP," Gattuso wrote to us in an e-mail. "There simply was no judicial review of the action available, because no entity had the requisite standing. A similar problem could develop under this legislation." David Zaring, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, said that the bill does seem to give the government some leeway in reinterpreting the fund in the future through the rulemaking process. "Shelby may be concerned because the bill gives [the government] modest rulemaking authority on how it construes the fund and some opportunities to reinterpret it," he said. "However, that rulemaking authority is limited. I don't see any sort of blank check in that." So, when it comes to the fund, it's clear that it can only be used to cover costs associated with shutting down a firm altogether, not to keep a firm afloat. But several of the people we spoke with pointed out that the bill is a bit vague in some areas, at least in their view. And indeed, the bill provides some flexibility in how funds are used during liquidation. That said, it's an overstatement for Shelby to say that the fund "is available for virtually any purpose that the treasury secretary sees fit." We also take issue with Shelby's underlying point, that the fund somehow encourages firms to take a bailout rather than bankruptcy. In fact, the rules of the fund dictate that it not be used to maintain companies that are bad for our financial system, but rather to shut down those companies altogether, a process akin to bankruptcy. Shelby also implies that the fund comes at a cost to taxpayers, saying the fund "can only reinforce the expectation that the government stands ready to intervene on behalf of large and politically connected financial institutions at the expense of Main Street and the American taxpayer." But remember, the businesses would pay into the liquidation fund, not taxpayers. The bill is very specific about that. So his underlying point here is incorrect. Shelby is right that the bill would create a $50 billion fund to help dismantle very large, faltering firms. While there may be just a bit of wiggle room on what costs the fund covers, the bill makes it clear that the money must be used to liquidate -- not keep alive -- failing firms. Also, the program is administered by the FDIC, and before it can step in to dismantle a firm, FDIC must have agreement of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and three bankruptcy judges. So, to say that the fund "is available for virtually any purpose that the Treasury Secretary sees fit," is more than a stretch. We find Shelby's claim to be False.	None	Richard Shelby	None	None	None	2010-04-16T18:18:33	2010-03-25	['None']
-pomt-09540	Says his executive order requiring young girls to be vaccinated against HPV wasn't mandatory.	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/feb/06/rick-perry/perry-says-hpv-vaccine-he-mandated-would-have-been/	When Gov. Rick Perry issued an executive order in 2007 requiring all Texas girls to receive a vaccine against the human papillomavirus before entering the sixth grade, lawmakers balked and blocked it. Critics said the vaccine, Merck & Co.'s Gardasil, was too new to declare safe. Some said too that Perry's order would infringe on parental rights or give girls a false sense of security, leading them to be sexually active too young. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, one of Perry's opponents in the GOP gubernatorial primary, frequently slams Perry's stilled order. Perry has stood by his action, most recently casting it as having created an optional vaccination requirement. "That piece of legislation was not mandatory, in the sense of when you can say no, something's not mandatory," he said during the second Republican gubernatorial debate Jan. 29. A just-say-no gubernatorial order? We decided to check. What we found: On Feb. 2, 2007, Perry issued an executive order — not a piece of legislation, as he said — requiring the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to adopt rules mandating all girls entering sixth grade to receive a vaccination against the types of HPV, a sexually-transmitted virus, that causes most cases of cervical cancer and genital warts. The order included an opt-out "in order to protect the right of parents to be the final authority on their children's health care." Perry ordered the Department of State Health Services to allow parents dissenting for philosophical or religious reasons to request a conscientious objection affidavit form. That form, which has been available since 2003, enables parents to enroll their children in public school even if they lack state-required immunizations. It's automatically granted as long as parents provide all required information. According to the Department of State Health Service's 2008-09 immunization report, which uses data from kindergarten and seventh-grade students at 1,300 independent school districts and 800 private schools, 0.28 percent of the students filed conscientious objection forms. Parents must renew exemption affidavits every two years to maintain their validity, according to Allison Lowery, assistant press officer at the Texas Department of State Health Services. We thought the opt-out form for public-school students proved Perry correct until we learned that not all private schools accept the affidavit. That means some private schools may not allow their students to exempt themselves from any state-required vaccinations. Some 15 percent of more than 1 million Texas girls in fifth through 12th grade in 2008 were enrolled in private schools, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. According to a 2006 Texas Attorney General's opinion: "A private school that does not accept state tax funds is not required to accept for enrollment a child who has received an exemption from the immunizations required by the Texas Health and Safety Code." In its policy for Catholic schools, the Catholic Diocese of Austin states: "Immunizations are not in conflict with the Catholic faith. Conscientious objections or waivers, which may be permissible for enrollment in public schools, do not qualify as an exception to this policy." Catholic schools in the diocese do accept medical exemptions, meaning if the immunization could somehow harm the child, it's not required to enroll. We wondered if the diocese's policy in favor of requiring state-mandated immunizations would have extended to refusing the opt-out form for girls subject to the HPV vaccination. Perry aides may have had the same question. According to internal e-mails published online by Hutchison's campaign (also obtained by the Austin American-Statesman under Texas open records laws in 2007), Brandon LeBlanc, then the governor's community affairs public liaison, wrote Feb. 6, 2007: "I don't have an answer for the questions I'm getting regarding private schools. Apparently Catholic schools in particular will require all state vaccines, but won't except (sic) the exemptions. My first inclination, assuming this is true, is that this is for the parents and the schools to sort out. Is there a better answer to this 'problem'?" Nora Belcher, then assistant director at the Governor's Office of Budget, Planning and Policy, replied: "I believe in the short term your answer is the correct one, plus, enrolling in Catholic school is a CHOICE (for parents, anyway)." In February 2007, the Roman Catholic Bishops of Texas came close to saying they wouldn't require the vaccine, issuing a statement recommending that "civil authorities should leave this decision to parents." But would parochial schools absolutely have left that particular vaccination decision to parents? Margaret McGettrick, director of education at the Texas Catholic Conference, the statewide association of the Roman Catholic diocese in Texas, recently said the superintendents, bishops and accreditation commission at the association responsible for setting school policies never formulated policy specific to the HPV vaccine. McGettrick said "it's a non-issue for us" because the HPV vaccine was never added to the state's list of required immunizations once lawmakers froze the order until the starting date of the 2011 regular legislative session. Allison Castle, Perry's press secretary, said: "We consider (the order) null and void and (Perry) will not pursue it in the future." En breve: Perry did issue an order requiring schoolgirls receive the HPV vaccine. In arguing that his order was not a mandate, Perry points to the Conscientious Objection to Immunization form that lets parents of public school students decline immunizations without consequence. The burden to file and refile the notarized forms on time falls on the parents. However, our research determined that it's not certain the opt-out would have been accepted for the 15 percent of Texas girls attending private schools. Also unknown: Whether every Catholic school would have allowed students subject to Perry's order to abstain from the three HPV shots in the vaccination series. Ultimately, the governor issued an order for the Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner to "adopt rules that mandate the age appropriate vaccination of all female children for HPV prior to admission to the sixth grade." According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a mandate is "a clear instruction, authorization or direction." Perry says the executive order wasn't mandatory, which, according to Webster, means "demanded or required." But that's what Perry's order did: it set up a requirement. Just because there's a loophole — a way to "say no," in the governor's parlance — doesn't mean the requirement doesn't exist. Physical education classes are also mandatory to graduate high school, but if you have any number of health conditions, you can skip the timed mile. We rate Perry's claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2010-02-06T12:51:42	2010-01-29	['None']
-pomt-02817	"These 60 acres (the Atlanta Braves want to build a stadium on) have produced zero SPLOST money for parks and recreation, have produced zero money for education."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2013/nov/26/john-loud/cobb-businessmans-claim-new-atlanta-braves-stadium/	By Eric Stirgus The proposed new home of the Atlanta Braves is a large swath of heavily wooded land that could be a hit for Cobb County government and schools if the baseball team moves there, some supporters of the plan say. "These 60 acres have produced zero SPLOST money for parks and recreation, have produced zero money for education," said John Loud, who owns Loud Security, based in Cobb. True? PolitiFact Georgia thought we’d do some digging. Loud, along with Superior Plumbing owner Jay Cunningham, have spearheaded an effort to rally public support in favor of the plan. The two men led a campaign for a 1 percent sales tax for education in Cobb County and the Marietta city school system that passed in March. Loud said he was referring to sales tax money from the land that has gone back to the county government or school system. "There’s no sales tax that comes out of those acres," he said. The Braves have secured land within the Cumberland Community Improvement District, team officials say. The team plans to use 60 acres for the stadium and development, the Braves say. The Cumberland CID is an area approved to tax businesses within its borders. The land is located just north and west of I-75 and I-285. The team wants to build a 41,500-seat stadium, along with an amphitheater, stores and restaurants leading up to the ballpark. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has identified several parcels where it believes the Braves want to build the new stadium and other development. The Braves declined to identify the parcels that have been secured, citing a confidentiality agreement. The team did say it believes the land is undeveloped. A Cobb County government spokesman agreed. "It’s all vacant land," said the spokesman, Robert Quigley. Cobb, like most metro Atlanta counties, collects a 1 percent special purpose local option sales tax on most items sold in local businesses to pay for the construction of new government buildings, roadways and equipment. Quigley said the county cannot collect SPLOST proceeds from vacant property. As for whether the property has produced zero money for education, that’s a more complicated element to Loud’s claim. Cobb collects about $140,000 a year in school taxes from the land, Quigley said. Our total, based on the parcels the AJC believes the Braves have secured, was close, at nearly $143,000. Loud was aware of how much money is collected in property taxes for the school system when PolitiFact Georgia gave him a call. He stressed he was talking about sales tax revenue in The Marietta Daily Journal article. "There’s no commerce (there), so there’s no sales tax generated," said Loud, who believes the county will collect millions of dollars annually from the land if it is developed by the Braves. To sum up, Loud said the 60 acres the Atlanta Braves are considering as part of a stadium development have produced no SPLOST money for parks and recreation and zero money for education. The site’s owners currently pay property taxes that go to the county’s school system. Loud said he was referring to sales tax revenue from the land. His quote in the newspaper article could had been clearer about the point he was trying to make. There is some additional detail that must be understood for anyone who reads Loud’s quote. Our rating: Mostly True.	None	John Loud	None	None	None	2013-11-26T06:00:00	2013-11-19	['Atlanta_Braves']
-pomt-11192	Antonio Villaraigosa's "recklessness (as mayor of Los Angeles) ... left no funding to test 7,000 rape kits, putting public safety at risk."	false	/california/statements/2018/may/16/john-chiang/fact-checking-tv-ads-false-claim-antonio-villaraig/	A new TV ad in the campaign for California governor attacks former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for what it calls his "reckless" role in Los Angeles’ massive rape kit backlog. But is it accurate? The ad was paid for by the John Chiang for Governor campaign. It began airing in markets statewide this past weekend. Chiang, the state treasurer, and fellow Democrat Villaraigosa are in a tight and increasingly heated primary race with several others to emerge as one of the top two candidates in November’s general election. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, is considered the race’s frontrunner. Below is the part of the ad that attacks Villaraigosa. For this fact check, we focused on the last portion about his role with the rape kit backlog: "He was called ‘a failure.’ An ‘embarrassment.’ As mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa drove L.A. to the brink of bankruptcy," a narrator says, as news headlines from 2009 and 2010 flash on the screen. "Villaraigosa’s recklessness threatened jobs, the economy and left no funding to test 7,000 rape kits, putting public safety at risk." The ad above was paid for by the John Chiang for Governor campaign. Villaraigosa served as mayor of Los Angeles from July 2005 to July 2013. The ad seizes on critiques of the former mayor during the height of the Great Recession, when cities and states across the country slashed budgets as tax revenue cratered. More specifically, the ad addresses the frustratingly slow process of clearing rape kits in California, as well as nationwide. State lawmakers this week held a press conference on a bill that would require the prompt testing of all kits in the state. Last month, Chiang made a similar call to action when he announced the circulation of a petition to have all rape kits in the state tested immediately. The use of DNA testing to find suspected criminals gained renewed attention with last month’s arrest of the suspected Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, who faces a dozen murder charges across California. Investigators said they have also linked him to nearly 50 rapes and three attempted sexual assaults from 1976 to 1986. Given the importance of this law enforcement tool, we wanted to know whether the TV ad accurately describes Villaraigosa’s role in LA’s pileup of untested rape kits. We set out on a fact check. Background on the LA backlog An October 2008 audit by Los Angeles Controller Laura Chick detailed the extent of the rape kit backlog. It criticized the Los Angeles Police Department for its lack of a comprehensive plan to end the backlog and its mismanagement of federal grants awarded for DNA testing. Specifically, the LAPD lost nearly $500,000 in grants for testing due to its "lax oversight" of the money, Chick wrote in the report. "Right now the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has about 7,000 rape kits sitting on freezer shelves waiting to be analyzed. Despite having been awarded nearly $4 million in grant funds for the LAPD's crime lab, this unacceptable backlog still exists." The audit was sent to Villaraigosa, who along with the LA City Council was responsible for oversight of the LAPD, as well as establishing its priorities. Chick did not place blame solely on the former mayor, nor did she describe any reckless acts that prevented funding. Instead, her audit spreads blame across city leadership. "How is it possible we are in this situation?" she wrote. "The answer is simple and obvious: The City, its elected leadership, as well as the Police Department, has not given this issue the attention, resources and priority it deserves." Evidence from Chiang’s campaign We asked Chiang’s campaign for evidence supporting the ad’s claim that Villaraigosa’s "recklessness" … "left no funding" for the DNA testing. A spokesman pointed to several news articles and editorials that criticized LA city leadership for not acting fast enough to fund crime lab technicians. Some mentioned Villaraigosa’s focus on hiring more police officers in contrast with lab techs. "Hiring more officers remains a worthy goal," The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote in October 2008, "but it need not be done foolishly and with contempt for rape victims whose cases deserve attention. The City Council -- and the LAPD -- must make funding the necessary lab work a priority." More specifically, Chiang’s campaign pointed to a May 2008 request by the city’s finance committee to add $400,000 to Villaraigosa’s budget for LAPD contractual services to pay for DNA testing, which they say he denied. The city’s June 2008 budget signed by Villaraigosa however, shows the police budget for contractual services increased by $400,000, suggesting he did approve the increase. The request for additional funds was made by former LA City Councilman and prosecutor Jack Weiss, who The Pasadena Star-News editorial board said in August 2008 had been "complaining about the backlog of criminal lab work for years, noting that it hasn’t been the priority it should." The editorial also said Weiss in 2007 "called the backlog of criminal-case DNA the ‘public safety scandal of our era,’ and asked Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and (then-LAPD Chief William Bratton) to hire new criminalists. He said he would push the council for $10 million in funding for this problem this year. That funding has not materialized, and the backlog hasn’t gone away." Weiss could not be reached for comment. Villaraigosa campaign’s response A Villaraigosa campaign spokesman said the ad is wrong for two reasons: the backlog started before Villaraigosa became mayor in July 2005 and was eliminated under his watch in 2011. The audit backs up the first point. It shows the backlog had reached 3,300 rape kits by 2003, two years before Villaraigosa took office. On the second point, several news articles detail the city’s elimination of the backlog in 2011, two years beforeVillaraigosa’s tenure as mayor ended. The Los Angeles Times in April 2011 reported on the elimination of what it called a "decades-old" backlog: "LAPD officials have spent the last two years scraping together federal grants, public funds and private donations to outsource the testing to private labs. They have also lobbied elected officials for special permission to add more analysts to the LAPD's lab despite a citywide hiring freeze." Our ruling A TV ad by John Chiang’s campaign for governor attacked former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for what it calls his "reckless" role in the city’s massive rape kit backlog. It said he "left no funding to test 7,000 rape kits, putting public safety at risk." A Los Angeles city audit from 2008 blamed elected leaders and the Los Angeles Police Department for their lack of attention and resources paid to the problem. The audit notes, however, the problem started well before Villaraigosa took office. Also, it doesn’t single out Villaraigosa and we found no evidence of any "reckless" acts by the former mayor. Additionally, the ad ignores the fact that the city eliminated the backlog near the end of Villaraigosa’s term in 2011. It gives the wrong impression that Villaraigosa "left no funding" whatsoever to pay for DNA testing when his tenure ended. That’s simply not the case. We found plenty of information that criticized Villaraigosa and the city for a slow start to addressing the problem. Chiang’s ad, however, distorts the facts and creates a narrative that’s simply not supported. We rated the ad’s claim False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. Editor's Note: After the publication of our fact-check, the Chiang campaign disputed our rating. After reviewing additional information provided by the Chiang campaign, we stand by our reporting and rating, which remains False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	John Chiang	None	None	None	2018-05-16T13:27:12	2018-05-12	['Los_Angeles']
-snes-04284	A poster reading "Superman is coming in Supergirl" was an official promotion by the CW network.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/superman-is-coming-in-supergirl-poster/	None	Fauxtography	None	Brooke Binkowski	None	‘Superman Is Coming in Supergirl’ Poster	9 August 2016	None	['Supergirl', 'Superman']
-snes-04520	The colored squares on toothpaste tubes identify the composition of the toothpaste enclosed therein.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-tube-stakes/	None	Inboxer Rebellion	None	David Mikkelson	None	Do Color Codes on Toothpaste Tubes Identify Their Ingredients?	22 July 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-09336	"The policy of the Bush administration was also not to add new nuclear capabilities."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/apr/11/robert-gates/defense-secretary-robert-gates-says-bush-administr/	The Nuclear Posture Review released by the Obama administration this week has several key points. It says that the United States will not develop new nuclear warheads, that programs to extend the life of the existing arsenal would rely on previously tested designs, and that the United States will not support new nuclear military capabilities. That's a break from the policy of George W. Bush, who proposed new nuclear warheads that would be longer-lasting, reliable and provide greater flexibility to ultimately reduce the nation's nuclear stockpile. On ABC's This Week on April 11, 2010, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the policy objectives of the two administrations are not that different. "The reliable replacement warhead program that existed in the past was really a means to an end," said Gates, who served in the same job for President Bush. "It was a means to modernizing the nuclear stockpile ... making it more reliable, safer, and more secure. The policy of the Bush administration was also not to add new nuclear capabilities. This was about how do you make the stockpile safer and more reliable." President Barack Obama's Nuclear Posture Review outlines a plan to modernize the existing nuclear arsenal without creating new warheads. If replacement of nuclear components is deemed critically necessary, the Pentagon would need the okay of the president and Congress. Gates said that plan "offers us a path forward, as Secretary Clinton says, in terms of reuse, refurbishment, and -- and if necessary, replacement of components. Not an entire warhead necessarily. So the chiefs, and I and the directors of the nuclear labs are all very comfortable this puts us in a position to modernize the stockpile." Here, we are focusing on Gates' claim that, "The policy of the Bush administration was also not to add new nuclear capabilities." That may be how the Bush policy ended up, but early on Bush championed a plan to develop a nuclear "bunker-buster" weapon. Bush's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review report stated that "a need may arise to modify, upgrade, or replace portions of the extant nuclear force or develop concepts for follow-on nuclear weapons better suited to the nation's needs." Specifically, the report talks about the need to develop weapons to get at a growing number of "hard and deeply-buried targets." That led to Bush administration proposals in 2003 and 2004 to modify existing warheads to develop a nuclear "bunker buster" -- formally known as the "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" -- that would use a nuclear warhead to destroy underground targets. But Congress repeatedly balked, and the nuclear weapon was never built. Obama, we note, was among those who voted against the program in 2005. "Congress basically said, 'No, you can't have it,' " Darryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told PolitiFact. The Bush policy then evolved toward modernizing the arsenal without adding to the U.S. nuclear capability. Bush proposed the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program, which sought to design new warheads with more long-term reliability, allowing the United States to continue to reduce its aging nuclear stockpile. The weapons could only have the same explosive power and be suited for similar targets as existing ones. That's what Gates meant when he said the Bush policy was not to add new nuclear capabilities. Congress denied funding for the program in 2008. Some were concerned it sent the wrong message to other countries that the United States was trying to persuade not to pursue nuclear arms; and others feared it might open the door to new nuclear weapons testing. Congress then passed the Stockpile Management Plan, which seeks to extend the life of the nuclear arsenal without building wholly new warheads. Gates makes a valid point that the Bush policy in the later years of his presidency -- while it called for the development of new nuclear warheads -- did not call for new nuclear capabilities. That's where Bush's policy ended up. But early on, the Bush administration did call for modifications to existing weapons to create a nuclear "bunker buster" that very much would have added to the United States' nuclear capabilities. And so we rule Gates' claim Half True.	None	Robert Gates	None	None	None	2010-04-11T17:59:45	2010-04-11	['George_W._Bush']
-pomt-10187	"But if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would've had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/22/barack-obama/obama-overstates-mccains-plan-whatever-that-is/	With the stock market on a roller coaster last week, Sen. Barack Obama decided it was a good time to take a shot at Sen. John McCain on Social Security. McCain has, in the past, supported plans that would allow workers, if they want, to have a portion of their Social Security put into personal retirement accounts that allow investment in the stock market. "And I’ll protect Social Security, while John McCain wants to privatize it," Obama said in a speech in Daytona Beach, Fla., on Sept. 20, 2008. "Without Social Security half of elderly women would be living in poverty — half. But if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week. Millions would’ve watched as the market tumbled and their nest egg disappeared before their eyes. Millions of families would’ve been scrambling to figure out how to give their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, the secure retirement that every American deserves. So I know Senator McCain is talking about a 'casino culture' on Wall Street — but the fact is, he’s the one who wants to gamble with your life savings." To be sure, it was a volatile week on Wall Street. Down 504 points Monday; up 141 Tuesday; down again, 449 points Wednesday; then back up again 410 points Thursday; and up another 319 Friday. The market ended up down just 34 points for the week. But whew, there was certainly a lot of angst. But there are a couple problems with Obama’s attack on McCain’s plans for Social Security. First and foremost is that McCain hasn’t actually laid out his plan for Social Security. In July, McCain was asked it. "I cannot tell you what I would do, except to put everything on the table," he told reporters. A few weeks later, he was asked about new taxes to shore up Social Security. "There is nothing that’s off the table. I have my positions, and I’ll articulate them. But nothing’s off the table," McCain said. "I don’t want tax increases. But that doesn’t mean that anything is off the table." We’re still waiting to hear McCain articulate his positions. "No one really knows what his plan is, including him," said John Rother, policy director at AARP. McCain’s statements on Social Security so far have been "too contradictory or too vague," to pin down, he said. To make any statements about McCain’s plan going forward would require a bit of mind-reading, Rother said. In lieu of that, we think it’s fair for Obama to take aim at McCain’s previous support for personal retirement accounts. In 1998, McCain voted in favor of a budget amendment to express "the sense of Senate" that any budget surplus should be used to reduce Social Security payroll tax and to establish personal retirement accounts. The vote — 50-48 in favor — largely came down along partisan lines. And in 2005, McCain supported President George W. Bush’s push to allow workers to divert a portion of the program’s payroll taxes to personal investment accounts. McCain supported Bush’s plan, going so far as to accompany the president on a series of town hall meetings in March 2005. The plan fizzled, though, and the initiative went down as one of Bush’s biggest defeats in domestic policy. McCain has since modified his stance. When we wrote about McCain’s plan back in April, McCain’s campaign Web site stated that McCain "supports supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts — but not as a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept. John McCain will reach across the aisle, but if the Democrats do not act, he will." That’s no longer on the Web site, and the McCain campaign did not respond to an e-mail seeking to clarify his position on Social Security. We’re not inclined to give McCain a pass just because he has failed to articulate his plan. But Obama’s statement is misleading, even when judged against McCain’s earlier support for Bush’s plan. First, Obama seems to be suggesting that today’s retirees would have had their Social Security tied up in the volatile stock market this week. The Bush plan for personal investment accounts would not have applied to those retirees currently getting Social Security. No one born before 1950 would have been eligible to participate in the investment plan; so only people 58 or younger. McCain stressed that point in a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on June 12, 2008. "I will not privatize Social Security, and it’s not true when I’m accused of that," McCain said. "But I would like for younger workers, younger workers only, to have an opportunity to take a few of their tax dollars, and maybe put it into an account with their name on it. That’s their money. ... And we will make sure that present-day retirees, I will commit, have the benefits that they have earned." We also think Obama may have been guilty of using some scare tactics here. For one, participation in the Bush program would have been entirely voluntary. Second, without signing a waiver, upon turning 47, the accounts would have been invested in a "life cycle portfolio," shifting from higher risk growth funds to secure bonds as people neared retirement (and thereby protecting near-retirees from sudden market swings). And last, people would have been able to set aside in their investment accounts only up to 4 percentage points of their payroll taxes (currently 12.4 percent), so only a little over a quarter of one’s Social Security taxes could have been invested. In short, it would have been impossible to see one’s entire nest egg disappear in a down market. And people would have been allowed to choose only from a small number of diversified index funds, preventing people from putting large portions of their retirement savings in just a few stocks. Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor told PolitiFact that Obama wasn’t necessarily talking about current retirees. "You don’t have to be retired to rely on Social Security," Vietor said. "Millions of people who will one day retire rely on Social Security as they plan their futures. Senator Obama’s bottom line is absolutely true. If McCain got his way and we had private accounts (a position he started articulating as early as 1998), people who are relying on that money for their retirement would be in a very difficult situation." There is a legitimate point to be made that to the extent that a person's Social Security plan is tied up in investment accounts, it is certainly subject to the vagaries of the stock market. But we are of the opinion that when Obama talked about "the millions of Floridians who rely on it" he was talking about current retirees. While McCain has remained vague about his plans for Social Security, he has never expressed support for a plan that would allow current retirees to invest a portion of their Social Security in stocks, and neither did the Bush plan McCain once backed. We rule Obama's statement False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-09-22T00:00:00	2008-09-20	['None']
-chct-00117	A Campaign Ad Says Joe Manchin Opposed Border Wall Funding - Did He?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/06/12/fact-check-joe-manchin-oppose-border-wall/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	10:17 PM 06/12/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01561	Says Michelle Nunn has acknowledged allowing a convicted felon to hold a fundraiser for her.	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2014/sep/12/ending-spending-action-fund/super-pac-attacks-nunn-fundraising-blunder/	The super PAC Ending Spending Fund is broadcasting another attack ad against Michelle Nunn, a politically pedigreed Democrat hoping to succeed Republican Saxby Chambliss as a U.S. Senator from Georgia. This time, it’s a radio ad simulating a man-on-the street interview with a potential female voter. In the ad, the announcer says: "According to news reports, she’s acknowledged allowing a convicted felon who is well known for his radical anti-American statements to actually hold a fundraiser for her." He then asked the unidentified woman: "Is there any wisdom in that thinking?" "I’m going to say "None," the woman responds. It’s part of a new campaign by Ending Spending that plays off Nunn’s well-known name. Her father, Sam Nunn was a respected moderate Democrat in the U.S. Senate for 24 years, from 1972 to 1997, who some considered White House or vice presidential material. The ad follows the theme of the super PAC’s new website, www.AbsolutelyNunn.com, which answers the question, is there any reason for Georgians to vote for her? But, PolitiFact Georgia wondered, is Nunn working with felons to win office? First, let’s look at Ending Spending Action Fund, formed by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts. As of Sept. 11, the group has spent nearly $2.8 million -- more than any other outside group -- on Georgia’s Senate race, according to OpenSecrets.org. The PAC favors Nunn’s GOP opponent, businessman David Perdue. Some of its money paid for ads during the contentious Republican primary earlier this year. The race is being closely watched, and heavily funded, nationally because of the tight battle for control of the U.S. Senate. It’s also a priority for state Democrats eager to reclaim a major statewide office. The Nunn-Perdue battle has drawn the fifth-most money from outside groups in Congressional races across the nation this year, $12.4 million on ads from both sides. That brings us back to the ad, which is a reference to the July 8 Washington, D.C. fundraiser that featured Sam Nunn as a special guest. Virtual Murrell is listed as one of the co-hosts of the event, giving $2,600 to Nunn’s campaign for the honor. Guests paid at least $250 to the campaign to attend, according to the invitation. Two days after the fundraiser, the conservative National Review broke the story that Murrell, now a political consultant, had pleaded guilty in 1995 to accepting a bribe while working as an Oakland (Calif.) City councilman’s aide. He was sentenced to a year in prison. Nunn expressed surprise at the news of Murrell’s history, which also includes a stint in the 1960s as a leader in the Black Panther movement. Her campaign declined this week to make her available to discuss the fundraiser and its fallout. Spokesman Nathan Click referred us to a statement released in July, which said Nunn was unaware of Murrell’s record and promised to return contributions linked to him. Click, however, declined to confirm the exact amount of money the campaign said was returned or to disclose how much money was tied to Murrell. "We didn't deposit any contributions from him or anything he raised for the event," Click said in a statement. We reached out to Murrell via email, to confirm that Nunn returned his donation and other he raised. He did not respond. We also contacted Brian Baker, Ending Spending’s president, who said Nunn has acknowledged Murrell, a convicted felon, co-hosted a fundraiser for her. That "is exactly what we say in the ad," Baker said. "The ad is 100 percent factual." The event wasn’t the campaign’s only embarrassing moment. In late August, a series of confidential memos were leaked, revealing Nunn’s campaign strategy and vulnerabilities. Ironically, those documents may support the campaign’s contention that Nunn didn’t know Murrell’s background. On page 57 of the 144-page document – after listing vulnerabilities such as being linked to President Obama and before several pages laying out campaign issues – is a category called "Vetting. It takes up less than a quarter of the page, most notably this one-sentence paragraph: "Currently, there are no plans to vet donors to the campaign," the memo said. Baker said finding out Murrell’s background "didn’t require a complicated vetting process" and was accessible with a basic Google search. PolitiFact Georgia has reviewed previous ad claims from the group, with mixed results. In August, Ending Spending ad’s claim that Michelle Nunn’s "foundation directed grants to an Islamic group tied to radical terrorists" earned a Mostly False. In July, we rated as Mostly True an Ending Spending claim that Nunn earned as much as $300,000 from Points of Light around the time it laid off 90 workers due to its merger with the nonprofit Hands on Network. Available information on the latest claim suggests Ending Spending’s new ad uses guilt by association in a bid to suggest Nunn knowingly wooed an inflammatory ex-convict to raise cash for her Senate bid. Nunn has repeatedly said she did not know Murrell’s history when she attended the fundraiser. She pledged to give back the money he raised, though the campaign and Murrell have not confirmed how much was determined to be linked to Murrell. Most of the statement from the Ending Spending attack ad is correct. A convicted felon did host a fundraiser for Michelle Nunn. Nunn has said she did not know anything about the man’s criminal background. And there is evidence from a leaked memo that her campaign was not vetting donors. The claim is accurate. But it leaves out some relevant details. We rate it Mostly True.	None	Ending Spending Action Fund	None	None	None	2014-09-12T00:00:00	2014-08-29	['None']
-pose-00371	"Will strengthen privacy protections for the digital age and will harness the power of technology to hold government and business accountable for violations of personal privacy."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/390/safeguard-the-right-to-privacy/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Safeguard the right to privacy	2010-01-07T13:26:57	None	['None']
-snes-01149	First Lady Melania Trump banned the White House staff from receiving flu shots.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/melania-trump-ban-flu-shot/	None	Junk News	None	David Emery	None	Did Melania Trump Ban White House Staff from Taking Flu Shot?	23 January 2018	None	['White_House']
-pomt-15193	"There’s a tremendous other number of public officials who have done the same thing" as Hillary Clinton with a private email server.	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/18/howard-dean/howard-dean-tremendous-number-public-officials-hav/	Morning Joe co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist tried a number of ways recently to get Howard Dean — former Democratic National Committee chairman and ardent Hillary Clinton supporter — to admit Clinton erred in using a private email server as secretary of state. Each time, Dean stood firm in his support for the Democratic presidential candidate. Geist then asked Dean how he would feel about a Republican doing what Clinton did. "Howard, is it fair to say if this were a Republican secretary of state, and someone you were not supporting for president," asked Geist, "you would be troubled by a secretary of state having a private email server in his or her home?" "No, I wouldn’t," Dean replied, cutting Geist off, "because I used to do that as governor, and I know there’s a tremendous other number of public officials who have done the same thing." Geist followed up, "And would only use a private server for State Department emails?" Dean demurred, saying whatever she was done was within the constraints of the law at the time. (Whether Clinton violated State Department protocols or the law is unclear.) We wanted to check Dean’s claim that he used a private server during his days in office and that the practice is widespread among politicians. Dean’s emails Clinton has drawn criticism for conducting government business through an email address privately hosted on a server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., instead of through the State Department's system. On Morning Joe, Dean equated her actions with his own, as well as a "tremendous" other number of officials. So we looked into Dean’s record for insight into his past email practices. We reached out to Dean through Democracy for America, the grassroots organizing group he founded, but didn’t get a response for the story. Dean, who was governor of Vermont from 1991 through 2003, faced questions about his email in 2001 when a concerned citizen requested to see his correspondence with a ski resort developer, according to an article in the Rutland Herald. Dean’s lawyers at the time said the emails were exempt from release because they were conducted through the governor’s private account. The article also mentions that Dean used neither a government-issued email address nor the computer supplied to him by the state. Vermont state archivist Tanya Marshall said Dean’s administration did not transfer any emails to the state records office at the end of his tenure. So Dean clearly used a private email account while he was governor. But we could find no evidence that he used a private server as well. And there's a difference. In fact, only one other politician is on record as doing the same: Clinton’s Republican presidential rival Jeb Bush. As Florida governor from 1999 to 2007, Bush used a private server for both his personal email account and the accounts of some of his staffers. Account vs. server Many politicians use private addresses, but private servers like the one Clinton had in her basement are rarely seen, said John Wonderlich, a policy director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group focused on government transparency. And there’s a big difference between a private account, which is generally free and simple to start, and a private server, which requires a more elaborate setup. Two other presidential candidates, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, used private email accounts hosted by large services like Google during their time in office. With services such as Gmail, messages they sent would have been stored on Google’s own servers around the world. While Google has a high level of security, email data stored on these kind of large commercial servers is often mined internally, for marketing purposes, for example, Wonderlich said. The Atlantic speculated the Clintons "may have wanted to be in control of the encryption of their correspondence, ensuring that no third parties — whether commercial, hacker, or government — were able to snoop on them." The unorthodox approach has opened up questions about her system’s level of security. Because the server was set up outside the State Department’s proverbial security fence, "any protection … aside from the physical protection of the Secret Service — would have been limited to the Clintons’ own personal resources," according to a March 2015 article in Wired. If the server was managed without the help of a third party, "you would have to have a staff that’s keeping up with all the latest fixes," said Clifford Neuman, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Computer System Security. "That can be hard with a small staff," he said. Clinton’s campaign says she used the private account and server out of convenience, and that "it enabled her to reach people quickly and keep in regular touch with her family and friends more easily given her travel schedule." While Clinton’s immediate predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, did not email extensively during her time in office, Colin Powell did use a private email address while he was secretary of state from 2001 to 2005. Powell, however, did not operate his own server. Our ruling In the context of discussing Hillary Clinton’s private email server for handling government business, Dean said, "I used to do that as governor, and I know there’s a tremendous other number of public officials who have done the same thing." It’s possible that Dean was trying to say that many public officials have used private email accounts. But by failing to mention that Clinton also set up her own server, he completely misses the point of Geist’s question. Besides Clinton, Jeb Bush is the only other official who used a personal server during his time in office. That does not speak to a "tremendous" trend. We rate Dean’s claim Mostly False.	None	Howard Dean	None	None	None	2015-08-18T16:50:41	2015-08-12	['None']
-goop-01864	Angelina Jolie Dating Cambodian Rapper PraCh Ly, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-prach-ly-dating-boyfriend-cambodian-rapper/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie NOT Dating Cambodian Rapper PraCh Ly, Despite Report	2:36 pm, January 10, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-06242	Actress Martha Raye entertained troops and tended to wounded soldiers in the field in Vietnam.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/martha-raye/	None	Entertainment	None	David Mikkelson	None	Martha Raye in Vietnam	22 August 2012	None	['Vietnam']
-tron-00428	The Cat That Dropped Out of Heaven	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/kitten-from-heaven/	None	animals	None	None	None	The Cat That Dropped Out of Heaven	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-vees-00208	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Actor Bill Pullman laughed at Robredo for 'copying' line from his movie	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-actor-bill-pullman-did-not-laugh-robre	None	None	None	None	fake news	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Actor Bill Pullman DID NOT laugh at Robredo for 'copying' line from his movie	May 11, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01146	"This Congress made history as the least productive, most unpopular Congress in the history of this proud nation."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2014/dec/18/pete-gallego/pete-gallego-says-congress-least-productive-popula/	Calling for less partisanship, a Texan leaving the U.S. House lamented the bickering and pettiness around him. But one-term Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego of Alpine also made a grander claim, saying in his Dec. 10, 2014, floor speech: "This Congress made history as the least productive, most unpopular Congress in the history of this proud nation." We failed to reach Gallego, who lost his 2014 re-election bid to Republican Will Hurd. But Anthony Gutierrez, who helped Gallego’s campaign, sent an email pointing out a May 2014 Vox web post showing the latest Congress was stacking up poorly in productivity and popularity compared to any Congress since the 1970s. Productivity We’ve gotten into congressional productivity before, rating True a May 2014 claim by Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, that with only 67 bills or so passed into law, "2013 was the least productive year in congressional history since we’ve been keeping record." The office of the U.S. House clerk offers one-page detailed numerical recaps of each year’s congressional proceedings dating back to 1947. And according to the latest tally available when we looked, 114 "public bills" were passed into law by the House and Senate from early January 2014 through Nov. 30, 2014. That was an improvement in that 73 measures made it into law from early January 2013 into early January 2014, according to another office tally. In our previous look at productivity, we found previous low-end years including 1995 (88 bills passed into law); 2011 (90); 1981 (145); 1969 (190) and 2012 (193). Per these counts, Congress fared better in 2014. But we take it that Gallego was referring to the full Congress, meaning his claim to history covered its two years in session. And the 113th Congress, which passed 187 measures into law through November 2014, trailed the productivity of previous ones by a wide margin, according to the clerk’s tallies. The previous least-productive Congress was in session in 1995-96, ultimately advancing 280 measures into law, according to the clerk’s count. Next-worst was the Congress that gathered in 2011-12, which had 283 laws to its account. Popularity Was the latest Congress, which adjourned days after Gallego spoke, the least popular in history? From early 2013 through October 2014, according to results compiled at pollingreport.com, some 73 percent to 85 percent of respondents to more than 20 Fox News polls disapproved of Congress. Per the latest results when we looked, 80 percent disapproved "of the job Congress is doing," 13 percent approved, 7 percent were unsure. That poll of registered voters, conducted Oct. 25-27 by Anderson Robbins Research and Shaw & Company Research, had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. In 2011-12, disapproval ratings in the Fox poll ranged from 60 percent of poll respondents to 83 percent, polllingreport.com says. In 2009-10, congressional disapproval ranged from 46 percent to 80 percent and in 2007-08, the disapproval range was from 44 percent to 77 percent, according to the website. In 2013-14, CBS News, asking poll respondents to approve or disapprove of "the way Congress is handling its job," found 75 percent to 85 percent disapproval. That range compared to CBS poll disapproval percentages of 62 to 84 percent in 2011-12; 55 to 82 percent in 2009-10; and 49 to 75 percent disapproval in 2007-08, pollingreport.com said. The latest result: 76 percent of 1,269 adults polled Oct. 23-27, 2014, disapproved, 14 percent approved, 10 percent were unsure; that poll had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. Those are pretty dismal figures (unless, say, you don’t have a stake in Congress being well liked and respected and so on). But they don’t prove the 113th Congress was the least popular ever. Polls through history We asked Brian W. Smith, a political scientist at St. Edward’s University, for perspective. By email, Smith cautioned there has only been careful regular polling on attitudes about Congress since the mid-1900s, meaning it’s impossible to say for certain the latest Congress is the least-popular ever. The Gallup polling organization has inquired into attitudes toward Congress since 1974 and only started asking monthly in 2001. Smith noted the results show Congress never proving very popular, except after the 9/11 attacks, when there was a spike to 84 percent of respondents approving of the job Congress was doing. Source: Research by Brian W. Smith, associate professor of political science, St. Edward’s University (received by email, Dec. 11, 2014) Since 2001, Smith said, the Gallup poll indicates the latest Congress to be the least popular. Source: Research by Brian W. Smith, associate professor of political science, St. Edward’s University (received by email, Dec. 11, 2014) "It is fair to say that… this Congress will have the lowest approval since we began collecting data. This is true as an average, and the 113th Congress has the lowest single approval at 9 percent, which was in November 2013." Smith reminded, though, there is often a caveat. Though Americans tend to hate Congress in general, he wrote, voters tend to like their local representative, which "means that" even in "times of congressional disdain, incumbents do very well at the polls," Smith said. By email, congressional scholar Norman Ornstein agreed polling on the popularity of Congress only goes back a few decades. That said, Ornstein replied, it seems clear "the last two congresses are at the very low end of the spectrum since we've been recording these things systematically." Our ruling Gallego said: "This Congress made history as the least productive, most unpopular Congress in the history of this proud nation." This claim lacked caveats: There wasn’t polling on the popularity of Congress for most of its existence and productivity has only be yard-sticked since 1947. That said, it looks like the 113th Congress was the least productive Congress in nearly 70 years and the least popular one since relevant polls launched in the 1970s. We rate this statement Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.sources.	None	Pete Gallego	None	None	None	2014-12-18T10:00:00	2014-12-10	['United_States_Congress']
-hoer-00686	South African Giant Rats Risk Alert	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/south-africa-giant-rats.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	South African Giant Rats Risk Alert	23rd June 2011	None	['None']
-afck-00418	South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world.	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/is-sa-worse-off-now-than-19-years-ago-the-facts-behind-that-facebook-post/	None	None	None	None	None	Is SA worse off now than 19 years ago? The facts behind THAT Facebook post	2013-11-28 05:16	None	['None']
-pomt-05716	Says pension contributions under Gov. Chris Christie would represent "75 percent of the total contribution made between the years 1995 and 2010. That's right, in 15 years, total state contribution was only $2.1 billion."	false	/new-jersey/statements/2012/mar/07/gary-chiusano/christies-pension-contributions-would-represent-75/	After just two years of making contributions to the state’s pension funds, Gov. Chris Christie apparently will be closing in on the total amount contributed by his five predecessors during a 15-year period. Well, that’s at least what one state assemblyman claimed in a recent TV appearance. With a combined pension contribution of nearly $1.6 billion over two fiscal years, Christie is on track to contribute 75 percent of the total state contribution made between 1995 and 2010, according to state Assemblyman Gary Chiusano (R-Sussex). Chiusano made that claim during a Feb. 26 interview on My9 News’ "New Jersey Now," when he appeared with Assemblyman Vincent Prieto (D-Hudson). The week before, the Republican governor unveiled his fiscal year 2013 budget, which includes a nearly $1.1 billion pension contribution. "Assemblyman Prieto is correct in terms of us funding the pensions by $1.1 billion, actually. And combine that with the contribution last year, the total…contribution by this Legislature and this governor is $1.6 billion," Chiusano told host Brenda Blackmon. "Brenda, that's 75 percent of the total contribution made between the years 1995 and 2010," Chiusano continued. "That's right, in 15 years, total state contribution was only $2.1 billion." PolitiFact New Jersey found that Chiusano needs to check his math, because he’s off by about $1.3 billion. Chiusano acknowledged in an e-mail that he mistakenly used the contributions made by former Gov. Jon Corzine to represent all of the contributions during that 15-year period. "You are correct. The figure I was using as a Grand Total was in fact a Sub Total," Chiusano told us. "The corrected statement in the future will be that Christie's total contributions to date will be 45.65% of the total contributed in 15 years of $3.4 billion. Thanks for catching that." Let’s explain how the pension payments break down. The governor’s fiscal year 2013 budget summary includes a page detailing pension contributions from fiscal year 1995 under then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman to Christie’s proposed payment for fiscal year 2013. According to that page, the combined state contribution between fiscal years 1995 and 2010 was about $3.4 billion -- not the $2.1 billion cited by Chiusano. Here’s the pension payments by governor: Governor Fiscal Years Total Pension Contribution Christine Todd Whitman (R) 1995-2001 $963,934,000 Donald DiFrancesco (R) 2002 $563,000 Jim McGreevey (D) 2003-2005 $101,424,000 Richard Codey (D) 2006 $165,026,000 Jon Corzine (D) 2007-2010 $2,175,596,000 All Five Governors 1995-2010 $3,406,543,000 Between payments in fiscal years 2012 and 2013, Christie’s total pension contribution would be $1,555,237,000, according to the budget summary. Based on that figure, Christie’s total contribution would represent about 45 percent of the total payment made between 1995 and 2010. That’s 30 percentage points less than the 75 percent claimed by Chiusano. Our ruling In a TV interview, Chiusano claimed that Christie’s total pension contribution would represent "75 percent of the total contribution made between the years 1995 and 2010. That's right, in 15 years, total state contribution was only $2.1 billion." But according to the state Treasury Department, Christie’s total payment of nearly $1.6 billion would represent about 45 percent of the roughly $3.4 billion contributed between 1995 and 2010. We rate this statement False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Gary Chiusano	None	None	None	2012-03-07T07:30:00	2012-02-26	['Chris_Christie']
-hoer-00139	Camel Spiders in Iraq	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/camel-spider-hoax-email.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Camel Spiders in Iraq Hoax Email	29th January 2010	None	['None']
-vogo-00505	Statement: “I heard $27 million for managed competition. That’s not achievable by July 1, 2011. That would assume that we managed competition out everything in the city that’s possible.” City Councilman Todd Gloria said at the voiceofsandiego.org Proposition D debate on Sept. 30.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-is-san-diego-outsourcing-everything/	Analysis: Much of the savings from Proposition D, the sales tax and financial reform ballot measure, is supposed to come from competitively bidding city services.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Is San Diego Outsourcing Everything?	October 14, 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-07020	Says that under City Council Member Randi Shade, Austin had the "highest city debt per person in Texas."	false	/texas/statements/2011/jul/06/better-austin-today-political-action-committee/austin-group-says-under-randi-shade-austin-has-had/	In a mailer backing Kathie Tovo over incumbent Austin City Council Member Randi Shade, the Better Austin Today political action committee recently said: "Under Randi Shade we have had ... the highest city debt per person in Texas." Numero uno? Jeff Jack, the group’s chairman, told us the debt ranking traces to survey results posted online by the Texas Municipal League from asking cities to share their debt levels. Jack said that he added up each city’s debt, listed on the survey, and divided that by each city’s population to come up with per-person totals; Austin, he said, finished first, at $6,291 per person. "There is quite a range when you start thinking about differences," Jack said. We turned next to the league, whose executive director, Bennett Sandlin, initially cautioned the survey results "are solely the result of city self-reporting" and have not been verified. At our request, the league took its survey results from 2008 through 2010 and calculated each responding city’s per-capita debt. Counting three types of debt -- general obligation, certificates of obligation and revenue-backed -- Austin ranked 10th among Texas cities in 2008 and 2009, at $5,643 per resident and $5,787, respectively, and ninth in 2010, at $6,291, Jack’s cited figure. Notably, much smaller cities showed greater per-person debt each of the years. In 2010, for instance, Johnson City and Galveston had more debt per person; the No. 1 per-person debt in the state appears to have been in Deport, which is 18 miles southeast of the East Texas city of Paris. So, Austin finished in the top 10 among cities that answered the survey, and it was by far the highest-ranking big city. In 2008 and 2009, cities with greater overall debt per capita topped out in population with Granbury, home to about 8,000 residents. Galveston, higher ranked in 2010, had 57,500 residents to Austin’s more than 750,000. However, Sandlin cautioned against making city-to-city debt comparisons that fold in outstanding revenue bonds. "The reason is that, unlike general-obligation and certificates-of-obligation debt, revenue bonds are typically not payable by the citizens through property taxes, but rather by the users of city utilities, such as water or electric (services)," he wrote. "Many city utilities serve areas far larger than city limits, so those debts are being serviced by non-citizens and thus might not be a fair measure of how much debt the citizens bear." In Austin’s case, Austin Energy, the city-owned electric utility serving residents of Austin plus the rest of Travis County and a portion of Williamson County, has more than $1 billion in outstanding revenue-backed debt and the city’s water utility, airport and convention center together account for more than $2 billion in revenue-supported debt, according to Art Alfaro, the city treasurer. Those debts, to rehash, are to be paid from revenue by the entities that issued them--and not from property tax dollars. Alfaro said in an interview that any fair city-to-city debt comparisons should be limited to general-obligation debt, the only kind backed by property taxes. Austin’s more than $800 million in this type of debt reflects bonds issued to build streets, libraries, parks and anything needed to run the city, he said, the vast majority approved by voters. Removing Austin’s revenue-backed debt changes its ranking considerably, the league’s survey results show. By this gauge, Austin was 208th among responding cities, at $871 per resident, in 2008 and 120th in 2009 and 2010, at $1,213 and $1,258, respectively. Not counting revenue-backed debt, among larger cities, Lubbock and Richardson had greater per-capita debt in 2010 and Houston’s per-capita debt was more than the debt for Austin in 2008 and 2009. By email, Jack said not counting revenue-backed debt doesn’t make sense: "If a business entity has a cost increase it passes that cost along to the consumer. In the same way revenue bonds, though not going through the (city’s) general fund, increase the cost indirectly through higher utility rates, user fees and the like," Jack said. It "all adds up … it is the total cost that must be considered." Separately, we asked Standard & Poor’s, which bestows credit ratings to cities, how it would analyze the per-capita debts of Texas cities. Dallas-based analyst Horatio Aldrete said the firm puts Austin’s "net debt"--less revenue-related debt but taking into account the general-obligation debts of overlapping jurisdictions such as Travis County and the Austin school district--at $3,664 per person. That’s compared to $3,600 in Dallas, $3,611 in Fort Worth, $4,700 in San Antonio and $4,000 in Houston. Austin, Aldrete said, is "kind of middle of the pack." Aldrete said it doesn’t fold in revenue-related debts because those are absorbed by rate payers, not the city. The firm’s Austin report says it raised its rating of Austin’s debt to "AAA" in 2008 "based on the likelihood that the city's employment base and fiscal policies should allow it to maintain its strong financial condition even during economic fluctuations such as the current recession." Our take? Taking into account all debts linked to the city, including revenue-backed debt, Austin didn’t rank first among Texas cities. And by a fairer comparison--focused on debts funded from property taxes--Austin landed way short of tops in Texas. Also, the statement’s laying of responsibility for the debt ranking on a single council member is unsupported. We rate the claim False.	None	Better Austin Today Political Action Committee	None	None	None	2011-07-06T06:00:00	2011-06-18	['Texas', 'Austin,_Texas']
-pomt-14483	Says Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty "claims to have taken a pay cut, but for 2016, he voted to raise his salary by 19.6 percent."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2016/feb/26/jason-nassour/challenger-levels-mostly-false-claim-about-gerald-/	With early voting in motion, Travis County Precinct 3 Commissioner candidate Jason Nassour charged his Republican primary opponent, incumbent Gerald Daugherty, with hypocritically voting himself a fat pay raise. "Your current county commissioner claims to have taken a pay cut, but for 2016, he voted to raise his salary by 19.6 percent," Nassour said on Facebook Feb. 18, 2016. SOURCE: Facebook post, Jason Nassour, Feb. 18, 2016 (screenshot Feb. 26, 2016) The first part of Nassour’s claim points to Daugherty touting his own fiscal frugality. On Daugherty’s campaign website, for instance, he says he has "taken an 8 percent pay decrease in each of the nine years he has been in office." That’s nine years in two chunks: Daugherty, a businessman, recaptured the seat representing western Travis County on the five-person commissioners court in 2012 after losing the spot in 2008. The other seats, including the county judge’s post, are held by Democrats. Nassour’s backup We asked Nassour, an Austin attorney, where he got his number for Daugherty’s vote for a steep salary increase. Nassour pointed us to a screenshot on his campaign Facebook page showing a portion of a Travis County budget document laying out the salary and benefits of the Precinct 3 commissioner in the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years and as proposed for the fiscal 2016 budget. By phone, Nassour said: "I took this right off the county website. I’ll be the first one to come out and say I’m wrong, but I’m in the business of looking at what’s on paper." The provided screenshot indicates $82,600 was to be spent on the Precinct 3 commissioner’s salary in 2015 and in the column for the fiscal 2016 proposed budget, the budgeted salary for the commissioner is $101,417, seemingly suggesting an even greater, 23 percent, surge than what Nassour declared. By phone, Nassour said he got the lower 19.6 percent figure by dividing $82,600 by $101,417 and subtracting the result from 1. Our sense: That’s not how to calculate the percentage difference (and by Nassour’s approach, we reached a different result, 18.6). County records To get a fix on the relevant figures, we turned to county records where we couldn’t find the $82,600 salary for 2015 in posted budget documents. On the county’s website, that is, the relevant document lists the Precinct 3 commissioner salary in 2015 as $90,109, identical to what the county spent on the salary the year before. To our request for clarification, Travis Gatlin, the county’s budget director, said it looked like Nassour compared actual amounts spent in 2014 and 2015 to the amount budgeted for the commissioner’s salary in 2016. His point: Actual amounts spent can be less than what the county budgets at the start of a fiscal year. By phone, Gatlin also said Nassour’s source documents appeared to be out of date. While the finalized budget was posted once approved at the end of September 2015, figures showing actual spending in 2015 were updated in mid-December 2015, Gatlin said, after expenditures were finalized for the fiscal year, which ran through September 2015, and all payroll information had been filed. The amount budgeted for each of the four county commissioner salaries in fiscal 2015, for instance, was $98,463. But in the 12 months, the county paid $90,109 for Daugherty’s salary, according to the budget’s 2015 actual expenditures data when we looked in late February 2016. Daugherty’s proclaimed lower pay So, take what Daugherty took in pay in 2015 and that breaks out to about 8 percent less than the budgeted base salary for each commissioner that year--as Daugherty says on his campaign website. But that’s not the full picture. After Daugherty rejoined the body in 2013, he accepted a salary of $90,109 for fiscal 2013, according to his signed affidavit. At the time, that was about 5.7 percent less (not 8 percent less) than the budgeted salary for each commissioner. In September 2015, most recently, Daugherty signed an affidavit saying he would take a salary of $93,000 in fiscal 2016, which was up $2,891, 3.2 percent, from what he took in pay for 2015. (If he had accepted the authorized $101,417, his pay would have increased nearly 13 percent, we calculate.) Daugherty’s vote Even if Daugherty didn’t take all of the higher base salary, did he vote for increasing it? When the commissioners began to consider raising their base salaries from $98,463 to $101,417, Daugherty voted against beginning the process of approving 3 percent raises for most county elected officials, according to the minutes of the body’s Aug. 11, 2015 meeting. An Austin American-Statesman news story published about the decisive meeting quotes Daugherty saying he thought the commissioners "ought to try to lead by example in elected officials," adding he would prefer if elected officials were required to ask the county for raises rather than garnering across-the-board salary increases. Records show, further, that Daugherty was absent from the Sept. 1, 2015, meeting at which the commissioners court set each commissioner’s 2016 salary at $101,417. Later, though, Daugherty joined his colleagues in voting for adoption of the full 2016 county budget, including the salary changes, at the body’s Sept. 29, 2015 meeting, according to meeting minutes. "When you vote for the budget, at the end it’s sort of a formality," Daugherty told us by phone. "The budget is done at that stage … It’s one of our responsibilities, and that happens every year. You don’t vote against the budget because there’s one thing you voted against." We shared the figures we found with Nassour, who said by phone that he believes he was misled by budget information posted by the county in September 2015. With regards to Daugherty’s reasoning on his vote for approval of the budget, Nassour said, "If you vote for the budget, you vote for what’s in it. I know that’s hard, because when you’re looking at the budget you’re looking at a lot … If there are things in the budget I don’t approve of, it’s my job not to vote for it" or "say I stand by it." Our ruling Nassour said Daugherty "claims to have taken a pay cut, but for 2016, he voted to raise his salary by 19.6 percent." It looks to us like Daugherty initially opposed certain pay raises for 2016 including those penciled in for commissioners. Still, he later voted for the budget including the raises. However, he personally set his own increased salary at an amount some $8,400 less than the newly authorized salary for commissioners. His pay went up 3.2 percent, not nearly 20 percent. We rate this claim Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Jason Nassour	None	None	None	2016-02-26T21:52:27	2016-02-18	['None']
-snes-03645	President Obama, Elizabeth Warren and other top Democratic officials have distanced themselves from Hillary Clinton by unfollowing her on social media.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-warren-unfollow-hillary-clinton/	None	Politicians	None	Dan Evon	None	Obama, Warren Unfollow Hillary Clinton	2 November 2016	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton', 'Elizabeth_Warren']
-pomt-02928	Terry McAuliffe "wants to raise your taxes $1,700 to pay for his infinite promises."	false	/virginia/statements/2013/nov/01/ken-cuccinelli/cuccinelli-says-mcauliffe-wants-raise-average-fami/	Republican Ken Cuccinelli is closing his gubernatorial campaign with warnings to Virginia families about the price they’ll pay if Democrat Terry McAuliffe wins Tuesday’s election. "Terry also wants to raise your taxes $1,700 to pay for his infinite promises," Cuccinelli said during the final gubernatorial debate on Oct. 24. He’s makes the same claim on a number of ads, including a TV spot released on Oct. 29 that says, "Terry McAuliffe’s plan: expand Obamacare, increase spending, raise your taxes by $1,700." The tax charge originates from Cuccinelli’s estimate of the fiscal impact of various promises he says McAuliffe has made. Let’s look at how the Republican arrived at that number. Cuccinelli says the McAuliffe’s pledges add up to $14 billion in new spending over the next four years. About $12 billion of that sum stems from statements McAuliffe has made on three issues: public school funding, college debt and public teacher pay. On K-12 education, Cuccinelli points to a section on page 11 of McAuliffe’s platform where the Democrat laments cuts to school funding that the state made during the Great Recession and has not fully restored. "It’s time to restore those standards and make sure our schools have the tools they need to get the job done," McAuliffe’s platform says. Cuccinelli interprets that statement as a McAuliffe pledge to fully restore education money at the start of his administration. The Republican cites research by The Commonwealth Institute, a liberal think tank, which found that in inflation-adjusted numbers, the per-pupil general fund spending for K-12 students was about $5,000 during the 2007-08 school year fiscal year, but only about $4,000 this school year. With enrollment data from the Virginia Department of Education showing about 1.2 million K-12 students in 2012-13, Cuccinelli estimates that restoring per-pupil funding to 2007 levels would cost more than $1.2 billion annually, or $5 billion over a four-year McAuliffe term. The second biggest expense, Cuccinelli says, would come from what he interprets to be McAuliffe’s position on college debts assumed by Virginia undergraduates. Page 12 of McAuliffe’s platform says, "Every student deserves the opportunity to get a quality education and start their working lives without the burden of debt." Cuccinelli says that means McAuliffe is vowing to clear all Virginia students’ debts. Using figures from the Institute for College Access, which estimated that 2011 college graduates receiving a bachelor’s degree in Virginia had an average debt of $14,628, Cuccinelli estimated it would cost $667 million to pay off the loans of the entire class. Once rising enrollments and debt loads are taken into account, Cuccinelli says the total cost of this policy would be nearly $3.9 billion over the next four years. Cuccinelli also says McAuliffe has vowed to raise teacher pay in Virginia to the national average. He points to a May 25 speech in Manassas in which McAuliffe said, "as governor, I want to make sure that we pay our teachers the national average in order for us to get the best possible teachers." Cuccinelli took figures from the National Education Association showing there are 103,908 teachers in Virginia. During the 2011-2012 school year, Virginia instructors earned an average of $48,703. That was $6,715 below the national average of $55,418. Cuccinelli estimates it would cost about $700 million a year -- or $2.8 billion over four years -- to end the disparity. To compute the tax cost per family, Anna Nix, a Cuccinelli spokeswoman, says the campaign divided its estimated four-year, $14 billion cost of McAuliffe’s full agenda by four, which comes to $3.5 billion annually. Cuccinelli’s camp divided that yearly cost by the state’s population of 8.2 million and arrived at an estimate of $427 per person. So an average four-person family would pay slightly more than $1,700, Nix reasons. Josh Schwerin, a McAuliffe spokesman, dismisses Cuccinelli’s calculations, saying his campaign "is just making up numbers." "Terry has no plans to raise taxes," Schwerin said in an e-mail. He also denied that McAuliffe has made any of the three major promises Cuccinelli attributes to him. He said that McAuliffe’s comments on restoring public school funding, raising teacher salaries to the national average and easing college students’ debts merely reflect his boss’s "spending priorities." "It would be irresponsible to say how much you’re going to spend before knowing how much revenue there will be," Schwerin wrote. Cuccinelli’s $1,700-a-year tax estimate assumes McAuliffe will accomplish all of his policy ambitions during his first months in office without reducing any governmental expenses. McAuliffe has pledged to "save millions of taxpayers dollars through operational efficiencies," but his plan is not greatly detailed. He’s broadly called for reducing government energy costs, cutting state employee travel expenditures and streamlining agencies. Cuccinelli’s estimate assumes there will be no increase in state revenues during a McAuliffe governorship, ignoring that general fund tax receipts have risen by an annual average of 3.7 percent over the last three years. It also assumes McAuliffe will fail to convince the General Assembly to expand Virginia’s Medicaid program to reap federal dollars available under Obamacare. There may be good reason for Cuccinelli’s hunch: the Republican-led House is staunchly opposed to the enlargement. McAuliffe says the expansion could produce $500 million a year in new revenues and savings, but some predict analysts predict the annual yield may only be $50 million. Cuccinelli’s tax estimate also ignores some standard practices in state budgeting. For example, it assumes that the state would pay the entire cost of raising average teacher salaries to the national average. Virginia traditionally shares the cost of increasing teachers’ pay with localities. Our ruling Cuccinelli says McAuliffe wants to raise taxes by $1,700 annually for an average four-person family to pay for his "promises." The major problem is that Cuccinelli’s claim is based on his own interpretation of McAuliffe’s agenda. He assumes, for example, that McAuliffe’s statement that college graduates "deserve the opportunity" to start their careers without the burden of student debts is a promise that the state will pay off their loans, starting his first year in office. He assumes McAuliffe’s statement that "it’s time" to restore per-pupil funding in public schools to pre-recession levels is a vow to do that instantly. Then, Cuccinelli takes his assumptions and multiplies them by a stew of worst-case scenarios to come up with his unreliable tax estimate. We don’t fault Cuccinelli for demanding specifics on McAuliffe’s agenda; the Democrat has addressed issues with a broad brush throughout the campaign. It’s fair to ask how McAuliffe would accomplish his objectives and keep his word not to raise taxes. But that doesn’t give Cuccinelli the license to create a platform for his rival. We rate his claim False.	None	Ken Cuccinelli	None	None	None	2013-11-01T13:47:05	2013-10-24	['None']
-tron-00137	Wendy’s Uses Horse Meat in Chili and Burgers	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/wendys-uses-horse-meat-in-chili-and-burgers/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Wendy’s Uses Horse Meat in Chili and Burgers	Nov 24, 2015	None	['None']
-afck-00354	“In 2009 the number of contact crimes was 1,407 per 100,000 people. In 2012 the number of contact crimes was 1,233 per 100,000 people.”	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/has-the-anc-moved-south-africa-forward-we-examine-key-election-claims/	None	None	None	None	None	Has the ANC moved South Africa forward? We examine key claims	2014-04-30 10:32	None	['None']
-snes-04911	The Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) wants to cancel Memorial Day and replace it with a holiday honoring "Muslim terrorists."	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cair-memorial-day-terrorists/	None	Military	None	Kim LaCapria	None	CAIR Wants to Change Memorial Day to Honor Terrorists?	15 April 2016	None	['Council_on_American–Islamic_Relations', 'Islam', 'Memorial_Day']
-pomt-08986	"I said no to higher taxes and fees."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2010/jul/15/ellyn-bogdanoff/bogdanoff-said-she-was-against-taxes-omits-votes/	In one of the biggest Republican primary battles in South Florida, two state legislators -- Ellyn Bogdanoff of Fort Lauderdale and Carl Domino of Jupiter -- will face off Aug. 24 to replace Sen. Jeff Atwater, who is running for CFO. To appeal to conservative primary voters, Bogdanoff tries to portray herself in a TV ad as protecting Floridians from higher taxes. Her ad, set against the backdrop of orchestral music and showing images of people struggling to pay bills, emphasizes her role as chair of the Finance and Tax Council -- a position she held for the 2009 and 2010 sessions. Bogdanoff and her husband Steve are seated at what looks like a kitchen table in the ad (it's in a neighbor's home). "The economic downturn has been tough on a lot of people. We've had record job losses and a budget shortfall for state government. As chair of the Finance and Tax Council, the insiders and special interests pushed me to raises taxes. But higher taxes would only make it harder for the people of Florida to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how to make ends meet. I don't represent special interests. I represent the people of Florida so I said no to higher taxes and fees and I will continue that fight in the state Senate." In this Truth-O-Meter item, we explore whether Bogdanoff "said no to higher taxes and fees." The ad is not the first time she has made a similar claim. On her website, Bogdanoff writes: "As Chair of Finance & Tax in the Florida House I have stood against every proposed tax increase. During these challenging economic times, increasing taxes on millions of hard-working Floridians is just simply wrong and is counter–productive to the positive steps we are taking to get the economic engine of Florida moving again." The Truth-O-Meter previously ruled as True a claim by Sen. Charlie Justice, who is running for Congress, that the 2009 Legislature raised taxes and fees by almost $2 billion. A handy spreadsheet from the state Office of Economic and Demographic Research details the laws passed in 2009 that affected state revenue. They include: • $935 million from a $1-per-pack tax increase on cigarettes. • $797 million from sharp fee increases to get a driver's license or new car tags. • $304 million in higher business taxes to replenish Florida's bankrupt unemployment compensation trust fund. • $195 million from fee increases for filing various types of court motions. The bottom-line projection added up to about $2.2 billion in new taxes and fees. We looked at a few of those bills to determine how Bogdanoff voted. • She voted in favor of the conference report for Senate Bill 1778 -- a transportation bill that increased fees for certain title certificates. A bill analysis listed several fees that would increase under the bill related to obtaining crash reports, driver licenses and registrations. • She voted against Bill 1840, the cigarette surcharge tax. • She voted in favor of bill 1718, which raised court fees. • She voted in favor of Bill 810, which made employers subject to higher rates of taxation for unemployment compensation benefits. (The Legislature delayed the increase the next year.) Bogdanoff also voted for the overall budget bill in 2009, which reflected the overall $2.2 billion in new taxes and fees. We sent our findings to Bogdanoff's campaign and asked for an explanation. Bogdanoff called us back directly. She says we can't interpret her ad to mean she never voted for a tax or fee increase -- she doesn't use the word "vote" in her ad. By "I said no," Bogdanoff said, "I mean advocate, said no, stated my position, tried to sway everybody. I'm the one who says no to higher taxes and fees. ... I did not win the battle in 2009. Ultimately I made the decision to vote for a responsible balanced budget." Bogdanoff has made a name for herself as a legislator who fights tax increases, as several news articles show. It's clear that she resisted raising taxes early in the 2009 session. She also made moves to try to prohibit tax increases -- for example, refusing to move forward a bill that would have allowed Miami-Dade residents to vote on a sales tax for Miami-Dade College in 2009. In a Feb. 25, 2009, Miami Herald article about House Republicans being against tax increases, Bogdanoff said: "The average citizen is going to say, 'Don't take money from me, go find it in the budget,' " she said. "I don't care if it's a cigarette tax or a liquor tax, it's still a tax." While the Senate was exploring a range of options including taxes on cigarettes and beer distributors and raising fees to resolve a $3 billion deficit, Bogdanoff resisted, according to a March 26, 2009, Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times article. "The quick thing to do is just simply raise revenue," Bogdanoff was quoted in that article -- and was paraphrased as saying she would resist as long as it takes, even if that led to an overtime session. "If you come to me and say, 'Do you want to have a longer session or do you want to raise taxes?' I'll take the longer session, " she said. In a May 3, 2009, Miami Herald article, she suggested eliminating property taxes altogether: "What we need to do is . . . start all over again," she said. "If we could figure out how to get rid of property taxes altogether, our economy would be incredibly built." During that session, she repeatedly fought against a cigarette tax and then voted against it. A Dec. 18, 2009, Sun-Sentinel Florida Politics blog stated that Bogdanoff said eliminating the corporate income tax was her top priority because it would make Florida attractive for corporations looking to relocate. A May 2, 2010, profile of her in the Miami Herald stated that during this year's session she successfully negotiated more than $218 million in tax breaks and economic incentives designed to stimulate the Florida economy. In response to the ad, the Sun-Sentinel Florida Politics blog wrote July 13 that Bogdanoff "did send public signals to House leadership in 2009 not to send any of the $2.2 billion in higher taxes and fees through her committee. But she did vote for them on the House floor." That blog best sums up Bogdanoff's actions: She spoke loudly and clearly that she was against making Floridians pay more -- but ultimately she wanted to be a team player and voted for the budget. Bogdanoff defends her ad because she says it doesn't refer to her votes -- it refers to what she "said" in her role as chair of the Finance and Tax Council. We agree that she spoke against tax increases -- but ultimately politicians are judged by their votes. Many observers of her ad could interpret "I said no to higher taxes and fees" to mean that she she voted against them. That critical detail, that she voted for some of them, is left out and leaves a different impression. We rate this claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Ellyn Bogdanoff	None	None	None	2010-07-15T17:07:16	2010-07-13	['None']
-snes-02183	A child who wore a Stearns Puddle Jumper life jacket while swimming experienced difficulty breathing and "severe bruising on her rib."	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/puddle-jumper-life-jackets/	None	Business	None	David Emery	None	Are Puddle Jumper Life Jackets Hazardous to Children?	19 June 2017	None	['None']
-tron-03387	“A German’s View on Islam” by Dr. Emanuel Tanay	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/tanay-merek-german-islam/	None	religious	None	None	None	“A German’s View on Islam” by Dr. Emanuel Tanay	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Islam', 'Germany']
-goop-02543	Taylor Swift Pushing Joe Alwyn To Go Public With Relationship?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-push-joe-alwyn-relationship-public-romance/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Taylor Swift Pushing Joe Alwyn To Go Public With Relationship?	7:03 pm, August 23, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-05284	"Obama’s flush with cash, returning to Wall Street for even more money. … Wall Street sure supports President Obama."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2012/may/24/american-future-fund/american-future-fund-wall-street-obama/	President Barack Obama called out "fat cat bankers on Wall Street," but those wealthy bankers sure help him out when he needs campaign donations, says an ad on the air in Florida dubbed "Obama’s Wall Street." It’s from the conservative organization American Future Fund. Here’s the script: Obama: "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street." Narrator: "But guess who gave $42 million to Obama’s last campaign for president: Wall Street bankers and financial insiders, more than any other candidate in history. But Obama voted for the Wall Street bailout. His White House is full of Wall Street executives … ." (The ad then shows photos and lists the names in the White House "inner circle.") The narrator continues: "Now, Obama’s flush with cash, returning to Wall Street for even more money. Obama won’t admit to supporting Wall Street, but Wall Street sure supports President Obama." There are a lot of claims in that ad, and our friends at FactCheck.org have already picked apart the list of 27 officials the ad shows, and whether they really are White House inner circle folks and former Wall Street executives. Many of them aren’t. (FactCheck also wrote that the fund later tweaked the ad.) For our fact-check, we will focus on whether "Wall Street sure supports Obama." The ad’s message is that the president is Wall Street’s favored candidate, and that he is cleaning up in Wall Street donations this cycle, just like he did in 2008. The ad was launched in February, but we've seen it on television in Florida in May. A February press release from the fund stated the $4 million buy covered nine states, including Florida, Ohio and Virginia. We contacted the fund to ask if it had any additional citations beyond what was in the ad and did not get a response. First, some background about the American Future Fund: It states on its website that it advocates "conservative, free market ideals," and its president is an Iowa state senator. Many of the group’s ads target Obama. The New York Times reported that the group was started with seed money from an ethanol executive. The Center for Responsive Politics, which analyzes campaign donations, wrote in 2010 that the American Future Fund received about half of its $23 million from the Center to Protect Patients Rights, a group that gave donations to groups opposed to the federal health care law or abortion. Obama’s vote as a senator and the 2008 campaign The ad is correct when it states that while a senator Obama voted in favor of the Wall Street bailout (H.R. 1424) on Oct. 1, 2008. He was one of 74 senators, along with his Republican presidential opponent John McCain, to vote in favor. The ad then cites fundraising data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group which analyzes campaign donations. We looked at CRP’s data ourselves for the 2008 and 2012 presidential races. During the 2008 campaign, Obama raised about $42.8 million from the finance/insurance/real estate industry -- far above McCain’s haul of about $31.1 million. (FactCheck.org wrote that Obama’s haul was more than George W. Bush’s in 2004 even when adjusted for inflation.) The center breaks down that finance/insurance/real estate industry into more detail, including securities and investment, which outreach coordinator Evan Mackinder said would be the most specific way to characterize Wall Street donations. Obama raised about $16 million from the securities and investment industry, while McCain raised about $9.4 million. The ad cites the $42 million figure -- the larger and broader number -- rather than the more specific securities and investment number, but the ad can take some leeway on that point, because it described it as "Wall Street and financial insiders." After Obama became president and pushed for financial reform, his relationship with some in the finance sector soured. We found many news reports documenting that tension. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, founded the investment firm Bain Capital and has had friendly relations with Wall Street and secured millions from those donors. Romney said he would repeal the Dodd-Frank regulations and has been vague about other reforms that he would enact to avoid the 2008 financial meltdown. Obama and Romney donations in the 2012 race Through April, Romney is in the lead in donations from finance/insurance/real estate and, within that, the securities and investment industry, according to a May analysis written by the Center for Responsive Politics. Romney has raised about $19.2 million from the finance/insurance/real estate including about $8.5 million from the securities and investment industry, according to the center’s analysis. Obama has raised about $8.4 million in the finance/insurance/real estate, including about $3 million from securities and investment. That means Romney has raised between double and triple Obama’s haul from the securities and investment sector. If we look at the donations proportionally, it would show that the securities sector funded about 3 percent of Obama’s haul and 10 percent of Romney’s. (This doesn’t provide a full picture since the center’s analysis is for donations that were more than $200 a pop -- in the case of Obama that means about $99 million of his $217 million is reflected in the analysis by industry.) The analysis shows that the securities/investment industry is the second-largest source of donations for Romney, behind the "retired" category. It comes in fifth for Obama, behind retired, lawyers, education and business services. The securities/investment donations are even more lopsided for the super PACs: the Restore Our Future pro-Romney PAC raised about about $21 million from that industry while the Priorities USA Action pro-Obama PAC raised about $218,500. The center wrote in a March blog post that the ad uses its data to make a misleading point when it states that "Wall Street sure supports President Obama": In a separate March 2012 article, the center stated that between his campaign committee and a PAC, Romney had received about 72 percent of the near $33 million in Wall Street donations through February. "The sheer amount of cash Wall Street has sent Romney represents an extremely lopsided giving pattern. No other presidential candidate, including President Barack Obama, comes close to tapping the motherlode of industry riches. The industry's abandonment of Obama could hardly be more dramatic: Wall Street's preferred candidate in the 2008 race with more than $6 million in industry campaign contributions at this point in the cycle, he has received less than $2.6 million from the industry so far this time around." News articles cited in ad The American Future Fund ad flashes headlines or information from a few news articles. But we found the ad cherry-picked a few of its sources. • The ad shows a partial headline from an October 2011 Washington Post story: "Obama still flush with cash from financial sector." The rest of that headline, which was omitted from the ad, stated, "despite frosty relations." The article explains that Obama had raised more from the financial and banking sector than Romney but not when putting aside Democratic National Committee money. • The ad cites the headline from a February 2012 Bloomberg article "Obama returns to NYC for Wall Street fundraiser." That article includes this sentence: "So far this election cycle, he hasn’t been able to match the success he had four years ago in getting money from Wall Street." Our ruling The American Future Fund’s ad says, "Obama’s flush with cash, returning to Wall Street for even more money. … Wall Street sure supports President Obama." It is true that Obama has received millions of dollars from Wall Street this cycle. But the intention of the ad is to suggest that Obama is Wall Street’s preferred candidate, just like in 2008. In reality, the numbers don’t bare that out -- Romney is the preferred candidate, based on both campaign contributions and news coverage. The fund’s ad relies on data from Center for Responsive Politics, but it uses the data in a misleading way. Whether we looked at the broader finance/insurance/real estate industry or the more narrow securities and investment sector, the Romney campaign is far ahead of the Obama campaign in dollars. We rate the statement Mostly False.	None	American Future Fund	None	None	None	2012-05-24T18:12:18	2012-02-27	['Barack_Obama', 'Wall_Street', 'New_York_Stock_Exchange']
-pomt-13920	Says Ron Johnson referred to "The Lego Movie" as an "insidious anti-business conspiracy."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2016/jun/24/russ-feingold/did-ron-johnson-call-lego-movie-anti-business-cons/	It’s not every day a U.S. Senate election includes conspiracy claims over an animated children’s movie and a staffer dispatched to visit an opponent dressed as "Lord Business." It felt like something we should check out. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, took hits from bloggers in May 2015 after criticizing "The Lego Movie" for pushing an anti-business message. Amid a contentious election that could swing the balance of power in the Senate, challenger Russ Feingold has repeatedly revisited Johnson’s statements, including June 3, 2016, at the state Democratic Party convention in Green Bay. Amid one of many reminders that he had visited all 72 Wisconsin counties, Feingold said this: "Something else I didn’t hear around the state is that, as Sen. Johnson said, that ‘The Lego Movie’ — he said this — that ‘The Lego Movie’ is an insidious, anti-business conspiracy. I didn’t hear that. My grandkids don’t even think that." Did a sitting U.S. senator claim Hollywood is in cahoots with anti-business forces elsewhere to bring their insidious doctrine to the masses? What Johnson said "The Lego Movie" — which was released in February 2014 and brought in almost $500 million worldwide — follows the exploits of an extraordinarily average Lego construction worker named Emmet. The Washington Post described him as "an unthinking worshipper at the consumerist temples that President Business has erected to distract his citizens from Business’ evil plan to freeze them into a state of perfection." In short, President Business — later revealed to be the sinister Lord Business — is trying to glue all the Legos together to keep everything in its proper place, and Emmet and his team of master builders want to maintain freedom and creativity. We eventually learn the plot stems from the imagination of a young boy playing with Legos belonging to his businessman father, who plans to, yes, glue them together to keep everything in its proper place. So what did Johnson say? From March to May 2015 he commented on the movie in various forums including comments to the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram and Wispolitics.com, a small group in Cedarburg and in a since-deleted blog post on his official Senate site. In the various comments, Johnson made multiple references to leftist control of education and the media and repeatedly referred to "The Lego Movie" as anti-business, though not in those direct words. As WisPolitics.com, phrased it in a May 28, 2015, post, Johnson "lamented what he called a ‘cultural attitude’ that ‘government is good and business is bad,’ giving as an example the animated ‘Lego’ movie, in which the villain is called ‘Lord Business.’ "That's done for a reason," Johnson told the site. "They're starting that propaganda, and it's insidious." Johnson noted in his blog post the same day that his comments were inspired by a Wall Street Journal column criticizing the anti-business tone of the movie. So Johnson clearly called the movie ‘insidious’ and implied it was anti-business, but there’s no conspiracy claim. (Merriam-Webster defines a conspiracy as "a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal.") When questioned on the "conspiracy" claim, Feingold’s campaign provided a dozen links to stories on Johnson and "The Lego Movie," but no evidence that Johnson had called it a conspiracy. A Feingold spokesman noted only that Johnson mentioned the movie to the Leader-Telegram two days after describing to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce how "the radical left" controls the university system, education system, news media, entertainment media and "more and more of our courts." The coverage of that talk also did not include any more direct reference to a conspiracy. And the conspiracy claim was notably absent when Feingold’s campaign hammered Johnson on "The Lego Movie" several weeks before the Democratic convention speech. The campaign issued a news release May 14 and even sent a press assistant to Johnson’s Milwaukee office dressed as Lord Business, asserting he and Johnson were friends. The character offered to endorse the senator if he supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement backed by the Obama administration. Is the movie anti-business? As long as we’re on the topic, are Johnson and other commentators right to call the movie anti-business? However you summarize the plot, it is a feature-length piece of product placement, which seems a curious frame for anti-business propaganda. And while being "anti-business" is an opinion, it’s worth noting the creators at least didn’t intend it that way. Philip Lord, who co-wrote and co-directed the movie, described it as an "anti-totalitarian film for children. Something that was talking about the importance of freedom and innovation in keeping society honest." When asked to respond on Twitter to the anti-business claims last year, Lord said: "Art deserves many interpretations, even wrong ones." Our rating Feingold told a hall full of Democrats that his opponent called "The Lego Movie" an "insidious, anti-business conspiracy." Johnson used the word "insidious" to describe the movie on multiple occasions and repeatedly referred to it as anti-business, though not in so many words. But Feingold is wrong on the boldest and most significant part of the claim. A conspiracy implies a specific fact – that some great hidden hand or collusion is at work to indoctrinate the masses. And it’s something Johnson never said. We rate Feingold’s claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/a8bce5ab-0679-4245-95b8-b779a490875f	None	Russ Feingold	None	None	None	2016-06-24T05:00:00	2016-06-03	['None']
-snes-06199	An open microphone caught President Obama muttering caustic comments about the 4th of July holiday.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-miss-golf-holiday/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did President Obama Say ‘I Can’t Believe I Have to Miss a Good Day of Golf’ for July 4?	5 July 2013	None	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-01805	Melania Trump Wore Heels to Visit Texas After a Hurricane?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/melania-trump-heels-houston-hurricane-harvey/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Melania Trump Wore Heels to Visit Texas After a Hurricane?	31 August 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04625	Canada has legalized oral sex with non-human animals.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/canada-legalizes-beastiality/	None	Crime	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Canada Legalize Bestiality?	10 June 2016	None	['Canada']
-goop-00511	Taylor Swift, Joe Alwyn “Headed For Split” Over ‘Cats’ Movie, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-joe-alwyn-split-cats-movie-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Taylor Swift, Joe Alwyn NOT “Headed For Split” Over ‘Cats’ Movie, Despite Claim	3:56 pm, August 6, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-02260	Prince George Stole And Wore Prince William’s Pants?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/prince-george-pants-prince-william-shorts/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Prince George Stole And Wore Prince William’s Pants?	9:23 am, November 3, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-08037	"I stopped requesting earmarks in 2008."	true	/texas/statements/2011/jan/05/michael-mccaul/michael-mccaul-says-he-stopped-requesting-earmarks/	In an e-mail newsletter, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, celebrated the defeat of an annual spending bill that Senate Republicans refused to support. "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tried to pass a proposed omnibus budget bill with 6,714 earmarks worth $8.3 billion, but pulled it after Americans became outraged that Washington is not listening to their cries to stop pork barrel spending," McCaul said in the Dec. 20 e-mail. "I am proud that I stopped requesting earmarks in 2008 until the system becomes 100 percent transparent." Republican lawmakers have lately been swearing off earmarks — funding for local projects that lawmakers slip into spending bills — so we wondered if McCaul's own hands have been pork-free since 2008. First, we turned to databases of earmarks from fiscal 2008 to 2011 created by the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that is critical of earmarks. Prior to 2007, when the House tightened disclosure rules, lawmakers weren't required to attach their names to earmark requests. According to the 2008 database, McCaul joined other lawmakers in securing 19 earmarks worth $19.96 million in 2007. Alone, McCaul sponsored five earmarks totaling $1.72 million. He requested $200,000 for the City of Austin and $900,000 for an Imaging Research Center in Austin, among others. But according to the databases and Taxpayers for Common Sense spokesman Steve Ellis, McCaul hasn't requested any earmarks since. Mike Rosen, a spokesman for McCaul, passed along an April 2008 op-ed column by the congressman in which he said he was joining 35 colleagues in not "requesting earmarks until meaningful, common sense reforms are made." The op-ed, published in the Houston Chronicle, suggests that each earmark be brought to the floor and voted on; currently, they're added to legislation and usually passed without debate. In his 2008 op-ed, McCaul noted that while most earmarks "are legitimate, and submitted by politicians who earnestly want to help the largest number of people by finding meaningful and worthwhile requests ... the lack of transparency and accountability in the process have bloated already unprecedented government spending and led to well publicized abuses like the infamous Alaskan 'bridge to nowhere.' In 2005, Alaska's Congressional delegation secured about $230 million to build a bridge to an island of 50 people. In a March press release responding to the Senate's defeat of a proposed earmark moratorium, McCaul reiterated his position, saying he wouldn't request earmarks until it's "100 percent transparent as to the sponsor and recipient and until each earmark is subject to an up and down vote on the House floor." The New York Times reported in December that while some lawmakers have denounced earmarks, they haven't necessarily stopped seeking money for special projects. The Washington-based Citizens Against Government Waste obtained a letter to the Department of Education from Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., asking the agency to release money "needed to support students and educational programs" in a local school district that later said it received about $1 million in stimulus aid, according to the Times. Rosen told us that McCaul "routinely writes letters of support for entities" in his district that are "applying for federal competitive grants." Such agencies include the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services and the Department of Energy, Rosen said in an e-mail, "for projects that range in scope from alternative energy to law enforcement to health and domestic violence programs." "The funding sought is already budgeted by each agency for eligible projects and the grants are awarded based on set criteria established by law," Rosen said. Ellis told us that he wouldn't call that earmarking, because "the agency is still making the decision. When you have an earmark in a piece of legislation, it subverts the agency decision-making process." Upshot: McCaul stopped requesting earmarks in spending bills as of 2008. That's True.	None	Michael McCaul	None	None	None	2011-01-05T06:00:00	2010-12-20	['None']
-goop-01648	Charlize Theron Invited To Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Wedding?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/charlize-theron-prince-harry-meghan-markle-wedding-invited/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Charlize Theron Invited To Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Wedding?	2:51 am, February 5, 2018	None	['Prince_Harry']
-snes-01512	Was the 'Black Soldier' Killed in Niger a Deserter?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/was-soldier-killed-deserter-satire/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	Was the ‘Black Soldier’ Killed in Niger a Deserter?	26 October 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-12801	Says there is a "new law now charging all protesters with terrorism."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/feb/14/blog-posting/fake-news-alert-bloggers-claim-protesters-can-be-l/	The headline on an Internet post claims a recently passed law allows protesters to face terrorism charges, but a closer read shows the post is guilty of misrepresenting the facts. "New law now charging all protesters with terrorism," reads an undated post on a site called RedRockTribune.com. The post says it has been shared more than 363,000 times on Facebook, which flagged the story as part of its efforts to stamp on fake news in its users’ news feeds. The article can be traced back to a Nov. 17, 2016, item on ConservativeDailyPost.com, but it has been shared on several other websites. It says a Republican has a new legal solution for dealing with liberal protesters — a law charging them with "economic terrorism." The headline on the post makes it sound as if a law allowing terrorism charges for protesters is already in place. The body of the post implies the law is on a national scale. That’s not an accurate description of what happened. The headline takes the core of a real event but builds a story full of incorrect details around it. There’s currently no law on the books along these lines. Washington state Sen. Doug Ericksen did suggest a bill criminalizing protests in the way described. The Republican proposed the measure in November, after protests erupted following President Donald Trump’s election. The idea was aimed largely at environmental activists in the Pacific Northwest who looked to shut down commercial and transportation projects in the region. Ericksen said his bill would make protesting a felony were the protest to "block transportation and commerce, cause property damage, threaten jobs and put public safety at risk." There are already legal guidelines in place limiting protests — you can be arrested for harassing people, or blocking walkways, streets or the entrances to buildings, for example. But Ericksen wanted to make the punishments much more severe. The "economic terrorism" charges could be levied against groups that organized such protests. Penalties would have included a $10,000 fine and up to five years in prison. "I respect the right to protest, but when it endangers people’s lives and property, it goes too far," Ericksen said. "Fear, intimidation and vandalism are not a legitimate form of political expression. Those who employ it must be called to account." Ericksen is serving as communications director for the Environmental Protection Agency as part of Trump’s transition team while also keeping his state office, drawing a recall effort from opponents. But at the time the post was written, Ericksen was only proposing a bill penalizing protesters that harshly, and only in his state. That alarmed critics and the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He did eventually file a bill in the state Senate, but it wasn’t quite as severe as the one he originally suggested. SB 5009 would impose prison terms on protesters who "cause an economic disruption," ranging from 60 days for a misdemeanor and up to a year for a felony. One example to which he referred was of Washington protesters who blocked train tracks to two oil refineries in May 2016. The bill is currently sitting in the state Senate’s Law and Justice Committee. There’s no national law that brands protesters as terrorists. The headline makes a ridiculous leap to misrepresent the actions of a Washington state senator. We rate it Pants on Fire! https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/eaefa54d-17d4-415b-a5a9-53c3ea6a8d78	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-02-14T17:33:49	2016-11-17	['None']
-pomt-02099	"We were the last flag flying in Benghazi."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/may/16/trey-gowdy/trey-gowdy-says-we-were-last-flag-flying-benghazi/	Rep. Trey Gowdy -- the South Carolina Republican tapped by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to head the newly established House Select Committee on Benghazi -- has begun sharing some of the questions he plans to investigate. Gowdy’s panel is charged with looking into the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. government complex in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. During an appearance on Fox News Sunday on May 11, 2014, host Chris Wallace asked Gowdy, "So, tell me the single biggest question you want to ask" former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Gowdy responded, "Why were we still in Benghazi? The British ambassador was almost assassinated. Our facility was attacked twice. There were multiple episodes of violence. We were the last flag flying in Benghazi, and I would like to know why." The notion that the United States was "the last flag" in Benghazi has been echoed by other Republican critics of the Obama administration’s actions before, during and after the Benghazi attack. Now, with the head of the Benghazi panel citing it as one of his top investigative priorities, we thought we’d check it out. We quickly found contrary evidence in a report issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Jan. 15, 2014. The report stated that "although some countries and international organizations had reduced their presence in Benghazi, the United States maintained a diplomatic presence there similar to the UN, the European Union, and other Western countries such as Italy, France, Turkey, and Malta." The report footnoted this claim to a Dec. 6, 2013, email from the State Department to the Senate committee. "I think the Senate report is a fine source" for this sort of information, said Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group founded by conservatives and hawkish Democrats. "I doubt the Democrats were in cahoots to lie about this sort of thing. Absent any contrary evidence, I don't see any reason to doubt the Senate report on this." Joscelyn then dug a little further and provided us with some additional evidence. On Jan. 12, 2013 -- four months after the attack on the U.S. complex -- the vehicle of the Italian consul general was attacked by terrorists in Benghazi. No one was injured, but according to the State Department, the attack on the Italian diplomat was carried out by terrorists who "had a role in the 2012 attacks against U.S. facilities." Then, on Oct. 11, 2013, a car bomb in Benghazi caused severe damage to the building housing the joint honorary consulates of Finland and Sweden. There were no injuries or casualties. All told, then, it seems that other nations also had a footprint in Benghazi just before the attack on the United States’ complex, and continued to have one afterward. So where did the notion that "we were the last flag flying in Benghazi" come from? When we checked with Gowdy’s staff, they pointed us to testimony given by Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, who was stationed in Libya as a site security team commander in Libya from February 2012 to August 2012. He testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee when it was investigating the Benghazi attack in October 2012. Wood’s testimony appears to be the source of the vivid phrase "last flag flying in Benghazi." Here’s what he told the committee: "The British consulate moved out when I was there, and they actually had (a memorandum of understanding) with us to leave their weapons and vehicles on our compound there in Benghazi. They would come back and occupy at times, draw their weapons and vehicles, and do their work, and return them and leave. The attack on the International Red Cross was another attack that also involved us and threats to the compound there in Benghazi. The threats were made on Facebook to both the remaining Western influences there in Benghazi, being the Red Cross and the U.S. Embassy compound. The Red Cross was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades in early June. When it was attacked a second time, I believe they made the decision they were going to give up and leave Benghazi. When that occurred, it was apparent to me that we were the last flag flying in Benghazi. We were the last thing on their target list to remove from Benghazi." We reached Wood, who is now back at his job with the federal Bureau of Reclamation in Utah. By phone, Wood said that when he used the phrase "last flag flying in Benghazi," he was specifically referring to the three western institutions mentioned in the threats on Facebook -- the British and United States diplomatic complexes and the Red Cross facility. In other words, Wood didn’t literally mean there was no other western presence in Benghazi -- rather, he was referring to the United States as the last of the three specifically cited targets to be attacked. So by Wood’s account, the United States wasn’t literally the last western entity in Benghazi -- though it was one of the last, operating a higher-profile and more permanent facility than the other nations that remained on the ground. For instance, Wood said he recalls Turkey having a presence in Benghazi -- "Amb. Stevens went to meet with Turkish diplomats there," he said — but he said the Turks tended to put people on the ground periodically and "for a specific reason." France, for its part, would "rent a villa and send their diplomats, then wrap it all up and leave no trace." Wood said that, in his view, the truth lies "somewhere in the middle" between the Senate report (which glosses over the impermanence of some of the western operations in Benghazi) and Gowdy’s claim that the United States was literally the last western entity in the city. Our ruling Gowdy said the United States had "the last flag flying in Benghazi." Some nations, such as the United Kingdom, had abandoned Benghazi or limited their footprint prior to the attack on the United States complex. But like a game of telephone, the meaning of the phrase Gowdy used shifted from its original meaning as politicians embraced it as an evocative talking point. In his testimony, Wood used the phrase more rhetorically than literally, explaining that the United States was the last of three western institutions that had been mentioned in a terrorist threat to be attacked. In fact, there’s clear evidence that several other western nations had a presence in Benghazi immediately before and well after the attack on the U.S. compound. We rate the claim False.	None	Trey Gowdy	None	None	None	2014-05-16T11:38:58	2014-05-11	['None']
-snes-05688	Photograph shows a rhino that was given a pink horn to prevent poaching.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rhinos-elephants-getting-pink-horns-prevent-poaching/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Are Rhinos and Elephants Getting Pink Horns to Prevent Poaching?	21 May 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-00186	Says Ohio congressional candidate Danny O’Connor "would make Columbus a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/19/defending-main-street/danny-oconnor-wouldnt-and-cant-make-columbus-sanct/	"Sanctuary city" is a term that typically applies when local police won’t cooperate with federal authorities if someone in their custody is suspected of immigration violations. This is a flash point in the national debate over borders and immigration. It’s also apparently a flash point for Republicans in the 2018 Ohio Congressional District 12 election. A new ad from Republican U.S. Rep. Troy Balderson says his opponent, Danny O’Connor, supports progressive values such as sanctuary cities. A Balderson ad in early October said it more directly: O’Connor "supports making Columbus a sanctuary city." And a recent ad from a group called Defending Main Street, a PAC affiliated with the Republican Main Street Partnership, says the same thing: O’Connor "would make Columbus a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants." Would he? Could he? And what’s the proof? The proof, Defending Main Street says, is a tweet from O’Connor in support of a policy from the mayor of Columbus. The tweet said nothing specifically about sanctuary cities. Yet it touched on an issue awfully close, and raised a good question: Does O’Connor really want to make Ohio’s capital city a sanctuary city? The tweet in question Soon after taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump issued a travel ban barring immigrants from certain Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. He said they posed a national security risk. In turn, Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther issued an executive order on Feb. 3, 2017, for his city. It said that the city supports refugees and will help place or settle those "eligible to be admitted to the United States as refugees." Note the language: "eligible to be admitted." The mayor's order also said the city would not use its resources "for the sole purpose of detecting or apprehending persons based on suspected immigration status, unless in response to a court order." This meant the city was not going to stop or pull people over just to check on their immigration status. Yet as refugee-friendly as this sounds, the mayor's executive order made an important legal distinction: The city would not investigate or cooperate in an investigation "unless a warrant exists, a criminal violation was reported, or an arrest was made." Some cities refuse to do even that -- and those are the very cities the White House defines as sanctuary cities. Ginther announced his intentions to issue this order a few days earlier, with a Jan. 30 news release. The mayor that day wrote a tweet as well: "This week I will issue an executive order that will support the resettlement of refugees in Columbus." The tweet was about supporting resettlement -- legal resettlement, as the executive order made clear. The mayor's tweet said nothing about refusing to cooperate with federal authorities when police have arrested someone -- which the mayor was not saying, anyway. The mayor's tweet on supporting resettlement prompted O’Connor to send a tweet of his own to his followers. It retweeted Ginther’s words and added, "Proud of my friend and Mayor @andrewginter for his leadership in pushing back against Trump. We are all immigrants!" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Sanctuary or no O’Connor made no mention of sanctuary cities in his tweet. Defending Main Street says that the mayor's announcement closely mirrors sanctuary city laws and O'Connor's tweet was an endorsement. But it wasn't a clear endorsement of sanctuary city policy. Some definitions are helpful here. The White House website says the term sanctuary city "generally refers to jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with lawful federal immigration enforcement efforts, often by rejecting immigration ‘detainer’ requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement." Here is how this works, the White House says: When local police arrest "an illegal alien on criminal charges, ICE issues a detainer, which is a request that the local authority notify ICE before releasing the alien and maintain custody for a short time so that ICE may take custody for removal purposes. Sanctuary jurisdictions, including many big cities, refuse to comply with ICE’s detainer requests." Columbus has never declared itself a sanctuary city. It said it wecomes immigrants, but it never said it wouldn’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Rather, the mayor's order said the city would do so when "a warrant exists, a criminal violation was reported, or an arrest was made." That is a lot different from cities that have made arrests in crimes but still refuse ICE requests to turn the individuals over for ICE custody. Those cities are more typically labeled — or declare themselves — sanctuary cities. ICE says this as well: It places "detainers on aliens who have been arrested on local criminal charges," so it can determine whether it has probable cause to believe that they are removable from the United States. That phrase -- they have been arrested on local criminal charges -- is the same criterion the mayor used in his executive order. ICE adds on its website, "When law enforcement agencies fail to honor immigration detainers and release serious criminal offenders, it undermines ICE’s ability to protect public safety and carry out its mission." The Center for Immigration Studies, which describes itself as supporting "low immigration" while being "pro-immigrant," has an online map pinpointing sanctuary cities. None are in Ohio. That’s because the center uses "the strictest definition possible," which means cities that refuse or prohibit their agencies from complying with ICE even when someone has been arrested, spokesman Matthew Sussis said. O’Connor’s views As Franklin County recorder, O’Connor has no power to make Columbus a sanctuary city. He wouldn’t if elected to Congress, either. "O'Connor does not support sanctuary cities," his campaign manager, Annie Ellison, told us. As for his views on immigration, O’Connor told Vox that "I don’t support abolishing ICE... Oversimplifying things is not going to solve our immigration problem." In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch in early July, O’Connor said, "What we have right now at the border with the separation of children from their families is abhorrent. If we make sure our immigration debate is focused on safety and not on penalizing folks who aren't committing crimes and are contributing economically, that's the right way to do things." Our ruling Defending Main Street says, as Troy Balderson has also said, that Danny O’Connor "would make Columbus a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants." O’Connor couldn’t if he wanted to, but he also has not said that. He supported policies of the Columbus mayor, who said the city would not volunteer to go after federal immigration suspects or turn them over to ICE "unless a warrant exists, a criminal violation was reported, or an arrest was made." That doesn’t meet the definition of a sanctuary city by ICE or groups that support lower levels of immigration. We rate the claim False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Defending Main Street	None	None	None	2018-10-19T13:50:19	2018-10-12	['Ohio', 'Columbus,_Ohio']
-snes-04032	Ted Cruz said he'd run as a Democrat against Donald Trump if Hillary Clinton had to drop out of the 2016 presidential race.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ted-cruz-run-as-democrat/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Ted Cruz Said ‘If Something Happens to Hillary’ He’ll ‘Run as a Democrat Against Trump’	15 September 2016	None	['Ted_Cruz', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-08534	Says Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen "knew about (the Ken Kratz sexting) case for nearly a year and did nothing about it."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2010/oct/04/scott-hassett/challenger-scott-hassett-says-attorney-general-jb-/	Prosecutor Ken Kratz has been battered by a storm of denunciation since revelations in September 2010 that he used his position -- and sexually suggestive text messages -- to pursue a crime victim and possibly two other women who relied on him to do right by them in court. Among those castigating the Calumet County district attorney is Scott Hassett, the Democrat candidate for state attorney general. But Hassett’s thunder has also pounded another prosecutor, Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, his Republican opponent in the Nov. 2 election. It was Van Hollen’s Department of Justice that in October 2009 conducted a criminal investigation of Kratz’s most recent "sexting." Hassett was blunt in a Sept. 21 e-mail to his supporters, declaring: "Van Hollen knew about this case for nearly a year and did nothing about it." Hassett has since been more measured, saying Van Hollen did nothing "substantive." When we asked him to back up his claims, Hassett said Van Hollen should have taken a number of steps, including: Questioning Kratz as part of DOJ’s criminal investigation. Reporting Kratz to the Office of Lawyer Regulation, the state agency that investigates attorney misconduct. Reporting Kratz to Gov. Jim Doyle, who has the power to remove district attorneys from office. Much has happened publicly in recent weeks, so it’s important to keep in mind what was known at the time. Let’s look at Hassett’s accusation in light of how the case unfolded and the role of Van Hollen’s office in it: Criminal investigation The Department of Justice’s involvement was limited to the racy texts sent to Stephanie Van Groll in October 2009 by Kratz, then the chair of the state Crime Victims Rights Board. Kratz had gained attention in 2007 for successfully prosecuting junkyard worker Steven Avery for the murder of a young photographer. Reports about texts to the other two women and a separate woman who says Kratz invited her to an autopsy didn’t surface until after the Associated Press revealed the Van Groll texts on Sept. 15, 2010. Kratz, 50, had met Van Groll, 26, while prosecuting a domestic violence case against her former boyfriend. In one text, he wrote: "You may be the tall, young, hot nymph, but I am the prize." On Oct. 22, 2009, the third day of receiving such text messages, Van Groll reported them to Kaukauna police. Van Groll said Kratz was harassing her and she feared that his interest in her could affect how Kratz prosecuted her former boyfriend, who was accused of strangling her. Van Groll went to police in Kaukauna, in Outagamie County, because she lived there at the time. Kaukauna police turned their investigation over to the state Division of Criminal Investigation because the Police Department often works with the Calumet County district attorney's office. The Justice Department opened its investigation on Oct. 27, 2009. It closed the probe several days later, without questioning Kratz. Van Hollen told PolitiFact Wisconsin "there weren’t any facts that indicated any crimes were committed." Van Hollen, who described himself as being "very involved" in the case, said he didn’t question the decision by investigators who determined it was not necessary to interview Kratz. He noted the department took the step of replacing Kratz in the domestic violence case involving Van Groll with one of its own prosecutors. Office of Lawyer Regulation Even though Van Hollen’s agency decided not to file criminal charges, Van Hollen and other department attorneys may have had an obligation to report Kratz to the state Office of Lawyer Regulation. Wisconsin Supreme Court rules require a lawyer to make such a report if he or she knows another lawyer has committed professional misconduct. The misconduct must raise "a substantial question as to that lawyer's honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer." Two days after the Kratz scandal broke in the news, the Wisconsin District Attorneys Association’s executive committee -- which includes a Department of Justice official -- called on Kratz to resign his district attorney post. The committee judged his behavior with Van Groll as repugnant and "inconsistent with the standards of our profession." That would seem to qualify as professional misconduct that the Department of Justice should have reported to the Office of Lawyer Regulation as it was reviewing the case for possible charges. Van Hollen’s office did not to report Kratz to the regulatory office -- but it did pressure him into reporting himself. On Nov. 12, 2009, less than two weeks after the criminal investigation was closed, Department of Justice attorney Kevin Potter told Kratz in an e-mail "we believe the matter needs to be reported to OLR. Again, we would be willing to discuss with you what we see as being your options and what we believe to be the best course of conduct for you to follow." Three weeks after that, on Dec. 4, 2009, Kratz reported his texts to Van Groll to the Office of Lawyer Regulation. It could be argued that a complaint filed the Department of Justice would carry significant weight with OLR. But Van Hollen said his office believed that cases that are self-reported were more likely to result in disciplinary action. The Department of Justice also pressured Kratz in an e-mail to resign from the state Crime Victims Rights Board, which investigates complaints of public agencies or officials accused of violating the rights of crime victims. About a month later, on Dec. 3, 2009, Kratz stepped down. Ultimately, the Office of Lawyer Regulation did an initial review and told Van Groll on March 5, 2010, it would not conduct a formal investigation of Kratz. The letter said his texting, while inappropriate, "did not appear to involve possible professional misconduct." Since the news surfaced about the other women surfaced, however, OLR said it would open an investigation of Kratz. Gov. Jim Doyle After the news broke about Kratz’s texts to Van Groll and the woman who said he invited her to an autopsy, Doyle used a state law that allows a governor to remove a district attorney from office to launch a process for deciding whether Kratz should be removed. The law allows the governor to oust a DA "for cause," which is defined as "inefficiency, neglect of duty, official misconduct, or malfeasance in office." Van Hollen said it wasn’t necessary to inform Doyle because the Office of Lawyer Regulation’s purpose is to investigate lawyer misconduct. He pointed out that while Doyle could remove Kratz as district attorney, OLR action could potentially result in Kratz being barred from practicing law altogether. OK. We’re ready to make a closing argument. In his bid for attorney general, Democrat Scott Hassett accused Republican incumbent J.B. Van Hollen of doing nothing for nearly a year after his office learned that Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz had sent sexually suggestive text messages to a crime victim. Van Hollen’s office reviewed the case for possible criminal charges, but found no grounds for any. Van Hollen could have reported Kratz directly to the Office of Lawyer Regulation, but his office instead pressured Kratz himself to do so, feeling that would make the case even stronger. They also pressured him to resign from the Crime Victims Rights Board. They could have reported the text matter to Gov. Jim Doyle, but Van Hollen felt the review panel was in the best position to determine if Kratz committed professional misconduct. Hassett argues Van Hollen could have done more. But his statement was that Van Hollen did nothing. Our verdict: Hassett’s statement is False. (Note: Ken Kratz resigned from his position Oct. 4, 2010)	None	Scott Hassett	None	None	None	2010-10-04T09:00:00	2010-09-21	['None']
-snes-00491	As of May 2018, there were more than 10,000 unaccompanied children in United States government immigration detention centers.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/are-10000-children-in-u-s-detention-centers/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Are More Than 10,000 Children in U.S. Detention Centers?	8 June 2018	None	['United_States']
-pomt-12942	Activities by foreign governments had "absolutely no effect on the outcome of this election."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jan/08/donald-trump/donald-trumps-dubious-claim-foreign-governments-ha/	On Jan. 6, President-elect Donald Trump was briefed on the U.S. intelligence community’s probe into allegations of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, including possible connections to electronic hacks and public releases of private communications by senior Democrats. A declassified version of the report found that "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate (Trump’s opponent, Hillary) Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency." Following the intelligence briefing, Trump’s office released a statement. After noting the "constructive meeting" and the "tremendous respect" he had for their work, Trump stated: While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat (sic) National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines. There were attempts to hack the Republican National Committee, but the RNC had strong hacking defenses and the hackers were unsuccessful. The phrase that caught our eye was, "there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election." That's a pretty definitive statement. And Trump echoed this argument in a Jan. 7 tweet: "Intelligence stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results. Voting machines not touched!" However, the argument that there was no impact of any kind on the election outcome is not backed up by the intelligence community’s report. The report specifically stated it didn’t look at that question. Here’s what the report actually said: We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The U.S. Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze U.S. political processes or U.S. public opinion. So if the Trump campaign is using the intelligence community report to back up its assertion that there was no Russian influence on the outcome, it's doing so without justification. When we contacted the Trump transition media office, we did not receive a response. Here’s our review of the publicly available evidence. Ballot counts The Trump camp has a point on one issue: Despite some concern among security experts going into the election that Russia might hack into state and local vote-counting systems and tamper with the tallies, the intelligence community report found that any such efforts by Russia were not successful in changing any votes. The report says that while "Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards," the Department of Homeland Security "assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying." Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, conceded this in an interview with the PBS NewsHour on Jan. 6. "It is true there is no evidence that the tampering with voter machines or tampering with voter registrations or any of like that affected the counting of the votes. That's true," Schiff told PBS’ Judy Woodruff. Some observers might be concerned that Russia did manage to breach at least some election authorities’ computer networks, and they might also be concerned that Russia and Putin, according to the report, tried to influence the election, even if it’s less clear whether they succeeded. Still, Trump has a point that Russia didn’t literally change actual votes electronically. Ballot tampering vs. other types of Russian influence Members of the Trump camp have portrayed the report’s clean bill of health on the question of Russian ballot-tampering as proof that Russia had no impact at all on the election. For instance, on the Jan. 8 edition of CNN’s State of the Union, incoming White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told Jake Tapper that "if you read the full report, they make very clear, (Director of National Intelligence James) Clapper in his testimony (to the Senate Armed Services Committee) made very clear on Thursday under oath that that any attempt, any aspiration to influence our elections failed. They were not successful in doing that." On Fox News Sunday, incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus echoed Conway’s invocation of Clapper’s testimony, saying Clapper had testified to the Senate panel "that there is no evidence in the report that any of this changed the outcome of the election." Neither assertion is accurate. First, to equate a lack of ballot tampering with a lack of any Russian influence on the election conflates two things that are not the same. Conway and Priebus essentially defined ballot-rigging as the only way an election can be influenced, when in reality the intelligence report primarily addresses other ways Russia tried to influence the election. The Russian effort blended, in the report’s words, "covert intelligence operations — such as cyber activity — with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls.’ " And second, Clapper in his testimony never said that "any attempt, any aspiration to influence our elections failed" (as Conway put it) or that "there is no evidence in the report that any of this changed the outcome of the election" (as Priebus put it). Clapper’s most direct remark at the Senate hearing on this issue came in this exchange with the panel’s chairman, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.: McCain: "So really, what we're talking about, is if they succeeded in changing the results of an election, of which none of us believe they were, that would have to constitute an attack on the United States of America because of the effects, if they had succeeded, would you agree with that?" Clapper: "First, we cannot say -- they did not change any vote tallies or -- or anything of that sort." McCain: "Yeah, I'm just talking about…" Clapper: "And we have no -- we have no way of gauging the impact that -- certainly the intelligence community can't gauge the impact it had on the choices the electorate made. There's no way for us to gauge that." Subsequently in the hearing, Clapper arguably went even further in a response to questioning by Sen. Angus King, I-Maine. King, referring to his work with Baltic states that have been grappling with Russian influence in elections for several years, said, "The best defense is for our public to know what's going on, so they can take it with a grain of salt. … That's why I think public hearings like this and the public discussion of this issue is so important, because we're not going to be able to prevent this all together. But we need to have our people understand that when they're being manipulated. Would you agree with that conclusion?" Clapper responded, "Absolutely. That's why I feel so strongly about the statement in October," referencing his own statement during the campaign that the Russian government had been engaged in efforts "intended to interfere with the U.S. election process." How credible is the argument that Russia influenced the election in some fashion? Schiff is one of many Democratic officials who personally believe that other types of Russian efforts may have had an impact on an election that ultimately hinged on fewer than 100,000 votes cumulatively in three states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In his PBS interview, Schiff specifically referred to the hacking and release to websites such as WikiLeaks of personal emails written and received by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and other top Democrats -- releases that Trump prominently featured during the campaign. "The daily dumping of information that was damaging to Secretary Clinton and helpful to Donald Trump was hugely consequential," Schiff said. But is it possible to move beyond a gut feeling and prove that Russia influenced enough voters to change the election’s outcome? Not really, say political scientists. A campaign as large-scale as a presidential race is buffeted by so many factors that it’s essentially impossible to know for sure that any given factor played a role in determining who won. "The presidential election, with its national constituency, is decided by multiple, interrelated causes, all of which were necessary but not sufficient," said Kyle Saunders, a Colorado State University political scientist. Referring to such factors as the candidates’ personalities and messages as well as the general political environment, Saunders said that "no one determinate cause can be offered as ‘the’ explanation, and doing so is a fool's errand." Saunders agreed that one doesn’t have to believe that hacking did affect the election to say comfortably that Trump is wrong to say it absolutely didn’t affect the election -- there's simply no way of knowing either way with any certainty that something affected the outcome. He added that while a reasonable case can be made that the hacking did help Trump, that's informed speculation -- not certainty -- and said there’s no way to know how big a factor it may have been compared to other factors. "It is difficult to argue that the barrage of damaging information released almost exclusively about Clinton and Democrats did no harm or did not create an atmosphere in which voters questioned her judgment or credibility or dampen support for her candidacy," said Costas Panagopoulos, a Fordham University political scientist. That said, Panagopoulos added, "in truth, there is no way to know with certainty what the causal impact of Russian involvement was on the outcome of the 2016 election." Our ruling After meeting with senior intelligence officials about the details of a soon-to-be-released report on alleged Russian hacking, Trump said that activities by foreign governments had "absolutely no effect on the outcome of this election." Trump can use the intelligence report to bolster this assertion only in one limited way -- that Russia did not succeed in tampering with vote counts (though it appears to have tried). On the broader issue of whether Russia had any impact on the outcome of the election, the report specifically noted that it didn’t address this issue, and Clapper in his Senate testimony didn’t either. Saying there was no Russian ballot-tampering is not the same thing as saying there was no Russian influence on the election. Political scientists say it’s impossible to move beyond informed speculation about whether there was a Russian impact on the election’s outcome -- or, importantly, whether there wasn’t an impact. Trump’s formulation, echoed by later statements by those in his camp, offers a definitive, broad-brush conclusion that isn’t proven by the evidence, and really can’t be. We rate this statement Mostly False. Share the Facts Politifact 3 6 Politifact Rating: Activities by foreign governments had "absolutely no effect on the outcome of this election." Donald Trump President-Elect A statement released by Trump's transition office Friday, January 6, 2017 -01/-06/2017 Read More info	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-01-08T17:21:06	2017-01-06	['None']
-pomt-12272	"The president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/05/sarah-huckabee-sanders/has-donald-trump-never-promoted-or-encouraged-viol/	Has President Donald Trump promoted violence? At a White House briefing, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders answered with a definitive no. During a June 29, 2017, press briefing, CBS News’ Major Garrett asked Huckabee Sanders about some of Trump’s recent tweets, including a pair directed at "low I.Q. Crazy Mika" and "Psycho Joe" -- the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Trump mocked Mika Brzezinski by tweeting that she had been "bleeding badly from a face-lift" during a visit to Mar-a-Lago. Garrett said that "some have suggested" that Trump’s tweets have "misconstrued one of the messages that should have been gathered" after the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., and several others at a congressional baseball practice. "Do you have any reaction to that sentiment, that conversations like this create an atmosphere that is either dangerous or one we need to avoid?" Garrett asked. Huckabee Sanders responded, "The president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence. If anything, quite the contrary. And he was simply pushing back and defending himself." We’re not considering Trump’s tweet of a GIF showing him body-slamming a figure labeled CNN at a professional wrestling match, which Trump sent several days after Huckabee Sanders’ comment. However, the record shows at least one clear case and possibly several others in which Trump has said things that we believe an ordinary listener would understand as encouraging violence. (The White House declined to comment on the record.) The clearest example In February 2016, during his campaign for president, Trump told a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, "So I got a little notice. We have wonderful security guys. It said, ‘Mr. Trump, there may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience.’ So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell .... I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise." As a review of the video shows, Trump is not smiling or chuckling as if this was intended as a joke. Other examples of Trump speaking favorably of violence On several other occasions, Trump invoked violence without necessarily inciting it. (Hat tips to the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake and Mashable for collecting a number of these in one place.) • August 2015. At a press conference in Michigan, Trump contrasted his interactions with the public with those of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who had recently faced opposition from Black Lives Matter protesters. "That will never happen with me," said Trump, according to a dispatch by the Washington Post’s David Weigel. "I don't know if I'll do the fighting myself, or if other people will. It was a disgrace. I felt badly for him, but it showed that he was weak. You know what? He's getting the biggest crowds, and we're getting the biggest crowds. We're the ones getting the crowds. But that's never going to happen to Trump." • November 2015. At a rally in Alabama, Trump said about a protester, "Get him the hell out of here, will you, please? Get him out of here. Throw him out!" The following day, calling into Fox News, Trump responded to a question about allegations that the protester had been "roughed up." The protester, Trump said, had been "so obnoxious and so loud ... maybe he should have been roughed up. Maybe he should have been roughed up. Because it was totally disgusting what he was doing." • February 2016. At a rally in Las Vegas, Trump again responded to a protester: "See, he’s smiling. See, he’s having a good time. Oh, I love the old days, you know? You know what I hate? There's a guy, totally disruptive, throwing punches. We're not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days, you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out in a stretcher, folks. Oh, it's true. … The guards are very gentle with him. He’s walking out with big high-fives, smiling, laughing. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you," • March 2016. At one point at a rally in Michigan, Trump reiterated his pledge to pay legal fees for people who remove protesters. "Get him out," Trump said. "Try not to hurt him. If you do, I'll defend you in court, don't worry about it." (Trump later said he had never made the pledge to pay legal fees.) • March 2016. At an event in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump referred to a past incident with protesters. "We have had a couple that were really violent, and the particular one when I said I'd like to bang him, that was a very  —  he was a guy who was swinging, very loud and then started swinging at the audience and the audience swung back, and I thought it was very, very appropriate. He was swinging, he was hitting people, and the audience hit back, and that’s what we need a little bit more of." • March 2016. At a rally in North Carolina, Trump said, "In the good old days this doesn't happen because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, they would not do it again so easily. But today they walk in and they put their hand up and they put the wrong finger in the air at everybody. And they get away with murder, because we’ve become weak." • March 2016. At a rally in St. Louis, Trump once again addressed protesters who were being removed from the facility. "Part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long (to remove the protesters) is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right? And they're being politically correct the way they take them out. So it takes a little bit longer. And honestly, protesters they realize it -- they realize there are no consequences to protesting anymore. There used to be consequences. There are none anymore." • March 2016. At a rally in Kansas City, talking about someone who had rushed the stage, Trump said, "I don't know if I would have done well, but I would have been out there fighting, folks. I don't know if I'd have done well, but I would've been — boom, boom, boom. I'll beat the crap out of you." The legal question Trump’s words have, on occasion, drawn lawsuits. However, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union has written skeptically about whether Trump’s words would qualify legally as incitement to violence. "There is no question that Trump’s decision to use his bully pulpit to actually bully protesters and to rile up his crowds against them is morally despicable," wrote Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney with the free-speech group wrote concerning a lawsuit stemming from a Trump rally in Louisville. "But legally, deciding whether what happened in that crowded theater rises to the level of incitement is a trickier task." Rowland wrote that "incitement charges have been used to jail anti-war protestors, labor picketers, Communists, and civil rights activists. Over time, the Supreme Court learned from these mistakes and adopted a very speech-protective test to determine when incitement has taken place. In Brandenburg vs. Ohio, the court ruled that the First Amendment permits liability for incitement only when speech is intended and likely to cause imminent and serious lawlessness. It’s a high bar for a reason, and Trump’s conduct at the rally didn’t meet it." Our ruling Huckabee Sanders said, "The president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence." We found one example -- when Trump said, "If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you?" -- that clearly fits the criteria of promoting or encouraging violence. This was not an isolated incident; we found at least seven other examples in which Trump offered public musings that showed a tolerance for, and sometimes even a favorable disposition toward, physical violence. Trump’s words may not meet a legal threshold for incitement to violence, but Huckabee Sanders’ portrayal seriously distorts the record of Trump’s past statements. We rate her statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Sarah Huckabee Sanders	None	None	None	2017-07-05T10:31:25	2017-06-29	['None']
-pomt-07434	China holds 26 percent of the U.S. debt.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/22/herman-cain/herman-cain-says-china-holds-26-percent-us-debt/	Here's one thing many Republicans and Democrats agree on: concern about the amount of our debt held by China. The issue has been raised recently by President Barack Obama and seemingly every Democratic and Republican leader. It's been a key talking point for possible GOP candidate Donald Trump. So how much of the U.S. debt, exactly, does China hold? In a speech at a tea party event in Iowa on April 16, 2011, potential Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said it's 26 percent. "If we don't begin to grow with the potential that we have in this country, we will have another national security crisis, and that national security crisis is that China will be as big as we are," Cain said. "They'll start to develop a military as big and as good as ours and they've got a billion more people and they're holding 26 percent of our debt. And you think we're going to be able to sing Kumbaya with them?" We e-mailed a spokeswoman at Friends of Herman Cain to substantiate the figure and did not hear back, but it appears Cain was referring to a U.S. Treasury report on the major foreign holders of treasury security. According to the report, as of February of this year, China held $1.15 trillion worth of U.S. treasury securities. Together, all foreign holders came to $4.47 trillion. So China's share of that comes to about 26 percent. China, incidentally, tops the list of foreign holders of U.S. debt, followed by Japan and then, with a much smaller share, countries such as the United Kingdom and Brazil. But that's just the foreign holders of treasury securities. More than two-thirds of the debt is held by U.S. residents and institutions. When you look at everyone who holds U.S. treasury security, China's share drops to 8.1 percent ($1.15 trillion out of $14 trillion). Of course, there are lots of ways to slice debt statistics. For example, instead of gross federal debt (the figure cited above), some people prefer to use a figure for "debt held by the public." That's the gross federal debt minus the share of the debt held by the U.S. government itself. That was $9.4 trillion at the end of 2010. Which would put the portion held by China at about 12.3 percent. There are also Chinese holdings of debt outside of Treasuries, said Derek Scissors of the conservative Heritage Foundation. But that doesn't get Cain anywhere near his 26 percent figure. "Even stretching, you can't get past 15.6 percent of our debt as held by China and I would not use that number," Scissors said. The number cited by Cain is "misleadingly large," Scissors said. "He's not talking about our debt, he's talking about the foreign share of our debt. If you are going to use that number, you really have to explain it." In other words, Cain should have dropped in some qualifiers to make his statement accurate. For example, he could have said "among the foreign holders of U.S. debt, China ranks first and holds 26 percent." But he didn't. Cain said simply that China "is holding 26 percent of our debt." There are a couple ways to consider debt, but using the two most common, Cain is either off by more than double or more than triple. We rate Cain's statement False.	None	Herman Cain	None	None	None	2011-04-22T17:39:16	2011-04-16	['United_States', 'China']
-pomt-03017	Chris Christie "has not increased the taxes on anyone."	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2013/oct/13/kim-guadagno/kim-guadagno-claims-chris-christie-hasnt-raised-ta/	New Jersey has plenty of reason to re-elect Chris Christie next month, according to Kim Guadagno, his lieutenant governor. In addition to sticking to his principles, Christie, a Republican, has been a strong steward of residents’ money during his time as governor, Guadago said to supporters Monday in Carlstadt. Guadagno was filling in for Christie, who had to cancel his appearance at the last minute. "He has not increased taxes on anyone," the lieutenant governor told the crowd. Christie also has made this claim a few times, but the Truth-O-Meter’s stance on it remains the same from the first time we fact-checked it: the consequences of some of Christie’s budget-cutting actions have resulted in tax increases for some New Jerseyans. And PolitiFact New Jersey isn’t the only fact-checking group to say so. Our truth-seeking colleagues at FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, have called the governor out for claiming not to have raised taxes. Let’s start with some background on how New Jersey generates tax revenue. The state’s three biggest revenue generators are the gross income, sales and corporation business taxes, none of which have increased since Christie took office on Jan. 19, 2010. So Guadagno is correct that the governor has not actually raised any of those taxes. But other actions by the governor cut tax relief for those who relied on support from programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and other credits. In the eyes of some experts that means certain New Jerseyans had less money to pay their taxes, and the impact of the cuts was essentially a tax increase for those residents. The EITC is a credit given certain residents who work and have earned income. It reduces the amount of New Jersey tax owed and may result in a refund, even if those eligible for the credit owe the state no taxes, according to the state Treasury Department. Treasury Department spokesman Bill Quinn has said that in many cases, the EITC represented a subsidy to low-income people, and more than three-quarters of New Jerseyans who received the credit in 2010 actually owed the state no tax. Still, New Jersey cut the EITC during Christie’s first year in office. Christie also cut spending for two property tax relief programs, one of which -- now known as the Homestead Benefit program -- more than halved the average rebate that exceeded $1,000. Although state Treasury Department officials have argued that tax credit programs are payments from the state and reductions in credits do not represent tax increases, some experts disagree. Dennis J. Ventry, Jr., a professor at University of California Davis School of Law, previously told PolitiFact New Jersey that a reduction in a tax credit is "absolutely a tax increase," while Richard Pomp, a professor of law at the University of Connecticut and state taxation expert has said, "To someone who has had a benefit cut that is less money they have to spend," whether you call it a tax increase or a spending cut. Joseph Henchman, vice president of legal and state projects at the Tax Foundation, a business-backed group, has said it would be a mistake to equate reductions in tax credits as tax increases or spending cuts. "They have elements of both and are strictly neither," Henchman said. Kevin Roberts, spokesman for Christie's gubernatorial campaign, said previous administration comments on this topic stand. "There have been no tax increases under this Governor," he said in an e-mail. Our ruling Guadagno said about Christie in a speech to supporters in Carlstadt, ""He has not increased the taxes on anyone." It’s true that the governor has not increased the rate of taxation for New Jersey’s three biggest revenue generators: the gross income, business and sales taxes. But it’s also true that he has cut tax credit programs that resulted in some New Jerseyans having less money to pay their tax bills. In the eyes of some experts, that’s still a tax increase. We rate Guadagno’s claim Half True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Kim Guadagno	None	None	None	2013-10-13T07:30:00	2013-10-08	['None']
-snes-01281	United States health care facilities face an intravenous bag shortage because of the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Maria in September 2017.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-maria-cause-an-iv-bag-shortage/	None	Medical	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did Hurricane Maria Cause an IV Bag Shortage Across the United States?	29 December 2017	None	['United_States']
-pomt-10193	"In January, I outlined a plan to help revive our faltering economy, which formed the basis for a bipartisan stimulus package that passed the Congress."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/18/barack-obama/congress-didnt-pass-obamas-economic-plan/	With global financial markets shaken by the credit crisis, Barack Obama is promoting his ability to devise solutions for a troubled economy. In a Sept. 16 speech in Golden, Colo., Obama took credit for inspiring the economic stimulus package that Congress enacted and President Bush signed in February, saying its components had roots in an economic plan he outlined a month earlier on the campaign trail. "In January, I outlined a plan to help revive our faltering economy, which formed the basis for a bipartisan stimulus package that passed the Congress," Obama said. He went on to criticize his GOP opponent, John McCain, for promoting corporate tax breaks at the same time. The stimulus package was Congress’ attempt to promote consumer spending and revive the flagging economy through a combination of tax rebates, business tax incentives and housing provisions worth a total of $124.5-billion through the end of fiscal 2018. Despite most lawmakers’ initial optimism, recent signs are it hasn’t achieved its intended effect; August housing starts hit a 17-year low and credit rating agencies are forecasting weak holiday sales this winter. But can Obama really take credit for having "formed the basis" of the plan? He did articulate some policy proposals that found their way into the package, but he was far from the only politician promoting ways to prime the economy. And in many cases, he was endorsing ideas that already had been raised by others. The economic stimulus plan began life on Jan. 11, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., sent President Bush a letter asking him to help hammer out a bipartisan package to shore up the economy. By enlisting White House involvement, Pelosi and Reid hoped to pre-empt a possible avalanche of competing proposals to address the nation's economic problems. Bush endorsed the idea on Jan. 17, and the next day delivered an economic address calling for tax rebates for individuals and tax breaks for businesses to deliver "a shot in the arm" to the faltering economy. Obama announced his plan in a news release on Jan. 13. The backbone of Obama’s plan was tax relief for working-class Americans and senior citizens. He called for an immediate $250 tax cut for workers and their families and a $250 bonus for seniors, to be delivered in their Social Security checks. He advocated further cuts if the economy continued to worsen. And he backed expanding unemployment insurance and providing relief to homeowners hit by the housing crisis. Congress decided to go much further on the question of rebates. The final package incorporated a House-written stimulus plan that directed $600 payments to individuals who paid taxes in 2007 on wages or investment income, and $1,200 for couples. The payments would phase out beginning with individuals who made more than $75,000 in adjusted gross income and couples with more than $150,000. But anyone qualifying for a check would receive an additional $300 for each dependent child under age 17. It should be noted that the practice of providing tax breaks in tough times is not exactly new, meaning no one in the current Congress can claim credit for thinking up the idea. President Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, for example, sent rebates of $300 for individuals and $600 for married couples filing jointly in the hopes of stimulating the economy, though the payments in that instance were called "advance refunds." Obama’s call for expanded unemployment insurance never made it into the stimulus package, though Democratic leaders included an extension of the program in a supplemental war spending bill that Congress cleared in June. The provision, which gained traction after the nation’s jobless rate recorded its biggest jump in 20 years, extended unemployment insurance in all states by 13 weeks beyond the 26 weeks already authorized under law. States with unemployment rates of 6 percent or higher got an additional 13 weeks. So while Obama might have broached the idea, it took dire news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to prod Congress into taking action. Obama’s somewhat vague call for relief to distressed homeowners also was not included in the stimulus package. However, similar, more detailed plans had floated around Congress for nearly a year, as the depth and intensity of the mortgage crisis became apparent. Lawmakers including Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut — a former Democratic presidential candidate — and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., discussed ways of averting more foreclosures as early as March 2007, including creating public-private "rescue funds" that ease the way for borrowers to rewrite the terms of their mortgages. These discussions eventually led to provisions in a mortgage relief bill that Congress enacted and President Bush signed on July 30 that established a temporary government program to help borrowers who can’t afford current mortgage payments avoid foreclosure. The program, called HOPE for Homeowners, reinsures mortgages between Oct. 1, 2008 and Sept. 30, 2011, thereby making the government liable if the borrower defaults on the new loan and if the amount received in foreclosure is less than the outstanding principal. The costs of the program will be paid for by funds diverted from mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As to Obama's claim that his economic plan "formed the basis" for the package that became law, we see lots to dispute that. Congress had its own ideas about the size of tax rebates to individuals and didn’t adopt Obama’s ideas about unemployment insurance or homeowner relief. What’s more, lawmakers on committees with jurisdiction over the housing market discussed more detailed plans for helping homeowners months before Obama articulated them. Obama clearly deserves credit for offering a plan to bolster the sagging economy before Congress acted. But he is exaggerating the role his plan played in the stimulus package, which was jointly constructed with congressional leaders and the White House. For these reasons, we judge his claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-09-18T00:00:00	2008-09-16	['United_States_Congress']
-snes-04771	London's new mayor Sadiq Khan threatened Donald Trump with terror attacks if the candidate's proposed anti-Islam proposals were implemented.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/londons-mayor-threatens-trump/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	London’s New Mayor Threatens Trump	12 May 2016	None	['London', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-11564	"We invested" in our transportation system "$24 billion over eight years. That’s $3 billion more than what former Governor Jim Doyle spent on transportation over the same period of time."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2018/feb/06/scott-walker/why-scott-walker-real-terms-has-spent-less-transpo/	In his Jan. 24, 2018, State of the State speech, something of a launching pad for his run for a third term as governor, Republican Scott Walker drew contrasts between himself and his predecessor, Democrat Jim Doyle. Despite criticism for not spending more on transportation, Walker nevertheless claimed he’s done better than Doyle, stating: "We invested" in our transportation system "$24 billion over eight years. That’s $3 billion more than what former Governor Jim Doyle spent on transportation over the same period of time." Walker has made the same claim for at least 11 months, on Twitter, in a weekly radio address, in media interviews and in public appearances. The numbers The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau told us it’s possible to reach Walker’s figures by considering the total raw dollars put toward transportation programs, including a double-count of the principal in terms of money borrowed. That is, Walker’s method counts the principal at the time money was borrowed, and counts it again when repayments are made on that debt. That method shows Walker’s eight years of DOT funding, in raw dollars, including bonding and subsequent debt service payments, at $25.8 billion -- $3.4 billion more than Doyle. But besides doing the double counting, that measure also fails to take into account inflation. So, it is problematic in two ways. Here are the fiscal bureau numbers without the double counting but including inflation: Governor Period Real DOT funding Difference Jim Doyle 2003-’11 $18.7 billion +$1.3 billion Scott Walker 2011-’19 $17.4 billion Those figures show that Doyle, in real dollars, spent more on transportation than Walker has. We ran into a similar issue when Walker said in February 2017 the state is "investing more money into education than ever before in the history of Wisconsin." Our rating was Mostly False, since it didn’t take into account inflation, which is the best way to measure amounts over time. Our rating Walker says "we invested" in our transportation system "$24 billion over eight years. That’s $3 billion more than what former Governor Jim Doyle spent on transportation over the same period of time." Walker’s claim uses raw dollars and counts the total amount of bonding, debt service and all funds put toward transportation. But that double-counts the principal and ignores inflation. Excluding the double counting and taking into account inflation -- that is, real dollars spent on transportation -- Doyle actually spent more in his eight years than Walker has in his. We rate Walker’s statement Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com More on Walker and transportation Road project progress: In December 2017, Walker said: "Road projects across the state are staying on track or getting done sooner thanks to the good work of the team at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation." Our rating: Mostly False. He pointed to one highway project being ahead of schedule. But a wide range of other projects -- including major ones -- have been delayed. Promises kept: In November 2017, we rated as a Promise Kept two pledges that Walker made during his 2014 campaign for a second term as governor. He repaid funds that had been raided from the state transportation fund, and he prevented any more raids from the funding from occurring.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2018-02-06T06:00:00	2018-01-24	['Jim_Doyle']
-tron-01286	Historian wrote an article comparing our economic times to the Great Depression and Obama to Hitler	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/timwood-history/	None	education	None	None	None	Historian wrote an article comparing our economic times to the Great Depression and Obama to Hitler	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Great_Depression', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-00207	Says Detroit-area law enforcement is searching for a 'vigilante' serial killer after three pedophiles were killed in one week	pants on fire!	/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/oct/16/blog-posting/no-pedophiles-outside-detroit-are-not-being-target/	A story claiming that a vigilante is killing pedophiles outside of Detroit includes gruesome details about the murders of three men accused of sexually assaulting children. But according to the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office, the article is "completely FAKE NEWS." Published Sept. 30 on nbc9news.com—a website that features an "NBC 9 News" banner— the article is headlined, "Macomb County Fears ‘Vigilante’ Serial Killer After Third Pedophile Found Murdered in 1 Week." This story was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) As it turns out, what Macomb County residents actually feared was that this story was real: The Macomb County Sheriff’s Office announced on Facebook that several people reached out to ask the agency about the story after it appeared in their News Feeds. On Oct. 1, the sheriff’s office posted a message refuting the allegations. "The Macomb County Sheriff’s Office has not had any recent murders involving any registered sex offenders and our residents have no reason to be fearful of a killer on the loose," the agency’s statement reads. Three days earlier, on Sept. 28, a nearly identical story about a serial killer appeared on a website called cbs15.com. "Longview, TX Authorities Fear ‘Vigilante’ Serial Killer After Third Pedophile Found Dead In A Week," the headline reads. As in Michigan, the supposed first victim in Longview was "a 52-year-old man charged with sex offences [sic] against children as young as 5." The Longview Police Department also derided the article as "fake news." "There is no truth or validity that our sources can find that the author or the supposed news affiliate exists," reads a statement that the department posted on its own Facebook page on Sept. 28. Clicking on the byline for both stories leads to contact pages for the purported news sites. "We’d love to hear from you," the pages read, "please use the form below for any general enquiries." Messages sent to both the NBC 9 News and the CBS 15 News websites were not answered. Reached by phone, Eric Ehrler, a detective sergeant with the Macomb County sheriff's office, said the story is false. "Don't know where it came from, and there's no information that it is accurate at all," he said. The NBC News affiliate in Detroit, WDIV Local 4, responded to the false headline by writing its own story on the hoax: "There are several NBC affiliates throughout the country that broadcast on a virtual channel 9," writes Brian Newland in an article on WDIV’s website, "but none of them appear to be associated with nbc9news.com." We rate the headline Pants on Fire.	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-10-16T11:28:05	2018-09-30	['None']
-pomt-13792	Says Hillary Clinton is proposing "destroying Medicare for seniors."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/19/donald-trump-jr/donald-trump-jr-wrong-hillary-clinton-proposing-de/	Speaking at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Donald Trump Jr. touted his father, the newly anointed GOP presidential nominee, as someone who would be able to do a better job on health care than his rival, Hillary Clinton. He said his father would be "a president who will repeal and replace Obamacare without leaving our most vulnerable citizens without health care, and who will do it without destroying Medicare for seniors, as Hillary Clinton has proposed." Given how popular the single-payer health care program for seniors is, it was pretty obvious to us that Clinton wouldn’t have put the proposal "destroy Medicare" on the issues page of her website. (We were right on that one.) Still, we wondered whether there is any plausible interpretation of her actual Medicare policy proposals in which they could end up "destroying Medicare for seniors." We didn’t hear back from the Trump campaign about what Donald Trump Jr. meant, but we took a look for ourselves. First, let’s review Clinton’s agenda for Medicare. On her issues page, the word "Medicare" comes up twice. First, Clinton said she would "explore cost-effective ways to make more health care providers eligible for telehealth reimbursement under Medicare and other programs." That’s a fairly limited program, as well as relatively non-controversial and unlikely -- even in a worst-case scenario -- to endanger the program’s future, said Sherry Glied, a health policy specialist at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. The second reference to Medicare on Clinton’s issue page is more sweeping -- to "support letting people over 55 years old buy into Medicare." Currently, you need to be 65 to get coverage under Medicare. Under Clinton’s proposal, people up to 10 years younger than that could sign up for the program if they wanted to. Health care experts told PolitiFact that this proposal comes with challenges, but that even if worst came to worst, the idea seems unlikely to jeopardize the program’s continued existence for its core membership of those 65 and older. "There have been lots of proposals of this type in past and not much concern about the effects on traditional Medicare, assuming premiums are set correctly," Glied said. She said the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last analyzed a proposal of this sort in December 2008 and "raised no concerns about effects on the program as a whole." A. Bowen Garrett, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s health policy center, agreed that the eventual fine print in Clinton’s proposal is going to matter, because in any program that’s optional, there’s a risk that it could attract a relatively small and less healthy pool of beneficiaries who could force premiums upward. Still, Garrett said, "I do not see why that would necessarily harm the program" in the way Donald Trump Jr. meant it. Indeed, in the fight to craft the Democratic platform, Clinton’s allies managed to defeat a more sweeping proposal backed by Bernie Sanders to cover all Americans through a Medicare-style single-payer system. After the proposal was defeated, several experts -- including some who are sympathetic to the idea of expanding health insurance coverage -- told Kaiser Health News that the Sanders approach that Clinton defeated was disruptive enough to have actually put the program at risk. "It’s hard to be nimble" when a system gets that big, Ezekiel Emanuel, who advised Obama on crafting his signature health care law, told the publication. "No organization in the world does anything for 300 million people and does it efficiently." Princeton University health policy expert Paul Starr, a onetime adviser to President Bill Clinton, concurred that "to try to do it in one fell swoop would be massively disruptive," according to Kaiser Health News. Other health care specialists told PolitiFact that Donald Trump Jr.’s statement is vastly overheated. "There is nothing in her proposals that would destroy Medicare or harm present or future beneficiaries," said John Rother, the president and CEO of the National Coalition on Health Care and the former executive vice president for policy at AARP -- the seniors’ group that would presumably be at most direct risk if Medicare collapsed. Clinton is urging "changes, yes, quite a few. But nothing that would harm the program or those it serves." Rena M. Conti, a health policy specialist at the University of Chicago, agreed. "Nothing I am aware her saying to date would imply that she aims to dismantle the current Medicare program or take away benefits that seniors currently enjoy or bankrupt the trust fund that is used to finance some current Medicare benefits for seniors," she said. Our ruling Donald Trump Jr. said Clinton is proposing "destroying Medicare for seniors." Clinton is certainly not proposing that in a literal sense, and experts we contacted agreed that her actual policy proposals -- especially making Medicare an option for those between 55 and 65 -- were ambitious but were hardly a dagger at the heart of the program. We rate the claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/9f004f69-1547-4e54-a877-a2ba06f7153f	None	Donald Trump Jr.	None	None	None	2016-07-19T23:56:02	2016-07-19	['None']
-goop-00245	Kate Middleton Pregnant With Fourth Baby, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-middleton-not-pregnant-fourth-baby/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kate Middleton NOT Pregnant With Fourth Baby, Despite Report	11:32 am, September 20, 2018	None	['None']
-afck-00213	“Since 2011, the City of Cape Town has created more than 140,000 temporary work opportunities for unemployed South Africans through [the Expanded Public Works Programme].”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/does-the-da-create-change-that-moves-sa-forward-we-weigh-up-key-claims/	None	None	None	None	None	Does the DA create ‘change that moves SA forward’? We weigh up key claims	2016-06-02 06:07	None	['None']
-snes-02043	John McCain No Longer a Senator?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/john-mccain-retires/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	John McCain No Longer a Senator?	19 July 2017	None	['None']
-vees-00467	VERA FILES YEARENDER: DIGONGsyonaryo	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/verafiles-yearender-digongsyonaryo	None	None	None	None	Duterte	VERA FILES YEARENDER: DIGONGsyonaryo	December 31, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-14748	"One of the things I would immediately do … is bring back the warrior class -- Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. ... Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/16/carly-fiorina/carly-fiorina-claims-military-generals-retired-ear/	The Republican candidates divided their time during the CNN Las Vegas presidential debate criticizing each other and criticizing President Barack Obama. Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina combined both in her answer to how she would defeat ISIS. "To wage war, we need a commander in chief who has made tough calls in tough times and stood up to be held accountable over and over, not first-term senators who've never made an executive decision in their life," Fiorina said. "One of the things I would immediately do, in addition to defeating them here at home, is bring back the warrior class -- Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn't want to hear." That is an interesting list of military leaders. We looked into their reasons for leaving. Fiorina might have a point for some of them, but certainly two of her examples don’t hold up. Gen. John Keane In a military career that spanned 37 years, Keane rose to become acting chief of staff and vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army. The trouble for Fiorina is Keane resigned in 2003. Obama took office in 2009. Keane never served under Obama. Gen. David Petraeus Petraeus was appointed by President George W. Bush to lead the multinational forces in Iraq. He became chief of the military’s Central Command in 2007 and was appointed by Obama to be commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Obama nominated Petraeus to head the Central Intelligence Agency in 2011. Petraeus retired from the military to take on the new position. Petraeus was forced to resign from the CIA in 2012 when investigators uncovered that he had shared classified materials with a woman who was writing his biography, and in fact was having an extramarital affair with her. Gen. Stanley McChrystal McChrystal was Obama’s pick to lead American and NATO forces in Afghanistan at a time when the war was taking a mounting toll on U.S. soldiers. McChrystal advocated for a strategy that called for as many as 40,000 additional troops. Many in the White House disagreed, among them Vice President Joe Biden. Ultimately, McChrystal got much of what he recommended. His downfall came when he allowed a Rolling Stone reporter to travel with him. When the article emerged, McChrystal and his staff were quoted making disparaging remarks about Biden and other top civilian administration officials. Such a public rift between top military and civilian officials created a management crisis in the White House. Obama removed McChrystal from his post. In Rose Garden remarks, the president said "the conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general." McChrystal’s story partly follows Fiorina’s narrative. He did disagree with some of Obama’s top advisers. On the other hand, Obama largely did what McChrystal wanted. We can’t know the complete inside story, but the immediate issue that cost McChrystal his job wasn’t that he spoke up, but that he spoke too publicly. Gen. James Mattis Mattis was part of the command shuffle that took place after Obama fired McChrystal. Petraeus, who had been the head of Central Command moved over to run operations in Afghanistan. Obama put Mattis in charge of Central Command. Obama removed Mattis from that job in 2013. By some reports, there was concern in the White House that Mattis seemed too eager to use military force against Iran. But another account has it that he rubbed civilian officials the wrong way with the issues he raised about Iran. While we don’t know all the details, it seems possible that Mattis was removed over policy differences. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn Flynn was a key intelligence adviser to McChrystal in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2012, he became the head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. According to the Washington Post, Flynn wanted to reorganize the agency, placing more operatives overseas and focusing on a range of threats beyond the conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. His management style and strategic plans put him at odds with his bosses, importantly, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers. Flynn and his deputy left the agency at the same time. Flynn’s story largely aligns with Fiorina’s message. Our ruling Fiorina said that five generals -- Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, and Flynn -- resigned because they all told Obama things he didn’t want to hear. Fiorina might be pushing the point of whether Obama himself didn’t like what they had to say, but two of the men -- Mattis and Flynn -- likely departed over policy differences, published reporting shows. McChrystal’s story is harder to judge because Obama took his advice. There was friction over policy, but he was removed from his post due to an interview with Rolling Stone that at the very least put Obama in a difficult position. Petraeus’ departure had nothing to do with policy. He mishandled classified documents and had an affair. Keane retired long before Obama took office. Fiorina is on solid ground with only two of her examples, and also indicated an Obama involvement that is not proven. That’s shaky enough to rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Carly Fiorina	None	None	None	2015-12-16T00:42:48	2015-12-15	['Barack_Obama', 'David_Petraeus']
-pomt-10714	Obama says his health care plan is "universal."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/nov/26/barack-obama/no-mandate-makes-universal-claim-tough/	Barack Obama responded to an attack on his health care plan from Hillary Clinton by saying, "I do provide universal health care. The only difference between Senator Clinton's health care plan and mine is that she thinks the problem for people without health care is that nobody has mandated -- forced -- them to get health care." The distinction between the two plan's is that Clinton's has a mandate requiring people to get health insurance; Obama's does not. Is it fair to say a plan is universal without a mandate? There's little doubt that Obama's plan would significantly expand health care coverage. In its structure, it's not that different from Clinton's: Both leave in place employer-based private insurance; they increase access to Medicaid and SCHIP programsl they subsidize premiums for some employers; and they create pools for individuals to buy their own cheaper insurance. But universal? Obama's plan "would get close to universal coverage," said Sara Collins, a health care expert with The Commonwealth Fund. "It's clear his goal is universal coverage," she said, noting that Obama's plan includes a mandate for children. "But I think to get all people covered, he would have to mandate that adults get it, too." We think Obama is pushing the envelope calling a plan without a mandate "universal." For that reason, we rate his claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2007-11-26T00:00:00	2007-11-15	['None']
-snes-03032	Most Favored Nations	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trumps-muslim-ban-exclude-countries-businesses/	None	Uncategorized	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Does President Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ Exclude Countries Where He Has Businesses?	31 January 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04313	JFK donated his entire presidential salary to charity.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jfk-presidential-salary/	None	Politicians	None	Dan Evon	None	John F. Kennedy Donated His Entire Presidential Salary to Charity	5 August 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00454	A VA hospital removed military flags in order to fly a LGBTQ pride flag.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/va-hospital-flag-pride/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a VA Hospital Replace Military Flags with a Pride Flag?	15 June 2018	None	['None']
-pose-01177	Launching literacy achievement academies would renew, and build on, a program initiated in the 1990s at the urging of then-Gov. George W. Bush.	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/abbott-o-meter/promise/1267/create-literacy-achievement-academies/	None	abbott-o-meter	Greg Abbott	None	None	Create literacy achievement academies	2015-01-20T14:00:00	None	['George_W._Bush']
-pomt-13704	Says Hillary Clinton "negotiated the first agreement — ever — where China and India officially committed to reduce their emissions."	half-true	/global-news/statements/2016/jul/28/bill-clinton/fact-checking-bill-clinton-hillarys-big-climate-ch/	In detailing their much-scrutinized marriage and love story at the Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton also took care to list his wife’s numerous legislative and foreign policy achievements. Among them: "She put climate change at the center of our foreign policy. She negotiated the first agreement ever — ever — where China and India officially committed to reduce their emissions." While Bill Clinton’s claim is largely accurate, he’s offering a rosy spin on the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, which was at the time and continues to be widely panned. Hillary Clinton did play a key -- but not solo -- role in the talks with China and India, and it was the first time the two countries made emissions reduction pledges in an international agreement. But unlike the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 or Paris Agreement of 2015, the accord wasn’t actually an official agreement. It wasn’t "adopted" by signatories, but merely "taken note of" (in other words, they formally recognized the accord’s existence). Furthermore, the "agreement" was non-binding and the countries set their own voluntary targets, leading some environmentalists and experts to cast it aside as essentially meaningless. Let’s dive in. Before Copenhagen, China and India had both signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States backed out of. But because they were developing countries, they were not required to curb their carbon emissions. In 2007, in response to overtaking the United States as the world’s biggest carbon emitter, China released its first national climate change program and said it would reduce its energy consumption by 20 percent by 2010 and "consequently reduce CO2 emissions." Similarly, India released a national action plan on climate change in 2008, in which it didn’t commit to reducing emissions but laid out steps that would. But it wasn’t until Copenhagen that the two countries finally committed to reducing carbon emissions. In this sense, the accord "played a major role in breaking" the "firewall" between developed countries and developing countries when it came to climate action responsibility, according to David Ciplet, an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who wrote Power in a Warming World: The New Global Politics of Climate Change and the Remaking of Environmental Inequality. "However, whether the Copenhagen Accord was a positive development overall is definitely controversial," Ciplet told PolitiFact. Nonetheless, like her husband, Hillary Clinton often touts the accord as one of her major climate change accomplishments, referring to it as a "key diplomatic breakthrough" on her campaign website and recounting how she and Obama were "hunting down the Chinese" to get them to the table. She devotes a significant chunk of a chapter in her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, to the talks. She notes the role of Todd Stern, a key negotiator, as well as her and Obama’s famous tag-team chase to find the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiaobao during the talks. "In a makeshift conference room whose glass walls had been covered by drapes for privacy against prying eyes, we found Wen wedged around a long table with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and South African President Jacob Zuma. Jaws dropped when they saw us. 'Are you ready?' said President Obama, flashing a big grin," Clinton writes. "Now the real negotiations could begin. It was a moment that was at least a year in the making." But according to news reports, world leaders, environmental activists and experts, the "real negotiations" didn’t actually lead to anything with teeth. China and India did end up agreeing to reduce their emissions and set their own targets, but emphasized the pledge was not legally binding. This basically changed the international approach to climate action from Kyoto Protocol, which had a compliance mechanism, to "a voluntary approach where countries are free to determine unilaterally what forms of action they would like to commit to," said Ciplet. "Many, including myself, saw this as a much weaker mitigation framework than a robust second commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol," he said, adding that even after the Paris Agreement, "we are still not on track" in mitigating climate change. Our ruling Bill Clinton said Hillary Clinton "negotiated the first agreement — ever — where China and India officially committed to reduce their emissions." Clinton was at the table at the Copenhagen Accord, though she wasn’t the only U.S. official present. And while it was the first time China and India made pledges in an international agreement, their pledges were not legally binding. Many, if not most, environmentalists and experts say the agreement was a wash at best and a failure at worst. We rate Clinton’s claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/3d55f16e-04cd-47ac-8e55-fc8fe373c7b6	None	Bill Clinton	None	None	None	2016-07-28T20:00:29	2016-07-26	['China', 'India']
-pose-01191	A fund already created by lawmakers would need about $363 million to cover tuition costs currently absorbed by institutions of higher education.	not yet rated	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/abbott-o-meter/promise/1281/provide-state-funding-free-tuition-available-veter/	None	abbott-o-meter	Greg Abbott	None	None	Provide state funding for free tuition available to veterans and their children	2015-01-20T14:00:00	None	['None']
-pomt-08512	Daniel Webster "is an advocate for a group that teaches that mothers should not work outside the home."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2010/oct/06/alan-grayson/follow-taliban-dan-ad-alan-grayson-slams-daniel-we/	Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., one of the most outspoken Democrats in the House, garnered attention -- much of it negative -- for a stinging ad he released on Sept. 25, 2010, labeling his Republican challenger, former state House Speaker Daniel Webster, "Taliban Dan" due to his longstanding connection to a conservative Christian group. PolitiFact Florida ruled one part of the ad False and another part Half True. In fact, the national and local attention became so intense that Webster experienced a surge in fundraising among voters who thought that Grayson's attack had gone too far. On Oct. 6, 2010, the Grayson camp released a new ad that covers much of the same territory, but which eliminates some of the more provocative language and claims from the first ad. (In what may be a sign that the Grayson campaign is distancing itself from the "Taliban Dan" ad, the YouTube link to it has now been made inaccessible to the general public.) As soon as we heard about the new ad, we knew we had to fact-check it. So we'll analyze several claims from the ad separately. Here's a full transcript of the new ad: Daniel Webster's Washington backers are attacking Alan Grayson on women's issues. The facts on Webster's record: Fact: Webster sponsored a bill to create a form of marriage that would trap women in abusive relationships. Fact: Webster is an advocate for a group that teaches that mothers should not work outside the home. Fact: Webster would force victims of rape and incest to bear their attacker's child. Those are the facts. Don't let Daniel Webster make the laws we will have to live with. The one we'll check now is the claim that "Webster is an advocate for a group that teaches that mothers should not work outside the home." As we noted in our fact-check of the earlier "Taliban Dan" ad, the Grayson campaign is referring to a conservative Christian group called the Institute in Basic Life Principles. Webster has been involved with the group for nearly 30 years and continues to participate in training sessions and speak at seminars. In a 2003 interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Webster said he home-schooled his six children using the institute's curricula and said that the group's teachings have had a major influence on his life. Since that 2003 article, Webster has kept up his ties to the group -- in fact, the allegation from the "Taliban Dan" ad that we rated False stems from an address Webster made to the group in 2009. So we have no quarrel with Grayson's description of Webster as someone who continues to be "an advocate" for the group. What about the notion that the institute "teaches that mothers should not work outside the home"? We see strong indications that that's the case, but we'll also mention some notable caveats. As we reported in our earlier analysis, the institute helps teach Christians how to find success by following scriptural principles, and some of its specific teachings are controversial. The institute teaches that married couples are to abstain from sex 40 days after the birth of a son, 80 days after the birth of a daughter and the evening prior to worship, and that people should avoid rock and even contemporary Christian music because it can be addictive. In web-based instructional materials titled, "How a Wife’s Attitudes Can Preserve Her Marriage: Seven Key Areas of Respect and Submission," the institute writes, "The specific roles of husbands and wives are defined in Scripture: 'Let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband' (Ephesians 5:33). A wife who respects her husband’s leadership and submits to him greatly strengthens the marriage relationship." Among other things, the institute's materials tell wives, "Do not threaten your husband or make demands," and they warn that "if you lack inward Godliness and outward neatness and modesty, your husband can lose respect for you and be more easily tempted by other women." We looked through the institute's website and found hints that the group doesn't expect mothers to work outside the home, but we couldn't find an explicit teaching on that point. For instance, the institute teaches, "Trust God to provide for your family’s financial needs through your husband’s leadership." It also teaches wives to "maintain personal neatness in your appearance. Wear your clothes and hair in a way that honors your husband’s preferences. As an expression of how important your husband is to you, do your best to look nice when he comes home from work." The implicit assumption in that teaching is that the man will be working outside the home and the woman will be taking care of the children. And a 1997 St. Petersburg Times profile of Webster quoted the Rev. Tom Brandon, identified as an institute director, saying that it would not be natural for a woman to work outside the home and the man to raise the children. "That puts a wife in a role that she's not equipped for inwardly or outwardly and puts the man in the same position," he said. "A man is the lover and leader. (The wife's) role is to trust God to supply her needs through the leadership of her husband and to serve with him and fulfill his needs." Brandon's quote gets us closer to confirming Grayson's claim, but it's still focused on the idea of house-husband, which muddies the message a bit. So while the view that mothers shouldn't work seems consistent with the institute's teachings, we can't find anything in the institute's materials explicitly requiring mothers to forgo work in order to stay home. But we perceive a more important omission in Grayson's ad -- it ignores substantial evidence that Webster has not adhered to this particular tenet, at least in his official duties. For starters, he has employed numerous working mothers in his office. A Webster spokeswoman said that he employed at least three as senior aides in the legislature: Ann Drawdy, his chief legislative assistant in the House and Senate; Allison Carter, a policy analyst during his tenure as Senate Majority Leader; and MaryPat Moore, his health care policy director during his tenure as speaker. The spokeswoman added that Webster currently has working mothers on his congressional campaign staff. In addition, colleagues in both parties have said that Webster has not sought to push his religious beliefs on them. The 2003 Times profile quoted two of them -- former Democratic House Speaker Peter Wallace and state Sen. Nancy Argenziano, a moderate Republican who served with Webster in the House. "He's a very religious man, but he never imposed that on anybody," Argenziano said. "If he had a personal agenda for his personal beliefs, he never made it the will of he House, so to speak. He was the best speaker I've seen." So where does this leave us? An institute director and some of the teaching materials give strong hints that mothers are expected to be at home, but we don't find anything explicitly requiring mothers to forgo work in order to stay home. But even if that is the group's belief, Webster has employed several mothers in senior positions, and colleagues have said he didn't push his beliefs in the Legislature. That contradicts the impression given in the ad that Webster is personally opposed to mothers working outside the home. So we rate the ad's claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Alan Grayson	None	None	None	2010-10-06T17:58:58	2010-10-06	['None']
-goop-01594	Katie Holmes, Jamie Foxx Expecting A Baby, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/katie-holmes-jamie-foxx-baby-not-true-family/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Katie Holmes, Jamie Foxx NOT Expecting A Baby, Despite Late And Wrong Report	2:24 pm, February 12, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-01868	Counter-demonstrators in Charlottesville did not have the appropriate permits to protest a white supremacist rally.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/counter-demonstrators-permits-charlottesville/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	Counter-Demonstrators Didn’t Have Permits in Charlottesville?	21 August 2017	None	['None']
-bove-00251	How India’s Twitter Influencers Fell For A Known Fake News Website	none	https://www.boomlive.in/how-indias-twitter-influencers-fell-for-a-known-fake-news-website/	None	None	None	None	None	How India’s Twitter Influencers Fell For A Known Fake News Website	Jun 07 2017 2:30 pm, Last Updated: Jun 16 2017 7:14 pm	None	['India']
-pomt-06054	"Since the passage of Obama's stimulus package, over 1 million additional jobs were lost and nearly 25 million Americans are out of work, are stuck in part-time work, or have given up looking."	half-true	/florida/statements/2012/jan/11/mitt-romney/romney-says-obamas-stimulus-package-over-1-million/	Presidential candidates are zeroing in on job growth with just weeks to go before Florida's Jan. 31 primary. The state has suffered double-digit unemployment since May 2009. In a campaign brochure sent to voters in early January, Republican candidate Mitt Romney attacked President Barack Obama's fiscal policies as the "failed job-killing policies of government spending, regulation and Obamacare." The mailer then criticizes the $787 billion stimulus package that "promised jobs and relief to small businesses but failed to deliver." "What did all that spending do for our economy, families and small businesses?" the mailer asks. "Since the passage of Obama's stimulus package, over 1 million additional jobs were lost and nearly 25 million Americans are out of work, are stuck in part-time work, or have given up looking." Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, implies that if you've gotten the pink slip since the stimulus package passed, or are stuck in a part-time job, you should feel free to blame Obama. Are Romney's numbers right and is it fair for him to blame Obama? Romney's numbers We turned to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, to check Romney's numbers about job losses and unemployment. Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, known as the stimulus, in February 2009. We aren't certain of the exact date of the Romney flier -- the Miami Herald's Naked Politics blog posted it Jan. 6 -- but we believe it relied on November 2011 data. (We did not hear back from Romney's press office when we asked about it.) • Jobs lost: In February 2009 there were about 132.8 million jobs in the United States. In November 2011 there were 131.7 million jobs. That means that there was a job loss of about 1.1 million -- or as Romney claimed "over 1 million." Romney combines three categories for the remainder of his claim -- saying that nearly 25 million are out of work, are stuck in part-time work, or have given up looking. Let's look at each one individually: • Out of work: 13.3 million were unemployed in November 2011. • Stuck in part-time work: BLS has a category called "part-time for economic reasons" which was about 8.5 million in November 2011. • Given up looking: BLS economist Jim Walker pointed us to the categories of "marginally attached" workers -- those who want a job and searched in the past year but not in the past four weeks. That figure was about 2.6 million in November 2011. If we add out of work, stuck in part-time work and given up looking this brings our total to about 24.4 million -- or as Romney said, "nearly 25 million." Is Obama to blame? Now that we've dispatched with the numbers, which are accurate, what about Romney's suggestion here that Obama is to blame or as Romney wrote on the mailer "Obama isn't working"? This report from the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, released in July, estimates the Recovery Act "raised employment by 2.4 to 3.6 million jobs relative to what it otherwise would have been." Don't trust White House advisers to evaluate the president's policies? It's not just their handiwork. The March report cited four independent analyses by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and three by private economic analysis companies, IHS/Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody's Economy.com. Estimates ranged from 1.3 million to 2.45 million jobs created or saved. (We reviewed this evidence before in our December 2011 fact-check of Florida Republican Rep. Steve Southerland.) In November, the Congressional Budget Office reviewed economic data related to the stimulus and concluded that in the third quarter of 2011, Recovery Act policies: • Raised real gross domestic product by between 0.3 percent and 1.9 percent. • Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.2 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points. • Increased the number of people employed by between 0.4 million and 2.4 million. • Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 0.5 million to 3.3 million. Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution and an economist for the U.S. Department of Labor 1979-81, says that Romney's statement could cause listeners to incorrectly infer that Obama's stimulus package caused 1.1 million in lost jobs. "Gov. Romney probably recognizes that most of the job losses in 2009 would have occurred, even if Romney himself had taken the oath of office on Jan. 20. (Recall that he was a candidate for the Republican nomination.) Even with all the powers of the U.S. presidency it’s hard to stop a serious recession on a dime," Burtless said. "Many economists, including me, think the job loss would have been considerably greater and the recovery of payroll jobs weaker without the stimulus." Our ruling Romney said: "Since the passage of Obama's stimulus package, over 1 million additional jobs were lost and nearly 25 million Americans are out of work, are stuck in part-time work, or have given up looking." Romney's numbers about job losses and unemployment are correct. But Romney's suggestion that Obama's stimulus is to blame is misleading. Economists both inside and outside the government say the stimulus helped prevent further job losses. We rate this Half True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-01-11T14:12:27	2012-01-06	['Barack_Obama', 'United_States']
-snes-00717	A meme presents accurately describes Japan's healthcare and health insurance system.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/healthcare-in-japan/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Six ‘Facts’ About Healthcare in Japan	25 April 2018	None	['Japan']
-pomt-01579	Virginia Democrats recently enforced voter ID rules that were "considerably more stringent than those contained in the state law they denounce."	half-true	/virginia/statements/2014/sep/09/mark-obenshain/obenshain-says-democrats-exceeded-voter-id-law-rec/	Democrats have portrayed state Sen. Mark Obenshain as the face of voter suppression since the Harrisonburg Republican began his successful push in 2013 for a law requiring Virginians to produce photo identification at the polls. Obenshain recently threw paint back at his adversaries in the wake of the Aug. 9 firehouse primary Democrats held for the state Senate seat that was relinquished by Henry Marsh, D-Richmond. In his Aug. 13 newsletter, Obenshain wrote, "In the Democratic Party-run firehouse primary to choose the party’s state senate nominee in the 16th District special election, Democrats -- free to adopt any voter identification standard they wished, or none at all -- opted for requirements considerably more stringent than those contained in the state law they denounce, actually going so far as to require that IDs show the address at which the individual is registered." We wondered whether Democrats did adopt voter ID rules for the contest that were tougher than state law standards. State voter ID law Obenshain’s bill passed on partisan votes in the House and Senate last year and was signed by then-Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican. Democrats and many liberal-leaning organizations opposed the measure, saying Virginia had no history of election fraud and voicing concerns that the law would make it harder for the elderly, poor and minorities to vote. Republicans said their aim was not to deny access to ballots, but to protect the integrity of Virginia’s elections. The law, which went into effect July 1, requires voters to produce one piece of identification at the polls: a photo ID. Acceptable forms of the photo identification include a Virginia driver’s license that has not been expired for more than 12 months; a U.S. passport or any other photo ID issued by the U.S., Virginia or one of its political subdivisions; a student ID issued by any institute of higher learning in Virginia; any employee identification card; or a voter ID card that can be obtained through local registrar’s offices. It should be noted that the law does not require the photo ID to include the voter’s address. Poll workers are required to check the ID against voter rolls to make sure the person is registered to vote in the precinct and, if so, is allowed to cast a ballot. ID in the 16th District A firehouse primary is not a typical election; it’s an informal caucus run by a political party, which establishes the rules. On Aug. 9, Democrats opened two caucus sites in Richmond and each of five other localities in the 16th District. Registered voters could drop by between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and -- provided they first signed an allegiance oath to the Democratic Party -- cast a paper ballot for one of four candidates seeking the Senate nomination. Robert Dempsey, executive director of the Democratic Party of Virginia, sent PolitiFact the rules for the special election primary. They required each voter to provide proof of registration or residency. The procedures did not demand a photo ID and Dempsey said the party was willing to accept some forms of identification that had once been acceptable in state-run elections, such as a utility bill. Obenshain contends Democrats went beyond the bounds of state law by requiring voters to produce two IDs. Dempsey said that did occur briefly at one polling station, the result of a misunderstanding by officials, and was quickly corrected. Dempsey noted, accurately, that written procedures did not call for two forms of IDs. Obenshain also says Democrats exceeded state law requiring voters to produce an ID bearing their current address. There’s no dispute here. Dempsey said officials checked the address against the one listed in voting rolls. If there was a discrepancy, the voter was allowed to cast a provisional ballot. About 3,800 votes were cast in the four-candidate firehouse primary, including 156 provisional ballots that were never counted because they wouldn’t have made a difference in outcome; Del. Rosalyn Dance of Petersburg won hands down. The district is heavily Democratic, and Dance will have an edge this fall in a race against independent Preston Brown. Our ruling Obenshain claims that the Democratic Party enforced voter ID rules in the 16th Senate District firehouse primary that were "considerably more stringent" than those mandated in a new state law. There was a temporary glitch at one polling place that required voters to produce two IDs, instead of just one mandated under state law. This was quickly corrected and didn’t reflect the party’s intent. That brings us down to the one ID that most primary voters had to produce. Democrats went one step beyond state law by requiring an ID with an address and another step by making sure the address matched with the one listed in voter rolls before a ballot was handed out. On the other hand, the party gets points for leniency because it did not enforce a state law requiring voters to produce a photo ID. So Obenshain’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out a lot of important information. We rate it Half True.	None	Mark Obenshain	None	None	None	2014-09-09T09:23:49	2014-08-13	['None']
-hoer-01123	Get Free Six Flag Tickets	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/get-free-six-flag-tickets-facebook-survey-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Get Free Six Flag Tickets Facebook Survey Scam	July 20, 2016	None	['None']
-hoer-00178	Car-Jacking Scheme Warning - Paper on Rear Window	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/car-jacking-warning.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Car-Jacking Scheme Warning - Paper on Rear Window	December 2005	None	['None']
-pomt-08958	By 12th grade, "more than 3 out of 10 girls have been pregnant at least once."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2010/jul/22/georgia-association-homes-and-services-children/group-says-more-3-out-10-girls-have-been-pregnant-/	Among the many dismal claims PolitiFact Georgia runs across, this one seemed more depressing than most. An e-mail newsletter sent by a membership group of state foster homes and other child services said that by 12th grade, "more than 3 out of 10 girls have been pregnant at least once." Really? That much? Normer Adams, executive director of the Georgia Association of Homes and Services for Children, is editor of Welfare Watch. The newsletter used the teen pregnancy statistic to illustrate the need for programs and praise the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention's (G-CAPP) Second Chance Homes, where teen mothers live as they learn to be self-sufficient. Here's what the newsletter said: "By the 12th grade, 63% of all students have had sex and more than 3 out of 10 girls have been pregnant at least once." This item deals with the pregnancy statistic. Adams said he got his information from the Web site of G-CAPP, which is a major statewide nonprofit that advocates to lower teen pregnancy rates. G-CAPP's "Fast Facts" page gives a list of statistics on the state of teen pregnancy in Georgia and nationally. "Three in ten girls in the U.S. become pregnant at least once before age 20," it states. That's not by twelfth grade, but by age 20. So the newsletter didn't accurately cite the figure. Still, "three in ten" in the U.S. seemed like a lot, so we called the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit that produces statistics and other information frequently used by teen pregnancy prevention groups. It's where G-CAPP got its figures. The group calculated the pregnancy statistic itself, said Bill Albert, its chief program officer. An April 2008 fact sheet on the statistic said it was based on 2004 teen pregnancy rates from the National Center for Health Statistics, the most recent figures at the time. The usual teen pregnancy rate measures the rate of teen pregnancy in a single year. The figure from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy is different because it measures the "cumulative risk of teen pregnancy over a teen girl's entire life up to age 20," according to its fact sheet. The group totaled the teen pregnancy rate for girls in each of those 10 years, adjusting for teens who have multiple pregnancies. It found that 29.81 percent of girls become pregnant at least once as a teen, or three in 10. To get an independent take on the subject, we contacted the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group that performs social science research, policy analysis and public education on sexual and reproductive health in the U.S. and internationally. It checked data from the National Survey of Family Growth that was released last month. The survey, a sample of 15- to 44-year-olds across the nation, was conducted between 2006 and 2008 by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just under 28 percent of women who were age 20 at the time of the survey reported having ever been pregnant, according to the data. That's very close to 29.81 percent from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Or three in 10. And for girls who are 18, the typical age for a 12th-grader, that figure was about 17 percent, according to that same set of data. So why don't we notice more of these pregnant teens? Albert from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy said only about half of these teens give birth. "Some may have hidden the pregnancies, some may have elected to terminate the pregnancy, others may have suffered a fetal loss," Albert said. "In short, pregnancy is -- up to a point -- hard to detect. Children are not." So yes, three in 10 females in the U.S. become pregnant at least once by age 20. This means that while Welfare Watch got the statistic from the G-CAPP Web site wrong, it's correct that a significant percentage of U.S. teens become pregnant. So while the statement is generally true, it was off-target on some important information. We rate the statement Half True.	None	Georgia Association of Homes and Services for Children	None	None	None	2010-07-22T06:00:00	2010-07-15	['None']
-pomt-14727	Says he faced "a record budget deficit" in Virginia in 2014.	false	/virginia/statements/2015/dec/21/terry-mcauliffe/mcauliffes-misspoken-claim-about-facing-record-def/	It’s a set part of Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s spiel to talk about how he "inherited a $2.4 billion deficit" when he took office in January 2014 and managed, with the bipartisan help of legislators, to balance the state budget. In a recent PolitiFact, we checked McAuliffe’s claim that the shortfall was left behind by his predecessor, Republican Bob McDonnell. We noted that McDonnell proposed a balanced budget before leaving office and records show that the brunt of the economic slowdown that caused the shortfall, although not McAuliffe’s fault, occurred during his watch. We rated that claim Mostly False. The governor added a new element to the claim on Dec. 10 during his monthly radio show on WRVA in Richmond. "I came in with a record deficit I inherited," said McAuliffe, a Democrat. Without rehashing details of the "inherited" part of his statement, we decided to examine McAuliffe’s claim that the $2.4 billion shortfall he confronted was "a record deficit" for Virginia. Records show the state faced a far greater crisis at the start of 2010, when McDonnell was succeeding Democrat Tim Kaine as governor and Virginia began suffering the full effects of the Great Recession. Two reports by the General Assembly’s budget committees at that time identified a shortfall of almost $4.5 billion for the two-year budget that would begin July 1, 2010. Brian Coy, McAuliffe’s director of communications, told us the governor "misspoke" in claiming he faced a deficit record. The reason for the mistake requires a little explanation. McAuliffe, as we noted in a Nov. 16 fact check, typically follows his claim about inheriting a $2.4 billion deficit with the kicker that he and lawmakers adroitly turned the problem "into a record surplus." He offered the same kicker on WRVA, noting that the so-called "record deficit" is "now a record surplus." Coy said McAuliffe inadvertently used the adjective "record" to describe both budget developments instead of just the surplus. "When you talk to the public all day, sometimes you have a slip of the tongue," Coy said. We know of no other instance where the governor made a similar claim about the shortfall. The record surplus stems from McAuliffe’s announcement in July 2015 that Virginia ended the first year of its biennial budget $550 million in the black. That slightly outstrips the previous surplus high of $545 million for the budget year ending in mid-2005, according to records going back to 1990. But it should be added that when adjusted for inflation, the 2005 surplus still is the highest. Some people seeing all these figures might conclude that Virginia’s budget has made an almost $3 billion rebound during the past year -- from a $2.4 billion shortfall in 2014 to a $550 million surplus this year. As we’ve noted before, that’s not the case. McAuliffe and the legislature overestimated the state’s economic problems in August 2014, when they adjusted the two-year budget to a "pessimistic" forecast of a $2.4 billion shortfall. That assumption turned out to be $550 million too high and produced the record surplus McAuliffe now cites. Our ruling McAuliffe said the $2.4 billion budget shortfall he and lawmakers resolved last year was "a record deficit" for Virginia. When we questioned about the assertion, a spokesman said the governor misspoke. Indeed, the reddest ink in Virginia was seen in 2010, when the state, in the teeth of recession, faced a $4.5 billion shortfall for the coming two-year budget. We don’t suggest the crisis McAuliffe faced was peanuts or question the explanation that he made a simple "slip of the tongue." But words matter, and we rate McAuliffe’s statement False.	None	Terry McAuliffe	None	None	None	2015-12-21T08:38:10	2015-12-10	['None']
-pomt-07834	"The people that went to school with (Barack Obama), they never saw him, they don't know who he is."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/14/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-people-who-went-school-obama-nev/	Donald Trump began a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 10, 2011, by announcing that he is "thinking about" running for president. Too often, Trump said, successful people don't run for president because they don't want to be "scrutinized or abused." As a result, he said, we get presidents like Barack Obama. "Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere," Trump said. "In fact, I'll go a step further: the people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don't know who he is. It's crazy." The line drew big applause from the conservative audience. We tried unsuccessfully to reach Trump to see if he was suggesting that Obama led an unremarkable life during his school years, or if it was a wink to the conservative legions who are not convinced that Obama is a natural-born American citizen. In any case, Trump's comment harkens back to an attack line that dogged Obama throughout the 2008 presidential campaign -- that he had a shady background that didn't add up. First, we'll set the stage with a brief outline of Obama's academic career. Obama began his schooling in Indonesia (where his mother and step-father had moved from Hawaii), attending Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School, both in Jakarta, from ages 6 to 10. Obama then returned to Honolulu, Hawaii, to live with his maternal grandparents and attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, through high school. Obama began his college career at Occidental College in California in 1979. After two years, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he studied political science and graduated with a B.A. in 1983. Obama later went to, and graduated from, Harvard Law School. We'll start in the middle of Obama's post-secondary education, his two years at Columbia, because that has been the nexus of previous "None-of-his-classmates-knew-him" claims. As Snopes.com points out in an October 2009 article debunking the claim, it appears to have roots in two sources. The first is a 2008 Wall Street Journal editorial about "Obama's Lost Years" at Columbia which states, "Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him." About the same time, Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee Wayne Allen Root -- who attended Columbia at the same time as Barack Obama -- told Reason: "I think the most dangerous thing you should know about Barack Obama is that I don't know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me. I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever!" In a 2005 interview in an alumni magazine, Columbia College Today, Obama said that while at Columbia he was somewhat involved with the Black Students Organization and participated in anti-apartheid activities, but otherwise kept a fairly low profile. "Mostly, my years at Columbia were an intense period of study," said Obama, who lived off campus. "When I transferred, I decided to buckle down and get serious. I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk." So he wasn't BMOC. But he wasn't entirely invisible either. A May 15, 2008, story by the Associated Press, "Old friends recall Obama's years in LA, NY," quotes the recollections of an old roommate of Obama's in New York, Sohale Siddiqi. And former roommate and friend, Phil Boerner, has shared his recollections of Obama's time at Columbia with several reporters and is quoted in David Remnick's Obama's biography, The Bridge. The New York Times did an extensive interview with Boerner for a Jan. 20, 2009, story. And Politico posted online an article Obama wrote for Columbia's weekly magazine, The Sundial, which ran under the headline, "Breaking the War Mentality" on March 10, 1983. After FactCheck.org ran a story about the Columbia classmate's claim, another former classmate e-mailed to say she, too, remembered Obama. So we called her. Cathie Currie, who currently teaches social psychology at Adelphi University, recalled Obama joining her group occasionally to play pick-up soccer games on the lawn outside the library. She was a graduate student at the time, and Obama was an undergrad. He was a good soccer player, she said, even though basketball was his primary athletic passion. Obama also made an impression with his maturity and wisdom, she said. He talked about things like government for all the people, she said. In fact, Currie assumed because of Obama's heady conversation that he was a graduate student as well. Currie isn't surprised that he was not widely-remembered by fellow Columbia classmates. "My sense of it was that he was keeping a low profile," Currie said. He seemed like someone who had made a decision to prioritize his studies, she said. "We'd ask him to go out with us for beers after soccer," she said. "He seemed like he wanted to, but then he'd step back and say, 'Sorry, I'm going to the library.'" We're not going to spend too much time on Obama's time at Occidental and Harvard Law. Dozens of former classmates and teachers from those schools have publicly shared their recollections (and photos) of Obama. Obama was the president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review journal, for goodness sake. But here's a few stories chock full of classmates' recollections: New York Times, "In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice." Boston Globe, "At Harvard Law, a unifying voice: Classmates recall Obama as even-handed leader." The Weekly Standard, "The Real Obama." For this story, reporter Dean Barnett contacted dozens of Obama's classmates at Harvard Law School. "Also noteworthy is that virtually everyone seemed to know Obama," Bartnett wrote. YouTube.com even has this video of classmate Hill Harper talking about Obama. In fact, many of Obama's former classmates volunteered for his presidential campaign, and Politico ran a story about some 20 Harvard classmates who were members of his transition team. The story ran under the headline "School buds: 20 Harvard classmates advising Obama." As for Occidental, lots of former classmates and teachers have come forward to talk about the Obama they remember from his two years on campus there. For example, see the Los Angeles Times' Jan. 29, 2007, story, "Occidental recalls 'Barry' Obama." Trump casts a wide net with the statement "people that went to school with him." So we did a little digging to see whether there have been any classmates from elementary and high school who recall Obama. Plenty. A comprehensive story on Obama's childhood by the Chicago Tribune should put this to rest. By our count, it names -- and quotes -- more than a dozen former classmates and teachers from Obama's youth. Among those quoted are two students from each of the two schools Obama attended in Indonesia, as well as several of Obama's grade school teachers. They related stories of how Obama was teased because of his race, how he struggled with learning the Indonesian language, how he drew cartoons and even wrote an essay about how he wanted to be president one day. The story also quotes several classmates and teachers at Punahou School in Hawaii, a private school Obama attended in Hawaii through high school. Among them are some of Obama's closest childhood friends, as well as teachers. In his senior year, Obama's basketball team (he was not a starter) won a state championship in 1979. The Chicago Tribune notes that Obama was nicknamed "Barry O'Bomber" by teammates due to his accuracy on long jump shots. David Remnick's Obama biography The Bridge is sprinkled with quotes from former classmates and teachers of Obama in elementary and high school. We could get deeper into this but it seems like overkill. It's abundantly clear that there are lots and lots of former classmates who remember Obama at every level of school. It's true that Obama's two years at Columbia are relatively undocumented. And far fewer classmates have publicly shared recollections of Obama from that period, as opposed to other school years before and after. At Columbia, Obama was a transfer student, he lived off campus and by his and other accounts he buried himself in his studies and didn't socialize much. But even so, there are several students who recall Obama at Columbia. In short, media accounts and biographies are filled with on-the-record, named classmates who remember Obama. Trump is certainly right that presidential candidates are heavily scrutinized. As even a basic online search confirms, Obama's school years were, too. Trump's claim that people who went to school with Obama "never saw him, they don't know who he is" is ridiculous. Or, to borrow Trump's phrase, it's crazy. We rule Trump's statement Pants on Fire.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2011-02-14T17:39:38	2011-02-10	['None']
-snes-00960	Oxford professor of Islamic studies Tariq Ramadan said "we are here to colonize the U.S. and Canada" with Sharia law.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muslim-scholar-tariq-ramadan-sharia-law-colonize/	None	Racial Rumors	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did a Muslim Scholar Advocate ‘Colonizing’ U.S. and Canada with Sharia Law?	22 February 2018	None	['United_States', 'Canada', 'Islam', 'Tariq_Ramadan', 'Sharia']
-pose-00796	Pave "the way for ongoing job growth by purging unnecessary laws and regulations that stifle Texas entrepreneurs."	not yet rated	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/perry-o-meter/promise/827/purge-unneeded-laws-and-regulations-that-stifle-en/	None	perry-o-meter	Rick Perry	None	None	Purge unneeded laws and regulations that stifle entrepreneurs	2011-01-13T12:33:38	None	['Texas']
-tron-01150	Help Find Kathlee Hennigan	none	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hennigan/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Help Find Kathlee Hennigan	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-00890	George, Amal Clooney Renewing Vows?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/george-amal-clooney-renewing-vows/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	George, Amal Clooney Renewing Vows?	5:11 pm, June 2, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-00334	Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt “Consciously Re-Coupling”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-consciously-recoupling-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt “Consciously Re-Coupling”?	11:00 pm, September 3, 2018	None	['Brad_Pitt', 'Angelina_Jolie']
-pomt-14410	Says Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi "will be the very first pro-life first lady."	mostly true	/colorado/statements/2016/mar/11/james-dobson/ted-cruz-ad-says-his-wife-will-be-very-first-pro-l/	There was a time when no presidential candidate's TV ad would trumpet his wife's views on abortion. But Sen. Ted Cruz's campaign does so proudly with an ad featuring James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family in Colorado, praising the Texas senator's spouse. "His wife, Heidi, will be the very first pro-life first lady," Dobson says in the TV ad, in which he also endorses Ted Cruz for president. The ad has aired about 30 times -- mostly in Iowa before the caucuses -- between November 2015 and late February 2016, according to PoliticalAdArchive.org It is an intriguing claim, so PolitiFact decided to examine its accuracy. For this analysis, we're defining "pro-life" as how the first ladies felt about access to abortion from a policy perspective, not their personal view. We asked the Cruz campaign for information supporting Dobson's claim. (Dobson's spokesman said Dobson was out of the country and unreachable for comment.) The Cruz campaign provided a 2012 Townhall.com report, headlined: "Surprising: Ann Romney would be first Pro-Life First Lady since Roe vs. Wade." The story says that every first lady from Pat Nixon to Michelle Obama has supported a woman’s freedom of choice on abortion -- even if some first ladies’ personally opposed abortion. Ann Romney, wife of then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, in 2012 told ABC’s The View, "I am pro-life. I'm happy to say that." Clearly, Mrs. Cruz isn't the first candidate's wife to be held up as possibly the first pro-life first lady. And in this election year, Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s wife, Jeanette, is also described -- along with Heidi Cruz -- as "Unapologetically Pro-Life." The New York Times reports that friends and colleagues "detect Mrs. Rubio’s influence on her husband’s outspoken opposition to abortion in almost all cases." Remember, in the Cruz campaign ad, Dobson says Heidi Cruz "will be the very first pro-life first lady," while the campaign’s supporting documentation is a story stating that all first ladies since the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe vs. Wade decision, which legalized abortion in 1973, have supported a woman’s choice on abortion. Experts say it is very difficult to find a first lady commenting on abortion before the court ruling, because few Americans publicly discussed the controversial issue, let alone presidents’ wives. "The reason people didn't discuss (abortion) back then was because it was illegal," said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who is considered the foremost historian on the political and social power of first ladies. His books include the two-volume First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents' Wives and Their Power, 1789-1990. Anthony said it is known that two pre-Roe vs. Wade first ladies, Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson were "pro-choice." Yet this is why it’s hard to confirm or refute Dobson’s claim that Heidi Cruz’s anti-abortion stand would be a "first" for first ladies. In the past, if a first lady had opinions on abortion, "they weren’t made public," said Edith Mayo, a curator emerita at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, who oversaw a first ladies exhibit. "So you'd have a very difficult time tracing it," added Mayo, whose books include, First Ladies: Political Role and Public Image and The Smithsonian's Book of First Ladies. Anthony said first ladies’ reticence about discussing controversial issues changed during the national upheaval over the Vietnam War. Suddenly presidents’ wives, whose duties had historically tended toward ribbon cuttings and non-controversial projects, were facing tougher questions from reporters. "The Vietnam War is the turning point," said Anthony, who wrote speeches for Nancy Reagan. "So questions are asked to Pat Nixon that would never have been previously asked of her immediate successors. ... Mrs. Nixon really got to be the first one to be asked about the Equal Rights Amendment, about abortion, about amnesty for guys who didn't go to Vietnam." "From that point, every single (first lady) has had to address and respond to questions on important issues," he said. Yet it is true that every first lady since since Roe vs. Wade has publicly expressed their support for a woman’s choice on abortion. Here’s a list: Pat Nixon: In response to questions after the Roe vs. Wade decision, Pat Nixon said, "I believe abortion is a personal choice." A year before the ruling, she offered a more nuanced opinion: "I'm really not for abortion. I think it's a personal thing. I mean abortion on demand — wholesale." Betty Ford: When Barbara Walters asked her views on Roe vs. Wade, Ford called it "a great, great decision." As she later recalled the interview, "I just said, 'Well, I'm delighted because I'm glad they have taken abortion out of the backwoods and put it into the hospitals.' " Rosalynn Carter: At a 1980 press conference, Carter said she and her husband are "personally very opposed to abortion" and always have been. However, she supported the Roe vs. Wade decision while being against federal funding for abortion. "I oppose it for myself, but I have a hard time with deciding for other women what is right or wrong or best for them," Mrs. Carter once wrote. Nancy Reagan: After President Ronald Reagan had left office, Mrs. Reagan told a George Washington University class in 1994 that while she personally opposed abortion, she supported a woman’s right to choose. "I'm against abortion. On the other hand, I believe in a woman's choice," she said in response to a question from Anthony, her former speech writer who was teaching a class titled "The President's Spouse." Her comments were not a total surprise. According to a book by former White House chief of staff Donald Regan, Mrs. Reagan once said, "I don't give a damn about the pro-lifers," and demanded that all mention of abortion be removed from the president's 1987 State of the Union address. Barbara Bush: When her husband ran for president in 1980, Mrs. Bush drew attention by expressing her pro-choice views on abortion. Then, during President George H.W. Bush's 1992 re-election campaign against Bill Clinton, Mrs. Bush opposed Republicans placing an uncompromising anti-abortion policy in the GOP platform. She said it was a "personal thing" and added, "The personal things should be left out of, in my opinion, out of platforms and conventions," she told reporters. She later wrote in her memoirs, "She supports abortion rights. But, her opinion didn’t matter because she’s not elected by the American people." Hillary Clinton: In January 1999, Hillary Clinton ventured into new territory for a first lady by addressing NARAL -- then known as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. She declared her goal of "keeping abortion safe, legal and rare into the next century" -- a phrase that's become her pro-choice mantra. "I have never met anyone who is pro-abortion," she told the crowd. "Being pro-choice is not being pro-abortion. Being pro-choice is trusting the individual to make the right decision for herself and her family, and not entrusting that decision to anyone wearing the authority of government in any regard." Laura Bush: While less of an activist than some first ladies, Laura Bush didn’t shy away from expressing her views -- even when they differed from her husband’s. Katie Couric asked her on the day of George W. Bush’s inauguration if Roe vs. Wade should be overturned, and Mrs. Bush replied "No." In her 2010 memoir, "Spoken from the Heart," Laura Bush writes, "While cherishing life, I have always believed that abortion is a private decision, and there, no one can walk in anyone else’s shoes." Michelle Obama: Mrs. Obama often speaks about her husband's support for a woman's choice on abortion. "And he believes that women are more than capable of making our own choices about our bodies and our health care ... that's what my husband stands for," Mrs. Obama said at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Our ruling In the Ted Cruz campaign ad, James Dobson says, "His wife, Heidi, will be the very first pro-life first lady." In support of the claim, the campaign provided an article stating that all first ladies since the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision have supported a woman’s choice on abortion. That is accurate. Yet, Dobson’s claim went further, stating that Mrs. Cruz would be the "very first pro-life first lady" -- the first in American history. Experts say it’s difficult to confirm or refute the claim because, while abortion has always been a controversial subject, before Roe vs. Wade it was also illegal. None of the experts we spoke with could cite a first lady publicly commenting on the issue before Roe vs. Wade, except for Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson. This raises the possibility that other first ladies may have opposed abortion earlier in the country’s history, but never expressed it publicly. With that caveat, we rate the claim Mostly True.	None	James Dobson	None	None	None	2016-03-11T11:51:12	2015-11-21	['None']
-pomt-00083	"I made my decision on Kavanaugh before the allegations surfaced, and it was all about Kavanaugh's alliance and allegiance to dark money and unlimited political contributions."	mostly false	/missouri/statements/2018/nov/01/claire-mccaskill/mccaskill-said-she-decided-her-kavanaugh-vote-alle/	Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill has said repeatedly that she didn’t decide to vote "no" on then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh because of the sexual assault allegations against him. However, she did know about the allegations when she announced her decision, a fact she denied during an Oct. 25, 2018, debate against Republican challenger and Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley. "I made my decision on Kavanaugh before the allegations surfaced, and it was all about Kavanaugh's alliance and allegiance to dark money and unlimited political contributions," McCaskill said during the debate. Here's the timeline: The Washington Post published its story outlining California professor Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of Kavanaugh’s sexual misconduct on Sept. 16, 2018. As of that date, McCaskill had yet to announce how she would vote on the nominee. The next day, Sept. 17, 2018, statement said that she was "deeply troubled by these allegations" and that they should be investigated by the Senate Judiciary Committee. In it, she did not disclose how she planned to vote. McCaskill’s statement about her vote came a few days later, on Sept. 19, 2018. In that statement, she acknowledged the allegations against Kavanaugh but said that she did not base her decision on them. "(W)hile the recent allegations against him are troubling and deserve a thorough and fair examination by the Senate Judiciary Committee, my decision is not based on those allegations but rather on his positions on several key issues, most importantly the avalanche of dark, anonymous money that is crushing our democracy," the statement read. McCaskill repeated a version of the claim in an Oct. 30 interview with CNN, saying she "made her decision before the allegations had even really surfaced, way before the ugly confirmation process." McCaskill’s decision to vote "no" did precede other allegations of sexual misconduct. The story about a second woman, Deborah Ramirez, broke in the New Yorker on Sept. 23, 2018. A third accuser, Julie Swetnick, came forward on Sept. 26. Ford and Kavanaugh testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27, 2018, a little more than a week after McCaskill made her official statement. Our ruling McCaskill said that she made her decision to vote against Kavanaugh before allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced. McCaskill did say in her statement at the time that her "no" vote was based on Kavanaugh's position on several issues, including dark money. But McCaskill did know about the sexual assault allegation from Ford. The other allegations from Ramirez and Swetnick had not yet been made public. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Claire McCaskill	None	None	None	2018-11-01T09:52:48	2018-10-25	['None']
-pomt-00573	"In Florida, when Jeb Bush was governor, state authorities conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the presidential election in 2000" and "in 2004 a plan to purge even more voters was headed off."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2015/jun/09/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-revisits-floridas-2000-and-2004-vo/	In a speech calling for an expansion of voting rights, Hillary Clinton attacked what she described as efforts to restrict voting by Republican governors thinking of running for president, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. "In Florida, when Jeb Bush was governor, state authorities conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the presidential election in 2000. Thankfully, in 2004 a plan to purge even more voters was headed off," she said in a speech at Texas Southern University on June 4, 2015. We decided to look back at the 2000 and 2004 voter purges in Florida to see if her description was accurate. The 2000 purge In 1997, thousands of corrupt votes were cast in a Miami mayoral election, prompting state lawmakers to approve election legislation in 1998. The bill went into effect without the signature of Gov. Lawton Chiles, a Democrat. (A spokesman for Chiles at the time told the Miami Herald that he objected to a provision in the law related to absentee ballots.) This was the legislation that eventually led to the 2000 purge. The 1998 law provided $4 million to weed out dead people and felons from the state's voter rolls. So the Department of State hired Boca Raton-based DTS Technologies to produce a list of possible felons. (In Florida, a felon couldn’t vote unless he or she underwent a cumbersome restoration process overseen by the governor and Cabinet.) The company warned the state that their matches would produce many false positives, but state officials wanted DTS to use broad parameters, which meant more felons off the rolls. In August 1998, Secretary of State Sandra Mortham announced that about 50,000 felons and 17,000 dead people were on the voter rolls. Almost immediately, questions arose about the accuracy of the list. Twenty county election supervisors decided to ignore the state’s directive, because they found the data unreliable, including a Marion County elections supervisor who found her own name on the list. Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho said he received a list of about 700 names before the 2000 election. "We did a check on it and could only find 30-some felons," Sancho said. "We cleared 94 percent of the list." But not all counties did their own research on the "deeply flawed" list, he said. "If you went to vote on Nov. 7, and an official said you are on the list, if you tried to argue you could be arrested, and you were told so," he said. Ultimately, it was Mortham’s successor, Katherine Harris, elected in 1998, who oversaw the 2000 purge along with a state elections lawyer Emmett Mitchell. (In 2003, Florida’s elected secretary of state became an appointed position.) After the election, news organizations and other groups tried to figure out how many people had been denied the right to vote. But the numbers varied widely — though the reported estimates were higher than George W. Bush’s 537-margin in the 2000 presidential election. A 2001 Palm Beach Post investigation asserted that at least 1,100 eligible voters were wrongly purged. Other reports put the figure much higher. The NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union sued the state in 2000, and the settlement required the state to run its old felon lists with new standards. At a hearing before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in January 2001, Bush placed the blame for the state’s woes on election officials. But a divided commission concluded that many Florida leaders were responsible, including Bush, for the "unjust removal of disproportionate numbers of African American voters." A week later, Bush along with the Cabinet implemented the commission’s recommendation to make the clemency process easier for ex-felons seeking to restore their voting rights. Botched purge in 2004 The state compiled a new list of 47,000 potential felons before the 2004 election. But after a lawsuit forced the state to make the list publicly available in July 2004, the Miami Herald reported that more than 2,000 of those names -- many of them black Democrats -- should not have been on the list, because their rights to vote were restored through the state's clemency process. A separate issue was that Hispanics made up 0.1 percent of the list, in a state where nearly one in five residents were Hispanic. The state’s criminal database didn’t have "Hispanic" as a category, but voter registration rolls did have it, which created a discrepancy. Less than two weeks after the list was released, the state scrapped the entire list, saying it was flawed. Not including Hispanic felons on the list "was an oversight and a mistake. … And we accept responsibility, and that's why we're pulling it back," Bush said at the time. But even before they tossed the list, state officials knew it was flawed. A May 2 internal memo detailed a half dozen missed deadlines, failed software programs, repeated miscues and personnel problems. Our ruling Clinton said, "In Florida, when Jeb Bush was governor, state authorities conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the presidential election in 2000" and "in 2004 a plan to purge even more voters was headed off." Clinton omits that this effort started before Bush was in office, though it did continue under his watch. In 2004, the state scrapped another purge after officials admitted errors. The statement is accurate but needs additional information. So we rate it Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/f3460a63-5e8e-495c-9b16-f7881257edc0	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2015-06-09T12:18:45	2015-06-04	['Jeb_Bush', 'Florida']
-pomt-02778	"I have cut taxes 63 times, including a 2006 property tax reduction that ranks as the largest in state history."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2013/dec/08/david-dewhurst/dewhurst-didnt-personally-cut-taxes-and-some-incre/	David Dewhurst, seeking his fourth term as lieutenant governor of Texas, consistently talks up the state’s economy while simultaneously noting tax cuts. The Houston Republican, who presides over the Texas Senate, touted 54 tax cuts in a recent video ad. A bit earlier, in an Oct. 1, 2013, post on his campaign website, he took credit for even more. "Under my leadership, the Texas Senate has helped strengthen our state’s foundation with essential conservative legislation," Dewhurst said. His post singled out actions to balance budgets, address border security and tort reform, stop Medicaid from expanding, restrict abortions--and to cut taxes. The Senate passed legislation to cut "taxes for all Texans," Dewhurst’s web post continued. "I have cut taxes 63 times, including a 2006 property tax reduction that ranks as the largest in state history." Dozens of Dewhurst-provided cuts? We were curious. Big picture, Texans paid about the same level of taxes in 2010 (the latest year of available data) as they did when Dewhurst took over as lieutenant governor in 2003, according to calculations by the non-partisan Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C. Foundation figures indicate that on average, Texans ponied up 5.7 percent of their personal income for state and local taxes in Texas both of those years. Still, in between that percentage dropped to as little as 5.1 percent, in 2006 and 2008, the figures suggest. After we inquired into Dewhurst’s reference to cutting taxes 63 times, Dewhurst’s campaign blog post was amended to say 54 cuts. We stuck with checking what was posted for about two months. Earlier, to our request for backup information, Dewhurst campaign spokesman Travis Considine emailed a document headlined "David Dewhurst Tax Cuts" stating that since becoming lieutenant governor, Dewhurst "has cut taxes by more than $15 billion through 63 pieces of legislation." Among the listed measures, a 2006 measure setting in motion one-third reductions in school district maintenance and operation property tax rates is credited with "savings" of more than $12.6 billion, accounting for 84 percent of Dewhurst’s total declared savings. A convention of Texas state government is to estimate costs and savings in one- or two-year increments. That's probably because lawmakers almost always budget two years at a time. By email, Considine told us the campaign chose to list five-year savings figures when they were available from fiscal notes written by budget board staff at the time the cited measures passed into law. He didn’t say why. Not noted on Dewhurst's backup: The 2006 reduction was partly funded by tax increases. According to a chart emailed to us Dec. 3, 2013, by John Barton, a staff spokesman for the Legislative Budget Board, the various increases were initially projected to raise nearly $4.7 billion in the fiscal year that ran through August 2011. In that year, the chart indicates, the property-tax reductions were expected to cost the state about $7 billion--while in reality, the tax hikes generated about $2.5 billion less in 2011 than initially predicted. We took a long look at the campaign's list of tax-cut measures, finding the vast majority to be carefully targeted, that is, not necessarily benefiting every Texan. By our count, about 40 of the changes in law related to exempting particular entities or transactions from sales or property taxes, many of them not lacking a precise savings estimate. Dewhurst’s document lists about 10 sales tax-cut measures. The largest, at a value of about $700 million through five years, is a 2013 law exempting from the sales tax through 2026 "depreciable tangible personal property directly used in qualified research," the legislation’s fiscal note states. Another 2013 law provided for sales tax refunds to providers of cable or Internet access was projected by the budget board at a value of $250 million over five years. Dewhurst’s document also specifies a 2009 law placing backpacks among items subject to the state’s annual three-day "sales tax holiday," a change projected to save affected taxpayers more than $40 million over five years, according to the proposal’s fiscal note. Also noted: A 2007 law exempting pay-phone calls from the sales tax at a projected five-year value of more than $6 million, per the relevant state fiscal note. Among about 30 listed measures touching on property taxes, a 2013 law exempted equipment in certain data centers from property taxes at a projected five-year value of $58 million. A 2007 law protecting elderly and disabled homeowners with homestead exemptions from being stuck with potentially higher school taxes was projected by the state to save beneficiaries (and cost the state) $745 million over five years, while a 2009 law giving full homestead exemptions to fully disabled veterans was predicted to be worth more than $50 million over five years. Dewhurst’s document lists a half-dozen laws related to the business franchise tax, though there appears to be a little duplication in that an exemption of small businesses was simply extended. A 2013 law changing who pays the tax, extending a small business exemption and temporarily lowering the tax rate was projected to reduce such tax collections by $1.3 billion over five years. By far, though, the stand-out measure on Dewhurst’s list is House Bill 1, signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry in May 2006 and described by Dewhurst as cutting school property taxes by more than $12.6 billion over five years. We couldn’t confirm that figure, but the budget board chart shows more than $30 billion in state expenditures from 2007 through 2011 to cover the state costs of the tax cuts. Separately, it’s been disputed whether the 2006 actions whittled taxes as much as some ballyhooed. In 2010, we rated as Mostly False a Perry claim that "we cut property taxes by one third." The tax-rate mandate did reduce school property taxes at first. School tax collections declined 6.4 percent between 2005 and 2007, the year the cuts were fully implemented, according to the Texas Education Agency, which also offered us data showing that collections for school maintenance and operations taxes were 30.2 percent lower in 2007 than the state projected they would have been without the tax cut. A business group, the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, reached a similar conclusion by comparing 2007 school property taxes with what it calculated Texans would have paid without the mandated cut. The related savings were about $7 billion, it said. "The average Texan's total property tax bill in 2007 was 20 percent lower than what it likely would have been had there been no tax relief initiative," the group concluded. Then again, school property tax collections ultimately increased partly because districts had leeway to inch up their rates over the years and benefited, in many cases, from increasing property values. In both 2006 and 2007, the total taxable value of property in Texas rose more than 10 percent each year. The taxpayer association identified other reasons that the overall reduction in property taxes did not meet expectations: increases in the portion of school taxes dedicated to bond debt, as well as increases in taxes paid to cities, counties and other taxing districts. As we noted above, Dewhurst’s declared tax cuts were accompanied by some tax hikes intended to make up a portion of the school revenue lost due to the rate reductions. As described in a TTARA guide to Texas school funding, revised in January 2012, legislators created a tax-relief fund to reimburse districts by drawing on revenue gains from a revised and expanded business franchise tax and increases in state cigarette and tobacco taxes, plus a change in how the state calculates the taxable price of used cars and trucks. According to the guide, some $2.2 billion was to be pulled from the fund in the 2011-12 school year. A May 19, 2006, Austin American-Statesman news article called the expansion of the state’s business tax the "centerpiece" of Perry’s plan to cut school property taxes. As he signed the business-tax measure into law, Perry said: ""Today I am proud to sign into law landmark business tax reforms that will provide greater fairness for employers, reliable funding for our school classrooms and revenue that will help deliver a record $15.7 billion property tax cut for the people of Texas." The Statesman story continued: "The plan cuts property tax rates for school operations by one-third over two years. It adds $1 per pack to the cigarette tax. The plan will cut more in taxes than it brings in, and it includes $1.5 billion in increased school spending, including $2,000 pay raises for teachers." Considine stressed to us by email that there was still a net tax decrease thanks to the 2006 actions. The record-breaking part of Dewhurst's blog-post claim rings true. We recalled only one other substantial statewide property-tax break. The 1997 Legislature sent voters a proposed constitutional amendment, subsequently adopted, increasing from $5,000 to $15,000 the residential homestead exemption from school property taxes, a change then estimated to save a typical Texas homeowner about $12 a month, according to a July 1997 report by the House Research Organization. That report also said: "The net result would be one of the largest tax reductions in state history." By email, school finance expert Joe Wisnoski of Austin offered his ballpark estimate that the 1997 actions have a current-day annual value of about $$650 million to $700 million with the annual value of the 2006 tax-rate actions being far more--at least $6 billion, he said. Finally, we identified no reason to believe Dewhurst didn’t support all the tax-cut proposals passed into law on his watch. He’s a long-time Republican leader in the Republican-steered Capitol. But he didn’t personally cut any taxes. He had no vote on the listed measures--those belonged to senators and House members. On the other hand, his powers include the appointment of pivotal Senate committees, the reference of individual proposals to particular committees and the setting of the Senate's floor agenda. He was a gavel-wielding player. Our ruling Dewhurst said: "I have cut taxes 63 times, including a 2006 property tax reduction that ranks as the largest in state history." This statement paints an incomplete picture. About 63 (or 54) measures giving someone a tax break passed into law on Dewhurst’s watch, but it's not like Texans are less tapped by such taxes of late than before. Notably, too, most of the touted laws targeted particular beneficiaries. Also, Dewhurst didn't personally cut any taxes; those decisions involved the House, Senate and governor, though Dewhurst was a leader. The 2006 school property-tax-rate reduction was historic. But this statement fails to acknowledge that actions Dewhurst helped usher into place the same year led to hundreds of millions of dollars in lesser tax increases. All told, this claim contains an element of truth, but overlooks critical facts that would give a full, accurate impression. We rate it as Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	David Dewhurst	None	None	None	2013-12-08T12:00:00	2013-10-01	['None']
-goop-02292	Taylor Swift “Copying” Kim Kardashian’s Style, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-copying-kim-kardashian-style-fashion/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Taylor Swift NOT “Copying” Kim Kardashian’s Style, Despite Report	6:09 am, October 27, 2017	None	['Taylor_Swift']
-para-00028	Says Indonesia's release of boat talk details are an "unprecedented step by an Indonesian foreign minister".	true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/27/chris-bowen/who-needs-wikileaks-indonesia-tells-all-behind-sce/index.html	None	['Asylum Seekers', 'Border Protection', 'Foreign Affairs']	Chris Bowen	Jonathan Pearlman, Peter Fray	None	Who needs WikiLeaks? Indonesia tells all on the "behind the scenes" boats talks	Friday, September 27, 2013 at 4:56 p.m.	None	['Indonesia']
-snes-02783	A study discovered men's beards are alarmingly riddled with fecal microbes.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/study-find-mens-beards-filled-poop/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a Study Find Men’s Beards Are Full of Fecal Matter?	5 May 2015	None	['None']
-farg-00378	"California is registering non-citizens to vote"	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/false-claim-of-california-registering-noncitizens-to-vote/	None	fake-news	Facebook image	Angelo Fichera	['illegal immigrants']	False Claim of California Registering Noncitizens to Vote	September 14, 2018	[' Monday, September 10, 2018 ']	['None']
-pomt-06414	"After every major conflict ... what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/26/leon-panetta/leon-panetta-says-military-has-hollowed-out-after-/	In congressional testimony reported in a New York Times article on Oct. 23, 2011, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned against cutting defense spending too severely as the U.S. winds down its involvement in Iraq and reconsiders how to proceed in Afghanistan. "After every major conflict — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union — what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts that impacted on equipment, impacted on training, impacted on capability," Panetta said. "Whatever we do in confronting the challenges we face now on the fiscal side, we must not make that mistake." After a reader pointed out this quote to us, we decided it was worth checking. Before starting our analysis, we’ll note a few factors. First, on the statistical side, we’ll look overall defense spending, and troop levels. For spending, experts told us that the best figures to use are inflation-adjusted, annual totals. Second, the definition of the key phrase Panetta used -- "hollowing out" -- is open to interpretation. "‘Hollowing out’ is a rather imprecise term that is floating around the Pentagon a lot these days," said Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent think tank on defense and related spending. "It can mean not providing troops with adequate pay and benefits so that the best ones leave. It can mean not providing troops with adequate training, leaving them unprepared for combat. Or it can mean providing troops with substandard equipment, poorly maintained equipment or an insufficient quantity of equipment. When Panetta and others in the Pentagon say this, I’m not sure if they mean all of these things happened in the past or just some of them." The Pentagon did not respond to a query seeking data and background to support Panetta’s point, so we turned to a range of military experts and historians to assess whether the U.S. military experienced a "hollowing out" as Panetta said. Now, let’s look at some numbers. For spending, we measured the decline from the peak spending year of the war to the lowest level within five years after hostilities ended. The full details of our methodology can be found here, but the bottom line is that defense spending fell after World War II by 92 percent, after the Korean War by 53 percent, after the Vietnam War by 26 percent and after the Cold War by 28 percent. As for worldwide troop levels, they fell by 27 percent after the Korean War, by 40 percent after the Vietnam War and by 32 percent after the Cold War. (The data we found did not include numbers for the aftermath of World War I, or for troop levels after World War II.) What both of these measurements show is that for the periods following Korea, Vietnam and the end of the Cold War, both defense spending and worldwide troop levels declined by about one-quarter to one-half within a few years. So Panetta has a point. Still, determining whether these declines led to a "hollowing out" requires looking at more than just the raw numbers. After all, it’s no surprise that both military spending and troop levels would decline after a war concludes. A more relevant question is whether the decreases were severe enough in their scope and composition to hurt the United States’ ability to act militarily, given the threats the nation faced at the time. This is more of a judgment call, and the experts we contacted expressed some ambivalence. "The accuracy of Panetta's statement largely hinges on how you define ‘hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the board cuts,’" said Lance Janda, a historian at Cameron University. "His point is that during periods of budget cutting, we have to make smart choices, rather than cutting everything back the same amount, and that our choices have to reflect the threats we'll face in the future. That's a point I suspect most people would agree with. My caveat is that his use of historical examples is a bit suspect, and doesn't reflect the political realities that governed defense spending during the 20th century." Let’s take a look at the political, economic and military contexts surrounding each of the post-war periods Panetta cited. Post-World War I The cuts made after World War I are universally considered to have been major. But at least one historian we contacted believes that the damage to American military capabilities has been overstated. "We did make huge cuts in defense spending after World War I, but that was to be expected after waging a massive conflict in Europe and was vital in that we could not have sustained wartime spending levels indefinitely," Janda said. "The cuts made sense in that we faced no serious threat to the continental United States, and they were unavoidable in a political environment that by the mid 1920s had concluded that our involvement in World War I had been a mistake." The arrival of the Great Depression in 1929 made the need for cuts even more urgent, Janda said. He added that the largest cuts came in Army spending, under the belief that the Navy was the nation’s first line of defense and critical to protecting overseas possessions. Once it became clear in the late 1930s that conflict with Japan and Germany was likely, military spending began to rise again. "Should we have started sooner? Maybe," Janda said. "Should we have spent more on the Army? Yes. But that's in hindsight, and it's not like the cuts of the 1920s were still haunting us in 1939. So I think that while Mr. Panetta is right about the fact that we cut defense spending after World War I, he's overstating the case to argue that those cuts ‘hollowed out’ the force that existed when we were threatened almost 20 years later." Post-World War II The decline in defense spending after World War II was massive and rapid. The U.S. Army shrank from 89 divisions in 1945 to 10 in 1950, said Ted Wilson, a historian at the University of Kansas. In this context, June 1950 -- the start of the Korean War -- came as "a rude awakening," said William W. Stueck, historian at the University of Georgia. Unlike the two-decade period between the world wars, the Korean War came about five years after the end of World War II, and for this reason it has become a poster child for the dangers of a "hollowed out" military. But even here the situation is more complicated. Janda notes that, as after World War I, cuts were made because "our wartime spending levels were politically and economically unsustainable. Did we hollow out the force? I don't think so. It dramatically shrunk in size, to be sure, but we still had the largest navy and air force on the planet. What cost us in Korea in 1950 was that the veterans of World War II had largely gone home, and the Army was composed of draftees with no combat experience. It's also true that our tanks and bazookas could have been better, and that the Army took the brunt of the cuts between 1945 and 1950. But again, that was because we made a choice and decided that in a world with nuclear weapons that we were better off putting the bulk of our resources into the Air Force and the Navy as our first line of defense." Post-Korean War Unlike the enormous decreases following both World Wars, the aftermath of the Korean War was the first in a series of more modest cutbacks. The key difference is that by then the Cold War was underway, and the U.S. determined that a standing military -- one backed by cutting-edge technology from a permanent defense industry -- was necessary. After the Korean War, President Dwight Eisenhower "continued to see a high-level -- even an expanding -- security threat from the Soviet Union," Stueck said. But because of concerns that high military spending could be a threat to the U.S. economy, Eisenhower made substantial cuts in the Army (his old branch), though he increased Air Force spending. When John F. Kennedy entered office, he pursued an expansion of the defense budget even before the escalation in Vietnam. Both Janda and Harrison see this period as a weak link in Panetta’s claim. "Eisenhower made a number of deliberate decisions in the early 1950s to shift the focus of military strategy from fighting major ground wars like Korea to using nuclear deterrence to stop Soviet expansion," Harrison said. "These were not blind, across-the-board cuts, as Panetta suggests, but rather were targeted cuts that reflected a shift in strategy." Post-Vietnam War The term "hollowed out" is most widely associated with the post-Vietnam era, when the United States was recovering from an unpopular war. There’s wide consensus that military readiness -- not to mention a willingness to intervene militarily -- slumped in the 1970s, which provides some support for Panetta’s claim. But even here, several experts said that the "hollowing out" had a lot to do with the military’s shift from the draft to an all-volunteer force -- an important transformational change that caused some short-term challenges. "After the all-volunteer force was instituted in 1973 and wages increased to attract quality volunteers, morale rose to new peaks," said Tim Kane, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Another factor was more obscure -- procurement decisions made under President Richard Nixon. "The biggest problem we had in the 1970s was that we needed new tanks and aircraft, and we didn't have them because of decisions made in the 1960s and early 1970s by the Nixon administration, the Army, and the Air Force," Janda said. Systems like the M-1 Abrams, the B-1 bomber, the MX Missile, Cruise missiles and stealth fighters were in the pipeline, he said, but they were ready only by the time Ronald Reagan became president, he said. So while the term "hollowing out" may be apt for the post-Vietnam period, it’s more of a stretch to say it was caused by "deep, across-the-board cuts." Post-Cold War There was a "peace dividend" after the end of the Cold War, but it was limited by the rapid emergence of the Persian Gulf War. And during the 1990s, the United States participated in a large number of limited military interventions in such places as Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti and the no-fly zones in Iraq, often using air power, sometimes combined with specialized ground forces. "Were we ‘hollowed out?’ No," Janda said. "We were still the most powerful nation on the planet. But we had to make choices, just like the Romans did 2,000 years ago when they stopped expanding and limited the number of legions in the Roman Army. No nation can afford to spend too much on defense." Our ruling Panetta said that "after every major conflict — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union — what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts." He’s correct that spending and troop levels fell -- enormously after the World Wars, more modestly after the other conflicts. But there’s less consensus that the cuts -- particularly the ones that followed after the conclusion of Korean War and the Cold War -- led to a "hollowed out" force. We think it’s a stretch to suggest, as Panetta does, that cuts were made across the board. In most cases, the cuts weren’t knee-jerk but were in fact made with a larger strategy in mind. On balance, we rate Panetta’s comment Half True. CORRECTION: The quote checked in this item was made at a congressional hearing. While the comment was included in a recent New York Times story, it was not made during one of Panetta's two interviews for the that story, as the initial version of this story had indicated.	None	Leon Panetta	None	None	None	2011-10-26T17:58:52	2011-10-23	['None']
-pose-00486	Will provide "temporary business tax incentives through 2009. The February 2008 stimulus bill increased maximum Section 179 expenses to $250,000 but this expires in December 2008. This provision will encourage all firms to pursue investment in the coming months, but will particularly benefit small firms which generally have smaller amounts of annual property purchases and so choose to expense the cost of their acquired property."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/506/raise-the-small-business-investment-expensing-limi/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Raise the small business investment expensing limit to $250,000 through the end of 2009	2010-01-07T13:27:00	None	['None']
-snes-00279	A school principal in Richmond expelled two children for wearing crucifixes to school.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/children-expelled-wearing-crucifixes/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Principal Mamasai Mamakusa Expel Two Children for Wearing Crucifixes?	31 July 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00570	'Pope Comes Out as Gay'	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/pope-comes-out-gay-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Hoax - 'Pope Comes Out as Gay'	March 9, 2013	None	['None']
-tron-03289	Sarah Palin’s Prayer Request	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/sarah-palin-prayer/	None	prayers	None	None	None	Sarah Palin’s Prayer Request	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-01621	Under a proposed medical marijuana amendment in Florida, "you don't get refills -- you get it forever."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2014/aug/28/drug-free-america/medical-marijuana-amendment-allows-patient-get-it-/	Opponents have made many arguments against Florida’s proposed medical marijuana amendment, but here’s a new one: They say patients would be able to get an unlimited amount of pot should the measure pass. Dr. Rafael Miguel, director of the Sarasota Memorial Institute for Advanced Medicine's Pain Medicine Program, was one of three representatives for Drug Free America who visited the Tampa Bay Times editorial board on Aug. 20. He joined Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri and Tallahassee attorney Susan Kelsey to discuss why the Sunshine State should shy away from Amendment 2 in November. Miguel offered several reasons why the medical establishment did not like the constitutional amendment. He said there was an unreasonable focus on marijuana’s smokeable form in order to obtain psychoactive effects, and added that the process by which doctors help patients get cannabis flies in the face of the prescription model of doling out drugs. Miguel focused on how "recommendations" to use marijuana are not prescriptions, and that they don’t allow doctors to control the amount and dosage patients consume, or for how long they consume it. "You don't get refills -- you get it forever," Miguel said. "There's no regulation on consumption." PolitiFact Florida has written about the amendment’s guidelines before, but we were curious in this case whether doctors who recommend medical marijuana to patients would indeed have no say in how much or for how long their patients could take it. Following guidelines Medical marijuana is legal in 23 states and the District of Columbia. (Colorado and Washington state have gone a step further by legalizing cannabis for recreational use, even though the cultivation, possession and use of the drug remains against federal law.) Doctors in states that allow medical marijuana don’t prescribe the drug -- that could potentially lead to federal sanctions, since the U.S. government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug. Inclusion on that list means, legally, that marijuana has no known medical benefits, even though that claim is much disputed. Instead, in states that allow medical marijuana, doctors recommend people who suffer from certain approved conditions -- typically diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, or other conditions causing chronic pain. States make their own rules for supplying the drug that vary from state to state. Florida’s Amendment 2 says that, should the initiative pass, the state Department of Health would create guidelines for the manufacture, distribution and use of marijuana. That worries opponents like Drug Free America; they argue that the language is too broad to limit the scope of the drug’s impact on the state. Miguel didn’t immediately return PolitiFact Florida’s request for more specifics about what he meant. During his editorial board visit he made it clear he preferred the FDA-approved process of writing prescriptions with a specified dosage, duration, potency and number of refills, using clinically tested drugs. The amendment doesn’t give doctors any of that control, Miguel said, and it doesn’t define any limit. In general, the measure says the state Department of Health will create regulations. However, the initiative does lay out some of the process. It defines a written "physician certification" as a document that says the doctor feels the patient has a condition that may be aided by the use of cannabis and specifies "for how long the physician recommends the medical use of marijuana for the patient." There also is a section that requires the Florida Department of Health to create "a regulation that defines the amount of marijuana that could reasonably be presumed to be an adequate supply for qualifying patients’ medical use, based on the best available evidence." That limit on quantity could be waived, depending on the patient’s condition. The language prevents a strict interpretation of how involved a doctor would be, said attorney Kelsey, who has criticized the amendment for being so vague it would eventually be challenged in the state supreme court. "As I read it, the doctor doesn’t say the amount at all," Kelsey said. "He just gives the patient the certification and it says for how long, then the patient gets their ID card and takes that to the dispensary and that is the point at which the quantity is determined and handed out." So how is the drug distributed in states that allow it? Every state has different regulations for the process, but a good benchmark for Florida may be Nevada, because it passed medical marijuana as a constitutional amendment instead of as legislation. Colorado adopted constitutional amendments in 2000 and 2014, but the second one legalized recreational use, which the Florida Amendment does not do. Passed by voters in 2000, the Nevada amendment language was even shorter and more vague than the Florida proposal. It required the state Legislature to provide for a registry and to create guidelines, a process delegated to the state Department of Health and Human Services in subsequent legislation. As of 2013, Nevada limited patients to 2.5 ounces of marijuana every 14 days. Patients must get an ID card through a registry, and must renew their membership on the registry with a doctor’s approval every year. Even in states that allow patients to grow their own marijuana plants, there are legal limits to how much they can cultivate. It’s a moot point in Florida, because the amendment doesn’t allow for personal cultivation. Many laws or regulations also say doctors can tell the state agency in charge if they think a patient would no longer benefit from medical marijuana, according to Karen O’Keefe, state policy director at the Marijuana Policy Project, which favors regulations like Amendment 2. "In most cases, the laws also specify that the card becomes void if the patient ceases to have the qualifying condition," O’Keefe said. "I see no reason why regulators couldn’t include similar provisions in Florida." Our ruling Miguel said when it comes to doctor’s recommendations for medical marijuana, "You don't get refills, you get it forever." He was referring to how a doctor’s "recommendation" for cannabis does not allow the same level of control as a medical prescription does. He said there was no written limitation on how much or for how long a patient could get marijuana in the amendment, a common criticism by opponents of the amendment. It’s possible that potential Florida regulations would not limit time on a registry or how long a doctor’s certification would last for a patient. But it would be premature, and speculative, to assume that there would be no way under the amendment to stop a recommendation from going on forever. Other states have created their own rules, limiting the quantity and frequency of the drug that patients can get. They also limit how long patients can be on a registry before requiring a doctor’s approval. We rate the statement Mostly False. CORRECTION, AUG. 29, 2014: This version of the article has been updated to reflect that Colorado passed constitutional amendments in 2000 and 2012, the latter of which allows recreational use of marijuana.	None	Drug Free America	None	None	None	2014-08-28T15:22:58	2014-08-20	['None']
-snes-01210	Norway announced that it was changing its name to "shithole."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/norway-renames-shithole-solidarity-countries-trump-insulted/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Norway Renames Itself ‘Shithole’ in Solidarity With Countries Trump Insulted?	15 January 2018	None	['Norway']
-pomt-13066	California has seen a "56 percent decline in the gun murder rate" since the 1990s.	mostly true	/california/statements/2016/nov/16/gavin-newsom/gavin-newsom-understates-californias-rapid-drop-gu/	California voters added to what are considered the nation’s strongest gun control laws on Election Day by approving Proposition 63. The measure imposes background checks on ammunition sales; bans possession of large-capacity ammunition magazines; and forces owners to give up their weapons as soon as they can no longer legally possess them. Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, who is running for governor in 2018, helped author the initiative and led the campaign for it. The measure had received nearly 63 percent approval as of mid-November, with some votes still uncounted. In a press conference the day after Prop 63 passed, Newsom made several claims about the effectiveness of California’s gun restrictions. "We have significantly reduced the gun-murder rate because of our progressive gun policy," Newsom said, adding that California has seen a "56 percent decline in the gun murder rate since we started to step up and step in and lead the nation in common sense gun safety laws, background checks, restricting large-capacity clips and the like." Gavin Newsom makes his claim about California's gun murder rate at about the 6:30 minute mark in the video above. We decided to focus on Newsom’s claim that California has seen a "56 percent decline in the gun murder rate" since it began imposing tough gun laws in the 1990s. Whether those gun laws are the driving force behind such a drop is a matter of mixed opinion. Gun rights groups say tougher criminal penalties, not gun laws, have led to the decline. PolitiFact does not fact-check predictions or opinions. A Glock 30SF .45 Auto semi-automatic pistol with a Glock 13-round extension magazine installed, and 13 rounds of hollow-point ammunition are seen in Alexandria, Va., Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2016. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen) Our research The gun murder rate measures the number of gun-related homicides per 100,000 residents in a geographical area. A separate measurement, the gun death rate, takes a broader look including homicides, suicides and accidental shooting deaths. Based on our research and contact with Newsom’s campaign spokesman, it appears the lieutenant governor mixed up the two rates and ended up understating the drop in California’s gun murder rate by more than 10 percentage points. The state’s gun death rate -- not the gun murder rate -- dropped 56 percent from 1993 to 2013, according to figures provided by Ari Freilich, an attorney at the San Francisco-based Law Center for Gun Violence Prevention. The attorney cited age-adjusted data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The nonprofit law center advocates for gun control laws and is considered an authority on gun crime statistics. The law center’s figures do not include data from 2014, a year in which gun deaths and gun homicides continued to fall in California. Nor do they include statistics from 2015 and 2016, which are not yet available. Still, the 20-year span is the approximate period during which California imposed strict new gun laws, spurred by mass shootings years earlier on a Stockton schoolyard and inside a San Francisco law office. This meant the rate of deaths by any kind of shooting declined from 17.48 per 100,000 residents in 1993 to 7.68 per 100,000 residents. Larger drop in gun murder rate During this same period, California’s gun murder rate declined even faster: By 65 percent, according to a review of the CDC’s fatal injury reports by PolitiFact California. If 2014 is included, the rate dropped by 67 percent. Data from these reports have been cited by both gun control and gun rights groups to describe California’s decline in gun violence. They show gun murders fell from 9.60 per 100,000 residents in 1993 to 3.14 per 100,000 in 2014. In raw numbers, this means nearly 2,000 fewer people in California died in gun homicides in 2014 (when 1,233 were killed) compared with 1993 (when 3,183 were killed). Nationwide, the gun murder rate fell 45 percent during much of the same period. Between 1993 and 2000, it dropped from 7.0 homicides to 3.8 homicides per 100,000 people, according to a Pew Research analysis in 2015 of available federal data. Since then, Pew reported, the rate has remained relatively flat. Our ruling California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said California has seen a "56 percent decline in the gun murder rate" since it enacted strong gun control laws in the 1990s. Newsom appears to have mixed up the gun murder rate with the gun death rate. California’s gun murder rate dropped 67 percent between 1993 and 2014, according to a review of fatal injury report data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A similar, though somewhat smaller, drop in the gun murder rate took place nationwide during this period. Newsom’s overall point is correct: Gun deaths, including gun homicides, have dropped significantly in California since the state imposed the new laws. We are not fact-checking the cause of this drop. Gun rights and gun control groups have different opinions on this. What is clear is that gun homicides have declined significantly, and even faster than what Newsom stated. His claim needs this key clarification. We rate it Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/21282e24-9e4d-4493-be54-4e319e129524	None	Gavin Newsom	None	None	None	2016-11-16T14:23:20	2016-11-09	['California']
-snes-04654	An image shows a young woman who was beaten up by anti-Trump demonstrators at a rally in San Jose.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-protester-violence-san-jose/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Teenager Beaten by Anti-Trump Protester	5 June 2016	None	['None']
-tron-00820	“The President Without a Country” an Opinion by Pat Boone	opinion!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/pat-boone-president-country/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	“The President Without a Country” an Opinion by Pat Boone	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-02333	"A child born in America today will inherit $1.5 million in debt the moment they're placed in their mother's arms."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2014/mar/26/john-mccallum/candidate-worries-about-growing-federal-debt/	A congressional candidate recently offered some news that might make a child never want to grow up. "A child born in America today will inherit $1.5 million in (federal) debt the moment they're placed in their mother's arms," John McCallum, a St. Simons Island resident who is running as a Republican for Congress, said in one campaign ad. "For children like mine, it’s not the American Dream. It’s the American nightmare." A PolitiFact Georgia reader asked us to dive deep into this costly claim and see whether McCallum’s numbers are on target. McCallum is running for the congressional seat currently held by Jack Kingston, a Republican from Savannah. Kingston is running for the U.S. Senate. McCallum once worked as a congressional aide for Newt Gingrich. McCallum was the GOP’s nominee for secretary of state in 1998 but lost that campaign to Cathy Cox. At first glance, McCallum’s figures seem way off. The U.S. Debt Clock, for example, says the debt per citizen is currently around $55,000. The current debt per taxpayer is slightly more than $150,000. So how did McCallum come up with this extremely higher estimate? A campaign official pointed us to the U.S. Senate Republican Committee on the Budget as the source of his claim. The committee’s website allows you to enter your birth date and it immediately computes your lifetime share of the national debt. For someone born on St. Patrick’s Day this year, the answer doesn’t seem lucky: $1,532,026. An official in the committee’s office sent us some information explaining how the estimate is calculated. A child born in 2014 is projected to have a life expectancy of 80. The committee used a population estimate of 598,933,000 for the United States in 80 years. Some estimates we’ve seen show estimates as high as 625 million by 2095. The total gross debt 80 years from now is assumed to be $917.58 trillion, for a lifetime share of debt at $1.532 million, if you use the committee’s population estimate. We checked how much the average debt would be if the U.S. population rose to 625 million by 2095. Our calculation was $1.47 million. McCallum’s estimate is based on a few assumptions. First, a child born today will live to 80. Second, the U.S. debt projection may change in 80 years, for better or worse. Third, the U.S. population may change in 80 years. It also assumes that Washington will not enact any legislation to meaningfully reduce the debt. Right now, there seems to be no viable legislative solution in sight. To sum up, McCallum said a child born today will inherit $1.5 million in federal debt. That’s about 10 times what the current debt is per taxpayer. McCallum’s claim is based on educated estimates of future projections that may change. With that caveat, we rate McCallum’s statement Mostly True.	None	John McCallum	None	None	None	2014-03-26T06:00:00	2014-03-18	['United_States']
-pomt-01365	"Prayer rugs have recently been found on the Texas side of the border in the brush."	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2014/oct/19/david-dewhurst/david-dewhurst-says-prayer-rugs-found-texas-brush-/	The lieutenant governor of Texas has twice declared the discovery of "prayer rugs" on the Texas side of the border with Mexico, also suggesting members of the Islamic State group have possibly snuck in. At the September 2014, Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., David Dewhurst described suspicions of an impending invasion of terrorists crossing the Rio Grande. As a sign, he said, "prayer rugs have recently been found on the Texas side of the border in the brush," according to CSPAN2 video posted online by the liberal news site Talking Points Memo. Of late, some Texas-Mexico border claims have lacked factual footing. In September 2014, PolitiFact rated Mostly False a claim the Islamic State group was operating in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. PolitiFact Texas subsequently rated Pants on Fire a California congressman’s statement that at least 10 ISIS fighters had been caught by the U.S. Border Patrol. So Dewhurst, who about a week earlier made a similar claim about prayer rugs in a border security panel discussion at the Texas Tribune Festival, made us wonder. For starters, scholars and Muslim religious figures we reached for this story warned against linking Muslim prayer to a person’s interest in terrorism. In themselves, experts said, the rugs -- like the ones pictured below in a photo emailed to us by Anees Siddiqui of Austin -- represent cleanliness; they’re placed on the ground where a Muslim believer prays. Also, the experts said, the rugs are not used by all the world’s estimated 1.6 billion Muslims. Courtesy photo: Anees Siddiqui, spokesman, the Islamic Center of Greater Austin. Dewhurst’s basis To our inquiry, Andrew Barlow, a state spokesman for Dewhurst, who lost his re-election bid this spring, emailed us two URLs and said, "Lt. Governor Dewhurst based his statement on this report: ...and this article." The latest provided account was a Sept. 11, 2014, online news report by KTRH, 740 AM in Houston, quoting Ed Turzanski, a former U.S. intelligence officer and professor of political science and government at La Salle University in Philadelphia, saying: "We've seen Muslim prayer rugs and other items that have been left behind by people entering the country illegally." By phone, Turzanski told us Border Patrol agents, in numerous private conversations over the past decade, told him prayer rugs were found at the border, but it’s been "a number of years" since the last report. He also offered to try to put knowledgeable sources in touch with us; we heard no more. Otherwise, he warned, government agencies would not admit prayer rug discoveries to the press. He said officials in President Barack Obama’s administration forbid the Border Patrol from speaking about anything that "goes against the administration’s border security narrative." The other news story Barlow noted, posted June 30, 2014, on Breitbart.com, a conservative news and commentary website, quoted an unidentified "source who works among independent American security contractors along the southern border in Arizona and Texas" saying six Middle Easterners had been picked up in Laredo, Texas, "right along (the area) with the ranchers in Texas finding prayer rugs in their ranches." After we tried to contact the Breitbart reporter, Kerry Picket, Kurt Bardella, president of Endeavor Strategic Communications, the firm that runs public relations for Breitbart, said by phone Breitbart could not reveal the source who described the prayer rug discoveries. He also said the organization could not tell us what group the source belongs to, where the source lives or why the source believed the ranchers’ findings were prayer rugs. Bardella said: "The source stands by his statement." Other accounts and authorities Via the Nexis news database, we spotted news reports of prayer rugs found along the border as long ago as 2005. None of the reports presented on-the-record sourced-by-name evidence. Separately, federal and local law enforcement authorities denied receiving reports of found prayer rugs while Tom Vinger, spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, emailed us that the agency doesn’t track that information. By phone, Joe Gutierrez Jr., spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, said he had heard "nothing" about prayer rug finds. Gutierrez said he passed our query on to all Texas Border Patrol sectors by email. A response came from Rod Kise, a public information officer at the Rio Grande Valley Sector headquarters in Edinburg. Kise emailed: "Regarding the discovery of prayer rugs along the Texas-Mexico Border, we had no reports of prayer rugs being found." Kise also said: "It is not unusual to find trash/etc. along smuggling routes." By email, Nick Georgiou, managing editor of the Laredo Morning Times, said the newspaper "is not aware of any reports of Muslim prayer rugs found near the Texas-Mexico border around Laredo." To our inquiry, Brenda Medina-Moreno, a Laredo spokeswoman for the Webb County sheriff’s office, said by email: "The Webb County Sheriff’s Office has not come across any prayer rugs and/or reports of the rugs along our border crossings." Experts: Photograph not a prayer rug Amid unnamed-source reports of prayer rug findings, we found only one article presenting a photo of an alleged prayer rug found on the border in Arizona. The July 9, 2014, news story was written for Breitbart.com by Picket, who also wrote the story on prayer rugs found by ranchers near Laredo, Texas that Dewhurst relied on. By email, Breitbart spokesman Bardella pointed out an editor’s note attached to the end of the July 2014 story. The note said: "We reasonably relied on the statements and picture provided by a third-party source regarding the finding of an apparent prayer shawl at the border. There are now conflicting reports about those statements; however, the third party source still fully stands behind the accuracy of his original account." To get our own sense of the photo’s accuracy, we sent a copy of the photograph and a request for analysis to over a dozen U.S. religious figures and scholars. We received eight replies, with all the respondents saying the pictured item did not look like a prayer rug. Frank Griffel, chairman of the Council of Middle East Studies at Yale University, said: "Is this a joke? What makes people think that the vague cloth at the border is a prayer rug? I can't see any connection. It's an old piece of cloth and it has no resemblance to a rug, even less so to a prayer rug." Samer Ali, associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, said it didn’t look like a prayer rug because it was too thin, had seams, had hems and didn’t look like any design he’d seen on a prayer rug. Mustafa Umar, director of education and outreach at the Islamic Institute of Orange County in California, said: "The checkered pattern is not characteristic of a prayer rug and was in fact discouraged by the Prophet Muhammad to use because that pattern distracts the Muslim from prayer." Our ruling Dewhurst said "prayer rugs have recently been found" in brush on the Texas side of the U.S.-Mexico border. This claim is weakened because it’s not backed up by sourced-by-name witnesses nor did any authority confirm such a find when we inquired. If prayer rugs were showing up to someone’s alarm, we think there'd be legitimate photographs and the rugs themselves available for inspection. Another hole: While people of the Muslim faith surely cross the Mexico-Texas border – that’s not at issue in this fact check – it’s unreasonable to presume the presence of prayer rugs means individuals carrying them intend to commit violent acts on U.S.soil, an implication of Dewhurst’s declaration. In the end, we find his statement incorrect and ridiculous. Rugs (we mean Pants) on Fire!	None	David Dewhurst	None	None	None	2014-10-19T06:00:00	2014-09-26	['Texas']
-thet-00073	Did the SNP government end hospital parking charges?	none	https://theferret.scot/snp-government-did-not-fully-end-hospital-parking-charges-in-2008/	None	Fact check Health 	None	None	None	Did the SNP government end hospital parking charges?	May 21, 2017	None	['None']
-abbc-00205	The claim: Federal Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane says gas supply problems are looming in NSW because there has been insufficient progress in developing its coal seam gas industry.	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-30/gas-shortages-nsw-macfarlane/4980952	The claim: Federal Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane says gas supply problems are looming in NSW because there has been insufficient progress in developing its coal seam gas industry.	['oil-and-gas', 'states-and-territories', 'liberals', 'australia', 'nsw']	None	None	['oil-and-gas', 'states-and-territories', 'liberals', 'australia', 'nsw']	Will New South Wales run short of gas by 2016?	Wed 23 Apr 2014, 6:50am	None	['Ian_Macfarlane_(economist)', 'New_South_Wales']
-pomt-06288	A DeKalb sewer project "will create up to 4,000 direct jobs per year at peak production, many of which will be set aside exclusively for DeKalb residents."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2011/nov/21/dekalb-county/county-claims-sewer-work-will-create-4000-jobs/	DeKalb County has peered deep into its sewers and found a trove of jobs. The county needs $1.35 billion in water system upgrades to replace mains, aging tanks, and build or repair other infrastructure. Through its recently-announced ONE DeKalb Works program, which they bill as a "local stimulus program," they hope to keep many of those contracts and jobs in the county. "As a result of these ground-breaking partnerships, ONE DeKalb Works will create up to 4,000 direct jobs per year at peak production, many of which will be set aside exclusively for DeKalb residents," the program’s brochure said. Oh, job estimates. We’ve tackled them many times before. The numbers are typically miscast or overstated. We can’t resist a job estimate. We switched on our Truth-O-Meter let it spin away. According to county documents, the program will work like this: DeKalb County’s Department of Watershed Management plans to upgrade its water system from 2013 through 2017. The county’s First Source ordinance, which was updated this year, requires all contractors with contracts worth $50,000 or more to make a "good faith effort" to fill half of the jobs their projects create with DeKalb residents, it says DeKalb Workforce Development, a division of the county that helps job seekers get training and connects businesses with applicants, keeps a list of pre-screened workers that contractors can use to find qualified candidates. Contractors who don’t make a good faith effort to reach the 50 percent goal may become ineligible for future projects. The National Urban League will monitor four of these contracts as part of a pilot project to make sure contractors comply with the ordinance. The League will have the authority to check contractor payroll records, and will report on how well contractors are meeting county hiring goals. Since the revised ordinance went into effect in late summer, DeKalb has referred 149 possible employees to 65 contractors who won their bids, county spokesman Burke Brennan said. The county has confirmed contractors hired seven of them, but it’s still collecting data. So it’s accurate to say that DeKalb has an ordinance that requires contractors try its best to hire a certain amount of locals. The county also has specific plans to monitor contractors and sanctions in place should contractors violate the statute. But saying that these jobs will be available "exclusively" for DeKalb residents is a bit of an overstatement. Contractors must simply make a good faith effort. Now on to the ONE DeKalb Works’ job estimates. They were issued by the University of Georgia Carl Vinson Institute of Government, which often generates economic impact studies. We looked at their study and found they used two standard, widely-accepted models. The study calculated how many "direct" jobs the project will create. These positions are for people working directly on improving the county’s water system. Each job equals one position lasting for one year. It also estimated "indirect" jobs, which are created when the county purchases materials for the project, and "induced" jobs, which is when workers create jobs by using their earnings to buy clothes or lunch and the like. The average reader often looks at job estimates for a major project and gets the impression that they represent jobs for people who are actually building it. In fact, some governments add direct jobs to indirect and induced jobs to get the totals that they release to the press. This can give an inflated sense of how many jobs a project will create. Another mistake is governments sometimes add together the number of jobs per year created in each each year of the project. This can artificially inflate job numbers as well. For instance, if a project lasts for five years, and a particular worker is set to work on it for all five years, his one job would count as five jobs under this method. DeKalb avoids these problems, by and large. In information that accompanies the brochure online, it lists jobs for each year separately. It doesn’t add direct, indirect and induced jobs together. When work is in full swing in 2015, there will be 3,670 jobs assigned to work directly on the sewer project, according to one economic impact model. Using the second model, UGA found that number is 4,170 direct, indirect and induced jobs in DeKalb county. "We can be fairly sure that the impact in DeKalb County is somewhere between the two estimates and the actual impact will be determined by the amount of materials purchased from firms in the county," the UGA report concludes. Overall, DeKalb does well with its jobs claim. We think it’s reasonable, if optimistic, to say "up to" 4,000 jobs directly will created by the project when it’s at its peak. The county does run into a little trouble when it claims some of the ONE DeKalb Works jobs are set aside "exclusively" for locals. This overstatement would be a serious concern, given that DeKalb has only confirmed that seven workers have been hired under the current First Source rules. But it’s not a serious concern in this case. The First Source ordinance is brand new and the county is still collecting hire data. Also, the ordinance appears to have real teeth since the county established a pilot project to monitor ONE DeKalb Works contracts. We therefore rate DeKalb’s claim Mostly True.	None	DeKalb County	None	None	None	2011-11-21T06:00:00	2011-11-11	['None']
-farg-00407	"State Passes Historic Bill To Keep Trump Off The 2020 Ballot – Trump Prepares To Sue"	misleading	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/rhode-island-tax-returns-bill-didnt-pass/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Angelo Fichera	['2020 election']	Rhode Island Tax Returns Bill Didn’t Pass	June 26, 2018	2018-06-26 16:03:35 UTC	['None']
-snes-04765	Photograph depicts a Bernie Sanders rally in California attended by more than 27,000 people that was ignored by the news media.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/27000-people-came-to-a-bernie-sanders-rally-in-california/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	27,000 People Came to a Bernie Sanders Rally in California	16 May 2016	None	['California', 'Bernie_Sanders']
-vees-00056	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online post comparing Aquino and Duterte relief operations	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-online-post-comparing-aquino-and-duter	None	None	None	None	misleading	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online post comparing Aquino and Duterte relief operations MISLEADS with outdated photos	September 19, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-07207	Michigan and Massachusetts raised their bottle deposit and "could no longer afford the program because the redemptions were so high there was no profit in there."	pants on fire!	/oregon/statements/2011/jun/06/jeff-kruse/state-senator-says-two-states-bottle-bill-systems-/	The Oregon Senate recently gave final approval to a bill that widely expands Oregon’s iconic bottle bill. Among other things, the legislation increases the sorts of beverages covered and leaves room for a possible increase from the current nickel deposit to a dime. It’s that last bit, the five to ten cents bit, that drew the strongEST rebuke from dissenting senators. The increase happens only if the return rate in Oregon dips below 80 percent two years in a row. Distributors don’t think that will happen. In fact, they’re so sure they can keep rates high that they endorsed the bill. But some Republican senators didn’t see how that made any sense. If proponents were so certain redemption rates wouldn’t fall, why bother including that provision in the bill at all? Sen. Jeff Kruse was among those who spoke against that piece of the expansion. "We have some unintended consequences that may come in with this increase to a dime … I would point to a couple states -- Michigan and Massachusetts -- that increased their redemption value and what happened in both of those states is they could no longer afford the program because the redemptions were so high there was no profit in there," he told his colleagues. His reasoning as far as we could tell -- and he later confirmed -- was that those states had such high redemption rates, the deposit money mostly got refunded and that left the states no money to run their programs. That’s a pretty dire prognosis: The program could work so well that it would eliminate its own funding stream. PolitiFact Oregon decided to check it out. First up was Michigan. We talked to Terry Stanton, the spokesman for the state’s Department of Treasury. Michigan’s deposit, he said, was indeed 10 cents -- the highest in the nation -- and the return rate was nearly 97 percent. (For comparison, Oregon is just under 80 percent.) Does the high redemption cause problems? Is the Michigan system going broke? At first, Stanton didn’t seem to understand what we were asking. The idea that the bottle redemption program was a way to raise funds and not to encourage recycling just didn’t seem right. "I don't know," he said. "That wasn't the purpose of the program … This was initiated really to clean up the road waste." Right, we said. Same with Oregon. But here, the unclaimed deposits help run the system. If there aren’t any, the system might face problems. We asked again: Is that happening in Michigan. He checked and sent us this e-mail: "First, as noted on the phone, Michigan's bottle deposit law was put in place in the 1970's, to help cleanup roadsides, etc., that were becoming cluttered with bottles and cans. The deposit has been at 10 cents since inception. Michigan's program, which was approved by a vote of the people, was not designed to be a revenue generator but to keep roadsides and the environment clean. ... "As for the unredeemed cans, the Michigan Bottle Deposit Law states that of the unclaimed deposits that revert to the state, 75 percent is deposited into the Cleanup and Redevelopment Trust Fund and 25 percent is returned to the retailers. ... "I'm not sure what the individual in Oregon is claiming as far as ‘not having the money to operate.’ As far as I'm aware, Michigan's program is not experiencing problems." Well, that didn’t seem to match very well with what Kruse had said. So, we gave him a call and asked where he’d heard that Michigan was going broke. "I don't have documentation," Kruse said, adding it came from "a discussion we were having." "The logic behind it is that the program pays for itself by those (deposits) that aren't returned. So, if you get to the point where you're getting 100 percent" there’s no fuel for the program, Kruse said. "I guess i was trying to make the point that this move, if we got back to the dime, could come back to bite us in a way that we did not anticipate." Then, he added that the deposit might be even higher in Massachusetts -- even a quarter. Maybe there were issues there. We did some Googling (we’re hi-tech here) and couldn’t find anything about a quarter deposit there. We did find a few articles about an expansion included in the Massachusetts governor’s proposal, but that dealt only with the types of containers included. There wasn’t a word about an increase from a nickel to a quarter. But we like to be complete in our fact-checking, so we gave the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection a call. We talked to Edmund Coletta, the spokesman for the department, about the latest on the state’s deposit system. The bottle deposit, he confirmed, was still a nickel. The governor recently pushed to get more beverage containers included under the program, he said, but neither the state’s House nor Senate included the changes in their budget proposals. What’s more, he added, increasing the current nickel deposit is "definitely not in the governor’s proposal." For a final word on all this, we decided to give John Anderson a call. He’s the president of the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, the group that’s helping to expand redemption centers through the state. We asked him whether Kruse might be on to something. Could an increased deposit lead to a collapse in Oregon’s system? While it’s true, he said, that unredeemed deposits "are the major funding for the system" it’s unlikely that, even with a dime, we’d hit Michigan’s 97 percent return rate. Part of that has to do with the fact that Michigan is surrounded by major out-of-state population centers. That "Seinfeld" episode about Kramer taking empties from New York to Michigan for the double deposit? That actually happens. But Oregon only has Vancouver nearby. So even at 10 cents, "we end up about in the high 80s, that's my estimate," Anderson said. "I think we lose on redeemed deposits, but I don't think we go into a crisis mode. "I don't think that's a problem that we really need to spend a lot of time on." This case seems pretty open and shut to us. Kruse tried to persuade his Senate colleagues that too-high deposits in Michigan and Massachusetts were crippling those programs. But Michigan says that’s not the case and Massachusetts doesn’t even have a higher deposit rate. Kruse doesn’t have any evidence to back up his claim. The statement is not just false -- it’s ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire.	None	Jeff Kruse	None	None	None	2011-06-06T06:00:00	2011-05-25	['Michigan', 'Massachusetts']
-abbc-00383	In his campaign launch speech on August 25, 2013, Tony Abbott promised a Coalition government would give $200 million to dementia research.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-27/200-million-for-dementia-research-promise-check/5454838	None	['alzheimers-and-dementia', 'diseases-and-disorders', 'health', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'health-policy', 'social-policy', 'government-and-politics', 'australia']	None	None	['alzheimers-and-dementia', 'diseases-and-disorders', 'health', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'health-policy', 'social-policy', 'government-and-politics', 'australia']	Promise check: $200 million for dementia research	Sun 8 May 2016, 7:37am	None	['Tony_Abbott', 'Coalition_(Australia)']
-snes-02027	A Royal Caribbean vessel fired upon and sank a Carnival Cruise liner in "disputed waters" on the high seas.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/royal-caribbeans-sinks-carnival-cruise/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Shelling from Royal Caribbean’s M.S. ‘Allure’ Sinks Carnival Cruise Vessel that Crossed into Disputed Waters?	21 July 2017	None	['Carnival_Cruise_Lines', 'Royal_Caribbean_International']
-hoer-00594	'Hanging Naked Man' Orchid Flower Images	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/hanging-naked-man-orchid.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	'Hanging Naked Man' Orchid Flower Images	May 13, 2014	None	['None']
-snes-03643	The NYPD raided Clinton's property as part of the Anthony Weiner investigation.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nypd-raids-hillary-clintons-property/	None	Junk News	None	Bethania Palma	None	New York Police Raid Hillary Clinton’s Property	2 November 2016	None	['Bill_Clinton', 'Anthony_Weiner', 'New_York_City_Police_Department']
-pomt-12800	On using the Common Core standards for English and math instruction	full flop	/wisconsin/statements/2017/feb/15/john-humphries/humphries-changed-course-common-core-standards/	Two candidates in the Feb. 21, 2017 primary election for state superintendent of public instruction are in a race to replace. Replace the Common Core academic standards, that is. Their stances have earned Lowell Holtz and John Humphries the label of "flip floppers" from the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now. We decided to turn to the Flip-O-Meter to determine if the challengers to incumbent Superintendent Tony Evers -- a Common Core supporter -- merit that label. Adopted by many states, the kindergarten-to-12th grade standards were designed as a rigorous national effort that would base teaching on college and job-world needs and allow comparison of U.S. students to their international counterparts. In Wisconsin most school districts, if not all, have adopted Common Core as the standards for English and math, said Thomas McCarthy, spokesman for the state Department of Public Instruction. The Flip-O-Meter, of course, does not rate whether it’s good policy or politics to switch a position. It simply measures consistency in positions over time. Some argue a change demonstrates an openness to new facts or a willingness to compromise. Others say it is evidence of inconsistent principles or lack of backbone. So, where does Humphries stand? Humphries then Before the election, Humphries’ views on Common Core can be found in letters he wrote on behalf of the Wisconsin School Psychologists Association. He was president-elect. It’s an imperfect source because the communications don’t necessarily represent his personal views. But he personalized one of the letters using his own experience and has not said he disagreed with their content. In October 2013, the group praised Common Core to a task force considering implementation of the standards. The "higher, better" standards were developed with a broad coalition and should go into effect quickly, the letter said. "There is broad agreement on the positive impact they have had already. I have seen firsthand the significant, positive impact these new standards have had on our work in schools," Humphries wrote. Humphries told the task force that he was a school psychology consultant for the state Department of Public Instruction before returning to the schools in 2011, working in Dodgeville as a school psychologist and director of special education and pupil services. The Common Core has required educators to refocus their efforts, he wrote: "In Dodgeville for example, our staff spent hundreds of hours this summer re-working our curricula in order to align with the new, higher standards." The letter offered some specific criticisms of Common Core, but said it should be the "baseline" for any new standards. In March 2014, Humphries and two other officials with the group expressed concerns about proposed state legislation to dump Common Core and start from scratch to develop new standards. New standards could be less rigorous and take Wisconsin out of the national conversation on educational outcomes, the letter warned, because more time and national expertise would be needed if Wisconsin started over. Rather, the authors wrote, the state should improve and clarify some areas of Common Core, then provide money to put the "Wisconsin Common Core Extension Standards" into effect. Humphries now Jump ahead to February 2017. On the campaign trail, Humphries said he wanted to "replace" Common Core. The standards, he said, are too weak. Instead, the state should take two years to develop new standards with state and national expertise. Good intentions have frequently turned to poor implementation, inadequate communication, and too many decisions being taken away from parents and educators by state and federal politicians, Humphries said in a campaign news release in February 2017. Humphries’ praise of Common Core had been criticized by some conservatives, and his rollout of a "repeal" was greeted skeptically Feb. 2, 2017 by talk show host Jerry Bader in an appearance on that show. On that show, Humphries said he disagreed that the 2013-’14 letters were supportive of Common Core. Our rating It’s tempting to call this a Half Flip given that the 2013-14 correspondence wasn’t entirely praiseworthy of Common Core. And there’s the problem that Humphries was speaking for hundreds of psychologists, not just himself. But in our view Humphries downplays and miscasts those letters instead of distancing himself from the positions expressed. And the contrast is vivid: Common Core was strong, now it’s too weak. Common Core is needed right away, now we can wait two years. Common Core should be the baseline, now it should be dumped. That’s a major reversal. And a Full Flop. Share the Facts Politifact 8 6 Politifact Rating: On using the Common Core standards for English and math instruction John Humphries Wisconsin state school superintendent candidate Campaign statement Thursday, February 2, 2017 02/02/2017 Read More info	None	John Humphries	None	None	None	2017-02-15T05:00:00	2017-02-02	['England']
-tron-00078	General Vo Nguyen Giap: Vietnam War Lost at Home	incorrect attribution!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/general-vo-nguyen-giap-vietnam-war-lost-home-incorrect-attribution/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	General Vo Nguyen Giap: Vietnam War Lost at Home	Dec 21, 2016	None	['Vo_Nguyen_Giap']
-pomt-07718	Says the Army is spending $7 million to sponsor a NASCAR team.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/mar/03/betty-mccollum/rep-betty-mccollum-argues-against-army-funding-nas/	Rep. Betty McCollum says the government wastes a remarkable amount of money sponsoring a NASCAR team -- $7 million a year. "In 2011, the U.S. Army is sponsoring Ryan Newman's #39 Chevrolet Impala in the Spirit Cup series at a cost to the taxpayers of $7 million," McCollum, D-Minn., said in a statement. A reader wondered whether this was true, so we looked into it. The NASCAR sponsorship was cited many times during the recent House of Representatives deliberations on budget cuts. During one round of budget-cutting in February 2011, the House voted to slice more than $61 billion from the budget, but it spared the money that the Army pays to sponsor Newman's NASCAR team. The Army has sponsored various NASCAR teams for many years and has sponsored Newman's for the past two years. Backers of the expenditure say sponsorship pays off in recruiting leads. "Last year alone, the U.S. Army's motor sports programs generated more than 46,000 qualified leads, more than 1,300 pledges of support from key business and community leaders, and more than 484 million media impressions (34 million of which offered specific Army recruiting messages)," said Newman in a website discussion. A spokesman for Stewart-Haas Racing confirmed that the Army pays $7.4 million for its co-sponsorship. The team's website quotes Newman saying that he is energized by the sponsorship. "Being around the U.S. Army soldiers is an inspiration to me and the race team," he said. "The physical, emotional and mental strength of these individuals is a driving force behind our mission to get the soldier’s car into Victory Lane." But to McCollum the sponsorship is too much. "Taxpayer-funded NASCAR race cars are an absurdity at a time when the Republican-Tea Party is cutting federal support for homeless veterans, law enforcement officers, and firefighters," McCollum said in a press release announcing her proposed amendment. "With trillion dollar deficits, this amendment is where the rubber meets the road for my Republican Tea Party colleagues," she said. But her amendment failed. We won't weigh in on the debate over whether the Army's money is well spent or not. When it comes to the dollars, though, McCollum is on the mark, so we rate this statement True. Editor's note: In an earlier version, the name of Stewart-Haas Racing was misspelled.	None	Betty McCollum	None	None	None	2011-03-03T14:25:44	2011-02-16	['None']
-pomt-00343	Says "Mike Madigan and Kwame Raoul team up to raise property taxes."	mostly false	/illinois/statements/2018/sep/16/erika-harold/republican-ag-candidate-misleads-attacking-opponen/	Complaining about corruption and high property taxes is the low-hanging fruit of election politics in Illinois, and Republican attorney general candidate Erika Harold hits on both in a recent ad targeting her Democratic opponent, state Sen. Kwame Raoul of Chicago. The TV spot starts off with Harold stating, "In Illinois, politicians have turned corruption into an art form." "I’m Erika Harold and this scheme is one of the worst: Mike Madigan and Kwame Raoul team up to raise property taxes," she continues, as a picture of the Democratic House Speaker and Raoul flashes on-screen with text characterizing their collaboration as a "scheme." "In Chicago, Madigan’s business does property tax appeals for the powerful," she goes on to say. "Higher taxes, higher profits. And Kwame Raoul? His top donor gets massive tax breaks from the county, while you get higher taxes. I’m Erika Harold. As attorney general, I’ll make the politicians pay for their corruption—not you." Harold’s ad contains a hodgepodge of accusations and innuendo, including that reference to Madigan’s property tax business to which Raoul has no connection. Yet it’s all framed around a central implication that Raoul and Madigan somehow participated in a corrupt "scheme" to line their pockets by hiking property taxes. That makes her statement about the two teaming up to raise property taxes much more provocative. So we decided to give it a closer look. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Missing context Harold’s ad refers to a 2014 bill sponsored by Raoul in the Senate and Madigan in the House that sought to get two of Chicago’s ailing pension funds for city workers back on financial track. The measure was aimed at facilitating a plan of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s to reduce a multibillion-dollar pension shortfall by cutting city worker retirement benefits and requiring both workers and the city to increase contributions into the municipal and laborers’ pension funds. Then-Gov. Pat Quinn, as well as lawmakers from both parties, quickly objected to language in the bill Quinn said would "gouge" city property owners. Within days, Raoul, Madigan and Emanuel pulled that language. The watered-down bill eventually passed and was signed into law by Quinn, though it was later struck down as unconstitutional by the Illinois Supreme Court. Harold campaign spokesman Aaron DeGroot acknowledged Raoul and Madigan carried the bill at Emanuel’s request and that they removed the property tax provision before its passage. Even so, DeGroot said the context was immaterial. "The reason they all sought the property tax is irrelevant," DeGroot wrote in an email. "We never claim property taxes were raised as a result of the legislation. We do say, though, that Raoul and Madigan endorsed a property tax increase. That is true. The additional context or final result does not make that fact any less true." Without that context, however, Harold’s accusations amount to cleverly misleading wordplay. By stating that Raoul and Madigan teamed up "to" raise property taxes, she erroneously implies that raising taxes was the proposal’s central aim. What’s more, among those speaking in favor of the bill on the day it passed in the House was the chamber’s Republican leader, Jim Durkin. "Doing nothing is not an option," he said, later adding "I don’t want to see the city of Chicago fall in line with Detroit." "The sponsors were acting in response to the city’s request to change the state law," said Amanda Kass, associate director of the Government Finance Research Center at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "Everybody recognized the city’s contributions were too low." Not a "scheme" There’s another reason context is critical in making sense of Harold’s property-tax claim: the on-screen text reiterating that Raoul and Madigan’s proposal was a "scheme" right after she’d called it "one of the worst" in the sordid history of public corruption in Illinois. Framing the bill that way suggests Raoul used his public office for personal gain. There is no evidence for such a claim, and Harold’s campaign did not attempt to support it when we asked for proof. Instead, DeGroot argued Raoul is complicit in what he described as Illinois’ "inherently corrupt" property tax system, contending he’s not only supported property tax increases but has also "been silent on reform." As for the allegation about Raoul’s top donor benefitting from lucrative tax breaks, that was a reference to Neil Bluhm, chairman of Rivers Casino in Des Plaines as well as the finance chair of Raoul’s campaign. In making the charge, Harold’s ad cites a 2016 investigation by the Better Government Association that showed how Rivers had received lucrative property tax breaks after appeals filed with Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios. The article made no reference to Raoul, and DeGroot did not say the Democrat was involved with the Rivers tax break. "We say Raoul’s top donor was the recipient of a million-dollar tax break," DeGroot wrote. "Nothing more." Our ruling Harold says "Mike Madigan and Kwame Raoul team up to raise property taxes." Her statement contains an element of truth in that Raoul and Madigan did sponsor legislation in 2014 that initially contained a proposal from Emanuel for a new property tax levy for several ailing pension funds. But the tax component was not the primary aim of the bill, which also sought to shore up the funds by cutting city worker retirement benefits and requiring both workers and the city to put more money into them. That tax language didn’t even make it into the final version of the bill. Yet Harold’s claim spuriously suggests Raoul teamed up with Madigan for the express purpose of hiking taxes, leaving out all mitigating context. We rate it Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Erika Harold	None	None	None	2018-09-16T15:00:00	2018-08-13	['Michael_Madigan', 'Kwame_Raoul']
-pomt-00932	Georgia’s share of money from the Federal Highway Trust Fund declined 12 percent between 2008 and 2013.	true	/georgia/statements/2015/feb/25/associated-press/report-accurate-decline-federal-transportation-dol/	Georgia lawmakers are struggling to come up with $1 billion annually for road and bridge work, and they see nothing to suggest Uncle Sam will be lending much help -- let alone extra money. For decades, states have been receiving money each year from the Federal Highway Trust Fund. But those dollars have been shrinking of late for all but Alaska and New York. Last weekend, The Associated Press published a national analysis of Federal Highway Trust Fund spending between 2008 and 2013, the latest year for which figures were available. It showed overall trust fund money to the states was down 3.5 percent during that period. Based on population, Georgia saw the third sharpest decline in awards for the period -- down 12 percent. Only Minnesota and Washington took bigger hits, AP reported. With transportation a top issue to Atlanta commuters and business leaders and one of the hottest topics of debate in this year’s General Assembly session, PolitiFact Georgia decided to dig a little deeper. First, a little background on the trust fund, its history and its role in the angst playing out under Georgia’s Gold Dome and in other state capitols. Congress funded construction of interstates and some other roads through the general fund until 1956 when the Federal Highway Trust Fund was established, using proceeds from the federal fuel tax of 18.3 cents a gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents a gallon on diesel fuel and related excise taxes. The trust fund had an $8 billion shortfall in 2008, attributed to higher gas prices and lower gas consumption driven by the recession, that had to be covered with money from the general fund. Similarly, $7 billion had to be transferred to the fund in 2009, and $19.5 billion in 2010. Congress passed a stopgap plan last year to prevent a funding lapse, and the trust fund could again be on the chopping block in May without intervention. Some states have responded by proposing new taxes, tolls and fees. Leaders in the Georgia House have proposed a bill to raise $1 billion for transportation, an issue they acknowledge is critical to the state’s long-term growth. The plan’s backers also say it will decrease Georgia’s reliance on federal funding for road upkeep. In 2014, about $1.2 billion, or more than 54 percent of the state DOT budget came from federal funds. "The more independent we can be from the federal government, the better off we are long term," Seth Millican, director of the Georgia Transportation Alliance, an arm of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, said last week. Mick Bullock, spokesman for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said transportation funding is "an issue states are grappling with all around the country. "Pending what happens in Congress with the Highway Trust Fund, state legislatures need a long-term funding solution for their transportation infrastructure," Bullock said. ‘if Congress does not act, states will have to look at other funding solutions." Now to the numbers. The Georgia Department of Transportation provided us with data on the sizable dollars that flowed to road projects in the state from the federal trust fund in the period that had been reviewed. Georgia received $8.14 billion in 2008 to 2013 -- including (with rounding) $1.44 billion in 2008; $1.36 billion in 2009; $1.4 billion in 2010; $1.37 billion in 2011; $1.3 billion in 2012 and $1.27 billion in 2013. By our calculations, that was a net loss of about 12 percent. We asked for data for the five prior years -- thinking that might provide additional light. In the five prior years, we saw the state’s annual allotment from the trust fund go up almost every year, (with rounding) $1 billion in 2003; $1.22 billion in 2004; $1.27 billion in 2005; $1.23 million in 2006; and $1.34 billion in 2007. Overall, in that period, Georgia’s funding through the trust fund increased at a steady clip -- about 34 percent. Our ruling. The money Georgia receives from the Federal Highway Trust Fund fell by more than 12 percent in 2008 through 2013. State and federal data we reviewed backs up that finding by The Associated Press. We rate the statement True.	None	The Associated Press	None	None	None	2015-02-25T00:00:00	2015-02-21	['None']
-pomt-15336	For African-Americans between the ages of 17 and 20, "the real unemployment rate … is 51 percent."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/13/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-says-real-unemployment-rate-african/	During a campaign event in Portland, Maine, that attracted thousands of supporters, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders made a striking claim about unemployment among African-American youth. "For young people who have graduated high school or dropped out of high school, who are between the ages of 17 and 20, if they happen to be white, the unemployment rate is 33 percent," he said. "If they are Hispanic, the unemployment rate is 36 percent. If they are African-American, the real unemployment rate for young people is 51 percent." A reader asked us to check whether Sanders was correct, so we took a closer look. (Sanders seems to have made this a go-to talking point in his campaign; he offered a similar claim in an interview with The Nation.) We’ll start by noting that the most commonly used unemployment-rate statistic is not as high for each group as Sanders indicated. The most readily available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics covers the age range from 16 to 19, which isn’t identical but gives a quick approximation. For whites in that age range, the official unemployment rate was 15.7 percent, for Hispanics it was 20.8 percent and for African-Americans it was 31.8 percent. In other words, the official unemployment rate shows the same general pattern -- that African-American youth unemployment is significantly higher than white youth unemployment and, to a lesser extent, higher than Hispanic youth unemployment. Still, the levels for each group are lower than what Sanders said. So what’s going on? Sanders’ camp pointed us to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank. This data is different from the more familiar measurements for a few reasons. One, the institute didn’t just look at employment status for people between the ages of 17 and 20; it limited its reach to high school graduates who were not enrolled in further schooling. And two, EPI counted not only unemployed workers but also those who were working part-time due to the weakness of the economy and those who were "marginally attached to the labor force." The latter category includes people who did not meet the strict definition of being in the job market, but weren’t entirely out of the market, either. The statistic EPI used, known by the wonky shorthand U-6, is officially called a measure of "labor underutilization" rather than "unemployment." EPI itself used the term "underemployment" in its research. It’s a real statistic, but Sanders didn’t really describe it the correct way. He twice used the term "unemployment rate" and once used the variation "real unemployment rate," a vague term that doesn’t have any official definition at BLS and wasn’t mentioned in the EPI research he was quoting. On the other hand, Sanders’ choice of statistics actually understated his broader point. Since it’s reasonable to assume that dropouts have an even higher unemployment rate than high-school graduates, the figure for "young people who have graduated high school or dropped out of high school," as he put it, is probably even higher than 51 percent, since that figure includes only high school graduates. All in all, economists agreed that Sanders had a point despite his problems with terminology. "He should have been clearer," said Tara Sinclair, a George Washington University economist. "But I think the overall scale is right. Both education and race are predictive of employment outcomes in the United States. A number of different studies show that even for the same levels of education, minorities appear to have worse average employment outcomes." Our ruling Sanders said that for African-Americans between the ages of 17 and 20, "the real unemployment rate … is 51 percent." His terminology was off, but the numbers he used check out, and his general point was correct -- that in an apples-to-apples comparison, African-American youth have significantly worse prospects in the job market than either Hispanics or whites do. The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, so we rate it Mostly True.	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2015-07-13T15:39:42	2015-07-06	['None']
-pomt-09613	Says Rick Perry's "Pay to Play" politics led him to send $899 million to an offshore call center in Bermuda, driving down enrollment in children's health insurance	false	/texas/statements/2010/jan/15/texas-democratic-party/democrats-say-perry-sent-899-million-offshore-call/	As Gov. Rick Perry questioned efforts by congressional Democrats to pass a health care overhaul, the Texas Democratic Party accused him of undermining Texans' care with policies that benefit private companies instead of citizens. "Perry's 'Pay to Play' politics led him to send $899 million to an offshore call center in Bermuda — a privatization scheme that deeply cost Texas taxpayers and resulted in 237,000 children losing their health insurance through CHIP," according to an Oct. 5 party news release. CHIP stands for Children's Health Insurance Program, which serves children of the working poor. The specter of needy Texans forced to seek assistance from operators in Bermuda — causing more than 200,000 children to lose their insurance coverage — seemed shocking. We wondered if the Democrats' charge was true. The Democrats' news release cited a 2007 article by the San Antonio Express-News.We couldn't find anything in the Express-News article to back up the fiery claim. A party activist quickly admitted at least partial error. Phillip Martin of the Texas Democratic Trust, which helps the party, said the press release was worded incorrectly. "The call centers obviously weren't in Bermuda," Martin said, "but the company was based in Bermuda — so Texas taxpayers' money did go to a company in Bermuda." The state had hired Accenture, a consulting and outsourcing company, to lead a group of companies called the Texas Access Alliance that would field social service applications and enroll clients. Accenture LLP, the U.S. subsidiary of Accenture Ltd., was incorporated in Bermuda in 2001, though shareholders voted last year to move the place of incorporation to Ireland. But CHIP phone calls haven't been going to either country. In fact, they're answered in Texas. We learned from the Health and Human Services Commission that the state's contract with Accenture required call-center employees to work from U.S. locations. The centers, located in Austin, San Antonio, Midland and Athens (the city near Tyler in East Texas — not Greece), have been run by Virgina-based Maximus, which signed a contract with the state when Accenture's role ended in June 2007. Commission spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman said: "The only way a call could be sent out of state is if a catastrophic situation happened that took down all the phone lines." In a broader context, the Democrats’ Martin suggested the creation of the call centers still was part of a Republican-fostered privatization scheme driving down CHIP sign-ups. Martin’s point: In 2003, the GOP-led Legislature made a push for privatization. Part of that involved directing the HHSC to determine whether using call centers run by private firms would cut costs. Kirsten Gray, Democratic Party communications director, explained that "'Pay to Play' is a political term of art," which we assume means Perry's politics are inspired by whoever coughs up enough money toward his career. He did sign HB 2292 — the legislation that ushered sweeping changes into the state's health and human services — but Rep. Arlene Wohlgemuth authored the bill, and the Legislature passed it. Accenture later landed the state’s call-center contract, which was projected to cost $899 million over five years, the cost figure cited by the Democrats. The privately run call centers were set up to process applications for CHIP, food stamps and Medicaid. Accenture ended up getting $245 million because Maximus took over the call centers. We made a run at gauging whether the creation of the call centers alone reduced CHIP participation, as the Democrats claimed. It’s just not so. True, during the two years that Accenture was employed by the state, CHIP caseloads decreased and applications were lost in the system, causing children to lose health coverage. But those numbers first dropped before the Accenture contract — after lawmakers approved policy changes restricting enrollment. For instance, an amendment adopted in the 2003 legislative session required clients to re-enroll every six months instead of 12 — a reduced time-frame intended to keep children from staying in the program past the time that their parents’ income surged. However, that resulted in more children being dropped from the rolls because their parents failed to re-enroll in time. CHIP sign-ups rebounded a bit after legislators restored the 12-month enrollment period in 2007. Anne Dunkelberg, associate director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for low-income Texans, summed up: "The state implemented some really, really ill-considered policy changes, all at the same time." She said that a combination of policy changes, privatization and staffing cuts all contributed to CHIP reductions, but it's impossible to blame any one factor for CHIP reductions. True, privatizing oversight of CHIP may not have delivered hoped-for savings, and enrollment may have been reduced. But the Democrats' claim that Perry sent nearly $900 million to an outfit in Bermuda, directly causing more than 200,000 children to lose their health coverage, amounted to a big overreach. If they'd been more careful — even saying that the call centers were part of a troubled privatized model — our analysis may have been different. But the party misstated the facts, undermining what could have been a meaningful critique. We rule the statement False.	None	Texas Democratic Party	None	None	None	2010-01-15T11:45:52	2009-10-05	['Bermuda', 'Rick_Perry']
-pomt-07926	"No one in the private sector gets unlimited accruals of vacation and sick leave."	half-true	/florida/statements/2011/jan/28/ed-turanchik/ed-turanchik-says-no-one-private-sector-gets-unlim/	Think government workers get gold-plated benefits packages? Tampa mayoral candidate Ed Turanchik does. His campaign platform calls for stopping unlimited accumulations of vacation and sick days and taking a long look at the city's pay scales. He told the weekly publication Creative Loafing in the Dec. 10, 2010, issue that, "No one in the private sector gets unlimited accruals of vacation and sick leave. That's gotta be changed." We wanted to know, can Tampa's city workers collect unlimited vacation and sick time? And are such practices extinct at private companies? Tampa’s policy We first turned to Tampa's personnel manual for guidance. Full-time workers get about 12 vacation days per year, plus extra days depending on how long the person has worked for the city. A 20-year employee earns seven extra days, for example. Workers also receive 12 days of sick leave, but don't get extra days based on seniority. Employees can save their vacation time and carry up to six weeks to the next year. Additional vacation time gets converted to sick days, which have more restrictions than vacation time. Workers can carry forward as much sick leave as they want. (Tampa has four contracts that cover union workers, police officers, firefighters and all other employees. Each contract is different, but the vacation and sick leave policies are largely consistent.) Asked on Jan. 25 about his description of Tampa's benefits package, Turanchik noted that retiring workers are paid for their unused vacation time (up to the six-week cap) and for half of their unused sick days. Even though vacation time is capped, he said, extra days are converted to sick leave and can eventually be cashed out at the lower rate. "It grows and grows and grows," he said. So Turanchik is mostly correct about Tampa's policy. Combining vacation and sick leave, an employee can accumulate unlimited paid time off. But vacation days are capped and additional time is counted as sick leave, which is harder to use and less lucrative upon retirement. Tampa is mostly in line with other large area cities, though it's the only major city with unlimited sick leave. Both St. Petersburg and Clearwater cap vacation and sick days. Retiring St. Petersburg city workers can cash out almost five months of unused time off, while their Clearwater counterparts get a little more than five months. (That figure was cut by about a third for newer Clearwater hires.) Tampa vs. the private sector It turns out that policies similar to Tampa's are somewhat common in the private sector, according to several studies of employee benefits packages. The New Jersey-based employment law think tank Alexander Hamilton Institute surveyed 1,193 companies about their benefits. Roughly three-fifths of the businesses have traditional vacation plans such as Tampa's. The rest give workers a lump sum of time off to use for vacation, sick days or personal time. The survey found a large group of traditional companies — about 36 percent — offer unlimited sick time. Another 28 percent let workers collect more than six weeks. Tampa's 30-day cap on vacation time also is common, though less so. About one-fifth of traditional employers set caps between 21 and 30 days. Roughly the same number allow workers to carry only five days to the next year. Almost 11 percent allow unlimited vacation accumulation. Another report has similar results. A 2009 survey by the Society for Human Resources Management found that 14 percent of traditional companies offer unlimited sick time. On average, companies allowed workers to roll over 20 vacation days to the next year, or 10 days less than the city of Tampa. We sent Turanchik copies of the studies and asked him if he had any evidence to support his statement that "no one" in private business gets unlimited vacation and sick leave. He said he made the claim based on his own experience as a labor lawyer and from talking with business owners. "I haven't talked to a single business in the Tampa Bay area that allows for unlimited accruals," he said. Turanchik also pointed to another finding from the Alexander Hamilton Institute: 87 percent of employers, a "resounding majority," don't cash out unused sick time when a worker retires. "It's just not a package you see," he said. "I'm sure there's a few companies that do it. But as a general proposition, it's just not an acceptable practice." Our ruling Turanchik's description of Tampa's benefits package is largely correct. He's also right that it's rare for a private business to offer unlimited accumulation of sick leave with a large payout upon retirement. Unlimited vacation also is rare. But his original statement was "no one" in the private sector gets unlimited vacation and sick leave. Several studies say that's not true -- though very few of those companies will pay for unused sick time upon retirement as the city does. The essence of his point is correct, and we rate Turanchik's statement Half True.	None	Ed Turanchik	None	None	None	2011-01-28T17:55:54	2010-12-09	['None']
-pomt-01629	Heroin and prescription opioids are "the number one cause of accidental or preventable death in Wisconsin."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2014/aug/27/brad-schimel/top-cause-preventable-deaths-heroin-prescription-o/	Federal health officials have documented a rise in overdose deaths from opioids -- heroin, as well as prescription painkillers such as OxyContin that can lead to heroin abuse. The latest figures, reported in July 2014, show there were 4,397 heroin deaths across the country in 2011, up 44 percent from 2010. Meanwhile, prescription opioid deaths, following a more than decade-long rise, claimed many more lives -- 16,917, up 2 percent. But, comparatively speaking, just how serious is the opioid problem? In an Aug. 15, 2014 interview on Wisconsin Public Television, Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel, the Republican candidate for state attorney general, was asked what he considered the most important facing the winner of the Nov. 4, 2014 election. Schimel -- who faces Jefferson County District Attorney Susan Happ, a Democrat -- gave this response: "Well, right now, the biggest public safety issue we face is the heroin and prescription opioid problem. It is the number one cause of accidental or preventable death in Wisconsin. It surpassed traffic crashes quite a few years ago already." Is it true that overdoses from heroin or prescription opioids not only outnumber traffic fatalities, but are the top cause of accidental deaths in Wisconsin? The statistics The latest figures from the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that nationally, there were 41,340 fatal drug overdoses of all types in 2011, making it the leading cause of injury death in the country. But what about in Wisconsin? When we asked Schimel’s campaign about his claim, Schimel replied in an email that he had misspoken. He told us he meant to say that the number of all drug overdose deaths in Wisconsin -- not just heroin and prescription opioid deaths -- exceed the number of motor vehicle deaths and are the top cause of accidental deaths. We checked the latest report from the state Department of Health Services, which said there were 2,789 accidental deaths in 2012. The leading cause was 1,091 falls (which also was the leading cause in 2011, according to the department). There were 615 motor vehicle deaths. The same number of deaths -- 615-- was caused by "accidental poisoning and exposure to noxious substances." But those 615 included deaths caused by a variety of drugs, as well as other substances such as alcohol. Separately, we obtained figures from the health department showing there were 511 opioid deaths in Wisconsin in 2012. That included 187 heroin deaths, up from 27 in 2002. And there were 324 deaths caused either by prescription opioids or a mix of prescription opioids and heroin, up from 144 in 2002. Our rating Schimel said heroin and prescription opioidss are "the number one cause of accidental or preventable death in Wisconsin." Schimel acknowledged to us that he misspoke and in fact opioid deaths are down the list. The latest figures, for 2012, show falls was the leading causes of accidental death in Wisconsin. Tied for second were motor vehicle deaths and drug overdose of all types -- including 511 deaths from heroin or prescription opioids. We rate the statement False.	None	Brad Schimel	None	None	None	2014-08-27T05:00:00	2014-08-15	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-04712	Says Gov. Chris Christie has embarked on a tour to "demand that New Jersey’s Democratic legislature approve an immediate tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest."	false	/new-jersey/statements/2012/sep/02/barbara-buono/barbara-buono-says-chris-christie-embarked-tour-de/	Even before Gov. Chris Christie stepped on stage Tuesday night to deliver his keynote address at the Republican National Convention, New Jersey Democrats were criticizing the governor for exaggerating his success as the state’s chief executive. Barbara Buono, a Senate Democrat from Middlesex County who has said she is "seriously considering" a 2013 bid for governor, took aim at Christie in an opinion column published in Politico late Monday night for making "wildly optimistic" revenue projections to prove New Jersey can afford a tax cut. "Being honest about the numbers would undermine the ‘Endless Summer’ tour that Christie has embarked on to demand that New Jersey’s Democratic legislature approve an immediate tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest – regardless of whether the state can afford it," Buono wrote. Here, however, it’s Buono that’s not being forthright. Although Christie initially proposed in January to cut income taxes 10 percent across-the-board over three years, he backed off that proposal before the start of his "Endless Summer" tour. Christie now supports a plan based on a proposal from the Senate Democrats that would provide homeowners with an income tax credit based on their property tax bills. Under the governor’s original plan higher income filers, who pay more in income taxes, would have benefited more than lower income filers. But under the plan Christie now supports -- the plan he signed onto before kicking off his tour of New Jersey to blast Democrats for not approving a tax cut -- that’s not the case since some wealthy individuals would not even qualify for a tax cut. On July 2, Christie conditionally vetoed a bill increasing the state’s top income tax rate on millionaires to enhance property tax relief payments for certain residents. Christie suggested turning that legislation into a tax cut plan based on a proposal the Senate Democrats released earlier in the year. Under Christie's new proposal, homeowners who earn $400,000 or less in taxable income would receive an income tax credit based on their property tax bill. The credit would be phased in over four years, reaching 10 percent of the first $10,000 homeowners pay in property taxes. The maximum credit under the plan would be $1,000. To support the state senator’s claim, Christina Zuk, Buono’s chief of staff, pointed to a July 26 news article that quotes Christie saying: "I'm fighting for the tax cut now because you know, businesspeople are making decisions now about whether they're going to expand next year. The Democrats say we'll get to it. We'll get to the tax cut in December or January. Well that's going to be too late for 2013. Those businesspeople are already going to be deciding where they're going to invest their money, where they're going to spend." But Christie just says tax cut, not income tax cut. And still, he has publicly backed off his original proposal and put forth a plan based on a homeowner’s property tax burden. It’s also worth noting that Christie’s conditional veto also recommended restoring a cut he made during his first year in office to the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, a program which benefits lower income individuals. The conditional veto increased the state credit to 25 percent of the federal credit amount, up from 20 percent. Our ruling Buono said that Christie embarked on an "Endless Summer" tour to "demand that New Jersey’s Democratic legislature approve an immediate tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest." Christie first proposed an across-the-board income tax cut that would have benefited higher income filers more than lower income filers. But Christie has since backed off that plan. Before the governor kicked off his "Endless Summer" tour, he signed on to a version of the Senate Democrats’ plan to give an income tax credit based on individuals’ property tax bills. We rate Buono’s statement False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Barbara Buono	None	None	None	2012-09-02T07:30:00	2012-08-27	['Chris_Christie', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'New_Jersey']
-goop-02743	Ben Affleck Trying To Win Jennifer Lopez Back From Alex Rodriguez, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-win-jennifer-lopez-back-alex-rodriguez/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Ben Affleck NOT Trying To Win Jennifer Lopez Back From Alex Rodriguez, Despite Report	11:24 am, June 11, 2017	None	['Ben_Affleck', 'Alex_Rodriguez']
-pomt-05108	"Obamacare is . . . the largest tax increase in the history of the world."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/28/rush-limbaugh/health-care-law-not-largest-tax-increase-us-histor/	A silver lining for conservatives in the Supreme Court’s health care decision Thursday is that the court allowed the law to stand based on the idea that the individual mandate was a tax. That news has Republicans and conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh bringing out an old -- and incorrect claim -- that the health care law constitutes the largest tax increase ever. Rep. Connie Mack, a Republican from Florida running for the U.S. Senate, called it "the largest tax on the American people in history" in a press release. Florida GOP congressional candidate state Rep. Gary Aubuchon said on Twitter that the "ruling confirms Obamacare is the largest tax increase in U.S. history. U.S. Rep. Jeff Landry, R-Pa., put it this way: "This is the largest tax increase on the poor and the middle class in the history of this country"; and Alabama Republican Party chair Bill Armistead said that "The United States Supreme Court has essentially created the largest tax increase in American history." Then there's Limbaugh, who turned up the rhetoric on radio the way only he can. Forget the United States,"Obamacare is nothing more than the largest tax increase in the history of the world," he declared. This claim is wrong. While the health care law certainly is, on the whole, a tax increase, it’s not the largest in American history -- and as such -- cannot be the largest in the history of the world. (Luckily, there's enough U.S.-based research that we don't have to explore the tax increases of the Roman Empire, adjusted for inflation.) We addressed this more than a year ago. But here’s a refresher. Major tax provisions The federal Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan committee of Congress with a professional staff of economists, attorneys and accountants, provided members a detailed breakdown of the tax impact of the health care law from 2010-2019. • Starting in 2013, Medicare payroll taxes increase 0.9 percentage points for people with incomes over $200,000 ($250,000 for couples filing jointly). Also, people at this income level would pay a new 3.8 percent tax on investment income. The 10-year cost: $210.2 billion. • Starting in 2018, a new 40 percent excise tax on high-cost health plans, so-called "Cadillac plans" (over $10,200 for individuals, $27,500 for families), kicks in. That's expected to bring the government a total of $32 billion in 2018 and 2019. • Starting in 2011, there's a new fee for pharmaceutical manufacturers and importers. That's expected to raise $27 billion over 10 years. • Starting in 2013, a 2.3 percent excise tax on manufacturers and importers of certain medical devices starts. The 10-year total: $20 billion. • Starting in 2014, a new annual fee on health insurance providers begins. Total estimated 10-year revenue: $60.1 billion. • Starting in 2013, the floor on medical expense deductions on itemized income tax returns will be raised from 7.5 percent to 10 percent of income. That's expected to bring in $15.2 billion over the next 10 years. • Starting in 2011, a 10 percent excise tax on indoor tanning services. That's expected to bring in $2.7 billion over the next 10 years. There also is money in the law going the other way. The plan includes government money, in the form of tax credits, to subsidize the cost of health insurance for lower-income people who don't get insurance through their employer. For the record, many Republicans and tax experts argue those shouldn't count as tax cuts. And there is a tax cut for some very small businesses that allows them to write off a portion of the cost of providing insurance to their employees. Combined with various other revenue-generating provisions, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the health law will bring in more than $437.8 billion by 2019. The government's nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the additional revenues coming in to the government to be $525 billion between now and 2019. Does that translate to the biggest tax increase in American history? Comparing tax impacts of legislation First, we need to set some goal posts. There are many ways to define or measure the size of a tax increase, and not all tax increases have been measured the same way over time. The health care tax provisions, for instance, take effect between 2011 and 2018, meaning the full effect of the legislation won't be felt until near the end of the decade. On top of that, it doesn't make sense to compare 2019 dollars to 1985 dollars. You have to adjust for inflation, or express the amount as a total of Gross Domestic Product at the time, which is a way to measure the relative impact of a tax provision at the time it was enacted. To make matters even more complicated, there are tax cuts that are direct results of tax increases, and vice-versa. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA), for example, was passed largely to reverse revenue losses from the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (ERTA). For our comparison, we used a method perfected by Jerry Tempalski, an analyst in the Office of Tax Analysis with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In 2006, Tempalski tried to determine the relative impact of major tax revenue bills from 1940-2006. He used revenue estimates from Treasury and the Joint Committee on Taxation and calculated the impact as a percentage of GDP. For 1940-1967 calculations, he used a single-year snapshot of the revenue impact of the tax legislation. For more recent tax bills, from 1968-2006, Tempalski used a two-year average of the revenue effects. Tempalski wrote: "The comparison of tax bills for the first period should be examined with some caution, because the revenue estimates are from different sources and are not completely consistent. The comparison for the second period can be viewed with more confidence, because the estimates are relatively consistent." As a percent of GDP, here are the top five tax increases from 1940-2006, according to Tempalski: 1. Revenue Act of 1942: 5.04 percent of GDP; 2. Revenue Act of 1941: 2.2 percent of GDP; 3. Current Tax Payment Act of 1943: 1.13 percent of GDP; 4. Revenue and Expenditure Control Act of 1968: 1.09 percent of GDP; 5. Excess Profits Tax of 1950: .97 percent of GDP; And here are the top five tax increases from the "modern" era of 1968-2006: 1. Revenue and Expenditure Control Act of 1968: 1.09 percent of GDP; 2. Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982: .8 percent of GDP; 3(t): Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act of 1980: .5 percent of GDP 3(t): Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993; .5 percent of GDP; 5: Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990; .49 percent of GDP. The 2010 health care law The list obviously does not include the health care law, which passed in 2010, and a spokeswoman for the Department of Treasury says it hasn't been updated. So we calculated our own percent of GDP figure. We used 2019 as our baseline because that's when all of the tax provisions of the law will be in effect. In 2019, the CBO estimates, the government will see increased revenues of $104 billion. We then divided that number into the projected GDP for 2019, which according to the CBO economic forecast is $21.164 trillion. That would mean the tax increase provisions of the health care law would amount to .49 percent of total GDP. Depending on your rounding, that would mean the tax increases resulting from the health care law would be about the size of tax increases proposed and passed in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter, in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush and in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. The health care-related tax increases are smaller than the tax increase signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 and a temporary tax signed into law in 1968 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. And they are significantly smaller than two tax increases passed during World War II and a tax increase passed in 1961. The tax increases in the health care legislation do reverse a trend of federal tax cuts and represent the first significant tax increases since 1993. But they are not the largest in the history of the United States. And -- despite what Limbaugh said -- that means they cannot be the largest ever in the history of world. Limbaugh's inflated rhetoric takes a wrong claim and puts it into the realm of the ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire. UPDATE: Some readers noticed that our initial analysis of Limbaugh’s claim failed to include references to the penalty that people who declined to purchase health insurance would be asked to pay. After all, the Supreme Court declared that penalty a tax. The CBO figure we used for our calculation, a total of $104 billion in revenue generated in 2019, is inclusive of all revenues, including the penalty or tax individuals might pay if they do not purchase health insurance. The figure for that year was estimated to be $14 billion for penalties paid for by employees and individuals. (Page 19 of this report.)	None	Rush Limbaugh	None	None	None	2012-06-28T12:50:59	2012-06-28	['None']
-pomt-10303	Fully inflating tires is "a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/08/barack-obama/obama-inflates-this-tire-claim/	Who would've guessed tire pressure would turn out to be Topic A on the campaign trail? The candidates have been talking about it for days. At a town hall event in Berea, Ohio, Sen. Barack Obama brought up the subject again, knocking Sen. John McCain for mocking him for advocating proper tire inflation. "The Republicans are going around -- this is the kind of thing they do, I don't understand it -- they're going around, they're sending, like, little tire gauges, making fun of this idea, as if this is Barack Obama's energy plan," Obama said in the August 5 appearance. "Now, two points: One, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is. But the other thing is they're making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent." We've decided to check that last sentence, which the McCain campaign and a conservative blog brought to our attention. We found that Obama was correct in a prior claim along these lines, when he suggested that inflating tires properly and getting tune-ups could "save all the oil" we could get from drilling in protected areas offshore. (The McCain campaign and its allies in the conservative blogosphere have attacked that finding from every angle, but we stand by it.) But this new claim is different. This time Obama didn't talk about what tire inflation and tune-ups "could" do. He said "every expert" was in agreement that tire inflation "would absolutely reduce our oil consumption" by 3 to 4 percent. We imagine very few experts would say that. "You can make some back of the envelope calculations to show that number would be impossible to obtain," said Thomas Menzies, a senior program officer at the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies who managed and drafted a study on tires and fuel economy. So let's do that. To support the claim, Obama's campaign referred us to this brochure from the U.S. Department of Energy. On page 31 it says: "Keep tires properly inflated and aligned to improve your gasoline mileage by around 3.3 percent." Similarly, this Department of Energy Web page says: "You can improve your gas mileage by around 3.3 percent by keeping your tires inflated to the proper pressure. Under-inflated tires can lower gas mileage by 0.4 percent for every 1 psi drop in pressure of all four tires." Under-inflation is a severe problem (affecting 80 out of 81 cars according to one survey), but most tires do not suffer from severe under-inflation. This survey by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 26 percent of passenger vehicles had at least one tire under-inflated by 25 percent or more, and the average under-inflation of the four tires for those vehicles (not each tire) was 6.8 pounds per square inch. So if those drivers corrected their tire pressure, their fuel consumption would be 2.7 percent (6.8 x .4) better. That's just the severe under-inflators -- savings would be smaller for the rest of us. So fuel consumption would fall by something less than 2.7 percent if passenger vehicles corrected their tire pressure. Furthermore, those savings alone would not result in a one-to-one reduction in oil consumption, as Obama suggested, since just 70 percent of the oil we consume goes to vehicles. The rest gets used in a vast array of products from petroleum jelly to fertilizer. Also, commercial vehicles have less of a problem with under-inflation, because truckers check their tire pressure religiously to minimize fuel consumption. So they would further drag down the average savings from correcting tire pressure. Obama's prior claim on this subject was safely couched in generalities and possibilities. But this time he veered into certainties and absolutes -- "every expert," "would absolutely" -- put an exact number on fuel savings, and linked it to overall oil consumption in a way that did not stand up to scrutiny. We find his claim to be False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-08-08T00:00:00	2008-08-05	['None']
-goop-01044	Kris Jenner Begging Kourtney Kardashian Take Over Family Empire After Kim, Khloe Scandal	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kourtney-kardashian-kris-jenners-favorite-kim-khloe-scandals/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Kris Jenner NOT Begging Kourtney Kardashian Take Over Family Empire After Kim, Khloe Scandals	1:14 pm, May 7, 2018	None	['Kris_Jenner', 'Kourtney_Kardashian']
-pomt-13873	Says Donald Trump's position is "to roll back all" of the financial regulations passed after the financial crisis.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/05/elizabeth-warren/warren-says-trump-no-fan-post-crisis-wall-street-r/	Sen. Elizabeth Warren did not leave her signature issue behind when she became presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s most pugnacious critic. "Donald Trump has already offered his big wet kiss to Wall Street. He has said, ‘Hey guys, if I get in, I'm going to roll back all of those regulations, because it makes it too hard for banks to cheat people,’ " Warren said in a June 28 interview on The View. Trump never said he wanted to make it easier for banks to cheat people, but he has said he wants to roll back regulations on Wall Street. In the context of the interview, Warren is likely referring to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protect Act, the premier piece of legislation regulating the banking industry after the crash. Warren has been a consistent crusader for stricter regulation of the financial industry. Early in the campaign, Trump distinguished himself from his rivals for the Republican nomination with some tough language directed toward Wall Street. "The hedge fund guys didn't build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky," Trump said in a CBS interview in August. At other points, he extended a similar critique to "Wall Street Guys" in general. Trump said that hedge fund managers "get away with murder," but he’s been unclear about what he’d do to change that. One concrete Trump proposal on Wall Street was changes to the tax code that would change tax provisions benefitting hedge fund managers, but because of separate tax cuts for partnerships, his tax plan actually had the effect of substantially improving their position. On Dodd-Frank, Trump has gone on the record again and again saying that the law is bad news for the economy and the banking industry. He’s called it a "disaster," and a "very negative force." Well before he launched his current presidential run, Trump attacked increased regulation after the financial crisis, which he said prevented loans to all but the very wealthy. And while it's not the same thing as a "big wet kiss to Wall Street," Trump has said he expects bankers to appreciate his position. "I think things have to be done with (Dodd-Frank), and I think Wall Street would like to hear that," Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. The only bit of wiggle room here is that Trump has been inconsistent about how much of Dodd-Frank would be left when he finished with it. He has said he would "get rid of it," "repeal it" or, almost word-for-word from Warren’s statement, "roll that back." He has also said, however, that "there are some aspects you could leave," and that could be "changed greatly" instead of being eliminated. In Trump’s most recent statement about Dodd-Frank, in a mid May interview with Reuters, he said he would release a plan within two weeks that would be "close to a dismantling of Dodd-Frank." A month after his Reuters interview, the plan, which would presumably settle this question, has not been released. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Our ruling Warren said Trump wants to "roll back all of those regulations" on Wall Street banks. While we don’t know what Trump’s plan would look like exactly, he certainly wants to scrap a lot of the law. It might not be right to say "all" of those regulations, but Trump himself has been unclear on that point. We rate this Mostly True.	None	Elizabeth Warren	None	None	None	2016-07-05T11:25:10	2016-06-28	['None']
-goop-01933	Kate Hudson Secretly Married To Danny Fujikawa?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-hudson-married-danny-fujikawa-secretly/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kate Hudson Secretly Married To Danny Fujikawa?	1:42 pm, January 1, 2018	None	['Kate_Hudson']
-snes-02781	The president of Knox Machinery wrote a letter to the president of General Motors, criticizing the latter for seeking a government bailout.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/letter-to-general-motors/	None	Soapbox	None	David Mikkelson	None	Letter to General Motors	16 December 2008	None	['None']
-pomt-11583	"New York consistently ranks as one of the worst voting turnout states in the nation."	true	/new-york/statements/2018/feb/01/andrea-stewart-cousins/new-york-consistently-ranks-low-voter-turnout/	Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the top-ranking Democrat in the New York State Senate, claimed New York state has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. New York state, which has the fourth most registered voters among states, historically does not have high voter turnouts, the Westchester Democrat said. "New York consistently ranks as one of the worst voting turnout states in the nation," Stewart-Cousins said. Democrats in the Senate want Republicans, who control the chamber, to support legislation they believe would increase turnout. More than a dozen bills introduced by Stewart-Cousins and other Democrats would allow automatic voter registration and early voting among other changes. Is voter turnout really as bad in New York state as Stewart-Cousins said? Presidential election years In the November 2016 election, New York state had the eighth-worst voter turnout among states, when 57.2 percent of voting-age citizens went to the polls, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. Before 2016, New York state has ranked in the bottom half of states for voter turnout in all but one election during the last two decades, according to the census figures. The state ranked 29th in voter turnout among states in the 1996 presidential election. Some years have been better than others, but the state’s turnout has mostly declined since then. 2000: New York state ranked 35th in voter turnout at 59 percent. 2004: The state ranked 42nd, but the turnout rate increased that year to 60.2 percent. 2008: Turnout dropped to 58.8 percent. The state ranked 43rd that year. 2012: The state ranked 39th with a turnout rate of 58.7 percent. The state has also ranked poorly in most non-presidential election years, when turnout is generally lower in all states. 1998: New York state ranked 23rd among states, its best ranking in the past two decades with a turnout rate of 48.2 percent. 2002: The ranking went down to 39th with a turnout rate of 43.6 percent. 2006: The state ranked 45th at 42.5 percent. 2010: New York state ranked 37th at 43.6 percent. 2014: Turnout dipped to 34.4 percent. New York state ranked 48th. Except for 2014, the state’s voter turnout rate has not varied much between four-year periods. Rates for other low-turnout states have shifted New York state’s ranking each year. Turnout in Georgia, for example, has increased from about 51 percent in 1996 to 60 percent in 2016. Other data Election data experts also rank New York state near the bottom of states for voter turnout. The United States Election Project, with election numbers dating back to 1980, ranked New York state 14th lowest in voter turnout in 2016. The project uses different methodology than the Census Bureau to calculate turnout, according to Dr. Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who created and manages its database. The Census Bureau tracks turnout rates based on self-reporting from people in each state. McDonald, instead, uses the total population of eligible voters in each state drawn from administrative records. He then compares that population with the number of votes for the highest office on the ballot each year. New York state ranked in the bottom 10 states for voter turnout in all but two elections over the last decade, according to McDonald’s numbers. Our ruling Stewart-Cousins said "New York consistently ranks as one of the worst voting turnout states in the nation." Voter turnout rates reported by the U.S. Census Bureau and McDonald confirm that claim. New York state has ranked near the bottom of states for voter turnout in most elections over the last few decades. We rate her claim True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Andrea Stewart-Cousins	None	None	None	2018-02-01T11:36:29	2018-01-23	['None']
-pomt-04233	Says Fran DeWine’s made-from-scratch dinner rolls are a delicious favorite in a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.	true	/ohio/statements/2012/nov/21/mike-dewine/mike-dewine-touts-his-wifes-recipes-delicious-part/	Even PolitiFact Ohio needs an occasional break from politics. We decided that taking one on Thanksgiving would give all of us something to be thankful for. But fact-checking doesn't take a holiday. When we received a Thanksgiving news release from Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, our attention was immediately seized. In addition to holiday greetings, the release included three recipes DeWine credited to his wife, Fran. He said the recipes -- for crescent rolls, broccoli salad and "Fran's carrot cake with lemon cream cheese icing" -- are family favorites and part of a delicious and traditional Thanksgiving meal. Hoping it didn't look too obviously like we were pitching for samples, PolitiFact Ohio asked the attorney general how he backs up his claim of deliciousness. "I think I would start with the rolls," he told us. "Fran's been making these rolls for, well, we've been married for 45 years, and she's been making the rolls for probably 40. She took it from a recipe in one of her first cookbooks, and she modified it mainly by adding honey." She also adds cracked wheat flour from the family farm because "it embodies the spirit of the harvest," he said. "The strongest evidence (of deliciousness) I would give," he continued, "is if you would be there on Thanksgiving, or any other meal, to watch our grandkids wait for the turkey to come out of the oven. "Fran takes the turkey out and puts the rolls in. Before they can actually get served, kids are taking rolls off the pan, burning their fingers to get them. I've seen them put as many as five on a plate." The DeWines have 18 grandchildren, with a 19th on the way next month. They host 75 people for Thanksgiving. To feed them all, Mrs. DeWine makes 12 dozen rolls. "They're to die for," her husband said. "The best evidence is to watch people eat them. Even people who say they don't eat rolls like them. At any family gathering, really, people expect Fran to have them." DeWine sometimes spreads them with red raspberry jam from his son, an organic farmer. To be really decadent, he said, he adds both jam and butter. We questioned whether that wouldn't be so good it's illegal. Exercising his prosecutorial discretion as the state's chief law enforcement officer, he assured us we would be on safe legal ground. He said the broccoli salad was a relatively new addition to the holiday menu that was added by a daughter-in-law. "I'm not a great fan of broccoli per se, but in that combination it's very, very tasty," he said. "It's a healthy, interesting mixture." We asked him about the cake. At PolitiFact Ohio, we are well known as carrot cake fiends. "The carrot cake is also a favorite of mine," he said. "The frosting is very similar to a frosting my mother used to make on chocolate cake, a cream cheese with lemon frosting. When it comes out of the oven …" PolitiFact Ohio didn’t press him to finish the description. We had heard enough to begin pondering how we could slip in for dinner. A family recipe in use four decades certainly is a tradition. And DeWine’s descriptions left us craving his wife’s cooking. We rate his claim of deliciousness as True. We’re sharing the recipe for Fran DeWine’s Favorite Rolls above. They would certainly enhance any holiday leftovers. You can find the others in his news release. Happy Thanksgiving.	None	Mike DeWine	None	None	None	2012-11-21T12:30:00	2012-11-20	['None']
-tron-03585	Edward C. Smith: In Defense of Robert E. Lee Commentary	authorship confirmed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/edward-c-smith-defense-robert-e-lee/	None	war	None	None	['abraham lincoln', 'civil war', 'confederacy', 'robert e. lee']	Edward C. Smith: In Defense of Robert E. Lee Commentary	Aug 24, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-12954	"Jackie Evancho’s album sales have skyrocketed after announcing her inauguration performance."	true	/pennsylvania/statements/2017/jan/05/donald-trump/did-word-trumps-inauguration-concert-cause-jackie-/	Donald Trump hasn’t had an easy time getting artists to perform at his inauguration. Many, reportedly including Elton John and Bruno Mars, said they wouldn’t perform. So far the only artists slated for the inauguration on Jan. 20 are the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Rockettes and Pittsburgh-area native Jackie Evancho, who rose to fame on "America’s Got Talent." And Trump believes Evancho’s decision to perform has been great for her career. On Twitter Wednesday, he claimed Evancho’s "album sales have skyrocketed after announcing her inauguration performance." Not long after, the New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff tweeted a screenshot displaying Evancho’s most recent album falling from 93 to 134 on the Billboard top 200 albums list in the last week. That didn’t look so good for the president-elect. So is Trump’s Twitter boast correct? Did Evancho, who is 16, see a steep rise in sales since it was announced she’d be a performer at the Trump inauguration? It was Dec. 14 when Evancho said she’d be performing. She had released a new album in late October, "Someday at Christmas." Numbers from BuzzAngle Music, a music data-tracking company, show digital and physical sales of all her albums hovering between 2,500 and about 3,000 in late October to the end of November (Evancho has three older full-length albums, including another Christmas album). Sales rose to about 4,600 the first week after Thanksgiving. For the week beginning Dec. 2, they were 5,800. (BuzzAngle tracks sales from a Friday to Thursday every week.) The inaugural announcement happened in the middle of the next week. For the Dec. 9 to Dec. 15 sales period, her sales jumped to about 7,176. The next week, from Dec. 16 to Dec. 22, they went up to 14,173. That’s an increase of 98 percent. The sales bump ended there. The week of Dec. 23 to Dec. 29, Evancho’s sales fell down to 9,479. As of Wednesday, her sales for this week were at 1,442. During the same timeframe, Evancho’s streaming rates went up at a similar rate. The first full week after the Trump announcement, beginning Dec. 16, Evancho’s songs were streamed about 754,000 times. The previous week they had been streamed about 410,000 times. Our Ruling Donald Trump tweeted that 16-year-old Jackie Evancho’s "album sales have skyrocketed after announcing her inauguration performance." He’s right. Evancho’s album sales nearly doubled in the first full week after she was announced as an inauguration performer compared to the previous week. (She was also streamed much more often.) Though sales for the week of Dec. 23 to Dec. 29 went down from about 14,000 to 9,000, that number is still about 50 percent higher than from the week of Dec. 2 to Dec. 9. That is the last full week BuzzAngle Music has data for. Besides, rockets typically come down. We rule the claim True.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-01-05T12:40:34	2017-01-04	['None']
-pomt-10785	"With the resources it takes to execute just over three months of the Iraq war, we could fully fund the expansion of health care for needy children that Bush vetoed."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/15/chris-dodd/dodd-off-by-5-billion-on-guns-and-butter/	Sen. Christopher Dodd says that the cost of the Iraq war for three months equals the cost the expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program that President Bush vetoed on Oct. 3, 2007. The Congressional Research Service reported in July 2007 that the cost of the war in Iraq for the first half of the budget year 2007 is estimated to be about $10 billion a month. Three months of the war would cost $30 billion. The expansion if SCHIP is estimated to cost $35 billion over five years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So, SCHIP costs $5 billion more than three months of the war. To most of us, $5 billion is big bucks. In Washington, it's not.	None	Chris Dodd	None	None	None	2007-10-15T00:00:00	2007-10-03	['Iraq', 'George_W._Bush']
-pomt-00510	As governor, Maggie Hassan first proposed a $1 billion spending increase.	half-true	/new-hampshire/statements/2015/jun/24/impact-america/ad-says-nh-governor-hassan-proposed-1-billion-spen/	As budget season threatens to go into overtime and Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan ponders her political future, ads are already attacking her management of the state budget. One spot in particular, funded by the "pro-growth" group Impact America Action, is called "Hassan Spending Problem" and cites a particularly noteworthy number. "Maggie Hassan has a spending problem," the spot’s narrator says, in a web ad viewed more than 27,000 times. "As governor, Hassan first proposed a $1 billion spending increase." The number also appears in an ad titled "The Hassan Plan," as well as on the group’s website. But is the claim true? Did Hassan actually propose such an increase with her first budget, for 2014-2015? We decided to check it out. Hassan came into office inheriting a $10.1 billion total budget approved by a Republican-controlled legislature. Her first budget proposal weighed in at $11.1 billion -- a roughly 10 percent increase -- and it restored many cuts, including a halving of aid to the university system. Here’s how that $1 billion increase broke down, according to Hassan’s executive summary. -- $184 million more from the general fund -- $493 million more from the federal government -- $348 million more from "other funds," which includes the education trust fund; fees and assessments to fund the banking and insurance departments and the Public Utilities Commission; county and local funding; and transfers among state agencies: It’s worth noting that nearly half of that $1 billion increase comes from federal funds -- not New Hampshire state taxes. And that $493 million was meant mostly for the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. When politicians debate the budget, though, they generally talk about general fund spending, because that’s the pot of money most directly controlled by the state. Looking at that fund alone, Hassan’s budget proposed an increase of about $184 million. That’s up "7.1 percent, from more than $2.6 billion to nearly $2.8 billion," according to Concord Monitor reporting. The ad cherry-picked the most all-encompassing number -- total spending, including federal grants. (It also was careful enough not to claim claim that Hassan proposed hiking taxes by $1 billion or raising spending $1 billion more from the general fund. Both claims would have been entirely untrue.) Impact America Action is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group that isn’t required to report its donors publicly, according to the Sunlight Foundation. But the ad does cite a source for its $1 billion claim. That would be an article from the New Hampshire Union-Leader, dated Feb. 14, 2013. But even that article clarified that Hassan’s total budget request included "federal money and other state revenue such as highway funds and court fines." It’s also worth noting, the two-year budget cycle closes on June 30, and the state is expected to ultimately spend about $10.5 billion during the period the ad cites. New Hampshire Democrats panned the ads, saying the claims had already been debunked by PolitiFact. It’s true when Hassan was running for election in 2012 we checked claims about Hassan’s votes to increase taxes and budget increases when she was Senate Majority Leader. But this recent claim was a new one to us. Our ruling Multiple ads from Impact America Action state that "As governor, Hassan first proposed a $1 billion spending increase." The reality is more complicated. There was a spending increase of $1 billion in her proposal, but nearly half of that amount came from the federal government, and much of the rest came from other sources of revenue. Only about $184 million -- one fifth of the total increased spending -- came from the general fund. We rate the claim Half True	None	Impact America Action	None	None	None	2015-06-24T20:16:40	2015-06-08	['None']
-chct-00352	FACT CHECK: Did Germany Vote Hitler Into Power?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/08/17/fact-check-did-germany-elect-hitler-as-chancellor/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	4:54 PM 08/17/2017	None	['None']
-pose-00439	"We will leverage private sector funding to bring these cars directly to American consumers. We'll give consumers a $7,000 tax credit to buy these vehicles."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/459/enact-tax-credit-for-consumers-for-hybrid-cars/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Enact tax credit for consumers for plug-in hybrid cars	2010-01-07T13:26:59	None	['United_States']
-pomt-07811	For thousands of public employees, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill would "take away any say they have in the workplace, and eliminate their union."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/17/afl-cio/wisconsin-afl-cio-says-gov-scott-walkers-budget-re/	Labor experts agree that Gov. Scott Walker’s move to curtail collective bargaining rights for public employees is a dramatic departure from Wisconsin’s labor-friendly past. The Wisconsin State AFL-CIO has launched TV and radio spots condemning the plan while the Wisconsin Club for Growth is airing a TV ad supporting the changes. We’ll look at the Club for Growth ad in a separate item. The TV ad from the AFL-CIO centers on this message, delivered by a narrator: "There’s now a move under way in Madison to take away the rights of thousands of teachers, nurses and other trusted public employees. A bill to take away any say they have in the workplace, and eliminate their union." The visual backdrop includes lines from news articles about Walker’s plan. Among the snippets: A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story that reads Walker’s plan would eliminate "any say on benefits and work rules" and an Associated Press story that reads "all collective bargaining rights would be removed for state and local public employees." Is the ad correct that the plan would "eliminate" union representation for thousands and wipe out "any say" they have through collective bargaining. When asked to back up the claims, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Stephanie Bloomingdale cited a Wheeler Report analysis that summarizes the budget-repair bill. Let’s take a deeper look at claim. Most of the debate has focused on what bargaining rights will be curtailed and the overall effect of the plan. Digging deeper, the bill does eliminate all bargaining rights -- wages, benefits, working conditions -- for specific categories of public employees. It would roll back the rights to organize unions and bargain for benefits for 30,000 University of Wisconsin System faculty and academic staff. Those rights were approved by Democrats in the 2009-'11 budget. Not all of the 30,000 have joined a union, though. So far, under those rights, faculty at two universities, UW-Superior and UW-Eau Claire, have formed unions. The measure would also repeal collective bargaining rights for some 5,000 home health care workers and for 2,800 employees of University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics, including nurses. It would also eliminate current collective bargaining rights of licensed child care providers. All of that is also discussed in summaries of the bill and a letter from Walker to state employees. As for the other public employees -- a much larger group that includes schoolteachers, local government workers and about half of 76,000 state employees -- the bill would allow collective bargaining only on a base pay rate (not overtime or special pay issues), and on raises only within the rate of inflation. That means no bargaining on fringe benefits, working conditions, outsourcing, safety and other issues. So, the TV ad is correct on many of its main points. But it also overreaches. For instance, it suggests that the outright elimination of bargaining rights would cover all public employees. But they would not be completely eliminated for teachers outside of higher education, one group cited. Or for all "other trusted public employees." Indeed, the ad does not mention that there would be no change for firefighters, police and state trooper unions -- a fact that has drawn its own criticism. (Firefighters are part of AFL-CIO; police are not.) That incomplete information is underlined when the ad flashes a portion of a Feb. 10, 2011, Associated Press story, highlighting the words: "All collective bargaining rights would be removed for state and local public employees." That’s a selectively edited version of the AP story, which added a significant phrase to that line: "except when it comes to wages." The effect is to make Walker’s sweeping plan look even bolder. Let’s look at the rest of the message as presented in the ad. Would workers "take away any say" in the workplace, as the ad claims? Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie said public employees would continue to have a say on working conditions -- not through unions, but through civil service laws. He noted those laws contain ways to file workplace grievances, and ensure employees are hired based on merit and experience, and are fired only for just cause. But civil service systems are not in place at all Wisconsin municipalities and leave a lot of workers uncovered, according to Andrew Phillips, general counsel for the Wisconsin Counties Association. For instance, about one-third of counties have no civil service system, and of the two-thirds that do, many only apply to deputy sheriffs, he said. The Legislature was considering changes to address this. What about the question of whether the unions would be eliminated? Clearly, some workers would have the right to organize directly eliminated, while many others would not. Bloomingdale, the AFL-CIO official, acknowledges that the bill before the Legislature does not directly eliminate all subjects of collective bargaining -- but nearly all of them. She argues the bill’s provisions overall discredit the unions’ role and therefore endanger them. One example she cites: Raises for unionized workers would be capped at inflation, but pay for nonunion employees is not. That disparity would hurt union membership, Bloomingdale said. Other aspects of the bill: As Walker noted in his letter, employers would be prohibited from collecting union dues on behalf of the unions, members of collective bargaining units will not be required to pay dues, and there would have to be a vote every year on the status of the union. We asked experts including academics and lawyers on both sides of labor-management talks about the assertion that -- on a practical basis -- the plan would mean the death of public employee unions. James Scott, a management-side attorney who represents Milwaukee County, said the changes are dramatic, but not unprecedented. He said nine states totally prohibit collective bargaining for public employees, and 10 others restrict it to police/fire, or teachers or state employees. His view of how life would be under the proposal: "There isn’t much utility in belonging to a public sector labor union other than perhaps the social side of it," Scott said. He said calling it a death knell for unions might be "a little bit" too strong, but not much. Timothy Hawks, whose law firm represents municipal and state employees, said if the bill goes through as drafted "you have busted every (public employee) union in the state." A state official with a stake in both sides of labor disputes, Peter Davis, general counsel at the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, said it was a "fair prediction" public sector workers would walk away from paying dues. Cheryl Maranto, chairman of the management department at Marquette University’s College of Business Administration, said the bill would have the effect of "totally eliminating public sector bargaining in the state" by rendering the unions "irrelevant and powerless." In the historical view, she said Walker’s Democratic predecessor, Jim Doyle, overreached with pro-union moves and now Walker is going too far in the opposite direction. Let’s get to the bottom line. The AFL-CIO ad claims "thousands" of workers, including teachers, would lose all say in the workplace and see their union eliminated under Walker’s budget-repair bill. The measure would eliminate bargaining rights for some groups of public employees, including nurses and teachers in higher education. That total tallies out to "thousands," but the ad presents the question as if all public employees would lose all bargaining rights. It even selectively shortens a news account to underline this point. That is an overreach, at least as an immediate consequence of the bill. As for the future, three of our four experts agreed with the union contention that it could be the end result in the future. The fourth felt it was only a small stretch. The PolitiFact definition for Half True is: The statement is accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. That’s what this ad does. And that’s the ruling: Half True.	None	AFL-CIO	None	None	None	2011-02-17T14:24:58	2011-02-17	['Wisconsin']
-snes-03678	Dogs and wolves are genetically 99.9% identical.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dogs-99-percent-wolf/	None	Critter Country	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Are Dogs Really 99.9% Wolf?	28 October 2016	None	['None']
-goop-01039	Tristan Thompson Giving Khloe Kardashian “List Of Demands”?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/tristan-thompson-khloe-kardashian-demands-rules-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Tristan Thompson Giving Khloe Kardashian “List Of Demands”?	3:00 am, May 8, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-01824	Monsanto Creates Genetically Modified Strain of Marijuana	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/monsanto-creates-genetically-modified-strain-of-marijuana/	None	health-medical	None	None	None	Monsanto Creates Genetically Modified Strain of Marijuana	May 7, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06328	"By 2015, we will be sending so much interest" to China that "we will be paying for the entire People's Liberation Army."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/nov/10/michele-bachmann/michele-bachmann-says-us-will-soon-send-enough-int/	During the Nov. 9, 2011, Republican presidential debate in Michigan, Rep. Michele Bachmann took aim at the United States’ dependence on borrowing from China with the use of a striking statistic. "By 2015, we will be sending so much interest money over, we will be paying for the entire People's Liberation Army of China, the No. 1 employer of the world," she said. We wondered whether the part about interest payments and the People’s Liberation Army was accurate. (We have seen conflicting information about whether the PLA is the world’s largest employer, so we’re not going to rate that part of her statement.) First, some background. The PLA is the primary military entity within China and includes the army, navy, and air force, as well as the nation’s nuclear missile assets. It has 2.3 million people on active or reserve status. Officially, the Chinese defense budget is $91.5 billion for 2011. But many experts believe the actual figure is significantly higher. In an annual report to Congress, the Pentagon said that "estimating actual PLA military expenditures is a difficult process due to the lack of accounting transparency and China’s still incomplete transition from a command economy. Moreover, China’s published military budget does not include major categories of expenditure." So the Pentagon estimated that China’s total military-related spending for 2009 was actually "over $150 billion." And what about U.S. interest payments to China? As it happened, PolitiFact Virginia looked at that question earlier this year, so we’ll use their methodology here.. The U.S. has $10.26 trillion in publicly held debt -- that is, the sum of all federal securities held by institutions and individuals outside the U.S. government, including China and other foreign nations. China buys U.S. Treasury bonds in public auctions, the same way other nations and investment companies purchase U.S. debt. According to the Treasury Department, China, along with Chinese companies and investment groups, held about $1.14 trillion in U.S. debt in August 2011, or roughly 11 percent of all public debt, making China the biggest holder of U.S. debt of any foreign country. Because American debt has long been considered one of the safest investments in the world, the government can borrow money at very low cost, paying an average of less than 2 percent annual interest on its debt during the past decade. In October 2011, the U.S. had an average interest rate of 2.859 percent. In fiscal 2011, the federal government is expected to spend $206 billion in interest payments for public debt, according to the Office of Management and Budget. So if China holds about 11 percent of the U.S. public debt, then all other things equal, China would have received $22.7 billion that year. That’s well below even the official, $91.5 billion cost of the PLA, much less the Pentagon’s estimate of $150 billion. There are possible developments that could change this. Interest rates could go up; China could take on a bigger U.S. debt load; the mix of debt vehicles held by China could shift; or PLA spending could plummet. But the gap still seems to us to be too wide to bridge. Bachmann did say "by 2015," not currently, but the trendline doesn’t suggest U.S. interest payments will explode by that much in just four years. Our ruling Bachmann said that "by 2015, we will be sending so much interest" to China that "we will be paying for the entire People's Liberation Army." Today, we only pay about a quarter (if you use official statistics) or 15 percent (if you use the Pentagon’s estimate), and the likelihood that those percentages will increase dramatically within four years is almost nil. So we rate Bachmann’s comment False.	None	Michele Bachmann	None	None	None	2011-11-10T16:57:01	2011-11-09	['China']
-pomt-10770	"The founders advised non-interventionism."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/22/ron-paul/founders-were-wary-of-european-alliances/	Ron Paul deplored the situation in Iraq during a recent debate, and invoked the founders of the United States as advising non-intervention in foreign affairs. That's arguably true. The sentiment is best encapsulated in George Washington's farewell address of 1796. "The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave," Washington wrote. "It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." Though many of the founding fathers advised avoiding foreign entanglements, in most cases they were thinking of the circumstances of their own day, said Mary Jenkins, a program specialist with the Independence National Historical Park. After the Revolutionary War, many of the founders were worried about the nation's resources, both financial and military, and did not want the young nation to become embroiled in the French Revolution or other European issues. "Certainly for that time period, that was their advice," she said. Historians over the years have debated whether the founders' advice should be extrapolated as appropriate for circumstances more than two hundred years later. That debate continues today. Interestingly, another piece of advice Washington had in his farewell address was to avoid party affiliations, especially parties based on regional distinctions. (Red states, blue states, anyone?)	None	Ron Paul	None	None	None	2007-10-22T00:00:00	2007-10-21	['None']
-pomt-13511	Tom Reed "has actually voted for every single trade deal that has ever come before him in any form."	true	/new-york/statements/2016/sep/02/john-plumb/reed-has-voted-trade-deals-opposes-tpp/	U.S. Rep. Tom Reed has come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade accord with 11 Pacific Rim nations, but a Democrat trying to unseat him has made a point of reminding voters about his votes on other trade deals. "He has actually voted for every single trade deal that has ever come before him in any form," John Plumb said in an interview on Capital Tonight. Plumb, like others, believes some free trade agreements have hurt the region economically. Reed, R-Corning, first took office in 2011, and he’s taken conservative positions in a Congress where Republicans hold the majority. Plumb, who most recently served as a military aide in the Obama administration, moved back to the Jamestown area in May to run against Reed in the Southern Tier’s sprawling 23rd Congressional District. While Reed has come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that trade deal has yet to come up for a vote in Congress. But others have, so we checked his record to see if he voted for every single trade deal that has come before him so far. Voting on trade deals Since Reed took office, the United States has entered into three trade agreements. The agreements - with Panama, Colombia and South Korea - took effect in 2012. Each reduced trade barriers between the United States and those countries. Reed voted in favor of all three when they came to the floor of the House of Representatives for roll call votes. Reed also voted in 2015 to implement what’s known as Trade Promotion Authority. It has been used for decades to allow the sitting president to negotiate major trade deals with consultation from Congress. In this case, Congress gave President Obama authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The legislation itself is not a trade deal but is seen as a precursor to one. The Trans-Pacific Partnership would eliminate tariffs on goods and services, remove non-tariff barriers and set rules for trade and business investment among the United States and other countries in the proposed accord, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam. New York’s congressional delegation was mixed on the TPA bill because some saw it as a procedural pre-approval for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Reed voted for the legislation, but he has said he does not support the negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership. "Tom Reed opposes TPP. He has done so since the text was made available by the Obama administration," said Amy Hasenberg, a spokeswoman for his campaign. "Like every trade deal that has come before Tom, he evaluated it on its merits. For Western New York, TPP didn't have any merits." Voting for free trade Other votes in Congress impact free trade, too. The Cato Institute has compiled votes in Congress on legislation supporting or limiting free trade. One measure, for example, resurrected the Export-Import Bank. Reed voted in favor of resurrecting the Export-Import Bank in 2015 after its authority lapsed for five months.The bank offers credit to a small percentage of foreign buyers who may not be able to afford interest rates available on the free market. The bank subsidizes financing to those buyers by offering lower rates. The institute says the subsidies help some American companies at the expense of domestic customers, foreign suppliers, and other exporters. The bank promotes trade for some products made in the United States over others. The institute says this infringes on free trade. "It’s paying them to do business with American companies," said Bill Watson, a trade policy analyst from the Cato Institute. "The companies get a lower interest rate than they would in the free market. "It does that by putting U.S. taxpayers on the line by guaranteeing financing," he added Simon Johnson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agrees, but he said that while export subsidies may reduce free trade, they typically increase trade overall. Our ruling In an interview, Plumb said Reed "has actually voted for every single trade deal that has ever come before him in any form." Congress has voted on three trade agreements with other nations since Reed took office in 2011, and a look at the roll calls confirmed he voted for each one. Reed did vote to reauthorize the Export-Import bank. But Plumb got it right when he said the congressman voted for the trade agreements. We rate this claim as True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/ceb78aa0-2afe-4fbe-9a99-710a714a1232	None	John Plumb	None	None	None	2016-09-02T15:33:40	2016-08-29	['None']
-pomt-03343	The oceans "have become 30 percent more acidic."	mostly true	/rhode-island/statements/2013/jul/21/sheldon-whitehouse/us-sen-sheldon-whitehouse-says-oceans-are-30-perce/	Most people have heard about what will happen if humans keep pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air as we burn more fossil fuels, including warmer temperatures, melting polar caps, rising sea levels, stronger storms and big changes in the types of plants and animals that can survive and thrive in particular regions of the world. "But wait," as an evil TV pitchman might gleefully declare, "there's more." On June 12, 2013, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, took to floor of the Senate for one of his regular speeches about the impact of pollution on Earth's climate. This time he focused on a lesser-publicized problem -- the oceans are becoming more acidic. "Our oceans face unprecedented challenges from climate change and carbon pollution," he said. "Oceans have absorbed more than 550 billion tons of our carbon pollution. As a result, they have become 30 percent more acidic. That is a measurement. That is not a theory." Thirty percent more acidic? Our first question was: "Is it true?" Our second was: "If so, what does that mean?" When most people think of measuring acidity, they think of pH, the scale that runs from 0 to 14. (Think back to your school days and the little strips of paper that changed color depending on whether a substance was an acid or a base.) "So," you might ask, "has the pH of the ocean shifted a few points?" Not at all. The pH scale is not a straight-line measure like a yardstick. It's a logarithmic scale, where a one point drop would make a substance 10 times more acidic. (What you're really measuring is the number of hydrogen ions, which determine how acidic something is.) Whitehouse's office directed us to several sources -- and we found our own -- reporting that since the mid-18th century, when air pollution became more prevalent, the pH of surface seawater has gone from about 8.2 to about 8.1. (That's a rise in acidity, but sea water would have to drop below 7.0 before it could be officially classified as an acid.) Lowering the pH by a tenth of a point translates to a 26-percent rise in hydrogen ion concentration, but some of those science sources say the increase is actually closer to 30 percent. The pH scale has been around only since 1909. How do we know what the pH was like in the 1800s or earlier? The oceanographers we consulted told us basic chemistry provides the answer. Seawater absorbs air, including carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide interacts with the water to make the ocean more acidic. Researchers have good measurements directly comparing carbon dioxide and pH dating to 1989. They show that surface ocean acidity has risen as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen, just as expected. To go further back in time, scientists have measured the carbon dioxide concentrations in tiny bubbles of air trapped in ice found in places such as Greenland and Antarctica. Those ice cores show that, until the 1850s, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere had not risen above 280 parts per million for most of the last million years or so. But in the past century and a half, they’ve been rising steadily, causing an increase in ocean acidity. Today, those carbon dioxide levels have occasionally passed 400 parts per million. "It's been mostly in the last 100 years," said Steve D'Hondt, an oceanography professor at the University of Rhode Island. One other point. The acidity of the entire ocean hasn't changed by the amount Whitehouse citied. The chemical composition of deeper layers shifts much more gradually. "It's been a long time since the deep ocean touched the atmosphere," said Andrew Dickson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California-San Diego. "So it's not true of the ocean as a whole. It's only true of the surface layer." That leads us to our second question: what does it mean? Because the effects of acidification are currently restricted to the upper 600-1,600 feet of the ocean, where most of the life is found, there's serious concern that small changes in pH will have a big -- and not very healthy -- effect on many ocean species, although some may be unaffected. Earth's oceans have been much more acidic in the past -- 110 million years ago the oceans were 400 percent (five times) more acidic. But most of those changes developed over millions of years, giving organisms time to evolve and adapt to the shift. The current rise in acidity is rapid. Said University of Rhode Island oceanographer Arthur Spivack, "We already have a measurable change in ocean pH and we're going into a period where there will be a substantial change." Our ruling U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said the oceans "have become 30 percent more acidic." He is correct if you look at the increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions since the 1850s in the upper layers of the ocean, where most sea life thrives. We also note that he's describing the change using a measure that heightens the drama for the casual listener. But regardless of how it is characterized, that change is cause for concern if it harms ocean creatures sensitive to changes in pH. On the other hand, the deeper ocean has not seen a 30-percent increase. Because his statement is accurate but needs clarification and additional information, we rate it Mostly True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Sheldon Whitehouse	None	None	None	2013-07-21T00:01:00	2013-06-12	['None']
-pose-00014	"Strengthen Small Business Administration programs that provide capital to minority-owned businesses, support outreach programs that help minority business owners apply for loans, and work to encourage the growth and capacity of minority firms."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/16/increase-minority-access-to-capital/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Increase minority access to capital	2010-01-07T13:26:45	None	['None']
-afck-00308	“Under the stewardship of President Zuma, South Africa has one of the largest renewable energy programmes ranked among the top 10 in the world.”	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/has-president-jacob-zumas-government-done-a-good-job/	None	None	None	None	None	Has President Jacob Zuma’s government done ‘a good job’?	2015-03-23 07:37	None	['South_Africa']
-goop-01745	Caitlyn Jenner Giving Kylie Jenner “$50K Push Present” To Get Plastic Surger	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-jenner-kylie-push-present-plastic-surgery-mommy-makeover/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Caitlyn Jenner NOT Giving Kylie Jenner “$50K Push Present” To Get Plastic Surgery	2:07 pm, January 24, 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00165	Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb Mercury Warning	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/mercury-fluorescent-lights.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb Mercury Warning	May 2007	None	['None']
-pomt-06962	"Eighty percent of the American people support an approach (to federal budget problems) that includes revenues and includes cuts."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jul/15/barack-obama/barack-obama-said-80-percent-americans-favor-both-/	As President Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress continued their high-stakes stand-off over raising the debt ceiling and other budget issues, Obama held a press conference to press his case that he's a reasonable guy. One of the main points of contention is whether an agreement should include tax increases of any kind, such as closing tax loopholes or tax increases on the wealthy. Republicans oppose raising taxes. During a press conference on July 15, 2011, Obama was asked if the negotiations would be going better if he had started making his case to the public months ago, pushing a proposal that included tax increases and spending cuts. Obama rejected the premise. "You have 80 percent of the American people who support a balanced approach. Eighty percent of the American people support an approach that includes revenues and includes cuts. So the notion that somehow the American people aren't sold is not the problem," he said. "The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically into various positions because they boxed themselves in with previous statements." We won't weigh in on Obama's diagnosis of being dug in, but we were interested in the poll numbers on whether the public supports a balanced approach or not. The most recent poll we found largely supported Obama's statement. A Gallup poll conducted July 7-10, 2011 posed the question this way: "As you may know, Congress can reduce the federal budget deficit by cutting spending, raising taxes, or a combination of the two. Ideally, how would you prefer to see Congress attempt to reduce the federal budget deficit: only with spending cuts, mostly with spending cuts, equally with spending cuts and tax increases, mostly with tax increases, or only with tax increases?" The answer "only spending cuts" got 20 percent. The other answers were "mostly spending cuts," 30 percent; "equal spending cuts and tax increases," 32 percent; "mostly tax increases," 7 percent; "only tax increases," 4 percent; unsure/other, 6 percent. We'll note that Obama counted in his favor people who favored only tax increases or who weren't sure, so he wasn't completely accurate. If you deduct those groups, only 70 percent support the balanced approach. But the poll did support his overall point. Other polls also showed support for Obama's statement, but not quite at an 80-percent level. A poll from Quinnipiac University conducted July 5-11, 2011, asked: "Do you think any agreement to raise the national debt ceiling should include only spending cuts, or should it also include an increase in taxes for the wealthy and corporations?" In this case, 67 percent favored including tax increases, while 25 percent favored spending cuts only. Another 8 percent were unsure. In June, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that most people, 46 percent, favored a combination of cuts and tax increases, compared with 26 percent who said cuts alone and 13 percent who said raise taxes. An ABC/Washington Post poll from April found the number was higher, at 59 percent. We reviewed polls and consulted experts a few weeks ago for a fact-check on whether people support tax increases or not. Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who studies polls on taxation, told us polls usually show support for balanced approaches, particularly if people don't have to pay the higher taxes themselves. "Generally, combinations of tax hikes and spending cuts are most popular. It seems fair to most people. Spending cuts are favored in the abstract. Tax hikes are favored as long as they don't affect me. Generally, people don't think anybody should have to pay more than a quarter of their income in total taxes," she said. Finally, a few other cautions on poll numbers. Pollsters have long noted that when you ask questions with different wording, you get different results. All the polls we looked at phrased the question slightly differently. A few recent polls also suggested that people find the whole debt ceiling debate confusing, or they aren't following it very closely. A Pew Research Center/Washington Post poll from May asked people how well they felt they understood what would happen if the government does not raise the federal debt limit; 47 percent said "not too well" or "not at all well." And the July Gallup poll found that 42 percent of respondents were following the issue "not too closely" or "not at all." Getting back to Obama's statement, he said, "You have 80 percent of the American people who support a balanced approach. Eighty percent of the American people support an approach that includes revenues and includes cuts." Even the best poll doesn't show support quite that high -- he would more accurately have accounted for the small numbers that support only tax increases or were unsure, putting the number at 70 percent. But his overall point is correct that polls show most Americans support a balanced approach when given a choice between cutting spending or raising taxes. So we rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2011-07-15T16:55:10	2011-07-15	['United_States']
-pomt-03279	Under Obamacare, people who "have a doctor they’ve been seeing for the last 15 or 20 years, they won’t be able to keep going to that doctor."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2013/aug/05/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-patients-wont-keep-doctors-obamac/	Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., calls Obamacare a "broken and failed experiment." In an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity on July 31, Rubio railed against the health care law, saying it would hurt regular folks. "Just think about the people that have health insurance now, and they’re happy with it. They’re going to lose that health insurance. They have a doctor they’ve been seeing for the last 15 or 20 years, they won’t be able to keep going to that doctor," he said. Rubio’s claim that insured patients will have to stop seeing their long-time doctors caught our attention, so we decided to check it out. We asked a Rubio spokesman for an explanation and did not get a response. Even without Obamacare patients sometimes have to switch doctors If we set aside the health care law, there are already ways that people can end up losing access to their doctor now. Companies can switch health care plans, and some employees’ doctors may not be in the new network. Employees can lose their job -- or switch jobs -- and end up with a different plan that doesn’t include the same doctor. Switching jobs -- and therefore, potentially health insurance -- can happen often. In 2012, the median job tenure was 5.4 years, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. "It's hard to imagine many people on the same health plan for 15-20 years given natural job turnover," said Paul Fronstin, senior research associate at Employee Benefit Research Institute. The health care law leaves in place the current health insurance system, so switching plans and possibly doctors will still happen. The law also puts more requirements on insurance companies, so that they have to offer more comprehensive coverage. For people who are uninsured or have to buy insurance on their own, the law creates state-by-state health insurance exchanges where people can buy their own insurance. These new options mean people may end up switching health plans, and that could mean switching doctors. But experts on the health care law told us it’s difficult to predict how many will fall into that category. There are many factors at play, including the particular insurance plan, geography and if the patient shops for a plan on the exchange. "Most people are not going to be affected, at least in the short term," said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. "Will it be huge numbers? Probably not. Will some people find they can’t keep their current doctor? Yes." If Rubio wants to protect people from involuntary changes in their doctors, "the best remedy is to abandon the current employer-based insurance system and to provide insurance on some other basis -- e.g., a single-insurer system of the kind they have in Canada," said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution. Now let’s examine the possibilities as it relates to Obamacare: • Employers that offer health insurance: It’s possible that employers will switch their health care plans and that a new plan won’t include some employees’ current doctors in network. But that was already the case before Obamacare. "If the ACA results in more employers switching plans, it is possible that more people will be in a situation where their new plan isn't in the network, but I've seen nothing that quantifies this," Fronstin said. It’s also possible that some large employers could decide to drop their plan and pay the penalty, forcing employees to buy insurance from the exchanges. Also, a small employer who won’t face a penalty could drop their plan, sending workers to the exchanges. But industry experts are not expecting the changes to be particularly widespread. Barry Schilmeister, a health care actuary and senior consultant at Mercer, said that "it's not likely that employers will be making a lot more carrier changes than in the past, if they're keeping their traditional programs (which most are, for now)." • Exchanges: A patient’s current doctor may not be available through some -- or potentially any -- of the plans offered on the exchanges. There are lots of different scenarios here. A patient’s doctor might be on an exchange plan, but the consumer might choose a cheaper alternative instead that doesn’t cover that doctor. If that consumer truly couldn’t afford the plan covering their doctor, we might call that being "forced" to switch doctors, but if someone simply chooses to save money, then they are making a choice. Gail Wilensky, former head of Medicare and Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush, said that there is some truth to Rubio’s claim, because there is the potential for some patients to lose access to their doctor. But she said at this point, it’s not possible to predict how many people that will happen to in the first year of the exchange -- or beyond. "Just like private plans now don’t include all the doctors, many doctors may not choose to be in the plans offered in the exchanges," she told PolitiFact. That "will depend on which companies participate in the exchanges, whether they have a relationship with those plans, and the payment rates that the plan will use for the exchange. Many states have pushed plan premiums way below what the companies thought it would take and may come in with narrow networks to live within those rates." News reports indicate that some health care insurance companies are forgoing some state exchanges, at least for now. Aetna announced Aug. 2 that it was pulling out of Maryland’s individual exchange. We interviewed spokespersons at a few health care companies and learned that United Health plans to participate in about a dozen exchanges, while Aetna plans to join about 14. Cigna currently offers individual plans in 10 states and has chosen half for initial participation in exchanges. This means for consumers who now have a particular insurance company and have to buy a plan on the exchange, "whether your doctor might be on other plans is a crapshoot -- maybe yes, maybe no," Wilensky said. • Medicare: Jeff Johnson, state director of Florida AARP, said that nothing in the Affordable Care Act would force patients on Medicare to switch doctors. Future changes to Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors "could affect doctors getting out of Medicare." However, that has been an issue years before Obamacare. The "sustainable growth rate" passed into law under President Bill Clinton is supposed to set Medicare reimbursement costs but is routinely bypassed by Congress. "The Affordable Care Act did not include a permanent fix to that," he said. Judith Stein, executive director of Center for Medicare Advocacy, said every year doctors decide whether to continue serving patients on Medicare or Medicare Advantage -- and that’s unrelated to Obamacare. With Medicare Advantage, doctors consider how many of their patients are on the plan, reimbursement rates and administrative hassles "It may be your Medicare Advantage plan may not include your doctor next year, but not because of Obamacare. ... That has always been the case and continues to be the case." Our ruling Rubio said that for people who currently have health insurance, "They have a doctor they’ve been seeing for the last 15 or 20 years, they won’t be able to keep going to that doctor," due to Obamacare. Rubio ignores the fact that without Obamacare, patients can lose access to their doctor when their employer switches plans or they switch (or lose) jobs. Some patients who buy health insurance through the exchange could lose access to their current doctor, but it’s difficult to predict how many. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2013-08-05T15:59:24	2013-07-31	['None']
-pomt-03066	"Photo ID is not required for those who vote by mail."	true	/texas/statements/2013/oct/01/league-women-voters-texas-education-fund/nearly-all-texans-who-vote-mail-need-not-present-p/	Toward the end of a press release describing the Texas mandate that voters present photo identification at the polls, the League of Women Voters of Texas Education Fund said: "Photo ID is not required for those who vote by mail." Say what? Granted, there is an obvious logistical lurch in requiring someone who mails in a ballot to also in some fashion prove that they are the person whose ballot is being cast. That is, for you youngsters, there’s not yet an instant-check app for that. But still, if the 2011 ID law put in place by the state’s ruling Republicans was intended to prevent voter impersonation, it’s arguably a twist that there is no ID provision for those who vote by mail. As noted by the league, voters going to the polls will be expected to present a photo ID issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (a driver's license, personal ID card, concealed handgun license or election identification certificate) or by the federal government (a passport, military ID or a citizenship or naturalization certificate). The registration deadline for voting in the Nov. 5, 2013, election is Oct. 7. So, no photo ID for Texans voting by mail? By email, Linda Krefting of Lubbock, who chairs the education fund, pointed out the 2011 law has no provision for photo IDs being presented in connection with balloting by mail. She also pointed out a query and reply on a "Frequently Asked Questions" web page kept by the Texas Secretary of State’s office, which oversees elections: "Does the new photo ID requirement apply to voting by mail? "A. The new requirement does not change the process for voting by mail." Another question and answer on the web page delivers more detail, stating that a registered voter wishing to vote early by mail, which is no longer called "absentee voting," may request a mail ballot by meeting any of several conditions. That is, according to the answer, the voter will be out of her or his home county on Election Day and during the early-voting period or the voter is sick or disabled or she or he will be 65 or older on Election Day or confined in jail though still eligible to vote. Chapter 82 of the Texas Election Code further defines "disabled"; a disability can include an expectation of being in childbirth on Election Day, for instance. Also, a person in jail can be allowed to vote in person at the discretion of the authority in charge of the jail, the law says. By telephone, Alicia Pierce, an office spokeswoman, confirmed that the state voter ID law did not impose photo ID requirements on Texans voting by mail. But there is a photo-ID element to federal law, Pierce said, in that a first-time voter who registers to vote without providing either their photo ID number or the last four digits of their Social Security number will be asked by county officials to send a copy of their ID if she or he requests a mail ballot. By phone, Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County clerk, told us local officials must request a copy of a photo ID of such first-time voters in accord with the federal Help America Vote Act, which took effect in 2006. She said the ID copy must be sent back to the county in the envelope holding, but separate from, the sealed mail-in ballot. DeBeauvoir emailed us the county’s notice requesting photo IDs of such voters. Notably, it says that mail-ballot voters are still not required to send a copy of a photo ID if they check a box indicating they are "disabled, in the military or living overseas." DeBeauvoir said that in the 2012 general election, about 3 percent of the county’s ballots for president were submitted by mail. A snapshot of current events: In late September 2013, county elections official Michelle Parker told us by phone that 1,767 of the county’s more than 600,000 registered voters--less than 3/10 of 1 percent--had been flagged to possibly be asked for photo IDs should those voters seek to vote by mail in the 2013 elections. Our ruling The league said: ""Photo ID is not required for those who vote by mail." That’s correct for all but first-time voters who did not present a photo ID number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when registering to vote. Such voters who seek to vote by mail can expect to be asked for a copy of their photo ID, yet even these voters do not have to do so if they are disabled, in the military or living overseas. We see nothing significant missing from this claim and rate it as True. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. sources Telephone interviews, Alicia Pierce, title, Texas Secretary of State’s office, Sept. 25, 2013 Web page, "FAQ," VoteTexas.gov, Texas Secretary of State’s office (accessed Sept. 25, 2013) Telephone interviews, Dana DeBeauvoir, Travis County clerk, Austin, Sept. 25 and 26, 2013 Notice sent to some Travis County voters by mail, "Request for Identification" (received by email from Dana DeBeauvoir, Sept. 25, 2013) Telephone interview, Michelle Parker, assistant director, Travis County Elections Division, Sept. 25, 2013	None	League of Women Voters of Texas Education Fund	None	None	None	2013-10-01T12:24:07	2013-09-23	['None']
-snes-04548	Ex-UN Official John Ashe died suspiciously the day before he was scheduled to testify against Hillary Clinton.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/un-official-john-ashe-killed-the-day-before-he-was-to-testify-against-hillary-clinton/	None	Conspiracy Theories	None	Kim LaCapria	None	UN Official John Ashe Killed the Day Before He Was to Testify Against Hillary Clinton	27 June 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-11210	A "catch and release" immigration policy "is a Democrat rule, Sherrod Brown, this is a Democrat rule."	false	/ohio/statements/2018/may/11/donald-trump/ohio-trump-misleads-blaming-democrats-catch-and-re/	President Donald Trump called the nation’s immigration laws a "disgrace" and pointed the finger at Democrats, including U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, for the policy he calls "catch and release." "You've seen catch and release," Trump said. "You catch them and then you release them, okay? That's what it is. This is a Democrat rule, Sherrod Brown, this is a Democrat rule, catch and release. You catch them, you release them." Trump said that the undocumented immigrants then wait a year for a hearing and don’t show up in court. Trump made his comments at a tax roundtable in Cleveland on May 5, a few days before U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci won the GOP primary to challenge Brown in November. We found Trump’s talking point that "catch and release" is a "Democrat rule" wrong. In fact, the underlying policy has continued under his own administration. "For decades, across both Democratic and Republican administrations, many immigrants apprehended while trying to enter the country (by land or sea) have been released from custody while their legal right to remain in the United States was being resolved by the courts," said Adam Cox, a New York University law school professor. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com History of 'catch and release' under Bush and Obama "Catch and release" refers to immigration authorities detaining undocumented immigrants but releasing them while they wait to appear before an immigration judge. The practice didn’t start during a Democratic administration, said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a George Mason University political science professor. On the contrary, the roots can be traced back to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2001 during the Republican administration of George W. Bush. The court ruled in Zadvydas vs. Davis that the government couldn’t indefinitely hold individuals beyond six months if it’s unlikely that ICE can actually deport them soon. The Bush administration eventually responded to the court order by increasing detention bed space and expanding "expedited removal," said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. Under expedited removal, apprehended undocumented immigrants are detained and quickly go before an immigration agent. But in reality, the policy of releasing immigrants awaiting hearings didn’t end. Senate Republicans made attempts to stop the practice during Obama’s administration, but the process continued. Two key groups that have been exempted from expedited removal are those seeking asylum and undocumented minors. Those two groups soared during Obama’s tenure. A bill signed by Bush, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, codified the process for the treatment of undocumented minors. 'Catch and release' under Trump In January 2017, Trump signed an executive order to terminate "catch and release." In reality, it didn’t change actual policy. In an October Senate hearing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said "catch and release" was not official policy but was still happening due to a long backlog of cases and a shortage of immigration judges. "It's just the reality that there are so many people claiming and being entitled to hearings that we don't have the ability to provide those hearings, and they are being released into the community, and they're not coming back for their hearings," Sessions said. The White House said that as a result of existing law, more than 107,000 unaccompanied minors had been released since fiscal year 2016. The White House blamed Congress for not providing enough money for detention space. Brown played no particular role with 'catch and release' Trump singled out Brown, likely because Trump was speaking in Ohio, but we found no statements by Brown about "catch and release." During the wave of unaccompanied minors in 2014, Brown called for "comprehensive immigration reform." Earlier this year, Brown supported amendments to boost border security and provide legal status for Dreamers, but the amendments didn’t draw enough support in the Senate to proceed. Brown’s campaign spokesman said that he has never voted or publicly commented on "catch and release." Our ruling Trump said the policy called "catch and release" is "a Democrat rule, Sherrod Brown, this is a Democrat rule." Trump was referring to the practice of releasing apprehended undocumented immigrants while they await a hearing before an immigration judge. Trump misleads by labeling the policy a "Democrat rule" because it dates back to at least Republican President George W. Bush. Under Trump’s Republican leadership, the practice continues. A few factors are at play here, including lack of detention space and the laws about unaccompanied minors. But those factors aren’t in the hands of Democrats alone. Trump also singled out Brown, the Ohio senator, with no evidence that he played any role in the policy. We rate this claim False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-05-11T10:00:00	2018-05-05	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-12030	"Mass voter fraud just discovered, to the amount that could void Hillary’s victory In New Hampshire."	false	/punditfact/statements/2017/sep/15/young-conservatives/website-passes-along-dubious-claims-about-fraudule/	Apparently, the Internet is never going to leave the 2016 presidential race behind. A Sept. 8 post on the website Young Conservatives was headlined, "Mass Voter Fraud Just Discovered, to the Amount That Could Void Hillary’s Victory In New Hampshire." We learned about the post through a partnership between PolitiFact and Facebook to fact-check articles of questionable accuracy. The article said, "Hillary Clinton blew an election she should’ve won with ease. In fact, the former secretary of state lost a rigged election in her favor to a man with zero experience holding political office. That’s how awful a candidate she was. Now, new reports of voter fraud are popping up. The numbers are so egregious, in fact, that Hillary’s New Hampshire victory might not even count anymore." As evidence, the post cited a Washington Times article that said that in New Hampshire, "more than 80 percent of voters who registered on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses, or 5,313 of them, neither had a state license nor registered a motor vehicle almost 10 months later." That’s larger than the number of votes that separated Clinton and her opponent, Donald Trump. Clinton won the state over Trump by 2,732 votes. The claim in the Young Conservatives post is effectively the same as a separate assertion we checked, by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Kobach, the vice chairman of the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, said, "Facts have come to light that indicate that a pivotal, close election was likely changed through voter fraud on November 8, 2016: New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate Seat, and perhaps also New Hampshire’s four electoral college votes in the presidential election." We rated that False. David Rufful of Young Conservatives told PolitiFact that his site "provides conservative commentary on news reports originating from outside news sources. In this case, we are sourcing an article from The Washington Times and The Gateway Pundit. … A PolitiFact assessment of an article at Youngcons.com would seem to be misplaced as we aren't the original source." However, the post was widely read -- when we looked, it had been shared nearly 55,000 times. So we’ll recap our evidence here. Domicile vs. residency New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, a fellow member of the commission co-chaired by Kobach and launched by President Donald Trump, said that the facts laid out by Kobach don’t create proof for the accusation of voter fraud. He said Kobach had fudged the line between domicile and residency, which is crucial in understanding New Hampshire voting law. A state Supreme Court decision has determined that a person can lawfully vote in New Hampshire while holding motor vehicle registration or a driver’s license in another state. In other words, it’s not necessary for the 5,313 voters in question to have become residents in order for their votes to be valid. That’s because eligible voters can be domiciled in the state without having to be residents — something Gardner acknowledged has caused confusion, even among polling officials. Domicile is defined as the place where a person sleeps, more than any other place, most nights of the year, or where they intend to return after a temporary time away. "The basic difference between a ‘resident’ and a person who merely has a New Hampshire ‘domicile,’ is that a ‘resident’ has manifested an intent to remain in New Hampshire for the indefinite future, while a person who merely has a New Hampshire ‘domicile’ has not manifested the same intent," Gardner wrote. College voters Kobach said that residents must obtain a New Hampshire’s driver’s license or register a vehicle in the state 60 days after moving, but that’s limited to drivers of motor vehicles. As multiple articles pointed out, college students are typical examples of people who would drive in another state without establishing residency in New Hampshire. New Hampshire Public Radio’s analysis of out-of-state IDs used to vote in November found that "the towns that see the highest rates of out-of-state IDs used at the polls are all home to college campuses." Kobach was unconvinced. "Being enrolled in a college does not free you from the legal obligation to become domiciled," Kobach said in his testimony. But that’s misleading, as becoming domiciled isn’t as complicated as he makes it sound. A voter can prove domicile using a New Hampshire driver’s license, a vehicle registration in the state, or a non-driver ID or other government issued photo identification that lists a New Hampshire address. But in some towns, providing a form issued by a New Hampshire college or university is sufficient to prove domicile. In Manchester, a voter can prove domicile by presenting a monthly bill, a medical bill, pay stubs showing a current address, or postmarked mail within the last 30 days. Other towns accept similar documentation. Otherwise, voters can simply sign an affidavit attesting they live there. In the case of affidavits, the state mails a letter to the listed address and if undeliverable or ignored, the case gets forwarded to the attorney general’s office for review. The other aspect of New Hampshire law that lends to the confusion is that alongside 15 other states, it has a same-day voter registration policy. "The result is that yes, it is possible and legal for someone to drive into a polling place in a car with out-of-state tags, register to vote, and vote," Fergus Cullen, who ran the New Hampshire Republican Party from 2007-08, told PolitiFact in February. "Of course they have to sign affidavits and they would be risking significant legal penalties if they voted in more than one place or state. The odds of being caught are pretty high." According to the New Hampshire Department of State and Department Safety, 196 people are being investigated as possibly having voted in New Hampshire and one other state — but even that isn’t proof that they did. Other concerns In the meantime, even if the votes had been were fraudulent -- and again, they were not -- the article’s use of the word "mass" is also questionable, since these votes accounted for well under 1 percent of the votes cast for president in the state. The article also misleads when it says that these findings "could void" Clinton’s victory. There is no mechanism for changing election results once they have been certified by the state and electoral votes have been cast. "Once the electoral college votes are certified it's done," said Andrew Smith, a University of New Hampshire political scientist. Our ruling The Young Conservatives post was headlined, "Mass Voter Fraud Just Discovered, to the Amount That Could Void Hillary’s Victory In New Hampshire." The article cited 5,313 votes cast with out-of-state IDs. However, under New Hampshire law, there is nothing fraudulent about them, as a person can lawfully vote in New Hampshire while holding motor vehicle registration or a driver’s license in another state. And even if those votes were somehow declared fraudulent, there would be no way to "void" Clinton’s four electoral votes in New Hampshire. We rate this statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Young Conservatives	None	None	None	2017-09-15T19:10:20	2017-09-08	['None']
-pomt-03233	Says "nearly half of Oregon's children are poor."	half-true	/oregon/statements/2013/aug/16/jim-francesconi/are-nearly-half-oregons-children-growing-poor/	With the State Board of Higher Education handing oversight of Oregon’s universities to independent boards, Jim Francesconi, one of the state board members, recently took to The Oregonian’s opinion pages to note a few of the issues the new custodians will have to deal with. Among them he said, and most importantly, education has to be accessible. "Oregon," he wrote, "must demonstrate that working people and poor folks can still make it in America. Education after high school is the way, but it is out of reach for many children, especially in rural Oregon. Nearly half of Oregon's children are poor." It was the line about the percentage of poor children in the state that caught one Oregonian reader’s attention. Oregon is hardly a rich state -- particularly when the national economy itself is down and out -- but nearly half? That seemed a stretch. We agreed with our reader -- it was worth looking into. Our first call was to Francesconi to see where he got his figures. He said the information came from a 2012 report by Children First for Oregon, an advocacy group. According to that report, "nearly 50% of children are either poor or low-income." Francesconi almost immediately realized his mistake. "In retrospect, I wish I would have said poor or low income." Though there may not be a difference to the average person, there is a distinction between poor and low income as far as the U.S. government is concerned. In order to qualify as poor, a family must make 100 percent or less of the federal poverty level. Low income refers to families between 100 and 200 percent of the federal poverty level. So what does that mean in a practical sense? A family of four living in Oregon in 2013 would be considered "poor" if they make $23,550 or less a year. To be considered low income, a family would have to make between $23,550 and $47,100 a year. (For the curious, the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University has a handy online calculator that can detail the poverty level for families of various sizes living in various states.) If you check the most recent Census information, you’ll find that in 2011 a little more than 23 percent of children (those younger than 18) in Oregon live in families at or below 100 percent of the federal poverty level while another 21 percent live in low-income families. The figures are slightly higher still for young children, or those under 6 years old. Now, if we were just using the government’s definition of "poor" this would be a really easy False. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, about a quarter of the state’s children are poor, not half. But, at PolitiFact Oregon we strive for more context. Plus, it seemed to us that a family of four making $30,000 would likely feel pretty poor even if they didn’t meet the strict federal definition. So, we placed a couple calls to various non-partisan poverty centers around the nation and spoke with some experts. First up was Jennifer Romich, a professor at the University of Washington and founding affiliate of the West Coast Poverty Center. Using the federal poverty level as a strict line of who is poor and who is not can be problematic, she told us. "The federal poverty line is widely seen as too low," Romich said. "Among folks who spend their lifetime measuring poverty, they can agree that the current measure is problematic." It doesn’t, for instance, take into account government assistance or tax expenditures. Plus, the measure, which rises with inflation, was developed in the 1960s and, aside from a couple small amendments, hasn’t been updated since. Romich explained that it "was originally based on USDA reckonings that a family spends about 30 percent of their income on food which was true in the 60s but is not true today." Nowadays, she said, health care and housing costs, for instance, are consuming much more of a budget. Either way, Romich said, families that are classified as low income are still going to "feel economically deprived. … In laymen’s terms, you'd think of this as unofficially poor or close to poverty." Another expert, this time from Columbia University, agreed. "I think that many low-income families who are above the poverty line, but not much above it, are struggling a great deal with paying bills and finding childcare that is stable and affordable and paying co-insurance on medical visits and putting gas in the car," said Sheila Smith, who oversees the early childhood program at the National Center for Children in Poverty. "We like to think that families who are above that threshold of the official poverty line are doing OK. But we know, in fact, that they ... are struggling in many ways." Smith said she and her colleagues at the poverty center look at whether states are actively promoting the needs of low-income residents, they often put the benchmark at 200 percent of the federal poverty level. For instance, does the state set the income eligibility for child care subsidies at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. (The cut off in Oregon is 185 percent.) "Families who are at or above 200 percent of the FPL," Smith explained, "still really need that support for income stability." So what is an appropriate way to determine what poverty is and who feels it? Romich pointed us to the work of a colleague who measures poverty with a "Self-Sufficiency Standard." Essentially, how much would various types of families living in various parts of the country have to make to meet basic needs. Diana Pearce, the mind behind the standard describes how it works in an Oregon-specific report from 2011: "The Self-Sufficiency Standard is a measure of economic security that is based on the costs of the basic needs for working families: housing, child care, food, health care, transportation, and miscellaneous items as well as the cost of taxes and the impact of tax credits. In 2011, Pearce determined that a family of four -- with one school-age child and one preschooler -- living in Multnomah County would have had to make $52,989 in order to meet their needs. Now, remember, that’s how much the parents would have to make collectively. That amount would put the family at 225 percent of the federal poverty level. For what it’s worth, that family would also qualify for housing assistance. The National Center for Children in Poverty employs a similar metric for their "basic needs budget calculator." Their calculator, which calculates for families living in 2008, doesn’t have data for Oregon, however we ran the estimates for Vancouver, Wa., and Clark County. According to the calculator, a two-parent family with one school-age child and one preschooler would have needed to bring in $48,523 a year in 2008 to meet basic needs. So where does this leave us? Francesconi said in an opinion piece that "nearly half of Oregon's children are poor." In fact, if you use federal definitions for poverty, about a quarter are poor and another quarter are low-income. But experts tell us that families that are described as low-income still struggle to meet their basic needs and, for all intents and purposes, qualify as poor. Be that as it may, Francesconi was referencing a report that used the federal definitions. As such, his statement leaves out important details and we, too, think it would have been better to say "poor and low income." We rate this claim Half True.	None	Jim Francesconi	None	None	None	2013-08-16T16:23:59	2013-08-07	['Oregon']
-snes-01801	A photograph shows an "inflatable dam" holding back the flood waters surrounding a Texas home.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/texas-house-saved-inflatable-dam/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Was This House Saved from a Flood by an ‘Inflatable Dam?’	31 August 2017	None	['Texas']
-snes-02461	President Donald Trump's website contains a release about a plan to 'fuck the poor.'	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-url-poor/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did a Trump Campaign Web Site URL Reveal a Contempt for the Poor?	9 May 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-03059	Among the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, Milwaukee is the "only one" where the poverty rate is more than "four times greater in the city than it is in the suburbs."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2013/oct/03/tom-barrett/milwaukees-city-suburban-poverty-disparity-worst-a/	Stating that Milwaukee is pounded by poverty isn’t startling -- unless you state it the way Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett did. Seeking support for his 2014 city budget, Barrett met Sept. 24, 2013, with the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. At one point, he lamented the economic hardship in his city. The mayor distributed a list that showed the ratio of city poverty to suburban poverty in the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, those with a metro population above 1 million. Then he said of Milwaukee: "We are the only metropolitan area in the entire country where you’ve got that ratio higher than four, meaning that the poverty rate is four times greater in the city than it is in the suburbs. Only one. Only one." There’s no question the city of Milwaukee has had some of the highest poverty rates in the country. Let’s see if the measure Barrett uses -- a city-to-suburban poverty ratio -- is accurate. Barrett’s numbers The list Barrett provided came from NewGeography.com, which is "devoted to analyzing and discussing the places where we live and work." It was included with a July 2012 article by Wendell Cox of Demographia, a Belleville, Ill., public policy firm. Using 2010 census data, Cox provided a ratio to show how much greater the poverty rate is in the city vs. the suburbs in the 51 largest metro areas. For Milwaukee, the poverty rate was 29.5 percent in the city and 6.9 percent in the suburbs -- a ratio of 4.3. In other words, the city’s poverty rate was 4.3 times higher than the suburban rate. And, as Barrett said, Milwaukee was the only large metro area with a ratio above 4. The three next-highest ratios behind Milwaukee, along with the city poverty rate vs. the suburban rate were: Metro area City poverty rate Suburban rate Ratio Hartford, Conn. 31.2% 7.8% 3.99 Baltimore 25.6% 6.7% 3.80 Rochester, N.Y. 33.8% 9.3% 3.62 Newer numbers Nearly a week before Barrett made his claim, the U.S. Census bureau released new poverty figures -- for 2012. Barrett alluded to them in his editorial board interview and had commented on them several days earlier in a Journal Sentinel news article. A day after the new census figures, the Brookings Institution think tank posted a report on the 2012 poverty rates. The report didn’t list ratios like those in the report Barrett had cited. But a simple calculation of Brookings’ city and suburban poverty rates shows that both the Milwaukee and Hartford, Conn., metro areas had a poverty ratio above 4: Metro area City poverty rate Suburban rate Ratio Hartford, Conn. 38% 7.9% 4.81 Milwaukee 29.9% 7.3% 4.10 Our rating Barrett said that among the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, Milwaukee is the "only one" where the poverty rate is more than "four times greater in the city than it is in the suburbs." Barrett was correct in citing 2010 census figures showing Milwaukee was the only large metro area with a poverty ratio above 4, but his claim went a bit too far in that the just-released 2012 figures show two areas with that ratio. That did not, however, undermine the thrust of his point, that the Milwaukee metropolitan area is virtually alone by this measure. We rate the statement Half True. If you would like to comment on this item, you can do so on the Journal Sentinel’s web page.	None	Tom Barrett	None	None	None	2013-10-03T05:00:00	2013-09-24	['Milwaukee']
-snes-03855	Joyce Meyer died "shortly after taking ill" in October 2016.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joyce-meyer-dead-at-73/	None	Junk News	None	Brooke Binkowski	None	Joyce Meyer Dead at 73	6 October 2016	None	['None']
-goop-00868	Kardashians Cutting Off Contact With Khloe Kardashian Over Tristan Thompson?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/khloe-kardashian-family-cut-contact-tristan-thompson/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kardashians Cutting Off Contact With Khloe Kardashian Over Tristan Thompson?	3:43 pm, June 6, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-05334	The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority "concluded that light rail in Cobb County would more than double commute time and would therefore be unsuccessful in alleviating traffic congestion."	false	/georgia/statements/2012/may/15/transportation-leadership-coalition/anti-transportation-tax-group-light-rail-doubles-c/	Metro Atlanta needs to fix its traffic problems, but it doesn’t need rail, a group opposed to a plan to raise taxes to overhaul the region’s transportation system said. The Transportation Leadership Coalition operates the www.traffictruth.net website, which lists reasons to vote against the 1-cent sales tax July 31. One of the top ones is that it won’t help you in a traffic jam. Even research by the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, which helps create regional transportation policy, found that light rail could make your commute far worse, the website said. "GRTA concluded that light rail in Cobb County would more than double commute time and would therefore be unsuccessful in alleviating traffic congestion," it read. More than double commute time? Then why would anyone in his right mind want light rail? We took a close look at the claim. The referendum is known as the Transportation Special Local Option Sales Tax. It would raise taxes by 1 cent in the metro area over the next 10 years to build or upgrade roads, highways and mass transit. Even if the referendum passes, it won’t fund rail for Cobb County. Local leaders who developed a slate of projects that the tax would fund struck it from the list. It will pay for other rail projects, such as one in the Clifton Road corridor near Emory University and streetcars in and around downtown Atlanta. Transportation tax foes repeatedly use this fact as a reason to oppose it. To find out more about the GRTA claim, we called volunteers for the Transportation Leadership Coalition. They told us they got their information during meetings for the Northwest Connectivity Study, a years-long effort in the early 2000s. The GRTA’s aim was to find out what kind of mass transit system would help locals best cope with their commutes. The study recommended bus service that would use HOV lanes to take them closer to the city’s core instead of light rail or other types of transit, according to news accounts and GRTA study documents. (The bus service never launched. It morphed into a project to build special "reversible lanes" that switch their direction of travel depending on the time of day. Drivers will pay a toll to use them to get around traffic jams.) The study estimated commute times for some of these mass transit options. The HOV lane bus service would take 36 minutes to travel from the Busbee Park and Ride lot in the Kennesaw area to Midtown, according to study documents. Light rail would take an estimated 53 minutes, or 17 minutes more. But it did not compare mass transit trip times to car commutes, GRTA spokesman William Mecke told PolitiFact Georgia. It didn’t look into how these mass transit projects would affect traffic congestion, either. "Therefore, GRTA drew no conclusions as to how much these transit options would impact commute times or alleviate traffic congestion," Mecke told us in an email. Project documents outlining the scope of the study back up this statement. Mecke cautioned that the study’s estimates are old. "That was eight years and another economy ago," Mecke said. Transportation Leadership Coalition volunteer Ron Sifen recalls the Northwest Corridor effort differently. Sifen, who said he supports mass transit, said he was a supporter of light rail until he saw a GRTA presentation in the early 2000s. The presentation compared trip times for car commuters with those of light-rail riders. Sifen said car trips were so much shorter, and light rail was so much more expensive than other options, he decided light rail was a bad idea. We wanted to give Sifen and others from the anti-transportation tax group another chance, so we checked our newspaper archives and other resources for any suggestion that light rail would double Northwest Corridor commute times. We found nothing. We also looked at the GRTA’s yearly Transportation MAP Report, which shows commute times for certain freeway segments. We hoped we could do a back-of-the-envelope calculation for the length of a car commute and compare it with the light-rail time. We couldn’t. It doesn’t show how long it takes a car commuter to drive from the Busbee Park and Ride to Midtown. It’s possible that car commutes could be shorter than prospective light-rail commutes. Trains make regularly scheduled stops. But even if data collected as part of the Northwest Connectivity study, or any other transportation studies in the early part of the past decade, did confirm that this were true, that data would be very old. To sum up: The Transportation Leadership Coalition said that the GRTA "concluded that light rail in Cobb County would more than double commute time and would therefore be unsuccessful in alleviating traffic congestion." The GRTA denied it made this conclusion, and we found no evidence it did, either. The Transportation Leadership Coalition earns a False.	None	Transportation Leadership Coalition	None	None	None	2012-05-15T06:00:00	2012-04-30	['None']
-pomt-07136	"The Democrat-led Senate has failed to pass a budget for 750 days ... Senate Democrats have neglected one of their most basic responsibilities."	half-true	/ohio/statements/2011/jun/16/rob-portman/sen-rob-portman-chides-senate-democrats-not-passin/	Legislators haven't stopped using speeches, news releases and snail mail to deliver messages, but they increasingly rely on social media like Twitter and Facebook to make points quickly and constantly, if sometimes too briefly. Ohio's Sen. Rob Portman, for example, sent this tweet on May 17: "We’re in a fiscal crisis, yet the Democrat led Senate has not passed a budget in 748 days." Twitter limits statements to 140 characters, so we asked Portman's office for elaboration. We were referred to a news release posted on his website on May 19. It quotes Portman, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, saying: "It is a shame that while our nation is in a fiscal crisis and families and small businesses are forced to do more with less, the Democrat-led Senate has failed to pass a budget for 750 days now. By failing to pass and live within a budget, something Ohio families and small businesses do on a regular basis, Senate Democrats have neglected one of their most basic responsibilities." If a basic responsibility of Senate Republicans is staying "on message," Portman did his duty. We recognized his point as one that was made the same day by the National Republican Senatorial Committee -- which added a specific reference to Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat up for re-election next year. "Every month, every Ohio family has to put together a budget and live within their means, yet Sherrod Brown and his fellow liberal Democrats apparently don't believe they should be held to that same standard in Washington," said NRSC spokesman Jahan Wilcox. "Passing a federal budget each year is the most basic responsibility of the Congress, but for more than four years Brown has been content to kick the can down the road and keep maxing out the government credit card. Now here we are after 750 days, and Brown and his fellow Democrats won't even propose a budget, let alone pass one." Updated versions of the one-size-fits-all statement have been issuing from the NRSC since then ("760 days and counting," "770 days and counting"), targeting Brown and at least seven other Senate Democrats. We did some simple subtraction and got back to April 29, 2009 -- which was, according to the Congressional Research Service and news sources, when the Senate passed a budget resolution for fiscal 2010. None has passed since, so the time tally in the statements from Portman and the NRSC is accurate. But we wondered if that meant the Senate, under Democratic control, had neglected its basic responsibility. Our colleagues at PolitiFact Florida had the same question. Building on earlier work by our PolitiFact National colleagues, they found the claim lacks important details. A budget resolution is a policy plan that outlines the intent of Congress, but it is not an appropriations bill, or spending bill, which actually allocates money for specific purposes. In the absence of a budget resolution, appropriations bills have continued to allocate money. The inability to pass the budget framework can reflect poorly on the majority party's organizational skills and/or on the degree of partisan discord in Congress. Since 1983 -- the first year the Senate and House stopped passing two budget resolutions annually and started passing one -- the two chambers failed to pass a joint budget on four occasions. For fiscal year 2003, the Senate, which was under Democratic control, failed to pass a budget resolution. On three other occasions -- fiscal years 1999, 2005 and 2007 -- the Senate and House failed to reconcile their different bills and pass a compromise measure. In those three cases, Republicans were in the majority in both chambers. Jason Peuquet, staff analyst at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan public policy think tank, told PolitiFact Florida that the lack of a budget resolution makes the Democrats appear irresponsible, though they have continued to allocate dollars as needed through other spending bills "But the larger picture is that lawmakers in Congress and the administration have so far not enacted a long-term fiscal plan to stabilize and reduce the debt," Peuquet said. "That is the true metric of fiscal responsibility, and there is plenty of blame to go around for both parties as to why our fiscal outlook is so dire." While the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Portman have correctly stated the number of days since a budget passed the Senate, their statements are loaded with a certain amount of hyperbole. The claim implies that the stalled budget process is the exclusive fault of Senate Democrats and not a function of partisan politics on both sides. It also fails to note that since 1983, the GOP was in control of both houses of Congress in three of the four years that a budget resolution wasn’t approved. Those are important details to know. On the Truth-O-Meter, a statement that is accurate but leaves out important details can get just one rating: Half True.	None	Rob Portman	None	None	None	2011-06-16T06:00:00	2011-05-19	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-01669	Says Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y., "voted to raise the Social Security retirement age on us."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/aug/19/martha-robertson/new-york-state-democrats-tv-ad-challenges-gop-cong/	The possibility that Congress could cut back on Social Security has long been a potent weapon in the campaign ad wars. Recently, the theme emerged again in a congressional race in western New York state. It came up in a television ad created by Martha Robertson, a Democratic Tompkins County legislator who is challenging the Republican incumbent, Rep. Tom Reed, in New York’s 23rd district, a sprawling region bordering Pennsylvania known as the Southern Tier. Among other things, Robertson’s ad charges that Reed "voted to raise the Social Security retirement age on us." Policy experts have long suggested a hike in the retirement age as a way to ease the fiscal and demographic crunch facing the Social Security program. The aging of the baby boomers means that fewer workers will have to support more retirees in the coming years. To remain solvent, the program might need to institute higher taxes, reduced benefits or a later retirement age. However, among elected officials, openly advocating for any of these options is considered the "third rail" of politics -- in other words, touch it and you die -- because each policy proposal is so unpopular. This is particularly true among older voters who are reliant on Social Security and who tend to vote at higher-than-average rates. Since most elected officials are on record opposing a higher retirement age, the ad raised our eyebrows. So we took a closer look. On screen, the ad provides a footnote that led us to an alternative budget blueprint offered in 2012 by Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., and then-Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio. In 2012, Cooper and LaTourette offered a budget based on the final report of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, better known as the Simpson-Bowles commission, after its co-chairs, former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., and former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, a Democrat. The Cooper-LaTourette amendment failed by a wide margin in the House -- just 38 lawmakers voted for it, with 382 voting against -- but Reed was one of 16 Republicans who voted for it. However, the accuracy of Robertson’s ad hinges on whether Reed’s vote would have raised "the Social Security retirement age on us." To be accurate, the claim relies on the assumption that Reed was, in effect, voting for what was advocated in the Simpson-Bowles final report. And that assumption is murkier than the ad lets on. It’s true that the Simpson-Bowles report did propose raising the Social Security retirement age. Specifically, it said that after the retirement age reaches 67 in 2027 under current law, the age should be indexed for increases in life expectancy. That would mean upping the retirement age to 68 around 2050, and to 69 around 2075. (Using a similar calculation, the Simpson-Bowles proposal would also raise the early-retirement age at which Americans can retire in exchange for smaller monthly benefits.) Robertson’s spokesman, Seth Stein, told PolitiFact, "Our ad is factual. Congressman Tom Reed has voted for Cooper-LaTourette, which is based on Simpson-Bowles -- and many independent analysts agree that this plan would raise the retirement age." However, the ad’s claim ignores two important qualifiers. The first is that the proposal Reed actually voted for did not include the Simpson-Bowles language on raising the retirement age. Here’s the language Reed and the other 37 lawmakers did vote for: "It is the policy of this resolution that Congress should work on a bipartisan basis to make Social Security sustainably solvent over 75 years. … Legislation to ensure sustainable solvency shall reflect the principles and framework outlined in the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Moment of Truth report and the bipartisan Rivlin-Domenici Restoring America’s Future report, which … include, among other proposals … accounting for changes in life expectancy over the next 75 years." That language is significantly more vague than what��s used in the Simpson-Bowles report. This may well have been a dodge to shield lawmakers from having to do exactly what the ad accuses Reed of doing, but it does cast some doubt on the ad’s claim that Reed explicitly "voted to raise the Social Security retirement age." Believing that Reed cast such a vote requires connecting some dots in a way that may, or may not, be reasonable. The second qualifier is Robertson’s use of the phrase "on us" to refer to those who would be hit by the retirement-age increase (setting aside whether Reed even voted to do that). Given that the Simpson-Bowles report suggests that the first one-year increase could take place in 2050, no one older than 31 years today would be affected at all. In New York’s 23rd district, roughly 39 percent of the residents are 31 and under, and only about 17 percent of the district’s voting-age population -- the target of the ads -- is 31 or under. So emphasizing the potential impact by using the words "on us" is a bit of an exaggeration. A large majority of those watching the ad would be completely unaffected by a proposed retirement-age increase that never made it into law (and that Reed may or may not have voted for). Our ruling In an ad, Robertson said Reed "voted to raise the Social Security retirement age on us." That’s a stretch. While the Cooper-LaTourette budget proposal was based on the Simpson-Bowles report, which did support an increase in the retirement age, the actual measure considered by the House (and voted for by Reed) was significantly more vague on that point. Meanwhile, even if you agree that Reed was effectively voting for a retirement-age increase, it’s an exaggeration for the ad to say that such a hike was "on us," since a large majority of the district would not have been affected by a policy that was only designed to take effect in 2050. On balance, we rate the claim Half True.	None	Martha Robertson	None	None	None	2014-08-19T17:31:53	2014-08-12	['None']
-afck-00147	4 million houses built by government since 1994	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/president-zumas-track-record-7-claims-progress-fact-checked/	None	None	None	None	None	President Zuma’s track record: 7 claims about #progress fact-checked	2017-04-21 06:20	None	['None']
-snes-00350	A viral video shows George Lopez urinating on President Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in July 2018.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/george-lopez-trump-hollywood/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Comedian George Lopez Urinate on Donald Trump’s Hollywood Star?	13 July 2018	None	['Hollywood_Walk_of_Fame', 'George_Lopez', 'Donald_Trump']
-goop-02720	Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon Fighting Over Equal Pay For Apple TV Series?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-reese-witherspoon-equal-pay-apple-tv-series/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon Fighting Over Equal Pay For Apple TV Series?	3:51 pm, December 7, 2017	None	['Jennifer_Aniston']
-tron-01217	Pictures from raid of drug dealer’s house in Mexico	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/drug-cash/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Pictures from raid of drug dealer’s house in Mexico	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-03615	Then-Gov. Carl Sanders put 56 percent of the state budget into education, a figure that has not been achieved since.	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2013/may/08/zell-miller/education-spending-under-gov-sanders-touted/	Georgia sometimes gets a bad rap for the amount of money the state invests in education and spends on students. Just last month, for example, a study by a national education organization said Georgia fell six spots to 25th out of 40 states in spending on its pre-kindergarten program over two school years since 2010 due to budget cuts. But the education funding battles of recent budget years were different 50 years ago. In a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about the 1963 Georgia Legislature, former Gov. Zell Miller recalled the strides made in education by then-Gov. Carl Sanders. Miller lauded Sanders for putting 56 percent of the state budget into education -- a figure, Miller said, that has not been achieved since. That percentage seemed rather large, even for the largest portion of state government. PolitiFact Georgia wondered if Miller, who later became a U.S. senator, was correct. Miller, a North Georgia Democrat and longtime politician, called the 1963 legislative session "the birth of modern Georgia." That was the year that the courts ordered that Senate districts be reapportioned to reflect populations, which meant more power for Georgia’s cities and minorities. That 1963 session saw the first African-American senator (Leroy R. Johnson), and the installment of Sanders as governor. Sanders, also a Democrat, became governor at age 37, the youngest in the nation at the time, after running on a platform of a new, modern Georgia. He’s known as Georgia’s first New South governor, and the first modern governor elected by popular vote. He served one term, from 1963 to 1967; ran unsuccessfully for the post in 1970 against Jimmy Carter, then left politics to practice law. In the book "Carl Sanders: Spokesman of the New South," author and historian James F. Cook repeats a similar statistic about Sanders’ education investment: "... he (Sanders) made education his first priority and directed nearly sixty cents of every tax dollar into education." The book passage says that under Sanders’ leadership, 10,000 new teachers were added to Georgia’s schools, and more schools and classrooms were built than under any previous administration. The Governor’s Honors program and the junior college network were started, four junior colleges were elevated to four-year status and a new dental school was established. As for funding, $176.5 million was appropriated for University System construction, and average faculty salaries increased 32.5 percent, moving Georgia from 10th to fourth place among Southern states. "I knew that the more people we could educate in Georgia, the better off the state would be in every capacity, politic wise, business wise, otherwise," Sanders said in a 2007 Georgia Public Broadcasting interview. The kicker, according to Cook’s book: Despite Sanders’ extensive education spending, the former governor left $140 million in the treasury -- the largest amount ever left to a succeeding governor up to that time. In addition to the historical accounts of Sanders’ spending, we also checked with the state Education Department and state budget office for more help. Financial reports of all school systems kept by the Georgia Department of Education were available from 1996 to 2012. Those records showed that one year, 1998, the education portion of the state’s budget exceeded Sanders’ 56 percent, by 2 percentage points. For the available reporting years, the data showed four years -- 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2001 -- where the education allocation tied Sanders’ 56 percent figure. It must be noted that some of the budgets in the Education Department data included some state funding for Georgia schools that was not available during Sanders’ tenure, such as lottery funds. Data compiled and provided by the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget included information from Sanders’ first year in office, 1963, through fiscal year 2014. The data substantiated Miller’s claim about Sanders’ education allocation reaching 56 percent of the budget, but also showed that the allocation reached 58 percent for schools during his third year in office, 1965. The budget office data also showed the education portion of the state budget either equaled or exceeded the 56 percent allocation from 1964 through 1970, and from 2009 to 2011. Agency officials noted that the data included lottery and tobacco settlement funds. Those dollars weren’t available to Sanders. Also of note, the amounts from 1963 to 1974 -- which covered Sanders’ term -- included money for capital projects, like buying land and building facilities. How was Sanders able to accomplish his education goals? "I had the budget power to put together a package of bills to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish because the (House and Senate) didn’t have their own budget officers," Sanders, 87, told PolitiFact Georgia in an interview from his law office. "I didn’t realize I would be the last governor with that power." So does Miller’s claim get fully funded? He said former Gov. Carl Sanders allocated 56 percent of the state budget to education, a level that has not since been achieved. Historical accounts and actual state education and budget data confirmed Sanders’ allocation levels. The data also showed a few years since Sanders when the levels have reached that amount, but those years included funding, such as lottery and tobacco settlement dollars, that were not available to Sanders. Overall, it is important to note that over the past 50 years, methods for funding education in the state, the available revenue streams and the definition of what constitutes education have changed numerous times. Still, data showed that education has always accounted for more than half of the budget in each of those years. We rate Miller’s claim Mostly True. Staff intern Karishma Mehrotra contributed to this article.	None	Zell Miller	None	None	None	2013-05-08T00:00:00	2013-03-17	['Carl_Sanders']
-pomt-07144	"The cost-of-living increase in Social Security is tied to wage inflation."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/15/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-says-social-security-cost-living-adj/	During an interview on the June 12, 2011, edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum proposed a reform of Social Security. The host, David Gregory, asked Santorum, "On Social Security, would you raise the retirement age?" Santorum -- a former two-term U.S. senator from Pennsylvania -- responded, "I proposed that back in 1994. I think that's an option that has to be on the table. I think the one thing that we should do is to deal with the cost of living increase. The cost -- I asked a senior everywhere I go, Iowa, New Hampshire, I say, ‘Should we -- what should the cost of living increase be tied to?’ And the answer is always, ‘Well, it should be tied to the prices that we pay for goods and services.’ Well, it's not. The cost of living increase in Social Security is tied to wage inflation. Why is this? Why, why, what does that have to do with cost of living for seniors? Answering his own question, Santorum said, "It doesn't. And so what we need to do is change it from a wage inflation index to a price inflation index. If we do that, you solve anywhere from half to three-quarters of the [shortage] in Social Security over time. So that's one thing we can do. We can do it now. We'll have minimal, minimal effect on anybody at or near retirement, but long-term it creates sustainability for young people who are sitting out there who don't believe Social Security is going to be there for them." A reader asked us to check Santorum’s claim, so we did. The short answer is that Santorum is wrong that "the cost of living increase in Social Security is tied to wage inflation." The long answer is a little more complicated. Since 1975, Social Security has provided automatic annual cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs, to its beneficiaries. These COLAs are determined by a federal statistic called the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W. (If there is no inflation, or falling prices, there’s also no COLA, as is the case this year.) CPI-W is a subset of the more familiar inflation statistic known as CPI-U. But both measures are similar, in that they represent "the buying habits of the residents of urban or metropolitan areas in the United States" through calculating the changes in prices for a fixed "basket" of goods. The consumer products used to calculate the two statistics are the same, with the difference coming only from the weighting used to average together the raw data. It’s important to note that despite the inclusion of "wage" in the statistic’s name, it is not a measurement of wages. It is a measurement of how fast prices are rising for a collection of consumer goods. "‘Cost-of-living increase’ has a precise meaning, and the increase is definitely not tied to wages, so his answer is clearly false," said Paul Van de Water, an economist with the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But even if his description on Meet the Press was inaccurate, Santorum didn’t get the wage inflation-vs.-consumer product inflation idea from nowhere. The experts we spoke to believed that Santorum had essentially garbled his message. Unlike annual COLAs once you’re in the Social Security system, the initial benefit you receive is indeed determined by an index of wage inflation. Santorum "was probably intending to talk about proposals for slowing the growth of initial Social Security benefits," Van de Water said. "At present, benefits for one year’s cohort of new retirees compared to the previous year’s cohort grows roughly in line with average wages, and proposals have been made to slow the growth of initial benefits by tying it to prices instead of wages." The program could trim costs this way because wages tend to grow at a rate roughly one percentage point faster than prices, said Michael Tanner, a retirement-security specialist with the libertarian Cato Institute. "Such a change would hold future Social Security benefits constant in real terms but would eliminate the benefit escalation that is built into the current formula," Tanner said. "Estimates suggest that making this change alone would result in a 35 percent reduction in Social Security’s currently scheduled level of benefits, bringing the system into balance by 2050. Variations on this approach would apply the formula change only to higher income seniors, preserving the current wage-indexed formula for low-income seniors." Still, it is different from proposals to change COLAs -- the idea that Santorum seemed to be suggesting on Meet the Press. There’s another wrinkle to mention as well. When Santorum reports hearing seniors complaining about COLAs not being tied to "the prices that we pay for goods and services," it echoes a different ongoing debate. Some have suggested that a statisticians could create a more appropriate COLA measure by measuring inflation using a basket of consumer products more like those that elderly people purchase on a regular basis, said David John, a Social Security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In fact, in 1987, Congress ordered the Bureau of Labor Statistics to create an experimental measurement called the CPI-E (the "E" is for elderly) to see whether it might be a better tool for adjusting payouts under Social Security. CPI-E differs from the other inflation measures by giving certain items more or less weight, based on their importance to the typical senior citizen's budget. For instance it gives more weight to medical costs. John said he expects that using CPI-E might be more accurate. But it would also add to the program’s cost, potentially shortening the actuarial health of the program by five years, according to a paper published by the New York Federal Reserve Board. Henry Aaron, an economist with the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution, said internal details about how Social Security works "is complicated stuff, and almost no one other than a small cadre of Social Security buffs understands it. Santorum clearly does not." When we contacted Santorum’s camp, they sent us a statement that sought to "clarify" what he had said. "He was not referring to the COLA that we typically think of for Social Security," the statement said. "Under current law -- ‘wage indexing’ -- benefits rise so that the ratio of benefits to pre-retirement earnings -- the ‘replacement rate’ -- stays constant. Sen. Santorum would argue that we need to move to ‘price indexing,’ where the benefit stays constant in real terms but the replacement rate falls. There are several proposals already on the table to do just this, and they would solve between 30 percent and 100 percent of the solvency issues facing Social Security." Santorum’s statement to PolitiFact explains what he was trying to say, but we make our ruling based on the initial statement, since that’s what viewers saw. In this case, Santorum’s original statement -- that "the cost of living increase in Social Security is tied to wage inflation" -- is flat wrong. It’s not, because COLAs for existing beneficiaries are based on price increases for consumer goods. So despite Santorum’s subsequent clarification, we rate his comment False.	None	Rick Santorum	None	None	None	2011-06-15T11:03:29	2011-06-12	['None']
-goop-00022	Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock Making Movie Together?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/julia-roberts-sandra-bullock-movie/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock Making Movie Together?	2:00 pm, November 8, 2018	None	['Julia_Roberts']
-snes-02886	John McCain solicited campaign contributions from Russia.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mccain-campaign-contributions-russian-government/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did John McCain Solicit a Campaign Contribution from the Russian Government?	23 February 2017	None	['Russia', 'John_McCain']
-pomt-02871	I am "the first Latina to run for governor of Texas."	false	/texas/statements/2013/nov/13/miriam-martinez/edinburg-candidate-least-second-latina-run-governo/	Edinburg journalist and activist Miriam Martinez said on her campaign website that she’s "the first Latina to run for governor of Texas." ¿De veras? Martinez, who recently filed her candidacy for the 2014 Republican gubernatorial nomination, told us by telephone that she based her self-description, which we saw on Nov. 11, 2013, on research into other Texas women to run for governor. She said Democrats Ann Richards, who won in 1990 and lost in 1994, and Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, who ran five times from 1924 through 1940, were not Latinas. Martinez further noted that Republican Debra Medina, who like then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison challenged Gov. Rick Perry in the 2010 primary, married into her Latina surname after growing up near Beeville as Debra Parker, as the Austin American-Statesman reported in a Feb. 12, 2010, news story. Toward gauging Martinez’s "first," we tallied all the women to run for governor from 1845 through 2010. Our sources were the 2004-05 Texas Almanac plus historical election results posted online by the Texas Secretary of State’s office. Our sift--which got us to 15 women--yielded one pre-Martinez candidate clearly identified as Latina. (Skip ahead if you must.) After Ferguson made her bids, suffragist leader Minnie Fisher Cunningham sought the 1944 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, drawing 48,039 votes and placing second to Coke Stevenson in the nine-candidate field. Frances Farenthold ranks among the best-known woman to run for governor. Farenthold, who was a legislator, reached a runoff for the Democratic nomination in 1972 and also ran in the 1974 primary, losing both times to Dolph Briscoe. Other hopefuls fared less well. Benita Louise Marek Lawrence of Brenham ran in the 1950 Democratic primary and Johnnie Mae Hackworthe, also of Brenham, who reportedly once unsuccessfully offered three Jersey cows in lieu of the $1,000 candidate filing fee, was in the 1968 Democratic primary ultimately led by Preston Smith. In 1972, the Socialist candidate for governor was Deborah Leonard; the same party ran Sherry Smith for governor in 1974 and Sara Jean Johnston in 1978. Sheila Bilyeu ran in the 1986 Democratic gubernatorial primary, finishing second to last in the six-person field. The 1986 Libertarian nominee for governor was Theresa Doyle. When Richards led the Democratic field in 1990, other contenders included Theresa Hearn-Haynes. And what of Latinas? San Antonio physician Alma Ludivina Aguado garnered 19,273 votes in the seven-person 2010 Democratic gubernatorial primary carried by Houston Mayor Bill White. In a Jan. 4, 2010, press release, Aguado referred to herself as potentially the first Hispanic woman physician to serve as governor. The release said Aguada was born in Eagle Pass on the Texas-Mexico border. Footnote: Several Latinos have run for governor. Henry B. Gonzalez of San Antonio sought the Democratic nod in 1958 before he went on to win repeated U.S. House terms. Laredo businessman Tony Sanchez became the Democratic nominee for governor in 2002 after besting then-Attorney General Dan Morales and others in the primary. Also, La Raza Unida nominees lost for governor in the general elections of 1972, 1974 (that’s no typo; governors through ‘74 had two-year terms) and 1978. Separately, Alonso Veloz was a Democratic candidate for governor in 1968 and Democrats Gary Espinosa and Felix (Rodriguez) Alvarado ran in 1994 and 2010, respectively. By phone, Martinez told us she had not heard of Aguado. Martinez then said that she is the first Latina to run for governor as a Republican. "Perhaps I have to stress that," she said. When we looked a day later, her campaign website newly referred to her as the first Republican Latina to run for governor. Our ruling Martinez said that she’s the first Latina to run for governor of Texas. Election results indicate she is at least the second Latina aspirant behind Aguado, a Democrat who ran in 2010. We rate this claim, since amended on Martinez’s website, as False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Miriam Martinez	None	None	None	2013-11-13T14:53:50	2013-11-11	['Texas']
-goop-01495	Jennifer Aniston Did Dump Justin Theroux For Brad Pitt, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-jennifer-aniston-dump-justin-theroux-not-true/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Aniston Did NOT Dump Justin Theroux For Brad Pitt, Despite Report	1:48 am, February 26, 2018	None	['Brad_Pitt', 'Jennifer_Aniston']
-goop-01270	Kris Jenner “Pregnant At Age 62,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kris-jenner-pregnant-62-baby-false-april-fools/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kris Jenner NOT “Pregnant At Age 62,” Despite Claim	12:42 pm, April 1, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-02053	Kim Kardashian Did Fire “Hot Staffer” To “Save Marriage,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-fire-staffer-marriage-kanye-west/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian Did NOT Fire “Hot Staffer” To “Save Marriage,” Despite Claim	11:31 am, December 11, 2017	None	['None']
-vogo-00546	Statement: “There’s just a few hundred pairs left in the world, believe it or not,” Rob Hutsel, executive director of the San Diego River Park Foundation, said during a KPBS story about California least terns that ran July 19.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-sizing-up-the-bird/	Analysis: A distinctive black cap sets the California least tern apart from other birds nesting along Southern California beaches. It has a white underbelly, orange bill and forked tail. Its population plummeted in the 20th century, driven by human activity and development in and near its beach habitat.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Sizing Up the Bird	July 27, 2010	None	['California']
-pomt-14754	"The states have always defined marriage."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/13/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-states-have-always-defined-marria/	Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., doesn’t like the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, but he said he won’t work to overturn it if he becomes president. Instead, Rubio told NBC’s Chuck Todd, he would appoint Supreme Court justices who "will interpret the Constitution as originally constructed." Same-sex marriage is not a constitutionally protected right, and marriage laws have always been the responsibility of the states and not the federal government, Rubio said in an interview that aired Dec. 13 on Meet the Press. "If you want to change the definition of marriage, then you need to go to state legislatures and get them to change it, because states have always defined marriage," he said. "And that's why some people get married in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator. And in Florida, you have to wait a couple days when you get your permit. Every state has different marriage laws." We wondered if Rubio was right that "states have always defined marriage." Rubio’s statement echoes critics of this summer’s Obergefell vs. Hodges Supreme Court ruling who say the specific issue of same-sex marriage should be left to individual states. Rubio has a point that marriage laws are largely the states' responsibility, such as the permit and license laws he noted. But states cannot make laws that violate the Constitution, and the June ruling legalizing same-sex marriage was not the first time the Supreme Court limited state regulation and, essentially, defined marriage. The most pertinent example is the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving vs. Virginia, which invalidated any bans on interracial marriages. The court decided unanimously that these bans violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. "It is true that states have generally defined who can get married and the process by which it happens, unless those laws contradict the Constitution, as you rightly point out in the Loving case," said Jason Pierceson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield and author of Same-Sex Marriage in the United States: The Road to the Supreme Court. "States have primary control in many policy areas, but those powers are limited by the 14th Amendment." Jane Schacter, a Stanford University constitutional law professor, showed us a few more examples of the Supreme Court overturning state marriage laws on 14th Amendment grounds. In 1971’s Boddie vs. Connecticut, the court found a Connecticut law requiring poor people to pay a fee to get divorced violated the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. Seven years later, in Zablocki vs. Redhail, the court overturned a Wisconsin statute barring fathers who were behind on child support payments from getting married. And in Turner vs. Safley, the court in 1987 said a Missouri statute barring inmates from getting married was unconstitutional. "There is no unrestricted prerogative of a state to do whatever it wishes with respect to marriage, Constitution be damned," Schacter said. "But it is always case by case." Pierceson added that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which passed Congress with bipartisan support, is another example of the federal government making a law affecting the definition of marriage. The law, which the court struck down in 2013, defined marriage as one man and one woman for federal purposes, such as tax provisions that take marital status into account. Marriage isn’t the only place where states make their own laws and then the Supreme Court can overturn them if they’re unconstitutional, said Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. For example, states run their own elementary education systems, but they cannot segregate their public schools because that would be unconstitutional. "You can argue about whether (the same-sex marriage decision) has a firm basis in the Constitution," Roosevelt said. "But it's not out of the ordinary just because it's a constitutional limit on state marriage laws." Rubio’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Our ruling Rubio said, "States have always defined marriage." Rubio has a point that states are generally in charge of administering marriage within their boundaries. However, his statement implies that state marriage regulations were untouched by the federal government up until the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage, and that is not the case. There are numerous 20th century examples of the Supreme Court overturning state marriage regulations that it found to be unconstitutional, including the 1967 decision to invalidate laws banning interracial marriages. We rate Rubio’s claim Half True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2015-12-13T17:02:27	2015-12-13	['None']
-tron-02701	Video Shows What Happens When Lightning Strikes a River	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/lightning-strikes-river/	None	natural-disasters	None	None	['lightning', 'weather', 'youtube']	Video Shows What Happens When Lightning Strikes a River	Aug 3, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02939	Ben Carson on Muslims Email: Can a Muslim Be a Good American	incorrect attribution!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ben-carson-muslims-email/	None	politics	None	None	['gop', 'islam', 'patriotism']	Ben Carson on Muslims Email: Can a Muslim Be a Good American	Feb 10, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-05497	President Obama achieved the lowest IQ score among all U.S. presidents of the last 100 years.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-iq-test/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	FALSE: President Obama Scores 102 on IQ Test, Lowest in Presidential History	13 December 2015	None	['United_States', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-09971	Obama's "first call (as president) to any head of state was to Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Fatah party in the Palestinian territory."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/may/08/chain-email/one-obamas-first-calls-was-palestinian-leader-and-/	A recent chain e-mail claiming President Barack Obama directed $20.3 million to allow "hundreds of thousands of 'Hamas' Palestinians to resettle in the United States" (which we found was Pants on Fire wrong) includes a common refrain of chain e-mails that Obama is a Muslim (one we've checked before and found was False), plus a new twist. It said that after Obama's inauguration, "His first call to any head of state, as president, was to Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Fatah party in the Palestinian territory." We checked the accounts of Obama's first day and found some truth to the claim. According to a statement from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, on the morning of Obama's first full day in office, Jan. 21, 2009, the president placed brief phone calls to four Middle Eastern leaders — Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Jordan's King Abdullah and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "He used this opportunity on his first day in office to communicate his commitment to active engagement in pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace from the beginning of his term, and to express his hope for their continued cooperation and leadership," Gibbs said in the statement. "In the aftermath of the Gaza conflict, he emphasized his determination to work to help consolidate the ceasefire by establishing an effective anti-smuggling regime to prevent Hamas from rearming, and facilitating in partnership with the Palestinian Authority a major reconstruction effort for Palestinians in Gaza. He pledged that the United States would do its part to make these efforts successful, working closely with the international community and these partners as they fulfill their responsibilities as well. The President appreciated the spirit of partnership and warm nature of these calls." Palestinian officials on the West Bank bragged that Obama called Abbas first. According to a story in Agence France Presse on Jan. 21, 2009, Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina quoted Obama as saying, "This is my first phone call to a foreign leader and I'm making it only hours after I took office." The spokesman said Obama vowed "to work with him (Abbas) as partners to establish a durable peace in the region" and that he (Obama) "would deploy every possible effort to achieve peace as quickly as possible." The New York Daily News wrote a story about the slippery diplomatic slope that comes along with things as small as who got called first. The story quotes a spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington as saying his government had "no idea" who Obama called first; and that the White House was mum on the issue. We also got no response from the White House on the matter. But we think the issue of who got called minutes before someone else is irrelevant. The point is that Obama's first calls were to leaders of this region — all of them. The e-mail may be right that Obama called Abbas first. At the very least, Abbas was among the very first. But consider the context in which the statement was made, to back up the suggestion that Obama is actually a Muslim. Assuming Obama did call Abbas first — and again, we can't confirm that — we do know that one of his very next calls was to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The e-mail conveniently leaves that detail out. Here at PolitiFact, we define a Half True statement as one that is accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We think this claim fits the bill. Half True.	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2009-05-08T16:43:32	2009-05-02	['Mahmoud_Abbas', 'Fatah', 'Barack_Obama']
-snes-01055	While in college, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was in a rock band whose lyrics and album titles championed the use of marijuana.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jeff-sessions-marijuana-rock-band/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Jeff Sessions Praise Marijuana in a College Rock Band?	7 February 2018	None	['Jeff_Sessions']
-goop-01412	Kim Kardashian “Reached Her Limit” With Kanye West?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-kanye-west-limit-split/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian “Reached Her Limit” With Kanye West?	5:12 pm, March 10, 2018	None	['Kim_Kardashian']
-pomt-06768	Providence's port is "200 miles closer to Europe than any other Eastern port."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2011/aug/21/james-bennett/incoming-economic-development-director-says-provid/	Rhode Island has a lot going for it. Really. But we never knew we were so close, in terms of geography, to Europe. Our proximity was highlighted by the newly named economic development director for Providence, James Bennett, who was hired to give some direction to economic growth in the capital city. During a news conference announcing his appointment, he pointed to one advantage the city -- specifically its port -- has over its competitors. "Providence has got a number of assets. . . . The port [is] 200 miles closer to Europe than any other Eastern port," he said. "We need to, I think, focus on turning that into an economic engine." The statement sent us scrambling for our maps. We're not cartographers, but it seemed to us that Boston is a bit east of Providence. And what about ports in Maine or New Hampshire? We got a list of ports from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Next we tracked down the westernmost part of Europe. Lisbon, Portugal, seemed to be the best candidate. Actually, it’s Cabo da Roca, about 26 miles west of Lisbon. But because of Earth's curvature, that's not the closest point to New England. Dublin, on Ireland’s eastern coast, is 171 miles closer to Providence than Cabo da Roca. Ireland’s western coast is even closer. So we turned to Google Maps, and asked for the distance, as the crow flies, to Dublin (to pick a relative landmark). Here's the result: From Providence: 3,030 miles (and a very tired crow) From Boston: 2,993 miles (37 miles closer than Providence) From Portsmouth, N.H.: 2,950 miles (80 miles closer) From Portland, Maine: 2,906 miles (124 miles closer) When we contacted Bennett, he promised to call us back in five minutes. Four minutes later, we got a call instead from the spokesman for Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, David Ortiz, saying he would handle the question. A day later, Ortiz wrote us to say Bennett "regrets the narrow error of fact." "Mr. Bennett misspoke; he picked up the incorrect information about the Port of Providence’s geographic proximity to Europe in a recent conversation about the port’s assets, competitive advantages and potential to compete with other major Eastern commercial ports for the European market," Ortiz said. In short, Bennett said Providence's port is 200 miles closer to Europe than any other port on the East Coast. The only way that's true is if you ignore the ports in every coastal state north of us. It's not even true when you consider the major port facilities in New York, which are about 155 miles to our west, not 200. So, whether you're looking east or looking west, Bennett's statement is plain wrong. His spokesman may call it a "narrow error of fact," but we hope that when he gives a pitch to a developer in his new role, he avoids such errors, narrow or otherwise. Our compass, the Truth-O-Meter, points to False. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	James Bennett	None	None	None	2011-08-21T00:01:00	2011-08-15	['Europe']
-snes-03104	A highway sign in Maryland told drivers to "Consider Canada" due to inauguration traffic.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/highway-sign-consider-canada/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Highway Sign Urged Drivers to ‘Consider Canada’ Due to Inauguration Traffic?	20 January 2017	None	['Canada', 'Maryland']
-snes-05472	A December 2015 school shooting in Arapahoe County, Colorado, was circumvented by an armed school resource officer.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/arapahoe-school-shooting-stopped-armed-sro/	None	Guns	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Was the Arapahoe School Shooting Stopped by an Armed School Official?	18 December 2015	None	['Colorado']
-pomt-05513	"Together we added more jobs than any other area" while I was Dane County executive.	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2012/apr/13/kathleen-falk/democrat-kathleen-falk-says-under-her-leadership-d/	Democrat Kathleen Falk’s rejoinder to criticism that unemployment tripled during her time as Dane County executive is that she helped create thousands of new jobs. She fleshed out her boast in a campaign TV ad in advance of the May 8, 2012 recall primary. The Democratic winner will face Republican Gov. Scott Walker opponent in the June 5, 2012 recall election. Talking directly into the camera about honesty and transparency and her governing style, Falk says: "For 14 years I’ve brought people together to solve tough problems. Together we added more jobs than any other area, while holding taxes down. That’s the Wisconsin way, and that’s the governor I’ll be." In an earlier item we found the Dane County unemployment rate -- though it was notably low among the state’s counties -- tripled during her tenure, as the Republican Governors Association claimed. But it was not all due to her policies. (A new Walker campaign ad against Falk hammers on the same unemployment figures). But if unemployment tripled, could Dane County have really posted the best record in the state on creating jobs? In the ad, Falk does not specify what types of jobs, but we’ll examine private and public sector ones from March 1997 to April 2011, Falk’s tenure as executive. We’ll compare it to other counties and to metropolitan areas, since she used "other areas" as her measuring stick. If you look at the raw change in jobs numbers for Wisconsin counties in that period, Dane County -- home to fast-growing Madison -- did add "more jobs than any other area." The net gain of all jobs was 48,000 jobs, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Of course, Dane County is home to much of state government and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Even if you take out public-sector jobs, Dane County led the way with 34,000 new jobs. Meanwhile, Milwaukee County ranked last, losing 43,000 jobs of all types. For part of that time, Falk’s top Democratic rival in the recall, Tom Barrett, was mayor of Milwaukee (2004 to present). And Walker was Milwaukee County executive (2002-10). When we looked at the broader metro areas analyzed by the Bureau of labor Statistics, the Dane County area -- a three-county "metropolitan statistical area" defined by the federal government -- ranked #1 in private job growth and all job growth. What about as a percentage growth? Falk didn’t say "fastest growing," but the county still fares well by that measure. Dane saw 19 percent growth, ranking 10th out of 72 counties, and tops among the counties over with more than 100,000 residents. Of course, jobs are measured differently than unemployment. And in this case, the seeming contradiction -- more unemployment amid more jobs -- can be explained largely by the workforce growing faster than those jobs were created. So Falk is on target on jobs added. But just as in our evaluations on job loss and relative blame, there is more than the statistical side to the claim. Falk credited herself and the efforts to pull people together as the reason for the growth. Is that alone responsible? Of course not. When we rated Half True a Republican Governors Association claim concerning unemployment under Barrett, we noted mayors have some role on job creation programs but that state and national economic trends influence local employment trends to a far greater extent. The same holds true of Falk, who ran a county. In the Half True rating on a similar claim by the RGA on unemployment tripling under her watch, we felt that assigned too much blame to her. The converse is true here; Falk takes too much credit. Her campaign argues Falk deserves credit on job creation because she got federal dollars for infrastructure and community development, created a foreign trade zone to aid export-import opportunities and supported an early childhood program that helps working parents enter the workforce, among other initiatives. We haven’t examined the details of each of those moves, but even if Falk deserves sole credit for all of them, they are certainly not the main drivers of job numbers. In sum, Falk correctly brags about Dane County’s standout record on job creation during her tenure, but exaggerates her role in the trend. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Kathleen Falk	None	None	None	2012-04-13T08:00:00	2012-04-09	['None']
-tron-01080	Charles Manson Found Dead at 80	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/charles-manson-found-dead-at-80/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Charles Manson Found Dead at 80	Sep 15, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-00460	Video of Hypnotized Bunny Taking a Shower	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/rabbit-hypnosis/	None	animals	None	None	None	Video of Hypnotized Bunny Taking a Shower	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pose-01000	Will "pass meaningful tort reform to lower healthcare costs and allow doctors to stop practicing defensive medicine."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/tennessee/promises/haslam-o-meter/promise/1068/pass-meaningful-tort-reform-to-limit-malpractice/	None	haslam-o-meter	Bill Haslam	None	None	Pass "meaningful tort reform" to limit malpractice suits	2012-01-18T15:26:36	None	['None']
-snes-03245	The government of Thailand issued a warning about canned food contaminated with HIV.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hiv-in-canned-food-warning/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Warning Issued by Thailand About HIV in Canned Food?	29 December 2016	None	['Thailand']
-vogo-00090	Statement: “The existing blue line today is probably one of the best light rail lines in the entire country,” said Gary Gallegos, executive director of SANDAG, in a July 17 interview with Voice of San Diego.	determination: mostly true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-one-of-the-best-light-rail-lines-in-the-country/	Analysis: It’s not often that people say nice things about San Diego public transportation.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: 'One of the Best Light Rail Lines' In the Country	August 1, 2013	None	['None']
-tron-02141	Antifa Manual Found at The Evergreen State College Campus	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/antifa-manual-found-evergreen-college/	None	internet	None	None	['alt-right', 'antifa', 'protests']	Antifa Manual Found at The Evergreen State College Campus	Aug 31, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04162	A high school boy was shot by a police officer who mistook his saxophone for a gun.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/police-saxophone-machine-gun/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Was a High School Teen Shot After Police Mistook a Saxophone for a Machine Gun?	27 August 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-08012	"Saturday's shootings reflect a disturbing trend. Mass shootings have become commonplace since the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007. There have been dozens of incidents where three or more people have been fatally wounded. Hundreds have died."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jan/11/pierre-thomas/week-report-says-hundreds-have-died-multiple-victi/	On Jan 9, 2011, ABC News' This Week with Christiane Amanpour aired a special edition from Tucson, Ariz., the site of a bloody attack on a public meeting called by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., that left at least six dead, including a federal judge, an aide to Giffords and a nine-year-old girl. Another 14 were wounded, including Giffords, who is in critical condition after being shot through the head. A local 22-year-old, Jared Lee Loughner, has been charged. In a report, ABC News senior justice correspondent Pierre Thomas tried to put the attack into context. "Saturday's shootings reflect a disturbing trend," Thomas said. "Mass shootings have become commonplace since the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007," in which a single gunman killed 32 and wounded many more. "There have been dozens of incidents where three or more people have been fatally wounded. Hundreds have died." We wondered if mass shootings have indeed been that common in recent years. We looked through some of the major criminal-justice statistical sources, including the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Study, but initially we failed to find any published statistics on mass shootings. We eventually reached James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, who said he had worked on his own with raw FBI statistics over many years and had the numbers to put the claim to the test. For the years relevant to Thomas' statement, here are the number of incidents in the United States in which four or more died in shooting incidents, according to Fox's calculations. (Criminologists told us that the usual cut-off in these type of statistical studies is four victims rather than three.) • 2007: 23 • 2008: 29 • 2009: 27 So, with a three-year total of 79 such incidents, it's clear that describing it as "dozens of incidents" is accurate. And the number of incidents with at least three victims would be even higher -- perhaps as many as five times as high. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 0.12 percent of homicides in 2005 involved four victims while 0.60 percent of homicides involved three victims. If those ratios remain more or less constant over time, then there are about five times as many three-victim homicides as four-victim homicides. Now, what about the suggestion that "hundreds" of people die in such incidents? That, too, appears to be accurate. Using just the baseline of four dead per incident, the numbers killed in mass shootings in 2007, 2008 and 2009, would be 316, according to Fox's tabulations. If the threshold is raised to shootings involving three victims, the death toll could be roughly 1,600. So these facts are correct. However, Thomas' statement lacks some important context. First, Thomas suggested that there was a "disturbing trend," which we interpret to mean a steady increase. But if you look at Thomas' three-year period, the number did rise from 23 to 29 between 2007 and 2008, then fell from 29 to 27 from 2008 to 2009. That's not a trend; it's more like what the experts call "statistical noise." While Thomas didn't refer to trends over a longer period than just three years, the numbers for the longer term are murky as well. To more easily analyze Fox's data -- which goes back to 1976 -- we averaged the number of incidents for each five-year period (or, in the case of 2006 to 2009, a four-year period). Here are the results: • 1976-1980: 20.6 incidents annually • 1981-1985: 16.8 • 1986-1990: 18.2 • 1991-1995: 23.0 • 1996-2000: 20.0 • 2001-2005: 21.0 • 2006-2009: 25.5 The numbers do show a rise over the final three periods, but over the course of 34 years, the trendline shows peaks and valleys. Viewed over 34 years, the direction is not exactly clear. "It would be misleading to suggest that there was some long-term upward trend in mass shootings since 1976," said Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University. "The exact number are highly unstable, but ignoring small, year-to-year fluctuations, there was no trend one way or the other from 1976 to 2009. Further, if these figures were computed on a per-capita basis, taking into account population increases, the long-term trend in the rate would be downward." Second, Thomas used the word "commonplace" to describe multiple-victim homicides. "Commonplace" is a subjective term, and clearly, even a single multiple homicide is a tragedy. However, the term "commonplace" seems a bit too strong in this context. As mentioned earlier, the Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers showed that in 2005, 0.60 percent of all homicide incidents involved 3 victims, and 0.12 percent -- or one of every 1,000 homicides -- involved four victims. Despite the heartache involved, those are, in the big picture, pretty modest numbers. "Murders are not 'commonplace' in the first place, and mass killings are even less common," said Christine E. Rasche, an emeritus criminologist at the University of North Florida. "We are more likely to hear about them today because of a much more ubiquitous media which quickly brings us news from all over the world. In the past, we were more likely to hear only about local events." So let's recap. Thomas was correct to say that "there have been dozens of incidents where three or more people have been fatally wounded," and he was also correct that "hundreds have died" in such incidents. But its a stretch to say that killings of three or more people are now "commonplace," and it's not clear that there's been a distinct trend upward, either since 2007 (as Thomas put it) or over the past three decades. So we rate his statement Half True.	None	Pierre Thomas	None	None	None	2011-01-11T09:00:06	2011-01-09	['None']
-pomt-08155	Says the CBO estimates that fully extending the Bush tax cuts would add 600,000-1.4 million jobs in 2011 and 900,000-2.7 million jobs in 2012.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/dec/03/national-association-manufacturers/national-association-manufacturers-cites-cbo-suppo/	The National Association of Manufacturers says fully extending the Bush tax cuts will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. On Dec. 2, 2010, the business group issued a statement to show its support for extending all the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire on Jan. 1. Jay Timmons, the group's executive vice president, said that "manufacturers strongly support extending the 2001 and 2003 tax rates for all taxpayers. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, fully extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would add between 600,000 and 1.4 million jobs in 2011 and between 900,000 and 2.7 million jobs in 2012." We wondered whether the CBO, an independent group that estimates the cost and impact of legislation, really found that a full extension of the tax cuts would be such a job-creating engine. So we tracked down the original CBO analysis. The estimates come from written testimony by CBO director Douglas W. Elmendorf before the Senate Budget Committee on Sept. 28, 2010. Strictly speaking, the trade group has reported the numbers correctly. For 2011, the CBO did indeed estimate that full extension of the tax cuts on a permanent basis would create 600,000 to 1.4 million jobs, plus an addiional 900,000 to 2.7 million jobs in 2012. However, a couple of caveats are in order. What are the alternative scenarios? The way the group phrased its statement, you might think that the only alternative to its preferred option would be to let all the tax cuts expire. But the CBO ran the numbers under three other options -- a permanent partial extension (that is, a permanent cut for all but the wealthiest taxpayers, as Obama and many congressional Democrats favor) as well as a two-year extension for all taxpayers and a two-year extension for all but the wealthiest taxpayers. The option favored by the manufacturers and most Republicans -- full, permanent extension -- does produce the most jobs. But the Democratic option isn't far behind. In 2011, the permanent partial extension sought by Democrats would generate between 500,000 and 1.2 million jobs, which is about 100,000 to 200,000 fewer jobs (or 14 to 17 percent less) than the Republican option would generate. The picture is similar for 2012. Meanwhile, both of the options for a temporary extension -- for all taxpayers, or for all but the wealthiest -- would produce fewer jobs than either of the previous two options, according to CBO. Based on these estimates, you might say that the CBO data points to the GOP option as clearly the best, since it creates more jobs than any of the other alternatives. But it's more complicated than that. This brings us to the second bit of missing context. What happens after 2012? CBO found that the economic benefits from a permanent repeal for all taxpayers are higher in the first two years, but that policy comes with troublesome side effects after that. In his testimony, Elmendorf argued that without other tax hikes or deep spending cuts, a permanent extension of the tax cuts would balloon the deficit to unsustainable levels. That's especially true if Congress extends the tax cuts for all tax brackets. "A permanent extension of all of those tax cuts without future increases in taxes or reductions in federal spending would roughly double the projected budget deficit in 2020; a permanent extension of those cuts except for certain provisions that would apply only to high-income taxpayers would increase the budget deficit by roughly three-quarters to four-fifths as much," Elmendorf testified. "As a result, if policymakers then wanted to balance the budget in 2020, the required increases in taxes or reductions in spending would amount to a substantial share of the budget—and without significant changes of that sort, federal debt would be on an unsustainable path that would ultimately reduce income. ... Compared with the options examined here for extending the expiring tax cuts, various other options for temporarily reducing taxes or increasing government spending would provide a bigger boost to the economy per dollar of cost to the federal government." When we contacted the NAM, Erin Streeter, the vice president for communications, said, "With an unemployment rate that remains historically high, today’s number edging up to 9.8 percent, we believe the best way forward is job creation. The more jobs we can create, the more economic growth we will see across the nation." But she didn't push back on the substance of our analysis. So NAM is accurately quoting the numbers on the Republican alternative but conveniently leaving out the detail that the Democratic alternative is nearly as good at creating jobs. It also ignores the CBO's conclusion that extending the tax breaks for upper-income Americans offers diminishing returns. On balance, we rate the statement Half True.	None	National Association of Manufacturers	None	None	None	2010-12-03T14:21:47	2010-12-02	['Congressional_Budget_Office', 'George_W._Bush']
-tron-03009	Michael Savage Sabotaged for Covering Hillary Clinton’s Health	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/michael-savage-sabotaged-covering-hillary-clintons-health/	None	politics	None	None	['2016 election', 'donald trump', 'hillary clinton', 'liberal agenda', 'media']	Michael Savage Sabotaged for Covering Hillary Clinton’s Health	Sep 28, 2016	None	['None']
-goop-02177	Alex Rodriguez Wants Jennifer Lopez To Hang Out Less With Leah Remini?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/alex-rodriguez-wants-jennifer-lopez-stop-hanging-out-leah-remini/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Alex Rodriguez Wants Jennifer Lopez To Hang Out Less With Leah Remini?	10:57 am, November 19, 2017	None	['Alex_Rodriguez']
-pomt-08648	Allen West called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" and said "this country's got to get on sound footing by destroying it."	false	/florida/statements/2010/sep/15/ron-klein/klein-says-west-called-social-security-ponzi-schem/	What do you get when you mix a Democratic congressman facing a tough re-election battle, an outspoken Republican challenger famous for his rhetoric, and an NPR transcript of an interview with a journalist who recently found himself facing some heat for e-mail comments about conservatives? Those are the ingredients for a disputed TV ad. Here are the details: Allen West, the Republican challenging Democratic Rep. Ron Klein in District 22, is known for his unique and often controversial soundbites. As Klein faces West for the second time in two years in the closely Democratic-Republican split South Florida district, he is trying to use West's words against him by portraying him as extreme. In a Sept. 13, 2010, Klein TV ad, the announcer says: "Allen West has extreme politcal views,'' and then quotes West speaking to a crowd saying: "I'm just honored to be here today with all of my fellow right wing extremists." (The ad doesn't state the location of that speech but the Klein campaign said it was from this July 2009 Broward County tea party event seen on YouTube.) The announcer then continues: "Allen West called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. He said this country has got to get on sound footing by destroying it. And West said that Medicare can be cut. Those aren't our values. Allen West. Too extreme for South Florida." The text on the TV screen reads slightly differently in part from the voiceover: "Allen West called Social Security a 'Ponzi scheme.' Allen West: said Social Security should be destroyed." The text on the screen states that the source of those statements is NPR on Feb. 23, 2010. In this Truth-O-Meter we wanted to explore: Did West call Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" and say "this country has got to get on sound footing by destroying it?" The district, which spans Broward and Palm Beach counties, has a heavy concentration of retirees so Social Security is a hot-button issue. First we turned to the Klein campaign to ask for their documentation for the ad. Spokesperson Melissa Silverman e-mailed us a transcript of a Feb. 23 NPR interview between NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross and David Weigel, then a reporter for the Washington Independent, an online news publication. The name of the Fresh Air episode was "CPAC, the Tea Party and the Remaking of the Right." Weigel had attended both the Conservative Political Action Conference that had been held about a week before in Washington, D.C., and the National Tea Party Convention, which was held about one month prior to his NPR interview. Around minute 23 of the program, Gross asked: "So is this a fair statement to make, that a lot of the Tea Partiers not only believe that taxes should be cut but that a lot of the programs that taxes pay for should be extremely cut or maybe even abolished, including Social Security and Medicaid, Medicare? " Here was Weigel's response: "That's absolutely true. And they'll put in some caveats about programs that people have paid into for a long time. But, you know, I talked to Allen West, who's kind of the perfect Tea Party candidate. He's a lieutenant - sorry - retired lieutenant colonel. He left the armed services after firing a weapon close to the head of an Iraqi prisoner and getting disciplined for it. "He ran for Congress in 2008. He talked like this and he lost. But he's running again, and he's raised more money than his opponent -- Congressman Ron Klein. And I talked to him at CPAC. He got on the CPAC bill and he said, yes, Social Security's a Ponzi scheme, it's the biggest Ponzi scheme, but I'm not going to get rid of it right away but I, you know, hint-hint, eventually this country's got to get on sound footing by destroying it." We tracked down Weigel and asked him about his comments about West on NPR. Weigel quit his job blogging for the Washington Post this summer after e-mails he wrote critical of conservatives surfaced. He now works for Slate, an online magazine owned by The Washington Post Company. Weigel said he had spoken to West on various occasions in the past -- including at CPAC but also over the telephone. Weigel said he wasn't positive when and where he interviewed West about Social Security and said he doesn't believe he ever wrote an article or blog about West's comments on Social Security. When Weigel spotted the ad, he said he called the Klein campaign to ask for their source of evidence. The answer: the transcript of his interview on NPR. "I'm really confused as to why the campaign would do this," Weigel said. "I think it's an interesting thing to pull to start looking for something. It's weird to quote a reporter's take on a conversation he had and portray it as a quote from the candidate." Weigel said his full statement about West wasn't a direct quote. "I remember 'Ponzi scheme' because that is not a word everyone uses,'' he said. "It's a word a lot of Republicans use. I was explaining what the conversation (with West) was about. I wasn't saying 'here was a direct quote about that guy.' To grab those two things and say those are quotes from him is kind of odd." Weigel said when he spoke to Silverman at Klein's campaign, she asked him if he stood by his reporting. He says he does. "The only thing I can say is I phrased it that way and everyone was fine with it in February 2010. It definitely is what Allen was thinking,'' Weigel said. However, "that's a weird thing for a campaign to do -- use a reporter paraphrasing something." Weigel said since the ad surfaced he looked through some old notes but couldn't find the Social Security conversation with West. We found at least a few articles or blogs Weigel wrote that focused on or mentioned West. Weigel wrote an Aug. 24 profile of the West-Klein race for Slate that didn't mention Social Security with the subheadline: "Florida's Allen West may be crazy, but so far this year, that hasn't hurt Republicans." On his campaign blog, West criticized Weigel who "had the delusional gall to declare me, well, crazy." Weigel also wrote a short piece Feb. 19 on terrorism issues discussed at CPAC for the Washington Independent that mentioned West and a June 23 Right Now Washington Post blog on black Republicans. Neither mentioned West's views on Social Security. We also did a Nexis search for West and Social Security during the past five years and found no articles -- other than a discussion about Klein's ad -- in which West was quoted or paraphrased as stating Social Security is a Ponzi scheme or should be destroyed. We told Silverman that Weigel said his comments during the NPR interview were not direct quotes but rather him recounting what West said. We asked if that was the campaign's only source of evidence and if they still stood by their ad and why. She wrote: "The campaign stands behind this ad. It is an accurate reflection of Allen West's dangerous and extreme views on Social Security and Medicare." We asked West's campaign manager Josh Grodin whether West called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" and made the comments about destroying it. "I don't have time to go through every video," Grodin said in an interview Sept. 14. "I think the onus is on the Klein campaign. .... I would have to go through dozens and dozens of videos." At PolitFact Florida, we agree that the onus to prove a claim is on the campaign or person making it, but we also do additional research. Grodin asked us to send him Klein's documentation, so we sent him the NPR transcript. "The Klein campaign is citing a claim by David Weigel. A guy who has lost all credibility and has no journalistic integrity whatsoever is making a claim? That's pathetic. There is nothing else to say about that." Again we asked Grodin, did West make the statements? "Has Allen ever called Social Security a Ponzi scheme? I don't know," Grodin said. "Has he ever said we need to get on the right footing by destroying it? No. That's ridiculous." So Grodin denies the remark about destroying Social Security, but the campaign isn't confirming or denying the Ponzi scheme comment On the issues section of West's website, he has a brief description about Social Security: "The critical aspect of Social Security is that we must restore it to the independent trust fund account. Once the politicians moved it to the general operating account, they used it for their pork barrel spending spree. The fact that we are creating a jobless morass in America means there are less workers paying into the system. This is another reason why we need private sector growth, which in turn creates jobs, which will replenish the Social Security fund." So how does Klein's claim stack up? The TV ad said West called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" and said "this country's got to get on sound footing by destroying it." The Klein campaign relied on one source of evidence: an NPR transcript of an interview with a reporter who now says that his description of West was a paraphrase, not a quote -- though he does remember West using the phrase "Ponzi scheme." We don't think a reporter's description of what a candidate says can stand as the sole source for an attack ad, particularly when neither the reporter nor the Klein campaign can find anything he wrote about West's comments on Social Security. We couldn't find any proof that West said it, and we find Klein's proof insufficient. We rate this claim False.	None	Ron Klein	None	None	None	2010-09-15T18:12:04	2010-09-13	['None']
-faan-00011	 “When other ministers were found to have broken the rules, they had to pay the money back.”	factscan score: true	http://factscan.ca/andrew-scheer-pay-back/	While ministers are not always legally required to pay back costs when they’re found to have contravened conflicts laws, there is an informal precedent for paying back such costs. Even public officials who were not formally found breaking the rules have reimbursed taxpayers, including for some travel costs.	None	Andrew Scheer	None	None	None	2018-03-09	ruary 6, 2018	['None']
-goop-02533	Younes Bendjima Moving In With Kourtney Kardashian?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/younes-bendjima-moving-in-kourtney-kardashian-living-together/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Younes Bendjima Moving In With Kourtney Kardashian?	12:53 pm, August 26, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-00999	A Florida gun owner voluntarily gave up his AR-57 rifle to law enforcement after the Parkland school shooting.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/florida-man-surrenders-ar57/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did a Florida Gun Owner Turn in His AR-57 After the Parkland School Shooting?	19 February 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-09697	Women pay 48 percent more for health insurance.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/nov/09/louise-slaughter/slaughter-claims-women-pay-48-percent-more-health-/	During a heated weekend debate over the House health care bill, Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York made her case for the overhaul. In part, she said she supports the bill because of how it would improve women's health care. "We will stop telling women ... that they have to pay 48 percent more for health insurance because ... it is all right to do that because women have different diseases," said Slaughter, who holds the gavel of the powerful Rules Committee, a panel that sets the parameters for House debate. "We want to have an end to that." What Slaughter is talking about is the practice of gender rating; insurance companies routinely charge women higher premiums than men of the same age and health status because, to put it simply, women go to the doctor more often. With policies purchased on the individual market, companies can deny coverage due to pre-existing conditions that are specific to women, such as being pregnant ; these are practices the House health care bill aims to end. There's plenty of evidence that women pay more for health care. For instance, according to a recent report by the Center for American Progress, women ages 19 to 64 are more likely to spend 10 percent of their income on out-of-pocket health care costs compared to men. During their child-bearing years, women are likely to pay 68 percent more on their health care than men, according to the same report. And a May 2009 study by the Commonwealth Fund found that, in 2007, 45 percent of women accrued medical debt or experienced problems with insurance bills. In short, there's little disagreement that women pay more for health care costs than men do, but do they really pay 48 percent more for insurance? We were hard pressed to find the same statistic that Slaughter mentioned on the House floor. We checked with Slaughter's office and were told that the figure had actually come from a document distributed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office about how health care reform could help women. According to Pelosi's Web site, "Women are charged up to 48 percent more than men in the individual market. ... These women pay up to 48% more in premium costs than men." Those numbers were pulled from a recent study by the National Women's Law Center, a group that supports health care reform, that looked at how much women who are 25, 40 and 55 pay for health insurance compared to men, according to Pelosi's office. The group found that women age 25 are charged between 6 and 45 percent more than men for identical insurance coverage. Women at the age of 40 face monthly premiums between 4 and 48 percent higher than men's monthly premiums. As Pelosi's brief pointed out, these numbers have to do with the individual market, meaning the consumer bears the entire cost of the plan. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that approximately 6 percent of all women buy their coverage through the individual market. The 38 percent of women with health insurance through their employer or the 25 percent of women who get insurance through a spouse presumably face much lower costs. So, while Slaughter's underlying point is correct -- that women pay more for health insurance than men do -- she failed to include some important details in her floor speech. For one, she omitted that women can pay as little as 4 percent or as much as 48 percent more in premiums, so she cherry-picked the highest number possible. Furthermore, Slaughter did not mention that these figures are only for women who buy health insurance through the individual market, which is a relatively small number of consumers compared to women who get insurance through other means. As a result, we give Slaughter a Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Louise Slaughter	None	None	None	2009-11-09T18:41:24	2009-11-07	['None']
-pomt-09440	Charges on the Republican Party of Florida credit card were made with "my money."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2010/mar/11/marco-rubio/rubio-gop-credit-card-my-money/	The story about Marco Rubio's Republican Party of Florida American Express card has devolved into a game of soundbite one-upsmanship. Questions about whether Rubio charged personal expenses on the GOP's corporate card have produced dueling remarks from the campaigns of Rubio and his primary opponent, Gov. Charlie Crist. Many have centered on whether party money was used for repairs to Rubio's family minivan and the $133.75 Rubio charged on the GOP credit card at a Miami barber shop. We decided it was time to put some of the claims to our Truth-O-Meter. Rubio appeared March 4, 2010 on Fox News with Neil Cavuto to talk about the U.S. Senate primary. Of course, his credit card bills came up. Cavuto told Rubio that Crist has suggested that the charges indicate Rubio isn't the fiscal conservative he has claimed to be. Rubio, in response, brushed the tactic off as a silly act of desperation. Cavuto pressed further. "Well, I guess, others were saying, they're not so silly when you champion a cause that you're going to cut abusive and wasteful spending when they say that you charged grocery bills or repairs of your family minivan, purchases at a wine store, you know where this is going?" Cavuto asked Rubio. "Yes, but here's what they don't tell you, it's my money," Rubio said. "It's a card that was secured under my credit and I made payments out of my own pockets directly to American Express. It's ridiculous. It's not true and it is being put in the worst possible way to divert attention from the central issues of this campaign." The issue here is whether Rubio is correct to assert to a national audience that charges on the GOP card were his money. The answer is, it's complicated. What we know Rubio was among a group of at least a half-dozen Florida lawmakers given GOP credit cards in recent years, allowing them to use party money for certain expenses. The card was intended for party business, "primarily those associated with fundraising, candidate recruitment and other activities related to electing Republicans," according to party spokeswoman Katie Betta. Using the card for personal expenses was not explicitly prohibited, but personal expenses "were expected to be paid through a reimbursement, or in some cases directly to American Express," Betta said. There was no written policy on the use of the cards, Betta said. Rubio, who had the card while he was a member of the state House leadership, used the GOP American Express to pay for both personal and party-related matters. A majority of the party-business charges are related to travel -- airfare, hotel, rental cars. Some other "party" charges, according to a Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times analysis, include: $765 at Apple's online store for "computer supplies" -- (Campaign says for a computer hard drive and software). $25.76 from Everglades Lumber for "supplies" -- (Campaign says for office supplies such as a power strip). $53.49 at Winn-Dixie in Miami for "food" -- (Campaign says for snacks, soft drinks, and other office supplies). $68.33 at Happy Wine in Miami for "beverages'' and "meal" -- (Campaign says Happy Wine also is a tapas and sandwich restaurant). $78.10 for two purchases at Farm Stores groceries in suburban Miami -- (Campaign says for snacks, soft drinks, and other office supplies). $412 at All Fusion Electronics, a music equipment store in Miami, for "supplies" -- (Campaign says the store repairs computers). Rubio and his campaign say all of the purchases paid for by the party were approved business expenses. Rubio, who also could bill the state for some travel expenses, explained his policy for dealing with the charges in a written response to the Herald and Times, the newspapers that broke the original story. "When it came to incurring expenses, I erred on the side of caution and maintained two operating principles: If it was debatable as to whether the expense was state or Party related, I tried to err on the side of saving taxpayer money by charging that expense to the Party," Rubio wrote. "If it was a question between Party expenses or personal expenses, I would err on the side of protecting Party money by paying personally for those charges. "Whenever I incurred a personal expense, I paid American Express directly," Rubio added. "I was as diligent as possible to ensure the Party did not pay for items that were unrelated to Party business." Rubio says he sent about $16,000 to American Express to cover personal expenses, but those payments were not made monthly. Rubio made no payments during one six-month stretch in 2007. The Herald/Times story also detailed purchases that the newspapers could not determine whether they were political or personal. Rubio, in many cases, was unable to provide clarification. The party, for instance, paid a $1,000 charge at Braman Honda in Miami for repairs to Rubio's family minivan in January 2008. Rubio told the newspapers that the minivan was damaged by parking attendants at a political function and that the party agreed to cover half of his insurance deductible. The party also paid more than $2,000 for him to rent a car in Miami for five weeks while the minivan was being fixed. Campaign spokesman Alex Burgos said that Rubio sent "a $500 direct payment to American Express to cover half of the $1,000 car repair." "The fact is the $16,000 in personal expenditures were paid for by Marco Rubio's money," Burgos said. "The $109,000 paid for by the party was for party business." But not everything adds up. Rubio identified to the Herald and Times at least $1,265 in personal expenses billed to the card between March and November 2008: $1,024 in charges from a Tallahassee property management company, and $241 for a flight to Las Vegas after a relative's death. During that eight-month period, however, Rubio repaid only $982 toward the credit card, records show. Rubio's campaign would not provide a list of all the personal expenses he repaid. Rubio's campaign said he attempted to pay his personal expenses as soon as possible, but sometimes had trouble getting statements to examine from Republican Party officials. Corporate card skinny A key element to deciding whether it was Rubio's money, as he claims, is to know how the American Express corporate card works. Molly Faust, a spokeswoman for American Express, declined to discuss the Republican Party of Florida account, or Rubio specifically. But she did discuss the American Express program generally. Here are some key details: While the business must authorize an employee to be included on the corporate charge account, the employee applies for the card individually. The card includes the employee's name, and has a unique account number. The card isn't a typical credit card. The bill is required to be paid in full every month. If it's not, American Express charges late fees, but not interest. (That means if Rubio didn't pay a personal expense off right away, the party would have to pay the charge, or pay late fees). While the card is designed for business use, American Express doesn't mandate business-use only as a policy. How the card is paid off is decided between the employee and the employer. Employees can send payments to American Express and be reimbursed by the company, the company can pay the bill, or some mix of contributions. Here's a critical point. If the bill isn't paid, the company is liable, Faust said, so long as the employee is following company guidelines. In that scenario, the late payments will not affect the employee's credit score, Faust said. Let's repeat that: "As long as the employee has adhered to maintaining their account and their responsibilities to the company, they are not liable," Faust said. While Faust is talking in general, that's a key distinction in addressing Rubio's claim because there was no real policy regarding the use of the cards. Under that rule, Rubio would not have been liable for any charges -- personal or business. So when Rubio says he paid back about $16,000 in personal charges, it's unclear if he had to, or if he would be penalized if he did not. His money may have never been at stake. Separating party from personal Another key to this discussion is trying to separate personal from party expenses. Take for instance the $78.10 Rubio charged at a Miami convenience store about a mile from his home. The charges were to Farm Stores, small drive-through convenience stores that sell things such as milk, beer, soda and potato chips. When asked about the charges, along with others by the Herald/Times, Rubio didn't specifically explain what he purchased at the convenience store. (Campaign spokesman Albert Martinez told PolitiFact Florida the charges were for office snacks). Whatever it was, the GOP paid for it. Not Rubio. The state party's quarterly financial report lists payments to American Express in its "expense" report. The party itemizes those charges -- though not by cardholder -- in a separate filed called "Other Distributions." If charges aren't listed there, Rubio and the RPOF say, it means he paid for it himself. That means Rubio paid for the now infamous visit to a barber shop called Churchill's on Nov. 18, 2006, for which Rubio charged $133.75. The charge -- Rubio says it was for a $20 haircut and items for a silent auction -- was not on party statements that we could find. But those statements can be difficult to interpret, because the party grouped some expenses together, rather than itemized them. Our ruling To recap, Rubio said the charges were made with "my money." There is some evidence on both sides. On one hand, Rubio is able to document that he made payments to American Express for some items that he declared to be personal. That supports his contention that it was his money. But the fact that there were purchases that appear to be personal, and were paid for by the Republican Party, undercuts his claim. And although the card was under his name, American Express says that in general -- as long as a cardholder isn't violating the rules set out by the company -- it is the company (in this case the party) that is liable for the charges. And the cardholder (in this case Rubio) won't have his credit rating affected if the bill is not paid on time. So there's little evidence that it was "his money," but more that it was really the party's. We rate his claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2010-03-11T12:19:35	2010-03-04	['None']
-pomt-05665	Says there have been "well over" 54 million abortions since 1973.	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/mar/18/chris-smith/chris-smith-says-more-54-million-abortions-have-be/	U.S. Rep. Chris Smith has garnered attention for his ardent -- and sometimes graphic -- condemnation of abortion. The Republican congressman, who represents parts of central New Jersey, took to the House floor on March 8 to denounce a new proposal: "after-birth abortion." During his speech, Smith said: "since 1973" -- when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in the Roe v. Wade case -- "well over 54 million babies have had abortion forced upon them." Now, he said, this "perverse proposal" for "after-birth abortion," or killing a newborn in all cases where abortion is permissible, has emerged. PolitiFact New Jersey will leave others to debate "after-birth abortion." We decided to look only at Smith’s claim about the number of abortions. First, let’s note that some abortion rights supporters contest using words such as babies and children in describing unborn fetuses. Jeff Sagnip, Smith’s public policy director, dismissed that argument, saying "to object to the use of the term ‘babies’ in this context is out of step with common use." And it’s clear Smith was referencing the number of abortions since 1973, so that’s what we are fact-checking here. Sagnip referred us to a report from the National Right to Life Committee, a group that opposes abortion, that claims there have been more than 54.5 million abortions through 2011. The committee’s total is based on data collected by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that advocates on issues of sexual and reproductive health. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also collect data on abortions, but states aren’t required to report to the federal agency so the numbers are incomplete in some years. And people on both sides of the abortion debate largely consider the Guttmacher Institute the authority for this type of data. The institute has tracked roughly 49.3 million abortions through 2008 from surveys of abortion providers. The National Right to Life Committee estimates the total through 2011 by assuming the number of abortions in 2008 -- about 1.2 million -- stayed the same. That puts the total near 53 million, a reasonable estimate, according to a spokeswoman for the Guttmacher Institute. But the committee also adds 3 percent for a possible under-reporting rate, which pushes the total above 54 million. The Guttmacher Institute found its 1992 survey overlooked some small providers and suggested that the number of abortions was actually between 3 percent and 4 percent more than reported. In its most recent report, the institute said: "undercounting has likely become more pronounced over the last decade" because of early medication abortions at facilities that don’t offer surgical abortions. Spokeswoman Rebecca Wind said the Guttmacher Institute "acknowledges the potential underreporting in our abortion reporting, but we do not adjust the figures to account for underreporting. Rather, we report the actual number of abortions that are reported to us, so we are confident in this figure. We then acknowledge the level of potential underreporting in the reporting of those data." Our ruling Smith said that since 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, there’s been "well over" 54 million abortions. The Guttmacher Institute has tracked roughly 49.3 million abortions through 2008. If the recent trend of about 1.2 million abortions per year holds true through 2011, it’s reasonable to assume the total is now close to 53 million. Even by that figure, Smith is close. The Guttmacher Institute acknowledges the potential for underreporting in its data, but does not adjust its figures. The statistic Smith cites relies entirely on the Guttmacher Institute data, except it adds 3 percent to adjust for the potential underreporting -- a calculation the institute doesn’t support. Either way, both totals through 2011 are subject to projections and estimates, and for that reason we rate this claim Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Chris Smith	None	None	None	2012-03-18T07:30:00	2012-03-08	['None']
-pomt-10520	"I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/mar/10/hillary-clinton/a-small-but-significant-role/	Asked what makes her qualified to deal with a 3 a.m. phone call about a foreign crisis, Sen. Hillary Clinton has been citing her work as first lady on issues involving Northern Ireland, China and Kosovo. In an interview on CNN's American Morning on March 5, 2008, Clinton said, "I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland. I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo. I've been standing up against ... the Chinese government over women's rights and standing up for human rights." We'll deal with the Kosovo and China claims separately. Here, we address Clinton's claim about Northern Ireland. Her involvement came when she was first lady. The Clinton administration got involved in the Northern Ireland peace process at the urging of a group of Irish-Americans who believed the United States could help settle the long dispute between Catholics and Protestants. The key U.S. player in the process was George Mitchell, a former U.S. senator from Maine who chaired the peace negotiations. While Mitchell and others handled the direct diplomacy of the peace talks, Clinton focused on women and community leaders in Northern Ireland, according to Mitchell and others involved. She made several trips to Ireland and met with women and community leaders and continued conversations with them after she returned to the United States. She is perhaps best known in Northern Ireland for an Oct. 31, 1997, speech at the University of Ulster in Belfast in which she brought back a teapot that had been given to her in a previous visit. "I don't know whether a Catholic or a Protestant made this teapot. I don't know whether a Catholic or a Protestant sold this teapot. I only know that this teapot serves me very well," Clinton said. "And this teapot stands for all those conversations around those thousands of kitchen tables where mothers and fathers look at one another with despair because they cannot imagine that the future will be any better for their children. But this teapot also is on the kitchen table where mothers and fathers look at one another and say, we have to do better. We cannot permit this to go on. We have to take a stand for our children." But overall, how involved was she? Consider the evidence: • David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland who shared a Nobel Peace Prize for the settlement, last week told the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, that Clinton's claim was "a wee bit silly." He said, "I don't want to rain on the thing for her, but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player." • The Clinton campaign issued a statement quoting John Hume, the leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party who shared the Nobel with Trimble, saying "she played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland. ... She visited Northern Ireland, met with very many people and gave very decisive support to the peace. ... In private she made countless calls and contacts, speaking to leaders and opinionmakers on all sides, urging them to keep moving forward." • Clinton didn't get much attention at the time. When Mitchell was interviewed on ABC's This Week shortly after the Good Friday Settlement in April 1998, he had effusive praise for President Clinton but did not mention Hillary Clinton. In his book Making Peace, Mitchell mentioned Hillary Clinton only in passing and he did not mention her in his speech when he was given a United Nations Peace Prize in 1998. Interviewed this week by PolitiFact, Mitchell said Hillary Clinton did not take part in the actual talks but that she was "quite helpful in the process. ... She was quite active in encouraging women in Northern Ireland to get involved and stay involved in the peace process." • Inez McCormack, an Irish labor leader, said Clinton played an important role building grass-roots support for the peace process. She said Clinton also was influential in making sure the peace accords included provisions guaranteeing equality based on gender, religion and sexual orientation. "She understood that you had to tackle inequality if you were going to make the peace," McCormack said in an interview. Clinton raised the visibility for issues of equality, which helped them get more support, McCormack said. • Stephen Farry, a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, said it's important to put the Clinton administration's efforts in perspective. "It is an exaggeration to say that the administration brokered the agreement. ... Most of the heavy lifting to reach the Good Friday Agreement was provided by the British and Irish governments," Farry said in an e-mail to PolitiFact. He said Hillary Clinton "did not, to my knowledge, have any direct role with the key players in the negotiations. She did play a positive role in engaging with civil society in Northern Ireland, and building on work that was already in progress. This would have assisted with the general atmospherics." * In her memoir Living History, Clinton recounts her teapot speech and several other anecdotes about her visits to Ireland and Northern Ireland, but there's little in the book to indicate that she played a key role. Clinton claimed that she "helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland." That's the kind of thing that Mitchell, Hume or Trimble could accurately say. But based on our interviews and research, it's a stretch for Clinton to say so. Although she played a role, especially with women in Northern Ireland, her statement leaves the impression that she was more involved than she was. We find her statement to be Half True.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2008-03-10T00:00:00	2008-03-05	['Northern_Ireland']
-pomt-00606	"Today in America, 70 percent of us are earning the same or less than we were 12 years ago, and this is the first time that that has happened this side of World War II."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/02/martin-omalley/martin-omalley-says-70-us-are-earning-same-or-less/	Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore, threw himself into the Democratic presidential contest on May 30, 2015. He begins the race well behind frontrunner Hillary Clinton, but in his announcement speech, he hit some populist notes that sought to separate himself from the political and economic status quo. "Today in America," he said, "70 percent of us are earning the same or less than we were 12 years ago, and this is the first time that that has happened this side of World War II. Today in America, family-owned businesses and farms are struggling to compete with ever larger concentrations of corporate power. … The American dream seems for so many of us to be hanging by a thread." We wondered whether it was true that "70 percent of us are earning the same or less than we were 12 years ago," and if that’s happening for the first time since World War II. When we checked with O’Malley’s staff, they initially pointed to data from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. The group looked at the increase or decrease for hourly wages by percentile. That is, it grouped all wage earners into 10 equal categories -- the bottom 10 percent of earners, the next 10 percent, and so on. Using that data, it’s possible to calculate the percentage increase or decrease in adjusted wages over a given 12-year period. If you look at the EPI data from 2002 to 2014, then each grouping up to and including the 70th percentile saw its inflation-adjusted income decline. That supports the first part of O’Malley’s claim. The second part of his claim -- that "this is the first time that that has happened this side of World War II" -- is less clear. EPI sent us data going as far back as 1973, and just using that more limited data period, we found two separate 12-year periods during which the bottom 70 percentile groups all lost ground or saw no change -- from 1973 to 1985, and from 1979 to 1991. So, using the EPI data set at least, it’s not unprecedented since World War II for the bottom 70 percent to see incomes universally flat or declining. The O’Malley campaign also pointed to raw data from the Census Bureau. This data breaks the income spectrum into five categories (rather than 10, as EPI did) and it begins in 1947 and runs through 2013. This data set supports O’Malley’s general point: For only three 12-year periods does the bottom 80 percent of the income scale experience a decline or no change in inflation-adjusted income, and they’re the three most recent periods. Those are 1999 to 2011, 2000 to 2012, and 2001 to 2013. However, this data set does not appear to be the source of O’Malley’s original "70 percent" claim, since the Census Bureau didn’t break down the data to the 70th percentile level, only to the 60th or the 80th percentile. One additional note: O’Malley hasn’t described the data in the most accurate way. Saying that "70 percent of us are earning the same or less than we were 12 years ago" suggests that the data looks at whether specific individuals have seen their wages go up or down. This is known as "longitudinal data," and such data exists (though, due to the complexity of tracking individuals for years on end, it tends to be more limited). Why does this matter? From one year to the next, it’s common for people to jump around from one percentile group to another. The EPI data and the census data miss the income changes these people experience -- the data doesn’t show how specific individuals did over time, but rather how entire percentile groups did from year to year. As a result, we simply don’t know how specific individuals saw their income rise or fall over that period. Maybe this would push O’Malley’s figure higher or lower; the important thing is, we simply don’t know. Our ruling O’Malley said that "today in America, 70 percent of us are earning the same or less than we were 12 years ago, and this is the first time that that has happened this side of World War II." His overall point is valid -- wages did go down or stay the same for the bottom 70 percent between 2002 and 2014. However, using the same data set that makes this part correct, there are at least two earlier 12-year periods that show the same pattern going back to 1973. This undercuts O’Malley’s claim that this is unprecedented going back to World War II. On balance, we rate the claim Half True.	None	Martin O'Malley	None	None	None	2015-06-02T15:50:52	2015-05-30	['United_States']
-tron-03307	Focus on Chain Letters	none	https://www.truthorfiction.com/chains/	None	promises	None	None	None	Focus on Chain Letters	Mar 16, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-03254	The life and experiences of Cindy McCain	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cindy-mccain/	None	politics	None	None	None	The life and experiences of Cindy McCain	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-04544	Says the government has "gotten the TARP money back plus a profit."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/28/bill-clinton/bill-clinton-says-tarp-turned-profit/	The financial crisis of 2008 spawned some new terminology -- "too big to fail" and the Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP, as it's more commonly known, is the $700 billion in government money set up to rescue banks such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and a host of other financial entities, big and not so big. There were dire predictions on TARP’s final cost to taxpayers. The Congressional Budget Office said it could top $350 billion. But the payback was higher than expected, which former President Bill Clinton mentioned during an interview on The Daily Show. Describing the atmosphere at the height of the financial crisis, Clinton said, "Everybody was all hands on deck and they did a lot of things, including the unpopular TARP bill to keep us from falling into a depression. By the way, you have gotten the TARP money back plus a profit." This is something the former president has said before, so we decided to see if it is correct. It isn’t. "The point about coming out ahead is wrong ," said Paul Kiel who has covered the bailout for the investigative news site ProPublica. "But TARP won’t be as much in the hole as people feared." Clinton is right only if you look just at the money that went to banks. According to the latest update from the Treasury Department, $245 billion went out the door to banks and $266 billion came back. The $21 billion gain came from dividends and gains when Washington sold the shares it held. But TARP went beyond banks. The government put $80 billion into General Motors, Chrysler and GM’s financial subsidiary, GMAC. Another $68 billion went to the insurance company, American International Group, AIG. On a much smaller scale, $5 billion has been used to help homeowners avoid defaulting on their mortgages and other housing market assistance. This is where Clinton’s statement goes off track. The government still has plenty of money tied up in GM, GMAC and AIG. Between the three, taxpayers are looking at about $57 billion outstanding. Once you account for the profit made on the banking side, TARP is $34 billion in the hole. That is a fraction, about 10 percent, of the original estimate. Where TARP ends up is of course a matter of educated guesswork, but most analysts expect the loss to decline further. In March, the Congressional Budget Office predicted the total lifetime cost would be $32 billion. Kiel thinks it could drop below $20 billion. Kiel is bullish on AIG. "It’s extremely likely that all the AIG money will come back," Kiel said, "and it could even be positive." In 2010, Congress capped the program at $475 billion. Looking ahead, the greatest uncertainty lies with the housing foreclosure program within TARP. The government has barely dipped into the $45 billion available and there’s over a year left for people to apply. Whatever is spent will not be repaid. Our ruling Former President Clinton said government got the TARP money back plus interest. That is correct for the money that went to banks. It is incorrect for TARP as a whole. The program remains about $34 billion in the red. We rate the statement Mostly False.	None	Bill Clinton	None	None	None	2012-09-28T10:42:04	2012-09-20	['None']
-pomt-12602	"Doctors who discovered cancer enzymes in vaccines all found murdered."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/apr/04/blog-posting/doctors-deaths-were-not-connected-fake-news-websit/	A fake news story tried to connect the random deaths of doctors with conspiracy theories around vaccination. Neonnettle.com posted a story headlined,"Doctors who discovered cancer enzymes in vaccines found murdered," on March 2, 2017. Facebook users flagged the story as potentially being fabricated, as part of the social media site's efforts to clear fake news from users' news feeds. The story claims that the doctors found the enzyme nagalase in vaccines, connecting nagalase to cancer, autism and diabetes. The article speculates that the doctors were murdered in order to prevent their findings from going public. We reached out to the website but got no response. Their argument is that nagalase suppresses the immune system and would therefore be bad if found in vaccines. There have been controversial studies that claim to show that the GcMAF protein, which aims at reduction of nagalase concentration in the body, could be treatment to diseases like cancer, autism, or HIV. These are all diseases where the nagalase level is supposed to be high. That theory lacks scientific evidence, though. The British government has warned against the purchase of GcMAF, since it is not licensed and its production does not adhere to production standards. Scientific journals where those theories were published have retracted them, because they are not proven. Healthnutnews.com identified five doctors it said were connected to the nagalase discovery. But we found little evidence that the deaths of doctors are were connected to the vaccine controversy. Dr. Bruce Hedendal, a 67-year-old doctor in Florida, was found dead in his car in June 2015. The actual cause of his death is not clear, but natural causes have been cited by Florida local TV stations. Hedendal was a chiropractor, and there are no reports that he was involved in challenging the pharma industry in any way. Another doctor from Florida, Dr. Theresa Ann Sievers, 46, was found murdered in her Florida home in 2015. An investigation found that her husband Mark had hired two men, Curtis Wayne Wright Jr. and Jimmy Rodgers, to kill her so he could collect insurance money. Again, her death was not connected to the pharmaceutical industry. In a follow-up article, healthnutnews.com broadened the theory to include two additional doctors. Dr. Jeffrey Whiteside, 63, went missing after a fight with his wife and was found dead. His death was ruled a suicide. Dr. Patrick Fitzpatrick,a 74-year-old retired eyedoctor, went missing while hiking in Montana. The police searched but never found him. A officer of the Gallatin County Sheriff’s office told the Bismarck Tribune that Fitzpatrick may have suffered from occasional confusion, due to his advanced age. He also said that they had no reason to believe criminal activity was involved in this case. The only person who was actually involved in the vaccination debate was Dr. Jeff Bradstreet, 61. He became controversial for his claim that vaccines could cause autism, a theory that has been refuted by several studies. Bradstreet treated his autism patients with the GcMAF protein, which the FDA does not recognize as treatment for autism. According to the Rutherford County, N.C.. Sheriff’s Office, his wounds appear to be self-inflicted. He was not murdered. But his death in 2015 gave way to a wave of conspiracy theories. While the article says these doctors died in connection with promoting theories about vaccines, only Bradstreet’s case even comes close. And even that is a stretch. As for sourcing, neonnettle.com refers to thebigriddle.com, which posted the exact story a year ago. Thebigriddle.com cites conspiracyclub.co as its source, a site that doesn’t exist anymore. Our ruling The article puts forward a conspiracy theory that is based on the actual deaths of American doctors, but there is no information that they worked together on vaccine discoveries, nor were their deaths connected. The conclusions in the article are pure speculation. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-04-04T14:00:00	2017-03-02	['None']
-goop-02159	Angelina Jolie Did Reveal “Why I Really Left” Brad Pitt, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-left-brad-pitt-reason-why/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Angelina Jolie Did NOT Reveal “Why I Really Left” Brad Pitt, Despite Claims	2:18 pm, November 22, 2017	None	['Brad_Pitt']
-tron-01014	Antifa Member Stabs Man for Having Neo-Nazi Haircut	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/antifa-member-stabs-neo-nazi-haircut/	None	crime-police	None	None	['antifa', 'criminal justice', 'white nationalists']	Antifa Member Stabs Man for Having Neo-Nazi Haircut	Sep 13, 2017	None	['None']
-abbc-00106	The claim: Tim Costello says the Coalition's proposed $4.5 billion cuts to foreign aid will result in the loss of 450,000 lives.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-12/costello-foreign-aid-cuts-claim-not-credible/4949042	The claim: Tim Costello says the Coalition's proposed $4.5 billion cuts to foreign aid will result in the loss of 450,000 lives.	['relief-and-aid-organisations', 'federal-government', 'australia']	None	None	['relief-and-aid-organisations', 'federal-government', 'australia']	Tim Costello's claim foreign aid cuts will cost 450,000 lives is not credible	Wed 18 Sep 2013, 1:29am	None	['None']
-tron-02507	The Marriott Hotel chain is classifying portions of Jerusalem as “Occupied Palestinian Area”	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/marriott-jerusalem/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	The Marriott Hotel chain is classifying portions of Jerusalem as “Occupied Palestinian Area”	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Jerusalem']
-snes-02209	The household plant Dieffenbachia, one of the most common indoor plants, is so poisonous it can kill a child in one minute and an adult in 15 minutes.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/household-dieffenbachia-deadly/	None	Old Wives' Tales	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Is the Common Household Plant ‘Dieffenbachia’ Deadly?	14 June 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-13370	"Not one illness has been reported from raw milk in" Texas "in more than four years. A total of six illnesses have occurred in the last 20 years."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2016/sep/29/dan-flynn/dan-flynn-says-raw-milk-has-caused-just-six-texas-/	CORRECTION, 12:30 p.m., Sept. 30, 2016: After this fact check posted, Rep. Dan Flynn's office pointed out an error. We'd presented all national illnesses and deaths tied to food by the federal government as being linked to raw milk. We've now amended that sentence below to note only the illnesses and a death connected to raw milk. These changes didn't affect our rating of the claim. Thirteen legislators charged Texas authorities with unwarranted interference--in milk deliveries. At issue: Whether consumers may legally designate an agent to bring raw--meaning unpasteurized--milk from a farm to a pickup spot. State law says licensed producers may sell raw milk to retail customers where the milk is produced. Our curiosity was stirred, though, by the legislators suggesting raw milk rarely poses a health risk. After all, pasteurization kills the bacteria responsible for diseases including typhoid fever, tuberculosis and diphtheria. Still, the lawmakers said in their September 2016 letter to the Texas Department of State Health Services: "Not one illness has been reported from raw milk in our state in more than four years. A total of six illnesses have occurred in the last 20 years." Do those counts hold up? The letter, we determined, failed to account for up to 10 suspected illnesses in 2015 due to drinking raw milk. Before then, it appears, there were indeed a handful of identified illnesses. Flynn: Two illnesses in 2000, four in 2011 When we asked the letter’s lead author, Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Van, how he reached his conclusion about no illnesses in more than four years and just six in 20 years, an aide, Kelli Linza, emailed us a chart citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The chart included an entry stating the agency confirmed two Texas illnesses, both in February 2000, traced to drinking unpasteurized milk. Linza later told us Flynn also recognized four 2011 cases of salmonellosis allegedly linked by State Health Services to raw milk from a North Texas dairy. Agencies: Seven to 10 illnesses in 2015 Next, we emailed the CDC about such Texas illnesses; spokeswoman Brittany Behm pointed us to its database of foodborne outbreaks enabling us to glean, clicks later, that from 2005 through 2015, Texas had two suspected outbreaks and seven illnesses (but no deaths) attributed to raw milk--all in March and April 2015. Nationally in the decade-plus, the government tallied more than 421 illnesses and one death linked to raw milk, according to our database search. Closer to home, we asked State Health Services about the frequency of illnesses tied to drinking raw milk. Spokesman Chris Van Deusen replied by email that in 2015, "raw milk was the suspected source of at least 10 reported cases of illness in Texas. "As is frequently the case with foodborne illness investigations," his reply continued, "we weren’t able to test the milk consumed by the people who got sick, so we can’t say 100 percent definitively that raw milk was the cause. Often, by the time someone gets sick and an investigation occurs, the food has been eaten or discarded, so there’s no longer product available to test. "Also, it’s worth noting that only a small percentage of foodborne illnesses are diagnosed and reported, so there may be additional cases out there that we don’t ever find out about," Van Deusen wrote. We circled back to Flynn about the reported illnesses from 2015. By email, Linza expressed concern that the suspected 2015 instances of illness linked to raw milk that we found didn’t show up in what Flynn fetched from the CDC in July 2016. Linza, asked whether Flynn asked State Health Services to tally raw-milk illnesses, said she didn’t remember doing so. Separately, Van Deusen affirmatively answered our inquiry about whether the count of 10 suspected 2015 illnesses linked to raw milk would have been available to anyone asking the agency about such illnesses in July 2016, which was when Flynn queried the CDC. National hospitalizations, deaths Nationally, we found in an online search, the Food and Drug Administration tallied 133 health incidents from 1987 to September 2010 due to raw milk or raw milk products, accounting for 269 hospitalizations, three deaths, six stillbirths and two miscarriages. Also, CDC research published in 2012 found that "between 1993 and 2006, more than 1,500 people in the United States became sick from drinking raw milk or eating cheese made from raw milk." According to the CDC study, states where the sale of raw milk was legal had more than twice the rate of outbreaks as states where it was illegal. The 30 states where raw milk sales were legal at the end of the study in 2011 included about a dozen states, like Texas, that allowed raw milk sales only on the farm where the milk was produced. Then again, a chart with the study says the identified outbreaks occurred in 25 states--with no outbreaks in Texas: SOURCE: Study, "Increased Outbreaks Associated with Nonpasteurized Milk, United States, 2007–2012," Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, in journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, January 2015 (accessed Sept. 19, 2016) We also spotted a nongovernmental website funded by a Washington state law firm that represents food-poisoning victims. When we peeked, the site, realrawmilkfacts.com, had a chart itemizing 2,468 U.S. illnesses and two deaths from June 1998 through October 2013, all attributed to raw milk products. By phone, Bill Marler, managing partner for the Marler Clark law firm, told us the firm doesn’t have a hand in the figures, relying instead on California researchers. In Texas, the chart indicates, four residents took ill with salmonella in November 2010 after ingesting raw cow milk from a farm store. In April 2011, Dallas County’s Health and Human Services Department said a 56-year-old resident had been hospitalized after drinking unpasteurized milk. The agency said that since November 2010, three other similar cases of illness linked to raw milk had been investigated by the state. Previously, per the Real Raw Milk Facts chart, a June 2005 Texas outbreak involved a dozen residents who ate cheese made from raw milk. Before that, in February 2005, two Texas residents took ill from eating cheese made from raw milk, the chart indicates, with another 14 Texas illnesses attributed to raw milk in 2000 and 2003 (when one person died). Our ruling Flynn wrote: "Not one illness has been reported from raw milk in" Texas "in more than four years. A total of six illnesses have occurred in the last 20 years." Government counts suggest raw milk only rarely touched off illnesses in Texas over those decades. However, Flynn presented an incomplete too-low count, failing to note seven to 10 illnesses tied to raw milk that reportedly occurred in Texas last year. We rate his claim Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/f9375e24-ce06-4dd1-bb25-84ead1f35b19	None	Dan Flynn	None	None	None	2016-09-29T11:03:56	2016-09-13	['Texas']
-pomt-12144	Says that compared to Rick Baker's time as mayor, Kriseman "had wet weather events that he did not experience" that caused sewage spills. Baker "went through significant periods of drought during his time as mayor."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2017/aug/10/rick-kriseman/was-weather-during-krisemans-term-perfect-storm-se/	St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman has deflected some blame for the city’s sewage problem onto Mother Nature, saying opponent and former Mayor Rick Baker had an easier time avoiding sewage spills because he didn’t face as much severe rain. The sewage crisis has become the central issue of the Aug. 29 primary election, exacerbated by the 2015 closure of the Albert Whitted Water Reclamation Facility on the downtown waterfront. The decision to close the plant was made by City Council in 2011 and carried out in 2015 by the Kriseman administration. Since the plant’s closure, the city has been whipped by severe storms, prompting the release of millions of gallons of sewage into the bay. A Tampa Bay Times story in June uncovered a large disparity in the amount of sewage spilled during Baker’s two terms and Kriseman’s first. About 1.5 million gallons spilled under Baker in nine years, and 186 million gallons spilled under Kriseman through the 2015-16 summers. Kriseman acknowledged the difference but argued Baker benefited from better weather conditions. "Clearly, there is no comparison in the numbers," Kriseman told the Times in June. "But we also had wet weather events that he did not experience. He went through significant periods of drought during his time as mayor. "When you don't have significant rain events, and you're still having spills, you still need to take a look at your system." In the weeks since that interview, Kriseman has accepted responsibility for his response to the sewage crisis. We were still intrigued by Kriseman’s explanation to the reporter. So we checked out whether it really did rain more under Kriseman, whether there was more drought under Baker, and what effect the weather really played in the system spilling nearly 124 times more under Kriseman than Baker. After consulting climatologists and the campaigns, here’s what we found out: The rainfall under Kriseman was only slightly worse than under Baker. Most importantly, Kriseman’s claim overlooks the consequence of his own decisionmaking and its connection to millions of gallons of spilled sewage. Kriseman’s rain totals The average annual rainfall at Albert Whitted Airport was higher during Kriseman’s term, but not by as much as he made it sound. According to data compiled by the National Weather Service, from 2001-09 the average annual rainfall at Albert Whitted airport was about 45.4 inches. The average rainfall under Kriseman’s three years was about 53.74 inches. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Average rainfall can be useful to understand part of the story. But excessive rain events (such as high flooding, tropical storms and hurricanes) are also relevant to consider, said Dustin Norman with the National Weather Service, given the underlying issue of sewage capacity. "If you get an inch and a half a day for 30 days that’s way different than 40 inches in one day," Norman said. The city has been hit with several big storms since 2015 when the first major spill of Kriseman’s tenure occurred. In 2015, nearly 15 inches of rain fell between mid July and early August, causing the city to release 31.5 million gallons of untreated and partially treated sewage. Tropical Storm Colin hit the next summer, leading to 10 million gallons being dumped or spilled in June 2016. The worst event for the sewer system was Hurricane Hermine, which swamped aging sewer pipes in 2016 with 8.1 inches of rain. St. Petersburg reported spilling at least 151 million gallons of sewage as a result of Hermine — officials were unable to give a more exact tally because of a broken flow meter. How Baker fared with wet weather events Four hurricanes struck Florida in 2004. Tampa Bay avoided a direct hit but received a large amount of rainfall. The Tampa-St. Petersburg area got 12 to 14 inches of rain in August 2004, which experts said was notably high. "The first part of (Kriseman's) statement, that ‘we had wet wet periods he did not experience,’ may be an overstatement," said David Zierden, a state climatologist at the Florida Climate Center at Florida State University. "I do know that August of 2004 was very wet, with the Tampa-St. Pete getting 12-14 inches that month." Since that is considered high, we wanted to know the typical monthly rainfall total for the Albert Whitted Airport and how many times a month exceeded it. Daniel Brouillette, a climate services specialist at Florida State University, helped us out by compiling monthly rainfall totals from the airport from January 1987 to December 2016. He considered any monthly total that was more than two standard deviations greater than the mean monthly total — 11.14 inches of rain — as "extremely wet." Under Kriseman, five of his 43 months in office exceeded the mean of 11.14 inches (about 11.6 percent of his months). Under Baker, eight of his 105 months in office (or about 7.6 percent) exceeded the mean. So Kriseman experienced a greater percentage of "extremely wet" months, but not dramatically so. Decades of inadequate maintenance, and a consequential plant closure The Tampa Bay Times obtained a draft report by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission last month that places much of the blame for the city's 200-million gallon sewage spill crisis on the administration of Kriseman, as well as the past two decades of city leadership, which includes the Baker administration from 2001-10. In particular, it pointed to the closure of the Albert Whitted plant in April 2015 and the Kriseman’s failure to reopen the plant to alleviate the sewage crisis after the heavy rains of August 2015. Kriseman and his team have described the rain events of 2015 as "historic," "unprecedented" or a "100-year event." But investigators said those descriptions "were not based in fact or reality," as the amount of rainfall Pinellas received in 2015 happened every 10-15 years, and the greater 2016 amount occurred every 25-30 years. A representative from the commission cautioned that the draft was not official, and said that the investigation is ongoing. How the mayors’ dry spells compare Baker experienced a couple of notable periods of drought at the very beginning and end of his tenure. Kriseman’s team said the mayor’s point about Baker going through "significant periods of drought" is bolstered by Baker referring to a 2002 drought in his 2011 book The Seamless City. "During my terms, the issues that generated the single largest number of complaints came in 2002 during a drought." Baker wrote. Kriseman’s team also provided PolitiFact with a 2007 Water Resources Department memo that talked about water restrictions in the city because of the lack of rainfall. Brian Fuchs, an associate geoscientist and climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center, compiled a time series of drought data for Pinellas County from 2000 to Aug. 2, 2017. Yellow bars indicate abnormally dry conditions. (The county level is the smallest geographic point the Drought Monitor can address.) Baker encountered the tail end of the worst period of drought in Pinellas County when he took office in April 2001. The eight-month 2000-01 stretch was the worst drought of the last 17 years (when the Drought Monitor began collecting data). But drought conditions lifted that summer, and there was no drought for the next five years. And after a three-week period of minimal drought for just 1 percent of the county in the summer of 2006, the county remained drought free until January 2007. The county experienced periods of moderate drought in 2007 and 2008, but none that matched the intensity of 2000-01. The year 2009 saw periods of moderate and severe drought but could not be considered extreme, according to the Monitor. Flash forward to Kriseman’s first term. Kriseman’s first two years were relatively normal. Then in late 2016, after the bad storms, moderate drought covered the entire county. "Overall, both mayors had both wet and drought periods during their tenures in office," Brouillette said. Our ruling Kriseman addressed the disparity between sewage spilled under his administration and Baker’s by saying, "We also had wet weather events that (Baker) did not experience. He went through significant periods of drought during his time as mayor." Kriseman's explanation is exaggerated. Experts told us the weather was only slightly more favorable to Baker than Kriseman. Both mayors experienced significant rain events and some drought. While heavy rains played a role in the sewage spills, both the handling of the Albert Whitted plant as well as decades of city neglect put St. Petersburg's massive sewage problems into motion. The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. So we rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Rick Kriseman	None	None	None	2017-08-10T10:30:00	2017-06-24	['None']
-pomt-14815	"The actual (construction) contracts that we’ve awarded to date have come in several hundred million dollars below estimates."	mostly true	/california/statements/2015/nov/24/jeff-morales/have-construction-costs-dropped-several-hundred-mi/	LISTEN TO THIS STORY: California’s high-speed rail plan is perhaps best known for its sky-high cost estimates, which at one point spiked to $98 billion. The project’s budget was subsequently cut to $68 billion -- still well above the state’s $33 billion price tag in 2008, when voters approved bond funding for the rail network. But questions about cost overruns continue to dog the California High-Speed Rail Authority. A consultant’s draft report was recently made public and indicated the system’s Merced-to-Burbank stretch could cost $8 billion more than expected. Rail authority officials said the report was preliminary, and hasn’t increased the current budget. In recent weeks, Jeff Morales, the rail authority’s chief executive officer, and other authority leaders, have tried to change the narrative about mounting costs. They’ve started to say that expenses are, in fact, trending down. "The actual (construction) contracts that we’ve awarded to date have come in several hundred million dollars below estimates. That’s the reality of where we are in the program," Morales said during a press conference in Madera in late October, captured in the video clip below. KSEE TV Fresno, Nov. 1, 2015 Several hundred million dollars is miniscule compared with the project’s overall cost. But because the CEO’s statement goes against the project’s past financial history, it inspired us to check the facts. Checking Morales’ claim Rail authority officials clarified that Morales was referring to the project’s first two major construction contracts. We dug out those documents for a look. The first is for a 29-mile stretch of track from Madera to Fresno, including a tunnel and several raised crossings, one over the San Joaquin River. The authority’s lowest cost estimate was $1.2 billion. The winning bid was significantly less, at about $1 billion. The authority’s second major project is a 60-mile leg from Fresno south to the Tulare-Kern County line. It projected the price as low as $1.5 billion. The winning bid was a slightly more than $1.2 billion. Doing the math, the bids were a combined $480 million less than the lowest estimates. That qualifies as "several hundred million dollars." Morales, the rail authority executive, doesn’t call this a ‘savings’ in his statement. He says only that bids came in below estimates, which the authority set for itself. On the right track? These bids are significantly less than estimated. But is that the end of the story? And does this mean the rail authority will see a cost savings? Not likely, said Jan Whittington, a professor at the University of Washington who studies the financing of large-scale infrastructure projects across the globe. That’s because there are always unforeseen consequences. Crews could hit harder rock than anticipated, find an endangered species along the route or encounter unstable soil, all adding to the time and cost of the project. "There’s always going to be something that either the project manager or the contractors themselves did not foresee in design that they encounter during construction," Whittington said. "It’s nice to hear that they received bids that were lower than anticipated. But you don’t know how much it costs until they finish constructing it and it’s begun operating." Still in the hole Steve Boilard, who heads Sacramento State University’s Center for California Studies, said any implication that lower construction bids lead to actual savings is wrong. He said these lower bids do little to remove the bullet train’s overall financial uncertainty. The authority lacks funds for the bulk of the project, which would link the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas. "With an overall cost of $68 billion, it just means that the hole that we’re in and having to find money, maybe is going to be a little bit less as a result of these lower bids," Boilard said. Morales isn’t the only rail authority leader to tout the low bids. Dan Richard, the authority’s chairman, recently told Capital Public Radio that that "costs are coming down" for much of the system, in part, due to the bids. In a follow up interview, Richard explained that the authority is using design-build agreements that shift some cost overruns to the construction contractor. He said, however, there is no way for the authority to completely avoid unexpected, added expenses. Our ruling Jeff Morales, the rail authority’s chief executive officer, said in late October: "The actual (construction) contracts that we’ve awarded to date have come in several hundred million dollars below estimates." After digging out the original documents, the winning bids are a combined $480 million below the authority’s cost estimates. That works out to "several hundred" million. Still, the lower bids do nothing to wipe away the overall project’s financial uncertainty, several experts said. Its funding gap remains in the tens of billions of dollars. The implication behind Morales’ statement about the bids is that the authority is either controlling its costs or could potentially save money. Officials probably wouldn’t talk about the bids otherwise. Even the authority’s chairman said there’s no way to safeguard against all possible higher expenses. The phrase "to date" in the CEO’s carefully worded comment may be the most critical going forward. Every independent expert we spoke with suggested future cost overruns are likely for the project. Even so, our fact checks evaluate the here and now, and not predictions. We rate the claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Jeff Morales	None	None	None	2015-11-24T00:00:00	2015-10-29	['None']
-snes-04621	The media is covering up that "multiple shooters" were involved in the mass killing at an Orlando nightclub.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/multiple-shooters-orlando-cody-agnew/	None	Crime	None	Dan Evon	None	‘Multiple Shooters’ at Orlando Nightclub	13 June 2016	None	['Orlando,_Florida']
-pomt-09442	"When we started this health care debate a year ago, 85 percent of the American people had health insurance, and 95 percent of the 85 percent were happy with it."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/mar/10/george-will/will-says-95-percent-people-health-insurance-are-s/	As the debate over health care reform moves slowly toward a climax, Republicans and other critics have argued that the public has made clear its opposition to the Democratic approach. On the Feb. 21, 2010, edition of ABC's This Week, conservative columnist George Will -- a critic of the plan backed by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats -- cited poll figures about Americans' satisfaction with their own health coverage. "When we started this health care debate a year ago, 85 percent of the American people had health insurance, and 95 percent of the 85 percent were happy with it," Will said during the show's roundtable discussion. "So there was no underlying discontent that you now postulate to drive this radical change." We thought it would be worth checking whether Americans are really so enthusiastic about their health coverage. First, we'll dispatch with Will's claim that 85 percent of Americans had health insurance. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the leading arbiter of the number of uninsured Americans, Will is exactly on the mark. In the last Census Bureau study, 255.1 million Americans had health insurance in 2008, while 46.3 million did not. That's 84.6 percent, or rounding up, 85 percent -- just as Will said. Now, for the polling data. We were able to find eight surveys taken in 2008 and 2009 that asked Americans whether they were satisfied with their health coverage. We ruled out poll questions that asked about satisfaction with the costs of health care, which we decided goes beyond the scope of Will's comment. To conform with Will's formulation, we also ruled out polls that questioned people who lack insurance in addition to those who have it. Our two-year search period covers a longer time than Will's phrasing of "a year ago," but doing so provides us with a much wider sampling of polls to choose from. Typically, the polls we located offered their respondents four or five possible choices. Most common was "very satisfied," "somewhat satisfied," "somewhat dissatisfied," or "very dissatisfied." One poll, sponsored by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, added another category: "extremely satisfied." To determine whether respondents of a given poll were "happy" with their health insurance -- as Will phrased it -- we lumped together the percentages for "very satisfied," "somewhat satisfied" and, where applicable, "extremely satisfied." Here's what we found, poll by poll, in reverse chronological order: • Quinnipiac University, Sept. 2009. "How satisfied are you with your health insurance plan?" 54 percent very satisfied, 34 percent somewhat. Total: 88 percent satisfaction. • Quinnipiac University, June 2009. "How satisfied are you with your health insurance plan?" 49 percent very satisfied, 36 somewhat satisfied. Total: 85 percent satisfaction. • ABC News/Washington Post, June 2009. "For each specific item I name, please tell me whether you are very satisfied with it, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. ... Your health insurance coverage." 42 percent very satisfied, 39 percent somewhat satisfied. Total: 81 percent satisfaction. • Mathew Greenwald & Associates for the Employee Benefit Research Institute, May 2009. "Overall, how satisfied are you with your current health insurance plan?" 21 percent extremely satisfied, 37 percent very satisfied, 30 percent somewhat satisfied. Total: 88 percent satisfaction. • ABC News/Washington Post, June 2009. "For each specific item I name, please tell me whether you are very satisfied with it, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. ... Your health insurance coverage." 42 percent very satisfied, 39 percent somewhat satisfied. Total: 81 percent satisfaction. • Mathew Greenwald & Associates for the Employee Benefit Research Institute, Aug. 2008. "Please rate your satisfaction with each of the following aspects of your health care. ... Quality of health care I receive through my (health insurance) plan." 31 percent extremely satisfied, 41 percent very satisfied, 23 somewhat satisfied. Total: 95 percent satisfaction. • Mathew Greenwald & Associates for the Employee Benefit Research Institute, Aug. 2008. "Please rate your satisfaction with each of the following aspects of your health care. ... Overall satisfaction with my health (insurance) care plan." 23 percent extremely satisfied, 38 percent very satisfied, 30 percent somewhat satisfied. Total: 91 percent satisfaction. • Mathew Greenwald & Associates for the Employee Benefit Research Institute, May 2008. "Overall, how satisfied are you with your current health insurance plan?" 17 percent extremely satisfied, 36 percent very satisfied, 33 percent somewhat satisfied. Total: 86 percent satisfaction. If you average these eight scores, the total rate of satisfaction is 87 percent. In all but one poll, the satisfaction level was below Will's stated level of 95 percent. One poll, taken five months before Obama was inaugurated, did come up with 95 percent satisfaction. But alone among these eight polls, that survey asked participants about the "quality of health care I receive through my (health insurance) plan." While we decided that the wording was close enough to merit inclusion on our list, the modest difference in satisfaction levels may stem from the way the question was phrased. Many people feel more warmly toward their doctors than they do toward their insurers. So, while one poll with unique wording pegged satisfaction at 95 percent, the average of all relevant polls over a two-year period was eight points lower than what Will cited. However, Will is correct that the levels of satisfaction with one's own health insurance are consistently high. Indeed, they're extraordinarily high, when one considers how rarely surveys find such high levels of agreement among Americans. Since Will portrayed the larger point accurately, even while modestly overstating the number, we rate his comment Mostly True.	None	George Will	None	None	None	2010-03-10T18:58:11	2010-02-21	['United_States']
-pomt-00789	"Just two weeks ago, Congressman Hurd quit his post on the House Committee on Small Business saying that he was unable to find the time to serve."	half-true	/texas/statements/2015/apr/07/pete-gallego/pete-gallego-re-seeking-seat-says-will-hurd-quit-h/	Democrat Pete Gallego, who lost his U.S. House seat to Republican Will Hurd in 2014, seeks a 2016 rematch. A reason for voters to change sides, Gallego said in an April 2, 2015, email blast, is that Hurd evidently doesn’t have time to fulfill his duties. "Just two weeks ago, Congressman Hurd quit his post on the House Committee on Small Business saying that he was unable to find the time to serve," Gallego said. We were curious about Gallego’s charge. Is freshman Hurd short of time? Resignation letter Gallego’s campaign spokesman, Anthony Gutierrez, responded to us by email by pointing out a March 2015 entry in the Congressional Record showing that Hurd, a former CIA officer, asked to be removed from the committee in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner. Hurd’s letter, dated March 16, 2015, said: "I write today to resign from the House Small Business Committee. While I appreciate the honor of being appointed, in order to best serve the constituent of Texas' 23rd Congressional District, I believe I must focus on my existing committee assignments. "With my background in the intelligence community cybersecurity, and representing the district with the largest length of U.S.-Mexico Border, my ability to focus on my Information Technology Subcommittee Chairmanship and Border and Maritime Subcommittee Vice-Chairmanship is where I believe I can be of most value to my constituents and colleagues in the House. "I appreciate your timely consideration of this request." According to the CR entry, the Texan’s resignation was accepted the same day. Hurd's committee assignments We looked next into Hurd's workload. His House website says Hurd serves on the House Homeland Security Committee; he’s vice chair of its Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee and also serves on its Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee. Hurd also serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for which he chairs its Information Technology subcommittee; his appointment to the chairmanship was described as a plum prize in a February 2015 San Antonio Express-News news story pointed out to us by Shana Teehan, Hurd’s communications director. Hurd also serves on the oversight panel’s National Security Subcommittee. An online search led us to a web page created by the House clerk, dated Feb. 10, 2015, listing each member’s committee assignments. That list showed Hurd as a member of the small business panel plus the two others. Counting Hurd, six Texas members of the House were assigned to three committees each; the other 30 Texans had one or two assignments. And as of April 7, 2015, Hurd was still listed as a member of all three panels on another House clerk’s web page. (Previously, Gallego was a member of two committees.) Hurd campaign elaborates By phone, Hurd campaign spokesman Josh Robinson said Hurd initially learned of his appointment to the small business panel from a committee-issued press release. The panel’s Jan. 21, 2015, announcement listed Hurd among 14 committee members. According to the committee's calendar, the panel subsequently met three times before Hurd resigned. Hurd appreciated the appointment, Robinson told us, but given his other assignments and desire to travel back and forth to the vast 23rd Congressional District, he decided "being in another committee meeting in D.C. was not going to be helpful." Hurd, Robinson said, would rather focus on small businesses in his district than "listen to a bunch of bureaucrats" in hearings. Chairman Chabot: 'Procedural glitch' By email, Teehan provided a statement she described as obtained by Hurd’s office about March 18, 2015, from Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, who chairs the small business panel. Chabot, praising Hurd’s energy and enthusiasm, is quoted saying that even though "a procedural glitch means it is necessary to change his committee assignments, I know he’ll be a dedicated voice for working Americans across his district." Teehan also emailed Rep. Lamar Smith’s description of Hurd’s appointment to the small business panel as "a small administrative matter that has now been corrected." Smith, R-San Antonio, serves on the House Republican Steering Committee, which Teehan described as responsible for Republican committee assignments. Glitch? Administrative error? We left messages for aides to Chabot and Smith seeking elaboration while wondering how this might pertain to Hurd’s departure from the committee. We didn’t hear back. Next, we filled in Gallego’s adviser, Gutierrez, who pointed out by email that House committee assignments, including Hurd’s appointment to the small business committee, were entered into the Congressional Record on Jan. 13, 2015--eight days before the mentioned press release came out and about two months before Hurd submitted his letter to leave the committee. Our ruling Gallego said Hurd recently "quit his post on the House Committee on Small Business saying that he was unable to find the time to serve." Hurd, who separately had two other committee assignments, quit the small-business panel stressing his desire to focus on security-related subcommittee assignments. Gallego’s statement, leaving the impression Hurd said he lacked time to serve, left out important details. We rate his claim Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Pete Gallego	None	None	None	2015-04-07T16:16:44	2015-04-02	['None']
-snes-00971	An iPhone operating system upgrade in 2018 removed Easter holidays from the iOS calendar application.	outdated	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/apple-easter-calendar-iphone/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Apple Remove Easter from iOS Calendars?	23 February 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-09868	Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. "spent $1.3 trillion on tax cuts for the wealthy" and "trillions" each on a war and on Medicare drug benefits.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/05/donna-brazile/donna-brazile-says-bush-spent-13-trillion-tax-cuts/	Republicans have been attacking President Barack Obama for proposing an expensive health care overhaul on top of a costly economic stimulus. But some Democrats have been growing frustrated at the GOP attacks, saying that the same Republican Party agreed to massive spending and deficits when it controlled the presidency and Congress. Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist and pundit, gave voice to these frustrations on Aug. 2, 2009, on CNN’s State of the Union. "The Bush administration doubled the national debt and it did not help the middle class with the basics of their everyday living," Brazile said. "So we're all concerned about the deficit, but this is needed investment to ensure that we give Americans who have lost their jobs a lifeline, whether it's providing food stamps, whether it's giving states (money to continue) Medicaid funding, or giving these American workers the ability to go out there and retrain and retool themselves." She continued, “We spent $1.3 trillion on tax cuts for the wealthy that we could not afford. We spent trillions on a war that we could not afford. We spent trillions on Medicare with the expensive program that gives money to the drug companies, and nobody raised a peep about the deficit.” We won’t pass judgment on the more subjective issue of whether the tax cuts, the war costs or the Medicare drug plan were, as Brazile, claims, unaffordable. But we think it’s worth checking to see whether Brazile did the math right. We'll take her assertions one by one. On the tax cuts, Brazile was right: President George W. Bush’s 2001 tax package was expected to reduce federal revenues by roughly $1.3 trillion, according to Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation, the key arbiter for the cost of tax legislation. Brazile also asserted that the Bush tax cuts were for the wealthy. The Joint Committee on Taxation found the changes in the tax rates were roughly the same among different groups, but analyses using other measurements have found a disproportionate benefit to wealthier Americans; even supporters of the tax cuts conceded that the rich, under a system of progressive taxation, already paid a large share of the tax burden, and thus reaped a disproportionate share of the gains when taxes were cut. The Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the centrist-to-liberal Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, looked at all of the Bush-backed tax cuts enacted between 2001 and 2008 and found that the richest one-fifth of the population saw its after-tax income rise by 5.4 percent, compared to 0.7 percent for the bottom one-fifth. Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent saw its after-tax income rise by 7.3 percent. Brazile’s second claim was that "a war" cost trillions of dollars. She wasn't specific about which war, but since most assessments of this question have combined the costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — in part because untangling those costs is so difficult — we'll look at them together. A partial answer to this question comes from a May 15, 2009, report by the Congressional Research Service, “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11.” That report found that $864 billion had been spent for “military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs and veterans’ health care.” That number can be updated to take into account the slightly more than $77 billion allocated for ongoing war operations in May, when Obama signed a supplemental war spending bill. Finally, one can also include the $130 billion sought by the president for regular fiscal year 2010 for operations in Afghanistan. In all, these three numbers add to about $1.07 trillion — crossing the 13-digit threshold, but not reaching the multiple "trillions" suggested by Brazile. Some budget analysts believe future costs will ultimately hike the overall pricetag into the trillions. Former Clinton administration economic adviser and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, writing with Harvard University scholar Linda J. Bilmes, published a book last year titled The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict . It includes $700 billion for veterans’ costs that exceed peacetime levels, including disability payments and health care coverage; $1 trillion for the interest on funds borrowed to finance the war; and another $1 trillion to cover the loss of life and severe disability caused by the war, including the provision of caregivers for wounded veterans and the removal of productive assets from the economy. Economists we spoke with said it's reasonable to include those costs in the ultimate pricetag. But most of that additional money has not yet been "spent," as Brazile claimed. Finally, we looked at how much the Medicare drug plan has cost the taxpayers. According to the 2008 annual report of the Medicare Board of Trustees, a total of $549 billion is expected to be spent on the program in fiscal years 2006 through 2015. (Budget wonks take note: We did not include the full amount paid out by the drug plan, but rather took that number and subtracted the costs footed by beneficiary premiums and transfers from the states. Our number includes what was actually paid by the taxpayers through the general treasury.) Because costs for the program are expected to rise as the years go on, the total amount spent will eventually cross the $1 trillion threshold. But during the standard, 10-year budget window, the amount only gets a little more than halfway to that level. And it will be many, many years before it hits "trillions," as Brazile suggested. So she is incorrect to say that amount has been spent. So let’s recap. The numbers support her broad point that there was lots of spending when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress. But individually, the accuracy of her assertions is more mixed. Brazile correctly described the cost of the 2001 Bush tax cut, but she overstated the cost of the wars. Although the pricetag may ultimately be trillions, that hasn't been spent yet. And she exaggerated the 10-year cost of the Medicare drug plan. So we rate her claim Half True.	None	Donna Brazile	None	None	None	2009-08-05T16:55:44	2009-08-02	['United_States', 'George_W._Bush', 'Medicare_(United_States)']
-tron-01781	Obamacare Article 54 Goes into Effect May 1, Will Divert 30% of Social Security	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obamacare-article-54-goes-into-effect-may-1-will-divert-30-of-social-security-fiction/	None	health-medical	None	None	['barack obama', 'healthcare', 'obamacare', 'social security']	Obamacare Article 54 Goes into Effect May 1, Will Divert 30% of Social Security	Apr 16, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-12486	Poor people pay "in some cases, up to 25 percent of (their) income for water."	mostly true	/global-news/statements/2017/may/01/matt-damon/matt-damon-some-pay-25-their-income-water/	Hollywood star Matt Damon has been a champion of bringing clean water and sanitation to the world’s poor for many years, co-founding the group Water.org. The organization links families to microloans so they can tap into safe water supplies. In a conversation with the president of the World Bank, Damon tried to convey a sense of the severity of the problem. "The poor often pay more for water than the middle class," Damon said. "These people have no savings, but they’re paying every day, in some cases, up to 25 percent of their income just for water." People who live in poverty always spend most if not every penny of what little they earn on basic necessities. That is part of the crushing reality of being poor. But we wanted to know about the fraction of their income that goes toward water. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Rosemary Gudelj, spokeswoman for Water.org, told us the statistic was based somewhat on anecdotal evidence. Gudelj said Damon drew on the work of the group’s co-founder Gary White. "Gary’s statement has been, ‘I have met people who pay up to 25 percent of their income on water,’ " Gudelj said. "This comes from Gary’s experience in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, when doing research for his master’s thesis." That might not seem like much to hang a claim on, but we did find a 2006 United Nations Development Program estimate that confirmed Damon’s point. "In Uganda water payments represent as much as 22 percent of the average income of urban households in the poorest 20 percent of the income distribution," the report said. The report went on to say that in countries such as Argentina, El Salvador and Jamaica, the bottom fifth of households were spending over 10 percent of their money on water. The core problem, the report said, is the poorest families often pay the highest prices for water because they aren’t connected to the pipes that provide service to middle class and wealthy homes: "In Jakarta, Lima, Manila and Nairobi households living in slums and low-­income settlements typically pay 5–10 times or more for their water than high-income residents of the same city. In Manila an estimated 4 million people receive water resold through kiosks, pushcart vendors or tanker deliveries." Each of those middlemen take their cut, and the cost of water rises accordingly. Now, that United Nations report is a decade old and progress has been made since. But Damon avoided hard numbers and the risk that some would be outdated. Taken at face value, he only said that some people pay as much as 25 percent of their income on water. To know the reality, the gold standard would be household spending surveys from a range of countries. But it looks like current ones for water expenditures don’t exist. A report from the advocacy group WaterAid used a baseline assumption that someone was buying the 50 liters/day minimum for drinking water and and sanitation set by the World Health Organization in compiling hypothetical water bills for many countries. But Michael Hanemann, an economist who specializes in water at the University of California Berkeley, said that’s a dicey set of calculations. "In economics it is the case that when something is expensive, people buy less of it," he told PolitiFact. "It is more likely that they are getting by with less water." Or as likely, they are using unclean water, and paying the price with illness and bad health. By the way, the average water and sewer bill in the United States is about 0.5 percent of household income, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Our ruling Damon said that poor people sometimes pay as much as 25 percent of their income for water. A decade-old United Nations report said that the urban poor in Uganda were paying very nearly that much, about 22 percent of their wages. Damon’s co-founder of Water.org has seen people spending this much in his work in Honduras. More recent hard data appears to be in short supply. But it wouldn’t take much for Damon’s claim to be accurate. Given that poor people pay an inordinate share of whatever money they have for basic needs, and they tend to live in places where water costs more, some people probably do spend as much as Damon said. The facts we have are enough for us to rate this claim Mostly True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Matt Damon	None	None	None	2017-05-01T18:04:20	2017-04-20	['None']
-snes-03726	Brad Pitt recently slammed liberals for "taking [his] money" and has endorsed Donald Trump for President.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brad-pitt-endorses-trump/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Brad Pitt Endorses Donald Trump, Slams Money-Hungry Liberals	24 October 2016	None	['Donald_Trump', 'Brad_Pitt']
-tron-02697	Rev. Al Sharpton Owes Millions in Back Taxes	truth! & disputed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/al-sharpton-owes-millions-in-back-taxes/	None	money-financial	None	None	None	Rev. Al Sharpton Owes Millions in Back Taxes – Truth! & Disputed!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-05062	Hillary Clinton admitted her Iraq War vote was elicited in exchange for money provided by the Bush administration to help rebuild New York City after the 9/11 attacks.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-iraq-vote-bribe/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Was Hillary Clinton Bribed for Her Iraq War Vote?	15 March 2016	None	['New_York_City', 'George_W._Bush', 'Iraq_War', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-goop-01245	Jennifer Garner Had Awkward Run-In With Ben Affleck’s Girlfriend In Hawaii?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-garner-ben-affleck-hawaii-lindsay-shookus/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Garner Had Awkward Run-In With Ben Affleck’s Girlfriend In Hawaii?	4:33 pm, April 4, 2018	None	['Ben_Affleck']
-pomt-08700	Likens Obama's predicament to 1982, saying, "when Reagan just started out, (unemployment was at) exactly the same point. He was two years into his term. The unemployment was well over 10 percent, and it did come out of it."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/sep/07/mary-jordan/how-similar-were-recessions-under-ronald-reagan-ba/	As Democrats grapple with the stagnant economy and President Barack Obama's crumbling approval ratings, expect to hear this comparison a lot: Barack Obama in 2010 = Ronald Reagan in 1982. On the surface, the comparison is compelling. Reagan and Obama succeeded unpopular incumbents and rode a wave of goodwill into office. During their first two years, both presidents faced brutal recessions, and their approval ratings took big hits. Reagan's Republican Party ended up losing 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm elections (increasing the Democrats' majority). Yet only two years later, after the economy had regained its footing, Reagan won a landslide re-election victory. Naturally, Obama partisans hope the same will happen in 2012. So when we heard Mary Jordan, a longtime foreign correspondent with the Washington Post, use this analogy during the roundtable segment of ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour, we decided it was time for a fact-check. Jordan said, "And remember, folks, that 1982, when Reagan just started out, it was exactly the same point. He was two years into his term. The unemployment was well over 10 percent, and it did come out of it." We can't yet say how Democrats will fare in November compared with how Republicans did in 1982 and in this item we're only examining unemployment. So we turned to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency that calculates the unemployment rate. In August 1982, two months before the midterm elections, the unemployment rate stood at 9.8 percent. In August 2010, it was 9.6 percent. So the numbers are remarkably similar. Even the comparative rise during each president's term was similar. The unemployment rate rose 2.5 points between Reagan's election and the last unemployment survey before the midterm election, compared with 3 points for Obama. Case closed? Not really. For one thing, in 1982, the unemployment rate only rose to "well over 10 percent," to use Jordan's words, in October 1982, when it hit 10.4 percent. However, this number was released after Election Day, meaning that it could not have been a factor on voters' minds. It peaked at 10.8 percent in November and December 1982. So while Jordan's number is not far off, it does modestly exaggerate how high voters knew unemployment to be as they prepared to vote. Here's another difference -- the average unemployed worker this year has been jobless much longer than in 1982. In August 1982, the median length of unemployment was 8.7 weeks. In August 2010, it was 19.9 weeks -- more than twice as long. And that's not a blip. For nearly a year, the median duration of unemployment has ranged between 19 and 25.5 weeks. So Jordan is right that there are some similarities between the recessions of 1982 and 2010. But she glosses over the fact that unemployment didn't go "well over 10 percent" in 1982 until after the election, and her use of the overall unemployment rate overlooks an important factor -- that workers this year are likely to have been without jobs much longer. On balance, we rate Jordan's comment Mostly True.	None	Mary Jordan	None	None	None	2010-09-07T15:47:23	2010-09-05	['Ronald_Reagan', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-09040	"Powerful Houston Democrats Sylvia Garcia (Democrat county commissioner in Harris County) and Elyse Lanie(r) (wife of the former liberal Democrat mayor Bob Lanier) sponsored a Democrat fundraiser for Speaker (Joe) Straus with numerous Democrat officials and high-ranking union officials."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/jul/05/david-barton/david-barton-says-houston-democrats-teamed-raise-m/	Writing delegates to the Texas GOP’s state convention, Aledo activist David Barton depicted House Speaker Joe Straus of San Antonio as out of line in his bipartisanship. Barton, a former party vice chairman, levels nearly 20 charges in his letter, including: "Powerful Houston Democrats Sylvia Garcia (Democrat county commissioner in Harris County) and Elyse Lanier (wife of the former liberal Democrat mayor Bob Lanier) sponsored a Democrat fundraiser for Speaker Straus with numerous Democrat officials and high-ranking union officials." Democrats passing the hat for the Republican speaker? We wanted details. Barton subsequently told us in an e-mail: "I knew several of the key Democrats who put it together (including the head of the union based in Houston who was a principal in the event) and I also heard about it from influential business leaders who were invited to the event by Garcia and Lanier." He said guests were summoned by phone or e-mail. Straus’s spokeswoman, Tracy Young, confirmed that Straus raised money for his campaign at a May 4, 2010 party held at the Laniers’ Houston home. Young said, though, the event was hosted by Harris County’s entire House delegation—not just Democrats. Also, she said, Garcia, the county commissioner, did not attend. We reached Garcia, who said she was invited to the party, but couldn’t attend -- nor did she call or e-mail anyone to invite them. Barton’s suggestion that she did so, Garcia said, "is just not true." Asked if she’s a Straus supporter, Garcia replied: "Not really ... The only campaign I am worried about is the Sylvia Garcia re-election campaign." By e-mail, Young forwarded a document inviting recipients to the "Bayou Tribute to Speaker Joe Straus." Under "Honorary Host Committee" it lists 29 Houston-area House members, 17 Republicans and 12 Democrats. Young also shared a document titled "Host Committee" listing more than 30 sponsors of the event including Bob Perry and tort-reform advocate Dick Weekley, Houston homebuilders and major GOP donors; super-lobbyist Mike Toomey of Austin; beer distributor and donor John Nau of Houston and political action committees for law firms, pilots and oil and energy-related firms. The listed sponsors include a PAC for the United Transportation Union. The Laniers are among eight identified underwriters of the party. While mayor of Houston, Bob Lanier was viewed as a Democrat, though the office is filled via non-partisan elections. The May event at the Lanier’s home, Young said, "wasn't a Democrat(ic) fundraiser - it was a bipartisan fundraiser." How does all this add up? Without a subpoena, we can’t determine whether Garcia invited others to the fundraiser, though it appears she did not attend. The rest of Barton’s statement is notable for what it leaves out. For instance, it’s fair to say the Laniers sponsored the party. But so did more than two dozen other backers, including GOP benefactors. While "numerous" Democratic officials were listed as honorary hosts, so were many Republican officeholders. As for "high-ranking union officials," we identified one union’s role. On the other side of the political spectrum Barton did not mention hosts such as Anadarko Petroleum PAC. That committee’s parent company is a partner BP oil well that blew in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also the biggest single corporate donor to Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. We weren’t given a list of guests so we could not assess their partisan affiliations. At the least, the Straus event does not appear to have been planned as the Democratic fundraiser Barton portrays. To the contrary, it may have underscored a reality of Texas politics: It behooves players of all stripes to make merry with the speaker. We rate Barton’s sally Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	David Barton	None	None	None	2010-07-05T06:00:00	2010-06-12	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Bob_Lanier_(politician)', 'Harris_County,_Texas']
-pomt-07229	Wisconsin’s technical college graduates "have a higher employment rate and starting salaries" than four-year college graduates nationwide.	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/jun/02/michael-rosen/union-leader-says-wisconsins-technical-college-gra/	As commencement ceremonies were held throughout Wisconsin in May 2011, an economics instructor delivered what might be startling news to graduates of four-year colleges: "Wisconsin’s tech college grads have a higher employment rate and starting salaries than four-year grads." So read the headline on a May 19, 2011, blog posting from Michael Rosen, who teaches economics at Milwaukee Area Technical College. He is also president of the union that represents MATC teachers and other employees. It might not be surprising if more technical college graduates than four-year graduates get jobs soon after finishing school. But they get paid more, too? Rosen’s blog post, essentially a news and opinion column, appeared on WisOpinion, a website run by WisPolitics.com, and was distributed to subscribers of the weekly WisOpinion e-newsletter. It was also picked up by other sites. To back his statements, Rosen cited figures from two sources: The Wisconsin Technical College System’s 2010 Graduate Follow-up Report from April 2011. It reported results of a survey of 2010 graduates of Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges. The 17,498 graduates surveyed by the various colleges, through mail and other ways, represented 68 percent of the graduates that year. A New York Times story about a May 2011 Rutgers University study. Rutgers surveyed online a nationally representative sample of 571 U.S. residents who graduated from a four-year college between 2006 and 2010. A note before we proceed: Although 68 percent of the tech college grads responded to the survey, they are not a scientific sample of all grads, which could skew the results. For example, unemployed grads would be undercounted if they were less likely to respond to the survey. In contrast, Rutgers said it used a nationally representative sample of people ages 22 to 29 and that its survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. Now, let’s grade both of Rosen’s claims. Employment rate Rosen claimed that Wisconsin technical college graduates have a higher employment rate than four-year college graduates nationally. The Wisconsin technical colleges survey found that 88 percent of the grads who responded to the survey and who were in the labor force (as opposed to getting more schooling, for example) were employed within six months of finishing school. However, the survey did not try to determine which of those were employed full time and which were employed part time, said Julie Tyznik, performance measurement coordinator for the state tech college system. Of those who were employed, 71 percent said they were in a job related to the training they received. The Rutgers national survey of four-year college graduates found that only 56 percent of the 2010 graduates had gotten a full-time job within about 10 or 11 months of graduation. (Like some of the tech college grads, some four-year grads went on to further schooling or didn’t enter the labor force for some other reason.) Of those who did get jobs, 70 percent worked in a field related to their studies. So, the 88 percent employment figure for the tech college grads is higher than the 56 percent figure for the four-year grads -- but there are some apples and oranges involved in this comparison. Tech college grads were considered employed even if they worked only part time, while the four-year grad survey measured only full-time employment among 2010 grads. More detail is available in the Rutgers study if all of the 2006 through 2010 grads are considered. In the full sample, 53 percent were employed full time, 12 percent part time, 3 percent were self-employed and 2 percent were in the military. That’s a total of 70 percent employed. Of the rest, 21 percent were in graduate school and 9 percent were unemployed. Starting salary Rosen claimed Wisconsin technical college graduates earn a higher starting salary than four-year college graduates nationally. He said the median starting salary was $31,198 for Wisconsin technical college graduates and $27,000 for four-year graduates nationally. (The median is the mid-point -- half of the salaries are below and half are above the mid-point.) But on this claim, as academics like to say, more research is needed. The $31,198 starting salary for 2010 Wisconsin tech college graduates applies only to those graduates who were employed full-time in occupations related to their training. In other words, the picture is skewed because the dollar amount doesn’t take into account the tech grads who weren’t working in their chosen fields or those working part time. The Rutgers study found the median starting salary for all 2010 four-year grads surveyed was $27,000, the comparison Rosen cited. But when the comparison was shifted to only those working in fields related to their studies, the salary was $35,000 for the four-year graduates who got their degrees between 2006 and 2010 -- nearly $4,000 more than the starting salary for the tech college grads. (Rutgers professor Cliff Zukin, one of the authors of the Rutgers study, told us the survey sample was too small to generate a median starting salary for only the 2010 four-year graduates.) Rosen agreed he was wrong on his second claim about starting pay. He argued that his larger point -- that Wisconsin technical grads do better coming out of school than four-year grads nationally -- is accurate because, in his view, more of them find work. OK, let’s don those caps and gowns; we’re about to graduate from this little course. Rosen said Wisconsin’s technical college graduates have a higher employment rate and starting salaries than four-year college graduates nationally. On the first claim, a direct comparison of 2010 grads can’t be made because a complete breakdown wasn’t available, but more 2010 tech college grads found work than the 2006 through 2010 four-year grads. On the second claim, Rosen admitted he was wrong. We would also note that the tech college data comes from an unscientific survey and the four-year grads data was from a scientific survey. We don’t know how Rosen would score this all out on an economics quiz, but on our scale it rates a Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Michael Rosen	None	None	None	2011-06-02T09:00:00	2011-05-19	['None']
-snes-03081	Carl Sagan once speculated about the dangers of a future United States in which “key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries”, where people “have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority” and “no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues”.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/carl-sagans-foreboding-of-an-america/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Carl Sagan’s ‘Foreboding of an America’ Predicted 2017?	23 January 2017	None	['United_States', 'Carl_Sagan']
-vees-00278	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Impostor site posts claims actor The Rock praised Duterte	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-impostor-site-posts-fake-news-claiming	None	None	None	None	fake news,imposter site	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Impostor site posts FAKE NEWS claiming actor The Rock praised Duterte	March 16, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03228	No arrests were made after thousands of young people got into a massive brawl at a Kentucky mall because everyone involved was white.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thousands-white-teens-brawled-mall-nobody-arrested/	None	Crime	None	Bethania Palma	None	Thousands of White Teens Brawled at a Mall and Nobody Was Arrested?	30 December 2016	None	['Kentucky']
-pomt-01469	David Perdue "proposes rolling back the clock on women’s health care."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2014/oct/01/georgians-together/pac-ad-misleading-/	As election day draws closer and the push for votes intensifies, the airwaves are being flooded with political attack ads. One new ad for Michelle Nunn, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, makes a claim about her Republican opponent, businessman David Perdue, that piqued our interest. Perdue "proposes rolling back the clock on women’s health care," the ad states. The Nunn camp has already been trying to turn female voters against Perdue with ads about a lawsuit filed during his tenure as CEO of discounter Dollar General. The lawsuit accused Dollar General of paying male managers more than female managers for the same work. The new ad from super PAC Georgians Together opens talking about the wage discrimination lawsuit, which was settled by Dollar General’s parent company for $18.75 million several years after Perdue left the company. The ad closes with these lines: "David Perdue -- Georgia women just can’t trust him. Michelle Nunn -- Georgia women can always trust her." For our fact check, we reached out to Keith Mason, a longtime Democratic operative and treasurer of Georgians Together, the super PAC that was launched to support Nunn’s campaign and that is funding the new ad. We asked for evidence to support the ad claim that Perdue proposes rolling back the clock on women’s health care. "Perdue supports outright repeal of ACA [the Affordable Care Act]," Mason said in an email. Perdue has had on his campaign website that he wants to repeal and replace the ACA, also known as Obamacare, Mason said. He also pointed us to a news report that Perdue and four of his primary opponents publicly backed a plan by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to strip funding for the ACA as part any government spending bill, an effort that led to a government shutdown and ultimately did not succeed. How does that translate to women’s health? Mason forwarded us a link to a Chicago Tribune story headlined: "Numerous Affordable Care Act Provisions Specifically Benefit Women." The article said most plans under the ACA include preventive care, and, for women, that means an annual "well-woman visit," breast-feeding support, contraceptives, contraceptive counseling, annual mammograms and cervical cancer screenings. William S. Cluster, director of the Center for Health Services Research at Georgia State University, said there’s an argument for stating that women of childbearing years would be more adversely impacted by repeal of the ACA. Women under 45 have more health care needs than men in the same age group, he said. Prior to the implementation of the ACA, premiums in the individual market were higher for women than for men and the coverage often excluded preventative care -- mammograms for example -- and maternity care, Custer said. "The Affordable Care Act prohibits insurers from charging different premiums to men and women. It also requires plans to offer maternity care and preventive health (coverage)." he said. ‘So while a lot of Georgians would lose coverage, or face higher costs with the repeal of the ACA, women may feel that loss more than men." Perdue spokesman Derrick Dickey said the candidate’s position has been clear. "David does support the outright repeal of Obamacare," Dickey said. Perdue would like to see it replaced with "a consumer-driven" alternative, such as U.S. Rep. Tom Price’s Empowering Patients First Act, the spokesman said. But the ad claim by the Nunn camp is "misleading," Dickey said. "If the Nunn campaign thinks repealing Obamacare is ‘rolling back the clock on women’s health care,’ they should just say that," he said. "However, they can’t because Obamacare is incredibly unpopular." Polls indicate Dickey’s right on the public’s sentiment. In a poll taken in August and September, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that public opinion of the Affordable Care Act remains more negative than positive. Among registered voters, 49 percent view the law unfavorably, 35 percent favorably. Opinion tilts even more negatively among likely voters, 51 percent vs. 35 percent, the poll found. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly maneuvered over the past four years to try to repeal or defund the ACA, which was signed into law on March 23, 2010 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 28, 2012. Some political analysts link the rise of the conservative Tea Party movement and the Republican takeover of the U.S. House in the 2010 midterm elections to the public furor over the law’s debate and enactment. Kerwin Swint, head of the political science department at Kennesaw State University, said he "completely understands" the strategy behind the Georgians Together ad claim. "The Nunn camp and their supporters want to take full advantage of the gender gap by driving up Perdue's negatives among female voters," Swint said. "But if their only evidence for ‘rolling back the clock on women's health care’ is Perdue's support for repealing the ACA, that's pretty flimsy." The latest reports show about 316,00 Georgians have selected marketplace plans, 57 percent females and 43 percent males Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said these type of ads have become standard in Democratic campaigns this year. If its not ACA repeal, its GOP backing of a personhood amendment or backing of stricter controls on abortion, Sabato said. "Democrats have to do everything possible to expand the gender gap in their direction. Control of the Senate is riding on whether women heavily support candidates such as Nunn," he said. "Republicans will carry men, as usual, and Democrats will win women, but the margins matter." Our Ruling. The super PAC, Georgians Together, makes a claim that contains some truth. Some women could be hurt by repeal or replacement of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which has expanded some benefits for some women. But the ad never mentions Obamacare. That’s a major omission. Voters also need to know what Perdue is proposing -- repeal and replacement of Obamacare -- others have tried to do and failed. And you could argue that almost any group helped by Obamacare could be hurt with its repeal. There is a lot of missing context in this attack ad. We rate it Half True.	None	Georgians Together	None	None	None	2014-10-01T00:00:00	2014-09-23	['None']
-pomt-09268	Members of Congress "have not reduced their salaries ... since the Great Depression," meaning they've gone "eight decades without a pay cut."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/apr/30/ann-kirkpatrick/members-congress-havent-had-pay-cut-great-depressi/	Given widespread voter frustration with Congress and stagnation in private-sector pay, it's no surprise that Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., has introduced a bill to cut the pay for members of Congress by 5 percent. Kirkpatrick touted her bill in a House floor speech on April 28, 2010, saying that it was time for lawmakers to face a pay cut. "When millions of Americans are tightening their belts," she said, "folks have the right to expect their elected officials to do the same. ... Members have not reduced their salaries for 77 years, since the Great Depression. I do not know anyone back in Arizona who has gone eight decades without a pay cut. Senators and representatives should be no different." We thought it would be worth checking her comment that lawmakers "have not reduced their salaries" since 1933, which she says resulted in "eight decades without a pay cut." Kirkpatrick chose her year wisely: In the midst of the Great Depression, Congress voted to reduce its salaries twice. In 1932, lawmakers cut their pay from $10,000 to $9,000. A year later, they cut salaries from $9,000 to $8,500. Kirkpatrick is correct that since 1933, congressional salary rates have only climbed upward. Today, salaries for representatives and senators are $174,000 a year. (Click here for a table of congressional salaries from 1789 to today.) Case closed? Not so fast. The situation changes when you account for inflation. We used the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator to determine the inflation-adjusted salaries at some of the key points for Congress during the past 77 years. Overall, the number has indeed gone up from the adjusted 1933 rate of $142,297 (in 2010 dollars) to $174,000 per year today. But we found that there have been periods when lawmakers' pay was stagnant, and once inflation is factored in, that means they effectively took pay cuts. For instance, just before salaries were raised in 1965, the congressional pay rate that had been in force since 1955 -- $22,500 -- had shrunk in value to $19,452, a 14 percent decline in purchasing power. And just before salaries were raised in 1975, the congressional pay rate that had been in force since 1969 -- $42,500 -- had shriveled in value to $31,638 in 1969 dollars, a whopping 26 percent decline in purchasing power. "There were a number of years since 1969 in which Congress specifically voted to hold its nominal salary unchanged even though price levels were rising and an automatic pay formula would have bumped up its pay, along with the pay of other senior officers of the U.S. government," said Gary Burtless, an economist with the liberal Brookings Institution who has testified before a House committee on lawmakers' salaries. There's also evidence that, once inflation is factored in, lawmakers are less well-compensated today than they once were. In 1955, lawmakers were paid the equivalent of $182,713 in 2010 dollars, an amount 5 percent higher than today's actual level. In 1965, they were paid the 2010 equivalent of $207,267, or 19 percent higher than today's actual level. Factoring inflation into the equation doesn't disprove Kirkpatrick's statement that members of Congress "have not reduced their salaries for 77 years." But it does make it hard for her to argue that lawmakers have gone "eight decades without a pay cut." In reality, congressional salaries have zig-zagged quite a bit over the years, sometimes exceeding today's level of purchasing power and sometimes falling short. We're not shedding tears for the buying power of people who earn more than $170,000 a year. But the erratic way that Congress has raised its salaries means that the story is more complicated than Kirkpatrick portrays it. We rate her statement Half True.	None	Ann Kirkpatrick	None	None	None	2010-04-30T16:06:48	2010-04-28	['United_States_Congress', 'Great_Depression']
-pomt-08458	Loranne "Ausley's a financial train wreck for taxpayers -- pushing gas taxes, property taxes, taxes on seniors."	false	/florida/statements/2010/oct/14/jeff-atwater/loranne-ausleys-tax-record-center-stage-state-cfo-/	In her TV ad, Democratic chief financial officer candidate Loranne Ausley threw a series of three claims against her Republican opponent Jeff Atwater. We said False. Now Atwater is firing back with a trio of claims against Ausley in an ad of his own. The ad is called "Two Liberals," and liberally tries to tie Ausley to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Yes, they are both Democrats and women. "This Washington liberal is raising taxes and wrecking our economy. Now, Pelosi has Loranne Ausley, the Tallahassee politician who wants total control ... of our money," a narrator says. "Watch out, because Ausley's a financial train wreck for taxpayers -- pushing gas taxes, property taxes, taxes on seniors. "Pelosi and Ausley -- too liberal too costly." Like Ausley's ad attacking Atwater, we're fact-checking the whole of the three specific claims -- that Ausley, a former member of the Florida House, pushed gas taxes, property taxes and taxes as seniors. Our analysis reveals a political art -- clever wording. Gas taxes Ausley didn't push for increased gas taxes as a member of the state House. Instead, she voted against a one-month, eight-cent reduction of the gas tax back in 2004. Here are the details. The bill, HB 237, reduced the state gas tax from 14.3 cents to 6.3 cents in August 2004, and also created a back-to-school sales tax holiday for school items $50 or less. The proposal passed with broad bipartisan support: 107-8 in the House and 34-4 in the Senate. Ausley was one of the eight no votes in the House. Atwater, a member of the state Senate, voted yes. But that didn't mean the measure was completely popular. Newspaper editorials argued the loss in state revenue for temporarily lowering the gas tax -- about $60 million -- wasn't worth the small savings to drivers. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune editorial board calculated that the average driver would save a "whopping" $3.67. "Don't spend it all in one place," they wrote. "Loranne voted to keep the existing tax structure in place, as well as against the entire budget that year because of the lack of funding for important issues like boosting teacher salaries and the critical funding of Florida KidCare," Ausley spokesman Kevin Cate said. It's worth noting that the idea of a gas tax holiday resurfaced in 2008 and was being pushed by Gov. Charlie Crist. Crist asked state Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, to file an amendment to a revenue bill (SB 1838) that would suspend 10 cents of the state's gas tax for a two-week period from July 1-14. But the amendment was never heard in the GOP-controlled Senate and Atwater, as a senator, didn't have to take a vote on the measure. Neither did Ausley, who was in the House. Property taxes Ausley didn't push for increased property taxes as a member of the state House. Instead, she voted against Republican proposals to cut property taxes. Here are the details. During a special session in June 2007, Ausley voted against sending a proposed constitutional amendment to the ballot asking voters to replace Save Our Homes assessment caps with bigger homestead exemptions. Under the proposal, which passed without a Democratic vote, the first $200,000 of value would get a 75 percent exemption, then property values between $300,000 and $500,000 would get an additional 15 percent exemption. Homes valued at $500,000 and up would get a maximum exemption of $195,000. Democrats argued that the tax cuts could harm funding for education and for police and fire protection. Ausley did vote to schedule the special election for the proposal on Jan. 29, 2008. She also voted for a proposal to roll back the tax bases for cities, counties and special taxing districts. Ultimately, the Republican-led constitutional proposal was tossed off the ballot by a judge who ruled the amendment was confusing. So legislators returned to deal with the constitutional proposal that October. Ausley was just one of two House members to vote against a House plan to raise the homestead exemption, create a cap on assessment increases for non-homesteaded property, provide additional exemptions for low-income seniors, and allow people to move and keep some of their homestead tax cap. According to the Tallahassee Democrat, Ausley complained that the "cuts would devastate poor and rural counties." That proposal never became law or was put to voters either. Instead, the final tax reform product in 2007 -- what became known as Amendment 1 on January 2008 ballots -- passed the House 97-18 and the Senate 35-4. Ausley again voted against the measure. Amendment 1 passed with 64 percent of the vote. Taxes on seniors Ausley didn't push for increased taxes on seniors. Instead, she opposed cutting and eliminating the state's intangible tax. This is ground PolitiFact Florida already has covered in a claim against Ausley from the Republican Party of Florida. Here are the details. The intangible tax, which was repealed by the Legislature in 2006, was a state tax paid on the value of investments such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, money market funds and unsecured notes. Savings accounts, pension funds, certificates of deposit and 401(k)s were not subject to the tax. The tax was paid mostly by middle- and upper-income Floridians who had those types of investments. On several occasions, Ausley voted against repealing, or making cuts to the intangible tax. In 2001, she did vote for a more modest cut than Republicans were proposing. Democrats argued that the benefit of the cut was largely to the wealthy and the loss of state revenue would hurt programs for the poor. The tax, of course, didn't apply only to seniors. It applied to anyone who had those types of investments. And it didn't apply to things that would be traditionally considered retirement funds like a 401(k) or a pension. Summary This fact check centers on Atwater's claim that "Ausley's a financial train wreck for taxpayers -- pushing gas taxes, property taxes, taxes on seniors." First, we want to mention that Atwater's ad also claims that Ausley "wants total control of our money." That's incendiary and far-reaching rhetoric that cannot be supported by examining Ausley's statements or voting history. You should ignore the line. What is true, though, is that Ausley voted against measures to create a gas tax holiday for one month in 2004, voted against sweeping property tax cuts in 2007 and voted against eliminating a state tax on investments. That makes the "taxes on seniors" immediately deceptive because the intangible tax isn't a tax on seniors specifically. Something else that has us scratching our heads more, though. Atwater says Ausley was "pushing" these taxes. But was she? Time to take out the dictionary. There are several definitions of the word push, but in this context we find a couple that make sense - "To cause to increase," and "To press forward energetically against opposition." Ausley didn't vote to cause those taxes to increase, nor did she press forward energetically with the taxes. She voted against cutting them. We find this claim False.	None	Jeff Atwater	None	None	None	2010-10-14T17:45:21	2010-10-13	['None']
-snes-04225	"Mutation Response Vehicle" vehicles spotted near Longwood, Florida, are related to outbreaks of the Zika virus.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mutation-response-vehicle/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Mutation Response Vehicle	17 August 2016	None	['None']
-goop-00169	Emma Stone Trying To Breakup Ex Andrew Garfield, New Girlfriend Susie Abromeit?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/emma-stone-andrew-garfield-new-girlfriend-susie-abromeit-break-up/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Emma Stone Trying To Breakup Ex Andrew Garfield, New Girlfriend Susie Abromeit?	2:51 am, October 6, 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00601	Denmark Whaling Shame Protest Email	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/denmark-whaling.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Denmark Whaling Shame Protest Email	January 25, 2014	None	['None']
-snes-00318	A set of images show Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović in a bikini.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/croatian-president-bikini/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Do These Photographs Show the Croatian President in a Bikini?	19 July 2018	None	['Croatia']
-vees-00419	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Was the definition of EJKs changed under the Duterte administration?	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-was-definition-ejks-changed-under-dute	Did Cayetano have basis in saying the definition of EJKs was changed under the current administration?	None	None	None	Human rights,Cayetano,Extrajudicial killings	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Was the definition of EJKs changed under the Duterte administration?	May 21, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-06237	Steve Kroft of CBS' 60 Minutes penned an article critical of George Soros.	misattributed	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/george-soros-one-evil-human/	None	Soapbox	None	David Mikkelson	None	George Soros – One Evil Human	4 October 2012	None	['George_Soros', 'CBS', '60_Minutes']
-bove-00115	No, These BJP Ministers Were Not Sleeping During The Budget	none	https://www.boomlive.in/no-these-bjp-ministers-were-not-sleeping-during-the-budget/	None	None	None	None	None	No, These BJP Ministers Were Not Sleeping During The Budget	Feb 02 2018 5:13 pm, Last Updated: Feb 06 2018 2:18 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-02820	"Macy's sent a letter to Rick Perry urging him to veto" equal pay bill.	true	/texas/statements/2013/nov/25/senfronia-thompson/macys-other-retailers-asked-rick-perry-veto-equal-/	A reader forwarded an email to us in which state Rep. Senfronia Thompson urged a boycott of Macy’s department stores on the day after Thanksgiving 2013. "The fact that Macy's doesn't support equal pay for women should stop you from shopping there on Black Friday," the Houston Democrat wrote, saying that her equal-pay proposal cleared the Legislature earlier this year, but "then Macy's sent a letter to Rick Perry urging him to veto the law, which he ultimately did." Thompson’s House Bill 950 was among 24 bills Perry vetoed June 14, 2013. It would have created state law similar to 2009’s federal Lilly Ledbetter Act, which gave plaintiffs more time to sue over pay discrimination in federal courts. An Aug. 6, 2013, news story in the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas Retailers Association members including Macy’s and Kroger’s had written Perry in May asking him to kill the legislation because, they said, it would lead to open-ended litigation and duplicate federal law. Thompson spokeswoman Milda Mora told us by phone that the representative learned of the letters from the Houston Chronicle reporter in August and checked with the governor’s office, which provided her with copies that Mora emailed to us. One written on Macy’s letterhead (click here or scroll down to view it) concluded, "The federal requirements under Lilly Ledbetter are unnecessary and would be harmful to Texas employers. We urge you to veto this legislation." Macy’s spokeswoman Bethany Charlton confirmed that her company sent the May 31, 2013, letter, which was signed by a company vice president. By email, Charlton said the company "absolutely supports equal pay for equal work among men and women" but believes existing laws "provide strong remedies" for discrimination. Perry’s logic was similar: "House Bill 950 duplicates federal law, which already allows employees who feel they have been discriminated against through compensation to file a claim with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission," said his June 14, 2013, veto statement. Progress Texas, the pro-Democratic organization that distributed Thompson’s email and is organizing the boycott, disputes Perry’s statement that the bill would have duplicated federal law, saying that the Ledbetter protections need to be codified in state law for them to apply to cases in state courts. The group’s executive director, Ed Espinoza, told us by email that his group launched a boycott of Macy’s and other retailers when the news broke in August. An Aug. 7, 2013, Chronicle news blog post said Thompson took part in that boycott also, canceling a planned appearance at a Macy’s store to mark the state’s annual sales-tax holiday. Mora said that Thompson, who was quoted in an Aug. 9, 2013 Texas Public Radio news story as saying she had previously been a "card-packing member of Macy’s," but had not shopped there since the letters became public. Our ruling Thompson said "Macy's sent a letter to Rick Perry urging him to veto" her equal pay measure. As the Houston newspaper reported, Macy’s wrote the governor May 31, 2013, saying "We urge you to veto this legislation." The claim is True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Senfronia Thompson	None	None	None	2013-11-25T15:06:11	2013-11-20	['Rick_Perry']
-farg-00405	"Actress Sandra Bullock: 'Donald Trump Is Doing Everything To Improve Our Nation, If You Don’t Like Him Just…'"	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/fake-sandra-bullock-quote-about-trump/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Beatrize Stephen-Pons	['Donald Trump']	Fake Sandra Bullock Quote About Trump	June 29, 2018	2018-06-29 17:32:39 UTC	['Sandra_Bullock']
-pomt-00743	Says Hillary Clinton took "money from kings of Saudi Arabia and Morocco and Oman and Yemen."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/apr/20/reince-priebus/hillary-clinton-took-money-kings-four-countries-go/	For probably as long as Democrats anticipated Hillary Clinton announcing for president, Republicans anticipated attacking her. On April 12, 2015, the day Clinton’s run became official, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus disparaged her on CBS' "Face the Nation." The former chairman of the Wisconsin GOP appeared on the program after U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who declared for president several days before Clinton did. Paul told host Bob Schieffer that Clinton will have a problem with women voters because "she has taken money from countries that abuse the rights of women," and he referred to Saudi Arabia. Schieffer later noted that Saudi Arabia had given money to Clinton’s foundation, and then while interviewing Priebus, said Clinton couldn’t use that money personally. Schieffer added: "But it also occurs to me, a lot of your candidates and the Democrats as well, are going to be taking campaign contributions that we are never going to know where they come from -- but now you can give these unbelievable amounts of money without any accounting of where the money comes from." Priebus replied with a claim about kings and cash: "But the difference is, all those other entities -- Super PACs, parties, individual candidates -- they can't take money from kings of Saudi Arabia and Morocco and Oman and Yemen, and that's what Hillary Clinton did. And so she's going to have to account for this money." Priebus' statement goes beyond foreign government contributions to the Clinton Foundation, leaving the impression Clinton herself may have benefitted from money donated by the four countries -- including Yemen, which is the home of one of al-Qaida’s most active branches, and where the United States has conducted airstrikes since 2009. Let's sort it all out. Clinton Foundation Not only Republicans are raising questions about whether the Clinton Foundation is taking millions of dollars a year from governments and other donors that want political influence. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Politico and CBS News have run stories about the questions, with a Journal analysis noting that the number of governments contributing to the foundation in 2014 appeared to have doubled from the previous year. Responding to Priebus’ claim, the foundation emailed us a statement saying: "Like other global charities, the Clinton Foundation receives support from individuals, organizations and governments from all over the world because the foundation's programs improve the lives of millions of people around the globe." The charity, originally named the William J. Clinton Foundation, was launched in 2001 by former President Bill Clinton. Its aim is to partner with government and non-government organizations to tackle issues such as AIDS and poverty. The foundation has received millions of dollars from foreign governments, as PolitiFact National found in February 2015 when it rated that claim by a conservative group as True. When Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, under President Barack Obama, the foundation agreed to disclose its donors at the request of the White House. When she left the Cabinet post, in February 2013, the foundation became the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, with Hillary Clinton taking an active role in fundraising. Clinton resigned from the foundation’s board just before announcing her candidacy. And a few days later, the foundation announced it would modify its policies while she is a candidate for president, limiting which governments can give directly to the foundation. An important note: Candidates for office are prohibited by law from accepting campaign contributions from foreign governments, but foundations have no such restriction. Here’s what we know about the four countries cited by Priebus: Saudi Arabia The kingdom gave between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation between the time the foundation was created through 2014, and some portion of the funds was contributed in 2014, according to the foundation’s searchable database. (The database only reports ranges of the total amounts given and does not provide a breakdown by year, except that it notes which donors made a contribution in 2014.) According to a February 2015 news article by the Washington Post, Saudi Arabia was among some foreign governments that had been supporting the foundation before Clinton was appointed secretary of state, did not give while she was in office and then resumed giving. Saudi Arabia has long been regarded by the United States as a friend and a "strong partner in regional security and counterterrorism efforts," according to the State Department. Oman The Sultanate of Oman gave the foundation between $1 million and $5 million through 2014, including contributions given in 2014, according to the foundation database. The U.S. and Oman have been parties to a military cooperation agreement since 1980. Oman "plays an important role in helping the United States realize its regional stability goals" in the Middle East, the State Department says. Morocco Four days before Clinton announced her run, Politico reported that the foundation was accepting at least $1 million from a Moroccan government-owned company to hold a high-profile conference in May 2015 in Marrakech with the king of Morocco. The article noted that in 2011, Clinton’s State Department had accused the Moroccan government of "arbitrary arrests and corruption in all branches of government," but that when she announced the conference in September 2014, she praised Morocco as "a vital hub for economic and cultural exchange." The U.S. regards Morocco as a "strong partner in counterterrorism efforts," according to the State Department. Yemen Neither the Post nor the Politico articles, which were cited to us by Priebus’ office, reported any donations to the foundation from Yemen. And a spokesman for the foundation told us the country has never been a donor. Yemen borders Saudi Arabia and Oman, but unlike those countries and Morocco, is not a monarchy. American drones have been conducting strikes in Yemen since 2009. On April 14, 2015, the al-Qaida terrorist group announced that one of its top spokesmen for its branch in Yemen had been killed the previous day by an American drone strike. Our rating Priebus said Clinton took "money from kings of Saudi Arabia and Morocco and Oman and Yemen." The monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Oman have contributed to the Clinton Foundation, but Yemen, which does not have a king, has not. And although Priebus’ claim was made during a discussion of the foundation as well as contributions to political candidates, his phrasing could have left the impression that Clinton herself, rather than the foundation, received the money. For a statement that is partially accurate, our rating is Half True. To comment on this article, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's web page. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Reince Priebus	None	None	None	2015-04-20T06:00:00	2015-04-12	['Morocco', 'Saudi_Arabia', 'Oman', 'Yemen']
-snes-02234	Queen Elizabeth contradicted London Mayor Sadiq Khan by "refusing to retract" an invitation to Donald Trump to visit the UK.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/queen-elizabeth-london-mayor/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Queen Elizabeth Refuse to Retract an Invitation to President Donald Trump?	10 June 2017	None	['London', 'Donald_Trump']
-hoer-00427	Padlock on Facebook Home Page Hacker Warning	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/padlock-facebook-hacker-warning-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Padlock on Facebook Home Page Hacker Warning Hoax	7th April 2011	None	['None']
-mpws-00044	 In a speech to union workers this week, House Speaker Paul Thissen said the Legislature is focusing on putting more money in the pockets of Minnesotans. Chief among those priorities are raising the minimum wage and making sure women get better pay. “The argument that the Republicans make that this is going to undermine jobs, that it’s going to tank our economy, simply don’t hold up to the facts,” Thissen said. “We did it in the 90s, and our economy got better, we did it in the mid-2000s and our economy got better.” Thissen went on to point out that woman are particularly affected by changes in the minimum wage. “Sixty percent of the folks on minimum wage or less are women in this state. They make up 50 percent of the workforce, but they are disproportionately working at low-paying jobs.” 	accurate	https://blogs.mprnews.org/capitol-view/2014/03/poligraph-thissens-minimum-wage-claims-mostly-true/	None	None	None	Catharine Richert	None	PoliGraph: Thissen’s minimum wage claims mostly true	March 21, 2014, 2:30 PM	None	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Minnesota']
-pomt-03277	Says by rejecting an expansion of Medicaid under the new law, Georgia was depriving 25,000 veterans of health care coverage.	true	/georgia/statements/2013/aug/06/michelle-nunn/senate-candidate-pushes-war-vets-medicaid-plan/	Democrat Michelle Nunn recently jumped into Georgia’s race for the U.S. Senate and talked about a troubling issue: military veterans without health insurance. Nunn, who is campaigning as a problem-solver and not a partisan politician, responded to a question about the controversial federal health care law, widely called "Obamacare," by saying she supports efforts to suture trouble spots, but not to repeal it. Nunn then added in an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Political Insider blog that by rejecting an expansion of Medicaid under the new law, Georgia was depriving 25,000 veterans of health care coverage. PolitiFact Georgia wondered about the accuracy of Nunn’s claim. Nunn was CEO of the Points of Light Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan volunteer organization inspired by then-President George H.W. Bush. Her father, conservative Democrat Sam Nunn, represented Georgia in the U.S. Senate from 1972 to 1997. Her entry into the race was widely welcomed by Democrats and by Republicans who’ve portrayed Nunn as a liberal who’ll be in lockstep with President Barack Obama. She’s never run for political office. An estimated 650,000 Georgians would be eligible for Medicaid if the state agreed to expand coverage. The health law calls for states to expand coverage to individuals with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $26,300 for a family of three. The federal government would cover the entire cost of the expansion for the first three years and at least 90 percent after that. Many Republicans, including Gov. Nathan Deal, do not believe Washington can keep such a commitment considering the federal government’s financial challenges. Critics worry the state could eventually get stuck with the tab. States have the option to participate in the Medicaid expansion. Deal declined. "The state simply can’t afford to expand Medicaid as Obamacare is now structured," Deal spokesman Brian Robinson said. "The majority of our population will bear huge new costs as individuals covering their families and as taxpayers." We read several accounts that Georgia has one of the largest populations of veterans in the nation. Georgia’s Department of Veterans Services estimates that there are 776,000 veterans in the state. Not all veterans are eligible for medical benefits through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, thus some of them are uninsured, said Tim Sweeney, director of health policy for the left-leaning Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, which has done research on the subject. Priority for benefits goes to veterans injured in combat, those receiving pension benefits and those determined to be disabled. Nunn’s deputy campaign manager, Zac Petkanas, said the candidate’s claim was based on two reports released earlier this year. One was a nationwide study of uninsured veterans compiled by the Washington-based Urban Institute. The institute describes itself as a nonpartisan research center, but its leadership includes several former Clinton administration officials. The second report was an examination of the potential impact of Medicaid expansion on veterans by the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. The Urban Institute report said it used U.S. Census Bureau data to come up with its estimate. The institute found there are about 1.3 million uninsured veterans younger than 65. The estimate is in line with several news reports on the topic in recent years. The institute found 535,000 of those uninsured veterans were eligible for Medicaid under the income guidelines set by the federal government. "We used data from the American Community Survey, which asks about veteran status, health insurance status, and various sources of income; the income measure we used approximates the way income will be counted under the Affordable Care Act," said Jennifer Haley, a co-author of the report. The report found that 43 percent of all poor, uninsured veterans reside in seven states, and Georgia is one of them. About 56,000 Georgia veterans were uninsured, the report found. Of that number, 24,900 of them fell within the Medicaid eligibility guidelines, the Urban Institute found. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported about the study in May. The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute also estimated 25,000 Georgia veterans would be eligible for Medicaid under the rules in a report it released in May. Sweeney said its report was primarily based on prior Urban Institute research. "They’re as robust and credible as it gets when it comes to research like this," Sweeney said. Slightly more than 6 percent of veterans nationwide lack health insurance, according to a 2011 profile of U.S. veterans done by the Department of Veterans Affairs. If the numbers are similar for Georgia veterans, that amounts to about 50,000 of them without insurance, which is close to what the Urban Institute found. The profile does not specify how many of them would be eligible for Medicaid. The U.S. Census Bureau does not keep its own data on veterans without health insurance. A Census Bureau official suggested we contact the Urban Institute for such information, noting it did a study on the topic and may be a good resource. State officials said they did not have research on how many veterans could be added to Georgia’s Medicaid rolls. "The state can’t cherry-pick which groups of people would be eligible for expanded coverage under Medicaid. Nunn is making a political argument, not a policy argument, so it’s not something we’d have numbers on," Robinson said. To sum up, Nunn claimed 25,000 military veterans could be added to Georgia’s Medicaid rolls if the state would sign up for the federal government’s plan under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. The claim was based on research that hasn’t been reviewed for a second opinion and appears on target. We rate this claim True.	None	Michelle Nunn	None	None	None	2013-08-06T00:00:00	2013-07-22	['None']
-tron-02172	Amazon Offers 50% Off Coupon	scam!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/amazon-offers-50-off-coupon/	None	internet	None	None	None	Amazon Offers 50% Off Coupon	Dec 14, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-11181	"Breaking: Santa Fe killer expresses his love for Obama."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/may/21/daily-world-update/no-evidence-santa-fe-killer-expressed-love-obama/	Within hours of the shooting at Santa Fe High School, fake news stories appeared on social media claiming that the shooter had clear political allegiances. "Breaking: Santa Fe killer expresses his love for Obama," said a May 18 headline by The Daily World Update. Facebook flagged this story as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook's News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) We found no evidence that the suspect loved Obama. The story falsely said that "Dimitrius Pagopogouritz is a liberal whose immigrant parents raised him on welfare in the projects of San Dimas." The story invented a "leaked interview with police" in which the suspect "admitted he was an Obama-loving moonbat who was looking to ‘end gun violence’ by adding another shooting." The first sign that this is made up is that the suspect’s name is wrong; his actual name is Dimitrios Pagourtzis. The story also makes up all sorts of ridiculous details, including that suspect’s father is serving a life sentence for stealing "6,000 pounds of tainted turkey bacon." Law enforcement has not released information about a motive for the mass shooting that left 10 people dead. The mother of one victim said that her daughter had recently turned down the advances of the boy. The Daily World Update is linked to a frequent purveyor of hoaxes, Christopher Blair, who says he creates fake stories to make money. While Blair identifies The Daily World Update as satire, other blogs often pick up Blair’s stories without the satire asterisk. Fake accounts imitating the suspect on Facebook also depicted him wearing a hat showing support for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, with a background photo displaying a banner espousing anti-fascists, or Antifa, views. The Daily World headline said, "Breaking: Santa Fe killer expresses his love for Obama." We found no evidence that the suspect declared his love for Obama. We rate this statement Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Daily World Update	None	None	None	2018-05-21T14:15:40	2018-05-18	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-02720	Pastor John Hagee said that "God made all lesbians flat" so they can be identified by "normal people".	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hagee-lesbians-flat/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Pastor John Hagee Say that God Made Lesbians ‘Flat’?	28 March 2017	None	['God', 'John_Hagee']
-pomt-14986	Says Edward Snowden "could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/14/hillary-clinton/clinton-says-nsa-leaker-snowden-failed-use-whistle/	Edward Snowden’s decision to reveal the existence of massive national security databases of Americans’ email and telephone data remains a flashpoint for debate among Americans. Some people praise Snowden as a hero. To others, Snowden is a traitor. The U.S. government charged Snowden, an employee of a government security contractor, with violating the Espionage Act. He found asylum in Russia but would like to return home. At the first Democratic debate Oct. 13, CNN moderator Anderson Cooper pressed the candidates to offer their view of Snowden. Hillary Clinton said Snowden shouldn’t come home "without facing the music." "He broke the laws of the United States," Clinton said. "He could have been a whistleblower. He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower. He could have raised all the issues that he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that." That’s not accurate, we found. While American law does shield government whistleblowers, it wouldn't necessarily apply in Snowden's case. The law Snowden was charged with two counts of unauthorized communication under the 1917 Espionage Act. That law makes it a crime punishable by death or imprisonment to share "information relating to the national defense" with anyone who might want to do harm to the United States. Among other details, Snowden showed that under a federal court order, Verizon was providing the National Security Agency with the phone records of nearly all its customers, and on similar terms, giants such as Google and Facebook were turning over user data. He also let the world know that the United States was listening in on the private calls of the leaders of its closest allies. That law has no specific whistleblower protection. What Snowden could have relied on, experts say, is the 1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. That law includes some protections, but they're not as strong as Clinton lets on. And it's not clear they could have saved Snowden. Under that 1998 law, Snowden could have raised his concerns with the Inspector General’s Office at the NSA or spoken to congressional intelligence committees. (A separate federal law protects whistleblowers more generally, but that only applies to sharing unclassified information, not the secret materials that Snowden had in hand.) Snowden claims that he did raise his concerns with a legal division at the National Security Agency but was rebuffed. The National Security Agency has released a single email from Snowden in which he asked for clarification of the laws that govern the agency. A debate over protection The 1998 law aimed at intelligence community workers specifically includes contractors such as Snowden. Daniel D’Isidoro, a former U.S. Army judge advocate, argued in the Harvard Law School National Security Journal that Snowden did have a legal pathway to voice his concerns. But he also said it was unclear if the issues Snowden raised would have fallen under the guidelines of that law. Briefly, Snowden’s complaints would need to meet the definition of an "urgent concern." That term specifically doesn’t cover policy disagreements. At the time, the NSA could reasonably assert that it was following the law, which would undercut Snowden’s case, D’Isidoro said. Tellingly, Thomas Gimble, the acting inspector general for the Army, said in 2006 House testimony that the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act was "a misnomer." It "does not provide statutory protection from reprisal for whistleblowing for employees of the intelligence community," Gimble said. An assessment in the Boston University Law Review concluded that the 1998 law "arguably fails to provide any real protection to national security whistleblowers." Others familiar with this legal landscape echoed the view Snowden would have been vulnerable to prosecution if he went public through government channels. The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, for instance, does not prohibit agencies from retaliating against employees, said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University School of Law. Goitein said President Barack Obama helped matters slightly when he issued a presidential order preventing retaliation against federal employees. But that order did not explicitly address the rights of contractors such as Snowden. And Goitein added, neither that directive nor the whistleblower law "bars the government from criminally prosecuting whistleblowers." This has played out before. In 2010, NSA staffer Thomas Drake tried to use proper channels to report allegations of improper contracting but wound up the target of an investigation, said Kathleen McClellan, the national security and human rights counsel for the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower advocacy group. "Drake followed the Intelligence Community Whistleblower law to a ‘T’," McClellan said in January 2014. "He went to the Department of Defense inspector general and both congressional intelligence committees and it did not protect him from retaliation. In fact, it made him the target of an investigation." Federal agents went after Drake in pursuit of a separate matter and charged him with multiple felonies, according to a report from the Committee to Protect Journalists. When it became clear that whatever Drake had shared with the press was either not classified or already in the public domain, the government’s felony case collapsed. A federal judge said it was "unconscionable" that Drake and his family had endured "four years of hell." We reached out to the Clinton campaign and did not hear back. Our ruling Clinton said that Edward Snowden could have gotten all the protections of being a whistleblower." A key 1998 law focused on intelligence community workers does lay out a pathway Snowden could have followed. However, there is at least a significant legal debate over whether the issues Snowden wanted to raise would fall under that law. Additionally, legal experts including an Army inspector general have said that the 1998 law does not protect whistleblowers from reprisals. The protections that Clinton referenced do not seem to be as strong as she suggested, and most of the expert opinion suggests they would not apply to Snowden. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2015-10-14T16:04:45	2015-10-13	['None']
-tron-03469	Doomsday Asteroid Will Hit Earth in February 2017	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/doomsday-asteroid-will-hit-earth-february-2017/	None	space-aviation	None	None	['astronomy', 'conspiracy', 'doomsday']	Doomsday Asteroid Will Hit Earth in February 2017	Jan 27, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-03030	Says Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke "has proven on the Madison Board of Education" that she supports raising taxes and spending.	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2013/oct/10/republican-party-wisconsin/gop-says-mary-burke-candidate-governor-has-tax-and/	The quiet but steady buildup to Democrat Mary Burke’s campaign for governor gave the Wisconsin Republican Party time to pounce. On Oct. 7, 2013, the day Burke announced her candidacy by video, the state GOP launched MaryBurke.com, a site that denigrates the former Trek Bicycle Corp. executive and state commerce secretary as a liberal millionaire and a killer of jobs. The party also uses the site to attack Burke’s tenure on the Madison School Board, declaring: "Mary Burke is simply more of the same – as she has proven on the Madison Board of Education. (She) voted to increase taxes by the maximum amount under state law by voting to approve the 2012-’13 Madison (Metropolitan) School District final budget on Oct. 29, 2012. Rather than work to make government more efficient, she voted to raise taxes and increase spending. She would do the same as governor – and we’ve come too far to go backward now." We can’t predict, of course, what Burke would do if she is elected governor in November 2014. But we can check her taxing and spending record -- scant, though it may be -- since she was elected to the Madison School Board in April 2012. Three votes Burke has taken part in three school board votes on two budgets for the Madison Metropolitan School District. In Madison, property taxes make up about 60 percent of the school district’s funding. The school board has relatively little control over the rest of its revenue, which comes from the state, the federal government and local sources such as student fees. (Statewide, as of 2011-’12, school districts got an average of 43 percent of their revenue from property taxes, although the range was 14 percent to 93 percent, according to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.) To back its claim against Burke, the Republican Party cited not only property tax levies but total budget figures, so we’ll examine both. 1. Preliminary 2012-’13 budget Burke joined the majority on the school board in a 6-1 vote on June 18, 2012, to approve the school district’s preliminary budget for 2012-’13. It would have raised the property tax levy by 4.95 percent. The school district’s portion of the property tax bill for the average Madison home, valued at $232,000, would have increased $91. 2. Final 2012-’13 budget Burke joined in a 7-0 vote on Oct. 29, 2012, that gave final approval to the 2012-’13 budget. It included a smaller levy increase than the preliminary budget -- 1.75 percent. That meant an $8 increase on the property tax bill for the average Madison home. The size of the total budget, taking into account all sources of revenue, rose by 4.3 percent. So, for her first annual budget, Burke voted twice in favor of raising property taxes and the size of the total school district budget. 3. Preliminary 2013-’14 budget On Aug. 26, 2013, the school board voted 6-1 to to approve a preliminary budget for 2013-’14. A final vote is scheduled for Oct. 28, 2013. Burke was the lone dissenter. The property tax levy would increase nearly 4.5 percent, boosting the property tax bill by $119 on a typical Madison home. Despite her no vote, Burke indicated she was open to a property tax increase. Several weeks before the preliminary vote, she told The Capital Times regarding property taxes: "I think in an environment where we’ve seen real wages in Dane County decrease, and a lot of people are on fixed incomes, we have to work as hard as possible to limit any increase to the inflation rate." As for the total budget, it would actually decrease, by less than half of a percentage point; but, again, Burke voted no. So, for her second budget, Burke expressed being open to a relatively small property tax hike, but voted against a preliminary plan that would carry a larger levy increase but a smaller total budget. Our rating The Wisconsin Republican Party said Burke "has proven on the Madison Board of Education" that she supports raising taxes and spending. Burke voted for a larger total budget, which included a property tax increase, for 2012-’13. In a preliminary vote for 2013-’14, she opposed a property tax increase that was larger than she advocated; that was part of a proposal that actually reduces the size of the total budget. For a statement that is partially accurate but leaves out important details, we give the state GOP a Half True. If you would like to comment on this item, you can do so on the Journal Sentinel’s web page.	None	Republican Party of Wisconsin	None	None	None	2013-10-10T05:00:00	2013-10-07	['None']
-pomt-03012	Says U.S. Rep. Steve Daines, R-Mont., "opposes a vote on his own legislation that he proposed just a few months ago."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/15/democratic-senatorial-campaign-committee/democrats-say-rep-steve-daines-wont-back-his-own-b/	No great insight is necessary to predict that both parties will aim to use the government shutdown to their advantage in the 2014 elections. The political jabbing is already underway in the Montana Senate race to replace Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat, who won’t run again. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee attacked Rep. Steve Daines, R-Mont., the state’s only House member and a likely contender for Baucus’ seat. "Daines is irresponsibly doing everything he can to make sure the reckless Republican government shutdown continues no matter how dire the consequences are for Montana," the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wrote in a press release. "In fact, Daines is so thoroughly wedded to his partisan political shutdown that he opposes a vote on his own legislation that he proposed just a few months ago." In this fact-check, we’ll look at whether Daines actually opposed a vote on a bill he introduced. We contacted the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and spokesman Justin Barasky noted that back in March, Daines cosponsored a bill called the Government Shutdown Prevention Act. The gist of the measure, endorsed by 16 Republicans and no Democrats, is that if the parties couldn’t come to terms, government agencies could stay open, funded at the same level they are today. If four months went by and there was still no deal, agencies would absorb a 1 percent cut, and that would be repeated every three months until a more durable bill passed. House Democrats are circulating a petition that would force an immediate vote by the full House on the bill. Known as a discharge petition, it would override House leadership and for that reason, it is an unusual move that reflects a breakdown of party control. Daines will not sign the petition, not that his Democratic colleagues invited him to. They sent letters to 30 Republican representatives, asking them to join the effort, and Daines was not on that list. The discharge petition is no ordinary parliamentary tactic. A petition of this sort succeeds only when the speaker’s hold on his own party has failed. A discharge petition with a twist In the view of the Democrats, Daines has failed to do all he could to put his legislation to a vote. But the real story is more complicated. If the Democrats got the 218 votes they needed, presumably 200 Democrats and 18 Republicans, the special rule they proposed would lead to an immediate floor vote on an amendment to strip the original language from the bill and replace it with Democratic version that simply funds the government at current levels. The parts about automatic spending decreases would be gone. If that amendment failed, the bill would go back to the House Appropriations Committee and there would be no vote by the full House on the original measure. So the discharge petition forces a vote on a substitute for Daines' bill; it doesn't force a vote on the original bill text itself. Alee Lockman, Daines’ communications director, said he won’t sign because what would emerge wouldn’t be his bill. "The bill my boss cosponsored and the bill that would result through the Democrats’ discharge petition would not be the same," Lockman said. We contacted the office of another cosponsor of the bill, chair of the House Budget Committee Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. His spokesman said for the same reason, he also had no plans to sign the petition. Independent analysts agree that Daines would not have the chance to vote on the measure he introduced. Donald Wolfensberger, an expert on House parliamentary procedure at the Wilson Center in Washington with long ties to the Republican party, affirmed that the Democratic measure "completely replaces the base text." Sarah Binder, a Brookings Institution fellow and professor of political science at George Washington University, said the Democrats’ petition leaves little room for what Daines had in mind. "I think we're talking about two different measures, and thus refusing to sign the discharge petition on the resolution does not signal a member's unwillingness to vote for a bill that she or he cosponsored." By Binder’s count, 407 discharge petitions have been filed since the end of WWII. Only 2 percent were successful. If you include instances when the threat of a petition forced House leaders to charge course, the track record rises but still only to 9 percent. Researchers Susan Miller and Marvin Overby at the University of Missouri looked at a dozen years of recent congressional activity, and their results tell us that Daines has a lot of company in refusing to sign a discharge petition for a bill he introduced. Miller and Overby found that when the sponsor or cosponsor comes from the party in power, they refuse to sign about 80 percent of the time. Our ruling The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said Daines opposes a vote on legislation he introduced. Democrats are seeking House members to sign a discharge petition to bring the legislation Daines introduced for a vote, and Daines won’t sign. However, the Democratic move would take away all the relevant text of the original bill, replace it with new language, leaving in place only the original bill number. Independent experts said that Daines would be voting on a measure that is substantially different from the one he put his name to in March. We rate the claim False.	None	Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee	None	None	None	2013-10-15T12:15:05	2013-10-09	['United_States']
-pose-00682	"I will introduce legislation to reform and redirect the $125 million Loan Guarantee Fund."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/linc-o-meter/promise/712/reform-and-redirect-loan-guarantee-fund-for-econom/	None	linc-o-meter	Lincoln Chafee	None	None	Reform and redirect loan guarantee fund for economic development	2011-04-27T06:57:14	None	['None']
-pomt-08166	In Wisconsin, "deaths from domestic violence are at the highest in 10 years."	true	/wisconsin/statements/2010/dec/02/gwen-moore/us-rep-gwen-moore-says-domestic-violence-deaths-wi/	When U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) was honored by the National Network to End Domestic Violence, she issued a statement saying "we have a real crisis on our hands." In Wisconsin, her Oct. 7, 2010, statement read, "deaths from domestic violence are at the highest in 10 years." Indeed, eight days earlier, the Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence released a report that made that claim. According to her spokesman, Moore based her statement on a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about the report. The article said domestic violence "claimed 67 lives" in 2009. We wondered: Does that mean domestic abusers killed 67 people? And is that number, as Moore claimed, a 10-year high? The Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence, like the national organization that honored Moore, is an advocacy group committed to ending domestic violence. It has produced a "domestic violence homicide report" each year since 2000, using data from crime report summaries from local police agencies and from various news articles. The coalition defines homicide as "the killing of one human being by another." But its annual homicide reports actually count more than that. As in previous years, the 67 deaths in the 2009 report included homicides in commonly understood domestic violence cases -- such as when the victims and perpetrators were spouses or partners, former spouses or partners, or adults with children in common. Homicides of other people are counted if, for example, a woman’s current boyfriend kills the woman’s former boyfriend; if a third person trying to protect a domestic violence victim kills the perpetrator; or if the domestic violence victim kills the perpetrator in self-defense. But the Wisconsin coalition -- as it clearly notes in its report -- also adds suicides committed by domestic violence perpetrators. For example, it counts the January 2009 death of a Fond du Lac County man who took his own life after shooting his wife to death outside their home. All told, the coalition says that in 2009, "there were 47 domestic violence homicide incidents resulting in 67 deaths -- 52 homicides and 15 perpetrator suicides." Many people would not consider a domestic violence perpetrator who committed suicide to be a domestic violence victim. The coalition says it has always included perpetrator suicides in its annual tallies because they occurred as a result of a domestic violence incident, said spokesman Tony Gibart. By the coalition’s count, the 67 total deaths in 2009 was the highest in 10 years, exceeding the previous high of 61 in 2003. Excluding the suicides, the 52 other domestic violence homicides also were the highest in 10 years, exceeding the previous high of 45 in 2003. So, Moore accurately quoted the group’s statistics, and those statistics have been consistently handled -- even though including the suicides increases the number. We checked a few other states for how they tally domestic violence deaths: Illinois: In its most recent report, the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence counted 76 homicides between June 2009 and May 2010. It did not include perpetrator suicides. Minnesota: The Minnesota Coalition for Battered Women, which tallied 25 domestic violence homicides in 2009, says it does not include perpetrator suicides because its focus is on the women, men and children who are murdered in domestic incidents. "There’s no national standard way of reporting" domestic violence deaths, but counting perpetrator suicides is not common, said Shellene Johnson, the Minnesota coalition’s program manager. We also asked a state agency, the Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance, if there are official statistics on domestic violence deaths. The answer is, not exactly. Homicides tracked by the office are not identified in terms of whether they were the result of domestic violence, and suicides are not tracked at all. The office can infer which homicides were domestic, based on the relationship between the offender and the victim as recorded in police reports, said spokeswoman Tami Jackson. But unlike the Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the office does not look more closely into the circumstances of the deaths, she said. That brings us back to Moore’s claim. The Milwaukee congresswoman said deaths in Wisconsin from domestic violence "are at the highest in 10 years." Moore accurately quoted statistics compiled by an advocacy group for 2009. It’s important to note the group includes suicides committed by domestic violence perpetrators, which makes the death tally higher than it would otherwise be. Even so, either way you track it, the 2009 numbers were at a 10-year high. We rate Moore’s statement True.	None	Gwen Moore	None	None	None	2010-12-02T09:00:00	2010-10-07	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-12553	Says Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. has said Black Lives Matter "is a terrorist movement, a hate group and calls it, Black LIES Matter."	true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/17/sheriff-david-clarke-us-senate/pro-sheriff-david-clarke-group-says-clarke-called-/	A committee aiming to persuade the "people’s sheriff" to run for the U.S. Senate is raising money by highlighting the African-American’s inflammatory statements about Black Lives Matter. It’s no secret that Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., a Donald Trump supporter and nationally known conservative, has harshly criticized the group. Yet, we wondered if he has gone as far as the Sheriff David Clarke for U.S. Senate draft committee says he has. As reported by the liberal magazine Mother Jones, the committee sent a fundraising email on April 5, 2017 that suggested several reasons why Clarke would make a good senator -- starting with this one: "Milwaukee’s conservative black Sheriff CORRECTLY says ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ is a terrorist movement, a hate group, and calls it ‘Black LIES Matter.’" The committee also makes the statement on its website. Let’s look at each of the three parts. The committee Sheriff David Clarke for U.S. Senate is not a committee authorized by Clarke, but is registered with the Federal Election Commission as an official draft campaign. It has attacked first-term U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, for being a lesbian as part of its effort to get Clarke to run against her in 2018. Clarke has not ruled out a run, but hasn’t expressed strong interest, either, while a number of Republicans have. For her part, Baldwin has said Clarke is "being groomed" to challenge her, and has raised campaign funds herself off his possible candidacy. While a favorite of the right, Clarke has drawn criticism for his racial remarks as well as for his performance as sheriff as he increasingly spends time on national television and traveling the country on speaking engagements. He has also said virtually nothing about four inmate deaths in the jail he manages that are under investigation. Now to the statement about what Clarke said. ‘Hate group’ Black Lives Matter formed after a Florida jury in 2013 found George Zimmerman not guilty of murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teen. Describing its aim as rebuilding "the black liberation movement," the group has participated around the country in demonstrations, including some around Milwaukee, about police killings of black people. Clarke called Black Lives Matter a "hate group" in a July 2016 opinion column he wrote for FoxNews.com and has made any number of similar references such as these: "I wish the Southern Poverty Law Center would add them (Black Lives Matter) to the list of hate groups in America … this hateful ideology of Black Lives Matter." -- Fox News’ "America’s News HQ," July 31, 2016 "Black Lives Matter are purveyors of hate. It is a hateful, violent ideology." -- Fox News’ "Hannity" show, July 17, 2016 Black ‘Lies’ Matter Clarke has used "Lies" instead of "Lives" in referencing the group many times, including in his memoir, released in February 2017, and on CNN and Fox in 2015. In the Fox interview, he elaborated on why, saying: "The whole thing is built on a lie, the whole premise is built on a lie. But it’s a conglomeration of misfits. You have Occupy movement, you have organized labor in on it now, you have criminals, you have black racialists, you have cop haters and anarchists have now formed together this faux movement, if you will." ‘Terrorist movement’ Clarke hasn’t used a terrorism reference nearly as often, but he does so twice in his book: Black Lives Matter does not "care about black lives. They care about their own radical ideology of terrorism: anarchy." "In the five days surrounding the Dallas shooting -- which was the worst police massacre since 9/11, by the way -- there was even more Black LIES Matter-inspired violence (four attacks on police are listed)….Let me guess. You’d never heard of these incidents. That’s because the media protect and lie about this insidious terror organization." Clarke also predicted on Twitter in 2015 that Black Lives Matter "will join forces with ISIS to being (sic) down our legal constituted republic." And in a July 2016 column he wrote for The Hill, he said: "We have several forces internal and external attacking our rule of law: ISIS, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street – just the most recent iterations of the elements who brand themselves as unique but seek the same revolutionary aim: take down the West …" Our rating The Sheriff David Clarke for U.S. Senate draft committee says that Clarke said Black Lives Matter "is a terrorist movement, a hate group and calls it, Black LIES Matter." Clarke has repeatedly used Lies instead of Lives in labeling the group, and has repeatedly called it a hate group. In his memoir, he calls the group a "terrorist organization." We rate the statement True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Sheriff David Clarke for U.S. Senate	None	None	None	2017-04-17T05:00:00	2017-04-05	['None']
-goop-01394	Angelina Jolie Getting Married To “Husband Number Four,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-married-husband-four-wedding-false/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie NOT Getting Married To “Husband Number Four,” Despite Report	10:52 am, March 14, 2018	None	['None']
-farg-00212	"The average premium across this country has actually doubled under Obamacare."	misleading	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/05/pence-misleads-premiums/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Mike Pence	Lori Robertson	['Affordable Care Act']	Pence Misleads on Premiums	May 25, 2017	[' Speech in Louisiana – Wednesday, May 24, 2017 ']	['None']
-pomt-05586	Says Barack Obama's health care law "will be the biggest job-killer ever."	false	/florida/statements/2012/apr/02/rick-scott/rick-scott-calls-health-care-law-job-killer/	As Supreme Court justices embarked on three days of oral arguments in the historic lawsuit over the health care law, Gov. Rick Scott went on a national TV media blitz and said one of the most regurgitated falsehoods of the health care debate. "I ran on a campaign of getting our state back to work. This will be the biggest job-killer ever," he said on Fox and Friends on March 26, 2012. "I mean, think about it, the government can’t buy health care cheaper than anybody else can. And we have these unbelievable penalties, which will have to go up." "It will be a big job-killer because it will cost too much," he said. PolitiFact has examined similar claims about the law’s job-killing effect from House Republican Leader Eric Cantor, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and former U.S. Senate candidate and former Florida House Majority Leader Adam Hasner. None fared well on our Truth-O-Meter. We wanted to rule on Scott’s statement given renewed debate on the law. We’ll explain how we examined the "job-killing" rhetoric in the past before getting around to Scott specifically. None of the folks who made the claim before now could back it up with valid projections of job losses, and instead presented partisan reports or skewed interpretations of independent reports as evidence. One Republican document, "Obamacare: A Budget-Busting, Job-Killing Health Care Law," claimed "independent analyses have determined that the health care law will cause significant job losses for the U.S. economy." It cites a 2010 report by the CBO, which analyzes the impact of legislation, that allegedly determined the law would lead to roughly 650,000 lost jobs. But the report didn’t say that. It said the reduction in the amount of labor in the economy would be "roughly half a percent" -- and not because of onerous regulation. Some workers around retirement age may decide to stop working earlier than they planned, the report states, pointing to the affordability of insurance to be offered outside of the workplace. The same report says the law may also mean more people seek jobs because of a Medicaid expansion that allows more low-income people to work and still qualify for the program. The CBO does highlight a part of the law that will likely lead to lost jobs: the requirement that businesses with 50 or more workers pay a fee if they do not offer health insurance (or if the plan they offer falls short on some criteria and at least one employee receives a subsidy from the to-be-created insurance exchange). This fee, CBO states, will be passed on to employees through reduced wages and other compensation. Because some businesses pay a chunk of employees at minimum wage, it’s inevitable that some will take on fewer low-wage workers. They may also respond by hiring more part-time or seasonal employees. That’s as specific as it gets in the CBO’s update. Why? Because it will take time to assess the effects of the law, most parts of which won’t be implemented for another couple of years. Another source the Republicans have used for backup is pretty irrelevant now. The National Association of Independent Business said in a 2009 report the impact of a provision requiring businesses to offer insurance would lead to the elimination of 1.6 million jobs, two-thirds of which would be from small business. But the blanket employer mandate did not make it into the final law, which exempts companies with 50 or fewer employees from any mandate. The NFIB produced a more recent study in November 2011 blasting another part of the law: an escalating annual fee (starting in 2014) on the health insurance sector that the group says will be passed on to businesses through increased premiums. This requirement, which the lobbying group calls a health insurance tax, would lead to lost private-sector jobs between 125,000 and 249,000 in 2010, the group said. Job losses would total 4,700 through 2021 in Florida. We’ve found a few problems with NFIB research in our past stories. For starters, it’s not really independent in the ideological sense. The lobbying group opposes policy that places a financial burden on business and sued against the health care law at the Supreme Court. In other words, it’s not exactly our go-to source for objectivity. Still, we dug into the substance of their claim that the law will cost hundreds of thousands of private jobs in our most recent check of this job-killing claim. Several skeptical experts told us the impact would not be that big, pointing out that employer payments under the law are small, and that the NFIB’s research doesn’t factor in new tax credits under the law for small businesses, which would actually lead to savings in premium contributions. "The rhetorical hysteria explicit in the term ‘job killer’ is enough to make one despair for rational public debate," said Henry Aaron, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in a February email with PolitiFact. Like CBO, we’ve cautioned that a discussion of what the law will or won’t do is mostly based on speculation. Even when parts of the law go into effect in 2014 (barring Supreme Court action), we won’t know if it has a drastic effect on jobs until the years that follow. Our friends at FactCheck.org arrived at the same conclusions we did about the job-killing threat in January 2011. So what about Scott? Could he cite new, compelling evidence for this well-worn claim? "It’s a prediction based on conversations with business owners and other job creators," spokesman Brian Burgess wrote in an email. He didn’t elaborate. Analyzing the truthfulness of predictions is tricky business in which we normally prefer not to delve. But the job-killing claim is widely spread, and does not carry proof. Scott’s spokesman said this is a prediction based on anecdotal conversations with business owners. We say it’s not one steeped in credible, independent evidence -- it’s more like a scare tactic. We rule this claim False.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2012-04-02T11:42:20	2012-03-26	['None']
-pomt-10157	Says McCain "voted to let governments charge rape victims" for forensic exams.	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/01/planned-parenthood/ad-distorts-mccains-record-on-violence-against-wom/	A new ad from Planned Parenthood makes two charges against Sarah Palin and John McCain. It says Wasilla, Alaska, charged rape victims for forensic exams when Palin was mayor and that, as a senator, McCain "voted to let governments charge rape victims" for forensic exam kits. We've examined the controversy over the Wasilla rape kit policy in this previous article, so here we'll examine the charge that McCain voted to let governments charge the victims. The ad begins with a rape victim named Gretchen who says, "I just didn’t think it would happen to me. I was drugged and raped." The announcer says, "Under Mayor Sarah Palin, women like Gretchen were forced to pay up to $1,200 for the emergency exams used to prosecute their attackers." The screen says "Charged rape victims for exams - Source: CNN, September 22, 2008." (We reported earlier that Gretchen is from Illinois, not Alaska , and was not subject to the Wasilla policy.) The announcer continues: "In the Senate, John McCain voted against legislation to protect women from these same heartless policies" while the screen says, "Voted to let governments charge rape victims." Gretchen then says, "That is something to me that’s unthinkable. It scares me to death." The screen attributes the McCain allegation to a vote on Aug. 25, 1994, on a crime bill that included the Violence Against Women Act, which itself included a provision that required states to provide free forensic exams for rape victims. Planned Parenthood's logic: Because McCain opposed that bill, he voted to let governments charge victims for their rape kits. That's quite a stretch. Indeed, McCain voted that day against a conference report on the crime bill, but he opposed it not because of the Violence Against Women provisions, but because it included extra spending that McCain considered unrelated to crime and it had a provision that would have banned so-called assault weapons. Nine months earlier, McCain had supported the original bill, which included the Violence Against Women Act, when it passed the Senate 95-4. So that alone is a significant contradiction of Planned Parenthood's claim. Also, McCain has supported the Violence Against Women Act when it has come up for reauthorization. In 2000, McCain joined a unanimous vote on a crime bill that included the Violence Against Women Act. In 2005, he praised the law when he introduced a companion bill to provide protections for Indian women. "The 1994 Violence Against Women Act has had a tremendous impact on raising the national awareness of domestic violence and providing communities, including Indian tribes, the resources to respond to the devastating impact of domestic violence," he said. When we asked Planned Parenthood if it had any other evidence to bolster its claim, spokesman Tait Sye scrounged up a few more: a vote against a 2008 justice spending bill that included all justice programs (McCain opposed it because it had too many earmarks), and a couple of other votes that are not directly related to the rape provision of the Violence Against Women Act. That's the best they got? That's the classic kind of cherry-picking we've seen in campaign ads and it is flimsy evidence for the serious charge that McCain opposed the program, especially in light of his clear support at other times. Planned Parenthood has virtually nothing to back up its charge that McCain voted to let states charge for rape exams. Sure, McCain voted against a larger crime bill in 1994, but that vote was about assault weapons and spending, not the Violence Against Women Act. And McCain has supported the law before then — and twice since. Planned Parenthood's claim isn't just False, it's ridiculously so, which merits a Pants on Fire.	None	Planned Parenthood	None	None	None	2008-10-01T00:00:00	2008-10-01	['None']
-goop-02712	Karrueche Tran Was “Terrified” Of Chris Brown Run-In At BET Awards, 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/karrueche-tran-chris-brown-bet-awards-restraining-order/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Karrueche Tran Was NOT “Terrified” Of Chris Brown Run-In At BET Awards, Despite Report	5:06 pm, June 26, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-09922	Even high estimates for an early draft of the health care plan are "less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/24/paul-krugman/bush-tax-cuts-health-care-probably/	Paul Krugman, a noted economist and a columnist for the New York Times , made the case in a recent column that Democratic senators need to unite to pass health care reform. "I'm not that worried about the issue of costs," Krugman wrote. "Yes, the Congressional Budget Office's preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts." We wanted to know if Krugman was right that the initial cost estimates for health care legislation by the Congressional Budget Office were less than "the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts." The CBO released its study of a draft bill from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) on June 15, 2009. The report concluded that the plan would cost $1 trillion between 2010 and 2019. It also said the plan would reduce the rolls of the uninsured by 16 million, which is only about a third of those currently without insurance. (So the plan as rated is not "universal.") Those findings have fueled debate. Opponents of health care reform said they show the plan is too expensive and won't cover everyone. Health care supporters said that the draft legislation does not include all the major elements of health care reform that will increase coverage or reduce costs, such as a public option health insurance plan or requirements for employers to contribute to insurance plans. But the draft bill is the best we have to work with, because so far it's the only one rated by CBO, a nonpartisan group that estimates the cost of legislation. Next, we wanted to put a price tag on the Bush tax cuts. Krugman doesn't give a time frame for the $1.8 trillion price tag. The law was written so that the tax cuts expire in 2010, and we think that's the time frame he was talking about. (We e-mailed him about this but didn't hear back.) Looking back, how much have the Bush tax cuts cost us so far? There's not a CBO report on that puts a dollar figure on that, and different think tanks calculated the lost revenues different ways. Keep in mind, we're talking about estimating something that didn't happen: How much in revenues didn't the government collect? Economic conditions change over time, and changes in tax code can affect that. So it's not a straight-up calculation. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities agrees with Krugman. The center's 2009 report on the Bush tax cuts states: "The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts added about $1.7 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2008. Because they (were) financed by borrowing — which increases the national debt — this figure includes the extra interest costs resulting from that additional debt. This figure also includes the cost of 'patching' the Alternative Minimum Tax to keep the tax from hitting millions of upper-middle-class households, a problem the tax cuts helped cause. Over the next decade (2009-2018), making the tax cuts permanent would cost $4.4 trillion, assuming that the tax cuts remain deficit-financed." We then asked the conservative Heritage Institute about the Bush tax cuts. Brian Riedl analyzes the federal budget for the group. He said Krugman's $1.8 trillion number only considers the government's lost revenue, and doesn't account for the economic activity that lower taxes generate. He said the number was "defensible, but an overstatement." He estimates there would be a stimulative effect from tax cuts that could shave about 25 percent off that tally. Still, he said, Krugman is in the right ballpark for a static score of uncollected revenues. "I can't believe I'm actually saying one of Krugman's numbers is defensible," he added. There's one other implicit assumption in Krugman's statement. He writes, "But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts." We know the CBO report scored the first draft at $1 trillion, but we also know that CBO determined the draft was not a "universal" plan — only about a third of the uninsured would be covered. But would a truly "universal" bill still come in under $1.8 trillion? "Absolutely," said Kenneth Thorpe, a health care expert at Emory University. He said draft version of the bill could be modified to expand coverage to everyone and trim costs, and he thinks the total cost of that would likely be just over $1 trillion. He said the Senate Finance Committee is working on a new plan, though it has not been released to the public. "I think that you can provide universal health care coverage for all 46 million of the uninsured for just over $1 trillion," he said. After reading many studies on the cost of the Bush tax cuts, it seems to us that Krugman is in the ballpark with his $1.8 trillion estimate. But we believe there are a couple of important caveats to his comparison. First, his wording implies that CBO's much-discussed estimate is for universal coverage, but it's not. Also, he doesn't offer a time frame for the Bush tax cuts, so we can't be sure he is comparing the same number of years. Finally, the health care plan is still very much in flux, and the CBO estimate is based on an early and incomplete bill. So we find Krugman's claim Mostly True.	None	Paul Krugman	None	None	None	2009-06-24T09:57:25	2009-06-22	['None']
-wast-00040	"Two senators \xe2\x80\x94 bipartisan \xe2\x80\x94 reached out to the election apparatus in Florida to let them know that the Russians are in the records, and all they have to do, if those election records are not protected, is to go in and start eliminating registered voters."	4 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/08/17/has-russia-hacked-into-floridas-election-system-theres-no-evidence/	None	None	Bill Nelson	Salvador Rizzo	None	Has Russia hacked into Florida's election system? There is no evidence.	August 17	None	['Russia']
-chct-00320	FACT CHECK: Could DACA Legislation Lead To 'Chain Migration'?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/09/19/fact-check-could-daca-legislation-lead-to-chain-migration/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	1:32 PM 09/19/2017	None	['None']
-hoer-01140	Fake Britains Got Talent Facebook Page	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-britains-got-talent-facebook-page-is-a-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Fake Britains Got Talent Facebook Page is a Scam	May 5, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-02304	The NCAA will "get billions" from the men’s basketball tournament. "Players get a trophy."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/01/arian-foster/arian-foster-ncaa-gets-billions-players-get-trophi/	As the final four teams in the NCAA basketball championship get ready to play this weekend, the top question on the mind of virtually every sports fan is which schools will win. (At PunditFact, we like Florida.) But let the record show that at least one man has made up his own mind on the ultimate victor. Arian Foster, an NFL running back with the Houston Texans, was asked for his pick in the 68-team tournament. His tweeted reply? "NCAA will win. They'll get billions, players get a trophy," Foster wrote. Ouch! At a moment when most people care about individual achievement and team cohesion, Foster is looking at the role of filthy lucre. We decided to see whether the facts back up his claim that the NCAA will get billions from the tournament, while the players will take home mere trophies. We tweeted to Foster and did not hear back. We also sent an email to the NCAA press office and got no reply. But there’s enough information on the public record to get some clarity. Ideally, we would have revenue numbers for this year, but we’ll have to make do with financials from 2013. From the NCAA’s home city of Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Star culled through the organization’s financial statements and reported that in 2013, the tournament brought in nearly $770 million, or about 84 percent of the organization’s total revenues. That’s big money but it isn’t billions. Furthermore, the NCAA shared most of that with the member colleges and universities. About $525 million passed from the NCAA to individual schools. These numbers are in line with NCAA financial reports we found for 2012 and 2011. Now, not all of the money that went to the schools ended up with the student-athletes. Regardless if they win during March Madness, they do get more than a trophy. The largest benefit comes in the form of athletic scholarship dollars. Known as grant-in-aid, student-athletes received the equivalent of $125 million in the 2012-13 season, according to the Indianapolis Star. This covers tuition, room and board and books for the players. The average grant across all sports and all divisions in the NCAA was over $13,000 for men and $14,000 for women. All of these disbursements from the NCAA cover all sports, not just basketball. A smaller fund, the Student Assistance Fund, is awarded on a case-by-case basis. The value last year was about $73 million. So in round figures, student-athletes got about $200 million out of the total revenues, or about a fourth of it. There is one other pot of money -- worth about $25 million -- that pays for tutors and other support to help the players keep up their grades. We didn’t include it because this is an indirect benefit. These scholarships might not be as generous as they would seem -- a fact that has led some to call for additional compensation for players. We came across studies that concluded that many athletes find that their scholarships don’t cover the full cost of their education. Some finish their time in school saddled with debt but with no diploma. Still, if Foster was talking about a single year, these numbers don’t back him up. While there are signs that revenues will be higher this year and could cross the $1 billion mark, it would require a doubling of revenues to get to billions (plural). That doesn’t seem likely. However, if we look at the next 10 years, the NCAA is completely in the multi-billion dollar zone. Its 2011-24 contract with CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting is worth at least $10.8 billion. That is the largest single revenue stream and there are others. In this longer time frame, Foster is correct about the riches flowing to the NCAA. It is harder to know what would happen to the grants flowing to the players. Under the current NCAA by-laws, schools are not allowed to give students more than the actual costs of going to school. It is possible that revenues will rise faster than the cost of higher education. As a result, players will get a declining share of the proceeds. A pending lawsuit aims to overturn the NCAA limits on financial rewards to players. This raises issues of fairness but our fact-check deals only with whether the players get some monetary benefit and clearly, as a group, they receive substantial sums. Our ruling Foster said that the NCAA gets billions, while the winning players walk away with just a trophy. The revenues that come from the college basketball championship might be close to $1 billion, but there’s no sign that they have reached the $2 billion level. In addition, much of that money leaves the NCAA and goes to the schools. About a quarter of the total turns into scholarships for student-athletes. If Foster was talking about the NCAA’s lucrative multi-year contracts with broadcasters, his numbers are more accurate on the revenue side, but players still end up getting a lot more than a trophy. We don’t know what he had in mind. Overall, Foster’s point that the NCAA and colleges get a lot more out of the deal than the players is accurate. His specifics, however, are off. On balance, that comes to a Half True.	None	Arian Foster	None	None	None	2014-04-01T18:12:31	2014-03-19	['None']
-pose-00396	"He will stop the development of new nuclear weapons; work with Russia to take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert; seek dramatic reductions in U.S. and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons and material; and set a goal to expand the U.S.-Russian ban on intermediate-range missiles so that the agreement is global."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/416/stop-the-development-of-new-nuclear-weapons/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Stop the development of new nuclear weapons	2010-01-07T13:26:58	None	['Russia', 'United_States']
-snes-06046	Video shows a girl pulling puppies from a bucket and throwing them into a river.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/a-bone-to-pick/	None	Crime	None	David Mikkelson	None	Girl Throws Puppies Into River	3 January 2014	None	['None']
-tron-02005	Trump Executive Order Leads to Capture of ISIS Leader at JFK Airport	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/trump-executive-order-leads-capture-isis-leader-jfk-airpor/	None	immigration	None	None	['donald trump', 'refugees', 'terrorism']	Trump Executive Order Leads to Capture of ISIS Leader at JFK Airport	Feb 3, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-01394	"As mayor, [Allan Fung] raised taxes three times."	mostly true	/rhode-island/statements/2014/oct/14/american-leadhership-pac/american-leadhership-ad-ignores-three-years-allan-/	He's the only candidate in the race for Rhode Island governor who has been in a position to raise taxes. So it's not surprising that Allan Fung, the Republican mayor of Cranston, has come under attack for -- wait for it -- raising taxes. A new ad titled "Allan Fung - An Insider's Insider" by the American LeadHERship PAC, a political action committee that is focused on electing Democrat Gina Raimondo, asks, "What do we really know about Allan Fung?" The ad calls him "a career politician" and says, "as mayor, he raised taxes three times." Fung became mayor in 2009. He has repeatedly acknowledged that he raised taxes three times during his six years in office. But he also inherited a huge pension problem, a budget that had $1.5 million in phony savings, and a school committee that had spent about $8 million it didn't have. His first year in office was marked by a massive cut in state aid that rocked cities and towns. And, with the Great Recession in full swing, it didn't get easier for him or other mayors. For example, early in his term, general revenue sharing, where the state gave about $55 million from sales and income taxes to municipalities, was eliminated. But he and the city ultimately stabilized the budget and during the last three of his six years in office, the city has not raised taxes. In the end, the statement in the American LeadHERship commercial is accurate. But because it leaves out the important context of the three most-recent years in which he did not raise taxes, we rate it Mostly True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	American LeadHERship PAC	None	None	None	2014-10-14T00:01:00	2014-10-08	['None']
-thet-00054	"These latest figures show there is still a considerable problem. It is unacceptable that services at nearly 60 per cent of stations failed to hit the performance target last month."	false	https://theferret.scot/labour-train-stations-scotrail-failed-targets/	None	Fact check 	Neil Bibby MSP, Scottish Labour transport spokesman	None	None	Labour’s claim 60 per cent of train stations failed targets is False	August 10, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10038	Louisiana is turning down $100 million "that would require us to change our unemployment law, that would have actually raised taxes on Louisiana businesses."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/feb/24/bobby-jindal/jindal-unemployment-measure-stimulus/	Since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act became law on Feb. 17, 2009, a few Republican governors have said they don't intend to accept some of the money, saying it comes with too many strings attached. That includes Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who appeared on Meet the Press on Feb. 22. "Why would you turn down $100 million for federal unemployment assistance for your state?" asked moderator David Gregory. "You're talking about temporary federal money that would require a permanent change in state law," Jindal said. "The $100 million we turned down was temporary federal dollars that would require us to change our unemployment laws, that would've actually raised taxes on Louisiana businesses. We as a state would've been responsible for paying for those benefits after the federal money disappeared." Gregory then quoted Louisiana's Democratic senator, Mary Landrieu, saying that Jindal's claims were "inaccurate," but Jindal stuck by his statement. First, we have to note that while $100 million sounds like a lot, it is actually a relatively small portion of Louisiana's stimulus package. Jindal has said he intends to accept federal money that will pay for a $25 per week increase in benefits for unemployment recipients, as well as money for transportation projects. Landrieu says the transportation money should total $430 million, and that the state will get $718 million in stabilization funds aimed at schools, and another $752 million for agriculture and rural development. When you factor in money to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other federal projects, Louisiana will ultimately receive "billions" from the package, Landrieu said. But Jindal is rejecting money that the federal government is offering states to loosen their rules governing unemployment compensation. (Find it under Sec. 2003, "Special transfers for unemployment compensation modernization. ) The incentive varies by state, but Louisiana's take is about $100 million, or more precisely $32.8 million with the potential for another $65.6 million. The first change the federal government wants is known by the lovely jargon "alternative base." It makes slight changes to the formula states use when determining if workers qualify for cash payments. Basically, it would allow more low-wage and seasonal workers to be eligible for unemployment, a method already used by 19 states. Jindal believes this change would cost Louisiana up to $12 million a year, and the experts we consulted said that estimate sounded about right. After Louisiana used the $32.8 million, it would have to come up with $12 million a year on its own. If Louisiana agreed to that measure, it could try for the $65.6 million by extending its unemployment provisions even further — such as covering people who seek part-time work or those who leave their jobs for a "compelling family reason." To take only the first provision into account, Jindal is saying that Louisiana would get $32.8 million in funds up front for potential ongoing expenses of $12 million a year, which he says is not much of a deal. And he is saying businesses, which pay the taxes that fund unemployment compensation, would get a tax increase to pay for that. But he sidesteps two key points: The $12 million a year is not a solid number — it could conceivably drop if the economy improves and more people get jobs. And state officials may decide to pay for it in ways other than a tax increase. Wayne Vroman, an economist with the nonpartisan Urban Institute who studies unemployment insurance, said there's a good chance the tax increase would not be needed. "There's a kind of balance through having more stimulus that would tend to reduce future taxes," Vroman said. A business-oriented group, UWC-Strategic Services on Unemployment & Workers' Compensation, was less optimistic about avoiding a tax increase, but the group's president said it's not clear how much taxes would have to go up. "I think it's fair to say that there would be some increase in taxes to pay for additional payouts," said Doug Holmes. "How much will that be? When would the tax kick in? It's really hard to speculate about that." Holmes also said that business taxes for unemployment in most states will rise dramatically next year regardless of whether states take the incentive money or not. That's simply a function of the downturn in the economy and the way the taxes are calculated. Clearly, Jindal's comment is speculative in some respects. But it's also logical to think that expanding unemployment insurance will cost more, and that the government will have to find that money, possibly increasing taxes on the employers who pay into the fund. On the other hand, some states might be better off giving workers the money and getting their local economy back into gear. Certainly the stimulus bill itself does not specify tax increases for unemployment. Given all these factors, we find that Jindal's statement is largely correct. He is right that the $100 million he turned down would have required Louisiana to change its unemployment law. But he can't be sure that it would mean higher taxes based on that alone. It depends how the economy rebounds and how the costs are allocated. The law itself does not require tax increases. For this reason, we find his statement Mostly True.	None	Bobby Jindal	None	None	None	2009-02-24T18:24:52	2009-02-22	['Louisiana']
-tron-00824	Ben Bernanke Told Everyone At a Neighborhood Bar How Screwed The Economy Really Is	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ben-bernanke-bar/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Ben Bernanke Told Everyone At a Neighborhood Bar How Screwed The Economy Really Is	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-hoer-01007	Kroger Warns of Free Check Scam on Facebook	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/kroger-warns-free-check-scam-facebook/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Kroger Warns of Free Check Scam on Facebook	June 10, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-08271	"Anybody who is familiar with the historical data from the IRS knows that raising income tax rates will likely actually reduce federal revenues."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/nov/09/mike-pence/mike-pence-says-raising-taxes-lowers-tax-revenues/	On one side, we have David Stockman, the budget director for President Ronald Reagan. On the other, it's Rep. Mike Pence, the conservative Indiana Republican and potential presidential candidate. The venue: This Week with Christiane Amanpour. The topic: What's worse, raising taxes or letting the deficit run wild? Stockman said the deficit could ruin the country and savaged the Republican Party's refusal to consider tax increases. "Both parties, unfortunately, became free lunch parties, the Republicans cutting taxes every time they had a chance, never doing anything about spending, and the Democrats digging in to defend everything that was there," Stockman said. "As a result, we now have this massive deficit. ... This will not end well. It's going to end in a disaster." Pence agreed that Republicans had wrongly allowed spending to increase during the George W. Bush administration but said that Republicans were now more committed to reducing government. "We think we ought to go back to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, and freeze there," Pence said. "There's been an 84 percent increase in domestic spending since this administration took office. We've got to roll back there. That will save $100 billion in the first year. How about a net hiring freeze on Capitol Hill? ... For Americans under the age of 40, we've got to put everything on the table in the area of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. We have got to reform these entitlement programs. They are threatening the fiscal vitality of future generations of Americans." Not good enough, said Stockman: "Social Security needs to be means-tested right now, not for benefits in 2030, right now, for the top one-third of beneficiaries who have private income that they've earned over their lifetime. We need to drastically scale back Medicare. And the Republicans expanded it. And I appreciate what Mike is saying, but there's no track record of a willingness to take on the doctors, the pharmaceutical companies, the scooter chair manufacturers, who are everywhere. (And) we need to take on defense ... We can't be the policemen of the world anymore because we can't afford it. We're going to have to cut defense drastically. And that isn't just fraud, waste and abuse. It's force structure, fewer divisions, fewer aircraft carriers. And even if we do all that, we still have to raise revenue." Raising revenue means a tax increase, which Pence said was a bad idea. And Pence further argued that a tax increase wouldn't help anyway: "David believes that every tax increase equals a revenue increase, but that's not true. Anybody who is familiar with the historical data from the IRS knows that raising income tax rates will likely actually reduce federal revenues." That's what caught our attention as fact-checkers. How can raising taxes not raise money? And does the historical data really show that? First, we should note that if you take Pence's statement at its most literal, it's not correct. The Internal Revenue Service has published detailed tables of tax collections, and they go up almost every year. They went up after tax increases passed in 1990 and 1993, and, when taxes were cut in 2001, collections dropped. But it's a bit more complicated than that. If you're not an economist, it sounds counterintuitive to claim that raising taxes gets you less money, but there is some logic behind the theory. You have to start with the idea that government can tax people so much that it creates a disincentive to work. Let's start with an extreme: If you tax people at 100 percent -- which means you'd take all of their income -- people quit their jobs, and you'd get zero dollars in taxes. And rates that are close to 100 percent create similar disincentives. Back in 1980, for example, tax rates were much higher than they are now, with marginal tax rates on the highest incomes at 70 percent. Today, the top rate is half that -- 35 percent. During the Reagan years, economists postulated that you could cut that top rate, which would stoke economic activity and produce more tax revenues. (You might remember terms such as supply-side economics or the Laffer curve that offer explanations for the theory.) And this seems to be where Pence is coming from. During the 1980s, Reagan cut taxes, and tax revenues did go up almost every year. But we consulted the tax experts, who told us you can't just look at the raw numbers, for several reasons. First, you should expect tax revenues to go up each year due to economic growth and inflation, even if tax rates stayed the same. Second, there's not a straight line between tax rates and tax revenues. You can raise taxes the same year the economy tanks and get less revenue, or you can cut taxes during a time of economic growth and get more revenue. And those changes in the economy aren't necessarily caused by what the government is doing with tax rates -- the upturns could be due to new inventions and innovations, and the downturns could result from financial panics and real estate bubbles that have little to do with tax rates. And economists have to go to quite a bit of trouble to separate out the effects of tax policy from other things happening in the world. We also consulted a 2006 Treasury Department report that examined the revenue effects of major tax law changes since World War II. The report examined tax revenues generated by various tax law changes as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product, a measurement that accounts for economic growth and inflation. The laws that reduced tax rates produced declines in revenues, and the laws that increased tax rates produced increases in tax revenues. So this too contradicts Pence's claim. Interestingly, Stockman agreed with a little bit of Pence's underlying assumption that increases in taxes can inhibit economic growth. But he disagreed that tax revenues would decrease if the government raised taxes. "I just have to respectfully disagree," Stockman said. "You will have some loss of revenue because some activity or transactions won't happen, but if you raise taxes on paper by $100 billion, maybe you'll get $90 billion or $85 billion. But it's just common-sense fact that, when you raise the rates, you get more revenue. Normally, it's a bad thing to do. But we are in such dire shape that we have no choice but to accept the negative trade-off of some harm to the economy to start paying our bills." The tax experts we spoke with agreed with Stockman. In this climate, raising the top tax rates from 35 to 39.6 percent would increase revenues. The effect Pence is talking about would not happen at this level of taxation, they said. "There is some rate at which it would be true," said Roberton Williams of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. "But I don't think there are any established economists who would argue that we're near that." "At current tax rates, most tax increases will increase revenues, at least in the short and medium run," said Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "The caveat is that in a fragile economy, it can be unpredictable." "There is no real dispute among economists that broad-based federal income tax cuts reduce revenue (except when tax rates are much higher than they are now)," said Alan D. Viard of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Revenue is lower than it would be without the Bush tax cuts -- liberal and conservative economists are in accord on this question." To recap, Pence said that, "Anybody who is familiar with the historical data from the IRS knows that raising income tax rates will likely actually reduce federal revenues." Actually, the historical data doesn't show that. Experts said the economic theory Pence is drawing from doesn't apply in the current situation, and an increase in tax rates would not cause tax revenues to decline. So we rate his statement False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/99d4f639-1c35-43e2-8ba7-3480dabc1ce7	None	Mike Pence	None	None	None	2010-11-09T16:30:32	2010-11-07	['None']
-pomt-03118	The Capitol Police force is "going so far as to use paramilitary equipment" in dealing with singing protesters in Madison	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2013/sep/18/chris-larson/chris-larson-says-capitol-police-are-using-paramil/	Arrests and escalating tension became routine at the longrunning Solidarity Sing Along protests at the Capitol rotunda in Madison after a judge left in place for now the state's authority to require a permit to protest when more than 20 demonstrators gather. Many refused to get permits after the July ruling, and Capitol Police responded with arrests after trying futilely to shout warnings into bullhorns as a chorus of protesters drowned them out. The noontime protests began in 2011 in reaction to Gov. Scott Walker’s move to sharply curtail union collective bargaining power. In early September 2013, trying to break the standoff over the singalong arrests, a top legislative Democrat took both the singers and the Walker administration to task. "I think the singers are in the wrong and should get a permit if they are going to protest on a continuous basis and they know they are going to be there," Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson of Milwaukee said Sept. 5, 2013 on "The Devil’s Advocates Radio show (WXXM-FM 92.1 in Madison). "I agree with many of their protests, I agree with where they’re coming from, but I think it’s a simple act ..." Then Larson caught our attention with this: "At the same time, I think that Walker is overstepping his bounds and is in the wrong by enforcing this to the extent that he is, in giving his police chief a raise in a shadowy way, and is going so far as to use paramilitary equipment to try and shut down the voices of the protesters. So both sides could take a step towards the middle." We’re familiar with the controversy over the use of a ghost job to give the new Capitol Police chief a double-digit pay raise. But Larson’s line about "paramilitary equipment" employed by the Capitol cops was a new one for us. The phrase conjures up images of officers in riot gear and flak jackets, and advanced weaponry inside the Capitol, where -- we should note -- arrests have tapered off dramatically in September. Larson’s office told us the "equipment" in question is one device that broadcasts a message warning protesters they are subject to arrest unless they disperse. The machine can emit a high-pitched noise, we were told. With a bit of research, we found that protesters here and elsewhere call the machine a "sound cannon" or "sonic weapon." And with a bit more research, we learned that state officials term it an "advanced microphone." Sounds like a job for the Truth-O-Meter. The equipment in question is described by its manufacturer as the hand-held LRAD 100X "long range acoustic device." It and its much larger cousins have come under scrutiny as crowd-control and communication mechanisms in clashes between police and protesters in Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, at the NATO summit in Chicago and elsewhere. The device’s loudspeaker function cut through crowd noise and clearly communicate at up to 1,000 meters, its maker, San Diego-based LRAD Corporation, says. Protesters who’ve labeled it a cannon have focused on the high-pitched, high-decibel "warning tone" the machine can emit. The continuous squeal sent street protesters scurrying away at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh in 2009. Regarding the warning tone on the LRAD 100X model used at the Capitol, the company’s website says: "The warning tone provides a non-lethal deterrent, shapes behavior, and supports intent determination while preserving time for force escalation." Translation: the tone can get people’s attention, get them to momentarily stop what they are doing or move out of the way. At very close range (about 3 feet), the 100X’s warning tone puts out 137 decibels continuously. Brief exposure to noise at 120 dB (a nearby clap of thunder) or 140-190 dB (gunshot) can cause immediate hearing damage, according to the Dangerous Decibels project. LRAD spokesman Robert Putnam told us that putting hands over your ears or stepping six feet out of the narrow sound field can remove the risk of injury. But here’s the deal: With the exception of a brief test, it appears that Capitol Police in Madison are not using the warning tone. We watched dozens of YouTube videos taken by protesters, and talked to people who’ve observed most of the rallies, and could find evidence of only one rally at which police briefly sounded the continuous shrill warning tone. That was on July 18, 2013, which our research shows may have been the first day the police put the device into use. A spokeswoman for the state agency that oversees the Capitol Police, told us the device is not being used "in that manner" but declined to discuss the July 18 video. "It would be inaccurate to say that the (Capitol Police Department) uses the LRAD in a harmful manner – they use it make an announcement," state Department of Administration spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said. "There is a brief beeping right before the announcement starts ..." On July 18, the video shows, uniformed officers accompanied by a man in street clothes walked the device in with the warning squeal activated. "Watch out, there’s a sleeping child," an off-camera man says to them. The warning tone sounded for at least 20 seconds and crowd reaction to it appeared minimal. In Madison, a story in Isthmus, the Madison weekly newspaper and website, on the July 18 protest called the device a "loudspeaker." On that day and others we observed on video, officers stationed themselves one floor above the ground floor of the rotunda where most singers gather. One officer holds up the 14-inch by 14-inch black speaker while another works the microphone and MP3 player containing the message to disperse. It did not appear that arrests were made on July 18. Overall, then, the evidence strongly suggests that police are using the machine to get a message out before making arrests, not to drive people off with an annoying or threatening warning tone. Paramilitary in nature? Larson described the device as "paramilitary" in nature. In recent years, as critics have complained about the militarization of police forces, the "paramilitary" label has been attached to a variety of gear, notably that used by military-style special weapons and tactics (SWAT) units. Things like body armor, shields, night vision goggles, armored vehicles. The marketing of the acoustic devices suggests it fits into multiple categories, including military, paramilitary, and traditional law enforcement. LRAD Corporation created it following the 2000 terrorist attack on the USS Cole. Since then, the military, companies -- and more than 100 law enforcement agencies including National Guard units -- have put them to use in diverse ways including fending off pirates, issuing storm warnings, serving warrants and for SWAT operations, riot control, hostage situations and crowd control at large events and protests. In war zones, soldiers have mounted units to vehicles or used them at security checkpoints to communicate with civilians in order to avoid potentially lethal misunderstandings, said Putnam. So there’s no doubt they have military and paramilitary applications, and are marketed as such. Still, they can also be used purely as communications devices, as the Capitol Police in Madison appear to be doing. The devices, we found, do not appear on a list of "paramilitary" equipment outlined in United Nations sanctions documents banning batons, clubs, riot sticks, body armor, riot shields and whips. A detailed 2011 Canadian police review of law enforcement use of LRADs said they have been called both "weapons" and "devices." The review recommended that police factor in volume control and standoff distances when using the warning alarm function. Our rating Larson said the Capitol Police force under Walker is "going so far as to use paramilitary equipment" at daily singalong protests in Madison. There’s an element of truth to his claim, in that these devices have paramilitary and military uses. But they also are used by a variety of non-military agencies for communication and mass notification, and Capitol Police appear to have used them predominantly, if not almost exclusively, to make sure protesters are clued in that arrests will follow if they don’t disperse. Unlike in Pittsburgh and other cities where police have used the devices, we found no scenes here of stunned protesters scurrying away in the face of ear-splitting noise. Our definition of Mostly False is that a statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We think that fits here. Editors note: This item was updated Sept. 19, 2013 to clarify in the first paragraph the judge's ruling.	None	Chris Larson	None	None	None	2013-09-18T23:00:00	2013-09-05	['None']
-tron-01088	CNN Anchor Brooke Baldwin Blames Veterans for Baltimore Violence	previously truth! now resolved!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cnn-anchor-brooke-baldwin-blames-veterans-for-baltimore-violence/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	CNN Anchor Brooke Baldwin Blames Veterans for Baltimore Violence	May 14, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-14287	The "rate of uninsured Americans (is) 8.8 percent."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/apr/05/barack-obama/barack-obama-jumps-gun-us-uninsured-rate-then-reve/	On the sixth anniversary of his signing of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama took a victory lap on Medium. In a brief article punctuated by several celebratory photographs, Obama wrote, "20 million. That’s how many people now have the health coverage they need thanks to the president’s health care law. In fact, for the first time ever, more than 90 percent of Americans have health coverage, putting the U.S. rate of uninsured Americans at 8.8 percent." When we began to check the percentage of uninsured Americans, we found some discrepancies. After we told the White House about our concerns -- but before we were able to publish our fact-check -- the White House made a change to the text of the Medium post and noted that a correction had been made. The White House confirmed that it had changed the language after our inquiries. Fact-checker success! We’ll address the White House’s correction and change in this fact-check, but our policy is to fact-check the way a claim was phrased originally. The confusion generated by this case stems from the reality that there are several different measurements of uninsured Americans, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. (The Kaiser Family Foundation has assembled a helpful cheat sheet to sort through the various measurements.) The gold standard of measurements is considered to be the data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. However, the bureau only publishes its uninsured number once a year, and the figure released most recently -- 10.4 percent uninsured for calendar year 2014 -- is out of date. Here’s the summary of the Census Bureau’s most recent data. A more frequently updated yardstick -- released every quarter -- is Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. The most recent number from Gallup, for the fourth quarter of 2015, shows the uninsured rate at 11.9 percent. That’s higher than what Obama cited in his Medium post, but Gallup’s figure is always a bit higher than other numbers because it only surveys adults. On average, adults are somewhat more likely to be uninsured than children. Here’s what Gallup’s recent trend line looks like. When we asked health policy experts if they could think of what Obama might have been pointing to, they suggested the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health Interview Survey. The most recent data from this survey covers the first three quarters of 2015, making it the most recent large-scale federal source for data on the uninsured. Using this survey, Obama came pretty close: The uninsured rate through September 2015 was 9.1 percent, and as the chart below shows, this came after consistent declines in the uninsured rate since 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act was signed. Still, the White House specified an uninsured rate of 8.8 percent. So where did that come from? To get there, the White House relied on Department of Health and Human Services projections of the uninsured rate through the first quarter of 2016 -- two quarters beyond the last hard data from the National Health Insurance Survey. Here’s a graphic from the Council of Economic Advisers illustrating what the White House did: What the White House did in this slide is a "reasonable approach," said Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Still, the problem with the wording in the Medium post is that the White House didn’t acknowledge that it was using a projection -- it used the present tense, suggesting it was citing current, validated data. When we contacted several health care experts before the White House changed the post, most agreed that the White House should have been more careful with its figures. "In the end, I don’t think a difference of 0.3 percent matters that much -- the 9.1 percent figure is an impressive achievement in and of itself," said Jonathan Oberlander, chair of the department of social medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "But it would have been better for them to say something like the uninsured rate in September 2015 stood at 9.1 percent and they project that it has since fallen to 8.8 percent." Gail Wilensky, who ran Medicare and Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush, agreed. The actual numbers are "impressive on their own," she said. "There was no need to gild the lily." After our inquiry, the White House changed the 8.8 percent projection to the 9.1 percent figure offered by the CDC survey and noted the change with a correction. Our ruling Obama, in his Medium post, said the "rate of uninsured Americans (is) 8.8 percent." Hats off to the White House for correcting its post based on our inquiry, even before we could publish our fact-check. Still, we put claims to the Truth-O-Meter based on their original form, and in this case, Obama, despite being close to accurate, jumped the gun by shaving off a few tenths of a percentage point before they officially materialized. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2016-04-05T15:32:52	2016-03-23	['None']
-bove-00003	Congress’ Facebook Page Disables Sponsored Ad In Pakistan	none	https://www.boomlive.in/congress-facebook-page-disables-sponsored-ad-in-pakistan/	None	None	None	None	None	Congress’ Facebook Page Disables Sponsored Ad In Pakistan	Oct 18 2018 4:20 pm, Last Updated: Oct 18 2018 4:28 pm	None	['None']
-goop-02142	Mel B And Heidi Klum More Than Friends, Romantic Couple?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/mel-b-heidi-klum-friends-couple-lovers/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Mel B And Heidi Klum More Than Friends, Romantic Couple?	5:00 pm, November 25, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-00496	The Cartoon Network announced that new episodes of 'Courage the Cowardly Dog' would premiere on 30 February 2019.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-courage-cowardly-dog-rebooted/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Is ‘Courage the Cowardly Dog’ Getting Rebooted?	7 June 2018	None	['None']
-afck-00232	“Expanded community works programmes from 45 municipalities in 2011 to 196 in 2015 and increased the number of participants from 100,000 to more than 200,000.”	mostly-correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/is-the-anc-advancing-peoples-power-we-fact-check-key-election-claims/	None	None	None	None	None	Is the ANC ‘advancing people’s power’? We fact-check key election claims	2016-05-19 06:39	None	['None']
-pomt-02571	Quarterbacks "won the (Super Bowl) MVP more than 50 percent of the time."	true	/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/30/marshall-faulk/looking-good-bet-super-bowl-mvp-likely-be-quarterb/	The pre-game punditry is rampant ahead of Super Bowl XLVIII (A.K.A. 48). Who’s going to win? Who’s going to be the game’s most valuable player? Let’s hypothesize! NFL Hall of Fame running back Marshall Faulk says the MVP pick is "already etched in stone." Obviously, it’s going to be Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning, he said during a face-off with Michael Irvin on the NFL Network. Faulk laid out pretty compelling evidence to make his case. "Quarterbacks, they have won the MVP more than 50 percent of the time," he said. Someone on Twitter heard Faulk’s claim and asked us if it is correct. Turns out Faulk is right. Of the 47 Super Bowls, 26 quarterbacks have walked away with MVP honors, way more than any other position, according to an ESPN tally. Victors include multiple winners such as Green Bay’s Bart Starr, Pittsburgh’s Terry Bradshaw, and San Francisco’s Joe Montana, as well as recent repeat winners in New England’s Tom Brady and the New York Giants’ Eli Manning. Peyton Manning could join the two-time MVP club Sunday night. He won the award for Super Bowl XLI in 2007 after passing for 247 yards and a touchdown against the Chicago Bears. For his MVP pick, Irvin chose Broncos wide receiver Wes Welker. Wide receivers and running backs are the next most likely positions for MVP, but they far and away trail the quarterbacks. (It’s a lot tougher for defense. The last defensive player to win the award was Tampa Bay Buccaneers safety Dexter Jackson in 2003.) We rate Faulk’s claim True.	None	Marshall Faulk	None	None	None	2014-01-30T16:00:00	2014-01-28	['None']
-afck-00009	“50% of grade six pupils cannot read at all”	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/number-of-qualified-primary-school-teachers-and-grade-6-literacy-in-nigeria-higher-than-claimed/	None	None	None	None	None	Number of qualified primary school teachers and grade 6 literacy in Nigeria higher than claimed	2018-09-17 12:00	None	['None']
-pomt-00232	Says Kentucky Rep. Andy Barr "would let shady payday lenders take advantage of our troops" and that he took "$36,550 from payday lenders."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/09/With_Honor/ad-accuses-andy-barr-allowing-payday-lenders-take-/	The "cross-partisan" group With Honor, which formed to support military veterans running for Congress, has backed Democratic challenger and Marine veteran Amy McGrath. McGrath is running against Republican incumbent Andy Barr for the U.S. House seat in central Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District. The September ad lambastes Barr’s support of the payday lending business. The ad says that Barr has accepted campaign donations from payday lending organizations and that he would let them take advantage of service members and their families. "In Kentucky, we respect our troops, but Congressman Andy Barr would let shady payday lenders take advantage of them," the ad says. It goes on to say that he took "$36,550 from payday lenders, then let them stick our troops with outrageous fees. It’s what’s wrong with Congress." It is no secret that payday lenders routinely sock consumers with excessively high charges and fees. But did Barr "let them" stick military families with outrageous fees, while also taking money from them for his campaign? Yes and no. First, some background According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, "payday loans are small-dollar, short-term, unsecured loans that borrowers promise to repay out of their next paycheck or regular income payment." Payday loans often include very high interest rates or fees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, formed under President Barack Obama through the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, launched the nation's first program for supervising "non-bank" financial services, which include payday loan providers, as well as debt collectors, mortgage companies and credit-score companies. So what did Barr do, exactly? At issue is Barr’s 2017 vote for the Financial CHOICE Act, which passed the House but failed in the Senate. Barr was one of seven original cosponsors of the bill. The bill would make sweeping changes and repeal provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, in part by weakening the power of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Under the plan, the agency would lose its oversight of payday lenders. There is a line in the legislation that says, "the agency may not exercise any rulemaking, enforcement, or other authority with respect to payday loans, vehicle title loans, or other similar loans.’’ With Honor spokeswoman Ellen Zeng also pointed to a June 2017 Military.com article that grappled with whether the bill would undo certain protections for active and retired service members and their families. The bureau has played a major role in "providing restitution and help to troops taken advantage of by illegal financial practices," the article states. One program, in the bureau's Office of Servicemember Affairs department, has fielded over 74,000 complaints about predatory financial practices from the military community since 2011, a 2017 CFPB report says, resulting in more than $130 million in relief to affected service members. But then there’s the Military Lending Act Barr’s campaign released a statement after the ad aired calling it misleading. There are existing laws that protect military families from payday lenders, the campaign said. The 2006 Military Lending Act put a 36 percent cap on the amount of interest small-dollar lenders could charge on loans to military families. When veterans groups raised concerns about the Financial CHOICE Act, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, who sponsored the bill and chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said it would not touch protections for veterans. "The Financial Choice Act does not weaken the laws that specifically protect active-duty and retired members of our armed forces," he said in a June 2017 statement. Zeng says the group stands by the ad, as the bill would have drained the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she says plays a vital role in protecting military veterans and their families from predatory payday lenders. Did Barr collect over $36,000 from payday lenders? This part is pretty straight-forward. Yes, he did. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, an authoritative database of campaign finance data, Barr has accepted $36,550 from PACs and individuals associated with the payday lending industry since his 2014 campaign. He has received $7,500 from payday lenders in 2018. Our ruling With Honor says Barr "would let shady payday lenders take advantage of our troops" and that he received $36,550 in campaign donations from payday lenders. It is true that Bar has accepted $36,550 in donations from payday lenders. But the other part is more complicated. Barr voted for legislation that would weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s power over payday lending agencies, which could indirectly affect military families as the agency fields complaints from the community. However, a 2006 law provides servicemembers protection, with a 36 percent cap on the interest small-dollar lenders could charge families. So while the CFPB could have provided more protections to the military community than the 2006 law, the ad makes it appear as if Barr’s actions were connected to legislation specifically about veterans. We rate it Half True. Share the Facts 2018-10-09 16:37:45 UTC PolitiFact 4 1 7 PolitiFact Rating: Half True Says Kentucky Rep. Andy Barr "would let shady payday lenders take advantage of our troops" and that he took "$36,550 from payday lenders." With Honor Self-described "cross-partisan" group https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVUcSDChtOc&feature=youtu.be Monday, September 10, 2018 2018-09-10 Read More info	None	With Honor	None	None	None	2018-10-09T12:27:19	2018-09-10	['None']
-pomt-12328	"The new Rasmussen Poll, one of the most accurate in the 2016 Election, just out with a Trump 50% Approval Rating. That's higher than O's #'s!"	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jun/19/donald-trump/donald-trump-tweet-50-approval-cherry-picks-pollin/	President Donald Trump opened his first Father’s Day as president with a bright-and-early boast about his poll numbers. "The new Rasmussen Poll, one of the most accurate in the 2016 Election, just out with a Trump 50% Approval Rating. That's higher than O's #'s!" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Rasmussen Reports retweeted the president’s message (and so did more than 21,000 other accounts) despite some questionable logic. Trump cherry-picked his data Among pollsters, Rasmussen has consistently published higher approval ratings for Trump than its peers that track presidential job approval among Americans. Its June 13-15 poll of 1,500 likely voters did show 50 percent job approval for Trump, with a sampling margin of error of 3 percent. His numbers hadn’t hit the 50 percent-mark since late April, according to Rasmussen’s approval index history. Rasmussen’s numbers are atypical of the polls that have surveyed Trump’s approval ratings. The next-closest results were still pretty far from 50 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll of 1,500 registered voters from June 11-13 showed 42 percent approval. A June 9-15 Survey Monkey poll of adults showed 43 percent. Gallup, which polls all adults on a three-day rolling basis, most recently showed 39 percent approval. When you look at polling more broadly, Rasmussen really sticks out. The RealClearPolitics.com average of polls from May 30-June 17 shows 40 percent job approval -- a full 10 percentage points lower than the rate Trump touted in his tweet. FiveThirtyEight performs a similar comprehensive reflection of polling data, and it came in even lower -- 38.7 percent approval (and 55.4 percent disapproval) by Trump’s 150th day in office. Obama ratings weren’t as low at this point in his presidency What about Trump’s assertion that Obama fared more poorly? It’s not the case if you use the most apples-to-apples comparison: Rasmussen’s own polling at this stage of his presidency. Rasmussen’s results for Obama during the same period in June 2009 do not show an approval rating below Trump’s 50 percent. Obama’s approval ratings were between 54 and 58 percent through June 9-16, 2009, and they did not dip below 50 percent until late July of that year. Gallup’s tracking of Obama’s job performance showed a higher mark of 60 percent approval at that time. Of course, Obama’s approval rating did dip below the high 50s later in his presidency. Obama’s ratings in the Rasmussen poll did consistently fall below 50 percent from the fall of 2009 to the summer of 2012, and again from the summer of 2013 to the spring of 2016. However, experts caution that it’s most appropriate to compare presidents’ approval ratings at the same point in their presidency. Historically, most presidents have tended to have higher approval ratings early in the "honeymoon" period of their tenure before they sink, as some voters begin to tire of their policies. In addition, Obama periodically did reach 50 percent or more in Rasmussen polls even during his weaker periods, and when he didn’t, he was often within a point or two of that mark. This means it’s possible to do some reverse cherry-picking that makes Obama look better than Trump. Trump’s overall polling right now is far below what all past presidents have polled at an equivalent point in their first term. (Here’s a comparison of Gallup approval ratings for Trump’s predecessors, going back to Harry Truman.) What explains Rasmussen’s result? One reason why Rasmussen has shown higher ratings for Trump stems from its methodology. For one, it polls likely voters. Registered voters tend to offer higher job approval than surveys of adults more generally. And surveys of likely voters -- Rasmussen’s approach -- offer higher job approval ratings still. "As we move from all Americans, to registered voters, to likely voters, and to actual voters, the sample becomes more educated, more wealthy, and more Republican," said Steven S. Smith, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. "Statistical weighting can reduce the bias. Rasmussen weights, but we know little about Rasmussen’s weighting procedures. The details matter." Meanwhile, polls that use live callers have been showing lower approval ratings than polls conducted by online or automated survey. Rasmussen uses automated surveys. "Automated polls only call landlines, which means they miss the roughly half (!!) of the American population that uses mobile phones only," FiveThirtyEight editor in chief Nate Silver wrote in February. "This matters because cell-only individuals tend to be younger, lower income, and more urban, all of which bias landline-only surveys in a conservative direction," Smith said. Each of these factors help explain the higher results for Rasmussen in Trump’s favor. We reached out to Rasmussen but did not hear back by deadline. Was Rasmussen 'one of the most accurate' polls in 2016? Finally, what to make of Trump’s implication that Rasmussen should be more trusted because it was more accurate than other pollsters about the 2016 election? The strongest evidence comes from looking at the final pre-election national polls. According to the rundown in RealClearPolitics, Rasmussen was the only pollster to get the popular vote result -- a two-point Hillary Clinton win -- correct in its final pre-election poll. Two pollsters (Monmouth University and NBC News/Survey Monkey) had Clinton winning by six points; four (ABC News/Washington Post, CBS News, Fox News, and Economist/YouGov) had Clinton winning by four, two (Bloomberg and Reuters/Ipsos) had Clinton winning by three, one (IBD/TIPP) had Trump winning by two, and one had Trump winning by five (Los Angeles Times/USC). However, it’s worth taking this with a grain of salt. First, the polls that had Clinton winning by two or three points were all very close to the mark once margins of error are taken into account. And second, Rasmussen was lucky to have its two-point margin come during the final pre-election poll. During the last week before the election, its daily results were scattered -- Clinton by three, tie, tie, Trump by three, tie, and Clinton by two. Overall, FiveThirtyEight’s comprehensive pollster ratings gives Rasmussen the mediocre grade of C-plus, and it found a two-point Republican bias in its polls. (This rating did not encompass the entire 2016 campaign, but it did go back earlier; it factored in 657 polls by Rasmussen.) Of course, Trump would not be the first president to tout an outlying poll result. "It is hardly new that presidents choose to talk about polls that support their view of the world and themselves," said Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. Our ruling Trump said, "The new Rasmussen Poll, one of the most accurate in the 2016 Election, just out with a Trump 50% Approval Rating.That's higher than O's #'s!" There’s a grain of truth here: Rasmussen did put out that result two days before Trump’s tweet, and Rasmussen was closest to the mark among pollsters in its final pre-election survey. However, Trump has engaged in some serious cherry-picking. Other polling in this time frame shows approval ratings for Trump that are seven to 11 percentage points below Rasmussen’s finding. And contrary to Trump’s assertion, Obama’s numbers in the same poll at the same point in his presidency were higher than Trump’s current results. We rate the claim Mostly False. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-06-19T15:37:25	2017-06-18	['None']
-goop-02385	Kardashians Coordinated Pregnancies For $25 Million?	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/kardashians-coordinated-pregnancies-25-million-kim-khloe-kylie/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kardashians Coordinated Pregnancies For $25 Million?	1:07 pm, October 4, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02549	Says 85 percent of IDEA charter-school students come from low-income families and about 99 percent of its graduates go to college.	mostly true	/texas/statements/2014/feb/05/greg-abbott/idea-schools-serving-many-disadvantaged-background/	Visiting a Rio Grande Valley school run by a Texas nonprofit, Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott credited the program with thriving, according to a news story by the Rio Grande Guardian The story quoted Abbott, visiting IDEA Weslaco on Dec. 12, 2013, as saying that through competition, IDEA Public Schools, a tuition-free K-12 public charter system with more than 15,000 students in 30 schools, had forced nearby school districts to improve. The Dec. 17, 2013, story continued: "Abbott pointed out that 85 percent of IDEA students come from low-income families, many from colonias. However, about 99 percent go on to college." Abbott, the state’s attorney general, further said that his "goal of seeing the Texas education system rise to the No. 1 ranking in the country is achievable. When you have a school (IDEA) that can have such a large population of low-income students, including students from colonias, be able to come to the school, get a great education, have the dream of going to college and actually go on to college at the rate of 99 percent of the graduates, you see that the No. 1 ranking is within our grasp." A reader brought Abbott’s 85 percent/99 percent claim to our attention. Online, IDEA Public Schools describes itself as a growing network of tuition-free K-12 public charter schools serving schools throughout the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio and Austin. IDEA Allan Academy and College Prep opened in Austin in 2012, offering kindergarten through grade two plus grade six, via an agreement with the Austin school district. The district then ended the partnership, but the school continued by moving to a temporary location and there are plans to build a permanent school in the Montopolis area in time to enroll students in kindergarten through fourth plus sixth and eighth grades in fall 2014, according to a Nov. 1, 2013, Austin American-Statesman news story. In its online history thumbnail, IDEA traces its founding to two Teach for America volunteers; IDEA is an acronym for Individuals Dedicated to Excellence and Achievement. The group also says: "IDEA is committed to ‘College For All Children.’" As the basis of Abbott’s statement, Abbott campaign spokesman Avdiel Huerta emailed us a one-page IDEA document with a chart indicating that of 950 program graduates from 2007 through 2013, 947 enrolled in college. The only year with a difference in high-school graduates and students entering college was 2013 when 429 of 432 graduates made that transition, according to the chart. By telephone, Tom Torkelson, founder and ceo of IDEA Public Schools, told us the group developed the document in December 2013 after Abbott started talking up its successes. He said far less than 10 percent of the students tabulated as going to college start at two-year community colleges. A background section of the document says the organization’s vision is to become the "number one producer of low-income college graduates in Texas." Starting in middle school, it says, students are taken on college field trips; parents go to college-centric workshops. High school seniors are coached on applying to, and enrolling in, college, the document states. "We do not rest until every IDEA graduate sets foot on their college campus the fall following high school commencement," the section closes. We asked Torkelson how many of its students ultimately finish college. He said that to date, 55 percent completed a degree in six years. "There is still some work to do," he said. And are most students from low-income backgrounds? By email, IDEA spokeswoman Vanessa Barry sent us a portion of IDEA’s state 2012-13 Academic Performance Report, also posted online by the Texas Education Agency. In 2012-13, according to the report, IDEA schools had 12,567 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, with 10,491 of them, or 84 percent, considered economically disadvantaged. State reports for previous school years, posted online, show the share of students deemed economically disadvantaged increasing from 72 percent of about 2,700 IDEA students in 2007-08 to 82 percent of about 9,500 students in 2011-12. By email, Michael Franco, IDEA’s chief of staff, said that as of Dec. 9, 2013, 87 percent of the IDEA students came from low-income households, though he cautioned such a figure would not be verified by the state until the end of the school year. Torkelson said the prevalence of students from low-income backgrounds is in keeping with where IDEA schools are located. He said students are not chosen based on family incomes. We also inquired into how many students choose not to remain in, or flunk out of, IDEA schools. Torkelson said that 5 percent of the IDEA students enrolled at the start of a school year have chosen to go to a different school by the start of the next year, not counting another 5 percent of students whose families move out of state. At our request, Julian Vasquez Heilig, a University of Texas associate professor of educational policy and planning, built a chart estimating the share of IDEA students who have left the school before graduation. His estimation, rooted in data reported by the IDEA schools to the Texas Education Agency, was that 508 students graduated from the schools from 2007 through 2012, while about 54 students left the schools before having a chance to graduate--a subset equivalent to 11 percent of the graduates over the six years. By telephone, Heilig said that generally, charter schools airing such notable success rates should acknowledge that they are describing solely the students who remained in the schools’ programs. IDEA’s 99-percent claim, Heilig said, doesn’t demonstrate that every student who attends its schools goes to college. We shared Heilig’s chart with IDEA’s leaders, who replied by email with a statement from Torkelson calling the school’s 99 percent figure "a fact that stands alone without the need for an asterisk. IDEA has been very open and clear that this number pertains to graduating seniors. Like other schools, both public charter and traditional who serve K-12 populations, IDEA does lose some students each year to a variety of factors (e.g. relocation, programs like traditional football that we cannot offer). However, this does not diminish the exceptional work of our students." Our ruling Abbott said 85 percent of IDEA students come from low-income families and about 99 percent of its graduates go to college. In 2012-13, 84 percent of IDEA’s students came from economically disadvantaged households and according to IDEA, more than 99 percent of 950 IDEA graduates since 2007 subsequently went to college. Then again, the 99 percent figure does not account for any of perhaps 50 IDEA students who left its schools without graduating from 2007 through 2012. We rate Abbott’s claim, which did not acknowledge this limitation, as Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Greg Abbott	None	None	None	2014-02-05T10:47:39	2013-12-12	['None']
-snes-00596	Did a Woman Say a Theme Park ‘Fat-Shamed’ Her Because She Couldn’t Fit on a Ride?	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/woman-say-theme-park-fat-shamed-couldnt-fit-ride/	None	Entertainment	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did a Woman Say a Theme Park ‘Fat-Shamed’ Her Because She Couldn’t Fit on a Ride?	14 May 2018	None	['None']
-snes-00094	Inmates at Orleans Parish Prison spent several days in flooded cells while awaiting rescue after Hurricane Katrina, and hundreds of them disappeared.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/inmates-abandoned-katrina/	None	Hurricane Katrina	None	Dan Evon	None	Were Inmates Abandoned at Orleans Parish Prison During Hurricane Katrina?	13 September 2018	None	['Hurricane_Katrina']
-pomt-12823	Says a video shows "Coretta Scott King thanking Jeff Sessions for Rosa Parks library."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/feb/09/true-pundit/no-coretta-scott-king-didnt-thank-jeff-sessions-vi/	Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., died in 2006. But her opinion on the man who is now President Donald Trump’s attorney general is still being talked about today. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., tried to read a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King that criticized Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., as the Senate was considering his confirmation for attorney general. (He was ultimately confirmed on a near-party-line vote.) Before Warren could finish reading the letter, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell successfully silenced her under an obscure Senate rule. The Senate’s decision to silence Warren energized her supporters. But it wasn’t long before conservative corners of the Internet tried to push a counter-narrative showing Coretta Scott King as favorable towards Sessions. On Feb. 8, an aggregation site called True Pundit published a post with the headline, "SHATTERED: Video of Coretta Scott King Thanking Jeff Sessions for Rosa Parks Library Crushes Elizabeth Warren Racial Stunt." Here’s the rest of the post, which also referenced a controversy over Warren and whether she had American Indian heritage: Well, that was quick. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s racial stunt that sparked her removal from the senate floor Tuesday night proved even shorter than her time living in a teepee. Warren attempted to use the words of Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr., to smear Sen. Jeff Sessions’ bid for Attorney General. Warren’s now warrant-less claim was that King’s wife’s words framed Sessions as a bigot. But now a more recent video has surfaced where Coretta King in fact praises Sessions at the launching of the Rosa Parks Library and Museum. What a difference 12 hours can make. Several readers were curious about what the attached video showed, so we took a closer look. (True Pundit did not respond to an inquiry through its website.) The event in question was the Dec. 1, 2000, dedication of the Rosa Parks Library and Museum, located on the Montgomery, Ala., campus of Troy State University (since renamed Troy University). Parks had helped spark the civil rights movement in 1955 when she defied Alabama’s Jim Crow racial laws by refusing to relinquish her seat in the front of a municipal bus in Montgomery. Speakers at the dedication included Parks herself; Coretta Scott King; civil rights widow Juanita Jones Abernathy; civil rights leaders Johnnie Mae Carr, Dorothy Height, Evelyn Lowery, Elaine Steele, Mammie Till-Mobley; actor Cicely Tyson; and several elected and appointed officials, including Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, Montgomery mayor Bobby Bright, Troy State-Montgomery chancellor Jack Hawkins and president Cameron Martindale, U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, and Sessions. Here’s a transcript of what King said on the YouTube video embedded in the website. A complete video of her address has been archived by C-SPAN, starting around the 1:06:44 mark. To President Martindale, to Sen. Sessions, Mayor Bright, Troy State Chancellor Jack Hawkins Jr., Dr. Dorothy Height, Ms. Johnnie Carr, Juanita Abernathy, Mammie Till-Mobley, to all of the distinguished program participants and guests in this audience today, it's a great honor and a privilege for me to join you in celebrating the grand opening of the Rosa Parks Library and Museum. History teaches us that all great freedom movements begin with an inspiring act of courage, and in this regard the American civil rights movement provides a supreme example. The library and museum we dedicate today is a living testament to the courage, commitment and character of the great woman whose act of courage sparked our freedom struggle, the woman we call Mrs. Rosa Louise Parks. In her extraordinary courage and humility, Mrs. Rosa Parks provided our movement with a matchless example of the very spirit of non-violence. That was the only time King mentioned Sessions in her speech -- and it her words fall well short of "thanking" him, whether for his role in establishing the library or for anything else. She simply acknowledged his presence in the room, as she did with other dignitaries. We checked with Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton who is now a founding partner of West Wing Writers, which does speechwriting for a variety of clients. "This is the verbal equivalent of a wave or a handshake," Shesol said. "In speechwriting, we call this the ‘acknowledgments’ section -- a list of people that you simply have to mention, in passing, given their office or stature. The sort of people who you can't risk slighting by appearing to ignore them." Shesol said there is a separate category of salute that qualifies as a genuine thank you. "When someone needs to be singled out and thanked for their role in something, or for their contribution or leadership, that requires the speaker to pause and say something grateful and meaningful," he said. And King did just that later in her speech, in a portion not shown in the YouTube clip that True Pundit appended to its post. In her remarks, King specifically thanked the Montgomery Improvement Association and Troy State University for their efforts on helping establish the library and museum. "What you have here is a willful misinterpretation of a very basic gesture," Shesol said of the way True Pundit framed its post. Our ruling True Pundit said a video shows "Coretta Scott King thanking Jeff Sessions for Rosa Parks library." Even a cursory review of the video shows no such thing. King did acknowledge Sessions’ presence at the event, along with the presence of seven other dignitaries. But she did not go any further than mentioning his name. By contrast, she specifically thanked a local community group and the hosting university for their help in making the museum a reality. The website twists King’s actual words to a ridiculous degree, so we rate it Pants on Fire.	None	True Pundit	None	None	None	2017-02-09T15:00:17	2017-02-08	['Rosa_Parks', 'Jeff_Sessions']
-pomt-10160	"Under Barack Obama's plan, the government would spend $1-trillion more."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/01/republican-national-committee-republican/another-truth-o-meter-vs-spend-o-meter-smackdown/	Tweaking a line of attack it first employed in February, the Republican National Committee is charging that Americans would have to finance $1-trillion of new spending if Barack Obama fulfills all of his campaign promises over one term in the White House. And that’s above and beyond whatever the government decides to spend bailing out the financial system. A new RNC ad called “Worse,” unveiled Sept. 30, 2008, references the calamity gripping the financial markets and the taxpayer-funded bailout now under consideration in Congress, then contends Obama’s agenda would unleash geysers of additional red ink. “Wall Street squanders our money and Washington is forced to bail them out with – you guessed it – our money,” an announcer says. “Can it get any worse? Under Barack Obama’s plan, the government would spend a trillion dollars more – even after the bailout.” The ad has its genesis in a graphical device called the “Spend-O-Meter” that the RNC featured on its Web site during the primary season in an effort to depict both Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton as tax-and-spend liberals. We’ve already ruled on its February claim that Obama wanted to spend $874-billion during his first term in office, concluding that the Republicans correctly identified about half of the Illinois senator’s proposals as new spending and made some highly creative assumptions about the rest. But how did the total balloon to the current $1-trillion? The biggest change is Republicans have revised upward their claim on how much Obama’s health care plan would cost. Obama wants to mandate that employers either offer health coverage or pay a sum equal to a percentage of their payrolls to fund a new national insurance plan. His campaign says this so-called “play or pay” approach would result in $50-billion to $65-billion in new costs to the government. The RNC, on the other hand, contends the plan would cost $150-billion a year, or $600-billion over four years, and bases its estimate on a Sept. 17 interview Obama gave 60 Minutes . (In February, the Republicans incorporated the Obama campaign’s high-end estimate of $65-billion a year, or $260-billion over four years, in their tally.) Here’s Obama’s exchange with 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft: Kroft: “How much is it going to cost? $150-billion, right?” Obama: “It is. It is. But we pay for every dime that we propose to spend … Roughly speaking, I believe in pay-as-you-go. That if you want to propose a new program, you better cut some old ones. If you want to expand a program, then you better figure out where the money’s coming from.” It’s not clear to us why Obama agreed with Kroft’s figure when it contradicts his campaign’s own estimate. Regardless, it’s difficult to forecast with any accuracy what such an initiative would cost, in part because Obama’s campaign has yet to flesh out many details. The RNC makes the highly unlikely assumption that the health care plan would go into effect as soon as Obama takes office. And it doesn’t factor Obama’s companion proposal to cover much of the new cost by allowing President Bush’s tax cuts on dividends and capital gains for individuals making more than $200,000 a year to expire in 2010. An analysis of Obama’s plan by a group of conservative-leaning health policy experts in the Sept. 16 issue of the journal Health Affairs puts the likely cost at approximately $100-billion annually. The figure is based on cost projections of a proposal released by the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund that shares certain features with Obama’s plan, including a mandate for employer-sponsored insurance. However, Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis says the comparison is strained, because unlike her organization’s blueprint, the Obama plan doesn’t explicitly require adults to have health insurance. Davis added that Obama campaign also hasn’t specified eligibility criteria or the size of subsidies that would come from Medicaid and the federal State Children’s Health Insurance Program, both of which provide assistance to low-income Americans. So the Obama health plan remains something of a Rorschach test – an expensive big-government mandate to its critics, a fiscally responsible exercise in strengthening the social safety net to supporters. Call it what you want, but it’s almost pointless to attach a price tag until the Obama camp more clearly spells out its intentions. And the 60 Minutes interview seems like weak evidence, absent any change in policy, on which to hang an additional $340-billion spending claim. The next biggest item on the list is $156-billion to expand the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. Obama has said he wants to fix a "doughnut hole" in the program that leaves some mid-range drug prescription costs uncovered. The RNC doesn't mention that Obama proposes to pay for that with cost-saving measures, such as allowing the federal government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies in setting Medicare drug prices. The campaign said it wouldn't close the doughnut hole if it couldn't find cuts to pay for it. Some of the Obama campaign's proposals and cost projections cited on the Republicans’ tally continue to be correctly categorized as new spending, in one form or another. They include: A plan to spend $18-billion a year on elementary education. Expanding the AmeriCorps national service program at a cost of about $3.5-billion a year. Doubling the size of a foreign assistance fund, from $25-billion to $50-billion, that’s aimed at meeting the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal of reducing global poverty. Providing $2-billion in aid to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries. Creating a $1.5-billion fund to help states implement paid-leave systems. Even Obama acknowledges uncertainty about his proposals given the downturn in the economy and the cost of the financial bailout. In the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, 2008, he said, "There's no doubt that we're not going to be able to do everything that I think needs to be done." But overall, the Spend-O-Meter hasn’t improved its batting average since February. We rule the Republicans’ $1-trillion claim: Half True.	None	Republican National Committee	None	None	None	2008-10-01T00:00:00	2008-09-30	['None']
-pomt-09728	A "massive" federal computer network will make your medical records available to "millions of people" with a "complete lack of privacy and confidentiality," while doctors and hospitals who don't take part face "stiff penalties."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/22/senior-citizens-league/seniors-group-warns-about-risks-electronic-health-/	Could Big Brother — or garden-variety snoopers — soon get their hands on your medical data? The Senior Citizens League, a group that boasts 1.2 million members and is affiliated with the Retired Enlisted Association, recently sent out a mailing saying it was possible. According to a copy obtained by the Huffington Post, the group sent a four-page letter, along with a questionnaire and a cover letter signed by former Rep. David Funderburk, R-N.C., to seniors, expressing two related concerns about Democratic health care reform plans being debated on Capitol Hill. One is that they could lead to the rationing of care. The other is that the government is assembling a "national government computer network" that will contain Americans' medical files. We've already addressed the question of rationing , so we'll focus here on the plans for a computer network. Here's what the Senior Citizens League letter said: "The key to these changes is a massive national government computer network, which is now being created. When it is complete, your complete medical record will be available 24 hours a day to health care workers at computer terminals in pharmacies, doctors' offices and hospitals across the country and to government workers. ... To ensure that all doctors, hospitals and pharmacies participate and place their records in the new system, a portion of the economic stimulus legislation passed in February includes stiff penalties for doctors and hospitals which do not participate. The complete lack of privacy or confidentiality that comes when millions of people can see your records and the virtual certainty of computer errors has raised concern among many Medicare beneficiaries." First, a little background on health information technology, or HIT for short. Computerizing medical records has long been a goal of policymakers across the ideological spectrum. The idea is to shift from paper-based records to electronic ones, so that doctors can access information about their patients more quickly and easily and make better clinical decisions as a result. Supporters hope that HIT will reduce the frequency of medical errors, unnecessary diagnostic tests and inappropriate treatments. While the biggest impact would likely be felt within a patient's small circle of physicians, nurses and pharmacists, planners also envision scenarios in which an emergency room doctor treating a patient traveling far from home would be able to quickly receive medical records about that patient. Officials also hope that, in the longer term, streamlining record-keeping could bring down the rapidly escalating cost of health care. In 2004, President George W. Bush issued an executive order creating incentives for the use of health information technology, to be spearheaded by a new federal official, the national coordinator for Health Information Technology. President Barack Obama went further when Congress passed his economic stimulus package in February 2009. The stimulus included several items designed to promote HIT, including $19 billion over four years to fund electronic infrastructure improvements and the widespread adoption of electronic health records by providers. The goal under both presidents has been to create electronic health records for each person in the United States by 2014. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology describes the Nationwide Health Information Network as a "network of networks." All the experts we spoke to, including the Department of Health and Human Services, emphasized that it is not a single database residing at, say, a federal agency. It's more accurately viewed as a network to link many separate databases where records already exist, such as regional databases or medical offices, along with efforts to establish common technical standards so that these far-flung repositories of data can exchange information as needed. "While providers will eventually be required to actively exchange patient information between electronic health records, there is no law or regulation calling for the development of a national patient information database," said Brian Wagner, the senior director of policy and public affairs with the eHealth Initiative, a group that represents companies and professional organizations with a stake in HIT. The Senior Citizens League excerpt raises two main questions about HIT. — Who would have access to the network? Could it be as many as "millions" of people? Our experts agreed that such loose access is certainly not the goal of the program, and they added that intensive efforts are being taken to prevent that from happening. On its Web site, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology says it understands that a lack of trust in the system would be a serious problem. "Coordinated attention at the federal and state levels is needed both to develop and implement appropriate privacy and security policies," the office says. Portions of the stimulus bill stiffened existing privacy protections from the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, which governs how medical records can be used. The stimulus extended the list of mandatory protections and penalties to business associates of medical providers who were already covered by them. In the case of privacy breaches, patients now must be notified, and the penalties for violations were increased. Most important, providers and associates covered by HIPAA must limit disclosure of private health information to the minimum number of people necessary to accomplish a valid purpose. Those purposes generally involve treatment, payment or medical administration. "It's not going to be available at Kinko's for all the world to see," said Len Nichols, director of the health policy program at the centrist-to-liberal New America Foundation. Wagner said that the network won't be structured in a way that allows any medical professional to fish around for data on anyone they like. Users would still have to request specific information from another doctor, and provide a good reason why they need it. The main difference under a functioning system of HIT would be that that record would be sent electronically rather than faxed or mailed, potentially saving hours or days. One upside is that, unlike paper-based systems, electronic health records create audit trails every time they're accessed, meaning that HIT systems can actually afford greater privacy protections for patients. "The level of access to this information will also be limited based on each person’s role in the provision of care," said HHS spokeswoman Nancy Szemraj. "Depending upon the type of violation, fines can reach up to $1.5 million per privacy violation." The notion that there will be "unauthorized, limitless access to patient health information in an electronic health record is absolutely incorrect," she said. Still, everyone agrees that vigilance is needed. Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, calls it "absolutely critical to have policies to say who can access information and for what purposes. Are they in place today? No. Are there active efforts going on today to change that? Absolutely." — How stiff are the penalties for noncompliance? They're not immediate, and providers will have many opportunities to benefit from carrots before they face any sticks. Between 2011 and 2014, the stimulus provides bonus payments to encourage health care providers to implement "meaningful" usage of HIT for Medicare and Medicaid. In 2015, the penalties begin. Providers who haven't instituted meaningful use of HIT would see their Medicare reimbursements (though not their Medicaid payments) reduced by 1 percent in 2015, 2 percent in 2016 and 3 percent in 2017. The secretary of Health and Human Services can increase these penalties by an additional point or two if implementation significantly lags. So let's summarize. The Senior Citizens League has a point that HIT presents unprecedented challenges in privacy and security, and that strategies to keep up with these threats continue to evolve. However, the group significantly overstates the degree to which HIT is intended to collect medical data in one place and the extent to which users will be able to poke around records that they don't have a legitimate need to access. It's inaccurate to say that there will be a "complete lack of privacy or confidentiality;" laws against unauthorized use are already in place, and federal officials have explicitly made privacy a high priority. Finally, the penalties against nonparticipation that the group cites begin in 2015 — after several years in which providers can receive financial bonuses for participating. On balance, we find the group's claims Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Senior Citizens League	None	None	None	2009-10-22T18:22:04	2009-10-01	['None']
-tron-01397	The twist ties on loaves of bread tell how fresh they are	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/freshbread/	None	food	None	None	None	The twist ties on loaves of bread tell how fresh they are	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-09258	On transparency in dealing with the Republican Party of Florida's financial issues.	full flop	/florida/statements/2010/may/03/bill-mccollum/bill-mccollum-transparency-rpof-credit-card/	"Right now the party matters are totally internal … I don’t think it’s good for any political party to be having everything that’s done inside the party open to the public and the press." Feb. 9, 2010 "I think we need to have as much transparency as possible in the party. Always have thought that." April 27, 2010 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Republican candidate for governor and Attorney General Bill McCollum says he always favored transparency when it comes to answering questions about the Republican Party of Florida's financial problems. Speaking to St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald reporter Marc Caputo in the state Capitol courtyard on April 27, 2010, McCollum said that "I think we need to have as much transparency as possible in the party. Always have thought that." That's not what Florida Democrats say. They have accused McCollum of trying to sweep the state party's problems under the rug. "Why is Bill McCollum so scared of putting some sunshine in these dark corners?" Florida Democratic Party spokesman Eric Jotkoff said. "Good things never come out of shady places." The back and forth gives us an opportunity to use our Flip-O-Meter. In this item, we wanted to examine McCollum's statements on transparency. First, if you've missed the RPOF credit card saga, here's a recap: In August 2009, court records were released showing that indicted former House Speaker Ray Sansom charged $173,000 on his Republican Party-issued credit card, taking his family on a trip to Europe, making visits to Best Buy and spending thousands on flowers, clothing, meals and hotels. The records prompted some Republicans to criticize then-party Chairman Jim Greer. Greer cut up his party American Express to help mollify critics. But then, more credit card statements were leaked to the press -- statements from Greer, former House Speaker and U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio and RPOF executive director Delmar Johnson. The new statements led to more questions and led some party leaders to call for Greer's ouster. In January 2010, he resigned. Then came questions about questionable contracts to a business Greer and Johnson had an interest in, then more questions about credit card spending, then reports that the U.S. Attorney's office, the FBI, the IRS and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were investigating. The RPOF kicked Greer out of his state committee post. Greer sued. The party leaders still standing faced questions about transparency -- specifically, when would they release all the financial records. Starting in February, McCollum was asked whether 1) The RPOF should release all of its credit card statements so party donors could see how their contributions were being spent, and 2) If he, as attorney general, should launch an investigation in the RPOF's spending practices. You can see the evolution of his answers over two weeks in February. Initially, in a Feb. 9 interview with reporters, he said the party should not release its credit card records. "That might be a question for the Legislature to decide, since the Legislature makes the rules for parties," McCollum said, according to the Orlando Sentinel. "Right now the party matters are totally internal … I don’t think it’s good for any political party to be having everything that’s done inside the party open to the public and the press. On the other hand I think it’s very important for the party regulars … all have a clear and confident understanding of what’s been going on in terms of everything, credit cards and bank accounts, everything else. I think that’s what’s been missing, and I think that’s what the next chairman will correct." Then, in a campaign statement on Feb. 11, he said the Republican Party should conduct a private audit of its finances before he would order a public state investigation. He said he wanted to wait until the state party chose Greer's replacement. "I share the outrage over recent revelations of extravagant contracts and lavish spending," McCollum said. "If audit findings suggest potential criminal activity, I will assist the State Executive Committee in directing these findings to the appropriate law enforcement investigatory agency. The old way of doing business at the Republican Party of Florida enabled an egregious and unforgivable violation of trust between Party leadership and our membership. Now it is time to clean up the mess. I support taking every measure possible to ensure we never again face the challenges before us today." On Feb. 16, McCollum again resisted calls for a public state investigation -- this time from Democratic attorney general candidates Dan Gelber and Dave Aronberg -- in comments published in the Lakeland Ledger. Finally on Feb. 20, after McCollum's choice for GOP chairman state Sen. John Thrasher was elected, McCollum called for a full internal forensic audit (as he said he would on Feb. 11), and urged that the results be released publicly (which he didn't say in the press release). If any potential illegal activity surfaced during the audit, he said it should be turned over to law enforcement. "Credit cards should be a part of that. Everything should be," McCollum said. The St. Petersburg Times noted after the Feb. 20 appearance that McCollum had "switched gears." "If there is any illegal or criminal behavior they discover - and they may or may not - I stand ready to assist you (Thrasher) in directing that to the appropriate law enforcement agencies,'' McCollum said at a news conference. On March 15, McCollum referred the results of the audit to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for further investigation. On April 23, the state GOP executive committee voted to release all credit card statements to the public from party and elected officials. McCollum spokeswoman Kristy Campbell said McCollum has consistently pushed for greater transparency with members of the party and with the public and that McCollum "has taken a prime leadership role in working to address issues to regard lavish spending and fiscal mismanagement." And though it may not have happened happened right away, the party credit card statements from January 2007-February 2010 are being released and public investigations are under way. It should also be noted that Gov. Charlie Crist, not McCollum, had been the de facto leader of the state party until he decided to pursue an independent run for the U.S. Senate on April 29. But, we're here to judge McCollum's comments. For McCollum to say in April that he always has supported "as much transparency as possible" about the state party's spending records doesn't match his statements from February. Back then, he rejected calls to ask for the release of party credit card statements and said specifically that it's not good for all of the inner workings of a political party to be aired in the public. Only later did he say the state party's audit of its financial problems should be released to the public. And only after a private party audit suggested wrongdoing did he refer the case to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. We rate McCollum's statements on transparency a Full Flop.	None	Bill McCollum	None	None	None	2010-05-03T18:43:39	2010-04-27	['None']
-pomt-03571	A state report’s "projection is that approximately half of public employees" would live outside municipal boundaries in a decade if the state bans local residency requirements.	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2013/may/19/tom-barrett/milwaukee-mayor-tom-barrett-says-state-report-proj/	Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is marshalling a big number as he continues his uphill battle to save a requirement that city employees reside in Milwaukee. Fifty. As in 50 percent. A frustrated Barrett met May 10, 2013, with Journal Sentinel reporters and editors, a day after an altered version of Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to wipe out all local residency rules for public employees won Joint Finance Committee approval. Republicans control both houses of the Legislature and the committee action suggests it will pass. Barrett repeated his concern that many of the city’s 7,200 city employees would move if residency is lifted, leading to a drop in property values. And he said there’s hard evidence of just how many. When asked "How many people do you think will actually leave in 10 years?" Barrett pointed to what he called a "projection" by the nonpartisan state Legislative Fiscal Bureau. The mayor quoted the state projection as "approximately half of public employees" living outside city limits will leave within 10 years. Barrett didn’t specify whether the state prediction was limited to Milwaukee or all municipalities that would have to dump residency rules, but the context of the question was clearly Milwaukee. When we asked Barrett spokeswoman Jodie Tabak for backup, she cited a May 9, 2013, fiscal bureau memo that examined the issue and laid out possible alternatives to Walker’s proposal. That memo at one point examined the possible economic impact of lifting residency for Milwaukee city employees. It did so by looking briefly at two large Midwestern cities with vastly different economies that lifted residency rules in 1999: Detroit and Minneapolis. (In both cases state lawmakers mandated the end to the municipal rules -- as Wisconsin lawmakers now seek to do.) Fifty-three percent of Detroit’s police force now lives outside the city, according to the fiscal bureau memo. That figure was reported by PolitiFact Wisconsin in 2011, when Republicans considered ending residency but pulled back. We rated as Mostly Truea Barrett claim that 53 percent of Detroit’s police force moved out when residency there was lifted. The fiscal bureau memo also focused on Minneapolis. "Recent estimates indicate that the percentage of city employees residing in the City has declined from nearly 70% when the requirement was in place to only 30% now," the memo said. (The Minneapolis residency requirement was only in place for six years, so not all employees were subject to it by 1999 when the rule was lifted.) Tabak said Barrett was referring to the Detroit and Minneapolis numbers when he made his claim. Barrett, though, said the fiscal bureau report contained a "projection" of what would happen here. Here’s the state memo’s only stab at that: "While the actual level of out-migration of public employees from the City of Milwaukee can only be speculated on at this point, two recent examples of other major Midwestern, U.S. cities that lifted their residency requirement may provide some insight," it said. Essentially, the memo said the Detroit and Minneapolis experiences could be suggestive, but it offered no prediction on Milwaukee’s "actual level." Tabak noted that the memo says: "Given that public employees, their unions, and associations want relief from the residency requirements in Milwaukee, it would seem somewhat evident that providing that relief could lead to some number of those public employees migrating out of the City." But that doesn’t tell us much, at least not in terms of a percentage. Before we wrap up, we should note that we found another example of a city that saw state lawmakers end residency requirements more than a decade ago: Baltimore, in 1995. As of 2012, 47% of Baltimore’s city workers lived outside the city, according to data on Open Baltimore. Among police employees, that spikes to 77 percent. So, in the three cities, large chunks of the workforce -- or at least the police force -- have chosen to live outside city limits a decade or more after the repeal of residency. Right around half of workers in fact; more in the case of Baltimore cops. But those figures look backward, at other cities. Barrett’s claim went further, saying a state memo forecasts a similar effect here -- approximately half, he said. There’s an element of truth in his statement, in that the state memo said the experience elsewhere "may provide some insight" into Milwaukee’s fate. And the experience in other cities may well play out here over time. But the state report stops well short of predicting Milwaukee’s experience. The mayor overreached in claiming an independent state report put a number on that. We rate Barrett’s claim Mostly False.	None	Tom Barrett	None	None	None	2013-05-19T09:00:00	2013-05-10	['None']
-snes-02723	Did Democrats Tweet an Altered Version of a Socialist Party Poster?	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/democrats-socialist-party-poster/	None	Politics	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did Democrats Tweet an Altered Version of a Socialist Party Poster?	27 March 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10387	"McCain lobbied for (a) $10-million pork project honoring conservative justice."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/17/barack-obama/it-sure-looks-like-pork/	Sen. John McCain has a well-deserved reputation in Washington as a pork-buster. The presumptive GOP presidential nominee regularly castigates colleagues when they insert language in spending bills forcing taxpayers everywhere to pay for projects only of interest to a select few. In a recent e-mail to reporters, Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, tries to paint McCain as a hypocrite, pointing out that in 2006, McCain co-sponsored legislation with fellow Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl "that asked for $10-million for an academic center at the University of Arizona named in honor of William Rehnquist, the former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice." In essence, Obama argued, McCain had "lobbied for (a) $10-million pork project." The New York Times, which wrote about the bill in February 2006, reported that some saw it at the time as a pork-barrel project. Reporter Carl Hulse wrote that "while the goal" of a Rehnquist center "may be laudable," critics were calling it "a classic case of lawmakers' trying to funnel money directly to a home-state institution for a project that should find financing elsewhere." Aides to McCain told Hulse the difference between McCain's proposal and the projects McCain so often derides as "pork," lies in the way the project was pursued. Pork projects, the aides argued, are attached to massive spending bills with little or no debate. McCain's proposal was introduced as a standalone bill that could only advance with some measure of debate. In the end, McCain's bill never got out of committee. That's a fair point, but even McCain allies told the New York Times that it was the type of project that should be funded at the local level, or with private funds. "If it doesn't meet the technical term of earmark, it would probably meet the public idea of one," Pete Sepp, a vice president at the National Taxpayers Union, said at the time. We see McCain's point that pork projects are earmarks for funding that are attached with little or no debate to spending bills. McCain has long said the big objection to such projects is as much about the short-cut process for for approving them as it is about the value of the projects being funded. But another important aspect of a pork project is its parochial nature. Pork projects are typically only of interest to people in a particular region, and those people, pork-busters like McCain usually argue, should be the ones to pay for it. The latter is what's at stake in the request for $10-million for an academic center at the University of Arizona, even if it is named after the late U.S. chief justice. For a purist on spending like McCain, it's hard to argue this wasn't a parochial, pork-barrel project. As a result, we find Obama's charge Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-06-17T00:00:00	2008-06-12	['None']
-bove-00290	FactCheck Alert: From Kulbhushan Jadhav’s Death Sentence To Success Of Give It Up Campaign	none	https://www.boomlive.in/factcheck-alert-from-kulbhushan-jadhavs-death-sentence-to-success-of-give-it-up-campaign/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck Alert: From Kulbhushan Jadhav’s Death Sentence To Success Of Give It Up Campaign	Apr 11 2017 11:25 am, Last Updated: Apr 15 2017 3:06 pm	None	['None']
-farg-00420	The Santa Fe, Texas school shooter "was wearing a symbol of Antifa."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/05/no-antifa-connection-in-texas-school-shooting/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Saranac Hale Spencer	['conspiracy theories']	No Antifa Connection in Texas School Shooting	May 22, 2018	2018-05-22 19:43:04 UTC	['Texas', 'Anti-fascism', 'Santa_Fe,_New_Mexico']
-tron-03298	Get rich from a chain letter	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/chainletter/	None	promises	None	None	None	Get rich from a chain letter	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-03722	Says Texas state funds were spent on "a TV series on spouses cheating on their wives, kind of glorifying the act of cheating."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2013/apr/15/jodie-laubenberg/jodie-laubenberg-says-state-money-supports-tv-show/	During floor debate, a Republican legislator complained that state expenditures on TV and film productions have extended to a long-running series celebrating cheating spouses. Really? Rep. Jodie Laubenberg of Parker initially asked a House colleague about his proposed amendment to the House version of the 2014-15 state budget. Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, said he sought to shift money from the state’s film and music marketing fund to teacher pensions. When last we wrote about the fund, overseen by the governor’s office, we noted the 2011 Legislature had agreed to spend $16 million each year to "market Texas as a film location and promote the Texas music industry," according to the May 26, 2011, House-Senate conference committee report. Laubenberg asked Leach: "Would you like me to give you a couple of examples of things being funded with this money?" At Leach’s go-ahead, Laubenberg replied: "How about ‘Bad Kids Go to Hell,’ ‘Cheaters,’ ...a TV series on spouses cheating on their wives, kind of glorifying the act of cheating--yeah, entertainment for some, unless you’re the one cheated on." After listing other entertainment projects she described as helped along with state funds, Laubenberg closed: "You know, if you want to watch this, fine, but I think you ought to do it on your own dime and not the state’s dime." To our inquiry, Laubenberg later left a message saying she had been reading from a list provided by Leach, whose office emailed us a spreadsheet listing more than 400 projects. A header on the spreadsheet says each one was "paid" by the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program through March 2013. More detail: The incentive program offers "qualifying productions" a shot at payments equaling 5 percent to 17.5 percent of the money they spend in Texas or 8 percent to 29.25 percent of eligible wages paid to Texas residents, according to agency information posted online, depending on budget levels and types of production, with both live-action and animated projects eligible. The spreadsheet’s sixth entry indicates $74,736.58 was paid March 22, 2013, to Bobby Goldstein Productions in Dallas in connection with "Cheaters," which is described on the sheet as a reality show. Lower entries show previous payments to the company in connection with "Cheaters," $72,714 in May 2012 and $100,082 in May 2011, respectively. By email, gubernatorial spokesman Josh Havens confirmed the state has paid about $248,000 since May 2011 to the Dallas company that produces "Cheaters," which is among several hundred projects benefiting from such aid. "The program met the incentive program requirements for economic impact and Texas resident employment," Havens said. By phone, the show’s executive producer, Bobby Goldstein, told us that he hires more than 20 full-time and probably 30 part-time employees for the show and the company contributes a lot in taxes. So, is the legislator correct that the series celebrates unfaithfulness? Not so, Havens replied, pointing out the message that appears at the start of each episode stating that from the program’s "surveillance cameras, you are about to view actual true stories, filmed live, documenting the pain of a spouse or lover caused by infidelity. This program is both dedicated to the faithful and presented to the falsehearted to encourage their renewal of temperance and virtue." (We confirmed the text here.) Goldstein said: "We don’t make this show and make it look like somebody did something good. We point out they did wrong. It’s sort of a scarlet ‘A.’" We viewed excerpts of episodes placed on YouTube by viewers. Our impression was the show centers on confrontations between purported cheaters, cheatees and, often, involved third parties. A vivid example involved a cheating man punching his irate girlfriend in a parking lot; blood runs. Another excerpt showed a man being confronted in a bed as a dominatrix edges out of camera range. Critic Pete Vonder Haar described the show this way in an April 25, 2012, account in the Houston Press, an alternative weekly. "The premise of the show is simplicity itself: a man or woman, suspecting their partner of philandering, contacts the steely professional ‘Cheaters’ investigative team. They, in turn, put the suspected party under surveillance, amassing evidence of their infidelity for presenting to the complainant. A confrontation is ‘arranged’ between the aggrieved party and their wayward lover. Hilarity then ensues, if by ‘hilarity’ you mean emotional breakdowns and the occasional threat of physical violence." The article, which Goldstein called accurate, says the show is primarily taped in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, though there have been Houston-area forays. "I’m not one given to hyperbole," Vonder Haar wrote, "but ‘Cheaters’ is as great an American institution as baseball and morbid obesity. Who but the good old U.S. of A. would so brazenly combine our love of moralistic posturing (the wayward partners are referred to as ‘suspects’ as if they were felons) with salacious, albeit (barely) pixelated footage of sexual transgressions." Finally, we revisited posted state guidelines for the incentives to see if any provision might restrict support for "Cheaters." The guidelines say projects not eligible for the aid include those considered obscene as that term is defined in the state’s penal code, meaning something the "average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest in sex." The code further lists explicit acts defined as obscene and also says something is obscene if taken as a whole, it "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value." Havens said in his email that the Texas Film Commission "felt the project fell well short of the definition of obscene." Our ruling Laubenberg said the state helped fund a show that glorifies cheating spouses. Mild point: The state-supported show, "Cheaters," doesn’t limit itself to exposing cheating spouses. We’re not sure, either, that everyone would agree the show glorifies infidelity, considering its theme is to expose the practice and touch off emotional confrontations. The legislator could have clarified that an intended point of the show is that cheaters are wrongdoers. We rate the claim as Mostly True.	None	Jodie Laubenberg	None	None	None	2013-04-15T10:00:00	2013-04-04	['None']
-faan-00085	 “Since the depths of the Great Recession, more than 1.2 million net new jobs have been created—overwhelmingly full-time, well-paying and in the private sector.”	factscan score: true	http://factscan.ca/gary-goodyear-1-2-million-net-new-jobs/	Canada gained a net 1,220,800 jobs from June 2009 to April 2015. Of these, approximately 91 per cent were full-time, and 81 per cent were in the private sector.	None	Gary Goodyear	None	None	None	2015-06-05	pril 24, 2015	['None']
-snes-04242	The media ignored Kim Rhode's bronze medal-winning performance in the 2016 Summer Olympics due to her stance on gun rights.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kim-rhode-ignored/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	Media Ignore Kim Rhode’s Sixth Olympic Medal	15 August 2016	None	['Kim_Rhode']
-pomt-12066	Says Lady Gaga was arrested after a confrontation with First Lady Melania Trump.	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/sep/06/blog-posting/no-lady-gaga-was-not-arrested-criticizing-melania-/	A fake news items claiming that pop star Lady Gaga was arrested after criticizing Melania Trump is a hoax that’s been circulating since before the 2016 election. The story claims that Lady Gaga’s Nov. 6, 2016, tweet criticizing Trump set in motion a dramatic chain of events that unfolded days before the country would cast their ballots in the general election. ".@MELANIATRUMP to say u will stand for "anti-bullying" is hypocrisy. Your husband is 1 of the most notorious bullies we have ever witnessed," Lady Gaga tweeted. According to the fake account, just hours after the offending tweet, Gaga and Melania Trump met face-to-face, with Gaga hurling insults while the future first lady ignored the enraged pop star. That’s when Gaga threw something at Trump, according to fake witnesses, forcing the Secret Service to intervene. "The New York Post tried to reach out to the NYPD after it was reported that GooGoo was taken away in a black Yukon in handcuffs, but as of yet there’s no record of an arrest," the item read. "You can rest assured if this incident isn’t prosecuted by the corrupt liberals in the city government that the less-than-lady will be staring down the barrel of a multi-million dollar lawsuit." The item surfaced Sep. 3 on American Flavor, which we’ve previously labeled a fake news site. But the ersatz claim’s origins trace back to a Nov. 6, 2016, item on an outlet called America’s Last Line of Defense, a satirical site whose mission is to inflame conservative readers and draw them into mistaking extraordinary conspiracies for truth. A photo that ran alongside the original item purports to show Gaga being arrested. But as one eagle-eyed writer at Snopes points out, it’s actually a screengrab of actress Amanda Bynes being escorted into a courthouse in 2013. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-09-06T15:20:44	2017-09-03	['None']
-pomt-11296	"James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION"	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/apr/20/donald-trump/trump-falsely-says-comey-memos-disprove-collusion-/	President Donald Trump claimed that memos written by former FBI Director James Comey "show clearly" that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 election, and that Trump has not obstructed justice amid ensuing investigations. Comey, who Trump removed as FBI director in 2017, made detailed notes following seven encounters with Trump. Comey had testified before Congress about portions of the memos, but they became public in their entirety for the first time on April 19, which prompted Trump to claim the memos cleared his name. "James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION," Trump tweeted. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Comey has said he made written records of his meetings with Trump in part due to concerns the president might lie about their discussions. Here, Trump’s tweet badly mischaracterizes their contents. Investigation ramped up since Comey’s firing Nowhere in Comey’s memos does he say that Trump did not collude or obstruct justice. Let’s recap how the memos came to be. In July 2016, when Comey was still FBI director, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. After Trump was elected, Comey made contemporaneous notes of seven discussions he had with Trump. On May 9, 2017, Trump fired Comey as FBI director. From this point forward, Comey would have no role investigating Trump campaign ties to Russia. Later that month, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel. Mueller was authorized to lead the investigation into possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, as well as other matters that "may arise directly from the investigation." (Rosenstein was acting as attorney general in place of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself from the investigation.) Here’s the key point: After the reins were passed from Comey to Mueller, the investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia escalated dramatically. Comey wasn’t in any position to make definitive statements about whether collusion existed or not. To date, Mueller’s investigation has swept up four members of Trump’s campaign, including three who have agreed to work with Mueller’s team as part of a plea deal. Mueller’s probe is ongoing, and he has yet to issue a final determination on the collusion question. Comey’s memos may figure into obstruction case The idea that the memos exonerate Trump on charges of obstruction of justice is even weaker. For starters, Comey’s memos contain details that many experts would consider legally relevant in an obstruction case against Trump. The memos describe a one-on-one dinner with Trump on Jan. 27, 2017, at the White House, where Trump turned the conversation to whether Comey wanted to stay on as FBI director. Comey has said he suspected Trump was seeking a "patronage relationship" with him. Comey’s memo goes on to state that Trump explicitly requested his loyalty later that evening, saying, "I need loyalty, I expect loyalty." The memos also describe a private meeting at the White House the following month, in which Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, saying, "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go." Finally, two days after Comey’s ouster, Trump said in a nationally televised interview that he’d been thinking about the FBI’s Russia investigation when he fired Comey. "When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story," Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt. As in the case of the collusion question, Mueller has yet to issue a final determination on whether Trump obstructed justice. Comey: There’s ‘at least circumstantial evidence’ of criminal wrongdoing Even when the Comey memos are read in a light most favorable to Trump, they still don’t support his claim that the writings exonerate him. Comey’s memos show Trump repeatedly asking for his help to "lift the cloud" being cast over his presidency by the Russia probe. Comey writes that he reassured Trump multiple times that the FBI was not investigating him. But Comey’s final memo was written more than a year ago, before Mueller ramped up the investigation and before Trump admitted he had been thinking about the Russia investigation when he fired Comey. More recently, Comey addressed the investigation in his memoir A Higher Loyalty, where he holds open the possibility of criminal wrongdoing: "One of the pivotal questions I presume that Bob Mueller’s team is investigating is whether or not in urging me to back the FBI off our investigation of his national security adviser and in firing me, President Trump was attempting to obstruct justice, which is a federal crime. It’s certainly possible. There is at least circumstantial evidence in that regard, and there may be more that the Mueller team will assemble." Our ruling Trump said the Comey memos "show clearly" that there was no collusion and no obstruction of justice. Nowhere in Comey’s memos does he say that Trump did not collude nor obstruct justice. And in the year since Comey penned his last Trump memo, a special counsel has been appointed who has escalated the investigation. That investigation has resulted in other charges against four members of Trump’s campaign, including three who have agreed to plea deals. In his book, Comey writes that the memos and the circumstances of his firing may be legally relevant to an obstruction case against Trump. Comey has also held open the possibility that Trump may ultimately be found to have committed criminal wrongdoing. We rate this Pants on Fire. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-04-20T13:33:46	2018-04-19	['None']
-pomt-09230	Louisiana gets "not one single penny" from Gulf Coast offshore oil revenues.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/may/13/mary-landrieu/landrieu-says-louisiana-doesnt-get-one-single-penn/	In the wake of the BP oil leak disaster, offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has come under intense scrutiny. On May 11, 2010, as Congress held hearings on the incident, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. -- whose state has so far been most directly threatened by the slick -- discussed the issue with MSNBC's Ed Schultz. Landrieu, who has often been an advocate for the energy industry in the Senate, told the liberal talk show host, "I can promise you, no one's going to let the industry skid. We're going to make BP pay. And, I might say, and you know because you've heard me say this before, when will America realize that the Gulf Coast states need revenue-sharing? Do you know how much money the federal treasury gets from this industry every year? An average of $5 billion. Do you know how much money Louisiana gets? Not one single penny." Landrieu's statement was so forceful -- that Louisiana gets "not one single penny" -- that we thought it deserved a fact-check. Before we get to that question, let's first look to see if she was correct about the federal treasury's take. It turns out that Landrieu is basically right. For 2009, the Minerals Management Service -- the office in the Interior Department that collects revenues from energy production -- sent $5.7 billion directly to the federal treasury. But is the Louisiana share of offshore oil royalties really zero, as Landrieu suggested? It's a bit complicated, but the truth is the state makes millions. Here's the breakdown: • For the first 3 miles out from the shoreline, Louisiana -- like other states -- gets to keep 100 percent of any royalties produced by oil and gas drilling. In the most recent year available, 2008, this amounted to $275 million. • Between 3 and 6 miles from the shoreline -- a federally owned band formally known as the 8(g) area -- the federal government sends 27 percent of the royalties to Louisiana. The reasoning is that federal drilling in this area sucks out some of the oil from deposits that span the 3-mile dividing line between state and federal ownership, so these payments are meant to compensate for the lost revenue to states. In 2009, they totaled $22 million and they're estimated to be $32 million this year. • Beyond 6 miles from the shoreline is considered federal territory. For new drilling projects, states get a 37.5 percent share directly to their treasuries and an additional 12.5 percent for state land and water conservation fund projects. The 37.5 percent figure alone amounted to $6.3 million for Louisiana's treasury in 2009, with additional estimated amounts of $558,000 in 2010 and $476,000 in 2011. Existing drilling projects do not currently provide royalties to the states -- a sore point for Louisianans. (More on that later.) And some bonus money that's an indirect result of oil and gas operations off its shores: Louisiana gets a share of the Coastal Impact Assistance Program, a federal program funded by a one-time appropriation of $1 billion distributed between from 2007 to 2010. This money is dispersed to Gulf Coast states, except for Florida, in an amount roughly proportional to the amount of offshore production in federal waters off their shores. Through this program, Louisiana has taken in a share of the $1 billion appropriation. The grand total that Louisiana receives in a typical year is difficult to compute because of big variations in oil prices and other factors, but we feel safe in saying it's in the tens of millions of dollars every year, and depending on how you slice the numbers, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. Either way, it's not accurate to say that Louisiana received "not one single penny," as Landrieu did. (We ran our findings by both Landrieu's office and by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and they agreed that our reporting was accurate.) So what's behind Landrieu's claim? She has long argued that the state gets far less than it deserves from the proceeds of offshore drilling. Before passage of the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006 -- a bill that Landrieu championed -- Louisiana indeed got no financial benefit from federal wells further than 6 miles from its shores. And even that bill didn't go nearly as far as Landrieu wanted. Because only revenues from new projects are included initially, the payments to Louisiana will be relatively modest through 2017 -- a year outside the "budget window," which is a common trick for lawmakers to make bills seem less expensive than they actually are. After that, the payments get quite large, as royalties from existing projects kick in. Louisiana could reap some of an estimated $385 million in 2017 and a share of up to $630 million in later years. Not seeing those big amounts materialize sooner has been a continued source of irritation for many Louisianans, including Landrieu. Reasonable people can disagree over how much Louisiana deserves to receive from drilling off its shores, but even if Landrieu has a point that her state is getting a raw deal over royalties, it is clearly incorrect for her to say that the state gets "not one single penny" from offshore drilling. We rate her statement False.	None	Mary Landrieu	None	None	None	2010-05-13T18:11:48	2010-05-11	['Gulf_Coast_of_the_United_States', 'Louisiana']
-pomt-08928	"Ken Buck's (District Attorney's) office? His spending skyrocketed by 40 percent."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/26/jane-norton/ken-bucks-budget-increased-commissioners-said-it-w/	A Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Colorado is heating up with a battle of television ads. Jane Norton recently attacked her opponent over a set of ads being run by Americans for Job Security, a pro-business advocacy group. "Seen those TV ads attacking me? They're paid for by a shady interest group doing the bidding of Ken Buck. You'd think Ken would be man enough to do it himself," Norton says in the ad. "Here's the truth: In state government, I cut budgets, cut programs and reduced staff," Norton continues. "Ken Buck's Office? His spending skyrocketed by 40 percent. We need a senator who's actually cut spending, and has the backbone to stand her ground." Norton is a former lieutenant governor who got early backing from some national Republican Party leaders. Buck is the Weld County District Attorney and a former U.S. attorney and has received backing from the tea party movement. Here, we'll look at Norton's statement about Ken Buck that spending at his office "skyrocketed by 40 percent." We've also fact-checked the ad that Norton was responding to and explained more about the group Americans for Job Security. We contacted Norton's office to ask for back-up for her statement about Buck's office, but they didn't get back to us. The Weld County Commission, though, said the District Attorney's budget increased by 30 percent during Buck's tenure, not as much as Norton's ad said. From 2005 to 2009, the budget increased from $3.4 million to $4.4 million, they said. (Buck was elected in November 2004; Weld County is northwest of Denver.) We wanted to double-check their numbers, so we reviewed budget documents from Weld County. We found there are a number of ways to look at the budget, depending on whether you include budgets for special programs in different years. (A victim's assistance program is one example.) We looked at the base budgets, though, and found that the 2005 budget was closer to $3.2 million. The difference between $3.2 million and $3.4 million isn't much, but it's enough to push the percentage growth from 30 percent to 38 percent. Whatever the number, the commission defended the increase in a formal letter signed by all five commissioners. They noted that the budget grew along with the population of the county and as the number of its courts in Weld County increased as well. Crime, meanwhile, decreased. "The Weld County Commissioners are impressed with the return on investment we have made in our District Attorney's Office and would not approve budget increases if we didn't believe it was to the benefit of our county," they said. The commissioners noted that the population increased 40 percent between 2000 and 2009. However, we calculated the population change from 2005 to 2009, the time period in question, and found the population increased 12 percent. We will stipulate that there are several different ways to look at the District Attorney's office budget, but whichever way you look at it, the budget increased somewhere between 30 and 40 percent, which is pretty close to Norton's claim. On the other hand, the Weld County Commission defended the increase as appropriate and a good use of resources, an important idea for voters to consider. So we rate Norton's statement Mostly True.	None	Jane Norton	None	None	None	2010-07-26T16:52:19	2010-07-09	['None']
-pomt-12920	Says Georgia’s 5th congressional district, represented by John Lewis, is "in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested)."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jan/15/donald-trump/trumps-john-lewis-crime-invested-atlanta/	President-elect Donald Trump kicked off Martin Luther King Jr. weekend by sparring with Democratic Georgia Rep. John Lewis, after the civil rights icon said he doesn’t see Trump as a "legitimate president." Lewis, in an interview with NBC, said he wouldn’t attend the presidential inauguration because he thought the Russians had helped Trump win election. A few hours later, Trump hit back on Twitter, saying the place Lewis represents is "crime infested." As many have noted, Lewis has had a long record of action, including dozens of arrests dozens for protesting segregation, enduring violence at the hands of state troopers and leading the fight for racial justice in the 1960s. But is Trump right that Lewis’ district today isn’t doing so hot? A transition team spokesman referred us to the district’s unemployment, poverty and crime rates. They are higher than the national and state averages, but the district is doing well . Calling it "crime infested" is a stretch. Georgia’s 5th congressional district, which Lewis has represented since 1987, consists of most of Atlanta (Fulton county) as well as parts of the surrounding suburbs (DeKalb and Clayton counties). Here’s a map: To get a sense of how Georgia’s 5th is doing, we looked at the Census Bureau’s My Congressional District service, which compiles federal demographic and socioeconomic data. Georgia’s 5th State average National average Unemployment rate (2015) 8.2 percent 5.5 percent 5.0 percent Median household income (2015) $48,017 $49.620 $53,889 Poverty rate (2015) 21.3 percent 17.0 percent 13.5 percent Percent with high school degree (2015) 87.6 percent 85.4 percent 86.7 percent Percent with bachelor's degree 40.6 percent 28.8 percent 29.8 percent As you can see, the district has higher unemployment and poverty rates than the national and state averages and a lower median income. On the flip side, it also has a higher rate of education attainment. Atlanta, the heart of the district, is a major international transportation hub and one of the fastest growing places in the country. Forbes named the city the ninth best place in America for businesses and career development, and among the best for job growth and education. The Brookings Institution’s Metro Monitor report — which measures economic trends in 100 U.S. cities like job and wage growth, poverty and gross metropolitan product — placed Atlanta at No. 32 for growth (though it ranked at No. 62 and 63 for prosperity and inclusion, respectively) in its January 2016 report. A separate analysis by PNC Financial Services noted Atlanta’s "tech and corporate cluster" and its "economic dynamism." (A number of Atlanta companies, including Coca Cola and Delta Air Lines, made the Fortune 500 in 2016). Longer term, the financial analysts concluded, the city will be "an above-average performer." In sum, Trump is exaggerating when he says Georgia’s 5th is "falling apart" by some metrics and, by others, he’s flat-out wrong. What about his parenthetical swipe at the dangers of living in Lewis’ district? Crime is not reported by congressional district so we’ll have to look at the Georgia 5th’s constituent parts. As the Trump transition team accurately noted, Atlanta had the 14th-highest violent crime rate in 2015 with 1,120 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. That’s about triple the national average: 372.6 offenses per 100,000. (We should note the FBI cautions against ranking and comparing crime rates across cities.) But that ignores the fact that Atlanta’s violent crime rate, as well as property, has been decreasing over the past decade, mirroring the overall national trend. Here are two charts showing that: See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com While Atlanta does make up most of the Georgia’s 5th, the district does contain parts of other towns with lower crime rates. For example, Brookhaven in the northern tip had a violent crime rate of 327.9 in 2015, and Morrow in the southern end 574.6, according to FBI statistics. Residents of Lewis’ district did not agree with Trump’s depiction of their neighborhood, and rallied to defend it on social media. The Atlanta Journal Constitution highlighted the reactions on its front page Sunday morning, emblazoned with the headline: "Atlanta to Trump: ‘Wrong.’ " And in 2007, when Trump was looking to add his name the city’s skyline, he seemed to have a very different opinion of it, according to a 2015 Journal Constitution article. "Atlanta is one of those cities that won’t be suffering the real estate foibles. Atlanta is like New York. New York is as hot as it ever has been," Trump said. "It’s just going to get better." (That year, the violent crime rate was 1623.8, about 45 percent higher than it was in 2015.) A day after his initial tweets, Trump broadened his claim and said Lewis should focus on "crime-infested inner cities of the U.S." Our ruling Trump said Georgia’s 5th congressional district is "in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested)." The district isn’t in as terrible economic shape as Trump suggests. While it has higher unemployment and poverty rates than the national average, it still has a thriving economic hub in Atlanta and higher educational attainment. Atlanta does have a much higher crime rate than the national average, but like most major cities, that has been in decline. We rate Trump’s claim Mostly False. Share the Facts Politifact 3 6 Politifact Rating: Says Georgia’s 5th congressional district, represented by John Lewis, is "in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested)." Donald Trump President-elect in a tweet Saturday, January 14, 2017 -01/-14/2017 Read More info Correction: A previous version of this article compared the fifth district's poverty rate for families to the state's and country's poverty rates for all individuals. The district's overall poverty rate is 21.3 percent.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-01-15T18:04:17	2017-01-14	['None']
-tron-00327	Virus that pretends to be a Red Cross request for donations	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/redcross/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Virus that pretends to be a Red Cross request for donations	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-05221	A book titled "Do You Want to Play with My Balls?" was published for children.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/balls-book-for-parents/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan Evon	None	Was a ‘Do You Want to Play with My Balls?’ Book Intended for Children?	5 May 2015	None	['None']
-snes-04567	Thomas Jefferson wrote that "the strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms" is to "protect themselves against tyranny in government."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thomas-jefferson-gun-quote/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Thomas Jefferson on Gun Rights	22 June 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00288	"Will create a prison-to-work incentive program, modeled on the Welfare-to-Work Partnership, to create ties with employers, third-party agencies that provide training and support services to exoffenders, and to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/305/create-a-prison-to-work-incentive-program/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Create a prison-to-work incentive program	2010-01-07T13:26:54	None	['None']
-chct-00333	FACT CHECK: Trump Claims Democrats Supported Reagan Tax Cuts	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/09/07/fact-check-trump-claims-democrats-supported-reagan-tax-cuts/	None	None	None	Kush Desai | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	12:43 PM 09/07/2017	None	['None']
-snes-05887	A photograph shows the offspring of a woman who gave birth to 69 children.	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/valentina-vassilyeva-children/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Does This Photograph Show the Offspring of a Woman Who Gave Birth to 69 Children?	14 January 2015	None	['None']
-goop-00699	O.J Simpson Asking Kim Kardashian For Pardon Help?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/oj-simpson-kim-kardashian-pardon/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	O.J Simpson Asking Kim Kardashian For Pardon Help?	10:10 am, July 4, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-02919	Bill Clinton Files for Divorce from Hillary Clinton	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bill-clinton-files-divorce-hillary/	None	politics	None	None	['bill clinton', 'donald trump', 'hillary clinton', 'the clintons']	Bill Clinton Files for Divorce from Hillary Clinton	May 18, 2017	None	['Bill_Clinton']
-pomt-04906	Says U.S. Senate opponent Eric Hovde "supported billions in stimulus for high-speed rail" and "billions more to bail out banks."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2012/aug/03/mark-neumann/fellow-gop-senate-candidate-eric-hovde-backed-bill/	According to polls, support for Wisconsin U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde is strongest among tea party supporters and the most conservative voters. Yet, in a July 17, 2012 TV ad, there’s a smiling Hovde, a Republican, pictured alongside a smiling President Barack Obama. The ad is from fellow GOP candidate Mark Neumann, who has stepped up his attacks on Hovde as the Aug. 14, 2012 primary approaches. "Like Barack Obama," the ad says, "Hovde supported billions in stimulus for high-speed rail and, like Obama, billions more to bail out banks." It ends stating that Hovde is "too liberal" with "your money." With the comparison to Obama -- whose policies Hovde has sharply criticized -- Neumann tries to portray Hovde as a backer of big government. Let’s see just how much support Hovde voiced for spending billions for high-speed trains and to bail out troubled banks. High-speed rail To back the high-speed rail part of Neumann’s claim, Neumann campaign manager Chip Englander cited the November 2008 edition of Hovde Industry Update, a newsletter published by one of Hovde’s financial services companies. The publication date is important in understanding the context of what the newsletter says. Even before Obama took office in January 2009, he was working with Democratic congressional leaders on an economic stimulus plan. What emerged, in February 2009, was a nearly $790 billion bill that included $282 billion in tax relief and $507 billion in spending, with about $48 billion for the Department of Transportation. (The estimate of the bill’s total cost has since been raised to $840 billion.) The newsletter -- all eight pages were devoted to one article -- was headlined: "Welcome to the government spending bubble." But far from welcoming government spending, the newsletter’s first paragraph ends with a warning: "At the core of these problems" in the U.S. financial system "is the toxic mix of Wall Street and Washington, which first led to the Internet bubble, then to the credit and housing bubble, and now to what may become a governmental spending bubble at the worst possible time." The newsletter goes on at length to criticize actions by the Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. Treasury in banking. Then it turns to the stimulus, saying the stimulus "needs to achieve the maximum effect and to address the root causes of this (financial) crisis." High-speed rail comes into play when the newsletter suggests stimulus money should be focused on "targeted federal infrastructure projects": "Again, building high-speed, light rail systems on the East and West coasts would stimulate job creation, increase productivity for those people and companies that transact business up and down the coastlines, and vastly reduce fuel consumption, as more people opt to use mass transit rather than drive their own automobile. Obviously, achieving a material reduction in oil demand would help attack this country’s single greatest cause of our massive trade and capital account deficits. Lastly, these programs would provide tangible, long-lasting benefits to society." Hovde doesn’t mention spending billions, but it’s easy to see that even a single high-speed rail project on either coast could cost that much. The proposed Milwaukee-to-Madison high-speed line spurned by Gov. Scott Walker had been slated for $810 million in federal funds. And the $48 billion in stimulus received by the federal DOT included $8 billion for high-speed and "inter-city rail programs." When we asked for a response from Hovde, his campaign spokesman, Sean Lansing, cited a July 2012 interview Hovde did with a Green Bay TV station. Hovde said the claim that he supported billions for spending for high-speed rail was "totally false." But then he acknowledged his newsletter did say that "during the height of the financial crisis, if we feel it necessary to spend money on stimulus," the money could be spent on high-speed rail on the coasts. We also found that in a March 2009 interview with CNBC-TV’s "Squawk Box" program, Hovde noted that he had previously advocated for spending stimulus money on high-speed rail. So, at a point when it was clear there would be a stimulus bill, Hovde supported spending stimulus money on high-speed rail, which likely would involve billions of dollars. But Neumann’s ad leaves out vital context from the newsletter: That Hovde opposed the stimulus money. He was arguing if there were a stimulus, it should be spent on projects that make an impact, such as high-speed rail on the East Coast. The ad also skips past the fact that these comments were made before Hovde was a candidate, presenting them as if he is an unabashed booster of spending as part of his campaign. Bank bailouts To back the part of the claim that Hovde supported billions "to bail out banks," Englander cited a clip from a TV appearance in which Hovde says: "Without question, I was an advocate from the get-go to inject capital into the banking system." This has some similar problems. The clip comes from an earlier interview Hovde did on "Squawk Box," in November 2008, about TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It was signed into law the previous month by President George W. Bush. Criticized by some Republicans as a bailout, the law authorized the U.S. Treasury to spend up to $700 billion to stabilize financial markets. Hovde criticized TARP for several minutes, though he said "something needed to be done." Then one of the hosts asked him: "Didn’t the government do something right by preventing the financial market from collapsing, by preventing the banking system from collapsing at some point?" Hovde replied with the part of the quote that Neumann cites, then said more: "Without question, I was an advocate from the get-go to inject capital into the banking system. But you should've done it on terms that were a little bit more punitive and required them to access private capital along with it, as well as putting the government's money -- taxpayer money -- in the most senior position." He added: "If they would have structured it properly and forced the banks to go to the private sector, there was a lot of private sector money that, on the right terms, would have come in. And, yes, we needed to stabilize the system." In response, Hovde spokesman Lansing again cited the July 2012 Green Bay TV interview. Asked if he supported billions to bail out banks, Hovde said: "I have been opposed to that from Day One." He said he had written and given interviews in 2008 asserting that, "if we needed to give money to these companies, then executives should have been replaced and the cost of the capital should have been higher." Like the high-speed rail part of Neumann’s claim, Neumann’s ad takes a partial statement and ignores critical context. It further muddies things by comparing Hovde to Obama, when the TARP proposal in question was done under Bush. On the other hand, Neumann’s ad didn’t say Hovde supported TARP but rather that he supported billions to bail out banks. Hovde did express support for a taxpayer-funded bailout, albeit with an approach he asserted would better protect taxpayers. Our rating Neumann compared Hovde to Obama, saying Hovde "supported billions in stimulus for high-speed rail" and "billions more to bail out banks." Hovde was critical of the stimulus plan, but did back high-speed rail as a spending option when it was clear the stimulus program would be created. Similarly, Hovde didn’t back TARP, as the ad implies, but did favor taxpayer assistance provided in a different way. Neumann’s claim is partially accurate, but takes Hovde’s statements out of context -- our definition of Half True.	None	Mark Neumann	None	None	None	2012-08-03T09:00:00	2012-07-17	['United_States_Senate_election_in_Wisconsin,_2012', 'United_States']
-farg-00489	“Kevin Bacon: ‘We are blessed to have Donald Trump as our president.'"	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/12/kevin-bacon-isnt-trump-supporter/	None	fake-news	Various websites	Saranac Hale Spencer	['campaign 2016']	Kevin Bacon Isn’t a Trump Supporter	December 8, 2017	[' Sunday, December 3, 2017 ']	['Kevin_Bacon', 'Donald_Trump']
-snes-01961	Starbucks Refused Free Product to Marines Serving in Iraq?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gi-joe/	None	Business	None	Snopes Staff	None	Did Starbucks Refuse Free Product to Marines Serving in Iraq?	29 September 2004	None	['None']
-pomt-00128	"‘MAGA bomber’ identified as former CNN employee who donated to heavily to Hillary Clinton."	pants on fire!	/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/oct/26/blog-posting/false-report-democratic-cnn-ties-pipe-bombs/	In the world of right-wing conspiracy fans, the series of bombs sent to former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, CNN and other targets of President Donald Trump’s barbs is nothing more than a left-wing Democratic feint –– a false-flag operation designed to undermine Trump’s message. An outfit called Stranger Than Fiction News posted a video on its Facebook page Oct. 25. Over footage of a group of masked protestors burning an American flag, the post has the bold news headline "‘MAGA bomber’ identified as former CNN employee who donated to heavily to Hillary Clinton." (The video matches an antifa flag burning in Portland, Ore.) The video had over 30,000 views, and if the comments are any guide, it reached a receptive audience. Comments included "The Democratic Party is a terrorist organization," and "The fake pipe bomb fiasco that has gripped America for the last two days is rapidly unraveling as a political hoax." A couple of people asked "Is this for real?" To which we say, no. This is pure, 100 percent certified fake news. The FBI’s latest statement (as of the time we published) says only that an 11th package was recovered in Florida, addressed to Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. There’s been no announcement of any suspects, much less a person with ties to CNN or the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Stranger Than Fiction News also promotes the false story of crisis actors who pretend to be grieving survivors after gun massacres . Take this as your daily dose of Pants on Fire fake news. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-10-26T11:14:48	2018-10-25	['CNN', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-tron-02044	After a Schoolteacher Called Thomas Edison “Addled,” His Heroic Mother Stepped In	mostly fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/after-a-schoolteacher-called-thomas-edison-addled-his-heroic-mother-stepped-in/	None	inspirational	None	None	None	After a Schoolteacher Called Thomas Edison “Addled,” His Heroic Mother Stepped In	Oct 5, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-02759	Taylor Swift, Joe Alwyn Getting “Handsy” In Paparazzi Photos, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-joe-alwyn-not-photos-paparazzi-pictures-pda-handsy/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Taylor Swift, Joe Alwyn NOT Getting “Handsy” In Paparazzi Photos, Despite Claims	12:31 pm, June 3, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-08882	Says President Barack Obama initially said the national health-care mandate isn't a tax, but his administration now says it is a tax.	mostly true	/texas/statements/2010/aug/02/republican-party-texas/republican-party-texas-says-president-barack-obama/	Channeling U.S. Rep Joe Wilson, the Republican from South Carolina who shouted "You lie!" during President Barack Obama's speech to Congress in September, the Republican Party of Texas has accused the president of lying when he said that a new federal mandate requiring individuals to have health insurance was not a tax. "You lie!" the party tweeted July 19. "Obama said O-care mandate wasn't a tax. Now Obama admin says it is a tax." Did the Obama administration talk one way and then the other? Per the legislation that Obama signed into law in March, most people will be required to have health insurance starting in 2014. There are exceptions, but individuals who aren't exempt and refuse to join a plan will be required to pay an annual penalty of $695 per person, up to a maximum of $2,085 per family, or 2.5 percent of household income, whichever is greater. The health care law calls the fine individuals must pay if they don't have insurance a "penalty." In a Sept. 20, 2009, interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Obama denied that the mandate to buy health insurance was equivalent to a tax. "For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase," Obama said. He noted that Americans are required to have auto insurance, but nobody considers that a tax increase. (Auto insurance is a state mandate, but all the states except New Hampshire require it of resident drivers.) When Stephanopoulos pressed Obama on whether the mandate was a tax, Obama said: "I absolutely reject that notion." However, on July 16 The New York Times published a story that seemed to vindicate opponents of the health care overhaul who argued that the insurance requirement was a tax. The headline: "Changing stance, administration now defends insurance mandate as a tax." Texas is one of 21 states challenging the law's constitutionality in court, but Virginia was the first to face the federal government in a July 1 hearing on its lawsuit. The New York Times pointed to a brief filed in that case by the U.S. Department of Justice defending the individual mandate as "a valid exercise" of the federal government's "power to lay and collect taxes." Congress can impose taxes to provide for the "general welfare" under Article I of the Constitution. From the health-care law: "The requirement regulates activity that is commercial and economic in nature: economic and financial decisions about how and when health care is paid for, and when health insurance is purchased." The law then says that national health spending is projected to increase from $2.5 trillion — 17.6 percent of the economy — in 2009, to $4.7 trillion in 2019. In its legal brief, the department says the penalty is also a tax because it will raise revenue — $4 billion a year by 2017, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — and because it's imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code. Individuals who refuse to obtain health insurance and are penalized will have to report the fine "as an addition to income tax liability," the brief says. The health care law itself doesn't mention Congress' taxing authority, instead noting that the mandate is protected under the Constitution's Article I "commerce clause," which lets Congress regulate commercial activity that has a substantial effect on the national economy. "The tax argument is the strongest argument," the Times quoted Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School who supports the law, saying. "This bill is a tax. Because it's a tax, it's completely constitutional." Balkin is also quoted saying that Obama "has not been honest with the American people about the nature of the bill." White House spokesman Matt Lehrich defended the law both ways last week, telling us: "We believe that the Commerce Clause provides ample constitutional authority for the individual mandate. If anyone has any doubts about that — and we don’t think they should — it’s also clear that that the mandate is constitutional under Congress’s power to tax." Similarly, Steven Schwinn, an associate professor of constitutional law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, pointed out on his blog July 18 that the Obama administration has consistently defended the mandate in court primarily under the Commerce Clause, and secondarily under Congress' taxing power to promote the general welfare. Henry Aaron, a scholar who specializes in health care and tax policy at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, said Obama was correct to say the mandate isn't a tax. "A mandate is meaningless unless it is backed up by some 'or else,' as in 'obey the mandate or else,' " Aaron said. "The administration asserted the legal power to impose a mandate. The mandate is backed up by a tax that has to be paid if the mandate is violated. You obey the mandate or you pay the tax." Upshot: In his interview with Stephanopoulos, Obama insisted the mandate to purchase health coverage is not a tax. But in defending its legality, the Justice Department argues in part that the mandate is a valid exercise of Congress' taxing power. From where we sit, Obama was trying to make a political point; the Justice Department, a legal one. In its tweet, the Republican Party overreaches when it says the administration now calls the mandate a tax. The administration (still) isn't doing that. But it does cite Congress' power to levy taxes as authority for the mandate. And that enables the GOP to score its own political point, based on what looks like the administration's runs at having it both ways. We rate the GOP's recap of Obama's early position and his administration's recent defense of the law as Mostly True.	None	Republican Party of Texas	None	None	None	2010-08-02T06:00:00	2010-07-19	['None']
-pomt-01503	Jason Carter "actually opposed more funding for education in the Senate."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2014/sep/24/republican-governors-association/attack-mostly-target-carter-opposed-education-fund/	The too-close-to-call race between Republican incumbent Nathan Deal and Democratic challenger Jason Carter has the Republican Governors Association plunking down more money in Georgia. The RGA has already spent $1.6 million on Georgia’s governor’s race and is upping its investment with a new ad that started airing Tuesday in most parts of the state. The association has previously taken to the airwaves in Georgia to attack Carter, a state senator from Atlanta, as a "liberal trial lawyer" and a champion of expanding Medicaid as part of Obamacare. The new 30-second challenges one of Carter’s biggest campaign promises -- his vow to improve education funding. "Jason Carter promises to invest more in education. But Carter actually opposed more funding for education in the Senate," the ad states. That’s a frequent claim out of the Deal campaign. It’s also very similar to a claim that PolitiFact has examined previously and deems worthy of a second look -- given that education is one of the hottest topics in the race and one of taxpayers’ biggest investment. (This year alone, the cost of K-12 education is $7.9 billion, or 43.4 percent of the state’s $18.3 billion budget.) The ad from the Republican Governors Association specifically takes aim at Carter’s vote in the most recent General Assembly session on the 2015 state budget (though the RGA gives a wrong citation in the ad for HB 744, the 2015 appropriations bill). Out of 56 state senators, Carter was one of only four who voted "No" on the budget," state records show. The budget included austerity cuts to education, totaling $747 million. But they were the smallest cuts since 2009 and, as such, were viewed by leaders in education as largely positive. This past spring, when Deal signed the 2015 budget into law, Carter explained his opposition was rooted in a belief that having a separate education budget would restore all, not just some, of the previous cuts. "Budgets reflect values, and this budget shows that Gov. Deal does not value our students, teachers and classrooms," Carter said in a statement in April. Carter has since expanded on his idea of a separate education budget, including a questionable funding stream from tax cheats to boost spending. Republicans argued that Deal increased education funding every year, a claim PolitiFact found overstated his record. On the campaign trail, Carter has repeatedly attacked Deal for underfunding education. Most of his public statements as a state senator focused on education and called for more money, both on the K-12 and college levels. "To say he does not support more funding is completely erroneous," Carter spokesman Bryan Thomas said. "It’s precisely the opposite. He does not want our schools to continue to be shortchanged." Republicans, however, have suggested that Carter’s vote against the 2015 budget was strictly political posturing. They point out that he voted in favor of Deal’s three prior state budgets, all of which had larger education austerity cuts. (Georgia’s 180 school systems collectively were underfunded more than $1.1 billion in 2012, $1.1 billion in 2013 and nearly $1.1 billion in 2014, according to allotment sheets from the Georgia Department of Education.) Austerity cuts reflect the difference in what school systems qualify for and actually receive from the state under the education funding formula, the Quality Basic Education Act of 1985. Carter has voiced concerns about the state’s commitment to public education during his short Senate career. His criticism, specifically of Deal on education, has sharpened in recent months, with his campaign manager at one point calling Deal Georgia’s worst education governor. (See PolitiFact’s Pants On Fire ruling of that claim.) Around the nation, there are 36 governor’s races this fall and about a third of them -- including the one between Deal and Carter -- are considered competitive, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "Deal is one of five incumbent Republicans who is in some degree of difficulty," Sabato said. "Deal is a slight favorite, but Carter has kept it close." In summary, the RGA ad claims that Carter "actually opposed more funding for education." It would be accurate to say Carter voted against the current state budget that expanded money for schools. Carter has called for more education funding for nearly all of his short political career. But when it came down to votes in the state Senate, he voted with Gov. Deal on three budgets that contained austerity cuts and against the governor on a budget that had the smallest austerity cuts in years. The GOP was careful in wording its latest ad to say Carter opposed more funding for education "in the Senate." That statement needs that context but is largely on target. We rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Republican Governors Association	None	None	None	2014-09-24T00:00:00	2014-09-23	['None']
-pomt-12491	Says of the GOP health care proposal, "pre-existing conditions are in the bill."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2017/may/01/donald-trump/does-new-version-ahca-still-cover-pre-existing-con/	President Donald Trump remains hopeful that he can deliver on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a plan from the Republican Party. In an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation, Trump argued that the GOP’s health care plan covers pre-existing conditions, despite what news reports have said. "Pre-existing conditions are in the bill," Trump said April 30. "And I just watched another network than yours, and they were saying, ‘Pre-existing is not covered.’ Pre-existing conditions are in the bill. And I mandate it. I said, ‘Has to be.’ " Trump was more than likely referring to the most recent version of the GOP health care overhaul, an amendment by U.S. Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., introduced in late April. "This bill is much different than it was a little while ago, okay? This bill has evolved," Trump said. "But we have now pre-existing conditions in the bill. We've set up a pool for the pre-existing conditions so that the premiums can be allowed to fall." When CBS’ John Dickerson pressed Trump on whether everyone with pre-existing conditions would be covered, Trump said, "We actually have a clause that guarantees." White House spokesman Sean Spicer said at the May 1 news briefing that Trump was referring to the MacArthur amendment and that Trump is ensuring that "coverage of pre-existing conditions is at the core" of the legislation. But the reality of how the bill addresses pre-existing conditions -- which are health problems patients have before new insurance kicks in -- is much more complicated than Trump makes it sound. What the amendment says on pre-existing conditions In March, the Republican’s American Health Care Act died without a vote when Republicans couldn’t agree on the bill designed to replace the Affordable Care Act. Under the new bill, called ACHA, insurers had to cover pre-existing conditions, but they could have charged more for people who are recently uninsured. The MacArthur amendment would allow states to obtain waivers to some requirements of the Affordable Care Act, including the "essential health benefits" provision that requires maternity care or mental health services. The amendment has language that appears to protect those with pre-existing conditions stating that "nothing in this Act shall be construed as permitting insurers to limit access to health coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions." But experts say other parts of the amendment suggest that those with pre-existing conditions could struggle to maintain affordable health insurance. The amendment permits insurers to set premiums based on the "health status" of an individual by looking at their current and past health status and make predictions about how much an individual will use medical care in the future, said Linda Blumberg, senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute. That’s where pre-existing conditions could come into play, because it would mean that the costs rise for consumers who are sicker, said Timothy Jost, Washington and Lee University School of Law emeritus professor. "Health status underwriting is literally charging a higher (possibly much, unaffordably, higher) premium to people with pre-existing conditions," Jost said. "Under the MacArthur amendment, they could not be refused coverage, but insurers could impose high enough premiums that coverage would be unaffordable." The amendment says that the waiver would allow states to set up a high-risk pool or participate in a new federal invisible risk-sharing program to help states reimburse insurers for covering high-risk consumers. "No state may obtain a waiver for health status unless it has taken these efforts to protect those who might be affected," stated a MacArthur press release. "In states with a waiver, individuals who maintain continuous coverage could not be rated based on health status." That means people who stay insured without any lapses can’t be charged more by insurance companies if they get sick. But experts said that many low-income people aren’t able to stay covered without breaks, and that questions remain about the effectiveness of the high-risk pools. The American Medical Association, which opposes the amendment, said in a statement that it "could make coverage unaffordable for people with pre-existing conditions." The AMA raised questions about whether the high-risk pool would be "sufficient to provide for affordable health insurance or prevent discrimination against individuals with certain high-cost medical conditions." Our ruling Trump said of the GOP health care amendment, "Pre-existing conditions are in the bill." The amendment says that health insurers can’t limit access to coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, but that insurers can charge people more if states agree. In some states, health insurers would be able to charge sicker people more. And experts warn that high-risk pools -- the mechanisms meant to keep premiums lower for sick people -- might not be effective. Overall, the latest proposal seems to weaken existing protections for people with pre-existing conditions, not strengthen them. We rate the statement Mostly False. ' See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-05-01T14:15:44	2017-04-30	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-08370	"More private-sector jobs were created in the first eight months of 2010 than in the eight years of the Bush administration."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/25/nancy-pelosi/nancy-pelosi-says-more-private-sector-jobs-created/	House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. -- who is in danger of losing her leadership position if the Republicans take over the House -- must really like the following talking point, because she's used it at least twice on national television in recent days. "More private-sector jobs were created in the first eight months of 2010 than in the eight years of the Bush administration," she said in an interview on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann on Oct. 21, 2010. The day before, Pelosi said something virtually identical in an interview on PBS' Charlie Rose Show. We thought we'd check to see if she's correct. We turned to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency that tracks employment numbers. According to the BLS website, there were 111,634,000 Americans employed in the private sector at the start of George W. Bush's first term, in January 2001. Eight years later, in January 2009, there were 110,961,000 Americans employed in the private sector. So the United States lost 673,000 private-sector jobs on Bush's watch. That makes it easy for Pelosi: If the United States netted even one private-sector job in 2010, she'd be accurate. And the nation actually did quite a bit better than that. Private-sector employment in January 2010 was 107,123,000, a number that grew to 107,970,000 by Septmeber 2010. That works out to be 847,000 jobs created. So Pelosi's statement is accurate. But it's also a classic case of cherry-picking -- for two reasons. First, Pelosi carefully cited private-sector employment, not total employment. There's a valid reason to focus on private-sector jobs rather than government jobs, since private-sector jobs produce income-boosting goods and services to a degree that government jobs do not. Still, choosing private-sector jobs helps Pelosi's case in a crucial way: If she'd chosen total employment instead, her formulation would have been wrong. Total employment -- that is, the combination of private- and public-sector jobs -- during Bush's tenure increased by 1.08 million, while total employment in 2010 has increased by 599,000. (Quick aside: Who would have thought that federal and state government jobs would have increased by 1.7 million in eight years under Bush and fallen by 357,000 since President Barack Obama took office?) Second, Pelosi chose her start and end dates in a way that's highly favorable to Obama and unfavorable to Bush. If she'd instead chosen to start from the beginning of Obama's term -- rather than half way through his first two years -- she would be stuck with a net loss of nearly 3 million private-sector jobs, not the increase of 847,000 she came up with for 2010. Pelosi essentially started counting from the low point for jobs and only counted the upward part of the trendline. Meanwhile, the start and end points she used for Bush give the former president no such break. The jobs picture under Bush looked like an arc, heading generally upward through mid 2007 before heading downward again. If she had used only the upward portion of the arc, as she did for Obama, it would have showed a gain of 3.9 million private-sector jobs. You could argue that it's unfair to pin the blame on Obama for job losses early in his tenure. Still, Pelosi drew the lines for her comparison as artfully as state legislatures have been known to draw lines defining congressional districts, and, similarly, Pelosi's choices are not just highly selective but also beneficial to her side. To be fair, Pelosi's staff points out that they have not shied from showing the full arc of the jobs numbers since Obama took office, attaching a fact sheet showing both the decline and rise in jobs since Obama's inauguration. But her televised comments don't reflect that. To fully understand the jobs comparison Pelosi makes, you need to understand how she sliced and diced the numbers. It's a good example of a statement that is accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. -- the Truth-O-Meter's definition of Half True. So we rate it Half True.	None	Nancy Pelosi	None	None	None	2010-10-25T16:19:42	2010-10-21	['None']
-goop-01857	Ben Affleck “Threatened” By False Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel Dating Rumo	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-threatened-jennifer-garner-josh-duhamel-dating-rumor-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Ben Affleck NOT “Threatened” By False Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel Dating Rumor	9:45 am, January 11, 2018	None	['Ben_Affleck', 'Jennifer_Garner']
-pomt-07783	If Wisconsin's governor cuts perquisites as much as he plans to do, "it would still leave (workers) better off than their private sector" counterparts.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/21/george-will/george-will-says-wisconsin-governors-benefits-prop/	With national attention focused on a showdown in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to reduce state worker benefits, the issue led to some spirited back-and-forth between union-backer Donna Brazile and conservative columnist George Will during the round-table discussion on ABC's This Week. Brazile called the workers who have flooded the state capitol to back union workers an "organic movement." "Just like the Tea Party went out there and grabbed the microphone, what you have is grassroots people out there saying, 'No more,' no more budget cuts on the back of working people." Brazile said. Will responded, "Donna, what you call the grassroots is a tiny minority of this tiny minority of Wisconsin people who work for the government. Three hundred thousand public employees in Wisconsin went to work -- while the teachers were clutching their little signs that say it's all about the kids, they're abandoning their classrooms, lying to their supervisors, saying they were sick, and going off to protest in defense of perquisites, which if the governor cuts them as much as he plans to do, would still leave them better off than their private sector" counterparts. We decided to check Will's claim that perks or non-wage compensation such as health and retirement benefits) -- if cut as much as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has proposed -- would still leave public employees "better off" than those in the private sector. Walker's plan would require state workers to pay 5.8 percent of their pension contributions and to double their share of health premiums to 12.6 percent. Our colleagues at PolitiFact Wisconsin have been all over many of the issues in this contentious debate, and back on Feb. 8, they fact-checked a claim Gov. Walker made in his first "state of the state" address, that most state employees could pay twice as much toward their health care premiums, and it would still be half the national average. Here's some of what our friends at PolitiFact Wisconsin found: * A Kaiser Family Foundation study that concluded that employees nationally -- public and private -- pay an average of 29 percent of the cost of the premiums. Among just state and government workers nationwide, the average was 25 percent for family coverage. * A U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010 health care benefits survey that put the employee share at 32 percent for family coverage. It’s 21 percent for single coverage. * A study by The Segal Co., a private benefits firm, that looked just at state government workers and found that a majority pay between 20 percent and 60 percent of their premium costs for family coverage. In other words, no matter how you slice it, the 12.6 percent share of health care premiums that Walker proposes employees pay is well below what most pay in the private -- and public -- sectors. That gets us halfway there. The second piece is pensions. Again, Walker's plan would require state workers to pay 5.8 percent of pension contributions. This one is a little more difficult to compare. Most public employees have a pension plan. But fewer than one in five private-sector employees has access to a pension plan. And those who do typically don't contribute anything to it. Much more often, private employees have access to employer-sponsored retirement benefits (such as 401(k) plans), rather than pensions. And a third of the private sector workforce has no access to an employer sponsored retirement plan at all. "The 401(k) has become the de facto retirement benefit in the private sector," said Keith Brainard, research director for the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. Typically, Brainard said, employers will match about 3 percent to 5 percent of an employee's salary. Employees may contribute to their 401(k), but they aren't required to contribute. So Wisconsin public employees may be required to contribute more to the their retirement plan than those in the private sector, but that doesn't mean they're at a disadvantage compared to the private sector. In fact, experts say they will be better off. According to a survey prepared by Brainard in October 2009, "The retirement security of working Americans presently appears shaky outside the public sector, due not only to the nation’s heavy use of a retirement plan model that has been found to be undependable in its ability to provide reliable retirement income, but also due to low relative rates of participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans. " Conversely, "For most states and local governments, retirement security of retired workers is a policy that is being achieved." As always, Brainard said, there are exceptions, such as for those government employees who don't work long enough to become vested in a pension. But Will's comment, as it relates to pension is "largely accurate," Brainard said. "Overall, the retirement plan typically provided to Wisconsin public employees --whether or not they are contributing 5.8 percent -- provides a larger retirement benefit than private sector employees get." We'd like to cite one more survey, one by the Wisconsin Legislative Council which found that even among major public employee retirement systems, most required employee contributions of more than 5 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "for government workers with a required plan contribution, the average contribution is 6.3 percent of earnings." So Walker's proposal is in line with the norm for government workers. Now, we'd like to drop one big disclaimer into this whole analysis. Many experts contend that while state workers get better benefits, they get paid less than folks in the private sector. PolitiFact Wisconsin took a closer look at that issue here. The point is that it's important to consider an employee's total package of wages and benefits when comparing public and private sector compensation. But that's not the issue before us here. Will clearly stated that he was talking about just the benefits side of the equation. And with regard to the changes Walker has proposed -- requiring greater employee contributions to pension and health care -- Will is right that they would still leave public employees "better off" than those in the private sector. We rate Will's comment True.	None	George Will	None	None	None	2011-02-21T18:55:11	2011-02-20	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-10241	On support for the Bridge to Nowhere.	full flop	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/01/sarah-palin/as-candidate-yes-as-governor-no/	Shortly after being introduced as Sen. John McCain's vice presidential running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin sought to bolster her credibility as a crusader against wasteful spending, saying, "I told Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' on that bridge to nowhere." We ruled that statement only Half True. Yes, we noted, Palin formally nixed plans for a nearly $400-million Alaska bridge project to connect the tiny city of Ketchikan to Gravina, an island with just a few dozen residents and an airport. The project was derisively nicknamed the Bridge to Nowhere by a government watchdog group and became a national symbol of federal pork-barrel spending. Long before Palin killed the project, Congress washed its hands of the bridge. In the transportation spending bill that included money for the Ketchikan bridge, Congress deleted the wording that would have directed money for the project, though it left the money in place so Alaska officials could decide which transportation projects to spend it on. As a result, Alaska diverted much of the $223-million from the federal government to other projects, leaving the Ketchikan-Gravina bridge project woefully underfunded, and with no prospect of additional federal funding. That was the point at which Palin formally killed the bridge project. Several of our readers wrote to us saying we were too generous with our ruling, that Palin had flip-flopped on the issue, at one time supporting the bridge before later opposing it. We think that's a separate matter, and so we'll address it here. While running for governor in September 2006, Palin assured the Ketchikan Chamber of Commerce she was all for the bridge. "The money that's been appropriated for the project, it should remain available for a link, an access process as we continue to evaluate the scope and just how best to just get this done," Palin said then, according to a story in the Ketchikan Daily News . "This link is a commitment to help Ketchikan expand its access, to help this community prosper." "I think we're going to make a good team as we progress that bridge project," she told the audience. And in a written questionnaire for the Anchorage Daily News the following month, October of 2006, Palin was asked directly, "Would you continue state funding for the proposed Knik Arm and Gravina Island bridges?" Her answer: "Yes. I would like to see Alaska's infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now — while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist." Palin's position began to shift once she became governor, however. Palin took over as governor in December 2006 and in February 2007 her proposed state budget didn't include state funding for the Ketchikan bridge. A spokesman noted that Palin's proposed capital budget focused on projects that could draw federal money, too. At that point, according to the Ketchikan Daily News , the cost of the bridge had risen $67-million and former Gov. Frank Murkowski had recommended putting $195-million in the state budget for Ketchikan's bridge. In defending the change of position this week, Palin campaign spokeswoman Maria Comella said Palin "acted like a responsible and effective executive. After taking office and examining the project closely, she consistently opposed funding the 'Bridge to Nowhere' and ultimately canceled the wasteful project." It's true that on Sept. 21, 2007, Palin officially killed the project. "Ketchikan desires a better way to reach the airport, but the $398-million bridge is not the answer," Palin said in a prepared statement. "Despite the work of our congressional delegation, we are about $329-million short of full funding for the bridge project, and it's clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island." But she wasn't sounding like someone who opposed the project as wasteful either. "Much of the public's attitude toward Alaska bridges is based on inaccurate portrayals of the projects here," Palin said. "But we need to focus on what we can do, rather than fight over what has happened." So the question here is whether Palin flipped positions on the project, or conceded to the political reality that opposition had become too strong against it. Without further support from Congress, Alaska would have had to shoulder most of the cost itself. Palin's quotes about the project this week seem to suggest she opposed the project. "I've championed reform to end the abuses of earmarked spending by Congress," Palin said at a joint appearance with McCain in Washington, Pa., on Aug. 30. "And I did tell Congress, thanks but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted to build a bridge, we were going to build it ourselves." McCain said Palin has "stopped government from wasting taxpayers' money on things they don't want or need. And when we in Congress decided to build a bridge in Alaska to nowhere for $233-million of yours, she said, we don't want it. If we need it, we'll build our own in Alaska. She's the one that stood up to them." Nevermind that Alaska didn't give the money back. It spent the money on other transportation projects. The context of Palin's and McCain's recent statements suggest Palin flagged the so-called Bridge to Nowhere project as wasteful spending. But that's not the tune she was singing when she was running for governor, particularly not when she was standing before the Ketchikan Chamber of Commerce asking for their vote. And so, we rate Palin's position a Full Flop.	None	Sarah Palin	None	None	None	2008-09-01T00:00:00	2008-08-30	['None']
-pomt-08880	A bill to cap carbon emissions "could cost Ohio 100,000 jobs."	mostly false	/ohio/statements/2010/aug/02/rob-portman/portman-uses-outdated-context-claim-cap-and-trade-/	The only thing better than accusing an opponent of losing jobs in Ohio’s hard-pressed economy is linking him or his party to proposals that might cause even higher Buckeye State unemployment. That’s what Rob Portman, the Republican running for U.S. Senate, attempts in a TV commercial that says a "job-killer" energy tax is "coming our way from Washington." "It could cost Ohio 100,000 jobs we cannot afford to lose," Portman says in the ad. Portman’s concern is shared by business leaders, especially manufacturers. But he nearly steers a legitimate concern off the rails with his 100,000 job-loss figure. The "energy tax" would come from a proposed bill to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Though the so-called cap-and-trade bill would not specifically impose a tax, it’s clear enough what Portman means. The bill would limit carbon emissions while creating a trading system so companies that cut their carbon output – by burning less coal, for instance – could sell their unneeded carbon credits. Companies that needed to exceed the caps could buy those credits. Unless there was generous help to companies in coal-reliant states like Ohio, a cap-and-trade bill could hurt, because there aren’t enough alternatives right now to coal-fired electricity. "The fact is that any carbon legislation is designed to make us not use coal," says Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington. "So if you’re a state that has a lot of coal, you’re going to get hammered." Theoretically then, Portman’s broad fear is not off the mark, although various studies and analyses make conflicting claims. But Portman strays by claiming the cost could be 100,000 Ohio jobs, and by saying the bill "is coming our way." His job-loss figure comes from an analysis of a bill that the House of Representatives passed last year. Two problems: The analysis, from a study sponsored by the business-backed National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council of Capital Formation, predicted two potential outcomes. Ohio’s job losses by the year 2030 could range anywhere from 79,700 to 108,600, the study said. Yet Portman chose to go with a figure closest to the outside extreme. The bill he relies on in order to make the claim has stalled for a long time in the Senate with objections not only from Republicans but also from industrial-state Democrats like Ohio’s Sherrod Brown. Few people in Washington believe a broad cap-and-trade bill has a chance of passing, especially in an election year. "I sure wouldn’t want to bet the farm on it," says Stephen Hess, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution, a centrist-liberal think tank. "I don’t think I’d even want to bet a weekend at Atlantic City." The House bill was sponsored by liberal members Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Henry Waxman of California. Senate Democrats don’t have enough of a majority to just rubber-stamp the Waxman-Markey bill, and Democrats like Brown are insisting on better economic protections for coal-reliant states. The campaign of Lee Fisher, Portman’s Democratic rival in the Senate race, says Fisher too believes the Waxman-Markey bill would harm Ohio unless it got better protections. That doesn’t mean a compromise cannot be fashioned, and several are on the table. One would require provisions to keep foreign manufacturers that don’t have carbon restrictions from gaining advantage and taking jobs from the United States. Another would grant extra carbon credits to keep companies in Ohio and similar states from paying too much while they transitioned to greener energy sources. Yet another, being considered as a separate bill that has President Barack Obama’s support, would create clean-energy manufacturing grants to help companies develop jobs in wind, solar and other alternative energy sources. Different interest groups, economists and lawmakers use different analyses to project the potential job losses or gains from these proposals. The Peterson Institute for International Economics said in May that a climate-change measure introduced by Sen. John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, would prompt enough clean-energy investment in its first decade to add 203,000 new jobs nationally. But higher energy and product prices in the second decade would offset those job gains, the Peterson economists said. Economists at the University of California at Berkeley had a more optimistic take, saying that adoption of a House-style bill could add as many as 1.9 million jobs nationwide – with 35,000 to 61,000 of those in Ohio – by 2020. That is assuming that states have "balanced policies" that utilize not only a cap-and-trade system but also complementary policies for energy efficiency and clean technology, the authors said. For an additional take, we looked at a Congressional Budget Office analysis, published in May. The CBO examined three independent economic studies by outside groups: Brookings, Resources for the Future, and CRA International, a consulting firm. The CBO’s conclusion from these: Workers who rely on coal and other fossil fuels for their jobs would be affected, but eventually, most workers who lost jobs would find new ones. In particular, the CBO said, a "gradually increasing tax on greenhouse gas emissions," as envisioned in the Waxman-Markey bill, "would probably only have a small effect on total employment during the next few decades." The CBO did not quantify that, however. So we turned to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and took out our calculator. If 100,000 jobs were lost due to cap-and-trade, as Portman claims, that would represent a loss of anywhere from 2 percent to 2.4 percent of Ohio jobs, depending on how you measure today’s employment. That’s not a small effect – which would seem to put Portman’s claim at odds with the CBO’s analysis. A loss of 100,000 jobs "would be quite meaningful" in terms of overall Ohio employment, says Ken Mayfield, an economist and president of ClearView Economics of Pepper Pike. In his commercial, Portman couches his number by saying the state "could" lose that many jobs. And campaign spokeswoman Jessica Towhey says that Portman uses the 100,000 number because it comes from a legitimate study of the only cap-and-trade bill that has passed a chamber of Congress, making it more realistic than Senate proposals that are speculative for now. If Obama were to demand action, Towhey said, Senate Democrats could quickly line up in support and enact a final cap-and-trade bill. But the political roadblocks to Waxman-Markey in the Senate make its passage equally speculative -- unless there are concessions for states like Ohio. And Portman chose to use the worst-case conclusion on Waxman-Markey. In fact, last October another fact-checking outfit, Factcheck.org, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, did its own full review of the National Association of Manufacturers’ claim. It examined the national prediction rather than those for individual states, focusing on the claim that cap-and-trade could cost up to 2.4 million jobs. Factcheck.org turned to the same in-depth study by the Energy Information Administration, or EIA, that backers and detractors of Waxman-Markey were citing at the time. The EIA analyzed 11 different sets of assumptions, every one of which showed there would be fewer jobs in 2030 with the Waxman-Markey bill than without. But "only the most severely pessimistic set of assumptions" produced job losses on the scale cited by the manufacturers, and now repeated by Portman. And remember, that was the worst case scenario from two groups that tend to support big business’ side of the issue. That’s why we find Portman’s claim to be Barely True. Comment on this item. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Rob Portman	None	None	None	2010-08-02T14:00:00	2010-07-06	['Ohio']
-goop-02587	Nicole Kidman Divorcing Keith Urban Because He Hugged “Sexy Redhead,” 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/nicole-kidman-divorcing-keith-urban-hugged-woman/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Nicole Kidman NOT Divorcing Keith Urban Because He Hugged “Sexy Redhead,” Despite Report	10:37 am, August 11, 2017	None	['Nicole_Kidman']
-pomt-00243	Says "On the Public Service Commission, (Kevin Cramer) raised his pay to over $93,650."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/08/heidi-heitkamp/did-kevin-cramer-raise-his-own-salary-23000-no/	A new campaign ad in the North Dakota Senate race claims Republican contender Kevin Cramer gave himself a five-figure raise as a public official. "Could you give yourself a $23,000 raise?" the ad voiceover says. "Ask Kevin Cramer. On the Public Service Commission, he raised his pay to over $93,650." Cramer did get raises totalling that amount. But the ad completely distorts Cramer’s hand in securing the pay increase. The Public Service Commission has three commissioners who are elected to six-year terms. They regulate utilities, pipeline safety, telecommunications, railroads and other state services. Cramer joined the commission in August 2003. He served until the end of 2012, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Commissioners’ salaries usually originate from the governor’s office, which works with the Office of Management and Budget to determine how much money is available for public officials, according to Jeff Larshus, director of state financial services at the OMB. The governor then submits a budget to the Legislative Assembly, which writes the salaries into statute and votes on their approval. So saying Cramer raised his own salary ignores the arbiter of that salary. The OMB proposed and received across the board salary hikes for elected officials every year between 2005 and 2012. These include the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, superintendent for public instruction, state auditor, state treasurer, and the tax, insurance, public service and agriculture commissioners. In 2005, they all got a 4 percent hike from their last salary number, determined in 2002. They got three more 4 percent hikes in 2006, 2007, and 2008, a 5 percent increase in 2009, another 5 percent increase in 2010, and then 3 percent in 2011 and again in 2012. While their salaries all differ, the percentage increases were equal across the board. That’s how Cramer’s salary jumped from $69,874 to $95,611 from the time he was elected to the time he left office — a $25,737 increase. "So did it go up considerably during that time frame?" Larshus said. "Yes. But it wasn’t because the commissioner asked for the salary." Commissioners submit a budget to the OMB every two years. There, they can suggest compensation for commissioners. But staff at the Public Service Commission and at the OMB said they could not recall an instance in which they had requested salary bumps for commissioners. The OMB had three of the four budget requests during which Cramer served and got salary hikes on file. Only one asked for equity funds to raise administrative staff salaries. But that does not include the commissioners, according to Jill Kringstad, Accounting Budget Specialist. She could not recall any instances where commissioners' salary increases were included in budget requests. The bottom line is that the legislative assembly needs to approve, write into law and vote on any proposed salaries for elected officials proposed by the OMB. These salary changes were all ultimately set by the legislature. Heitkamp’s office said Cramer could have refused to accept the raises or requested lower salary numbers to the OMB. The current governor had to change a North Dakota statute in order to fulfill his campaign promise to refuse pay. Our ruling Heitkamp said, "Could you give yourself a $23,000 raise? Ask Kevin Cramer. On the public service Commission, he raised his pay to over $93,650." Cramer’s salary increased by $25,737 during his tenure on the Public Service Commission. But he didn’t give himself that raise. The governor proposed it, the OMB drafted it, and the legislative assembly voted on its passage. The other 12 elected officials in North Dakota received the same percentage salary bump. We rate this statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Heidi Heitkamp	None	None	None	2018-10-08T10:12:05	2018-09-26	['None']
-snes-04776	Big Lots is closing all locations immediately.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-lots-closing/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Big Lots Closing?	11 May 2016	None	['None']
-snes-05607	Facebook has deemed the posting of the U.S. Marine Corps emblem a violation of the network's community standards.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-usmc-ban/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Facebook Ban the Posting of U.S. Marine Corps Emblems?	28 July 2015	None	['None']
-goop-02457	Kim Kardashian Getting Professional Help For North West?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-professional-help-north-west-hates-saint/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian Getting Professional Help For North West?	12:26 pm, September 16, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-06398	"1.53 million jobs are at risk (from potential defense cuts)."	mostly true	/virginia/statements/2011/oct/29/randy-forbes/rep-randy-forbes-says-153-million-defense-jobs-are/	U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes, R-4th, is warning that potential cuts in defense spending would inflict mass destruction on the U.S. economy. Forbes, whose district is anchored in South Hampton Roads where military installations dominate the economy, unveiled a web ad saying the zeal to cut the nation’s debt has left U.S. defense vulnerable. The commercial says Congress must turn to other programs for savings, or face "catastrophe. " "1.53 million jobs are at risk," the ad’s narrator says. "Pink slips are waiting to be handed out." We wondered if 1.53 million defense jobs really are at risk in the latest round of federal budget negotiations. So we decided to take a look. First, a little background. After much debate in August, Congress agreed to raise the nation’s debt ceiling in return for long-range budget cuts. The first part of the deal called for reducing overall spending by $900 billion over the next 10 years, including about $400 billion in defense cuts. The defense budget is now about $700 billion a year. The legislation set up a 12-member, bipartisan super committee of senators and representatives to cut an additional $1.5 trillion in overall spending. If the group fails to reach consensus by Nov. 23, then $1.2 trillion in reductions will automatically occur -- half from defense and half from domestic programs. That cut to defense, combined with the $400 billion in reductions already agreed on, would mean a total loss of $1 trillion in defense money over the next 10 years. How does Forbes take that figure and compute job losses? Joe Hack, Forbes’ spokesman, pointed us to a comment by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in September that a $1 trillion defense cut could add 1 percent to the country’s unemployment rate. Hack then referred us to Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing the size of the U.S. labor force at about 154 million in September. Cutting 1 percent of that would lead to the loss of 1.53 million jobs, he said. We ran the numbers ourselves and found Forbes to be accurate. We came across other estimates that conclude $1 trillion in defense cuts would lead to significant layoffs, although not quite as high as Forbes states. The Department of Defenses says about 6 million jobs are supported by military spending, including 3.8 million private sector jobs, 700,000 Department of Defense jobs and 1.5 million active-duty service members outside of reserve units. "Sequestration ($1 trillion in cuts) assumes across the board spending cuts with losses peaking in the 2013-2014 time period, with 1 million to 1.5 million jobs lost and that could increase the U.S. unemployment rate by nearly 1 percentage point in the near term," said Lt. Col. Elizabeth Robbins, a spokeswoman of the Department of Defense. So Forbes’ number is at the top end of what the Department of Defense estimates as far as job losses. It could be as high as 1.5 million but as low as 1 million, according to the Pentagon. We asked the Defense Department to direct us to any underlying reports showing how they arrived at their numbers for job losses and lower unemployment rate, but they didn’t provide any. The Aerospace Industries Association, which represents aerospace and defense companies, estimates $1 trillion in defense cuts would cause a loss of slightly more than 1 million jobs. Some layoffs would occur among defense industry contractors and suppliers, but the bulk -- some 653,570 jobs -- would be lost in communities due to the to the loss of payroll spending associated with those jobs, the report states. The report was authored by Stephen Fuller, director of the Center of Regional Analysis at George Mason University. In a response to questions from Forbes at a October 26 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, Fuller said his job loss projections don’t include tallies of lost active duty members or civilians employed by the Department of Defense. In an October 14, 2011 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the House Armed Services Committee Chairman, Buck McKeon, R-Calif., said automatic cuts from sequestration "would kill upwards of 800,000 of our active-duty, civilian and industrial American jobs." Claude Schafin, a House Armed Services Committee spokesman, said McKeon’s analysis doesn’t take into account any indirect layoffs in communities that would happen as a result of losses at the Department of Defense and their contractors. Projections of a 1 percent unemployment spike losses have drawn skepticism from some advocacy groups who charge they’re overblown. A study by Heidi Garrett-Peltier, a research professor at the University of Massachusetts, concludes the job losses from defense spending would be less than the Department of Defense estimates. Her work was funded by The Institute for Policy Studies, which says it advocates for a U.S. foreign policy based in part on demilitarization. In an interview Garrett-Peltier said a $1 trillion military cut over 10 years would cost about 860,000 jobs funded either directly or indirectly by the Department of Defense. If you include additional jobs losses in communities from a loss in spending from laid-off employees, the jobs loss would be 1.1 million, she said. Garrett-Peltier said government spending on defense does not generate as many jobs as investments in health care, education and other areas. "Are we better off cutting $100 billion in the defense budget or from education, health care, clean energy?" Garrett-Peltier said. "We would lose more jobs (from domestic cuts) than cutting $100 billion a year in defense." Our ruling: Forbes, in a web ad, says 1.53 million jobs would be lost if defense cuts hit $1 trillion. The congressman is clearly presenting a worst-case scenario, basing his figures on a statement by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. The actual estimate by the Department of Defense -- which Forbes does not note -- is job loss between 1 million and 1.5 million. Other experts come up with smaller estimates, although their math does not always include all potential layoffs from reduced military -- such as local businesses, active duty members and the like. We don’t want to minimize the economic impact of $1 trillion in defense cuts. Forbes’ statement on the resulting job loss is credible, but very much on the high side estimates out there. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Randy Forbes	None	None	None	2011-10-29T07:00:00	2011-10-12	['None']
-tron-00770	Steven Levy Commentary on Christmas	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/steven-levy/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Steven Levy Commentary on Christmas	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-afck-00290	“The labour absorption rate for young people [is] 30.8%.”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/national-youth-policy-unemployment-and-education/	None	None	None	None	None	National Youth Policy: unemployment and education claims fact-checked	2015-06-10 01:12	None	['None']
-pomt-14784	The "federal government is going after school districts, trying to force them to let boys shower with little girls."	false	/texas/statements/2015/dec/04/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-incorrectly-says-obama-forcing-boys-and-g/	Sen. Ted Cruz recently veered from discussing Syria to suggesting our government wants schoolboys to shower with girls. The Republican presidential candidate commented after interviewer Steven Crowder mentioned "genetically proper pronouns." "Look," Cruz said, "these guys are so nutty that the federal government is going after school districts, trying to force them to let boys shower with little girls." The Texan went on: "Now listen: I’m the father of two daughters, and the idea that the federal government is coming in saying that boys, with all the god-given equipment of boys, can be in the shower room with junior high girls – this is lunacy. And I bet you there are a whole lot of parents – particularly parents of daughters – that are not eager to have the federal government saying, ‘Guess what? Your daughter has to shower with a boy, if he wants to be in there,’ " Cruz said. A video of the conversation was posted online Nov. 19, 2015. We hadn’t heard about a push for coed showers by the government under President Barack Obama and also didn’t hear back from Cruz’s campaign about how he concluded the government is trying to let boys shower with girls. But a Nov. 22, 2015, news story in The Advocate said Cruz "appeared to be alluding to the administration’s recent support of two separate transgender students who have sued their school districts after administrators refused to let the students use the restrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity." Our read: Just one of the mentioned situations involves a student seeking access to locker rooms, though news stories indicate there have been other recent instances of transgender individuals seeking unfettered access to high school locker rooms. What’s a transgender person? For starters, it’s not factually accurate to say that letting transgender students into locker rooms amounts to boys being permitted to shower with girls. A transgender individual is a person whose gender identity, expression or behavior is different from those typically associated with their assigned sex at birth, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. Broadly, this can mean a person born a boy identifies as a girl or vice versa. A transgender also may receive hormone treatments and undertake sex reassignment surgery. Pat Griffin, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, advocates for including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students in college and interscholastic athletics. Griffin wrote in September 2015: "It is important for policy-makers to understand that transgender girls (who were assigned a male gender at birth) are not boys. Their consistent and affirmed gender identity as girls is as deep-seated as the gender identity of non-transgender girls." After we posted this fact check, readers suggested we'd failed to capture the ongoing debate over transgender rights; we followed up by writing this story. "Student A" in Illinois The Advocate story led us to check into the case of an Illinois transgender girl barred by her school district from changing clothes for gym class and other activities with girls. The girl, represented by the ACLU of Illinois, filed a complaint in 2013 charging sex discrimination in violation of federal law. On Nov. 2, 2015, the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education wrote the superintendent of the school district in Palatine, Ill., northwest of Chicago, saying the district’s restriction violates Title IX, the federal bar on sex discrimination in any education program or activity. The ACLU of Illinois declared the federal holding had national significance. "The decision places school districts all across the nation on notice that Title IX requires making such facilities available for students who are transgender," the group said. "It is the first such decision issued by the department, building on legal briefs and policy statements of the federal government interpreting federal laws prohibiting discrimination." The office’s letter, signed by regional director Adele Rapport of Chicago, says "Student A" was born male and from a young age identified as female, transitioning in middle school "to living full-time as a young woman" and, among steps evidently not including sex reassignment surgery, taking "an ongoing course of hormone therapy." Also, the letter says, the district has given the student "unlimited access to all girls’ restrooms in the school" and "allows her to participate in girls’ athletics." According to the letter, the student, required to take a daily gym class, sought "an opportunity to change clothes privately within the girls’ locker rooms, in an area such as a restroom stall." The district answered that it would not be "practicable" to do so in the school’s six girls locker rooms "because there were too few stalls and too many students," the office wrote. The letter further says the student told the office in October 2015 she’d use privacy curtains in the locker rooms if the school made them available. Talks involving the district and office did not lead to a resolution, the letter says. School district stresses private changing rooms The Palatine-based Township High School District 211 said in a Nov. 2, 2015, press release it disagreed with the department’s ruling and beyond continuing settlement negotiations, it was prepared to "engage in all avenues of due process to determine whether our position of honoring the rights of all the students is within the law." The district’s release also said: "The students in our schools are teenagers, not adults, and one's gender is not the same as one's anatomy. Boys and girls are in separate locker rooms – where there are open changing areas and open shower facilities – for a reason." A Nov. 3, 2015, Chicago Tribune news story said the district had 30 days to reach an agreement with authorities or risk having its federal educational funding suspended or terminated and the matter also could be referred to the Department of Justice. And on Dec. 3, 2015, after Cruz made his claim, the government announced a settlement with the district agreeing to give the student access to school locker rooms "based on the student's request to change in private changing stations" in the rooms. Other conflicts A Nov. 2, 2015, New York Times news story on the Illinois dispute said: "The rights of transgender students have become the focus of disputes in school districts in many states, leading to divergent approaches regarding which sports teams they can play on, bathrooms they can use and pronouns they are addressed by. In separate cases, two California school districts agreed to lift restrictions on transgender locker room and restroom access after federal officials intervened. Students at one Missouri high school protested a decision by the district to let a transgender girl use female locker rooms and restrooms." In the Missouri instance, the Times reported Sept. 2, 2015, transgender Lila Perry, 17, used girls’ restrooms and locker rooms until a local protest led her to drop her physical education class. Professor’s take We called Griffin, the professor emeritus, who told us it’s her view that boys showering with girls is an inaccurate characterization of the government saying transgender students should, by law, have full access to school facilities including locker rooms. Griffin also called the education department’s ruling in Illinois "the developing precedent" nationally. Cruz’s statement, Griffin said, amounts to "fearmongering" and "reflects a complete ignorance" of transgender students, especially overlooking the fact that a transgender girl is not a boy so "it’s not a boy in the girls’ locker room." In contrast, Griffin said, the focus of most U.S. school officials has been on ensuring every student has a right to privacy in a locker room or restroom. Griffin, asked about state policies on transgender student-athletes, pointed us to a breakdown on Transathlete.com, which compiles policies and research regarding transgender inclusion in sports. According to the website, Texas ranks among about a dozen states with no policy ensuring transgender participation. The site touts Massachusetts’ policy, which says, in part: "Where there are sex-segregated classes or athletic activities, including intramural and interscholastic athletics, all students must be allowed to participate in a manner consistent with their gender identity." We also reached out to the federal education department, which did not comment on Cruz’s claim but pointed us to a Nov. 2, 2015, statement by Catherine Lhamon, an assistant secretary in the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, saying: "All students deserve the opportunity to participate equally in school programs and activities – this is a basic civil right. Unfortunately, Township High School District 211 is not following the law because the district continues to deny a female student the right to use the girls’ locker room. The district can provide access to this student while also respecting all students’ privacy." Our ruling Cruz said the "federal government is going after school districts, trying to force them to let boys shower with little girls." Cruz’s vision of schoolboys everywhere showering with girls grossly distorts the issue. The fact is the Obama administration has sided with transgender students seeking access to school facilities including locker rooms, holding that anything less would violate federal anti-discrimination requirements. Such conflicts — few and far between — haven’t had to do with the government wanting boys to shower with girls. We rate the claim False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2015-12-04T14:08:14	2015-11-19	['None']
-snes-01342	A video shows a sick, possibly starving polar bear on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/starving-polar-bear-viral/	None	Critter Country	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Does a Viral Video Show a Polar Bear Starving to Death?	12 December 2017	None	['Baffin_Island', 'Northern_Canada']
-pomt-07520	"We’re paying out-of-state residential facilities hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more," to house children in state custody	mostly true	/rhode-island/statements/2011/apr/08/roberto-dasilva/rep-dasilva-says-ri-pays-hundreds-thousands-dollar/	State Rep. Roberto DaSilva recently introduced legislation intended to make it much more difficult for the state Department of Children, Youth and Families to send children in its care to out-of-state residential treatment facilities. He said he was moved by the story of Nicholas Alahverdian, who was the subject of a column by The Providence Journal’s Bob Kerr. Alahverdian says he endured years of abuse and neglect in two out-of-state residential facilities where he was sent by DCYF. He has formed his own nonprofit organization to advocate for children in DCYF care. He has also filed state and federal lawsuits stemming from his alleged mistreatment. DaSilva said in a General Assembly news release that Rhode Island has the resources to provide children with the treatment they need within the state. DaSilva said he is concerned about the well-being of children in state care and also about keeping taxpayer dollars in the state. "We’re paying out-of-state residential facilities hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, to house our own state residents," DaSilva said. "It just doesn’t make sense, especially in these dire economic times." Among the children the DCYF takes into its custody are those who are victims of abuse or neglect caused by their primary caretakers, those who are in the juvenile justice system and ordered by courts to have access to rehabilitative care, and those with emotional, behavioral or developmental challenges who need out-of-home care and treatment and whose parents give DCYF temporary custody, according to DCYF interim Director Kevin J. Aucoin. The DCYF has said it is working to reduce its dependence on residential treatment programs, both in Rhode Island and in other states. So we wondered whether the agency is still spending as much as DaSilva says on such placements. We asked DaSilva where he got his information and he referred us to a website called the Rhode Island DCYF Transparency Portal. It shows the agency’s expenditures in various categories such as personnel and foster care. The top expenditure is residential services. For fiscal year 2010, for instance, the portal shows the state spent $117 million for residential care for youth in DCYF custody, which also includes costs for foster home placements and varous community services Much of that money was spent on local services such as Child and Family Services of Newport County or Ocean Tides, a residential treatment program in Narragansett for male juvenile offenders. The DCYF also budgets an additional $22.4 million this year for youths sent to the Rhode Island Training School. But the website shows that millions of dollars go to out-of-state programs. For example, Mass Mentor Inc., which provides services at several Massachusetts locations to children with developmental disabilities was paid $376,829 in the first quarter. During the same quarter, the Bennington School in Vermont was paid $77,769 and the Glen Mills School in Pennsylvania got $59,246. We asked Kevin J. Aucoin, interim director of DCYF, for more data. He said that this fiscal year, the DCYF expects to spend $65.5 million on residential services for 718 children, with $9.5 million going to out-of-state facilities, most of them in nearby states. Aucoin says the spending on residential programs has been declining. In fiscal year 2007, for example, the state spent $85.4 million for 1,102 children. In that year, it spent $18.4 million to send 154 children out of state. All residential placements are expected to be reduced as the agency adopts a new model of care that focuses on keeping families together. Aucoin said the DCYF sends children out of state for specialized treatments not offered by in-state providers. Those include multiple psychiatric diagnoses and severe and profound developmental disabilities. The majority, he said, have severe aggressive behaviors. Some may be youth with significant "sexual offending behaviors." Aucoin said children are placed out of state only with approval of the Family Court and only after the agency demonstrates there is no adequate program in-state. So it appears the only fault with DaSilva’s claim is it is too conservative. Instead of spending the "hundreds of thousands," DaSilva claims, the state actually expects to spend nearly $10 million on out-of-state programs. We find his claim to be Mostly True.	None	Roberto DaSilva	None	None	None	2011-04-08T00:00:01	2011-03-21	['None']
-goop-01447	Jennifer Aniston “Devastated” Justin Theroux Wants Baby With Alexa Chung Is Tru	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-justin-theroux-baby-alexa-chung-not-true/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Aniston “Devastated” Justin Theroux Wants Baby With Alexa Chung Is NOT True	1:41 pm, March 5, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston', 'Alexa_Chung']
-pomt-09612	Says Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson threatened to shoot him.	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2010/jan/15/hector-uribe/hector-uribe-says-jerry-patterson-threatened-shoot/	Two former state senators are warming up Texas-style in anticipation of a fall showdown over who should be Texas land commissioner through 2014. Lately, they've kidded each other about gunplay. Democrat Hector Uribe's campaign went so far as to issue a press release suggesting the Republican he hopes to defeat, incumbent Commissioner Jerry Patterson, recently threatened to shoot him. Uribe's Jan. 11 release states: "Meanwhile, Uribe’s Republican opponent threatened to shoot him last week." Keeping our own tongues firmly in cheek, we checked into the claim. Uribe's spokesman, Harold Cook, traced Patterson's threat to an item in the online Quorum Report. In the Jan. 4 item, Patterson notes that he and Uribe both appeared in "The Alamo," a movie. Patterson wrote, according to the report: "Hector's a friend and fellow actor. We were both in the recent movie ‘The Alamo’, filmed near Austin, albeit on different sides in the conflict (actually Hector had a real part, I was just an extra). When Hector surrendered at San Jacinto, I should have shot him when I had the chance... " "I hope folks understand then we were just acting, now it's a real war," the item quotes Patterson saying. Contacted later, Patterson — who once helped pass Texas' concealed-weapon law — said he was joking about any shooting. "If it's not tongue-in-cheek stuff, that's a criminal offense," Patterson said. "You're not supposed to threaten people. Does this put me on the (federal) no-fly list?" Probably not. Especially when it's all just in good fun — and he didn't really make a threat. He just expressed ex post facto regret. This is why we love Texas politics. Where else would a (pretend) gunfight spill into a (real) race for land commissioner? And where else would we get to fact check a claim like this one? For making us laugh and for reminding us not to take this stuff too seriously, we give Uribe's claim that he was threatened a rating of Pants on Fire. And we suggest that all guns remain holstered for the rest of the campaign.	None	Hector Uribe	None	None	None	2010-01-15T11:58:00	2010-01-11	['None']
-vees-00255	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: News of Duterte calling Marcos a 'hero'	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-news-duterte-calling-marcos-hero-inclu	None	None	None	None	Duterte,Marcos wealth,Noynoy Aquino	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: News of Duterte calling Marcos a 'hero' includes partly false content	April 18, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-03983	Says abortions are decreasing.	true	/texas/statements/2013/feb/12/donna-howard/donna-howard-says-abortions-are-decreasing/	Responding to a question about lawmakers barring state aid to Planned Parenthood clinics, state Rep. Donna Howard said she hopes colleagues reverse course after they see the impact of clinic closings on constituents. The Austin Democrat, speaking at a Jan. 22, 2013, Texas Tribune public interview, also said such closings could drive up abortions. "Those who are claiming that they want to reduce abortion, which I think is just about everybody, I don’t think anybody wants to see that increase -- and in fact, it has be.en decreasing," Howard said. A reader asked us to check whether abortions are decreasing. We quickly found state and federal figures indicating a decrease. Howard’s chief of staff, Scott Daigle, guided us to information kept by the Texas Department of State Health Services, which says that "induced terminations of pregnancy" in the state totaled 77,592 in 2010, down from 77,850 the year before and 81,591 in 2008. Agency spokeswoman Carrie Williams provided a chart confirming those figures and covering additional years. She added, by email, that preliminary data indicate 72,470 abortions occurred in 2011 -- some 5,100 fewer than the year before. The chart shows that while the number of abortions decreased every year from 2009 through 2011, it went up in five of the eight previous years, topping out at 82,056 in 2006. Daigle also said that a November 2012 report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that abortions nationally decreased from 857,475 in 2000 to 784,507 in 2009. According to information posted online by the centers, those tallies drew from data submitted voluntarily by states and other "reporting areas," which it had been collecting since 1969. The 2009 abortion rate for 45 "reporting areas," ranging from states to New York City that had continuously provided data since 2000, the centers say, was 15.1 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 years and the abortion ratio was 227 abortions per 1,000 live births. It said the figures were based on data evaluated from the areas that reported data every year during 2000-2009. Compared with 2008, the total number and rate of reported abortions for 2009 decreased 5 percent and the abortion ratio decreased 2 percent, CDC said. "The change from 2008 to 2009 represented the largest single-year decrease in the total number and rate of reported abortions for the entire period from 2000 to 2009," the center says. From 2000 to 2009 the number, rate, and ratio of reported abortions decreased 6 percent, 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively, to the lowest levels for the period, the center says. Historically, abortions surged after a key court ruling, then started decreasing. According to the centers’ Nov. 23, 2012, "Abortion Surveillance" report for 2009, abortions ramped up after the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing the procedure in all states.: After the decision, "the total number, rate (number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 years), and ratio (number of abortions per 1,000 live births) of reported abortions increased rapidly, reaching the highest levels in the 1980s before decreasing at a slow yet steady pace," the report says. "However, the incidence of abortion has varied considerably across demographic subpopulations, and recent reports through 2008 have suggested that the sustained pattern of decrease has leveled off. Continued surveillance is needed to monitor long-term changes in the incidence of abortion in the United States." Separately, we asked the Guttmacher Institute, which studies and advocates on issues related to reproductive health, for its analysis. Broadly, spokeswoman Rebecca Wind said by email, the "national numbers and rates of abortion were declining from the early 1990s to about 2005, but appear to have leveled off in the most recent period studied." She pointed us to a January 2011 Guttmacher paper on the incidence of abortion in 2007 and 2008, based on interviews of abortion providers, saying by phone that the next update, drawing on interviews being conducted this year, is to be published in early 2014. The 2011 paper includes a chart indicating that the number of U.S. abortions peaked at 1.6 million and hovered above 1.2 million from 2004 through 2008, the last year shown. The incidence of abortion changed little between 2005 and 2008, the paper says. The number of abortions increased by 0.5 percent, from 1,206,200 to 1,212,350, the paper says, while the abortion rate increased 1 percent, from 19.4 to 19.6 per 1,000 women aged 15-44. Also, the abortion ratio did not change over this period, remaining at 22 abortions per 100 pregnancies. Wind told us that while the decline in abortion had leveled off from 2005 through 2008, this followed a long-term decline in abortion rates. Our ruling Howard said abortions are decreasing. The Texas tally has dropped for several consecutive years, while nationally the total hovered around 1.2 million from 2005 through 2008, by one analysis, and the number and rate decreased in 2009, according to information analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control. This claim rates True.	None	Donna Howard	None	None	None	2013-02-12T10:00:00	2013-01-22	['None']
-pomt-13607	"Toomey crossed party lines… to stop gun sales to suspects on the terror watch list."	mostly false	/pennsylvania/statements/2016/aug/15/independence-usa-pac/did-pat-toomey-cross-party-lines-tighten-gun-laws-/	As Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey battles for re-election in one of the most important senate races in the nation, it’s been his record on guns that’s drawn some of the most attention. It’s apparently part of why former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed Toomey, and Bloomberg’s political action committee is now running ads in support of Toomey that tout his efforts to "put our safety ahead of partisan politics." The Independence USA PAC bankrolled an ad running in Pennsylvania that claims "Toomey crossed party lines twice: first to support background checks, and now to stop gun sales to suspects on the terror watch list." We’ve written before about Toomey signing on in 2013 and putting his name on a bill that would have expanded background checks. But what about his efforts to stop gun sales to suspects on the terror watch list? Toomey’s record there is a bit murkier. To be clear: A bill that would stop gun sales to suspects on any sort of terror watch list has not passed. Efforts were made after the June shooting in Orlando at Pulse Nightclub, the deadliest mass shooting in American history, which left 49 people and the shooter dead. But those efforts were fruitless. There were several major bills drafted in the wake of Orlando that would have closed what’s been called "the terror loophole," or would make it harder for suspected terrorists on the federal government’s radar to buy guns. Two such bills -- both with largely partisan backing -- were brought up for a vote on June 20 and both were defeated. Proponents of a ban on gun sales to those on a terror watch list say individuals who are suspected terrorists appear on a no-fly list, but are still allowed to purchase guns. Opponents worry individuals who accidentally end up on the no-fly list would be stripped of their second amendment rights. The Democrats’ bill was a plan by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, and her bill would have placed a blanket ban on the purchase of guns by those on the no-fly list, as it was dubbed "no-fly, no buy." Some Republicans argued her bill didn’t give an out to people who may have ended up on the watch list mistakenly. Two Republicans voted in favor of Feinstein’s bill. Toomey wasn’t one of them, saying the bill didn’t include enough due process for potential gun owners. The majority of Republicans supported a bill from Sen. John Cornyn, of Texas. His measure, which was backed by the National Rifle Association, would have placed a three-day hold when anyone on the terror watch list attempted to purchase a gun. Within those three days, the government would have to present a case before a court in order to stop the person from buying the firearm. Though Toomey said in June that it would be hard for law enforcement to make Cornyn’s measure "workable," he voted in favor of it in the end. Toomey also drafted his own bill to close the terror loophole, which he touted as a measure that would bridge the gap between the Feinstein and the Cornyn amendments. Under Toomey’s plan, the U.S. attorney general would generate a list of "likely terrorists" separate from the existing no-fly list. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would review the list, and the attorney general would have the power to block the purchase of a gun by an individual on that list. But Toomey’s bill largely flopped. Though he was reportedly in talks with gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, the group ultimately didn’t endorse his proposal. Republican leaders didn’t put it up for a vote, and Democrats largely opposed it. When PolitiFact reached out to Toomey’s campaign to inquire about his record when it comes to closing the terror loophole, his campaign pointed out that Toomey was one of eight Republicans to support an amendment from Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, that would have given the Justice Department the ability to deny gun sales to individuals on two terror-related lists -- and it had an appeal process. That bill, which Toomey spoke on the Senate floor in favor of, had bipartisan support and survived a "test vote" several days after the Feinstein and Cornyn amendments failed. That showed that the bill had significant support, but not the 60 votes it would need to advance -- meaning GOP leaders probably won’t bring it up for a full vote any time soon. Independence USA, which is running the ads in Pennsylvania, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Our Ruling In an ad running in Pennsylvania, the Independence USA PAC backed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed "Toomey crossed party lines… to stop gun sales to suspects on the terror watch list." This ad is misleading at its core, largely because a measure to stop gun sales to suspects on the terror watch list never passed. Toomey’s own bill failed to garner significant support from either side of the aisle. Though he voted for the Collins amendment which had bipartisan support, that amendment was drafted by a Republican. In the end, Toomey voted with his party when he voted against Feinstein’s bill and in favor of Cornyn’s. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Independence USA PAC	None	None	None	2016-08-15T14:00:00	2016-08-01	['None']
-snes-01247	Alien Spotted Boarding UFO in Romania?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alien-spotted-boarding-ufo-in-romania/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Was an Alien Spotted Boarding a UFO in Romania?	8 January 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03442	Ace Hardware is refusing to sell propane to Dakota Access pipeline protesters.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ace-hardware-stands-against-standing-rock/	None	Business	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Ace Hardware Stands Against Standing Rock?	1 December 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-01882	"We in this state saw more job creation in the last three years since I've been governor than you saw in the whole eight years of Doyle’s time as governor."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2014/jul/09/scott-walker/scott-walker-says-job-growth-better-under-jim-doyl/	Gov. Scott Walker is unintimidated when it comes to sizing up his job growth numbers next to his predecessor’s. But did he create more jobs in his first three years than former Gov. Jim Doyle did over two full terms? Walker made that claim during a June 19, 2014 news conference at Milwaukee’s annual Water Summit. "We, in this state, saw more job creation in the last three years since I’ve been governor than you saw in the whole eight years of Doyle’s time as governor," Walker said. "So I think if people look, are we at where we want to be in terms of our goals? Going forward, voters will see the difference. The last thing we want to go back to is a much lower job creation number, even before the recession." Walker has focused a lot on Doyle’s record as he’s come under criticism from Mary Burke, the leading Democrat in the 2014 governor’s race, for lagging on his promise to help create 250,000 new private-sector jobs in his first four-year term. (We have rated that promise Stalled). Let’s see if Walker’s latest comparison holds up. Wisconsin private sector job growth When we asked Walker’s press secretary, Laurel Patrick, for data to back up this comparison, she cited the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, a set of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is considered the gold standard when it comes to jobs data, as it is based on a survey of nearly all state businesses. It is released about seven months after every quarter ends. The scorecard as of June 19, 2014 shows the state lost 47,413 private-sector jobs by the end of Doyle’s eight-year tenure. Under Walker, the state gained 91,813 private sector jobs from 2011 through 2013. In Doyle’s first full term from 2003 through 2006, the state gained 86,530 jobs, which was still slower than the national average. It was 5,283 fewer jobs than were added during Walker’s first three years. Wisconsin has experienced slow-moving growth for the past decade, said Dale Knapp, research director at the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, a private fiscal research group. "That’s simply the nature of our economy," Knapp said. "(Wisconsin) tends to go with the (national) economy but at a slower pace." State job creation has grown at this slow pace since at least 2000, a September 2013 Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance study showed.The study tracked the state economy from 2000 to 2012 and found that job creation has declined as has population growth. It’s hard to create jobs if there aren’t workers to fill them. Digging deeper A more nuanced picture emerges when you look more closely at Doyle’s full time in office. In Doyle’s first term, from 2003 through 2006, the state gained 86,530 jobs, which was still slower than the national average. It was 5,283 fewer jobs than were added during Walker’s first three years. In December 2007, the Great Recession began -- about one year into Doyle’s second term. When the recession took its toll, the unemployment rate rose to 10 percent in Wisconsin and the state lost 133,943 jobs during Doyle’s second term. That created the net loss of 47,413 jobs by the end of 2010. By official measures, the recovery from the recession started in June 2009. Wisconsin saw a jobs turnaround in 2010, the last year Doyle was in office, when 33,658 jobs were added. That’s significant because it was the last time Wisconsin outpaced the national average in job growth. In 2011, when Walker took office, job growth did not keep up with the national or regional pace, according to a September 2012 study from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a non-profit think tank. The study shows Wisconsin lost 21,900 jobs between January 2011 and May 2012. That put its rate of job growth at 0.73 percent, slowest in the midwest and 42nd in the nation. Job growth has been slow yet steadily positive since 2011 but no evidence shows the pace is changing, according to Laura Dresser, Associate Director at the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. "Wisconsin is on the weak side of an already weak recovery," Dresser said. In the middle of a gubernatorial race, Walker has worked to frame the jobs issue to his advantage. So has Burke, who was secretary of commerce under Doyle from 2005 to 2007. Here are the year-by-year private sector figures going back to Doyle’s first year: Year Job growth percent Number of jobs gained or lost Doyle: 2003 +0.236% 5,479 Doyle: 2004 +1.69% 39,374 Doyle: 2005 +0.835% 19,741 Doyle: 2006 +0.928% 21,936 Doyle: 2007 +0.33% 7,970 Doyle: 2008 -2.34% -56,463 Doyle: 2009 -5.05% -119,108 Doyle: 2010 +1.5% 33,658 Walker: 2011 +1.322% 29,800 Walker: 2012 +1.47% 33,872 Walker: 2013 +1.21% 28,141 Said Knapp: "Governors like to take credit for growing jobs, but in the bigger picture, there’s not a whole lot they do that affects job creation. We’re more affected by what happens nationally than state policy." Last year, Wisconsin added 28,141 jobs at a rate of 1.2 percent that ranks 37th in the nation based on figures released June 19, 2014 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our rating Walker said, "We in this state, saw more job creation in the last three years since I've been governor than you saw in the whole eight years of Doyle’s time as governor." Walker is right on the numbers that show Wisconsin did gain more jobs in his first three years as governor than Doyle did in his eight years. But there’s an indirect element of blame in his claim. On that score, it’s worth noting Wisconsin consistently trailed the nation in job growth before the Great Recession triggered the second-term losses that dragged down Doyle’s tally. Walker skates past that fact as he chooses a comparison most favorable to himself. We rate Walker’s claim Mostly True.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2014-07-09T05:00:00	2014-06-19	['None']
-pomt-14843	"71% of WI’s roads are in poor or mediocre condition and 14% of WI’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/nov/18/jennifer-shilling/jennifer-shilling-71-state-roads-rated-poor-or-med/	In early November 2015, potholes prompted some crossing of party lines when the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee approved Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to borrow $350 million over the next two years for road projects. Democrats offered key support. Even before that, Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling (D-La Crosse) was arguing more spending was needed. On Oct. 1, 2015 she tweeted this: "71% of WI’s roads are in poor or mediocre condition and 14% of WI’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. #JustFixIt" In Wisconsin’s budget battles over infrastructure, few deny the need for road maintenance. But is Shilling right about how bad the situation is? Digging into the numbers Shilling’s team directed us to a report from the U.S. Department of Transportation that cited the same statistics as the tweet -- that 71 percent of roads in Wisconsin are in poor or mediocre condition and 14 percent of bridges are classified as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. So, the report is quoted accurately. But what about the numbers themselves? The two statistics were drawn from different sources of data. The data on road conditions came from the 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. The report, the most recent available, is put out by the American Society of Civil Engineers, a trade and advocacy organization. By the group’s tally, Wisconsin is one of just six states with at least 70 percent of roads rated in poor or mediocre condition, meaning our roads are in worse shape than the national average. But experts caution that the report card can overstate the amount of need for road repairs. First, the report uses a small source of data for each state and then extrapolates that data to the entire state roadway system. Ashwat Anandanarayanan, director of transportation policy for the environmental group 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, said the civil engineers’ reports also conflate new roadway construction and maintenance, resulting in what appears to be greater need. "Lots of roads need to be fixed," he said. "Not a lot need to be expanded." So then, what is a better measuring stick? The Wisconsin Department of Transportation collects its own data on road conditions that is used in the Highway Performance Monitoring System by the Federal Highway Administration, which is considered the gold standard of transportation information. According to these figures, the percentage of Wisconsin roads in poor or mediocre condition is much lower -- 38 percent of the state highway system falls into those categories. That doesn’t mean the state will fare better in a national comparison by that measure. In fact, the state lags behind the U.S. average in most indicators of roadway quality. As for bridges, Shilling said 14 percent of Wisconsin’s bridges were in disrepair or functionally obsolete. This statistic, which is accurate, came from WisDOT data submitted to the Federal Highway Administration. But while Shilling cites the number as evidence of the state being behind, Wisconsin does pretty well here in a national comparison. Only three states — Arizona, Minnesota and Nevada — reported a smaller percentage of bridges in disrepair. Our rating Shilling said "71 % of WI’s roads are in poor or mediocre condition and 14% of WI’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete." The report she cited from the federal Department of Transportation backed up her figures, but the numbers used for her road statistic aren’t the most accurate available. By another measure, the percentage of roads in poor or mediocre condition is far smaller. There was no dispute on the bridge number, though on that front the state actually fares better than most others. We rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Jennifer Shilling	None	None	None	2015-11-18T05:00:00	2015-10-01	['None']
-snes-04384	Pope Francis has endorsed Hillary Clinton for President.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pope-francis-shocks-world-endorses-hillary-clinton-for-president/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Hillary Clinton for President	24 July 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-05465	Says the Congressional Budget Office has estimated "every penny of the federal budget will go to interest on the debt and entitlement spending by 2025."	true	/virginia/statements/2012/apr/23/frank-wolf/will-entitlement-programs-and-debt-consume-us-budg/	U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf says the nation’s fiscal future is dark. "According to the Congressional Budget Office’s long-term estimate, every penny of the federal budget will go to interest on the debt and entitlement spending by 2025," Wolf, R-10th, said in a March 28 speech on the House floor. "That means no money for national defense. No money for homeland security. No money to fix the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads. No money for medical research to find a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases," Wolf added. Is that really what the nonpartisan CBO said? Dan Scandling, Wolf’s spokesman, said his boss was referring to a June 2011 report from the CBO detailing the agency’s latest long-term outlook on the nation’s fiscal fitness. Tables in the report contain projections showing that by 2025, payments for Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and debt interest will exceed all federal revenues going into the budget. That’s a shade different from Wolf’s statement that there won’t be any money at all to pay for additional programs since, beyond using tax revenues, the U.S. also has been known to borrow money to finance its budget. That technical distinction caught the eye of budget analysts we spoke to. But it doesn’t detract from Wolf’s gist that the CBO report shows the growing costs of entitlement programs and debt payments are eating up the government’s resources. The CBO’s scenario of exhausted revenues was based on the assumption that major U.S. policies in effect in June 2011 will continue indefinitely, such as extending the Bush tax cuts and preserving Medicare reimbursement levels to physicians. The CBO also laid out a second, more optimistic outlook that assumed laws on the books in June 2011 will take effect. That means that the Bush tax cuts would actually expire at the end of this year and Medicare payments to physicians would fall sharply in 2013. Under that scenario, revenues through 2085 would always stay above the costs of entitlement programs and interest payments on the national debt. So Wolf is focusing on the bleakest CBO outlook. Is that fair? Jim Horney, a vice-president at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said Wolf is not alone in citing the dark scenario. Although current laws call for ending all the Bush tax cuts and lowering Medicare reimbursements, Horney said it will be politically difficult for Congress to carry out these actions. Wolf’s statement is similar to the conclusion reached in 2010 by a bipartisan commission appointed by President Barack Obama to recommend ways reduce the national debt. "By 2025 (federal) revenue will be able to finance only interest payments, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security," the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform stated in its final report. "Every other federal government activity -- from national defense and homeland security to transportation and energy -- will have to be paid for with borrowed money." Two analysts told us the gloomy forecast offers the most realistic map of the financial road ahead. Jason Peuquet, research director at the centrist Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said his organization has run its own numbers and concluded that entitlement and debt interest will outpace revenues in 2026. Josh Gordon, policy director at the centrist Concord Coalition,a group that urges deficit reduction, pointed to a March 2012 report from the General Accounting Office that shows at some point between 2020 and 2030, the amount of spending on entitlements and interest will outpace all federal revenues going into the budget under the more pessimistic scenario. "The real key is the revenues are still pretty low," Gordon said. "The lower the revenue, the easier it is for spending programs to be larger than it." Our ruling Wolf said the CBO projects that by 2025, every penny of the federal budget will go to interest on the debt as well as spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The CBO report he cites says entitlements programs and debt interest will consume all the revenues going into the budget that year. Wolf’s language is a bit inexact, but we don’t think it detracts from his clear point: the U.S. is on a dangerous fiscal path. We rate his statement True.	None	Frank Wolf	None	None	None	2012-04-23T06:00:00	2012-03-28	['None']
-bove-00276	The Truth Behind This Gruesome Photo Shared By Hindus, Muslims And Christians: A FactCheck	none	https://www.boomlive.in/the-truth-behind-this-gruesome-photo-shared-by-hindus-muslims-and-christians-a-factcheck/	None	None	None	None	None	The Truth Behind This Gruesome Photo Shared By Hindus, Muslims And Christians: A FactCheck	Apr 28 2017 3:33 pm, Last Updated: Mar 14 2018 5:19 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-11030	"The deficit ... is coming down, and it’s coming down rapidly."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/02/larry-kudlow/larry-kudlow-wrong-about-deficits-falling-rapidly-/	Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council for President Donald Trump, raised eyebrows when he said in a Fox Business Network interview that the nation’s deficit is falling on Trump’s watch. The economy under President Donald Trump, Kudlow said on June 29, "is throwing out enormous amounts of new tax revenues. As the economy gears up, more people working, better jobs and careers -- those revenues come rolling in, and the deficit, which is one of the other criticisms (of Trump’s economic policy), is coming down, and it’s coming down rapidly. Growth solves a lot of problems." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com As it happens, the deficit hasn’t come down to date -- which sparked a quick backlash on social media and prompted Kudlow to amend his remarks later that day. Kudlow told the Washington Post that "the economy is so strong right now it’s going to produce lower deficits. I probably should have said future deficits." However, that assertion is questionable as well. The most trusted source for future budget projections, the Congressional Budget Office, shows rising deficits for years into the future. The deficit so far under Trump In fiscal year 2015, when Barack Obama was president, the federal deficit was $438 billion. (A refresher: The deficit refers to federal revenues minus federal outlays. Each year’s deficit adds to the overall public debt.) In fiscal year 2016, which was also under Obama, the deficit rose to $585 billion. In fiscal year 2017, which was about two-thirds on Trump’s watch, the deficit rose to $665 billion. The deficit also rose as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product -- a way of comparing economic statistics across time. In fiscal year 2015, the deficit was 2.4 percent of GDP, rising to 3.2 percent of GDP in fiscal 2016 and 3.5 percent in fiscal 2017. So on a full-year basis, Kudlow is wrong. He’s also wrong if you look at the first seven months of fiscal year 2018. According to the Treasury Department, the first seven months of the current fiscal year saw a deficit of $385 billion -- which is 12 percent higher than the first seven months of fiscal year 2017, when the deficit totaled $344 billion. The future course of the deficit As for the future, CBO finds no reason to expect the deficit to go down any time soon. For fiscal year 2018, CBO projects a deficit of $804 billion, rising each successive year to $981 billion in 2019, $1 trillion in 2020, $1.1 trillion in 2021, and $1.3 trillion in 2022. The deficit is also poised to increase as a percentage of GDP -- from 3.5 percent in 2017 to 4.0 in 2018 and eventually to 5.4 percent in 2022. Here’s the full chart from CBO’s most recent projections, released in April. Not only that, but CBO specifically cited the tax cut Trump backed and signed into law as a reason for spiraling deficits. "The deficit that CBO now estimates for 2018 is $242 billion larger than the one that it projected for that year in June 2017," CBO wrote in its April report. "Accounting for most of that difference is a $194 billion reduction in projected revenues, mainly because the 2017 tax act is expected to reduce collections of individual and corporate income taxes." And the projections would be even worse if Congress doesn’t allow the recent round of tax cuts to expire. "In that scenario, far larger deficits and much greater debt would result than in CBO’s baseline projections for the 2019–2028 period," CBO wrote. Our ruling Kudlow said, "The deficit ... is coming down, and it’s coming down rapidly." After being criticized, he later clarified that he "probably should have said future deficits." Kudlow’s first formulation is wrong, and his revised version isn’t supported by the most widely trusted barometer -- projections by the CBO. Trump tax bill, which dramatically cut revenues, is a big reason why. The statement is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate the statement Pants on Fire! See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Larry Kudlow	None	None	None	2018-07-02T14:56:16	2018-06-29	['None']
-hoer-01259	Candy Crush Invites Murder	fake news	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/candy-crush-invites-murder-story-is-satire-not-real-news/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Candy Crush Invites Murder Story is Satire, Not Real News	March 11, 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00171	"The federal government's National Asset Database, which is supposed to guide homeland security priorities, lists 77,069 potential U.S. targets including petting zoos and popcorn factories. Experts say this database is relatively useless for any level of homeland security planning. Barack Obama's Department of Homeland Security will develop a meaningful critical infrastructure protection plan across the nation and will work with the private sector to ensure that all real targets are prepared for disasters both natural and man-made."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/184/create-a-real-national-infrastructure-protection-p/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Create a real National Infrastructure Protection Plan	2010-01-07T13:26:50	None	['United_States', 'Barack_Obama', 'United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security']
-hoer-01127	Mini Cooper Countryman Giveaway on Facebook	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/mini-cooper-countryman-giveaway-on-facebook-is-a-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Mini Cooper Countryman Giveaway on Facebook is a Scam	July 4, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00446	Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's mistress turned wife, said that she hated seeing children separated from their parents but that people shouldn't blame the Führer.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-eva-braun-say-hated-seeing-children-separated/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Eva Braun Say She ‘Hated Seeing Children Separated from Their Parents’ But Not to Blame Hitler?	18 June 2018	None	['Eva_Braun', 'Führer', 'Adolf_Hitler']
-pomt-03987	There are twice as many gun shops as McDonald’s in the United States.	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2013/feb/11/markel-hutchins/are-there-more-places-buy-gun-big-mac/	So what’s easier to find? The golden arches or a gun shop. The Rev. Markel Hutchins, an Atlanta-based civil rights activist, had an answer during a recent discussion about federal gun legislation on "The Ryan Cameron Show," which airs weekday mornings on V-103 FM in Atlanta. "There are twice as many gun shops as McDonald’s," Hutchins said. McDonald’s eateries are just about everywhere in America. PolitiFact Georgia was listening while stuck in traffic and wanted to find out whether Hutchins’ claim is true that there are more places to buy a gun than to grab a Happy Meal. Hutchins wants laws to restrict the availability of handguns across the country, particularly in urban areas such as Atlanta. He led a rally last week outside the headquarters of gun manufacturer Glock, located in Smyrna, a northern suburb of Atlanta. Hutchins says gun rights advocates are distorting the intent of the Second Amendment, saying it was written to allow Americans to arm themselves to protect the nation. There had been a spate of high-profile shootings in Atlanta a week before Hutchins’ interview. A 14-year-old boy was shot, allegedly by a 15-year-old boy, on the campus of an Atlanta middle school. The student who was wounded was not seriously injured. A day after that shooting, a Morehouse College student was shot inside a gym on the campus. The student was reportedly in stable condition and expected to make a full recovery. Hutchins said he was indeed claiming that there are more gun shops nationwide than McDonald’s restaurants. Hutchins sent us an ABC News article published in mid-December to back up his claim and said he did some additional research because he didn’t believe it was true. "My God, it was right there," he said. The McDonald’s website contains a number of facts and figures, including how many restaurants there are in the country. The latest tally, as of 2011, was 14,098 in the United States. There were 33,510 worldwide, the website shows. The number on the restaurant’s website matched what ABC reported. The news outlet reported there are 51,438 retail gun stores in America. Programs, such as American Public Media’s "Marketplace," have reported the total is about 58,000. Some online research we did found others making similar claims that there are twice as many gun stores as McDonald’s in America. Those numbers, however, are more complicated than they first appear. What Hutchins and some news outlets have referred to as "guns stores" are actually federal permits issued to sell guns. Those could represent retail establishments that primarily sell guns, larger retail vendors (such as Wal-Mart) that sell guns as part of a much larger retail venue or pawnshops that carry guns as part of their inventory. The numbers also refer to people who sell guns at gun shows several times a year and have no bricks-and-mortar store. We attempted to make an oranges-to-oranges comparison here -- to compare McDonald’s locations to free-standing stores that primarily sell guns. It’s hard to find detailed data on actual gun stores online. The U.S. Census Bureau does not keep data on gun stores. Neither does the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms keeps a monthly log on its website of how many people and pawnbrokers are licensed to sell guns in the country and its territories. In January, the total was 58,725. About 51,000 of them were gun dealers. The rest were pawnbrokers. In Georgia, the total in January was 1,746. In 2011, to be consistent with the most recent information we have about the number of McDonald’s restaurants nationwide, there were 56,059 federally licensed firearms dealers and pawnbrokers in the country. That’s quadruple the number of places to buy Chicken McNuggets. The ATF does not track how many licensed dealers own a business that they sell guns from as opposed to those who may sell guns at a show. The ATF database has lists of every person licensed to sell guns. In Georgia, most people on the January list say they own a business. There were about 175 people on the list with a license who did not include the name of a business. About 100 of them are retail stores such as Wal-Mart, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Academy Sports & Outdoors. In some cases, the list contains the name of the person licensed to sell guns and the business itself. The leader of an organization of firearms retailers had a lower estimate of how many gun shops there are nationally. Andrew Molchan, president of Professional Gun Retailers Association, believes there are probably 9,000 "real" gun stores in America. His definition of a gun store is a place that regularly sells the weapons year-round. His estimate did not include businesses such as Wal-Mart because some of those stores do not sell any guns. Molchan said it’s tough to come up with a firm number of how many gun stores there are for several reasons. For example, he said some pawnshops sell only a handful of guns year-round. "It’s not hard and crisp," Molchan said of coming up with an actual estimate of how many gun shops there are in the U.S. When told about Hutchins’ claim, Molchan replied, "That’s not necessarily wrong." Some people, he said, may have a license to sell guns, but they don’t sell any at all. He believes there are probably as many as 25,000 businesses that sell guns. To sum up, Hutchins said there were twice as many gun shops than McDonald’s restaurants in the United States. There are numbers we found that support his argument. But this claim, like many we’ve tackled, is not as simple as it seems. His overall point seems accurate -- there are a lot of places to buy guns in the United States. Our rating: Mostly True.	None	Markel Hutchins	None	None	None	2013-02-11T06:00:00	2013-02-04	['United_States']
-vogo-00336	Statement: “It takes six days of waiting before you can get into L.A. or Long Beach,” Congressman Bob Filner said Aug. 30 in an interview with NBC 7 San Diego, referring to how long ships wait before docking in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/mayor-2012/fact-check-filner-mistaken-on-ports-congestion/	Analysis: Along the campaign trail for mayor, Bob Filner has put a proposal to boost San Diego’s commercial shipping hub at the forefront of his plan to improve the local economy.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Filner Mistaken on Ports' Congestion	September 11, 2011	None	['Los_Angeles', 'Bob_Filner', 'Long_Beach,_California', 'San_Diego']
-tron-00120	Dying Veteran Bill Schoonover’s Letter to Senators	authorship confirmed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dying-veteran-bill-schoonovers-letter-to-senators/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Dying Veteran Bill Schoonover’s Letter to Senators	Mar 9, 2016	None	['None']
-goop-02223	Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez Did Talk About “Eloping” After Getting Back Together, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-bieber-eloping-selena-gomez-back-together-wedding/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez Did NOT Talk About “Eloping” After Getting Back Together, Despite Reports	8:39 pm, November 9, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-07256	The Democratic health care law "added 12 years of solvency to Medicare."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/27/debbie-wasserman-schultz/did-health-care-law-add-12-years-solvency-medicare/	Ever heard of Medi-scare? It’s political slang that means attacking opponents for their plans to rein in Medicare spending. Republicans say they’re victims of Medi-scare because Democrats keep distorting their recent proposal, a plan to turn Medicare into a program where seniors buy their own health insurance plans and the federal government pays part of the tab. The plan wouldn’t apply to anyone 55 or older, but would start for new enrollees in 2022. Still, it would be a dramatic change from the current system, where the government pays doctors and hospitals directly. A Democrat won a close special election in upstate New York on May 24 after campaigning against the plan, prompting Republicans to complain that Democrats were demagoguing the plan. Boo hoo, say Democrats like Debbie Wasserman Schultz. It was just last year that Republicans tried to scare seniors by telling them the health care law would gut Medicare spending, said Wasserman Schultz, who was recently named head of the Democratic National Committee. "It's the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to who's engaging in Medi-scare," said Wasserman Schultz in an interview on MSNBC on May 25. "The Republicans leading up to the 2010 election actually fabricated what Democrats did to Medicare. In fact, we added 12 years of solvency to Medicare and ensured that it would be better for seniors overall. And what the Republicans have done under Paul Ryan's plan is actually end Medicare as we know it, turn into it into a voucher program. There's no running from that." We documented a slew of Mediscare ads against Democrats during the 2010 election cycle. But we were interested in the wonkier question of whether the health care law did indeed add 12 years of solvency to Medicare. Solvency in this case means the money flowing into Medicare covers 100 percent of the bills for patient care. We started researching the issue, and at first, Wasserman Schultz seemed on solid ground. In August 2010, the Medicare Board of Trustees reported that the health care law did indeed add 12 years of solvency to Medicare Part A, the portion of Medicare that covers hospitalization. It also improved the financial outlook for Part B, which covers physicians’ services and other care. The report specifically credited the Democratic health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed earlier that year. We should note those estimates come with a few warnings. The report itself says that projecting health care costs into the future includes many uncertainties. Additionally, the report doesn’t include changes that Congress will likely make to current law, especially the predictable increases in payments to physicians known as the doc fix. Also, the independent chief actuary for Medicare questioned whether the projected cost savings were realistic. But overall, the board of trustees report is an official estimate for the Medicare program, the reports are put together with a consistent, detailed methodology, and its annual reports are usually referred to by both parties. The bigger problem with Wasserman Schultz's statement is that just a few weeks ago, the board of trustees issued a new report that revised its estimates for the health care law. Instead of adding 12 years of solvency, the board concluded, the law will only add eight years of solvency. Starting in 2024, the program will need either new revenues or reduced expenses to meet all of its obligations. The board said the shortfall was because of the continuing economic slowdown, which has reduced the Medicare program’s income from taxes, and a few other lesser factors. So Wasserman Schultz’s number is off by about a third. Nevertheless, her overall point, that the Democrats’ health reform law added to the overall solvency of Medicare, is correct. The 2011 report included the same warnings that estimating health care savings for the future is an uncertain process, but it also concluded that the financial outlook for Medicare is "substantially improved as a result of the changes in the Affordable Care Act." The law reduced spending and increased revenues in several ways. It slows increases in payments to hospitals and nursing homes. It raises Medicare hospital taxes for high earners. And it introduces several new programs aimed at steering the health system away from paying doctors and hospitals per procedure ("fee for service") and instead paying for good outcomes. When we contacted her office, a spokesman said that the number may have been off, but the point was still right. "The important thing is that Democrats moved to substantially extend the life of the Medicare Trust Fund while also making broad improvements to Medicare," said spokesman Jonathan Beeton. To summarize, Wasserman Schultz said that the Democratic health care law "added 12 years of solvency to Medicare." She’s off on the number, citing an older, more optimistic report. The latest estimate indicates Medicare will only have eight additional years of solvency, one-third less than the previous estimate. But she’s right that the Affordable Care Act improved the financial outlook for Medicare, and that Democrats have successfully passed legislation to reduce future spending for the program. So we rate her statement Half True.	None	Debbie Wasserman Schultz	None	None	None	2011-05-27T14:57:46	2011-05-25	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Medicare_(United_States)']
-hoer-00771	One Way Glass Toilet	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/one-way-glass-toilet.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	One Way Glass Toilet	May 2009	None	['None']
-snes-00650	Nelson Mandela praised President Trump ahead of a South African visit by Barack Obama.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nelson-mandela-trump-praise/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did Nelson Mandela Praise President Trump?	7 May 2018	None	['Nelson_Mandela', 'Barack_Obama', 'South_Africa']
-goop-01294	Jennifer Aniston Visited Brad Pitt’s Family In His Hometown Of Missouri?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-brad-pitt-visit-family-mom-missouri/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Aniston Visited Brad Pitt’s Family In His Hometown Of Missouri?	4:53 pm, March 28, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston', 'Brad_Pitt']
-goop-01618	Anne Hathaway Having Marriage Problems, Fighting Husband Over Where To Live?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/anne-hathaway-marriage-problems-husband-fighting-adam-shulman/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Anne Hathaway Having Marriage Problems, Fighting Husband Over Where To Live?	5:52 pm, February 8, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04037	Says according to the FBI, more people are killed each year with hammers and clubs than rifles.	true	/texas/statements/2013/jan/30/greg-abbott/greg-abbott-says-according-fbi-more-people-are-kil/	Not long before President Barack Obama’s Jan. 16, 2013, speech calling for more gun control measures, Texas’ attorney general tweeted about a different class of assault weapons. Greg Abbott wrote, "FBI: More people killed with hammers & clubs each year than rifles," and supplied a link to a Jan. 3, 2013, Fox News commentary piece that originated on Breitbart.com and referred to FBI murder statistics from 2005 through 2011. PolitiFact in Washington, D.C., recently tackled a similar claim culled from Facebook: Obama was on the record supporting bans on certain semi-automatic rifles before his Jan. 16 speech, in which he again called for renewing the 1994-2004 federal "assault weapons" ban while urging education, mental health and other measures to reduce gun violence. Like Abbott’s tweet, the Facebook post cited the FBI. PolitiFact looked at the bureau’s annual report on "Crime in the United States," a collection of data from local agencies on several categories of crimes. The Facebook post earned a "True" rating because it reflected the FBI’s statistics from 2011, the most recent year available, for murders with knives (1,694), personal weapons (728, typed on Facebook as 726), blunt objects (496) and rifles (323). The Facebook post did not include homicides the FBI attributed to handguns (6,220), firearms whose type was not stated (1,587) and "other guns" (97). Those numbers mean handguns were used in 72 percent of all firearm murders in 2011 and slightly under half of all murders using any kind of weapon that year. Abbott’s tweet, similarly, did not include some FBI-tracked categories by referring solely to rifles and blunt objects and leaving out other significant firearm categories. Still, according to the FBI’s data covering 2005 through 2011, blunt objects such as clubs and hammers were consistently used to murder more people than rifles alone. FBI homicide data 2005-2011, ranked in order of weapons used most often in 2011: Our ruling Like an older Facebook item, Abbott’s tweet uses data selectively, ignoring the significant role of handguns in gun violence. That said, it is correct that FBI data indicates that in 2011, more people were killed with "clubs and hammers" than with any type of rifle. We rate his statement as True. Clarification: This story originally posted with the "speaker" identified as "Facebook posts" instead of Greg Abbott. Updated 2:54 p.m. Jan. 30, 2012.	None	Greg Abbott	None	None	None	2013-01-30T12:45:22	2013-01-03	['Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation']
-snes-01803	Four major hurricanes have hit the United States on 29 August, across 12 years, forming a meaningful pattern.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/29-august-hurricanes/	None	Superstition	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Is There a Link Between Major Hurricanes and 29 August?	31 August 2017	None	['United_States']
-hoer-00766	John Gebhardt Holding Injured Baby in Iraq	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/john-gebhardt-iraq-girl.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	John Gebhardt Holding Injured Baby in Iraq	October 2009	None	['None']
-clck-00037	the warming is not nearly as great as the climate change computer models have predicted.	misleading	https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/global-surface-temperatures-increasing-according-climate-projections-contrary-wall-street-journal-claim/	None	None	None	None	None	Global surface temperatures are increasing according to climate projections, contrary to Wall Street Journal claim	[' The Wall Street Journal, 19 Jan. 2017 \xa0 ']	None	['None']
-goop-00756	Ben Affleck Planning Wedding To “Pregnant” Lindsay Shookus, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-proposing-lindsay-shookus-pregnant-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Ben Affleck NOT Planning Wedding To “Pregnant” Lindsay Shookus, Despite Claim	1:20 pm, June 25, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-07380	"You’ve got each day 10,000 new seniors, baby boomers, becoming eligible for the entitlement programs."	true	/virginia/statements/2011/may/04/eric-cantor/rep-eric-cantor-says-10000-baby-boomers-day-are-be/	Amid the pop of champagne at the start of 2011, you many not have noticed the beginnings of a monumental event that will reshape America. The first baby boomers turned 65. Every day this year, and for the next 18 years, multitudes more will turn 65 and begin to rely on the nation’s already-stressed entitlement programs. Baby boomers are Americans born between Jan. 1, 1946 and Dec. 31, 1964. Their 65th birthdays mark the beginning of eligibility for Medicare and fall one year before their full qualification for Social Security. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has been blanketing cable networks to promote the House GOP budget and the need for major spending cuts. His effort comes as Congress and the president grapple with both the 2012 federal budget and more immediate need to raise the debt ceiling. Appearing on CNBC April 27, Cantor, R-Va., said "you’ve got each day 10,000 new seniors, baby boomers, becoming eligible for the entitlement programs. Ten thousand a day." Is Cantor’s number right? We asked Megan Whittemore, Cantor’s press secretary, where the congressman came up with the figure of 10,000 seniors a day becoming eligible for entitlements. She pointed us to a series of statements and reports by the Social Security Administration. In October 2007, when the first baby boomer claimed early retirement benefits from Social Security, the agency put out a press release. Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, born one second after midnight on Jan. 1, 1946, qualified for payments in January 2008, the agency said, adding that "over the next two decades, nearly 80 million Americans will become eligible for Social Security benefits, more than 10,000 per day." Social Security allows recipients to start claiming benefits at age 62, though that means accepting a lower monthly payout. The full retirement age for boomers born in 1954 or earlier is 66. It then increases by two months in each of the next six birth years, with everyone born 1960 or later getting full benefits at age 67. Retirees can choose to defer payments up until they’re 70, receiving a larger monthly check in return. The Social Security agency also referred to the 10,000-a-day statistic in its report for fiscal 2012. The Pew Research Center highlighted the statistic in a 2010 study on baby boomers. According to Census data gathered by Pew, 76 million people were born in the United States during the generation. After subtracting those who have already died and adding immigrants born during those years, the Census estimates there are roughly 79.6 million people aged 45 to 64 in America. If you divide 79.6 million by 19 years, then divide that by 365 days, you get 11,478. That’s the number of people, on average, who will turn 65 each day for the next 19 years. Obviously not everyone in that category will live to 65, but the math clearly gives you a figure above the 10,000-a-day cited by Cantor. We also checked the Social Security awards given in 2010. According to the SSA, 4.05 million retired workers or survivors of deceased workers started getting payments last year. That means 11,102 people each day began receiving checks. In 2009 the number was slightly higher, at 11,436 per day. Right now, about 8,600 people a day enter Social Security through the traditional retirement program, and another 3,000 each day through the programs for families of disabled or deceased workers. If the head count climbs up to 11,400 per day through the traditional program, plus another 3,000 per day through the programs for families of disabled or deceased workers, that’s almost a 25 percent increase in the number of Social Security beneficiaries. And consider this: In 1950, as Social Security ramped up, there were 16 workers per recipient. Today there are 2.9 workers per recipient, and by 2041 the SSA says there will be just 2.1 workers per recipient. Let’s review. Rep. Eric Cantor said 10,000 Americans per day become eligible for entitlement programs, meaning Social Security and Medicare. His number are borne out in projections and data from the Social Security Administration. During 2009 and 2010 ,the number of Social Security recipients was actually above 11,000 per day, though many of those people were not retirees. Census data show nearly 80 million baby boomers, born over a span of 19 years. They will turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare at a rate of 11,478 per day. In fact, as of May 3 an estimated 1.4 million people have turned 65 this year. The numbers are staggering. We rate Cantor’s statement True.	None	Eric Cantor	None	None	None	2011-05-04T12:33:24	2011-04-27	['None']
-tron-01568	Obama Changes Oath of Allegiance for New Americans	mostly fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama-changes-oath-of-allegiance-for-new-americans-2/	None	government	None	None	None	Obama Changes Oath of Allegiance for New Americans	Jul 28, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-02834	"All" University of Texas "student-athletes get an iPad."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2013/nov/22/jody-conradt/university-texas-student-athletes-may-borrow-limit/	Speaking against paying student-athletes, a long-time Texas Longhorn official said sports scholarships already include special benefits. Jody Conradt, a University of Texas special assistant, said during a Sept. 28, 2013, Texas Tribune Festival panel discussion on the UT campus: "I have to make one point. We’re not just talking about a scholarship as defined by scholarship. We’re talking about the money spent, unlimited tutors, unlimited access to athletic training; all of your injury issues are taken care of. You can get money to go home at Christmas if that is an emergency… You can get clothes, through a program called the Student Athlete Opportunity Fund." Conradt, who coached the UT women’s basketball team for 31 years, continued: "So over time there have been ways to give more benefit to student-athletes that is not what people consider the scholarship." For instance, she said, "all... student athletes get an iPad. They get a lot of things that the normal student does not." Most of those declared benefits didn’t surprise us. But does each UT student-athlete get the popular Apple iPad tablet (which were retailing for about $180 to $500, depending on screen sizes and other features, when we online window-shopped this November)? Nick Voinis, UT’s senior associate athletic director, told us by phone that UT’s student-athletes, who numbered 551 as of mid-November, may borrow iPads, Amazon Kindles and other electronic equipment thanks to a fund created by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the governing body for intercollegiate athletics. Voinis stressed that many student-athletes come to school already having computers, laptops or iPads. Still, he said, the option is there for those students to check out a laptop or iPad. "Some check them out for a day or two, some for a semester," Voinis said, or the full year. He said the programs keeps 30 tablets, mostly iPads, available for checkout. For the year that started in August 2013, Voinis said, nearly $338,000 flowed from the NCAA to UT’s Student Athlete Opportunity Fund. Those dollars, he said, could be spent on computers, laptops, iPads, school supplies and other items such as university fees not covered by scholarships, including emergency trips home. That’s correct, a NCAA official told us. According to an Aug. 22, 2012, online post by the NCAA, the association and its member schools in 2010-11 paid more than $53 million to more than 81,000 student-athletes. "The money, which comes from the NCAA’s Student Assistance Fund, paid for trips home, clothing, summer school, tutoring, graduate test fees, health insurance and countless other costs that scholarships don’t cover," the NCAA said. "A version of the Student Assistance Fund was first offered in 1999, after the NCAA inked a $6 billion broadcast deal with CBS. The decision to start the fund came from the NCAA’s desire to give back to student-athletes more directly than through grants or other forms of aid that are often laden with restrictions. The fund has grown each year since its inception." By email, NCAA spokeswoman Stacey Osburn pointed out an association rule (15.01.6.1) restricting how such aid is spent. The rule says universities shall not tap such aid to finance salaries, grants-in-aid (other than summer school) for student-athletes with remaining eligibility, capital improvements, stipends and outside athletics development opportunities for student-athletes (e.g., participation in a sports camp or clinic, private sports-related instruction, greens fees, batting cage rental, outside foreign tour expenses)." So iPads are permitted, it looked to us. We recognized another way that some student-athletes land iPads--as gifts to participants in football bowl games. Players in the 2012 Valero Alamo Bowl, which was won by the Texas Longhorns, received $550 worth of gifts including an iPad Mini, bowl spokesman Rick Hill told us by phone. Our ruling Conradt said all UT student-athletes get an iPad. That’s not so, though less than 30 iPads are available for UT’s 500-plus student-athletes to borrow for up to a year at a time. We rate this statement, which has an element of truth but otherwise ignores critical facts, as Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Jody Conradt	None	None	None	2013-11-22T13:20:47	2013-09-28	['University_of_Texas_at_Austin']
-snes-02499	A photograph shows a woman wearing a sign reading 'My Legs Are Open for Refugees.'	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/legs-open-refugees-sign/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did a Canadian Woman Wear a ‘My Legs Are Open for Refugees’ Sign?	3 May 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-13639	"The Obama-Clinton war on coal has cost Michigan over 50,000 jobs."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/09/donald-trump/donald-trump-exaggerates-michigan-job-losses-coal-/	During an economic address at the Detroit Economic Club, Donald Trump tailored some of his statistics to the local audience. "As a result of recent Obama EPA actions, coal-fired plants across Michigan have either shut down entirely or undergone expensive conversions, making them non-competitive in many cases," Trump said. "The Obama-Clinton war on coal has cost Michigan over 50,000 jobs." Trump has often criticized efforts by the Obama administration -- and those who find climate change to be a serious concern -- to wean the United States from fossil fuels by tightening federal environmental regulation of coal-fired power plants. Here, we’ll take a look at the second part of Trump’s statement: "The Obama-Clinton war on coal has cost Michigan over 50,000 jobs." This assertion initially caught our eye because we’d never thought of Michigan as one of the premier coal-producing states. Our suspicion was correct: According to the National Mining Association, Michigan is not on the list of 26 states that currently produce any amount of coal. Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of workers engaged in any type of mining in Michigan over the last decade has varied between 5,000 and 7,000, making it essentially impossible to have lost 50,000 existing jobs in that sector. And as the Washington Examiner has noted, Michigan has fewer than 20,000 people working in the electricity generation sector today. So the scale of the job losses Trump cites seem, at least at first blush, to be unlikely. So what was Trump trying to say? The prepared version of his speech includes a footnote that points to a news release from the National Mining Association published almost five years ago, on Sept. 7, 2011. Here are some excerpts from that news release, which criticized "Beyond Coal," a campaign against coal-fired power plants coordinated by the environmental group the Sierra Club and cited a study the group released: "The destructive impact of the ‘Beyond Coal’ campaign is most clearly evident in the following 10 states where power plants blocked by the club represent the highest number of potential jobs (construction and permanent) foregone: Illinois (126,612), Texas (122,065), Montana (114,102), Nevada (75,194), Florida (75,055), Ohio (70,371), Colorado (55,620), Michigan (53,587), Oklahoma (42,581) and Kentucky (38,824)." In response to an inquiry from PolitiFact, Andrew Wheeler, an energy adviser to the Trump campaign, also pointed to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis that found that 10 delayed or canceled projects in Michigan -- most of them coal-fired plants -- would have created 56,000 jobs up front had they been built. Between the 53,000 jobs cited by the National Mining Association and the 56,000 jobs cited by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wheeler said, "it is obvious that the ‘over 50,000 jobs’ cited by Mr. Trump is accurate." But just because a campaign is able to footnote a specific number doesn’t mean that the number is meaningful, or as fully contextualized as it ought to be. Here are a few important things to know about this number. • The number refers to "potential" jobs lost, not actual jobs lost. This is an important point that would not be obvious from the way Trump phrased his statement. By leaving the impression that these were actual jobs lost, Trump’s statistic invites a degree of outrage that isn’t warranted. And there are good reasons to be cautious about future job projections, especially when they have been framed so broadly as to include vendors to the industry, rail transport, ports and machinery manufacturers. Any job projections of this sort are subject to rosy estimates -- especially if a group has a vested interest in the issue. In making an argument to the public, all groups will put forward their most favorable case. Trey Pollard, the national press secretary for the Sierra Club -- which has its own dog in the fight -- said the number of plants being counted by the mining association are essentially "the coal industry’s wildest dreams" -- a reflection of circumstances in which they can build coal plants "in any community they want to." • The number doesn’t reflect that coal is increasingly being replaced by natural gas. Trump’s decision to use this number tells only part of the story of how the electricity sector has been developing. In recent years, according to federal statistics, coal has been losing ground to natural gas and, to a lesser extent, renewable energy when it comes to electricity generation. A July 2016 analysis by Sam Evans of the School of Business and Economics at King University in Bristol, Tenn., found that environmental regulation has been a factor in this switch, but a "secondary" one. "The recent decline in the generation share of coal, and the concurrent rise in the share of natural gas, was mainly a market-driven response to lower natural gas prices that have made natural gas generation more economically attractive," Evans wrote. • This isn’t just about Obama or Clinton. Trump ignores that much of the impetus in Michigan for switching away from coal has come from the state’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, and from utilities themselves. Snyder has generally continued his support for steps to shift away from coal that began under his Democratic predecessor as governor, Jennifer Granholm. In 2015, Snyder said at an energy conference that "now is the time to look at a long-term transition away from coal," adding that because of the state’s natural gas infrastructure, "we're well positioned to actually have a fair amount of that coal demand go to natural gas." And Gerry Anderson, the chairman and CEO of DTE Energy, an electric utility that serves more than 2 million customers in the state, has written that "we plan to retire older, less efficient coal plants and build new, cleaner natural gas power plants over the next decade." Our ruling Trump said that "the Obama-Clinton war on coal has cost Michigan over 50,000 jobs." However, this claim is problematic on several levels. While the number matches one projection of how many potential jobs could be lost from the blockage of coal-fired plants, there’s a difference between actual jobs lost and potential future jobs lost. And the number cited -- an impossible-to-confirm projection based on broadly construed calculations released by a pro-coal group -- should be taken with a big grain of salt. Trump also ignores that market forces, not just environmental regulations, have driven many of the job losses in the coal sector, and he also ignores that Michigan Republican officials and utilities themselves -- not just the Obama administration -- have pushed the switch away from coal. We rate the claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/5237e30a-995b-4c02-a36c-e160efe29dfa	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-08-09T16:50:56	2016-08-08	['Michigan']
-pomt-11408	"Newspapers have framed this election as my fight against the Illinois mafia."	false	/illinois/statements/2018/mar/21/bruce-rauner/rauner-cites-own-remarks-proof-outside-support-ele/	Incumbent Gov. Bruce Rauner struck a number of familiar notes in his speech Tuesday night as he claimed a narrow primary victory over insurgent Republican challenger Jeanne Ives, talking about tax cuts, job growth and term limits for elected leaders. But the multi-millionaire Rauner also sought to frame his coming general election battle against Democratic nominee J.B. Pritzker as one pitting the interests of the little guy against entrenched political insiders allied with the billionaire Pritzker. Then Rauner threw in a new wrinkle to his standard line of attack. "Newspapers have framed this election as my fight against the Illinois mafia," he told the applauding crowd. "But it’s really the people versus the Illinois mafia." Rauner has long been free with tossing around incendiary terms to describe rivals, in particularly Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, whom the governor frequently lambastes as "corrupt." But this latest turn of phrase, which Rauner attributed not to himself but "newspapers," got us to wondering. Which newspapers? A look in the mirror So we reached out to his campaign for an answer. A spokesman quickly responded by emailing a link to a single opinion column published a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal titled, "Bruce Rauner vs. the Illinois ‘Mafia.’" In the piece, which represents the views of a single columnist and not the paper’s editorial board, Rauner pins Illinois’ problems squarely on Madigan. The Journal quotes Rauner referring to his archrival as "the mafia kingpin of Illinois" and then taking an additional swipe at Madigan for simultaneously serving as a powerful lawmaker and as a partner in a law firm specializing in property tax appeals. "It’s a mafia protection racket," Rauner said of Madigan’s dual roles. But the ‘mafia’ references in the headline and column come from Rauner’s own mouth, not from the impressions of the writer, who also goes on to note that: "Mr. Rauner sounds confident and plans to spend whatever it takes to make the election a referendum on reform versus the Madigan Mafia." Rauner campaign aides did not respond to our follow-up email asking whether they believed other newspapers had framed the election in similar terms. Our ruling After barely squeaking out a victory over a primary challenger, Gov. Bruce Rauner declared to supporters that, "Newspapers have framed this election as my fight against the Illinois mafia." Incendiary rhetoric has been a staple of Rauner speeches for years, but in upping the ante even more in his fight against Pritzker it appears the governor is also projecting his own words onto the thoughts of others. Newspapers, or more precisely one column in the Wall Street Journal, did not frame Rauner’s re-election fight in terms of a struggle with a mafia-like force. That is Rauner’s own characterization and he is simply quoting himself while seeking to attribute the observation to others. This dizzying feedback loop earns Rauner’s primary night claim a False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bruce Rauner	None	None	None	2018-03-21T17:45:00	2018-03-20	['Illinois']
-pomt-07073	In the first 24 to 36 hours of the operation in Libya, "you saw $115 million go downrange because a Tomahawk cruise missile is a little over $1 million each."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2011/jun/27/allen-west/allen-west-says-military-spent-115-million-first-3/	War is hell. War is expensive. And we can attempt to quantify just how expensive it is. That's what Republican U.S. Rep. Allen West, an Army veteran who now represents part of Broward and Palm Beach counties, did in a June 20, 2011 interview on Fox News. West has been critical of the U.S. military actions in Libya launched in March. In a Miami Herald/St. Petersburg Times article on June 23, West was quoted as saying "We can't keep committing U.S. military to 'protect innocent civilians'; they're exhausted." He went into more detail on Fox News in response to a question about whether President Barack Obama would have gotten authorization from Congress to launch the operation, West responded: "Well, the thing is this. You have got to be able to explain what the mission is. And being 22 years in the United States military, we have seen three different missions being stated. First of all, we're going to protect innocent civilians. Kind of hard to do that from 30,000 feet. The next thing, we say we're going to go in and attack the military capability of (Moammar) Gadhafi. Really hard to do between the vehicles of the rebels and his vehicles. And now we want to take Moammar Gadhafi out of power. There are means by which we can restrict and constrain and kind of temper Moammar Gadhafi without coming back again and having a third combat operation. And you want to talk about the economics of this, in the first 24 to 36 hours, you saw $115 million go downrange because a Tomahawk cruise missile is a little over $1 million each." For this Truth-O-Meter item, we wondered if West got his numbers right. How much does the Tomahawk cruise missile cost and did we spend $115 million in the first 24 to 36 hours on missiles in Libya? And what if anything can we draw from that initial cost? Navy spokeswoman Amanda Greenberg told us in a June 23 interview that a Tomahawk cruise missile costs approximately $1.1 million. During the first 24 to 36 hours, 110 were fired by Coalition forces -- the majority by the U.S, she said. That math works out to about $121 million. West's spokeswoman Angela Sachitano directed us to a March 23 article in the National Journal which states: "On the first day of strikes alone, U.S.-led forces launched 112 long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, which cost about $1 million to $1.5 million apiece, from ships stationed off the Libyan coast. That totaled $112 million to $168 million. Since those first strikes, U.S. and British forces have launched at least another 12 Tomahawk missiles. The Defense Department typically buys about 200 Tomahawks a year. While the military likely can put off buying new missiles for months, it will ultimately need to boost planned procurement rates to refill its stockpile." The tab in Libya continues to rise. That's a concern among Democrats and Republicans who have opposed the conflict that the Obama administration entered without seeking Congressional authority. Whether Obama violated the 1973 War Powers Resolution is the topic of a separate June 22, 2011 article on PolitiFact. The White House said in a report that as of June 3, the cost of the Libya operation was about $716 million. By Sept. 30, or 90 days into the conflict, that figure is expected to rise to about $1.1 billion. West's numbers about the first day and a half are clearly on target or close enough. But what do they mean? We interviewed four experts including Gordon Adams, a professor of foreign policy at American University who was associate director for national security and international affairs at the federal Office of Management and Budget in the 1990s. We also interviewed Zack Cooper, senior analyst at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic Budgetary Assessments who co-wrote a report in March about the costs of a no-fly zone in Libya published before the conflict started. Our additional experts were James Phillips, senior research fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. None of our experts quibbled with West's numbers. But some said the cost from the first day and half doesn't shed much light on the big picture. "His numbers are right but it doesn't mean anything," Adams said, because the government already bought those missiles and would ultimately use them somewhere. "We've already got them in the inventory -- it's not a new expenditure," Adams said. The government won't necessarily replace each Tomahawk missile that it used in Libya, Adams said. And that initial cost "doesn't tell you anything" about how much will ultimately be spent because we don't know how long the operation will continue or the operational tempo. Cooper's report estimated the initial and longer-term costs of creating different types of no-fly zones. For a limited no-fly zone covering mostly northern Libya, the report estimated upfront costs between $400 and $800 million and ultimately between $1.18 and $3.4 billion over six months. "The initial costs in these sorts of operations are typically higher in the first stages of the operations because more expensive munitions are being used and there are a high number of targets at the outset of combat operations," Cooper said in an e-mail. It's not helpful to compare the cost in the first day and a half in Libya to other conflicts, Cooper said. For some broader conflicts where the initial start-up time is at least multiple days and can include troops on the ground, it's harder to pinpoint the costs compared to the cost of dropping a certain number of bombs and multiplying the cost of each bomb. For other conflicts including some of the no-fly zones "they start small and sort of build so initial costs may be relatively small but costs over time may be large." "I think the Libya situation is anomolous," Cooper said. So can we draw any meaning from the costs in Libya the first 36 hours? "The cost of the first day or first couple of days was largely Tomahawk missiles and maybe some other munitions, but for the most part that's why it was so expensive," Cooper said. "The cost in the long term of a no-fly zone is typically fuel and operational costs so the two are very different. The upfront cost of imposing a no-fly zone are typically substantially higher than the week-to-week cost of flying planes above Libyan territory." On Fox News West said that the United States launched about $115 million worth of missiles within the first day or day and a half in Libya. That's about $6 million less than the figure we received from the Navy. And West didn't note that some of the Tomahawks were fired by U.S. allies. But still, close enough. But there are a couple of caveats -- namely, that the U.S. already had those missiles in stock, so it doesn't represent new spending. And initial costs in a military intervention are always higher, experts told us. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Allen West	None	None	None	2011-06-27T10:55:40	2011-06-20	['Libya']
-hoer-01015	Kevin M James the Owner of Mercedes, is Giving Away Cars on Facebook	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/7837-2/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	No, Kevin M James the Owner of Mercedes, is not Giving Away Cars on Facebook	April 28, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-11088	"When you tally up their representation in Congress and governorships, the Democrats almost have their lowest representation in about 100 years."	true	/punditfact/statements/2018/jun/15/fareed-zakaria/yes-democratic-party-nearly-its-weakest-point-cent/	While the Democratic Party held the White House for two terms during Barack Obama’s presidency, much of the country was turning a deeper shade of red. Republicans made dramatic down-ballot gains over the past decade, a trend that may have been overlooked somewhat given Democratic control of the executive branch for most of this time. But as the party vies to recapture the House and Senate from the GOP in upcoming midterm elections, the roots of Democrats’ recent losses are being reexamined. "Unless Democrats face up to this reality and devise a strategy to reverse this tidal wave of defeat, they might find themselves surprised one more time this November," said CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. "When you tally up their representation in Congress, state legislatures and governorships, the Democrats almost have their lowest representation in about 100 years." This stat, from the June 10 broadcast of his CNN show, was depicted in a graphic showing each of the two major parties’ power shifts since 1920 in Congress, governorships and state legislatures. (Source: CNN) The chart shows an ebb and flow of the parties’ power over roughly the past 100 years. The high-water mark of Democratic representation came during the New Deal era. But overall, the century is bookended with Democrats in positions of relative weakness. Zakaria is right: The Democratic Party is at nearly its weakest point in a century. Methodology Zakaria’s broader point was that center-left politics are in decline not only in the United States, but across the Western world. He cited a book by Barnard College Sheri Berman, "Why the Left Loses," which posits several explanatory factors: center-left parties field weak leaders; they shoulder the blame (fairly or not) when the post-World War II liberal order fails, as in the 2008 global financial crisis; and they’ve embraced a politics of identity that alienates large swaths of the electorate. A central premise to Zakaria’s argument was the statistic about Democrats’ near-historically low influence in Congress and at the state level. A CNN spokeswoman said Zakaria had been relying on a Real Clear Politics analysis of more than a century of data, as well as a piece in 538.com. We contacted the RCP researchers Sean Trende and David Byler (who is now with the Weekly Standard), who shared their dataset with us. Zakaria deviated slightly from their methodology (he omitted partisan data on presidents), but the down-ballot numbers seem to back up his point about Democrats’ waning power. "Zakaria’s chart doesn’t include presidential performance, which is included in our original metric," Trende said. "That wouldn’t, however, alter the basic conclusion, and his findings are a fair representation of our research." To establish their partisan power index, Trende and Byler devised a points system for Democrats’ and Republicans’ performance in five electoral categories: president, House, Senate, state legislatures and gubernatorial performance. They added the five metrics together for each party, at two-year intervals. The party with the higher number had more power relative to the other. Byler noted a couple caveats. For starters, the dataset ends at the 2016 election. Furthermore, the researchers made certain judgment calls that resulted in the index not tracking exactly with election results. For example, Janet Napolitano won the 2006 Arizona gubernatorial election, but left relatively soon after the 2008 election to join the Obama administration. That meant Jan Brewer, a Republican, was in office for much of 2009-11. Under the RCP index, we found three historical instances where Democrats held a weaker position, relative to Republicans, than they did following the 2016 election: in 1920, 1926 and 1928. Given Zakaria’s hedging — he said Democrats almost have their lowest representation in about 100 years — we think his claim passes muster. Congress The RCP data shows the Democrats’ Senate representation was weakest in 1920 during the Republican presidency of Warren G. Harding. At that point, the GOP held a 59-37 seat advantage — with Democrats holding 10 fewer seats than they do today. (Technically, Democrats currently hold 47 seats, though two Independent senators — Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine — caucus with the Democrats, giving Republicans a razor-thin 51-seat majority.) See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com To get another view of the historical data, we turned to the Brookings Institution’s Vital Statistics on Congress, which tracks election results (again, the RCP data is not precisely pegged to election results). According to Brookings, there were nine other instances where Democrats held fewer Senate seats than they do today: 1921 (37), 1923 (43), 1925 (40), 1929 (39), 1947 (45), 1997 and 1999 (45 each), 2005 (44) and 2015 (44). As in the Senate, the 1920s were a rough decade for House Democrats. The party’s weakest showing in the House was in 1920, when Democrats held 131 seats to Republicans’ 303, according to RCP data. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Brookings data shows six other instances when Democrats held fewer than the 193 seats they boast today. State legislatures At the state legislative level, Democrats have ceded enormous power to Republicans over the past decade. In 2008, Democrats controlled twice as many legislatures as the GOP (24-14). But Democrats’ fortunes began to reverse with their 2010 midterm "shellacking" (to borrow Obama’s phrase). See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com John Mahoney, a policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said it was accurate to say Democrats are at near-historical lows in this arena. "There are currently 3,125 Ds serving in state legislatures, which is the lowest since 1928 when there were 3,057 Ds serving," Mahoney said. "The lowest ever (since 1900) Democratic representation in the states was in 1920 when only 2,545 Ds were serving in state legislatures." Governor’s mansion A look at Democrats’ standing in governships over the past decade shows a similarly declining trend, placing the party in one of its weakest positions over the past century. Democrats now hold 16 governors mansions, compared to 33 controlled by Republicans. (Gov. Bill Walker of Alaska is an Independent.) See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com According to RCP data, the only time Democrats had a weaker standing in the past 100 years was in 1920, when they controlled a mere 14 governorships. One thing to remember As we have noted in the past, the Democratic decline under Obama that produced the current low point was unusually big, but it was hardly unprecedented. Since World War II, no two-term president (or presidential tag team) has ever gained Senate seats, House seats, governorships, or state legislative chambers over an eight-year period. Rather, every single presidency has suffered substantial losses in each of those categories over the past seven decades. There has literally been no upside in down-ballot races for presidents as far back as Franklin D. Roosevelt. Our ruling Zakaria said, "When you tally up their representation in Congress, state legislatures and governorships, the Democrats almost have their lowest representation in about 100 years." Democrats wield less power than Republicans in each of these offices. In the 1920s, they had an even weaker standing relative to the GOP than they do today. But Zakaria hedged his bets by saying Democrats almost have their lowest representation in about 100 years — and the numbers appear to back him up. We rate this True. See Figure 5 on PolitiFact.com	None	Fareed Zakaria	None	None	None	2018-06-15T09:46:19	2018-06-10	['United_States_Congress', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-03557	"Forty-six cents of every dollar" Ohio could get for Medicaid expansion "is going to come from China or some other country that doesn’t like us very much."	false	/ohio/statements/2013/may/22/ron-maag/rep-ron-maag-says-46-percent-medicaid-expansion-mo/	Free money from Washington sure sounds enticing. But State Rep. Ron Maag, a Southwest Ohio Republican, says he doesn’t believe it’s really free. That’s one reason Maag does not want Ohio to expand Medicaid, the joint federal-state healthcare program for low-income Americans. The expansion money would come from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, providing states with Medicaid cash to enroll residents earning up to 138 percent of the poverty level. The federal government would provide full funding for the first three years, and then 90 percent. Besides skepticism about how much more Ohio might ultimately have to cover, Maag, of Warren County, doubts the federal government can really afford its portion, either. "Forty-six cents of every dollar that we would be getting from Washington, D.C., is going to come from China or some other country that doesn’t like us very much," he said at an Ohio House Finance and Appropriations Committee hearing on April 12. Plenty of Ohio Republicans have doubts about expanding Medicaid, but Maag’s statement stood out because it sounded contrary to federal assessments about the program’s financing. So we asked Maag to explain his claim. He told us in a telephone interview that the federal government already borrows 46 cents of every dollar it spends. He based that on a Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, report issued in December. The CBO report that Maag cited was a monthly review that showed the amount of money the government had spent (the outlays) so far in the fiscal year; the amount of revenue it took in (chiefly from taxes), and the difference between the two. The difference was in the negative column. That means the government had a deficit and must borrow to cover it. Divide the deficit by the outlays and you get the figure Maag stated -- 46 cents of every dollar spent as of that moment was deficit spending. That is not a projection, Maag said. "It’s an absolute." It was, at least, last December. And the percentage figure, 46, was high, prompting the Washington Times and several other media outlets to report it. But this CBO budget report covered a relatively narrow time frame, only two months. What would happen if you looked at a broader period, using the most current CBO report, issued May 7? Or the April report that was issued a week before Maag spoke? The deficit figure would change -- or, rather, it has changed. The CBO monthly review issued on April 5 provided figures for the first six months of the current fiscal year. They showed a lower level of deficits: 34 cents for every dollar of federal spending. Why had the deficit figure gone down? Part of it was due to more tax activity from an improving economy. Revenues were about 12 percent higher than for the same period in 2012 and spending was 3 percent lower, the CBO said. This was not a fluke. Subsequent CBO reports have noted the same thing: As the economy has improved, tax revenues have gone up and deficits down. OK, so the deficits are shrinking and Maag had not yet read the latest monthly CBO figures. (Doesn’t everyone in the Ohio General Assembly?) Let’s put aside the exact figure, for it is still a deficit. What about Maag’s broader point -- that Medicaid expansion under Obamacare would result in more deficit spending? That is not what the CBO -- the same nonpartisan office whose work Maag mentioned in defending part of this claim -- projects. The CBO has examined this several times, working with the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. Obamacare has costs, chiefly the cost of expanding health coverage with Medicaid and with subsidies for individuals and small employers who lack insurance, cannot afford it and cannot qualify for Medicaid. But it also has savings. Some of the savings are supposed to come from reducing the amount of money the federal government now pays to hospitals to care for the uninsured. In Ohio alone, the government will pay hospitals $7.4 billion less over the next 10 years, according to testimony to state lawmakers from Mike Abrams, president and CEO of the Ohio Hospital Association. Additionally, the federal government will get money from taxes on high-premium or "Cadillac" health care policies, from taxes on medical device sales, from penalties on employers who fail to provide insurance and, according to projections, from cuts and efficiencies geared to slow the growth rate of Medicare, the federal program for seniors. When the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, the CBO said the net savings would reduce deficits over 10 years by $143 billion. The CBO has taken a few additional swipes at this, and each time its projections show deficit reduction. When asked last year to examine what would happen if Obamacare were repealed, the CBO said deficits would grow by $109 billion between 2012 and 2022. Even though government costs would go down if Obamacare were repealed, so would the revenue and savings built into the health care bill. So we circle back to Maag’s claim that "Forty-six cents of every dollar that we would be getting from Washington, D.C. would come from China or some other country that doesn’t like us very much." His number was wrong and out of date. The CBO, whose projections both parties rely on, says deficits will go down, not up. We need not take up the last part of his sentence -- that the money would come from countries like China or others who don’t like the United States very much. But for the record, the Pentagon said last year that it does not view China’s holding of United States debt as a threat. Maag’s instincts tell him he is right. But the facts, projections and law, as they exist today, do not support his claim. We rate it False.	None	Ron Maag	None	None	None	2013-05-22T15:58:40	2013-04-12	['China', 'Ohio']
-wast-00111	"Smugglers prioritize profit over people. And when aliens pay them to get here, they are contributing $500 million a year \xe2\x80\x94 or more \xe2\x80\x94 to groups that are fueling greater violence and instability in America and the region.	2 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/21/are-human-smuggling-cartels-at-the-u-s-border-earning-500-million-a-year/	None	None	Kirstjen Nielsen	Glenn Kessler	None	Are human-smuggling cartels at the U.S. border earning $500 million a year?	May 21	None	['United_States']
-goop-00270	Queen Elizabeth Escaped Assassination Attempt?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/queen-elizabeth-assassination-attempt-terrorist-attack/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Queen Elizabeth Escaped Assassination Attempt?	3:00 am, September 14, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03565	A Hillary Clinton supporter defecated on a sign in protest of Donald Trump.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-supporter-defecated-on-sign/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Hillary Clinton Supporter Defecated on Trump Sign?	11 November 2016	None	['Donald_Trump', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-09798	"Every other democracy in the world has a health care system that covers everybody, and we don't."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/15/howard-dean/dean-says-us-only-democracy-without-universal-heal/	Supporters of health care reform have often said health coverage in the United States lags behind other countries. On the Sept. 13 edition of NBC's Meet the Press , former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean said the United States should meet the standards of its international peers. Dean, who just stepped down after serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said that "America can do anything. Every other democracy in the world has a health care system that covers everybody, and we don't. Of course we can do this. How ridiculous." But is he right that the United States is alone among democracies? No. It is true that most, if not all, industrialized democracies in Western Europe have systems that experts consider universal coverage, as do wealthier countries such as Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. But other democracies fall short, according to international statistics and a half-dozen experts we spoke with. While dozens of countries are classified as democracies, we chose to examine a few that are large and have been politically stable in recent years. Here's the lowdown on their degree of health coverage: -- India. In the cities, and especially for families with means, the medical care ranks among the best in the world. But hundreds of millions of Indians are desperately poor, and about three-quarters live in rural villages. For these Indians, health care is sporadic and substandard. "In theory, India has a publicly financed and publicly provided health care delivery system, aside from its large private sector, that is available at heavily subsidized rates to everyone," said Ajay Mahal, an international health economist at Harvard's School of Public Health. "Thus, one could say that it does have a health system that 'covers' everybody. In practice, however, at least at primary health care facilities in rural areas, doctors and health workers are often absent from work. Drugs tend to be unavailable in many public facilities and there are long lines to contend with at public hospitals. This leads to lots of people opting for private care — and for that they have to pay out of pocket. In this sense you could say that the system does not cover everybody." -- Mexico. The United States' southern neighbor has a constitution that guarantees universal health care, and observers credit the Mexican government with launching Seguro Popular, a federal program that targets the uninsured. For better-off Mexicans, health insurance and facilities are similar to what is found in richer nations. But in practice, the Mexican system falls short of universal coverage. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of wealthy countries that includes Mexico, reported that in 2007, 65.7 percent of Mexicans had either public or private health insurance. All other OECD countries — except for Turkey (see below) and the United States — either reached 100 percent or came very close to doing so. David C. Warner, a professor of health and social policy at the University of Texas who has studied health care in Mexico, said that "in reality, I would say it falls short" of universal coverage. Mexicans are "guaranteed public health clinics and hospitals, but those tend to be fairly spotty." -- Turkey. The other OECD nation besides the United States to fall short of full coverage is Turkey. The most recent statistics, from 2003, show that 67.2 percent of Turks were covered. A 2008 report by the U.S. Library of Congress found that "the rural population is poorly served by the health care system" and that "workers in Turkey’s large informal economic sector generally lack health coverage." For the past six years, the governing party has been implementing a plan to broaden coverage, so the number has likely risen. "Turkey is in transition to make health care universal," said Mustafa Younis, a health economist at Jackson State University who has studied the Turkish system. A number of other large democratic countries have struggled with carrying out their stated promises to provide universal coverage. In South Africa and the Philippines, for instance, widespread poverty, insufficient health budgets and a shaky medical infrastructure — especially in rural areas — have posed steep challenges, experts say. We called Dean to ask about his comment. A spokeswoman said that the former governor "simply misspoke. He meant to say, as he has for years, that every other industrialized democracy" has universal coverage. If Dean had said that, he'd probably be right. But on Meet the Press , he didn't, so we rate his statement False.	None	Howard Dean	None	None	None	2009-09-15T18:27:53	2009-09-13	['None']
-pomt-13026	Says Donald Trump "won more counties than any candidate on our side since Ronald Reagan."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/dec/04/mike-pence/mike-pence-says-donald-trump-won-most-counties-rep/	With a split in the 2016 Electoral College and popular votes, there’s been an unusual amount of jockeying this year over how to frame the Election Day results. On the Dec. 4, 2016, edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, Vice President-elect Mike Pence used the yardstick of counties won to explain why Donald Trump’s victory was a watershed. "To be around Donald Trump, as you know, having known him for a number of years, is to be around a man of boundless energy from literally the day after the election," he said, "a historic election where he won 30 out of 50 states (and) more counties than any candidate on our side since Ronald Reagan." Is this correct? It is, though election experts say it speaks to longtime Republican dominance in rural areas. A closer look at the numbers We were able to secure statistics for counties won by each presidential candidate from Dave Leip, creator of the indispensable "Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections" website. The following chart shows the breakdown in counties won by each party’s nominee going back to 1984, which was Reagan’s last election as well as the one in which he won every state except one (Minnesota). Two housekeeping notes: The data for 2016 is preliminary, and Alaska doesn’t calculate vote data by borough, which is that state’s equivalent of a county. Election Republican counties won Democratic counties won Independent counties won 2016 2,623 489 0 2012 2,420 693 0 2008 2,238 875 0 2004 2,530 583 0 2000 2,397 659 0 1996 1,587 1,526 0 1992 1,582 1,519 15 1988 2,295 820 0 1984 2,781 334 0 So Pence is on target that the number of counties won by Trump exceeds the number of counties won by every Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984. For a more visual look, here are maps showing the counties won by the parties in each of those elections. Note that the 2016 map, from the Washington Post, uses the now-traditional Democratic blue-Republican red color scheme. 2016 The rest of the maps, from Leip's website, use blue coloring for Republican counties and red coloring for Democratic counties. (For the record, Leip started using his coloring code in 1994, before the current version became standard; he says that changing every map on his site would require an enormous time commitment.) 2012 2008 2004 2000 1996 1992 1988 1984 Trump receives credit from electoral specialists for expanding the Republican footprint, notably in places that had previously backed Barack Obama. According to a calculation by Time magazine, Trump won 220 counties that had voted for Obama in 2012, while Hillary Clinton took far fewer -- 17 -- that had gone for Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee. And Trump outperformed Romney’s vote share in 2,728 counties, compared to just 383 where Clinton outperformed Obama. But the places where Clinton performed better than Obama did were almost always in much more populous counties. According to Time’s calculations, the counties where Clinton gained ground on Obama had a median of 75,554 voters in 2016. The comparable figure for the counties where Trump exceeded Romney’s performance was 9,905 voters. So the median Clinton-trending county was more than seven times bigger than the median Trump-trending county. The divide doesn’t stop at population. Mark Muro and Sifan Liu of the Brookings Institution crunched the numbers on the overall economic output of Clinton and Trump counties. Their finding? Clinton’s comparatively tiny number of counties "encompassed a massive 64 percent of America’s economic activity," compared to 36 percent for Trump’s much larger stable of counties. Here’s a graphical representation of what they found, with Clinton counties in blue and Trump counties in red, and each county’s rectangle scaled to the size of the output in that county: "Here you can see very clearly that with the exceptions of the Phoenix and Fort Worth areas and a big chunk of Long Island, Clinton won every large-sized county economy in the country," the authors wrote. "Trumpland consists of hundreds and hundreds of tiny low-output locations that comprise the non-metropolitan hinterland of America, along with some suburban and exurban metro counties." All of this illustrates a general pattern for Democrats in recent election cycles: They have run strongly in populous and economically growing urban and suburban areas, but poorly in lightly populated rural areas. This has been true for the entire period we’re looking at -- in fact, Bill Clinton never managed to win more counties during his two victories in the 1990s -- but the partisan disparity has been growing steadily. And the pattern reached a new apogee with the Trump vs. Clinton race. This helps explain why Clinton has so far won 2.6 million more votes than Trump did -- almost 2 percentage points more -- while losing so many counties. "Loving County, Texas, has a population of 82, while California’s Los Angeles County has over 9.8 million," said Costas Panagopoulos, a Fordham University political scientist. "The number of counties won is not necessarily a meaningful indicator, absent any consideration of the population of these counties." Seth Masket, a University of Denver political scientist, agreed. "Partisanship increasingly correlates with urbanism," he said. "There are a lot more rural counties than urban ones, so I'd expect Republicans to be winning more and more counties over time. So the claim that the GOP is winning more counties is possibly an interesting reflection on residential living patterns, but it doesn't really reflect what the voters wanted or what the government has a mandate to address." Our ruling Pence said that Trump "won more counties than any candidate on our side since Ronald Reagan." The electoral results leave little doubt that Trump expanded Republican success compared to Romney’s baseline in many corners of the country. However, it’s important not to overstate the importance of the statistic Pence cited. Clinton may have won fewer counties overall, but the ones she did win tended to be much more populous and economically dynamic. The statement is accurate, but it needs an asterisk, so we rate it Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/ea7c6f37-927c-4edc-9de7-f78fd53257aa	None	Mike Pence	None	None	None	2016-12-04T17:54:39	2016-12-04	['Ronald_Reagan']
-snes-01522	A video shows a ghost haunting a hallway at a school in Ireland.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ghost-on-camera-hallways-ireland-school/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Was a Ghost Caught on Camera in the Hallways of an Irish School?	26 October 2017	None	['Republic_of_Ireland']
-clck-00038	Marine life has nothing whatsoever to fear from ocean acidification.	unsupported	https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/ocean-acidification-expected-harm-marine-ecosystems-overall-cherry-picking-can-lead-opposite-conclusion/	None	None	None	None	None	Ocean acidification is expected to harm marine ecosystems overall, cherry-picking can lead to the opposite conclusion	[' Mike Wallace, The Spectator, 30 Apr. 2016 \xa0 ']	None	['None']
-goop-02677	Billy Bush Hosting Fox Show “Top 30,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/billy-bush-not-hosting-fox-show-top-30-fake-news/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Billy Bush NOT Hosting Fox Show “Top 30,” Despite Report	3:01 pm, July 13, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04834	Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is sending out pink “Woman Cards” to those who donate to her campaign.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-embraces-the-woman-card/	None	Politicians	None	Stephanie Larsen	None	Hillary Clinton Embraces the ‘Woman Card’	30 April 2016	None	['None']
-goop-02157	Leonardo DiCaprio Becoming Antisocial Amid Midlife Crisis?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/leonardo-dicaprio-midlife-crisis-antisocial/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Leonardo DiCaprio Becoming Antisocial Amid Midlife Crisis?	12:35 am, November 23, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02262	Coconut Oil May Help Alzheimer’s Victims	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/coconut-oil-4-alzheimer/	None	medical	None	None	None	Coconut Oil May Help Alzheimer’s Victims	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-farg-00437	“Maine House Democrats Vote to Allow Female Genital Mutilation.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/04/false-headline-on-a-hot-topic/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Saranac Hale Spencer	['false stories']	False Headline on a Hot Topic	April 27, 2018	2018-04-27 22:39:30 UTC	['None']
-faly-00054	Fact Check: Are more people travelling in Airplanes than in AC trains?	unverified	https://factly.in/fact-check-are-more-people-travelling-in-airplanes-than-in-ac-trains/	Fact: While it is true that the National Civil Aviation Policy was unveiled in 2016, it is not clear what the government meant by transformation of the sector. Hence the claim is UNVERIFIED.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Are more people travelling in Airplanes than in AC trains?	None	None	['None']
-pomt-09269	Says the American public "overwhelmingly opposed" Democratic-steered health care plan.	half-true	/texas/statements/2010/apr/29/kay-bailey-hutchison/sen-kay-bailey-hutchison-says-democrats-passed-hea/	U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, speaking for Republicans in response to President Barack Obama’s weekly radio address on Saturday, spiced a call for keeping watch over the nation’s financial sector with a ‘plaint about Democrats’ stewardship of recently adopted health care legislation. "Americans are troubled," Hutchison said, "by the way Democrats forced their health care bill on the public that overwhelmingly opposed it." We missed the whips and chains in the health-care fight and wondered if Hutchison imagined things, considering key actions took place by majority votes. That said, we're setting aside this part of her statement as partisan hyperbole. For this article, we’re focusing on Hutchison’s claim that the American public "overwhelmingly opposed" the health care plan. PolitiFact.com previously looked at references to public opinion and the health care legislation. In February, it found Mostly True a statement by Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona, that 75 percent of the American people "have said either don't do anything (on health care) or start over." And in March, PolitiFact.com rated as Half True Democratic U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth's statement that polling showed almost 40 percent of Americans opposed the health-care plan because they didn’t think it went far enough. Responding to our inquiry, Hutchison spokesman Jeff Sadosky told us that from late April 2009 to late April this year, telephone calls and letters mostly sent by Texans to the senior Texas senator ran heavily against "Obama’s health care" approach. More than 18,100 callers were opposed while 4,830 were in favor; about 75 percent of more than 350,000 letters that Hutchison received were against the reform, Sadosky said. Still, signals from Texas constituents don't necessarily demonstrate national sentiment. We turned next to polls taken before and after the final congressional action, which was followed in late March by Obama signing the plan into law. According to almost every poll we found, more Americans opposed action than favored it as the debate reached its climax. According to a Gallup poll taken March 4-7, weeks before the final votes, 48 percent of Americans said they would advise their representative to vote against an Obama health-care reform measure with 45 percent saying they’d advise a favorable vote. At the time, Gallup said the result confirmed "the generally divided nature of public opinion on health care legislation." Seeking to gauge whether Americans' opposition was overwhelming, as Hutchison puts it, we reviewed summaries of polls compiled by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation, a reliable font of information on health care. From our sampling: A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll taken March 19-21 asked individuals if they generally favored or opposed the health care plan then awaiting final action. The tally: 39 percent in favor, 59 percent against and 2 percent with no opinion. A Bloomberg poll taken those same days found 38 percent of respondents in favor, 50 percent opposed and 12 percent not sure. Some other polls showed a narrower approval/disapproval gap. A Quinnipiac University poll taken March 22-23 found 40 percent mostly approving of the health care system changes just passed by Congress, 49 percent mostly disapproving and 11 percent not knowing or answering. In a CBS News poll taken March 18-23, 42 percent said they approved of the "current health care reform" measure, 46 percent were opposed and 12 percent said they did not know or declined to answer. And a poll taken March 23-26 by The Washington Post found 46 percent of respondents supporting the changes to the health care system just enacted by Congress and Obama with 46 percent opposed. A Gallup poll taken in early April showed a near-even break between Americans saying passage of the plan was a bad thing and Americans saying it was good. Forty-nine percent of individuals polled April 8-11 said it was a bad thing with 45 percent saying it was good. Generally, Gallup writes, "over the past year, Americans have been remarkably stable in their assessments of the bill, with neither supporters nor opponents able to generate sustained majority agreement with their position." Doubts remain high in Texas, according to an April 14 telephone poll by Rasmussen Reports. Sixty-seven percent of surveyed likely voters favor a proposal to repeal the health care plan to stop it from taking effect, with 28 percent opposing such a move. Where does all this leave Hutchison’s claim of overwhelming opposition at the time lawmakers acted? Certainly, many Texans clamored against approval. And national polls show more Americans opposed the action than supported it. But Hutchison overreaches by calling that opposition overwhelming. We rate Hutchison’s statement as Half True.	None	Kay Bailey Hutchison	None	None	None	2010-04-29T21:21:57	2010-04-24	['United_States']
-pomt-01576	Says U.S. House candidate Carlos Curbelo "supported ending the Medicare guarantee."	false	/florida/statements/2014/sep/09/joe-garcia/does-republican-carlos-curbelo-support-ending-medi/	U.S. Rep. Joe Garcia, D-Miami, portrays his Republican challenger Carlos Curbelo as out of touch with middle-class residents in his South Florida district when it comes to issues such as Medicare benefits. A Web ad repeatedly shows Curbelo in a TV interview saying "if anybody has a complaint, file it," while the ad lists a litany of attacks on Curbelo. (That quote is unrelated to Medicare and relates to a situation involving Curbelo’s work as a lobbyist.) Narrator: "When Curbelo supported ending the Medicare guarantee? Curbelo: "If anyone has a complaint, file it." Here we will fact-check whether Curbelo "supported ending the Medicare guarantee" -- an attack that could draw the attention of senior voters in the district that spans Miami to Key West. Paul Ryan’s proposals for Medicare The ad provides no explanation about what it would mean to end the Medicare guarantee or why Garcia claims that is Curbelo’s view. Curbelo is a Miami-Dade school board member who has never served in Congress so he hasn’t voted on any Medicare plan. Garcia’s attack relates to Curbelo’s statement in April 2014 about a GOP budget plan by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Ryan, the House budget chairman, has included proposals to overhaul Medicare in his past few budget proposals with some changes along the way. When the Miami Herald asked Curbelo in April about whether he supported Ryan’s plan in response to a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attack, Curbelo said, "I would vote for any budget that helps create jobs and rewards hard work, protects Medicare for seniors, and stops immorally piling debt on my generation and on my daughters' generation. While I have not fully reviewed this budget I'm inclined to support it." So what did the DCCC mean about ending the Medicare "guarantee"? The clearest -- and least controversial -- explanation of how Medicare is a guarantee is that once you turn 65, you get Medicare, no questions asked. That’s been the case since Medicare was established in 1965. Medicare is structured as a defined-benefit plan rather than a defined-contribution plan. That means it specifies the benefits provided, rather than letting benefits depend on the amount of money paid into the system. But the federal government doesn’t guarantee that it will pay for every possible service or treatment -- Medigap insurance plans have emerged to pay for the procedures that Medicare doesn’t cover. And Congress and the president can change what is covered under Medicare. The Affordable Care Act makes changes to Medicare to reduce future growth of the program. Ryan has released multiple versions of his Medicare plan the past few years. The plan Ryan released this year advocates reforming Medicare into a "premium support" program in which, starting in 2024, every new beneficiary would go into the premium-support system, but they will be able to choose whether their premium-support payment goes to help pay for a private plan or a traditional fee-for-service plan. (Critics refer to this as a voucher plan, and it does have some similarities.) A spokesman for Ryan said the premium support payment would be pegged to the average bid. For those who were 55 or older in 2013, they would remain in the traditional Medicare system. Ryan also raises the eligibility from age 65 to 67. Ryan’s proposal to overhaul Medicare has not gone far because it lacks support in the Democratic-controlled Senate. The ‘guarantee’ of Medicare Simply saying that Ryan’s plan is "ending the Medicare guarantee" is a misleading overstatement. If we talk about the "Medicare guarantee" simply as seniors getting Medicare when they hit a certain age, they are still guaranteed to get it. "It is a fundamental change to Medicare, but saying that it ends the guarantee is too far, because everyone would still get some kind of insurance," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who has advised Republican Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama on health care matters. Michael Tanner, a health care expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that under Ryan’s plan Medicare "is liable to be a smaller benefit, but it still is going to be a universal benefit. While it's going to be a smaller benefit, so is President Obama’s." Some Medicare experts we interviewed argued that it is unclear what types of services would remain guaranteed. "The Ryan plan keeps changing, lacks key details, and has multiple dimensions, making it hard to evaluate," said Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy professor at the University of North Carolina. Today, Medicare has a host of services that are covered including a number of days in the hospital or nursing home and covers specified tests and procedures. "These are ‘guaranteed.’ What would be covered under an insurance plan that people might buy with a voucher is not specified in law," said Henry J. Aaron, a senior fellow at Brookings Institute. "Benefits could erode over time if the voucher was not increased as fast as medical costs rise, a standard feature of many voucher plans, unless people ponied up additional premium payments that might rise rapidly if they want to maintain breadth of coverage." At this point, Ryan’s plan leaves advocates with questions. "I don’t know for certain if there would be guaranteed core benefits or if the benefits that are guaranteed now would have to be in those plans," said Judith Stein, executive director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy. "It would be substantially different." What Curbelo says Curbelo told PolitiFact Florida that he is against a voucher or premium-support plan for Medicare. "I’ve never supported the voucher concept," Curbelo said. "I don’t think we need to do that. I think we can preserve Medicare as it exists today through other reforms." Curbelo calls for "eliminating the rampant fraud in fee-for-service, adjusting the eligibility age to account for longer lifespan, and potentially, means testing," his campaign spokesman Wadi Gaitan told PolitiFact Florida. Curbelo, however, doesn’t deny that he said he supported Ryan’s overall budget proposal, though he told PolitiFact Florida he disagrees with the premium-support plan within it. "Given a choice between the GOP budget and the Democrats’ budget, he would have supported the GOP budget," Gaitan said. Accusing a Republican of wanting to get rid of the "Medicare guarantee" is a common Democratic tactic this year -- in fact, Garcia’s attack on Curbelo is similar to one in April by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. (The DCCC has used a similar attack on U.S. Rep Steve Southerland, R-Fla., and the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee has used it against GOP Senate candidate Joni Ernst in Iowa.) This Democratic talking point is the latest variation on the Democratic line that "Republicans voted to end Medicare," which PolitiFact rated Lie of the Year in 2011. Our ruling Garcia said "Curbelo supported ending the Medicare guarantee." The Democrats are hanging this claim on a very weak thread: when asked about Ryan’s budget proposal which includes a Medicare overhaul Curbelo said, "While I have not fully reviewed this budget I'm inclined to support it." That statement sheds no light on Curbelo’s views on changing Medicare. Ryan’s plan would change Medicare but it wouldn’t end the guarantee that seniors get it when they hit a certain age. And Curbelo says he wants to reform Medicare in other ways that don’t involve Ryan’s premium-support plan. We rate this claim False.	None	Joe Garcia	None	None	None	2014-09-09T12:22:10	2014-09-05	['None']
-pomt-12076	Says Aaron Rodgers "is not the highest tax rate payer" in Wisconsin, it's "the single mom getting 24 grand in benefits with two kids who will lose 80 cents on the dollar if she goes and takes a job."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2017/sep/01/paul-ryan/paul-ryan-says-single-mom-who-takes-job-not-packer/	A Dominican nun took the microphone at a CNN town hall in Racine, Wis. with U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, noted that they are both Catholics, and said to him: I’d like to ask you how you see yourself upholding the church’s social teaching that has the idea that God is always on the side of the poor and dispossessed. The Janesville Republican responded, in part, by referring to the Green Bay Packers’ star quarterback -- and arguing that welfare programs need to be reformed so that they don’t discourage work. Alluding to high tax rates he had criticized earlier in the Aug. 21, 2017 forum, Ryan said: I was telling you about these successful small businesses in Wisconsin -- they’ve got a 44.6 percent tax rate. That’s not the highest tax rate payer. I mean, Aaron Rodgers -- who deserves every salary -- is not the highest tax rate payer in this state. You know who it is? It’s the single mom getting 24 grand in benefits with two kids who would lose 80 cents on the dollar if she goes and takes a job. We have to fix that. Ryan essentially repeated the claim three days later while visiting Boeing in Washington State, comparing the aerospace giant and its corporate tax rate to the same single mother. He has also made nearly the same claim in the past, including at least twice in 2016. An unemployed single parent on public assistance who takes a job doesn’t suddenly start paying an income tax rate of 80 percent. And though Ryan has a point, the example he gives is rare, not common. Tax rates For 2017, Rodgers’ contract with the Packers pays him a base salary of $12.55 million. That alone puts him in the income brackets with the highest tax rates: 7.65 percent for Wisconsin, which applies to taxable incomes over $244,750 39.6 percent for federal, for taxable incomes of $418,401 and over That means Rodgers’ marginal rate -- the amount paid on the last dollar of income -- is a total rate of 47.25 percent. (The state rate plus the federal one.) So, what happens to the unemployed single mother, in Ryan’s scenario, who takes a job? Marginal tax rates Ryan spokesman Ian Martorana told us Ryan’s reference was not to the income tax rate paid by the single mother, but rather her effective marginal tax rate -- which takes into account public benefits that are lost as a result of an increase in income. Think of losing benefits as a result of taking a job as a tax. Ryan argues that by taking a job, the woman in his example would lose 80 cents in benefits for every $1 in income earned from taking a job. That would be a marginal tax rate of 80 percent. Experts told us that wouldn’t be the highest marginal tax rate anyone pays, but it would be among the highest. The problem is, Ryan’s statement suggests the 80 percent rate is relatively common. Experts told us it’s possible, but very rare, that a single unemployed parent could collect $24,000 a year in public benefits. She likely would need to receive relatively uncommon housing assistance in addition to food stamps, Medicaid and other benefits. The experts also said such a person would be hit with what amounts to an 80 percent tax rate only if she takes a job within a narrow income range above the poverty level -- not, for example, if the job pays minimum wage. A 2015 research paper Ryan’s office cited to us from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office does not provide marginal tax rates for a single parent like the one Ryan described. However, for a single parent with one child -- and only within a narrow income range -- the marginal tax rate for 2016 averaged 75 percent Another source cited by Ryan, 2015 testimony to Congress from the nonprofit Urban Institute, also said marginal tax rates can reach 75 percent. But that occurs among relatively few people -- poverty-level workers who not only receive benefits such as food stamps and health insurance, but much less common housing assistance, and then begin earning higher incomes within a narrow range above the poverty level. In contrast, an unemployed person who takes a job would almost never face an 80 percent marginal tax rate, experts told us. That’s because while a newly employed person might lose some benefits by becoming employed, she would gain benefits from earned income and child care tax credits that come with taking a job. Other data For example, in a 2014 paper, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, argued that a single mother of two is better off by taking a job, even if it pays only $12,000 per year. She would lose some food stamps and have to pay income taxes. But by gaining the earned income and child tax credits, "that $12,000 job leads to a $16,630 increase in income," according to the paper. Only in narrow circumstances -- with an income of less than $29,000 and receiving "an unusual combination of government benefits" -- would the marginal tax rate for a single mother of two exceed 80 percent, according to a 2016 paper by the center. "In the overwhelming majority of cases, in fact, adults in poverty are significantly better off if they get a job, work more hours, or receive a wage hike," that paper said. At the same time, even if marginal tax rates don’t reach 80 percent for most lower-income people, they are perceived as a problem. The paper from the nonpartisan CBO says "when marginal tax rates are high, people tend to respond to the smaller financial gain from employment by working fewer hours, altering the intensity of their work, or not working at all." And Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance president Todd Berry told us: "It is a real problem for anyone moving up the income scale from poverty, because so many of these programs are income-conditioned. The main point to be made here is how these programs are designed can create powerful disincentives" to work. Our rating Ryan says Aaron Rodgers "is not the highest tax rate payer" in Wisconsin, it's "the single mom getting 24 grand in benefits with two kids who will lose 80 cents on the dollar if she goes and takes a job." There’s some mixing of apples and oranges here. The reference to Rodgers is for the actual highest rate he would pay for income taxes. With regard to the single mother, Ryan is referring to her marginal tax rate -- how much in public benefits she would lose by taking a job. Ryan is correct that it’s possible for the woman he describes to lose 80 cents in benefits for every $1 in income earned -- an 80 percent marginal tax rate. But that occurs in very rare cases where the mother would be receiving a higher than typical set of public benefits and would take a job within a narrow income range above the poverty level. The vast majority of lower income people aren’t hit with a marginal tax rate as high as 80 percent, although even lower rates are considered strong disincentives to work. And advocates for the poor say the unemployed generally are better off financially by taking a job, even if they lose some public assistance. For a statement that contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, our rating is Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com A footnote Ryan had been under criticism for not holding town halls in his southern Wisconsin district that were open to the public. We rated as Mostly True a claim from Randy Bryce, a Democrat who is running for Ryan’s seat in 2018, that Ryan had not done a public town hall in the district for more than 600 days. Ryan had turned to telephone town halls and events held in workplaces, which had limited public access. The CNN event was something of a hybrid: members of the public could apply to CNN to attend, but it was not like a traditional town hall held in a public building that anyone could enter. In Racine, Ryan drew headlines for criticizing remarks made by President Donald Trump about racial violence nine days earlier in Charlottesville, Va. But a portion of the CNN town hall was spent discussing taxes. More on Ryan, Rodgers and taxes In Context: Scott Walker, Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre True: Ryan says the U.S. "tax rate on successful small businesses is 44.6 percent," while the business tax rate in Canada is 15 percent. Mostly True: Trump in Wisconsin says America’s federal business tax rate is the highest "in the world."	None	Paul Ryan	None	None	None	2017-09-01T05:00:00	2017-08-21	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-14505	"In Ohio, more than half the providers of safe and legal abortion have had to shut down" since Gov. John Kasich took office in 2011.	half-true	/ohio/statements/2016/feb/22/cecile-richards/planned-parenthoods-ceo-says-half-ohios-abortion-c/	Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, told a crowd of women in Los Angeles how she really feels about the idea of Gov. John Kasich, R-Ohio, winning the presidential election: "It would be a complete and utter disaster." She continued, "Gov. Kasich has come off as a moderate, only by comparison to Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, but it’s really important to know in Ohio, more than half the providers of safe and legal abortion have had to shut down. He signed 17 separate bills to restrict reproductive access in the state." We looked more closely to find out how many of Ohio’s abortion providers had closed, and whether it could be attributed to Kasich’s leadership. Ohio’s chapter of NARAL Pro-Choice America has been keeping tabs on clinic closings and openings. They say that since 2011, Kasich’s first year in office, eight of the 16 surgical abortion clinics have closed or stopped performing abortions. A new provider in Akron opened in the summer of 2015, bringing the total number of functioning surgical abortion clinics in the state to nine. PolitiFact Ohio confirmed NARAL’s tally of closings in Ohio, in chronological order: February 2011, the Mahoning Valley Women’s Center, Youngstown June 2012, Capital Care Network, Columbus April 2013, Capital Care Network, Akron October 2013, Center for Choice, Toledo October 2013, Cleveland Center for Women’s Health June 2014, Cleveland Surgi-Center August 2014, Complete Healthcare for Women, Columbus August 2014, Women’s Medical Center of Cincinnati They key legislation that caused at least four of the clinics to close was passed in Ohio’s 2013 budget (HB 59). Kasich signed into law regulations that equate to a Catch-22 for abortion providers. HB 59 requires all ambulatory surgical facilities to have a transfer agreement with a local hospital to admit patients in case of emergency. At the same time, the law prohibits public hospitals from entering into transfer agreements with abortion providers. H.B. 59, 130th Gen. Assemb., Reg. Sess. (Ohio 2013) In 2013, the New York Times wrote about Ohio’s changing climate for women’s reproductive rights. "Ohio has become a laboratory for what anti-abortion leaders call the incremental strategy — passing a web of rules designed to push the hazy boundaries of Supreme Court guidelines without flagrantly violating them." Michael Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, put it more succinctly last year, when the Columbus Dispatch quoted him as saying, "The goal is to end abortion." The transfer agreement legislation shut down Toledo’s Center for Choice; the center was unable to get a transfer agreement from a private hospital after legislation outlawed their agreement with the public University of Toledo Medical Center. Today, their phone number forwards calls to a clinic in Michigan, the next-closest location for women seeking surgical abortions in the area. Likewise, the Women’s Medical Center of Cincinnati was denied an exception to their transfer agreement from the Ohio Health Department and went to court to fight the decision in Hamilton County. The center lost in court and closed in August 2014. A representative at Cleveland’s Surgi-Center told PolitiFact that when their location’s lease was up in July 2014, they had to move, which meant applying for a new ambulatory surgical center license through the Ohio Department of Health. "Knowing all the problems other clinics were having," the Surgi-Center stopped performing abortions. They still provide reproductive health services like STD screening and birth control. The Cleveland Center for Women’s Health closed in 2013 and relocated to Detroit, Mich., where there are fewer regulations for clinics that do abortions. The other four shuttered abortion providers closed for reasons that are not as directly tied to state regulations. The Mahoning Valley center in Youngstown closed as a business decision, according to NARAL. The Capital Care Network location in Akron closed after state inspectors identified safety violations that temporarily halted services, and the provider opted to close rather than correct the issues. In Columbus, Capital Care merged with Founders’ Women’s Health, another abortion provider. Finally, according to NARAL, the doctors with Complete Healthcare for Women, who still provide complete women’s health care services other than surgical abortions, never gave an explanation for why they stopped performing the procedures after 2014. Our ruling Richards said that "more than half the providers of safe and legal abortion have had to shut down." PolitiFact confirmed that since 2011, seven abortion providers have closed and an eighth stopped performing surgical abortions. That’s half of the previous 16 providers in the state -- not more than half. Also, four of the eight providers closed for reasons associated with provisions in HB 59, which Kasich signed. But that law hasn’t been directly tied to the other four abortion providers’ decisions to shut down. We rate Richards’ statement Half True.	None	Cecile Richards	None	None	None	2016-02-22T16:47:42	2016-02-09	['Ohio', 'John_Kasich']
-huca-00008	 "The (Green party's) resolution process is very different from other parties. Members come up with resolutions independently. Neither the leader nor anyone in the executive of the party can reject resolutions that comply with submission guidelines, nor does the party know ahead of time what resolutions will come forward. This grassroots process is a testament to the democratic values of the party." 	a little baloney	https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/08/11/green-party-bds-elizabeth-may-baloney-meter_n_11455428.html?utm_hp_ref=ca-baloney-meter	None	None	Green party news release	Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press	None	Green Party BDS Controversy: 'A Little Baloney' In Claim Resolution Process Is 'Very Different'	08/11/2016 01:34 EDT	2016.	['None']
-faan-00045	 “We made a clear commitment in the campaign to stop the bombing mission [in Iraq] by Canadian jets.”	factscan score: true	http://factscan.ca/justin-trudeau-clear-commitment-to-stop-the-bombing/	Ending Canada’s combat mission in Iraq, and specifically ending its contribution to bombing, were part of the Liberal Party platform that led to their election on October 19. 	None	Justin Trudeau	None	None	None	2015-11-17	n October 19.	['Canada', 'Iraq']
-vogo-00561	Fact Check TV: Grand Jury Power and OxyContin Deaths	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-tv-grand-jury-power-and-oxycontin-deaths/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Check TV: Grand Jury Power and OxyContin Deaths	June 28, 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-02306	Says President Barack Obama's acceptance of an "Islamic order and gold medal" was "unconstitutional."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/apr/01/facebook-posts/meme-says-barack-obamas-acceptance-islamic-order-a/	In the run-up to President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, a reader sent us a Facebook meme that addressed a previous Obama visit to the kingdom. The meme features a pair of photographs of Obama, in what appears to be a Saudi palace, receiving an elaborate medal and necklace over his head. The text says, "Unconstitutional!!! Accepting an Islamic order and gold medal, 2/2011." The text of the meme goes on to quote the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 9: "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State." We wondered whether Obama had received an honor from the Saudis, and if so, whether his acceptance of an "Islamic order and gold medal" was "unconstitutional." After a bit of digging, we discovered that the meme was referring to something that happened in June 2009 -- not February 2011, as the meme had said. It involved the awarding of the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit, which is considered Saudi Arabia’s highest honor. It’s named for the first monarch of Saudi Arabia, also known as Ibn Saud. (The Saudi Embassy didn’t return an inquiry for this article.) We should also note here that, even though the meme has a distinct anti-Obama tone, President George W. Bush also received the same award in January 2008. After the award was placed around Bush's neck, the Associated Press reported, the president and King Abdullah "exchanged the region's traditional double kiss. ‘I am honored,’ Bush said." So, partisans beware: Whatever truth we find for Obama, the same will go for Bush. What does the Constitution say? A look at the Constitution confirms that the meme correctly relays the passage, known as the "emoluments clause." The framers included the clause because it signaled an end to hereditary leadership. Not only would the United States avoid granting titles of nobility itself, it would also prevent its leaders from accepting them from other countries. Under the emoluments clause, the president clearly qualifies as a "person holding any Office of Profit or Trust." And in this case he certainly received something "from any King, Prince, or foreign State." So the key question is this: Does the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit qualify under one or more of the following categories. Is it a present? An emolument? An office? A title? We can quickly rule out "office." But the medallion is certainly a "present." Whether it’s an emolument (that is, a "gain from employment or position") or a title is a bit more up for grabs. Was it a "present"? Gifts -- tangible objects of more than trivial value -- are exchanged often in diplomacy, and there’s a well-established system for handling them. The portion of U.S. law known as 5 USC § 7342 ("Receipt and disposition of foreign gifts and decorations") sets out the conditions under which foreign gifts can be accepted. Essentially, a gift from a foreign country or foreign leader can be accepted on behalf of the United States, as long as it is handed over to an appropriate arm of the federal government, typically the General Services Administration or the National Archives. Often, these gifts find their way to presidential libraries, where the public can view them. The point is that they are property of the government, not the individual recipient. By passing this statute, Congress has essentially offered blanket consent for such acquisitions, without having to consider each one in a separate act. In the Jan. 18, 2011, edition of the Federal Register, the Obama administration officially disclosed the gift (a "large gold medallion with the Royal seal in a green leather display box" from "Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia") and confirmed its disposition to the National Archives. So the medallion as a "present" appears to pose no constitutional problems. Was it an "emolument" or a "title"? The answer to this question is murkier. On the one hand, J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, said the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit "is more than a mere medal. It confers an order, as indicated by its name, even if most people don’t take such things as seriously anymore." When King Saud created the order in the 1950s, Pham said, it was "modeled after the various orders of chivalry awarded by European royal houses," such as the United Kingdom’s Most Honorable Order of the Bath and Spain’s Order of Isabella the Catholic. Pham said these orders, both Saudi and European, "are differentiated from medals awarded for military service or civilian achievement. The latter are properly decorations, while the former confer membership, or honorary membership, in a class of individuals which, in former days, would have been referred to as having raised the recipient to the nobility if he or she did not already belong to it." In a 2009 Washington Post op-ed, Pham and Chapman University law professor Ronald Rotunda argued that "Washington, Madison and Hamilton would have clearly understood that the Abdul Aziz Order falls under the same ban they had in mind for any public officials coveting awards made under the honors system of the British monarchy." Other experts, however, say the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit is more accurately considered an award for civilian achievement, not a grant of nobility. "All countries have decorations or honors they bestow on both their own citizens and foreigners, usually in recognition of some deed or act, or in the case of foreigners, simply an expression of gratitude for their contribution to the good relations between the two countries," said Edward W. Gnehm Jr., a professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. "Many ambassadors receive similar medals or honors when they are leaving a post. They are certainly not a title, office or emolument." The ultimate argument against the order conferring a title stems from the specifics of how the Saudi royal family operates. "It is not a title of nobility, that is for sure," said F. Gregory Gause III, a Middle East specialist at the University of Vermont. "There is only one way into the ‘nobility’ in Saudi Arabia, and that is to be a member of the Al Saud family." The award, he said, is one "symbolizing achievement." Even Pham, who believes it’s fairer to say that acceptance into the order amounts to a title, agrees that the Facebook meme doesn’t describe the situation entirely accurately. Notably, he said, the meme is wrong to say that it’s an "Islamic order." "It is in fact open to non-Muslims, whereas the Saudi Collar of al-Badr is limited to Muslims," Pham said. Our ruling The meme says Obama's acceptance of an "Islamic order and gold medal" was "unconstitutional." Experts agree that Obama’s acceptance of the medallion and collar -- and their transferral to the National Archives -- is entirely constitutional, since the administration followed the longstanding rules on gifts set up by congressional statute. Experts are more divided, however, on whether acceptance of the medallion amounts to acceptance of a foreign title. Meanwhile, the meme errs in calling it an "Islamic order." On balance, we rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2014-04-01T15:58:30	2014-03-27	['Islam', 'Barack_Obama']
-snes-03836	Melania Trump had copied her statement regarding her husband's offensive statements about women from Hillary Clinton.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/melania-trump-copied-statement-from-hillary-clinton/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Melania Trump Copied Statement from Hillary Clinton	10 October 2016	None	['Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-04462	"We need a Senator who shows up to work. Sherrod Brown missed over 350 official votes."	mostly false	/ohio/statements/2012/oct/10/josh-mandel/josh-mandel-dings-sherrod-brown-missing-350-votes-/	For months, Democrats have accused Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel of neglecting his official responsibilities because he failed to attend the first fourteen state Board of Deposit meetings that occurred during his term. Mandel denies that he ducked his duties and says his office sent a representative to each meeting. PolitiFact Ohio rated a claim about his missing work because he was traveling, raising campaign money as Half True. Now Mandel, the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate against Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown, is airing a statewide television ad that says Brown is ignoring his official duties. The ad claims that Brown and other politicians in Washington "think they can live by a different set of rules," and dings Brown for missing more than 350 votes in Congress. "With 400,000 unemployed, we need a Senator who shows up to work," says the ad’s announcer, as the TV screen shows an empty chair. "Sherrod Brown missed over 350 official votes. When he finally showed up, voted to raise his own pay six times. Sherrod Brown, living by different rules than us." PolitiFact decided to look at the ad’s suggestion that Brown has not shown up for work and its claim that he missed over 350 official votes. A new release that announced the ad’s launch said Mandel’s campaign obtained its statistics from the GovTrack website. The news release also mentioned a fact missing from the ad that puts the missed votes in better perspective - they occurred over a period of more than 19 years, starting when Brown entered the U.S. House of Representatives in January 1993. A visit to the GovTrack website indicates there have been more than 10,000 recorded votes in that period. The largest number of Brown’s missed votes - 83 - occurred in 2000. He missed 13.7 percent of that year’s votes after suffering broken ribs and vertebrae in a car accident in Knox County. Brown spent more than a week in Mansfield MedCentral Hospital after the Jan. 30 crash, and missed occasional votes throughout the year because of follow-up medical treatments. For months after the crash, Brown wore an odd-looking plastic back brace around the U.S. Capitol. Then-President Clinton told Brown the brace made him resemble "a Roman soldier in a 1960s movie." Brown’s second highest year for missed votes was 2006, the year of his successful U.S. Senate race against incumbent GOP Sen. Mike DeWine. He missed 51 votes that year. Thirty-four of them were in its third quarter, the height of campaign season. Since he joined the U.S. Senate in 2007, GovTrack indicates that Brown has missed 21 out of 1779 votes - a 98.8 percent attendance record. This year, he hasn’t missed any votes. In 2011, he missed three. In 2010, he didn’t miss any. When asked why Mandel’s ad didn’t provide the context that Brown’s missed votes occurred over nearly two decades, Mandel spokesman Travis Considine said its claims are "factual," and observed that Brown’s missed vote rate was higher than the congressional median. The GovTrak website says the median rate of missed votes for all members of Congress is 2.5 percent, while Brown’s rate is 3 percent. "Why is it OK for Democrats to criticize Treasurer Mandel on meeting attendance but it’s not OK to question why Senator Brown missed more than 350 votes?" Considine asked in an email. "Are you employing a "different set of rules" for Brown and Mandel? " Brown’s campaign responded to the ad with a news release that claimed Mandel is "desperately trying to distract from his own appalling attendance record" by attacking Brown. It said Brown’s voting record would have been better if not for the car crash, and the fact that he had to care for his dying mother in 2009, a year when records show that Brown missed eight votes. There is an element of truth in Mandel’s claim: The ad correctly says that Brown has missed over 350 official votes. But it omits critical facts that would convey a different impression. It doesn’t mention those missed votes were spread over more than 19 years that includes Brown’s time in the U.S. House of Representatives and during that time more than 10,000 votes occurred. Brown’s voting attendance record throughout his congressional career - including time missed because of car crash injuries - is actually 96.5 percent. As a U.S. Senator, his attendance record is nearly 99 percent. Knowing those facts, and that Brown missed 351 out of 10,074 votes since January of 1993, would give a listener a different impression. On the Truth-O-Meter, the claim in the Mandel campaign ad rates Mostly False.	None	Josh Mandel	None	None	None	2012-10-10T06:00:00	2012-09-13	['None']
-pomt-07361	"Prices are going up. Unemployment is continuing to go up."	half-true	/texas/statements/2011/may/06/ron-paul/us-rep-ron-paul-says-prices-are-increasing-and-une/	U.S. Rep. Ron Paul is courting the belly vote. During the first 2012 presidential debate in South Carolina on Thursday, the Texas Republican said the economy will cause President Barack Obama’s re-election efforts to suffer. "My theory is that people vote from their bellies because it’s whether they’re hungry or not or have jobs and need things, that’s why people vote," Paul said. "And we’re in big trouble. Prices are going up, unemployment is continuing to go up." We decided to check whether both prices and unemployment are rising. Let’s start with the former. Cheryl Abbot, an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, told us that prices are almost always going up because of inflation — the question is whether prices have been increasing at a faster rate as of late. And the answer is yes. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index, year-over-year inflation rate has been accelerating since November 2010, when the rate was 1.1 percent. The bureau’s most recent data is from March, when the inflation rate was 2.7 percent. The price spike is "almost entirely due to gasoline prices," Abbot said. Take gasoline prices out of the picture, and the rate change is nominal, she said. What about unemployment? Flash back to January 2008, when the unemployment rate stood at a mere 5 percent. By October 2009, it was 10.1 percent. During most of 2010, unemployment hovered just below 10 percent, peaking in November at 9.8 percent. But since then, the rate has fallen every month, dropping to 8.8 percent in March. Until today, that is, when the the bureau reported that unemployment ticked up two-tenths of a point, to 9 percent, in April. That’s still high by historical standards, Abbot said, but she quibbles with Paul’s claim that unemployment "continues to go up." So do we. We have no qualms with Paul’s price claim, but unemployment has dropped steadily for four of the last five months. And the labor bureau didn’t report April’s uptick until after Paul made his debate talking point. We rate the statement Half True.	None	Ron Paul	None	None	None	2011-05-06T17:03:43	2011-05-05	['None']
-snes-05738	Photograph shows an enormous blue whale swimming underneath a boat.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/why-i39m-scared-of-the-ocean/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Why I’m Scared of the Ocean	24 April 2015	None	['None']
-tron-00371	Giant Florida Cane Spider Attacks House in Photo	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/giant-florida-cane-spider/	None	animals	None	None	['animals', 'facebook', 'photoshop']	Giant Florida Cane Spider Attacks House in Photo	Jul 11, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-03663	An 11-year-old girl was shot and killed by a police sniper at the Standing Rock pipeline protest site but the media covered up news of it.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/girl-shot-at-standing-rock/	None	Conspiracy Theories	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Girl Shot by Police Sniper at Standing Rock Protest	31 October 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-05651	"This bill allows Virginia to join about 23 other states that have an ultrasound procedure" before an abortion.	mostly true	/virginia/statements/2012/mar/21/bob-mcdonnell/mcdonnell-says-23-states-have-ultrasound-requireme/	During a rapid-fire exchange on Meet the Press earlier this month, Gov. Bob McDonnell rejected host David Gregory’s contention that the legislation puts Virginia in a socially conservative corner. "This bill allows Virginia to join about 23 other states that have an ultrasound procedure," said McDonnell, a Republican. "It’s actually only about seven that have these kind of procedures," Gregory interrupted. "No, but there’s 23 that require a woman to have an opportunity to see an ultrasound," McDonnell replied. We wondered if the governor’s number is correct. Debate over Virginia’s law this winter became a national story when it became clear that the measure would require use of an invasive, transvaginal ultrasound -- even against a woman’s will. At McDonnell’s urging, the Republican-led General Assembly eventually passed a toned-down measure mandating that women, at least 24 hours before an abortion, undergo a common abdominal ultrasound in which an imaging wand is rubbed across the stomach. The patient must be offered an opportunity to view the image and hear the fetal heartbeat. Victims of rape and incest are exempt from the law if the molestation or assault was reported to legal authorities. Taylor Thornley, a spokeswoman for McDonnell, said the governor got his statistics about other states from separate studies by two groups that seldom agree: The Guttmacher Institute, a research and advocacy organization that supports women’s access to birth control and abortions; and the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion. Neither group’s research includes Virginia’s law, which will become effective July 1. The National Right to Life Committee lists 23 states that have an "ultrasound option" and gives a brief description of each law. Guttmacher lists 21 states with ultrasound laws, including seven that mandate the test be performed before an abortion. Unlike the National Right to Life Committee, Guttmacher does not count North Carolina and Oklahoma, where the mandatory ultrasound laws have been stayed pending court challenges. Guttmacher shows the wide range of laws: Five states require that ultrasounds are offered to the woman by the provider: Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah. Nine states require that if an ultrasound is conducted to prepare for the abortion, the provider must offer to show the woman the image: Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia. Six states require an ultrasound for each abortion and the provider must offer to show the woman the image: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. One state, Texas, requires an ultrasound for each abortion and that the provider display and describe the image. North Carolina and Oklahoma would fit into that final category if not for the court challenges. In the meantime, those states and Wisconsin require that women be given information on how to access ultrasounds. (Utah requires both that the woman be offered an ultrasound and that if the procedure is performed to prepare for the abortion, the woman is offered an opportunity to view the image.) So the state requirements range from giving women information on accessing ultrasounds to requiring abortion providers to give ultrasounds and display and describe the image. Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the institute, said once Virginia’s law goes into effect in July, it will be listed as requiring an ultrasound before an abortion and that the provider must offer to show the woman the image. Our ruling McDonnell, in a carefully worded statement, said the bill he recently signed "allows Virginia to join about 23 other states that have an ultrasound procedure" before allowing abortions. It is technically correct that 23 states have passed legislation that at least requires women be offered information on how to get ultrasounds before abortions. But the governor, in implying Virginia has adopted a mainstream law on ultrasounds, omitted a contradicting fact: Virginia will join only nine states that have passed mandatory ultrasound bills. And the enforcement of the laws in two of those states has been delayed by legal challenges. While McDonnell is accurate in saying 23 states have laws that deal with ultrasounds, his claim creates a misleading impression by not acknowledging only nine states require the procedure. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Bob McDonnell	None	None	None	2012-03-21T06:00:00	2012-03-11	['None']
-pomt-11701	Says the Texas General Land Office led by George P. Bush has repaired just two homes since Hurricane Harvey.	mostly true	/texas/statements/2017/dec/21/jerry-patterson/charge-george-p-bush-led-agency-has-repaired-two-h/	Jerry Patterson says the fellow Republican who succeeded him as Texas land commissioner, George P. Bush, fixed very few homes in the months since Hurricane Harvey slapped ashore in August 2017. Patterson, otherwise confirming his 2018 candidacy for land commissioner, a post he previously held for 12 years, said in a recent interview that the Bush-led General Land Office hadn’t accomplished much in the way of hurricane relief. On Dec. 8, 2017, Patterson said to Austin American-Statesman commentator Ken Herman: "I mean, who the hell’s in charge here? And now we have tens of thousands of Texans who are essentially homeless and the land office has repaired two--two homes. And we’ve got folks waking up that have been sleeping in tents and they got snow this morning. People are still sleeping in tents." Patterson’s comment seemed potent given that the GLO announced in September 2017 it was teaming with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to hasten post-Harvey recovery in part by helping eligible survivors begin to patch up their homes--though full rebuilds weren’t in the mix. Bush said at the time: "With the magnitude of the damage from Hurricane Harvey, there is no doubt this will require a long recovery. This agreement marks the beginning of a new model for simplifying and expediting the transition out of sheltering to short-term and long-term housing recovery efforts." We focused this fact-check on Patterson’s insistence the GLO had only repaired two homes. Homeless--and tents? But Patterson’s other pokes also got our attention. How many Texans remain homeless due to the hurricane is hard to pin, we recently found. But a University of Texas expert, Gordon Wells, has estimated, based on flood insurance claims and satellite imagery, that at the least, more than 1 million Texas homes sustained flood damage though he told us that count could exceed 1.7 million. After Patterson spoke, we queried government officials about survivors in tents. By phone, the GLO’s Pete Phillips said some Aransas County residents, resistant to options such as out-of-town hotels, were residing in tents. Similarly, Bob Howard of FEMA’s Harvey response team responded by email: "Every effort is made to ensure survivors are aware of available local, state and federal resources. Thus far, all tent-dwellers found by the field team have indicated they prefer to remain in their current status or are not eligible for federal disaster assistance." Now let’s turn to Patterson’s focus on homes repaired with government help since Harvey and related rains flooded much of Southeast Texas. Patterson points to federal program We asked Patterson the basis of his numerical claim; he told us by phone that he was referring to two homes repaired as of early December 2017 through the federal Direct Assistance for Limited Home Repair (DALHR) program. Patterson, who said he’d drawn his tally of two from state-enlisted contractors and others he declined to identify, urged us to seek insight from elected leaders in counties hit by Harvey. We heard back from elected officials in two counties. Galveston County’s county judge, Mark Henry, said by phone that flooding due to Harvey had flooded 22,000 to 24,000 local homes with water an inch to eight feet deep. Henry, who volunteered that he’s a longtime friend to Patterson, said his office daily fields calls from residents awaiting help. Calling delayed repairs "frustrating," Henry said: "As far as the why" repairs have been delayed, Henry said, "I don’t know and I don’t care. I want it to get done." By email, a GLO spokeswoman, Brittany Eck, specified that as of mid-December 2017, the agency along with FEMA had housed 56 Galveston County "applicant households and 446 are in the process of receiving a direct housing solution." Also by phone, Loyd Neal, Nueces County’s judge, expressed chagrin that no agency advanced dollars enabling the Coastal Bend Council of Governments to hire individuals to consider applicants for short-term housing help. By email, Eck countered that the GLO had guaranteed up to $200,000 in reimbursed administrative costs to the regional councils asked to help administer post-Harvey housing assistance. Eck said that after the Coastal Bend council declined to participate, GLO employees were carrying out the program in that region. Neal told us that nearly four months since Harvey’s arrival, FEMA-funded housing including trailers or manufactured homes had yet to be brought into Port Aransas, the island tourist town where, Neal elaborated, more than two-thirds of local hurricane-damaged condominiums had yet to reopen. "It’s an absolute disgrace," Neal said, "that the state of Texas and the federal government and whoever else is in charge of this have not responded. It’s the greatest bureaucratic buck-passing I’ve ever seen." By email, Eck said that per FEMA in December 2017, 52 Nueces County households were in need of direct housing assistance. Correct count, but… We confirmed Patterson’s count of two homes whose DALHR repair projects had been completed with Eck and Phillips, a land office administrator. But those officials said Patterson’s claim gave short shrift to everything Harvey-related that Bush and the land office have undertaken and, Phillips said, to FEMA’s supervisory governing role. "He is oversimplifying what is going on," Phillips said, and "cherry-picking" given that the federal government supports housing options including thousands of hotel rooms, two types of home repair and possibly temporary apartments or trailers or manufactured homes. At the state level too, Phillips elaborated, "we’re always at the mercy of FEMA. They control the triage process" including, Eck said, confidential lists of homeowners for GLO to contact about their possibly seeking partial repairs backed by federal aid. Patterson, commenting on Phillips’ general assessment of his claim, said by email that "to be clear, I made a statement, and it turned out to be 100% factually accurate. None of the ‘context’ or ‘cherry-picking’ BS need apply." DALHR in Texas In November 2017, Bush announced the completion of the first DALHR home-repair project in Dickinson, in Galveston County. A GLO press release said the project included electrical and plumbing repairs, wall insulation, sheet rock, siding repair and replacing kitchen and bathroom sinks and a bathtub. That release said DALHR "provides permanent repairs for homeowners with moderate damages who lack available housing resources." But not everybody qualifies, the release made clear, in that beneficiaries must have sustained a FEMA-verified loss of $17,000 or more after 18 inches of interior flooding or more--though Phillips told us the GLO later encouraged FEMA to drop the 18-inch requirement, a change that qualified an additional 2,600 homes for consideration. According to the release, interested homeowners had to clear another half dozen hurdles such as a lack of other applicable insurance coverage and that eligible damages wouldn't exceed $60,000 or half the pre-hurricane taxable assessed value of the home. Then again, Eck told us by email, the latter limit was subsequently relaxed to allow awards to pay for up to half of a home’s replacement value. The November release also said that funded repairs under DALHR "are limited to real property components such as heating, plumbing, ventilation and air conditioning, walls, floors and ceilings," leaving our structural or engineering needs or any items covered by other aid. Varied aid offerings Let’s walk through some more of what the GLO and FEMA described as the programs they’re steering to Harvey survivors. Notably, Phillips said, and FEMA’s Howard confirmed, the teaming of the state agency with FEMA to coordinate short-term housing aid marked the first time a state agency had been given that front-line role. Eck said Gov. Greg Abbott "tapped the GLO to help FEMA implement these programs three weeks after the storm, in part due to the enormity of the affected area. In all cases, the applicant must be approved for eligibility by FEMA and, if interested, agree to the terms of FEMA’s regulations. The GLO is processing eligible applicants for short-term housing programs as FEMA is making their information available to the agency," Eck wrote. By email, Eck wrote that individuals displaced by the hurricane and its aftermath were offered federally funded hotel stays by FEMA while they looked for longer-term housing. "This program is currently housing 15,027 individuals in 1,334 hotels," Eck said. "None of the programs provided by FEMA are designed to be a permanent home replacement or complete repair program," Eck added. "The programs are designed to be short-term (up to 18 months) stopgap solutions while individuals work on long-term solutions." Starting Nov. 18, 2017, Eck wrote, the agency through early December 2017 had contacted 664 households judged by FEMA to be potentially qualified for the program. She said those contacts led to 290 expressions of interest and 182 DALHR home inspections--with 67 homes pre-qualified for repairs and 13 work orders issued for builders to start. "To date, two homes have had the work completed," Eck wrote. By email. FEMA’s Howard wrote: "We believe it is two projects at this point." Phillips said by phone that his DALHR goal was to complete more than 100 home projects by 2018; he said 36 builders were standing by ready to do the "re-work" on homes. Meantme, Phillips said, over 670 Texas families had received direct housing help by landing a trailer or manufactured home. At our request, FEMA’s Howard emailed us that agency’s daily Harvey fact sheet from the date that Patterson made his claim stating that 638 Texas families by then had been provided a trailer or manufactured home. As of mid-December, Howard told us by email, 8,057 Harvey survivors in the state still showed a need for a trailer or manufactured home and, he said, 2,600 of them remained under review for DAHLR aid. Otherwise, Phillips said, the GLO helped make available 40 apartment units in Wharton and also found 120 units of "corporate housing" to be made available in Conroe, in both cases under FEMA-backed programs. Howard said that generally by Dec. 14, 2017, 894,606 Texas residents had registered for Harvey-tired FEMA assistance of one kind or another. Another Patterson-cited program Patterson further told us the GLO had failed to help Texans benefit from another FEMA offering, the Partial Repair and Essential Power for Sheltering (PREPS) program, which provides up to $20,000 enabling homeowners to shelter in their homes thanks to limited repairs and the restoration of power. Eck said by email that PREPS aid was being offered by FEMA separately in that beneficiaries need a local government to provide a 10 percent match for an award to be made. By phone, meantime, Phillips said GLO officials had judged PREPS to be of limited value because families getting awards end up practically camping at home. The DALHR program, Phillips said, gets families "close to being whole." Our ruling Patterson said that since Hurricane Harvey, the agency helmed by Bush has done just two home repairs. Patterson’s figure, confirmed by GLO, was accurate. However, this claim leaves out ample significant information such as FEMA’s overriding control of the complicated DALHR program, which isn't open to every homeowner and only funds partial repairs. Notably too, additional homes were poised to qualify for or get repairs through DALHR at the time that Patterson spoke. We rate this statement Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Jerry Patterson	None	None	None	2017-12-21T17:31:23	2017-12-08	['None']
-pomt-10139	"Oil companies ...currently have 68-million acres that they're not using."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/07/barack-obama/unused-acres-arent-necessarily-being-ignored/	In the second presidential debate on Oct. 7, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama listed energy independence as one of the nation's biggest priorities, and touched briefly on the controversial issue of whether to open up new areas to offshore drilling. "I believe in the need for increased oil production," Obama said. "We're going to have to explore new ways to get more oil, and that includes offshore drilling. It includes telling the oil companies, that currently have 68-million acres that they're not using, that either you use them or you lose them." Obama has been a consistent opponent to opening new areas to offshore drilling. But in early August, Obama softened that position when he said he was open to supporting the New Energy Reform Act of 2008, a bipartisan compromise bill that includes alternative energy incentives that Obama wants — such as $84-billion over 10 years on research and development of better batteries, fuels and energy-saving technologies and tax incentives for people who buy hybrid and alternative-fuel cars — but also would allow drilling for oil and natural gas as close as 50 miles from Florida’s west coast. As he did in the debate, Obama has often bolstered his case against moving too fast on drilling with the argument that before opening up new areas to drilling, oil companies should be required to drill the acreage they already have. Obama is echoing a June report from the Democratic staff of the House Natural Resources Committee, which cited the fiscal 2007 statistics from the Interior Department's Minerals Revenue Management that classified 67,055,715 acres of oil and gas leases as "non-producing." The line sounds good as a Democratic rebuttal to Republican demands that Democrats move to allow drilling in Alaska's protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and offshore areas that also are currently off limits to the oil and gas companies. A Democratic House bill would bar new oil and gas leases to leaseholders who have not met benchmarks to "ensure" oil and gas production within five years on the leases they already hold. But Obama's statement is misleading, inasmuch as it suggests that oil and gas companies have access to 68-million acres of oil and gas fields that they deliberately are not drilling. What Obama did not take into account is the long, complex process that companies must work through, both in federal red tape and in geologic exploration, before leased property becomes a producing oil or gas field. The government classifies that acreage as "non-producing" simply because the companies aren't taking oil and natural gas out of it now. David Curtiss, director of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' Geoscience and Energy Office in Washington, D.C., says it's wrong to assume that "the only lease that is being actively worked is one that has a drill rig on it." The Interior Department issues leases for onshore territory for 10-year initial terms. The department issues offshore leases for five-, eight- or 10-year initial terms, depending on the depth of the water. Dave Smith, a spokesman for the department's Minerals Management Service, which handles offshore leases, says those initial terms are calculated according to how long the government thinks it will take oil and gas companies to find and start producing oil or gas. For both onshore and offshore leases, the companies have to comply with government permitting requirements as they undertake a lengthy scientific exploration process that culminates in test drilling to determine whether there is enough oil or natural gas in a particular spot to warrant full-scale drilling. All the while, the companies are paying rent to the federal government for acreage that is classified as "non-producing." It can take more than 10 years for a company to start producing oil or natural gas from a leased parcel, but as long as the company can demonstrate that it is making serious efforts to find some, the leases are extended. If the company cannot show that it's actively working the parcel, the lease is not renewed. Sometimes companies don't renew leases if their early work leads them to believe adequate reserves of oil or gas don't exist. Obama's statement suggests that "non-producing" acreage where drilling is permitted is land that oil companies are ignoring. That is simply not true. Years of exploration and federal permitting must be completed before leased land yields oil or gas. As a result, we find Obama's claim to be False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-10-07T00:00:00	2008-10-07	['None']
-pose-00804	Will reduce a state backlog of more than 38,000 pending veterans claims.	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/perry-o-meter/promise/835/cut-backlog-of-pending-veterans-claims/	None	perry-o-meter	Rick Perry	None	None	Cut backlog of pending veterans claims	2011-01-13T12:33:38	None	['None']
-pomt-04197	"The city of Atlanta has one of the highest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender populations per capita, ranking third among major American cities."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2012/dec/07/alex-wan/claim-about-size-atlantas-gay-population-has-some-/	The ongoing national debate about same-sex marriage recently reached the court of opinion inside Atlanta City Hall. Alex Wan, an openly gay Atlanta city councilman serving his first term, introduced legislation during the City Council’s last meeting of 2012 declaring support for marriage equality. Wan’s nonbinding resolution contained several pieces of information to back up his argument. We thought one statement in particular would be interesting to fact-check. "The city of Atlanta has one of the highest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender populations per capita, ranking third among major American cities," it read. Atlanta has long been perceived to have one of the largest LGBT populations in the South, if not the nation. An annual LGBT pride festival draws an estimated 200,000 people. Several intown neighborhoods have businesses that market heavily to the LGBT community. Mayoral candidates actively courted LGBT voters during the 2009 campaign. Wan’s resolution passed by an 11-2 vote. Wan’s resolution may have little sway across the street from City Hall among lawmakers who work in the state Capitol. In 2004, 76 percent of Georgia voters backed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The councilman recognized that obstacle, but believes the tide is shifting nationally on the issue and wanted Atlanta to be on the forefront. Wan said he’s unaware of any other Georgia cities that have passed a similar resolution. "We should be one of the first voices to that dialogue because of the sheer number (of LGBT residents in the city)," Wan said in a telephone interview. Wan added that he has been with his partner for more than seven years and said it "seemed inconsistent to me" that they’ve made such a commitment but can’t have it legally recognized by the state. The issue is somewhat thorny inside City Hall. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has been criticized by some LGBT activists for not fully supporting same-sex marriage. Reed, who as a state lawmaker successfully passed a hate crimes bill to protect gays and other groups, has said he respects the council’s vote on the resolution. Wan said he didn’t intend to pressure Reed by introducing the resolution and hopes the mayor will soon "reach the same conclusion" on same-sex marriage. Wan said he based the claim about Atlanta off information from the online library Wikipedia. The Wikipedia link used a chart that was published in 2006 in The Seattle Times. The chart read Atlanta ranked third, with 12.8 percent of its population as LGBT. The sources for the chart were the U.S. Census Bureau and the Williams Institute, which conducts research on sexual orientation, gender identity law and public policy. The U.S. Census Bureau tracked the number of same-sex couples (it does not attempt to determine sexual orientation) by county in 2010. Among counties with 50 or more same-sex couples, DeKalb County was first in Georgia and 10th nationwide with about 15 same-sex couples per 1,000. Fulton County was second in Georgia and ranked 21st in the U.S. with nearly 12 same-sex couples per 1,000. According to another website, City-Data, Atlanta ranked 32nd in the percentage of same-sex unmarried households. If you narrow it down to cities with overall populations greater than 100,000, Atlanta ranked sixth in the percentage of same-sex unmarried households. The list does not indicate when it was compiled, but the numbers were pretty similar to the most recent U.S. census data. PolitiFact Georgia reviewed 2011 U.S. census data, and it showed the percentage of same-sex unmarried households in Atlanta was 1.6 percent. Atlanta’s percentage was lower than San Francisco, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Oakland, Calif., Seattle and Santa Fe, N.M. Of those cities, Seattle is the only one in a state that recognizes same-sex marriages, and their law was passed last month. To sum up, Councilman Wan said Atlanta has one of the highest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender populations per capita and ranks third nationally. From what we can determine from U.S. census and other data, it’s valid to state Atlanta has one of the highest LGBT populations in the country. It’s less clear that Atlanta ranks third nationally because there’s not much current data detailing the percentage of all LGBT residents by city. Atlanta ranks below more than at least five cities when it comes to same-sex, unmarried households. The first part of Wan’s claim appears accurate. But even these numbers are open to interpretation. It appears Atlanta is a little lower than third in the other part of the claim. Overall, Wan’s statement is probably accurate, but it needs a lot of context. We rate it: Half True.	None	Alex Wan	None	None	None	2012-12-07T06:00:00	2012-12-03	['United_States', 'Atlanta']
-pomt-10168	Under Obama's tax plan, "95 percent of you will get a tax cut."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/27/barack-obama/many-will-get-tax-cuts-but-not-that-many/	At the presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., Barack Obama described his tax plan and said, "Here's what I can tell the American people: 95 percent of you will get a tax cut." We checked a similar claim of Obama's recently, that 95 percent of working families would get lower taxes under Obama's plan, and found it to be True . But Obama stretched things when he said that 95 percent of "you" — everyone — would receive a tax cut. The part of Obama's tax plan that results in widespread tax cuts is a tax credit for workers, intended to offset payroll taxes. Single workers would get $500, and working couples would get $1,000. But not all taxpayers get paychecks from an employer, and those who don't would not get the credit. Additionally, Obama intends to raise taxes on higher brackets ($200,000 for singles and $250,000 for couples) which would offset any tax cuts for those incomes. A detailed analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that if you look at all tax filers, 81 percent of tax filers would see reduced taxes under the Obama plan. So Obama's statement at the debate glosses over a few important details about who would get tax cuts under his plan. If you're talking about everyone, it's 81 percent. If you're talking about working families, it's 95 percent. The difference between 81 percent and 95 percent is not insignificant. We rule his debate statement Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-09-27T00:00:00	2008-09-26	['None']
-tron-01809	HIPPA Medical Hack for Denied Insurance Claims	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hippa-medical-hack-for-denied-insurance-claims/	None	health-medical	None	None	None	HIPPA Medical Hack for Denied Insurance Claims	Dec 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13493	Says Donald Trump supports "an agenda out there" to privatize the Veterans Affairs health care system.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/07/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-says-donald-trump-supports-privati/	Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton pledged to do "whatever is required to move the VA into the 21st century" during NBC’s Commander-In-Chief Forum, while adding that her opponent’s plan would be much worse for veterans. "I will not let the VA be privatized," Clinton said Sept. 7, 2016, during the forum at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York. "I do think there is an agenda out there, supported by my opponent, to do just that. I think that would be very disastrous for our military veterans." We wondered if Republican nominee Donald Trump has proposed or supports privatization of the health care system for U.S. veterans. Trump, for the record, addressed the question head on when it was his turn to answer questions. "I never said take the VA -- take the Veterans administration -- private." "I wouldn’t do that," Trump added. "I do believe, when you're waiting in line six, seven days, you should never be in a position like that. You go out, you see the (private) doctor, you get yourself taken care of." Trump's comments are consistent with what he's said before, and Clinton's concerns about privatization are a misleading Democratic talking point. In July, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine said that "Donald Trump is a guy who has called for privatization" of the VA. What we found then, and what holds now, is that Trump wants to give veterans access to private providers when they face delays at the VA. That's not the same as privatization. When we contacted Clinton's campaign about her statement, spokesman Josh Schwerin sent us several references where Trump's plan has been characterized as some degree of privatization and Trump’s explicit promise to give veterans the chance to go elsewhere for care. "Every veteran will get timely access to top quality medical care. Every veteran," Trump pledged in a July 11, 2016, speech in Virginia Beach, Va. "Veterans should be guaranteed the right to choose their doctor and clinics, whether at a VA facility or at a private medical center. We must extend this right to all veterans, not just those who can’t get an appointment in 30 days or who live more than 40 miles from a VA hospital, which is, unfortunately, the current and wrong policy." The logistics of how that would work, of course, are another matter. Trump has spoken of letting VA patients go to any doctor or health care facility that accepts Medicare and getting treatment there immediately. The VA would pay for the bill. Experts we spoke with raised several issues with Trump’s plan and also debated whether Trump's plan should be considered a type of partial privatization. One concern is that non-VA providers don’t have the same level of experience that the VA has with treating veteran's health issues — including combat injuries, combat-related illnesses and mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder. There's also concern that letting veterans go anywhere for their care would result in fragmented, uncoordinated, and lower-quality care. Our ruling Clinton said Donald Trump supports privatizing the Veterans Affairs health care system. Trump does support allowing more privatized care in cases where treatment at the VA is delayed or inadequate. In some cases he's talked about giving veterans a choice that would include doctors and hospitals outside the system. But that's not the same as privatizing the system, which would get the get the government out of the treatment business. Trump has never proposed that. Because Clinton's statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, we rate it Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/9e782bf2-269d-45f2-9c69-c527093c99f2	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-09-07T22:32:00	2016-09-07	['None']
-snes-00624	President Trump's decision to reverse the Iran nuclear deal will cost 100,000 Boeing jobs.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-trump-jobs-iran-nuclear-deal/	None	Politics	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did Trump Kill 100,000 Boeing Jobs By Pulling Out of the Iran Nuclear Deal?	9 May 2018	None	['Iran', 'Boeing']
-pomt-03446	Says the Obama administration plans to reduce the number of beds devoted to holding individuals violating immigration laws and to "release hundreds of dangerous criminals into our communities."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2013/jun/21/michael-mccaul/mccaul-said-obama-administration-plans-reduce-dete/	U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas warned of bad guys on the horizon while summarizing proposed appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security. In his June 5, 2013, floor remarks, the Austin Republican and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said the outlined spending would cover additional Border Patrol officers and continued operation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which enforces laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration. Plus, McCaul said, the legislation had "funding for ICE’s 34,000 detention beds despite the administration’s plans to reduce the number and release hundreds of dangerous criminals into our communities." A flood of dangerous criminals? In this context, "beds" refers to ICE regularly placing non-U.S. citizens "who are apprehended and determined to need custodial supervision" in more than 250 facilities around the country, Congress has lately required the government to maintain at least 34,000 beds to house such apprehended individuals, though not all the beds are always filled. Administration urged reduction in detention beds McCaul spokesman Mike Rosen told us by email that Congress mandated 33,400 detention beds from 2009 through 2011 before raising the threshold to 34,000 starting in 2012. In contrast, Rosen said that President Barack Obama had proposed to fund 31,800 beds in fiscal 2014, which begins Oct. 1, 2013. Homeland Security’s 2014 budget request says the cut would save $114 million, adding: "This level of beds allows ICE to ensure the most cost-effective use of federal dollars, focusing the more-costly detention capabilities on priority and mandatory detainees, while placing low-risk, non-mandatory detainees in lower cost alternatives to detention programs." An April 12, 2013, Washington Times news article put the budget request this way: "The president said he wants to reduce the number of illegal immigrants ICE keeps in detention from 34,000 to 31,800." The story also said, "Congress fought hard during the past decade to boost the number of detentions, arguing that those who were allowed back into the general population rarely returned to be deported." The story quoted Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano as saying the department believes it can keep all high-priority individuals detained with the lower number of beds, while making use of alternatives to track the other people in deportation proceedings, the story said. So, the administration sought to fund fewer detention beds. Detainees have included few violent criminals And was the result going to be hundreds of dangerous criminals let loose? ICE officials did not respond to our inquiry about the percentage of violent criminals in detention nor did we come up with other current-day breakdowns. But according to a Feb. 11, 2010, outside analysis, when the number of detainees surged more than 60 percent to 385,524 from fiscal 2005 through fiscal 2009, few of them had criminal convictions. The study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that detainees "without any criminal conviction doubled between fiscal 2005 and (fiscal) 2009," the study said, when they accounted for 73 percent of detainees. However, the share of detainees with criminal convictions reached 43 percent in the first three months of fiscal 2010, the study said, as increases in overall detainees leveled out. Government released 2,200 detainees By email, Rosen said McCaul’s reference to dangerous criminals reflected on "detainee releases for budgetary reasons," including felons, in 2013 that McCaul tabulated based on information he obtained from ICE’s director, John Morton. During February 2013, the agency indeed released individuals who had past criminal convictions, according to news accounts and testimony, though few had felony convictions and most remained subject to immigration proceedings. Public knowledge of the releases appears to have been spurred by a news story. On March 1, 2013, the Associated Press reported that Homeland Security had recently released more than 2,000 illegal immigrants from its jails--in states including Arizona, California, Georgia and Texas--due to looming budget cuts. According to the report, the released individuals--granted supervised release under conditions that can include mandatory check-ins, home visits and GPS devices--would still be required to appear for immigration hearings. The story, citing ICE budget documents, said the agency had temporarily shuttered plans to release 3,000 additional detainees in reaction to intense criticism. The internal budget documents "show the Obama administration had intended to reduce" the average daily population of detainees from about 31,000 to 25,748 by the end of March 2013, the story said. Also, Rosen pointed us to an ICE document with those figures. About two weeks after the news story appeared, ICE’s Morton testified to the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that he had 2,228 detainees released over several weeks from Feb. 9 to March 1, 2013 "to other forms of supervision," according to a transcript. He said he acted for immediate budgetary reasons plus concern about the federal sequester that was set to trigger automatic cuts starting in March. Also in February 2013, Obama warned that if the sequester hit, "federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go." PolitiFact in Washington rated that claim Mostly False, concluding that while U.S. Attorney offices would face cuts under the sequester, officials would have discretion in prioritizing cases notably involving, by and large, individuals yet to be tried. Official: Dangerous criminals not among released Morton told the subcommittee that ICE’s releases did not include dangerous criminals. He said officials let out individuals "who were not subject to mandatory detention and they did not pose a significant threat to public safety" and, he said, each individual remained subject to deportation. Seventy percent "of those individuals released had no criminal record," Morton said. "The remaining 30 percent were either misdemeanants or other criminals whose prior conviction was not a serious violent crime." He closed his prepared statement by saying "there are no mass releases of dangerous criminals under way or any plan for the future, just efforts to live within our budget." Questioned by U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock, the subcommittee chairman, Morton said the released individuals included 10 "Level 1" offenders, in this case meaning crimes like aggravated financial felonies, Morton said, and four of the 10 were subsequently returned to custody. The six not returned to custody were not violent criminals, he said. Morton said one "Level 1" offense occurred in 1979 and another involved the single father of a 5-month-old child. He said that in each of these releases, field officers made the decision "and I'm confident that if I were to share these offenses with you, you would be better reassured that we are not out willy-nilly releasing serious Level 1 offenders." Morton said the released individuals included 159 "Level 2" offenders, including "a fair number" of people whose "most serious offense will have been for a theft offense, for example petty larceny or shoplifting, traffic offenses. The largest category will be for" drunk driving, Morton said, including some multiple convictions. He said 460 "Level 3" offenders, convicted of misdemeanors, were released, saying their crimes would have ranged from a single traffic offense, a single drunk driving conviction or shoplifting. In May 2013, Nelson Peacock, an assistant secretary of homeland security, said 622 of the released detainees had some type of criminal conviction. In his May 6, 2013, letter to Sens. Carl Levin and John McCain, which McCain posted online, Peacock specified that there were 32 Level 1 and 80 Level 2 detainees released. He wrote, too, that 58 released detainees were re-detained. At the March subcommittee hearing, Carter noted that the agency’s "priorities for detention include illegal aliens who have not been convicted of crimes but otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety." Morton replied that no such detainees were released. He also said he did not know how many of the released individuals had pending criminal charges. Carter: "How many were violent criminals?" Morton: "I am not aware of any violent criminals..." Also at the meeting, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, said that under federal law, the agency has had the authority to release detainees since at least 1952. Morton agreed, saying detentions are the exception to normal practices. "We have limited resources," Morton said. "Congress has directed a level of mandatory detention that focuses around mainly violent offenders and certain aliens; the vast majority of the people in the system Congress provides for consideration for release." Morton earlier said: "Just to give you some perspective of it, there are 350,000 people in immigration proceedings at any given time, only about 34,000 of whom -- actually, in Alaska, some of the Border Patrol cases aren't even in formal proceedings -- are in detention. The vast majority of people are not detained by design. Congress has provided for their release on bond or a supervision. Immigration judges make those calls." Next, we circled back to McCaul’s office per Morton's testimony. By email, Rosen said the "drastic reductions" in detention beds in Obama’s budget request "would inherently result in the release of dangerous criminals." Outside takes We also ran the congressman’s claim past David Burnham, co-director of the records clearinghouse, who said any reference to dangerous criminals being let go exaggerates the administration’s intent. "There’s some rhetoric here," Burnham said. Donald Kerwin, who directs the New York-based Center for Migration Studies, which describes itself as devoted to the study of migration, to the promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities and to public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants and newcomers, pointed out by telephone that the administration has long said its focus is on deporting criminal immigrants and recent arrivals, which is what ICE says on an agency web page including a graph indicating that in the fiscal year through September 2012, 55 percent of immigrants removed from the country were convicted criminals. An Obama adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, touted the approach in a White House blog entry Aug. 18, 2011. Kerwin speculated that the only way the administration would release a seriously violent criminal from detention is "mistakenly." Our ruling McCaul said the Obama administration, seeking to reduce the number of detention beds, plans to "release hundreds of dangerous criminals into our communities." The administration has sought to shrink the number of beds devoted to holding individuals in detention, saying that would save money. If approved, this could lead to more individuals who face immigration proceedings not living behind bars. It also looks to us like the government is keeping its options open on releasing more immigration detainees if money runs tight. However, we did not confirm any related expected release of hundreds, or even a few, dangerous criminals. The February 2013 release of 2,200-plus individuals didn't include violent criminals, a top administrator testified. McCaul’s statement has an element of truth; the administration's budget request. But there doesn't appear to be any plan to release dangerous criminals. We rate the claim as Mostly False.	None	Michael McCaul	None	None	None	2013-06-21T10:31:04	2013-06-05	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-14974	"I did not play any role in bringing the company to RI as did others in government. I was tasked with handling the legislation affecting the company by my superiors."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2015/oct/18/steven-costantino/despite-his-protests-afar-costantino-played-key-ro/	Steven M. Costantino, a former House Finance Committee chairman, was more than a hundred miles away, working in Vermont’s state government, when newly disclosed public records and emails fueled a wave of recent headlines on the $75 million 38 Studios boondoggle. From the other side of the Green Mountains, he could feel the spotlight. The state’s financing of the upstart video-game company, to the tune of $75 million in loan guarantees, lured 38 Studios from Massachusetts to Providence in 2010, but left Rhode Island taxpayers vulnerable in the company’s 2012 bankruptcy. Amid the torrent of new headlines about 38 Studios, Costantino, who is now commissioner of the Department of Vermont Health Access, issued the following statement on Sept. 27: "My only involvement in the matter in RI was because of my former position in the RI legislature. I did not play any role in bringing the company to RI as did others in government. I was tasked with handling the legislation affecting the company by my superiors." Costantino acknowledges he was involved with the legislation, but denies "any role," compared with what "others in government" did, to "bring" Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios to Rhode Island. How can he have been both involved and not involved? Unfortunately, the former lawmaker did not respond to our request for an interview, leaving us to sort out this contradiction on our own. The freshly released emails and deposition transcripts hark back to early 2010 when Rhode Island’s courtship of 38 Studios began to get serious. The documents give the public a window into which state officials were driving the 38 Studios deal. Costantino comes across as a behind-the-scenes facilitator, helping to lay the groundwork for the public financing. The comments recorded in the depositions and other records show that Costantino: Developed the idea for guaranteeing 38 Studios’ loans. He was the first to advocate for 38 Studios’ receipt of a $75-million state guaranteed loan, according to Keith Stokes, chairman of the R.I Economic Development Corporation at the time. And J. Michael Saul, then the EDC’s finance director, recalls that Costantino proposed the expansion of an existing loan guarantee program during a visit to 38 Studios’ headquarters in Maynard, Mass. "And at the conclusion of the meeting," Saul testified, "he turned to me and asked me the question: If we were to increase the $50-million (loan program) to $125 million would this -- I’m paraphrasing here -- would this be helpful to get this done?" In another email, an EDC lawyer, Robert I. Stolzman advised Carcieri’s chief of staff Andrew Hodgkin that he had sent him several documents including a draft "authorizing the RIEDC to guarantee 38 Studios’ debt (at the suggestion of House Finance Chairman Costantino, the … draft reflects a larger authorization for this as a Jobs Creation Guaranty Program)." Costantino, in his deposition in 2014, did not to dispute anything in the Stolzman note. Was among just a few lawmakers in the loop. Only House Speaker Gordon Fox, Senate President M. Teresa Paiva-Weed, Sen. Daniel DaPonte, and Costantino knew about the 38 Studios transaction when the General Assembly approved the bill for the guarantees in 2010, according Marcel A. Valois, the EDC’s former director. Another email from Stolzman, the EDC’s lawyer, suggests that Sharon Reynolds, the House fiscal adviser, and Costantino were privy to certain background and "summary information" on the "38 Studios transaction" before Governor Carcieri. Shielded the 38 Studios transaction from public scrutiny. During a videotaped discussion of the bill on the House floor on April 13, one lawmaker asked about the origins of the loan guarantee legislation and who was behind it. "There's always conversations with lobbyists and small businesses," Costantino said. He didn’t name 38 Studios. Later on in June of 2010, Costantino told Stolzman he hadn’t told a Providence Journal reporter about his visit to 38 Studios. And Costantino said he wanted to know what EDC staffers were saying about the deal. Steered the legislation for 38 Studios’ guaranteed loan. In two separate April 2 emails with the numerals "38" noted in the subject line, Stokes mentions Costantino’s role in scheduling the legislation, advising others that "Steven Costantino wants to move on it next week" and that Costantino has advised him that House Speaker Fox wants to post the item for hearing. Our ruling In his defense, Costantino issued a statement in which he said: "I did not play any role in bringing the company to RI as did others in government. I was tasked with handling the legislation affecting the company by my superiors." In other words: Don’t blame me, I was just doing my job. But the records and comments of people involved illustrate that Costantino played a key part in Rhode Island's courtship of 38 Studios. The legislation he helped pass, offering valuable loan guarantees, was his idea, according to one former EDC official. During the process, Costantino shielded his idea from the type of full political scrutiny that might have killed it. He did this by not naming 38 Studios on the House floor when he was asked who was pushing for the loan-guarantee program. When the deal was done, the CEO of Schilling's company thanked all members of the General Assembly and singled out five elected officials by name, including the former House Finance Committee chairman. Costantino played a pivotal role in creating the 38 Studios mess. In some ways, the record shows he bears as much responsibility as the other elected government officials who "tasked" him. We rate his statement False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Steven Costantino	None	None	None	2015-10-18T00:00:00	2015-09-27	['None']
-chct-00058	FACT CHECK: Trump Says Lincoln Was Ridiculed For The Gettysburg Address	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/09/13/fact-check-trump-gettysburg-address/	None	None	None	Shane Devine | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	1:38 PM 09/13/2018	None	['None']
-snes-00212	Someone defaced Mount Rushmore with graffiti reading "Obama Was Here" and "F*ck Trump."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mount-rushmore-defaced-graffiti/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Was Mount Rushmore Defaced with Political Graffiti?	16 August 2018	None	['Barack_Obama']
-tron-02613	Cannibal on Death Row Requests Boy for Last Meal	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/death-row-cannibal/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Cannibal on Death Row Requests Boy for Last Meal – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-09459	"President Obama's bill won't bring down the costs (of health care) for average Americans -- or really for very few Americans, if any."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/mar/04/michele-bachmann/bachmann-says-democratic-health-care-bill-wont-low/	Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., has a reputation for using political rhetoric that pushes the envelope. On March 3, 2010, she appeared on CNN's Larry King Live along with Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, a Floridian who's also known for his outspokenness from the opposite ideological perspective. We thought we'd look into one of the comments she made about the issue of the day: the Democratic health care reform plan. "Unfortunately," she said, "President Obama's bill won't bring down the costs for average Americans -- or really for very few Americans, if any." To test this claim, we turned first to the nonpartisan referee for such questions -- the Congressional Budget Office. We looked at a CBO analysis of the Senate Democratic health care bill released Nov. 30, 2009. This bill -- which was passed by the Senate in December 2009 -- forms the basis for President Barack Obama's own proposal. (The CBO has not directly analyzed Obama's proposal, but most health policy analysts do not expect the numbers to change dramatically from what the CBO analyzed in November.) Before we dig into the CBO study, we should outline the three types of private coverage and how they differ. Individual policies are obtained directly by individuals or families, without an employer serving as an intermediary. "Small-group" plans are provided through small employers. And "large-group" policies are plans obtained through larger employers. The CBO looked at the effect of the health care bill on premiums for each category. One other thing to know: The bill provides subsidies for people in the individual and small-group markets whose income is below certain thresholds. The CBO looked at how the bill would change premiums both before subsidies were factored in and after. So here's what the CBO expects for 2016, the year its analysts chose as the benchmark. For individual plans -- before subsidies are taken into account -- the bill would make policies 10 percent to 13 percent more expensive. But a big reason for this increase is that the bill would set higher minimum standards for coverage. So, before subsidies are factored in, people and families buying individual policies would have to pay more, but they would also be getting more generous coverage. However, it's worth noting that many people on the individual market would qualify for subsidies. In fact, the CBO estimates that 57 percent of individual-market purchasers would. And once these subsidies are factored in, buyers on the individual market would see their premiums drop quite a bit -- between 56 percent and 59 percent, according to the CBO. (The question of whether to count or not to count subsidies when analyzing the bill became a major bone of contention during the Feb. 25, 2010, presidential health care summit; you can read a previous PolitiFact item for a more detailed explanation of this question, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/25/barack-obama/obama-says-under-democratic-health-plan-family-ins/) For the second category -- the small-group market -- the CBO estimates that unsubsidized premiums would land somewhere on the continuum between rising by 1 percent and falling by 2 percent. For the 12 percent of small-group beneficiaries who are expected to qualify for subsidies, premiums would fall by 8 to 11 percent. Finally, in the third category -- the large-group market -- the change in premiums would range from no change to a 3 percent decline. (Large-group beneficiaries are not eligible for subsidies under the bill.) To fuly analyze Bachmann's claim, we need to add in one additional factor: the number of Americans who will buy insurance in each of these three markets. The CBO estimates that 134 million people will be covered by large-group plans, 25 million will be covered by small-group plans and 32 million will be covered by individual market plans. The total of these three categories is 191 million people. (Remember that many Americans are covered by Medicare, Medicaid or other government plans, and these are not included in the CBO's analysis, or in ours.) Let's first analyze these numbers using the strictest definition -- unsubsidized premiums. And because the CBO is using a range of likely outcomes, we'll do our best to quantify how many people will actually see their premiums fall. We'll do this by assuming that, say, for a range of 10 percent to 13 percent, one quarter will see a change of 10 percent, one quarter will see a change of 11 percent, one quarter will see a change of 12 percent, and one quarter will see a change of 13 percent. The real numbers will not fit so neatly into that kind of breakdown, but health economists tell us it's a serviceable guide. By our reckoning, then, three quarters of the 134 million people in large-group plans -- 101 million -- will see their premiums fall slightly. Next, in the small group market, let's assume that half the beneficiaries will see a decline in premiums (those who see their premiums fall by 1 percent or 2 percent.) That translates to about 13 million people. So, right off the bat -- without factoring in subsidies -- the CBO expects 114 million people to see their premiums go down at least a little bit. That's about 60 percent of beneficiaries. Once subsidies are accounted for, the percentages rise. In the small-group market, 12 percent of beneficiaries would qualify for subsidies, the CBO projects. Proportionally, these subsidies would reduce premiums for an additional 1.5 million people. In the individual market, 57 percent would qualify for subsidies, according to CBO. That's about 18 million people who'd see their premiums drop. So, adding it up, nearly 134 million people should see their premiums go down when subsidies are factored in. That's about 70 percent of all privately insured Americans. What about the rest? By our calculations, about 45 million people would see their premiums stay the same. Adding them to the 134 million Americans who saw their premiums drop, you get 179 million people, or almost 94 percent of those on private insurance. That leaves about 14 million Americans who would see their premiums go up, according to the CBO's model. (The numbers don't add up to 191 million due to rounding.) These unlucky beneficiaries -- mostly people with individual insurance who earn too much to receive subsidies -- account for 7 percent of those with private insurance in 2016. Of course, the CBO's projections are only that -- projections. In addition, basic mathematics suggests that some number of Americans will see their premiums rise or fall by greater amounts than the CBO estimates. So our exercise should be taken with due caution. But the CBO is the generally accepted arbiter of these questions and the overall trend seems solid despite the caveats. However, looked at another way, Bachmann would have had a stronger point if she had said the bill's benefits are limited. Only about 21 million people -- those who receive subsidies -- will see their premiums drop by more than a few percentage points. That's about 11 percent of the people with private insurance in 2016 -- within shouting distance of the "very few Americans" she referenced in her quote. Measured in raw dollars, a decrease of 1 to 3 percent won't put a whole lot of additional money in the pockets of the other nine-tenths of the private market. By the CBO's estimate, the difference could be on the order of $100 or $200 on a several-thousand-dollar policy. But we're rating Bachmann's claim that "President Obama's bill won't bring down the costs (of health care) for average Americans -- or really for very few Americans, if any." And on that, our interpretation of the CBO numbers indicates she's wrong. Using the strict, unsubsidized figures, 60 percent of Americans in the private insurance market should see their premiums fall. And taking into account the subsidies, a full 70 percent would see their premiums fall. And almost 94 percent would see their premiums either fall or stay the same. No matter how you slice it, the overwhelming majority are likely to see a decline. So we find her claim False.	None	Michele Bachmann	None	None	None	2010-03-04T19:04:10	2010-03-03	['United_States', 'Barack_Obama']
-chct-00180	FACT CHECK: Do Wind Turbines Kill 750K Birds A Year?	verdict: unsubstantiated	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/03/12/fact-check-wind-turbines-kill-750k-birds-a-year/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	11:40 AM 03/12/2018	None	['None']
-tron-01447	E.coli bacteria found in bagged salads?	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/salads/	None	food	None	None	None	E.coli bacteria found in bagged salads?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06417	"The largest category of people coming into the technical schools in Wisconsin are people with four-year degrees."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/oct/26/scott-walker/gop-gov-scott-walker-says-largest-category-technic/	We’ve heard the lousy job market has led many people to go back to school. But huge numbers of people with four-year degrees going to technical college? Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker spoke about technical colleges when he was asked about unemployment during a TV interview that was broadcast Oct. 16, 2011. He told CW14 in Green Bay he had repeatedly heard employers say "we have jobs, particularly good-paying manufacturing jobs, we just don’t have enough skilled workers, we don’t have enough people interested in those jobs." The Republican governor went on to say: "In fact, the largest category of people coming into the technical schools in Wisconsin are people with four-year degrees because the jobs that they’re looking for with their degrees aren’t there, and so instead they’re going back to school to get more technical training." Technical colleges have long been the next step for many students who have just finished high school and for experienced workers looking to upgrade their skills. So we wondered if those groups are now being outnumbered in Wisconsin’s technical schools by people with bachelor’s degrees. That’s what Walker said -- but it apparently isn’t what he meant. Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie told us in an email: "My understanding is that this quote was based on a conversation he had with tech college officials where they made a point to highlight the fact that one of the fastest growing enrollment demographics was individuals who have attended four-year colleges." That’s a far cry from Walker stated in the interview. He labeled college graduates the largest group entering technical schools. So, let’s dig into the numbers. Technical colleges are a key part of the discussion of how to attack unemployment in Wisconsin, where the jobless rate was 7.8 percent in September 2011, and at the national level. A few days after an October 2011 survey revealed that U.S. manufacturers lack qualified applicants for 600,000 skilled positions, the Wisconsin AFL-CIO cited the shortage and called on Walker to restore a 30 percent funding cut he made to technical colleges in the 2011-2013 state budget. The number of college graduates, meanwhile, who applied to U.S. graduate schools rose 8.4 percent in 2010, according to a September 2011 report from the Council of Graduate Schools. So, are an increasing number of four-year graduates heading to technical college, too? As of 2009, the number of four-year degree holders transferring into one of Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges"had grown 30 percent in the last decade," according to a publication from the Wisconsin Technical College System. But that statistic is a bit dated and it deals with whether that group is increasing. A small set of individuals can still show a large percentage increase. Moreover, Walker referred to four-year grads in relation to other groups. So, we sought more information from Morna Foy, executive assistant and vice president of policy and government relations for the technical college system. Foy said she believed Walker was trying to repeat a statement that she and other technical college system officials had made -- that a growing percentage of transfer students into the technical colleges are students who already have four-year degrees. We asked her for a breakdown of transfer students who entered technical college in 2009, 2010 and 2011, to see if there were any trends. Foy emphasized that the 2011 figures were just being finalized, so Walker would not have been aware of them when he made his statement. The figures show that students with four-year degrees -- more specifically, those who had completed 16 or more years of schooling -- made up 15 percent of the nearly 10,000 technical college transfer students in 2009. The rate increased to 16 percent in 2010. So, based on figures that had been publicized when Walker did the TV interview, there was a 1-percentage-point increase between 2009 and 2010 in the number of people entering technical college who had four-year degrees. (The rate remained at 16 percent for 2011.) But in each of the three years, the largest category of students transferring into the technical colleges each year remained those who had completed 12 years of schooling -- in other words, high school graduates. High school graduates made up more than one-third of the transfer students each year, more than twice the level of four-year grads. Our conclusion Walker said "the largest category of people coming into the technical schools in Wisconsin are people with four-year degrees." Walker’s spokesman said the governor actually meant to claim that an increasing number of people with four-year degrees are going to technical college. Between 2009 and 2010, the percentage of college graduates entering technical college rose a bit. But high school graduates make up the largest category of transfer students in technical schools, far outnumbering those with college degrees. We rate Walker’s statement False.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2011-10-26T09:00:00	2011-10-16	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-02970	"No one beta-tested" healthcare.gov.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/22/sam-stein/huffington-posts-sam-stein-says-no-one-beta-tested/	The rollout of the Obama administration’s health insurance marketplaces website has been so roiled with problems -- from a pricing glitch, to flawed data, to widespread log-in fails -- that even journalists from left-leaning media are calling for top officials to be hauled before Congress. But while appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Huffington Post political editor Sam Stein went a bit too far in criticizing the agency’s prep work before the Oct. 1 launch of healthcare.gov. Or at least that's what he told us when we asked him. "It seems from all of the reporting, and from what I can gather, that up until very recently they (the Obama administration) didn’t realize how bad this was going to go out," Stein said on MSNBC. "And no one beta-tested the site, which is almost criminal when you think about it." The beta-testing line got picked up by conservative outlets such as the National Review and the Blaze, and we wanted to check it out. Stein directed us to a Washington Examiner report with a headline that somewhat contradicted his statement, which he acknowledged: "Troubled Obamacare website wasn’t tested until a week before launch." "Unfortunately, in the rush of cable news, I didn't add the clause ‘until a week before launch,’ " Stein told us. "I should have done that and apologize." That’s true. But Stein is more right than even he thinks, in part because he inadvertently used the word "beta" to describe the specific website testing. In the IT world, there are many kinds of tests under many kinds of names. Put another way, Stein goofed -- but by goofing, he got closer to the truth. Here’s what you need to know. The Examiner story, quoting someone speaking anonymously, said officials did not allow testing on the website until just days before it went live Oct. 1. The biggest problem, according to this report and others, was that leaders of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decided to act as the central coordinator for the project (CMS would not tell the Examiner if the agency holds that role). The next day, the Washington Post described how government officials and contractors proceeded with the rollout despite a botched crucial test days earlier. They ran a simulation, unsuccessfully, in which a few hundred people tried to log onto the website at the same time. The failure proved an early warning of the bumpy road to come. Officials went forward with the launch, and the website "locked up" almost immediately when 2,000 users tried step one, the Post reported. Unnamed sources told the Post that an end-to-end trial run of the process did not happen by as late as Sept. 26, the week before the launch. (Here at PolitiFact we don't rely on unnamed sources, but the reports from the Examiner and the Post appear credible.) "Beta testing" is a very specific term in the tech world that most professional software goes through before launching. It comes after a product is in an "alpha" phase, or the earliest version of software that is subject to some tests to find any big issues. When a product reaches beta, it is tested by a larger group of people not connected to its development in an effort to gather feedback and make more fixes before a large-scale launch. Big tech companies like Google sometimes launch products in beta mode, but enterprise and government software vendors don’t usually do it that way, said Alexander Howard, former Washington correspondent for tech-centric O’Reilly Media and a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. They stop adding features in the months preceding a launch to "start testing the heck out of it," Howard said. The development of healthcare.gov has been an entirely different story, he said, with no use of those terms. "The only thing we have is reporting that says the first testing occurred the last week before it went live, and then it went live," Howard said. "There was testing, but it’s not clear that it was in a beta version." According to published reports, healthcare.gov got additional features quite close to the launch, with no evidence of a consumer-centric test that went outside of the government. So Stein might have inartfully used the word beta-testing, but he might also have a point. "Even if those tests nominally did occur, they were as good as nonexistent based on the complexity of the project," said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican digital strategist. Testing of any kind was difficult because the specifications for the website were evolving the month before the website went up, said Gail Wilensky, senior fellow at Project Hope and former Medicare director under former President George H. W. Bush. The Post story, by the way, said a test group of 10 insurers that had access to the site advised the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that the site was not ready to launch nationwide. Insurers have been in "regular communication" with government officials and contractors to test the back end of the site dealing with enrollment, Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for the industry group America's Health Insurance Plans, told us. But most people are getting hung up on the earliest steps of setting up an account and verifying who they are. We reached out to CMS and CGI Federal, one of the main contractors for the website, but did not hear back. (We suspect they’re busy.) Our ruling Here’s what Stein said: "No one beta-tested" healthcare.gov. Stein, in fact, meant to say something else, he told us. But at PolitiFact we check the statements as they are made. In this case, Stein is closer to the truth than maybe even he thought. Stein specifically referred to beta testing on MSNBC, which is a phrase that traditionally means certain members of the public were allowed to access the website well before it opened. There's no evidence to suggest that happened, and the federal government isn't talking. Ultimately, this is a glitch of a statement talking about the glitches of a website. But it rates Mostly True.	None	Sam Stein	None	None	None	2013-10-22T18:54:51	2013-10-21	['None']
-pose-01294	"I think NATO's great. But it's got to be modernized. And countries that we're protecting have to pay what they're supposed to be paying."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1386/ask-countries-we-protect-pay-more-for-joint-defens/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Ask countries we protect to pay more for joint defense	2017-01-17T08:38:50	None	['NATO']
-pomt-08247	Portland Community College serves more students than all of the state’s universities combined.	false	/oregon/statements/2010/nov/13/portland-community-college/portland-community-college-tries-put-enrollment-nu/	It’s that time of the year again, when universities and colleges start to release their fall headcount numbers. Normally PolitiFact Oregon would leave this stuff to the education reporters -- except that one figure in the article Portland Community College wrote about its enrollment caught us by surprise. After noting the total student headcount for this fall -- 41,409 -- PCC went on to say that annually, it serves "more than 93,800 students ... (more than all of the state’s universities combined)." It was that last note that gave us pause. Could one community college really be serving more people than the entire state university system? We decided to find out. First, we went back to Portland Community College and asked for more specific numbers. Laura Massey, the college’s director of institutional analysis, said that for the 2009-2010 academic year, Portland Community College served roughly 93,799 students. So the news release had that number right. Next we went to the Oregon University System to check out their numbers. Bob Kieran, the assistant vice chancellor of institutional research and planning, told us that, for the same time period, the state-run universities served 122,883 students. It’s clear that, with these numbers, the statement in the PCC release doesn’t hold up. Before we issued a verdict, though, we decided to look at the numbers one other way. Overall student headcount can be a little misleading in that it counts every student, no matter the amount of time they actually spend on campus. Say you decide to take a single photography course for leisure, well, you’re counted the same as a student going to school full time in pursuit of a degree. Luckily, Oregon community colleges and universities are also required to report "full-time equivalent" numbers. That means they combine part-time students and count them as one full-time student. One full-time equivalent is equal to a student being fully enrolled for the fall, winter and spring terms of a given year. According to Massey, for the 2009-2010 school year, Portland Community College counted 31,395 full-time equivalents. Kieran says the entire Oregon University System counted 80,944. Again, the numbers don’t support the PCC claim. (That, of course, doesn’t diminish the fact that Portland Community College serves an awful lot of students each year.) James Hill, the man who wrote the enrollment numbers article, said that "it’s always been that case" that PCC served more students annually. He said he would review his numbers and thanked us for pointing out the discrepancy. Seeing as how neither the total headcount or full time equivalent figures back PCC up, we find this claim False. Comment on this item.	None	Portland Community College	None	None	None	2010-11-13T06:00:00	2010-11-08	['None']
-wast-00039	We have shut down nearly 90 percent of the online sex-trafficking business and ads.	3 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/08/20/has-sex-trafficking-law-eliminated-percent-sex-trafficking-ads/	None	None	Ann Wagner	Glenn Kessler	None	Has the sex-trafficking law eliminated 90 percent of sex-trafficking ads?	August 20	None	['None']
-snes-04160	A farmer who attempted to rope a deer described the hilariously painful experience.	legend	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rope-a-dope/	None	Critter Country	None	David Mikkelson	None	Rope-a-Dope Deer	10 March 2008	None	['None']
-hoer-00319	Facebook Shoes	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/facebook-shoes-like-farm.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Facebook Shoes Like-Farming Scam	June 24, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-08443	"If you want to see the jobs that I've saved and created in this storm he helped create, go anywhere in Ohio."	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2010/oct/16/lee-fisher/fisher-touts-job-development-success-stories-acros/	If Ohio voters take away one line from this years election, it will be that the state has lost 400,000 jobs. It's a number more ubiquitous than your ZIP code and the first talking point of GOP statewide candidates, from treasurer to governor. And its the mantra of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rob Portman, a former congressman and top adviser to President George W. Bush. Portman uses the figure to put his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, on the defensive. That's because Fisher, who took office in January 2007, also served as the state's development director. That's the position responsible for creating jobs, and Fisher held the title until he announced his U.S. Senate bid in February 2009. PolitiFact Ohio has found the figure is accurate, ebbing and flowing from month-to-month, but that it leaves out a lot of context. Namely, the national recession influenced the states job losses more than any single politician, and the states been losing jobs under both Democrats and Republicans for more than a decade. Fisher blames the state's job losses entirely on the recession created by Bush's job and trade policies, which were influenced by Portman's two years in the White House. While Fisher offered the same defense again in the most recent debates, he also highlighted his argument that as lieutenant governor and development director, he was busy negotiating deals to save and create other jobs across the state. He drew loud applause from his hometown crowd at the Oct. 8 debate at the City Club of Cleveland when he walked off the stage with this line: "If you want to see the jobs that I've saved and created in this storm he helped create, go anywhere in Ohio. If you want to see the jobs he helped to create, go to Beijing, Shanghi, or Hong Kong." PolitiFact Ohio already has examined the second part of this statement. We thought now we'd examine the first part, that Fisher created or retained jobs around the state. Fisher is referring to a number of Ohio companies, some well known, such as Akron's Goodyear Tire & Rubber, and some much less familiar, such as Toledo's Xunslight Corp. So let's look at some of the deals he has mentioned by name in the debates and on the campaign trail: Goodyear: Fisher and his colleagues in the development department worked closely with Goodyear officials for months to put together a lucrative aid package that helped persuade the tire maker to build a new headquarters in Akron. Goodyear received a $20 million low-interest loan and $30 million in tax credits from Ohio. These were tied to keeping 2,900 workers for 15 years and its headquarters in Akron for 30 years. Of course, many others, notably Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic and developer Stuart Lichter, also played key roles. First Solar: The company started here using technology developed at the University of Toledo, but now is based in Arizona. It still has a production plant in Perrysburg. The company received a $225,000 grant in 2009 to expand that facility while Fisher headed the Ohio Department of Development. Amylin Pharmaceuticals: The San Diego-based company made a decision to open a facility near Cincinnati and later expand its operations before Fisher was in office. But in 2007, Gov. Ted Strickland's administration cut a deal to give the company a 10-year, 75 percent tax credit to encourage it to invest $400 million in an expansion project. At the time, the Cincinnati Enquirer quoted West Chester Township Trustee President George Lang, a Republican, crediting Fisher with helping get the deal done. Xunlight: The flexible solar panel maker received a $7 million loan from the state in 2008 through a couple of sources. The company has complimented the Strickland administrations focus on renewable energy. General Motors: On the verge of collapse just a couple of years ago, the company received support from both Bush and President Barack Obama. Fisher and other Democrats supported the federal governments decision to loan the company $50 billion. And Fisher and Strickland help secure a nearly $82 million state tax package for the company to help expand in 2008. While Fisher cant claim credit for being singularly responsible for landing any of these deals, he played a role as development director and lieutenant governor. And the state has helped far more companies than noted above. So, can you find Fisher handiwork in the four corners of the state, as he suggests? While he's adding a bit of rhetorical flair when he says, look anywhere in the state, he is conveying an accurate picture of his and the development department's work. So we rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Lee Fisher	None	None	None	2010-10-16T13:30:01	2010-10-08	['Ohio']
-pomt-11943	"Loopholes in current law prevent ‘Unaccompanied Alien Children’ (UACs) that arrive in the country illegally from being removed."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/11/donald-trump/donald-trump-omits-facts-claim-loopholes-minors-un/	President Donald Trump recently sent Congress a list of his immigration priorities as legislators consider a plan to allow Dreamers to stay in the United States. Dreamers are young people who grew up in the United States after being brought here illegally as children or infants. Trump has said he was willing to negotiate with Democrats in order to allow them to stay. In exchange, Trump is seeking changes to immigration law that would affect other minors who come to the United States illegally. "Loopholes in current law prevent ‘Unaccompanied Alien Children’ (UACs) that arrive in the country illegally from being removed," said Trump’s outline. "Rather than being deported, they are instead sheltered by the Department of Health and Human Services at taxpayer expense, and subsequently released to the custody of a parent or family member -- who often lack lawful status in the United States themselves." The children Trump is talking about tend to be from Central America, as opposed to Mexico. Waves of unaccompanied minors from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador came to the United States in recent years fleeing gang violence and poverty. Trump wants to make it harder for these children to claim asylum (a type of relief sought by unaccompanied minors) and to be able to remove them all expeditiously. Typically, a loophole refers to an unintended consequence, ambiguity or omission from a law that allows something to be evaded. The Trump administration, however, deems the procedures laid out in law for treating unaccompanied minors as "loopholes" that need to be changed. But the law explicitly requires that a federal agency place children from non-border countries "in the least restrictive setting" (in many cases with family members) and to help them access legal counsel for their removal proceedings. Even with these procedures, however, thousands of children are still ordered removed. Trump’s claim gives a misleading impression. How the laws for unaccompanied minors work An Unaccompanied Alien Child is the legal term for a child who does not have a lawful immigration status in the United States; is under 18 years old; and has no parent or legal guardian in the United States, or for whom no parent or legal guardian in the United States is available to provide care and physical custody, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The number of apprehensions of unaccompanied minors peaked in 2014 at 68,541, up from 38,759 in fiscal year 2013. Their apprehensions have fluctuated since 2014. Border Patrol agents tallied about 38,500 apprehensions of unaccompanied minors from October 2016 to August 2017. There have been concerns for years that unaccompanied minors were not being adequately screened to determine if they should be sent back to their countries. So Congress passed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, formalizing how they should be treated, and President George W. Bush signed it into law. "Special rules" in the law allow unaccompanied minors from contiguous countries (Mexico and Canada) to be quickly returned to their countries. But unaccompanied minors from other countries are not immediately sent back by immigration officers; they are placed in formal removal proceedings. The law requires that they be transferred within 72 hours to HHS, which places them "in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child." In many cases, children await their immigration court hearing while living with family members in the United States, including relatives who are in the country illegally. The law directs HHS to ensure "to the greatest extent practicable" that unaccompanied minors have access to legal counsel, including pro-bono services. The procedures for unaccompanied children cases are not loopholes, but rather basic requirements of the law, said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute and a former acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families within HHS during the Obama administration. Legal representation a factor in case outcome The most common immigration relief granted to unaccompanied minors includes asylum, special immigrant juvenile status, and "T nonimmigrant status" for victims of trafficking, said a January 2017 Congressional Research Service report. Data shows that children with an attorney are more likely to be allowed to stay in the country than children who lack representation. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University examined outcomes for unaccompanied minors cases filed and decided from fiscal years 2012 to 2014. Outcomes for unaccompanied minors with an attorney (8,761 cases): In 73 percent of cases an immigration court allowed the child to stay in the United States, in 12 percent of cases a child was ordered removed, in 15 percent of cases a judge entered a "voluntary departure" order (child still has to leave the country, but the voluntary departure carries less severe consequences than a removal order). Outcomes for unaccompanied minors without an attorney (12,817 cases): In 15 percent of cases the child was allowed to stay in the country, in 80 percent of cases a child was given a removal order, and in 5 percent of cases, a voluntary departure order. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Our ruling Trump said, "Loopholes in current law prevent ‘Unaccompanied Alien Children’ (UACs) that arrive in the country illegally from being removed." The Trump administration argues there is a loophole for unaccompanied minors primarily from Central America. They are referred to HHS and in many cases placed with family members while they await their immigration court hearing. The law directs HHS to try to connect unaccompanied minors with legal counsel, and having an attorney can help them win their case and allow them to stay in the United States. But this process is not a loophole; it’s outlined in the law. The law also does not prevent their deportation: at least 2,707 unaccompanied minors were removed in fiscal year 2017. The statement has an element of truth but leaves out critical context that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-10-11T11:38:21	2017-10-08	['None']
-snes-04667	Hillary Clinton blamed racism for the death of a gorilla in a Cincinnati zoo.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-blames-racism-for-cincinnati-gorillas-death/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Hillary Clinton Blames Racism for Cincinnati Gorilla’s Death	3 June 2016	None	['Cincinnati']
-tron-01992	Photo Shows DACA Recipients Burning American Flag	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/photo-shows-daca-recipients-burning-american-flag/	None	immigration	None	None	['california', 'daca', 'donald trump', 'immigration']	Photo Shows DACA Recipients Burning American Flag	Jan 3, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01536	"New Hampshire has lost more jobs to China than any other state."	half-true	/new-hampshire/statements/2014/sep/16/senate-majority-pac/ad-targeting-scott-brown-says-new-hampshire-has-lo/	As Election Day draws nearer, the New Hampshire Senate race has grown in prominence nationally. With polls showing the contest between Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen and Republican challenger Scott Brown closer than ever, both candidates -- and their independent allies -- are airing hard-hitting attack ads, hoping a victory might sway control of the U.S. Senate. One ad released on Sept. 15, 2014, by the Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic-aligned independent group, takes aim at Brown for his alleged support for outsourcing jobs. Part of the ad piqued our interest: "New Hampshire has lost more jobs to China than any other state," the narrator says. Accompanying the narration was a visual that said, "NH has lost more jobs to China than any other state." Given that New Hampshire ranks as only the 42nd biggest state in population, that claim sounded odd. So we decided to take a look. Senate Majority PAC did not respond to an inquiry, but we found the Union Leader article cited in the ad. It covered the publication of a study in 2012 by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal group based in Washington. It’s worth noting that the report’s authors cautioned that "it is not a statistical survey of actual jobs gained or lost in individual companies, or the opening or closing of particular production facilities." Rather, the group fed federal trade and employment data into a mathematical model to estimate how many jobs were displaced by trade with China between 2001 and 2011. So what did the study find? It found that New Hampshire ranked first among the 50 states in the estimated number jobs lost to China -- as a percentage of the state workforce. That’s similar to, but not the same as, the ad’s language. The ad talked about the number of jobs, not jobs as a percentage of the workforce. If you measure estimated job losses by the raw number instead of the percentage of the workforce, then New Hampshire, a relatively small state, falls far down the list. New Hampshire is tied for the 29th out of the 50 states on the list of estimated job losses. And on the list of congressional districts in the report, neither of New Hampshire’s two districts rank among the top 20 nationally for estimated job losses to China. We’ll close by noting that the Union Leader’s headline got it right, but the ad’s version of that headline dropped four key words at the end. The article said, "NH has lost more jobs to China than any other state, 2.94% of total workforce." Our ruling The Senate Majority PAC ad said that "New Hampshire has lost more jobs to China than any other state." First, the ad did not note that this was an estimate, rather than a hard number of actual jobs lost to China. Second, the estimate was that New Hampshire lost the biggest percentage of its workforce -- not most jobs -- to China. We have no quarrel with the use of workforce percentages as the yardstick for this comparison, since doing so makes it possible to fairly compare 50 states that have widely disparate numbers of residents. But the distinction between jobs and percentage of the workforce should have been reflected in the ad. Otherwise, it makes the ad’s claim seem more powerful than it is. The claim is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True.	None	Senate Majority PAC	None	None	None	2014-09-16T16:46:42	2014-09-15	['China']
-tron-01765	The IRS is going to require guns to be listed on income tax forms	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/sb2099/	None	government	None	None	None	The IRS is going to require guns to be listed on income tax forms	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06199	I differed with my party on business legislation, on consumer protection, and on free trade agreements.	false	/oregon/statements/2011/dec/10/suzanne-bonamici/suzanne-bonamici-says-shes-different-other-democra/	The two major party candidates vying for a congressional seat in January’s 1st District special election both claim to be independent and bipartisan. At a recent debate co-hosted by the Independent Party of Oregon, former Democratic state Sen. Suzanne Bonamici and Republican businessman Rob Cornilles were asked to provide hard evidence. John Schrag of The Forest Grove News-Times asked: "...Can you provide three specific examples of where you differ from your party on matters of policy that are either now before Congress or we can expect to come before Congress in the next couple of years?" We will consider Bonamici’s three examples, on business, consumer protection and free trade, with this question in mind: Did she, in fact, differ with her party on matters of policy? Overall, Bonamici said she looks at policy on its merits, regardless of the forces behind it. "And that happened in the last session, when my party Democratic chair didn’t want to hear a bill that I thought was good for Oregon business. I convinced that chair to hear the bill, it passed and it’s helping an Oregon business right now," she said. House Bill 2095, now law, allows Oregon to join a multi-state compact that makes it easier for insurers to offer new products. It passed out of the Oregon House on a 48-10 vote and landed in the consumer protection committee of Sen. Chip Shields, D-Portland. He was afraid the compact would erode local oversight. Bonamici favored the bill and convinced him to allow a vote in committee. "She bucked a Democratic chairman; no one would have had an opportunity (to vote) had she not taken on her Democratic chairman," said Carol Butler, Bonamici’s campaign manager. Still, the proposal cleared the Senate 28-2. While the no votes came from Democrats, most in her party supported the bill. We give her credit for changing Shields’ mind, but we rule this portion False. Bonamici: "Another place where I’ve differed -- in fact I’ve become a leader in my party -- and that’s on consumer protection issues: cracking down on mortgage fraud, making sure that people who are facing foreclosure have all the opportunities that they can to prevent losing their home, protecting seniors and middle class families from scams. I’ve been a leader and strengthened my party in that way." That’s a sweet talking point. But consumer protection is an issue on which Democrats have long prided themselves. Oregon Senate Democrats highlighted the issue as an agenda item for the 2011 Legislature -- and proudly claimed success after the session. Still, the director of Economic Fairness Oregon insists that many Democrats would have been happy approving watered-down legislation if not for Bonamici’s advocacy. "The best example," said Angela Martin, "is in her advocacy of consumer protection with teeth." So let’s accept that Bonamici goaded skittish Democrats into supporting more consumer friendly legislation. That still doesn’t make up for the fact that siding with consumers is supposed to be a key part of the Democratic Party platform. To suggest otherwise is silly. We could rate this a Pants on Fire. Bonamici: "And finally, during this campaign I could have taken the easy way in a primary campaign and said I wouldn’t support the free trade agreements that were pending before Congress. I took my time and did research and came to a reasoned conclusion about those, rather than just take a party line approach on those." Congress approved agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, earlier this year. Generally, businesses like trade agreements as a way to get goods into other countries. Labor groups argue they will lose jobs. In the special primary election, Bonamici’s main rivals came out against the trade agreements. Bonamici refused to take a position then, saying that she would need specifics in order to vote. Job creation in the district would be her main criterion. But is being opposed to free trade the party-line approach? Oregon’s Democratic delegation split on the proposals. Sen. Ron Wyden and Reps. Earl Blumenauer and Kurt Schrader came down on the free-trade side (although Blumenauer and Schrader did vote against the pact with Colombia, where there are particular concerns over the killing of unionists). Sen. Jeff Merkley and Rep. Peter DeFazio voted against all three. Bonamici now says she would vote for the South Korean agreement, but against the other two. We don’t see how her position differs with those in her party. Democrats in Congress split. But we’ll give her a Mostly False, because she was under pressure from her primary opponents. We get what Bonamici is trying to say. In the first case, she differed with Shields, a Democrat, who controlled the committee, but not from the rest of her caucus. In the second case, she differed with some Democrats who, according to one lobbyist, had to be coaxed into tougher legislation. In the third case, she differed with her primary opponents. But that doesn’t mean she’s differed with Democrats on matters of policy. We combine the three mini-rulings to come up with a False.	None	Suzanne Bonamici	None	None	None	2011-12-10T07:05:51	2011-11-27	['None']
-pomt-14008	The presence of gorillas calls into question the concept of evolution.	false	/punditfact/statements/2016/jun/03/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-asks-why-cincinnati-zoo-gorilla-hadn/	A question for the ages: Why is a gorilla a gorilla, and not a human? Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh wondered aloud about primate evolution while discussing the case of a boy who fell into a gorilla enclosure at a Cincinnati zoo. Limbaugh said the zoo keepers did the right thing when they made the difficult but necessary choice to shoot and kill Harambe, a 400-pound male gorilla, to protect the toddler in the May 28 incident. But some animal activists are outraged at the death of a critically endangered animal. One dimension of this outrage, Limbaugh said, is people think they’re related to gorillas. "A lot of people think that all of us used to be gorillas, and they're looking for the missing link out there," Limbaugh said. "The evolution crowd. They think we were originally apes. I've always had a question: If we were the original apes, then how come Harambe is still an ape, and how come he didn't become one of us?" Limbaugh has delivered mixed messages on his belief in evolution in the past. In 2004, he asked why chimpanzees and baboons "got stuck being idiot gorillas" instead of becoming humans. Then in 2010, he said, "clearly things evolve," while still expressing skepticism about the progression of human and primate evolution. We thought we’d take the opportunity to answer Limbaugh’s question and explain why the presence of gorillas doesn’t negate the concept of evolution. Humans are apes, as members of the taxonomic family hominidae, which also includes the great apes — orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Humans, the great apes, monkeys and more are all primates. However, humans didn’t evolve from gorillas or other apes, as Limbaugh suggests. Rather humans, gorillas and all other apes evolved from a common ape-like ancestor (now extinct) around 5 million to 8 million years ago. See the primate family tree to the left. Scientists know this from studying the comparative anatomy and DNA for humans and other creatures, said Blythe Williams, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. "Each species has changed over time," Williams said. "For reasons that are not clear, our own species has changed in some very dramatic ways, such as becoming bipedal and getting really big brained." Some experts believe this common ancestor was chimp-like, while others think it might have been different from anything currently living, said David Pilbeam, professor of human evolution at Harvard University. Williams said the question Limbaugh poses — why gorillas and humans coexist despite evolution — is akin to asking why Rush Limbaugh hasn’t evolved into his cousin, Stephen, or vice-versa. The two share a common ancestor, but they’re not the same person. "They are different people, with some shared DNA," Williams said. "But because of the introduction of other genes into their gene pool, via parents, they are not exactly the same as one another or their shared grandparent." So it’s not that there was a linear progression from gorillas to humans, and some gorillas just didn’t evolve. It’s that over some 6 million years, descendants of a single, common species became gorillas, and others became humans. "Evolution, including human evolution, doesn't have a goal beyond survival and reproduction," Pilbeam said, making the argument that becoming human isn’t the end-all-be-all in evolution. Homo sapiens are the only remaining human species, having emerged about 200,000 years ago, though there used to be numerous human species, including our closest extinct relative, the neanderthal. Certain genes differ just 1.8 percent between humans and gorillas. The difference in those genes is about 1.2 percent between humans and our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee. Our ruling Limbaugh said the presence of gorillas calls into question the concept of evolution. Limbaugh hit on a common misconception that humans evolved from modern-day apes. In reality, modern-day humans and modern-day gorillas are cousins, having both evolved from a common, but now extinct, ancestor. We rate Limbaugh’s statement False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/b42f712a-3014-4819-ac8e-9e84151e6146	None	Rush Limbaugh	None	None	None	2016-06-03T14:21:19	2016-05-31	['None']
-snes-00106	Nike released a line of sneakers designed to look as if they had been burned in order get back at consumers who destroyed their products in protest.	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nike-burned-sneakers/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Nike Release a Line of ‘Burned’ Sneakers to Clap Back at Protesters?	11 September 2018	None	['None']
-tron-02777	Jesus named the Antichrist—and it’s Barack Obama	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama-antichrist-video/	None	obama	None	None	None	Jesus named the Antichrist—and it’s Barack Obama	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13728	"As secretary of state, (Hillary Clinton) worked hard to get strong sanctions against Iran's nuclear program" and "got Russia and China to support them."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/27/bill-clinton/bill-clinton-praises-hillarys-half-court-shot-iran/	President Barack Obama had to ask Hillary Clinton more than once if she would be his secretary of state, but it was worth the effort, former President Bill Clinton said in a speech praising his wife’s record. "As secretary of state, she worked hard to get strong sanctions against Iran's nuclear program," Clinton said on the second night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. "And in what the Wall Street Journal no less called a half-court shot at the buzzer, she got Russia and China to support them." This sounded like a fact-check we’ve done before. On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has said she put together the sanctions that helped usher Iran to the negotiating table, ultimately resulting in the landmark nuclear deal. We rated this claim Mostly True. Throughout her first 18 months as secretary of state — from January 2009 to June 2010 — U.S. and global sanctions on Iran increased, and it’s fair to say that Clinton and the State Department played a major role in this development. The invitation Upping sanctions on Iran was a clear priority for Clinton’s State Department. She talked at length about the importance of pressuring Iran to discontinue nuclear activity, including through sanctions, at her nomination hearing in January 2009. She and other members of the Obama administration spoke publicly about the topic regularly. The State Department, including top aides and Clinton herself, led the diplomatic effort to get other countries to join the U.S. plan to pressure Iran, overcoming large hurdles such as getting Russia and China on board. In her memoir Hard Choices, Clinton recalls hashing out final details of a plan over drinks with a Chinese official. The New York Times reported that she personally talked with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. As Bill Clinton said in his speech, a Wall Street Journal editorial did call this feat "a half-court shot at the buzzer." In June 2010, the United Nations Security Council approved tough new sanctions on Iran, including expanding an arms embargo and restricting certain financial and shipping enterprises. At the time, Obama called them "the toughest sanctions ever faced by the Iranian government." Those sanctions enabled even tougher measures from the United States and the European Union, which were passed immediately. Congress passed several more bills containing additional sanctions on Iran during the rest of Clinton’s tenure, which ended in early 2013. While the Treasury Department is the primary agency responsible for enforcing sanctions, Clinton appointed a special adviser in 2010 to oversee U.S. efforts "to ensure full and effective implementation of all U.N. Security Council resolutions related to Iran, including most recently UNSCR 1929." Experts told us that Clinton is correct to take some of the credit for the rapid increase in international sanctions on Iran, and these sanctions were a big part of the reason why Iran rejoined multilateral talks about its nuclear program. The RSVP The State Department was key to getting other countries to go along with and add to U.S. efforts to pressure Iran, said Patrick Clawson, senior fellow and research director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The international sanction ramp-up "shocked Iran's leaders," Clawson said. "Besides the pain the sanctions inflicted, they raised the possibility more — worse — was coming. That was a key factor pushing Iran to resume more serious talks." There is room for subjective interpretation on who deserves the credit for effective sanctions because many corners of the U.S. government are involved in the Iran effort, said Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution. But the State Department had its hands in every aspect of new sanction-making and implementation. And in the absence of the United Nations resolution, which was Clinton’s lobbying success, it would have been challenging to get a global coalition to significantly ramp up the sanctions, she said. But whether sanctions were a big factor in bringing Iran to the negotiating table is not crystal clear, Maloney said. Iranian officials have historically denied the significance of sanctions, but Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said recently that Iran negotiated the deal specifically to have sanctions lifted. Beyond the multilateral effort, Clinton’s team also played a role in the sanctions that Congress passed, said Richard Nephew, an expert on sanctions with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Lawmakers would not have written that legislation without consulting the State Department and the administration (as evidenced in this 2010 New York Times article). Nephew noted, though, that Congress did pass some sanctions that went further than the administration’s wishes. "Without Secretary Clinton's good diplomacy— and the message that she radiated down the system to make this a priority and so forth — you can argue that the reductions would not have been as steep or as lasting," Nephew said. Congress’ sanctions that affect Iran’s oil exports resulted in a 50 percent reduction in oil exports and were instrumental in getting Iran to the negotiating table, said Nephew, who worked at the State Department under Clinton. Our ruling Bill Clinton said, "As secretary of state, (Hillary Clinton) worked hard to get strong sanctions against Iran's nuclear program" and "got Russia and China to support them." During Hillary Clinton’s first 18 months as secretary, the State Department led the global effort to increase sanctions on Iran — notably getting Russia and China on board — culminating in an important U.N. resolution. Clinton was personally involved in these diplomatic efforts and pushed them publicly. Experts said these sanctions, on top of other sanctions passed before and after, were crucial to getting Iran to the negotiating table. However, Clinton wasn’t singularly responsible for the sanctions or getting China and Russia to support them, just as the sanctions passed under her watch likely weren’t singularly responsible for opening up Iran to talks. We rate Bill Clinton’s statement Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/707e84bc-45ce-4cd8-bbd4-36d41d27ab0f	None	Bill Clinton	None	None	None	2016-07-27T00:51:00	2016-07-26	['Russia', 'China', 'Iran', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-snes-05170	Donald Trump called for a boycott of all Apple products in a tweet sent from his iPhone.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-iphone-tweet/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Donald Trump iPhone Boycott Tweet Controversy	22 February 2016	None	['Apple_Inc.', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-08553	"An organized crime syndicate was extorting money from his (Tom Ganley’s) business, threatening his family, but he fought back and won the FBI's highest civilian award"	true	/ohio/statements/2010/sep/30/tom-ganley/tom-ganley-touts-role-fbi-investigation/	Tom Ganley is the largest automobile dealer in Ohio, and the owner of other businesses including insurance, real estate, aviation, and finance companies. But it is a reference to his encounter with organized crime in the 1980s that opens the first TV ad in his GOP campaign for Congress against 13th district Democratic Rep. Betty Sutton: "An organized crime syndicate was extorting money from his business, threatening his family, but he fought back and won the FBI's highest civilian award." PolitiFact Ohio earlier gave Ganley a rating of Barely True rating for his claim, in a Sept. 13 interview with The Plain Dealer’s editorial board, that he took down the mob in Northeast Ohio. That claim overstated his role. Truth be told, though, we felt bad about putting a mark against Ganley’s reputation in what is, by all accounts, a laudable act: endangering himself in the interest of justice. He was instrumental in helping the Justice Department put several dangerous criminals behind bars. We wondered whether his overstatement to the newspaper’s editorial board is how he has been portraying his role in the investigation to the public. Before we get to what we found, we note, in the interest of transparency, that Ganley is a major advertiser in The Plain Dealer. We did not find that Ganley has overstated his role in the investigation when speaking to the public, although others have. Generally, Ganley has portrayed his role the way he portrays it in his political ad: someone who helped the FBI with an investigation. Our reporting for the earlier PolitiFact item backs up what the TV ad says. Articles in The Plain Dealer archives show that two organized crime figures -- former Teamsters Union leader John J. (Skip) Felice and Joseph C. Ilaqua -- were sent to prison by U.S. District Judge Alvin I. Krenzler in July 1983 after pleading guilty to conspiring to extort $10,000 and a car from Ganley in 1981 and 1982. The indictment against Felice said he told Ganley in April 1981 that high ranking organized crime figures wanted Ganley killed, and that Felice could get the contract canceled in exchange for money. Ganley wore a wire when he met with the extortionists and asked questions at the FBI's request to help the bureau crack other cases, former FBI agents said. "During this investigation, it became evident to these organized crime members that Mr. Ganley was cooperating with the FBI and that he would be testifying against them at trial," says a 2007 press release the FBI issued when it gave Ganley its Louis E. Peters Memorial Service Award. "This realization resulted in additional death threats directed at Mr. Ganley and his family. Mr. Ganley refused to be intimidated by these criminals and consented to having FBI agents live at his residence to provide security for himself and his family." Retired FBI agents contacted by The Plain Dealer described Ganley’s actions as courageous and important to the FBI’s investigative strategy. We rate the claim in his television ad to be True.	None	Tom Ganley	None	None	None	2010-09-30T08:00:00	2010-09-16	['Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation']
-snes-02318	Ivanka Trump, by way of a female entrepreneurship fund, received a $100 million donation from Saudi Arabia.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ivanka-trump-saudi-arabia-100-million-donation/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Saudi Arabia Give Ivanka Trump a $100 Million Donation?	30 May 2017	None	['Saudi_Arabia']
-pomt-07849	"In the month of January, Canada created more new jobs than we did."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/11/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-tells-cpac-canada-created-more-jobs-ja/	At the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual pep rally for the political right, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney complained that the economy had not recovered under President Barack Obama. He said, "Today there are more men and women out of work in America than there are people working in Canada. And in the month of January, Canada created more new jobs than we did." We’ll look separately at these two claims, which came from his CPAC speech on Feb. 11, 2011. In this item, we’ll analyze the claim that "in the month of January, Canada created more new jobs than we did." We found the relevant data for Canada at the website of Statistics Canada. For the month concluding in January 2011, Canada created a net 69,200 jobs. For the U.S. numbers, we turned to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found Romney is correct. Over the same period, the U.S. created a net 36,000 jobs. So the U.S. created about half as many jobs even though it is nine times larger than Canada. It's worth noting that U.S. job growth was substantially stronger than Canadian job growth in each of the previous three months. In October, the U.S. economy created 171,000 jobs, compared to just 3,000 for Canada. In November 2010, the U.S. economy created 93,000 jobs, compared to 15,200 for Canada. And in December 2010, the U.S. created 121,000 jobs, compared to 22,000 for Canada. But on a per capita basis, in recent months U.S. job creation exceeded Canada's only in October. January happened to be a month when U.S. job creation was especially low and Canadian job creation was especially high, but it is the most recent month and it reflects the general pattern when you account for population. We find the claim True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2011-02-11T17:19:04	2011-02-11	['Canada']
-pomt-10668	"Sixty-five percent of the Iraqi people now say it's okay to shoot an American soldier."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/21/bill-richardson/he-hypes-the-language-the-numbers/	In a Democratic debate on Nov. 15, 2007, Bill Richardson had a startling way to support his view that the situation in Iraq is not improving: "What I'm saying, also, is that look at this statistic — 65 percent of the Iraqi people now say it's okay to shoot an American soldier." Where did that number come from? Katie Roberts, Richardson's deputy communications director, points to a BBC-sponsored poll of Iraqis in September 2007. BBC says the poll was conducted in face-to-face interviews with 2,212 people "in more than 450 neighborhoods across all 18 provinces of Iraq in August, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5%." But the poll does not directly support the 65 percent figure. Nor does the poll put the question nearly as starkly as Richardson stated. "Thinking about the political action of other people," the question says, "do you find each of these items to be acceptable or not acceptable?" The first item was "attacks on coalition forces," and 57 percent of the respondents found them "acceptable." Among Sunnis, 93 percent said "acceptable;" among Shiites, it was 50 percent, and among Kurds, it was 5 percent. It's not at all clear that the same number would have said it is acceptable if people had been asked, "Is it okay to shoot an American soldier?" So Richardson is at least casting the response in more dramatic terms than the question interviewers asked. At the same time, the poll clearly suggests that about half of the Iraqi people consider attacks on coalition forces "acceptable." The Richardson campaign did not respond to our request to explain the disparity in numbers. Polling expert John G. Geer, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Public Opinion, theorized that Richardson excluded the responses of Kurds. Sure enough, if you subtract the 354 Kurd responses from the 2,212 total, the math supports Richardson's 65 percent figure. This makes sense if you consider many Kurds would eventually like to have a state of their own. But removing the Kurds exaggerates the poll results and does not accurately reflect Richardson's statement, which referred only to "the Iraqi people." "The question," says Geer, "is whether 'attacks on coalition forces' equates to 'shooting an American soldier,' which of course it doesn't. Possibly they'd be more likely to say it's acceptable, I don't know." He adds, "It's generally a fair point to say Iraqis are unhappy with the American presence in Iraq. The general point has some validity, but he's exaggerated. That's what campaigns do." And what we do is call them on it. Richardson wasn't just "juicing the numbers," as Geer said. He was deliberately hyping the language and hyping the numbers to make a stronger point than the facts justified. The best we can rule is Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Bill Richardson	None	None	None	2007-12-21T00:00:00	2007-11-15	['United_States', 'Iraq']
-pomt-04883	"As president, Barack Obama has never visited Israel."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/07/mitt-romney/romney-says-obama-has-not-visited-israel-president/	Following a trip in which he said Israel was blessed by the hand of providence, Mitt Romney is out with an ad questioning President Barack Obama’s allegiance to the Jewish state. "Who shares your values?" a narrator asks as an image of Obama appears. "As president, Barack Obama has never visited Israel and refuses to recognize Jerusalem as its capital." Romney, the ad continues, "will be a different kind of president who stands by our allies. He knows America holds a deep and cherished relationship with Israel." The ad closes with clips of Romney giving a speech in front of the Old City and praying at the Western Wall. In another fact-check, we’ll look at the ad’s claims about Obama’s record on Jerusalem as the nation's capital. Here, we ask, has the president been there? Before he moved to the White House As an Illinois senator, Obama made his first visit to Israel in January of 2006. In 2008, while running for president, he returned on a multi-nation trip to Israel, Jordan, Germany, France and Britain. That trip, like Romney’s this year, was designed to bolster his foreign policy credentials. At the time, Obama declared America a friend of Israel and said we "must always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself." But Romney’s ad specified that Obama has not been to Israel "as president," and that assertion is correct. As it turns out, that’s not unusual. Our colleagues at the Washington Post’s Fact-Checker column delved into the archives of the historian’s office at the U.S. State Department. According to those records, seven of the last 11 presidents (dating back to Harry Truman who was in the White House when Israel was established) never visited Israel. The Obama campaign, when we asked for a response, pointed out that Republicans Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were among those who never went to Israel. Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were the only ones to visit during their first term. George W. Bush went to Israel twice during his last year in office. That historical context is noteworthy: A majority of the last 11 presidents did not visit Israel. But the Romney ad’s claim is still accurate. We rate it True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-08-07T15:44:38	2012-08-05	['Israel', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-00714	Algeria "wanted to be taken off of the terror list" at the time it made an unreported donation to the Clinton Foundation.	false	/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/28/joe-scarborough/scarborough-says-algeria-donated-clinton-foundatio/	Television pundits are raising a lot of questions about foreign government donations to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. But not everyone get all the details right. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s Morning Joe flubbed describing the situation in the April 27 show. He was discussing a column by the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus, whose op-ed highlighted an unreported donation to Bill Clinton’s foundation by Algeria in 2010 as an example of sloppiness. The donation, and others like it, raises questions about whether Clinton went "soft" on Algeria for contributing to her husband’s cause under the appearance of earthquake relief in Haiti, Marcus wrote. Scarborough said the situation will "stink to high heaven" even if it’s a legal gray area. "I think it was Algeria, maybe, that had given a donation that went unreported at a time when they wanted to be taken off of the terror list in the State Department," Scarborough said. "They write the check, they get taken off the terror list. ... At the same time, and then it goes unreported by the Clinton Foundation." "Is there a quid pro quo there? I don't know, that's really hard to tell," he said. Scarborough went on to break down to his panelists how easy it would be to explain to voters what might have occurred. "This is pretty simple stuff. So Algeria is on the terror list, they want off the terror list, the State Department's making a decision to do it, they write a check for what? How much? How many million dollars do they write a check for? I don't know, but Algeria writes a check. You're from Boston, you know how politics works. They write a really big check to the Clinton Foundation," Scarborough said. "The Clinton Foundation takes the check, and then just, out of nowhere the State Department then decides, well, they are going to take Algeria off the list. Now why did Algeria write a big check to the Clinton Foundation at the time they want something from the State Department? That's pretty simple for most voters." The problem with all of this isn’t the donation, or questions about a quid pro quo with Algeria. It’s the fact that Algeria wasn’t ever on the terror list. (Media Matters first pointed out what Scarborough said.) An ally against terror The list Scarborough mentions is a serious designation given to just four countries the State Department considers state sponsors of terrorism: Syria, Iran, Sudan and Cuba. President Barack Obama is poised to remove Cuba from the list as a show of improved diplomatic relations. (Libya, Iraq and North Korea are the only countries that have been removed.) Algeria is actually a key partner of the United States in fighting terrorism in North Africa and "has a long history of fighting terrorism," the State Department says. The country spent about 20 years locked in a civil war between the military and various Islamist groups after an Islamist group won a 1991 election that was scrapped. The country’s president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, lifted a state of emergency in April 2011. But the country continues to struggle with radical violence in neighboring countries. Algeria was attacked by the group that calls itself al-Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb almost 200 times in just 2013 in the form of improvised explosive devices, bombings, kidnappings, and fake roadblocks. Human rights violations hamper relations The Algerian government is not a state sponsor of terror. But its hands are not clean when it comes to human rights, which is most likely what Scarborough was trying to recall on air. The Washington Post story that revealed the Algerian embassy’s donation of $500,000 also mention that the one-time gift coincided with increased lobbying visits to the State Department about human rights violations. In 2010, Algeria spent more than $420,000 lobbying American officials on inter-country relations and on "human rights issues," the Post found, citing documents filed as part of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The year also saw an increase in meetings between State Department officials and lobbyists representing Algeria, growing from "a handful" of recorded visits in the years before and after to 12 visits in 2010, the Post reported. The Algeria donation came soon after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, the Clinton Foundation said. It was unsolicited and went to the Clinton Foundation Haiti Relief Fund, "where the entire amount of Algeria’s contribution was distributed as aid in Haiti." Algeria had not donated before and has not donated since, a foundation spokesman said. The foundation acknowledged it did not alert the State Department about the gift for vetting, which was required under a memorandum of understanding between the Obama administration and the Clintons in an effort to prevent foreign governments from trying to curry favor with Hillary Clinton’s State Department by donating to Bill Clinton’s philanthropy. So what are the human rights issues Algeria was lobbying on? Reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the State Department outline the activities of a strict authoritarian government that represses its people’s freedom of assembly and association, overuses pretrial detentions, and employs a judicial system that is susceptible to corruption. The State Department’s 2010 report of human rights issues in Algeria highlights more issues including reports of arbitrary killings, the government failing to account for people who disappeared during the civil war in the 1990s, violence and discrimination against women, and continued restrictions for workers’ rights. The government of Algeria has resisted inspections by independent human rights groups. MSNBC's Diana Rocco said Scarborough deserves some credit for indicating he "wasn’t sure it was" Algeria, and that the exchange that followed "clearly shows he’s using it as a hypothetical scenario to make his larger point about how the quid pro quo scenario may have unfolded." None of that, though, means that Algeria was on the terror watch list in the first place. Neither Algeria nor other governments revealed to have given to the foundation — Australia, the Dominican Republic, Kuwait, Norway, Oman and Qatar — are sponsors of terrorism, either. Our ruling Scarborough was trying to recall the details of a news story about Clinton Foundation donations from foreign governments when he brought up Algeria’s donation to the foundation to try getting off the "terror list." There are parts about the donations that may not look good for Clinton. Maybe it becomes a legal problem, maybe it’s just a political one. But to claim the foundation took donations from a country on the terrorist list is inaccurate. Scarborough’s claim rates False.	None	Joe Scarborough	None	None	None	2015-04-28T15:15:06	2015-04-27	['Clinton_Foundation', 'Algeria']
-pomt-02381	In the U.S., "African-Americans continue to be arrested at nearly three and one half times the rate of whites" on marijuana charges.	true	/rhode-island/statements/2014/mar/16/naacp/new-england-naacp-says-african-americans-us-are-ar/	While there’s a growing debate over whether to legalize marijuana, some are troubled by what they see as unfairness in enforcement of existing laws. Among them is the New England Area Conference of the NAACP. The organization released a statement March 3 in support of a Rhode Island House bill that would legalize using marijuana or possessing up to an ounce. Currently, possession of an ounce or less of marijuana is a civil offense, punishable by a $150 fine. Among their reasons for supporting that change, the statement said, was that in the United States, African-Americans were 3.7 times more likely than whites to get arrested on marijuana charges, based on the number of arrests and their share of the nation’s population. James Vincent, president of the Providence NAACP, said the claim was based on a June 2013 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, "The War on Marijuana in Black and White." That report charted how many blacks and whites were arrested for marijuana possession and then, based on the racial population of each state, what the marijuana arrest rate per 100,000 people was for each race. The ACLU report used statistics compiled by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, a wide-ranging database of annual crime statistics that are often used in national crime studies because each state submits the same type of information, which allows apples-to-apples comparisons. Nationally, according to the report, the marijuana arrest rate for African-Americans in 2010 was 716 per 100,000, while for whites it was 192 per 100,000, meaning African-Americans were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. The disparities were present across the country; in some states, the arrest rate for African-Americans was as much as 8.3 times the white rate. In Rhode Island, before possession of small amounts of marijuana was decriminalized, the arrest rate for African-Americans was 524 per 100,000, while the rate for whites was 201 per 100,000. That meant African-Americans were 2.6 times more likely to be arrested on marijuana charges than their white fellow citizens. That Rhode Island disparity was specifically cited in the bill text as a proposed "legislative finding" justifying enactment of the legislation. The authors of the ACLU report cautioned the FBI data wasn’t perfect. They noted that the FBI didn’t count Latinos as a separate group, usually putting them in the ‘‘white’’ classification. That has the effect of preventing an accurate measurement of Latino arrests and inflating the number of white arrests, the report said. The authors said more research could be done to explore how other factors, such as past criminal records, age of the persons arrested or the population density of the location of the arrest might affect the arrest rates. The authors said they weren’t trying to prove or disprove a particular theory on why the disparities they found existed, just that the disparities were there. And they aren’t the first to study the issue. In 2009, Human Rights Watch, based in Washington, D.C., did a similar study, "Decades of Disparity, Drug Arrests and Race in the United States." While the ACLU study focused on marijuana possession arrests, the Human Rights Watch looked at all drug arrests by race from 1980 to 2007. Like the ACLU, Human Rights Watch used the FBI statistics and found arrest rates for blacks were multiple times higher than whites. In the last year it analyzed, 2007, it found African-Americans were 3.6 times more likely to be arrested on a drug charge, close to the ACLU’s 3.7 multiple for marijuana arrests in 2010. Our ruling The NAACP New England Area Conference said "African-Americans continue to be arrested at nearly three and one half times the rate of whites" on marijuana charges. The group accurately cited a nationwide study that used a widely accepted data source, and a similar study done a few years earlier found almost the same disparity. We find the statement True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	NAACP	None	None	None	2014-03-16T00:01:00	2014-03-03	['United_States']
-pomt-05239	"Women have come through the recession worse off than men … the numbers bear that out. We went from a 7 percent unemployment rate for women when he (President Barack Obama) was elected to an 8.1 percent now."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/jun/04/caroline-casagrande/caroline-casagrande-says-women-have-come-through-r/	The recession and its aftereffects have been hard on millions of people across the country. But it’s been especially hard on women, according to state Assemblywoman Caroline Casagrande (R-Monmouth). "Women have come through the recession worse off than men … the numbers bear that out," Casagrande said to My9TV’s Brenda Blackmon on the April 29 "New Jersey Now" program. "We went from a 7 percent unemployment rate for women when he (President Barack Obama) was elected to an 8.1 percent now." Casagrande is correct about most of her data, PolitiFact New Jersey found. Obama was elected in November 2008 and took office on Jan. 20, 2009. Anita Velardo, Casagrande’s communications director, said in an e-mail that Casagrande’s statistic referred to the period from January 2009 to March 2012. But since Casagrande said elected, we’ll look at the unemployment rate for both periods. From November 2008 to March 2012, unemployment among women rose to 8.1 percent from 6.2 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For men, the rate climbed to 8.3 percent from 7.4 percent. From January 2009 to March 2012, unemployment for women rose from 7 percent to 8.1 percent. The rate for men, however, decreased from 8.6 percent to 8.3 percent. That’s because the male-dominated industries that lost jobs prior to January 2009 were starting to rebound. Now let’s look at data for the recession, which the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research said occurred from December 2007 to June 2009. During the recession, unemployment among women spiked from 4.9 percent to 8.3 percent. For men, the rate more than doubled, from 5.1 percent to 10.6 percent. Men’s unemployment was higher than women during the recession, but women have had a tougher time getting work and living day-to-day during the ongoing economic recovery, according to a September 2011 report, "Women and Men Living on the Edge: Economic Insecurity After the Great Recession," prepared by the Institute For Women’s Policy Research and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Economic and labor experts we talked with supported Casagrande’s claim. Male-dominated fields such as construction and manufacturing often are hit first in recessions and tend to rebound first during an economic recovery, according to Elisabeth Jacobs, a Governance Studies fellow at the Brookings Institution; Gary Burtless, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings; and Harry Holzer, a professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Female-dominated fields such as education, public sector jobs and retail often are hit later and rebound slower, they said. "In terms of lost jobs, men suffered worse than women and have seen a bigger drop in their employment rate," said Burtless, who contributed $750 to Obama’s campaign in 2011 but also was an adviser on aspects of labor policy to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "In terms of the number of adults who are still looking for work, women’s situation looks (proportionately) a bit worse than that of men." "The recovery has progressed more slowly for women than for men, and the unemployment rate for women is indeed higher today than it was when President Obama was elected president," Jacobs said in an e-mail. But is Obama to blame? Our colleagues at PolitiFact.com addressed this issue in April after Mitt Romney’s campaign claimed women were hit hard by job losses under Obama. Their report showed that women have had a more difficult jobs recovery than men, but Obama cannot bear all the blame, just as he couldn’t take the credit if jobs were booming when he took office. Our ruling Casagrande said, "women have come through the recession worse off than men … the numbers bear that out. We went from a 7 percent unemployment rate for women when he was elected to an 8.1 percent now." Labor statistics show and some experts told us that while men took the brunt of job loss during the recession, the industries they dominate – construction and manufacturing – tend to bounce back first during economic recovery. Women often are affected much later than men during a recession, meaning they are more likely to have a slower rate of gaining employment. Casagrande’s timeframe is off slightly for the statistic she cited, and Obama can’t be held completely responsible for the slow recovery among women. We rate Casagrande’s statement Mostly True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Caroline Casagrande	None	None	None	2012-06-04T07:30:00	2012-04-29	['None']
-snes-02673	A DNA test proved that a retired postman fathered more than 1300 illegitimate children.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/postman-fathered-1300-children/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	DNA Test Proves Retired Postman Has Over 1,300 Illegitimate Children?	29 February 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-04594	Says when Republicans took over the state legislature in 2010, New Hampshire’s tax rate for employers was 50th in the nation, and unemployment had more than doubled under Democrats.	half-true	/new-hampshire/statements/2012/sep/21/william-obrien/nh-speaker-house-says-democrats-are-blame-high-bus/	Eyes and ears for questionable campaign claims are everywhere. Recently a New Boston reader reached out to PolitiFact New Hampshire with a campaign mailer he received from Speaker of the House Bill O’Brien R-Mont Vernon this summer. The material was one of many tools incumbents are employing in a tussle for party control of the statehouse in 2013. "When Republicans took over the legislature in 2010, we inherited a tax rate for employers that was 50th -- dead last -- in the nation," O’Brien said. "Add to that one of the most intense regulatory state government structures in the country, and it was no wonder that the unemployment rate had more than doubled since the Democrats took power four years prior." Along with this excerpt, our reader had a simple request: "Would you be willing to crunch the numbers here?" We were happy to oblige. First, we reached out to O’Brien through his campaign email and phone number, but we heard nothing back. We broke his claim into two parts, and reached out to The Tax Foundation and the New Hampshire Employment Security for some answers. The Tax Foundation, a business-backed policy group, offered some guidance for the part of the claim where O’Brien speaks about New Hampshire’s "tax rate for employers" in 2010. That year New Hampshire ranked 50th on The Tax Foundation's corporate tax index, according to economist Scott Drenkard. Every year The Tax Foundation takes an "all-encompassing" look at the entire tax system of a state, Drenkard said, breaking it into five subcategories: corporate, income, sales, unemployment insurance, and property taxes. "The word ‘rate’ is concerning to me because it’s not exactly what it looks at," Drenkard said. "The rate is only part of this story." Drenkard pointed us to a New Hampshire Watch Dog article that broke down the Tax Foundation’s ranking at the time. As part of the study, New Hampshire ranked 7th best for overall business tax climate, and had been 7th since 2007. In 2006, the Granite State was 6th. "New Hampshire’s economic competitiveness was dragged down in the rankings by its worst in the nation corporate tax policy," according to the article. "The rate is fairly high," Drenkard said. "That's part of the component there. There's a business profits tax and New Hampshire limits carryforwards, one of the things that's an important part of the base." New Hampshire also got "dinged" in 2010 for offering credits for creating jobs, as well as research and development credits and investment credits, which The Tax Foundation scores as negative in its corporate tax policy, Drenkard added. "Those, for the most part, mixed with the high rate, ended up putting it in 50th in 2010," Drenkard said. "In general, the spirit of what he’s trying to say is certainly true. We rank it as one of the worst corporate tax structures in the country." State legislatures write the laws that impact tax structure, Drenkard said. But it’s important to note that in 2012 -- under a Republican-controlled legislature -- the Granite State only hits 46th in its corporate tax rank compared to the rest of the country. Each Tax Foundation study is considered exclusive to the year in which it is conducted and should not be compared with previous ranks, Drenkard said. "For the most part, I don’t remember hearing any fantastic corporate tax reforms from New Hampshire at least recently," Drenkard said. "So the story is it was bad in 2010 and for the most part is still one of our lowest ranked corporate tax codes." As for the Granite State’s unemployment statistics, O’Brien is fairly accurate on the numbers by themselves. "Roughly, you could say it doubled," Annette Nielsen, an economist for New Hampshire Employment Security said. Looking at 2006 generally -- four years prior to Republicans taking over the state legislature in November 2010 -- unemployment was in the 3.4-3.7 percent range, Nielsen said. It stayed that way through May 2008, she added. In November and December that year, the recession hit, and state unemployment numbers started rising. By December 2008 the unemployment was 4.8 percent. By October 2009 it peaked at 6.7 percent and stayed that way through January 2010. Not quite the "more than doubled" number O’Brien cited, but close. New Hampshire’s increasing unemployment rate followed nationwide trends, Nielsen said. "The nation was at a much higher rate, it peaked in October at 10.1 or 10.2 percent," Nielsen said. "It followed the general trend of the nation." Are Democrats to blame for the increased unemployment figures? "Whether it could be better or worse, that's kind of a little more individual -- what people maybe feel," Nielsen said. "There are some forces that are national that have an impact. New Hampshire is not an island by itself. It’s part of the nation and there were some greater forces that were taking place at that time." Dennis Delay, an economist with the N.H. Center for Public Policy Studies, an independent nonprofit that pursues data-based research on public policy matters, agreed. Unemployment increased in New Hampshire as a result of the Great Recession, he said. "States with Republican legislatures also saw unemployment rates rise substantially after 2007, because of the worldwide financial crisis and its impact on local economies," Delay added. He provided a graph of job losses in the U.S. and compared it to New Hampshire, which shows the spike in job losses nationwide during that period of time. "The situation in New Hampshire looks similar, although New Hampshire did not lose as many jobs in percentage terms as the U.S.," Delay added. Our ruling: O’Brien said that when Republicans took over the state legislature in 2010, the state's tax rate for employers was last in the nation, and unemployment had more than doubled under Democrats. We find he generalized a 2010 tax study, zeroing in on New Hampshire’s corporate tax rate, when several other factors contribute to The Tax Foundation’s corporate tax index for New Hampshire. And he failed to mention that New Hampshire’s corporate tax rank is still in the same ballpark in 2012. O’Brien used accurate unemployment figures comparing 2006 to 2010, but the numbers have more to do with the Great Recession than with the people (or the party) running the state. O’Brien was on target with the rank and rates he cited, but there is context missing and misplaced blame. We rate his claim Half True.	None	William O'Brien	None	None	None	2012-09-21T07:09:22	2012-08-15	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-01919	Says 95 percent of people caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border said in a survey "we are coming because we’ve been promised amnesty."	half-true	/texas/statements/2014/jun/29/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-accurately-recaps-survey-result-indicatin/	People have increasingly crossed into Texas over the Rio Grande because they think Uncle Sam has open arms, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said the other day. Cruz, at a San Antonio press conference with fellow Republicans Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, said a May 2014 government survey of over 200 people apprehended trying to enter the country illegally proves his point. Asked "why are you coming here?," Cruz said, "95 percent said we are coming because we’ve been promised amnesty. We are coming because if we get here, we were told that we are allowed to stay, that we will have a permiso." We wondered if most recent arrivals are citing expectations of amnesty. Record crossings Tens of thousands of people, including children mostly from Central American countries, have been crossing the border, resulting in a record number of non-Mexicans getting apprehended. Accounts have varied on why more are coming than before. For instance, a June 16, 2014, National Journal news story quoted Leslie Velez, a senior protection officer at the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, as saying its 2014 interviews of 404 children revealed many were fleeing violence and crime in their home countries. Survey says... And what was Cruz citing? By email, Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier pointed out June 2014 news stories in The Washington Post and the Washington Examiner summarizing a Border Patrol survey reportedly brought to light in an undated document Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, placed into the records of the Senate Judiciary Committee at a June 2014 hearing. A copy of Grassley’s document, emailed to us by Texas Sen. John Cornyn’s office, describes May 2014 interviews of adults and children by Border Patrol officers in the agency’s Rio Grande Valley sector. By telephone, Grassley spokeswoman Beth Pellett Levine said the senator knows a whistleblower summarized the interviews, though she said that as of June 24, 2014, Homeland Security hadn’t confirmed or denied the document’s authenticity. By email, a Del Rio-based Border Patrol spokesman, Dennis Smith, declined to comment on the four-page document. According to the document, the agents interviewed 230 adults and unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala on May 28, 2014. The focus, the document says, was to "obtain a general consensus as to why" the border crossers "are migrating en masse" into the country through the Rio Grande Valley. The word "amnesty" doesn’t appear in the summary of results. Also, the document says in many cases, "the subjects mentioned more than one reason," including gang-related violence, extreme poverty, high unemployment, poor living conditions and subpar educational circumstances -- with many women mentioning domestic abuse. Still, the document says, the main reason interviewed individuals "chose this particular time to migrate" was to "take advantage of the ‘new’ U.S. ‘law’ that grants a ‘free pass’ or permit (referred to as ‘permisos’) being issued by the U.S. government to female adult" non-Mexicans "traveling with minors and to" unaccompanied children." The document says the issue of "permisos" was the "main reason provided by 95% (+/-) of the interviewed subjects." The document doesn’t confirm any new law and we’re unaware of any. Confusingly, too, the document says the permisos are "Notice to Appear" documents, but it also says those documents aren’t free passes to stay in the country. Rather, the document says, the notices are routinely issued to undocumented entrants "when they are released on their own recognizance pending a hearing before an immigration judge." The document goes on to say the granting of permisos "is apparently common knowledge in Central America and is spread by word of mouth, and international and local media. A high percentage of the subjects interviewed stated their family members in the U.S. urged them to travel immediately, because the United States government was only issuing ‘permisos’ until the end of June 2014," while several people said they’d heard they’d be issued only through May 2014, the document says. Most unaccompanied children, the document says, stated they were going to join a parent or parents or other family members already in the country. The children "stated they wanted to take advantage of the ‘permiso’ being issued by the U.S. government to minors traveling alone." Many children cited high crime in their countries and forced recruitment into gangs, the document says, with others mentioning educational opportunities in the U.S. Outside lawyers: ‘It’s not amnesty’ To our telephone inquiries, immigration lawyers who looked over the Grassley-publicized document offered different interpretations of the references to permisos. Each one also said it would be inaccurate to interpret the permisos as amnesty, as in passes to remain in the country without risk of being deported or other penalties. Elizabeth Lee Young of the University of Arkansas School of Law, who emailed us a "Notice to Appear" document, characterized it as an immigration court summons. "Most of the people know it’s a notice to go to court," Young said. Anyone who doesn’t show up for their court date, she said, is subject to immediate deportation. Significantly, Young said, no one caught after crossing is given a work permit, which is how she said she usually interprets "permiso." Detainees given a notice near the border, the lawyers told us, can then be held in a government facility or released deeper into the country on personal recognizance -- as children and women with children often are, the lawyers said. Toni Maschler, a Washington, D.C., attorney, said generally, she considers a permiso a permit, like a driver’s license, and not the notice to appear for an immigration hearing. Maschler speculated the document’s references to permisos were really to the document that releases someone on their own recognizance. Lisa Brodyaga, a lawyer in San Benito, close to the Texas-Mexico border, similarly said the document’s references to permisos probably mean paperwork related to releases on personal recognizance, which she said clear the way for women and unaccompanied children to leave the border region; men, for the most part, she said, are kept in detention. Each release "allows you to get out of detention, allows you to travel, it allows you to go be with your family," Brodyaga said, "and, as long as you go to your hearings when you have them, it allows you to stay in the United States. It’s a ‘permit,’ until you get deported." "It’s nowhere near amnesty," Brodyaga said, which would mean "you are forgiven for something. You’re not forgiven. You’re subject to the laws of the United States… This does not entitle them to remain indefinitely." Similarly, Maschler said the release on personal recognizance is "not amnesty. It doesn’t give anybody a permanent right to stay in the United States." Young said: "Amnesty would indicate some form of legal waiver of your undocumented presence or entry. That is not the situation." Apprised of the lawyers’ assessments, Cruz’s spokeswoman said by email Cruz didn’t say that any legal papers deliver amnesty to border crossers. The point is people are coming because they think they’ll be allowed to stay, as they have been, Frazier said. Our ruling Cruz said a survey indicates 95 percent of people caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border said "we are coming because we’ve been promised amnesty." This statement accurately recaps a statistic in a document made public by another senator: 95 percent of 230 adults and unaccompanied children interviewed recently by the Border Patrol gave as the main reason for their journeys the U.S. government issuing permisos, which the document defines as notices to appear in immigration court enabling recipients to stay in the country at least until then. But that’s not "amnesty," as in an absolution enabling people to stay indefinitely without risk of penalty, and indeed "amnesty" goes unmentioned in the survey summary. Also, as unsaid by Cruz, the immigrants listed other reasons for coming, including crime and violence in home countries. The document, with its anonymous origins, doesn’t specify how many individuals singled out these other factors. Another study, in which the United Nations earlier surveyed twice as many immigrants, pointed to gang violence as the vital factor. We rate this claim, which is partly accurate but leaves out relevant details, as Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2014-06-29T06:00:00	2014-06-23	['None']
-snes-05185	Bill Maher smoked a joint during a live broadcast of 'Real Time with Bill Maher,' and the FCC imposed a hefty fine.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-maher-smokes-joint/	None	Entertainment	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Bill Maher Smokes a Joint on ‘Real Time’?	19 February 2016	None	['Bill_Maher']
-pose-01008	"The current practice of administering the (state driver's license) written test in multiple languages should be reviewed to examine its costs and benefits."	stalled	https://www.politifact.com/tennessee/promises/haslam-o-meter/promise/1076/review-multi-language-drivers-license-tests/	None	haslam-o-meter	Bill Haslam	None	None	Review multi-language driver's license tests	2012-01-18T15:26:36	None	['None']
-pomt-10671	"I can't sign money. That's illegal."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/19/hillary-clinton/if-shes-right-bills-a-criminal/	During a campaign stop at a supermarket in Des Moines, Iowa, Hillary Clinton was asked by a shopper to autograph a dollar bill. She refused. "I can't sign money. That's illegal," Clinton said, according to a CBS News video of the exchange. "I'm so sorry." The shopper then showed reporters the dollar, which had apparently been autographed by Clinton's husband. "Well," the shopper said, "Bill signed it." So let's explore whether Sen. Clinton is correct, which would implicate her husband in a federal crime. In fact, the Treasury Department says "defacement of currency" is against the law. The law specifies that "whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined not more than $100 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both." But if Bill is busted for violating Title 18, Section 333, then the feds will also have to prosecute some other prominent law-breakers, including treasury secretaries who have routinely autographed dollar bills, which are printed with their signatures. Like so many laws, this one becomes a matter of interpretation. In this case, it's a question of whether an autograph is a deliberate attempt to deface a bill so it can't be used again. The Treasury Department doesn't think so and says autographing dollar bills is permitted. A department fact sheet says, "Throughout the years, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Treasurer of the United States have autographed currency notes bearing their signatures at the request of private citizens. This practice is not considered as defacement since the autographs are generally provided to persons as keepsakes as opposed to circulating currency." Claudia Dickens, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, said it only becomes a violation when it is mutilated so much that it is" unacceptable to a merchant or vending machine. That's defacing." She said autographing "is certainly not something that the Department of Treasury encourages, but it's not disallowed." And so we find that although Clinton's statement has a germ of truth because defacing dollars is illegal, she is wrong about an innocent autograph. She could have signed that buck without fear of prosecution. We find her statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2007-12-19T00:00:00	2007-12-18	['None']
-goop-02047	Kate Middleton Adding Workload Because Of Focus On Meghan Markle, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-middleton-adding-royal-workload-heat-meghan-markle-mania/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Kate Middleton NOT Adding Workload Because Of Focus On Meghan Markle, Despite Report	5:16 am, December 12, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04279	Says during George W. Bush’s administration "we were losing millions of jobs per month," while under Barack Obama we have "three years of gaining hundreds of thousands of jobs per month."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/nov/02/michael-moore/michael-moore-said-us-lost-millions-jobs-month-und/	On the day of the final release of jobs numbers before the presidential election, liberal filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted a comparison of how the job market has fared under President Barack Obama and his predecessor, President George W. Bush. "Under Bush we were LOSING MILLIONS of jobs per month; under Obama we have 3 yrs of gaining hundreds of thousands of jobs per mo," Moore tweeted to his 1.2 million followers. Were Moore’s figures correct? No -- in fact, Moore conceded so himself when he sent a corrected tweet about five hours later. Let's look at the numbers. Job losses under Bush We turned to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the government’s official collector of employment numbers. Since Moore didn’t specify what types of jobs he was referring to, we took the most basic measure -- private sector jobs combined with government jobs, not counting farm jobs or the military. During Bush’s final year -- the year with the heaviest job losses during his tenure -- the monthly net change in jobs bottomed out in the fourth quarter. Between October 2008 and November 2008, the economy shed 803,000 jobs. Between November 2008 and December 2008, the economy lost 661,000 jobs. And between January 2009 and December 2008, the economy lost 818,000 -- the highest number of Bush’s tenure (and higher than any monthly loss under Obama). That’s a huge number, but it’s not "MILLIONS." In fact, it’s not even 1 million. So Moore’s tweet exaggerated the size of the losses under Bush. Job gains under Obama The job picture did eventually improve under Obama, but Moore exaggerates when he says the economy has been gaining hundreds of thousands of jobs per month for the last three years under Obama. During 2010, the job market expanded by an average of 85,000 per month. In 2011, the average rose to 153,000 per month. And in 2012, the average rose again, to 157,000 per month. Those numbers are a whole lot better than what the nation experienced in 2008, but these rises don’t qualify as "hundreds of thousands," which we would define as at least 200,000. What about increases above 200,000 during individual months? Looking at the 34 months since January 2010, the net increase has exceeded 200,000 jobs a total of 10 times, or less than one-third of the time. And several of those were months where the job numbers were boosted only temporarily due to a flurry of hiring for the once-a-decade U.S. Census. Moore's correction About five hours after Moore's original tweet was posted, and after we had contacted his office, he sent a tweet correcting the record. "Thx for tweets on job loss - worst month w/Bush was 800K+ jobs lost, most months since '10 have had 100K+ jobs gained http://mmflint.me/QbEkPM." Moore's second tweet was correct. Our ruling Moore's initial tweet was incorrect when it said the nation was "losing millions" of jobs per month under Bush, since even the weakest month under Bush saw the economy lose less than 1 million jobs per month. And he was also incorrect to say that the economy has been "gaining hundreds of thousands of jobs" per month for three years under Obama. The economy has averaged well under 200,000 jobs per month during that period and only exceeded the job-gain threshold of 200,000 in 10 months. We applaud his correction, but we still rate his initial tweet False.	None	Michael Moore	None	None	None	2012-11-02T16:49:39	2012-11-02	['Barack_Obama', 'George_W._Bush']
-para-00137	Only Labor "will continue to invest in both road and rail projects".	false	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/26/team-julia-gillard/julia-gillard-tweets/index.html	None	['Infrastructure']	Team Julia Gillard	David Humphries, Peter Fray	None	Julia Gillard tweets	Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 4:15 p.m.	None	['None']
-pomt-14527	Travis County residents "trusted me to take on Tom DeLay — and we won."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2016/feb/17/gary-cobb/gary-cobb-won-guilty-jury-verdicts-against-tom-del/	It’s no secret: A Democratic candidate for Travis County district attorney starred in the high-profile prosecution of a felled U.S. House majority leader found guilty of campaign finance violations. A May 2015 Austin American-Statesman news story summed up: "Travis County prosecutor Gary Cobb persuaded jurors in 2010 that former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had illegally channeled corporate funds to Texas candidates." Still, an adviser to one of Cobb’s opponents in the March 2016 primary asked us to gauge a TV ad posted on Cobb’s campaign website. In the spot, Cobb faces the camera and says: "You trusted me to take on Tom DeLay — and we won." By email, Jeff Crosby, an adviser to candidate Margaret Moore, noted that while a local jury found DeLay guilty, his convictions were thrown out on appeal. We asked Katie Naranjo, a consultant to Cobb’s campaign, about Cobb’s victory statement. By email, Naranjo told us Cobb "was entrusted as lead trial lawyer" in DeLay’s trial "and Gary (and his trial team, other attorneys, investigators and support staff—that is, ‘we’) won the trial." Naranjo acknowledged the convictions were overturned. Still, she wrote, "Gary was not the appellate lawyer, which was another team. Trial lawyers often win a trial, and then that result might get overturned on appeal. That doesn’t mean that the trial lawyers didn’t win the trial." News accounts Let’s revisit the DeLay turning points as depicted in Statesman news stories, starting with the trial. In November 2010, eight years after the county launched its investigation, a jury found DeLay, then 63, guilty of laundering corporate money into political donations during the 2002 elections. His indictment on the charges earlier led him to give up the leadership post; next, he left the House. From the Statesman account of the verdict: DeLay, a Republican whose nickname was "The Hammer" because of his heavy-handed leadership style, was accused of conspiring to funnel $190,000 of corporate money through the Republican National Committee, which sent $190,000 in campaign donations to seven GOP candidates for the Texas House. Prosecutors argued that DeLay conspired to launder corporate money into political donations as the first step in creating a GOP majority in the Texas House. It later redrew the state's congressional districts to favor Republicans, which prosecutors said bolstered DeLay's hold on his leadership post in Washington. State law prohibits corporations from giving donations to candidates directly or indirectly. Prosecutors earlier said they thought the DeLay case is the first such criminal charge ever filed over the state's century-old law on corporate contributions in state political races. In January 2011, DeLay was sentenced to three years in prison. But he also was released on a $10,000 bond pending appeals avowed by his lead trial lawyer, Dick DeGuerin. Cobb's role Cobb appears to have led the county’s courtroom team. A web search led us to a 2011 commentary by Rob Kepple of the Texas District & County Attorneys Association stating Cobb was part of a "seasoned team" of prosecutors in DeLay’s trial including Beverly Mathews, Steven Brand and Holly Taylor. Separately to our inquiry, the Travis County district attorney, Rosemary Lehmberg, said Cobb was the county’s lead counsel in the trial. Lehmberg said: "He was not as active in the appeals process," specifying that Taylor steered that task. Appeals courts On Sept. 19, 2013, the state’s 3rd Court of Appeals sided with DeLay and overturned the convictions won by Cobb. In a 2-1 ruling that broke along party lines, the judges said the prosecution had failed to prove "proceeds of criminal activity." It further noted that the jury on two occasions had asked trial Judge Pat Priest whether the $190,000 was "illegal at the start of the transaction" or "procured by illegal means originally." And, the court said, prosecutors didn’t prove that point — a critical element to conspiring to launder money — and the judge never answered the jurors’ questions. More than a year passed. But on Oct. 1, 2014, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, splitting 8-1 along party lines, upheld the lower court. DeLay’s political committee could legally donate corporate money to the Republican National Committee and the national organization could legally make political donations to Texas candidates, the court found, and the agreement to swap money didn’t constitute conspiracy -- and DeLay didn’t "knowingly" violate the law. District attorney comments At the time, Lehmberg said in a written statement the court had effectively repealed the state law prohibiting corporate donations to candidates and placed an impossible burden on the state to prosecute violators of the ban. "The decision undermines the fairness and integrity of our elections," she said. For this fact check, we asked Lehmberg if Travis County "won" against DeLay. She credited Cobb with winning at trial. But, she said by phone, "ultimately, we didn’t" prevail. Our ruling Cobb says Travis County residents "trusted me to take on Tom DeLay--and we won." Cobb and the county won a jury verdict against DeLay. However, the convictions were tossed by an appeals court; its ruling was upheld by the state's highest criminal court of appeals. We rate Cobb's claim Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Gary Cobb	None	None	None	2016-02-17T15:56:35	2016-02-16	['Travis_County,_Texas', 'Tom_DeLay']
-goop-00857	Meghan Markle “Regrets” Marrying Prince Harry, Misses Old Life?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/meghan-markle-prince-harry-regrets-marrying-misses-old-life-not-true/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Meghan Markle “Regrets” Marrying Prince Harry, Misses Old Life?	3:00 am, June 8, 2018	None	['Prince_Harry']
-farg-00030	"We’ve got the cleanest country in the planet right now. There’s nobody cleaner than us."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/08/u-s-not-ranked-the-cleanest-country/	None	the-factcheck-wire	FactCheck.org	D'Angelo Gore	['environment']	U.S. Not Ranked the ‘Cleanest’ Country	August 23, 2018	2018-08-23 21:54:20 UTC	['None']
-tron-00117	Doctor, Paramedic Save Each Other’s Lives 30 Years Apart	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/doctor-paramedic-save-others-lives-30-years-apart/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Doctor, Paramedic Save Each Other’s Lives 30 Years Apart	Apr 26, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-02918	Dropping the Hammer on James Comey	commentary!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dropping-hammer-comey/	None	politics	None	None	['clinton foundation', 'fbi', 'hillary clinton', 'james comey']	Dropping the Hammer on James Comey	May 23, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10929	Says he’s "never voted ‘present’ in the House instead of taking a yes or no position.	true	/texas/statements/2018/jul/26/roger-williams/roger-williams-says-hes-never-voted-present-us-hou/	U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, who represents the 25th Congressional District running north and west from Austin to just south of Tarrant County, declared that he always commits to a position on issues before the House--never voting "present" the "chicken way." A reader asked us to fact-check Williams's tout. Williams, a former Texas secretary of state who faces Democratic nominee Julie Oliver on the November 2018 ballot, was asked by Maria Bartiromo, who hosts the Fox Business Network’s "Mornings with Maria," why some Democratic colleagues had voted "present" instead of "yes" or "no" on a House-approved resolution. The measure expressed support for officers who carry out the mission of Immigration & Customs Enforcement, the agency that some Democrats lately say should be disbanded. The House vote on the resolution was 244-35 with 18 Democrats joining Republicans favoring the proposal and 34 voting against it, The Hill reported--with another 133 Democrats voting "present" as urged by Democratic leaders. The leadership "strategy was aimed at both protecting vulnerable Democrats from a contentious vote," The Hill said, "and protesting what most Democrats deemed a political stunt designed to distract the media and the public from Congress’s failure to enact immigration reforms, including efforts to address the separation of migrant families on the U.S.-Mexico border," its story said. The morning after the House action, Bartiromo asked Williams: "How do you justify voting ‘present?’" Williams replied: "Well, I never voted ‘present.’ So I don’t know that I can justify it. It’s the chicken way out is the only way I know we can put it." Checking vote histories We didn’t divine a way to plumb a government website to determine if Williams, who joined the House in 2013, had never voted "present." But to our inquiry, Joshua Tauberer, founder of GovTrack.us, a site that compiles congressional votes, confirmed Williams’s statement. Tauberer said by email that Williams, who as of late July 2018 had been eligible to vote in 3,604 roll-call votes, "has never voted ‘present,’ except in quorum calls where ‘present’ is the only vote one can make." Tauberer told us he reached his conclusion by querying the site’s internal database of votes, which he described as built in part from member votes posted by the House clerk. We were curious too about other Texas members voting "present." On that front, Tauberer emailed us a spreadsheet showing more than 1,900 "present" votes by Texans since 1990, though most weren’t substantive, we found. We sifted the provided information to find that 26 Texas members, from both parties, accounted for more than 680 non-procedural votes of "present" since 1990 with Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas, leading the delegation with 84 votes of "present" followed by Democratic Rep. Gene Green of Houston, with 61. According to our sort, Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Ennis placed third with 59 "present" votes; he was trailed by GOP Reps. Sam Johnson of Plano and Lamar Smith of San Antonio, with 57 "present" votes each, and Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston, who voted "present" 50 times. We sifted the information even more to find that since Williams joined the House in 2013, 11 House Democrats had voted "present" 20 times across nine issues -- topped by Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, doing so five times. Most recently, the results show, Reps. Green and Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen each voted "present" on the ICE resolution that Williams supported. Since 2013, the information indicates, no Texas Republicans in the House voted "present" on non-procedural issues. Outside analyst Finally, we asked an expert on Congress generally about the prevalence and significance of "present" votes. Steven Smith, a Washington University political scientist, said by email that party strategy or an individual’s political calculation often underlie the semi-rare "present" votes. "At times, a legislator may want to avoid committing to the ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ position without reducing his or her rate of voting participation," Smith wrote. "The legislator will be counted as having voted but without having committed to either side. This probably can be rationalized as having unacceptable alternatives, but it avoids adding a vote for or against a cause, group or constituency," Smith said. Our ruling Williams said he’s never voted "present" instead of taking a position on issues before the House. That’s backed up by research we elicited from the founder of the GovTrack.us website. We rate this claim True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Roger Williams	None	None	None	2018-07-26T17:50:47	2018-07-19	['None']
-goop-02704	Kylie Jenner, Travis Scott Did Split, 	3	https://www.gossipcop.com/kylie-jenner-not-split-travis-scott/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kylie Jenner, Travis Scott Did NOT Split, Despite Claim	1:48 pm, June 29, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02694	H.R. 2847 Expected to Cause U.S. Dollar to Collapse	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hr-2847-dollar-collapse/	None	money-financial	None	None	None	H.R. 2847 Expected to Cause U.S. Dollar to Collapse	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13924	Austin was the "site of the first mass shooting in the country."	false	/texas/statements/2016/jun/23/steve-adler/steve-adler-wrong-first-us-mass-shooting-occurred-/	Austin’s mayor struck a grim historical note when asked if he could help people understand the June 2016 shooting rampage that took 49 lives in a gay club in Orlando. "For me it’s beyond understanding," Steve Adler replied on KOKE-FM’s morning program a couple of days after the carnage. "It’s the kind of thing that could happen anywhere, though. You know," Adler said, "Austin was ... the site of the first mass shooting in the country, from that tower, that was the very first one." Adler was referring to the Aug. 1, 1966, acts of University of Texas student Charles Whitman, whose shots from atop UT’s iconic Main Building ultimately took 14 lives, wounding 31; he’d earlier stabbed to death his wife and mother. Whitman’s fusillade ended when he was shot and killed at short range. KOKE host Bob Cole followed up, asking Adler if he was saying Whitman represented "the first mass shooting in our country." "That’s what I’m told," Adler replied. "First one." No doubt, Whitman holds broad significance. Texas author Gary Lavergne’s 1997 book, "A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders," says: "With deadly efficiency, he introduced America to public mass murder, and in the process forever changed our notions of safety in open spaces." Before 1966, Lavergne wrote, "mass murder was so rare that the" criminal justice "system had no special category or documentation for it. Statistics and prosecutors had treated such criminals and their crimes in the same manner as a single murder." However, mass shootings take in far more events than Adler acknowledged, making this Austin-was-first statement incorrect. Adler spokesman concedes error Mayoral spokesman Jason Stanford owned up to error when we inquired into the basis of Adler’s statement. By email, Stanford said he’d given the mayor the "first mass shooting" conclusion based on what he’d personally heard since moving to Austin in the 1990s. Next, we looked at news stories fetched from electronic archives, finding that the Austin American-Statesman didn’t deem Whitman the nation’s first mass shooter, at least in recent decades. Rather, a July 1991 American-Statesman news story called the day’s events "one of the worst mass killings in American history." Later in 1991, the Associated Press recapped the death of Richard Speck, who "shocked the nation in 1966 by stabbing and strangling eight student nurses" in a night. That story quoted James Alan Fox, then dean of Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice, saying the Speck slayings marked the start of America's "age of mass murder. Mass murder was not something that was in our vocabulary until Richard Speck," Fox said. Whitman, the story noted, fired from the UT Tower two weeks after the Speck murders. Defining mass shootings That story's mention of Fox prompted us to seek the professor’s analysis of Adler’s statement. By phone, Fox reminded us that a mass shooting has conventionally been defined as one involving four or more deaths by gunfire, not counting military operations or shoot-outs connected to gang activity or other crimes, all in the same one-day period--a definition he sticks with, he said, for the sake of comparisons over time. That definition is in keeping with a 2008 FBI report stating that over the previous three decades, a mass murder was defined as four or more murders occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders--though later, a 2012 law set the federal threshold for a "mass killing" as three or more people killed, we noted in a January 2016 fact check. Yet there’s room for other definitions and a narrower term. By email, Fox noted a Stanford University database of U.S. mass shootings launched after the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings. The Stanford project advises: "Instead of limiting our data collection to incidents in which four or more fatalities occurred (the previous FBI definition for mass murder), we instead collect incidents of three or more shooting victims (not necessarily fatalities). All mass shooting definitions are arbitrary in that there is no natural way to quantify such an event." In June 2016, Stanford’s database, which chronologically starts with the Whitman shootings, listed more than 300 incidents fulfilling its "mass shooting" definition, most recently an April 2016 drive-by incident in Missouri that left four people injured. Mass public shootings To our inquiries, Fox and Grant Duwe, author of a book on mass murder in the U.S. and director of research and evaluation for the Minnesota Department of Corrections, each noted another term with a slightly different definition--"mass public shootings." A 2013 Congressional Research Service report defined such shootings as "incidents occurring in relatively public places, involving four or more deaths—not including the shooter(s)—and gunmen who select victims somewhat indiscriminately." Whitman, Fox suggested to us, accounted for the first mass public shooting on a college campus and the largest to that time. A memorable previous public mass shooting, Fox said, occurred in September 1949 when Howard Unruh shot and killed 13 people, including three children, in a 20-minute stroll through his neighborhood in Camden, N.J., according to Unruh’s October 2009 obituary in the New York Times. Duwe said in an October 2014 article in Reason that he’d identified 161 U.S. mass public shootings since 1900, "which I've defined as incidents that occur in the absence of other criminal activity (e.g., robberies, drug deals, gang ‘turf wars,’ et cetera) in which a gun was used to kill four or more victims at a public location within a 24-hour period." And from 1900 until Whitman acted, Duwe told us by phone, there were 30 U.S. public mass shootings. His break-out, provided by email, showed pre-Whitman mass public shootings in 20 states--all but two resulting in less than 10 deaths. "Even though they didn’t match the number of victims killed or wounded in the UT-Austin shooting," Duwe said, "they certainly qualify as mass public shootings." According to the compilation, two pre-Whitman shooters caused more than a dozen deaths: Unruh and Frank Gonzalez, a California man who shot pilots on a passenger plane in May 1964; 43 people perished. A caution Generally, Fox and Duwe each cautioned against getting bogged down in assessments of first or worst mass shootings partly because, due to the limits of the commonly accepted definition, incidents such as the Saint Valentine’s Day and Wounded Knee massacres get parsed out. "This whole thing of what’s the largest," Fox said, "is really an absurd exercise as if any of these episodes would be any less tragic if wasn’t the largest." Whitman, he added, "certainly did for many many years embody what Americans thought of when they heard mass murder." Our ruling Adler said Austin was the "site of the first mass shooting in the country." The UT tragedy appears to have been the nation’s first mass public shooting on a college campus. But there were 30 mass shootings--mass murders of four or more individuals in a 24-hour period--just in the 60-plus years before Whitman acted. We rate the statement False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/77fb039b-85ac-49be-913e-e178386c55e9	None	Steve Adler	None	None	None	2016-06-23T15:07:07	2016-06-14	['None']
-snes-03554	Melania Trump has filed for divorce over her role as the First Lady of the United States.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/melania-trump-files-for-divorce/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Melania Trump Files for Divorce	13 November 2016	None	['United_States', 'First_Lady', 'Melania_Trump']
-pomt-05299	Says New Jersey’s prison system is "61 percent African-American even though our state is just 13 percent black."	true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/may/21/cory-booker/cory-booker-said-black-people-represent-more-60-pe/	If the United States wants to secure a future as a leading democracy, it must invest in its children, according to Newark Mayor Cory Booker. But right now the country is failing to live up to its potential, Booker said in a speech at a May 4 forum held by the American Federation for Children, a group that advocates for school choice. At the end of his speech, Booker, talking about "the carnage that happens when we fail to live up to the promise of this nation," told a story about the death of a boy he knew when he first took office in 2006. While recounting that story, Booker stopped himself and said: "I know the data. I see what's happening to young minority men in this country. I see how much, when looking from a financial perspective how much we as taxpayers pay, billions of dollars in New Jersey for a prison system or correctional system that doesn't correct. Recycling the same people over and over and over again. A prison system that is 61 percent African-American even though our state is just 13 percent black." PolitiFact New Jersey checked Booker’s statistics on the state’s prison population and found that he knows the data well. New Jersey housed 23,810 people in all of its correctional facilities, including halfway houses and county jails, as of Jan. 3, according to data from the state department of corrections. Of those nearly 24,000 offenders, 61 percent, or 14,469 people, are black. By comparison, 22 percent, or 5,300 inmates, are white and 16 percent, or 3,785 inmates, are Hispanic. New Jersey’s prison population, excluding offenders held in a facility for women and another facility for adult male sex offenders, is smaller, with 15,407 inmates. Of that population, 62 percent are black. How does the racial makeup of the state’s prison population compare with the state’s overall population? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 13.7 percent of New Jersey’s population is black. So Booker’s numbers are right. But we wondered how New Jersey compares with the rest of the nation. Based on estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 38 percent of prisoners under state and federal jurisdiction at the end of 2010 were black. According to the same data, about 32 percent of prisoners were white and more than 22 percent were Hispanic. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates are based on prisoners with a sentence of more than one year. Overall, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population is black, according to 2010 census data. John M. Paitakes, professor of criminal justice at Seton Hall University, said there are many factors behind these statistics, citing prior records and legal representation. He also noted that profiling and prejudice could be factors, but said, "I don’t think it’s any more in New Jersey than in other areas." "I think before you draw any conclusions you have to look at all those factors to get a realistic picture of what it is," he said. Our ruling Booker said New Jersey’s prison system is "61 percent African-American even though our state is just 13 percent black." Data from the state corrections department and U.S. Census Bureau back his statistics. We rate the claim True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Cory Booker	None	None	None	2012-05-21T07:30:00	2012-05-04	['None']
-pomt-00488	Says Mahlon Mitchell "received a massive raise on the backs of hard-working firefighters and turned the union into his own personal political slush fund."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2018/aug/09/republican-party-wisconsin/wisconsin-gop-takes-jabs-democratic-gubernatorial-/	As eight Democrats fight for the right to take on Gov. Scott Walker in November, the state Republican Party is throwing its own punches from the sidelines. Their latest jab came in the form of an Aug. 1, 2018, news release announcing a series of radio ads against four Democrats running for governor. The ads pick up some of the same themes found on a party-created webpage that slams the "Democrats’ dangerous race to the left." Here’s what the GOP has to say about Mahlon Mitchell, head of the statewide firefighters union: "Mitchell received a massive raise on the backs of hard-working firefighters and turned the union into his own personal political slush fund." So, it’s a double shot. Let’s look at both parts of the claim -- the "massive raise" and the "personal political slush fund." Compensation increase When asked for evidence to back up this part of the statement, state GOP communications director Alec Zimmerman referred PolitiFact Wisconsin to a Jan. 22, 2018, piece by watchdog columnist Dan Bice in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The online headline: "Firefighter leader Mahlon Mitchell would take pay cut if elected governor." The piece noted that Mitchell was named president of the state firefighters group early in 2011 in the wake of a scandal in which top union officials were filing fraudulent expense reports. Specifically, Zimmerman cited this paragraph: Since taking the union's helm, Mitchell has seen his pay jump from $54,500 in 2011 to $90,600 in 2016 (plus another $6,787 in other income) — a 66% bump, according to federal Department of Labor filings. His predecessor made about half what Mitchell does. PolitiFact Wisconsin checked the firefighter union’s Department of Labor filings for 2017 and found there had been another increase. Those filings show Mitchell’s 2017 union compensation at $70,922, plus $31,727 for disbursements for official business and an additional $12,431 for other disbursements for a total of $115,080. So, Mitchell’s overall union compensation went from $97,387 in 2016 to $115,080 in 2017, an increase of about 18 percent. When compared to $54,500 when he began in 2011, his union compensation has increased to $115,080 in 2017, or about 111 percent over six years. While there is no official definition for a "massive pay raise," Mitchell’s union compensation increase of 111 percent from 2011 to 2017 compares to an 18.3 percent increase in base pay for an entry level Madison firefighter during that same period. According to the City of Madison Fire Department website, an entry level firefighter is currently paid $50,204.70. In 2011, an entry level firefighter salary was $42,449.16. "Since he’s working at a Union funded by the dues of firefighters, it’s accurate to say that his raises were funded by their contributions," said Zimmerman. Still, framing it as on the "backs of hard-working firefighters" goes a little too far in that it portrays it as something imposed on union members. Steve Wilding, secretary/treasurer of the state firefighters union, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in January 2018 that salaries and per-diems for the union's brass are voted on by the nearly 200 delegates at the group's annual convention. (Note: Mitchell’s pay from the City of Madison is not included in this discussion because the state GOP allegations are specifically addressing compensation from "hard-working firefighters" not city taxpayers.) Political spending On the "political slush fund" part of the claim, Zimmerman provided spreadsheets that showed, in his words, that the union’s political spending under Mitchell shifted to "being overwhelmingly supportive of liberal causes while he was at the helm, including over $40,000 to Mahlon’s campaigns." We turned to Follow The Money, a website that is part of the National Institute on Money in Politics, which compiles campaign-donor, lobbyist, and other information from government agencies nationwide. The site shows that the Wisconsin Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin has made an overwhelming majority of its contributions to Democratic candidates over the years, including Gov. Jim Doyle, Mary P. Burke and yes, Mahlon Mitchell, who in 2012 unsuccessfully ran for the office of lieutenant governor in a recall election against Rebecca Kleefisch. The union has also contributed to GOP candidates, such as Scott Walker and Brad Schimel, though the amount of the donations to the Republican candidates have fallen far short of the donations to Democrats. According to the Journal Sentinel January article, since 2011 to that point, the firefighter union's political action fund had donated a total of $129,250 to state candidates and PACs, with 98% of the cash going to Democrats. Also, during Mitchell's 2012 lieutenant governor's bid, the firefighters PAC gave $3,500 to his campaign and the union itself donated $40,000 to an outside group backing Mitchell with independent expenditures, the Journal Sentinel reported in the January article. Mitchell had no role, officials said, in the spending of these union funds, having recused himself on the matter. In the current campaign, a U.S. Department of Labor website listing shows the union contributed $25,000 to Mahlon Mitchell for Wisconsin on Nov. 13, 2017, and $15,444 on Nov. 30, 2017, for a total of $40,444. But what of the "slush fund" characterisation? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "slush fund" as "a fund for bribing public officials or carrying on corruptive propaganda; an unregulated fund often used for illicit purposes." While there is plenty of hyperbole in politics, in our view this goes too far. For instance, there are no allegations that contribution limits were ignored or any campaign finance laws broken. What’s more, there is no evidence that Mitchell alone decides where the union contributions go. In January, when the state GOP first made the "slush fund" allegation, Wilding -- the union secretary/treasurer -- told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the union’s bylaws and constitution prevent individuals from enriching themselves at the expense of other members. In an Aug. 8 Journal Sentinel article, Wilding noted to columnist Dan Bice that Mitchell’s base compensation dropped from some $90,000 in 2016 to $70,000 in 2017. Wilding said top union officials are paid a small salary and a payment for services performed for the organization on a day-by-day basis. Meanwhile, Mitchell’s campaign communications director Kirsten Allen responded with a general slam on Walker. Allen did not provide a response when asked in a series of emails and telephone calls to address the specific issues that are part of this factcheck. Our rating The state GOP says Mitchell "received a massive raise on the backs of hard-working firefighters and turned the union into his own personal political slush fund." The union members did OK the compensation increase, so saying it was "on the backs" of firefighters goes too far. But Mitchell’s 111 percent increase over a period of about six years is a major one. So the GOP has a point on that part of the claim. Meanwhile, the union’s political contributions have shifted to Democrats, including more than $40,000 to Mitchell’s current campaign. But the GOP provided no evidence Mitchell solely decides where the political contributions go. Indeed, the union says he recuses himself from any discussions. Even with an allowance for the hyperbole of campaign season, the "slush fund" characterization goes too far. For a statement that is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context our rating is Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Republican Party of Wisconsin	None	None	None	2018-08-09T06:00:00	2018-08-01	['None']
-pomt-02955	For the state of Florida, "there is not an additional cost with implementation of the Common Core standards."	half-true	/florida/statements/2013/oct/26/pam-stewart/state-education-chief-says-theres-no-additional-co/	One of the many complaints about Florida’s move toward new school standards has centered on its cost. "Based on data from several sources, the Common Core standards and accompanying tests will be very expensive – both to implement and to maintain," the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition argues on its website. At a recent public hearing on the standards, Florida education commissioner Pam Stewart challenged the criticism of the K-12 English and math standards. "Our analysis is there is not an additional cost with implementation of the Common Core standards," Stewart said. Her assertion brought out the doubters, even among Common Core supporters. PolitiFact Florida decided to take a closer look. The issue isn’t as clear cut as you might imagine. Most policy analysts watching Common Core agree that its implementation carries expenses. The National Conference of State Legislatures offers a sample list of what to expect: one-time transition costs such as new instructional materials, tests, technology and teacher training, and ongoing maintenance and updates. "When taking into account all of the things that need to be updated and the fact that it’s difficult for state education agencies to change their practice (move away from ‘business as usual’), I think it will be extremely challenging to keep costs flat," said Anne Hyslop, an education analyst for the New America Foundation. Indeed, the Florida Department of Education created a spreadsheet in February detailing more than $100 million in Common Core projects the state had embarked upon. The items included $24 million for the creation of student tutorial lessons, $4.7 million to generate math assessments and lesson study toolkits, and $25.5 million for a database of test questions for teachers to use. Funding for the vast majority of these projects came from a federal Race to the Top grant that Florida won, in part, for agreeing to adopt the Common Core. During the spring 2013 legislative session, Florida lawmakers noted that testing for the new standards would require computers, and they adopted a law barring the state from using Common Core-affiliated tests until all schools had the needed technology in place. The bill analysis noted that the State Board of Education requested $442 million for the improvements, a number later revised downward to $100 million. So the Common Core price tag is well documented. But that doesn’t make Stewart completely wrong. "It costs something," said Patrick Murphy, research director for the Public Policy Institute of California. "The question is, does it cost extra money than we were going to spend?" Murphy noted Stewart’s use of the word "additional," and said that makes all the difference. "It is not impossible to conceive of a scenario where existing funds that may have been slated for, say, ‘general’ professional development will be used to focus on the (Common Core). If I was running a school district, that is what I would do," he said. In a paper for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute titled "Putting a Price Tag on the Common Core," Murphy and colleagues put forth three models under which states might implement Common Core -- "Bare Bones," "Business as Usual" and "Balanced." In two of the three possibilities, the group projected Florida to carry millions in added costs. Florida Department of Education officials did not have any reports that separated costs out in such a way. State officials noted, though, that adoption of the standards cost nothing, and that much of the implementation, such as training and textbook purchases, would have been funded in some form even if the state weren’t using the standards. "The purchase of materials for the new standards was embedded in our regular instructional materials purchase cycle so did not result in additional purchases or increased costs unless school districts chose to do so," DOE spokeswoman Tiffany Cowie said in an email. As another example, the state’s move to improve school technology could be attributed to a 2011 legislative mandate to have materials fully digital by 2015, or an even earlier press to transition all state testing to computers. "This process began before Florida’s standards were adopted and will continue regardless of Florida’s new standards," Cowie said. Also, Florida has paid about $30.59 per student annually for FCAT testing in recent years. It has not selected a Common Core test, so it has no estimate for the potential cost differences. "If the department chooses PARCC, no additional cost will be incurred, as the creation of the test is free to all participating PARCC states," Cowie said. "If another test is selected, there will be costs associated with the procurement of a new test." From the department’s view, then, much of the money would have been spent on similar projects anyway, with or without the new standards. Our ruling Stewart said implementation of the Common Core would not incur additional expenses. Some of the money spent on Common Core is money the state would have spent anyway on curriculum and testing. But experts said it’s unlikely that implementing the new standards cost the state no additional money. Another wrinkle: The state received a federal grant to help pay for Common Core implementation. We rate her statement Half True.	None	Pam Stewart	None	None	None	2013-10-26T20:00:00	2013-10-15	['None']
-snes-05682	Telephone customers returning one-ring calls from foreign phone numbers and are charged hefty fees.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/one-ring-scam/	None	Fraud & Scams	None	David Mikkelson	None	‘One Ring’ Scam	2 June 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-10231	Barack Obama supports plans to raise "income taxes ... payroll taxes."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/03/sarah-palin/obamas-taxes-hit-only-higher-incomes/	Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin accepted the nomination for the vice presidency at the Republican National Convention and used her speech to attack Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. "Taxes are too high. He wants to raise them. His tax increases are the fine print in his economic plan, and let me be specific," Palin said on Sept. 3, 2008, in St. Paul, Minn. "The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes ... raise payroll taxes ... raise investment income taxes ... raise the death tax ... raise business taxes ... and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars." Here, we'll review Obama's position on income taxes and payroll taxes. We've checked previous claims about his position on investment income taxes and estate taxes . Obama wants to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the upper-income brackets. So the claim is true if you are a family making more than $250,000 a year, or a single person making more than $200,000. Otherwise, it's generally not the case. In fact, Obama advocates eliminating income taxes for seniors with incomes less than $50,000. The payroll tax claim is a little different. Obama proposes a $1,000 tax credit on income for working families ($500 for singles), to offset payroll taxes. So for most people, Obama is actually lowering payroll taxes. But he has said he would raise payroll taxes on people making higher incomes of about $250,000 in order to keep Social Security solvent. Currently, only the first $97,500 of a person's income is taxable. So for higher incomes, Obama would raise payroll taxes. Palin is painting Obama's proposals with a broad brush and not including crucial context. Obama does intend to increase taxes. But most people have incomes of less than $200,000, and these people would not see income tax increases or payroll tax increases under Obama's plan. We rate Palin's statement Half True.	None	Sarah Palin	None	None	None	2008-09-03T00:00:00	2008-09-03	['None']
-pomt-05905	"We've seen more anti-women's choice bills introduced in the first half of this session than we've seen in the last three General Assemblies."	true	/ohio/statements/2012/feb/03/armond-budish/armond-budish-says-more-bills-limiting-abortion-we/	Majority Republicans in the Ohio House said the economy would be their chief focus this year, in the second session of the state's 129th General Assembly. "The focus of this body will be the economy and to help the private sector create jobs," Rep. Matt Huffman, the majority floor leader, said at a news conference at the Statehouse to roll out this year’s party agenda. House Republicans proclaimed the same message last year after they reclaimed the majority in the 2010 fall election. But state Rep. Armond Budish, the minority leader in the house, would beg to differ. He asserts that House Republicans instead pushed an agenda to diminish workers’ rights, voting rights and abortion rights. "We've seen more anti-women's choice bills introduced in the first half of this session than we've seen in the last three General Assemblies," Budish said at a Jan. 31 news conference announcing his party's priorities. PolitiFact Ohio asked Budish's office for the numbers. They provided a list identifying legislation that would restrict abortion that was introduced last year and from previous General Assemblies. We checked that list ourselves, too, using the search engine for laws, acts and legislation on the legislature's website. The list, we noted, includes such measures as HB 125, prohibiting abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected, and HB 153, the state operating budget, which contained two provisions restricting access to abortion. It did not include such measures as HB 180, creating the "Massillon Tiger Football Booster Club" license plate and prohibiting any money raised by it to go to "abortion-related activities." The list showed 11 bills that would affect abortion rights from 2011, the first session of the 129th General Assembly. That’s more than any of the three previous two-year sessions. There were eight bills in 128th General Assembly, nine in the 127th and six in the 126th. We rate Budish's statement as True.	None	Armond Budish	None	None	None	2012-02-03T06:00:00	2012-01-31	['None']
-pomt-09577	"Because of the steps we took, there are about 2 million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jan/27/barack-obama/obama-claims-two-million-more-americans-would-be-u/	The number of jobs "saved or created" by the massive economic stimulus championed by President Barack Obama has been a matter of intense partisan disagreement all year, and no doubt the president's claims in his State of the Union address will reignite the debate. "Because of the steps we took" in the stimulus, Obama said, "there are about 2 million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed." Obama's numbers come from a Jan. 13, 2010, report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, which concluded that through the fourth quarter of 2009, the stimulus raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been by 1.5 million to 2 million jobs. So right off the bat, the president has chosen to highlight the top end of his own advisers' projection. And it is a projection, as the CEA report acknowledges, subject to a large margin of error. "As we have emphasized, measuring what a policy action has contributed to growth and employment is inherently difficult because we do not observe what would have occurred without the policy," the report states. "Therefore, it must be understood that our estimates are subject to substantial margins of error. The results, however, are strong enough and clear enough that we are confident that the basic conclusions are solid. That a wide range of private and government analysts concur with our estimates adds a reassuring check on our analysis." Let's taker a look at some of those other private and government analyses. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan government agency regularly cited by politicians in both parties, pegged the number of jobs saved or created by the stimulus through the fourth quarter of 2009 at somewhere between 800,000 and 2.4 million. That's obviously an extremely wide range, which the CBO said was "intended to reflect the uncertainty of such estimates and to encompass most economists’ views on the effects of fiscal stimulus." Obama's number is within that range, but well toward the high end. As an aside, the CBO recently revised its projection of the cost of the stimulus, estimating that it will cost $75 billion more than originally anticipated. The new estimate is that the stimulus will increase budget deficits by $862 billion over the next decade. The CEA report notes projections from several other economic forecasters: IHS/Global Impact, which projected the number jobs saved or created by the stimulus in 2009 at 1.25 million; Macroeconomic Advisers, 1 million; and Moody's Economy.com, 1.6 million. Obama's 2 million number is rosier than all of those projections. Many Republicans have attacked the "saved or created" numbers cited by the White House as ridiculous in light of an unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent; and the loss of roughly 3 million more jobs since the stimulus was passed. "There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the stimulus has saved or created any jobs, let alone 2 million," said Brian Riedl, lead budget analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation. "It's impossible to know how the economy would have performed without the stimulus," Riedl said, and he finds it "implausible" that the country would have lost 5 million jobs in 2009 (the 3 million lost plus 2 million "saved" by the stimulus) if the stimulus had not passed. "I don't know how they can back that up." It's a classic case of single-entry bookkeeping, Riedl said. The government is just shifting jobs from one part of the economy to another, he said. The $250 billion spent by the federal government surely created jobs, he said, but fails to account for pulling $250 billion borrowed by the federal government from other sectors of the economy. "That's money that would have been spent somewhere else in the economy," Riedl said. "The effect is that you are going to cancel stuff out. That's why unemployment numbers aren't dropping." For the president's numbers to be true, Riedl said, you'd have to assume those who lent the federal government the money would otherwise have stuffed that $250 billion "in a mattress or put it in a safe." However, Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody's Economy.com, said while Riedl's argument might hold water in robust economic times, the fact is that when the government passed the stimulus, "People weren't borrowing; the demand wasn't there." The last Moody's projection was for the third quarter of last year, he said, and at that point, Moody's estimated that employment was about 1.1 million greater than it would have been without the stimulus. Faucher expects that when fourth quarter numbers are added, that number will be closer to 1.5 million. "I would say that he (Obama) is in the ballpark," Faucher said. "It may be a little high, but not ridiculously high." But, he warned, these numbers are all just economic projections. "By definition, this is an art, not a science," Faucher said. And that's our biggest issue with Obama's definitive claim that if not for the stimulus, 2 million Americans working right now would otherwise be unemployed. It's a projection. Economists can't say for sure what would have happened if the stimulus had not passed, and whether those who got jobs through the stimulus would otherwise be unemployed. And while the number cited by Obama is backed up by the projections from his Council of Economic Advisers, it's on the high side of the projections from the CBO, and significantly higher than projections from several other economic forecasters. And so we rate Obama's claim Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2010-01-27T22:06:55	2010-01-27	['United_States']
-pomt-13176	Says Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Russ Feingold "voted over 250 times to raise taxes."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2016/oct/27/americans-prosperity/americans-prosperity-falsely-claims-250-tax-increa/	Democrat Russ Feingold spent nearly two decades in the U.S. Senate, and is now trying to win back his old seat from Republican Ron Johnson, who ousted Feingold in 2010. A recent campaign ad from Americans for Prosperity claims one theme permeated Feingold’s tenure in Washington — a push for higher taxes. The conservative political advocacy group even puts a precise number on that claim: "He voted time and again to make life more expensive for families in Wisconsin," the narrator says in the ad, released in August. "Russ voted over 250 times to raise taxes — 250." The Club for Growth, another conservative group, used the same figure in an ad released Oct. 12, 2016, wording it as "250 votes for higher taxes." Did Feingold really cast that many votes to raise taxes? The matter isn’t as straightforward as the nice round number leads viewers to believe. Disagreement over budget votes When asked for backup, Americans for Prosperity, founded by billionaire businessman and activist David Koch, provided a list of 264 votes dating back to Feingold’s 1993 debut in the U.S. Senate. We did our own research and also sent the list to Feingold’s campaign for feedback. The foundational question is what constitutes a vote to "raise taxes"? More than half the votes cited in the ad — 150 — came on budget resolutions, which set non-binding parameters for considering tax and spending legislation. They are used as blueprints for the budget or in some cases to make a political statement. But PolitiFact has noted repeatedly that it is inaccurate to suggest votes on non-binding budget resolutions are the same as votes on legislation that sets policy. The resolutions often don’t include precise details and don’t on their own raise, lower or even keep taxes the same. "You’re voting for kind of an overall map and taking multiple votes on that same map, and not directly raising or lowering taxes in a piece of legislation," said Joshua Gordon, policy director of the Concord Coalition, a group that urges deficit reduction. Americans for Prosperity contends the votes are a fair addition to the tally. "Although many of the spending and revenue levels set in budget resolutions require additional legislative action to implement, there are a number of spending and tax policies set by budget resolutions," said James Fellinger, a spokesman for the group. "Budget resolutions enact procedural changes in order to ease the passage of those policies — voting for a budget resolution is plainly supporting the policies it outlines." The ad’s tally also includes many votes that were actually against tax cuts — not in favor of tax increases. Feingold spokesman Michael Tyler said Feingold campaign counted more than 150 such examples among the votes cited by Americans for Prosperity. It’s not merely a semantic distinction. When PolitiFact Florida fact-checked a nearly identical claim about votes to raise taxes, three federal budget experts generally agreed that a vote against a new tax cut isn’t the same as a vote for a tax increase. Gordon said that element of the ad’s claim "is probably the worst argument of all of them" from a fiscal policy perspective. "The voter reading that is going to believe (Feingold) voted in 250 separate times to raise an individual’s own income tax," Gordon said. "By any standard that sort of accounting is false in terms of what we expect the average voter to take away from the (claim)." A counting question Meanwhile, there is another problem: Though Americans for Prosperity cited 264 separate votes from Feingold, they came on only 65 pieces of legislation. The votes came on amendments that varied widely in content and scope, so each represented a different position. Nevertheless, that counting approach inflates the total. For example, Feingold cast 34 votes on Senate Concurrent Resolution 23 in 2003, which established Congress’ version of the budget for the following year. Each vote took a position on a proposed change of some kind, but should that count as 34 votes or one? "Counting multiple votes on the same legislation and all of its permutations just serves to pad the number, but in some cases isn’t completely inaccurate, just not telling the full tale," Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, told PolitiFact Florida in 2012 when it tackled and rated a similar item. Another problem with the 250 tally: some of the votes come on nuanced, multi-part amendments that are not easily categorized. One example is the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, companion legislation to the Affordable Care Act that helped established Obamacare. Feingold cast three votes on March 24, 2010, against amendments that would exempt certain devices from a 2.3 percent tax (in effect, voting to raise a tax). But the amendment would have offset that by lowering the law’s affordability tax exemption for individuals (voting to lower a tax). Despite the offsetting effect, Americans for Prosperity lists it as a tax increase. Our rating Americans for Prosperity says Feingold voted more than 250 times to raise taxes as a U.S. senator, contending any vote in support of a higher tax should be part of that tally. But that number is built on assumptions and simplifications. Though Feingold cast tax-related votes that many times, more than half of those came on non-binding resolutions that took a position in favor of raising taxes but did not raise taxes by themselves. The claim also does not account for the large number of votes that were actually against a tax cut, not in favor of a tax increase. Experts say that’s a big difference. And it doesn’t acknowledge the nuanced nature of the votes themselves or that many votes came on elements of the same legislation. We rate the ad’s claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/8aecd592-a350-4255-97a3-e1210795a4a1	None	Americans for Prosperity	None	None	None	2016-10-27T05:00:00	2016-08-22	['Russ_Feingold']
-pomt-10123	"The Democrats in the Senate and some members of Congress defended what Fannie and Freddie were doing. They resisted any change."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/13/john-mccain/theres-plenty-of-bipartisan-blame-for-crisis/	In the back-and-forth campaign blame game going on over the financial crisis, Sen. John McCain pointed the finger at Democrats and Obama for failing to support a plan to exert regulatory control over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005 and 2006. "But you know, one of the real catalysts, really the match that lit this fire was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," McCain said at the second presidential debate on Oct. 7. "I'll bet you, you may never even have heard of them before this crisis. But you know, they're the ones that, with the encouragement of Senator Obama and his cronies and his friends in Washington, that went out and made all these risky loans, gave them to people that could never afford to pay back. "And you know, there were some of us that stood up two years ago and said we've got to enact legislation to fix this. We've got to stop this greed and excess. "Meanwhile," McCain said, "the Democrats in the Senate and some ? and some members of Congress defended what Fannie and Freddie were doing. They resisted any change." Set up decades ago by the federal government to underwrite mortgages and promote home ownership, Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.) became major players in the domestic mortgage market. They don't make loans to homeowners directly, but they purchase mortgages, bundle them into securities, and sell some of them on the open market. Together, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed about $5-trillion in mortgages, about half of the U.S. market. After years of rapid growth in home prices, foreclosures and mortgage delinquencies began rising by 2006. Some homeowners had adjustable-rate mortgages that were resetting to higher rates they could no longer afford. In other cases, speculators were overextended and dumping properties. Outright fraud had some role: people who took out loans never intending to pay them back. Regardless of the reasons, by 2008 foreclosures were affecting Fannie and Freddie. The agencies didn't have enough money to meet their financial obligations, and the U.S. government took them over on Sept. 7. When McCain points an accusing finger at the Democrats for encouraging Fannie and Freddie to make too many risky loans, he's talking about the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act initiated by Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel in 2005. In 2006, McCain signed on to the Republican-led attempt at regulatory overhaul of the mortgage-financing firms, which both went through multibillion-dollar accounting scandals earlier in the decade. The occasion that prompted McCain’s involvement was the release of a 340-page report from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight that concluded that Fannie Mae had manipulated earnings and violated basic accounting principles. It describes an “arrogant and unethical corporate culture” in which executives were more concerned about their bonuses than meeting the company’s housing mission. The findings, based on a 27-month investigation and resulting in a $400-million fine paid to the government, prompted McCain to join other critics and call for more scrutiny of Fannie and its sibling, Freddie Mac."If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole," McCain declared in a May 26, 2006, news release. While McCain is quick to blame Democrats for opposing the legislation — they did — the Republicans controlled Congress at the time, and there was a Republican in the White House. Yet the bill languished in the Senate, and it wasn't until earlier this year that Congress and the Bush administration, shaken by the extent of the subprime crisis, completed a regulatory overhaul by combining OFHEO and the Federal Housing Finance Board into a new regulatory body, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. We should also note that prior to 2000, support for Fannie and Freddie was more bipartisan. In the late 1990s, the Republican-controlled Congress — with the blessing of Democratic President Bill Clinton — eased the credit requirements on loans that Fannie and Freddie purchased. "It's a bipartisan problem," said Bill Beach, director of the Center for Data Analysis at the conservative Heritage Foundation. McCain rightly notes that the 2005-2006 efforts to regulate Fannie and Freddie were Republican-led, and opposed by the Democrats, but McCain's current attempts to depict those efforts as an early warning that could have lessened the current credit crisis don't wash. McCain was talking mostly about potential fallout from accounting troubles, not freewheeling lending standards based on a housing bubble. And he said nothing about major financial institutions becoming badly leveraged on bad loans and new securities products. Even if the 2006 effort to strengthen oversight had succeeded, it’s debatable whether it would have averted the subprime crisis. The extent of the problems was not yet fully known, and it’s a leap of faith to suggest that regulators granted expanded power would have noticed a deterioration in Fannie and Freddie’s loan portfolios soon enough and would have sounded an alarm. So first, when McCain talks about this legislation, it's not the cure-all he suggests it may have been; the focus then was on corruption in Fannie and Freddie, which isn't really what the financial crisis is about. Democrats may have opposed it, but it didn't appear to have all that many champions in a Republican-controlled Senate, either. And last, if you look back in time, Democrats and Republicans supported an easing of lending standards in the late 1990s. So for McCain to lay Fannie and Freddie woes entirely at the feet of the Democrats is unfair. We rate his statement Half True.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-10-13T00:00:00	2008-10-07	['United_States_Congress', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Fannie_Mae']
-pomt-14145	"In the history of Republican primaries, I’ve gotten the most votes in the history of the Republican party."	false	/california/statements/2016/may/02/donald-trump/donald-trumps-claim-about-receiving-most-votes-eve/	Donald Trump’s march to the GOP nomination picked up steam last week, with dominant primary victories in the northeast. After the wins, several news outlets reported that the New York billionaire could break the record for most Republican primary votes in history — if Trump scores big in Indiana, New Jersey and California. Those states have yet to vote. Trump, apparently not wanting to wait, declared he’s already achieved the voting record. "In the history of Republican primaries, I’ve gotten the most votes in the history of the Republican party," Trump said during his speech on Friday, April 29 at the California Republican Party Convention south of San Francisco. Trump went on to say he’s broken the record without needing to wait for big states like California. Was Trump right? Had he already collected the most primary votes in history? We set out on a fact check. Our research Eric Ostermeier, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and founder of the number-crunching blog Smart Politics, has taken a look at the data. "He is on pace to break the record, but he hasn’t yet," Ostermeier told PolitiFact California. "I’ve seen no possible configuration of numbers that show he’s already broken it." Ostermeier placed Trump’s primary vote total at about 10 million so far. That’s still short of the 10.8 million votes George W. Bush received in the 2000 GOP primaries. If one counts both primaries and caucuses, Trump would still be short of Bush’s overall tally, the professor said. Bush’s total is considered closer to 12 million if both types of elections are counted, he said. Ostermeier estimated Trump would likely achieve the primary vote record if he earns a strong win in California’s primary, where he could pick up more than a million additional primary votes. He said Trump’s large vote totals can be attributed to the relatively close match-up he’s had with Cruz late into the primary season. Several news articles, including by the Washington Post and Politico, used primary vote totals logged by RealClearPolitics.com. Its data show Trump has yet to break the record. Trump’s campaign did not respond to our request for comment. Our ruling Donald Trump said he’s already earned the most Republican primary votes in history. Experts who track this say Trump is on pace to break the record, but is still shy by about 800,000 votes. They predicted a strong victory in California --- more than a month from now -- could hand Trump the milestone. We rate Trump’s claim False … for now. UPDATE: About one month after PolitiFact California rated Donald Trump’s "most votes in history" claim on April 29, 2016 as "False … for now," the vote totals have changed. Trump now appears to have broken the all-time record for most votes in a GOP presidential primary. That’s according to Eric Ostermeier, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota and founder of the number-crunching blog Smart Politics. Ostermeier told us on June 1, 2016 that Trump’s victory in the Washington primary on May 24, 2016 put him over the top. The rating on his April 29 claim remains the same because we judge statements based on the data available at the time. Trump got ahead of himself again during a speech in Sacramento, also on June 1, 2016, where he said he’s broken the GOP presidential primary record "by millions" of votes. We rated that claim "False again … for now." Ostermeier predicted Trump could smash the record by millions following the June 7 primary in California, New Jersey and other states. We'll be watching. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/082e07f8-9846-4ffa-b768-1719cae2ac47	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-05-02T17:28:29	2016-04-29	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-14768	"If Trump had just put his father’s money in a mutual fund ... he’d have $8 billion."	false	/punditfact/statements/2015/dec/09/occupy-democrats/occupy-democrats-say-simple-investment-trumps-fath/	Donald Trump is a billionaire and he plays it up big in his bid to be president. What he did in business, he argues, he can do for the country. Republican and Democratic critics aim to shoot holes in that assumption. One tack is that Trump hasn’t been the super savvy investor he purports to be. The liberal group Occupy Democrats posted an image on its Facebook page on Dec. 2, 2015, to bring Trump down a notch or 10. Under a smiling photo of Trump, the image has these words: "Bloomberg puts Trump’s current net worth at $2.9 billion. ... If Trump had just put his father’s money in a mutual fund that tracked the S&P 500 and spent his career finger-painting, he’d have $8 billion." The source, included in the post, is Deborah Friedell with the London Review of Books. As it turns out, the graphic from Occupy Democrats did a fine job of quoting Friedell, but Friedell did a less than stellar job of quoting the source for her claim. Friedell’s words come from her review of a new biography of Donald Trump, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success by Michael D’Antonio. Here’s the full text relevant to this fact-check: "Bloomberg puts Trump’s current net worth at $2.9 billion, Forbes at $4.1 billion. The National Journal has worked out that if Trump had just put his father’s money in a mutual fund that tracked the S&P 500 and spent his career finger-painting, he’d have $8 billion." But if you read the National Journal story, it doesn’t directly tie whatever money Trump got from his father to an eventual $8 billion today. Here’s the key paragraph from a Sept. 2, 2015, article headlined "The 1 Easy Way Donald Trump Could Have Been Even Richer: Doing Nothing." "Had the celebrity busi­ness­man and Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate in­ves­ted his even­tu­al share of his fath­er’s real-es­tate com­pany in­to a mu­tu­al fund of S&P 500 stocks in 1974, it would be worth nearly $3 bil­lion today, thanks to the mar­ket’s per­form­ance over the past four dec­ades. If he’d in­ves­ted the $200 mil­lion that For­bes magazine de­term­ined he was worth in 1982 in­to that in­dex fund, it would have grown to more than $8 bil­lion today." There’s a bit of informed guesswork behind these numbers because outsiders can only know so much about Trump’s finances. The National Journal writer, S.V. Dáte, figured Trump started with $40 million in 1974. That’s the year he became president of his father’s real estate company. By one estimate, the firm was worth about $200 million and divided among Donald Trump and his four siblings, each would have received $40 million. But it’s not as though the company was liquidated that year. Trump’s father lived until 1999, so whatever happened, it’s more complicated than Trump receiving a cash inheritance in 1974 and deciding what he would do with it. We’re left with a question of how much money Trump got from his father and, most important, at what point those assets morphed from being his father’s to being his. In 1982, after running his father’s firm for eight years, Forbes magazine estimated Trump’s worth at $200 million. Since he was in charge of the company, then those dollars are more his than his father’s. The Journal article tiptoed around this uncertainty with careful phrasing. The author talked about Trump investing "his eventual share of his father’s real estate company." An eventual share is not cash in hand. Similarly, the article did not say that the estimated $200 million in 1982 was from Trump’s father. Dáte told us in his view, that truly was Trump's money because the real estate company was worth more than that. Dáte said he didn't really care what the status of the assets was. "I just wanted to get to the point of saying that given the amount of money he started with, to be a billionaire — it's not too hard," Dáte said. "I worded it as carefully as I did because there are a lot of uncertainties." Importantly, if the $200 million did not come from Trump's father, then you can't say that the father's money could have been worth $8 billion today. But the Occupy Democrats’ Facebook post took a paraphrase of the National Journal piece and then edited the paraphrase down to the text on the image. Occupy Democrats editor Omar Rivero didn’t defend the graphic he shared. Rivero said his group occasionally shares graphics made by others. "As you can see in the post description and in the watermark, this graphic was made by Santa Pegatina, a political graphics maker," Rivero said. The best summary of the National Journal article is that it presents a hypothetical investment scenario using numbers that have some basis in the value of the Trump holdings, but aren’t necessarily what Trump got directly from his father. Running the numbers Even if the underlying assumptions are dodgy, the math at least is in the ballpark. We used $40 million as the starting point for 1974. Honghui Chen, associate professor of finance at the University of Central Florida, told us the account would have grown to $3.94 billion by November 2015 if the money had followed the S&P 500 index and all dividends had been reinvested. This is a rough calculation that ignores taxes owed on dividends, but it’s on the same scale as what the National Journal reported. Chen said it’s trickier to calculate the value of $200 million invested in 1982. "Because the stock market in 1982 was quite volatile, the current value of $200 million investment in 1982 would depend on the time at which it was initially invested," Chen said. If it went in right at the end of 1981, it would be worth $6.7 billion. Invested in June 1982, the value today would be $8.3 billion. Invested at the end of 1982, it would be worth $9 billion. Again, in the neighborhood of what the Journal said. There is a huge debate over Trump’s current net worth. Estimates from outsiders, such as Bloomberg and Forbes, range from about $3 billion to about $4 billion. Trump says he has closer to $9 billion. Our ruling Occupy Democrats shared an image that said if Trump had taken the money he got from his father and simply put it in a fund that tracked the S&P 500, he’d have $8 billion today. While it's true that Trump got a leg up from his father on the order of many tens of millions of dollars, this specific claim suffers from a key flaw. The only way to hit the $8 billion mark is to start with $200 million in 1982, and it's wrong to say that was Trump's father's money. While the father's business put Trump on the path to have $200 million in 1982, Trump himself had been running the company for eight years. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Occupy Democrats	None	None	None	2015-12-09T15:33:55	2015-12-02	['None']
-faan-00029	 Barack Obama’s reference to Canada doing its “full share” not a call to increase defence spending	factscan score: false	http://factscan.ca/harjit-sajjan-nato-full-share/	Harjit Sajjan suggested that Barack Obama’s recent comment on Canada contributing its “full share” to NATO did not refer to a NATO guideline on overall defence spending. But the Defence Minister’s interpretation is not very persuasive, and similar comments made elsewhere by Obama clearly reference the spending target. 	None	Harjit Sajjan	None	None	None	2016-07-14	 July 9, 2016	['Canada']
-snes-02633	Adolf Hitler never used chemical weapons (against his own people).	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hitler-chemical-weapons-spicer-assad/	None	History	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Adolf Hitler Never Used Chemical Weapons?	12 April 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-07680	Says Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s cuts to education are the same as his proposed corporate income tax rate reduction.	mostly false	/florida/statements/2011/mar/08/alan-grayson/alan-grayson-returns-msnbc-stage-criticizes-gov-ri/	Minutes after Florida Gov. Rick Scott finished delivering his first State of the State address, a trio of Democrats took turns rebuffing the new governor on everything he just said. Senate Minority Leader Nan Rich and House Minority Leader Ron Saunders came first in brief televised remarks, attacking Scott’s plans to cut education funding and make teachers, firefighters and police officers take de facto pay cuts in order to contribute to their own retirement. They were, in many ways, a warm-up act for former Florida U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, who used a national cable platform offered by MSNBC to excoriate Scott's plans. Grayson opened the interview on March 8, 2011, by answering a question about how Scott -- whose former hospital company Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 corporate felonies and paid $1.7 billion in fines -- could be elected governor in the first place. He said it was par for the course for Florida Republicans. "The last head of the Republican Party of Florida was literally led away in chains and indicted," Grayson said, referring to deposed RPOF chairman Jim Greer. Then Grayson cracked a joke, saying Scott once refused to answer questions during a deposition by invoking his 5th Amendment constitutional rights 75 times. "That’s like pleading the 375th." Grayson closed the interview by criticizing Scott’s plan to cut and eventually eliminate the state’s 5.5 percent corporate income tax, suggesting education spending reductions are funding the corporate tax cut. "He wants to eliminate the corporate income tax and cut corporate taxes in Florida by $1.5 billion," Grayson said. "He wants to cut funding for the schools by $1.5 billion. "He’s taking money out of children’s pockets dollar for dollar so he can stuff it in his own." We knew we’d find a fact check among all the one-liners. We wanted to see if Grayson’s shrewd ledger work is right: Does Scott’s budget reduce education funding by the same amount he would cut corporate taxes? The numbers are fairly easy to find, it turns out. Scott’s budget proposal for 2011-12 reduces the total amount of state K-12 education funding from $18.2 billion, to $16.5 billion -- a total cut of $1.7 billion. That number includes local property taxes the state mandates school boards collect (the required local effort), the state contribution from sales tax revenues and trust funds, and money passing through the state from the federal government. The cuts break down this way (we’re rounding a bit, so everything might not add up exactly): * The state’s contribution would decrease by about $11 million, but remain largely the same, about $8.9 billion. * Required local education taxes would shrink by about $660 million, and discretionary local taxes would shrink an additional $200 million -- shrinking the local contribution from about $8.4 billion to nearly $7.5 billion. * And the state also would not replace about $873 million in federal stimulus funds. On the other side of the ledger is Scott’s proposed cut to the 5.5 percent corporate income tax. The tax is exactly what it sounds like -- it’s paid as a percentage of the incomes of Florida businesses. Florida already has one of the lower corporate tax rates in the country, but Scott has made eliminating the tax a priority. As part of his 2011-12 budget, Scott proposes reducing the tax rate to 3 percent. His office says the reduction will save corporations $460 million. Put another way, the cut will trim state revenues as part of the 2011-12 budget by $460 million. It doesn’t take an Ivy League mathematics degree to figure out that the numbers don’t begin to line up the way Grayson suggests. The tax cuts represent $460 million, which is less than one third of the $1.7 billion education cut. Part of the issue might be Scott’s budget proposal is actually for two years -- 2011-12 and 2012-13. Over two years -- after factoring in a second reduction of the corporate income tax rate from 3 to 2.5 percent -- corporations would save a total of $1.5 billion, according to the governor’s office. But that’s not being fair -- $1.5 billion over two years doesn’t exactly compare to $1.7 billion over one year. In reviewing Scott’s tax-cutting proposals, it appears Grayson’s error also could have been singling out the corporate income tax as a way to cast Scott as a greedy CEO-type looking out only for his buddies. As we said in a previous item, Scott is proposing a total of $1.7 billion in tax and fee cuts as part of his 2011-12 budget. Scott’s proposal includes cuts to the corporate income tax, a cut to required school district property taxes, and a cut to unemployment taxes. PolitiFact Florida has previously ruled that roughly half of those cuts apply only to businesses, while half apply to homeowners and typical Floridians. Look at the numbers -- a total of $1.7 billion in tax and fee cuts in 2011-12 versus a proposed total education funding cut of $1.7 billion. They match (well, they’re not identical, because of rounding). And there’s one final way to look at this. The corporate income tax is estimated to collect about $2 billion in the current budget year. If it’s eliminated, a goal of Scott’s, that would be $2 billion less the state would receive. That’s on the order of the $1.7 billion K-12 education Scott is proposing for 2011-12. But again, that’s comparing additional budget years beyond even 2012-13 to cuts coming this year. On MSNBC, Grayson targeted Scott’s proposal to cut the corporate income tax, suggesting the cuts for corporate CEOs are being paid for on the back of students. While he’s right that any tax cut results in money not available to be spent on programs like education, he gets his numbers wrong. If Grayson had said the tax cuts and fees being proposed by Scott are being paid for by education cuts, he’d have more of a point. But sticking to what he said, we rate this claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Alan Grayson	None	None	None	2011-03-08T21:12:02	2011-03-08	['None']
-pomt-10215	"While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/09/chain-email/story-of-banned-books-is-murky/	One of the most potent claims in an e-mail written by Wasilla, Alaska, resident Anne Kilkenny is that when Sarah Palin was mayor, she tried to have some books removed from the city library. Here's how the claim reads in Kilkenny's e-mail: "While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter." ( Read the entire e-mail for yourself here. ) The most definitive record for much of this issue comes from a Dec. 18, 1996, article in the Wasilla newspaper, the Frontiersman. In that story, Wasilla library director Mary Ellen Emmons (now Mary Ellen Baker) said that after Palin was elected mayor, she twice inquired about censoring library books. "I'm not trying to suppress anyone's views," Emmons told the Frontiersman. "But I told her (Palin) clearly, I will fight anyone who tries to dictate what books can go on the library shelves." "This is different than a normal book-selection procedure or a book-challenge policy," Emmons said. "She was asking me how I would deal with her saying a book can't be in the library." Palin told the Frontiersman that she had no particular books or other material in mind when she posed the questions to Emmons. In a written statement to the newspaper, Palin "said she was only trying to get acquainted with her staff" and that the question was "rhetorical." Also from the story: "Emmons said Palin asked her on Oct. 28 if she would object to censorship, even if people were circling the library in protest about a book. 'I told her it would definitely be a problem the ACLU would take on then,' Emmons said. "Asked who she thought might picket the library, Palin said Monday, 'Had no one in mind ... again, the issue was discussed in the context of a professional question being asked in regards to library policy.' " In an interview with PolitiFact, Kilkenny said the issue also came up at a council meeting soon after Palin took office in 1996. Time has passed, Kilkenny said, and she can't remember the exact words, but she said Palin asked Emmons something like, "What would your response be to my request to remove books from the library collection?" "I remember being shocked at the implication," Kilkenny said. She said that there was a long pause of silence, and that Emmons responded that books were selected in line with national criteria for a library its size. Kilkenny said she remembered Emmons concluded firmly: "I would absolutely not comply with your request." Kilkenny said Palin's request didn't sound rhetorical to her. The conversation between Palin and Emmons came the same week that Palin requested resignations from all the city department heads as a test of loyalty, the Frontiersman noted. Emmons, a popular librarian who was then president of the Alaska Library Association, did not resign. On Jan. 30, 1997, about six weeks after the story appeared, Palin told Emmons and the police chief that she was dismissing them. The next day, Palin changed her mind about Emmons and let her stay on. Emmons finally resigned in August 1999. ( See our ruling on the e-mail's claim about the police chief here. ) We can say for certain that no book was ever banned. Nor is there any record that Palin initiated a formal process to censor any books. June Pinell-Stephens, longtime chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Alaska Library Association, said she scoured the organization's archives and could find no record of any formal actions to ban books in Wasilla under Palin's tenure as mayor. That jibes with Wasilla Library records as well. "We have no records of any books being 'banned or censored' ever," Wasilla Mayor Diane M. Keller said in a statement released about the issue. Keller told PolitiFact that the city hasn't been able to find any minutes to substantiate that the issue was ever raised by Palin at a City Council meeting. Nor does Keller, who was a council member at the time, recall any such conversations. Jeanne Troshynski, president of the Friends of Wasilla Library, said the last formal request to remove a book came in 2005, with the challenge of a book written by Jon Stewart of The Daily Show called America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction. That was three years after Palin left office as mayor. Wasilla records show the last formal challenge before that was in 1986 to Bumps in the Night, by Harvey Allard — well before Palin's tenure as mayor. In both cases, the challenges were denied and the books remained on the shelf. But Kilkenny's e-mail doesn't claim that Palin initiated a formal process to ban books. In fact, Kilkenny said she does not recall that Palin even mentioned specific books that she wanted banned. And Emmons, now Mary Ellen Baker, isn't talking. A message on her answering machine states: "I have nothing to add to reports from that time. I do not want to discuss the matter. Please respect my privacy." But the Frontiersman reporter who wrote that article in 1996 now says Emmons told him Palin did mention three books that she wanted removed from the shelves. Paul Stuart is semiretired, though he still occasionally contributes articles to a weekly paper, the Mountain Ear, in Conway, N.H., where he lives. Stuart told PolitiFact that in a conversation with Emmons after his article ran, she listed three titles. He said he could recall only two, and initially said they were I Told My Parents I'm Gay and I Asked My Sister. We looked for these titles; they don't appear to exist. "Mary Ellen told me that Palin asked her directly to remove these books from the shelves," Stuart said. "She refused." Asked later if the first book could have been Pastor, I am Gay, a controversial book written by a pastor who lives just outside Wasilla, Stuart said that was it. Howard Bess, author of Pastor, I am Gay and former pastor of Church of the Covenant in nearby Palmer, recalls that his book challenging Christians to re-examine their ideas about and prejudices against gays and lesbians was not well received in Wasilla when it was published in 1995 — the year before Palin was elected mayor. Virtually every book store in Wasilla refused to sell it. Bess said he gave two copies to the Wasilla Library, but they quickly disappeared. So he donated more copies. The controversy over the book was part of the context of that time period, he said. "Knowing Sarah's religious connections and the people involved, I would be surprised if my book was not one of those at issue," Bess said. "But I don't know that for a fact." "I don't think anyone has the facts except Mary Ellen, and she ain't talking," Bess said. In addition to Kilkenny's e-mail, there is another one circulating widely with the subject line, "The Books Sarah Palin tried to have banned." It purports to be a list taken from the official minutes of the Wasilla Library Board. ( Read it for yourself here. ) The 93 titles appear to be a generic list of frequently banned books. It was not part of the official minutes of the Wasilla Library Board. In fact, the Harry Potter series listed didn't even begin until 1998, two years after this list is alleged to have been generated. In short, the list is a fake. As for Kilkenny's claim, there is no proof that Palin tried to fire the librarian because she refused to consider removing books. In fact, Palin asked for the resignation of a handful of department heads to test their loyalty, according to reports at the time. The claim that Palin had specific books she wanted removed is also unsupported. Kilkenny herself said she does not recall that any titles were named by Palin at the time. Yes, a reporter provides a secondhand account 12 years later in which he says the librarian named books Palin wanted removed. But Stuart's recollection seems hazy (he didn't get the right title at first). The librarian isn't talking. There are no public records or meeting minutes to substantiate the claim. And no one else corroborates that Palin ever listed any titles. So we find no basis to find that part of the story true. But Palin did ask the librarian if she would consider removing books. Maybe it was posed as a rhetorical question as Palin says. But she asked. So we rule the statement Half True.	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2008-09-09T00:00:00	2008-08-31	['Wasilla,_Alaska']
-thet-00001	It is quicker, online using an app, to order cocaine to your house than to order a pizza. If you’re in Glasgow you can get it delivered to your door quicker than a Dominos.	half true	https://theferret.scot/cocaine-pizza-faster-ross-thomson-fact-check/	None	Crime and justice Fact check 	Ross Thomson MP	None	None	Claim you can get cocaine faster than pizza in Glasgow is Half True	October 13, 2018	None	['Glasgow']
-snes-04456	Stacey Dash was hired by Donald Trump for his "Negro Outreach Program."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stacey-dash-donald-trump-outreach/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Donald Trump Hires ‘Clueless’ Star for Outreach Program	13 July 2016	None	['Donald_Trump']
-farg-00511	“President Trump signed an executive order according to which any illegal who lives on welfare will be sent home.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/06/twisting-facts-draft-executive-order/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Sydney Schaedel	['immigration']	Twisting the Facts on a Draft Executive Order	June 28, 2017	2017-06-28 22:11:10 UTC	['None']
-snes-01492	Did Virginia's Governor Legalize Marijuana?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/virginias-governor-legalize-marijuana/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Virginia’s Governor Legalize Marijuana?	1 November 2017	None	['Virginia']
-hoer-01082	Disney Cruise Last Minute Cancellation	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/disney-cruise-last-minute-cancellation-facebook-survey-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Disney Cruise Last Minute Cancellation Facebook Survey Scam	October 20, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-02366	Wounded Warriors Project Operational Expenses Outweighs Funds Given to Program Services	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/wounded-warriors-project-financials2012/	None	military	None	None	None	Wounded Warriors Project Operational Expenses Outweighs Funds Given to Program Services	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-10658	"McCain opposes repeal of the death tax."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/31/mitt-romney/mccain-wants-to-keep-it-on-life-support/	Gov. Mitt Romney has a television ad in New Hampshire that attacks Sen. John McCain for his positions on taxes and illegal immigrants. Specifically, he charges that McCain "opposes repeal of the death tax," officially called the estate tax, a tax on the property passed forward and received at death. Just looking at the votes, Romney is right. The issue has come before the U.S. Senate at least three times, and each time McCain voted against permanently repealing the estate tax. But in a closer look at McCain's record, we find he supports a plan that would render the tax moot for most people. McCain says he wants a tax exemption on estates worth up to $10-million and a 15 percent tax on inheritances worth more than that. Under that plan, about 95 percent of the estate tax returns filed in 2006 would be exempt, according to Internal Revenue Service statistics. Which means the tax would survive for only the wealthiest few. Still, given McCain's votes against repealing the tax, we rule Romney's claim Mostly True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2007-12-31T00:00:00	2007-12-28	['None']
-goop-01882	Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton “At War” Over Chloe Kohanski, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/gwen-stefani-blake-shelton-war-chloe-kohanski-split-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton NOT “At War” Over Chloe Kohanski, Despite Claim	9:34 am, January 9, 2018	None	['Gwen_Stefani']
-pomt-07239	"In the late 1980s, the U.S. was nearly the lowest-taxed nation in the world, and a quarter century later we're nearly the highest."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/31/steve-moore/wall-street-journals-steve-moore-says-us-taxes-wer/	In a May 26, 2011, column in the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore, one of the editorial page editors, argued that the United States had low taxes compared to its rivals when Ronald Reagan was president, but now ranks among the world’s highest-taxed nations. "In the late 1980s," Moore wrote, "the U.S. was nearly the lowest taxed nation in the world, and a quarter century later we're nearly the highest." The claim came within a column that argued that proposals by President Barack Obama could effectively raise the marginal tax rate for the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers to 62 percent. We recently checked a similar claim by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who said that Obama policies would lead to a top rate of 44.8 percent. (Ryan’s claim -- which earned a rating of Mostly True -- used less expansive parameters than Moore's did.) After a reader suggested that we look at the column, we zeroed in on Moore’s claim about comparative international taxes. We should start off by noting that most comparisons like these are not made with every nation in the world but rather with countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, a group of nearly three-dozen large, industrialized democracies. This makes it a fairer comparison. Because Moore was writing in the rest of the column about marginal personal income tax rates, we first turned to international comparisons of those rates for the OECD nations. We looked at data for 1988 -- Reagan’s last year in office, and a year when top U.S. marginal tax rates reached a new low -- as well as 2010. For 1988, the highest marginal tax rate for U.S. taxpayers was 28 percent. Of the 20 countries in the OECD comparison, only one had a lower rate -- Switzerland, at 11.5 percent. So using this statistic, Moore is correct. However, top marginal tax rates are an imperfect statistic for this kind of comparison. Perhaps the most important problem is that they only take into account national taxes. Some OECD nations levy relatively light taxes at the national level but heavy taxes at the state and local level. This makes international comparisons using only the national statistic incomplete. So we turned to another yardstick -- tax revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product. This measure shows how big the total tax burden is compared with a nation’s economy. It incorporates national, state and local taxes of all types, rather than just income taxes. OECD statistics are available for 1985, in a study of 26 nations. In the U.S., total tax revenue accounted for 25.6 percent of GDP. Only six nations had a lower percentage -- Mexico, Korea, Greece, Portugal, Switzerland and Turkey -- and several of those were not among the top ranks of industrialized nations in 1985. So here too, Moore’s has solid backing for his claim that in the 1980s "the U.S. was nearly the lowest-taxed nation in the world." But what about today? Here, the backing is less solid. Looking strictly at top marginal tax rates, the U.S. rate of 35 percent was solidly in the middle of the pack -- tied for 18th among the 34 nations studied. Moore’s claim doesn’t hold up any better if you use taxes as a percentage of GDP. In 2006 -- the most recent year for which an OECD comparison is available -- taxes accounted for 28 percent of U.S. GDP, up modestly from what it was in 1985. All told, 25 nations had a higher percentage than the U.S., while just four -- Mexico, Japan, Korea and Turkey -- had a lower percentage. That hardly makes the U.S. "nearly the highest" taxed nation in the world. In fact, in order to rank in the top five nations on the 2006 list, the U.S. would have needed taxes to account for 43 percent of GDP -- about one and a half times their actual share. When we asked Moore if there was any data we were missing that would prove his point about the U.S. tax burden today, he said, "today our corporate tax rate is highest and our personal income tax with the Obama proposals (included) would be well above average." He’s basically correct that our corporate tax rate is the world’s highest -- we’ve ruled that claim Mostly True in the past, although for many companies, loopholes and other tax rules bring down the rate they actually pay. Even so, nowhere in the column does Moore bring up corporate or business taxes, so we don’t think that’s strong support for his claim. As for potential tax increases under Obama, those are speculative. Because of that, we don’t see them as justification for stating that "a quarter century later we're nearly the highest" in taxation. Moore would have been on safer ground if he’d written, "If the increases I’ve outlined here are enacted, we might end up with some of the highest tax rates in the world." But even this would be speculative, since we wouldn’t know what other countries’ tax rates will be if and when the U.S. hikes Moore opposes are enacted. We have no quarrel with Moore’s characterization of the late 1980s as a period when U.S. taxes were low compared with its rivals. It clearly was. But Moore's main point, that taxes have gone up significantly since the late 1980s, is a stretch. To the contrary, we find convincing evidence that the U.S. today remains a relatively low-tax nation compared to its industrialized competitors. U.S. tax rates might go up over the next few years, but that's speculation, not established facts. On balance, we rate Moore's comment Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Steve Moore	None	None	None	2011-05-31T14:04:31	2011-05-26	['United_States']
-pomt-13273	"Lindsay Parkhurst wants to take away programs like Social Security and Medicare that seniors have earned throughout their lifetimes."	pants on fire!	/illinois/statements/2016/oct/13/katherine-cloonen/cloonen-says-her-gop-opponent-wants-strip-seniors/	Few local legislative races in Illinois are as hotly contested as the one in the 79th District between incumbent state Rep. Kate Cloonen, D-Kankakee, and her Republican challenger Lindsay Parkhurst. Cloonen, who won the 2014 election by a mere 122 votes and the 2012 election by just 91, is seeking her third term in the General Assembly. Parkhurst is a political newcomer and a defense attorney who has headed a general practice law firm for 16 years, during which she has represented clients in Social Security disability and workers’ compensation cases. In a Sept. 21 campaign ad posted on Cloonen’s Facebook page, she claimed, "Lindsay Parkhurst wants to take away programs like Social Security and Medicare that seniors have earned throughout their lifetimes." Since state lawmakers play no role in these federal programs, we decided to check the record to see if there’s any merit to Cloonen’s claim. Confusing claim Cloonen’s campaign did not respond to multiple emails and phone messages requesting information and sources used to back up her claim. The ad cites three articles from 2011 by the Philadelphia Tribune, NPR and Bloomberg.com, as well as a March 2014 article by the Chicago Tribune. However, the NPR article dated March 29, 2011, was about Democratic members of Congress holding a rally to support Social Security. The Bloomberg story from Aug. 12, 2011, was about former GOP congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare for future recipients. Neither article mentions Parkhurst. A search of the Philadelphia Tribune and Chicago Tribune archives did not yield any results for the dates listed. But considering Parkhurst was a private citizen at the time and not even on the political radar, it’s unlikely these news stories would include any mention of her, let alone describe her position on Medicare and Social Security benefits for seniors. In a phone interview, Parkhurst told PolitiFact Illinois she has no idea where the Cloonen camp got this information to level the accusation. Parkhurst noted she has represented clients in cases involving Social Security disability benefits for people who were not at the eligible age of 65 -- the opposite of what Cloonen’s ad suggests. "I advocate for people to qualify and obtain those benefits," Parkhurst said. "I have been an advocate for 16 years." When asked about her general position on Social Security and Medicare, Parkhurst said both are part of a contract the federal government has made with U.S. citizens and one that must be honored, not eliminated. Regardless, the claim against Parkhurst is curious because state lawmakers have no authority over these federal programs. State role in Social Security and Medicare Charlie Wheeler, director of the Public Affairs Reporting graduate program at the University of Illinois-Springfield and a long-time former politics and government reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, says the ad attempts to make a connection that’s not there and ignores the fact that the state only administers these programs and cannot eliminate Social Security benefits or Medicare for seniors. Wheeler said the only quasi-logical explanation behind Cloonen’s claim is that the Democrat is trying to tie Parkhurst to the GOP’s national platform, which many believe includes policies that would hurt the Social Security program. It’s a very old and common campaign tactic to link a local legislative candidate to his or her party’s broader policies and scandals, Wheeler noted, pointing to recent TV ads and campaign mailers in which Democratic and Republican candidates have tried linking their opponents to sex offenders. "The state Legislature and state law have very little to do with Social Security and Medicare. Those are federal programs," Wheeler said. "State involvement would be to the extent that it collects Social Security taxes and passes them on to the federal government." Our ruling In a campaign ad posted on Facebook, Cloonen said, "Lindsay Parkhurst wants to take away programs like Social Security and Medicare that seniors have earned throughout their lifetimes." With Social Security and Medicare being federal programs, state lawmakers have no say in setting benefit levels for these programs. Additionally, Parkhurst has not previously held elected office and therefore has no public voting record on Social Security or Medicare. Nor has she talked about her position on Medicare or Social Security benefits in her campaign. Ironically, Parkhurst is a defense attorney whose law firm has helped clients obtain Social Security disability benefits. She believes both Social Security and Medicare are part of a contract the federal government must honor. Cloonen’s campaign did not respond to multiple emails and messages for comment, and the articles cited in the ad contain no mention of Parkhurst. There is no evidence to back Cloonen’s claim, nor can we find any statement or action by Parkhurst that would have, even indirectly, elicited it. We rate Cloonen’s claim Pants on Fire. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/487f0897-a88a-4c8f-a8c5-4d5464447785	None	Katherine Cloonen	None	None	None	2016-10-13T14:12:31	2016-09-21	['Medicare_(United_States)']
-goop-01650	Katy Perry “Waiting” For Robert Pattinson To “Let Her Out Of Friend Zone,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/katy-perry-robert-pattinson-friend-zone-dating-made-up/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Katy Perry NOT “Waiting” For Robert Pattinson To “Let Her Out Of Friend Zone,” Despite Report	9:45 am, January 31, 2018	None	['Robert_Pattinson']
-pomt-07784	"The firefighters, the policemen and others who supported (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker) in his election bid ... don't have to worry about their collective bargaining rights."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/21/donna-brazile/donna-brazile-says-unions-supported-scott-walker-a/	The ongoing budget crisis in Wisconsin got pundits George Will and Donna Brazile debating on This Week with Christiane Amanpour. Will said that changes proposed by Gov. Scott Walker were reasonable and necessary given budget constraints. Brazile countered that the governor was using the excuse of a budget battle to destroy collective bargaining rights for public employee unions. "And, look, what we're talking about is that the governor has cherry-picked what public workers he will subject to this so-called removal of their collective bargaining rights," Brazile said. "The firefighters, the policemen and others who supported him in his election bid, well, guess what? They don't have to worry about their collective bargaining rights." Brazile implied that this was political payback, and we want to be clear that we’re not checking Walker’s motivations. We’re looking only at whether "the firefighters, the policemen and others who supported him in his election bid ... don't have to worry about their collective bargaining rights." Our first stop was checking Walker’s proposal. It asks state workers to pay more for their pensions and health insurance, which reduces take-home pay. But it also sets limits on collective bargaining power for the public sector unions. In a letter to public workers, Walker explained that his proposal would limit bargaining only to base pay, which means unions could not bargain for improved health insurance, working conditions or pension benefits. Pay increases would be limited to increases in the cost of living, using the Consumer Price Index, unless voters approved other pay increases via a referendum. Union members would have to vote to stay unionized each year, and contracts could only last only a year, among other limitations. Walker concluded the list of changes by noting, "Local police and fire employees and State Patrol Troopers and Inspectors are exempted from these changes." So Brazile is right that police, firefighters and others are exempt. Our next question was, are these the groups "who supported him in his election bid"? During the campaign last November, leaders of the Milwaukee Professional Firefighters Association and Milwaukee Police Association appeared in an ad supporting Walker and blasting his opponent, Democrat Tom Barrett. Walker also won endorsements from the West Allis Professional Police Association and the Wisconsin Troopers Association Walker didn’t get the endorsements of two statewide unions, the Wisconsin Professional Police Association and the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, which both backed Barrett. For the record, the governor told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the charge that he was exempting police and firefighters was "ridiculous." He said he didn't recommend changing the rules for police officers and firefighters because he didn’t want public safety work disrupted. We then contacted the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, the statewide union that endorsed Walker's opponent last year. Executive director Jim Palmer said the statewide organization is much larger than the local Milwaukee police union that endorsed Walker. The state group has approximately 11,000 members versus Milwaukee’s roughly 1,400, he said. Similarly, the state firefighters association has more than 3,000, compared with the Milwaukee union’s 875. The state police union is opposed to the changes Walker is proposing for other public sector workers, which include county jailers and police dispatchers, Palmer said. The statewide firefighters' union also opposes the proposal. Palmer said he believes that Walker exempted police and firefighters not for political payback, but because they are the public workers who are most popular with the public. "And in that way, it’s very political," he said. Brazile said, "The firefighters, the policemen and others who supported (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker) in his election bid ... don't have to worry about their collective bargaining rights." It’s true that Walker won the endorsement of Milwaukee police and firefighter organizations, and they won’t lose collective bargaining rights if Walker’s proposal succeeds. But not all unions supported Walker. In fact, the two significant statewide organizations endorsed his opponent, and they too would be exempt from restrictions on collective bargaining. Because the statement leaves out the fact that the police and fire unions broke ranks on whether or not to support Walker, we rate this statement Half True.	None	Donna Brazile	None	None	None	2011-02-21T17:29:47	2011-02-20	['Wisconsin', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-goop-01094	Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux Had “Explosive Showdown” Over Brad Pitt?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-justin-theroux-brad-pitt-showdown-made-up/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux Had “Explosive Showdown” Over Brad Pitt?	10:37 am, April 30, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston', 'Brad_Pitt']
-snes-05159	The Obama Administration is "fighting in court" to allow non-citizens to vote in general elections.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-non-citizens-vote/	None	Ballot Box	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Obama Administration Fighting to Allow Non-Citizens to Vote?	24 February 2016	None	['None']
-goop-02890	George Takei Running For Congress, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/george-takei-not-running-congress-april-fools-day-prank-joke/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	George Takei NOT Running For Congress, Despite April Fools’ Day Prank	10:28 am, April 1, 2017	None	['None']
-thal-00137	Claim: It’s cheaper for the State to build houses directly, than to contract it out to the private sector	half true	http://www.thejournal.ie/social-housing-ireland-cost-of-state-private-building-2888760-Jul2016/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck: Is it cheaper for the State to build houses directly than to use the private sector?	Jul 24th 2016, 7:30 PM	None	['None']
-goop-02493	Angelina Jolie Revenge Dating Johnny Depp, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-not-dating-johnny-depp-revenge-romance/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Angelina Jolie NOT Revenge Dating Johnny Depp, Despite Report	1:34 pm, September 6, 2017	None	['Johnny_Depp', 'Angelina_Jolie']
-snes-01087	In January 2018, technology companies revealed plans to sell a sex robot that can cook and clean by 2019.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sex-robot-cooking-cleaning/	None	Technology	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Will a Cooking, Cleaning Sex Robot Be Available by 2019?	1 February 2018	None	['None']
-snes-02692	Only one person out of 87,000 tested positive for drugs under Arizona's $3.6 million drug-testing program for welfare recipients.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/arizona-drug-welfare-recipients/	None	Politics	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did Arizona’s Drug Testing Program for Welfare Recipients Catch Just One Person?	3 April 2017	None	['Arizona']
-pomt-01894	Says Greg Abbott "has lost" in court "four times in just the past few days."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2014/jul/06/wendy-davis/greg-abbott-sustained-four-setbacks-court-though-h/	State Sen. Wendy Davis wink-admonished delegates to last month’s Texas Democratic Party convention not to "clap too much" for her "or Greg Abbott will sue you." Davis, the party’s nominee for governor, then noted that Abbott, the state attorney general and Republican gubernatorial choice, often boasts about going to work, suing the federal government and going home. In May 2013, we rated as True Abbott’s claim he’d sued President Barack Obama’s administration 25 times. "He is so proud of that," Davis said. "But what he doesn’t say is that our judges go to work; they rule against him and the people of this state win. In fact, he has lost four times in just the past few days. If he... were your lawyer," Davis said, "you would fire him on the spot." Four Abbott losses in a June jiffy? Davis's list of Abbott's "losses" By email, Davis spokesman Zac Petkanas pointed out news stories published over a week in June 2014 describing court actions while Abbott’s office separately responded that Davis failed to note key details. Let’s walk through how Davis backed up her statement before laying out Abbott’s objections. On June 16, 2014, according to a Dallas Morning News blog post, a state appeals court ruled a former Texas assistant attorney general, Ginger Weatherspoon, could proceed with her lawsuit charging she’d been fired for refusing to lie under oath about a judge. The story said: "The AG’s office has spent years trying to get the suit tossed, claiming, among other things, that Weatherspoon didn’t make a ‘good faith’ effort to blow the whistle to the right links in the chain of command. A three-justice panel disagreed, and issued an opinion Monday written by Justice David Evans that said Dallas County Judge Martin Hoffman did the right thing last year when he refused to grant the AG’s office its request for summary judgment." In the opinion, Evans said Weatherspoon reported suspected criminal violations to appropriate authorities inside the attorney general’s office. She "has sufficiently alleged that she made good faith report of a violation of law by another public employee to an appropriate law enforcement authority," Evans wrote. According to a June 18, 2014, news story in the Austin American-Statesman, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered the state to pay almost $1.1 million in legal fees to lawyers who represented Davis and minority rights groups in a legal challenge to district boundaries drawn by the Republican-majority Legislature. The story said: "U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer’s order criticized lawyers in" Abbott’s "office for submitting a legal brief that devoted more effort to complaining than it did to answering the legal issues in the fight over lawyer fees." Collyer, an appointee of President George W. Bush, wrote: "This matter presents a case study in how not to respond to a motion for attorney fees and costs." Five days later, a state judge had spurned Abbott’s attempt to remove state District Judge John Dietz from presiding over the long-running public school finance case, the Statesman reported. Abbott, facing a likely legal defeat in the case as a whole, had argued emails showed the judge was biased in favor of school district lawyers seeking to have the state’s school-finance system declared unconstitutional, the story said. Visiting Judge David Peeples found Dietz had "acted in good faith, holding out-of-court conversations with plaintiffs lawyers because ‘he believed that all parties had agreed to let such discussions take place,’" the story said. The same day, the Texas Tribune summed up a U.S. Supreme Court ruling as the "latest loss for Texas in its ongoing campaign against the federal government and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency." The Tribune news story went on to say the court had "largely dismissed" Abbott’s "challenge of federal climate rules. Seven justices agreed that the EPA is allowed to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from most large industrial facilities, like power plants and factories." Based on the accounts offered by Davis, it looks like Abbott experienced an unappealable loss at the Supreme Court (the EPA case), the loss clearing the way for a former employee to have her day in court, plus two losses that could yet lead to appeals courts making win-or-loss rulings. Abbott's office objects Abbott's state spokesman, Jerry Strickland, said the turns were not so clear-cut. Besides, Strickland told us by email, Davis failed to note a criminal prosecution simultaneously completed by Abbott’s office. According to a Statesman news story posted online June 20, 2014, a Bastrop County jury sentenced a former teacher to 15 years in prison for sexually assaulting a student; the attorney general’s office handled the case after the Bastrop County district attorney’s office recused itself. Of course, Davis didn’t say Abbott had four losses uninterrupted. Strickland said of three of the results Davis was referencing: The decision enabling the former employee’s lawsuit to proceed was only procedural. "Citing the decision as a loss when the case hasn’t even gone before a judge is like saying a team won the game because they won the pre-game coin flip," Strickland said. The D.C. judge who awarded attorney fees also issued a stay on the decision, pausing her order so the state could appeal. The decision not to order Dietz’s removal from the school funding lawsuit didn’t determine how the finance lawsuit itself will be judged on the state’s appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. "No matter what happens on any day, in any motions in the school finance case, those decisions along the way are not the final word," Strickland said. Past those, Strickland said Abbott won the EPA case "on the issues we argued." Specifically, Strickland said, the high court overturned the EPA’s illegal greenhouse gas permitting scheme after determining that it ignored federal law, exceeded the authority granted the agency by Congress and violated the federal Clean Air Act. "That was precisely what the state argued and thus, this was a win" for Abbott, Strickland said. The court’s decision affirmed and reversed, in part, a lower court’s ruling in EPA’s favor. The justices basically said the EPA had exceeded its statutory authority when it interpreted the Clean Air Act to require certain kinds of permitting for industrial plants based on their greenhouse-gas emissions. On the other hand, the court concluded, the agency may continue to treat greenhouse gases as a pollutant subject to regulation under federal law. Expert analyst revisits EPA ruling For expert perspective, we asked Lyle Denniston, a reporter who analyzes Supreme Court decisions for the online Supreme Court of the United States blog, to speak to how Abbott and the state of Texas fared in the EPA case. Denniston said by email that states including Texas made arguments that paralleled those offered by lawyers for business firms--and those arguments prevailed. Specifically, he said, the states said EPA couldn’t bootstrap its regulation of greenhouse gases from motor vehicle exhausts into a broad regime of regulating greenhouse gases from industrial plants. Still, Denniston said, Texas fell short of a complete victory because the court didn’t agree the EPA has no authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other stationary sources. Rather, he wrote, the court decided EPA could regulate greenhouse gases from sources already that were obliged, under law, to curb air pollution--meaning the agency could regulate 83 percent of greenhouse gas sources instead of the 86 percent that would have come under its regulatory sway if the administration’s broadest argument had stuck, Denniston said. Strickland, provided Denniston’s comments, cautioned against reading the high court’s ruling too narrowly. The case, Strickland emailed, "was about separation of powers, and the limits of EPA's authority. The court rebuked what they saw as a federal government that tried to rewrite the rules and laws, without legislative approval. This is a victory" for Abbott. Our ruling Davis said Abbott "has lost" in court "four times in just the past few days." Abbott sustained four legal setbacks, we conclude, but the Democrat's statement needs clarification. Three rulings could prove to be bumps along the road o’ litigation possibly culminating in Abbott wins. And in the EPA case, the justices partly agreed with Texas, though they upheld federal regulation of greenhouse gases as pollutants. Notably, too, just one of the referenced rulings involved the Obama administration. We rate this claim as Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Wendy Davis	None	None	None	2014-07-06T06:00:00	2014-06-27	['None']
-abbc-00237	Since the summer break, tensions have been simmering within the Coalition over electric vehicles. Although Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg has thrown his support behind electric cars, some on the government benches are yet to be convinced.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-07/fact-check-does-corolla-emit-less-than-tesla/9461096	The data on the Green Vehicle Guide website shows only the more powerful Tesla models emitted "close to 200 grams" of carbon dioxide per kilometre. Most emitted less, some considerably less. Mr Kelly referred to "a Tesla" and "a Corolla". However, the website lists 27 different models of Tesla, with emissions varying depending on the model. At the time Mr Kelly made his claim (the website has since been updated), emissions for the various Tesla models ranged from 174 to 212 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre. For petrol Corolla models, emissions ranged from 171 to 191 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre. However, according to experts, the data for the emissions intensity of the energy grid was out of date at the time the claim was made. The website has been updated since Mr Kelly made his claim with data reflecting the 2015-16 electricity mix between coal, gas and renewables. This resulted in a significant improvement in the reported environmental performance of the Tesla compared with petrol Corollas, such that five models of Tesla had higher emissions than the most polluting Corolla (191 grams of CO2 per kilometre), compared with 22 that were less polluting. After the update, 17 models of Tesla had higher emissions than the least polluting petrol Corolla (171 grams of CO2 per kilometre), while 10 had lower emissions than even the most environmentally friendly petrol Corolla. Mr Kelly does have a point — not all Tesla models are cleaner than Corollas. However, it is a stretch to suggest — even using out-of-date 2013-14 data for the emissions intensity of the electricity grid — that Corollas have "significantly" lower emissions than Teslas. And experts said it was misleading to compare high-performance cars with mid-performance ones. They pointed out that a fairer comparison for a Corolla was a small electric car such as a Renault Zoe, which according to the latest data on the website emits between 121 and 136 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre — less than any of the five petrol Corollas.	['liberals', 'environmental-impact', 'alternative-energy', 'australia']	None	None	['liberals', 'environmental-impact', 'alternative-energy', 'australia']	Fact check: Does a Toyota Corolla emit less than a Tesla?	Fri 13 Jul 2018, 3:35am	None	['None']
-pomt-03909	"About two-thirds of all consumption is services. . . It was just the opposite" when the sales tax was enacted in the '30s.	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2013/feb/27/joseph-testa/ohio-tax-commissioner-joseph-testa-says-consumptio/	Ohio Gov. John Kasich has proposed a broad overhaul of the state’s tax system as part of his biennial budget proposal. At a news conference to unveil his plans, he called on Ohio Tax Commissioner Joseph Testa to help explain proposed changes in the tax code. The governor’s proposal includes cuts to the state’s personal income tax and a 50 percent income deduction for small businesses. One way some of that revenue loss would be offset is through changes to the state’s sales tax. While the 5.5 percent rate would be cut to 5 percent, the tax base would be broadened by applying it to most services. It now principally applies just to sales of goods. Testa, while explaining the plan, said the changes were long overdue and needed to address the evolution of the state’s economy over nearly eight decades. "About two-thirds of all consumption is services. The tax code has never been updated to address that. It was just the opposite (when the tax was enacted) in the '30s." PolitiFact Ohio decided to assess the tax commissioner’s claim. Ohio enacted its sales tax in 1935 as a way to raise revenue to help public schools that were struggling to pay their bills during the Great Depression. At the time, most schools received their funding through property taxes. Many Ohioans failed to pay their taxes because of the difficult economic times, according to Ohio History Central, an online product of the Ohio Historical Society. As a result, schools had less money to pay educational expenses. Prior to enactment of the Ohio Retail Sales Tax Law there were taxes on sales of cigarettes and gasoline, but on few other products. The new tax extended to nearly all goods, and dramatically increased tax receipts. It raised nearly $17 million for public schools in 1935. Some revenue also went to help local governments. Since then, the tax has remained focused on the sale of goods. The governor’s budget proposal, though, would add the tax to sales associated with nearly all services. Everything from haircuts and movie tickets to lawyer bills and real estate services would be subject to a 5-cent tax on every dollar. But what about Testa’s contention that Ohio’s economy has evolved and that transactions involving services now account for two-thirds of all personal consumption expenditures? We contacted Testa’s office to ask on what he based his statement. Were there numbers to support the reversal in spending habits? Gary Gudmundson, a spokesman for Testa, provided a chart that the Department of Taxation had prepared for the budget rollout. It attributed its figures to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. For 1935, the year Ohio enacted the sales tax, it showed total personal consumption of $55.9 billion, with $31.6 billion (56.5 percent) going toward goods and $24.3 billion (43.5 percent) going to services. Not quite 2-to-1 in favor of goods, but goods sales accounted for a solid majority of purchases. Money spent on personal consumption climbed steadily over the years. By 2012 the total consumption figure was about $11.12 trillion. About $3.78 trillion (34 percent) was for goods purchases. About $7.34 trillion (66 percent) was for services. We checked and the numbers provided in the state’s chart match the Bureau of Economic Analysis data. It should be noted, though, that the data reflects money spent on goods and services on a national basis. The Bureau of Economic Analysis told us that it didn’t have state-by-state data. Gudmundson said the state had rough figures that only went back to the ‘80s, but that the expectation was that Ohio, as one of the larger states in the nation, would have economic experience similar to the national figures. State-specific numbers on production help bolster Testa’s contention, although production is not the same as consumption. In 2011, the state saw $326 billion in privately produced services and $102 billion in privately produced goods. The figures illustrate "the continuing shift in Ohio’s economy away from goods production and towards services," according to a report last year from Ohio’s Policy Research and Strategic Planning Office. So where does that leave Testa’s claim? He said that about two-thirds of consumption is for services, and on a national basis, data shows he is correct. One could reasonably conclude that the same trend holds true in Ohio. Testa also said it was just the opposite when the state enacted its sales tax. On a national basis, the goods purchases didn’t account for two-thirds of total consumption in 1935, but it was a significant majority. And the numbers support Testa’s overarching point that the economy has changed significantly since then to be a service dominated market. With those points of clarification, the tax commissioner’s claim rates Mostly True.	None	Joseph Testa	None	None	None	2013-02-27T16:59:31	2013-02-04	['None']
-pomt-04031	Research shows that "a vast majority of arriving immigrants today come here because they believe that government is the source of prosperity, and that's what they support."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jan/31/rush-limbaugh/limbaugh-says-immigrants-come-us-seeking-prosperit/	Florida Sen. Marco Rubio talked immigration recently with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, steering into an interesting side issue: why people come to the U.S. "You look at people that come from Latin America. They come to get away from stale, stagnant economies where the rich keep winning and everybody else keeps working for them because big government dominates those economies," Rubio said. To which Limbaugh responded: "Well, is that the reason that a majority of immigrants come to this country today? I know it used to be. They wanted to be Americans. They wanted to escape oppression. They wanted to become citizens of the greatest country on earth. I've seen a number of research, scholarly research data which says that a vast majority of arriving immigrants today come here because they believe that government is the source of prosperity, and that's what they support." Here, we’ll look into Limbaugh’s assertion that belief in an expansive central government is what draws people to our shores. Polling Hispanics We did not hear back from Limbaugh’s show, but we suspect that the research he referred to is a 2012 Pew Research Hispanic Center poll, asking Hispanics about their political ideology. The poll broke down the results by generation, so it’s possible to distinguish first-generation Hispanics (i.e., immigrants) from U.S.-born Hispanics. The poll, which queried 1,220 Latino respondents ages 18 and older, asked, "Would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" In the results, 75 percent of Hispanics said they preferred bigger government (compared with 41 percent of the general population.) A breakdown by generation showed an even greater skew: Among first-generation Hispanics (i.e., immigrants), 81 percent favored bigger government. In the second generation, 72 percent favored bigger government, and the figure fell to 58 percent in the third generation and higher. Steven Camarota, with the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors stricter immigration laws, pointed us to another Pew poll asking people’s opinions of socialism, capitalism and libertarianism. Among blacks, whites and Hispanics, Hispanics had the most unfavorable view of capitalism: 55 percent. Overall, 50 percent had a favorable view of capitalism, while 40 percent had an unfavorable view.) In Camarota’s view, "the general sentiment (of Limbaugh’s statement) seems to be right that a very large fraction -- of Hispanics anyway -- show a very strong sentiment toward what could be called progressive or liberal views of government." But that’s just Hispanics, and Limbaugh simply referred to "a vast majority of arriving immigrants." Camarota cited similar figures about Asian immigrants, also from Pew polling. In a 2012 survey, 57 percent of foreign-born Asians in the U.S. said they prefer a bigger government that provides more services, while 33 percent want a smaller government providing fewer services. So there is evidence that recent immigrants, at least among Hispanics and Asians, favor more government, which could reasonably be construed as a belief that "government is the source of prosperity," as Limbaugh said. But is that belief the reason people immigrate? Jobs & family Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, dismissed Limbaugh’s claim as off-base. "If Rush Limbaugh was right, we would not have people leaving during a recession like we did," Nowrasteh said in an interview. "About a million unauthorized immigrants have gone home to their home countries because there are no jobs for them here." A separate study by the Cato Institute says "immigrants come to America today to build a better life through work, not welfare, just as they have throughout American history." It backs up this point with U.S. Department of Labor data on labor force participation. Among foreign-born people, the work rate was 67.9 percent in 2010, compared to the native-born rate of 64.1 percent. It’s worth noting that welfare benefits are generally not available to immigrants. Illegal immigrants, of course, cannot receive public services such as cash assistance or Medicaid at all, and legal immigrants aren’t eligible for five years. Other programs are totally inaccessible until they become citizens. "Undoubtedly, there are undocumented immigrants getting some of those things. But they are for the most part not eligible," said Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Immigration patterns indicate that that "source of prosperity" isn’t what immigrants seek anyway. "Immigrants go to states that have smaller benefits for welfare recipients," Nowrasteh said. "They go to the states that have the fastest-growing economies. If they were coming for welfare, they’d go to the places with the biggest welfare states." A wide-ranging international survey by Gallup of people all over the globe found that 150 million adults worldwide would like to migrate to the U.S., making it by far the top desired destination. "Opportunity" was the most common reason given, meaning "the chance to join family members who are already in other countries, to start a new business, to express one's views without fear, or to live where children are treated with respect." Gallup also found that the human development index of the country of origin was a significant factor too. That index measures citizens’ health, life expectancy, schooling options and wealth. The poll found that the desire to migrate "tends to be higher in countries with medium to low human development." Our ruling Limbaugh said research shows that "a vast majority of arriving immigrants today come here because they believe that government is the source of prosperity, and that's what they support." Surveys of Hispanic and Asian immigrants show that majorities of immigrants favor bigger government, which could be the "source of prosperity" Limbaugh meant. But we could find no research to say that those views are what drive people to immigrate. Family connections and job opportunities in the U.S. are the most common reasons cited in studies. Limbaugh’s claim contains a grain of truth but makes a misleading causal connection. That fits our definition of Mostly False.	None	Rush Limbaugh	None	None	None	2013-01-31T17:19:48	2013-01-29	['None']
-tron-00845	Clinton Pilot Dimitri Noonan Found Dead After Revealing Clinton/Lynch Meeting	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dimitri-noonan-found-dead/	None	clinton	None	None	['bill clinton', 'hillary clinton', 'paul ryan', 'the clintons']	Clinton Pilot Dimitri Noonan Found Dead After Revealing Details of Clinton/Lynch Meeting	Jul 19, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04709	Vatican City, the Taj Mahal, Yankee Stadium and five other landmarks could all fit inside the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/size-of-indianapolis-speedway/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Size of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway	25 May 2016	None	['Yankee_Stadium', 'Taj_Mahal']
-fani-00004	CLAIM: 30,000 people cross Ireland-Northern Ireland border daily.	conclusion: accurate	https://factcheckni.org/facts/do-30000-people-cross-ireland-northern-ireland-border-daily/	None	brexit	None	None	None	Do 30,000 people cross Ireland-Northern Ireland border daily?	None	None	['None']
-pomt-09879	John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, "has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jul/29/glenn-beck/glenn-beck-claims-science-czar-john-holdren-propos/	As evidence that the country is closer to socialist than capitalist these days, radio and talk show host Glenn Beck recently made this claim about John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy: "I mean, we've got czars now," Beck said during his July 22, 2009, program. "Czars like John Holdren, who has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population." Political figures like Holdren, who are little-known by most Americans, make easy targets. And Beck's biting quick hit on Holdren provides a healthy enough dose of outrage on which to hang his argument. But is it true? Beck's allegation has its roots in a book Holdren co-authored with Paul and Annie Ehrlich more than three decades ago called Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment . Conservative bloggers have quoted the book extensively, and often out of context, to make the point that Holdren has advocated positions such as the ones Beck stated. We obtained the book to see exactly what Holdren, then a young man, wrote (or co-wrote). The book is just over 1,000 pages, and it clearly makes that case that an explosion in population presented a grave crisis. Although it is a textbook, the authors don't shy away from presenting a point of view. As the preface states, "We have tried throughout the book to state clearly where we stand on various matters of controversy." In a section on "Involuntary Fertility Control," Holdren and the other authors discuss various "coercive" means of population control — including putting sterilants in the drinking water. But they stop well short of advocating such measures. Here's a few excerpts: "The third approach to population limitation is that of involuntary fertility control. Several coercive proposals deserve discussion, mainly because some countries may ultimately have to resort to them unless current trends in birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means. ... "Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock. ... "Again, there is no sign of such an agent on the horizon. And the risk of serious, unforeseen side effects would, in our opinion, militate against the use of any such agent, even though this plan has the advantage of avoiding the need for socioeconomic pressures that might tend to discriminate against particular groups or penalize children." Later, the authors conclude, "Most of the population control measures beyond family planning discussed above have never been tried. Some are as yet technically impossible and others are and probably will remain unacceptable to most societies (although, of course, the potential effectiveness of those least acceptable measures may be great). "Compulsory control of family size is an unpalatable idea, but the alternatives may be much more horrifying. As those alternatives become clearer to an increasing number of people in the 1980s, they may begin demanding such control. A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences, while redoubling efforts to ensure that the means of birth control, including abortion and sterilization, are accessible to every human being on Earth within the shortest possible time. If effective action is taken promptly against population growth, perhaps the need for the more extreme involuntary or repressive measures can be averted in most countries." And here's the part that some have interpreted as Holdren advocating for forced abortions. "To date, there has been no serious attempt in Western countries to use laws to control excessive population growth, although there exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated. For example, under the United States Constitution, effective population-control programs could be enacted under the clauses that empower Congress to appropriate funds to provide for the general welfare and to regulate commerce, or under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such laws constitutionally could be very broad. Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society. Few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion, however." This comes in a section discussing population law. The authors argue that compulsory abortions could potentially be allowed under U.S. law "if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society." Again, that's a far cry from advocating or proposing such a position. In the book, the authors certainly advocate making abortions readily accessible for women who want to get them. But they never advocate forced abortions. Big difference. In response to the comments from Beck and others, Holdren's office issued this statement: "The quotations used to suggest that Dr. Holdren supports coercive approaches to limiting population growth were taken from a 1977 college textbook on environmental science and policy, of which he was the third author. The quoted material was from a section of the book that described different possible approaches to limiting population growth and then concluded that the authors’ own preference was to employ the noncoercive approaches before the environmental and social impacts of overpopulation led desperate societies to employ coercive ones. Dr. Holdren has never been an advocate of compulsory abortions or other repressive means of population limitation." Holdren's office also provided a statement from Annie and Paul Ehrlich, the co-authors: "We have been shocked at the serious mischaracterization of our views and those of John Holdren in blog posts based on misreadings of our jointly-authored 1000-page 1977 textbook, ECOSCIENCE. We were not then, never have been, and are not now 'advocates' of the Draconian measures for population limitation described — but not recommended — in the book's 60-plus small-type pages cataloging the full spectrum of population policies that, at the time, had either been tried in some country or analyzed by some commentator. Under questioning by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., during his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren said he "no longer thinks it's productive to focus on optimum population for the United States. ... I think the key thing today is that we need to work to improve the conditions that all of our citizens face economically, environmentally, and in other respects. And we need to aim for something that I have for years been calling 'sustainable prosperity.'" Vitter continued with his line of question, asking directly, "Do you think determining optimal population is a proper role of government?" Said Holdren: "No, senator, I do not. ... I think the proper role of government is to develop and deploy the policies with respect to economy, environment, security, that will ensure the well-being of the citizens we have." But with regard to Beck's claim that Holdren "has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population," the text of the book clearly does not support that. We think a thorough reading shows that these were ideas presented as approaches that had been discussed. They were not posed as suggestions or proposals. In fact, the authors make clear that they did not support coercive means of population control. Certainly, nowhere in the book do the authors advocate for forced abortions. Some have argued that Holdren's view of the imminent and grave global dangers posed by overpopulation should provide pause, given Holdren's current view that global warming now presents imminent and grave global dangers. That's a matter for reasoned debate. But in seeking to score points for a political argument, Beck seriously mischaracterizes Holdren's positions. Holdren didn't advocate those ideas then. And, when asked at a Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren said he did not support them now. We think it's irresponsible to pluck a few lines from a 1,000-page, 30-year-old textbook, and then present them out of context to dismiss Holdren's long and distinguished career. And we rate Beck's claim Pants on Fire!	None	Glenn Beck	None	None	None	2009-07-29T15:54:48	2009-07-22	['None']
-pose-00921	“I will cut the tax rate by eliminating the Alvarez tax increases. Our government is just too big and too expensive. Taxpayers want and deserve a government we can afford. We need to eliminate duplication, eliminate unfilled positions and focus on essential services.”	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/carlos-o-meter/promise/953/cut-property-taxes/	None	carlos-o-meter	Carlos Gimenez	None	None	Cut property taxes	2011-07-14T16:08:03	None	['None']
-vogo-00397	Statement: The city has given “no pay raises for our employees for the last three years,” Mayor Jerry Sanders said at an April 14 press conference.	determination: misleading	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-no-pay-raises-for-city-workers/	Analysis: The city plans to pay $231.2 million for employee pensions next year, about $26.5 million less than previously estimated by its retirement system. At a press conference two weeks ago about his proposed budget, Sanders described the drop:	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: No Pay Raises for City Workers?	April 27, 2011	None	['None']
-pomt-09490	"Since 1981, reconciliation has been used 21 times. Most of it's been used by Republicans."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/25/harry-reid/reid-says-repblicans-have-used-reconciliation-more/	Although the Feb. 25, 2010, televised health care summit was billed by President Barack Obama as an attempt to forge some bipartisan agreement, it didn't take long for the talk to turn to reconciliation. Reconciliation is a legislative procedure adopted in 1974 to balance budget bills. It can be a complex process, but what you really need to know about a reconciliation bill is that it can be passed with a simple majority, rather than the 60-vote supermajority Democrats lost when Scott Brown of Massachusetts was elected to the Senate. In other words, it's an option some Democrats are mulling if a bipartisan plan cannot be achieved. In the Republicans' opening statement, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said, "You can say that this process has been used before, and that would be right. But it's never been used for anything like this. It's not appropriate to use to write the rules for 17 percent of the economy." Alexander quoted Alexis de Tocqueville that the greatest threat to the American democracy would be the tyranny of the majority. Soon after, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid accused Republicans of having a bit of amnesia on reconciliation. "No one has talked about reconciliation, but that's what you folks have talked about ever since that came out, as if it's something that has never been done before," Reid said. "Now, we as leaders here, the speaker and I, have not talked about doing reconciliation as the only way out of all this. Of course it's not the only way out. But remember, since 1981, reconciliation has been used 21 times. Most of it's been used by Republicans for major things, like much of the Contract for America, Medicare reform, the tax cuts for rich people in America. So reconciliation isn't something that's never been done before." We'll set aside some of the hypocrisy here (see Reid's comments in 2005 when he talked about the "arrogance of power" when Republicans were mulling reconciliation). Similarly, we'll set aside the hypocrisy of Republicans who used reconciliation in the past, but now denounce it. The issue we're looking at here is whether Republicans have really used reconciliation bills more than Democrats, as Reid claimed. On Nov. 14, 2008, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service put out a report on reconciliation bills between 1981 and 2009. There have been 22 of them, including three that were vetoed by President Bill Clinton. It's been used for health insurance portability (COBRA), nursing home standards, expanded Medicaid eligibility, increases in the earned income tax credit, welfare reform, start-up of the state Children's Health Insurance Program, major tax cuts and student aid reform. While some have tallied the Republican vs. Democratic report card on reconciliation based on the president in power at the time, we think it makes more sense to look at the party in power in Congress when the reconciliation procedure was initiated. By our count, eight of the reconciliation bills were initiated by a Democratic-controlled Congress. The rest, 14, were done by a Republican-controlled Congress. So by that measure, Reid is on target. "It's a legitimate argument," said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "And Reid is absolutely right. It has been used a lot, and more by Republicans than Democrats." On April 20, 2009, Mann co-authored an article in the New Republic, "Truth and Reconciliation: Sidestepping the Filibuster," along with Molly Reynolds, also of Brookings, and Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, which concluded that "Health reform 2009 style would be the most ambitious use of reconciliation but it fits a pattern used over three decades by both parties to avoid the strictures of Senate filibusters." Still, we think looking at all 22 reconciliation bills casts too wide a net. Many reconciliation bills were not even all that controversial, and enjoyed wide bipartisan support. But other ones have clearly involved policy decisions that otherwise would likely have failed. Only eight involved votes where the winning side had less than the supermajority threshold of 60 votes. One could argue those were the times when Congress got around the need for the standard 60 votes. But even among that smaller group, six of the eight came courtesy of a Republican-controlled Congress. By way of counterpoint, Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, argues that any comparison of past reconciliation bills to one on health care is flawed. "This is a unique situation," Darling said. "It's completely unprecedented to use reconciliation to amend a bill that is pending in Congress but has not passed." Darling called the Democrats' threat of reconciliation a measure of last resort to steamroll through a bill that can no longer get 60 votes in the Senate and is unpopular with the American public. Whether or not a reconciliation bill on health care meets the intent of the legislative procedure is certainly a matter for legitimate debate. But Reid said reconciliation has been used 21 times since 1981, and that most of the time, it's been Republicans who have initiated it. We find that there have been 22 reconciliation votes, 14 of them by a Republican-controlled Congress, and that it makes more sense -- in light of the debate over making an end-run around the 60-vote threshold -- to focus on the reconciliation bills that passed without a supermajority. But even then, Republicans have reached for reconciliation bills more often than Democrats since 1981. We rule Reid's comment True.	None	Harry Reid	None	None	None	2010-02-25T12:37:03	2010-02-25	['None']
-tron-00307	Muslim Mayhem on AirTran Jetliner	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/airtran297/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Muslim Mayhem on AirTran Jetliner	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-05167	There are small worms in bags of Lipton tea.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/are-there-worms-in-lipton-tea-bags/	None	Food	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Are There Worms in Lipton Tea Bags?	23 February 2016	None	['None']
-goop-02052	Emma Stone Did Say “Stand Behind” Donald Trump, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/emma-stone-donald-trump-fake-news/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Emma Stone Did NOT Say “Stand Behind” Donald Trump, Despite Fake News	12:38 pm, December 11, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02446	Says Debo Adegbile "was nominated to serve as a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals" and "was abruptly withdrawn by the administration."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/feb/27/pat-toomey/pat-toomey-says-barack-obama-previously-nominated-/	President Barack Obama’s pick to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division has dredged up a decades old controversy surrounding Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black radical convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer. Obama nominated Debo Adegbile to be an assistant attorney general in November. Adegbile previously served as director of litigation at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams on Feb. 24 that said Adegbile was not fit for the post because he attempted to "seize on (the Abu-Jamal) case and turn it into a political platform from which to launch an extreme attack on the justice system." In 1982, Abu-Jamal was found guilty of murdering a Philadelphia police officer in a case that garnered national attention. The case went on for many years. In 2009, Adegbile was at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund when it filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Abu-Jamal’s sentence was invalid because the jury was racially biased. Later, Adegbile was one of several lawyers to represent Abu-Jamal when prosecutors tried to reinstate the death penalty. Abu-Jamal is serving a life sentence without parole. But it was Toomey’s final salvo calling on Adegbile to withdraw his nomination that caught our attention. "Only three years ago, Mr. Adegbile was nominated to serve as a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Months later that nomination was abruptly withdrawn by the administration. That would be the best course here." At PolitiFact, we won’t debate Adegbile’s credentials for this important position, nor weigh in on a decades-old controversy. But whether Adegbile was previously nominated by Obama for a position is something we can, and will, look at. Nominate vs. consider We perused through the record of presidential nominations. Adegbile’s name doesn’t appear prior to his most recent nomination to the Justice Department. So we then turned to Toomey’s office. They immediately conceded their error. "We should have written that he was under consideration," said Elizabeth Anderson, a spokeswoman for Toomey’s office. "He was not nominated." Presidents consider nominees all the time. Some considerations are more public than others. Former United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, for example, was publicly "considered" to be the secretary of state by Obama, but her name was never formally submitted for nomination after Republicans lined up against her. In the case of Adegbile, the Washington Post reported in 2011 that Obama "asked the American Bar Association to evaluate the credentials of Debo Patrick Adegbile, director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit." More recently, the Los Angeles Times reported that "Florida lawyer Ben Hill, who was chairman of the bar association committee, said in an interview that Adegbile's name was withdrawn before he was rated by the group." Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee asked Adegbile this year why his name was withdrawn in 2011. Responding to a question submitted by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Adegbile wrote: "I withdrew myself from consideration for a nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit based upon my personal, professional and practical assessment that my family’s best interests were served by my decision to remain in my position at the NAACP LDF in New York at that time." In his op-ed with Williams, Toomey said Adegbile’s nomination was "abruptly withdrawn by the administration." But Adegbile contends it was his own doing. A spokesman for the White House also said Adegbile took himself out of the running. Toomey’s office pointed to a Washington Post story (which is actually a wire version of the aforementioned L.A. Times article) where it was reported that "the White House later withdrew his name." Finally, it’s worth noting that Obama has had a tough time filling U.S. Court of Appeals seats in the D.C. Circuit. It’s widely considered a stepping stone to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Republicans have repeatedly blocked his nominees. When the Senate Democrats invoked the so-called "nuclear option" to change Senate rules for confirming presidential appointments, it was to move ahead with three Obama appointees to the 12-member U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Adegbile’s confirmation for assistant attorney general now only needs a simple majority, which Democrats can arrange without help from Republicans. At the time he was being considered for the judgeship, Republicans could have forced a 60-vote threshold to confirm Adegbile’s nomination, if it reached that point. Our ruling Toomey, along with Williams, wrote that "Adegbile was nominated to serve as a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Months later that nomination was abruptly withdrawn by the administration." Adegbile was never nominated, a point Toomey’s office conceded. He was considered for the job by Obama, but only briefly and not formally. Presidents considered many names before making an official nomination. The distinction is important, because having to pull a nomination after it's formally made is a less frequent occurrence and a more significant setback for an administration. We rate this statement False.	None	Pat Toomey	None	None	None	2014-02-27T12:11:58	2014-02-24	['United_States']
-hoer-00177	Panadol Extra Kidney Damage Warning	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/panadol-extra-hoax.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Panadol Extra Kidney Damage Warning Hoax	January 2006	None	['None']
-pomt-09158	"Almost 1 million children ... have no health insurance in this state."	true	/florida/statements/2010/jun/09/bud-chiles/bud-chiles-1-million-children-health-insurance/	Lawton "Bud" Chiles III, son of the late Gov. Lawton Chiles, announced his independent run for governor on June 3, 2010, by saying he'd be a voice for those who traditionally have been cut out of the democratic process. "I'm here to speak for 1 million Floridians who today are out of work, for almost 1 million children who have no health insurance in this state and for millions of Florida citizens like me, who believe that Florida can and must do better by its families and by its communities," Chiles said. Chiles, previously a registered Democrat, said he opted out of a Democratic primary with Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink after he spoke on the phone with Sink and she told him she plans to raise $30 million in the race. Sink denies using that figure. In this item, we wanted to check Chiles' claim that almost 1 million Florida children are without health insurance. The number is particularly surprising, given that the state operates a program called Florida KidCare, which provides free or heavily subsidized health insurance for many uninsured children under 19. To qualify for Florida KidCare you must be a U.S. citizen or an eligible non-U.S. Citizen (read the eligibility information here). The Florida Department of Health says that 1.8 million children are currently enrolled in the program. To begin to assess Chiles' figure we turned to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a group that analyzes health care policy. In October 2009, they produced a report called "The Uninsured, a Primer," which details the number of people insured and uninsured by race, gender, age and state. The report is based on Census information and averages 2007 and 2008 calculations to provide state-level data. Kaiser says the data comes with a margin of error between 5 and 7.9 percentage points. According to Kaiser, 18.3 percent of Florida's 4.3 million children under 19 are without health insurance, or about 787,000 children. Only Texas has a higher percentage of children uninsured, Kaiser found. Families USA, a national consumer health care group, said in an October 2008 study that 797,000 children in Florida were without health care (18.8 percent of all children). The study, like Kaiser's, relied on Census data and counted children under 19. Families USA found that over 60 percent of Florida’s uninsured children come from low-income families who likely are eligible for Florida KidCare. A third group, The Commonwealth Fund, found in a 2009 study that 18 percent of children 0-17 in Florida were without health insurance -- the highest percentage of children uninsured in the country. The Commonwealth Fund study did not attach a raw number like the Families USA and Kaiser surveys, but 18 percent is in the same range as the findings of the other two studies. In his announcement as a candidate for governor, Chiles said that almost 1 million children in Florida don't have health insurance. The most reliable and recent studies put the number at close to 800,000. Chiles uses the word "almost," which gives him some leeway. We rate his statement True.	None	Bud Chiles	None	None	None	2010-06-09T10:17:59	2010-06-03	['None']
-abbc-00428	The claim: Kevin Rudd says building a high speed rail project from Brisbane to Melbourne by 2035 would cost less than the Coalition's paid parental leave scheme for the same period of time.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-29/rudd-high-speed-rail-parental-leave-cost-comparison/4914434	The claim: Kevin Rudd says building a high speed rail project from Brisbane to Melbourne by 2035 would cost less than the Coalition's paid parental leave scheme for the same period of time.	['family', 'community-and-society', 'federal-government', 'federal-elections', 'alp', 'rudd-kevin', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'transport', 'australia']	None	None	['family', 'community-and-society', 'federal-government', 'federal-elections', 'alp', 'rudd-kevin', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'transport', 'australia']	Kevin Rudd's high speed rail, parental leave cost comparison is unsound	Fri 30 Aug 2013, 3:11am	None	['Melbourne', 'Kevin_Rudd', 'Brisbane', 'Coalition_(Australia)']
-pomt-06125	"Florida is considered the fourth-largest gambling state in the nation."	half-true	/florida/statements/2011/dec/27/ellyn-bogdanoff/ellyn-bogdanoff-said-florida-considered-fourth-lar/	Supporters of a proposed bill that would allow three massive destination casino resorts in South Florida often argue that gambling is already a big business here -- in fact, one of the largest in the country. "Florida is considered the fourth-largest gambling state in the nation, but it has let the industry drive policy decisions and that has produced the worst kind of gaming,'' Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, R-Fort Lauderdale, said in an October 2011 interview about her casinos bill. "To me, no kind of gaming is good, but we as policymakers have to decide, do we want gaming with five-star hotels or Internet cafes in strip malls?" That fourth-largest ranking claim has been repeated multiple times by Bogdanoff, including in a joint editorial with state Rep. Erik Fresen, R-Miami, and by other individuals, including former U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart. Diaz-Balart is a lawyer and adviser for the Genting Group, which has purchased the waterfront Miami Herald property with plans to build a mega casino-resort there. We wondered if the ranking is true. The roots of the claim Bogdanoff's legislative assistant, Aaron Nevins, told us that the source of her claim came from a Oct. 24, 2011, report by Bernstein Research, a leading watcher of gambling stocks. "Florida has more gaming options than Las Vegas," the report states. "There is currently $3.4B of gaming occurring in Florida or $7.4B if one includes the lottery ... There are 8 casinos in the state run by Native Americans. Seven of these are Seminole and one is Miccosukee. These casinos generated revenues of just over $2B in 2009, making Florida the fourth largest state for tribal gaming...." Setting aside the numbers for a second, the Bernstein report makes clear it is discussing tribal gaming not gaming overall in that section, a distinction not made by Bogdanoff. "She misspoke," Nevins told PolitiFact in a Dec. 20 interview. "Florida is the fourth-largest state for tribal gaming." Other measures, rankings What else is out there? We asked Nevins if there were any other sources that ranked states' gambling revenues -- and he quickly found a separate report about states' gambling revenues in fiscal year 2010 by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, a group that describes itself as the public policy research arm of the State University of New York. According to the Rockefeller report, 43 states operate lotteries, 15 allow commercial casinos, 12 have racinos, and over 40 states allow pari-mutuel wagering. Lotteries and casinos generate the bulk of gambling-related revenues. The report on Page 5 compares states' revenues from lotteries, casinos, racinos and traditional pari-mutuel wagering. In Florida, revenues totaled about $1.4 billion -- ranking the state third behind New York and Pennsylvania. The group also found that -- in the states where data was available -- Florida ranked third in Native American casino revenues, behind California and Connecticut. (A brief pit stop here to explain why the Bernstein and Rockefeller reports were billions apart on their Florida figures. The Rockefeller report cited about $1.25 billion for the lottery, which is the amount that went to the state's Education Enhancement Trust Fund, while Bernstein cited total lottery revenues of about $4 billion. Those figures can be seen in this chart on page 117 from Florida's Department of Economic and Demographic Research.) Now, back to the Rockefeller chart showing Florida at No. 3. How could Florida be ahead of Nevada, which had $829.3 million in revenues, placing at No. 12? This chart looks at gambling revenues from four sources -- lotteries, casinos, racinos and pari-mutuel wagering -- combined. Nevada only has one category here -- casinos -- while Florida has the lottery, racinos (race tracks with slot machines) and pari-mutuel wagering. But let's take a look at a few other charts in the Rockefeller report that examine states' gambling rankings in various ways: * States' reliance on gambling revenues: In fiscal year 2009, Florida was 15th at 3.3 percent. Nevada -- at 12.5 percent -- had the highest percentage of gambling revenue as a share of the state's own-source revenue. * States' share of nationwide gambling revenues: Florida was third at 5.8 percent behind New York and Pennsylvania for fiscal year 2010. * Gambling revenue per resident 18 & above: Florida was 21st at $94.4. Rhode Island was No. 1. * Gambling revenue as a percentage of personal income: Florida was 19th at 0.2 percent. West Virginia was No. 1. And there are even more charts in the report that compare gambling revenues between 2009 and 2010 and zero in on single sources of gambling such as racinos. But you get the picture -- each measure of gambling can result in a different state being the top, second or fourth. And we'll toss in one more source of state-by-state comparisons. We found a ranking of states related to commercial casino activity from the American Gaming Association's 2011 state of the states survey. For example, on state-by-state consumer spending, or gross gaming revenue -- what a casino earns before it pays taxes, salaries or other expenses, Florida ranked 16th in the country. On tax revenue, Florida ranked 15th. (The AGA is focused here on its definition of commercial casinos, which includes racinos -- but note these rankings don't reflect tribal establishments or the lottery.) And if you guessed Nevada as No. 1 for commercial casino tax revenue you'd be wrong -- Pennsylvania and Indiana were higher. How could Indiana be higher than Nevada? "Indiana ranks higher than Nevada because, while its gross gaming revenue is lower than Nevada, its tax rate is much higher, yielding a larger tax contribution from commercial casinos in the state," said Holly Wetzel, spokeswoman for the association. Check out this article from Stateline.org, a publication of the Pew Center on the States: "Nevada can still lay claim to being the nation’s leading casino state, with a total take of $10.4 billion last year, but casino revenue and casino tax revenue are two very different things. State tax policies for casinos vary widely. Tax rates often are higher for casinos located at racetracks, sometimes called 'racinos,' where the slot machines tend to be operated by the state lottery as opposed to the more traditional state regulatory gaming commission." What's the best source? So is there a preferred way to compare states to conclude which one is the largest, or fourth-largest, gambling state in the nation? Does it all depend on what point you want to make or what you are looking at? We posed those questions to experts in the industry as well as academics. Wetzel, of AGA, told us in an interview: "I don't think there is a right or wrong or agreed-upon way to measure it. It depends upon what question you are asking." Wetzel said most firms comparing markets look at gross gaming revenues -- what a casino earns before it pays taxes, salaries or other expenses. It can also be useful to look at tax contributions -- but there are different tax rates in various states. "You can slice it and dice it anyway you want to depending on what story you are wanting to get at," Wetzel said. "The way we rank it is gross gaming revenue." Lucy Dadayan, one of the authors on the Rockefeller report, agreed with Bogdanoff that gambling is already in Florida in a big way. "However, the statement by the senator isn’t made in terms of reliance on gambling, or on any adjusted basis," Dadayan told PolitiFact Florida in an e-mail. "So total gambling expenditures (which we don’t collect) is the best measure in that regard. From the figures we collect, I’d say total gambling revenues to the state are the most useful measure, and Florida is in the 3rd place by this measure. The choice of the measure is really dependent on the purpose of the comparison." Dean Gerstein, principal investigator for an in-depth gambling study done for the federal government in 1999 and now vice provost and professor at Claremont Graduate University, said the best measure depends on the point a person is trying to make. "A measure is a statistical construct designed to best match the concept you have in mind. If the concept is the sheer size of an industry, then total revenues/sales is the usual metric," Gerstein said. "If it is the significance of the industry to the 'local' economy, it is the industry’s local wages plus locally retained profits (including the tax rake) generated, as a percentage of local wage/profit retention/tax. "If you are interested in gambling by residents, you want to know how much the local residents gamble away per capita, regardless of where they do so. Hence all the CA residents who trek to Vegas are exporting money. But all the multinational corporations that own Vegas casinos are exporting profits. The preferred stat depends on what you are interested in, and it is important to think straight about this. Note that the states with the largest populations — CA, TX, NY, FL — tend to dominate any stat that is based in some part on total population, while Nevada and other small-pop mountain states will be down in the weeds. When you put population in the denominator (that is, 'per capita'), that changes things." Our ruling As Bogdanoff introduced her casino bill she said: "Florida is considered the fourth-largest gambling state in the nation..." But this isn't as simple as college football rankings. There isn't one universally accepted measure. Now, Bogdanoff's legislative assistant acknowledges she should have specified tribal gaming. But that said, Bogdanoff's broader point is certainly supported from the majority of research, which suggests that -- if you include the state lottery -- Florida is certainly a big gambling state. No. 4? That's a lot less clear and very much dependent on what you measure and how you measure it. On balance, we rate this claim Half True.	None	Ellyn Bogdanoff	None	None	None	2011-12-27T13:41:26	2011-10-26	['None']
-pomt-07313	The Massachusetts health care plan is "wildly unpopular" among state residents.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/16/laura-ingraham/laura-ingraham-says-massachusetts-health-plan-wild/	On the May 12, 2011, edition of the Fox News Channel's’ O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly and conservative commentator Laura Ingraham discussed a speech on health care given earlier that day by possible Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Romney’s speech was designed to draw distinctions between the Massachusetts health care plan passed when he was governor and the national health care law signed in 2010. In a separate item, we analyzed whether Romney was justified in calling the national law a "government takeover." Here, we’ll look at a comment Ingraham made regarding in-state public opinion about the Massachusetts plan. "Look, I like Mitt Romney," Ingraham said. "I think he's a really smart guy, and I think he would be a good president. ... On this, I don't get it, though, Bill. I mean, costs have gone up. It's wildly unpopular." We wondered whether the Massachusetts system was in fact "wildly unpopular" with Bay State residents. We found two polls that shed light on this question to one degree or another. One was conducted in early April 2011 by Suffolk University of 500 Massachusetts residents. In response to the question, "Do you think health care in Massachusetts is working?" the poll found that 38 percent said yes, 49 percent said no, and 13 percent were undecided. This would seem to provide a measure of support for Ingraham’s claim. However, the question was phrased more broadly than Ingraham’s claim because it referred to "health care in Masschusetts," which could include factors well beyond the state health plan, such as their own personal experiences with the specific doctors, hospitals and pharmacists they use. And even if the results were a direct commentary on support for the Massachusetts system, a split of 38 percent in favor and 49 percent against doesn’t indicate the state health care law is "wildly unpopular," as Ingraham said. Unpopular, perhaps, but not necessarily "wildly" so. A more appropriate yardstick for measuring the plan’s popularity is a survey taken by the Harvard School of Public Health with the Boston Globe in mid September 2009. Here are two questions that most directly address Ingraham’s claim. Both were asked of the 467 respondents who told the pollsters that they were aware of the law: Given what you know about it, in general, do you support or oppose the Massachusetts Universal Health Insurance Law? Support: 59 percent Oppose: 28 percent Don’t Know: 13 percent Do you think the Massachusetts Health Insurance Reform Law should be repealed, continued as the law currently stands, or continued but with some changes made? Repealed: 11 percent Continued as the law currently stands: 22 percent Continued but with some changes made: 57 percent Don’t know: 10 percent The first question found residents support the law by more than a two-to-one margin. The second demonstrated that residents were not entirely satisfied with all of the law’s provisions, but it did show that support for outright repeal was low -- only 11 percent. A major caveat to the Harvard poll is that it was taken a year and a half ago, and sentiment may have changed since then. (Support for the law did drop by about 10 points compared to a 2008 Harvard poll.) Still, the Harvard data, despite being older, directly addresses Ingraham’s claim and indicates she was wrong. "The statement about the plan being ‘wildly unpopular’ is unfounded given available polling data," said Robert Blendon, the Harvard researcher who helped do the poll. As for the newer poll, David Paleologos, who directed the poll in question, said the question has value, while acknowledging that it is broader in focus. "It’s a snapshot of how people feel currently about Massachusetts health care," he said. "I think that’s all we can garner from the question. … Unless questions are identically worded, a lot of the comparison is left open to one’s opinion." On the advice of experts, we decided not to consider a recent customer satisfaction survey commissioned by the government agency that runs the state health insurance exchange created under the law. That study found that 84 percent of participants in the Commonwealth Care program rated it 4 or 5 on a five-point satisfaction scale, while only 4 percent said they were dissatisfied. Some news accounts mistakenly reported that this was a poll of all Massachusetts residents, but it wasn't, so we don't believe that it's a valid yardstick for assessing Ingraham's comment. We should note that an estimated 400,000 Massachusetts residents -- or only about 6 percent of people living in the state -- have secured health coverage as a direct result of the law, according to the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of Massachusetts. That has enabled 98.1 percent of Massachusetts residents to secure insurance -- the highest rate of any state. But that also means that the impact of the law has been indirect for more than 9 of 10 Massachusetts residents. Residents need to include a certificate of insurance when they file their taxes. More important, but less tangibly, they may find their insurance costs or their taxes going up due to how the law has reshaped the insurance market. And there is evidence that the increase in number of insured residents in the state has put pressure on primary care physicians, potentially leading to longer waits for service. Still, one Massachusetts political analyst, Tufts University political scientist Jeffrey Berry, said he didn’t detect a groundswell of opposition to the law among residents. "Massachusetts voters, like voters everywhere, are unhappy with rising health care costs," Berry said. "They see that in their insurance premiums -- every paycheck and every year, the rates go up. The reform for the uninsured passed during the Romney administration is, itself, largely invisible. People know it's there but don't know how it's working (or, unless they're on it, don't know how it works). There's very little press coverage of the program. In Massachusetts there is simply no controversy about the plan at this point. Most telling is that there is no real organized opposition to it and no effort in the state legislature to revise it." Berry concludes that Ingraham’s "wildly unpopular" claim is "wildly exaggerated." Additional data from the Harvard poll supports Berry’s sense that it’s actually apathy -- rather than opposition -- that’s shaping views of the Massachusetts plan. The pollsters asked, "Generally speaking, do you think this health insurance law is helping, hurting, or not having much of an impact on the quality of your health care, the cost of your health care and your ability to pay medical bills if you were to get sick." Here are the results: • On quality, 23 percent said the law was "helping," 14 percent said "hurting," and 55 percent said it was "not having much of an impact." • On cost, 19 percent said it was helping, 24 percent said it was hurting and 47 percent said it wasn’t having much impact. • And on people’s ability to pay their medical bills, 24 percent said it was helping, 14 percent said it was hurting and 53 percent said it wasn’t making much difference. In other words, for each of these three issues, either a majority or a plurality of respondents said the law wasn’t having a significant impact. So where does this leave us? The Harvard data contradicts Ingraham’s argument, showing a fair amount of support for the law in general alongside feelings that it’s not doing much for them personally. The Suffolk poll is more recent, but the question asked is too broad to speak directly to Ingraham’s claim. And we couldn't find any other support for Ingraham's claim. So we rate Ingraham’s statement False.	None	Laura Ingraham	None	None	None	2011-05-16T14:47:26	2011-05-12	['Massachusetts']
-hoer-01071	Toyota 4Runner Giveaway	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/another-toyota-4runner-giveaway-scam-hitting-facebook/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Another Toyota 4Runner Giveaway Scam Hitting Facebook	November 9, 2016	None	['None']
-farg-00229	Says human activity, or carbon dioxide emissions, is not the “primary contributor” to global warming.	none	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/03/pruitt-on-climate-change-again/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Scott Pruitt	Vanessa Schipani	['SciCheck', 'carbon dioxide']	Pruitt on Climate Change, Again	March 9, 2017	[' CNBC\'s "Squawk Box" – Thursday, March 9, 2017 ']	['None']
-pomt-07514	"I have the No. 1 show on NBC."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/08/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-his-show-no-1-nbc-he-right/	No one ever accused Donald Trump of being modest. So when he was asked in a combative Today show interview when he would formally announce a campaign for president, the tycoon said he was being respectful of NBC. After all, Trump said, his show The Celebrity Apprentice is the network's top-rated show. Here's the exchange with Today host Meredith Vieira: Vieira: "What are you waiting for?" Trump: "I hate to say it, I have the No. 1 show on NBC. Is that a correct statement? I mean, The Apprentice is doing great -- The Celebrity Apprentice." Vieira: "What does that have to do...." Trump: "It has a lot to do. It sounds so trivial, and I hate to even bring it up, but I'm not allowed to run during the show. You're not allowed to have the show on and be a declared candidate. It’s a great show and it’s got phenomenal ratings, and until that show is over, I can’t declare, because otherwise, NBC would have to take the show off the air, and I think that would be very unfair to NBC." This season's Celebrity Apprentice is the latest in a long-running NBC reality show that features celebrities ranging from a country singer to a Playmate of the Year competing in a series of challenges that include creating a children's book and selling pizzas. At the end of each show, one of them gets fired by Trump. So how do the ratings look? It depends whether you're referring to recent weeks or to the entire season. If you look at the most recent week’s Nielsen ratings, Trump is right. For the week ending April 3, 2011, The Celebrity Apprentice ranked higher than any NBC prime time broadcast show among adults age 18-49 -- the coveted demographic for television executives. We should note that the bar is pretty low to be the highest-rated NBC show these days. When you consider shows on all broadcast networks that week, The Celebrity Apprentice ranked 15th. And The Celebrity Apprentice was the only NBC show to rank in the top 22 -- behind 10 from CBS, eight from ABC and three from Fox. We’ll also note that for the previous week -- the one ending March 27 -- The Celebrity Apprentice finished third on NBC and 19th overall. Still, Trump's right for the most recent ratings. For the entire season, however, The Celebrity Apprentice is not the top-rated NBC show. Marc Berman, a senior television editor at AdWeek, provided us with the average Nielsen ratings for all 160 broadcast network shows between Sept. 20, 2010, and April 3, 2011 -- basically, the entire season to date. Here’s how the top NBC shows stack up for the 18-to-49 demographic: 1. Sunday Night Football (3rd overall) 2. Football Night in America pregame show (tied for 17th overall) 3. The Office (tied for 17th overall) 4. The Biggest Loser (tied for 34th overall) 5. The Celebrity Apprentice (tied for 36th overall) And here are the numbers for all ages: 1. Sunday Night Football (4th overall) 2. Harry’s Law (29th overall) 3. Football Night in America pregame show (33rd overall) 4. Law & Order L.A. (42nd overall) 5. The Celebrity Apprentice (44th overall) So in both categories, The Celebrity Apprentice ranks fifth behind a mix of scripted dramas, sitcoms, reality shows and Sunday football. By this standard, Trump is wrong to say he has "the No. 1 on NBC." "It’s misleading," Berman said. "His show is doing well for NBC, but it’s not the No. 1." So Trump's boast needs some context. He's right for the most recent ratings, but not for the season overall. We find his claim Half True.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2011-04-08T14:09:38	2011-04-07	['None']
-pomt-01140	"The reason why Cubans don't have access to 21st century telecommunications — like smart phones, like access to the Internet — is because it is illegal in Cuba."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/dec/19/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-castros-not-embargo-reason-cubans/	There’s a good chance most Cubans won’t be able to read this article. And the reason why — lack of Internet access — is a point of a contention between President Barack Obama and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. Obama on Wednesday, Dec. 17 announced sweeping changes to the United States’ decades-old isolation policy against Cuba, promising renewed diplomatic relations and an easing of regulations on commerce. Obama said the drastic shift in approach to the Communist-controlled island would help bolster the Cuban people, who he said have suffered from America’s cold shoulder. "I believe in the free flow of information," Obama said. "Unfortunately, our sanctions on Cuba have denied Cubans access to technology that has empowered individuals around the globe." Rubio, a Florida Republican and a Cuban American, chastised Obama’s comments in an animated rebuttal. "The president said that the people of Cuba do not have access to advanced, 21st century modern technology for communications and telecommunications because of the U.S. embargo. That is false," Rubio said. "The reason why they don't have access to 21st century telecommunications — like smart phones, like access to the Internet — is because it is illegal in Cuba." Obama’s statement wasn’t as full-throated as Rubio made it sound. And some of what Obama suggested is true, experts told us. That said, Rubio has the better part of the argument that Cuba’s restrictive policies loom large over the debate. Cuba’s restrictions Cuba has less access to the Internet than most countries in the world. It is the only country in the Western Hemisphere with an Internet access rating of "not free" by Freedom House, a human rights advocacy group. Citing the National Statistics Office in Cuba, Freedom House said about 23 percent of Cubans have access to the Internet. But those numbers, while very low, are likely inflated: Many of those people have access only to a tightly controlled Cuban intranet that includes email and government-approved sites. Outside experts, Freedom House said, estimate only about 5 percent of people have access to the full World Wide Web. The government of Cuba maintains almost complete control over telecommunications industries in the country, and it uses a mix of repressive policies and price gouging to keep Cubans offline. Regulations essentially prohibit private Internet use in homes and it is illegal to access the Internet outside government-controlled methods. On top of that, the cost of even a basic computer is more than twice the average Cuban’s annual salary. Cubans who log on to the Internet do so via public, government-run access points. There, patrons deal with some of the slowest speeds in the world. And rates set by the government make it difficult for the average worker on a $20 weekly salary to consistently log on. Checking email costs $1.50 an hour. Access to the national intranet is $0.60 per hour, and international websites are $4.50 per hour, Freedom House said. Bloggers and dissenters are quickly shut down and, in many cases, imprisoned. Alan Gross, the imprisoned American contractor released by Cuba this week, was arrested for building telecommunications infrastructure on the island. As for smartphones, most mobile phones can send messages, even internationally, but cannot access the Internet. GPS and satellite capabilities are prohibited. An iPhone, if procured, would be a pretty dumb phone in Cuba. Cuban officials have recently indicated a potential shift in policy that could open the Internet to personal and mobile usage, but it’s also possible it will be limited to Cuba’s intranet and email. Such promises have been made before. Cuba installed a 1,600 kilometer fiber-optic cable between the island and Venezuela in 2011 with financial help from China (a project completed despite the U.S. embargo, it should be noted). It was supposed to increase speeds and access for Cubans. Actual advances have been modest. And it’s not as though the United States is the only country capable of supplying Cuba with telecommunications technology in today’s global economy. The regime has prioritized preventing political dissent over technological advancement. There’s no guarantee that will change if U.S. policy does. This is why Rubio is right in saying that the U.S. embargo is far from the only factor affecting access. Sure, Cuba is poor and has bad infrastructure, but there are poorer countries with better Internet access, said Larry Press, an information systems professor at California State University Dominguez Hills who writes a blog on Internet access in Cuba. When infrastructure improved in Cuba, access largely did not. "I think Rubio is closer to the truth than Obama," Press said. "Both have a degree of truth, but the Cuban government's fear of the Internet was a bigger hindrance than the embargo." The embargo effect Rubio was not quite right, however, when he said that Obama’s comment was unequivocally false. Obama said that U.S. sanctions on Cuba "have denied Cubans access to technology." This is true to a certain extent. Part of Cubans’ access problem has to do with the exorbitant cost of technology, relative to how poor the country is, and lifting those restrictions could help that problem. In 2009, Obama cracked the door open marginally for American telecommunications companies to operate in Cuba by allowing them to establish connectivity between Cuba and the United States, and letting satellite radio and television companies serve Cuban customers. Additionally, people could donate (but not sell) telecommunication devices like computers and phones to Cubans. The changes announced Dec. 17 further opened up the ability for U.S. companies to build telecommunications infrastructure in Cuba and it allows for the commercial sale of communication devices and software. Matt Borman, deputy assistant secretary of export administration, told PolitiFact that if American companies were able to compete with other foreign telecommunications suppliers in Cuba, there is an expectation that it would pressure the government to create more viable infrastructure. That could spur more Internet freedom. In a report published in 2010, the Brookings Institution made a similar argument. A of couple experts told us that Obama’s side carries weight because Castro has made an effort in recent years to ease some restrictions, such as lifting the ban on personal computers. (It may be hard to believe, but internet access in Cuba used to be even worse.) So the United States’ sanctions prevent Cubans from acquiring technology that is now legal, said Julia Sweig, an expert on Cuba and Latin America at the Council on Foreign Relations. Our ruling Rubio said that rather than the U.S. embargo, the reason why Cubans "don't have access to 21st century telecommunications — like smart phones, like access to the Internet — is because it is illegal in Cuba." "Illegal" is probably the wrong word. There are some ways to legally access the Internet in Cuba, but not in one's home, or on mobile devices, and not by connecting to the full World Wide Web. Internet use is primarily restricted to government-run access points that are heavily monitored. The usage rates, set by the regime, are so expensive that it is cost prohibitive for most Cubans to log on. Political dissenters are barred from publishing online and are punished if they do. The end result is similar to full prohibition: Cuba has one of the lowest rates of Internet access in the world. The U.S. sanctions have played a role in limited availability of technology. However, Rubio is right that the Cuban government has nearly complete control over the Internet. That isn’t a result of sanctions on telecommunication business activity in Cuba. Even if the United States fully repeals its embargo, government control over Internet access could continue. We rate Rubio’s statement Mostly True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2014-12-19T10:57:40	2014-12-17	['Cuba']
-goop-01443	Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux Marriage Did End During 2017 Trip To Paris, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-justin-theroux-marriage-ended-paris-divorce-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux Marriage Did NOT End During 2017 Trip To Paris, Despite Claim	9:47 am, March 6, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston']
-pomt-13824	"We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/14/barack-obama/barack-obama-offers-flawed-comparison-between-teen/	President Barack Obama attracted attention for a bold assertion about how easy it is to obtain a gun during his speech at an interfaith memorial service for five officers slain by a sniper in Dallas, Texas. "As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools," he said. "We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment. We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs. We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book, and then we tell the police, ‘You’re a social worker, you’re the parent, you’re the teacher, you’re the drug counselor.’" Critics pounced on the Glock remark, saying Obama was making a misleading — or even outright false — comparison. But the White House said it had evidence to back up Obama’s line. So we decided to take our own look. What the White House says The White House offered PolitiFact several news reports to back up Obama’s case. The gist of these reports was that there are lots of guns to be found in low-income urban areas, but comparatively few books and relatively little access to the Internet. However, much of the evidence these articles provided was anecdotal, and none of the articles directly compared guns to computers or books --- not to mention Glocks, the specific make of handgun Obama cited. And none of the articles offered a rigorous academic comparison of the specific claim Obama made. For example: • One study by New York University researchers found a scarcity of children’s books in low-income areas of Detroit, Los Angeles and Washington. But the study looked at stores that sold books without taking into account public libraries or school libraries, which make obtaining books easier. More importantly, the study didn’t compare the availability of guns. • Several articles offered quotes by people familiar with low-income communities that included observations similar to what Obama said in Dallas. For instance, one Chicago resident told Al Jazeera America that getting a gun in her neighborhood is as easy as buying a pack of gum. "If you want a gun, you can just go get a gun," she said. "You got the money? You can get a gun." And D. Watkins, a young, African-American writer from Baltimore who wrote The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America, told public radio host Terry Gross that he bought his first gun "from some dudes in the neighborhood that sold guns. It was simple. ... (It was) Business as usual. And it's still like that." None of these accounts offered a direct comparison of guns’ availability compared with books or Internet access. • One link referenced an academic study about a lack of access to food in low-income areas, but it did not address either guns or books. • A news report cited research about the relative lack of Internet access in low-income households. But another article the White House provided said that while teens in families making less than $50,000 a year are less likely to have access to a desktop or a laptop computer than teens in higher income groups, the rate even for the lower-income group is still pretty high: All told, eight of every 10 of these lower-income teens had access to a computer. In all, we find the White House’s evidence unpersuasive on Obama’s specific claim. There’s no hard data making his comparison. And on the question of access to computers, we found data showing a relatively high rate of Internet access even among lower-income teens. Problems with the comparisons We considered the meaning of Obama’s remark a few different ways — but none provide a slam dunk for his argument. He said it was easier for a teen to obtain a Glock over a book or a computer. It might be easier for some people in some places, but it’s still against the law. "It is already against federal law for someone under the age of 21 to buy a handgun, such as a Glock, from a licensed firearms dealer," said John R. Lott, Jr., president of the generally pro-gun Crime Prevention Research Center. And federal law on handguns also makes it unlawful for anyone "to sell, deliver, or otherwise transfer (a handgun) to a person who the transferor knows or has reasonable cause to believe is a juvenile" — that is, under 18. That means that any teen would have to break the law to make such a purchase. Alternately, they could barter for a handgun or steal one, which might be practical but would also be against the law. So let’s now consider the case of teens who are willing to break the law. One interpretation is whether a gun is cheaper to get than a book. Experts said the price of a "street" handgun can range between $50 and $500, depending on the local vagaries of supply and demand. Glocks in particular "are very expensive," said Alan Lizotte, a criminal justice professor at the University at Albany. Street Glocks without a criminal history would be especially tough, he said. That would make them easily more expensive than books purchased at a store, and certainly more expensive than books borrowed for free from a library. "There are 80 public libraries in Chicago and 95 public high schools and 92 private high schools in the city," Lott said. The second interpretation of Obama’s remark is the ease, or accessibility, of locating a gun. This is perhaps the most favorable interpretation for Obama, since credible research shows that there’s both a relative shortage of books and a relative surplus of guns in low-income neighborhoods. But it’s worth remembering that there don’t appear to be any studies that compare books and guns directly. In addition, there’s a lot of variation, neighborhood by neighborhood, across the country. "If there’s lots of street-gang activity where you live, you may know someone who can get you a gun," said James Alan Fox, interim director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. "If you live in a middle- or upper-middle class suburb, a gun may not be as accessible for a teenager. I wouldn’t know who to ask to buy a street gun." Some points for Obama Experts acknowledged, though, that Obama had a point with his remark, even if he made an imperfect comparison. "It is pretty easy for a teen to get a handgun at little cost and very quickly, at least in some places, including urban places," Lizotte said. That said, Jay Corzine, a sociologist and gun-policy expert at the University of Central Florida, called Obama’s framing "weird." "The most credit I can give the president is that the statement may be true in a very small number of cases that are dependent on the context -- location, day of the week, time of the day, cash in hand," Corzine said. Our ruling Obama said, "We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book." There’s little doubt that in some lower-income and high-crime neighborhoods, it is strikingly easy for even teens to acquire a handgun. On this, there is ample anecdotal evidence. But buying a gun is not likely to be cheaper than buying -- or borrowing -- a book or securing access to a computer, even for teens in poor neighborhoods. On multiple levels, Obama’s comparison is flawed. We rate it Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/08198a52-ac06-472b-8b7e-c51e47432be3	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2016-07-14T17:41:51	2016-07-12	['None']
-snes-04376	The Clintons were forced to return an estimated $200,000 in furniture, china and art they "stole" from the White House.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-stole-white-house-furniture/	None	Politicians	None	David Emery	None	Did Hillary Clinton Steal $200,000 in White House Furnishings?	26 July 2016	None	['Bill_Clinton', 'White_House']
-snes-04713	QuikTrip's Safe Place is equipped to provide a safe room and assistance to a variety of victims of violence or persons otherwise in danger.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/quiktrip-safe-place/	None	Business	None	Kim LaCapria	None	QuikTrip Safe Place	25 May 2016	None	['None']
-tron-03532	Gitmo Detainees Swapped for Bowe Bergdahl Are Now ISIS Leaders	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/gitmo-detainees-swapped-for-bowe-bergdahl-are-now-isis-leaders/	None	terrorism	None	None	None	Gitmo Detainees Swapped for Bowe Bergdahl Are Now ISIS Leaders	Oct 1, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-12531	"The Wawa Welcome America festival (features) . . . America's largest free concert."	pants on fire!	/pennsylvania/statements/2017/apr/21/wawa-welcome-america/pants-fire/	On April 13, Wawa, Inc. and Welcome America, Inc., a nonprofit in partnership with the City of Philadelphia, sent out a press release to announce Wawa’s continued commitment to hosting Wawa Welcome America, Philadelphia’s Fourth of July festival. Wawa confirmed it will continue to host the 25-year-old celebration through 2019. The citywide, six-day festival includes fireworks, free museum admission and what the press release claims to be the largest free public concert in the country: "The Wawa Welcome America festival is the nation’s signature July 4th celebration in the birthplace of our nation. This multi-day, citywide festival features all FREE events such as America’s largest free concert, some of the nation’s largest fireworks displays, outdoor movie screenings, free museum days, neighborhood events and more." Last year’s celebration peaked at around 25,000, but that number accounts for the whole day’s worth of activities at Benjamin Franklin Parkway, from noon until the fireworks, which begin after the concert ends at 10 p.m. The attendance for the concert, which began at 5 p.m., dwindled last year to 6,500 due to escalating rainfall. Generally, Wawa Welcome America does attract a significantly bigger audience. In 2015, Philly.com reported that city officials estimated the crowd at the concert to be upwards of 175,000, with the full day’s attendance reaching 700,000 people. The lineup that year, curated by Philly native sons The Roots, snagged headliners Nicki Minaj and Ed Sheeran, as well as Jennifer Hudson. 175,000 people still isn’t the highest attendance at a free concert, though. Millions came out to celebrate the new millennium in Times Square’s New Year’s Eve bash in 2000. Each of President Obama’s inauguration events (with entertainment provided by Aretha Franklin in 2009 and Beyoncé in 2013) drew over a million people — in 2009 it was closer to two million. And, at the same time as Wawa Welcome America, there’s the July Fourth concert at the Capitol; last year the headliners of that, which also runs live on PBS and NPR, included country stars Gavin Degraw and Cassadee Pope, as well as Christopher Jackson, who played George Washington in the Broadway hit "Hamilton." The year before, Hunter Hayes and KC and the Sunshine Band led up to headliner Barry Manilow. All of these are free events — though some of them aren’t centered around the performances, like the presidential inaugurations — that include concerts that are free and open to the public. They fit the description. Melanie Sole, a spokesperson for Welcome America, explained it’s pretty difficult to accurately compare crowd sizes from events in different cities because "every city counts things differently and there are many factors to be aware of when comparing city to city." Crowd size estimates also tend to have political- and business-related biases. A prime example is the Trump administration’s claim that the president’s inauguration crowd was much larger than it appeared to be in aerial photos. Because of common biases and inaccuracies often involved in measuring crowds, Digital Design and Imaging Services markets itself as being able to provide an "accurate, defensible crowd count." Specialists there have offered crowd size estimates for major events in Washington D.C. like the recent Women’s March and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which DDIS estimated drew 215,000 people, claiming only a 10 percent margin of error. The specialists at DDIS are able to provide some of the most accurate estimations of crowd size partly because of a kind of technology they developed themselves called a balloon test, which isn’t an actual balloon, but a ten inch orb tethered to float above a crowd and use laser rangefinders to scan the area. The Federal Aviation Administration bans flying helicopters over large gatherings for safety purposes, so without a balloon test it’s difficult to get a good aerial view for a measurement tool. Even without use of the DDIS’s resources, to get an even close to accurate estimate, "you must have high resolution photos, you must have orthographic views, and you must have lingering resources to determine a peak [in attendance]," President of DDIS Curt Westergard explained. It’s not an easy measurement to get correct. Inaccurate counts can lead not only to dangerous situations regarding people in the crowds getting swift access to resources in emergency situations, but also make comparing sizes at different events extremely difficult. "We make our comparisons to other publicly reported data by other Independence Day concerts plus review available data from the music industry and other sources," Sole said of Welcome America’s crowd size estimations. She added, "No other free Independence Day concert in America makes our claim nor has sought trademarks as ‘America’s Free Largest Independence Day Concert.’ There may be other data not publicly available or known to us." Even assuming the estimations Welcome America is relying on are accurate, 175,000 people definitely isn’t the largest free concert audience in the United States, as shown above. Concerts at inauguration events and New Year’s Eve celebrations regularly top that count. In a separate email, Sole added quite a few more qualifiers to the initial statement, asserting that the Wawa Welcome America concert is the "longest, diverse, inclusive, free, live concert event on July 4th—Independence Day." Even restricting the comparison to that day, Philadelphia’s concert still isn’t the biggest. Washington, D.C.’s concert has drawn up to 250,000 people in past years, reports The Washington Times. Though the National Park Service no longer provides a count, the Metro system, which provides estimates of crowd sizes by measuring the amount of people using transit, said their count reached 500,000 for 2013’s celebration. Sole also provided a list of additional criteria Welcome America uses to distinguish its event as the biggest nationwide: • The Parkway is one continuous space with unobstructed views from Love Park to the Main stage for one, continuous, live concert experience. The Parkway can accommodate a range of crowds compared to other venues in other cities that may have multiple "official" sites. • Factors in the counting of attendees--over time--include the timing of the Parkway pre-concert entertainment, the length of the live concert, diversity of performers, audience appeal, fireworks timing, weather and other factors (such as day of the week—this year July 4th is a Tuesday versus a long weekend or weekend day itself). • Review of Philly’s July 4th historical data and the Independence Day crowd estimates reported over time by the media and other sources along with visual evidence (such as pictures and videos). • We include live broadcast ratings and live streaming viewers. All portions of Philly’s events are live, never taped. However, none of these criteria were included in the original statement, which just claimed Wawa Welcome America features the largest free concert in the country-- not just on the Fourth of July and not based on the diversity of performers or the length of the live concert or whether the view of the stage is continually unobstructed. Today, Welcome America put out another announcement unveiling Mary J. Blige as the headliner for this year’s concert. This press release instead lauded the event as "America’s largest free Independence Day concert." Our ruling The original claim in Wawa and Welcome America’s press release stated Wawa Welcome America features America’s largest free concert. Welcome America Spokesperson later reiterated in an email that the organization measures a variety of factors including length of the concert, whether it’s live and whether there is an unobstructed view of the stage throughout the crowd. She also revised the initial claim and instead referred to the concert as the largest one in the US on Independence Day (which is still not totally accurate). Regardless, what we’re fact checking is the original statement from the press release. Philadelphia can certainly claim it has a pretty huge Independence Day celebration, but Wawa Welcome America is definitely not the largest free concert in the United States. We rate this claim as Pants on Fire.	None	Wawa Welcome America	None	None	None	2017-04-21T13:40:09	2017-04-13	['United_States']
-pomt-04191	Social Security has not contributed to the debt and the deficits.	mostly false	/new-hampshire/statements/2012/dec/10/jeanne-shaheen/social-security-doesnt-contribute-national-debt-sa/	When it comes to the fiscal cliff, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is willing to consider anything to ease the fall. Everything, that is, except for one key federal program. "I think we do need to take Social Security off the table because Social Security has not contributed to the debt and the deficits," Shaheen said Tuesday, Nov. 27 in an interview on MSNBC’s Jansing and Co. "We do need to fix it for the long-term," she said. "But that's a different discussion than the one that we're having about those programs that are actually costing." We’ve heard claims like this before. In August 2011, PolitiFact gave a Mostly True ruling to a claim that Social Security didn’t cause the debt crisis. At the same time, we ruled Mostly False on a claim that Social Security doesn’t contribute a penny to the deficit. We decided to take another swing at it. To start, we approached representatives from Shaheen’s Senate office, who reminded us that Social Security is a self-financed program, funded primarily through dedicated payroll taxes. In most years, including the period from 1984-2009, the program takes in more money than it distributes in benefits, creating a surplus. Those surplus dollars add to the Social Security trust funds, which currently hold about $2.7 trillion in assets. The two trust funds -- one dedicated to old age and survivors’ insurance and the other committed to disability insurance -- collect interest over time. And that interest only adds to the surplus, thereby reducing the deficit, according to Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Including interest, the Social Security trust funds held a surplus of $69 billion in 2011, $68.6 billion in 2010 and $121.7 billion in 2009, according to Social Security Administration records. "To that extent, it’s actually reducing the overall federal deficit," Van de Water said. But, other analysts argue the interest payments earned by Social Security only amount to a re-shuffling of government dollars. As noted in the prior PolitiFact rulings, the Social Security trust funds may be considered separate, but, in reality, they are not "locked boxes" or closed-off savings accounts. Rather, Social Security is required by law to put its entire surplus into interest-earning government bonds. The dollars invested in Treasury bonds are frequently mixed and invested with other revenue sources in the government’s general fund, and, together, the money is used for other government purposes, including spending, repaying debts and cutting taxes. So, when the Social Security trust funds collect interest, they are merely accepting money from other parts of the government, according to Howard Gleckman, an analyst for the Tax Policy Center, a joint effort between the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. Without considering interest, Social Security has actually been running a deficit over recent years, Gleckman noted. And, when Social Security runs a deficit, the program draws on interest from the Social Security bonds, forcing government officials, already operating at a deficit, to borrow more money from other sources to make up the difference. "It’s an accounting fiction," Gleckman said of the interest payments. "It helps make the Social Security funds look more solvent, but really you've just taken (money) out of general fund. … The money is simply being transferred from one government account to the next." In 2010, the program ran a "cash deficit" of $49 billion, according to the Social Security Administration’s summary of its 2012 annual report. The following year, the deficit stood at about $45 billion, and, looking forward, the program’s future doesn’t look much brighter. Social Security trustees project the program’s cash deficit to exceed $60 billion over the next few years, and by 2033, the trust fund will no longer have enough money to cover full benefits for beneficiaries, according to the most recent estimates. "The Trustees project that (the deficit) will average about $66 billion between 2012 and 2018 before rising steeply as ... the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers," according to the annual report. Lawmakers from both parties have proposed ways to bridge the gap and salvage the program. But, with the insolvency date looming, Social Security stands to have an even greater effect on the debt moving forward, according to Laurence Kotnikoff, an economics professor at Boston University. "Nobody can claim Social Security isn’t part of the overall problem," Kotnikoff said. "It’s all labeling games. … It absolutely contributes to the overall fiscal situation. It’s in terrible shape." Our ruling: Social Security is designed as a self-supporting, pay-as-you-go program, in which current payroll taxes pay for current benefits. This played out for many years, and with interest, the program has built up an annual surplus, which appeared to help offset the national deficits. But, in reality, Social Security is not closed off from the rest of the government. The program’s surplus funds are frequently invested in Treasury bonds, and during surplus years, the bonds earn interest paid with other government dollars. And in recent years, the amount of taxes collected have not equaled the benefits distributed, leaving the Social Security funds facing a cash deficit, which then forces the government to borrow more money to offset. This was the case in 2010 and 2011, and Social Security trustees anticipate higher deficits looking forward. While there’s a case for both interpretations, we see clear evidence that Social Security does affect the nation’s debt and deficit. We rate Shaheen’s claim Mostly False.	None	Jeanne Shaheen	None	None	None	2012-12-10T10:02:42	2012-11-27	['None']
-tron-03502	The British Airways attendant who turned the tables on a racist passenger	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/racistpassenger/	None	space-aviation	None	None	None	The British Airways attendant who turned the tables on a racist passenger	Mar 16, 2015	None	['British_Airways']
-afck-00285	“In 2013, of the total 5,698 deaths in South Africa due to transport, 2,515 were among youth, indicating that 44% of all traffic accident deaths in the country occurred among the youth.”	unproven	https://africacheck.org/reports/national-youth-policy-health-and-violence/	None	None	None	None	None	National Youth Policy: crime & health claims fact-checked	2015-06-11 11:46	None	['South_Africa']
-pomt-04106	"[W]e see America's prison population exploding, with America having a greater percentage of its people behind bars than any other nation in the world!"	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2013/jan/14/hank-johnson/does-us-have-highest-percentage-people-prison/	A Georgia congressman recently penned a letter to an American legend that sparked some conversation among the PolitiFact Georgia staff. U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat who lives in DeKalb County, decried the large number of Americans incarcerated, among other things, in a message to Frederick Douglass, the famed 19th-century abolitionist, author and activist. The letter was written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, written by President Abraham Lincoln to end slavery. "[W]e see America's prison population exploding, with America having a greater percentage of its people behind bars than any other nation in the world!" wrote Johnson, a former magistrate court judge. PolitiFact Georgia examined a similar claim by Johnson before. The congressman claimed last year that the United States imprisons more than any nation in the world. PolitiFact Georgia found Johnson was likely correct that the U.S. has more people behind bars than any other country, but America does have one of the largest populations in the world, so it’s not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison. Our research showed there are probably some nations with a higher percentage of people in prison, so we rated Johnson’s claim Half True. We were slightly surprised by this claim floating around again. We wondered whether there was anything new to consider on this issue since we fact-checked it in May. This time, Johnson was talking about the percentage of people in jail, not the total prison population as he did last year. We decided to take a look. Last year, the estimates we found all said there were about 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons. That’s about 730 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans. The estimate remained about the same. The International Centre for Prison Studies, based at the University of Essex in Great Britain, keeps the most detailed information about prison populations worldwide. Its World Prison Population List is widely used in studies and by reporters. In the report we reviewed last year, the U.S. had the highest percentage of its citizens in prison among nations where the ICPS could verify such information. Russia and Rwanda ranked second and third, respectively. Both countries were well behind the United States. Russia had 598 people in its prisons per 100,000 citizens. As for China, the most recent ICPS report states that nation has at least 1.6 million people in its prisons. The number may be as much as 2.3 million if you include an estimated 650,000 held in detention centers. Using the larger estimate, that would be 170 people per 100,000 Chinese citizens, which is far lower than the U.S. At the time, we found it was possible that there were two other countries that put a greater percentage of people in prison: Cuba and North Korea. Has that changed? First, let’s look at Cuba. A 2003 study reported in The Miami Herald found an estimated 100,000 inmates in 200 prisons and labor camps spread across the Caribbean island. Several prominent human rights organizations did not dispute the figure. In 1995, the United Nations estimated there were "between 100,000 and 200,000 prisoners in all categories,'' the Herald reported. "If accurate, the figure of 100,000 inmates in an island of nearly 11.3 million people would give Cuba 888 inmates per 100,000 people, far ahead of the United States," the Herald article said. Johnson’s office sent us information that suggests the number of prisoners on the island may be much lower. The most recent ICPS report shows the prison population was 510 people per 100,000 residents as of May. In May 2011, Amnesty International compiled a report on North Korea and concluded there were an estimated 200,000 people being held in political prisoner camps. The estimate was based on satellite images and eyewitness accounts. That equates to 813 per 100,000, higher than the U.S. The ICPS has similar totals for North Korea, citing the South Korean National Human Rights Commission. North Korea’s total cannot be independently verified. "Otherwise, without any firm, recent, quantified statistics involving North Korean figures, it is very difficult to evaluate whether the statement that they have higher incarceration rates is accurate," said Andy Phelan, a spokesman for Johnson. "It is, however, entirely accurate to state that the United States has the highest reported incarceration rate, as well as the highest total prison population, based on the most recent studies." The United States has the highest percentage of people in its prisons of any nation that can be verified. From the most recent numbers we’ve seen, the U.S. may have a higher percentage than one nation (Cuba) we thought had more of its people in prison. We’ll give Johnson a higher grade this time on the Truth-O-Meter but still leave room for another country (North Korea, perhaps) that may have a higher percentage of its people in prison. Our rating: Mostly True.	None	Hank Johnson	None	None	None	2013-01-14T06:00:00	2013-01-01	['United_States']
-pomt-01217	"In Rhode Island, a recent study showed that among a group of people who had been homeless for a year or more, Medicaid costs averaged about $60,000 per person."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2014/nov/23/anne-nolan/crossroads-head-anne-nolan-says-long-term-homeless/	The head of Rhode Island's largest homeless shelter argued in a Nov. 12, 2014 Providence Journal commentary that the costs of not finding someone a home can be very high. Anne Nolan, president of Crossroads Rhode Island, reported that, "In Rhode Island, a recent study showed that among a group of people who had been homeless for a year or more, Medicaid costs averaged about $60,000 per person, which is far higher than the typical $18,096 per person per year for disabled adults on Medicaid and $9,240 per person per year for the average Medicaid recipient." That's a huge difference. We were curious about whether those numbers were accurate and why the gap was so large. Medicaid is a joint state-federal, government health-care program for the very poor. Nolan’s commentary referenced the 2013 "Rhode Island Annual Medicaid Expenditure Report," developed by the state's office of Health and Human Services. We located the report, but we couldn't find any numbers that matched Nolan’s. So we emailed her to make sure that was really her source. She replied that the information actually came from a June 1, 2014, report by Providence College sociologist Eric Hirsch, in which he identified 5,986 Rhode Islanders who had spent at least one night in an emergency shelter over a 28-month period and discovered that 2,308 were covered by Medicaid. Their Medicaid expenses totaled $58 million. Hirsch doesn't calculate the cost per person, so we did. It's $10,795 per person per year. That's pretty close to the average for all Medicaid recipients and a far cry from $60,000. So where did Nolan get her $60,000 figure? In his report, Hirsch wanted to make the point that those costs were not evenly distributed among the homeless. "In fact," he wrote, "the 67 individuals who were homeless for one year or more and had the highest Medicaid bills had total charges of $9,325,375." That's $139,185 per person for these 67 people" over 28 months. "The corresponding annual charge was just under $60,000 per person," Hirsch wrote. But we immediately noticed a problem -- $60,000 isn't the average for all long-term homeless people. It's only for the 67 people who racked up the highest Medicaid bills, a distinction Nolan didn't make in her commentary. When we contacted Hirsch, he explained that, "We do want to be able to argue that it would be most cost effective to house the most vulnerable." In other words, finding housing for 'high cost' homeless are going to save the most money. He said he used an arbitrary cutoff -- expenses of $47,000 or more -- to identify the high-cost users. Because Nolan was talking about all long-term homeless on Medicaid -- not just the 67 with the highest bills -- we asked Hirsh for the information on the larger group. He went back to his data and reported to us that there were 442 long-term homeless people who had, on average, $23,650 in Medicaid charges per person per year. Although that's double the amount for the typical person who was homeless for at least one night, it's dramatically less than $60,000. When we wrote back to Nolan asking if she was aware that the $60,000 figure only applied to homeless Medicaid patients with the biggest bills, she said she had misinterpreted the report. Finally, for the record, Hirsch and Nolan erred when they said the average Medicaid cost is $18,096 per person per year for disabled adults. As Hirsch reported when we questioned the figure based on the state Medicaid report, the correct amount is $21,696. Our ruling Anne Nolan said Rhode Islanders who have been homeless for at least a year cost Medicaid an average of $60,000 per person per year. But the $60,000 cost she cites applied only to the 67 homeless people with the highest medical bills, a major caveat she didn't mention in her commentary. The annual dollar amount for all Medicaid recipients in the study who were homeless for at least a year was $23,650 -- a substantial cost to taxpayers, but far less than what Nolan indicated. Because Nolan's statement makes it sound like it applies to all long-term homeless people on Medicaid when, in fact, it only focuses on the most-expensive subset, we rate it False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Anne Nolan	None	None	None	2014-11-23T00:01:00	2014-11-12	['Rhode_Island']
-chct-00280	FACT CHECK: Did Rick Perry Say Fossil Fuels Will Prevent Sexual Assault?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/11/03/fact-check-did-rick-perry-say-fossil-fuels-will-prevent-sexual-assault/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	1:11 AM 11/03/2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10289	The musical Mamma Mia! has "been selling out for years."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/15/john-mccain/mccain-knows-abba/	John McCain may not know much about culture, but he knows ABBA. At a town hall at the Aspen Institute on Aug. 14, 2008, McCain conceded that he didn't know a lot about art and music. New York Times reporter Katharine Seelye wrote that McCain said if he's "lacking in anything," it is an appreciation for music and art and "the other great things in life," partly because he spent 5 years as a prisoner of war. But then the 71-year-old senator launched into a defense of the Swedish pop band ABBA. "Everybody says, 'I hate ABBA, Oh, ABBA, how terrible, blah, blah, blah.' How come everybody goes to Mamma Mia! ?" McCain said. "Everybody goes! They've been selling out for years." We wondered if McCain was right that Mamma Mia!, the musical based on ABBA's recordings, has been "selling out for years." First, we will assume that McCain was referring to the stage version, which has been playing on Broadway since 2001, not the movie version, which opened this summer. The Broadway show's Web site says the stage production, which has been performed in eight languages, has been seen by more than 30-million people in over 170 cities. The Web site calls it "the ultimate feel-good show." And McCain seems to be keeping up with Broadway box office receipts. TicketNews, which tracks Broadway receipts, reports that Mamma Mia! is still selling out. For example, it sold out its performances the weeks ending Aug. 3 and Aug. 10, selling about 101 percent of its seats (the number exceeds 100 because it includes standing-room tickets). A survey of other weeks in the past year found the show nearly sold out or exceeded capacity. Alfred Branch Jr., news editor of TicketNews, told us that the show is "a virtual sellout most nights." So McCain is right that Mamma Mia has been selling out for years. This claim is True.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-08-15T00:00:00	2008-08-14	['None']
-para-00176	Under Labor, taxpayers have paid to train public servants on how to get "a good night's sleep".	true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/may/17/jamie-briggs/liberal-party-says-public-servants-trained-get-goo/index.html	None	['Public Service']	Jamie Briggs	Chris Pash, Peter Fray	None	Taxpayers have paid to train public servants on how to have "a good night's sleep"	Friday, May 17, 2013 at 12:30 p.m.	None	['None']
-tron-02243	Health Benefits of Oil Pulling	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/oil-pulling/	None	medical	None	None	None	Health Benefits of Oil Pulling	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-04874	A photograph captures Harriet Tubman as a "Gun-Toting, Democrat-Shooting" Republican.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harriet-tubman-gun-republican/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Harriet Tubman: Gun-Toting Republican	22 April 2016	None	['Harriet_Tubman']
-pomt-02407	Under Scott Walker, Wisconsin "unemployment's up" from 4.8% to 6.2%	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2014/mar/07/mary-burke/democratic-challenger-mary-burke-says-wisconsin-un/	Even as it became clear that he's not on track to deliver 250,000 jobs by January 2015, Gov. Scott Walker has repeatedly told voters that Wisconsin’s unemployment rate has gone down since he took office in January 2011. News articles have chronicled a gradual decrease in the rate, including a report that it dipped to a five-year low in November 2013. And yet, with her first TV ad in the 2014 gubernatorial campaign, Democratic candidate Mary Burke contradicts that notion. Midway through the ad, unveiled March 5, 2014, the narrator says that "under Walker, unemployment’s up." Simultaneously, a figure on the screen changes from 4.8 percent to 6.2 percent. So, under Walker, has unemployment really gone up? And what are the numbers? What Burke says The ad starts by touting Burke. It cites Wisconsin jobs at Trek Bicycle Corp., the Burke family business, where Mary Burke worked as an executive years ago. And it states that Wisconsin had 72,000 more jobs when Burke served as state commerce secretary than it does today. (The 72,000 is an updated version of a claim Burke made in October 2013, which we rated Half True. She was correct on the number -- 84,000 at that time -- but overstated the credit she and Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle deserved.) Then the ad stops talking about Burke and transitions to Walker, citing anti-Burke ads from what it calls "Walker's" Republican Governors Association. Walker is a member of the national association's executive committee and was vice chairman in 2013. The narrator then says that "under Walker, unemployment’s up." That’s when the figure on the screen spins from 4.8 percent to 6.2 percent. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal government’s official jobs counter, is footnoted as the source. The narrator continues the attack on Walker by saying job prospects are down and layoffs continue. Regarding the unemployment rate claim specifically, Burke spokesman Joe Zepecki told us: "We're not examining it in terms of (Walker’s) time in office overall -- we're comparing it what it was when Burke was commerce secretary." But that's not what the viewer sees and hears when the ad pivots from praising Burke to attacking Walker. It talks only about Walker; it doesn’t compare him to Burke. Moreover, with the narrator’s words presented along with the two percentages on the screen, Burke’s message is that unemployment during Walker’s time as governor has risen from 4.8 percent to 6.2 percent. But unemployment was much higher than 4.8 percent when Walker took office. And the trend since then has been down, not up. Rates are down Asked for evidence to back the claim, Zepecki did not cite numbers from the start of Walker’s tenure. He told us that on an annual average, Wisconsin’s unemployment rate was never higher than 4.8 percent during the more 2 1/2 years that Burke was commerce secretary. In contrast, Zepecki said, the monthly rate under Walker has never been below 6.2 percent. We reviewed monthly figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency cited in the ad. -- When Burke served as state commerce secretary -- February 2005 to November 2007 -- Wisconsin's unemployment rate was steady. It started at 4.8 percent, hit a high of 4.9 percent in June 2007 and went as low as 4.6 percent, which was the rate when she left. -- After Burke left the commerce post, unemployment rose, and later dropped, during the rest of Doyle’s second term as governor. The rate peaked three times at 9.2 percent, including as late as January 2010, then eventually fell to 7.8 percent in December 2010, Doyle’s final full month in office. -- Under Walker, the highest unemployment rate has been 7.7 percent -- including in January 2011, the month he took office. Since then, the rate has gradually trended downward, with a bump up here and there, to a low of 6.3 percent in December 2013, the latest month available. (A footnote: The state Department of Workforce Development had reported the December 2013 rate one notch lower, at 6.2 percent. A spokesman for the state agency told us the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the figure to 6.3 percent after the state agency announced its number.) So, without stating any comparison between Burke and Walker, the ad claims unemployment is higher under Walker and provides figures indicating an increase from 4.8 percent to 6.2 percent. But the rate was much higher than 4.8 percent when Walker took office and it has gone down, not up, during his tenure. Our rating Burke's said that "under Walker, unemployment’s up," from 4.8 percent to 6.2 percent. Burke defends the claim by saying 4.8 percent is a reference to when she served as state commerce secretary, which was several years before Walker became governor. But the ad gives no indication that that is the comparison she is making. Moreover, during Walker’s time as governor, unemployment started at 7.7 percent, not 4.8 percent. And rather than trending upward, the rate has steadily dropped to 6.3 percent. For a claim that is false and ridiculous, we give Burke a Pants on Fire. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s web page. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.	None	Mary Burke	None	None	None	2014-03-07T11:17:39	2014-03-05	['Wisconsin']
-goop-00834	Chris Hemsworth In “Agony” Over Elsa Pataky’s “Steamy Kiss” With Co-Star, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/chris-hemsworth-elsa-pataky-co-star-marco-pigossi-kiss-reaction/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Chris Hemsworth NOT In “Agony” Over Elsa Pataky’s “Steamy Kiss” With Co-Star, Despite Claim	4:12 pm, June 12, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08360	The lawyer who brought the case against NationsBank said "publicly that Alex Sink had nothing to do with the case, had nothing to do with the situation and didn't know about the problems."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2010/oct/26/alex-sink/alex-sink-says-lawyer-backs-claims-she-didnt-know-/	In their third and final gubernatorial debate on Oct. 25, 2010, Rick Scott and Alex Sink traded accusations that each has been party to fraud. Sink again hammered Scott for his time running Columbia/HCA and the hospital company's convictions and $1.7 billion in fines for defrauding Medicare and Medicaid. But this time Scott countered with allegations that Sink was the president of NationsBank operations in Florida when that company was accused of fraud and forced to pay government fines and settle a class-action lawsuit. Unlike Scott, Sink said she had what amounts to a get-out-of-jail-free card. "That case, the lawyer that brought that case -- it was a class-action case against another company -- he even has said publicly that Alex Sink had nothing to do with the case, had nothing to do with the situation and didn't know about the problems," Sink told CNN's John King and the St. Petersburg Times' Adam C. Smith, the debate's moderators. "What more can I say?" In a separate item, we dealt with Scott's accusations. You can read that item, here. In this fact check, we'll explore Sink's rebuttal. Some quick background about the case. In 1994, while Sink was president of NationsBank's Florida operations, a stock broker with bank subsidiary NationsSecurities came forward with what he described as an orchestrated nationwide scheme to get bank customers to move investments from safe, federally insured accounts to more risky brokerage and mutual funds. NationsSecurities broker David Cray, who worked in Florida, said the bank intentionally blurred the lines between its traditional banking business and its securities business and misled customers into thinking those securities investments were protected by the bank or the federal government. The scheme permeated the entire bank, Cray, and later others, said. Brokers were given sales scripts to try to convince bank customers to move their money into more risky securities. NationsSecurities branch managers encouraged employees to "use fear to sell" securities. In one orientation sales meeting, a manager suggested that a broker could ask customers: "Is this your risky money or safe money? If this is risky, I know a guy at Merrill or Dean Witter." And NationsBank helped NationsSecurities by providing brokers with lists of customers who had Certificates of Deposit about to mature. The bank and stock brokers pushed the mutual funds because they received more lucrative fees, Cray said. The allegations led to a class-action lawsuit from investors who lost money by unknowingly making the risky investments, which in the end lost money. The Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission also began investigations. Eventually, NationsBank and NationsSecurities settled the investigations, agreeing to pay $8.1 million to investors in 2002, paying civil fines to the federal government of $6.75 million in 2000 and $6.4 million in 2002 and $4 million to the SEC in 1998. No criminal charges were ever filed. Sink says the lawyer who started the case, Jonathan Alpert of Tampa, has said Sink had nothing to do with the scheme. Here's what Alpert told the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald in October when previously asked about Sink's role in selling the risky investments. "Alex Sink could've done nothing about it. It was run out of Charlotte," said Alpert, referring to NationsBank's headquarters. "I know she knew what was going on -– that investments were being sold in the bank -- but that's it. And she was powerless to stop it, anyway. I had e-mails where the state presidents were being told what to do, that they had to help the securities people. They would dig into customers bank accounts to identify people who had enough money to buy securities. "Charlotte said: 'This is what's going to happen in your bank lobbies and this is the way it's going to be.' They didn't say you're going to do A, B, C and D, they would say the bank cooperates fully with NationsSecurities," Alpert said. "If Alex Sink were involved in it, it would be a wonderful story for the gubernatorial election. But she didn't know anything about it." Alpert, who said he voted for Sink, said she no doubt knew that riskier investments were being sold in the bank, but that she was likely not aware of the way brokers were manipulating customers to close the sales. And Sink has previously told the Times she "had no authority or control" over the securities sales. "There were very, very strict firewalls between any kind of securities and brokerage operations and operations of commercial banking," she said. Those "firewalls," Sink said, were the result of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial and investment banking. (The act was repealed in 1999.) But that didn't prevent Sink from finding out what was going on in her bank, noted Yale University finance expert Jonathan Macey. "She's the state bank president," he said. "She has the authority and perhaps the responsibility to know what's going on in her lobby." The original whistle-blower in the case, former NationsSecurity broker Cray, said, "I would tend not to point the finger at Alex Sink for this." Which brings us back to her statement. At the CNN/St. Petersburg Times debate Sink said that the lawyer who brought the case against NationsBank said "publicly that Alex Sink had nothing to do with the case, had nothing to do with the situation and didn't know about the problems." We think Sink is mostly quoting the lawyer in the NationsBank case, Jonathan Alpert, accurately. Alpert said Sink wasn't involved in the deceptive selling of more risky involvements through NationsSecurities and didn't know anything about the deceptive practices being employed. The companies NationsBank and NationsSecurities were managed separately. But Sink did know securities were being sold in her banks, and was in a position to voice questions or concerns about the practice if she sensed anything was being handled inappropriately. That's enough of a connection in our minds to knock this claim down one notch, and rate it Mostly True.	None	Alex Sink	None	None	None	2010-10-26T16:14:08	2010-10-25	['Alex_Sink', 'NationsBank']
-vogo-00332	Statement: “Retirement costs are projected to consume one-third of Los Angeles’s budget by 2015, and half of San Diego’s budget by 2025,” Tad Friend, a reporter for The New Yorker magazine, wrote in a Sept. 5, 2011 article.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-the-new-yorker-feeds-the-pension-monster/	Analysis: An article in The New Yorker magazine this month detailed the poisonous pension politics in Costa Mesa, an Orange County community where a city worker committed suicide after receiving a layoff notice in March.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: The New Yorker Feeds the Pension Monster	September 15, 2011	None	['The_New_Yorker', 'San_Diego', 'Los_Angeles', 'Tad_Friend']
-afck-00125	“[We have achieved] a halving in the number of deaths of children under 5 years.”	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/jubilee-party-manifesto-4-claims-fact-checked/	None	None	None	None	None	The Jubilee Party manifesto: 5 claims fact-checked	2017-07-02 02:02	None	['None']
-snes-01553	Police warned citizens to "stay inside" on Halloween night because of information that "creepy clowns" planned a "purge night."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/creepy-clowns-halloween-night-purge/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Creepy Clowns Plan Halloween Night Purge, Cops Warn ‘Stay Inside’?	20 October 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-00371	"It is only under President Trump that we have become the largest producer of oil and gas resources."	false	/virginia/statements/2018/sep/11/corey-stewart/corey-stewart-wrongly-says-trump-made-us-top-oil-a/	Thanks to President Donald Trump, Corey Stewart says, the United States is leading the world in oil and gas production. Stewart, Virginia’s Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, made that claim twice during a July 21 debate with Democrat incumbent Tim Kaine. Stewart — a Trump loyalist — was portraying Kaine as a constant opponent of the president programs, including energy policy. "Because of President Trump, the United States is - now get this - the largest combined supplier of oil and gas resources on the planet," Stewart said. Stewart repeated the claim three minutes later. "It is only because of President Trump that we have become the largest producer of gas and oil resources," he said. We investigated Stewart’s statements. The U.S. is the world’s largest combined producer of gas and oil. The question is whether that happened during Trump’s presidency, which began Jan. 20, 2017. The answer is no. Stewart’s campaign didn’t respond to three requests for proof of Stewart’s claim. So we turned to research from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which compiles data of global energy production and consumption. Figures and charts in an EIA report this spring show that the U.S. overtook Russia as the world’s largest gas and oil producer in 2011 - when Barack Obama was president. The U.S. produced 43.92 quadrillion British thermal units of gas and oil a day that year (roughly equivalent to 22 million barrels), compared to Russia’s daily rate of 43.85 quadrillion Btu. Saudi Arabia was a distant third, producing 26.5 quadrillion Btu daily. Since then, the U.S. has steadily expanded its lead. In 2017 - the first year of Trump’s presidency - the U.S. produced 59.4 quadrillion Btu of oil and gas daily, compared to Russia’s rate of 46.4 quadrillion Btu a day. Saudi Arabia again ranked third, at 28.7 quadrillion Btu. The EIA and other energy experts attribute the growth in U.S. production to a surge in extracting oil and gas from shale by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process involves using water pressure to fracture rocks and release their natural gas and oil. The U.S. is the world leader in shale gas production. Shale production has made the U.S. the "undisputed global oil and gas leader," Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, which advises 30 nations, told a U.S. Senate committee in January 2018. He said the U.S. should keep that that status for years to come. The U.S. overtook Russia in 2009 to become the world’s largest gas producer. It passed Saudi Arabia in 2013 to become the leading oil producer. Our ruling Stewart said, "It is only under President Trump that we have become the largest producer of oil and gas resources." His campaign didn’t respond to three requests for proof. EIA data shows that U.S. has been the world leader in gas production since 2009, oil production since 2013, and combined gas and oil production since 2011. All of this happened well before Trump came to White House. We rate Stewart’s statement False. Correction: An earlier version of this fact check mispelled the first name of Fatih Birol.	None	Corey Stewart	None	None	None	2018-09-11T10:04:42	2018-07-21	['None']
-pomt-05249	Says the Affordable Care Act was a federal takeover of the student loan industry and ‘profits’ on the loans go to help pay for the health care law.	mostly false	/new-hampshire/statements/2012/jun/01/kelly-ayotte/kelly-ayotte-claims-student-loan-change-government/	College loans and universal health care might not seem to be related, but U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH, says there is an unusual linkage. Ayotte tied the two issues together last month in a May 8, 2012, email that her office sent to the press titled, "We Can Prevent a Student Loan Rate Increase Without Raising Taxes." The message, meant to convey Ayotte’s stance on temporarily extending existing rates on new subsidized Stafford loans, raised some questions about where student loan interest is going, and whether government "profits" from those loans are used to help pay for the health care law. "Under the Affordable Care Act, which amounted to a federal takeover of the student loan industry, the government borrows money at 2.8 percent and then loans money to students at 6.8 percent. Government profits are then used to help pay for the health care law," Ayotte asserted. PolitiFact Ohio has already laid out how the federal government is using student loans to pay for some health care reforms when it fact-checked a claim made by Sen. Rob Portman. Through the Reconciliation Act of 2012, which combined student loans and health care in one bill, Congress removed the private sector from the student loan process, to eliminate federal payments to banks and to move the revenue from the lending process into federal coffers. The savings was expected to be about $58 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, with $39 billion going back into student loan programs, $10 billion toward deficit reduction and $9 billion directed toward health care. Yet, Ayotte’s email took Portman’s logic a step further, claiming a government takeover of the student loan industry and using profits to pay for Obamacare. PolitiFact has given plenty of Pants on Fire ratings to claims that say Obama’s health care law is a federal takeover of the health care system -- it was PolitiFact's Lie of the Year for 2010. But a takeover of the student loan industry? That’s a new one. First we contacted Ayotte’s legislative office to get sources for the claim. They cited PolitiFact Ohio’s Half True ruling on Portman’s claim as back up for Ayotte’s statement. But that only dealt with a portion of what Ayotte was saying. PolitiFact Ohio walked through the history of government involvement with student loans, up to the Reconciliation Act of 2010, which permanently moved the government away from subsidizing private lenders for student loans as had been the practice since 1965. With the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, created with the Higher Education Act of 1965, the federal government guaranteed student loans against default by promising a certain interest rate to the banks, even if the rates students paid were lower. In other words, the government money has always been behind the loans to American students. "(The Reconciliation Act of 2010) didn’t take over the student loan industry, it ended a federal program," said Jason Delisle, Director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation. "The semantic problem of the government taking over its own program is really kind of crazy." "You wouldn’t talk about the government taking over the Social Security program, or a government takeover of Medicare," Delisle said. "It didn’t take over the industry. The private companies that were involved were participating in a federal program and were getting paid for that. So how do you get ‘federal takeover’ out of that?" Through the FFEL program, the government paid additional fees to banks for administration and collection of student loans, providing them a revenue stream. While millions of Americans earned college degrees, the system required billions of dollars in federal subsidies, and some in Washington, especially Democrats, sought alternatives, which ultimately prompted The Reconciliation Act of 2010. When we asked Ayotte’s office to address the "federal takeover" of student loans, they pointed to the CBO break down of the Reconciliation Act that explains the reconciliation package would eliminate the federal guaranteed loan program and replace it with direct loans administered by the Department of Education and funded through the U.S. Treasury. Because the government has always backstopped student loans, calling the Reconciliation Act of 2010 a "federal takeover" isn’t accurate, said Justine Sessions, a spokeswoman for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Pensions and Labor, which is chaired by Democrat Tom Harkin. "What the health care reconciliation package did was eliminate the middleman," Sessions said. "The middleman equals a bunch of private banks." In addition, many of the same companies involved in the guaranteed loan program service the expanded direct loan program, Delisle added. They include nonprofit and for-profit companies, including Sallie Mae, Nel Net, Mohela, Granite State Management and Resources, among others. "The federal government can’t do all this work itself," Delisle said. "(The guaranteed loan program) wasn’t really a private sector thing. What’s really important to understand about that is the government set all of the terms on the loans, the interest rates, the terms of repayment, all of that was set in law and the loan companies couldn’t change those." And private lenders can still make loans to students, Delisle added. "They can do it, they just don’t get any subsidies from the government," Delisle said. "They don’t do it because it’s a money loser." As for the rates Ayotte’s staff provided, those were accurate, Delisle said, but to call the interest the government gains on the loans "profits," is a stretch. "Banks can borrow at the same rate as the federal government," Delisle said. "They don’t make money off lending to students at 6.8 percent. … This concept that the difference between the rate the government charges on the loan and the rate they pay to borrow is profit, is totally wrong." Subsidized loans do not make money for the government, Sessions said. They actually cost the federal government money. "The claim seems to conflate two completely unrelated issues," Sessions said. "The 6.8 percent interest rate was set by Congress in 2002 with overwhelming bipartisan support and it was the projected average rate that would result in 2006 under a fixed rate formula." Loans had the same interest rates under both the direct loan and FFEL programs, Sessions said, and the cost of student loans to the government fluctuates with program changes, economic conditions, borrower repayment patterns, and the relationship between the government’s borrowing rate and the interest rate at which borrowers repay loans. There’s also more to the cost of the loan than what the government pays to borrow, Delisle added, including losses from defaults, administrative costs, cost of equity, loan forgiveness, and risk. Current fixed rates do not offset those additional costs. "The bottom line is that the claim about the 2010 legislation that cut out the middleman in the student loan system is completely unrelated to the claim about what government charges for student loans," Sessions said. "Reinstating the FFEL program would cost the government additional fees and subsidies that would be paid to banks." Our ruling The government’s Reconciliation Act of 2010 was not a takeover, but rather an elimination of a federal student loan program the government had used since 1965. Private companies are still involved in servicing the program and private lenders can still make their own student loans without a government subsidy. The government does borrow in the 2.8 percent ballpark and loans money to students at 6.8 percent but the difference is not a profit, it helps compensate for the unanticipated losses inherent with any loan. Finally, the money saved in the Reconciliation Act of 2010, not "profits" from the direct loans, is used to fund elements of the Affordable Care Act. Since Ayotte’s statements have elements of truth but lack critical facts, we give her a Mostly False. UPDATE: This item has been updated to note that Justine Sessions is a spokeswoman for the Democrat-controlled Senate Committee on Health, Education, Pensions and Labor. Also, we have corrected a quotation from Jason Delisle who said he mistakenly said the government does not "make money off lending to students at 2.8 percent," when he meant to say 6.8.	None	Kelly Ayotte	None	None	None	2012-06-01T13:44:53	2012-05-08	['None']
-pose-00193	"Barack Obama and Joe Biden would work with key European allies to persuade the European Union as a whole to end its practice of extending large-scale credit guarantees to Iran."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/207/work-to-persuade-the-european-union-to-end-credit-/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Work to persuade the European Union to end credit guarantees to Iran	2010-01-07T13:26:51	None	['Europe', 'European_Union', 'Joe_Biden', 'Iran', 'Barack_Obama']
-snes-05362	An elderly birdwatcher had a physical altercation with an Oregon militant at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birdwatcher-oregon-militia/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	FALSE: 79-Year-Old Bird Watcher Takes Down Oregon Militant	14 January 2016	None	['Oregon']
-pomt-08655	On whether President Obama's speeches to school children spread "socialist ideology."	full flop	/florida/statements/2010/sep/14/jim-greer/former-florida-gop-chair-apologizes-obama-educatio/	A year ago, we fact-checked a statement from the Republican Party of Florida that claimed President Barack Obama intended to indoctrinate school children with socialist ideology. The alleged vehicle: a back-to-school speech given to the nation's students. Some of Obama's other political opponents echoed the charge, and principals across the country had to answer questions from parents about whether students were required to watch the speech. This year, Obama gave a speech to schoolchildren on Sept. 14, 2010, with little controversy. Like last year, he spoke of the necessity of hard work and a good education. But we were surprised by a dramatic change of position for Jim Greer, the former head of the Republican Party of Florida. Here's his statement from last year: "As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the president justify his plans for government-run health care, banks and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other president, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power." We fact-checked that at the time and rated it Pants on Fire. We found no evidence that Obama intended to address school children on public policy matters, much less socialism. All evidence pointed to a more generic speech on the importance of education, and that's what Obama delivered. Greer's position has entirely changed since then, and in more ways than one. Greer lost his party chairmanship in January 2010, and state authorities arrested him in June on corruption charges, alleging that he used a secret contract to send party donations to a consulting firm he owned. Greer now faces six felony charges, including fraud and money laundering. (PolitiFact Florida has detailed a timeline on Greer's departure from the state party.) Meanwhile, Gov. Charlie Crist -- who picked Greer as party chairman after Crist became governor in 2006 -- left the Republican Party in April to run as an independent for U.S. Senate. The party supports Marco Rubio, a former state legislator and speaker of the House, in that race. This year, to mark Obama's speech to students, Greer sent the following text message to Florida reporters: "In the year since I issued a prepared statement regarding President Obama speaking to the nation’s school children, I have learned a great deal about the party I so deeply loved and served. Unfortunately, I found that many within the GOP have racist views and I apologize to the president for my opposition to his speech last year and my efforts to placate the extremists who dominate our party today. My children and I look forward to the president's speech." We called the Republican Party of Florida and asked them about Greer's statement, but they declined to comment. That could be because Greer earlier this year filed a lawsuit against the party for failing to pay him severance of $124,000, plus health care. Just this past weekend, party officials said they were contemplating their own lawsuit against Greer and Crist for misspending party funds. So Greer is no longer head of the party and repudiates his own statements from a year ago. Could Greer's new view on Obama's school speech be just another stick-in-the-eye to the people who kicked him out of his job? Sure. Greer sent a letter to Crist last month asking for his campaign contributions back, because Greer said he needs the money to defend himself. In the letter, he blasted state party leaders, some by name, saying they "are simply liars, racists, and extremists ... the current bunch that are running the show will stop at nothing to cover for their own misdeeds." Whatever Greer's motivations, we very seldom see such a thorough change of position on over-the-top political rhetoric, much less an apology. To note that dramatic reversal, we put Greer on the Flip-O-Meter and rate his statement a Full Flop.	None	Jim Greer	None	None	None	2010-09-14T17:36:11	2010-09-14	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-04120	Mexico-Guatemala Border Wall	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mexico-guatemala-border/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Mexico-Guatemala Border Wall	26 August 2015	None	['None']
-hoer-01087	Free 85 Aldi Coupon	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/free-85-aldi-coupon-facebook-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Free 85 Aldi Coupon Facebook Scam	October 15, 2016	None	['None']
-goop-01738	Ben Affleck Facing “Brain Damage” After Motorcycle Crash, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-motorcycle-crash-brain-damage-accident/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Ben Affleck NOT Facing “Brain Damage” After Motorcycle Crash, Despite Report	3:53 pm, January 24, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-03425	TV Pastor Joel Osteen Denounces Christianity and Calls it Quits	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/joel-osteen-quits/	None	religious	None	None	None	TV Pastor Joel Osteen Denounces Christianity and Calls it Quits	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-05278	Actor Barry Williams, who played Greg Brady on 'The Brady Bunch,' was shot and killed by police officers in California.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/barry-williams-not-dead/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	‘Brady Bunch’ Actor Barry Williams Was Not Shot Dead By Police	2 February 2016	None	['California']
-tron-02466	Stretching TV standards	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/tvstandards/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Stretching TV standards	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-12584	"There is no legal basis" for Donald Trump's "missile strike against Syrian military assets."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2017/apr/07/mark-pocan/mark-pocan-wrongly-claims-donald-trump-had-no-lega/	The morning after the U.S. cruise missiles assault on a Syrian air base, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan questioned the legal authority of President Donald Trump to order the attack. "There is no legal basis for last night’s missile strike against Syrian military assets," the Madison-area Democrat declared in a statement on April 7, 2017. "Congress must be called back immediately, if President Trump plans to escalate our military involvement. He must send a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) to Congress, as I have previously called for." The 59-missile assault was launched in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack by the government against Syrian civilians two days earlier. News reports quoted U.S. officials as saying Trump had the right to use force to defend national interests and to protect civilians from atrocities. Meanwhile, first-term U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Green Bay, while praising the "limited strikes," also said Trump "should seek congressional authorization for any sustained military operation in Syria." There’s certainly debate over the extent of a president’s authority to use military force without approval from Congress. But Pocan went too far in saying there is no legal basis for Trump’s action. Competing arguments To support Pocan’s claim, his office noted the U.S. Constitution assigns to Congress the power to declare war, and sent us commentary on that provision and the missile attack by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU reiterated its position that "the decision to use military force requires Congress’ specific, advance authorization." Pocan also cited the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was enacted over a veto by Republican President Richard Nixon. It says "the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities" can be done only "pursuant to a declaration of war, specific statutory authorization, or a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." And Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general under Republican President George W. Bush, argued in 2013 that Democratic President Barack Obama didn’t have unilateral authority to launch attacks against Syria, as was being considered at the time. Goldsmith said the president’s authority to use force without congressional approval had been extended to protect American persons and property abroad, but that rationale would not have applied to the attacks Obama contemplated (but never carried out). The Trump administration, meanwhile, also invokes the Constitution (Article 2) in asserting that the president has the power to defend the U.S. national interest. In this case, that interest is described as "promoting regional stability, which the use of chemical weapons threatens" -- which the Trump administration likened to the Obama administration’s justification for using force in Libya in 2011. Other views Experts agree that in limited instances, such as the Syrian missile attack, a president has legal authority provided in the Constitution as commander-in chief. Cameron University history and government professor Lance Janda said he agrees with Pocan’s call for a new congressional authorization for use of force, adding: "We have not declared war on anyone since 1941, and yet we are the most active nation state on the planet when it comes to military action." But "having said that," Janda continued, the Constitution gives the president authority as commander in chief to use force to protect our national interests and War Powers Resolution gives the president "leeway to respond to attacks or other emergencies." McGill University professor of international relations Mark Brawley also said the president has authority to use military force in a crisis, but then should notify Congress within 48 hours. The president also should ask Congress for authority to use military force if there will be extended conflict, or for a declaration of war, if the United States will be at war with Syria, he said. Like the Trump administration, Georgetown University professor Anthony Arend, whose specialties include international relations and constitutional law of U.S. foreign relations, also cited Article 2 of the Constitution and the president’s power as commander-in-chief. He told us: "While the precise scope of this power is unclear, a strong argument can be made that the president can use force in short military operations -- especially where there is minimal risk to American lives -- without congressional authorization. Indeed, over the years, Congress has generally acquiesced in such presidential uses of force. "Because the air strikes were undertaken by cruise missiles that put virtually no American lives at risk and because the strikes lasted only minutes, the president's action would seem to be a lawful use of force under the Constitution. Needless to say, if further military actions were to be undertaken, they could rise to the level of requiring congressional authorization." Added Richard Stoll, an international conflict scholar at Rice University, about the Trump attack: "This is not new." Stoll said he would advise a president to get congressional approval before taking additional action, but presidents many times have taken a "one-off" action such as the Syrian attack. Those views correspond to a 2013 fact check of then-U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who said Obama would have had the legal authority to strike Syria without a vote from Congress. PolitiFact National’s rating was True. As our colleagues reported: Since the last time Congress declared war, at the beginning of World War II, presidents have generally initiated military activities using their constitutionally granted powers as commander in chief without having an official declaration of war in support of their actions. Even under the War Powers Resolution, the president can send in forces without approval from Congress. Lower courts have ruled in favor of the White House in the use of force, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on that point. Our rating Pocan said: "There is no legal basis" for Trump's "missile strike against Syrian military assets." For limited military activities like the missile strike, presidents can send in forces without approval from Congress. We rate Pocan’s statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Mark Pocan	None	None	None	2017-04-07T17:01:59	2017-04-07	['Syria']
-goop-02774	Savannah Guthrie Does Need To “Watch Out” For Megyn Kelly, 	3	https://www.gossipcop.com/savannah-guthrie-not-watch-out-megyn-kelly-nbc/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Savannah Guthrie Does NOT Need To “Watch Out” For Megyn Kelly, Despite Report	3:08 pm, May 26, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-03921	Dandelion root can kill 98 percent of cancer cells in 48 hours.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dandelion-kills-cancer/	None	Medical	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Dandelion Root Kills 98% of Cancer Cells in 48 Hours?	29 September 2016	None	['None']
-vees-00227	On April 29, in a speech at the Davao International Airport, Duterte said:	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-duterte-revises-earlier-claim-about-fo	None	None	None	None	Duterte,foreign service	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte revises earlier claim about foreign service degree	May 03, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-15008	"Millions of dollars are spent by Planned Parenthood to elect Democrats to the House of Representatives and the Senate."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/oct/08/sean-duffy/planned-parenthood-spends-millions-elect-democrats/	During debate on a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., alluded to secretly recorded videos that prompted the legislation, then he made a claim about the group’s political activity. "If you watch this debate, you have to ask: How could anybody defend the practices at Planned Parenthood?" Duffy said on the House floor on Sept. 18, 2015, the day the House approved the one-year defunding. "Harvesting body parts. How could anybody defend that? It’s an easy answer. Look in (the) political season. Millions of dollars, millions of dollars are spent by Planned Parenthood to elect Democrats to the House of Representatives and to the Senate. This isn’t about babies; this is about money." A reader asked us to check Duffy’s claim. The videos, the funding The videos, first released in July 2015, show Planned Parenthood officials offhandedly discussing how they sometimes procure tissue from aborted fetuses for medical research. The anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress, which recorded the videos, alleges Planned Parenthood is illegally profiting from fetal organ sales. But Planned Parenthood says it has done nothing illegal, and that the videos were edited in a misleading way. The defunding bill, which has yet to be taken up by the U.S. Senate, would end federal payments to Planned Parenthood for a year, diverting the money to thousands of community health centers. Republicans say those clinics could handle the displaced Planned Parenthood patients, but Democrats say the centers are overburdened and sometimes in remote locations. Planned Parenthood gets around $450 million each year in federal payments, mostly Medicaid reimbursements for handling low-income patients. That's around one-third of the organization's $1.3 billion annual budget. As for Planned Parenthood’s political activity, some of this ground was covered when Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina made a similar claim. She said Planned Parenthood "funnels millions of dollars in political contributions to pro-abortion candidates." PolitiFact National rated the statement Mostly True. Millions have been spent. But the caveat is that the operational, medical clinics of Planned Parenthood cannot spend money in politics -- separate entities that are affiliated with Planned Parenthood can. Duffy’s claim Duffy’s claim was a little different -- that Planned Parenthood spent millions to elect Democrats to the House and Senate. We found, using figures from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, that that was this case. In the 2014 election cycle alone, Planned Parenthood-affiliated groups that can't give directly to candidates or coordinate with them, such as Planned Parenthood Votes, a Super PAC, made over $6 million in independent expenditures. That included $1.85 million spent in support of Democrats and $2.87 million spent against Republicans. "In addition, Planned Parenthood's PAC gave nearly $590,000 to congressional candidates, all of them Democrats." The numbers would be higher, of course, if previous cycles were included. Our rating Duffy said: "Millions of dollars are spent by Planned Parenthood to elect Democrats to the House of Representatives and the Senate." By law, the operational, medical clinics of Planned Parenthood cannot spend money in politics. But separate entities that are affiliated with Planned Parenthood can, and they spent millions just in the 2014 election cycle to elect Democrats. We rate Duffy’s statement Mostly True.	None	Sean Duffy	None	None	None	2015-10-08T05:00:00	2015-09-18	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Planned_Parenthood']
-goop-02698	Jay Z Did Call Kanye West “Pesky Fly,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jay-z-pesky-fly-kanye-west-feud-tidal/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jay Z Did NOT Call Kanye West “Pesky Fly,” Despite Report	9:52 am, July 3, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-01513	Do Hundreds of Papers Published in 2017 'Prove' That Global Warming is a Myth?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/400-papers-published-in-2017-prove-that-global-warming-is-myth/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Do Hundreds of Papers Published in 2017 ‘Prove’ That Global Warming is a Myth?	26 October 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-15249	"In 1947, when I was born, there were about 450,000 lions. In the mid-70s, when my kids were born, there were about 100,000. Today, there are less than 30,000."	mostly true	/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/03/jack-hanna/jack-hanna-talks-cecil-week-claims-africas-lion-po/	As experts debate legal consequences for the Minnesota dentist who killed well-known Zimbabwean lion Cecil, conservationists and animal rights activists are using the opportunity to highlight threats to the long-term viability of lions in the wild. Animal expert and television personality Jack Hanna, who is also the director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, emphasized how quickly the lion population has decreased within his lifetime on ABC's This Week. "In 1947, when I was born, there were about 450,000 lions," Hanna said in the Aug. 2 interview. "In the mid-'70s, when my kids were born, there were about 100,000. Today, there are less than 30,000." We wondered if Hanna’s claim about the lion population was true. Has the population really shrunk by more than 90 percent in 68 years, and if so, why? When it comes to counting lions, accurate numbers are almost as elusive as the animals themselves. 1940s Most scientists and researchers agree that the number of lions in the wild is in decline. The Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the species as "vulnerable" on its threat scale, just one level below "endangered." It’s the speed of the decline that is in dispute. A spokesperson for Hanna said he was citing loose figures from the National Geographic Society’s Big Cats Initiative. The organization’s page on lions estimates that there were around 450,000 African lions in the 1940s, 100,000 in the 1980s, and 20,000 today — almost exactly mirroring what Hanna said. Other research questions some of Hanna's figures. He claimed more than 450,000 lions roamed the savannahs in the 1940s, but detailed studies of the population weren’t conducted back then. That means data for that period is virtually nonexistent. Susie Weller, a spokeswoman for Panthera, another big cats advocacy group, cited her organization’s own estimate that there were already as few as 200,000 "over a century ago." In other words, no one really knows how many lions there were in the 1940s. "You might even see numbers in the millions," said Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation ecology at Duke University and a contributor to the Big Cats Initiative. 1970s Hanna then claimed there were 100,000 lions in the wild during the 1970s. No empirical data exists for that time either, not that scientists haven't tried to make a best guess. In 1996, a team of researchers employed land-use data to predict there were around 75,800 lions in 1980. The study, which was not published, is widely cited and was conducted at Cranfield University’s International Eco Technology Research Centre in the United Kingdom. Pimm said that this strategy was one of the more reliable ways to estimate the size of the population. "What we can consider," he said, "is how much lion habitat there was back then, and then approximate how many lions fit into that area. But if you’re going to put a number on it, you have to be careful to couch it in very, very approximate terms." The geographic analysis is the closest anyone has come to a population count for that time, and it’s a rough guess at best. Jason Riggio, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis and the author of a study on lion populations, said the 1980 number "arguably should not be cited as fact" because it doesn’t take into account expert opinions or survey data. Hanna’s claim that there were 100,000 lions left in the 1970s isn’t far off from the closest estimate for that decade, yet isn’t based on any convincing data. Today Hanna was more on target when he said there "are less than 30,000" lions left in the wild today. A widely used figure for the present population comes from the 2012 study led by Riggio. The paper, which combines data from two counts in the early 2000s, puts the population "between 32,000 and 35,000." Other organizations cited the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species as an authoritative source for species population numbers and trends. The Red List questions Riggio’s numbers, arguing that, among other issues, his team’s use of older figures ignored downward trends that may have taken place in some regions. "We have greater confidence in the estimate of fewer than 20,000 lions in Africa than in a number over 30,000," reads the group’s file on lions. Still, Hanna’s claim that there are fewer than 30,000 lions left in the wild today is within the range of these two estimates. Lions, Pimm said said, stake out in some of the most unforgiving natural habitats in the world, making them hard to locate, spot and count. "There are roughly 30,000 lions in Africa," said Pimm, "and they’re spread out over a massive area. People just don’t realize how big the continent really is." Some researchers in the field, including Riggio, are reluctant to mention specific numbers for the changing lion population given the problematic data. But the experts agreed that Hanna's general point about a massive decline in the species is accurate. The threat lions pose to farms means that "they are persecuted intensely in livestock areas across Africa," according to the IUCN, and growth in the bushmeat market has led to a decrease in the abundance of their prey. While hunters claim that trophy hunting in small numbers is a valuable way to finance conservation, the IUCN has reported an unsustainable number of kills in regions across the continent. Our ruling Hanna said, "In 1947, when I was born, there were about 450,000 lions. In the mid-'70s, when my kids were born, there were about 100,000. Today, there are less than 30,000." Counting lions in the wild is extremely difficult and requires a lot of estimation. Any hard numbers, therefore, should be taken with a grain of salt. Hanna’s claim reflects the consensus among researchers that lion numbers are in decline. The exact figures are up for some deabte, but his point is certainly valid. We rate it Mostly True.	None	Jack Hanna	None	None	None	2015-08-03T13:21:08	2015-08-02	['None']
-tron-00179	U.S. Marines Defending Embassy in Egypt Without Ammunition	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/usmc-no-ammo/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	U.S. Marines Defending Embassy in Egypt Without Ammunition	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Egypt', 'United_States']
-tron-01567	President Obama Didn’t Lower Flags for Chattanooga Shooting	truth! & outdated!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/president-obama-didnt-lower-flags-for-chattanooga-shooting/	None	government	None	None	None	President Obama Didn’t Lower Flags for Chattanooga Shooting	Jul 28, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-01074	"Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jan/16/rand-paul/rand-paul-says-most-people-receive-disability-back/	Turning 40? Sen. Rand Paul says you can look forward to back pain in your near future, and maybe some anxiety. But don’t try to turn your ailments into a government check. At a breakfast event Wednesday, Jan. 14 in New Hampshire, the Kentucky Republican and potential presidential candidate spoke out against a public safety net that catches too many people who don’t need help. "The thing is, all of these programs, there’s always somebody who’s deserving. (But) everybody in this room knows somebody who is gaming the system," Paul said. The proof? Look no further than the diagnoses landing people on disability, he added. "Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club," he said to laughter. "Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everybody over 40 has a little back pain." Paul may be having a little fun about the aches and pains of growing older, but his comment raises serious questions about a program relied on by millions of people. Is the majority of the disability population suffering from back pain and anxiety? We decided to check the numbers. Identifying the problem The Social Security Administration has provided benefits to people with disabilities since President Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation in 1956. The program is intended to provide cash assistance to people who are disabled for a year or longer and cannot work or can only work menial jobs for little pay (about $1,000 a month). The number of individuals receiving disability has been on an upward trajectory for decades. In 1970, there were less than 2 million beneficiaries; now, the program has surpassed 10 million, far outpacing U.S. population growth. Nearly two-thirds of people on disability are 50 or older. The large growth in the program has sparked claims of waste, fraud and abuse. And indeed, several reports from the Government Accountability Office have found problems with the program, as Paul’s office pointed out. After an audit of disability insurance in 2013, the Government Accountability Office estimated that in fiscal year 2011, the Social Security Administration made $1.29 billion in potential cash benefit overpayments to about 36,000 individuals who were working and making more than $1,100 a month (the limit to receive disability benefits). The 36,000 people receiving improper payments, while a lot on paper, represent about 0.4 percent of all beneficiaries, the report said. There are other ways Social Security gives out benefits to those not deserving, but paying people already working is about 72 percent of the problem, according to the Social Security Administration. Factoring that in, the GAO estimates overpayments equaled $1.62 billion, or 1.27 percent of all disability benefits, in 2011. It’s a lot of money, but the disability program is a $128 billion program. The Government Accountability Office goes on to say the exact number of improper payments is unknown. It could be higher. Additionally, another GAO report warned the Social Security Administration’s efforts to thwart potential physician-assisted fraud are "hampered by a lack of planning, data, and coordination." Back and anxiety Let’s narrow in on Paul’s specific claim: "Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts." This is not rooted in the official numbers. Social Security does not group people by back pain or anxiety in any of their published reports. Instead, they track a much broader list of physical and mental ailments. What would back pain or anxiety fall under? Most back problems would fall under the category "diseases of the musculoskeletal system and connective tissue," the most common ailment. In 2013, 27.7 percent of all people received benefits for these types of ailments. If you look at just workers, it was 30.5 percent. There's also another category, "injuries," that might include some back problems. Those affect another 4 percent of workers. But not all musculoskeletal system and connective tissue diseases are back problems. Far from it. They include ailments ranging from a broken bone and bad burns to amputated limbs and deformities. Anxiety would be included in "mental disorders." That category is broken down further as follows: Mental disorder Percent of all workers on disability Autistic disorder 0.2 Developmental disorders 0.1 Childhood and adolescent disorders not otherwise clasified 0.1 Intellectual disability 4.1 Mood disorders 14.9 Organic mental disorders 3.4 Schizophrenic and other psychotic 4.8 Other 3.9 Total 31.5 As you can see, it's a pretty confusing list, and it's not immediately clear which category certain mental ailments would fall into. If by "anxious," Paul meant a catchall term for all mental disorders, then, sure, about one-third of all disabled workers have some sort of mental issue. Paul's spokesman singled out the subcategory "mood disorders" when explaining how Paul reached his conclusion. Other media outlets have similarly placed anxiety under this heading. However, the Social Security Administration told us that category typically includes affective disorders like depression, not anxiety disorders. Instead, people suffering from "anxiety disorders" -- which include things like post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder -- are included in the "other" category. That category also includes diseases like Tourette syndrome and affects far fewer people than mood disorders, about 3.9 percent. For the sake of argument, let's follow Paul's faulty logic. Even assuming generously that every single person with a musculoskeletal system problem came in with "back pain," and every person with a "mood disorder" had anxiety, it still only equals 45.4 percent, less than half. Throw in "other" mental disorders, you're still just below 50 percent. If you categorize anxiety correctly as "other" and add it to all musculoskeletal system problems, you would end up far lower, at 34 percent. And again, not every person with a musculoskeletal problem has a back problem, and not every person with a mental disorder has anxiety. For Paul to imply as much is either stretching reality or downplaying serious ailments. There has been an increase in the number of people receiving disability for musculoskeletal system and mental problems. In 1961, the most common ailment for new beneficiaries was heart disease or stroke. Meanwhile, 8 percent of those going on disability received assistance for musculoskeletal system issues. That’s an interesting and notable statistic, and one worth exploring. NPR published a very extensive report suggesting some older, unskilled workers are going on disability (many with back issues) because the only jobs available to them are physically strenuous. But that doesn’t wash away Paul’s mischaracterization of the ailments nor his inflation of the numbers. Our ruling Paul said, "Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts." The numbers don’t add up. The two broader disability categories that include back pain ("diseases of the musculoskeletal system") and anxiety disorders ("mental disorders - other") don’t even equal close to 50 percent, let alone those two ailments by themselves. Paul’s quip might make for a good soundbite, but it’s not rooted in reality. We rate the statement False.	None	Rand Paul	None	None	None	2015-01-16T16:23:11	2015-01-14	['None']
-pomt-15179	Says "56 percent of (the U.S.-Mexico) border is not under our control."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/23/ben-carson/ben-carson-most-border-not-under-our-control/	Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson suggested drones could really help the country’s overstressed border patrol. Carson told CNN’s Jim Acosta on State of the Union on Aug. 23, 2015, that the drones could be used for more than just surveillance along the Mexican border, potentially taking out caves that smugglers and cartels use to cross into the United States. "We're not getting support from the federal government to deal with these people," he said. "They're being outgunned. Fifty-six percent of that border is not under our control." There was a bit of overlap between Acosta and Carson (this transcript quotes Carson saying 66 percent), but we heard 56 percent. We wondered if Carson was correct that more than half of our southern border was "not under our control." We didn’t hear back from Carson’s campaign when we tried to contact them for the source of the retired neurosurgeon’s figure. But we have an idea where he may have gotten it. A 2011 Government Accountability Office report said U.S. Customs and Border Protection considered 873 miles of the almost 2,000-mile U.S. border with Mexico under "operational control" in fiscal year 2010. Those are areas they classified "as those in which it has the ability to detect, respond, and interdict illegal activity at the border or after entry into the United States." Operational control was broken down into two definitions: "Controlled" areas had enough agents to either deter or detect and apprehend illegal entries immediately at the border. We must note this still doesn’t mean a 100 percent apprehension rate, but controlled status accounted for 129 miles, or about 15 percent of those 873 miles under operational control. The other 85 percent were considered "managed" areas, where agents could still identify and apprehend most entries from as far as 100 miles away. The other 1,120 miles of border — the 56 percent of the total border to which Carson is likely referring — fell under two other definitions. The report said nearly two-thirds was considered "monitored," meaning illegal entries were likely to be detected, but resources or accessibility could make responses difficult. The other third was labeled "low-level monitored," defined as regions where detection and interdiction were constrained by few resources or poor infrastructure. "Border Patrol reported that these two levels of control were not acceptable for border security," the GAO report said. So does that mean they aren’t under control, as Carson said? Experts have told us before that there’s no set definition for a secure border, and it’s not fair to set the standard as a 100 percent border-crosser apprehension rate because then no part of the border would qualify. Border Patrol agents are charged with many duties beyond stopping illegal immigration. They are supposed to catch drug smugglers, weapons traffickers, potential terrorists, money launderers and more. Apprehensions only tell part of the story. Because no one knows how many crossing attempts there truly are each year, by any group targeted by the border patrol, there’s no way to really set a universal metric for security. The 2011 GAO report said the Department of Homeland Security was replacing its border security measures, and it expected data reported to Congress to wane as programs were updated through 2012. A January 2015 report by now retired Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said that as of 2014, more than 700 miles of the southern border "were not secure." The report blamed "little to no deployment density or aviation surveillance coverage." The oversight report blamed the problems in part to a lack of overall border security plan by the Department of Homeland Security. But Coburn’s report also said that "it is impossible to judge whether the border is secure" based on available data. There’s no way to tell just how many crossings went undetected, the report said, and changes in apprehensions and economic and social factors in immigration made extrapolating overall security very difficult. As far as reported statistics, we know that illegal migration through the border has decreased in recent years. The Bipartisan Policy Center said that in 2007, there were 1.6 million instances of people apprehended, turned back at the border or evidence of people making it across, known as "gotaways." The center said that number had dropped to 741,881 in 2013. There also is evidence the number of native Mexicans living in the U.S. is leveling, experts have said, and eight of the nine sectors the border is broken into by the Border Patrol had higher effectiveness ratings in 2013 than they did in 2006. Christopher Wilson, deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, gives Carson credit for using the term "control," since that’s the word the border patrol used in part to measure its own effectiveness. But as a practical matter, it’s impossible to stop everyone from crossing the border, he said. That makes it difficult to settle on how much enforcement would be required for everyone to consider it "enough." Wilson added things have indeed improved, no matter which source you cite. "All the different measures point to an overall improvement in border security over at least the last 10 years," Wilson said. "We don’t know what a secure border is, because we’ve never defined it as a society." Our ruling Carson said that "56 percent of that (U.S.-Mexico) border is not under our control." U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a 2011 report that 873 miles of the U.S. Mexico border was under "operational control." The other 1,120 miles, or about 56 percent, fell under two classifications "not acceptable for border security." That doesn’t mean there is an utter lack of control, but that the agency’s ability to detect or respond (or both) to crossings was hampered by a lack of resources or infrastructure. Carson did not specify what he meant by control, and experts have told us security is a subjective metric. It doesn’t appear he pulled the number out of thin air, but available data does show that illegal crossings along the border have overall been on the decline. We rate Carson’s statement Half True.	None	Ben Carson	None	None	None	2015-08-23T12:18:46	2015-08-23	['None']
-goop-01614	Jennifer Aniston Does Have “Absurd Diet Demands” For Justin Theroux, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-justin-theroux-diet-marriage-problems/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Aniston Does NOT Have “Absurd Diet Demands” For Justin Theroux, Despite Report	10:01 am, February 9, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-00737	"We have an 80 percent graduation rate in high school after spending more per student than any country in the world other than Liechtenstein, I think, or Luxembourg and a couple other small countries."	true	/florida/statements/2015/apr/21/jeb-bush/does-united-states-spend-more-student-most-countri/	While some conservative activists and presidential hopefuls have trashed Common Core, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush remains a supporter of the education standards. Bush’s support for Common Core could put him at odds with primary challengers should he decide to enter the race: Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, opposes Common Core, while Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a potential candidate, once showed tacit support but later called for repeal. During an event on April 17 in New Hampshire, a Nashua resident asked Bush straight up: "Gov. Bush: where do you stand on Common Core?" Bush said: "Thank you for bringing that up. If it wasn’t going to be brought up, I was going to bring it up myself." Bush then made his case that Common Core is essentially a push for higher standards, to address concerns about student achievement in the United States. "We have an 80 percent graduation rate in high school after spending more per student than any country in the world other than Liechtenstein I think, or Luxembourg and a couple other small countries," Bush said. Bush drew applause when he said "we don’t need a federal government involved in this at all," and added that he supported proposed legislation to ban the feds from creating standards or curriculum. (PolitiFact has rated multiple claims from other politicians that Common Core is a "federal takeover" of education and found them misleading.) Here we will fact-check Bush’s claim about the national graduation rate and how much we spend per student compared to other countries. Graduation rates and per-pupil spending There are a few different ways to measure graduation rates including the federal government's cohort method, which examines how many students who enter 9th grade graduate four years later with a standard diploma. By that measurement, the national average was about 81 percent in 2012-13. (Florida is below that national average.) As for spending, Bush’s spokeswoman pointed to a 2013 Associated Press article about a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that compared per-pupil spending among 34 advanced industrialized nations. Formed in 1961, OECD sets international standards on a wide range of topics, including education spending. The most recent OECD study -- from 2014 using 2011 data -- shows that the United States spends $12,731 per student on secondary education. Four countries -- Austria, Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland -- spend more. Those same countries are also the only ones that spend more than the United States per student on primary schools. Country Secondary per-pupil spending Austria $13,607 Luxembourg $16,182 Norway $13,939 Switzerland $15,891 United States $12,731 (Bush mentioned Liechtenstein, a tiny country located between Austria and Switzerland, but that wasn’t included on the OECD list.) Pointing to the OECD data, the federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics notes that a country’s wealth is positively associated with expenditures per student. When examining expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product for all levels of education, the United States and Chile are seventh out of 32 countries. Stanford professor Eric Hanushek, an expert on economic analysis of educational issues, told PolitiFact that the OECD ranking is the best source currently available to judge differences among nations in education. However, University of Iowa education professor David Bills offered one caveat. "What matters is not the absolute budget per se, but the proportion of that budget that is spent on instruction," Bills said. Traditionally the United States spends big parts of its educational budget on non-instructional items such as security -- more so than some other nations. Bush has changed how he has worded his claim about how per-student spending in the United States compares to other countries. In 2013, Bush claimed that the United States spends "more per student than any country in the world," which Factcheck.org noted was inaccurate since a few countries spent more. Our ruling Bush said, "We have an 80 percent graduation rate in high school after spending more per student than any country in the world other than Liechtenstein, I think, or Luxembourg and a couple other small countries." The national average for the graduation rate was 81 percent in 2012-13, according to one method the federal government uses to calculate the rate. Among advanced countries, the United States ranked fifth in per student spending for secondary education behind Austria, Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland. Liechtenstein wasn’t on the list, but since Bush expressed uncertainty, we think his statement is still accurate. We rate this claim True.	None	Jeb Bush	None	None	None	2015-04-21T17:07:21	2015-04-17	['Luxembourg', 'Liechtenstein']
-snes-05322	Donald Trump claimed he could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and not "lose any voters."	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-fifth-avenue-comment/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Donald Trump ‘Fifth Avenue’ Comment	24 January 2016	None	['Fifth_Avenue', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-00887	The University of Wisconsin System "will be much more affordable than just about any other campus in America" because "going forward we have a cap on it tied to inflation."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2015/mar/09/scott-walker/scott-walker-uw-tuition-will-be-lower-just-about-a/	As Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential star continued to rise, Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, challenged him on how his budget treats the University of Wisconsin System. "You cut funding, state funding for the University of Wisconsin higher education system by 13 percent. You cut funding for the state parks system by 28 percent," Wallace said during the March 1, 2015 interview. "Governor, are those your priorities?" Walker responded by noting that critics said his 2011 budget cuts would devastate K-12 education, but graduation rates and reading scores are up. That led to this exchange: WALLACE: But the University of Wisconsin says they're going to have to raise tuition on students. WALKER: But they're not. We have a two-year tuition freeze. WALLACE: I know, but they're saying after that. WALKER: Going forward, we have a cap on it tied to inflation. And so, we will be much more affordable than just about any other campus in America. At issue are fears that big tuition hikes could be coming after 2017. They stem from Walker’s proposed Walker’s tuition freeze between 2015 and 2017, which would stymie UW from raising more revenue via tuition to replace the $300 million aid cut the governor wants. Walker is saying a big tuition increase won’t happen, and that UW schools will be near the top in affordability nationally. Let’s hit the books. We asked Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for Our American Revival, a group Walker formed as he explores a 2016 presidential bid, to back up Walker’s claim. She pointed us to 2014-’15 figures for tuition and fees at universities in other states compared with UW-Madison and at four-year public universities in Wisconsin as a group. The numbers come from a good source -- the College Board’s survey of college pricing trends. But Wisconsin is right in the middle of the pack or somewhat worse by various measures, the numbers show. -- All four-year schools: Among the states, Wisconsin’s average cost of in-state tuition and fees at these schools -- the "sticker price" at least -- ranked 26th highest. -- Flagship campuses: UW-Madison tuition and fees ranked 22nd highest compared to flagship campuses in the other 49 states. -- Two-year campuses: Wisconsin’s costs ranked 15th highest. Among four-year schools in the Big Ten (now with 14 schools), Nebraska, Iowa and Maryland charged less in 2014-’15 than Wisconsin. A gap of $2,000 to $3,000 a year separates Wisconsin and the least expensive states. Of course, nobody knows how the tuition rankings will look down the road after Walker’s freeze. But it would take a lot more than a freeze to put Wisconsin near the most affordable states. Cap on tuition? Next let’s look at Walker’s contention that "Going forward, we have a cap on it tied to inflation." The governor’s pending 2015-’17 budget plan would freeze tuition for the two years -- but it applies only to that period. Wallace, though, specifically asked about what happens after that. So that was the period Walker was citing when he referenced a "cap" going forward. Walker did suggest in February 2015 during a trade mission to the United Kingdom that he was "open" to the notion of putting an inflationary lid on tuition past 2016-’17. The idea drew criticism from UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank, who said it contradicted Walker’s plan to spin off the UW System as an independent authority with control over its budget and more ability to find efficiencies. In any case, no ongoing cap is in place. It’s not even formally introduced anywhere and Walker said he had no specific plan. So it’s not nearly the done deal Walker made it sound like. Our rating Walker said the University of Wisconsin schools "will be much more affordable than just about any other campus in America" because "going forward we have a cap on it tied to inflation." His evidence is current rankings, but they show the state is neither high nor low for student costs. And the inflationary cap the governor mentioned remains only a gleam in his eye. We rate his claim False. ------ More on Scott Walker For profiles and stories on Scott Walker and 2016 presidential politics, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Scott Walker page.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2015-03-09T05:00:00	2015-03-01	['United_States', 'University_of_Wisconsin_System']
-pose-00378	Will "update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/397/update-copyright-and-patent-law/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Update copyright and patent law	2010-01-07T13:26:57	None	['None']
-pomt-05793	"Over 40 percent of children born in America are born out of wedlock."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/feb/24/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-says-over-40-percent-children-are-bo/	During the Feb. 22, 2012, presidential debate in Mesa, Ariz., Rick Santorum offered extended comments on "the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America" and "teens who are sexually active." Santorum said, "What we're seeing is a problem in our culture with respect to children being raised by children, children being raised out of wedlock, and the impact on society economically, the impact on society with respect to drug use and all -- a host of other things when children have children. … Two days ago on the front page of the New York Times, they're talking about the same thing. The bottom line is we have a problem in this country, and the family is fracturing. "Over 40 percent of children born in America are born out of wedlock. How can a country survive if children are being raised in homes where it's so much harder to succeed economically? It's five times the rate of poverty in single-parent households than it is in two-parent homes. … We hear this all the time, cut spending, limit the government, everything will be fine. No, everything's not going to be fine." Santorum touched on a lot of issues -- and essentially sidestepped the question from moderator John King, who had reminded him that "you told an evangelical blog, if elected, you will talk about what, quote, 'no president has talked about before -- the dangers of contraception.' Why?" For this item, we’ll focus on the main statistic he offered -- that "over 40 percent of children born in America are born out of wedlock." Simply put, he’s right. According to 2009 data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 41 percent of all births were to unmarried women. The percentage has risen steadily since at least 1980, the earliest year for which data was provided in the CDC report. In 1980, it stood at 18.4 percent. By 1990, it was 28.0 percent. And by 2000 it was 33.2 percent. "It has been increasing over the last 50 years," said Tom W. Smith, a senior fellow at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. While we’re on this topic, we’ll also look at an issue that Mitt Romney brought up later in the debate -- that "among certain ethnic groups, the vast majority born out of wedlock." This data is also included in the CDC report. In 2009, 17 percent of births to Asian-Pacific Islanders were out of wedlock, with non-Hispanic whites at 29 percent, 53 percent for Hispanics, 65 percent for American Indians and Native Alaskans and 73 percent for non-Hispanic blacks. So Romney’s claim would be accurate at least for American Indians and non-Hispanic blacks. Meanwhile, within age groups, unmarried births accounted for 87 percent of those to teenagers and 62 percent of births to women age 20 to 24. About 20 percent of births to women age 30 and over were to unmarried mothers. But births to unmarried teens as a percentage of all unmarried births has declined. Unmarried teen births (those to mothers from age 15 to 19) represented 21 percent of all unmarried births, which is far lower than the rate in 1970, which was 49 percent. Our ruling Federal data backs up Santorum’s contention that "over 40 percent of children born in America are born out of wedlock." In fact, the number for 2009, the most recent available, is a record high, based on the data included in the federal report. So we rate the statement True.	None	Rick Santorum	None	None	None	2012-02-24T12:43:38	2012-02-22	['United_States']
-pomt-13431	"Latinos in Nevada support Educational Savings Accounts, helping more than 450,000 students access better schools. But Catherine Cortez Masto is against it."	mostly true	/nevada/statements/2016/sep/19/libre-initiative/group-correct-catherine-cortez-masto-opposes-new-s/	The conservative-leaning LIBRE Initiative is using a new school choice program as political ammunition in Nevada’s competitive U.S. Senate race. The grassroots nonprofit, which has financial ties to the billionaire Koch brothers, released a digital ad in English and Spanish on Sept. 13 accusing Democratic Senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto of opposing an educational program favored by Hispanics. "Latinos in Nevada support Educational Savings Accounts, helping more than 450,000 students access better schools," the ad says. "But Catherine Cortez Masto is against it." The second part of the claim is not in dispute, as Cortez Masto clearly came out in opposition to the program in August, saying it diverts money from public schools. But the ad overstates the Latino support and the number of people who are set to benefit from the ESA program, which has been tied up in lawsuits almost immediately after being passed. ESA 411 Nevada lawmakers approved a bevy of new educational programs in 2015, but one of the most controversial has been the Education Savings Account program. Approved by Republican lawmakers on a party-line vote, the bill creates a program allowing parents to pull their children out of public schools and receive roughly $5,100 (about 90 percent of yearly per-pupil funding) a year to be used for private education expenses — private school tuition, textbooks, transportation, etc. It’s similar to a school voucher system, but program backers say the key difference is that the money is distributed through "education savings accounts," state-run accounts that reimburse parents for approved educational expenses. Other states have created similar programs, but Nevada is unique in that all parents can apply for the program regardless of income or any other factor. Several groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union’s Nevada branch, sued before the program could be implemented and successfully had a legal hold placed on the program. The state’s Supreme Court heard arguments on the program in late July, and both sides are still awaiting for a ruling from the court. Total enrollment Constant litigation hasn’t stopped the program from turning into political ad material. The ad text claims that "more than 450,000 students to benefit from school choice," citing a 2015 Lincoln County Register editorial. That’s the total number of students in Nevada (now closer to 467,000), but isn’t anywhere close to the actual number of program applicants, which numbers around 7,800 at the most recent count. The program is open to all students, but it is misleading to say that all of them will "benefit" from the program when the number of applicants is so small. LIBRE Initiative spokesman Wadi Gaitan said in an email that continuing legal uncertainty over the program means that the number of applicants is an "incomplete" barometer of who the program is helping, as presumably some parents are waiting for the dust to settle before deciding to enroll in the program. The ad’s vocal track differs from the text overlay as well, saying the program would help "more than 450,000 students access better schools." Again, there are no barriers for parents to apply for the program, but it’s a bit far-fetched to assume that it will give literally every student in the state access to the school of their choosing given that tuition alone tends to cost more than the projected ESA stipend. Average private school tuition in Las Vegas ranges from $8,700 to $9,600 a year, according to information from privateschoolreview.com. Demographic data released on program applicants shows that the majority of parents applying live in ZIP codes with higher-than-normal average household incomes (though income levels of applicants aren’t disclosed). The ad also cites a 2015 poll funded by the American Federation for Children, a conservative-leaning nonprofit that champions "school choice." The group found that 71 percent of Nevada Hispanics polled favored the program. More recent polling found that the program is still supported by voters, though not as strongly as the earlier poll suggests. A KTNV-TV 13 Action News/Rasmussen Reports poll from August found that Hispanic voters polled supported the program on a 47 to 35 percent basis, with 17 percent undecided. Our ruling A new ad from the LIBRE Initiative claims, "Latinos in Nevada support Educational Savings Accounts, helping more than 450,000 students access better schools. But Catherine Cortez Masto is against it." There’s no question that Cortez Masto opposes the ESA program. But the ad exaggerates the size and scope of the program itself. Only a fraction of the state's 450,000 students have actually applied to be part of the program. The ad also accurately cites polls showing Hispanic support for the program, though recent polls show more modest support. Because this ad is accurate but needs clarification, we rate it Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/736fb02e-95c9-43ad-a5ea-ec50d5c4839b	None	LIBRE Initiative	None	None	None	2016-09-19T16:30:48	2016-09-13	['Nevada']
-tron-01743	Even If You Are Not Catholic, This Is Eye Opening	grass roots movement!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/catholic-eye-opener/	None	government	None	None	None	Even If You Are Not Catholic, This Is Eye Opening	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06999	"Mitt Romney is the first Massachusetts politician to run for president and not win the New Hampshire primary in a generation."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jul/10/new-hampshire-democratic-party/democrats-say-mitt-romney-first-massachusetts-resi/	Mitt Romney, now competing in his second New Hampshire primary, considers himself more than a neighbor from the south. The former Massachusetts governor, who owns a home on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, likes to think of himself as one of the Granite State’s own. But state Democratic leaders were quick to point out last week that state voters haven’t always returned Romney’s affection. Speaking with reporters on a June 27, 2011, conference call, Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley said Romney, who placed second in the 2008 primary, was the first Bay State politician in decades who failed to win the New Hampshire primary. "It's important to note that Mitt Romney is the first Massachusetts politician to run for president and not win the New Hampshire primary in a generation," Buckley said. "The people of New Hampshire know him very well." PolitiFact decided to check the record books. Prior to Romney’s last run in 2008, the last three Massachusetts politicians to run for the Oval Office all got off to good starts by winning the New Hampshire primary, according to state voting records. In 2004, John Kerry, the U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, won the Democratic primary, defeating former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, among other candidates. Twelve years earlier, in 1992, U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas defeated Bill Clinton to win the primary; and four years prior to that, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis won the primary on his way to the 1988 Democratic nomination. Political analysts say all three Massachusetts residents took advantage of the physical -- and philosophical -- proximity of the two states. Voters from both states tend to hold common cultural values, political attitudes and histories, according to Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. And, because much of southern New Hampshire, the state’s most populous area, falls within the Boston media market, Granite State voters are often familiar with Massachusetts candidates even before election season begins, added David King, a lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. But the home court advantage doesn’t help all Massachusetts candidates. Indeed, you need only go back to 1980, when U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy lost his bold bid to unseat President Jimmy Carter. So it was 28 years between that loss and Romney's. Does that count as "a generation"? To find out, we asked the experts. Genealogists across the country don’t have a set definition for the length of a generation, the time between the birth of a parent and that parent’s child. We found a range of answers from 20 to 30 years. Ancestry.com, a national genealogical website, considers a generation as 25 years; the New England Genealogical Society accepts a generation as 25 to 30 years, and the U.S. Genealogical Society extends it between 20 and 30 years. "Anywhere between twenty and thirty years seems to be the standard, but there is no hard and fast rule," said Laura Prescott, a Brookline, New Hampshire resident and president of the Association of Professional Genealogists. "It’s something that changes over time, and it’s an inexact science." Our ruling Buckley said Romney was the first candidate to lose "in a generation." Buckley is right if you rely on the shorter time period of 20 or 25 years, but he is off if you rely on the 30-year standard. Even so, he wouldn't be that far off, and his underlying point is correct that Romney's 2008 loss was unusual by historical standards. So we find his claim Mostly True.	None	New Hampshire Democratic Party	None	None	None	2011-07-10T06:00:00	2011-06-27	['Massachusetts', 'Mitt_Romney']
-pomt-05843	Says U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, a candidate for Senate, supports raising taxes "by $858 billion."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/feb/15/us-chamber-commerce/us-chamber-says-rep-tammy-baldwin-backed-raising-t/	There was never any doubt that opponents of U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, a Madison Democrat running for the U.S. Senate, would brand her as a liberal who loves taxes. On the day Baldwin announced her candidacy in September 2011, Republican Senate candidate Tommy Thompson called her the most liberal member of the House. Based on annual ratings of House members’ votes, we gave Thompson a Mostly True on that claim. Now two major business organizations say Baldwin loves taxes enough to raise them "by $858 billion" -- and they cite Baldwin’s own website as evidence. A politician touting an $858 billion tax increase? This could get interesting. The claim is made in a TV ad sponsored by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and paid for by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The ad was released Feb. 9, 2012. It begins with a narrator saying: "Washington has made things tough for job creators. More red tape doesn't help. ‘Obamacare’ will kill jobs; Tammy Baldwin fought hard for it. Taxes? Tammy Baldwin thinks they're too low and wants to raise them." At that point, a message on the screen reads: "Tammy Baldwin -- raise taxes by $858 billion" and lists Baldwin’s official House website as the source. Is it an accurate attack? ‘Bush-era tax cuts’ The Wisconsin business group referred us to the U.S. Chamber, which referred us to the taxes page on Baldwin’s website. It discusses her vote against an $858 billion bill that extended what are known as the Bush-era tax cuts. The tax cuts -- on income, capital gains, dividends and business -- were enacted in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush. They were temporary -- their major provisions were to expire at the end of 2010. The bill Baldwin voted against was adopted and signed into law in December 2010. On the web page cited by the chamber, Baldwin says she supported continuing the tax cuts only for families that earn up to $250,000, because "adding $858 billion to the national debt just to give a special tax break to those with incomes over $250,000 is fiscally irresponsible." The ad’s claim about Baldwin is based on that single no vote. But, as we’ll see, it wasn’t the only measure put to a vote in the House on extending the Bush tax cuts. And the $858 billion figure -- though widely cited -- is more complicated than presented in the ad. What’s in the $858 billion The law extends the Bush tax cuts two more years -- but it also provided a new, temporary payroll tax cut, made other tax changes and extended unemployment benefits for 13 months. The total "cost" of the package -- in terms of how much it adds to federal budget deficits -- is estimated at nearly $858 billion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. About $721 billion of that is reduced revenue from the tax changes -- including $408 billion from the two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts -- and the rest is from additional spending. So, does Baldwin’s vote against an $858 billion bill composed primarily of tax cuts mean she supported raising taxes by $858 billion? Not exactly. Had Baldwin’s side defeated the bill -- and had the Bush tax cuts been allowed to expire -- the people who benefited from those tax cuts would have been paying higher taxes as of January 2011. But, as we’ve noted, the bill also contained other measures such as the new cut in payroll taxes and the extension of unemployment benefits. So, it can’t be argued that taxes would have been raised by a full $858 billion had Baldwin’s side prevailed. Secondly, had the $858 billion bill been defeated, it doesn’t necessarily mean the debate would have ended and that the Bush tax cuts would have expired; another bill could have emerged. Baldwin campaign spokesman Phil Walzak pointed out that a week before the vote on the $858 billion bill that became law, Baldwin voted for an alternative that would have extended the Bush tax cuts, permanently, for families earning less than $250,000. The failed measure also would have made other changes that would have added a total of $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Nearly all of that, $1.34 trillion, would have been revenue lost from making most of the Bush tax cuts permanent. To compare the two bills only in terms of extending the Bush tax cuts: The bill Baldwin voted against reduces revenue by $408 billion for two years, or $204 billion on an annual basis. The bill Baldwin voted for would have reduced revenue $1.34 trillion over 10 years, or $134 billion per year. So, Baldwin supported extending most of the Bush tax cuts, although taxes would have gone up for families earning $250,000 or more. In the end, there were two votes on competing proposals. By using the approach the ad uses, Democrats would be able to argue that those who voted against the first, more limited package, opposed cutting taxes. Our ruling In a TV ad, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says Baldwin supports raising taxes by $858 billion, citing her vote against a bill that primarily contained tax cuts. It’s true that had Baldwin’s side prevailed and if no other action was taken, taxes would have increased, although not by the full $858 billion. But Baldwin did vote separately for a measure that would have extended most of the Bush tax cuts. And it can’t be assumed that the Bush tax cuts would not have been extended had the bill Baldwin opposed not become law. There’s only an element of truth in the chamber’s claim, which is our definition for Mostly False.	None	U.S. Chamber of Commerce	None	None	None	2012-02-15T15:44:00	2012-02-09	['United_States', 'Tammy_Baldwin']
-tron-01424	The Mayo Clinic Grapefruit Diet	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/mayoclinicdiet/	None	food	None	None	None	The Mayo Clinic Grapefruit Diet	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-11396	"Since taking office, Andrew Cuomo has given massive tax breaks to corporations and the super rich."	mostly false	/new-york/statements/2018/mar/23/cynthia-nixon/cynthia-nixon-claims-cuomo-has-helped-corporations/	Actress Cynthia Nixon quickly went on the attack against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo when she announced she would run against him in a primary for governor. Nixon, a Democrat, portrayed the incumbent as a career politician who has spent his time in office pandering to corporations and the wealthy and passing legislation for their benefit, Nixon said. "Since taking office, Andrew Cuomo has given massive tax breaks to corporations and the super rich," Nixon said. Nixon’s campaign staff said she was talking about cuts to the state’s corporate tax rate and changes to the state’s tax code that favored wealthy filers. Cuomo and state lawmakers have reduced income tax rates for middle-class earners. PolitiFact New York checked Cuomo's claim that middle-class New York State residents will have the "lowest tax rate in 70 years" and found his statement to be Mostly True. Cuomo has also said "taxes for every New Yorker are lower today than when I started." PolitiFact New York ruled that it’s true income taxes for individuals, corporations, and manufacturers are lower than when he took office in 2011. But it ruled that statement Half True because property taxes are higher. But has he given "massive tax breaks" to corporations and high-income earners? Corporate taxes The state tax rate on corporations when Cuomo took office was 7.1 percent. State lawmakers struck a deal with Cuomo during the 2014 state budget that cut the rate to 6.5 percent, the lowest in almost half a century. The corporate tax rate for manufacturers was eliminated altogether. The deal also affected the estate tax -- a tax on one’s property and assets after death before inheritance. The tax applied to anyone with an estate worth more than $1 million before the deal. The state now only taxes estates worth more than about $5.2 million. The 'super rich’ Cutting corporate tax rates can help wealthy earners. As we have reported before, lower corporate taxes benefit wealthy shareholders of those companies. But aside from the higher estate tax threshold, Cuomo has not provided any "massive tax breaks" to super-rich earners. Even the estate tax benefit is questionable, said E.J. McMahon, research director at the Empire Center, a state fiscal watchdog group. "The estate tax reform did not save a penny for the super-rich," McMahon said. "The rate and scope of the tax on the largest estates is unchanged from before 2014." In 2011, Cuomo wanted to let the state’s so-called "millionaires tax" expire. Filers who reported more than $500,000 in state income would have seen their state tax rate fall from 8.97 percent to 6.85 percent if the tax expired. Democrats in the Assembly wanted to keep the "millionaires tax." In the end, Cuomo agreed to keep the tax but lowered the rate from 8.97 percent to 8.82 percent for the state’s highest earners. "By no stretch of the imagination is this a massive tax break for the super-rich," McMahon said. "In fact, in the dictionary definition of the term, there hasn’t been a ‘massive’ tax cut for anyone." One group did see a tax cut. The millionaires tax now only applies to single filers who earn more than about $1 million and married couples whose combined income exceeds about $2 million. The previous law imposed the millionaires tax on couples when their income was more than $500,000. Other tax cuts Nixon’s campaign also pointed to tax breaks for banks and real estate developers. Lawmakers repealed part of the tax law that determined how much state tax banks had to pay in 2014. Banks were instead added to the corporate tax code, which changed how much of their income was subject to state tax. That meant lower taxes for banks headquartered in New York state. Cuomo also approved legislation that gave tax breaks to five major real estate developers in New York City. A provision to waive property taxes for five projects over a decade was tucked into an omnibus housing bill in 2012. One developer was expected to save $35 million on a luxury apartment tower in Manhattan, for example. Cuomo was criticized for accepting campaign donations from the developers shortly before the bill was signed. Our ruling "Since taking office, Andrew Cuomo has given massive tax breaks to corporations and the super rich," Nixon said in a speech announcing her candidacy. Cuomo has approved a tax cut for corporations since taking office, and the new rates will be the lowest in decades. Some wealthy earners also have lower state income tax rates today than when Cuomo took office. But the tax breaks hven't been huge and, with one exception, hven't been for the "super rich." A higher tax rate for the wealthiest earners has continued under Cuomo and no other major tax breaks for those filers are apparent. We rate her claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Cynthia Nixon	None	None	None	2018-03-23T16:02:46	2018-03-20	['None']
-pose-01034	"Ending tax deductions for companies shipping jobs overseas, and using the saving to create a new tax credit for companies that bring jobs home."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/1114/create-new-tax-credit-companies-bring-jobs-united-/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Create a new tax credit for companies that bring jobs to the United States from overseas	2013-01-20T06:00:00	None	['None']
-tron-00473	Photos of a Bullfighter Who Got Gored Through the Throat by a Bull	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/matador-gored-throat/	None	animals	None	None	None	Photos of a Bullfighter Who Got Gored Through the Throat by a Bull	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-vogo-00447	Statement: “Through aggressive efforts by businesses and residents alike, we’re using far less water than we did 20 years ago, with a population that’s one-fifth larger,” Mayor Jerry Sanders said in his State of the City address Jan. 12.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/science-environment/fact-check-more-san-diegans-less-water/	Analysis: In his annual address, Sanders touted the drop as one of the city’s best accomplishments, highlighting new infrastructure and a “conservation culture” among residents.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: More San Diegans, Less Water	January 20, 2011	None	['None']
-goop-01032	Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez Secretly Engaged, Marrying In July Fourth Wedding?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-lopez-alex-rodriguez-engaged-marrying-july-fourth-wedding/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez Secretly Engaged, Marrying In July Fourth Wedding?	1:36 pm, May 8, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Lopez']
-pomt-04354	Elizabeth Townsend runs the elections office that omitted a school board race on a ballot and gave a School Board candidate "faulty advice."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2012/oct/23/shirley-anderson/herando-county-candidate-claims-rival-supervisor-e/	Hernando supervisor of elections candidate Elizabeth Townsend stood on stage at a recent political forum and defended herself against the way she was portrayed in recent flier distributed by her opponent, Shirley Anderson. "Elizabeth Townsend Runs The Office That . . ." the mailer reads in large yellow letters. Below the statement are excerpts from newspaper articles highlighting recent problems with the elections office. One headline reads, "Ballot omits school race." Another states "Faulty advice, political disaster / An election official steers School Board hopeful William Kingeter wrong." In this fact-check, we will examine the claim that Townsend runs the office. We'll also explore what role she had in the recent issues excerpted on the mailer. • • • Townsend has been the director of operations for the elections office since December 2010. The official job description for the position includes a list of more than 30 responsibilities. These include everything from informing and training staff on office procedures to ensuring that redistricting is carried out after each national census to knowing and understanding Florida election laws. Nowhere does it say the director of operations runs the office. The job description clearly denotes that the person in the position serves the supervisor of elections. The operations director, according to the description, is responsible for "performing assigned responsibilities effectively and efficiently within the framework set forth by the Supervisor of Elections." It also states the director will perform "other duties as assigned" and will handle "speaking engagements unless the Supervisor of Elections states otherwise." Hernando Supervisor of Elections Annie Williams took issue with the claim Anderson makes in the flier. "Liz does not run the office," she said. "I am ultimately responsible for everything that goes on in here." She added: "As far as running the office, Annie Williams is in charge of running the Supervisor of Elections Office." Between the job description and the statements from Williams, the answer of who runs the office seems clear-cut. But it gets a bit more complicated. In at least two places, Townsend has claimed to run or operate the Supervisor of Elections Office. When asked why she said Townsend runs the office, Anderson pointed to these statements. "I have run this office in a nonpartisan manner and have proven I will continue to do so by treating all voters and candidates with dignity and respect regardless of party affiliation," Townsend claims as part of her candidate statement on the Hernando elections office's website. On her campaign website, elizabethtownsend.org, she writes: "Currently as the Director of Operations, I: Operate the elections office in an efficient, fiscally responsible, nonpartisan manner." Williams disagreed with these characterizations. "That's somewhat overstated, yes," she said. Townsend said Williams runs the office. "My responsibilities obviously encompass things that are part of that office. It would be impossible to separate the two," she said in an email. "I operate and carry out my responsibilities within the framework that the supervisor of election sets. She runs the office." Said Anderson: "If (Townsend) is now trying to convince people that she does not oversee the daily operations of this office, then she has clearly embellished her resume." • • • So what about Townsend's role in the two incidents highlighted in the mailer? The July 26 headline, "Faulty advice, political disaster," refers to an incident where Williams mistakenly gave School Board candidate William Kingeter the incorrect election date after misreading Florida Statutes. Williams told him he would appear on the Nov. 6 general election ballot when School Board races were actually on the Aug. 14 primary ballot. Kingeter said the error cost him valuable campaign time. Williams admitted to making the mistake. In addition, Kingeter verified that Townsend did not give him the misinformation. Townsend's only involvement came later when she found out about the mistake. She called the candidate and provided him the correct information. The story "Ballot omits school race" highlights an incident that came shortly before the primary election. In it, one School Board race was omitted from one voting machine. A vendor failed to load the latest information, according to a news release provided by Advanced Ballot Solutions, the vendor. "It was identified that the ballot file installed on one of your systems by ABS was not updated with the official ballot for Style 31N1, as provided to us by the Hernando County Supervisor of Elections," it reads. The person who got the first incorrect ballot, School Board member Dianne Bonfield, noticed the problem and alerted the office. The problem was fixed, and no other voters were affected. Bonfield was eventually able to cast a correct ballot. The Tampa Bay Times asked Anderson if she had information connecting Townsend to these incidents. "Nowhere on the mailer did it say that she contributed directly to these gaffes," she wrote in an email. "You did." Our ruling Anderson's flier claims Townsend runs the elections office. That overstates her opponent's role. Both Townsend's job description and her boss make it very clear: The supervisor of elections runs the Supervisor of Elections Office. But Townsend also stretched the truth by claiming to run or operate the office. They are both misleading statements. As for connecting Townsend to the incidents cited in the mailer, Anderson misleads voters. Townsend had no role in them. For stretching the truth and misleading voters, PolitiFact rates this claim Mostly False.	None	Shirley Anderson	None	None	None	2012-10-23T17:22:08	2012-10-17	['None']
-pomt-09035	"I’m running against a groundhog. He saw his shadow on the primary day, and no one has seen him since."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/jul/06/jeff-weems/democrat-jeff-weems-says-republican-foe-has-been-o/	Houston lawyer Jeff Weems, the Democratic nominee for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, says his November opponent is so low, he’s below ground. "I’m running against a groundhog," Weems said June 26 at the Texas Democratic Party’s convention in Corpus Christi. "He saw his shadow on the primary day, and no one has seen him since." Say what? Weems had already flashed a flair for appellations; he called his opponent a "potted plant" in June 25 remarks to the convention’s United Auto Workers caucus. Later, he told us in an e-mail he’s crossed paths with GOP nominee David Porter only once since the March 2 primaries; the two spoke separately at an April event in Wichita Falls. Weems said Porter’s campaign website and Facebook page reflect "a similar lack of activity." He said the online Texas Tribune "has been trying to schedule a debate or meeting or panel discussion with the two of us, but his campaign will not return their phone calls." Michael Blunk, Weems’ campaign assistant, followed up in an e-mail, saying: "We call David a groundhog because he's not showing his face any more, he went back into hiding." Porter, a CPA who lives in Giddings but has long practiced in Midland, hasn’t proved a media hound before or after upsetting the better-funded GOP incumbent, Victor Carrillo, in their primary, a search for news articles suggests. Shortly after the primary, the Midland Reporter-Telegram quoted Porter, who had long been a local businessman, insisting he wasn’t running a stealth campaign; the candidate was quoted saying he’d done mailouts, in-person campaigning and made online efforts to reach voters before the primary. Using the Nexis search tool, we found 17 articles about Porter and the railroad commission published from January until the March primary. From then through June, there have been 41 articles or blogs mentioning Porter and the commission, most of them reflecting on Carrillo’s loss. Our search yielded one mention of a Porter campaign stop; on April 18, the Wichita Falls Times Record News included a sentence about Weems and Porter appearing at the April 21 Alliance of Energy Producers meeting in Wichita Falls. Of course, minimal news coverage doesn’t prove a candidate is deliberately out of sight. A Nexis search for articles on Weems and the commission from January through June delivered 34 results. Down-ballot candidates nearly always draw less attention than, say, aspirants for governor or the U.S. Senate. To get a feel for Porter’s online outreach, we read his Twitter posts. Snippets: On March 3, Porter announced Barry Williamson, a former railroad commissioner, as his campaign chairman; on May 20, the candidate said he was heading to a GOP meeting in Lee County; on June 17, he hailed the backing of Michael Williams, current commissioner; and on June 28, Porter wrote: "Last week was busy with several meetings in Houston, and Austin and ending up Saturday night at the Bastrop Tea Party with about 250 people." About 15 minutes later, he wrote: "Know of an event I should attend? Please email Info@VoteDavidPorter.com." Seeking other signs of campaign activity, we looked at Porter’s campaign site, which didn’t list any events. So, stealth candidate after all? Not so, said Corbin Casteel of Austin, Porter’s general consultant. Casteel said Porter has been balancing a wind-down of his accounting business with politics; during May and June the candidate made 33 campaign stops in nine counties including Bastrop, Travis, Tarrant, Dallas and Harris. "It’s all energy (group) meetings and GOP leader meetings," Casteel said. Casteel declined to share details of the stops, saying that would play into Weems’ hands. "We’re not going to let him bait you into us releasing (Porter’s) political activity," Casteel said. Ahead, Casteel said, Porter plans to attend events hosted by the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association and natural gas companies and he’ll make a tour of more than 40 counties. Casteel called Weems’ claim Porter has not returned the Tribune’s calls "a lie." Ross Ramsey, the Tribune’s managing editor, said it hasn’t had communication difficulties with either campaign. One event Porter likely won’t join: a debate. "Jeff Weems is a litigator," Casteel said. "David Porter is an accountant. Why would we put our candidate in that position, to stand in front of a podium?" We asked about Porter’s infrequent Twitter posts. Casteel said: "David is being true to himself and who he is as a person and candidate. He’s not going to use social media in a way to produce faux activity." Trying another tack, we contacted officials with groups that watch the commission closely. Bill Stevens, executive vice president of the energy alliance, said that since the primary, Porter has participated in a 30-minute conference call with the alliance and came to its Wichita Falls meeting. Wayne Hughes, executive vice president of the Panhandle Producers & Royalty Owners Association, said Porter provided answers for a questionnaire printed in the group’s May newsletter. Asked if the GOP hopeful has otherwise seemed out of sight, Hughes replied: "We don’t have any guidelines for judging Mr. Porter’s appropriateness as a candidate. We feel like we have a clear picture of what Mr. Weems is all about and his appropriateness as a candidate. Can I stop there?" We informed Weems of the activities summarized by Porter's campaign. He stood by his convention critique. Our suss: Porter has kept a low profile, but that does not a Punxsutawney candidate make. The Democrat's statement is Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Jeff Weems	None	None	None	2010-07-06T06:00:00	2010-06-26	['None']
-pomt-02644	On foreign policy, Joe Biden was against aid for Vietnam, said the fall of the Shah was "a step forward" for human rights in Iran, opposed Reagan's defense build-up and voted against the first Gulf War.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/16/robert-gates/robert-gates-criticism-vice-president-joe-biden/	A new memoir from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates hit the book shelves this month, drawing both praise and criticism for its candid insights into the two most recent presidents Gates worked for, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and their administrations. Washington reporters immediately latched on to Gates’ portrayal of Vice President Joe Biden. Biden, he said, is a nice guy — "simply impossible not to like" — but "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." Ouch. Asked to back up his harsh words Jan. 13, 2014, on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Gates replied: "Frankly, I believe it. The vice president, when he was a senator — a very new senator — voted against the aid package for South Vietnam, and that was part of the deal when we pulled out of South Vietnam to try and help them survive. He said that when the Shah fell in Iran in 1979 that that was a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran. He opposed virtually every element of President Reagan's defense build-up. He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX and so on. He voted against the first Gulf War. So on a number of these major issues, I just frankly, over a long period of time, felt that he had been wrong." This is not an argument without consequence. Biden served for years on the Foreign Relations Committee, including several stints as chairman, and he was picked as Obama’s running mate in part because of his experience in world affairs. For someone of Gates’ stature to publicly criticize a sitting vice president is uncommon. We can’t — and won’t — weigh in on whether Biden was on the right or wrong side of history. That’s a debate that likely will never end. Nor are we stipulating that Gates’ examples are the definitive list by which the last 40 years of U.S. foreign relations will be judged. But we did wonder if Gates’ description of Biden’s history was accurate. That led us to this review of the career of a man who first entered the Senate in 1973 and who twice has acted on his presidential ambitions and may again in 2016. History between Biden and Gates Biden won his first election in 1972 at just 29, fueled by the anti-war sentiments of a generation wary of the Vietnam conflict. Biden later said he "wasn’t against the war for moral reasons; I just thought it was stupid policy." At other times in his career, Biden advocated for military intervention. Most notably, Biden was an early and instrumental advocate of military intervention in the Serbia and Kosovo conflicts during the Clinton administration. He reportedly called Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic "a damn war criminal" to his face and later said his work in the Balkans was one of his two "proudest moments in public life." Biden and Gates have not always disagreed. In his memoir Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Gates recalled fighting military leaders in 2007 to get more money to protect troops on the ground against roadmines. It was Biden who offered an amendment to fund Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles to the tune of $1.5 billion. It passed unanimously. But there’s clearly tension between Gates and Biden. Gates wrote that just sitting next to Biden was "awkward" because they so frequently were at odds. Biden is mentioned on nearly six dozen pages of Gates’ 600-page memoir, often in an unflattering light. Biden, too, has not always been so kind to Gates. When President George H.W. Bush nominated Gates to director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1991, Biden not only voted against his confirmation, he openly criticized Gates. "I believe it is time for us to look forward. I have been disappointed in the past in Mr. Gates’ analytical skills, especially in regard to the Soviet Union," Biden said, according to the Senate record. "I have chosen to err on the side of new thinking." A few minutes later, Gates won confirmation by a vote of 64-31. When Gates was confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate 95-2 to Secretary of Defense under the second Bush, Biden was one of three senators not to vote. Clearly, these two men have some history. But what about Gates’ claims regarding Biden’s record? Let’s go through them one by one. Biden "voted against the aid package for South Vietnam." On April 10, 1975, President Gerald Ford requested Congress to provide nearly $1 billion in military and humanitarian aid to South Vietnam within nine days. By this point, American intervention in Vietnam was waning after two decades of involvement, and Ford’s request was the final attempt to bring U.S. assistance to the war-torn country. On April 25, 1975, the Senate approved a conference report to provide some financial assistance on a 46-17 vote. Biden, just two years after taking office, voted against the measure. The bill ultimately died in the House. And on April 29, as the South Vietnam capital of Saigon was captured, Ford order an evacuation of all remaining U.S. personnel from Indochina. Biden said when "the Shah fell in Iran in … 1979 ... that that was a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran." We were not able to find evidence that Biden spoke positively of the fall of the Shah. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was the leader of Iran until January 1979, when he and his family were forced out of the country by backers of Ruhollah Mostafavi Musavi Khomeini, an exiled cleric critical of the regime. Khomeini returned to the country in February 1979 to claim power as supreme leader and proclaim the Islamic Republic of Iran, the state it remains in today. An extensive search through newspaper archives found no instances of Biden speaking positively of the Shah’s ouster. Jules Witcover, author of Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, does not recall coming across such a statement in his research, either. We found reference to the statement in a 2008 opinion piece published by the New York Post that heavily criticized Obama’s choice of Biden as his VP. But there was no source for it. The comment has continued to circulate in conservative media, again without citation. We contacted both the Post and the author to ask for a source, but we didn’t hear back. Through a publicist, we asked Gates to back up the claim. They simply referred us back to his book. We found no other source for this statement, and especially no original citation, so we have significant doubts that it’s accurate. We will update this point if more evidence comes to light. Biden "opposed virtually every element of President Reagan's defense build-up. He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX and so on." Following World War II, the United States’ approach to the Soviet Union and the spread of communism centered on containment. President Ronald Reagan changed that, said Barry Watts, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a national security think tank. "If you read through key national security documents written under Reagan, they basically turn their back on containment and say, ‘we can win this thing,’" Watts said. "And the defense build-up under Reagan is the concrete substantiation to put increased pressure on (the Soviets)." During the next eight years, Reagan would push Congress to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on defense. One such proposal was to bring back the B-1 bomber, a plane canceled under President Jimmy Carter. On Dec. 3, 1981, Biden voted for an amendment to eliminate funds for the B-1 from the defense appropriation bill. The amendment failed, and the defense spending bill passed the Senate a day later with $2.4 billion for the B-1. Biden did not vote on the Senate bill. The same bill also contained $2 billion for the MX, an intercontinental ballistic missile known as the "Peacekeeper." Biden voted for an amendment that would have eliminated some funding for the MX, which failed. The B-2, also known as the "Stealth bomber," was a secret project for much of the 1980s. Funding for the project was included in the 1987 defense spending bill, but the amount was classified. Biden voted for the final bill, but we could not find his position on that particular appropriation. However, from 1989 to 1992, Biden continually voted for measures that stripped funding from the B-2 project, according to voting record scorecards kept by the Council for a Livable World, a group that advocates for nuclear arms control. As for the rest of the defense build-up, Biden voted in favor of the final military spending compromise resolutions passed by Congress throughout the Reagan years, his office noted. But he also often voted against many of the administration’s military priorities during the amendment phase. Biden annually earned high ratings in the 1980s voting scorecards from the Council for a Livable World, which generally opposed Reagan’s defense build-up. The exception was in 1987 and 1988, when he earned low marks after missing many of the votes while running for president. Biden "voted against the first Gulf War." Biden was a staunch opponent of the first invasion of Iraq in 1991 under President George H.W. Bush. The day before the vote, he delivered a blistering speech against the war and accused Bush of threatening to usurp the constitution to commit troops without congressional consent. But Biden was not alone in his dissent. The House had its longest debate in the history of the chamber in deciding whether to go to war, according to the Los Angeles Times, and the Senate only narrowly passed the joint resolution authorizing use of force in Iraq, 52-47. Biden voted no, citing a torn Congress and country. "Even if you win today, you still lose," Biden said on the day of the vote. "The nation is divided on this issue." Our ruling Gates’ assessments of Biden’s positions on South Vietnamese aid, the Reagan defense build-up and the first Gulf War are accurate, according to our research. However, we found no solid evidence that Biden actually said the fall of the Shah was a step forward for human rights in Iran. Experts will continue to debate whether foreign policy decisions of Gates and Biden will be viewed favorably by historians. But Gates portrayal of Biden’s record was accurate, with the exception of the unproven claim about Biden’s comments on Iran. We rate Gates’ statement Mostly True.	None	Robert Gates	None	None	None	2014-01-16T16:11:10	2014-01-13	['Joe_Biden', 'Iran', 'Ronald_Reagan', 'Vietnam', 'Gulf_War']
-pomt-01785	"The increase in the garbage tax that [Mayor Allan Fung] imposed in Cranston for some people has been as much as $200."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2014/jul/27/kenneth-block/ken-block-says-cranston-mayor-allan-fung-increased/	Cranston’s new automated trash collection system, approved in February, is just getting under way, but it has already raised a stink. Ken Block, a Republican candidate for governor, argues that the new program comes at an additional cost. He claims that Cranston Mayor Allan Fung, his gubernatorial primary opponent, has raised "the garbage tax" by "as much as $200 for some residents." Block raised the issue during a debate with Fung on Rhode Island Public Radio on July 15, 2014. When it was Block’s turn to ask Fung a question, he said, "You know, I’ve heard from a number of Cranston residents, including a few CPAs, that the increase in the garbage tax that you’ve imposed in Cranston for some people has been as much as $200 dollars. And for a number of people in Cranston, that’s equivalent to what is in effect a five-percent increase in their property tax … "So my question to you is: When you talk about not increasing taxes but you’re charging some people the equivalent of 5 percent increase in property taxes, with $200 to collect garbage where they paid much less than the year before, how do you explain that, and do you think that’s acceptable? I hear from a ton of people we talked to in Cranston; they’re very unhappy with this." In response, Fung said he’d heard from many residents that they’re happy with the new system. "I’m not sure where you’re talking about a garbage tax," he said. "We haven’t raised taxes." Garbage tax? $200 increase? Equivalent to 5-percent tax increase? Is this just a lot of trash talk? Here are the facts, according to the city’s website and the mayor’s office: Cranston’s new automated trash pickup system,which started in June, is intended to boost the city’s recycling rate from 23 percent to the state’s goal of 35 percent and potentially earn rebates; keep the city cleaner by using closed containers; and reduce the rodent population by using the largely chew-proof barrels. All in all, it should make for a cleaner, sweeter-smelling Cranston with an eased "critter" problem. As part of the program, Cranston residents have received two new, free 65-gallon rolling barrels, one for trash, the other for recyclables. Residents can opt for smaller, 35-gallon bins if the larger ones are too unwieldy. Residents who want a third barrel must pay $150 per year. There’s another change: the city no longer removes bulky items and appliances for free. Residents must pay $18 per bulky item, and $25 per mattress or box spring. The bottom line: There is no new "garbage tax," but there new fees for services that were free before. Now let’s examine Block’s claim. When we asked the Block campaign what he was talking about, they emailed us a five-page response, contending that he was referring to the charge for the optional extra barrels, and the new removal fees for bulky items. We should note that, in his back-and-forth with Fung, Block at one point said: "You don’t want to call it a tax - let’s call it a fee. They’re now paying a fee …" But he also used the words "tax" or "taxes" six times in roughly 30 seconds. In his email, Block explained his math. "The fact of the matter is that the citizens of Cranston are paying much more for trash removal than they were in the prior year when it was already done as a service paid for by their tax dollars," Block wrote. "Collectively every household that has an extra bin ($150), plus any household that has a large curbside item ($18 per item) adds up to a sum of money that Cranston taxpayers are collectively paying for out of pocket that they didn’t pay for the year before -- call it a fee, call it a tax, call it whatever, but many Cranston residents are now paying more for trash service than they were a year ago." As for the five percent: "If a homeowner has an annual property tax bill of $4,000 and he/she needs to purchase an extra bin, and also pay for three curbside items, "then he /she is paying approximately $300 in new fees, which is a 5% increase over their $4,000 tax bill." OK, but just a second. How many is "many" when we’re talking about people paying for additional bins? Block cites 2008 Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each person in the U.S. "creates a daily average of 4.5 pounds of solid waste." From that, Block extrapolates that "each person creates approximately 30 pounds of solid waste per week" in concluding that "larger families will need an extra bin or bins." Block also noted that the 65-gallon barrels provided in Cranston are smaller than the 90-gallon barrels provided in nearby Warwick. And he noted that residents who previously could discard bulky items such as sofas, carpets and mattresses will now have to pay extra fees. It’s a little early to predict how many people in Cranston will be paying extra for bulky waste or renting extra bins. But to date, out of 28,600 residential units that have received barrels, only 80 have requested an additional trash bin - or 0.3 percent, the mayor says. Fung also called Block’s statement "false in a number of respects" and noted that there hasn’t been an increase in property taxes for three years. "So even if a portion of the regular property tax were to be segregated or designated as paying for refuse removal services, the statement that there has been an ‘increase’ is false, because the overall tax rate has stayed constant for three consecutive years," he said. Our ruling During a radio debate, Ken Block said, "The increase in the garbage tax that [Mayor Allan Fung] imposed in Cranston for some people has been as much as $200." He then mentioned the word "tax or taxes" five more times. But there is no garbage tax. And only those who request an extra barrel or are discarding bulky items and mattresses will pay any extra fees. In fairness, Block later used the word "fee," and "additional fee." But we believe the average listener would conclude that Block was talking about a hike in -- or extra fee beyond -- an existing "garbage tax." In addition, Block’s claim that "many Cranston residents are now paying more for trash service than they were a year ago," is sweeping generalization. Only 80 residents have so far requested an extra barrel. We won’t say that Block’s claim is a whole lot of garbage. But it certainly misleads and exaggerates. We rule his statement False. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Kenneth Block	None	None	None	2014-07-27T00:01:00	2014-07-15	['None']
-tron-03081	Why Hillary Clinton Was Really in Beaumont, Texas	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hillary-clinton-really-beaumont-texas/	None	politics	None	None	['2016 election', 'hillary clinton', 'islam']	Why Hillary Clinton Was Really in Beaumont, Texas	Mar 17, 2016	None	['Beaumont,_Texas', 'Texas']
-pose-00248	"In the Obama Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency will strictly monitor and regulate pollution from large Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) - which raise more than 40 percent of U.S. livestock - with fines for those who violate tough air and water quality standards."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/264/regulate-pollution-from-major-livestock-operations/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Regulate pollution from major livestock operations	2010-01-07T13:26:53	None	['United_States', 'Presidency_of_Barack_Obama']
-pomt-00275	Says Democratic North Carolina House candidate Dan McCready "took money from the Pelosi crowd" and is "with them" in their agenda and "wants to repeal your tax cut."	half-true	/north-carolina/statements/2018/oct/02/mark-harris/powered-pelosi/	How genuine is a Democrat who talks like a conservative? In an ad, Mark Harris, a former pastor and Republican candidate in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, holds up two blue T-shirts to raise that question. One is light blue, the other royal blue — but hues can deceive, he suggests. In other words, Harris’s Democratic opponent, businessman Dan McCready, isn’t showing his true colors. McCready "talks like a conservative but is shading the truth," Harris tells viewers. "He donated to Hillary Clinton. Took money from the Pelosi crowd. McCready’s team wants to grow government, and repeal your tax cut. He’s with them, no matter how he tries to color it." Conservative and liberal shadings play a role in this race. The seat has been held by Republicans since 1963 but suddenly is competitive. McCready, the Democrat, says that if elected, he won't vote for Nancy Pelosi for House Democratic leader, or House speaker if the party wins a majority. But Harris says McCready is just trying to hide that he is "with" the "Pelosi crowd." So we took a look at the ad’s factual claims to find out. The money Federal campaign records show McCready, a Marine veteran, Harvard MBA and investor in solar farms, donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. He gave $500 to Clinton’s presidential campaign and $500 to the Hillary Victory Fund, a fundraising entity that gave proceeds to Clinton, the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties across the country. But what about the "Pelosi crowd?" We asked the Harris campaign and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which supports Republican candidates. They cited donations to McCready by Democrats on Pelosi’s leadership team. They also said the House Majority PAC, a leading super PAC spending heavily to elect Democrats, has spent money in the race. Tallies tracked by the Center for Responsive Politics show the House Majority PAC has spent $327,925 to oppose Harris. Technically, this is not Pelosi’s PAC, but it is considered affiliated. It works on the same goal as Pelosi: to win a Democratic House majority. And while the money is not legally considered a donation to McCready, it unquestionably helps him. Through its founder, the PAC has ties to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, the official campaign arm of House Democrats -- and Pelosi is the House Democrats’ elected leader. Also: The DCCC supports McCready. While it would likely support any Democrat who has a chance of winning, McCready was among the first candidates on the DCCC’s "Red to Blue" list, which "arms top-tier candidates with organizational and fundraising support," the DCCC said when announcing this. Pelosi chose Rep. Ray Ray Lujan, of New Mexico, to chair the DCCC, although fellow Democrats had to affirm her choice. That puts him in the "Pelosi crowd," the NRCC said. Lujan has his own leadership PAC, Turquoise PAC, and the PAC along with Lujan’s own reelection campaign committee have given McCready $5,000. Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland is the House Democratic whip, a key member of the Pelosi leadership team. He has given McCready’s campaign $14,000 through his own leadership PAC and his campaign committee. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina is assistant Democratic leader. His leadership PAC gave McCready $5,000. The PAC affiliated with Rep. Linda Sanchez of California, the Democratic caucus vice chair, donated $2,000.. McCready "has the blessing of party leaders — he is their candidate," Kerry Rom from the NRCC told us. "Support from Pelosi-linked organizations and her leadership team tells us where he ultimately stands on the issues." The smudges Is there a straight line from financial support for a candidate and the people — say, Pelosi — he’ll support? Steven Greene, a political science professor at North Carolina State University, said it’s more like a set of "big, gray smudges." "It would be folly to say that Nancy Pelosi has nothing to do" with decisions on where to put House leadership or allied resources, Greene said. "But it doesn’t suppose any loyalty to Pelosi" on McCready’s part, since McCready has made clear he wants a different Democratic House leader. McCready in November criticized Pelosi in a Charlotte Observer column, saying Pelosi "used moves from the Bill Clinton-era playbook" when initially defending Rep. John Conyers against charges of sexual assault. McCready told the Washington Post and others that Democrats need "new blood." His campaign told PolitiFact that if elected, McCready will not vote for Pelosi as leader. And he has received campaign donations from others who want Pelosi out. For example, the NRCC, in an email to us, listed Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, as part of Team Pelosi. Crowley’s leadership PAC donated $5,000 to McCready. But Crowley — who lost his recent primary election and won’t be in Congress next year — had said he would oppose Pelosi’s return to leadership. The tax cuts Harris uses the "Pelosi crowd" label to say that McCready wants to "grow government and repeal your tax cut." Yet there is no evidence of that. McCready has only said he wants to make sure the tax cuts for individuals and families stay in place after their scheduled 2025 expiration. "Dan will fight for middle-class tax cuts and policies to level the playing field for hardworking North Carolinians," his campaign website says. It is impossible to know what other policies "to level the field" might face a House vote, although some liberal Democrats have suggested raising corporate income tax rates closer to their pre-cut levels. This takes us into supposition for issue after issue: What would McCready do? That is actually the subtext of the Harris ad. McCready is a Democrat. He's "with" the Pelosi crowd. But there are degrees of beliefs and votes within the Democratic Party. To simplify in the spirit of the ad: There are California Democrats, and there are Southern Democrats. They are not all the same. Our ruling Are there ties between members of Team Pelosi and McCready? Absolutely. Does McCready support the same agenda as Democratic leaders such as Pelosi? Based on his website, he supports much of it, but it is the agenda of Democrats in general. He opposes turning Medicare into a voucher program. (House Republicans have proposed a program they say would be entirely voluntary.) He wants to protect the EPA from "a hatchet." He supports abortion rights. Such agreement, however, would make the overwhelming majority of Democrats "in with" Pelosi. It would mean the southern "blue dog" Democrats are. It would mean the East and West Coast Democrats are -- even those who want to replace her because they say she hasn't been foreceful or confrontational enough. There would be few distinctions When Republicans invoke Pelosi’s name and say an opponent is "with them," they are using "shorthand for ‘Oh, those liberals,’" Greene said. Harris’ claim has elements of truth. But it affixes a generic label that needs fuller context. We can’t say which shade of blue will come out of the wash, but we can rate the claim: Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Mark Harris	None	None	None	2018-10-02T12:00:00	2018-09-20	['Nancy_Pelosi']
-snes-00091	In the event of a hurricane, mobile phone users can update their voicemail greetings even if they lose WiFi and cellular service.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/update-voicemail-no-service/	None	Technology	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Can Mobile Phone Users Update Their Voicemail Greetings Without Cellular Service?	13 September 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-03607	"In 2010, everybody said you can't dare let guns go into the national parks, and of course the rapes, murders, robberies and assaults are down about 85 percent since we did that."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/may/09/tom-coburn/tom-coburn-says-after-national-park-gun-ban-lifted/	During an interview on the MSNBC show Morning Joe, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., argued for legislation he’s proposing that would allow guns to be carried into lands controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers. To make the case that guns make places safer, Coburn cited a dramatic before-and-after statistic that stems from the lifting of a ban on guns in national parks. Coburn was a leader in the effort to get Congress to approve the change. President Barack Obama signed the national park provision into law, and it took effect in February 2010. "In 2010," Coburn said on Morning Joe, "everybody said you can't dare let guns go into the national parks, and of course the rapes, murders, robberies and assaults are down about 85 percent since we did that." That’s a pretty stunning drop. Is it accurate? When we checked with Coburn’s office, John Hart, a spokesman, acknowledged that his senator had misspoken in a way that overstated the decline. Hart said Coburn’s office had compared FBI crime data on National Park Service land from 2008 to 2011, the most recent year available. By the office’s calculations, the number of violent incidents actually dropped by 12 percent, not 85 percent. "The numbers show crime rates have declined, but he misspoke when he mentioned 85 percent," Hart said. "On balance, the facts support our conclusion that crime rates would go down under our policy, not the conclusion of the amendment’s critics who said that allowing guns in national parks would lead to more crime." However, before we bless Coburn’s revised analysis, let’s look at the original data. Here’s a summary chart for violent crimes in the national parks between 2008 and 2011. Year Murder and non-negligent manslaughter Forcible rape Robbery Aggravated assault Total violent crimes 2008 5 37 66 259 367 2009 3 34 64 206 307 2010 15 45 58 251 369 2011 7 34 58 224 323 Change, 2008-11 +40% -8% -12% -14% -12% Change, 2009-11 +133% 0 -9% +9% +5% A few issues jump out to us. First, murders actually went up between 2008 and 2011, contrary to what Coburn said. More importantly, using 2008 as the "before" year in this before-and-after comparison amounts to cherry picking. As we noted, the law went into effect in 2010, so the most obvious way to frame the comparison would be to use the data from 2009 (the last full year before the gun ban was lifted) and 2011 (the most recent year). And as it turns out, the comparison to 2009 is not nearly as favorable to Coburn’s overall point. Between 2009 and 2011, these four categories of violent crimes actually rose collectively by 5 percent. Robberies did decline by 9 percent, but murders more than doubled (from a very small base), the number of rapes was stable and the tally of aggravated assaults -- by far the most common of these four crimes -- rose by 9 percent. Meanwhile, it’s also worth noting that the number of crimes in national parks is generally pretty small, which makes it unclear how much stock anyone should place in year-to-year percentage increases and decreases. Finally, we’ll point out that Coburn’s stated decline may -- or may not -- have been caused by the deterrence of having guns around. But if they were a cause for the decline from 2008 to 2011, what’s to stop someone from arguing that they were the cause of the increase from 2009 to 2011? The numbers alone simply don’t tell us. Our ruling On Morning Joe, Coburn said, "In 2010, everybody said you can't dare let guns go into the national parks, and of course the rapes, murders, robberies and assaults are down about 85 percent since we did that." Coburn’s office acknowledges that he misspoke; they actually calculated a decline of 12 percent, which is dramatically lower than 85 percent. But we find even the revised statistic to be questionable. It hinges on using 2008 data, when 2009 data would be more appropriate -- and a comparison using data from 2009 actually shows an increase in violent crime in national parks since the gun ban was lifted. Meanwhile, it’s far from clear that guns had an influence on the relatively small number of crimes that take place in national parks. We rate Coburn’s statement False.	None	Tom Coburn	None	None	None	2013-05-09T17:49:21	2013-05-09	['None']
-pomt-14582	"The American people will not support doing anything about people that are in this country illegally until the law is enforced first."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2016/feb/06/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-change-legal-status-illegal-immigrants/	Marco Rubio was grilled about his 2013 immigration bill during the ABC debate in New Hampshire, specifically about why he abandoned his own legislation. Debate moderator David Muir asked Rubio, "Gov. (Chris) Christie has said of you, as soon as you felt the heat, you turned tail and run. Gov. (Jeb) Bush has said, ‘I don't think we need people cutting and running anymore.’ Did you fight for your own legislation, senator, or did you run from it?" Rubio replied: "We can’t get that legislation passed. The American people will not support doing anything about people that are in this country illegally until the law is enforced first, and you prove it to them." Is that how the majority of Americans feel about changing immigration laws? Based on our previous fact-checks, we suspected public polling contradicted that position. We could not reach a Rubio spokesperson on debate night. Polls about path to legal status Rubio was a cosponsor of a bill that included a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. It included significant hurdles, including fines and a waiting period. The bill passed the Senate in 2013 but stalled in the House after leadership refused to bring it up for a vote. Since then, Rubio has called for a piecemeal approach that emphasizes border security first. Recent polls have asked people if they support a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants. That would allow them to work and pay taxes, but they would not be able to vote, for example, which would require citizenship. A May 2015 poll found broad public support for path to legal status, according to a report from the Pew Research Center. The poll found that 72 percent of Americans said that undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States should be allowed to stay in the country legally, if certain requirements are met. The poll found that 42 percent said they should be able to apply for citizenship while 26 percent said they should only be able to apply for permanent residency. Pew’s survey found that 56 percent of Republicans favored a path to legal status. However, George Hawley, a political scientist at the University of Alabama, previously told PunditFact that the Pew survey also shows a complicated set of attitudes. "A majority of Republicans also felt that giving people who came to the United States illegally a way to gain legal status is like rewarding them for doing something wrong," Hawley said. "Further, 42 percent of Republicans felt legal immigration should be decreased, compared to 21 percent who think it should be increased. Also, far more Republicans view immigrants as a burden, 63 percent, than view them as an asset for the country, 27 percent." Other 2015 polls also showed broad support for giving illegal immigrants a path to legal status. A Pew survey done in September 2015 found that "majorities across all demographic and partisan groups favor providing legal status to undocumented immigrants. Republicans (66 percent) continue to be less likely than independents (74 percent) or Democrats (80 percent) to support a path to legal status for those in the U.S. illegally." A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted in July found a majority of adults showed support for some sort of legal status. The poll found that 47 percent of all adults supported a pathway to citizenship while 17 percent supported the right to a legal status, adding up to a total of 64 percent. The majority of Republicans too supported some sort of legal status. Among Republicans, the poll found 36 percent support a pathway that eventually allows citizenship while 17 percent favored legal status, for a total of 53 percent. Gallup found in July 2015 that 65 percent favored a path to citizenship in a poll conducted in July 2015. But this poll included larger samples of blacks and Hispanics -- Hispanics are more likely than other groups to favor a path to citizenship. Gallup found big differences between the two major parties. At 80 percent, Democrats overwhelmingly favored a path to citizenship while that dropped to 50 percent for Republicans. So currently, majorities support allowing people here illegally to change their status in some way that allows them to stay. Polls conducted at the time the bill was being debated also showed public support, though. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in May 2013 -- a month before the Senate passed the bill -- asked, "Would you support or oppose a program giving undocumented immigrants now living in the United States the right to live here legally if they pay a fine and meet other requirements?" About 58 percent chose "support." When a path to legal status was specifically connected with border security, support hit 50 percent. But 44 percent said they should not be linked. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in April 2013 asked, "Do you think a law allowing people to apply for citizenship should take effect only after border control has been improved, or should take effect without being linked to border control efforts?" Fifty percent chose "after being improved," while 44 percent said "without being linked" while the remainder were unsure. One expert told us it’s not so much that the general public opposes immigration legislation, but that House members in competitive districts fear losing primary races. "Some polls ask about other immigration policies, like building a wall, using e-verify, etc. which are generally favored, but polls have shown for a while now that there is broad support for some pathway to legalization or citizenship," said Stephen A. Nuño, a professor of politics and international affairs at Northern Arizona University. "The problem is that high concentrations of Republicans in those Republican House members’ districts are feared and are closely watched by potential challengers. There is the other thing that many Republican leaders simply don't want a pathway to legalization regardless of what the country wants." Our ruling Rubio said, "The American people will not support doing anything about people that are in this country illegally until the law is enforced first." Multiple polls have showed that the majority of Americans support some type of status to allow illegal immigrants to remain in the United States -- and some extend that to citizenship. We found one poll that suggested people would like to see border enforcement first, but there are many polls that show straightforward support for legal status. We rate this claim Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/9632eb5c-a709-4c91-a182-1376ae3ecab0	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2016-02-06T23:33:25	2016-02-06	['United_States']
-pomt-14970	Says CNN deleted an online poll showing Bernie Sanders won the first Democratic presidential debate to help out Hillary Clinton.	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2015/oct/19/nowthis/no-internet-cnn-did-not-delete-its-poll-showing-be/	A conspiracy theory rattled the Bernieverse soon after many media outlets, including CNN, pronounced Hillary Clinton the winner of the first Democratic presidential debate. Some of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters said no, Sanders was the clear winner, evidenced by a CNN poll that showed most people thought Sanders was best. The problem: CNN deleted the poll. The theory: CNN deleted the poll to so as not to counter its narrative that Clinton won. A video by NowThis, which shares GIFs and video stories by social media, picked up on a Reddit theory and promoted this video on Twitter and Facebook, teasing, "It looks like CNN is trying to help Hillary look good, even if that means deleting polls." Here’s part of the script that was seen by millions: "The Internet thinks Bernie Sanders totally won the debate. But CNN thinks Hillary won. Even though CNN’s own polls say Bernie won by 68 percent. But that doesn’t concern them. They allegedly just deleted the polls." The video suggests CNN "deleted the polls" showing Sanders won because CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, is "one of Hillary’s biggest donors," spending more on her campaign than "Bernie’s top 15 donors gave him." This is just one example of a viral claim. For now, we will skip the part about the conspiracy that focuses on Time Warner’s campaign donations, because there’s a fundamental flaw with these posts. CNN didn’t delete its poll. The poll showing Sanders way ahead is here on Facebook through CNN.com/vote. It’s not on CNN’s website, but it’s not clear that it ever was on CNN’s website. The original link does not appear to be working on some mobile devices. Try this link if you are having problems with the links above. It should take you to a log-in screen and then show the poll, which has closed. CNN’s digital team used a Facebook app to run live polls of users about what they thought of the debate as it was happening. CNN anchor Don Lemon reported on the strong show of support for Sanders from CNN’s Facebook Lounge on debate night. Lemon mentioned how Facebook users thought Sanders excelled on foreign policy, economic issues and overall debate performance. So not only did CNN not delete the poll, but the news channel also did not hide it. It might be obvious, but these are clearly non-scientific polls. NowThis attempted to correct its report on Facebook by posting this update on the video’s comment stream: "Clarification: This was an unofficial social media user poll, and CNN says it's still live on their web site and Facebook page." But again, you don't have to take CNN's word for it that the post wasn't deleted, and NowThis can't hide behind the use of the word allegedly. The poll is here for anyone to see. Here's a screengrab we took Oct. 19: Our ruling Sanders supporters are free to disagree with analysis by journalists and pundits of who won the Democratic debate. What isn’t up for debate, however, is the fact that CNN did not delete its poll of Facebook users, who overwhelmingly said Sanders won the debate. It’s still on a Facebook page managed by CNN. We rate the claim Pants on Fire. We've updated this fact-check to account for some of the issues we've heard from users about opening the links. Some of our links were not working on some readers' mobile devices.	None	NowThis	None	None	None	2015-10-19T15:14:03	2015-10-15	['Bernie_Sanders', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-faan-00108	 Islamic State is “a force bent on … genocide.”	factscan score: true	http://factscan.ca/stephen-harper-islamic-state-is-a-force-bent-on-genocide/	Like Stephen Harper has done, experts from academia, rights groups, and the United Nations have described Islamic State as a genocidal organization.	None	Stephen Harper	None	None	None	2015-02-20	mber 30, 2014	['None']
-pomt-01231	"The Kochs stand to make around $100 billion if the government approves the Keystone XL pipeline."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2014/nov/19/thom-hartmann/does-keystone-xl-promise-100-billion-profit-koch-b/	Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline are stoking fear about the project by connecting it to two of the biggest bogeymen in politics: Charles and David Koch. The claim goes that the Koch brothers stand to make $100 billion if the pipeline gets built. The figure, which would effectively double the Kochs’ net worth, has bounced around liberal news organizations and was repeated this month by progressive radio talk show and TV host Thom Hartmann on his RT show. Take it with a block of salt, a PunditFact analysis finds. The $100 billion estimate is far from a neutral analyst’s prediction, based instead on the far-out calculations of a group that wants the pipeline, and the Koch brothers, to fail. Here’s what you need to know. Keystone and Kochs in context First, let’s put $100 billion in perspective. That’s an enormous sum, half as much as Facebook’s value, about the same as the Dominican Republic’s GDP and approximately equal to the Kochs’ combined, reported net worth. If the brothers had a sure windfall on their hands, you might think they would be actively promoting the pipeline, or at least be positioned to pounce by reserving space in it or actively drilling in the area. (Map via TransCanada.) But the Kochs have repeatedly told reporters and Democratic lawmakers that the company has no involvement in the pipeline and is not a proposed customer. For the record, "we are supportive of it," Koch Industries spokesman Rob Tappan told PunditFact. Pipeline builder TransCanada has also tried swatting down Koch connections, saying Koch Industries has "absolutely nothing" to do with the pipeline. Koch Industries is, however, a major player in the Canadian oil market. The Washington Post identified the company in April 2014 as the largest foreign leaseholder of acres of Canadian oil sands. An Alberta Energy spokesman told us the agency could not confirm the Post’s analysis of Koch-leased lands -- estimated to be between 1.12 million to 1.47 million acres -- because "organizations like Koch can change and occasionally restructure." Even so, the considerable amount of land leased by the Kochs does not automatically signal that the Kochs will get a sure $100 billion payout, or any payout. Many of the Koch land-leases, the Post reported, came before Keystone was ever proposed, the company has not reserved space in the pipeline as is typical, and the pipeline route would not run near Koch-owned refineries. How you get $100 billion The origin of the Keystone = $100 billion for the Kochs line stems from a 2013 report from the International Forum on Globalization. While that group may sound neutral, it in fact opposes "free market" institutions such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and North American Free Trade Agreement. The group also makes no secret of its opposition to the pipeline and Koch Industries. It produced an October 2013 report, "The Billionaires’ Carbon Bomb: Koch brothers and Keystone XL." Experts we consulted were struck by the report’s bias, with chapters devoted to victims of "Koch greed" and the Kochs’ vast web of nonprofit spending for political aims, as well as its calculation that the Keystone XL pipeline carries "$100 billion in potential profits" for the Kochs. Experts in energy, economics and business called the methodology behind the figure "absurd" and "puzzling." In PunditFact terminology, that would be Pants on Fire. In an email, International Forum on Globalization executive director Victor Menotti (notable for his arrest during anti-WTO protests in 1999) said his group kept the methodology "simple to give people a credible idea of what Koch has at stake with Keystone." The group came up with two different numbers -- experts didn’t vouch for either -- and multiplied them together to come up with Kochs' potential profits. The group assumed that the land leased by Koch would contain 15 billion barrels of "profitable-to-produce" Canadian tar sands oil, a guesstimate extrapolated from one documented 2006 sale of a 374,000-acre parcel with 47 billion barrels of oil mixture (more details on page 8 of the IFG report). The group assumed a $15 gross production per barrel due to Keystone XL. Multiply one by the other and you get $90 billion. Round it up by $10 billion and you get headlines. Counting the ways We consulted four experts in energy economics and the petroleum industry to review the forum’s report and offer their analysis. They pointed out 10 significant flaws. 1. Price of oil is down: When the report was released, oil prices were about $100 a barrel. They’ve since fallen to about $75 a barrel, a drop that cuts into the report’s estimated profit of $15 per barrel. Menotti acknowledges this and said his group is working on an update that accounts for the drop in the price of oil since the summer. 2. Not realistic: The amount of oil the group says the Kochs will pump through the pipeline (15-16 billion barrels) is "enough to fill Keystone XL to capacity for about 80 years if you assume that all the oil is shipped as diluted bitumen," said Andrew Leach, a professor of energy policy at the University of Alberta School of Business. 3. Unlikely payoff: Leach said a better measure to understand the potential return for the Kochs is by looking at current lease sale prices. In Alberta, oil leases are running about $70 an acre. Multiply that by 2 million acres -- the high end of what the Kochs may have -- and you get $140 million. "It’s pretty hard to believe that a pipeline would increase the value of an oil sands lease by three orders of magnitude," Leach said. 4. Development takes time: According to the Vancouver Observer, Koch has filed a development permit for one site, "but the time to develop all 2 million acres would be very long," Leach said. The weather and infrastructure costs present more of a challenge to produce in Alberta. 5. Keystone creates more competition: The pipeline would introduce more competition into refineries that have been bottlenecked with too much oil from Bakken and Midwestern crude at Cushing, Okla., pipelines, the experts said. If the pipeline is built, more Canadian oil sands could enter the market at Gulf Coast refineries to compete with oil brought in from the Middle East and Venezuela. "Competition doesn’t usually lead to increased prices," said Anastasia Shcherbakova, a University of Texas Dallas clinical assistant professor in energy economics and energy finance. 6. Does not factor in taxes: The report does not factor in taxes or royalties that need to be paid to the Canadian government, another factor that eats into the assumption of $15 profit per barrel, said Detlef Hallermann, a Texas A&M University associate clinical finance professor who earned his doctoral degree in mineral economics. 7. Lack of discount rate: The usable oil substance will not be plied from below the surface all at once. Oil-sands mining is a long-term, high-cost investment, and the report does not go into how long the estimated 6 billion barrels would take to produce. Revenues generated over time should be calculated in present value, not nominal terms, to reflect how much it costs to bring the project online and maintain it, Shcherbakova said. "My understanding of the analysis ... is they’re counting all $100 billion as if it’s all coming to you today," Hallermann said. 8. The Kochs don’t own the land: The Kochs are not the owners of these acres, they own the rights to explore the parcels themselves. Leases are held for a term, not for forever, said Terry McInturff, chairman of Texas Tech University’s area of energy, economics and law. 9. Every acreage is not equal: The report assumes the geology of the leased land is uniform and will yield uniform amounts of oil. But that is not how it works in Alberta’s boreal forests. "That would be too easy," Shcherbakova said. 10. Assumes no Keystone, no oil: Experts also noted that the report mistakenly assumes that other methods to transport crude oil sands would not happen if the pipeline is rejected. Our ruling The claim here is that the Koch brothers will turn a $100 billion profit if the Keystone XL pipeline is constructed, essentially doubling their net worth. As we’ve shown, the Kochs hold oil leases in Canada. We're not ruling out that they could benefit in some ways from the Keystone XL pipeline. But trying to extrapolate their oil-sands leases into a specific profit figure is sheer folly. The authors of the report that tried to do so made so many assumptions and mistakes that experts deemed their analysis "absurd." We rate it Pants on Fire!	None	Thom Hartmann	None	None	None	2014-11-19T16:10:15	2014-11-07	['None']
-goop-01557	Kendall Jenner In Love With Scott Disick?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kendall-jenner-scott-disick-in-love/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kendall Jenner In Love With Scott Disick?	3:46 pm, February 16, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08417	Says Republican Reid Ribble says stimulus bill failed to jumpstart the economy, but his "roofing company made almost $300,000 off stimulus funded projects."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2010/oct/20/democratic-congressional-campaign-committee/democratic-group-says-republican-us-house-candidat/	If you can’t trust a candidate’s own official campaign biography, just what can you trust? That’s a question that popped up as we tried to determine the accuracy of a television ad from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attacking Reid Ribble, the Republican challenging two-term U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen (D-Appleton). No, Ribble is not one of those wannabes who claimed he was a decorated war hero when the closest he came to action was watching a Rambo movie. This is more mundane -- until recently, Ribble’s bio posted on his own campaign website said he owned a roofing company. That ownership claim helped give the DCCC -- whose aim is to win or hold seats for Democrats -- an opening to air an attack ad portraying Ribble as a hypocrite on stimulus money. The 8th Congressional District, which includes Green Bay and the Fox Valley, has long been considered a swing seat. Both sides have targeted it this year. And with jobs on the mind of voters, it’s little surprise Democrats would tag Ribble as looking out for himself instead of others. The ad starts with newsreel-style black and white footage, with an announcer loudly proclaiming, "Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Politician says one thing, does another!" It goes on to say Ribble has criticized the stimulus plan, which Kagen supported, saying it failed to "jumpstart" the economy, but his "roofing company made almost $300,000 off stimulus funded projects." That was just the first of the finger pointing: The Ribble campaign responded by calling the Democrats liars, saying the candidate sold the family business in December 2009 and, besides, the jobs in question weren’t worth anywhere near $300,000. Charges of lies and hypocrisy. That’s our cue. Let’s try to sort this all out. It should be an easy job -- either Ribble’s roofing company got the contracts or it didn’t; either he owned it at the time or it had been sold. But, as reporters and roofers know, looks can be deceiving. Sometimes you just have to look under a couple of shingles to see what’s what. For its backup, spokeswoman Gabby Adler said the DCCC found references to Reid Ribble owning the company on his campaign website and the roofing company’s website. Though not mentioned in the ad, the Democrats are citing a contract awarded by the Kaukauna School District to Security Roofing -- a division of The Ribble Group -- to renovate the roof of Haen Elementary School. The contract was awarded in October 2009, but the work was done in 2010. Let’s start with the ownership question. Brandon Moody, Ribble campaign manager, said The Ribble Group was sold to Ribble’s nephew, Troy Ribble, in December 2009. Ribble, Moody said, had no ownership stake when the project was done and the company was paid. "It’s a timeline issue and it’s a lie," Moody said. Then we peeked under the shingle. We found it’s the Ribble campaign that has a timeline problem. The roofing job was awarded by the school district in October 2009, said Robert Schafer, district financial officer for the Kaukauna schools. That’s before the company was sold. Not only that, Schafer said, when the bids were sought, Reid Ribble was the contact person for the company. Troy Ribble, confirmed his uncle handled the bid for the project. In our search, we came across paperwork filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission in February 2010 that lists Reid Ribble as chairman of the company. They had done some work in Virginia earlier this year. What gives? "He is the chairman of the board of directors," Troy Ribble told PolitiFact Wisconsin. Troy said his uncle, however, does not own stock in the 52-year-old company and is not involved as an executive in day-to-day operations. Reid Ribble remains a consultant, Troy said. The acquisition makes him the third generation of Ribbles to own the firm. What’s more, on Oct. 13, 2010 -- some 10 months after Ribble said he sold the company -- we found his campaign website read: "Reid owns and operates one of the most successful roof construction and consulting companies in the United States." Ribble’s Facebook page is even clearer: It lists him as the president of the Ribble Group Inc. Even the company site still listed him as president until at least early October. Like the campaign site, that website has since been changed. For his part, Moody referred to the out-of-date campaign website as "minutia." But for a first-time candidate, one promising to bring his business acumen to Washington, that life story -- and how it’s presented to the public -- strikes us as important. Meanwhile, we asked repeatedly for documentation that the firm had been sold, but the campaign did not provide it. The campaign sent us a copy of a June 14, 2010, letter from attorney Roy Fine to Troy Ribble that refers to the sale of the company. The letter asks Troy to sign "Resolutions by you as the sole remaining shareholder dated effective Dec. 10," as well as forms for the redemption of Reid Ribble’s stock and his employment agreement. So, regardless of whether the company was sold, Reid Ribble still has strong ties to the company. He is chairman, receives a monthly consulting fee and was active when the company bid on the school district work. Now let’s look into the $300,000 figure the Democrats use as the price tag. To back up the claim, Adler produced a letter from the school district to the state Department of Public Instruction outlining $1 million worth of projects that it hoped to finance with the no-interest bonds issued as a result of the stimulus. The list included $700,000 worth of roofing projects. But asking is different than receiving. Only $500,000 worth of bonding authority was granted, said Natalie Rew, auditor for the state Department of Public Instruction. Of that, only about $133,000 was paid to The Ribble Group, Schafer said, noting the remainder went to other projects. (The Ribble Group has done other large projects for the district, work not funded with stimulus dollars.) That’s a long way from making "almost $300,000 off stimulus funded projects." That’s laying the shingles on a little thick. So, what do we know? Ribble says he sold his company in December 2009, but has not shown us a definitive document to prove it, instead offering a "trust me" response. That’s hard to do when the campaign’s own website, which the Democrats relied on in making their claim, until recently, touted Ribble’s ownership. Besides, Ribble remains involved as chairman. As for the project itself, the school district said the job was awarded while Reid Ribble was in charge, even if the work was done later. But the $300,000 figure the Democrats cite is also off, way off -- the actual amount received was about $133,000. With the sloppiness on both sides, here’s the cleanest we can call it: Half True.	None	Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee	None	None	None	2010-10-20T09:00:00	2010-10-08	['None']
-bove-00015	CLAIM: NDA repaid the pending bills of oil bonds worth Rs 1.4 lakh crore.	none	https://www.boomlive.in/have-upa-era-oil-bonds-prevented-modi-govt-from-reducing-oil-prices/	FACT: False. Out of the Rs 1.44 lakh crore bonds issued by UPA between 2005 to 2010, only two bonds to the sum of Rs 3,500 crore matured during NDA’s term. The next one will mature only in October 2021.	None	None	None	None	Have UPA-Era Oil Bonds Prevented Modi Govt From Reducing Oil Prices?	Sep 15 2018 11:58 am, Last Updated: Sep 19 2018 11:39 am	None	['None']
-goop-00011	Angelina Jolie Tried Getting Brad Pitt Back With Help From Selena Gomez?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-tried-getting-brad-pitt-back-with-help-from-selena-gomez/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Angelina Jolie Tried Getting Brad Pitt Back With Help From Selena Gomez?	2:06 am, November 11, 2018	None	['Angelina_Jolie', 'Brad_Pitt']
-snes-02424	A photograph shows "rainbow mountains" in Peru.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rainbow-mountains-of-peru/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Are the ‘Rainbow Mountains of Peru’ Real?	16 May 2017	None	['Peru']
-pomt-10987	"$1.8 billion Of Soros’ money just intercepted – he could officially go to prison for years"	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/13/blog-posting/soros-not-headed-jail/	Billionaire George Soros has made his final donation, according to some conservative bloggers. A May article in Right Wing News says that nearly $2 billion of his money was "intercepted" and that the investor could go to jail for years. This article, which has been shared over 5,000 times on Facebook, is not true. This story was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) Soros is a hedge fund manager and philanthropist. He has donated $18 billion to his philanthropic organization, Open Society Foundations, for initiatives to support universities, promote democracy, and reduce poverty. He also regularly donates to Democratic campaigns in the United States. Lately, Soros has focused on changing the justice system by donating to local district attorney candidates who pledge to act tougher on police brutality cases and be more aware of racial issues in policing. The Right Wing News post frames this as the grounds for Soros’s arrest. But who intercepted the money? What was the crime? We decided to investigate. Anticlimactic Clickbait The headline of this article, which states that the money was intercepted and that Soros could be headed to jail, is widely unsupported by evidence. It is also unsupported by the article itself, which never explains or even mentions legal action being brought against Soros. Instead, the article on Right Wing News focuses on Soros’s involvement in district attorney elections in California. The author cites entire paragraphs from Fox News and the Los Angeles Times, two outlets that have reported on Soros’s election donations. Neither mention any legal action, and a Nexis search did not find any other articles about about arresting Soros. This part of the headline appears to be entirely false, and merely meant to entice readers to click. It is true that Soros and other liberal groups have donated huge sums of money to candidates who want to crack down on police brutality. However, a Los Angeles Times graphic shows that Soros donated about $19 million to 21 prosecutor campaigns across the country since 2014. In California, he has spent $2.7 million. This is a far cry from $1.8 billion spent on four campaigns in California, as Right Wing News claimed. The headline’s claim that this money was intercepted by someone was also unsupported by the body of the post and any other sources. Our ruling Right Wing News repurposed existing news articles about district attorney elections in California to make it appear that George Soros had donated 100 times more money than he had. The website then headlined this article with two baseless claims: that Soros’s donations had been intercepted, and that he was likely to go to prison. Soros is not in legal trouble for his donations to district attorney campaigns, has only donated $2.7 million in California, and none of his money was intercepted by a third party. Due to a completely fabricated headline and incorrect numbers, we rate this claim Pants on Fire! UPDATE (July 16, 2018): After we published our fact-check, Right Wing News contacted us to say that the story was an opinion piece and that the headline included an error. Right Wing News adjusted the headline to say, "OPINION: $1.8 Million Of Soros’ Money Just Intercepted – He Should Officially Go To Prison For Years."	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-07-13T16:15:12	2018-05-25	['None']
-abbc-00124	The issue of political donations remains a source of ongoing policy debate in Australian politics, amid concerns that powerful interests — including property developers, tobacco, liquor and gambling businesses — are buying influence.	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-12/fact-check-does-tasmania-have-weakest-political-donation-laws/9407872	Ms O'Connor's claim is a fair call. Currently, Tasmania's political donation laws are almost identical to those of Victoria. This amounts to a subtle distinction between the two states. However, once Victoria's promised new rules are legislated, Tasmania unambiguously will have the weakest political donation laws among the states and territories; equally as weak as the federal laws to which it defers.	['greens', 'political-parties', 'elections', 'tas']	None	None	['greens', 'political-parties', 'elections', 'tas']	Fact check: Does Tasmania have the weakest political donation laws in the nation?	Thu 5 Jul 2018, 7:47am	None	['Australia']
-tron-00903	The “friendlygreetings” e-card that acts like a virus	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/e-card/	None	computers	None	None	None	The “friendlygreetings” e-card that acts like a virus	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pose-00373	Will "get true broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation's wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/392/expand-broadbands-reach/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Expand broadband's reach	2010-01-07T13:26:57	None	['United_States']
-snes-04102	Phillip Morris has announced the introduction of Marlboro M brand marijuana cigarettes.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marlboro-marijuana-cigarettes/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Has Phillip Morris Introduced ‘Marlboro M’ Marijuana Cigarettes?	23 January 2014	None	['Philip_Morris_International']
-pomt-11843	Chicago is "the city with the strongest gun laws in our nation."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/nov/07/donald-trump/trump-wrongly-repeats-chicago-has-strongest-gun-la/	President Donald Trump might be in Asia, but violence on the homefront followed him to South Korea. In a joint press conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, a reporter asked Trump if he would consider extreme vetting for people trying to buy a gun in the wake of the mass shooting at a Texas church. Trump said a longer waiting period would have made no difference and then drew on a familiar talking point. "You look at the city with the strongest gun laws in our nation, is Chicago, and Chicago is a disaster," Trump said. Trump used this line during the presidential campaign, with particular emphasis on Chicago’s high murder rate. Our partners at PolitiFact Illinois said he had a point about the murders, but his description of the Windy City having the toughest gun laws was way off the mark. Since then, the administration has taken the line even further into inaccurate territory. Here’s why. There are two ways to measure the toughness of gun laws. You can look at the rules controlling gun ownership and the penalties for misuse of a weapon. From 1982 to 2010, Chicago prohibited people from keeping handguns in their homes. When Washington, D.C., saw a similar ban overturned, Chicago did have the toughest gun law in the country. That lasted about two years. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Chicago ordinance in 2010. The plaintiffs in the case of McDonald vs. City of Chicago argued that the ban left them vulnerable to criminals, and the court agreed. The court said that the Second and 14th Amendments protected the right to bear arms and that neither Chicago nor Illinois could interfere with that. At one time, the state of Illinois prevented gun owners from carrying a concealed weapon. That ended in 2013 when the state became the last in the country to allow the practice. To get a gun in Chicago, you must take a firearms training class and get a Chicago firearms permit. The course costs between $100 and $150 and the permit costs $100. You would also need a state firearms owner identification card, which can take as many as 50 days for processing. It’s harder and requires more time to do the same in New York. It takes about three to six months to get a permit and costs over $400. And unlike Chicago, New York runs its own concealed carry permit process, as does Los Angeles. Chicago also isn't particularly tough when it comes to enforcement. A 2014 Chicago Sun Times analysis found that Chicago judges tended to hand down the minimum sentence of one year for illegal gun possession while the maximum is three years. Felons with a weapon got four-year sentences on average while they could have received 10. On the state level, the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a pro-gun control group, gives many states higher rankings for restricting gun ownership and use. A total of seven states, including New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, California and Hawaii, have rules that go beyond what Illinois has. The group said Illinois could bring up its score if it allowed local governments to pass gun laws, required guns be stored safely at home and gave local law enforcement more leeway to deny conceal carry permits. The one area where Chicago is trying to reduce access to weapons is by not allowing gun stores or firing ranges to open within the city limits. So far, courts have ruled against Chicago. We reached out to the White House and did not hear back. Our ruling Trump said Chicago has the strongest gun laws in the nation. The statement is years out of date. After a Supreme Court ruling, Chicago residents can own handguns and carry them unseen on the streets. A national gun control group puts seven states above Illinois in regulating gun ownership. Trump needs to refresh this talking point. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-11-07T14:53:36	2017-11-07	['None']
-pomt-14152	Says Donald Trump’s "only economic agenda is imposing massive taxes on the American people with a 40 percent tax hike of a giant tariff."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may/01/ted-cruz/donald-trumps-economic-agenda-imposing-massive-tax/	Sen. Ted Cruz, looking to gain momentum against GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump ahead of the Indiana primary, contended that Trump’s economic policies would hurt Hoosiers and Americans across the country. Cruz said on NBC’s Meet the Press that his top priority is to bring manufacturing jobs back to Indiana, and he has a "real policy agenda" to do it, unlike Trump. "Donald’s only economic agenda is imposing massive taxes on the American people with a 40 percent tax hike of a giant tariff," Cruz said. "That would send us into a recession. It would drive jobs overseas. It would kill small businesses." Is Cruz right that the only idea up Trump’s sleeve is a giant tax on imports? Trump has certainly floated the idea of imposing tariffs on goods made overseas, but it’s not the only item on his economic agenda. And though it’s not entirely clear whether the tariffs would amount to 40 percent tax hike, experts agree that the costs would be passed onto U.S. consumers and businesses. Let’s begin with what Trump has proposed. Trump’s plan to correct ‘stupid trade’ First, Trump has outlined a few other economic proposals beyond tariffs like declaring China a currency manipulator, upholding intellectual property law, ending China’s export subsidies (more on this later) and lowering the corporate tax rate to incentivize American companies to stay at home. He’s also suggested renegotiating or pulling out the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and stopping the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Cruz has a point that Trump has talked at length about imposing tariffs on imported goods as a remedy for trade imbalances and lost American jobs. He’s specified a 35 percent tariff on some goods coming from Mexico and 45 percent tax on all Chinese products, which he said in the last Republican debate is a "threat" that he’d only enact it if "they don’t follow the rules." Here are some of the comments Trump has made regarding tariffs: • Candidacy announcement speech, June 16, 2015: Trump said he’ll tax China "until they behave properly" and charge a 35 percent tax on "every truck and every part manufactured in (the Ford plant in Mexico) that comes across the border." • Interview with the New York Times editorial board, Jan. 7, 2016: "I would tax China coming in, products coming in. I would do a tariff. And they do it to us. ... I would do a tax. And let me tell you what the tax should be. The tax should be 45 percent. That would be a tax that would be an equivalent to some of the kind of devaluations that they’ve done. They cannot believe that we haven’t done this yet." • GOP primary debate in South Carolina, Feb. 13, 2016: Trump said he’ll tell Carrier, the American air conditioner company that announced a move to Mexico, "we're going to tax you when those air conditioners come. So stay where you are or build in the United States because we are killing ourselves with trade pacts that are no good for us and no good for our workers." • GOP primary debate in Miami, March 10, 2016: "If you don't tax certain products coming into this country from certain countries that are taking advantage of the United States and laughing at our stupidity, we're going to continue to lose businesses and we're going to continue to lose jobs. ...The 45 percent is a threat that if they (China) don't behave, if they don't follow the rules and regulations so that we can have it equal on both sides, we will tax you. It doesn't have to be 45, it could be less." Making Americans pay for the haul Trump’s tariff proposals have been called "uneducated," "worrisome" and "entirely ridiculous," and many economists (though not all) say they would hurt Americans. However, Cruz may be overstating the impact. "The biggest losers would be U.S. consumers and companies," said Scott Lincicome, an international trade law and policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. Tariffs at the level Trump is suggesting would cause prices of cheap products like air conditioners and intermediate goods like auto parts to soar and could cost U.S. jobs. But as some of the costs would be absorbed by Chinese and Mexican exporters, a 40 percent tariff doesn’t translate directly into a 40 percent tax hike. "You would have to do some analysis to determine how much of a tax hike it is, but it is probably significantly less than 40 percent," said Joel Trachtman, a trade law specialist at the University of Maryland. Trachtman noted, however, that the sum of all Trump’s trade proposals — including the rejection of free trade agreements — may get you to a 40 percent hike. Trump’s tariffs would also see push back from the World Trade Organization, Lincicome pointed out, as Mexico City and Beijing wouldn’t take them lying down. "The WTO sanctions these types of duties targeting export markets with the stroke of a pen. That’s just insane," he said. "It’s a blatant violation of WTO rules. He would get us involved with a bunch of litigation and retaliation." For example, the 35 percent tariff the United States imposed on Chinese tires in 2009 cost American consumers $1.1 billion in 2011 and the U.S. chicken industry $1 billion, according to analysis by the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics. The price of Chinese-made car tires rose by 26 percent, so the United States imported from countries like Thailand, Indonesia and Mexico instead and paid a premium for the shift. China also retaliated by slapping a tariff on American poultry, reducing chicken exports by 90 percent. Looking ahead, Trump’s suggested tariffs for Mexican imports would significantly affect the U.S. auto industry and would-be American car buyers. For example, the base price of a Chrysler Ram pick-up truck, which is currently assembled in Mexico, would increase by $9,000, according to Reuters. And like China, Mexico could return the favor by taxing U.S. goods as they’ve done in the past. Our ruling Cruz said Trump’s "only economic agenda is imposing massive taxes on the American people with a 40 percent tax hike of a giant tariff." Tariffs are not Trump’s "only" economic proposal. But Trump has trumpeted taxing Mexican and Chinese imports by 35 and 45 percent respectively. Most economists agree that American consumers and manufactures would bear some of the cost of these tariffs, though it’s not entirely clear if prices would increase by 40 percent, as Cruz says. Cruz’s claim is partially accurate. We rate it Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/fd0657bd-5afd-42ce-92a4-f6fef1cd8d00	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2016-05-01T17:54:13	2016-05-01	['United_States']
-tron-03135	President’s Half Brother Photographed in Hamas Scarf	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/malik-obama-hamas/	None	politics	None	None	None	President’s Half Brother Photographed in Hamas Scarf	Apr 5, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01861	Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn Oujia Board Seance Took “Terrifying Turn”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-hudson-oujia-board-goldie-hawn-seance/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn Oujia Board Seance Took “Terrifying Turn”?	5:54 pm, January 10, 2018	None	['Kate_Hudson']
-ranz-00008	We're in the biggest construction boom New Zealand has ever seen.	fact	https://www.radionz.co.nz/programmes/election17-fact-or-fiction/story/201857236/fact-or-fiction-do-the-leaders-know	According to this year’s National Construction Pipeline Report the value of all recorded building and construction was $34 billion in 2016. Data available from the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE) stretches back to 1988 and shows this to be the highest level of total construction expenditure over that 30-year period (including adjusting for inflation). MBIE forecasts that the value of national building and construction will increase to $42 billion in 2020.	Elections	Bill English	None	None	Fact or Fiction: Do the leaders know?	4 September 2017	None	['New_Zealand']
-tron-00751	Actor, Comedian Sinbad is Dead	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/sinbad/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Actor, Comedian Sinbad is Dead	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-05290	Says Mitt Romney is wrong to claim that spending under Obama has "accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history," because it's actually risen "slower than at any time in nearly 60 years."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/23/facebook-posts/viral-facebook-post-says-barack-obama-has-lowest-s/	EDITOR'S NOTE: This item prompted a large volume and feedback and comments. We published an article about the comments on May 25 and an update to this item on May 31. You'll find the update below, at the end of the fact-check. On May 22, 2012, Rex Nutting, the international commentary editor for the financial website MarketWatch, published a column titled, "Obama spending binge never happened." Nutting’s column explored data on federal spending patterns during recent presidencies, concluding that -- contrary to the tax-and-spend stereotype of Democrats -- President Barack Obama has actually presided over the smallest increases in federal spending of any recent president. The column went viral. Within hours, people who liked the column were posting a graphic on Facebook that paired a line from Nutting’s column with a quote from Mitt Romney’s campaign website. Under the heading, "Romney’s World," the Facebook post quoted a Romney Web page saying, "Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history." (That accurately quotes Romney.) Immediately to the right, under the heading, "Real World," the Facebook post provided a retort using a caption from Nutting’s key chart: "Government spending under Obama, including his signature stimulus bill, is rising at a 1.4 percent annualized pace — slower than at any time in nearly 60 years." (The post cited the quotation to the Wall Street Journal; technically, Nutting writes for MarketWatch, which is an affiliate of the Wall Street Journal.) The Facebook post appears to have originated with the liberal blog Groobiecat Call, which promises "data-driven analysis" and "lefteous indignation." Before the day was out, roughly a dozen PolitiFact readers had forwarded it to us, seeking our view of its accuracy. So we looked into it. Nutting’s column First, let’s recap what Nutting said in his column: "Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, an ‘inferno’ of spending that threatens our jobs, our businesses and our children’s future. Even Democrats seem to think it’s true. But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s." Nutting ran the numbers for the past 60 years, adjusting for the fact that "the first year of every presidential term starts with a budget approved by the previous administration and Congress." For Obama, that means that "the 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress." He continued, "By no means did Obama try to reverse that spending. Indeed, his budget proposals called for even more spending in subsequent years. But the Congress (mostly Republicans but many Democrats, too) stopped him. If Obama had been a king who could impose his will, perhaps what the Republicans are saying about an Obama spending binge would be accurate." Nutting did, however, attribute a portion of fiscal 2009 spending to Obama rather than Bush. He reassigned about $140 billion, covering spending made that year through the stimulus bill, the expansion of a children’s health-care program and other appropriations bills passed in the spring of 2009. "If we attribute that $140 billion in stimulus to Obama and not to Bush," Nutting wrote, "we find that spending under Obama grew by about $200 billion over four years, amounting to a 1.4 percent annualized increase." Our analysis Before presenting our own calculations, we’ll get some methodological issues out of the way. Like Nutting, we used historical data from the Office of Management and Budget along with projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Projecting outlays into the future involves a degree of uncertainty, but CBO’s most recent projections are considered the most independent and reliable. Because we’re checking the Facebook post rather than Nutting’s column, we examined the way the post compared the presidents. Since the Facebook post ignores differences between presidents’ first and second terms, which are noted in Nutting’s chart, we’ve combined presidents’ entire tenures into a single time span. And several presidents who served during the past 60 years didn’t have tenures that coincided precisely with fiscal years, due to assassination or resignation. So we’re using the closest fiscal years we can, and we’re skipping President Gerald Ford, whose tenure was too short to adequately measure. Here are the average spending increases per year in raw dollars (not adjusted for inflation) in descending order by president: President Fiscal year baseline Last fiscal year Average percentage increase per year Carter 1977 1981 16.4 Nixon 1969 1975 13.5 Johnson 1964 1969 11.0 George W. Bush 2001 2009 10.2 Reagan 1981 1989 8.6 Kennedy 1961 1964 7.1 George H.W. Bush 1989 1993 5.8 Clinton 1993 2001 4.0 Eisenhower 1953 1961 3.6 Obama 2009 2013 1.4 So, using raw dollars, Obama did oversee the lowest annual increases in spending of any president in 60 years. Here are the results using inflation-adjusted figures: President Fiscal year baseline Last fiscal year Average percentage increase per year Johnson 1964 1969 6.3 George W. Bush 2001 2009 5.9 Kennedy 1961 1964 4.7 Carter 1977 1981 4.2 Nixon 1969 1975 3.0 Reagan 1981 1989 2.7 George H.W. Bush 1989 1993 1.8 Clinton 1993 2001 1.5 Obama 2009 2013 -0.1 Eisenhower 1953 1961 -0.5 So, using inflation-adjusted dollars, Obama had the second-lowest increase -- in fact, he actually presided over a decrease once inflation is taken into account. Bottom line: The Facebook post’s claim that government spending under Obama is "slower than at any time in nearly 60 years" is very close to accurate. Explaining the results So why the disconnect between Obama’s image as a big spender and the reality of how much federal spending has actually grown? First, Obama’s record on debt is a lot less flattering than is his record on federal government spending. During the same time that spending is poised to be increasing by 1.4 percent per year under Obama, the debt will be increasing by 14.6 percent per year. The reason? Year by year, federal revenues haven’t been keeping up with spending, due to the struggling national economy (which has held back tax revenues) and a continuation of tax cuts. And each year there’s an annual deficit, the national debt grows. Second, federal spending under Obama is higher as a share of gross domestic product than it has been in most of the previous 60 years. That, too is because of the economy, which has simultaneously slowed the growth of GDP and boosted government spending for programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. Third, the aging of the baby boomers has driven a rise in entitlement spending that is masking cuts Obama and the GOP Congress have made, and have promised to make, in discretionary spending. Using outlays as the unit of measurement, as Nutting and the Facebook post have done, means focusing on money already spent. It does not take into account future spending that’s been committed to but not yet carried out. And finally, many Americans associate Obama with the high-profile legislative activities of his first year or two, when initiatives such as the stimulus sent spending upward the fastest. Since then, spending has slowed, thanks in part to spending cuts pushed by congressional Republicans. Which brings us to another important issue: The president is not all-powerful, so his record on spending was accomplished in collaboration with congressional Republicans. Our ruling The Facebook post says Mitt Romney is wrong to claim that spending under Obama has "accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history," because it's actually risen "slower than at any time in nearly 60 years." Obama has indeed presided over the slowest growth in spending of any president using raw dollars, and it was the second-slowest if you adjust for inflation. The math simultaneously backs up Nutting’s calculations and demolishes Romney’s contention. The only significant shortcoming of the graphic is that it fails to note that some of the restraint in spending was fueled by demands from congressional Republicans. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly True. UPDATE, May 31, 2012 While we have already shared some of the critiques of this fact-check in a previous follow-up story, critics have since noted that two of our fellow fact checkers -- the Washington Post Fact Checker and the Associated Press -- offered more negative rulings on related claims. The Fact Checker addressed the apparent discrepancy succinctly in a follow-up column, saying "we did not evaluate the same thing." There’s a widespread misconception that we gave a Mostly True rating to Rex Nutting’s MarketWatch column. After our original fact-check published, White House spokesman Jay Carney tweeted, "PolitiFact backs MarketWatch analysis of federal spending under POTUS & predecessors." Many conservative bloggers read our fact-check the same way, as they attacked us. The assumption made by both sides is wrong. We examined at a Facebook post that said Mitt Romney is wrong to claim that spending under Obama has "accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history," because it's actually risen "slower than at any time in nearly 60 years." The Facebook post does rely partly on Nutting’s work, and our item addresses that, but we did not simply give our seal of approval to everything Nutting wrote. In fact, half of the Facebook post stems from something else entirely -- a claim on Mitt Romney’s website. Using and slightly tweaking Nutting’s methodology, we recalculated spending increases under each president back to Dwight Eisenhower and produced tables ranking the presidents from highest spenders to lowest spenders. By contrast, both the Fact Checker and the AP zeroed in on one narrower (and admittedly crucial) data point -- how to divide the responsibility between George W. Bush and Obama for the spending that occurred in fiscal year 2009, when spending rose fastest. How you divide the spending between Bush and Obama for fiscal 2009 only makes a difference to our ruling if the shifts move Obama significantly up or down our rankings. Do they? Nutting attributed spending from the first year of every presidential term to the previous administration, arguing that every new president starts their term four months into a fiscal year begun under their predecessor. Historically, this has not been a particularly controversial approach, and even some of Nutting’s critics we spoke to agreed that it’s not a bad rule of thumb. But fiscal year 2009 was special because it came amid an economic and financial free fall that drove the nation’s leaders to spend a lot more than they ordinarily would. Nutting did take these factors into account, but not to the extent that some critics think is needed. Nutting shifted $140 billion in fiscal 2009 spending from two of Obama’s signature programs -- the economic stimulus package and an expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program -- out of Bush’s column and into Obama’s. He also shifted excess spending beyond what Bush would have spent from the appropriations bills signed by Obama in 2009. A number of critics also argued that spending for the Troubled Asset Relief Program should be taken into account. This program aided troubled financial institutions and involved a lot of money going out the door in fiscal 2009 and a lot of money coming in the door in subsequent years as the money was paid back to the treasury. The critics note that counting the TARP expenses as Bush’s artificially raises the baseline level of spending Obama inherited, thereby making Obama’s subsequent spending increases seem unrealistically small. We think reasonable people can disagree on which president should be responsible for TARP spending, but to give the critics their say, we’ll include it in our alternative calculation. So, combining the fiscal 2009 costs for programs that are either clearly or arguably Obama’s -- the stimulus, the CHIP expansion, the incremental increase in appropriations over Bush’s level and TARP -- produces a shift from Bush to Obama of between $307 billion and $456 billion, based on the most reasonable estimates we’ve seen critics offer. That’s quite a bit larger than Nutting’s $140 billion, but by our calculations, it would only raise Obama’s average annual spending increase from 1.4 percent to somewhere between 3.4 percent and 4.9 percent. That would place Obama either second from the bottom or third from the bottom out of the 10 presidents we rated, rather than last. When we encounter a compound claim such as this one, we consider the accuracy of each part separately. During our internal discussions, we give a preliminary rating to each half of a claim, then average them to produce our final, published rating. Our extensive consultations with budget analysts since our item was published convinces us that there’s no single "correct" way to divvy up fiscal 2009 spending, only a variety of plausible calculations. So the second portion of the Facebook claim -- that Obama’s spending has risen "slower than at any time in nearly 60 years" -- strikes us as Half True. Meanwhile, we would’ve given a True rating to the Facebook claim that Romney is wrong to say that spending under Obama has "accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history." Even using the higher of the alternative measurements, at least seven presidents had a higher average annual increases in spending. That balances out to our final rating of Mostly True.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2012-05-23T16:39:14	2012-05-22	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-06022	"Mayor Barrett saved Milwaukee $25 million, thanks to Gov. Walker’s reforms."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2012/jan/15/club-growth/wisconsin-club-growth-says-milwaukee-mayor-tom-bar/	Those billboards around Milwaukee featuring Mayor Tom Barrett’s mug and a claim he "saved Milwaukee $25 million" are clever if you slow down to read the punch line. If you can do it without driving your car into an embankment, you’ll see they are sponsored by the conservative Wisconsin Club for Growth and give credit to Barrett’s once -- and possibly future -- gubernatorial rival, Scott Walker, for making the savings possible. Barrett, the signs’ smaller print says, got the savings "thanks to Gov. Scott Walker’s reforms." The billboards hit on a theme voters undoubtedly will hear over and over from Republicans if Barrett takes on Walker in a possible recall election in 2012. The billboards refer to Walker’s controversial budget legislation that took health care and pensions out of collective bargaining for most public employees. That allowed local governments and schools to impose cost-sharing for those benefits instead of negotiating with labor leaders. Barrett’s campaign, reacting to the ad, denounced it as completely off base, in a statement to WTMJ4 that said: "The only thing accurate about that billboard is the picture of Tom Barrett." What’s the truth? Club for Growth didn’t respond, but the Journal Sentinel reported in August that the city of Milwaukee will indeed save $25 million in 2012 just on health care costs, in large part by asking employees to pay more. In fact, Barrett’s budget document said revisions to the city’s health insurance -- the ones made easier by Walker’s changes -- would help drive overall health care costs down for the first time in more than 20 years. We contacted the same Milwaukee budget official quoted in August 2011, and he told us the city still expects a $25 million drop in health costs. Case closed? The official, city economist Dennis Yaccarino, says the $25 million actually overstates savings related to the Walker budget alone. He said city officials didn’t make that clear in early August when a Journal Sentinel reporter first got the number from the city and published the $25 million figure in the context of Walker’s changes. That story ran Aug. 8, 2011. The newspaper followed up August 21, 2011, quoting city officials saying $6 million of that savings number was from the city’s own decision to switch from an insured HMO to a self-funded approach due to projected cost savings. The $6 million switch is noted that way in Barrett’s budget. The move, we should note, was negotiated with the city’s largest union two years ago but was not put in place until now for reasons unrelated to the state budget, according to Yaccarino and Richard Abelson, executive director of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, which represents general city employees. Yaccarino said the city calculated in 2011 that it was paying a profit to its carrier and could keep the money for itself by going self insured. That scenario had not existed until 2011, hence the delay, he said. So that leaves $19 million of savings for Milwaukee from Walker’s original budget plan and the amended one he signed, right? Not exactly. Remember, the $25 million figure is just on the health care costs side fo the equation. What about public employees paying more in pension costs? That’s the second part of Walker’s limits on collective bargaining over benefits. Milwaukee didn’t put them in place due to questions about the legality of the state changes as they apply to Milwaukee. So that’s a 0. Finally, city official note Walker’s overall budget cut municipal aid, leaving the net "savings" to the city much reduced from $19 million. But the billboard refers to Walker’s "reforms," which is the changes tied to the collective bargaining issue. It is making a narrower claim, on how much was saved from the reforms, not how the city fared overall. Our conclusion Billboards say Walker’s "reforms" allowed Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to save $25 million for the city. The city is that much ahead, but a portion was Barrett’s doing before Walker’s budget was enacted. We rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Club for Growth	None	None	None	2012-01-15T09:00:00	2012-01-04	['Tom_Barrett_(politician)', 'Milwaukee']
-tron-01165	There are No-Go Zones in Europe under Sharia Law	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/no-go-zones-in-europe-under-sharia-law/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	There are No-Go Zones in Europe under Sharia Law	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Europe']
-snes-03590	Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country had received more than 10 million immigration applications from Americans immediately after the 2016 presidential election.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/canada-receives-10-million-immigration-applications/	None	Immigration	None	Bethania Palma	None	Canada Receives 10 Million Immigration Applications	9 November 2016	None	['Justin_Trudeau', 'Canada', 'United_States']
-snes-05952	Jaden Smith stated he wanted to have his penis removed on his 18th birthday.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jade-smith-birthday/	None	Junk News	None	Snopes Staff	None	Did Jaden Smith Say He Wanted His Penis Removed on His 18th Birthday?	4 November 2014	None	['None']
-pomt-11315	"Red Crescent Says No Evidence of Chemical Attack in Syria’s Douma."	false	/punditfact/statements/2018/apr/13/antiwarcom/syrian-red-crescent-did-not-deny-chemical-attack-d/	On April 7, reports emerged from Syria’s civil war that residents of the city of Douma east of Damascus were potential victims of chemical weapons. The reports have yet to be confirmed, but footage of women and children foaming at the mouth threaten to draw a military strike by Western forces. The California-based non-interventionist website Antiwar.com posted an article saying the Syrian Red Crescent, which is a member of the international Red Cross/Red Crescent federation, rejected the idea of a chemical attack. "The Syrian Red Crescent issued a statement Monday dismissing the allegations of a weekend chemical weapon attack in the city of Douma," the April 9 article said. "The statement insisted their medical personnel in the city had found no evidence any such attack took place." PolitiFact contacted the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (the organization typically includes the Arab designation) to confirm the statement. "We are not aware of such a declaration," said Rana Sidani Cassou in the Beirut office of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. "Neither the Syrian Arab Red Crescent nor the International Federation are in a position to confirm or deny any attack." In fact, during the April 7 attack, Syrian jets had targeted the Syrian Red Crescent hospital in Douma and the next day, the group tweeted that the Douma branch had shut down. When we contacted Eric Garris, director of Antiwar.com, the website retracted the article, and posted a new one with the headline "Report of Syrian Red Crescent Statement on Alleged Douma Attack Incorrect." Garris told PolitiFact that they based the original story on an article that appeared April 8 on the Russian-state sponsored news website Tass. That article said the Syrian Red Crescent had issued a statement. We can’t verify that. The Tass article quotes doctors who work with the Syrian Red Crescent talking about an attack that took place in January. Garris said his news editor believes Tass might have changed the article from the version he first saw. Garris said his group moved ahead with the story, even though he did not find confirmation on the Syrian Red Crescent website. "I have no excuse for letting it slip through like this," Garris said. "We should have been more diligent. There’s enough misinformation out there, and we don’t want to be a part of that." The retraction said, "In the future, we will not use foreign news sources as the sole source for important articles like this." Our ruling The Antiwar.com website said that the Syrian Red Crescent had issued a statement saying that they found no evidence of a chemical attack in Douma. The organization’s director said that was based on an article from the Russian news service Tass. The Syrian Arab Red Crescent did not make such a statement. Antiwar.com posted a full retraction of its article and apologized for the mistake. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Antiwar.com	None	None	None	2018-04-13T13:29:16	2018-04-09	['None']
-tron-00911	eMails Advertising Insurance May Lead to Computer Virus	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/fake-insurance-ads/	None	computers	None	None	None	eMails Advertising Insurance May Lead to Computer Virus	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-02027	Says Michele Bachmann said on Fox News, "This country could use a president like Benjamin Franklin again."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2014/jun/05/facebook-posts/did-michele-bachmann-say-country-could-use-preside/	Misleading memes about U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., continue to give our readers pause. We’ve twice debunked wild posts claiming Bachmann said Jesus wrote the Bible in English and that she said President Barack Obama might be responsible for the April Fort Hood, Texas, shooting spree. Both quotes were made up, so they got our Pants on Fire rating. Recently, a reader asked us to investigate a third post, a screenshot of Bachmann in mid speech with a quote overlay. "The nation has gotten away from the principles of the founding fathers under the failed leadership of Barack Obama. This country could use a president like Benjamin Franklin again," the posts quotes Bachmann as saying on Fox News on May 28. If this were a baseball game, we’d call "strike three!" Yes, Bachmann is no fan of Obama. Yes, she is known to bring up the founding fathers, sometimes to controversial ends. But no, she did not remember iconic American Ben Franklin as a past president. Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, served as the nation’s first postmaster general and later as U.S. ambassador to France. But he was never president. A search of transcripts and news stories for the quote came up dry. Bachmann spokesman Dat Kotman said she did not even appear on Fox that day, and we could not find any evidence that she did. As if the meme weren't fishy enough, the screenshot is also the backdrop for the fake quote about Fort Hood. It’s originally from Bachmann’s June 2013 interview on Fox News’ Hannity when she discussed her decision to leave Congress at the end of her term in January 2015. The post appears to track back to a satirical group called "Christians for Michele Bachmann." Bachmann did extol Franklin in a high-profile address, but she did not refer to him as a president. She referenced Franklin twice in a speech announcing that she was abandoning her 2012 presidential bid. Bachmann alluded to a painting by Howard Chandler Christy of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, which hangs in a stairway in the Capitol’s House wing. She remembers seeing the painting, with its reminder of the "connection we have to the principles of freedom and justice," on the night she decided to seek the Oval Office. Benjamin Franklin is seated distinctly in the center of the painting, one of the most visible figures in a sea of powdered wigs. "But never was the painting's reminder more poignant than on the evening of March 21, 2010, the day Obamacare was passed," Bachmann said. "Staring out from the painting is the face of Ben Franklin as a consistent reminder of the fragile Republic he and the founders gave to us." She did not refer to him as a past president then, and we could not find other examples of her mistaking him for a president. Our ruling A meme claims that Bachmann said, "This country could use a president like Benjamin Franklin again." This quote is made up. Bachmann wasn't on TV the night of her alleged remarks and we could find no reference of her claiming Franklin was president. We rate the claim Pants on Fire.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2014-06-05T10:45:00	2014-06-05	['Benjamin_Franklin', 'Michele_Bachmann', 'Fox_News_Channel']
-tron-00256	LOL Stands for “Lucifer Our Lord”	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/lol-stands-for-lucifer-our-lord/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	LOL Stands for “Lucifer Our Lord” – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-03776	College students "who are NOT U.S. Citizens and who get the PELL Grant" plan to return to their home countries after getting free gas cards and child care.	pants on fire!	/florida/statements/2013/apr/01/chain-email/email-florida-teacher-says-dominican-student/	Did you hear the one about foreign students ripping off the U.S. by getting federal grants to go to college and then ditching our country to return home? The chain email from "a Florida teacher" arrived in our inbox March 28, 2013. It reads: "This is a subject close to my heart. Do you know that we have adult students at the school where I teach who are NOT U.S. Citizens and who get the PELL Grant, which is a federal grant (no payback required) plus other federal grants to go to school? "One student from the Dominican Republic told me that she didn't want me to find a job for her after she finished my program, because she was getting housing from our housing department and she was getting a PELL Grant which paid for her total tuition and books, plus money left over." The email also stated that this Dominican student accessed other special programs that supplied her with a credit card for gas and another to pay for daycare. The email continued: "The one student I just mentioned told me she was not going to be a U.S. citizen because she plans to return to the Dominican Republic someday and that she 'loves HER country.’ I asked her if she felt guilty taking what the U.S. is giving her and then not even bothering to become a citizen and she told me that it doesn't bother her, because that is what the money is there for!" We wanted to research if a noncitizen can get a Pell Grant to go to college with no intention of becoming a citizen and then simply return to their home country. As we soon discovered, this chain email has had a long life -- it was debunked in fact-checks by Snopes.com and Factcheck.org in 2008. Pell Grants Pell Grants are federal awards to low-income students for post-secondary education. The grants are for students to obtain bachelor's degrees or certain postbaccalaureate programs that lead to teacher certification. The grant does not have to be repaid, and the maximum amount for this year is $5,550. Citizens can get the grants. Also, students who are permanent residents -- commonly referred to as those who have a "green card" -- are considered eligible noncitizens and can get student aid if they meet eligibility criteria, said Jane Glickman, a U.S. Department of Education spokeswoman. We couldn’t find statistics on how many of the 9.7 million Pell Grant recipients are green-card holders, but Glickman said the vast majority are citizens. The chain email also claimed that the Pell Grant would pay for "total tuition and books, plus money left over." It appears highly unlikely our Dominican student would be profiting from the Pell Grant, since the average price of a four-year college education is far above the grant. (PolitiFact’s 2011 analysis showed it covered about 34 percent of public college costs.) The email also suggested that this Dominican student is seeking a free ride from the United States and giving nothing in return. Legal permanent residents who get Pell Grants can choose to return to their country, however, the majority eventually apply for citizenship. And they do pay taxes. Other programs mentioned in the email The chain email claimed that the Dominican student was accessing two other programs, called WAIT and CARIBE, to help pay for expenses: "She was looking into WAIT which gives students a CREDIT CARD for gas to come to school, and into CARIBE which is a special program (check it out - I did) for immigrants, and it pays for child care and all sorts of needs while they go to school or training." C.A.R.I.B.E. – Career Recruitment And Instruction In Basic English Refugee Program -- is a federally funded adult education program in Hillsborough County Public Schools. The program’s website explains that it "provides English language, GED, and Hi-Tec vocational training to recent Cuban, Haitian, and other entrants with legal, documented refugee or asylee status." (The website puts those two words in bold.) Program manager Estela Weideman told PolitiFact that CARIBE does not provide child care but will refer students to other programs that provide vouchers for child care if they qualify. "All we provide are English classes to the adults, and only those that qualify," Weideman said. The criteria is very specific -- participants must be refugees or asylum seekers, which typically means people fleeing oppressive regimes or war conditions. (In 2008, the director of this Hillsborough County program told Factcheck that he had received more than 600 emails about the chain letter and had received calls around the country, including from congressional offices.) Several other counties in Florida have similar adult education programs for refugees including in Miami-Dade County. It’s unlikely that this alleged Dominican student would qualify for Hillsborough’s program, though. State Department refugee admission statistics for 2012 do not show any refugees from the Dominican Republic. We also found no Dominicans were U.S. refugees from 2002 to 2011. The picture was more complex for those seeking asylum -- one category referred to as seeking asylum "defensively" as part of a removal hearing included tiny numbers from the Dominican Republican -- eight in 2011, for example. We couldn’t find anything on the other program mentioned in the email -- WAIT -- that would supposedly provide students with gas to go to school. This program doesn’t appear to exist. Our ruling The chain email paints a picture of free-loading foreigners, college students "who are NOT U.S. citizens and who get the PELL Grant," then return to their home countries after getting free gas cards and child care. While green card residents can get Pell Grants, those people are generally legal permanent residents -- not people looking to return to their own countries. And there’s no free gas cards or child care. We rate the chain email’s claim Pants on Fire!	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2013-04-01T11:52:46	2013-03-28	['None']
-vees-00336	Matt Damon said Duterte’s the ‘last man standing’ in drug war	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/week-fake-news-matt-damon-did-not-say-dutertes-last-man-stan	None	None	None	None	fake news	THIS WEEK IN FAKE NEWS: Matt Damon DID NOT say Duterte’s the ‘last man standing’ in drug war	November 17, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-06175	"The American Conservative Union gives [Rep. Tim] Ryan a dismal 0.0 percent rating for the billions he has contributed to our national debt."	mostly false	/ohio/statements/2011/dec/14/marish-agana/republican-challenger-marisha-agana-says-us-rep-ti/	Since arriving in Congress after a hard-fought 2002 campaign, Tim Ryan hasn’t had to break much of a sweat to keep his seat representing the heavily Democratic 17th District. He plans to compete for sixth term next year in the reconfigured 13th District, part of a Republican-drawn map that eliminates two Ohio seats because of slow population growth. And though the Niles Democrat’s Youngstown-Warren base remains intact, the district now includes more of Akron and Summit County to the west, as well as a portion of Stark County. Two candidates have filed signatures to challenge him in the primary, but conventional wisdom says Ryan will cruise into the 2012 general election. Which brings us to Marisha Agana. Agana, a pediatrician from the Warren suburb of Howland Township, is running for the seat as a Republican. Despite the political makeup of the district, she is positioning herself as an unquestionable conservative and casting Ryan as an unabashed liberal. "Our Democratic incumbent is a prime example of the problem throughout Congress," Agana said in a news release announcing her candidacy. "The American Conservative Union gives Ryan a dismal 0.0 percent rating for the billions he has contributed to our national debt." The second part of Agana’s statement caught PolitiFact Ohio’s eye. As congressional campaigns ratchet up in the coming months, candidates are sure to use such partisan rankings in hopes of defining their opponents as too liberal or too conservative. But given Ryan’s pro-gun and anti-abortion proclivities, we wondered if Agana’s was playing fair. First, some background on ACU. The Alexandria, Va., advocacy group bills itself as the nation’s "oldest and largest grassroots conservative organization." In February, ACU released its annual congressional ratings, based on how the 435 House members decided on 24 issues in 2010. "The votes selected in this edition of the ACU Ratings of Congress are not always considered the ‘most important’ votes as defined by others," the group says on its website. "Instead, the votes selected are chosen to create a clear ideological distinction among those casting them." Congressional representatives are rated based on how often they vote in accordance with ACU beliefs on those selected topics. Votes tracked in 2010 ranged from the establishment of Native Hawaiian sovereignty to the extension of unemployment benefits. (ACU opposed both.) Ryan’s votes on all 24 measures put him at odds with the group, earning him a 0 percent. Historically, though, Ryan has a slightly better record on ACU issues. In 2009, when he was in agreement with the organization on one of 25 votes, he received a 4 percent rating. Overall, for the eight full years he has served in Congress, Ryan has an 13.25 percent rating. Agana obviously was referring to Ryan’s most recent 0 percent rating. She also attributed the goose egg to the "billions he has contributed to our national debt." Not only does that claim contain hyperbole that might give the impression Ryan alone has contributed billions of dollars to the national debt, it also is far less verifiable. And we checked with ACU spokeswoman Kristy Campbell, who said that the ratings are based on votes in "three main areas." Besides fiscal issues, which would include the debt, ACU also looks for "strong national defense" votes and "social/traditional values," Campbell said via email. "As many of the votes we rate are related to spending and fiscal discipline, it is not inaccurate to say the congressman received a 0.0 score in 2010 because of his contribution to the national debt," Campbell added. "However, last year, he also received a 0.00 percent rating across the spectrum of other issues important to conservatives," including the "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" repeal. Most of the votes ACU rates could be classified directly or indirectly as a fiscal issue because of spending requirements and the impact on the budget. But as even Campbell acknowledges, Ryan’s votes on these issues do not represent the entire reason he received a 0 percent rating. Agana paints Ryan with too broad a brush in her statement. While it’s true his most recent ACU rating was 0, Ryan has a higher lifetime score than all but two Ohio Democrats ranked in 2010: Rep. Zack Space, who lost a re-election bid last year, and Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo. Ryan is no conservative, but he is more moderate than Agana implied. As for the "billions" of dollars for which Agana holds Ryan directly responsible, spokeswoman Patricia Brant told PolitiFact Ohio that the campaign was stating a simple "cause and effect." Brant said votes on certain fiscal issues added billions of dollars to the federal deficit. The national debt is the accumulation of annual budget deficits. But for PolitiFact Ohio, simplicity should not come at the expense of accuracy. Agana’s statement is an exaggeration. Her words exclusively tagged Ryan, one of 435 congressional representatives, with adding billions of dollars to the debt. While there is some truth at the core of her argument, Agana played too fast and loose with the facts. On the Truth-O-Meter, her claim merits a rating of Mostly False.	None	Marisha Agana	None	None	None	2011-12-14T20:00:00	2011-10-30	['United_States']
-snes-01611	The U.S. government banned the sale of lawn darts in the aftermath of a child's death.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-u-s-government-ban-lawn-dart-sales/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did the United States Government Ban Lawn Dart Sales After a Child’s Death?	9 October 2017	None	['United_States']
-pomt-03769	"Opponents of Section 5 (of the Voting Rights Act) complain of state expense, yet their only cost is the paper, postage and manpower required to send copies of legislation to the federal government for review."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2013/apr/03/john-lewis/costs-associated-voting-rights-act-can-vary-case/	A Supreme Court decision on a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act could come in June. The court heard arguments in late February on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires Georgia and eight other states with a history of discrimination -- Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia -- to get permission, or "preclearance," from the federal government before implementing any changes affecting elections. The provision is being challenged by Shelby County, Ala., and also applies to parts of seven other states. Opponents of the provision, including Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens, say the blatant racial intimidation and discrimination that existed in voting processes decades ago no longer exist. They also say the formula used to determine which states are covered under the statute is outdated because it is based on voter turnout and registration data from 1972. They also cite the high cost for adhering to Section 5 requirements when states or jurisdictions want to make changes to their elections processes. Georgia was one of several states that filed a "friend of the court" brief supporting Shelby County’s suit. The Justice Department has rejected election changes in Georgia nearly 180 times under the Section 5 provision. Throughout the challenge, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia and a civil rights pioneer, has been a crusader for keeping Section 5, and he made his case in an opinion column for The Washington Post a few days before the court arguments. "Opponents of Section 5 complain of state expense, yet their only cost is the paper, postage and manpower required to send copies of legislation to the federal government for reviews, hardly a punishment," Lewis wrote. But what about court costs and attorneys’ fees? Did states not have these expenses, too? We wondered whether Lewis’ low-cost compliance analysis was correct. After years of efforts, particularly in Southern states, to prevent blacks from voting, voting rights battles reached a peak in 1965. Early that year, Lewis and other voting rights marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on their way to Montgomery, the state capital, were attacked by state troopers. That attack, along with other violent incidents in the South against blacks and activists, persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to push for a strong voting rights law that eventually became the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 of the act, including the preclearance review requirement for specific jurisdictions seeking elections changes, was extended in 1970, 1975, 1982 and for 25 years in 2006. The Voting Section of the Department of Justice reviews 15,000 to 24,000 voting changes each year, and receives between 4,500 and 5,500 Section 5 submissions. Jurisdictions seeking a preclearance review have two options under Section 5: a declaratory judgment process and an administrative review process. The declaratory judgment process is a court-intensive process that involves the jurisdiction’s filing a motion with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. A three-judge panel hears the request. Any appeals go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. The administrative review process is designed to be an expeditious, cost-effective alternative. It involves jurisdictions’ submitting proposed voting changes to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice for review. If the attorney general doesn’t object to the change, or if no objection is filed within 60 days, then the jurisdiction can implement the change. The DOJ provides a list of documents and information jurisdictions must submit for the administrative review, including a reason for the change, the date the change would take effect and contact information for the agency in charge of enforcing the election change. The DOJ reports that more than 99 percent of the changes affecting voting are reviewed administratively. Administrative review documents can be filed by mail and online. States choosing the declaratory judgment process first, or after a voting change was denied in the administrative process, can accrue large legal bills. For example, South Carolina spent $3.5 million last year challenging a DOJ rejection of its proposed voter ID law. After taking the case to court, the three-judge declaratory judgment panel ruled in January in the state’s favor and precleared the law for 2013. The federal government was ordered to pay $54,000 of the state’s costs. Texas also appealed a rejection of a redistricting plan. That appeal before the Supreme Court is likely on hold until the Shelby County case is decided. But several states covered in whole or part by Section 5 -- California, Mississippi, New York, and North Carolina -- support its constitutionality, and in an amicus brief they filed in the Shelby County case, they wrote that "its compliance burdens are minimal." Lewis’ office points out that the litigation costs associated with the declaratory judgment process are optional, unless a jurisdiction wants to challenge that decision through a lawsuit. Lewis’ assessment of the compliance costs is fair, said Myrna Perez, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning think tank/advocacy group. Perez has reviewed several elections changes filed by different states. But Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia who has done studies on the impact of the Voting Rights Act in Georgia, said the administrative review route may be simple and inexpensive for trivial changes, such as moving a polling place from a fire station to a school. With more complex changes, such as redistricting plans, though, even the administrative review route can be complicated and carry indirect costs, he said. Georgia spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees for outside attorneys -- not including work done by internal office staff -- for a federal judicial review of the state’s redistricting plan in 2001. In March 2002, the state Legislature passed a midyear budget that included $1.8 million for legal fees to defend the plan. "You will have to provide the alternative plans that were considered and rejected, votes on those plans," Bullock said. "I have no idea of the costs, but there is a fair amount of manpower to do this." And that manpower has a cost, he said. So does Lewis’ claim balance the scales of justice? Lewis said that opponents of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires certain jurisdictions to obtain preclearance from the federal government to implement elections changes, are wrong when they say adhering to the requirements can be expensive. Lewis says the cost is minimal, with states only having to fund the paper, postage and manpower required for submitting the required documents. For administrative reviews on minor issues, Lewis appears to be correct. The Justice Department provides an administrative process for preclearence submissions that is designed to cut litigation costs. And most of the states choose this option. But that option can be expensive. And there is also another more costly option for states that involves taking the case through the court system, which is likely to require significant amounts of money in legal fees. Lewis’ claim is partially accurate but leaves out important details about the second review method’s cost for more complex elections changes. For this missing information, we rated his claim Half True. Staff writer Karishma Mehrotra contributed to this story.	None	John Lewis	None	None	None	2013-04-03T06:00:00	2013-02-24	['None']
-goop-01872	Bindi Irwin, Chandler Powell Engaged?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/bindi-irwin-chandler-powell-engaged-wedding/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Bindi Irwin, Chandler Powell Engaged?	4:21 am, January 10, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-00857	Warning: Do Not Accept Friend Request from John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/friend-request-john-jacob-jingleheimer-schimdit/	None	computers	None	None	['cyberattacks', 'facebook', 'warnings']	Warning: Do Not Accept Friend Request from John Jacob Jingleheimer Schimdit	Jul 12, 2017	None	['None']
-goop-02831	Jennifer Aniston Using Brad Pitt As “Leverage” In Justin Theroux Marriag	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-using-brad-pitt-leverage-justin-theroux-marriage/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Aniston NOT Using Brad Pitt As “Leverage” In Justin Theroux Marriage	3:11 pm, April 29, 2017	None	['Jennifer_Aniston', 'Brad_Pitt']
-pomt-06854	There was a "loss of eight million jobs during the Bush eight years."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/aug/03/harry-reid/harry-reid-says-8-million-jobs-lost-during-george-/	During a Senate floor speech on Aug. 2, 2011 -- shortly before a vote on the final debt-ceiling bill -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., compared the job-creation records of President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush. "My friend (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.) talks about no new taxes," Reid said. "Mr. President, if their theory was right, with these huge (tax cuts) that took place during the Bush eight years, the economy should be thriving. These tax cuts have not helped the economy. The loss of eight million jobs during the Bush eight years, two wars started, unfunded, all on borrowed money, these tax cuts all on borrowed money -- if the tax cuts were so good, the economy should be thriving. If we go back to the prior eight years during President Clinton’s administration, 23 million new jobs were created." A reader asked us whether Reid was correct that there was a "loss of eight million jobs during the Bush eight years." So we looked into it. As always, we looked at jobs numbers compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the government’s official source of employment data. During Bush’s eight years in office -- January 2001 to January 2009 -- the nation actually gained a net 1.09 million jobs. (Because there were gains in government jobs, the private sector actually lost 653,000 jobs during that period.) This isn’t remotely close to what Reid claimed. Reid's office didn't respond to our request for information, but we think we know what he was referring to. From the economy’s peak to its low point, the nation lost 8.75 million jobs. Here’s the problem: The peak for jobs came in January 2008, while the low point for jobs came in February 2010. This means the starting point for Reid’s measure came seven years into Bush’s eight-year tenure, and the low point occurred about a year into Barack Obama’s tenure. In other words, Reid had a point in saying that there was a "loss of eight million jobs" -- but it didn’t come "during the Bush eight years." The loss of eight million jobs occurred during a roughly two-year period shared more or less equally between Bush and Obama. Reid may blame Bush’s policies for every single one of those jobs lost -- an opinion he’s entitled to, but one we are unable to fact-check. Still, his statement is incorrect as spoken. Reid went on to say, "If we go back to the prior eight years during President Clinton’s administration, 23 million new jobs were created." We looked at the BLS numbers and found that Reid was basically correct in that claim. From January 1993 to January 2001, the nation gained 22.7 million total jobs. This means that Reid specifically counted Clinton’s job-creation numbers from his inauguration day to the date he exited from office, but he did not do so for Bush, even though he used the Clinton figure as a direct comparison. It strikes us as a clear-cut case of cherry-picking. So where does this leave us? Reid is correct that more than 8 million jobs were lost in the United States during the recent economic downturn, but he’s flat wrong to say that it happened "during the Bush eight years." Compounding the error, Reid makes a direct comparison between Bush and Clinton, yet he uses one method that makes Clinton’s number seem strong and Bush’s number seem weak. We rate Reid’s statement Pants on Fire.	None	Harry Reid	None	None	None	2011-08-03T12:19:39	2011-08-02	['None']
-goop-01114	Jamie Foxx “Upset” Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson Are “Talking Again,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jamie-foxx-katie-holmes-joshua-jackson-talking-again-friends/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jamie Foxx NOT “Upset” Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson Are “Talking Again,” Despite Reports	3:02 pm, April 25, 2018	None	['Jamie_Foxx', 'Katie_Holmes']
-pomt-09982	"About halfway through fiscal year 2009, Washington has run out of money."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/apr/30/john-boehner/boehner-cites-debt-day-numbers-carefully/	"In short, about halfway through fiscal year 2009, Washington has run out of money." In an op-ed published April 26, House Republican Leader John Boehner laid out a case for "Debt Day." "It is the day of the Fiscal Year — beginning on Oct. 1 of the previous calendar year — on which total government spending exceeds total federal revenues," Boehner wrote. "And in our current fiscal year, that falls on April 26 — this Sunday, just days before the administration’s 100th day milestone. In short, about halfway through fiscal year 2009, Washington has run out of money." Now keep in mind, we know "Debt Day" is not a literal concept. Thanks to withholding and estimated taxes, the government collects income tax revenues year-round, and it has other sources of tax revenues as well. It also borrows money by selling U.S. Treasury securities. So the government does not have to shut down because its pockets are empty. Boehner acknowledges that, calling it a symbol of "our government’s arrogant culture of spending." We were intrigued by the "Debt Day" claim and wanted to check Boehner's numbers for accuracy. He uses numbers provided by the Congressional Budget Office that are widely regarded as fair and accurate. And he accurately explains how he uses them to calculate debt. Boehner blames the Obama administration for a "borrowing binge" in his editorial, but it's only fair to note that the 2009 budget started back on Oct. 1, 2008, when Boehner's fellow Republican George W. Bush was president. Parts of that budget were finalized, however, under Obama's watch on March 11, 2009. Boehner also notes accurately that "Debt Day" has arrived earlier this year than any time in the past decade, since the surpluses that marked the end of the Clinton administration. Here are the "Debt Days" for previous years, based on CBO numbers. Again, it's important to remember the calendar for these dates starts Oct. 1 of the previous year, not Jan. 1. We've also included the percentage of each year's budget that was actually paid with government revenues, as opposed to borrowing: 2002 - Sept. 2 - 92 percent 2003 - July 29 - 83 percent 2004 - July 27 - 82 percent 2005 - Aug. 14 - 87 percent 2006 - Aug. 27 - 91 percent 2007 - Sept. 9 - 94 percent 2008 - Aug. 5 - 84 percent 2009 - April 26 - 57 percent Boehner carefully explains how he arrives at the "Debt Day" number, and he uses widely accepted numbers in his calculations. The statement we're checking here is, "In short, about halfway through fiscal year 2009, Washington has run out of money." That "halfway" number is a little bit of a push; it's actually 57 percent of the year. And, the "run out of money" is metaphorical, not literal. But Boehner is right with his central point that we're spending more money than we're taking in, and that the difference is close to the halfway mark this fiscal year. So we rate his statement True.	None	John Boehner	None	None	None	2009-04-30T17:06:05	2009-04-22	['None']
-snes-03341	Keanu Reeves overcame a series of tragic events in his life, before and after becoming a wealthy movie star.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/keanu-reeves-tragic-story/	None	Glurge Gallery	None	David Emery	None	The Tragic Life of Keanu Reeves	14 December 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-05634	Says "New Jersey has the most educated population of all the states in this country."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/mar/23/sheila-oliver/sheila-oliver-claims-new-jerseyans-are-most-educat/	Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver is tired of hearing people suggest that New Jersey has a problem of adequately educating its residents. In fact, according to Oliver, New Jerseyans are the "most educated" in the nation. The Essex County Democrat extolled the virtues of the Garden State during a Feb. 27 speech at the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. "New Jersey is a great place. We probably have the best strategic position on the East Coast. We have so many natural assets," Oliver told the audience. "And, I’m gonna get into the subject of education in a moment, but I want to tell you New Jersey has the most educated population of all the states in this country. And we need to stop this self-fulfilling efficacy that we’ve got a problem when it comes to adequately educating people in our state." Oliver’s claim about us having the "most educated population of all the states" is not far off, PolitiFact New Jersey found. In recent years, New Jersey has stood in fifth place among the states for the percentage of its residents, 25 years old and over, who have at least a bachelor’s degree, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. First, let’s explain the source of Oliver’s statement. To back up the claim, Oliver spokesman Tom Hester Jr. cited various education statistics, including a 2009 news article by U.S. News & World Report about, in part, New Jersey having the highest high school graduation rate in 2006. He also cited a Huffington Post article that claimed the state ranked sixth for the percentage of adults between 25 and 34 years old with college degrees. "New Jersey has the nation’s highest high school graduation rate and ranks at the very top in student achievement and college graduation rates," Hester said in an email. "Quite simply, the Speaker believes that when you combine it all together, NJ has the most educated population." But two experts told us the best measure to determine the "most educated" states is the educational attainment data compiled by the census bureau. Through a spokesman, Thomas Snyder, director of Annual Reports for the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education, said in an e-mail: "I believe the educational attainment data are the most relevant for this question." David Bills, an associate professor at the University of Iowa’s College of Education, agreed that the educational attainment data is the "best available measure." "I’d call it the best available measure, with the main problem being that many people complete their education after age 25, so this measure will underestimate how many people will eventually get degrees," Bills said in an e-mail. "Not everyone over age 25 has completed their schooling." Now, let’s explain how many New Jersey residents have college degrees. In 2009, 34.5 percent of New Jerseyans, 25 years old and over, had at least a bachelor’s degree, according to the census bureau. In 2010, 35.4 percent of state residents fit the same criteria, according to the census bureau. In both years, New Jersey was in fifth place behind Massachusetts, Colorado, Maryland and Connecticut. Even after accounting for the margins of error attached to those statistics, New Jersey doesn’t place first. So, New Jersey may not have the "most educated" population, but it certainly has one of them. Our ruling In a speech at Rider University, Oliver claimed "New Jersey has the most educated population of all the states in this country." According to educational attainment data from the U.S. Census Bureau, her claim is pretty much on target. In 2009 and 2010, New Jersey ranked fifth for the percentage of its population, 25 years old and over, who have at least a bachelor’s degree. We rate the statement Mostly True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Sheila Oliver	None	None	None	2012-03-23T07:30:00	2012-02-27	['None']
-snes-00063	Is This a Photograph of Christine Blasey Ford Holding a 'Not My President' Sign?	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/christine-blasey-ford-not-my-president/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This a Photograph of Christine Blasey Ford Holding a ‘Not My President’ Sign?	19 September 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01601	"Over 73% of all donations raised (from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge) are going to fundraising, overhead, executive salaries, and external donations."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/sep/02/blog-posting/bloggers-incorrectly-blast-als-ice-bucket-challeng/	By now, there are very few Americans who haven’t heard of the "ALS Ice Bucket Challenge" -- the social media-driven campaign during the summer of 2014 to dump ice water on your head as a way of raising awareness of the neuromuscular disease ALS and promoting donations to the ALS Association, which funds medical research and support programs for those who have the disease. The effort has led to at least $94 million in donations to the ALS Association -- a jolt of extra funding for a group that last year spent a comparatively modest $26 million. But not everyone is happy about this development. A blog called politicalears.com posted an article stating that the Ice Bucket Challenge was a "fraud" because most of the money was being spent on administration and overhead. The unsigned post was picked up widely on social media feeds; that’s where PolitiFact readers noticed it. Several of them asked us to check it out, so we did. (The website has no contact information, so we were unable to reach the person who wrote the post.) Here are key excerpts from the Aug. 28 blog post, headlined, "Ice bucket fraud: ALS Foundation admits that 73% of donations are not used for ALS research." "We've been duped. America is filled with fun-loving and caring people. The viral ice bucket challenge has combined both our sense of responsibility to our fellow human with fun. And it has been fun! Who didn't love seeing Sarah Palin doused? "But wait? Ice Bucket Challenge donations are nearing $100 MILLION. Where is that money going? According to the ALS Foundation, not towards ALS. "Over 73% of all donations raised are going to fundraising, overhead, executive salaries, and external donations. Less than 27% is actually used for the purpose we donated for. "According to the ECFA, a charitable watchdog, 27% of donations actually making it to the cause they are donated to is unacceptable. In fact, the ECFA won't deem a non-profit as a reliable charity unless at least 80% of donations make it to their intended projects. ... "The ALS Foundation is a terrible organization to send your money. If you decide to take the Ice Bucket Challenge, may I humbly suggest that you select a well-researched charity (on your own, no endorsements here) and send it to them." The post reprints a pie chart taken directly from the ALS Association’s website, showing the following breakdown of expenses: Research: $7.2 million (27 percent) Patient and community services: $5.1 million (19 percent) Public and professional education: $8.5 million (32 percent) Fundraising: $3.6 million (14 percent) Administration: $1.9 million (7 percent) Let’s start by noting some comparatively minor problems. First, the group in question is the ALS Association, not the "ALS Foundation," as the blog post calls it. Second, the ALS Association hasn’t said anything to "admit" the claims asserted in the blog post, as the post’s headline says. In fact, they’ve posted a response to it here. Now for the blog post’s biggest mistakes: • "Over 73% of all donations raised are going to fundraising, overhead, executive salaries, and external donations." Not true. The 73 percent figure appears to come from subtracting everything except for the 27 percent that falls under "research." The charitable way (no pun intended) of viewing the post’s error is that it misread the category headings. If the post had simply said "research accounts for only 27 percent of the ALS Association’s budget," that would be technically correct though still misleading, since the group’s mission statement includes several goals beyond directly sponsoring research. They include raising awareness, serving as a trusted source of information, providing patients with access to support services and advocating for increased funding for research. Once you include "patient and community services" and "public and professional education" as legitimate spending to advance the group’s stated mission, the percentage spent on items supporting those goals rises to nearly 79 percent. But the blog post actually exacerbated its error by specifically labeling 73 percent of the group’s spending as "fundraising, overhead, executive salaries and external donations." That’s flat wrong. We’ll add that if anyone wants to donate money to the association for research only, they can do that. "If a donor would like 100% of their donation to go to research, he/she can simply check a box on our online donation form here," the association’s website says. "If a donor already donated and would like to redirect their donation, please email us at donations@alsa-national.org." • The role of ECFA. The post cites standards by ECFA, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a group founded in 1979 that "enhances trust in Christ-centered churches and ministries by establishing and applying Seven Standards of Responsible Stewardship to accredited organizations." However, when we contacted ECFA, Dan Busby, the group’s president, told PolitiFact that his group does not advance the argument made in the post. "We were very surprised to see the ALS-related report which attributes certain statements to ECFA," Dan Busby, the group’s president, told PolitiFact. "We did not provide any information for the story." Busby added that, contrary to what the blog post said, his group doesn’t have a "bright line" test for a charity’s appropriate spending percentage. "The data of applicants and members which reflect high overhead expenses are carefully analyzed for propriety," he said. "In addition to considering the financial picture of a potential donee charity, we believe donors should also look at other attributes, including the charity's commitment to effective board governance, financial integrity, and appropriate accountability." Other groups that analyze charities have given the ALS Association high scores. Charity Navigator, for instance, gave the ALS Association a score of four stars out of four for financial standards and transparency and accountability. The association is "Top Rated" by Charity Watch, is accredited by the Better Business Bureau and is a Guidestar Exchange gold participant. Our ruling The blog post said that "over 73 percent of all donations raised (from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge) are going to fundraising, overhead, executive salaries, and external donations." Whether purposely or by incompetence, the anonymous blogger misreported the ALS Association’s figures. In reality, nearly 79 percent of the ALS Association’s expenditures were for purposes that advance its stated mission. Fundraising, overhead and executive salaries account for no more than 21 percent. We rate the claim Pants on Fire.	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2014-09-02T15:49:28	2014-08-28	['None']
-hoer-00730	Kevin Carter Pulitzer Prize Photograph	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/kevin-carter-pulitzer.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Kevin Carter Pulitzer Prize Photograph	26th May 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-05544	Says the Obama administration "will no longer enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)."	half-true	/florida/statements/2012/apr/09/vern-buchanan/vern-buchanan-says-obama-will-no-longer-enforce/	The Human Rights Campaign, a national organization that fights for the rights of gays and lesbians, has targeted U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., for his statements on the Defense of Marriage Act. In a mailer, Buchanan said that "the Obama administration recently announced it will no longer enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the federal law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman." The Human Rights Campaign said that was wrong. "While President Obama announced last year that his administration believed the law to be unconstitutional and could not continue to defend it in court, he also made clear that the law would continue to be enforced unless struck down or repealed," said the HRC. The act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, says states do not have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, and that the federal government does not recognize same-sex marriage. Obama promised to repeal DOMA during his 2008 campaign. The HRC sent a press release on March 14, 2012, claiming that a Buchanan mailer mischaracterized the status of DOMA. The HRC said they received the mailer recently, but staff at Buchanan’s office told us the mailer was a year old. They also said Buchanan, who represents the Sarasota area, stood by the statements. Was Buchanan correct to state that the Obama administration recently announced it would no longer enforce DOMA, or was he wrong, as the HRC suggested? DOMA status In February 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner saying that the Obama administration would no longer defend the law -- in court. Holder argued that the law, as applied to same-sex couples legally married under state law, violates the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment. While the letter stated that the Obama administration would not defend the law in two cases, it also stated that it will continue to be "enforced" by the executive branch until Congress repeals it, or the courts definitively strike it down. The law will still be defended, though. A group of House leaders directed the House general counsel to defend DOMA -- the initial contract with a law firm was for $500,000 and later amended for up to $1.5 million. In response to our questions, the U.S. Department of Justice sent us a letter Holder wrote to Boehner in February 2012 related to a case in which military personnel were seeking benefits for same-sex spouses. Holder wrote that though DOMA is unconstitutional, the executive branch will continue to enforce a federal law that pertains to the military that defines spouses as opposite sex. According to the Service Members Legal Defense Network, which is working on the plaintiffs’ side, although DOJ is not defending the suit, the plaintiffs and other gay and lesbian military families are not getting the same benefits as their straight married peers. In October 2011 the department announced some benefits where members may designate beneficiaries of their choosing, regardless of sexual orientation. But Department of Defense spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said that the eligibility for a number of benefits is restricted by several statutes including DOMA. Obama has repeatedly said that his administration would no longer defend DOMA in the courts, but he distinguished between defending in the courts and enforcement during a Sept. 28, 2011, roundtable discussion with reporters. "Administratively, we can't ignore the law. DOMA is still on the books," Obama said. "What we have said is even as we enforce it, we don't support it, we think it's unconstitutional. The position that my administration has taken I think will have a significant influence on the court as it examines the constitutionality of this law." HRC gave us two examples of how DOMA remains enforced. The Internal Revenue Service will not allow legally married same-sex couples to file jointly, and the Social Security Administration will not provide survivors benefits to a surviving same-sex spouse. We confirmed this with the two agencies. On the other hand, Buchanan spokesman Max Goodman cited examples of where the administration’s announcement -- or Holder’s direct action -- influenced courts to halt deportation of illegal immigrants, which he counted as a lack of enforcement. • In March 2011, the deportation case of Monica Alcota was put on hold. Alcota overstayed her tourist visa from Argentina and married a woman in Connecticut. The couple’s attorney said the judge and government attorneys agreed to the action for several reasons, including Obama’s direction to not defend DOMA. A judge later dismissed her case. • In May 2011, Holder vacated a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals in the case of Paul Wilson Dorman, a gay man from Ireland cleared for deportation after the judges ruled against the man on the basis of DOMA. Holder asked the board to determine whether the man, who had a civil union in New Jersey, could be considered a spouse under New Jersey law. The case remains pending. • An immigration judge in Newark suspended a deportation in the case of Henry Velandia in May 2011 citing the action that Holder took in the Dorman case. Velandia, from Venezuela, had married a man in Connecticut. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement later decided that it would no longer pursue deportation. Buchanan’s office also pointed to comments made by constitutional scholars such as Ed Whelan, who worked for the U.S. Department of Justice from 2001 to 2004. Whelan testified about DOMA before the House in 2011 and is now the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. "The executive branch’s defense of a law in court is an essential part of enforcement, not something separate from enforcement," Whelan told PolitiFact in an email. "Might it have been better if Rep. Buchanan’s statement had said: ‘The Obama administration recently announced that it would no longer enforce in court the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman’? Perhaps. But as this tweak illustrates, there is no problem with his use of the word ‘enforce’ (rather than ‘defend’)." We decided to run the statement by a few other legal experts not involved in the cases Even though the president takes an oath to support the Constitution, the president can take a position on whether a particular statute is unconstitutional, said Stephen Schnably, a constitutional law professor at University of Miami. If he finds that it is unconstitutional, there’s an argument that the president’s duty bars him from defending it in court. DOMA raises the unanswered question of whether Obama and his administration have the legal right to choose which of Congress’ laws they defend and which ones they don’t -- a question before the U.S. Supreme Court in a separate case, said Bob Jarvis, a constitutional law professor at Nova Southeastern University. "One could certainly say that any failure to compel obedience to DOMA is a failure to enforce it," Jarvis said via email. "On the other hand, one could also say that a failure to defend a law in court is different from a failure to enforce it in everyday life." Peter Edelman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown, said there’s a difference between deciding not to defend the constitutionality of a law and failing to enforce it. "It is a significant step in and of itself, but it is not the same as not enforcing the law," he said. Our ruling Buchanan said in a mailer that the Obama administration "would no longer enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)." The Obama administration said in February 2011 it would no longer defend the law in the courts. But the HRC cites examples that enforcement continues -- for example, gay couples can’t file their taxes jointly. We found legal experts who made arguments on both sides about whether not defending DOMA in the courts equals not enforcing it. If Buchanan had said that Obama would no longer "defend" DOMA he’d be on safe ground, but he chose "enforce" instead. The Obama administration is enforcing the law to some extent, such as forbidding joint tax returns or survivors’ benefits in Social Security for gay couples. Still, there’s clear evidence that the Obama administration is seeking to mitigate the law’s effects. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Vern Buchanan	None	None	None	2012-04-09T09:21:36	2011-03-01	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-03105	A photograph shows President Obama taking the oath of office with his hand on a Quran.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-used-quran-for-oath/	None	Politicians	None	Dan Evon	None	Did President Obama Use the Quran to Take His Oath of Office?	30 June 2016	None	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-02909	In 1929, the Secretary of State shut down a program that was "collecting information to protect America" because it was "unseemly," but that move led to "millions and millions" of deaths in World War II.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/nov/04/mike-rogers/rep-mike-rogers-says-us-shuttering-intelligence-op/	The debate over the federal government’s surveillance policies -- prompted by the release of National Security Agency documents taken by leaker Edward Snowden -- has revived interest in a decades-old tale of spycraft. The story of the "American Black Chamber" intelligence program came up during an interview with House Intelligence chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on the Nov. 3, 2013, edition of CBS’ Face the Nation. Amid a discussion of whether the United States had been wrong to spy on friendly foreign leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Rogers stood up for an aggressive American intelligence effort overseas. "We did this in the 1930s," Rogers said. "We turned it off. In 1929, the Secretary of State at that time, (when) they were collecting information to protect America, said, ‘You know, we shouldn't do this. This is unseemly.’ They turned it off. Well, that led to a whole bunch of misunderstanding that led to World War II, that killed millions and millions of people." We had two questions about Rogers’ claim. First, was he accurate in describing the history of this early United States intelligence effort? And second, is it reasonable to argue that the elimination of such a program led to "millions and millions" of deaths in World War II? The "American Black Chamber" This part of the story begins with Herbert O. Yardley (1889-1958), an Indiana native who became a code clerk with the State Department and later served during World War I in the cryptologic section of military intelligence. He parlayed that experience into what is generally considered the United States’ first peacetime code-breaking operation -- a joint project of the Army and the State Department. Using a shell company office in Manhattan, cryptoanalysts toiled behind a locked door, breaking foreign codes used in telegrams. During its dozen years of operation, the office cracked the codes of 45,000 telegrams, including messages sent by at least 19 nations, both allies (England and France) and rivals (Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union), according to David Kahn’s landmark 1996 history, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet. In 1921 and 1922, the office figured out the codes used by Japanese negotiators at an international naval conference in Washington, providing internal Japanese bargaining positions to chief negotiator Charles Evans Hughes. Their work made it possible for the United States to secure an advantageous outcome. But by the late 1920s, the project began to fall out of favor. Congress was reluctant to provide more funding, while telegraph company executives were increasingly uncomfortable diverting telegrams. (This part of the story offers an eerie parallel to the unease expressed by Google and other companies to customer data traffic being surveilled by the NSA.) For Yardley, a new source of turbulence emerged when Herbert Hoover became president in 1929. Listening to Hoover’s first speech as president from a speakeasy, Yardley could sense that the administration’s goal of following high ethical standards would pose a serious challenge to his office. He was right. In a bid to pre-empt any change to his program, Yardley waited until Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson had been in office for a few months -- banking that Stimson had "lost some of his innocence is wrestling with the hardheaded realities of diplomacy," as Kahn put it -- and then presented him with some important code-breaking results. The tactic had worked with previous Cabinet officials, but this time, it backfired. Stimson, Kahn writes, "was shocked to learn of the existence of the Black Chamber, and totally disapproved of it. He regarded it as a low, snooping activity, a sneaking, spying, keyhole-peering kind of dirty business, a violation of the principle of mutual trust upon which he conducted both his personal affairs and his foreign policy. ... Stimson rejected the view that such means justified even patriotic ends (and) said later, 'Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.' In an act of pure moral courage, Stimson, affirming principle over expediency, withdrew all State Department funds, (and) since these constituted its major income, their loss shuttered the office." We interviewed several scholars of intelligence and all agreed that on the basic facts of the Black Chamber, Rogers was essentially right -- the who (the Secretary of State), the when (1929) and the why (that such surveillance was ungentlemanly). The only objection we heard is that while the Hoover administration shut down the Black Chamber, it did not shut down all such intelligence activities. The Army Signal Corps, under the leadership of William Friedman, continued to produce intelligence. Before we move on to the second part of Rogers’ quote, we’ll provide a brief postscript about the key players. Yardley was initially ostracized when his shop closed down, never working again for the U.S. government (though he consulted with such foreign countries as Canada and China). He did, however, get a revenge of sorts by publishing a book, The American Black Chamber, that became a financial and critical success. To this day, it remains a classic of the cryptologic literary genre. Meanwhile, the highly ethical Hoover administration proceeded to "lie straightforwardly" (Kahn’s words) by denying, in no uncertain terms, the existence of the Black Chamber, even when confronted with Yardley’s book. And Stimson? As peacetime morphed into World War II, he changed his tune. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, Stimson received intelligence from MAGIC, a highly classified codebreaking effort run by divisions of the Army and Navy. Did the shuttering of the Black Chamber lead the United States to World War II While Rogers’ description of the Black Chamber is generally accurate, our experts said, his suggestion that its absence led to World War II is, at the very least, greatly exaggerated. Richard Breitman, an American University scholar of the World War II era, acknowledged that the closure of Yardley’s office "undoubtedly hindered American intelligence collection during the 1930s," but he added that "connecting this with the outbreak of World War II, which began in Europe without U.S. participation, is way off." Breitman noted that "there was plenty of public information, including Hitler's Mein Kampf, about Nazi Germany's general inclination to go to war," he said. In addition, "various western diplomats reported specific details from Berlin and elsewhere about Nazi plans. But Congress had limited the Roosevelt Administration's capacity to react with the Neutrality Acts." Joseph Wippl, a professor of the practice of international relations at Boston University, also points to the broader push in the United States toward neutrality, arguing that the disbanding of the Black Chamber was a symptom of a more general disengagement the nation was undergoing at the time. "After World War I, the United States returned to a policy of isolationism, in spite of the fact we were the world's dominant power," he said. "The fact that we did not have military or intelligence capability before World War II reflects what happened to the United States after World War I -- that is, back to isolationism." John Pike, the director of globalsecurity.org, said that after spending "nearly half a century studying World War II, only in recent years have I come to think I have some understanding of the thing. To me, (Rogers’) is a novel proposition. There were certainly many intelligence failures in the years before the war, but they were mainly failures of imagination, not collection." Our ruling Rogers said that in 1929, the Secretary of State shut down a program that was "collecting information to protect America" because it was "unseemly," but that move led to "millions and millions" of deaths in World War II. He is generally correct in his description of that year’s shuttering of a pioneering codebreaking project called the Black Chamber, but historians dismiss any suggestion that the program led inexorably to the onset of World War II. At best, they say, that notion is greatly exaggerated. We rate Rogers’ statement Half True.	None	Mike Rogers	None	None	None	2013-11-04T18:33:57	2013-11-03	['United_States', 'World_War_II']
-pomt-12195	"More than 15,000 transgender Americans" are "serving in the military today."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/jul/26/mark-pocan/how-many-people-military-are-transgender/	An announcement by President Donald Trump on Twitter that the U.S. government "will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military" drew an almost immediate denunciation from U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan. The Madison-area Democrat called the decision "outrageous and shameful" and "based in discrimination" in a news release issued July 26, 2017. He concluded by stating: "With more than 15,000 transgender Americans serving in the military today, President Trump should immediately reverse course on his decision and he should stop using shocking policy shifts on Twitter to distract Americans from his failing health care plan." Given that the issue of transgender troops may be unfamiliar to many readers, we thought we’d check Pocan’s claim that more than 15,000 are serving in the military. No official data The Pentagon has said it does not know how many transgender people serve in uniform because until 2016, they faced discharge if they revealed their identities. A Pentagon spokesman did not reply when we asked if the the Pentagon has any estimates. The U.S. Census Bureau also does not collect data on sexual orientation or gender identity. (In April 2016, more than 75 members of Congress wrote to the Census Bureau to request the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity as a subject for the bureau’s regular American Community Survey. The bureau concluded, according to a March 2017 memo, that "there was no federal data need" to include those.) So, there are no official statistics on the number of transgender people in the military. That leaves us with two prominently cited studies that produced estimates which vary. 2014 study To support Pocan’s statement, his office referred us to a 2014 report by UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy. (The Human Rights Campaign and the National Center for Transgender Equality pointed us to the same study.) That study estimated that 15,500 transgender individuals were serving on active duty or in the Guard or Reserve forces. The study said its primary source was a national survey done by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality, which the researchers said was the largest sample of transgender people in the United States available at the time. That survey was conducted over a six-month period starting in the fall of 2008. "Data that allow for a direct tabulation of the number of transgender individuals who serve in the U.S. military simply do not exist," the researchers wrote. "The estimates in this research brief rely on a variety of assumptions that could affect their accuracy." They added, however, that "the estimates certainly suggest that transgender individuals are part of the active duty U.S. armed forces, perhaps in portions that exceed that of the general population." 2016 study A 2016 study by the RAND Corp., commissioned by the Pentagon, reported lower figures than the UCLA study. The RAND researchers estimated between 1,320 and 6,630 active duty and between 830 and 4,160 in the reserves. That would be a total of between 2,150 and 10,790 transgender service members, based on figures for people serving in the military in 2014. The study said the estimate was derived from data from multiple surveys. And the reseachers noted: "It is important to note that there have been no rigorous epidemiological studies of the size" of the U.S. transgender population, including those who serve in the military. Asked about the difference between the two studies, Pocan’s spokesman told us: "Whenever we have multiple studies, we try to take the more inclusive one." Our rating Pocan said: "More than 15,000 transgender Americans" are "serving in the military today." A UCLA study estimated the figure is 15,500, while a more recent study by the RAND Corp. estimated 2,150 to 10,790. There are no official counts, so Pocan goes too far in flatly stating his figure. But his figure matches one of two prominently cited estimates. We rate the statement Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Mark Pocan	None	None	None	2017-07-26T15:42:47	2017-07-26	['United_States']
-pomt-10315	On offshore drilling.	half flip	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/04/john-mccain/mccains-cheerleading-for-drilling-is-new/	In an interview with the News-Leader in Springfield, Mo., on June 18, 2008, Sen. John McCain was asked about his recent push for offshore oil drilling. "You have changed your thoughts on that, am I correct?" "No," McCain said. "I've always said it's up to the states and I still say that." The interview came a day after McCain's headline-making speech in Houston in which he made a pitch for lifting a federal moratorium on offshore drilling. So McCain says it's not a switch, but is it? We wanted to find out if he has consistently said it's up to the individual states to decide whether to drill off their coasts. Here's the rest of McCain's answer to the question: "But if the states want to drill offshore, and I hope they do. ... Gasoline prices have gone from a buck and a quarter to four dollars and it's even going to go higher, according to some. I think we have to explore all of the options that we have, and review them. "And I think offshore oil exploration and natural gas exploration is a good thing to do. But the states would still make the decision." Opponents have said McCain was once a proponent of the federal moratorium on offshore drilling. But McCain's record is not so clear. About the closest we could come to finding an inconsistency in McCain's position was two newspaper articles from the presidential race in 1999 — one from the San Francisco Chronicle, the other from the Ventura County (Calif.) Star — in which the reporters paraphrase McCain's position as supporting the moratorium on offshore drilling. In 2000, the Associated Press listed McCain's position on offshore drilling as "Supports state wishes over federal fiat in oil drilling." Here's a sampling of McCain quotes about offshore drilling, starting with ones made when he ran for president in 2000. • "Ronald Reagan believed ... that states should have enormous input into the decisions that directly concern them. This directly concerns the people of California, this decision on offshore oil drilling. Now, off of this coast of Texas, I understand Texans want offshore oil drilling. That's fine with me. Off Florida, they don't. I think that we should allow these decisions, to some degree to be made — significant degree to be made by the people who are directly affected by them." McCain during an interview on ABC News' This Week, Feb. 27, 2000. • "The leases for offshore oil drilling should never have been granted without allowing Californians a legitimate voice in the decisionmaking process. I believe it is up to the voters of California to determine the fate of these leases, and as president, I will respect the decision they make regarding the leases. The people of California deserve to be heard, without being forced to resort to legal action against their own government. As president, I will see to it that the interests of the people of California rise above the special interests of Washington." McCain to the Associated Press in March 2000. • "I wouldn't drill off the coast of Florida unless the people of Florida wanted to. And I wouldn't drill off the coast of California unless the people of California wanted to. And I wouldn't drill in the Grand Canyon unless the people in Arizona wanted to." McCain during a Republican presidential debate in Dearborn, Mich., Oct. 9, 2007. • "Look, I'm a federalist, and I believe the states should decide to enormous degrees what happens within those states, including off their coasts. The people of California have decided they don't want oil drilling off their coasts. The people of Louisiana have decided that they do." McCain during a Republican presidential debate in Simi Valley, Calif., on Jan. 30, 2008. Here's what McCain said in Houston on June 17, 2008: "With gasoline running at more than four bucks a gallon, many do not have the luxury of waiting on the far-off plans of futurists and politicians. We have proven oil reserves of at least 21-billion barrels in the United States. But a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production. And I believe it is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions and to put our own reserves to use. "We can do this in ways that are consistent with sensible standards of environmental protection. And in states that choose to permit exploration, there must be an appropriate sharing of benefits between federal and state governments. But as a matter of fairness to the American people, and a matter of duty for our government, we must deal with the here and now, and assure affordable fuel for America by increasing domestic production." We should note one anomaly in McCain's position. Unlike many of his Republican counterparts in the Senate, McCain has long been opposed to drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, even though most Alaska residents support it. In Houston, McCain explained why ANWR is a special case. "Quite rightly, I believe, we confer a special status on some areas of our country that are best left undisturbed," McCain said. "When America set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we called it a 'refuge' for a reason." As for McCain's voting record on offshore drilling, it's a bit mixed. In June 2003, McCain was among 10 Republicans who voted for an amendment proposed by Democratic Florida Sen. Bob Graham that would have called off a survey and inventory of possible offshore oil and natural gas deposits. It failed. In August 2006, McCain voted in favor of a bill that authorized drilling in about 8.3-million acres of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, off the coasts of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. The bill, which passed handily, also established a 125-mile buffer until 2022 for energy development in Gulf waters off the Florida coast, and extended the moratorium on energy exploration and development in the Gulf from 2012 to 2022. As for ANWR, McCain voted yes on a 2006 procedural measure that protected legislation opening up the Arctic refuge; but he voted for an amendment to strike language that would have done the same in the previous year's budget resolution. Nowhere in those previously listed interviews or speeches prior to Houston does McCain actively advocate for states to institute offshore drilling. Nor does he talk about creating incentives to encourage them to do it, as he did in Houston. That's why the speech made for front-page headlines. Yes, McCain has long been in favor of letting states ultimately decide whether to drill, but he's now become a cheerleader for the cause. If it's not a change in position, it's at least a change in posture. So we rate McCain's position a Half Flip.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-08-04T00:00:00	2008-08-04	['None']
-pomt-11931	An Ohio ballot issue would address the fact that "we’ve gone from paying about $100 for Epipens to over $600 ... We don’t have a choice but to pay it and the drug companies know it."	mostly false	/ohio/statements/2017/oct/13/ohio-taxpayers-lower-drug-prices/ohio-issue-2-ballot-initiative-proponents-overstat/	Ohio Taxpayers for Lower Drug Prices claims its ballot initiative could lower the price tag for the EpiPen, a popular auto-injector for serious allergic reactions. "We’ve gone from paying about $100 for EpiPens to over $600. And they only hold about one dollar’s worth of medicine," the Aug. 29, 2017, video says. "We don’t have a choice but to pay it and the drug companies know it. Vote yes on Issue 2, the Drug Price Relief Act." Do EpiPens really cost that much, and could their price go down with an up-vote on the ballot initiative? Prescription drugs may be severely overpriced, but the ad misrepresents the bill’s impact. And strangely, its example of EpiPens doesn’t really apply to the population that the group is trying to help. Issue 2 is a ballot initiative up for a vote on Nov. 7. If approved, it would require all drugs bought by the state -- whether for Medicaid or other state programs -- to match Veterans Affairs prices, which receive a 24 percent discount off market price in addition to sometimes undisclosed rebates. The idea is that it would lower the state’s health care costs. The ad has a point that the price for the EpiPen two-pack soared since 2007, from $94 to $609. Each pen holds about one dollar’s worth of the drug epinephrine. While the ad makes it sound as though there is no alternative, Mylan released a $300 generic EpiPen two-pack in December 2016 and Lineage Therapeutics offers a generic auto-injector for $110. That’s still a lot, but it’s less than the $600 the ad mentions. The ad also misrepresents the population the initiative would aid, as approximately 70 percent of EpiPen users are privately insured, and Medicaid patients already pay nothing out of pocket, according to Brittany Warner, an Ohio Medicaid spokeswoman. And even if the ad was referring to the prices paid by the state, instead of patients, Medicaid already enjoys significant discounts. Brand EpiPen 2-pak’s listed price for the Medicaid program is $291.41, but because it doesn’t include rebates (which remain confidential), it may be lower. The VA price is indeed lower: $182.33, which includes rebates. "They’re trying to appeal to the sense of outrage of high drug prices, especially for things that ought to be covered for free, but it’s a weird example to cite in the context of this particular initiative, as the vast majority of people who use it are privately insured," said Kao-Ping Chua, a health policy researcher at the University of Chicago who co-authored a study of out-of-pocket spending on EpiPens. Chua said the privately insured and the uninsured bore the greatest brunt of the price increase, though the price they faced for the injectors varied depending on the type of plan they are on. According to Julie Knell, a spokeswoman for Mylan, the company that sells EpiPens, "nearly 90 percent of consumers who received EpiPen Auto-Injector or its authorized generic had an out-of-pocket cost of less than $100 and more than 80 percent are paying less than $50." "I would still argue that $100 is a lot to pay for a life-saving medication," Chua said. "This is the difference between life and death." In addition to the Medicaid program, the state purchases drugs for state employees, prisons, and other state-run programs, but the campaign was unable to pin down the effect of the initiative on these groups. Dennis Willard, a campaign spokesman, said 4 million Ohioans would be affected, 2.8 million of whom are on Medicaid or CHIP. Rachel Sachs, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, told us that if the initiative worked (she identified various legal issues with it in a blog post), the biggest impact would be felt by state correctional systems, which go unmentioned in the ad. Chua warned that if lowering the price for the privately insured was the goal of Issue 2, this wasn’t the best way forward, as companies could raise costs for private insurers to make up for lost revenue from states like Ohio. Opposition ads make a similar argument, claiming VA prices could also increase in response to the act. Researchers Thomas J. Hwang and Aaron S. Kesselheim evaluated this question when the group proposed a similar initiative in California. (It didn’t pass.) They said that the long-term budgetary effect of the ballot initiative was uncertain. A review claiming causation between a similar 1990 measure and increased VA prices couldn’t be "credibly established," they said. Sachs said that restricting the price pharmaceutical companies can demand from the state of Ohio shouldn’t affect the price they offer private insurers or the VA. That’s because price discrimination makes it so that pharmaceuticals arrange different prices with each market, and there’s no reason to believe they haven’t already struck the best deal possible in each one. While studies suggest cost-shifting, or the displacement of costs on other markets, has little impact on hospitals, Sachs admits there’s insufficient research on this phenomenon in the pharmaceutical industry. In the absence of research on the impact of similar initiatives elsewhere, Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, said it would be difficult to gauge the proposal’s impact on the privately insured. Our ruling A pro-Issue 2 ad in Ohio claimed, "We’ve gone from paying about $100 for Epipens to over $600. And they only hold about one dollar’s worth of medicine. We don’t have a choice but to pay it and the drug companies know it." There is a key difference in the "we" paying $600 -- a relatively small fraction of the privately insured population -- and the population for whom the initiative plans to lower prices. The majority of those covered by state-sponsored insurance, like Medicaid, already pay a $0 co-pay. The campaign didn’t provide evidence of the impact on other state-insured populations, though it could have a significant impact on the smaller prison population, which does not face the same rebates as the Medicaid program. The ballot initiative would have no formal effect on prices for the privately insured, and the trickle-down effect for market prices remains speculative. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Ohio Taxpayers for Lower Drug Prices	None	None	None	2017-10-13T06:00:00	2017-08-29	['Ohio']
-pomt-06559	Says Gov. Chris Christie has "now come up with a new agenda" for ethics reform in September 2011.	mostly false	/new-jersey/statements/2011/oct/03/john-wisniewski/john-wisniewski-claims-chris-christies-ethics-refo/	Gov. Chris Christie has been promoting his ethics reform package for more than a year, but that message apparently never reached the ears of Assemblyman John Wisniewski (D-Middlesex) until this past month. Wisniewski, chairman of the state Democratic Party, claimed in a Sept. 26 interview on NJToday that Christie was silent on the subject of ethics reform until coming up with a new agenda in September. "The governor has this urgent ethics reform package. So when we met as a body in the Legislature in June, the governor was silent, and in July, the governor said nothing. And in August, the governor was traveling to meet with the Koch brothers (Charles and David Koch)," Wisniewski told anchor Mike Schneider. "And finally, in September, he’s now come up with a new agenda and he’s talking about an issue – he’s accusing legislators, accusing me, of not disclosing where we earn our income. Every year, we file a financial disclosure report." Does the governor’s ethics reform package represent "a new agenda"? It didn’t take long for PolitiFact New Jersey to determine Wisniewski was off with that claim. The package took a backseat over the summer -- when officials were debating pension and health benefits reform, and the state budget -- but Christie first unveiled his ethics reform proposals a year ago. "This really has been on the agenda for over a year," said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University. Wisniewski told us he stands by his statement. Even if Christie spoke about ethics reform in the past, that has not been his agenda, Wisniewski said. "It’s not been what he’s talking about," Wisniewski said. Let’s explain how long Christie has been discussing ethics reform. In September 2010, Christie proposed a series of ethics reform measures, such as having a more detailed financial disclosure statement for the legislative branch, and a complete ban on dual office holding. By April 2011, the governor was still talking about how he had proposed an ethics reform package in September, but none of his proposals had received a hearing in the Democratic-controlled Legislature. At an April 26 town hall meeting, Christie said, on the subject of ethics reform, the Legislature’s report card would read, "demonstrates a complete disinterest in the subject matter." In the months following those remarks, ethics reform would fall into the shadows behind pension and health benefits reform and, soon after that, a showdown over the new state budget. In August, much public attention focused on proposed toll hikes and then Hurricane Irene. By September -- with Election Day on the horizon -- Christie renewed his focus during recent town hall meetings on ethics reform. David Redlawsk, a political science professor in the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, said it’s incorrect to claim ethics reform represents a new topic for Christie, but he agreed that the proposals fell off the radar after being unveiled last year. "He made the proposals, but he never did what was necessary to push them hard," Redlawsk said. "He turned to other parts of his agenda." Before we turn to our ruling, let’s talk about the financial disclosure report cited by Wisniewski in the television interview. Wisniewski and other legislators are required to file financial disclosure statements by May 15, detailing sources of income and other data from the preceding calendar year. For each source of income, legislators must show the range of their earnings according to four categories, with the highest level listed as $50,000 or more. "Nobody’s hiding anything and it’s outright false to suggest otherwise," Wisniewski told us. In his most recent report, Wisniewski listed his sources of earned income as what he receives through his law firm and through his legislative salary. But the financial disclosure statements submitted by Christie and other designated state officials provide greater detail of income earnings. Those forms outline seven categories with the highest level identified as greater than $500,000. Our ruling Wisniewski claimed Christie had "come up with a new agenda" for ethics reform this past month. But the governor unveiled his ethics reform proposals a year ago, and reiterated the need for action earlier this year. Still, Wisniewski is right that ethics reform has not been the governor’s top priority in recent months. We rate the statement Mostly False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	John Wisniewski	None	None	None	2011-10-03T05:15:00	2011-09-26	['Chris_Christie']
-para-00218	"The Coalition’s alternative climate change policy will cost billions of dollars more than Tony Abbott claims and has no chance of meeting Australia’s emissions reduction target."	mostly true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/20/mark-butler/how-much-direct-action-cost/index.html	None	['Carbon Tax', 'Environment']	Mark Butler	Michael Koziol, Peter Fray	None	How much will the Coalition's Direct Action plan cost?	Tuesday, August 20, 2013 at 9:01 a.m.	None	['Tony_Abbott', 'Australia']
-abbc-00152	The claim: Adam Bandt says the Federal Government has cut spending on science, research and innovation to an "historic low".	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-07/adam-bandt-research-development-spending-claim-checks-out/5789134	The claim: Adam Bandt says the Federal Government has cut spending on science, research and innovation to an "historic low".	['research', 'medical-research', 'government-and-politics', 'federal-government', 'political-parties', 'greens', 'australia']	None	None	['research', 'medical-research', 'government-and-politics', 'federal-government', 'political-parties', 'greens', 'australia']	Fact check: Science, research and innovation spending cut to 'historic low'	Tue 7 Oct 2014, 5:56am	None	['None']
-afck-00001	“ Kenya has a workforce of 20 million people.”	mostly-correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/is-top-ruling-jubilee-party-official-right-about-who-is-paying-income-tax-in-kenya/	None	None	None	None	None	Is top ruling Jubilee Party official right about who is paying income tax in Kenya?	2018-10-30 08:29	None	['Kenya']
-tron-02126	Cassie Bernall Said “Yes” When Asked about her faith by a shooter at Columbine	disputed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cassie/	None	inspirational	None	None	None	Cassie Bernall Said “Yes” When Asked about her faith by a shooter at Columbine	Mar 16, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-01534	Denmark Teacher Rails Against Socialism, Bernie Sanders	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/denmark-teacher-rails-against-socialism-bernie-sanders/	None	government	None	None	None	Denmark Teacher Rails Against Socialism, Bernie Sanders	May 20, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00956	Donald Trump intervened to stop a bat-wielding mugger in New York City in 1991.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-stops-mugging-1991/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Donald Trump Stop a Mugging in 1991?	27 February 2018	None	['New_York_City', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-06531	"Legally, it doesn't make any difference" which state district you live in when running for Congress.	true	/rhode-island/statements/2011/oct/07/brian-newberry/house-minority-leader-brian-newberry-says-congress/	Want to run for Congress? Are you facing a bruising election battle in the district where you vote? Here's a solution: run in another district. And don’t worry, you don’t even need to move to the new district. Brian Newberry, a Republican and the minority leader in Rhode Island's House, raised the concept during an interview on WPRI-TV's "Newsmakers" broadcast Oct. 2, 2011. He was talking about the campaign for the Congressional District 1 seat now held by Democrat David Cicilline. In 2010, Republican John J. Loughlin II, a former Tiverton state representative, almost beat Cicilline, getting 44.6 percent of the vote. Loughlin is itching for a rematch. But former state police Supt. Brendan Doherty also is running for the seat as a Republican. Newberry is afraid a GOP primary between Loughlin and Doherty would be divisive and help Cicilline win reelection in 2012. So Newberry has suggested that, instead, Doherty run in Rhode Island's 2nd Congressional District against incumbent Democrat James Langevin. But Doherty, whose residence is in Cumberland, doesn't live in that district. "Legally it doesn't make any difference," Newberry said. That may come as a shock to some people. Voting outside your district is a felony, and people are periodically arrested for the crime. Even if you own a business in a community, which gives you a big stake in local politics, you can't vote there unless your actual residence is there. And it's illegal to run for any state or local office unless your primary residence is in the district. But it's OK to run for Congress outside your district? It is, as long as the district is in your state. "The U.S. Constitution does not require candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives to live in the district they wish to represent," said Chris Barnett, spokesman for Secretary of State A. Ralph Mollis. It sets three requirements. "You must be at least 25 years old, must have been a U.S. citizen for at least the past seven years, and must live in the state you want to represent." Article I Section 2 of the founding document says nothing about being an "inhabitant" (to use the original wording) of the specific district where you are running. In addition, you don't even have to move into the state until the day before election day. And because states cannot pass laws that supersede the U.S. Constitution, no further restrictions would be permitted without a constitutional amendment. (The last time this issue came up in Rhode Island was in 1995 when then-Lt. Gov. Robert Weygand decided to run for Congress in the 2nd District while he was living in East Providence, in the 1st District. While there was no legal requirement that he move to the 2nd District, he ultimately did so, closing a deal on a home in North Kingstown on the same day he officially declared his candidacy.) State and local elections are different. Because the U.S. Constitution is silent on such matters, the states are free to require that people running for office actually live among the people they are seeking to represent. So running for either of Rhode Island's two House seats can be done by any Rhode Island resident. Where you live in the state doesn't make a difference, as Newberry said. We rate his statement True. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Brian Newberry	None	None	None	2011-10-07T08:00:00	2011-10-02	['United_States_Congress']
-snes-04045	A new federal law will bar persons under the age of 18-years old from riding as passengers on motorcycles.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/children-motorcycle-ban/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	New Regulation Bans Children from Riding on Motorcycles	13 September 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-04407	Says Mitt Romney refused to say whether he'd sign the Lilly Ledbetter bill.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/16/barack-obama/obama-mitt-romney-refused-say-whether-he-supports-/	Updated Thursday, October 25th, 2012 at 2:08 p.m. Asked about fair pay for women during the second presidential debate, President Barack Obama was quick to bring up the first piece of legislation he signed into law -- the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Audience member Katherine Fenton asked Obama, "In what new ways to you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?" Obama talked about being raised by a single mom who put herself through school and of his grandmother, who worked her way up from a bank secretary to a vice president but "hit the glass ceiling." "She trained people who would end up becoming her bosses during the course of her career. She didn't complain. That's not what you did in that generation," he said at the debate at Hofstra University on Oct. 16, 2012. "And this is one of the reasons why one of the first -- the first bill I signed was something called the Lilly Ledbetter bill." Romney responded by saying at one point he had more women in senior leadership positions than any other governor and that he wanted to help more women find jobs. Obama jumped in, saying, "Katherine, I just want to point out that when Gov. Romney's campaign was asked about the Lilly Ledbetter bill, whether he supported it, he said, ‘I'll get back to you.’ And that's not the kind of advocacy that women need in any economy." Did Romney and his campaign really refuse to say whether he supported the law? Sort of. The law, which Obama signed on Jan. 29, 2009, made it easier for workers to pursue wage discrimination claims but received little Republican support in Congress. It updated 1960s civil rights and age discrimination laws to reset the statute of limitations on such claims with each new paycheck. In 2007, the Supreme Court had ruled in Ledbetter vs. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. that the 180-day statute of limitations started from the day an employer made the decision to discriminate — making it harder for employees who claimed such discrimination later to get relief, such as back pay. What did Romney have to say about it? For a previous fact-check in May, the Obama campaign directed us to a couple media reports. In an April 2012 conference call covered by a Washington Post blogger, a Huffington Post reporter asked an unnamed Romney adviser whether Romney supported the Lilly Ledbetter Act. The adviser responded, "Sam (Stein), we’ll get back to you on that." Later, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul clarified in an email, "He supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law." The second piece the Obama campaign showed us was a Romney interview by Diane Sawyer of ABC News. Sawyer asked Romney, " If you were president — you had been president — would you have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Law?" Romney’s response: Romney: "It's certainly a piece of legislation I have no intention of changing. I wasn't there three years ago —" Sawyer: "But would you have signed it?" Romney: "... I'm not going to go back and look at all the prior laws and say had I been there which ones would I have supported and signed, but I certainly support equal pay for women and — and have no intention of changing that law, don't think there's a reason to." Here, Romney did refuse to say whether he would have signed the bill into law. But he also said he has "no intention of changing that law." Our ruling Obama said that when asked whether he would have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act into law, Romney's campaign said, "I'll get back to you." His point was that the campaign was dodging the question. Indeed, a Romney adviser did say earlier this year that he would "get back" to a reporter about whether he supported the Lilly Ledbetter Act. A spokeswoman then said he would not change it, and Romney later said he "certainly support(s) equal pay for women," and has "no intention of changing that law." So Obama is correct about the initial statement, but Romney later clarified by saying he wouldn't change the law. We rate Obama's claim Mostly True. CORRECTION: A previous version of this item said the Supreme Court's Ledbetter decision made it "impossible for employees who learned of such discrimination later to get relief, such as back pay." In fact, the court declined to address the question of whether employees who learned of discrimination after the statute of limitations expired would be protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-10-16T23:49:06	2012-10-16	['None']
-pomt-09432	Says the Texas State Board of Education is considering eliminating references to Christmas and the Constitution in textbooks.	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2010/mar/12/gretchen-carlson/gretchen-carlson-says-state-board-education-consid/	After spending most of Wednesday gathering public comment, the Texas State Board of Education began hashing out how history, government and economics are taught in Texas public schools. The board's efforts to revise social studies curriculum standards had drawn national attention, from the Fox News Channel in particular. On Wednesday morning's broadcast of "Fox & Friends," co-anchor Gretchen Carlson sounded scandalized by what the network dubbed the "Texas Textbook Wars." "Stage set for a bitter debate — the Texas Board of Education begins hearings today on proposed changes to textbooks that could change what students across the country learn," she said. "About history!" Addressing Jason Moore, a Texas parent who planned to speak at Wednesday's hearing, Carlson said: "So, one of the proposed changes, Jason, is actually to start history class in the year 1877, which would be a big problem for a lot of people, would it not? And eliminate references to certain holidays, Founding Fathers, the Constitution! I mean, no surprise that Christmas, they want to get rid of that because they've been doing that for the last couple of years, but c'mon, the Constitution?" Come again — we the people will not study the Constitution in school? Christmas nearly kaput? Moore corrected Carlson on one count — he said the board had made clear that it's not considering eliminating references to the Christian holiday. Carlson didn't acknowledge her goof. The Texas Education Agency, which oversees primary and secondary education, blasted Fox News for distorting the facts. "The Fox Network in recent days has repeatedly broadcast highly inaccurate information about the State Board of Education’s efforts to adopt the new social studies curriculum standards," the agency said in a press release. On Thursday, "Fox & Friends" co-anchor Steve Doocy backpedaled on his colleague's earlier statement. According to a Fox News transcript, Doocy said on the show: "I just want to clarify some stuff, a couple of points. First of all, they were upset that what we said that what they are doing down in Texas is they are developing standards for new textbooks. Technically, what they are doing is they are developing curriculum standards that will set what is taught in classes, and then those standards will become part of a framework that textbooks are based on. We were just trying to make it simpler… "Also," Doocy said, "we talked about a suggestion that was made that history is, American history starts in the year 1877. That was a suggestion, made first of all, in North Carolina, and we thought we were pretty clear that these were just suggestions, and there have been a lot of suggestions, regarding the founding fathers, and some different dates that may or may not be included in the text . . . . We want to make sure you understand, they were just suggestions, and that is our clarification." So Fox admits it erred on what the Texas board is debating: curriculum standards, not textbook content. Now, what about those Christmas and Constitution deletions Carlson bemoaned? Let's start with the Christmas brouhaha, which broke out last summer. In standards under revision for sixth-grade world culture courses, the board's Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills review committee recommended replacing Christmas and Rosh Hashanah with the Buddhist and Hindu holiday Diwali as examples of significant religious holidays. Here's the wording of the committee's proposed July revision with deletions in parentheses: "Culture. The student understands the relationships among religion, philosophy, and culture. The student is expected to a) explain the relationship among religious ideas, philosophical ideas, and cultures; and b) explain the significance of religious holidays and observances such as (Christmas and) Easter, Ramadan, (and) Yom Kippur (and Rosh Hashanah) Diwali in (selected) various contemporary societies." Critics immediately called the proposed changes "the war on Christmas." When the board met in September, it made clear that those holidays would be put back in — and they were restored in the committee's October revision. Upshot: The board isn't considering removing Christmas from the list of holiday examples. What about starting the teaching of American history in 1877, leaving out the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 and decades of events after that? Doocy said on "Fox & Friends" that Carlson was referring to suggestions in North Carolina. He didn't elaborate on why his colleague referred to the Tar Heel State while talking about Texas. We confirmed that while updating its curriculum standards, North Carolina's education board came under fire for a proposed change to spread its teaching of history over several grades so that high school juniors would only study U.S. history post-Reconstruction, after 1877. Currently in that state, U.S history after 1789 is taught in high school. Texas has long spread its teaching of history over several grades. The Texas Education Agency said: "Texas has and always will teach U.S. History from the beginning until present day. U.S. History through Reconstruction is taught in eighth grade... U.S. history since 1877 is taught in 11th grade." We found eight references to the Constitution in the proposed revisions to the high school standard, and more than 20 in both the draft middle school and elementary school standards. Nothing is final yet — the board is expected to give final approval to the standards in May. So let's review. First, the board is hammering out changes to state curriculum standards, not textbooks. Second, the board is not considering removing Christmas from a list of various religious holidays. And third, the board has never considered removing the Constitution from history textbooks or the state's curriculum. The "Fox & Friends" anchor made things simple and irresponsibly far-fetched and wrong. We rate Carlson's ridiculous statement as Pants on Fire.	None	Gretchen Carlson	None	None	None	2010-03-12T17:45:08	2010-03-10	['None']
-pomt-05417	The fastest-rising expense in the U.S. Defense Department is health care.	true	/georgia/statements/2012/may/02/saxby-chambliss/senators-claim-military-health-care-costs-going-hi/	U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss has been going around the Atlanta region in recent weeks talking about the dangerous consequences of the federal government’s inability to rein in spending. One area of spending that has the Georgia Republican concerned is the U.S. Defense Department’s health care budget. We thought one claim by the senator was a case for the Truth-O-Meter. In an April 11 speech to the Marietta Rotary Club, The Marietta Daily Journal paraphrased Chambliss as saying health care costs are the fastest-rising expense in the Defense Department. "If we’re not careful, it’s going to consume our ability to buy weapons systems and to pay our men and women at the rate we need to pay them," Chambliss told the crowd in Marietta. Chambliss, who serves on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, made a similar point in an April 23 speech at the Atlanta Press Club. "If I went around this room to every company represented here and I asked you what is the fastest-rising expense in your business over the last decade, I dare say 100 percent of you would say it’s health care costs," Chambliss said. "And it’s exactly that way in the federal government, including TRICARE in the Department of Defense, which is taking away our ability to spend money on other quality-of-life issues and identify weapons systems to equip our men and women." TRICARE is the program that provides health care to active-duty service members. Since defense is such an important part of the duties of the federal government, PolitiFact Georgia decided to examine whether the senator was correct. Bronwyn Lance Chester, a spokeswoman for Chambliss, sent us several newspaper articles and other documents to back up the senator’s claim. She did not specify the time period to which Chambliss was referring. That left us to our own interpretation. The Military Health System budget, which pays for care for nearly 10 million military members, their families, retirees, dependent survivors and some others, nearly tripled over the past decade, Defense Department officials say in their budget overview, released in February. According to the overview, spending rose from $19 billion in fiscal year 2001 to the 2012 fiscal year total of about $53 billion. That $53 billion total does not include health care costs for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The federal budget year begins Oct. 1 and ends Sept. 30. We’re currently in fiscal year 2012. Multiple news accounts quote former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other military officials as saying health care is the fastest-growing cost of the department budget. We saw nothing in that report that shows a larger increase in any department. PolitiFact Georgia also looked at the latest Defense Department budget, which was completed in March. Lance Chester referred us to Table 5-5 of the budget, known as the Green Book, which has a breakdown of spending in several categories dating back to 1970 and projected through fiscal year 2017, which would begin Oct. 1, 2016. We began by looking at the last five years. Here, the numbers were higher than what we saw in the February report. The current fiscal year spending under the health category was $100 billion. In fiscal year 2008, it was $82.74 billion. By our calculations, that was nearly a 21 percent increase over that five-year time span. That was the largest increase we saw. The second-highest increase was in fuel, which rose by 19.6 percent. In fiscal year 2017, the health portion of the Defense Department budget is projected to be $114.24 billion. Other medical costs rose by a similar percentage. Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an organization of former federal budget officials, members of Congress and experts, is frustrated with politicians of all stripes in Washington for their failure to manage taxpayer money. We asked her if Chambliss is correct about this claim. "It’s true," said MacGuineas, who describes herself as a political independent. Defense officials are proposing to cut health care costs by increasing health care fees, copays and deductibles for retirees. Any way you slice the numbers, it appears the senator’s claim is based on some solid numbers. Health care spending was the fastest-rising cost over the most recent five years, Defense Department figures show. It is also projected to be the fastest-rising cost over the next five years. We rate this Chambliss claim as True.	None	Saxby Chambliss	None	None	None	2012-05-02T06:00:00	2012-04-11	['None']
-pomt-06718	Say New Jersey Reps. Donald Payne and Frank Pallone are "socialists who are openly serving in the U.S. Congress."	pants on fire!	/new-jersey/statements/2011/sep/01/blog-posting/bloggers-claim-new-jersey-congressmen-donald-payne/	U.S. Reps. Donald Payne and Frank Pallone have been serving in Congress for more than two decades as Democrats, but several blog posts have offered another word to describe both officials. Socialists? An Aug. 12 post on the website for a group called Sovereign Citizens United names Payne (D-10th Dist.) and Pallone (D-6th Dist.) as members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which it says was created by the Democratic Socialists of America. "I’m sure if you asked random people on the street if we had open socialists in the US Congress, they would say – well only Bernie Sanders (Senate). But the right answer is much, much worse," according to the post. Another post on a website called "The Obama File" mentions Payne and Pallone and claims "members of the Progressive Caucus also belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)." Here’s a blog post on Aug. 17 by Texas radio host Dan Cofall, whose show airs out of Fort Worth: "The magic number ‘70’ is the number of members of the 111th Congress who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). These are not just politicians who vote left of center; these are card-carrying members of ‘The Democratic Socialists of America’." That blog post names Payne, but not Pallone. Cofall did not respond to an email seeking comment. While most of the names politicians are called are opinions, calling a congressman a Socialist sounds both emphatic and exact. But real card-carrying Socialists say those members, including Payne and Pallone, aren’t Socialists. The list that Cofall and dozens more rely upon "is completely fraudulent," said Frank Llewellyn, who served as national director of the Democratic Socialists of America for 10 years until stepping down July 5. There is not one member of Congress who is a formal member of the DSA, Llewellyn said. In order to join, a person must fill out a form and pay dues. Even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, is not a formal member of the DSA, Llewellyn said. The last member of Congress who was an actual card-carrying member, he said, was California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums, who served 28 years in the House until leaving in 1998. Llewellyn and DSA’s new national director, Maria Svart are chagrined for two reasons. First, they have to spend time knocking down reports that never seem to go away. Second, Llewellyn said, "if we had formal political relationships with 70-odd members, we would be making a lot more money’’ from dues. So, Payne and Pallone have been identified as socialists for being members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. But what is that caucus anyway? According to its website, the Progressive Caucus is one of the largest in Congress and works for such causes as economic justice, civil rights and civil liberties as well as global peace and security. Llewellyn said that DSA supports some of the policy positions of the caucus. But agreeing with some positions doesn’t make a member of Congress a card-carrying Socialist. And for the record, both Payne and Pallone reject being labeled a socialist. With so much space available on the Internet, Payne told PolitiFact New Jersey he wasn’t surprised to learn of the blog posts, but said their reasoning defies logic. Payne argued that progressive principles make the country unique and strong, allowing individuals to move between income levels. Of the "socialist" label, Payne said: "I’ve been called worse things than that." Pallone said in a written statement: "The progressive label dates back to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson who fought to break up the corporate monopolies and trusts that were crippling the American economy. Those ideas are just as important in our efforts to create jobs and grow the economy." The ruling Misinformation and smear campaigns are part of political life. But these persistent claims about socialists are riddled with errors and outright lies. Any one of the problems would be sufficient to discredit the report, but taken together, the effort is flagrantly false. For that reason, we rate this claim: Pants on Fire. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2011-09-01T05:15:00	2011-08-12	['United_States', 'Donald_M._Payne', 'United_States_Congress', 'New_Jersey']
-snes-03140	Lord of the Flies author William Golding once said that women are "far superior [to men] and always have been."	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/william-golding-on-women/	None	Questionable Quotes	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did Author William Golding Say That ‘Women Are Far Superior’ to Men?	25 May 2016	None	['William_Golding']
-snes-01261	Donald Trump Watches 'The Gorilla Channel'?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-watches-gorilla-channel/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Dan Evon	None	Does Donald Trump Watch ‘The Gorilla Channel’?	5 January 2018	None	['None']
-tron-03220	Czech News Quote About the Election of President Obama	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/prager-zeitung/	None	politics	None	None	None	Czech News Quote About the Election of President Obama	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-03908	"Property taxes had increased 70 percent in the previous 10 years."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2013/feb/28/chris-christie/chris-christie-repeats-claim-about-70-percent-hike/	The years before Gov. Chris Christie became governor were just awful, with previous administrations raising property taxes by startling amounts, he suggested during Tuesday’s budget address to the Legislature. In describing the way things used to be done in New Jersey, Christie asked lawmakers and the public to recall the state’s dire financial straits as recently as four years ago. "Property taxes had increased 70 percent in the previous 10 years," Christie said, according to the text of his speech. Christie has made this claim before, first in October at a town hall meeting in West Milford. Given that New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the nation, the 70 percent jump in a decade might not seem so shocking. But we learned a couple of things: first, the increase was actually slightly higher than 70 percent, but it falls once property tax rebates are factored into the mix. Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak told PolitiFact New Jersey at the time that the 70 percent jump in taxes in the decade before the governor took office resulted from "unrestrained spending and overgenerous benefits and the expansion of government at the local and state level." Let’s look at the numbers. The average property tax bill in New Jersey was roughly $4,240 in 1999, according to data from the state Department of Community Affairs. By 2009 -- the year before Christie took office -- the average property tax bill had climbed to about $7,280. That increase amounts to more than 71 percent. Now let’s look at the issue of rebates. In previous fact-checks, experts have explained that reductions in property tax rebate programs could be viewed as tax hikes, since they’re intended to reduce property tax costs for homeowners. In 1999, when the NJ Saver program was started under former Gov. Christie Whitman, the average rebate check mailed to homeowners was $111. By 2009, the average rebate was $1,037. When those rebates are deducted from the average property tax bill, the increase over the decade before Christie took office comes in under 70 percent. In 1999, homeowners paid an average of about $4,130 in property taxes, with the rebate. In 2009, that figure jumped to roughly $6,240, an increase of more than 51 percent. Christie stopped delivering checks for property tax relief during his first year in office and changed the program so the rebate was deducted from property tax bills. In 2011, the average property tax bill was $7,759. With the credit, the average bill was $7,519. Our ruling Christie said during his budget address that "property taxes had increased 70 percent in the previous 10 years" to him becoming governor. Looking at the numbers, the average property tax bill in the 10 years before Christie took office climbed more than 70 percent, from about $4,240 to about $7,280. But the increase drops to more like 50 percent when property tax rebates are factored into the equation. Still, the overall point here is that property taxes jumped significantly in the decade before he became governor. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Chris Christie	None	None	None	2013-02-28T07:30:00	2013-02-26	['None']
-goop-00320	‘SNL’ Cast Taking Sides In Ben Affleck, Lindsay Shookus Split, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-lindsay-shookus-split-snl-cast/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	‘SNL’ Cast NOT Taking Sides In Ben Affleck, Lindsay Shookus Split, Despite Report	5:00 pm, September 5, 2018	None	['Ben_Affleck']
-pose-00660	As Speaker of the House, John Boehner vowed that he will continue to fly commercial rather than military planes. "Well, I have talked to our security folks about the security that's involved in my new role," he said in an interview. "But over the last 20 years, I have flown back and forth to my district on commercial aircraft, and I'm going to continue to do that."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/gop-pledge-o-meter/promise/690/boehner-will-fly-commercial/	None	gop-pledge-o-meter	John Boehner	None	None	Boehner will fly commercial	2010-12-22T09:57:30	None	['John_Boehner']
-snes-06007	Photographs show the aftermath of a motorcycle-automobile collision.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/do-you-see-the-motorcycle/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Do You See the Motorcycle?	27 May 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-08729	"Florida is enjoying its lowest crime rate in 39 years."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2010/sep/01/charlie-crist/crist-says-floridas-crime-rate-lower-1971/	On his campaign website for his independent bid for U.S. Senate, Gov. Charlie Crist touts public safety laws enacted during his tenure as governor including the "Anti-Murder Act" that sends violent felony offenders who violate probation back to jail, a law requiring criminals to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences, and the Jessica Lunsford Act to protect children from sex offenders. "Due to these important policies and laws, Florida is enjoying its lowest crime rate in 39 years." For this Truth-O-Meter we wanted to explore whether the state's crime rate is the lowest it has been in 39 years. We turned to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which issued a press release on April 7, 2010, stating in the headline "Governor Crist announces lowest crime rate in 39 years." The purpose of the press release was to announce the state's Annual Uniform Crime Report for 2009. The press release stated that "the report indicates the state’s overall index crime rate has reached a 39-year low, declining by 6.4 percent in 2009, compared to 2008. The number of violent crimes (murder, forcible sex offenses, robbery and aggravated assault) committed in Florida dropped 10 percent last year; the number of non-violent crimes (burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft) decreased 6.2 percent." The report includes offenses reported during 2009 and data submitted by 409 of the 415 local, county and state law enforcement agencies that serve approximately 99.9 percent of the state’s population, according to the press release. The FDLE's website includes a chart of crime stats starting in 1971. For 1971 it states that Florida's population was about 7.04 million and the total number of crimes was 399,055. Those numbers translated to a rate of 5,667.5 crimes per 100,000 people. By 2009, the state's population had risen to about 18.75 million and the total number of crimes was 824,559. That translated to a crime rate of 4,397.5 crimes per 100,000 -- or the lowest since the state started counting in 1971. So clearly the crime rate in 2009 was the lowest it had been since 1971. But it's worth noting that the drop in the crime rate below the 1971 figure -- 5,667.5 -- occurred years before Crist became governor in January 2007. The rate fell to 5,604.3 in 2000 and then stayed below that 1971 figure every year since. The rate was 4,632 in 2006, rose to 4,694.7 in 2007, rose to 4,699.8 in 2008 and then fell to 4,397.5. In other words, for two of Crist's years in office as governor the crime rate increased while in one year it decreased. We asked Crist campaign spokesman Danny Kanner if Crist should get credit for the crime rate dropping to the lowest rate in 39 years if it had already dropped below that 1971 rate before he took office Kanner wrote back: "If the statement is 'Florida is enjoying its lowest crime rate in 39 years,' that means it's lower with Crist as governor than the years prior to the time he took office dating back 39 years, which is true." We wondered did FDLE collect the data the same way in 1971 as it did for 2009? We spoke to Kristen Chernosky, a spokeswoman at FDLE. She said that FDLE collected the data in 1971 the same as today -- by asking law enforcement agencies across the state to voluntarily submit it. We asked: Did the vast majority comply during the first year? Chernosky said there were 334 agencies that reported in 1971 but Chernosky was uncertain how many agencies existed at that time so she didn't have a percentage of reporting compliance. Of course, crime statistics are only as good as the agencies that report them. In at least a few high-profile instances, South Florida police agencies were accused of doctoring crime reports: * In Boca Raton in 1998, investigators concluded that a captain altered nearly 400 crime reports the previous year to make them look less serious than they were. The original list sent to the FDLE reported 3,250 crimes while the correct list reported 3,635 crimes, the Miami Herald reported in 1998. * In Broward County, the state attorney's office launched an investigation in 2003 into allegations that Broward Sheriff's Office deputies manipulated crime statistics by using "exceptional clearances" -- when a crime is declared solved despite making no arrests, according to a Jan. 6, 2008, Miami Herald article. Deputies were accused of doctoring stats by making up false confessions and pinning crimes on the wrong individuals. * After complaints by a police union in Miami, in 2007 the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated allegations that Miami police doctored crime statistics to make the city appear safer than it was. An Oct. 6, 2007, article in the Miami Herald stated that the reporter found "dozens of reports that were classified as less-serious offenses than the facts in the reports would indicate." The FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement found no evidence of a systematic effort to suppress crime numbers. But fudging crime stats is nothing new, said Dennis Jay Kenney, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "There is no reason to believe the cheating is any worse now than it was 20 years ago -- that is a longstanding problem,'' he said. Kenney said it's possible to argue that the auditing procedures today are better than in the past but still "yes they can cheat." So how does Crist's claim stack up? He's right on the math that the state's crime rate in 2009 was lower than it was in 1971. But Crist omits that it had dropped below the 1971 rate before he became governor and that the rate went up his first two years in office. So for that omission, we rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Charlie Crist	None	None	None	2010-09-01T17:14:18	2010-09-01	['None']
-pomt-03484	"47 - New provisions ObamaCare charges the IRS with implementing, according to the Government Accountability Office."	true	/ohio/statements/2013/jun/12/dave-joyce/rep-dave-joyce-says-irs-must-carry-out-47-provisio/	A number of Republican lawmakers recently have sought to link two longtime targets of conservatives: President Barack Obama’s health care law and the Internal Revenue Service, which is under fire for its role in scrutinizing some Tea Party groups and others. PolitiFact, like our colleagues at FactCheck.org and the Washington Post Fact Checker, has examined several related claims from lawmakers including Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. We rated as False the claim that the IRS is "going to be in charge of our health care." We found the claim that the IRS will be in charge of "a huge national database" on health care that will include Americans’ "personal, intimate, most close-to-the-vest-secrets" so ridiculous that we gave it our Pants on Fire! rating. Rep. David Joyce of Russell Township made a claim that looked to have a more solid foundation in a Tweet posted June 5: "47 - New provisions ObamaCare charges the IRS with implementing, according to the Government Accountability Office." We quickly found the source, the GAO's report to Congress of June 2012, and we did not have to look far into it. The report begins: "The Internal Revenue Service's implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a massive undertaking that involves 47 statutory provisions and extensive coordination across not only IRS, but multiple agencies and external partners." That backs up Joyce's statement. But we thought knowing more about the 47 provisions would be useful. The IRS has posted a list of its roles in implementing the health care law, which include everything from levying additional payroll taxes on certain high-income Americans to taxation of medical devices and brand-name drugs. Among the key roles are approving subsidies for Americans seeking insurance on newly created health exchanges, and confirming that taxpayers have health insurance -- and assessing a financial penalty if they do not. (The penalties start at $95 per adult in 2013 and rise to $695 per adult in 2016.) The revenue provisions are vital to the health care law, the Treasury Department Inspector General said in a report this year. "Revenue provisions contained in the legislation are designed to generate $438 billion to help pay for the overall cost of health care reform," the report said. "More than 40 of these provisions added to or amended the Internal Revenue Code and represent the largest set of tax law changes the IRS has had to implement in more than 20 years." "Indeed," the Post's Fact Checker noted, "the Supreme Court upheld the law precisely because the individual mandate fell within Congress’s taxation power (even though the Obama administration had tried hard to claim this was not a tax)." Other federal agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, are also involved in implementation of the law. Far more responsibility falls on the Department of Health and Human Services, which has taken the lead in organizing its implementation, providing information to the public about the law and providing oversight. Joyce’s statement is accurate. On the Truth-O-Meter, it rates as True.	None	Dave Joyce	None	None	None	2013-06-12T06:00:00	2013-06-05	['None']
-pomt-05246	Figures cited by Gov. Scott Walker "are not commonly used" to measure job creation.	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2012/jun/01/tom-barrett/democrat-tom-barrett-says-republican-gov-scott-wal/	Talk about jobs has dominated the Wisconsin recall election, and in the run-up to the June 5, 2012 vote much of the discussion has turned into a numbers game. As in: My numbers are better (and more official) than your numbers. Much of the confusion stems from the unusual decision by the Walker administration to release a batch of 2011 jobs data almost six weeks before it is to be released by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figures come from a census of about 95 percent of state employers, and are viewed as the most accurate measure of employment in Wisconsin. The numbers, which show an increase of more than 23,000 jobs in 2011, will eventually be used to update the less-accurate monthly BLS numbers Barrett has used to claim a jobs decline. During the May 31, 2012 debate at Marquette University, Barrett said of Walker: "I'm saying that he came up with a new set of numbers that are based on a new set of numbers that are used but are not commonly used." So just how common are these numbers? This isn’t the first time we’ve visited this issue. The last time this flared up, we rated False Walker’s claim that the jobs numbers were "final" because the feds had not yet verified them. We rated Walker’s claim the state added 33,200 jobs on his watch Mostly False, in part because he combined the unverified annual census data for 2011 with less reliable monthly survey data for 20122 And we rated False Barrett’s claim Walker "cooked the books" by releasing numbers "he just dreamed up." Since then, things have changed a bit. On May 30, 2012, the Walker administration claimed the state’s census numbers had been verified by the feds and that the number was now even higher -- 23,608. (In a new separate item, we rated Half True that Walker claim from the debate.) The feds have only said they are done reviewing the state’s figures but, following past practice, will not release any information until June 28, 2012, when numbers for all 50 states are released. There’s no question Walker rush-released the census numbers. Barrett is right that preliminary census figures are are not typically cited. And there tends to be more focus by the public and media on the monthly numbers. But the census numbers certainly are regularly used. Indeed, the feds use them to firm up the basis for the monthly numbers. We rate Barrett’s claim Half True. (You can comment on this item on the Journal Sentinel's website).	None	Tom Barrett	None	None	None	2012-06-01T18:55:02	2012-05-31	['None']
-pomt-12537	"I have not called for impeachment" of President Donald Trump.	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/19/maxine-waters/maxine-waters-wrong-say-she-has-not-called-trumps-/	More than perhaps any member of Congress, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has discussed the possibility of impeaching President Donald Trump. So it was a bit of a surprise to hear her say she has "not called for impeachment" of Trump during a recent interview on MSNBC. Here’s the backstory. On the morning of April 18, 2017, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., tweeted, "The President is a liar, his actions are contemptible, & I'm going to fight everyday until he's impeached." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Later that day, when Waters sat for an interview with MSNBC’s Craig Melvin, the anchor read her tweet on air and asked her about it. Here’s a portion of their exchange: Melvin: "You just started that by saying the question becomes, should we wait to call for impeachment until we have the answers to have that question..." Waters: "Well, I have not..." Melvin: "-- or some of the questions." Waters: "-- I have not called for impeachment." Melvin: "You said, ‘I'm going to fight every day until he's impeached.’ That's what you tweeted." Waters: "Yes, but here's what I've said. Here's what I've said. I've said that we need the information. We need to connect the dots. We need the facts in order to do the impeachment. And I'm going to work every day to try and help get those facts and to reveal them to the republic, to our public until, of course, impeachment is taking place." A reader asked us to look into Waters’ statement that "I have not called for impeachment." We found that’s not accurate. During the interview on MSNBC, Waters seemed to draw a distinction between calling for impeachment and calling for investigations into matters that could lead to impeachment. And she has taken a more procedural approach at times, saying, for instance, during an April 2 CNN interview that "we want to know about the hacking … and the interference with our elections. And I really want to know, because I know, if we can prove collusion, then he is impeachable. A lot of people don’t want to talk about that, but I do." (Waters’ office did not respond to an inquiry for this article.) However, even if you grant that this distinction by Waters is valid, ample evidence exists showing Waters actually calling for impeachment. For instance, on Feb. 3, Waters gave an interview on the streaming video channel Cheddar in which she said her "greatest desire is to lead (Trump) right into impeachment." Then, just three days before her appearance on MSNBC, Waters spoke at a rally on the Capitol grounds to demand that Trump release his tax filings. "I don’t respect this president," she told the crowd. "I don’t trust this president. He’s not working in the best interests of the American people. … I will fight every day until he is impeached." She then proceeded to start the crowd on a chant of "Impeach 45," referring to Trump, the 45th president. The crowd responded to her invitation, and Waters led them by chanting "Impeach 45" three times. She then closed her speech saying, "Go ahead: Impeach 45" before exiting the stage. You can see Waters and the crowd chanting in this video. Waters didn’t seem to be hiding the fact that she had chanted "Impeach 45." The same day she appeared on MSNBC, Waters retweeted a CNN video clip of her speaking and leading the chants. Our ruling Waters said on MSNBC that "I have not called for impeachment." She has at times called for investigations that could lead to Trump’s impeachment, rather than calling for impeachment directly. But on at least two occasions -- the Cheddar interview and the tax rally -- she did call for Trump’s impeachment directly, in one case literally cheerleading for impeaching Trump at a rally at the U.S. Capitol. We rate her claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Maxine Waters	None	None	None	2017-04-19T16:49:39	2017-04-18	['None']
-tron-00222	President Bush comforts a teen who lost her mother in the World Trade Center	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ashley/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	President Bush comforts a teen who lost her mother in the World Trade Center	Mar 17, 2015	None	['George_W._Bush']
-tron-02248	Pray for Katie Fitch	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/katie-fitch/	None	medical	None	None	None	Pray for Katie Fitch	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-vogo-00597	Statement: “We’ve seen an increase in circulation since Aug. 1,” Union-Tribune publisher Ed Moss said in an October 2009 interview.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-the-newspapers-increasing-circulation/	Analysis: When Moss made his statement in October, the newspaper’s circulation had just hit a new recent low: 242,000 daily subscribers and 309,000 Sunday subscribers.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: The Newspaper's Increasing Circulation	April 26, 2010	None	['None']
-goop-01878	Caitlyn Jenner Getting “Drastic Plastic Makeover,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-jenner-drastic-plastic-makeover-surgery/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Caitlyn Jenner NOT Getting “Drastic Plastic Makeover,” Despite Report	12:03 pm, January 9, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-01180	Warnings about propane tanks used for making meth	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/propane-tanks/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Warnings about propane tanks used for making meth	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-afck-00267	“Youth illiteracy is nearly nonexistent at 4%.”	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/claims-of-south-africas-spectacular-transformation-fact-checked/	None	None	None	None	None	Claims of South Africa’s ‘spectacular transformation’ fact-checked	2015-10-23 06:12	None	['None']
-pomt-04177	"Right now one of our highest job growth sectors is Leisure and Hospitality. We've added jobs that mostly fall within the restaurant and bar sector industry. These are not high-paying jobs, as the U.S. Department of Labor estimates this is an industry sector with the lowest average wages and the lowest proportion of its workforce earning minimum or subminimum wage jobs."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/dec/16/lou-greenwald/lou-greenwald-says-low-paying-jobs-seeing-most-gro/	Job growth in some fields appears to be a bumper crop in the Garden State, but it’s not the kind that appeals to Assembly Majority Leader Lou Greenwald (D-Camden). Greenwald said during a Dec. 4 press conference in Trenton that the state needs higher-paying jobs to grow the economy. "Right now one of our highest job growth sectors is Leisure and Hospitality," Greenwald said during the press conference to announce a Democrat bills package focusing on job creation and economic development. "We've added jobs that mostly fall within the restaurant and bar sector industry. These are not high-paying jobs, as the U.S. Department of Labor estimates this is an industry sector with the lowest average wages and the lowest proportion of its workforce earning minimum or subminimum wage jobs." Greenwald is correct that Leisure and Hospitality is one of New Jersey’s highest job growth sectors, and that the jobs are considered low-paying. The rest of his statement was erroneous, however. Let’s look at each part of Greenwald’s remarks. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks data in 11 major employment sectors, including Leisure and Hospitality. Jobs in that sector typically include bartenders, servers, food-service workers and other service-oriented jobs. "Jobs in this sector are often part-time, seasonal, and paid at low hourly rates," said Joseph Seneca, an economics professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Total employment in that sector in New Jersey increased by 5,700 jobs (1.7 percent) from October 2011 to October 2012, according to BLS data. The only sector with higher job growth for the same period was Education and Health Services, at 16,600 jobs (2.7 percent). Next, let’s review salary for both sectors. Leisure and Hospitality jobs in New Jersey had the lowest average salary in 2011, at about $22,329, according to BLS data and Seneca. The average salary in the state that year was $57,546. The numbers are also low when looking at average weekly wages, said Martin Kohli, a chief regional economist for the BLS. For first-quarter 2012, the average weekly wage in New Jersey for workers in Leisure and Hospitality fields was $450, according to a database Koli prepared for us. That’s the lowest salary of the 11 sectors that BLS tracks, Koli said. How did Education and Health Services compare? In New Jersey, the average annual wage in 2011 was $47,338. The weekly salary for first-quarter 2012 was $893. "The Majority Leader acknowledged that we have created some jobs in New Jersey," Brian McGinnis, Greenwald's communications director, said in an e-mail. "No one is disputing that. He used the example of the Leisure and Hospitality sector to make a larger point. As the data … show, while this sector has added jobs, they are not for the most part the kind of good-paying middle-class jobs that will help drive a strong economic recovery in New Jersey." Now let’s look at the rest of Greenwald’s claim. Greenwald said Leisure and Hospitality has "the lowest proportion of its workforce earning minimum or subminimum wage jobs." That would mean a small number of those workers are earning minimum wage or below, and that’s not accurate. McGinnis acknowledged that Greenwald misspoke. "The data show the Leisure and Hospitality sector is the industry with the highest proportion of its workers earning minimum wage or below," McGinnis said. " The data further show that about one half of all workers who are paid at or below minimum wage are working in this industry -- primarily in restaurant/food service." Our ruling Greenwald said, "Right now one of our highest job growth sectors is Leisure and Hospitality. We've added jobs that mostly fall within the restaurant and bar sector industry. These are not high-paying jobs, as the U.S. Department of Labor estimates this is an industry sector with the lowest average wages and the lowest proportion of its workforce earning minimum or subminimum wage jobs." Leisure and Hospitality saw the second-highest rate of job growth in New Jersey in 2011, but a BLS economist confirmed that the average weekly salary of workers for that sector is the lowest among all sectors tracked. Greenwald, however, misstated that those jobs have the lowest proportion of workers earning minimum wage or below. We rate Greenwald’s statement Mostly True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Lou Greenwald	None	None	None	2012-12-16T07:30:00	2012-12-04	['None']
-pomt-11060	Says Republican gubernatorial candidate Adam Laxalt "tried to cut a deal with big pharma" in a lawsuit.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jun/25/afscme/ad-falsely-accuses-nevadas-gop-governor-candidate-/	For about two weeks in June, the Nevada chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, had a television ad up in the Las Vegas and Reno markets. At a cost of over half a million dollars, the ad from the union of government workers skewered Republican gubernatorial candidate Adam Laxalt for cozying up to drug companies. In 2017, Nevada passed a law to help put a lid on rising diabetes drug prices. Two major pharmaceutical trade groups sued to block it. Attorney General Laxalt’s office has been defending the measure and the AFSCME ad said he slacked off. "Laxalt tried to cut a deal with big pharma instead of standing up for us, and drug prices continue to rise," the ad said. "Adam Laxalt delivered for drug companies, not for us." Legally, it is premature to say Laxalt delivered for anybody, because both sides are waiting for a judge to rule. In the same vein, the law won’t fully kick in until Jan. 15, 2019, so it is too early to fault it for not controlling drug prices. That leaves whether Laxalt "tried to cut a deal with big pharma" as the key claim to check. AFSCME sent us their supporting evidence. It was a September court filing that said the two sides had failed to settle before bringing the matter before a judge. (The defendant in the case is Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval. The plaintiffs are the drug trade associations Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and Biotechnology Innovation Organization. ) "The parties’ counsel discussed a potential resolution to avoid this motion," the filing said. "But on Sept. 12, 2017, defendants’ counsel advised that defendant Sandoval would prefer that plaintiffs proceed with the filing of a motion." To AFSCME, the discussion of a "resolution" amounted to trying to cut a deal. But that interpretation goes way beyond what the words mean, University of Nevada law professor Thomas Main told us. "That sort of phrasing is common in these filings," Main said. "I wouldn't read much, or anything, into that alone." Main noted that state and federal court rules require both sides to try to settle out of court. Basically, if the parties can avoid tying up court time, they should do so. The rules say the parties must talk to each other and if they fail to come to terms, they must certify that they "were unable to resolve or narrow the dispute without court intervention." And that’s what the words in the court filing do. Interestingly, Laxalt’s campaign staff pointed to the same words in the same document to show that he didn’t cut a deal with the drug company representatives. If he had, the case would have settled, and it hasn’t. A union health fund attempted to join the suit on the side of the state on the grounds that Laxalt hadn’t filed a vigorous response to the drug makers’ suit. The judge in the case turned the group down. No Laxalt The AFSCME ad puts Laxalt at the center of the discussions with the drug trade groups. Actually, he left that to others in his office. Laxalt spokesman Parker Briden told us that he hadn’t participated, and a Deputy Attorney General confirmed that. He was not on the phone calls with the drug company lawyers. That further undercuts the assertion that he tried to cut a deal. The union noted that Laxalt received campaign contributions from drug maker Eli Lilly. Eli Lilly gave $3,100. The company sells drugs for treating diabetes covered by the state’s pricing transparency law. Our ruling An ad from the AFSCME union said Laxalt tried to cut a deal with drug makers. The only evidence that Laxalt’s office attempted to settle a suit brought by drug trade groups is a court filing that certifies that the parties failed to come to terms. That interpretation ignores that court rules require the parties to see if they can settle out of court, and to certify that they tried and and failed. The ad puts far too much weight on legal boilerplate, a Nevada law professor said. On top of that, Laxalt did not personally participate in those early discussions between his office and the drug makers’ lawyers. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	AFSCME	None	None	None	2018-06-25T16:20:26	2018-06-06	['None']
-pomt-08410	Says Bruce Starr broke the law by letting lobbyists wine and dine him in Maui.	false	/oregon/statements/2010/oct/21/chuck-riley/chuck-riley-says-bruce-starr-broke-law-taking-free/	PolitiFact Oregon remembers 2006 all too well. Leggings made a fashion comeback. Democrats took back the Oregon House. And that fall, The Oregonian reported on a bunch of state legislators for accepting lavish trips to Maui courtesy of the Oregon Beer and Wine Distributors Association. One of those legislators was state Sen. Bruce Starr, R-Hillsboro, who faces Rep. Chuck Riley, D-Hillsboro, in the Nov. 2 general election. To no one’s surprise, Riley is bringing up Starr’s stay at the palatial Grand Wailea Hotel in May 2002 to attend the distributors’ conference. Riley’s ad, "On Our Side," starts with a photo of Starr and a pretty Hawaiian view in the background. A female announcer, backed by a breezy ukulele, says: "What’s not pretty? The ethics commission ruled he broke the law by letting lobbyists foot the bill." (There also appears to be a pork chop dressed up to resemble a pineapple on the table.) But it’s not true. The state ethics commission did fine Starr in 2007 -- but not for going to Hawaii on the dime of a lobbying group. Rather, Starr was fined for failing to disclose the 2002 conference on annual disclosure forms filed with the state. At the time, it was perfectly legal for lobbyists to treat legislators to such trips and for legislators to accept them. The distributors, led by lobbyist Paul Romain, paid about $18,000 in 2002 and in 2004 to fly, feed, shelter and entertain a total of seven state legislators at two conferences. Starr attended the four-day conference with his wife. The ethics commission fined him $300 for not disclosing that trip and another education trip to Israel paid by another organization. Starr said at the time that he didn’t report the trip because the lobbyist, Romain, told him he didn’t have to. He amended his reports, showing that the beer and wine distributors paid $961 for airfare, $1,007 for his hotel room, $300 for food and beverages and $250 for golf. Molly Woon, a spokeswoman for Senate Democrats, defends the statement. Perhaps PolitiFact Oregon is overthinking the issue? "He broke the law for taking a lobbyist-paid trip; you can say more, but that's the basic fact," she said. We have to disagree. Starr broke no laws or ethics rules by taking the trip at a lobbyist’s expense, which is what the Democrats’ ad claims. What Starr did wrong was fail to report the trip. The statement is False. Comment on this item.	None	Chuck Riley	None	None	None	2010-10-21T06:00:00	2010-10-20	['Maui']
-tron-01009	Florida School Shooter Nikolas Cruz is a Member of Antifa, Resistance Groups	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/florida-school-shooter-nikolas-cruz-member-antifa-resistance-groups/	None	crime-police	None	None	['alt-right', 'guns', 'mass shooting', 'white nationalists']	Florida School Shooter Nikolas Cruz is a Member of Antifa, Resistance Groups	Feb 15, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03408	Iconic legacy fragrance Chanel No. 5 will be discontinued because the construction of a train track in France threatens its flower supply chain.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chanel-no-5-discontinued/	None	Business	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Chanel No. 5 to be Discontinued?	6 December 2016	None	['France']
-snes-04188	A video depicts a young woman's struggling to open a can of Spaghetti-Os as a crowd watches and cheers her eventual hard-won victory.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/woman-struggles-to-open-can-of-spaghetti-os/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Young Woman Struggles to Open Can of Spaghetti-Os	24 August 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00014	At least 100,000 churches called for the withdrawal of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/churches-kavanaugh-nomination-withdrawn/	None	Politics	None	Bethania Palma	None	Did 100,000 Churches Call for the Kavanaugh Nomination to Be Withdrawn?	4 October 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-10183	"Barack Obama has the longest track record of any candidate in this election in support of the 'Bridge To Nowhere.' "	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/23/john-mccain/turning-the-tables-on-obama/	They say the best defense is good offense. Which probably explains the latest tack by John McCain's campaign on the Bridge to Nowhere backlash. For weeks, the media has castigated Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for her repeated claim "I told the Congress ‘thanks, but no thanks,’ on that Bridge to Nowhere." In our analysis , we noted that while Palin formally put an end to the project, it was nearly dead anyway, and Alaska still kept the money for other transportation projects. We also noted that Palin flip-flopped , having supported the bridge project during her run to become governor. Recently, the McCain campaign has tried to turn the tables. According to several recent campaign press releases: "Barack Obama has the longest track record of any candidate in this election in support of the 'Bridge To Nowhere.' " We’re betting if you’re on this Web site, you’re enough of a political junkie to know what the Bridge to Nowhere is. But just in case, it was a plan to build a nearly $400-million Alaska bridge to connect the tiny city of Ketchikan to Gravina, an island with just a few dozen residents and an airport. The project was derisively nicknamed the Bridge to Nowhere by a government watchdog group and became a national symbol of federal pork-barrel spending. As Exhibit A to show Obama’s longtime support, the McCain campaign notes that Obama voted in 2005 for the conference report on the Highway Reauthorization Bill, which included $225-milion for the Gravina Island bridge. The conference report passed 91-4. And yes, McCain was among the four who voted against it. In a floor statement explaining his opposition, McCain specifically referenced the Gravina Island bridge among his many concerns with the bill. But does Obama’s vote for the bill equal support for the Bidge to Nowhere? Let’s put this in some perspective. The bill included $286.5-billion though 2009 for highway, mass transit, safety and research programs. The Alaska bridge was less than a tenth of 1 percent of the spending in the bill. "So they’re saying that because Obama was among the 91 senators who voted for the highway funding bill, that makes him a supporter of the bridge? That’s laughable," Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor told PolitiFact. We agree. The bill included more than $1.3-billion for transportation projects in Illinois, which also could explain Obama's vote. "This gets so goofy," said Keith Ashdown, a spokesman for Taxpayers for Common Sense. Ashdown is the guy who saddled the Gravina Island project with the dubious moniker, "Bridge to Nowhere," a catchy name that helped the project become a national poster child for wasteful government spending. "He (Obama) voted for the bill that would have made the Bridge to Nowhere a reality," Ashdown said. "But I don’t know if that means he supported it. I don’t think that’s true." But there’s some more to consider. With the Bridge to Nowhere a national laughingstock, U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in October 2005 proposed an amendment that would have redirected $125-million in funding for the Alaska bridge toward reconstruction of a New Orleans bridge damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Obama voted against the amendment, which failed. McCain was not present and didn’t vote. On Nov. 15, the Chicago Tribune printed a commentary from Obama which, in part, explained his decision. "Others intent on cutting spending have pointed to Alaska’s ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ as a wasteful project," Obama wrote. "I agree and believe that it represents the first type of project we should cut. But it’s wrong to single out one state’s pork project. If we’re serious about shared responsibility, let’s eliminate all pork projects in all states." Due to uproar over the so-called Bridge to Nowhere project, a congressional committee directed the $225-million earmarked for the Gravina Island bridge to the Alaska Department of Transportation. So Alaska would keep the money, but it would no longer be tied to the Bridge to Nowhere. Alaska could decide how to spend the money as it saw fit. They could even decide to spend it on the bridge. By way of timeline, it was a year later — in the fall of 2006 — that Palin, then a candidate for governor of Alaska, assured the Ketchikan Chamber of Commerce she was all for the bridge, and told the Anchorage Daily News "the window is now — while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist." It was a view she changed when she became governor. Early in 2007, she did not include funding for the bridge in her budget. And faced with a project whose pricetag had ballooned to $400-million, the fact that much of the federal money for the project had been spent on other transportation projects, and little prospect that the federal government would throw any more money at the unpopular project, she formally pulled the plug. Palin’s role has been well-reported in the media. But back to Obama. Yes, he voted in favor of the massive transportation bill that included funds for the Bridge to Nowhere. But we don’t think that translates to support for the project. Some might argue that the Coburn amendment gave Obama a clear opportunity to kill the Bridge to Nowhere — where it was not lumped in with other projects — but Obama chose not to. But again, does that equate to support for the project? In his commentary, Obama made clear he did not support the project, but didn't think it was right to single out one specific earmark from one state. The original bill inlcuded literally thousands of projects, with a little something for every state. And it passed with a resounding 91 senators in favor. We think it’s a stretch to claim that Obama supported the Bridge to Nowhere. Certainly not the way Palin once did when she was running for governor of Alaska. Voting for a $236-billion spending bill that included the Alaska bridge is hardly support for it. But because Obama could have voted to kill the project with the Coburn Amendment, we’ll give it a Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-09-23T00:00:00	2008-09-15	['Barack_Obama']
-faan-00032	 The Liberals would be “the first government of a major democracy to change the electoral system without a direct popular mandate expressed in a referendum.”	factscan score: false	http://factscan.ca/jason-kenney-electoral-reform-without-a-referendum/	Several other democratic countries have changed their electoral systems without a referendum, including Japan, Australia and France. 	None	Jason Kenney	None	None	None	2016-05-22	 May 12, 2016	['None']
-pomt-05960	Sherrod Brown "has voted with Barack Obama 95 percent of the time."	true	/ohio/statements/2012/jan/25/ohio-republican-party/ohio-republicans-say-sherrod-brown-has-voted-obama/	Republicans in Washington, D.C., and Ohio have vast ideological differences with U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat. Brown says the government plays a positive role in people’s lives when it provides a safety net (new health insurance programs, financial regulation, help for cash-strapped cities and schools) while supporting the private sector. Republicans say the government needs to step back to propel the economic engine that is the private sector. While lofty, that makes for a poor sound bite. But the GOP knows this, and is prepared to frame its November election effort against Brown like this: "When you look at his voting record, what's going to stick with voters is that he has voted with Barack Obama 95 percent of the time. He can talk about differences some of the time, but you've got to look at the record." That quote comes from Christopher Maloney, communications director for the Ohio Republican Party. Maloney made the claim to The Plain Dealer during a telephone interview in December 2011, and again with a slight variation on Jan. 22, 2012, that we’ll discuss in a moment. It is that variation that we're checking here. The interview was for a story, published Jan. 23, on how Republicans plan to campaign against Brown in the coming political season. While the newspaper checked out the figure and had reason to believe it was accurate, it also believed -- for purposes of PolitiFact Ohio -- that the figure deserved further examination, and a ruling on the Truth-O-Meter. After all, voters are likely to hear the claim a lot this year. Maloney said his figure came from Congressional Quarterly, a nonpartisan journalism organization that reports on Capitol Hill lawmaking dispassionately. CQ, as it is known, serves as a bit of a bible for journalists, congressional offices and even lobbyists, because it goes into the weeds of legislating like few other publications do. Its reporting winds up in CQ Today, CQ Weekly, CQ online products, and an annual hard-bound political almanac, "Politics in America." Besides covering hearings and more, CQ examines voting patterns for every member of Congress and sorts them in ways that allow comparisons. One of those ways is through an annual examination of presidential support, or the number and percentage of votes by each lawmaker on bills in which the sitting president has staked a position. So, for example, CQ counted a vote for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the economic stimulus bill, as a vote in support of the president. The same principle applied to the health care reform vote of 2010, to votes on taxes, the debt ceiling, and so on. Presidents weigh in on fewer than half of all Senate votes (Obama had a position on 39 percent of the Senate’s 235 votes last year), and some bills have broad bipartisan support no matter who is in the White House. No lawmaker winds up with a presidential support score of zero -- not even such small-government fans as Republicans Jim DeMint of South Carolina or Rand Paul of Kentucky. But the closer to zero, or to 100, a score is, the higher the lawmaker’s opposition or support for the president’s agenda. Back to the figure Maloney cited: He stated from the start that his source was CQ. He originally said the figure for Brown was 97 percent -- that is, that Brown has voted with President Obama 97 percent of the time. That was based on an average of CQ ratings, for 2009 (Obama’s first year, when Brown scored 96 percent) and 2010 (98 percent). Maloney was accurate when he made the statement because CQ Weekly had not yet published its ratings for 2011. That changed, just before The Plain Dealer was about to publish its story. A new issue of CQ Weekly came out, with new numbers covering 2011. And the positions of Brown and Obama, it turns out, diverged slightly more often in 2011 than in the previous two years. Brown’s presidential support rating dropped to 92 percent in 2011 -- matching, it turns out, the 92 percent support rate that other Democratic senators had on average for the president last year. In contrast, Brown’s Ohio colleague, Republican freshman Rob Portman, voted with the president 59.5 percent of the time in 2011 -- which while not as high as the 71.90 percent rate of Maine Republican Susan Collins, still put Portman in the top tier, at 13th, of Republicans voting most often for Obama’s positions. DeMint and Paul, by contrast, each had presidential support ratings of 41 percent in 2011. When averaged for the three years of Obama’s presidency so far, then, Brown’s support fell from 97 percent to 95 percent. (Do the math: 96 plus 98 plus 92, divided by 3, equals 95.3.) Maloney, when told by The Plain Dealer that CQ had had just put out brand new figures, updated his statement to reflect that 95 percent rate. We report this without judgment on whether it is good or bad to support the Obama agenda. Brown has disagreed with Obama on foreign trade and on some greenhouse gas-regulation issues. But Maloney says that "you’ve got to look at the record." And the record -- compiled not by an opposition party but by a publication regarded as eminently impartial -- provides an average of 95 percent. The figure is current. On the Truth-O-Meter, Maloney’s claim merits a rating of True.	None	Ohio Republican Party	None	None	None	2012-01-25T06:00:00	2012-01-22	['None']
-tron-02033	Parasites infesting the breast from new bras	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/infestedbreast/	None	insects	None	None	None	Parasites infesting the breast from new bras	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-04082	"Thanks to Washington, nearly everyone will pay more in taxes in 2013. Somehow people think it's just the wealthy. It's not."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2013/jan/20/scott-walker/gov-scott-walker-says-nearly-everyone-will-pay-mor/	Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, frequently tweets on national political issues from @ScottKWalker. As the fiscal cliff deal approached, Walker pleaded with Washington not to "screw up" the economy by letting taxes go up. He then criticized the eventual deal in a series of tweets, culminating with this bipartisan slam on Jan. 4, 2013: "Thanks to Washington, nearly everyone will pay more in taxes in 2013. Somehow people think it’s just the wealthy. It’s not." Walker poked at "Washington" again in his Jan. 15, 2013 "state of the state" speech, saying federal officials were putting more money in the hands of the government, not the people. Much of the fiscal-cliff debate, which ended in a New Year’s Day deal, focused on whether to extend the across-the-board reduction in federal income-tax rates approved in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush. Those lower rates were due to expire at the end of 2012, but the cliff deal extended them. For almost everyone, that is. The deal locked in the reduced Bush-era rates for taxable income up to $400,000 (single filers) or $450,000 (joint). For the portion of a filer’s taxable income above those amounts, the tax rate will rise to 39.6 percent, the Clinton-era rate. Fewer than 1 percent of US households are expected to report taxable income above those thresholds in 2013, a Tax Policy Center study found. The deal kicks in a few other tax increases for wealthier folks, adding to some that were approved as part of federal health care reforms. But income-tax rates for most people will not change. So what does Walker mean when he says, "nearly everyone will pay more in taxes in 2013"? When we asked for backup, Walker campaign spokeswoman Nicole Tieman sent us a Wall Street Journal blog item on the deal’s failure to extend a different tax break -- the Social Security payroll tax holiday of 2011 and 2012. The holiday came from President Barack Obama as a continuation of Democratic-backed measures passed in the 2009 stimulus package. It reduced the worker share of Social Security taxes taken off paychecks from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent. For example, that gave workers making $75,000 to $100,000 an average break of $1,194 on federal taxes in 2012, another Tax Policy Center study found. The average across all income levels was $721. In 2012, Obama initially sought to extend the payroll break again, but Republicans were split on it, and some Democrats weren’t thrilled with it either. So Obama and Congress let it die a quiet death. Three experts told us a large share of Americans will see their taxes rise in 2013 compared to 2012 because of the disappearance of the Social Security payroll tax holiday. Some 77 percent of all U.S. households will be paying more in taxes overall in 2013 than in 2012, almost completely because the payroll tax is returning to its old level, said Roberton Williams, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a project of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. William McBride, the chief economist at the business-backed Tax Foundation, told us that "anyone with a job that pays wages is affected, so, a high percentage of the population." He said that 83 percent of tax returns report some wages. Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, confirmed it would hit "every paycheck." So, Walker is on to something regarding the payroll tax, though Williams said "nearly everyone" was a bit of a reach. There are a couple other important points to cover about Walker’s claim about the deal, formally known as The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. Marr and Williams noted that Walker’s description is just one of the ways to look at the tax situation. "Is it actually a tax increase, or are we just not giving you a break anymore?" asked Williams. Unlike the Bush-era tax cuts, which Republican sponsors tried repeatedly to make permanent, the payroll tax was designed as short-term boost to the economy, Williams said. Marr called the Social Security tax holiday a political orphan, with neither party much interested in fighting over keeping it. If Washington had not acted on the payroll and income tax rates,90 percent of Americans would have seen a tax increase, Williams said. In blaming Washington for the tax increase, Walker takes into account the decision to end one break -- the Social Security payroll cut -- but does not factor in the new life that Congress and the president gave to another break, the income tax cuts that were extended for most. Our rating Walker tweeted, "Thanks to Washington, nearly everyone will pay more in taxes in 2013. Somehow people think it's just the wealthy. It's not." From the perspective of the real net effect on people’s tax rates compared to last year in the wake of the deal, Walker’s claim about the fiscal-cliff legislation rings pretty true, depending on your definition of what constitutes "nearly everyone." The expiration of the Social Security payroll tax holiday means that tax will revert to higher, pre-2011 rates for everyone who earns a paycheck, though a minority of tax filers have no wage earnings. But he makes a glass-half-empty claim about a broad deal by viewing the result in a narrow context of one tax decision, while leaving out important information about the tax effect of another major decision that was part of the deal. It would also have the ring of truth to say that "thanks to Washington" a massive tax increase was averted in the same deal. But then, he only had 140 characters to work with. We rate Walker’s claim Half True.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2013-01-20T09:00:00	2013-01-04	['None']
-pomt-08349	Dan Seals has been running for office "since before there were, like, iPods."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/27/robert-dold/robert-dold-targets-dan-seals-illinois-race-using-/	It's not every day that a campaign ad lands in our inbox and makes us laugh out loud -- especially in the midst of a campaign cycle with commercials featuring Viagra-fueled sex offenders, puppy mass-murderers and roving psychopaths. But the ad aired by Republican Robert Dold targeting Democrat Dan Seals had us at "broheim." It features a charming if foul-mouthed sea lion hired to film an "endorsement" for Dan Seals. Seals (not the sea lion) is running for the Chicago-area seat being vacated by Rep. Mark Kirk, the Republican nominee for Senate. With a slight Democratic edge and a moderate, suburban vibe, the 10th District is one of the rare GOP-held seats that's actually in play for the Democrats this year. In fact, political handicapper Charlie Cook rates it Lean Democratic, meaning that Dold, even though he's a Republican running in a Republican year, is airing the ad as a slight underdog. Perhaps that's why the Dold campaign went for an ad with potential for buzz. In any case, the script is so priceless that we'll reprint it in its entirety here: Narrator: "And now, a very special political endorsement." Sea lion: "Dan Seals is a proud resident of the 10th District." Director (voice off-screen): "Actually, he's not." Sea lion: "What, he's not?" Director: "Cut!" Sea lion: "Dan Seals is a tax fighter." Director: "No, he's all about raising your taxes and increasing government spending." Sea lion: "Aaargh! For real, broheim?" Sea lion: "Dan Seals is a fresh new candidate." Director: "Nah, he's run like two times already and lost. I think he was running since before there were, like, iPods." Sea lion: "What the -- ?" (Bleep) Sea lion: "Look, if you want common-sense leadership in Congress, lower taxes and more jobs, just vote for Robert Dold." Sea lion (to director): "All righty, arf-arf. Where's my fish treat?" Closing jingle: "It's Dold with a 'd,' not an 'e.'" We like the ad so much that we feel a bit guilty subjecting it to the Truth-O-Meter. But subject it we must. We could have looked at the question of whether Seals lives in the district or not. (A local media outlet in the district reported that Seals lives "a block and a half outside the district boundary." Meanwhile, the same article notes questions about Dold's own history of residing in the district. The Constitution only requires that a candidate live in the state where the election is being held.) But we didn't. Instead, we're looking at the burning question of whether the spokesmammal was correct when he said that Dan Seals was running for office "before there were, like, iPods." We first looked at Seals' biography. He has indeed run (and lost) for Congress twice before -- in 2006 and 2008. Prior to that, he worked in a variety of corporate and policy jobs, including a position in the U.S. Commerce Department and as an economics fellow in the U.S. Senate. Seals was clearly a policy-wonk in training, but none of these positions involved electoral politics, so we won't count them as positions in which he was "running." Even assuming that Seals started campaigning actively a year or more before the 2006 election, that would only peg the beginning of his career as a candidate to 2005. What about the iPod? Well, we located a Newsweek cover featuring Apple co-founder Steve Jobs holding the music player that's dated July 26, 2004. (Doesn't it look bulky?) So the iPod clearly existed well before Seals began to run for office. We found the original news release for Apple's initial unveiling of the iPod on Oct. 23, 2001. And units were on sale beginning on Nov. 10, 2001, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. So, versions of the iPod were on sale for three to four years before Seals began running for office. When we ran our findings by the Dold campaign, spokesman John McGovern replied, "This ad is intended to be light-hearted and a tongue-in-cheek response to the relentlessly negative tone of the Seals campaign. All cultural references are intended to be humorous and casual." Having waded through so much muck while reviewing this year's campaign commercials, we're all for light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek. And as you have probably picked up, we love this ad. But sometimes the Truth-O-Meter has to exercise tough love. So, as much as we love the pinniped, the ad got it wrong about the iPod, so we rate it, like, False.	None	Robert Dold	None	None	None	2010-10-27T15:02:03	2010-10-26	['Dan_Seals_(Illinois_politician)']
-snes-06083	Venomous 'two-striped telamonia' spiders are lurking beneath toilet seats in public restrooms.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/two-striped-telamonia-spider/	None	Inboxer Rebellion	None	Snopes Staff	None	Two-Striped Telamonia Spider	30 September 1999	None	['None']
-hoer-01148	Kroger Free $80 Gift Card	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/kroger-free-80-gift-card-facebook-survey-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Kroger Free $80 Gift Card Facebook Survey Scam	April 11, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-02437	Seventy-five percent of the young adults in this country are not mentally or physically fit to serve.	true	/rhode-island/statements/2014/mar/02/bing-west/author-bing-west-says-seventy-five-percent-young-a/	Bing West, Marine veteran of Vietnam and an expert on counterinsurgency warfare, was discussing military preparedness with host Gene Valicenti last week on WPRO-AM. They were talking about Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s proposed defense budget, which includes, among other spending cuts, trimming the Army from its current level of 520,000 troops to as low as 440,000 active duty soldiers, the lowest level since before World War II. West opposes the troop reductions, saying such cuts would make it difficult for the United States to respond quickly to future military threats. If those kinds of cuts must be made, he said, it is common sense to have a backup mobilization plan in place to rapidly increase the size of the military. In other words, he said, a draft. Besides the obvious political challenges in reinstituting the draft, which ended in 1973, West said there’s a logistical problem as well: Seventy-five percent of the young adults in this country are not mentally or physically fit to serve, he said. Watch out, Valicenti warned, Politifact might hear you. Well, we did. West’s number sounded high, so we went out to muster the facts. When we called West, he said he got the figure from reports he’d read in newspapers around the country, most recently the Washington Post. We looked for the original research that might have driven those reports, and we found it. The 75 percent unfit figure has been reported for a few years now. It came from a 2009 report called "Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve, 75 Percent of Young Adults Cannot Join the Military." The report was prepared by Mission Readiness, an organization that includes 89 retired military officials, including a former navy secretary, and officers from generals to chief petty officers and sergeant majors. The group advocates for improvements in the United States’ education system and the health of the nation’s youth. The report said increasing obesity rates among Americans ages 17 to 24, declining high school graduation rates and criminal backgrounds were severely narrowing the pool of applicants who could meet the armed forces’ academic and physical health standards for recruits. The report noted that one in four young Americans lacks a high school diploma and 30 percent of those who have one and try to enlist fail the military’s math and reading tests. It also estimated that 27 percent of those between 17 and 24 could not hit the armed forces’ weight limits and 32 percent had other health problems, such as asthma, poor eyesight or hearing or attention deficit disorders, that ruled them out for military service. The report also said about 10 percent of the potential military service population was ineligible because of at least one prior felony or serious misdemeanor. Mission:Readiness isn’t the only one sounding that alarm. On March 3, 2009, Curtis Gilroy, then the director of the accession policy office of the undersecretary for defense for personnel and readiness, told the U. S. Congress’ House Armed Services Committee pretty much the same thing. He cited the primary drivers as obesity and low high school graduation rates when he said "we find that only 25 percent of our young people today, aged 17 to 24, are qualified for military service. Not a good situation." Our ruling Bing West said 75 percent of young adults in the United States were physically or mentally unfit to serve in the military. The Defense Department and a non-governmental organization have both done research that support his claim. We find the statement True. (Comment on this ruling on providencejournal.com. If you have a claim you'd like us to check, send it to politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Bing West	None	None	None	2014-03-02T00:01:00	2014-02-25	['None']
-pomt-07734	Says that in a hearing, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords suggested to Gen. David Petraeus that the Army "put more emphasis on less environmentally damaging methods, like stabbing or clubbing enemy forces in order to minimize the carbon output."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/mar/01/chain-email/chain-e-mail-gabrielle-giffords-treats-satire-trut/	A reader recently forwarded us a chain e-mail with a rather striking claim about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who is recovering from a brain injury after an assassination attempt in Tucson, Ariz., on Jan. 8, 2011. A version of it has been posted on a variety of blog sites, including this one. Here are excerpts: "I had no idea that this Congresswoman was such a nut case. "It was a tragedy that 19 people were shot and six died. As a result Giffords will be held out as a saint, when in fact, she is an idiot , a left wing ‘enviro-nut’ who should not be in Congress. The media only cares about her because she is a Democrat. Had she been a Republican, like the federal judge who was killed, she would have been off the front page the next day, as he has been. "I had forgotten she was the Congresswoman that was involved in the following exchange with General Petraeus: "Poster-child for what is wrong in Washington, DC Our Arizona 8th District US Congressional representative, the Hon. Gabrielle Giffords, in a meeting of the House Armed Services Committee, asked General David Petraeus the following question: ‘General Petraeus, what are you doing to reduce carbon emissions in the war on terror?’ Wow. I had to read, and re-read this several times to believe it. ... "What Google says about Rep. Giffords: Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Az) took Afghan Commander, General David Petraeus, to task for what she characterized as ‘willful disregard of the environmental impact of our war effort.’ ‘There is no policy, no plan to minimize carbon emissions in our military activities,’ Giffords charged. ‘Bombs are dropped and bullets are fired without considering the environmental impact.’ Giffords insisted that she was ‘not demanding an immediate halt to current military operations in the Middle East. I'm just saying that battle plans should include an environmental impact assessment as a regular part of the process before attacks are launched.’ "She also suggested that the Army ‘put more emphasis on less environmentally damaging methods, like stabbing or clubbing enemy forces in order to minimize the carbon output.’" We found it hard to believe that a member of Congress would actually say that the Army should "put more emphasis on less environmentally damaging methods, like stabbing or clubbing enemy forces in order to minimize the carbon output." So we set out to find the source. Our friends at Snopes.com provided the first clue, noting in a post from July 28, 2010 -- six months before the Tucson shooting -- that a false e-mail had been circulating about Giffords’ alleged questioning of Petraeus. Snopes.com explained that on June 16, 2010, Petraeus had testified before the House Armed Services Committee and that one of the lawmakers who questioned him was Giffords. She did indeed ask a question that combined elements of environmental and military policy, but the line of inquiry was rather different than what the e-mail suggested. "There's been a lot of attention back here in the United States on what's happening with the BP oil spill," Giffords said at the hearing. "And as we all know, the largest user of energy on the planet is actually the United States Air Force, and the (Department of Defense) is the largest user of energy in the United States. And I really want to commend the work done on behalf of DOD, and also what's happening in the field with our energy, but it's an area that I just really want to focus on. "And I know a lot of questions have been asked, but during the last three years, supply lines have increasingly threatened -- have been threatened, either by enemy action or through international places. And in places like Kandahar, where we have a large presence, we have been plugged in to a very unsustainable and really an incapable grid system. "We know that a major part of the upcoming Kandahar offensive will include some serious repairs and upgrades to the energy system which include small-scale solar and hydropower systems, and also some solar-powered streetlights. I'm just curious whether or not there's plans to utilize any of those same technologies at our bases around Afghanistan, and wouldn't that greatly reduce our need for fuel?" In other words, Giffords did not ask, "General Petraeus, what are you doing to reduce carbon emissions in the war on terror?" -- as the e-mail indicated -- but rather asked him whether the use of alternative energy sources could provide a more reliable and more secure power source for troops located in a faraway, unstable theater of operations, potentially relieving soldiers from having to defend vulnerable supply chains required to move conventional forms of energy. And that’s where the e-mail checked by Snopes.com ended. The version we received added new claims, including the parts about battlefield environmental impact statements and about Giffords urging American forces to club, rather than shoot, enemy forces. These comments were also absent from the transcript of the June 16, 2010, hearing. But we were able to track down the source: a July 17, 2010, post at the Arizona Conservative blog that was clearly labeled "Semi-News — A Satirical Look at Recent News." Here’s the entire satirical post: "Army’s ‘Carbon Footprint’ Taints War Effort "Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Az) took Afghan Commander, General David Petraeus, to task for what she characterized as ‘willful disregard of the environmental impact of our war effort.’ "‘There is no policy, no plan to minimize carbon emissions in our military activities,’ Giffords charged. ‘Bombs are dropped and bullets are fired without considering the environmental impact.’ "Giffords insisted that she was ‘not demanding an immediate halt to current military operations in the Middle East. I’m just saying that battle plans should include an environmental impact assessment as a regular part of the process before attacks are launched.’ "She also suggested that the Army ‘put more emphasis on less environmentally damaging methods, like stabbing or clubbing enemy forces in order to minimize the carbon output.’" In other words, the chain e-mailer cut and pasted the satirical post -- but, whether intentionally or accidentally, left out the crucial label "satirical." We reached out to two people who have posted or forwarded the item but did not hear back. So where does this leave us? In the hearing, Giffords did indeed raise an issue involving alternative energy with Petraeus, but it was not to express a concern that the military should "reduce carbon emissions in the war on terror" -- rather, it was to improve energy reliability and security for American forces on the ground. And the claims that Giffords urged American forces to club, rather than shoot, the enemy in order to reduce carbon emissions were pure satire but not labeled as such by the chain e-mailer. All told, the claims in the chain e-mail are ridiculous. So we rate this chain e-mail Pants on Fire! UPDATE: Shortly after we posted the story, the man who wrote the satirical post in July 2010 returned our e-mail. "I have been writing about 300 satirical pieces a year since 2005," said John Semmens. "Only once did I directly see one passed around as real news." Semmens said he has been contacted by journalists about a half dozen times over six years, so seeing one of his pieces circulate in this way strikes him as "a relatively unusual event."	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2011-03-01T16:38:23	2011-02-24	['David_Petraeus', 'Gabrielle_Giffords']
-afck-00344	“The overall crime rate has decreased by 21 % since 2002…”	misleading	https://africacheck.org/reports/2014-sona-claims-revisited-zuma-on-crime/	None	None	None	None	None	2014 SONA claims revisited: Zuma on crime	2015-02-10 12:25	None	['None']
-snes-05814	In the Air Tonight	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/in-the-air-tonight/	None	Entertainment	None	David Mikkelson	None	In the Air Tonight	12 September 2000	None	['None']
-snes-03667	Hillary Clinton's campaign manipulated a photograph to increase the crowd size at one of Bill Clinton's appearances.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/manipulated-photograph-of-bill-clinton-crowd/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Manipulated Photograph of Bill Clinton Crowd	30 October 2016	None	['Bill_Clinton', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-11597	"After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jan/30/donald-trump/us-finally-seeing-rising-wages-donald-trump-said/	President Donald Trump touted economic achievements on his watch during his State of the Union address. One of the statistics he cited was wage growth. "After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages," Trump said. However, that’s problematic in two ways. We asked Jed Kolko, the chief economist at the jobs site Indeed.com, for the best measure to use, and he said it was median usual weekly real earnings for full-time wage and salary workers, 16 years and over. This is a measure that tends to reflect the typical wages of people with stable employment and it is adjusted for inflation. This figure has been calculated quarterly since 1979. Here’s the full run of the data: See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com This data shows that after Trump entered office, wages initially went up, then fell. For the fourth quarter of 2017, the figure was $345. That’s slightly below the $349 mark in the fourth quarter of 2016, before Trump entered office. Even if you allow for some quarterly blips, however, Trump’s statement is also misleading in another way. The "years of wage stagnation" he refers to didn’t end with Trump’s presidency -- wage growth began under President Barack Obama. Wages hit their post-Great Recession low in the second quarter of 2014, at $330. They climbed, with just a few blips, for the rest of his presidency. When we asked the White House for data, they said, incorrectly, that the most recent data was from the third quarter of 2017. The White House also offered another statistic: average real weekly earnings of all private-sector employees. For this statistic, wages have indeed risen since Trump has been in office — by less than 1 percent from December 2016 to December 2017. But here, too, wages rose over the equivalent periods of time in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016, in one case by as much as 2 percent over the course of a year. So it’s incorrect to say the United States is "finally" seeing wage increases. Our ruling Trump said, "After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages." By the most common measure, wages did go up for the first three quarters of Trump’s presidency, but they fell in the fourth, wiping out all the gains on his watch and then some. And even if you ignore this fourth quarter figure as a blip, his assertion ignores that wages — by two different measurements — began their climb during the final years of Obama’s presidency. We rate his statement Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-01-30T23:01:19	2018-01-30	['None']
-pose-01138	"During my second term I will: Continue to expand funding for springs restoration and alternative water supply programs."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/1224/more-funding-springs-restoration-and-alternative-w/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	More funding for springs restoration and alternative water supply programs	2014-12-30T10:51:41	None	['None']
-pomt-12447	"If you’re getting your insurance through (your employer), nothing changes" under Trumpcare.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/may/11/rod-blum/iowa-gops-blum-gets-it-wrong-acha-effect-employer-/	Rep. Rod Blum, R-Iowa, faced a feisty crowd at a high school gymnasium in Dubuque when voters in his district pressed him on his vote for the House Republican health care bill, the American Health Care Act. Blum aimed to put the bill’s changes into perspective. "This bill, Trumpcare — whatever you want to call it — is about the individual market only," he said May 8. "That’s 12,000 people in my district. So if you’re in the group health insurance program through your employers, if you’re getting your insurance through the group health insurance, nothing changes." In this fact-check, we look at whether the House GOP measure changes nothing in employer-based plans. In reality, the bill does change the rules in a couple of ways that could affect employer plans. But the impact is far from certain. Core benefits One of the changes has to do with a key amendment authored by Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J. It gives states the option to pick their own list of "essential health benefits," the services that every plan must provide. Under the Affordable Care Act, that list includes 10 services, from hospitalization to prescription drugs to pediatric care and more. Under the American Health Care Act, states could apply for waivers to drop some items from that list. Some common examples are maternity care or mental health, services that weren’t always part of insurance plans before the Affordable Care Act took effect. Blum’s spokesman Paul Smith told us it is wrong to focus on the MacArthur waivers. Blum "was speaking about the large-group market, not the small-group market where the MacArthur waivers could potentially apply," Smith said. Smith is correct that the amendment only addresses the individual and small-group markets. But that doesn’t settle the question. First, Blum spoke about employer-based insurance generally. The distinction between small- and large-group plans might have been lost on his audience. Yet even if he was thinking about large employer plans, which cover about 110 million people nationwide, health law analysts say the Republican bill could touch those plans and those people, too. The link between the list of benefits and financial protection The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, has two financial cushions for people. It bans annual and lifetime limits on coverage and requires insurance companies to put a cap on how much a person needs to pay out-of-pocket. In theory, no matter how big the medical bills get, they won’t drive someone into bankruptcy. The important thing is, both protections apply only to services on the essential benefits list. There’s another wrinkle. Companies that offer insurance through a large-group or a self-insurance plan are not required to provide every service on the essential benefits list, but for any item on that list that they do offer, those financial protections kick in. With that, we get to the significance of the MacArthur amendment. No one knows how many states will want to trim the essential benefits list, but the possibility could create some new options for the larger plans. "Employers could choose to base the plans they offer on a definition of essential health benefits that is considerably weaker than the current one," Matt Fiedler, a health studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, said. Fiedler said any service not on a state’s list is not subject to the financial protections of no yearly or lifetime limits. Health law professor Allison Hoffman at UCLA gave the hypothetical case of maternity and newborn care. "If the American Health Care Act becomes law, a state might define essential health benefits not to include maternity and newborn care," Hoffman said. "Then, an employer could once again cap them." Neither Fiedler nor Hoffman said that this would definitely happen; only that it could happen. Thomas Miller, a health law fellow at the market-oriented American Enterprise Institute, doesn’t argue the point. But Miller does downplay the significance. "It's not unusual for the first round of voting on bills with recently revised amendments to fail to connect and integrate fully with pre-existing law," Miller said. He described this intersection between the MacArthur amendment and current regulations, an "indirect bankshot" that has nothing to do with the amendment’s purpose or intent. Miller and Fiedler said the problem could be avoided through new regulations. End of the employer mandate Under the American Health Care Act, no one must buy insurance, nor do employers have to offer it. Fiedler called this change "clear and unambiguous." "The Congressional Budget Office projected that there would be a change in behavior," Fiedler said. The CBO didn’t look at the individual and employer mandates separately, but in its initial assessment of the House Republican bill, it said eliminating both would "substantially reduce the number of people with health insurance coverage." Miller noted that since large employers regularly offer insurance in order to compete for workers, keeping or ending the mandate would make little difference. Our ruling Blum said for people who get their insurance through their employer, the American Health Care Act changes nothing. The experts we reached said that there actually is a way that the GOP bill could affect employer plans. States could decide to trim the list of essential health services. Employers could still offer a fuller range of services, but the extra ones wouldn’t be subject to the rules that protect households against massive medical bills. No expert said this was certain to happen. Right now, it is a legal possibility. The end of the employer mandate also changes the rules for large employers, ending penalties for those that don’t offer insurance. But for different reasons, the impact is uncertain. Blum's statement is partially accurate but leaves out important information. We rate it Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Dubuque.	None	Rod Blum	None	None	None	2017-05-11T18:27:24	2017-05-08	['None']
-goop-01578	Jon Hamm Upset That Chris Martin Stole Dakota Johnson From Him?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jon-hamm-dakota-johnson-chris-martin/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jon Hamm Upset That Chris Martin Stole Dakota Johnson From Him?	2:33 pm, February 14, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01544	Tiffany Haddish Dating Lamar Odom?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/tiffany-haddish-lamar-odom-dating-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Tiffany Haddish Dating Lamar Odom?	3:57 pm, February 19, 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00907	Sex Trafficking Site Tracker Warning Going Viral on Facebook	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/bogus-sex-trafficking-site-tracker-warning-going-viral-on-facebook/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Bogus Sex Trafficking Site Tracker Warning Going Viral on Facebook	September 7, 2018	None	['None']
-farg-00470	“UPDATE: Cop Who Arrested Malia Obama Found Dead Under Suspicious Circumstances.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/02/malia-obama-didnt-attack-elderly-woman/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Mark Shtrakhman	None	Malia Obama Didn’t Attack Elderly Woman	February 27, 2018	2018-02-27 20:34:49 UTC	['None']
-tron-03300	GAP is rewarding you for forwarding emails for the company	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/gap/	None	promises	None	None	None	GAP is rewarding you for forwarding emails for the company	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-02540	Says President Barack Obama has issued upwards of 1,000 executive orders, more than any modern president.	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/feb/06/chain-email/chain-email-claims-barack-obama-has-signed-1000-ex/	In his State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama said he doesn’t intend to wait if Congress doesn’t move forward on his priorities in 2014. "I'm eager to work with all of you," Obama said Jan. 28. "But America does not stand still, and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that's what I'm going to do." That means using his executive office — "I've got a pen and I've got a phone," he has taken to saying lately — to accomplish his agenda, if necessary. Republicans have lashed out in response, insisting Obama is overstepping his authority. Reps. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Steve King, R-Iowa, even threatened to sue the president. We also saw an old chain email resurface claiming that Obama has already issued more executive orders than any of his predecessors. It first gained attention in the fall of 2012. "This president is determined to take control away from the House and Senate," the email says, while providing a tally of presidential executive orders from Teddy Roosevelt to Obama. The email claims Obama issued 923 executive orders in his first 3.5 years and "More than 1000+ and counting executive orders in six years." It goes on to list a handful of examples of Obama’s alleged work. (Read the chain email in its entirety.) As we dug into its claims, we found that pretty much everything about this email is wrong. And most of it was already debunked more than a year ago by our good friends at FactCheck.org. But several readers sent it to us again, and since the issue of executive authority has become newsworthy of late, we thought this deserved an update. By the numbers The tradition of executive orders dates back to our first president, George Washington, though it was used sparingly through the first 100 years of the union. Executive orders are official actions taken by the president directing the federal government and bureaucracies. They carry the power of law, but can be revoked or amended by future administrations and are limited in scope. For example, Obama cannot use executive orders to raise the minimum wage for the entire country, but he can (and plans to) raise the minimum wage for workers hired under new federal contracts to $10.10 an hour. The process picked up under Ulysses S. Grant, who issued 217 executive orders, nearly 140 more than his predecessor Andrew Johnson, who himself almost doubled Abraham Lincoln, the previous record holder. After Grant, it became commonplace for presidents to issue more than 100 executive orders. In fact, four presidents have eclipsed 1,000 executive orders: Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Notice Obama is absent from that list.) Franklin Roosevelt holds the record with 3,522 executive orders during his 12-plus years in office. But according to the chain email, FDR used his pen infrequently and issued a paltry 11 executive orders -- another inaccuracy. Here’s the incorrect tallies of presidential executive orders in the chain email versus the actual numbers, provided by the University of California Santa Barbara The American Presidency Project. President Executive orders according to chain email (false) Actual number of executive orders Franklin Roosevelt 11 3,522 Harry Truman 7 907 Dwight Eisenhower 2 484 John F. Kennedy 4 214 Lyndon Johnson 4 325 Richard Nixon 1 346 Gerald Ford 3 169 Jimmy Carter 3 320 Ronald Reagan 5 381 George H.W. Bush 3 166 Bill Clinton 15 364 George W. Bush 62 291 Barack Obama 1000+ 168* *As of Jan. 20, 2014 It’s obvious the chain email is way off. Not only is Obama far from the most prolific user of executive orders, at this point he’s not even on pace to surpass President George W. Bush’s total. In fact, unless he picks up speed, Obama will likely sign fewer executive orders than any two-term president since the start of the 20th century. Judging the acts That’s not the only part where the chain email invokes an alternate reality. It also lists 14 executive orders Obama signed that allegedly usurp traditional executive powers, including things like seizing control of the media, railroads, waterways and correctional institutions. The email invited us to "Feel free to verify the ‘executive orders’ at will." When we looked up the specific executive order numbers that the chain email mentioned, we found that they were all signed by other presidents. Also, those order numbers matched up with executive orders on either entirely different topics or orders that were much more limited in scope. Here's the rundown: Executive order number What the chain email claims it does What it actually does Who actually signed it No. 10990 Allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports. Created the Federal Safety Council in the Department of Labor to improve workplace safety for federal workers and civilian contractors Kennedy No. 10995 Allows the government to seize and control the communication media. Assigned telecommunications management functions Kennedy No. 10997 Allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals. Assigned emergency preparedness functions to the Secretary of the Interior Kennedy No. 10998 Allows the government to take over all food resources and farms. Assigned emergency preparedness functions to the Secretary of Agriculture Kennedy No. 11000 Allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision. Assigned emergency preparedness functions to the Secretary of Labor Kennedy No. 11001 Allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions. Assigned emergency preparedness functions to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Kennedy No. 11002 Designates the registration of all persons. Postmaster General to operate a national registration. Assigned emergency preparedness functions to the Postmaster General Kennedy No. 11003 Allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft. Assigning emergency preparedness functions to the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency Kennedy No. 11004 Allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations. Assigned certain emergency preparedness functions to the Housing and Home Finance Administrator Kennedy No. 11005 Allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities. Assigned emergency preparedness functions to the Interstate Commerce Commission Kennedy No. 11049 Assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period. Directs Secretary of Commerce to help president decide which public works projects to fund through Public Works Acceleration Act Kennedy No. 11051 Specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis. Prescribed responsibilities of the Office of Emergency Planning in the Executive Office of the President Kennedy No. 11310 Grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President. Assigned emergency preparedness functions to the Attorney General Johnson No. 11921 Allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. Financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months. Adjusted emergency preparedness assignments to organizational and functional changes in Federal departments and agencies Ford As you can see by the table, none of these executive orders were signed by Obama. The first executive order Obama ever signed was No. 13489, far later than even the most recent executive order listed in the email (they count up). Many of the executive orders listed above deal with the Defense Protection Act passed by Congress in 1950 and reauthorized repeatedly since then. According to the Congressional Research Service, the act says "authorities can be used across the federal government to shape the domestic industrial base so that, when called upon, it is capable of providing essential materials and goods needed for the national defense." Obama has signed subsequent executive orders similar to the ones issued by Kennedy, Johnson and Ford that deal with emergency preparation, but they don’t create a state of martial law, like the email implies. The Congressional Research Service even said in 2000 that the Defense Protection Act "has nothing whatever to deal with martial law." Our ruling The chain email said Obama has issued more than 1,000 executive orders. That’s not even close. As of Jan. 20, 2014, he was at 168. The email also infers that Obama has far surpassed his predecessors in using his executive powers. That, too, is way off. FDR signed off on more than 3,500 executive orders, and, in fact, Obama is on pace to issue fewer executive orders than any two-term president since 1900. As for the 14 executive orders highlighted in the email? Obama didn’t issue any of them. They came from Kennedy, Johnson and Ford. Almost all of them have been revoked. Overall, the statements in this email seem to be completely made up. So we rate its claims Pants on Fire!	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2014-02-06T15:00:35	2014-02-02	['None']
-pomt-07765	When it comes to protesters in Madison, "almost all" are now from outside of Wisconsin.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/23/scott-walker/wisconsin-gov-scott-walker-says-out-staters-accoun/	Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker got right to the point when he was chatting Feb. 22, 2011, with a prank caller pretending to be a major Republican power-broker: The protests in Madison are dying down. And changing to mostly out-of-state residents. In the secretly-recorded call, Walker assured a New York blogger posing as industrialist David Koch -- a contributor to Walker’s campaign and many GOP causes -- that things were under control at the Capitol. "Well, we’re actually hanging pretty tough," Walker said in the call, which was taped and made public Feb. 23, 2011. "I mean, you know, amazingly there’s a much smaller group of protesters almost all of whom are in from other states today." We know Wisconsin is awful popular these days. And the battle over the budget-repair bill is national news. But are "almost all" of the protesters in from other states? We asked Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie about the not-intended-for-the-world-to-hear statement from his boss. He sent us two links to news stories from over the weekend -- one from the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, and another from the Decatur, Ill., newspaper. Here’s what the Feb. 21, 2011, blog post in the Weekly Standard said: "Labor groups and Democratic Party organizations from outside the state have been sending people to Madison for the demonstrations." It went on to note an e-mail from the Chicago Teachers Union, which said it was sending a bus Feb. 21, 2011, to Madison. The union’s twitter feed posted a message the evening of Feb. 19, 2011, saying: "CTU Supports Wisconsin Workers. Get on the bus Monday." Meanwhile, the Decatur paper reported Feb. 22, 2011 -- the day Walker made his comment during the non-Koch call -- that Illinois union leaders were sending protesters to Wisconsin. "A number of Illinoisans have headed to Madison in recent days to join the battle over Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's effort to end collective bargaining for public employee unions," the paper reported. "The Illinois Education Association, the state's largest teacher union, reports it has sent 14 staff members to Wisconsin to help organize members in their fight," the story said. It went on to say another union -- Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees -- "has a number of staff members on the ground" and was sending a two bus loads on Feb. 22, 2011 and one on Feb. 23, 2011. OK, fair enough. That’s a few bus loads accounted for -- albeit not all on the day of Walker’s phone conversation. And, of course, there surely were other out-of-state protesters that day. But "almost all"? The crowds in Madison did drop on the day of the call. After several days of school district closings around the state due to teachers calling in sick to attend protests, the vast majority of teachers were back in the classroom. Milwaukee and Madison school districts reopened. We did a little more investigating to learn: Who are these protesters? Of course there’s no one checking ID cards, and no way to come up with a definitive percentage, but there are ways to gauge the makeup of such crowds. The Journal Sentinel has had reporters and photographers on the scene day and night since the protest began. We looked at dozens of pictures from protests Monday night and Tuesday, taken by Journal Sentinel photographers (You can see some of these pictures here.) We saw many signs and clothing that suggest Wisconsin protesters -- Badgers and Packers attire, a sign mentioning Janesville, signs mentioning the Madison teachers union and so forth. One man wore a T-shirt from the Shoe Box, a Madison-area store. However, that man, Thomas Brown, is from New Mexico. He came back to visit family near Madison. We won’t count him as an out-of-state agitator. We did see signs such as "Michigan Supports WI workers," and one that read "Coast to Coast Solidarity" that mentioned California and New York. On Feb. 23, 2011, when Teamsters President Jim Hoffa spoke, signs for Chicago Sheet Metal Workers were evident and there were Teamsters from other states present, according to news reports and Madison police. We sent a Patrick Tricker, a reporter for the UW-Madison The Daily Cardinal, through the crowd the afternoon of Feb. 23, 2011. It was day two of the state Assembly’s marathon vote on Walker’s measure, which involved hundreds of Democratic amendments. In an informal survey, Tricker spoke directly to 26 protesters in the Capitol rotunda. About a fourth of the 26 were from out of state, half from Madison and the remainder were from other parts of Wisconsin. He found one from California and one from Alaska. That’s nowhere near "almost all." Finally, we asked law enforcement for their take. "The vast majority of people protesting are from here -- Wisconsin and even more from Dane County," said Joel DeSpain, public information officer for the Madison Police Department. How would DeSpain know? "I grew up here," said DeSpain, who attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked 25 years as a television journalist in that city before taking the job with the cops. "I know Madison, this is my town," DeSpain said he has seen friends, family members, people he has known for more than 30 years attending protests. The crowds on Feb. 22, 2011 -- the day of the Walker phone call -- included hundreds of state corrections officers and Madison police officers, he said. Said DeSpain: "Unless somebody’s giving them all sorts of t-shirts from Wisconsin" these are local protesters. Let’s bring this item home. In his not-so-private phone call, Walker claimed protests were getting smaller and almost all of the protesters at the state Capitol were there from out of state. Certainly there are folks there from far and wide. But there’s no evidence the out-of-towners have taken over. All evidence points to this being -- and remaining -- a home grown effort. We rate Walker’s statement False. Patrick Tricker of The Daily Cardinal contributed to this report.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2011-02-23T19:03:07	2011-02-22	['Wisconsin', 'Madison,_Wisconsin']
-snes-04228	A tote bag bears a slogan poking fun at people who fear Arabic writing.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/arabic-tote-bag/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Fear the Grim Arabic Tote Bag	17 August 2016	None	['None']
-hoer-00341	Rihanna 'S3X' Tape Survey Facebook	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/rihanna-tape-spam.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Rihanna 'S3X' Tape Survey Scam Messages Hit Facebook	February 28, 2013	None	['None']
-goop-02535	Beyonce Excited For Taylor Swift Diss Of Kim Kardashian In New Song?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/beyonce-excited-taylor-swift-diss-kim-kardashian-new-song/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Beyonce Excited For Taylor Swift Diss Of Kim Kardashian In New Song?	3:06 pm, August 25, 2017	None	['Taylor_Swift', 'Kim_Kardashian', 'Beyoncé']
-pomt-09762	In the 1950s, "A lot of people got rich — and they had to pay a top tax rate of 90 percent."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/02/michael-moore/michael-moores-film-capitalism-claims-richest-paid/	In his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story , Michael Moore makes a case that the richest Americans used to shoulder a much bigger portion of the tax burden back in the years of his childhood. In the 1950s, "A lot of people got rich — and they had to pay a top tax rate of 90 percent," Moore says in the film. Considering that the top marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans today is 35 percent, that figure seems astounding. But it's true that in the 1950s, the top marginal tax rates were over 90 percent. So does that mean that someone in 1955 making a half million dollars had to fork over $450,000 of it to Uncle Sam? No. We are talking here about "marginal" tax rates. Moore doesn't go out of his way to explain this, so we will. The marginal tax rate is the top rate of income tax charged to individuals on their last dollar of earnings. So in 1955, for example, when the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent, that was the tax rate owed on a person's income over $300,000. That person would, however, pay 20 percent on the first $2,000 of income; 21 percent on the next $2,000 in income; 24 percent on the next $2,000 and graduated on up to the highest rate. On average, a person making, say, $500,000 would pay substantially less than 90 percent of their income in federal taxes. The top marginal tax rates peaked in 1952 and 1953 at 92 percent for income over $300,000. Bob Williams of the Tax Policy Center did some math for us to give this some perspective. In 1952 and 1953, Williams said, when the top income tax rate was 92 percent for income over $300,000, a person would have to make waaaay more than $300,000 to actually end up paying an average of 90 percent of their income. According to Williams, someone would have to make $2,328,400, and therefore pay $2,095,560, to get to that 90 percent threshold. But people with income of less than $2.3 million — remember we're talking about 1952 and 1953 — would have paid, on average, something less than 90 percent, and perhaps much less. Still, Moore's point is valid. The top marginal tax rates paid by the richest Americans were far higher in the 1950s than they are now. In 2009, the top marginal rate was 35 percent on income above $372,958. And although Moore didn't use the term "marginal tax rate," he did say "top tax rate." People without CPAs might mistake that for a person's average tax rate (it's not), but it's valid wording. And so we rule this one Mostly True.	None	Michael Moore	None	None	None	2009-10-02T11:32:10	2009-10-02	['None']
-goop-02885	Michael Strahan “Causing Mayhem” At “GMA,” 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/michael-strahan-gma-feud-good-morning-america-anchors/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Michael Strahan NOT “Causing Mayhem” At “GMA,” Despite Report	10:48 am, April 5, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-13831	"90% of rural women and 55% of all women are illiterate" in Morocco.	false	/global-news/statements/2016/jul/14/snapchat/snapchat-highlights-decades-old-data-part-michelle/	Factual claims are apparently now like Pokémon. They can be anywhere. We stumbled across an interesting factoid recently while flipping through a Snapchat story documenting First Lady Michelle Obama’s visit to West Africa and Morocco from June 27 to July 1. Obama just joined Snapchat, if you’re interested. Snapchats disappear, but we were able to grab a screengrab with a sobering claim about illiteracy rates among women in Morocco. The snap had the headline "Moroccan illiteracy" and said that "90% of rural women and 55% of all women are illiterate." Is that true? Or should this claim disappear right along with your Snapchat? We wanted to find out. Tracking the claim to its source The journey of this claim is particularly interesting, and shows the perils of how incorrect or outdated statistics can be repeated over and over. The snap cites as its source a blog post by Vital Voices, a non-profit that advances women’s causes around the globe. That actually is a reposting of an article from the IntLawGrrls website, a blog dedicated to discussion of international law and policy. The original IntLawGrrls post is from September 2011 and was written by Christie Edwards, the current director of international humanitarian law at the American Red Cross. Edwards claimed in her piece that "recent surveys in Morocco estimated the country’s illiteracy rate to be approximately 55 percent of all women. Fully 90 percent of rural women in Morocco are illiterate." Edwards’ blog cites a UNICEF table of statistics. But that table doesn’t correspond to her figures. The UNICEF table only lists an overall literacy rate of 74 percent for women 15-24 in Morocco (or an illiteracy rate of 26 percent). It makes no mention of illiteracy rates for a wider age range of women or for rural women specifically. So we asked Edwards where she got her data from. A spokeswoman told us the statistic actually comes from a 2004 USAID report on education in the Muslim world. That report includes, without citation, the following passage: "Literacy levels remain very low: 63 percent for men and 38 percent for women. Illiteracy is a particular problem for women in rural areas, where nine out of 10 women are illiterate." The claim that nine out of 10 rural Moroccan women are illiterate goes back even further, to a 1996 USAID resource request report that claims, "Women remain especially disadvantaged by low literacy (13% of rural women are literate)." So to recap, a 2016 Snapchat relies on a crosspost of a 2011 blog that erroneously cites UNICEF data when in fact it’s coming from a 2004 USAID report that is using a 1996 USAID resource request as is its foundation. If that sounds fishy, it is. Illiteracy in Morocco To find out the current illiteracy rate among Moroccan women, we examined public records maintained by UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics. The website’s profile on Morocco lists a literacy rate of around 62.05 percent for women aged 15 years and older in 2015, which translates to an illiteracy rate of 37.95 percent. (Correction: An earlier version of this fact-check listed a different percentage.) The database doesn’t give specific information about illiteracy for rural versus urban women. Leonardo Menchini, the head of the social inclusion section at UNICEF Morocco, shared the most recent data on illiteracy rates for urban and rural populations with PolitiFact. UNICEF’s data come from the 2014 Moroccan census. The takeaway: illiteracy remains an issue for females in Morocco, but not near the levels seen in the Snapchat. Our ruling A Snapchat story featuring First Lady Michelle Obama claimed that, in Morocco, "90% of rural women and 55% of all women are illiterate." That data is, in some cases, at least 20 years old -- way older than Snapchat. The claim cites old data from a report in 2004, that tracks back to a 1996 USAID request report. The most recent information from UNESCO and UNICEF indicate that Morocco’s illiteracy among women is still relatively high (60 percent in rural areas and 42 percent overall), but much lower than what the snap says. We rate this claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/452873e9-e53d-4ae9-9483-c9f7c3576d83	None	Snapchat	None	None	None	2016-07-14T10:27:32	2016-06-30	['Morocco']
-vees-00052	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Palace spox Roque says these Duterte quips should not be taken seriously	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-palace-spox-roque-says-these-duterte-q	None	None	None	None	Harry Roque,Duterte jokes,rape jokes	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Palace spox Roque says these Duterte quips should not be taken seriously	September 25, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-11303	"The United States has a massive trade deficit with Japan. It's anywhere from $69 billion to a $100 billion a year."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/apr/19/donald-trump/donald-trump-correct-about-size-us-trade-deficit-j/	When President Donald Trump held a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-A-Lago resort, a Japanese journalist asked the leaders about trade between the two countries. Trump started his answer by saying, "The United States has a massive trade deficit with Japan. It's anywhere from $69 billion to a $100 billion a year. That's massive by any standpoint." When we took a closer look, we found that the lower end of Trump’s scale has some credibility, but not the upper end. First, let’s look at the data for trade in goods alone. (This is not the most complete look at trade — more on that later.) But the figure for goods alone is the one that trade skeptics are more apt to cite, because it is more likely to paint the United States as getting the short end of the stick in bilateral trade. U.S. Census Bureau data shows that the U.S. deficit with Japan in goods has been consistent in recent years, from $67 billion to $69 billion. In 2017, it was $68.8 billion. That figure is in line with the lower end of Trump’s range, but it’s well below the upper end of his range. In fact, the higher figure Trump offered is about 50 percent larger than the actual size of the deficit. There’s a more comprehensive figure that combines the deficit in goods and services. It makes Trump’s point more inaccurate. The United States tends to have a more favorable balance of trade in services, which includes sectors such as financial and insurance services, legal services, business consulting, and entertainment. Any goods-and-services deficit is usually smaller than the deficit in goods alone. According to Census Bureau data, the U.S. deficit with Japan in goods and services in 2017 was $56.1 billion. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com So Trump offered an upper estimate that’s almost twice as large as the actual goods-and-services deficit. Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, confirmed our conclusion that Trump’s upper-end estimate was off-base. "President Trump tends to get creative when speaking about bilateral trade deficits," she said. Trump called the trade deficit "massive." Let’s put it into context. The size of Japan’s goods-and-services deficit is far below that of China’s, and it’s also smaller than those of Mexico and Germany. But the deficit with Japan still ranks high on the list of deficits among top trading partners. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com The deficit with Japan is modest as a percentage of all trade between the two nations. The 2017 goods-and-services deficit with Japan amounted to 19.6 percent of total trade between the two countries. That was larger than the percentage for Mexico (11.1 percent), but it was smaller than for either Germany (28.5 percent) or China (47.4 percent). When we contacted the White House, they came up with identical data as we did — about $69 billion as a deficit in goods, but not as high as $100 billion. Our ruling Trump said, "The United States has a massive trade deficit with Japan. It's anywhere from $69 billion to a $100 billion a year." The U.S. trade deficit with Japan is roughly $69 billion if you only look at the trade in goods. A more comprehensive figure that includes the balance of trade in services is even smaller, $56.1 billion. Either way, the $100 billion that Trump threw out is unsupported by the data. We rate the statement Half True. CORRECTION: This version has corrected the size of the goods and services deficit with Japan. It is $56.1 billion, not $57.1 billion. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-04-19T17:11:29	2018-04-18	['United_States', 'Japan']
-pomt-10010	"Warren (Buffett) still does support me."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/mar/23/barack-obama/Warren-Buffett-still-backs-Obama/	The Oracle of Omaha is still for Obama. So the president claimed on 60 Minutes , interrupting interviewer Steve Kroft to tout the continued support of Warren Buffett, the Omaha-based stock-picker extraordinaire. "Your plan really for solving the banking crisis was met with very, very, very tepid response," Kroft said to Obama. "A lot of people said they didn't understand it. A lot of people said it didn't have any, enough details to solve the problem. I know you're coming out with something next week on this. But these criticisms were coming from people like Warren Buffett, people who had supported you, and you had counted as being your..." "And Warren still does support me," Obama interjected. "But I think that, understand, Warren's also a big player in the financial markets who's a major owner of Wells Fargo. And so he's got a perspective from the perspective of somebody who is part owner of a bank." Indeed Buffett, who endorsed Obama during the campaign, did explicitly say during a three-hour interview March 9 with CNBC that he still supports Obama. "I voted for Obama and I strongly support him, and I think he's the right guy," Buffett said early in the interview. Buffett did criticize Obama's handling of the banking crisis, saying that "a bank that's going to go broke should be allowed to go broke," as long as the depositors are protected. (Obama's approach has leaned toward giving the banks more bailout money in some form rather than letting them fail and having the government take them over.) But Buffett's primary concern was that Obama wasn't communicating clearly with the public about struggling banks. "The right answer for me (to the banking crisis) is the president to clarify things as only he can, because you have heard so many different things," he said. "He is the commander in chief on this, and it has to be clarified ... because if people aren't clear, they're going to be confused. And if they're going to be confused, they are going to be scared stiff. And that has to end." It's not surprising Buffett would want Obama to focus on the financial crisis — it has cost Buffett $25 billion. That's how much of his $62 billion fortune he lost in the past year, as shares of his holding company Berkshire Hathaway fell nearly 50 percent, Forbes reports. That knocked Buffett off his perch as the world's richest man, to No. 2 behind Bill Gates. Toward the end of the three-hour interview, Buffett reiterated his support for Obama. "He is the right president," Buffett said. "He's very, very smart. He's got, I think, exactly the right goals. He's articulate and I — you know, he will be the right person to be the commander in chief in this economic crisis." So clearly Obama was on solid ground touting Buffett's continued support. We find this claim to be True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2009-03-23T17:15:12	2009-03-22	['None']
-vogo-00639	Statement: “By partnering with the private sector to provide services we have saved over $390 million,” County Supervisor Pam Slater-Price said in her State of the County speech Feb. 10.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/county-savings-estimate-exaggerated/	Analysis: When public officials talk about “partnering with the private sector” to deliver services, they are generally referring to outsourcing government services. The county started outsourcing some services in 1998, and supporters say it saves taxpayer money.	None	None	None	None	County Savings Estimate Exaggerated	February 19, 2010	None	['None']
-farg-00043	A VA accountability law enacted last year allows the VA to say "you're fired" to employees. "Before, there was nothing you could do."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/07/va-could-fire-workers-before-trump-signed-law/	None	the-factcheck-wire	FactCheck.org	D'Angelo Gore	['Veterans Administration']	VA Could Fire Workers Before Trump Signed Law	July 27, 2018	2018-07-27 13:34:02 UTC	['None']
-snes-04850	An image shows a curt response from a Target customer service representative.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/target-customer-service-transgender-bathroom/	None	Business	None	Dan Evon	None	Fake Target Customer Service Account Responds to People Angry About Transgender Bathroom Policy	27 April 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-10526	John McCain has "a consistent pattern of ducking important environmental votes."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/mar/04/sierra-club/he-was-campaigning-not-ducking/	In his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Arizona Sen. John McCain hasn't shied away from citing his differences with Republican orthodoxy on the environment. On the campaign trail, for example, he's touted a Senate bill he is sponsoring to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to combat global warming. It's a bill that has won McCain lots of friends in the environmental movement. So it was something of a surprise earlier this month when Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope sent out a tough missive condemning McCain as an ally of corporate polluters. Urging Sierra Club supporters to write to their local newspapers to spread the word about McCain's poor environmental record in the Senate, Pope said McCain had "a history of siding with the polluters and special interests, and a consistent pattern of ducking important environmental votes." For this item, we'll focus on the allegation of ducked votes. As evidence, Pope cited a new study by the League of Conservation Voters examining crucial environmental votes taken in the Senate last year. Of the 15 votes the League studied, McCain was not present for any of them. Under the League's strict methodology – dating to the vote study's origins in the early 1970s – a missed vote counts as one against the environment. As a result, McCain's environmental support score for 2007 was zero percent, a point Pope stressed in his letter. "According to the scorecard, McCain was the only member of Congress to skip all 15 crucial environmental votes," he wrote. Pope didn't mention that the strict methodology also turned Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic front-runner in the presidential race, from an environmental champion into one of the least environmentally friendly Democrats in the Senate. His score dropped from a 96 in 2005-2006 to 67 last year. The drop was almost entirely attributable to missed votes. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton also suffered for missing votes. Her score dropped from 89 in 2005-2006 to 73 in 2007. The methodology is inherently unfair, says David Jenkins, a lobbyist for Republicans for Environmental Protection, a group that has endorsed McCain. He notes that McCain had a good excuse for missing votes: He was running for president against Republican challengers who had no similar commitments to keep them from the campaign trail, nor could McCain easily coordinate his absences with the Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, who schedules votes and was more accommodating to his Democratic colleagues, Clinton and Obama, according to Jenkins. For his part, McCain has never scored very high on the League's vote study. Still, his average grade of 44.3 from 2001-2006, before his current presidential campaign and after his previous one, is actually the third-highest score among Senate Republicans. And the League itself apparently doesn't think so poorly of McCain. In endorsing him for re-election in 2004, the group called him "a leader on global warming" and a "strong voice of reason" against a controversial plan to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. McCain, the League said, had also been a strong opponent of the Bush administration's energy policies, which have been widely condemned by environmentalists. Even Rob Smith, director of the Sierra Club's Arizona affiliate, says McCain — while he hasn't supported the group in all of its local campaigns — has been "a champion" when it comes to preserving forest land in Arizona and reducing noise pollution around the Grand Canyon. The case against the charge that McCain has "a consistent pattern of ducking important environmental votes," is clear cut. Indeed, McCain did miss 15 important environmental votes in 2007, while running for president. He also missed five environmental votes scored by the League in 1999, during his prior bid for the White House. But those years excepted, McCain has missed only three of 212 votes scored by the League since McCain's first year in the Senate, 1987. That's not a consistent pattern. The Sierra Club's charge, therefore, is False.	None	Sierra Club	None	None	None	2008-03-04T00:00:00	2008-02-23	['None']
-pomt-01210	Says "99 percent of the time police officers aren't charged when they kill young people of color."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2014/nov/25/benjamin-crump/lawyer-ferguson-case-99-time-police-not-charged-de/	Even before the grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., announced its decision in the police shooting death of teenager Michael Brown, the lead lawyer for the Brown family challenged the grand jury process. Attorney Benjamin Crump said the ground rules were skewed in favor of police officer Darren Wilson. All one needed for proof, Crump said, was to look at the statistics. "The process is completely unfair," Crump said on ABC’s This Week on Nov. 23, 2014. "Ninety-nine percent of the time police officers aren't charged when they kill young people of color." We called Crump’s office to learn what statistics he relied on to back up his claim about 99 percent of police killings of minority youth. We did not hear back. We contacted a number of criminologists and other experts in fatalities at the hands of law enforcement officials. All of them told PunditFact that the data don’t exist to prove Crump right or wrong. At the same time, they said his number probably has a measure of accuracy, even if it doesn’t show what he thinks it does in terms of racial bias. Criminologist Candace McCoy at City University of New York said a simple fact dominates any assessment of Crump’s statement. "It is very rare for an officer to get indicted at all, no matter what the race of a victim," McCoy said. How rare is hard to pin down Ideally, we would know the number of police officers indicted for homicide of a person of color and the total number of people killed by police. We lack accurate figures for both. The closest we can get to the number of officers charged with homicide comes from Philip Stinson, a criminal justice researcher at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Stinson looked at records from 2005 to 2011 and found that in those years, there were a total of 81 cases where at least one officer was charged with murder, nonnegligent manslaughter or negligent manslaughter. It’s important to note that this is a count of cases, not officers. You could imagine that a single death might involve more than one person from a law enforcement agency. While we could take 81 as a minimum figure, Stinson also told PunditFact he has no information on the race of the person who died. "I understand his (Crump’s) sentiment, and perhaps that is true historically," Stinson said. "But I don’t think there is any empirical research that would support his summary statistic of 99 percent." But let’s just say we took the 81 figure and compared it to the total number of deaths at the hands of law enforcement. That would give us some idea of how often an officer is charged when they kill someone. Unfortunately, we hit another data problem. There are two sources, the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and both undercount the number of people killed by police. There are many reasons. Top among them: Some reporting is voluntary, and often the person recording the death doesn’t even know whether an officer was involved. The consensus among experts is that the numbers are too low, but it’s unclear by how much. With that in mind, we find that the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports show 2,695 justifiable homicides by law enforcement from 2005 to 2011. By definition, those are deaths in which officers followed the rules in using lethal force. If we add to that the 81 deaths to approximate the deaths that were not justified, we get 2,776. That would mean that officers are charged in about 3 percent of the cases when someone is killed. We went through a similar process with the CDC’s National Vital Statistics data and wound up with pretty much the same result. So when Crump said 99 percent of the time police are not charged in the killing of a person of color, he might have been in the ballpark. To flip his approach, he would be saying police are charged 1 percent of the time, while the flawed numbers we have say 3 percent -- regardless of race -- might be closer to the truth. But criminologist David Klinger at the University of Missouri-St. Louis said Crump’s claim about race is misleading. "Because it doesn’t include the all-important question, ‘Compared to what?’ " Klinger said. "If cops were routinely indicted in the wake of shooting old white guys, and they were only rarely getting indicted for shooting young people of color, he would be making a valuable point. That, however, is not that case." Criminologist Lorie Fridell at the University of South Florida echoes the thoughts of her peers. "Since officers are rarely charged in deadly force situations, that statistic, although not documented, is probably not too far off and would probably hold true for non-minority victims of police deadly force as well," Fridell said. The question of how often law enforcement officers are charged in the death of a young person of color is distinct from the debate over whether police are more likely to kill minorities than whites. There is a body of evidence that says blacks are more likely to be victims of lethal force than whites, but other analyses find a more complicated set of connections involving race, income, serious crime and policing strategies that make violent encounters between blacks and police more likely. Our ruling Crump said 99 percent of the time police officers aren’t charged when they kill a young person of color. With the caveat that police officers are rarely charged at all, the limited data and the opinions of criminologists back up Crump’s claim. But there is no hard data for either the number of police officers indicted for homicide of a person of color or for the total number of people killed by police, so we cannot say with certainty whether this happens 99 percent of the time. We rate the claim Half True.	None	Benjamin Crump	None	None	None	2014-11-25T11:46:52	2014-11-23	['None']
-vees-00046	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online post claiming Chinese hospital ship to aid ‘Ompong’ victims	false	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-online-post-claiming-chinese-hospital	None	None	None	None	false news,misleading	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online post claiming Chinese hospital ship to aid ‘Ompong’ victims FALSE	September 27, 2018	None	['China']
-goop-02527	Orlando Bloom “Two-Timing” Katy Perry?	3	https://www.gossipcop.com/orlando-bloom-two-timing-katy-perry-cheating-back-together/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Orlando Bloom “Two-Timing” Katy Perry?	11:39 am, August 29, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02322	Sears is Providing Financially for Employees Who are Reservists on Active Duty	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/sears/	None	military	None	None	None	Sears is Providing Financially for Employees Who are Reservists on Active Duty	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-06313	You can look up anyone's driver's license for free through the 'National Motor Vehicle Licence Organization' web site.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/license-to-squeal/	None	Humor	None	David Mikkelson	None	Online Driver’s License Look-Up	24 June 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-13625	Overdosing is now the number one accidental killer in our Commonwealth.	true	/pennsylvania/statements/2016/aug/11/josh-shapiro/surprising-stats-car-crashes-and-overdoses-pennsyl/	Pennsylvania’s heroin and prescription drug abuse crisis is one of the most acute problems facing the state, and the number of overdose deaths has skyrocketed in recent years. Sitting politicians and candidates for office are racing to propose solutions. Among them is Democrat Josh Shapiro, a Montgomery County commissioner and a candidate for attorney general who dedicated a page on his campaign website to fighting the opioid epidemic. But it was the stat he used at the beginning of his platform that caught our eye. "Overdosing," his campaign wrote, "is now the number one accidental killer in our Commonwealth." At first glance, it’s a stunning statistic. But this one checks out to be true, as drug overdose deaths have increased over the years while car crash deaths have been on the decline for decades. We took a look at the numbers to compare the leading causes of death in Pennsylvania and compare those to the number of deaths related to drugs. Drug overdose deaths have sharply risen in recent years. The most recent data shows that upwards of 3,500 people died of a drug overdose in Pennsylvania last year, representing a significant increase from 2014, according to a recent report released by the Pennsylvania State Coroners Association. Nearly 2,500 people died in Pennsylvania of a drug overdose in 2014, and Pennsylvania leads the nation in the number of drug overdose deaths among young men. A report released last summer by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation put these figures into context: The number of deaths by drug overdose first surpassed car accidents in 2011, and the difference has only become more stark since then. Drug overdose deaths now surpass car accident deaths in 36 states. According to PennDOT, 1,195 were killed as a result of a motor vehicle crash in Pennsylvania in 2014, and the 2014 total of reportable traffic crashes is the fourth lowest total since 1950. (PennDOT defines a crash as one in which an injury or a fatality occurs or at least one of the vehicles involved requires towing from the scene.) That means that in 2014, drug overdoses represented double the number of deaths compared to motor vehicle crashes in Pennsylvania and is by far the leading accidental cause of death in the state. Though drug overdose data is available for 2015 and 2014, the most comprehensive data with regard to the reason for all deaths in the state is from 2013. The Pennsylvania Department of Health reported that in 2013, 4,891 people died of an "accident" -- a category that includes drug overdoses. Of those, the Center for Disease Control reports 2,426 were drug overdoses. In 2013, 1,965 people died from an accident that wasn’t a drug overdose or in a vehicle while 1,313 people were killed as a result of a car accident. But it’s important to note: Drug overdoses are the No. 1 form of accidental death in Pennsylvania, not the No. 1 overall reason for death. That’s heart disease, followed by cancer and chronic lower respiratory disease. In addition to illnesses and accidents, there were 630 homicides in Pennsylvania in 2013. Here’s a look at the top five causes of death in the commonwealth in 2013: Heart disease - 31,537 Cancer - 28,418 Chronic lower respiratory disease - 6,702 Cardiovascular disease - 6,575 Total accident deaths (including drug overdoses) - 4,891 The opioid addiction and drug overdose problem is increasing the most in 1. Rural areas of Pennsylvania ravaged by addiction to prescription drugs and 2. In Philadelphia, which had the highest drug-related death rate per 100,000 people in 2014. That year, 655 people died of a drug overdose in Philadelphia and heroin was present in 349 of those deaths. According to a report by the Drug Enforcement Agency, the increasing abuse of heroin and cocaine as well as opioids like fentanyl and oxycodone caused the spike in drug overdoses in the city over the last decade. There was a 33 percent increase in drug-related deaths in Philadelphia between 2013 and 2014 alone. Susquehanna, Cambria, Fayette and Wayne counties round out the top five counties in the state where drug overdose deaths have increased most rapidly. Our ruling Attorney General candidate Josh Shapiro wrote in his campaign platform for fighting the opioid epidemic in Pennsylvania that "Overdosing is now the number one accidental killer in our Commonwealth." Data from The Department of Health, the Center for Disease Control and the several other independent reports shows that overdosing has surpassed car crashes and other accidental causes as the leading accidental cause of death in Pennsylvania. We rate the claim True.	None	Josh Shapiro	None	None	None	2016-08-11T18:00:00	2016-08-11	['None']
-hoer-00574	Harry Potter Author J.K. Rowling Avowed Satanist	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/rowling-avowed-satanist.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Harry Potter Author J.K. Rowling Avowed Satanist Hoax	22nd September 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-03768	"75 percent of the (air traffic control) towers the Obama Administration is closing are located in Republican Congressional Districts."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2013/apr/03/jim-sensenbrenner/rep-f-james-sensenbrenner-says-75-percent-closed-a/	Dozens of small airports around the country were touched by federal budget cuts under a decision announced March 22, 2013, by the Federal Aviation Administration. A total of 149 air traffic control towers operated by private contractors will be shut down, the agency decided. The decision was one of the most high profile and broad based actions to come under the politically charged sequestration cuts. Eight Wisconsin airports are on the list, including Crites Field in Waukesha, which lies in the district of U.S. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Menomonee Falls). Sensenbrenner issued a news release March 22, 2013, criticizing the FAA decision, saying the "contract towers" save money and have fewer safety problems. He also noted that the FAA’s budget was being cut 5 percent, but the spending for the contract towers was dropping 75 percent. Sensenbrenner added: "Not coincidentally, 75 percent of the towers the Obama Administration is closing are located in Republican Congressional Districts." Critics have said the administration is playing politics with the budget cuts. But Sensenbrenner’s claim was one of the first we’ve seen that quantified this complaint. Are 75 percent in GOP districts? We asked the congressman’s office for evidence to support his claim. That’s when we started to feel some turbulence. "That information came from a member of the aviation subcommittee," responded Sensenbrenner spokesman Ben Miller in an email. We asked him to be more precise about the source of the claim and the actual number. Three days after our initial inquiry, Miller responded: "We have reissued the press release noting the correction. I appreciate you pointing it out." Wait a minute. We didn’t offer a correction. We only asked a question. The reissued news release carried the notation "updated," and this information: "(A statistic in the previous release was unverifiable)." Miller elaborated in an email: "We received (the statistic) from the office of a member on the Aviation subcommittee and are unwilling to throw anyone under the bus. We couldn’t verify the statistic we received and therefore issued a retraction. Unfortunately, Rep. Sensenbrenner is unavailable for an interview today." Still curious on the number, we started searching, emailing and mapping. Sensenbrenner’s claim was repeated in several news accounts of his reaction to the budget cuts, including on Fox News and in the Janesville Gazette. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel coverage did not include the claim.) We did come across a similar claim from another House member, U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Penn.). "Two out of every three towers slated for closure are in Republican Congressional districts," Pitts said in a March 7, 2013 news release. "Unfortunately, this political game has real implications for public safety." The statement by Pitts, who is not a member of the aviation subcommittee, came before the FAA announced its final tower closing list. At the time, there was a preliminary list of 189 airports. Pitts, whose district includes one of the airports, did some analysis of that preliminary list, said spokesman Andrew Wimer. "We had some of our interns here look up some of the ZIP codes," of the affected towers and then cross referenced that information with congressional districts, Wimer said. The result: Just under 66 percent were in Republican districts, Wimer said. Wimer declined to release the data, and he would not say what the survey results say about the final closing list. So we’re on our own to test Sensenbrenner’s claim. We plotted the 149 towers set for closure on a map. And then we cross referenced by party with congressional districts. Of the 149 airports slated for closure, four fall inside two separate congressional districts. Of those four, two sit in two Republican districts while the other two straddle a Republican and a Democratic district. Eighty-four (58 percent) of the remaining airports fall squarely inside Republican districts while 61 (42 percent) are in Democratic districts. The overall breakdown of the House is 234 Republicans to 201 Democrats, which means Republicans have about 54 percent of the seats. There is another factor at play: Many of the affected airports are in less-populated rural areas that tend to lean Republican. Let’s land this item. Arguing politics were involved in the FAA’s tower closing decision, Sensenbrenner said 75 percent of the towers set to close were in Republican districts. Three days after we asked about it, Sensenbrenner removed the claim and, in at least in one version of the statement, included a note saying a previous version relied on "unverifiable" information. It would have been more accurate to say that the statement was unverified. We verified the numbers. And we rate the statement False. (Click here to search an interactive map of the location of the towers slated to close, along with the details of the congressional district where the tower is located)	None	Jim Sensenbrenner	None	None	None	2013-04-03T09:00:00	2013-03-22	['None']
-pomt-07515	In Florida, it’s not illegal for an immediate family member of state officials to prosper from legislation supported by a spouse.	true	/florida/statements/2011/apr/08/broward-county-medical-association/group-claims-it-not-illegal-florida-spouse-benefit/	From appointing state health agency heads to proposing how much funding state-run health care programs should receive, Gov. Rick Scott has some major influence over the state's medical industry. It's that influence coupled with Scott's former business dealings in health care that has at least one group of Florida physicians concerned that Scott could potentially peddle legislation that would benefit a fast-growing urgent-care clinic company he co-founded. On March 31, 2011, the board of directors of the Broward County Medical Association convened for its monthly meeting, where one of the items up for discussion was how Scott's position might benefit Solantic Corp. -- a chain of 32 walk-in clinics Scott helped found in 2001. Before taking office in January 2011, Scott transferred his $62 million worth of shares in the company into a trust under his wife's name. Scott said that by doing so, he was free of any future conflicts of interest. "As I've told you, I'm not involved in that company," Scott was quoted as saying in the St. Petersburg Times in an April 2, 2011, article about why he didn't sell his shares instead. Still, for the 20-member board of the Broward Medical Association, Scott handing over his shares to his wife did not address concerns that his actions as governor could potentially benefit Solantic. So the board unanimously agreed to issue a resolution. "It is a conflict of interest for the governor (or any government official) to have his immediate family own urgent-care centers or clinics and for them to benefit financially from government health care reform," read the resolution, according to an e-mail provided by the group's president, Dr. Aaron Elkin. The association represents 1,500 allopathic and osteopathic physicians of all specialties, according to its website. The association then sent out notice of the resolution with the following statement: "Gov. Scott transferred his ownership interest in Solantic to a trust owned and managed by his wife. Solantic has contracts with Medicaid HMOs. Their volume of patients will likely increase if/when Medicaid Reform is expanded statewide. Gov. Scott's wife sits on the Solantic board. Florida is one of the few states where that arrangement (an immediate family member may prosper from legislation supported by their spouse) is not illegal." We wondered if the last part of the statement was true. Does Florida have no laws banning a state officer from supporting legislation that would benefit an immediate family member? What Florida law says First, we turned to Florida statutes and the Florida Commission on Ethics to see what the law spells out in cases where an immediate family member’s finances could potentially cause a conflict of interest. Kerrie Stillman, spokeswoman for the Florida Commission on Ethics, said she couldn't comment on Scott's potential conflict of interest but directed us to the provisions of the law that might be relevant. The issue of "misuse of public position" is addressed in Florida Statute 112.313. The law reads: "No public officer...shall corruptly use or attempt to use his or her official position or any property or resource which may be within his or her trust, or perform his or her official duties, to secure a special privilege, benefit, or exemption for himself, herself, or others." When it comes to business dealings, the same statute says that a public officer shall not "either directly or indirectly purchase, rent, or lease any realty, goods, or services for his or her own agency from any business entity" in which the officer, his or her spouse or child is an officer, partner, director or proprietor or has a "material interest." As long as Solantic is not doing business directly with the governor's office, then Scott is technically not violating those provisions, said Mark Herron, a Tallahassee attorney specializing in ethics and government affairs. Herron also previously served on the Florida Commission on Ethics. "His agency is the Executive Office of the Governor, it’s not the Agency for Health Care Administration, the Department of Health, the Department of Elder Affairs, etc.," Herron said. "From a strict reading of those provisions, he doesn’t have any conflicting interests as long as Solantic is not doing business with the Executive Office of the Governor." While Scott does not have a vote in legislative matters -- only the ability to propose or veto legislation -- it's worth noting that even other state lawmakers can still vote on an issue, even if there is a potential conflict of interest. Florida Statute 112.3143 provides that "no state public officer is prohibited from voting in an official capacity on any matter." The statute goes on to clarify that should there be a potential conflict of interest, such as a "special private gain or loss of a relative or business associate," the elected official has 15 days after the vote occurs to "disclose the nature of his or her interest as a public record in a memorandum file filed with the person responsible for recording the minutes of the meeting." In contrast, on the municipal and county level, the same statute gives a different set of instructions. Should a conflict of interest arise, officials have to abstain from voting on the measure, and publicly announce at the meeting why they aren't voting. They also have 15 days to file a memorandum with the clerk or whoever is recording meeting minutes. Herron said that when the state’s initial ethics laws were passed in 1975, both local and state governments were held to the same standard. But the provisions for municipal and county officials were changed in 1984 because lawmakers felt local elected officials have more day-to-day dealings with approving and entering into contracts. A measure working its way through the Legislature this year seeks to hold all state officers to the same standard as local and county officials when it comes to voting on items where there may be conflicts of interest. Blind trusts The issue of where to place a governor's financial holdings to avoid a potential conflict of interest has been around long before Scott -- whose reported net worth is $218 million -- took office. During two terms as governor, Jeb Bush, whose net worth coming into office was close to $2 million, held his assets in a blind trust, according to the St. Petersburg Times. A blind trust is one in which the owner hands over power of attorney to someone else, and has no right to intervene in the holdings of the trust. Gov. Charlie Crist likewise placed his assets in a revocable trust, according to the Times. That's similar to a blind trust in that you’re handing over the daily decisions about assets to someone else, but there is still an opportunity to chime in on the management of the assets. For the 2011 legislative session, Republican Sen. Mike Fasano has revived a bill he first sponsored in 2007 that would require the governor and other elected officials to place their financial assets in a blind trust. We called Scott's office to get his take on the concerns that, by transferring his Solantic shares to his wife’s trust, he had not eliminated the potential for a conflict of interest, but we did not hear back. Still, when Scott was pressed again on the subject of potential conflicts of interest with Solantic at an economic forum in West Palm Beach on April 4, 2011, he told the Palm Beach Post: "That company will not be doing business with the state, and I've told everybody all along, hold me accountable for that." However, even if Solantic does not do business with the state in an official capacity, the company can still accept payments through state workers compensation programs and Medicaid HMO plans. For example, people covered by state-run programs may visit a Solantic clinic as a personal decision. According to figures provided by Solantic CEO Karen Bowling to the Palm Beach Post and St. Petersburg Times, the company received $110,657 from the state in 2010, and $20,061 so far in 2011 -- mainly for providing employment-related physicals and workers' compensation cases. "Even when we cast the governor's actions in the best light possible and presume his compliance with the relevant Florida voting conflict and disclosure of financial interests statutes, his indirect but real financial interests in the current trust creates an appearance of impropriety from a reasonably objective public perspective," said Tony Alfieri, director of the Center for Ethics and Public Service at the University of Miami School of Law. Our ruling The medical association's resolution criticizes Scott for a conflict of interest, but its e-mail announcing the resolution concedes it is not illegal in Florida for an immediate family member of a state officer to prosper from legislation supported by their spouse. So back to our question: Is it legal? Provisions in Chapter 112 of the Florida Statutes allow state lawmakers to vote on issues that might benefit family members so long as they disclose the relationship after the vote. Scott may propose health-care legislation and budgets and appoint health-care officials, but he's not a lawmaker. Solantic clinics benefit from doing routine medical work paid for through state programs, such as Medicaid or workers' comp exams, but Scott has said repeatedly that Solantic will not officially do business with the state. "From the point of view of complying with the strict definition of the law, he appears not to have violated any of the provisions," Herron said. "But, as everyone has noted, there may be a higher standard than a legal standard to be held to." The legal standard is the one we're fact-checking. We rate this claim True.	None	Broward County Medical Association	None	None	None	2011-04-08T12:50:23	2011-04-02	['None']
-pose-00041	"Barack Obama believes that the first place to look to strengthen Social Security is the payroll tax system. Obama believes that one strong option is increasing the maximum amount of earnings covered by Social Security by lifting the payroll tax cap on only earnings above $250,000."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/44/lift-the-payroll-tax-cap-on-earnings-above-25000/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Lift the payroll tax cap on earnings above $250,000	2010-01-07T13:26:46	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Social_Security_(United_States)']
-pomt-02692	The federal health care law tells "the American people precisely what type of coverage they have to have."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/05/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-obamacare-tells-people-precisely-what-/	Mitt Romney may no longer be a presidential candidate, but he remains a vocal critic of President Barack Obama, particularly Obama’s health care law. During an appearance Jan. 5 on Fox News Sunday, the Republican and former Massachusetts governor weighed in on the Affordable Care Act as it enters an important year of the rollout. "It's not just that the president tells people that they have to buy health insurance; it's that he tells them what health insurance they have to buy," Romney said. "The idea that the government knows better than the American people what kind of insurance they have to have makes no sense, and it's something ... I think the American people are rejecting in large numbers." Romney put it more succinctly later in the program when he said that the federal health care law tells "the American people precisely what type of coverage they have to have." This issue came up quite a bit toward the end of 2013, when millions of Americans discovered their current health insurance policies did not meet minimum standards for coverage required by the law. But is it fair to say the federal government is telling Americans what insurance they have to buy and dictating the type of coverage they must own? For insurance sold on the individual market — i.e. plans purchased individually and not through an employer — there are requirements of what’s included in a policy. The administration calls them the 10 "essential health benefits." They are: Ambulatory patient services Emergency services Hospitalization Maternity and newborn care Mental health and substance use disorder services Prescription drugs Rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices Laboratory services Preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management Pediatric services Plans sold in the individual markets must meet those requirements. That means some people who aren’t thinking about having children — or can’t have children — will still need to purchase coverage for maternity care and pediatric services. Others who don’t regularly rely on prescription drugs will still pay for a plan that includes it. Critics, such as Romney, say this requires people to pay for coverage they don’t need or want. Proponents say the alternative (a.k.a. pre-Obamacare) was an individual market where people were often paying for plans that actually provided very little coverage and the new law sets minimum standards. And, like plans purchased through your employer, requiring everyone to pay for certain coverage, even if they don’t need it, will spread the risk around and keep the cost lower for everyone. In practice, it means fox example that men and women will pay the same rates for equivalent coverage, and women won't be charged more because they can have children. The 10 essential health benefits apply to any plan that has not been grandfathered into the law. In practice, that includes all of the plans purchased in the individual markets offered by the federal government or states. It also includes any businesses with 50 or more full-time employees who previously did not offer insurance to their workers (Obama delayed the employer mandate until 2015). To be clear, there’s still choice in the individual market. While there are minimum coverage requirements regardless of the policy, 95 percent of consumers who buy insurance on the federal marketplace will have a choice between options offered by two or more insurance providers. In the 36 states where the federal government is running or assisting the marketplace, the average consumer has a choice between 53 health insurance options. Those choices range from less costly catastrophic insurance for younger adults to the higher-tiered bronze, silver and gold plans. Consumers can choose to pay more for more coverage and benefits. So Romney is right that the health insurance law is mandating some type of coverage, but he’s exaggerating as to the extent. That’s even more true for Americans who already receive their health insurance through an employer. Their plans are not required to offer the 10 essential benefits if they were in place before March 2010, though they are required to make some more minor changes. One of them requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent of someone’s premium on patient care. Employers also cannot significantly decrease the benefits, or risk losing grandfathered status, but they can make changes. (For the record, individual plans also can avoid the 10 essential benefits if they are considered grandfathered under the law. That’s easier said than done, however, and prompted the cancellations letters that came out last year. Obama has asked that some old, expiring plans remain on the books one more year before transitioning out.) Our ruling Romney said the administration is telling "the American people precisely what type of coverage they have to have." We were unable to reach Romney. The health care law does mandate some types of coverage, and for some people, requires 10 essential health benefits. But it’s not nearly as sweeping as Romney makes it sound. The biggest changes are on the individual market, while people who get their insurance through an employer will see far fewer major changes, if any. We rate his statement as Half True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2014-01-05T17:30:25	2014-01-05	['United_States']
-goop-00352	Ryan Reynolds Anxiety Ruining Blake Lively Marriage?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ryan-reynolds-blake-lively-anxiety-marriage-problems/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Ryan Reynolds Anxiety Ruining Blake Lively Marriage?	3:51 pm, August 30, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-01100	James Stuhlman Was Murdered While Walking His Dog	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/james-stuhlman-was-murdered-while-walking-his-dog/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	James Stuhlman Was Murdered While Walking His Dog	Mar 24, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13649	Says Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are "responsible for leading America into a deal that will arm Iran."	half-true	/north-carolina/statements/2016/aug/05/richard-burr/nc-sen-richard-burr-says-nuclear-deal-will-arm-ira/	The United States is the world’s largest arms dealer, but Iran is one country the government usually doesn’t like doing business with. Yet on the heels of a Wall Street Journal article on connections between the Iran nuclear deal, prisoner swaps and $400 million in cash being secretly flown to that country, Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina said President Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton paved the way for Iran to expand its military strength. "The administration, including President Obama and Secretary Clinton, is responsible for leading America into a deal that will arm Iran, the number one state sponsor of terrorism," Burr said in a press release Wednesday. Previous PolitiFact articles have found it’s False to say the Iran deal will allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons, since it actually does the opposite. But Burr made a broader statement, saying the deal "will arm Iran" in general, with no specific mention of nukes. We wondered if that, too, was wrong. Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is seeking re-election to a third term in the Senate. He faces Democratic challenger Deborah Ross. A nuclear armed Iran? Iran was within two or three months of building eight to 10 nuclear weapons before the deal was signed in July 2015, according to the Obama administration. The deal forced destruction or removal of nuclear equipment and the loss of 97 percent of Iran’s enriched uranium. Iran also had to promise never to build or buy a nuke. For a good refresher on the deal, see PolitiFact’s "6 things to know about the Iran deal." It will be allowed to enrich uranium again starting in a decade, but only for research and power plants. International inspectors will be tasked with ensuring it’s not enriching uranium more than 3.67 percent. Approximately 90 percent enrichment is necessary to make a bomb. And even after some restrictions sunset (others never do), wrote Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Nephew, Iran will still be subject to other nuclear treaties – and violations "permit the United States and its partners to respond with a range of options, up to and including the use of military force." Non-nuclear weapons Burr’s spokesperson, Taylor Holgate, told us Burr really meant that the Iran deal gives the pariah nation more money and access to buy other, non-nuclear weapons. "With more resources including access to global markets and this most recent injection of $400 million, Iran will continue and even grow its nefarious efforts via its military and proxies in the region," Holgate said. Like with nukes, the Iran deal does not literally arm Iran with conventional weapons either. No one sent weapons to Iran in exchange for giving up its nuclear work. But since Burr’s office clarified his remarks as being about about money, we’ll take a look at that, too. As part of the deal, countries that had frozen Iranian-owned bank accounts will release that money. Estimates range from $56 billion to $150 billion, plus the $400 million from the U.S. that inspired Burr’s original claim. That’s enough money to buy some serious military gear. Unfortunately for Iran, it can’t. The nuclear deal did not lift a worldwide embargo on selling such weapons as helicopters, tanks, artillery and missiles to Iran. That is set to remain in effect until October 2020, said Arms Control Association nonproliferation policy director Kelsey Davenport. She said the embargo could be lifted before then if inspectors think Iran is following the terms of the deal. But the U.S. and other world powers can put the embargo back in place. "It can be snapped back into place by the (United Nations) Security Council through 2025 if one of the states party to the deal believes that Iran is violating the agreement," she said. Clinton’s role in the nuclear deal Burr attacked Clinton for the Iran deal, although it was actually her successor as Secretary of State, John Kerry, who finalized the deal. Clinton had been out of office more than two years by the time the U.S., Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany and United Kingdom signed it. However, that doesn’t mean Burr is wrong for including Clinton. She has claimed responsibility for the deal, too. "I spent 18 months putting together the sanctions against Iran so that we could force them to the negotiating table," Clinton said previously. PolitiFact rated that Mostly True. Experts believe sanctions from her time in office did help bring Iran to the table, but so did sanctions passed both before and after her tenure. A separate settlement Burr’s statement attacking Clinton and Obama referenced a $400 million payment the U.S. reportedly made to Iran in January that the Wall Street Journal reported recently. However, that payment was made under Kerry, not Clinton. It was the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement over a failed 1979 arms deal. The U.S. took $400 million for a delivery of fighter jets but never sent them or gave back the cash after Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the king, who had himself consolidated power in a 1953 CIA-sponsored coup. Burr and his spokesperson both referenced that January payment as something that could help Iran buy weapons. However, the Wall Street Journal also quoted CIA Director John Brennan saying the U.S. is monitoring the money. There was no mention of concerns over military spending. "The money, the revenue that’s flowing into Iran is being used to support its currency, to provide moneys to the departments and agencies, build up its infrastructure," Brennan reportedly said. Our ruling Sen. Richard Burr said that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are "responsible for leading America into a deal that will arm Iran." That’s not true in a strictly literal sense, except for the fact that Obama and Clinton (and John Kerry) are responsible for the Iran deal, along with Iran, Russia, China, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Iran is not being given any weapons, and in fact it is giving up some very powerful weapons it was on the verge of developing. However, if Iran plays by the rules, it will have access in the future to weapons dealers and to billions of dollars in cash that it can’t legally access now. There’s no guarantee it will happen, but it will if everything goes according to plan. Essentially, the deal does not arm Iran but could allow Iran to better arm itself. We rate this claim Half True because it’s partially accurate but leaves out important details. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/a847c865-1a11-4e90-8090-fa9a6d8ebd8b	None	Richard Burr	None	None	None	2016-08-05T18:48:57	2016-08-03	['Iran', 'United_States', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-03742	"Congresswoman Frederica Wilson successfully postpones closure of the North Perry airport tower."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2013/apr/10/frederica-wilson/frederica-wilson-says-she-stopped-broward-airport-/	When the budget sequester started in March, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that it would soon shutter 149 airport towers nationwide. Enter U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, the South Florida Democrat best known for her sequined hat and matching ensembles. Wilson is also famous for her passion -- whether speaking out for inner city children, Haitian refugees, or, in this case, air traffic controllers facing layoffs. On April 4, Wilson held a press conference to protest the threatened closing of the North Perry airport in Pembroke Pines. Wilson gave a rousing speech -- sometimes over the noise of airplanes flying overhead -- against the FAA’s plan. Wilson said fighting the sequester was "the civil rights movement of 2013 ... It's going to hurt people, people will die, people will suffer, people will lose their homes, people will lose their tax break." The next day, the FAA announced that it would delay closures slated for Florida and other states until June 15. Lots of politicians expressed relief including U.S. Reps Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, and C.W. Bill Young, R-Indian Shores. But Wilson’s press statement had a different tenor: she took credit for the FAA’s decision though only for the airport in Pembroke Pines: "Congresswoman Frederica Wilson successfully postpones closure of the North Perry airport tower," announced the headline. The press release continued: "Following the Congresswoman’s month-long campaign to save the tower, which included fact finding, speeches, official requests, and legislation, Congresswoman Wilson was notified, this morning, by FAA officials that the tower had been granted a temporary reprieve from closure...." There is no dispute that Wilson fought the closure and a day after her press conference, the FAA announced the closure delay. But should she get credit here for prompting the FAA to act? The lawsuits against the FAA Soon after the FAA made its announcement in March that it intended to close airports, the airports began filing lawsuits. About 20 were filed and plaintiffs argued that the closures would jeopardize safety. The clock was ticking: Closures were set to start April 7, prompting lawyers to start filing emergency motions. We interviewed Peter Kirsch, an attorney who represents multiple plaintiffs. He said plaintiff lawyers from three firms had conference calls with federal officials on April 5. The lawyers reached an agreement in the early afternoon and that led to the FAA’s announcement that it would delay closures until June 15, Kirsch said. "The FAA decision was part of an agreement among the lawyers that the FAA would delay the closure date if we would agree to withdraw our emergency motion for a stay, which is like a preliminary injunction or restraining order," Kirsch told PolitiFact Florida. On Friday afternoon, the FAA issued a press release stating that it was delaying tower closures nationwide. "This additional time will allow the agency to attempt to resolve multiple legal challenges to the closure decisions." Kirsch said several factors were pressing on FAA administrators. "I think they recognized that they would not accomplish the closure of these towers in an orderly fashion .... There is no question that this particular dispute, this battle is being played out administratively, being played out in courts, and being played out in Congress. No one of those is independent of the others." Airport officials told PolitiFact Florida that they were stunned at the speed that the FAA was attempting to move. When an airport has a modest construction project, the FAA requires a safety plan that can take six months to complete, said Lawrence Krauter, chief executive officer of an airport in Spokane, Wash., that filed one of the lawsuits. But due to the sequester, the FAA was attempting to pull off a major nationwide change even faster. That the FAA wasn’t ready to pull this off was evident in a conference call between the FAA and airport officials nationwide less than a week before the closures were slated to start. The FAA couldn’t answer basic questions about the timing of closures and procedures for local airports taking over, Krauter told PolitiFact. "I don’t think there was enough time that the FAA could respond to all of those things. I think they made good decision step back," Krauter said. "I think that call was pivotal in establishing there were some fundamental issues and there wasn’t time to coordinate." Wilson on tower closures and sequestration Shortly after she issued her press release on April 5, we spoke to Wilson by telephone to ask why she was taking credit. Wilson said she spoke with Roderick Hall, FAA Assistant Administrator for Government and Industry Affairs, about the cuts that morning after the FAA had threatened to lock the North Perry tower if Broward didn’t sign an agreement. "We gave them a threat," Wilson said. "The threat was if they came to shut the tower down I would personally be there to stop them. ... I told him I am a protester of the civil rights movement. He said, ‘Congresswoman I am aware of your advocacy."’ She said Hall called back later in the day and told her about the decision to delay the closures. "He said ‘Congresswoman go ahead, you can take the credit. It's from pressure, pressure pressure from Congresspeople like yourself," Wilson said. "He didn’t mention anything about lawsuits." Hall didn’t respond to messages we left on his cellphone, and the FAA pointed us to their press release that didn’t mention Wilson or congressional pressure. Four members of Wilson’s staff, including legislative director Justin Talbot Zorn, joined PolitiFact Florida on a conference call Monday to explain why they believe Wilson deserved the credit. Wilson’s staff said that from the moment she learned about the closures at North Perry and Opa-Locka she had fought them and sent two letters to the FAA protesting their plan. Then she held the press conference Thursday, April 4. On Friday, Wilson’s office was contacted by Kent George, Broward County’s aviation director. George’s staff had received an agreement from the FAA Thursday night. The FAA gave the county a deadline of 3 p.m. to sign the agreement, though George said it wasn’t clear why the FAA wanted to charge $5,280 a month. (The county had a separate agreement to pay the workers.) "They said if the agreement wasn’t signed they intended to change the locks on the tower at midnight on the 6th," George told PolitiFact. That’s when George’s office contacted local members of Congress. Wilson got on the phone with Hall to protest the closure and "he said he see what he could do by 3 p.m," Zorn said. Hall called back later that afternoon, said Zorn, who was in on the call with Wilson and recounted it for PolitiFact. "This second call, he said, ‘Thank you so much for your call this morning. We understand how important this is and how passionate you are about this. I have good news for you...’ " he said. Then Hall told Wilson about the delay. "So you can claim this as a win. You can take as much credit as you want to take for this." The scope of the phone call was only about North Perry -- Hall didn’t discuss the lawsuits or the FAA’s nationwide decision. So Wilson did take credit for North Perry and issue the press release. Pressure from Congress We can’t be certain exactly what was said between Hall and Wilson but even if we assume that he did give her the sense that she could take credit, does it seem reasonable that Wilson’s pressure caused the FAA’s decision? By that Friday, the FAA was facing lawsuits nationwide and protest letters from politicians across the country. Airport officials we interviewed say bipartisan congressional pressure could have played a role, but there is no dispute that the litigation was the driving force. "I think the litigation, I think the media coverage, as you know, was pretty intensive, and certainly calls and letters from Congress have an impact on any federal agency," said Spencer Dickerson, president of the American Association of Airport Executives, which sued the FAA said. Our ruling In a press release Wilson took credit for the FAA’s decision to postpone closing an airport tower in her district. "Congresswoman Frederica Wilson successfully postpones closure of the North Perry airport tower," stated the headline. The press release also stated "Following the Congresswoman’s month-long campaign to save the tower, which included fact finding, speeches, official requests, and legislation, Congresswoman Wilson was notified, this morning, by FAA officials that the tower had been granted a temporary reprieve from closure...." The press release can leave readers with the misleading impression of cause and effect: Wilson protested for a month, and the FAA caved and postponed this particular airport tower closure. But there was no separate FAA decision for the North Perry tower. In explaining its nationwide decision, the FAA wrote that the delay would buy it time "to attempt to resolve multiple legal challenges to the closure decisions." While congressional pressure nationwide could have played a role in the FAA’s decision, clearly the lawsuits seeking immediate action from the courts was the driving factor. Even if Wilson had ignored the tower battle, the FAA likely would have taken action at North Perry and the other sites. We’re not evaluating Wilson’s claim that an FAA official whose job includes fostering relationships with Congress gave her the impression that she deserved credit -- we are evaluating her claim that her actions led to the FAA’s decision. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Frederica Wilson	None	None	None	2013-04-10T11:35:15	2013-04-05	['None']
-pomt-03502	"The violent crime rate in America is the same as it was in 1968, yet our prison system has grown by over 500 percent."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2013/jun/07/john-lewis/john-lewis-uses-crime-and-prison-stats-push-justic/	In recent years, elected officials, criminologists and others have examined ways to decrease the number of people sitting in U.S. prisons. For some officials, it’s a matter of money. In the post-Great Recession world, some lawmakers are looking for less costly ways to deal with nonviolent offenders. Other leaders, for different reasons, are concerned about how many people are in prison. U.S. Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon and veteran Atlanta congressman, recently co-wrote an op-ed about the "presumption of guilt" he believes the criminal justice system institutionally holds toward African-Americans. The op-ed included some complaints about the prison system. "The violent crime rate in America is the same as it was in 1968, yet our prison system has grown by over 500 percent," wrote Lewis, a Democrat, and Bryan Stevenson, who teaches law at New York University. PolitiFact Georgia wanted to find out whether this claim was accurate. Is the crime rate the same as it was 45 years ago and has the nation’s prison system grown by 500 percent? First, let’s look at the portion of the claim about the growth of the prison system. Lewis and Stevenson were referring to the number of Americans in prison. There were about 188,000 people in state and federal prisons in 1968, according to a report the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics sent us. In 2011, the BJS reported 1,598,780 people were locked up in state and federal prisons. A quick comparison of the numbers shows the U.S. prison population is eight times greater than it was in 1968. A BJS official issued a caveat concerning the numbers. "[P]rior to 1977, prisoners in physical custody of a state were counted. Starting in 1977, BJS began counting the number of prisoners under state jurisdiction, or legal authority, since some states began housing prisoners in local jails, private prisons, and paying other states to have physical custody of the inmates," BJS statistician E. Ann Carson said via email. We also checked whether the percentage of people in U.S. prisons had increased by 500 percent since the American population is greater now than it was in 1968. In 1968, 94 out of every 100,000 U.S. residents were in state and federal prisons. In 2011, 492 out of every 100,000 U.S. residents were sentenced to more than one year in prison. The 2011 average is more than five times greater than it was in 1968, so that part of the claim appeared on target. Now, for the crime rate. The FBI does an annual report on crime in the United States that is used by most criminologists. In 1968, the violent crime rate was 298.4 crimes per 100,000 residents. In 2010, the most recent year available, the violent crime rate was 403.6 crimes per 100,000 residents. Obviously, that’s an increase since 1968. If it’s any comfort, the nation’s violent crime has declined steadily since its 1991 zenith of 758.2 crimes per 100,000 Americans. How about in Atlanta? Violent crime data is not available for 1968. The FBI does have information on what are generally considered the most dangerous crimes and puts them in what it calls the Part I category. PolitiFact Georgia had that data from 1969 onward when we fact-checked Mayor Kasim Reed’s claim that felony crimes in Atlanta are as low as they’ve been since that year. In Atlanta, the Part I crime rate was 6,387 per 100,000 residents in 1969. In 2012, the Part I crime rate was 7,997 per 100,000 residents. The 2012 crime rate was indeed the lowest since 1969, so we rated Reed’s claim True. Studies show there’s been an increase in people reporting rape, particularly by individuals they know, in the past three decades. Federal research concluded nearly 70 percent of attempted and completed rapes between 1992 and 2000 were reported. In December 2011, the FBI announced it had changed the definition of rape to penetration, no matter how slight, without the person’s consent. Brenda Jones, a spokeswoman for Lewis, said the claim was based on studies of crime in America’s highest populated state, California, and the nation’s largest municipality, New York City. The studies were done by James Austin, a criminologist who has worked inside prisons and held leadership positions in organizations that study crime and the corrections system for more than four decades. "Many criminologists believe that crime rate data has to be examined within jurisdictions to understand what the impact of current policies have been since we don't have a national crime policy," Jones said. "It's by looking at particular jurisdictions that most data emerges that supports the claim that the violent crime rate today is where it was in the late 1960s in most places." The California study includes a chart that shows the violent crime rate in California in 1968 was the same as 2012. Austin wrote in a November 2012 op-ed that the violent crime rate in California was at its lowest since 1960. The New York City study that they cited went back to 1986. It shows that felony arrests had declined since 1986, but misdemeanor arrests increased. City leaders credit numbers showing a decline in crime to a substantial increase in the size of its police force and computerized mapping techniques to put more officers in high-crime areas. They also cite a "broken windows" approach to policing, which means being more aggressive in combating low-level crime and quality-of-life issues. This was not an easy ruling for us. Lewis and Stevenson wrote that the violent crime rate is the same as it was in 1968, yet the prison system has increased by 500 percent. The claim was part of their argument against the growth of the nation’s prison system. The data we saw show they are correct about the growth of the prison system, but the nation’s violent crime rate has increased nationally. They used California and New York City to make their case about the crime rate, but the national crime rate has increased since 1968 and so has the crime rate in cities like Atlanta. We believe more evidence is necessary for Lewis and Stevenson to prove the first part of the statement. The second part is on target. On balance, we rate this claim as Half True.	None	John Lewis	None	None	None	2013-06-07T00:00:00	2013-05-17	['United_States']
-vogo-00622	Fact Check TV: Drugs, Firefighters and UCSD's Enrollment	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-tv-drugs-firefighters-and-ucsds-enrollment/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact Check TV: Drugs, Firefighters and UCSD's Enrollment	March 15, 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-05075	Says "our 12 month job increase was the sixth highest in the nation."	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/jul/04/chris-christie/chris-christie-claims-new-jerseys-job-gains-last-y/	Calling on state legislators Monday to approve a tax cut immediately, Gov. Chris Christie returned to a familiar rallying cry: job growth in New Jersey is among the highest in the nation. "We’ve added nearly 85,000 private-sector jobs since February of 2010, seeing the best year of private-sector job growth in 2011 in over a decade and with 2012 already on pace to be even stronger," Christie said in a speech during the special session of the state Legislature. "Our 12 month job increase was the sixth highest in the nation and we’re seeing housing sales, car sales and personal income increasing at higher rates than the nation." But in claiming "our 12 month job increase was the sixth highest in the nation," the Republican governor also was making a familiar mistake, PolitiFact New Jersey found. As we’ve noted in previous fact-checks, job growth can be measured in two ways -- the net increase in jobs and the percentage increase. Looking at percentage increases accounts for states’ different population sizes. Christie’s claim is right in terms of the net increase, but wrong in regard to the percentage increase, according to seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between May 2011 and May 2012, New Jersey gained 59,800 total nonfarm jobs -- including private- and public-sector employment -- for an increase of nearly 1.6 percent, according to the bureau. The May 2012 figures are preliminary. That net increase places the Garden State in sixth place among the 50 states, just as Christie said. But the percentage increase leaves the state in 13th place. The governor made the same mistake in February, when he said private-sector job growth in 2011 "places New Jersey in the top third among all of the states." He received a Half True, because his claim was right for the net increase, but wrong for the percentage increase. The governor's office did not respond to requests for comment. Our ruling In a speech Monday during the special session of the state Legislature, Christie claimed "our 12 month job increase was the sixth highest in the nation." That’s a very specific claim, but it’s only true when you look at New Jersey’s net increase of 59,800 total nonfarm jobs between May 2011 and May 2012. The percentage increase of nearly 1.6 percent leaves the state in 13th place. We rate the statement Half True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Chris Christie	None	None	None	2012-07-04T07:30:00	2012-07-02	['None']
-pomt-14940	Unlike Benghazi, there were no investigations of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, none about key aspects of the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War, and none about embassy attacks under George W. Bush.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/27/viral-image/internet-graphic-asks-why-focus-benghazi-when-othe/	One of the arguments made by critics of the House Select Committee on Benghazi is that the investigation is being treated differently than previous attacks. The creator of a Web graphic recently sought to draw a sharp contrast, suggesting that there was no investigation of key aspects of other deadly incidents, including the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War and embassy attacks under George W. Bush. The post was created by a Facebook community called Point Counter Point and reached a wider audience through a re-posting by Occupy Democrats, a progressive advocacy group with a sizable presence in social media. Here’s part of what the group said in a graphic that circulated on the Internet around the time former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was testifying before the Benghazi select committee: • "241 Marines die in Beirut. … Zero investigations." • "3,000 Americans died on 9-11. … No investigation why (President George W.) Bush ignored all CIA warnings." • "4,500 American soldiers die in Iraq. … No investigation why the war lasted 10 years at a cost of $6 trillion." • "66 Americans die at U.S. embassies (during the Bush administration). … Zero investigations." A reader suggested we take a closer look, so we did. We found several problems with these claims, along with a nugget or two that checked out. Here's the graphic we're checking: The Beirut bombing On Oct. 23, 1983, a truck filled with explosives breached the perimeter of a Marine barracks compound at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon. An explosion destroyed the building and killed 241 U.S. military personnel. The idea that this was never investigated is wrong. A panel led by Adm. Robert L.J. Long, who had recently finished serving as commander of U.S. military operations in the Pacific, produced a report looking at how the attack happened. The panel’s seven-week probe concluded that the Marines did not have the necessary intelligence to counter the attack, and also found problems with the actions of commanders in Lebanon and senior officers above them in Europe. The 9/11 attacks The graphic doesn’t deny that there were investigations of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but it claims that none investigated why Bush "ignored all CIA warnings." However, the highest-profile investigation -- commonly known as the 9/11 commission -- did indeed address the nature of advance intelligence about possible attacks and the response within government. The commission found that as 2001 began, counterterrorism officials received "frequent but fragmentary reports about threats," but "because the amount of reporting (was) so voluminous, only a select fraction (could) be chosen for briefing the president and senior officials." The number of threat reports surged in June and July, the commission found, including a June 30 briefing to top officials headlined "Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks" and "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in U.S." on Aug. 6, 2001. Efforts to disrupt various plots were undertaken in some 20 countries. The commission concluded that "no one working on these late leads in the summer of 2001 connected the case in his or her in-box to the threat reports agitating senior officials and being briefed to the president. Thus, these individual cases did not become national priorities." This conclusion may not have squared with that of some critics -- that Bush was given clear and specific warnings yet ignored them while vacationing at his ranch -- but it’s inaccurate to say that this topic wasn’t thoroughly investigated by the bipartisan commission. The Iraq War Several panels have looked at the Iraq War, including one chaired by former judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Chuck Robb; another chaired by former Secretary of State James A. Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton; and two directed by the Senate Intelligence Committee. In addition, multiple congressional hearings were held on the issue. The Silberman-Robb panel and the Senate panel were both highly critical of pre-war intelligence. Meanwhile, the Baker-Hamilton commission was not designed to be backward-looking; it was asked to analyze the state of post-war Iraq and suggest paths forward. "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating," the Baker-Hamilton commission said in its report. "There is no path that can guarantee success, but the prospects can be improved." Taken narrowly, the graphic has a point that no commission was created specifically to address the question of why "the war lasted 10 years at a cost of $6 trillion." But this glosses over the fact that several major commissions and congressional hearings were undertaken to address the many controversial aspects of the Iraq War, before, during and after the war itself. Embassy deaths under President George W. Bush This is where the graphic makes its most salient point. As PolitiFact has noted, there were at least 20 instances in which terrorists succeeded in killing at least one person in attacks on U.S. embassies, consulates or traveling diplomatic personnel between 2001 and 2009, when Bush was president. (Not all victims were Americans.) But unlike the Beirut bombing, 9/11 and the Iraq War, these attacks did not lead to the creation of a commission, either cumulatively or individually. For the first six years under Bush, the Republicans controlled Congress, while for the final two years, the Democrats did. Ted Bromund, a foreign policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, drew a contrast with how Congress and the executive branch responded to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Even though these occurred under a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and a Republican Congress -- a lineup equivalent to the one that produced the Benghazi investigations -- the process back then was much less fraught, even though it played out in the middle of the highly polarizing Monica Lewinsky scandal. The bombings "were the subject of a substantial State Department investigation, a massive FBI one, and much congressional action around improving embassy security in the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s," Bromund said. "But they were not the subject of much partisan interest because, first, the American people and the American system had not yet fully put two and two together to see these attacks as part of a rising al-Qaida threat, not merely one-off attacks; second, because the Clinton Administration did not seek to deny the obvious, that the Kenyan and Tanzanian attacks were indeed carried out by an organized terrorist group; and third, Clinton struck Sudan and Afghanistan with cruise missiles in 1998, two weeks after the bombing, in retaliation. While there is significant debate about whether the attack struck a relevant target in Sudan, it did draw widespread GOP support." Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also pointed to today’s fractious state of partisan politics as a key source of differences in how investigations were handled then as opposed to now. "The problem with the Benghazi hearings is their blatant partisanship and redundancy," O’Hanlon said. Our ruling The graphic says there were no investigations of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, none on key aspects of the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War, and none about embassy attacks under George W. Bush. The graphic has a point that deadly embassy attacks by terrorists during the Bush presidency did not prompt an investigation like the ones we’ve seen on the Benghazi attack. However, it’s flat wrong about the Beirut attack, and its assertion that key aspects of 9/11 and the Iraq War have not been investigated are largely incorrect. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Viral image	None	None	None	2015-10-27T16:43:04	2015-10-23	['Beirut', 'George_W._Bush', 'Iraq_War', 'Benghazi']
-pomt-02473	"More than 40,000 troops are still stationed in Afghanistan with no clear objective. Even in the best case, by the end of the year at least 10,000 American soldiers will still be on the ground."	half-true	/texas/statements/2014/feb/21/david-alameel/david-alameel-airs-outdated-count-us-troops-afghan/	Calling for an end to the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, Democratic U.S. Senate aspirant David Alameel cited troop counts that made us wonder. Alameel, a Dallas investor and Army veteran, said in a Feb. 7, 2014, email blast: "It’s long past time to end the war in Afghanistan and bring our troops home. It has been more than 12 years and more than 40,000 troops are still stationed in Afghanistan with no clear objective." "Even in the best case," his email also said, "by the end of the year at least 10,000 American soldiers will still be on the ground." We can’t judge any "clear objective," but current and expected U.S. troop counts are checkable. And to our inquiry, a Pentagon spokeswoman, Elissa Smith, shortly sent a chart by email showing U.S. troop levels in that country from November 2001, after 9/11, to February 2014, when there were 34,000 American troops there, down from 46,000 at the start of December 2013. According to the government, more than 2,100 U.S. troops have died in the conflict. A January 2014 report by the authoritative Congressional Research Service summarized the build-up of American troops in Afghanistan and the build-down. "The number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which peaked at about 100,000 in June 2011, was reduced to a ‘pre-surge’ level of about 66,000 by September 2012, and is expected to fall to 34,000 in February 2014," the report said. "The ‘residual force’ that will likely remain in Afghanistan after 2014 is expected to consist of about 6,000-10,000 U.S. trainers and counterterrorism forces, assisted by about 5,000 partner forces performing similar missions." The report continued: "The U.S. troops that remain after 2014 would do so under a U.S.-Afghanistan security agreement that has been negotiated but which President Hamid Karzai, despite significant Afghan public and elite backing for the agreement, refuses to sign until additional conditions he has set down are met." More up-to-date information was available when Alameel spoke. By email, Alameel campaign spokeswoman Suzie Dundas pointed out two news reports on troop levels by CBS News, which attributed figures to the U.S. military. A Jan. 9, 2014, CBS News news story said that roughly 38,000 "American service members remain in Afghanistan." We spotted one higher U.S. troop count, which Dundas ultimately said was the basis of Alameel’s statement. As of the end of 2013, according to a Jan. 10, 2014, report on Afghanistan by the Brookings Institution, roughly 43,000 U.S. troops were in Afghanistan. In contrast, the Pentagon’s chart indicates 38,500 U.S. troops were there at the start of January and about 34,000 U.S. troops there just before Alameel spoke. And what about troops expected to be there at the end of 2014? According to a Jan. 22, 2014, CBS News report noted by Dundas, the Pentagon had just proposed leaving 10,000 troops in Afghanistan after 2014 and drawing down the number of troops to zero by the end of 2016. But other news stories published at the same time said President Barack Obama had been presented with a recommendation including the possibility of having no troops in Afghanistan by year’s end. A Jan. 22, 2014, New York Times news article specified that the Pentagon had proposed that 10,000 troops remain in Afghanistan when the international combat mission ends there later in 2014--or no troops at all. The Times story also said 10,000 troops are "around the minimum number officials say is required to protect the remaining diplomatic, military and intelligence personnel and installations in the country," Caitlin M. Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, was quoted as saying that Obama "has not yet made decisions about final troop numbers," which Smith, the Pentagon spokeswoman, reaffirmed to us. Similarly, other news articles--like the Times, quoting unidentified officials--said the recommendation to Obama was to reduce troop levels to 10,000 or to go to zero. Stars and Stripes, a newspaper serving members of the military based in the Department of Defense but operating independently from it, quoted officials as saying the recommendation came from Gen. Joseph Dunford, the top U.S. and NATO coalition commander in Afghanistan, who discussed it during a meeting of the White House National Security Council. The Wall Street Journal said in its story: "Military leaders told Mr. Obama that if he rejects the 10,000-troop option, then it would be best to withdraw nearly all military personnel at the end of this year because a smaller troop presence wouldn't offer adequate protection to U.S. personnel, said officials involved in the discussions." Our ruling Alameel, who advocates ending the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, said more than 40,000 U.S. troops remain there now and under his "best-case" scenario, at least 10,000 will remain at the end of 2014. This claim may have been close in spirit, but it aired outdated information. There were about 34,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan just before Alameel piped up though there had been more than 40,000 troops there as of December 2013. Also by the time the candidate spoke, a general had reportedly recommended reducing U.S. troop levels to 10,000--or zero--by the end of this year, though no decision had been announced. We rate this claim, which overstates both the troops there now and the possible number of troops by year’s end, as Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	David Alameel	None	None	None	2014-02-21T10:05:10	2014-02-07	['United_States', 'Afghanistan']
-pomt-13994	Says Judge Gonzalo Curiel "is a member of a club or society, very strongly pro-Mexican."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/07/donald-trump/trump-wrongly-casts-california-lawyers-group-stron/	Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump says U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel is "not treating me fairly." Curiel ruled that the public can see internal papers from the now defunct Trump University. Trump’s critics and reporters have pounced on the documents. They’ve pointed to examples of a calculated effort to target people who could ill-afford expensive training sessions and had little chance of profiting from them. But for Trump, the bad press stems from a bad legal decision that has more to do with his immigration policies than the merits of a lawsuit. He said it is "just common sense" that Curiel’s ties to Mexico explain his ruling. Curiel, born and raised in Indiana, had parents who were naturalized U.S. citizens from Mexico. CBS News host John Dickerson pressed Trump as to what his parents had to do with him not ruling in Trump’s favor. "He is a member of a club or society, very strongly pro-Mexican, which is all fine," Trump said on Face the Nation on June 5. "But I say, he's got bias. I want to build a wall." It’s a serious matter to accuse federal judges of bias solely because of their ethnic background, and top-ranking Republicans have rejected Trump’s line. Our interest though is strictly in this club that Trump referenced. Is it actually "strongly pro-Mexican" as he said? We reached out to the Trump campaign for details and did not hear back. The group in question is the California La Raza Lawyers Association. It dates back to 1977. The group’s immediate past president, Joel Murillo, told us that it was formed in response to stereotyping coming from judges and lawyers. "There were judges on the bench saying people with Spanish surnames were prone to be savages," Murillo said. "When we tried to integrate with the mainstream bar association, we were denied. We were marginalized. The only people who were willing to work with us were us." Murillo says the days of stereotyping are over, and the group now focuses on the professional development of Latino lawyers and encouraging students to pursue a career in law. He called Trump’s description of the association as very strongly pro-Mexican a "misnomer." Murillo said most of the group’s recent work targets improving the quality of education for all students in California. The group has not been involved in the immigration debate. "The closest was when there were beatings by police and others that offended the constitutional rights of people," Murillo said. "We made suggestions of ways to ameliorate attacks on people with Spanish surnames." Our search of the Nexis newspaper database found an episode in 2004 when the association wrote a letter calling for the cancellation of a popular Los Angeles reality television show in which illegal immigrants competed for the free services of an immigration lawyer to apply for a green card. The show "functions as a magnet to encourage people to enter this country without documentation," the letter said. The group’s bylaws state, "The purpose and goal of this association is to promote the interests of the Latino communities throughout the state and the professional interests of the membership." That membership is now about half Latino, Murillo said, and in terms of party affiliation, "the lawyers who belong pretty much reflect the population." California is about 43 percent Democratic, 28 percent Republican and about 24 percent undeclared. Murillo also noted that strictly speaking, the group is focused on the Latino community, a term that is much broader than people with family roots in Mexico. The association’s website, last updated in 2013, describes a judicial committee that "seeks to increase the number of Latinos appointed to judgeships." Kevin Johnson, dean of the University of California Davis School of Law, told us the association is "seen as a pretty moderate group" that’s mainly focused on civil rights. On the legal front, we found the group filed a 2012 friend of the court brief in support of Sergio Garcia, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico seeking admission to the State Bar of California. But the issue was broader than simple Hispanic solidarity. That brief was co-written by the Asian/Pacific Bar Association of Sacramento. In 2002, the San Francisco chapter joined with nine other organizations to support an appeal on the grounds that racism tainted the jury selection process. The defendant, Stanley Williams, did not have a Spanish surname, and the other organizations included the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Los Angeles, the Asian Law Caucus and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. We asked Johnson if including "La Raza" in the group’s name carried a special meaning. He said the term is "sort of a product of its times" that emerged from the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s. "The founders and presidents have not been remarkable, in a political sense," Johnson said. The group is often confused with the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy group often criticized by conservatives. Aside from a similarity in their names, the only tie we found was a link to the National Council of La Raza on the lawyers association website. But that list of links also includes the National Latino Police Officers Association and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The conservative website Redstate posted an op-ed rebuking Trump’s use of the California lawyers group as proof of Judge Curiel’s political motives. The writer, Leon Wolf, called the effort to disparage the association "dishonest." "As far as I can tell, they appear to be a pretty garden variety special interest lawyers association," Wolf wrote. "Every state has these chapters for Hispanic lawyers, black lawyers, women lawyers, Mormon lawyers, Christian lawyers, Jewish lawyers -- you name it, there is a lawyer association for it in every state." Our ruling Trump said Curiel belonged to a group that is very strongly pro-Mexican. The California La Raza Lawyers Association does advance the interests of the Latino legal community and works on issues that matter in Latino communities more broadly. However, it has stayed on the sidelines in the immigration debate. The one exception is one letter from a dozen years ago which objected to a television show on the grounds that the program encouraged people to enter the country without documentation. The group’s rare court filings focus on civil rights in general. Trump’s statement is accurate only in the sense that the association’s mission aims to support Latinos, but even that is flawed because he said the group was pro-Mexican and the Latino designation reaches a wider set of people. The claim ignores critical facts that would give a very different impression. We rate this assertion Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/65caa1ee-d498-4628-bfb0-06dfb82e4b14	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-06-07T13:14:57	2016-06-05	['None']
-pomt-00190	With the Republican-backed tax cut, "we’re seeing the result, and to date, federal tax revenues have gone up."	half-true	/texas/statements/2018/oct/19/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-said-gop-tax-cut-led-higher-revenues-did-/	Texas Sen. Ted Cruz touted his support for the Republican-backed tax bill in his second debate against Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke. After saying that previous tax cuts have led to increases in revenue, such as those under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, Cruz said, "This time with that tax cut we’re seeing the result, and to date, federal tax revenues have gone up. Federal tax revenues are higher this year than they are last year without the tax cut." (It can be seen here around the 51:00 mark.) Is that correct? Tax collection data If you look at the sheer number of dollars collected, irrespective of inflation and without regard to the size of the overall economy or other factors, taxes went up very slightly. Specifically, new federal data show that tax revenues rose between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2018 by 0.4 percent. (Federal fiscal years run from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.) The rise is smaller than almost every previous year since World War II, except for a handful of years in which tax revenues declined, largely due to recessions. And the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group that favors shrinking the federal deficit, found that the small increase in nominal dollars collected disappears once you add in other factors. If you adjust for inflation, the group found, tax revenues actually fell by 1.6 percent. (This calculation is for the first 11 months of fiscal 2018, compared to the first 11 months of 2017. The group had not calculated the data for the full year by our publication time, but the differences from adding the 12th month should be minor.) You can also look at tax revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product — essentially, factoring in economic growth which should, in turn, generate tax revenues. In this case, GDP growth didn’t boost tax revenues proportionately — this measure fell by 4.1 percent over the first 11 months of the fiscal year. Finally, we can look at actual tax collections relative to the expectations of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in June 2017, which was several months before the law passed. CBO’s projection of $3.531 trillion in tax collections was based on population growth, inflation, wage growth, and other factors. By this standard, tax revenue fell short of the projection by 5.7 percent. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com Each of these measurements undercut Cruz’s argument that tax revenues increased. "Tax revenues naturally grow with a growing economy," said Donald Marron, a fellow at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. "The economy has been doing well. Revenues, however, haven’t grown as much. So the tax cuts reduced revenues relative to what they would have been, just as every serious analyst predicted." Is the new tax law the reason for higher nominal revenue? In addition, Cruz portrayed a direct relationship: The tax law was passed, and revenue went up. But that’s questionable. We can probe this question by separating out the months in which the old tax law prevailed and looking only at the months in which the new tax law was the primary factor shaping tax payments. Three months in fiscal 2018 were governed by the old law — October, November and December. Another two months — March and April — were governed by the new law, but were dominated by tax payments for income generated in 2017, and thus was predominantly shaped by the old law. A final month, September, had not produced final data by the time of our article. That leaves six months in which it was the new law that shaped tax payments to the government — January, February, May, June, July and August. And if you compare the cumulative collections for those six months in 2017 and 2018, tax collections actually declined by 3.8 percent between 2017 (when the old law was in force) and 2018 (when the new law was in force). In this chart, the drop from 2017 to 2018 is clearly visible. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com Catherine Frazier, a spokesman for Cruz, emphasized that Cruz was correct about the calculation using nominal dollars, "In fact, individual tax revenues this year are $96 billion higher than last year, even after cutting individual taxes," she said. Our ruling Cruz said that with the Republican-backed tax cut, "we’re seeing the result, and to date, federal tax revenues have gone up." They have gone up by less than half of 1 percent in nominal dollars, one of the weakest increases since the end of World War II. They have actually fallen if you factor in inflation, growth in the economy, or prior projections for tax collections. Cruz’s suggestion that the new tax law caused the nominal increase is dubious, since in the months when that new law was the primary mover of tax payments, collections actually fell by 3.8 percent. We rate his statement Half True. See Figure 5 on PolitiFact.com	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2018-10-19T11:28:28	2018-10-16	['None']
-pomt-06293	The largest number of gamblers are "from the poorest segments of the population."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2011/nov/18/john-stemberger/largest-numbers-gamblers-come-poor/	In the ongoing war about gambling in Florida, some critics have turned to the Bible to state their case. The Florida Family Policy Council, an Orlando-based conservative Christian organization, has sided with gambling opponents. In a post on its blog, the council poses the question Is Gambling Morally Wrong? The blog post from Oct. 20, 2011, uses partial quotes from Wayne Grudem, a theology professor at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona and author of the book Politics According to the Bible: "My own judgment is that large commercial gambling outlets such as casinos and state-sponsored lotteries bring much more harm to a society than the benefits they generate (such as tax revenue)… First, it is socially harmful (and fiscally regressive) because the largest numbers of gamblers comes from the poorest segments of the population. Second, (it) leads to an addiction to gambling … and this addiction destroys marriages, families … and increases societal breakdown. Third, studies have shown that where gambling businesses are established, crime rates increase." (Here is the page in the book that contains these quotes.) There are a few interesting claims in that statement but for this Truth-O-Meter we will explore whether the largest number of gamblers come from the poorest segments of the population. The council's president, John Stemberger, said the blog was about gambling in general, not just casinos or lotteries in Florida. Gambling is a hot topic in Florida. Two South Florida Republican state legislators -- Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff and Rep. Erik Fresen -- have proposed opening the door to full-scale gambling by allowing three mega-resort casinos to bid on licenses for Las Vegas-style games. One company, Genting, has proposed a massive casino for downtown Miami. We reviewed six studies that included information about gambling and income as well as several news articles or websites. We also interviewed about a dozen academics who have studied gambling. Some of the sources came from Stemberger and Grudem, while others came from professors, the gambling industry or gambling opponents. The research we examined fell into a few general categories. Research from the casino industry. Not surprisingly, those involved in the casino industry found that the bulk of their visitors are middle or upper-class. American Gaming Association's 2011 State of the States survey of casino entertainment states that compared to the general population, casino visitors are less likely to have a household income of less than $35,000 and more likely to have incomes between $35,000 and $100,000. "The demographic profile of casino visitors is similar to that of the general U.S. population. While men are more likely to have visited a casino than women, and the average casino visitor is slightly older, the breakdown by income and level of education mirrors that of the general population." (For more from the casino industry check out Harrah's 2006 survey.) Lottery studies. There is a lot of evidence -- some focused on particular cities or states -- that lotteries draw in poor people. "A number of studies have investigated the demographic predictors of lottery gambling and have tended to find that, on average, state lottery products are disproportionately consumed by the poor...," states this 2005 Brookings Institution paper. "Average annual lottery spending in dollar amounts is roughly equal across the lowest, middle and highest income groups. This implies that on average, low-income households spend a larger percentage of their wealth on lottery tickets than other households." One of the best examples we found was this 1998 investigation by the Washington Post, which found that the lotteries in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia rely on "a hard core of heavy players, who, on average, have less education and lower incomes than the population as a whole, according to lottery documents and data." For example, among heavy players in Virginia, "one in six had household incomes of less than $15,000, according to the lottery data." In Washington, data showed that "the city's most anemic lottery market lies west of Rock Creek Park in an area with the highest education and income levels and the thinnest concentration of minorities." (To find more articles or studies about gambling in particular cities or states, check out this bibliography at the end of this article or from this anti-casino group.) Researchers at Duke University published a 1999 report, "State Lotteries at the Turn of the Century." It found that lottery participation increased as people made more income but only up to the $100,000-per-year level. Still, among those who do play, "players with incomes less than $50,000 spend more than others, and the lower income categories have the highest per capita spending," it said. One of the report's co-authors, Philip Cook, told PolitiFact in an e-mail that his research shows "poorer households spend a higher percentage of their income on state lotteries (which are the most common form of gambling). The percentage who participate in lottery play is not higher for low income households. But those who do play, play a lot." National gambling research. The most extensive research we reviewed stemmed from The National Gambling Impact Study Commission, a 1999 report done for the federal government. For that study, The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago published a 768-page report compiling surveys of nearly 3,000 gamblers and non-gamblers. The report included detailed statistics on gambling, by income and by type of game. Income Monthly gaming Few times/year gaming One day a year gaming Lifetime Gaming No lifetime gaming Weekly lottery Monthly lottery Yearly lottery Lifetime lottery No lifetime lottery Less than 24k 10.6 11.7 9.8 32.5 35.4 11.4 11.3 19.5 23.8 34.0 24k-49,999 13.0 20.8 9.3 36.9 19.9 14.5 15.6 25.8 18.5 25.5 50k-99,999 11.8 24.3 13.3 33.7 16.8 13.2 15.8 32.1 14.8 24.2 100k or more 16.7 22.0 13.8 33.5 14.0 11.5 14.3 23.6 27.4 23.2 To summarize the report's key findings, we turned to Dean Gerstein, the report's principal investigator who now works as a vice provost and professor at Claremont Graduate University. "If you define gambling fairly broadly — placing a bet on a game of chance at least once in a lifetime, or once in the past year, or even once in the past month — then members of the poorest segment of the population are, in general, less likely to gamble than members of the middle segments. By any reasonable definition, the largest numbers of gamblers are clearly not poor," he wrote in an e-mail to PolitiFact. "The richest Americans, the 10 percent or so with incomes greater than $100,000/year, are actually the most likely to spend money gambling -- as they are to spend money on everything else, since they have far more money to spend. But since this group of well-off people is relatively small, only 10 percent of the population, the number of gamblers from the middle income segments ($25,000 - $100,000) is much larger." But when poor people gamble, a larger proportion have serious problems related to their gambling than wealthier people, Gerstein said. "In general, gambling very heavily doesn’t do nearly as much damage to rich people as it does to poor people — rich people can afford to throw away a lot more money on gambling without getting into hot water." What the experts and Stemberger said Many of our experts said the council's claim was too vague -- research about gambling and income typically specifies the type of gambling, the frequency, and sometimes the location. The regular purchaser of lottery tickets at a store in inner-city Baltimore probably isn't the same as the occasional high roller at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. "In my opinion this is a poorly worded and misleading statement," said David Just, an economics professor at Cornell, who has studied poverty and lotteries. "By no means does this group constitute the majority of those playing the lottery. Those in poverty are just 16 percent of the U.S. population. They do not outspend the other 84 percent of the country. There is some evidence that a larger proportion of them play, but this is weak evidence and heavily disputed. It is widely believed they spend a higher portion of their income than wealthier individuals. While I can sympathize with the motive behind the FFPC (Florida Family Policy Council) statement, it seems they should have been more careful in making their argument. Lottery tickets and casino visitors are really different crowds for the most part." John Welte, a senior research scientist at the Research Institute on Addictions at Buffalo State University of New York who wrote about geographic factors and gambling in this article, told us that the council's claim was wrong. "That statement is not correct," Welte said in an e-mail. "Gamblers are generally not more common in the poorest segments, although poorer gamblers tend to gamble more often. What is true, and perhaps more relevant, is that problem gamblers are more prevalent in the poorest segments of society." But research shows that lotteries can hurt the poor. "The bottom line is a lot of this gambling is directed toward the poorer segments of society who are spending proportionally more," said John Kindt, a business administration professor at the University of Illinois who studies gambling. Kindt said he was speaking primarily about lotteries but that lotteries are like a gateway drug to creating new addictive gamblers. "We are making poor people poorer." We sent our findings to Stemberger, and he asked us to consider two additional reports. One was a 1997 article from the Minneapolis Star Tribune about a study of state treatment programs for problem gamblers that found that poor problem gamblers had debts proportionally higher than more affluent gamblers. But the article stated, "state officials said they couldn't conclude that compulsive gamblers are disproportionately poor. That's because state-funded programs may attract the poor more than affluent people who have insurance or other options for treatment." Stemberger also pointed to studies about gambling in Wisconsin. This 1995 study of Native American casinos found gamers have an average household income of between $20,000 and $30,000 a year. Fewer than 15 percent enjoy household incomes in excess of $60,000, while almost 30 percent have household incomes less than $20,000. But the study didn't state that the gamblers were disproportionately poor compared to the population near the casinos. Our ruling The council's blog stated "the largest numbers of gamblers comes from the poorest segments of the population." The council's president said he was speaking in general about gambling -- not specific to lotteries or casinos or to any specific location. The data about the income demographics of gamblers must be explained in the context of the type, frequency and sometimes location of gambling. There is a lot of data to suggest that lottery sales outlets are concentrated in poor neighborhoods and that poor lottery ticket buyers end up spending a higher portion of their income. But that isn't what the council claimed. And the research about lotteries would not necessarily apply to the Las Vegas-style casinos that the Florida legislature is now considering. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	John Stemberger	None	None	None	2011-11-18T12:05:19	2011-10-20	['None']
-pose-00290	"Will create a White House Office of Urban Policy to develop a strategy for metropolitan America and to ensure that all federal dollars targeted to urban areas are effectively spent on the highest-impact programs. The Director of Urban Policy will report directly to the president and coordinate all federal urban programs."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/307/create-a-white-house-office-on-urban-policy/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Create a White House Office on Urban Policy	2010-01-07T13:26:54	None	['United_States']
-pomt-12649	"Our minority graduation rate went from levels below Milwaukee and Madison, to above 80%" when I was Beloit school superintendent.	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/mar/24/lowell-holtz/lowell-holtz-says-graduation-rates-soared-minority/	In his bid to unseat Tony Evers as state school superintendent, self-described "kidservative" Lowell Holtz criticizes Wisconsin’s dubious distinction of graduating white high school students at much higher rates than minority students. On his campaign blog, Holtz says his attention to safety and discipline as Beloit school superintendent from 2006 to 2009 improved the completion rate among high school students of color. Specifically, he claimed: "Our minority graduation rate went from levels below Milwaukee and Madison, to above 80%." The statement caught our attention in part because Milwaukee and Madison have well-documented struggles with low graduation rates for black and Hispanic students. To back up his claim, the Holtz campaign pointed to data collected by the state Department of Public Instruction. It’s the best source of data in this case. We confined our review to graduation rates for African-American and Hispanic students because they make up most of the minority students in Beloit. Black students were 26 percent of the total enrollment there in 2006-’07, Holtz’s first year in the district. Hispanics made up 13 percent of the student body. Let’s look at the graduation rates from his time in Beloit, spanning three school years: For African Americans: 2006-’07: 64 percent 2007-’08: 76 percent 2008-09: 85 percent For Hispanics: 2006-’07: 74 percent 2007-’08: 75 percent 2008-’09: 84 percent The figures back up the part of Holtz’s claim about rates climbing over 80 percent on his watch. What about the contention that Beloit’s graduation rates started out below those of minority students in Milwaukee and Madison? At that time, 2006-’07, Beloit’s rate for black students was slightly lower than in Milwaukee, but slightly above Madison’s rate. So that’s a mixed bag. As for Hispanic students, the graduation rate in Beloit was higher than in either of those two districts in Holtz’s first year. But if you look back to the year before he arrived, Beloit’s graduation rate for Hispanic students was significantly lower than the rates in Milwaukee or Madison. Again, some support. For context, the graduation rate for white students in Beloit was considerably higher than for black students, but the gap between the groups narrowed dramatically by Holtz’s third year. That’s because while the rate for whites improved (topping Milwaukee and Madison), the rate for black students rose more. There is another aspect to Holtz’s claim -- to what degree did his policies influence the rate? Specific policy changes he helped enact fueled the progress, Holtz claims, pointing to improvements in safety and discipline. But experts, and Holtz, acknowledge that students, teachers, parents, elected officials and community members all have to play a role. That muddies the water on claiming credit. Our rating: Holtz says that when he ran the Beloit school district, "Our minority graduation rate went from levels below Milwaukee and Madison, to above 80%." Rates rose significantly and topped 80 percent both for black students and Hispanic students. But the picture upon his arrival was not quite as bleak as Holtz claimed. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Lowell Holtz	None	None	None	2017-03-24T06:00:00	2017-03-18	['Milwaukee']
-pose-01064	"McAuliffe will work in a bipartisan way with the legislature and with stakeholders in both the business community and local government to find agreement on revenue-neutral solutions to give localities the option to reduce or eliminate the burdensome BPOL, Merchant's Capital tax, and Machinery and Tool tax."	not yet rated	https://www.politifact.com/virginia/promises/macker-meter/promise/1146/seek-options-lower-or-replace-local-business-taxes/	None	macker-meter	Terry McAuliffe	None	None	Seek options to lower or replace local business taxes	2014-01-17T12:38:22	None	['None']
-pomt-02117	Says Rep. Justin Amash "votes more with the Democrats than with the Republicans."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/may/13/mike-rogers/does-justin-amash-vote-more-often-democrats-or-rep/	Establishment Republicans who have for years operated under the threat of "getting primaried" by conservative challengers are hoping to turn the tables in Michigan, where there’s an all-out brawl to oust tea party favorite Rep. Justin Amash. Amash has become a polarizing figure within the Republican caucus, according to Politico, and some of his colleagues aren’t pulling punches in taking on the Michigander and his hardline anti-tax, anti-spending, anti-federal government stances. Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., called Amash, "al-Qaida’s best friend in the Congress." Harsh. A fellow Michigan Republican, Rep. Mike Rogers, said Amash is "completely out of line with" voters in his district. "He votes more with the Democrats than with the Republicans, and that’s not out of principle, that’s out of him branding himself as something different," said Rogers, who has contributed $5,000 to Amash’s primary opponent, Brian Ellis. Amash’s countered: "I vote less often with (House Minority Leader) Nancy Pelosi, the real San Francisco Democrat, than any member of Congress." How can you vote with Democrats more than Republicans and rarely vote on the same side as Pelosi, the House’s top Democrat? Something isn’t adding up here, so we decided to take a look. How Amash has voted A spokesman for Amash linked us to OpenCongress.org, a website from the nonpartisan Sunshine Foundation that aggregates voting records. The site also studies which colleague on each side of the aisle votes with members of Congress most and least since January 2013. Pelosi’s profile page says the Republican she least often votes with is, indeed, Amash. The two have been on the same side of just 22 percent of votes. That’s partly achieved by Amash staking out positions that put him against most of Congress on widely bipartisan measures. For example, Amash was one of only two House members to vote against a bill to reauthorize spending for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to assist local law enforcement agencies in training for and coordinating efforts to rescue missing children. On Facebook, Amash said the bill created federal bureaucracy and the tax dollars would be better spent locally. (Republicans can criticize Amash’s record, but he’s unique in his diligence about explaining nearly all of his votes on Facebook.) So if Amash seldom votes with Pelosi, is it possible he still votes with Democrats more, as Rogers said? In a word, no. As a whole, Amash has more often sided with the GOP caucus. Amash’s profile on OpenCongress.org says he has voted with his party 82 percent of the time since January 2013. There are certainly many Republicans who toe the party line more closely. Rogers, for example, was with the majority of his GOP colleagues for 96 percent of roll calls since 2013. But there are Republicans who vote with the GOP less often than Amash this Congress, too, though none in Michigan. On some issues, though, Amash has joined forces with Democrats. His high-profile fight to curb NSA funding for metadata collection — which put Amash on the map with civil libertarians — enlisted a coalition of Republicans and Democrats weary of the military-industrial complex. The vote on his measure narrowly failed, with 111 Democrats supporting it — despite strong objections from President Barack Obama — alongside 94 Republicans. So where does Rogers’ claim come from? Rogers spokeswoman had no response but forwarded our request to Amash’s challenger Ellis. They noted that in 2012, a Congressional Quarterly analysis found Amash’s votes put him on the same side of President Barack Obama 51 percent of the time. It’s an interesting tidbit, but it won’t help Rogers on the Truth-O-Meter. The analysis only looked at 61 votes that year where Obama had a stated position. It includes many consequential bills, but it’s just a fraction of the total votes taken in 2012. Further, in 2011 and 2013, Amash was opposite Obama 75 percent of the time. But it did help us find a few interesting examples of Amash voting with Obama’s favored positions. For example, Amash voted "no" on a GOP bill in 2012 that would have extended lower rates for student loans and pay for it with cuts to Obamacare. It passed the House despite a veto threat from Obama. On his Facebook page, Amash said he sided against it because he didn’t believe the cuts covered the cost of lowering student loan rates. Also in 2012, he voted against Republicans on a bill to replace across-the-board spending cuts (the so-called "sequester") with other more targeted cuts, while lifting spending caps on the military. Obama, instead, wanted to replace the sequester with tax increases and cut in other ways; Amash said he opposed the Republican proposal because it increased spending. More recently, Amash was one of just three Republicans (and 20 lawmakers in total) not to vote for more sanctions against Iran last July. At the time, the Obama administration was asking for some leeway from Congress to approach the newly elected Iranian regime with alternatives. Amash later said of his vote: "If our goal is peaceful reform within Iran, it would be wise to give the new president an opportunity to talk before turning to new threats." But again, these are a relatively small number of high-profile votes. Congressional Quarterly found Amash never voted with his party less than 85 percent of the time in a given year. Our ruling Rogers said Amash "votes more with the Democrats than with the Republicans." Rogers didn’t back up his claim, but we found two sources that showed that Amash has sided with Republicans upward of 80 percent of the time. That may be lower than many of his colleagues, and we found found a few high-profile examples of his voting against his own party. But by the numbers, he votes far more often with Republicans than Democrats. We rate Rogers’ statement False.	None	Mike Rogers	None	None	None	2014-05-13T09:52:30	2014-05-08	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-12171	Says Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told players: "Stand for the Anthem or you’re off team."	false	/texas/statements/2017/aug/02/greg-abbott/greg-abbott-celebrates-false-claim-jerry-jones-tol/	Texas Gov. Greg Abbott just celebrated what he described as an ultimatum from Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to the team’s players: If you don’t stand for the national anthem, you're gone. Abbott said in a tweet posted toward midnight Aug. 1, 2017: "Thank you Jerry Jones: Cowboys Jerry Jones to Players: Stand for the Anthem or you're off team." Abbott's tweet further pointed to a Uconservative.net web post from that day headlined: "Cowboys Jerry Jones to Players: ‘Stand For the Anthem or You’re Off the Team.’" Yet the site’s story, we noticed, doesn’t quote Jones making that statement to players other than to fold in a person’s unsourced July 27, 2017, tweet quoting Jones saying so. So, did Jones tell players to stand up or pack up? According to a September 2016 news blog post by the Dallas Morning News, Jones at the times expressed displeasure about Colin Kaepernick, a San Francisco 49ers quarterback, not standing for the playing of the anthem. Kaepernick said he wasn't standing to protest social inequality; he ultimately kneeled for the anthem through the team’s 16 regular-season games after sitting through the anthem during some pre-season games. ESPN reported in March 2017 that Kaepernick, no longer a 49er, intended to stand for the anthem in the 2017 season. The 2016 Morning News story noted that every Cowboys player had stood for the anthem at the team’s season opener that week. It didn't quote Jones telling players anything. From the story: "I got to give a big pat on the back to our entire team, our coaching staff, our entire organization," Jones said Tuesday morning on 105.3 The Fan's Shan and RJ show [KRLD-FM]. "We strongly, strongly support the flag. In every way, we support -- it's almost ridiculous to be saying it -- the people that for generations and generations have given it all up so we can get out here and show off in front of millions of people on television. We respect that so much. That's the real business. "The forum of the NFL and the forum on television is a very significant thing. I'm for it being used in every way we can to support the great, great contributors in our society and that's people that have supported America, the flag, and there's no reason not to go all out right there. For anybody to use parts of that visibility to do otherwise is really disappointing." After Abbott posted his August 2017 tweet, the Dallas newspaper both took note of the Uconservative web post and pointed out that its reporters previously found no basis to reports of Jones saying he’d fire any player who didn’t stand for the anthem. On Oct. 7, 2016, the paper reported that Jones "never made those or other alleged comments and the episode as described never happened." That post followed on Snopes.com, a venerable fact-checking website, debunking a Facebook post suggesting Jones had addressed players about standing for the anthem. Seeking factual elaboration, we made an inquiry to Abbott’s press office and also emailed a spokesman for the Dallas Cowboys. We’ll update this fact-check if we field replies. Our ruling Abbott said that Jones told Cowboys players: "Stand for the Anthem or you’re off team." In a 2016 radio interview, Jones aired disappointment in Kaepernick not standing for the anthem. We spotted no confirmation of Jones telling Cowboys players to stand or be gone. We rate this claim False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Greg Abbott	None	None	None	2017-08-02T17:51:12	2017-08-01	['Jerry_Jones']
-pomt-05322	"New Jersey has the largest transit system in the entire country."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/may/17/bill-pascrell/rep-bill-pascrell-says-new-jerseys-transit-system-/	New Jersey’s transit system could begin seeing more customers if Port Authority toll hikes slated for December take effect. That might be good for revenue, but the system is already overburdened, according to U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-8th Dist.), who spoke about the issue during a May 3 interview on WOR-AM’s "The John Gambling Show." "New Jersey has the largest transit system in the entire country," said Pascrell, who will face Rep. Steve Rothman in the June 5 Democratic primary for a newly redrawn congressional district. "One third of the budget of the transit system comes from the federal government, so what you’re doing is pushing ... folks that continue to drive our bridges and tunnels, (you) are not giving them relief to have an option to use mass transit, which is overburdened as it is right now." New Jersey has a major transit system but is it really the largest in the U.S.? Not quite, PolitiFact New Jersey found. "It depends on how you measure it," said Martin Robins, director emeritus of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University. Let’s start by noting that not all transit systems are the same. New Jersey has a statewide transit system, meaning its fleet of trains and buses, for example, cover much of the state. Most other transit systems in the country are regional, meaning coverage in part of a state or a portion of two states. "Congressman Pascrell was referring to NJ Transit, the largest statewide transit system in the country," Pascrell spokesman Paul Brubaker told us in an e-mail. So what’s the difference between the transit systems? Politics, Robins said. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for example, is funded by fare-payers and the state, but few political jurisdictions in New York state benefit from the MTA. NJ Transit has a built-in constituency in the Legislature because it serves much of New Jersey, he said. Now, let’s check how New Jersey ranks. "(If you’re looking at) which system carries the most people, has the most equipment operating every day, New Jersey clearly does not have the largest transit system in the country. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York is the largest," Robins said. But in terms of statewide systems, New Jersey’s is the largest, Robins said. The American Public Transportation System agreed. "They’re not the largest transit system," said Virginia Miller, a spokesman for the advocacy group, which seeks to improve public transportation by making it available and accessible across the country. "No one’s bigger in North America than (the MTA). They’re one of the biggest in the world. New Jersey is the highest statewide system." Based on 2010 figures in the APTA’s 2012 Public Transportation Fact Book, NJ Transit ranks second in the nation in terms of passenger miles, and seventh for unlinked passenger trips. The Federal Transit Administration does not rank transit systems, but collects certain data from those systems that receive federal funding. Based on that, the FTA confirmed the MTA tops NJ Transit in terms of ridership, size of bus fleet, size of budget and miles of commuter rail. Our ruling Pascrell claimed during an interview on "The John Gambling Show" that New Jersey’s transit system is the largest in the nation, but didn’t distinguish that there are statewide systems and regional systems. Still, transportation experts and agencies we spoke with don’t discount the congressman’s statement. New York’s MTA is the biggest overall and New Jersey is within the top 10. In terms of statewide systems, New Jersey’s is, indeed, the largest. We rate the statement Mostly True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Bill Pascrell	None	None	None	2012-05-17T07:30:00	2012-05-03	['None']
-pose-00218	To reduce bills rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them, Obama "will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/234/allow-five-days-of-public-comment-before-signing-b/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Allow five days of public comment before signing bills	2010-01-07T13:26:52	None	['United_States', 'Barack_Obama', 'White_House', 'United_States_Congress']
-goop-02119	Angelina Jolie Getting Sexy Makeover For Awards Season, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-sexy-makeover-awards-season-oscars/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie NOT Getting Sexy Makeover For Awards Season, Despite Report	3:04 pm, November 29, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04367	Virginia’s educational level among whites is higher than Georgia’s.	true	/georgia/statements/2012/oct/22/larry-sabato/georgia-virginias-education-levels-under-microscop/	With less than three weeks to go before the presidential election, the voting trends of Georgia’s residents took center stage last week in a story by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The article explored why Georgia’s white voters cast ballots for GOP candidates. The story is similar to a fact check completed earlier this election season by PolitiFact Georgia on which party has more supporters. Election results and the recent makeup of the state Legislature suggested that more Georgians consider themselves Republican. But why is that? Political analysts in the story cited several factors, including culture, organization and demographics, specifically educational achievement. In other states such as Virginia and North Carolina -- both of which went for President Barack Obama in the 2008 election -- large groups of highly educated non-Hispanic white voters tend to be more liberal and vote Democratic. But in Georgia the educational achievement level and voting persuasion of white voters is different. "I’m pretty sure, despite Atlanta, that Virginia’s educational level among whites is higher than Georgia," Larry Sabato, a national political expert at the University of Virginia, said in the AJC story. From a previous fact check, we knew that more voters in the state identified as Republicans. And an AJC poll released last week showed that Obama had the support of just 22 percent of Georgia’s likely white voters. But is Sabato correct? Does Virginia have a more highly educated white voting population than Georgia? Georgia’s secretary of state does not keep statistics on voters’ education or income levels. Through his political analyst and media relations coordinator, Sabato told us his statement was based on 2008 exit polls conducted by CNN. Reviewing the exit poll of 1,973 Georgia respondents, 31 percent of those polled were white college graduates, compared with the 40 percent of white college graduates among Virginia’s 2,466 respondents. Drilling down further into the numbers, of Georgia’s white college graduate respondents, 73 percent voted for then-Republican presidential nominee John McCain, compared with 25 percent for Obama. Among the same demographic in Virginia, the gap between those voting for McCain and Obama was much smaller than in Georgia. Fifty-five percent of Virginia’s white college graduates voted for McCain and 44 percent voted for Obama. At the postgraduate level, the numbers are even closer. Eleven percent of Georgia’s exit poll respondents identified as postgraduate. Half of those postgraduate voters cast ballots for McCain; 49 percent voted for Obama. Virginia had more postgraduate respondents: 23 percent. Of those, 52 percent voted for Obama, 47 percent for McCain. (That poll did not break down those statistics by race.) This pattern of voters in Georgia and the Deep South of voting for Republicans has been steady despite the education level, said Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University. "In a state like Virginia where you have a lot of Northern migrants and people coming in from outside the state, things may be different," he said. Looking at the 2008 exit polls, the highest number of McCain votes came from voters with lower education levels, but the main point is that McCain won at every education level, Black said. Using just the exit poll data, Sabato’s statement has merit, but exit polls are one source. Voter data from the secretary of state and census data are probably more reliable, said Kerwin Swint, a political science professor at Kennesaw State University. And as far as education and voting, "the traditional finding from the research is that college graduates are more likely to vote Republican, possibly due to higher incomes, but those with advanced degrees (master’s level and higher) tend to go in the other direction and vote Democrat." Three-year estimates of census data from 2008 through 2010 published in April by the Southern Regional Education Board showed that Virginia (36.5 percent) had a higher percentage of whites over age 25 with bachelor’s degrees than Georgia (30.3 percent). Three-year averages of census data from 2007 through 2009, reported by the National Center for Education Statistics, of whites over age 25 with high school completion and a bachelor’s or higher degree also showed a larger percentage of Virginia residents in that category (37.1 percent) than Georgia residents (31.3 percent). In a news story about Georgia’s white voters and the tendency to cast ballots for GOP candidates, Sabato described the differences in Virginia and Georgia. "Despite Atlanta, Virginia’s educational level among whites is higher than Georgia," he said. Based on exit polls and census data, Sabato’s statement is correct. Examining the data further shows that Georgia’s white voters at any education level are more likely to vote Republican. We rate Sabato’s statement True.	None	Larry Sabato	None	None	None	2012-10-22T06:00:00	2012-10-16	['Virginia', 'Georgia_(U.S._state)']
-snes-02731	The State Department has imposed sanctions against Phillippines Vice President Leni Robredo, banning her from the U.S.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/leni-robredo-banned-us/	None	Junk News	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did the State Department Ban the Vice President of the Philippines from the U.S.?	25 March 2017	None	['United_States', 'United_States_Department_of_State']
-pomt-08940	"In the 18th Congressional District, 100% of electric generation comes from coal."	true	/ohio/statements/2010/jul/24/bob-gibbs/house-candidate-bob-gibbs-touts-coal-power-generat/	State Sen. Bob Gibbs wants to make sure you know coal is important in Ohio’s 18th Congressional District and that he doesn’t like efforts to shrink the district’s carbon footprint. Gibbs is the Republican candidate in the 18th, which includes all or parts of 15 counties in Ohio’s Appalachian region. On his campaign website he argues that efforts to restrict carbon emissions, commonly known as Cap and Trade, would increase energy costs and be bad for the district. "In the 18th Congressional District, 100% of electric generation comes from coal. That means that every single household in this district will see a huge increase in their energy bills if Cap-and-Trade would become law." It’s true that all electricity generated in the 18th is produced at coal-fired power plants, but that doesn’t mean when residents flick on their lights they are not also using electricity from other sources. Much of the district gets power from rural electric cooperatives. Other areas, though, are serviced by FirstEnergy Corp.’s Ohio Edison and AEP Ohio’s Columbus Southern Power Co. and Ohio Power Co. First Energy has ownership stakes in two nuclear power plants in Ohio and a third in Pennsylvania. AEP Ohio has two plants in Ohio that burn natural gas to generate power and a hydro-electric plant on the Ohio River. Still, all power generating plants actually located within the district are coal-fired. So while the statement is not completely illuminating, we rate it as True. Comment on this item.	None	Bob Gibbs	None	None	None	2010-07-24T06:00:00	2010-07-21	['None']
-obry-00013	As the Wisconsin gubernatorial race progresses, Democratic candidate and Milwaukee businessman Andy Gronik has repeatedly taken aim at Republican Gov. Scott Walker. In a Jan. 24 blog post, Gronik condemned Walker for low wages that he said lead to residents having to work multiple jobs. Said Gronik: “Wisconsinites will remember Walker’s failures when they go to work at that second, third or fourth job because their wages are so low that one job won’t cut it.” The Observatory checked this claim. 	verified	https://observatory.journalism.wisc.edu/2018/04/19/wisconsin-jobless-rate-at-historic-low-but-many-face-low-pay-work-two-jobs/	None	None	None	Gerald Porter Jr.	None	Wisconsin jobless rate at historic low, but many face low pay, work two jobs	April 19, 2018	None	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Milwaukee', 'Wisconsin', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-pomt-15080	"The top 1/10th of 1 percent today in America owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent."	mostly true	/virginia/statements/2015/sep/21/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-says-top-01-us-have-almost-much-wea/	Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders told Liberty University students on Sept. 14 that he didn’t expect them to agree with his liberal views on abortion and gay marriage. But Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, sought common ground with students at the conservative Christian university in Lynchburg by casting wealth inequality as a moral issue. "There is no justice, and I want you to hear this clearly, when the top 1/10th of 1 percent -- not 1 percent -- the top 1/10th of 1 percent today in America owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent," Sanders told the crowd, packed into the Vines Center arena for weekly convocation. "And in your hearts, you will have to determine the morality of that, and the justice of that." We decided to examine Sanders’ statement that the richest 0.1 percent has nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent. It’s a standard line in Sanders’ speeches. Warren Gunnels, policy director of Sanders’ presidential campaign, said the senator’s source for the statistic is a Nov. 13, 2014, article in The Guardian, a British newspaper. As our colleagues at PolitiFact Wisconsin have written, the article reported on the findings of a research paper, about wealth inequality during the past 100 years. The study was commissioned by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan organization in Cambridge, Mass., which is best known as the arbiter for determining when the U.S. economy falls into recession. The authors of the study were economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics. Using tax records, they made estimates for 2012 on wealth -- that is, the value of all assets, such as a home, and savings and retirement accounts, minus all debts, such as mortgages and credit card balances. The top 0.1 percent included 160,000 families with net assets of at least $20 million. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent encompassed 144 million families with average wealth of $84,000. That report says wealth concentration among the richest Americans followed a U-shaped pattern during the past century. It was high in the beginning of the 20th century and then fell from 1929 to 1978. But the study found that wealth concentration among the richest has been rising since, fueled in particular by gains held by the wealthiest 0.1 percent families. The families in that echelon saw their share rise from 7 percent of total household wealth in the late 1970s to 22 percent in 2012. The bottom 90 percent’s share of the nation’s wealth fell from 35 percent in the mid-1980s to 23 percent in 2012. Two other prominent economists -- Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Edward Wolff of New York University -- have said the study makes solid estimates about wealth inequality. Wolff said he was not aware of another study that examined the wealth of the top 0.1 percent. But not all economists think the NBER study is the best way to measure wealth. Richard Burkhauser, a professor of policy analysis at Cornell University, told PolitiFact Wisconsin that while Saez and Zucman are "very well respected economists," he faults their study for excluding Social Security income. "To ignore it as they do grossly understates the wealth held by Americans in the bottom 99 percent of the population," Burkhauser said. Almost 60 million Americans - mostly retired and disabled workers - receive Social Security benefits averaging $1,223 a month, according to the Social Security Administration. Another criticism of the NBER study is that it doesn't take into account changes in tax laws, according to Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute. In a July 9, 2014, op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Reynolds wrote that new tax laws in the 1980s and ’90s skew the increase in wealth inequality. Those laws, he said, required that more capital income of high-earning taxpayers be reported on individual returns, while excluding most capital income of middle-income savers and homeowners. The Tax Policy Center in Washington estimates that 42 percent of all capital gains and dividends reported to the IRS for 2014 came from the top 0.1 percent. Put another way: Of roughly $722 billion in total capital gains and dividends reported, about $305 billion were filed by the top echelon of earners. The center also estimates that the top 0.1 percent paid slightly more than half of all capital gains and dividend taxes collected for 2014. They paid about $70 billion of the $138 billion generated through the levies. Our ruling Sanders said the top 0.1 percent of Americans have nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. His claim accurately echoes findings in a study by two internationally known economists, and their work has been widely cited as authoritative. But it needs a clarification: Some economists say the study underestimates middle-class wealth by excluding Social Security benefits and not fully considering certain tax laws. With that qualification in mind, we rate Sanders’ statement Mostly True.	None	Bernie Sanders	None	None	None	2015-09-21T00:00:00	2015-09-14	['United_States']
-tron-02915	President Trump Signs Executive Order Banning Impeachment	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/trump-executive-order-impeachment/	None	politics	None	None	['congress', 'donald trump', 'satire']	President Trump Signs Executive Order Banning Impeachment	 May 31, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-14120	"The Obama administration has even joined Islamist governments in sponsoring a U.N. resolution that would shred our First Amendment by threatening to make discussion of radical Islamism potentially illegal."	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2016/may/09/ted-cruz/cruz-claims-obama-administration-sponsored-un-reso/	In an email to supporters March 28, 2016, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas criticized the Obama administration’s approach to fighting terrorism. The email, with the subject "If I Am Elected President, America Will Have a Commander-in-Chief Committed to Defeating Radical Islamic Terrorism," reprinted a Cruz op-ed column published that day in the New York Daily News. Cruz wrote the op-ed after New York City Police Chief William Bratton criticized his call to monitor Muslim neighborhoods in the aftermath of the Brussels terrorist attacks. Cruz, who since has dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination for president, defended his plan to monitor Muslim neighborhoods by citing the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, which has been connected to the architects of the Brussels attack. Then, he turned to President Barack Obama’s approach to terrorism and the differences between their two philosophies: fighting "radical Islamic terrorism" as Cruz and other Republicans call it, or fighting extremist groups, as Obama has clarified. "In the wake of 9/11, there was a broad consensus in favor of a common-sense domestic counterterrorism strategy," Cruz wrote. "But over the last seven years, the focus on protecting the homeland has been lost. The Obama administration has even joined Islamist governments in sponsoring a U.N. resolution that would shred our First Amendment by threatening to make discussion of radical Islamism potentially illegal." It’s no secret Cruz and Obama disagree on what to call terrorists. But is it true the Obama administration "joined Islamist governments" to sponsor a United Nations resolution to "make discussion of radical Islamism" illegal in contravention of the First Amendment? U.N. resolution The Cruz campaign did not answer our queries about the basis of his U.N. claim, but Josh Greenman, opinion editor for the Daily News, replied by email that Cruz’s statement reflected the senator’s "interpretation of United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18." The U.N. Human Rights Council adopted that resolution in March 2011 with the purpose of "combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief." The resolution promotes religious tolerance and calls on member states to ensure proper representation of religious minorities. The resolution was a compromise, reached in 2011 after more than a decade of negotiations. In 1999, Muslim states, through the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, began introducing resolutions intended to combat what they saw as the defamation of religion, often through the criminalization of blasphemy. Western states opposed the proposals, arguing they interfered with free speech. By 2011, the different parties agreed to modify the resolution to drop any references to blasphemy or defamation. The resolution passed unanimously after that compromise. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it a "landmark achievement." PunditFact checked a statement related to Resolution 16/18 on Jan. 14, 2015. PunditFact found Mostly False a claim that the Obama administration, through the resolution, supported Muslim allies trying to establish an international blasphemy standard. One clause in the resolution supported that claim: In a list of "actions to foster a domestic environment of religious tolerance, peace and respect," the resolution calls on states to adopt "measures to criminalize incitement to imminent violence based on religion or belief." To defend the United States’ ability to support a resolution with that language without violating its Constitution, PunditFact reported, State Department officials Michael Posner and Suzan Johnson Cook cited a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brandenburg v. Ohio. In its ruling, the high court held that all speech is protected "except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." Therefore, the State Department officials said, the resolution language was in line with U.S. law. PunditFact determined that negotiating with Muslim allies to tone down language on blasphemy and defamation laws did not equate to supporting their cause. However, the resolution language that leaves a door open to criminalization -- an interpretation some Muslim countries have insisted is the correct reading of the agreement -- bumped the rating to Mostly False, rather than False. Cruz goes further Cruz’s claim is more extreme than the one PunditFact checked in 2015. Cruz says that the same resolution could "shred our First Amendment" and threaten to make discussion of radical Islamic terrorism illegal. A web search for experts on Muslim states and the U.N. led us to Turan Kayaoglu, an associate professor at the University of Washington Tacoma who studies the intersection of religion, human rights and international relations. Kayaoglu stressed that no U.N. resolution could in any way threaten the United States’ First Amendment. Whenever the United States signs an international document, Kayaoglu said by telephone, it insists on restrictions to exclude anything that would infringe on First Amendment rights. Kayaoglu said this insistence goes back to 1966’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a landmark agreement on international human rights that the United States also worked to ensure would not supercede its Constitution. As for the other portion of Cruz’s claim, Kayaoglu emphasized that Islamic countries attempted to criminalize blasphemy, or hate speech, through Resolution 16/18, which the U.S., European Union and other actors rejected, as explored by PunditFact. By claiming that the resolution would "make discussion of radical Islamic terrorism illegal," Kayaoglu said, Cruz is interpreting the resolution in the same way as Islamic states, rather than through the understanding emphasized by the U.S. and E.U. When member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation attempt to criminalize blasphemy, they usually are focused on "things like defaming Muhammad," Kayaoglu said. Blasphemy laws could extend to discussion of the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and other terrorist groups. Or, as Cruz calls it, "radical Islamism." "In an interesting way, what Sen. Cruz is believing, is he’s following the interpretation of Islamist governments that’s been rejected repeatedly by the Obama administration and other European governments," Kayaoglu said. When the resolution passed in 2011, Clinton, then secretary of state, offered the United States’ interpretation of the agreement: "The United States strongly supports today’s resolution, which rejects the broad prohibitions on speech called for in the former ‘defamation of religions’ resolution, and supports approaches that do not limit freedom of expression or infringe on the freedom of religion," she said. Our ruling Sen. Ted Cruz said that the Obama administration has "joined Islamist governments in sponsoring a U.N. resolution that would shred our First Amendment by threatening to make discussion of radical Islamism potentially illegal." The United States in 2011 voted in support of United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, which promotes religious tolerance. That approval only came after the U.S. and its western allies successfully negotiated to have language criminalizing blasphemy dropped from the resolution to ensure it comports with free speech rights and the First Amendment. Cruz’s interpretation of the resolution’s wording, one expert said, more closely resembles that of Islamist governments than the Obama administration. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2016-05-09T10:12:21	2016-03-28	['United_Nations', 'Barack_Obama', 'Islamism', 'First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution']
-tron-01626	Democratic Origins of Social Security	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ss-origins/	None	government	None	None	None	Democratic Origins of Social Security	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-00197	The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 bans Muslims from holding public office in the United States.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muslims-holding-public-office/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Does the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 Bar Muslims from Holding Public Office?	20 August 2018	None	['United_States']
-snes-02414	A commencement speech delivered by President Trump at Liberty University in May 2017 bore remarkable similarities to one given by Reese Witherspoon's character in the 2001 film "Legally Blonde."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-legally-blonde-speech/	None	Politics	None	David Emery	None	Did President Trump Plagiarize His Commencement Speech from ‘Legally Blonde’?	17 May 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-13355	The Great Recession emerged "in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/02/hillary-clinton/hillary-clintons-base-linkage-tax-cuts-and-great-r/	During the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton tried to fix blame for the Great Recession on a cherished part of conservative economic policy -- tax cuts. "Trickle-down did not work," Clinton said, referring to a derisive name for tax cuts that dates from the presidency of Ronald Reagan. "It got us into the mess we were in, in 2008 and 2009. Slashing taxes on the wealthy hasn’t worked." Later in the debate. Clinton doubled down on that argument, saying, "Well, let’s stop for a second and remember where we were eight years ago. We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s. That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm." We had usually heard from experts that the Great Recession stemmed most directly from the bursting of a housing bubble that led to a financial-sector meltdown. So we wondered whether economists thought Clinton’s argument held water. First, some history: President George W. Bush enacted two rounds of tax cuts, though critics said that richer Americans benefited disproportionately. It is these cuts -- coming on top of previous rounds of tax cuts for wealthier Americans -- that play a prominent role in Clinton’s assertion at the debate. Most, though not all, of the economists we contacted -- liberals, conservatives and in between -- expressed skepticism about the linkage Clinton made. (For their part, our friends at the Washington Post Fact Checker gave the claim Three Pinocchios out of a possible four, in large part based on the analysis of a 663-page report from 2011 by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.) That said, when we contacted the Clinton campaign, they stood by the assertion. Two of the campaign’s arguments stand out as plausible: • Bush administration regulators took their eyes off Wall Street. • Bush’s tax and budget policies fostered income inequality that, in turn, promoted unsustainable investments by the wealthy in homes owned by families with stagnating income and uncertain abilities to pay them back. We found one expert who strongly sided with Clinton’s analysis -- Robert S. McElvaine, a historian at Millsaps College who has written about the Great Depression and the Great Recession. (The Post’s Fact Checker found a couple more that had been put in touch through the campaign.) "It’s not the tax cuts for the rich per se, but their effect of concentrating income at the very top that was the major cause of the Great Depression," and, in turn, the Great Recession, McElvaine said. When income is too concentrated, he said, the rest of the population doesn’t have enough to maintain sufficient demand, and the economy suffers, he said. So there is at least some support for a lack of Wall Street regulation and income inequality for setting the stage for the financial crisis that spawned the recession. However, the economists we checked with expressed skepticism -- some strongly so -- about Clinton’s assertion that the recession emerged "in large part" due to tax policies. On the left, Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic Policy and Research, said he wouldn’t just call tax cuts a minor factor in causing the recession -- he said he "can't think of any way they were a factor at all." If anything, he said, "the conventional wisdom goes the other way -- tax cuts tend to increase the deficit, which pushes up interest rates and in turn drags down house prices." On the right, Dan Mitchell, an economist with the libertarian Cato Institute, agreed. "Hillary is spouting nonsense," he said. "No economic theory links tax cuts -- or, for that matter, tax increases -- to financial market meltdowns." Other economists we contacted echoed these sentiments. "Clinton is on solid ground criticizing Bush’s tax cuts, but blaming them for the recession goes too far," said Bruce Bartlett, a former Ronald Reagan aide who has sometimes broken with some conservative orthodoxies. "One can certainly say that the Bush tax cuts failed to raise economic growth or lower unemployment to any significant degree, and one can argue that the Reagan tax cuts were not especially stimulative as well. But to argue that the Bush tax cuts caused the 2008-09 recession is a stretch." Harvey Rosen, a Princeton University economist who was an official in the administrations of both Bush and his father, said that tax cuts seem like an unlikely culprit, because "historically we’ve had relatively low rates without terrible -- or any -- recessions." He added that low tax rates "would not make my list of the top 10 reasons for the recession." Instead, Rosen pointed to a "housing bubble in the United States and Europe that was fed by excess liquidity and poorly regulated mortgage markets." This became a problem, he said, when large financial institutions that had huge amounts of assets dependent on high housing prices found themselves with too little capital to stave off failure when the market crashed. "After a number of financial firms failed, it caused a panic, and confidence in the financial system collapsed," Rosen said. "With the collapse in confidence came a collapse in credit markets -- no one was able to borrow -- which ultimately caused a contraction of the real economy." Brookings Institution economist Gary Burtless added another factor: the irrational psychologies of the bubble, on the part of both homebuyers and lenders who felt empowered to pursue risky arrangements in the absence of strict regulation. "By the middle of the 2000-2010 decade, a great many loans were made that prudent lenders would not have made in the 1990s or ever the early 2000s," Burtless said. This, in turn, led to the "end of a housing boom, a sharp decline in housing prices, widespread mortgage defaults, widespread mortgage securities defaults, and a lack of assets to cover the losses at nine large financial institutions -- Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, the CitiCorp holding company, and the AIG holding company," said Lawrence White, an economist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Our ruling Clinton said the Great Recession emerged "in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm." It’s broadly accepted that lack of Wall Street regulation played a role, and it’s arguable that income inequality helped set the conditions. But an ideological cross-section of economists agreed that the recession was primarily caused by a housing bubble that turned into a financial crisis, and that it was caused by many factors more significant than low taxes. So for Clinton to say that tax cuts for the rich "in large part" caused the Great Recession is a significant exaggeration. We rate it Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/48b7f1d3-bad5-4ddc-9f70-04550828765b	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-10-02T17:16:29	2016-09-26	['None']
-hoer-00561	Michael Jackson Died Years Ago	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/michael-jackson-dead.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Michael Jackson Died Years Ago Hoax	December 30, 2013	None	['None']
-snes-02051	Columbia Records mistakenly released a Byrds album without a title.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/untitled/	None	Entertainment	None	David Mikkelson	None	The ‘Untitled’ Byrds Album	27 April 2004	None	['None']
-pomt-11990	"Since 2010, Republicans have won unaffiliated voters in every general election."	mostly true	/north-carolina/statements/2017/sep/27/dallas-woodhouse/woodhouse-says-gop-winning-unaffiliated-voters-nc/	The number of unaffiliated voters recently surpassed the number of registered Republicans in North Carolina, leaving the GOP as the third largest voting bloc on paper. According to NC GOP’s executive director, Dallas Woodhouse, Republicans should view this as good news. Upon hearing that there are now 2,640,000 registered Democrats, 2,056,000 unaffiliated voters and 2,055,000 Republicans, Woodhouse said unaffiliated voters have helped Republicans more than Democrats in recent elections. "It is important to note that since 2010, Republicans have won unaffiliated voters in every general election," he said. As Woodhouse acknowledged in an email, there’s no way to tell how individual voters cast a ballot – because voting ballots are secret. The N.C. State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement cannot compile or release data on how any group of registered voters voted, said Pat Gannon, the board’s spokesman. "Because of the secrecy of the ballot, we wouldn’t be able to determine who unaffiliated voters voted for," Gannon said. So there’s that obstacle. But does that mean Woodhouse is wrong? Election results In fact, election results and exit polls tend to back him up. Basically, Woodhouse argues that Republicans have outperformed Democrats in many recent statewide election results, despite having fewer registered voters. In 2010, Republican Sen. Richard Burr won re-election. In 2012, for the first time in decades, a Republican won the race for governor. After going for President Barack Obama in 2008, the state supported Republican Mitt Romney. In 2014, Republican Thom Tillis unseated incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan, a Democrat. In 2016, NC voters favored Republican Donald Trump for President, Democrat Roy Cooper for Governor and Burr for Senate. Woodhouse mostly focused on the races for president, governor and senator. But Cooper is one of several Democrats who won statewide races over the years, including for state auditor (Beth Wood), secretary of state (Elaine Marshall) and attorney general (Cooper, then Josh Stein). Don’t those victories weigh against Woodhouse’s claim? That brings us to the evidence from exit polls. Exit polls Woodhouse provided links to several exit polls that show self-described independents consistently supporting Republicans and PolitiFact found other polls that show the same pattern. There’s one caveat to this: people don’t always describe themselves accurately in exit polls. A 2017 Elon University poll found a difference between voters who were registered with a party but identified themselves as independents. The Elon poll found that 43 percent of the roughly 500 voters surveyed identified as independent. But only 30 percent were unaffiliated. But here’s what exit polls have found: A CNN exit poll in the 2016 elections for president, governor and Senate, which surveyed about 4,000 people, asked voters to identify themselves as Republican, Democrat or independent as well as liberal, conservative or moderate. The polls found that independents favored Trump, Burr and McCrory. Moderates, however, supported the Democrats in each race. A Quinnipiac poll published a day before the election supports the findings of the CNN exit poll. Quinnipiac gave the edge to Cooper, despite finding that independent voters favored McCrory. It showed independents supporting Burr and Trump at an even higher rate. An Elon University poll from 2016 also showed independents breaking for McCrory. And an exit poll done for a group of media organizations and published by the New York Times showed a similar breakdown: independents and those favoring third parties favored Trump and moderates favored Hillary Clinton. A 2014 CNN exit poll shows self-identified "independents" supported Republican Thom Tillis over Democrat Kay Hagan 49 percent to 42 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, self-identified "moderates" favored Hagan 59 percent to 36 percent. According to another exit poll published by the New York Times, this one in the 2012 presidential election, self-identified independents favored Romney and moderates favored Obama. Participation in primaries Recent primary elections reflect what the exit polls suggest: that unaffiliated voters are more interested in voting for Republicans than Democrats. In North Carolina, unaffiliated voters can participate in the primary elections for any party they choose. Stats provided by the state elections board show that unaffiliated voters have overwhelmingly participated in the Republican primary in each election since 2010. In 2010, 54 percent of unaffiliated voters took Republican ballots while 39 percent took Democratic ballots. In 2012, 44 percent took GOP ballots while 30 percent took Democratic ballots. In 2014, 61 percent took Republican ballots while 33 percent took Democratic ballots. And in 2016, 56 percent took GOP ballots while 41 percent took Democratic ballots. The consistent participation in Republican primaries shows many unaffiliated voters have partisan leanings and puts the idea of unaffiliated voters as "swing voters" into doubt. "In fact, most independents who ‘lean’ to one party over the other vote at levels comparable to partisans, at least nationally," said Michael Bitzer, professor of politics and history at Catawba College in Salisbury. Bitzer’s comments are supported by a 2016 Pew Research study, which notes that most independents express a partisan leaning. What experts think Most experts PolitiFact spoke with suggested Woodhouse’s claim is on track, even though it’s nearly impossible to verify with complete certainty. Jason Husser, director of the Elon University poll, warned against people making assumptions without polling of voters whose partisan affiliations are known. "The only way anyone could make that ‘every general election since 2010,’ claim with confidence is if they have multiple quality surveys using voter registration list samples (not random digital dial samples)," Husser said. "Otherwise they couldn't differentiate registered as unaffiliated voters from self-identified independents (who are often registered with a party)." Still, Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, a left-leaning polling firm, described the claim as "basically right." "Democrats still having such a large registration advantage over Republicans," Jensen said, "basically means it’s impossible for Republican candidates to win statewide without winning independents." Our ruling Woodhouse stated unequivocally that Republicans have "won" North Carolina’s unaffiliated voters in each general election since 2010. There is no way to prove that claim with complete certainty because ballots are private. And exit polls can be unreliable because voters sometimes misrepresent their political allegiances. However, polls and primary participation stats show a consistent trend of unaffiliated voters voting for Republicans. Furthermore, given the relatively lower number of registered Republicans, experts say the GOP wouldn’t have achieved its recent success without repeatedly winning over unaffiliated voters. PolitiFact rates this claim Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Dallas Woodhouse	None	None	None	2017-09-27T12:48:31	2017-09-13	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-11510	Say David Hogg is a crisis actor.	pants on fire!	/florida/statements/2018/feb/21/blog-posting/why-you-shouldnt-believe-claims-stoneman-high-stud/	Multiple internet bloggers are falsely accusing David Hogg, a student survivor of the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., of being a paid actor with a past of pushing for additional restrictions on guns. The conspiracy theories spread to the mainstream when Benjamin Kelly, an aide for Florida state Rep. Shawn Harrison, R-Tampa, told a reporter that Hogg and another student were "actors" who "travel to various crisis (sic) when they happen." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com The aide was fired, and the Broward County School District said Hogg and his classmate are "absolutely students at Stoneman Douglas." Here are the facts. The genesis of the ‘crisis actor’ claims Conspiracy theorists have latched on to a CBS news video of Hogg in Los Angeles from 2017 as evidence that the teen might be a plant. Hogg posted a video that showed an argument between his friend and a lifeguard on Redondo Beach. The argument was unrelated to guns. After Hogg’s friend put a boogie board on a trash can on the beach, a lifeguard asked him to remove it. The friend complied with the lifeguard's request, but the interaction turned sour after the friend made a snide remark. Hogg’s video of the dispute went viral. CBS later interviewed Hogg about the dispute and the video. From there, websites like the conspiracy-minded Infowars reached for straws, including Hogg’s appearance after the shooting on CBS This Morning. "Interestingly, Hogg has reconnected with CBS for an appearance on CBS This Morning as the mainstream media unabashedly features high school students as figureheads for a new anti-gun push," InfoWars wrote in a blog. Folks on the internet took the claim one step further and claimed that the video was proof that Hogg was just pretending to be a high school student in a different state. At one point, the No. 1 trending video on YouTube was a video suggesting that Hogg was an actor, but the video has since been removed. Hogg says he was visiting California, which is corroborated by his personal Twitter account. "I love going to LA for the summer," he tweeted August 5, 2017. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com Shortly after, on Aug. 10, 2017, Hogg posted a short vlog (video blog) on YouTube about his experience in California. And finally, The Eagle Eye, Marjory Stoneman Douglas' newsmagazine, published a story about his vacation and viral video. More on the California connection Some social media users took the claim further and said that Hogg actually graduated from Redondo Shores High School in California. But evidence that supported those theories — like a supposed yearbook photo of Hogg in California — was debunked by fellow Stoneman Douglas High students on Twitter. One student, Sarah Chadwick, said that the images of Hogg allegedly pictured in a California yearbook were really from Stoneman High. "She claims it’s not a Douglas yearbook (which I promise it is, I know multiple people in that picture) yet there’s someone in the pic wearing a douglas t-shirt????" Chadwick tweeted. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Another Stoneman Douglas High alumnus tweeted a video, which showed him flipping to Hogg’s photo in a Douglas yearbook. "There’s a photo going around claiming David Hogg did not attend Douglas, but a school in California. Here’s a video to debunk that:" tweeted Joey Wong. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com Hogg’s father is a former FBI agent Some, meanwhile, have used Hogg’s criticism about the FBI, combined with the fact that his father is a former FBI agent, to suggest some conspiracy aimed at hurting President Donald Trump. Those theories are unfounded. Our ruling Conspiracy-minded websites are claiming Stoneman Douglas High students are crisis actors hired to stir up controversy. Not only is there no credible evidence to support this claim, plenty of evidence contradicts it entirely. The school district has confirmed that the targeted students are, in fact, students. Broward County Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie and Stoneman High students on Twitter have confirmed that Hogg is a senior at Stoneman Douglas, not a crisis actor. We rate this claim Pants on Fire! See Figure 5 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-02-21T16:34:52	2018-02-21	['None']
-snes-05878	A number of localities in the United States, France, and Britain are considered Muslim "no-go zones" (operating under Sharia Law) where local laws are not applicable.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sharia-law-muslim-no-go-zones/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Sharia Law Muslim ‘No-Go’ Zones	30 March 2015	None	['United_States', 'United_Kingdom', 'France', 'Islam', 'Sharia']
-tron-02508	Mars is Going to Be the Closest to Earth Then Ever Before in Recorded History	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/mars/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Mars is Going to Be the Closest to Earth Then Ever Before in Recorded History	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-03141	In 2012, the state "put together a list of over 100,000 people that they thought were ineligible to vote. Came out there were less than 10."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2013/sep/12/charlie-crist/charlie-crist-says-secretary-state-put-together-li/	Florida’s effort to search for noncitizens on the voter rolls launched a firestorm in the weeks leading up to the 2012 presidential election. Gov. Rick Scott’s initiative was lampooned on The Daily Show; the U.S. Department of Justice cried foul; and two South Florida congressmen held a presser to tout errors on the list, including a Brooklyn-born World War II vet flagged as potentially not being a citizen. But in the end, just how many noncitizen voters did Florida find among almost 12 million voters? Former Gov. Charlie Crist gave his answer in a speech to Louisiana Democrats on Aug. 17, 2013. He started by bashing the state’s recent announcement that it intends to scrutinize the voter rolls for noncitizens yet again. "Our governor just announced last week he is going to start a purge of voters in Florida," Crist said. "They tried it last year. The secretary of state put together a list of over 100,000 people that they thought were ineligible to vote. Came out there were less than 10. I mean, what a joke. It’s unconscionable what they will do to win these elections." Crist, a former Republican turned independent turned Democrat, is considering a bid against Scott. If Crist runs in 2014, one way he will try to boost turnout among Democrats and minorities is by hammering Scott’s record on voting rights. So was he correct to say that the effort to get rid of noncitizen voters only led to "less than 10" being removed? 2012 efforts to purge voter rolls First, we’ll briefly recap the history of the search for noncitizen voters. Shortly after Scott took office in 2011 he asked his top election official at the time to look into removing noncitizens from the voter rolls. By 2012, the Division of Elections put together a list of about 180,000 potential noncitizens based on driver’s license data. The state whittled the list down to about 2,600 names and sent them to county election supervisors in April 2012. Liberal groups criticized the list that they said disproportionately targeted Hispanics and other minorities. Supervisors found all sorts of errors and would later use words such as "sloppy" and "embarrassing" to describe the state initiative. One of the problems was that the driver’s license data doesn’t get updated when a legal resident later becomes a citizen. By September 2012, the Division of Elections said it had confirmed 207 noncitizens on the voter rolls and that the names would be provided to county elections supervisors to contact the voters. Any that matched federal homeland security data would be removed. Later that month the state produced a new list of 198 potentially ineligible voters. But by then, supervisors were fed up with the timing and process, and the effort appeared to fizzle out. A year later, in August 2013, news broke that the state was about to launch another round of searching for noncitizens on the voter rolls. So what was the total removed? PolitiFact Florida asked the division of elections for the total number of noncitizens removed, including a breakdown by county, during 2012. The best figures we could obtain from the state only included those removed as of Aug. 1, 2012. We counted 85 who were listed as being removed because they were "not a U.S. citizen." (A few additional voters on that list were removed for other reasons, such as being dead or moving out of state. One category for removal was "request by voter," though it doesn’t explain why the voters requested it.) As a back-stop, we next checked in directly with some of the county supervisors of elections to see how many noncitizen voters they removed from the rolls. Their answers made it clear it was more than 10. Miami-Dade: 16 voters removed. Collier: 36 removed. Broward: Seven voters removed. Orange: Seven voters removed. Lee: Six voters removed. Hillsborough: Two voters removed. Pasco: Two voters removed. Pinellas: Six voters removed. We asked Crist to explain how he arrived at his figure of "less than 10." "Just from news accounts, may have been around 40 or so actually," he responded in an email. "And somewhat more purged." He sent us a copy of an August 2013 New York Times article about the state’s renewed effort that stated: "Ultimately, the list of possible noncitizen voters shrank to 198. Of those, fewer than 40 had voted illegally." Our ruling Crist said that in 2012, "the secretary of state put together a list of over 100,000 people that they thought were ineligible to vote. Came out there were less than 10." If Crist’s point was that only a tiny fraction of noncitizens were found on the voter rolls, that’s certainly true. But he’s wrong that the number was less than 10. The best data we could nail down from the state was that there were about 85 noncitizens removed as of August 1, 2012. We rate his claim Mostly False.	None	Charlie Crist	None	None	None	2013-09-12T16:24:03	2013-08-17	['None']
-pomt-13009	"We adopted the modern Social Security system at a time when the average person died before they were old enough to get Social Security."	true	/virginia/statements/2016/dec/12/newt-gingrich/gingrich-correct-life-expectancy-initially-fell-sh/	Social Security today is not the program President Franklin D. Roosevelt had in mind when he signed it into law in 1935, according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "We adopted the modern Social Security system at a time when the average person died before they were old enough to get Social Security," he said during a Dec. 2 interview on "The John Fredericks Show," broadcast in Virginia. "We now have some people who are living 50 years on Social Security," Gingrich said. "Nobody ever tried to design a system like this, and we’re going to have to rethink our whole approach." We wondered if Gingrich was right about life expectancy falling short of Social Security age in 1935. The bill signed by Roosevelt offered benefits to retirees when they turned 65. U.S. life expectancy for a person born in 1935 was just under 62 years, according to records from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On average, girls were expected to live to 64 and boys to 60. We were curious whether the retirement age was set purposely at 65 to deprive most people of receiving Social Security. Did Roosevelt make this calculation? "Certainly the Roosevelt administration did not," said Edward Berkowitz, a professor of public policy at George Washington University and author of several books on Social Security. "My understanding, that I received from longtime Social Security actuary Robert Myers, was that the age 65 had no particular significance and was chosen because a choice needed to be made and (it) seemed reasonable." Myers, who died in 2010, helped to write the Social Security law and in a 1992 memoir offered a simple explanation for how the Roosevelt administration chose the qualifying age for benefits. "Age 65 was picked because 60 was too young and 70 was too old," he wrote. "So we split the difference." Berkowitz told us that life expectancy at birth - then and now - "is not a good measure of how many people who are working and paying into Social Security will die before age 65." That’s because the life expectancy average is skewed by infant deaths. After infancy is survived, life expectancy goes up. That said, we’ll give you one final set of numbers. Average U.S. life expectancy from birth in 2015 was 78.8 years, according to figures just released by the National Center for Health Statistics. It declined from 78.9 in 2014 - the first drop since 1993. Average life expectancy for men last year was 76.3 years; for women, 81.2. Our ruling Gingrich said, "We adopted the modern Social Security system at a time when the average person died before they were old enough to get Social Security." We rate his statement True.	None	Newt Gingrich	None	None	None	2016-12-12T00:00:00	2016-12-02	['None']
-tron-02847	Biblical Historian Says He Does Not Respect President Obama	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/barton-respect-obama/	None	obama	None	None	None	Biblical Historian Says He Does Not Respect President Obama	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pose-00947	"I will call for an increase in the allowable size of the Rainy Day Fund, to help buttress the Commonwealth against the difficult times that we must always be prepared for."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/virginia/promises/bob-o-meter/promise/981/expand-the-rainy-day-fund/	None	bob-o-meter	Bob McDonnell	None	None	Expand the Rainy Day Fund	2011-09-09T12:56:22	None	['Commonwealth_of_Nations']
-snes-04772	A Canadian teen discovered a lost Mayan city using satellite maps.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/canadian-teen-satellite-maps/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Canadian Teen Finds Lost Mayan City With Satellite Maps	11 May 2016	None	['Canada']
-pomt-10674	"Iranian mullahs took American hostages and they held the American hostages for 444 days. ...The one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the Oath of Office …"	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/18/rudy-giuliani/ad-misleading-about-iran-hostage-crisis/	Rudy Giuliani invokes his tough-on-terrorism image with a television advertisement about the Iran hostage crisis. He gets most of the facts correct but his insinuation that President Reagan deserves all the credit for the hostages' release is wrong. Here is the transcript of his 30-second commercial, spoken as grainy black and white photos of hostages appear on the screen: "I remember back to the 1970s and the early 1980s. Iranian mullahs took American hostages and they held the American hostages for 444 days. And they released the American hostages in one hour, and that should tell us a lot about these Islamic terrorists that we're facing. "The one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the Oath of Office as President of the United States. The best way you deal with dictators, the best way you deal with tyrants and terrorists, you stand up to them. You don't back down. I'm Rudy Giuliani and I approve this message." The script is technically accurate. On Nov. 4, 1979, militant Iranian students — not mullahs, as Giuliani says — took control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 hostages. Of those, 52 remained in captivity for 444 days. The terms of their release is the Algiers Accord, an agreement negotiated by Jimmy Carter's administration on Jan. 19, 1981, according to State Department documents. The following day at 12:23 p.m. EST, less than one hour after Carter relinquished the presidency to Ronald Reagan, the hostages were let go. But just because it happened on Reagan's watch, doesn't mean he deserves credit, said Warren Christopher, Carter's deputy Secretary of State and lead negotiator for the United States. "It happened that they did not hit Algiers until (Reagan) was in office about a half-hour," Christopher said. "But all the negotiations took place before the inauguration." Temple University professor David Farber and journalist Mark Bowden both wrote books about the Iranian hostage situation and reach similar conclusions. "The whole direction is misleading," Farber said. "Reagan had made no claims he would do something specifically different. There was no cause-and-effect relationship." "(Giuliani) is reporting one of the standard glib historical assessments of the hostage crisis," Bowden said. "The idea that Reagan had any affect on their release is laughable." Bowden said waiting until Carter left office had more to do with the Iranian leaders dislike of Carter "than a fear of Reagan," he added. While Giuliani is technically correct that the hostages were released after 444 days in the first hour Reagan took office, Reagan wasn't responsible. So Giuliani's message doesn't match the facts. We rule this statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Rudy Giuliani	None	None	None	2007-12-18T00:00:00	2007-12-05	['United_States', 'Iran', 'Ronald_Reagan']
-hoer-00208	Circulating Post Recommends Wasp Spray As A Substitute for Pepper Spray	misleading recommendations	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/wasp-spray-substitue-pepper-spray.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Circulating Post Recommends Wasp Spray As A Substitute for Pepper Spray	January 22, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-12235	Russian natural gas company "Gazprom held Europe by the throat -- they were a monopoly, and now the U.S. is breaking into that monopoly with our exports of (liquefied natural gas)."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/17/pat-robertson/us-liquefied-natural-gas-game-changer-russia-europ/	When PolitiFact fact-checks an interview with the president, we usually train our Truth-O-Meter on the president’s answers. But during a recent televised sit-down between President Donald Trump and televangelist Pat Robertson on the Christian Broadcasting Network, a question by Robertson caught our attention. Robertson said Gazprom, a Russian natural-gas giant, "held Europe by the throat -- they were a monopoly, and now the U.S. is breaking into that monopoly with our exports of LNG," or liquefied natural gas. Trump replied, "We are. We have LNG exporting all over." The normal way to transport natural gas is through pipelines, but pipelines aren’t considered economical for transoceanic shipments of natural gas. Liquefied natural gas, or LNG, has been cooled so that it can be shipped more efficiently as a liquid in specially designed cargo ships. Transporting natural gas this way requires specialized facilities at both ends of the voyage. (Here’s a more detailed explanation from the federal government.) See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Diagram: Government Accountability Office With that in mind, we wondered whether Robertson was accurately describing the current state of trade in natural gas between the United States, Europe, and Russia. We found that Robertson had a point, but one that was oversimplified. (A public-relations firm that represents the Christian Broadcasting Network, which was founded by Robertson, told PolitiFact that they had nothing to add to his comments during the interview.) We’ll break down Robertson’s claim into two pieces. Did Gazprom hold ‘Europe by the throat’? Is it ‘a monopoly’? Gazprom does indeed have a history of being used by the Russian government as a hardball tool of foreign policy. In 2008, during a dispute with Ukraine, Russia cut off gas supplies to Europe. Natural gas emerged as a possible conflict point again in 2014, after the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea. Threats by Russia are credible because certain European countries are heavily dependent on Russian natural gas. "Russia supplies 100 percent, or close to 100 percent, of natural gas imports in some central eastern and southeastern European countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Finland and, until recently, Lithuania," said Jason Bordoff, director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. This "gives Russia some leverage," Bordoff said. "Unlike oil, which can more easily and flexibly be moved from place to place, gas typically moves through pipeline, which makes buyer and seller more dependent." That said, Robertson’s phrasing isn’t entirely accurate, experts told PolitiFact. Gazprom is a monopoly from the perspective of Russia, Bordoff said -- that is, it’s the only company allowed to export pipeline gas from Russia. But it is not a monopoly from the perspective of its European buyers, especially in the northwestern and southern portions of the continent, where energy portfolios are more diversified, said Tim Boersma, a senior scholar at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy. "Russia only supplies about one-third of Europe's gas, so Europe has plenty of other sources," Bordoff said. In many cases, he said, European countries buy Russian gas because it is cheaper -- not because it’s the only option. Meanwhile, much of Europe has options beyond natural gas. "Natural gas competes with coal, oil, nuclear and renewables to various degrees across Europe," said Paul Sullivan, an energy-markets specialist affiliated with National Defense University and Georgetown University. "Often, markets for energy sources can overlap, especially in the long run as relative prices change." Is the U.S. now ‘breaking into that monopoly with our exports of LNG’? This is certainly an aspiration of the United States, which in recent years has begun tapping into large reserves of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." Speaking at a press conference in Warsaw in advance of the recent G-20 summit meeting, Trump said, "Let me be clear about one crucial point. The United States will never use energy to coerce your nations, and we cannot allow others to do so. You don't want to have a monopoly or a monopolistic situation." And the United States’ aspiration is beginning to materialize, at least in a modest way. In June, one LNG shipment traveled from the United States to Poland, and another is expected to arrive in Lithuania later in the summer, Bordoff said. Both shipments were made possible because Poland and Lithuania have built new LNG terminals in recent years. "In these two instances, Bordoff said, "LNG from the United States competes more or less directly with Russian gas." However, the U.S. footprint in European LNG markets is quite small. Currently, shipments to Europe represent a fraction of the United States’ LNG exports -- according to the most recent data, the top 10 buyers of American LNG are dominated by Latin American and Asian nations. In order, they are Mexico, Chile, Japan, China, Argentina, Jordan, India, Kuwait, South Korea, Turkey. In addition, a sizable chunk of the LNG sent by the United States to Europe goes to countries like Spain, Portugal and Italy -- places where American LNG is generally not displacing Russian natural gas. Spain and Portugal do not import Russian gas, and while Italy does, it has a more balanced portfolio, Bordoff said. Limits to future growth Meanwhile, a variety of factors are expected to limit how much of a player United States LNG can eventually become in European markets. Here are some of them: • Infrastructure and price. The cooling and uncooling of LNG adds to the ultimate price of the fuel -- and it requires the construction of LNG-capable terminals. In addition to the LNG terminals in Poland and Lithuania, Croatia is expected to build one, but it probably won’t be operational until 2020, Bordoff said. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com A liquefied natural gas carrier docked in France. (Wikimedia commons) Pipelines used by Russia, by contrast, are already built and operating. "American LNG may have some presence in Europe, but Russian gas will be always cheaper and more competitive," said Anna Mikulska, a fellow at Rice University’s Center for Energy Studies. And the United States is not exactly brimming with LNG export facilities, either. The only one located in the lower 48 states is Sabine Pass in Louisiana. Another one, in Alaska, is geared more toward Asian markets. (There are other terminals that take imports only.) "We have a lot of LNG export facilities in the works, but so do the Australians and others," Sullivan said. "Australia is focusing mostly on the Pacific and Asian markets, but it could break into other markets later." • The United States is a latecomer to this market. Even within the universe of LNG exporters to Europe, other countries have a head start on the United States. The top natural gas suppliers to Europe -- via either pipelines or LNG -- are, in order, Russia, Norway, Algeria, Qatar, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Libya, Trinidad & Tobago, and Peru. Even for Poland and Lithuania, the recipients of American shipments this year, the leading LNG suppliers are currently Qatar and Norway, Bordoff said. "Europe has many actual and potential sources of natural gas and LNG," Sullivan said. "The U.S. is one of them, but this will be small for some time. The U.S. will also be exporting to Asia due to the faster growth of Asian demand compared to Europe." Succeeding in the European LNG market, Sullivan said, "will take a long time and require massive investments." • Russian business practices. "Russia plays hardball with prices," Sullivan said. "As soon as they see possible competition, they drop prices and change other characteristics of gas deals to try to slow the competition." A final note: While neither Robertson nor Trump specifically credited Trump’s actions in office for the progress being made in LNG markets, we should note that these trends were already under way during the tenure of his predecessor, President Barack Obama. "This is not thanks to Trump," Mikulska said. "In fact, the Obama administration's policy to liberalize LNG exports is much more responsible for the growth in LNG trade." Our ruling Robertson said that "Gazprom held Europe by the throat -- they were a monopoly, and now the U.S. is breaking into that monopoly with our exports of LNG." He has a point -- Russia has a history of using natural gas supplies as an instrument of foreign policy, and a number of European countries are heavily reliant on Russian gas, making them susceptible to pressure. However, many European countries have other energy-supply options, and while the United States has made recent gains in the European LNG market, these advances have been limited and face challenges going forward. We rate the statement Half True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Pat Robertson	None	None	None	2017-07-17T10:00:00	2017-07-12	['United_States', 'Russia', 'Gazprom', 'Europe']
-pomt-00233	Says Marsha Blackburn "voted against the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which attempts to protect women from domestic violence, stalking, and date rape."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/oct/09/taylor-swift/taylor-swift-marsha-blackburn-voted-against-reauth/	Pop star Taylor Swift jumped into the rough and tumble of politics with a rebuke of Tennessee Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn and an endorsement of Democrat Phil Bredesen. In a long Instagram post, Swift explained that her concern over matters of gender orientation and racism drove her to speak out. "I cannot vote for someone who will not be willing to fight for dignity for ALL Americans, no matter their skin color, gender or who they love," Swift said. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Blackburn, Swift said, "terrifies" her. "She voted against equal pay for women," Swift wrote. "She voted against the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which attempts to protect women from domestic violence, stalking, and date rape." Here, we look at whether Blackburn in fact voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. Blackburn did vote against the bill, but she voted in favor of a Republican alternative. The differences were not great, but they hung on the very issue of gender orientation that Swift wrote about. The 2013 controversy The Violence Against Women Act was two decades old in 2013 when Congress wrestled with renewing the funds to support it. The law paid for programs to prevent domestic violence. It provided money to investigate and prosecute rape and other crimes against women. It supported counseling for victims. The $630 million price tag was less the problem than some specific language on non-discrimination. The Senate approved its bill first on Feb. 12, 2013, by a wide bipartisan margin of 78 to 22. That measure redefined underserved populations to include those who might be discriminated against based on religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. There were also changes in the recognition of the authority of Native American tribes to enforce the law within the tribal justice system. When the bill came over to the House, a key sticking point had to do with orientation and identity. House Republicans crafted a version of the legislation that omitted the sexual orientation and gender protections. The American Bar Association opposed the GOP version, saying "the House substitute eliminates certain critical improvements." Domestic violence shelters in some southern states said they had heard from governors’ offices that they couldn’t use federal funds for LGBTQ victims because the law didn’t explicitly say they were covered. "You show up bleeding at the door and we’re going to address the bleeding, not stop to ask about your sexual orientation or gender identity first," said Ruth Glenn, CEO of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. "We didn’t want programs to lose their funding because they didn’t do triage on that basis." The House Republican version failed by a vote of 166 to 257. The nay votes included 60 Republicans. Blackburn voted in favor of the Republican measure. The Senate version, the one that ultimately became law, came up next and passed 286 to 138. The bill had picked up 27 additional Republican votes. Blackburn voted no. We reached out to Blackburn’s office for comment and did not hear back. Our ruling Swift said Blackburn voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. Blackburn voted no on the final version that became law. She did vote for a Republican alternative that lacked discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. While there were other issues, over two dozen Republicans decided that it was better to fund the act than to continue to oppose the nondiscrimination provisions. Blackburn was not one of them. We rate the claim Mostly True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Taylor Swift	None	None	None	2018-10-09T12:18:55	2018-10-07	['None']
-pomt-06091	"We are now eighth in the nation in job creation . . . we are No. 1 in the Midwest."	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2012/jan/06/john-kasich/john-kasich-says-ohio-no-8-job-creation-no-1-midwe/	When John Kasich narrowly upset incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland to become Ohio's 69th governor, an issue the Republican pounded on was job creation. Ohio had lost nearly 400,000 jobs during Strickland's tenure, and Kasich played that song again and again as he pinned the losses on Strickland. With Ohio's economy on a modest rebound, the Kasich administration is keeping a close eye on the key economic numbers during his first year in office knowing that how voters perceive Kasich's record on jobs could be a key factor in whether he earns a second term in office. Kasich held an end-of-the-year session with reporters Dec. 19, 2011, that was designed to highlight his administration’s accomplishments and Ohio's limited economic recovery over the past year was front and center. As Kasich rattled off some statistics to bolster his case, he honed in on job creation -- a key measuring stick in a state where unemployment rates have hovered in the double digits in recent years. Kasich said Ohio is now on the comeback trail under his tenure. "We are now eighth in the nation in job creation...and No. 1 in the Midwest," Kasich told reporters. PolitiFact Ohio went to work to check out the governor’s claim. Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols told us the numbers came straight from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data that serves as the baseline for the state's unemployment rate. Using the category of all non-farm workers adjusted for seasonal employment -- so that work done only part of the year, like summer lifeguards, aren't included -- we compared the number of jobs in Ohio in January 2011 when Kasich took office with where the numbers stood in late December when the November estimates were released. We found that Ohio was close to where Kasich had said -- 9th in the country in the raw number of jobs created with a net increase of an estimated 45,200 jobs this year. Ohio was also tops in the Midwest if you define the Midwest as the U.S. Census Bureau does: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. (If you include Pennsylvania as a Midwest state Ohio would slip to No. 2.) But when you look at what states rank the highest in raw numbers of jobs created over that time frame, you begin to notice a common characteristic: they are predominately the states with the highest populations. By raw numbers the most jobs created were in California (193,800), Texas (158,300), Florida (120,200), New York (101,000), New Jersey (52,100), Massachusetts (50,000), Louisiana (49,700), Pennsylvania (45,400) and Ohio (45,200). And by population the biggest states are California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The only state in the top seven in population to be outside the top 10 in job growth is Illinois, which is No.11 in raw number of jobs created with 38,100. When you hold steady for the relative population size of a state by looking at the new jobs created as a percentage of the state's workforce population, Ohio drops precipitously down the job creation ranks. In terms of relative job creation, Ohio has roughly 0.89 percent more people estimated to be in the workforce today than at the beginning of the year which is good for 22nd place among the 50 states. Once you hold equal for population, the top 10 job creation states become a mix of small, medium and big states: North Dakota (3.72 percent more workers than January 2011), Wyoming (2.64), Louisiana (2.63), Oklahoma (2.24), South Carolina (2.09), Utah (2.04), Arizona (1.74), Florida (1.68), Massachusetts (1.57) and Texas (1.51). Ohio's 22nd ranking would slot them in between West Virginia (0.98 percent) and Pennsylvania (0.80). And two other Midwestern states, by the U.S. Census definition, would top Ohio on a percentage basis -- South Dakota and Nebraska. Kasich spokesman Nichols argues that raw numbers are how job creation is commonly discussed and that because the Kasich administration spent so much time talking about the raw number of lost jobs under Strickland's watch that it should be how things are measured. "It's the very same yardstick we used during the election," Nichols said. While that is true, the context of Kasich's remark came when he was comparing Ohio to other states around the country trying to make the case that the Buckeye State was becoming a national leader in job creation. Ranking by percent increase of the workforce allows for an apples-to-apples comparison. The results give you a mix of states of all population sizes in the top 10. That's additional information that clarifies the claim and puts the job picture in better context. On the Truth-O-Meter, the governor’s claim rates Mostly True.	None	John Kasich	None	None	None	2012-01-06T06:00:00	2012-01-19	['Midwestern_United_States']
-snes-03691	Chelsea Clinton is married to George Soros' nephew.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chelsea-clinton-george-soros-nephew/	None	Politicians	None	Dan Evon	None	Is Chelsea Clinton Married to George Soros’ Nephew?	27 October 2016	None	['George_Soros', 'Chelsea_Clinton']
-vogo-00467	Statement: “We find that about two-thirds of the businesses and multifamily complexes are doing a great job, but that means that there’s still about a third that don’t have recycling,” Ken Prue, the city’s recycling program manager, said on KPBS Nov. 17.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-how-often-san-diego-recycles/	Analysis: Nearly three years ago, the city created mandatory recycling rules for residents and business owners — use the blue bins or face a maximum $1,000 fine.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: How Often San Diego Recycles	December 15, 2010	None	['None']
-tron-02941	President Trump to Remove Statue of Liberty, Return it to France	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/president-trump-statue-of-liberty/	None	politics	None	None	['barack obama', 'donald trump', 'immigrants']	President Trump to Remove Statue of Liberty, Return it to France	Feb 9, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10108	"Sen. Obama's campaign announced that he's choosing his cabinet."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/21/john-mccain/no-cabinet-picks-yet/	At a rally in Bensalem, Pa., John McCain accused Barack Obama of getting cocky. "We have 14 days to go. We're a few points down. The national media has written us off . . . Just the other day, Sen. Obama's campaign announced that he's choosing his Cabinet," McCain said at the Oct. 21, 2008, event. The remark invokes a theme from the McCain campaign that Obama has gotten overly confident. McCain and his surrogates have criticized (and sometimes ridiculed) the Obama campaign's use of an emblem that resembled the presidential seal on a lectern, and the campaign's use of large Greek columns as a backdrop for Obama's stadium speech to the Democratic National Convention. Rather than "a few points down," the latest Gallup poll showed McCain trailing by 10 points nationally; the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll had him down by 9 points. It's a matter of opinion whether the media "has written us off." There have been many news stories about how McCain has fallen behind, but most that we've seen have not said definitively that he will lose. For this item, we are exploring whether McCain was correct when he said that Obama "has announced that he's choosing his Cabinet." We have seen no such comment by the Obama campaign, nor could the McCain campaign provide one. Instead, the McCain campaign pointed to an Oct. 19 article in the Sunday Times of London that was headlined " Barack Obama lines up a cabinet of stars as John McCain struggles on ." The headline seems to indicate Obama is far along in his Cabinet-picking. But the story doesn't live up to the headline. The story is just another speculative account of what Obama might do if he is elected: "A host of well-known figures . . . have indicated they would be willing to serve in some capacity," the article says. It relies not on any "announcement" from Obama, but on unnamed sources such as "an Obama adviser" and "one leading Democrat policy adviser." The closest the article comes to an announcement from Obama himself is to quote his comment from the final debate that he would adopt a bipartisan approach to government and admired Republican Sen. Richard Lugar and Gen. Jim Jones, the former NATO commander. “Those are the people, Democrat and Republican, who have shaped my ideas and who will be surrounding me in the White House,” Obama said. But that's a long way from "announcing" that he was picking his Cabinet. In fact, it came in response to a question. The McCain comment is particularly silly because it's been widely reported that both campaigns have staffers planning a transition and exploring possible Cabinet choices. McCain's transition team is said to be headed by John F. Lehman Jr., a Navy secretary under President Reagan. William E. Timmons, a longtime Washington lobbyist, is also involved, according to an account in the New York Times . Obama's team is headed by John Podesta, a chief of staff under President Clinton. The Obama campaign declined to comment on transition plans and the McCain campaign did not reply to an e-mail about it. News accounts suggest that Obama's team is further along than McCain's but that both campaigns have begun preparations so they are ready in case they win. Clay Johnson III, deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told the New York Times that “the White House staff has met with transition representatives” for McCain and Obama. “Both campaigns are doing what they need to do to be prepared to govern on Jan. 20 at noon,” said Johnson, who was executive director of the Bush transition team in 2000-01. “The amount of work being done before the election, formal and informal, is the most ever.” But back to McCain's claim. Has Obama "announced that he's choosing his Cabinet"? He definitely has not. What's happening is the usual transition planning that occurs with any presidential campaign in the final days before an election. We find McCain's claim to be False.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-10-21T00:00:00	2008-10-21	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-08272	"The amount of the revenue required by the state (for the construction of high-speed rail) is around 10 percent."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2010/nov/09/bill-nelson/bill-nelson-says-feds-are-funding-most-proposed-ta/	Elected Democrats and Republicans are concerned that outsider Rick Scott's victory in the race for governor could doom a proposed high-speed rail line connecting Tampa and Orlando. So they're coming to the defense of the $2.654 billion rail line by noting that construction of the proposed rail line would mostly be paid for with federal dollars. Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson made the case to a group of 1,800 business leaders on Nov. 8, 2010, at an Orlando rail forum. "Let's ask the governor-elect not to return the $2 billion in federal funds the state so desperately needs," Nelson said. "The amount of the revenue required by the state is around 10 percent," Nelson said. "It could be one of the biggest boosts to the Florida economy since the location of Disney and the interstate highway system." Republican state Sen. Paula Dockery, a Scott adviser and rail supporter, also has said she hoped Scott would move forward with the rail project, noting that the project is estimated to create 5,000 jobs during the four-year construction period and that the rail line would employ 600-1,000 people once operational, and other spin-off jobs. We can't check the job creation figures, since they are estimates, but we can assess Nelson's claim that the state is on the hook for only around 10 percent of the cost to build the line. But first a little bit about the line itself, and why people are concerned Scott might kill the Tampa-to-Orlando project. Construction on the 85-mile rail line would link downtown Tampa with the Orlando International Airport and would begin in earnest in 2012 and be completed in 2015. The rail line would have five stations mainly along Interstate 4, and would include stops in Polk County, near Disney World and at the Orange County Convention Center. Plans call for purchasing five trains capable of holding 250 passengers that could make the entire trip in less than an hour at speeds of at least 168 mph. According to the state, a one-way trip from Tampa-Orlando is anticipated to cost $30 as a one-time fare, or less for regular users. The state also has plans for an $8 billion Orlando-Miami line, though no funding is in place. Scott has questioned the rail line publicly, first attacking his Democratic gubernatorial opponent Alex Sink for supporting the line without addressing how she'd pay for it, then saying the true cost to the state is unknown. Here's what he had to say about rail during the Oct. 25, 2010, CNN/St. Petersburg Times debate: "Every project we do, we have to get return for taxpayers," Scott said. "So, the way I look at it, on the high-speed rail, if the federal government is going to fund all of it, and there's no -- there's nothing the state -- going to cost the state any money, let's look at it. But let's look at a final feasibility study. Let's look at exactly what the state is responsible for. But if you're going to build an office building, you wouldn't ... go build half of it with the money and wait and see, hopefully, somebody is going to show up with the rest. We shouldn't be doing that with any projects like rail. "Let's make sure we have all of the money. Let's do a final feasibility study. Let's actually look at what the real return is," Scott added, saying he would put a hold on the project until he had all the data he needed. The fear from Nelson and others that Scott might kill the rail project was made more real when newly elected Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio said that they wanted to end rail projects in their states, saying the projects are a money pit. So how is the Tampa-Orlando line being paid for? In January, President Barack Obama announced that the rail line will receive $1.25 billion in federal stimulus dollars. Then in October, the federal government announced it was directing another $800 million to the project in transportation funds. As part of the $800 million award, the state pledged a match of $280 million. That's a total of $2.33 billion already committed to the project -- leaving a funding gap of around $325 million. Nazih Haddad, chief operating officer for the state Transportation Department's Florida Rail Enterprise, said the gap will hopefully be filled by additional federal dollars, or potentially private sector investment. "At this time, the state's contribution is limited to $280 million," Haddad said. If that's the case, the state will contribute $280 million for the construction of the $2.654 billion Tampa-Orlando line, or 10.55 percent. (So far it has pledged 12 percent of the $2.33 billion committed). The caveat, of course, is that the percentage neglects to account for how the remainder of the line will be funded. If the state was forced to pick up the rest of the costs, the state's share would rise to 22.8 percent. If the state was asked to pick up half of the remaining costs, the percentage contribution would increase to 16.7 percent. A quarter of the additional cost translates to a 13.6 percent share. And so on. State and federal officials, including Nelson, predict the federal government will fund much if not all of the cost remaining. But we're not willing to write the money off as a foregone conclusion. Haddad correctly clarified Nelson's comments. "If we are able to obtain the remaining money from federal sources, the total federal share will be approximately 90 percent with the state's share of a little over 10 percent," he said. Now, since we're talking about money, a quick word on the operation of the train. State officials say they will seek a partnership with a private operator to maintain and run the system, with each side sharing some of the risk. Still, the state estimates the system will turn a profit in its first year of operation. The system will cost $164,000 a day to run, but will generate $170,000 a day in revenues, and about 5,400 riders daily. (These, again, are figures we can't check since they're projections and estimates. Also, no word on how any profit would be shared). Back to Nelson's claim. He said the amount of revenue required by the state to build the Tampa-Orlando high-speed rail line is "around 10 percent." Nelson's point is largely right. The federal government to date has pledged $2.05 billion to the line compared to $280 million from the state. That puts the state on the hook for about 12 percent of the costs so far. But there is still a $325 million or so hole that needs to be filled. Depending on how the state, the federal government and possibly the private sector split that cost, the state's share could increase, or decrease. Until those checks are written, we think it's appropriate to rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Bill Nelson	None	None	None	2010-11-09T16:27:47	2010-11-08	['None']
-snes-04599	A photograph shows a Muslim woman disrespecting the United States by sitting during its national anthem.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muslim-woman-sits-national-anthem/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Woman Sits During National Anthem	16 June 2016	None	['United_States', 'Islam']
-wast-00107	I recently signed legislation that includes more than $2 billion to improve school safety, including the funding for training, and metal detectors, and security and mental health.	4 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/23/the-trump-administrations-bogus-spin-that-it-obtained-2-billion-for-school-safety/	None	None	Donald Trump	Glenn Kessler	None	The Trump administration's bogus spin that it obtained $2 billion for \xe2\x80\x98school safety'	May 23	None	['None']
-goop-00997	Katy Perry “Furious” Taylor Swift Shared Olive Branch Publicly?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/katy-perry-taylor-swift-furious-olive-branch-shared-publicly-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Katy Perry “Furious” Taylor Swift Shared Olive Branch Publicly?	2:34 pm, May 15, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-07324	"We're within 600 miles of 60 percent of America. We're in a perfect location."	true	/ohio/statements/2011/may/13/john-kasich/gov-john-kasich-says-60-percent-us-population-with/	Location is commonly cited as the most important consideration in buying real estate, and geographic location was the reason that Cleveland once was tagged as being -- or occupying -- "the best location in the nation." The slogan was coined in 1944 by the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., now part of FirstEnergy Corp., to help build post-war business. "The claim was based on the fact that within 500 miles of the city lived half the people of the United States and Canada; that Cleveland was the natural meeting place of iron ore, coal, copper, gypsum, stone, sand and other vital raw materials; and that efficient water, rail, highway and air transportation facilitated delivery and reduced costs," wrote historians Carol Poh Miller and Robert Anthony Wheeler. The slogan has fallen into disuse, but geography hasn't changed. Gov. John Kasich touted the concept this month when he spoke to the Ohio Chamber of Commerce about making Ohio more competitive for business growth: "We're to the point now where location matters because logistics matters again," he said. "Cost of shipping things matters again. We're within 600 miles of 60 percent of America. We're in a perfect location." Given our Buckeye bias, PolitiFact Ohio wanted to believe it. But we have examined similar claims before and found them wanting. We knew that population has shifted since the 1940s, when the population center point of the entire nation (now in Missouri) was still in Ohio. But we also noted that Kasich moved the measuring stick from 500 miles cited in those previous claims to 600 miles. Using the tools we employed before, we built a map including all U.S. counties whose seats are located within 600 miles of Ohio's borders. We used U.S. Census Bureau data to calculate the aggregate population. We found that 184,900,000 people live within 600 miles of Ohio, or 59.9 percent of the U.S. population of 308.7 million. That's 60 percent, whether you round off by a number that is not statistically significant or factor a margin of error. The 600-mile reach would include nearly all of the Eastern Seaboard, the upper Midwest, much of the Deep South and some states west of the Mississippi River. One additional note: In addition to 60 percent of the U.S. population, Kasich’s claim also would encompass the most populous parts of Ontario and Quebec. We rate Kasich's statement as True.	None	John Kasich	None	None	None	2011-05-13T06:00:00	2011-05-10	['United_States']
-pose-00800	"Double the number of Texas-Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (T-STEM) academies from 46 to 92, significantly increasing the number of students attending the academies."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/perry-o-meter/promise/831/double-texas-science-technology-engineering-and/	None	perry-o-meter	Rick Perry	None	None	Double Texas-Science, Technology, Engineering and Math academies	2011-01-13T12:33:38	None	['None']
-vogo-00062	Statement: “To close driest year ever, water use last month in SD was up 25% over the same month a year ago. Do better,” Matt O’Malley of San Diego Coastkeeper wrote in a Jan. 30 tweet.	determination: mostly true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-surging-water-use-in-a-parched-california/	Analysis: California is in the midst of one of its worst-ever droughts.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Surging Water Use in a Parched California	February 5, 2014	None	['None']
-para-00061	"The Federal Coalition wants to privatise public health care. Just like America."	pants on fire!	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/14/nsw-nurses-and-midwives-association/does-coalition-want-privatise-health-care-like-US/index.html	None	['Health']	NSW Nurses and Midwives' Association	Jonathan Pearlman, Peter Fray	None	Does the Federal Coalition want to privatise public health care like in the US?	Wednesday, August 14, 2013 at 6:15 p.m.	None	['United_States']
-pomt-03276	Says Houston National Cemetery is preventing Christian prayers from being said at military funerals.	false	/texas/statements/2013/aug/06/america/foramerica-says-houston-national-cemetery-preventi/	An image posted on Facebook by the conservative group ForAmerica says, "The Houston National Cemetery is preventing Christian prayers from being said at military funerals!" ForAmerica, which according to its website is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Reston, Va., urges Facebookers to "like" the image "if you agree this is wrong!" Well, turns out it is wrong -- just not in the way ForAmerica meant. "That’s an old story," Houston National Cemetery director Mat Williams told us by phone. "We got a bunch of calls about that. But it’s not true." ForAmerica spokesman Keith Appell told us the image and an accompanying blog entry, posted July 11, 2013, were based on a item posted the day before on the conservative Breitbart.com website and a July 9 report from the Family Research Council, a conservative, Christian group based in Washington, D.C. The Breitbart item and the council’s report said that on July 26, 2011, U.S. Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, "determined that Houston National Cemetery was preventing Christian prayers from being said at military funerals." Such allegations about the 430-acre cemetery in northwest Houston resulted in legal action in 2011 that drew national attention, according to Houston Chronicle news stories from June 28, 2011, Sept. 22, 2011, and Dec. 12, 2011 and an Oct. 20, 2011, KHOU-TV news story. U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes granted a temporary restraining order May 26, 2011, that allowed a pastor to deliver his Memorial Day invocation as written after the clergyman said then-director Arleen Ocasio told him not to say "Jesus Christ" in the service held at the cemetery, where nearly 70,000 service members and veterans and their spouses have been interred since its dedication in 1965. Ocasio, according to a Aug. 30, 2011, New York Times news story, "began enforcing a little-noticed 2007 policy that prohibits volunteer honor guards from reading recitations — including religious ones — in their funeral rituals, unless families specifically request them." U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs officials said the policy originated after "complaints about religious words or icons being inserted unrequested into veterans’ funerals," the Times story said. Later that year, the Chronicle reported, Veterans’ Affairs settled a lawsuit that alleged officials had told local veterans and volunteers not to use religious words such as "Jesus" and "God" during funerals at the cemetery. In the settlement reached Sept. 21, 2011, the VA did not admit fault but agreed not to interfere with religious speech at funerals unless relatives objected, according to the next day’s Chronicle news story. Since then, current cemetery director Williams said, "We haven’t had any incidents; no problems." U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, and a Culberson aide have visited the cemetery, he said, and veterans are there every day: "If there was anything like that, they would be in an uproar. But no, it’s a phony story." Veterans’ families aren’t restricted from practicing any religion, he said. "It’s their service; they can do any religious ceremony they want." Leaders of Houston volunteer groups that were plaintiffs in the 2011 lawsuit gave us similar accounts. "Everything is running very smooth there. There are no problems," said Cheryl Whitfield, director of National Memorial Ladies, whose 34 members sometimes are, she said, the only mourners during funerals at the cemetery. "We attend all of the burials at Houston National Cemetery every day. There are anywhere from four to 12 a day. So we attend approximately 60 a week. And we give our condolences to the family," Whitfield told us by phone. "We use God’s name, we use Jesus’ name; we’re able to say anything to help console the family." Her group finds out in advance about relatives’ wishes regarding religion’s role in the funeral, she said. "We pretty well know ahead of time if they have an issue with us saying ‘God bless you’ or anything." The current commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars district that brought the lawsuit, Bill Shaffer, told us by phone that he’s been with District 4 for about 16 years and knew of no such problems before or since the 2011 events. "I know we’ve had Jewish people, I know we’ve had Muslims, we’ve had Christian Science, Baptist, Catholic," he said. "We adhere to whoever it is. That veteran deserves his last rites and we go along with whatever the family wishes, and I just hope that the government continues to do that." The VFW has been a Christian organization since its founding in 1899, he said, and the team from District 4 that provides funeral honors performs a ritual that can include a 21-gun salute, presentation of the American flag, a chaplain and prayers. "It’s up to them. Whatever part of the ritual they want, we do," he said. "If they want the entire ritual, we do the entire ritual." ForAmerica spokesman Appell, when informed that we’d found no evidence Christian prayers were being prevented, told us the group "believed the information to be current." Our ruling ForAmerica said the Houston National Cemetery "is preventing" Christian prayer at military funerals. The group based its claim on recent online references to a congressman’s claim in July 2011. We found no current restrictions or even proof that anyone was stopped from saying a Christian prayer in the past. To the contrary, volunteers and the current cemetery director told us Christian prayers are welcome. We rate ForAmerica’s statement as False.	None	ForAmerica	None	None	None	2013-08-06T18:07:24	2013-07-11	['None']
-snes-06227	Sherlock Holmes said, "Elementary, my dear Watson."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elementary-my-dear-watson/	None	Entertainment	None	David Mikkelson	None	Sherlock Holmes and ‘Elementary, My Dear Watson’	2 July 2006	None	['Sherlock_Holmes']
-pomt-10498	Obama "has no experience or background at all in national security affairs."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/apr/03/john-mccain/saying-no-experience-is-no-fair-/	Commenting on Sen. Barack Obama's proposal to leave a "strike force" of U.S. troops in the Middle East after a withdrawal from Iraq, Sen. John McCain belittled his potential rival for the White House, saying Obama had no expertise in the area of national security. "I think somebody ought to ask what in the world (Obama's) talking about, especially since he has no experience or background at all in national security affairs," McCain said in an interview on MSNBC's Morning Joe program. As a Vietnam war hero and senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who has played a key role in most major debates on the war and the military, McCain might feel justified in delivering such a broad swipe. He's not the only candidate to go down this road; before bowing out of the race, former Democratic contender Joe Biden, the senior senator from Delaware, incorrectly said Obama hadn't passed any bills in the Senate. We ruled that statement False. McCain is exaggerating, too. In his three years in the Senate, Obama has dealt with substantial issues such as nuclear proliferation as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and also participated in debates on the Senate floor and within the Democratic caucus on the war strategy, proposed timetables for troop withdrawals and the U.S. response to the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. That national security experience might not match up to McCain's lengthy resume, but it's arguably more than George W. Bush brought to the White House after he was elected president in 2000. One of Obama's biggest legislative accomplishments in the national security arena came in 2006 when he helped write an exemption to the 1954 Atomic Energy Act allowing the United States to export to India civilian nuclear power technology, including nuclear fuel and reactors. The move was seen as cementing relations with an emerging power without endangering longstanding non-proliferation policies. Bush, in signing the bill in December 2006, praised it for "lay(ing) the foundation for a new strategic partnership between our two nations that will help ease India's demands for fossil fuels and ease pressure on global markets." In 2005, Obama and then-Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., toured a weapons destruction facility in the Ukraine where the United States was taking the lead in a three-year NATO program to destroy small arms, shoulder missile launchers and other supplies often sought by terrorists. The pair later collaborated on an effort to triple spending for programs to counter the spread of conventional weapons, but the bill never made it to a Senate vote. In 2005, Obama also participated in a more parochial national security debate, arguing against the Base Realignment and Closure Commission's decision to move some operations at the Rock Island Arsenal in his home state of Illinois to military installations in Texas. It's true that Obama's freshman rank and committee assignments didn't throw him in the middle of the national security fray, and it's true that his background is no match for McCain's. But to say he has absolutely no national security background or experience is an overstatement. For this reason we rule McCain's statement to be False.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-04-03T00:00:00	2008-04-03	['None']
-snes-03922	German police officers started wearing chainmail in 2016 due to an increase in refugee stabbing attacks.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/german-police-chainmail/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	German Police Wearing Chainmail to Defend Against Refugee Attacks	29 September 2016	None	['Germany']
-farg-00059	It's "not true" that immigrants in the U.S. illegally are "safer than the people that live in the country" in terms of crimes committed.	none	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/is-illegal-immigration-linked-to-more-or-less-crime/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Donald Trump	Robert Farley	['Illegal immigration']	Is Illegal Immigration Linked to More or Less Crime?	June 27, 2018	[' Press conference – Friday, June 22, 2018 ']	['United_States']
-pomt-14880	"There are more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/10/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-us-tax-code-has-more-words-bible/	During the Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, Ted Cruz compared two volumes -- one beloved by many, the other loathed by almost everybody. "There are more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible -- and -- and not a one of them is as good," Cruz said. Our New Jersey affiliate checked a similar claim on length in 2013, so we’ll apply their research to Cruz’s claim here. How long is the tax code? A 2010 report by the Internal Revenue Service’s Taxpayer’s Advocate Office found that the tax code contained 3.8 million words. That calculation was made by downloading a zipped file of the code, unzipping it and running it through Microsoft Word’s word count feature, according to a footnote in the report. A 2012 version of the report puts the number of words in the code at "about 4 million." We also reached out to CCH, the Riverwoods, Ill.-based publisher of the two-volume 2013 Winter version of the tax code and was told the best estimate of word length was 4 million. That was two years ago, but we think it’s a safe bet that the length of the tax code has only increased since then, not decreased. How long is the Bible? Dennis Olson, the Charles T. Haley professor of Old Testament Theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary, told PolitiFact New Jersey that a fair approximation of the Bible’s length is 800,000 words for the Old and New testaments combined. "The King James Version would be 823,156 while the more recent New Revised Standard Version would be 774,746 words," Olson said. Hellen Mardaga, an assistant professor of New Testament at Catholic University in Washington, agreed that estimates that put the Bible at 800,000 words were credible. Put it all together and the tax code is roughly five times as long as the Bible. So Cruz is correct. Our ruling Cruz said, "There are more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible." It’s generally accepted that the tax code is about 4 million words long and that the Bible is about 800,000. That’s five times as long. So Cruz’s claim is True.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2015-11-10T23:58:18	2015-11-10	['Bible']
-goop-01237	Taylor Swift Buying Home Near Joe Alwyn, Says Inside	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-buying-home-joe-alwyn-false-house-shopping-london/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Taylor Swift NOT Buying Home Near Joe Alwyn, Says Insider	8:55 pm, April 5, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-02026	Justin Bieber Talking To Pastor Carl Lentz About Proposing To Selena Gomez?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-bieber-carl-lentz-proposing-selena-gomez/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Justin Bieber Talking To Pastor Carl Lentz About Proposing To Selena Gomez?	3:55 pm, December 15, 2017	None	['None']
-pose-01252	"If I'm elected president, I will push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress."	stalled	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1343/enact-term-limits/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Enact term limits	2017-01-17T09:09:22	None	['United_States_Congress']
-pomt-11888	Says the GOP plan he supports is "the biggest tax cut in U.S. history."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/26/donald-trump/donald-trump-wrong-his-tax-plan-biggest-cut-ever/	Over and over again, President Donald Trump has touted his tax proposal as the biggest ever. On Oct. 25, he tweeted, "Working hard on the biggest tax cut in U.S. history. Great support from so many sides. Big winners will be the middle class, business & JOBS." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com That same day, he told Lou Dobbs of the Fox Business Network, "We’re bringing the corporate rate down to 20 percent from 35 percent. ... This will be the biggest tax cut in history. In the history of our country." See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com But is it? Tax experts say no. (The White House did not respond to our inquiry.) The current tax proposal is still a work in progress, but the Senate budget resolution allows it to reduce federal revenues by $1.5 trillion over 10 years. An estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget suggests that, when all is said and done, the reduction in tax revenues will increase to $2.2 trillion over 10 years. So based on what we know now, the tax proposal will probably amount to between $150 billion and $220 billion per year. That doesn’t stack up as the largest cut ever. The Treasury Department has published a list of the biggest tax bills between 1940 and 2012, measured not only by contemporary dollars but also by inflation-adjusted dollars and as a percentage of gross domestic product — two metrics that experts say give a sense of scale. Depending on what projection of the current bill you use and what yardstick you measure it by, at least one tax bill on the Treasury list, and possibly others, were larger. Here’s the list by inflation-adjusted dollars: Tax bill Inflation-adjusted dollars American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (enacted in 2013) $321 billion Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 $210 billion Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 $208 billion Current tax proposal $150 billion - $220 billion Revenue Act of 1964 $64 billion Revenue Act of 1945 $60 billion Revenue Act of 1978 $55 billion Revenue Act of 1948 $38 billion At least the 2013 bill -- and possibly the 2010 and 1981 bills -- exceeded the current bill in inflation-adjusted tax cuts, depending on what figure you project for the current bill. And here are the tax laws ordered from highest to lowest as a percentage of GDP: Tax bill Percentage of GDP Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 2.89 percent Revenue Act of 1945 2.67 percent Revenue Act of 1948 1.87 percent American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (enacted in 2013) 1.78 percent Revenue Act of 1964 1.6 percent Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 1.31 percent Current tax proposal 0.8 percent-1.2 percent Revenue Act of 1978 0.8 percent By this measurement, at least six bills cut taxes by more than the current proposal. A seventh, the Revenue Act of 1978, is essentially tied with the current proposal as a percentage of GDP. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has noted that an even earlier tax cut, from 1921, accounted for 1.1 percent of GDP. The group added in a blog post that "if President Trump wanted to pass a tax cut that exceeds the record 2.9 percent of the economy in 1981, it would cost roughly $6.8 trillion over ten years." No formulation of the current proposal is close to that. "Unless lawmakers scrap their current plans for tax reform and start over from scratch, it’s simply implausible to claim that this legislation will provide the largest tax cut in U.S. history," said Joseph J. Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project at the group Tax Analysts. Our ruling Trump said the GOP tax plan he is supporting is "the biggest tax cut in U.S. history." Even the most expansive estimate for the current proposal’s tax cut is exceeded by the 1981 tax cut in inflation-adjusted dollars. And as a percentage of GDP, a half-dozen or more previous tax cuts were larger. We rate the statement False. See Figure 5 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-10-26T17:02:57	2017-10-25	['United_States', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-snes-00273	A pedophilia group put up a sign reading "Pedophiles are People Too" near a school in Oregon.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pedophile-poster-oregon/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Was a ‘Pedophiles Are People Too’ Notice Posted Near an Oregon School?	1 August 2018	None	['Oregon']
-pomt-05152	Says President Obama's new immigration plan "is amnesty."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/20/jim-demint/immigration-plan-enforcement-amnesty/	After President Barack Obama unveiled a new immigration plan for young people who came to the U.S. illegally, it didn't take long for opponents to criticize the plan with a familiar word: amnesty. Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, responded with a press release that said Obama's action on undocumented youth "is amnesty." That was echoed by other Republicans such as U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who said "President Obama's decision to grant amnesty to potentially millions of illegal immigrants is a breach of faith with the American people." The Obama plan, which does not require congressional approval, allows young people who came here illegally to apply for temporary relief from deportation. In a memo, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano gave immigration officers the leeway to grant that relief for up to two years at a time. They also can approve work permits. Obama said it was the right thing to do for the economy and because "we are a better nation than one that expels innocent young kids." He said, "This is not amnesty. This is not immunity. This is not a path to citizenship. It’s not a permanent fix. This is a temporary, stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people." In this fact-check, we'll examine whether it is accurate to call the new Obama plan "amnesty." DeMint’s spokesman, Wesley Denton, says the matter is straightforward. "When people who are here unlawfully are told by the government that they will not be prosecuted and instead given a legal status and work permits, that’s amnesty," Denton says. In the immigration debate, there is no word more loaded than amnesty. PolitiFact has done many fact-checks on various uses of the word and found it is more accurate when it’s applied to policies that lead to permanent legal status. A tweet from Georgia congressman Paul Broun during the 2011 State of the Union address saying Obama "is calling for amnesty" took a rating of Half-True. While it lacked some necessary qualifiers, it referred to the president’s support for the DREAM Act, a bill that offers the possibility of citizenship. It’s helpful to look at the legal definitions of amnesty. Black’s Law Dictionary defines it as "a sovereign act of pardon and oblivion for past acts, granted by a government to all persons who have been guilty of crime." The Legal Dictionary at the FreeDictionary.com offers more background and notes that "an act of amnesty is generally granted to a group of people who have committed crimes against the state." It gives the example from 1977 when President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty for Vietnam War draft dodgers. Overall, you can break amnesty into two elements, and it’s the second that really matters. It applies to a group of people who have broken the law. And it says to those people, you are permanently free from punishment for your offense. The new Obama policy matches up on the first part but not the second. "It does not forgive anything, nor does it create any new rights," says Muzaffar Chishti, director of the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group that is supported by groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and the World Bank. Chishti emphasizes, "You are still subject to deportation if the the government decides to do that." While some have said any relief from legal action is amnesty, whether it lasts for two years or forever, Chishti said the temporary nature of the Obama plan makes it significantly different than true amnesty. Indeed, the legal definitions provide examples where amnesty is permanent immunity from punishment. Chishti’s group estimates that about 1.4 million undocumented residents would be eligible under the new program. How many actually come forward might depend on their assessment of the risks. Ben Johnson, Executive Director of the American Immigration Council, a group that supports the move by Obama, agreed with Chishti's point that the policy offered people only temporary relief. He said anyone applying under the program has to understand that they will be giving immigration officials a lot of personal information. "Two years from now, they might be more vulnerable" to deportation, Johnson said. But there's also the practical definition of amnesty. If the ax of deportation never falls, critics of the administration ask, was it ever really there? The Homeland Security memo lays out a program that would grant deportation relief for two years at a time, renewable for as long as the applicant is under 30 years old, after which they would no longer qualify for deferral. During that time, the person could, at local discretion, be granted a work permit. While the White House made much of the temporary nature of the policy, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports low levels of immigration, isn’t buying it. "There’s nothing as permanent as a temporary status," Krikorian says. He and other opponents of this approach to young illegal immigrants can’t imagine that after encouraging people to come forward and allowing them to work, the government would then turn around and deport them. Still, we find it's a stretch to describe an enforcement plan as amnesty, a legal term that connotes broad and permanent protection. The people who are accepted into Obama's plan might not be deported immediately but they still could be in the future. Our Ruling DeMint and other critics say the Obama plan is amnesty, but the facts of the plan indicate it's an exaggeration to describe it that way. Legally, amnesty focuses on a group of people and grants them a permanent pardon. The Obama administration’s policy could reasonably be said to focus on a group, but deferring deportation is not the same as forgiveness and the relief it offers is limited in time. Concerns about where this policy might lead are a valid topic for discussion, but go beyond what the policy actually says. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Jim DeMint	None	None	None	2012-06-20T10:59:39	2012-06-15	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-04579	"We have more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/sep/24/tommy-thompson/us-has-more-natural-gas-saudi-arabia-has-oil-senat/	After speaking to the Milwaukee Rotary Club on Sept. 11, 2012, Wisconsin U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Thompson took questions from the audience. Asked about achieving energy independence, the former Republican governor called for several initiatives, including converting semitrailer trucks and buses so that they can burn compressed natural gas rather than diesel fuel. After all, Thompson reasoned: "We have more natural gas, ladies and gentlemen, than Saudi Arabia has oil." We do? It turns out another GOP politician recently preceded Thompson down this road. Let’s see where it’s led them. Jon Huntsman, the former presidential candidate and Utah governor, also referred to new sources of energy when making the same claim Thompson did during a GOP presidential debate in December 2011. PolitiFact National rated his statement Mostly False, given that it is off based on two of three ways to measure the question. 1. In terms of proved resources -- those likely to be developed under current economic and operating conditions -- Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves are far larger than U.S. natural gas reserves. 2. Saudi Arabia also comes out ahead when considering technically recoverable resources -- those that could be developed using current exploration and production technology, without regard to cost. 3. The U.S. leads Saudi Arabia only when comparing current production levels -- the U.S. produces more natural gas every year than Saudi Arabia produces oil. Even at that, reserves are more relevant than current production in terms of moving America toward energy independence. The U.S. Energy Information Administration provided the statistics used by PolitiFact National. We checked back with the agency, which confirmed that each of the three statistics remains true. Back to Thompson. Thompson campaign spokeswoman Lisa Boothe said Thompson "clearly meant to say was that we produce more natural gas in this country every year than Saudi Arabia produces oil." We don’t think it is so clear, given that Thompson made no mention of production. Our rating Thompson stated: "We have more natural gas than Saudi Arabia has oil." The U.S. produces more natural gas than Saudi Arabia produces oil. But in terms of reserves -- those that are proved and those that are technically recoverable -- Saudi Arabia leads. We rate Thompson’s statement Mostly False.	None	Tommy Thompson	None	None	None	2012-09-24T09:00:00	2012-09-11	['Saudi_Arabia']
-pomt-06177	"Speaker Gingrich has said that we ought to get rid of our child labor laws."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/dec/14/mitt-romney/romney-gingrich-wants-scrap-child-labor-laws/	Newt Gingrich has a bold solution for helping kids in poor communities climb out of poverty: put them to work. The Republican presidential candidate and current front-runner in many polls suggested, in a Q & A with students at Harvard University Nov. 18, that poor children should be paid to work as janitors in their schools to learn a work ethic and begin to rise to prosperity. "Get any job that teaches you to show up on Monday. Get any job that teaches you to stay all day, even if you’re having a fight with your girlfriend. I mean, the whole process of making work worthwhile is central," the former House speaker said. Gingrich has taken considerable heat over his comments, and in an interview with Fox News on Dec. 6, his Republican rival Mitt Romney highlighted the issue as one on which he and Gingrich differ. "Speaker Gingrich has said that we ought to get rid of our child labor laws. That, I think, is a mistake," Romney told Fox’s Carl Cameron. Ditching the nation’s child labor laws would be a radical move. We wanted to know if that’s what Gingrich is really proposing. What he said At Harvard, a female freshman stood and asked Gingrich what he proposes to do about growing income inequality and declining social mobility in America. Gingrich cited three main factors that have caused the inequality -- the collapse of the housing market, which took much of middle-class America’s wealth with it; a decline in manufacturing jobs, which he blames on government policies; and an education system that fails poor kids while cutting off other pathways out of poverty. "Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy" he said. "It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods entrapping children in, first of all, in child laws which are truly stupid. Okay, you say to somebody, ‘you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age. Fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing.’ "I tried for years to have a very simple model. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor, and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they’d have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising. "You go out and talk to, as I do regularly, talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between 9 and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something. They were washing cars. They all learned how to make money at a very early age. What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don’t do it. Remember all the stuff about don’t get a hamburger-flipping job -- the worst possible advice to give to poor children. "Get any job that teaches you to show up on Monday. Get any job that teaches you to stay all day, even if you’re having a fight with your girlfriend. I mean, the whole process of making work worthwhile is central." His remarks generated a lot of buzz, and Gingrich addressed the issue again at a campaign stop in Des Moines, Iowa on Dec. 1. "You have a very poor neighborhood. You have kids who are required under law to go to school. They have no money. They have no habit of work. What if you paid them part time in the afternoon to sit in the clerical office and greet people as they came in? What if you paid them to work as the assistant librarian? And I'd pay them as early as is reasonable and practical." "Then we get down to the janitor thing," Gingrich continued, in reference to his previous comments. "(I received) letters written that said janitorial work is really hard and really dangerous and this and that. OK, fine. So what if they became assistant janitors and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom. And you paid them." On Dec. 6, in a radio interview with host Curtis Sliwa on WNYM-AM 970, Gingrich further clarified what jobs he thinks young kids should and shouldn’t have. "They could be the person who greets you when you walk in the door," Gingrich said, according to POLITICO. "They could help in the school library. They can help in the kitchen. They can help clean up after lunch." "Kids shouldn't work in coal mines, kids shouldn't work in heavy industry," he said. What the law says Child labor laws are contained in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. According to the Department of Labor, the laws "were enacted to ensure that when young people work, the work is safe and does not jeopardize their health, well-being or educational opportunities. These provisions also provide limited exemptions." The law establishes that minors be paid minimum wage, sets hours that 14- and 15-year-olds can work (i.e., not after 7 p.m. except in the summer) and prohibits youths from working in places like mines, factories or boiler and engine rooms. They are permitted to do office work, kitchen cleaning, cashiering, bagging and customer carry-out. (Our favorite exemption: "the making of wreaths composed principally of natural holly, pine, cedar, or other evergreens.") Based on Gingrich's remarks, he doesn't appear to have any desire to do away with the law's provisions banning youngsters from dangerous workplaces. His argument, instead, seems to be with restrictions on younger children working. Gingrich’s side R.C. Hammond, Gingrich’s campaign spokesman, said the point of Gingrich’s idea is "to instill a work ethic in every youngster." "To help you start off on the right foot and be successful in life, it’s helpful to start work early," Hammond said. "The point that Newt was making is that public schools should make opportunities to go to work. It could be anything, and it’s pretty much on par with whatever your first summer job was." (Hammond’s first job: camp counselor. Gingrich's, in Stuttgart, Germany, where his father was serving in the Army, was at a bowling alley that didn’t have an automatic pin replacer. "They hired Newt to go and replace the pins that had been knocked down," Hammond told us.) So was Romney correct that Gingrich wants to do away with the existing law? "Any characterization that doesn’t encompass what we just discussed is inaccurate," Hammond said. Other perspectives Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard University economics lecturer and senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, said he thought saying Gingrich wants to get rid of the law "seems a little broad brushed and overly strong. It would be a weakening of child labor laws." But that might not be all bad, he said. "For some families it would be nice if another $10 or $20 a week came in, and I think that parents are better at making those decisions than a blanket rule," he said. "Why should it be the government’s business?" We talked to other experts on child labor who said that the changes to the law Gingrich has talked about probably would do more harm than good. Eric Edmonds, a Dartmouth College economics professor and author of the book Child Labor and the Transition Between School and Work, recently wrote about Gingrich’s take on child labor. "The issue is that workers that start unskilled stay unskilled. Especially if their education is suffering as a result. Working children do not learn skills that are going to help them to succeed in today’s technologically advanced global economy. How is learning to be an unskilled laborer at an early age going to help families in the long-run?" Edmonds wrote. "It is not ... We’ve seen what happens when successive generations of families need their children to work. They are unable to escape poverty." Hugh Hindman, a professor of Labor & Human Resources at Appalachian State University, said Gingrich is not the first leader to recommend child labor as an anti-poverty program, but that it doesn’t work. "It has never worked to alleviate poverty, except in the very short-term, and it exacerbates poverty in the longer term. There is a phenomenon known as the ‘child labor trap’ … very poor parents send their children to work as household survival strategy. Consequently the children forfeit schooling and fail to acquire the human capital that would qualify them for anything other than low-wage work as adults. These become the very poor parents of the next generation who send their children to work as household survival strategy. And on again into the next generation," Hindman said. He added that jobs such as babysitting that Gingrich mentioned are beneficial for young people, but the opportunity to do them are "skewed in favor of middle and upper-middle class children." "If Mr. Gingrich could find a way to provide more poor children with these sorts of opportunities, he might well do some good," Hindman said. "There’s not a golf course (in their neighborhoods)," said Harvard's Miron, "but there’s a grocery store down the street that needs boxes stacked or the sidewalk swept." Our ruling Romney said, "Speaker Gingrich has said that we ought to get rid of our child labor laws." We found that Gingrich has proposed some unconventional changes to child labor legislation, which he called "truly stupid." Specifically, he said that kids younger than 14 growing up in poverty should be allowed to work as a means of elevating themselves. But he also clarified that children shouldn’t hold mining or industrial jobs. While Gingrich appears to be in favor of easing age restrictions on working, he has given no indication that he wants to "get rid of" many other provisions, such as those that prohibit kids from working in certain dangerous occupations. On balance, we rate Romney’s statement Mostly False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2011-12-14T11:29:25	2011-12-07	['Newt_Gingrich']
-abbc-00424	The claim: Two industry associations say 80,000 charity workers would be affected by Labor's proposed changes to the way Fringe Benefits Tax can be calculated for salary sacrificed cars.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-04/802c000-charity-workers-will-be-impacted-by-fbt/4929108	The claim: Two industry associations say 80,000 charity workers would be affected by Labor's proposed changes to the way Fringe Benefits Tax can be calculated for salary sacrificed cars.	['federal-elections', 'federal-government', 'manufacturing', 'tax', 'charities-and-community-organisations', 'charities', 'advertising', 'australia']	None	None	['federal-elections', 'federal-government', 'manufacturing', 'tax', 'charities-and-community-organisations', 'charities', 'advertising', 'australia']	Oversimplified: '80,000 charity workers' would be affected by FBT changes	Mon 9 Sep 2013, 2:46am	None	['None']
-faly-00030	Claim: All 34 international airports and all 48 domestic airports have been provided with accessible feature.	partly true	https://factly.in/fact-checking-government-claims-on-accessibility-for-persons-with-disabilities-pwds/	Fact: All 34 International Airports & 48 Domestic Airports, have been provided with accessibility features. The infographic says all 48 domestic airports, but the number of domestic airports in India is more than 48. Hence, the claim is PARTLY TRUE.	None	None	None	None	Fact Checking Government Claims on Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities (PwDs)	None	None	['None']
-goop-00052	Kaley Cuoco Having Marriage Problems, Focusing On ‘Big Bang Theory’ Instead Of Husband?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kaley-cuoco-marriage-problems-big-bang-theory-husband-karl-cook/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kaley Cuoco Having Marriage Problems, Focusing On ‘Big Bang Theory’ Instead Of Husband?	10:15 am, November 1, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-03166	"We will have the highest general revenue in state history next year. Conservative pro-growth policies work in our state."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2013/sep/06/rick-scott/rick-scott-says-next-years-record-tax-collections-/	Florida is set to collect more tax money next year than ever before, state officials say. And not only is Florida Gov. Rick Scott proud of the accomplishment, he is taking credit. "After right-sizing government and cutting taxes, this year we had our first budget surplus in six years," Scott told conservatives gathered in Orlando for an Americans for Prosperity Foundation summit on Aug. 30, 2013. "It gets better: Our state revenue estimating conference says we will have the highest general revenue in state history next year. Conservative pro-growth policies work in our state." Scott’s right: State economists (the wonkishly called revenue estimating conference) say tax collections in the 2014-15 fiscal year will be higher in sheer dollars than ever. But crediting "conservative pro-growth policies" for the extra flow of money is a conclusion that ignores trends nationwide, as PolitiFact Florida found out. Future tax collections The state’s revenue estimating conference, one of 10 consensus estimating conferences, is comprised of members from the governor’s office, the Legislature and its research arm, the Office of Economic and Demographic Research. They meet throughout the year to come up with a best guess for how much money the state can spend. It’s an important job because Florida is required to balance its budget each year, so lawmakers need to have a good accounting of how much money is available. You can think of the state budget, which has grown to over $74 billion, as a three-legged stool. The first leg is what we’re talking about in this fact-check, general revenue. That money can be spent pretty much on anything because it’s the money the state most directly controls. The second leg is trust funds, or money that is collected for a specific purpose. A good example is the tolls you pay on Florida roads that are then earmarked specifically for road projects. The third leg is money that comes from the federal government and also has a specific purpose (Medicaid funding, for example). Amy Baker, director of the Office of Economic and Demographic Research, confirmed Scott’s claim about general revenue for fiscal year 2014-15. According to projections, the state is expected to collect a record $27.3 billion. The pot has not been this large since the 2005-06 budget year, when collections totaled $27.07 billion. However, it's not a record when adjusted for inflation. Revenue projections for 2014-15 are significantly lower than revenues in the 2005-06 fiscal year and slightly lower than revenues in the 2007-08 fiscal year, said Chris Mai, a research assistant at the State Fiscal Project at the left-leaning Center for Budget Policies and Priorities. "That same amount of money in nominal terms is not enough to provide the same services -- education and health care -- as in 2008," said Elizabeth McNichol, a senior fellow at the center. Where does that money come from? Most states collect an income tax, but Florida does not. It leans heavily on its 6 percent base sales tax. Other big taxes that go into state general revenue include the corporate income tax, beverage and tobacco taxes, and documentary stamp taxes, which are based on real estate transactions. Florida’s sales tax collections are climbing primarily because of growth in personal income, population and tourism, Baker said. Even though year-over-year population growth is not as high what it was before the recession, it’s finally going up. That means there are more people to spend money on big-ticket items, such as houses, cars, appliances and, yep, Disney World tickets. That includes the first wave of baby boomers retiring nationally, many of whom are young, have cash to spend and are moving to Florida, said Karen Woodall, executive director of the left-leaning Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy. To try to associate that tax revenue growth with Scott’s conservative policies, the governor’s office directed us to a Moody’s Investors Services report that praised Florida’s fiscal management, including building up rainy-day reserves. The report predicted the state would likely outpace the nation in long-term growth because of its climate and low cost of living, "as well as strong demographic and economic fundamentals, driven by the tourism, health care, and education sectors." Yet, Moody’s said, the construction and real estate markets remain a drag on Florida’s economy, and the state is more vulnerable than the rest of the country if a new housing bubble emerges from outside investors. "Florida’s difficulty in the last few years doesn't stem from its tax code," said Lyman Stone, a state tax economist at the business-backed Tax Foundation. "It stems from having a real estate- and construction-driven economy in a real estate- and construction-driven recession." So what does more revenue mean? Collecting a record amount of money is a sign Florida’s economy is en route to normalcy, which in Florida, translates to more people moving into the state and good tourism figures. But in the larger picture, Florida is not that special. The slow-and-steady recovery story is the same for most of the country, experts told us. In fact, several other states -- and plenty run by Democrats -- are doing better. Most states returned to or exceeded 2008 revenue levels by the 2012-13 fiscal year, said Todd Haggerty, policy analyst for the Fiscal Affairs program at the National Conference of State Legislatures. The growth continued for 33 states in 2013-14, though at a more modest clip. Not every state has released 2014-15 revenue expectations. Of those that have, 26 states and D.C. project revenue growth between 0.1 and 5 percent, Haggerty said. That's where Florida falls, along with New York and Texas. That's behind a group of 11 -- Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon and Vermont -- that expect growth between 5 and 10 percent. The NCSL does not examine in-depth why revenue is growing in each state, Haggerty said, though he noted some states (California) increased tax rates while others benefited from an energy boom (North Dakota). "Given that the revenue recovery is happening in almost every state, it’s pretty clear that it’s a general trend," McNichol said. No one can fault Scott for talking up the state as a tourism and business mecca. But could he bring about record-setting tax collections through a toolbox of tax cuts and shrinking government, or as he put it, "conservative pro-growth policies?" Even economists on the conservative side are skeptical. "We think certainly he’s doing the right things from an economic standpoint," said Kurt Wenner, vice president of tax research at Florida TaxWatch. "But it’s certainly hard to dial a direct relationship between how much revenue comes from that." Stone of the Tax Foundation pointed to a few examples of tax breaks passed under Scott that are "straight-up revenue losses," such as the four-day sales tax holidays and an assortment of tax credits. Other longer-lasting, pro-business cuts are more likely to have economic benefits in the future, he said, such as temporarily removing a sales tax on machinery and equipment for manufacturers, removing businesses from the corporate income tax roll, and reducing unemployment compensation taxes. (The temporary tax cut for manufacturers won’t even take effect until 2014.) "I’m skeptical that these changes drove a big enough economic recovery in revenue changes," Stone said. Our ruling Scott said that Florida "will have the highest general revenue in state history next year. Conservative pro-growth policies work in our state." Scott's statistic is wrong if you account for inflation. But the bigger issue is that Scott overreaches by connecting the revenue resurgence with conservative policies. The trajectory is not unique to Florida, or conservatives. There’s an element of truth to this statement but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2013-09-06T14:49:33	2013-08-30	['None']
-pomt-02480	"When the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport needed to stop its earthquake spike a few years ago, they temporarily shut down the wells that were injecting fracking fluid into the ground ... (and) those earthquakes stopped."	true	/punditfact/statements/2014/feb/19/rachel-maddow/msnbcs-maddow-earthquakes-led-texas-airport-close-/	If couples in Central Oklahoma felt the earth move on Valentine’s Day, it might not have been passion. Five earthquakes hit the area last Friday, followed by a sixth the next day. The quakes weren’t big. The strongest measured 3.5 on the Richter scale, but all of them were over the threshold to get residents’ attention. Rachel Maddow noticed as well. The MSNBC host linked the flurry of seismic activity to the region’s sizeable number of wells used to dispose of waste from oil and gas hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Oklahoma has about 6,000. There are many clustered in the county where the quakes took place. Maddow suggested that Central Oklahoma take a tip from Texas. "When the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport needed to stop its earthquake spike a few years ago," Maddow said, "they temporarily shut down the wells that were injecting fracking fluid into the ground at high pressure on the airport property, and lo and behold, those earthquakes stopped." A reader asked us to see if that is true. We can report that it is. "It’s an accurate assessment," said Dave Magana, the senior manager for public affairs at the airport. In fracking, operators pump water and chemicals into the ground to release oil and natural gas. When those fluids come back to the surface, the wastewater is moved to a disposal well where it is pumped back deep into the Earth. In 2008, the airport had leases with the Chesapeake Energy company for two such wells. One of them was near an old inactive fault line. The wells became active in September 2008 and the first earthquake came in October of that year. Brian Stump, a seismologist at Southern Methodist University, was part of a team that studied what was going on. "Based on the timing and the location of the earthquakes, there was a plausible linkage," said Stump. Dallas-Fort Worth managers took Stump’s report to heart. "The airport asked Chesapeake to close the well, and they did," Mangana said. The earthquakes stopped. The well in question has remained inactive, although a second well on airport land continues to operate. Fracking and its environmental impacts are a contentious issue. A study from the National Academy of Sciences did not find that getting natural gas this way led to "induced seismic activity." However, it did conclude that disposal of wastewater "does pose some risks." Our ruling Maddow said, "When the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport needed to stop its earthquake spike a few years ago, they temporarily shut down the wells that were injecting fracking fluid into the ground ... (and) those earthquakes stopped." An airport official confirms Maddow's story, aside from the fact that it was one well. Officials at the airport asked that a well be shut down, and after it was, the earthquakes eventually stopped. Seismologists linked the well to the earthquakes. We rate the claim True. Update: This item was updated on Feb. 24, 2014, to make clear that airport officials asked Chesapeake Energy to shut down the well.	None	Rachel Maddow	None	None	None	2014-02-19T17:47:58	2014-02-17	['None']
-chct-00108	FACT CHECK: Does The LSAT Registration Form List A Dozen Different Gender Options?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/06/22/fact-check-lsat-registration-form-gender/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	5:47 PM 06/22/2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00621	Hate Letter Targets Autistic Teen and His Family	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/hate-letter-targets-autistic-teen.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Hate Letter Targets Autistic Teen and His Family	August 20, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-00770	Says Hillary Clinton "erased all of her emails even though they were subject to recall and review by Congress."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2015/apr/12/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-hillary-clinton-deleted-emails-we/	Hillary Clinton’s announcement that she would run for president was met with a round of attacks from Republicans on the Sunday shows. Taking up the cause on Fox News Sunday was 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. "You've seen in polls and in discussions across the country a feeling that Hillary Clinton is just not trustworthy," Romney said April 12, 2015. "This whole story about her having erased all of her emails even though they were subject to recall and review by Congress, I think that's made people remember that with the Clintons, it's always something." We have dissected before the web of laws and regulations that surround Clinton’s use of a private email account as Secretary of State. For this fact-check, we look at Romney’s claim that she erased all of her emails when they should have been kept for use by Congress. A review of the facts shows Romney had a point, but he mangled the details. A quick recap In March, the public learned that instead of using a State Department email account when she was in charge, Clinton ran all of her email through a private server in her New York home. When State Department officials asked for copies of her government-related emails late last year, Clinton’s staff went through her files and sent over about 30,000. According to Clinton, about an equal number of emails were judged to be personal and were erased. Specific to Romney’s statement that Clinton erased all of her emails, there is no question that she preserved and delivered thousands to the State Department. Clinton has said that all of this was in line with federal regulations. We have found that it isn’t so cut and dried. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) oversees federal recordkeeping, and its code requires federal agencies to keep records that document agency activity so that they are readily available when needed -- such as for Freedom of Information Act requests or congressional inquiries. However, not all records need be retained. Agencies have the discretion to delete material that is deemed to have no value. The laws are tighter today than when Clinton was secretary, but even during her tenure, her sole reliance on a private email account skirted the law, experts tell us. "The key thing is that while use of a personal account was not prohibited, exclusive use of it was," said Daniel Metcalfe, professor of law at American University and former director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy. With a State Department email account, all of Clinton’s emails would have been stored on a government computer. Any researcher or government body would then have access, pending the normal privacy and security reviews. (That said, the department preserves relatively few emails.) Clinton’s private email account changed the process completely. She, not a government worker, had control over the emails, and even though emails she sent to government workers would have been saved under their email accounts, searching those records would be infinitely more complicated. Romney’s botched wording The legal experts we reached said Romney’s use of the phrase "recall and review by Congress" is ambiguous. (We tried to reach Romney for clarification and did not hear back by the time we published. If we learn more, we will update this fact-check.) Jason R. Baron is a lawyer at Drinker Biddle and Reath and a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration. Baron told PunditFact that in the most literal sense, Congress plays no role at all in deciding what materials should be preserved when an official leaves office. "This is an executive branch function," Baron said. "In most agencies when a senior official leaves, there is a protocol to review the documents that the official might have. The Federal Records Act doesn’t expect Congress to review anything." On the other hand, Congress has the right to subpoena records as part of an investigation and congressional committees have been investigating the deaths at the American compound in Benghazi, Libya. This might be what Romney had in mind. But if he did, that makes his point even harder to prove. Douglas Cox is a law professor who specializes in government records law at the City University of New York. Cox said Romney is on thin ice if he meant that Clinton ducked a congressional subpoena. "Clinton has stated that she turned over to the State Department any records responsive to congressional subpoena at the time," Cox said. "An allegation that she destroyed records subject to subpoena is a serious one, and it is speculative absent more specific evidence." Baron raises one legal wrinkle that might bolster Romney’s claim. He said it’s possible that Clinton had a reasonable expectation that a committee might want to dig further. Baron said in the private sector, if you think that a future lawsuit might call for certain records, you should keep them. "If I were her lawyer, I would have told her that it would be prudent to preserve any evidence that might be subject to a congressional inquiry," Baron said. Regardless of the legal arguments on that score, Baron said he believes that what Clinton did -- stepping down without a department review of her records and then unilaterally deleting some -- was inconsistent with the spirit if not the letter of the Federal Records Act. Cox shares that view, even as he discounts Romney’s statement. "Clinton's decision to destroy all emails that she and her private attorneys unilaterally decided were not federal records is both shocking and suspicious," Cox said. "But the problem is that not all of her emails were ‘subject to recall and review by Congress.’ There is plenty of justifiable criticism for Clinton's actions, but that does not appear to be one of them." Our ruling Romney said that Clinton "erased all of her emails even though they were subject to recall and review by Congress." Romney got it wrong when he spoke of all of her emails. We know that about 30,000 emails were turned over to the State Department. Romney’s words about recall and review by Congress are ambiguous. In terms of preserving records, legal experts agree that Congress has no direct role. That is a function of the executive branch. In terms of a congressional investigation, a legal expert told us Clinton did respond to congressional subpoenas, and there is no proof she destroyed evidence subject to a congressional investigation. Romney’s statement contains an element of truth -- Clinton did delete some emails -- but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2015-04-12T18:23:03	2015-04-12	['United_States_Congress']
-snes-04359	President B. Lyndon Johnson once said, "I'll have those niggers voting Democratic for 200 years."	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/	None	Politics	None	David Emery	None	Did LBJ Say ‘I’ll Have Those N*****s Voting Democratic for 200 Years’?	27 July 2016	None	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-tron-03547	Jordan’s King Abdullah II Will Fly Combat Missions Against Islamic State	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/jordans-king-abdullah-ii-will-fly-combat-missions-against-islamic-state/	None	terrorism	None	None	None	Jordan’s King Abdullah II Will Fly Combat Missions Against Islamic State – Fiction!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Jordan']
-pomt-03398	Says $800,000 cost of Texas special legislative session would pay for 1.6 million condoms, 90,000 months of the pill or 20 full-time sexual health educators.	mostly true	/texas/statements/2013/jul/03/sarah-ponder/austinite-says-800000-cost-special-session-could-p/	Amid thousands of protesters at the Texas Capitol, Sarah Ponder of Austin carried a sign with a financial comparison: "$800,000: 1.6 million condoms, 90K months of the pill, 20 full-time sexual health educators or 1 medically unnecessary & hypocritical special session," it read. The July 1, 2013, rally took place the first day of the 2013 Legislature’s second special session, called by Gov. Rick Perry after a filibuster and demonstrators kept legislation restricting abortions from winning final Senate approval. Ponder, who works for an education technology company, said she wanted to show that the money likely to be spent on the special session could instead pay for measures she said would be more effective at reducing abortions: providing substantial contraception aids or paying 20 educators’ salaries for a year. We shopped around, comparing the costs of a special session to Ponder’s alternatives. Cost of a special session In a June 26, 2013, news story Ponder sent us, Waco ABC affiliate WXXV-TV said, "Each special session could cost taxpayers more than $800,000," based on per-diem payments to legislators to cover their food and expenses. Other news stories we found typically gave either a per diem cost of $800,000, a per diems-plus-overhead cost of $1 million or both. Per diems are the biggest cost of Texas special sessions, which can last up to 30 days. At the current per diem rate of $150, with 182 lawmakers eligible (31 senators, 150 representatives and the lieutenant governor), 30 days of payments would equal $819,000. Not all lawmakers take the payments, though. June 18, 2013, news stories from the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle indicated that during the year’s first special session, six or eight senators and 26 House members declined some or all of the payments. Dewhurst spokesman Travis Considine told us by phone that Dewhurst turned down all per diem payments for both special sessions. If 33 lawmakers rejected the payment on days their chambers did not convene, the state might have shelled out $716,100 on per diems during the session. Other costs bring the total up. Legislative Budget Board staff spokesman John Barton told us by email that, wrapping in overhead costs such as utilities, security, printing and staff support, a 30-day special session could cost $1 million to $1.2 million. The pill Ponder emailed us a March 12, 2012, news story from The Week, a news magazine, that said generic-drug versions of birth control pills cost $9 a month and brand-name pills cost $90 a month. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy offers information at bedsider.org on the availability and costs of contraceptive options. The group is a nonprofit that produces research frequently used by teen pregnancy prevention organizations. The campaign’s site gives the same $9-$90 range cited in The Week’s article, with explanatory details. Oral contraception pills, containing hormones that prevent egg production or fertilization, are usually taken once a day. "A woman without insurance using generic birth control pills will typically pay about $25 a month," according to the site. The group’s chief program officer, Bill Albert, told us by phone that information on the site is updated and current. With Medicaid or private insurance, according to the site, women can get the pill free or for just the cost of their co-pay (the fixed amount an insured patient pays out-of-pocket each time he or she gets a medical service). "For most people," the Bedsider article said, the co-pay "ranges from $5 to $35." Federal funding makes free or low-cost pills available to many, the site said. Without insurance, generic pills at pharmacies can cost $10-$20 a month, the site says, or $20-$30 a month from Planned Parenthood, with name-brand pills selling for $60-$90 a month at pharmacies. The site says its information came from a survey of Planned Parenthood clinics and birth control manufacturers. Condoms Ponder told us she chose an average cost per condom of 50 cents by looking at items for sale on Amazon.com. Bedsider.org gives prices from a survey of online retailers: 30 cents to $1.54 apiece for male condoms at national chain pharmacies and 18 cents to 60 cents apiece at Walmart. As with the pill, the site said, condoms can be obtained for free or at reduced costs at clinics. But also as with the pill, there are more expensive options available. In a December 2009 article, Consumer Reports rated 22 types of condoms on strength, reliability and whether holes were present in the material; the best seven ranged from 71 cents to $1.10 each. To check options that are widely available, we visited a CVS pharmacy on South Congress Avenue and found prices from 79 cents to $4.35 apiece. Sexual health educators Ponder said she estimated from personal knowledge that the annual salary of an entry-level sexual health educator at a nonprofit organization might be about $35,000 to $40,000. Francine Gertz, human resources manager for the City of Austin’s health and human services department, told us by phone that the city employs health educators in programs such as its adolescent health initiative, which according to its website provides education and presentations for students, parents and others. The entry-level salary for a first-level public health educator -- a job that requires a four-year degree and two years of experience -- is $40,000, Gertz said, and a second-level public health educator with 13 years of experience might earn $54,000. Texas Workforce Commission spokeswoman Lisa Givens suggested by email that we look at a couple of the federal government’s occupation categories. One was "health educators," which encompassed broad job titles such as community health worker and narrow ones such as early breastfeeding care specialist. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website, most people employed in this category nationwide earned about $53,000 a year as of May 2012. Job search website Indeed.com, whose data has been cited by Forbes and U.S. News and World Report magazines, says the average annual salary for a "sexual health educator" in Texas is $50,000 (compared with $52,000 nationally). Such averages are based, the site says, on "salary information extracted from over 50 million job postings from thousands of unique sources over the last 12 months." Adding up our results Now, let’s take another look at that sign. A 30-day special session might cost $716,100 to $819,000 in per diems alone; Ponder assumed an $800,000 cost. And how do the alternative expenditures on her sign price out? Like Ponder, we found estimates saying a month of oral contraceptive pills could cost $9 to $90, but we also read that a typical cost would be $25. Ponder went with the $9 figure and said $800,000 would buy 90,000 months of pills. We calculate that $800,000 would pay for 88,900 months of pills at $9 or 32,000 months at $25. That’s a difference of 4,700 years. To phrase it another way, $800,000 would buy 32,000 women a month’s worth of pills at $25 or 88,900 women’s pills for a month at $9. Condoms, Ponder estimated, would cost about 50 cents on average. With $800,000, we calculate, you could indeed provide 1.6 million 50-cent condoms. Using Bedsider.org’s range, we figure $800,000 would buy 2.7 million condoms at 30 cents each or 520,000 condoms at $1.54 each. To predict that $800,000 would pay for 20 full-time sexual health educators, Ponder said she estimated an annual salary for an entry-level position at a nonprofit at $35,000 to $40,000. That doesn’t contradict what we found, because the salaries we gathered covered a spectrum, from $40,000 for a city job requiring two years’ experience to $54,000 for veteran educators. We calculate that $800,000 would pay 20 educators at $40,000 or 16 educators at the Texas average salary of $50,000 listed by Indeed.com. Our ruling Ponder used a conservative estimate for the cost of the second special session, presuming it runs for the full 30 days. She used the lowest price we found for the pill, a mid-range price for condoms and a salary that doesn’t seem out of line for an entry-level sexual health educator position, so it’s probably true that under certain circumstances, you could pay for the items on her sign with $800,000 apiece. Then again, it might be fairer to estimate the pill at $25 a month instead of $9, which means you could only pay for 32,000 months of contraception, not the 90,000 months she cited. And unless you only wanted to hire newly-graduated sexual health educators, you might have to pay them more like $52,000 per year, which would cover 16 instead of 20 educators. So an adjusted version of the sign might read: "$800,000: 1.6 million condoms, 32,000 months of the pill, 16 full-time sexual health educators" instead of "$800,000: 1.6 million condoms, 90K months of the pill, 20 full-time sexual health educators." We rate Ponder’s claim as Mostly True.	None	Sarah Ponder	None	None	None	2013-07-03T14:58:02	2013-07-01	['Texas']
-goop-02065	Angelina Jolie Did Say Cancer Scares Led To Brad Pitt Split, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-cancer-scares-brad-pitt-split-reason/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Angelina Jolie Did NOT Say Cancer Scares Led To Brad Pitt Split, Despite Claim	9:54 am, December 8, 2017	None	['None']
-para-00035	Says the Foreign Investment Review Board "has never said no to any agriculture purchase or any aggregate business purchases in its history".	true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/18/barnaby-joyce/giving-green-light-agriculture-foreign-investment-/index.html	None	['Agriculture']	Barnaby Joyce	Michael Koziol, Jack Fisher, Peter Fray	None	Giving the green light to agriculture: the Foreign Investment Review Board	Wednesday, September 18, 2013 at 3:45 p.m.	None	['None']
-pomt-03591	Says "we" have put more boots on the U.S.-Mexico border "than at any time in our history, and illegal crossings are down by nearly 80 percent from their peak in 2000."	half-true	/texas/statements/2013/may/13/barack-obama/obama-says-record-level-boots-ground-near-us-mexic/	In his weekly radio address May 4, 2013, President Barack Obama revisited an administration message that tends to draw attention in Texas. "The truth is, right now, our border with Mexico is more secure than it’s been in years," Obama said. "We’ve put more boots on that border than at any time in our history, and illegal crossings are down by nearly 80 percent from their peak in 2000." Obama went on to extol a developing Senate effort to overhaul immigration laws, potentially enabling U.S. residents lacking federal permission to be here to qualify for citizenship. We've explored proclamations about border security before. For this article, we wondered about Obama’s references to boots on the ground and illegal crossings. Boots on the border By email, Heather Wong, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, pointed us to a Border Patrol chart indicating that in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2012, the agency had 18,516 agents stationed in its Southwest sector, which sweeps in the southern border region. Those agents, up by 10 from the year before, comprised 87 percent of 21,394 agents nationally, according to the chart, which indicated the 2012 count in the border region was at least greater than at any time since 1983, the earliest year shown, when there were about 3,500 agents in the region of about 4,000 nationally. In the year that began Oct. 1, 2012, the chart indicates, the nation’s total number of Border Patrol agents dipped 2 percent to 21,394. As PolitiFact has noted before, the biggest bump in Border Patrol staffing came under Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush. Between 2001 and 2009, Bush’s tenure, the number of agents posted nationally rose from about 9,800 to a little more than 20,000. In May 2011, PolitiFact quoted Jack Martin of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports stricter illegal immigration guidelines, as saying: "There has been a steady buildup of BP officers for several years given impetus by the 9/11 attacks." We’d snap-shut this portion of our review except the country has historically put boots on the ground near the southern border for other reasons, as PolitiFact colleagues have explored. There was the Mexican-American War of 1846 and the lesser known Mexican Expedition of 1916. Should those military activities count as "boots on the ground" on the border? Our thinking is that neither event quite matches modern-day circumstances. The Mexican-American War was a war that happened after the United States annexed Texas in 1845, making it more of a battle to define the border than defend it. At first glance, the Mexican Expedition seems a bit different. Those events occurred during the Mexican Revolution, when Pancho Villa launched a surprise attack inside the United States at Columbus, N.M. History books say that President Woodrow Wilson sent somewhere between 75,000 and 150,000 troops to the border in 1916, far more personnel than the Border Patrol has ever dispatched. But historians previously told PolitiFact the Mexican Expedition isn't directly comparable with the 21st-century border situation. "During the Mexican insurrection, Pancho Villa raided into U.S. territory. It was, then, not about attempts by Mexicans to get into the U.S. individually for various personal reasons, or drug smuggling, etc.," Richard H. Kohn, a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said by email. Clemson University historian Paul Christopher Anderson agreed that current concerns with immigration are very different from worries of the early 1900s. "The U.S. involvement on the border and in Mexico from 1913 to 1917 was tied primarily to questions of diplomacy, imperialism and Mexican sovereignty," he said by email. Illegal crossings Setting aside boots, are illegal crossings of the border down nearly 80 percent from 2000? It’s impossible to pinpoint that, given that the crossings are often secretive. Homeland Security’s Wong offered an indirect indicator, U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions, which in the year that ran through September 2012 totaled nearly 365,000, the government says, which was 78 percent less than the nearly 1.7 million apprehensions in fiscal 2000. That percentage reduction in apprehensions also occurred in the region near the U.S.-Mexico border. A Border Patrol chart shows that while 2000 was the latest peak year for apprehensions, 1986 was the overall peak year; the agency that year reported 1.69 million apprehensions, a tally not topped by the 1.68 million apprehensions 14 years later. Then again, another chart shows there were nearly 28,000 fewer apprehensions in the southern border region in 1986 than in 2000, when the 1.64 million apprehensions set a record for the Southwest sector. Apprehensions near the border have not exceeded 1 million since 2006, the chart indicates, and they decreased every year from 2006 through 2011 when they totaled 327,577, the least apprehensions in the sector since 1972. In 2012, the nearly 357,000 apprehensions in the region reflected a one-year uptick of 9 percent. We asked Homeland Security if this means there also was a recent increase in illegal crossings. Homeland Security spokesman Peter Boogaard emailed us a statement attributed to Michael Friel, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, that did not address our question head-on. Friel said the agency has noted increased apprehensions in South Texas, particularly of individuals from Central American countries. Increases in manpower and technology, Friel said, give the agency confidence it’s apprehending more illegal border crossers. Linking boots on the border to illegal crossings Generally lower levels of apprehensions are one thing. But do they signal the extent of illegal crossings, what Obama highlighted? By email, Boogaard called Border Patrol apprehensions the "best measure of illegal or illicit border crossings." When demographers try to measure the number of people crossing the border illegally, they usually refer to the net flow -- arrivals to the United States minus departures. Lately, that number has been essentially a wash, according to statistics from the Pew Hispanic Center. In its April 2012 report, the Pew center estimated that between 2010 and 2011, the number of immigrants from Mexico declined so much that the flow into Mexico was bigger than the flow out of Mexico for the first time since "probably in the 1930s," Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer for Pew, told PolitiFact in October 2012. Still, apprehension statistics are an imperfect gauge of population flow, since they can be affected by the magnitude of the border patrol effort. Passel said that while this statistic is not a "direct measure of flow across the border," it is "widely accepted as an indicator of the magnitude of the flow." There is disagreement, at least, over how changes in enforcement levels near the border affect illegal crossings. Passel has said that Obama has a point that law enforcement -- something the president has influence over -- has a major impact. "We know from various surveys that the cost of hiring a smuggler to get into the U.S. has increased significantly as enforcement has been ramped up," he said. "We also know that Mexicans have been pushed into more remote areas to try to cross where it is physically more difficult and dangerous." But Doug Massey, a professor at Princeton University's Office of Population Research who has studied immigration issues, considers the economy the overriding factor. The recession, he said, had an immense effect on border crossings. Dwindling prospects of finding a job in sectors such as construction, which traditionally attract a disproportionate number of Latinos, dampened the urge for potential Mexican migrants to undertake a difficult journey, Massey said. Massey, saying the government could achieve substantial savings by reducing border patrols, has called intensified border enforcement "counterproductive. Rather than discouraging the entry of undocumented workers, it lowers their rate of departure and thereby raises net immigration," he wrote in a 2007 paper. In a 2011 book, Massey attributed the reduction of undocumented migration to near zero to a combination of "harsh enforcement, expanding guest worker migration and economic turmoil." Finally, as PolitiFact colleagues have noted, other significant factors have been out of Obama’s control -- namely, the state of the economy in Mexico (which has been relatively healthy) and the activity of the drug cartels (which has increased violence on the Mexican side of the border). Our ruling Obama said: "We’ve put more boots on" the U.S.-Mexico "border than at any time in our history, and illegal crossings are down by nearly 80 percent from their peak in 2000." There are more Border Patrol agents than ever along the border and while there once were more troops there, we do not see those military pursuits as comparable to existing day-to-day border enforcement. But the claim has other flaws. For starters, most of the surge in agents that Obama said "we" put on the border occurred under Bush. Also, there is no count indicating illegal border crossings are down nearly 80 percent. Obama evidently put a fine point on an indirect indicator, Border Patrol apprehensions, which were 78 percent lower in the border region in 2012 than in 2000, the year the Southwest sector experienced its peak level of apprehensions. Finally, his statement fails to acknowledge there is at least debate over whether economic conditions, rather than enforcement, drive ebbs and flows in such migration. Notably, too, those conditions aren’t independently controlled by any president. There is sufficient missing context here to make Obama’s claim Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2013-05-13T18:27:57	2013-05-04	['Mexico–United_States_border']
-snes-02733	A single eruption from a volcano puts 10,000 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all of human activity has throughout history.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/volcano-carbon-emissions/	None	Politics	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Does a Single Volcanic Eruption Release as Much CO2 As All of Humanity Has to Date?	16 December 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-09522	"We have killed lots of innocent people in the state of Texas."	false	/texas/statements/2010/feb/13/farouk-shami/farouk-shami-says-state-texas-has-killed-lots-inno/	At a televised debate Monday, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Farouk Shami said he opposes Texas continuing the death penalty as things stand. "If we are 110 percent that that person deserved death, I would support it, yes," Shami said. "Not as it currently stands, absolutely not. We have killed lots of innocent people in the state of Texas." His declaration prompted us to take a closer look. The state of Texas hasn’t admitted putting even one innocent person to death. Still, Shami’s campaign suggested the candidate’s claim was backed up by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit clearinghouse that has written reports critical of the death penalty. Online, the center lists five individuals executed by the state of Texas from 1989 through 2004 as "possibly innocent." Shami spokeswoman Kelly Johnson said the list justifies Shami’s declaration that the state has put lots of innocent people to death. "Farouk believes that one innocent man put to death is too many," Johnson said. "Therefore the five listed on the deathpenaltyinfo.org Web site constitute ‘lots.’" Of course, the center’s description is "possibly" innocent—not "certainly." Steve Hall, who helms the StandDown Texas Project, a group that seeks a moratorium on executions in Texas, acknowledged: "No executed Texas death row inmate has been proved innocent beyond anyone’s doubts." Still, Hall told us he believes innocent people have been put to death in Texas. He singled out post-execution investigations by journalists that suggest three men -- Todd Willingham, Carlos DeLuna and Ruben Cantu -- were not guilty of the charges that led to their executions. News reports have aired questions about the original investigation leading to the conviction of Willingham of murder after a 2001 house fire killed his children. He was executed in 2004 after Gov. Rick Perry did not act on an outside expert’s challenge of the original investigation’s arson findings. DeLuna was executed in 1989 for killing a convenience store clerk despite claims by his lawyer at trial that authorities had mixed him up with another man (who died in prison in 1999). The other man’s relatives and friends later recalled him boasting about getting away with the murder, according to articles published in The Chicago Tribune in 2006. Cantu was executed in 1993 for a 1984 murder. News reports later quoted both the only eyewitness at trial and another convict saying Cantu, a juvenile at the time of the crime, was not the perpetrator. In 2005, The Houston Chronicle quoted Bexar County’s district attorney from the time of Cantu’s trial expressing second thoughts. Sam D. Millsap Jr., who had made the decision to charge Cantu with capital murder, told the Chronicle he never should have sought the death penalty in a case based on the testimony of an eyewitness who identified Cantu only after police officers showed him Cantu's photo three separate times. "It’s so questionable. There are so many places where it could break down," Millsap told the newspaper. "We have a system that permits people to be convicted based on evidence that could be wrong because it's mistaken or because it’s corrupt." It's possible, as Shami said, that Texas has put innocents to death--conceivably "lots" of them. Nationally, the death penalty information center writes, "there is no way to tell how many of the over 1,000 people executed since 1976 may also have been innocent. Courts do not generally entertain claims of innocence when the defendant is dead. Defense attorneys move on to other cases where clients' lives can still be saved." But without a state-approved review, perhaps, it’s a reach to say such executions have happened for a certainty. Shami could have said it’s possible that innocent convicts have been executed or that the topic bears careful study. He asserted much more than that. We rate his statement as False.	None	Farouk Shami	None	None	None	2010-02-13T20:53:58	2010-02-08	['Texas']
-goop-01883	Paris Hilton Using Nicole Richie As Wedding Planner?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/paris-hilton-wedding-planner-nicole-richie/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Paris Hilton Using Nicole Richie As Wedding Planner?	3:43 pm, January 8, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-13425	"We had the Democratic Governors Association and the Obama political machine come into a Republican primary to try and rig the election by spending $1 million against me in the last couple of days."	mostly true	/missouri/statements/2016/sep/21/eric-greitens/greitens-claim-democrats-investing-primary-checks-/	Republican gubernatorial candidate Eric Greitens claims Democrats spent $1 million against him just before the August primary election. On an Aug. 11 Fox & Friends appearance, Greitens said, "We had the Democratic Governors Association and the Obama political machine come into a Republican primary to try and rig the election by spending $1 million against me in the last couple of days." That number stood out, so we decided to investigate the claim. We reached out to Greitens' campaign staff for more information. Parker Briden, a campaign spokesman, said Greitens was referring to television attack ads aired against Greitens right before the primary. Campaign finance records Briden referred us to Missouri campaign finance reports filed by the Chris Koster campaign detailing contributions from Jobs and Opportunity, a political action committee. Koster won the Democratic primary for governor and will square off against Greitens in the general election in November. Beginning two weeks before the Aug. 8 primary, the PAC made four "in-kind" contributions — contributions of goods and services and not cash — to Koster for Missouri, Koster's campaign. The in-kind contributions carried a total valuation of over $1 million, according to the reports filed by the Koster with the Missouri Ethics Commission. The largest contribution was reported as $713,082, made on July 29. The same week, two other contributions were made — one valued at $112,560, and another for $150,080. On Aug. 5, three days before the election, the committee made a final contribution valued at $25,710.82. After the donations were made, the Greitens campaign issued a press release titled "Koster Caught in Conspiracy to Hijack Republican Primary." "This is an attempt by national Democrats to steal an election in Missouri through meddling in the Republican primary," the release read. Attack ad The reported contributions coincided with a series of television ads attacking Greitens that aired in the five days before the primary. A group called Jobs and Opportunity is credited for paying for the ad. A YouTube video of the ad was posted on July 29, about a week before the primary. According to Koster's campaign finance expenditures, his campaign normally pays between $500,000 and $700,000 for media advertising. No other single campaign expenditure comes close to that amount. That puts the PAC's contribution in perspective — it's unlikely a $1 million in-kind contribution would buy anything else. The ad lambastes Greitens for accepting a separate $1 million contribution from Michael Goguen, a California-based tech financier. Goguen is the subject of a pending civil lawsuit with a woman who has accused him of sexual abuse. "While others returned his money, Greitens says he's honored to take it," the ad's narrator says. Greitens is right: the Democratic Governors Association is behind money given to his Democratic opponent. The Washington, D.C. address for Jobs and Opportunity that the Koster campaign reported to the Missouri Ethics Commission is also the address for the Democratic Governors Association. A week before the election, Jobs and Opportunity made a $1 million in-kind contribution to Koster, which coincided with a TV ad attacking Greitens. Although the political action committee is unaffiliated with Koster’s campaign, Koster's campaign had some knowledge of the ad before it aired, since the in-kind contribution was listed on Koster's campaign finance report. PACs that act independently from a candidate do not have to report contributions to that candidate's campaign, said James Thomas, the campaign treasurer for Catherine Hanaway, who was a Republican gubernatorial candidate in the primary. But when the PAC is in contact with the candidate, related contributions need to be reported. For example, the PAC could have discussed when the ad's content or when it would be aired with Koster's campaign, Thomas said. Since Missouri has no limits on campaign contributions, it's okay that the PAC talked to Koster's campaign. It would be a different story if this were a federal election, though, Thomas said. Federal PACs can only contribute $5,000 to a candidate, so Jobs and Opportunity’s $1 million in-kind contribution would be illegal. On July 31, Greitens released an ad in response to the PAC's ad. In the ad, which has since drawn national attention, Greitens fires rounds of a machine gun into an open field. "Eric Greitens is under attack from Obama's Democrat machine," the narrator of the ad says. "When he fights back, he brings out the big guns." After the primary, Greitens said no other Democratic groups launched attack ads against any other Republican gubernatorial candidate, according to the Associated Press. We also asked Austin Chambers, Greitens' campaign manager, why Greitens repeatedly cited President Barack Obama's involvement in the ad buy. Chambers said the company the PAC hired to purchase the airtime for the ad is the same Obama has used for his ads. The company, named GMMB, produced ads for Obama during both of his presidential campaigns. And though Koster's donations were big, they were legal, despite Greitens' press release connoting Koster's involvement in illegal activity. Koster's campaign directed all questions to the spokesman for the PAC. Marvin Overby, an MU political science professor, said large donations like the PAC's are common before an election. "This happens a lot. It's just part of the rough and tumble of politics," he said. "I'm not sure the Greitens' campaign wouldn't have done the same thing." Our ruling Greitens said the Democratic Governors Association and "the Obama political machine" spent $1 million against him leading up to the primary election. A PAC with the same address as the Democratic Governors Association made four in-kind contributions totaling that amount in the weeks leading up to the election. And though both Obama and the PAC hired the same company to work on their ads, there's no evidence to support Greiten's statement that the "Obama political machine" colluded with the PAC. We rate this claim as Mostly True.	None	Eric Greitens	None	None	None	2016-09-21T01:13:01	2016-08-11	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-11893	On NFL players protesting during the national anthem.	half flip	/wisconsin/statements/2017/oct/25/scott-walker/scott-walker-flips-hard-nfl-protests/	Responding to the controversy over NFL players kneeling or sitting during the national anthem, Green Bay Packers players issued a statement saying the "NFL family is one of the most diverse communities in the world." We found mixed evidence on that claim. The next day, on Sept. 27, 2017, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was asked in Green Bay about the protests. He didn’t say what the protesting players should be doing. But less than a month later, the Republican governor, who is widely expected to run for a third term in 2018, was sending a different message. Which means it’s time to turn to our Flip-O-Meter, which assesses whether a politician has been consistent on an issue. Three Walker statements, and a mobilization effort, are key. They show the governor pivoting from a hands-off position to telling the NFL players exactly what they should do during the anthem. He also suggested the players instead take a stand against domestic violence, even though the protests have centered on racial inequality and police brutality. 1. ‘They should have to explain’ Walker was asked by a reporter in Green Bay on Sept. 27, 2017: "You don’t find it disrespectful what’s happening, entering this political debate to sports? He said: "Well, again, I’ll let others explain what they’re doing it and why they’re doing it. I just know in my household, my kids were always taught, as I was always taught, you stand and put your hand over your heart ….Now, part of those rights are the right to protest, so others can do that. But then they should have to explain why they’re doing that." So, he made no direct statement to what players who had been protesting should do. 2. ‘Time for players in the NFL to stop their protests during the anthem’ In a letter Walker sent to the NFL and its players union, Oct. 16, 2017, Walker wrote: "A lot has been made about National Football League players protesting by kneeling, remaining in the locker room, or other means during the national anthem. Speaking up for what you believe in is a profoundly American idea, but disrespecting our flag, and the men and women who have fought to protect and defend our country, is not American in the slightest. "It is time for players in the NFL to stop their protests during the anthem and move on from what has become a divisive political sideshow …. "My request is simple: Stand for the American flag and the national anthem out of respect for those who risk their lives for our freedoms, and then take a stand against domestic violence to keep American families safe." Walker then repeated his call for the protests to end. 3. ‘It’s simple: Stand up’ In an interview on the "Fox & Friends" talk show on the Fox News Channel on Oct. 23, 2017, Walker said: "For the NFL, it’s simple: Stand up, put your hand over your heart. Do what Americans are taught to do, like we were taught to do in my family and I passed on to my kids. When the national anthem is played, stand up and show respect for the men and women who are currently in harm’s way, as well as all those great veterans who fought for that flag. If you want to speak out on something else, do it at a different time in a different platform …." 4. Mobilization Two days after the Fox interview, Walker’s campaign announced an online petition and digital ad campaign "to build pressure on the NFL and its players to stop protesting the national anthem and flag." So, Walker had gone from not directly addressing the players who were protesting to trying to mobilize Americans against them. Worth noting Walker has made it a point to underscore his new position. The anthem controversy had begun to die down when Walker took the step of sending his letter. And Walker’s campaign organization highlighted the governor’s statements about it on "Fox & Friends," issuing a news release saying that he had "urged" players to stand, and starting the mobilization effort. There appears to be a wider political connection. The day after Walker released his letter, the Republican Governors Association, of which Walker is chairman, sent out a fundraising solicitation announcing "I Stand" bumper stickers were available in exchange for a campaign contribution to the association. The email says the stickers are available for a donation of $5 or more. The liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now pointed out the timing. Our rating Walker initially didn’t tell NFL players what they should do, but he did note the right to protest. Less than a month later, he said: "It is time for players in the NFL to stop their protests during the anthem," and he asked the players to stand during the pre-game playing of the anthem. Then Walker went further, saying: "For the NFL, it’s simple. Stand up, put your hand over your heart." Finally, his campaign launched an online petition and digital ad campaign to pressure the players to stop their protests. On the Flip-O-Meter, our ratings are No Flip, Half Flip or Full Flop. For a partial change in position, we give Walker a Half Flip. div class='artembed'>See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2017-10-25T05:00:00	2017-10-24	['None']
-pomt-04095	The United States has "an immigration system where only 6.5 percent of people who come here, come here based on labor and skill."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2013/jan/16/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-only-65-percent-immigrants-come-h/	Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is a key to the Republicans’ hope to capture more of the Hispanic vote in 2016. And to achieve that goal, Rubio -- a potential presidential contender -- wants to be the face of the GOP’s immigration plans. Rubio unveiled his plan for immigration legislation in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 12. Rubio’s plan calls for allowing more immigrants into the country who bring investment or skills, a guest-worker program for farm laborers and a path to citizenship for certain people in the United States illegally. Rubio sees his immigration plan as something that can spur economic growth. "I'm a big believer in family based immigration," Rubio told the Journal. "But I don't think that in the 21st century we can continue to have an immigration system where only 6.5 percent of people who come here, come here based on labor and skill. We have to move toward merit and skill-based immigration." That precise figure -- 6.5 percent -- caught our attention, so we decided to check it out. Brookings policy brief Rubio obtained the 6.5 percent figure from a January 2011 policy brief from the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. The author, Brookings vice president Darrell West, called for immigration reform that in the short term would allow employers to hire workers with scientific and technological skills. West argued that some other countries such as Canada have already crafted policies to attract skilled and unskilled workers. Canada gives applicants points based on their field of study, education and employment experience. "Some 36 percent of all Canadian immigrant visas are in the ‘skilled-worker’ category, as opposed to only 6.5 percent in the United States," West wrote. We contacted West to ask how he arrived at his figure. West told us in an email that there are different numbers depending on the immigrant category and the definition of skilled workers. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security publishes numbers that relate to "legal permanent residents" and how many are family sponsored or employment-based. "But even those numbers are not exact, because the employment category combines skilled and unskilled workers," West wrote. "My 6.5 percent figure was my best approximation of the conflicting numbers that exist in this area." We looked at the numbers ourselves and found the vast majority of immigrants are accepted for family unification and a smaller slice are for employment, though the numbers vary depending on the type of visa and employment. West’s number drew from a group known as legal permanent residents. In 2011, a total of 1,062,040 persons became legal permanent residents. Family sponsored was the largest category for people who earned this status in 2011. Employment-based preferences accounted for 13.1 percent. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security provides a breakdown for people receiving the employment-based preferences. "Professionals with advanced degrees" accounted for 6.3 percent. Another category combined "skilled workers, professionals and unskilled workers," and that accounted for 3.5 percent. (The combined category makes it difficult to pluck out a number for only "skilled" workers.) The 2011 Yearbook of immigrant statistics shows that within those employment categories, the numbers reflect not just workers, but their spouses and children. Our ruling In an interview on reforming our immigration system, Rubio said "I'm a big believer in family based immigration. But I don't think that in the 21st century we can continue to have an immigration system where only 6.5 percent of people who come here, come here based on labor and skill. We have to move toward merit and skill-based immigration." Rubio pulled his number from a 2011 Brookings paper that said, "Some 36 percent of all Canadian immigrant visas are in the ‘skilled-worker’ category, as opposed to only 6.5 percent in the United States." Immigration data shows that most people come here for family reasons. The number of legal immigrants who come based on an employment varies depending on the type of visa and category of employment. But one valid example is to look at legal permanent residents -- 13.1 percent were employment-based preferences in 2011, and professionals with advanced degrees accounted for 6.3 percent. The data isn’t as precise as Rubio makes it sound, but his basic premise is correct, and some numbers do support his claim. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2013-01-16T13:39:33	2013-01-12	['United_States']
-snes-03668	The Clinton Foundation has purchased over $137 million of illegal arms and ammunition	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-bought-137-million-worth-of-illegal-arms/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Hillary Clinton Bought $137 Million Worth of Illegal Arms	30 October 2016	None	['Clinton_Foundation']
-snes-02418	Attorney General Jeff Sessions has investments in the private prison industry.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jeff-sessions-private-prisons/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Does Jeff Sessions Have Investments in the Private Prison Industry?	17 May 2017	None	['Jeff_Sessions']
-pomt-03745	Says Obama called Medicaid "broken" four years ago.	mostly true	/texas/statements/2013/apr/09/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-obama-called-medicaid-broken-four-/	"If you don’t believe me that Medicaid is broken, just ask our president," Texas Gov. Rick Perry told the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 14, 2013. "Four years ago, he said, and I quote, ‘We can't simply put more people into a broken system that doesn't work,’ end quote." In Perry’s speech at the American Conservative Union’s annual gathering of activists, he described Medicaid as "on its way to bankruptcy" and vowed he wouldn’t join other Republican governors who had gotten on board with Obamacare’s expansion of the state-federal program, which insures low-income Americans. But did President Barack Obama say it was "broken"? An Internet search will quickly enough direct the curious reader to Obama’s remark, made June 2, 2009, at the White House before a health-care discussion with Senate Democrats. Between the quotation marks Perry indicated, he captured Obama’s words; here we present them with more context: As we move forward on health care reform, it is not sufficient for us simply to add more people to Medicare or Medicaid to increase the rolls, to increase coverage in the absence of cost controls and reform. And let me repeat this principle: If we don't get control over costs, then it is going to be very difficult for us to expand coverage. These two things have to go hand in hand. Another way of putting it is we can't simply put more people into a broken system that doesn't work. So we've got to reform the underlying system. And this means promoting best practices, not just the most expensive practices. (Click here to read Obama’s full speech, and here to watch Perry’s speech.) Perry spokesman Josh Havens confirmed by email that the governor was referring to this Obama speech, and pointed out a precedent in Obama’s 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope": As initially passed in 2010, Obamacare would have required states to expand Medicaid by opening the program to all households with income below 138 percent of the federal poverty level — which in 2013 is $15,865 for an individual, $32,499 for a family of four. A June 2012 Supreme Court decision gave states the choice to opt in or opt out of expanding their Medicaid rolls, which is the decision Texas currently faces. But much more was at stake in mid-2009. Obama’s health-care overhaul would not pass the Senate until Dec. 24, 2009; the House passed it March 21, 2010. A CNN timeline shows Obama had told Congress in February 2009 that health care reform would not wait another year and held a White House summit on health care in March 2009. In June 2009, Obama launched what news stories in the Washington Post, New York Times and other papers described as a full-on push to get comprehensive health care legislation drafted and passed. The speech Perry quoted was one salvo. Obama hit the same notes in a letter sent to the Senate Democratic leaders after that meeting and in his June 5, 2009, weekly radio/Internet address. In each, Obama called the health-care system "broken" and specified that rising health care costs were the problem, citing Medicaid as a factor in the letter but not in the speech. Obama’s letter said, "Soaring health care costs make our current course unsustainable" and "the ever-increasing cost of Medicare and Medicaid are among the main drivers of enormous budget deficits." In the radio address, he did not name Medicaid or Medicare but said, "We will seize this historic opportunity to finally fix what ails our broken health-care system" by attacking "the root causes of skyrocketing health care costs." White House spokeswoman Joanna Rosholm declined to comment on Perry’s claim. We asked Havens for his thoughts on Obama’s references to the health-care system (not just Medicaid) as broken. Havens replied by email: "No matter how you want to look at it, the president specifically referred to Medicaid when he was talking about a broken system that doesn’t work." Our ruling Perry said that Obama called Medicaid "broken." In context, it’s clear the president was including Medicaid as a significant part of the entire health care system and that his larger point was that health care costs need to be reined in. Still, Obama described expanding the Medicare and Medicaid rolls as putting "more people in a broken system." We rate the governor’s statement as Mostly True.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2013-04-09T14:00:00	2013-03-14	['None']
-snes-02626	The White House cancelled the 2017 Easter Egg roll.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-house-easter-cancel/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did the White House Cancel the 2017 Easter Egg Roll?	13 April 2017	None	['White_House']
-snes-03212	Turtle in a Bind	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/turtle-misshapen-rubber-band/	None	Fauxtography	None	Bethania Palma	None	Turtle Misshapen Due to Being Caught in Rubber Band for 19 Years?	3 January 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-14669	Says Bernie Sanders "voted for what we call the 'Charleston Loophole.'"	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/17/hillary-clinton/fact-checking-hillary-clintons-claim-bernie-sander/	Trying to highlight an area where she is to the left of her opponent, Hillary Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders for his position on guns during the NBC-YouTube Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C. Guns are a particularly emotional topic in South Carolina after Dylann Roof was accused of killing nine African-Americans in a Charleston church in June. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, defended his record on guns saying that he "supported from day one an instant background check to make certain that people who should not have guns do not have guns." Clinton fired back at Sanders with a list of his votes on gun bills, including this one: "He voted for what we call the ‘Charleston loophole.’ " We wanted to know what Clinton meant by the "Charleston loophole" and if Sanders voted for it. Brady bill Clinton and some advocates for tighter gun laws argued Roof was abetted by the three-day time limit for background checks for gun purchases, dubbing it the "Charleston loophole." Supporters of gun rights say blame actually goes to the FBI and its botched paperwork. Under current federal law, the FBI performs background checks on would-be gun buyers in South Carolina and 29 other states through its National Instant Criminal Background Check System. (The rest of the states do their own background checks.) If the check isn’t denied or completed in three days, the gun seller can proceed with the sale. Roof was able to get a gun as a result of clerical errors. Roof tried to buy a handgun in West Columbia, S.C., on April 11. An FBI examiner found that Roof had been arrested for a drug charge March 1. Because the records didn’t show a conviction, the examiner couldn’t deny the purchase but continued to look into Roof’s criminal history. Roof’s rap sheet mistakenly listed the neighboring county’s sheriff office as the agency that arrested him, leading the FBI examiner to request more information from the wrong offices. When the three days were up, the case was still listed as "pending" and Roof was able to purchase the gun. Two months later, Roof allegedly shot and killed nine worshippers and injured one in a historically black church in Charleston. He faces trial on murder charges later this year. Those three days were at the heart of the the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which passed in 1993. A word about waiting periods: The Brady Bill didn’t contain a waiting period that required purchasers to wait to receive their firearm. (Some advocates like this idea, because they believe it might prevent impulsive acts of gun violence.) Rather, the bill set a time limit -- sometimes called a default to proceed -- for the government to conduct its background checks. Sanders, then in the U.S. House of Representatives, voted against the Brady Bill five times -- including a version that reinstated a five-day time limit for background checks. In November 1993, Sanders voted for an amendment imposing an instant background check instead. The problem was technology for instant checks didn’t exist at the time. As a result, according to the Washington Post Fact-Checker, supporters of the Brady bill were forced to negotiate a compromise. What first was proposed as 10 days for the government to conduct the check ultimately was whittled to three days. The final compromise version of the Brady bill was passed and signed into law on Nov. 30, 1993. It prohibited the transfer of a gun to an unlicensed individual, unless three business days have lapsed and the system has not notified the transferor that it would violate the law. Sanders voted against the final bill. Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver told us in July that Sanders voted against the bill because he believed a national waiting period was a federal overreach and because he was answering to his constituents. (We did not get a response from the Sanders’ campaign on debate night about Clinton’s attack.) So to recap: Sanders supported shortening the time the government had to conduct background checks. Whether extra time would have kept Roof from purchasing a gun is unclear. Our ruling Clinton said that Sanders "voted for what we call the Charleston loophole." In 2015, Roof was able to buy a gun after time ran out for the government to perform a background check -- the result of a clerical error when the FBI sought records from the wrong local law enforcement agency about Roof. Whether more time would have made a difference remains unknown. But Roof was able to purchase the gun after a three-day waiting period expired. Sanders voted in 1993 to shorten the time window for the government to conduct its check. Roof was able to purchase a gun after waiting out a three-day time limit on background checks. We rate this claim Mostly True. Clarification: This fact-check was edited on Jan. 19 to clarify waiting periods and and time limits on background checks.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-01-17T23:41:44	2016-01-17	['Bernie_Sanders']
-pomt-06551	"My home state since June of 2009 created 40 percent of the new jobs in America."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2011/oct/04/rick-perry/perry-right-texas-job-growth/	Republican presidential frontrunner Rick Perry visited the Atlanta area Friday to talk to a group about what his state has done to help businesses flourish. The Texas governor proudly did so amid some verbal shots at President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney. Perry made a Texas-size claim about job growth in his state during his 12-minute speech at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. "My home state since June of 2009 created 40 percent of the new jobs in America," Perry told the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, an organization that researches and advocates for fiscally conservative ideas to promote the Peach State’s economic growth. June 2009 is when economists believe the "Great Recession" ended. Was Perry right? We wanted to find out. Perry has based his candidacy -- in part -- on all the people working in Texas, saying policies like the state’s lack of an income tax and his efforts to get out of the way of businesses are part of the reason for the job growth. In June 2009, there were nearly 10.3 million Texans on payrolls, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In August 2011, the most recent federal data available, slightly more than 10.6 million people were working in Texas. The increase was about 323,000 jobs. Nationally, the number of additional Americans working increased by nearly 837,000 during that same time span. If you do the math, Texas accounts for 38.6 percent of that increase. Perry’s camp calculates the increase at 39.2 percent. It came up with the same amount of new workers in Texas but said the job increase was 824,000. Either way you slice it, the percentage of additional workers in Texas in comparison to the rest of the nation is impressive. So what’s going on in Texas? Some economic experts say Texas has some natural advantages, such as its oil, its ports and its proximity to Mexico. Thomas Saving, the director of Texas A&M University’s Private Enterprise Research Center, noted several other factors -- such as it being a right-to-work state and having low debt -- that draw businesses to the state. Saving, who teaches at Perry’s alma mater, said much of the job growth is in education and health care. The state’s population is growing, which means it needs more teachers. Texas, he said, has more people on the Medicaid rolls because of that population growth, which requires more health care professionals. Saving noted that the governor’s office in Texas does not have as much power as other states, so Perry should not get all the credit for the job growth. He also noted the simple factor of the additional people moving into the Lone Star State is another explanation for the job growth. That state’s population grew by nearly 4.3 million people between 2000 and 2010, more than any other state, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. California was second, with a population increase of about 3.4 million. Texas is now third in U.S. population, behind California and New York. Economist Doug Hall also pointed out the state’s population growth and its unemployment rate, which has risen from 7.7 percent in June 2009 to its current rate of 8.5 percent. "That’s a pretty significant number that [Perry] doesn’t mention," said Hall, director of the Economic Analysis & Research Network for the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute. Our friends at PolitiFact Texas tackled a similar topic when Perry boasted about the state’s job creation during a GOP presidential debate. It noted that moderator Brian Williams pointed out that Texas has the highest-in-the-nation share of minimum-wage workers. Perry’s numbers are on target, but there is some context to consider here. Some of the growth may be attributable to Texas’ regulations, but there are other factors, such as the state’s major population growth and the large number of minimum-wage workers. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2011-10-04T06:00:00	2011-09-30	['United_States']
-goop-02254	Gwen Stefani “Convinced” Blake Shelton Won’t Propose This Year?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/gwen-stefani-convinced-blake-shelton-not-propose-this-year-2017/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Gwen Stefani “Convinced” Blake Shelton Won’t Propose This Year?	7:53 pm, November 3, 2017	None	['Gwen_Stefani']
-snes-00873	A black box recording has surfaced featuring an eerie message that suggests the disappearance of Malaysia Flight MH370 involved extraterrestrials.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mysterious-voicemail-malaysian-airlines-disappearance/	None	Junk News	None	Bethania Palma	None	Was Flight MH370 Found with an Eerie Black Box Recording Saying: “SOS, They Are Not Human”?	19 March 2018	None	['None']
-goop-00314	Justin Bieber ‘Breaking Out In Pimples’ Because Of Hailey Baldwin Engagement Stress?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-bieber-breakouts-pimples-hailey-baldwin-engagement-stress-acne-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Justin Bieber ‘Breaking Out In Pimples’ Because Of Hailey Baldwin Engagement Stress?	11:46 am, September 6, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-00627	"For our next two years in my state, we will end with a structural surplus of $499 million."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/may/26/scott-walker/scott-walker-says-499-million-surplus-ahead/	The education funding cuts in Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed 2015-’17 budget rankled critics because at one point a nearly $1 billion surplus was projected for the start of that budget. Walker and fellow Republicans returned much of the surplus to taxpayers in 2014, and then slower-than-predicted growth in tax collections further boxed in the GOP entering the new budget cycle. Now, while campaigning for president, Walker eagerly touts his budget as fiscally responsible. He is even using the "S" word again -- surplus. "At the end of the budget we're debating right now for our next two years in my state, we will end with a structural surplus of $499 million -- nearly a half-a-billion dollars on the structural side of things," Walker said in a May 9, 2015 speech at the South Carolina Freedom Summit in Greenville. Wait, his budget cuts education but it ends up in a surplus? All the claims and counterclaims about deficits and surpluses can get confusing. Let’s look more closely at this one. First, note the modifier "structural" in front of "surplus." That’s important. Walker is talking about a particular measure of a budget’s fiscal responsibility, one published regularly by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. It’s usually called the "structural deficit" or "structural surplus," but even that name is misleading. The measure is not a prediction of whether the next budget will be in balance. By law it has to be. Rather, it is a tally of the size of the budget challenge lawmakers will face in the following budget (2017-’19) based on the spending and taxing decisions they are making in the upcoming one. Think of it as a rough projection of the amount of tax-collection growth the Legislature and governor will need to balance that 2017-’19 budget. It’s rough because the Fiscal Bureau doesn’t try to guess how much tax collections might rise or fall, or factor in demand for Medicaid health programs. But it gives lawmakers an idea of how decisions they are making might affect state finances going forward. The Fiscal Bureau examined Walker’s 2015-’17 budget plan and said it would create a positive balance of $300 million in year one of that 2017-19 budget and another $199 million in year two. This is the report that Walker spokeswoman Laurel Patrick cited to back up his claim. That adds up to $499 million, as Walker said. His own budget document published a similar number. Behind the numbers Much of the "structural surplus" traces to Walker’s proposed cut in aid for local school districts and to timing factors in the way Walker funds school tax credits, said Dale Knapp, research director at the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. "You generally run into structural problems when, in the second year of the budget, spending is greater than ongoing revenues," Knapp said. "That is not the case in the governor’s proposal." Another expert agreed with the numbers, but found fault with how Walker phrased the deficit number as a done deal, when it’s not through the Legislature yet. "He assumes that the budget will pass exactly as he proposed it, and we all know that won’t happen," said Jon Peacock, head of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families’ Wisconsin Budget Project. "Even the governor has been urging changes to the budget." That’s a fair point; the budget is still in the sausage-making stage. Peacock raised a larger criticism of using the structural imbalance number as a measure of the state’s fiscal condition. Lawmakers and governors have learned how to game a once-useful tool, he said. For instance, Peacock said, Walker’s budget unrealistically assumes a popular form of school aids will disappear in the following two-year budget. Knapp, too, called the school aid change "a bit of an accounting trick" that seems designed only to inflate the size of the structural surplus. Our rating Walker said a sign of his restoring fiscal responsibility was that "For our next two years in my state, we will end with a structural surplus of $499 million." A reliable, independent source made that estimate, so the figure is solid. Walker, though, makes it sound like a done deal when the budget is still undergoing legislative review. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2015-05-26T05:00:00	2015-05-09	['None']
-pomt-10594	"I was pretty proud of being the only guy on the stage that ever had a job in the private sector."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/25/mitt-romney/he-should-check-their-resumes/	Mitt Romney likes to trumpet his experience in the private sector. He was the head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and founder of Bain Capital, a venture capital and investment firm. During a campaign rally in Pensacola on Jan. 25, 2008, the day after a Republican debate, Romney boasted, "I was pretty proud of being the only guy on the stage that ever had a job in the private sector." He needs to check the resumes of his rivals. Three of the four other candidates on the stage with Romney at the Boca Raton debate have private sector experience. Rep. Ron Paul was an obstetrician from 1968 to 1996 and has delivered more than 4,000 babies. That sounds like the private sector to us. Mike Huckabee has held several private sector jobs. He was a minister at Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Ark., the producer of radio and TV ads and a founder of KBSC-TV, a Christian TV station in Texarkana, Ark., now known as KLFI-TV. He served as the station's president from 1987 through 1992. He hosted a show called Positive Alternatives and, during his tenure, the station started airing Texarkana football. Rudy Giuliani has spent much of his career in public service, but he practiced law with the firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler from 1977 to 1981. When he stepped down from being mayor of New York in 2002, he founded Giuliani Partners, a consulting firm in emergency preparedness, public safety, crisis management, energy and health care. In 2005, he became a partner in Bracewell & Giuliani, a large law firm. When we inquired with a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign about the remark, she said Romney was referring to business experience. But we find plenty of the private-sector experience of the other candidates to be in business – especially Giuliani's work for the consulting firm, Huckabee's work at the Christian TV station and Paul's work running a medical practice. And so we find Romney's statement to be False. (For a PolitiFact chart summarizing the candidates' experience, click here.)	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2008-01-25T00:00:00	2008-01-25	['None']
-pomt-10750	"The Alternative Minimum Tax...was created by Congress in 1969 to affect 155 wealthy Americans. Because it was never indexed for inflation, those original 155 taxpayers has increased to affect about 3.5-million in 2006."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/nov/01/rudy-giuliani/adding-up-the-amt/	On Jan. 17, 1969, Treasury Secretary Joseph W. Barr told Congress that 155 taxpayers making $200,000 or more did not pay any taxes on their 1966 income. That shook lawmakers into creating the alternative minimum tax in the Tax Reform Act of 1969. It was created as separate income tax system to ensure people did not use loopholes to avoid paying any taxes at all. Because of the law, people who are able to use deductions and legal shelters to lower their tax bill too much must pay a minimum income tax, the AMT. Under the law, taxpayers who meet the AMT threshold must pay the higher tax bill, whether it's their actual bill or the AMT. The trouble is that, unlike the standard income tax system, the AMT is not indexed for inflation. So as time moved on, growing numbers of people have fallen into the AMT program and, as a result, are paying higher taxes. In 2006, 3.5-million taxpayers fell under the AMT, which equates to about 4 percent of American taxpayers, according to the Congressional Research Service. But that was with a special limit — "a patch" — imposed by Congress. So, Giuliani has it right. All of it.	None	Rudy Giuliani	None	None	None	2007-11-01T00:00:00	2007-09-05	['United_States', 'United_States_Congress']
-pomt-07698	Texas "ranks third in teen pregnancies... and it is No. 1 in repeat teen pregnancies."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2011/mar/07/gail-collins/new-york-times-columnist-gail-collins-say-texas-ra/	New York Times columnist Gail Collins isn’t on board with cutting education spending to balance the budget in Texas, one of the fastest-growing states in the land. "Nobody wants to see underperforming, overcrowded schools being deprived of more resources anywhere. But when it happens in Texas, it’s a national crisis," Collins writes in her Feb. 16 column. The column continues: "The birth rate there is the highest in the country... Texas ranks third in teen pregnancies — always the children most likely to be in need of extra help. And it is No. 1 in repeat teen pregnancies." We wondered if Collins pegged how the state ranks. Responding to our request for backup information, Collins pointed us to data from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit that produces statistics and other information frequently used by teen pregnancy prevention groups. Citing the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the campaign reported in December that Texas had the third-highest teen birth rate among girls age 15-19 in 2008, behind Mississippi and New Mexico. Collins also cited Susan Tortolero, director of the University of Texas Prevention Research Center in Houston whom Collins quotes in her column, as a source. In an interview, Tortolero told us that Collins referred to pregnancy rates when it would have been more accurate to cite birth rates. Texas has the fourth-highest teen pregnancy rate nationally, Tortolero said, but the third-highest teen birth rate. "We’re No. 1 in teen repeat births, not pregnancies," she said. Next, we sought teen pregnancy data from the Washington- and New York-based Guttmacher Institute, which studies and advocates on issues related to reproductive health. In 2005, the most recent year for which there’s state-level data, Texas had the fourth-highest teen pregnancy rate among women ages 15-19, an institute report says. States with higher rates were Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico, which led the nation with 93 pregnancies for every 1,000 teenage women. States with large teenage populations also had high numbers of teen pregnancies, according to the report. California reported the highest number of teen pregnancies in 2005 (96,490), followed by Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois (30,000-70,000 each). Teen pregnancy rates declined in every state from 1988 through 2000, according to the report, and in every state save North Dakota from 2000 through 2005. Institute spokeswoman Rebecca Wind told us that according to institute studies on teen sexual behavior, improved contraception use accounted for approximately three-quarters of the decline in teen pregnancies. Over the past couple decades, Texas has been among the 10 states with the highest teen pregnancy rates. In 1988, it had the 10th highest rate, according to the report. It had the eighth highest rate in 1992, second highest in 1996, and fourth highest in 2000. Rochelle Tafolla, a spokeswoman at Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas, told us she didn’t know of a repeat teen pregnancy study — "pregnancy is a harder data point to track," she said. But according to September 2009 data by Child Trends, a nonprofit Washington-based research group, Texas led the nation in the percentage of all births to mother under age 20 that are repeat births in 2006. When we asked Collins whether she confused birth rates and pregnancies in her column, she said: "You’re right." Summing up? Collins incorrectly referred to Texas’ teen birth rate as a pregnancy rate — Texas actually ranks fourth in teen pregnancies, not third. We couldn’t find data for repeat teen pregnancies, but Texas leads the nation in repeat teen births. We rate her statement as Mostly True.	None	Gail Collins	None	None	None	2011-03-07T06:00:00	2011-02-16	['Texas']
-tron-01264	Letter By Florida Teacher: Immigrants Are Owed Nothing But Opportunity	mostly fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/letter-by-florida-teacher/	None	education	None	None	['government waste', 'immigrants', 'schools']	Letter By Florida Teacher: Immigrants Are Owed Nothing But Opportunity	Jan 25, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-12231	"Malia Obama Fired From Cushy Internship At Spanish Embassy"	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/jul/18/freedomcrossroadsus/no-malia-obama-wasnt-fired-smoking-marijuana/	It’s summer internship season and everyone loves a juicy story on a former first daughter’s internship cut short due to drug busts. At least fake news sites seem to. Don’t be fooled, though. A story that Malia Obama was fired from an internship at the U.S. embassy to Spain is fake news. A June 29, 2017, post on FreedomCrossroads.us says that the eldest daughter of former President Barack Obama was caught smoking marijuana during her internship at the Spanish embassy and sent home. "She was caught, by Embassy Security — aka the U.S. Marines — on the roof of the building burning a doobie and playing with the Ambassador’s carrier pigeons," the story said. "Ambassador Bedard is an avid hobbyist." Obama did intern at the embassy, in 2016, not this year. And there were no reports of her dismissal. This summer, Obama traveled with her family to Bali and Jakarta and is continuing an internship at the Weinstein Company movie studio she began in the spring. She is still expected to go to Harvard in the fall — which the post also denied. "She won’t be starting Harvard this fall and she has no future in government, since all government jobs require drug tests," the post said. The story said Malia Obama was caught by U.S. Marines, but that’s unrealistic. They are indeed stationed at embassies, but their primary role is that of protecting classified material in the interest of the United States’ national security — not watching over summer interns. The post also refers to the wrong ambassador. There has never been a U.S. ambassador to Spain by the name of Bedard, and there is actually no U.S. ambassador in Spain at all right now. Trump called for the resignation of foreign ambassadors nominated by Obama at the start of his tenure, and hasn’t replaced previous Spanish ambassador to Spain, James Costos, since. We don’t know whose carrier pigeons the story refers to, but there were no reports of pigeons during her internship last year, either. This isn’t the first time a fake news story about the former president’s eldest daughter has made its rounds on blogs and Facebook this year. Previous reports we’ve debunked said that Malia was expelled from Harvard before she even started and that she was arrested for drinking, drugs and dog-fighting. The latest story appeared on FreedomCrossroads.us, an unreliable site that as we have noted previously, has an About Us page that claims it "uses facts that don’t exist and relies more on imagination than the truth." We rate this statement Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	FreedomCrossroads.us	None	None	None	2017-07-18T10:33:44	2017-06-29	['None']
-tron-01974	Floyd Mayweather Donates Millions to Houston Flooding Relief	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/floyd-mayweather-donates-millions-houston-flooding-relief/	None	natural-disasters/hurricane	None	None	['celebrities', 'hurricane harvey', 'natural disasters', 'sports']	Floyd Mayweather Donates Millions to Houston Flooding Relief	Aug 31, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-00689	The United States "is not modernizing its nuclear weapons."	false	/florida/statements/2015/may/05/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-united-states-not-modernizing-its/	U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., argues that the United States needs to do more to beef up its military to face down evil. Speaking at the Iowa Faith and Freedom summit on April 25, Rubio said that threats worldwide "require strong American leadership, which we cannot exert as long as we eviscerate military spending, which is what we are doing now. We are placing our nation at a dangerous position." Then he said this about the country’s nuclear stockpiles: "We are the only nation that is not modernizing its nuclear weapons." We wanted to know whether Rubio was correct that the United States isn’t modernizing its nuclear weapons, so we consulted with experts on U.S. nuclear policy. (We reached out to Rubio’s presidential campaign and Senate office and did not get a response.) Modernizing nuclear weapons Multiple experts told us that Rubio’s claim about nuclear weapons is wrong because ongoing and planned nuclear modernization efforts are extensive. The United States has been spending billions modernizing nuclear equipment -- and has plans to continue to do so. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s March 2015 report to Congress details plans to modernize nuclear equipment including various warheads over the coming years. A Congressional Research Service Report issued the same month covered similar topics. Modernization is happening for many different types of nuclear programs, said Matthew Bunn, an expert on nuclear proliferation and a professor Harvard University. (During the 1990s, Bunn was adviser to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.) "First, while we haven’t deployed major new strategic systems in some time, we’ve been modernizing the ones we’ve got more or less continuously — new rocket motors and guidance systems for the Minuteman missiles, lots of rebuilt parts for the B-52s, etc., etc. We’re in the middle of a $10 billion modernization of the B-61 bomb," Bunn said. These modernization plans are not cheap. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in January that the administration’s plans for nuclear forces would cost $348 billion over the next decade. During the next three decades, the cost to maintain the nuclear arsenal and purchase replacement systems could rise to more than $1 trillion, according to a 2014 report by the The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The size of the U.S. stockpile has been declining since the 1960s and will decline further under the new START Treaty agreed to with Russia in 2011. But nuclear weapons can "live" for a long time. Several nuclear weapons introduced or upgraded in the 1990s or 2000s can be used for another 20 to 30 years, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. (Kristensen pointed to several upgrades in recent decades.) One analyst we spoke with had concerns that the upgrades aren’t happening fast enough. Tom Donnelly, a defense policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told PolitiFact that "we are not really modernizing our nukes very seriously" and that some projects are years -- even decades -- away and could could fall prey to budget cuts. But Benjamin Friedman, an expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that even if some modernization plans were canceled, "we would still be modernizing our nuclear arsenal or our nuclear weapons, just less of them. So any normal definition of ‘modernize,’ describes what the United States is doing with its nuclear weapons." Rubio compared the United States to the rest of the world without naming any other countries when he said "we are the only nation that is not modernizing its nuclear weapons." Rubio said that the United States was "the only nation" not modernizing its weapons, but Bunn, the Harvard professor, said comparing the United States on that basis with other countries is misleading. China, for example, is modernizing its arsenal, but its arsenal is also far smaller. The United States and Russia have over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, he said. "So I would say: (a) not true that we haven’t been modernizing at all; (b) IS (mostly) true that we haven’t bought any big new strategic delivery systems lately; (c) highly misleading not to mention that all nuclear powers other than ourselves and Russia have tiny nuclear arsenals compared to ours," Bunn said. Our ruling Rubio said that the United States "is not modernizing its nuclear weapons." Most of the experts we interviewed disputed Rubio’s statement. While the United States has reduced the number of warheads, it has also been modernizing nuclear equipment and has plans to continue to do so. We rate this claim False.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2015-05-05T10:42:11	2015-04-25	['United_States']
-pomt-08484	Since the stimulus package was passed, "Ohio’s lost over 100,000 more jobs."	true	/ohio/statements/2010/oct/11/rob-portman/portman-uses-new-and-improved-number-job-losses-st/	PolitiFact has rapped Rob Portman for certain claims made during his U.S. Senate campaign. We’ve credited Portman, too, for truthful statements. That’s the nature of the Truth-O-Meter: We play it as it lays. Which brings us to Portman’s latest television ad. In the 30-second spot, Portman points to "out-of-control" federal spending, "dangerous" deficits and an economic stimulus plan that he says isn’t working. "Since the $800 billion stimulus passed, Ohio’s lost over 100,000 more jobs," Portman says in the commercial. The claim about the stimulus program not working has been batted about repeatedly. The White House said when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in February 2009, that unemployment would peak at 8 percent. Yet it is now 9.6 percent nationally, and 10.7 percent in Ohio. A number of economists say that even more jobs would have been lost were it not for the government spending to stimulate the economy. The Congressional Budget Office’s last quarterly evaluation said the stimulus increased national employment by 1.4 million to 3.3 million jobs. There have been mistakes, missteps and gaffes documented in the spending programs, however, and Portman and other Republicans say the spending was poorly focused. This central question will be for historians and economists in the future to settle. We’re merely taking note of Portman’s claim because of this: He uses a lower number -- 100,000 jobs lost in Ohio since the stimulus passed -- than he used previously. When he put the figure at 150,000 in June, the Truth-O-Meter ruled it Half True -- because only 127,900 jobs had actually been lost, judging by the most widely accepted measure. That was based on Bureau of Labor Statistics figures through May, the most current at the time. The numbers come from surveys of employers and are adjusted as the data becomes more complete. Using updated data, BLS now shows the post-stimulus job losses in Ohio came to 130,000 for the period Portman claimed in his earlier statement.. But now it’s October and Portman is using a lower figure when he speaks. As he said in his newest ad, and repeated during an Oct. 8 debate at the City Club of Cleveland, since the stimulus bill passed, "Ohio’s lost over 100,000 more jobs." Yet here’s the thing: Portman’s rhetoric might actually be too cautious now. As measured by the latest BLS figures, which go through August and are preliminary, Ohio has 149,200 fewer jobs now than when the stimulus passed. That’s exquisitely close to 150,000. What happened? The state steadily lost jobs through 2009 but the numbers started improving early in the year, continuing through May. The summer saw a retraction, however, reducing Ohio’s employment count by a total of 19,200 jobs during June, July and August. So Portman was accurate and then some with his recent, more cautious statement. The Half True ruling nevertheless stands for his June claim, because PolitiFact doesn’t believe in fortune-telling and Portman’s numbers were in fact off when he made that statement. But we give credit where credit is due. So the Truth-O-Meter takes a turn to the right and rules on Portman’s newest claim: True. Comment on this item.	None	Rob Portman	None	None	None	2010-10-11T17:00:00	2010-10-06	['Ohio']
-snes-05504	California has banned a popular type of ammunition, the .45 ACP.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-banned-45-acp-ammunition/	None	Junk News	None	Brooke Binkowski	None	Has California Banned .45 ACP Ammunition?	11 December 2015	None	['California']
-chct-00186	FACT CHECK: How Large Is The US Trade Deficit?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/03/06/fact-check-trump-800-billion-trade-deficit/	None	None	None	David Sivak | Fact Check Editor	None	None	4:08 PM 03/06/2018	None	['None']
-bove-00126	Social Media Push For Anil Ambani Despite 97% Shareholder Wealth Destruction In 10 Years	none	https://www.boomlive.in/social-media-push-for-anil-ambani-despite-97-shareholder-wealth-destruction-in-10-years/	None	None	None	None	None	Social Media Push For Anil Ambani Despite 97% Shareholder Wealth Destruction In 10 Years	Dec 27 2017 2:52 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-15270	"House Republicans just passed a bill that makes it legal for single mothers to be fired by their employers."	false	/punditfact/statements/2015/jul/28/occupy-democrats/house-republicans-attacked-passing-bill-makes-it-l/	A meme shared by the liberal Facebook group Occupy Democrats calls out Republicans for an alarming affront to women. "House Republicans just passed a bill that makes it legal for single mothers to be fired by their employers," it says. The meme was shared more than 60,000 times, suggesting a lot of people found the news outrageous. We wanted to know if the meme is accurate: Did House Republicans really pass a bill that makes it legal for single moms to be fired by their employers? The outrage, we found, is overblown. No bill was passed It’s clear from a cached image of Occupy Democrats’ website and a Huffington Post article that the meme’s underlying beef is with the First Amendment Defense Act, HR 2802, introduced by Republicans on June 17. The bill, co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, is a conservative response to the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage. Before we get into the bill’s language and possibly worrisome interpretations, we want to make one thing clear: This bill has not passed the GOP-led House. Far from it.The bill has been submitted to a committee for consideration. But it has not been debated, much less voted on, in committee or on the House floor. The Senate has also not moved on its companion. This, of course, doesn’t preclude either chamber from getting around to it. But to say the bill has been passed is just wrong. Only about 15 percent of bills make it past the committee stage, according to GovTrack.us. With that out of the way, we’ll explain why some advocates for women are concerned about its wording. What the bill actually says Some Americans saw the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage as a potential affront to their religious beliefs under the First Amendment. The authors of the First Amendment Defense Act attempted to address how the court’s decision could affect religious institutions in a situation that came up during oral arguments. Justice Samuel Alito asked in April whether a religious school could lose its tax-exempt status if it opposes same-sex marriage, and the U.S. solicitor general, who was arguing for same-sex couples, said "it’s certainly going to be an issue." The First Amendment Defense Act mentions this exchange in its text and proposes that it should be illegal for the federal government to impose tax, grant or benefit sanctions on organizations that oppose same-sex marriage because of religious or moral convictions. The bill does not mention women at all. So where does the concern for single moms losing their jobs come into play? The part that worries some people is section 3(a), which reads: "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Federal Government shall not take any discriminatory action against a person wholly or partially on the basis that such person believes or acts in accordance with a religious belief of moral conviction that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or that sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage." Emily Martin, vice president and general counsel of the National Women's Law Center, pointed to the last part about sexual relations being reserved for the marriage of one man and one woman. The wording "can absolutely" be applied to women who are pregnant outside of marriage, she said. The introductory clause "notwithstanding any other provision of law," Martin said, seems to indicate that FADA would overrule other existing laws on this issue. Usually, when an individual feels she has been discriminated against, she has to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The agency would then investigate the concern and give a ruling or provide the complainant with a "right to sue." However, Martin argued that, in an extreme scenario, it’s possible the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would not have jurisdiction in cases under this bill since the First Amendment Defense Act specifically forbids the federal government from taking discriminatory actions against a person. (EEOC spokesman James Ryan said that the agency does not comment on pending legislation in Congress.) Samuel Estreicher, director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law at New York University’s Law School, says he would not read the bill as repealing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which protects against sex discrimination). Still, he said it could use some clarification. " ‘Acting in accordance with religious belief’ goes too far as a basis for protection," Estreicher said. "People can do bad things in accordance with their religious belief. … There needs to be better definition of the protected acts." PunditFact reached out to Occupy Democrats but did not hear back. What the bill’s sponsors say The bill’s primary sponsors in the Senate and the House say the bill is not supposed to target single mothers. This accusation resonates with Labrador personally because he was raised by a single mother. In a phone interview, Labrador said the First Amendment Defense Act deals exclusively with possible federal government actions against employers that do not support same-sex marriage. The federal government would not be able to use tax or other federal sanctions, such as withdrawing benefits or tax-exempt status, against employers who oppose same-sex marriage. Further, he said, the bill does not address employer-employee relationships, and if an employee felt that she was discriminated against, she would still be able to seek recourse through employment protections in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That said, Labrador said he would make the bill more clear by defining which government actions would be considered discriminatory against institutions that oppose same-sex marriage. One part of the law (Clause 3(b)(5), to be specific) might be read as a catch-all for federal discrimination, so Labrador said he will take it out. "While (the possible firing of pregnant single mothers) was never an intended result of this legislation, we are taking these concerns seriously and working on tightening the language to ensure that the intent of the bill is clear," Labrador’s office said in a written statement. As of July 28, the bill had not been amended by the committee. Amendments can be introduced either by a committee or during debate in the House or Senate. Our ruling The Occupy Democrats’ meme said, "House Republicans just passed a bill that makes it legal for single mothers to be fired by their employers." There are big flaws with this claim: The bill in question has not been debated in the House or Senate, let alone passed under any definition of the word. It has merely been introduced. Further, the bill does not legalize the firing of single mothers. The bill deals with discriminatory actions that the federal government could take (such as tax sanctions) against religious institutions that oppose same-sex marriage. The meme scares Facebook users about an outrageous House Republican move that did not occur. So we rate the claim False.	None	Occupy Democrats	None	None	None	2015-07-28T16:05:34	2015-07-17	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-14845	In Japan, "permanent residency is not given to Muslims," the "propagation of Islam" is banned, "one cannot import a Koran published in the Arabic language," and "Muslims cannot even rent a house."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/17/viral-image/viral-graphic-says-japan-keeps-out-radical-islam-t/	Amid rising concerns about terrorist attacks by ISIS, we’ve seen an uptick in chain emails and viral images about Islam. One viral image points to Japan as an example of a country that keeps out radical Islam by cracking down on all forms of Islam and its adherents, implying that this is a good model for the United States to follow. The graphic is a simple black-and-white block of text with the headline, "Japan keeps Islam at bay by putting restrictions on Islam and ALL Muslims." The graphic then mentions a variety of ways in which Japan supposedly keeps tight control over the Muslims in its midst: • "Japan is the only nation that does not give citizenship to Muslims" • "Permanent residency is not given to Muslims" • "Propagation of Islam in Japan is banned" • "In the University of Japan, Arabic or any Islamic language is not taught" • "Japan is the only country in the world with a negligible number of embassies in Islamic countries" • "One cannot import a ‘Koran’ published in the Arabic language" • "Muslims must follow Japanese law and language". • "The Japanese government is of the opinion that Muslims are fundamentalist, and unwilling to change their Muslim laws" • "Muslims cannot even rent a house in Japan" • "There is no sharia law in Japan" We wondered whether the graphic is accurate. To streamline our analysis, we focused mostly on these four claims -- that in Japan, "permanent residency is not given to Muslims," the "propagation of Islam" is banned, "one cannot import a Koran published in the Arabic language," and "Muslims cannot even rent a house." We heard back from three experts who have experience with the intersection of Japan and Islam, and all three said the graphic is blatantly incorrect. "The chain email is nothing but malicious falsehood," said Kumiko Yagi, a professor at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Graduate School who has written extensively about Islam and other religions. Kamada Shigeru, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Tokyo, agreed, saying that all four of the claims we spotlighted are wrong. He said Japan doesn’t discriminate in permanent residency on the basis of religion and that "propagation" of Islam is not banned. He added that the Koran or other religious books in Arabic can be imported. As for renting a residence, he said there may be some reluctance among residents of Japan to rent apartments to foreigners as a general rule, but he said there’s no specific animus toward Muslims. These four claims "are totally unfounded," said Glenda S. Roberts, a professor of cultural anthropology and Japanese studies at the graduate school of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. "It is disturbing that such an email is circulating," she added. "These claims are simply ridiculous." Other claims in the graphic are easily debunked. For instance, the graphic claims that "Japan is the only country in the world with a negligible number of embassies in Islamic countries." Yet a quick visit to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website shows that Japan has embassies in such countries as Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, plus a permanent representative to the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, there is nothing in Japanese nationality law that prevents Muslims from becoming naturalized citizens. The requirements concern length of residency, age, a history of "upright conduct," the ability to support oneself and a willingness to give up other nationalities. There is no mention of religion. As for universities not teaching Arabic, we found that the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies does. Classes in Arabic are also taught at the Arabic Islamic Institute in Tokyo. Last year, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made clear Japan’s respect for people of the Islamic faith during an event with the Islamic diplomatic corps. "I have found that a fundamental aspect of the spirit of Islam is harmony with and love for others," Abe said. "I believe therein lie points of commonality with the Japanese spirit, which is founded on co-existence." Our ruling The graphic says that in Japan, "permanent residency is not given to Muslims," the "propagation of Islam" is banned, "one cannot import a Koran published in the Arabic language," and "Muslims cannot even rent a house." Each of these four statements is incorrect, and the overall point of the graphic -- that Japan keeps itself free from radical Islam by discriminating against all Muslims -- is dramatically off-base. We rate these claims Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Viral image	None	None	None	2015-11-17T16:43:56	2015-11-16	['Islam', 'Japan', 'Arabic_language', 'Quran']
-snes-04154	The Clinton Foundation rates higher than the Red Cross in charity rankings.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-foundation-scores-higher-as-a-charity-than-the-red-cross/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Clinton Foundation Scores Higher as a Charity than the Red Cross?	29 August 2016	None	['Clinton_Foundation', 'International_Red_Cross_and_Red_Crescent_Movement']
-pose-01126	"Governor Scott will propose to double down on Florida's investment in digital learning initiatives for school districts from $40 million to $80 million."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/1212/double-investment-digital-learning-initiatives/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	Double investment in digital learning initiatives	2014-12-30T10:49:30	None	['None']
-pomt-10377	"More than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/23/barack-obama/statistics-dont-lie-in-this-case/	In a Father's Day address at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Sen. Barack Obama chose a less than celebratory topic: the absence of men in the lives of many children, especially black children. "More than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children." He went on to say that these absent fathers don't realize that "responsibility does not end at conception" and are "acting like boys instead of men." The New York Times noted that Obama sounded like comedian Bill Cosby, who has blamed fatherlessness in the black community, among other things, for African-Americans' overrepresentation in jail and underrepresentation among the educated. By using the term "we," we will assume Obama is speaking to people roughly his age, 46. And by that measure, his claim is backed up by data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1960, the year before Obama was born, 22 percent of black children lived with single parents. In 1968, the number rose to 31.4 percent. By 2006, the 1960 percentage had more than doubled to 56 percent. And the single parents are overwhelmingly women. In 2006, 91.4 percent of single parents of black children were mothers. That figure hasn't changed over the years. In 1960, it was a shade lower at 91 percent. The figures for single-parent families show a rosier picture among other races. About 28 percent of children of all races lived with a single parent in 2006. In 1960, only about 9 percent of American children lived with a single parent. The absence of fathers is important, Obama continued, because "children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison." Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist with Harvard Medical School and co-author with Bill Cosby of Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, said Obama's view rings true: The absence of fathers corresponds with a host of social ills, including dropping out of school and serving time in jail. But he said other factors such as poverty, education level and the age of parents also correlate with single motherhood and adolescent problems. "I felt he was correct in calling attention to the fact that father involvement in children's lives is very important for their well-being and their healthy growth, and studies show that," Poussaint said. Rebecca Blank, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies social and economic policy, wrote in an e-mail that it's difficult to pinpoint the exact causes of the social problems Obama mentions because they're so interrelated. But solid research has shown that growing up in a single-family household, even if other factors are controlled, has a negative effect. "I think there are very few social scientists these days who wouldn't agree that children in single-parent households are at risk of a variety of bad outcomes and that family structure has some causal impact on that risk," she wrote. Obama's premise that the absence of fathers is leading to social problems is backed up by research, but we're not ruling on that part of his statement. We're ruling on his claim that, "More than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children," which U.S. Census numbers substantiate. And we rule it to be True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-06-23T00:00:00	2008-06-15	['None']
-snes-01166	Is Tide Discontinuing Their PODs Product Because Consumers Eat Them?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tide-discontinuing-pods/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Is Tide Discontinuing Their PODS Product Because Consumers Eat Them?	21 January 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00269	BMW Manager X6 Giveaway	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/bmw-manager-like-farming-scam.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	BMW Manager X6 Giveaway Like-Farming Scam	February 26, 2014	None	['None']
-goop-02103	Angelina Jolie “Desperate” For Brad Pitt Reconciliation, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-reconciliation-brad-pitt-wants-back/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Angelina Jolie NOT “Desperate” For Brad Pitt Reconciliation, Despite Reports	12:16 pm, December 2, 2017	None	['Angelina_Jolie']
-pomt-05029	"Mitt Romney's companies were pioneers in outsourcing U.S. jobs to low-wage countries."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/13/barack-obama/were-romneys-companies-pioneers-outsourcing/	For Mitt Romney, a candidate who has made job creation the centerpiece of his campaign, it hardly helps to have news reports that Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas. Based on that coverage, the Obama campaign produced a television ad that asserted "Mitt Romney's companies were pioneers in outsourcing U.S. jobs to low-wage countries." Our fellow fact-checkers at FactCheck.org and the Washington Post said similar claims from the Obama campaign were exaggerated. That prompted the Obama campaign to take the unusual step of pushing back with a long letter defending the claims. Subsequently, other news organizations have reported more on Romney’s time at Bain, which in turn led the Obama campaign to accuse Romney of not telling the truth about himself and the firm he once led. We decided to fact-check two parts of the Obama campaign’s statement. Were these really Romney’s companies? And were these companies actually "pioneers in outsourcing" ? Romney and his campaign have noted repeatedly that Romney left management of the company in 1999. That may be, but Romney was the company's founder, providing vision and direction for Bain. It's not as if his influence ended the moment he left to run the Olympics. Meanwhile, calling the companies "pioneers in outsourcing" overstates the case. They did promote outsourcing, but they were part of a trend already decades in the making. Romney's companies? Romney started Bain Capital in 1984. Its specialty was investing in new companies and helping them grow or taking troubled companies and turning them around. Romney likes to mention success stories like Staples, the office supply company. Some of these firms were deeply involved in outsourcing. The word "pioneers" comes directly from a June Washington Post article: "During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components." The Romney camp demanded a retraction on the grounds that some of the companies cited also created jobs in the United States. Others companies became part of the Bain portfolio after Romney took a leave of absence in February 1999, to run the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. The Washington Post retracted nothing. As an example, let’s start by looking at a company that Bain did control under Romney’s watch: Modus Media. Modus Media specialized in helping companies like IBM and Dell Computers manufacture hardware overseas. As FactCheck.org confirmed, it was controlled by Bain. No one argues whether Modus Media created jobs in countries such as Singapore and China. Now, if those jobs never existed in the United States in the first place, it is difficult to argue that Modus Media or Bain sent them overseas. But in 2000, the firm unambiguously disrupted the lives of about 200 American workers when it announced it was closing a plant in Fremont, Calif. and opening one in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Romney campaign argues that prior to this, Modus Media had created about 700 domestic jobs. We don’t know the quality and pay of those jobs and how they would compare to the jobs that were lost. But we do agree that those new jobs should be part of the overall picture. The Romney campaign has also repeatedly asserted that the plant relocation didn’t happen during "Romney’s time." FactCheck.org emphasized that the move took place "more than a year after Romney had left Bain." This issue of when Romney stepped down and whether he can be held accountable for things that happened after February 1999 has become something of a cottage industry in the media. Talking Points Memo, Mother Jones, and the Boston Globe have unearthed SEC filings and personal financial disclosure statements that list Romney variously as CEO, Managing Director, and president of Bain as late as 2002. Bain released internal memos that seemed to show Romney played no role in management decisions. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker added another document that lends weight to the argument that Romney was not part of Bain management after 1999. It is a 2002 Massachusetts State Ballot Law Commission report certifying Romney’s eligibility to run for governor. It examined Romney’s activities when he took over the Olympics and based on weeks of testimony, the report revealed a man consumed with that task and who had no active connection to Bain. Looking at all the evidence made public so far, we do not think Romney was actively involved in the day-to-day management of Bain after 1999. But it doesn’t mean his influence disappeared after he left. Were they "pioneers"? Romney was the company’s founder, and we think it worth a broader look at Bain’s investment practices, starting in the early 1990s. "Typically, private equity companies tended to focus on companies in the $100 million to $500 million range," said Anant Sundaram, a researcher in mergers and acquisitions at the Dartmouth Tuck School of Business. More often than not, they turned them into companies worth $2.5 billion. Getting there was not easy. "Did the private equity firms have the incentive to do a lot of cost cutting?" Sundaram said. "You bet. Was outsourcing one of the ways of cutting those costs? You bet. Everybody was doing it." Our research shows that outsourcing was well established by the time Bain began buying shares in the companies described in the recent articles. To call these companies pioneers is a stretch. "This had been going on for decades," said Tim Sturgeon a researcher who focuses on outsourcing at the Industrial Performance Center at MIT. Outsourcing grew significantly starting in the early 1990s thanks in part to the expansion of the Internet and changes in the rules of international trade. Bain was one of scores of private equity firms that participated. "They were part of the herd," said Sturgeon. "To say they picked the pioneers gives (Bain) too much credit for being innovative. It was a mainstream strategy by that point." Every expert we contacted agreed that when Bain invested in the companies in question, it was counting on high returns that included the results of outsourcing. In that light, the exact month that Romney stepped away from Bain makes little difference. When Modus Media closed that plant in California in 2000, it was making the kind of move Romney and Bain expected when they first got behind it. The particular decision was not known, but the general nature of the decision was, the experts we spoke with said. Matthew Rice, Chief Investment Officer for DiMeo Schneider and Associates, a Chicago-based investment consulting firm, says he doesn’t see how Romney can divorce himself from the strategies that made Bain profitable. "Technically, I guess he can," Rice said. "But they would have done it anyway, whether he was there or not. If you can offshore and cut costs, you do it. Because if you don’t, the business might not survive and nobody would have any jobs." And Bain would not make any profits. And the sole purpose of any fund, private equity or otherwise, is to make a profit. Our ruling The Obama television ad holds Romney responsible for sending jobs outside the country. It said "Romney’s companies were pioneers in outsourcing U.S. jobs to low-wage countries." We find reasonable grounds for labeling the companies as "Romney’s." He was the founder of Bain and assembled a team that looked to make high returns. One strategy was to invest in companies that played off the trend in outsourcing. We make no judgment on whether outsourcing is good or bad. It was widely seen as profitable, and Bain selected companies that would succeed. If picking a company makes it yours, then these were Romney’s companies and in a general sense, they did what he expected them to do. The one caveat is there is a gray area of direct accountability, because no one has reported that he was personally involved in managing those firms. We find little evidence that the particular firms were "pioneers in outsourcing." The Obama campaign took the word from the Washington Post but used it as its own. Outsourcing was well established by the early 1990s, and firms were applying it in a variety of industrial areas. The Bain companies were among that group. The Obama campaign's statement would have voters believe that Romney played a key role in driving the outsourcing phenomenon. We find that an exaggeration. We rule the statement to be Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-07-13T14:00:54	2012-07-03	['United_States']
-pomt-10665	Says he has "the most impressive education record" of the Republican candidates.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/27/mike-huckabee/not-quite-the-best/	Standing on a stage in Iowa, amid all his competitors for the Republican presidential primary, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee made a bold claim. Of all the candidates, he said, he owned "the most impressive" education record. "We raised standards, we measured and we held people accountable for the results," he said. It might seem an easy thing to prove. He had 10 years of executive leadership under his belt, compared to Mitt Romney's four and Rudy Giuliani's eight. The others, of course, had none, leaving this a contest where only three could compete. Huckabee also had a pretty hefty resume behind him, including past chairmanships of the Education Commission of the States and the Southern Regional Education Board. And under his watch, he pushed for or signed legislation that improved Arkansas teacher pay, curriculum standards and education funding. The results were quite remarkable. As the Education Trust reports, Arkansas was the biggest gainer in fourth-grade math and second best in eighth-grade math over seven years of the national exam known as the "nation's report card." By the time of the debate, in fact, Huckabee had become the only Republican to be endorsed by the New Hampshire chapter of the National Education Association. But as is the case with all claims of being the best or worst of something, Huckabee's takes just a small amount of poking to find points that deflate the logic. First, consider Romney's record. Though in office a shorter time than Huckabee, Romney certainly can claim as strong, if not stronger, results. Massachusetts fourth- and eighth-graders rated first in the nation in both math and science on the "nation's report card" in both 2005 and 2007. Education Week rated Massachusetts as fifth on its 2007 "chance for success" index, compared to Arkansas' 39th. Second, consider Huckabee's critics, who say the former governor claims too much credit. Tom Kimbrell, a former superintendent who now heads the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators, minces no words in assessing Huckabee's tenure: "He was the governor of Arkansas, but as far as being part of the process, he was not present. There was no leadership at all." Kimbrell, who was knee-deep in many of the state's education issues during Huckabee's tenure, said the Legislature and the state's education organizations made things happen on most key issues. And when Huckabee did press his views, such as on arts education and consolidation of small school districts, Kimbrell contended the results were not positive. Consolidation did not save money as promised, though it did disrupt many small rural communities. And a mandate for arts education came without funding and ended up as part of a lawsuit. Gary Ritter, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Arkansas, put it this way: "He took unpopular stands in favor of strategies he believed would work. I'm not sure if they worked." Did Huckabee act on education issues? Yes. Was his record the "most impressive" of the bunch? Romney certainly competes. So we rate Huckabee's boast Half True.	None	Mike Huckabee	None	None	None	2007-12-27T00:00:00	2007-12-12	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-chct-00254	FACT CHECK: Did Climate Change Cause The California Wildfires?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/12/15/fact-check-did-climate-change-cause-the-california-wildfires/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	8:08 PM 12/15/2017	None	['None']
-bove-00030	Did Air India Buy Paintings From Former Defence Minister’s Wife For Rs 28 Crore?	none	https://www.boomlive.in/did-air-india-buy-paintings-from-former-defence-ministers-wife-for-rs-28-crore/	None	None	None	None	None	Did Air India Buy Paintings From Former Defence Minister’s Wife For Rs 28 Crore?	Aug 17 2018 1:41 pm, Last Updated: Aug 17 2018 4:55 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-11388	Says David Hogg wasn’t at school during the Parkland school shooting.	pants on fire!	/florida/statements/2018/mar/27/blog-posting/david-hogg-not-school-during-shooting-s-fake-news/	Multiple internet bloggers falsely claimed that student David Hogg was not on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when the school shooting happened Feb. 14. The inaccurate claims surfaced after CBS News produced "39 Days," a documentary of several Stoneman Douglas High School students including Hogg. At the beginning of the video, Hogg, described as a student journalist, explained his immediate actions following the shooting that left 17 people dead. Some bloggers took the 14-second soundbite to insinuate that Hogg wasn’t actually at school when the shooting took place. "In a recently leaked excerpt of a CBS documentary, David Hogg admits he was at home during the Parkland shooting," reads the opening of a story on Squawker.org. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com "David Hogg admits he wasn’t at school during Parkland school shooting," says a headline on DailyPresser.com. None of those claims are true. The inaccurate posts say that Hogg’s comments directly contradict statements in a Feb. 15 Time Magazine interview. Hogg said he heard a gunshot while sitting in an AP environmental science class around 2:30 p.m. The blogs juxtaposed that statement with the following statement from Hogg in the CBS documentary: "On the day of the shooting, I got my camera and got on my bike and rode as fast as I could three miles from my house to the school to get as much video and to get as many interviews as I could because I knew that this could not be another mass shooting." People questioned how Hogg could be at school when the shooting started and also be riding his bike three miles to get his camera. And if Hogg really did leave school; how did he get back on to campus if the area was on lockdown? The timeline presented in this way is a bit confusing, but the blogs didn’t try to fairly settle the seeming discrepancy. Here’s what happened. Hogg was at the school during the shooting. Hogg shot a video on his cellphone while taking cover in a classroom closet. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Sometime after that, he went home. At around 6 p.m., Hogg went back to get interviews, according to Vox. "The evening after the shooting, Hogg says, he biked up to the school, where the media was still camped out," the article says. "This time, he put himself in front of the camera, making his first — but not final — plea for an end to mass shootings." Regardless of this information, other conservative news websites including InfoWars and RedState jumped the gun and reported that the CBS interview "cast doubt" on Hogg’s whereabouts during the school shooting. Sometime after the original stories, both websites issued "updates" on their stories to say that the CBS video included Hogg’s quote without context. But not every site did. "It appears that the problem was that CBS included a very confusing quote without context," wrote conservative Florida writer Sarah Rumpf, author of the errant RedState story. "Hogg was on campus during the shooting and returned several hours later to interview people across the street." Claims that Hogg was not at school during the shooting are not based in reality. We rate them Pants on Fire!	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-03-27T12:23:27	2018-03-26	['None']
-pomt-08973	Some city of Atlanta employees "have not had raises in eight years."	false	/georgia/statements/2010/jul/18/charles-clark/union-leader-says-atlanta-hasnt-been-fair-some-emp/	We've all heard stories about employees who didn't get raises, but this claim from a union representative struck us. Charles Clark, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local 1644, said during the heat of debate among city of Atlanta leaders concerning whether to give only police officers raises that some employees had not received raises in eight years. "We think it is an insult to single out a group, without giving others a raise, when those others have not had raises in eight years," Clark said. Has it been that bad for some city employees? Well, we checked with the city of Atlanta's Human Resources Department. They keep personnel records of city employees and should know when was the last time they've received raises. According to their records, all city workers, except sworn police officers and firefighters, received a 2.6 percent cost-of-living increase on July 1, 2007. Those workers then received an additional 1 percent cost-of-living increase on New Year's Day 2008, HR officials said. Sworn police officers and firefighters received a 2 percent cost-of-living increase Jan. 1, 2008, the HR Department reported. Sworn police officers and firefighters received a performance-based salary increase of 3.5 percent in June 2008, a city HR official said. Gina Pagnotta, a Public Works Department employee who leads a 300-member association of Atlanta employees, agrees that city workers have received raises in the past eight years, although she's fuzzy on the details. "They did not get a substantial raise. They did get a cost-of-living increase," said Pagnotta, president of the Professional Association of City Employees. "Not having any raises in eight years, that is not correct." Employee pay was a big issue at City Hall in recent months when Atlanta's new mayor, Kasim Reed, said he wanted to give police officers -- and only them -- salary increases. One of Reed's biggest campaign promises was to improve public safety. He has vowed to hire more police officers as mayor and make sure they are better paid. Several City Council members initially opposed the pay hikes, saying to exclude other city workers would hurt employee morale. Last month, the council approved Reed's proposal concerning police officers and boosted their salaries by 3.5 percent. The council gave a similar salary increase to firefighters and a $450 bonus to city workers making less than $75,000. Reed said he supported the moves. Clark said he was initially told the workers had not received any raises in that time period. He said the cost-of-living adjustments are negligible if you consider that health insurance costs for Atlanta workers have risen in each of the past five years. "If one wanted to get technical about it, one would say [the city is] correct," Clark told PolitiFact Georgia. "But a deeper look would reveal that the cost to employees rose. The money went to offset the increase in insurance, so they did not receive any net gain." We followed up with the Human Resources Department to see if there was any merit to Clark's claim. Atlanta, like most local governments, uses a 12-month budget cycle (fiscal year) that begins July 1 and ends June 30. The city used two health care providers (Kaiser and Blue Cross and Blue Shield) in July 2007, when the cost-of-living adjustments took effect. On July 1, the health care rates rose for all city workers. Atlanta workers with families that used Kaiser paid an additional $904.20 during that 12-month period, a review of city records show. Workers using Blue Cross and Blue Shield paid an additional $1,003.20, the records show. The increases for workers without families were one-third of that total, regardless of which insurance provider they used, the review showed. The average salary for an Atlanta employee is about $47,000, according to city Human Resources officials. Since the average city worker makes $47,000 a year, we multiplied that number times the 2.6 percent cost-of-living adjustment and the additional 1 percent cost-of-living increase they received on Jan. 1, 2008. That worker's annual salary became $48,704, a $1,704 increase. The $1,704 is more than the increase in health care costs for a city worker with a family by at least $700. OK, but some Atlanta workers make much less. An employee with the salary of $30,000 watched his or her pay rise by about $1,100. That's still about $100 more than the health care increase if the employee had a family. Health insurance rates rose again in July 2008, 2009 and 2010. Clark is correct that those increases eclipse the cost-of-living increases given to most city workers in July 2007 and January 2008. However, his initial claim was that some city workers "have not had raises in eight years." Clark, who took the job about 3 1/2 months ago, said some city workers told him they hadn't received raises in eight years. In a subsequent interview with PolitiFact Georgia, Clark said the workers may have been comparing the 2.6 percent cost-of-living increase to what he said had been 3.5 percent salary increases in prior years. "It's a teachable moment," Clark told PolitiFact Georgia. "I stand clarified or corrected." PolitiFact Georgia appreciates his candor, but sorry, Charlie, we still find the claim is False.	None	Charles Clark	None	None	None	2010-07-18T06:00:00	2010-06-24	['Atlanta']
-pomt-09342	Says she introduced a ban on "dirty dancing."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2010/apr/09/frederica-wilson/wilson-banned-dirty-dancing/	State Sen. Frederica Wilson, a Miami Gardens Democrat running for the congressional seat now held by Kendrick Meek, is making an unusual boast about her accomplishments as a school board member: She says she introduced a ban on "dirty dancing." Here is what she says on her campaign Web site: "As a member of the Miami-Dade County School Board, Senator Wilson introduced reading labs and an African-American history curriculum into our schools, as well as a dirty-dancing ban in our community." She reiterated that claim in a March 9, 2009 press release announcing her campaign and on her Facebook page -- so there's no doubt she's against kids engaging in nasty booty moves. Pelvic thrusts aren't usually mentioned in congressional campaigns, so we jumped at the chance to explore whether she truly had introduced a ban. First, some background on dirty dancing. To many, the phrase conjurs up memories of the 1987 movie starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. Remember the story? Grey plays a good girl nicknamed "Baby" who is on a family vacation at a Catskills resort. She stumbles upon a room where the working-class crew -- including Johnny, a beer-swigging-shirt-unbuttoned dance instructor played by Swayze -- are grinding their scantily clad bodies wrapped around each other in Do You Love Me. Johnny teaches Baby to dance -- among other, ahem, lessons -- and they fall in love. She learns some choreographed dance moves that are more of the gaze-into-each-other's-eyes variety than the make-your-grandma-blush type. In one famous scene, he lifts her by her hips as she is dripping wet in a lake. A decade later, the Miami-Dade school board took up the topic. There was no mention of the movie in the articles we found about the mid 1990s discussions, but there was plenty of harrumphing about kids dancing in sexually suggestive ways. "I've seen it in little tiny elementary school children. I couldn't take it, " Wilson said in a Nov. 19, 1995, Miami Herald article which stated that she asked school administrators to hold a meeting on the topic. "I don't think it sets a good standard for our district. We cannot allow (the dancing kids) to degrade the school district or themselves." In a 1997 op-ed, school board member Wilson said she was considering introducing a ban. "It has been called 'dirty dancing,' but it's really nothing more than simulated sexual intercourse. Outrageously, too many folks involved with Dade County's public schools -- including teachers, administrators, and parents who ought to know better -- call it 'cheerleading,' 'marching,' or other types of school-sponsored student performance. Whatever it's called, it's vulgar and degrading. It has no place in our schools, on our playgrounds, or in our students' lives. So, imagine my disgust and dismay when I marched in Dade's Martin Luther King Day Parade earlier this year and saw Dade high school cheerleaders bumping and grinding their way down Martin Luther King Boulevard." In a July 1997 news article, she was quoted saying, "I've seen horrendous behavior. I saw a band member bend over and a female majorette come from behind and simulate actual intercourse. I almost passed out, but people in the stands were applauding." Rather than calling it a "dirty dancing ban," it was known as "Guideline 25B: Student dance performances and/or productions: Procedures for promoting and maintaining a safe learning environment." The board's explanation of the rule said that cheerleading, dance and band performances at events, performances or educational settings "are essential to the establishment and maintenance of an atmosphere that fosters cultural and artistic exchanges. However the board recognizes that certain modes of dance are inappropriate, unsuited for immature audiences and may offend the community's sense of propriety rather than foster appropriate conduct that is consistent with school board rules and state statutes." School board documents said the rule prohibited performances that depicted "actual or simulated sexual intercourse (normal or deviate), masturbation, excretory functions and actual lewd exhibition of genitalia." It's clear from news coverage and school board minutes that Wilson was the driving force behind the ban. School board minutes for the July 9, 1997, meeting state that Wilson proposed the rulemaking. The motion passed unanimously. On Aug. 27, 1997, the school board voted again in favor of the proposal. But there's still a bit of exaggeration in her statement: Wilson described this as a ban "in our community" when it strictly related to school-related groups or performances. She told us that was a reasonable description because "the dirty dancing ban was on school bands and majorettes in the community. We have a lot of parades -- the MLK parade, different half time shows at football games in the community. I witnessed it -- a lot of forward-thrusting of the pelvic bone." Clearly Wilson introduced the dirty dancing ban approved by the school board in 1997 and we don't doubt that school activities now have less forward-thrusting of the pelvic bone. But her claim that the ban would apply "in our community" is a little misleading. Some people might think her ban applied to the entire county, not just the schools. So we rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Frederica Wilson	None	None	None	2010-04-09T14:37:08	2010-04-09	['None']
-vogo-00331	Statement: “Either party can reopen in future years for those articles pertaining to Health and Welfare and Wages,” said a San Diego Unified School District financial disclosure, signed March 1, 2010 by Superintendent Bill Kowba and former Chief Financial Officer James Masias.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/fact-check-district-claims-it-can-reopen-labor-talks/	Analysis: Last year, the San Diego Unified School District entered into a three-year contract with its teachers union that the district is already attempting to renegotiate. In the deal, struck in the midst of financial distress, teachers agreed to five unpaid days off for each of the first two years, saving the district about $20 million a year.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: District Claims It Can Reopen Labor Talks	September 20, 2011	None	['None']
-pomt-09572	"We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jan/28/barack-obama/tax-cut-95-percent-stimulus-made-it-so/	President Barack Obama talked a lot about economic recovery during his State of the Union address on Jan. 27, 2010, including the benefits of the economic stimulus bill passed last year. The stimulus, formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, included tax cuts for many Americans, Obama said. "We cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses," Obama said. "We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college." Democrats applauded, while Republicans were silent for the most part. In one of the unscripted moments of the night, Obama looked at the Republican side of the room, smiled and said, "I thought I'd get some applause on that one." Here, we wanted to check Obama's statement that he cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. The key word in his statement is "working." Obama's claim is based on a tax cut intended to offset payroll taxes. Under the stimulus bill, single workers got $400, and working couples got $800. The Internal Revenue Service issued new guidelines to reduce withholdings for income tax, so many workers saw a small increase in their checks in April 2009. The tax cut was part of Obama's campaign promises. During the campaign, Obama said he wanted $500 for each worker and $1,000 for working couples. Since the final number was a bit less than he promised, we rated his promise a Compromise on our Obameter, where we rate Obama's campaign promises for fulfillment. During the campaign, the independent Tax Policy Center researched how Obama's tax proposals would affect workers. It concluded 94.3 percent of workers would receive a tax cut under Obama's plan based on the tax credit to offset payroll taxes. According to the analysis, the people who wouldn't get a tax cut are those who make more than $250,000 for couples or $200,000 for a single person. Obama said he intended to raise taxes on those high earners, a promise he reiterated during the State of the Union, and that revenue would offset the stimulus tax cut. Because the stimulus act did give that broad-based tax cut to workers, we rate Obama's statement True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2010-01-28T00:02:13	2010-01-27	['None']
-snes-04433	Black Lives Matter protesters in Baton Rouge chanted calls for "dead cops ... now" shortly before three officers were killed in that city.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/black-lives-matter-protesters-chant-for-dead-cops-now-in-baton-rouge/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Black Lives Matter Protesters Chant for ‘Dead Cops Now’ in Baton Rouge	18 July 2016	None	['Baton_Rouge,_Louisiana']
-pose-00560	Will develop plan to keep Veterans Trust Fund solvent. "One of my first jobs as governor will be to develop a long-term plan to ensure the Veterans Trust Fund remains solvent."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/walk-o-meter/promise/583/develop-plan-to-keep-veterans-trust-fund-solvent/	None	walk-o-meter	Scott Walker	None	None	Develop plan to keep Veterans Trust Fund solvent	2010-12-20T23:16:36	None	['None']
-tron-02189	Teens Swag Facebook Photo Donations Claim	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/teens-swag-facebook-photo-donations-claims/	None	internet	None	None	None	Teens Swag Facebook Photo Donations Claim	Aug 10, 2015	None	['None']
-vogo-00180	Will San Diego Have the Shortest School Year? Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/will-san-diego-have-the-shortest-school-year-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	Will San Diego Have the Shortest School Year? Fact Check TV	October 15, 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-04198	Says real estate taxes were put in place to pay for Obamacare.	mostly false	/texas/statements/2012/dec/06/todd-hunter/todd-hunter-says-obamacare-funded-real-estate-taxe/	A South Texas legislator opposed to the federal health care overhaul signed into law by President Barack Obama doesn’t like how the law came to be. State Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, was asked during a Nov. 26, 2012, Texas Tribune event what he favors in state health care reform. Hunter replied: "The first thing I prefer is transparency," adding that in his view, doctors, nurses and the people weren’t included in writing the federal act. "And when you have amendments where Nebraska gets exempted from the taxation and then today we’re finding out you have real estate taxes being placed to pay for this?" Hunter said. "Actually, the biggest problem is how it was handled," Hunter said. First, let’s weigh the Nebraska exception. By email, Hunter told us he was referring to the so-called "Cornhusker Kickback," which was a 2009 deal resulting in the Senate-approved version of the health care act giving Nebraska added federal Medicaid funds, as recapped by FactCheck.org in a December 2011 review. At the time the amendment was accepted, U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, declared he would vote for the overall proposal. However, the Nebraska provision was removed before the legislation passed into law, FactCheck noted. In turn, "all states ended up with more federal funds, and they may well have Nelson to thank for it," FactCheck wrote. By phone, Hunter told us he had not said that the Nebraska amendment stuck in the plan because he didn’t know whether it did. He said he mentioned the amendment to demonstrate the deal-making that went on. In any event, his Nebraska reference could be taken as vague. So we’re focusing this fact-check on whether real estate taxes were put in place to fund Obamacare. Hunter pointed us to a Nov. 17, 2012, Forbes.com blog post by Michael Chamberlain, a personal financial planner. Headlined "Will You Pay the New Obamacare Tax," the post says a surtax in the law means couples with incomes over $250,000 a year and singles earning more than $200,000 could see their taxes increase in 2013. He also nudged us to an undated publication on the tax from the National Association of Realtors, which says in part that the "tax WILL NOT be imposed on all real estate transactions, a common misconception." Indeed. In February 2011, PolitiFact debunked a claim that under Obamacare, all real-estate transactions would be subject to a 3.8 percent sales tax. That statement, rated Pants on Fire, is deceptive because a Medicare tax on investment income created under the law applies to the investment income of single taxpayers who make more than $200,000 or couples who make more than $250,000. (It’s spelled out in Section 1402 of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, titled "Unearned income Medicare contribution.") That seems worth stressing. The tax would only apply to very high earners, accounting for no more than 2 percent of taxpayers, Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Tax Policy Center, told us by telephone. For them, he noted, the tax would apply to the lesser of how much the taxpayer’s adjusted gross income exceeds the $200,000/$250,000 threshold or the amount that their investment gains exceeds the relevant threshold. And which investments might be subjected to the tax? According to the Internal Revenue Service, the Net Investment Income Tax applies, starting in 2013, to investment income for those very high earners from interest, dividends, capital gains, rental and royalty income and certain annuities plus income from businesses involved in trading financial instruments or commodities and businesses that are "passive activities to the taxpayer," meaning they're held for the purposes of gradual long-term appreciation. Williams said he calls the tax an investment tax. "When somebody says ‘real estate tax’ to me, I don’t think of the capital gains tax on real estate sales. I think of the property tax" levied by local and state governments. "This" new tax "has nothing to do with property taxes," Williams said. Separately, a director for the Washington-based Tax Foundation, which says it seeks sound tax policy, said the group does not call the tax a real estate tax. Joe Henchman said by phone: "I imagine calling it a real estate tax could scare a lot of people, unnecessarily. Everyone is going to think it applies to them when 99 times out of 100, it won’t." While few property owners would be affected in the tax’s early years, the foundation said in a Sept. 24, 2010, blog post that more home sellers could be hit as years pass because the tax changes were not indexed for inflation. PolitiFact has previously pointed out that homeowners will not be socked by the tax even if they make sales profits of hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s because there’s a long-standing tax exemption on the profits from home sales. To be hit with the investment tax, you would have to clear more than $250,000 in profit off your home, which means at least $250,000 more than you paid for it. The ceiling is higher for a married couple. Married couples are not taxed on the first $500,000 of profit from home sales. And again, that's profit, not the sales price. Finally, we wondered how much total revenue the tax is expected to produce. Williams suggested we consider research by the Joint Committee on Taxation, which assists members of Congress on tax policy. The panel’s March 20, 2010, fiscal analysis of the health care law says that combined with a change in law stepping up payroll tax contributions by high-income taxpayers, the investment tax is expected to raise $210 billion from 2010 through 2019, a little under half of $438 billion in net revenue attributed to the overall law. Hunter later said he didn’t intend to scare anybody with his comment. "We do need to make sure folks know how complicated this deal is," Hunter said. Our ruling Hunter said real estate taxes were put in place to pay for Obamacare. That’s an incomplete characterization, potentially leaving the misimpression we’ll all be ponying up every time we sell a property. In reality, the tax helping to fund the health care law is an investment tax solely affecting the very wealthiest taxpayers and then only touched off by super-sized profits from any of a variety of investment types. Real estate (including rents) fits into the big mix, giving the claim an element of truth. We rate it as Mostly False.	None	Todd Hunter	None	None	None	2012-12-06T16:00:00	2012-11-26	['None']
-pomt-02142	Says Rick Scott’s record on jobs includes Florida "ranked 2nd in the nation in long-term unemployment."	half-true	/florida/statements/2014/may/06/charlie-crist/charlie-crist-says-florida-no-2-long-term-unemploy/	In an April TV ad by Gov. Rick Scott’s political committee Let’s Get to Work, the narrator states: "Florida’s unemployment tripled. 800,000 jobs gone...." and reels off other bad news economic statistics. "Which governor took Florida to the bottom? Charlie Crist." Crist counter-attacked on his campaign website and argued that the unemployment picture isn’t as rosy as painted by his Republican opponent. "Floridians understand that Scott’s numbers never tell the whole truth. But, since he insists on talking about numbers, here are some of his own..." Crist then cites a series of unflattering economic numbers including this one: "Florida is ranked 2nd in the nation in long-term unemployment." We looked at the state’s ranking on long-term unemployment and found that there was some truth to Crist’s claim but that the data comes with some caveats -- particularly about Crist’s implication that Scott owns that ranking. Long-term unemployment Crist’s claim about the long-term unemployed linked to a February article in the Orlando Sentinel that cited analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. EPI calculated that 46.2 percent of laid-off Floridians were out of work for at least six months in 2013. Only New Jersey and Washington, D.C., were higher, at 46.6 percent. We interviewed David Cooper, the economic analyst at EPI, who wrote the post in January that included a state-by-state map showing long-term unemployment. Cooper said that he used the monthly data released by the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate the share of those unemployed 27 weeks or longer by state. The Current Population Survey, on which the BLS bases its data, is a sample representative for the nation. But when the data is used to drill down to the state level, the margin of error goes up significantly, Cooper said. And drill down even further to those who are long-term unemployed, and "again the margins of error go up even more." So while Cooper found Florida was in second or third (since New Jersey and D.C. were tied), the margin of error is large enough it could fall anywhere from the second to seventh place range, he said. "Florida is clearly near the top, (but) where it sits in order is kind of ambiguous," he said. We sent the EPI report to a few Florida economists. While they didn’t dispute EPI’s numbers, economists noted that there are other ways to measure long-term unemployment. "The figures provided by EPI are the percent of the unemployed that are long-term unemployed, not the percent of the labor force that are long-term unemployed," said Rollins College economist Bill Seyfried. So that will lead to different rankings, because one starts with the pool of unemployed, while the other looks at the entire labor force. Seyfried looked at long-term unemployed divided by size of labor force and determined that Florida came in 11th place in 2013. Florida’s unemployment rate declined considerably in 2013, which resulted in a relative improvement in the percent of the labor force that are long-term unemployed, Seyfried said. University of Florida economist David Denslow added some caveats to EPI’s data: Unemployment data is difficult to measure because people may not accurately report whether they are actively seeking work and how long they have been unemployed. Also, he said the sample size is small. "We don't know just where Florida ranks in those data, since the margins of error are too large," Denslow said. "But it is highly likely that Florida is one of the top 10." Blame on Scott? Crist’s statement could be interpreted as blaming Scott for the long-term unemployment figures. Economists we interviewed said that governors can take steps to influence employment, but there are other national economic trends at play that can’t be blamed (or credited) to any one particular politician. Just as Crist can’t be blamed for the nationwide economic crash as the housing bubble burst, Scott can’t be blamed for the state’s long-term unemployment figures as Florida recovers. Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida's Institute for Economic Competitiveness, said, "It is a tough sell to push the blame for long term unemployment onto Gov. Scott, particularly since the problem clearly has its roots in the recession that occurred during Gov. Crist's term. Florida shed over 800,000 jobs during Gov. Crist's term and that amount of jobs cannot be recovered overnight. The long-term unemployment problem is more a function of the severity and nature of the recession experienced in Florida rather than any particular policy." Our ruling Crist said in a blog attacking Scott, "Florida is ranked 2nd in the nation in long-term unemployment." An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute ranked Florida second, with New Jersey and the District of Columbia ahead. But there is a significant margin of error to these numbers, and it’s difficult to pinpoint each state’s ranking. Other economists used other measures to come up with a different ranking for Florida. Also, while governors can play a role in developing jobs, the pace of Florida’s recovery can’t be pinned on Scott. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Charlie Crist	None	None	None	2014-05-06T16:01:22	2014-04-25	['None']
-pomt-08250	"The Republican who was just elected governor of the great state of Florida paid his campaign staffers, not with money, but with American Express gift cards."	half-true	/florida/statements/2010/nov/12/rachel-maddow/rick-scott-pays-campaign-workers-gift-cards-not-ca/	Rick Scott poured $73 million of his own money into his successful campaign for governor. Yet he wouldn't even pay his campaign workers in cash, says MSNBC liberal commentator Rachel Maddow. On her Nov. 10, 2010, show, Maddow said Scott inexplicably paid his campaign workers in American Express gift cards. Maddow made the claim in a rhetorical game of true or false, which you can watch here. "The Republican who was just elected governor of the great state of Florida paid his campaign staffers, not with money, but with American Express gift cards for some reason. Is that true or false?" Maddow asked. "That is, ding, true. A young man named Mark Givens(sic), who said he found a job through the Rick Scott for governor campaign through a listing on Craigslist, has told local WTSP news station that he did not find out until after he had already worked for Rick Scott's campaign that Rick Scott's campaign would not pay him in, you know, money." We wanted to check Maddow's claim with our own Truth-O-Meter game -- True or Pants on Fire! (Or somewhere in between). Maddow said her source was WTSP, Tampa Bay's CBS affiliate, which ran a Nov. 8, 2010, report claiming that a Scott campaign worker named Mark Dongivin was paid in gift cards and not cash. Dongivin told the TV affiliate he worked on the Scott get-out-the-vote campaign off and on for about a month, walking neighborhoods and making phone calls. But when it was time to get paid, he was told there would be no checks. "We can't give you a check, we're gonna give you gift cards," Dongivin said his supervisor told him. Dongivin said he wasn't the only Scott campaign worker to be paid in gift cards and not a check or cash. The TV report went on to cite an unnamed spokesperson, something we won't do at PolitiFact Florida, who acknowledged some campaign workers were paid in gift cards, and that anyone who had a problem with the arrangement could return the cards for a check. That's the background. Now for the details. In the Republican primary, the Scott campaign used its own campaign account to pay for its staff. But after the primary, payroll responsibilities switched to the Republican Party of Florida. It's standard practice, in part because the party can receive larger campaign contributions than an individual candidate. Scott spokesman Brian Burgess directed us to the party to answer questions about how staffers were paid. They 'fessed up. "Like many other campaigns, gift cards were distributed to short-term Scott field staff almost exclusively for the final 72-hour field efforts," Republican Party of Florida spokesman Dan Conston said. "It's a simpler and quicker way of compensating short-term help." Conston said a Scott campaign representative and someone from the party would approve the spending, but did not say who. Neither Conston nor Burgess said how many temporary campaign workers were paid in gift cards. Full-time staffers were paid by check, Conston said. Two other notes from Conston: He said the gift cards were only used in the last week of the campaign, and that because of service fees, the campaign actually paid above face value. In Dongivin's case, he was a temporary worker hired to drive out voters on Election Day. Typically, it's a responsibility many people might associate with a volunteer -- and many campaigns use volunteers in the same way. Dongivin was paid $178 on Oct. 15, according to Republican Party of Florida campaign finance records. He also likely received a second payment on Oct. 31, 2010 -- though those records are not yet public. We reached out to more than 20 people across the state who worked with the Scott campaign to see how they were paid. Most didn't respond to our messages, but those that did say they were paid in checks, just like every other employee they knew. Michael Fluno worked out of the Tampa office of Scott's campaign until shortly after the primary and said he was always paid in checks. While Fluno was working on the campaign, he said, he "knows, for a fact, that no one was paid with any kind of gift card." Same goes for Dean Palecheck, of Orlando, who worked on the campaign during both the primary and general election. When asked how he was paid, Palecheck said: "Paid by check, like any normal employee there." What's interesting here is that it's not new for campaigns to use gift cards to pay part-time, temporary workers. In fact, President Barack Obama's campaign did the same thing in 2008. A TV station in Indianapolis reported that last-minute workers for Obama's 2008 campaign were paid $30 Visa gift cards for three-hour shifts of work. The temporary workers complained to the TV station that they were not being paid fairly. Which brings us back to Maddow. On her nationally televised cable program, the liberal commentator picked up on a local TV news report and claimed Scott "paid his campaign staffers, not with money, but with American Express gift cards." While she's right that Dongivin, and other temporary workers, were paid with gift cards and not cash, we think her comments are a bit misleading to the average viewer. First, we think many people might think Maddow was referring to all campaign workers, but traditional campaign staffers -- the people working day in and day out on the campaign -- were paid by check, like any normal job. A Republican Party official said it was simply an easier, more efficient and quicker way to pay people. And second, it's not that unusual. In 2008, Obama did the same thing. Playing it up in Scott's case takes it out of context, so we rate this claim Half True.	None	Rachel Maddow	None	None	None	2010-11-12T17:45:46	2010-11-10	['American_Express', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-00583	If Fox News' presidential debate rules had been in place during the 1992 election, "Bill Clinton wouldn't have been on the stage."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/07/rick-santorum/foxs-debate-rules-would-have-kept-bill-clinton-sta/	Republicans have a bumper crop of presidential candidates, and it has created a traffic problem for the television networks that help put on the debates. At last count, there are 10 confirmed contenders (Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz) with more possible on the way (Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal). Fox News announced it would hold the first debate on Aug. 6 in Cleveland, but the cable network said it would invite only the top 10 declared candidates. The network’s ranking would be set according to "an average of the five most recent national polls" as of Aug. 4. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, called the cut-off arbitrary. Appearing on Fox News, where he once was a contributor, Santorum dipped into history to show that early poll results are meaningless. "We should have the opportunity for everyone to be heard," he told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace on June 7, 2015. "You know, if you would have taken the top two-thirds of the folks in 1992, Bill Clinton wouldn't have been on the stage." Clinton obviously went on to win the White House, and Santorum’s concern is obvious. While Santorum won 11 primaries in 2012, today he ranks tied for 11th in the latest Fox News poll. That’s just outside Fox News’ debate cut-off -- though that can change depending on who officially declares and what later polls show. We decided to dig into the wayback machine of primary polls. We wanted to know what numbers Santorum had in mind and reached out to his communication staff but did not hear back. What we found suggests Santorum is right that Clinton started out in 1991, the year before the presidential election, with low polling numbers. But Santorum is making a comparison that doesn’t quite fit because of the huge difference in the 1992 primaries versus the one beginning now. Moreover, by the time the Democratic candidates did debate in 1991, Clinton was not doing as poorly in the polls as Santorum claims. The early polls FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver accumulated and analyzed several cycles of presidential primary polls, including the cycle leading up to the 1992 election. Silver was able to find just three polls from January-June 1991, a period comparable to today. And the ones he found showed Clinton at the back of a crowded field -- with an average of just 1.7 percent. That was good enough for 13th out of 19 prospective candidates. In a hypothetical sense, a debate that included the top two-thirds of those candidates just barely might have excluded Clinton. The problem with such a hypothetical is that there were hardly any declared Democrats running for president by June 1991. One of the conditions for the Fox News debate is that only official, announced and registered candidates need apply. In mid 1991, the would-be frontrunner was New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. Cuomo ended up not running. And in fact, the top 9 candidates in early polls that year all declined to run, Silver found. Clinton himself didn’t announce his candidacy until October 1991. So a snapshot of June 1991 versus June 2015 is hardly useful. Neither is a comparison that focuses on an August 2015 debate. The earliest debates in the 1992 cycle we found were an NBC debate on Dec. 15, 1991, and one sponsored by PBS on Jan. 19, 1992. By then, the hypothetical field had been narrowed to actual candidates, and the polling was more favorable to Clinton. By the time of the first debates, there were five main Democratic candidates: Clinton, former California Gov. Jerry Brown, and Sens. Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey and Paul Tsongas. A sixth candidate, Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, withdrew on Jan. 8, 1992. He participated in the Dec. 15 debate but not the one on Jan. 19. A search on LexisNexis provided us with a handful of polls for the men who were left standing: Poll Date Brown Clinton Harkin Kerrey Tsongas New York Times/CBS Oct. 22 12 5 3 7 2 Los Angeles Times Nov. 12 18 9 6 5 4 Los Angeles Times Nov. 27 20 9 4 5 4 USA Today/CNN/Gallup Jan. 14 21 17 9 11 6 Silver’s polling average from July to December 1991 shows a tight pack: Candidate Polling average Mario Cuomo 9.9 Douglas Wilder 9.7 Jerry Brown 14.9 Bill Clinton 8.3 Bob Kerrey 7.7 Tom Harkin 6.3 Paul Tsongas 4.1 The point here is that there never were more than 10 serious declared candidates, as might happen in 2015. And Clinton’s position was not as poor as Santorum made it seem. By the time of the first debate, Clinton would have passed muster by the Fox News standard as an announced candidate ranked among the top two-thirds of the pack. Our ruling Santorum said that if Fox News had applied its 2016 rules to a hypothetical Democratic primary debate in 1992, that Clinton would not have been on the stage. Santorum was trying to make the point that early presidential polls may not be the most useful yardstick to determine who gets into a debate and who doesn’t. In that regard, Clinton’s story from 1991 somewhat backs that up. Early presidential polls showed Clinton as a significant underdog. But in reality, Santorum errs in trying to make a comparison between the 1992 and 2016 presidential cycles. Most of the top Democrats Clinton trailed in those early polls never actually declared as candidates. Under the Fox News rules, none of them would qualify to participate in its debate. And by the time the field was set in late 1991, Clinton’s position in the polls suggested he was a viable candidate. Santorum’s statement contains an element of truth in that Clinton did start low in the polls, but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.	None	Rick Santorum	None	None	None	2015-06-07T18:29:52	2015-06-07	['Bill_Clinton', 'Fox_News_Channel']
-pomt-03890	The majority of public funding for the Marlins stadium "came from hotel taxes, the burden of which is incurred by tourists who are visiting our city, NOT the resident taxpayers."	half-true	/florida/statements/2013/mar/05/jeffrey-loria/marlins-owner-jeff-loria-says-tourists-not-taxpaye/	After a dismal 2012 season, Marlins baseball owner Jeffrey Loria slashed payroll and got rid of a handful of expensive players, including star shortstop Jose Reyes and pitcher Josh Johnson. Miami baseball fans cried "foul!" Loria’s moves revived debate about the lucrative public financing the Marlins won to build their stadium in 2009. On Feb. 24, Loria took out a full-page "letter to our fans" ad in the Miami Herald and other South Florida newspapers to defend his team’s deal, saying he wanted to review the "facts." Loria’s letter was full of claims about the team’s roster, finances and the stadium deal -- with some reminders about the 2003 World Series sprinkled in. Loria began with an admission that the Marlins’ performance on the field "stunk" and said he takes his share of the blame. But then Loria turned up the defense: "Those who have attacked us are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. The majority of public funding came from hotel taxes, the burden of which is incurred by tourists who are visiting our city, NOT the resident taxpayers....." Sports writers and others have ripped apart Loria’s rant. (Yahoo! Sports rebutted Loria’s claims about everything from player trades to finances to the stadium’s design awards.) Here at PolitiFact, we decided to put part of Loria’s claims about the stadium’s public financing to the Truth-O-Meter: "The majority of public funding came from hotel taxes, the burden of which is incurred by tourists who are visiting our city, NOT the resident taxpayers." Loria’s claim suggests that it was largely tourists -- not Miami-Dade taxpayers -- who are footing the bill for a stadium project. Is it those high-rolling tourists who are mostly paying by plunking down credit cards at luxurious hotels in South Beach and beyond? Do resident taxpayers bear minimal financial burden here for the stadium? Marlins stadium deal We turned to Miami Herald articles, stadium agreement documents and county officials to explain the deal. After about a decade of failed attempts, the Marlins finally reached a deal in 2009 with Miami-Dade County and the city of Miami to replace the Orange Bowl stadium with a 37,000-seat retractable roof stadium in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. The stadium cost about $515 million. Add in the parking complex, and the total rises to more than $600 million. The county, the city and the Marlins themselves all contributed to a fairly complicated deal. Here’s a big-picture accounting of what each agreed to put in: Miami-Dade County: In March 2009, commissioners voted for a plan that was largely funded by three different hotel bed taxes that added up to almost $300 million. (The county also pitched in other sources of money, including $50 million from an earlier voter-approved bond referendum that is being paid off with property taxes.) We should note that while tourists pay bed taxes, so does anyone else who stays in a hotel or motel for any reason. That includes business people visiting the area, friends and family who visit local residents, and locals who live in hotels or need a room for the night. In total, the county borrowed about $409 million for the Marlins project, which includes debt service and the cost of issuing the bonds, a county spokeswoman told PolitiFact Florida. The county manager wrote in a memo before the vote that the bed taxes "cannot be used for general government funding purposes such as social services, public safety and public education." But some bed tax dollars can be used for non-sports projects, such as museums and theaters. The stadium was built on city-owned land later deeded over to the county, so the Marlins don’t have to pay property taxes. City of Miami: In March 2009, the city of Miami pledged $94 million for the city-owned, 5,800-spot parking structures (the final cost later dropped). The city also committed $13 million from bed taxes toward stadium construction, and $12 million for other improvements. Marlins: The team agreed to pay about $120 million toward stadium construction, and borrowed an additional $35 million from the county. The team pays rent, starting at about $2.3 million a year, plus 2 percent a year, to pay back that loan. The team is also paying $6 million of the county’s construction costs. The Marlins pays the city about $10 per parking space. If all this weren’t complicated enough, in 2011, the Miami Herald reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission -- which was already reviewing the city of Miami’s finances -- had launched a separate probe of the stadium deal, to see if the city misled investors about the parking complex bonds. Experts say that Loria is omitting some key points We interviewed a few stadium financing experts who said that while Loria was correct that hotel bed taxes paid for a huge chunk of the cost, his claim obscured the fact that it was still public money, and it could have been spent on other projects to benefit local taxpayers. "Simply put, Miami is going to get bed tax revenue regardless of whether Marlins park was built. So the implication that the city’s budget wasn’t affected by their decision to allocate their limited tax revenue to stadium construction is disingenuous," said Chris Lafakis, Moody’s senior economist who analyzes Florida, in an email to PolitiFact. We also interviewed Adie Tomer and Siddharth Kulkarni, researchers for the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. They have argued that the stadium will cost the county $2 billion over 40 years, when all the interest on the borrowing is included. "Focusing on tourist taxes obscures the real essence of debate, which is what can Miami do with this revenue?" Tomer said. "$2 billion is an enormous long-term cost. Those revenues are lost now." Roger Noll, a Stanford economics professor, said that higher taxes on tourists take away money they would have spent in local businesses. "Politically, taxing tourist-related activities (hotels, rental cars) is attractive, because some voters do not understand that a targeted tax hurts the business that is being taxed as well as its customers," he said. Jonah Keri, a baseball writer for ESPN’s Grantland, said Loria’s letter is right on one point: The county should get some of the blame on the stadium deal. "Loria is saying the real idiots here are the government who didn’t protect you from me," Keri said. "That’s true. The thing about Loria is, I don’t think he is that much worse than any other owner. It really is the case that local officials are the ones who bungled this. Any capitalist is going to do this." In an interview with PolitiFact, Marlins president David Samson defended Loria’s claim, noting that bed taxes can’t fund general government functions. "It can’t go to police officers, firefighters, nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers. ... It cannot be used to build park shelters for the homeless, as an example." Our ruling In response to renewed criticism about the 2009 Marlins stadium financing deal, Loria said "The majority of public funding came from hotel taxes, the burden of which is incurred by tourists who are visiting our city, NOT the resident taxpayers." Loria is borrowing from politicians’ playbooks here: He cherry-picked a fact that puts the situation in the best light while omitting a thorough explanation. On the surface, he is correct: Much of the public funding for the stadium came from hotel bed taxes largely (though not entirely) paid for by tourists. But these are still tax revenues that belong to the taxpayer, and if it didn’t go to the Marlins, it would have gone to some other public purpose to benefit those taxpayers. He also ignores that the county will be paying off that debt for decades. His implication that locals can shrug their shoulders at that public cost, and dismiss it as coming from the wallets of out of town tourists, is disingenuous. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Jeffrey Loria	None	None	None	2013-03-05T10:16:23	2013-02-24	['None']
-afck-00282	“HIV counselling and testing is implemented in all health facilities, public places and gatherings. A total of 109 047 people have been tested for HIV so far in the 2014-2015 financial year.”	mostly-correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/crisis-what-crisis-africa-check-tests-free-state-health-claims/	None	None	None	None	None	Crisis? What crisis? Africa Check tests Free State health claims	2015-06-12 05:45	None	['None']
-tron-01282	Emailed comments to Muslims from a Michigan professor	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/wichman/	None	education	None	None	None	Emailed comments to Muslims from a Michigan professor	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Michigan']
-pomt-02322	"Kesha Rogers is not a Democrat."	false	/texas/statements/2014/mar/28/gilberto-hinojosa/kesha-rogers-democrat-favoring-obama-impeachment/	Kesha Rogers of Houston, whom we’ve described as a Lyndon LaRouche Democrat, isn’t even a Democrat, according to the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. Gilberto Hinojosa said in a Feb. 25, 2014, email blast, "Kesha Rogers is one of the candidates on the ballot for U.S. senator in the Democratic primary -- but do not be fooled. Kesha Rogers is not a Democrat." In the email, Hinojosa pointed out that Rogers favors the impeachment of President Barack Obama. He also said she has "paraded around Texas with a poster of the president with a Hitler mustache. Rogers believes that the U.S. economy is secretly controlled by London financial institutions," Hinojosa wrote, "and she has advocated for colonizing Mars," charges the party told us came from Rogers’ campaign website and a Dec. 6, 2013, news blog post by the Dallas Morning News. "That’s not what real Democrats stand for," Hinojosa wrote. Rogers subsequently placed second to Dallas investor David Alameel in the party’s March 4 primary. She garnered 110,160 votes, or 22 percent of the vote, behind Alameel’s 238,618 votes, or 47 percent. The winner of their May 27, 2014, runoff stands to face Republican Sen. John Cornyn in November. A Rogers adviser, Harley Schlanger, the Western States spokesman for the Lyndon LaRouche PAC, urged us to check Hinojosa’s not-a-Democrat declaration, pointing out that thrice before Rogers has run as a Democrat for a Texas post. The state party has been emphatic about LaRouche Democrats not being mainstream. An example of that: In a March 19, 2014, commentary, LaRouche--a longstanding conspiracy theorist and former presidential candidate--called Obama a lackey for the queen of England intent on global thermonuclear warfare. LaRouche also speculated about Obama’s imprisonment or suicide. Party resolved not to help her Asked for Hinojosa’s back-up evidence, party spokesman Emmanuel Garcia shared a web link to a party-written "fact check" stressing reasons not to consider Rogers a valid Democrat, led by her desire to see Obama impeached. The document includes a resolution approved in December 2013 by its governing body, the State Democratic Executive Committee, stating that party members, officers and candidates are neither required nor encouraged to support the candidacy of any person self-identifying in alignment with the LaRouche movement or LaRouche himself, though they are free to "relate to, describe and interact with any such candidates or campaigns as they individually deem." The resolution closes by stating the party "will have no relationship with the campaign of any person identifying him or herself as aligned with the LaRouche Movement or Lyndon LaRouche; no such campaigns will have access to party materials or data, no listing on the party website and no position of privilege, recognition, or credentialing at party meetings or conventions." Rogers' past candidacies Texas Democrats twice nominated Rogers as the party's candidate to represent the Houston-area 22nd Congressional District and Rogers previously ran for state party chair. In 2010, Rogers carried 53 percent of the primary vote to capture the Democratic nomination for the House seat representing CD 22, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s office, and she won the party’s 2012 nod to represent the district by carrying 51 percent of the primary vote, defeating the other hopeful. At the 2006 Democratic state convention, Rogers finished last among candidates for party chair, attracting 98 delegate votes, or 1.5 percent, according to a June 11, 2006, blog post by the pro-Democratic Burnt Orange Report. So, Rogers is making her fourth run for a post as a Democrat. We turned next to Texas laws touching on party identification. 'Affiliating' with a Texas party Unlike in many states, Texans do not commit to a partisan or independent affiliation when they register to vote. But state law includes language about affiliating with a party. According to chapter 162 of the Texas Election Code, a "person becomes affiliated with a political party when the person: (1) is accepted to vote in the party's primary election; or (2) applies for and is provided an early voting or limited primary ballot to be voted by mail." Also, according to the law, a person affiliates by taking an oath at a precinct convention or a person may affiliate by taking an oath at any time, the law says, while an affiliation expires after the end of an election year or at the start of a subsequent election year, whichever comes first. Rogers' voting history This leads us to a traditional though crude way of gauging a Texan’s lean: their history of voting (or not) in party primaries. Any registered voter can vote in any primary (though they can't switch to the other party's runoffs). Still, as we wrote in a 2010 fact check, voting in a primary doesn't always mean a person sees himself as belonging to that party. Most voters abstain from primaries. To our query, Democratic pollster Jeff Smith of Austin, citing data he jointly owns with the party, said Rogers voted in Harris County in the 2002 through 2008 Democratic primaries and November general elections. He said Rogers voted in the county’s 2014 Democratic primary after voting in Fort Bend County in the 2010 and 2012 Democratic primaries and general elections. He said the records show no instances of Rogers voting in a Republican primary. For her part, Rogers told us she's been a life-long Democrat. "I’m a Democrat because I represent the true traditions of the Democratic Party," Rogers said by phone. "I don’t represent the Wall Street leg of the Democratic Party, which has now taken control." Expert observers Finally, we asked close observers of Texas politics including Mark Jones, an oft-quoted Rice University political scientist, to weigh in. By email, Jones said that it’s inaccurate to say Rogers isn’t a Democrat. "While Kesha Rogers without question holds positions on many issues that are sharply at odds with those of most Democrats," Jones wrote, "she has the right to profess to be a Democrat and run for public office as a Democrat... In the United States in general, and in Texas in particular, anyone can claim to be a Democrat or Republican and compete in that party's primary," Jones said, "even if they hold positions that are anathema to an overwhelming majority of people that identify with and support the party. "Thus, just as Louisiana Republicans two dozen years ago could not prevent former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke from publicly identifying himself as a Republican and running for office as a Republican," Jones said, "Texas Democrats cannot prevent Kesha Rogers from publicly identifying as a Democrat and running in the Democratic primary." Jones added: "While she is clearly in a fringe faction within the Democratic Party, a faction with longstanding roots in the party whose views on many (though not all) major issues are clearly far outside of the Democratic mainstream, her self-identification and political participation are consistently Democratic." Austin lawyer Buck Wood, an expert on election law, said by phone that Hinojosa must have meant Rogers isn’t a genuine Democrat, which the party has often said. (Separately, party spokesman Garcia said Hinojosa wasn't backing off his reference to Rogers as not a Democrat.) Rogers’ filing as a candidate and voting in the 2014 party primary makes her a Democrat, legally speaking, Wood said. Ed Sills, spokesman for the Alameel-backing Texas AFL-CIO, suggested Hinojosa has a case. By email, Sills said the "totality of one’s beliefs, platform and behavior need to be considered in evaluating whether someone is really part of a political party or not." He likened Rogers to the late Gene Kelly, a San Antonio-area resident who repeatedly sought party nominations (sometimes successfully) without showing signs of wanting to help the Democratic ticket. On her campaign website, Sills said, Rogers doesn’t refer to herself solely as a Democrat, instead saying "LaRouche Democrat." But we noticed her site also includes positive references to John F. Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other Democratic heroes. Rogers says on the site: "Texas already has a tradition of FDR-JFK Democrats fighting for the forgotten man, against Wall Street, including: Barbara Jordan, Wright Patman, Henry B. Gonzalez, Jim Wright, and Ralph Yarborough," referring to influential U.S. House members through history and the late liberal senator. Our ruling Hinojosa said Rogers isn’t a Democrat. We don’t see how to factually reconcile this statement, tied to disagreement with Rogers’ anti-Obama views, with Rogers twice winning primaries to become the party’s nominee for a House seat. Under state law, too, a voter affiliates with a party by voting in its primary, which Rogers has done repeatedly. We rate this claim as False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Gilberto Hinojosa	None	None	None	2014-03-28T10:00:00	2014-02-25	['None']
-pomt-04309	Says Democrats first proposed prohibiting the government from negotiating prices for prescription drugs in Medicare Part D and he "had nothing to do with" that provision in the law.	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/oct/30/tommy-thompson/tommy-thompson-says-he-had-nothing-do-provision-ba/	Campaigning for the U.S. Senate, Republican Tommy Thompson called himself the "mastermind" of Medicare Part D, which he pushed while serving as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. On Oct. 18, 2012, in the second of three debates with Tammy Baldwin, Thompson again took credit for the program and criticized the Democratic congresswoman for voting against it. But he rejected an accusation by Baldwin that he was responsible for one controversial provision. A provision known as "non-interference" -- prohibiting the government from negotiating with drug makers over drug prices -- was first proposed in 1999 by Democrats, notably President Bill Clinton, Thompson claimed. And Thompson said it was Congress that inserted a non-interference clause in the Medicare Part D legislation he pushed, which became law in 2003. "I had nothing to do with it," Thompson said. Baldwin shot back: "You were the quarterback and the mastermind of Medicare Part D, but you had nothing to do with it?" Baldwin has repeatedly attacked Thompson over the non-interference provision and did so again in the pair’s third and final debate a week later. She calls it a "sweetheart deal" for drug companies, saying the government can’t use its bargaining power to try and obtain lower drug prices -- although others counter that competition among private insurers in Part D has led to lower prices. We’ve rated True a claim by Baldwin that the Part D law, "adopted under Thompson’s watch," bars the government from negotiating for "better prices" on prescription drugs. At the time, six weeks before the second debate with Baldwin, Thompson’s campaign said nothing about the non-interference clause being the Democrats’ doing. That’s a different claim. Let’s check it out. Thompson’s case Medicare Part D is an optional insurance program for prescription drugs for people on Medicare. A key feature is that private insurance companies offer a variety of plans and beneficiaries choose the plan that's best for them. The government subsidizes the program but does not run it. Medical Part D was created by the Medicare Modernization Act, which also made other changes to Medicare. It was proposed by President George W. Bush, and Thompson was the administration’s point man on lobbying Congress to create it. When we asked for evidence to back Thompson’s claim that others were responsible for non-interference, his campaign did not respond. But Thompson expounded on his claim both in the second and third debates and in a meeting with Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editors and reporters on the day of the second debate. Thompson said non-interference was first introduced by Clinton and Democratic congressional leaders in a Medicare Part D proposal in 1999, which did not become law. Thompson also maintained that when the Bush administration proposed Part D, it contained only general principles. He said non-interference became part of the law only after it was introduced by then-Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., and Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. "I had nothing to do with it, never had a sweetheart deal with anybody," he told the Journal Sentinel. The record The Clinton Part D proposal did, as Thompson said, include a non-interference clause. But the language differs from that in the Medicare Part D that later became law under Bush. Under the Clinton proposal, pharmacy benefit managers would have negotiated on behalf of the federal government with drug manufacturers, said Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But in Bush’s Part D, the government can’t negotiate at all, leaving negotiation up to the individual insurance plans. Park agreed with Thompson that Bush’s Part D proposal was a set of principles and not legislation. But while Democrat Baucus was very involved in the Part D legislation, Republicans controlled both the Senate and the House, Park noted. As for Thompson’s claim that he had "nothing to do" with the non-interference clause that ended up in the law, that didn’t wash with Park or other experts we interviewed. "Any time Congress is involved in major legislation, the administration is heavily involved," said Park. Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a think tank that promotes free market principles in health care, said the Bush administration clearly supported non-interference to promote competition among private insurers and keep the government out of setting drug prices. "It’s really the key element to allowing this competitive marketplace to work," said Turner, who noted that Medicare Part D has cost less than was anticipated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Indeed, in 2007, when Democrats pushed legislation to repeal non-interference, Bush threatened a veto, arguing that competition among insurers was resulting in lower drug prices. Our rating Thompson said Democrats first proposed prohibiting the government from negotiating prices for prescription drugs in Medicare Part D and he "had nothing to do with" that provision in the final law. Democrats did introduce a version of the so-called non-interference provision, but it didn’t go as far as the provision that became law under Bush. Moreover, Thompson was the point man on Medicare Part D for the Bush administration, which supported non-interference. We rate Thompson’s statement Mostly False.	None	Tommy Thompson	None	None	None	2012-10-30T13:35:23	2012-10-18	['Medicare_Part_D']
-tron-00996	Gun maker Says Dell refused to sell him a computer	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/gundell/	None	computers	None	None	None	Gun maker Says Dell refused to sell him a computer	Mar 16, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-01682	Says Marilinda Garcia supports "$150 billion in new taxes."	pants on fire!	/new-hampshire/statements/2014/aug/15/gary-lambert/gop-challenger-gary-lambert-says-rival-marilinda-g/	With New Hampshire voters gearing up for a primary election, Republican candidate for Congress Gary Lambert tried to cast himself as the true fiscal conservative in the race when he distributed a campaign mailer this August. The former state senator from Nashua pledged sound leadership for New Hampshire’s economy if he’s elected to represent the 2nd Congressional District. Lambert also criticized his major opponent in the GOP primary, state Rep. Marilinda Garcia, asserting that Garcia supports "$150 billion in new taxes." Lambert said the move would result in massive job losses, and his campaign flyer pictured Garcia’s face on the side of a building, underneath a sign that reads "Going out of business." With both candidates courting the Republican base, any move to increase taxes could be a turn-off for voters. But is Garcia really pushing for a tax hike, and one that could be measured in billions of dollars? Her campaign quickly denied the charge, and Lambert’s flyer didn’t provide much information to back it up. To get to the bottom of it, PolitiFact New Hampshire asked Lambert’s campaign for an explanation of where the $150 billion figure came from. Campaign manager Josh Davidson pointed us to an April 2014 event at which Garcia said she supports closing some types of tax loopholes. Her remarks were filmed and posted to YouTube by the conservative blog Granite Grok. Garcia said that small businesses are at a disadvantage because, unlike large corporations, they can’t hire lawyers and accountants who are able to "find those loopholes that could reduce your tax rate from 35 (percent) to 20 (percent) like the big companies do." "So that’s a big problem," she continued. "We need to close those types of loopholes." Lambert argues that by calling for Congress to close "those types of loopholes," Garcia was calling for the elimination of the entire system of tax credits, exemptions and other mechanisms that allow companies to lower their taxes. Those mechanisms are collectively known as "tax expenditures," a term the federal government uses to describe revenue lost because of tax deferrals, preferential tax rates, exclusions, exemptions or deductions. Combined, the federal government will provide corporate tax expenditures worth an estimated $148 billion in fiscal 2014, according to numbers crunched by the White House Office of Management and Budget. That’s close to the $150 billion figure cited by Lambert’s campaign. However, there are several caveats to consider. To begin with, it’s hard to know exactly how much new revenue the country would receive if any tax expenditures were eliminated. It wouldn’t necessarily be $148 billion. As the White House’s Office of Management and Budget notes, eliminating one type of tax break may alter economic behavior, or provide an incentive for companies to chase another type of tax break. Also, the system of tax breaks is interdependent -- eliminating one could lower the amount of taxable revenue in another, or move a company into an entirely different tax bracket. There’s also the question of whether the reforms would apply solely to corporations, or if tax breaks for both corporations and individuals would be eliminated. Many are available to both types of taxpayers. In fact, a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office determined that more than two-thirds of the tax expenditures used by corporations in 2011 were also used by individual taxpayers. That means tax breaks used exclusively by businesses -- the segment Garcia was referencing in her comments -- account for only a portion of the $148 billion worth of corporate tax expenditures. It’s also worth noting that eliminating a loophole isn’t the same thing as instituting a new tax, as Lambert suggests. Any new revenue would simply come from existing taxes. Garcia also disputes the notion that she would support any net increase in taxes. Her communications director, Kenny Cunningham, wrote that Garcia hopes to lower the overall corporate tax rate by eliminating special interest-backed tax loopholes. "Marilinda has pledged multiple times not to support any new increases in the tax burden and has a long voting record in the NH Legislature to prove her commitment to action on this issue, not just words," Cunningham wrote. Our ruling Lambert claimed that Garcia supports $150 billion in new taxes. His statement was based on a remark Garcia made about closing tax loopholes that help big corporations. The Office of Management and Budget estimates in fiscal year 2014, companies will receive about $148 billion in tax expenditures. That’s close to the figure Lambert offered, but overall, the statement is inaccurate for several reasons. Even if one accepts the premise that Garcia wants to end all tax breaks for corporations, the expenditures she’s referring to would probably be valued at less than $150 billion, unless Garcia also supported ending tax breaks that are available to both companies and individuals. According to her campaign manager, Garcia would not support any increase in the tax burden. Instead, she seeks to eliminate loopholes that benefit special interests while working to lower the overall corporate tax rate. Not only is Lambert’s campaign mailer inaccurate, but it offers such an astronomically high figure that the claim is far-fetched. For these reasons, Lambert’s claim earns a rating of Pants on Fire.	None	Gary Lambert	None	None	None	2014-08-15T14:51:06	2014-08-11	['None']
-snes-01995	Actor Kirk Cameron has contracted an extremely rare form of leprosy.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kirk-cameron-diagnosed-leprosy/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Was Kirk Cameron Diagnosed With a Rare Form of Leprosy?	28 July 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-06002	Says an Obama administration policy prohibits people who work with at-risk youth from promoting marriage as a way to avoid poverty.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/19/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-says-obama-prohibits-encouraging-you/	Rick Santorum says the president has issued a gag order on talking to young people about marriage. During a debate in South Carolina on Jan. 16, 2012, Santorum gave a winding answer to a moderator’s question about combating poverty. He mentioned a study that he said found that people who have a job, earn a high school diploma and get married before having children are far less likely to be poor. "It's a huge, huge opportunity for us," he said. "But what is the Obama administration doing?" The White House, Santorum said, "now has regulations that tell (people who work with at-risk youths) that they can no longer promote marriage to these young girls. They can no longer promote marriage as a way of avoiding poverty and bad choices that they make in their life." It was a vague claim but one that piqued our curiosity. What’s behind this? We reached out to Santorum’s campaign to ask for the basis of the claim but didn’t get a reply. In the debate, the former Pennsylvania senator said he learned about the no-marriage rule from Elayne Bennett, founder and president of the Best Friends Foundation. The organization provides character education for at-risk girls in Washington, D.C., schools. Its message to adolescents, according to Bennett: "that the best decision is to reject the risk behaviors of sex, drugs and alcohol." Bennett is the wife of Bill Bennett, former education secretary under President Ronald Reagan and drug czar under President George H.W. Bush. Both Bennetts are well-known conservatives. In an interview, Elayne Bennett told us Santorum’s statement was incorrect with regard to marriage. Here’s some background: Best Friends Foundation was awarded a five-year, $2.5 million grant by the Department of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. The Healthy Marriage Grant, which included a component for counseling inner-city teenagers on the benefits of marriage, addressed issues such as abuse prevention and life skills. But Bennett said that about two years ago, after Obama was elected, one aspect of the grant’s terms changed. "We were not to discuss abstinence or sex as a risk behavior," Bennett said. "It was a verbal instruction that we had to remove that word -- abstinence -- from our curriculum materials, which we did because we wanted to adhere to the new policy." Bennett says she rejects the label "abstinence-only" for what she teaches but said, "we do recommend that the best choice for young people is to say no to risk behaviors." Formerly that meant encouraging girls to wait to have sex -- until the grant terms changed. But she said the change never applied to discussing the benefits of marriage, and she thought Santorum’s statement in the debate left that impression. She said she spoke to him the next day, and he acknowledged it was "lost in the translation." In the debate, Santorum added that the White House had restricted federal grantees from talking about abstinence and described why he thinks that’s harmful. "They (the grantees) have to be neutral with respect to how people behave," Santorum said. "The problem is neutrality ends in poverty, neutrality ends in choices that hurt people's lives. This administration is deliberately telling organizations that are there to help young girls make good choices, not to tell them what the good choice is. That is absolutely unconscionable." Bennett, who also issued a statement clarifying Santorum’s error, said she still agrees with his broader point about the benefits of discussing abstinence. Source of the confusion The Department of Health and Human Services told us that its position (in the prior administration and in this administration) stems from a 2006 law signed by President George W. Bush. Called the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, it identifies eight activities on which healthy marriage funds can be used. Here, word for word, are the eight activities listed in the statute: • Public advertising campaigns on the value of marriage and the skills needed to increase marital stability and health. • Education in high schools on the value of marriage, relationship skills and budgeting. • Marriage education, marriage skills, and relationship skills programs that may include parenting skills, financial management, conflict resolution and job and career advancement. • Pre-marital education and marriage skills training for engaged couples and for couples or individuals interested in marriage. • Marriage enhancement and marriage skills training programs for married couples. • Divorce reduction programs that teach relationship skills. • Marriage mentoring programs which use married couples as role models and mentors in at-risk communities. • Programs to reduce the disincentives to marriage in means-tested aid programs … . Clearly, promoting marriage is an express purpose of this grant, not prohibiting promoting it. A 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office review of the grant found that there was confusion among grant recipients and HHS staff about what was allowed to be taught about abstinence. "HHS officials told us that abstinence education was not allowable under the Healthy Marriage program, but we observed during our site visits and review of grantee data several Healthy Marriage grantees operating programs that focused on abstinence education," the report states. To clear up confusion, HHS said that in 2011 they made the existing policy more explicit but did not change the policy. The department also added that the topic of abstinence can be one component of some of these activities, but a stand-alone abstinence education program does not fit within the statutory uses of the funds. Our ruling Santorum said the Obama administration is not allowing people who work with at-risk adolescents to promote the benefits of marriage. Santorum said he had heard this from Elayne Bennett of the Best Friends Foundation, but she told us he misspoke. The change under Obama, according to Bennett, was about what could be taught regarding abstinence -- not marriage. The Department of Health and Human Services said there was confusion in this area, so it clarified the policy, which does allow discussion of abstinence in other contexts but not as a stand-alone education program. Santorum simply got it wrong. His statement is False.	None	Rick Santorum	None	None	None	2012-01-19T18:09:38	2012-01-16	['Barack_Obama']
-pose-00946	"By maintaining (Medicaid) eligibility for pregnant mothers at current levels and promoting education and care for pregnant mothers, we will reduce low birth weights, still births, and long-term health issues for children who will be enrolled after birth in Medicaid programs."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/virginia/promises/bob-o-meter/promise/980/reduce-still-births-low-birth-weights-and-improve/	None	bob-o-meter	Bob McDonnell	None	None	Reduce still births, low birth weights and improve child health care	2011-09-09T12:56:22	None	['Medicaid']
-snes-01339	Eddie Bauer clothing stores destroy and discard leftover products rather than giving them intact to charity.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/do-eddie-bauer-stores-destroy-clothes/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Do Eddie Bauer Stores Destroy Leftover Clothes Instead of Donating Them?	13 December 2017	None	['Eddie_Bauer']
-pomt-02739	Goodwill Industries International pays workers with disabilities wages as low as pennies per hour.	half-true	/georgia/statements/2013/dec/18/national-federation-blind/goodwill-faces-criticism-over-pay-disabled-workers/	Workers’ wages have become a lightning rod issue recently. Fast-food employees have lobbied for an increase in the minimum wage. Earlier this year, Wal-Mart workers protested low wages at the mega store. And President Barack Obama is now backing a proposal by congressional Democrats to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour and tie it to inflation. The wage discussion has spilled over into jobs for disabled workers as well, with the National Federation of the Blind claiming Goodwill Industries International doesn’t adequately compensate its disabled workers. The NFB recently organized a public awareness campaign with members of local chapters delivering petitions to Goodwill affiliates nationwide asking the company to change its payroll practices that allow "payment of wages as low as pennies per hour to workers with disabilities." "For over seventy years, Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act has allowed employers to obtain special wage certificates that permit them to pay their workers with disabilities wages far less than the federal minimum," said a news release from the organization. Is Goodwill really paying some employees pennies per hour? We decided to investigate. Goodwill Industries is a nonprofit organization that provides job training and placement, among other services, to people with disabilities. The company comprises 165 independent, community-based affiliates in the United States and Canada, according to its website. There are four regional Goodwill offices in Georgia. When it comes to pay, Goodwill has long faced criticism. Earlier this year, the company was featured on NBC’s "Rock Center with Brian Williams" in a segment claiming that some disabled workers at the company’s Pennsylvania affiliates were paid as little as 22 cents an hour. Forbes reported that some Goodwill workers in Montana earn less than $4 per hour sorting and hanging clothes in stores. Salon and the Huffington Post have also reported on the low wages. Company officials said the cases highlighted in those reports are special cases and were not indicative of Goodwill’s overall pay scale, which has most workers earning at least minimum wage. According to corporate officials, only 64 affiliate agencies pay disabled workers below minimum wage and 101 do not, said Chris Danielsen, the NFB’s spokesman. "(Goodwill) says it’s a local decision by each affiliate to pay workers below minimum wage. And that this affects only 7,000 workers; our point is that it should not affect any," he told PolitiFact Georgia. Critics have also noted the high pay of Goodwill President and CEO Jim Gibbons, who is also blind. An Internal Revenue Service 990 form reports that Gibbons’ pay was more than $508,000 in 2011, plus an additional $217,000 in other compensation. Last year’s report, which is posted on the agency’s website, listed Gibbons’ pay at more than $533,000, plus an additional $99,000 in other compensation. So how is Goodwill allowed to pay workers below the federal minimum wage? And what about disabled workers at Georgia’s Goodwill affiliates, is their pay also lower than $7.25 an hour? In an online response to media reports and questions about its payroll practices, Goodwill Industries highlights the Special Minimum Wage Certificate, authorized under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. This provision, Section 14(c) of the law, allows employers to pay people with disabilities below the federal minimum wage. The organization also produced a position paper on the issue. "The certificate is not a ‘loophole,’ " reads the Goodwill corporate statement, which goes on to note, "eliminating this program would harm -- not help -- people with significant multiple disabilities." We called each of the four regional Georgia affiliates covering the Atlanta, Columbus, Macon and Savannah areas to determine their compensation policies. There are no workers paid below minimum wage at stores or offices in the Macon region, a spokeswoman told us. The region possesses the 14(c) special wage certificate but doesn’t use it, she said. The North Georgia affiliate, which includes the Atlanta area, does not have the 14(c) certificate and pays all its some 2,500 disabled workers at least minimum wage, a spokeswoman said. All workers in the Columbus region are also paid at least minimum wage, and the affiliate does not have the 14(c) certificate allowing for lower wages. More than 30 percent of the 700 Goodwill employees in the Savannah region are disabled, a spokeswoman said. The region does hold a 14(c) certificate but doesn’t use it, and the lowest hourly wage offered employees in the region is $7.75 an hour. Despite the Georgia results, the state chapter of the NFB has criticized Georgia’s Goodwill affiliates for about two years, asking the regions with the special wage certificates to eliminate them. Nationally, the NFB is supporting congressional legislation, introduced by U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., that would repeal the section of the federal law that allows special wage certificates. Georgia Democratic Congressmen Sanford Bishop and John Lewis have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. The NFB has started an online Change.org petition for Goodwill Industries International to pay its workers a real wage. Thus far, more than 170,000 people have signed on to the petition. So is the National Federation of the Blind correct that Goodwill Industries pays some disabled employees pennies per hour? Yes and no. The international nonprofit, like other organizations that employ disabled workers, is allowed to pay those employees below minimum wage because of a provision of the federal labor law. For Goodwill, which allows each of its independent affiliates to determine whether to use the reduced wage allowance, the pay scale varies. Some affiliates pay workers minimum wage and even more, while other affiliates do pay extremely low wages, depending on the situation and how much work employees are able to complete. In Georgia, all four affiliates pay disabled workers at least minimum wage. And two affiliates possess the lower wage certificate, which they could eventually decide to use. We rate the NFB’s claim Half True.	None	National Federation of the Blind	None	None	None	2013-12-18T06:00:00	2013-10-31	['None']
-pomt-07949	"We are living with a legacy of deficit-spending that began almost a decade ago."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jan/25/barack-obama/ten-years-deficits-even-more/	One of the themes of President Barack Obama's State of the Union address was the need to take control of the national budget. "Now, the final step – a critical step – in winning the future is to make sure we aren't buried under a mountain of debt," Obama said. "We are living with a legacy of deficit-spending that began almost a decade ago. And in the wake of the financial crisis, some of that was necessary to keep credit flowing, save jobs, and put money in people's pockets. But now that the worst of the recession is over, we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in. That is not sustainable. Every day, families sacrifice to live within their means. They deserve a government that does the same." His comment had a partisan undertone. By saying deficit spending began almost a decade ago, he is referring to the presidency of George W. Bush. We wanted to review the history of deficit spending and put Obama's statement in a bit of perspective. To do that, we turned to the historical tables on the federal budget published by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Obama said that deficit spending "began almost a decade ago." The historical data shows that from 2009 to 2002, the country did indeed run deficits. There's no doubt once the 2010 numbers are fully compiled, they too will show a deficit. You have to go back to the time of President Bill Clinton, working with a Republican Congress, to find budget surpluses. The historical tables show surpluses for the years 1998 to 2001. But the nation's debt did not begin under President Bush. The historical data show the government ran deficits from at least 1970 to 1998. (The CBO's most recent summary of historical data only goes back to 1970.) So that includes deficits under Republicans Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, as well as Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (for much of his presidency). So Obama isn't telling the full story by saying the legacy of deficit spending began a decade ago. It goes back even farther than that. We should point out that deficits are not the same thing as government debt. When the government spends more than it takes in during a single year, that's a deficit. Add up the deficits over many years, minus any surpluses, and you get the public debt. So even when there were surpluses under the Clinton administration, there was still significant public debt. But the surpluses meant that the overall debt was getting smaller. There's one caveat to Obama's statement. Deficits started again 2002, at $157.8 billion that year. They got a bigger after that, hitting $412.7 billion in 2004, but started shrinking again in 2005. The recession hit in 2008, and the deficit ticked up to $458.6 billion. But thanks to the stimulus and a deepening recession, the deficit got much bigger in 2009 -- it hit $1.414 trillion in 2009, according to the CBO statistics. And to get even wonkier, you can look at deficits as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product, a metric that accounts for inflation and economic growth. (The Gross Domestic Product is a measurement of the size of the entire U.S. economy.) If you look at it this way, the 2009 deficit is the largest since at least 1970, at 9.9 percent. The next largest deficit was in 1983, when it was 6.6 percent. Obama is correct that there was a turning point toward deficit spending a decade ago. But he isn't telling the full story of the nation's deficits, a "legacy" that began long before George W. Bush was president. We rate the claim Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2011-01-25T22:37:09	2011-01-25	['None']
-pomt-09228	"Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu received almost $1.8 million from BP over the last decade."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/may/14/ed-schultz/schultz-claims-landrieu-got-18-million-bp-pac-and-/	Newsflash: The oil and gas industry gives a lot of money to politicians. Among them is Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat whose state stands to be hardest hit by the thousands of barrels of oil gushing from BP's Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. Here's what Ed Schultz, the liberal host of MSNBC's Ed Show, had to say about her share of the dough: "Americans are getting a real education on what the color of oil is," Schultz said on the May 5, 2010, episode of his show. "It's green. It's real green. It's big money and influence. Just so you know what's coming down, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu received almost $1.8 million from BP over the last decade." That's quite a bit of cash, so we decided to look into the claim. It turns out that the $1.8 million figure has been one of Schultz's regular talking points. On May 6, Schultz criticized Landrieu for defending the oil industry while small businesses in the region could be wiped out by the disaster. "We have interviewed people on this program in recent days that are on the verge of not only losing their family business of 80 years, their clientele right now, and wiping out the whole industry, yet you are concerned about the liability limits on big insurance and oil?" he said. "Sen. Landrieu, you‘re really looking out for people, aren't you? Or is it just that $1.8 million worth of money to your campaign speaking right now from BP?" And on May 11, 2010, Schultz said, "We should point out that Senator Landrieu has taken $1.8 million from BP over the last 10 years," shortly after an interview with Landrieu ended. We checked that figure against data from OpenSecrets.org, a website that tracks campaign contributions. Between 2000 and 2009, BP employees and the company's political action committee contributed $25,200 to Landrieu. And since Landrieu was elected to Congress in 1996, BP employees and the company's political action committee have given her a total of $28,200. (So far, Landrieu hasn't received any money from the company's workers or PAC in 2010, so we excluded that year from our analysis.) To put those campaign contributions to Landrieu in perspective, the company's employees and action committee have donated a total of $4,734,181 to all federal candidates since 1996, when Landrieu's congressional career began. That means that during her entire time in the Senate, Landrieu's only gotten about 0.6 percent of BP's action committee and employees' total contributions. Both figures are a far cry from the $1.8 million Schultz claimed on his show. Alana Russo, Schultz's spokeswoman, said that the original figure came from a May 4 CNN story; the news organization has since corrected the error. She also pointed out that Schultz issued his own correction on May 12. "In recent days we have been reporting on this program on two different occasions that Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana had taken $1.8 million from BP," he said. "I want to come off the top tonight and correct that number. It is $752,000... I want all of you to know our apologies from me, Ed Schultz, on this. I don‘t like getting my numbers wrong." But Schultz did get the numbers wrong - again. Indeed, Landrieu has received $752,744 from all the oil and gas industry's political action committees and employees -- not just BP -- during her entire career. Schultz initially said that Landrieu had received $1.8 million from BP in the last decade, so his "correction" is an apples-to-oranges comparison. (We should also note that OpenSecrets is in the middle of updating some of its information; according to the organization, the most up-to-date figure is actually $758,744. But that number is available only on some parts of the OpenSecrets site.) Furthermore, he said that he'd reported the $1.8 million figure twice on his show. But we found that he mentioned the statistic three times. Russo told us Schultz is planning to issue an additional correction on his May 14 show. So how to rate it on the Truth-O-Meter? Given Schultz's incorrect correction, we won't wait for a new one. He repeatedly claimed that Landrieu had made $1.8 million from BP employees and PAC in campaign contributions over the last decade. We found that she's only made $25,200 from them in that period of time. That's a huge difference. Schultz eventually issued a correction, saying that Landrieu's only gotten $752,000. But Landrieu has received about that much during her entire career from the entire oil and gas industry, not just BP's political action committee and employees. Pants on Fire!	None	Ed Schultz	None	None	None	2010-05-14T16:40:49	2010-05-05	['Mary_Landrieu', 'Louisiana', 'BP']
-snes-00986	News stories about a mass shooting at a Florida high school were timestamped days earlier than 14 February 2018, which prove that the mass shooting was actually a "false flag" hoax.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/were-stories-florida-shooting-before/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	Were News Stories About the Florida Mass Shooting Posted Days Before It Happened?	20 February 2018	None	['None']
-snes-02071	A peer-reviewed study has found evidence that nearly all of global warming has been fabricated by climate scientists.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/climatology-fraud-global-warming/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Peer-Reviewed Study Proves All Recent Global Warming Fabricated by Climatologists?	14 July 2017	None	['None']
-snes-06141	A list reproduces Saul Alinsky's rules for "How to Create a Social State."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/how-to-create-a-social-state/	None	Quotes	None	David Mikkelson	None	Beware the Useful Idiots	21 January 2014	None	['None']
-tron-02265	Harmful Levels of Benzene Build Up in Parked Automobiles	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/benzene/	None	medical	None	None	None	Harmful Levels of Benzene Build Up in Parked Automobiles	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-para-00087	Adding bureaucracy [such as child care centre ratings] has pushed your fees up 22% in two years.	half-true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/05/sussan-ley/how-much-is-cost-childcare-rising-sussan-ley/index.html	None	['Child Care', 'Education']	Sussan Ley	Ellie Harvey, Peter Martin, Peter Fray	None	The cost of child care is rising - but by how much?	Monday, August 5, 2013 at 5:50 p.m.	None	['None']
-snes-04835	The Dalai Lama is has renounced religion and is pursuing a career as a sitcom writer.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-dalai-lama-atheist/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	The Dalai Lama Converts to Atheism, Will Step Down to Pursue Sitcom Career	29 April 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-06791	"Twenty-five states have lower unemployment than Texas" which is "tied with Mississippi for more minimum-wage jobs than anywhere in the United States."	true	/texas/statements/2011/aug/16/lloyd-doggett/lloyd-doggett-says-texas-has-worse-unemployment-25/	U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett told ABC News on Aug. 11, 2011, that Gov. Rick Perry’s rosy depictions of employment conditions in Texas aren’t entirely accurate. "Twenty-five states have lower unemployment than Texas does today," the Austin Democrat said, adding that "we're tied with Mississippi for more minimum-wage jobs than anywhere in the United States." Is Texas middling in unemployment and tied with the Magnolia State for minimum-wage jobs? Yes and yup. According to the latest monthly state-by-state unemployment rates, posted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas’ seasonally adjusted June unemployment rate of 8.2 percent placed it 26th among the 50 states. North Dakota had the lowest rate, 3.2 percent. The most populous states faring better than Texas were Pennsylvania, ranked 18th (7.6 percent), and New York, which was 23rd (8 percent). Regarding minimum-wage workers, the Austin American-Statesman said in a July 17 news article that Texas and Mississippi led the nation last year with 9.5 percent of hourly workers earning at or less than the federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25. Hourly workers aren’t the entire labor force, which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as adults who are working plus those lately looking and available for work. The Statesman story says that according to the bureau, 550,000 Texans earned no more than the minimum wage in 2010, and the number of Texas workers earning the federal minimum wage or less was greater than the totals for California, Florida and Illinois combined. In the story, Lori Taylor, an associate professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, attributes the state’s lower wages to its having a younger, less educated workforce and a lower cost of living. In March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in an online post that nearly 5.8 million Texas workers were paid hourly rates in 2010, representing 55.7 percent of the state’s workers, a proportion that compares with 58.8 percent nationally. A bureau economist, Steven Haugen, told us in an interview that most other workers are salaried, though some work on commission or do piece work; the bureau doesn’t collect data on those workers’ pay rates, he said. A table in the bureau’s post lists each state and its percentage of hourly workers paid at or below minimum wage (people who work for tips and worker younger than 20 are among those who can be paid less than minimum wage). Texas and Mississippi each had 9.5 percent of hourly workers paid at or less than minimum wage, tying for first among the states. Under Texas law, employers must pay workers the federal minimum wage. Alabama and West Virginia, at 9.3 percent, were next highest, followed by Louisiana (8.9 percent), Oklahoma (8.6 percent), Georgia (8.5 percent), Tennessee (8.3 percent), Kentucky (8.1 percent) and Missouri (8 percent). Washington, which has a state minimum wage rate higher than the federal rate, had the lowest share of hourly workers paid at or below minimum wage, 1.1 percent. In sheer numbers, Texas had 268,000 hourly workers earning minimum wage and 282,000 paid below the minimum wage, the bureau says, the most of any state by a wide margin. Almost 13 percent of the nation’s hourly workers paid at or below the minimum wage were in Texas, the second most-populous state with more than 25 million residents, or about 8 percent of the nation’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Mississippi, with almost 3 million residents, had 34,000 and 29,000 hourly workers, respectively, earning the minimum wage or less. We rate Doggett’s statement True.	None	Lloyd Doggett	None	None	None	2011-08-16T06:00:00	2011-08-11	['United_States', 'Texas', 'Mississippi']
-afck-00227	“Average life expectancy increased from 53.4 years in 2004 to 62.5 years in 2015.”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/is-the-anc-advancing-peoples-power-we-fact-check-key-election-claims/	None	None	None	None	None	Is the ANC ‘advancing people’s power’? We fact-check key election claims	2016-05-19 06:39	None	['None']
-vees-00192	​VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online posts with old story on Noynoy Aquino's undistributed Yolanda funds	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-online-posts-mislead-old-story-noynoy	None	None	None	None	fake news,misleading	​VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online posts MISLEAD with old story on Noynoy Aquino's undistributed Yolanda funds	May 30, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-07413	Says the hospital listed on Barack Obama’s just-publicized long-form birth certificate denies the president was born there.	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2011/apr/27/leo-berman/state-rep-leo-berman-says-kapiolani-medical-center/	Trying to quell recurrent unfounded claims that he wasn’t born in Hawaii, President Barack Obama released his long-form birth certificate Wednesday. In a White House news conference, the president said he was releasing the document in order to move on from the so-called "birther" issue: "We have to make a series of very difficult decisions about how we invest in our future but also get a hold of the deficit and debt. But we're not going to be able to do it if we are distracted. We're not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts." Nevertheless, Obama said, there will likely be "a segment of people" for whom the evidence of his birth certificate is not enough. Indeed, shortly after Obama spoke, state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, said he’s still not persuaded that Obama was born in a Honolulu hospital, according to the Texas Tribune. The Tribune reported that Berman, who has filed legislation to require presidential candidates who want to appear on the Texas ballot to present their birth certificate to the secretary of state, "claims the hospital Obama lists on his birth certificate — in fact, all hospitals in Honolulu — have denied the president was born there." We followed up with Berman, who told us that two hospitals, including Kapiolani Medical Center For Women and Children, where Obama says he was born, have denied it. He couldn’t recall the name of the other hospital. Asked where and when the hospitals made the denials, Berman told us: "In several places over the past year and a half," but provided no more specifics. "Neither hospital recognized the fact that he was born there and not only that, but you would think that the hospital that gave birth to the president of the United States would have some kind of commemorative plaque or something." Berman also said that "it’s going to take someone with a lot of money like Donald Trump to take a look at this and see if Kapiolani will admit whether or not he was born there." Trump, a possible GOP presidential candidate, has repeatedly suggested that Obama was not born in the United States. Earlier this month, for example, he said Obama’s "grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed his birth." PolitiFact rated that statement False. Responding to a 2008 question about whether "she was present when he was born in Kenya," Obama’s grandmother, who speaks Swahili, at first said through a translator that she was. Then she clearly and repeatedly corrected herself, saying that he was born in the United States. A subset of Obama critics, dubbed "birthers," doubt that he is a natural-born U.S. citizen, a requirement to serve as president. PolitiFact has checked at least five other claims about Obama’s birthplace, finding no truth to any of them. One was a February claim by Berman, who said Hawaii’s governor "can’t find anything that says (Obama) was born in Hawaii." Finding no evidence that the governor said that, we rated his claim False. We searched the Lexis-Nexis database, which archives news articles, and the Internet, where skepticism about Obama’s proof of citizenship thrives, for assertions that Kapiolani hospital had ever denied that it was the site of Obama’s birth. We found no instances of hospital officials making that assertion. However, we found a Jan. 18 story by World Net Daily, a conservative news website that has fanned the birth certificate controversy, reporting that a former Honolulu elections official had said that Kapiolani hospital has no record that Obama was born there. Two days later, Hollywood reporter Mike Evans, claiming to be a longtime friend of Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s, told Minnesota’s KQRS-FM radio that the governor had told him that he had searched "everywhere using his powers as governor" at Kapiolani and Queen’s hospitals and that "there is no Barack Obama birth certificate in Hawaii. Absolutely no proof at all that he was born in Hawaii." However, FoxNews.com later quoted Evans as saying that he had misspoken. "I haven’t talked to Neil since he’s been governor," he said. According to Fox, Evans said that he called Abercrombie’s office after reading online reports that the governor couldn’t find Obama’s birth certificate but Abercrombie did not return his call. Obama’s newly-released long-form birth certificate contradicts those reports — and Berman’s claim. The document says that Barack Hussein Obama II was born at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital at 7:24 p.m. Aug. 4, 1961. We attempted to reach officials from the Kapiolani Medical Center for Woman and Children on Wednesday and didn’t hear back. But as FactCheck.org reported in its April 9 look at Trump’s claims, Kapiolani can’t legally release individually identifiable health information, which the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) prohibits. Individually identifiable health information, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is information relating to the provision of health care to an individual, or anything that can reasonably be used to identify the individual, such as a name, address, birth date or Social Security number. An individual’s health information can only be shared under certain circumstances, according to the site, such as reporting a gunshot wound to the police. Protected information includes information in an individual’s medical record, and health providers must comply with an individual’s right to decide whether or not health information can be shared for certain purposes. In July 2009, World Net Daily quoted Kristy Watanabe, a spokeswoman at Hawaii Pacific Health, which includes the Kapiolani hospital, as saying: "Our comment to everyone who has been calling is that federal law does not permit us to provide any more details concerning information about Obama’s birth without authorization from Mr. Obama." However, the medical center has promoted a January 2009 letter Obama wrote on White House stationery to congratulate the medical center on its centennial celebration. "Kapiolani was one of Hawaii’s earliest hospitals, and it has served many generations of Hawaii’s people with distinction," the letter says. "As a beneficiary of the excellence of Kapiolani Medical Center — the place of my birth — I am pleased to add my voice to your chorus of supporters." The Foundations of Hawaii Pacific Health published the letter in the spring 2009 issue of its Inspire magazine, and the medical center posted video of Abercrombie reading Obama’s letter at the centennial dinner on its website. For CNN’s recent investigation into "birther" claims, which aired April 25-26, CNN reporter Gary Tuchman traveled to Hawaii to conduct numerous interviews, including one with Monika Danielson, who says she was in the hospital at the same time as Obama's mother and saw him in the nursery. He also interviewed Chiyome Fukino, who was the state Health Department's director under Republican Gov. Linda Lingle. The bottom line, according to Tuchman: His research "reveals what most analysts have been saying since the 'birther' controversy erupted during the 2008 presidential campaign: Obama was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961. Period." So far as we can tell, Kapiolani hasn’t confirmed that Obama was born there, citing federal privacy law that prevents it from doing so. But we found no record that the hospital has ever denied it, as Berman claims. Nor did the lawmaker provide evidence of such. We have a rating for such statements. Pants on Fire!	None	Leo Berman	None	None	None	2011-04-27T17:17:54	2011-04-27	['None']
-pomt-10316	"I have repeatedly said that many of the predatory loans that were made in the mortgage system did target African-American and Latino communities."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/01/barack-obama/obama-cites-ethnicity-in-mortgage-crisis/	In a town hall in St. Petersburg, Fla., an audience member challenged Obama about speaking out on issues affecting the black community, including the subprime mortgage crisis, among other issues. "Why is it that you have not had the ability to not one time speak to the interests and even speak on behalf of the oppressed and exploited African community or the black community in this country?" the man asked. Not true, Obama replied. "I think you're misinformed about when you say not one time. Every issue you've spoken about, I actually did speak out on," Obama said. "I have repeatedly said that many of the predatory loans that were made in the mortgage system did target African-American and Latino communities," Obama said. He went on to defend his record on other civil rights issues. We wondered if Obama's statement on the subprime mortgage was true, so we looked through press releases, transcripts and news stories to find out. Most notably, on Oct. 18, 2007, Obama wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to investigate subprime lenders to determine whether minority borrowers have been victims of discrimination. Obama wrote in his leter that there was already substantial evidence to indicate this was so. "Black families are paying more for home loans than similarly situated white families. Effective action to address this disparity is long overdue," Obama wrote. On the campaign trail, Obama has also discussed the same issue several times, though we found most of our examples of him discussing it before Hispanic audiences. On June 28, 2008, Obama told the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, "We have to stabilize the housing market. And the Latino community as well as the African-American community was particularly hard hit when it comes to foreclosures." On Feb. 19, 2008, Obama was at a campaign event in San Antonio, Texas, and discussed the need for people having mortgage problems to receive help negotiating with their lenders. "My suspicion is that it's very important we have Spanish-speaking counselors because I know that both the African-American community and Hispanic community have been disproportionately targeted by some of these practices." It's not a campaign theme he hits over and over again, but Obama has made the statement several times, and the 2007 letter is particularly strong evidence to bolster Obama's argument. We rule his statement True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-08-01T00:00:00	2008-08-01	['None']
-pomt-13682	Says, regarding the presence of classified information in her email, FBI Director James "Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/01/hillary-clinton/hillary-clintons-wrong-claim-fbi-director-comey-ca/	Hillary Clinton said that she has told the public a consistent and truthful story about classified material on her emails, and FBI director James Comey backed her up. That immediately caught our attention. On the July 31 edition of Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace played a video montage of several times Clinton said something like: "I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time." Wallace remarked, "After a long investigation, FBI director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true." That’s not what Clinton heard Comey say, she responded. "Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails," she said. Clinton appears to have selective hearing. In saying Comey called her answers "truthful," Clinton was apparently referring to — and putting a positive spin on — a comment Comey made in a July 7 congressional hearing regarding Clinton’s closed-door interview with the FBI as part of their investigation. Comey said, "We have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI." In her interview with Wallace, Clinton was making the point that what she told the public is consistent with what she told the FBI, and Comey said what she told the FBI was "truthful," campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin said. So Clinton’s statement implies that Comey has confirmed that her public comments are accurate. That is incorrect. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, asked Comey at the July 7 congressional hearing, "Did she lie to the public?" Comey responded, "That's a question I'm not qualified to answer." He also said he hadn’t compared Clinton’s public comments with the FBI interview to see if there were inconsistencies. There is no transcript of the FBI interview. When Comey announced the FBI’s findings July 5, it was clear that there are obvious inconsistencies between what Clinton said publicly about classified information on her private email server before her FBI interview and what the FBI found. Pointedly, Clinton said there wasn’t any classified information in her email, and he said there was. Take the video Wallace played on Fox News Sunday. In it, Clinton said, "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials" (March 10, 2015); "I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time" (July 25, 2015); "I had not sent classified material nor received anything marked classified" (Aug. 18, 2015). But Comey reported that, of the tens of thousands of emails investigators reviewed, 113 individual emails contained classified information, and three of them bore markings signifying their classification status. (Information can still be classified even if it does not have a label.) Eight email threads contained top-secret information, the highest level of classification, 36 contained secret information, and the remaining eight contained confidential information. About 2,000 emails have been retroactively classified, or up-classified, meaning the information was not classified when it was emailed, but it is now. "Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," Comey said in a July 5 statement. Then, there was this exchange between Comey and Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., at the congressional hearing: Gowdy: "Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails either sent or received. Was that true?" Comey: "That’s not true." Gowdy: "Secretary Clinton said, ‘I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.’ Was that true?" Comey: "There was classified material emailed." In fairness to Clinton, Comey said some of the classified emails were insufficiently marked, and it’s understandable that she didn’t realize that some of the ones without labels were actually classified. But he also said of some of the classified emails that did not bear markings, "There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about the matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation." We’ll also note a couple other major inconsistencies between Clinton’s remarks and the FBI’s findings: Clinton repeatedly said she turned over all work-related emails to the State Department in 2014, about 30,000 emails. However, Comey said FBI investigators uncovered "several thousand" work-related emails that she had not handed over to the State Department. And, Clinton has said her email servers "had numerous safeguards. It was on property guarded by the Secret Service. And there were no security breaches." Comey said that while there’s no evidence anyone successfully hacked Clinton’s email servers, they certainly were susceptible to attack. There was no full-time security staff, which are found at government agencies and commercial email providers like Google. Further, he noted that Clinton used her personal email abroad, which could have allowed "hostile actors" to access her account. Our ruling Clinton said regarding the presence of classified information in her email, FBI director James "Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people." A reasonable person would interpret Clinton’s statement to mean that Comey has endorsed her public remarks about her email. This is not the case. Talking specifically about Clinton’s closed-door FBI interview, Comey said there is "no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI" about her email practices. But Comey has specifically declined to comment on whether Clinton’s public remarks have been accurate. Further, while not explicitly rebuking Clinton’s public comments, Comey highlighted a major problem with them. Clinton repeatedly said she did not have any classified information whatsoever in her email, marked or unmarked. After the FBI investigation, including the interview with Clinton, Comey said she unequivocally did. We rate her claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-08-01T18:00:36	2016-07-31	['United_States', 'Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation']
-para-00094	Labor's Regional Resettlement Arrangement is entirely in accordance with Australia's international obligations.	mostly false	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/01/mark-dreyfus/png-breach-international-law/index.html	None	['Asylum Seekers']	Mark Dreyfus	Michael Koziol, Flynn Murphy, Michael Pelly, Peter Fray	None	Dreyfus says the PNG arrangement accords with international law	Thursday, August 1, 2013 at 9:46 a.m.	None	['Australia']
-snes-03389	A portion of Route 66 in New Mexico plays "America the Beautiful" when you drive over it.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/highway-plays-america-beautiful/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Highway Plays ‘America the Beautiful’	8 December 2016	None	['United_States', 'New_Mexico']
-hoer-00486	'FDA Approves Tranquilizing Darts for Children'	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/fda-approves-tranquilizing-darts-children-fake-news.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Fake-News: 'FDA Approves Tranquilizing Darts for Children'	May 21, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-04301	Southwest Airlines is giving away four tickets to Las Vegas and $5,000 spending money to Facebook users who share and like a page.	scam	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/southwest-airlines-las-vegas-ticket-giveaway-scam/	None	Inboxer Rebellion	None	David Mikkelson	None	Southwest Airlines Las Vegas Ticket Giveaway Scam	7 February 2016	None	['Las_Vegas', 'Facebook']
-goop-01680	Nicole Kidman “$8 Million Tell All” Still True, One Year After False Repor	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/nicole-kidman-tell-all-book-false/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Nicole Kidman “$8 Million Tell All” Still NOT True, One Year After False Report	3:02 pm, January 31, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-10328	Says Obama flip-flopped on withdrawing troops from Iraq.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jul/24/let-freedom-ring/his-tone-changed-but-not-his-position/	A new TV ad from the conservative group Let Freedom Ring echoes a charge made by Sen. John McCain's campaign that Sen. Barack Obama has flip-flopped on withdrawing troops from Iraq. The allegation is based on comments Obama made on July 3, 2008, when he discussed an upcoming trip to Iraq and what it would mean for his foreign policy. "I've always said that the pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability. That assessment has not changed," he said. "And when I go to Iraq and have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground, I'm sure I'll have more information and will continue to refine my policies." The McCain campaign pounced on those comments, charging Obama with flip-flopping. "Since announcing his campaign in 2007, the central premise of Barack Obama's candidacy was his commitment to begin withdrawing American troops from Iraq immediately," said Brian Rogers, a McCain spokesman. "Today, Barack Obama reversed that position proving once again that his words do not matter. He has now adopted John McCain's position that we cannot risk the progress we have made in Iraq by beginning to withdraw our troops immediately without concern for conditions on the ground." Let Freedom Ring made the same point in its TV ad. We examined other claims from the ad in this article. Here, we'll examine the Iraq charge. (Much of the material below comes from this previous item that explored the McCain flip-flop charge.) We examined Obama's statements on Iraq from the campaign to try to uncover whether he was backtracking on earlier promises. Iraq was one of the most pressing issues of the Democratic primary, discussed and dissected during more than 20 debates. We found that Obama has made a few points about Iraq over and over again: that he opposed the war "from the start"; that U.S. troops should leave Iraq quickly and in an orderly fashion ("as careful getting out as we were careless getting in"); and that the United States should not have permanent bases inside Iraq. How quickly should troops leave? His campaign Web site says the following: "Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al-Qaida attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al-Qaida." The McCain campaign and the RNC have pointed to the "16 months" statement as an indication that Obama favors a "precipitous withdrawal," presumably as early as the middle of 2010. (We checked that claim earlier here and found it Half True.) They also point to a March 2008 statement from Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe. "On Iraq, he has been very clear," Plouffe said in March 2008. "He offered a withdrawal plan well over a year ago. It's essential to his candidacy and a rock-solid commitment. ... It will be 16 months at the most where you can withdraw combat troops." Plouffe's statement appears to be the best evidence to support the McCain campaign's argument. Plouffe was responding to comments from former Obama adviser Samantha Power, who had said the 16-month timeframe was a "best-case scenario" that Obama wouldn't necessarily follow once he was in office. Power was forced to resign after calling Sen. Hillary Clinton a "monster." But does this mean a 16-month clock starts ticking the moment Obama enters office? We could not find a direct statement from Obama saying that, and found statements he made throughout the campaign that contradicted that. For example: • At a Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H., on Sept. 26, 2007, the late Tim Russert pressed Obama as to whether he would have all troops out by the end of his first term. "I think it's hard to project four years from now, and I think it would be irresponsible. We don't know what contingency will be out there," Obama said. "I will drastically reduce our presence there to the mission of protecting our embassy, protecting our civilians and making sure that we're carrying out counterterrorism activities there. I believe that we should have all our troops out by 2013, but I don't want to make promises not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out." • At a Democratic debate in Cleveland on Feb. 26, 2008, Obama said, "As soon as I take office, I will call in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we will initiate a phased withdrawal, we will be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in. We will give ample time for them to stand up, to negotiate the kinds of agreements that will arrive at the political accommodations that are needed." • At a debate in Philadelphia on April 16, 2008, Obama said, "Now, I will always listen to our commanders on the ground with respect to tactics. Once I've given them a new mission, that we are going to proceed deliberately in an orderly fashion out of Iraq and we are going to have our combat troops out, we will not have permanent bases there, once I've provided that mission, if they come to me and want to adjust tactics, then I will certainly take their recommendations into consideration; but ultimately the buck stops with me as the commander in chief." • On Meet the Press on May 4, 2008, Russert asked Obama what he would do if advisers thought "a quick withdrawal" from Iraq would result in genocide. Obama replied, "Of course, I would factor in the possibilities of genocide, and I factored it in when I said that I would begin a phased withdrawal. What we have talked about is a very deliberate and prudent approach to the withdrawal — one to two brigades per month. At that pace, it would take about 16 months, assuming that George Bush is not going to lower troop levels before the next president takes office. We are talking about, potentially, two years away. At that point, we will have been in Iraq seven years. If we cannot get the Iraqis to stand up in seven years, we're not going to get them to stand up in 14 or 28 or 56 years." Taken in their entirety, Obama's comments reflect a philosophy of "about 16 months" for withdrawal. He also appears to be willing to take advice from commanders on the ground that might affect the general pace, but not the overall goal of withdrawal. Yet Obama has been artful in his rhetoric. His campaign has clearly emphasized "16 months" when speaking to antiwar audiences and " about 16 months" when answering questions from withdrawal skeptics. But Obama never urged a "precipitous" withdrawal; even a bill he offered in January 2007 that set a deadline for getting out of Iraq contained an exemption for national security. The Plouffe statement, however, stands out. Plouffe said the 16-month time frame was a "rock-solid commitment." But it's the only statement we found that supports the idea of withdrawal with no allowances made for circumstances on the ground. After the McCain campaign attacked Obama as a flip-flopper, the candidate responded with another news conference the same day. "I intend to end this war," Obama said. "My first day in office I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission. And that is to end this war. Responsibly, deliberately, but decisively. And I have seen no information that contradicts the notion that we can bring our troops out safely at a pace of one to two brigades per month. And again, that pace translates into having our combat troops out in 16 months' time." Weighing all these statements together, we find the McCain campaign and Let Freedom Ring are off-base in saying Obama has changed position. Obama repeatedly said facts on the ground could affect the tactical moves of an overall withdrawal. Obama's position was not an ironclad withdrawal timeline in the first place. We find the charge that Obama has reversed position to be False.	None	Let Freedom Ring	None	None	None	2008-07-24T00:00:00	2008-07-24	['Iraq']
-goop-00252	Justin Theroux Had ‘Instant Connection’ With Angelina Jolie Before Meeting Jennifer Aniston?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-theroux-angelina-jolie-jennifer-aniston-meeting/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Justin Theroux Had ‘Instant Connection’ With Angelina Jolie Before Meeting Jennifer Aniston?	2:52 pm, September 18, 2018	None	['Angelina_Jolie', 'Jennifer_Aniston']
-pomt-00670	"The families that are covered through the Low Income Pool is a different group of individuals than are covered by Obamacare."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2015/may/11/rick-scott/patients-who-use-lip-are-different-medicaid-expans/	Washington may favor expanding Medicaid, Gov. Rick Scott argues, but it won’t help the people being served by the soon-to-expire Low Income Pool, called LIP. Speaking to reporters, Scott said he doesn’t share the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ position that growing Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act is a better solution than renewing the current LIP fund. The LIP program, which mostly helps cover hospital costs for uninsured and underinsured patient visits, is set to expire June 30. "The families that are covered through the Low Income Pool is a different group of individuals than are covered by Obamacare," Scott said. Given the context, we’re taking "Obamacare" to mean Medicaid expansion; we contacted Scott’s office, but they didn’t elaborate. One of the chief arguments for Medicaid expansion is that it would cover uninsured Floridians, many of whom receive care at hospitals and clinics that then turn to the LIP program to offset costs. We decided to check if Scott was right about those being two different sets of potential patients. LIP vs. Medicaid The debate over Medicaid expansion and the loss of federal matching money for the $2.2 billion LIP fund has roiled the state Legislature this year. While the Senate wants a Medicaid expansion based on private insurance, the House refuses. Adding fuel to the fire is that Washington in 2014 said it would not renew the LIP, a temporary program funded since 2005 by both state and federal taxes. That led to a billion-dollar hole in the budget and a standoff that requires a special session in June. One of the primary arguments for expansion has been that more than 800,000 Floridians would be covered under a broader Medicaid program. The Affordable Care Act allows Florida to cover all adults with incomes below 138 percent of federal poverty level. (100 percent is currently $11,770 for an individual and $24,250 for a family of four). The pro-expansion side points out this means the hundreds of thousands of newly eligible Floridians would be able to enroll in Medicaid and have access to the physicians and preventive care it offers. Advocates say this would preclude the need for LIP money, as most of the uninsured who typically turn to emergency room visits for care would then be insured. But just because you are uninsured doesn’t necessarily mean you are poor enough to qualify for an expanded Medicaid. The LIP fund helps reimburse care providers for services rendered instead of directly covering patients. That means it pays for anyone who is uninsured, whether they would qualify for Medicaid or not. Experts told us those who don’t qualify for Medicaid would include undocumented immigrants and people above 138 percent of the federal poverty level without insurance. But that second group at least enjoys the benefit of being able to get subsidized policies if their incomes are less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Even if they don’t choose to enroll in one of those policies, the option exists. It’s also not right to say that potential Medicaid beneficiaries and those helped by LIP are mutually exclusive groups, as Scott makes it sound. Chances are that most of the uninsured making these uncompensated ER visits are the poorest patients, Harvard health policy professor Ben Sommers told us. "Technically yes, some portion of the people potentially served by the LIP would not be identical to the people covered by the ACA (Affordable Care Act)," he said. "But in broad strokes, the main people who benefit from the LIP would benefit even more from the Medicaid expansion and ACA Marketplace coverage." Florida has the second-highest total of low-income, uninsured adults in the nation behind Texas, so insuring them through Medicaid would mean hospitals would get paid for their services, those analysts said. It’s much more effective than attempting to pay emergency bills after the fact. "If you have insurance you may know that you can get preventive care like vaccinations, mammograms or primary care," said Leighton Ku, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University. "If there is only uncompensated care, more people are likely to skip preventive and primary care because they will worry about the cost ... and only get care when they are quite sick and need emergency or hospital care." Our ruling Scott said, "The families that are covered through the Low Income Pool is a different group of individuals than are covered by Obamacare." This makes it sound as if the people who would qualify for Medicaid under an expansion are completely different than patients who leave hospitals with unpaid bills the LIP fund helps pay to providers. Health policy experts said that while there would still be uninsured people not paying their bills under an expansion, plenty of overlap exists between the two, especially at lower incomes. We rate the statement Mostly False.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2015-05-11T11:21:59	2015-05-06	['None']
-tron-02747	President Obama Dismantling Statue of Liberty	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/president-obama-dismantling-statue-liberty/	None	obama	None	None	None	President Obama Dismantling Statue of Liberty	Jul 6, 2016	None	['None']
-peck-00058	Is Tanzania’s HIV medicine shortage due to donor cutbacks?	partially true	https://pesacheck.org/is-tanzanias-hiv-medicine-shortage-due-to-donor-cutbacks-aefd85380117	None	None	None	Kiki Otieno	None	Is Tanzania’s HIV medicine shortage due to donor cutbacks?	Apr 12	None	['None']
-pomt-03619	"We are dealing with an administration that, quite frankly, has shown a reluctance to enforce the immigration law."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/may/07/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-obama-shows-reluctance-enforc/	Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is taking a precarious lead on immigration reform within his party, where the vocal conservative wing is wary of any hint of amnesty for people living in the U.S. illegally. Rubio is framing his case, in part, by reminding Republicans that they don’t want President Barack Obama leading the way on this issue. "We are dealing with 11 million people, but we are also dealing with the future of immigration in this country, and we are dealing with an administration that, quite frankly, has shown a reluctance to enforce the immigration law," Rubio told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren on April 30, 2013. "Look, if you want to know the single impediment to get things done ... people don't believe the Obama administration or the federal government will enforce the law." As Rubio continues barnstorming for immigration reform, the claim that Obama has gone soft on enforcement has become part of his script. Is it true? We reached out to Rubio’s spokesman, Alex Conant, the White House and other experts to evaluate Obama's record on enforcing immigration law. First, we'll examine points from Obama's critics, evidence that they say shows he is reluctant to enforce immigration law. Then we'll look at the other side, at evidence that some say shows Obama has vigorously enforced immigration law. Where enforcement has decreased Prosecutorial discretion on deportations. Conant pointed us to the criticism that the Obama administration is choosing not to deport millions of known illegal immigrants. In 2011, the administration announced a policy of making deportation of criminals (think violent offenders, gang members and drug traffickers) who are in the U.S. illegally a top priority. Those with no criminal record or threat to public safety became a low priority and would likely be allowed to remain in the U.S. These positions are enshrined in the "Morton memos," directives from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton issued in June 2011. "ICE … has limited resources to remove those illegally in the United States. ICE must prioritize the use of its enforcement personnel, detention space and removal assets to ensure that the aliens it removes represent, as much as reasonably possible, the agency's enforcement priorities, namely the promotion of national security, border security, public safety, and the integrity of the immigration system," Morton wrote. That meant that family members, students and other longtime resident immigrants would not be targeted. Deferred action on immigrants brought as children. Conant also cited Obama’s actions on immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children, commonly called "Dreamers." In June 2012, Obama announced that his administration would no longer deport young undocumented immigrants if they met certain criteria, including having entered the United States as children, having a clean criminal record and attending school. Prosecutorial discretion and deferred action no doubt mean that certain segments of immigrants are not being eyed for deportation. But David Martin, an international law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, argued that doesn’t add up to a reluctance to enforce the law. He said it’s "choosing different things to enforce." "There’s been an effort since very early to be more serious and more systematic about the priorities," Martin said. "In my view that’s a perfectly appropriately way to operate a law enforcement agency. I see it as more sensible enforcement." Position on "border triggers." Many Republicans, including Rubio, want immigration reform to include a "trigger" that says the border will be secure before immigrants can begin the path toward legal status or citizenship. The Obama administration opposes such a trigger. "I think that once people really look at the whole system and how it works, relying on one thing as a so-called trigger is not the way to go," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in March 2013. "There needs to be certainty in the bill so that people know when they can legalize and then when the pathway to citizenship, earned citizenship, would open up." A border trigger, however, is a mechanism of proposed law -- not something currently in place that the Obama administration is declining to enforce. A lawsuit against Arizona. Is Obama not only shying from enforcement, but also going after states that are getting tough? Conant noted the Justice Department’s 2010 lawsuit against the state of Arizona over its controversial immigration law that grants local police greater authority to check the legal status of people they stop. The law was meant to "discourage and deter" illegal immigrants from staying in the state. Federal officials said Arizona’s law would flood them with cases of illegal immigrants who pose no danger. But the federal government’s lawsuit is a constitutional issue more than an enforcement one. "They went after Arizona on a constitutional principle that the federal government is in charge of immigration and it’s the federal government that should be making immigration laws, not Arizona," said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration attorney and adjunct professor at Cornell Law School. No more 287(g) program. Jessica Zuckerman, a homeland security analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the Obama administration has "all but abolished" a program that allows state and local law enforcement to essentially be deputized as immigration agents and be allowed to arrest people for immigration issues. It’s known as 287(g). "That program’s been undercut basically to the point that it doesn’t exist anymore," Zuckerman said. Indeed, this 2012 announcement from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, says exactly that. "ICE has also decided not to renew any of its agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies that operate task forces under the 287(g) program. ICE has concluded that other enforcement programs... are a more efficient use of resources for focusing on priority cases," the announcement said. Fewer workplace raids. Zuckerman also said far fewer random searches are occurring at workplaces where illegal immigrants are suspected to be employed. Large-scale workplace arrests of illegal workers were hallmarks of the George W. Bush administration's approach, and in 2011 arrests from worksite raids had dropped by 70 percent since Bush left office. That too reflected Obama’s contrasting priorities, as ICE officials turned their attention to employers. If immigration inspectors found evidence that immigrant workers’ identity documents might be false, managers had to dismiss the workers or risk prosecution. But Zuckerman argues that document audits don’t equal enforcement. "It needs to be part of other enforcement measures that have decreased," she said. "None of them alone is a silver bullet." Where enforcement has increased Experts also told us that Obama has ramped up enforcement on some avenues of immigration law. "Secure Communities." While backing away from the 287(g) program, the Obama administration put renewed emphasis on the Secure Communities program which is meant to identify "dangerous criminal aliens" for deportation. Local law enforcement agencies send criminal suspects’ fingerprints to be checked in national crime databases. If an arrestee turns out to be an illegal immigrant with a serious rap sheet, the person can be taken into federal custody. Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, said the program was used in about 3 percent of U.S. jurisdictions when Obama took office and is in about 97 percent today. Secure Communities, he said, "is the most effective immigration enforcement tool to date as it conscripts local law enforcement into enforcing federal immigration laws. Zuckerman, however, noted that "it only focuses on criminal aliens and not the broader issue." Deportations are up. It has been widely reported that overall deportations of illegal immigrants have increased during Obama’s term. ICE deported 409,949 immigrants in the 2012 fiscal year, up from 396,096 immigrants in FY 2011 and more than 392,000 immigrants in FY 2010. Those figures all show a steady increase over every year of the Bush administration. This chart from the pro-immigrant group America’s Voice shows year-to-year figures. Those numbers, however, are disputed by critics who note that deportations at the border are up, while other types -- such as those from the defunct 287(g) program -- have dropped off. "They’re doing a different kind of enforcement that results in higher numbers, but there are definitely not more people being removed from the interior of the country," Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies which favors lower immigration levels, told the Washington Times recently. At PolitiFact, we have also noted that personnel and other resources to stop illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have increased dramatically in recent years. The number of border patrol officers more than doubled from about 10,000 to about 21,000 between 2004 and 2012. Employer prosecutions. As we noted above, while fewer workplace raids are happening, the Obama administration is focusing more on prosecutions against employers and doing more audits of workers’ documentation paperwork to ensure immigration compliance. In 2011, the New York Times reported that ICE started 2,746 workplace investigations, more than double the number in 2008. Fines totaling a record $43 million were levied on companies in immigration cases. Our ruling Rubio said the Obama administration "has shown a reluctance to enforce the immigration law." His spokesman pointed out some concrete changes in how Obama has approached immigration, namely a program to allow people brought here illegally as children to seek deferred action on deportation and an emphasis on deporting criminals while leaving many illegal residents who are otherwise law abiders alone. But while Rubio calls that reluctance, others see it as prioritizing. Obama has put new emphasis on some approaches, such as adding border agents, while minimizing others, such as the 287(g) program. Whether those priorities represent sound policy is a matter of opinion. But Rubio’s statement suggests that Obama has turned his back on enforcing the law, and the reality is much more nuanced than that. We rate the statement Half True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2013-05-07T11:00:27	2013-04-30	['None']
-pomt-00231	"Only Duterte’s Philippines and Trump’s United States of America have money bail."	mostly true	/california/statements/2018/oct/09/gavin-newsom/are-us-philippines-only-two-countries-money-bail/	Democrat Gavin Newsom touted a new state law that ends monetary bail during the Oct. 8 California gubernatorial debate. The bill, which outgoing Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed in August, emerged after years of complaints that the money bail system is punitive for low-income Americans, in some cases making those who cannot afford their share of the bail wait for months behind bars for minor violations or for crimes they are ultimately cleared of. Instead, the bill would enact a system of "risk assessments" that sets out non-monetary conditions for release. (As is the case currently, the highest-risk arrestees would be remanded into custody without bail.) To Newsom, the law is a first step toward correcting a national blemish. Referring to President Donald Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Newsom said, "Only Duterte’s Philippines and Trump’s United States of America have money bail. California became the first state to step up and step into this debate and do the right thing." When we looked into Newsom’s assertion, we found that he was largely correct, though with some caveats required. The focus on the United States and the Philippines as outliers internationally in bail policy dates back to at least 1991, when a University of Southern Mississippi professor, F.E. Devine, wrote a study titled, "Commercial Bail Bonding: A Comparison of Common Law Alternatives." (Devine died in 2011.) Referring to commercial bail bond companies, Devine wrote that "with the exception of the Philippines and an ambiguous provision in Liberia, which does not seem to result in any important commercialization of bail, these companies do not exist outside of the United States." He continued, "The Philippines exhibits the only bail system outside the United States dominated by commercial provision of bail." Three experts with a specialty in bail bonds said that Devine’s singling out of the two countries still stands, though they added that Newsom could have been more careful in his wording. Other countries do require monetary deposit for pretrial release in at least some cases, said Megan Stevenson, an assistant professor of law at George Mason University. "For instance, I know cash bail is sometimes used in Canada," though its use is much more limited, Stevenson said. A more accurate way to phrase it, she said, would be to say that "only the U.S. and Philippines have a cash bail system that is dominated by commercial bail bondsmen." This makes a difference because a commercial bail industry has a financial stake in the system. Shima Baradaran Baughman, a law professor at the University of Utah, said that she referred to the same two countries as outliers in her 2017 volume, "The Bail Book." Asked whether she agreed with Stevenson’s clarification about commercial bail bonding companies being the important distinction, she said she did. Tim Schnacke, executive director of the Colorado-based Center for Legal and Evidence-Based Practices, agreed. "I've tried to correct people when they say it the way (Newsom said it) but it just keeps finding legs," Schnacke said. The other asterisk we would place on Newsom’s assertion is his invocation of Trump and Duterte. As Devine’s book makes clear, the cash bail policies of the United States and the Philippines predated the Trump and Duterte presidencies by decades. Our ruling Newsom said, "Only Duterte’s Philippines and and Trump’s United States of America have money bail." These two countries are international outliers on bail policy, but Newsom would have been more accurate if he’d specified the role of commercial bail providers, rather than "money bail" more generally. In addition, his references to Trump and Duterte are gratuitous, since the policies were well-established for decades before they took office. We rate the statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Gavin Newsom	None	None	None	2018-10-09T16:26:32	2018-10-08	['United_States', 'Philippines']
-pomt-04220	Operating a health care exchange would be "illegal" in Georgia and some states because of legislation passed in those states.	false	/georgia/statements/2012/nov/28/michael-cannon/experts-say-federal-law-trumps-state-law-obamacare/	Georgians who oppose Obamacare can rest a little easier. According to one health care expert, they don’t have to worry about one particular element of what’s officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Three days after the presidential election, Michael Cannon, the director of health policy studies for the Cato Institute, wrote an article in the National Review saying that states are under no obligation to create health care exchanges. He then wrote a claim we hadn’t heard before. "[O]perating an Obamacare exchange would be illegal in 14 states," he wrote. "Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia have enacted either statutes or constitutional amendments (or both) forbidding state employees to participate in an essential exchange function: implementing Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates." Is that correct? PolitiFact Georgia decided to conduct an examination of the claim. Cannon told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution health reporter via email that he based his statement on Senate Bill 411, passed by the Georgia Legislature in 2010 and signed into law by then-Gov. Sonny Perdue. Cannon cited this particular portion of the bill: "To preserve the freedom of citizens of this state to provide for their health care: No law or rule or regulation shall compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer, or health care provider to participate in any health care system." Cannon declined via email to comment for our fact check, saying he’s continuing his boycott against the PolitiFact franchise. He ended his email with a Latin phrase Cannon has used in other articles, Tyrannis delenda est., which means "tyranny must be destroyed." The Washington-based Cato Institute advocates for limited government intervention on social and business matters. The federal health care law, passed in March 2010, gives states the opportunity to organize health care exchanges where consumers and small businesses will be able to compare the quality and prices of health plans. If states won’t create an exchange, the federal government will do it. Gov. Nathan Deal announced Nov. 16 that he would not set up an exchange under the health care law. Most conservatives and libertarians were livid about the provision in the federal health care law known as the "individual mandate," which requires Americans to buy health insurance and the majority of employers to provide it. Twenty-six states, including Georgia, filed a lawsuit to overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act shortly after President Barack Obama signed it into law in March 2010. Georgia SB 411 was an attempt to counter the federal law. Senate Republicans pushed for the legislation after Democrats refused to support a similar amendment to the Georgia Constitution. Perdue signed the bill in June 2010. PolitiFact Georgia has delved into this topic before. In 2010, Sen. Judson Hill, a Marietta Republican, sent a mailer to potential voters in his district saying he had "stood up to Barack Obama by passing legislation that prevents you from being forced to join government health plans or buy health insurance against your will." Hill was referring to SB 411. PolitiFact Georgia found experts who noted that the state action would have little impact because the federal government has "extremely broad" power to provide incentives and disincentives through the tax code. With those caveats, and the uncertainty over the federal health care law’s future, Hill’s claim was rated Half True. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the health care law in a 5-4 ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the individual mandate may "reasonably" be characterized as a tax. A spokeswoman for Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens, a vocal critic of the federal law, said his office does not generally speak on state law when Olens is not directly engaged in the issue. Bill Custer, director of Georgia State University’s Center for Health Services Research, qualified in his comments to us that he’s not an attorney, but he believes the federal health care law overrides any state legislation. "My understanding is that there is no compulsion in any part of the law now (that was what the Supreme Court ruled this summer) so the state law is moot and in any case federal law supersedes state law on this issue," Custer said via email. Other nonpartisan experts we contacted agreed. "Federal law trumps state law," said Russ Toal, director of the Office of Public Health Practice/Community Service at Georgia Southern University. "I don’t think (Cannon’s claim) is accurate." Kathleen Burch, an associate professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, said the state law doesn’t prohibit the creation of an exchange. Burch, who specializes in constitutional law, also cited the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause, which gives the federal law authority over inconsistent state exercise of power. To sum up, Cannon wrote that creating a health care exchange under the 2010 federal health care law would be "illegal" in Georgia and 13 other states. He wrote that those states have legislation that precludes "implementing Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates." The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate was allowable under the Constitution. The experts we spoke to and others note federal law supersedes state law here. We rate this claim False.	None	Michael Cannon	None	None	None	2012-11-28T06:00:00	2012-11-09	['Georgia_(U.S._state)']
-pomt-13151	"Jack Berry voted for a plan to cut $23.8 million from our schools."	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2016/oct/31/levar-stoney/levar-stoney-weakly-claims-jack-berry-voted-cut-23/	There’s a photo of a sad-looking girl sitting at a school desk on a new flier being circulated by Richmond mayoral candidate Levar Stoney. "Jack Berry voted for a plan to cut $23.8 million from our public schools," the handbill states in capital letters. Berry also is among the seven candidates in the mayor’s race. He’s held a number of key administrative posts in the Richmond region but never has held elective office. So we wondered if he had, indeed, voted to cut millions from city schools, as Stoney said. Footnotes on Stoney’s flier base the claim on an April 17, 2012, article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that updated a funding feud between Mayor Dwight C. Jones and the city’s School Board. The controversy began in February 2012, when the board passed a school budget with $263.7 million in projected expenses but only $239.9 million in projected revenues. Rather than cut expenses, the board opted to approve its underfunded budget and ask Jones and the Richmond City Council to make up the difference. Jones responded in March by appointing a task force of 11 public and private executives to look for savings in the School Board’s budget that wouldn’t hurt classroom instruction. Berry, a former Richmond budget director, was one of the appointees. The panel hired two outside consultants, including former Richmond City Manager Robert C. Bobb, to find possible short- and long-term cuts. The consultants’ $35,000 fee was paid by the Greater Richmond Chamber Foundation. On April 16, 2012, the panel voted 10-1 to recommend $23.8 million in cuts to the School Board’s proposed budget. Berry voted with the majority. An article in the next day’s Times-Dispatch - footnoted in Stoney’s flier - said the task force "leaned heavily" on the consultant’s recommendations in finalizing its list of proposed cuts. The list included: •cutting 20 teacher positions; •cutting 25 teacher aides; •cutting 50 non-teacher positions; •imposing three furlough days; •changing various health care benefits; •changing the structure of plant service and security; and •eliminating the employee bonus pool. Stoney’s flier calls the package of cuts "Berry’s plan," but there’s nothing in The Times-Dispatch’s coverage that suggests he was the mastermind. To the contrary, the article cited by Stoney says the task force "heavily leaned" on the recommendations of its consultants in finalizing its list of proposed cuts. It also should be noted that Berry was not one of the two people Jones appointed as co-chairmen of the panel. A week later, Jones asked City Council to contribute an additional $5.1 million for education - far below the extra $23.8 million the School Board sought. The mayor rejected the task force’s recommendations for furlough days and eliminating health benefits for the school system’s pre-Medicare retirees. The council increased that amount to $5.6 million. In the end, Richmond schools were left with a $250 million budget for the 2012-13 school year, anchored by a $129.4 million appropriation from the City Council and with the rest coming from state and federal sources. That was slightly higher than the $249.1 million for the 2011-12 school year, which included $123.8 million in city funds. Our ruling Stoney’s flier says, "Jack Berry voted for a plan to cut $23.8 million from our schools." The Richmond School Board passed a budget in 2012 that exceeded its revenues by $23.8 million and asked the city to make up the difference. Mayor Jones refused and appointed an 11-member advisory committee, which included Berry, to find savings. The panel voted 10-1, with Berry’s support, to recommend a plan that itemized $23.8 million in cuts to the board’s proposed budget. The City Council largely adopted that plan. Stoney’s statement suggests that Berry had an official role in the budget deliberations. He didn’t. Berry served as an adviser to the mayor with instructions to find efficiencies. He didn’t have a say in the actual appropriation of city funds for education; that remained in the hands of the City Council. It’s also misleading to say, as Stoney does, that the plan "cut" $23.8 million from schools. Most of that sum was hoped-for new money from the City Council that the School Board never received. So Stoney’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores important facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/23f24b7a-2d34-4c7d-9f00-81e65e12263b	None	Levar Stoney	None	None	None	2016-10-31T12:16:49	2016-10-17	['None']
-pomt-09413	A national poll found that among people who oppose the Democratic health care reform bill, "almost 40 percent" opposed it not because it goes too far, but because "they don’t think it goes far enough. ... They will not be unhappy when we pass health care reform."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/mar/19/john-yarmuth/yarmuth-40-percent-health-care-bill-opponents-say-/	Republicans have repeatedly made the case that the public believes the Democratic health care bill goes too far in restructuring the American health system. But on March 16, 2010, Rep. John Yarmuth, a Democrat from Kentucky, sought to remind the public that a lot of Americans don't think the bill goes far enough. "Madam Speaker," Yarmuth said in a House floor speech, "every time I hear a Republican talking about health care reform, they say the American people don’t want it. They say it so much that I think they’re beginning to try to convince themselves that it’s true. But there’s a national poll that shows what the real story is. They asked, of all the people who are opposed to health care or say they are, how many are opposed to it because they don’t think it goes far enough. Forty percent. Almost 40 percent said that was the reason. They will not be unhappy when we pass health care reform." Given a steady stream of polls showing a plurality or even a majority of Americans saying the bill goes too far, Yarmuth's number struck us as surprisingly high. So we decided to look into it. We asked Yarmuth's office which poll they were referring to. They said it was a poll conducted for McClatchy newspapers by Ipsos Public Affairs -- a credible firm that works with a variety of media outlets -- between Feb. 26 and Feb. 28, 2010. The poll asked 1,076 voters a series of questions about health care and other issues and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 points. Specifically, it asked the following: "You said you are opposed to the health care reform proposals presently being discussed. Is that because you favor health care reform overall but think the current proposals don't go far enough to reform health care, or you oppose health care reform overall and think the current proposals go too far in reforming health care?" All told, 37 percent of voters said that the current proposals "don't go far enough to reform health care" -- close enough, in our view, to make Yarmuth's "almost 40 percent" reference accurate. On the strategic level, Yarmuth may have a point that the invisibility of the doesn't-go-far-enough crowd in the public opinion wars may have hampered the proreform camp's cause. "There is reasonable evidence that the current bill looks weaker in public opinion polls because some 10 percent to 20 percent of the public say 'opposed' when they mean that they want more progressive, further-reaching reform," said Charles Franklin, a polling expert at the University of Wisconsin. Given the intense media focus on how well the Democratic plan polls, Franklin said, "the irony is that progressives have made health care reform less likely to pass by [telling pollsters] they oppose this bill." But while Yarmuth, in his basic analysis, got his facts right, it's also worth making a few cautionary points. • Even at nearly 40 percent, it's still a minority view among those who oppose the bill. The February Ipsos poll found that 54 percent -- a clear majority -- of those opposed to the health care bill said the bill went too far. (Another 10 percent said they opposed the bill but couldn't explain why.) • An earlier survey by the same pollster showed softer support for "doesn't go far enough." Ipsos asked the same question during a survey taken for McClatchy between Nov. 19 and Nov. 22, 2009. In that poll, 25 percent said they opposed the bill because it doesn't go far enough -- quite a bit lower than the 37 percent who said so three months later. In the earlier poll, 66 percent said they opposed it because it went too far, and 9 percent couldn't explain why they were opposed. • Most importantly, it's not necessarily clear what voters mean when they say the bill "doesn't go far enough." It could mean that the respondent prefers that the bill include the public option -- a more liberal idea that didn't make its way into the final measure -- or it could mean they think it doesn't go far enough in advancing conservative ideas like health savings accounts or medical malpractice reform. As Megan McArdle, a blogger for TheAtlantic.com, wrote in December, "I could go down to [the libertarian Cato Institute] right now and poll 65 percent support for the proposition that the health care reform doesn't go far enough -- in the direction of taking away the employer health care tax exemption, means testing Medicare, and other ideas that no one would call 'left.' " These variations became evident in a CBS News poll taken between Jan. 6-10, 2010. On three distinct issues, poll-takers asked all respondents whether the bill "goes too far," "doesn't go far enough," or is "about right." On how the bill handled providing health insurance "to as many Americans as possible" -- a factor of special interest to liberals -- "doesn't go far enough" edged "goes too far" by a slim 35 percent-32 percent margin. On how the bill handled controlling costs -- an issue favored by fiscal conservatives -- "doesn't go far enough" outpaced "goes too far" by a 39 percent-24 percent margin. And on regulating the health insurance industry, "doesn't go far enough" walloped "goes too far" by a 43 percent-27 percent margin. Trying to meld all these divergent strains into a single, reliable polling question is virtually impossible. Indeed, a look at the data makes clear a bedrock belief of pollsters -- that the framing and the precise wording of a question can make a huge difference in the results. Back to Yarmuth's claim. To his credit, he accurately cited a result from a legitimate poll. However, due to variations in wording and the complexity of polling this issue, there's quite a bit of uncertainty about what that result actually means. It does not conclusively demonstrate that, as Yarmuth put it, nearly 40 percent of voters "will not be unhappy when we pass health care reform." Some of those voters likely believe that the bill should have gone further in a conservative direction, not a liberal one, and they are unlikely to be happy if a Democratic bill passes. So we rate his statement Half True.	None	John Yarmuth	None	None	None	2010-03-19T10:34:44	2010-03-16	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-06147	In a watershed 1958 decision, "the Warren court asserted by itself that the Supreme Court was supreme over the president and the Congress."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/dec/20/newt-gingrich/newt-gingrich-says-supreme-court-crossed-major-thr/	During the Dec. 18, 2011, edition of CBS’ Face the Nation, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had an extended and often pointed conversation with host Bob Schieffer about his views on how the judiciary relates to the other branches of government. In the interview, Gingrich explained his position that judges, at least in some circumstances, should be called to account for their decisions that flout the public will, either by being brought before Congress or in some cases by being removed from office. In the days before the interview, Gingrich had been pointing voters to a paper he had written about the issue. In the paper, Gingrich suggested a number of options for reining in the judiciary, including "judicial accountability hearings" before Congress, impeachment of judges, defunding or eliminating lower courts and changing how law schools teach the issue of judicial checks and balances Such ideas drew criticism from legal observers, including two former attorneys general who served under President George W. Bush. Fox News reported that Michael Mukasey said that some of the ideas are "dangerous, ridiculous, totally irresponsible, outrageous, off-the-wall and would reduce the entire judicial system to a spectacle." Alberto Gonzales said that the country’s greatness is "built upon the foundation of the rule of law. And one of the things that makes it great and (ensures that) the rule of law is protected by having a strong independent judiciary." But on Face the Nation, Gingrich doubled down. He told Schieffer, "You have this real problem that since 1958, when the Warren court asserted by itself that the Supreme Court was supreme over the president and the Congress, you've had a fundamental assault on our liberties by the courts. You have an increasingly arrogant judiciary. And the question is, is there anything we the American people can do? Well, the standard conservative answer has been, well, eventually we'll appoint good judges. I think that's inadequate." We decided to look at his claim that in 1958, "the Warren court asserted by itself that the Supreme Court was supreme over the president and the Congress." It’s one of the linchpins of Gingrich’s ideas on the judiciary, one he cited both in the Face the Nation interview and in the paper he wrote. Cooper vs. Aaron The 1958 case in question is Cooper vs. Aaron, which grew out of opposition by the Arkansas state government to school desegregation ordered by the Supreme Court in the landmark case Brown vs. Board of Education. In its unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court wrote that "this Court cannot countenance a claim by the Governor and Legislature of a State that there is no duty on state officials to obey federal court orders resting on this Court's considered interpretation of the United States Constitution in Brown vs. Board of Education." In his paper, Gingrich places special emphasis on the role of Cooper vs. Aaron in shaping how the judiciary operates today, calling it a "power grab" that is "a modern phenomenon and a dramatic break from all previous American history." Here’s a portion of his argument: "If the Supreme Court ruled that two plus two equal five, would the executive and legislative branches have to agree? Would we have to pass a Constitutional amendment to overrule the Court and reassert that two plus two equals four? "In 1958, all nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court signed on to a judicial opinion in the case Cooper vs. Aaron that asserted that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution was supreme in importance to the constitutional interpretation of the other two branches of government, and that this judicial supremacy, all nine justices asserted, is a ‘permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.’ "The Supreme Court assertions in Cooper vs. Aaron are factually and historically false. Nevertheless, following Cooper vs. Aaron, the executive and legislative branches have largely acted as if the Constitution empowered the Supreme Court with final decision making authority about the meaning of the Constitution. The executive and legislative branches have further behaved as if they have no choice but to give total deference to Supreme Court decisions, even if the executive and/or legislative branch believes the Supreme Court has seriously erred in its constitutional judgments." Legal experts we spoke to agreed that Cooper vs. Aaron was, and remains, an important case on the question of judicial power. But many of the same experts added that Gingrich has exaggerated the case’s significance and meaning. We see two significant problems with how Gingrich used the example of Cooper vs. Aaron. Gingrich’s focus on Cooper vs. Aaron wrongly ignores earlier legal precedents Cooper vs. Aaron did not assert "by itself" the primacy of the Supreme Court, as Gingrich said. It may have offered an especially clear and forceful distillation of that principle, but the view did not emerge suddenly from the minds of the 1958 court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren -- a jurist, not coincidentally, who was unloved by many conservatives on ideological grounds. The notion that the Supreme Court can overrule the other branches of government dates back to the landmark case of Marbury vs. Madison in 1803. "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," wrote the justices, led by Chief Justice John Marshall. "Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each. … This is of the very essence of judicial duty." The ruling goes on to state that "the judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution," and it backs the "principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void, and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument." Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, said that "Cooper vs. Aaron is usually taken as the canonical case for judicial supremacy, so it’s not inappropriate to refer to it in this context. But Gingrich is stretching the point to suggest that this was a Warren court invention. The idea that the Supreme Court’s judgment about the meaning and requirements of the Constitution takes priority over that of other governmental actors is clearly articulated in Marbury vs. Madison, which Cooper relies on." Jesse Choper, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, added that one can cite a whole host of cases prior to 1958 in which the Supreme Court affirmatively blocked actions by both Congress and the president on constitutional grounds. "There’s a zillion of those," Choper said. "All the New Deal cases were about that. And there are certainly cases in which the Supreme Court has held the executive branch unconstitutional." Probably the biggest, he said, was Youngstown Co. vs. Sawyer (1952), in which the court overruled an executive order by President Harry Truman to nationalize steel mills to avert a nationwide strike. Contrary to what Gingrich says, many of the experts said, there was not a bright line between pre-1958 and post-1958 Supreme Court jurisprudence. Gingrich is incorrect if he’s suggesting that "this is new or different than what largely happened during the period prior to 1958," said Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs at the libertarian Cato Institute. All of this said, most of our experts agreed that Gingrich isn’t totally off-base about Cooper. Several noted that the decision’s language is especially forceful, perhaps because it came in reaction to the "massive resistance" to desegregation that Brown had sparked. For instance, the justices in Cooper asserted "the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution, and that principle has ever since been respected by this Court and the Country as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system." "No matter how you read it, (that is) a big step beyond Marbury," said Vik Amar, a University of California at Davis law professor. "Marbury said that courts have the power and duty to interpret the constitution, and that they have to do so independently. It didn’t say that other branches always had to fall in line with the courts’ interpretations, and it certainly didn’t say other branches have no interpretive role to play." In addition, several experts noted that Gingrich has a point when he details past historical examples of presidents refusing to bend to the Supreme Court in every instance. "Thomas Jefferson and others not only denounced Marbury vs. Madison as wrong but also asserted that the executive and judicial branches had the power to decide for themselves what is the meaning of the Constitution," said legal commentator Stuart Taylor Jr. Finally, there is a longstanding -- though controversial -- strain of thinking that echoes Gingrich’s views. Cooper vs. Aaron has been "highly criticized, not just on the right but also on the left," said Brad Snyder, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin. Then-Attorney General Edwin Meese argued in a high-profile 1986 speech that in Cooper, the court "appeared to arrive at conclusions about its power that would have shocked men like John Marshall. ... Obviously the decision was binding on the parties in the case, but the implication that everyone would have to accept its judgments uncritically, that it was a decision from which there could be no appeal, was astonishing...." Taylor said that the general acquiescence by the president and Congress to the Supreme Court over the course of history comes from pragmatic reasons. "The alternative is that each branch, and, worse, perhaps even the states, would disregard Supreme Court rulings they did not like, moving from a ‘rule of law’ society toward something more chaotic," he said. Cooper vs. Aaron doesn’t explicitly deal with the presidency or Congress at all Despite what Gingrich said on Face the Nation, Cooper vs. Aaron addressed actions of state-government officials, not the president or Congress. "Cooper vs. Aaron was about the supremacy of federal law over the states," said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean the law school at the University of California at Irvine. "It had nothing to do with the Supreme Court relative to Congress and the president. It was about whether Arkansas could disregard a federal court order for desegregation." Roosevelt agreed. "Giving the Supreme Court the last word vis-a-vis state officials is less controversial than giving it the last word vis-a-vis the other branches of the federal government," Roosevelt said. On these grounds, "the claim that Cooper established judicial supremacy over the President and Congress is substantially misleading." Gingrich's larger argument While it's beyond the scope of this fact-check, we do think it's worth noting that almost all the experts we asked had serious problems with Gingrich's proposed policies. "The supremacy of judicial review has served to protect our constitutional rights for over two centuries," said Ronald Rotunda, a law professor at Chapman University. "It was a unanimous decision, signed by each of the nine justices," said Chemerinsky, a leading liberal in legal thinking. "It emphatically says that federal law is supreme and court orders must be complied with. It is hard to imagine a less controversial decision in hindsight." Douglas Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law professor who held top Justice Department posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, concurred. Gingrich’s solution, Kmiec said, "is to go to war with the basic idea expressed in every civics class by every school child -- namely, judges interpret that which is written down as law, and state executives in administering the interpreted laws can’t reinterpret them, or the whole system falls. … As I see, it Newt's argument has the tendency to wrongly invite citizens to be mad over nothing, or at least nothing he has addressed. This will prompt unknowing citizens to hold courts in the same low regard as they hold Congress itself. It also suggests a mind more inclined to invent trivial, hypothetical problems, which undermines the fragile commitment to the rule of law needed to fairly resolve real cases or controversies." Our ruling In attacking the Supreme Court for its power relative to the other branches of government, it’s understandable that Ginrgich has zeroed in on Cooper vs. Aaron. It is an unusually strong statement of the court’s primacy. But in doing so, Gingrich gets two things wrong, leaving out crucial context. He says the decision claimed that "the Supreme Court was supreme over the president and the Congress," when in fact the decision dealt with the court’s primacy over state officials. Meanwhile, he exaggerates how much of a watershed the 1958 decision was. There was a tradition of judicial review going back to 1803, and the court had repeatedly curtailed both presidential and congressional power in the years between. On balance, we rate his statement Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/154167aa-a11c-47e9-973f-f2bb7d90a584	None	Newt Gingrich	None	None	None	2011-12-20T01:01:29	2011-12-18	['United_States_Congress']
-pose-01136	"At the beginning of Gov. Scott’s second term he will propose a 10-year, $500 million, funding program for alternative water supply investment that requires an applicant to meet water conservation benchmarks to qualify for funding. ... During a second Gov. Scott term will recommend a ten-year program for springs restoration totaling $500 million.	not yet rated	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/scott-o-meter/promise/1222/invest-1-billion-floridas-waters/	None	scott-o-meter	Rick Scott	None	None	Invest $1 billion in Florida's waters	2014-12-30T10:51:29	None	['None']
-tron-01645	V.A. Hospital Refuses to Allow ‘Merry Christmas’ Cards	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/va-christmas/	None	government	None	None	None	V.A. Hospital Refuses to Allow ‘Merry Christmas’ Cards	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-bove-00240	‘Trust In Government’ Fiasco: How Blind Trust In Foreign Media Exposed Indian Media	none	https://www.boomlive.in/trust-in-government-fiasco-how-blind-trust-in-foreign-media-exposed-indian-media/	None	None	None	None	None	‘Trust In Government’ Fiasco: How Blind Trust In Foreign Media Exposed Indian Media	Jul 19 2017 9:16 pm, Last Updated: Jul 21 2017 4:16 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-07024	Says U.S. House opponent Michael Williams does not live in and has never voted in the congressional district he’s seeking to represent.	false	/texas/statements/2011/jul/05/roger-williams/roger-williams-says-foe-has-never-voted-congressio/	Newly stumping for a U.S. House seat, Roger Williams told a Weatherford crowd that opponent Michael Williams lacks local grounding. The two Williamses (unrelated) are both Republicans who recently dropped U.S. Senate bids to run in the same newly created North Texas House district. "My opponent does not live in the district," Roger Williams said June 28, according to The Weatherford Democrat. "My opponent has never voted in the district." Not living there? Never voted there? Per the U.S. Constitution, a citizen does not have to live in a congressional district to hold its House seat, though they must be an inhabitant of the same state. If a candidate doesn't live in the district, though, their opponents are likely to point that out. In this episode, Roger Williams was questioning his foe's ties to the 33rd Congressional District just drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature. Its map of the state’s 36 congressional districts awaits Gov. Rick Perry’s approval. Michael Williams’ campaign disputed Roger Williams’ charge in a June 30 press release. The release says Michael Williams and his wife, Donna, "have owned and claimed a homestead exemption on the same home" in the district since 1995 and, it says, Williams has voted in Arlington many times. In an interview, Will Fullerton, Michael Williams’ campaign manager, told us Williams lived in an Austin condominium while serving on the Texas Railroad Commission, from 1999 to this spring, to satisfy a state constitutional provision requiring statewide elected officials to live in the capital. He said too that Williams has lived in his Arlington home since resigning from the commission as of April 2. Williams was registered to vote in Austin while serving as a commissioner, Fullerton said, though he laid plans to register in Tarrant County after stepping down. We turned next to government sources. According to a clerk with the Tarrant County Appraisal District, Michael and Donna Williams have claimed a homestead exemption on an Arlington residence since 1995. A county elections clerk, Rita Castillo, told us the county fielded a voter registration application from Michael Williams on June 24 and it’s being reviewed by the Texas secretary of state’s office, which oversees elections. Castillo said a state database lists Michael Williams as currently registered to vote in Austin. Responding to our open-records’ request, Tarrant County later provided information indicating that Michael Williams went to the county’s polls 10 times from November 1994 through November 1999. To our inquiry, Roger Williams’ spokesman Colby Hale stressed by email that Michael Williams admits to living in Austin for a decade and to making Austin the "principal location where he votes." He later added that Roger Williams intended to say that for more than a decade, Michael Williams lived, worked and voted in Austin. Far as we can tell, this amended description is about right. However, Michael Williams has also lived in Arlington, where he has claimed a homestead in Arlington for more than 15 years. And contrary to his foe’s published statement, Michael Williams also has voted in the 33rd district and lives there now. All told, the essence of Roger Williams’ statement — that Michael Williams is a carpetbagger — doesn’t hold up. We rate the claim False.	None	Roger Williams	None	None	None	2011-07-05T06:00:00	2011-06-28	['None']
-pomt-08785	"In 2008 (Mandel) was re-elected to a second term, representing a district with a 2:1 Democrat to Republican voter ratio."	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2010/aug/20/josh-mandel/republican-josh-mandel-touts-his-electability-comi/	Josh Mandel, a Republican from the left-leaning region of Northeast Ohio, knows the importance of cross-over appeal to winning an election. That’s why Mandel, a state representative running for Ohio treasurer, has been telling voters this year about the overwhelmingly Democratic makeup of his constituency. The message is part of Mandel’s strategy to snatch up some Democratic votes in his bid against incumbent Treasurer Kevin Boyce, a Democrat. "In 2008 (Mandel) was re-elected to a second term, representing a district with a 2:1 Democrat to Republican voter ratio," according to the online biography on Mandel’s campaign website. Mandel, of Lyndhurst, was first elected in 2006 to represent the 17th House District, made up of more than a dozen suburbs in eastern Cuyahoga County. He was re-elected in 2008, securing 72 percent of the vote. Northeast Ohio long has been a region that favors Democrats. But does Mandel's district, which includes some of the wealthier suburbs in Cuyahoga County, lean to the left as much as his online biography suggests? Is his cross-over appeal that strong? Mandel’s campaign cited voter registration statistics recorded at the time of his re-election in November 2008. They showed 38,575 registered Democrats in Mandel’s district compared to 16,449 registered Republicans. "The voter registration of the district is actually over 2-to-1," campaign manager Michael Lord said in an e-mail. "Josh will continue using this number because it’s true and he’s proud to have been elected with a strong mix of Democrats, Republicans and independents." Although Mandel’s math is right, voter registration records usually aren’t the best way to size up an electorate, said Ohio State University political science professor Paul Beck, whose specialties include voting behavior and political parties. "The registration records themselves are not a very good litmus test," Beck said. That’s because the party affiliations only attach when voters participate in primary elections and choose a specific party’s ballot. Those who only vote on issues and do not declare for a party and those who don’t vote in the primary election at all remain classified as independents and would not show up in Mandel’s numbers. And depending on the races in a primary election, voters may switch parties. Consider this scenario: A moderate voter opts to vote in the hotly contested 2008 primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Even if that voter had supported Republicans in the past and even if he voted for Republican John McCain in the general election, that voter remains a Democrat on county voting records until opting for Republican ballot in another primary. Beck also noted that voter registration records can be inflated with voters who may have moved away without canceling their registration. Recent election results are a better gauge of a voting population’s tendencies, he said, because they include a larger sample of voters and lack the fundamental flaws of registration statistics. Using recent election results, Mandel’s district has favored Democratic candidates, but by a much slimmer margin than he asserts. The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association studied results of five recent elections for its 2010 Ohio Election Guide. It found that Republicans in the 17th House District tend to receive about 46 percent of the vote. In the 2008 presidential election Mandel's district split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Obama received 37,350 votes, about 51.5 percent. McCain received 35,207 votes, about 48.5 percent. What all this shows is that depending on which gauge you use, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans can vary significantly. Yet by one measurement, Mandel is correct We rate his statement as Mostly True. Comment on this item.	None	Josh Mandel	None	None	None	2010-08-20T09:00:00	2010-08-19	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-goop-02497	Kendall Jenner Banned From Cara Delevingne’s Birthday Trip?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/kendall-jenner-banned-cara-delevingne-birthday-trip-feud/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kendall Jenner Banned From Cara Delevingne’s Birthday Trip?	10:25 am, September 5, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-01531	President Obama Named 5th Best President in History by University	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/president-obama-named-5th-best-president-history-university/	None	government	None	None	None	President Obama Named 5th Best President in History by University	Jun 2, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-04473	A photograph shows a sign in Australia indicating that Pokemon Go players are being targeted by police.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/australian-police-targeting-pokemon-go-players/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Australian Police Targeting Pokemon Go Players	11 July 2016	None	['Australia']
-pomt-06698	"Point Pleasant Beach does not own its beaches; they are privately owned and operated by businesses such as Jenkinson’s"	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2011/sep/05/vincent-barrella/point-pleasant-beach-mayor-says-boroughs-beaches-a/	It might seem a given that a Shore town would rake in waves of revenue from its beaches. But that’s not always the case. Point Pleasant Beach, for example, doesn’t own most of its beaches but is responsible for some of the costs associated with millions of visitors every summer, according to Mayor Vincent Barrella. "Point Pleasant Beach does not own its beaches; they are privately owned and operated by businesses such as Jenkinson’s," Barrella wrote in an Aug. 22 column that appeared in The star-Ledger. Could it be true that some of the most popular beachfront along the Jersey Shore is privately owned? PolitiFact New Jersey found that more than 42 acres of beach are privately owned and operated in Point Pleasant Beach, and the borough owns only the 1.03-acre Maryland Avenue Beach. Several other Shore towns also do not own their beaches, said Larry Hajna, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Let’s look at beach ownership in the borough. Point Pleasant Beach has approximately two miles of privately held oceanfront property, according to the borough’s 2006 Open Space and Recreation Plan. The public can access nearly 30 of those 42 acres by purchasing daily or seasonal badges from private operators. The remaining beach is not open to the public, according to the plan. Most of the borough’s beaches are owned by Jenkinson’s, Martell’s, Risdens Beach Inc., the Elizabeth Carter Association and a number of private homeowners. One of the largest beaches in the borough is owned by Jenkinson’s, but the company also has the costs that come along with it. "We own it, operate it, insure it and staff it," said Marilou Halvorsen, marketing director for Jenkinson’s Boardwalk. Although the Maryland Avenue Beach is owned by the borough, Aqua Serve Lifeguard Service leases and operates it. The difference in ownership means Aqua can charge whatever admission fee the market can bear, while municipal operation of the beach would mean the state sets the maximum fee, said Borough Clerk Maryann Ellsworth. And that’s been a losing proposition for the community. "We lost so much money running it that we decided at least six years ago to lease out the running of the beach," said Ellsworth, who added that the borough lost from $10,000 to $14,000 annually when it operated the beach. Aqua Serve pays the borough $2,000 annually to operate Maryland Avenue beach, but that money is largely eaten up in costs the borough pays for portable toilets there, Ellsworth said. The daily badge fee at Maryland Avenue Beach is $8. Beaches and the cost to operate them was even an issue for the town’s forefathers. Minutes from the Aug. 16, 1887 meeting of the Point Pleasant Beach Council state "Ownership of the beach turned down by the Council because of extreme cost to the borough for maintenance," according to the Point Pleasant Historical Society. At that point, the council decided to permit privately owned beaches in the borough. Still, Barrella told PolitiFact New Jersey that he hopes the borough can one day buy Risdens Beach if it ever becomes available, so the borough can generate revenue the way he said Belmar and Manasquan do from their beaches. Belmar’s beach badge revenue total was $3,023,386 from Memorial Day to Labor Day in 2010; and $2,657,278 from Memorial Day this year through Aug. 21, said Patricia Zwirz, purchasing agent. Manasquan, which has a utility to operate its beach, took in $1,793,000 from beach badges in 2010 for the same period as Belmar; and was at $1,695,000 just before Hurricane Irene hit the Jersey Shore, according to Beach Department manager/beach manager Walter Wall. Our ruling Barrella says the borough’s beaches are privately owned and operated by various businesses in town. While Jenkinson’s and others do own most of the beachfront, the borough owns slightly more than an acre of prime real estate: the Maryland Avenue beach. For that reason, we rate Barrella’s claim Mostly True. To coment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Vincent Barrella	None	None	None	2011-09-05T05:15:00	2011-08-22	['None']
-pomt-12352	For 22 percent of N.H. Meals on Wheels recipients, the delivery driver is "the only human contact in their life from week to week."	true	/new-hampshire/statements/2017/jun/09/ann-mclane-kuster/kuster-says-meals-wheels-critical-human-lifeline-s/	New Hampshire could be considered one of the main exhibits of the "silver tsunami," a term used to refer to the aging population in the United States. Tied for second in the nation for the oldest population in terms of median age, the state is bracing for the effects of a declining workforce, strained medical services and ballooning public retirement benefits. But economists’ focus on those issues fails to capture the experiences of seniors living alone in their homes – sometimes after all their peers have died. U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster reminded listeners this week of the isolation of needy seniors with a depressing statistic she picked up from a ridealong with a local Meals on Wheels program. Kuster, a Hopkinton Democrat who was discussing the potential detrimental effects of President Donald Trump’s proposed budget, said for 22 percent of home delivery participants, "Meals on Wheels is the only human contact in their life from week to week, the only person they see." The claim was striking. Do so many needy seniors in New Hampshire have no one else in their lives but the Meals on Wheels driver? Kuster made the statement to group of nonprofit officials from the fields of child care, mental health and nutrition. She said the cuts proposed in Trump’s budget outline, especially an 18 percent reduction to the Department of Health and Human Services, were "so dramatic and so Draconian." To be clear, the president’s budget is just a spending plan and it does not earmark any specific cuts to Meals on Wheels. It's premature for us to project what could happen to Meals on Wheels spending, so we not checking whether Trump's budget is Draconian; rather, we’re examining Kuster’s claim about the lonely lives of New Hampshire seniors. Meals on Wheels is a national program that serves 2.4 million people. It’s funded partly through federal dollars and delivered more than 137 million meals in 2016. We reached out to Kuster, who said her claim was about New Hampshire Meals on Wheels recipients, not a nationwide statistic. The best figures on this subject are kept by a coalition of Meals on Wheels affiliates in six New Hampshire counties that all administer the same survey each year. These organizations cover both the most rural and also the most densely populated parts of the state. Meghan Brady is the longtime president of St. Joseph Community Services, which is based in Merrimack and is one of the members of the New Hampshire Coalition of Aging Services. As a group, the coalition served more than 1.1 million meals to more than 13,000 older and disabled adults in 2016, Brady said. It’s made up of the Community Action Program of Belknap-Merrimack Counties (in Concord), the Grafton County Senior Citizens Council (in Lebanon), Ossipee Concerned Citizens (in Center Ossipee), Tri-County Community Action Program (in Berlin) and St. Joseph Community Services (in Merrimack). In the fall, the coalition delivers a survey along with its meals to everyone who’s in the program at the time, she said. The return rate is better than half. "On any given day, the likelihood is the delivery person is the only individual the Meals on Wheels recipient will see, but for 21 percent of them, the driver is the only person they’ll see all week," Brady said, quoting last year’s statewide statistics. For her program in particular, the 22 percent statistic that Kuster cited is dead on, she said. At the event Kuster's staffer offered a different statistic, but she said 22 percent, so we'll stick to that number. Brady, who has been working for St. Joseph Community Services for 22 years, said she’s seen this situation grow worse in recent years. "Over the last several years, all of us have seen an increase in isolation and hunger," she said. "We measure this by the annual surveys, by the requests we receive for additional food and by the number and type of follow-ups we do," such as calling social workers on clients’ behalves, putting them in touch with additional services and sometimes calling 911. Some of the other findings, she said, are significant: 63 percent reported that because of the Meals on Wheels program, they can continue to live in their homes, and 36 percent reported that they don’t always have enough money or food stamps to obtain the food they need without the deliveries. "We have a gentleman who’s in our program who is 102. How old do you think his kids are?" she asked. "People are living longer. We have people who have outlived family and friends, so this is very important." St. Joseph’s Community Services raises about 30 percent of its budget privately, she said, but it also relies on a few sources of government funding, which was the context in which Kuster originally made her claim. Some news media outlets reported Trump’s budget director allegedly claiming that Meals on Wheels is "not showing results." The Washington Post’s fact-checker investigated that claim and found he never said that. As for the budget’s impacts on Meals on Wheels, it’s not exactly clear yet, Brady said. "My understanding is that the proposed budget includes an 18 percent decrease at the Department of Health and Human Services at the federal level," she said. "Two of our funding sources are in that area. What impact that cut would have, we do not know." On thing that is clear in the budget is that it seeks to nix funding for a federal Housing and Urban Development program called Community Development Block Grants. Brady said her organization has received a $42,000 block grant, but that’s only a sliver of the total $3.6 million in revenue and support the nonprofit reported last year from the government and donors. Nationally, Meals on Wheels doesn’t keep data specific to human interaction, said Jenny Bertolette Young, the vice president of communications. "We do know that 51 percent of home-delivered meal recipients live alone," she said in an email. "One would assume that homebound recipients that live alone likely lack human contact outside of the Meals on Wheels volunteer." She said it’s a "common anecdote" that the driver is oftentimes the only person a recipient will see in a given day. Our ruling Kuster said for 22 percent of Meals on Wheels home recipients, the driver "is the only human contact in their life from week to week, the only person they see." The depressing statistic is backed up by the data collected by a coalition of Meals on Wheels providers in New Hampshire. We rate the claim True.	None	Ann McLane Kuster	None	None	None	2017-06-09T18:43:43	2017-06-05	['None']
-pomt-12098	Says the Joker's "Red Hood" origin story is "the true one."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/25/jake-tapper/joker-origin-story-draws-out-geek-cnns-jake-tapper/	For Batman fans, the history of the Joker is no laughing matter. A report that said Warner Bros. is working on a spinoff featuring the origins of the arch-villain led to a Twitter tussle between DailyWire.com editor Ben Shapiro and CNN’s Jake Tapper. On Aug. 23, 2017, Shapiro tweeted his dismay at the news that Warner Bros. may feature a young version of the Joker, with a gritty, 1980s-style backdrop similar to potential producer Martin Scorsese’s well-known crime dramas. "The whole point of the Joker is that he has no set origin story," Shapiro said, including a link about the potential film. Tapper, apparently a Caped Crusader devotee, tweeted a reply contradicting Shapiro: "Not true, you obviously never heard of the RED HOOD." Tapper included a page from Detective Comics No. 168, which was released in 1951. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com The page shows the Joker telling Batman how he once had been a laboratory worker who attempted to steal $1 million from the Monarch Playing Card Company. He made his escape by swimming through chemical waste, which turned his skin white and his hair green. He took his name from the eponymous playing card and has been arching Batman ever since. But something sounded off to this fact-checker, who thought Shapiro had a point about the Joker’s past being mysterious. PolitiFact has written about whether there’s been a female Thor, and whether Wonder Woman’s Gal Gadot or Man of Steel’s Henry Cavill is paid more money, so we have some experience. In true geek fashion, we raised this objection with Tapper, saying that the Red Hood origin story was just the one with which people were most familiar. "Because it's the true one," Tapper replied. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com We’ll see about that. Red Hood or red herring? The most succinct reply to this came from Nick Valente, a publicist for DC Comics. "You are correct, there is no definitive backstory for the Joker," he said. CASE CLOSED! But wait! Like most comic book plotlines, there’s always room for this story to expand and change. The Joker has been around almost as long as Batman himself, first appearing in 1940s Batman No. 1, when the Dark Knight got his own title after starting in Detective Comics a year earlier. There have been several iterations of the character, but through the decades he has been portrayed largely as a psychotic killer, bent on antagonizing Batman and the people of Gotham City. The Joker had no backstory to speak of until 1951, when the anecdote about the Red Hood that Tapper cited was printed. Versions of this origin have appeared in various forms over the years, with details changed. Glen Weldon, author of The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture‎, said that DC gave the character an origin story, but that was "back in the halcyon days before a ravenous fanbase insisted that every random story must calcify into canonical truth." One of the most famous modern versions of the Red Hood story is Alan Moore’s account in 1988’s The Killing Joke, in which the Joker is a former engineer and failed comedian who leads armed robbers into his former employer, Ace Chemical Processing, Inc., after the death of his pregnant wife. He wears the Red Hood as a disguise and jumps into the chemicals to flee Batman. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com But that doesn’t mean we should believe the Joker, because, well, he’s the Joker. He’s an unreliable narrator, because his insanity keeps him from telling the truth, and us from knowing the difference. Even Moore’s version of the Joker acknowledged that his story is essentially unknowable. "Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another," the Joker said. "If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" There are plenty of other variations of the story. Sometimes Batman knocks the Joker into the vat, sometimes the hapless criminal jumps. Sometimes the Red Hood isn’t involved at all. Later storylines show that the Red Hood is an alias adopted by many other criminals. Eventually, even Batman’s sidekick Robin dons the Red Hood. "Since that (1951) story was first published, just about every time any comic's made even the most casual reference to Joker's origin, the Red Hood bit has come and gone, but the ‘fall into a vat of acid, goes nuts’ thing remains," Weldon said. The movies complicate things further. In the 1989 film version of Batman, Jack Nicholson’s Joker is a lifelong criminal named Jack Napier (the only time the Joker is given a first and last name) who actually is the man who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents. The late Heath Ledger’s acclaimed 2008 take on the Joker in The Dark Knight gives a nod to the ambiguity of it all, with the grease-painted antagonist telling different characters more than one version of how he was disfigured. (There’s also an offshoot movie based on Jared Leto’s tattooed Joker and Harley Quinn from 2016’s Suicide Squad coming, but that’s a different set of issues altogether.) DC Comics recognizes that their most famous villain juggles the truth. Their Origin of the Joker showed the killer acknowledging that even he gets confused by which story is right. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com "Though the Red Hood story — in its blurriest form of spills and chemical burns — is perhaps the most-pointed to origin story for the Joker, it is by no means the definitive one," said Brad Ricca, SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University and a comics historian. Recent comic book storylines have suggested that Batman has actually matched wits with three different Jokers through the years. Other stories hint further that the Joker may be immortal. The character has cycled through several personalities and backstories, sometimes insane and sometimes not, but always a dark-humored and lethal opponent for Batman. That’s the strength of comic books, which are free to retroactively change the continuity however the creators see fit, our experts said. Will Brooker, a film and cultural studies professor at Kingston University, said that the most sinister aspect of the character is that inability to define how he became the way he is. "My feeling is that to pin Joker down to a fixed backstory and identity is reductive, unimaginative and suggests a lack of understanding of what Joker is really about," said Brooker, author of Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon. "He is essentially the opposite of Batman, who has a fixed, definite origin. The whole point is that Batman can never work out who Joker is and where he came from." Our ruling Tapper said the Joker's "Red Hood" origin story is "the true one." That's right, we're fact-checking where the Joker came from. So sue us! This claim is throwing down the gauntlet for comic book nerds, pointing to a 1951 backstory about the Joker wearing a disguise and swimming through chemical waste as the one, true origin of the archvillain. He may prefer that version, and that’s fine, because it’s not wrong. But comic historians and even a DC Comics publicist we consulted agreed that the Joker has no definitive backstory — indeed, that is one of the defining strengths of the character. We rate Tapper’s statement Mostly False. See Figure 5 on PolitiFact.com	None	Jake Tapper	None	None	None	2017-08-25T10:00:00	2017-08-23	['Red_Hood', 'Joker_(comics)']
-tron-00369	Photo Shows Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke Posing With Dead Elephant	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/photo-shows-interior-secretary-ryan-zinke-posing-dead-elephant/	None	animals	None	None	['africa', 'animals', 'donald trump']	Photo Shows Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke Posing With Dead Elephant	Nov 27, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-07461	"Americans will pay more in taxes in 2011 than they will spend on groceries, clothing and shelter combined."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/18/reince-priebus/reince-priebus-says-americans-pay-more-taxes-groce/	A reader sent us a fundraising e-mail sent to supporters by Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus on April 14, 2011, just days before federal taxes were due. In it, Priebus offered a striking statistic. "The tax hikes President Obama wants will only fuel Washington's addiction to spending rather than help curb it," he wrote. "More importantly, they will hurt one of the strongest engines of growth and job creation in our economy: small businesses. And they will harm middle-class families by taking more money from their pockets at a time when Americans need every dime to cover their expenses. In fact, according to the Tax Foundation, Americans will pay more in taxes in 2011 than they will spend on food, clothing and housing combined -- and it's still not enough for Barack Obama." The reader wondered whether it was really true that "Americans will pay more in taxes in 2011 than they will spend on groceries, clothing and shelter combined." So we decided to look into it. Before we checked with the Tax Foundation, the source Priebus cited, we did our own math. First, we’ll note that no one -- including Priebus -- knows for sure how Americans will allocate their money in 2011, since more than half the year hasn’t happened yet. The best we can do is extrapolate from previous years. Given the data available, the last year for which we can do it accurately is 2009. We began by measuring expenditures on groceries, clothing and shelter. For this, we turned to statistics collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, an office within the U.S. Commerce Department. In a data series known as National Income and Product Accounts, the bureau tracks how Americans spend their income. For 2009, Americans spent almost $778 billion for food and beverages consumed at home. For clothing, the figure is $322 billion, and for housing, it’s $1.582 trillion. Total expenditures: $2.682 trillion. For taxes paid, we had to look in two places. The amount of federal taxes paid is included in the historical tables for the president’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. In 2009, the federal government took in $2.105 trillion in revenues. As for the states and localities, the Tax Foundation found a total of $1.282 trillion in taxes collected. Add both of these tax categories together and you get $3.387 trillion in taxes. So in 2009, Americans did indeed pay more in taxes than they did for food, clothing or shelter. By that calculation, Priebus is correct, as is the Tax Foundation, the source of his information. (It would have been closer if Priebus had said "food" rather than groceries, since Americans spent an additional $513 billion for food in restaurants. But he didn’t.) Some economists, however, say this is not the only way to calculate it. The Tax Foundation calculation shows that the average American pays more for taxes than for food, clothing and shelter. But there are wide variations in what individual Americans pay. One chart published by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center shows what percentage of income is paid in taxes by Americans of different income levels. There are wide differences. Households with less than $10,000 in annual income actually get a small amount of money back from the federal government, often through the Earned Income Tax Credit, a refundable federal income tax credit for low to moderate income working individuals and families. For Americans with incomes between $10,000 and $20,000, only three-tenths of 1 percent of income goes toward taxes. For those between $20,000 and $30,000, less than 6 percent went to taxes. And for those between $30,000 and $40,000 in income, less than 11 percent is spent on federal taxes. Now let’s compare that to patterns of spending. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, for taxpayers of all incomes, groceries accounted for about 8 percent of personal consumption expenditures in 2009, while clothing accounted for 3 percent and housing accounted for 16 percent. Combined, that’s 27 percent. Meanwhile, "Personal consumption expenditures" accounted for about 89 percent of total personal income. So food, clothing and housing probably account for roughly 25 percent of personal income. While we couldn’t find these statistics for different income classes, lower-income Americans would probably spend a larger percentage of their incomes on these items, since these are necessities, and they have less overall to spend. So, for those toward the the bottom of the income scale, the tax burden -- even when adjusted for state and local taxes -- is probably less than 20 percent, while spending on food, clothing and shelter probably accounts for 25 percent or more. By contrast, the higher you go up the income ladder, the more accurate Priebus’ claim becomes. Those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000 pay 20 percent of their income in federal taxes. Between $200,000 and $500,000, it’s 23 percent, and between $500,000 and $1 million, it’s 25 percent. And for those over $1 million, it’s 27 percent. Add in state and local taxes and these percentages climb even higher. Meanwhile, the percentage spent on necessities is probably lower than 25 percent. So, many people within these upper-income groups do likely pay more in taxes than in food, clothing and shelter. The difference is that, according to the Tax Policy Center, these upper-income groups account for a smaller share of the population. Approximately 44 percent of Americans have annual cash incomes at $40,000 or below -- the first category we looked at, in which people likely pay more in food, clothing and shelter than in taxes. By contrast, about 22 percent of Americans have annual cash incomes of at least $100,000, a level at which the tax burden likely outpaces food, clothing and shelter. So while a substantial minority of Americans probably does pay more for taxes, the numbers suggest that there are more Americans whose food, clothing and shelter expenses exceed their tax burden. This doesn’t mean that the Tax Foundation calculation is not useful. Kail Padgitt, a staff economist for the Tax Foundation, notes that the study "is purposefully designed to take an aggregate look at the overall tax burden of the country, not any one individual person." Among other things, the way the Tax Foundation calculates it is helpful for studying changes in the tax burden over time, and in comparing the United States’ tax burden to that of other countries. J.D. Foster, an economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation, calls the dispute "an age-old running battle." He said "The Tax Foundation is using averages. The purpose of averages is to summarize information." When Priebus says that "Americans will pay more in taxes in 2011 than they will spend on groceries, clothing and shelter combined," his statement is vague enough to be read either as an aggregate measurement (in which case he’d be correct) or a description of the patterns for individual Americans (in which case he’d likely be wrong more often than he’s right). On balance, we rate his statement Half True.	None	Reince Priebus	None	None	None	2011-04-18T12:17:19	2011-04-14	['United_States']
-pomt-11662	"Queen Elizabeth removes Obamas from royal wedding guest list."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/jan/08/american-today/no-proof-queen-elizabeth-removed-obamas-prince-har/	The guest list for Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle has been the subject of fake news accounts — including one that Queen Elizabeth delivered a "well-deserved and humiliating beatdown" to Michelle Obama by striking her from the guest list. "Queen Elizabeth removes Obamas from royal wedding guest list," said a Dec. 10 headline on America Today. Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat fake news. The story is similar to an earlier article by Just News USA. We found only speculative news reports about whether the Obamas would be invited and no official reports about the guest list. We found no credible news articles which stated that the Queen struck the Obamas from the list. The fake story said that when Michelle Obama heard that Harry was marrying a black woman (Markle is biracial) she tried to "sneak a spot on the guest list." "Barack, who had been practically stalking Prince Harry on Twitter in recent weeks, made a post within seconds of the news coming out, which served the purpose of letting the Royals know that he and Michelle were angling for an invitation to the wedding of the year," the story said. Ever since the couple announced their engagement in November, there have been multiple speculative news reports about who will and won’t be invited to the wedding. Some news reports based on unnamed sources said that the couple want the Obamas at their May 19 wedding. While the royal family has been friendly with the Obamas, we found no official reports. The royal family has put out two press releases regarding the engagement in November, and neither mention an invite list. On Dec. 27, while guest-editing a BBC morning radio program, Harry joked that the guest list was still a ways off. "I don't know about that -- we haven't even put the invite or the guest list together yet. Who knows if (Obama's) going to be invited or not," Harry said. "I wouldn't want to ruin that surprise." News reports have speculated about whether Trump will be invited to the royal wedding although there is precedent for sitting U.S. presidents to not attend. While those reports are speculative, Markle was critical of Trump before her engagement. In May 2016 while on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, Markle said Trump was "divisive" and "misogynistic." A headline said that "Queen Elizabeth removes Obamas from royal wedding guest list." We found no credible reports that the Queen took this action -- just speculation about whether the Obamas will be invited. We rate this headline Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	America Today	None	None	None	2018-01-08T17:09:12	2017-12-10	['None']
-afck-00202	“In Midvaal… unemployment is half of what it is for the rest of Gauteng.”	incorrect	https://africacheck.org/reports/sas-local-government-election-3-final-anc-da-eff-fact-checks/	None	None	None	None	None	SA’s local government election: 3 final ANC, DA & EFF fact-checks	2016-08-02 06:02	None	['None']
-wast-00201	Clinton Foundation "was created and money started to roll in. ... The Clintons are now worth in excess of $100 million."	3 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/08/10/pro-trump-ad-suggests-clinton-foundation-donations-contributed-to-clintons-net-worth/	None	None	Rebuilding America Now	Michelle Ye Hee Lee	None	Pro-Trump ad suggests Clinton Foundation donations contributed to Clintons' net worth	August 10, 2016	None	['Bill_Clinton', 'Clinton_Foundation']
-pomt-08017	Obama’s mid-term approval ratings are similar to other presidents who went on to re-election.	half-true	/virginia/statements/2011/jan/10/tim-kaine/tim-kaine-says-obamas-approval-ratings-fine-compar/	With Democrats woozy from their shellacking in November’s congressional elections, political junkies are riveted on 2012 and whether President Barack Obama will win a second term. No one is putting a better spin on Obama’s fortunes than Tim Kaine, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He wrote an end-of-the year column for Politico, a Washington news organization, saying Obama’s "list of achievements already dwarfs that of many presidents." Kaine, a former Virginia governor, encountered skepticism during a TV interview last Sunday. Ed Henry, CNN’s senior White House corespondent, noted Obama’s approval rating from voters dropped 6 percentage points in 2010. "You made your case but it seems like the American people aren’t buying it, sir," Henry said. Kaine replied, "Relatively, if you look at the president’s mid-term numbers compared to other presidents in their mid-term, he’s fine." We decided to take a closer look. Kaine was responding to a Gallup poll conducted in the final week of December that showed 47 percent of adult Americans approved of Obama’s job performance, 45 percent disapproved and 8 percent were undecided. First, we asked for clarification of what Kaine meant when he said Obama is "fine." Alec Gerlach, a DNC press secretary, said Kaine meant Obama’s mid-term poll numbers "are in the neighborhood of other presidents who got re-elected, including Reagan and Clinton." So for this fact-check we will focus on whether Obama's ratings are indeed similar to presidents who got re-elected. Then we researched polls by Gallup because it has the longest record of tracking presidential popularity, dating to 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt was beginning his second term. We compared Obama’s numbers to the approval ratings other presidents received at the start of the year after mid-term congressional elections. To keep the comparison consistent, we turned to the first Gallup poll on Obama completely conducted in 2011. A survey from Jan. 2 to Jan. 4 found the president had 49 percent approval, 45 percent disapproval and 6 percent were undecided on his job perfromance. The average mid-term mark for presidents -- from Roosevelt in 1939 through Obama in 2011 -- is 53.5 percent approval, 36 percent disapproval and 10.5 percent undecided. Obama seems to be in the neighborhood, but not on the best street. Let’s look at the presidents who got reelected in that time span. Their average mid-term approval was 57 percent and disapproval was 35 percent. Obama is not in that school district. But neither were Ronald Reagan nor Bill Clinton midway through their first terms. Then they moved up quickly. Reagan was the least popular mid-term president. At the start of 1983, with the nation emerging from recession, he had 37 percent approval and 54 percent disapproval. Less than two years later, Reagan carried all but one state in a landslide reelection. Bill Clinton’s numbers at the start of 1995 were similar to Obama’s today. Clinton had 47 percent approval, 45 percent disapproval. In 1996, he was easily reelected. In contrast, George H.W. Bush had a robust 59 percent approval rating in early 1991 only to lose reelection the next year. All told, we were able to find the last 19 mid-term presidential polls by Gallup. Obama’s approval rating is the 11th highest. Of the eight presidents below him, four times their party retained the White House in the next election, and four times it didn’t. Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, says mid-term polls are a horrible gauge of coming elections because a president’s popularity can soar or plummet with events. "They don’t say a thing," he said. "The numbers that matter are the votes of people and, considering the beating Democrats took on Nov. 7, the president is by no means OK, assured of a successful term or a second one." Let’s review. Kaine, with his spokesman’s elaboration, said Obama’s mid-term polling popularity is "fine" compared to other presidents who went on to re-election. Kaine is correct in saying that Obama’s numbers compare favorably to Reagan and Clinton. But the president’s mid-term approval rating -- gauged by the first poll completely conducted in the new mid-term year -- is 8 percentage points below the average of re-elected presidents since 1939. His disapproval rating is 10 percentage points above the average. We know those numbers can change in an instant. But when a politician is down by 8 or 10 percentage points, we say he’s behind but within striking distance. We rate Kaine’s statement Half True.	None	Tim Kaine	None	None	None	2011-01-10T10:00:00	2011-01-02	['None']
-hoer-01122	Fake Agent Linda Smith Facebook Page Used For Lottery Scams	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-agent-linda-smith-facebook-page-used-for-lottery-scams/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Fake Agent Linda Smith Facebook Page Used For Lottery Scams	July 22, 2016	None	['None']
-hoer-00284	'World's Largest Snake Video' Survey	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/worlds-largest-snake-survey-scam.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	'World's Largest Snake Video' Survey Scam	December 30, 2013	None	['None']
-tron-01357	Starbucks is Giving Away Free Lifetime Passes to Celebrate its Anniversary	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/starbucks-is-giving-away-free-lifetime-passes-to-celebrate-its-anniversary/	None	food	None	None	None	Starbucks is Giving Away Free Lifetime Passes to Celebrate its Anniversary	Nov 2, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-02415	Kim Kardashian “Allergic” To Jewelry After Robbery?	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-allergic-jewelry-robbery/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian “Allergic” To Jewelry After Robbery?	6:15 pm, September 27, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04371	"There are more oil rigs in operation in the United States than the rest of the world combined."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2012/oct/22/david-cicilline/us-rep-david-cicilline-says-us-has-more-oil-rigs-o/	Are we doing enough to produce energy in the United States? That was one of the issues on the table when U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, a Democrat, and former state police Col. Brendan Doherty, a Republican, squared off in a WPRI - Providence Journal debate Oct. 16. Doherty talked about a bill he supports that would raise revenue for infrastructure by allowing more oil and gas drilling on federally-owned lands. Cicilline called it "a big, big giveaway to big oil . . . when we already know, according to the best available data as of February of this year, there are more oil rigs in operation in the United States than the rest of the world combined." More oil rigs in operation than everyone else in the world? That's quite a statistic. We wondered if it is true. This is a talking point that has been used in the past by the Obama administration. In fact, when we asked the Cicilline campaign for the source of the factoid, they sent us to a blog entry at the White House website that stated it without giving a source or offering any numbers. PolitiFact Florida looked at the claim (and a related claim) this winter, when President Obama offered it in February during speeches in Miami and earlier in New Hampshire. They found that the answer wasn't quite so simple. The U.S. Energy Information Administration recommended that PolitiFact get the latest count from Baker Hughes, an oilfield services company. We checked the numbers from two weeks ago. (For even more recent numbers, go here.) As of Oct. 12, 2012, the company had tallied 1,835 oil and gas drilling rigs in the United States and 1,615 in other countries. (That U.S. number is 188 lower than the 2011 total. The international number is 71 rigs higher.) However, the Baker Hughes data do not include rigs drilling in Russia or onshore China because those statistics are difficult to get. Richard Mason, who works for the publication Hart Energy Digital, told PolitiFact in February that "the last numbers I saw out of Russia, which are 18 months old, had more than 1,000 rigs active." Kurt Abraham, executive editor of World Oil, another energy publication, cited a report from a Chinese state-owned company that manufactures rigs and rig equipment that showed more than 1,000 land rigs. As Cicilline’s statement stood, only 221 more international rigs were need to make it False. And the Baker Hughes count is probably missing the approximately 2,000 rigs in Russia and China. And all that was applicable in February. Our ruling David Cicilline said, "There are more oil rigs in operation in the United States than the rest of the world combined." He said that information comes from "the best available data" in February. He's relying on a count that excludes some of the largest producers of oil and gas in the world, calling that the "best available data." It's not. The best available data would take into account reliable evidence that two thousand rigs are in operation in China and Russia, a number that would allow the world total to overwhelm the U.S. total. Just because you haven't counted something, doesn't mean it's not there. For that reason, we rate Cicilline's claim False. (Get updates from PolitiFact Rhode Island on Twitter: @politifactri. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	David Cicilline	None	None	None	2012-10-22T00:01:00	2012-10-16	['United_States']
-pomt-06731	Say Oregon Reps. Peter DeFazio and Earl Blumenauer are "socialists who are openly serving in the U.S. Congress."	pants on fire!	/oregon/statements/2011/aug/29/blog-posting/bloggers-claim-peter-defazio-and-earl-blumenauer-a/	Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio has been called a lot of things over his 12 terms in Congress -- hot head, visionary, renegade, principled, effective and determined. Now, if a burst of activity on websites and blogs in recent weeks is to be believed, DeFazio is something else -- a socialist. And he’s not alone. The posts, all of which piggyback from a single offering that has been replicated on dozens of websites in recent weeks, says there are 70 card-carrying Socialists in the House of Representatives, including Rep. Earl Blumenauer, another Democrat from Oregon. (The number actually varies. Some posts say 70 while others insist it’s either 73 or 76. One post used both 76 and 75 in the same entry.) An Aug. 12 post on the website for a group called Sovereign Citizens United mentions DeFazio and Blumenauer by name. It also says this: "I’m sure if you asked random people on the street if we had open socialists in the US Congress, they would say – well only Bernie Sanders (Senate). But the right answer is much, much worse." "This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one," says an Aug. 16 post on ConservativeByte.com. "The radical Marxist-progressives (communists) took control of the Democrat party some time ago. They’ve only become more emboldened with the election of Barack Obama, who was raised as a communist from birth." In case you miss the point, the post comes equipped with a large and very bright hammer and sickle emblem. While most of the names politicians are called are opinions, calling a congressman a Socialist sounds both emphatic and exact, which always gets our attention here at PolitiFact Oregon. Another thing that gets our attention is when a claim gets spread far and wide. This one meets that test, too. Here’s a blog post on Aug. 17 by Texas radio host Dan Cofall, whose show airs out of Fort Worth: "The magic number ‘70’ is the number of members of the 111th Congress who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). These are not just politicians who vote left of center; these are card-carrying members of ‘The Democratic Socialists of America’." Cofall did not respond to an email asking for comment. And we couldn’t reach anyone from ConservativeByte. Before we get to our ruling, let’s begin with some basics. Congress resets itself every two years, which means the current edition is the 112th Congress, not the 111th. Why does that matter? Because the new Congress that begins in January every two years always follows an election and some of the people on the list are no longer in office. Cofall acknowledges this but then continues to list names from the 111th Congress anyway. Those listed as "card carrying" socialists who are no longer serving include: Robert Wexler (Florida), Phil Hare (Illinois), John Hall (New York), Alan Grayson (Florida), and Neil Abercrombie (Hawaii). Then there’s this: Real card-carrying Socialists say those members, including DeFazio and Blumenauer, aren’t Socialists. The list that Cofall and dozens more rely upon "is completely fraudulent," said Frank Llewellyn, who served as national director of the Democratic Socialists of America for 10 years until stepping down July 5. There is not one member of Congress who is a formal member of the DSA, Llewellyn said. In order to join, a person must fill out a form and pay dues. Even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, is not a formal member of the DSA, Llewellyn said. The last member of Congress who was an actual card-carrying member, he said, was California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums, who served 28 years in the House until leaving in 1998. Llewellyn and DSA’s new national director, Maria Svart are chagrined for two reasons. First, they have to spend time knocking down reports that never seem to go away. Second, Llewellyn said, "if we had formal political relationships with 70-odd members, we would be making a lot more money’’ from dues. For the record, both DeFazio and Blumenauer say they’ve never been associated with the Democratic Socialists of America. "This is another made-up Internet rumor that has no merit," DeFazio said. "I am a proud Democrat who has taken many independent stands over the years. I am anti-so called free trade, pro-American jobs, pro-infrastructure investment, pro-fair taxation, anti-amnesty, pro-balanced budget amendment, pro-Wall Street re-regulation, and pro-audit the Pentagon and Federal Reserve. I am an Oregonian and an independent thinker." Blumenauer was equally annoyed. "No matter which side of the political aisle it comes from, this kind of name calling and rhetoric represents exactly what is wrong with our democracy today," he said. "Rather than bringing people together to solve our nation's problems, it spreads false and divisive allegations throughout the media and the public. It is a major distraction from the real work that needs to get done." Bad information gets spread all the time. But where did the number, or numbers, come from? The list purported to have originated with the DSA says this on page two: Q: How many members of the U.S. Congress are also members of the DSA? A: Seventy It then lists them by name. What it does not say is that the names are simply lifted en masse from the membership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a collection of liberal-leaning lawmakers that includes DeFazio and Blumenauer but officially, not a single socialist. According to its website, the Progressive Caucus is one of the largest in Congress and works for such causes as economic justice, civil rights and civil liberties as well as global peace and security. Llewellyn said that DSA supports some of the policy positions of the caucus. Voicing support for positions embraced by a group of lawmakers is a routine part of business on Capitol Hill and is employed by organizations as disparate as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Rifle Association and NORML, a group devoted to legalizing the use of marijuana. But agreeing with some positions doesn’t make a member of Congress a card-carrying Socialist. Llewellyn says similar accusations of Socialism (with a capital S) have surfaced every election year since 1991 when the Progressive Caucus was created. "There’s nothing we can do to stop it, Llewellyn said. "I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve tried to stop it." Misinformation and smear campaigns also are part of political life. But these persistent claims about socialists are riddled with errors and outright lies. Any one of the problems would be sufficient to discredit the report, but taken together, the effort is flagrantly false. For that reason, we rate this claim: Pants on Fire. Return to OregonLive to comment on this statement and ruling.	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2011-08-29T17:03:09	2011-08-12	['United_States', 'United_States_Congress', 'Earl_Blumenauer', 'Oregon']
-goop-00544	Brad Pitt Fuming Over Angelina Jolie ‘Pervert Pal,’ 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-angelina-jolie-pervert-pal-custody-wrong/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Brad Pitt NOT Fuming Over Angelina Jolie ‘Pervert Pal,’ Despite Late And Wrong Report	3:37 pm, July 31, 2018	None	['Angelina_Jolie', 'Brad_Pitt']
-pomt-13243	"Back in the Great Recession, when millions of jobs across America hung in the balance, Donald Trump said rescuing the auto industry didn’t really matter very much. He said, and I quote again, ‘Let it go.’ "	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/18/hillary-clinton/clinton-twists-trumps-words-rescuing-auto-industry/	Donald Trump didn’t care about rescuing the auto industry during the 2008 recession, Hillary Clinton said at a rally in Michigan. Clinton told her audience at Wayne State University in Detroit that she supported the 2008 government bailout for the American auto industry, which was faltering during the financial crisis. But Trump, she said, doesn’t support American workers, much less those in Michigan’s auto industry. "Nobody should be surprised, because back in the Great Recession, when millions of jobs across America hung in the balance, Donald Trump said rescuing the auto industry didn’t really matter very much," Clinton said at the Oct. 10 rally. "He said, and I quote again, ‘Let it go.’ Now, I can’t imagine that. I supported President (Barack) Obama’s decision to rescue the auto industry in America." Actually, Trump's public comments about the auto industry's demise were the opposite of what Clinton said. He called for saving it. In December 2008, when Congress and then-President George W. Bush were debating giving the auto industry a bailout, Trump gave several interviews in which he stressed the importance of saving the Big Three automakers: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Trump’s position on an auto bailout was inconsistent leading up to Dec. 19, 2008, when Bush laid out plans to go forward with the bailout. Trump said the government should help the auto companies, but he also regularly suggested the they could save themselves if they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with some government support. Mid 2009, months into his first year as president, Obama forced Chrysler and General Motors to go through bankruptcy. While he might have clashed with Bush and Obama on exact particulars of how to solve the auto crisis, Trump consistently said the auto industry needed to be saved: Dec. 9, 2008, Fox: Trump told host Greta Van Susteren that "I think you have to try and save the companies, and I think you can easily save the companies." He added, referring to "bankruptcy," that auto companies "don't like the ‘B’ word. I think they probably should use it." Dec. 10, 2008, CNBC: "You have to save the car industry in this country," Trump said. "General Motors can be great again, Ford can be great again, and Chrysler could be great." Dec. 17, 2008, Fox: Cavuto asked Trump if he thought the country could do without one of the Big Three auto makers. Trump responded, "No. I think you should have the Big Three…. I think the government should stand behind them 100 percent. You cannot lose the auto companies. They are great. They make wonderful products. Maybe they are making too much. Maybe they are not making too much. I just bought a Dodge Ram truck from Arrigo Dodge, who is a member of one of my clubs and a great guy." Dec. 18, 2008, CNN: Host Wolf Blitzer asked Trump if Bush should bail out the auto industry. Trump replied, "Well, I hope he does it, but you have to make a much better deal with the unions. … The fact is you have to make the companies competitive. And if you're not going to make a deal with the union, and a great and fair deal and a competitive deal, then they shouldn't do it. But absolutely, they should try and save the companies. You just can't lose Chrysler, you can't lose Ford, and you can't lose General Motors." Clinton also quoted Trump saying "let it go," referring to the auto industry. Clinton’s phrasing makes it sound like Trump said that quote during the recession. But he actually said it in 2015. And Clinton took the comment out of context. "You could have let it go, and rebuilt itself, through the free enterprise system," Trump said in August 2015, according to the Washington Post. "You could have let it go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself, and a lot of people felt it should happen. Or you could have done it the way it went. I could have done it either way. Either way would have been acceptable. I think you would have wound up in the same place." So six years after the $80 billion bailout began, Trump has maintained his ambiguous position. He said either a bailout or just bankruptcy would have been fine. But his message was not firmly, as Clinton implied, that the country should have left the auto industry out to dry. Our ruling Clinton said, "Back in the Great Recession, when millions of jobs across America hung in the balance, Donald Trump said rescuing the auto industry didn’t really matter very much. He said, and I quote again, ‘Let it go.’ " Trump is documented as saying just the opposite during the recession. He regularly said the auto industry needed saving amid a low point for manufacturers in December 2008. He said the government should stand behind the auto industry "100 percent." Clinton also takes the "let it go" quote out of context and time. Trump made that comment in 2015, not 2008. And he was making the point that a number of actions could have saved the auto industry, one of which was "let it go" into bankruptcy. We rate Clinton’s statement Pants on Fire!	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-10-18T17:54:55	2016-10-10	['United_States', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-02737	Gov. Rick Scott "backed the federal shutdown."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2013/dec/18/florida-democratic-party/rick-scott-back-federal-shutdown-florida-democra/	Gov. Rick Scott had a "terrible 2013," says the Florida Democratic Party in a year-end video bashing the Republican leader who faces voters next year. The Democrats unveiled a long list of attacks, most of which were recycled from earlier attacks or news articles. But this one in particular caught our eye: "This fall Scott even backed the federal shutdown that cost Floridians millions each day and pushed America to the brink of default." We wanted to check if Scott, the self-described jobs governor, backed the October shutdown that furloughed hundreds of thousands of employees. Some House Republicans had hoped to use a shutdown to delay or defund the federal health care law, but that didn’t happen. What Scott said Scott didn’t get a vote on the federal shutdown so the only way to judge whether he "backed" it is by reading his words. We reviewed statements Scott made in news releases and to the media about the shutdown, which started Oct. 1 and ended Oct. 16. We found that Scott repeatedly bashed Obama and praised the way that Florida had handled its own finances, but he avoided taking a stance in favor or against the shutdown. On Sept. 30 Scott issued a news release that stated: "The impending federal government shutdown represents a failure of leadership. One of the most basic functions of governing is budgeting. At the state level, we compromise and negotiate to create a balanced budget every year. But, President Obama has shown no interest in negotiating or compromising. We have paid down state debt in Florida by $3.5 billion and paid back another $3.5 billion federal loan over the last two and a half years while also cutting taxes." (We should note that state debt is a very different animal than federal debt, and states are prohibited from running annual budget deficits.) In addition to that news release, a Scott spokeswoman sent us a few tweets by Scott ("The buck stops with the President. We need leadership now," and "@BarackObama and Congress should not take pay for every day of shutdown"). But none of those tweets shed much light on whether he thought shutting down the government was a good idea or not. During a news conference Oct. 9, Scott refused to answer questions about whether he agreed with Republicans in Washington who tied the budget to delaying or defunding Obamacare: "What I agree with is the fact that the buck stops with the president," Scott said. "It's disappointing he doesn't know how to compromise and negotiate to get a budget done. I've done it for three sessions...." The next day, Scott’s chief of staff announced that Florida would not use state funds to temporarily backfill federal programs. At the time, there was mounting criticism that the shutdown which closed federal parks was a blow to the fishing and tourism industry in the Keys. On Oct. 16, Obama signed a bill that ended the shutdown. Scott criticized the fact that it wasn't a long-term agreement on debt and said that "our nation’s leaders have their heads in the sand about our economic future." A spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party pointed to two blog posts -- from the Tampa Bay Times and the Florida Times-Union -- that stated Scott’s position on the shutdown aligned him with congressional Republicans and pointed to Scott’s repeated criticism of Obama. While it’s true that Scott did put blame on Obama, a review of Scott’s actual statements shows that he appeared to dodge the question of whether he supported or opposed the shutdown as a political tactic. Instead, Scott used the shutdown as a chance to criticize Obama and call for reducing federal spending and debt. One final note: The Florida Democratic Party also said the shutdown would "cost Floridians millions each day." Financial analysts at Moody’s estimated the shutdown cost the economy about $20 billion in direct and indirect effects, or roughly $4 per day for every man, woman and child in America. Based on Florida’s population of about 19 million, that translates to about $77 million per day in Florida. "It’s fair to say that the shutdown cost Floridians as economic agents and as taxpayers millions per day," Moody’s economist Brian Kessler said. Our ruling The Florida Democratic Party said that Scott "backed the federal shutdown." Scott used the October shutdown as an opportunity to tout the state’s fiscal management and wag his finger at Obama. But a review of Scott’s statements about the shutdown shows that he dodged taking a clear stand favoring or opposing the shutdown itself. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Florida Democratic Party	None	None	None	2013-12-18T11:03:15	2013-12-11	['None']
-pomt-12552	"When public schools face increased competition, they get better and kids learn more."	mostly false	/new-hampshire/statements/2017/apr/17/jeb-bush/does-school-competition-lift-all-boats-jeb-bush-sa/	As New Hampshire considers the merits of a universal Education Savings Account bill, education reformers nationwide are watching - and weighing in. Senate Bill 193 would allow parents to use 90 percent of the per-pupil grant the state gives to local public schools and instead put it toward alternative educational expenses, including private school tuition or homeschooling. ESAs function basically like vouchers, but they give parents more options about how the money can be spent. Proponents of ESAs tout them as the next evolution in school choice. If SB 193 is passed by the House (it cleared the Senate in March), it would be one of the most expansive school choice laws in the country. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, whose Foundation for Excellence in Education is backing market-based education reform efforts nationwide, submitted an op-ed in New Hampshire papers this week, urging passage of the bill. "This legislation (will not) hurt public schools. In fact, a large body of research, including that done in my home state of Florida, indicates quite the opposite. When public schools face increased competition, they get better and kids learn more," he wrote. Critics of choice typically say that diverting funds from public schools hurt those schools. So putting aside the question of whether vouchers actually help the kids who use them, we wondered: Does research show that school choice, and specifically vouchers, help public schools get better? ESAs, like vouchers, have traditionally been targeted to certain types of students, like those in low-performing schools or students with disabilities. But the bill in New Hampshire, as it’s currently written, is open to all. Five states so far have adopted ESA programs -- Arizona, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, and Nevada -- but only Nevada and Arizona have recently opened up eligibility to all, as New Hampshire is considering doing. Bush’s team at the Foundation for Excellence in Education pointed us to a compilation of 30 policy briefs and academic studies put together by EdChoice, a school choice advocacy group. In all but one of the studies cited by EdChoice, researchers found some sort of gain for public schools facing competition from vouchers or tax-credit scholarships. But most of the studies compiled by the advocacy group found only modest positive relationships between test scores in public schools and competition from voucher programs or tax-credit scholarship programs. Here’s how EdChoice explained that: "Many existing voucher programs are limited in the number and type of students they’re allowed to serve and the amount of choice they’re allowed to offer. Narrowly constricted programs produce narrowly constricted results. To produce revolutionary results, we would need broad programs -- eligibility for all students," the group wrote on its website page where the studies are posted. But David Figlio -- who co-authored three of the studies cited by EdChoice -- said expanding eligibility for these programs wouldn’t necessarily produce more positive gains. "Less responsible voucher advocates will say that this is proof positive that these programs work," said Figlio, who is the Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. "I think a more responsible take on this is these programs don’t seem to be hurting public schools -- at the scale that they’re at." Figlio has studied the effects of voucher programs in Ohio and Florida and found "modest positive gains," he said, for students in public schools facing competition from voucher programs. He added later: "Key emphasis on the word modest." Figlio said it was important to note two things about the voucher systems he had studied -- the types of students they served, and the number, and cautioned against overstating the research. "In both Florida and Ohio, these are programs that are serving very disadvantaged students," Figlio said. "I would feel very uncomfortable with taking that work and looking at vouchers for more advantaged kids." The number of students participating in the programs Figlio studied were small. And so it makes sense, he said, that schools would have retained the capacity to make improvements -- because they hadn’t lost that much revenue. Figlio said he wasn’t aware of domestic research that had shown negative effects of vouchers on public schools. But research in the U.S. has so far just looked at relatively small, targeted voucher programs. The program being proposed in New Hampshire would be open to all public school students. So Figlio suggested research in foreign contexts -- namely, Chile -- might be instructive here. Miguel Urquiola is a professor of economics at Columbia University. He's published extensively about Chile, which adopted a universal voucher program in the 1980s. Urquiola said that in Chile's case, public school performance -- as measured by test scores -- got "significantly" worse with the implementation of vouchers. But Urquiola cautions that the main driver behind this was likely not that public schools did a worse job. Rather, the key factor was that higher-performing students transferred in large numbers from public to private schools. "(Chile) seems to be mainly a story of affluent students and affluent families leaving the public sector," he said. On the whole, Urquiola said that vouchers had been a "disappointing" reform effort, with minor measurable effects on student performance. "School choice and the privatization of schools are fun things to argue about. But in terms of real effects they are a bit of a red herring," he said. "The evidence indicates that -- perhaps surprisingly -- such reforms do not make education really good; they do not make it really bad either." As for the research on competitive effects of school choice policies in general -- vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and charters all together -- the jury is still out, said David Arsen, a professor of education policy and K-12 educational administration at Michigan State University. "The research is mixed. For the most part the competitive effects of school choice are modest. Sometimes positive. Sometimes negative. Sometimes no effect at all," he said. Arsen, who wrote a review of the literature on the competitive effects of choice back in 2012, warned against making "broad, generic claims about the competitive effect." "Because it depends. Most particularly it depends on details of policy design," he said. Our ruling In urging the passage of a New Hampshire bill to establish education savings accounts, Jeb Bush said "when public schools face increased competition, they get better and kids learn more." Some research shows positive gains in public schools when choice is offered, but researchers say those studies typically only show minor effects, and that the specifics of the programs matter a lot. In Florida and Ohio, where vouchers were targeted to certain types of students, researchers found minor improvements in public school performance. In Chile, where vouchers were universally available, public school test scores got worse. But Bush cited "a large body of research," and ESA programs like the ones being proposed in New Hampshire have only very recently been implemented in Arizona and Nevada, and haven’t been studied. To imply that competition will lift all boats -- especially in the context of this legislative proposal -- isn’t supported by the research. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Jeb Bush	None	None	None	2017-04-17T10:14:48	2017-04-06	['None']
-pomt-04048	"Spending of government money is 17 percent less than it was a decade ago."	true	/georgia/statements/2013/jan/29/nathan-deal/has-deal-been-frugal-state-budget/	Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal made a claim on his Twitter page that initially had us stumped. "Spending of government money is 17 percent less than it was a decade ago," the message said as Deal delivered his State of the State address. Isn’t the state budget larger than it was a decade ago? In fiscal year 2003, which began July 1, 2002, and ended June 30, 2003, then-Gov. Sonny Perdue and the Legislature approved a $16.2 billion general fund spending plan. In the proposed fiscal year 2014 budget, Deal wants to spend about $17.4 billion for the state’s general fund. The entire proposed state budget would be about $19.8 billion. Deal explained the decrease in his speech. "Using 2012 dollars, our per capita spending of government money is 17 percent less that it was a decade ago," the governor said. Adjusted for inflation, the fiscal year 2003 budget would now be $20.15 billion. The difference between that budget and Deal’s proposed budget is about $3 billion, a 17 percent decrease. We rate this statement True.	None	Nathan Deal	None	None	None	2013-01-29T06:00:00	2013-01-17	['None']
-pose-01278	“They should build a safe zone. Take a big piece of land in Syria and they have plenty of land, believe me. Build a safe zone for all these people, because I have a heart, I mean these people, it’s horrible to watch, But, they shouldn’t come over here. We should build a safe zone.”	stalled	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1369/build-safe-zone-syrian-refugees/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Build a safe zone for Syrian refugees	2017-01-17T08:38:21	None	['Syria']
-pomt-09978	On switching parties.	full flop	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/may/01/arlen-specter/specters-party-change-shows-full-flop-its-finest-f/	Yes, this one is a no-brainer. But we can't resist using our Flip-O-Meter to record such a complete reversal of position. Arlen Specter, the senior senator from Pennsylvania, was a moderate Republican, and one of only three Republican senators to vote for the economic stimulus bill that passed in February 2009. But many moderates in Pennsylvania have jumped ship. In the 2008 election, about 200,000 Pennsylvania Republicans became Democrats, many so they could vote in the hotly contested Democratic primary between Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton. This meant that as Specter looked to re-election next year, his prospects for beating a more conservative challenger — Pat Toomey, a former congressman who headed the free-market, antitax Club for Growth — were looking pretty bad. Yet Specter had ruled out switching parties, until ... Well, let's look at the evidence. Specter, in an interview with The Hill on March 17, 2009: "I'm staying a Republican because I think I have a more important role to play there," he said. "I think each of the 41 Republican senators, in a sense — and I don’t want to overstate this — is a national asset," he said, "because if one was gone, you'd only have 40, the Democrats would have 60, and they would control all of the mechanisms of government." Specter, in a news conference on April 28, 2009: "In the course of the last several months since the stimulus vote, I have traveled the state and surveyed the sentiments of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania and public opinion polls, observed other public opinion polls, and have found that the prospects for winning the Republican primary are bleak. I am not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate ... . But I'm prepared today take on all comers — all comers — in a general election. And therefore, I have decided to be a candidate for re-election in 2010 in the Democratic primary." Some of our rulings require a lot of time spent gathering evidence and a finely calibrated review of tricky points. Not this one, though. Like judges in an Olympic diving competition, we know a perfect move when we see it: Full Flop!	None	Arlen Specter	None	None	None	2009-05-01T14:56:32	2009-04-28	['None']
-pomt-04505	Romney’s Medicare plan was estimated to "cost the average senior about $6,000 a year."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/04/barack-obama/obama-said-romneys-plan-could-cost-future-retirees/	Viewers of the first presidential debate got a heavy dose of Mediscare politics. Mitt Romney attacked President Barack Obama for"cutting $716 billion from the program," which mostly covers seniors’ health care expenses. Obama attacked Romney for supporting a "voucher"-like model to reform Medicare. At one point, Obama stared straight into the camera and told certain viewers to listen up. "If you're 54 or 55, you might want to listen 'cause this, this will affect you," he said during the Oct. 3, 2012, debate at the University of Denver. "The idea, which was originally presented by Congressman (Paul) Ryan, your running mate, is that we would give a voucher to seniors and they could go out in the private marketplace and buy their own health insurance. "The problem is that because the voucher wouldn't necessarily keep up with health care inflation, it was estimated that this would cost the average senior about $6,000 a year." Obama and other Democrats, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, have invoked premium hikes somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000 before. We’ve quibbled with it because the figure is rooted in a study of an outdated Medicare plan by Ryan, the House budget chairman from Wisconsin. Ryan released his initial Medicare plan in early 2011, and Democrats have attacked it as harmful to seniors ever since. Under this first version of the plan, Medicare would have changed from a program that pays doctors and hospitals fees for particular services to one in which beneficiaries would be paid an amount by the government that they could use toward private insurance premiums. Critics said those who fell under the new rules would face an increasingly large gap between what the government paid for their benefits and what their health care services cost. This plan passed the GOP-led House but died in the Senate. Ryan has offered updated versions of the plan, the most recent being part of his fiscal year 2013 budget proposal. It still offers seniors a defined amount toward private insurance rather than paying providers directly. But there are two big differences between the new plan and the earliest one: The newer version allows beneficiaries under 55 a choice of using their payment to buy private insurance or a plan that acts like traditional Medicare. The amount of their payment would be set by the price of the second-cheapest plan. Romney indicated in an August interview that he supports Ryan’s most recent plan. The Democrats have cited as evidence for their claims of the Romney-Ryan plan’s increased out-of-pocket costs a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. This 2011 report relied on analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that found the difference of out-of-pocket office costs between the Ryan plan ($12,500, in 2022) and traditional Medicare ($6,150) to be $6,350. The problem with Obama using this estimate is simple: The CBO analysis was of the original Ryan plan, not the more recent one that Romney supports. Ryan has not yet asked for a more thorough analysis of his latest proposal. Ryan’s current plan caps overall growth in Medicare spending, but it’s also a little more generous in how fast it allows subsidies to grow as health care costs increase. Ryan also made a number of other technical changes to address concerns that the credits wouldn’t keep up if medical costs kept going up and up. As we said earlier, the amount a beneficiary receives would be based on the second least-expensive plan available on a Medicare exchange. The Obama campaign pointed us to an Oct. 2, 2012, memo from David Cutler, a Harvard economist who advised Obama’s 2008 campaign. Cutler’s memo summarizes an August 2012 analysis he co-authored for the liberal Center for American Progress regarding Romney-Ryan’s new Medicare plan. "Overall, these results confirm the view that even under the revised voucher proposal, the additional cost to enroll in Medicare for the vast bulk of people will be $6,000 annually or more," Cutler’s memo states. Still, absent details from the Ryan camp and an updated CBO analysis, it’s not clear what would happen over time if the new, market-based payments grew faster than the Ryan plan’s cap on Medicare spending. Would savings still come from beneficiaries? Or providers? Or somewhere else? Competing claims about its financial impact on seniors remain speculative. Obama is repeating a number about an old Republican plan because there isn’t an updated analysis of the new plan, which contains significant differences. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2012-10-04T12:04:40	2012-10-03	['None']
-snes-05889	A Google Maps image captured a furtive body disposal.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/google-maps-body-disposal/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Dead Body? Google Maps 52.376552,5.198303	17 April 2013	None	['None']
-farg-00284	Claims that FBI Director James Comey found her public statements about not sending or receiving classified email to be “truthful.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2016/08/clintons-email-falsehood/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Hillary Clinton	Lori Robertson	['Presidential Election 2016', 'classified information']	Clinton’s Email Falsehood	August 1, 2016	[' Interview on "Fox News Sunday" – Sunday, July 31, 2016 ']	['Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation']
-obry-00003	Flint, Michigan, the city known for its contaminated water crisis, has something in common with Wisconsin — childhood lead poisoning. According to Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore of Milwaukee, the proportion of children with elevated blood lead levels among Wisconsin’s children has risen close to those of Flint. In a letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Moore said, “The rate of lead poisoning among children in Wisconsin is nearly equal to Flint, Michigan.” The Observatory decided to check this claim. 	verified	https://observatory.journalism.wisc.edu/2018/05/10/wisconsins-rate-of-lead-poisoning-worse-than-flint-michigans/	None	None	None	Gerald Porter Jr.	None	Wisconsin’s rate of lead poisoning worse than Flint, Michigan’s	May 10, 2018	None	['Michigan', 'Wisconsin', 'United_States', 'Milwaukee', 'Gwen_Moore', 'Flint,_Michigan', 'Centers_for_Disease_Control_and_Prevention']
-pomt-10450	Hillary Clinton advocates "a freeze on foreclosures. Barack Obama said no."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/may/01/hillary-clinton/clinton-and-obama-differ-on-freeze/	A new Hillary Clinton ad highlights sharp differences between Obama and Clinton on gas taxes and housing. "When the housing crisis broke, Hillary Clinton called for action -- a freeze on foreclosures. Barack Obama said no. "Now, gas prices are skyrocketing, and she's ready to act again. Hillary's plan: Use the windfall profits of the oil companies to pay to suspend the gas tax this summer. Barack Obama says no, again." We looked at Obama's position on a gas tax holiday previously . He does oppose it, calling it an expensive, short-term fix with little impact for consumers or national energy policy. On housing, Clinton wants lenders to freeze foreclosures for 90 days on owner-occupied homes purchased with subprime mortgages. She wants lenders to freeze interest rates on subprime loans for owner-occupied homes for five years, or until homeowners can refinance. She wants to create a $30-billion fund for states to deal with the effects of foreclosures, everything from helping individual homeowners pay their bills to making up lost property tax revenues for police and firefighters. Clinton believes lenders should voluntarily embrace the freezes she suggests as a means of preventing widespread defaults. She would not impose the freezes through the force of law. Obama, on the other hand, opposes interest-rate freezes and a foreclosure freeze. He and his advisers have said that across-the-board freezes on foreclosures and interest rates are short-term fixes. The measures could end up doing more harm than good if lenders decide to raise interest rates on new homeowners to make up their losses, the campaign has said. He favors a $10 billion fund that would help homeowners avoid foreclosures. He also proposes reforms to bankruptcy court that would allow judges to modify mortgage terms. Of course, Clinton's ad doesn't explain any of that. But it's not wrong when it says that Obama opposes the foreclosure freeze. We find her statement True.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2008-05-01T00:00:00	2008-04-29	['Barack_Obama', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-tron-02584	George Washington Statue Covered to Prevent Martin Luther King Celebrants From Being Offended	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/naacp-washington-statue/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	George Washington Statue Covered to Prevent Martin Luther King Celebrants From Being Offended	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-11622	Says under her leadership, "Democrats fought to ... make sure the (2011 HOPE) bill ... prevented the use of ACT/SAT testing standards."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2018/jan/24/stacey-abrams/georgia-governors-race-hope-scholarship-abrams/	Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has taken some heat for co-sponsoring a 2011 bill to revamp the HOPE higher education aid program. Critics of the former House minority leader say she cut a deal that hurt poor and minority students. The Abrams campaign rejected the charge. "Under Abrams’ leadership, Democrats fought to prevent certain cuts and make sure the bill included funding for remedial classes at technical colleges, a 1 percent low interest loan program, and prevented the use of ACT/SAT testing standards that would have harmed poor students and students of color," spokeswoman Caitlin Highland wrote in an email Jan. 17. A key point of contention centers on the role of standardized test scores in the aid program. In this fact-check, we looked at whether Abrams prevented the use of ACT/SAT testing standards in setting eligibility for scholarships. A program called HOPE HOPE stands for Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally and dates from 1992. It was one of the country’s earliest merit-based state aid programs. Over the years, it reached hundreds of thousands of students and provided billions of dollars in assistance. Until 2011, it had two basic streams: HOPE grants defrayed costs for attending technical colleges, and HOPE scholarships covered the full-tuition, plus books and other fees, for people working on two-year associate’s and four-year bachelor’s degrees. In 2011, costs were outstripping proceeds from the Georgia state lottery that funded the program. The state’s newly elected governor, Republican Nathan Deal, moved to trim the spending. A bipartisan bill In February 2011, flanked by lawmakers including Abrams, Deal unveiled a plan for HOPE. Among its many measures, it created two tiers in the scholarship awards part of the HOPE program – one for the best students and one for good but not exceptional ones. The original full-tuition HOPE scholarship was renamed the Zell Miller scholarship in honor of the former U.S. senator and governor. It significantly racheted up the eligibility requirements. Aimed at high performers, the Zell Miller scholarship program was limited to students with a 3.7 grade point average and a combined score of at least 1200 for the critical reading and math sections on the SAT or a 26 ACT score. The original HOPE scholarship remained in name, but the bill made it less generous. Instead of full tuition, it provided support that approached 90 percent of tuition, and it no longer covered books and other costs. Unlike the Zell Miller award for elite scholars, the HOPE scholarship remained free of a standardized test score requirement. As before, students were eligible if they had at least a 3.0 grade point average. Test scores on the table Did Abrams actually save the HOPE scholarship program from a standardized test requirement? Abrams’ communications director Priyanka Mantha told us Abrams did. "The original Republican proposal sought to impose testing requirements on students who wished to receive the scholarship, in order to narrow eligibility," Mantha said. "But under her leadership, the scholarship retained an eligibility tier without testing requirements because such tests would have disproportionately disqualified low-income students and students of color." There is no hard data on the discussions that took place behind closed doors, but an Atlanta Journal Constitution article from that time said the test score idea was in play. The news report listed eight suggestions. One of them was "require high school graduates to earn a minimum SAT/ACT score to be eligible." Mantha said the creation of the Zell Miller scholarship with a test score requirement was the result of Abrams’ intervention. "The two tiers of the HOPE program are the crux of the compromise she achieved," Mantha said. "Students who may have been eliminated from eligibility under the GOP proposal instead retained access to a version of the HOPE scholarship." Ben George, chief of staff to the Senate Minority Leader in 2011, said his boss and other Democrats were not part of the discussions and were "caught completely off-guard" by the deal with the governor. The fallout from 2011 As part of the 2011 bill, lawmakers raised the grade average for the HOPE grant for technical colleges from 2.0 to 3.0. According to a report from the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning study center, full-time enrollment in the state’s technical college system fell "nearly 25 percent between 2011 and 2012." In 2013, lawmakers rolled back the hike in the grade average. Other changes, however, remained in place, including pulling back the amount of HOPE grant and scholarship aid. That made it harder for lower income students to stay enrolled. After the first two years, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that students from higher income neighborhoods went from being twice as likely to secure a full-tuition scholarship to three times as likely, compared to students from lower income neighborhoods. Georgia State University told the Journal that it had to drop dozens of students for not paying tuition after their scholarship aid dropped (although most of them were able to return after the school made a special plea to donors). Our ruling Abrams said she led the fight to prevent the use of standardized test scores as part of the HOPE program. In 2011, she supported a plan to make minimum test scores part of the eligibility requirements for the full-tuition HOPE scholarship. The bill that emerged renamed the full-tuition scholarship, raised the minimum grade point average and added a minimum test score requirement. The bill did not add similar requirements to the original scholarship program, but made it less generous. Abrams’ statement is accurate but it leaves out important details. We rate this claim Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Stacey Abrams	None	None	None	2018-01-24T09:30:00	2018-01-17	['None']
-pomt-08472	Says Illinois gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady's first priority after winning the primary "was to sponsor a bill that would mass-euthanize sheltered dogs and cats in gas chambers."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/12/pat-quinn/pat-quinn-blasts-bill-brady-sponsoring-bill-pet-eu/	Illinois is famous for its rough and tumble politics, but Gov. Pat Quinn still managed to turn heads with a new TV ad that says his Republican rival, state Sen. Bill Brady, wanted to make it easier to put pets to death. With creepy music in the background, the ad shows grainy images of dogs being forced into a chamber. As the dogs are put in, the soundtrack suggests the dogs are screeching and howling with fear. Words superimposed over the images of the dogs say, "Just two days after Bill Brady won the primary for governor, Sen. Bill Brady's first priority was to sponsor a bill that would mass-euthanize sheltered dogs and cats in gas chambers." It continues, "Bill Brady's law would undo a deal worked out over two years by veterinarians, Farm Bureau and Illinois' Humane Society." The ad cuts to shots of people with their pets denouncing the bill and Brady's role in it. "Shame on Bill Brady!" says a woman holding a fluffy white dog. "I'm a Republican, but I don't support him for the mass euthanization of animals." To check the claims in the ad, we first turned to the legislative archive for the Illinois Senate. We found the bill referenced in the ad, SB 2999. It was indeed filed on Feb. 4, 2010, two days after the Feb. 2 primary, and we confirmed that it was the first bill Brady introduced after primary day. However, the primary election results were so close that, due to recounts, it actually took until March 5 for Brady to officially be declared the winner. Brady's bill sought to amend a landmark 2009 law on euthanizations. The 2009 law was a compromise for animal-welfare advocates who had been seeking a flat-out ban on the use of gas chambers. Instead, it put more restrictions on the practice. Under the 2009 law, shelters using the gas chambers had to euthanize animals one at a time, had to provide a justification for using the gas chamber, and had to have a veterinarian present from start to finish. The new requirements were expected to sharply reduce the use of gas chambers in Illinois, because of the significant added time and expense, said Jordan Matyas, Illinois state director for the Humane Society of the United States. A lethal injection -- the most common way of euthanizing pets -- typically takes two minutes or so, rather than the 30 to 40 minutes it takes in a gas chamber. So two of the biggest reasons a shelter would want to use the gas chamber -- euthanizing many pets at once and doing it inexpensively -- were upended by the new law. In fact, Matyas said he's unaware of any gas chambers being used in Illinois today. Brady's bill, offered the following year, would have widened the options for animal shelters. His bill, which according to media reports was introduced on behalf of a constituent who works in animal control, would have lifted the one-animal-at-a-time limit. That could have made a difference in how shelters calculated whether to use gas chambers instead of injection. For instance, the chambers can be used for "fractious cats, violent dogs or other animals that may subject the staff at the animal control facility to risk of injury," said Peter S. Weber, executive director of the Illinois State Veterinary Medical Association, one of the groups that initially had supported gas chambers prior to backing the 2009 compromise bill. Our research suggests that the ad's summary of the issue is pretty accurate. But there are a couple of significant caveats that we think are worth noting. First, the ad says the bill "would mass-euthanize sheltered dogs and cats in gas chambers." Actually, the bill wouldn't mandate it, as the ad's use of the word "would" suggests, but rather allow the practice. In fact, the bill requires veterinarians "to use professional judgment" on doing single or multiple euthanizations, "taking into consideration the safety of facility staff and the most humane practices" -- a requirement that animal-welfare advocates believe would be used as a loophole, but which does appear explicitly in the bill. Second, the ad includes footage of dogs being placed into a cramped-looking metal box that, we are led to assume, is a gas chamber for putting down shelter animals. In the footage shown, we counted at least four, possibly five dogs, crammed into the same enclosure within that box. However, whether the practice shown on the footage would be allowed under Brady's bill is questionable. The Brady bill required that the euthanasia chambers "must allow for the separation of animals." Matyas' interpretation is that the chambers must be manufactured to be compatible with separated chambers, but that the separators don't have to be installed. But the wording is vague enough that no one knows for sure how that language would be interpreted. So the ad's use of footage showing dogs crammed into one chamber is justifiable, but not necessarily the only outcome. Third, we think a viewer watching the ad could come away thinking the bill is still active, and that Brady continues to back it. In fact, just days after sponsoring the measure, Brady backed off after opposition by the Humane Society of the U.S. and its allies prompted several unflattering news articles. In one Chicago Sun-Times story, Matyas was quoted saying, "I have no idea why Sen. Brady introduced a bill that would allow as many animals as you want to be put into a gas chamber and they’d be exposed to one another. Under his legislation, you could have 10 dogs in one box, gasping for air, at the same time fighting, at the same time fearing for their lives." A Quad City Times story quoted Brady explaining his decision to back off. "It’s not ready," Brady said. "And the political games were distracting from the discussion." Ultimately, on March 3, John O. Jones, the state senator who became sponsor of the bill after Brady dropped out, tabled the measure. So the bill has been moot for more than half a year. The Brady campaign told us the ad gets the timing wrong because of the long delay in settling the election. Indeed, by the time Brady was officially declared the winner, Brady had disassociated from the bill and it had been tabled by its new sponsor. So where does this leave us? Quinn's stark ad is right that the bill was sponsored two days after the primary but it incorrectly suggests that it was Brady's first act after winning. Quinn is close on the substance of what the bill would have done. But the ad oversteps somewhat in suggesting that the bill would have required mass euthanizations, rather than just allowing them, and it glosses over the fact that Brady dropped his sponsorship and that the bill has been moot for most of this year. On balance, we rate the claim Half True.	None	Pat Quinn	None	None	None	2010-10-12T18:49:57	2010-09-30	['Bill_Brady_(politician)']
-para-00084	"Labor’s (FBT) tax hike will cost 320,000 Australians an average of $1,400 per year."	mostly true	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/07/tony-abbott/abbott-says-fbt-tax-hike-will-cost-320000-australi/index.html	None	['Tax']	Tony Abbott	Chris Pash, Peter Fray	None	Abbott says the FBT tax hike will cost 320,000 Australians an average $1,400 a year	Wednesday, August 7, 2013 at 6:25 p.m.	None	['None']
-goop-01953	Britney Spears “Secret Wedding” Claim Tru	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/britney-spears-secret-wedding-sam-asghari-married/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Britney Spears “Secret Wedding” Claim NOT True	2:39 pm, December 28, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-01142	Barack Obama, George Soros, and other Democrats were involved in a plot to stage a military coup in conjunction with a government shutdown.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/democrats-shutdown-coup/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did Obama, Soros, and Democrats Order a Government Shutdown to Stage a Coup?	23 January 2018	None	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'George_Soros', 'Barack_Obama']
-pose-01266	"I would defund it because of the abortion factor, which they say is 3 percent. I don't know what percentage it is. They say it's 3 percent. But I would defund it, because I'm pro-life."	stalled	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1357/defund-planned-parenthood/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Defund Planned Parenthood	2017-01-20T11:03:45	None	['None']
-pomt-10389	Obama couldn't have afforded his home without Rezko's help.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/17/republican-national-committee-republican/theres-no-"gotcha"-here/	In the immediate wake of the conviction of Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a prominent former fundraiser for Sen. Barack Obama, on federal charges of fraud and money laundering, the Republican National Committee put out a news release that raises questions about whether Obama has profited from his relationship with Rezko. "Could Obama have afforded his home without Rezko's help?" the release asks. Obama and his wife, Michelle, purchased a century-old mansion from a Chicago doctor in 2005 for $1.65-million. On the same day the Obamas closed on their house, Rezko's wife, Rita Rezko, bought a vacant lot next door from the same seller, at the full asking price. While the lots were being sold separately, and the seller has confirmed that the Obamas got no discount from Rezko purchasing the lot next door, the GOP news release suggests Obama flip-flopped on the issue of whether he could afford to buy the vacant lot purchased by Rezko. "Obama originally said that he could not afford to purchase the parcel of land Rezko's wife purchased and that the house itself was already a stretch." "But Obama later said that he did not need help purchasing 'both or either of the tracts' of land involved in the purchase of his Chicago home." The first statement is accurate. It comes from an interview Obama had with the Chicago Tribune, published Nov. 1, 2006: "It was 'already a stretch' to buy the house, Obama said, so the vacant lot was not affordable for his family." The second quote is based on a Time magazine reporter asking Obama for a March 6, 2008, story: "Did you generally or expressively state a need for help in buying both or either of the tracts?" Obama: "No, I didn't need help." This answer isn't the clear contradiction it's made out to be. Obama was not asked if he could afford to buy both of the tracts, he was asked if he ever told Rezko that he needed help buying both or either of the tracts. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times in March 2008, Obama said the sellers had originally sought to sell the house together with the vacant lot next door, but when the property sat on the market for a long time, they decided to separate the lots. The second vacant lot was big enough to be developed. So by the time the Obamas first saw the house, it was being marketed separately. Obama has consistently said that he only ever pursued the purchase of the home, not the lot. In that context, he would have had no reason to tell Rezko he couldn't afford both lots. And with his recent book advances, he apparently had the money to buy the house without Rezko's help. (His 2005 financial disclosure form states that he received $378,239 in book royalties; and $847,167 in a book advance.) His answer to Time appears to reflect that. The GOP appears to be parsing words in hopes of scoring a "gotcha" that just isn't there. We rate the statement False.	None	Republican National Committee	None	None	None	2008-06-17T00:00:00	2008-06-05	['Tony_Rezko', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-08582	A $300 million stimulus allocation to Wisconsin "has led to the creation of tens of thousands of jobs in every corner of this state."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2010/sep/26/tom-nelson/tom-nelson-says-initial-stimulus-allocation-create/	If you want to incite lively conversation during halftime of your next Packer party, ask how many jobs have been created by the federal stimulus. Let’s just say that opinions differ -- widely -- on how effective the stimulus has been. If your party-goers include Tom Nelson, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, he might chime in before anyone reached for another cheese curd. "I have a track record of dealing with tough budgets as a vehicle, as a means to get people back to work," Nelson said in a radio interview that aired a week before his Sept. 14 primary win. "And we were one of the first states in the country to pass and to implement a statewide stimulus that has led to the creation of tens of thousands of jobs in every corner of this state." That’s a lot of new jobs. Nelson, the majority leader of the state Assembly, used the term "statewide stimulus." But he told PolitiFact Wisconsin he meant the federal stimulus money that was distributed throughout the state. More specifically, Nelson said he was referring in the radio interview to the 2009 Wisconsin Act 2. That law, which Nelson voted for, was adopted in February 2009 by three-vote margins in both the Assembly and the Senate. It was a budget-adjustment measure that also directed an initial $300 million in federal stimulus funds to the state Department of Transportation. The money was for 47 projects, mostly on highways and freeways. So, for Nelson’s "tens of thousands" of jobs statement to be correct, that $300 million would have to have created at least 20,000 jobs. Did it? From the beginning, stimulus job-count figures have been beset with problems, in Wisconsin and around the country. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for example, found that an October 2009 report by the White House -- claiming stimulus money created or saved more than 10,000 jobs in Wisconsin -- was rife with errors, double counting and inflated numbers. In January 2010, the White House abandoned its method of counting jobs "created or saved." Instead, it began labeling jobs as having been funded by stimulus dollars. That isn’t to say the stimulus has not had any effect. A July 2010 paper by two economists -- one from the public sector and one rom the private -- said stimulus spending created 2.7 million jobs. But Nelson’s claim was not about all stimulus money, just that initial gush of cash given to the DOT. Nelson said he based his jobs statement on "talking points," which he later said were based on two sources: The state website that tracks federal stimulus spending, which says 63,000 jobs have been created or saved. A November 2009 news release from state Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison), which cites two statements about new jobs. One statement, from a contractors group and three unions, referred to a study that said the 2009 state budget would create more than 25,000 jobs. The other statement, from a transportation builders group, predicted the state budget and "remaining federal stimulus dollars will support" more than 28,500 jobs. But Nelson is mixing apples and oranges. The first talking point refers to jobs created or saved, when Nelson’s comment referred only to jobs created. What’s more, the 63,000 figure is based on all stimulus money given to the state as of August 2010, not the initial $300 million Nelson originally cited. The second talking point moves everything to a different source. It claims the state budget -- not stimulus money -- would create the jobs cited. Or the budget and remaining stimulus money. Again, Nelson is off point. There are hard numbers -- rather than predictions -- that Nelson could have used to gauge the effect of the $300 million given to DOT. PolitiFact Wisconsin analyzed figures from Recovery.gov, the federal website that tracks stimulus funds. The latest data available show that, through the first half of 2010, the $300 million cited by Nelson funded 1,203 jobs. There’s no way to know how many were created and how many were saved. But that’s miles away from Nelson’s original claim. OK, almost time for the second half kickoff. Where does all of this leave us? Nelson stated that an initial $300 million in stimulus money for road projects created tens of thousands of jobs in Wisconsin. As evidence, he turns to much broader measures -- jobs created or saved, all stimulus spending, the state budget and stimulus money. But the actual jobs figure from the initial allotment barely exceeds 1,200 -- and even that is a mix of jobs created and jobs saved. We rate Nelson’s statement False.	None	Tom Nelson	None	None	None	2010-09-26T09:00:00	2010-09-07	['None']
-farg-00232	"I've been on the Armed Services Com for 10 years. No call or meeting w/Russian ambassador. Ever."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/03/mccaskills-russian-flub/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Claire McCaskill	Eugene Kiely	['campaign']	McCaskill’s Russian Flub	March 2, 2017	[' Twitter – Thursday, March 2, 2017 ']	['None']
-snes-01173	Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg bought a "super-yacht" for $150 million.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-mark-zuckerberg-buy-a-150-million-yacht/	None	Technology	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Did Mark Zuckerberg Buy a $150 Million Yacht?	19 January 2018	None	['Mark_Zuckerberg']
-snes-03646	Tequila fights viruses, aids weight loss, and is beneficial for people afflicted with gastrointestinal illness.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/drinking-tequila-health-benefits/	None	Medical	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Drinking Tequila Provides Many Health Benefits?	2 November 2016	None	['None']
-abbc-00067	On the eve of the September 2013 election, Tony Abbott promised that there would be no cuts to SBS under a Coalition government.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-27/no-cuts-to-the-sbs-promise-check/5391126	None	['television-broadcasting', 'broadcasting', 'information-and-communication', 'media', 'abbott-tony', 'liberals', 'federal-government', 'australia']	None	None	['television-broadcasting', 'broadcasting', 'information-and-communication', 'media', 'abbott-tony', 'liberals', 'federal-government', 'australia']	Promise check: No cuts to SBS	Sun 8 May 2016, 7:37am	None	['Tony_Abbott', 'Coalition_(Australia)']
-tron-01293	The University of Kentucky has removed Holocaust studies	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/holocaust-kentucky/	None	education	None	None	None	The University of Kentucky has removed Holocaust studies	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-00367	Guy the Beagle Rode in Queen Elizabeth’s Car for the Royal Wedding	none	https://www.truthorfiction.com/guy-the-beagle-rode-in-queen-elizabeths-car-for-the-royal-wedding/	None	animals	None	None	['animals', 'celebrities', 'england', 'Royal Family']	Guy the Beagle Rode in Queen Elizabeth’s Car for the Royal Wedding	May 25, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-15238	"This is the most generous country in the world when it comes to immigration. There are a million people a year who legally immigrate to the United States."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2015/aug/06/marco-rubio/rubio-america-most-generous-when-it-comes-legal-im/	When U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida addressed the topic of immigration during the first Republican debate, he portrayed our country as the leading repository of legal immigrants. "This is the most generous country in the world when it comes to immigration," Rubio said Aug. 6. "There are a million people a year who legally immigrate to the United States and people feel like we are being taken advantage of." Rubio went on to talk about people who call his office in frustration as they wait years to come to the United States legally. Statements about illegal immigration by Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and businessman Donald Trump were hot topics during the debate. Here, we will fact-check whether Rubio got his figure right, and we will explain what he means about the United States being the "most generous in the world when it comes to immigration." Legal immigration Rubio’s stance on how to change immigration laws has been a hot topic since 2013 since Rubio and seven other senators crafted bipartisan legislation that passed the Senate. The bill included a pathway to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants, though one with significant hurdles. But the House wasn’t interested in that approach, and after that died, Rubio said he still favored changing immigration law through piecemeal bills. In May, Rubio said at the National Review Forum that "We have a legal immigration system in America that accepts 1 million people a year, legally. No other country in the world even comes close to that." As we explained in our earlier fact-check, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security keeps track of the number of new legal permanent residents a year, and in 2013 it was just shy of 1 million at 990,553. Of the 2013 number, about 46 percent were new arrivals, and about 54 percent were people already in the United States whose status was upgraded to "permanent." As for how the United States stacks up against other countries in terms of legal immigration, we turned to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Formed in 1961, the OECD collects data on a wide range of topics, including immigration. We looked at the data in two ways for 2013: First, the sheer number of legal immigrants and secondly, the number of new immigrants as a percentage of the population. OECD standardizes the data from various countries to make them comparable with those in the United States. That process aims to count only permanent residents and exclude other categories such as seasonal workers or students. When we fact-checked Rubio’s claim in May, the OECD was in the process of standardizing the data for 2013, but expected the United States to be in the top spot for the sheer number of immigrants with nearly 1 million immigrants. Provisional figures by OECD showed that Germany had 466,000 while the United Kingdom had 291,000. In per capita rates,the United States placed 19th out of 24 countries. That means that the United States received fewer immigrants per capita in 2012-13 compared with several European countries, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Our ruling Rubio said, "This is the most generous country in the world when it comes to immigration. There are million people a year who legally immigrate to the United States." Rubio got his number correct: Nearly 1 million legal immigrants came to the United States in 2013, according to data from the federal government. In terms of sheer numbers, that puts the United States ahead of other countries, but not in terms of a percentage of the population. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2015-08-06T22:38:38	2015-08-06	['United_States']
-pomt-04143	AIG has fully repaid the federal government "plus a profit of more than $22 billion."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jan/02/american-international-group/aig-says-it-has-repaid-government-plus-profit/	New Year’s Day football watchers got a heavy dose of rah, rah from AIG, the big insurance company that was bailed out by federal taxpayers. An ad called "Thank You, America" featured scenes from Hurricane Sandy, tornado-ravaged Joplin, Mo., and the World Trade Center — disasters the company insured — with the message: We paid you back. AIG has repaid "everything, plus a profit of more than $22 billion," an employee in the ad says. Text on the screen soon flashes: "$205 billion, paid to America from AIG." You’ll see the ad over the next two weeks as you watch sports, news and the Golden Globes. We thought you might wonder: Is that true? Did the company pay back its loans plus a profit? Final stock sale Back in 2008, AIG was in deep trouble. AIG Financial Products had invested heavily in complicated financial instruments called credit default swaps. As financial journalist Michael Lewis put it in his book The Big Short, AIG became, essentially, the world’s biggest owner of subprime mortgage bonds. When those bonds turned out to be dangerously hollow, the financial world unraveled. Bear Stearns failed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed and Lehman Bros. went bankrupt. After markets reacted badly to the Lehman bankruptcy, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department decided to rescue AIG. Offering $182 billion to stabilize the company, the federal government became its largest stockholder. Two years ago, the Treasury held 92 percent of AIG’s common stock — more than a billion and a half shares. The company made significant changes, including slashing bad investments made by AIG Financial Products, the division that oversaw the controversial credit default swaps. The federal government gradually sold its stake. Last month, the Treasury sold the last shares for an overall "positive return" of $22.7 billion. Andrew Ross Sorkin, a New York Times columnist and author of Too Big to Fail, called AIG the "turnaround of the year." Still, the New York Times editorial board and critics of the bailout point out that amount doesn’t take into account tax breaks the company got as part of the deal. Former members of an oversight panel said in March that a special tax exemption offered by the Treasury in 2008 amounted to a "stealth bailout." It allowed AIG to count net operating losses against future tax bills, which "some estimate has contributed to $17.7 billion in profits for the company," according to the group of former oversight panelists, including chair Elizabeth Warren, now a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. So, have the government’s loans been repaid, with a "positive return" of $22 billion for taxpayers? Yes. Was the entire U.S. bailout of AIG, including special tax provisions, that profitable? No. Our ruling AIG says it honored its commitment to repay the government, plus a profit of more than $22 billion. It's true that the government has recouped the $182 billion it loaned AIG, plus $22.7 billion. Still, critics have a point that a special tax provision granted to aid the struggling company substantially offsets that "profit." We rate the company’s claim Mostly True.	None	American International Group	None	None	None	2013-01-02T15:51:12	2013-01-01	['None']
-pomt-02627	In 2011, Carlos López-Cantera "staunchly supported" a Florida bill modeled after Arizona’s immigration law	mostly false	/florida/statements/2014/jan/21/democratic-hispanic-caucus-florida-miami-dade-coun/democratic-hispanic-group-says-carlos-lopez-canter/	Gov. Rick Scott named former House Republican leader and Miami-Dade property appraiser Carlos López-Cantera as his lieutenant governor and runningmate on Jan. 14, 2014. López-Cantera was born in Spain to Cuban parents and lives in a county with a large number of Hispanic voters. Democrats dove into López-Cantera’s past record on immigration and launched immediate attacks, including about a controversial 2011 proposal known as the Florida Immigration Enforcement Act (HB 7089). "In 2011, Lopez-Cantera staunchly supported HB 7089, the anti-immigrant bill modeled after the racial profiling Arizona law, which Rick Scott embraced during his first governor's race," said the Miami-Dade chapter of the Democratic Hispanic caucus of Florida in a Jan. 16 press release. "Lopez-Cantera called it a ‘common sense’ and ‘reasonable’ bill in a press release on March 10, 2011." The Florida Democratic Party launched a similar attack. We wanted to know, did López-Cantera "staunchly support" House Bill 7089? López-Cantera’s comments about an Arizona-style law in 2010 During his Republican primary in 2010, Scott vowed to bring an Arizona-style law to Florida. "Rick Scott backs Arizona’s law; he'll bring it to Florida and let our police check if the people they arrest are here legally. That’s common sense," his campaign said. Signed into law by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer in 2010, that law requires police who stop a person to verify their immigration status if they reasonably suspect the person of being in the country illegally. (The U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the law in 2012.) The law became a focal point of a hotly contested Republican primary between Scott and then Attorney General Bill McCollum as they battled for conservative voters. In May 2010, McCollum announced he would support an Arizona-style law. Though Scott strongly supported the measure as a candidate, he abandoned it once he became governor. PolitiFact Florida rated the campaign pledge a Promise Broken on our Scott-O-Meter, a database of his campaign promises. Back during the 2010 campaign, the Miami Herald interviewed Hispanic legislators, including López-Cantera, about McCollum’s support for the Arizona law. "As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think Florida has a problem like Arizona does," López-Cantera said. "I realize there’s a problem in Arizona. They have a serious problem, but I don't think you can compare it to Florida." In August 2010, López-Cantera told the Tampa Bay Times: "I am concerned that this could jeopardize civil liberties." The topic of immigration reform remained a concern for López-Cantera after Scott won the primary, and it appeared the two had a conversation about it. "I asked about the issue going forward, and he (Scott) said immigration is an issue, but the more pressing one is jobs and the economy," López-Cantera told the Miami Herald in September 2010. Immigration bills during 2011 session López-Cantera served as the state House majority leader and would have to deal with a range of Republican viewpoints on immigration reform: both hardliners who wanted a crackdown and some Hispanic lawmakers and constituents who viewed such a push as anti-Hispanic. During the 2011 session, legislators introduced the Florida Immigration Enforcement Act as HB 7089 and a similar bill in the Senate, SB 2040. The bills were not identical to Arizona’s law, but for immigrant advocates it raised fears that it would increase racial profiling. Some business-backed groups also raised concerns because there was a component that related to employers. The House bill would have required police to check the immigration status of a person subject of a criminal investigation if the police had "reasonable suspicion" the person was in the country illegally. Also, employers would be required to check workers’ immigration status. The Senate counterpart didn’t go as far and only let police police check the status of an inmate -- not a person only under investigation -- and it gave some wiggle room to employers. In March 2011, the House judiciary committee passed the bill 12-6. López-Cantera, Miami-Dade’s delegation chair, wasn’t a member of that committee. But in his press release after the vote he spoke positively about the law but didn’t specifically state how he would vote on it: "Chairman Snyder and the Judiciary Committee recognize the unique and diverse history of our state and have worked hard to bring all stakeholders to the table to produce this piece of common sense, Florida immigration reform. This legislation is designed to preserve employment opportunities for Floridians through the use of the E-Verify system. "The bill does not require law enforcement officers to ask individuals for immigration documentation during routine traffic stops. It does, however, give law enforcement officers the tools necessary to enforce the immigration laws of the United States." "I look forward to watching this reasonable and effective approach to immigration reform work its way through the legislative process." Activists opposing the bills turned up the heat and particularly targeted López-Cantera and Sen. Anitere Flores, a sponsor of the Senate bill and another Hispanic Republican from Miami-Dade. In April, left-leaning and Hispanic groups announced they would launch Spanish-language radio ads calling out the two legislators. Groups also held a protest in front of López-Cantera’s office. While the attacks were going on, the Herald reported that López-Cantera was now against the House measure and planned to vote against it as well. "Florida doesn’t need an immigration law," he said in April 2011. The Senate passed a version of the bill, but the full House never took a vote. The measure was dead by the end of the session. We asked for evidence from the Miami-Dade group that made the claim but didn’t hear back. However Joshua Karp, spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party, said there was a period of time when López-Cantera supported the bill but later flip-flopped. We were unsuccessful at getting a direct response from López-Cantera. A spokesman for the Republican Party of Florida sent us a statement arguing that Florida’s proposed bill was different from the Arizona law and repeated this line from López-Cantera’s press release: "The bill does not require law enforcement officers to ask individuals for immigration documentation during routine traffic stops." Our ruling The Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida’s Miami-Dade chapter that stated López-Cantera "staunchly supported" a bill modeled after Arizona’s immigration law. López-Cantera never had to take a vote on the bill, so the only evidence we can evaluate is his statements about the bill. At first, López-Cantera said he looked forward to "watching this reasonable and effective approach to immigration reform work its way through the legislative process." That’s a positive statement, but hardly "staunch" support. But as protesters turned up the heat on López-Cantera, he became decidedly opposed, saying "Florida doesn’t need an immigration law." We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Democratic Hispanic Caucus, Miami-Dade Chapter	None	None	None	2014-01-21T11:27:26	2014-01-16	['Arizona']
-goop-02484	Selena Gomez “Stage 5 Clinger” And “Driving Away” The Weekend?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/selena-gomez-clingy-needy-the-weeknd/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Selena Gomez “Stage 5 Clinger” And “Driving Away” The Weekend?	2:33 pm, September 8, 2017	None	['None']
-vogo-00547	Statement: “A lot of people don’t realize it. If the Chargers disappear tomorrow and the city decided to tear down Qualcomm, San Diego State would lose its Division I-A sports status. Not just in football, but across the board. Because you have to have a Division I-A football team to have a Division I-A sports status. And to have that you have to have a stadium over a certain size,” Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani said May 19 at a meeting with stadium boosters.	determination: misleading	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-how-would-losing-qualcomm-affect-sdsu/	Analysis: The NCAA separates college sports into three divisions, with Division I having the most athletic scholarships and the highest level of competition.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: How Would Losing Qualcomm Affect SDSU?	July 22, 2010	None	['San_Diego_State_University', 'San_Diego_Chargers']
-tron-00889	Security Compromise at Ebay Resulted in Requests to Change Passwords	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ebay-password-change/	None	computers	None	None	None	Security Compromise at Ebay Resulted in Requests to Change Passwords	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-14045	"Vietnamese is the third most commonly spoken language in Texas."	true	/texas/statements/2016/may/26/john-cornyn/john-cornyn-says-vietnamese-third-most-common-lang/	John Cornyn recently stressed that Communist Vietnam, visited by President Barack Obama, needs to improve its human rights record. Cornyn opened his Senate floor remarks, though, by calling Vietnamese residents of his home state of Texas "some of the most accomplished people." The second-term Republican added: "Many are surprised when I tell them that Vietnamese is the third most commonly spoken language in Texas." English is most-spoken, Cornyn told his colleagues, with Spanish ranking No. 2. Makes sense. But we wondered about his Vietnamese language claim. By email, Cornyn spokesman Drew Brandewie told us Cornyn reached his conclusion based on U.S. Census bureau charts on languages spoken at home posted in October 2015. By far, according to the bureau’s 2009-2013 American Community Survey, English and Spanish were most-spoken at home in Texas--and Vietnamese placed a distant third, . Brandewie also noted news accounts that cited the bureau data including a November 2015 Texas Tribune story. A chart with the Tribune story presents the state’s most-spoken languages other than English under this summary: "Of the nearly 24 million people in Texas five years or older, 65 percent speak only English at home. The rest speak more than 160 languages combined." Top 10 languages other than English spoken in Texas households Language Number of Speakers Spanish 6,983,380 Vietnamese 193,408 Chinese* 140,971 Tagalog 72,248 German 69,140 French 60,730 Hindi 59,602 Urdu 57,662 Korean 55,794 Arabic 55,304 *Includes Cantonese, Mandarin other Chinese languages SOURCES: News story, " As Texas Grows, More Languages are Spoken at Home," Texas Tribune, Nov. 26, 2015, chart citing 2009-2013 American Community Survey. Some 164 languages are lately spoken in Texas, the story said. Significantly, it said, changing "immigration patterns are increasing the number of other foreign languages spoken in Texas households, from Vietnamese and Chinese to Tagalog, the language spoken in the Philippines." 2014 census data Seeking the latest available data, we reached out to bureau spokesman Robert Bernstein who emailed us a breakdown drawing on results from the 2014 one-year ACS indicating that some 201,997 Texas residents age 5 or older speak Vietnamese at home. That count trailed only the 2014 survey’s tally of English-only speakers in Texas (16,126,855) and Spanish speakers (7,465,279). Some perspective; 65 percent of the estimated 25 million Texans age 5 or older speak only English at home, according to the survey, and 30 percent speak Spanish--while only 0.81 percent speak Vietnamese. That is, there’s a big dropoff from second to third place. Bernstein also provided national results on languages spoken at home. According to the 2014 ACS, 79 percent of the 299 million U.S. residents 5 or older speak only English, 13 percent speak Spanish and, in third place, about 5.5 percent speak French. Next, per the survey, 1 percent of residents speak Chinese at home with 0.5 percent, nearly 1.5 million residents, speaking Vietnamese. Longer view We also heard back from Lloyd Potter, the state demographer, who noted by email that according to the ACS covering 2010-2014, English, Spanish and Vietnamese were the three most-spoken languages in Texas. Those were followed, the five-year results suggest, by Chinese, other Asian languages, African languages, Tagalog, German, French and Urdu. Our ruling Cornyn said Vietnamese is the third-most-spoken language in Texas. Survey data supports this claim though English or Spanish is spoken by far more residents. We rate the claim True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/6c1cadb7-066f-4ab9-9e61-00a254d1ed01	None	John Cornyn	None	None	None	2016-05-26T14:30:29	2016-05-23	['Texas', 'Vietnam']
-pose-00460	Will "Support development of high-speed rail networks across the country. Providing passengers with safe high-speed rail will have significant environmental and metropolitan planning advantages and help diversify our nation's transportation infrastructure. Our domestic rail freight capacity must also be strengthened because our demand for rail transportation has never been greater, leaving many key transportation hubs stretched to capacity. Obama and Biden are committed to renewing the federal government's commitment to high speed rail so that our nation's transportation infrastructure continues to support, and not hinder, our nation's long-term economic growth."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/480/support-high-speed-rail/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Support high-speed rail	2010-01-07T13:27:00	None	['Joe_Biden', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-07561	"Originally, Democrats promised that if you liked your health care plan, you could keep it. One year later we know that you need a waiver to keep your plan."	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2011/mar/31/morgan-griffith/morgan-griffith-says-you-need-waiver-keep-your-hea/	U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith is on the long list of Republicans who observed the first anniversary of the health-care reform law by firing out a scathing statement. Griffith, who represents the 9th Congressional District in Southwest Virginia, said in a March 25 newsletter that Americans were misled about the bill. "Originally, Democrats promised that if you liked your health-care plan, you could keep it," Griffith wrote. "One year later we know that you need a waiver to keep your plan." We gave his statement a checkup. Roughly 160 million Americans get health insurance through employee benefits, and millions more buy it on the private market, according to Tim Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and a consumer advocate for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Our research turned up no evidence of blanket waivers being required by the government. But experts did tell us Uncle Sam was issuing some waivers for limited-benefit plans and coverages that were not meeting a new requirement to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on health benefits rather than administrative or other costs. Beth Breeding, Griffith’s press secretary, confirmed that Griffith’s comments refer primarily to the limited-benefit, or "mini-med" plans popular at huge employers with lots of part-time or low-wage workers. Two of the largest users are Wal-Mart and McDonalds. These policies often have annual limits on on total payouts. Jost said the caps can be as low $2,000. The new law bars annual benefit limits, starting in 2014. The ban will be phased in over the next three years, allowing benefit caps of $750,000 in 2011, $1.25 million in 2012 and $2 million in 2013. But the health-care reform law provides an out for plans that can’t meet these new limits without jacking up premiums. If an insurer can convince regulators that the new caps would cause premiums on a plan to soar, regulators can issue a waiver. During the first two months of this year, 1,040 waivers were issued for limited-benefit plans covering 2.6 million workers, according to the the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s roughly 1.6 percent of the employees with health care coverage. Jost believes virtually every mini-med plan in America has sought a waiver. "These waivers include some pretty good plans with $250,000 or $500,000 annual limits that just can’t quite get to the threshold," Jost said. "Some offer pretty decent coverage, and some offer virtually nothing." Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said mini-med plans are expected to all but vanish by 2014. He said the government predicts many businesses will bring their plans into compliance with new standards, even though it will likely force businesses to spend more. But Tanner stressed that most companies and their employees will not go through a waiver process. "That’s just not the case now," Tanner said. During the health care debate, President Barack Obama promised Americans would be able to keep their plans, if they like them. PolitiFact rated that statement Half True, because while many elements of the health care system will not change, private companies retain the right to switch and tweak their health care plans. Many do so now, and they will continue to do so after 2014. When Obama later said nothing in the law will force most employers to change plans, the statement was rated True. While employers retain the right to change plans, they are not, in most cases, required to do. So here’s our final diagnosis. Griffith wrote in a column excoriating insurance provisions in the health care reform law that "you need a waiver to keep your plan." His press secretary told us the congressman was only talking about limited-benefit plans, although Griffith made no such distinction in his writing. About 2.6 million Americans are covered by limited-benefit plans. That’s a tiny percentage of the 160 million people who have employer-sponsored health coverage, and millions more who have other forms of coverage. Contrary to what Griffith said, very few Americans will need a waiver to keep their health-care plan. We rate his statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Morgan Griffith	None	None	None	2011-03-31T17:47:30	2011-03-25	['None']
-tron-02074	White House help with rescuing a small boy and paying for his funeral?	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bush-funeral/	None	inspirational	None	None	None	White House help with rescuing a small boy and paying for his funeral?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-06001	Prospective new gang members are being initiated by killing the drivers of cars who flash their headlights at them.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lights-out/	None	Automobiles	None	Snopes Staff	None	Flashing Headlights Gang Initiation	30 November 1998	None	['None']
-goop-01204	Keith Urban Did “Walk Out” On Nicole Kidman After “String Of Arguments,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/keith-urban-nicole-kidman-walked-out-separated-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Keith Urban Did NOT “Walk Out” On Nicole Kidman After “String Of Arguments,” Despite Reports	5:14 pm, April 11, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-03427	A Federal Judge Halted 2010 National Day of Prayer	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/national-day-prayer-unconstitutional/	None	religious	None	None	None	A Federal Judge Halted 2010 National Day of Prayer	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-para-00042	The fine print of the Coalition's Direct Action plan contains "a great, big new carbon tax".	mostly false	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/30/mark-butler/does-coalition-plan-introduce-carbon-tax-after-all/index.html	None	['Carbon Tax', 'Climate change', 'Direct Action', 'Environment']	Mark Butler	Michael Koziol, Peter Fray	None	Does the Coalition plan to introduce a carbon tax after all?	Friday, August 30, 2013 at 12:28 p.m.	None	['None']
-pomt-00692	Says the Clintons "burst through their own self-pronounced guidelines" by accepting foreign donations. "There is a clip of Bill Clinton saying we're not going to take foreign donations."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2015/may/04/joe-scarborough/scarborough-clinton-foundation-broke-its-own-rules/	A 2012 Q&A session between Bill Clinton and Ashley Judd has surfaced as evidence in the case against the Clinton Foundation and its acceptance of foreign donations while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. In the video, Clinton’s words seem hypocritical. Here’s how MSNBC host Joe Scarborough described it on his April 30, 2015, show. "There is a clip of Bill Clinton saying we're not going to take foreign donations because if somebody had business before the State Department, there would be an appearance of impropriety," Scarborough said. "They not only burst through what the guidelines of the White House put up, they burst through their own self-pronounced guidelines." Scarborough is right that there's a video clip of Clinton dicussing foreign donations, but as this fact-check will show, he misleads viewers by saying it's a sign the Clintons burst through their "self-pronounced guidelines" of taking foreign donations. What Bill Clinton said The 2012 interview took place at the London School of Economics. Clinton was asked by a fawning Judd about the creation of the Clinton Global Initiative -- which is, effectively, a subsidiary of the Clinton Foundation. Initiative projects range from paying for technology so that small stoves to charge cell phones, to loans for small businesses, to free Web ads to raise money for overseas development nonprofits. As often happens with Clinton, he gave a sidewinder of an answer. But here’s the relevant portion of his response for our purposes: "The Clinton Global Initiative meets every year. Then we do one (meeting) just on the American economy, which we will continue to do until we reach full employment. We had one (meeting) in Hong Kong for Asia, which I had to suspend those while Hillary was secretary of state for good reason. In order to do one around the world and make the economics work and keep the entry fee fairly low, you have to have sponsors. And if your wife is secretary of state and you get sponsors in another country, they may be doing it just because they believe in it, but it opens up too many questions of conflicts of interest. So we suspended those. "But if she leaves the State Department in January, then I expect we’ll have one in 2013 in Latin America and then another shortly thereafter in Asia because they’re interested in it." As you can see, Scarborough’s comments aren’t out of thin air. But Clinton is talking specifically about the Clinton Global Initiative. That’s an important distinction, it turns out, because of the specific guidelines set out by the Clintons when Hillary Clinton was nominated as secretary of state. A bevy of initiatives The Clintons (and we say Clintons to describe them as a group, but Hillary Clinton was walled off from the organizations as secretary of state) operate several separate initiatives under the umbrella of the Clinton Foundation. While Hillary Clinton ran the State Department, the foundation oversaw the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, the Clinton Climate Initiative, the Clinton Guistra Sustainable Growth Initiative and the Clinton Hunter Development Initiative. (The last one had nothing to do with hunting. It was named for Scottish entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter and focused on development projects in Rwanda and Malawi.) The foundation still runs those different programs, although it has dropped the initiative label from some of them. The point is, the Clinton Global Initiative was one of a handful of programs under the foundation’s umbrella. The modus operandi of the Clinton Global Initiative is to act as a broker between donors and doers. It holds big meetings to bring together governments, donors, and non-governmental organizations with shared concerns. The initiative charges fees to join as members, seeks sponsors to hold these big meetings and then pushes members to make big dollar commitments to key projects. Brian Mittendorf, a professor of accounting at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business who follows nonprofit filings, including those of the Clinton Foundation, said that most of the money never passes through the Clinton Global Initiative’s hands. "CGI (the Clinton Global Initiative) doesn't implement the projects but instead acts as a ‘facilitator’ to match donors and get commitments to action," Mittendorf said. "So, those commitments are not reflected as donations to the Clinton Foundation or CGI." To get an idea of the contrast, in 2011, the global initiative had $26 million in revenues, but boasted that it secured commitments of $7.39 billion for projects that would roll out over many years. The promises of the Clintons and the memorandum of understanding So now we get to the Clintons "self-pronounced guidelines." When Hillary Clinton was nominated by Barack Obama as secretary of state in 2008, the Clinton Foundation instantly emerged as a stumbling block to her confirmation. The Obama transition team attempted to deal with the possible conflicts of interest with a memorandum of understanding between the Clinton Foundation and the new administration. That memo created different requirements for the Clinton Global Initiative and other Clinton entities. According to the memorandum, the Clinton Global Initiative would be spun off as a separate nonprofit entity that could take no money from any foreign government. In addition, the Clinton Global Initiative agreed not to hold any big meetings outside the United States. The other Clinton programs and initiatives could continue to accept money from foreign governments, but they had to report new donors or any existing government donor that decided to "increase materially its commitment." Memorandum terms Clinton Global Initiative Memorandum terms Clinton Foundation and other Clinton subsidiaries No donations from foreign governments Can accept donations from foreign governments, increased reporting requirements No large meetings outside the United States Foreign meetings allowed This, again, is key, because Clinton was speaking only of the Clinton Global Iniative in his 2012 remarks. Clinton Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian said the global initiative was treated differently because the initiative mainly brought funders together. As such, the global initiative did not need to collect money directly from foreign governments. In contrast, Minassian said, a program like the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative -- now called the Clinton Health Access Initiative -- ran projects that delivered health care to people in developing countries. "You couldn’t stop the money for AIDS because millions of people depended on that for their drugs," Minassian said. "Those were programs we actually implemented. No one wanted to interrupt that because it would make no sense." So why would the Clinton Global Initiative have any need at all for funds from foreign governments? Minassian said such help made large foreign meetings possible. "You need to be invited. You need additional police and security," Minassian said. "The host country is a key sponsor. This is not like holding a meeting at the Sheraton in New York City." Minassian said that after a meeting in December 2008 in Hong Kong, the program limited its annual gatherings to New York City from 2009 to 2012, the years Hillary Clinton headed the State Department. The first meeting outside America took place about 10 months after she left. It was held December 2013 in Brazil. Foreign money did go to the Clinton Global Initiative The restriction on the global initiative applied specifically to foreign governments. However, the initiative could and did accept donations from foreign donors (Scarborough just said foreign donations, not donations from foreign governments). There are two ways to support the initiative. Membership costs $20,000 and comes with a ticket to go to the annual meeting. Sponsors pitch in substantially more to help pay for the meetings themselves. In return, they get publicity, multiple tickets to the meeting and other perks like their own meeting room at the annual gathering. The organization’s Internal Revenue Service filings show total revenues of $28.2 million in 2012 and $26 million in 2011. The split between member fees and sponsorships is unclear, but Minassian said those are the only two sources of revenues. In 2011, foundations backed by Ukrainian businessman Victor Pinchuk and Dubai-based Indian Sunny Varkey helped fund the annual meeting in New York. So did the French bank Credit Agricole and Indo Gold, an Australian mining company with investments in India, Africa and Germany. During Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearings, senators raised concerns about any foreign entity, government or private, making donations to the Clinton Foundation. The policy for the Clinton Global Initiative that emerged from the memorandum only banned accepting funds from foreign governments, along with no longer holding large meetings outside America. Since Hillary Clinton left the State Department, the governments of Germany, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Oman, and others have given money to the global initiative. Minassian said that now that she is running for president, that will stop, as will plans to hold gatherings overseas. Our ruling Scarborough accused Bill Clinton of hypocrisy, saying the former president violated his own self-pronounced guidelines by accepting foreign donations while his wife was secretary of state. As evidence, Scarborough pointed to comments made by Clinton in 2012. But Clinton's comments were more narrowly focused than Scarborough let on. Clinton said the Clinton Global Initiative didn’t take donations from foreign entities while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state because it opens questions of conflicts of interest. That prohibition is outlined in a memorandum of understanding signed by the foundation and the Obama administration. There is, as of yet, no accusation that the initiative broke that term of the agreement. As far as the other Clinton programs and initiatives, the Clintons were permitted to collect donations from foreign governments. But they did agree to increased reporting requirements, though the Clinton Foundation says it failed to meet the reporting requirements in some cases. In short, there are serious questions about how the Clinton Foundation reported foreign government donations. But Bill Clinton’s 2012 interview provides little extra fodder -- beyond a juicy soundbyte -- for those questioning the Clintons’ decision to take foreign government money. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Joe Scarborough	None	None	None	2015-05-04T18:32:22	2015-04-30	['Bill_Clinton']
-snes-02364	A respected physicist has warned that fidget spinners could have a harmful effect on the Earth’s center of gravity.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fidget-spinners-affect-gravity/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Physicist Warns That Fidget Spinners Could Affect Earth’s Center of Gravity?	23 May 2017	None	['None']
-farg-00357	President Trump has the “right” to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.	none	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/06/can-trump-fire-mueller/	None	askfactcheck	Sarah Sanders	Robert Farley	['collusion']	Can Trump Fire Mueller?	June 15, 2017	[' Press Gaggle – Tuesday, June 13, 2017 ']	['Robert_Mueller']
-pomt-08559	When each faced a pension funding crisis, Tom Barrett made tough choices and smart cuts while Scott Walker passed $400 million in pension debt to the next generation.	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2010/sep/29/tom-barrett/tom-barrett-says-gubernatorial-rival-scott-walker-/	Republican Scott Walker likes to tout his credentials as a reformer who led a people’s crusade to clean up a county government racked by pension corruption and fiscal mismanagement. His Democratic rival in the governor’s race, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, is taking aim at the heart of Walker’s white-knight appeal -- and his record as Milwaukee County executive -- in a multimedia barrage. In a statewide TV spot, buttressed by his campaign’s blog and Facebook and Twitter accounts, Barrett paints an alternate vision: A county executive who recklessly borrowed a mountain of money to help pay for those bloated county pensions. In a TV ad, Barrett says he and Walker faced the same pension funding crisis. "Under Tom Barrett, the city of Milwaukee met the crisis head on, and Barrett used smart budget cuts to help solve the problem," the ad says. "In Milwaukee County, Scott Walker borrowed $400 million -- $400 million -- and passed the pension debt on to the next generation. So who do you trust? It’s Tom Barrett who’s a straight shooter, with honest plans for Wisconsin." Barrett’s campaign website labels Walker’s borrowing "reckless" and says: "People are angry at politicians who duck the tough choices, kick the can down the road, and then pose for the holy pictures. This is precisely how Scott Walker dealt with the County pension crisis." The issue is an important -- and complicated -- one. The TV ad refers to actions in 2009, one by the city and one by the county, to shore up funding shortfalls in their employee pension funds. Milwaukee County’s dilemma stemmed from three sources. First was the mega-generous pension benefits deal for employees approved by Walker’s predecessor, Tom Ament. It was outrage over the pension deal that drove Ament from office in 2002. Second, stock market losses slammed the county’s pension fund, along with those of many other such funds. Finally, Walker and the County Board underfunded pensions by $41 million from 2004 to 2008. By late 2008, the county faced a nearly $53 million payment from its budget to the pension fund. Instead of making the payment through tax increases or budget cuts, at Walker’s urging the County Board took a borrow-and-invest approach using pension obligation bonds. The county issued $400 million in pension-related notes on March 19, 2009, a county summary of the plan shows. That partially shores up the county pension fund right now, but the county must repay the debt over 25 years. If the invested funds earn 8 percent, it could save the county $240 million. If they don’t earn at least 6.19 percent, the county could wind up paying extra. In year one, the bond deal meant the county paid in $8.5 million less than it would have without the deal. At City Hall, in the fall of 2009 Barrett faced a major pension squeeze that was largely due to the financial crisis and stock market losses. In recent years, the city’s fund had been in such good shape that no payment by the city was required. This time a $49 million contribution was required. To make the payment, Barrett and the Common Council made cuts in library service, fire ladder-truck staffing, public works laborers and others. They also raised fees and property taxes. Before we move on, there are two other things to note: First, Milwaukee County faced the exact same sized contribution as the city did -- $49 million -- in 2007. It made the payment through budget cuts and a County Board-initiated tax increase. Second, city ordinances -- unlike those governing Milwaukee County -- require officials to keep the pension fund at a level where it can pay for all future obligations. That is known as 100 percent funded. The details mentioned in Barrett’s ad are not in dispute. Beyond those details, though, is the main message: Barrett took a responsible approach, while Walker recklessly used a short-term fix that will push costs onto the next generation. Is Barrett right? Let’s start by looking more deeply at pension obligation bonds, also known as POBs, the approach Walker and the county took in 2009. Such bonds are controversial, a 2010 study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College notes. "Many state and local governments remain wary of these transactions," the study says. "Some view POBs as being unfair to future generations, and others see them as overly risky." Why are they considered risky? The bonds are sold to investors and the proceeds are invested, often in securities. That approach is riskier but can bring in higher yields and generate long-term savings, notes Duquesne University business professor James Burnham in his study of pension bonds. Wisconsin is one of 10 states where most of the use of pension obligation bonds has been concentrated. Given the right circumstances, they can be a useful tool for managing pension costs, experts say. The State of Wisconsin has used the approach. The Boston College study looked at every pension obligation bond issue from 1986 to 2009. It noted: "Unfortunately, in practice, the data show that governments with healthy pensions and solid fiscal positions have historically not issued POBs. Rather, the governments that issue POBs are those facing the greatest fiscal stress and thus least able to shoulder the additional risks from a POB." Milwaukee County would certainly fit that profile; numerous independent studies have detailed the county’s structural deficits. Let’s get back to the heart of Barrett’s message, and its three main critiques: 1. The county approach pushes costs onto the next generation. On the face of it, the plan does. It locks Milwaukee County into payments for 25 years in contrast to the pay-as-you-go system pensions are usually paid on. Moody’s rating service analyzed the county’s bond issue and noted that it "will increase the county’s debt burden" to well above average. The Boston College study says taxable pension bonds "transfer a current pension obligation into a long-term, fixed obligation of the government." But others say the county’s overall indebtedness isn’t really changed by the approach, because pensions are paid for on a deferred basis regardless of whether a loan is involved. The POB is just a different way to finance it, said Stephen Gauthier, director of technical services at the Government Finance Officers Association, a membership organization. As a normal practice, the county determines annually how much to contribute to the pension fund based on a 30-year amortization period, county officials note. 2. It’s a bad deal for taxpayers. On this point, it’s too soon to tell, mostly because the county’s calculated gamble is a long-term bet. Should the county’s investment returns on the $400 million badly miss the mark, the deal will be a net loser -- the pensions will cost more than they would have, said David Anderson, senior managing consultant at the PFM Group, the county’s financial adviser. But if the county meets its investment goals over 25 years, the POB deal could save more than $240 million in pension payments, county officials were told. The county took various steps to minimize the risk. It borrowed a large amount but within the range of reasonable by a standard used by Burnham, the Duquesne professor. Its timing on the bond sale was very good. The investments are off to a good start. So those are good signs. But the county skipped a $2 million payment this year to a "stabilization fund" it set up to guard against losses from the bond sale. And the county’s funding problem was so deep that even the $400 million didn’t cover the entire shortfall. The bonds covered 82 percent of it. That means the county has to make contributions on top of the debt repayments. On the cautionary side: The past performance of POBs across the country is not encouraging, the Boston College study found. The study found that "most POBs issued since 1992 are in the red." It was done after the financial crisis, which had a major effect on many pension funds, so factor that in. 3. Tom Barrett faced the same pension crisis and made tough choices and smart cuts instead of borrowing money. Were their situations really comparable? In the big picture, the county’s fund is in tougher shape. When it came to choices, Barrett had little choice but to meet the problem head-on, because the city’s charter ordinance requires that officials keep the pension fund at 100 percent funding. The county is not required to meet that threshold, so it can underfund the account today in hopes that market increases will cover the difference later. Let’s wrap this up. Everyone agrees the approach used by Scott Walker and the County Board carries inherent financial risks -- though it also has potential financial rewards. It does push costs down the road, in this case over a 25-year period, though it’s hard to say at this point whether that will be longer than the payoff without such a loan. Barrett labels the approach "reckless." In his favor, the county fits the profile of troubled municipalities that a study shows haven’t fared as well with POBs. But even critics say POBs can be useful if employed under the right circumstances. And if the return on investments meets best-case projections, it could mean $240 million in savings to the county. We won’t truly know for decades. While the pension challenge Barrett faced was real, it was a one-year wonder as crises go, unlike the county’s ongoing drama. Barrett did avoid borrowing and made cuts in some popular programs -- but he also raised taxes and fees to address it. Beyond that, under the city system Barrett essentially had no choice but to address the problem immediately. We rate the Barrett statement Half True.	None	Tom Barrett	None	None	None	2010-09-29T09:00:00	2010-09-08	['Tom_Barrett_(politician)', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-para-00091	On funding for Labor's Better Schools Plan.	half flip	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/02/tony-abbott/abbotts-flip-school-funding/index.html	None	['Education']	Tony Abbott	Ellie Harvey, Alix Piatek, Peter Fray	None	Abbott's flip on school funding	Friday, August 2, 2013 at 3:44 p.m.	None	['None']
-snes-00334	If the President Is Impeached for Treason, Is Everyone Else Removed from Office as Well?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/treason-impeachment-removal/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	If the President Is Impeached for Treason, Is Everyone Else Removed from Office as Well?	17 July 2018	None	['None']
-tron-01871	Reports of cell phone fires	truth! & unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cell-chargers/	None	household	None	None	None	Reports of cell phone fires	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-bove-00017	IANS Kills Story On Ganga Endangered After WWF-India Says No Such Report This Year	none	https://www.boomlive.in/ians-kills-story-on-ganga-endangered-after-wwf-india-says-no-such-report-this-year/	None	None	None	None	None	IANS Kills Story On Ganga Endangered After WWF-India Says No Such Report This Year	Sep 08 2018 1:58 pm, Last Updated: Sep 10 2018 1:25 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-07425	"Every person on death row was a foster kid."	false	/florida/statements/2011/apr/25/steve-wise/sen-stephen-wise-says-everybody-death-row-was-fost/	Here at PolitiFact Florida, we always welcome suggestions for claims worth checking. This item came to our attention via Twitter from Florida Times Union political columnist Abel Harding. "Sen. Stephen Wise: 'Every prisoner on death row was a foster kid.' Any way to check that @PolitiFact_FL?" We were up for the task. Wise's comment came during the March 30, 2011, Senate Education PreK-12 Committee hearing, during a discussion of SB 1546, a charter school expansion proposal sponsored by Sen. John Thrasher. The measure is aimed at authorizing state universities and other Florida College System schools to enter into charter school contracts with local school districts. Leslie Poole, outreach director for the Washington, D.C.-based The Seed Foundation, a nonprofit that operates two high-performing "urban boarding schools," testified before the committee about the success of the foundation's charter program. The foundation's two schools in the District of Columbia and Maryland have been featured on 60 Minutes. President Barack Obama held a bill-signing at the D.C. school in 2009, where he lauded the program as "a true success story." When asked by Wise how many children in the program came through the foster care system, Poole responded that of the D.C. school's 336 students, about one-third of them have been touched by the child welfare system. "I'll just say this to you members, so you can kind of know what the situation is in Florida," Wise said after Poole's comments."One-third of all the inmates in the State of Florida come through the foster care system. Every person on death row was a foster care kid. This is a program that will make a difference in kids' lives." (You can hear the statement on this video of the meeting posted on the state Senate website. Wise's remark is about 41 minutes into the meeting.) As of April 22, 2011, there are 393 inmates on death row, according to the Florida Department of Corrections. We were startled to hear that every one of these killers has something in common. Could it be that all of them had, at one point, been through the foster care system? We wanted to ask Wise and his legislative staff for the source of his statement. But after calling and e-mailing him and his staff for four days, we never heard back. So we started looking. State agencies and advocates • Department of Corrections: The agency responsible for death row keeps stats on the age, race and gender of death row inmates -- you can view it online -- but has nothing regarding their upbringing, said department spokeswoman Jo Ellyn Rackleff. "All we keep is documents regarding their conviction, none of which would indicate if they were in foster care," Rackleff said in a phone interview. • Florida Department of Children and Families: The agency that administers the state's foster care program says it collects no data on foster care children who wind up on death row. DCF does periodically survey adults ages 18 to 22 to determine their status after they leave foster care, and it produced a 2009 report titled "Independent Living Transitional Services." According to the report, roughly 9 percent of 1,500 respondents between the ages of 18 and 22 said they had been incarcerated within the past 12 months. "We do know that kids who have been in the foster care system have a higher risk of being arrested, but whether or not they end up on death row, that's too specific to know," said Diane Hirth, spokeswoman for DCF. "If we tracked that information, we would have to do it in reverse. Why not track all the foster kids who graduated college and became successful?" • Commission on Capital Cases: Created by the Legislature in 1997, the commission oversees capital punishment cases and ensures that those convicted have proper access to legal representation. Roger Maas, the commission's executive director who has headed the commission since its formation, said he does not have such statistics. "Let me know if you figure out if it's true or not," Maas said. "I've never heard that, but it would be interesting to know." • Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty: This Tampa-based group advocates for the elimination of the death penalty and is headed by Mark Elliott. Elliott said he has not come across any studies similar to what Wise claimed. "It doesn’t sound familiar," Elliott said, before referring us to a Miami-based criminal attorney. • Defense attorney: Terence Lenamon has made a name for himself representing high-profile death penalty cases, and founded the Florida Capital Resource Center, which collects statistics to provide to death penalty defense attorneys. He has been featured on CNN's Nancy Grace show and on the A&E reality crime-series The First 48. Lenamon currently represents Casey Anthony, the Orlando mother charged with murdering her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee Anthony. "I can assure you, not everyone on death row has been in the foster care system," Lenamon said in a phone interview. "I have two guys on there right now who weren't in the foster care system. That right there dispels the theory." Two killers who weren't in foster care The two clients Lenamon was referring to are Wadada Delhall and Harrel Braddy. Delhall was sentenced to death row in September 2008, after a jury found him guilty of the first-degree murder of Hubert McCrae. Delhall reportedly shot McCrae 11 times in front of an auto-repair shop where McCrae worked. McCrae was a witness to a previous murder at the same shop in which Delhall's brother was a suspect. During the sentencing hearing, Delhall's mother, Grace Allen, pleaded with the jury to spare her son's life, according to an Aug. 16, 2008, Miami Herald article. Allen told jurors how Delhall, her eldest son, assumed the responsibility of taking care of his five younger brothers when he was 18, because she was arrested on charges of drug trafficking in 1995. "He took care of his brothers, but he was never in foster care," Lenamon said. In Braddy's case, a Miami-Dade judge handed down the death penalty in 2007 for the 1998 killing of a 5-year-old girl. Braddy was accused of dumping Quatisha Maycock's body in the Florida Everglades, where she was attacked by alligators. "The child was found dead in the Everglades with alligator bite marks on her head and stomach and her left arm severed," reads an Oct. 16, 2007, Miami Herald article on the trial. "The medical examiner testified that the girl was still alive when one or more alligators bit her. Braddy told investigators he left Quatisha in the swamp because she witnessed him trying to kill her mother, who survived Braddy's choking attack." The article notes that both of Braddy's parents attended the trial, and Lenamon again stated his client was never in the foster care system. "I think it's kind of an irresponsible assertion to make without backing it up," Lenamon said of Wise's claim. Possible source The closest we came to information similar to Wise's claim was a March 24, 2009, posting that appeared in an online forum maintained by the Sun-Sentinel. The article was written by Mike Dunlavy, then chairman of Florida Youth Shine, a statewide advocacy group for foster care children. Dunlavy spent years in the Florida foster care system as a child, and was appointed by then-DCF secretary Bob Butterworth to a state Task Force for Child Protection. In the online forum called "The Slant," Dunlavy described a 2009 visit to Tallahassee to speak to the Senate PreK-12 Education Committee, of which Wise was also then a member. Dunlavy wrote: "Sen. Frederica Wilson, a Miami Democrat, asked, 'What happens to the foster youth who do not enter the Independent Living program.' That one was easy. 'Unfortunately,' I said, 'many of them fall to the wayside, contributing the root of the many ailments that plague our communities. Without support it's hard to imagine them creating a better way of life for themselves.' "She followed up with a statistical question that no one in the room knew off hand. Trying to maintain my wit, I answered 'I'll research that,' but you all might find it interesting that recent research shows that every person currently on Death Row in Florida spent time in foster care." We tracked down Dunlavy in Jacksonville, where he remains active in foster care advocacy, to ask him about that comment. He said he received the anecdote from a Tallahassee lobbyist dealing with children's rights issues. He could not recall the name of the person who gave him that statistic, or what group she might have represented. "I think it stretched so that it wasn't just kids in foster care, but kids who went through the adoption process, or kids who didn't quite make it into the foster care program but were abandoned," Dunlavy said. "Thinking back, I don't know how complete that figure was." Our ruling To us, this claim is woefully incomplete and unsubstantiated. The state agencies that supervise death row inmates and foster kids said they don't have information about inmates who were in foster care, nor do any other groups involved with death row or foster care that we could find. We easily found two cases of inmates on death row who had not been through the foster care system, disproving the claim of "all" death row inmates. A foster care advocate who made the same claim two years earlier says today he can't vouch for it. Perhaps Wise was just repeating Dunlavy's comment from 2009, or perhaps he is privy to other information that "every person on death row was a foster kid." We wish that the senator had called back to tell us the source for his comment, because it carries a harsh sting for those who are or have been in foster care, as well as the officials, families and volunteers who work with them. If we hear from him later, we will update this item. For now, we rate the claim False.	None	Stephen Wise	None	None	None	2011-04-25T09:42:09	2011-03-31	['None']
-hoer-00102	Albany Bread Poisoned by Staff	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/albany-bread-poisoned-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Hoax - Albany Bread Poisoned by Staff	14th November 2011	None	['None']
-snes-00604	Video captures a woman who thwarted and subdued an armed man attempting to rob attendees of a Mother's Day event.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brazil-mothers-day-robbery/	None	Crime	None	David Mikkelson	None	Does This Video Show a Thwarted Mother’s Day Robbery?	13 May 2018	None	['None']
-abbc-00114	A brawl reportedly involving up to 200 people in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood has reignited the debate about crime in Victoria and, in particular, offending by African Australians.	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-05/fact-check-sudanese-gangs-victoria/10187550	Ms Nyuon's claim checks out. Between April 2017 and March 2018, they made up a combined 73.5 per cent of the unique offender population (those people alleged to have committed crimes) in Victoria; whereas, those born in Sudan made up 1.1 per cent. Experts told Fact Check that statistics from the CSA were an accurate representation of Victoria's offender characteristics. Monash University Associate Professor in Criminology Rebecca Wickes said: "1 per cent of offences are being committed by those who have reported being born in South Sudan. That is accurate." Melbourne University Professor of Criminology Mark Woods said: "Nyadol Nyuon's claim is correct; the overwhelming majority of crime in Victoria is committed by Australian-born offenders." This fact reflects population statistics more generally: Australian-born and New Zealand-born people account for 64.8 per cent and 1.6 per cent of Victoria's population, respectively. In percentage terms, there is a greater disparity between population and crime rates for people born in Sudan and South Sudan, who make up just 0.14 per cent of Victoria's population. However, experts stressed that discussions surrounding this issue fail to take into account the age profile of the Sudanese population in Victoria, which helps explain their overrepresentation in the crime statistics.	['crime', 'crime-prevention', 'immigration', 'vic']	None	None	['crime', 'crime-prevention', 'immigration', 'vic']	Fact check: Do Sudanese people account for only 1 per cent of crimes committed in Victoria?	Thu 6 Sep 2018, 7:11am	None	['Melbourne', 'Victoria_(Australia)', 'Collingwood_Football_Club']
-pomt-14806	"Ron Johnson said specifically that he hopes the first steps occur to privatize the" Veterans Administration.	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/nov/27/russ-feingold/us-sen-ron-johnson-wants-take-first-steps-privatiz/	In an interview on a liberal talk show on Madison radio, Russ Feingold answered a question about the Veterans Administration -- hit by scandals nationally and in Wisconsin -- by contrasting himself and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, the man who took his Senate seat in 2010. Mike Crute, co-host of the "The Devil’s Advocates," asked Feingold on Nov. 12, 2015: "Do you think we have a problem with the Veterans Administration, does it need major reform, or does it simply need more financial resource?" Feingold, a Democrat who was in the Senate for 18 years, began his reply by saying: "Well, this is an area of enormous difference between me and the incumbent senator." Then he made an attack on Johnson, saying of his Republican opponent in the 2016 Senate race: "Look, we have to show a genuine commitment to make sure that veterans, when they come home, are able to get a job and that they have timely and adequate health care. The answer is not to privatize the VA. And Ron Johnson said specifically that he hopes the first steps occur to privatize the VA." As we’ll see, Johnson has advocated for privatizing elements of the VA -- such as allowing veterans to get medical care outside the VA system. But he has not gone so far to call for replacing a public system with an entirely private one. VA scandals The Veterans Administration’s medical care of veterans, both nationally and in Wisconsin, has been under fire for more than a year and a half. In May 2014, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned from President Barack Obama's cabinet. There had been intense scrutiny of the VA during the previous month, following allegations that 40 patients died while awaiting care at a Phoenix VA hospital where employees kept a secret waiting list to cover up delays. It turned out to be a system-wide problem in which VA employees lied about how quickly they saw patients to take advantage of a program that incentivized VA hospitals if they scheduled a primary care appointment within 14 days. In January 2015, the California-based Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that doctors at the VA medical center in Tomah, Wis., handed out so many narcotic painkillers that some veterans took to calling the place "Candy Land." That led to scrutiny from the VA and state regulators, as well as the arrests of three people on charges of illegal drug sales at the facility. Also in January 2015, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Daniel Bice reported that Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin -- under fire for her office's inaction over alleged overmedication at Tomah -- abruptly ousted one of her top state staffers. And in March 2015, Bice reported that Johnson aides had sat on whistleblower tips about the facility. Johnson on the VA As for Johnson’s position on the VA, there’s no question he has pressed for turning to the private sector for some aspects of care. A couple of weeks after the VA secretary’s resignation, the Senate passed legislation aimed at easing scheduling problems at Veterans Affairs facilities by allowing the VA to contract with private medical facilities -- enabling veterans facing long waits to get quicker treatment. The bill also enabled the VA to use $500 million from its current budget to hire more medical staff. Johnson was one of only three senators to vote no, indicating he wanted to go further, in terms of private options. He said at the time that he preferred another bill, which he co-sponsored, that would have given veterans the ability to receive treatment outside the VA system -- not just from private facilities the VA might contract with. "I want to fix the problem and I think the best way to fix it is that we give veterans the ability to exit the system if they're not given quality care in a timely manner or if they're too far from a VA (facility)," Johnson said. The Feingold campaign cited that statement among others as evidence to back Feingold’s claim. These two statements were from March 2015 were the strongest: According to to VoteVets.org, which has produced material criticizing Johnson, Johnson said at a campaign event: "I’ll tell you from my standpoint, I believe the long-term solution on VA hospitals is, start moving it more toward a private system." In an interview with a Wausau, Wis., TV station, Johnson was asked if veterans should be treated in private health care. He said: "We're moving toward that model. The veterans' health care bill that we did pass, the Choice Act, starts a pilot program. And we need to assess that, we need to look at that very carefully. I don't want to throw everybody under the bus. I think the vast majority of people who work in the VA system are doing it because they really want to provide good, quality care. But, again, it's a bureaucratic, government-run system, and that's just a problem." Again, Johnson was advocating a move toward more privatization. But he left the door open to making changes that would stop short of turning to a completely private system. For example, in an October 2015 statement cited by Feingold’s campaign, Johnson said: "I really do think that is probably the long-term solution for the VA healthcare system is move more towards veterans’ choice. Accessing the private care system as opposed to building new centers that we’re not able to staff. There’s a better way of doing this. And I think it really is relying more on a private healthcare system." Our rating Feingold said "Johnson said specifically that he hopes the first steps occur to privatize the" Veterans Administration. Johnson has advocated for privatizing at least parts of the VA system, but not for moving to a completely private system. We rate Feingold’s claim Half True. More on Feingold-Johnson National Republican Senatorial Commitee: Says Russ Feingold cast the "deciding vote" for the "largest tax increase" in history. Mostly False. Feingold: Says Johnson "opposes entirely a federal minimum wage," except perhaps for "guest workers." True. Johnson: Some 8.1 million of the estimated 11 million to 12 million people "in this country illegally are working." Mostly True.	None	Russ Feingold	None	None	None	2015-11-27T05:00:00	2015-11-12	['None']
-pomt-00392	"Thanks to President Trump and Republicans over the past year through July, U.S. manufacturing added 327,000 jobs, the most of any 12-month period since April 1995, when the figure added a healthy 345,000 positions."	mostly true	/west-virginia/statements/2018/sep/06/west-virginia-republican-party/its-largely-accurate-manufacturing-jobs-have-been-/	Have manufacturing jobs been on the rise more quickly than in two decades? The West Virginia Republican Party touted gains in manufacturing employment in a tweet on Aug. 7. "Thanks to President Trump and Republicans over the past year through July, U.S. manufacturing added 327,000 jobs, the most of any 12-month period since April 1995, when the figure added a healthy 345,000 positions," the tweet said. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com To support its assertion, the state party tweeted a link to a CNBC article that included that text verbatim. How accurate are those numbers? They check out. Between the months of July 2017-July 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a gain of 327,000 jobs in manufacturing, just as the CNBC article said. We looked at the previous July-to-July gains or losses in manufacturing jobs going back to 1994-95 and found that the 2018 performance was easily the best during that period. Here are the results: See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com We also confirmed that from April 1994 to April 1995, the economy gained 345,000 manufacturing jobs. The intervening periods -- May 1994 to May 1995, and June 1994 to June 1994 -- both fell short of 345,000. We’ll note that manufacturing jobs are only slowly recovering the ground they have lost since the 1980s, and especially after the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009. Here’s the long view of manufacturing employment in the United States: To the extent that manufacturing employment has been increasing, it’s been doing so at a fairly steady -- if modest -- rate since 2010, including more than six years on President Barack Obama’s watch. In addition, while the tweet gave Trump and Republicans credit for the recent gain, economists say presidents don’t deserve either full credit or full blame for employment trends on their watch. The president is not all-powerful on economic matters; broader factors, from the business cycle to changes in technology to demographic shifts, play major roles. Our ruling The West Virginia Republican Party tweeted, "Thanks to President Trump and Republicans over the past year through July, U.S. manufacturing added 327,000 jobs, the most of any 12-month period since April 1995, when the figure added a healthy 345,000 positions." The numbers and the length of time are accurate. It’s worth noting, however, that the climb has been under way for years, and that many factors play a role in such economic achievements, not just the president or his party. The statement is accurate but needs additional information, so we rate it Mostly True.	None	West Virginia Republican Party	None	None	None	2018-09-06T12:36:01	2018-09-07	['United_States', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-vees-00232	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Story on PH to expel Kuwait ambassador	misleading	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-story-ph-expel-kuwait-ambassador-misle	None	None	None	None	Fact check,misleading	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Story on PH to expel Kuwait ambassador MISLEADING	April 30, 2018	None	['Kuwait']
-pomt-13124	Says Russ Feingold "voted to raise taxes on Social Security benefits for seniors, he even tried to give Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2016/nov/03/ron-johnson/ron-johnson-russ-feingold-social-security-votes-ra/	A Ron Johnson radio ad that criticizes opponent Russ Feingold begins by talking about the federal budget deficit, then turns to one of the most common attack themes in election campaigns: Social Security. The female narrator in the ad, which was released Oct. 10, 2016, says Johnson’s Democratic challenger "voted to raise taxes on Social Security benefits for seniors, he even tried to give Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants." It’s a two-fer sort of claim, combining nearly identical attacks that Johnson has made separately elsewhere. For example, a TV ad by the Republican incumbent says Feingold "voted to increase taxes on Social Security benefits." https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/5e846588-f639-4bfd-b092-3704294314d4 And in the first debate of the Wisconsin Senate race, Johnson said Feingold "voted to tax Social Security benefits" and "also voted to give Social Security benefits to people who come into this country illegally." So, with the Nov. 8, 2016 election looming, let’s check the two parts of the claim from the radio ad. "Voted to raise taxes on Social Security benefits for seniors" Johnson’s campaign cites Feingold’s yes vote in 1993 on President Bill Clinton’s 1994 federal budget. One provision in the budget raised income taxes on Social Security benefits for middle-class and affluent seniors. A vote for the massive federal budget, of course, is a vote for the overall taxing-and-spending plan. It doesn’t necessarily mean support for every one of the thousands of provisions in it. For example, when Johnson was accused of having "supported a plan to cut benefits and raise the retirement age" for Social Security, our rating was Mostly False. Part of the evidence cited was Johnson’s vote for a federal budget plan, not a proposal dealing solely with Social Security. In this case, there was a motion to remove the tax increase from the budget. Feingold voted to table the motion -- a vote that helped keep the increase in the budget. Republicans have also posted a video clip of Feingold speaking prior to his votes that indicated why he was not opposed to the tax increase. He said he probably would vote for the tax increase because it would be paid only by people who were earning enough money that they were already paying income taxes on their Social Security benefits. So, the vote was to raise taxes only on more affluent Social Security recipients, not all of them. "Tried to give Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants" Johnson’s campaign cites a Feingold vote on an amendment to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, saying Feingold voted against closing a loophole to ensure that illegal immigrants did not receive Social Security benefits. There was a motion to table the amendment and the motion was approved 50-49, with Feingold in the majority. In other words, the amendment failed. But we’ve already rated this part of the claim, when Johnson made it in the 2010 Feingold-Johnson campaign. Our rating was False. The amendment did not apply to illegal immigrants. It dealt with the policy on payments to formerly illegal workers -- undocumented workers who later were made legal. Illegal immigrants would not have been made eligible for Social Security benefits even if amendment had passed. Our rating Johnson says Feingold "voted to raise taxes on Social Security benefits for seniors, he even tried to give Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants." On a proposal that would have removed a tax increase on Social Security benefits from the 1994 federal budget, Feingold voted no and indicated he was satisfied the increase applied only to higher-income senior citizens. The tax increase wasn’t imposed on all Social Security recipients. Feingold did not vote to give Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants. For a statement that has an element of truth, our rating is Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/e545737e-e5bf-4db1-a246-22fc389df84b	None	Ron Johnson	None	None	None	2016-11-03T09:30:00	2016-10-10	['Russ_Feingold', 'Social_Security_(United_States)']
-pomt-05984	"Eleven states have enacted these pay-to-play reforms."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2012/jan/23/william-perry/ga-group-uses-claim-back-pay-play-proposal/	The presidential race isn’t the only place where there has been some bare-knuckle debate recently. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and Common Cause Georgia Executive Director William Perry went one on one during a recent broadcast on WXIA-TV, and it got quite heated. The main topic was Atlanta’s process of awarding contracts to individuals and companies hoping to run businesses at the city-owned Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Perry’s argument: It wasn’t transparent and lends itself to accusations of cronyism. Reed’s take: It was open, and Perry’s complaints were hypocritical. Perry wants Atlanta to enact pay-to-play legislation that would restrict campaign contributions to elected officials or candidates running for office. Perry’s proposal would cap campaign contributions for those doing business with Atlanta at $250 per business entity. He wrote a letter to Reed outlining the idea and said he supports similar legislation for the state of Georgia and in Fulton County. "It is the state law in 11 states and has withstood court challenges, so we’ll continue to push it because it is good public policy," Perry said during the WXIA broadcast on Jan. 4. Perry’s claim about 11 states having pay-to-play laws prompted us to test the accuracy of his claim on the Truth-O-Meter. During the Jan. 3 Atlanta City Council meeting, Perry and Councilman H. Lamar Willis went back and forth on several details concerning Perry’s pay-to-play idea. Perry defended the idea. "It is the state law in 11 states and has withstood court challenges, so we’ll continue to push it because it is good public policy," Perry said. Perry said the 11 states he was referring to were California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont and West Virginia. Perry told PolitiFact Georgia he may have underestimated the total. He provided us a May 2010 report by the law firm Perkins Cole to back up his argument. The report on pay-to-play statutes lists 19 states with some sort of pay-to-play guidelines. Some of those states, such as New Jersey, prohibit businesses with state contracts exceeding $17,500 from making contributions to any candidate, state or county political committee. New Jersey’s law has an exemption for highway contracts. Other states in the report that Perry cited have guidelines that are more narrowly defined. Here are some examples from the report Perry sent us: Indiana prohibits anyone who has a contract with that state’s Lottery Commission from making a contribution to a political candidate while the contract is in effect and three years after the contract has expired. Violators can face up to three years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Louisiana has pay-to-play restrictions on casino operators, no-bid hurricane rebuilding contractors and contractors for the Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp. New Mexico does not allow a prospective contractor, family member or representative to give a campaign contribution or any other thing of value to a public official during the negotiation period for a sole-source or small purchase contract. In Pennsylvania, a person who has made a political contribution to a municipal official or candidate within the past two years is disqualified from entering into a contract with that municipality’s pension system. The report notes two states that had their pay-to-play initiatives removed. In Florida, state lawmakers repealed two statutes concerning pay-to-play. In Colorado, the state Supreme Court overturned its law that sole-source government contractors and their families cannot contribute to political campaigns during the contract or two years afterward. The court ruled it violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Natalie O. Wood, an official with the National Conference of State Legislatures, published a study of pay-to-play laws for her organization in 2009. Her report concluded that there were nine states with comprehensive pay-to-play laws: Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia. Each state has laws that essentially limit people doing business with the government from making campaign contributions to elected officials or candidates. In an interview, Wood said she would cut that list to eight states because of the Colorado court decision. She discussed the distinction between comprehensive pay-to-play laws and the rules in some states that focus on sole-source contracts. "My understanding of the issue of no-bid versus competitive-bid contracts is that in those states that only focus on the former, the ban on contributions would only impact companies who obtained their contract without having to bid on it," Wood said. A few states have seen legal efforts to challenge pay-to-play laws, arguing the guidelines violate free speech. Some have argued the laws aren’t strong enough. New Jersey Comptroller Matthew Boxer complained in September that the state’s pay-to-play law "does not work" because some local governments exploit a loophole that allows them to award contracts to any vendor — regardless of how much money they contribute to candidates — as long as they use a "fair and open" process. Perry told us he stood by his claim. "Some [states’ pay-to-play laws] are extremely specific while others are expansive," he said. "In at least 11 states, there is some recognition that it is not a good idea to allow campaign contributions to decision makers." There are variations of pay-to-play laws in at least 11 states, as Perry said. However, some are more detailed and comprehensive than others, as Wood said. The laws in some states seem to be less rigorous than what Perry has proposed in the city of Atlanta. We believe Perry’s claim needs some clarification and rate it as Mostly True.	None	William Perry	None	None	None	2012-01-23T06:00:00	2012-01-04	['None']
-snes-05922	A video shows two hikers walking on a lake of crystal clear ice.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walking-on-water/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Mikkelson	None	Walking on Beautiful Clean Ice in Slovakian Mountains	13 December 2014	None	['None']
-pomt-03963	Wisconsin’s laws "ranked the worst in the world for mining investment."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2013/feb/15/wisconsin-manufacturers-and-commerce/wisconsin-regulations-ranked-worst-world-mining-bu/	With the prospect of thousands of jobs being created in northern Wisconsin, Republican legislators and business leaders are once again leading a push for changes to the state’s mining laws. Gogebic Taconite has continued to express interest in spending $1.5 billion to open an iron ore mine in far northwestern Wisconsin. Before it proceeds, the company wants lawmakers to write new laws specifically for iron mining that would relax some environmental rules and provide greater certainty about the regulatory process. A bill to accommodate Gogebic narrowly died in 2012 and with Republicans back in control of both houses and the governor’s office, a renewed campaign to secure passage is under way. Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business group, has aggressively pushed for the bill’s approval. In interviews and public hearing testimony, the group’s chief lobbyist, Scott Manley, has spent months trying to put Wisconsin’s mining laws into perspective. At a Jan. 23, 2013, public hearing before a joint legislative committee considering mining legislation, Manley had this to say about the need for mining legislation: "A recent survey of 500 mining companies throughout the world by the Fraser Institute … found alarming evidence that Wisconsin’s environmental regulations and regulatory framework discourage investment in mining jobs. "For example, of the 79 states and countries analyzed in the survey, Wisconsin’s environmental regulations ranked the worst in the world for mining investment. Eighty-five percent of the respondents characterized Wisconsin’s environmental laws as either a ‘strong deterrent to investment’ or ‘would not invest due to this factor.’ The Fraser Institute survey diagnoses a significant problem with Wisconsin’s mining laws." Manley has made similar statements in the past, including a Nov. 30, 2012, interview with talk show host Charlie Sykes, and in a Nov. 24, 2012, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel opinion piece. So, is Wisconsin really worst in the world for mining investment? Let’s start with the study. Since 1997, the Fraser Institute, an independent Canadian think tank, has taken a look at the state of the mining industry around the world. The group says it conducts "an annual survey of metal mining and exploration companies to assess how mineral endowments and public policy factors such as taxation and regulation affect exploration investment. Survey results represent the opinions of executives and exploration managers in mining and mining consulting companies operating around the world." The survey Manley cites is Fraser’s 2010-11 report. The results were gathered between Oct. 19 and Dec. 3, 2010. That time frame overlapped the election for governor won by Republican Scott Walker, but was well before discussion on mining legislation heated up. There have also been two reports issued since then -- and those reports don’t include Wisconsin. So, Manley is picking an outdated report to make his point. What’s more, it is a survey. The results are determined by whoever chooses to respond. It is not scientific. So, the conclusions you can draw from it are limited. In the survey in question, Fraser sent it to 3,000 mining and exploration firms and executives, and received responses from 494, or about 16.5 percent. All told, the responses addressed the economic and political climates for mining in 79 regions around the world. That underlines how the results are dictated by who responded, not by any effort to represent all states or countries in a proportional way. Nor does it require any particular knowledge of how one state’s regulations compare to, say, another country’s regulations. The findings, when listed as the top 10 and bottom 10 geographic regions, were pretty grim for Wisconsin. "The bottom 10 scorers are Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Wisconsin, Madagascar, India, Guatemala, Bolivia, DRC (Congo), Venezuela, and Honduras," the report said. "Unfortunately, except for Wisconsin these are all developing nations which most need the new jobs and increased prosperity mining that can produce." The report included two comments about Wisconsin. In each case, the respondent is described only in vague terms. "Make everyone do without any mining products for a month or a year in Wisconsin. Outlaw all mining materials. — Producer company with more than US $50M revenue, Senior management" "Wisconsin properly evaluates the economic impact of mineral development to job growth and economic stability. — Consulting company, Consultant" So how did Wisconsin wind up so low on the list? Fraser conducts its surveys anonymously, and keeps most of the raw data secret. However, there are indications that few of the responses pertained to Wisconsin. And the responses received about Wisconsin were strongly negative about the economic and policy climate for mining in the state. Some examples: -- One key question -- asking for a rating for regions that had the "most/least favorable policies toward mining" -- received only 13 responses about Wisconsin. That is based on a raw number (one of the few provided) that was included in a spreadsheet accompanying the report. Wisconsin received no "most favorable" votes, and 13 "least favorable." That compares with 116 responses for Quebec, deemed the most favorable region, and 68 for Venezuela, the least favorable. -- Fraser dropped Wisconsin from its two subsequent surveys, for 2011-12, as well as the soon-to-be-released 2012-13 study, according to the group’s survey coordinator, Alana Wilson. Regions are dropped when there are fewer than 10 respondents for that area. -- Asked about "uncertainty concerning the administration, interpretation and enforcement of existing regulations," 88 percent said Wisconsin’s situation was negative for investment in mining, while 12 percent said state rules were either a mild deterrent or no deterrent to such investment. In short, the responses about Wisconsin were heavily negative and appear to have come from as few as 13, or 2.6 percent, of the 494 responses received by Fraser in 2010. (A spokesman said executives from Gogebic did not participate in the survey.) Manley said in an interview he was unaware of the details about the Fraser survey, other than that it was sent to about 3,000 mining industry officials. He said he didn’t know about the small sample size or that Wisconsin was dropped from subsequent surveys. "The people that they are asking are the people who are interested in making that investment or not" in mining, Manley said. "I can’t think of another survey that has the breadth of taking the pulse of the mining industry." Manley said the survey results were consistent with the situation in Wisconsin, at least in terms of mining regulations, and history. He said that the current state law, in effect since 1998, amounts to a "mining moratorium" because it sets unreasonably high standards for establishment of a new mine. Also, he said, only one mine has received a permit under the existing state law. Dating to 1974, the Flambeau mine near Ladysmith that operated for a short time and is now closed. (Lead miners were active in the 1800s, including some before the state was established. Besides Flambeau, other mines operated but not under modern regulations.) Manley said the Fraser report puts Wisconsin in the same group as developing countries and "from our standpoint it underscores the need for reform." Our rating WMC says Wisconsin is among the "worst in the world" for mining investment, according to a study by a Canadian think tank. To be sure, the state landed in the bottom 10, along with numerous developing countries and no other U.S. states. But the methodology behind the report illustrates the flaws in using it to make sweeping comparisons. A small number of people familiar with Wisconsin answered -- so small that the state was dropped from subsequent surveys. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce	None	None	None	2013-02-15T09:00:00	2013-01-23	['None']
-pomt-02631	In Virginia, "Medicaid has grown by 1,600 percent in the last 30 years."	true	/virginia/statements/2014/jan/20/william-howell/speaker-howell-says-virginias-medicaid-costs-are-1/	House Speaker William Howell says Virginia should rein in the ever-rising costs of Medicaid rather than expand the program to cover 400,000 additional low-income Virginians. Howell, R-Stafford, staunchly opposes Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s goal to broaden the state’s Medicaid program as part of Obamacare. The speaker, in a January 5 op-ed in the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, wrote that Medicaid is rife with waste and fraud and in dire need of reform. "Medicaid has grown by 1,600 percent in the last 30 years," Howell wrote. Howell was referring to the cost of Virginia’s Medicaid program -- an expense evenly split between the federal government and the state. We’ve heard the figure he cited before. Former Gov. Bob McDonnell used it repeatedly in explaining his reluctance to expand the program. Under Obamacare, the federal government would pay all the costs of the new enrollees’ health care until 2016, and eventually, 90 percent from 2020 and beyond. We wondered whether the 1,600 percent growth figure is correct. Matthew Moran, a Howell spokesman, pointed us to data from the House Appropriations Committee showing the total of state and federal funds budgeted for Virginia’s Medicaid program was $455 million in 1984 and projected at $8.1 billion this fiscal year. That’s a 1,683 percent increase. We also sought Medicaid spending figures from the Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services -- the agency that administers Medicaid, which now covers about 1 million Virginians. We got somewhat different numbers. Craig Markva, a DMAS spokesman, said his agency estimates Medicaid costs increased by about 1,400 percent over the thirty-year period. Why are the numbers different? Markva noted that DMAS was formed in 1985 -- one year after the starting date for Howell’s claim. Prior to that, he said some Medicaid expenses were pooled with costs of other health programs in the state budget. DMAS estimates the 1984 Medicaid price tag was $531 million -- some $76 million above the committee figure the Howell used. Either way, it’s a huge increase. Markva said policy makers started using the 1,600 percent figure a few years ago and, back then, it was undisputedly accurate. Between 1980 and 2010, he said, DMAS estimates Medicaid rose by 1,650 percent. What caused this tsunami? Inflation played a big part. The 30-year figures cited by Howell and the House Appropriations Committee fall to a 694 percent increase in Medicaid costs when adjusted for inflation. DMAS, in a report last June, said rising healthcare costs and greater use of services accounted for most of the increased costs in the state’s medicaid program between 1990 and 2012. Growing enrollments also pushed up costs, according to DMAS. There were 300,000 enrolled in the program in 1990 and that grew to 1 million in 2012. Enrollments have risen for a couple of reasons, Markva explained. "Some of this was simply population growth," Markva said in an e-mail. Also contributing to the surge were federal laws that significantly expanded the population eligible for Medicaid, Markva said. The state contributed to the growth by transferring people with intellectual disabilities out of institutions and into the community homes where they require costly long-term care. Markva said the annual cost per Medicaid enrollee was $1,617 in 1980, and that rose to $6,453 in 2010. "This is a 453 percent increase or about 6 percent per year," Markva said. "Much of this increase is simply the same increase in health care cost that everyone experience over this time period. Some increase was also due to the creation and expansion of waiver programs, which bring into the program new members and new services, resulting in higher per person costs." The rest of the nation has also seen large hikes in their Medicaid spending. Total Medicaid spending among all states rose from $33.1 billion in 1985 to $398.4 billion in 2012, according to a report from the National Association of State Budget Officers. That’s an 1,100 percent increase. Adjusted for inflation, it comes to a 332 percent rise. Our ruling Howell said the cost of Medicaid in Virginia "has grown by 1,600 percent over the last 30 years." We find no reason to quibble. The Speaker accurately cited budget figures kept by the House Appropriations Committee, a source that many around the Capitol -- including PolitiFact Virginia -- turn to for reliable data. We rate his statement True.	None	William Howell	None	None	None	2014-01-20T01:00:00	2014-01-05	['Virginia']
-vogo-00080	Statement: ” Competing against hundreds of applicants nationwide, SANDAG has won a $14 million federal grant to replace four aging timber trestle bridges in the Los Peñasquitos Lagoon in North County – a critically needed project to improve the reliability of both passenger and freight services in the nation’s second busiest rail corridor,” SANDAG, the region’s planning agency, wrote in Sept. 8 press release.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-southern-californias-railway-ridership/	Analysis: San Diego’s rail system just received crucial funding to repair some of its aging bridges.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Southern California's Railway Ridership	September 20, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-07627	"Florida is one of only three states that require licenses for commercial interior designers."	true	/florida/statements/2011/mar/18/national-federation-independent-business-florida/business-group-says-florida-one-three-states-regul/	Abhorred by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Republican legislators and even President Barack Obama, regulations have been a popular target of lawmakers this year. Prosperity in the private sector, they say, will come when government removes rules that stifle competition and growth. On Jan. 25, 2011, the House Business and Consumer Affairs Subcommittee heard regulation-related complaints from several pro-business representatives, including Allen Douglas, legislative affairs director for the National Federation of Independent Business’ Florida branch. The NFIB is a national association of advocates for small businesses. Douglas focused his complaints on state licenses, particularly those for interior designers. The state issues licenses for many professions, but the interior design license is a hot debate. Proponents say it takes a certified design professional to ensure a commercial space is fit for human needs. Opponents, like the NFIB, argue it should not take several years of experience, education and exams to do the job, and Florida’s law is too severe. "Florida is one of only three states that require licenses for commercial interior designers," Douglas told the committee. "The argument will be it’s a public safety and health issue. … If you’re in an office building with a lot of cubicles, the aisle ways need to be a certain width, you know, you can’t block the fire exits. Well, there’s other people in place -- fire marshals, other types of inspectors -- that will take care of that. "It keeps people out of the industry, because it’s very hard to become a commercial interior designer in this state." Back up: Florida is one of just three states that requires a license for commercial interior designers? That’s an exclusive club, if true. We had to give this claim a second look. We started by checking the Florida Statutes, to see whether Florida regulates its commercial interior designers in the first place. The answer is yes. Florida has a "practice act" that mandates commercial interior designers have licenses. To attain one in Florida, an aspiring designer must achieve six years of education and experience and pass all three portions of the National Council for Interior Design Qualification exam. There is a $125 biennial renewal fee, and continuing education is also required. A practice act is more stringent than title or registration acts in other states, which regulate the profession in name only. Many states have title or registration acts that allow applicants to market themselves as "certified" or "registered" interior designers as long as they meet varied exam, education and experience requirements and fees. Earning state approval is a way to give consumers a certain amount of confidence in whom they hire. Next we touched base with Douglas. He says he got involved with Florida’s interior design law in 2009, when the NFIB and the Institute for Justice, a national libertarian law firm, filed a federal lawsuit against the state Board of Architecture and Interior Design challenging Florida’s practice act. The Institute for Justice put up a YouTube video and statement about Florida’s interior design law two years ago, calling the state "ground zero in the nationwide battle to ‘cartel-ize’ the interior design industry." The institute claimed interior design regulations have several consequences, including higher fees and fewer employment opportunities, "especially for minorities and older mid-career switchers." On Feb. 4, 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle of the Northern District of Florida ruled in the NFIB’s favor on one part of the lawsuit: A rule that limited the use of "interior designer" to only those with licenses was unconstitutional. This decision allows unlicensed residential decorators the option to market themselves as "interior designers." However, Hinkle upheld Florida’s practice act, which governs non-residential designers, as constitutional. The NFIB and Institute for Justice appealed their lawsuit to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Alabama. On March 1, 2011, the appeals court rejected their case in a 24-page document, saying in part it would not "second-guess the legislature’s judgment as to the relative safety justifications versus any burdens imposed on interstate commerce." The appeals court affirmed the district court’s ruling, so Florida’s interior design law remains in effect. So, to recap: Interior designers in Florida need a license for jobs that involve commercial spaces, draperies, flooring, clubhouses and swimming pool areas. The license enables them to submit stamped and signed drawing plans and carry out work on design projects. But no one needs a license to offer residential interior design, or services including window treatments and paint. The Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which oversees the board, sums it up for consumers: "If you are going to hire someone to design the interior of a commercial structure, he/she needs to be licensed." But what we wanted to check is whether three states is correct. Douglas pointed us to Patti Morrow, executive director of the Interior Designer Protection Council and a staunch advocate for fewer restrictions on the industry. Morrow tracks interior design legislation for all states on her website. She is sometimes depicted boasting pink boxing gloves, symbolizing her fight against Florida’s "anti-competitive, anti-consumer monopoly" of interior design. She said by phone that four states used to require a license to practice interior design: Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Nevada. But Alabama left the pack when the state Supreme Court ruled its practice act unconstitutional in 2007. So that leaves three. Morrow, who lives in New Hampshire, appeared at an emotional committee meeting of the Florida House, which passed a bill that would roll back regulation of interior designers and 30 other professions, on March 15, 2011. She repeated at that meeting the claim about Florida being one of three states to regulate commercial interior design. We then went to the website of the pro-licensing side, the Interior Design Associations Foundation, which also tracks state legislation, to corroborate the count. The American Society of Interior Designers offers a similar state-by-state view of requirements for interior designers. Check! These groups’ practice-act counts match up to Morrow’s count of three states. Now, we should mention that while those three states are the only that require "licenses," several states — including New York, Kentucky and Alabama -- have education, experience and exam requirements that do not result in a license but grant use of a title. In New York, for instance, a "certified interior designer" applicant must pay a $377 fee, be at least 21, have at least seven years of acceptable education and experience credits, pass the NCIDQ, and "be of good moral character." Douglas said that "Florida is one of only three states that requires licenses for commercial interior designers. Both the pro- and anti-licensing camps agree that only Florida, Nevada and Louisiana require licenses to practice commercial interior design, and a court upheld the Florida law earlier this month. The state Legislature is trying to remove some of the restrictions on these licenses, but it has not happened yet. So we rate this statement True.	None	National Federation of Independent Business-Florida	None	None	None	2011-03-18T11:18:28	2011-01-25	['None']
-pomt-05955	"Nearly half of all persons under 30 did not go to work today."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/25/mitch-daniels/mitch-daniels-says-nearly-half-all-persons-under-3/	During the Republican response to the State of the Union address, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels painted a grim picture of American employment today. "The president did not cause the economic and fiscal crises that continue in America tonight, but he was elected on a promise to fix them, and he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse," Daniels said in the nationally televised address. "The percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades. One in five men of prime working age and nearly half of all persons under 30 did not go to work today." There are a lot of facts in that sentence, but many readers zeroed in on the claim that "nearly half of all persons under 30 did not go to work today." So we’ll take a look at it. We turned to numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency responsible for tabulating employment statistics. The bureau’s website allows users to mix and match the national data by various sub-categories, including age. There’s no single category for "under 30," and BLS doesn’t calculate data on those below the age of 16, but we were able to put together an "under 30" category by merging four others: 16 to 17; 18 to 19; 20 to 24; and 25 to 29. This also allowed us to compare statistics for those separate groups. The purest comparison we did -- one that seems to track Daniels’ statement most closely -- is to divide the number of people employed by the total number of persons in that age group. This statistic is known as the "employment to population ratio." We then flipped this ratio around to mirror how Daniels phrased it -- the total of persons not working divided by total population in that age group. For December 2011, the most recent month available, we found that 44.4 percent of the 16-to-29 age group was not employed. So, Daniels is in the ballpark. But there’s a problem: This is a ridiculous statistic to use. It includes Americans aged 16 to 18 (who are supposed to be in high school) and those 18 to 22 (many of whom are in college). If you leave high schoolers out of the equation and look only at ages 18 to 29, then the percentage who are not working declines to 37.5 percent. If you look only at ages 25 to 29, an age when most people are out of school altogether, it declines further, to 27.1 percent. But even this is beside the point if you are trying to craft a credible statistic. A more appropriate measure for Daniels would have been the tried-and-true unemployment rate. The unemployment rate takes the number of unemployed people and divides it by those who are "in the labor force," which means that they are either employed or are jobless but looking for work. This measurement ignores people who are not seeking work, such as students or individuals who are raising children full-time or are unable to work for whatever reason. These statistics offer a significantly different picture. In the broadest age range -- 16 to 29 -- the unemployment rate is 13.6 percent. For those between 18 and 29, it’s 12.9 percent. For those between 20 and 29, it’s 11.9 percent. And for those between 25 and 29, it’s 9.7 percent. None of these measures gets Daniels any higher than 13.6 percent of the population -- far lower than the nearly 50 percent figure he cited. Our ruling We suppose in a narrow sense, Daniels has a point that "nearly half of all persons under 30 did not go to work today." But that’s because the number includes many people who have no desire to work -- for instance, full-time high school or college students, stay-at-home parents or others who are unable to work. We can understand the concern about the nation’s current high level of unemployment, particularly among youth. Americans age 16 to 19 have an unemployment rate of 23.1 percent, and those who are 20 to 24 have a rate of 14.4 percent -- both well above the 8.5 percent for all age groups, which is itself elevated from historical averages. Still, the statistic Daniels chose to document this one is a wildly misleading one. We rate it Pants on Fire. UPDATE: After we published our story, a spokeswoman for Gov. Daniels replied to our query. She said that "the employment-to-population ratio, which captures the number of people working as a percent of the population, is an important indicator of economic activity and the health of the society. For the 16-to-29-year-old cohort, the ratio peaked at 68.2 percent in 1989 and declined by 7.5 percentage points over the next 19 years, reaching 60.7 percent in 2008. The EPOP was 55.2 percent for 2011. So the nearly half -- 44.8% -- is correct. I would not agree that only those captured as unemployed in the unemployment rate are of concern. The total number of people actually working is important. Of course the governor wants students to pursue post-secondary education and has pursued ways to make it easier for them to do so during his tenure as governor." We stand by our original ruling.	None	Mitch Daniels	None	None	None	2012-01-25T15:35:33	2012-01-24	['None']
-pomt-06518	"The reality is that we have roughly 15,000 undocumented immigrants living in the state..."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2011/oct/11/jorge-elorza/law-professor-says-ri-has-roughly-15000-undocument/	The decision by the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education to allow undocumented immigrants to be eligible for in-state tuition at the state’s public colleges and university made for lively debate on a recent Channel 10 "News Conference." Jorge O. Elorza, a professor of law at the private Roger Williams University School of Law, who supports the policy, faced off with one of the policy’s most vocal opponents, William T. "Terry" Gorman, executive director of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement. During the discussion, Elozra argued in favor of the policy, saying it will give undocumented students a better chance of going to college and building careers. "The reality is that we have roughly 15,000 undocumented immigrants living in the state, and they’re here and they’re not going anywhere," he said. "And so I think as a state we have to ask ourselves, do we make engineers, scientists and innovators out of them? Or do we deny them a college education . . . ?’’ Wait, did he really say 15,000? (Yes, he did.) But other estimates we’ve seen say there are twice as many. At a time of heated debate in Rhode Island and nationally over laws and policies with respect to undocumented immigrants, it’s clearly important to get as accurate a number for this population as possible. To be fair, there are no hard numbers; only estimates. PolitiFact Rhode Island addressed the issue in a fact-check in January of Gorman’s claim that illegal immigration costs Rhode Island $400 million a year. (We ruled Gorman’s claim Pants on Fire.) In researching that item, we used data from the federal Department of Homeland Security and the Pew Hispanic Center to come up with an estimate of 30,000 to 35,000 illegal immigrants in Rhode Island -- twice as many as Elorza said. So we asked Elorza how he came up with the 15,000 estimate. "I did a Google search,’’ the professor said. And he sent us a link to his source material: a Web site called StateMaster.com. Sure enough, the site has a chart entitled: "Estimated number of illegal immigrants (most recent) by state." The StateMaster chart reports the estimated number of "illegal" immigrants in Rhode Island as 16,000. The facts The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics reported that the "unauthorized" immigrant population in this country in 2010 was 10.8 million. The agency doesn’t report data for Rhode Island; it only offers estimates for states with larger populations because of the "uncertainty in the precision for smaller states,’’ DHS spokesman Michael Hoefer told PolitiFact earlier this year. But a February 2011 report by the Pew Hispanic Center offers estimates for smaller states, including Rhode Island. Their estimate for "unauthorized" immigrants in Rhode Island in 2010 was 30,000 -- twice as many as Elzora stated during the TV news conference. How did Pew arrive at 30,000? We posed that question to Jeffrey S. Passel, Pew’s senior demographer. (He was in Colorado at a conference of experts who are developing projections about future levels of immigration worldwide.) For large states and the country as a whole, Passel said, Pew researchers analyze Homeland Security data about legal immigrants entering those states. They compare that data with the number of immigrants counted in those states during the Current Population Survey conducted by the U.S. Census. The survey doesn’t count everyone, he said, so Pew adjusts for people left out of the survey. From the Current Population Survey, the data crunchers can see who reported that they were not born in the United States and then use other information they reported in the survey -- such as whether they work for the government or receive food stamps or welfare -- to determine if they are living in this country legally. (To get a government job or food stamps, a person is generally required to have a Social Security number, so "it’s a very strong indicator,’’ Passel said, "that the people are legal.") The researchers then create two categories: people who are "definitely here legally," he said, and those who are "possibly here illegally." The difference between the number of immigrants who are living in the country legally and the total number of immigrants reported in the Current Population Survey produces the estimated number surveyed who are "unauthorized immigrants.’’ The Pew estimate for Rhode Island has a margin of error of plus or minus 5,000, so the actual number of unauthorized immigrants in the state could be 25,000 to 35,000, according to the report. Nationally, Pew reported, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the country in 2010 was about 11.2 million. So, where did the 15,000 number that Elorza used for Rhode Island come from? Old data StateMaster.com, the web site that Elorza cited, claims that its data are the "most recent." But scroll down to the bottom of its chart and read the fine print. Just below where it shows the total U.S. illegal immigrant population estimate as 6.9 million -- next to the red capital letters that say "DEFINITION" -- is this disclosure: "Latest available data - 2000 Census...’’ The chart is based on 11-year-old data. Since then, the estimated population of undocumented immigrants in Rhode Island has almost doubled. Peter Skerry, a political science professor at Boston College who has studied immigration trends for two decades, offers this caution about using data from the Internet. "If I go to a dinner party and want to say something, I’ll go to Google or Wikipedia,’’ Skerry said. "But if I’m going to do an interview on immigration . . . I’m going to rely on the best sources I can find. Everything on a computer screen isn’t necessarily right." To recap, the statement by Professor Elorza that Rhode Island has about 15,000 undocumented immigrants in Rhode Island is based on 11-year-old data and current estimates put the number at about twice that many. To his credit, when the error was brought to Elorza’s attention he acknowledged it and directed us to the current data from the Pew Center report. "Terry Gorman told me off air that he thought the number of undocumented immigrants was larger,’’ Elorza said in an e-mail. "I told him I had no problem using the larger number; it made my point even stronger.’’ If only he had checked his numbers before he went on TV. But he didn’t, so we rate Elorza’s claim False. (To comment on this and other rulings, visit our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Jorge Elorza	None	None	None	2011-10-11T00:01:00	2011-10-02	['None']
-hoer-00588	Reports Warn Users About Venomous Puss Caterpillars	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/puss-caterpillar-warning-reports.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Reports Warn Users About Venomous Puss Caterpillars	September 8, 2014	None	['None']
-pomt-13065	"Thirty-one percent of school districts are still receiving less funding per pupil than they did prior to the dramatic budget cuts of 2011."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2016/nov/16/donna-howard/donna-howard-says-31-percent-texas-school-district/	A Democratic legislator maintains lawmakers in 2017 can step up spending on education and other necessities partly by tapping the state’s so-called rainy day fund. As things stand, Donna Howard of Austin wrote in a September 2016 commentary in the Austin American-Statesman: "Thirty-one percent of school districts are still receiving less funding per pupil than they did prior to the dramatic budget cuts of 2011." We wondered if that was so. 2011, to refresh, was when the Republican-led Legislature addressed a projected revenue shortfall in part by revising school funding formulas. Those changes and other cuts resulted in school districts getting $5 billion less in state aid through August 2013 compared to what districts likely would have fielded otherwise. Aide: Howard drew on state prediction Asked how Howard reached her 31 percent conclusion, Jacob Cottingham in her office told us she relied on a Legislative Budget Board staff projection. Cottingham forwarded a Sept. 21, 2016, email from Andy MacLaurin, a board manager, containing a splash of the state’s legendarily acronymic funding formulas. M&O refers to school maintenance and operations funding and WADA refers to the "weighted average daily attendance" student counts used by the state to calculate how much a district stands to get in state and local aid, taking into account varied student needs. MacLaurin wrote that according to the 2015 projection, 31.3 percent of the state’s 1,000-plus school districts "were projected to have a lower M&O revenue per WADA" in fiscal 2016 "than they did in fiscal year 2011 while in fiscal year 2017," MacLaurin said, "23.8 percent of districts were projected to have a lower M&O revenue per WADA than in fiscal year 2011." So, there’s Howard’s stated 31 percent. Then again, the projection indicated, fewer districts (nearly 24 percent) were expected to get less aid per student in fiscal 2017 (the current fiscal year) compared with 2011. Also, MacLaurin’s email signaled more analysis to come, stating: "However, please note that these figures are based on the model the LBB has used since the end of last session; this fall, we'll be updating the model with new student counts and property value estimates which are likely to change these percentages." Next, we followed up with LBB staff spokesman R.J. DeSilva who emailed us district-by-district aid projections behind the information sent to Howard. DeSilva also noted that the cited projection, developed in May 2015, indicated that on average, school districts were projected to field more aid per student in fiscal 2016 ($6,149) and 2017 ($6,098) than the districts got in fiscal 2011 ($5,734). Actual spending data Enough of projections; we hunted up-to-date spending data. We initially queried the Texas Association of School Boards, which advocates at the Capitol, where Dax Gonzalez referred us to the Texas Association of School Business Officials, which trains school finance and operations professionals. Later, at our request, Tom Canby of TASBO developed and emailed us a spreadsheet, drawing on audited revenues reported to the Texas Education Agency. The spreadsheet, which adjusted for inflation, indicates that compared with fiscal 2011, 395 of the state’s 1,024 districts, or 38 percent, fielded less state and local funding per student in fiscal 2015, the latest year of available data. Canby said he focused on M&O aid, leaving out aid related to debt service or capital projects. Also, when applicable, he said, he did not take into account "Robin Hood" payments from property-wealthy districts to others as required by law. We spotted another way to break down the figures. Again adjusted for inflation, the districts fielding less per-student state and local aid in 2015 served 1.1 million students, or 22 percent of nearly 5 million students statewide. Flip side: More than 3.8 million students, 78 percent, attended schools in districts that got more such aid per student. According to the spreadsheet, the Austin, North East, Frisco, Round Rock and Clear Creek districts were the largest districts that drew less state plus local aid per student in 2015 compared with 2011. Highest-enrollment districts fielding more of such per-student aid in 2015 were the Houston, Dallas, Cypress-Fairbanks, Northside and Fort Worth districts. Canby, asked why certain districts were getting less aid per student than four years before, replied that how school funding works in Texas is so convoluted, "there is no simple plain English explanation." Why do some districts get less than before? We reached a sanded-down explanation after hearing more from Canby and eliciting the detailed emailed analysis of Amanda Brownson, research director for Raise Your Hand Texas, an advocacy group that says it focuses on giving every student access to high-quality public education. Basically, some districts have remained short of making up for plummets in local revenue touched off by state lawmakers a decade past. In that 2006 special session, members voted to drive down local school property tax rates as championed by then-Gov. Rick Perry. Lawmakers also agreed to shore up districts by filling the self-created revenue gaps with state aid but that move was accompanied by a stipulation that a district would no longer draw the shore-up or "hold harmless" aid once oft-tweaked state education funding formulas delivered enough money to make up the difference. One more pivot: in 2011, revenue-strapped lawmakers shaved the shore-up or "hold-harmless" money--a move that remains in effect--delaying full recovery for some districts. Our ruling Howard said 31 percent of Texas districts are receiving less funding per pupil than they did prior to the 2011 "budget cuts." Howard’s assessment was based on a 16-month-old projection while actual results appear to have been worse. Inflation-adjusted data suggest 38 percent of districts fielded less state and local aid per student in fiscal 2015 than before the 2011 reductions. We rate Howard’s statement Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/0c20ef09-f901-426b-bc73-fd3b54a19253	None	Donna Howard	None	None	None	2016-11-16T18:33:53	2016-09-19	['None']
-snes-05072	Taco Cabana Restaurants have banned Donald Trump supporters	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/taco-cabana-sign-donald-trump-prank/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	Taco Cabana Sign Banning Trump Supporters Was a Prank	14 March 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-11552	"The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/feb/08/donald-trump/donald-trump-wrongly-suggests-british-dont-love-th/	As thousands marched in the streets of London recently to protest funding cuts to the British National Health Service, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to criticize the idea of universal health care. "The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working. Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks!" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Trump’s Feb. 5 tweet came shortly after Nigel Farage, the former UK Independence Party leader, talked about the NHS march and universal health care on Fox & Friends, warning Americans it would be "politically impossible" to remove such a system once introduced. Trump thanked the network on Twitter for "exposing the truth" shortly after Farage’s appearance. We wondered how accurate Trump’s claim was that people joined the NHS march because the UK’s universal health care system "is going broke and not working." We looked at the origins of the march and recent polling statistics about British public opinion on the National Health Service, commonly called the NHS. We also looked at the current funding situation, since Trump’s claim suggests it’s losing money. We found that Trump’s tweet gives a misleading impression about how the British public feels about its health care system. Public support for NHS University of North Carolina health policy professor and deputy director of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, Thomas C. Ricketts, told PolitiFact that the NHS probably has higher public support than any other government program in the UK. Public support for the NHS being maintained in its current form remains high according to a poll by Ipsos; 77 percent of people support this, while 9 in 10 people think the founding principles of the NHS should still apply to services today. Two-thirds of adults are willing to pay more of their own taxes to pay for the NHS. In a poll by YouGov last year, 84 percent of people were in favor of the service continuing to be run by the public sector. Helen Howson, the director of the Bevan Commission, an independent think tank for health in Wales, is working to find ways to improve the system while maintaining the principles set out at its founding. "The NHS is a service which was set up to ensure that no one would be disadvantaged on the basis of their ability to pay, and people are passionate about these principles," she said. The NHS march, officially named, "NHS in crisis: Fix it now" was organized by the People’s Assembly, an independent, national campaign against austerity and Health Campaigns Together, a coalition defending the NHS. This year marks 70 years of NHS existence in the U.K., but the health care system has gone through what has been described as the worst winter in its recent history. The lack of funding is often blamed on austerity measures put forth by the Conservative Party and there have been concerns raised over privatizing parts of the system. Trump’s comments regarding the demonstration received immediate response by British officials, such as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who said people were marching because they love the NHS and hate what is being happening to it by the current party in power. Health minister Jeremy Hunt, who was largely blamed for the severe lack of winter funding, hit back at Trump’s remarks, writing on Twitter that not one of the marchers "wants to live in a system where 28m people have no cover." Growing concerns This is not to say that people don’t have concerns about the NHS. In a poll released last summer by the British Medical Association, more people are unhappy with the NHS than satisfied for the first time in the public poll run by British doctors. It showed that 70 percent of people think the health service is going in the wrong direction. The poll shows that 43 percent of respondents are dissatisfied with the service, which is double the number of dissatisfaction percentage in only two years. About 33 percent of respondents say they are satisfied. The poll also concluded that 82 percent of people are worried about the future of the NHS, 62 percent expect the NHS to get worse in the coming years and only 13 percent think that it will improve. The leading concerns of the respondents included a lack of funding, the possibility that the NHS may cease to be free at the point of use, increased waiting times and a lack of attention given to the service because of Brexit. Democrats’ push Trump also claimed that Democrats are pushing a similar health care plan to the NHS in the United States. Democrats have devised plans ranging from a total-government "Medicare for all," also known as a single-payer health system, to a more limited "public option" that pits individual government-run plans up against private insurance for people who weren’t able to find affordable coverage in Obamacare. The latter allows Americans to gain access to government insurance alongside private health care plans. The current version of Obamacare, more formally known as the Affordable Care Act, has little resemblance to the NHS, where the government owns most of the hospitals and clinics, and doctors and nurses are government employees. Our ruling Trump said, "The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working. Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks!" While the NHS has lost funding over the years, the march that took place was not in opposition to the service, but a call to increase funding and stop austerity cuts towards health and social care. The march resulted because people want universal health care to work better, not because they want it taken over by the private sector. We rate this Mostly False.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-02-08T11:00:28	2018-02-05	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Universal_health_care']
-tron-01430	The Government is banning organic Farming	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hr875organicban/	None	food	None	None	None	The Government is banning organic Farming	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-03712	Satellite images of hexagon-shaped holes in clouds above the Bermuda Triangle prove that large blasts of sinking air are the cause of mysterious shipwrecks and plane crashes in the area.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/scientists-solve-bermuda-triangle/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Scientists Finally Solve the Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle?	25 October 2016	None	['None']
-tron-03059	Hillary Clinton Wears Armani Jacket During Inequality Speech	mostly truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hillary-clinton-wears-armani-jacket-inequality-speech/	None	politics	None	None	None	Hillary Clinton Wears Armani Jacket During Inequality Speech	Jun 9, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-10921	Says Foxconn "is under investigation in mainland China for securities fraud, environmental fraud and labor fraud."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2018/jul/31/matt-flynn/flynns-claims-against-foxconn-fall-short-actual-fr/	Ever since Gov. Scott Walker signed a $3 billion agreement with Taiwan-based Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, the deal has been an object of controversy in Wisconsin politics. The complaints from Democratic gubernatorial candidates have ranged from the size of the deal to the cost per new job to the environmental impact of the plant. Matt Flynn, one of eight remaining hopefuls, offered a different one in an April 12, 2018, interview with Green Bay’s WFRV-TV. In the interview, Flynn claimed Foxconn "is under investigation in mainland China for securities fraud, environmental fraud and labor fraud." That's quite a lot of fraud. But is the claim itself fraudulent or on target? When we asked Flynn's campaign to provide backup for the claims, it cited several news articles detailing various investigations into Foxconn's activities. We made our own checks as well. All the articles cited refer to past investigations rather than ongoing ones, as claimed by Flynn, and they did not necessarily discover any instances of fraud. Additionally, most of the investigations cited were not official governmental reviews, as implied by Flynn’s statement. Rather, they were conducted by advocacy groups and media organizations. Let’s take a look at each of the areas Flynn cited. The environment Flynn said Foxconn is under investigation for environmental fraud. When asked for backup, his campaign cited a 2013 investigation by Chinese regulators after allegations the electronics supplier had dumped heavy toxic metals into canals that lead to a nearby river. The campaign also cited another investigation, though this one was not government-led: Pressured by environmental groups, Apple in 2012 agreed to conduct independent environmental reviews of some of its suppliers, including Foxconn. Steph Tai, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, framed it this way: An environmental violation is noncompliance with environmental law, whereas environmental fraud is concealing the fact of that noncompliance. They are different legal categories. But the boundary between the two categories is often hazy. Last year, a firm owned by Foxconn subsidiary FIH mobile in Hebei province’s Langfang city tried to stop the Chinese environment ministry's pollution inspectors from making checks during a nationwide investigation of more than 3,000 companies. Does this constitute violating environmental laws or environmental fraud? According to Tai, it could be both, because most operating permits require a company to allow inspectors inside. Preventing inspectors from making checks would thus violate the dictates of the permit. "If this sounds like such claims could overlap a lot, don't worry," said Tai. "They often do in these kinds of cases." Flynn’s campaign disputed Tai’s definition of fraud, arguing that fraud encompasses a broader range of illegal activities than concealment. Labor A similar absence of government-led inquiries and legal ambiguities plague Flynn's claim on the subject of labor fraud. It is true that Foxconn has been investigated multiple times for alleged labor abuses, though none of the investigations were government-led. More importantly, none of the investigations are ongoing. Most recently, between August 2017 and April 2018, the U.S.-based advocacy group China Labor Watch investigated the Hengyang Foxconn plant in Hunan province, which primarily manufactures Amazon Echo Dot and Kindle devices. The group identified numerous labor violations, including excessive hours, low wages, and inadequate training. Peak production season saw employees putting in more than 100 overtime hours per month, far beyond the 36 hours allowed under Chinese law. In some instances, employees worked 14 consecutive days. About 40 percent of the workforce was comprised of "dispatch" workers (temporary, low-cost, agency-recruited staffers) -- far in excess of the 10 percent limit under Chinese law. Dispatch workers had limited pre-job safety training, underpaid overtime hours and unpaid sick leave. Still, China Labor Watch declined to identify these labor violations as labor fraud. "I cannot say for certain whether our findings would constitute as labor fraud," said Winnie Shen, a program assistant at China Labor Watch, in an email. In 2012, the New York Times published an investigation into labor violations at Foxconn, including extended overtime and crowded living conditions for workers. It also documented multiple factory explosions caused by combustible aluminum dust, which had amassed in high concentrations due to poor ventilation. Later that year, an audit of three of Foxconn's Apple facilities and over 35,000 workers by the Fair Labor Association, a collaborative initiative between universities and businesses that promotes workers’ rights, unearthed labor abuses not dissimilar from those recently found by China Labor Watch. During peak production, employees worked an average number of hours that exceeded Chinese legal limits. The Fair Labor Association also found that 14 percent of workers potentially didn't receive fair compensation for unscheduled overtime. Later that year, Foxconn reached an agreement with Apple to improve conditions for millions of workers assembling iPhones and iPads. The FLA later confirmed Foxconn had improved working conditions ahead of schedule, though employees still described these measures as insufficient. The FLA’s report has also been subject to criticism. Some other examples of Foxconn’s labor violations: In 2006, the British newspaper The Mail reported on extensive hours, low wages, crowded dorms and military-style drills. In 2010, a rash of workers committed suicide to raise awareness of poor labor conditions. Foxconn responded by pledging to improve working conditions and installing netting around dormitories to catch falling workers. In 2012, 150 employees at the company's Wuhan production facility threatened to commit suicide over a wage dispute. Whether the company's persistent violations of Chinese labor law constitutes fraud is the question. "To me, fraud does not seem like the right word," said Mary Gallagher, director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. She noted that an example of fraud would be "keeping two sets of working time reports, so that it appears to be no violations of overtime." Again, however, the Flynn campaign argued that fraud encompasses a broader range of illegal activities than concealment. Securities In this case, the Flynn campaign did cite an official government investigation: an initial public offering (IPO) review of the company conducted by the China Securities Regulatory Commission, which scrutinized all of Foxconn’s present and past transactions. Such reviews are part of the standard procedure for being granted an IPO. As such, Flynn’s statement is misleading because it implies that Foxconn was investigated for a specific legal breach rather than as part of a standard procedure. The first statement suggests malice, the second suggests nothing. Moreso, the Chinese securities regulatory investigation concluded on March 8, 2018. Flynn made his claim on April 12. As such, Foxconn would not have been under investigation for securities fraud at the time he made his statement, as he implied. Although not cited by the Flynn campaign, reports show Foxconn has been investigated for bribery. In 2013, authorities in Taiwan investigated allegations that Foxconn Technology employees had accepted bribes from the company's supply-chain partners. They eventually detained several former executives. According to Foxconn, it had requested an investigation from authorities after an internal audit uncovered a few violations -- though the company insisted these violations were limited in scope. So while Chinese authorities did briefly look into Foxconn for alleged bribery, the scope of the investigation was extremely limited, and it is not clear that it found any instances of securities violations, let alone securities fraud. The Flynn campaign also cited two blog posts that described questionable business practices at Foxconn. But neither related to a formal investigation, let alone an ongoing one. As for Foxconn, the company issued a statement to us that read: "Foxconn can state that there is no truth to the claim made by Mr. Flynn regarding our company’s operations in China. Foxconn is committed to fulfilling our responsibilities as a global industry leader and good corporate citizen. As part of that commitment, Foxconn works hard to ensure we comply with all relevant laws and regulations in all markets where we operate." Our rating Flynn claimed that Foxconn "is under investigation in mainland China for securities fraud, labor fraud and environmental fraud." But all of the investigations cited by Flynn are old. The violations uncovered by some do not necessarily constitute fraud, while a few others did not find any violations at all. Much of the evidence cited comes from outside groups, including advocacy groups and even media companies, rather than the government. We rate Flynn’s claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com This article was changed on July 31, 2018 to say the deal Walker signed provides state subsidies of up to $3 billion, not $4 billion. Public money to support the project, including state and local government funds, could total $4 billion.	None	Matt Flynn	None	None	None	2018-07-31T06:00:00	2018-04-12	['China']
-snes-01532	Four black players sent the NFL an "ultimatum" that included demands that the league force "white fans" into community activism.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nfl-players-demand-month/	None	Sports	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Black NFL Players ‘Demand’ that the NFL Force ‘White Fans’ Into Community Activism?	24 October 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-05886	Public education has been permanently cut "by $1.6 billion through changes in the Standards of Quality funding formula."	mostly true	/virginia/statements/2012/feb/07/kitty-boitnott/kitty-boitnott-says-virginia-has-cut-16-billion-mi/	The Virginia Education Association says the state has been saving money by lowering public school standards. "Since the 2008 General Assembly, we have permanently cut biennial funding for public education by $1.6 billion through changes in the Standards of Quality funding formula," VEA President Kitty Boitnott said in a Jan. 23 news conference. The $1.6 billion cited by Boitnott is an eye-popping number. We wanted to know if her figure is correct and if the loss of the funding is, as she said "permanent." The Standards of Quality are minimum mandates Virginia sets forth for public education on teacher-pupil ratios, benefits for educators and basic curricula. The General Assembly sets the benchmarks every two years after considering recommendations by the state Board of Education. Virginia is required by law to pay 55 percent of the overall cost of the SOQs and local school districts must pay the rest. For this two-year budget cycle, which began July 1, 2010, the state will pay about $9.6 billion toward meeting the SOQs, and localities will pay about $7.8 billion. Boitnott is essentially saying the state obligation would have been $1.6 billion higher if the General Assembly had not taken steps since 2008 to lower Virginia’s education standards. Robley Jones, the VEA’s director of government relations, said Boitnott’s figures came from a report on education funding released last month by the Senate Finance Committee. The study contained a table detailing the 10 "substantive" reductions to public education programs approved by the General Assembly since 2008. The cuts came to a biennial total of $1.57 billion, and Boitnott rounded up. The biggest savings came from reducing the number of support positions -- such as clerks, teacher aides and bus drivers -- required by the state. That action removed $754 million in SOQ obligations. Lawmakers in 2010 found another $513 million in savings by eliminating certain types of equipment and travel from SOQ calculations and changing the formula for estimating health care costs for school employees. Boitnott, however, is slightly off in her analysis of the the Senate Finance Committee’s data. The table makes no claim that the 10 cut education programs it lists were part of the SOQs, as Boitnott suggests. In fact, four of the items were not part of the state’s minimum requirements, according to Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Department of Education. They account for $174 million in biennial costs. So the real reduction in SOQ mandates comes to about $1.4 billion per biennium. Jones, who provided the information for Boitnott’s statement, said he made an inadvertent mistake in computing the SOQ reductions. That brings us down to one last question: Are the cuts to the SOQ formula permanent, as Boitnott says? Technically, they are not. The General Assembly is free to restore the funding, but that is not likely to happen. Julie Grimes, a spokeswoman at the Department of Education, said officials there cannot recall an instance where legislators cut funding for an SOQ program and later replenished it. When the state reduces funding for SOQ programs, localities often absorb the costs. Most school districts in Virginia are not satisfied with just attaining minimum SOQ standards and fund their schools at far greater levels than the state demands. The SOQs allow legislators to claim they fund 55 percent of the state’s educational mandates. But a different picture emerges when total expenditures on Virginia public education are computed. The localities pay about 50 percent, the state, the state pays 40 percent and roughly 10 percent comes from the federal government. Our ruling: Boitnott said that since 2008, the legislature has permanently cut $1.6 billion in programs from the state’s formula for funding public schools. She’s a bit off; the actual figure is $1.4 billion. Boitnott said these losses are "permanent." The General Assembly could restore funding, but a spokesman at the state Department of Education said officials cannot recall an instance where lawmakers cut an SOQ program and later reversed themselves. We rate Boitnott’s claim Mostly True.	None	Kitty Boitnott	None	None	None	2012-02-07T13:43:31	2012-01-23	['None']
-abbc-00324	The claim: Daniel Andrews says ambulances are taking longer to arrive than ever before.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-24/daniel-andrews-ambulance-response-times-fact-check/5881784	The claim: Daniel Andrews says ambulances are taking longer to arrive than ever before.	['states-and-territories', 'government-and-politics', 'doctors-and-medical-professionals', 'health', 'elections', 'advertising', 'alp', 'vic']	None	None	['states-and-territories', 'government-and-politics', 'doctors-and-medical-professionals', 'health', 'elections', 'advertising', 'alp', 'vic']	Fact check: Are Victorians waiting longer than ever for ambulances to arrive?	Tue 25 Nov 2014, 1:40am	None	['None']
-pomt-05477	"Tourism accounts for 439,000 jobs in the state of Ohio, and visitors spend $36 billion annually."	true	/ohio/statements/2012/apr/20/mike-dovilla/mike-dovilla-says-tourism-ohio-accounts-439000-job/	The Ohio Department of Development was in Republican Gov. John Kasich’s crosshairs before he even was elected. Kasich has never been shy about ripping the department as a sluggish bureaucracy unable to keep pace with the modern business world. Since taking office last year, Kasich has worked to overhaul the department through privatization and other means. Such dramatic changes have required the help of state lawmakers, and GOP members of the House of Representatives and the Senate have been supportive of Kasich’s plan to reform the department. GOP lawmakers unveiled legislation – House Bill 489 and its companion, Senate Bill 314 – in March that proposes several new changes to the Department of Development, or what remains of it. The department’s economic development responsibilities last year were transferred to JobsOhio, a private nonprofit corporation that Kasich proposed and lawmakers approved. A key provision of the new legislation establishes TourismOhio, an agency that would, through a five-year pilot program, replace the department’s tourism division. State Rep. Mike Dovilla, a Republican from Berea who is a primary sponsor of HB 489, said funding for TourismOhio would be linked to sales-tax revenues from tourism-related industries. Dovilla also talked about the connection between tourism and job creation. "According to recent figures, tourism accounts for 439,000 jobs in the state of Ohio, and visitors spend $36 billion annually," Dovilla said April 12 in a news release from his office announcing TourismOhio. PolitiFact Ohio thought the robust figures Dovilla cited were worth a look, particularly since Kasich’s overhaul of the Department of Development has been a source of constant skepticism from Democrats from the beginning. Dovilla’s office pointed us down two paths to back up the figures for jobs and spending. Each however, lead us to the same source. That was Tourism Economics, a subsidiary of Oxford Economics, which is a joint venture that involves Oxford University’s business college and provides economic research and advice international organizations, governments and blue-chip companies. The state has hired Tourism Economics to monitor the economic impact of tourism in Ohio for about five years, said Amir Eylon, Ohio’s tourism director. The company is responsible for the estimates Dovilla cited for tourist spending in Ohio and the Ohio jobs supported by tourism. In its report, it notes that the data it collects is cross checked against figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Eylon said Tourism Economics’ economic impact estimates are credible and consistent with other metrics he monitors. Tourism Economics’ report released in May 2011, "The Economic Impact of Tourism in Ohio," contained the jobs statistic. The report, which measured employment in 2010, said that 326,964 jobs were directly related to tourism while another 112,109 jobs were indirectly linked to tourism. Indirect employment figures include jobs that are sustained when tourism-related industries spend money. It also includes jobs that are supported by the spending of workers whose jobs are directly tied to tourism. Taken together, Ohio tourism supported 439,073 jobs, according to the report. The inclusion of indirect jobs for evaluating economic impact is not uncommon, but it’s also one worth explaining since in this case they account for about 26 percent of the jobs involved. The average listener might not realize that the total figure includes not just jobs such as those of hotel workers, but also jobs that rely on the patronage of those hotel workers who spend their wages on items such as gasoline or groceries. The $36 billion spending figure Dovilla cited is slightly out of date. Tourism Economics provided that figure to Ohio’s tourism division in 2010. More recently, Tourism Economics reported in May 2011 that Ohio tourism generated $38 billion in sales in 2010, up $2 billion from the previous year. While overall spending increased $2 billion from 2009 to 2010, hotel occupancy increased about 6 percent over that time, and revenue from room sales increased slightly less than 6 percent, according to the Ohio Hotel and Lodging Association. Dovilla’s statement is accurate. He has accurately cited figures for employment and spending prepared by credible researchers. And it’s true that the total jobs figure he cited includes 112,109 indirect jobs that are not supported by consumers spending tourism dollars, but rather by the spending habits of the tourism industry and its employees. But inclusion of such indirect jobs is not unusual for assessing economic impact. On the Truth-O-Meter, Dovilla’s claim rates True.	None	Mike Dovilla	None	None	None	2012-04-20T06:00:00	2012-04-12	['Ohio']
-goop-00002	Britney Spears Secretly Engaged, Using Surrogate For Third Child?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/britney-spears-surrogate-engaged-sam-asghari/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Britney Spears Secretly Engaged, Using Surrogate For Third Child?	5:01 pm, November 12, 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00510	250,000 Texas Turkeys Infected With Ebola	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/texas-turkey-farm-ebola-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Hoax Report Claims 250,000 Texas Turkeys Infected With Ebola	November 15, 2014	None	['Texas']
-goop-02282	Katie Holmes Dumped Jamie Foxx Because He Couldn’t “Make A Commitment”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/katie-holmes-dumped-jamie-foxx-over-commitment/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Katie Holmes Dumped Jamie Foxx Because He Couldn’t “Make A Commitment”?	12:21 pm, October 29, 2017	None	['Jamie_Foxx']
-hoer-01251	Matt Damon is Moving to Pembroke Pines, Florida	fake news	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/matt-damon-is-not-moving-to-pembroke-pines-florida/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Matt Damon is NOT Moving to Pembroke Pines, Florida	April 1, 2016	None	['Pembroke_Pines,_Florida', 'Matt_Damon']
-goop-02351	Kourtney Kardashian “Pregnant Too,” 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/kourtney-kardashian-not-pregnant-no-baby-younes-bendjima/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kourtney Kardashian NOT “Pregnant Too,” Despite Reports	10:24 am, October 13, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-00148	Screenshots document musician Sean P. Diddy Combs' futile attempts to secure a Twitter handle from comb-seller 'Sean's Combs.'	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sean-combs-twitter-handle/	None	Humor	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Musician Sean Combs Fail to Buy a Twitter Handle from Comb-Seller ‘Sean’s Combs’?	29 August 2018	None	['Sean_Combs']
-pomt-12900	"The exodus of citizens from New York State has been growing."	true	/new-york/statements/2017/jan/20/edward-cox/new-york-losing-more-people-other-states-its-gaini/	Edward F. Cox, the chairman of the New York State Republican Committee, took exception when Gov. Andrew Cuomo said "the exodus has stopped" in New York state. "He said there is no exodus, we’ve stopped the exodus. Wrong – completely wrong," Cox said to reporters in Albany. "The exodus of citizens from New York state has been growing, it’s never been larger. That’s an absolute fraudulent statement the governor made, that the net exodus of citizens from New York state has been stopped under his regime. Absolutely wrong. That’s a lie and he knew it was." Is Cox right? Are more people moving out of New York state than moving in? Cuomo’s comment The problem with Cox's statement, according to a Cuomo spokesman, is that Cox misinterpreted what the governor said during his regional State of the State address in Buffalo. Cuomo said: "So we got the spending down. It allowed us to get the taxes down, and that’s why you see a new attitude where businesses believe they’re welcome in New York, families believe they’re welcome in New York. The exodus has stopped, the job growth has started." Cuomo's statement left room for interpretation, but PolitiFact New York evaluated that claim in July 2016 and rated it True. Source: New York State Department of Labor Census data Cox interpreted Cuomo's statement as about people. The U.S. Census Bureau tracks how many people move in and move from states each year. Between April 2010 and July 2016, the latest data available, 846,669 more people moved out of New York state than moved in. That's the largest outflow in the country. Source: U.S. Census Bureau The state’s population increased by 367,719 people in the same time period thanks to births and international migration. Cuomo took office in January 2011. Leaving out data between July 2010 and July 2011 still leaves the state with a net domestic migration loss of about 723,000 between 2011 and 2016. The exodus from New York state is not new. The trend goes back decades. Our ruling Cuomo and Cox are like ships passing in the night. Cuomo's statement was previously rated True. And Cox's version of the statement - '"the exodus of citizens from New York state has been growing" - is verified by census data. We also rate Cox's claim as True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/4390d3e2-ddd7-476a-94ce-072de6842156	None	Edward Cox	None	None	None	2017-01-20T18:01:38	2017-01-10	['None']
-farg-00316	Said methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide.	none	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/how-potent-is-methane/	None	featured-posts	Bernie Sanders	Jessica McDonald	['climate change']	How Potent Is Methane?	September 24, 2018	[' Twitter – Tuesday, September 11, 2018 ']	['None']
-pomt-03459	"Some of these members of the House of Representatives get hundreds of thousands of dollars in farm subsidies" but want to cut food stamps.	true	/ohio/statements/2013/jun/18/sherrod-brown/sen-sherrod-brown-says-lawmakers-who-take-farm-sub/	Congress is deciding whether to reform the nation’s farm subsidy system and, while it is at it, will probably cut the amount it dedicates to food stamps for the poor and low-income workers. Both programs are part of what’s known as the farm bill, the five-year authorization that sets the terms for government crop assistance and defines eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. It turns out that some Congress members receive farm subsidies themselves, or get them through farms and corporations they and their relatives own. Whether they should or shouldn’t is not for us to say. Proponents and opponents of the subsidies, primarily direct payments made to farm owners, can be found in both political parties. But U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, finds it disconcerting that some of the lawmakers who gladly take the government’s subsidies want to cut SNAP, or subsidies to people who need help buying groceries. Discussing the 2013 farm bill, which recently passed in the Senate and is under debate in the House, Brown told reporters on a conference call on June 12, "There's a lot of pressure in the House of Representatives to just emasculate the SNAP program. For whatever reason, some of these members of the House of Representatives get hundreds of thousands of dollars in farm subsidies. They think they earned that, and on the other hand, then they want to cut food stamps, and I think that's morally wrong." We cannot read the minds of subsidy recipients, so we will not judge whether Congress members -- who earn $174,000 federal salaries -- think they have earned the right to farm subsidies. But Brown’s claim struck us as worth examining. Examples were easy to find. The Environmental Working Group, or EWG, an advocacy and research group, maintains a database of federal farm subsidies and has run lawmakers’ names to see what they or their families are getting. News organizations have used this database (and the public can, too), and some have noted where the recipients stand on food stamps, or SNAP. For instance: * Rep. Steve Fincher of Tennessee, "who supports billions of dollars in cuts to the food stamp program," is "one of the largest recipients of federal farm subsidies, according to new annual data released by a Washington environmental group." This was in the New York Times on May 22. Fincher, from Frog Jump, Tenn., and his wife "collected nearly $3.5 million in subsidies from 1999 to 2012," reported the Times, using EWG data. In 2012 alone, the couple received about $70,000 in direct payments, which is "money that is given to farmers and farmland owners, even if they do not grow crops," the Times wrote. During debate in May on whether to cut $20.5 billion from SNAP over the next 10 years, Fincher, a Republican, said, "We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over. This is other people’s money that Washington is appropriating and spending." * Rep. Doug LaMalfa of California and his wife, Jill, together own one third of DSL LaMalfa Family Partnership, which in 2012 alone got $188,570 in direct farm payments from the federal government, according to the EWG. That would put last year’s subsidies to LaMalfa and his wife at $62,857. But going back to 1995, the DSL LaMalfa Family Partnership has received $5.13 million, which would put the share of Rep. LaMalfa and his wife at $1.7 million, EWG said. In May, LaMalfa won a House amendment that would require electronic fraud prevention measures and eliminate bonus pay for signing up new SNAP recipients. He said in a statement then, "The success of the food stamp program should be measured by how many Americans become self-sufficient, not how many are added to the rolls." * Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana has received $196,268 in farm subsidies since 1997, according to the EWG. Stutzman, a Republican, recently proposed cutting SNAP by $30 billion over 10 years, deeper than the $20.5 billion now on the table, saying, "Everyone in Washington talks about deficit reduction but we’ve introduced a real, responsible plan to save taxpayer dollars. Over the past decade, SNAP spending has doubled as this program outgrows its original mission of providing temporary assistance." The list goes on. The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, both reviewing the same EWG data as other media, noted that 15 members of Congress got farm subsidies in 2012. (None were from Ohio.) Thirteen were Republicans and two were Democrats. The Democrats were in the Senate -- Michael Bennett of Colorado and Jon Tester of Montana, who says he is the Senate’s only "working farmer." Both voted June 10 for the Senate version of the farm bill, which would cut SNAP by $4 billion, or about $16 billion less than the House GOP leaders want. Brown, too, voted for the bill after failing to get the SNAP cut restored. It’s fairly obvious where this leaves Brown’s claim that some House members accepted "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in farm subsidies but are eager to cut food stamps. But before ruling, we’ll note in fairness that some of the farm-subsidy recipients told the Wall Street Journal that the farm programs need reform, too. Fincher issued a statement saying, "I voted immediately to remove direct payments," the Journal wrote. And, the Journal added, a spokesman for LaMalfa said the lawmaker has long opposed the farm-subsidy system and voted to end direct payments. In Stutzman’s case, the receipt of subsidies was a political issue in his 2010 election. But he maintained to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that the farm-support system is like a mandate, giving him no choice. The farmer "has to take it," he told the Journal Gazette in 2010. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the program is voluntary. OK, so maybe he and the others didn’t like it one bit when they got farm subsidies. We’re not here to judge their motives. But we are here to judge Brown’s claim. It is True.	None	Sherrod Brown	None	None	None	2013-06-18T11:43:37	2013-06-12	['None']
-pomt-05024	Says he "never supported" federal health care individual mandate.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/jul/15/tommy-thompson/gop-wisconsin-senate-candidate-thompson-says-he-ne/	Among conservatives, a hated provision of federal health care reform is the "individual mandate," which requires Americans (with some exceptions) to buy health insurance. That sentiment has left Republican Tommy Thompson in a difficult spot as he vies with three opponents in the August 2012 primary for U.S. Senate. The former governor and U.S. health and human services secretary has made statements for and against the health care reform legislation that eventually became law. That led us to rate Half True a claim by the national Club for Growth, a conservative group, that Thompson supported "Obamacare." On June 13, 2012, two weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court declared most of the reform law constitutional, Thompson issued two Internet statements about the individual mandate. In one message from a Twitter account for his campaign, Thompson said he "didn’t support the individual mandate." And in the other tweet, directed at Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Matt Canter, he went further, stating: "Can’t back down from something (i.e. the individual mandate) that you never supported, Canter." Taken together, Thompson is claiming he "never supported" the individual mandate. Never is pretty absolute, so let’s check the record. Opponents’ evidence Arguing that Thompson did support the mandate, Canter cited a video clip released by the Washington, D.C.-based Club for Growth the day before the Supreme Court ruling. (While the national Club for Growth has repeatedly attacked Thompson, and is supporting Republican Mark Neumann in the Senate race, the Wisconsin chapter has not.) In the clip, Thompson speaks at a national health care reform forum at American University in Washington, D.C. At the April 2006 event, held more than two years before Obama’s election, Thompson refers to reform in Massachusetts, saying: "You’ve also got to consider strongly -- and I happen to support that, what Massachusetts did -- and that is requiring health insurance, the coverage of health insurance. This is a little bit opposed to what Republicans really think or propose. But the truth of the matter is, just like automobile insurance, you’ve got to have coverage. And if you’re going to be able to cover the uninsured, you’re going to have to have some degree of a mandate to cover the uninsured." Both Canter and Club for Growth also cited video of a University of Texas speech in February 2007 in which Thompson says: "I, for one, believe the mandate for health insurance is all right. We mandate insurance for automobiles. You know you can’t drive in Texas without automobile insurance. You can’t drive in any state without automobile insurance. It’s a mandate, but it’s certainly something that we should discuss in this country, and I think that’s positive." So, Thompson said he supported Massachusetts’ health insurance requirement and said such a mandate is "all right," although both statements were made before Obama’s reform efforts were launched. Thompson’s evidence To defend Thompson’s claim, his campaign spokesman, Brian Nemoir, said Thompson "is the only candidate who has testified before Congress against the mandates." He cited a portion of Thompson’s May 2008 testimony to the Senate Finance Committee: "I am not convinced that the individual mandate is the correct approach," Thompson said, according to a transcript. "We have seen in Massachusetts that the individual mandate approach is not effective at covering the most vulnerable part of the population, that part of the population which needs coverage the most." So, after the generally supportive statements in 2006 and 2007, Thompson in 2008, shortly before Obama’s election, indicated he did not support an individual mandate. Nemoir also cited an August 2011 report by the University of Pennsylvania-based FactCheck.org, which concluded that Club for Growth had falsely attacked Thompson as a "champion of Obamacare," and he provided statements saying Thompson opposes what eventually became law. But Thompson’s past or current positions on the overall reform are not at issue here. In our item about Club for Growth’s claim about Thompson, Thompson’s campaign noted that Thompson at a July 2008 forum on a "universal mandate" for health insurance said: "I don’t want a mandate." But moments later Thompson said: "I’m not opposed to it, I just don’t think it’s the most practical way." Our rating Thompson said he "never supported" an individual mandate. But while he is now an opponent of the health care reform law and its mandate requiring most Americans to buy health insurance, Thompson said in 2006 he supported a mandate and in 2007 said a mandate is "all right." We rate Thompson’s statement False.	None	Tommy Thompson	None	None	None	2012-07-15T09:00:00	2012-06-13	['None']
-goop-00963	Portia de Rossi Did Warn Jennifer Aniston To “Stay Away” From Ellen DeGeneres, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/portia-de-rossi-jennifer-aniston-ellen-degeneres-stay-away-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Portia de Rossi Did NOT Warn Jennifer Aniston To “Stay Away” From Ellen DeGeneres, Despite Report	1:14 pm, May 22, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-05710	Actor Steve Buscemi was once a firefighter and assisted the FDNY after the 9/11 attacks.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/steve-buscemi-fdny/	None	September 11th	None	David Mikkelson	None	Steve Buscemi: 9/11 Hero	4 September 2013	None	['None']
-vogo-00027	Statement: “In San Ysidro, ambulance help is arriving a full minute faster than before. In Skyline, we’re opening a temporary fire station to immediately improve emergency service. In Encanto, we boosted Fire-Rescue response by three minutes,” Mayor Kevin Faulconer said in his State of the City address on Jan. 14.	determination: true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-the-mayors-response-to-emergency-response/	Analysis: During his first year in office, Mayor Kevin Faulconer has tried to emphasize his support for the city’s lower-income communities.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: The Mayor’s Response to Emergency Response	January 22, 2015	None	['San_Ysidro,_San_Diego']
-tron-00067	Ben Carson Audit Reveals $500 Billion in HUD Bookkeeping Errors	mostly fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ben-carson-audit-reveals-500-million-hud-error/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	['barack obama', 'ben carson', 'donald trump', 'government waste', 'hud']	Ben Carson Audit Reveals $500 Billion in HUD Bookkeeping Errors	Apr 7, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-07844	A 5-cent charge on paper bags is a tax.	false	/oregon/statements/2011/feb/13/mark-daniels/mark-daniels-says-oregons-proposed-paper-bag-fee-t/	Opponents have raised a number of arguments to make their case against Senate Bill 536, which would ban plastic shopping bags and require retailers to charge a nickel per paper bag: It’s the elimination of choice at the checkout. It’s based on lies by the environmental community. And yes -- they went there -- it’s a tax on sacks. At a public hearing, Mark Daniels, a vice president from Hilex Poly Co., said the proposal would force consumers to "pay a tax on paper bags." To that, bag-ban champion Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, jumped in and said the nickel charge is not a tax, and pointed to a Legislative Counsel opinion showing so. The next day, the Taxpayer Association of Oregon, which is opposed to the bag ban, accused Hass of trying to censor speech. So, we wanted to know, is a nickel charge on a paper bag a tax? Is it a de-facto tax? A tax has a very specific definition in Oregon government. It’s so specific that the state constitution calls for a higher number of votes-- three-fifths of each chamber -- to pass a tax than to pass a fee, which only requires a simple majority. Voters approved the change in May 1996, embedding the provision into the Oregon Constitution. In any case, to be a tax, it must raise revenue for the general treasury. Former legislative counsel Greg Chaimov agrees with the current Legislative Counsel opinion that the nickel provision is neither a tax nor a fee. "It’s whatever the grocers want to call it. For constitutional purposes, a fee or a tax is at issue only if it is bringing money into the government." Dexter Johnson, the current legislative counsel, said the bag charge would be most similar to the bottle bill deposit, also known as the "container deposit law." In Oregon and in other states, you have to pay a nickel extra for beer, soft drinks and bottled water; that money stays with distributors unless you return the bottle to the grocer for your nickel. And here’s another charge that doesn’t count as a tax or a fee. In 1999, state lawmakers ordered utility companies to assess a "public purpose charge" on electricity and gas bills. Much of the money goes to the nonprofit Energy Trust of Oregon, with some proceeds going to weatherize schools and low-income homes. Again, it doesn’t "raise revenue" because the money doesn’t go into state coffers -- even if the government dictates how the money should be spent. Back to the bag charge. The state doesn’t get any of that money. Grocers can spend the money however they want. And shoppers -- and this is critical -- don’t need to pay a nickel for a paper bag. They are free to bring in their own carrying devices, from gym bags to multi-use plastic bags to previously used paper bags. There is no constitutional right to a disposable sack. Anna Richter Taylor, a lobbyist representing Hilex, argues that for Oregonians who have never before had to pay for a supermarket bag, this is a tax. "The Legislature can call it what they want, but government -- and not grocers -- is forcing consumers to buy a reusable bag or a paper bag," she said. PolitiFact Oregon doesn’t like paying for something that once was free. But remember, television used to be free. Bottled drinks were once 5 cents cheaper. Utility companies used to not charge 3 percent extra for energy programs. Frankly, we think it’s easier to avoid the 5 cent charge on bags than it is to bypass bottled drinks or the public purpose charge on utility bills. We rate the claim False. Comment on this item.	None	Mark Daniels	None	None	None	2011-02-13T06:00:00	2011-02-08	['None']
-snes-04546	UN vehicles have been quietly positioned for action in Virginia and Kentucky as a preemptive response to imminent economic collapse.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/un-vehicles-in-southern-states/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	UN Vehicles and Trucks Spotted in Southern States	27 June 2016	None	['Kentucky', 'Virginia']
-pose-01318	“A Trump administration will renegotiate NAFTA and if we don't get the deal we want, we will terminate NAFTA and get a much better deal for our workers and our companies. 100 percent."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1410/renegotiate-nafta/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Renegotiate NAFTA	2017-01-17T09:08:03	None	['North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement']
-snes-03307	Donald Trump will include Moscow's Red Square in the stops along his "victory tour."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-takes-victory-tour-moscows-red-square/	None	Ballot Box	None	Bethania Palma	None	Trump Takes Victory Tour of Moscow’s Red Square	19 December 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01847	Bounce Fabric Softener Dryer Sheets Work as Bug Repellent 	truth! & misleading!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bounce-fabric-softener-dryer-sheets-work-as-bug-repellent/	None	household	None	None	None	Bounce Fabric Softener Dryer Sheets Work as Bug Repellent –Truth! & Misleading!	Aug 14, 2015	None	['None']
-abbc-00429	The claim: Tony Abbott says households will be $550 a year better off if the Coalition scraps the carbon tax.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-28/abbott-using-outdated-figure-on-carbon-tax-cost/4912726	The claim: Tony Abbott says households will be $550 a year better off if the Coalition scraps the carbon tax.	['climate-change', 'environment', 'federal-government', 'federal-elections', 'abbott-tony', 'emissions-trading', 'australia']	None	None	['climate-change', 'environment', 'federal-government', 'federal-elections', 'abbott-tony', 'emissions-trading', 'australia']	Tony Abbott's claim households will be $550 a year better off without the carbon tax is outdated	Fri 30 Aug 2013, 9:50am	None	['Tony_Abbott', 'Coalition_(Australia)']
-pomt-08491	Says "Scott Walker says he would ban stem cell research"	false	/wisconsin/statements/2010/oct/10/tom-barrett/democratic-governor-candidate-tom-barrett-says-opp/	Stem cells hold the potential to treat, and even cure, some of our most deadly and debilitating illnesses, including heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s and diabetes. To make the cells do their magic, research is needed — and the University of Wisconsin has been at the forefront of that work. But for many people, there is a tension between conducting such research and protecting the sanctity of human life. The dilemma confronts not only scientists, but politicians, who are able to set government funding priorities and even place limits on the work scientists do. As in 2006, stem cell research has become an issue in the race for governor. Just as outgoing Gov, Jim Doyle did four years ago, Democratic nominee Tom Barrett is running a TV ad that paints his Republican opponent — Scott Walker — as extreme on the issue. The ad features a mother talking to the camera about her son, who has juvenile diabetes. She describes how stem cell research "gives our family hope, hope for a cure," and she continues with a blunt declaration: "Scott Walker says he would ban stem cell research in Wisconsin. That’s right, ban it." It is the mother making the statement. But as the candidate, Barrett is responsible for the content of the ad. Indeed, as the mother speaks, the words "Scott Walker says he would ban stem cell research" appear on the screen. Before we can evaluate the accuracy of Barrett’s claim, we need a brief explanation of stem cells and the current state of science. Here are some key points from a primer by the National Institutes of Health: Stem cells are important for two reasons: As a generic type of cell, stem cells can renew themselves through cell division. Moreover, they can be induced to become specific tissue or organ cells that have special functions. That gives stem cells their potential to treat, and someday even cure, a number of diseases. Scientists work with two types of stem cells: embryonic and adult. Embryonic stem cells are derived from an embryo, which science defines as the "developing organism from the time of fertilization until the end of the eighth week of gestation, when it is called a fetus." Adult stem cells, in contrast, come not from a developing organism but from the body. Embryonic stem cells have a crucial advantage: With regard to treating diseases, embryonic stem cells can become all cell types of the body. Adult stem cells are thought to be limited to differentiating into different cell types of their tissue of origin. The embryonic-adult distinction is critical, though it is not mentioned in the TV ad. The mother in the ad is Heidi Fallone. She and her husband, Edward, are two of the six members of the board of directors of Wisconsin Stem Cell Now, a group that advocates specifically for embryonic stem cell research. Heidi Fallone’s connection to the group is not mentioned in the ad. She is presented as an average mother, with her message packing an emotional wallop as strong as the words: Walker would ban stem cell research. In truth, Walker’s comments on the topic have expressed support for stem cell research generally — but not if it involves embryos. It is a line that many candidates have drawn, including Mark Green, who was the subject of Doyle’s attack in 2006. In his ad, Doyle used a Verona mother, pictured with her young daughter, who has diabetes. The mother said Green would "outlaw stem cell research." In the 2010 campaign, Walker and his campaign staff have issued various statements, including two in August, that spell out his position. In one, a day after a U.S. district judge shut down federal funding of all research involving embryonic stem cells, a Walker aide said, "We can realize the potential of stem cell research without destroying human embryos or resorting to human cloning. We can both protect the earliest stages of life and find cures." In another statement, also in the wake of the judge’s ruling, Walker himself said that "science has shown us repeatedly that you can have successful stem cell research without destroying a human embryo." As an alternative to embryonic stem cell research, researchers have been developing techniques to reprogram adult cells back to the embryonic state. But recent studies have revealed problems. The reprogrammed cells appear to retain a memory of their previous role — as skin, for example — and differ in subtle ways from embryonic stem cells. In response to questions, the Barrett campaign has defended its TV ad. Campaign spokesman Phil Walzak told the Associated Press: "Embryonic stem cell research is stem cell research, Walker wants to ban it — he wants to ban stem cell research." The statement, though, shifts the debate. No one disputes that Walker opposes embryonic stem cell research. As additional support, Walzak provided PolitiFact Wisconsin two newspaper articles and a survey Walker completed for the group Pro-Life Wisconsin. But the material, like other items cited, showed only that Walker opposes embryonic stem cell research, not that he wants to ban all stem cell research. In an interview, Walzak said the Barrett ad is accurate because it is widely known that only embryonic stem cell research — not adult stem cell research — is being debated in terms of a research ban. However, since the ad began running, Barrett has altered his message. An e-mail sent by Barrett’s campaign to supporters, signed by Fallone, says Walker would ban "critical" stem cell research. It goes on to criticize Walker’s opposition to embryonic stem cell research. If anything, that underlines how inaccurate the TV ad’s language is. So, where does that leave us? Democrat Tom Barrett is running a TV ad claiming his opponent for governor, Republican Scott Walker, "would ban stem cell research in Wisconsin." In truth, Walker has repeatedly said he supports research involving adult stem cells, but opposes research involving embryonic stem cells. That is a critical distinction in the world of science — and of politics. Barrett’s ad ignores it, presenting Walker as so extreme on the matter that he is "against hope." We rate Barrett’s claim False.	None	Tom Barrett	None	None	None	2010-10-10T09:00:00	2010-10-01	['None']
-snes-03112	The Hampton United Methodist Church called Donald Trump a pervert, a con artist, and a fascist on their church sign.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/church-mock-trump-sign/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Hampton United Methodist Church Mock Trump on its Sign?	19 January 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-05792	On mandatory ultrasounds before abortions.	no flip	/virginia/statements/2012/feb/24/bob-mcdonnell/mcdonnells-support-mandatory-ultrasounds-abortions/	Across the country and around the world, pundits are saying Gov. Bob McDonnell performed a career-defining flip-flop Wednesday by urging fellow Republicans in the General Assembly to ease legislation mandating ultrasounds before an abortion. The Guardian in London called it a "U-Turn;" Al Sharpton on "PoliticsNation" called it a "huge turn-around;" Slate called it a "backtrack." Politico wrote: "The conservative blogosphere collectively bemoaned Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s decision to withdraw his support for legislation requiring invasive ultrasounds to be performed before abortions." The narrative, in many of the stories, is that McDonnell’s action will harm his chances to become the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican national ticket this year. So we wheeled out our Flip-O-Meter to see if McDonnell really did change his position in the ultrasound controversy. On the morning of Jan. 31, during an interview on WTOP radio, McDonnell announced his support of legislation requiring physicians, before an performing an abortion, to conduct an ultrasound and present the image of the fetus to the mother. Here’s an excerpt from his talk with broadcaster Mark Segraves: Segraves: "But what do you support – the idea of having a woman have to take a sonogram before getting an abortion? Is that something you would support?" McDonnell: "An ultrasound – yes, I actually was the original sponsor of that bill about 10 years ago, to give a woman the right to know all the information before she makes the choice." Segraves: "Well, giving her the right to know and mandating a procedure are two completely different things." McDonnell: "Yeah, but I think it gives full information – an ultrasound is used – it’s modern technology, the costs have been driven down, to be able to have that information before making, what most people say is a very important, serious, life-changing decision, I think, is appropriate." McDonnell didn’t get into the types of ultrasounds or the details of the bill. And the legislation did not specify any type of sonogram that must be performed. Several hours later, debate on the Senate floor cast the bill in a new light. Several Democrats, for the first time, argued that the common "jelly on the belly" abdominal sonogram -- in which a wand is rubbed over a woman’s stomach -- may not be sensitive enough to render the image of a fetus in the first months of pregnancy. In such cases, they said, the abortion law would require physicians to conduct invasive transvaginal ultrasounds -- even against a mother’s will -- to get an image. The first news account disclosing that the bill would require transvaginal ultrasounds ran on Feb. 3. After that, the story went viral. The bill, which critics called "state-sanctioned rape," earned the ridicule from Jon Stewart and Saturday Night Live. More than 1,000 people protested at the state Capitol on Feb. 21. Then, on Feb. 22, McDonnell urged the Republican-controlled General Assembly to amend the bill so that no woman would be required to have a transvaginal ultrasound. In a written statement, the governor said he had been initially unaware that the legislation would require the invasive procedure. "I have come to understand that the medical practice and standard of care currently guide physicians to use other procedures to find the gestational age of the child, when abdominal ultrasounds cannot do so," McDonnell wrote. The House amended the bill as the governor requested. The measure is pending in the Senate. So, is there any evidence McDonnell reversed himself on mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds before an abortion? The answer is no. The governor, on Jan. 31, endorsed the general concept of mandating ultrasounds before abortions. Hours later, several senate Democrats revealed the legislation would require some use of transvaginal ultrasounds, even against a woman’s will. There is no record that McDonnell ever endorsed or defended mandatory use of the invasive procedure. Did McDonnell alter his long-held support for requiring women to undergo a non-invasive, external ultrasound before an abortion? The answer, again, is no. He still backs that. Despite all the uproar, we cannot find any change in McDonnell’s stance. We rate this No Flip.	None	Bob McDonnell	None	None	None	2012-02-24T13:16:12	2012-02-22	['None']
-pomt-01986	Under Gov. Scott Walker, "employer confidence now stands at 95 percent," compared to "only 10 percent" at the end of the "Gov. Jim Doyle-Mary Burke administration."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2014/jun/15/republican-party-wisconsin/employer-confidence-sky-high-under-gov-scott-walke/	Gov. Scott Walker has used surveys by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business group and a key supporter of his, to make statements about how good business leaders feel about Wisconsin since he took office. Some of the claims have been off the mark. In February 2012, Walker said 94 percent of Wisconsin employers think the state "is heading in the right direction" and a majority say they will "grow their companies in 2012." We rated his statement Half True. While the figures were cited correctly, they came from a relatively small Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce survey that was not reflective of the overall makeup of businesses in the state. Walker presented the figures without noting the critical limitations. On May 30, 2014, the Wisconsin Republican Party issued a statement about unemployment that contrasted Walker with Mary Burke, the leading Democratic candidate in the November 2014 gubernatorial election. Burke served as state commerce secretary under Walker's predecessor, Democrat Jim Doyle, for part of Doyle’s tenure. The GOP’s claim: "Under Walker, employer confidence now stands at 95 percent; at the end of the Doyle-Burke administration, employer confidence was only 10 percent." The GOP's evidence When we asked for evidence to back the claim, the party cited the latest WMC survey, which was released in January 2014. WMC said that from November through mid-December 2013, it sent surveys by mail and email to 1,291 chief executive officers who are WMC members, and that 341 (26 percent) responded. The GOP said its claim centered on Question 21, which asked: "Do you think things in Wisconsin are going in the right direction, or on the wrong track?" The results: Right direction -- 95 percent; Wrong track -- 5 percent. In contrast, in WMC’s June 2010 survey, the last done before Walker’s election, the figures were 10 percent "right direction," 90 percent "wrong track." But Burke served as Doyle’s commerce secretary for less than three years of Doyle’s eight-year tenure, leaving the post in November 2007. In WMC’s June 2007 survey, the final one before Burke left Commerce, 59 percent said things in Wisconsin were going in the right direction -- much greater than the 10 percent in the June 2010 survey. Moreover, like Walker's claim, the GOP claim was broad and without any qualifications. As stated, the claim suggests the overwhelmingly positive figures for Walker reflect the opinions of business leaders statewide. But as we noted in our Walker factcheck, the survey respondents don’t match up well with Wisconsin’s statewide business profile. A majority of survey respondents in the latest survey were chief executive officers of manufacturing businesses. But manufacturing establishments are just 6 percent of Wisconsin’s businesses. Similarly, WMC represents some small businesses, but half its 3,500 members have more than 50 employees. On more specific questions, the results of the latest survey weren’t quite as positive for Walker. For example: 44 percent of the responding CEOs said they planned to add employees in the next six months; 65 percent said they expected moderate growth in the Wisconsin economy in the next six months and 2 percent expected good growth. Our rating The state Republican Party said that under Walker, "employer confidence now stands at 95 percent," compared to "only 10 percent" at the end of the Doyle- Burke administration. The statement contains an element of truth, in that 95 percent of chief executive officers who are members of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and who responded to the latest WMC survey, agreed that "things in Wisconsin are going in the right direction" rather than "on the wrong track." But the claim ignores critical facts in suggesting that the 95 percent figure applies to all Wisconsin employers, when in fact the CEOs responding to the survey are not a representative sample of all employers. And although only 10 percent said the state was going in the right direction at the end of Doyle’s term in 2010, the rate was 51 percent in the survey done shortly before Burke left Commerce in 2007. We rate the state GOP’s statement Mostly False.	None	Republican Party of Wisconsin	None	None	None	2014-06-15T05:00:00	2014-05-30	['None']
-pomt-05128	Federal health care reforms amounted to ‘the government takeover of health care.’	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2012/jun/24/tommy-thompson/tommy-thompson-says-federal-health-care-reforms-ar/	Republican Tommy Thompson uses a farm field as a backdrop and a stop sign as a prop in a new television ad for his U.S. Senate campaign. The former governor rattles off a list of practices that he would "stop" if voters send him to Washington in November 2012: deficits, tax hikes,over-regulation of business. "And I’ll stop the government takeover of health care by repealing ‘Obamacare,’ " he concludes. Thompson is one of four candidates seeking the GOP nomination for the seat held by retiring U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.). We asked Thompson campaign spokesman Brian Nemoir to explain the last item, about which plenty has been written. He provided this explanation. "The statement is ‘I’ll stop the government takeover of health care,’" Nemoir wrote in an email. But that skips the end of the sentence, which is the key: Thompson says he’ll stop the takeover "by repealing ‘Obamacare.’ " Did the federal health reforms -- part of a key case awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling -- amount to "the government takeover of health care." Seems like we’ve been down this road a few times. Indeed, calling the 2010 health care reform bill a "government takeover of health care" was deemed the 2010 "Lie of the Year" by PolitiFact National. Readers also chose it as that year's most significant falsehood. It concluded that the statement "is simply not true." Here are some details from that item: • Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies. • Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up "exchanges" where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don't have it. • Under the law, the government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors. • The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers. • The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine. PolitiFact National concluded: "PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers." For his part, Nemoir said the law is "a mandated program reducing consumer health care choice coupled with massive increases in both cost and regulation of an industry impacting virtually all Americans, and currently responsible for nearly 20 percent of our GDP, seemingly fits the formally undefined, ‘government takeover.’" Nemoir also said Thompson, who served as U.S. Health and Human Services secretary under President George W. Bush, "has demonstrated leadership on tough issues throughout his career and is uniquely positioned as a health care expert." That may be true, but his resume is not at issue in the "government takeover" claim. Finally, Thompson suggests he would repeal the health care law by himself. Of course, there are 99 other senators, and the House of Representatives, and the president, who would have a say in it. But we think most would recognize that as Thompson simply stating his position, not claiming he could do it unilaterally. Our conclusion Thompson says in a TV ad that federal health reforms amount to "the government takeover of health care." It’s not a government takeover. We’ve said numerous times that characterizing the law in this way is a distortion of the facts -- and the 2010 Lie of the Year. We rate his claim Pants on Fire.	None	Tommy Thompson	None	None	None	2012-06-24T08:00:00	2012-06-07	['None']
-pomt-00995	Fundamental changes made to the language describing the Wisconsin Idea in the University of Wisconsin System's mission statement were the result of a "drafting error."	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2015/feb/06/scott-walker/despite-deliberate-actions-scott-walker-calls-chan/	Echoing other national media, U.S. News & World Report declared Feb. 3, 2015 that Gov. Scott Walker was having a better two-week run than any 2016 presidential hopeful. The very next day, Walker got caught in a political firestorm back home. News broke that language included in Walker’s state budget proposal would fundamentally change something known as the "Wisconsin Idea" -- a mission statement for the University of Wisconsin System that had been in place, and held in some esteem, for more than a century. The Wisconsin Idea doesn't have a precise meaning, but an early definition was: "The borders of the university are the borders of the state." In short, the Wisconsin Idea is a notion of public service, including the system’s contributions to state government as well as "research directed at solving problems that are important" to citizens. Today, the university system includes the flagship University of Wisconsin-Madison and 25 other campuses that comprise the $6 billion-per-year UW System. The backlash to Walker's proposal, even from some conservatives, was swift. So was Walker’s response. Using his official Twitter account, the governor stated on Feb. 4, 2015: "The Wisconsin Idea will continue to thrive. The final version of budget will fix drafting error -- Mission statement will include WI Idea." "Drafting error"? Really? Walker’s budget changes The day before his tweet, Walker had given his 2015-’17 state budget address. It made no mention of the Wisconsin Idea. The next day, the left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy, a Madison-based group, reported that the 1,800-page budget bill itself included language that, in effect, struck the Wisconsin Idea from the mission of the University of Wisconsin System. That mission is contained in a state statute. As shown in a photo accompanying this story, Walker’s budget deletes a number of phrases contained in the statute. Among the statements that are removed: "Extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses"; and "Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth." With some added language, the edits to the language emphasized the mission should be to "meet the state’s workforce needs." How changes occurred Walker’s "drafting-error" explanation suggests the rewriting of the UW System's mission was some kind of mistake -- changes made inadvertently. Walker’s spokeswoman told us the governor had learned shortly before sending his tweet that "there was a miscommunication during the back and forth of the budget process." But the evidence indicates the changes to the Wisconsin Idea language were intentional. As revealed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, based on emails and other information gathered by the newspaper: As the budget was being prepared, Walker’s administration insisted to UW System officials that the changes to the Wisconsin Idea language be made. In December 2014, a budget analyst in Walker's Department of Administration directed the nonpartisan budget-writing office to remove the phrase "Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth" from the state statute covering the UW System's mission. In January 2015, the same analyst told the budget-writing office to remove another phrase: "To extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses." Five days before Walker introduced his budget, a UW System official sent an email to Walker's budget staff raising concerns about the changes, saying: "We strongly urge that stricken language is unique to depicting the character, mission and vision of the UW System." That UW official, John Yingling, later told the Journal Sentinel that Walker’s budget staff responded by saying the changes would remain in the budget. Backtracking from earlier statements, Walker eventually admitted that UW System officials had thrown up red flags and been rebuffed -- although he also said there "was a confusion out there" and "it was a mistake that someone made." Walker’s office also issued a statement claiming that when his office told the budget staff to "keep it simple, they took that to mean that we only wanted workforce readiness language in the mission when we really wanted the language added to the existing mission statement.....It was a simple miscommunication during the natural back and forth of this process." Our rating Walker said fundamental changes to the language describing the Wisconsin Idea in the University of Wisconsin System's mission statement were the result of a "drafting error" in his state budget proposal. But Walker’s administration had insisted to UW System officials on making the changes, giving detailed instructions on passages to be removed from state law. And eventually Walker himself acknowledged that the UW System had objected to the changes before his budget was put into final form. His original claim was not only inaccurate, but ridiculous. Pants on Fire. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s web page. This item was revised on Feb. 6, 2015, so that it refers to a budget analyst in Walker's Department of Administration, rather than a Walker administration official. ------ More on Scott Walker For profiles and stories on Scott Walker and 2016 presidential politics, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Scott Walker page.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2015-02-06T11:41:26	2015-02-04	['None']
-chct-00089	FACT CHECK: Did Joe Biden Never Get More Than 1 Percent When He Ran For President?	verdict: unsubstantiated	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/07/25/fact-check-joe-biden-1-percent-president/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	5:32 PM 07/25/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-14065	"The first tweet was sent from Austin."	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2016/may/20/steve-adler/steve-adler-ridiculously-claims-first-tweet-was-se/	Austin Mayor Steve Adler, making a pitch for special transportation aid, made it clear he thinks of his city as an innovation capital. In part, he said later that day, that’s because the very first tweet was launched in the city. "Austin is where good ideas become real," Adler said in a May 17, 2016, morning meeting in Austin with U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. Later, Adler said during a "smart growth" panel discussion not involving Foxx: "The first tweet was sent from Austin." Austin American-Statesman technology reporter Lilly Rockwell sounded skeptical in her tweet reporting Adler’s claim to history: "Hmm, @MayorAdler claims the first tweet was sent from Austin. I know it became popular at #SXSW but was the first tweet really sent here?" We wondered too. To our inquiry, mayoral spokesman Jason Stanford said Adler occasionally makes his first-tweet-from-Austin claim "as shorthand for how Twitter became real when it came to SXSW. He often says that Austin is where good ideas become real, and he likes to cite Twitter as an example, though in this case he is inexact with his word choice. The mayor has been duly and suitably reminded that words have meaning but apologizes to no one for bragging about Austin’s role as a launch pad for innovation." Answer: #CA So, when was the first tweet? After reaching out to Twitter’s press office (not hearing back), we followed the suggestion of KUT News reporter Nathan Bernier, who’d retweeted and questioned Adler’s claim. Bernier guided us to a 2013 book by journalist Nick Bilton covering Twitter’s birth and growth, "Hatching Twitter," which includes a chapter stating that one of the San Francisco-based company’s founders, Jack Dorsey, posted the first "official" Twitter update at 11:50 a.m. March 21, 2006. According to the book, Dorsey tweeted from the office of his then-employer, Odeo, a faltering podcast venture. Dorsey’s post said: "just setting up my twittr,’ matching the wording of a test message someone else sent earlier. Other insiders joined in, according to the book, on what was then a crude website that like a blog, presented a stream of updates. We also noticed a "Milestones" section on Twitter’s website showcasing Dorsey’s groundbreaking tweet, though with a Central time zone time-stamp: A web search led us next to a July 2006 TechCrunch story stating: "Odeo released a new service today called Twttr, which is a sort of ‘group send’ SMS application... Each person controls their own network of friends. When any of them send a text message to ‘40404,’ all of his or her friends see the message via sms. This launched officially today, and a few select insiders were playing with the service at the Valleyschwag party in San Francisco last night." So it looks like the first tweet was fired off in California. Austin's moment Still, the next milestone listed by Twitter says that in March 2007, "Twitter breaks through at SXSW Interactive, wins the digital confab’s SXSW Web Award," and that mention includes a web link to a description of the prizewinning moment: "Twitter won the SXSW Web Award tonight in the ‘Blog’ category. Of course everyone immediately Twittered that Twitter won, causing massive waves of SMS notifications throughout the ballroom." The South by Southwest conference, of course, occurs in Austin. A March 2007 San Francisco Chronicle news story called Twitter the "toast of the town" during SXSW Interactive that year. More from that story (which indicates "tweet" hadn’t yet gained currency as a noun or verb): "Large flat-panel screens at the conference had people's twitters floating by in real time. Cell phones beeped and buzzed during speeches. Groups of people stood in pockets at parties, looking down at their glowing phones and PDAs. San Francisco blogger and humorist Min Jung Kim wrote a Twitter haiku observing, "twitter defined as/turning bunches of geeks to/14 year old girls." "Twitters filled up users' cell phones and wore out their batteries. "It also gave rise to a new lingo. Among the coinages: twittermob, which, in the definition from Thor Muller of Web design firm Rubyred Labs and the forthcoming company Satisfaction, is ‘an unruly and ragtag horde of people that descend on an ill-prepared location after a provocative twitter message.’ ... "In the words of a twitter from Scott Beale, a heavy twitterer and the head of San Francisco's Laughing Squid Web hosting service, ‘I think we reached Twittercal mass in Austin. It will be interesting to see where we go from here.’" Our ruling Adler said the first tweet was sent from Austin. That’s not so. Twitter gained momentum during a SXSW conference in Austin, but the first tweet had been sent nearly a year earlier from California, where the company is based. This claim gets a rating that fits well under 140 characters: Pants on Fire! PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/3ce670ca-0573-406e-a6b2-3cbe92a6fe74	None	Steve Adler	None	None	None	2016-05-20T16:34:32	2016-05-17	['Austin,_Texas']
-pomt-10933	"Trump tax cut benefits all congressional districts, up to $44,697 per family."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/26/kevin-mccarthy/could-trump-tax-cut-save-44697-family/	As Republican lawmakers seek to gain momentum for "tax cut 2.0" -- legislation to expand the tax law signed in December by President Donald Trump -- they have returned to tax-related messaging. One tweet by a prominent House Republican latched on to a new study of the tax law’s impact. On July 23, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sent a tweet touting the benefits of the tax changes, which were passed exclusively with Republican support. "ZERO Democrats voted for this → ‘Trump tax cut benefits all congressional districts, up to $44,697 per family,’" McCarthy tweeted. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com The tweet links to an article about a study by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, that had been released that same day. The gist of the Heritage study is that, thanks to the tax law, "in 2018, taxpayers will save an average of $1,400, and married couples with two children will save $2,917. Over the next 10 years, because of a larger economy driven by tax cuts and the tax cuts themselves, the typical American household will benefit from more than $26,000 more in take-home pay, or $44,697 for a family of four." We don’t doubt that taxpayers in every congressional district will benefit in some way from the tax law. However, McCarthy glosses over some of the study’s nuances. Let’s take a closer look. Analyzing the Heritage study The word to focus on in the Heritage study is "average." It appears 121 times in the 27-page report. By contrast, the term "median" doesn’t appear at all. Here’s why that matters. When you compute an average (specifically, the "mean") of a set of numbers, you calculate the sum of everything, then divide that by the number of items. But when you compute the median, you line up all of the items from smallest to largest, then choose the midpoint. For something like the tax bill, which has significantly different impacts on different types of taxpayers, the measurement you use can make a significant difference. As we have noted, the tax law provides a disproportionate share of its benefits to wealthier taxpayers. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers do get tax cuts under the law -- something we’ve fact-checked Democrats for downplaying -- but all told, the tax bill does skew favorably toward the wealthy. That’s not a surprise -- under the United States’ progressive tax system, richer taxpayers foot a disproportionate share of the tax bill. Still, it’s a notable feature of the law. Here’s an analysis of the size of the average tax cut for each income group, compiled by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. For 2018, the average tax cut for the middle 20 percent of the income scale is $780. That’s much less than it is for the top one-fifth of the income scale -- $5,790 -- and compared to the top 1 percent, at $32,650, it’s positively paltry. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com In Heritage’s methodology, these very large tax refunds are factored into the calculations. If a median had been used, the expansionary effect of those large amounts on the "typical" figure would have been muted. "Because of the high-dollar value of the tax cuts received by many wealthy households and the fact that there are fewer wealthy households than low-income households, the average tax cut is going to be higher than the median tax cut," said Patrick Newton, a spokesman for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Tax experts said it’s not clear that Heritage could have computed a true median with the data available. But other groups have come up with other ways to weed out the impact of very large tax savings when producing a measurement of a typical tax cut. The Tax Policy Center is one of them. As we noted, the Tax Policy Center found that the average tax cut for the middle 20 percent of the population was $780. That’s a fraction of the analogous figure in the Heritage study, $1,400. Another group that made a similar assessment, the liberal-leaning Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, found a figure in line with the Tax Policy Center -- $800 for the middle 20 percent. "Certainly only looking at the average tax change is not reflective of what the ‘median’ taxpayer will experience," said Joe Rosenberg, a senior research associate at the Tax Policy Center. Adam Michel, Heritage’s tax policy analyst, told PolitiFact that they did not calculate a median, but added that "we are not unique in using averages," citing both Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation and the Tax Policy Center. "That said, every statistic, both median and mean, gives you different information," Michel said. He added that an alternative approach -- looking at the tax cut as a percentage of income in every congressional district, rich and poor -- shows that lower-income districts actually saw tax cuts account for a larger percentage of income than higher-income districts did. A final note: McCarthy’s use of the $44,697 figure is a bit overheated, as well. It refers to a 10-year cumulative figure, using assumptions that the tax cut boosts economic growth. So that figure is neither for a single year, nor is it guaranteed to pan out. McCarthy’s office did not respond to inquiries. Our ruling McCarthy said, "Trump tax cut benefits all congressional districts, up to $44,697 per family." The benefits McCarthy is talking about are added up over 10 years, something that is readily apparent. The number does come from a real study -- and McCarthy is careful to hedge by saying "up to" -- but he glosses over significant nuance. The actual one-year, per-household tax cut in the study he cited is $1,400, and even that is exaggerated because the study uses averages, which give greater weight to big tax cuts at the top of the income scale than a median would have. Estimates by other organizations suggest a middle-income household would save between $780 and $800 per year. We rate the statement Half True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Kevin McCarthy	None	None	None	2018-07-26T11:14:15	2018-07-23	['None']
-hoer-01197	Facebook Team Security Last Warning Your Account Will Be Disabled	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/facebook-team-security-phishing-scam-last-warning-account-will-disabled/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Facebook Team Security Phishing Scam Last Warning Your Account Will Be Disabled	February 26, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-01339	Photos prove the Denver light rail system has low ridership.	false	/florida/statements/2014/oct/23/no-tax-tracks/greenlight-pinellas-opponents-argue-denver-light-r/	No Tax For Tracks, the grassroots group opposing the Greenlight Pinellas mass transit initiative, says it has plenty of evidence light rail isn’t worth the cost. Just look at Denver, they say. Spokesperson Barb Haselden presented a series of photos during a debate with Greenlight’s Kyle Parks at the Stetson University College of Law on Sept. 29 (starting in the video at 27:40). The images showed a nearly deserted transit station, empty rail cars and a parking lot with almost no cars. "I went to Denver for a transportation conference; they opened their light rail line 16 months ago. … When I got out and walked up to the front door to the brand new transit hub, nobody was there," she said, clicking onto an image of glass doors. "I walked in the door that you just saw, main concourse at 10:30 Friday morning, nobody was there." Empty staircases. "Ticket windows: Nobody’s there. A few people waiting on a train." Ticket windows without buyers. About a half-dozen people waiting on a platform. "I got on the train, I quickly turned to the right to take a picture, and then I turned to the left." A couple of passengers, then no passengers. "But people say, well gee, maybe this is because it’s 10:30 and they had all gone to work," she said. "Here’s the Park-n-Ride lot. Empty." No Tax For Tracks is using this as proof that Greenlight Pinellas is a boondoggle, despite the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority and Greenlight boosters crying foul. The whole thing made PolitiFact Florida wonder, was her presentation truly worth a few thousand fares? On the FasTracks Haselden and No Tax For Tracks didn’t return our messages, but we figured out she attended the American Dream Conference from Sept. 19-21, 2014, sponsored by the American Dream Coalition, a vocal opponent of mass transit. Speakers conducted presentations with titles like "Sustainable Suburban Development Can Defeat Social Engineering," "Stopping Wasteful Projects Through Citizen Advocacy" and "Fighting Southern Florida’s Seven-50 Plan," referring to a public-private urban planning initiative in southeast Florida. The conference started with a tour on Sept. 19, including taking a train from downtown Denver’s Union Station to Golden on the region’s newest light rail line, the West line on the project called FasTracks. The public began using it in April 2013. It’s the first light rail line in the transit expansion approved by voters in 2004. The plan instituted a new 4/10 of a percent sales tax to add six new rail lines and bus rapid transit to the four lines in service since October 1994. The project was originally projected to cost $4.7 billion, but grew to more than $6 billion. These points are highlighted in a No Tax For Tracks video from the conference in which Natalie Menten, an elected board member for the Denver area’s Regional Transportation District and outspoken opponent of government spending, calls the entire project "a failure, from start to finish." Menten says the RTD public relations department would say the project came in under budget and ahead of schedule, and that wasn’t true. So we asked the district’s PR department. That’s not quite what they told us. Fare vs. fair It should be noted that yes, the FasTracks project’s budget did increase significantly. Several things occurred to (ahem) derail initial estimates. Pauletta Tonilas, senior public relations manager for the RTD, said some engineering and environmental solutions ended up being more complex than planned. There also was a spike in construction costs, as the prices for concrete, steel, diesel fuel, copper and the like went up. The Great Recession also disrupted the project, cutting into sales tax revenue after 2008. Another snag was a recent change by the Federal Railroad Administration requiring the use of bigger, stronger light rail cars on lines that moved along freight corridors, Tonilas said. With some creative financing and planning, the RTD finished the first phase, the 12-mile West line, eight months ahead of the working schedule. The West line averages about 14,000 trips per day -- that is, one person buying a ticket -- and should grow when other FasTracks lines open in 2016, Tonilas said. That accounts for about 17 percent of the 84,000 or so trips she said the entire light rail system gets per day, although that varies from month to month. The whole RTD system, including bus, rail and shuttle service, averages about 350,000 trips per day. To put that in perspective, Denver’s light rail consistently ranks in the top 10 light rail systems in the country, in terms of ridership. San Francisco’s streetcars get some 220,000 trips per day and Charlotte gets about 16,000, according to the American Public Transportation Association. Tampa’s streetcar line nets somewhere around 700 trips per day. Current projections for the 24-mile Greenlight Pinellas light rail line from St. Petersburg to Clearwater scheduled to open in 2024 estimate it will cost $1.87 billion to build, with about 17,000 riders per day by 2035. Back to the negatives Now, let’s get back to Haselden’s presentation, because there are some holes in it. First, the empty concourse. Scott Reed, assistant general manager for RTD communications, told us that was not a light rail station. It’s the renovated Union Station bus concourse, an underground station with light rail platforms above it. It’s still pretty empty, but that’s because ridership generally follows normal commuting times, Reed said. It’s no surprise the bus concourse and rail platforms were relatively empty at 10:30 on a Friday morning. Also, this was a westbound train headed to the suburbs in the morning, the opposite of normal commuting patterns. Haselden said no one was at the Park-n-Ride lot, but there’s a good reason for that, too: That was a parking lot for the Pepsi Center, the arena where the city’s professional hockey and basketball teams play, Reed said. It wouldn’t normally be filled on a Friday morning. Union Station doesn’t have a Park-n-Ride lot, Reed said, because it’s downtown. On at least one occasion, during an interview with Fox 13, Haselden was told the parking lot belonged to the arena, and the station said she had apologized. Our ruling No Tax For Tracks gave a presentation with photos they said prove the Denver light rail system has low ridership. After examining the presentation and Denver’s light rail system, we found the opposite. Not only are the photos misrepresenting the city’s mass transit, but statistics show the Mile High city has one of the more successful systems in the country. No Tax For Tracks may not approve of how rail is funded or operated, but using photos of one thing and saying it’s another nullifies the argument. We rate the statement False. Correction, Oct. 24, 2014: The story has been changed to reflect the Tampa streetcar line averages about 700 trips per day. The story previously had a different number.	None	No Tax For Tracks	None	None	None	2014-10-23T11:51:30	2014-09-29	['Denver']
-pomt-11330	Says Buzz Aldrin "passes UFO lie detector test leaving experts convinced that he encountered alien life."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/apr/10/blog-posting/no-buzz-aldrin-didnt-see-space-aliens-and-take-lie/	Buzz Aldrin, the 88-year-old astronaut who became the second man to walk on the Moon in 1969, made the news in recent days -- but not of his own volition. A story about Aldrin witnessing space aliens went viral. The headline on hidden-mag.com’s post was, "Buzz Aldrin ‘passes UFO lie detector test leaving experts convinced that he encountered alien life.’" The post went on to say that Aldrin and other astronauts -- Al Worden, Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper -- "gave accounts of their sightings under strict lab conditions." Specifically, the post said, the four "took part in the study conducted by the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology in Albany, Ohio." One problem with the story: Cooper died in 2004, while Mitchell died in 2016. Worden is 86. Another problem with the post: It said that Aldrin had said "he was a spaceship on his way to the Moon," the post said, when he saw "something out there that was close enough to be observed … sort of L-shaped." According to the post, Aldrin passed a test akin to a lie detector, only "more reliable." That’s an incomplete and misleading snippet from a Reddit Ask Me Anything session he took part in three years ago. Here’s the full comment. "On Apollo 11 (en) route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world -- it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft. So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don't know. So technically, the definition could be ‘unidentified.’ "We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently it wasn't, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose these observations, on another country's television network. And the UFO people in the United States were very very angry with me, that I had not given them the information. It was not an alien. Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence. That's what Carl Sagan said. There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost CERTAIN that there is life somewhere in space. It was not that remarkable, that special, that unusual, that life here on earth evolved gradually, slowly, to where we are today. "But the distances involved in where some evidence of life may be, they may be hundreds of light years away." Bottom line: In the Reddit session, Aldrin clearly rejected any suggestion that the light he saw was some sort of of space alien. A representative for Aldrin told PolitiFact that the lie-detector angle is bogus as well. "We don’t know where this new UFO story came from," said Christina Korp, vice president of marketing, media and business development for Aldrin. "Buzz did not take a lie detector test. He has never said he saw a UFO." Referring to the light he mentioned in the Reddit session, Korp said, "Buzz has been very clear on this over the years and has never wavered in his description of it. He does not believe in UFOs. ... This is not the first time someone has tried to capitalize on using Buzz’s name to make headlines." The Aldrin story appears to have originated with an April 8 "exclusive" article in the Daily Star, a site based in the United Kingdom. Our ruling Various websites ran articles with headlines claiming that Buzz Aldrin passed a lie detector test claiming he "encountered alien life." However, a spokeswoman for Aldrin said the retired astronaut never took any type of "lie-detector" test. Meanwhile, Aldrin was clear in the Reddit session three years ago that he felt an unusual light he saw during space flight had prosaic origins and was not an alien. We rate this Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-04-10T18:29:22	2018-04-09	['None']
-goop-02919	Kim Kardashian, Kanye West “Over,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-over-kanye-west-divorce-papers-2017/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian, Kanye West NOT “Over,” Despite Divorce Report	10:13 am, March 22, 2017	None	['Kim_Kardashian']
-pomt-10265	While in the Illinois Senate, Barack Obama passed legislation moving people "from welfare to jobs."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/25/michelle-obama/obama-sponsored-state-level-welfare-law/	Michelle Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on Aug. 25, 2008, dwelling largely on a personal portrait of her home life with Barack Obama and her upbringing in a working-class family on Chicago's South Side. She concluded her speech with a call to civic duty. "I believe that each of us — no matter what our age or background or walk of life — each of us has something to contribute to the life of this nation. It's a belief Barack shares — a belief at the heart of his life's work. ... "It's what he did in the Illinois Senate, moving people from welfare to jobs, passing tax cuts for hard- working families, and making sure women get equal pay for equal work." Here, we'll look at a claim we checked previously , that Obama moved people from welfare to work. The claim goes back to his days as a state senator in the Illinois legislature. President Bill Clinton and Congress significantly overhauled welfare in 1996, requiring recipients to work and setting time limits on benefits. The states in turn had to change their laws to meet the new federal requirements. In 1997, Obama signed up as a chief co-sponsor (one of five in the Senate) on Illinois' version of the legislation. But the Illinois governor at the time, Republican Jim Edgar, got a lot of credit as well. Press reports from the time referred to the plan as "the Edgar plan." This isn't the first time Obama has referred to Illinois laws as if he passed them singlehandedly . Also, in floor remarks from the time, Obama expressed less than full support for the federal legislation. He was particularly concerned that people removed from welfare would be able to receive training so they could earn a living wage. "I am not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare," Obama said on the Illinois Senate floor. "Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation, because I think it had some problems. But I'm a strong believer in making lemonade out of lemons. ... I think this is a good start, and I urge support of this bill." Nevertheless, the legislation's primary role was welfare reform, and the legislative record shows that Obama had a leadership role in getting it passed. For these reasons, we find Obama's claim Mostly True.	None	Michelle Obama	None	None	None	2008-08-25T00:00:00	2008-08-25	['Barack_Obama', 'Illinois']
-snes-02383	The restaurant review website Zomato suffered an attack that compromised 17 million users' data	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zomato-hack/	None	Technology	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Was Zomato Hit by Hackers?	22 May 2017	None	['None']
-snes-00916	McDonald's restaurants are turning their iconic gold arches upside down to celebrate International Women's Day.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-restaurants-flipping-womens-day/	None	Business	None	Bethania Palma	None	Are McDonald’s Restaurants Flipping Their Iconic Golden Arches Upside Down for Women’s Day?	8 March 2018	None	['None']
-snes-06250	Radio talk show host Neal Boortz delivered a controversial commencement speech at Texas A&M.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/texas-am-commencement-address/	None	Soapbox	None	David Mikkelson	None	Neal Boortz’s Texas A&M Commencement Address?	21 July 2003	None	['Neal_Boortz']
-goop-01766	Jennifer Lopez Did Say ‘It’s Hilarious’ That Drake Is ‘Name-Checking’ Her In Son	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-lopez-drake-song-diplomatic-immunity-reaction/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Lopez Did NOT Say ‘It’s Hilarious’ That Drake Is ‘Name-Checking’ Her In Song	1:50 pm, January 22, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-12981	"Pence: ‘Michelle Obama Is The Most Vulgar First Lady We’ve Ever Had’"	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2016/dec/20/politiconocom/satirical-site-made-story-mike-pence-called-michel/	Vice President-elect Mike Pence attacked First Lady Michelle Obama as the most distasteful woman to ever live in the White House — at least according to a fake news story on a website that bills itself as satirical. A headline on an Oct. 14, 2016, story on Politicono.com declared "Pence: ‘Michelle Obama Is The Most Vulgar First Lady We’ve Ever Had’." Users flagged the suspicious post as part of Facebook’s attempt to stop the spread of fake news. The story was pegged to a real instance of Pence defending Donald Trump, who was then the GOP presidential candidate running against Hillary Clinton. Michelle Obama had said in a speech on Oct. 13, without mentioning Trump by name, that a 2005 recording had shown the GOP nominee admitting to "sexually predatory behavior." Pence appeared on CBS This Morning on Oct. 14 and sounded puzzled by Michelle Obama’s comments. "Look I have a lot of respect for the first lady," he said. "But I don’t understand the basis of her claim." But that’s about as far as Pence’s comments went. He never called Obama vulgar, and certainly not the most vulgar first lady ever. That’s because Politicono.com is a website (its slogan is "Just Enough News") that takes a kernel of real news and sprouts an entire fabricated story around it. It says readers come to the site to read "a unique brand of entertainment and information that is enhanced by features like our fact-button, which allows readers to find what is fact and what is satire." Indeed, at the top of the Pence story are two buttons: "Show facts" and "hide facts." Clicking the "show facts" button highlights only the first paragraph of the story. The rest is entirely made up. Politicono.com didn’t respond to our requests for comment, but when we talked to them for another fact-check in 2015, an administrator pointed out they admit some content is exaggerated. That makes the website less culpable than many others that give no indication something may be contrived, but it’s still not immediately apparent the story is fake. It’s also very misleading to build upon a real event and then purposely obscuring which part is true and which is not. The comments section on the story itself certainly shows many have been fooled. Either way, Pence did not call the first lady vulgar. We rate the headline Pants on Fire. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/db2cffb7-ed7c-43c0-bec1-ef2b2a47a828	None	Politicono.com	None	None	None	2016-12-20T16:07:59	2016-10-14	['None']
-pomt-07812	"For the last decade, funding in the health and human services budget has grown at twice the rate as other parts of the budget, and I think that context is important."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2011/feb/17/joe-negron/state-sen-joe-negron-says-human-services-spending/	The call for cuts to state spending has started in earnest in Tallahassee where lawmakers are beginning the process of formulating Florida's upcoming budget. They are doing so amid projections of a $3.62 billion financial shortfall. One cost-cutting plan, pitched by Sen. Joe Negron, a Stuart Republican who chairs the Senate Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee, calls for trimming $1.5 billion in health care spending by privatizing Medicaid and cutting certain benefits. "My goal is the benefits under Medicaid will not be worse than what any private citizen has, but not better, either," Negron told the Palm Beach Post on Feb. 14, 2011. Negron also spoke about his plan to rein in health care spending at a Feb. 15 hearing of his committee. "For the last decade, funding in the health and human services budget has grown at twice the rate as other parts of the budget, and I think that context is important," Negron told the committee, as reported by the Orlando Sentinel. We decided to evaluate Negron's claim concerning the rate of growth for program spending. When we asked the senator how he arrived at his statement, he provided us with this spreadsheet that gave the amount appropriated for human services for the 2001-2002 budget compared to the amount appropriated in the 2010-2011 budget. He also provided spending figures for all other program areas in those two years. To clarify, health and human services is not a single department in Florida. Rather, it's a section of the budget that provides funding for state agencies like the Department of Health, Department of Children and Families, Elder Affairs, Veterans Affairs and the Agency for Health Care Administration. Negron's figures show $16.9 billion was appropriated for spending in the 2001-02 budget, which 10 years later increased to $28.5 billion. That's an increase of 68 percent. He did the same calculation for all other state-funded programs, showing a change from $31.2 billion in 2001-02 to $41.8 billion a decade later. Those figures amount to a 34 percent increase. "The extraordinary growth in Medicaid has limited the ability to fund other equally worthy budget areas such as education," Negron said in a phone interview on Feb. 15. By taking a financial snapshot of the budgets approved in 2001 and 2010, Negron's figures do demonstrate that the change in the human services budget is twice the change in the rest of the budget. But is it fair to compare just the first and last years of the decade, which shows the change but not the rate of growth? After all, parts of the budget went up and down at different times and different rates during those years. The Governor's Office of Policy and Budget pointed us to 10 years of budgets. To evaluate the rate of growth, we computed the compound annual growth rates over the decade. The compound annual growth rate is what financial analysts call a "smoother." It would be the growth rate if the budget grew at a steady rate for 10 years, and it's a common way to compare the rate of change over time. We'd explain how to calculate it, but it involves exponents. This is a good explanation, if you want to see the details. A number of free CAGR calculators are available on the internet, and you can try them here, here or here. You can see our math here. In a CAGR comparison, the rates are a little different. The budget for human services grew at a compound annual growth rate of 5.3 percent over 10 years, and the rest of the budget grew at 3.04 percent. That's still considerably higher growth for human services, by about 75 percent, but not twice as much. Negron was looking back at the past decade, but we also reviewed Gov. Rick Scott's proposed budget for the next two years. The budget cuts are about $5 billion the first year, 2011-12, and another $2.6 billion the following year. And Scott proposes to keep human services spending at almost the same level as this year. So if Negron had included the budget forecast in his statement, it would have easily been true no matter which method we used for comparison. But Negron's comment was that "for the last decade, funding in the health and human services budget has grown at twice the rate as other parts of the budget." From the start of the decade to the end, the increase in the human services budget is double the rest of the budget, but the growth rate is not quite doubled. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Joe Negron	None	None	None	2011-02-17T12:07:33	2011-02-15	['None']
-pose-00319	"Will enlist other federal agencies, industry and academia to develop innovative scientific and technological research projects on the International Space Station."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/336/partner-to-enhance-the-potential-of-the-internatio/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Partner to enhance the potential of the International Space Station	2010-01-07T13:26:55	None	['None']
-pomt-13404	"Welcome to #Houston, the most #diverse city in #America."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2016/sep/23/sylvester-turner/sylvester-turner-calls-houston-nations-most-divers/	Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner unveiled 60 welcome signs destined for the city’s airports, libraries and convention center via a tweet saluting the city’s diversity. "Welcome to #Houston, the most #diverse city in #America. New posters up at City Hall and the airports," Turner said in July 2016. The Bayou City is known for a few things. Its size as the nation’s fourth-most populous city, for one. The constant one-two punch of heat and humidity for much of the year could be another. And the city’s diversity comes to mind. Still, with other U.S. cities having similar reputations, we wondered how Turner determined Houston ranks No. 1. Turner cites Kinder Institute study By email, Janice Evans in the mayor’s office told us Turner relied on a 2012 report from the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a Rice University think tank, stating that based on the 2010 U.S. Census, the Houston metropolitan area--taking in Harris and adjoining Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, and Galveston counties--was the most racially and ethnically diverse of the country’s top 10 most populous metropolitan areas. The report, we found, relied on a statistical calculation known as an Entropy Index which a 2004 U.S. Census Bureau paper calls a measure of "evenness," in this instance how ethnic groups are distributed across Houston-area neighborhoods. The index, devised by Dutch econometrician Henri Theil and others in the early 1970s, compares the population of individual groups to the general population. Kinder’s analysis counted the population of four major ethnic groups (white, black, Latino and Asian) and calculated how close the total population was to having balanced percentages across the groups. In the end, Houston had an entropy score of 0.874, narrowly edging New York, which had a 0.872 score. "All but two of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, Boston and Philadelphia, have a higher entropy score than the national average of 0.709," the report said, "meaning that in general the large metropolitan areas are more diverse than the nation as a whole." Metro Areas Entropy Index Scores Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX 0.874 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island NY-NJ-PA 0.873 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 0.859 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA 0.855 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 0.822 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL 0.820 Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI 0.806 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA 0.786 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 0.686 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH 0.570 SOURCE: Report, Houston Region Grows More Racially/Ethnically Diverse, With Small Declines in Segregation, Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2012 The Houston metro area stood out, the report said, because "unlike the other large metropolitan areas, all four major racial/ethnic groups have substantial representation in Houston with Latinos and Anglos occupying roughly equal shares of the population." City versus region? But when talking about diverse cities, it’s worth mentioning that neither diversity nor "city" has a consistent definition. John Logan, a Brown University sociologist whose research we spotted online, explained by email that researchers often prefer to look at metro area populations rather than limiting their focus to residents within city limits, since in many urban areas people live beyond the city limits. Jack Fong, a sociologist at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, told us that historically, the definition of any city or metropolitan area has proved fluid, even ambiguous, with no exact consensus among experts. We reached out to Fong after he was cited as an expert in a May 2016 diversity study on the online financial planning website WalletHub. That study pegged Houston as the 23rd most diverse city in the nation--though 10th among cities with a population exceeding 300,000. Fong said that often in diversity studies, researchers decide on the physical boundaries first and then derive data on the population within those boundaries, instead of surveying people to see how they self-identify. He said people connect to a city very much based on emotion, and "don’t care what the map says." In an urban sociology textbook, Fong noted the many ways a city has been defined, across regions and throughout history, "given that almost 200 countries on the planet have different approaches toward identifying the boundaries of their urban areas." Both the WalletHub analysis and a May 2015 article posted by FiveThirtyEight focused on cities rather than metropolitan areas. The FiveThirtyEight study went this route because cities matter "especially for questions of urban planning and city-administered services like schooling and policing," the story read. Houston comparatively looks less diverse, we determined, if you look at cities by themselves, not sweeping in adjoining areas. The Kinder Institute report also found two suburbs of Houston, Pearland and Missouri City, were more diverse than Houston itself. "There’s no perfection, no precision, no exactness in how diversity can be measured," Fong said. The lack of one singular definition of what a city or metro area is, along with analyzing the population based on different categories, will lead to varying outcomes. When local leaders tout their city’s diversity, however, Fong would recommend following up to find out how they reached those conclusions. Other research Web searches and interviews helped us identify other studies, not all of them placing Houston first in diversity. For instance, a clickable analysis by the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at Brandeis University makes it possible to gauge the diversity of metro area populations based on a variety of factors for the years 2000, 2010 and 2012. Among options: The data can be analyzed to look at only the population under 18 years of age, or over 65 years old, or to compare native-born and foreign-born residents. Houston ranked 11th for its 18 and under population and 97th for its 65 and older population among the 100 largest metro areas, and sixth nationally for its foreign-born and 39th for its native-born populations. Another resource, the US2010 Project from Brown University and Penn State University, allowed us to gauge the "diversity index" of the nation’s major metro areas for 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. By this analysis, the greater Houston area in 2010 landed eighth nationally, trailing areas including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York and Las Vegas. It looked to us like Houston didn’t rank first because the project took into account five racial ethnic categories, the additional one being other, which mainly accounts for the Native American population; Kinder considered four. Bingo, Logan told us by email, further noting that when people identified as more than one race, they were not counted in both categories but instead assigned to one in the US2010 rankings. "These choices naturally have some impact on the diversity measure," Logan said. We shared our diverse findings with Turner’s office. In reply, spokeswoman Janice Evans pointed out by phone that however Houston ranks, it’s "very diverse. Anyone who lives here knows that." Our ruling Turner tweeted that Houston is the most diverse city in the country. While the Kinder Institute report lists Houston as the most diverse out of the country’s biggest metropolitan areas, other metro area rankings, such as the US2010 Project, place it high but not at the very top. Rankings that compare only cities rank Houston lower nationally. Experts acknowledge diversity can be calculated in a multitude of ways, which makes it difficult to come to one singular conclusion. We rate this claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/7fd8047b-dea7-410c-9c78-8e61e9db2304	None	Sylvester Turner	None	None	None	2016-09-23T18:12:53	2016-07-26	['United_States', 'Houston']
-snes-05160	A photograph shows two Ku Klux Klan members dressed in white robes showing support for Donald Trump at the Nevada caucus.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-kkk-supporters/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Donald Trump Supporters Wear KKK Robes to the Nevada Caucus?	24 February 2016	None	['Nevada', 'Ku_Klux_Klan', 'Donald_Trump']
-snes-04397	A Knoxville man was killed in a fiery collision caused by a wrong-way driver playing Pokemon Go.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pokemon-go-fatal-crash-in-knoxville/	None	Crime	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Pokemon Go Caused a Fatal Crash in Knoxville?	22 July 2016	None	['Knoxville,_Tennessee']
-vees-00165	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Website with outdated story on Bongbong's electoral protest	misleading	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-website-misleads-outdated-story-bongbo	None	None	None	None	false news	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Website MISLEADS with outdated story on Bongbong's electoral protest	June 22, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-00190	Greenpeace Activists Damage Peru’s Nazca Lines	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/greenpeace-activists-damage-peru-nazca-lines/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Greenpeace Activists Damage Peru’s Nazca Lines – Truth!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-05575	"More children die in agricultural jobs than in any other industry."	true	/georgia/statements/2012/apr/04/rashad-taylor/federal-stats-back-labor-deaths-claim/	Most nonbinding resolutions that come before the Georgia House of Representatives garner little debate, but one involving child labor laws got a little testy. Some House members were angry about a U.S. Department of Labor proposal they say would make it tougher for children to work on the family farm. Agriculture is Georgia’s largest industry. So Georgia lawmakers wrote House Resolution 1561, which said the federal agency "seeks to impose harsh, extreme, and uncalled for regulations attempting to ban students from working on farms." Not so, said Rep. Rashad Taylor, an Atlanta Democrat who opposed the resolution. Taylor said he’s worried about the safety of children working on some farms. He offered several amendments to the resolution, claiming portions of it were incorrect. Taylor’s argument included a claim that some lawmakers quickly disputed. "More children die in agricultural jobs than in any other industry," he said. One lawmaker suggested more children die playing football than from agricultural work. Another suggested the numbers may be higher because more children work in agriculture than other industries. Rep. Penny Houston, a Republican from South Georgia, asked Taylor several pointed questions that suggested she didn’t think the lawmaker from the big city understood the issue. Her questions included a query wondering if Taylor had ever picked peas. We dug deep on Taylor’s claim. Currently, minors may be employed by their parents at any time in any occupation on a farm owned or operated by his or her parents. Unfortunately, there’s not much research on child labor deaths. The most recent data came to us from a department within the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They put together a spreadsheet using Bureau of Labor Statistics data to determine the number of children 18 and under who died on the job between 2003 and 2010. During that time, there were 311 deaths nationwide. Nearly half of those deaths, 151, were in the agriculture industry, the data showed. A CDC spokeswoman told PolitiFact Georgia that 73 percent of all work-related deaths for children 15 and under were in the agriculture, forestry and fishing industries. They did not have a more specific breakdown for all industries. A 2006 study by two CDC researchers reached similar conclusions. The study was based on two sets of data from 1992 to 2002. In that report, they noted research that found an astounding 79 percent of all work-related deaths for youths 10 years of age and younger occurred in agriculture production. "As a proportion of all young workers, young workers in agriculture production incur a disproportionate share of fatalities," the 2006 report says. The National Consumers League puts out an annual list of the most dangerous occupations for teenagers. In 2011, the most dangerous industry for young people 18 and younger was agriculture, with a death rate of 21.3 per 100,000 full-time employees, according to the report. Another report we saw, using BLS data, showed between 1992 and 1998 that nearly 43 percent of work-related fatalities for children 18 and younger were due to agricultural work. The second-highest percentage of fatalities was in retail trade. So why are a high proportion of children losing their lives in agriculture industries? One report found the most common cause of death of youths in agriculture is from farm machinery, such as a harvester or tractor. Between 1992 and 1997, 51 deaths of youths in agriculture nationwide could be specifically attributed to overturned tractors. Other research shows a high number of falls from moving vehicles or mobile equipment and being struck by the same. There are few reports on this subject, and there are very few deaths to study. But everything we’ve seen shows a high percentage of work-related deaths among children occur in agriculture. The most recent data shows it is nearly 50 percent. The numbers seem to back up Taylor’s claim. For the record, Taylor’s efforts to amend the resolution failed. The resolution passed. Maybe PolitiFact’s ruling will give Taylor some solace. Maybe not. We rate his claim True. Update The following section was inadvertently edited out of the print version of Tuesday’s PolitiFact Georgia regarding a statement by state Rep. Stacey Abrams on Georgia’s per-capita spending: (This item will not evaluate Abrams’ moose claim, though we warn her that she may receive calls from irate fans of South Dakota elk. Elk are common there. Their moose cousins tend to live farther north.)	None	Rashad Taylor	None	None	None	2012-04-04T06:00:00	2012-03-20	['None']
-pomt-08279	Says Washington's reach extends to "even telling us what kind of light bulb we can use."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/nov/08/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-washingtons-reach-extends-telling-/	No duh, Gov. Rick Perry has a thing against things from Washington. His new book, "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington," brims with what-the-hey statements about whassup in our nation's capital including a declaration that lit us up. Saying there's "no end to the reach of Washington," Perry writes that Washington is "even telling us what kind of light bulb we can use." We asked Perry for backup on that claim and didn't hear back. Then we launched a search for "use-this-bulb" regulations. What we found: In 2007, Congress voted to improve the efficiency of light bulbs. President George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act, which set energy efficiency standards for kinds of incandescent lamps (light bulbs), incandescent reflector lamps (like track lighting in your kitchen), and fluorescent lamps, according to a December 2007 summary by the Congressional Research Service. With a few exceptions, the law also prohibits the U.S Coast Guard from purchasing incandescent light bulbs for use in Coast Guard office buildings. Barack Obama, Bush's successor, promised while running for president to to sign a measure into law that "begins to phase out all incandescent light bulbs." He said the change would save Americans $6 billion a year on their electric bills. Last year, PolitiFact reported that no such proposal was made it into law, though in June 2009 Obama announced changes in lighting standards. Starting in August 2012, fluorescent tube lamps (most commonly found in offices and stores) and conventional incandescent reflector lamps must become more efficient. The government said such fluorescent and incandescent lamps represented approximately 38 percent and 7 percent, respectively, of total lighting energy use. Our search for instances of the government directing which bulbs residents can use unearthed a June 2010 editorial in the Washington Times objecting to Federal Trade Commission-issued regulations of light-bulb labels. The editorial says the regs were ordered by Congress as part of its 2007 decision to force the more efficient, curlicue-shaped compact fluorescent light bulb "on a public that so far has refused to embrace it willingly. Beginning Jan. 1, 2012, the editorial says, bureaucratic rules will phase in, and" conventional 100-watt bulbs "will be first on the contraband list." Make sense? Jen Stutsman, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Energy, told us that conventional incandescent bulbs are not expected to meet the efficiency standards Congress set, though the government expects manufacturers to improve incandescent technologies to meet the higher standards or consumers will move to compact fluorescent light bulbs, LED technologies or halogens. She said new standards for 100-watt bulbs take effect in January 2012. New standards for 75-watt bulbs start in 2013 and standards for 60- and 40-watt bulbs start in 2014. Stutsman said the expected shifts aren't equivalent to the government telling Americans which light bulbs to use. "Under no circumstances does it say that a consumer must purchase a specific type of light bulb," Stutsman said. Finally, we sought advice from the Dallas-based American Lighting Association, a trade group whose director of engineering and technology, Terry McGowan, said in an e-mail that it's a stretch to say federal laws are telling us what light bulb to buy. "Federal law is requiring that household light bulbs be made more efficient in steps over time as a nationwide energy-saving measure. It's like saying that new cars will have to deliver more miles/gallon. Maybe some people would say that's mandating what kind of car to buy; but that's an interpretation — especially if many cars on the market can meet the miles/gallon requirement," McGowan said. "There will still be household light bulbs available," McGowan's e-mail says, noting later that special-purpose bulbs used in appliances or for decorative purposes are exempted. "One thing is for sure; what we use for lighting our homes will take some thought — and maybe we'll be changing what we decide to do." So, is Washington telling us what kind of bulb to use? Not yet, though the 2007 law steps up efficiency requirements and that's expected to result in consumers purchasing and using different bulbs. These factors give Perry's statement an element of truth. We rate it Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2010-11-08T06:00:00	2010-11-02	['None']
-pomt-02270	Says the Koch brothers "funded the fight to let flood insurance premiums soar ... Now they’re spending millions to buy a Senate seat for Bill Cassidy so he can fight for them."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/apr/08/senate-majority-pac/democratic-group-assails-koch-brothers-role-louisi/	Charles and David Koch, the deep-pocketed, libertarian industrialists, seem to be all over the airwaves these days. If it’s not campaign ads being run by such Koch-supported affiliates as Americans for Prosperity, then it’s ads run by Democrats attacking candidates favored by the Koch brothers. One ad from a pro-Democratic group, the Senate Majority PAC, attacks Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who is challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu in 2014. The ad features images of storm devastation -- a hot-button issue for Louisiana residents, who faced several deadly hurricanes in the past decade. Here’s the narration: "We’ve been battered by hurricanes, lost everything to floods. And for thousands of Louisianans, flood insurance and hurricane relief are our only protection. But the out-of-state billionaire Koch brothers funded the fight to let flood insurance premiums soar, helping the insurance companies and cut off hurricane relief for Louisiana families. Now they’re spending millions to buy a Senate seat for Bill Cassidy so he can fight for them. If the Kochs and Cassidy win, Louisiana loses." That’s a lot of information to weigh on the Truth-O-Meter, so we decided to zero in on this claim -- that the Koch brothers "funded the fight to let flood insurance premiums soar" and "now they’re spending millions to buy a Senate seat for Bill Cassidy so he can fight for them." We’ll start by offering a hat-tip to the Washington Post Fact Checker, who gave this ad Four Pinocchios, saying that "individual lines may be true, but the net effect is highly misleading." Did the Koch brothers fund "the fight to let flood insurance premiums soar"? While the money flowing in and out of such groups as Americans for Prosperity is hard to pin down, it’s pretty clear that the group took a strong stance in a congressional debate over flood insurance. Here’s the background. The Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Act of 2012 overhauled the National Flood Insurance Program, a federal program that provides insurance in a market -- flood insurance -- that has been historically neglected. The 2012 bill sought to bring risk and premiums into closer balance, so that flood insurance would become less of a drain on the federal treasury. It did this in part by phasing out subsidies to a portion of policyholders, at least until a policy lapses or a property is sold. For some policyholders, this meant premium rises -- a problem particularly acute in states with heavily populated coastlines. After it was passed and the size of the increases became clearer, lawmakers in these states -- including Louisiana -- felt pressure from constituents to modify the Biggert-Waters law. So lawmakers put together legislation that capped annual individual property rate increases at 18 percent, restored a grandfather rule, and refunded some premiums already paid. On March 21, 2014, President Barack Obama signed the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act into law. So how do the Koch brothers fit into this? Their affiliate, Americans for Prosperity, joined a wide range of other conservative groups in signing a letter opposing some of the proposed changes to Biggert-Waters. "Americans for Prosperity is proud to join a coalition urging Congress not to pass the Homeowners Flood Insurance Affordability Act," the group said in a post on its website. "The bill delays many of the critical reforms of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 that puts the National Flood Insurance Program in a better position going forward." The joint letter signed by AFP said the proposed legislation permitted the return of "subsidies that distort the market, belie the foundation of the NFIP, and expose taxpayers to further debt. Conservative organizations should oppose this legislation and educate and activate their supporters in opposition." Levi Russell, director of public affairs with Americans for Prosperity, disputes the notion that opposition to the legislation means allowing "flood insurance premiums to soar," saying the group supported an alternative proposed by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., that would have offered Louisiana policyholders some relief. But that was earlier in the process. The Toomey proposal was dead by the time the group signed the letter cited above, and it only talks about blocking the proposed overhaul, not presenting an alternative. Ultimately, a prominent advocacy groups funded by the Koch brothers, AFP, took a strong stance against House legislation to curb premium increases for flood-insurance policyholders. Are the Koch brothers "spending millions to buy a Senate seat for Bill Cassidy so he can fight for them"? AFP has run a number of ads against Landrieu, including this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one. It’s worth noting some legal caveats. Americans for Prosperity is a 501(c)(4) group, meaning that it can advocate for political issues but cannot urge votes for or against a specific candidate. This is why its ads typically urge viewers to "tell" Landrieu that they oppose this issue or that or to call her office, rather than suggesting they vote for her opponent. In addition, the group’s legal status means that it cannot coordinate with the Cassidy campaign (or with the campaign of any other Landrieu opponent). So even if it’s true that the Koch brothers want to "buy" a Senate seat for Cassidy, it’s not the kind of support Cassidy can actively court. Still, Cassidy hasn’t exactly renounced them, either. The Baton Rouge Advocate reported that in January, Cassidy and AFP held events at the same restaurant in Covington, La., within 30 minutes of each other, and that between the events, Cassidy told someone from AFP, "Thank y’all for the ads you’re running. Obviously, you care deeply about our country, and Obamacare is a bad thing." So, viewed in isolation, both of these claims contain a lot of truth. Case closed? Not so fast. There’s a gaping omission in the Senate Majority PAC ad that undercuts the suggestion that Cassidy is simply a puppet of the Kochs. What’s missing? The Senate Majority PAC ad ignores that the bill so strongly opposed by AFP and other conservative groups was, to a large degree, shepherded by none other than Rep. Bill Cassidy. In fact, the measure was officially known as the "Grimm-Cassidy substitute amendment." The "Grimm" in the bill’s name -- Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y. -- wrote a letter to the New Orleans Times-Picayune touting Cassidy’s role. "I am extremely grateful to Dr. Cassidy for being such a dedicated partner in our efforts to protect homeowners throughout the country," Grimm wrote. "Without his contributions, the House's ability to forestall the catastrophic effects of Biggert-Waters and pass a far-reaching relief bill for the hard-working folks from the Big Apple to the Big Easy may never have been realized at all." Cassidy provided an exhaustive timeline of his involvement in the flood-insurance legislation in a news release here. So, in the case of flood insurance, Cassidy was working hard to enact the proposal that Koch-affliliated groups opposed. Our ruling The Senate Majority PAC ad said the Koch brothers "funded the fight to let flood insurance premiums soar ... Now they’re spending millions to buy a Senate seat for Bill Cassidy so he can fight for them." Two major Koch-funded groups opposed the legislative rewrite of the flood-insurance law, and AFP has been airing a lot of ads attacking Cassidy’s opponent. But the ad’s message is significantly undermined by its suggestion that Cassidy is a puppet of the Kochs, particularly on flood insurance. The reality is that Cassidy sided with constituents and against the AFP position on flood insurance as recently as last month. The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False. Correction: The initial version of this story incorrectly stated that FreedomWorks receives funding from the Koch brothers. While FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity were both split off from Citizens for a Sound Economy, a now-defunct group founded and funded in part by the Koch brothers, there is no evidence that FreedomWorks receives any Koch brothers funding today. This change does not affect our ruling of Mostly False.	None	Senate Majority PAC	None	None	None	2014-04-08T17:19:56	2014-03-26	['None']
-pomt-01075	On Common Core education standards	half flip	/wisconsin/statements/2015/jan/16/scott-walker/scott-walkers-shifting-position-common-core-educat/	Abruptly and unmistakably, Gov. Scott Walker stated a position on what nationally had become a contentious issue among conservatives: the Common Core education standards. His one-sentence announcement on July 17, 2014 read: "Today, I call on the members of the state Legislature to pass a bill in early January (2015) to repeal Common Core and replace it with standards set by people in Wisconsin." Previously, Walker’s position had not been so stark. Later, after his State of the State speech on Jan. 13, 2015, it became even less clear. All as Walker embarks on a second term and, increasingly, captures attention as a potential 2016 candidate for The White House. So has Walker has done any sort of flip-flop on Common Core? As we turn to our Flip-O-Meter, it’s important to note we’re not making a value judgment about changing a position. Rather, we are looking at whether Walker has been consistent in his stance, or changed it. Some argue a change in position shows inconsistent principles or lack of backbone, others see it as pragmatism or a willingness to compromise. Walker support The Common Core State Standards were in place in Wisconsin before Walker became governor in January 2011. State schools superintendent Tony Evers had adopted them for the state, without controversy, seven months earlier. (Evers has remained a strong Common Core supporter.) Common Core is a set of standards for English and math unveiled in 2010 that came out of years of discussion between private nonprofit groups and state education departments. The goal was to better prepare students for college and careers and ensure that students in different states learn the same academic concepts. The federal government has had a role in encouraging states to adopt the standards, but they are voluntary. Walker gave a nod to Common Core in his first state budget, which became law in June 2011. It directed Evers’ Department of Public Instruction to come up with a new statewide test for school children, and that test would have to "measure mastery" of the Common Core standards. Seven months later, in January 2012, a report was issued by the state Read to Lead Task Force, which was formed by Walker and Evers, and chaired by Walker. The report made recommendations on improving children’s reading. It noted Wisconsin was among the first states to adopt the Common Core standards, which it called "rigorous." And one of the recommendations was to ensure that the state’s early learning standards aligned with Common Core. In April 2013, Alan J. Borsuk, an education fellow at Marquette University, observed in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel commentary that nearly three years after its adoption in Wisconsin, Common Core was little known outside of education circles. Walker "has been low key in his support, but nonetheless has been on board," Borsuk wrote. "Implementation is one of the things that Walker and Evers have cooperated on. There is criticism and opposition, but it has been pretty low volume." So, Walker showed tacit support for Common Core during most of his first term. Then there was change. Review, repeal Walker’s second state budget became law in June 2013. It prohibited the Department of Public Instruction from "directing school districts" to do further implementation of Common Core. But Common Core standards adopted by the state superintendent to that point remained in effect. Seven months later, in January 2014, Walker went further. In a speech at the State Education Convention, the governor said he was working on legislation to create a commission (to be chaired by Evers) to revisit the Common Core standards. Walker said they weren't high enough and were being dictated by people who weren't from Wisconsin, when they should be "driven by people in Wisconsin." Then six months after his speech -- and facing a formidable challenge from Democrat Mary Burke in his bid for re-election -- Walker issued his out-of-the-blue July 2014 news release calling for Common Core to be repealed (a stance he later reiterated). "The declaration comes after months of virtually no public debate among Wisconsin lawmakers on the standards," a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel news article reported. "Earlier this year, a proposal in the Legislature to undo them went nowhere, with Walker saying little." Borsuk, of Marquette, wrote: "The one-sentence news release issued by Walker symbolized how little this controversy has to do with serious work on specific aims for children's education and how much this is about politics and appealing to blocs of voters as the November (2014) election approaches." Stepping back As definitive as Walker’s position had seemed to become, it would shift again. On Jan. 5, 2015, the day of Walker’s inauguration for his second term, The Daily Caller published comments from Laurel Patrick, the governor’s press secretary. She spoke of repealing Common Core -- but of something less than that, as well. "As he works to continue transforming education, Gov. Walker will work with the Legislature on an education reform bill that includes accountability for all schools receiving state funds, as well as a repeal of Common Core," Patrick was quoted as saying. But she added: "The bottom line is he wants to make sure that no school district in the state is required to use the Common Core standards." That led Truth in American Education to accuse Walker of sending mixed signals. The group, which opposes Common Core, said "making ‘sure that no school district in the state is required to use the Common Core standards’ sounds nice, but that is an opt-out not a repeal ….Walker needs to stop saying he wants Common Core repealed, but then signal that he will settle for a weaker opt-out bill." A week later, in his State of the State address, Walker made no mention of repeal and seemed to be leaning toward opt-out, saying: "I call on the members of the state Legislature to pass legislation making it crystal clear that no school district in the state is required to use Common Core standards. Going forward, I want to eliminate any requirement to use Common Core." Our rating Walker hasn't explicitly advocated the Common Core education standards, but his position has varied. During most of his first term, the governor showed tacit support. By mid-2013, he was hitting the pause button on further implementation of the standards. In mid-2014, Walker called for an outright repeal. But by January 2015, he was saying only that he didn’t want school districts required to use Common Core. For a partial change of position and inconsistent statements, our rating is a Half Flip. ------ More on Scott Walker For profiles and stories on Scott Walker and 2016 presidential politics, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Scott Walker page. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's ​web page.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2015-01-16T15:35:04	2015-01-13	['None']
-tron-03083	Bernie Sanders Gave Speech to Bank of America	misleading!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bernie-sanders-gave-speech-to-bank-of-america/	None	politics	None	None	None	Bernie Sanders Gave Speech to Bank of America	Mar 14, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-00496	Photos of Bambi and Thumper a Fawn and Wild Rabbit	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bambi-thumper/	None	animals	None	None	None	Photos of Bambi and Thumper a Fawn and Wild Rabbit	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pose-00362	"Will stop shuttering consulates and start opening them in the tough and hopeless corners of the world. He will expand our foreign service, and develop the capacity of our civilian aid workers to work alongside the military."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/381/open-new-consulates-in-the-tough-and-hopeless-cor/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Open new consulates "in the tough and hopeless corners of the world"	2010-01-07T13:26:57	None	['None']
-pomt-08712	Jennifer Carroll is the "first African-American Republican woman to be part of a statewide ticket in Florida."	true	/florida/statements/2010/sep/03/rick-scott/jennifer-carroll-could-make-history-if-elected-li/	Conservative outsider Rick Scott says he's making history with his pick for lieutenant governor. Scott's pick, Jacksonville-area state Rep. Jennifer Carroll, "is the first African-American Republican woman to be part of a statewide ticket in Florida," the Scott campaign said in a Sept. 2, 2010, news release. Carroll was born in Trinidad and moved to Florida in 1986, according to her state House website. Scott called her the "embodiment of the American Dream." But is she the first black Republican woman on a statewide ticket? In short, yes. The lieutenant governor's position has existed two separate times in state history. The first came from 1865-1889, the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, but the position was elected independent of the governor. In those years, the lieutenant governor served as ex-officio president of the Senate and cast tie-breaking votes. The lieutenant governor also was next in the line of succession to be governor. The post was abandoned from 1889-1968, before being revived. Since then, candidates for governor select a prospective lieutenant governor. The two then run together as joint candidates, or a ticket. That makes this year's two major tickets -- Scott and Carroll for Republicans, and Alex Sink and Rod Smith for Democrats -- just the 11th set in state history. The first modern-day lieutenant governor, Ray C. Osborne, was appointed by then-Gov. Claude Kirk following an amendment to the state Constitution. Carroll is the third Republican woman to be selected as the GOP candidate for lieutenant governor, but the first black woman. In 1978, former U.S. Sen. Paula Hawkins was a candidate for lieutenant governor on a ticket with Jack Eckerd. The two lost to Bob Graham and Wayne Mixson. Then in 2003, Toni Jennings became the first woman lieutenant governor. She was nominated by Gov. Jeb Bush to replace Frank Brogan. (Bush picked Sandra Mortham as a running mate in late 1997, but she withdrew after only two months when questions were raised about her office practices and spending as secretary of state.) We also should note that Carroll is the first black woman to be a major party nominee for lieutenant governor. Claude Kirk, the quixotic former Republican governor, attempted a comeback as a Democrat in 1978 and ran with state Rep. Mary Singleton, the first black woman elected to the Jacksonville City Council. The two lost in the primary. And she's the third major party black candidate for lieutenant governor. David Montgomery, a Republican, was the first during Reconstruction in 1876. The second was Darryl Jones, who was Democrat Jim Davis' running mate in 2006. We noticed that the Scott campaign used "African-American" to describe Carroll though she was born in Trinidad in the Caribbean. Carroll on her website describes herself as black, but she also is chair of the Republican Party of Florida African-American Leadership Council. We really don't want to get into a race debate about what constitutes African-American. Suffice to say she is the first black woman to be on the GOP ticket. In announcing his pick for lieutenant governor, Scott said Carroll "is the first African-American Republican woman to be part of a statewide ticket in Florida." The sample size is smaller than you might think, but Scott is right. We rate his statement True.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2010-09-03T17:05:27	2010-09-02	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-snes-00125	Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's children were escorted from Senate chambers as a result of being harassed by hecklers during his confirmation hearing.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brett-kavanaughs-children-harassed/	None	Politics	None	David Emery	None	Were Brett Kavanaugh’s Children Escorted from a Senate Hearing Room Because They Were Harassed by Hecklers?	6 September 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00413	Hackers Posting Insulting Messages In Your Name	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/hackers-insulting-messages-facebook.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Another Pointless Facebook Warning - Hackers Posting Insulting Messages In Your Name	ADD	None	['None']
-pomt-02538	"Any Floridian who has ever requested an absentee ballot henceforth gets one automatically."	false	/punditfact/statements/2014/feb/06/george-will/george-will-says-any-floridian-who-has-ever-reques/	Conservative pundit George Will lamented the waning influence of Election Day in a column about the special election to replace the late Rep. C.W. Bill Young. The race is the first federal election of the year, and both Democrats and Republicans are watching it closely as a potential sign of what will happen in other congressional races in November. The country’s infatuation with early voting will give Democrat Alex Sink a leg up over Republican David Jolly in the race that ends March 11, he argued. "Sink will benefit from the national trend allowing early voting to obliterate Election Day. Any Floridian who has ever requested an absentee ballot henceforth gets one automatically. ... "Instead of a community deliberation culminating in a shared day of decision, an election like the one here is diffuse and inferior. If Sink wins, Republicans nationally can shrug; if Jolly wins, Democrats should tremble. But no matter who wins, the district loses because it has lost Election Day." His comment about Florida’s absentee voting policies raised some eyebrows in Florida political circles, so we wanted to check it out. (PunditFact reached out to Will and his researcher via email but did not hear back.) Will’s column links to the website Long Distance Voter, which provides absentee ballot guidelines state by state. In a Q&A format, it asks whether someone can vote absentee on a permanent basis in Florida. The answer says "sort of," explaining that ballots can be requested for a specific election or in advance of a regularly scheduled election. We checked with official sources, too. Both the Florida Department of State and the Pinellas County supervisor of elections’ office directed us to the Florida Statutes, 101.62 (1)(a). It reads: The supervisor shall accept a request for an absentee ballot from an elector in person or in writing. One request shall be deemed sufficient to receive an absentee ballot for all elections through the end of the calendar year of the second ensuing regularly scheduled general election, unless the elector or the elector’s designee indicates at the time the request is made the elections for which the elector desires to receive an absentee ballot. Translation: If a voter requested an absentee ballot for the Congressional District 13 special election, he or she would automatically receive one for the 2014 and 2016 general elections (unless he or she requested it just for this election). After that, their request would be canceled unless they made another request at some point. "So it’s not indefinite, in other words," said Pinellas County elections supervisor spokeswoman Nancy Whitlock. A voter who requested a ballot for the 2012 general election would automatically get one for the 2014 special election, as it is one of the elections covered in the two-cycle window. The exception would be if they requested a ballot solely for the 2012 election. Our ruling Will’s claim that "any Floridian who has ever requested an absentee ballot henceforth gets one automatically" is not accurate. A Florida voter who requested an absentee ballot would get one automatically through the end of the calendar year of the second general election -- not "henceforth." Will used strong language to describe why Sink would have the edge, saying people get mail-in ballots in perpetuity in Florida. But that's not the way it works. We rate the claim False.	None	George Will	None	None	None	2014-02-06T17:55:24	2014-02-06	['None']
-peck-00001	Are There Really 1.2 Million Mothers on the Free Maternity Programme?	false	https://pesacheck.org/uhurus-maternity-care-promises-exaggerated-2c238a3dfd9b	None	None	None	Leo Mutuku	None	Are There Really 1.2 Million Mothers on the Free Maternity Programme?	Apr 30, 2016	None	['None']
-tron-00292	Sandy Hook Victim Appears in Pakistani School Shooting Vigils	truth! & misleading!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/sandy-hook-victim-vigils/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Sandy Hook Victim Appears in Pakistani School Shooting Vigils – Truth! & Misleading!	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01508	Spice Girls Singing “James Bond” Theme Song?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/spice-girls-james-bond-theme-song/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Spice Girls Singing “James Bond” Theme Song?	12:30 am, February 23, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02525	Mark Warner voted for "nearly $1 trillion in new taxes and $7 trillion in new debt."	true	/virginia/statements/2014/feb/10/ed-gillespie/gillespie-says-warner-voted-new-taxes-and-more-deb/	Republican Ed Gillespie kicked off his campaign for the U.S. Senate by denouncing Democratic incumbent Mark Warner as a spendthrift. "Sen. Warner promised us fiscal responsibility, but he’s voted for nearly $1 trillion in new taxes and $7 trillion in new debt." Gillespie said in a video last month. We wondered whether Gillespie was right. Paul Logan, a spokesman for Gillespie, said his boss’s claim stems from Warner’s support of a Democratic budget plan that squeaked through the Senate last March on a 50-49 vote. The plan -- authored by by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash. -- called for $975 billion in new revenues over 10 years to be matched by an equal amount of budget cuts. The new revenues would come from targeting tax breaks used by high earners and corporations. That accounts for the "nearly $1 trillion in new taxes," that Gillespie cited. What about the $7 trillion in new debt? Logan said that also came from Murray’s bill. The legislation contained estimates that it would expand total debt from $17.1 trillion in fiscal 2013 to $24.4 trillion in fiscal 2023. That comes to a $7.3 trillion increase. Total U.S debt is the sum of two major calculations: 1) The amount of "intergovernmental holdings", or money the government owes itself to support beneficiary programs such as Social Security; and 2) The amount of "public debt" in Treasury securities that are held by individuals, corporations, the Federal Reserve and state, local and foreign governments. Economists generally prefer to discuss the national debt in terms of the amount that is publicly held. Murray’s bill would have lifted that portion from $12.2 trillion in 2013 tor $18.2 trillion in 2023 -- a $6 trillion increase. Now, let’s turn to Warner, who’s made budget reform his signature issue since entering the Senate in 2009. He’s tried to establish a bipartisan coalition of senators who share his views that the nation’s financial problems can be solved only through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. He’s criticized Republicans who refuse to increase taxes and Democrats who refuse to rein in entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Warner cast four major votes on budget plans last year: On March 21, he opposed a bill passed by House Republicans that would have balanced the budget in 10 years through trillions of dollars in cuts and no new taxes. The bill, which would have increased the national debt by $3 trillion at the end of the 10 years, was defeated in the Senate on a mostly partisan vote. On March 23, he supported Murray’s plan, which was rejected by the House. On Sept. 27, he supported a temporary government funding bill that passed the Senate. The House, however, insisted that the stopgap measure delay implementation of Obamacare. The resulting impasse led to a 16-day government shutdown. On Dec 18, he voted for a successful compromise budget that did not essentially alter spending, revenues or the rising arc of the national debt, projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to reach a total $25.2 trillion in 2023. The public debt is projected to be $19.1 trillion in 2023. Our ruling Gillespie says Warner "voted for nearly $1 trillion in new taxes and $7 trillion in new debt." Although some economists might quibble with his debt figure, we don’t. We rate his statement True.	None	Ed Gillespie	None	None	None	2014-02-10T00:00:00	2014-01-16	['None']
-pomt-07220	"No one thought we could get a bipartisan bill (Medicaid) passed. We did in the Florida Senate."	false	/florida/statements/2011/jun/03/mike-haridopolos/mike-haridopolos-claims-medicaid-reform-was-bipart/	Mike Haridopolos is eager to prove himself a worthier U.S. Senate candidate than his rivals. Contenders Adam Hasner and George LeMieux have spent the past few months out of office, but Haridopolos was spotlighted during the session as state Senate president. So why not tout his legislative victories? Haridopolos set out to do just that in an interview on Bay News 9's "Political Connections" show on May 22, 2011. Co-host and St. Petersburg Times political editor Adam Smith asked Haridopolos for his view on a plan by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to reform Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older. Ryan's plan, explained here in another PolitiFact fact-check, would basically shift Medicare's insurance responsibilities from the federal government to private insurance companies as a way of dramatically cutting costs, starting in 2022. Haridopolos neglected to answer if he would back the Ryan plan if he were a senator, but he commended Ryan for "having an honest discussion with the American public." Then Haridopolos steered the conversation away from the country's Medicare debate to Florida's problem with Medicaid -- and what he, as Senate president, has done about it. (Haridopolos caught heat about a week later when he tried to dodge the Medicare question again. A conservative radio host booted him off his show on May 31 for failing to say how he would vote on Ryan's plan if he were a member of the U.S. Senate. The incident prompted Haridopolos' campaign staff to say he would not vote for the plan as written.) But let's get back to Medicaid. Florida's Medicaid program insures about 3 million Floridians and eats up one-third, or about $22 billion, of the state budget. Haridopolos took on the issue "aggressively," he said, which resulted in reforms passing the House and his chamber. Gov. Rick Scott signed the bills on June 2. "No one thought we could get a bipartisan bill (Medicaid) passed," Haridopolos said. "We did in the Florida Senate because we listened to people for two years before we acted. Same thing with Medicare. We're going to take the input of the people and not have this top-down approach." A bipartisan bill passed in the Florida Senate, eh? If true, that bolsters Haridopolos' argument that he can create policy with the blessings of competing parties. Sounds easy enough to check. Let's start by reviewing what the Legislature passed. The Medicaid package moves almost all management of Florida's Medicaid program to state-approved HMOs and health care networks. It's a departure from the old system, in which the state pays doctors for procedures they perform. Among other effects, the plan requires managed care companies to share profits and allows recipients to obtain vouchers for private health insurance. The overhaul needs approval in the form of a waiver by the federal government, which pays for more than half of the state program. Republicans say it will improve care, reduce fraud and save the state money as the program's costs threaten to escalate. Now to examine the votes. First, remember the makeup of the Florida Legislature, where Republicans hold veto-proof majorities. The House numbers this session were 81-39 GOP, and the Senate was 28-12 GOP. So passage of a Republican-backed bill didn't need bipartisan votes. Florida's Medicaid reform package required the House and Senate to vote on two bills: HB 7107 and HB 7109. In the House, both passed along party lines. In Haridopolos' Senate, HB 7107 passed by 28-11, with all the "yea" votes coming from Republicans, and all the "no" votes from Democrats -- a strict party-line vote. HB 7109 passed the Senate 26-12, and the the only bipartisan moment occurred when Republican Sen. John Thrasher voted against the measure, on the side of united Democrats. But even that was short-lived, as Thrasher changed his vote to "yea" immediately after the vote, according to the vote history. So there were no traces of bipartisan votes in Medicaid reform that passed both chambers. We asked Haridopolos spokesman David Bishop to explain what Haridopolos meant by "bipartisan" Medicaid reform. Bishop pointed us to two committee votes on the Senate's version of Medicaid reform, SB 1972. This bill never reached the Senate floor, though, because it was replaced by the House bills. That said, it did earn a few Democratic votes -- three, to be exact -- in two committee stops. Here's a recap: In the Health Regulation Committee, it earned a yes from Sen. Eleanor Sobel, the Democratic vice chairwoman from Hollywood. In the Budget Committee, Sobel and former Senate President Gwen Margolis of Miami both approved. We followed up with Sobel about her two "yes" votes. Would she call the Senate's Medicaid reform bipartisan? She offered this explanation via e-mail: "The Senate Medicaid reform proposal was a work in progress during the committee process. I was hopeful that a final product would benefit Floridians, but compromises with the House of Representatives resulted in something that would hurt the poorest of Floridians. I opposed the final version of the bill and voted 'no.' " Sobel added: "The final version of the Medicaid reform bill was by no means bipartisan." We asked Sen. Nan Rich, the Senate's minority leader, for her thoughts. Before the May 6, 2011, vote, she said, Senate Democrats took a caucus position to oppose Medicaid reform. The Democrats felt the Republican-led measures would undermine the quality of care for recipients, among other concerns, she said. "I can promise you that it was not bipartisan," she said. So where does that leave our ruling? Haridopolos claims the Senate passed "bipartisan" Medicaid reform this session. But the final, official tallies in the Senate were both strict party-line votes. Democrats even agreed in their caucus that they would oppose Medicaid reform, and they remained united on that. Haridopolos' spokesman points out a couple Democrats who voted for reform in committee -- but the version of the bill they voted on never reached the Senate floor and was not the version that passed. We looked for bipartisanship but didn't find it here. We rate this claim False.	None	Mike Haridopolos	None	None	None	2011-06-03T12:08:01	2011-05-22	['None']
-snes-00455	Did a Man Sue McDonald’s Because He Was Depressed After Eating a Happy Meal?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/man-sue-mcdonalds-depressed-eating-happy-meal/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Did a Man Sue McDonald’s Because He Was Depressed After Eating a Happy Meal?	15 June 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-06437	Says his parents "came to America following Fidel Castro's takeover" of Cuba.	false	/florida/statements/2011/oct/21/marco-rubio/sen-marco-rubio-said-his-parents-came-america-foll/	U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio sold his American success story as he stumped across Florida two years ago. His parents left Havana in 1959, he told a Panhandle audience, in search of a better life. He told a Tampa Bay TV station, a Fox Business host and Sean Hannity on Fox News that his parents came from Cuba at the end of the 1950s — when dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Fidel Castro's revolution. "In 1959," he told Fox 13 and Fox Business. "In '58, '59," he told Fox News. By Oct. 21, 2011, the biography on his U.S. Senate website still declared his parents "came to America following Fidel Castro's takeover." But interviews, documents and news articles in September and October raised doubts. PolitiFact Florida wanted to know: Did Rubio's parents come to America "following Fidel Castro's takeover"? Doubt An Oct. 19, 2011, story by the St. Petersburg Times said naturalization records showed Rubio's parents, Mario and Oriales, became U.S. residents in May 1956. At that time, Castro lived in Mexico after a failed 1953 attack on army barracks in Santiago de Cuba. Cubans lived under the dictatorship of Batista, who had seized power as he ran for re-election in 1952. The nation, which enjoyed high literacy, a strong educational system — even the world's fifth-highest number of TVs per capita — found itself ruled by decree. In May 1956, the Rubio family would fly to the United States. Castro returned to mount his revolution in December. More than two years would pass before Batista fled on Jan. 1, 1959. In 2006, Rubio, the young soon-to-be speaker of the Florida House, would recount the takeover: "In January of 1959, a thug named Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, and countless Cubans were forced to flee." To many, he seemed to count his own family among them. And in 2009 and 2010, he told reporters dates that made that possible. News stories called the lawmaker, himself born in the United States in 1971, the son of "exiles from Castro's Cuba." Some used a specific date: 1959. Story shift In September 2011, Rubio chatted with Miami Herald reporter Marc Caputo for a story about his upcoming autobiography. They talked about Rubio's parents' immigration from Cuba. Caputo, later recounting his notes, said Rubio "struggled to recall the year ... and said it was in ' '57 or '58 or '59.' " "When asked pointedly: Was it before the revolution? Rubio said it was before the revolution," Caputo wrote in an Oct. 20 blog post. Caputo included the detail in his September story, saying Rubio was, "the son of Cuban immigrants who left Cuba just before the 1959 revolution." When we searched for news references to Rubio's parents, we found the new account differed from dozens of articles about Rubio's past, his own TV interviews, and his official campaign and Senate bios. And Rubio's bio didn't change. After the Times and the Washington Post wrote about the discrepancy, Rubio released a statement. "The dates I have given regarding my family’s history have always been based on my parents’ recollections of events that occurred over 55 years ago and which were relayed to me by them more than two decades after they happened," he wrote on Oct. 20. "I was not made aware of the exact dates until very recently." Asked about Rubio's official bio the next day, spokesman Alex Conant confirmed, "the dates were wrong." "We just recently became aware of it, and it just hadn't been updated," he said. (The site updated the evening of Oct. 21, 2011 to say: "Marco was born in Miami in 1971 to Cuban exiles who first arrived in the United States in 1956.") Rubio learned the full story talking with his mom, Conant said, and looking at his parents' passports. (His father died in September 2010.) Instead of fleeing Castro's Cuba, the Rubios came to the United States for "economic opportunity," Conant said. Our ruling Several times during his race for U.S. Senate, Rubio told reporters and voters his parents left Cuba in 1959, suggesting they had fled Castro's rule. In his campaign bio, and later in his official Senate biography, he said his parents "came to America following Fidel Castro's takeover." Even after he stumbled over dates with a Miami Herald reporter and acknowledged his parents left before the revolution, his official Web bio stayed the same. After two news organizations reported his parents moved to the United States in 1956, his spokesman acknowledged that the bio was wrong. It was updated to say, "Marco was born in Miami in 1971 to Cuban exiles who first arrived in the United States in 1956." That puts everyone in agreement: The original statement is False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/65ac0f9d-294e-4c82-b97b-173ab4305c5d	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2011-10-21T18:11:34	2011-10-21	['United_States', 'Fidel_Castro', 'Cuba']
-pose-01261	"A hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health)."	stalled	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1352/impose-hiring-freeze-federal-employees/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Impose a hiring freeze on federal employees	2017-01-17T08:30:29	None	['None']
-pomt-02023	"We’ve got an average of 5,600 soldiers committing suicide. That’s about 20 a day."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2014/jun/06/david-scott/not-all-veteran-suicides-can-be-tied-va-care/	The controversy over lengthy delays at several of the nation’s Veterans Affairs medical facilities, including the Atlanta VA Medical Center in DeKalb County, has drawn significant criticism that those waits may have contributed to veterans’ deaths. One such voice is U.S. Rep. David Scott, a Democrat who represents portions of metro Atlanta. Scott was among lawmakers from both parties calling for Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki’s removal before the secretary resigned last Friday. In an interview with WABE just before that resignation, Scott tried to draw attention to the specific concern of mental health treatment in the scandal, which is compounded by allegations of efforts to cover up the delays. "We’ve got an average of 5,600 soldiers committing suicide," Scott said. "That’s about 20 a day." Back-of-a-napkin math shows an immediate miscalculation. That annual rate of suicides would mean 15 daily suicides. But even with the math blunder, those daily rates seemed striking enough for PolitiFact to want to get to the bottom of the matter. A spokesman for the congressman said he was first drawn to the issue of mental health services for veterans after reading an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation last year. In his WABE interview, Scott blamed Shinseki in particular and the VA in general, saying, "Nobody has been held accountable for all of those suicides." The AJC probe of the VA facility in DeKalb found that more than 500 veterans were on a waiting list to receive mental health care in 2010. Sixteen attempted suicide. The Atlanta VA tried to solve the problem by referring more veterans to outside treatment. But by 2012, that decision created long waiting lists at those outside clinics, according to the AJC investigation. Last year, federal audits tied the deaths of three veterans in Atlanta to poor oversight by hospital staff, including some who had been referred to outside facilities. It was later revealed that a fourth veteran committed suicide in a VA hospital bathroom, prompting the replacement of both the head of the hospital and the mental health director. "His big concern is for veterans who need help and can’t get it," said Scott’s chief of staff, Michael Andel. "It’s about the delay, especially in getting care in mental health needs." Andel referred us to an advocacy and support group, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, or IAVA, and a 2013 newspaper story about a VA study on suicide data. Both cite the daily estimate of 22 suicides by veterans. A closer look at the VA study, however, slightly complicates the issue. Based on the most extensive data ever collected by the VA on suicide, the report does calculate that 22 veterans die each day from suicide. But the estimate applies to all veterans, not soldiers who are on active or reserve services as Scott describes. The estimate relies on state data that identify the dead as veterans. It therefore includes those with or without any history of accessing VA care. A spokeswoman for the VA in Washington confirmed that the report also cites recent increases in the rates of suicide in the general population among middle-age adults between 35 and 64 years of age. The report found the majority of veteran suicides, about 70 percent, were by those age 50 and older. The report found that veterans make up a smaller percentage of the country’s suicides than a previous study in 2007. That suggests that an effort to improve suicide prevention programs at the VA had an effect, the report concludes, while also recommending additional improvements. "VA must continue to provide a high level of care, and recognize that there is still much more work to do," according to the study’s executive summary. "As long as Veterans die by suicide, we must continue to improve and provide even better services and care." Andel said Scott’s statement was a part of the congressman’s effort to use the study’s findings to push for change. Scott supports a proposal from U.S. Rep. Larry Bucshon, a Republican from Indiana, to offer employment incentives to psychiatrists who agree to work for the VA to help with the shortage of services. The IAVA has lobbied for a separate bill, the Senate’s Suicide Prevention for America's Veterans Act. Among other things, it calls for recruiting more health care workers to the VA and Department of Defense and reviewing those agencies’ suicide prevention programs. "We feel the system fails veterans, and that takes us to a point where unfortunately veterans are considering and committing suicide," said Nick McCormick, a legislative associate with the IAVA. "We want to get that information out so there can be change." To sum it up, though Scott is a little off on his math, he’s close enough on the daily rates for us. He has a point to drive home, that a lot of veterans are dying by their own hands. The problem is when he attempts to link the daily suicide rates of all military veterans, who may never have visited a VA center, with the current scandal. The study offers no evidence to back up the implication that blame lies with the VA on those deaths. With that context, we rate Scott’s statements as Half True.	None	David Scott	None	None	None	2014-06-06T00:00:00	2014-05-27	['None']
-pomt-04769	Says that Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam "has made it clear by his repeated actions that he will pursue a policy that promotes the interest of Islamist (sic) and their radical ideology as long as he is governor."	pants on fire!	/tennessee/statements/2012/aug/27/billhislamcom/anti-muslim-website-says-bill-haslam-promotes-inte/	Earlier this summer, a handful of Republican Party county committees in Tennessee passed resolutions criticizing Republican Gov. Bill Haslam for hiring Samar Ali, an accomplished young Muslim-American native of Waverly, Tenn., and honors graduate of Vanderbilt University and its law school. Now, at least two new websites are attempting to perpetuate the idea that Tennessee’s governor is somehow involved in a massive conspiracy to "promote the interests" of "Islamist radical ideology," including "Shariah compliant finance." For the purposes of this item, we are going to examine a statement from billhislam.com: "The Governor of the great state of Tennessee, Bill Haslam, has made it clear by his repeated actions that he will pursue a policy that promotes the interest of Islamist (sic) and their radical ideology as long as he is governor." We’re feeling déjà vu. PolitiFact Tennessee addressed an associated claim in July when GOP state Senate candidate Woody Degan of Shelby County charged the Haslam administration was "making our Economic Development Department Sharia compliant," in part by hiring Ali as international director earlier this year. The governor and the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development (ECD) rejected the contention that Ali or the department was doing anything relating to Sharia. We gave it our Pants On Fire ruling as not just false, but ridiculous. At its simplest, Sharia law is the moral code and religious law of the Islamic faith, addressing a variety of personal and secular topics. Aspects of Sharia law do govern business dealings, and some Muslims conduct business only under Sharia-compliant conditions. For example, Sharia may prohibit interest on loans, considering it usury, but may allow other lending fees in lieu of interest. But most people, constitutional scholars and others, agree that attempting to install Sharia as U.S. or Tennessee law would be unconstitutional and there’s been no bills at the state level to attempt it. The voters of Senate District 32 gave Degan a drubbing. He got 10 percent of the vote against state Sen Mark Norris, R-Collierville, in their Aug. 2 primary. Despite that, the shadowy movement that Degan connected with during his campaign has not been deterred. In addition to billhislam.com, there’s another anonymous blog calling itself the "tn Council 4 political justice," which has posted 39 "newsletters" on its site since April 9, focused on the purported threat of Islam on Tennessee and the Haslam administration’s role in it. The latest of these, posted Aug. 23, attempts to link Samar Ali’s father, noted Waverly, Tenn., physician Subhi Ali, to The Jerusalem Fund. The anonymous bloggers write that the Washington, D.C.-based humanitarian non-profit’s policies "reflect overtly pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas/anti-Israel positions." The bloggers also claim that "in addition to making grants for social services in the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories,’" a branch of the Fund also "supports the Palestine Diabetes Institute" and that Samar Ali served as the transatlantic liaison during the development of that project. From diabetes to terrorism? Those behind billhislam.com make that leap: they titled their Aug. 23 link to the tn Council 4 political justice "newsletter" on Dr. Ali and the Jerusalem Fund as "Dr. Jihad." They go even further, with one post trying to connect the dots between "Sharia compliant finance investments" that the Haslam administration strongly denies going after to the potential maiming of American soldiers in Afghanistan. Dave Vance of Big Rock, Tenn., writes on billhislam.com that "Apparently, Governor Haslam is comfortable with the distinct possibility ... that at least some of the SCF (Sharia compliant finance) investments on which he intends to spend taxpayer funds will go to provide funds to the very people who are killing American troops in Afghanistan." It would be one thing if all this had stayed buried in the cyber netherworld but it worked its way into Degan’s campaigns and aforementioned resolutions passed by a few county GOP organizations (notably including the state’s most affluent county, Williamson). Even the governor feels compelled to spend time addressing it occasionally. Last week, his top assistant, Deputy to the Governor Claude Ramsey, wrote the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, Chris Devaney, a letter disputing the allegations so Devaney could assure the GOP faithful that their standard-bearer is not a radical Islamist. We will note that Haslam is an elder at Knoxville’s Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church, a congregation of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. The blog and the website cite voluminous "research" in "connecting the dots," as one section of billhislam.com is labeled. But none of it that we’ve waded through has a shred of evidence to support the central claim. We received no response to inquiries to the site’s administrator, listed as Steven Curtis of Dover, Tenn., nor the contact email listed on the website. The inflammatory rhetoric, based upon no credible evidence we could discover, gets a ruling of Pants On Fire! UPDATE (Aug. 28, 2012): billhislim.com responded to our inquiry with an email after 11 p.m. on Aug. 27. The email address contained the name William Vance. It mostly reiterated points made on the website and urged media organizations to fact-check Gov. Haslam and his administration. The email can be viewed by clicking this link.	None	billhislam.com	None	None	None	2012-08-27T13:28:53	2012-08-27	['None']
-pomt-08206	Says Gov. Rick Perry's administration has proposed ending immunizations for 113,000 kids.	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/nov/20/mike-villarreal/state-rep-mike-villarreal-says-gov-rick-perrys-adm/	Democratic state Rep. Mike Villarreal of San Antonio sees the potential for "a public health disaster" in a document that lays out options for cutting the state health department's budget by 10 percent, according to a news release from his office. "Perry administration proposes ending immunizations for 113,000 kids," says the subject line of Villarreal's Sept. 7 statement. "We want Texas kids in school learning, rather than sitting at home or the doctor's office suffering from preventable diseases. ... If we don't prevent the spread of diseases among these children, we put at risk all Texas kids who are too young to receive their immunizations yet." An end to immunizations for thousands of youngsters? We wondered if Villarreal's shot hit the spot. First, some background on the federal Vaccines for Children program, which Texas has participated in since 1994. According to the website of the Texas Department of State Health Services, the program provides vaccines to health care providers for eligible children, including those who lack health insurance and those enrolled in the Children's Health Insurance Program and Medicaid. In 2010, the federal government spent more than $380 million on immunizations for children in Texas, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the state health services department, said 4.2 million Texas children qualified for the vaccinations under the federal program that year. To expand eligibility beyond the federal requirements, Texas pitches in some dollars so that any child who comes to a public health clinic can be immunized. The department is spending $7.1 million on the program in 2010-11 and expects to need $9.5 million for full funding in 2012-13. In May, Gov. Rick Perry and other state leaders, mindful of a looming revenue shortfall (lately pegged at $24 billion), asked state agencies to spell out possible 10 percent cuts in their budgets for 2012 and 2013. In August, the health services department laid out $238 million in possible reductions, with $7.7 million of that coming out of the state's spending on childhood immunizations. That proposal represents an 81 percent cut from what the agency expected to spend on the vaccination effort during 2012-13. The agency document, which Villarreal cites in his press release, describes the impact of the $7.7 million cut: "At this level of reduction, the overall safety-net program will need to reduce the number of children being vaccinated with GR funds (estimated 112,661 children). A significant portion of these children could be affected." GR refers to general revenue funds. The document further says: "This could end the public health clinic policy of turning no child away and instead will result in public clinics making referrals for those individuals that have health insurance to their medical homes for vaccines. If families are unable to go to their referral sites/medical homes, then the children may not be able to obtain vaccination services and could fall behind in the immunization schedule, ultimately lowering vaccine coverage levels and making our communities vulnerable to outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases." A "medical home" is one's usual health-care provider. While Villarreal's press release also says the Department of State Health Services "estimates that half of the children could be immunized through other programs," he concludes that the end result of the budget cut would be to eliminate immunizations for 113,000 children. At the agency, Williams disputed Villarreal's interpretation. She said 112,661 is the number of kids the agency estimated would receive vaccines purchased with general revenue in 2012-13. If the Legislature reduces the state contribution to the vaccine program by $7.7 million, she said, the agency estimates that half of the 112,661 children — about 56,000 — would not be able to receive immunizations at public health clinics. However, Williams said, that doesn't mean those kids would necessarily go without. "They may have to seek their immunizations elsewhere, such as through their regular doctor," Williams said. And what would happen to the other 56,000 children? Williams said the agency expects that they would still be able to receive immunizations at public health clinics, but she did not specify how that would be accomplished. "We likely will have to fill in the gap with vaccine from other resources, possibly federal sources," she said, because state dollars alone may not be able to cover all of them. Upshot: There's a 56,000 difference between the number of children Villarreal said would no longer get immunized and the number of children the agency says could no longer be served at public health clinics if the proposed budget cut happens. Asked to explain the discrepancy, Villarreal told us by e-mail that he issued his September statement after his office discussed the August budget cut proposal with agency officials. "At that time, they communicated to us that the proposal would end funding for 113,000 children and about half of them could be expected to find services elsewhere," Villarreal said. "That's what I said in the first two sentences of my press release. The agency now says that we misunderstood. The point is the same either way: A very large number of our children would be left without immunizations." We asked Williams about that early September conversation between a Villarreal staffer and Nick Dauster, director of the agency's Government Affairs Unit. She said: "There must have been a misunderstanding between what was said and what was heard in a phone call a couple months ago. Admittedly, it’s a complex topic that involves estimates and unknowns, and our early information could have been clearer, which is why we provided clarification." The "clarification" was an e-mail sent from Dauster to Peter Clark, Villarreal's legislative director, on Sept. 1 — before Villarreal issued his press release — saying that "an estimated 56,000 children could be affected" by the cut in immunization funding. "This represents children who receive immunization services normally paid for by general revenue," Dauster wrote. Finally, we explored whether it makes sense to ascribe the agency-level proposal to the Perry "administration," as Villarreal's statement does. By law, the governor appoints the chief executives as well as the governing boards of some major agencies, including the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, whose Perry-appointed executive commissioner chooses the commissioner of the health services department in consultation with the governor. Also, Williams told us that the health services staff put together its budget reduction proposals with input from commission overseers. We asked Stephanie Goodman, a commission spokeswoman, if it was accurate to characterize the health services department ideas as "Perry administration proposals." Her response: "No. Our staff developed the options." She said the governor's office wasn't involved in deciding what cuts to propose. And how does Villarreal's statement that the Perry administration proposes ending immunizations for 113,000 kids shape up? We'll take his reference to the "Perry administration" as a defensible poke. And a state agency has proposed ending most of the general revenue funding for immunizations for that many kids. However, the suggestion that none of those 113,000 children would get vaccinated misstates the estimated impact of the proposed $7.7 million budget cut. While the state acknowledges that half the children would no longer be served under the immunization program — and some of those may have insurance coverage — it expects the rest would still get their shots at public health clinics. However, it says it doesn't yet know exactly how those immunizations would be paid for. We rate Villarreal's statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Mike Villarreal	None	None	None	2010-11-20T06:00:00	2010-09-07	['Rick_Perry']
-snes-04775	A photograph shows President Obama pointing to a "Bernie 2016" sign.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-bernie-2016-sign/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Image Shows President Obama with “Bernie 2016” Sign	11 May 2016	None	['Barack_Obama']
-bove-00027	Fact-Checking Viral Video, Images Of Karnataka CM’s Aerial Survey	none	https://www.boomlive.in/fact-checking-viral-video-images-of-karnataka-cms-aerial-survey/	None	None	None	None	None	Fact-Checking Viral Video, Images Of Karnataka CM’s Aerial Survey	Aug 21 2018 3:44 pm, Last Updated: Aug 21 2018 4:11 pm	None	['None']
-pomt-04295	Says the NAACP's Ohio chapter has endorsed Issue 2.	mostly false	/ohio/statements/2012/nov/01/voters-first-ohio/voters-first-ohio-claims-issue-2-endorsed-ohio-con/	Issue 2, the redistricting reform proposal on the Nov. 6 ballot with broad support from Democrats, has not gained unanimous support from black political leaders. The president of Ohio Legislative Black Caucus in September voiced concerns to Gongwer News Service about how Issue 2 would affect African-American representation in Congress and in the Ohio Senate and House of Representatives. In response to the caucus’ concerns, Sandy Theis, a spokeswoman for the pro-Issue 2 group Voters First Ohio, told Gongwer that the Ohio Conference NAACP has endorsed Issue 2. The website for Voters First also lists the organization – although it is labeled incorrectly as the NAACP Ohio Chapter – among the group’s endorsers. The splintered support for Issue 2 among black leaders got PolitiFact Ohio’s curiosity up, so it decided to look into where exactly the NAACP stands on Issue 2. Issue 2 is a proposed amendment to the Ohio Constitution that would reform the way the state's congressional and legislative boundaries are drawn, a process known as redistricting that happens every 10 years. Elected officials, including the governor and legislative leaders, control the current redistricting process. District boundary lines typically are drawn to favor whichever party is in power. Last year, Republicans, who control state government, drew new lines that grouped voters into districts designed to help Republicans win future elections. Issue 2 would remove elected officials from the redistricting process and hand the responsibility over to a new redistricting commission. Should Issue 2 pass, a commission would be appointed next year to draw new maps for the 2014 election. It’s worth pointing out that, under the new maps, Ohio voters could elect two black women to Congress this fall for the first time: incumbent Democrat Marcia Fudge, of Warrensville Heights, and Democrat Joyce Beatty, who is running in the Columbus-area 3rd District created during the GOP-controlled redistricting. The Ohio Legislative Black Caucus, due to concerns over future African-American political representation, has voted to not endorse Issue 2 since the Gongwer story was published on Sept. 25, said Rep. Sandra Williams, a Cleveland Democrat and president of the caucus. So where does the Ohio Conference NAACP stand on Issue 2? "The NAACP has not blanketly endorsed Issue 2," Sybil Edwards-McNabb, the organization’s president, said in a telephone interview on Oct. 24. Edwards McNabb said the group has concerns about how the proposed redistricting commission would operate and how the new system would affect African-American political representation. "We may not have the same representation," she said. "We could pick up more, but we might lose all of it. That’s a concern." Despite these concerns, Edwards-McNabb said it would be inaccurate to say the group does not support Issue 2. Huh? "Sometimes when you’re not saying ‘no’ somebody might perceive that as a ‘yes’ and that’s not necessarily true," Edwards-McNabb said. "But we are not against Issue 2. We need a change in our redistricting process. It needs to be thoroughly thought through. We need another level of clarity." If the Ohio NAACP officially has not endorsed Issue 2, we asked Edwards-McNabb if she asked Voters First to remove the group’s name from the list of Voters First supporters. She said an e-mail has been sent to Voters First. "We have a dialogue and our concerns have been heard," she said. We asked Theis why she told Gongwer the NAACP endorsed Issue 2. She said two Voters First consultants had conversations with two NAACP executives who support Voters First and support NAACP members who campaign for the passage of Issue 2. Tom Roberts, the Ohio Conference NAACP’s political action chair, is one group member campaigning for Issue 2. Roberts, who also is third vice president of the NAACP’s Dayton chapter, said members of the organization are free to support Issue 2. "I know it doesn’t make sense to some people, but we never got to the point of endorsement," he said in an interview on Oct. 17. "I think the safest thing to say is we don’t endorse it but we have agreed to support community involvement in the process." So where does that leave us? Although there appears to be some support for Issue 2 from within the Ohio Conference NAACP, the bottom line is that the group, as a whole, has not endorsed Issue 2. Voters First’s statement that the NAACP endorses the redistricting proposal contains an element of truth. The Ohio Conference NAACP president says there is support for changing the system for redistricting. But the organization also has concerns about the impact Issue 2 could have on black political representation, and it has not formally endorsed Issue 2. Those are critical facts absent from the Voters First claim that would give a different impression. On the Truth-O-Meter, the claim rates Mostly False.	None	Voters First Ohio	None	None	None	2012-11-01T06:00:00	2012-09-25	['Ohio', 'National_Association_for_the_Advancement_of_Colored_People']
-pomt-06070	Says federal spending has increased 21 percent over the past three years.	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2012/jan/09/rob-portman/senator-rob-portman-says-federal-spending-rose-21-/	Sen. Rob Portman voted with a big Senate majority in December to extend the payroll tax holiday, but voiced concerns the same day about a separate $1 trillion bill financing the Pentagon and other federal agencies. "I just don't think this huge spending bill cuts enough," the Ohio Republican said. "With a 21 percent increase in federal spending over the past three years, Washington needs to cut back just as Ohio families have had to do." His news release called spending "out of control." That raised the eyebrows of PolitiFact Ohio. Has spending really increased by more than a fifth in three years? We asked Portman's office, and were pointed to an analysis issued in November by the Congressional Budget Office. Its first chart showed total federal outlays for 2008 of $2.98 trillion, compared with $3.6 trillion for 2011 -- an increase of 21 percent. That confirmed Portman's figure, but the numbers left us with questions. What was responsible for the big and bigger jumps in spending shown in 2008 and 2009, which would have been under the watch of President Bush? (President Obama's first budget was for fiscal 2010.) Why had outlays actually declined in 2010? We spoke with Jim Horney, vice president for federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "The figure is right," he said about Portman's statement. But he said it would be wrong to conclude that the number shows a permanent increase in the rate of spending. The big increase in 2008 and "really big" jump in 2009 were mainly, Horney said, "the result of the downturn, which drives up spending, and of attempts to deal with it." The recession, which began in the 2007-2008 fiscal year, drove up spending in areas like unemployment insurance and safety net programs. Attempts to deal with it included the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. "The big (spending) increase was driven by temporary factors. We're sort of leveling off now," Horney said. In the next three-year cycle, he noted, the projected spending of $3.6 trillion for 2012 is only 2.6 percent more than the actual outlays of $3.5 trillion in fiscal 2009-2012. The increase in the previous cycle, 2007-2010, was more than 27 percent. Portman's figure on spending was correct. But it is significant that the spending crosses administrations and is demonstrably tied to the faltering economy. That’s additional information that provides clarification. On the Truth-O-Meter, we rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Rob Portman	None	None	None	2012-01-09T06:00:00	2011-12-17	['None']
-afck-00091	“As at 30 October 2017, our external reserves had increased to US$34 billion.”	mostly-correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/hit-or-miss-taking-stock-of-5-claims-in-buharis-2018-budget-speech/	None	None	None	None	None	Hit or miss? Taking stock of 5 claims in Buhari’s 2018 budget speech	2017-11-29 11:15	None	['None']
-vees-00464	In 2006, when the law was passed, DSWD’s nationwide count of CICL was at 8,661. A year after, it went down to 2,759.	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-did-pangilinan-law-produce-generation	FACTBased on data obtained from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), the number of children in conflict with the law (CICL) has plunged significantly years after the passage of Republic Act No. 9344 or the Juvenile Justice Welfare Act of 2006.	None	None	None	Duterte,pnp,Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act,Crime,DSWD,CHR	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Did Pangilinan law produce a generation of criminals?	January 20, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-00904	More than any Republican governor in the 2014 elections, "I took a higher percentage of the Republican vote"and "yet I also carried independents by 12 points."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2015/mar/04/scott-walker/2016-horizon-scott-walker-asserts-his-appeal-among/	As he explores a run for the White House, Scott Walker is making a case for his electability, citing the fact he has won three elections for governor in four years. But he gives particular focus to the margins in his 2014 re-election victory. On Feb. 26, 2015, Walker spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, along with a host of other Republicans who are pondering a presidential run in 2016. The same day, he did an interview with Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity. Hannity's first question went to Walker’s electability: "How does a Republican win in Wisconsin because, on a presidential level, they haven't won since '84?" That was the year Ronald Reagan won a second term in a landslide. Since then, the state has gone Democratic seven straight times. "You've got to go big and you've got to go bold," Walker replied. He continued by describing his 2014 win for a second term, over Democrat Mary Burke: "I mean, ironically, I had solid support. In fact, I think more than any Republican governor in the country, I took a higher percentage of the Republican vote this last go-around, and yet I also carried independents by 12 points." We wondered about the numbers in Walker’s claim, one he repeated several days later in an interview with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday." So, did Walker win a higher percentage of the Republican vote in 2014 than any other Republican governor? And did he also win independent voters by a margin of 12 points? 2014 exit polls Edison Research does exit polling for five TV networks and the Associated Press. The key data for this fact check are found in the responses to this question: "No matter how you voted today, do you usually think of yourself as a Democrat, Republican, independent or something else." The results showed that three incumbent Republicans won at least 95 percent of the GOP vote in gubernatorial races (the GOP incumbent who won re-election with the lowest share of the GOP vote was Sam Brownback of Kansas, at 80 percent): Governor Percentage of Republican vote Terry Branstad, Iowa 97% Scott Walker, Wisconsin 96% John Kasich, Ohio 95% Two notes: Republican Greg Abbott won 96 percent of the GOP vote in winning the Texas governor's race. But he was running for an open seat. And exit polls, like any poll, have a margin of error and the difference between 96 percent and 97 percent are within the margin of error. At the same time, they are the best numbers available. So, Walker’s Republican support was extremely high, but not quite the highest. (On the other side, Walker won only 6 percent of the vote from Democrats. That 90-point partisan gap -- 96 percent of the GOP vote versus 6 percent of the Democratic vote – was the biggest of any 2014 candidate for governor in states where exit polls were done, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Craig Gilbert, who writes The Wisconsin Voter blog.) As for the second part of Walker’s claim, the Wisconsin exit poll found that among voters who identified themselves as independent or something else, Walker outperformed Burke by 54 percent to 43 percent. That’s a margin of 11 points, one point less than what Walker claimed. Our rating Walker said that more than any Republican governor in the 2014 elections, "I took a higher percentage of the Republican vote" and "yet I also carried independents by 12 points." Exit polls show both parts of the claim are slightly off. Walker’s 96 percent support from Republicans was second to Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad’s 97 percent. And among independent voters in Wisconsin, Walker led Democratic challenger Mary Burke by 11 points, not 12. For a statement that is accurate but needs clarification, Walker earns a Mostly True. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s web page. ------ More on Scott Walker For profiles and stories on Scott Walker and 2016 presidential politics, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Scott Walker page.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2015-03-04T11:30:54	2015-02-26	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-wast-00119	"If we do nothing, we know exactly what will happen. In just a short period of time, the world's leading state sponsor of terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world's most dangerous weapons."	not the whole story	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/09/fact-checking-president-trumps-reasons-for-leaving-the-iran-nuclear-deal/	None	None	Donald Trump	Salvador Rizzo	None	Fact-checking President Trump's reasons for leaving the Iran nuclear deal	May 9	None	['None']
-snes-04453	Police in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, busted an Amish dobergoat fighting ring.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amish-dobergoat-fighting-ring-busted/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Amish Dobergoat Fighting Ring Busted!	14 July 2016	None	['Pennsylvania', 'Lancaster,_Pennsylvania']
-pomt-12675	"Texas legislators have filed voucher proposals in every legislative session since 1995, but all of them have failed to become law."	true	/texas/statements/2017/mar/16/coalition-public-schools-coalition-public-schools/public-school-advocates-say-no-voucher-legislati/	Near the start of this year’s legislative session, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick stood on the Capitol’s steps and exhorted lawmakers in the House and Senate to vote on "school choice" legislation, saying it’s "it's easy to kill a bill when no one gets to vote on it." An advocacy group opposed to public funds supporting students going to private and religious schools urged a different course. In a Jan. 23, 2017, press release, the Coalition for Public Schools, which says it represents religious, child advocacy and education organizations, urged the Legislature to "focus its efforts on providing support for our neighborhood public schools instead of funneling public tax dollars" to private school "voucher schemes with little or no accountability for how our tax dollars are spent." The eight-paragraph release closed with a historical claim: "Texas legislators have filed voucher proposals in every legislative session since 1995, but all of them have failed to become law." That’d be a big 0-for-10 for voucher proponents because state lawmakers convene in regular session every odd-numbered year. We decided to check the record. For starters, we knew that Texans in 2017 can��t access government-backed vouchers to attend nonpublic schools. Nationally as of December 2016, 27 states afforded some kind of private school choice--and 14 states had voucher plans in law, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan group that offers "support, ideas, connections and a strong voice on Capitol Hill" for legislators. Wondering how the coalition reached its claim, we contacted a coalition member, the Texas Freedom Network, which says it watchdogs far-right issues, organizations, money and leaders. The network’s Jose Medina, who’d distributed the coalition’s release, emailed us a web link to a 2007 network report including an appendix listing Texas "voucher legislation" dating to 1993. Medina also pointed us to the network’s "legislative watch" web page showing bills filed under topics including vouchers from 1999 through 2015. Defining vouchers We paused to cover some definitions. Huriya Jabbar, a University of Texas education administration professor who has studied school choice and the political dimensions of education reforms, told us that "school choice" can include access to charter schools or the option to transfer to a different public school. Meanwhile, "private school choice" involves the use of public funds for private or parochial education. Asked about defining school vouchers alone, Jabbar pointed us to a 2015 article in Education Week, which covers schooling from kindergarten through high school. The article, "What's the Difference Between Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts?," explains differences in private school options that often get described collectively as vouchers, a "politically loaded term," the author wrote. The article says vouchers give parents "public funding allocated for their child toward tuition at a private school of their choice, including religiously affiliated private schools." Education savings accounts, similar to vouchers, can also pay for private tuition, the story says, though money in an account could be put toward out-of-class educational expenses such as tutoring or online enrichment. States that support such accounts set aside funds based on per-pupil funding estimates; parents may withdraw money for approved expenses, the story says. In Texas in 2017, state Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, filed Senate Bill 3 proposing education savings accounts for students from all income levels plus scholarships for students with the "greatest financial and academic need," Taylor’s measure states, to be supported by tax credits. That’s a funding approach taken by 17 states as of December 2016, according to the NCSL. States employ the credits, the article says, to "incentivize businesses or individuals to donate money to a scholarship-granting organization, which then gives money to students" to use for tuition at a private school. Texas is one of the states with constitutional amendments (often referred to as Blaine Amendments) that prohibit state funds from going to religious organizations. In those states, the Education Week article says, tax credit scholarships and education savings accounts "offer workarounds." We asked Josh Cunningham, an NCSL education policy specialist, if education savings accounts and tax credit scholarships would reasonably be grouped with vouchers in that each approach furthers public funding of non-public schooling. Cunningham suggested they could, as "they all for the most part serve a similar purpose, providing support for a public school student to enter into private school." Dozens of proposals Next, let’s review what we spotted in legislation considered since the 1995 session, which we based on text searches of "voucher," "scholarship" and "education savings account," to cover bills that dealt with public funding for private school tuition. We ran the terms through both the Texas Legislative Service website Telicon and the Texas Legislature online, which is managed by the Texas Legislative Council, session by session, coming up with 29 proposed bills related to school choice with funding in the form of vouchers, scholarships or savings accounts. We then checked each of the bills listed in the Coalition for Public Schools’ list in both services, to account for any that our search may have missed. In total, we found 54 relevant bills from every session that covered private "school choice" options. Among the proposals over the years, 11 envisioned pilot programs limited to certain student populations. For instance, House Bill 2366, which didn’t advance out of a House committee in 1999, called for a pilot program for "educationally disadvantaged" students. Six years later, HB 3042, which died in committee, more broadly called for vouchers for all students eligible to attend public schools. Texas Voucher and Voucher-Like School Proposals, 1995 through 2015 Year Proposals 1995 SB 92, HB 1315, HB 301 1997 HB 2395, HB 656, HB 318, SB 1206, HB 1110, HB 709 1999 HB2366, SB 10 2001 HB 1240, HB 2666 2003 HB 293, HB 658, HB 1554, HB 2465, SB 933 2005 HB 1263, HB 1445, HB 3042 2007 HB 18, SB 1506 2009 SB 1301, SB 1302, SB 183, HB 41 2011 HB 33, SB 157 2013 SB 1410, SB 115, SB 8, SB 17, SB 12, SB 15, SB 7, SB 18, SB 1575, SB 1015 2015 HB 279 2015 SB 4, SB 276, SB 642, HB 895, HB 1043, HB 3594, HB 4106, SB 623, SB 1178 2017 SB 3, HB 1184, HB 1335, SB 542 Sources: Texas Legislative Service website Telicon and Texas Legislature online Public school "choice" Let’s get specific. A form of public school choice, short of private-school vouchers, passed into law in 1995 when lawmakers created the Public Education Grant program open to students in any school where half the students or more didn’t perform satisfactorily on state tests the three previous years or the school was declared "low performing" by the state during those years, according to a 1997 House Research Organization summary. Under the law, each eligible student could attend a school in another district backed by the state and local funding provided for their education in their original district. In 1997, lawmakers widened such opportunities via HB 318 authorizing the state to fund up to 100 "open-enrollment charter schools," which students could attend with the grants, and otherwise allowing eligible students to apply a grant to attend another school in their home districts. Among other tweaks, a student would newly be eligible if half or more of a school’s students performed unsatisfactorily in any two of three previous years. A sampling of voucher proposals that died Also in 1997, Rep. Ron Wilson, D-Houston, proposed an amendment to a proposal that would’ve allowed students from low-performing schools to transfer to a private school and have tuition covered by state funds, provided the student attempted to enroll in another public school and was rejected. But House members deadlocked 68-68 on the amendment, which Wilson then withdrew after "voucher opponents rounded up some absent members who could have killed his measure," according to a May 8, 1997 Houston Chronicle news article. At the time, state Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, called that moment the House’s "closest vote ever" on vouchers. Among other measures that would put public funds toward private school costs that didn’t become law was HB 2465, offered in 2003 by Rep. Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington and chairman of the House Public Education Committee. Grusendorf’s plan would have created the Education Freedom Program for students in the state’s heaviest-enrollment districts. The bill’s analysis states that under the proposal, if a district served more than 40,000 students and a majority qualified as "educationally disadvantaged," those students whose families met certain financial requirements could attend private schools with state aid. The bill won the endorsement of the House Public Education panel by 5-3, but didn’t make it to the House floor before the session ended. According to minutes of the House Calendars Committee, that panel voted 7-0 on May 10, 2003, not to move the legislation to the House "at this time." Before the education committee acted, according to an April 4, 2003 news story in the Dallas Morning News, HB 2465 was fiercely debated with teacher groups and local school boards arguing against approval, saying the legislation would "rob the public schools of millions of dollars at a time when many are cutting programs." Proponents, such as Chris Patterson with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said that some children are still left behind in Texas, despite improvements to public education over the past two decades. A dozen years later, in the 2015 legislative session, Senate Bill 4, authored by Sens. Taylor; Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston; and Donna Campbell R-New Braunfels, would have given a low-income student or a student with disabilities a tax-credit scholarship to "attend the school of their choice," public or private. A bill analysis by the Senate Research Center added that the bill would have allowed businesses to make donations to an "educational scholarship organization" and thus receive a tax credit for the donation. According to an April 2015 news story in the Austin American-Statesman, the 31-member Senate gave preliminary approval to the bill on a "mixed 18-12 vote after rejecting a handful of Democratic-proposed amendments to the measure." A Democrat, Sen. Eddie Lucio, Jr. of Brownsville, voted for the proposal, the story said, with Republican Sens. Robert Nichols of Jacksonville and Konni Burton of Colleyville voting against it. In the House, where the measure died May 5, 2015 after it was referred to the Ways and Means committee, Republicans such as House Public Education Chairman Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock of Killeen expressed concern with the state’s abilities to hold private schools accountable to the same standards as public schools. We reached out to organizations supportive of educational savings accounts to see how this claim stacked up in their eyes -- the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Texans for Education Opportunity. The foundation’s Caroline Espinosa, declined to comment. We didn’t hear back from Texans for Education Opportunity. Our ruling The coalition said: "Texas legislators have filed voucher proposals in every legislative session since 1995, but all of them have failed to become law." All told, we identified 54 failed bills, at least one in each of the 11 regular sessions from 1995 through 2015, that proposed the use of public funds for private school tuition, though not every one was a pure voucher proposal. We rate this statement True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	The Coalition for Public Schools	None	None	None	2017-03-16T20:53:24	2017-01-23	['Texas']
-tron-02707	Before and after pictures of the tsunami areas	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/beforeandafter/	None	natural-disasters	None	None	None	Before and after pictures of the tsunami areas	Mar 19, 2015	None	['None']
-chct-00070	Then And Now - Are Millennials Better Off Than Their Parents?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/08/28/fact-check-millennials-income-mobility/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	3:44 PM 08/28/2018	None	['None']
-goop-00477	Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux Getting Back Together, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-justin-theroux-back-together-cars-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux NOT Getting Back Together, Despite Claim Romance Isn’t “Over”	11:02 am, August 11, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston']
-pose-00170	"Direct our precious homeland security dollars according to risk, not as a form of general revenue sharing."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/182/allocate-homeland-security-funding-according-to-ri/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Allocate Homeland Security funding according to risk	2010-01-07T13:26:50	None	['None']
-snes-04828	A woman was arrested for masturbating with a Happy Meal toy inside a McDonald's play area ball pit.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/woman-arrested-happy-meal/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Woman Arrested for Pleasuring Herself with Happy Meal Toy	2 May 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00170	Is California Gov. Jerry Brown Moving a Veterans Cemetery to Make Way for Low-Income Housing?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/california-veterans-cemetery-modesto/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Is California Gov. Jerry Brown Moving a Veterans Cemetery to Make Way for Low-Income Housing?	26 August 2018	None	['California']
-peck-00008	Has The Development Equalization Fund Been Scrapped?	true	https://pesacheck.org/are-poor-counties-set-to-lose-the-critical-development-equalization-fund-fc8871501cce	None	None	None	Leo Mutuku	None	Has The Development Equalization Fund Been Scrapped?	Jan 19, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04933	Says his "patents in ultrasound have revolutionized modern medicine."	pants on fire!	/tennessee/statements/2012/jul/30/george-flinn/memphis-candidate-george-flinn-claims-his-patents-/	Dr. George Flinn is well known in Memphis as a radiologist, radio station magnate and a big-spending, self-funding Republican political candidate who is running for Congress again this summer, this time in Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District. Fewer know him as an inventor with patents on file in Washington, but that’s what he claims in a commercial he’s airing as he seeks to defeat 2010 GOP nominee Charlotte Bergmann. The winner in Thursday’s Aug. 2 primary will face the winner of the primary between incumbent U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen and school board member Tomeka Hart. The commercial boldly claimsthat Flinn is "a doctor whose patents in ultrasound have revolutionized modern medicine, whose innovations have saved lives throughout the world." Based on the scant evidence we were able to discover and our lack of deep knowledge in the history of ultrasound technology, we are narrowing the focus to whether Flinn does indeed hold patents in ultrasound technology that might have revolutionized modern medicine. The only Flinn patent we were able to find was awarded on July 3, 2007, and it is not for ultrasound technology. Flinn and two others received patent No. 7,238,370 B2 for their invention of a substance made of pumice and an aqueous surfactant (like a detergent) that experiments showed increased skin thickness and gave it a "more youthful appearance." It was also tested on shaved guinea pigs. Its claim is that it prevents and treats "photoaging" of skin. Whatever the usefulness of this substance, we’re comfortable concluding it has not revolutionized modern medicine. It took Flinn’s campaign more than a week to provide information about other innovations the campaign believes backs up Flinn’s claims. OnThursday evening, July 26, campaign manager Kristi Stanley sent along three acknowledgement letters from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confirming receipt of applications for patents. Not patents, but applications for patents. The letters state that the information Flinn provided (which was not provided to PolitiFact) "will be examined for patentability." The letters also extend Flinn the right under federal law to seek a patent in foreign countries. Nothing that Stanley provided indicates Flinn sought foreign patents. She did note that Flinn also was involved in obtaining patents while employed by the National Institutes of Health that are held, not by him, but by that government agency. So let’s look at the three patent applications, according to the initial letters from the Patent and Trademark Office dated in May and June of this year. One (Customer No. 062439) is for "Chemotherapy Treatment Using Microspheres to Deliver a High Concentration of a Drug to a Tumor." The letter provided by Stanley provides no other information about the patent itself, just details about Flinn’s rights. It does not appear to deal with ultrasound. The second is titled "Process for an Improved Galactogram Procedure," with, again, no supporting description or detail. The third: "Color Encoding Method for Ultrasound Images." Again: No detail. We could explain that galactography is the examination of the breast by mammography and, specifically, examination of the milk ducts, or that microspheres are particles smaller than one millimeter in diameter. But it seems we can make short work of this analysis by saying that, although Flinn claims to deserve the patent for them, these are not patented inventions and he only sought them after he was deeply involved in this congressional campaign. If the technologies are being employed in medicine to demonstrative salubrious effect, it isn’t because they are his patents because the patents have not yet been granted. When contacted initially, the campaign indicated it was eager for us to examine the claim but did not provide the kind of supportive documentation that would establish its veracity. Instead, the documentation establishes the application for patents. But Flinn’s commercials flatly claim he his patents in ultrasound technology revolutionized modern medicine, when the record shows he he only applied for patents several months after this congressional campaign was under way. That kind of deliberate deception of voters earns this claim a Pants On Fire!	None	George Flinn	None	None	None	2012-07-30T03:00:00	2012-07-05	['None']
-pomt-13483	"In an interview with the Chicago Tribune's Editorial Board, Comptroller Leslie Munger says that in order to balance a budget, the state would have to 'cut social services completely.'"	false	/illinois/statements/2016/sep/08/seiu-healthcare-illinois-indiana/healthcare-union-twists-leslie-munger-comments/	On paper, the race for Illinois state comptroller is about which candidate is best qualified to be keeper of the state's checkbook. In reality, though, it's become an extension of the bitter budget war that's been waged for more than a year between Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan. Democrats and their supporters are doing everything possible to link incumbent Republican Leslie Geissler Munger to Rauner’s "reforms before revenue" position that has perpetuated the budget impasse and hurt social social service providers. Democratic comptroller candidate and Chicago City Clerk Susana Mendoza has made the connection the central theme of her campaign. In a YouTube video published Aug. 29, SEIU Healthcare of Illinois and Indiana, a union that represents health care and child care workers and is one of the sharpest critics of the anti-union Rauner, zeroed in on Munger for remarks she made during an Aug. 25 Chicago Tribune editorial board debate. SEIU claims Munger, who was appointed by then-Gov.-elect Rauner after the sudden death of Judy Baar Topinka in December 2014, said the state would have to "cut social services completely" in order to balance the budget. The 40-second YouTube video takes clips from the debate with the state’s four comptroller candidates, and includes a description that says: "In an interview with the Chicago Tribune’s Editorial Board, Comptroller Leslie Munger says that in order to balance a budget, the state would have to ‘cut social services completely.’" The union repeated the charge in a tweet: Politicians frequently argue about how to better manage social services, but we’ve never heard of any candidate advocating eliminating all programs that assist society’s most vulnerable citizens. We decided to look into SEIU’s claim. Context of comptroller’s comments James Muhammad, communications director for SEIU Healthcare Illinois Indiana, confirmed the YouTube video was referencing comments Munger made during the editorial board debate. Munger was asked by the editorial board whether she agrees with Rauner that reforms from his Turnaround Agenda must be passed before there’s an agreement on a full-year budget. Rauner sees his plan as helping business; his opponents see it as an anti-union assault in the guise of reform. While the comptroller did not answer the question directly, Munger said workers’ compensation reform and a property tax freeze are two of the governor’s reform items she believes would help businesses create more jobs, expand the tax base and grow the economy. This is where the SEIU YouTube video claims Munger said the state would have to "cut social services completely" to balance the budget. "We have to pass a balanced budget. I don’t know how you pass a balanced budget, unless you literally cut social services completely as an example, cut education," Munger said. "You cannot get to a balanced budget without a growing economy in our state right now. We cannot do it." The video includes Munger’s comments in their entirety, though both the title and the description imply the comptroller was saying the state needs to completely eliminate funding for social services to balance the budget. Despite Munger making clear she was using such cuts as "an example" to illustrate how drastic cuts alone would have to be, SEIU makes it appear as if Munger wants and is proposing to eliminate all funding for social services in the video as well as on its social media accounts. Munger reiterated her support for an income tax increase as long as it’s "coupled" with reductions in spending, noting the current individual income tax rate of 3.75 percent would have to be hiked up to about 8 percent just to pay down the state’s current $8.1 billion backlog of unpaid bills. "You cannot cut enough to get to a balanced budget, so you need revenue," Munger said during the debate. "And you cannot raise revenue enough to get it balanced without a growing economy." This statement also debunks SEIU’s contention that Munger wants to "cut social services completely," and further clarifies she was saying the state never would be able to make cuts as severe as what you would need to balance the budget as things currently stand. Our ruling In a YouTube video, SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana said: "In an interview with the Chicago Tribune's Editorial Board, Comptroller Leslie Munger says that in order to balance a budget, the state would have to ‘cut social services completely.’" The video, along with a tweet from the union’s Twitter account, gives the impression Munger wants to cut all funding for social services in order to balance the budget. However, both the video and the tweet take Munger’s comments out of context and fail to acknowledge she was speaking hypothetically. In addition, Munger’s statement that the state "cannot cut enough to get to a balanced budget" and "cannot raise revenue enough to get it balanced without a growing economy" undercuts SEIU’s contention that she wants to cut all social services. Essentially, Munger’s point is that lawmakers never would be able to make cuts as severe as what would be needed to balance the budget without new revenue. We rate SEIU Illinois’ claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/1390c5e4-4748-4f05-a7a2-50b8fe2a3698	None	SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana	None	None	None	2016-09-08T18:40:02	2016-08-25	['Chicago_Tribune']
-hoer-00406	Chicken Jerky Dog Treats Warning	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/chicken-jerky-dog-warning.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Chicken Jerky Dog Treats Warning	29th November 2011	None	['None']
-pomt-04817	"While (Barack) Obama preaches ‘we are our brother’s keeper,’ his brother and aunt live in real poverty in Kenya."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2012/aug/17/bill-zedler/texas-legislator-says-barack-obama-says-were-our-b/	State Rep. Bill Zedler lofted a double-sided claim about Barack Obama the day the Democratic president raised money by stumping in Texas. The Arlington Republican said in a July 17, 2012, Twitter post: "While Obama preaches ‘we are our brother’s keeper,’ his brother & aunt live in real poverty in Kenya." Obama often says Americans should care for one another. He said in his weekly radio address of Nov. 24, 2011: "This sense of mutual responsibility – the idea that I am my brother’s keeper; that I am my sister’s keeper – has always been a part of what makes our country special." He revisited that sentiment in his radio address of Dec. 24, 2011 and in a Feb. 2, 2012, speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, a Feb. 28, 2012, address to the United Auto Workers and a March 30, 2012, campaign speech in Burlington, Vt. And are the president’s brother and aunt impoverished in Kenya, as Zedler says? Obama has no Kenyan brothers. But by email, Zedler told us he relied on an excerpt of an interview of Obama’s Kenyan half-brother, George Obama, by Dinesh D’Souza, a former policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and author of a 2010 book, "The Roots of Obama’s Rage." George and Barack Obama had the same father. Zedler said he learned of the aunt’s conditions from a Fox News report featuring D’Souza. On July 17, 2012, D’Souza told Fox News host Sean Hannity that George Obama is living in "third-world poverty... And Obama won’t lift a finger to help him," according to a transcript of the appearance we obtained via the Nexis database. D’Souza also told Hannity that Obama has an aunt, his late father’s sister, "who as we speak is selling coal on the streets of Kenya for a couple dollars a day." A sizable share of Kenyans live in poverty. According to the Kenya section of the CIA’s "World Factbook," 50 percent of the nation’s residents lived below the poverty line as of 2000. As of 2005, according to the World Bank, the share of Kenyans living under the nation’s poverty line was 46 percent. For this article, we hunted for evidence that Obama’s half-brother and aunt live in poverty and that President Obama has not helped either one. By email, D’Souza told us he was referring to Hawa Auma Obama, whose brother was the president’s father. D’Souza said his information originated in a 2011 book by reporter Sally H.Jacobs, "The Other Barack," a biography of Obama’s father. Jacobs writes in the book that Hawa Auma, a widow, lives in a Kenyan village where she "spends most of her days sitting at the edge of the dirt road next to a pile of charcoal stubs that she sells" for about 40 cents per 2-kilogram tin. The aunt delights in a set of glasses that then-Sen. Obama gave her; he also gave her about $140 when he visited in 2006, Jacobs writes. "She wonders aloud if he will pay to get her teeth fixed," she writes. D’Souza’s videotaped interview of George Obama, placed on YouTube July 10, 2012, is described by the Hollywood Reporter as folding into a soon-to-be released movie featuring D’Souza, "2016: Obama’s America." In the interview, D’Souza tells George Obama that he had seen articles on CNN and elsewhere in the 2008 election year suggesting Barack Obama had not "done anything to help you." "I think he has a family of his own," George Obama replies. "He is supposed to help his family." D’Souza: "...Don’t you think you’re part of his family?" Obama: "Yeah, I’m part of his family. But I’m over it. I can help myself." D’Souza: "...Well, let me put it a different way. Recently, President Obama spoke and he was quoting from the famous story, of Cain and Abel, that we are our brother’s keeper." D’Souza asked George Obama: "Now my point is, you are his brother. Has he been your keeper?" Obama: "Go ask him. He’s got other issues to deal with." D’Souza: "Well, he’s taking care of the world, but don’t you start at home?" Obama: "Yeah, he’s taking care of the world. So he’s taking care of me. I’m part of the world." Obama then agreed the president doesn’t have to help him directly. D’Souza told the Hollywood Reporter that he met George Obama at a Nairobi hotel and they spent about 12 hours together. D’Souza is also quoted saying George Obama "lives in rubble on a few dollars a day while his powerful, multi-millionaire brother doesn't lift a finger to help him." By email, D’Souza told us that George Obama told him he lives on around $10 a month. In D’Souza’s 2010 book on the president, he writes that he read a 2008 London Telegraph news article on George Obama which showed him standing outside a ramshackle hut on Nairobi’s outskirts. That Aug. 20, 2008, Telegraph article actually summarizes an article in the Italian edition of Vanity Fair magazine, which said that George Obama, then 26, had met his American half-brother twice -- once when he was a youngster and again in 2006 when Barack Obama visited Nairobi. In his 2010 book, "Homeland," George Obama wrote that he was nervous about the 2006 visit with his half-brother, who was then a U.S. senator. "I was the kid from the slum, the Obama son who had been a gangster and served time," he wrote, adding that they greeted each other and shook hands toward the end of a family gathering. He wrote, too, that the pair lacked time for a conversation stretching to issues in the "ghetto" that he and others were trying to address. In the book, he said he briefly saw his half-brother again at a Nairobi hotel and the senator said he would call to chat longer, but no call came. As Obama won the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, George Obama said he agreed to be interviewed by a European journalist -- evidently the one who wrote the article for the Italian Vanity Fair. The Vanity Fair article, as recapped by the Telegraph, quoted George Obama as saying: "No-one knows who I am. I live here on less than a dollar a month." An accompanying photo is captioned: "George Hussein Onyango Obama, Sen. Barack Obama's long lost brother, was tracked down living in a hut on the outskirts of Nairobi." George Obama wrote in his book that he was photographed standing in the gateway of his late aunt’s home. He added: "No one could live on a dollar a day, let alone on three and a half cents a day, not even a Nairobi ghetto-dweller like me." He lives in a slum, Obama conceded, but did not resent that or feel his brother should do something about his situation. "No way," George Obama wrote. In the book, Obama further wrote that he later told a CNN reporter, David McKenzie: "I was brought up well; I live well even now." He said he did a similar interview with the London Times; an Aug. 22, 2008, article is available to paying readers on the Times’ website. D’Souza’s book says a 2008 CNN report -- perhaps the one mentioned in his interview of George Obama -- confirmed the Telegraph’s account. That’s not entirely so. The Oct. 22, 2008, CNN report describes George Obama as angered by the Italian Vanity Fair article. "I was brought up well. I live well even now," CNN reported Obama as saying. "The magazines, they have exaggerated everything. I think I kind of like it here. There are some challenges, but maybe it is just like where you come from, there are the same challenges." So, while George Obama lives in a slum, there are no indications he has been waiting for his half-brother to bail him out. For another observer’s take, we asked Washington Post journalist David Maraniss, who travelled to Kenya while researching his 2012 book on Barack Obama’s roots, about Zedler’s claim. Maraniss replied that the president has many Kenyan relatives with "varying economic circumstances." He said he did not visit George Obama. Separately, we emailed the White House about Zedler’s claim, drawing no reply. Our ruling President Obama, who often refers to being our brother’s keepers, has a half-brother, George Obama, living in a Nairobi slum and, as of 2011, a Kenyan aunt who sold charcoal by the road. The president gave the aunt some money in 2006, according to Jacobs’ account. There appears to be no sign of his otherwise helping his aunt or half-brother. Finally, Zedler's statement implies the president is not addressing distant family needs. That’s at least slightly misleading in that the half-brother has said he doesn’t expect such aid. Notably, too, there appear to be no signs of the president revealing that he is or is not privately pitching in. We rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Bill Zedler	None	None	None	2012-08-17T15:08:03	2012-07-17	['Barack_Obama', 'Kenya']
-pomt-04456	"Since President Obama took office, there are over 450,000 more unemployed women."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/10/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-ad-says-under-barack-obama-there-are-4/	A new ad from Mitt Romney's campaign uses small-business owner Melanie McNamara to make the case that Obama hasn't helped the economy -- particularly for women. "He promised to bring us all together, that we're all going to be able to prosper," she says in the ad. "I don't see the prospering." She voted for him 2008 but won't this time, she says. An on-screen visual says, "Since President Obama took office, there are over 450,000 more unemployed women." In exploring whether that number is accurate, we should note that economists say raw numbers are problematic because the population grows over time and the desire to join the labor force can wax and wane for reasons beyond broad economic conditions. In examining the Romney campaign's claim, we find the numbers can be tallied different ways to tell two very different stories. The outcome depends on when you start counting. If you start in January 2009, the month that Obama took office, there has been a 451,000 increase in the number of unemployed women 16 and up through the latest report, which was issued last week. But start the count later and you get a much different picture. The Obama campaign often uses February 2010, which was the point when monthly job changes turned from negative to positive. The problem is, each party’s approach amounts to cherry picking. Starting the count on the day Obama was sworn in ignores the reality that no president can have much impact on the economy in their first weeks or even months on the job -- a point that’s particularly important in Obama’s case because the job numbers were in a virtual free fall when he began his term on January 2009. On the other hand, starting the count at the low point, one year after taking office, shields Obama from any responsibility for more than a year. We’ve often taken a middle ground, starting the count in June 2009, which was the official start of the recovery, and a few months after Obama’s stimulus law took effect. As it turns out, using June 2009 makes a major difference in the result. Between June 2009 and September 2012, the number of unemployed women actually decreased by 548,000. There’s also another way to look at it -- to compare the 44 months after January 2009 to the 44 months prior to January 2009. During this period -- the final 44 months of George W. Bush’s presidency -- the number of unemployed women rose by almost 1.4 million. That’s more than triple the increase in unemployed women that we found even under the least flattering measurement for Obama. And if you look at Bush’s entire eight-year term, the number of unemployed women rose by more than 2.2 million. Even accounting for Bush’s longer tenure, that’s a rise far more rapid than occurred under Obama. Our ruling The Romney campaign claimed that "since President Obama took office, there are over 450,000 more unemployed women." That’s literally true, but the statistic is cherry-picked. Starting the count at the beginning of the recovery, rather than the beginning of Obama’s term, produces a starkly different result -- a decrease of 548,000 unemployed women. And the rise in women’s unemployment under Obama pales compared to the rise experienced under George W. Bush. These important pieces of context are left out of the ad. On balance, we rate the claim Half True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-10-10T18:09:10	2012-10-06	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-01098	A video shows a rat washing itself as though it is a human taking a shower.	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rat-showering-like-a-person/	None	Critter Country	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This a Rat Showering Like a Person?	30 January 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-13394	"The gun epidemic is the leading cause of death of young African-American men, more than the next nine causes put together."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/26/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-correct-gun-deaths-young-black-mal/	During the first presidential debate at Hofstra University, Hillary Clinton decried gun violence, especially as it impacts young African-Americans. "The gun epidemic is the leading cause of death of young African-American men, more than the next nine causes put together," she said. This is a claim Clinton has made before, and it’s accurate. We found the relevant data on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. Using this search form, we collected data on the 10 most common causes of death for African-American men and boys between the ages of 15 and 24, for 2014: There were 2,256 gun-related homicides in 2014, compared to 2,119 deaths in the next nine categories combined. This makes Clinton’s statement correct. If you add in the accidents and suicides related to guns, the gap between gun-related deaths and other types of deaths expands even further. There were 2,533 gun-related deaths in all 10 categories combined, compared to 2,002 deaths in the top 10 categories that had nothing to do with guns. We should note that this statement is dependent on the age range chosen. For instance, the statement is not correct for African-American boys between age 10 and 14. There were 38 gun-related homicides in that age and racial group in 2014, plus 10 gun suicides and three unintentional injuries caused by guns, for a total of 51. By contrast, the top 10 causes of death for that age and racial group included 271 deaths that had nothing to do with guns, such as diseases. That said, we think using the definition of "young" as 15-24 is a reasonable one. Our ruling Clinton said, "The gun epidemic is the leading cause of death of young African-American men, more than the next nine causes put together." As long as you define "young" as being between the ages of 15 and 24, Clinton’s statement is accurate, according to CDC data. We rate the statement True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/71bc1a22-7c79-4a3f-8b4d-78aba73d667b	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-09-26T23:13:55	2016-09-26	['None']
-vees-00022	Airing his frustration at a military general he fired in connection with the procurement of medicines and medical supplies for soldiers, Duterte recalled how he ran Davao City as mayor:	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-duterte-wrong-about-davao-citys-financ	Davao City’s revenue growth rate in 2016, the year Duterte was elected president, stood at 10.24 percent, not 9 percent, data from the Commission on Audit’s (COA) reports show.	None	None	None	Duterte,Davao economic growth,Davao revenue	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte WRONG about Davao City’s financial figures--again	October 18, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-01173	"We are younger than our competitors, and this is entirely because of immigration."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/dec/09/barack-obama/america-younger-competitors-because-immigration/	We’re not sure what a sexy argument for immigration reform would sound like, but President Barack Obama admitted that one he offered last week was a bit on the wonky side. "It's not a sexy argument to make to the public, but we are younger than our competitors, and that is entirely because of immigration," Obama told a group of business executives. "And when you look at the problems that China, Japan, Europe, Russia, are all going to have, a lot of it just has to do with their getting old. And we stay young because were constantly being replenished by these striving families from around the world. And we should want that to continue." We agree that this argument isn’t sexy. But is it accurate? The age of the population is important to a country because taxes generated by incomes of young workers support health care costs and Social Security benefits for those who are no longer working. We’ll take his claim in two parts. U.S. vs its competitors Is the United States younger than its competitors? "Competitors" is a loose term, but judging by the countries Obama listed, he’s comparing the United States to other large economies. There are a few ways we can determine whether a country is "young." We can compare median ages between countries. Or we can look at the percentage of the population that falls between certain age groups. Finally, we can look at demographic projections for what their age breakdown will be at a point in the future. Let’s take the top 15 countries by gross domestic product (GDP) and use the various models to compare their ages. Country Median age Percent of population under 24 Percent of population under 54 Percent of population 65 and older in 2050 United States 37.6 33.1 73.0 21.4 China 36.7 31.8 79.0 23.9 Japan 46.1 22.9 61.0 36.5 Germany 46.1 23.6 65.3 32.7 France 40.9 30.6 69.2 25.5 United Kingdom 40.4 29.9 70.9 24.7 (Great Britain only) Brazil 30.7 40.3 84.0 22.5 Russia 38.9 27.1 72.9 20.5 Italy 44.5 23.6 66.6 33.0 India 27.0 46.6 87.2 12.7 Sources: CIA World Factbook and Pew Research Center. In each case, it does appear that the United States is among the youngest countries. It’s certainly much younger than the European Union nations and Japan, and that trend will hold through the mid 21st century. You can also look at the European Union as a separate entity. It consists of many of the countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of advanced, industrialized economies. In the European Union, about 26 percent of the population is under the age of 24, and 66 percent are under 54 years old. By both measurements, the United States is younger than the European Union. The biggest exceptions are Brazil and India, two countries that have booming populations and large GDPs, but which began to industrialize later than the United States, Europe and Japan, and neither are considered advanced economies. The most interesting comparisons are China and Russia. Their age structure is relatively close to that in the United States. China, according to the CIA World Factbook, has a slightly younger median age than the United States and a larger percentage of its population is under the age of 54. On the other hand, with fewer very young people, China is expected to have a larger share of its population over 65 by 2050. China’s longstanding one-child policy, though softened recently, has created future demographic challenges for the country as well. Russia is slightly older than the United States when measured by median age, but it will have a smaller portion of its population over 65 in 2050. Bottom line: Brazil and India are clearly younger than the United States, and China and Russia are in the same ballpark, but the United States is younger than key European countries and Japan. The immigration affect The second question is what role immigration plays in keeping America’s population relatively young? The short answer is: Quite a bit, though the exact extent is hard to quantify. Obama’s statement is generally on point, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer for the Pew Research Center. A 2014 Pew report, "Attitudes About Aging," found that the United States has four times the immigrant population than any other country with Russia a distant second. The percentage of immigrants in the U.S. population was the third-highest of all the countries studied in the Pew report. Researchers estimate that 50 percent of the United States’ population growth from 1960 to 2005 stems from immigrants and their descendants. "Without immigration, U.S. population growth from 2005 to 2050 would be only 8.5 percent, more on par with that of European nations," the report concluded. If that were the case, the United States, like Europe, would be on path where its fertility rates fell short of replacement level — that is, not reproducing fast enough to replace the number of people dying. Immigrants coming to the United States tend to be younger and in their childbearing years. They also tend to reproduce at slightly higher rates than American natives and at much higher rates than the populations of other superpowers, Passel said. The net effect of the United States’ relatively high immigration rate is to raise the fertility rate beyond replacement levels. "We are not facing the kind of demographic deficits that some of the European and Asian countries are facing as a result of low fertility and little immigration," Passel said. "These countries have to devote a substantial share of resources to supporting the elderly." That said, relatively high immigration brings its own downside as well, Passel said. "The long-term projections show that immigrants don’t magically save Social Security," he said. "The issue there is the immigrants eventually get old, too. At least in the short to medium term, having immigrants come into the country adds to the workforce and Social Security collections, but it also adds to the obligations in the long term." Our ruling Obama said, "We are younger than our competitors, and this is entirely because of immigration." The United States is considerably younger than key European countries and Japan, but its age structure is largely similar to China and Russia. Brazil and India, which are best described as emerging but still developing competitors, have substantially younger populations. His main point — that immigration is driving America’s relative youth — is largely accurate. The United States is home to more immigrants than any other country, and many of them are younger and reproduce at higher rates than do native-born Americans. Without its immigration levels, the U.S. would look much more like Europe in its age structure. The statement is accurate but needs additional information, so we rate the statement Mostly True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2014-12-09T15:27:01	2014-12-03	['None']
-goop-02748	Johnny Depp Wants Vanessa Paradis Back?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/johnny-depp-wants-vanessa-paradis-back/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Johnny Depp Wants Vanessa Paradis Back?	9:05 pm, June 8, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02461	"Obamacare will mean 2.1 million fewer jobs by 2021."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2014/feb/24/americans-prosperity-georgia-chapter/details-reveal-distinction-obamacare-jobs-claim/	Opponents of the federal health care law recently got what they believe supports their argument that Congress should pull the plug on the legislation. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected that the law will push many Americans from the workforce. The Georgia chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a longtime critic of the law, held a rally at the state Capitol calling for the repeal of the controversial law, citing the CBO’s projections. "The Affordable Care Act has been disastrous for Georgians, causing premiums around the state to shoot up dramatically and causing many Georgians to lose their previous insurance. All this, despite the president’s promise that ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it,’" AFP Communications Director Joel Aaron Foster said. "The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says Obamacare will mean 2.1 million fewer jobs by 2021." PolitiFact Georgia wondered whether the Georgia chapter was correct in its interpretation about the potential number of jobs lost as a result of the law. Our partners at PolitiFact in Washington had looked at a similar claim and found one major flaw. The National Republican Congressional Committee claimed in a television ad that "Nonpartisan government analysts say Obamacare will cost our economy up to 2.5 million jobs." PolitiFact noted that the CBO report did not use the word "jobs." "CBO’s updated estimate of the decrease in hours worked translates to a reduction in full-time-equivalent employment of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024, compared with what would have occurred in the absence of the ACA," the CBO report said. The CBO report suggested some people will choose to work fewer hours, others may quit their jobs in order to get health care subsidies they would not receive if they continued to work their regular schedule. "Because some people will reduce the amount of hours they work rather than stopping work altogether, the number who will choose to leave employment because of the ACA in 2024 is likely to be substantially less than 2.5 million," the CBO report said. PolitiFact noted: "An important distinction in the report is that labor force will reduce by the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time workers over the next decade. That doesn’t mean 2.5 million people will leave their jobs. Some people will only cut back a few hours or leave a second part-time job while others may stop working entirely." PolitiFact rated the National Republican Congressional Committee’s claim Mostly False. We contacted Americans for Prosperity Georgia to see whether there was any additional context it has that may show it should earn a better rating on the Truth-O-Meter. The group’s spokesman, Foster, said the chapter stands by its statement. He pointed to other news coverage that used the same terminology to describe the conclusion the CBO reached in its report. "The CBO report said the health care law will cause Americans to cut their work hours, equating to 2 million fewer jobs in 2017. That number is predicted to eventually rise to the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs in 2024," Politico reported. We found other prominent news outlets used similar language in their initial coverage. "Several million American workers will reduce their hours on the job or leave the workforce entirely because of incentives built into President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday," The Associated Press reported in an article that was published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "That would mean losses equal to 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021, in large part because people would opt to keep their income low to stay eligible for federal health care subsidies or Medicaid, the agency said. It had estimated previously that the law would lead to 800,000 fewer jobs by that year." Some major news outlets described it differently, sticking closer to the CBO’s description of its projection. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, though, explained there is a difference. "[W]e should note that the figures (2 million, etc.) are shorthand for full-time equivalent workers — a combination of two conclusions: fewer people looking for work and some people choosing to work fewer hours. The CBO added those two things and produced a hard number, but it actually does not mean 2 million fewer workers," it reported. Our conclusion We debated long and hard about this one. Americans for Prosperity Georgia did capture the general theme of what the CBO tried to say about the impact of the health care law on employment. It will result in fewer people working fewer hours. But its terminology was not entirely accurate. The CBO report did not say the health care law would result in a reduction of 2.5 million jobs. It specifically said "more than 2.5 million people are likely to reduce the amount of labor they choose to supply to some degree" and added that "many of them will not leave the labor force entirely." We believe that is an important distinction. This claim does contain some element of truth, but some of the details are incorrect. We rate it Half True.	None	Americans for Prosperity Georgia chapter	None	None	None	2014-02-24T06:00:00	2014-02-17	['None']
-tron-02968	Monica Petersen Dies While Investigating Clinton Human Trafficking in Haiti	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/monica-petersen-dies-investigating-clinton-human-trafficking-haiti/	None	politics	None	None	['conspiracy', 'hillary clinton', 'the clintons']	Monica Petersen Dies While Investigating Clinton Human Trafficking in Haiti	Nov 18, 2016	None	['None']
-goop-01024	Kanye West Did Leave Kim Kardashian After “Massive Fight,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kanye-west-kim-kardashian-fight-divorce-false/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kanye West Did NOT Leave Kim Kardashian After “Massive Fight,” Despite Report	6:08 pm, May 9, 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00572	'News Report' Claims Gonorrhea Spread Through Air	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/gonorrhea-spread-air-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	'News Report' Claims Gonorrhea Spread Through Air	October 18, 2012	None	['None']
-goop-02859	Jane Fonda “Mental Breakdown” Claim Tru	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jane-fonda-mental-breakdown-declining-health-problems/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jane Fonda “Mental Breakdown” Claim NOT True	11:08 am, April 15, 2017	None	['Jane_Fonda', 'Mental_breakdown']
-pomt-02191	"Over 300K home owner suicides attributed to foreclosures."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/apr/25/facebook-posts/social-media-meme-says-300000-suicides-are-attribu/	A reader recently asked us to check a social media meme with a striking statistic about foreclosures and suicides. It said, "1.4 million homes stolen by banks since 2008. Over 300K home owner suicides attributed to foreclosures. Why won't anyone defend these American property owners' rights?" Have there really been 300,000 suicides linked to foreclosures? We decided to take a look. We first checked with the group credited with creating the meme -- a news and opinion site called occupycorporatism.com -- but an email to the site’s general inbox was not returned. So we next checked annual death statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most recent report came out in December 2013, covering statistics for 2010. For 2010, CDC found that suicide was the 10th most common cause of death, with 38,364 cases. Here’s the number for the past nine years: Year Suicides 2010 38,364 2009 36,909 2008 36,035 2007 34,598 2006 33,300 2005 32,637 2004 32,439 2003 31,484 2002 31,655 Total, 2002-10 307,151 So the total number of suicides from 2002-10 is around 300,000. But for the meme to be correct, you’d have to believe that every single American suicide between 2002 and 2010 was caused by a foreclosure. Of course, that assumes there was a reliable way to measure this kind of causal effect. (The CDC reports don't address what caused a person to commit suicide.) And the meme is even further off-base it it intends to be referring only to suicides since 2008. We asked several experts whether the meme's claim was even remotely possible. "There is no basis for this claim," said Douglas Massey, a population-research professor at Princeton University. "It isn't plausible that every suicide over a nine-year period could be attributed to foreclosure," agreed Janet M. Currie, a Princeton University economist who, along with Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University, has studied the health impacts of the rising tide of foreclosures in the United States. Tekin expressed similar skepticism when contacted by PolitiFact. In their own research, Currie and Tekin found that a location with about 400 foreclosures in a year might see 24 more medical visits for mental health conditions, including suicide attempts. But that wouldn’t be enough to support the meme’s claim, Currie said. Our ruling The meme said that over 300,000 homeowner suicides are attributable to foreclosures. But that would mean every suicide over a nine-year period would have been caused by a foreclosure, and experts say that’s not credible. We rate the claim Pants on Fire.	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2014-04-25T16:52:18	2014-04-25	['None']
-vogo-00214	Balboa Park Edition: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/community/balboa-park-edition-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	Balboa Park Edition: Fact Check TV	July 30, 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-15338	"The United States ranks second worst in income inequality across developed countries," after taxes and transfers.	mostly true	/virginia/statements/2015/jul/13/bobby-scott/bobby-scott-says-us-no-2-income-disparity-among-de/	U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott has long complained about the gap between rich and poor in the United States. "When measuring income inequality across the globe, after accounting for taxes and transfers, the United States ranks second worst in income inequality across developed countries," Scott, D-3rd, wrote in a June 12 statement. Scott made the comment in explaining his vote against a sweeping trade agreement with Asian nations; he said thinks it would depress U.S. wages. The congressman has also cited income inequality in his calls to raise the minimum wage and increase taxes on the wealthy. We recently gave a Mostly True rating to his claim that U.S. income disparity is at it highest level since the 1920s. This time, we wondered whether Scott is right about the United States’ global ranking. DeMontre Boone, a legislative assistant to Scott, said the congressman drew his information from a December 2013 article by the Pew research Center headlined "Global Inequality: How the U.S. compares." Pew defined developed countries as those belonging to the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, a group of 34 democratic nations seeking to improve trade. The OECD calculates the inequality of income distribution in terms of what’s called a Gini coefficient that ranges on a scale from zero to one. Zero means there’s perfect equality and every household earns the same income. One means there’s absolute inequality and a single household earns a country’s entire income. All nations fall somewhere in between. The Pew article, drawing mostly on 2010 calculations, has a chart placing the U.S. 10th highest among OECD nations in income inequality measured before taxes and transfers -- payments such as welfare and Social Security that a government makes to people without an exchange of goods or services. The U.S. Gini rating was .499, well behind the leader, Ireland, who came in at .591. Scott, you’ll remember, focused his comments on earnings after tax and transfers. And when that bottom-line data was computed, the U.S. surged to No. 2 on the disparity chart, with a .38 Gini. Chile, with a .501 coefficient, had the greatest inequality. So Scott cited information in the Pew chart correctly. But two issues still arise: The OECD has updated its figures since the Pew article was published, and Pew omitted three OECD nations from its chart -- Mexico, Turkey and Hungary -- because, unlike the other countries, their Gini figures were unavailable for 2009 or 2010. So let’s look at this again, armed with data mostly from 2012 that includes all OECD nations. When it comes to income inequality before taxes and transfers, the U.S. ranked 7th. Here’s a list of those seven countries and the Gini coefficients: Ireland, .582 Greece, .569 Portugal, .536 Chile, .532 United Kingdom, .523 France, .518 United States, .513 Now, let’s examine income equality after taxes and transfers -- the core of Scott’s claim. The U.S. rose to fourth in the rankings here, suggesting that the redistributive effects of our tax and public welfare systems are weaker than some of our trading partners. Here’s the top four list: Chile, .503 Mexico, .457 Turkey, .402 United States, .390 Of course not all industrialized nations belong to the OECD. The trade organization also computed Russia’s income inequality for 2012 and the post-tax and transfers rating of .396 was higher than the United States’. If you’re wondering, the five OECD countries with the lowest post-tax and transfers income disparity -- all with a Gini around .250 -- were Estonia, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Norway and Finland. Our ruling Scott said, "The United States ranks second worst in income inequality across developed countries," after accounting for taxes and transfers. Scott bases his claim on an outdated chart listing the statistical disparity in 31 of the 34 OECD nations. Updated information with all the OECD nations shows the U.S. with the fourth highest disparity and it drops another notch if you include non-member Russia. Clearly, the U.S. ranks near the top among developed nations in income inequality, but not quite as high as Scott says. We rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Bobby Scott	None	None	None	2015-07-13T00:00:00	2015-06-12	['United_States']
-pomt-03685	About 3 percent of Gov. Nathan Deal’s appointments have been African-American.	half-true	/georgia/statements/2013/apr/23/vincent-fort/few-blacks-picked-georgia-posts-lawmaker-says/	Before the Georgia Legislature ended its 2013 session last month, one senator took Gov. Nathan Deal to task for what the lawmaker said was a lack of racial diversity amongst appointees to various state boards and positions. "Less than 3 percent of appointees, since they’ve taken office, by the executive branch have been African-American," said Sen. Vincent Fort, an Atlanta Democrat who is African-American. Fort held a spreadsheet in his hand that he said documented the disparity. Just nine of some 200 appointments since Deal, who is white, was sworn in as governor in January 2011 were African-American, the senator said. Three of those African-Americans were appointed to the state’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, Fort said. "The point I’m trying to make is this," Fort told his Senate colleagues. "You see a lack of diversity in the appointments to government. That’s not right." About 30 percent of Georgians and the state’s registered voters are African-American, U.S. census figures and Georgia Secretary of State Office’s records show. PolitiFact Georgia wanted to know whether Fort’s claim was correct. It took us some time to do our own research, but we found African-Americans accounted for 7 percent of Deal’s appointments. Brian Robinson, the governor’s communications director, told PolitiFact Georgia that the governor’s office does not keep a breakdown of Deal’s appointments by race. Robinson said the governor wants racial diversity among his appointees. Robinson explained that anyone can apply to serve on a state board and applicants are not asked beforehand about their race. "The applicants do not report their race on the forms, though, and they don’t submit photos, so it would be difficult to guess the demographic breakdown of the governor’s appointees," Robinson said. Through a spokeswoman for Senate Democrats, Fort forwarded us the spreadsheet he cited on the Senate floor. It had 209 appointments, with the names of each person, the organization that person was appointed to, their race and gender, and where he or she lives. The spreadsheet had the race of all but eight appointees. PolitiFact Georgia, though, found Deal has made more than 800 appointments. The spokeswoman, Liz Flowers, explained the spreadsheet was based on a review of Deal’s executive orders. We looked through all of the governor’s news releases, which helped us to compile a more detailed list of Deal’s appointments. Deal, a former congressman from Gainesville, was elected with seemingly little support from African-American voters. Deal, a Republican, fared poorly in counties with large black populations in the 2010 general election against Democrat Roy Barnes. In Clayton County, where 72 percent of voters are black, Deal won 17 percent of the vote. In Dougherty County, where nearly 65 percent of registered voters are black, Deal won 30 percent of the vote. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution examined Deal’s appointments in May 2011, shortly after he took office. The findings: 83 of Deal’s 87 appointees -- 95 percent -- were white. Deal’s predecessor, Sonny Perdue, also a Republican, appointed whites at an 87 percent clip during his first year in office. In general, Georgia Republicans have had trouble gaining the support of black voters. In 2010, less than 3 percent of the state’s black voters cast ballots in the Republican primary, according to Emory University assistant political science professor Andra Gillespie. The professor cautioned that primary turnouts are typically low, so some black Republicans may have stayed home. She added that since Georgia has open primaries, some black voters who cast ballots in that primary may not typically side with the GOP. University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock estimated that 5 percent of black voters statewide cast their ballots for Deal. Flowers and some Democrats insist the lack of black support for Deal should not remove them from consideration for appointments. Some African-Americans on state boards told the AJC that they inquired about various positions even though they didn’t vote for the governor. Deal sought out others he knew and asked them to serve, the AJC reported. As the AJC did in 2011, PolitiFact Georgia used the AJC’s voter database, which comes from the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, as the primary source for our research. The database lists each Georgia voter, giving his or her full name, race, date of birth, gender and address. We also conducted detailed Internet searches to match the names of some appointees. It took us more than two weeks to compile our research. Fort’s spreadsheet went from the beginning of Deal’s term to the end of February 2013. We looked at appointments up to the date Fort made his comments. There have been some appointments since March 26. We examined appointments Deal made to state boards, commissions, councils and judicial positions. The appointments range from the state Board of Public Safety to the Board of Hearing Aid Dealers and Dispensers. Many appointees were small business owners. Nearly 70 percent of them were men. We counted 53 appointees who live in Gainesville, Deal’s hometown. Atlanta was the only city with more appointees on our list. Thirty-seven people were appointed to more than one board. And how many were black? Sixty-one of the 843, according to our count, or slightly more than 7 percent. A handful listed their race as "other." Fourteen were listed as "unknown." A small number listed their race as Asian or Hispanic. The remainder, nearly 90 percent of them, were white. Robinson defended the governor’s efforts toward racial inclusiveness. "[M]any agency heads hired by Governor Deal are African-American, and the governor recently appointed the state’s first Asian-American woman judge to sit on the Court of Appeals," Robinson said. "The governor’s actions in the recent DeKalb County school case also provide a telling example. Our liaisons were a white man and a black man. Our nominating panel was majority African-American, and five of the six board members that he appointed are African-American." To sum up, Fort said during a Senate session that less than 3 percent of the governor’s appointees are African-American. Our research showed it’s slightly more than 7 percent. The senator’s overarching claim that Deal has appointed a relatively low percentage of minorities has merit. But he was wrong by a handful of percentage points. It was based on an incomplete sampling of Deal’s total appointees. We rate the claim Half True.	None	Vincent Fort	None	None	None	2013-04-23T06:00:00	2013-03-26	['Nathan_Deal', 'African_American']
-snes-03316	Gas Lag	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bandits-posing-as-gas-company-workers/	None	Humor	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Bandits Posing as Gas Company Workers	19 December 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-06115	Says constitutional amendment would "help to stop unfair, double taxation on real estate."	half-true	/oregon/statements/2011/dec/30/Yes-on-79/are-oregon-home-sellers-really-subject-double-tax/	While we were trolling for some new facts to check, a rather urgent ad popped out at us on one of our favorite conservative websites: "Sign the Petition. Stop Unfair, Double Taxes," it read. The text was superimposed on a picture of a home with a "For Sale" sign. We were curious, so we clicked through. We landed on a website for Protect Oregon Homes. There, the same pitch continued in earnest. We were greeted with a picture of a home for sale. "Sold -- with double tax!" read the sign out front. On the side of the page was a calculator that helps visitors compute their property transfer tax. It was preset at just under 2 percent of the sales price. "Sign the Petition! We need your help to stop unfair, double taxation on real estate," is the first bit of text on the site, referring to a push for a constitutional ban on real estate transfer taxes. Wow, we thought. Do we really have a double tax on real estate? We decided to check. The taxation that the site is looking to "stop" would kick into effect when a home swaps hands. Protect Oregon Homes, backed by the Oregon Association of Realtors, is looking to amend the state constitution to bar "state/local governments from imposing taxes, fees, assessments on transfer of any interest in real property." There’s just one problem. When we looked a little further, we found out that there is only one such tax in the entire state (Washington County imposes a 0.1 percent transfer tax) and this proposed legislation would grandfather that charge in, just as previous legislation did. What’s more, beside that one-time Washington County exception, under current law, cities, counties and other jurisdictions don’t have the power to impose taxes on real estate transfers. So what gives? What would an amendment be stopping? Shaun Jillions, a spokesperson for Oregon Association of Realtors, explains it this way: "There's nothing in that (current) statute that stops the state Legislature from" instituting one or repealing the current ban. His line was pretty close to the one featured on the group’s website: The "state Legislature has the authority, subject to governor approval, to impose such taxes and fees or to change current statutory law," the site says. "Local officials would welcome any source of new revenue to keep their operations going. A new revenue stream from a tax on property sales would be very tempting ... We need a law to take this law off the table. Forever." Essentially, this is all about a strong defense being the best offense. The website even says so: "During the past five legislative sessions, there have been nine attempts to authorize such a tax at the state or local level." Jillions mentioned that same fact and even followed up a with a list of of the bills Realtors had been tracking. A single bill was introduced in the 2011 session but died without a hearing. The same happened to three bills during the 2009 session. In 2007, a bill that would open up the doors to transfer taxes did get multiple hearings, but it failed, too. Two bills in 2005 died without hearings and in 2003 two bills were introduced, only one got a single hearing, and both ultimately died. We asked Jillions about the poor showing most of these bills made. Did it seem a little disingenuous to say that there’s a double tax when there’s a law banning such charges and the bills put forward to end that ban have been largely dead on arrival? "That might have something to do with the lobbying efforts of the Oregon Association of Realtors," he said. We went one step further to gauge the Legislature’s interest in repealing the current ban and talked to Sen. Ginny Burdick, one of the chairs of the Revenue Committee. "I've not heard any push to do this in February, " she said, referring to the next time the Legislature meets. "It's certainly not on my priority list. "I don't see this coming up in the near future, but with the budget problems we have any revenue source can and should be on the table." Jillions also pointed to the fact that Multnomah County Commissioner Deborah Kafoury has been bullish about such a tax. Indeed, she sponsored a bill to overturn the ban back in 2003 when she was a state lawmaker. Most recently, she told Willamette Week that "putting a pre-emption into the constitution is really tying the hands of local voters. It’s already state law, and I don’t see why that’s not good enough." Finally, Jillions told us to take a look at a report issued in June 2008 by the governor’s Task Force on Federal Forest Payments and County Services. In the report, there’s a suggestion that the state drop its pre-emption of real estate transfer taxes. But that was issued years ago and we’re no closer to passing legislation of that nature now than we were then. Even with the report, the noncommittal statements from Burdick and a possible interest from one county commissioner, it doesn’t seem like a transfer tax is imminent, let alone even in existence. The Protect Oregon Homes website says signing the petition will "help to stop unfair, double taxation on real estate" when, in fact, there is only one such tax in Oregon and the repeal they’re floating would do nothing to end it. What’s more, a repeal of the current pre-emption, while certainly possible, is not something that the Legislature appears to be actively considering. Protect Oregon Homes acknowledges some of these points on their website, which tempers our ruling somewhat, but the general feeling you get from the group is that there’s a tax on the books -- or there will be soon -- and only a constitutional amendment will stop it. In fact, there is no double tax to stop. We give the group a Half True for this claim -- it’s partially accurate but leaves out some essential context.	None	Yes on 79	None	None	None	2011-12-30T15:35:37	2011-12-28	['None']
-snes-05844	One year of human time is the equivalent of seven years in a dog's age.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dog-and-human-years/	None	Critter Country	None	David Mikkelson	None	Dog Years vs. Human Years	8 May 2002	None	['None']
-pomt-07992	Says Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is hypocritical for challenging the constitutionality of the new health care law.	false	/ohio/statements/2011/jan/17/ohio-alliance-retired-americans/attack-dewines-health-reform-position-voluntarily-/	Wasting no time, new Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine made good on his campaign pledge to challenge the 2010 federal health care law as unconstitutional. DeWine, a Republican, notified Florida Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi on Jan. 10 that he would join 20 other states that have already signed on to try to invalidate the Affordable Care Act in U.S. District Court in Florida. The gist of the lawsuit, as DeWine explained in a news release: "The federal government simply does not have the right to force someone to buy a product -- be it health insurance or any other type of goods or services that an individual may or may not want -- or face a penalty." Under the Affordable Care Act, that requirement to buy health insurance would begin in 2014. Critics pounced, their reactions as predictable as DeWine’s. But one group in particular, the labor union-affiliated Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans, drew our attention when it said in a news release that DeWine’s first act as state attorney general was "at odds" with his actions as a U.S. senator. When we called to learn more about this claim, Norman Wernet, field organizer for the group, told us that DeWine was being "not only a little illogical but also hypocritical." That’s because as a senator, DeWine in 2003 supported a bill that added prescription drug coverage to Medicare, the federal government’s health program for seniors. Seniors would have to buy this coverage to participate, starting in 2006, and the law had a penalty for not buying drug coverage when eligible, said the alliance. It was a "mandate" no different from the new one requiring all Americans to get health insurance or face a fine, according to the alliance’s news release and our interview with Wernet. "It appears that what was constitutional to Senator DeWine in 2003 is no longer so," said the news release, going on to criticize the Medicare prescription drug law for additional reasons only tangentially related to the claim of constitutional hypocrisy. "This pang of conscience seems to us to be more political theatrics than sound use of Ohio’s time and money." We are not going to debate whether either of these laws is good or bad or whom they benefit. And far be it from us to argue the hotly debated question of whether the mandate to buy health care insurance or face penalties flies in the face of the Constitution. Federal courts will settle that. Instead, we have a more basic question to settle, because the alliance’s claim was news to us. We did not know that the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law had a mandate: Buy drug coverage (it is known as Medicare Part D) or else be penalized. As it turns out, neither did the groups with whom we checked. It needs to be noted that these sources, including the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which analyzes health policy, do not wish to engage in political debate. They have no beef with DeWine or the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans. But they referred us to their analyses, and to fact sheets from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, that described the Medicare prescription drug coverage as voluntary. That word -- voluntary -- shows up repeatedly. We read the 2003 bill itself, too, which could not say it more clearly, because the section establishing the drug program has this title: ‘‘PART D—VOLUNTARY PRESCRIPTION DRUG BENEFIT PROGRAM." We read the description of the program published by the pharmacy school of the University of California at San Francisco, which said: "It is voluntary." Finally, we asked CMS directly: Is enrollment mandatory or voluntary? CMS spokesman Tony Salters said, "Voluntary is correct." With so many people and publications saying the program is voluntary, how then, could the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans see it so differently? As Wernet explains his group’s take, everyone who is 65 or over and retired must either get into a Medicare Part D plan or have similar drug coverage, such as from the Department of Veterans Affairs or through a retiree health plan. Otherwise, they must pay a penalty when joining later. That penalty amounts to 1 percent of the cost of a drug policy for each month the enrollee has delayed since he or she was eligible, and it is added to the monthly premium the senior will pay. Yes, we asked, but can’t a retiree delay enrolling indefinitely and therefore never face a fine? What about wealthy seniors who don’t care about reducing their prescription costs (seniors with low incomes may qualify for subsidies to pay for Part D coverage), or healthy seniors who don’t have high drug costs or need a prescription policies? What about independent-minded people who just don’t want any part of this government-created health care system? Here is where the interpretations of "voluntary" diverge. Wernet said that eventually, the need for prescriptions and the financial pinch of paying for them catches up with people. So in reality, just about everyone winds up with some kind of coverage. Yet those who don’t sign up quickly, perhaps trying to "game" the system by waiting (and saving on premiums), get hit with the penalty. It is the same principle as in the new health care law, he said: You can try to avoid getting health care coverage until you get sick and decide you need it, but you’re going to pay a penalty. One penalty -- written in the 2010 health insurance law -- will kick in quickly once that provision takes effect, while other -- from the 2003 Medicare prescription law -- kicks in when seniors finally decide to enroll. The timing is different but the principle, he said, is the same. "To us, it seems to be a distinction without a difference," Wernet said. "What Congress said in 2003 is no different than what Congress said in 2010: You can’t game the system." We see a significant difference, however. The 2003 law that DeWine backed did not have a mandate. If you want to roll the dice when you retire, Congress said you certainly may. You’ll pay a penalty for delaying if you change your mind, but you are free not to change your mind. You have that choice -- and about 4.7 million people, or 10 percent of Medicare beneficiaries, have made that choice, according to CMS figures cited by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Not a one of them is paying a fine. In other words, DeWine is not being hypocritical in challenging the 2010 health insurance mandate, because when he voted in 2003 for the prescription insurance program, he was not supporting a mandate. That’s why we rate the Alliance for Retired Americans’ claim False.	None	Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans	None	None	None	2011-01-17T06:00:00	2011-01-10	['None']
-pomt-10786	"This (SCHIP) is socialized medicine. It is going to go to families that make $60,000 a year. Those aren't poor children."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/oct/15/duncan-hunter/hunter-schip-estimate-on-target/	Hunter contends that the bipartisan legislation to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program, vetoed by President Bush on Oct. 3, 2007, is socialized medicine and would allow families earning $60,000 a year to enroll. The socialized part is a bit of overstatement that we won't bother with here. But Hunter is correct—under certain circumstances—about the $60,000 figure. The legislation that would expand the SCHIP program, which sends federal money to states to cover health insurance for children in low-income households, would cover families with incomes up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line. For a single parent with two children, that would be $51,510 a year. For a family of four it would be $61,950. And, it is possible that families making more money could be covered. In Title 1 Section 114, the SCHIP legislation says states could, if they meet new requirements, be allowed to expand eligibility higher than 300 percent of the federal poverty line. But to do that, states would have to show that they are covering a "target" percentage of children with family incomes below 200 percent before they could go beyond that group.	None	Duncan Hunter	None	None	None	2007-10-15T00:00:00	2007-08-05	['None']
-pomt-10342	"I have a perfect voting record from organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and all the other veterans service organizations."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jul/17/john-mccain/not-perfect-with-all-the-veterans/	Sen. John McCain isn't used to criticism about his support for veterans. After all, he spent five years in a Vietnamese prison camp and has staked his presidential campaign on a pledge to carry on the Iraq war. But of late, McCain has taken heat from antiwar veterans groups such as VoteVets.org for hedging his support for legislation to expand federal funding to help veterans go to college and then for failing to show up for the Senate vote on a supplemental war spending bill that secured passage of the expanded GI Bill benefits last month. So when a man confronted McCain during a July 7, 2008, town hall meeting — accusing the Arizona senator of speaking out against the GI bill — McCain got testy. McCain responded that he hadn't opposed the enhanced educational benefits in the GI bill but wanted to ensure that they didn't stand in the way of the military securing re-enlistments. He said he and his allies successfully lobbied the bill's chief sponsor, Jim Webb of Virginia, to include a provision allowing a soldier who wanted to continue his military service to give his educational benefits to a family member. All that was true. But then McCain took it too far. "The reason why I have a perfect voting record from organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and all the other veterans service organizations is because of my support of them," he said. To be sure, the VFW and the Legion have given McCain awards in the past and can be fairly described as McCain supporters. The VFW's political action committee has endorsed him for re-election to his Senate seat and to his House seat before that, but neither group keeps a voting scorecard. At the same time, another veterans service organization cited by the McCain critic at the town hall meeting — the Disabled American Veterans — gave McCain only a 20 percent grade in its 2007 voting scorecard. McCain voted for only one of the amendments that the group tallied as key votes, while voting against the other four. Likewise, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a relatively new group that was instrumental in pushing for the expanded GI Bill, says McCain only voted veterans' way on 58 percent of the 155 Senate votes it tallied between 2001 and 2006. Even the Vietnam Veterans of America reports that McCain has voted against 15 of 31 priority bills it tracked between 2001 and 2008. As a result, we find McCain's claim to be False.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-07-17T00:00:00	2008-07-07	['None']
-pomt-14018	Florida has "issued more than 3 million conceal carry permits in the past 30 years. Only 168 have been revoked."	half-true	/florida/statements/2016/jun/02/donald-trump/donald-trump-minimizes-number-revoked-gun-permits-/	Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton continued their battle over gun rights following his recent endorsement by the National Rifle Association. Trump told the NRA that Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment (she doesn’t) while Clinton said that Trump wants to allow guns in schools (he has promised to get rid of gun-free zones). But Trump says Clinton’s positions are misguided because gun permit holders follow the law — and that includes Florida, where he says only a tiny speck have lost the right to a gun permit. "These are among the most law-abiding folks statistically in the entire country," Trump said. "In Florida, for example, they have issued more than 3 million conceal carry permits in the past 30 years. Only 168 have been revoked. That's 0.006 percent." Trump’s statement isn’t exactly right because he is only citing a certain category of revocations. A Trump spokeswoman didn’t respond for this fact-check. Number of Florida revocations Florida’s concealed weapon permit program started in 1987. Florida is a "shall issue" state, which means it's easier to get a gun permit here than in some other states, and Florida also grants permits to out-of-state residents. As Trump said, 3 million permits had been issued in Florida over the last three decades -- 3.1 million, to be more exact. As of April, about 1.6 million people in Florida currently have the permits. But Trump got his facts wrong about revocations, because he only cited a slice of them. Between October 1987 and April 2016, Florida revoked 10,841 concealed weapon or firearm license permits, according to a summary provided by the state’s division of licensing within the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The 168 figure that Trump cited is the number of those revoked for misuse of a firearm. There are various reasons that someone can have his or her gun permit revoked, according to state law. That includes permit holders who are convicted of certain crimes including felonies, those convicted of disorderly intoxication three times in a year, those committed to a mental institution, or those who due to physical problems can no longer safely use a gun. In 2011, the state stopped providing a breakdown for the reasons that permits have been revoked and by law now only track the number of revocations. What experts say about the revocations Revocation data alone doesn’t tell the full story about whether nearly all gun permit holders are law-abiding. In 2006, the state Legislature made the names of gun permit holders private, making it difficult for the public or journalists to examine whether there are questionable permit holders. That means we found little research about the topic in Florida, and much of it outdated. A Sun Sentinel investigation of those licensed to carry guns in the first half of 2006 found that permit holders included: More than 1,400 people who pleaded guilty or no contest to felonies but qualified because of a loophole in the law that allows them to carry guns three years after they complete their sentences if a judge withheld adjudication; 216 people with outstanding warrants, including a Tampa pizza delivery man wanted in the fatal shooting of a teenager over a stolen order of chicken wings; 28 people with active domestic-violence injunctions against them; and, Six registered sex offenders. The low number of revocations isn’t a surprise because the applicants had to meet criteria to get the permit in the first place, some experts said. "Revocations are relatively rare largely because the permit-holder population was already ‘pre-selected’ to be relatively law-abiding by virtue of the requirement that applicants pass a background check to get a permit in the first place," said Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University. Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy & Research, said that, as a group, concealed-carry permit holders have a below average rate of arrests and convictions. "But the policy question is are Florida and the other states who have made it so easy for nearly anyone to legally carry a loaded gun in public safer as a result? The research indicates that they are not," Webster said. "The best-case scenario is that these laws don’t affect violent crime, but the most rigorous research on the subject indicates that when states expand concealed carry of firearms, assaults with guns increase." Our ruling Trump said Florida has "issued more than 3 million conceal carry permits in the past 30 years. Only 168 have been revoked." Trump cited the number of permits issued since 1987 but exaggerated how few had been revoked. Florida revoked 10,841 permits, including 168 for misuse of a firearm. We don’t know the full picture about who has a gun permit -- or had it revoked -- because the identities of permit holders in Florida are private. We rate this claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/b3c0c6f4-ce79-49f2-bba0-8002483e163e	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-06-02T12:00:00	2016-05-20	['None']
-hoer-00347	Love Desire Facebook Group 'Virus' Warning	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/love-desire-facebook-warning.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Love Desire Facebook Group 'Virus' Warning	January 22, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-12086	Says Adam Sandler said "Mormons are some of the most decent people I’ve ever come across."	false	/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/29/blog-posting/fake-news-sites-say-celebrities-praise-mormons-quo/	A laundry list of fake news sites have posted a story claiming Adam Sandler praised Mormons in a podcast, but there’s no evidence the actor ever made the statements. The post, which we first saw on WRPM33.com on Aug. 23, 2017, ran under the headline, "What Adam Sandler is saying about Mormons." Facebook users flagged this post and several others on different websites as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to fight fake news. It’s nothing bad: The post actually says he found them to be exceptionally nice people. It’s just that we can’t find any evidence that Sandler actually said any of it. The post said Sandler was on an unnamed podcast when the atheist host began to disparage religion in general and Mormons in particular. Sandler, who grew up in a Jewish family, spoke up to defend the faith. "I don’t know, Tom. I don’t think I’ve ever had a reason to say anything negative about Mormons. I mean, I know you’re just having some fun here but — from my experience — Mormons are some of the most decent people I’ve ever come across," the story attributed to Sandler. He said more in the post, but they aren’t real quotes. Apart from there being a parody out there of his Hanukkah Song adapted for Mormons, we really couldn’t find him making much of any comment about Mormons at all. But that’s because WRPM33.com and scads of other sites are posting a made-up story. "Most of the articles on wrpm33.com are works of fantasy or satire and are not true," the site’s disclaimer said. The sites use domain names that sound like official media outlets, but don’t contain any apparent contact information. These are the same kinds of websites responsible for other stories we’ve looked at that claim celebrities have said or done things they haven’t. One popular story said that a celebrity made nice comments about the residents of a town after car trouble. Another post claimed that a celebrity enjoyed a town so much, they are moving there. In both cases, the name of the town and celebrity can change, with the bulk of the story staying the same. There’s even another subset of links telling readers that a Star Wars movie will be filming near their city. The object is clearly to get residents of the town named to click on the link, to earn advertising revenue for the (unidentified) owners of the site. We’ve already seen another version of this story that attributed the same quotes to Matthew McConaughey. More are sure to come. Be aware that links you see about celebrity news may be fabricated, especially if they mention a smaller location. It’s a friendly sentiment, but Sandler didn’t say these things. We rate this statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2017-08-29T14:00:00	2017-08-23	['None']
-para-00222	Says "Australia is 62nd in the world for number of refugees per capita."	mostly false	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/16/getup/cruel-australia-get-speed-right-numbers/index.html	None	['Asylum Seekers', 'Refugees']	GetUp!	Jonathan Pearlman, Peter Fray	None	Cruel Australia? Get up to speed on the numbers	Friday, August 16, 2013 at 1:51 p.m.	None	['None']
-faan-00090	 “Since coming to office … this government has enhanced veterans’ services and programs to the tune of some $5 billion.”	factscan score: misleading	http://factscan.ca/stephen-harper-since-coming-to-office-this-government-has-enhanced-veterans-services-and-programs-to-the-tune-of-some-5-billion/	Government figures show a budget increase of $4.7 billion in Veterans Affairs spending between 2006 and 2014. Looking at actual spending plus cuts affecting service, the $5 billion figure is misleading.	None	Stephen Harper	None	None	None	2015-05-14	uary 28, 2015	['None']
-pomt-10195	McCain "voted to cut education funding, against accountability standards. He even proposed abolishing the Department of Education."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/17/barack-obama/cherry-picking-the-record/	It's been nearly 50 years since a sitting senator, John F. Kennedy, has won the presidency, and Barack Obama's recent TV ad assailing John McCain's education record is a good example why. Senators, especially those with long tenures like McCain, have to take a lot of votes and state a lot of positions, all of which can later be used against them – even if the bulk of the senator's record points to a different conclusion than the attacker's. That's certainly the case with Obama's ad, which claims, among other things, that McCain "voted to cut education funding, against accountability standards. He even proposed abolishing the Department of Education." In each case, there's an example or two bolstering Obama's claims, but there are other examples in McCain's nearly 22 years in the Senate, more telling, that show that McCain generally supports increased funding for education, stronger accountability standards and a more powerful Education Department. On the first point, the Obama campaign cites a number of examples where McCain didn't support large increases in education funding backed by Democrats, but only one case in which McCain actually "voted to cut education funding," as the ad alleges. It came in 1995, when McCain voted for a Republican budget resolution calling for a 1 percent cut in the education budget. In the end, the Education Department's budget was cut slightly that year — in the midst of the budget wars pitting then-President Clinton against the new Republican majority in Congress. But the education budget quickly rebounded and McCain in 2001 voted for the law known as the No Child Left Behind Act, which increased federal education funding by a whopping 33 percent, or $14-billion, in a single year. The McCain campaign in response to the ad's allegations noted a number of other occasions in which McCain has supported increased education funding. It's true that Democrats have supported large funding increases beyond what Republicans have backed, but the Education Department budget today is still 60 percent higher than when Bush took office, increases that have largely enjoyed McCain's backing. Obama again cherry picks the record to make a case that McCain opposes accountability standards. The Obama campaign cites a number of pre-No Child Left Behind votes in which McCain didn't support Democratic efforts to require states to establish accountability standards as a condition of federal funding. Many Republicans long opposed such conditions as a federal imposition on what is traditionally a state responsibility: education. It wasn't accountability standards that they opposed, rather federal intrusion into state responsibilities. Even so, when Bush proposed just that idea in 2001, Republicans, including McCain, voted to create the most rigorous education accountability standards ever imposed by the federal government on the states through the No Child Left Behind Act. Given the McCain campaign's pledge to fully fund the No Child Left Behind Act, and in that way endorse the expanded federal role in education that law calls for, it seems unlikely McCain has any intention of abolishing the Department of Education should he be elected. But for what it's worth, he did way back in 1994, when he said on CNN's Late Edition that "given the origins of the Department of Education, I would favor doing away with it." There's evidence, then, for each of Obama's charges, but entirely absent is the larger context. Obama is citing exceptions in the McCain record rather than the rule, and claims — erroneously — that failing to support the large increases in education funding backed by Democrats is the same as supporting cuts. As a result, we find the Obama campaign ad's claims to be Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-09-17T00:00:00	2008-09-09	['None']
-snes-04741	Angry Bernie Sanders supporters threw chairs during an adversarial Nevada Democrat convention in May 2016.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-sanders-supporters-throw-chairs-at-nevada-democratic-convention/	None	Ballot Box	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Sanders Supporters Throw Chairs at Nevada Democratic Convention?	19 May 2016	None	['Bernie_Sanders', 'Nevada']
-pomt-03332	"The FL Guard has defended our freedom in Afghanistan, Iraq, and put their lives at risk; now the fed govt is going to cut their pay 20%."	half-true	/florida/statements/2013/jul/23/rick-scott/florida-national-guard-members-fought-overseas-now/	We’ll start with this fact: Gov. Rick Scott hearts the Florida National Guard. But as Scott lambasts the impact of federal budget cuts on the Guard, is he telling the truth? "The FL Guard has defended our freedom in Afghanistan, Iraq, and put their lives at risk; now the fed govt is going to cut their pay 20%" Scott said on Twitter July 16. Those are some fighting words about the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration. Are Florida Guard members who fought overseas now getting their pay slashed by 20 percent? Scott’s office directed us to the Florida National Guard for answers. We will draw from information from the Guard and U.S. Defense Department, as well as our previous fact-check stemming from a feud between Scott, a Republican, and Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, about the impact of sequestration on the Florida National Guard during a hurricane. Who exactly is getting furloughed The pay cut Scott mentioned refers to 11 furlough days for some members of the National Guard between July and September. That translates to a 20 percent cut in take-home pay during that time period -- not the entire year, said Lt. Col. James Evans, a Florida National Guard spokesman. About 966 employees in Florida face furloughs. (The precise number changes frequently due to new hires and those leaving the workforce.) The vast majority -- more than 900 -- are uniformed military technicians, also known as dual-status military technicians. The Miami Herald recently reported on their specific duties: "They are Guard members known as technicians, who draw their wages from federal funds in a range of jobs — from mechanics who maintain armored vehicles to public affairs specialists who write articles. While most Guard members are part-timers when not deployed, the nearly 1,000 so-called technicians are full-time federal civil service employees. Most work in northeastern Florida." Evans described the technicians as "the uniformed day-to-day backbone of our full-time force" and pointed out they are the only "troops in the Department of Defense that are NOT exempt from furlough under Sequestration." The Florida National Guard has 12,000 members. About 10,000 are those who train one weekend a month plus two weeks a year and hold outside jobs. These Guard members are not federal employees and don’t face furloughs, Evans said. Of the remaining 2,000 who work for the Guard year round, half are active guard and reserves -- such as those who patrol the airfield at Homestead in South Florida -- and don’t face furloughs. The other half include the military technicians and civilians who are paid from an account subject to furloughs. So we could say that about 8 percent of the Florida National Guard (966 of 12,000) face furloughs or, like Scott, we could say half of the state’s full-time force face furloughs. "If their unit goes to war, they go to war with them. They are a military member," Florida Guard legislative director Lt. Col. (Ret.) Glenn Sutphin told PolitiFact Florida. So how many of the furloughed guard members have fought in Iraq or Afghanistan? Of the employees taking furloughs, about 40 percent, or 385, have deployed since Sept. 11, Evans said. That includes 57 uniformed military technicians currently deployed around the world. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, more than 700 uniformed military technicians in Florida have been deployed, he said, many of them multiple times. Of the 18 Florida guard members who have died supporting an overseas federal mission, two were technicians on active duty orders. Our ruling Scott said "The FL Guard has defended our freedom in Afghanistan, Iraq, and put their lives at risk; now the fed govt is going to cut their pay 20%." Scott’s statement isn’t telling the whole story. A reader could falsely assume the entire Florida Guard is furloughed. But the furloughs only affect about 8 percent of the overall Florida National Guard, or about half of the full-time force. Also, the 20 percent pay cut is not annual or permanent; they are losing that amount for one-third of the year. Additionally, not every furloughed civilian employee has served in Afghanistan or Iraq. Among the 966 guard members being furloughed, about 40 percent have been deployed. Scott’s claim contains some elements of truth: Many Guard members have risked their lives in overseas deployments and now some face pay cuts for part of the year. But the details that Scott omitted are important for understanding the full effect of the furloughs. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2013-07-23T13:54:27	2013-07-16	['Afghanistan', 'Iraq']
-snes-05039	An "alien mummy" was recently unearthed in a pyramid, and scientists cannot explain its origins.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alien-mummy-baffles-scientists/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Alien Mummy Found, Scientists Baffled	21 March 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-03372	"There was a Gallup poll in Egypt last year, and 70 percent of Egyptians don't want our money."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/11/rand-paul/rand-paul-says-gallup-poll-found-70-percent-egypti/	The Egyptian military’s ouster of President Mohammed Morsi amid major anti-government protests has prompted some American politicians to urge the U.S. to hold back some or all of the roughly $1.5 billion in aid it gives annually to Egypt. Those who support an aid cutoff argue that despite the popular uprising, the military’s removal of a democratically elected leader undermines democracy, requiring a negative response from the U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., went a step further, arguing that Egyptians don’t even want the aid we give their country in the first place. (Paul is a longtime critic of foreign aid in general.) In a Fox News interview on July 8, 2013, host Eric Bolling asked Paul why President Barack Obama hadn’t called the ouster a "coup." Paul responded, "You know, I think they are confused on this. They, like so many supporters of foreign aid, think that that's how we buy friendship around the world, that's how we influence people. But the interesting thing is, there was a Gallup poll in Egypt last year, and 70 percent of Egyptians don't want our money. So, they burn our flag, they don't want our money and we say, ‘Oh, here, you must take it, or we want you to behave and act like Americans.’ But there isn't a whole lot of real democracy going on over there." We wondered whether Paul was right about the high level of public opposition to U.S. assistance in Egypt. The answer is that Paul is right. In fact, the opposition to aid is even more widespread among Egyptians than he had indicated. In a February 2012 poll, Gallup asked Egyptians, "Do you favor or oppose the U.S. sending economic aid to Egypt?" Gallup pollsters found that 82 percent opposed such aid. That was the highest level of opposition recorded in six Gallup polls between April 2011 and February 2012. Even the lowest level of opposition found in these polls -- 52 percent in April 2011 -- meant that a majority opposed U.S. aid. So it’s a stance that seems pretty widespread in Egypt in recent years. In a September 2012 analysis of its survey results, Gallup wrote that "Egyptians may resent U.S. aid for the same reason some members of Congress are calling it into question -- it is seen as a tool of U.S. influence with Egypt's government." The attitudes Gallup found are mirrored in Pew poll data from spring 2013. Pew asked Egyptians, "Overall, would you say U.S. economic aid to Egypt is having a mostly positive impact, a mostly negative impact, or no impact on the way things are going in Egypt?" Overall, 24 percent of respondents said "mostly positive," 55 percent said "mostly negative" and 18 percent said "no impact." When the wording of the question was varied to say "military" aid rather than "economic" aid, attitudes turned even more negative. Ten percent of respondents said "mostly positive," 58 percent said "mostly negative" and 28 percent said "no impact." These findings rang true with experts we contacted. "There is no doubt that there are large numbers of Egyptians who don’t want our aid," said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. While Paul’s claim is accurate, there’s one thing worth noting. The polls Gallup (and Pew) conducted did not use the familiar telephone-based random sampling technique most commonly seen in the United States. The Gallup poll used face-to-face interviews conducted in Arabic with 1,000 adults age 15 and older. Gallup has explained that face-to-face surveys are "normally conducted … by dividing a given population into blocks of roughly equal population density. Each block is further divided into blocks until a single household is chosen at random, and then a single respondent is randomly chosen from the household." The use of this methodology doesn’t mean such polls aren’t trustworthy -- if U.S.-style telephone methods had been workable in Egypt, Gallup could have used them -- but the approach is so different that we think it’s a point worth noting. According to Gallup, the margin of sampling error for the April 2012 survey was 3 percentage points, though the company also acknowledges that "question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls." Pew, for its part, makes clear that security concerns for pollsters made it impossible to include about 2 percent of the population that lives in "frontier" regions. Our ruling Paul said, "There was a Gallup poll in Egypt last year, and 70 percent of Egyptians don't want our money." That actually understates what Gallup found. One of the firm’s polls from April 2012 found that 82 percent of Egyptians opposed such aid. Other polls and regional experts confirm the existence of such levels of opposition. We rate the claim True.	None	Rand Paul	None	None	None	2013-07-11T10:55:01	2013-07-08	['Egypt', 'Gallup_(company)']
-goop-02218	Kylie Jenner “Emotional Wreck” Over Pregnancy?	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/kylie-jenner-emotional-wreck-pregnancy/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kylie Jenner “Emotional Wreck” Over Pregnancy?	12:35 pm, November 11, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-11939	"One in 10 babies born in this country is born in Texas."	true	/texas/statements/2017/oct/12/joyce-mauk/fort-worth-pediatrician-says-1-10-us-born-babies-b/	A Fort Worth pediatrician who supports continued federal backing of health insurance for children of the working poor suggested it’s an important issue in these parts because 10 percent of Americans start as Texans. In October 2017, Joyce Mauk, president of the Texas Pediatric Society, was quoted by the Austin American-Statesman as saying: "One in 10 babies born in this country is born in Texas, and so it affects us disproportionately if access to health care is compromised for children. There is nothing good you can say about taking away access to health care for children." At the time, Congress had failed to extend its authorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program before federal funding expired at the end of September. Without further action, about 400,000 Texas children and pregnant women were believed to be at risk of losing coverage by early 2018. We wondered about the share of U.S.-born babies birthed in Texas. By phone, Mauk told us she relied on statistics compiled from U.S. states by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that 403,618 Texas births accounted for 10 percent of 3,980,000 births nationally in 2015. We were shortly able to confirm that number, thanks to a January 2017 CDC report tabulating U.S. births. It showed 403,618 Texas births in 2015 made up 10.1 percent of 3,978,497 births nationally. Among the states, the chart shows, only California accounted for a greater share; 491,478 births there accounted for 12.4 percent of U.S. births. Next, we asked the CDC and the Texas Demographic Center, based at the University of Texas at San Antonio, about more recent data and figures giving historical perspective. By email, CDC spokesman Brian Tsai pointed us to bureau-posted 2016 birth counts by state, posted in September 2017, showing that the 406,945 births in Texas that year accounted for 10.3 percent of 3,956,112 births nationally. So, the 1-in-10 figure still holds up. In Texas, to our emailed queries, Lila Valencia of the demographic center provided a chart showing that Texas-born babies have comprised 1 in 10 U.S. births since 2008. From 1960 through 1971, the chart indicates, Texas-born babies made up 6 percent of U.S.-born babies. That share, the chart shows, was 7 percent from 1972 through 1979; 8 percent from 1980 through 1995; and 9 percent from 1996 through 2007. Of late, Valencia elaborated, "the Texas share of births has been steadily increasing, even following drops in the number of births following the Great Recession," Valencia wrote, adding: "If current total fertility rates and the child-bearing age distribution of women in each state remains the same, we would anticipate the Texas share of births to continue to increase given the younger age distribution of the state, its larger Hispanic share of the population, and its significant population growth relative to other states." Our ruling Mauk said 1 in 10 U.S.-born babies is born in Texas. According to government tallies, that’s been so since 2008. We rate this claim True. TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Joyce Mauk	None	None	None	2017-10-12T11:00:00	2017-10-03	['Texas']
-snes-00972	Marjory Stoneman Douglas encouraged activists to "be a nuisance" and to "never give up" even if discouraged by bad politics.	correct attribution	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marjory-stoneman-douglas-quote-on-activism/	None	Questionable Quotes	None	Dan Evon	None	Marjory Stoneman Douglas Quote About Activism?	23 February 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-09512	"My opponent... lost 43,000 jobs in Houston since he took over; we are losing jobs."	false	/texas/statements/2010/feb/18/farouk-shami/shami-said-houston-lost-43000-jobs-while-white-was/	Farouk Shami, the Houston businessman running for governor, has guaranteed a job to every working-age Texan if he's elected. He even said he'd pay the state, ahem, $10 million if he hasn't created 100,000 jobs during his first two years in office. Former Houston mayor Bill White, running against Shami, also trumpets his job record. But Shami suggests that voters can't expect as much from his opponent, arguing that Houston lost jobs during the White administration. "My capability and my experience is to create jobs, unlike my opponent, who... lost 43,000 in Houston since he took over," Shami said during the Feb. 8 Democratic primary debate. "We are losing jobs." Indeed? We decided to check the facts. Kelly Johnson, Shami's former communications director (she resigned with four other campaign staffers Feb. 17), said he was citing the change in the number of unemployed people in Harris County from January 2004, when White was sworn in as mayor, to December 2009, White's last month in office. Johnson said they used county data, which is not seasonally adjusted, because the Texas Workforce Commission's available numbers for the city didn't date to the beginning of White's tenure. Using the same data, we calculated that after six years, 42,325 more people were unemployed in Harris County than when White took office. But that doesn't mean Houston lost 42,325 jobs. Cheryl Abbot, a regional economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, advised us that unemployment data is used to track how many people are out of work, but it's not the right way to determine how many jobs have been gained or lost. Because a working person can have more than one job — and can lose a job but remain partially employed — the number of workers does not equal the number of jobs. To gauge how many actual jobs are on the books, Abbot directed us to nonfarm wage and salary employment numbers. The Texas Workforce Commission doesn't track that data by county, but by metropolitan area. We found that the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown area gained 278,700 jobs between the month White took office and December 2009, when he left. Johnson said Shami's campaign didn't use the raw number of nonfarm jobs gained or lost because that approach doesn't take into account population growth over time. Houston's population surged by nearly 288,600 between 2000 and 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — and some of those folks did not have jobs. "The population massively grew when White was mayor, so it's far more accurate to look (at) an unemployment rate (or the) number of people unemployed from when he took office to when he left," she said. So let's take another look at the number of Harris County residents recorded as unemployed while White was mayor. The county's annual unemployment rate dropped from 6.8 percent in 2003 to 4.8 in 2008. The 2009 rate isn't available yet, but some 107,403 people were unemployed in December 2008 — when the national economy was reeling. By December 2009, the ranks of the unemployed had grown in Harris County with 164,717 people out of work. We also found that 137,179 more people were employed in Harris County from the time White took office to when he left. The upshot? Shami erred in a couple ways. First, he distorted unemployment in the Houston area. It's true that the raw number of unemployed people increased by more than 42,000 (not 43,000, as Shami claimed) while White was mayor. But the number of unemployed people doesn't translate to the number of jobs lost in Houston. Second, Shami chose not to factor in the share of Harris County residents who were employed, which increased during White's tenure. We rate his claim as False.	None	Farouk Shami	None	None	None	2010-02-18T17:17:31	2010-02-08	['Houston']
-pomt-14728	Wisconsin "is on pace to double the number of layoffs" this year.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2015/dec/21/katrina-shankland/numbers-cited-katrina-shankland-layoffs-dont-tell-/	Days after Heinz Kraft announced plans to close the Oscar Mayer plant in Madison, an expected loss of about 1,000 jobs, state Assembly Democrats held a news conference to argue lawmakers should focus on job creation. The news conference came before a session of the state Assembly called by majority Republicans to consider election and campaign finance issues. Democrats said the focus, given the bad news from Oscar Mayer and several other major employers, should be on the economy and jobs. "We are on pace to double layoffs since 2014," declared Assistant Minority Leader Katrina Shankland (D-Stevens Point.) "This is the governor's worst year of his administration in terms of layoffs," she continued. "We're well over 10,000 layoffs and the people of Wisconsin are crying out for action." When we asked Shankland’s office for backup, an aide said Shankland was using state Department of Workforce Development data on notices of plant closings and mass layoffs. Shankland aide Annika Petty noted the "list does not yet include the layoffs announced in early November by Oscar Mayer." Unpacking the numbers For 2014, the state received layoff warning notices that covered 7,239 jobs. As of Nov. 2, 2015, the tally for this year was 11,057. So if you add in the Oscar Mayer layoff,that would bring it to about 12,050. That’s not quite double, but two months of data remained at the time Shankland made her claim and the numbers from earlier months suggest her claim is generally on target. But the layoff number are nowhere near as solid as Shankland suggests. Here is how the system works: In Wisconsin, businesses are required to file warning notices with the state when they anticipate ending employment for more than 50 workers. Wisconsin’s law is more strict than federal law, which sets the threshold at more than 100 workers. But some layoffs never trigger a notice, because they don’t reach the 50 person threshold. And the notices don’t always mean lost jobs. When a company changes hands, the old firm is required to file a notice, even if all the workers will retain their jobs with the new firm. In some cases, layoffs take place immediately. In other cases -- such as with Oscar Mayer -- the plant closing is expected months later. In still others, they never take place. So the numbers don’t represent actual layoffs. As such, experts say they are a lousy tool for assessing the state’s economy. That’s what we found when we rated a July 2015 claim from the liberal group American Bridge 21st Century, which said Wisconsin’s economy had "tanked" under Walker and "so far in 2015 over 6,685 people have been laid off, already more than in all of 2014." We rated the claim False. Shankland’s claim is somewhat different, in that she does not directly cite the number as evidence of the state’s economy tanking. But she did make it at a news conference that asserted more action is needed on jobs due to poor economic performance. Experts such as Brian Jacobsen, an economist at Wells Fargo and a professor at Wisconsin Lutheran College, say a far better indicator of the employment picture -- but one that’s not without it’s own flaws -- is the monthly jobs report. Those numbers show that as of October 2015, the state added an estimated 30,300 jobs in 2015. That includes a preliminary estimate of 15,100 private sector jobs added in October alone. The number is preliminary and subject to change. But the important point is this: Those figures are the net result of all changes, including layoffs and jobs added, not just one side of the coin. Our rating Shankland said Wisconsin "is on pace to double the number of layoffs this year." She cited layoff notices received by the state. But those aren’t actual layoffs. And while she’s about right on the number of notices received, she’s wrong to suggest that the employment numbers are headed downward this year. In the time frame she cited the state’s added about 30,300 jobs. We rate the claim False.	None	Katrina Shankland	None	None	None	2015-12-21T05:00:00	2015-11-16	['None']
-pomt-12757	Says "Donald Trump wants to eliminate overtime pay for people."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/26/thomas-perez/new-dnc-chair-tom-perez-says-donald-trump-wants-cu/	On his first full day as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, former Labor Department secretary Thomas Perez said the Democratic Party needs to win back American workers who turned to Republicans in the 2016 election. On the Feb. 26 edition of NBC’S Meet the Press, Perez said Democrats fell short by spending too much time bashing President Donald Trump and not enough time talking about a progressive economic message. "We stand for good wages. We stand for Social Security. We stand for retirement security. We brought this nation Medicare," Perez said of Democrats. "The Republicans are trying to voucherize Medicare and privatize Social Security." Then he said something we hadn’t heard before: "Donald Trump wants to eliminate overtime pay for people." While Trump has said he will not cut Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare, other Republicans have laid out plans for restructuring the programs. We wanted to look into the last part of Perez’s comment — is Trump really planning to deliver a KO to OT? To back up his claim, Perez’s team sent clips from three news articles and a memo from Trump’s campaign. However, none of these sources show Trump wants to "eliminate overtime pay," the money earned for working more than a specified number of hours a week. What Trump has said While Trump has not talked about eliminating overtime pay, he has supported rolling back an Obama-era regulation that would expand the number of people eligible for overtime. In an August 2016 interview with the online news service Circa, Trump was asked if there’s any new regulations he wanted to eliminate. The interviewer asked, "What are some fresh examples of federal regulations you’d roll back if you were president? For example, the Labor Department. They have a regulation that’s going to take effect on Dec. 1. It’s going to impose overtime requirements on small business. Would that be one of them?" Trump said the rules regarding overtime were just an example of the type of business regulations he would seek to roll back as president. Trump is quoted as saying, "We have to address the issues of over-taxation and over-regulation and the lack of access to credit markets to get our small business owners thriving again. Rolling back the overtime regulation is just one example of the many regulations that need to be addressed to do that." A small business advisory council memo from the Trump-Pence campaign Oct. 17 conveyed a similar message about the burden of economic regulations. "Labor issues like minimum wage, overtime rules, and union organizing all take their toll, reads the memo. "It seems to many small business owners out here in ‘flyover land’ that the insiders in D.C. have it in for them. And they probably do." It’s not clear from his comments if Trump was referencing any particular rule or regulation, but there is one notable Obama-era rule that made waves in Republican circles in 2016. Most employees in the United States are eligible for time-and-a-half overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours a week. But there’s an exception for white-collar workers. To be considered a white-collar worker by the government, an employee has to make more than $455 per week, be paid salary, and work in an administrative, executive or professional position. People who meet these criteria do not qualify for overtime pay. In March 2014, President Barack Obama signed a presidential memorandum directing the U.S. Labor Department (then led by Perez) to update regulations related to overtime pay in the Fair Labor Standards Act. Two years later, the Obama administration finalized a rule that would shrink the number of workers affected by the "white-collar" exemption. Under Obama’s proposed rule, those workers would be eligible for overtime if they made less than $47,500 a year (up from $26,660). The Department of Labor estimated that 4.2 million workers would become eligible to earn overtime as a result of the new rule. However, many states and businesses, unhappy with the new proposal, filed an emergency motion challenging the rule. On Nov. 22, 2016, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant in Texas, sided with those states and business groups and granted their motion for a nationwide injunction. With the new regulation on hold, the Trump administration could have decided whether to continue defending the rule in court, or kill it completely. In response, the White House issued a moratorium on all proposed federal regulations that have yet to take effect. Trump’s Labor Department is without a permanent chief. Trump had nominated fast-food executive Andrew Puzder for the role, though he withdrew from consideration Feb. 15 before a doubtful confirmation vote. Trump then nominated Alexander Acosta, a law school dean at Florida International University and former Justice Department official, who is awaiting confirmation. On Meet the Press, Perez said Trump wanted to eliminate overtime pay, and also that "he nominates someone to head the Labor Department who wants to gut overtime pay." It is likely Perez was referring to Puzder, who was an open critic of Obama’s overtime rule. In a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Puzder cautioned against "rewarding time spent rather than time well spent." We could not find instances of Acosta opposing the overtime rule. The White House did not respond for comment. Our ruling Perez said Trump "wants to eliminate overtime pay for people". Perez’s statement offers a misleading view of Trump’s position on overtime. Trump’s administration has said he wants to roll back regulations — some of which would expand the number of those eligible for overtime — but that doesn’t translate to wanting to eliminate overtime completely. The regulation that would expand overtime eligibility for white-collar workers has never been enforced because of a pending court challenge. We rate this statement Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/565d0156-e575-49fa-8881-9f6e6925f73e	None	Thomas Perez	None	None	None	2017-02-26T17:15:45	2017-02-26	['None']
-snes-05128	Coca-Cola's "Share A Coke" campaign includes a bottle for the KKK.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coca-cola-kkk-trump/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Coca-Cola Isn’t Selling a ‘Share a Coke with the KKK’ Bottle	2 March 2016	None	['Coca-Cola', 'Ku_Klux_Klan']
-snes-01858	A cemetery in Delaware, Ohio, is exhuming the bodies of confederate soldiers and relocating them to a nearby dump.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/delaware-cemetery-begins-exhuming-bodies-confederate-soldiers/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Ohio Cemetery Begins Exhuming Bodies of Confederate Soldiers?	23 August 2017	None	['Ohio', 'Delaware']
-pomt-08293	"Mr. Renacci was registered as a foreign trade lobbyist in the United States government."	half-true	/ohio/statements/2010/nov/01/john-boccieri/rep-john-boccieri-portrays-challenger-jim-renacci-/	Most days, congressional candidates can’t get donations from lobbyists quickly enough. They’ll even take them from lobbyists who handle a sub-specialty: foreign trade matters. And there’s nothing improper, illegal or fattening about that, because all sides in the nation’s trade battles -- from manufacturers who want cheap raw materials to the United Steelworkers of America, which wants to protect American foundry jobs – hire Washington lobbyists to look out for their interests. So what is up, you might ask, with this criticism of an opponent by John Boccieri, a Democratic incumbent in Ohio’s 16th Congressional District? He accuses Republican challenger Jim Renacci of registering "as a foreign trade lobbyist," as if that were disgraceful. Boccieri launched a cable television ad with that charge in early October. Then on Oct. 18 during a debate with Renacci in Canton, Boccieri repeated it. It’s a fact verifiable from public records, the first-term incumbent said in answer to a question about the tone of ads, "that Mr. Renacci was registered as a foreign trade lobbyist in the United States government." To back up this claim, Boccieri’s campaign pointed to a lobbying registration form filed in May, 2008, with the clerk of the U.S. Senate, where all lobbying registrations are kept. The form was filed by a fledgling consulting firm called Smokerise International Group, formed by three people, including Renacci, a Wadworth businessman. Named for Smokerise Drive, the street on which Renacci and other partners had offices, the firm also filed business registration papers with the Ohio Secretary of State’s office the same month, public records show. The name sounded worldly, but there was nothing else international about it – and certainly not its clients. It had none. The firm never filed a single piece of paper saying it represented anyone, as would be required if it had actual clients. Renacci’s campaign spokesman, James Slepian, says two business associates wanted to form the firm and Renacci agreed to help because of his background as a CPA. The firm "never got off the ground," Slepian said in an e-mail to us, "but as a precautionary measure, one of the partners registered all three of them as lobbyists, just in case they ever took on any lobbying clients." The registration, filed by Laura Mills, an attorney who was listed as vice chairman and owner, included areas of federal policy in which the firm might lobby. They listed nine areas, including defense, aerospace, the budget,small business matters and trade Note that they didn’t say "foreign" trade, which would be redundant because trade is understood to involve the movement of goods or services between two countries. That’s it. They never filed another piece of paper because they never lobbied. You expected a smoking gun? So did we, because calling someone a "foreign trade lobbyist" sounds dastardly. Of the nine potential lobbying areas listed in the Smokerise filing, Boccieri singled out only "trade" for criticism. We agree that might have been a smart tactic on his part, because saying that his opponent "registered as a small business lobbyist" would lack zing. This, then, is the extent of the evidence on which the Boccieri campaign makes its claim. It is Boccieri’s right to cast aspersions on trade lobbyists. But we were curious about his negative feelings, because Boccieri, like many candidates, has accepted campaign donations from lobbyists, according to our review of data from CQ Money Line and the Center for Responsive Politics, which are services that track fund-raising. We looked up some of these donor-lobbyists’ filings in the Senate and found that some have lobbied on trade matters. Or to use Boccieri’s own words: Boccieri even takes money from "foreign trade lobbyists." Not that there’s anything wrong with that. So yes, Renacci is registered as a lobbyist, and his fledgling firm said on its registration form that it intended to lobby on trade. But it ended up not lobbying at all, and had that not been the case, it also might have lobbied on all manner of benign-sounding matters, not a one of which Boccieri singled as horrific. Boccieri’s "foreign trade lobbyist" claim is not false because it contains elements of truth. But it leaves out context and detail, intentionally creating a menacing picture of Renacci’s activities. The claim’s accuracy is overshadowed by those details, and so the Truth-O-Meter considers it Half True.	None	John Boccieri	None	None	None	2010-11-01T14:30:00	2010-10-18	['United_States']
-pomt-05213	"More Hispanics have fallen into poverty under Obama."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/08/mitt-romney/romney-ad-says-more-hispanics-are-poverty-obama-to/	In a new Web ad, the Romney campaign questions how Hispanics in the U.S. have fared under President Barack Obama. The ad, titled "Dismal," flashes shadowy faces of Latinos along with text citing rising unemployment and poverty rates in that minority group. The statistics are bookended by clips from Obama’s own Spanish-language ads that say the country is moving in the right direction. "Really?" the ad asks. We decided to take a look at one of those statistical claims, specifically that "more Hispanics have fallen into poverty under Obama." As evidence, the ad cites U.S. Census Bureau figures, which show that poverty has been on the rise. In 2008, the census says, there were about 47.4 million Hispanics in the U.S. Almost 11 million, or 23.2 percent were impoverished. In 2009, 48.8 million Hispanics were living in the U.S., with more than 12 million in poverty. That marked a 2.1 percent increase in the poverty rate. And in 2010, it ticked up another 1.3 percent. All told, through 2010, 2.25 million more Hispanics are living in poverty than when Obama took office. So the numbers back up the point. But it's important to explore how much the Hispanic poverty rate can be blamed on Obama's policies. When rating claims such as this, PolitiFact weighs not only whether the claim is numerically correct but also whether it’s accurate to assign blame to the target of the ad. First, we should note that poverty across all groups was up in these years. The nation’s official poverty rate went from 14.3 percent in 2009 to 15.1 percent in 2010. So Hispanics weren’t alone, but they were harder hit. "Poverty increased for pretty much every demographic group in the country. There are more poor whites, blacks and Hispanics," said Madeline Zavodny, a professor of economics at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But Hispanics felt the impact more. "They are especially vulnerable to downturns. They are more likely to work in cyclical industries, like construction and manufacturing, than other demographic groups. Construction in particular was hit hard this downturn, and Hispanics bore the brunt of that," Zavodny said. Sheldon Danziger, director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, said it's off-base to pin the blame on Obama. "It’s not like anything Obama did was anti-Hispanic," Danziger said. "It’s because of the collapse of construction." Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, pointed to the original trigger for the recession: the housing bubble. When the economy was growing, largely on the expanding housing market, many Hispanics were able to buy their own homes. That tied up their wealth, which tends to be less diversified than non-Hispanics who invest more widely in stocks and 401(k) funds, Lopez said. So when the bubble burst and housing values fell, many Hispanics saw their household wealth evaporate. Gary Burtless from the centrist Brookings Institution added that the Hispanic population is younger as a whole than other groups, "and younger adults have suffered badly -- in the job market and as new homeowners who may be under water as a result of declining house prices." (As we’ve noted before, Burtless contributed $750 to Obama’s campaign in 2011. However, in 2008 he provided advice on aspects of labor policy to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and he has worked as a government economist and served on federal advisory panels under presidents of both parties.) We also talked to Leticia Miranda, senior policy adviser for the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group. She said unemployment is the single biggest driver of poverty and Hispanics are particularly vulnerable. She said that some policies have had a direct impact on Hispanics, such as the 1996 welfare reform bill, which imposed a five-year ban on use of public assistance including Medicaid, food stamps and welfare cash payments by legal immigrants. But she said Obama has made some positive strides to benefit Hispanics. Under Obama, the Department of Labor has put a greater focus on low-wage workers as well as on wage theft -- essentially workers not getting paid for their labor -- which tends to afflict immigrant workers, Miranda said. Finally, each of the experts we interviewed mentioned the economic stimulus package Obama signed in 2009 as a barrier that kept poverty from ballooning even more. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, determined that direct income assistance from the stimulus kept 2 million additional Hispanics from falling below the poverty line. Author Arloc Sherman found that 500,000 Hispanics benefitted from the temporary Making Work Pay tax credit, more than 600,000 from temporary improvements to the Earned Income Tax Credit and other tax credits for low-income working families, and more than 600,000 Latino Americans kept out of poverty through 2009 and 2010 extensions of stronger unemployment insurance championed by the president. Miranda called those "big positives for low-wage workers." Our ruling Romney’s ad correctly states that more Hispanics in the U.S. have fallen below the poverty line since Obama took office: 2.25 million more people through 2010, according to the census. But the ad’s clear message is that it’s Obama’s fault but experts say it's a much more complicated picture than that. We rate the statement Half True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-06-08T14:11:09	2012-06-05	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-04638	David Cicilline was "required to provide key information about city finances to an independent outside auditor. The deadlines were clear -- yet [he intentionally] missed them by months" until after the November 2010 election.	mostly false	/rhode-island/statements/2012/sep/14/brendan-doherty/brendan-doherty-says-incumbent-us-rep-david-cicill/	Republican Brendan Doherty wasted no time coming out of the starting gate for the general election race with Democratic U.S. Rep. David Cicilline for the 1st District seat. Less than 12 hours after Cicilline won the Sept. 11 Democratic primary, Doherty held a news conference listing Cicilline's top 10 "most serious deceptions." We decided to look at number four, which focused on the outside audit of Providence finances covering the final fiscal year when Cicilline was mayor. (We’ll be examining another item in Doherty's "top 10" separately.) We quote from Doherty's news release attacking Cicilline: "INTENTIONALLY MISSED DEADLINES: You were also required to provide key information about city finances to an independent outside auditor. The deadlines were clear -- yet you missed them by months. You delayed providing that information until after you were elected to Congress." Our mind-reading skills are limited, so we can't judge whether any delay was prompted by an intent to withhold information until after the Nov. 2, 2010, general election. So we e-mailed the Doherty campaign late Wednesday to see if it had any evidence to back up that part of the allegation. Meanwhile, knowing that Cicilline has repeatedly said he is responsible for the decisions made during his tenure, we were interested in whether his administration had clear deadlines that it missed by months. Doherty's press release cited an April 20, 2011, report, "Corrective Action Plan to Restore Sound Financial Management," written by Matthew M. Clarkin Jr., the city's internal auditor after Cicilline's departure, and Gary Sasse, who worked for 30 years as executive director of the nonprofit Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council and, more recently, a fiscal adviser to the Providence City Council. (The independent auditor does the city's official audit. The internal auditor works as a financial watchdog on behalf of the City Council.) The report says that according to the independent auditor, Braver PC, when it was time to do the audit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010, "For the first time in more than a decade the City requested a one-month extension from the Auditor General for the 2010 audit." State law gives cities and towns six months to complete annual audits. According to the report, "In August 2010, Braver submitted a list of documents and information to the Director of Finance, [documents] that were required to complete the annual audit, as well as a deadline for the submission of each item." On page 14, the report has a chart listing 15 types of financial information due by Oct. 12, 2010, or earlier, none of which was submitted to the auditor until after the Nov. 2 election, according to Braver. The delays ranged from about two months to about four months. The report says the auditing firm "was forced on several occasions to extend those deadlines. According to Braver, some of the information requested was not delivered until the day the report was released on January 31, 2011." The report verified that the city was in serious financial trouble. James Wilkinson, who oversaw the audit for Braver, confirmed the information in the Clarkin / Sasse report. The city had agreed to the original deadlines, he said. Clarkin also sent us an e-mail from Wilkinson suggesting changes in the report. Wilkinson, in fact, suggests only minor alterations to the chart showing how the deadlines were missed, and he recommends adding the note that some requested information didn't come in until the day the audit was released. But Wilkinson also ended his e-mail with an explanation for the delays. "This year's closing process was marked by delays and problems caused by miscommunication among the accounting personnel. We believe that the year-end closing could proceed more quickly and smoothly by developing a logical order for closing procedures and assigning responsibility for completing the procedures to specific personnel," he wrote. That speaks to a finance department in disarray under Cicilline, not one withholding data for political purposes, as Doherty implies. Wilkinson said the delay in 2010 was unusual for Providence. "They did have turnover in the finance department so there were a lot of things going on," he said. "There was cooperation but it was taking a while." But more important, according to Wilkinson, if the city had met all of its deadlines for supplying financial information, the audit still would not have been completed before the election. It typically comes out in late December. Cicilline spokesman Eric Hyers said Doherty falsely assumed that Cicilline knew about the auditor's deadlines and that the mayor instructed his staff to miss the deadlines. "Neither of those things happened." Doherty campaign spokesman Robert Coupe acknowledged that there was no smoking gun showing that Cicilline or his staff ordered a delay in the release of financial data. But the delay, he said, was part of a pattern that kept the public in the dark about the city's finances. There "was a consistent pattern of withholding key financial information, not only from the external auditor, but also from the internal auditor, the City Council and the Rhode Island Division of Municipal Finance," he said. That shows intent, Coupe argued. This "was not an accident but was a component of the overall pattern and therefore intentional." Our ruling Brendan Doherty said David Cicilline, when he was mayor of Providence, was "required to provide key information about city finances to an independent outside auditor. The deadlines were clear -- yet [he intentionally] missed them by months" until after the November 2010 election. A subsequent report by the city on what led to its financial problems, along with a supporting e-mail from the firm that did the outside audit, support the claim that many deadlines for the outside audit were not met by the Cicilline administration. However, Doherty declared that Cicilline intentionally withheld the information until after the election, suggesting that the delay was designed to help him get elected to Congress. We previously gave Cicilline a Mostly False on his statement that the internal auditor for the city of Providence "was not locked out" of access to the city's finances. We found evidence of serious delays but ultimately, in that case, that auditor (Clarkin's predecessor) received the long-sought information before the November election. But in this instance, involving the outside audit, we've seen no real evidence -- and Doherty provided none -- that the delays were part of an attempt by Cicilline to hide bad news from voters. The facts argue otherwise. The external auditor himself judged the delays to be caused by a finance department in disarray. And even if every deadline had been met, the results of the audit would not have been released before the November election. Such audits are due at the end of the year, nearly two months after the votes are counted, a timetable noted in the very document the Doherty campaign cites. In the end, we have the former head of the Rhode Island State Police making allegations without key evidence, and ignoring evidence that points in another direction. Because his statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, we rate it Mostly False. (Get updates from PolitiFact Rhode Island on Twitter: @politifactri. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Brendan Doherty	None	None	None	2012-09-14T00:01:00	2012-09-12	['None']
-snes-00429	Did Melania Trump Wear This Jacket on Her Way to Visit Children Separated from Their Families?	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/melania-trump-wear-jacket-visiting-children-separated-families/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Melania Trump Wear This Jacket on Her Way to Visit Children Separated from Their Families?	21 June 2018	None	['None']
-abbc-00234	With the Turnbull Government's proposed corporate tax cut stalled in the Upper House, the business lobby has been ramping up efforts to convince a handful of crossbench senators to pass the legislation.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-23/fact-check-corporate-tax-cuts-and-higher-wages/9652850	Senator Watt is on shaky ground. Although he accurately points out that half of the signatories to the BCA letter represent companies that did not pay any corporate tax in 2015-16, it is a stretch to suggest this means these companies would not be in a position to pass on potential future benefits — however small — in the form of higher wages. As experts noted, using a single year (in this case, 2015-16) to make a broad assertion about the future is problematic. Should the legislation be passed, the tax cut would not apply until the next decade for some larger companies. In their letter, the executives left open the timing of future wage increases resulting from the tax cut, promising stronger wages growth "as the tax cut takes effect". As experts pointed out, whether a company pays corporate tax in a given year depends on a range of factors, including market conditions, past capital investments and tax offsets. Not paying company tax in a particular year does not mean a business will not pay company tax in the future. Indeed, some of the signatory companies that did not pay corporate tax in 2015-16 have indicated they are on track to pay corporate tax in the near future. Economic modelling by Treasury and other analysts has concluded the corporate tax cuts would also broadly boost the economy, although the impact is likely to be modest. Whether other policies would be more effective in boosting wages is a different issue, and not the subject of this fact check; nor is whether the corporate tax plan — which is expected to cost about $65 billion over a decade — is in the nation's best interests, or should be prioritised over other budget measures.	['tax', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'alp', 'australia']	None	None	['tax', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'alp', 'australia']	Fact check: Would companies that paid no tax in 2015-16 be unable to benefit from a tax cut so as to invest more and help lift wages?	Thu 12 Jul 2018, 2:22am	None	['None']
-snes-02807	Shepard Smith Fired from Fox News?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shepard-smith-fired-from-fox-news/	None	Junk News	None	David Emery	None	Was Shepard Smith Fired from Fox News?	9 March 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-06122	"Newt balanced the federal budget."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/dec/28/winning-our-future/ad-credits-newt-gingrich-balancing-budget/	A TV ad airing in Iowa in the final week before the caucuses calls Newt Gingrich a "principled conservative" who has "fought for us." Here’s how: "Newt balanced the federal budget, reformed welfare, cut taxes and created 11 million new jobs," a man’s voice says as photos of Gingrich flash on the screen. The ad was produced the week of Dec. 26, 2011, by a group called Winning Our Future, a "super PAC" that can raise money for elections but isn’t formally affiliated with any candidate. Winning Our Future is clearly pro-Gingrich, stating on its website that its goal is to make him the Republican nominee for president. The ad makes several claims. Here, we’re focusing on the assertion that Gingrich balanced the federal budget. We’ve previously reported that there were indeed budget surpluses during his time as speaker of the House, from 1995 to 1999. By fiscal year 1998, the federal budget did reach a surplus of $69 billion. And in fiscal year 1999 -- which Gingrich can claim some responsibility for, even though he was out as speaker for most of the fiscal year -- it was in surplus as well, to the tune of $126 billion. So our main question is, how much credit does Gingrich deserve? We asked several experts who said it's a stretch to credit Gingrich alone because there were many forces and people at work in bringing the government to a balanced budget. The primary one: a booming economy. "The budget ended up balancing faster than either party expected simply because economic growth was so strong," said Chris Edwards, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. "I don’t think either party had much to do with that." He does credit Gingrich for pushing President Bill Clinton toward reducing the deficit. In his 1996 budget, "Clinton proposed to stabilize the deficit at around $190 billion. He did not propose to balance the budget. The Republicans under Gingrich pushed him into it," Edwards said, and that materialized in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Stan Collender, a former Democratic staffer for the House and Senate budget committees, was less generous about crediting Gingrich. "It happened on his watch but it doesn’t mean that he gets credit for it," said Collender. "The only thing you can give him credit for is stalling some additional spending programs." Collender agreed that the balanced budget was more a result of "a soaring economy, with capital gains taxes coming in, and the tech bubble than it had anything to do with legislation." Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said Gingrich is simply doing what politicians do. "He’s just kind of ignoring that there was anybody else in Washington doing anything about the budget, which is kind of in a politician’s DNA," Ellis said. Another factor Ellis cited is the 1993 tax increase that Clinton pushed through, over Gingrich’s and all other House Republicans’ objections. Tax increases generated more revenue, which led to surpluses. "It’s not necessarily the spending differential, it’s the revenue differential," Ellis said. Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report, summed up the ad’s claim this way: "The idea that one person, in this case Gingrich, is responsible for a balanced budget seems far-fetched at best and, frankly, pretty silly. Ever hear of checks and balances?" Our ruling Winning Our Future’s ad says, "Newt balanced the federal budget." Gingrich was House speaker in 1998, the first year of the surplus, and he can be given some credit for the 1999 surplus, even though he was out of Congress for most of that fiscal year. Even so, simply being speaker during the surplus years doesn’t mean that the balanced budget was his doing. He pushed for it, yes. But other factors like Clinton’s 1993 tax increase -- which Gingrich opposed -- were at work, too. And our experts agreed that a booming economy, generating millions more revenue, was the single most important factor, and one that no politician can take credit for. We rate the ad’s claim Half True.	None	Winning Our Future	None	None	None	2011-12-28T17:31:00	2011-12-27	['None']
-pomt-15170	"Many of the great scholars say that anchor babies are not covered" by the 14th Amendment.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/25/donald-trump/trump-many-scholars-say-anchor-babies-arent-covere/	Donald Trump says his plan to roll back birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants will pass constitutional muster because "many of the great scholars say that anchor babies are not covered." "Many of the great scholars" -- really? That comment caught our attention. In case you need a refresher on birthright citizenship: As it stands now, any person born on U.S. soil is a citizen -- regardless of the parents’ immigration status -- because of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. Trump has recently advocated for pulling back citizenship for illegal immigrants’ children. Some, like Trump, refer to these children as "anchor babies." "The parents have to come in legally," Trump said, talking to reporters in New Hampshire Aug. 19. "Now we’re going to have to find out what’s going to happen from a court standpoint. But many people, many of the great scholars say that anchor babies are not covered (by the 14th Amendment). We’re going to have to find out." Considering that about 300,000 babies are born to illegal immigrants and become citizens every year, we wondered if Trump is right to say that "many" scholars think this isn’t necessarily a constitutional right. We won’t dig into who’s a "great" scholar, but we will look at how widespread this position is and if "many" say the 14th Amendment isn’t an impediment to Trump’s plan. Differing interpretations The 14th Amendment became part of the Constitution in 1868 following the Civil War. The amendment established birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law for all citizens, making newly freed slaves full American citizens. The relevant clause reads: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Today, this clause is widely understood to mean that the Constitution requires that everyone born on U.S. soil -- regardless of parents’ citizenship -- is automatically an American citizen. We polled a number of experts in immigration law, and each one told us that this is the mainstream view among legal scholars, without question. The matter is not considered 100 percent settled, though. For one, the clause doesn’t directly address illegal immigration. Also, the Supreme Court has never made a specific ruling about a person born to undocumented parents. The most relevant Supreme Court ruling was in an 1898 case, United States vs. Wong Kim Ark. The court decided that a man, Wong Kim Ark, was an American citizen because he was born in America, even though his parents were Chinese immigrants. Because his parents were legal residents, the case does not directly apply to children of undocumented parents. To Trump’s point, there are some scholars who argue the 14th Amendment allows birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants but does not require it. This is a subtle but important point, because if the Constitution does not require birthright citizenship, Congress might be able to change the law without having to pass a Constitutional amendment, an arduous process. In any case, this viewpoint is held by only a handful of legal scholars, not "many." "I believe that Trump’s statement is incorrect," said Yale Law School professor Peter Schuck, one of the leading scholars who has endorsed this position. "I would say that our view on the constitutional issue is decidedly the minority view." The gist of the argument rests on the fact that the 14th Amendment requires people to be born on U.S. soil and be "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to receive citizenship at birth, as the amendment says. To understand this point a little better, consider the example of children of foreign diplomats born in the United States. These children are not citizens because their parents have allegiance to a foreign country and not the United States -- meaning they are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. Some people interpret the inclusion of "jurisdiction" as requiring mutual consent for citizenship: The person and the United States have to agree that this person is eligible for citizenship. If the parent is here illegally, does the United States agree that the child should be eligible for citizenship? Congress could, according to this point of view, decide that the answer to this question is "no," rendering the 14th Amendment inapplicable to these children, without violating the Constitution. We won’t dig into this question further -- there’s a lot of history and judicial precedent to digest on both sides of the argument. (If you want to read more, we recommend this 2010 Congressional Research Report.) The small group of scholars who endorse this idea -- that Congress can decide whether birthright citizenship extends to children of undocumented immigrants -- is not strictly partisan. Schuck is a self-described moderate, and he published the primary book on this topic in the 1980s with University of Pennsylvania professor Rogers Smith, who is liberal. Many of the scholars who have come out in support of this view in the past few weeks have conservative backgrounds, such as Edward Erler and John Eastman, both of the conservative Claremont Institute think tank. But not all conservatives share this point of view, either. Also, at least one federal judge has said publicly that interpreting the 14th Amendment in this way wouldn’t require changing the Constitution: Hon. Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit, appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Still, these legal thinkers "are in a very small minority," said Evelyn Cruz, director of the Immigration Law and Policy Clinic at Arizona State University’s law school. "Most scholars believe that the Constitution would need to be amended to achieve a reading opposite to Wong Kim Ark." Our ruling Trump said, "Many of the great scholars say that anchor babies are not covered" by the 14th Amendment. There are respected academics who argue that the 14th Amendment allows but does not require children of illegal immigrants to receive citizenship just by virtue of having been born on American soil. However, this is a minority of immigration and constitutional law scholars, far outweighed by those who believe the 14th Amendment requires birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. Trump goes too far when he says "many," so we rate his claim Half True.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-08-25T17:16:12	2015-08-19	['None']
-snes-02365	Television's children host Mr. Rogers said his mother responded to scary news by telling him, 'Look for the helpers.'	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/look-for-the-helpers/	None	Entertainment	None	David Mikkelson	None	Fred Rogers — ‘Look for the Helpers’	15 April 2013	None	['None']
-goop-00712	Kris And Caitlyn Jenner Doing New Reality Show Together?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kris-caitlyn-jenner-new-reality-show-untrue/	None	None	None	Alejandro Rosa	None	Kris And Caitlyn Jenner Doing New Reality Show Together?	12:39 pm, July 2, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-06675	"Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster" than Mitt Romney.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/08/rick-perry/dukakis-created-jobs-three-times-faster-mitt-romne/	Republican contenders for the presidential nomination Rick Perry and Mitt Romney sparred over jobs at a debate at the Reagan Library -- how many, what kind and who created them. The back-and-forth was full of stats and numbers, with Perry claiming his job-creation record as the Texas governor was superior to Romney's record as Massachusetts governor. And if that's wasn't enough, Perry said Romney's record was even worse than a Democrat's. "Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt," Perry jabbed. We decided to fact-check whether Perry's attack was accurate. As is our usual procedure, we wanted to check both whether the number was correct and the implication that Romney's policies contributed to the outcome. We'll begin by saying there are several different ways to count jobs, and the numbers change slightly depending on the parameters of your search. We decided to use numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Michael Dukakis was governor for three terms, while Romney was governor for one term. (Dukakis was governor from 1975 to 1979 and from 1983 to 1991. Romney was governor from 2003 to 2007.) We could make a number of choices about how to calculate job growth by selecting different parameters, particularly whether we should look at growth on annual basis or whether we should look at when the governors took office and when they left. By some of our calculations, Dukakis created three times more jobs than Romney, and by other calculations, it was even more. As we researched the item more, we found an analysis published a few days before the debate by Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller. Lewis looked at different job statistics and concluded that Dukakis created jobs faster than Romney did. Using numbers from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, Lewis found that Dukakis created an average of about 45,209 jobs per year, while Romney created an average of 12,850 jobs per year. So using those numbers, Dukakis' job creation was about three and half times Romney's. In a follow-up to his original post, Lewis noted that the Romney campaign objected to his analysis but not because they questioned the underlying numbers. Rather, they said that Romney inherited large deficits that harmed job creation and that the unemployment rate was lower when Romney left office than when Dukakis left office. Lewis said that he believed his original analysis still had merit. After looking at numbers from BLS, we concluded that Dukakis did have more robust job growth than Romney, and three times is a reasonable estimate, keeping in mind that one could use other reasonable estimates. We also noticed that Romney had his worst job growth during his first two years, giving creedence to the argument that his policies hadn't yet had time to take effect. Now to our second point: Is there any evidence that Dukakis' policies led to robust job growth, while Romney's didn't? We asked the Perry campaign for evidence, but we didn't hear back. To pursue that issue, we spoke with Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, an independent public policy organization. (Its board includes many business executives.) Widmer confirmed that there was a faster rate of growth under Dukakis than Romney, but he warned that governors have little ability to create jobs in the short term. He attributed the growth under Dukakis to a growing computer industry in Massachusetts that was focused around what were then called minicomputers, computers sized between a mainframe and a personal computer. "Massachusetts bet on the mini, while Silicon Valley bet on the PC," Widmer said. "None of that had anything to do with a governor, before, after or since." The bet on the mini didn't go so well, and job growth was dwindling even as Dukakis left office. And even when jobs were growing under Dukakis, people in Massachusetts didn't particularly credit his policies. "Many business leaders were critical of Dukakis for not being more supportive of the business community and policies that they thought would be helpful. But then jobs were still created because of the outside factors," Widmer said. Meanwhile, when Romney was governor, jobs were created slowly as Massachusetts pulled out of a nationwide recession. "Again, there was little connection between that and the initiatives of Gov. Romney," Widmer said. Romney himself made a similar point in the debate with Perry, saying that robust job growth in Texas can't be compared directly to job growth in Massachusetts. "States are different. Texas is a great state. Texas has zero income tax. Texas has a right to work state, a Republican Legislature, a Republican Supreme Court. Texas has a lot of oil and gas in the ground," Romney said. "Those are wonderful things, but Governor Perry doesn't believe that he created those things." In ruling on this statement, Perry is correct that Dukakis did grow jobs at a faster pace than Romney. But we find little evidence that meant Dukakis was better at job creation. Rather, larger factors were at work, such as the way the computer industry in Massachusetts was developing, as well as national economic trends. So we rate Perry's statement Half True.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2011-09-08T17:53:27	2011-09-07	['Michael_Dukakis', 'Mitt_Romney']
-pomt-05385	Says "an unchecked Democratic Majority in Trenton" is responsible for "years of diversions" from the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund.	mostly false	/new-jersey/statements/2012/may/07/anthony-bucco/state-sen-anthony-bucco-claims-democrat-led-legisl/	Democrats have been in control of the New Jersey Legislature for so many years that they can be held responsible for many of the state’s financial woes. But when it comes to diverting money from the state’s unemployment benefits fund, the Republican-led Legislature of years past deserves its share of the blame as well. In a May 1 news release, however, state Sen. Anthony Bucco (R-Morris) targeted "an unchecked Democratic Majority in Trenton" for diverting money from that fund, which is used to pay unemployment benefits to people who worked in New Jersey. "The Administration is to be applauded for putting the state’s unemployment insurance fund on the path to solvency more quickly than anyone expected," Bucco said in the news release. "Through a combination of tax reforms, efficiencies, and aggressive prosecution of fraud and abuse, this Governor has fixed the mess he inherited as a result of years of diversions and fiscal irresponsibility by an unchecked Democratic Majority in Trenton." The senator’s claim is largely wrong, PolitiFact New Jersey found. About 67 percent of the roughly $4.6 billion in total diverted funds was due to legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature between 1992 and 1997, according to the state’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services. Due in part to the fund diversions -- as well as the increased demand for unemployment benefits -- the fund was depleted by March 2009 and New Jersey began borrowing from the federal government to cover benefit payments. State officials anticipate paying off the loan by May 2014. Starting with a law enacted in late 1992, a total of about $4.6 billion has been diverted from the trust fund to cover charity care payments to hospitals, according to the OLS. The Republican-led Legislature approved legislation in 1992, 1996 and 1997 that led to the diversion of $3.141 billion, representing about 67 percent of the total diverted funds. In 2002 and 2003, Democrats controlled the State Assembly and the two parties shared control of the Senate. During those two years, legislators approved diverting $1.1 billion, or about 23 percent of the total funds. After Democrats took full control of both houses in 2004, the Legislature agreed to divert $450 million, which is about 10 percent of the total funds. Adam Bauer, a spokesman for the Senate Republicans, acknowledged that Republicans also diverted money from the trust fund. But he argued that the trust fund balance still increased when the GOP was in the majority. "Bucco’s line about ‘fiscal irresponsibility’ holds up because a diversion when the fund is not being stressed because of high unemployment and is approaching its record high fund balance is not irresponsible, but a diversion when there is high stress on the fund because of job loss and the fund is nearing a record low is irresponsible," Bauer said in an e-mail. Joseph Henchman, vice president of Legal & State Projects for the business-backed Tax Foundation, said he could understand both holding money in reserve as well as ensuring it "doesn't grow so large as to create pressure for unnecessarily higher benefits or beyond any possible future needs." "I can see both sides on this: on one hand, you want the fund to have enough in reserve to pay benefits when the economy dips, but you also don't want to accumulate funds beyond what you need," Henchman told us in an e-mail. Our ruling In a May 1 news release, Bucco claimed in regard to the state’s unemployment benefits fund that Gov. Chris Christie "has fixed the mess he inherited as a result of years of diversions and fiscal irresponsibility by an unchecked Democratic Majority in Trenton." Both political parties are responsible for diverting money from the trust fund. But of the roughly $4.6 billion in total diverted funds, about 67 percent of that was approved by the Republican-led Legislature between 1992 and 1997. We rate the statement Mostly False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Anthony Bucco	None	None	None	2012-05-07T07:30:00	2012-05-01	['None']
-tron-02773	“No He Can’t” by Dr. Anne Wortham	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/worthan-no-he-cant/	None	obama	None	None	None	“No He Can’t” by Dr. Anne Wortham	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-01454	Says Sen. Kay Hagan "has missed half of the (Senate Armed Services) Committee's hearings in 2014."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/oct/02/thom-tillis/thom-tillis-claims-kay-hagan-didnt-attend-half-arm/	The rise of the terrorist group known variously as ISIS, ISIL or the Islamic State has increased the role of national security in the political conversation just a month before the midterm elections. In North Carolina, state House speaker and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Thom Tillis released an ad that blames his Democratic opponent Sen. Kay Hagan for being missing in action as the ISIS threat grew. "In January, President Obama refers to the Islamic State as a ‘JV team,’ " the narrator says. "Days later the Armed Services Committee holds a hearing on new global threats. Sen. Kay Hagan? Absent. In fact, Hagan’s missed half the Armed Services Committee hearings this year." We’ve already checked whether Obama referred to the Islamic State as a JV team (he did). Here, we’ll review Tillis’ characterization of Hagan’s attendance record on the Senate Armed Services Committee. We went through all the committee’s meeting transcripts for 2014 to see which lawmakers were in attendance for each hearing. In compiling the information, we ran into an obstacle. Because the Senate Armed Services Committee often reviews confidential national-security information, it sometimes meets behind closed doors. Minutes for those meetings are not released to the public. Therefore, we’re not able to determine attendance for those meetings. In 2014, it appears there have been 11 closed hearings by the full committee. However, the committee has also held 22 open meetings this year, so we limited our calculations to those. How many of the public meetings has Hagan attended? The record shows the answer is nine. That’s not a great percentage — 41 percent — but is nine par for the course for a busy senator? Not exactly. While Hagan didn’t have the worst attendance among the 26 members of the Armed Services Committee this year, she came close. Only five senators — Roy Blunt, R-Mo.; Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; David Vitter, R-La.; Ted Cruz, R-Texas; and Mark Udall, D-Colo. — attended fewer meetings. Meanwhile, six of her colleagues attended at least 20 of the 22 meetings. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., as the chairman, and Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., as the ranking Republican, would be expected to have perfect or near-perfect attendance. But Sens. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., Tim Kaine, D-Va., and John McCain, R-Ariz., were present for at least 20 hearings. For the sake of argument, let’s go back a year and look at 2013. The Senate Armed Services Committee held 28 open hearings in 2013, of which Hagan attended 14, putting her among those who attended hearings least often. For those two years combined, then, Hagan was present for 23 of 50 open hearings. Only six senators have attended fewer open meetings. Republicans Vitter and Cruz attended the fewest hearings, 16, of any of the committee members. Hagan’s campaign did not dispute those numbers, but staffers said they were taken out of context. They pointed us to an article by the Charlotte Observer that quotes Tara Andringa, spokeswoman for Levin. According to the Observer, Andringa said, "Hagan appeared to have ‘one of the best attendance records on the committee.’ " That didn’t mirror our findings, so we reached out to Andringa for clarification. We didn’t hear back. Hagan’s campaign also explained that scheduling conflicts and other duties — including constituent issues, other committee hearings and bill drafting — kept her from attending all the committee meetings. Let’s take a closer look at the February hearing "on new global threats" that Tillis highlighted in his ad. Hagan’s campaign said she did not attend that hearing on Feb. 11 on "Current and Future World Threats" because she had a constituent meeting with Jerry Ensminger, a former Marine who had discovered that families living on the Camp Lejeune military base in North Carolina were getting sick and, in some cases, dying from contaminated tap water used on the base from 1957 to 1987. (Congress passed legislation to assist the victims of this problem in 2012 and Ensminger and others continue to lobby Congress for further investigation.) The Feb. 11 meeting, which included testimony from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, continued in a closed session on the afternoon of Feb. 27. It’s unclear whether Hagan attended the closed hearing (and they didn’t tell us). However, her campaign said she missed another Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in the morning of the same day to attend a banking committee meeting. Our ruling Tillis said that Hagan "has missed half of the (Senate Armed Services) Committee's hearings in 2014." We don’t know the number of closed meetings she attended, so it’s more accurate to say that Hagan missed half of the committee’s public hearings. Still, Tillis has a point — in 2014, Hagan attended nine of the 22 open hearings, which is not only below half but which also ranked near the bottom among committee members. The comment is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, so we rate it Mostly True. Update, Oct. 3, 2014, 11:00 a.m.: This version of the story reflects additional information about why Hagan was unable to attend the Feb. 11 Senate Armed Services Committee meeting and about her schedule on Feb. 27. The additional information does not affect the ruling, which remains Mostly True.	None	Thom Tillis	None	None	None	2014-10-02T17:11:49	2014-09-30	['Kay_Hagan']
-pomt-05495	"The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office concluded ObamaCare will cost the U.S. more than 800,000 jobs."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2012/apr/17/roger-williams/roger-williams-says-cbo-forecasts-obamacare-will-c/	Republican U.S House candidate Roger Williams of Texas promises to "end the fraud of Obamacare" in a mailer to Austin-area voters we spotted April 11, 2012. His mailer lists among promises broken by President Obama the notion that the 2010 overhaul of health care laws would create jobs. Under "Promise Broken," the mailer says: "The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office concluded ObamaCare will cost the U.S. more than 800,000 jobs." Really? Williams’ footnoted backup was a Feb. 11, 2011, blog post on AmericanThinker.com saying that Doug Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, had just testified to the House Budget Committee that as of 2020-21, the law was projected to reduce U.S. employment by 800,000. PolitiFact researchers have explored this testimony and topic before, most recently for a June 2011 Truth-O-Meter article after U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann said in a Republican presidential debate: "The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs. What could the president be thinking by passing a bill like this, knowing full well it will kill 800,000 jobs?" Broadly, the projection is open to misinterpretation. The CBO is a nonpartisan agency that provides economic analyses to members of Congress on how legislation will affect the federal budget and the economy. And in August 2010, it published a new outlook that considered the jobs impact of the just-approved health care law. While the CBO had determined the law would reduce "the amount of labor used in the economy," that was not the same as concluding that 800,000 jobs would be shed. Let’s begin with the negative effects the health care law could have on employment. The law was expected to cost some employers money, particularly large ones. Under its provisions, employers aren't required to offer insurance, yet if they don't and their workers make low wages and qualify for tax credits to buy insurance, then the employers will have to pay a fine. (This part of the law takes effect in 2014.) Even so, the CBO has said, fines imposed on large employers will affect low-wage workers the most. The CBO also projected the effects to be somewhat limited. "To the extent that changes in the health insurance system lead to improved health status among workers, the nation’s economic productivity could be enhanced," the CBO said in its report. "It is not clear, however, whether such changes would have a substantial impact on overall economic productivity or output. Moreover, many of the effects of the legislation may not be felt for several years because it will take time for workers and employers to recognize and to adapt to the new incentives." Still, that's not where the 800,000 jobs number comes from. It primarily comes from workers who choose not to work because they no longer have to work at jobs just to keep their health coverage. Here's how the CBO put it: "The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the legislation, on net, will reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by a small amount—roughly half a percent—primarily by reducing the amount of labor that workers choose to supply. That net effect reflects changes in incentives in the labor market that operate in both directions: Some provisions of the legislation will discourage people from working more hours or entering the workforce, and other provisions will encourage them to work more. Moreover, many people will be unaffected by those provisions and will face the same incentives regarding work as they do under current law." Basically, the CBO was saying that that once some people working mostly to keep their health insurance have other options -- to enroll in Medicaid, or to qualify for tax breaks to buy insurance from a health exchange -- they might choose to work less. The CBO describes this as a "small segment" of the population, about half a percent of the labor force. Notably, the CBO doesn't use the 800,000 jobs number in its report; critics of the law have extrapolated that number by calculating what half a percent of the workforce equals. Then again, as noted, then-CBO director Douglas Elmendorf confirmed that number in his February 2011 testimony. Elmendorf also explained, though, that the number was an extrapolation, and might not be precise. He said: "That means that if the reduction in the labor used was workers working the average number of hours in the economy and earning the average wage, that there would be a reduction of 800,000 workers. "In fact, as we mentioned in the -- in our announcements last summer, the legislation also creates incentives that might affect the number of hours people work, might affect the tendency to work with lower and higher income people. We haven't tried to quantify those things. But the impact is that these 800,000 (jobs) might not be exactly the number ..." The CBO report also noted that the health care law could actually help economic productivity: "To the extent that changes in the health insurance system lead to improved health status among workers, the nation’s economic productivity could be enhanced. It is not clear, however, whether such changes would have a substantial impact on overall economic productivity or output. Moreover, many of the effects of the legislation may not be felt for several years because it will take time for workers and employers to recognize and to adapt to the new incentives." PolitiFact rated Bachmann’s claim -- that the law "will kill 800,000 jobs" -- Mostly False because it exaggerated the CBO’s conclusions in a misleading fashion and included no qualifiers. When we inquired, a CBO staff spokeswoman, Deborah Kilroe, had no comment on the earlier PolitiFact analysis. Kilroe did say the CBO had done no additional analyses of projected reductions in employment due to the 2010 law. Our ruling The CBO says there could be the equivalent of 800,000 fewer workers in connection with Obamacare, the changes in federal health-care laws ushered into place by Obama. But these changes would not be due to employers not hiring workers. Rather, such results were predicted primarily because workers wouldn't have to work because health care coverage would be expanded. People working mostly for health insurance would either reduce their hours or leave the job market altogether. There could also be more economic productivity because of the health care law. We rate Williams’ claim Mostly False.	None	Roger Williams	None	None	None	2012-04-17T06:00:00	2012-04-11	['United_States', 'Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act']
-pomt-04982	Says President Barack Obama "has not raised taxes."	false	/new-jersey/statements/2012/jul/22/bill-pascrell/bill-pascrell-claims-barack-obama-has-not-raised-t/	Forget social issues. U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell said he learned in his recent primary fight that the economy is at the forefront of people’s minds. So while explaining the need to set aside distractions and reach a balanced approach to deal with national fiscal issues, the Democratic congressman tried to set straight President Barack Obama’s record on taxes. "We need tax cuts, there’s no question about it," Pascrell said in a July 18 interview on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. But, he said, "this president has not raised taxes. He has not raised taxes ... and I haven't agreed with the president on everything, even as a Democrat, but he has not raised taxes. There have been so many myths about this presidency and they need to be clarified and maybe we'll do that during the election." Has Obama really not raised taxes? Thomas Pietrykoski, Pascrell’s spokesman, said the congressman was "referring to the overall effective tax rate for American families." Our colleagues at PolitiFact National found last year that for the average middle-class family, the effective tax rate -- how much the average taxpayer pays as a percentage of his income -- fell between 2008 and 2011. But Pascrell didn’t make that distinction in the interview. And Obama has raised some taxes. Obama earned a False last year from PolitiFact National for saying he "didn’t raise taxes once." Soon after taking office the president signed a bill that increased the federal excise tax on tobacco products. That tax hike went into effect in 2009. Then Obama signed the health care law, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act but often called ObamaCare. That law includes several tax increases, some of which have not yet gone into effect, though some are in place now. For example, individuals who use indoor tanning services started paying a 10 percent tax in 2010. Other taxes in the law -- such as additional Medicare taxes of 0.9 percent on individuals who make more than $200,000 and couples that make more than $250,000 -- don’t go into effect until Jan. 1, 2013 or later. And then there’s the individual mandate, a linchpin of the health care law that will require people who forego health insurance coverage to pay a fine. The U.S. Supreme Court said in a decision upholding most of the law that the mandate "may reasonably be characterized as a tax" and that "it is reasonable to construe" it as a tax. Though these tax hikes may be relatively narrow in scope, they are examples of taxes increasing under Obama. But Obama has also cut taxes. The president said in 2011 that he "lowered taxes over the last two years." That statement earned a Mostly True from PolitiFact National. The president’s stimulus bill included the "Making Work Pay" tax credit, which was intended to offset payroll taxes. The credit gave up to $400 for working individuals and up to $800 for married taxpayers filing joint returns in 2009 and 2010. Also, Obama and Congress reached a deal in 2010 to lower payroll taxes by 2 percent for one year. The reduced tax rate was later extended through the end of this year. The tax cuts impacted a broader group, while the tax increases have had a more narrow reach. Nevertheless, some taxes have still increased under Obama. Our ruling Pascrell said "this president has not raised taxes." Some taxes have increased during Obama’s time in the White House. In his first months in office, Obama increased the federal excise tax on tobacco products and the national health care law includes a number of tax increases. It’s also true that other taxes -- such as payroll taxes -- have been reduced during the president’s tenure. However, it’s wrong to broadly state that Obama has not raised taxes. We rate this claim False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Bill Pascrell	None	None	None	2012-07-22T07:30:00	2012-07-18	['None']
-pose-01090	As governor, I will: Create a statewide scholarship fund that will guarantee that every high school graduate with demonstrated financial need can pursue at least two years of education or training beyond high school that puts them on a path to a career, or to a four-year college.	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/gina-meter/promise/1173/create-statewide-scholarship-fund/	None	gina-meter	Gina Raimondo	None	None	Create a statewide scholarship fund for every high school graduate with a financial need	2014-12-19T07:25:50	None	['None']
-snes-01587	A child successfully smuggled a penguin out of an amusement park by concealing the creature in his backpack.	legend	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birdnapped/	None	Critter Country	None	Snopes Staff	None	Child Abducts Penguin in Backpack?	20 June 2005	None	['None']
-snes-03549	New York Times columnist David Brooks said that Donald Trump needed to decide if he'd rather 'resign, be impeached, or get assassinated.'	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/david-brooks-trump-needs-to-decide-if-he-prefers-to-resign-be-impeached-or-get-assassinated/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	David Brooks: ‘Trump Needs to Decide If He Prefers to Resign, Be Impeached or Get Assassinated’	14 November 2016	None	['David_Brooks_(journalist)', 'The_New_York_Times', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-04446	Says Obama promised unemployment would never go above 8 percent.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/11/paul-ryan/ryan-obama-promised-unemployment-would-not-exceed-/	Seated a few feet apart in their lone debate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden jousted over how to boost the economy. Ryan sought to brand President Barack Obama’s recession remedies as a failure and said the president had broken his promise to keep unemployment below 8 percent. "They passed the stimulus. The idea that we could borrow $831 billion, spend it on all of these special interest groups, and that it would work out just fine, that unemployment would never get to 8 percent -- it went up above 8 percent for 43 months. They said that, right now, if we just passed this stimulus, the economy would grow at 4 percent. It's growing at 1.3. The claim that Obama said unemployment would not exceed 8 percent is one we’ve heard before. A super PAC ad took it even further, saying Obama promised unemployment topping out at 5.6 percent. But we've found these claims contain only a grain of truth. Projection vs. promise The source for Ryan’s statement -- and others like it -- is a Jan. 9, 2009, report called "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" from Christina Romer, then chairwoman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, the vice president's top economic adviser. Their report projected that the economic stimulus plan would create 3 to 4 million jobs by the end of 2010. It also included a chart predicting unemployment rates with and without the stimulus. Without the stimulus (the baseline), unemployment was projected to hit about 8.5 percent in 2009 and then continue rising to a peak of about 9 percent in 2010. With the stimulus, they predicted the unemployment rate would peak at just under 8 percent in 2009. The important word here is projection. The economic analysis wasn’t a promise, it was an educated assessment of how events might unfold. And it came with heavy disclaimers. "It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error," the report states. "There is the more fundamental uncertainty that comes with any estimate of the effects of a program. Our estimates of economic relationships and rules of thumb are derived from historical experience and so will not apply exactly in any given episode. Furthermore, the uncertainty is surely higher than normal now because the current recession is unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity." There's also a footnote that goes along with the chart stating: "Forecasts of the unemployment rate without the recovery plan vary substantially. Some private forecasters anticipate unemployment rates as high as 11% in the absence of action." Republicans have also cited a speech from then President-Elect Obama about the stimulus. But Obama’s speech also presents the report’s findings as "projections," and later says that a stimulus plan would "likely" save or create 3 million to 4 million jobs. Only then does he simplify his language to say, "we’ll create" as he talks about a focus on jobs in energy, health care and infrastructure. Here’s how he sets it up: "I asked my nominee for Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Dr. Christina Romer, and the Vice President-Elect's Chief Economic Adviser, Dr. Jared Bernstein, to conduct a rigorous analysis of this plan and come up with projections of how many jobs it will create — and what kind of jobs they will be. Today, I am releasing a report of their findings so that the American people can see exactly what this plan will mean for their families, their communities, and our economy. The report confirms that our plan will likely save or create three to four million jobs." As we now know, as the pair prepared their estimates, the economy was already far worse than the best numbers at the time captured. The unemployment rate hit 8 percent even before Obama signed a stimulus package into law in February 2009. It peaked at just over 10 percent in early 2010 and has decreased very slowly. In September, it fell to 7.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our ruling Ryan said the Obama administration promised "unemployment would never get to 8 percent." Obama didn’t say that. Rather, his Council of Economic Advisers predicted that the stimulus would hold it to that level. Their report included heavy disclaimers that the projections had "significant margins of error" and a high degree of uncertainty due to a recession that is "unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity." The sub-8 percent prediction did not hold true, but it’s still incorrect to characterize it as a promise or guarantee. We rate Ryan’s statement Mostly False.	None	Paul Ryan	None	None	None	2012-10-11T23:01:07	2012-10-11	['None']
-tron-01248	Mass renunciation of Hinduism in India	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hindus/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Mass renunciation of Hinduism in India	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-01289	Wisconsin Republicans "repealed a statewide fair pay law" that made "sure women are treated fairly on the job."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2014/oct/31/barack-obama/wisconsin-republicans-repealed-equal-pay-law-prote/	Seeking to boost voter turnout among Democrats, President Barack Obama campaigned for Wisconsin gubernatorial hopeful Mary Burke one week before the November election. At one point during his Oct. 28, 2014, appearance at Milwaukee’s North Division High School, Obama focused his remarks on women. And without mentioning Gov. Scott Walker by name, the president made a claim about equal pay and Republicans that we want to check. "We believe that America is stronger when women are full and equal participants in the economy," Obama said, according to a transcript from The White House. "In 2012, Republicans here in Wisconsin repealed a statewide fair-pay law. Now think about that. Just like I don’t understand why somebody would be against somebody having health insurance, I don’t understand -- why would you want to repeal a law to make sure women are treated fairly on the job? That’s your platform? That’s your agenda? Earlier this year -- it don’t make no sense." So, Obama's claim is that Wisconsin Republicans "repealed a statewide fair-pay law" that made "sure women are treated fairly on the job." That’s similar to a statement made by the liberal Greater Wisconsin Committee in a TV ad attacking Walker. Let’s check what the president said. Previous factcheck We covered much of this ground when Burke claimed that Walker’s repeal of a 2009 law left Wisconsin as one of five states "without an equal pay law protecting women from gender discrimination in their paycheck." We rated her claim -- which goes much further than Obama’s -- as False. Here’s what we found: The law Obama alluded to was the Equal Pay Enforcement Act. It was adopted in 2009 when Democrats controlled state government, then repealed in 2012 after Walker was elected and his fellow Republicans won the majority in the Legislature. The 2009 law allowed equal-pay claims to be filed as lawsuits in state court (such suits in federal court were already allowed and continue to be). That meant women claiming pay discrimination could potentially collect more money -- compensatory and punitive damages -- through state court, which some employee attorneys contend is easier and less expensive than suing in federal court. Previously, at the state level, they could only file a complaint with a state agency and potentially collect back wages and legal expenses. That approach remains. So, Obama is correct that Republicans repealed a fair-pay law. And that law was aimed at ensuring that women were treated fairly on the job. But Obama's claim could leave the impression that the repeal meant Wisconsin had no equal-pay law, when in fact it still does. Unaffected by the Republicans' repeal is the state's Fair Employment Act, which has been in place since 1982. It explicitly prohibits gender-based employment discrimination "in promotion (and) compensation paid for equal or substantially similar work." It allows people who believe they’ve faced pay discrimination to seek back wages and legal fees -- smaller damages than they might get in state court -- from their employers through a state administrative hearing process. And there is also the option to sue in federal court. Our rating Obama said Wisconsin Republicans "repealed a statewide fair-pay law" that made "sure women are treated fairly on the job." Walker and the GOP-led Legislature did repeal an law that provided more assurance -- through stiffer penalties against employers available in state court -- that women are treated fairly. But there is still a state law that allows women to win smaller damages for unequal pay through an administrative hearing process. For a statement that is accurate but needs more information, our rating is Mostly True. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s web page.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2014-10-31T05:00:00	2014-10-28	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-03493	"Black children constitute 18 percent of the nation's public school population but 40 percent of the children who are suspended or expelled."	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2013/jun/10/john-lewis/do-numbers-show-black-students-disciplined-higher-/	In the 1960s, John Lewis marched for racial equality. Lewis, now a veteran congressman from Atlanta, recently used another approach to voice his criticism concerning what he sees as another form of racial injustice. Lewis, a Democrat, co-wrote an op-ed that focused on his belief that African-Americans are being treated unfairly in the criminal justice system. The problem starts early, wrote Lewis and Bryan Stevenson, who teaches law at New York University. "Black children constitute 18 percent of the nation's public school population but 40 percent of the children who are suspended or expelled," they wrote. PolitiFact Georgia read the op-ed and wondered about the statistics they used to back up their argument. Are 40 percent of students suspended or expelled in America’s public schools black? We recently examined another statement in their op-ed that claimed the violent crime rate in America was the same since 1968, but the prison system had grown by 500 percent. We rated that statement Half True. Brenda Jones, a spokeswoman for Lewis, said Stevenson culled the information from a U.S. Department of Education online warehouse of school suspensions and expulsions. Jones said they relied on a 2009-2010 survey to come up with the numbers and a 2012 Children’s Defense Fund report on the subject. "The results from the schools surveyed show public school systems where Black students represented 18 percent of students but 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of those expelled," Jones said in one email. U.S. Department of Education researchers looked at 85 percent of the nation’s public school students in some 72,000 schools in a widely publicized report released in March 2012. They found although black students made up 18 percent of the nation’s public school population, they accounted for 35 percent of students suspended at least once and 39 percent of students expelled. The study also examined student readiness for college and careers, retention, and other issues. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the findings highlighted the need for educators to address the disparities. "The power of the data is not only in the numbers themselves, but in the impact it can have when married with the courage and the will to change. The undeniable truth is that the everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise," said Duncan, who is white. "It is our collective duty to change that." The Children’s Defense Fund cited the Education Department study in a 2013 report on how many Mississippi public school students ended up in prison, writing that 38 percent of students suspended nationwide were African-Americans. Some critics of the report complained Duncan and much of the news media focused exclusively on black students and wrongly assumed that the disproportionate percentage of those students being suspended or expelled was a result of institutional racism. "The feds have reached their conclusions, however, without answering the obvious question: Are black students suspended more often because they misbehave more?" Heather MacDonald, a well-known author, commentator and columnist who is white, wrote shortly after the report was released. We found plenty of debate over the rationale for the higher percentage of black students suspended or expelled in that report. Again, we were focused on whether the statistics used to make the claim were accurate. We continued our research by looking at past studies to see whether the numbers in that report were a one-time spike. In a 2006 federal study, black students made up 37.4 percent of those suspended from school. White students were slightly ahead, accounting for 39.1 percent of those suspended. About 20 percent of the students suspended were Hispanic. Black students made up about 38 percent of expulsions in one category and 42.5 percent of expulsions in another category, the 2006 report showed. Our conclusion: Lewis co-wrote that black students make up 18 percent of the students in America’s public schools but 40 percent of students who are suspended or expelled. The percentage of the U.S. student population is accurate, while the percentage of black students suspended or expelled is pretty close to the mark. We rate this statement Mostly True.	None	John Lewis	None	None	None	2013-06-10T00:00:00	2013-05-17	['None']
-pomt-01476	Scott Walker was elected governor on a promise not to take campaign contributions "from the date of his inauguration until the signing of the state budget," but broke it by taking nearly $5.6 million.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2014/sep/29/one-wisconsin-now/scott-walker-pledged-not-take-campaign-money-durin/	A liberal advocacy group is accusing Republican Gov. Scott Walker of breaking a campaign promise by accepting millions of dollars in campaign contributions while he crafted the state budget. One Wisconsin Now made the attack Sept. 26, 2014, less than six weeks before the election between Walker and Democrat Mary Burke. The Madison-based group began its news release with this: "In an ‘Ethics Reform Plan’ Scott Walker proposed while running for governor, he promised he would not accept contributions from the date of his inauguration until the signing of the state budget. "A review of Governor Walker’s campaign finance records by One Wisconsin Now shows that for each budget he introduced between Jan. 1 and the date the budget was signed into law, he raised nearly $5.6 million from 54,000 contributions." Our Walk-O-Meter tracks 65 promises Walker made during the 2010 campaign for governor. But none like the one described by One Wisconsin Now. Did we miss one? No. It turns out the pledge is actually from eight years ago, part of an ethics reform plan Walker issued during his brief 2006 run for the GOP nomination for governor. Saying government ethics is "one of the greatest challenges to Wisconsin's democracy," Walker vowed in that race not to accept any campaign donations from the time between the inauguration in January 2007 until the signing of the state budget. But Walker dropped out before the primary, deferring to then-Congressman Mark Green, who lost to Democratic incumbent Jim Doyle in the general election. Walker, of course, ran again for governor in 2010 and won. But we know of no campaign contribution promise made during that campaign like the one cited by One Wisconsin Now. When we posed that to Scot Ross, the group’s executive director, he argued Walker’s 2006 promise "has never been repudiated in subsequent campaigns." And he said Walker "did the opposite" of the 2006 pledge by accepting large campaign donations during the time he worked on state budget. But a campaign promise from an unsuccessful run doesn’t automatically carry over to the next campaign. And One Wisconsin Now ignores the fact Walker’s old promise specifically said it applied to the 2007 budget period. The group calculated the numbers for the 2011 and 2013 budget periods. Records from the state Government Accountability Board show Walker’s campaign received more than $6 million during the budget-preparation periods: $2.51 million from January 2011, the month he was inaugurated, through June 2011, when he signed his first state budget; and $3.52 million from January through June of 2013, the period when he and the Legislature took up his second budget. But it’s something of a moot point for this factcheck, given that Walker wasn’t elected on such a promise. Our rating One Wisconsin Now said Walker was elected governor on a promise not to take campaign contributions "from the date of his inauguration until the signing of the state budget," but broke the promise by taking nearly $5.6 million in contributions. Walker made such a promise during his failed campaign for governor in 2006, specifically noting the period would begin Jan. 3, 2007. But he did not make it again during his successful run in 2010. We rate the claim False. To comment on this item, go to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s web page.	None	One Wisconsin Now	None	None	None	2014-09-29T14:49:14	2014-09-26	['None']
-chct-00069	Conspiracy Theorists Claim That McCain Started The USS Forrestal Fire Of 1967, Killing 134 Service Members	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/08/30/fact-check-mccain-uss-forrestal-fire/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	3:21 PM 08/30/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-00009	"There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor."	false	/california/statements/2018/nov/12/donald-trump/trumps-overly-simplistic-and-false-claim-californi/	As deadly wildfires forced more than a quarter million Californians to flee their homes, President Trump recently alleged the infernos are the result of nothing more than poor "forest management." He also threatened to eliminate unspecified federal funds. The Camp fire in Northern California’s rural Butte County had killed 42 people and destroyed more than 6,400 homes as of Monday, making it the state’s most deadly and destructive fire in history. Authorities said more than 200 people remained unaccounted for. The fire started on Nov. 8, 2018 in a wooded area near the town of Paradise. Meanwhile, in Southern California, the Woolsey fire in Ventura and Los Angeles counties was blamed for the death of two people and had destroyed an estimated 435 structures. That blaze started on a suburban hillside, not a forest. In his first public comments about the fires, Trump tweeted on Nov. 10, 2018: "There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!" He tweeted again on Nov. 11, 2018: "With proper Forest Management, we can stop the devastation constantly going on in California. Get Smart!" Trump’s comments drew sharp rebukes from firefighters and state officials, both for the threat to withhold funding during an emergency and for oversimplifying the reasons the fires are so destructive. In a tweet two days later, he thanked California’s firefighters and first responders. He also approved California's request for a major disaster declaration, freeing up federal aid for fire response and recovery. Given the strong reaction, we decided to fact-check the president’s contention "there is no reason" for California’s fires other than poor forest management. Our research Trump’s claim suggests the state government controls decisions over how and whether to thin forests, clear brush and set prescribed burns. In reality, California owns just 2 percent of forest land in the state, while the federal government owns upwards of 60 percent, said Keith Gilless, a UC Berkeley professor of forest economics and chairman of the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. The rest is owned by private landowners, timber companies and Native American tribes. Gilless said tree harvests have declined significantly on national forest lands over the past four decades due, at least in part, to legal challenges by environmentalists concerned about clear-cutting. The professor added that money spent in the past on preventing fires has been diverted to fighting them. The state has made significant investments in forest management, he said, but "has no leverage" over the federal government to do the same. In August, McClatchy reported the Trump administration "proposed slashing tens of millions of dollars" for tree clearing. Gilless added that Trump’s tweet ignores additional key factors driving California’s recent "firestorms," such as winds reaching near 60 miles per hour and bone dry conditions. With those extremes, "even good preparation can be overcome," he said. "I think the biggest problem with the comments was the lack of nuance," Gilless said, describing them as "uninformed." "It is a complex situation. Simple pronouncements on a subject like this are almost always in error." Asked about Trump’s tweets in an interview on CNN, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Deputy Chief Scott McLean declined to respond directly, citing "the lack of information given in that tweet." He went on to describe California’s changing weather patterns. "What’s been pushing all the fires these last couple years? The winds. The erratic wind behavior. The high temperatures early in the year that have dried out all this vegetation," McLean said. Fire and climate experts also say the trend of more people moving into wildland areas increases the chances of sparking forest fires. Jesse Miller, an ecologist who studies wildfires and lectures at Stanford University, described Trump’s comments as "off base and not capturing the complexity of the situation." "Forest management might be part of the issue, but those are mostly federal lands up there (where the Camp fire started east of Chico). So, (Trump’s) actually in charge of most of those lands. … He’s also not recognizing the role of climate change. That’s by far what I and a lot of people think is the biggest factor driving these fires right now in California." The White House did not respond to a request for evidence supporting Trump’s tweet. Our ruling President Trump claimed in a tweet "there is no reason" for California’s deadly fires other than poor "forest management." Forestry and climate experts say forest management, which includes thinning out forests, setting prescribed burns and clearing brush, is only one factor. But it’s not the only one, and not necessarily the driving force in the state’s recent firestorms. California’s stronger winds, higher temperatures and drier conditions driven by climate change are also making the fires worse. That’s in addition to the fact that more people now live in forested areas, increasing the chances of sparking an inferno. Trump erroneously places the blame on just one factor, while ignoring these other reasons for California’s devastating fires. We rate his oversimplified claim False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-11-12T10:08:29	2018-11-10	['California']
-pomt-10733	Huckabee "was one of the highest taxing governors that we had in this country and rivaling Bill Clinton in terms of the Cato ratings."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/nov/14/fred-thompson/yes-he-raised-taxes-and-scored-low/	Thompson is correct that Huckabee is not exactly a darling of fiscal conservatives. When he became governor of Arkansas in 1996, Huckabee touted his aversion to taxes. But over the next 10 years, he became increasingly willing to compromise with the state's Democratic-led legislature on fiscal issues. Thompson cites information from the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank that issues biannual "Report Cards" for governors, based on their tax and spending records. In 1998, two years into his governorship, Huckabee received a B from Cato, which praised him for instituting a large, broad-based tax cut package in the previous year. However, Huckabee's Cato grade steadily dropped from there: The group gave him C's in 2000 and 2002, a D in 2004 and finally, as Thompson states, an F in 2006. In its report last year, the organization declared that Huckabee "went from being one of the best governors in America to one of the worst. ... The main reason for the drop was his insistence on raising taxes at almost every turn throughout his final term." Because of this drop, they gave him a grade of D for his 10-year career as governor. His tax increases included the state sales tax (more than once) as well as a cigarette and tobacco tax and a tax on nursing home beds. Huckabee's careerlong grade does, as Thompson states, match the D Bill Clinton earned in 1992, his last year as Arkansas' governor. Here's one last bit of context. It's worth noting that the fiscal reports done by Cato factor in spending policy as well as tax history, according to Stephen Slivinski, who produces the fiscal report cards. In 2006, Slivinski's team gave Huckabee the lowest grade of any governor when it came to tax policy. Thompson called Huckabee "one of the highest taxing governors," and it's hard to dispute that. Again, though, as a point of clarification, that doesn't mean Arkansas has the nation's highest tax burden. According to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit research organization, Arkansans have the 13th-highest state and local tax burden in the nation — that is, however, a significant jump from the No. 30 spot the state held when Huckabee became governor.	None	Fred Thompson	None	None	None	2007-11-14T00:00:00	2007-11-05	['Bill_Clinton', 'Mike_Huckabee']
-pomt-00255	Says three research universities "came out and said (CPS is) the best public school system in the United States of a major urban system."	mostly false	/illinois/statements/2018/oct/05/rahm-emanuel/emanuel-exaggerates-what-studies-say-about-cps/	Rahm Emanuel recently announced he won’t seek a third term as Chicago’s mayor, but he has continued to tout the city’s accolades, including recognition received in recent years for its improvements to public education. Last fall, we rated Mostly True a claim from a Chicago Public Schools press release that said its students were learning at a faster rate than their counterparts in 96 percent of U.S. school districts. That claim was based on findings from Stanford University that CPS students had improved at a faster rate on standardized test scores between third and eighth grade in recent years than their counterparts in most other U.S. school districts. But the report also noted that third- through eighth-graders in the nation’s third-largest district still perform below the national average, something the district’s glowing press release did not reflect. So we were curious what the mayor was referring to when he claimed a new title for CPS at a recent event: best among the nation’s largest districts. "30 years ago ... William Bennett, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Education, called the Chicago Public Schools the worst in the United States," Emanuel said while answering a question from an audience member at a forum hosted in Chicago by the New York-based Fortune magazine. "Stanford, University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago: all three, independently over 18 months came out and said it’s the best public school system in the United States of a major urban system." Adam Collins, a spokesman for the mayor, pointed us to studies from each university that he said backed up the mayor’s claim. "Reports from Stanford, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago all identify CPS students as having the fastest growing or the highest attainment in the matter and context covered within each study," Collins wrote in an email. The Stanford report, from education equality expert Sean Reardon, was the same one CPS based its claim on last year. Reardon found Chicago had the highest test score growth rate between third and eighth grade of any large district in the nation. But nowhere does the report label CPS "the best" among large urban districts. "We compared Chicago to the 100 largest school districts on measures of test score growth but not on other factors," Reardon said in a phone interview. The University of Chicago report cited by Emanuel’s office, which assessed college enrollment patterns among CPS graduates, was less analogous. It said the district’s four-year college enrollment rate of 44 percent exceeded that of New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas and called the district "a national leader in creating initiatives to support students in the transition to college." But like the Stanford report, it did not go so far as to crown CPS’ school system the best overall among similar districts. It also noted that CPS’ community college enrollment rate was lower than rates for other urban school systems. The UIC report, meanwhile, found Chicago elementary students were outperforming their peers in the rest of the state on standardized tests in comparisons between demographically similar groups. But the study was limited to Illinois, meaning no other major urban districts were included. For national context, however, UIC researcher Paul Zavitkovsky did refer to Reardon’s report. Zavitkovsky also pointed us to Chicago’s recent performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, where the district’s eighth graders scored slightly above the 2017 average for large cities, ranking lower than three other major urban districts in both reading and math but higher in those subjects than more than a dozen others, including Los Angeles, D.C. and Dallas. "I think the thing that’s fairest to say is that Chicago has made more progress toward school effectiveness than any large district in the country," Zavitkovsky said, adding that although academics must carefully define the terms of their research, the "spirit" of what the mayor said at the Fortune event was correct. Reardon took a similar view, noting that defining "best" remains something of an open question when it comes to evaluating school systems, complicated by the challenge of finding other measures of school quality tracked by all districts. He also pointed to college enrollment as another useful data point for making such an assessment. That context was missing entirely from the mayor’s remarks, however. Reardon’s research showing CPS students are improving the fastest among large districts comes closest to what Emanuel claimed. But even then, that’s far less emphatic than labeling CPS the best urban school system overall. Our ruling Emanuel said Stanford, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago all pronounced CPS "the best public school system in the United States of a major urban system." The mayor’s blanket assertion contains an element of truth — and some very good news — in that reports from all three universities underscored significant strides the district has made and ranked CPS at or near top of the list on certain measures of performance. But Emanuel dispensed with all the nuance in proclaiming CPS the "best" overall among big city districts, a declaration beyond the scope of any of the academic studies he cited to underpin his boast. We rate his claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Rahm Emanuel	None	None	None	2018-10-05T07:00:00	2018-09-25	['United_States']
-goop-00094	Bradley Cooper Stays At Gerard Butler’s Apartment After Fights With Irina Shayk?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/bradley-cooper-gerard-butler-irina-shayk-fights-apartment/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Bradley Cooper Stays At Gerard Butler’s Apartment After Fights With Irina Shayk?	4:08 pm, October 24, 2018	None	['Irina_Shayk']
-pomt-01283	Says U.S. Senate candidate Michelle Nunn was "handpicked" by President Barack Obama	half-true	/georgia/statements/2014/nov/01/david-perdue/democrats-want-nunn-know-she-will-often-oppose-the/	Democrat Michelle Nunn is running a close race against Republican David Perdue for Georgia’s open U.S. Senate seat. Perdue, the cousin of former Gov. Sonny Perdue, has made no bones that he doesn’t think the election is between him and Nunn, the daughter of longtime U.S. Senator Sam Nunn. In the race that could determine which party controls the Senate, Perdue has said that his real opponent is Barack Obama, a Democratic president with low approval ratings in Georgia. Obama "handpicked her. He funded her. He supports her," Perdue said in an Oct. 7 debate in Perry. "You will not bite the hand that feeds you." Perdue continued the theme in an Oct. 26 debate in Atlanta. When asked to pose a question to Nunn, he said, "Isn’t a vote for you just a vote for Barack Obama?" Implicit in Perdue’s effort to link Nunn with Obama is the often repeated charge that Nunn will be a rubber stamp for the president if she is elected. But Nunn has cited several areas where she disagrees with the president and reiterated that she will be a problem-solver and pragmatist in the Senate. "No one is feeding me by hand, David. I’ve spent maybe 45 minutes out of my entire life with President Obama," she said at the debate. "I do not agree with the president as some sort of rubber stamp." The back-and-forth could be political rhetoric. But with so much on the line nationally, PolitiFact Georgia wondered: did the president hand-pick Nunn with the expectation she would blindly support his policies? We began by asking the Perdue campaign for the basis for its claim. Spokesman Derrick Dickey cited not the president but two potential proxies: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the group Organizing for Action, or OFA. Reid did single out Nunn as "really good" in a July 2013 speech to OFA, Obama’s political arm. "The president is only as strong as his Congress," Reid said. "I talked with Michelle Nunn today. I think there will be an important announcement out of Georgia tomorrow." Nunn declared her candidacy on July 22, 2013. She consulted with the Democratic Senatorial Senate Campaign Committee before throwing her name into the ring, according to published reports. But she and her father have both said in interviews that Reid actually asked her not to run for the seat. Congressman John Barrow, a conservative Democrat running for re-election in the 12th District, was mentioned as a possible candidate instead for the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss. The DSCC did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Barrow spokesman Richard Carbo said the congressman had reviewed requests for a Senate run but in May 2013 announced he would stick with his initial House re-election plans. "He ultimately decided that he could continue to be an asset to the people in the 12th District and the entire state in the House of Representatives," Carbo said. A DSCC poll, released by the political website Politico.com a day after Barrow’s announcement, lends credibility to Nunn being the preferred candidate. The poll shows Nunn would fare better than Barrow against the then-presumptive GOP nominee, U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston. Dickey also notes that OFA committed to directing donors and money to Nunn’s campaign – the first such political effort for the group meant to be non-partisan. Since then, the president has told an Atlanta radio station that a Nunn victory in the race "means that Democrats keep control of the Senate" and his wife, Michelle Obama, headlined a fund-raiser for Nunn. "There is no doubt that Barack Obama and his allies picked Michelle Nunn to be the Democrat nominee and attempted to influence the outcome of the primary election on her behalf," Dickey said. Such ties may give Perdue an opening – but they don’t translate into Nunn walking in lockstep with Obama, or even the national Democratic Party. Nunn, for instance, has long bucked her party in calling for immediate action to build the Keystone Pipeline. Notably, that puts Nunn in the corner of only one prominent Democrat – fellow Southerner Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. She has pushed for reversing cuts to military spending, notably opposing Obama’s proposed cut to the A-10 Warthogs. She also criticized Obama for delaying funding and authorization to deepen the Port of Savannah. "Perdue's claim is ludicrous," Nunn spokesman Nathan Click said. "The fact is that since the beginning of this race, Michelle has been very clear that she is running to fight for Georgians and bring Georgia values on Washington -- not kowtow to party leaders." To that end, being the preferred candidate means only adding to the number of senators with a D after their name, not sharing all ideology, said Kerwin Swint, the director of the political science department at Kennesaw State University. Nunn has been clear she does support some of the party’s policies. She is for raising the minimum wage and has given support to Obamacare, with some changes. But it’s unlikely she could be a rubber stamp, or would even want to be, given the state’s politics, Swint said. "In a state like Georgia, you’d expect her to take a more conservative stance," Swint said. "She’s a moderate Democrat in a Southern state. Democrats would welcome her with open arms, knowing full well she’s going to have serious disagreements with them." Our ruling So, where does that leave us with Perdue’s claim? There is strong evidence that Democratic leaders – if not the president himself – made it clear that they preferred Nunn as the party’s nominee in Georgia. But Nunn’s stated opposition to some of Obama’s key policies supports the idea that she would not be a rubber stamp for the president. Perdue has a point about Nunn’s selection by top Democrats. But it needs a lot of additional information to be fully understood. We rate the claim Half True.	None	David Perdue	None	None	None	2014-11-01T00:00:00	2014-10-07	['None']
-pomt-10624	"I have never asked for nor received a single earmark or pork barrel project for my state."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/15/john-mccain/there-are-a-few-blips-on-the-record/	Responding to a question about the Bush tax cuts, Sen. John McCain boldly touted a perfect record against wasteful pork barrel spending at a Jan. 6, 2008, debate in New Hampshire. "... If we're going to restore the confidence of the American people and our Republican base first, we're going to have to cut the spending, we're going to have to eliminate the pork barrel and wasteful spending," McCain said. "And I'm proud to tell you, Chris, in 24 years as a member of Congress, I have never asked for nor received a single earmark or pork barrel project for my state and I guarantee you I'll veto those (spending) bills." McCain definitely holds claim to the title of pork-fighter, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. The Washington-based group watches for wasteful spending and has consistently lauded McCain as a champion of its causes, honoring him with its "Treasury Guardians" award. But holding a perfect record during a quarter-century of congressional spending isn't easy. Even a cursory review shows a few blips in his background: • In 2006, McCain co-sponsored with fellow Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl a bill that asked for $10-million for an academic center at the University of Arizona named in honor of William Rehnquist, the former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice. The project died in committee. • In 2003, he advocated and won authorization to buy property to create a buffer zone around Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, a project requested by the Air Force but not the president. • In 1992, he wrote a letter to the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requesting that the "EPA either reprogram $5-million out of existing funds or earmark the amount from an appropriate account" for a wastewater project in Nogales, Ariz., according to documents obtained by the Washington Post. The EPA administrator, William K. Reilly, said it wasn't doable. Whether these projects constitute earmarked pork depends on how you look at the issue. In its simplest form, pork barrel spending is a project designed to benefit a particular constituency, and an earmark is the designation of funds for a specific purpose. "I find items that would certainly look like parochial spending to many folks but it's hard to call them earmarks in the traditional sense of the definition," said Pete Sepp, a spokesman with the National Taxpayers Union. McCain has his own more nuanced definition, as do the various groups that track wasteful spending by Congress. "I take the approach that Justice Potter Stewart did in the Supreme Court decision about pornography," said Steve Ellis, with Taxpayers for Common Sense. "I can't quite define it but I know it when I see it." Ellis said McCain has a clear position against earmarks during his career. "None of those really rise to the traditional, largely accepted definition of earmarks," he said. "I think he's on pretty firm ground." McCain spokesman Brian Rogers defined congressional earmarks as "the practice of legislators designating the appropriation of money to specific unauthorized projects without the scrutiny of the congressional authorization process," he wrote in an e-mail. McCain's campaign points to the Rehnquist Center as the standard for how individual appropriations should be requested: stand-alone legislation that gets congressional study. "The bill did not pass, John McCain did not seek an earmarked appropriation for the center and the result was no funding for this center," Rogers said. With the Air Force base, McCain's camp said he argued for the authorization but the appropriations committee funded it. Rogers said the wastewater facility McCain sought was in the president's fiscal year 1993 budget. When the administrator said the agency couldn't meet the need from existing funds, Rogers added, the senator did not seek an earmark in an appropriations bill. However, McCain did write a letter with Kyl in October 2007 asking the EPA to include the money in its budget request. Again the EPA left it out, so Kyl — not McCain — put an earmark in the 2008 omnibus spending bill. "Senator McCain has been a consistent opponent of unauthorized congressional earmarks and pork-barrel spending," Rogers concluded. Such an assertion seems to rely heavily on interpretation — which runs counter to McCain's unequivocal statement at the debate. "To the average person on the outside world, there might not be much of a difference with these things," Sepp said. Indeed, we agree with Sepp that the narrow Washington definition of "earmark" is less important than the impression McCain has left. It appears he was seeking pork barrel projects for Arizona, which puts a few blemishes on an otherwise pure record against pork. And so while we find there is no question that McCain has been a leading congressional voice against pork, these three examples conflict with his bold claim. So we find that claim False.	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-01-15T00:00:00	2008-01-06	['None']
-pomt-05260	Says he "earned the highest possible credit ratings as state treasurer."	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2012/may/31/josh-mandel/josh-mandel-campaign-claims-he-earned-highest-poss/	Josh Mandel's new campaign ad "Change" uses about half of its 30 seconds to attack Sherrod Brown, the incumbent Democratic senator he hopes to unseat. For the remainder of the time, the ad touts Mandel’s record as the Republican state treasurer. Mandel, the ad says, "earned the highest possible credit ratings as state treasurer." That had a familiar ring to it, so PolitiFact Ohio decided to check it out. This is the second claim PolitiFact Ohio has looked at from this ad. We previously rated as False a claim that Brown "cast the deciding vote on a government takeover of health care." One of the treasurer's responsibilities is to invest money for local governments through the STAR (State Treasury Asset Reserve) Ohio investment fund, an investment pool with assets of more than $4.1 billion. The Mandel campaign confirmed that the claim in the ad refers to the AAA rating that Standard & Poor’s gave the STAR Ohio fund. It confirmed that rating in a letter to the state last August. Mandel made a similar claim in an email to supporters last October, saying then that the fund "just received the highest possible credit rating one of these funds can receive." PolitiFact Ohio rated that claim Half True. We found that the statement's wording, especially that the fund "just" received its rating, gave the impression that the rating had improved under Mandel. In fact, the rating had been in place for 16 years -- since 1995, the first year the fund was rated by S&P. Public finance experts said the treasurer did deserve some credit for maintaining that rating. Kevin O’Brien, executive director at the Center for Public Management in the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, noted then that the highest praise should be reserved for the fund managers who maintained the rating during the financial crisis in 2008. Mandel deserves credit for maintaining the rating his staff inherited when he took office in January 2011, said O’Brien, a former financial analyst for Moody’s Investors Service, another credit rating agency. "They maintained the bond rating; they didn't achieve the bond rating." The claim in the new ad, though similar to the email claim, is more carefully worded. It does not imply that the state’s rating had "just" improved. But knowing the credit rating has been at that level for more than a decade and a half provides a clearer picture. Mandel’s statement is accurate but needs additional information to provide clarification. On the Truth-O-Meter, the claim rates Mostly True.	None	Josh Mandel	None	None	None	2012-05-31T06:00:00	2012-05-23	['None']
-faan-00019	 The TPP “allows corporations from 11 different countries to sue Canada whenever our government passes a law that hurts their profits.”	factscan score: misleading	http://factscan.ca/paul-manly-tpp-profits/	The TPP does allow foreign investors to sue Canada, but not for profit loss alone. Companies must show that Canada breached one of its treaty commitments, which resulted in lost profit.	None	Paul Manly	None	None	None	2017-05-10	None	['Canada']
-hoer-00928	Message Claims That You Can Stop Mosques Being Built By Not Leaving Religion Blank on 2016 Australian Census	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/bigoted-and-nonsensical-message-claims-that-you-can-stop-mosques-being-built-by-not-leaving-religion-blank-on-2016-australian-census/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Bigoted and Nonsensical Message Claims That You Can Stop Mosques Being Built By Not Leaving Religion Blank on 2016 Australian Census	February 12, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00776	Did a Sperm Whale Die After Swallowing 64 Pounds of Plastic Debris?	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sperm-whale-die-swallowing-64-pounds-plastic-debris/	None	Critter Country	None	Dan Evon	None	Did a Sperm Whale Die After Swallowing 64 Pounds of Plastic Debris?	12 April 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04497	Says "Portland has higher standards than feds on allowed police use of force."	true	/oregon/statements/2012/oct/05/sam-adams/are-portlands-use-force-standards-stricter-federal/	The Portland City Council's decision to fight the mandated rehiring of Portland police officer Ron Frashour -- the man responsible for the 2010 fatal shooting of Aaron Campbell -- has again stoked public discussion about use of force. Central to the Frashour case is the question of whether the officer used the proper level of force in his interactions with Campbell two years ago. Frashour was initially fired after shooting an unarmed Campbell in the back, though a Multnomah County grand jury had found no criminal wrongdoing. The case then went to an arbitrator who heard training officers testify that Frashour acted as trained. The city is fighting that determination and the controversy over the policy and Frashour’s actions has stayed hot. In a small Twitter dust up, one user (@nextchampjr) asked Mayor Sam Adams if he thought the federal standard for use of force, which the arbiter found Frashour met, ought to be reworked. The mayor replied that, in fact, "Portland has higher standards than feds on allowed police use of force." We wondered whether that was accurate. Before we get to our analysis, we note that we’re staying out of the debate over how Frashour was trained, and how well. We are only examining the policy. First, we needed to establish the generally accepted federal standard. Such a standard exists, but not in quite the way you might expect. There’s no series of agreed-upon federal guidelines that lay out exactly what sort of force can be used in a specific instance. Instead there’s a legal term called the Graham Standard or the Objective Reasonableness Standard. Back in 1989, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Graham v. Connor that any questions regarding the use of force should be held to the Fourth Amendment rules of "reasonableness." Essentially, this means that any use of force should be such that it would be deemed necessary by "a reasonable officer." "When we say reasonable, it's an objective standard," explains Tung Yin, a criminal law professor at Lewis and Clark. "You judge it from the perspective of the reasonable officer on the scene." This caused some controversy at the time the case was decided because whether you perceive force as reasonable in the heat of the moment -- which is the standard -- is often different than how you perceive it after the fact, Yin said. So, how is Portland’s policy different? Caryn Brooks, the mayor's spokeswoman, pointed us to Portland Police Policy 1010.20. According to that policy, adopted by former Police Chief Rosie Sizer, officers should use "only the force reasonably necessary under the totality of circumstances to perform their duties and resolve confrontations effectively and safely." That piece just gets the bureau in line with the legal standards. But the policy also adds these two pieces of direction: 1) "It is the policy of the Bureau to accomplish its mission as effectively as possible with as little reliance on force as practical." 2) "The Bureau expects members to develop and display, over the course of their practice of law enforcement, the skills and abilities that allow them to regularly resolve confrontations without resorting to the higher levels of allowable force." Yin described this text as more "aspirational text, rather than any sort of legal requirement" but said he felt the mayor’s characterization was accurate. We agree with Yin. We rate this claim True.	None	Sam Adams	None	None	None	2012-10-05T14:07:05	2012-09-25	['None']
-wast-00051	In a Koch brothers-funded study...it shows that Medicare for all is actually much more, is actually much cheaper than the current system that we pay right now.	false	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/08/10/fact-checking-alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-media-blitz/	None	None	Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez	Glenn Kessler	None	Fact-checking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's media blitz	August 10	None	['None']
-ranz-00007	There's a separate immigration category for Labour's KiwiBuild programme	fact	https://www.radionz.co.nz/programmes/election17-fact-or-fiction/story/201857236/fact-or-fiction-do-the-leaders-know	Labour does have a policy under the immigration section on their website to introduce a KiwiBuild Visa. This visa is “for residential construction firms who train a local when they hire a worker from overseas".	Elections	Jacinda Ardern	None	None	Fact or Fiction: Do the leaders know?	4 September 2017	None	['None']
-hoer-01036	Surprise, Surprise! Valentines Day Luxury RV Facebook Giveaways	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/surprise-surprise-valentines-day-luxury-rv-facebook-giveaways-are-scams/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Surprise, Surprise! Valentines Day Luxury RV Facebook Giveaways Are Scams	February 10, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-07810	Limiting labor negotiations to only wages is "how it is for the most part in the private sector."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/17/alberta-darling/wisconsin-state-sen-alberta-darling-says-unions-pr/	A key argument for Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to strip Wisconsin public employees of most of their bargaining rights is pretty simple: The budget is tight, and they’ve got sweetheart deals you don’t find in the private sector. If the move is approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature, the state employees would be forced to pay more for pension contributions and health care coverage. As it stands, Walker’s bill would essentially leave only wages to be discussed at the bargaining table -- and those raises would generally be limited by the rate of inflation. As Republican leaders fanned out to defend the bill, state Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, appeared on WISN-TV’s "Upfront with Mike Gousha" on Feb. 13, 2011. She is co-chairman of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, the first stop for the bill. She began her comments by agreeing with Gousha about the scope of the proposals, which have stirred massive protests at the Capitol -- "It’s huge." -- and went on to say it was important that public employees pay their "fair share," just like workers in the private sector. Darling added, "The governor is proposing that we have collective bargaining deal only with wages which is how it is, for the most part, in the private sector." That didn’t sound right to us. Walker’s bill would rewrite the state Employment Relations Act -- a law covering state employees that is more than 50 years old and was last amended in 1971. But private sector unions are covered by a federal law and generally bargain on all sorts of things. We tried to reach Darling to ask for her backup, but she didn’t respond. So we turned to some experts who are involved in private sector labor relations. And we took a look at federal law, the National Labor Relations Act,which governs most private employers. According to this overview on the National Labor Relations Board website: "Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935 to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy." The law gives workers the right to bargain collectively for a contract that sets wages, benefits, hours and other working conditions, the NLRA says. The law also requires workers and employers to "bargain in good faith about wages, hours, vacation time, insurance, safety practices and other mandatory subjects." That covers a lot more than wages. To see how it plays out on a practical level, we checked in with some folks on both sides of the bargaining table. Candice Owley, president Wisconsin Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, said wages are only part of what’s important to nurses when they negotiate with hospitals. Her union represents about 3,000 nurses, about half of whom are employed at private facilities. "We spend very little time these days on wages and a whole lot of time on working conditions," she said, such as seniority, schedules, the length of shifts, and what happens when a nurse is assigned to a different department. Said Owley: "We bargain every kind of working condition imaginable." James R. Scott, a Milwaukee laywer who represents management. His firm, Linder & Marsack, has about 80 percent private sector work. "That’s not true," he said of Darling’s statement. "The standard is that you can bargain about everything that affects wages, hours and working conditions." Scott noted that recent high profile negotiations have involved concessions from workers at companies such as Harley-Davidson, Kohler and Mercury Marine. All of those manufacturers recently sought, and won, contracts that included two-tiered wage structures, the use of temporary workers and other changes that will reduce labor costs. With the companies reeling from the recession, the union members voted for changes that saved their jobs from being moved to other states. "When you’re in concession bargaining it tends to be about money," Scott said, but added that unions "are not prevented from making a non-economic proposal." Rick Badger, executive director of AFSCME District Council 40, whose membership is largely public employees, but includes some private sector workers. In the cases of Harley and other manufacturers, "really drastic measures were taken to some jobs, but the unions still exist," Badger said. He said future talks will, of course, include discussions of benefits, schedules and other matters. "All of these things are negotiated," Badger said. "You sit down and come up with solutions. It’s not just money, it’s the workplace." Let’s return to Darling’s statement. In arguing public employee unions ought to be treated more like their their private sector counterparts, she said "for the most part" private contract talks are limited to wages. However, the National Labor Relations Act make it clear: Private employers with unions are not only allowed to bargain on many other issues -- that law requires the subjects be about far more than just wages. We rate her statement False.	None	Alberta Darling	None	None	None	2011-02-17T15:30:31	2011-02-13	['None']
-pose-00889	"The first year ... Bob will reorganize city government to focus on assisting and growing our economy. All agencies involved in the permitting and regulatory process, community redevelopment, housing, construction services, the Tampa Convention Center and related iity entities will be consolidated into a single mission under the deputy mayor for economic opportunity."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/buck-o-meter/promise/921/consolidate-departments-for-business-permits-and-r/	None	buck-o-meter	Bob Buckhorn	None	None	Consolidate departments for business permits and regulation	2011-05-18T14:33:25	None	['None']
-tron-00317	Social Commentary on Race by Pat Buchanan	authorship confirmed!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/pat-buchanan-social-commentary-on-race/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Social Commentary on Race by Pat Buchanan	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-01330	Ed Gillespie’s "firm even lobbied for five foreign governments, including a dictator now awaiting trial for war crimes."	half-true	/virginia/statements/2014/oct/24/mark-warner/warner-says-gillespies-firm-lobbied-brutal-dictato/	A new ad by U.S. Sen. Mark Warner tags Republican challenger Ed Gillespie as "million dollar lobbyist" and links him to a notorious client. "His firm even lobbied for five foreign governments, including a dictator now awaiting trial for war crimes," narrator says. We decided to take a look. The dictator Although the ad doesn’t name the dictator, it leaves no doubt of his identity. The screen flashes an Ivory Coast flag and a headline from the Daily Mail in England on April 12, 2011 saying "Defiant dictator arrested." That article detailed the overthrow and capture of Laurent Gbagbo, who had ruled the Ivory Coast since 2000 and is now awaiting trial before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The West African nation faced violent division during Gbagbo’s reign and for years, the ruler resisted international pressure to stand for reelection. Gillespie, meanwhile, co-founded his lobbying firm in 2000 with Democrat Jack Quinn, a former chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore. On Nov. 10, 2004, Quinn Gillespie and Associates signed a six-month contract, worth $510,000, with the Ivory Coast to improve the nation’s relations with the United States. Among other things, the firm agreed to organize a visit to Washington for Gbagbo and meetings with U.S. leaders. You won’t find Gillespie’s signature on the contract, however. That’s because he was absent from the firm for almost two years when the contract was signed, according to Paul Logan, Gillespie’s campaign spokesman. Logan said Gillespie went on leave in January 2003 to serve as chairman of the Republican National Committee and didn’t return until March 2005. The contract and the firm’s subsequent federal disclosure that it was representing a foreign agent was signed by Quinn. The firm’s work for Gbagbo started Dec. 22, 2004 and ended June 30, 2005, according to a disclosure statement it filed with the U.S. Department of Justice. Jeffrey Connaughton, then vice chairman of Quinn Gillespie, told The New Yorker in 2012 that firm was hoping to demonstrate that Gbagbo was willing to have free and fair elections. Those hopes soured, the article said, when Connaughton flew to the Ivory Coast, met with Gbagbo, and concluded the leader "had no interest in democracy -- he just wanted P.R." Connaughton sent us a statement, which he also gave to The Washington Post, saying Gillespie made it "clear" when the firm started that he would not represent foreign governments. "He was at the RNC when I decided to take the lead on Ivory Coast, so if anyone had checked with (the firm) or me, we would have confirmed that Ed had absolutely nothing to do with it." Gbagbo finally agreed to hold elections in November 2010, but lost to Alassane Ouattara, refused to give up power and ignited a civil war. Gbagbo was arrested in May when French and rebel forces took control of the capital, Abidjan. He has been sent to The Hague, where International Criminal Court has charged him with four counts of being an indirect co-perpetrator of violent acts committed his troops. Human Rights Watch estimates at least 3,000 people were killed and 150 women were raped during the six-month crisis. Other nations Warner’s ad also flashes the flags of four other countries it says Gillespie’s firm represented. David Turner, Warner’s campaign spokesman, backed the claim by sending us Quinn Gillespie disclosure forms. They showed the company worked for: Pakistan from April 2006 to April 2008 Costa Rica from a few weeks near the end of 2006 Macedonia from April 2007 to April 2008 Bosnian Serb Republic from January 2007 through December 2007 The firm reported earning a total of $3 million from all five nations. For perspective, Quinn Gillespie was paid $52.3 million by domestic clients from 2006 to 2008, according OpenSecrets.org. The payments from foreign nations came to 5.4 percent of the firm’s revenues during the three years. Gillespie says he’s never personally lobbied for a foreign government and the records back him up. Disclosure forms filed by the firm do not list him on its lobbying team for any of the nations. The teams generally had Democratic lobbyists, as indicated by their campaign donations, which were part of the disclosures. Gillespie left the firm in June 2007 to work in President George W. Bush’s administration. The company continued its relationship with Bosnia and Macedonia after his departure and signed new contracts with Japan and Indonesia. Our ruling Warner’s ad says Gillespie’s "firm lobbied for five foreign governments, including a dictator now awaiting trial for war crimes." The ad -- which is carefully worded -- has a point that Gillespie’s firm lobbied for five foreign governments, including the Ivory Coast, whose former ruler, Gbagbo, is awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court. But the ad’s effort to link Gillespie to a brutal dictator lacks important context. Gillespie had been on leave from the firm for more than a year when the Ivory Coast deal was signed. None of the company’s federal disclosures indicate Gillespie was involved in the representation of any foreign clients, and Gbagbo was charged with crimes against humanity for events that happened in 2010 and 2011, well after the firm’s relationship with the Ivory Coast ended. While there’s accuracy to Warner’s claim, it leaves out vital details. We rate it Half True.	None	Mark Warner	None	None	None	2014-10-24T12:03:23	2014-10-20	['None']
-pomt-01668	Says his "Act 10 reforms" have "saved the taxpayers some $3 billion."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2014/aug/20/scott-walker/scott-walker-says-union-reform-law-brought-massive/	Scott Walker’s signature accomplishment as governor, the Act 10 collective bargaining reform law, curtailed the powers of public employee unions, reduced the take-home pay of most public workers and caused months of protests in Madison. In a July 21, 2014 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Walker defended the three-year-old law, and made a claim that he’s already begun to repeat ahead of the November general election. "I support our Act 10 reforms," he said, "because they saved the taxpayers some $3 billion." Walker has long been touting how the state and local governments have used the "tools" in the law to reduce spending on pensions and health benefits for public employees. But Act 10 wasn’t a tax cut. So have taxpayers really saved some $3 billion? Billions and billions We’ve heard from Walker before about billions in savings. In March 2014, he claimed that once his Blueprint for Prosperity plan was signed into law, "we will have delivered $2 billion" in tax relief -- a claim we rated True. But that statement was about tax measures that have or will come about as a result of actions taken during Walker’s four-year term. The new claim refers to taxpayer savings as a result of Act 10. The law requires most state and local government employees to pay a larger share of the cost of their pension and health benefits -- which is where Walker’s claim of savings to taxpayers comes in. There was never a question that the financial impact would be large. In criticizing the law, the liberal Institute for Wisconsin’s Future said in December 2011 that the higher benefit contributions would cost public employees $700 million per year in take-home pay. And public employees, of course, are taxpayers, too. Pension contributions Pension savings make up the lion's share of Walker's claim. All state employees and nearly all local government employees participate in the state pension system. Only the City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County run pension systems separate from the state. For years in the state system, state government and municipalities paid not only the employer share of pension contributions but -- primarily due to collective bargaining -- essentially all of the employee contributions. Act 10 requires that for most public employees, pension contributions be split equally between employees and employers. Contribution rates are adjusted each year, based on investment returns and other factors. For 2015, the rates are 6.8 percent of salary for most public employees and 7.7 percent for elected and executive employees. In other words, under Act 10, most public employees contribute 6.8 percent of their salaries for their pensions and their employers contribute the same amount. Walker puts the pension savings at $2.35 billion -- $1.56 billion from local government employees, plus $794.8 million from state employees (including those working for the University of Wisconsin System). That’s his tally for how much employees have contributed to their pensions from the time Act 10 took effect in 2011 through 2014, with the figure for 2014 being an estimate. We obtained figures from the state Department of Employee Trust Funds. They show $1.59 billion in state and local government employee pension contributions from 2011 through 2013. And, more than half way through 2014, the department expects the 2014 employee contributions to be at or slightly above the $761 million they were in 2013. So, even if the employee contributions in 2014 turn out to be the same as in 2013, the total savings to taxpayers would be $1.59 billion plus $761 million, or a total of $2.35 billion -- the same total Walker claims. But it bears repeating -- it isn’t as though those pension costs disappeared. Rather, they were transferred from taxpayers as a whole to public employees. Health insurance The next-largest Act 10 savings cited by Walker is from health insurance. It’s similar to pension savings in that public employees are picking up a greater share of the cost, easing the burden on general taxpayers. Act 10 requires most public employees to pay at least 12 percent of their premiums, which translated into a big increase for many employees and a savings for state and local governments. In addition, Act 10 gives public employers flexibility to change benefits, which can also result in additional savings for the unit of government involved. Walker says school districts statewide saved $200 million in health insurance costs just in 2011-’12, the first year after Act 10. That calculation comes from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. Dale Knapp, the group’s research director, told us the figure is conservative. Meanwhile, Walker says state government has saved $482 million on health insurance savings as a result of the higher employee premium contributions and changes made to health coverage -- $264 million for 2012 and 2013, plus $218 million for 2014 and 2015. He cited figures the State Budget Office uses to help create the state budget. The $200 million in school district health insurance savings plus the $482 million in state savings equals $682 million in health savings. Added to the $2.35 billion in pension savings makes $3.03 billion in total savings. The figures don’t take into account health insurance savings seen by municipalities, nor health savings seen by school districts after the first year of Act 10, so the actual number would be higher. Knapp said he’s not aware of any savings calculations for municipalities. Moreover, there is anecdotal evidence of other savings throughout the state. For example, a Milwaukee Public Schools actuarial report in 2012 said Act 10 enabled the school district to shave $1 billion from its long-term benefit obligations to retirees. MPS used the law to raise eligibility requirements for retirement benefits other than pension and changed the design of health care plans. Similarly, we found in a previous Act 10 factcheck that the law saved Milwaukee County $22 million in pension and health benefits in 2012, although that didn’t fully offset a reduction in state aid. That leads to an important point before we close. The Act 10 savings aren’t a dollar-for-dollar a tax cut for taxpayers. Rather, they are savings in the context of a budget and what would otherwise be spent for a particular purpose or program. Indeed, Walker himself has often said that easing the employee benefits burden on state and local governments has given them flexibility -- whether that’s using the savings for property tax relief, shifting money to other spending or offsetting cuts in state aid. Our rating Walker says his "Act 10 reforms" have "saved the taxpayers some $3 billion." Requiring most state and local government employees to contribute more to their pensions has saved public employers more than $3 billion, including $2.35 billion in pension costs, and there are more savings that haven’t fully been tallied. Those costs haven’t simply been eliminated, however. They’ve been taken on by public employees, who are also taxpayers. We rate the statement Mostly True.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2014-08-20T05:00:00	2014-07-21	['None']
-pose-00665	"Consider developing a 'cut as you go' rule that would apply to any member proposing the creation of new government programs or benefits...Under this 'CutGO' rule, if it is your intention to create a new government program, you must also terminate or reduce spending on an existing government program of equal or greater size – in the very same bill."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/gop-pledge-o-meter/promise/695/develop-a-cut-as-you-go-rule/	None	gop-pledge-o-meter	John Boehner	None	None	Develop a 'cut as you go' rule	2010-12-22T09:57:30	None	['None']
-pomt-12879	Imitation dairy products often differ nutritionally from those they mimic, and labeling them "milk" or "cheese" or "yogurt" is "against the law."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/jan/27/tammy-baldwin/labeling-imitation-dairy-products-milk-or-cheese-o/	Hostilities between the dairy industry and its competitors are flaring anew as alternatives to cow’s milk take up more space in the dairy case. That means the politicians can’t be far behind. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, spoke up Jan. 12, 2017 in a news release lauding herself as somebody who "stands up for Wisconsin dairy farmers." Baldwin wants Congress to pass the Dairy PRIDE Act -- officially known (at least to a few) as the "Defending Against Imitations and Replacements of Yogurt, milk, and cheese to Promote Regular Intake of Dairy Everyday Act." After two years of falling milk prices, she and other federal lawmakers want the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to enforce consumer regulations defining "milk." Is Baldwin right that imitation dairy products -- for instance, soy milk -- often differ nutritionally from dairy item? And is labeling them "milk" or "cheese" or "yogurt" against the law? To back that up, Baldwin’s office pointed us to nutritional labels, and to FDA regulations that plainly state: "Milk is the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows." 'Against the law' To dairy officials, inclusion of the word "milk" on non-dairy products is a misappropriation of the popularity of cow’s milk. But competitors say coconut milk and soy milk have long histories and aren’t confused with dairy. What’s more, they note, the FDA doesn’t punish "peanut butter" for using the dairy term "butter." But the FDA in 2008 and 2012 did tell two makers of drinks labeled "soy milk" that under its regulations, such labeling was inappropriate because the products did not contain "milk" as defined by the agency. "Soy drink" or "Soy beverage" would be better, the agency said at the time. That -- and regulatory language allowing the FDA to declare a product misbranded and try to block its sale -- help Baldwin’s case. Federal regulations are part of the United States Code that is the law of the land. But to the frustration of the dairy industry, the agency has not consistently enforced that line of reasoning, allowing use of "soy milk" and "almond milk" and many others. Rebecca Cross, a San Francisco-based regulatory lawyer for food product companies, said the FDA may be viewing labels on a case-by-case basis and allowing use of dairy terms on plant-based products so long as the use is not misleading. Nathan Beaver, a food and drug lawyer with Foley & Lardner in Washington, D.C., explained that foods such as soy milk that have no FDA-written "standard of identity" must choose a "common or usual" name for their products. Courts, though, have jurisdiction over disputes on the issue and therefore get final say on the meaning of the FDA rules. On milk, courts so far have found that cow’s milk competitors are not misbranded if their names don’t confuse consumers, said Cross. The nutrition comparison Dairy alternatives, Baldwin said, "contain a range of ingredients and nutrients that are often not equivalent to the nutrition content of dairy products." This is a bit tricky to evaluate given that beverages labeled as some kind of "milk" now come from such diverse sources as soy, almonds, cashews, hemp, rice, oats, coconut and sunflowers. For help, we turned to Vandana Sheth, a registered dietician and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, a leading organization of food and nutrition professionals. For starters, Sheth noted that dairy products can be a good source of calcium, vitamin D, protein and other essential nutrients. Soy milk provides close to the same amount of protein as cow’s milk. Rice milk typically provides minimal protein and is higher in carbohydrates. Almond milk is usually quite low in protein and also less calorically dense, she said. Plant protein tends to be of a lower quality than dairy proteins, though soy is close, said John Lucey, a food scientist who directs the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our own review of labels found that soy and almond beverages, like cow’s milk, are all relatively low calorie, low carbohydrate, low sodium drinks. They are all heavy with calcium. But they feature a different mix of vitamins and minerals, and fat content. Examples: soy milk has a lot of folate, while cow’s milk typically has none; cow’s milk contains some Vitamin C, but the soy, almond and hemp drinks we examined have none. Almond and soy milks feature some iron and fiber -- nutrients typically not found in cow’s milk. "All the products profile differently," said Susan Levin, a registered dietitian and director of nutrition education for the Washington, D.C.-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Bottom line: Baldwin’s nutrition observation is on target, based on a comparison of milk products. Our rating Baldwin claimed that imitation dairy products made from plants often differ nutritionally from the real thing, and labeling them "milk" or "cheese" or "yogurt" is "against the law." The nutrition point is accurate, and the legal point is partially so. Overall we rate her claim Mostly True. Share the Facts Politifact 1 6 Politifact Rating: Imitation dairy products often differ nutritionally from those they mimic, and labeling them "milk" or "cheese" or "yogurt" is "against the law." Tammy Baldwin U.S. senator, D-Wis. In a news release Thursday, January 12, 2017 -01/-12/2017 Read More info	None	Tammy Baldwin	None	None	None	2017-01-27T05:00:00	2017-01-12	['None']
-wast-00138	"The city of Denver refused ICE's request to turn over a criminal illegal alien charged with vehicular homicide for killing another driver in a horrific hit-and-run."	not the whole story	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/03/15/fact-checking-trumps-weekly-address-on-immigrants-crime-and-sanctuary-cities/	None	None	Donald Trump	Salvador Rizzo	None	Fact-checking Trump's weekly address on immigrants, crime and sanctuary cities	March 15	None	['Denver']
-pomt-10649	"Bill Clinton cut the military drastically."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/05/rudy-giuliani/he-ignores-bipartisan-support-for-defense-cuts/	At a Republican debate in Manchester, N.H., on Jan. 5, 2008, Rudy Giuliani blamed President Clinton for shrinking the military. "Bill Clinton cut the military drastically," Giuliani said. "It was called the peace dividend, one of those nice-sounding phrases: very devastating. It was a 25, 30 percent cut in the military." This claim is similar to others made by Mitt Romney in campaign speeches that we have previously checked and found were misleading. In April 2007, Romney said, "Following the end of the Cold War, President Clinton began to dismantle our military. He reduced our forces by 500,000. He retired almost 80 ships. Our spending on national defense dropped from over 6 percent of GDP to 3.8 percent today." The two Republicans are correct that military forces were reduced significantly under Clinton. The active-duty military totaled 1.8-million at the start of his presidency in 1993 and declined to 1.4-million in 2000. They are also correct that the naval fleet shrank dramatically. The Navy had 454 ships in 1993, but as vessels were retired and not replaced, the fleet was down to 341 by 2000. But they are selectively choosing numbers that make it appear that the military cuts were Clinton's alone. In fact, the cuts were prompted by the end of the Cold War during the presidency of President George H.W. Bush, a Republican. During Bush's presidency, he and Congress agreed to a sharp drop in military personnel. Active-duty military declined from 2.2-million to 1.8-million. Total defense forces also shrank, from 3.3-million to 2.9-million. The Republicans are trying to portray Clinton and the Democrats as weak on defense and to make the peace dividend look like a partisan effort. But contrary to the Republicans' claims, the post-Cold War shrinkage of the U.S. military was very much a bipartisan effort. It began under a Republican president and a Democratic Congress and continued under a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. And so we find, as we did before, that this claim is Half True.	None	Rudy Giuliani	None	None	None	2008-01-05T00:00:00	2008-01-05	['None']
-pomt-00657	The 2005 round of military base closings "has not yet resulted in savings."	half-true	/virginia/statements/2015/may/15/rob-wittman/rob-wittman-says-2005-brac-round-base-closings-has/	U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman is trying to thwart the Pentagon’s efforts to begin a new round of military base closing. There have been five rounds of closures in recent decades, starting in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union collapsed and the U.S. military retooled for a post-Cold War mission. The last round took place in 2005 and talk of new spate is worrying congressmen who have bases in their districts. Wittman, a Republican, represents Virginia’s 1st District which includes the Army’s Fort A.P. Hill and the Marine base in Quantico. He recently questioned whether a new round of the Base Realignment and Closure program -- known as BRAC -- made strategic and economic sense. "We cannot forget that the 2005 BRAC round has not yet resulted in savings," he stated in an April 30 news release. We checked to see if he was right about the lacking of savings. Gordon Neal, Wittman’s spokesman, sent us a 2009 report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that examined the bottom line of the 2005 BRAC, which shuttered 24 bases, realigned 24 others and eliminated about 12,000 civilian jobs. Calculations in the report were based on a Pentagon estimate that the 2005 BRAC would save Uncle Sam $3.9 billion a year -- an estimate that the GAO said is probably high. The GAO also noted that the military spent $35 billion implementing BRAC, far above the original $21 billion estimate. For example, it cost $1.7 billion more than expected to close Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington and move its operations to Fort Belvoir, Va. and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. A chart in the report shows the annual savings started in 2006, but those economies weren’t expected to be enough to pay off the upfront costs of BRAC until 2018, five years later than originally projected. The GAO updated its analysis in 2012 and found that the savings and cost estimates were still about the same. That’s the last time the agency did a cost analysis of the 2005 BRAC. "So 2018 should still be about the time that the savings would exceed the cost," Brian Lepore, GAO’s director of defense capabilities and management, wrote in an email. We spoke to two defense budget analysts and they both told us that Wittman’s statement is correct that the U.S. hasn’t yet pocketed "net savings" from the realignment. But that doesn’t mean the program isn’t paying off. Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the last round of BRAC is producing savings but, for the moment, they’re going towards recovering the costs of implementing the program. "We are going to hit the break even point, and after that it’s all savings," Harrison told us. Harrison was among nearly 40 defense analysts who late last month signed a letter supporting the Pentagon’s call for another round of closings, saying there are surplus military installations around the nation. Harrison said Wittman’s use of the 2005 BRAC to argue against another round is off base. The last realignment round was different from the four that came in the 1980s and 1990s, Harrison said, because it focused much more heavily on base consolidations than previous rounds that were mostly directed at merely shuttering facilities. Consolidations are more expensive, he said, because they entail moving operations from one place to another, which means buildings have to be constructed. In 2012, Dorothy Robyn, then deputy under secretary of defense, made the same point in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. "In short, the 2005 round took place during a period of growth in the military, and it reflected the goals and needs of that time. Because the focus was on transforming installations to better support forces -- as opposed to saving money and space -- it is a poor gauge of the savings that the Department can achieve through another BRAC round," she stated in written testimony. Robyn said the previous BRAC rounds in 1988, 1991, 1993 and 1995 totaled $8 billion in annual savings. Our ruling Wittman said that the 2005 BRAC round has "not resulted in savings." Savings are coming in every year, but they haven’t yet reached the break-even point of paying back the costs of BRAC. That’s expected to happen in 2018 and, after that, the money can be used for other purposes. Wittman’s statement is missing important information and creates a faulty impression that the 2005 BRAC has been a loser. On the whole, we rate his claim Half True.	None	Rob Wittman	None	None	None	2015-05-15T00:00:00	2015-04-30	['None']
-farg-00149	A provision of the Senate tax bill eliminating the penalty for not buying health insurance would have "no impact on anyone" who buys coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/11/cottons-false-insurance-assurance/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Tom Cotton	D'Angelo Gore	['health care']	Cotton’s False Insurance Assurance	November 21, 2017	[' CBS’ “Face the Nation" – Sunday, November 19, 2017 ']	['None']
-pose-00752	"I've been in cities where I've seen people stand in line to give their kids a chance to be safer and better educated. And the idea that we're going to deny them a chance to have choice; to put their kids where their kids can get the best education, in my opinion violates their civil rights. To me it's the biggest civil rights issue out there. The right of mothers and fathers to have the resources to put their kids in a school setting where their kids can learn and prosper."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/ohio/promises/kasich-o-meter/promise/782/promote-school-choice/	None	kasich-o-meter	John Kasich	None	None	Promote school choice	2011-01-07T15:00:17	None	['None']
-snes-03524	Celebrity Cruise lines released an ad saying that Donald Trump's supporters were no longer welcome on their ships.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/celebrity-cruise-lines-attacks-trump-and-his-supporters-in-new-ad/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Celebrity Cruise Lines Attacks Trump and His Supporters in New Ad?	17 November 2016	None	['None']
-snes-02026	A photograph taken during World War II shows members of the League of German Girls during a uniform inspection.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/league-of-german-girls-inspection-during-world-war-ii/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This a ‘League of German Girls Inspection’ During World War II?	21 July 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-05911	Says Pennsylvania charges a top income tax rate of 3 percent and Delaware "has no state income tax at all."	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/feb/02/joe-pennacchio/republican-senator-claims-pennsylvania-charges-top/	As Democrats and Republicans squared off Monday on Gov. Chris Christie’s proposal to reduce state income taxes, state Sen. Joe Pennacchio reminded his fellow legislators of how taxpayers in Pennsylvania and Delaware are already getting better deals. Pennsylvania charges a top income tax rate of 3 percent, while Delaware doesn’t collect any state income taxes, according to Pennacchio. "We’re competing worldwide, but especially we’re competing with our regional states. This has to make us more competitive, because when you take a look at us versus Pennsylvania, it's still three percent in Pennsylvania," Pennacchio (R-Morris) said during a Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee hearing. "When you take a look at us versus Delaware, it's still zero in Delaware." In a news release issued following the meeting, Pennacchio repeated the claim: "A small decrease is a good first step to making New Jersey more competitive with states like Pennsylvania which charges a top rate of 3%, or Delaware which has no state income tax at all." Each time, Pennacchio was right about Pennsylvania, but wrong about Delaware. As PolitiFact New Jersey found, both states charge state income taxes. Pennacchio acknowledged in a phone interview that he was wrong about Delaware, but argued that New Jersey still needs to be competitive with its neighboring states. "I think the premise is still the same," Pennacchio told us. Here’s the story with state income taxes in Pennsylvania and Delaware: Pennsylvania charges a flat income tax rate of 3.07 percent on all taxpayers, regardless of income level. Certain individuals or families may qualify for a state program that eliminates or reduces their state income taxes. So, Pennacchio is correct about the 3 percent rate in the Keystone State. But Delaware also charges a state income tax. In 2011, that state’s rates ranged from 2.2 percent on taxable income greater than $2,000 to a top rate of 6.95 percent on taxable income greater than $60,000. This year, Delaware’s top rate is decreasing to 6.75 percent. (For shoppers looking to save some money, Delaware doesn’t have a sales tax.) These seven states don’t collect any state income taxes: Alaska, Florida, South Dakota, Washington, Nevada, Texas and Wyoming. New Hampshire and Tennessee impose taxes on interest and dividends income, but not one’s wages. It’s worth noting that the top income tax rates in Pennsylvania and Delaware still remain below the maximum rate in New Jersey, where individuals with taxable income exceeding $500,000 face a rate of 8.97 percent. Our ruling At a Senate committee hearing and then in a news release afterwards, Pennacchio claimed that Pennsylvania imposes an income tax rate of 3 percent and Delaware doesn’t collect any state income taxes. The senator’s on target when it comes to Pennsylvania, where taxpayers face a flat rate of 3.07 percent. But he’s wrong about Delaware, since that state imposes income tax rates ranging from 2.2 percent to more than 6 percent. We rate the statement Half True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Joe Pennacchio	None	None	None	2012-02-02T07:30:00	2012-01-30	['Pennsylvania']
-pomt-00587	"We’re the only nation in the world that does not use the military to secure our border."	pants on fire!	/texas/statements/2015/jun/05/gary-painter/west-texas-sheriff-says-us-only-nation-not-use-mil/	A Texas sheriff was emphatic about the United States being alone on the planet in relying on non-military agencies to patrol its borders. Midland County Sheriff Gary Painter also was incorrect, we found. A Midland Reporter-Telegram news story posted online May 10, 2015 — in the wake of the Islamic State group claiming credit for a failed attack on a Garland, Texas, contest to draw cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad — quoted Painter saying he had no doubt ISIS has "contacts in Mexico supporting them. They’re a huge threat," Painter said, "because it is an avenue of approach to get into the U.S." Our eyes clamped on what Painter said next: "We’re the only nation in the world that does not use the military to secure our border. We’re not serious about it." By phone, Painter told us the United States is one of the few nations in the world not using the military to secure the border. He said he based his declaration on news reports showing military forces on the borders of other countries. "All you’ve got to do is look at the news on TV," Painter said. "You see it." He said he didn’t remember which countries he saw on those news reports. Experts say not so In contrast, experts we consulted called the Texan’s statement a substantial exaggeration. That said, some countries have heavy military presences on national borders, such as the forces watching over the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea. Separately, Israel’s 7,500-member Border Police, a branch of the Israel National Police, deals with problems relating to public security, terror, severe crime, rioting, guarding sensitive sites and securing rural areas, according to Israel’s Ministry of Public Security. In Mexico, a mix of agencies rely on the Army and Navy and the federal police to watch over its borders, Christopher Wilson of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars told us by phone. But, Wilson said, Mexico’s ports of entry are run by the country’s customs service with immigration-related security managed by its Instituto de Migracion. The military branches provide security at the ports as needed, Wilson said, and also are in charge of stopping and catching traffickers in drugs and people. Wilson said numerous countries similarly rely on military forces to pitch in near international borders in part because some border zones are isolated and other agencies don’t have the manpower. He offered as examples of strong military presences Guatemala and Brazil. Then again, Ross Burkhart, a Boise State University professor, told us by email, countries don’t deploy troops on borders unless they’re engaged in cross-border conflicts "that necessitate emergency border management procedures. Weak states in sub-Saharan Africa have most recently fallen into this category," Burkhart said. Lance Janda, a military historian at Cameron University in Lawton, Okla., said by phone that Canada and Costa Rica, which has border guards but no regular military, are examples of the many countries that do not secure their respective borders with the military. Then again, many countries have border-area checkpoints run by officers with weapons, he said. Commenting on the sheriff’s mention of TV news reports, Janda said: "Anything on the news is going to be violence, right? They’re not going to say nothing happened today on the border between Vietnam and Laos." U.S. Homeland Security For our part, we checked on how the United States regulates border security, then peeked at how Canada does so. In both instances, the military has not been the primary agency handling border safety. By email, Wilson said civilian law enforcement agencies handle U.S. border security. Still, he said, "we have securitized border management, rolling customs and immigration functions into agencies that have law enforcement and national security at the heart of their mission." On its website, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security says it "secures the nation's air, land, and sea borders to prevent illegal activity while facilitating lawful travel and trade." Homeland Security’s border security overview says U.S. Customs officials and a record 21,000-plus Border Patrol "agents, agriculture specialists, Air and Marine agents, and officers guard America’s front lines. These men and women prevent terrorists and their weapons from entering the United States while continuing their mission of seizing contraband and apprehending criminals and others who illegally attempt to enter the United States." Other Homeland Security agencies relevant to border security include the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), responsible for criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration and the Transportation Security Administration. So, the U.S. military doesn’t lead the charge on border security, which is in keeping with the Posse Comitatus Act, passed into law in 1878, which barred the Army from being employed to execute laws unless otherwise authorized by Congress or the Constitution. Still, Homeland Security has a military component: the United States Coast Guard is entrusted with defending the country’s maritime borders. And it’s not as if military forces don’t get called in. The non-partisan Congressional Research Service said in a February 2013 report, "Although the military does not have primary responsibility to secure the borders, the Armed Forces generally provide support to law enforcement and immigration authorities along the southern border." Since the 1980s, the report said, U.S. forces including the National Guard, as authorized by Congress, have conducted a wide variety of counterdrug support missions along the borders of the United States." The Defense Department’s "support role in counterdrug and counterterrorism efforts appears to have increased the department’s profile in border security," the report said. Also, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama each authorized National Guard troops to help watch the border with Mexico, the report said. Canada We didn’t have to venture far to find another country that doesn’t police its borders with the military. Canada’s Border Services Agency says it "ensures the security and prosperity of Canada by managing the access of people and goods to and from Canada." Broadly, the agency says it’s "responsible for providing integrated border services that support national security and public safety priorities." We spotted no mention of Canada’s armed forces being involved in border security. They’re not, academic experts told us. Burkhart, who helps direct Boise State’s Canadian Studies program, said by email the Canada Border Services Agency handles such duties with support from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in concert with the U.S. Coast Guard under the joint law enforcement "Shiprider" maritime security program in the Great Lakes and the Pacific Northwest. "The Canadian Forces, the name for the Canadian military, does not participate in border enforcement," Burkhart said. Other nations To our inquiry about countries using the military to secure borders, Peter Andreas, a Brown University professor, singled out Germany as a country whose military doesn’t secure the border. "Of course," Andreas said by email, "all nations that have a military would use the military if there were a military attack from another country." In the same vein, Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Foreign Relations, called the sheriff’s claim ridiculous. "Almost all advanced countries use law enforcement officials who are much like our own Border Patrol and Coast Guard," Alden emailed. By email, Denmark-based author Frank Jacobs advised that most European Union countries don't use the military to secure their borders. He said the Schengen Area describes the EU states and even a few non-EU nations where business people and tourists can freely circulate without being subjected to border checks. Anyone crossing into the United Kingdom faces border checks, he said, though those are handled by Her Majesty's Border Force, which is not a military force, but an agency of the Home Office (Ministry of the Interior). He said that travelers returning to the Schengen Area have to pass through the French douane, but that is not a military unit, instead a part of the Ministry for the Budget, Public Accounts and the Civil Service. Janda followed up by email, calling the sheriff’s statement "demonstrably false. Most countries in the world use national law enforcement to police their borders just like we do." He added: "The only countries that rely on their military to police/defend their borders are nations facing severe instability involving lawlessness and/or refugees in neighboring countries and/or open warfare." Our ruling Painter said the U.S. stands alone in the world in not using the military to secure "our border." We didn’t have to go far to prove Painter wrong. Canada is one of many countries that rely on federal patrols, not the military, to handle border oversight, just as the United States does. The sheriff might’ve seen some border-guarder troops in war-torn lands in TV news reports, but that’s not factual basis for this claim. Pants on Fire! PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Gary Painter	None	None	None	2015-06-05T15:11:13	2015-05-10	['None']
-tron-02374	Transportation Security Inspectors Tough On Military With Nail Clippers	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/tsa-military-nail-clipper/	None	military	None	None	None	Transportation Security Inspectors Tough On Military With Nail Clippers	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-00605	Wrestler “Big Show” Paul Randall Wight Jr. Shot and Killed in Ring	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/big-show-shot-killed-ring/	None	celebrities	None	None	['celebrities', 'death hoax', 'satire', 'sports']	Wrestler “Big Show” Paul Randall Wight Jr. Shot and Killed in Ring	Jun 19, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02794	Barack Obama Explains Why He Didn’t Follow Protocol During the National Anthem	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama-pin/	None	obama	None	None	None	Barack Obama Explains Why He Didn’t Follow Protocol During the National Anthem	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-chct-00214	FACT CHECK: CNN Contributor Says ‘In God We Trust’ Isn't The National Motto	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/01/31/fact-check-cnn-contributor-says-in-god-we-trust-isnt-the-national-motto/	None	None	None	Kush Desai | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	3:35 PM 01/31/2018	None	['None']
-goop-00154	Ben Affleck ‘Abandoned’ After Rehab, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-rehab-friends-relapse-not-true/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Ben Affleck NOT ‘Abandoned’ After Rehab, Despite Report	4:02 pm, October 10, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-00473	Does This Image Show a Toddler in a Cage Detained by ICE in 2018?	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/toddler-cage-photo/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Does This Image Show a Toddler in a Cage Detained by ICE in 2018?	12 June 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-06286	A Republican-led softening of firearms training rules means that "untrained individuals" would be allowed to carry guns with a state permit.	true	/wisconsin/statements/2011/nov/21/donna-seidel/seidel-says-untrained-people-would-be-allowed-carr/	The latest turn in Wisconsin’s long path to becoming the 49th state to allow carrying concealed weapons featured a Republican attorney general watching helplessly as Republican lawmakers tossed out several specific firearms training rules he drew up. When the smoke cleared, Democrats protested that GOP lawmakers went too far by eliminating a set amount of safety training (four hours) and instructor-signed proof of graduation from a firearms course before a permit could be issued. "Suspending these requirements is an abuse of power that will endanger the lives of Wisconsinites across our state," said state Rep. Donna Seidel, D-Wausau, the Assembly’s assistant minority leader. Her Nov. 7, 2011, statement continued: "This would allow untrained individuals to carry guns into public spaces where children are present, but rather than protect Wisconsin’s children, Republicans chose to pay off their friends in the gun lobby with another gift." We knew Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen argued the changes could make it tougher to prove fraud by firearms course instructors and students. But would people without any training at all be able to get a state permit? We asked Seidel to back up her claim, and her office pointed to Van Hollen’s testimony at the hearing before a legislative rules committee. In Madison, legislators write laws, which prompt agencies to pen specific rules to carry out the Legislature’s intent. A joint legislative committee reviews the rules and has the power to alter them. Let’s start with Van Hollen’s written testimony and his oral remarks on the rules and the changes, as well as documents on the Department of Justice website. He spoke shortly before the panel: Removed any time requirement for the firearms safety and training course. (Van Hollen had put in a four-hour minimum.) Took out the word ‘test’ from Van Hollen’s description of the required firearms safety and training course. Removed Van Hollen’s rule that people who teach the course get at least eight hours of instructor training. Took out Van Hollen’s rule that permit applicants get their instructor’s signature affirming the course was completed. It did the same for instructor contact information, and the location where the training was provided. Van Hollen said the rewrite of his rules, sought by the National Rifle Association, would make Wisconsin’s law among the most lenient among states that require permits. PolitiFact Wisconsin found the same thing in our reporting on an earlier item on the training requirements. States typically do one or more of the following: certify the training organization, their instructors or their courses; mandate specific topics for training; set a minimum number of hours; require the instructor to sign the training certificate. Wisconsin now requires none of those. The requirement to get an instructor-led safety course and provide a graduation certificate is still in effect, but Van Hollen told lawmakers the changes would "effectively gut" the training requirement because proving fraud would be next to impossible. The law, with the rules changes, is too vague to determine whether applications meet any meaningful standard, he said. "We can create as many laws as we want, but if we don’t have the ability to prove and prosecute them, they’re meaningless," Van Hollen said. "In a very real sense," Van Hollen wrote in written testimony, "an individual who has been certified by a ‘national or state organization’ could stand on the street corner and after a short conversation on firearm safety could hand out certificates for a fee." The state would risk legal challenges if it denied applications because only vague and subjective training criteria are left, he said. So what was the bottom line? Did Van Hollen say untrained individuals could slip through? He told the committee: "In essence, we will accept every application at face value without determining whether substantive and meaningful training has occurred." He concluded: "If the four-hour training requirement is removed from the statute and rules as they exist today, that effectively eliminates our ability to screen applicants … to determine whether anybody actually really met a training requirement or not." Van Hollen said his office would be forced to be "very liberal" in approving permits. Legal experts concurred that Van Hollen would be in a difficult spot if he tried to reject applications based on questions about meeting the ill-defined training requirement. Former Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager said Van Hollen is probably correct that if he denies applications based on questionable training that the state would get sued. And could well lose, she added. "I think he was left without anything to enforce," Lautenschlager said. Speaking generally about the appropriate role of an attorney general dealing with lawmakers, Jim Tierney, a former Maine attorney general, said: "This is an attorney general doing his job. You have to keep the elephants inside the ring. You have the constitution and due process and procedures that have to be followed. It’s an essential part of democracy." Finally, we spoke to Jim Franklin, executive director of the Minnesota Sheriffs Association. In that state, county sheriffs investigate and issue permits for concealed carry. The state law, in contrast to Wisconsin’s, requires safety instructors to submit their courses to the state for certification. The average course is 4 to 6 hours. The instructors have to sign off. The course curriculum is laid out by the state. We asked Franklin whether he could evaluate applicants’ training without those requirements in the law. "It would be much more difficult," he said. "It would be not impossible but certainly more difficult. We negotiated these things to avoid many of those pitfalls and strengthen the confidence of the public that good checking is going on." Our conclusion Seidel said a Republican-led weakening of firearms training rules means that "untrained individuals" would be allowed to carry guns with a state permit. As support, she cited comments by Van Hollen. We found his comments, at the very least, strongly suggest that people faking the training could still get permits. Others back up Van Hollen’s assertion that he would be in a weak position, and it’s clear Wisconsin’s rules would be among the most lenient among states requiring permits. The law is still on the books requiring an instructor-led training course, but it’s hard to prove that someone skipped it. So the door is open to "untrained" individuals getting a permit. We rate Seidel’s statement True.	None	Donna Seidel	None	None	None	2011-11-21T09:00:00	2011-11-07	['None']
-pose-00879	Will "implement a real jobs strategy for Milwaukee County, including establishment of a final Park East Plan that will turn the vacant land into job-generating development."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/abele-o-meter/promise/911/implement-a-jobs-strategy/	None	abele-o-meter	Chris Abele	None	None	Implement a jobs strategy	2011-05-11T10:21:33	None	['Milwaukee_County,_Wisconsin']
-vees-00051	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Report claiming Sotto 'feeling burdened' by Trillanes' stay at Senate	misleading	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-report-claiming-sotto-feeling-burdened	None	None	None	None	Trillanes,Cynthia Villar,Tito Sotto	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Report claiming Sotto 'feeling burdened' by Trillanes' stay at Senate MISLEADS with inaccurate headline	September 25, 2018	None	['None']
-vogo-00444	Statement: “We were prohibited from any major fund-raising activities,” Tom Hebrank, chairman of the Kensington-Talmadge Planning Group, told the Union-Tribune for a story published Jan. 12.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-cash-limits-for-community-groups/	Analysis: Before some business owners can open shop, their application must be reviewed by a neighborhood planning group. The volunteer residents study the proposals and advise the city on whether to ultimately approve it.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Cash Limits for Community Groups?	January 25, 2011	None	['None']
-pomt-01309	Figures for September 2014’s job growth in Wisconsin mark the "largest private-sector job creation we've had in the month of September in more than a decade"	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2014/oct/29/scott-walker/scott-walker-says-september-job-growth-largest-sep/	When the state’s monthly jobs report was issued a few weeks before the Nov. 4, 2014 election, it received more attention than usual from Gov. Scott Walker. With jobs and the economy a key focus in the tight race between Walker and Democratic challenger Mary Burke, the governor touted a report that said the state had added an estimated 8,400 jobs in September. A day after the numbers came out, and hours before his second debate with Burke, Waker told the League of Wisconsin Municipalities in an Oct. 17, 2014 speech: "Yesterday at noon, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development announced that our labor numbers, the numbers of jobs created in the private sector last month, for September, was 8,400 -- 8,400 new private-sector jobs were created in the state of Wisconsin last month." He continued with a claim we want to check: "That's the largest private-sector job creation we've had in the month of September in more than a decade. In more than a decade." In the days since, Walker has repeated the claim many times. Is he right? Tallying jobs The September jobs report is a preliminary one. It is extrapolated from a monthly survey of 3.5 percent of state employers by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. As such, the monthly numbers have a large margin of error and can swing widely when they are made final. This batch, for instance, has a margin of error of 7,980. The numbers can even change again later, when much more accurate quarterly numbers -- based on a census of nearly every state employer -- can be used to adjust monthly numbers. Nevertheless, the numbers are the most recent ones available. When we asked Walker’s campaign for backup, spokeswoman Alleigh Marre simply made the point they are the most recent month numbers and noted the numbers are widely reported each month. When we looked at a decade of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, September 2014 did come out on top: 2005: 2,000 2006: 1,200 2007: -3,700 2008: -8,700 2009: 400 2010: -3,200 2011: 4,400 2012: 6,400 2013: 1,300 2014: 8,400 The next-largest job gain for that time frame was an addition of 6,400 jobs in September 2012. The pendulum swung the other way in 2008, during the worst stretch of the economic downturn, when there were 8,700 jobs lost in that single month. To be sure, the September 2014 numbers are preliminary and the ones for previous years are final. So, there is a bit of apples-oranges going on in the comparison. But when when we rated Mostly True a Walker claim on how Wisconsin compares to Midwestern states for job growth over the past year, a federal BLS official told us it was reasonable to compare the preliminary number with a prior year, with the understanding the new number is not final. In that claim, Walker had compared preliminary July numbers from 2014 with final July numbers from 2013. That comparison showed the state ranked third in the Midwest. Of course, we can’t predict what the revised September jobs figure will be when the next round of data comes out in November 2014. But if it’s revised down by 2,000 or more jobs, then this would not be the best September in 10 years. Again, that best-in-Midwest growth claim is instructive. When the final numbers came out, the ranking fell from third to fourth. (And Walker revised his talking point.) In any case, we can only rate a claim based on what is known at the time it is made. And this one holds up, even by another measure. We also dug out the preliminary September reports for past years, so we could see how preliminary numbers for September 2014 compare to preliminary numbers for previous Septembers (We’re kinda geeky that way). The records for 2013 were complicated because of the federal government shut down and the comparable data for before 2009 wasn’t available. But the preliminary tally of 8,400 jobs in 2014 topped 2012 ( increase of 1,500), 2011 (decrease of 900) and 2010 (decrease of 9,900). Past use of the numbers Close readers will note that Walker has had a decidedly love-hate-love relationship with the monthly numbers, at times embracing them and at times dismissing them. In December 2011, Workforce Development Secretary Reggie Newson described the numbers this way: "These unreliable employment statistics out of Washington misinform the public and create unnecessary anxiety for job seekers and job creators about the shape of our state’s economy." Instead, state officials -- including Walker -- began to stress the more accurate quarterly numbers. Until the campaign season, when monthly numbers were back in vogue. We have even put Walker’s views on the numbers on the Flip-O-Meter, and rated them a Full Flop. But here we are simply rating what Walker said; the Truth-O-Meter does not have a hypocrisy setting. Our rating Walker claims that the September report which showed an increase of 8,400 jobs was the best in the past 10 years for that month. That stacks up. And a BLS official says the approach is legitimate, with the caveat the latest year is preliminary. Thus, we rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2014-10-29T05:00:00	2014-10-17	['Wisconsin']
-tron-03457	U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno identifies Christians as cultists	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/janetreno/	None	religious	None	None	None	U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno identifies Christians as cultists	Mar 16, 2015	None	['United_States', 'Janet_Reno']
-pomt-10812	"Today New Mexico (has) the sixth-fastest growing economy."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/sep/27/bill-richardson/not-exactly-but-close/	At the Democratic debate at Dartmouth College on Sept. 26, 2007, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson boasted about his state's economic growth. "New Mexico (has) the sixth-fastest growing economy," he said. He did not elaborate, so it's unclear whether he was referring to job growth or the state's gross domestic product. In his speeches and TV ads, Richardson has often mentioned job growth as an indicator of a strong economy while he's been governor. In his TV ads, he's boasted that for job growth, the state ranked as high as sixth in the nation. However, the latest employment report from the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions, which tracks job data, said the state ranked 14th for job growth in August 2007. The state hasn't ranked sixth since August 2006. If economic strength is measured by the increase in state's gross domestic product, New Mexico actually ranks higher than sixth. Measured by the change from 2005 to 2006 (the most recent data available), the state ranks fifth, according to U.S. Commerce Department data. So if Richardson was using this measurement of the economy, he slightly understated his state's growth. Either way, Richardson is generally correct that the state's economy has done well in his term (largely because of gains in the oil and gas industry). We find his claim Mostly True.	None	Bill Richardson	None	None	None	2007-09-27T00:00:00	2007-09-26	['None']
-pomt-04905	Tim Kaine, as governor, proposed tax increases on people earning "as little as $17,000."	true	/virginia/statements/2012/aug/03/george-allen/george-allen-says-tim-kaine-tried-raise-taxes-peop/	Republican Senate candidate George Allen recently accused Democratic opponent Tim Kaine of being a tax hiker, even on people of modest means. During a July 21 debate in Hot Springs, Allen criticized Kaine for "actually proposing tax increases that would be hitting people earning as little as $17,000 a year." We checked to see if Kaine, who was governor from 2006 to 2010, really did try to raise taxes on people at that income level. The Allen campaign, in a website post, backed Allen’s statement by citing news articles about a proposal Kaine unveiled in December 2009 as part of his farewell biennial budget proposal for 2010-2012. Kaine called for adding a 1 percent income tax surcharge and giving all proceeds to localities in return for them scrapping the car tax they levy on personal vehicles. Legislators in 1998 adopted a five-year plan to phase out the personal property tax on most cars and reimburse localities for their lost revenues. But the program was more expensive than anticipated and legislators eventually capped the state reimbursement at $950 million a year. The remaining share is paid by vehicle owners. Ending the car tax would mean the state wouldn’t have to provide the annual $950 million payment to localities, Kaine said in a speech to the General Assembly’s money committees. Kaine wanted to use the savings to help balance the state’s recession-wracked budget. News articles from the time said Kaine’s policy would raise the maximum state income tax rate from 5.75 percent to 6.75 percent. That maximum rate applies to all taxable income above $17,000 after deductions and exemptions are taken into account. The state charges gradually higher income tax rates up to that level. Virginia puts a 2 percent levy on the first $3,000 of taxable income, 3 percent of the next $2,000, 5 percent on the next $12,000 and then 5.75 percent on all taxable income above $17,000. The bill advancing Kaine’s proposal did not say the added tax would only be levied on taxable income of $17,000 or more. The added 1 percent surtax would have pertained to all income levels, according to Joel Davison, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Finance. Virginia does not require individuals with a state adjusted income below $11,950 and married couples with a state adjusted income below $23,900 to pay state income taxes. So they wouldn’t have been affected by the tax increase. Kaine’s proposal was killed by the General Assembly. It should be noted that some people earning $17,000 would have benefitted from Kaine’s plan if their savings from the elimination of the car tax outstripped their increased income tax. There are no estimates of the number of Virginians who would fallen into this category, but we suspect it would be a small group. Here’s why: For starters, we can eliminate those who didn’t own cars. Now, let’s consider those who did own vehicles. A single filer with no children earning $17,000 would have a taxable income of $13,070 after taking the standard deduction and exemption. A 1 percent income tax increase for that person would come to almost $131 a year. The car levy paid by that person would depend on where he or she lived because each locality sets it own tax rate based on the assessed value of the vehicle. In Richmond, a person wouldn’t pay a $131 levy unless they had a car worth about $9,000. In rural Henry County, a vehicle would have to be valued at about $17,500 to merit a $131 tax. Our ruling Allen said that Kaine proposed a tax increase that would have affected people earning "as little as $17,000 a year." Not everyone at that level would have paid more under Kaine’s plan, but it’s a safe bet that large number of them would have seen their overall tax bill rise. We rate Allen’s statement True.	None	George Allen	None	None	None	2012-08-03T09:57:04	2012-07-21	['None']
-pomt-00489	"I have always been there with" Donald Trump.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2018/aug/08/leah-vukmir/leah-vukmir-supported-donald-trump-after-he-won-pr/	Leah Vukmir blasted Kevin Nicholson, her opponent for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, for running a digital ad that undercuts her declarations of support for President Donald Trump. The winner of their Aug. 14, 2018 primary will face Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter: @PolitiFactWisc. In a July 31, 2018 interview on the national Fox Business Network, host Stuart Varney had this exchange with Vukmir about Trump: Varney: Do you back him 100 percent? Vukmir: I have always been there with him, I’ve stood with him, I continue to stand with him. Always? No. Chronology Before the Wisconsin primary in April 2016, Vukmir first supported Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who briefly ran for the GOP nomination before dropping out in September 2015. Then she backed U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who ended his run in March 2016. Vukmir said she ultimately voted for Cruz in the Wisconsin primary. So, Vukmir wasn’t with Trump then. (For his part, Nicholson wasn’t an original Trump supporter, either. He supported Rubio initially, but said he voted for Trump in the primary.) It wasn’t until the general election campaign that Vukmir endorsed Trump, was part of a women for Trump group and appeared in a radio ad supporting his candidacy against the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Vukmir’s campaign didn’t respond to our requests to provide information on this fact check. (Note: We’ve rated as False a claim by Nicholson that Vukmir said: "I’m not endorsing Donald Trump.") All of our fact checks in the Wisconsin U.S. Senate race. Our rating Vukmir said: "I have always been there with" Trump. Vukmir prominently supported Trump for president in 2016 after he won the Republican nomination. But before that, she supported other GOP contenders for the nomination and was sharply critical of Trump. We rate Vukmir’s statement False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Leah Vukmir	None	None	None	2018-08-08T13:13:11	2018-07-31	['None']
-tron-01157	Zim Ship Blockade in Port of Long Beach	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/israeli-zim-ship-blockade/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Zim Ship Blockade in Port of Long Beach	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-05953	Says Newt Gingrich said "Spanish is the language of the ghetto."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2012/jan/25/mitt-romney/spanish-language-ad-says-newt-gingrich-said-spanis/	Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are attacking each other on all fronts in Florida ahead of the Jan. 31, 2012, primary -- including en Español. In one Spanish-language radio ad, Gingrich calls Romney "anti-immigrant." (The Gingrich campaign said it was pulling the ad on Jan. 25, 2012, after Sen. Marco Rubio said it was unfair and not true.) In a rebuttal, Romney attacks Gingrich on radio as not being the Ronald Reagan conservative Gingrich claims. Romney also says that Gingrich said "Spanish is the language of the ghetto." Here’s a partial transcript of the ad, which is airing in South Florida (translation courtesy of Patricia Mazzei of the Miami Herald): "Gingrich enriched himself with Freddie Mac, one of the principle companies responsible for the mortgage collapse that has caused so much damage in our community. Reagan would have never joined forces with Nancy Pelosi as Gingrich did for advancing the extreme left agenda. And Reagan would have never offended Hispanics as Gingrich did when he said Spanish is the language of the ghetto. Now, searching for votes, Gingrich wants to change history. But the facts speak for themselves. Paid for by Romney for President, Incorporated." We’ve written about Gingrich’s relationship with Freddie Mac and Nancy Pelosi in other items. Here, we’re focusing on the claim that Gingrich said, "Spanish is the language of the ghetto." The claim comes from a speech Gingrich gave on March 31, 2007, to the National Federation of Republican Women, as he was considering running for president in 2008. We tracked down the speech in its entirety through C-SPAN, which originally broadcast the speech and has a wonderful video archive. You can watch Gingrich’s remarks by clicking here; the statements germane to this fact-check begin about 23 minutes in. "Nobody in the elite world understands this, this is an enormous center-right country," Gingrich said. "This was driven home for me a couple weeks ago when I was doing a press release for English First. They gave me some data. Eighty-five percent of the American people believe English should be the official language of government." After breaking for applause, Gingrich continued, "Now that's according to a Rasmussen poll. Zogby came back and said that's too high -- the number's 84. Gingrich then pivoted to the founding of the colony of Jamestown, "when people who believed their rights came from God first stepped foot on this continent." They had a "very simple model," he said: "We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and so they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto," Gingrich said. "Second … we should establish that citizenship requires passing a test on American history in English. And if that's true, we do not have to print ballots in any language except English." Gingrich’s comments were picked up that day by the Associated Press, which said Gingrich equated bilingual education with "the language of living in a ghetto." In looking at his remarks, he did not directly make that linkage -- his "language of living in a ghetto" is juxtaposed with "the language of prosperity." But the larger context, particularly the remark about ballot language, suggests that he was referring to Spanish. He was widely criticized for the comment. The AP article quoted Peter Zamora, co-chair of the Washington-based Hispanic Education Coalition, which supports bilingual education, as saying, "The tone of his comments were very hateful. Spanish is spoken by many individuals who do not live in the ghetto." On April 4, Gingrich posted a video on YouTube to explain the comments. He looked in the camera and spoke -- in Spanish. "Last weekend I made some comments that I recognize produced a bad feeling within the Latino community," Gingrich said in Spanish (his comments in the video are subtitled into English). "The words I chose to express myself were not the best, and what I wanted to say is this. In the United States it is important to speak English well in order to progress and have success. To achieve this goal, we should replace bilingual education programs with intensive English instruction courses and in this way permit that English be the language that all of us have in common. "This is an expression of support for Latinos, not an attack on their language. I have never believed that Spanish is a language of people of low income nor a language without beauty." Gingrich did not explicitly apologize for his comments in the web video. Gingrich was asked about the "ghetto" comment on Jan. 25, 2012, during an interview with Univision. He sidestepped the question in his answer. "I said -- about all languages -- I am for English as the common, unifying language," he said. "If I were going to live in Mexico, I would say that Spanish is really important for me to learn." Our ruling A Romney radio ad playing in Spanish in South Florida claims that Gingrich said "Spanish is the language of the ghetto." In a speech in 2007, Gingrich said that some language other than English is the "language of living in a ghetto." Gingrich didn’t say specifically that he was talking about Spanish, though most people assumed that was the language he was referencing. Gingrich recorded a web video in Spanish a few days later saying he could have worded his comments better. With those caveats in mind, we rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-01-25T17:02:21	2012-01-25	['Spain']
-pomt-02363	Russian annexation of Crimea "removes a million residents of the Ukraine that have provided the margin of victory for (Viktor) Yanukovych, the pro-Moscow prime minister in his last election."	mostly true	/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/19/karl-rove/karl-rove-says-crimea-annexation-removes-viktor-ya/	We and our friends at PolitiFact are used to poring over American election results. Here, we’ll test our skills looking at election returns from Ukraine. We’re checking a claim by Karl Rove, a former top adviser to President George W. Bush, who appeared on the March 16, 2014, edition of Fox News Sunday. Rove was discussing the Russian takeover of Crimea, suggesting that Russian-leaning candidates would now face long odds in Ukrainian politics without the votes of supporters on the Crimean peninsula. First, some background. Crimea which had long been a part of Russia until it was handed over in 1954 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Crimea, despite the presence of Russian military facilities and a majority-Russian populace, remained part of the newly independent Ukraine. But earlier this month, protesters in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev ousted pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych. After a pro-western transitional government took power, Russia sent troops into Crimea -- located on the country’s southeast flank -- and scheduled a referendum to determine whether Crimea should affiliate with Russia. In the March 16 referendum, which was criticized by the West as illegal, roughly 97 percent of Crimean voters sided with secession to Russia. Within two days, Russian president Vladimir Putin had formally accepted Crimea into Russia by signing an annexation treaty. While this treaty still needs to pass through a few more hoops to take effect, these are considered formalities. On Fox News Sunday, Rove operated under the assumption that annexation would go forward. Annexation, Rove said, "removes a million residents of the Ukraine that have provided the margin of victory for Yanukovych, the pro-Moscow prime minister in his last election." Such a change to the map would mean that the remainder of Ukraine, following the removal of one of its strongest pro-Russia bastions, would become more favorable electoral territory for pro-Ukrainian politicians. In the United States, it might be analogous to gains the Democratic Party could make if Texas were to secede from the union, or gains the GOP could make if California were to quit the United States. We wondered whether what Rove said was accurate, so we looked through Ukrainian election results from the 2010 presidential election. In that election, the second and final round of voting pitted Yanukovych against pro-Ukraine politician Yulia Tymoshenko. In the final balloting, Yanukovych defeated Tymoshenko 49 percent to 46 percent. In order for Rove to be correct, Yanukovych’s margin of victory over Tymoshenko in Crimea and Sevastopol -- the two regions that joined Russia -- would have to match or exceed his margin of victory in the nation as a whole. It turns out that Rove’s claim was close, but not perfect. In Crimea, Yanukovych beat Tymoshenko by a 639,529-vote margin, and in Sevastopol, he won by a 156,261-vote margin. Together, that equals a margin of 795,790. Nationally, though, Yanukovych beat Tymoshenko by a somewhat larger margin -- 887,909 votes. So Yanukovych’s margin in Crimea and Sevastopol didn’t account for all of his national margin of victory, but it came close -- about 90 percent of the vote. Dominique Arel, who chairs the Ukrainian studies department at the University of Ottawa, said that "47 percent of the electorate lives in the southeast. With the removal of Crimea, it probably shrinks to 45 percent or a touch less, making it very difficult in a polarized election for a southeast candidate to win." A final note: Other regions provided even more votes for Yanukovych than Crimea and Sevastopol did. Donetsk provided him with a margin of more than 2.2 million votes, while Luhansk gave him a margin of more than 1.1 million votes. Our ruling Rove said that Russian annexation of Crimea "removes a million residents of the Ukraine that have provided the margin of victory for (Viktor) Yanukovych, the pro-Moscow prime minister in his last election." Crimea and neighboring Sevastopol -- the two newly annexed portions of Russia -- were certainly bastions of support for Yanukovych in the 2010 election. But while they came close to providing his entire national margin of victory, they fell a bit short, providing 90 percent of Yanukovych’s winning margin. We rate Rove’s claim Mostly True.	None	Karl Rove	None	None	None	2014-03-19T12:14:57	2014-03-16	['Russia', 'Viktor_Yanukovych', 'Ukraine']
-pomt-00666	The state budget will include scholarship money for minority students as a concession to Senate Democrats for supporting the GOP-initiated transportation bill.	true	/georgia/statements/2015/may/13/senate-democrats/Democrats-parlay-votes-on-transportation-bill-into/	On May 4th, Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law the year’s most talked about bill -- one allowing the state to raise about $1 billion a year to tackle a backlog of transportation needs. The state’s Republican leadership initially wanted transportation issues handled closer to home. But a majority of the state’s voters nixed that idea in 2012, when a special purpose local option sales tax for transportation, the so-called T-SPLOST, was defeated in nine of 12 regions, including metro Atlanta. Passing the transportation bill, House Bill 170, this year -- even with Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, House Speaker David Ralston and behind it -- wasn’t easy, either. Some Democratic votes proved essential. Senate Democrats parlayed their support for the bill into concessions from Deal’s office related to one of their long-standing concerns, underrepresentation of minorities in contract awards at the Georgia Department of Transportation. This includes funding in 2016 of scholarships for minority students pursuing degrees in engineering, said Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Steve Henson of Tucker. A curious reader contacted PolitiFact weeks after the legislative session ended April 2, asking us to check if this were really true. "Where is it in the state budget?" she asked. PolitiFact promised to take a look. It took until Monday of this week, the day the governor signed the 2016 budget, for us to finally see the full picture. There is indeed money to fund scholarships for minority students who want to pursue degrees in engineering. There’s $3 million in fact. The money will be available in Fiscal Year 2016, which starts July 1, through the Georgia Student Finance Commission, best-known as the state agency overseeing the popular HOPE scholarship program. Qualifying minorities include females, African Americans, Hispanics and American Indians. These scholarships will be available to students at Georgia Tech, Kennesaw State, Georgia Southern, Mercer University and the University of Georgia, as well as qualifying dual-degree program students. For each $3,500 a student receives, he or she must commit to working in an engineering-related field in Georgia for one calendar year or repay the money in cash, plus interest. This is separate from an engineering scholarship program already available to Mercer University students. That program will cost the state about $1 million in 2016. But it’s obvious why the reader was skeptical. There is no reference to $3 million or any money in legislative budget documents. There is some budget language that says the program will operate with existing funds. That’s because, as we’ve been told, the Student Finance Authority will pay for the program with "revenue generated from the servicing and sale of student loans." The Georgia Student Finance Authority signed off on dedicating the $3 million to the scholarship program at a meeting earlier in the month in Statesboro. The vote though was contingent on the budget being signed by the governor, which, as we said, happened Monday. A 2012 study raised concerns about the representation of minority, women and economically disadvantaged business enterprises in construction and engineering contracts at the state DOT from 2009 t0 2011. Part of the DOT’s comeback was there aren’t enough minority engineers, Henson told PolitiFact. In negotiations on the transportation bill, in addition to the commitment to minority scholarships, Senate Democrats won concessions for more money for African-Americans and other minority road contractors, as well as a firmer pledge by the state DOT to steer more business toward minority-owned firms. The DOT board has already passed a resolution that Democrats have applauded related to contracts that will be issued in connection with the new transportation funding bill. Our conclusion Senate Democrats said they won concessions for their support of the transportation bill, including a commitment of funding for minority scholarships in engineering. The budget signed by the governor Monday includes a commitment of existing funds for that program. And based on action by the Georgia Student Finance Authority, the total amount will be $3 million. We rate the statement by Senate Democrats as True.	None	Senate Democrats	None	None	None	2015-05-13T00:00:00	2015-03-31	['None']
-pomt-04880	"We have reduced funding for education the least. They've suffered the least cuts."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2012/aug/08/fran-millar/did-lawmaker-get-good-grade-education-claim/	For the first time in more than a decade, federal officials say, local school systems are contributing a larger percentage of public education funding than state governments. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about the change in a news article and in its Get Schooled blog. One state lawmaker who plays a key role in education spending insisted that Georgia has not shirked its responsibility to its students. Education spending on children from kindergarten to the 12th grade has not dramatically declined in recent years, said Fran Millar, chairman of the Georgia Senate’s Education and Youth Committee. "State revenue has gone down across the board," said Millar, a Republican state senator from Dunwoody. "We have reduced funding for education the least. They’ve suffered the least cuts." A PolitiFact Georgia reader asked us to examine Millar’s statement. We, too, wondered whether Millar had correctly done his homework on this point. Has the state cut education spending to a lesser degree than other parts of state government? Millar told us he was referring to the percentage of spending on education, since it is such a large portion of state spending. Georgia’s current 12-month spending plan for k-12 education is about $7.2 billion. Georgia’s current fiscal year budget is about $19 billion. The state of Georgia manages its money on a 12-month timetable that begins July 1 and ends June 30. Millar added in an email and during a telephone interview to emphasize his point that the state had not made drastic cuts in education spending. "It’s the least-touched major area" in terms of cuts, Millar said. A few days after we started to examine Millar’s statement, the AJC reported that Gov. Nathan Deal and his budget staff have asked departments to come up with an additional $553 million in budget cuts by the 2014 budget cycle. The major portion of public school funding is exempt, the AJC reported. The senator said he was thinking about the years since Deal took office or Sonny Perdue’s last year as governor when he made his claim to the AJC. He said spending may have even increased during those years. We followed his suggestion of examining data from the Georgia Office of Planning and Budget to calculate recent state spending. PolitiFact Georgia looked at state spending since Deal took office in 2011 and from 2009, the year after the Great Recession began making an impact on state and local budgets. Here’s the breakdown on education spending in recent fiscal years: FY 2009: $8.20 billion. FY 2010: $6.59 billion. FY 2011: $7.07 billion. FY 2012: $6.97 billion. FY 2013: $7.17 billion. We found several state agencies with a smaller percentage of budget cuts. We considered what Millar said about the sizable chunk of money spent on k-12 education and focused on departments with large budgets. PolitiFact Georgia examined spending among the 10 departments with the largest current budgets, including four with current budgets greater than $1 billion. The K-12 budget is still about 20 times greater than technical colleges, the department with the 10th-largest budget. First, let’s look at spending since Deal took office. The Education Department’s budget rose by slightly more than 1 percent between FY 2011 and the current budget. Not a great deal of change there and not a decrease. What about the two most recently completed budget cycles? Between FY 2011 and FY 2012, the Education Department’s budget declined by slightly more than 1 percent. Of the 10 departments with the largest budgets, that was the smallest decrease. Five departments had budget increases, some as high as about 15 percent, as was the case for the Department of Community Health. Let’s examine spending since the recession. Since FY 2009, the Education Department’s budget declined by 12.5 percent. Of those with billion-dollar budgets, the Corrections Department was the only one with a smaller decrease, which was about 3 percent. Two other departments with large budgets -- transportation and technical colleges -- also had smaller percentage decreases of 8.5 percent and 11.2 percent, respectively. Again, there were some departments with budget increases. Millar countered that the state had no choice but to increase spending in some areas, such as the Department of Community Health, which oversees Georgia’s Medicaid program. State officials estimate they’ll have to spend about $4 billion in coming years to comply with the federal health care law. Millar maintained he had a good argument, despite the spending increases for departments and smaller budget cuts in other areas. "On balance, if you look at the numbers, I still think it’s a fair statement," the senator said of his initial statement. So where does this leave us? Millar’s larger point is that the state has not made major cuts in education spending in comparison with other larger departments since Deal took office. The 1 percent cut in education spending between FY 2011 and FY 2012 was the smallest among 10 of Georgia’s largest departments and among those with billion-dollar budgets, which supports Millar’s quote in the AJC. Millar’s argument loses some steam when examining spending between FY 2009 and now. We found a few larger departments with smaller percentage cuts than education. Additionally, there are some large departments with budget increases. Millar’s quote is accurate on some levels, but there are some details we found that lower his grade-point average on this statement. We rate the senator’s claim Half True.	None	Fran Millar	None	None	None	2012-08-08T06:00:00	2012-07-25	['None']
-snes-05386	If a $1.3 billion dollar Powerball jackpot were shared with every American, we'd all get $4 million each.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/powerball-wealth-sharing-meme/	None	Inboxer Rebellion	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Powerball Wealth Sharing Meme	11 January 2016	None	['United_States']
-pomt-11203	Says Julia Roberts told Celine Dion, "If you hate Trump you can go in your country."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/may/15/blog-posting/fabricated-headline-says-julia-roberts-told-celine/	A website’s claim that Julia Roberts told Celine Dion to leave the country if she hates President Donald Trump so much is completely made up — not to mention horrifically punctuated. "You’re wrong Celine the U.S. was destroyed by Obama and Muslim terrorists and now Trump going to make Obama destroyed America great again also if you hate trump you can go in your country," said a May 14 headline on cvikas.com. Facebook flagged this story as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook's News Feed. You can read more about our partnership with Facebook here. Bad punctuation aside, the story offers no additional context or evidence of this celebrity feud actually happening. It just repeats the faked Roberts’ quote from the headline and ends with a question: "Do you stand with Julie?" After the question, the story contradicts Roberts’ quote by including a YouTube video at the bottom of the article that shows Roberts speaking in support of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton at a rally in 2016. We’ve actually seen this fabricated quote before. In January, we debunked a claim that said Sandra Bullock told Hillary Clinton the same thing. This headline is pure click-bait clutter, so we rate it Pants on Fire!	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-05-15T15:31:57	2018-05-14	['Julia_Roberts']
-tron-00997	Hotmail will shut down if you don’t forward an email about it	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hotmail/	None	computers	None	None	None	Hotmail will shut down if you don’t forward an email about it	Mar 16, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-00119	Bradley Cooper, Irina Shayk Headed For Split Over Lady Gaga?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/bradley-cooper-irina-shayk-lady-gaga-split/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Bradley Cooper, Irina Shayk Headed For Split Over Lady Gaga?	10:20 am, October 18, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-14377	"The right-wing extremists are trying to take this seat so they can push their anti-choice and anti-equality agenda through our State House."	pants on fire!	/pennsylvania/statements/2016/mar/18/brian-sims/are-right-wing-extremists-running-brian-sims-house/	Brian Sims has held Philadelphia’s 182nd District House seat since 2012, earning a reputation as a progressive in an area featuring a wide area of Center City. This year in the primary he will face Democratic candidates Louis Lanni, Marni Snyder and Ben Waxman. On Saturday, Sims’ camp sent a fundraising email to his supporters addressed from him in which he said, "I never expected to have this big of a target on my back. The right-wing extremists are trying to take this seat so they can push their anti-choice and anti-equality agenda through our State House." Though Sims has competition from Democrats in the primary, he does not have any from Republicans. No Republicans are on the ballot, according to the City Commissioners Office. And because no candidates are running as Republicans in the primary, no candidates can run as Republicans in the general election. None of the Democrats Sims is facing appear to be "right-wing extremists." Like Sims, Lanni is openly gay. He’s run as a Republican in the past, unsuccessfully, but has stated the importance of a hate crimes statute for Pennsylvania and describes himself as a moderate on his campaign’s official Facebook page. Waxman and Snyder have also promoted progressive issues, such as gay rights, increased education funding, school reform, women’s rights and criminal justice reform. "I don’t think any of us are right-wing extremists," Snyder said. Snyder, who described Sims’ email as "extremely poorly worded," said she received a call from Sims the day the email went out while she was out "knocking on doors" in the district. "He called my cell phone and said, ‘I want you to know that this email went out and was terribly worded,’" she said. Waxman also said Sims called him to apologize after sending the email. Lanni could not be reached for comment. Both Snyder and Waxman said they were not bothered by the email, citing their concerns for the district and their respective campaigns. Sims followed up his fundraising email the same day with another email saying he was "sincerely sorry for offending my challengers for the State House." He said in the email, "when I wrote about the right-wing extremists and their anti-choice, anti-equality agenda, I was referring to the Donald Trumps and Koch brothers of the world, not the Democrats running for my State House seat." Dan Siegel, a lead consultant on Sims’ campaign, said the original email was meant to capture the same meaning as the clarification email but was worded poorly. "It read another way to people," he said. Joe DeFelice, chairman of the Philadelphia Republican City Committee, called Sims’ actions "political puffing." "The people at the other end of his emails probably don't know what his district looks like," DeFelice said. "It's normal campaign rhetoric but frankly disingenuous in this point." Our ruling Democratic State Rep. Brian Sims sent a fundraising email to his supporters notifying them of an attack on his seat: "The right-wing extremists are trying to take this seat so they can push their anti-choice and anti-equality agenda through our State House." But no Republicans are running for his seat, and it’s too late for any to enter the race as Republicans. The three Democrats running against him are not "right-wing extremists." The clarification email sent the same day apologized for the word choices but doesn’t undo the statement that had been prepared, written and sent to followers, asking them for a donation. We rate the statement Pants On Fire.	None	Brian Sims	None	None	None	2016-03-18T11:10:14	2016-03-12	['None']
-pose-00815	Have an eminent-domain "bill ready and probably passed and signed well before the legislative session is over."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/texas/promises/perry-o-meter/promise/847/sign-eminent-domain-reform-into-law-before-end-of/	None	perry-o-meter	Rick Perry	None	None	Sign eminent-domain reform into law before end of 2011 legislative session	2011-01-13T12:33:38	None	['None']
-pomt-13382	Says Marco Rubio "voted to slash school funding by billions of dollars and would eliminate the Department of Education."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2016/sep/27/afscme-people/unions-attack-marco-rubios-education-record/	Two liberal labor unions say that Sen. Marco Rubio’s priorities are wrong for Floridians. A TV ad by AFSCME People and AFT Solidarity accuses Rubio of favoring cuts to Social Security and Medicare and also says he "voted to slash school funding by billions of dollars and would eliminate the Department of Education." AFSCME represents public sector workers while AFT stands for American Federation of Teachers -- both unions endorsed Rubio’s opponent, U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter, in the U.S. Senate contest. The ad is airing in the Tampa and Orlando media markets. We have previously fact-checked similar claims about Rubio’s position on Social Security and Medicare cuts and found them Half True. Here we will look at the education-related attacks that refer to his vote on the federal budget in 2011 and a statement he made on the presidential campaign trail in 2015. Education cuts The ad doesn’t explain the timeframe for the cuts, but the fine print cites a 2011 article by the liberal Center for American Progress. At the time, the Democrats and Republicans were in a budget stalemate about how to fund the federal government through the end of the fiscal year. That’s a reference to H.R. 1, legislation to fund appropriations through the end of 2011 that passed the House but was rejected by the Senate in a 44-56 vote on March 9, 2011. Rubio joined most of his Republican colleagues in voting in favor of it -- only three Republicans voted against it on the floor, and no Democrats voted for it. (Ultimately, the House, the Senate and the president agreed to a series of short-term "continuing resolutions" to keep the government going, rather than approving a more sweeping spending bill.) The legislation aimed to cut spending by about $57 billion -- including loads of cuts that had nothing to do with education. Republican leaders emphasized the broader aspects of the plan about reducing the size of government while Democrats emphasized the impact on education and disease research (the National Institutes of Health would also have been hit). In a statement after the vote, Rubio said that he supported the Republican plan but said more time should be spent to overhaul entitlements: "I supported this first step towards getting our fiscal house in order, but the truth is that America has reached a point where saving $57 billion is a mere drop in the bucket when compared to our $14 trillion debt. While reducing discretionary spending is an important goal, Washington is devoting a disproportionate amount of time to a tiny slice of the budget while ignoring the fact that continued inaction on saving Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is bankrupting our country." Here are some examples of the education cuts: • Title I education spending. This is a program that sends federal funds to the states for K-12 education. H.R. 1 would have cut Title I spending by $693.5 million compared with the amount enacted for fiscal year 2010. • Part B IDEA grants. This program provides federal funding for special education based on a formula. H.R. 1 would have cut Part B spending by $557.7 million compared with the 2010 level. • Pell grants. This program funds low-income individuals pursuing undergraduate or sometimes graduate degrees. H.R. 1 would have capped the size of Pell grants for the 2011-12 award year at $4,015. Once that amount is adjusted for an additional sum provided under mandatory funding, the maximum level for Pell grants would be $845 lower than the 2011 level. • Head Start. This program provides low-income children of preschool age with child-development programs that teach skills that prepare them for school. H.R. 1 would have cut Head Start by a little under $1.1 billion. Education Department While campaigning for president in September 2015 in Carson City, Nev., Rubio said at a town hall, "I honestly think we don't need an Education Department." Rubio said that federal recommendations to state and local governments often turn into mandates tied to money. "What starts out as a suggestion ends up being, ‘If you want money from us, you must to do it this way,’ and you will end up with a version of a national school board," Rubio said. Democrats noted that Rubio’s college education was paid for in part by Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, which are administered by the Education Department. But Rubio said that federal programs that have merit could be transferred to other agencies. Although he wants to get rid of the education department, he supports efforts to make higher education affordable. Rubio also supports less federal involvement and more state and local control. For example, he introduced legislation that seeks to strengthen school choice for parents through a tax credit and he supports Florida’s tax credit scholarship program. We’ll note that Rubio has a lot of company among Republicans who want to eliminate the department. Such calls to ax the department are campaign rhetoric, said University of Iowa education professor David Bills. "Reagan back in 1980 would have loved to eliminate the DOE," Bills said. "I think it would be hard to find a major Republican now who doesn’t want to at least radically shrink it. .... All of that kind of slowed down when Bush II came in with No Child Left Behind. I think Rubio is pretty representative." Our ruling The TV ad by liberal groups says "Rubio voted to slash school funding by billions of dollars and would eliminate the Department of Education." Rubio, along with nearly all of his Republican Senate colleagues, voted for legislation in 2011 that would have cut about $57 billion in spending. The ad omits that this was across-the-board spending that didn’t solely target education, and it failed to pass. While a presidential candidate in 2015, Rubio did advocate eliminating the U.S. Education Department. The ad omits that he said he would move worthwhile programs to other agencies. We rate this claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/c614f268-bc66-4b6b-af17-6def87892390	None	AFSCME People	None	None	None	2016-09-27T16:07:51	2016-09-23	['None']
-pomt-13351	"A rural hospital in Missouri closes every 8 months. The legislature’s failure to expand Medicaid has brought crisis to many of Missouri’s rural health care providers."	half-true	/missouri/statements/2016/oct/03/chris-koster/koster-leaves-out-facts-medicaid-statement/	As we move into the final weeks before the Nov. 8 election, Democratic gubernatorial nominee and Attorney General Chris Koster is making a point to separate his political stances from the actions of the Missouri General Assembly. In a graphic posted on Instagram, Koster’s campaign wrote, "The legislature’s failure to expand Medicaid has brought crisis to many of Missouri’s rural health care providers." To support that, the post stated: "A rural hospital in Missouri closes every 8 months." That sounded pretty dramatic, so we decided to look into the claim. The post referred to research done by the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Koster campaign also directed us to an article from the Springfield News-Leader. What we found in examining the evidence is that not every hospital Koster cited is "rural," and the hospitals closed for a variety of reasons. Cecil G. Sheps Center Report The Sheps Center has tracked hospital closings in the continental United States since 2010. In that amount of time, three rural Missouri hospitals have closed, the center reports. The Sac-Osage Hospital in Osceola closed in September 2014, the Parkland Health Center Weber Road in Farmington closed in January, and the SoutheastHEALTH Center of Reynolds County in Ellington closed in March. Koster’s campaign also directed our attention to the Ozarks Community Hospital in Springfield, which closed its surgery department and emergency room in July. The Ozarks Community Hospital is not considered a rural hospital because it’s located in Springfield, population 160,000. The hospital contained 45 beds, plus 10 more in its geriatric psychiatry unit, a small number for a city of that size. If we start counting in September of 2014, these four closings work out to approximately one every eight months. But, again, while the Ozarks Community Hospital is small, it’s not rural. Medicaid According to Ryan Barker at the Missouri Foundation for Health, Missouri could have expanded Medicaid starting Jan. 1, 2014, before any of the hospitals closed. Expanding Medicaid would have had a significant impact on the reimbursement of health care providers. Dave Dillon, a spokesman for the Missouri Hospital Association, told St. Louis Public Radio that the legislature’s decision to not expand Medicaid will cost Missouri $4 billion in federal payments over the next six years. Under the Affordable Care Act, states were given the opportunity to expand the pool of citizens covered by Medicaid, a subsidized insurance for citizens living in poverty. The federal government would have covered the entire costs of the broadened coverage for the first three years, but the level of federal subsidy would decline after that. Legislators in Missouri and 18 other states chose not to expand Medicaid, in part because of the greater costs to the state, but also because of ideological opposition to subsidized insurance and Obamacare. Since many rural hospitals were already in crisis before 2014 because of a large burden of uninsured patients, the failure to expand Medicaid isn’t the direct cause for closings. However, Medicaid expansion was a missed opportunity to lessen the load on those affected hospitals. Why the hospitals closed In an article from the Kansas Health Institute News Service, Chris Smiley, the CEO of the Sac-Osage hospital, said the hospital was forced to close because of a large amount of uninsured patients and shrinking payments from Medicare. "Hospitals expected to see millions of newly insured customers thanks to federal subsidies enabling people to buy health insurance and the expansion of state Medicaid programs," explained the article. "In exchange, they agreed to accept reduced Medicare payments and a huge cut in disproportionate share hospital, or DSH, funding, which the federal government pays to offset the costs of uncompensated care." Since Missouri opted out of Medicaid expansion, this left the hospital with a gap in reimbursement. The closest hospital to Osceola is now Ellett Memorial Hospital in Appleton City, 30 minutes away. Parkland Health Center Weber Road officials were much less specific in their explanation, but said that concerns about building safety and regulations factored in the decision to close. Most of the hospital’s services, including emergency care, have since been relocated to other Parkland Health facilities, also located in Farmington. SoutheastHEALTH was forced to close because of a $6 million debt owed by Advanced Healthcare, the previous owner of the hospital. As the owners of the property, state Medicaid officials informed the company that it was liable for the debt. The nearest hospital to Ellington is now the Iron County Hospital in Pilot Knob. Ozarks Community Hospital was forced to close its ER and surgery center because the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services determined it did not have a large enough inpatient population to be considered a hospital. Since approximately 40 percent of the hospital’s patients were uninsured and it was being paid less money to treat them, the hospital was only able to admit patients following surgery by 2015, according to OCH Health System owner and CEO Paul Taylor in a Springfield News-Leader article. He said there is "no doubt in my mind" that the hospital would have stayed open if Missouri had expanded Medicaid. The Ozarks Community Hospital now functions as a clinic. Our ruling Koster said, "A rural hospital in Missouri closes every 8 months. The legislature’s failure to expand Medicaid has brought crisis to many of Missouri’s rural health care providers." Koster’s claim is a bit of stretch. Four small Missouri hospitals have closed entirely or in part since September 2014, three of which are rural. In half those cases, patients being unable to pay their bills was cited as a reason for the closure. And many of those patients likely would have been covered had Missouri expanded Medicaid. Koster’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/777d846a-33b3-42b6-8f88-49d665f6fe6a	None	Chris Koster	None	None	None	2016-10-03T09:54:56	2016-08-09	['Missouri']
-pomt-05397	Say that under state law, "systems development charges can only be spent on capital investment."	true	/oregon/statements/2012/may/05/charlie-hales/can-system-development-charges-be-spent-capital-pr/	Hard to believe, but we have another fact check on systems development charges. After all, there was no way Charlie Hales was going to take criticism lightly on the wonky subject. Hales pointed out to Jefferson Smith that development charges have nothing to do with maintenance, which is what the question was about. "Actually, Jefferson," Hales said, "under state law, and it’s something you should know, systems development charges can only be spent on capital investment. They can’t be spent on maintenance. We have a maintenance problem. That’s a different pot of revenue. It’s not what systems development charges pays for." Smith argued that if we’re not collecting systems development charges to pay for capital construction related to growth then that money has to come out of the general fund that should be used to pay for maintenance. Who’s right? Smith is flatly inaccurate in suggesting the law has changed. (He and his campaign later clarified that he did not mean to suggest the law had changed.) Oregon Revised Statutes, says systems development charges may be used only for "capital improvement." That improvement "does not include the costs of the operation or routine maintenance of capital improvements." We find Hales’ statement True.	None	Charlie Hales	None	None	None	2012-05-05T00:15:00	2012-04-30	['None']
-snes-00479	Hillary Clinton's daughter Chelsea "admitted" in a tweet that the Pizzagate conspiracy is "real."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chelsea-clinton-pizzagate-tweet/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did Chelsea Clinton Tweet That ‘Pizzagate Is Real’?	11 June 2018	None	['Chelsea_Clinton', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-pomt-07883	Says the Texas Forest Service planted 6,000 trees in the Dallas/Fort Worth area before the Super Bowl for unknown reasons at an unknown cost.	half-true	/texas/statements/2011/feb/06/michael-sullivan/michael-sullivan-says-texas-forest-service-planted/	Super Bowls often have off-the-field twists. On Feb. 3, conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan of Austin arched his brow about preparations for Super Bowl XLV, set for Sunday in Cowboys Stadium, writing in a Twitter post: "Your Texas Forest Service planted 6,000 trees in (Dallas/Fort Worth) area in advance of Super Bowl. Cost? Unknown. Why? Same. " Asked to elaborate, Sullivan replied via Twitter that he’d learned of the trees from a Capitol newsletter, Texas Insider. Its Feb. 3 edition includes an item stating the forest service plans to help the bowl go smoothly by mobilizing an incident management team. It closes: "In addition, the agency prepared for the coming deluge of tourists by planting more than 6,000 trees in Arlington and surrounding cities." Really? By e-mail, a service spokeswoman, April Saginor, told us the agency put $50,000 toward planting trees in a dozen North Texas host cities, which we later identified as Addison, Arlington, Dallas, Denton, Farmers Branch, Fort Worth, Frisco, Grapevine, Irving, Lewisville, Plano and Richardson. The idea, Saginor said, was to partner with the NFL, the Texas Trees Foundation and other agencies "to lessen environmental impacts of hosting the Super Bowl and improve the environment and quality of life in the area." A service press release quotes Jack Groh, director of the NFL’s environmental program, saying his agency has been facilitating environmental projects for Super Bowl host cities for 17 years. "This was the most extensive urban forestry project ever in the history" of such Super Bowl projects, Groh said. "This had more of a reach and more of an impact than we’ve ever had." In interviews, Groh and Janette Monear, executive director of the Dallas-rooted trees foundation, told us more than 6,500 trees were planted this past year in public spaces and near schools. Monear said the forest service’s $50,000 grant, consisting of federal aid, was matched by private donations gathered by the foundation. Groh told us the trees "actually do something for the local climate, whether it’s reducing pollution" by absorbing carbon dioxide "or lowering the temperature a little bit with shade." Given how quickly we were able to track down such details, we wondered if the tree project was "unknown" to denizens of the host cities. Democratic activist Phillip Martin of Austin, who poked at Sullivan’s Twitter message the night it launched, guided us to a Jan. 13 Fort Worth Star-Telegram news article previewing an Arlington luncheon, emceed by Cowboys’ great Drew Pearson, celebrating the plantings. And on Jan. 21, our online search showed, the Dallas Morning News published a news article quoting Groh and Arlington Mayor Richard Cluck, who said: "There are so many advantages to having the Super Bowl in your town ... and one of the big ones is the environmental program. There’s nothing more important to me, and it should be to you, to grow our tree population." The Dallas newspaper said in a Jan. 28 news article that the tree plantings are expected to touch off other planting programs. The story says the foundation "already has a deal with the city of Richardson to plant 50,000 trees, and this spring, the group will launch an initiative to put 3 million trees in North Texas soil." The story quotes Monear as saying: "It’s a legacy project. This growth is going to benefit the region for many years." So, 6,000 trees planted, as Sullivan says? That’s about right. At an unknown cost? For an unknown purpose? Not so, times two. Besides, "your Forest Service," as Sullivan puts it, didn’t plant the trees by its lonesome. Moreover, half the expenses were covered by private donations. We rate the statement Half True.	None	Michael Sullivan	None	None	None	2011-02-06T06:00:00	2011-02-03	['Super_Bowl']
-pomt-07695	In slashing $1.7 billion from Social Security, "Rep. Jim Renacci may end up forcing the entire agency to ... shut down for a month, causing seniors to not get their benefits on time, halting claims processing, and forcing new retirees and disabled workers into a backlog."	mostly false	/ohio/statements/2011/mar/07/democratic-congressional-campaign-committee/dccc-says-rep-jim-renacci-house-gop-would-force-so/	The GOP spending plan that passed the House of Representatives on Feb. 19 won’t become law because Democrats who control the U.S. Senate and hold the White House won’t let it become law. But that won’t stop Democrats from using its hypothetical cuts as campaign points. House Republicans say the cuts they approved show they’re serious about tightening the government’s belt and cracking down on pork-barrel spending. Democratic critics say its provisions would destroy thousands of jobs and undermine everything from education to food safety. Since passage of the spending package, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has dispatched a steady drumbeat of news releases targeting GOP supporters on aspects they believe will be politically unpopular. A Feb. 22 missive titled "Representative Jim Renacci and House Republicans Vote to Cut Social Security and Delay Benefits" made the following claim: "In slashing $1.7 billion from the Social Security Administration, Rep. Jim Renacci may end up forcing the entire agency to have to shut down for a month, causing seniors to not get their benefits on time, halting claims processing, and forcing new retirees and disabled workers into a backlog before seeing their benefits." It sounded like a draconian enough accusation for PolitiFact Ohio to check out. The news release attributes its projections to Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee, who estimated the cuts would force month-long furloughs at SSA, and an assessment by National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare CEO Barbara Kennelly, formerly a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Connecticut. Kennelly said that further cuts in Social Security funding would mean seniors would have to wait longer to get an appointment to file for benefits, would not receive timely benefit decisions or have their documents processed promptly, and that significant numbers of SSA employees would be furloughed. But the Democrats’ $1.7 billion figure uses the $12.5 billion that President Barack Obama proposed for the Social Security budget for 2011 as the baseline from which they claim cuts are being made. But that money was never allotted because no 2011 budget was passed. SSA has operated at the same $11.5 billion funding level it got in 2010. Republicans use $11.5 billion as a baseline to cite a lower level of cuts. Renacci spokeswoman Karin Davenport says the GOP bill would lop $125 million in administrative cuts from the agency’s 2010 spending level. More cuts would come from rescinding another $118 million from a computer center that’s not scheduled to be built until 2015, and from reclaiming $500 million from a "reserve" fund that Democrats say is already being tapped. If we set aside $1 billion of the Social Security cuts Democrats cite as phantom cuts coming from a budget that never materialized, that still leaves $700,000 that are acknowledged by both Republicans and Democrats. SSA did not return repeated telephone calls we made to determine the impact of those cuts. In their absence, we turned to Witold Skwierczynski , who heads the American Federation of Government Employees union that represents most of the nation’s SSA workers. While SSA isn’t talking to reporters, it is talking to his union. Skwierczynski says SSA has told the union that if Congress reduces Social Security’s funding at all beneath FY 2010 levels, some level of furloughs would be imposed. SSA sent the union a letter on Feb. 17 that requested bargaining over the possible implementation of furloughs, though it didn’t specify how long the furloughs might last. "It is important to note that the Commissioner has not decided to effectuate a furlough," the letter said. "However, given the potential of reduced Congressional appropriations for the remainder of the fiscal year, the Agency is issuing this notice at this time in the event that a furlough may become necessary." Skwierczynski says Obama requested a $1 billion increase in SSA’s 2011 funding because of increased demands for its services, and called potential passage of the GOP budget "a nightmare scenario for Social Security." "You have to understand that we are a growth agency," he said. "We are taking more and more claims because of the baby boom generation’s retirement and also because of the economic problems we have in this country. If people are laid off, they will file for retirement early. Many will file for disability, looking for a benefit they can receive to enable them to survive with out a job." If SSA workers are furloughed because of budget cuts or a government shutdown, beneficiaries would still get their regularly scheduled checks, Skweirczynski said. But furloughs would mean fewer workers available to process new claims and appeals. That would result in backlogs and delays in processing new paperwork. That’s what happened when furloughs were implemented during the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996. Where does that leave Democrats’ claims about Renacci? Their $1.7 billion figure overstates the potential budget cut by about $1 billion because it uses Obama’s budget proposal as a baseline, although that budget was never implemented. The GOP proposal still would lead to a significant reduction from an agency with a $11.5 billion budget. The AFGE union and correspondence from SSA agree that furloughs would likely result if the GOP budget proposal were implemented. But SSA’s letter to the union makes clear that no decision has been made on how to implement furloughs. There’s no way to determine whether those furloughs might last a month, as Democrats insist, and encompass the entire agency. Past SSA furloughs did delay some services for beneficiaries, but the entire agency was never shut down - as Democrats said might happen. Swierczynski said skeleton staffs maintained beneficiary records during a five day shutdown in 1995, and a larger crew of "essential employees" kept working in processing centers during a three week shutdown in 1996. Swierczynski told us regularly scheduled benefit checks would continue, but new claims and appeals could be backlogged and delayed. There are some elements of truth in the DCCC’s claim, but it stokes it up with hyperbole and leaves out several critical facts that would give listeners a different impression. On the Truth-O-Meter, that means Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee	None	None	None	2011-03-07T17:32:00	2011-02-22	['None']
-pomt-12901	"Our Navy has shrunk from more than 500 ships in 1991 to 275 in 2016."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2017/jan/20/donald-trump/trump-says-navy-has-shrunk-dramatically-1991/	President Donald Trump has vowed to rebuild the U.S. military, which he said during his inauguration speech represented a "sad depletion." A page on foreign policy on the newly revamped Trump White House website includes some statistics about a shrinking military: "Our Navy has shrunk from more than 500 ships in 1991 to 275 in 2016. Our Air Force is roughly one-third smaller than in 1991. President Trump is committed to reversing this trend, because he knows that our military dominance must be unquestioned." The size of the Navy’s fleet has been a familiar talking point at least during the past two presidential campaigns. But many of the past claims we have fact-checked compared the fleet to 1917, or 100 years ago, when technology was considerably different. Trump’s claim is a more reasonable comparison. We found that his numbers are correct, and that there are valid concerns about the size of the Navy. The Obama administration supported an increase in the number of ships. Navy fleet size A Trump spokesman referred us to a Navy website, which shows the annual number of ships dating back to 1886. Trump’s numbers are accurate: In 1991 there were 529 total active ships, and in 2016 there were 275. The number of ships peaked at 6,768 during World War II. Then the number drifted down during most of the 20th century, with slight upticks during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The number fluctuates a bit during each year as ships are rotated into and out of service. Lance Janda, a military historian at Cameron University, said Trump's claim requires further explanation. "The thing is, numbers are not everything," Janda said. "Ships today are much more expensive and more powerful than in the past, so it’s not like our Navy is less capable than it was in 1991. And it’s also a question of what kind of ships you want to have. We tend to have smaller numbers of really expensive, really capable ships. That’s nice when they work. It’s bad if you lose any." While the size of the fleet has shrunk, it remains powerful compared with other countries. "We remain the dominant Navy on the planet. Period," Janda said. "I’d like to see us go with less expensive ships so we can have more of them myself, but it’s not like we’re in danger of being surpassed as a naval power. We face much greater threats in the realms of cyberwar, space war and nuclear weapons than we do at sea." Michael O'Hanlon, a security expert at the Brookings Institution, a centrist-to-liberal group, agreed with that assessment. "The point is that no single metric captures all important trends," he said. "And the Navy has chosen to put more size, technology, and money into a smaller number of ships as a matter of policy. And our aggregate tonnage is still almost three times China’s." But Naval War College professor James Holmes said there are valid concerns about the Navy’s assets. (Holmes said he was speaking on behalf of himself and not the college.) Navy leadership estimates it only has enough supply to meet 50 to 60 percent of the demand from U.S. regional commands around the world, he said. It’s more complex than just looking at the sheer number of ships, he said. The first step is to determine how many ships are needed to deploy for a particular situation -- for example if the United States gets into a scrap in the South China Sea. Then, if the Navy has a sufficient amount of naval power, then the Navy can handle that contingency. "Technology has advanced in areas like electronic or cyber warfare and missile defense, so we're stronger in those areas," Holmes said. "But we let a lot of basic skills and technologies atrophy after the Soviet Navy's demise in 1991. With no apparent foe to fight, we neglected combat skills such as fighting other surface fleets or hunting submarines." Holmes was in the Navy of 1991 in a ship that carried Tomahawk anti-ship missiles that were able to strike at enemy vessels hundreds of miles away. "That no longer exists, and we are worse off for it," he said. "We converted all of those Tomahawks for land missions, e.g., strikes against ISIS today or Saddam's military in 2003." A review by the conservative Heritage Foundation of the military branches concluded that the Navy scored strong in readiness but that deferred maintenance is beginning to affect deployment. Brian Slattery, Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense policy analyst, said that those who decry ship count as a valid measure of power "discount that our adversaries’ and competitors’ navies have advanced, as well. "Even though American aircraft carriers are launching more sophisticated aircraft than they were decades ago, competitors such as China and Russia have developed new technologies to deny those carriers access to waters in their regions, including advanced anti-ship ballistic missiles, quiet diesel submarines, and their own modern aviation assets." Former President Barack Obama has already begun the process of growing the Navy. The Obama White House embraced a long-term plan that would elevate the Navy to 300 active ships in 2019 and keep it at or above that level through 2045. The Navy completed a formal review process in 2014 to consider its future military needs, and then in March 2015 set a goal for a fleet of 308 ships. In December 2016, the secretary of the Navy announced a recommendation of a 355-ship fleet and plans to include that in the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2018 30-year shipbuilding plan. Our ruling The Trump White House website says that "our Navy has shrunk from more than 500 ships in 1991 to 275 in 2016." Trump’s numbers are correct according to a document from the Navy, which shows the annual size of the fleet. However, sheer numbers do not tell the full story. The ships of today are more powerful than those in 1991. The United States remains the world's most powerful Navy. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-01-20T16:56:46	2017-01-20	['None']
-pomt-00465	"The teachers in (charter) schools don't even have to be certified."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2018/aug/15/gwen-graham/graham-misspeaks-charter-school-teacher-certificat/	Former U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham has promoted public education as her top priority in her campaign for governor, and she has openly criticized the charter school industry for drawing money away from traditional public schools. In an interview with editorial boards from major South Florida newspapers, Graham argued that some charter schools in Florida provided a subpar education. She said, "The teachers in (charter) schools don't even have to be certified." Charter schools operate as independent contractors within the public school system. These schools generally have more freedom to experiment than traditional public schools. Many are catered to specific subjects, like science or art, and some are organized for students with disabilities. However, with that increased freedom, charter schools are required to perform to a certain standard, and may be shut down if they fail. Most charter schools in Florida are run by the same statutes that govern public schools, and would therefore need certified teachers. But does Florida hold all charter schools to the same regulations? Depends on the charter According to the Florida Department of Education, most charter school teachers are required to be certified. The certification process is mandated by the Florida K-20 Education Code, a subset of the 2018 Florida Statutes. Statute 1002.33 reads, "Teachers employed by or under contract to a charter school shall be certified as required by chapter 1012." Statute 1012, the same rule that governs traditional public schools, requires teachers to "hold the certificate required by law and by rules of the State Board of Education" in order to teach. However, certification is not mandatory for a subset of Florida charter schools, called the "schools of hope." These charter schools operate within underserved districts that have "persistently low-performing schools." The legislature hoped to attract successful charter organizations from other states by offering financial incentives and increased administrative freedom. Gov. Rick Scott signed the controversial bill, known as HB 7069, into law in July 2017. Graham did not specify in her interview with the editorial boards that she was referring to these schools. Her campaign clarified when we contacted them, and linked us to the bill. According to HB 7069, "schools of hope" can hire administrators and "instructional personnel" who do not meet the requirements for public school teachers, so long as they have not been convicted of any felonies or other serious crimes. Instructional personnel include lead classroom teachers. To obtain a Florida teaching certificate, teachers must have a bachelor’s degree and complete several state accreditation tests. Most notable are the Florida Teacher Certification examinations, which include a general knowledge test, a professional education test, and a subject area test. A school of hope teacher would not be required to pass any of these tests. As of August 2018, no "schools of hope" have opened in Florida. Four companies have been approved as "hope operators," but none intend to begin operation for this school year. Thirteen counties have filed a lawsuit against HB 7069, arguing that it restricts the rights of districts to operate freely and violates the constitutional right to a uniform system of public schools. "Gwen believes charter schools must be held to the same standards as traditional public schools and, as governor, will fully enforce certification requirements," said Graham campaign spokesman Matt Harringer in an email. Our ruling Graham said that "The teachers in (charter) schools don't even have to be certified." At every charter school currently operating in Florida, teachers are held to the same certification standards as they would be in public schools. At "schools of hope," a recently introduced subset of charter schools, teachers will not need to be certified. Even when these schools begin operation, they will make up only a small percentage of the state's 654 existing charter schools. It is misleading to say that teachers in charter schools don't have to be certified when the vast majority of them do. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Gwen Graham	None	None	None	2018-08-15T15:44:56	2018-08-03	['None']
-pomt-13897	"Thanks to (North Carolina’s) governor and the legislature, the average teacher salary can barely support a family."	mostly false	/north-carolina/statements/2016/jun/28/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-wrongly-places-full-blame-nc-teach/	In a speech in Raleigh on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton laid out her plan for improving the economy and reducing income inequality. But she segued into local politics, too, seeking to boost the campaigns of North Carolina Democrats like Roy Cooper, who is running for governor against Republican incumbent Pat McCrory. Teacher pay was her weapon of choice for hitting the state’s Republican leaders. Clinton was introduced at her rally by a Durham teacher and by former Gov. Jim Hunt, a Democrat known for his education initiatives. "You know, for many years, thanks to people and leaders like Jim Hunt, North Carolina was a leading state when it came to education," Clinton said. "Now, unfortunately, thanks to your governor and the legislature, the average teacher salary can barely support a family." There are two things here that made our ears perk up. Can the average teacher "barely support a family" on his or her salary? And if not, is it the fault of McCrory and the state’s Republican-controlled legislature? How much teachers make The average North Carolina public school teacher made $47,819 in 2014-15 according to the National Education Association, an advocacy group. Both the NEA and the N.C. Department of Public Instruction have estimated the average teacher this school year is making just shy of $48,000. That’s the equivalent of slightly more than $23 per hour when adjusted to 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. That’s not the schedule teachers work, but we’ll use it for the sake of comparison since it’s what most people are familiar with. North Carolina’s cost of living What does it mean to be barely able to support a family? Clinton’s campaign didn’t respond on the record, but there are a few ways of looking at it. The average teacher’s salary is more than triple the minimum wage. It’s also enough to keep a family of nine out of poverty. For a more traditional family of four, it’s about double the poverty level. But the government’s poverty guidelines have faced criticism for being outdated and/or inaccurate. So what about other ways of measuring ways to support a family? MIT professor Amy Glasmeier created something called the Living Wage Calculator. It takes local-level data on taxes, rent, transportation, food, child care and other costs into account. The formula also assumes non-working adults are providing full-time child care. Glasmeier has written that it shows "the minimum level of income required for individuals and families to pay for basic living expenses" – a pretty good approximation of what Clinton was talking about. A single parent making the average teacher’s salary could support one child but would struggle to support two children, according to the living wage calculations. Likewise, if the teacher is married with a child, an average salary could easily support the child and a stay-at-home spouse. The salary would still be considered a living wage even if that couple had a second child – here it gets to the level of barely enough – but not if they had a third child and the spouse remained unemployed. But we didn’t want to just take a calculator’s word for it. So we asked a professor who studies poverty and politics, Duke University’s Anirudh Krishna. He agreed that a teacher’s salary can provide for a family’s basic needs but not much more. "An annual salary of $48,000 is less than what typically makes for significant intergenerational upward mobility," Krishna said. "Rents or mortgages usually make up for half of that amount, and food and fuel account for much of the rest, leaving relatively little for a rainy day, far less for a child’s college education." So this part of Clinton’s claim could be accurate or not, depending on how big the family in question is and what you consider to be barely supporting that family – whether it’s simply keeping the children out of poverty or being able to do more. But is Clinton right to pin the blame on Republicans for not giving teachers even higher salaries? Political blame Since 2010, the average teacher has earned right around the state’s median household income. Republicans took control of the state legislature in January 2011. In most states, teachers make more. North Carolina is one of the 10 lowest-paying states for teachers, and inflation-adjusted salaries have dropped 10.2 percent in the last decade, according to the NEA. Only three states saw teachers’ salaries fall by more between 2004-05 and 2014-15. Who is responsible? Both political parties have seen teacher pay rise and fall under their watch in the last decade, although Democrats were in power most of that time. Under Democratic Gov. Mike Easley average teacher pay grew by thousands of dollars, to $48,454 in 2008-09, his last year in office. Then the Great Recession happened and in 2009-10, Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue ordered a pay cut for state employees and teachers. That cut was approved by a Democrat-led legislature, and average teacher pay continued to fall every year under Perdue. Republicans were in charge of the statehouse the last two years of Perdue’s term. Both years, Perdue vetoed the budget and said more money should’ve been spent on education, but to no avail. Average teacher pay continued dropping after she left office. It reached its lowest point in McCrory’s first budget – the third year of GOP legislative control – when it dipped below $45,000 to 47th in the nation in 2013-14. But since then, teacher pay has been rising. It’s still not yet back to pre-recession levels, but it could be next year. The House, Senate and McCrory’s office have all said teachers ought to earn more than $50,000 on average in 2016-17. Our ruling Clinton said the average North Carolina teacher’s salary "can barely support a family" and placed the blame squarely on Gov. Pat McCrory and Republican legislators. The average teacher salary of just less than $48,000 is higher than what most households around the state make per year. Yet it’s also right around what’s considered the bare minimum "living wage" for a couple with two kids. Clinton, however, muddles the political blame. Average teacher pay did hit its lowest point when Republicans controlled both the governor’s office and General Assembly. Yet the only actual salary cuts happened under Democratic control. And more recently, Republicans have raised teacher pay almost back to pre-recession levels. We rate this claim Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/af0c5cf5-08de-414b-8ccd-705444c458a8	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-06-28T17:18:59	2016-06-22	['None']
-pomt-07158	Workers who pick produce in Georgia’s fields can make $12 to $18 an hour.	half-true	/georgia/statements/2011/jun/14/gary-black/some-farm-workers-do-earn-high-wages-not-all-do/	Recent talk about a shortage of workers in Georgia’s fields left your PolitiFact team wondering whether we should consider a career in cucumbers. The work may be hard, but if you believe Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, the industry pays solid wages. "Understand that these are $12, $13, $14, $16, $18 an hour jobs," Black told 90.1 WABE-FM’s Denis O'Hayer in an interview. "Talked to a gentleman yesterday, they had a crew of people, they were going to make $130 a day picking cucumbers. That’s 130 buckets of cucumbers, $1 per bucket." Up to $18 an hour? That’s more lucrative than flipping burgers or greeting customers at Walmart. Suddenly, picking cucumbers seemed like a viable Plan B. If Black is right, farm labor could be a neat answer to Georgia’s joblessness problems. Unemployment remains high at 9.9 percent. GA DOL Farmers complain their immigrant labor force is leaving the state to avoid racial and ethnic profiling, harassment, or deportation they think will result from House Bill 87, Georgia’s Arizona-style immigration crackdown. HB 87 requires that certain employers check their new workers’ immigration status and gives law enforcement officers more leeway to check a suspect’s immigration status. Gov. Nathan Deal signed the bill May 13, but it’s being challenged in federal court. Farmers report they’ve already lost thousands of dollars because they can’t find enough laborers. Black and others told us that field worker wages are often based on production. The more you harvest, the more money you get. "They range from minimum wage to as high as $18," Black told PolitiFact Georgia. He cited instances where farmers told him solid workers could make even more. But can job seekers reasonably expect to make $12 to $18 an hour? First, a note about harvesting jobs. A lot of them are temporary, and hours vary depending on Mother Nature. Laborers may have to work for 12 hours or more to pick a crop before it rots. Reporters for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed workers and farmers who said pickers earned about $100 a day. One worker said she expected to work about 12 hours for that amount. The most recent Georgia Department of Labor data date from the summer of 2010. The state tallied wage and employee numbers from farms with 10 or more employees who are covered by regular unemployment insurance. Such employers are required to report their numbers to the state. For 13 weeks during July, August and September, 10,600 or so workers in Georgia were involved in "crop production," or worked in farms, orchards, groves, greenhouses and nurseries that grow crops or plants. This group can include supervisors. They made an average of $367 per week, the data show. Pay varied depending on the crop. For instance, some 3,100 vegetable and melon workers made an average of $311 a week; about 1,000 blueberry and other non-strawberry crop workers made about $268; soybean crop workers (there were only 17) made about $666. The state Department of Labor did not determine an average hourly wage, so we did our own rough calculation. Although field workers often work 12-hour days, we based our figures on a 40-hour workweek to be conservative. We found that crop workers make about $9.18 an hour. Vegetable and melon workers were near $7.78. Blueberry workers made about $6.70 an hour. The soybean rate is $16.65, but that is for workers operating complex farm machinery, a relatively small number of workers. These numbers were lower than Black’s figures, so we turned to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s farm labor data for additional verification. They calculate regional wage rates for "field workers," or employees who plant, tend or harvest crops. We looked at spring and summer wages for the Southeast, which includes Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. Field workers made $8.86 per hour during the week of April 11 through 17, 2010. They made $9.12 an hour July 11 through 17, 2010. The federal figures were also lower than Black’s, so we consulted another source: former field worker Andrea Hinojosa, who opposes the immigration crackdown. She is director of Southeast Georgia Communities Project Inc., which provides health, education and other services to farm laborers. The onion pickers Hinojosa serves generally make 38 cents for each bucket, she said. Fast, experienced workers can make $9.50 or $10 an hour. It may be possible to make $12 an hour picking onions, Hinojosa said, but it’s rare. $18 an hour is far-fetched. "I’ve got to tell you, I’ve never seen, never heard of someone making $18 an hour," Hinojosa said. In sum, it is possible to make $12 to $18 an hour, as Black said, but those amounts are far higher than a typical wage. Information from state and federal agencies, the director of a farmworker aid group, and AJC reporters shows wages are closer to $10 an hour or less. Black’s statement is accurate on its face. Some farm workers "can" earn $12 to $18 an hour. Most, however, do not. His statement leaves out key details and takes things out of context. This is our definition of Half True.	None	Gary Black	None	None	None	2011-06-14T06:00:00	2011-06-02	['None']
-pomt-11219	"Democrats go full tyranny: now demand nationwide gun confiscation from law-abiding Americans ... at gunpoint, of course."	false	/punditfact/statements/2018/may/10/revolution-radio/california-lawmaker-called-assault-weapons-ban-not/	A story twisted the words of a California lawmaker who called for banning possession of semiautomatic assault weapons to falsely state that Democrats want to seize all guns. "Democrats go full tyranny: now demand nationwide gun confiscation from law-abiding Americans ... at gunpoint, of course," stated a May 7 headline on RevolutionRadio.org, which copied the story and headline by NaturalNews.com. Facebook flagged this story as part of its efforts to combat false news and misinformation on Facebook's News Feed. You can read more about our partnership with Facebook here. The headline blows out of proportion statements by U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, who represents the San Francisco Bay area. You may not realize this, but as a nonprofit news organization, we depend on — and answer to — you. Your support directly impacts our abilility to provide objective, factual reporting on issues that matter. Donate now to our Spring Campaign and go on the record as saying facts matter! Swalwell, a former prosecutor, wrote a USA Today op-ed calling for the United States to get rid of assault weapons. He wrote about the deadly outcomes of being fired at by such a weapon. "Trauma surgeons and coroners will tell you the high-velocity bullet fired from a military-style, semiautomatic assault weapon moves almost three times as fast as a 9mm handgun bullet, delivering far more energy. The bullets create cavities through the victim, wrecking a wider swath of tissue, organs and blood vessels. And a low-recoil weapon with a higher-capacity magazine means more of these deadlier bullets can be fired accurately and quickly without reloading." Swalwell said that reinstating the federal assault weapons ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004 would prohibit manufacture and sales, but it would still leave millions of assault weapons on the streets. "Instead, we should ban possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons," he wrote. "The ban would not apply to law enforcement agencies or shooting clubs." The NaturalNews story said that Swalwell "actually wants to see door-to-door gun confiscation teams engage in Nazi-style removal tactics in order to rid the streets of all firearms that he personally deems reckless and unnecessary." We saw no evidence in Swalwell’s op-ed that he wants law enforcement to use such a tactic. We asked his spokeswoman how he would envision law enforcement obtaining such assault weapons. "The Congressman supports an assault weapon buy-back period, and then limiting any weapons not sold back to licensed clubs and ranges, with a ban on possession anywhere else," Caitlyn McNamee said in an email. "He has never proposed and does not support door-to-door searches, which would be unworkable, unsafe, and – without a warrant – unconstitutional. But anyone found to be in possession of such a weapon after the buyback period has elapsed would be in violation of the law to possess and subject to prosecution." On his congressional website, Swalwell doesn’t propose any sort of widespread gun confiscation. While calling for more gun control measures, including improving background checks and an assault weapons ban, he has also stated support for the Second Amendment. "I am the son and brother of hunters and gun owners," he wrote. I know that guns can be used responsibly and the Second Amendment provides individuals certain rights to own firearms." A headline said that "Democrats go full tyranny: now demand nationwide gun confiscation from law-abiding Americans ... at gunpoint, of course." The story that followed wasn’t broadly about Democrats, but rather about one Democrat: U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell. He proposed getting rid of assault weapons, but didn’t call for confiscating all guns. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	RevolutionRadio.org	None	None	None	2018-05-10T10:05:59	2018-05-07	['United_States', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-10433	Eliminating earmarks "would make barely a drop in the bucket with regard to the national debt, the deficit."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/may/13/bob-barr/billions-of-difference-amounts-to-not-much/	When he announced May 12, 2008, that he was seeking the Libertarian Party nomination for president, former GOP Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia blasted his former party for running up the federal budget deficit during the last eight years. Barr added that he wasn't about to give likely Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain any reprieve merely because the Arizona senator is a longtime opponent of so-called pork barrel spending. Opposition to earmarks – line items in the federal budget directed to local and state projects – while a positive, isn't enough, says Barr. Eliminating earmarks "would make barely a drop in the bucket with regard to the national debt, the deficit," he said after announcing his candidacy at the National Press Club in Washington. As it turns out, Barr's right on the money about how little earmarks have contributed to expanding the national debt. While earmarking has become an easy focal point for fiscal conservatives concerned about the budget deficit, which is now more than $9-trillion in total, having added another $163-billion plus interest in 2007, it's only a small part of the problem. According to an Office of Management and Budget tally, earmarks totaled $17-billion in fiscal 2007, only about 10 percent of the deficit that year. Admittedly, that's after earmarking dropped considerably following the congressional lobbying scandals of 2005 and 2006. But even at their peak in 2005, when earmarks hit $52-billion, according to the Congressional Research Service and the OMB, that was only 16 percent of that year's deficit of $318-billion. Whether Barr's statement is true or not, then, depends on how you define "drop in the bucket." We'd say that Barr's pretty much correct, so we grade his statement Mostly True.	None	Bob Barr	None	None	None	2008-05-13T00:00:00	2008-05-12	['None']
-pomt-06014	Says "we’ve accomplished balancing two budgets without raising taxes. We’ve now created 60,000 new private-sector jobs. We’ve made government smaller."	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2012/jan/17/chris-christie/chris-christie-touts-accomplishments-video-preview/	New Jersey stood at a cliff two years ago. Our obituary was being written, and the state we’d grown up in was slipping away. But then Gov. Chris Christie rescued us. At least that's the version of events that plays out in a video the governor's office released today, about five hours before his annual State of the State address. The video includes a clip from Christie’s Dec. 20 appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, when the governor listed some of his accomplishments. "I have a Legislature that's overwhelmingly Democratic. Yet, we've accomplished balancing two budgets without raising taxes. We've now created 60,000 new private sector jobs. We've made government smaller. We've made it smarter. We've made it less expensive for people." With a backdrop of sunshine breaking through the white clouds, three phrases in red and blue font and all capital letters flash on the screen: "Balanced budgets. Created 60,000 jobs. Made government smaller." 'Balanced Budgets' It’s a claim Christie touts as a fiscal accomplishment: his administration balanced "two budgets without raising taxes." Christie is correct that he balanced two budgets, but the state constitution forbids governors from running budget deficits. Following that requirement, Christie signed two balanced budgets for fiscal years 2011 and 2012. So, that part of Christie’s statement is true. But the governor’s assertion that he didn’t raise taxes is not as clear. We found in a previous PolitiFact New Jersey ruling that although the rates for the state’s three major taxes -- gross income, sales and corporation business -- have not increased during Christie’s tenure, some experts view cuts in state tax credit programs as tax hikes. The state reduced funding for the State Earned Income Tax Credit and programs for property tax relief in fiscal 2011. One expert, Josh Barro, a fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, told PolitiFact New Jersey in July that a reduction in the earned income tax credit was not a tax hike, because it’s a welfare payment through the tax code. But reducing the property tax credits could be considered tax increases, since they’re meant to offset property tax burdens, he said. In that ruling, the governor’s claim earned a Half True from the Truth-O-Meter. ‘Created 60,000 Jobs’ One of the governor’s frequent talking points is that his administration is responsible for private-sector job growth in New Jersey. PolitiFact New Jersey has checked two previous claims with Christie pointing to jobs gained under his watch. First, let’s address the 60,000 private-sector jobs cited in the video. Based on the latest seasonally adjusted data from the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, the video isn’t far off. As of November 2011, there were 3,258,100 private-sector jobs in the Garden State. When compared with January 2010, when Christie was sworn into office, there’s been a gain of 54,700 private-sector jobs. Compared with February 2010 -- Christie’s first full month in office -- there’s been a gain of 62,100 private-sector jobs. But as economic experts have told us for previous rulings, the governor can’t take credit for all of that job growth. Just as we couldn't fully blame Christie for private-sector job losses, we can't fully credit him for private-sector job gains. Each time Christie made a similar claim about private-sector job growth, those statements have landed at Half True on the Truth-O-Meter. ‘Made Government Smaller’ Just as there’s been private-sector job gains, there’s been losses within New Jersey’s public sector. Christie’s claim on Morning Joe that "we’ve made government smaller" followed him saying that there are fewer state workers now than when former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman left office in 2001. We previously found that Christie’s numbers are solid, earning him a True ruling. Compared with January 2001, when Whitman resigned, there are 600 fewer state government employees, marking a minimal decrease of 0.4 percent. Since Christie’s first full month in office, the number of state workers has dropped by 13,100 to 137,800 employees as of November. So, Christie has "made government smaller" by reducing the number of state workers. Our ruling About five hours before he was set to deliver the State of the State address, Christie released a Hollywood-esque trailer touting his accomplishments. As words flash across the screen, Christie is heard listing some of those achievements as "balancing two budgets without raising taxes. We’ve now created 60,000 new private-sector jobs. We’ve made government smaller." We’ve heard all this before from the governor and, once again, his statement needs some serious clarification. Christie has balanced two budgets, but he is required to do so under the state constitution. It’s true that the rates for the state’s three major taxes have not changed under Christie, but the governor has cut funding for some tax credits. The jobs-related claims in the video are on target. The number of state workers has declined during Christie’s tenure, and number of private-sector jobs has grown by about 60,000. But the governor is giving himself too much credit for that job growth. Overall, the three claims don’t give a completely accurate picture of Christie’s New Jersey. We rate the statement Half True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Chris Christie	None	None	None	2012-01-17T13:30:00	2012-01-17	['None']
-pomt-06296	On auditing the Federal Reserve	half flip	/georgia/statements/2011/nov/18/herman-cain/where-does-cain-stand-auditing-federal-reserve/	Republican presidential candidate and Atlanta-area resident Herman Cain has encountered intense scrutiny in recent weeks for alleged sexual harassment, the viability of his 9-9-9 tax plan and, most recently, his difficulty with a question concerning President Obama’s policies on Libya. But there’s another question that we here at PolitiFact Georgia just couldn’t let go. Some GOP activists and Libertarians say the plain-spoken Cain is not shooting straight on whether he believes the Federal Reserve Bank needs to be regularly audited. The issue has come up in recent months and arose anew during a debate last month. Cain and Texas congressman Ron Paul engaged in some verbal jousting over what Paul said has been a lack of support from Cain on the idea. Cain’s and Paul’s core constituency -- fiscal conservatives and strict constitutionalists -- is the same, and both men appear to be fighting for their support in the crowded field of Republican candidates. Said Paul: "Mr. Cain, in the past, you’ve been rather critical of any of us who would want to audit the Fed." Cain, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said as part of his reply, "[T]o be precise, I do not object to the Federal Reserve being audited. I simply said if someone wants to initiate that option, go right ahead. It doesn’t bother me. So you — I’ve been misrepresented in that regard. I don’t have a problem with the Federal Reserve being audited. It’s simply not my top priority." We wondered if Cain flip-flopped on this issue, as some have claimed. One website, The Liberty Papers, contained a blog post saying Cain "is either a liar or has a very short memory" concerning auditing the Federal Reserve. The site included audio from Cain to argue he’s changed his position. Jason Pye, an Atlanta-area Libertarian activist who knows Cain, wrote a piece claiming the candidate has been dismissive of plans to audit the Federal Reserve. Pye said Cain has been as steady as Jell-O on auditing the Federal Reserve. "Which story are you going to get with a President Cain?" Pye told us. "There’s an inconsistency there." In one video posted by DraftCain2012, the candidate wanted to change the subject with folks who wanted to talk about auditing the Federal Reserve. One man told Cain they can’t audit the Federal Reserve. "We can audit them," Cain replied. Cain told the crowd that they should focus on setting up a meeting with Federal Reserve officials and ask questions about what control measures the bank has in place. He called the Federal Reserve "one of the tightest-run federal entities I have ever seen." Cain is asked specifically in that January meeting if he would ask for an audit of the Federal Reserve if elected president. "But first we need to find out the audits that are already going on," Cain said, raising his arms in exasperation. "What I’m saying is this request for an audit, I’m not sure if that’s the answer to any problem other than people think that they don’t want to be audited." In another YouTube clip, which is on other sites, there is audio of Cain from a guest appearance on "The Neal Boortz Show" discussing all of the audits already in place with the Federal Reserve. "We don’t need to waste money … with another audit that’s unnecessary," Cain said. That YouTube clip also contains video of Cain praising Paul’s efforts to get more information from the Federal Reserve, adding that the congressman "will have the ability to require an audit of the Federal Reserve Bank" as chairman of the House Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Committee. Paul is currently chairman of that committee. The YouTube clip was posted on May 8, but it does not show when the video of Cain was filmed. Cain tries to set the record straight in his new book, "This Is Herman Cain!: My Journey to the White House," released in September, albeit with some acerbic language directed at Paul and some of his supporters. "[T]hey’ve stretched the truth, saying that I did not want the Federal Reserve to be audited," Cain wrote. "I have never said that. I have said: ‘I don’t’ think you’re going to find anything to audit on the Federal Reserve.’ But they want you to believe that Herman Cain doesn’t want the Federal Reserve to be audited." In general, Cain has said an audit is counterproductive, but he will not object to it. That is largely consistent with his statement at the debate. However, there have been occasions where Cain has been confusing on the topic, like when he appeared to take a more definitive stance, saying on Boortz’s show that "we don’t need to waste money" with an audit. Because of that confusion, we rate his position on auditing the Federal Reserve as a Half Flip.	None	Herman Cain	None	None	None	2011-11-18T06:00:00	2011-10-11	['None']
-pomt-10028	"Under the Obama plan . . . all the health care in this country is eventually going to be run by the government."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/mar/05/tom-coburn/obama-health-plan-does-not-include-government-run-/	When Sen. Tom Coburn said that under President Obama, "all the health care in this country is eventually going to be run by the government," it was like a golden oldie PolitiFact has heard many times before. During the campaign, we heard the same tune from vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin , who said Obama was calling for a "government-run plan"; Mitt Romney , who said Obama "wants the government to take over health care"; and Rudy Giuliani , who called Hillary Clinton's similar plan "socialized medicine." (We rated their statements Barely True , Barely True and False .) Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, made his remarks while criticizing Obama on a different matter. Obama is moving to rescind Bush administration rules that protected medical workers from performing procedures such as abortion that conflicted with their religious or moral beliefs. Coburn, who is against abortion, said rescinding the order would be only a first step for the Obama administration. "Remember, under the Obama plan . . . all the health care in this country is eventually going to be run by the government," Coburn said in an interview on Fox News on March 4, 2009. "So it's part of an incremental creep towards eliminating any objection, both as us as taxpayers and then individual physicians in terms of not complying with a government-run bureaucracy," he added. Coburn and Obama can fairly disagree about conscience protections for health care workers who oppose abortions. But he's wrong that Obama's plan offers government-run health care. In fact, Obama's plan leaves in place the private health care system, but seeks to expand it to the uninsured. It increases eligibility for the poor and children to enroll in initiatives like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and creates pools for individuals to buy their own cheaper insurance. It also outlines strategies to rein in costs for everyone, such as electronic medical records and preventive care. "I think most of us would agree that if we want to cover all Americans, we can't make the mistake of trying to fix what isn't broken," Obama said at a health care conference he hosted on March 5. "So if somebody has insurance they like, they should be able to keep that insurance. If they have a doctor that they like, they should be able to keep their doctor. They should just pay less for the care that they receive." Would Obama's plan result in closer regulation of the health care system? Very likely so. It includes provisions that require health insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions and disclose more information about how they treat patients. Obama's plan also calls for evidence-based health care standards, so that government can stop paying (through programs like Medicare) for treatments that don't get good results. But the plan is very different from some European-style health systems where the government owns health clinics and employs doctors. We asked Coburn's office about his remarks. "What matters is not just President Obama’s intent, or what his plan states, but the likely effect and consequences of his plan," said spokesman John Hart. "Under Obama’s approach, the only plans left standing will be those controlled by the government." That may be Sen. Coburn's opinion on what could happen, but it's definitely not part of Obama's plan. And Coburn was very specific in saying that "under the Obama plan, all the health care in this country is eventually going to be run by the government." That gives the incorrect impression that Obama is promoting a government-run health care system. He's not. We rate Coburn's statement False.	None	Tom Coburn	None	None	None	2009-03-05T16:43:29	2009-03-04	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-00760	Authorities have deleted court records and online references to former United States Attorney Lisa Barsoomian, as part of a "deep state" conspiracy.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lisa-barsoomian-rod-rosenstein/	None	Politics	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did a Shadowy Conspiracy Involve ‘Purging’ the Internet of Records Relating to Lisa Barsoomian?	16 April 2018	None	['United_States']
-goop-00587	Tom Cruise Did ‘Flirt Up A Storm’ With “Extra” Host Renee Bargh, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/tom-cruise-renee-bargh-flirt-extra-host/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Tom Cruise Did NOT ‘Flirt Up A Storm’ With “Extra” Host Renee Bargh, Despite Report	4:23 pm, July 24, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-05061	Ted Cruz wants to ban the tritone interval in music due to its association with the devil.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-ted-cruz-tritone/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	Citing Evangelical Faith, Ted Cruz Calls to Ban “Satanic” Tritone	15 March 2016	None	['Ted_Cruz']
-pomt-03173	Says there's a "100-year-old international norm not to use chemical weapons."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/05/debbie-wasserman-schultz/rep-debbie-wasserman-schultz-says-theres-100-year-/	What’s so special about chemical weapons? As President Barack Obama appeals to Congress to authorize a limited military strike against Syria, he has focused on intelligence that the country killed its own citizens in a chemical attack. Yet far more Syrians have died in the nation’s two-year-old civil war in other ways. What’s the difference? U.S. officials and lawmakers explain that there’s long-standing international agreement that chemical warfare simply isn’t okay. Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, for example, recently described a "100-year-old international norm not to use chemical weapons." Have the world’s nations opposed such weapons since the early 1900s? Taboo since before they were fully developed Wasserman Schultz, a South Florida congresswoman, explained the president’s position in an interview Sept. 2, 2013, with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. He asked her why Obama sought congressional support to punish the Syrians when previous presidents had acted without lawmakers in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Libya. "Why do you believe it’s necessary now?" he asked. "Well, let's be clear," she said. "The president … does not believe that he is required to seek Congress' authorization." Instead, she said, congressional authorization for a targeted strike would help Syrian leader Bashar Assad understand that "his violation of a 100-year-old international norm not to use chemical weapons against either your own people or as a legitimate weapon of war will have a certain and severe response. And that he has to be held accountable for atrocities like that." A hundred years ago, the world had yet to face the horrors of World War I, when nearly 100,000 people were killed by grenades and artillery shells loaded with chemicals like chlorine and mustard gas. Nor had they experienced the million casualties that followed from chemical attacks worldwide. Yet, it turns out, some international agreement against gas attacks predated the war — and even full development of the weapons themselves. An early ban Wasserman Schultz’s office sent us a declaration from world powers at an International Peace Conference at The Hague — dated 1899. It banned projectiles designed to spread "asphyxiating or deleterious gases." It was binding only among signing countries in the case of a war between two of them, and didn’t apply if a non-signing country jumped into the battle. It was worded as a limited agreement, not a moral condemnation. It came before general use of the weapons themselves. It was signed by more than two dozen countries, and ratified by all the major powers — except the United States. The American representative to the conference didn't agree to the declaration partly because he thought gas warfare, which had not yet been fully developed, was just as humane as other warfare, according to instructions to the American delegates and their official reports. But the Hague Declaration marked the start of international consensus on the topic, says Richard Price, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia who wrote a book called The Chemical Weapons Taboo. "I think it's fair to say 'international norm' at that point," Price told PolitiFact. World War I was the first major test. Nations flunked. Fierce debate broke out over the reach of the ban, Price said, which restricted only projectiles, not all chemical warfare. Countries pointed fingers as thousands died in brutal chemical attacks in which victims choked and burned. Peace treaties, then the 1925 Geneva Conference, went much further than the Hague Declaration. World leaders in Geneva noted that "the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world." They wrote that prohibition of such weapons would be "universally accepted as part of international law" and appealed to the "conscience" of nations. The Geneva Protocol has since been ratified by 137 states, according to a white paper from the White House Office of Legislative Affairs provided by Wasserman Schultz’s office. But the United States, which pushed for the Geneva Protocol, didn't ratify it until 1975. Since then, chemical attacks have been rare, with just a few notable exceptions — such as Iraq’s use of them in the 1980s against Iran. Those attacks, it turned out, took place with American support. Syria, by the way, was among countries in agreement against chemical weapons, ratifying the Geneva Protocol in 1968. But Syria has been less cooperative since then, as one of the only holdouts to 1992’s Chemical Weapons Convention. (The United States actually ratified that one.) That agreement to entirely eliminate chemical weapons "for the sake of all mankind" includes 189 nations that represent about 98 percent of the world’s population, according to the United Nations. It may not be binding law for Syria, but it certainly represents an international norm, Price says. Our ruling Wasserman Schultz mentioned on CNN a "100-year-old international norm not to use chemical weapons." An international peace conference at The Hague before World War I did take up the use of chemical weapons, limiting their use between world powers more than 100 years ago. But disagreement about whether their use was humane led the American representative to hold out. Backlash after atrocities during World War I led to even broader international condemnation in 1925, nearly 90 years ago. Yet there weren't votes in the U.S. Senate to ratify that agreement until the 1970s. Now most of the world agrees such weapons ought to be eliminated entirely. But it was a long slog to get there. World powers did reach some international agreement against chemical weapons more than 100 years ago, though the context requires some clarification. We rate Wasserman Schultz’s claim Mostly True. CLARIFICATION: This article was updated to reflect that though gas projectiles hadn't been fully developed for practical use at the time of the Hague Declaration, some use of chemicals as weapons predated the 1899 agreement. Also, Syria didn't ratify the Geneva Protocol until 1968.	None	Debbie Wasserman Schultz	None	None	None	2013-09-05T11:26:36	2013-09-02	['None']
-pomt-04570	Says Obama sent $450 million to China to build a wind farm in Texas.	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/25/americans-tax-reform/anti-tax-group-says-obama-sent-450-million-china-b/	In the battleground state of Florida, critics of President Obama have accused him not simply of spending billions in stimulus money to no good effect but actually using that money to give a leg up to America’s economic rivals. Americans for Tax Reform has revived an old charge that Obama sent $450 million to create jobs in China. Americans for Tax Reform -- an anti-tax group whose founder, Grover Norquist, is famous for arguing for a government so small it could be drowned in a bathtub -- mailed a flyer to Florida voters that showed a stack of hundred dollar bills being blown in a graceful arc across the globe to land in a very red China. On the reverse side, it said "Obama's massive spending includes giving millions to a Chinese company to build a wind farm in Texas. The Chinese company is expected to receive $450 million in U.S. taxpayer money. More jobs in China .. fewer jobs here." We’ve looked at this sort of claim before and in this fact check, we examine whether Obama sent $450 million to China to build a wind farm in Texas. Promoting alternative energy under the stimulus Americans for Tax Reform told us it based this claim on an ABC News report from 2010. In that story, ABC pointed out that the bulk of the stimulus dollars spent on wind and solar projects went to foreign companies. With the twin goals of diversifying the country’s energy supply and boosting a domestic alternative energy industry, the Obama administration used the stimulus to expand a program that awarded tax credits for wind and solar projects once they came online and produced power. The tax credits were handed out as grants that could cover up to 30 percent of the construction costs. We checked on the latest numbers and found that as of 2011, some $9.8 billion went to fund over 300 wind farms around the country. The ABC report relied heavily on the work of Russ Choma, who at the time was a journalist with the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a project at American University. Choma noted that foreign companies received over 60 percent of the alternative energy grants. As we’ll explain in a moment, that does not tell us how much of that money went overseas. Right now, our main focus is that wind farm in Texas built with Chinese towers and turbines. The ABC report spoke of it this way, "Perhaps the most controversial wind project is one that has yet to receive stimulus money." It then goes on to say that a reporter visited the vacant offices of the Chinese firm that allegedly was providing the turbines. So Americans for Tax Reform relied on an article that said the project had not been funded and gave some evidence that hinted strongly that the project was not very active. In fact, by late 2010, it was clear that this particular Texas wind farm had never gone beyond the idea stage. In 2012, Liz Salerno, director of industry data and analysis for the trade group American Wind Energy Association, confirmed that. Salerno tracks wind projects across the country. "The companies held a press conference at the National Press Club in 2010," Salerno said. "They have made no progress since that announcement." PolitiFact Ohio wrote a piece making the same point in 2012. Let’s return briefly to the question of whether stimulus dollars have benefited foreign companies. The short answer is, yes but how much is unclear. Choma, the investigative reporter, noted that the larger overseas firms have American plants that make the blades and other components that were used in U.S. wind farms. Choma wrote that tracking the dollars would be a massive undertaking. "I can't say how many of the turbines built by American manufacturers were overseas, and how many of the turbines built by foreign manufacturers were built here," Choma said. To choose just one example, a wind farm in Alaska has a distinct multi-national flavor. The turbines come from GE, the blades from Brazil, the generators come from Southern California, the central hubs from the Florida Panhandle and the towers from China. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory reported that the grant program added between 44,000 to 66,000 jobs in the wind energy sector each year from 2009 to 2011. Employment peaked in 2009 when new construction was at its height. It has since fallen and the wind power industry is poised for further declines if government tax credits are not renewed beyond 2013. Our ruling The Americans for Tax Reform flyer said that Obama sent $450 million to China to build a wind farm in Texas. The wind farm was never built, the project sponsors never applied for government funds and never received any. These facts have been well known for at least two years and were publicly reported several times. The source cited by Americans for Tax Reform noted that the project had not been funded. The flyer spreads a discredited claim. We rate the statement Pants on Fire.	None	Americans For Tax Reform	None	None	None	2012-09-25T17:02:33	2012-09-21	['China', 'Texas']
-goop-01900	Caitlyn Jenner Did Call Daughters Kylie, Kendall A “Burden,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/caitlyn-jenner-kylie-kendall-burden-fake-news/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Caitlyn Jenner Did NOT Call Daughters Kylie, Kendall A “Burden,” Despite Fake News Story	12:08 am, January 5, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-05106	Germany has banned pork from school canteens because it offends Muslim 'migrants.'	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/germany-bans-pork-under-sharia-law/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Germany Bans Pork Under Sharia Law	7 March 2016	None	['Germany', 'Islam']
-snes-03222	Hollyweed Squares	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hollywood-sign-altered-hollyweed/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Was California’s Iconic ‘Hollywood’ Sign Altered to Read ‘Hollyweed’?	2 January 2017	None	['None']
-goop-02807	Britney Spears Pregnant Or Married, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/britney-spears-not-pregnant-married-sam-asghari-wedding/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Britney Spears NOT Pregnant Or Married, Despite Made-Up Tabloid Cover Story	10:55 am, May 10, 2017	None	['None']
-goop-01518	Jay-Z Said Jesus Was Autistic, Bad Role Model?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jay-z-jesus-autistic-bad-role-model-fake-news/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jay-Z Said Jesus Was Autistic, Bad Role Model?	8:20 pm, February 21, 2018	None	['None']
-vees-00171	​VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Trillanes 'ready' to die, already saying his goodbyes	fake	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-trillanes-ready-die-already-saying-his	None	None	None	None	fake news	​VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Trillanes 'ready' to die, already saying his goodbyes FAKE NEWS	June 15, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02210	Liberals have figured out a Facebook algorithm and "all the people getting banned from Facebook are somehow conservatives."	false	/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/22/todd-starnes/radio-host-only-conservatives-get-banned-facebook/	It seems like plenty of conservatives have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. They love to leverage its power and rack up big numbers when a post goes viral. But they hate it when Facebook yanks something they’ve put up. Conservative radio talk show host Todd Starnes thought he had grounds for complaint. He had quipped on his Facebook page that the owner of cattle that were grazing on federal land without a permit should have claimed they were Mexican cows seeking a better life. Facebook removed the post. On Fox News’ Hannity, Starnes blamed liberals. "Liberals just don't have a sense of humor," Starnes said. "Not the first time they have come after me for something I wrote on Facebook. And a lot of people think it's Facebook removing conservative posts, but they tell us that it’s an algorithm that the liberals have somehow figured out and coincidentally all the people getting banned from Facebook are somehow conservatives." There are two elements here to check. Is there an algorithm that liberals, or anyone, could exploit to bring down messages they don’t agree with? And are all the people getting banned from Facebook conservatives? We reached out to Starnes for supporting details and didn’t hear back. According to the press office at Facebook, there is no algorithm. The mega-social media site has community standards (Facebook says it does not tolerate bullying, hate speech and pornography, for examples) and readers can report posts that they think violate the rules. But a statement on the site says reports alone won’t bring a post down. "The number of times something is reported doesn't determine whether or not it's removed from Facebook," the statement says. A person, not an algorithm, decides the fate of a post. "When a person reports something to Facebook, we review whether it violates our Community Standards," Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld told PunditFact. "Abusive content directed at private individuals and attacks on people based on their race, ethnicity or national origin will be removed when reported to us." It is the abusive content, not the politics or ideology behind it, that lead to a post coming down. We were assured that the number of reports have no effect on the likelihood that a post will be reviewed. So then there’s the question of whether only conservatives suffer at the hands of this system. Starnes isn’t the first person to make a claim like this. At least one conservative website, facebookcensorship.com, has been set up for people to report when they feel they’ve been unfairly treated. A website affiliated with the conservative Weekly Standard, Examiner.com, reported that several conservative groups and bloggers found themselves temporarily banned by Facebook. The Examiner linked this to an anti-spam feature that spotted people who posted to different pages too quickly. Accurate or not, the instances don’t prove that Facebook only targets conservatives. The issue is: Do liberals make the same complaints? They do. In 2011, a liberal blogger wrote "liberal page administrators and bloggers in my network started spreading the word that they had been blocked from posting ANY content on ANY other wall for 15 days. No prior warning was given." In 2012, a group called "Being Liberal" complained about being kicked off Facebook. "I believe that there is right now an 'army' of paid trolls working for the conservative black PR macjine (sic) that is reporting our content," a poster wrote. A blog out of the Harvard Law School warned that the Facebook reviews inevitably will be subjective because they are done by human beings. One reporter who spent time at Facebook found that reviewers aim to make a decision within half a second. That wouldn’t leave much time for a careful assessment. There have been cases where Facebook has admitted that it made a mistake. Our ruling Starnes said all the people getting banned from Facebook are conservatives and that liberals had figured out a way to game the system. We could find no tally of conservative versus liberal complaints about troubles with Facebook. Starnes said all the people getting banned were conservatives and that is not the case. As for the algorithm, Facebook says there isn’t one. Users report violations and staff at Facebook review those reports. We rate this claim False. Update: We've updated this fact-check with an additional example of a liberal group complaining of being blocked on Facebook after a reader noted that one our previous examples likely came from a satirical conservative group.	None	Todd Starnes	None	None	None	2014-04-22T15:38:01	2014-04-17	['Facebook']
-pomt-05347	Says Jeff Reardon cut elementary school music classes, art instruction, teaching positions, basketball and volleyball programs, and he voted to raise school lunch prices.	mostly false	/oregon/statements/2012/may/11/mike-schaufler/did-jeff-reardon-cut-school-programs-and-vote-rais/	In defending his House District 48 seat in the primary election, Rep. Mike Schaufler, D-Portland, paints challenger Jeff Reardon as a big honking disappointment to schools. (Actually, this accusation cuts both ways.) A Schaufler campaign mailer features a forlorn-looking girl on one side. On the other, there’s an apple sliced with all the different ways Reardon, a David Douglas High School teacher and former school board member, has failed that girl and other students. Specifically, Reardon "cut elementary school music classes... cut art instruction … cut teaching positions … cut basketball and volleyball programs." He "even voted to raise school lunch prices." Truly, he must be a dreadful person opposed to the children. We had to know more. Reardon served on the David Douglas School Board from October 1987 to 1998, and as chair for the 1993-94 and 1996-97 fiscal school years. Hiram Sachs, a Schaufler consultant, said in an email that all of the claims stemmed from news stories published in The Oregonian and school board minutes, in the years 1988 and 1993. In February 1988, the David Douglas schools superintendent proposed a $25.4 million budget for the 1988-89 school year, according to a news story in The Oregonian. The proposed budget eliminated eight teaching positions. Board minutes show that Reardon, as a member of seven-member board, approved the budget. (The Oregonian news story also noted that the superintendent said the reduction shouldn’t raise the student-to-teacher ratio.) Let’s go to the next claim, that Reardon cut extracurriculars, including music, art, basketball and volleyball. Again, as a member of the board, Reardon voted to scale back athletics and extracurricular programs in the 1993-94 school year. (The following year some of those cuts were restored due to an increase in the budget, according to a 1994 news story in The Oregonian.) And finally, the claim about raising the price of school breakfasts and lunches. True! He did, in May 1993. Children had to pay 10 cents more for each meal. "If there were cuts, I can tell you they were done with the greatest agony. Any cuts of that nature would have been done as a last resort," said Reardon, who had trouble remembering details of the votes. Sachs, Schaufler’s consultant, said of course Reardon had choices. He could have pushed for administrative or other savings that would not have hurt children. "This is his voting record; this is the basis of his candidacy," Sachs said. Reardon, as a member of a school board, is absolutely responsible for every decision made by the board. We have no quibble with that, and wouldn’t suggest otherwise. But the mailer states that "Jeff Reardon’s cuts devastated our schools and shortchanged our kids." Reardon did not personally or single-handedly deprive children of teachers, art classes or basketball programs. We also think the mailer is misleading because it cherrypicks two budget votes and one school meal vote out of the more than 10 years Reardon served on the school board. For example, as we noted above, the school district was able "to hire 11 more teachers, restore cuts made in athletics last year and begin education reforms" in 1994-95 thanks to a $2.7 million budget increase. Budgets go up and they go down. If "Reardon’s cuts" shortchanged children, then most anyone who’s ever served on a school board probably is guilty of the same crime. As are legislators who approve K-12 budgets that result in program cuts. A decision to approve a budget -- or a bill -- that results in larger classrooms, fewer teachers, or more expensive lunches does not mean that that person supports those results. Schaufler’s mailer contains a nugget of truth but is woefully misleading. We rate it Mostly False.	None	Mike Schaufler	None	None	None	2012-05-11T17:42:46	2012-05-08	['None']
-tron-03448	The vanishing hitchhiker	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/vanashinghitchhiker/	None	religious	None	None	None	The vanishing hitchhiker	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-03232	An experimental Nazi missile launched in 1944 is expected to enter orbit, and threatens the midwestern United States.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/experimental-nazi-missile-aimed-at-u-s/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Is an Experimental Nazi Missile Aimed at the U.S.?	30 December 2016	None	['United_States']
-pomt-03411	Says "the mandate is 71 times that a child’s body will be injected with a disease" for immunizations.	false	/oregon/statements/2013/jun/29/jason-conger/are-oregon-children-subjected-71-immunization-shot/	The Oregon Legislature just made it harder for parents to exempt children from vaccinations required for school. This does not sit well with people -- including some lawmakers -- who say parents know best when or if their children should receive shots to protect them from whooping cough and measles. Rep. Jason Conger, R-Bend, voted no on Senate Bill 132. He spoke on the floor about the number of mandatory shots a child must receive in the course of his or her time in school: 71 times. "So there’s 17 at preschool, child care or Head Start enrollment. There are 19 at K through 5 grade, there are 17 in 6th grade and there are 18 in high school, well, 7th grade through high school," he said. "That’s not the number of immunizations, that’s the number of actual shots." He went on to say: "Understand that the mandate is 71 times that a child’s body will be injected with a disease. It is not, clearly, something we should take lightly when balancing the parent’s opinion about what is good for the child and the fact that the mandate is for 71 injections into their child’s body." Yeah, we did a double take, too, when we heard that. Three score and 11 shots? We wanted to know if this was true. It turns out that in citing this fantastic number Conger relied on a fact sheet, detailing which immunizations are required for the 2013-14 school year, based on the student’s grade. Unfortunately for Conger, this is the same fact sheet relied on by a spokeswoman for the Oregon Health Authority, in showing why the representative’s statement is not accurate. The sheet lists the immunizations needed for a child 18 months or older entering preschool, child care or Head Start. The child would need four doses for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis; three doses for polio; one for chickenpox; one for measles, mumps, rubella; three doses for Hepatitis B; two doses for Hepatitis A; and three or four doses against Hib disease. We count at most 18 shots. Now, when the student enters kindergarten, or any grades 1 through 5, the child needs another immunization shot against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis; one more shot against polio; and one more shot against the measles. We count 21 shots total. Because, you see, the categories of immunization shots are cumulative. It’s not that the child has to receive three shots to ward off Hepatitis B in preschool, and then again in kindergarten. Let’s continue. There are no new shots needed for the vaccinated child who enters grade 6. A student entering grades 7 to 12 needs to get one booster shot against tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis. We count 22 vaccination shots, at most. These vaccinations apply to children in public school and private schools, Head Start, preschools and certified child care programs. Home-schooled students are subject to immunization requirements in certain situations. Separately, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that children receive two influenza shots in the first year and a shot once a year, thereafter, wrote Susan Wickstrom, a spokeswoman with the Oregon Health Authority. There are also vaccines for pneumococcal, meningococcal conjugate, and HPV. "But even with annual flu shots, the total of immunization injections that a child receives before high school graduation would be less than 71," Wickstrom wrote to PolitiFact Oregon. She said it for us: Nowhere near 71 shots. The state requirements total, at most, 22 shots, including the Hib shots. We caught up with Conger and asked him to confirm our understanding. He did and immediately owned up to his mistake. He said he just counted up the number of shots before making his floor speech. "I was wrong about that," Conger said. "I certainly wasn’t trying to distort the truth. But I was wrong about that." Conger said his larger point remains: Government should be careful when curbing parental rights, he said. "In my view, the debate around SB 132 was about the need for legislative restraint and deference to parents generally in decisions about the welfare of their children." We rate the statement False.	None	Jason Conger	None	None	None	2013-06-29T06:00:00	2013-06-19	['None']
-snes-03874	An African Union Travel Advisory warned Africans heading for the U.S. about "continued instability" in America.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/african-union-issues-travel-advisory-for-u-s/	None	Junk News	None	Arturo Garcia	None	African Union Issues ‘Travel Advisory’ for U.S.	5 October 2016	None	['United_States', 'Africa']
-pomt-09704	Health care reform "establishes a new board of federal bureaucrats (the 'Health Benefits Advisory Committee') to dictate the health plans that all individuals must purchase."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/nov/04/house-republicans/health-benefits-advisory-committee-what-plan-buy/	A few months ago, a chain e-mail purporting to be a line-by-line analysis of the House health care reform bill reached in-boxes all over the country, warning people of the dire consequences of the Democratic plans for reform. Taking a page from the same playbook, the House Republican Conference has created a similar list for the new health care bill that will be coming to the House floor in the next few weeks. You can read our fact-check of the Republican analysis in its entirety. Here, we're looking only at the statement, "Page 111 - Section 223 establishes a new board of federal bureaucrats (the 'Health Benefits Advisory Committee') to dictate the health plans that all individuals must purchase." Under the Democrats' health care reform plan, people will have to buy health insurance or pay a tax penalty, and policymakers have said they want everyone covered. The House bill also says what basic coverage should include: hospitalizations, physicians' visits, prescription drugs, mental health and substance abuse treatment, preventive care, maternity care, well-baby and well-child care, and durable medical equipment. But it doesn't provide specifics, like what kinds of prescription drugs or specific medical procedures must be covered. The bill creates the Health Benefits Advisory Committee to advise the secretary of Health and Human Services on what the specifics should be. The committee will have up to 27 members appointed by the president and the Comptroller General, and it will represent the major stakeholders in the health care system, according to the bill. The committee doesn't dictate health plans, though: It advises the secretary, who can reject the recommendations. Another important caveat is that the committee helps set a baseline for different types of coverage. People are then free to select any health plan they like that meets or exceeds the basic requirements. So the committee does not dictate which health plans all individuals must purchase. We find the House Republican Conference's statement, "Page 111 - Section 223 establishes a new board of federal bureaucrats (the 'Health Benefits Advisory Committee') to dictate the health plans that all individuals must purchase," makes it sound as if bureaucrats tell you which plan you have to buy. In reality, the committee advises the secretary of Health and Human Services on what baseline coverage should include. We rate the statement False.	None	House Republican Conference	None	None	None	2009-11-04T18:16:59	2009-10-29	['None']
-snes-03676	Fox News admitted the investigation into the Benghazi deaths was a "complete hoax."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-news-benghazi-probe-hoax/	None	Uncategorized	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Fox News Said the Benghazi Probe Was a Hoax	28 October 2016	None	['Benghazi']
-pomt-02279	"The numbers of people that support Obamacare and like it have been steadily dropping."	false	/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/06/liz-cheney/liz-cheney-people-support-obamacare-have-been-stea/	Conservative pundits often incorporate polling data into their arguments against the Affordable Care Act, and it’s no wonder: Polls usually reveal that a plurality find the law unpopular. But a claim by Liz Cheney, the former conservative Wyoming Senate candidate and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, shows how polling trends can be easily flubbed on TV. As part of a political roundtable on Fox News Sunday on April 6, Cheney tried knocking down Democratic cheering about news from the White House that 7 million people signed up for Obamacare. The real story? The law is losing support, she said. "The numbers of people that support Obamacare and like it have been steadily dropping," she said. "The latest Wall Street Journal polls show that." PunditFact wanted to know if Cheney’s point is accurate. We didn’t hear back from her after reaching out on Twitter. Polls run aplenty, and the health care law is a frequently surveyed topic. We already know from PolitiFact that a sizable share of Americans want the health care law repealed, but they do not increasingly want it repealed. We wanted to look at the evolving support and opposition for the health care law, and not just from the Wall Street Journal. Sites like Huffington Post Pollster and Real Clear Politics offer averages of several polls to give readers an idea of the public’s changing views of the law since its infancy. It’s not a perfect way of looking at the data, as the survey questions are not identical and the polls vary in size. Still, the polling aggregators don’t show steadily falling approval ratings for the law. According to a Real Clear Politics average of nine major polls from March 16-31, 40.4 percent of Americans favor the law and 52 percent do not. This is less than 2 percentage points shy of the favorability mark for much of March a year ago, and down a bit from a recent high of 42.6 percent at the end of October (the highest average on Real Clear Politics was 43 percent in June 2010). As problems with the online insurance marketplaces mounted last fall, approval for the law fell, hitting 36.9 percent in December. Approval ratings since have spurted up and down to their most recent place. See the chart. HuffPost’s Pollster shows a similar trend in its aggregration. The most recent average for people who favor the health care law is 41.2 percent, down from 42.1 percent in October but up from 38.1 percent in December. After the health care law passed in March 2010, poll averages hovered between 40 and 43 percent for the rest of the year before falling off a bit. Obama’s re-election gave the favorability ratings another boost during the end of 2012, peaking at 43.4 percent. Polls on the health care law have been pretty consistent, said Karlyn Bowman, senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She pointed to AEI’s March 2014 study of health care polling by nine major pollsters since 2009. Shifts in support for the law have not been one of the bigger storylines because it has not changed that dramatically, she said. People usually chew on President Barack Obama’s favorability ratings or how he is handling the law’s implementation. Not even the poll Cheney singled out provides persuasive evidence for her claim that supporters have been turning against the law. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll was a March 5-9 survey of 1,000 adults with a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points. The poll asked, "From what you have heard about the new health care law, do you think it is a good idea or a bad idea?" and then "do you feel that way strongly, or not so strongly?" In March 2014, 35 percent said it was a good idea, and 49 percent said it was bad. Digging a little deeper, 26 percent of people said they strongly thought it was a good idea, trailing the 42 percent of respondents who felt strongly that it’s a bad idea. Previous NBC/WSJ surveys, of which there were eight since June 2013, don’t show a recent favorability freefall. "It is clearly more unpopular than popular, but negativity isn't growing in this poll," Bowman said. In fact, a new poll from ABC News and the Washington Post has Democrats hoping they’re flipping the Obamacare narrative. For the first time in at least 20 ABC/Post polls since August 2009, more people said they supported the law than opposed it, with support hitting a high of 49 percent. The 49 percent-48 percent margin could mean divisions are closer to a dead heat in the months after botched healthcare.gov rollout. Support was 40 percent and opposition was 57 percent in a November 2013 ABC/Post poll. Whether it’s an outlier or a new direction remains to be seen. "It could be that the tide is turning," Bowman said. "We just don’t know." Our ruling Cheney said, "The numbers of people that support Obamacare and like it have been steadily dropping." Americans remain divided on the health care law, and most polls show that more people oppose it than support it. But we found no evidence that people who once supported the law are "steadily" changing their minds -- not even in the poll Cheney specifically cited. We rate Cheney’s claim False.	None	Liz Cheney	None	None	None	2014-04-06T17:59:00	2014-04-06	['None']
-pomt-11779	Among states, Missouri ranks "3rd (in) average yearly growth of high-tech industries."	mostly true	/missouri/statements/2017/nov/27/missouri-department-economic-development/missouris-growth-high-tech-industries-mostly-line-/	In efforts to lure Amazon to the Midwest, Missouri officials sent three proposals to the tech-giant by Oct. 19 to be considered for the location of its second headquarters. Kansas City and St. Louis officials threw their hats into the ring, and state officials proposed an innovation corridor along I-70, which would link the two metro areas. Missouri’s brochure released on the MakeMOHQ2Home website claims the state ranked third in "average yearly growth of high-tech industries." When you think of a "high-tech" state, California and New York may be the first states to come to mind, but not Missouri. We wanted to find out how high-tech Missouri really is, and how it ranks in the country. We spoke with the researchers behind the data and economic experts who all agreed that rate of growth can be misleading. What’s a high-tech industry? The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that defining high-tech is a moving target. Generally, though, it considers jobs with lots of workers in science, technology, engineering and math fields to be part of the high-tech industry. Missouri officials used a 2016 Milken Institute study in their claim. The Milken Institute is a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank. The Milken Institute has a "free-market slant," said Michael Leeds, chair of the economics department at Temple University, "but (is) a credible group of scholars." Minoli Ratnatunga, director of regional economics research at the institute’s Center for Regional Economics, was a researcher in the study. Ratnatunga said the group considered 19 industries it thought were high-tech. A few of these industries include: pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing, commercial and service industry machinery manufacturing, medical equipment and supplies manufacturing, telecommunications and computer systems design. Missouri’s ranking The Milken Institute’s 2016 State Technology and Science Indexshows that Missouri ranked third in average yearly growth of high-tech industries from 2010 to 2015. However, this is just one component that makes up Missouri’s overall placement. In 2016, Missouri ranked 28 out of 50. Two years prior, Missouri ranked 34 out of 50. In 2012, Missouri ranked 29 out of 50. These scores are based on several factors: human capital investment, research and development, risk capital, technology and science workforce, and technology concentration. Massachusetts, Colorado and Maryland were ranked the top three states overall in 2016. Kansas, Tennessee and Oklahoma ranked behind Missouri, with West Virginia rated last. "That tells us where Missouri ranks relative to its peers," Ratnatunga said. "It’s improving, and things like (high-tech) growth is one aspect that’s impacted its overall ranking, but it’s not in the top tier." Ratnatunga said it’s easy for Missouri’s high-tech industry to look as if it’s grown exponentially. "If you have a relatively small sector, it’s easier to get a higher growth rate," Ratnatunga said. "The same 500 jobs added in California would be a smaller growth rate." Leeds also said the rate of growth can be deceiving. "If you have a very small base, twice a very small number is 100 percent growth, but it can be a very small number," he said. Ratnatunga said companies like Amazon need to look at the index overall when considering a state’s economy. This means recognizing qualities like overall growth in the economy, the quality of the workforce, universities, capital investments and research and development inputs. "If it doesn’t meet Amazon’s requirements, it might be a great choice for other companies that are looking to grow in high-tech," Ratnatunga said. Our ruling Missouri officials claimed Missouri ranked "3rd (in) average yearly growth of high-tech industries." While Missouri high-tech industries may have seen growth, the size of base matters. Missouri has seen a growth in high-tech jobs, but the claim can be misleading when you don’t consider the size of the base. Overall, Missouri is about average in the rankings. We rate this Mostly True.	None	Missouri Department of Economic Development	None	None	None	2017-11-27T17:33:03	2017-10-19	['Missouri']
-pomt-08926	"Jane Norton supported the largest tax hike in Colorado history."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/26/americans-job-security/jane-norton-supported-referendum-c-so-did-voters/	It's not everyday a candidate personally appears in an ad to call her opponent gutless, but that's what Jane Norton did in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Colorado. "Seen those TV ads attacking me? They're paid for by a shady interest group doing the bidding of Ken Buck," she said in reaction to the ad paid for by Americans for Job Security. "You'd think Ken would be man enough to do it himself," Norton says in her own ad. "Here's the truth: In state government, I cut budgets, cut programs and reduced staff," Norton continues. "Ken Buck's Office? His spending skyrocketed by 40 percent. We need a senator who's actually cut spending, and has the backbone to stand her ground." The "shady interest group" Norton refers to is an outfit called Americans for Job Security. What they had to say about her wasn't so nice, either. "Our country is at the brink," a narrator says. "Colorado families and workers need relief -- yet Jane Norton supported the largest tax hike in Colorado history, costing us billions. And Jane Norton's record on government spending? The state bureaucracy she managed grew by $43 million in just three years. Record taxes and reckless spending has cost Colorado jobs. Call Jane Norton, tell her no more tax hikes and big government spending." Norton is a former lieutenant governor who got early backing from Republican Party leaders. Buck, on the other hand, is the Weld County District Attorney and a former U.S. attorney and has received backing from the tea party movement. There are a lot of facts to sort through here. In this check, we're going to look at the tax increase charge against Norton. We'll examine Americans for Job Security's claim about an increasing bureaucracy in another report, and Norton's charges against Buck in still another report. Americans for Job Security isn't a typical political action committee. It's organized as a business league 501(c)(6), which means its ads are limited to issue advocacy and that the group isn't required to publicly disclose its donors. The group's website says it favors "free markets and pro-paycheck public policy," and it has a reputation for working against unions. Still, it was fairly easy for us to reach the president of Americans for Job Security, Stephen DeMaura and ask him about the group's claims, specifically that Norton "supported the largest tax hike in Colorado history, costing us billions." He said the group has not coordinated with Buck and that Norton should address the ad's substance. "Rather than wasting time with empty attack ads, she should respond to the claims and discuss them," DeMaura said. What Americans for Job Security calls the "largest tax hike in Colorado history" is actually subject to debate; some people contend it wasn't a tax increase at all. Let's start with a brief primer on Colorado tax history. Our story begins in 1992, when Colorado voters approved a Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, popularly known as TABOR. The measure said the government can't spend tax money collected under existing tax rates if revenues grow faster than inflation and population. Instead, the government had to rebate that money to taxpayers. These rebates applied to many types of taxes and business fees, but it primarily affected income and sales taxes. TABOR also required any tax increases to be approved by voters. By 2005, the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights had curtailed government spending to the point that some people felt basic services were being hurt, particularly for education. So voters were asked to approve Referendum C, allowing government to stop refunding excess revenues for the next five years. The measure drew bipartisan support from Colorado's elected leaders, including then Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, as well as his lieutenant governor -- Jane Norton. Anti-tax groups vehemently opposed the measure, saying it was a betrayal of TABOR. But voters approved Referendum C with 52 percent of the vote. Norton explained her support for the referendum in March 2010 to Fox 31 KDVR of Denver. "Referendum C is actually the Taxpayers Bill of Rights in action," Norton said. "TABOR allows for people to vote. And in this case, it was: do you want your tax refund to go -- it was a five-year time out -- and 52 percent of the people said yes, we will forgo our tax refund to help pay for essential services." Her campaign also told Denver's ABC 7NEWS that the referendum was "an unfortunate consequence of the worst recession in state history. Passing it meant the state did not have to close colleges, let prisoners out early, or cut services to the elderly." For our fact-check, we also wanted to determine whether Referendum C was actually the "largest" increase in tax revenues in Colorado history. We wondered, for example, if Referendum C was proportionally larger than Colorado's adoption of a 4 percent income tax in 1937. We looked, but we couldn't find any analysis comparing the two measures. Natalie Mullis, chief economist for Colorado Legislative Council staff, which provides policy analysis for the Colorado Assembly, said she's gotten the same question from Colorado officials, but no definitive answer exists. She did say that Referendum C was the only significant increase in tax revenues since 1992, when TABOR passed. The Americans for Job Security ad says in a graphic that Referendum C raised $6 billion. We asked Mullis about this; she said that the number was likely based on projections before the economic downturn started in 2008. The measure has actually generated about $3.7 billion, all of that in the three years right after the bill was passed. There were no extra revenues generated for 2009 and 2010, she said, due to the economic downturn. Americans for Job Security said that "Jane Norton supported the largest tax hike in Colorado history." If the issue is just Referendum C, then yes, Norton supported it. But there are a number of qualifiers to that "yes": The evidence is not conclusive that it's the largest tax increase in Colorado history, though certainly it's the largest in recent years. Also, technically speaking, the measure didn't increase tax rates -- it ended rebates, though that does mean less money in people's pockets. Finally, Norton supported a ballot issue on which Colorado voters had the final say and ultimately approved. Given these facts, we rate this statement Half True.	None	Americans for Job Security	None	None	None	2010-07-26T16:55:10	2010-07-09	['Colorado']
-snes-03270	Is Facebook Implementing User Fees?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-implementing-user-fees/	None	Computers	None	David Mikkelson	None	Is Facebook Implementing User Fees?	31 December 2009	None	['None']
-pomt-14967	On support for the Export-Import Bank	full flop	/wisconsin/statements/2015/oct/20/ron-johnson/ron-johnson-export-import-bank/	When General Electric announced plans to cut hundreds of jobs in Waukesha, company executives blamed Congress for failing to renew an obscure federal agency, the Export-Import Bank. Led by a group of conservatives, the House of Representatives over the summer of 2015 efused to reauthorize funding for the bank, which helps U.S. companies sell their goods and services in foreign countries by providing financing for export deals. Those opposed to the bank say it amounts to corporate welfare, while GE officials and other business leaders say it helps the playing field for U.S. companies competing in the global marketplace. Balancing those business interests with a desire for a smaller federal government can create some political complications -- including for U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican. Johnson defeated Democratic U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold in 2010 with support of the tea party conservatives who strongly oppose the bank. He faces a tough rematch against Feingold in 2016. In 2012, not long after he took office, Johnson, voted against reauthorization of what is often termed the "Ex-Im Bank." Three years later, he had a different take on the organization. Time to to our Flip-O-Meter, which examines whether a politician has changed position on an issue. Our requisite reminder: It does not measure whether any change is good or bad policy or politics, only whether the candidate has been consistent. The Wisconsin picture The bank has been in the news in Wisconsin thanks to the Sept. 28, 2015 announcement by GE that it would cut 350 jobs at its Waukesha operation, which makes engines for the oil and gas industry. The company said it would build a new factory and move the work to Canada because that country has an export credit agency. By that time, Johnson had already voted to support its reauthorization. In the wake of the GE news, Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had heard from companies that benefitted from the bank and call it an important tool to help them do business overseas. "They really could not get financing in the private sector for some of their products they wanted to export overseas," Johnson said. Johnson also expressed satisfaction with proposed reforms to the way the bank is operated, including increased reserves to protect against loan losses. In short, the senator said, he changed his mind. Despite the Senate action, the bank is in limbo because the House adjourned before taking the matter up, although a reauthorization vote is could come as soon as Oct. 26, 2015. Other changes Johnson was not the only high profile politician to change his views on the bank. Former Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry did a switch in the other direction. He was for the bank in 2014, and then then against it a year later, in the midst of his short-lived presidential campaign. That was rated a Full Flop by PolitiFact Texas. In an op-ed column published by the Wall Street Journal, Perry noted that since since 2007, more than 1,200 Texas companies had obtained help from the Ex-Im Bank in financing more than $24 billion in exports. Still, Perry wrote, he "can't get on board" with reauthorizing the charter for the 80-year-old bank: "I have been deeply disturbed by recent revelations of corruption and bribery at the institution." Our rating Unlike Perry, Johnson has more than a rhetorical say in the future of the Export-Import Bank. He voted on reauthorization twice in the Senate. First against it, then for it. And that’s a Full Flop.	None	Ron Johnson	None	None	None	2015-10-20T14:30:42	2015-10-20	['None']
-pomt-05587	"And the #jerseycomeback keeps rolling! Thanks to @GovChristie NJ now has lowest corruption risk of any state."	false	/new-jersey/statements/2012/apr/02/new-jersey-republican-state-committee/new-jersey-gop-credit-chris-christie-new-jersey-ha/	Soon after an article was published about a new study claiming New Jersey had the lowest risk of corruption in the nation, the state’s Republican Party told its Twitter followers the first-place finish was the result of the "comeback" led by Gov. Chris Christie. "And the #jerseycomeback keeps rolling! Thanks to @GovChristie NJ now has lowest corruption risk of any state," according to the March 19 tweet from the New Jersey Republican State Committee. But PolitiFact New Jersey found that the regulations behind New Jersey’s highest scores were put in place before Christie became governor. Christie, a Republican, has proposed a series of ethics reforms, but they’ve been stalled by the Democrat-controlled Legislature. Let’s explain the corruption risk investigation. The State Integrity Investigation was undertaken by journalists in every state, who analyzed 330 so-called "corruption risk indicators" across 14 categories. The analyses focused, in part, on the existence of certain laws and their effectiveness. On its report card, New Jersey received A grades in six categories, including State Pension Fund Management and Ethics Enforcement -- two categories where New Jersey ranked first. To analyze the Republicans’ tweet, we researched the origins of regulations cited within five of those categories. No laws were cited in the sixth category. Based on our review, all of those regulations were put into effect before Christie took office. Here’s a few examples: The report card points to various regulations governing lobbying activities, which Gov. Jim McGreevey updated with a series of laws enacted in June 2004. The New Jersey Conflicts of Interest Law, which covers various ethics rules, has been in effect since 1972. In January 2006, Gov. Richard Codey approved a bill to strengthen those regulations. Codey also signed a "pay-to-play" reform bill in March 2005, prohibiting state contracts of more than $17,500 for certain political donors. Gov. Jon Corzine expanded on those pay-to-play rules through an executive order in September 2008. The report card notes how Christie issued an executive order in April 2010 to specify who must file financial disclosure statements, but previous governors have taken similar actions. Through a spokesman, we asked journalist Colleen O’Dea, an editor-at-large at NJSpotlight, who conducted the investigation in New Jersey, about whether Christie’s reforms contributed to the state’s score. Here’s what she said: "I really have to tell you that there have been virtually none. Christie came in and has called for numerous reforms but has put through few, if any of those things our survey asked about." But Doug Mayer, spokesman for the New Jersey Republican State Committee, argued that Christie’s work as U.S. Attorney in prosecuting corruption cases led to an overall change in New Jersey’s political culture. "You would be hard pressed to find anyone in New Jersey, or the entire country for that matter, who doubts Governor Christie’s commitment or actual record on prosecuting political corruption. Some people don’t like to admit it, but the Governor’s record as a U.S. Attorney is impeccable and led directly to New Jersey’s overall change in political culture," Mayer said in an e-mail. "It is a fight he continues to this day with a substantial portion of his agenda dedicated to strengthening New Jersey’s ethics laws." However, such prosecutions did not factor into New Jersey’s score in the corruption risk investigation, according to Randy Barrett, spokesman for the Center for Public Integrity, one of the collaborators behind the project. "We weren’t looking at people, just the structures to deliver (or not) transparency and accountability," Barrett told us in an e-mail. Our ruling Referring to a nationwide investigation comparing states for their risk of corruption, New Jersey’s Republican Party claimed in a March 19 tweet: "Thanks to @GovChristie NJ now has lowest corruption risk of any state." But the regulations behind New Jersey’s highest scores were put in place before Christie became governor. As governor, Christie’s proposed ethics reforms have stalled in the Democrat-controlled Legislature. We rate the statement False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	New Jersey Republican State Committee	None	None	None	2012-04-02T07:30:00	2012-03-19	['None']
-hoer-00722	Scammers Pose as Microsoft Tech Support Workers to Hijack Computers	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/microsoft-callers-scam.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Scammers Pose as Microsoft Tech Support Workers to Hijack Computers	16th July 2010	None	['None']
-abbc-00195	The claim: Mr Murdoch says Australia is on its way to becoming what may be the world's most diverse nation.	in-the-green	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-08/rupert-murdoch-diversity-australia/5076168	The claim: Mr Murdoch says Australia is on its way to becoming what may be the world's most diverse nation.	['multiculturalism', 'immigration', 'australia']	None	None	['multiculturalism', 'immigration', 'australia']	Rupert Murdoch's vision for Australian diversity checks out	Thu 14 Nov 2013, 6:15am	None	['Rupert_Murdoch', 'Australia']
-snes-06030	Neil Armstrong cryptically uttered "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" as he first stepped onto the moon	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/good-luck-mr-gorsky/	None	Questionable Quotes	None	David Mikkelson	None	Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky!	16 September 1998	None	['Neil_Armstrong']
-pomt-09937	Inside the stimulus package "is anti-Christian legislation that will stop churches from using public schools for meeting on Sundays, as well as Boy Scouts and student Bible study groups."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/08/newt-gingrich/stimulus-bill-wont-change-status-sunday-school/	In a fundraising e-mail, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says that President Barack Obama is anti-Christian. "In fact, buried inside Obama's trillion-dollar stimulus package is anti-Christian legislation that will stop churches from using public schools for meeting on Sundays, as well as Boy Scouts and student Bible study groups," Gingrich wrote. The e-mail is part of Gingrich's fundraising efforts for an organization called Renewing American Leadership, which will "bring moral leadership back to our nation." We've looked before at a similar claim that the stimulus had an antireligion clause . It's based on the part of the bill that provides $3.5 billion for public and private colleges and universities to modernize, renovate or repair facilities. The bill says money may not be used for buildings that are "used for sectarian instruction or religious worship or a school or department of divinity; or in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission." Back in February, before the stimulus had passed, we checked out a claim from Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina that the language would stop students from having prayer groups or Bible studies in their dorms. We found that it wouldn't. The courts have been clear that religious groups are entitled to the same equal access to public facilities as any other group. While someone might conceivably file a lawsuit against prayer groups or Bible studies in dorms, those lawsuits would fail, according to all the experts we consulted. Howard Simon of the ACLU said it was preposterous to claim that the ACLU would sue if students in a dorm want to share their faith or organize a Bible study, even if that dorm was renovated with federal funds. "On what basis would there be a lawsuit? There is a First Amendment in our country. People have a constitutional right to state their faith." Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the language in the stimulus plan amounts to little more than boilerplate for federal legislation, similar to language used for decades in the Higher Education Facilities Act. It is simply designed, he said, to ensure that federal money isn't used to build churches and other religious facilities. But that doesn't mean religious groups can't use university facilities. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that religious groups have as much right to equal access to public facilities as anyone else. For example, in 2001, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Good News Club, a private Christian organization for children, which had been barred from using a public school for weekly afterschool meetings. Back when the stimulus was still being debated, Robert Alt, deputy director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, argued that the language in the stimulus bill was written too broadly. Yes, he said, the Supreme Court has made clear what the law is on all this, so why add the language at all? The provision, as written, "would seem to permit a legal challenge" to all sorts of religious activity on college campuses in buildings renovated with federal funds, he said. Given the Supreme Court's decisions, though, wouldn't those challenges fail? "The Supreme Court precedent is perfectly clear," Alt said. "I think they would lose." The new aspect of Gingrich's claim is that the stimulus language would affect church groups that meet in public schools, and that the Boy Scouts would be considered an excluded religious group. Rick Tyler, founding director of Renewing American Leadership and a spokesman for Gingrich, said in an e-mail that these concerns were based on the same provision that DeMint was concerned about. But we find that's not plausible because the stimulus clause refers specifically to money for higher education, not elementary and secondary schools as Gingrich's comment about "public schools" suggests. And Gingrich's claim is ridiculously false because court rulings have consistently said that religious groups have the same equal access rights for the public schools. "The law is fairly settled," said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Her group opposes allowing church groups to meet in public schools, but it is legal, she said. She pointed to two cases that allow churches to use public school facilities just like everyone else: the 2001 Good News Club case we mentioned previously and a 1991 case called Lamb’s Chapel vs. Center Moriches Union Free School District . The stimulus bill uses "boilerplate language," she said. "That's not going to override two Supreme Court cases." We found little support for DeMint's claim back in February that the provision would mean that students couldn't meet in dorm rooms for Bible study. Gingrich's claim is even more ridiculous to suggest the Boy Scouts would be among those banned from public schools. In short, we haven't seen anything that supports Gingrich's claim that the stimulus will stop church groups from meeting at public schools, nor Boy Scouts or Bible study groups. In fact, the clause on religion does not even apply to public schools. Inasmuch as this one seems aimed at unnecessarily inflaming the conservative Christian base, we'd like to retort with some flames of our own. We rate Gingrich's claim Pants on Fire. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/2c368a99-5e22-48ad-8225-26b2da181df4	None	Newt Gingrich	None	None	None	2009-06-08T18:43:58	2009-05-30	['Bible', 'Boy_Scouts_of_America']
-goop-02082	Kate Middleton “Jealous” Of Meghan Markle, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-middleton-jealous-meghan-markle-prince-harry-engagement/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kate Middleton NOT “Jealous” Of Meghan Markle, Despite Report	5:02 pm, December 5, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04251	Says that with President Obama's re-election, state and federal income tax rates for some taxpayers will rise "to roughly 65 percent."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2012/nov/15/mike-white/obamas-re-election-federal-and-state-rates-wiscons/	Two weeks before the presidential election, the owner of a Milwaukee-based international manufacturer warned his employees of "personal consequences" if Barack Obama were re-elected. The Oct. 23, 2012 email from Rite-Hite owner Mike White spurred state and national news coverage, a complaint with the state election board and even a review by local prosecutors. The election is over, but some of White’s claims remain relevant. He began the email by saying: "Every Rite-­Hite employee in America should understand the personal consequences to them of having our tax rates increase dramatically if President Obama is re-elected, forcing taxpayers to fund President Obama's future deficits and social programs (including Obamacare), which require bigger government. "Rite-­Hite is a Subchapter S corporation for taxes, meaning that our corporate tax rate is the highest personal tax rate. So what? Well, our RSP (retirement savings program) contributions are based on after-tax profits. The tax rate we pay is not 17 percent, as Warren Buffett would have you believe; with state taxes it is roughly 45 percent." He continued by stating: "President Obama has announced that our planned tax rate would increase to roughly 65 percent, reducing our after tax income by 36 percent and dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, your and my RSP contributions." Obama, of course, was re-elected. Does that mean state and federal income tax rates are on their way up to a promised combined 65 percent for some taxpayers? Background Rite-Hite, which employs some 1,400 people in North and South America, Asia and Europe, specializes in the manufacture and sale of loading dock and industrial door safety products. White, the company’s chairman as well as owner, is active civically, serving on the boards of Milwaukee’s Summerfest, which is billed as the world’s largest music festival; the Village of River Hills, an upscale Milwaukee suburb; and the foundation of Concordia University Wisconsin. He’s also a contributor to Republican candidates. We’re leaving aside the question of whether White’s email amounted to voter intimidation, which the local district attorney’s office is still reviewing. White said in the e-mail that neither he nor his company "will ever prejudice any employee for their political views." There are also lingering questions about the company’s plans in the wake of Obama’s re-election. Neither White nor his company's attorney responded to our requests for information about the claim of tax rates rising to 65 percent. But we can break it down. White’s e-mail said RiteHite is an "S corporation" and that "our corporate tax rate is the highest personal tax rate." Shareholders of an S corporation report the business’ income on their personal tax returns and are assessed tax at their individual income tax rates, according to the Internal Revenue Service. The highest individual tax rate is 35 percent, which is for people with an income above $388,350. So, White’s claim focuses on these high-income taxpayers. Increasing rates Obama has proposed eliminating what are known as the Bush-era tax cuts, enacted under President George W. Bush, for individuals earning more than $200,000 and married couples earning more than $250,000. That would raise the top federal rate to 39.6 percent. As for Wisconsin, its highest income tax rate is 7.75 percent. It is not slated to increase; in fact, Gov. Scott Walker has pledged to cut income taxes, perhaps in his 2013-15 budget. Add the top state rate of 7.75 percent to the highest federal rate proposed by Obama, 39.6 percent, and you get just over 47 percent -- slightly more than the 45 percent White said Rite-Hite is paying. To further analyze White’s claim, we contacted several experts, including Milwaukee tax attorney John Vitek; Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance research director Dale Knapp; and Jack Norman, director of Tax Fairness WI, a joint project of two left-leaning Wisconsin organizations. Each said the new combined state-federal rate that Rite-Hite will pay as a result of Obama's re-election could exceed 50 percent: 39.6 percent -- new top federal rate proposed by Obama 7.75 percent -- top Wisconsin rate (unchanged) 3.8 percent -- tax hike, starting in 2013, as part of "Obamacare" (the hike is on capital gains, dividend and interest income of high-income earners) 2.35 percent -- Medicare tax (includes an increase of 0.9 percent under Obamacare) 53.5 percent -- total combined rate So, that’s a significant increase. But it’s also well short of 65 percent. Two final notes: Vitek, the tax lawyer, said Rite-Hite doesn’t actually pay the taxes to the government; rather, it pays dividends to its shareholders to cover the taxes they are assessed as shareholders of Rite-Hite. Norman, the tax fairness group director (who wrote an analysis of White's e-mail), notes that tax rates are progressive -- you pay lower rates on the first portions of your income and higher rates on the higher portions. For example, the federal tax rate is 10 percent on income up to $17,400; the rate is 15 percent on income between $17,400 and $70,700; and so on. Norman's point is that high-earners like White pay the highest rate, currently 35 percent, only on the portion of income above $388,340. Our rating The owner of Milwaukee-based manufacturer Rite-Hite said that with Obama's re-election, the combined state and federal tax rate paid by his company would rise to about 65 percent. Experts say the rate might exceed 50 percent, but they see no way of it reaching 65 percent. We don't have the benefit of White's math to consider, but barring any other evidence, we rate his claim False.	None	Mike White	None	None	None	2012-11-15T09:00:00	2012-10-23	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-03488	The problem of unwanted sexual contacts in the military "is not just a woman's issue. More than half of the victims are men."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/11/kirsten-gillibrand/sex-crimes-military-gillibrand-says-over-half-vict/	Congress is putting pressure on the American military to crack down on rape and other types of sexual crimes. The latest Department of Defense report estimates that last year there were 26,000 incidents of unwanted sexual contact ranging from groping to forced sex. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., was talking about the full gamut of these offenses on Face the Nation on June 9, 2013. While much of the focus has been on women, Gillibrand emphasized that "this is not just a woman's issue. More than half of the victims are men." This seemed like a strong rhetorical point that deserved a closer look. PolitiFact examined a related claim by Gillibrand in April when she cited a survey that asked soldiers whether they had had any unwanted sexual contact by a fellow soldier at any point since joining the military. Given the long tenure of some service members, that question can cover a span of many years. Gillibrand said that 21.7 percent of women and 3.3 percent of men responded yes and we rated her statement Mostly True. Her latest claim is different in that she’s speaking more broadly about the gender of the victims. The Department of Defense defines unwanted sexual contact as "contact that was against a person’s will or occurred when the person did not or could not consent. The term describes completed and attempted oral, anal, and vaginal penetration with any body part or object, and the unwanted touching of genitalia and other sexually related areas of the body." The military uses this definition in an annual survey of soldiers and uses the answers to make a statistical estimate of the total number of incidents that took place. That's how military officials came up with the figure of 26,000. Generally speaking, the survey asks about three levels of contact: unwanted touching, attempted sex and completed sex. In that survey, 6.1 percent of active duty women reported that they had been a victim in some fashion. On the other hand, just 1.2 percent of active duty men described having those sorts of experiences. At first glance, the numbers might suggest that Gillibrand had it wrong. But Glen Caplin, her communications director, said she was correct because her tally used the percentages to extrapolate the actual count of men and women in the military who have been victims of unwanted sexual contact. In round figures, about 85 percent of the military are men, or well over 1 million. Caplin said 1.2 percent of the men in the military is about 14,000, while 6.1 percent of active duty women is about 12,000. "So it is more men than women," Caplin said. We checked with the Department of Defense press office and spokeswoman Cynthia Smith confirmed Caplin’s numbers. We did find another measurement of the gender differences that seems to tell a different story. In the full 2012 annual report on Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, the Pentagon includes the survey results along with a very different set of numbers -- the cases that made it into the official record. The second data set is much smaller, less than 3,000 cases. It represents formal allegations filed by victims plus instances when victims seeking treatment report a violation to a health care provider or staff at a sexual assault prevention office but might not file official charges. In that official record, women represent about 80 percent or more of the cases. The large disparity between the total number of men who responded in the survey that they had been victims and the relatively small number who sought treatment or made an official complaint is likely due in part to the greater reluctance of men to report unwanted sexual contact. Dr. David Lisak, an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and founder of One In Six, an advocacy group for sexually abused men, said it is no surprise that male soldiers rarely disclose assaults. "Men are taught from a very young age that the core elements of masculinity are strength and toughness, and that vulnerability is completely unacceptable," Lisak said. "In a culture such as the military, where the culture of traditional masculinity is often more rigidly enforced than it is in the civilian world, the stigma associated with sexual assault is intensified." It also seems that on the spectrum of unwanted sexual contact, men often faced less aggressive situations. In the survey, half the men said the most serious incident they experienced was "sexual touching only," while only a third of women said that was the worst thing. In comparison, over half of the women said they had been the victim of an unwanted sexual act that had either been attempted or completed. Only about 15 percent of men in total said they were the victim of an attempted or a completed sexual act. Our ruling Gillibrand said more than half the victims of sexual crimes in the military are men. That's not true in terms of the 3,000 sexual contacts that were officially reported, but it is true if you rely on the larger estimate of unwanted sexual contacts that comes from a more comprehensive survey of people in the military. We rate the statement Mostly True.	None	Kirsten Gillibrand	None	None	None	2013-06-11T11:09:34	2013-06-09	['None']
-tron-02019	Denmark Has Banned Muslims from the Country	mostly fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/denmark-has-banned-muslims-from-the-country/	None	immigration	None	None	None	Denmark Has Banned Muslims from the Country	Oct 21, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13959	Says Apple products are currently "90 percent conflict-free," and "Intel is 100 percent conflict-free."	mostly false	/global-news/statements/2016/jun/15/robin-wright/did-your-phone-computer-contribute-suffering-congo/	As you’re texting away on that snazzy smartphone, you may be "holding war" in your hands, says actress and activist Robin Wright. Wright, known for her roles in House of Cards, Forrest Gump, and The Princess Bride, compared minerals extracted in the Democratic Republic of Congo for electronics to blood diamonds in a recent speech and urged consumers to learn more about their electronics. "I do have an Apple iPhone. And Apple is 90 percent conflict-free currently," Wright said May 25. "Intel is 100 percent conflict-free. They are the biggest distributor of the chip. That’s huge." Are the vast majority of Apple and Intel products made without financing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo? The answer is complicated. While both Apple and Intel are commended by human rights groups for their leadership in transparency, Wright’s numbers are off. More importantly, experts told us it’s impossible to ensure that anything is completely conflict-free. Conflict minerals, a primer The Democratic Republic of Congo’s rich mineral deposits, worth about $24 trillion, supply the world’s demand for electronics and fund militias that have been warring with each other and the government for decades. Rebel groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army (remember Kony?) and the Congolese military itself loot or seize control of mines in the Kivu region. These mines are notorious for their rampant human rights abuses. The minerals eventually find their way into cell phones, computers, and other products. Armed groups earned an estimated $184 million from just four minerals in 2008 alone. Here’s a video from Enough Project, a human rights group, on how it all works: Corporate reporting Wright may have been thinking of figures in Apple’s and Intel’s filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, but she misstated a few things. As part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, publically traded companies are required disclose use of conflict minerals — specifically tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold — annually to the SEC. In 2014, Apple reported 88 percent of its smelters and refineries were verified as conflict-free or participating in third-party auditing programs. That same year, Intel said 100 percent of microprocessors and chipsets were conflict-free, but it couldn’t determine if the label applied to other products. Both companies improved their numbers in 2015, according to their latest SEC filings. About 78 percent of Intel’s smelters and refineries were deemed conflict-free. Apple stated 100 percent of its smelters and refiners are in audits but said it does not believe verification was sufficient to label its products "conflict-free." Here’s a chart showing how the two stack up next to other companies: *Apple rejects the label conflict-free **No 2015 report was available; numbers taken from 2014 report. Google and its subsidiary, Motorola, also did not report number of firms participating in audits. ***SanDisk was unable to determine whether their any of their products included conflict minerals or were conflict-free. Aspirations vs. reality But experts told us participating in audits or even being deemed in compliance doesn’t guarantee that the minerals are actually conflict-free for several reasons. "Our position is companies should not be allowed to make those types of statements," said Seema Joshi, Amnesty International's Head of Business and Human Rights. Laura Seay, a Colby College professor who studies the African Great Lakes, said ensuring a 100 percent conflict-free global supply chain is near impossible. Carly Oboth, a policy adviser for the watchdog NGO, Global Witness, called the designation "hypothetical and aspirational." According to Oboth, smelters and refineries receive verification based on their capacity to do due diligence (i.e. chain of custody documentation and proof of insurance), not whether they’ve taken the steps to ensure their supplies were actually mined humanely. The auditing regiment is currenting being revised, Oboth said, "but for the time being, there’s no oversight on whether they’re negating risks." And while Global Witness commended Apple for its decision to reject the "conflict-free," Oboth said it and Intel could be doing more. (AP Photo) There are few means to verify in the conflict-ridden eastern part of the country where many mines are located. Beyond issues of accessibility, miners and the armed groups have found ways of circumventing the system. The majority of minerals are being smuggled into neighboring countries with higher profit margins and much less rigorous certification methods, if they exist at all, Seay told us. ITR, a tin auditing firm, prices a kilo of tin at $2 while the same amount would fetch $4 or $5 in Rwanda. "If you can get your minerals, which may or may not be conflict-free, into Rwanda, you can get it labeled conflict-free," she said. "Do you take the $2 or do you hire a boat and go to Rwanda? It’s a no brainer." And even if the minerals stay in the country, Seay pointed out, the audit system has spurred a cottage industry for conflict-free labels: "You can also buy the tag in the markets in Kigali. All the incentives are set up for people to lie." Labels as lip service Then there’s the question of whether conflict-free labeling actually curbs violence and protects human rights. The evidence is mixed. Dodd-Frank didn’t work out as planned initially. The Congolese government enacted a temporary ban on mining and companies avoided sourcing from the region altogether. For one of the poorest countries in the world where mining employs one sixth of its population, Dodd-Frank "set off a chain of events that has has propelled millions of miners and their families deeper into poverty." Meanwhile, there were few signs that it had tempered violence or weakened the militias. But now that the ban has ended and companies are once again buying from the Democratic Republic of Congo, experts view Dodd-Frank a bit more positively. Seay, an initial critic, says it’s draw attention to the issue. "It got the attention of the Congolese government in a way that nothing else could have," she said, adding, "A lot of is lip service and a lot of is how much facade we should put up." (Screengrab from When Elephants Fight) A 2015 report by the International Peace Information Search, a development research institute, found that armed groups have been cut off from many tin, tantalum, tungsten mines, but still profit from gold. Seay said they’ve savvied up (i.e. by removing guards with machine guns from the mines) while finding funding sources in border crossings, charcoal, "conflict weed", wildlife smuggling, etc. The narrow focus of Dodd-Frank also means that "conflict-free" isn’t the same thing as abuse-free. Amnesty has documented child labor in the DRC’s production of cobalt, which is not designated as a "conflict mineral." Global Witness found lapis lazuli funds the Taliban, but Dodd-Frank doesn’t apply because the mines are in Afghanistan. "You can have a completely clean mine, as designated by Dodd-Frank, with child laborers and where woman are trading sex with the pit bosses in order to sell lunch around the periphery," Seay said. "There’s no such thing as 100 percent conflict-free anything." Our ruling Wright said Apple products are currently "90 percent conflict-free," and "Intel is 100 percent conflict-free." The numbers are off. Intel says 100 percent of is processors are conflict-free, but couldn’t vouch for its other products. Apple reported that 100 percent of its supply chain was participating in audits, but rejected the label. While experts commend both companies for leading the sector in moving away from conflict minerals, they cautioned against labeling anything 100 percent "conflict-free." We rate Wright’s claim Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/6012a2b8-893f-45e6-ba1e-9220fa3d64e7	None	Robin Wright	None	None	None	2016-06-15T15:00:00	2016-05-25	['None']
-pomt-02952	Says Barbara Buono "voted to raise her own pay 40 percent."	mostly true	/new-jersey/statements/2013/oct/27/chris-christie/chris-christie-ad-claims-barbara-buono-voted-give-/	Politicians and pay raises go about as well together as oil and water, from a taxpayer’s perspective. And Gov. Chris Christie knows it. That might explain why one of his latest gubernatorial TV campaign ads targeting Democratic challenger Barbara Buono, a state senator, claims she voted to give herself a significant salary bump during her time in the Legislature. Buono "voted to raise her own pay 40 percent," the ad claims, from $35,000 to $49,000, as it points out differences between the two candidates in areas of education, taxes and more. The election is Nov. 5. Buono was an Assembly member when she voted to raise her salary, but the ad doesn’t mention a couple of key points: the sponsor of the legislation for the hikes is a Republican friend and ally of Christie’s, and the vote happened nearly 14 years ago. Let’s review the history behind the bill in question, S2297, and where Buono fits in. Republican state Sen. Joe Kyrillos Jr. -- Christie’s close friend -- and Sen. Bernard F. Kenny, a Democrat from Hudson County, sponsored the bill, which was introduced on Jan. 6, 2000. It called for increasing the salaries of the governor, judges, cabinet members, county prosecutors and members of the Legislature. In advocating for the bill, Kyrillos of Monmouth County noted in multiple published reports at the time that lawmakers hadn’t had a raise in 12 years and that a raise was warranted because lawmakers’ jobs had become "demanding." Both houses of the Legislature passed the bill on Jan. 10, 2000. For legislators, the result was the 40 percent hike. Buono (D-Metuchen) voted for the raise, the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services confirmed. By comparison, the gubernatorial salary increased from $130,000 to $175,000 -- an approximate 35 percent hike. The governor at the time was Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican. The salary increases for governor and Legislature members didn’t take effect until January 2002, while salary hikes for judges, prosecutors, cabinet members and others had their pay increased upon enactment of the law. In addition to Buono’s vote, we also reviewed OLS documents showing how every other member of the Legislature voted on the salary hike bill. The votes were essentially an even split in the 80-member Assembly. Of 48 Republicans, 32 voted in favor, 15 voted against and one lawmaker didn’t vote. Among 32 Democrats, 16 - including Buono - voted in favor, 13 voted against and three didn’t vote. The state’s 40 senators had a similar tally. Among 24 Republicans, 13 voted yes, seven voted no and four didn’t vote. Eight Democrats voted for the bill, seven voted against it and one didn’t vote. That means the bill passed the Republican-controlled Senate and Assembly. The Republican role in the pay hike can’t be discounted, according to Buono’s campaign. "Governor Christie has repeatedly used a specious claim that omits key details," spokesman Sam Salustro said in an e-mail. "This was legislation sponsored by a key Christie ally who intensely fought for its passage, passed by a Republican legislature and signed by a Republican governor. The Governor has benefited from the law and is one of the only New Jersey governors in recent memory to take the full salary. So before he throws stones, he should take a look at his own party first." The bottom line is Buono’s vote, Christie’s campaign spokesman said. "So, in short, Barbara Buono cast a vote to raise her salary by 40% while embarking on a career of voting to raise taxes and fees on New Jerseyans 154 times and neither she nor her campaign is disputing it," spokesman Kevin Roberts said in an e-mail. Our ruling A recent TV ad from the Christie gubernatorial campaign claims Buono "voted to raise her own pay 40 percent." OLS documents show that members of the state’s 208th Legislature, including Buono in the Assembly, voted to raise salaries for themselves, the governor, cabinet members, county prosecutors and more. It’s worth noting, however, that the bill was sponsored by Christie friend and political ally Joe Kyrillos, passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature and signed into law by a Republican governor -- nearly 14 years ago. So yes, Buono voted to raise her salary 40 percent -- with a heap of help from her Republican friends and colleagues. Since the claim is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, we rate it Mostly True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com.	None	Chris Christie	None	None	None	2013-10-27T07:30:00	2013-10-21	['Barbara_Buono']
-tron-02646	Ken Blackwell commentary about Barack Obama	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/blackwell/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Ken Blackwell commentary about Barack Obama	Mar 17, 2015	None	['Ken_Blackwell']
-snes-02404	The Tim Allen show 'Last Man Standing' was cancelled due to the star's political beliefs.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tim-allen-cancelled-political-views/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Tim Allen Show ‘Last Man Standing’ Cancelled for Political Reasons?	18 May 2017	None	['None']
-pose-00719	"I will pursue, along with our congressional delegation, the establishment of a National Laboratory in Oregon."	stalled	https://www.politifact.com/oregon/promises/kitz-o-meter/promise/749/establish-national-laboratory-in-oregon/	None	kitz-o-meter	John Kitzhaber	None	None	Establish national laboratory in Oregon	2011-01-04T21:58:42	None	['Oregon', 'United_States_Department_of_Energy_national_laboratories']
-goop-02013	Macaulay Culkin Did Claim “Satanic” Hollywood Execs Ritually Murder Child Actor	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/macaulay-culkin-hollywood-execs-elites-murder-child-actors/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Macaulay Culkin Did NOT Claim “Satanic” Hollywood Execs Ritually Murder Child Actors	3:08 pm, December 18, 2017	None	['None']
-goop-00804	Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston Bringing Up His Children Together, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-jennifer-aniston-children-kids-custody/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston NOT Bringing Up His Children Together, Despite Report	10:17 am, June 18, 2018	None	['Brad_Pitt', 'Jennifer_Aniston']
-snes-05134	Leonardo DiCaprio is moving to Woodstock, Illinois.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/leonardo-dicaprio-woodstock-illinois/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	No, Leonardo DiCaprio Isn’t Moving to Woodstock, Illinois	1 March 2016	None	['Illinois']
-pomt-01079	"There’s nothing in the [RhodeMap RI] plan that takes away local government control and local zoning control."	half-true	/rhode-island/statements/2015/jan/16/kevin-flynn/ri-planner-kevin-flynn-nothing-rhodemap-ri-plan-ta/	The RhodeMap RI long-term economic development plan continues to spark controversy throughout Rhode Island. This week, Republican legislators said they would submit legislation to free municipalities from having to incorporate it in their local planning. That follows comments House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello made in December to radio station WPRO-AM. Mattiello said, "the plan is never going to come before the House or the Senate in its totality and we’re never going to vote on it." The controversy started in mid-September with the release of a 200-page draft of the plan, which is meant to guide efforts to improve the state’s economy. During meetings that sometimes descended into shouting matches, critics said that if RhodeMap RI were implemented, local cities and towns would be relinquishing control to the federal government on affordable housing and land-use issues because the plan was paid for, in part, by a $1.9 million U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant. Supporters said there's nothing in the plan that would infringe on individual property rights or local control over zoning. Because the debate is likely to continue in the coming months, we decided to examine a statement made late last year by Kevin M. Flynn, associate director for planning for the state Division of Planning, who oversaw the plan’s development. Addressing concerns about ceding municipal control, Flynn told EcoRI News, "there’s nothing in the plan that takes away local government control and local zoning control." We asked Flynn how he backed up his statement. While we waited for a response, we read through the RhodeMap RI plan, and found nothing to indicate a threat to local control, suggesting Flynn’s statement was accurate. But things got more complicated when we looked at other documents, including the Planning Division’s grant application, the grant agreement, and HUD’s description of the Sustainable Regional Planning Grant Program, the source of the $1.9 million. According to HUD, the program is intended to support planning efforts that integrate land use, economic and workforce development, transportation and infrastructure investments. It also aims to enable local and state planners to consider such issues as energy use, climate change, public health and "social equity" in economic planning. Agencies that apply for such grants must agree to generate plans aimed at producing, among other objectives, "equitable land use planning" that furthers the federal Fair Housing Act and complies with other civil rights laws. And those agencies must agree to analyze and overcome barriers to housing discrimination -- in HUD’s words, to "affirmatively further fair housing." Critics view those provisions with alarm, saying they essentially give the federal government license to override state and local government control. They point to a long-running legal dispute involving New York’s Westchester County as Exhibit A. More on that in a moment. When Flynn got back to us, he referred us to Article XIII of the Rhode Island Constitution, which empowers cities and towns to adopt and amend their charters, and enact and amend local land use laws. He also cited state zoning enabling legislation, which delegates zoning authority to cities and towns. "A plan is simply that. A plan," Flynn said. "A plan has no power to modify constitutional or statutory law." "The economic development plan could never supercede state law," he said. "That is a basic tenet of our jurisprudence." Looking for more impartial views, we reached out to more than 10 national housing law experts. The four who responded agreed that communities do not cede zoning control when they accept HUD grants. But they had some caveats. For example, Brian Gilmore, an associate professor and director of the Housing Clinic at Michigan State University College of Law, said, "I wouldn’t say they’ve ceded total control. I would say they have obligations." Robert G. Schwemm, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, said much the same thing. "It’s illegal to use local zoning power to maintain segregation," Schwemm said. However, "HUD has no direct power over local zoning authority," Schwemm said. "HUD could deny the grant or take back money," but that’s a remote possibility, he said. "The idea of a fund cutoff is virtually unheard of," because historically, the Fair Housing Act "has been enforced weakly. … They’re doing more than has been done in the past," he said of the Obama administration. HUD’s Annual Report on Fair Housing 2012-2013 showed that the agency received 495 analyses by cities and towns examining fair housing choice. Of those, HUD took enforcement action in five instances. Here’s why Westchester County is important. In 2006, a housing advocacy group sued the county in federal court, arguing that it had defrauded taxpayers by accepting $50 million in HUD grant money while failing to remove barriers to fair housing as required by its agreement with HUD. HUD later became a plaintiff in the suit. A judge ultimately agreed with the plaintiffs, and a landmark settlement was reached requiring the county to spend $50 million to build or acquire 750 affordable-housing units in communities that were more than 90 percent white. Now, the county and HUD are fighting over whether the county has complied with the settlement and whether it must amend its zoning ordinances to do so. The county has lost at least $20 million in HUD grants so far. We contacted the county for its take on HUD grants and local control. "The experience in Westchester has been caveat emptor," said Ned McCormack, Westchester communications director and senior adviser to County Executive Robert P. Astorino, using the Latin phrase for "buyer beware." "Once you take any money from HUD, your interpretation of what is expected in return and their interpretation vary widely." Our ruling Kevin M. Flynn said nothing in the RhodeMap RI plan "takes away local government control and local zoning control." Technically, there is nothing in the plan’s language that appears to compromise local zoning law or control. But his statement doesn’t acknowledge the strings attached to the HUD grant. In accepting the $1.9 million from HUD to develop the plan, the state agreed to, among other things, expand housing opportunities for underserved populations on the basis of race, ethnicity, or economic status and, thus, is obligated to do so. In fact, HUD has taken legal action against grant recipients such as Westchester County that, in its view, failed to live up to its agreement. It’s rare, but it has happened. For the record, in December, 26 Rhode Island cities and towns were awarded nearly $5.3 million in HUD grants through the Community Development Block Grant program On balance, we rate Flynn’s claim is "partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context," our definition of Half True. (Correction: Article XIII of the Rhode Island Constitution spells out home rule for cities and towns. The article number was incorrect in the original version of this item.)	None	Kevin Flynn	None	None	None	2015-01-16T00:01:00	2014-11-25	['None']
-tron-00856	Don’t Accept Anything from Facebook Hacker Fabrizio Brambilla	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/facebook-hacker-fabrizio-brambilla/	None	computers	None	None	['cyberattacks', 'facebook', 'warning']	Don’t Accept Anything from Facebook Hacker Fabrizio Brambilla	Aug 24, 2017	None	['None']
-thal-00002	FactCheck: Who got it right between Higgins and Ní Riada in the debate over speaking rights?	none	http://www.thejournal.ie/factcheck-michael-d-higgins-liadh-ni-riada-4287242-Oct2018/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck: Who got it right between Higgins and Ní Riada in the debate over speaking rights?	Oct 16th 2018, 6:00 AM	None	['None']
-hoer-00360	$1.20 Per Share to Help Girl With Cancer	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/girl-cancer-bed-share-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Facebook Share Hoax - $1.20 Per Share to Help Girl With Cancer	July 5, 2012	None	['None']
-tron-00081	Boy Dies in Santa’s Arms	investigation pending!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/boy-dies-santas-arms/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	['Christmas', 'seasonal']	Boy Dies in Santa’s Arms	Dec 14, 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00467	"Will work to provide states and local governments with the resources they need to address sprawl and create more livable communities."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/487/help-states-and-localities-address-sprawl/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Help states and localities address sprawl	2010-01-07T13:27:00	None	['None']
-pose-00297	Will support "efforts to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund to develop affordable housing in mixed-income neighborhoods. The Affordable Housing Trust Fund would use a small percentage of the profits of two government-sponsored housing agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to create thousands of new units of affordable housing every year...Will also restore cuts to public housing operating subsidies, and ensure that all Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs are restored to their original purpose."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/314/increase-the-supply-of-affordable-housing-througho/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Increase the supply of affordable housing throughout metropolitan regions	2010-01-07T13:26:54	None	['Freddie_Mac', 'Fannie_Mae']
-snes-00900	Disney announced in March 2018 that it was remaking 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks' with Kate Winslet.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-disney-announce-bedknobs-broomsticks/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Disney Announce a Remake of ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ with Kate Winslet?	14 March 2018	None	['Kate_Winslet', 'The_Walt_Disney_Company']
-pomt-05431	Gas prices have gone up 99 percent since Obama became president, "the highest gas price increase since Carter."	mostly false	/rhode-island/statements/2012/apr/29/national-republican-congressional-committee/national-republican-congressional-committee-says-g/	We received an email from the National Republican Congressional Committee recently that blamed the country’s high gas prices on the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress. The news release, which specifically targeted Rhode Island Democratic U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, posited several reasons why gas prices have skyrocketed, including unreasonable environmental regulations and too few offshore drilling permits. The overall effect on gas prices has been historic, according to the GOP committee. "99%: THE AMOUNT GAS PRICES HAVE INCREASED UNDER OBAMA, THE HIGHEST GAS PRICE INCREASE SINCE CARTER," the April 20 email blared. A quick check of two numbers in the release -- $1.928 per gallon, the national average price of regular, unleaded gas in February 2009, versus $3.843 per gallon, the price on March 29, 2012 -- confirmed that prices have indeed climbed by 99 percent since Obama’s inauguration. But what about the second part of the claim: is this really the highest increase since Jimmy Carter was president more than three decades ago? And is the implication that Obama is responsible for the increase accurate? At PolitiFact, we treat these types of blame/credit statements in two parts. We examine whether the numbers are right and how much experts say the person being blamed is responsible. Let’s start with the claim that the gas price increase is the highest since the Carter administration. Nathaniel Sillin, a spokesman for the NRCC, told us that the group came to that conclusion by looking at the presidencies from Carter onward and comparing the average gas price at the beginning of each president’s time in office with the price at the end. Since Obama is still in office, the committee is using the most recent price of gas for the number during his presidency. Sillin sent us a chart updated with the average price of gas from April 4. The chart showed that under Carter the price of gas increased by 103 percent; under Ronald Reagan it dropped by 66 percent; under George H.W. Bush it went up 20 percent; under Bill Clinton it increased 32 percent; under George W. Bush it rose 20 percent; and so far under Obama it has gone up 104 percent. So according to the updated chart the NRCC could actually claim that the increase is higher than that under Carter. The NRCC chart was based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and AAA. We decided to check their prices with the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the official statistical and analytical arm of the Department of Energy. The only major difference we found using the EIA data was that the drop in price under Reagan wasn’t as dramatic as the NRCC said. Instead of a 66-percent decrease, the EIA database gave us a still healthy decrease of 37 percent. And using the EIA data, the increase under Obama so far is actually 107 percent. But we have two main questions about the NRCC’s claim. First, is it fair to compare gas prices during Obama’s presidency in April to prices for his predecessors in January? Historically, gas prices generally rise through the summer, and fall in the autumn -- and this year they are projected to once again follow that pattern. (The price peaked last year in May.) For an extreme example, look at 2008, during George W. Bush’s presidency, when gas prices skyrocketed to more than $4 a gallon that July and plummeted to $1.79 a gallon the following January. If we look at the price that April -- the same month the NRCC used for Obama in its claim -- and compare it to the first month of Bush’s term, then the increase would have been 139 percent. That increase is in fact higher than Carter’s 103 percent or Obama’s 107 percent. And if we use the highest price in 2008, from August, and compare it with Bush’s first month in office, the increase is a whopping 180 percent. We also calculated the increase using precisely the same length of time for Bush that the NRCC used for Obama. So we compared the price in February 2005, the first month of his second term, to the price in April 2008 and came up with an increase of 81 percent. When we did the same calculation using January 2009 as the end date, we came up with a decrease of 6 percent. Again, this demonstrates how prices can change seasonally. Our second major question relates to the premise of the NRCC’s assertion -- that Obama is responsible for high gas prices. How much control does a president really have over gas prices? "Virtually none," Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for Oil Price Information Service of New Jersey, told us. "The real factors are global." "Oil is a global market in which America is a big consumer but a small supplier," Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago economist who has donated to Obama and informally advised his administration, wrote in The New York Times. "We consume about 20 percent of the world’s oil but hold only 2 percent of the oil reserves. That means we are, in economics jargon, ‘price takers.’ "Domestic production has increased during the Obama administration, but it has had minimal effects on global prices because, as producers, we are just too small to matter much. And even if domestic oil companies further increased production, they would sell to the highest global bidder." With supplies tightening because of conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East and demand growing in China and Japan (which shut down its fleet of nuclear power plants), the price of oil is going up, according to analysts. Fears about a disruption to oil production in Iran have increased the upward pressure. "Unfortunately, presidents get blamed for world market changes that occur during their time in office... but generally, they do not cause them," wrote Peter Van Doren and Jerry Taylor, senior fellows at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Our ruling The National Republican Congressional Committee said that gas prices have increased by 99 percent since Obama became president and that it’s "the highest gas price increase since Carter." The NRCC framed the question in such a way that it didn’t make an apples-to-apples comparison between presidencies. Seasonal fluctuations in gas prices could easily change the NRCC’s calculation for Obama’s presidency -- a variation the committee didn’t note in its news release. It also didn’t say that it was comparing the first and last months of a president’s term. The release implies that gas prices haven’t risen so high percentage-wise at any time under any other president since Carter. But that’s not true. When George W. Bush was in office, the national average price rose much higher by percent before falling. Finally, blaming presidents for gas prices is missing the point. Presidents have little control over them. The global economy is the prime factor. We rule the statement Mostly False. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	National Republican Congressional Committee	None	None	None	2012-04-29T06:00:00	2012-04-20	['Barack_Obama', 'Jimmy_Carter']
-pomt-02650	"Only 3 percent of voters 18 to 34 don't believe that climate change is really happening."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/15/chris-murphy/sen-chris-murphy-says-just-3-percent-voters-dont-b/	More than a dozen Senate Democrats called a news conference on Jan. 14, 2014, to draw attention to their efforts to curb climate change. One of those senators -- Chris Murphy, D-Conn. -- focused his remarks on the impact of public opinion on advancing an agenda on climate-change policy. Murphy said that advocates for policies to address climate-change "have to convince Republicans -- and those who would stand against the action that we're proposing -- of the electoral consequences of continuing to ignore this issue. We have to tell Republicans that if they ultimately want to stop the hemorrhaging from young voters in this country, they need to start paying attention to this issue, because only 3 percent of voters 18 to 34 don't believe that climate change is really happening." We wondered whether Murphy’s polling data was sound. Thanks to some previous reporting by our colleagues at PolitiFact Rhode Island, we quickly found a poll that appears to be the source for Murphy’s claim. It was commissioned by the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group, and conducted by a polling team that included one Democratic firm and one Republican firm. The poll was taken between July 8 and July 10, 2013, with 600 respondents, all of whom were registered voters between 18 and 34 who voted in the 2012 general election. The poll asked, "Which of the following best describes your view of climate change?" Here are the responses: • Climate change is a severe threat that we must start addressing now: 55 percent • Climate change is an issue to address in the years ahead, but it's not urgent now: 11 percent • Climate change may be happening, but it's a natural event that humans can't affect: 27 percent • Climate change is not really happening: 3 percent • Don't know: 3 percent This appears to support Murphy’s claim. We should note a few quibbles. • The poll was paid for by an environmental group. We always believe it’s worth noting whenever someone cites a poll paid for by a group with a perspective and a stake in the issue. However, the fact that two polling firms, one from each party, were included makes the poll somewhat more credible. • On a subsequent question in the same poll -- "When, if ever, will the consequences of climate change personally affect people like you?" -- the number answering "never" was 6 percent. That’s higher than 3 percent, though both are small percentages in the larger scheme of things. • There’s one other poll that asks a similar question and finds different results. But they aren’t exactly comparable. The Pew Research Center -- an independent polling organization -- surveyed a national sample of 1,504 adults age 18 or older between Oct. 9 and Oct. 13, 2013. One of the questions Pew asked was: "From what you’ve read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not?" Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 73 percent said the earth is warming, and 18 percent said it was not warming -- quite a bit higher than the 3 percent from the other poll. The two polls use different age ranges, but if respondents up to age 34 were added in, that would likely increase the percentage of global-warming deniers further, since an even higher percentage of 30- to 49-year olds said there was no global warming -- 28 percent. Why such divergent responses? One factor could be the precise wording of each poll. But a bigger difference is likely the pool of respondents. The LCV poll only counted answers from "registered voters … who voted in the 2012 general election," while the Pew poll simply asked "adults." This means the poll results aren’t comparable in an apples-to-apples fashion. This difference might have posed a problem for Murphy, but he was careful with how he worded his claim. He said "3 percent of voters" -- not "3 percent of Americans." So we don’t find fault on these grounds. "Pollsters don’t ask about climate change very often," said Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Most polls show that most people believe global warming is real. The question for policy makers is what kind of priority it should be, and here, many pollsters show it not to be very high." Our ruling Murphy said, "Only 3 percent of voters 18 to 34 don't believe that climate change is really happening." It should be noted that Murphy cited a poll that had been paid for by an environmental group. Still, we couldn’t find any poll with genuinely comparable data that clashed with Murphy’s carefully worded assertion. We rate his statement True.	None	Chris Murphy	None	None	None	2014-01-15T16:49:30	2014-01-15	['None']
-snes-03720	The Clinton Foundation suddenly transferred $1.8 billion to a bank in Qatar.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-moves-billions-to-qatar/	None	Junk News	None	Bethania Palma	None	Hillary Clinton’s ‘Sudden Move’ of $1.8 Billion to Qatar Central Bank Stuns Financial World	24 October 2016	None	['Clinton_Foundation', 'Qatar']
-pomt-00987	"If you look at the income of average Americans...they’re absolutely flat in constant dollars since 1979."	mostly true	/virginia/statements/2015/feb/09/don-beyer/beyer-says-middle-class-incomes-have-been-flat-197/	U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, D-8th, recently called on Congress to "jump start" the economy for middle-class Americans. "If you look at the income of average Americans -- working-class Americans, middle-class Americans -- they’re absolutely flat in constant dollars since 1979," Beyer said during a Feb. 4 speech to the Arlington County Democratic Party. We reviewed his claim. Tia Shuyler, Beyer’s press secretary, said her boss heard about the statistic late last year during an orientation for freshmen congressmen at Harvard University. She also sent us an October 2014 article from the Pew Research Center headlined, "For most workers, real wages have barely budged in decades." Pew relied on statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Let’s take a closer look: The data that measure Beyer’s claim are called "median usual weekly earnings." To compute it, BLS compiles the gross weekly paycheck earnings of a sample of all private sector employees in all industries, then establishes the midpoint figure at which half of the workers are earning more and half are earning less. At the start of 1979 -- as far back as the data goes -- median weekly pay was $232 in unadjusted dollars and that rose to $796 during the final quarter of 2014. When adjusted for inflation, the figures don’t move much. The early 1979 weekly pay is worth $757 in 2014 dollars. So in constant dollars, median weekly pay rose by $39 from the start of 1979 to the end of last year, a 5 percent increase. Beyer, of course, said the inflation-adjusted numbers are "absolutely flat" since 1979. The BLS data support his claim if you start counting in the third quarter of 1979 when median weekly pay was worth $792 in today’s money. That results in a $1 weekly decline in median earnings over the last 35 years, or about one-tenth of 1 percent. The status of the middle class is an emerging issue moving towards next year’s presidential elections. Several studies show that the holdings of the top 1 percent have soared during recent decades, spurring many Democrats to complain about a growing gap between the wealthy and the middle class. The BLS figures Beyer relies on are not the final word on median income, according to Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research group. Another way of looking at it, he said, is to use data from the U.S. Census Bureau. It shows median household income before taxes, using 2013 dollars, rose from $49,225 in 1979 to $51,939 in 2013, an increase of 5.5 percent. That’s pretty close to flat growth. But Burtless said widely used methods of examining gross income undercounts certain forms of compensation and gives short shrift to middle class gains over the decades. Burtless prefers a broader measure of income used by the Congressional Budget Office in a November 2014 report. The CBO based it’s computation of household earnings on several factors, including after-tax wages, other earnings, retirement income and benefits including employer-based health coverage and government subsidies. The CBO concluded that median household after-tax income, when adjusted in 2011 dollars, was $26,200 in 1979 and $38,500 in 2011, the latest year figures that were available. That’s a 47 percent increase. Broken down on an annual basis, that comes out to a 1.3 percent income increase each year. Our ruling Beyer says the income of middle-class Americans has been "absolutely flat" since 1979. He supports that claim by pointing to oft-cited Bureau of Labor and Statistics data showing little or no inflation-adjusted growth in the median gross wage of workers over the last 35 years. An analysis of Census Bureau data yields similar results. Economists, however, define income in far broader terms than individual gross wages. A wider examination of income by the Congressional Budget Office -- which includes other earnings, benefits and tax payments -- shows median household income has increased by 47 percent over the last generation. So there’s plenty of evidence backing Beyer’s claim, but it doesn’t win unanimous support from economists. We rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Don Beyer	None	None	None	2015-02-09T00:00:00	2015-02-04	['United_States']
-vogo-00496	Statement: “I have outlined ideas that produce budget savings in excess of $90 million annually — and savings that can be achieved in the FY 12 budget.” City Councilman Carl DeMaio, in response to a question about his budget cut ideas in voiceofsandiego.org, Oct. 13.	determination: barely true	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-cutting-the-budget-with-carl-demaio/	Analysis: The central question in the debate over Proposition D, the city of San Diego’s sales tax and financial reform ballot measure, is whether the city could solve its longstanding budget problems and maintain service levels without a tax increase.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Cutting the Budget With Carl DeMaio	October 28, 2010	None	['Fiscal_year']
-goop-00365	Pete Davidson A “Groomzilla” While Planning Ariana Grande Wedding?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/pete-davidson-ariana-grande-wedding-planning-groomzilla/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Pete Davidson A “Groomzilla” While Planning Ariana Grande Wedding?	9:54 am, August 30, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02150	President Barack Obama’s budget threatens national security by proposing "an Army of fewer personnel than we had before Pearl Harbor."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2014/may/04/jim-sensenbrenner/jim-sensenbrenner-says-army-smaller-pearl-harbor/	Near the end of an April 15, 2014 town hall meeting in his district, Wisconsin Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner listened to a constituent cite something on the Internet about the resignation of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "There’s no truth meter on the Internet," remarked Sensenbrenner, a Republican elected to Congress in southeastern Wisconsin since 1978. Respectfully, we beg to differ on that. A remark earlier in the town-hall session by Sensenbrenner about Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s plans to downsize the Army’s troop strength caught our attention. "With respect to the president’s budget proposal, there the recommendation was that we have an Army of fewer personnel than we had before Pearl Harbor," Sensenbrenner said when asked about survivor’s benefits. "That’s ridiculous and outrageous." Let’s put that one on our Truth-O-Meter. When we asked Sensenbrenner spokesman Ben Miller for backup on the historical comparison, he referred us to the U.S. Department of Defense’s budget request for fiscal year 2015. It quoted the Quadrennial Defense Review 2014. That five-year plan says the active Army will reduce its "end strength" to between 440,000 and 450,000 personnel. The current active-duty figure is about 520,000, Army spokesman Troy Rolan told us. Miller also pointed to stories in the New York Times, and a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story that included Associated Press reporting on Hagel’s budget. The Times piece said that "cuts proposed by the Obama administration would result in the smallest Army since just before the World War II buildup." The AP report said the active-duty Army would shrink to the "smallest number since 1940, when the nation was gearing up to enter World War II." But Sensenbrenner didn’t say Hagel’s plan would result in the smallest Army since before the war buildup. He said it would be smaller than the pre-war troop complement. Before the U.S. buildup got cranked up, the Army had 188,000 troops in mid-1939 and 264,000 in mid-1940, official Army figures show. So Hagel’s plan for 440,000 active troops would still be larger than that, contrary to what Sensenbrenner said. Sensenbrenner’s phrasing looks better if you limit the comparison just to the 1941 period right before Pearl Harbor. But the troop numbers from 1941 include the U.S. buildup that began in 1940 in the wake of Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland. By late August 1941, active-duty Army personnel totalled about 1.6 million. If Sensenbrenner was using 1.6 million as his comparison point, he couldn’t confine his outrage to the Obama/Hagel Army of 450,000, because every Army since 1952 has been smaller than 1.6 million. Troop levels ebb and flow, as you might expect, around major wars. After the World War II peak of 8.3 million, the Army’s numbers fell dramatically, then blipped up to 1.6 million during the Korean War. After another drop, the number ramped up to 1.475 million during the Vietnam War before levelling off at about 775,000 from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. The Army’s size fell significantly throughout the 1990s to 479,000 before slowly ticking up to 571,000 after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As America has drawn down troops in those nations, the Army’s strength has dropped to the current 520,000. So, with the proposed reduction, the Army would be just below where it was before the Sept. 11 attacks. Strained comparison There’s another angle to consider here: the difficulty in comparing a 1940 Army to today’s model. We asked military historian Lance Janda of Cameron University in Oklahoma to assess Sensenbrenner’s comments. Janda called the comments "terribly misleading, implying as they do a sort of similarity between the technology, force structure, threat environment, and federal budget reality in 2014 and the one in 1940 that simply does not exist." In terms of weapons systems, communications capabilities, speed of deployment, radius of action, and overall destructive potential, Janda said, the U.S. is light years beyond where it was prior to World War II. "In 1940 our Army and army Air Corps were relatively small and our Navy was one among several powerful navies around the world," Janda said. "Today, the United States Navy and Air Force have no peers." Travis Sharp, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a nonprofit think tank, wrote that size of the force often does matter, but "since the 2014 Army is not going to fight in the 1940 strategic environment, comparing them does not help us decide what to do today." "While interesting," Sharp wrote, "the comparison to 1940 is not particularly useful." "Today's Army is vastly more capable, even at a fraction of the headcount," John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, told us. Hagel, in announcing the budget reductions in February 2014, called them difficult and not without added risk. Hagel said the cuts assume the United States no longer becomes involved in large, prolonged stability operations overseas on the scale of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department reported. But he said the smaller force still would be capable of decisively defeating aggression in one major war "while also defending the homeland and supporting air and naval forces engaged in another theater against an adversary." Still, some analysts, including Sharp, have expressed concerns about repercussions on the battlefield and beyond if the active-duty complement falls to 440,000 without appropriate contingency planning. "Prioritizing technology over size has a strategic logic and conforms with historical practice," wrote Sharp. "Despite this logic, focusing on high-tech modernization without simultaneously implementing policies to regenerate ground forces quickly should a crisis erupt constitutes strategic negligence of the highest order." PolitiFact National checked a statement similar to Sensenbrenner’s in January 2012. The speaker was Mitt Romney. The Republican presidential candidate said that the U.S. military is at risk of losing its "military superiority" because "our Navy is smaller than it’s been since 1917. Our Air Force is smaller and older than any time since 1947." The claim earned a Pants on Fire rating. The numbers were close to accurate, but experts said it was wrong to assume a decline in the number of ships or aircraft automatically means a weaker military. And the comparison of today’s military to its predecessors in 1917 or 1947 was deemed ridiculous. Our rating Sensenbrenner said that President Obama’s budget proposed "an Army of fewer personnel than we had before Pearl Harbor." The congressman doesn’t read as much into the numbers as did Romney. But he flubbed the historical comparison pointed out by others, and experts say it’s a limited and potentially misleading comparison in any event. We rate the claim False.	None	Jim Sensenbrenner	None	None	None	2014-05-04T05:00:00	2014-04-15	['None']
-goop-02230	Kim Kardashian Moving Because She’s “Terrified” After Burglary?	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-moving-burglary/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kim Kardashian Moving Because She’s “Terrified” After Burglary?	9:15 am, November 9, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-08312	State House incumbent Jill Chambers, R-Atlanta, "personally profits from taxpayer money."	false	/georgia/statements/2010/oct/30/georgia-house-democratic-caucus-behalf-elena-paren/state-house-candidate-parent-said-incumbent-profit/	If you believe her foes, state House Rep. Jill Chambers is the candidate of your nightmares. Chambers "sold out our families," according to a mailer by Democrats on behalf of challenger Elena Parent. The Republican lets businesses "prey on consumers." But wait. There's more. "Even worse, Jill Chambers personally profits from taxpayer money," the mailer said. Profiting from taxpayer money? That claim begged for a fact check. District 81 is home to the Atlanta area's hardest-fought General Assembly race this season. Although the stretch of DeKalb County along Buford Highway leans toward Democrats, Chambers has managed to keep her seat since 2003. Parent, a political newcomer, could finally put the district in Democratic hands. The corporate attorney and former chief of staff for a state senator has strong backing and is not afraid of a fight. Mud is flying. Earlier this month, we checked out an attack by Chambers that accused Parent of taking money intended for the education of DeKalb children. We ruled that claim Pants on Fire. Now it's Parent's turn on the Truth-O-Meter. The Democrats' claim on her behalf that Chambers "profits" off of taxpayer money cites information from the General Assembly's Legislative Fiscal Office, which keeps track of member expenses. The mailer, received by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Oct. 13, elaborates: "This year alone, Chambers billed taxpayers $9,000 for her expenses on days when the Legislature wasn't even in session ... If that wasn't enough, Chambers has charged taxpayers an additional $110,000 for her 'expenses' on top of her taxpayer-funded salary." Parent's camp said they did not pay for the ad and did not coordinate with state Democrats who wrote it. They referred us to Don Weigel, director of the Georgia House Democratic Caucus, for additional details. He said they're not accusing Chambers of fraud. "The point we're making is she is abusing the system," Weigel said. In addition to an annual salary of about $17,300, state law entitles members of the General Assembly to a per diem and mileage for their services. Most receive $173 per day plus 50 cents per mile. This money is for session days and out-of-session committee work. Chambers chairs the MARTA Oversight Committee, which oversees spending for the transit agency. She is also assigned to the Appropriations, Rules and Governmental Affairs committees. The Democrats' argument goes like this: The business Chambers ran with her now ex-husband selling art supplies to interior designers faltered in recent years and closed. She filed for bankruptcy earlier this month. According to Parent's camp, as Chambers struggled financially, the number of days she said she performed out-of-session committee work jumped from 17 in 2008 to to 43 in 2009, even though the full MARTOC committee met only a few times in 2009. Weigel said Chambers could have exaggerated the amount of work she performed to get more money. A document Democrats sent AJC PolitiFact Georgia laying out their argument said that they were unable to get the Legislature to produce records that say "what, if any" services she performed for the state. AJC PolitiFact Georgia came up with expense records stretching back eight years. To receive a per diem for out-of session committee work, legislators must file a voucher that names the committee and lists the dates of service and miles driven. To receive reimbursements for costs such as stipends for legislative aides, yearly parking at the Capitol, printing and post office boxes, legislators must submit vouchers and proof of payment. We took a look at those vouchers and receipts and compared them to figures Democrats provided us on Chambers' expenses. We will take the mailer's points one at a time: Chambers billed taxpayers $9,000 for her expenses on days when the Legislature wasn't in session This statement is misleading. So far this year, Chambers' actual expenses total $3,324.95. This is less than half the $7,000 that state law allows. She paid the money out of pocket and was reimbursed after the state received proof of payment. Chambers also reported she performed 42 days of committee work out of session for a total of $7,266 in per diem payments and $743.40 in mileage. This means that Chambers did receive money for days the Legislature was not in session. But so long as she did the work, state law says she is legally entitled to the money. We found no evidence that the number of days she reported was alarmingly high, or that she failed to perform a claimed day's work. A 2003 AJC investigation into per diem days found it was unusual for legislators to claim more than 50 days after the end of the legislative session. Chambers' 42 days included days of out-of session committee work during spring session breaks. According to that 2003 investigation, that year's MARTOC committee chair claimed he worked 99 days after the spring session. Chambers charged taxpayers $110,000 for her expenses on top of her salary This statement is even more misleading than the first. The paragraph that includes this sentence begins with the words "this year alone." Therefore a reader might easily think that Chambers billed the state $110,000 for a single year's expenses. A closer look at Democrats' data shows the $110,000 is a total for about eight years of service in the Legislature, not one. And the money was not solely for expenses such as legislative aide work or office furniture. It was the entire amount she had received from the state in per diem, mileage and expense reimbursements. Once again, state law entitles her to the money, so long as she does the work and makes real payments. We took a closer look at some of Chambers' vouchers. They included work while the Legislature was on break during session, and duties for committees other than MARTOC such as Appropriations and Rules. So even though the full MARTOC committee met only a few times out of session, Chambers was involved in other committees that also met. And contrary to Democrats' claims, Chambers' per diem days did not post an unusual jump during her financial difficulties. Their 2010 numbers excluded vouchers she filed after April 19. According to Oct. 21 Fiscal Office records, Chambers has worked 42 days outside of session this year -- one day less than in 2009. Since Chambers began as MARTOC chair in 2005, her days have typically hovered between 32 and 43, although they dipped in 2008 to 17. This means Chambers would have actually received less money when she needed it most. Given this information, the accusation that Chambers "profits" from taxpayer money is out of bounds. As Parent is a former chief of staff to a state senator, she and her camp should have known better. At AJC PolitiFact, the burden of proof rests on the accuser. Democrats have not proved Chambers exaggerated the amount of work she performed. Furthermore, the accusations are misleading. Parent's backers suggest Chambers is wasteful or dodging the rules. But her actual reported expenses in recent years have been less than half of what is allowed by law. Her per diem is set by state statute, and the days she claimed dropped when she could have used the cash. Given the flimsy backing to the claim, by the Parent camp's rules, you could say any legislator "profits" from her work if she claims per diem and mileage. We therefore rule this claim False.	None	Georgia House Democratic Caucus on behalf of Elena Parent	None	None	None	2010-10-30T06:00:00	2010-10-13	['None']
-pomt-09615	During his tenure as mayor, he "saw Houston’s crime rates drop to the lowest levels in more than 25 years."	true	/texas/statements/2010/jan/13/bill-white/white-says-crime-hit-25-year-low-during-his-tenure/	As his campaign revs up, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White is pointing voters to his record as mayor of Houston from 2004 through 2009. On his campaign Web site and in a thank-you letter published Jan. 2 in the Houston Chronicle, he brags about the city’s crime rates. Though White in his public statements has stopped short of claiming he reduced crime in the nation's fourth-largest city, his Web site biography notes that during his tenure as mayor, he "saw Houston’s crime rates drop to the lowest levels in more than 25 years." White's critics have accused him of being soft on crime, and the issue is likely to emerge in the governor's race. We decided to investigate whether White's statement about the decrease in Houston crime was true. Statistics provided by his campaign confirm that the crime rate overall hit a 25-year low during his administration. That measure includes three nonviolent property crimes (such as burglary) as well as four major violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault). The White campaign's numbers, which were generated by the Houston Police Department for the years 1980 through 2008, show that the city’s 2008 total crime rate -- 6,080 offenses per 100,000 residents -- was the lowest of any of those years. In fact, 2006, 2007 and 2008 had the three lowest total crime rates in the 29 years of data offered by the campaign. To double-check the numbers, we compared White’s statistics with those of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which collects data from local law enforcement agencies for the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. The DPS numbers for Houston did not perfectly match the police department’s because the agencies use different population estimates in their calculations. However, the discrepancies were small and did not undermine White’s assertion: In the DPS data starting with 1980, 2008 was also the year with the lowest total crime rate: 6,053.7 offenses per 100,000 residents. Looking only at violent crime in Houston, the picture changes somewhat. There was at least one year -- 1998 being the most recent -- when the violent crime rate was lower than any year during White's tenure. And both the White campaign and Clete Snell, chairman of the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Houston Downtown, note that Houston experienced an uptick in violent crime in 2005, White’s second year in office, that they attribute to the influx of Hurricane Katrina evacuees. These days, few public officials can legitimately take credit for reducing crime locally. That's because crime rates have been trending down all across the country for years, in some cases to record lows. According to FBI data, the nation's total crime rate in 2008 was down 29 percent from 1983, 25 years earlier. Experts don't agree on the reasons for the persistent trend, but have suggested such factors as rising incarceration rates, the aging of the population and improved police practices. It is important to note that crime trends do not follow straight lines — they can fluctuate year-to-year. Still, according to the DPS data, total crime in Houston has dropped 31 percent since 1983. And the decline was under way before White took office. Nevertheless, when the Houston FBI office gave White the FBI Director’s 2007 Community Leadership Award, his efforts to combat crime were among the reasons cited. "Mayor White is being recognized for his outstanding contributions toward improving the quality of life in the City of Houston through his commitment to law enforcement and the prevention of crime," a statement from the FBI said. Summing up: Although experts debate the reasons for the downward trend in crime nationwide, White is right that the total crime rate in Houston hit a 25-year low during his time as mayor. We give him a True.	None	Bill White	None	None	None	2010-01-13T16:38:18	2009-12-28	['Houston']
-hoer-00263	BMW M3 Giveaway	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/bmw-m3-like-farming-scam.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	BMW M3 Giveaway Like-Farming Scam	March 18, 2014	None	['None']
-pomt-10196	Holding up a BlackBerry, McCain campaign adviser says, "you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/17/douglas-holtz-eakin/the-wireless-revolution-would-have-come-anyway/	Considering Sen. John McCain’s admissions that he is computer “illiterate,” that he has only recently begun to learn how to surf the Net and that he never e-mails, the comment (joke?) from one of his chief advisers made for some snarky blogosphere chatter. A reporter on Sept. 16 asked McCain’s top economic adviser what McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand financial markets. “He did this,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, holding up his BlackBerry, the ubiquitous handheld wireless device that serves as a mobile phone but also allows users to e-mail, text message and browse the Web. “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.” Was he saying McCain invented the Blackberry, or merely helped clear away government hurdles to innovation that allowed for Blackberry-like ideas to flourish? It didn’t take long for the political blogs to reach their own conclusion on that question and snort with Al Gore-invented-the-Internet references. The Obama campaign gleefully piled on as well. “If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. Even McCain laughed when told of Holtz-Eakin’s comment, according to senior aide Matt McDonald. “He would not claim to be the inventor of anything, much less the BlackBerry. This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer,” McDonald said. For the record, Gore never actually claimed to have invented the Internet either. We’re just not going to take seriously any suggestion that McCain actually helped create the BlackBerry. It’s absurd. The BlackBerry was developed by a Canadian company, Research in Motion, and released in 2002. But there is a real issue here, and that’s what McCain did, or did not do, as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that might be said to have fostered the growth of the wireless industry. McCain served as chairman of the committee from 1997 to 2001 and again from 2003 to 2005. According to an AP account of his remarks, Holtz-Eakin said McCain’s handling of regulation and deregulation of the telecommunications industry in particular left him with the skills to help revive the economy amid a mortgage crisis, an energy crisis and a Wall Street meltdown. By far the most important piece of legislation that emerged from McCain’s tenure on the Commerce Committee was the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first major overhaul of telecommunications laws since the New Deal. "The goal of this new law," according to an FCC Web site, "is to let anyone enter any communications business – to let any communications business compete in any market against any other." The act became law a year before McCain was chairman of the committee, though he was a member. And McCain opposed it and voted against it, arguing that it didn’t go far enough to deregulate the industry. As a result, he argued, it would not create the promised competition and lower prices to consumers. As far as the wireless industry is concerned, perhaps the other most significant government decision was to begin auctioning the airwaves to allow companies to spread wireless communications networks for telephones and computers around the country. Those auctions began in 1994. Again, McCain wasn’t yet the chairman, and he was not the major player driving the auctions. In fact, he voted against the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 that included provisions for the wireless spectrum auctions. The Commerce Committee oversees a wide array of interests: everything from the Coast Guard to communications to interstate commerce; science, engineering, and technology research and development; sports; transportation; and regulation of interstate common carriers, including railroads, buses, trucks, vessels, pipelines and civil aviation. The McCain campaign didn't respond to requests from PolitiFact for details on McCain's role in telecommunications and wireless issues. A February 2000 story in the Christian Science Monitor concluded that as for legislative accomplishments as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, "McCain has chalked up an average list of achievements. "Recently, for example, he has shepherded through bills to limit liability to companies from Y2K-related lawsuits, improve truck and bus safety, protect the privacy of children online, place a moratorium on Internet taxes, and designate a universal 911 emergency number." In 2004, McCain made headlines when, as chairman of the Commerce Committee, he pushed for stricter steroids policies in professional sports. McCain's appetite for deregulation has by and large made him a friend of the telecommunications industry (witness his campaign contributions), but the wireless revolution largely emerged on its own. Congress acted mainly to regulate or deregulate it, and to sell the airwaves as a public asset. For a chief policy adviser to hold up a BlackBerry and suggest McCain was a major player in fostering its development – even from a regulatory perspective – is more than a stretch. We rule the Holtz-Eakin comment False.	None	Douglas Holtz-Eakin	None	None	None	2008-09-17T00:00:00	2008-09-16	['John_McCain']
-goop-00466	Khloe Kardashian Trying To Have Twins?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/khloe-kardashian-twins-tristan-thompson/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Khloe Kardashian Trying To Have Twins?	2:22 pm, August 13, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-01192	Beheadings of deputies in San Diego County?	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/police-beheadings/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Beheadings of deputies in San Diego County?	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-00910	Homeland Security Warns to Disable Java in Computers	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/java-dhs-warning/	None	computers	None	None	None	Homeland Security Warns to Disable Java in Computers	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-01514	Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee “Black Hurricanes Matter” Claims	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/rep-sheila-jackson-lee-black-hurricanes-matter-claims/	None	government	None	None	['congress', 'liberal agenda', 'political correctness']	Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee “Black Hurricanes Matter” Claims	Oct 6, 2016	None	['Sheila_Jackson_Lee']
-tron-03091	Donald Trump’s Real Name is Donald Drumpf	mostly fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/donald-trumps-real-name-is-donald-drumpf-mostly-fiction/	None	politics	None	None	None	Donald Trump’s Real Name is Donald Drumpf	 Mar 1, 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00355	Will tie a plan to give schools a substantial infusion of funds to support teachers and principals and improve student learning to the condition that school districts develop programs to engage students in service opportunities. "Obama and Biden believe that middle and high school students should be expected to engage in community service for 50 hours annually during the school year or summer months. They will develop national guidelines for service-learning and community service programs, and will give schools better tools both to develop successful programs and to document the experience of students at all levels. They will encourage programs that engage with community partners to expand opportunities for community service and service-learning opportunities, so that students can apply what they learn in the classroom to authentic situations that help the community. These programs will also involve citizens from the community engaging students in service opportunities through the Classroom Corps."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/374/expand-service-learning-in-schools/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Expand service-learning in schools	2010-01-07T13:26:56	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Joe_Biden']
-snes-00709	The body of a notorious pedophile was found dumped on the doorstep of the British Parliament building.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/body-pedophile-dumped-parliament/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Was the Body of a Dead Pedophile Dumped in Front of Parliament?	26 April 2018	None	['United_Kingdom']
-tron-02142	14 Year Old Boy Shot By Stepfather, Needs Money for Surgery	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/14-year-old-boy-shot-stepfather-hoax/	None	internet	None	None	['facebook', 'scams', 'sick child']	14 Year Old Boy Shot By Stepfather, Needs Money for Surgery	Aug 22, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-02725	President Trump Sent Michelle Obama a Bill She’ll Never Repay	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/president-trump-sent-michelle-obama-bill/	None	obama	None	None	['donald trump', 'government waste', 'michelle obama']	President Trump Sent Michelle Obama a Bill She’ll Never Repay	May 5, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-12749	Says Scott Walker is proposing to add 485 employees "in the category of supervisor and management" to his Department of Administration.	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/mar/01/kathleen-vinehout/scott-walker-wants-add-485-positions-management-ca/	Wisconsin Democrat Kathleen Vinehout, who is considering a run for governor in 2018, is sounding alarm bells about the state budget proposed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker -- who appears to be preparing to run for a third term. In a Feb. 20, 2017 interview, the state senator from Alma was asked by Wisconsin Public Radio talk show host Joy Cardin about a column she had written about Walker’s 2017-’19 spending plan, which was released a couple of weeks earlier. The column highlighted what Vinehout -- who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination to run against Walker in the 2012 gubernatorial recall election -- described as little known details about the budget. Cardin wanted to know why there would be a large increase in the number of people working for the Department of Administration. That’s a department, whose secretary is appointed by Walker, that works closely with the governor’s office. Vinehout replied by saying 485 positions would be added to the department "in the category of supervisor and management," although in many cases, they would be people transferred from other departments. "It really kind of takes the whole heart of state government -- especially as money flows in and out of agencies, and puts it into the Department of Administration," she added. Leaving aside Vinehout’s view of the impact of the move, let’s check whether Walker is proposing to add 485 positions "in the category of supervisor and management" to his Department of Administration. The numbers The major functions of the Department of Administration include helping the governor develop and implement the state budget and supporting other state agencies with centralized purchasing and financial management. The department also coordinates telecommunications, energy, and land use planning and community development, and it regulates racing, charitable gaming and Indian gaming. Walker’s budget, which must be approved by the Legislature, would increase the department’s positions in both years of the budget. The new total for the department would be 1,149 positions -- an increase of 485. And those positions are listed under the heading of "supervision and management." But Bob Lang, director of the nonpartisan state Legislative Fiscal Bureau, gave us some context about the 485: The majority of positions are held by existing employees who work for other agencies; these are not new state government positions. The majority would continue to physically work in those agencies, such as the Department of Natural Resources, but would become employees of the Department of Administration. Despite the designation in the budget document as "supervision and management," the vast majority would not be supervisors or managers -- rather they are involved in the supervision and management of human resource activities such as employee recruitment and assistance, training, and payroll and benefits. Walker says the primary aim is to "assign various administrative functions to a single entity, allowing individual agencies to focus on their core business missions and avoid redundant efforts on services that can be offered most effectively from a central entity." But it’s also true that if the Legislature goes along with Walker’s plan, those employees would be more directly under his control. Our rating In sounding alarms about Walker’s budget, Vinehout says the governor is proposing to add 485 positions "in the category of supervisor and management" to his Department of Administration. Vinehout is correct on the number and, technically, they are "in the category" of supervisor and management. But while they are involved in the supervision and management of human resource activities, the vast majority are not actually in supervisory or management positions. For a statement that is accurate but needs clarification, our rating is Mostly True. Share the Facts Politifact 1 6 Politifact Rating: Says Scott Walker is proposing to add 485 employees "in the category of supervisor and management" to his Department of Administration. Kathleen Vinehout Democratic Wisconsin state senator In an interview Monday, February 20, 2017 02/20/2017 Read More info	None	Kathleen Vinehout	None	None	None	2017-03-01T05:00:00	2017-02-20	['None']
-pomt-11160	"Since 2015, the City of Milwaukee has spent more than $22 million on settlements with litigants accusing police of misconduct."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2018/may/24/bob-donovan/has-milwaukee-where-police-tased-nbas-sterling-bro/	By the evening of May 23, 2018, a newly released video -- showing the arrest and tasing of NBA basketball player Sterling Brown by Milwaukee police -- was going viral. The incident occurred Jan. 26, 2018, when Brown drew police attention by parking across two handicapped spaces outside a Walgreens about 2 a.m. The police bodycam footage showed officers had been confrontational from the start of their interaction with the Milwaukee Bucks rookie, who was thrown to the pavement and tased. As the video was being released, the Milwaukee police chief apologized to Brown, a 23-year-old African-American, and said officers had been disciplined. Brown has hired a prominent Wisconsin lawyer to bring a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Milwaukee. That raises the possibility of taxpayers having to pay for the police actions and made us wonder about an alderman’s statement made in connection with the incident: Has the City of Milwaukee paid, since 2015, more than $22 million to settle police misconduct lawsuits? Statement by an alderman The incident with Brown never sat well with Milwaukee Ald. Bob Donovan, who represents the south side neighborhood where it occurred -- but not necessarily because of how Brown was treated. Days after the incident, Donovan accused Mayor Tom Barrett, a frequent political rival, of having "ordered" that Brown not be charged with a crime -- allegations Barrett strongly denied. (Brown had been arrested on a tentative misdemeanor charge of resisting or obstructing an officer. But ultimately police decided not to request criminal charges be filed.) Now back to the release of the videotape. It had been reported two days before the release of the video when it would be released. Several hours before the release, Donovan issued a news release that didn’t mention Brown, but seemed to allude to him. The release carried this headline: "Has policing in urban America become an undoable job?" Donovan, who is known as strongly pro-police, lamented a lack of respect for officers, saying: "And there’s another thing that I just don’t get: Why someone would refuse to obey a lawful order given by a police officer." Just before using the Taser, which emits an electrical shock, on Brown, officers had told him to remove his hands from his pockets. Brown, who had taken his hands in and out of his pockets several times before that, replied: "Hold on. I've got stuff in my hands." The Donovan statement from the news release that we want to check is this: "Since 2015, the City of Milwaukee has spent more than $22 million on settlements with litigants accusing police of misconduct." The figures In October 2017, seven months before Donovan made his claim, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported: Police misconduct has cost Milwaukee taxpayers at least $17.5 million in legal settlements since 2015, forcing the city to borrow money to make the payouts amid an ever-tightening budget. That amount jumps to at least $21.4 million when interest paid on the borrowing and fees paid to outside attorneys are factored in, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found. At the time, the city was considering whether to close six fire stations, leading Ald. Bob Bauman to say: "Just have the police stop violating civil rights, and we’d have plenty of money for fire houses." So, the $21.4 million is close to Donovan’s claim of more than $22 million. Official tally: $20.2 million When we asked Donovan the source for his statement, he provided us a May 3, 2018, memo from the city’s nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau. The memo says that since 2015, the city has paid $20.2 million to settle police misconduct lawsuits or claims against the city, including four that exceeded $2 million: Case Amount Chaunte Ott, wrongfully convicted of 1995 homicide $6.5 million 74 African-Americans subject to strip, body cavity searches $5 million Woman raped by officer after he responded to her 911 call $2.5 million Dontre Hamilton shot to death by officer in a park $2.3 million But more pending The memo goes on to say that the total is $22.1 million if a pending settlement of $1.9 million in a stop-and-frisk lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union is included. On May 8, 2018, a Common Council committee postponed a vote to recommend approving the settlement when aldermen were told the estimated settlement could be much higher -- some $6 million. So, that settlement has not been finalized. Our rating Donovan says: "Since 2015, the City of Milwaukee has spent more than $22 million on settlements with litigants accusing police of misconduct." The city’s nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau puts the tally at $20.2 million, but notes that a pending settlement in one case would push the total to $22.1 million. We rate Donovan’s statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bob Donovan	None	None	None	2018-05-24T12:25:19	2018-05-23	['Milwaukee']
-goop-00702	Julia Roberts Saved Her Marriage?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/julia-roberts-marriage-saved-danny-moder/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Julia Roberts Saved Her Marriage?	4:38 pm, July 3, 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00922	a Call From 777888999 will Blast Your Phone Hoax	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/no-a-call-from-777888999-will-not-blast-your-phone-hoax/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	No, a Call From 777888999 will NOT Blast Your Phone Hoax	May 18, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-01148	Did Nancy Pelosi Say Building a Wall Will Violate the Rights of 'Millions of Illegals'?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nancy-pelosi-wall-violate-rights/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Did Nancy Pelosi Say Building a Wall Will Violate the Rights of ‘Millions of Illegals’?	23 January 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-06290	"Obama has (a) new Christmas tree tax."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2011/nov/20/greg-abbott/texas-attorney-general-greg-abbott-says-obama-has-/	Weeks before Thanksgiving, the Internet was abuzz with holiday news that no doubt would turn Santa Claus' smile upside down: President Barack Obama was trying to make it more expensive for people to buy Christmas trees. A headline on the Los Angeles Times’ website asked: "Is President Obama 'the Grinch who taxed Christmas' trees?" And a Republican congressman from Louisiana posted a press release slamming the president for trying to "sneak through this new tax on Christmas trees." In Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott and others took to Twitter the same day — Nov. 9, 2011 — to express their opposition. Abbott's tweet: "Obama = Scrooge. Obama has new Christmas Tree Tax." Really? Christmas trees are a big business in Oregon, so our PolitiFact colleagues there jumped on this claim. Included in Abbott's tweet was a link to a Nov. 8 blog post by David Addington on the conservative Heritage Foundation's website titled "Obama couldn't wait: His new Christmas tree tax." The post cited an entry in that day's Federal Register — which publishes information on regulations — announcing an effort to help the Christmas tree industry promote itself. It's what’s known as a "checkoff program" — under which producers of a commodity are required to pitch in money for ad campaigns, market research, product development and consumer education efforts. Some of the most familiar checkoff programs are for beef ("it’s what’s for dinner") and pork ("the other white meat"). According to the Federal Register entry on the Christmas tree program, it was sought by an industry group called the Christmas Tree Checkoff Task Force. Proponents of the program say the Christmas tree industry needs a sustained national marketing campaign to compete with advertising by sellers of artificial trees. To fund the program, growers and importers of Christmas trees will pay a "15-cent assessment" on each tree sold, and the money will go to a board made up of 12 Christmas tree sellers, who will direct the research and marketing efforts. Board members will be nominated by the industry and selected by the U.S. secretary of agriculture. Growers and importers who sell fewer than 500 trees a year are exempt from that 15-cent assessment — which Addington dubbed a tax in his blog. A day after the Heritage blog posted, criticism of the program exploded across the Internet. By the end of the day, the White House was telling reporters that the administration would delay the Christmas tree checkoff program. No new start date was given. Justin DeJong, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department, told us that the program is on hold because "misinformation" about it had created confusion for consumers shortly before the start of the Christmas season. DeJong disputed the labeling of the 15-cent assessment as a tax. "What’s being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign, and there are many success stories in every sector of the industry (milk, beef, pork, etc)," he wrote in an email. Official notice that the program had been delayed indefinitely appeared in the Nov. 17, 2011, Federal Register. The entry says that the program is on hold "to provide additional time for the department to reach out to the Christmas tree industry and the public to explain how a research and promotion program is a producer-driven program to support American farmers." Betty Malone, an Oregon tree farmer who led the task force that submitted the request for the program to the Agriculture Department, told PolitiFact Oregon that she was stunned anyone would describe the tree fee as something dreamed up by Obama. "We’ve been working on this for three-and-a-half years," she said. "The industry has talked about this for 20 years. This started long before Obama" was president. According to the task force's proposal, filed with the Agriculture Department on Aug. 12, 2009, sessions to gauge interest in the establishment of a checkoff program among growers were held in Michigan, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania in 2008 — when George W. Bush was president. Not everyone in the industry embraces the idea. According to the Nov. 8 Federal Register entry, the Agriculture Department received more than 550 responses about the checkoff program proposal during its 65-day designated "comment period." Of the total, 398 were in favor while 147 were opposed. In Texas, Marshall Cathey, president of the Texas Christmas Tree Growers Association, with more than 100 members, said the group voted against supporting the checkoff program proposal. We talked with two Texas Christmas tree farmers opposed to the program. Bob Childress, whose farm is about 40 miles east of Abilene, said he considers the program an example of government reaching inappropriately into the marketplace. Marc Nash, co-owner of Elgin Christmas Tree Farm, agreed and said he objects to being forced by the government to pay into an industry promotional campaign. Nash also said Texas growers, which primarily have small farms in rural areas, won't benefit from the checkoff program because its marketing efforts would most likely take place in major, urban areas where any increased sales would help large Christmas tree wholesalers. Next, we looked into whether the 15-cent fee would be passed on to tree buyers and whether it amounts to a tax, as Abbott says. The National Christmas Tree Association, a supporter of the program, said in a Nov. 9, 2011, press release that "the program is not expected to have any impact on the final price consumers pay" for trees. However, Addington, in his blog, writes that "of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees." Bryan Ostlund, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Christmas Tree Association, told PolitiFact Oregon that it's unclear whether the fees would ultimately be the responsibility of buyers. "It doesn’t get automatically passed along, but somebody along the line has to cover it," he said. PolitiFact also found disagreement about whether the tree charge is a tax. The federal government monitors the agricultural marketing board that administers the money, but the revenue doesn't go to the government. The national tree association agrees with the Agriculture Department that the 15-cent assessment isn't a tax. Again, Addington's perspective is different. In his blog, he writes: "The federal government mandates that the Christmas tree sellers pay the 15-cents per tree, whether they want to or not. The federal government directs that the revenue generated by the 15-cent fee goes to the board appointed by the secretary of agriculture to carry out the Christmas tree program established by the secretary of agriculture. Mr. President, that's a new 15-cent tax to pay for a federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees." For other perspectives, PolitiFact consulted national experts. "It certainly doesn't smell or quack like a tax," said Robert Litan, the vice president for Research and Policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation who was an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton. On the other hand, Dan Mitchell, an economist with the libertarian Cato Institute, says "a coercive levy is a tax." Our ruling Opinion is split on whether the 15-cent fee on Christmas trees — if it goes into effect — would be a tax and whether the cost would be passed along to consumers. Setting that eye-of-the-beholder issue aside, the claim that Obama was behind the tree charge suggests he came up with the scheme. That's not correct; the idea originated with the industry before he became president. We rate the statement Mostly False.	None	Greg Abbott	None	None	None	2011-11-20T06:00:00	2011-11-09	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-05846	The Obama administration has ordered $1 billion worth of 'disposable coffins' for use with 'FEMA camps.'	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-coffin-corner/	None	Conspiracy Theories	None	David Mikkelson	None	Obama Quietly Orders Millions of Disposable Coffins?	13 October 2014	None	['None']
-goop-01111	Matt Damon, Ben Affleck Did Have ‘Falling Out’ Over Lindsay Shookus, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/matt-damon-ben-affleck-lindsay-shookus/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Matt Damon, Ben Affleck Did NOT Have ‘Falling Out’ Over Lindsay Shookus, Despite Report	1:09 pm, April 26, 2018	None	['Matt_Damon', 'Ben_Affleck']
-snes-04291	A study proved e-cigarette use (or vaping) leads to an incurable condition known as "popcorn lung."	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vaping-causes-popcorn-lung/	None	Medical	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Vaping Causes ‘Popcorn Lung’?	8 August 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-14177	Says Target installed urinals in a women’s bathroom to "accommodate the ones who have giblets."	pants on fire!	/california/statements/2016/apr/26/facebook-posts/viral-facebook-claim-about-target-adding-urinals-w/	Has Target added urinals to a women’s restroom in California? That’s the claim in a Facebook post that’s been shared more than 14,000 times as of April 26, 2016, one week after the mega-retailer announced transgender customers are welcome to use bathrooms that match up with their gender identity at their stores nationwide. Target is the latest corporation to announce the policy, just as state legislatures have debated or approved so-called "bathroom laws." Those laws, including one signed by the governor of North Carolina in late March, would prohibit transgender people from using restrooms that do not correspond with the sex listed on their birth certificate. Target’s policy has led to mixed customer reviews. Some have cheered it, while more than half a million people had signed a boycott petition by American Family Association, a conservative Christian activist group, as of Tuesday. The group contends the policy encourages sexual predators and puts women and young girls in danger. We know the policy alone is controversial. But we wondered whether Target had taken its stance to an even more contentious level by installing urinals in a women’s store restroom? That’s the claim in the popular Facebook post by a user named Kathleen Crawford: "It's true. ..I'm in the women's bathroom at a Target north of LA...they actually took out a stall for women in order to accommodate the ones who have giblets...yes, these are urinals...for men...and so the war on women progresses. …" The allegation inspired outrage on some conservative blogs, where it was taken as fact. It shouldn’t be. Our research The Facebook post includes a photo of two urinals wrapped in plastic inside a restroom with a red wall. It shows no evidence of where, exactly, the photo was taken. When we contacted Target, a corporate spokeswoman called the claim on Facebook "inaccurate." "We have not made any changes to the restrooms," the spokeswoman, Molly Snyder, said in an email. "We have not added any urinals to any women's restrooms nor do we have any plans to do so." She said the company never had past plans to do so. So what’s going on with the photo? It’s hard to say for certain. We reached out to the person who posted it on Facebook, but we haven’t heard back. The myth-busting website Snopes.com also checked out the Facebook post and found it False. It said the "picture has nothing to do with Target's restroom policy. The image was not taken in a women's restroom at a Los Angeles Target store (rather a men's room that was undergoing repair or refurbishment)." Snopes.com did not say how it found out where the photo came from. Snyder, the Target spokeswoman, said she did not know its source. If Target had made this change, we’d expect more than just one photo to surface. We reached out to the woman on Facebook, and we'll add her response should we hear back. Our ruling A popular Facebook post alleged last week that Target installed urinals in a women’s restroom in California. Target representatives told us the claim is "inaccurate," and that the company has no plans to change its restrooms, and never did. Best we can tell, the Facebook post is a one-off picture that hasn’t surfaced in any other form (other than the thousands of people sharing it). So stop that! This claim rates Pants on Fire. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/7fedb0b8-7b12-4278-affd-bd43717e7f7c	None	Facebook posts	None	None	None	2016-04-26T16:17:44	2016-04-22	['None']
-pomt-03143	The United Nations has conducted "172 successful peacekeeping missions and negotiations."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/12/van-jones/van-jones-says-un-has-conducted-172-successful-pea/	With the U.S. and Russia locked in discussions over whether, and how, to exert control over Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, the United Nations’ role in international arms control is of particular interest. During a discussion on CNN’s Crossfire, host Van Jones pointed to the United Nations’ long record of successful actions to keep the peace and protect civilians. When co-host S.E. Cupp asked, "Do you trust the U.N.?" Jones responded that the United Nations had overseen "172 successful peacekeeping missions and negotiations." After Cupp expressed skepticism, Jones continued, "The world is a tough, nasty place, and we focus on the places the U.N. has not been able to change human nature. But we are in a much safer world because of the U.N. than we would be without it." Is it really true that the United Nations, since its establishment after the end of World War II, has overseen "172 successful peacekeeping missions and negotiations"? That would be between two and three new ones per year. When we checked with Jones, he pointed to a 2005 U.N. report. It stated that "since 1945, the U.N. has assisted in negotiating more than 170 peace settlements that have ended regional conflicts. Examples include ending the Iran-Iraq war, facilitating the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and ending the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United Nations has used quiet diplomacy to avert imminent wars." Because the document is eight years old -- and because "170 peace settlements" is not precisely the same thing as "172 successful peacekeeping missions and negotiations" -- we decided to check with the United Nations directly to see if there was an updated number. Counting the peacekeeping missions -- which are typically launched once a peace deal is in place -- is pretty straightforward: The running total since 1948 is 68 peacekeeping missions, of which 15 are ongoing. (The full list is in this U.N. document.) Counting "negotiations" is trickier. One obstacle to arriving at a solid number is that negotiations go on all the time, conducted by "envoys, small offices, or officers" even before a U.N. mission has been established, said Kieran Dwyer, the public affairs section chief in the U.N. departments of peacekeeping operations and field support. Another obstacle is that there’s overlap between peacekeeping operations and negotiations, so there’s a risk of double counting. "In cases where there is an existing peacekeeping operation, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Mali, the mission is involved in supporting continuing political processes or negotiations," Dwyer said. "This is a standard part of the mandate of many of the existing missions, supporting the completion of peace processes, often including negotiations of some sort." Such complications have meant that the United Nations is no longer updating the number it cited in 2005. "We are not currently keeping a running count of peace agreements reached with U.N. involvement," said Jared Kotler, senior officer for strategic communications and public affairs with the United Nations’ political affairs department. Our ruling Jones said the United Nations has conducted "172 successful peacekeeping missions and negotiations." His claim comes from a U.N. document, though one that is eight years old and that referred to a somewhat different metric. U.N. officials say there’s no way of knowing the correct number today, but the 2005 figure, combined with other data that is up to date, suggests that 172 is a reasonable approximation. We rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Van Jones	None	None	None	2013-09-12T15:56:56	2013-09-10	['United_Nations']
-pomt-02590	Texas added 6,600 miles of highway from 2001-2012, more than any other state.	half-true	/texas/statements/2014/jan/28/rick-perry/texas-change-highway-miles-not-no-1-adjusted-size/	Gov. Rick Perry recently tweeted that his state outpaced others in new highways on his watch. "Texas has added more than 6,600 new highway miles from 2001-2012, more than any other state over that time," Perry said Jan. 7, 2014, the same day he spoke at the Texas Transportation Forum about the importance of such infrastructure. A major reason that matters, according to a Perry press release issued that day, is that "investments in roads and infrastructure directly impact Texas' economic competitiveness and companies' ability to do business in the state." We wondered whether Texas outpaced every other state in the dozen years after Perry became governor in late 2000. The state Legislative Budget Board’s 2012-13 "Fiscal Size-Up" says Texas had about 80,000 miles of highway in 2012, specifically 28,441 miles of U.S. and state highways, 3,231 miles of interstate, 7,031 miles of frontage road, 40,939 miles of farm-to-market roads and ranch-to-market roads, and 331 miles of park roads. Those measurements are in "centerline" miles, the length of a highway. Another transportation measure is "lane" miles, which multiplies centerline miles by the number of lanes; a four-mile stretch of six-lane highway has 24 lane miles. Lane miles would reflect, for example, the widening of an older highway to ease congestion. Perry spokeswoman Lucy Nashed emailed web links to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration on lane miles of highway owned by state highway agencies in 2001 and 2012, to show how Perry reached his conclusion. Texas had the largest increase in highway lane miles in raw terms with 6,660 -- about 3 percent of Texas’ total 194,954 lane miles of state highway in 2012. Montana and Missouri were close behind in raw numbers, with 6,536 and 6,270 new lane miles, respectively. In centerline miles over those years, Texas’ state-owned highways gained 922, which ranked it fourth among the states. National commuting expert Alan Pisarski told us by phone that he thought Perry’s statistic sounded right and that other measures to check would be how mileage changed over time in relation to states’ size and population. Always worth remembering: Texas is real big. When we examine questions of which state has the most high school graduates or the most coal-fired plants, it’s important to take that bigness into account to get a real sense of how Texas is faring compared with other states with widely different populations and geographic areas. So, using U.S. Census Bureau data, we did a bit more math. Texas gained about 2/10 of a lane mile per square mile of area, ranking 21st in both 2001 and 2012. As its population ballooned, Texas’ lane miles of state-owned highway per 100,000 residents fell to 155, dropping it from 19th in 2001 to 23rd in 2012. Running those calculations for all 50 states suggests that Texas’ 2001-2012 change fell considerably shy of No. 1. Looking at the amount of change each state experienced, Texas had the 16th-largest gain in lane miles per square mile. Going by the change in highway lane miles per 100,000 residents, Texas’ drop placed it 42nd. Only six states gained ground in the population category -- ending up in 2012 with more lane miles per person than they had in 2001 -- and one of those was Michigan, the only state that lost population during this time. Over the same years, Texas saw the 12th largest increase in residents per square mile. Separately, we noted some oddities in our spreadsheet. Several states’ changes in lane mileage showed as negative numbers. As it turned out, the tables reflected changes that occurred when roads were reclassified -- say, when a state took over a county road or vice versa. Iowa, for example, apparently "lost" 1,266 lane miles from 2001 through 2012. Iowa Department of Transportation spokeswoman Andrea Henry told us by email that in 2002-03, her agency and Iowa cities and counties reevaluated the appropriate jurisdiction of public roads. "Through a series of individual agreements and legislation, well over 700 miles of state roads were transferred from the Iowa DOT to individual cities and counties," she said, probably reducing the number of state lane miles by about 2,000. Together with lane miles added by new construction, she said, "the net difference of a 1,266 mile reduction in lane miles is reasonable." Texas Department of Transportation spokeswoman Veronica Beyer told us by email that according to that agency, the state gained 6,634 lane miles from 2001 through 2012, "with the overwhelmingly vast majority of that being due to new construction (and not transfer of ownership)." The federal agency didn’t record how many miles of new construction took place in each state. Without such a statistic, we can’t tell whether Texas’ lane miles were the most in the nation because Texas built the most state highways or because other states reclassified a lot of miles. In response to our findings, Nashed said, "Given that we had to choose a number that represented the growth of the system, thus lane miles makes more sense than centerline miles (this way it incorporates taking a road from 2 to 3 lanes for example). "The state to state miles per square mile or population comparison would not have made sense, to me, in this case," she said, noting how Michigan’s drop in population made it appear that "their state system per capita actually shows significant growth over time even though they added just 6 new lane miles. Our ruling Perry tweeted, "Texas has added more than 6,600 new highway miles from 2001-2012, more than any other state over that time." This raw calculation stands up; Texas was No. 1 in total lane miles added. But Texas is also nearly the biggest state. Adjusting for states’ differences in population and geographic area shows Texas’ change in highway miles was the 16th largest gain per square mile of area and the state came in 42nd when ranked on the change in highway miles per resident. We rate his statement as Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2014-01-28T16:03:55	2014-01-07	['None']
-pomt-12595	Says President Donald Trump "had a different opinion" in 2013 than he does now about whether (Barack) Obama should have intervened in Syria after Obama's red line was crossed.	true	/punditfact/statements/2017/apr/05/greta-van-susteren/fact-checking-trump/	At least 70 people have died from a vicious chemical weapons attack in Syria, carried out by the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. President Donald Trump said blame for the attack lies with his predecessor, Barack Obama. "These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution. President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a ‘red line’ against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing," Trump said in an official White House statement April 4. Many commentators noted that this was a departure from Trump’s past position on Syria, including Greta Van Susteren, who recently moved from Fox News to MSNBC. "A few years ago in the midst of the debate whether President Obama should use force in Syria, then Mr. Trump, now President Trump, had a different opinion," Susteren said on her show April 4. "In a tweet, then Mr. Trump said, quote, ‘President Obama, do not attack Syria.’ " Trump conceded during an April 5, 2017, press conference that his stance on Syria and Assad has shifted, saying he is proud of his willingness to change his position based on current events. "My attitude on Syria and Assad has changed very much," he said, in part because "that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me." What Trump said about Syria in 2013 Obama made the "red line" comment in August 2012, when he said he would change his calculus on armed intervention in Syria if Assad used or moved chemical weapons. Almost a year later, Assad’s regime killed more than 1,400 people in a chemical weapons attack on the city of Damascus. Even though Assad crossed the "red line," Obama chose not to strike Syria and instead looked to Congress to authorize force. Eventually, through a deal with Russia, Syria handed over its chemical weapons, and no strikes were fired in direct retaliation for the chemical attacks. Throughout August and September 2013, as policymakers and pundits debated how to respond to the Syrian chemical attack, Trump lambasted the Obama administration, while simultaneously saying the United States should not intervene. We found more than 20 Trump tweets making that point. Here’s a sample: "What I am saying is stay out of Syria," he wrote Sept. 3, 2013. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Sept. 5, 2013, he wrote, "The only reason President Obama wants to attack Syria is to save face over his very dumb RED LINE statement. Do NOT attack Syria,fix U.S.A." See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com "AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA - IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!" he tweeted the same day. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com Although Trump’s position seems to have changed from 2013, there is an important consistency: his critique of Obama’s decision to set a red line in the first place then ignore it. "President Obama's weakness and indecision may have saved us from doing a horrible and very costly (in more ways than money) attack on Syria!" he tweeted Sept. 1, 2013. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com He reiterated this point in the April 2017 press conference. "The Obama administration had a great opportunity to solve this crisis a long time ago when he said the red line in the sand," Trump said. "And when he didn't cross that line after making the threat, I think that set us back a long ways, not only in Syria, but in many other parts of the world because it was a blank threat." Trump added that the most recent chemical attacks "crossed a lot of lines," yet he declined to say whether he would take military action in retaliation because he doesn’t want to tip off Assad. "I’m not saying I’m doing anything one way or the other, but I’m certainly not telling you, as much as I respect you," Trump said to a reporter. The Trump administration has accelerated airstrikes and other actions in Syria that began at the tail end of the Obama’s second term. In March, the Trump administration said it would send 400 additional troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State. Our ruling Van Susteren said Trump "had a different opinion" in 2013 than he does now about whether Obama should have intervened in Syria after Obama’s "red line" was crossed. In 2013, Trump said emphatically that the United States should not attack Syria even though the Assad regime crossed the line by using chemical weapons. But in 2017, he criticized the Obama administration for not reacting to the 2013 chemical weapon attack with force. Trump admitted that his position on Assad has changed. We rate Van Susteren’s claim True. See Figure 5 on PolitiFact.com	None	Greta Van Susteren	None	None	None	2017-04-05T15:48:55	2017-04-04	['Barack_Obama', 'Syria', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-12512	"The single-largest expense in over half of American households is child care."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/26/ivanka-trump/ivanka-trump-wrongly-says-child-care-costs-top-oth/	Correction: This report originally misquoted Trump’s comments based on reporting at the event as saying, "The single largest expense in American households is child care." According to video of the event, Trump said, "The single largest expense in over half of American households is child care." We have corrected the fact-check as such and changed the the rating from False to Mostly False. At a meeting in Berlin focused on empowering women entrepreneurs, first daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump said her father stood completely behind women in the workplace. "He's been a tremendous champion of supporting families and enabling them to thrive," Trump said. She said the thousands of women who have worked for her father know this to be true and that her father would prove it with his policies. "The single largest expense in over half of American households is childcare, even exceeding the cost of housing," Trump said April 25. "So it’s an enormous problem and it's one my father is committed to tackling" The high cost of child care has been well documented. Child Care Aware, a trade and advocacy group, found that it cost on average over $17,000 a year for infant day care in Massachusetts. The question is, does paying for child care top all the other expenses that half of the households have to cover, such as housing and food? Government data suggests it does not. For most families, the No. 1 cost is housing. The latest data on child care comes from a 2011 survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. It found that for all families with children under 15-years-old, child care costs 7 percent of their monthly income. The fraction was highest for families making less than $1,500 a month. They represented about 10 percent of the sample and paid nearly 40% of their income for child care. (However, the margin of error was quite large.) So then we looked at what Americans spend on their other needs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in 2015, the average married couple with children spent about 31 percent on housing, followed by about 18 percent on transportation. For single parents, housing ate up about 37 percent of their budget, and transportation, about 17 percent. Health care was the only category that took up a lower fraction than child care (which this expenditure report did not highlight). Married couples with children spent about 6.8 percent and single parents about 5.2 percent on health care. We found two bits of information that add a bit of support for Trump’s assertion. The New America Foundation, a center-left think tank in Washington, reported in 2016 that in a handful of states, including West Virginia, Mississippi, New York and Nevada, costs can rise above 30 percent of the state’s median income. But the underlying calculation used an expected cost of child care, not actual spending. A 2015 article in Forbes reported, "For many parents the cost (of child care) is greater than housing, transportation or utilities." However, the source behind that was a survey from the Child Care Aware organization. That group’s latest report is more restrained. It said the price tag in every state "rivals families’ annual expenditures on housing, transportation and the cost of tuition at a four-year, public university." It went on to say "in 38 states, the cost of infant care exceeds 10 percent of the state’s median income for a two-parent family." But neither statistic puts the cost of child care above all other expenses for half of all households. We reached out to the White House and as of publication, were still waiting for numbers. Our ruling Trump said that child care is the single largest expense faced by half of American families. We could find no data to support that. The number we did find suggests it isn’t the case. A government survey in 2011 found that the average family spends about 7 percent of its monthly income on child care. For the poorest households, the number rises to nearly 40 percent. Meanwhile, the government’s consumer expenditure survey found households with children spend at least 30 percent of their money on housing and at least 17 percent on transportation. The two data sets are not perfectly comparable, but they don’t suggest that child care tops the list of expenses for half of all families. Child care is a staggering burden for lower income households. With that in mind, we rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Ivanka Trump	None	None	None	2017-04-26T09:38:15	2017-04-25	['United_States']
-pomt-13472	For immigrants with visa overstays, "we make no effort to hold them accountable to that or uphold the law."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/12/mike-pence/mike-pence-says-theres-no-effort-against-visa-over/	Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence says that in addition to deporting undocumented criminals and strengthening the border, the United States should be tougher about removing people who overstay their visas. "An enormous number of people come to this country legally and then simply overstay their visas because we make no effort to hold them accountable to that or uphold the law," Pence said Sept. 4 on NBC’s Meet the Press. People who have overstayed their visas account for a large portion of the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally, about 40 percent by some estimates. Are government officials really making no efforts against people who overstay their visas, or to uphold the law? Pence’s team guided us to a June Washington Times article that says immigration officials "catch an abysmally small percentage of the illegal immigrants who arrived on visas but overstayed their welcome." The article attributes that factoid to an admission of immigration authorities. But there is more to the story. Enforcement priorities U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement does go after visa violators, but the agency prioritizes violent undocumented immigrants. The agency’s top focus is the removal of people convicted of violent crimes, such as murder and rape, ICE spokesperson Dani Bennett said via email. People who overstay their visas but don’t pose a threat to national security, public safety or border security fall into ICE’s second priority. The conservative-leaning Washington Times reported that at least 480,000 people didn’t leave the country as expected in fiscal year 2015. Immigration officials investigated just 10,000 of these cases and arrested fewer than 2,000 because, as the Times reported, "the others don’t rise to the level of being priority targets." The article was based on a June 2016 House Homeland Security Committee hearing on overstays. Homeland Security Department officials testified that out of the nearly 10,000 leads pursued: about 4,100 cases were closed for being in compliance; at least 3,000 were under current investigation; 1,910 were arrested, and the rest were under "continuous monitoring and further investigation as appropriate." ICE data shows that out of a total 235,413 removals in fiscal year 2015, about 18,500 were second-priority removals. There’s no breakdown of how many of those were visa overstays (that category also includes those convicted of drug-related crimes, unlawful possession or use of firearm and other misdemeanors). Indefinite number of overstays Immigration officials and scholars say not much is known about legal immigrants who overstay their visa, so they rely on estimates. In 2006, Pew Research Center said visa overstays could make up at least 4 million of the population here illegally, roughly one-third of that population. The first legal requirement for an entry-exit system came in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. It took about 20 years before DHS released its first ever Entry/Exit Overstay Report, though it only contained information for fiscal year 2015. Almost 45 million people were expected to leave in fiscal year 2015, the report said, and about 98.8 percent did so on time. About 482,700 were still in the country by Sept. 30, 2015, the end of the 2015 fiscal year. That dropped to 416,500 by Jan. 4, 2016. Overstay consequences While DHS devotes less enforcement resources to visa overstays than it does to border enforcement, violators are still apprehended and removed, said Donald M. Kerwin, executive director of the Center for Migration Studies, a think tank studying international migration. Undocumented immigrants also are not eligible for most public benefits, said Robert Warren, an expert on immigration and senior visiting fellow at the center. People who overstay their visas and become undocumented may also face limitations when applying for jobs. The Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 forbids employers from knowingly hiring people who are not authorized to work in the United States. If they leave and want to come back, they may be disqualified from getting a visa and not be let in, said Lazaro Zamora, a Bipartisan Policy Center senior policy analyst. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, unlawful presence for more than 180 days is punishable by a 3-year bar against re-entering, and unlawful presence of one year or more is punishable by a 10-year ban, Zamora said. Our ruling Pence said, "An enormous number of people come to this country legally and then simply overstay their visas because we make no effort to hold them accountable to that or uphold the law." Pence’s statement suggests there are no repercussions for people who overstay their visa. While they are not ICE’s top concern — officials say they prioritize the removal of convicted criminals over visa violators— they can still be deported and barred from coming back into the United States. About 8 percent of the 235,413 people removed from the country in fiscal year 2015 belonged to a category that includes visa overstays. We rate Pence’s statement Half True.https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/dacd5379-eb5c-4ea5-8303-93cd7e56e241	None	Mike Pence	None	None	None	2016-09-12T16:51:25	2016-09-04	['None']
-pomt-08110	Says federal health care overhaul will cost Texas state government "upwards of $30 billion over the next 10 years."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/dec/12/rick-perry/gov-rick-perry-says-federal-health-care-overhaul-c/	Stumping for his book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington, Texas Gov. Rick Perry often criticizes federal actions that he sees as overreaching, including the Democratic-steered health care overhaul that President Barack Obama signed into law in March. In a Dec. 3 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Perry called the plan "one of the greatest intrusions into our lives" and objected to its "massive cost" to states. "It will cost the State of Texas upwards of $30 billion over the next 10 years," Perry said. Why does the state expect the law to drive up its spending? One big reason is that it's projected to add about 2 million Texans to the number of people on Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled whose costs are shared by federal and state government. The new Medicaid recipients fall into two groups. The first: People made eligible by the new law, which starting in 2014 is anyone who makes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. (For a family of four, the level is $29,327. For a single person, it's $14,404.) This expansion will be a big change for Texas, which limits access to Medicaid more than most states. Currently, adult Texans without children do not qualify, and the vast majority of Medicaid beneficiaries are kids. The second: People who were eligible for Medicaid before the health care law passed but haven't signed up. According to Stephanie Goodman, a spokeswoman for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, some of these people are expected to come onto the rolls because of the requirement in the new law that all individuals obtain health insurance starting in 2014. These folks are more expensive for the state to serve than the first group because the federal government is expected to pay about 60 percent of their Medicaid costs, as opposed to almost all the costs for the newly eligible. We've heard state leaders talk about the projected costs before. In March, we rated Barely True Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst's statement that "this federal plan costs Texas taxpayers $2.4 billion per year." That number was based on a commission analysis that the law would cost Texas $24.3 billion over the decade running from 2014 through 2023. Dewhurst's statement was problematic on several fronts, partly because it was based on an outdated version of the law. In late March, the commission updated its 10-year cost estimate, raising it to $27 billion. At the time, Executive Commissioner Tom Suehs told lawmakers: "I can tell you right now we have not included all the items we believe that'll have a fiscal impact to the state." Here's how the $27 billion in costs breaks down: $9.5 billion for the "Medicaid expansion" enrollees — people made eligible by the federal law — and $8.6 billion for enrollees who were eligible for Medicaid before the new health care law passed. The rest, $8.9 billion, is what it would cost the state to continue higher payment rates that the new law mandates for primary care services. The federal government will fund the higher rates through 2014, but after that, state lawmakers will have to decide whether to chip in the money to continue paying providers more, Goodman said. If they do, the feds would share the cost as they do now for Medicaid. So, where does Perry get "upwards of $30 billion over the next 10 years"? His spokeswoman, Katherine Cesinger, said that the governor simply "rounded" up from $27 billion and that he was referring to the 10-year period that starts in 2014. But "the next 10 years" begins in January, 2011. The commission's analysis puts the tab for 2011 through 2020 at $13.1 billion, half the 2014-23 estimate. And if lawmakers choose not to continue the provider rate increases, the total drops to $8.4 billion. An essential fact underlying all these figures: Health care reform becomes more expensive for the state as time goes on. Among the factors driving up costs down the line is the federal government's declining contribution for Medicaid. During the first three years of the Medicaid expansion (2014-2016), the feds pay all the cost of newly eligible enrollees. Starting in 2017, that federal share starts to drop, reaching 90 percent by 2020. Another essential fact: So far, we've only mentioned the cost of health care reform to the Health and Human Services Commission. A June report by State Comptroller Susan Combs enumerates other costs — as well as some financial benefits — to the state as a whole, although it doesn't offer a net figure. (The comptroller's report also uses a different time period than the commission's, focusing on the 10 years from 2010 through 2019.) For instance, on the expense side of the ledger is the mandated expansion of health plans administered by the Employees Retirement System of Texas, the University of Texas System and the Texas A&M University System. One of the pluses: The comptroller's office estimates that the state will receive $1.3 billion in new revenue from a tax on premiums charged by insurers and health maintenance organizations licensed by the Texas Department of Insurance. As for the projected increase in Medicaid costs, the comptroller's report jibes with the health commission's estimates. But it also tabulates the hefty federal contribution. For every dollar the state spends on new Medicaid enrollees through 2019, the federal government will spend $13, according to the figures in the report. The total federal contribution: $76 billion. We asked Perry why he had focused solely on the commission's cost projections. Cesinger told us: "We fully recognize there will be additional costs to state government separate from the (health commission) costs. Unfortunately, those additional costs are difficult to calculate because it depends on factors yet to be determined," including how parts of the law are implemented. All told, Perry's sweeping statement is correct in one sense — federal health care reform will eventually cost the state billions. But he errs on several fronts. The latest cost projection from the Texas health commission is $27 billion, not $30 billion; the estimate covers 2014 through 2023, not the next 10 years; and it speaks only to a single state entity, not all of state government. We rate Perry's statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2010-12-12T06:00:00	2010-12-03	['Texas']
-pomt-08668	"While many of his colleagues turned down a $2,500 pay raise ... (Jeff) Plale pocketed the extra money."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2010/sep/13/citizens-progressive-wisconsin/wisconsin-state-sen-jeff-plale-pocketed-2500-year-/	Voters in a Milwaukee-area state Senate contest can be forgiven if they are confusing campaign literature with liquor advertising. Citing a laundry-list of complaints, the Progressive Wisconsin Political Fund has been labeling Democratic incumbent Jeff Plale an "Absolute Conservative." Plale is facing Milwaukee County Supervisor Chris Larson in the Sept. 14 primary. The district is heavily Democratic, but ideologically split. That led to the outside groups joining the fray. On the anti-Plale side, the Progressive Wisconsin Political Fund has mailed a dozen or more pieces, with many using a replica of the Absolut vodka bottle. Plale, of South Milwaukee, says he is puzzled by the vodka bottle image. "I don’t even like vodka," he said. Less confusing is the message in a piece labeled "Welcome to Plale’s Playhouse," featuring a cartoonish version of Plale standing in a tree house under a sign: "Typical Politicians Only!" Citing several issues, the piece argues that Plale puts his own interests before taxpayers. It includes this claim: "Last year, while many of his colleagues turned down a $2,500 pay raise because Wisconsin faced a deficit and our families faced tough economic times, Senator Plale pocketed the extra money." As a source, the fund cites a Feb. 9, 2009 item from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which itself is a reprint of a Wisconsin State Journal editorial from the day before. So did Plale take the money and run? Members of the state Assembly and Senate are paid $49,943. They received a $2,530 (5.06 percent) annual pay raise, which took effect in January 2009 and lasts for the current two-year legislative term. The raise amounts to about $210 a month. State lawmakers automatically got the increase to their salary -- a boost set by an administrative panel and approved by a bipartisan committee from both chambers. So there is no way to turn down the salary increase itself. "I have to pay them their full salary," said Robert Marchant, Senate chief clerk and administrator. The raises come at a time when state employees -- but not state lawmakers -- are required to take 16 unpaid furlough days, eight in the fiscal year that started July 2009 and eight in the fiscal year that started July 2010. And with lots of private-sector employees taking recession-driven pay cuts, many state lawmakers have made a point of giving their raises back. In the Senate, 31 of the 38 members have returned the money in one form or another, according to Marchant. There are several ways to do this, from taking unpaid furlough days to simply writing a check and depositing it back in the state coffers. Others have given the money to charity, though there is no system for tracking that. Plale said he is taking 16 unpaid furlough days to "give back" his raise. "That comes close to washing that out," Plale said. "How can I ask my staff to take 16 unpaid work days and not do it myself?" Will it even out in the end? According to Marchant, Plale in July 2009 began docking his monthly paycheck by $91.20. Over the course of two years, that will be the equivalent of 16 days of salary. From July of 2009 to Sept. 1, 2010, Plale had returned $1,276.90. Over the full two-year period, that would amount to $2,189, or 43 percent of the full raise. So what about the original claim, that Plale pocketed the money? Plale’s salary did go up, there was no way to stop that. He did not start giving the money back right away, as a few lawmakers did. Once other state employees were required to take furloughs, Plale imposed the same standard on himself -- long before the direct mail piece was sent. But that approach won’t account for the full raise, only about 43 percent of it. We rate the claim Half True.	None	Citizens for a Progressive Wisconsin	None	None	None	2010-09-13T09:00:00	2010-09-10	['None']
-pomt-05516	"What president has the worst record on female labor force participation? Barack Obama."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/apr/12/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-chart-claims-barack-obama-has-worst-re/	Amid signs that Barack Obama has gained ground among female voters, Mitt Romney is attacking the president on his record on women. We have already rated one claim from the Romney campaign, that "women account for 92.3 percent of the jobs lost under Obama," which earned a Mostly False. Now we’ll rate a second claim posted on the Romney campaign's website that was forwarded to us by a reader. "What president has the worst record on female labor force participation?" the website asks. "Barack Obama." It adds, "Turning the clock back 20 years on American women." First, it's important to note that the statement is confusing because it offers two time frames for the claim. The first sentence refers to the "worst record," suggesting that Obama has the worst record of any president. But then it seems to narrow that time frame to 20 years. We focused on the first part, since it’s so sweeping and since it's clear about what it refers to -- labor force participation, a standard economic statistic that’s checkable. Let's define our terms. The "labor force" includes people who are either employed (either full- or part time) or are unemployed (available and looking for work). It does not include people who aren’t currently seeking work. The statistic "labor force participation" divides the labor force by the total population excluding the military and people who are institutionalized. The statistic goes beyond the familiar unemployment rate, taking into account people who have left the job market, perhaps to go back to school, become a stay-at-home parent or retire. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has labor force participation data going back to 1948. When we checked with the Romney campaign, a spokesman told us that the point of the claim was that Obama was the only president to preside over a significant decline in female labor participation. So we looked at the data. Making comparisons between presidents is tricky, because different presidents served for different lengths of time. So to make things simple, we looked at the female labor participation rate at the beginning and the end of each president’s term. It turns out that every president between Dwight Eisenhower (the first president to start a new term after 1948) and Bill Clinton saw an increase in women’s labor force participation during their terms. The two most recent presidents saw declines -- 0.7 percentage points under George W. Bush and 1.7 percentage points under Obama. But were those losses attributable to either president? The arc of women’s employment participation rose gradually but consistently. It rose from roughly one-third of women in the work force in 1948 to about 57 percent in the late 1980s. In the almost quarter-century since then, labor force participation rates have moved in a fairly narrow range, topping out at 60.2 percent. And the reason for the long upward climb? Far-reaching social trends that are generally out of the control of any president, including the rise of feminism, the advent of birth control, and rising interest in providing girls with an education equal to that of boys. "Long-term social trends have pushed in the direction of rising labor force participation rates among women for decades," said Steven J. Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who served as an outside adviser to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. So, the fact that the labor participation rate for women rose by 3.8 percentage points under President Richard Nixon but fell by 1.7 percentage points under Obama isn’t very illuminating. The main reason for the difference is that Nixon happened to serve during a long period of rising workforce participation rates for women, while Obama happened to serve during a period when the rate has been stuck at more or less the same level for more than two decades. The current labor force participation rate for women age 16 and over is 57.7 percent. It’s true that this represents a low point in recent history. The last time it was this low was in April 1993, when Bill Clinton was president. That was 19 years ago -- close to the 20 years cited in the Romney web graphic. That said, there’s a lot of critical facts that Romney’s claim ignores. The drop in female labor participation is -- so far, at least -- pretty small. Between February 1989 and today -- a period that includes 277 monthly data points -- female labor participation moved up and down within a range of just 3.1 percentage points, a tiny fraction of the movement it displayed between 1948 and 1989. For the sake of comparison, the unemployment rate over the same period zigzagged in a range twice that big, 6.2 percentage points. Between January 2009, when Obama took office, and March 2012, the most recent month available, women’s labor force participation declined by 1.7 percentage points. (Starting the count the day Obama took office is probably not a fair way to measure his record, since his policies wouldn’t have had time to take effect, but we’ll use it here for the sake of convenience.) Considering that Obama inherited what many consider the worst recession since the Great Depression, a 1.7 percentage-point drop isn’t necessarily dramatic. It certainly could turn into a worrisome trend -- but that depends on where the number goes from here. "It depends on whether you see the recent declines as a temporary phenomenon due to a temporarily weak economy, or as the first installment that reverses much of a decades-long climb in the participation rate of women," Davis said. The decline in labor force participation under Obama was similar for men. Over the same period that the women’s labor participation rate was declining by 1.7 percentage points under Obama, the decline for men was actually steeper -- 2.2 percentage points. So labor force participation percentages don’t give much evidence that women in particular are suffering under Obama. This point is "what reveals it to be a political charge rather than an economic one," said Andrew Samwick, a Dartmouth College economist. In analyzing this question, the age of the workforce matters. As they age, more people tend to leave the job market. Given that the baby boomers are reaching or are already in retirement, a portion of the decline in labor participation rate for both sexes comes from the aging of the labor force. A straightforward way of minimizing the impact of aging workers on the statistics is to take a look at a more specific slice of the population -- workers age 25 to 54, who aren’t yet close to retirement. Economists can argue about whether this is a better measure to look at than ages 16 and up -- the figure used above -- but it’s certainly an alternative way of looking at the core of the working-age population. So how does Obama fare using this measurement? Labor participation for women in this age group fell by 1.3 percentage points between January 2009 and March 2012. During the same number of months into George W. Bush’s tenure, the labor participation rate for women in the same age group fell by 1.4 percentage points. Our point is not to say that Bush had a worse record than Obama for women’s employment. Rather, the fact that that Bush had slightly worse numbers than Obama did using this measurement runs counter to the Romney camp’s argument that Obama clearly had the "worst record on female labor force participation." The broader lesson of this comparison is that different statistics may show different trends, and when assessing the sweeping claim that Obama has the "worst record" on something, it’s important to look at the numbers from more than one direction. The decline in labor-force participation under Obama can’t be attributed to his policies alone. Presidents do not have unfettered ability to shape the labor markets. Obama inherited a serious recession, and that has had the biggest impact on women’s employment rates. As it happens, some of the hardest-hit employment sectors during the past few years -- state and local government -- attract a disproportionate share of women. According to BLS data, 57 percent of government workers are women. The state government workforce has shrunk by 2.6 percent since January 2009, and the local government workforce has shrunk by 3.3 percent since January 2009. Public education attracts particularly large numbers of women -- 71 percent of all employees -- and it has shrunk by 2.8 percent since January 2009. State and local government jobs cuts can't be pinned directly on a president. In fact, Republicans played a major role in shrinking public sector employment. A recent study by the liberal Roosevelt Institute found that the 11 states that voted in Republican legislatures in the 2010 elections accounted for 40.5 percent of all state and local government job losses. If anything, Obama’s policies may have eased the job losses in these sectors: A portion of his economic stimulus bill consisted of aid to states, which was designed to save jobs in education and other public services. A second round of stimulus worth $23 billion that Obama sought was rejected by Congressional Republicans. Our ruling Romney's website said, "What president has the worst record on female labor force participation? Barack Obama." According to federal statistics, every president since 1948 except for Obama and George W. Bush has seen women’s participation in the labor force rise on their watch, and Obama’s decline was bigger than Bush’s. So there’s a grain of truth to Romney’s claim -- but not much. The increases for presidents between 1948 and the late 1980s are largely due to broader social trends beyond the control of any president, so saying that Obama did worse than them is a red herring. Meanwhile, other cuts at the data paint a different picture. Under Obama, the decline in workforce participation for women was actually smaller than it was for men, and calculating the data using slightly different age groups shows that George W. Bush had a slightly worse record. This lack of context weakens Romney’s claim that Obama has the "worst record on female labor force participation" of any president. We rate this statement Mostly False.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-04-12T17:36:08	2012-04-09	['None']
-hoer-00712	Got a pencil? - Amazing Pencil Tip Sculptures by Dalton Ghetti	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/pencil-tip-art.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Got a pencil? - Amazing Pencil Tip Sculptures by Dalton Ghetti	6th October 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-11127	Rep. Dan Donovan "voted for Tax Cuts"	mostly true	/new-york/statements/2018/jun/04/donald-trump/did-rep-dan-donovan-vote-tax-cuts-trump-said/	President Donald Trump endorsed Rep. Dan Donovan for re-election, citing the Staten Island Republican’s support for tax cuts. In a tweet, Trump praised Donovan’s record on taxes, the military and other issues. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com "There is no one better to represent the people of N.Y. and Staten Island (a place I know very well) than @RepDanDonovan, who is strong on Borders & Crime, loves our Military & our Vets, voted for Tax Cuts and is helping me to Make America Great Again. Dan has my full endorsement!" Trump tweeted. Donovan faces a challenge from former Rep. Michael Grimm, who held the seat before Donovan won a 2015 special election. Grimm resigned from Congress after pleading guilty to felony tax evasion charges in 2014. Donovan trailed Grimm by 10 points in a poll conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in April. Trump’s tweet could help narrow that gap. But is Trump right about Donovan’s record on tax cuts? Recent tax cuts A spokesperson for Trump did not get back to us with information supporting his claim, so we can't say for sure what he was talking about in his endorsement. A search on Twitter shows Trump tweeted about tax cuts four other times in May. Each of those tweets referred to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the federal tax law passed last year designed to lower taxes for the middle class and give major breaks to corporations and wealthy earners. Donovan was one of only 13 Republicans in the House that actually voted against the law. He and four other Republicans from New York state were against a part of the bill that limited the deductibility of state and local taxes. Residents were previously allowed to deduct an unlimited amount of those taxes. The new law caps that deduction at $10,000. "Capping this deduction – which has been a part of the U.S. tax code since 1913 – will increase taxes and harm the already-unaffordable housing market in my district," Donovan said in a statement at the time. "With the state and local tax deduction nearly eliminated, this tax bill doesn't equal relief for far too many New Yorkers." Past tax cuts Congress has passed other tax cuts since Donovan took office. He voted in favor of an omnibus spending bill that included more than $600 billion in tax relief in 2015. The bill permanently extended several tax breaks enacted during the Great Recession that were set to expire in 2017. The enhanced child tax credit, for example, gave couples without a tax liability a larger tax refund based on the number of children they have. The 2017 tax law allows an even larger refund for those families with the credit. The 2015 law also extended a $2,500 tax credit for low- and middle-income filers attending their first four years of college. That credit was not changed in the 2017 law. Other provisions of the 2015 law expanded another tax credit for low- and middle-income workers with children, allowed teachers to deduct up to $250 in school-related expenses, and extended other tax breaks Donovan also voted for a budget bill earlier this year that included more tax extenders for filers, and a bill in 2017 that gave extra tax relief to victims of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Our ruling Trump said Donovan "voted for Tax Cuts." That's actually true. Donovan has voted for tax cuts in the past, though he was against the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act last year. Trump's other tweets about tax cuts refer to that law, but we can't assume what Trump was talking about. That makes Trump’s statement accurate, but it required additional information. We rate it Mostly True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-06-04T14:46:52	2018-05-30	['None']
-snes-03148	Adam Sandler was found dead of an apparent suicide in January 2017.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/adam-sandler-death-hoax-2/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Adam Sandler Death Hoax	13 January 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-14151	"In two years, Gov. McAuliffe has vetoed more bills that the previous three governors issued in each of their four-year terms."	true	/virginia/statements/2016/may/02/kirk-cox/kirk-cox-says-mcauliffe-has-vetoed-more-bills-last/	Gov. Terry McAuliffe is way too heavy-handed with his veto pen, says Del. Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights. "In two years, Gov. McAuliffe has vetoed more bills than the previous three governors issued in each of their four-year terms," Cox, the House majority leader, said during an April 20 floor speech when the General Assembly met to consider the Democratic governor’s vetoes of bills that lawmakers passed this year. We wondered whether Cox’s claim is correct. His speech, it turns out, was written by Matthew Moran, communications director for House Speaker Bill Howell, R-Stafford. Moran told us his information came from statistics kept by the Legislative Information System, a 22-year-old database of bills and votes in the General Assembly. The records show that McAuliffe vetoed 32 bills this year and 26 in 2015. That comes to 58 in the past two years. Here are the four-year totals of each of the three previous governors: •Republican Bob McDonnell, 20 vetoes; •Democrat Tim Kaine, 44 vetoes; •Democrat Mark Warner, 18 vetoes. McAuliffe offers a simple reason for his many vetoes: The Republican-led General Assembly, he says, has passed a lot of what he considers to be bad bills. Among McAuliffe’s vetoes this spring were bills that would have: •Prohibited state agencies from punishing religious organizations that discriminate against same-sex couples; •Stopped state funding for Planned Parenthood; •Allowed home-schooled children to play on public school sports teams; •Prevented localities from removing Confederate monuments; •Repealed the governor’s ban on firearms in state office buildings; •Extended coal tax credits to help struggling coal regions; and •Given legislators control over implementing federal energy regulations. McAuliffe said he made it clear to legislators that he opposed these and other measures. "Unfortunately, they sent those bills to me," he told reporters. "And I vetoed them. No surprise." We should note that the comparisons Cox made in accusing McAuliffe of veto-mania are tightly drawn and wouldn’t hold up if Cox had extended them past the previous three governors. The two governors immediately beyond that threshold, Republicans Jim Gilmore and George Allen, issued 90 and 84 vetoes, respectively, during their four-year terms. The legislative database doesn’t go back further. It’s anyone’s guess whether McAuliffe, who enters the final full year of his term in 2017, will top those high-water marks. In addition to the 58 vetoes from 2015 and 2016 to which Cox referred, McAuliffe rejected 10 bills in 2014. That gives him a total of 68 vetoes through his first three General Assembly sessions. The role of partisanship As a side note, we wondered whether the governors with the most vetoes faced General Assemblies controlled by the opposite party and vice versa. We found a strong, but not ironclad, correlation. Allen, a Republican who served from 1994 to 1998, had 53 vetoes during his first two years, when the legislature was controlled by Democrats; and 31 during his last two years, when the House was run by Democrats and the Senate was evenly split between the parties. Gilmore, a Republican who served from 1998 to 2002, had 60 vetoes during his first two years, when control of the House and Senate was split between parties. He issued 30 vetoes during his last two years, when both chambers were controlled by Republicans. Warner, a Democrat who served from 2002 to 2006, issued 18 vetoes over his four-year term - the fewest by any recent governor - even though he faced a Republican legislature the entire time. Kaine, a Democrat who served from 2006 to 2010, had 27 vetoes during his first two years, when Republicans ran both chambers. He issued 17 during the second half of his term, when Democrats gained control of the Senate and the House remained in GOP hands. McDonnell, a Republican who served from 2010 to 2014, had four vetoes during his first two years, when the House was Republican and the Senate was Democratic. He issued 16 during his last two years, when Republicans controlled the House and the Senate was split. McAuliffe, a Democrat, has faced a Republican-controlled legislature during his first three years and, as we’ve noted, issued 68 vetoes. Our ruling Cox said, "In two years, Gov. McAuliffe has vetoed more bills than the previous three governors issued in each of their four-year terms." The record bears him out. We rate his statement True.	None	Kirk Cox	None	None	None	2016-05-02T00:00:00	2016-04-20	['None']
-pose-00416	"He will work to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers, so workers can stand up for themselves without worrying about losing their livelihoods."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/436/work-to-ban-the-permanent-replacement-of-striking-/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Work to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers	2010-01-07T13:26:58	None	['None']
-pomt-06348	"People are five to seven times more likely to be murdered in workplaces that allow firearms than in those that prohibit it."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2011/nov/07/wisconsin-anti-violence-effort-educational-fund/workplace-homicides-more-likely-where-guns-allowed/	Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s support of concealed carry gave his critics, some of whom want to recall him from office in 2012, another reason to slam him. On Oct. 30, 2011, two days before the concealed carrying of guns and other weapons became legal in Wisconsin, one visitor to a Facebook site that bashes Walker took a shot at the Republican governor and the law. She posted this statement from the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort Educational Fund: "People are five to seven times more likely to be murdered in workplaces that allow firearms than in those that prohibit it." Concealed carry has drawn high interest from gun owners -- more than 80,000 application forms for permits were downloaded by 9 a.m. on the first day the law took effect -- and from people who fear more gun carrying will lead to more violence. So we decided to check WAVE’s statement. In becoming the 49th state to legalize concealed carry, Wisconsin generally allows people age 21 and over to carry hidden handguns, stun guns, most knives and other weapons. But there are restrictions, including some that apply to workplaces. Owners and occupants of property can prohibit concealed carry on or in the property. And employers can prohibit employees from carrying concealed weapons while on the job. WAVE, which describes itself as the "only statewide grassroots organization solely dedicated to reducing gun violence, injuries and deaths," has been pushing businesses to post signs prohibiting concealed carry on their premises. It has made the claim that people are five to seven times more likely to be murdered in workplaces that allow firearms to tens of thousands of people through its website, emails and direct mail, said executive director Jeri Bonavia. The claim, she said, is based on a May 2005 article in the American Journal of Public Health, which publishes peer-reviewed scientific research. The article was written by researchers from the University of North Carolina’s Department of Epidemiology and Injury Prevention Research Center. We also found an earlier article on the same study, which appeared in another research publication, the American Journal of Epidemiology. The researchers examined 152 homicides that occurred in 143 workplaces in North Carolina from January 1994 through March 1998. They concluded that workplaces where guns were permitted "were five to seven times more likely to be the site of a worker homicide relative to those where all weapons were prohibited." So, the researchers said workplaces that allowed guns were five to seven times more likely to be the site of a homicide. In contrast, WAVE said people are five to seven times more likely to be murdered in workplaces that allow firearms. We asked Stephen Marshall, one of the researchers, whether WAVE’s wording was an accurate expression of what his study found; he simply reiterated the phrasing used in the study. We put the same question to other researchers; some said they thought WAVE’s statement was an essentially accurate expression of what the study found, while others thought WAVE’s wording was problematic. But there’s a more important question in terms of whether WAVE’s claim is accurate: Does the study’s major finding -- North Carolina workplaces that allowed guns were much more likely to be the site of a homicide -- apply to other states, including Wisconsin? Marshall said one could not assume that the five-to-seven-times statistic from his study would be true for Wisconsin or any other place. Other experts, however, gave a range of answers on whether the finding of the North Carolina study is applicable to Wisconsin workplaces. Applicability unknown: Susan Gerberich, co-director of the Regional Injury Prevention Center at the University of Minnesota, said that because the study was limited to North Carolina, it is not known whether the increased risk of workplace homicide would be true in other places. Corinne Peek-Assa, director of the University of Iowa Injury Prevention Research Center, said "generalizing epidemiologic studies is never simple." And Mary Vriniotis, research specialist with the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said: "This study provides good evidence that workplaces allowing firearms increase the risk of workplace homicide," but "it's hard to say whether the findings in Wisconsin would be the same." Applicability possible: Epidemiology professor Sabrina Walsh of the University of Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center said it is possible the higher workplace homicide risk found in North Carolina would be true in other states. And Stephen Hargarten, director of the Medical College of Wisconsin Injury Research Center, said the North Carolina study should be cause for concern in Wisconsin that workplace homicides would occur more often in workplaces that allow guns than in those that don’t. Applicability likely: Daniel Webster, co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research, said that although the five-to-seven times statistic found in the North Carolina wouldn’t automatically apply to other states, "I don’t have any reason to think you’d have radically different findings" if the North Carolina study were replicated in Wisconsin. All the researchers said they were not aware of any other study like the one done in North Carolina. Our conclusion Citing a university study, the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort said: "People are five to seven times more likely to be murdered in workplaces that allow firearms than in those that prohibit it." Some experts faulted WAVE -- though others didn’t -- for using different wording than the study itself, which said North Carolina workplaces that allowed guns were five to seven times more likely to be the site of a homicide. Some experts said they could not conclude from the North Carolina study whether the higher likelihood of workplace homicide would be true in other places like Wisconsin. But other experts said the North Carolina study was proof that the workplace homicide rate in Wisconsin likely would be at least somewhat higher in workplaces that allow guns compared to workplaces that don’t. In sum, WAVE’s statement is generally accurate, but leaves out important details, such as that the study applied only to North Carolina. That’s our definition for Half True.	None	Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort Educational Fund	None	None	None	2011-11-07T09:00:00	2011-10-30	['None']
-bove-00205	Mumbai Deluge: Leptospirosis And What You Should Know	none	https://www.boomlive.in/mumbai-deluge-leptospirosis-and-what-you-should-know/	None	None	None	None	None	Mumbai Deluge: Leptospirosis And What You Should Know	Aug 30 2017 1:31 pm, Last Updated: Aug 30 2017 1:33 pm	None	['None']
-goop-00957	Khloe Kardashian, Tristan Thompson Do Have “Secret Plans To Elope,” 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/khloe-kardashian-tristan-thompson-elope-wedding-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Khloe Kardashian, Tristan Thompson Do NOT Have “Secret Plans To Elope,” Despite Report	12:00 am, May 23, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-07782	Sunday liquor sales could generate $3.4 million to $4.8 million a year in additional sales tax revenue for Georgia.	mostly true	/georgia/statements/2011/feb/22/distilled-spirits-council-united-states/georgia-can-bring-big-bucks-ending-booze-ban-group/	Each year, a new round of a seemingly age-old debate takes place at the Georgia Capitol, and 2011 has been no exception. Should Georgia lawmakers end the Sunday ban on the sale of alcohol in stores? After Gov. Sonny Perdue and his threatened veto of Sunday sales legislation left office in January, supporters of the change took heart. But last week, state Senate leaders said there wasn’t enough support in the Republican-led chamber to end the ban. Some lawmakers oppose ending the ban for moral reasons. Proponents of "takeout "alcohol sales hope to persuade lawmakers Wednesday with a rally at the Gold Dome. One group that wants to end the ban made its case to legislators in a recent op-ed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a Washington, D.C.-based group that says it represents many of the nation’s leading liquor manufacturers, says Georgia can add millions of dollars to its coffers from the sales taxes it would collect from people buying alcohol on Sundays. "Georgia stands to generate $3.4 [million] to $4.8 million in additional state tax revenues per year simply by repealing this outmoded ban," wrote the group’s vice president, Ben Jenkins. A PolitiFact Georgia reader was dubious that there would be an increase in liquor sales on Sunday since Georgians are already trained to make their purchases on Saturdays. He asked us to check out the council’s math. Georgia collects about $170 million a year in alcohol beverage taxes, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution report in 2009. Alcohol can be consumed at many sports events, restaurants and bars on Sundays, but it can’t be sold in grocery or liquor stores. Connecticut and Indiana are the only states that currently ban Sunday sales of all three types of alcohol: beer, wine and liquor. The Georgia Department of Revenue has not studied the potential economic impact of ending the Sunday takeout ban, a spokesman said. Mark Stehr, an associate professor of economics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has done several studies on the subject in recent years. His research shows there is a spike in all forms of alcohol sales on Sundays. "In most cases, people will plan around [a Sunday ban]," he said, "but some people forget or may be doing something with their kids and can’t buy on Saturday." The Distilled Spirits Council produced a four-page report that breaks down how it came up with its estimate. First, its study looks only at sales of liquor, not beer or wine. It used data from four states that relaxed their Sunday alcohol sales to help estimate the potential increase in Georgia. Those states, Delaware, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania, experienced statewide increases in sales between 5.8 and 9.5 percent. In order not to oversell the potential economic benefit, the council went with a 5 to 7 percent estimate. Using that 5 to 7 percent estimate, the council concluded there would be an increase of between 181,250 and 253,750 9-liter cases sold in Georgia a year. The council used Georgia’s 4 percent sales tax rate and added several state and local taxes to estimate that Georgia’s revenue from liquor sales would rise $3.4 million to $4.8 million a year. So what about this estimated 5 to 7 percent increase in sales? Is it correct? We asked around. Texas has studied the potential economic impact of allowing off-site consumption of alcohol. Its data shows the increase would be about 3.6 percent a year. Colorado lawmakers lifted a decades-old ban on Sunday liquor sales in 2008, boosting the state’s excise tax by 7 percent, USNews.com reported. A 2007 study for the National Tax Journal by Stehr reported the average state saw a per capita increase in the sales of beer and spirits of 4.1 percent and 5.2 percent, respectively, after repeal of a Sunday sales ban. The council sent us that report to support its conclusion. Stehr, however, has since updated his estimate, based on additional data from states that have eased their Sunday rules. He found that states experience about a 3 percent increase in liquor sales when a takeout ban is lifted. "I think it’s unlikely," Stehr said of the council’s 5 to 7 percent estimate, "but it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility." The studies we found all show alcohol sales increase after a repeal. Some reports show a 5 to 7 percent increase in liquor sales is within the range of possibility, but Stehr believes it would likely be a bit lower. Other states, like Texas, also use lower estimates. With that caveat, we’ll be cautious about the council’s estimate that ending the takeout ban will result in an annual increase of $3.4 million to $4.8 million in taxes in the state of Georgia. It appears safe to say sales tax revenue would increase; the only question is by how much. Therefore, we rate the claim as Mostly True.	None	Distilled Spirits Council of the United States	None	None	None	2011-02-22T06:00:00	2011-02-14	['None']
-abbc-00280	Changing "thin capitalisation rules" to limit the level of tax deductions a local subsidiary can claim for debt it owes to another group company overseas, saving $1.65 billion over three years.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-01/fact-check-is-labors-education-policy-fully-funded/7171252	Changing "thin capitalisation rules" to limit the level of tax deductions a local subsidiary can claim for debt it owes to another group company overseas, saving $1.65 billion over three years.	['budget', 'education', 'schools', 'superannuation', 'smoking', 'tax', 'alp', 'australia']	None	None	['budget', 'education', 'schools', 'superannuation', 'smoking', 'tax', 'alp', 'australia']	Fact Check: Is Labor's schools policy fully funded?	Wed 1 Aug 2018, 2:34am	None	['None']
-tron-03382	Baby Born in the Philippines Has Stigmata Sores	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/baby-born-in-the-philippines-has-stigmata-sores/	None	religious	None	None	None	Baby Born in the Philippines Has Stigmata Sores	Mar 30, 2015	None	['Philippines']
-pomt-06622	"Poverty among Americans 65 and over is statistically unchanged" in recent years because of Social Security.	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/19/rachel-maddow/rachel-maddow-said-social-security-keeping-older-a/	The most recent census numbers show poverty is on the rise. Median household incomes have fallen to their lowest level since the 1990s, prompting analysts to say we are in the midst of a "lost decade." Liberal talk show host Rachel Maddow reviewed the numbers on her prime-time show on MSNBC: The news that the U.S. poverty rate is now the highest it has been since the early '90s, nearly one in six Americans now living in poverty. And the specifics are even worse: Child poverty rose from under 21 percent to 22 percent. Poverty among Hispanic Americans went from more than 25 percent to more than 26 percent. Poverty among African-Americans went from just under 26 percent to over 27 percent. Poverty among white people is much lower than those other groups but it is rising, too, and fast. It went up from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent. The only large segment of the American population that serves as any sort of silver lining in these poverty numbers is older Americans. Poverty among Americans 65 and over is statistically unchanged, even as it is getting so much worse for so many other groups of people. And that, of course, is because we have something in this country that keeps older Americans out of poverty. It's called Social Security. And the fact that Social Security works, that it is keeping old people out of poverty in America, even as everybody else is slipping into it, the fact that it works means that in Republicanland, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is someone who says that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and a failure. We wondered if Maddow was right that Social Security is the main factor keeping older Americans out of poverty. We suspected the federal program likely played some role, but we also wondered what role traditional pensions played. So we decided to check it out. A review of how Social Security works: Workers contribute to the program via payroll taxes. (Most people are required to participate, with a few exceptions, such as retirement programs for government employees like those in Galveston County, Texas.) When workers reach retirement age, they file for Social Security benefits. The government calculates their benefits according to a formula primarily based on average lifetime earnings, and sends them monthly checks. They'll get that amount, with small increases for inflation, until they die. Social Security has become a political topic lately because officials project the program won't take in enough money to pay full benefits starting around 2036. Most people agree the program will have to be changed to make it more financially solid. Getting back to our fact-check, Maddow is right that the poverty rate for Americans over age 65 is quite stable. For 2010, it was at 9 percent, up slightly from 8.9 percent in 2009, and lower than it was during the 1990s, when it reached a decade-high 12.9 percent in 1992. Next, we wanted to know how much Social Security made a difference to seniors with relatively low incomes: Quite a bit, it turns out. The Social Security Administration performs economic analysis and publishes research statistics for Americans over age 65. The latest research available is for 2008, but Melissa Favreault, an expert on Social Security with the Urban Institute, told us she didn't expect the percentages would be significantly different for 2010. The Social Security Administration looks at taxpayers aged 65 and older, dividing them up by income into five groups, from the lowest earning group to the highest. (For you non-policy wonks out there, these five groups are known as quintiles.) The numbers show that the less income people have, the more they depend on Social Security. Meanwhile, people who get pensions tend to be in the higher earning groups. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau stated in its recent report that Social Security was keeping millions of people out of poverty: "In 2010, the number of people aged 65 and older in poverty would be higher by almost 14 million if Social Security payments were excluded from money income, quintupling the number of elderly people in poverty." If you added 14 million additional seniors to those already in poverty in 2010, the poverty rate for American over age 65 would be 45 percent, not 9 percent. We also found a 2008 report on Social Security from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service that analyzed ways to improve the future financing of Social Security. The report starts: "Social Security has significantly reduced elderly poverty. The elderly poverty rate has fallen from 35% in 1959 to an all-time low of 9% in 2006, in large part because of Social Security. If Social Security benefits did not exist, an estimated 44% of the elderly would be poor today assuming no changes in behavior." Still, there are a few other things to consider when evaluating Maddow's statement. Some seniors get public assistance from federal, state and local programs, particularly if they are poor or disabled. Those programs also have a role in keeping low-income seniors out of poverty. (Going back to the Social Security statistics that analyze quintiles, about 8 percent of the lowest quintile receives 50 percent or more of its income from public assistance.) Health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid could also indirectly increase people's income by paying for health care costs that they might otherwise pay out of pocket. Then there's the argument to be made that some Social Security beneficiaries would have saved the money on their own, in other more productive ways. We fact-checked Ed Schultz's statement on what poverty numbers might look like if Social Security had never existed, and looked in some detail at different scenarios. Finally, Social Security is not specifically aimed at keeping people out of poverty; many middle and upper-class people benefit as well. Social Security payments are based on people's lifetime earnings, so the more people earned during their working years, the more they get from Social Security. However, Social Security is progressive in the sense that low earners get more back in benefits than they contribute via payroll taxes. Andrew Biggs, an expert on Social Security with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that Social Security isn't particularly effective if looked at solely as an antipoverty program. "In 2010, Social Security spent over $575 billion on retirement and survivors benefits, which comes to $14,675 for each person over age 65 –- enough to give every person a benefit that's 50 percent above the poverty line," said Biggs. "And yet we still have 10 percent of seniors in poverty. If reducing poverty was our only goal, we could do a lot more while spending a lot less than we do." In rating Maddow's statement, she's largely correct that Social Security keeps a significant number of older Americans out of poverty. But other programs also play a role. We rate her statement Mostly True.	None	Rachel Maddow	None	None	None	2011-09-19T16:29:58	2011-09-19	['United_States']
-afck-00040	“About 8.2 million pupils are currently being fed from 24 States of the Federation”	unproven	https://africacheck.org/reports/buharis-2018-democracy-day-speech-7-main-claims-under-scrutiny/	None	None	None	None	None	Buhari’s 2018 Democracy Day speech: 7 main claims under scrutiny	2018-05-29 01:51	None	['None']
-pomt-15355	In Florida, "the number of voters who now register as ‘other’ has grown by a million in the last 10 years. Compare that with the Democrats, who only grew by 300,000 and the Republicans who grew by just 200,000."	mostly true	/punditfact/statements/2015/jul/08/chuck-todd/florida-no-party-voters-are-growing-question-why/	As the candidate field for the 2016 election continues to grow, the line between Republicans and Democrats is drawn, altered and emphasized. The race toward the primaries and the White House is starting, and the two major parties are, as usual, the ones to watch. Or are they? On a segment of Meet the Press this past Sunday, moderator Chuck Todd brought up a third group that may be just as important as the two major parties in the upcoming election. "The growing number of voters who don't affiliate with either major political party is reshaping our political system, perhaps more than you may realize," Todd said. Todd went on to describe how, according to a recent poll, a larger percentage of Americans identify as independent rather than as Democrat or Republican. Todd cited Florida as a specific example. "The number of voters (in Florida) who now register as ‘other’ has grown by a million in the last 10 years," Todd said. "Compare that with the Democrats, who only grew by 300,000 and the Republicans who grew by just 200,000." Has the number of independents really increased by a million? And what do those changes mean? Starting with 2014 as the most recent complete year, PunditFact looked at Florida voter data going back to 2004. We looked at last voter registration report before the November election. The chart below summarizes what we found. Registered Republican voters Registered Democrat voters No Party Affiliation 2004 3,892,492 4,261,249 1,886,013 2014 4,172,232 4,628,178 2,778,547 10-year change 279,740 366,929 892,534 Percent increase 7.19% 8.61% 47.32% The numbers are relatively close to what Todd said. (After hearing from Todd's staff, the differences mainly appear to be the result of rounding and whether or not you count minor parties such as the Reform Party, the Constitution Party and the Florida Socialist Workers Party, among others.) So the numbers are in the ballpark. Still, there are a few caveats to consider. No Party Affiliation is a catch-all Florida’s most recent voter registration form became effective in October 2013. In the Party Affiliation box, registrants are asked to choose whether they are affiliated with the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, a minor party, or no party at all. However, if left blank, registrants are automatically registered as having no party affiliation. PunditFact has asked the Florida Department of State how many people are registered with No Party Affiliation because they left the field blank. If we get an answer, we’ll update this item. No Party Affiliation doesn’t translate to no party In an article published in 2014 by Politics in Polk, Kevin Wagner, an associate professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University, warned about some additional nuances that are necessary to consider when talking about independent voters. "We have leaners or loosely affiliated voters," Wagner said. "Sometimes partisan voters like to call themselves independent. So just asking that question can be inaccurate." According to one 2009 article, once all the "leaners" are taken out of consideration, the pure independents actually end up totaling less than 10 percent of registered voters (with the leaners, independents total about 43 percent of the total registered voters). PunditFact also reached out to John Brehm, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. Brehm said it might be helpful to think of the "other" voters Todd mentioned as being divided into two categories. Young voters who have not yet formed a definitive identity mainly constitute the members of the first category. "The majority of these individuals will eventually come to identify with their parents’ party identities," Brehm said. "Some ... will be influenced by short term forces, typically economic, although sometimes having to do with major foreign policy crises (such as Sept. 11)." The other category of voters, described by Brehm as those who "left their partisan identity," includes "longtime Republicans or Democrats who say ‘their party has left them’." "Nearly all of these people will come to vote with their prior identities, and another large share will simply not vote," said Brehm. As far as not voting goes, the numbers at the polls seem to support this. In the 2014 midterm election, 28 percent of the voter turnout identified as independent. However, at the time, a Gallup poll recorded that independent voters made up 43 percent of registered voters. As Todd even put it during his show, "Even as the number of Americans identifying as independents has grown, we haven't seen a jump in the number of independent candidates, certainly none that are actually gaining traction, because there are none in the (presidential) race." Our ruling Todd said that "the number of voters (in Florida) who now register as ‘other’ has grown by a million in the last 10 years," while registered Democrat and Republican voters grew by 300,000 and 200,000 respectively. In Florida, voters who do not indicate affiliation on their registration forms are automatically placed in the No Party Affiliation category, artificially inflating the number of seemingly independent voters. And among voters registered as having No Party Affiliation, many still vote according to partisan lines. Still, the numbers are fairly close, and the trend is certainly spot on. Todd’s statement is accurate but needs some additional information. We rate it Mostly True. Update: We updated this item on July 8, 2015, to add more information explaining how NBC got its figures.	None	Chuck Todd	None	None	None	2015-07-08T12:13:15	2015-07-05	['Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-09880	"The Senate voted this week to allow illegal aliens access to Social Security benefits."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jul/29/chain-email/claims-senate-voted-give-undocumented-workers-soci/	You asked, so we're delivering. For nearly six months, loyal PolitiFact readers have encouraged us to look into a chain email about undocumented immigrants getting Social Security benefits. The e-mail has come in several forms, but most often goes as follows: "It does not matter if you personally like or dislike Obama. It is already impossible to live on Social Security alone. If the government gives benefits to illegal aliens who have never contributed, where does that leave those of us who have paid into Social Security all our working lives? Please sign this petition and flood President Obama's e-mail box with e-mails that tell him that, even if the House passes this bill, he needs to veto it. ... The Senate voted this week to allow illegal aliens access to Social Security benefits." Typically, the text is followed by hundreds of signatures asking President Barack Obama to veto said bill. The e-mails provide no bill number, no bill name and — oddly — they all insist that the Senate "voted this week" on the legislation. Yet, we've been getting the same petition for months. Digging back through our own archives we found the first version of this e-mail was sent on Feb. 13, 2009, a Friday. As with the many that have followed, the e-mail claimed the Senate had just voted on the bill, so we went back to the Congressional Record to see what the Senate had been debating that week, and we found that the stimulus was on the chamber's agenda. At first we thought the e-mail might have something to do with the stimulus package, but upon further investigation, we found that the claim goes back as far as 2006, as our friends at FactCheck.org have pointed out. (Then, the claim was used against senators who voted against an amendment to the Comprehensive Immigration Act that would have blocked Social Security benefits to legal immigrants who paid taxes before they obtained the right to work.) But back to 2009. We ran a search in Thomas, the Library of Congress's bill database, and found no such legislation. And just to be sure we hadn't missed anything, we contacted several groups that typically weigh in on the immigration debate to see if they'd heard otherwise. The answer from all corners was a resounding "no." "We're not aware of any such bill," said Ira Mehlman, communication director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that advocates for stronger border security and stricter immigration laws. "This garbage has been floating around since 2006" when Congress was debating the immigration bill, said Jon Blazer, who is an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. "First it was George Bush, and they just changed the name to Obama." Like most chain e-mails, it seems this letter has morphed through a Web-based game of telephone. What started as a specious campaign attack back in 2006 has hung around as a rumor under the new administration. We've been getting this e-mail for six months, and every time, it exclaims that the Senate voted "this week" on such a bill. Unless our senators are trapped in a time warp, debating and passing the same bill every week, such a claim is impossible. It's Pants on Fire for this chain e-mail!	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2009-07-29T14:03:12	2009-07-14	['None']
-goop-00407	Kanye West Did Tell Kim Kardashian To “Stop Looking Cheap,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kanye-west-kim-kardashian-stop-looking-cheap-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kanye West Did NOT Tell Kim Kardashian To “Stop Looking Cheap,” Despite Report	1:27 pm, August 22, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-05533	A restaurant customer named Jason Naglich wrote "Tip for U.S. Citizens Only" on his bill and stiffed his waitress.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tip-non-immigrants/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a Restaurant Customer Leave an Anti-Immigration Note in Lieu of a Tip?	20 November 2015	None	['None']
-goop-02293	Keith Urban Upset About Nicole Kidman’s New, Young “On-Screen Love”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/keith-urban-upset-nicole-kidman-young-love-big-little-lies-2-jealous/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Keith Urban Upset About Nicole Kidman’s New, Young “On-Screen Love”?	7:37 pm, October 26, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10091	Measures in Barack Obama's health plan could "lower health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/30/barack-obama/savings-projection-is-best-case-scenario/	During a 30-minute campaign ad that aired Oct. 29, 2008, Barack Obama laid out his policy proposals in detail, including health care. "In the last year, I've visited many hospitals that are computerizing records and implementing technology that improves patient care and dramatically reduces costs," Obama said. "That's why my health care plan includes improving information technology, requires coverage for preventive care and pre-existing conditions, and lowers health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year, and you can keep your same coverage and your same doctor." As Obama's statement makes clear, he brings down costs by introducing efficiency to the existing health care system. He believes the savings should be reflected in lower costs for health insurance and medical care. We wanted to look into that $2,500 number and see what's behind it. From our previous coverage of health care, we know that it's difficult to forecast costs with precision . But we were curious whether Obama's number was an approximation of realistic savings or an outlandish exaggeration of what experts would say is possible. The Obama campaign pointed us to a memo several researchers at Harvard University wrote after the campaign asked them to review Obama's plan . Their report concluded that health savings could reach about $2,500 per family, though they included the caveat that "there is no consensus in the research community about how much each element will save, or how much could be saved if these elements were effectively implemented in combination." We then turned to an independent health policy expert, Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University. He drew up detailed examinations of the Obama and McCain health plans that he published this summer. Thorpe considered savings that could be achieved through the following Obama proposals: • expanding evidence-based, best practice programs in public programs like Medicare • accelerating the adoption of electronic health information technology, such as electronic medical records • promoting wider use of wellness programs designed to reduce obesity and smoking • reducing administrative costs through changes in insurance programs • creating a clinical effectiveness research institute to discourage unproductive health care spending • improving patient safety by reducing preventable medical errors Obama's plan has additional cost-savings measures that relate to the way private insurance works. Thorpe did not include those measures in his analysis. Thorpe concluded that by 2012, the Obama plan could reduce health care spending by $203 billion to $273 billion per year. It sounds like a lot, but it's actually not that much when you consider the United States spends more than $2.5 trillion annually on health care. Thorpe's report figured that Obama's proposal could reduce total spending by between 6 and 9 percent. Other researchers believe it could be more, with some estimates as high as 30 percent. So take the total savings Thorpe found and divide it by about 140 million tax filers -- a rough equivalent for families -- and you get savings of between $1,500 and $2,000 per family. That's $1,000 to $500 away from what Obama touts, but he is likely using more aggressive savings targets. Both sets of numbers, however, are estimates based on events that have not yet come to pass, and it's not really possible to say that one set is wrong and another is right. Thorpe did say, though, that Obama's proposal is superior to John McCain's in achieving cost savings because Obama has designated funding to get initiatives off the ground, such as $50 billion over five years to encourage health information technology. McCain's plan does not include this funding, Thorpe said. The $2,500-per-family savings that Obama mentioned in his ad is a speculative estimate of what he hopes will happen once all the pieces of his plan are in place. It's $500 to $1,000 dollars higher than the number we came up with using Thorpe's independent analysis. We recognize that plans are vague and it's difficult to predict future numbers with any precision. But Obama's numbers are significantly higher than the best independent estimate we could find. So we find his statement Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-10-30T00:00:00	2008-10-29	['None']
-pomt-08470	"Houston suffered $1.7 billion in operating losses under Mayor Bill White."	half-true	/texas/statements/2010/oct/13/rick-perry/rick-perry-says-houston-had-17-billion-operating-l/	In a recent television ad, Gov. Rick Perry says Democratic gubernatorial nominee Bill White was a poor financial manager as mayor of Houston Perry's spot levels budget-related charges including this one: "Houston suffered $1.7 billion in operating losses under Mayor Bill White." We dug into this figure, which also pops up in a Perry ad that refers to the total as 17 billion dimes. In support of the number, Perry's campaign pointed us to a July report from Citizens for Public Accountability, which calls itself "a bipartisan group of retired partners of some of Houston's accounting firms." The report — written by Bob Lemer, a retired Ernst & Young accountant who often criticized city finances on White's watch — is titled "City of Houston Total Operating Losses Fiscal Years 2004-2009: $1.7 billion." In an interview, Lemer told us that he reached the figure by adding up the "change in net assets" entry from the city's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for each of the years White was mayor, 2004 through 2009. Because Houston's net assets declined every year, the cumulative change was a negative $1.69 billion. That figure, Lemer said, is the amount by which the city's expenditures exceeded its income during White's tenure. White spokeswoman Katy Bacon challenged the characterization of the $1.7 billion as an operating loss. "An operating loss is a business concept, not a government concept," she said. Lemer's report distorts "financial statements that are generated under government accounting standards," Bacon said. Say what? We decided to hit the books — one book, anyway — for a crash course in municipal finance. Our question: What are a city's "net assets" and what does it mean when they go up or down? According to "Financial Management in the Public Sector" by XiaoHu Wang, a public administration professor at the University of Central Florida, assets include land, building and equipment, as well cash and cash equivalents. Liabilities are what an organization owes to others. Subtracting liabilities from assets yields net assets. Cities track their net assets from year to year in their financial reports. A positive change means net assets increased; a negative number means they declined. The change "can be seen as an organization-wide operating surplus (or deficit)," the book says. Next, we asked Wang if it's fair to equate "change in net assets" with "operating loss," as Lemer did. Yes, Wang said, because both terms indicate a deficit. However, he cautioned that no single indicator, including this one, is sufficient to gauge a city's overall financial health. Other experts were critical of calling the $1.7 billion figure "operating losses." Lewis McLain, former executive director of the Government Finance Officers Association of Texas, told us that the problem with applying "for-profit" accounting terms — like operating loss — to nonprofit public entities is that their enterprises serve different purposes. "You wouldn’t expect the accounting for church finances to be exactly the same as for an automobile corporation," he said. While a company "focuses on measuring its use of assets to return a profit," a city focuses on the funding of a variety of expensive services for its citizens, "from road repair to police and fire officers to libraries and mowed parks." Diana Thomas, controller for the City of Austin, said the term "operating losses" is an unfair description; she noted that among the expenses subtracted from the city's net assets each year are long-term liabilities such as depreciation of assets and retiree benefits that will actually be paid out later. Cities only recently were required to account for some of those future costs on their current financial statements, Thomas said. McLain said the changes in accounting rules are a reason that Houston's "change in net assets" report shows high negative numbers. "The accounting profession has changed rules to recognize more of these (long-term) costs, since to not do so makes a huge liability less transparent," McLain said. "Houston is experiencing the same pressures as many cities across the state and nation. These liabilities have been accumulating for a number of years, mostly in the last three decades. It is not an overnight problem, and the solutions are going to be slow and painful." When asked what changes in net assets say about a city's financial health, McLain said: "Virtually nothing. In fact, they can be misleading and misused." The central purpose of a city's annual financial report, McLain said, is to fully report the financial affairs of a city functioning as "a multi-business entity with legal constraints on various monies that are placed in standalone funds for the purpose of accountability, control and disclosure." In fact, said McLain, "if you are going to talk about operating losses or gains," a more telling number is the balance in its general fund at the end of the year. The general fund, which is the government's largest kitty, helps supports most basic services, including police and fire protection. In Houston's case, the general fund balance increased every year that White was in office, except for 2009, McLain said, going from $136 million in 2004 to $332 million in 2008. The balance fell to $304 million in 2009. "That means revenues had to be bigger than expenditures for operations" during those years, McLain said. Summing up: The $1.7 billion figure for net operating losses in White's time as mayor has a basis in fact; the city's net assets did decline by that amount on his watch, though changes in accounting practices also drove up the number. Problematically, using a single private-sector measure to gauge overall financial performance in the public sector doesn't necessarily produce conclusive results. Houston's accumulated "changes in net assets" by themselves are an incomplete reflection of the city's fiscal health while White was mayor; the $1.7 billion figure may even be meaningless in this regard. We rate Perry's statement Half True.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2010-10-13T06:00:00	2010-09-15	['Houston', 'Bill_White_(Texas_politician)']
-pomt-08727	"The states that actually have lots of teachers in teacher unions tend to be the states that have done the best in terms of academic success in this country."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/sep/02/randi-weingarten/randi-weingarten-says-students-strong-union-states/	Education was the topic du jour on ABC's This Week on Aug. 29, 2010, and the discussion quickly came around to teachers unions. This Week host Christiane Amanpour asked Randi Weingarten, president of the American Teachers Federation, how schools can get around huge impediments in many collective bargaining agreements to getting rid of bad teachers. Weingarten responded with a quick defense of teachers unions. "Let me say this," Weingarten said. "First, the states that actually have lots of teachers in teacher unions tend to be the states that have done the best in terms of academic success in this country. And the states that don't tend to be the worst. "The issue is not a teacher union contract or a teacher union-management contract. What we have to do with these contracts is we have to make them solution-driven." We decided to check Weingarten's claim that states that "have lots of teachers in teachers unions tend to be the states that have done the best in terms of academic success." We realize we are wading into some treacherous waters here. An intense debate has raged for years over the effect of teacher unions on student achievement. On one side, you have those who believe unions act as an impediment to necessary school reforms; make it difficult to get rid of bad teachers, and oppose ideas like merit pay to encourage better teaching. On the other side are those who argue strong unions lead to better-paid, better-supported teachers, which helps to attract and retain better teachers and, in turn, contributes to improved student achievement. Weingarten's statement not only makes an absolute claim about better academic performance in states with strong unions, it implies unions are the reason why -- otherwise, why cite it? We contacted the American Federation of Teachers, which represents about 1.4 million K-12 teachers in the United States, to get backup for Weingarten's claim. Initially, spokesman John See pointed us toward a state-by-state breakdown on collective bargaining policies -- such as whether the state has a "right to work" law or allows strikes. And he included links to comparisons of academic achievement by state from the National Center for Education Statistics and Education Week. Strong union states like Maryland, Massachusetts and New York, See said, were among the highest ranked in these 2010 reports. Later, See also forwarded links to several studies linking teacher unions to higher student achievement. The first is a study published in 2000 in the Harvard Educational Review. According to the abstract: "Comparison of standardized test scores and degree of teacher unionization in states found a statistically significant and positive relationship between the presence of teacher unions and stronger state performance on tests. Taking into account the percentage of students taking the tests, states with greater percentages of teachers in unions reported higher test performance." The second is a 2002 survey of studies by Robert M. Carini of Indiana University Bloomington, who found that "While only 17 prominent studies have looked at the teacher union-achievement link, the evidence suggests that unionism raises achievement modestly for most students in public schools." However, Carini wrote that while studies seem to suggest that unions benefit middle range students, who are the majority, "a union presence was harmful for the very lowest- and highest-achieving students." "In fact, public opinion is split as to whether teacher unionism is harmful or helpful to educational outcomes," Carini wrote. "Considering both this general perception and the considerable rhetoric from both critics and supporters of unions, it is surprising that so little research exists on the unionism-achievement link. Still, the overall pattern in the research is increasingly clear; teacher unionism favorably influences achievement for most students in public schools." In an e-mail, See said the reports "make the positive findings pretty clear." If there were only one way to measure this statistic, See might be right. But, in fact, there are lots of variables in play. A 2008 paper written by Nathan Burroughs, a visiting research associate at the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, cited numerous studies that seemed to make the case both for and against unions with regard to student achievement. "Ideally, the proper role of collective bargaining in public education could be settled by a consensus in the research literature," Burroughs wrote in his paper, Arguments and Evidence: The Debate over Collective Bargaining's Role in Public Education. "Regrettably, no such consensus exists." "While a body of research exists suggesting that collective bargaining results in greater student achievement (usually measured through standardized test scores, most commonly the SAT), another body of work suggests the opposite," Burroughs wrote. "To complicate matters, both veins of research generally employ different analytical and statistical methods, making a clear-cut comparison somewhat elusive. In addition, there is a limited number of quality research studies dedicated to the effects of collective bargaining on student achievement." What gives? For one, the studies that showed a positive effect from unions typically examined student achievement at a single point in time; while studies that showed lower student achievement in states with stronger unions usually measured achievement over time. We spoke to Burroughs, who explained that while a snapshot might show better scores in an affluent state compared to a poor one; students in an affluent state might improve less dramatically over time than a poor one, producing dramatically different results. It's simply two different ways to measure a school's performance. "The intensity of the debate over the role of collective bargaining has obscured the fact that empirical evidence supports either side of the discussion," Burroughs concluded. "There can be no verdict on whether collective bargaining in public education is 'bad' or 'good,' because there is insufficient evidence to warrant a definitive judgment. Much of the research on the effects of collective bargaining focuses on only one or two elements of the question or has results that appear dependent on a particular methodological strategy." In addition, Burroughs cautioned that collective bargaining is most likely an indirect causal factor when it comes to student achievement; as opposed to direct factors such as income or parental education. "It could be a spurious relationship," Burroughs told us. "The data really isn't there. When it comes to making claims about unions and student performance, it's just not clear. I think it's more constructive to focus on other things." We also spoke to Andy Rotherham, co-founder of the non-profit Bellwether Education Partners, an education columnist for TIME.com and the blog Eduwonk.com, and co-editor of the book "Collective Bargaining in Education." "On its face, it's true," Rotherham said of Weingarten's claim. "Massachusetts (a strong union state) does better than Virginia or Alabama. What it ignores is all of the things that influence student achievement." "It's a classic correlation-causation fallacy," said Rotherham, who previously served at the White House as Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy during the Clinton administration. Ultimately, he said, research is mixed and there is no study that can definitively settle whether unions are, or are not, the problem with student achievement. "Sweeping statements one way or the other on this should be viewed with suspicion," Rotherham said. We agree. Weingarten's claim that states that have lots of teachers in teacher unions tend to be the states that have done the best in terms of academic success is perhaps technically correct -- at least by some measures. But the empirical scientific research on this subject is -- in the words of Burroughs -- "limited, ambiguous and incomplete." Further, there is even less evidence to support the implication that strong unionization is the cause for one state performing better than another. And so we rate Weingarten's claim Half True.	None	Randi Weingarten	None	None	None	2010-09-02T11:35:04	2010-08-29	['None']
-hoer-00755	Christmas Cards For Noah Biorkman	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/noah-biorkman-card-request.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Christmas Cards For Noah Biorkman	November 2009	None	['None']
-goop-01972	Meghan Markle ‘Overwhelmed’ By Royal Etiquette, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/meghan-markle-royal-etiquette-overwhelmed-queen-elizabeth-prince-harry/	None	None	None	Michael Lewittes	None	Meghan Markle NOT ‘Overwhelmed’ By Royal Etiquette, Despite Claim Prince Harry, Queen Helping Her	6:36 am, December 24, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-03251	A United Nations working group has "adopted a proposed agenda" to enable member nations to "disarm civilians within their borders."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/12/chain-email/united-nations-document-shared-social-media-says-c/	A reader recently sent us a realistic-looking document from the United Nations with a pretty explosive claim -- that the world body is moving forward with plans to help member nations disarm their civilian populations of "military grade," "concealable" and "hunting grade" firearms, and even "ammunition and components to manufacture ammunition." Americans who support the right to bear arms have long expressed worry that the U.S. government is on the verge of taking away lawful citizens’ guns, and that concern has only increased when a U.N. body is believed to play a supporting role. The document sent to us by the reader would seem to be (pardon the expression) a smoking gun. Superficially, the document has the trappings of officialdom -- a blue U.N. logo at the top, along with the name of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, a real office. It’s dated Aug. 5, 2013, and labeled "restricted." The headline reads, "Disarmament Commission -- Civilian Weapons Confiscation Study Group." And it’s filled with believable bureaucratic jargon, such as creation of a "codification framework" and the need to undergo a "full review by the Office of the Secretary General." Here’s the full text: "The issue of military grade weaponry in the hands of civilians looms ever larger in the face of the global implementation of 22/Agenda 21 by member nations. In particular, the United States of America has an estimated 500 million weapons in the hands of its civilian population. This is not just a static problem, it is a massive dynamic problem for the process of confiscation as there will be those who refuse to surrender their firearms. "The conclusion of discussions by the CWCSG led to the adoption of a proposed agenda to begin the process for introducing to member nations a framework by which they can begin codification of national laws to disarm civilians within their borders through a graduated process. "Within the discussion framework, we have identified several problem areas that must be addressed, they are: "1. Classification of military grade weapons to be made illegal for possession. "2. Creation of programs to provide reasonable compensation for voluntary surrender of said arms. "3. Codification of laws to begin the restricting and strict licensing of concealable firearms. "4. Codification of laws to begin the restricting and strict licensing of hunting grade firearms. "5. Codification of laws to restrict the sale of, and possession of ammunition and components to manufacture ammunition. "6. Finally, codification of laws to completely makes (sic) any and all firearms illegal to own, possess or use outside of military and law enforcement usage. "7. Creation of a United Nations Police Taskforce with the specific mission of assisting member nations with the collection of weaponry from civilian hands. "The CWCSG will submit its findings and final recommendations once we have created the codification framework for member nations for a full review by the Office of the Secretary General." The document is persuasive enough to have been picked up by pro-gun advocates on a few message boards and Facebook pages. But is it real? When we checked with the United Nations, a spokesman declared it a fake. "I checked the document number on our internal document system, and the reply I got back now was simply, ‘There is no document matching your request,’ said Farhan Haq, associate spokesperson for the Secretary-General. "The document number (A/CN.11/L.72) doesn't conform to our standard system, in any case." In addition, Haq said, "there is no such body as a ‘Civilian Weapons Confiscation Study Group.’ Nor does the United Nations involve itself in confiscating weapons from member states." Finally, Haq said, "the use of blue ink, some of the type font and the scanner icon in the bottom right-hand corner are not found in real U.N. documents. So, in several different ways, this document is fake." Our ruling A document found on the Internet and circulating via email and social media says that a United Nations working group has "adopted a proposed agenda" to enable member nations to "disarm civilians within their borders." If the document were real, it would confirm the worst fears of those who fear a mass confiscation of handguns, hunting rifles and ammunition in the U.S. -- but a United Nations spokesman cited several reasons for concluding that the document is a fake, including the fact that the study group referenced in the document does not exist. We rate the document Pants on Fire.	None	Chain email	None	None	None	2013-08-12T12:15:10	2013-08-12	['United_Nations']
-snes-05610	A man whose car bore personalized license plates reading 'NO PLATE' received notices for thousands of unpaid parking tickets.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to-bill/	None	Automobiles	None	David Mikkelson	None	NO PLATE	30 October 1999	None	['None']
-snes-05593	Four of Donald Trump's children would have been deported under his strict policy proposal against birthright citizenship.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-children-immigrant/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Would Donald Trump Deport His Children?	20 August 2015	None	['None']
-vees-00286	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte understates his salary again	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-duterte-understates-his-salary-again	None	None	None	None	Duterte's salary,EO201 s.2016	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Duterte understates his salary again	February 26, 2018	None	['None']
-faan-00072	 “This [Mediterranean] migration is not related to political problems in Libya.”	factscan score: false	http://factscan.ca/jason-kenney-mediterranean-migration/	The political situation in Libya is not solely responsible for the migration crisis, but it is related. Libya’s porous borders, instability and poor economy have played a role in the flow of migrants.	None	Jason Kenney	None	None	None	2015-07-18	pril 29, 2015	['Mediterranean_Sea', 'Libya']
-snes-03703	Infamous Chicago Cubs fan Steve Bartman won $3.7 million after betting that the team would be in the 2016 World Series.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/steve-bartman-wins-3-7-million/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Cubs Fan Steve Bartman Wins $3.7 Million from 9-Year-Old Bet on Cubs	25 October 2016	None	['Steve_Bartman_incident', 'Chicago_Cubs', 'World_Series']
-thal-00068	Claim: Supervised injection facilities don’t reduce deaths	we rate this claim false	http://www.thejournal.ie/medically-supervised-injection-centres-facilities-deaths-fact-check-3245282-Feb2017/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck: Do supervised injection centres reduce drug-related deaths?	Feb 20th 2017, 10:00 PM	None	['None']
-pomt-08238	"We now consume at the federal level 25 percent of the gross domestic product. Historically we were at 20 percent. So we've taken 5 percent away from the private sector."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/nov/15/rand-paul/rand-paul-says-federal-spending-has-risen-25-perce/	With the rise of the fiscally conservative tea party and the recent release of a draft report by the presidentially appointed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the nation's fiscal challenges have rocketed up the list of urgent agenda items in Washington. We'll take a look at two comments on federal spending made on the Nov. 14, 2010, Sunday talk shows -- one by Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and the other by Sen.-elect Rand Paul, R-Ky. We'll address Paul's here. On CBS' Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer asked Paul whether he would favor eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, as the commission suggested. "No, once again, I'm on the other side," Paul said. "I want to be on the side of reducing spending. So I think really the compromise is where you find the reductions in spending. But I don't think the compromise is in raising taxes. I mean, you have to put things in perspective. We now consume at the federal level 25 percent of the gross domestic product. Historically we were at 20 percent. So we've taken 5 percent away from the private sector. And the private sector is the engine that creates all these jobs. I want to send that 5 percent back to the private sector." We'll focus on whether Paul's numbers are correct. As we did with Conrad's comment, we turned to a historical table from the Office of Management and Budget that shows tax receipts, spending and the deficit as a percentage of GDP -- essentially, as a percentage of the nation's economy as a whole. The most recent full-year figure is for 2009, and it shows that federal spending accounted for 24.7 percent of gross domestic product that year, or 25 percent when rounded up. So Paul is correct. The second statistic -- the historical level of spending as a percentage of GDP -- is slightly more complicated, but here too Paul is basically correct. Over the past 40 years, spending has averaged 20.7 percent of GDP, though it has varied a bit over the years. In both the 1970s and the decade beginning in 2000, it was almost exactly 20 percent. In the 1990s, it was slightly higher, while in the 1980s it exceeded 22 percent. In fact, the only other years since 1950 in which federal spending exceeded 23 percent of GDP came in 1982 and 1983, with 23.1 percent and 23.5 percent, respectively. That was during and immediately after the last recession that rivaled the current one in severity, the 1981-82 recession. Economic downturns tend to affect this statistic because they slow GDP and increase the demand for government services. Even without special stimulus measures, spending goes up for mandatory items such as food stamps. So in 1983, under a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, the government spent just 1.2 percentage points less than the current level, which suggests that the recession shouldn't be ignored as a major reason why spending is so high. Still, Paul's larger point is valid. Federal spending is now approximately 25 percent of GDP, and that level is roughly 5 percentage points higher than the historical pattern. So we rate his statement True.	None	Rand Paul	None	None	None	2010-11-15T15:56:56	2010-11-14	['None']
-pomt-04363	"Virginia papers called (Scott) Rigell’s campaign ‘Mostly False.’"	pants on fire!	/virginia/statements/2012/oct/22/paul-hirschbiel/paul-hirschbiel-says-newspapers-called-scott-rigel/	Democrat Paul Hirschbiel, challenging U.S. Rep. Scott Rigell, R-2nd , is airing a TV ad that portrays Rigell as a below-the-belt campaigner. The commercial says "Virginia papers called Rigell’s campaign ‘Mostly False,’" and the screen flashes a PolitiFact logo. Since Hirschbiel campaign chose to invoke our name, we decided to examine his claim. Hirschbiel’s ad cites a PolitiFact Virginia article from the 2010 election, when Rigell defeated one-term incumbent Democrat Glenn Nye. The article examined a Rigell ad claim that Nye voted "in lockstep with Nancy Pelosi" 83 percent of the time. In fact, Nye voted with the Democratic Party about 83 percent of the time, but with Pelosi -- who was House speaker back then -- only 66 percent of the time. Nye actually had one of the most independent records in Congress and Pelosi rarely voted in 2009 and 2010, a standard for House speakers. Rigell’s statement was rated Mostly False and the Republican also earned a False for another claim during his 2010 run. We should also note that last year, we rated a claim he made about U.S. borrowing as True. This year, we have not rated any campaign statements by Rigell. Our ruling Hirschbiel said Rigell’s campaign had been labeled "Mostly False" and attributed his statement to PolitiFact. PolitiFact Virginia rated a single 2010 election claim by Rigell as Mostly False, but we never passed judgment on the overall veracity of the candidate or his campaign. Hirschbiel’s statement was over the top and we give it our worst rating: Pants on Fire.	None	Paul Hirschbiel	None	None	None	2012-10-22T14:12:02	2012-09-28	['None']
-snes-02140	Is Netflix Rebooting the 'Addams Family?' Series?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/netflix-addams-family/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is Netflix Rebooting the ‘Addams Family?’ Series?	26 June 2017	None	['None']
-chct-00107	FACT CHECK: Are Half Of All Border Patrol Agents Hispanic?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/06/24/fact-check-half-border-patrol-hispanic/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	5:11 PM 06/24/2018	None	['None']
-goop-00426	Nicole Kidman In “Revenge Romance” After Keith Urban Betrayal?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/nicole-kidman-keith-urban-revenge-romance-betrayal-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Nicole Kidman In “Revenge Romance” After Keith Urban Betrayal?	10:54 am, August 19, 2018	None	['None']
-tron-03301	Forward an email to find out about your future love life	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/secretcrush/	None	promises	None	None	None	Forward an email to find out about your future love life	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-02679	Kourtney Kardashian Did “Cut Ties” With Scott Disick, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kourtney-kardashian-not-cut-ties-scott-disick-contact/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Kourtney Kardashian Did NOT “Cut Ties” With Scott Disick, Despite Report	9:47 am, July 13, 2017	None	['None']
-tron-01883	Coca Cola Christmas Promotion	virus!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cocacola-virus/	None	household	None	None	None	Coca Cola Christmas Promotion	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-09146	"Bill McCollum holds the same position on (embryonic stem cell research) as Barack Obama."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2010/jun/11/rick-scott/bill-mccollum-and-barack-obama-stem-cell-research/	In a Republican primary, it's often hard to find major policy issues where the candidates disagree. That's why Rick Scott, the former health care CEO running for governor, is trying to make the most of a perceived policy difference with Attorney General Bill McCollum. In new direct mail pieces, Scott is claiming that McCollum supports embryonic stem cell research. Scott, meanwhile, says he would work to ban any embryonic stem cell research in Florida. "Career politician Bill McCollum -- Testing stem cells. Testing our values," the mailer reads. "Bill McCollum supports embryonic stem cell research. Bill McCollum holds the same position on this issue as Barack Obama, who recently lifted a ban on funding for embryonic stem cell research." McCollum disputed Scott's mailer, calling it false (and Scott "ruthless") in an interview with the Associated Press on June 7, 2010. "That's just absolutely not true. I don't know where he got that from," McCollum said. Sounds like a case for PolitiFact Florida. For this fact-check, we're going to detail to McCollum's public position on embryonic stem cell research, and then President Obama's. Then we'll see if they're the same, as Scott claims. McCollum's position Embryonic stem cells are harvested from embryos that are four or five days old. In almost every case, the stem cells are extracted from left-over embryos created by women attempting to get pregnant through invitro fertilization. Scientists say embryonic stem cells hold great potential, and can be used to test new drugs and have unique regenerative capabilities that could unlock treatments for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases. The embryos are destroyed in the process. To best understand McCollum's position on embryonic stem cell research, we need to start back in 1996 when McCollum was a congressman from Central Florida. That year, Congress attached an amendment to an appropriations bill that limited or banned federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The Dickey Amendment -- named for Arkansas Republican Jay Dickey --- said that the federal government could not fund the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes or fund research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death. The appropriations bill -- and the amendment -- passed 371-42. McCollum voted for the measure. The Dickey Amendment hardly ended the discussion, however, nor ultimately clarifies McCollum's position. The NIH produced a legal opinion that essentially created a loophole in the proviso. The federal government could not use tax dollars to create embryonic stem cells, the NIH said, but it could fund research on privately-created stem cell lines. Former President Bill Clinton's administration began crafting policies to fund embryonic stem cell research, but control of the White House changed before the new policies were implemented. Enter President George W. Bush. In August 2001, Bush essentially restated U.S. policy with an executive order. Bush gave a nationally televised speech, outlining his position -- that the federal government could and should fund research on the 60 or so embryonic stem cell lines already in existence, but that it would not fund research on new or future embryonic stem cell lines. Now, jump to the elections of 2004. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry promised if elected to open new embryonic stem cell lines to federal funding. Bush maintained his opposition. The dichotomy between Kerry and Bush trickled down the Florida Republican Senate primary that year between McCollum and Mel Martinez. Martinez supported Bush's restrictions and pressed McCollum to stake out a position. Throughout 2004, newspapers generically said McCollum favored increased embryonic stem cell research, but provided little context. In July 2004, McCollum said: ''I think appropriate funding for embryonic stem cell research is a pro-life position. It conforms completely with my faith and my belief in the unborn and my belief of when life begins. And I'm one with my conscience and with my Lord.'' Then, in an August 2004 debate, Martinez fired a second bullet on the stem cell issue. According to the Miami Herald accounting of the debate, Martinez said: "What you should do is define yourself. Do you support President Bush on stem-cell research or do you not?" Martinez said. "Or will you continue to side with John Kerry on this very important issue, and one, frankly, that's becoming a dividing issue in the presidential contest?" McCollum interrupted, the Herald reported. "Mr. Martinez, you know that I do not believe in stem-cell research that takes a life." McCollum then pointed out that other conservatives support the research, and the Herald reported that McCollum has said that test-tube-fertilized embryos that are to be discarded at fertility clinics are not technically human life. He said they should be used for scientific experiments to cure diseases. McCollum lost the primary, and his position on embryonic stem cell research was not questioned again. Until now. Spokeswoman Kristy Campbell explained his current thinking. "The general has been consistent on this issue," Campbell said. "He's never supported creating embryonic stem cells simply for research. But if the only options were to destroy the stem cells, or use them for research, he's preferred they go to research." To recap: McCollum voted for the Dickey Amendment, which blocks federal funding of at least some embryonic stem cell research, but he has consistently advocated for stem cell research beyond that of President Bush. In particular, he has said if the options for embryonic stem cells are destruction or research, he chooses research. Obama's position Obama clearly detailed his position on embryonic stem cell research during the 2008 presidential campaign. "I believe that the restrictions that President Bush has placed on funding of human embryonic stem cell research have handcuffed our scientists and hindered our ability to compete with other nations," Obama said in response to a question from the website ScienceDebate.org. "As president, I will lift the current administration’s ban on federal funding of research on embryonic stem cell lines created after Aug. 9, 2001, through executive order, and I will ensure that all research on stem cells is conducted ethically and with rigorous oversight," Obama wrote. "I recognize that some people object to government support of research that requires cells to be harvested from human embryos. However, hundreds of thousands of embryos stored in the U.S. in invitro fertilization clinics will not be used for reproductive purposes, and will eventually be destroyed. I believe that it is ethical to use these extra embryos for research that could save lives when they are freely donated for that express purpose." Practically, Obama's position was not altogether different that Republican nominee John McCain. McCain said he supported federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, but opposed the "intentional creation of human embryos for research purposes." In March 2009, Obama reversed U.S. policy and lifted Bush's ban on embryonic stem cell funding. Obama's reversal, however, is still somewhat limited by the Dickey Amendment. To recap: Obama supports increased funding for embryonic stem cell research, and reversed Bush's 2001 executive order. He says it is ethical to use extra embryos from invitro fertilization clinics that would otherwise be destroyed. Comparing the two Embryonic stem cell research is not a strictly partisan issue. The Republican-controlled Congress in 2005 passed a bill that would ease Bush's stem cell research restrictions, but it was vetoed by Bush. Among those supporting the measure were Republican senators Trent Lott, Orrin Hatch, Bill Frist and Kay Bailey Hutchison, and House Republicans Ginny Brown-Waite, Bill Young and Connie Mack. Bush also vetoed a similar measure in 2007 that passed with some GOP support. The key in this fact check, however, is to see if McCollum and Obama have the "same" position. On embryonic stem cell research, it appears McCollum and Obama are awfully close. Obama supports using embryonic stem cells that otherwise would be destroyed for research. McCollum does, too. The only real question is regarding funding. McCollum did vote for the Dickey Amendment, which sought to prevent federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. But in 2004, he talked about "appropriate funding" for embryonic stem cell research. Obama, meanwhile, has supported increased federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, saying embryonic stem cells "may have the potential to help us understand, and possibly cure, some of our most devastating diseases and conditions." There's enough of a question when it comes to funding in our minds to add a slight asterisk to Scott's mailer. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2010-06-11T16:40:49	2010-06-08	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-12869	"The overwhelming majority of America’s elite universities, they no longer require history majors to take a single course in American history."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2017/jan/30/don-willett/don-willett-elite-universities-dont-require-us-his/	Sounding a tad exasperated, a Texas Supreme Court justice told participants at a legislative forum that many young Americans have too little knowledge about basic U.S. civics and history. "Get this," Don Willett said at the January 2017 event hosted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. "The overwhelming majority of America’s elite universities, they no longer require history majors to take a single course in American history." At first pass, we can imagine a student possibly majoring in history without studying American history. After all, if you’re seeking expertise in what’s happened someplace beyond North America, you probably didn’t get steeped in it before college. Still, do most American colleges not require that history majors take even one American history course? Willett cites report We asked Willett, whose name appeared on a 2016 Donald Trump list of U.S. Supreme Court prospects, the basis of his claim. Willett, known for his oft-humorous Twitter account, answered with an email pointing out a report, closing his reply: "Gotta avoid that dreaded Robe on Fire rating." The July 2016 report -- issued by the Washington-based American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which says it’s an independent group "committed to academic freedom, excellence, and accountability at America's colleges and universities" -- states that 23 of the 76 U.S. colleges and universities ranked most highly by U.S. News & World Report were requiring students seeking a history degree to take courses in American history--so 70 percent were not. Do Top-Ranked U.S. Universities Require History Majors to take American History? SOURCE: Report, "No U.S. History?," the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, July 1, 2016 Also, the report says that among the high-ranked institutions requiring a course in American history, "11 allow courses so narrow in scope—such as ‘History of Sexualities’ or ‘History of the FBI’—that it takes a leap of the imagination to see these as an adequate fulfillment of an undergraduate history requirement." At the council, the study's lead author, Michael Poliakoff, told us by email that the focus was on university requirements "based on the understanding that it is through requirements that a program articulates its own concept of academic priorities." Poliakoff said the research did not try to gauge how many history students take at least one U.S. history course. Texas universities We checked some of the report’s accounts, starting with the two Texas universities included in the review. Rice University, the report says, previously required history majors to take a U.S. history course, "but their new set of requirements makes it merely optional." On a web page, Rice says that each history major matriculating after fall 2014 must take 10 history courses including one each in four of five fields: Premodern; Europe; U.S.; Asia, Latin America, Africa; and transnational history--perhaps an indication there’s a good chance a Rice history major takes American history. But it’s not required. Also, according to the report, the University of Texas requires history majors to take two U.S. history courses though, the study says, a class on Jews in American entertainment can count. To our inquiry, a UT spokesman, J.B. Bird, noted by email that by state law, every degree-seeking student at public colleges and universities--regardless of major--must take a couple American history courses. We confirmed that: The relevant state law, tracing to 1955, states that "a college or university receiving state support or state aid from public funds may not grant a baccalaureate degree or a lesser degree or academic certificate to any person unless the person has credit for six semester hours or its equivalent in American History." Bird also guided us to Jacqueline Jones, who chairs the university’s history department. By email, Jones said most UT undergraduates take the department’s survey courses, one covering American history before 1865, the other picking up from there. Jones also said it would be highly unlikely for a student to take an upper-level history course, including the one on Jews in American entertainment, toward complying with the state mandate. Jones further offered that she takes issue with "the premise that if a college student does not take history-department courses, s/he has learned no American history. My colleagues in the American Studies department teach many different history courses. Faculty in the Government department who teach U.S. politics and political institutions also teach American history. I could go on and list other relevant departments here—Mexican-American and Latino/Latina Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies, for example." Checking universities outside Texas We went on to check the requirements placed upon history majors at very-high-ranked Yale University, which the report singles out for creating a "specialist track" history degree, starting with the class of 2017, enabling students to "forgo a requirement in U.S. history whereas previous students were required to take at least two courses in the history of the United States or Canada." That’s correct, we confirmed on a Yale web page stating that students with the specialist track major may take up to eight courses within a chosen world region plus two courses from outside that region--with one of the possible five regions being the U.S. "Their overall coursework must include courses from at least 3 geographic regions," the university says. Then again, Yalies may alternatively seek a history degree on the "global track," which requires each major to take at least one U.S. history course. Harvard University, similarly listed in the report as not requiring history majors to take U.S. history, says on a web page that it requires students concentrating in history to take 10 history "half-courses," which we take to mean one-semester courses. According to the web page, Harvard’s requirements of history majors include a half-course in U.S. or European History (western). In spring 2017, about when Willett spoke, we noticed more than 25 course options in this category including nine courses centered on American history such as one on the American Revolution; another introducing American history with an emphasis on democratic political institutions; a course on the New Deal; and a course on U.S. legal history from 1776 to 1865. The University of Michigan, the highest-ranked public university identified in the report as not requiring history majors to take American history, says on a web page that each major must take 10 history courses--including one each from four of seven regions/categories including U.S./Canada. At the University of North Carolina, also listed in the report as not requiring history majors to take an American history course, history majors also must take 10 history courses, according to a university web page. Up to six of the courses can be in the student’s chosen "concentration," the page says; the university’s eight history concentrations include one in U.S. history. National expert We asked UT’s Jones to suggest a national expert who might speak to what universities require of history majors. Jones pointed us to Jim Grossman of the Washington-based American Historical Association, which describes itself as the nation’s largest professional organization serving historians in all fields and professions. Grossman, who said in a May 2016 commentary that the percentage of students earning history degrees has lately declined, noted by email that the council study didn’t give a lot of credit to colleges that require all undergraduates to take U.S history nor did it sort out the history courses that students actually take. "I wish I had such data," Grossman wrote. Grossman also told us that most institutions don't have a major in American history. "A student majors in history," Grossman wrote, "and in the best programs that major includes a wide variety of courses, enabling a student to develop the skills and habits of thought that a history major provides, but from a wide variety of angles." When we circled back to Poliakoff, he said the only recent research on what students actually take suggests that less than half of respondents in 1992, more than 20 years ago, took a U.S. history course. Poliakoff noted too that another council study, titled "What Will They Learn?," found 18 percent of American universities requiring all students to take U.S. government or history. The September 2016 version of that report states the council reached its conclusions about curricular requirements based on reviewing course catalogs and other publicly available materials for more than 1,100 colleges and universities. Our ruling Willett said the "overwhelming majority of America’s elite universities" don’t require history majors to take a course in American history. In 2016, some 70 percent of the country’s 76 colleges and universities most highly-ranked by U.S. News & World Report did not require history majors to take American history, a study shows, though clarifications are missing. There's evidently no current research on what students actually take while in places including Texas, every degree-seeking undergraduate at a public college must take American history. We rate the claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. CLARIFICATION, 10:23 a.m., Jan. 30, 2017: After this fact check posted, we added Professor Jones' additional comment that it'd be unlikely for a UT student to fulfill state requirements by taking an upper-level course such as the class on Jews in American entertainment. This addition did not affect our rating of the claim. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/cfbf3dff-2209-4f26-8b0a-b4a600e5f182	None	Don Willett	None	None	None	2017-01-30T17:56:41	2017-01-12	['United_States']
-pomt-13767	Says Hillary Clinton "wants sanctuary cities."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2016/jul/21/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-rnc-hillary-clinton-says-hillary/	Donald Trump said at the Republican convention that nothing affected him more deeply than spending time with parents who have lost their children to violence "spilling across our border." He said that Hillary Clinton favors shielding undocumented immigrants from federal laws. "My opponent wants sanctuary cities," Trump said to boos. Sanctuary cities are jurisdictions that have laws or practices that limit their assistance to federal immigration officials, for a variety of reasons that we’ll explain. Trump proposes eliminating federal grants to sanctuary cities. Clinton expressed support for the sanctuary city policies during her first presidential race in 2008. During her current race, she criticized decisions by a particular city in the spotlight for sanctuary policy; however, she did reiterate her support for sanctuary cities. We did not get a reply from the Trump campaign for this fact-check. Clinton’s comments on sanctuary cities in 2016 race There is no blanket legal definition of sanctuary cities, but it generally refers to places where local law enforcement officers aren’t required to alert federal authorities to residents who may be in the country illegally. Supporters of such policies, often in liberal jurisdictions or places with large Hispanic populations, say it’s not the job of local officials to help deport residents accused of low-level crimes. Supporters also say they don’t want undocumented immigrants to fear the police and avoid reporting crimes to them. Opponents say that sanctuary cities harm the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration laws and give some undocumented immigrants a pass. Attacking opponents for supporting sanctuary cities became a nationwide political talking point after the July 2015 shooting death of Kate Steinle of San Francisco. The alleged shooter, who was from Mexico and had been deported several times in the past, had been released from San Francisco’s jail facing drug charges, despite a federal request to keep him in custody so he could face deportation. The case sparked a debate over rules like San Francisco’s quarter-century-old law declaring it a "city and county of refuge." The law banned public employees from assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement with investigations or arrests unless required by a law or a warrant or for people convicted of felonies. Steinle’s death prompted the city to revisit the law. About a week later, Clinton was asked about her position on sanctuary cities on CNN. Brianna Keilar: "When you last ran for president you supported sanctuary cities. In light of this terrible incident, does that change anything about your view on this?" Clinton: "Well, what should be done is any city should listen to the Department of Homeland Security, which as I understand it, urged them to deport this man again after he got out of prison another time. Here's a case where we've deported, we've deported, we've deported. He ends back up in our country, and I think the city made a mistake. The city made a mistake, not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported. "So I have absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on. "However, there are -- like if it were a first-time traffic citation, if it were something minor, a misdemeanor, that's entirely different. This man had already been deported five times. And he should have been deported at the request of the federal government." Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin sent PolitiFact a statement the campaign issued a couple days after the CNN interview to clarify her position: "Hillary Clinton believes that sanctuary cities can help further public safety, and she has defended those policies going back years." Clinton’s comments on sanctuary cities in 2008 race Clinton appeared more favorable toward sanctuary cities during her first presidential campaign During an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly in 2008, Clinton defended sanctuary cities. O’Reilly: "Are you going to crack down on the sanctuary cities?" Clinton: "No, I’m not. And I’ll tell you why. … I’m not because the reason why a lot of those folks do it — in New York, why do police officers turn a blind eye? O’Reilly: "Because they want them to report crimes." Clinton: "They want them to report crimes. Because… sometimes you have two competing values. You want to report crime, you want to protect people and the violence spills way beyond whatever community." Our ruling Trump said that Clinton "wants sanctuary cities." During her first race for president, Clinton expressed support for sanctuary cities and said she wouldn’t crack down on them. She argued that without such policies, people will hide from police and not report crimes. In 2015, Clinton criticized the city of San Francisco for releasing a man from jail who later was charged with murdering a woman and had previously been deported many times. However, her campaign reiterated Clinton’s view that she believes sanctuary cities can help further public safety. We rate this claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/05011271-7504-4511-9980-22b4aa91ef07	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-07-21T23:03:45	2016-07-21	['None']
-pose-01036	"I want to create a veterans job corps, so we can put our returning heroes back to work as cops and firefighters in communities that need them."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/1116/create-veterans-job-corps/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Create a veterans job corps	2013-01-20T06:00:00	None	['None']
-pomt-02874	"In July 2010 the government said small businesses -- 60 percent -- will lose their health care, 45 percent of big business and a large percentage of individual health."	false	/punditfact/statements/2013/nov/13/sean-hannity/hannity-says-government-predicted-massive-loss-hea/	There is a once-obscure government report that Obamacare’s critics don’t seem to be able to resist misquoting. Sean Hannity made this mistake on his Fox News show Monday. "In July 2010 the government said small businesses -- 60 percent -- will lose their health care, 45 percent of big business and a large percentage of individual health," Hannity said. "That's not 5 percent. That’s half of America. That's 128 million Americans, by their math, not mine." Fox News told us that Hannity drew upon an article in Forbes that projected about 93 million people would not be able to keep their current plans under Affordable Care Act regulations. That article, plus a report from NBC, relied upon a government analysis from June 2010. It drew very little attention when it was published in the Federal Register. That has since changed. In this fact-check, we’re going to walk you through the report -- and why it doesn’t say what Hannity says it does. The 2010 federal report As part of the health care law, the federal government said people could keep the health insurance they had so long as the plan was in place before the health care law was passed in 2010. That’s the so-called "grandfather" provision. But if the plan changed -- sometimes even in ways people might consider minor -- people would have to purchase health insurance that meets new minimum standards. For some people, that could mean purchasing additional coverages for maternity and mental health care, which in turn could mean higher premiums. Back in 2010, three federal departments (Labor, Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service) tried to determine how many plans would change to the point that they would need to meet the new minimum standards. They looked at the historical patterns of insurance plans pre-Obamacare and tried to project what would happen in an Obamacare world. What they found is that many plans indeed would make the changes to trigger the new minimum standards. How many people would be affected? By the end of 2013, government analysts said half of all group or employer-based plans would change to the point that they would need to meet the new standards -- which is about what Hannity said. When combined with the number of people in the individual insurance market facing the same fate, government officials concluded that the health care plans of about 93 million to 99 million Americans would need to now meet the minimum standards created by the health care law. (Hannity said 128 million, which we’ll address shortly.) So why is Hannity wrong? The problem for Hannity is that the government analysts did not try to determine how many of those millions of Americans are in health insurance plans that already meet the minimum standards. That’s an important distinction because if plans already meet the minimum standards, the health care law has a modest impact. Robert Kaestner, a professor at the Institute for Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois, told us that most large employers already do what the law demands. "The requirements are not that binding because many of these plans adhere to the requirements already," Kaestner said. A 2013 survey by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans backs up Kaestner’s point. It found that about three-quarters of the employer-sponsored health plans it contacted already meet the criteria of the health care law. The survey included both large and small employers and was based on 966 responses from human resource officers and benefits consultants. While we don’t know exactly how many plans already meet the new minimum standards and how many don’t, there’s nothing in the government report to suggest that the reality is close to the 128 million that Hannity claimed. The difference between a changed plan and no plan at all Hannity said a total of 128 million Americans will lose health care. This is quite similar to a mistake Glenn Beck made, and we repeat this key point: A change in a plan is not the same as losing health coverage. One of the highest estimates of how many people will see their plans change comes from Christopher Conover, a researcher at Duke University and an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute. (The American Enterprise Institute and its scholars have generally been critical of the health care law.) Fox News noted that Hannity had interviewed Conover and relied on his work. But even Conover doesn’t back up Hannity’s claim. Conover estimated that as many 135 million people would see their plans affected, although his mid-range figure was 129 million. But Conover draws a line between seeing your plan change and losing your health care. "Let me clear that I am not predicting that 135.8 million Americans have or will have their policies canceled due to Obamacare," Conover wrote. Scott Harrington, professor of health care management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, was equally emphatic. "Losing grandfathered status does not mean that you lose your health insurance," Harrington said. Our ruling Citing a government report, Hannity said "small businesses -- 60 percent -- will lose their health care, 45 percent of big business and a large percentage of individual health." The government report did not say that. The report attempted to quantify the number of insurance plans that -- through the normal ebbs and flows of the market -- would change to the point that they would trigger new minimum standards. Put another way, government analysts tried to quantify how many plans would lose their grandfathered status. But they didn’t look at the coverage those plans offered. In those terms, many of the plans that will lose their grandfathered status already met the new minimum standards. We rate Hannity’s claim False.	None	Sean Hannity	None	None	None	2013-11-13T12:16:51	2013-11-11	['None']
-pomt-02995	"Unemployment in the city of St. Petersburg is below the state average."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2013/oct/17/bill-foster/bill-foster-says-st-petersburgs-unemployment-rate-/	Candidates for St. Petersburg mayor painted two very different portraits of the city’s economy during the recent Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9 mayoral debate. Mayor Bill Foster touted the city’s unemployment rate. "We've added 5,000 new residents to the city of St. Petersburg," Foster said. "Unemployment in the city of St. Petersburg is below the state average." Challenger Rick Kriseman’s response included claims about how there are fewer small businesses and fewer overall workers than before Foster took office in 2010. We decided to put each candidate’s economic talk on the Truth-O-Meter. (We checked Kriseman's statements here and here.) In this fact-check, we’re looking at Foster’s claim about the unemployment rate. Comparing the city’s unemployment rate with the state average is tricky. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out monthly reports with unemployment data for the country, state and metro areas. Using this data to compare cities with their home states is a little bit like analyzing apples and oranges. Why? The national and state data is adjusted for the season, but the metro data is not. The distinction between adjusted data and unadjusted data is important in Florida, where the economy is hugely susceptible to seasonal swings, economists told us. Think of the snowbirds who come to our state during the cooler months each year. They seek out services, pack restaurants, buy goods and visit the beach -- an annual economic stimulus. "That doesn’t just affect tourism jobs," said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James. "That affects everything." That factor and others, such as teachers taking off for the summer, contribute to the state’s unadjusted employment rate typically ticking up in the summer months. When seasonal forces are factored in, the unemployment rate is smoothed out. Cities do not get the same treatment, left only with the less precise, unadjusted figure. With that disclaimer, we’ll move ahead with the check using labor data mostly from BLS. 2013 unemployment rate Month St. Pete (NSA) FL (NSA) FL (SA) Jan. 7.7 8 7.9 Feb. 7.1 7.6 7.8 March 6.6 7 7.5 April 6.8 6.8 7.2 May 6.9 7 7.1 June 7.4 7.4 7.1 July 7.4 7.4 7.1 Aug. 6.9* 7.1 7 * From state Department of Economic Opportunity. NSA = Not seasonally adjusted, SA = Seasonally adjusted So the state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for August, the most recent month available, was 7 percent and the unadjusted rate is 7.1 percent. The BLS did not release unemployment data for metro areas and cities as scheduled on Oct. 2 due to the government shutdown. The bureau’s most recent, public estimate for St. Petersburg’s unemployment rate is for July 2013, when the (unadjusted) rate was 7.4 percent. That’s even with Florida’s unadjusted rate for July and larger than its adjusted rate. We checked in with the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity, which feeds some economic data to the BLS, before calling Foster’s claim inaccurate. According to DEO, the city’s unemployment rate for August was 6.9 percent -- a smidgen lower than the state’s unadjusted and adjusted rates for that month. The city’s unemployment rate was actually lower than the state’s, by either measure, for most of 2013. We asked our experts to point to better data, but they said this home survey-based data is the best we have. Residents are asked if they are working and, if not, whether they are looking for work. The government uses the data to crank out assessments for the national, state and local levels. "At the state level, they’re estimates," said Sean Snaith, a University of Central Florida economist. "So when you get down to the smaller and smaller geographies, the availability and timeliness of data both begin to wane." A declining unemployment rate is not necessarily a completely positive measure of the economy, PolitiFact Florida has found. Florida has a problem with discouraged workers being out of the workforce for a long time and eventually dropping out of the labor force. These workers are no longer reflected in the unemployment rate, which is a ratio of the number of workers versus the number of available workers. For example, Florida’s unemployment rate fell steeply from December 2011 to July 2013, from 9.4 percent to 7.1 percent. If the labor force had remained the same in July as it was a year and a half earlier, the real unemployment rate would have been 8.2 percent, according to an August 2013 report by the Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research. The report found that about half of the reason for the drop is due to people leaving the labor force or putting off joining it. A similar analysis has not been completed at the city level. Foster did not return our call seeking comment. Our ruling St. Petersburg’s unemployment rate is a little bit better than the state average, according to the most recent data we have from the state and federal government. It’s been the case for most of the year. Is it substantially better? No. And experts cautioned that the numbers we have are not the best. Still, they’re the best we have. We rate this statement Mostly True.	None	Bill Foster	None	None	None	2013-10-17T17:00:07	2013-10-15	['Saint_Petersburg']
-afck-00403	“Student enrolments at universities increased by 12% while further Education and Training college enrolments have increased by 90%.”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/a-first-look-at-president-jacob-zumas-2014-state-of-the-nation-address/	None	None	None	None	None	President Jacob Zuma’s sixth State of the Nation address fact-checked	2014-02-14 12:39	None	['None']
-tron-00653	Tony Romo and Jason Witten Admit to Romantic Relationship	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/tony-romo-and-jason-witten-admit-to-romantic-relationship/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Tony Romo and Jason Witten Admit to Romantic Relationship	Nov 4, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01087	Gigi Hadid Wants To Date Harry Styles?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/gigi-hadid-harry-styles-date/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Gigi Hadid Wants To Date Harry Styles?	10:04 am, May 1, 2018	None	['None']
-farg-00406	"Bernie Sanders Says Christianity Is An Insult To Muslims."	distorts the facts	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/sanders-didnt-call-christianity-insulting/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Saranac Hale Spencer	['false stories']	Sanders Didn’t Call Christianity Insulting	June 29, 2018	2018-06-29 17:45:16 UTC	['None']
-pomt-09544	"Our (Texas) graduation rate ranks 43rd out of 50 states."	true	/texas/statements/2010/feb/05/bill-white/texas-has-43rd-best-graduation-rate-united-states/	Democrat Bill White, the former Houston mayor running for governor, has said if elected, he'll "move Texas forward" — a vow he's said will include revamping education. "Texas should be America's great state of opportunity," White says in his first TV ad, which started airing Feb. 1. "But how can we move forward when our graduation rate ranks 43rd out of 50 states, and we're lagging behind in test scores?" Almost the bottom of the barrel? We decided to check. White spokeswoman Katy Bacon pointed us to the the Legislative Budget Board's 2010 Texas Fact Book, which lists everything from elected officials' phone numbers to — we're not kidding — our state snack and tie (tortilla chips and salsa, and the bolo, by the way). The fact book also ranks Texas' estimated public high school graduation rate for 2009 — 43rd, with 61.3 percent of students who were enrolled in ninth grade graduating. John Barton, the board's public information and report production manager, said the agency pulled the statistic from State Rankings 2009, a comprehensive publication issued by CQ Press, a widely-regarded nonpartisan publisher of infomation related to American politics and policy. The budget board's depressing ranking indeed matched CQ's, which used data from the National Education Association in Washington and the National Center for Education Statistics to compare the estimated number of public high school graduates in 2009 with the number who were enrolled in 9th grade in fall 2005. Vermont ranked first, with 96.6 percent graduating. South Carolina ranked last with 55.2 percent; Washington, D.C., isn't included. The national rate of graduating students in 2009 was 69.3 percent. Texas' graduation rate has been sliding. In 2001 the state ranked 35th, with 65 percent of students graduating from high school. In 2008, Texas ranked 42nd with 62.6 percent of students graduating. We rate White's claim as True.	None	Bill White	None	None	None	2010-02-05T15:24:49	2010-02-01	['Texas']
-bove-00225	Republic TV’s Facebook Poll Backfires; Majority Say They Will Not Stand With Varnika Kundu	none	https://www.boomlive.in/republic-tvs-facebook-poll-backfires-majority-say-they-will-not-stand-with-varnika-kundu/	None	None	None	None	None	Republic TV’s Facebook Poll Backfires; Majority Say They Will Not Stand With Varnika Kundu	Aug 09 2017 9:15 pm, Last Updated: Aug 09 2017 9:55 pm	None	['None']
-goop-00165	Bethenny Frankel Writing ‘Real Housewives’ Tell-All?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/bethenny-frankel-real-housewives-tell-all-book-rhony/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Bethenny Frankel Writing ‘Real Housewives’ Tell-All?	11:27 am, October 7, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08297	Says he has a track record of not raising taxes.	false	/texas/statements/2010/nov/01/rick-perry/gov-rick-perry-says-he-has-track-record-not-raisin/	Gov. Rick Perry says he's not overlooking any means of closing the state's widely expected revenue shortfall — except higher taxes, according to an Oct. 15 interview with the Texas Tribune. "I think for anybody to stand up here and say categorically there's not going to be this or there's not going to be that —" Perry started, before Evan Smith of the Tribune edged in: "Well, you said it with taxes." Perry's response: "Well, but I've got a track record of that too. We don't raise taxes." Later, Smith asked: "So you don't believe that at any time that anybody reasonably could look over the last 10 years and identify anything where a tax went up?" Perry agreed. We wondered whether Perry had accurately recited his track record as governor. After asking his campaign to elaborate, we took up a basic question: Has Perry signed tax hikes into law? Boy howdy, yes. Since becoming governor in late 2000, Perry has signed into law higher taxes on fireworks and cigarettes while also ushering into place a change in business taxation, according to the state comptroller's office. To get a handle on tax changes made early in Perry's governorship, we consulted a 2004 report from the comptroller's office that details the history of revenue-related bills that have become law from 1972 through 2003. Some notables from 2001, Perry's first legislative session as governor, and 2003: * House Bill 3667, which Perry signed into law on June 16, 2001, enacting a 2 percent tax on the retail sale of fireworks to help fund a rural volunteer fire department insurance fund. The new levy was projected to generate $848,000 over the next two years; it ended up raising about $1.4 million in that period. * Senate Bill 5, which Perry signed into law June 15, 2001, creating the Texas Emissions Reduction Plan Fund as part of an effort to help reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides, which are air pollutants. Revenue for the fund was generated through "several new charges," including a tax of 1 percent on the purchase or rental of diesel equipment. * House Bill 1365, signed by the governor on June 22, 2003, made tweaks in the emissions reduction fund to bring in more money. With the changes, the report says, the impact to the fund was projected to be $234.9 million in 2004-05. Austin consultant Billy Hamilton, who served as deputy comptroller under state Comptrollers John Sharp and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, told us that he doesn't think there was a tax increase per se in 2003. "There were, however, several fee increases, and one school of thought is that fee is another word for tax," he said. We gauged Perry's tax record from 2004 to the present from other sources, including news articles and agency communications. In 2004, before a special legislative session, Perry laid out a plan to cut local school property taxes while generating new revenue in several ways, including through a $1-a-pack increase in cigarette taxes, a fee on admissions to topless bars, a statewide business property tax, and the closure of loopholes enabling some taxpayers to avoid the state's franchise and motor vehicle taxes, according to an April 2004 press release from his office. The plan went nowhere. Lawmakers returned to the school finance topic in a 2006 special session, engineering a tax overhaul that reduced local school property taxes. To help districts offset the loss of revenue, the Legislature revamped the franchise tax, increased the cigarette tax and modified how the state taxes used-car purchases. Perry signed the overhaul legislation into law in May 2006. A key goal of the new franchise tax, often called the margins tax, was to apply it to companies that had largely avoided the old corporate franchise tax. As expected at the time, businesses paid more in total after the overhaul of the franchise tax than before, although less than was forecast. Franchise tax revenue had totaled $5.8 billion in 2006 and 2007. In 2008 and 2009, the first two years of the revised tax, total revenue was $8.7 billion. However, the 2006 changes didn't affect all businesses the same way, said Dale Craymer, president of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, which represents several hundred largely Texas-based businesses and legal and accounting firms. Because of the property tax reductions, some saw their taxes drop. Others had increases, he said. The $1-a-pack increase in cigarette taxes proposed by Perry in 2004 also was part of the 2006 tax changes; the $1.41-a-pack tax took effect in 2007. These increases alone generated $707 million in fiscal 2007 and $908 million in fiscal 2008. Lastly, the package required that the sale of used cars be taxed on a standard value "rather than trusting sellers to report the true sales price," according to a May 15, 2006 news article from The Associated Press. The additional revenue from that change was $20.8 million for 2007 and 2008. Three tax increases? Sure. However, Perry has stressed that the 2006 increases shouldn't be counted against him because the cuts in local property taxes set in motion by lawmakers were bigger. Told by Smith on Oct. 15 that some people consider the franchise tax change to be an increase, Perry replied: "That was a net tax decrease." Craymer has a similar view. In an e-mail, he told us that the franchise tax change was a part of a package of bills "that raised some taxes (franchise, cigarette, motor vehicle sales taxes) and lowered others (property tax) by much more." Craymer shared a document with us based on the 2006 estimates of the impact of the tax changes; for each year from 2007 to 2011, it shows the property tax reductions as greater than the revenue generated by the other taxes. "The new (franchise) tax never would have passed without the property tax cuts, so I don’t think it’s correct to try to look at it independently of the property tax cut," he said. Like Craymer, Americans for Tax Reform, a Washington-based group that collects pledges by officeholders and seekers not to raise taxes, says it doesn't consider tax swaps to violate the pledge. Spokesman Patrick Gleason told us the group's definition of a tax increase depends on the impact of a law. "If it's revenue neutral or a net cut, that doesn't violate the pledge," he said. On Oct. 1, 2009, Perry signed the group's pledge for governors, which says that signatories will "oppose and veto any and all efforts to increase taxes." Gleason said Perry hadn't previously signed the pledge. Tobacco users were hit again in 2009, when the Legislature decided to tax smokeless tobacco on weight rather than price, "generating additional revenue of $105 million over two years," according to a May 28, 2009 Dallas Morning News news article. According to a December 2009 report from the Legislative Budget Board, some of the new revenue helps repay medical-school loans for doctors who agree to practice in underserved areas of the state. The rest was to be used to help offset franchise tax revenue that was lost when the Legislature temporarily exempted 40,000 businesses. Another tax that has jumped recently is the unemployment tax, which businesses pay quarterly to the Texas Workforce Commission to replenish the trust fund that "provides unemployment insurance for Texas workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own," according to a Dec. 8, 2009 news release from the commission. Each year, the commission, whose members are appointed by Perry, sets a rate; it goes up if the balance in the trust fund is below a statutory level as of Oct. 1. According to a July 2009 news article in the Austin American-Statesman, "unemployment taxes rise and fall with the economy, and, in fact, the tax rate fell steadily in Texas between 2004 and 2008." However, the rate rose in 2009 and 2010, largely because of the impact of the economic downturn. In 2010, the increase in the minimum tax rate meant that most Texas employers would pay $64.80 per employee, compared with $23.40 the previous year. Craymer told us that the unemployment tax rate "is set automatically based on the balance in the fund and is independent of any gubernatorial action." We asked Hamilton about the big picture: Does he see tax increases during Perry's tenure? He said that depends on a person's perspective. "There were significant tax increases for some taxpayers in 2006 with the cigarette tax and margin tax changes," he said. "However, these are said to have been offset by reductions in school property taxes. In aggregate, that's true, but revenue neutrality is in the eye of the beholder. Some people wound up paying less, but some are paying more." We never heard back from Perry on his tax track record. Upshot: Legislation, reports, news articles and expert analysis show that Perry has signed about half a dozen tax increases into law, including the three 2006 changes intended to help cover cuts in school property taxes. Texans paying more thanks to Perry's signature on tax-increase measures include companies with higher business taxes, plus cigarette smokers and purchasers of smokeless tobacco, fireworks and diesel equipment. We rate the statement False.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2010-11-01T06:00:00	2010-10-15	['None']
-hoer-00149	Hotmail Account	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/hotmail-account-hoax.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Hotmail Account Hoax	September 2009	None	['None']
-goop-02781	Khloe Kardashian “Banned” From Cleveland Cavaliers Games, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/khloe-kardashian-not-banned-cleveland-cavaliers-games-tristan-thompson-lebron-james/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Khloe Kardashian NOT “Banned” From Cleveland Cavaliers Games, Despite Report	10:42 am, May 23, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-03721	30,000 scientists have signed a petition arguing that there is no convincing scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/30000-scientists-reject-climate-change/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	30,000 Scientists Reject Anthropogenic Climate Change?	24 October 2016	None	['None']
-afck-00341	“We have created 3.7-million work opportunities [between April 2009 and March 2014].”	correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/2014-sona-claims-revisited-zuma-on-the-economy/	None	None	None	None	None	2014 SONA claims revisited: Zuma on the economy	2015-02-11 04:31	None	['None']
-tron-00563	Hobby Lobby Closing All Stores Across the Nation	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hobby-lobby-closing-stores-across-nation/	None	business	None	None	['barack obama', 'church and state', 'liberal agenda']	Hobby Lobby Closing All Stores Across the Nation	Apr 14, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-14816	Says President Barack Obama did not invite a Republican senator to dine at the White House until his fifth year in office.	false	/iowa/statements/2015/nov/23/jeb-bush/jeb-bush-claims-obama-didnt-host-republican-senato/	During a campaign stop in Atlantic, Iowa, on Nov. 11, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush told a very detailed and specific story to underscore Democratic President Barack Obama’s alleged unwillingness to work with Republicans in the U.S. Senate. Here's what he said: "The story I tell all the time is about a Republican senator that was invited by the White House to have dinner with the president. And so he’s going up the rickety elevator to go up to the residence, the second floor, and the eager aide to President Obama says with great excitement, ‘Senator, you’re the first Republican he’s had dinner with in the residence since he’s been president.’ And that’s the fifth year." Obama is so unwilling to work with Senate Republicans, Bush alleges, that he didn't even invite one to dine at the White House until his fifth year in office. But is it true? Did Obama really wait until 2013 to host a Republican for dinner at the White House? Bush’s campaign declined to provide more information or sources for the anecdote. (Instead, a spokeswoman issued a statement saying the president has pursued "a policy of divide and conquer" and refused to work with Republicans.) The White House, meanwhile, referred us to the official White House Visitor Access Records, which are posted online in a series of spreadsheets. The Visitor Access Records contain extremely detailed – albeit inconsistently organized – entries for hundreds of thousands of White House visits. The 2012 database, for example, included more than 930,000 separate records. To vet Bush’s statement, we filtered these voluminous results first to show only visits in which "POTUS" – that is, the president of the United States – was listed as the "visitee." Then we filtered them further to capture visits to the "Residence" and other White House rooms in which it’s conceivable that a private dinner could occur. Among that filtered database, we searched for Democratic and Republican U.S. senators. Here’s what we found. When possible, we paired the results found in the database with news reports or White House statements concerning the meeting or a concurrent event. 2009 U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar. R-Ind., visited the residence area of the White House on Sept. 1, 2009, for an evening event. The day and time corresponds to a dinner celebrating Ramadan that included numerous guests. 2010 There appear to be no dinners or other events involving the president and members of the Senate in 2010. It should be noted, though, that Obama did invite Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Jon Kyl of Arizona, along with top Republicans from the House and Democratic leaders from both chambers, to a dinner following the midterm elections that November. That meal-time meeting was dubbed the "Slurpee Summit" after Obama promised to serve the drinks for dessert, but Republicans declined to attend, and the dinner was canceled. 2011 Obama hosted a dinner in the East Room of the White House (which is on the State Floor in the residence) attended by both Democrats and Republicans on May 2, 2011. McConnell was among those present. U.S. Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Mark Udall, D-Colo., visited the White House residence with a larger group during a state dinner for German Chancellor Angela Merkel on June 7, 2011. U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, visited the White House residence on Nov. 11, 2011, with a larger group. That same day, Obama called Murray to discuss budget and deficit reduction negotiations that were occurring at that time. 2012 McConnell attended a lunch with the president on Feb. 29, 2012, in a room labeled "POTUS dini" in the White House logs. Also at the table were House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Lugar visited the White House residence during a state dinner for British Prime Minister David Cameron on March 14, 2012. Democratic Sens. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, John Kerry of Massachusetts, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Charles Schumer of New York also visited the residence at that time. Democratic Sens. Kerry, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Ben Cardin of Maryland, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Richard Durbin of Illinois, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Jon Tester of Montana visited the White House residence during a St. Patrick’s Day reception on March 20, 2012. Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina was among 706 guests to visit the White House Residence on Dec. 12, 2012, during what appears to be a White House Christmas party. 2013 Democratic Sens. Casey, Durbin, Kerry, McCaskill, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Tim Kaine of Virginia, visited the White House residence on Inauguration Day in 2013. Obama hosted a bipartisan dinner for women senators on April 23, 2013. U.S. Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., visited the White House residence during a ceremony honoring Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients on Nov. 20, 2013. Democratic Sens. Durbin, Leahy, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Brian Schatz of Hawaii also attended. U.S. Reps. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, attended a lunch with the president in a room labeled "Private Di" in the White House logs on March 7, 2013. Obama dined with two large groups of Republican senators on March 6, 2013, and again on April 10. The first dinner took place at the Jefferson Hotel, while the second was held in the Old Family Dining Room on the State Floor of the White House. Ten Republican and 21 Democratic senators were among 878 guests to the White House residence on Dec. 12, 2013, during what appears to be a White House Christmas party. Our ruling Based on our review of visitor logs, there are a handful of instances in which Republican U.S. senators visited the White House residence between 2009 and 2012, including a 2011 dinner attended by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell. There’s also that high-profile 2010 case in which Obama invited two Republican senators to dinner – the famous Slurpee Summit – only to be publicly snubbed. And it’s worth noting, too, that the records indicate that Obama hasn’t dined privately with Democratic senators all that often either – suggesting that private evening meals just aren’t part of Obama’s congressional relations strategy. We rate this claim False.	None	Jeb Bush	None	None	None	2015-11-23T17:05:00	2015-11-11	['White_House', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Barack_Obama']
-goop-01473	Julia Roberts Furious Over Richard Gere Getting Engaged To Girlfriend?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/julia-roberts-richard-gere-engaged-girlfriend-proposed/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Julia Roberts Furious Over Richard Gere Getting Engaged To Girlfriend?	11:24 am, February 28, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-13630	"Bruce Rauner is of record that he will fully support the Trump candidacy. It's documented. It’s available."	mostly true	/illinois/statements/2016/aug/10/michael-madigan/Madigan-highlights-Rauners-support-Trump-camp/	Governor Bruce Rauner has stayed decidedly quiet about the 2016 presidential campaign. Despite Rauner’s reluctance to comment, Democrats are pouncing on the opportunity to try to link the first-term governor to the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump. Illinois House Speaker and Democratic Party Chairman Michael Madigan is one of those Democrats. Madigan has compared Rauner to Trump several times and said he feels fully justified grouping the two together. In an interview with WSIU and WBBM radio stations published Aug. 1, Madigan said: "Bruce Rauner is of record that he will fully support the Trump candidacy. It's documented. It’s available." We wondered if Madigan was right. Does Rauner fully support Trump? What’s Rauner’s take on the Republican presidential nominee? We looked into Madigan’s claim to find out. Supporting the presidential nominee When we asked where Madigan found the information backing his claim, Madigan spokesman Steve Brown simply said, "It’s everywhere online. Google it, and it will come up in 9 seconds." Brown didn’t point to any specific articles, so we took his recommendation and Googled our question. For the record, it only took Google .45 seconds to find articles relating to Rauner and Trump. In March, Rauner told reporters he would support the Republican presidential nominee, even if it turned out to be Trump. When asked why, Rauner explained, "I’m the leader of the Republican party in Illinois." He added, "I will do everything I can to support that nominee." That same month, he told students in Wilmette he was "horrified" by the presidential campaign rhetoric. "Democracy is hard, you know, and this presidential election, oh my goodness, I'm appalled by the rhetoric, it's appalling," Rauner said. "And it's ugly and it's nasty and it's weird, and just some of the statements that get made, I'm just, I'm horrified." Since those public comments, Rauner’s been asked repeatedly about his actions related to the presidential election. Rauner hasn’t said much and doesn’t answer questions about Trump. On July 12, Rauner did not join Trump during a campaign fundraiser even though the two were both in Chicago that day. A week later, Rauner skipped the Republican National Convention in Cleveland when Trump formally became the party’s presidential nominee. Rauner’s aides told the Chicago Tribune the governor wouldn’t formally endorse Trump, and did not explain why not. The Tribune reported, "Rauner repeatedly had sought to stay out of the presidential race, though he did say that as leader of the GOP in Illinois, he would back the eventual nominee. But Rauner aides stressed there are various levels of "support," and that the governor would not be giving Trump a formal endorsement." Brian Gaines, a political science professor at the University of Illinois, said because Rauner isn’t up for election this year, there’s really no reason for him make any more comments about his relationship with Trump. "There’s no law saying that a politician needs to endorse their party’s candidate," Gaines said. "(Sen.) Mark Kirk is the more interesting example. Since he would have more interaction with the president and he’s up for election, he really needs to comment. Rauner’s interaction is somewhat fabricated." In June, Kirk said publicly he would no longer support Trump. Gaines said Rauner’s language regarding Trump is much more nuanced and purposefully vague. "(Rauner) could say voting for Trump is a form of support and he wouldn’t have to say another word," Gaines explained. "And as the Trump campaign looks weaker and weaker, Rauner can point back and say ‘I never said I would endorse Trump.’" Rauner continues to refuse to answer questions from reporters about the presidential election, and his office did not return multiple requests for comment from PolitiFact Illinois for this story. Our ruling "Bruce Rauner is of record that he will fully support the Trump candidacy. It's documented. It’s available." Madigan is correct. In March, Rauner said he would fully support the Republican presidential nominee. When asked by a reporter if he would still support the nominee if it’s Trump, Rauner reiterated his earlier statement, saying: "I will support the Republican Party’s nominee." But Madigan does not reference any of Rauner’s subsequent comments, including Rauner’s refusal to formally endorse Trump. We rate this claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/8a7c3a9c-5eb5-4591-a6dc-7f29f5a7ad3c	None	Michael Madigan	None	None	None	2016-08-10T17:25:24	2016-08-01	['None']
-pomt-01978	When Rick Scott "was deposed in lawsuits about his company, he took the Fifth 75 times."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2014/jun/17/florida-democratic-party/rick-scott-took-5th-75-times-democratic-party-ad-s/	The Florida Democratic Party launched its first TV ad this year in the governor’s race and the subject is a familiar one: the investigation into Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s former health care company. "Maybe you’ve heard about what was the largest Medicare fraud in history, committed when Rick Scott was a CEO," the narrator says. "Or that Scott’s company paid record fraud fines of $1.7 billion dollars. And when Scott was deposed in lawsuits about his company, he took the Fifth 75 times. Meaning, 75 times, Scott refused to answer questions because – if he had – he might admit to committing a crime." The ad launched June 17, 2014, and is airing in West Palm Beach and Orlando, as well as Tampa Bay, which is home turf for Democratic front runner Charlie Crist. Earlier this year, we fact-checked a similar claim by the Democrats about the $1.7 billion fine, rating it Mostly True. Here we will fact-check whether Scott took the Fifth Amendment 75 times. It’s not a new topic, for Scott or for us. We fact-checked similar claims during Scott’s first race in 2010. Columbia/HCA Scott started Columbia in 1987 by purchasing two El Paso, Texas, hospitals. He quickly grew the company into one of the country’s largest publicly traded hospital chains, and in 1994, merged Columbia with Tennessee-headquartered HCA and its 100 hospitals. In early 1997, federal agents revealed they were investigating the Columbia/HCA chain for, among other things, Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Allegations included that Columbia/HCA billed Medicare and Medicaid for tests that were not necessary or ordered by physicians, and that the hospital chain would perform one type of medical test but bill the federal government for a more expensive test or procedure. Agents seized records from facilities across the country including in Florida. Scott resigned in July 1997. Scott said he wanted to fight the federal government accusations, but the corporate board of Columbia/HCA wanted to settle. In 2000, the company pleaded guilty to at least 14 corporate felonies and agreed to pay $840 million in criminal fines and civil damages and penalties. The government settled a second series of similar claims with Columbia/HCA in 2002 for an additional $881 million. The total for the two fines was $1.7 billion. Scott’s deposition Scott gave a deposition in 2000 in which he invoked the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 75 times. The amendment reads in part that no one "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." But that deposition was not part of the criminal fraud case being pursued by the federal government. In fact, Scott was never officially questioned during the federal criminal investigation. The deposition was part of a civil case in which Nevada Communications Corp. alleged that Columbia/HCA breached the terms of a communications contract. Scott gave the deposition at his offices in Stamford, Conn., on July 27, 2000, months before the settlement with the federal government. (The records of Scott’s deposition were distributed to reporters by Scott’s Republican primary opponent Bill McCollum in 2010.) The deposition shows that Scott repeatedly refused to answer questions. Scott's lawyer first interjected after an opposing lawyer began the deposition by asking simply if Scott was employed. "Under normal circumstances, Mr. Scott would be pleased to answer that question and other questions that you pose today," Scott's lawyer, Steven Steinbach, said. "Unfortunately because of the pendency of a number of criminal investigations relating to Columbia around the country, he's going to follow my advice, out of prudence, to assert his constitutional privilege against giving testimony against himself." Scott then went on to read the same answer, even when asked if Scott is a current or former employee of Columbia/HCA -- "Upon advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer the questions by asserting my rights and privileges under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution." The Democrats’ ad doesn’t tell viewers that the deposition was part of a civil case unrelated to the federal government’s criminal fraud investigation. However, Scott’s reason for invoking the Fifth Amendment was as a result of the criminal investigations, his lawyer said. What about other depositions? The Democrats’ ad makes a reference to multiple lawsuits: "And when Scott was deposed in lawsuits about his company, he took the Fifth 75 times." "The Nevada Communications Corp. case is the only lawsuit where Scott took the Fifth 75 times," Florida Democratic Party spokesman Joshua Karp told PolitiFact Florida. (The ad includes video footage of Scott from a 1995 case -- not the 2000 case which is the focus of the ad.) Karp pointed to a 2010 Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times article which stated that Scott gave "murky testimony" in a series of depositions. An example: In a 1997 deposition when he was asked about an apparent agreement he made with a Texas doctor, Scott said: "I don't know what your definition or anybody's definition of an ‘agreement’ is, or an ‘offer’ is, or ‘promise’ is.'' What he ‘might’ admit to if he had testified The ad states that "Scott refused to answer questions because, if he had, he might admit to committing a crime." We can’t fact-check what Scott might or might not have admitted, but it’s worth noting a few things about the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment cannot be used in a criminal court to suggest guilt, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1956. In a civil case, things get a little murkier, and judges or juries can infer what they want from a person using the Fifth Amendment. "The bottom line is that in a civil case, the judge and jury are free to draw the inference that 'a truthful answer to the questions that he was asked would incriminate him,' " George R. Dekle, Sr., a professor of law at the University of Florida, told PolitiFact Florida in 2010. "However, there can be myriads of reasons other than guilt which prompt a person to claim a Fifth Amendment privilege, and it might be just as reasonable to infer that the witness refused to answer for some other reason." Scott’s response During the Univision debate in October 2010, Scott was asked about the deposition: "With regard to that deposition, that was years after I left HCA. It was just, you know, all the same trial lawyers that are supporting my opponent, they were doing a fishing expedition, and they sat there, you know, it was a case I knew nothing about, I was not involved, I was not a defendant. So to stop the fishing expedition I just didn't do it." As for the case itself, Scott told the Tampa Bay Times in 2010, "There's no question that mistakes were made and as CEO, I have to accept responsibility for those mistakes. I was focused on lowering costs and making the hospitals more efficient. I could have had more internal and external controls. I learned hard lessons, and I've taken that lesson and it's helped me become a better business person and a better leader." Our ruling The Florida Democratic Party’s TV ad states that when Rick Scott "was deposed in lawsuits about his company, he took the Fifth 75 times." We have two quibbles with the ad: the Democrats don't specify that the deposition was from a civil business case -- not the federal government’s criminal fraud investigation into Columbia/HCA. However, Scott used the Fifth Amendment due to that federal investigation. Also, the ad refers to multiple lawsuits -- Scott was deposed in separate lawsuits, but he took the Fifth Amendment 75 times in only one of them. We rate this claim Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Florida Democratic Party	None	None	None	2014-06-17T17:17:26	2014-06-17	['None']
-tron-01986	Picture of President Bush and his father fishing in the streets of New Orleans after the hurricane	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bushvacation/	None	natural-disasters/hurricane	None	None	None	Picture of President Bush and his father fishing in the streets of New Orleans after the hurricane	Mar 17, 2015	None	['New_Orleans', 'George_W._Bush']
-pomt-14814	After the Texas cutoff of aid to women’s health care services including Planned Parenthood clinics, "over 150,000… women lost the only health care they had. Our Medicaid birth rate shot up. It cost taxpayers over $130 million in one year alone in extra Medicaid birth costs."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2015/nov/24/wendy-davis/wendy-davis-says-texas-lawmakers-cut-150000-women-/	Wendy Davis recalled recent Texas history while weighing in on the Republican push to defund Planned Parenthood. In a September 2015 interview on MSNBC’s "The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell," the former Texas Democratic gubernatorial nominee and state senator responded to Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida telling a Des Moines TV station he favors transferring all funding from Planned Parenthood to health centers that do not provide abortions. The funding shifts that Republicans seek nationally, Davis charged, will diminish women’s access to breast cancer screenings, contraceptive care and other health services. Looking back, Davis said that after Texas reduced funding for family planning care, "over 150,000 real women lost the only health care that they had. Our Medicaid birth rate shot up. It cost taxpayers over $130 million in one year alone in extra Medicaid birth costs. So, not only does it harm real women, it costs taxpayers more." Did she get that all those effects right? Legislative moves To recap, the 2011 Legislature drove down spending in a state family planning program by more than $70 million (from an existing two-year expenditure of $111 million) in 2012-13 and block family planning aid that flowed through a Medicaid-supported program from going to providers associated with abortions. Republican lawmakers also moved to remove Planned Parenthood from the state’s Women’s Healthcare Program, which provides low-income women access to family planning care. About two years later, legislators imposed stricter health and safety standards on clinics that perform abortions, a move expected to reduce the number of clinics from around 40 to 10; the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in November 2015 to review the law. Davis’ comments seemed curious in part because we found True in September 2015 a claim that Texas state government is "funding women’s health services at historically high levels." Most recently, the 2015 Legislature signed off on nearly $285 million in spending on several women’s health efforts, including $50 million for family planning services, in 2016-17. Per what Davis said, we looked into whether more than 150,000 women lost the only health care they had and whether the Texas actions drove up the number of births paid for through Medicaid. Davis offers backup Davis told us by phone her "over 150,000" figure came from a Texas Department of State Health Services report filed during a 2013 meeting of the State Health Services Council, which consists of nine members who gather feedback on the agency’s proposed rules and make recommendations to the agency and the overarching Health and Human Services Commission. Davis said: "The report in the hearing showed that in 2013, the amount of women served (by the DSHS Family Planning Program) was 47,322, which was a decrease from 202,968 clients served in 2011," indicating "a 77 percent decrease in the number of women served." That would be a decrease of 155,646 women served—more than 150,000. That program, the state says, helps clinics provide comprehensive low-cost family planning and reproductive health care services to women and men. According to the state, the services help individuals determine the number and spacing of their children, reduce unintended pregnancies, positively affect future pregnancy and birth outcomes, and improve general health. A 2013 report An online search landed the report Davis mentioned and her cited figures as part of the council’s Nov. 21, 2013, meeting agenda. Yet the report, "DSHS Family Planning Program Client Count and Average Cost Per Client, FY 2010-2013," didn’t specify women served; rather, it presented the "number of women and men" combined who received services from the DSHS Family Planning Program in the chosen years. So, how many women may have lost services? Additional inquiry led us to Enrique Marquez, a commission spokesman, who emailed us a chart indicating 181,460 women were served by the DSHS Family Planning Program in the state’s fiscal 2011, which ran through August 2012, while in fiscal 2013--after the actions by the 2011 Legislature--45,335 women were served. That’s a difference of 136,125--though that’s also without taking into account a decrease of 12,096 in women served by the state’s Women’s Health Program, which provides birth control, cancer screenings, annual exams and STD tests for low-income women. Women served by DSHS Family Planning Program and Women’s Health Program, FY 2011 - FY 2013 Program FY 2011 FY 2012 FY 2013 Difference (FY 2013 - FY 2011) DSHS Family Planning Program 181,460 76,898 45,335 136,125 decrease Women’s Health Program/Texas Women’s Health Program 127,536 126,473 115,440 12,096 decrease Total Decrease 148,221 Sources: Texas Department of State Health Services (numbers for DSHS Family Planning Program received by email from Enrique Marquez, Sept. 30, 2015; numbers for WHP/TWHP received by email from Bryan Black on Nov. 17, 2015) Add those up and you get 148,221, close to the 150,000 figure offered by Davis. Did women lose their only health care? Davis did not show nor could we determine the number of women who lost the only health care they had, as she put it. By email, HHSC spokesman Bryan Black said the agency has no way of estimating the number of women who were solely getting care through a state program. Separately, Sarah Wheat, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Texas, agreed with Davis that many women relied on its clinics for health care as did Janet Realini, who chairs the Texas Women’s Healthcare Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that says it’s dedicated to improving the health and well-being of women, babies and families by assuring access to preventive care for women. Researchers for the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, a project partnering with Ibis Reproductive Health, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have been studying the effects of the changes legislated in 2011 and 2013. The researchers told us Davis was likely right about the women losing their only health care, but they also said there’s no way to pin that. Medicaid-funded births We previously found True a claim that more than half the state’s births are paid for by Medicaid. For this story, we looked into whether Davis was correct about Medicaid-funded birth costs increasing more than $130 million in a year. Davis told us she drew that figure from a January 2013 report, "Texas Women’s Healthcare in Crisis," by the coalition chaired by Realini. That report noted a state projection of 23,000 additional Medicaid births in 2014-15, according to HHSC’s request for legislative appropriations covering 2014-15. The report, drawing on the same state projection, went on: "Budget cuts to DSHS Family Planning program will increase Medicaid costs by at least $136 million by 2015." The HHSC’s appropriations request at the time said those costs were projected to total $33 million in the year through August 2013 and an additional $103 million in fiscal 2014-15. By phone, Davis conceded she was off by saying the $130 million would accrue in a year; it was over two years. Separately, Realini cautioned, when we asked, that the presented projections covered three years, not one. Also, she said, the coalition hadn’t done a follow-up report. Over seven weeks, we asked the commission how much Medicaid births have cost taxpayers for each of the past five years, but didn’t field a response to that. Separately, neither the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare in Washington, D.C., nor outside experts could immediately provide such detail. So, did the rate of Medicaid-funded births surge? We inquired into whether the projections played out. To our inquiry, Marquez emailed a chart stating that in 2011, the year the family planning cuts were approved, there were 215,114 Medicaid-funded births in Texas. The tally dropped to 204,322 the next year. Medicaid-funded births in Texas, FY 2011 - FY 2014 Year Medicaid-paid births 2011 215,114 2012 204,322 2013 207,058 2014 213,253 Source: Texas Department of State Health Services (chart received from Enrique Marquez, Sept. 29, 2015) In 2014, after the cuts had taken effect, there were fewer--not more--Medicaid-funded births than in 2011, though the count had escalated in both 2013 and 2014. Our ruling Davis said that after the Texas cutoff of aid to women’s health services including Planned Parenthood clinics, "over 150,000… women lost the only health care they had. Our Medicaid birth rate shot up. It cost taxpayers over $130 million in one year alone in extra Medicaid birth costs." There was about that much of a drop-off in women participating in state-backed family planning and cancer screening programs. But Davis didn’t provide nor did we find confirmation all the women lost the only care they had or that Medicaid-funded birth costs actually spiked by the predicted $130 million-plus. In fact, there were fewer Medicaid-covered Texas births in 2014 than in 2011. We rate this multi-part claim Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. CORRECTION, 4:44 p.m., Dec. 2, 2015: We revised this fact check to correct our initial version's description of actions taken by the Legislature in 2011 to reduce family-planning aid that went to clinics connected to providing abortions. As a reader nudged, that version incorrectly said an action took place in 2013 when the move occurred in 2011. That story also was imprecise about the dollar costs of the actions. These changes did not affect our rating of Davis' claim.	None	Wendy Davis	None	None	None	2015-11-24T10:00:00	2015-09-21	['Texas', 'Planned_Parenthood', 'Medicaid']
-pomt-11152	"Gov. Kay Ivey gave nearly $1 million of taxpayers’ money to a liberal activist organization that promotes alternative lifestyles and transgenderism."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/may/29/scott-dawson/scott-dawson-alabama-governor-kay-ivey-lgbtq/	Scott Dawson, an evangelical minister running for governor in Alabama, accused the incumbent of funnelling taxpayer dollars to a controversial cause. "It's been uncovered that Gov. Kay Ivey gave nearly $1 million of taxpayers’ money to a liberal activist organization that promotes alternative lifestyles and transgenderism," Dawson’s campaign wrote in a press release. The organization in question is Free2Be, a non-profit that provides counseling services to LGBTQ victims of domestic violence and bullying in Alabama. The nonprofit has been the subject of heavy scrutiny in Alabama, but for financial reasons, not political ones. After the group’s founder, James Robinson, left the group in January, the board of directors determined that Free2Be did not have the financial stability to continue. The group shuttered its doors after a state agency found they had failed to pay payroll taxes to the IRS. Dawson’s campaign pointed us to a 2012 YouTube video as evidence Free2be is a "liberal activist organization that promotes alternative lifestyles and transgenderism." The video didn’t suggest the organization aimed to change anyone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Neither do the group’s public statements. Instead, Robinson railed against messages of hate from teachers, parents and churches towards LGBTQ teens. Federal grants So what taxpayer funding did the group receive until they landed in hot water? Dawson’s campaign overshot the target by a few hundred thousand dollars with their $1 million figure. The campaign calculated that Free2Be received $762,042.37 in federal grants since Ivey assumed office in April 2017, using data from Alabama’s Finance Department. But the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, which reviews grant applications and presents funding recommendations to the governor’s office for approval, announces grants on an annual basis. Ivey’s administration was responsible for approving $800,000 in grants for fiscal year 2018, which began in October 2017. Of that total, $727,410 came from the Victims of Crime Act, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice, and $49,915 from the federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act. The grants refunded expenses incurred by the organization. Those payments stopped in late March, when Free2Be shut down, and added up to $422,680.37. In fiscal year 2018, the state awarded $23.5 million in Victims of Crime Act grants to 79 nonprofit or governmental agencies across Alabama, said Department of Economic and Community Affairs spokesman Josh Carples. Free2Be was one of those recipients. The law requires that 10 percent of Victims of Crime Act grant funding go to underserved victims of violent crime each year. The agency started to look for LGBTQ grant recipients in 2013, after a program specialist noticed the agency was not funding any providers that serviced that community. Because it qualified as underserved, the specialist suggested the agency begin LGBTQ outreach. The following year, Free2Be was the only Victims of Crime Act applicant serving the LGBTQ population, and the agency approved their grant request. Taxpayer dollars Ivey’s campaign argued that the grants were not funded by taxpayer dollars, but by federal criminal fees. The Office for Victims of Crime’s website uses a similar distinction as Ivey in describing these grants: "The Fund is financed by fines and penalties paid by convicted federal offenders, not from tax dollars." But Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said there is a distinction between tax dollars and taxpayer dollars. "User fees are, technically, not ‘tax dollars’ in that they are not the product of our tax system," Gardner said. "But the broader claim that these are not ‘taxpayer dollars’ doesn't seem right. When we pay the $20 entrance fee to visit a national park, we're not paying a tax. But most people would say that $20 is ‘taxpayer dollars’ in that the government collected it from people, and will spend it on some public services." Gardner likened a $20 park fee to the fines and penalties paid by federal offenders. Susan Pace Hamill, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, agreed. "Criminal fines and forfeitures are not typical taxes, but resemble typical taxes because they represent dollars collected involuntarily and are used for some public purpose," Hamill said. Our ruling Dawson said, "It's been uncovered that Gov. Kay Ivey gave nearly $1 million of taxpayers’ money to a liberal activist organization that promotes alternative lifestyles and transgenderism." The organization in question is Free2Be, a victims resources nonprofit that serviced the LGBTQ community. Dawson distorted the organization’s purpose, which was to support LGBTQ victims of domestic violence and bullying in Alabama, not to change anyone’s gender identity or sexual orientation. The Ivey administration approved almost $800,000 in grants to Free2Be in order to meet a federal grant quota for underserved communities. But the group did not receive the full amount before it closed in March; it received a little more than half of that funding. The statement has an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate this statement Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Scott Dawson	None	None	None	2018-05-29T09:00:58	2018-05-15	['None']
-pomt-04022	"Eighty percent of those who have applied for licenses have no cancer, no Parkinson's disease or glaucoma. They have nothing you would associate [with] the use of medical marijuana."	half-true	/rhode-island/statements/2013/feb/03/patrick-kennedy/former-us-rep-patrick-kennedy-says-80-percent-peop/	When former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, D-.R.I., launched a national group in January that opposes marijuana legalization, he also took issue with medical-marijuana laws that he says may have been well-intended but are misguided. And he questioned whether many of those who get permission to use marijuana for medical reasons are using it for legitimate reasons. "Eighty percent of those who have applied for licenses have no cancer, no Parkinson’s disease or glaucoma," Kennedy said in a Jan. 8 story in The Providence Journal. "They have nothing you would associate [with] the use of medical marijuana." (Kennedy’s group, Project SAM, which stands for Smart Approaches to Marijuana, argues that medical marijuana should only be used in non-smoked forms. ) Nineteen states and the District of Columbia allow its medical use, although it is still illegal under federal law. In addition to cancer and glaucoma, among conditions approved for medical marijuana use are HIV/AIDS, severe or chronic pain, persistent nausea and multiple sclerosis. We decided to examine both parts of Kennedy’s statement, beginning with the specific ailments people cite when seeking permission to use medical marijuana. Kennedy’s group referred us to Kevin A. Sabet, a professor and drug policy institute director at the University of Florida, who is a former Obama administration adviser on drug policy and a co-founder of Project SAM. He guided us to statistical links on the Project SAM website and e-mailed some figures related to medical marijuana programs in Colorado. The most recent Colorado data, as of Nov. 30, 2012, showed 3 percent of that state’s roughly 107,000 medical-marijuana patients reported having cancer and 1 percent had glaucoma, while Parkinson’s was not listed as a specific reportable condition. Ninety-four percent reported severe pain as their condition or one of their conditions. We checked with other states and found similar figures. In most states, including Colorado, medical marijuana patients reported more than one condition. In Arizona, where medical marijuana became legal in 2010, just under 4 percent of its 33,600 medical marijuana cardholders reported having cancer while 1.5 percent reported glaucoma. By far the most reported condition as of Nov. 7, 2012, was chronic pain at 90 percent. Nevada, one of the earlier states to legalize marijuana for medical use, adopting it in 2001, showed cancer cases were about 3.6 percent of reported conditions -- and glaucoma just under 2 percent, as of Jan. 8, 2013. Severe pain was overwhelmingly the number-one condition, hovering at more than 3,200 patients monthly.The total number of patients with medical-marijuana cards in Nevada, fluctuates; as of Jan. 8, it was 3,580. In Rhode Island, where medical marijuana became legal in 2009, 5.9 percent percent of those who received approval in 2010 cited cancer or cancer treatment, according to the Department of Health. Four percent of those getting approval in 2012 reported cancer. Glaucoma accounted for about 1 percent in both years while Parkinson’s is not listed as a separate qualifying diagnosis. Rhode Island, which has 4,860 people approved to use medical marijuana in its program, lists a wider range of diagnoses than several states we examined. Forty-four percent of Rhode Island patients cited "severe debilitating chronic pain" in 2012; 17 percent reported muscle spasms and 11 percent reported severe nausea. So the first part of Kennedy’s statement is right: Only a very small percentage of medical marijuana users cited cancer or glaucoma as their reason for using the drug; states we checked do not specifically list Parkinson’s, indicating few cite that ailment. What about the second part of the statement, that 80 percent of the people using medical marijuana "have nothing you would associate" with it? Sabet, from Project SAM, said Kennedy didn’t mean that the 80 percent have no legitimate reason to use the drug. But we think that most readers would understand that statement to mean 80 percent didn’t have an ailment generally associated with medical marijuana use. The facts show otherwise. As our research found, chronic pain, severe pain or severe debilitating chronic pain -- the most common conditions medical marijuana users cite -- are among several conditions or diagnoses listed by states as qualifying reasons for using, contingent on whatever standard a state requires applicant and physician to meet. The states with medical-marijuana laws require some form of sign-off from a physician on an application. Dr. Syed Rizvi, a neurologist at Rhode Island Hospital and associate professor at Brown University, said the patients he has approved for medical marijuana have included those with multiple sclerosis, are extremely disabled, maybe in extreme pain, and may not have responded well to other medications. He said he limits it to patients he has seen for some time, even years. Dr. Josiah D. Rich, a professor of medicine and community health at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, said in his experience and from what he knows of other physicians, there are other legitimate conditions than those Kennedy cited that are legal in states for medical marijuana. "Some of my patients who have AIDS … get very nauseous with the medicines they take," and therefore are approved to use medical marijuana, Dr. Rich said. Our ruling Former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy said that "eighty percent of those who have applied for licenses have no cancer, no Parkinson’s disease or glaucoma" and that "they have nothing you would associate [with] the use of medical marijuana." Kennedy is right about the comparatively small percentage of medical-marijuana patients who use it for the conditions he named. But he is wrong that most of those using the drug do so for conditions not associated with it. In fact, states with medical marijuana laws allow use for chronic and severe pain -- the most common conditions cited by patients. Does everyone who has permission to use medical marijuana actually have a true medical need for it? We don’t know, but neither does Kennedy. We rate the statement Half True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Patrick Kennedy	None	None	None	2013-02-03T00:01:00	2013-01-08	['None']
-snes-03908	A transcript documents that Donald Trump gave a self-aggrandizing toast at his daughter Ivanka's wedding.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-wedding-toast/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Donald Trump’s Self-Aggrandizing Wedding Toast to His Daughter	30 September 2016	None	['Ivanka_Trump', 'Donald_Trump']
-tron-00756	Robin Williams Dead	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/robin-williams-dead/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Robin Williams Dead	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-obry-00048	As the next biennial budget proposal approaches, funding for transportation projects have hit a bump in the road. The Wisconsin Department of Transportation operates from three main revenue sources – federal funding, sources of state revenue like the gas tax and vehicle registration fees and bonding. As a projected $1 billion budget shortfall looms over the state’s Transportation Fund, GOP Assembly leaders and Gov. Scott Walker have continuously sparred over how to remedy the issue. 	mostly_false	https://observatory.journalism.wisc.edu/2016/11/14/state-representative-misrepresents-transportation-budget-figures/	None	None	None	Madeline Sweitzer	None	State representative misrepresents transportation budget figures	January 9, 2017	None	['Scott_Walker_(politician)', 'Wisconsin_Department_of_Transportation']
-pose-00127	"As Obama removes our combat brigades from Iraq, he will send at least two additional brigades to Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent. He will also provide our armed forces with the reset capability that they need. He will replace essential equipment, and he will ensure that our men and women in uniform get the care and support they have earned."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/134/send-two-additional-brigades-to-afghanistan/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Send two additional brigades to Afghanistan	2010-01-07T13:26:49	None	['Afghanistan', 'Iraq', 'Taliban', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-11513	"I have been much tougher on Russia than Obama, just look at the facts. Total Fake News!"	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/feb/20/donald-trump/has-donald-trump-been-much-tougher-russia-barack-o/	Amid swelling evidence of Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, President Donald Trump pushed back against critics who say he's given the Kremlin a free pass. In one tweet on Feb. 20, Trump said, "I have been much tougher on Russia than Obama, just look at the facts. Total Fake News!" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com The tweet immediately drew guffaws among media commentators and on social media, who quickly plucked examples of Trump downplaying evidence of a far-reaching effort by Russia to meddle in the election. (Just a day earlier, we gave Trump a Pants on Fire for tweeting that he "never said Russia did not meddle in the election.") When we looked at the past decade of U.S.-Russia policy, however, we found a more nuanced picture. Tougher government policies implemented under President Barack Obama have largely continued under Trump, even though they were often overshadowed — and perhaps undercut — by Trump’s friendly remarks and tweets toward Russia and President Vladimir Putin. The election-meddling conflict The consensus among experts is that Obama was more forceful than Trump has been to date on countering election meddling. "The key difference from Obama was (Trump’s) unwillingness to take the meddling issue head on," said Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. As we’ve noted in previous fact-checks, the Obama administration took actions before and after Election Day. Prior to the election, the Obama administration publicly named the Russian government as the culprit, confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin in person, and worked to secure U.S. election infrastructure — all while intelligence agencies investigated the issue. But the Obama administration’s most significant retaliatory measure against Russia came after Trump’s electoral win. On Dec. 29, 2016, Obama ordered 35 Russian diplomats and suspected intelligence agents to leave the United States, and he also imposed narrow sanctions on some Russian individuals and organizations. Trump, on the other hand, has cast doubt on Russia’s election meddling and repeated Putin’s denials of his government’s involvement. "The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to undermine the credibility of the FBI and intelligence agencies in their investigation and assessment of the threat to the integrity of U.S. elections by Russian operatives," said Yoshiko Herrera, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Herrera added that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking into whether the Trump administration crossed the line into obstruction of justice by trying to impede the investigation of the Russian threat to the American electoral system. While some experts noted that Trump signed a law calling for new sanctions against Russia in response to its interference with the election, they added that the legislation was hardly the product of Trump’s hardline advocacy. Congress largely passed the bill — with veto-proof majorities — in response to Trump’s downplaying of the meddling question and his seeming interest in lifting sanctions against Russia, Sestanovich said. When it came time to sign the bill into law in August, Trump did so grudgingly. He expressed significant reservations, saying it was "seriously flawed" because it usurped the executive branch’s negotiating authority. Matthew Kroenig, an associate professor in the Department of Government and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, said Trump had a point with his reservations about the legislative package, noting that the Obama administration made similar arguments that congressional sanctions against Iran infringed on the executive's authority to set foreign policy. Several experts said the White House has been hesitant to implement the sanctions. Sestanovich characterized its implementation as "slow and half-hearted." In late January, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told lawmakers the administration would apply sanctions to a new list of Russian oligarchs and senior government officials. "The Trump administration didn’t provide the list of who they apply to until very late," Herrera said. "That’s a clear sign of foot-dragging by the White House." Susanne Wengle, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, agreed that Trump "has not been proactive or voiced strong opposition to Russian involvement in U.S. politics," while Obama did. However, she noted that the Trump administration has not gone so far as to reverse Obama-era laws and regulations, including the Magnitsky Act, which targeted high-ranking Russians with sanctions. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to President Barack Obama in Hangzhou, China on Sept. 5, 2016. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool via AP) Geopolitical relations The White House provided some examples of policies broader than the reaction to election meddling. Judging the tweet based on the administration's geopolitical policies makes the analysis a bit more complicated. There’s a crucial dividing line for U.S. policy toward Russia — early 2014, when Russia annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea. Before that, the United States sought common ground with Russia. After that, Russia was seen in a more adversarial way. During the early years of Obama’s presidency, and especially during the Russian presidential interregnum of Dmitry Medvedev, the United States sought a "reset" with Russia and managed to hammer out several accomplishments, including a nuclear-arms deal. "Obama's first national security strategy only mentioned Russia as a potential partner, never as a possible threat," Kroenig said. "He promised in the famous ‘hot mic’ episode that he would have ‘flexibility’ to make concessions on missile defense after the (2012) election. He refused to intervene in Syria in part because his team feared direct conflict with Russia. He refused to provide lethal aid to Ukraine fearing escalation with Russia. And he did not develop a serious strategy to deter the threat of Russian nuclear ‘de-escalation’ strikes." However, an increase in conflict between the two countries, heightened by the return of Putin to the presidency in 2012, prompted skepticism about whether a genuine reset was feasible. Ultimately, the reset died out entirely after the Crimean annexation in 2014. In a very narrow sense, Trump has a case. "If you compare current 2018 U.S. policy to U.S. policy during Obama’s first term, then the U.S. is clearly ‘tougher’ on Russia now," said Dan Nexon, an associate professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. After 2014, however, Obama’s Russia policy stiffened considerably. These included a rapid set of sanctions on people and enterprises in March 2014 following the Crimean annexation, and sector-based sanctions on Russia in July 2014 following continued Russian military activities in eastern Ukraine, said Anders Åslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Later, Obama’s actions included the expulsion of Russian diplomats in December 2016, the closing of Russian compounds, and a variety of statements critical of Russia and Putin. Disentangling Trump’s comments from his administration’s policies Trump’s rhetoric has consistently indicated warmth and trust toward Russia and Putin, and Trump has also sent mixed signals about the U.S. commitment to NATO. On the other hand, post-2014 U.S. policy aimed at Russia has chugged forward in important ways since Trump became president — despite his rhetoric. "The rest of the executive branch and Congress have actually taken a few tough stands against Russia during the last year," said Susan H. Allen, director of the Center for Peacemaking Practice at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Among them, Kroening said, are a boost in funding for the European Reassurance Initiative, a security program that began under Obama; the development of new, low-yield nuclear capabilities to deter Russian nuclear attack; upgrades for missile defenses; and an approval of Montenegro’s bid to join NATO, which had been in the works for years. The Trump administration also slapped new sanctions on five Russians and Chechens over human rights abuses. Trump’s two highest-profile acts challenging Russia were his cruise missile attack against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, a Russian ally, and his approval of lethal arms sales to Ukraine. In both of those cases, Trump went further than Obama did, though it remains to be seen how thoroughly the administration will follow through on both developments. To the extent that Trump’s policies against Russia have met or exceeded Obama’s post-2014 policies, the credit goes more to his agencies and Congress, experts said. These policies are ones that "hawkish military types in his orbit like, and were not likely from his own initiative," said Wengle, the University of Notre Dame professor. Our ruling Trump said, "I have been much tougher on Russia than Obama, just look at the facts. Total Fake News!" There’s broad agreement that on election meddling, Obama’s actions — while arguably insufficient to the threat at hand — were stronger than Trump’s. On a broader geopolitical level, there has been a significant degree of consistency between the Obama and Trump administrations in actual U.S. policy, and even a few examples where Trump has gone further than Obama did. That said, Trump’s own record of Russia- and Putin-friendly comments have sent contrary messages about U.S. policy toward Russia. We rate Trump’s statement Mostly False. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-02-20T17:16:40	2018-02-20	['Russia', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-15262	Since Volvo spurned Georgia for South Carolina in early May, some 3,455 jobs promising more than $800 million in investments have come to the Peach State.	true	/georgia/statements/2015/jul/31/chris-riley/numbers-back-rosy-jobs-claim-georgia/	Job creation was one of the main issues in Gov. Nathan Deal’s successful re-election bid last year, with wins from the state’s focus on recruiting automakers a key element of the talk. Years of effort paid off with big headlines when Porsche North America expanded its headquarters here. The headlines got bigger earlier this year when Mercedes-Benz announced metro Atlanta would become the new home of its U.S. headquarters. But in May, the tone of the big news changed when Volvo rejected Georgia and went with South Carolina for a new $500 million factory that will employ 4,000 workers. State leaders were disappointed but called it a speed bump, not a crash, and pledged to focus on other economic development projects. This month, Deal’s chief of staff, Chris Riley, repeated the point. Since the May 11 Volvo announcement, Riley said those other projects have brought more than $800 million in investments and the promise of 3,455 jobs. "Sometimes the home runs look good," Riley said. "But it’s the singles and doubles that really add up." Mixed sports and driving metaphors aside, did Georgia really manage to bring in even more investment than the Volvo factory promised? We wanted to see the details. Riley was unavailable for comment, but a spokeswoman for Deal’s office said the governor’s top aide drew the numbers from the state’s Department of Economic Development. The agency is responsible for planning and mobilizing state incentives and other resources to attract new business and expand existing operations. The big pitches generate big numbers, in dollars and in jobs, and big headlines. With Mercedes-Benz, for instance, the state offered an incentives package worth $23.3 million. Taken with Fulton County’s property tax break worth $4 million for the next decade, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution calculated that package translated into incentives of $28,750 per job for the 950 total employees that will work in the new Sandy Springs headquarters. The smaller headlines, if they made news at all, were the smaller projects that Riley mentioned. The Economic Development Department keeps track of all of its work, though it only announces named projects when firms agree. Some expansions, for instance, are kept mum so competitors don’t learn of investments that put a firm at a disadvantage, department spokeswoman Stefanie Paupeck Harper said. But the department showed PolitiFact Georgia its tally, broken down by region and type of work when firm names are not released. Between May 11 and Riley’s statement, the department tallied 3,728 jobs – or 273 more than Riley claimed. Of that total, 300 came on the same day that Volvo spurned Georgia. Half of them are with an unnamed food processing expansion project in the 10-county region south and west of metro Atlanta. Named on the list: 100 manufacturing jobs coming with the expansion of MI Metals in Jenkins County; 100 software/tech jobs from Courion moving its headquarters from Massachusetts to Roswell; 200 automotive manufacturing jobs coming with German auto supplier NIFCO KTW’s construction of a plant in Toccoa; and 400 software jobs with the expansion of the Brazilian IT provider Stefanini in Atlanta. We found one error in the tally. The Economic Development Department counts 450 jobs with the relocation of Sage, a British software firm, while the official press releases list 400 jobs. Yet even without those 50 jobs, the tally grew to 3,871 jobs and $902 million in investment by the time we talked to Chris Carr, the state economic development commissioner, on July 23. Among the latest jobs: 120 positions (and $5.5 million in investment) with the relocation of the Dutch firm CSM Bakery Solutions to Sandy Springs. "Obviously, we tried to be aggressive with Volvo, but we are aggressive with smaller companies, too, because with the different regions, the impact is seen all over Georgia," Carr said. "It’s a fun thing to watch." That means the data back up Riley's claim, with one notable caveat. All the projects must invest and hire as promised to receive the incentives, but the timelines vary based on the project, Carr said. None of those extend beyond about eight years, Carr said. But the different deals mean that Georgia has not added nearly twice as many jobs since March, when Volvo said it was going to South Carolina. Then again, it’s not as if Volvo has already set up shop in the Palmetto State and added those jobs. It has years to get to its promise, known in the paperwork as "up to 4,000 jobs." So, in that frame, it means Riley was comparing apples to apples when he made his claim. And the point, Deal spokesman Brian Robinson said, was clear. "We all love the megadeals. They spread news about our state and our great business climate here," Robinson said. "But the jobs that don’t make the headlines present just as much economic security and opportunity for some Georgians, somewhere," he added. "Every Georgian has a stake in each one of these deals." Our ruling State officials promised that Georgia’s momentum for attracting new business would not falter following the loss of a $500 million Volvo plant to rival South Carolina in May. Gov. Nathan Deal’s chief of staff said in July that smaller deals since the Volvo project have led to the promise of 3,455 jobs and $800 million in investment statewide. State economic development data show Chris Riley was low in his tally. Even with an error in the data, Georgia can count nearly as many jobs and significantly more in investment than was promised by Volvo. We rate his claim True.	None	Chris Riley	None	None	None	2015-07-31T00:00:00	2015-07-17	['Georgia_(U.S._state)', 'South_Carolina']
-tron-02176	Prominent U.S. Senators and Mayors Outed As Members of KKK by Anonymous	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/prominent-u-s-senators-and-mayors-outed-as-members-of-kkk-by-anonymous/	None	internet	None	None	None	Prominent U.S. Senators and Mayors Outed As Members of KKK by Anonymous	Nov 3, 2015	None	['United_States']
-tron-00639	Nike Wouldn’t Let Steph Curry Put Bible Passage on Shoes	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/nike-wouldnt-let-steph-curry-put-bible-passage-shoes/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Nike Wouldn’t Let Steph Curry Put Bible Passage on Shoes	Mar 2, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-14952	Says Denmark’s suicide rate has been about twice as high as the United States’ over the past five decades.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/23/viral-image/internet-graphic-says-suicide-rate-much-higher-den/	Recently, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has been pointing to Denmark as an example of an economically just country, including a mention in the first Democratic presidential debate. Since then, an Internet graphic has been circulating that compares the United States to Denmark, purportedly in the form of a first-hand account by a Danish teacher. The description is unflattering to Denmark, and a number of readers have asked us to take a look at it. The graphic talks about excessive taxes and crushing personal debt for residents of Denmark, but one element that caught our eye is a claim about suicide rates. "Denmark’s suicide rate has averaged 20.8 per 100,000 (people) during the last five decades, with its highest level of 32," the graphic states. "The American suicide rate averaged only 11.1 (per 100,000 people) during the last five decades and has never exceeded 12.7." We decided to take a closer look. We should first note that Snopes.com recently broke down each of the meme’s statistical claims. It found a mixed bag -- some claims were largely accurate, but many statements were unsupported or false. According to Scopes, the meme was originally posted on a blog called The Federalist Papers on Oct. 20, and seemed to be a cheeky response to an earlier meme that was favorable toward Denmark, reproduced below: Since the meme references "the last five decades," we looked at the trends over that period from this chart by the World Health Organization. Denmark’s suicide rate (per 100,000 people) 1960: 20 1970: 22 1980: 32 1990: 24 2000: 14 2012: 8.8 Source: The World Health Organization United States’ suicide rate (per 100,000 people) 1960: 10.6 1970: 11.5 1980: 11.8 1990: 12.4 2000: 10.4 2012: 12.1 Source: The World Health Organization Using those numbers, Denmark’s average suicide rate over the last five decades is indeed about 20 people per 100,000. The average U.S. suicide rate in that timeframe is 11.5 people per 100,000. So the graphic has offered fairly accurate numbers. But a closer look at the data shows that they are presented in a misleading way. Reading the meme, one would think that Denmark has a much bigger suicide problem than the United States does. In reality, the latest statistics show exactly the opposite. Danish suicide rates peaked in the 1980s and have fallen significantly since then -- by almost three-quarters. By contrast, the U.S. rate has been largely static since the 1960s, rising modestly between 2000 and 2012. So by 2012, Denmark’s suicide rate was lower than the United States, not higher -- 8.8 people per 100,000 in Denmark, compared to 12.1 per 100,000 in the United States. When we reached Mikkel Clair Nissen, whose website was cited on the graphic, he said this line of query has interested him since Oprah Winfrey visited Denmark in 2009 and called Danes the happiest people in the world. To him, this clashed with Denmark’s historically high suicide rate. Nissen attributes more recent declines to the widespread use of antidepressants. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show Denmark with the highest rate of antidepressant use -- something that he expresses reservations about in his writings. It may be true that Denmark has reduced its suicide rate in part due to antidepressant use, but this seems tangential to the claim we’re checking -- that Denmark has a bigger suicide problem than the United States does. Our ruling An Internet graphic critical of Denmark claimed that Denmark’s suicide rate has been about twice as high as the United States’ over the past five decades. The numbers are accurate, but in the course of making a broader case against Denmark, the data is cherry-picked to make it seem as if Denmark has a much higher suicide rate than the United States. In reality, the rate today is about 50 percent higher in the United States, and in the United States the rate has been increasing somewhat in recent years. The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.	None	Viral image	None	None	None	2015-10-23T14:28:10	2015-10-22	['United_States']
-pomt-14387	"You know what Truman said, ‘You want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.’ "	false	/ohio/statements/2016/mar/17/john-kasich/john-kasich-misquotes-truman-wins-ohio-anyway/	Ohio Gov. John Kasich fell into a common trap while campaigning in his home state of Ohio the day before the primary election. He repeated a famous saying without checking it first. Explaining how he planned to fend off outside interests in his decision-making, the Republican presidential candidate invoked the 33rd president, saying, "You know what Truman said -- ‘You want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.’ " It does sound like one of the folksy, farm-charm quips for which Harry S. Truman is known. He’s the leader whose desk displayed the plaque reading, "The buck stops here." But did Truman really say, "You want a friend in Washington, buy a dog?' " Or is it a myth that solidified through repetition, like a thousand witticisms wrongly attributed to George Carlin in email chains? PITCH IN $1, HELP POLITIFACT GET $15,000 IN MATCHING FUNDS TO HIRE A FACT-CHECKER The definitive information comes from the historians at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Sam Rushay, supervisory archivist, told us, "We have never been able to confirm or verify that President Truman ever wrote or said, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,’ a quote that is often attributed to him." The most often cited source for the non-quote is from a work of fiction. In the play Give ‘em Hell, Harry, written by Samuel Gallu in 1975, Truman’s character says, "You want a friend in life, get a dog!" Previous investigators have found the mistake in a 1987 op-ed in the New York Times, and in a 1989 column by the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. In both cases, the writers credited the quote to the real Truman, and substituted the word "Washington" for "life." History proves that Truman was no fan of dogs. The Presidential Pet Museum’s website includes a page on "President Truman’s Unwanted Dog, Feller," given to the White House as a gift from a supporter. The president gave the puppy away to his doctor, which didn’t play well in the press. A reporter asked Truman, "Whatever happened to Feller?" "To what?" Truman said. "Feller, the puppy," the reporter said. "Oh, he’s around," Truman answered. Our ruling Kasich told an Ohio crowd, "You know what Truman said, ‘You want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.’ " Though that statement is often attributed to Truman, there’s no evidence Truman ever actually said that. We rate Kasich’s statement False.	None	John Kasich	None	None	None	2016-03-17T10:37:13	2016-03-14	['Washington,_D.C.', 'Harry_S._Truman']
-tron-02342	Anti War Activist Cindy Sheehan did not really rear her Army Soldier son	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cindy_sheehan/	None	military	None	None	None	Anti War Activist Cindy Sheehan did not really rear her Army Soldier son	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-00431	A photograph shows a Border Patrol agent following President Donald Trump's order to forcibly separate a child from his family.	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-photograph-border-agents-separating-children/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Does This Photograph Show Border Agents Forcibly Separating Children From Families?	21 June 2018	None	['United_States_Border_Patrol', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-11298	Claims to be endorsed by the Democratic Party.	false	/north-carolina/statements/2018/apr/20/duane-hall/democrat-touts-party-endorsement-party-we-want-you/	Since state Rep. Duane Hall won his first election in 2012, his name has been accompanied by the letter "D" for Democrat. But this year, it appears that he’s misusing the party label. Hall, a Raleigh attorney, is serving his third term representing state House District 11 and is seeking a fourth. But to earn it, he’ll first have to beat challenger Allison Dahle in the May 8 Democratic primary. Now, perhaps to reinforce his status as the strongest Democrat in the race, Hall is circulating mailers that suggest he’s endorsed by the Democratic Party. One mailer boasts that Hall is "making education priority one." And at the bottom, the words "endorsed by" accompany a blue "D" with a circle around it. The logo is almost identical to the one used by the Democratic National Committee. Hall indeed received the support of Democrats in previous elections. The Wake County Democratic Party included Hall’s name on voter guides at the polls in the 2014 and 2016 general election, said Virginia Reed, the group’s executive director. "He has been listed on our Democratic candidate slate cards in the past which could be considered an implied endorsement," Reed said. And the North Carolina Democratic Party promoted Hall in a similar manner, party spokesman Robert Howard said. No primary endorsements However, PolitiFact North Carolina found that neither the Wake County Democratic Party, the NC Democratic Party nor the DNC have endorsed Hall in his primary race against Dahle. On Wednesday, each party organization told PolitiFact that they don’t endorse any candidates in primary races. "We have not endorsed any 2018 candidates and will not until after May 8th," Reed said on behalf of the county party. "The state party supports Democratic candidates in the general election but does not typically endorse legislative candidates in the traditional sense, leaving that to local and county parties," Howard said. In fact, the state party has been the opposite of supportive of Hall this year. On Feb. 28, party chairman Wayne Goodwin called on Hall to resign from the legislature because he faced allegations of sexual misconduct. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Calls to resign "Sexual harassment is never acceptable – no matter the party or politics. These are serious allegations and Representative Hall should step down," Goodwin said in a statement. "The North Carolina Democratic Party has no tolerance for sexual harassment and we continue to encourage women to speak out against inappropriate behavior of any kind." Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, also called Hall to resign. Hall, for his part, denied that he has harassed anyone. Nonetheless, on Thursday, the DNC joined the state party in calling for Hall to resign. "The DNC does not endorse candidates running in contested primaries and we have not endorsed Duane Hall in North Carolina. We were not informed, nor did we approve the use of our logo in his mailer," Francisco Pelayo, DNC director of Hispanic media and regional press secretary, wrote in an email. "We take sexual harassment very seriously and we are very concerned by the allegations against Hall. We stand with Governor Cooper’s and NCDP’s calls for him to step down," Pelayo wrote. He added that he’s not aware of any time that the DNC has previously endorsed Hall. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com It’s unclear why Hall is using the "D" logo. He didn’t respond to an email or voicemails left by a reporter. What is clear is that the national, state and county parties haven’t endorsed him this year. Our ruling Hall’s mailer suggests that he’s endorsed by the Democratic Party. The local and state parties have promoted him in the past. But the Wake County Democratic Party, NC Democratic Party and Democratic National Committee all denied making any primary endorsements at all. Not only are the parties not endorsing him, the NCDP and DNC have called on him to step down. We rate this claim False. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Duane Hall	None	None	None	2018-04-20T13:19:58	2018-04-20	['None']
-pomt-03803	"Already, a prototype driverless car has traveled more than 300,000 miles in the crowded maze of California streets without a single accident."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2013/mar/25/jeb-bush/driverless-car-has-gone-300000-miles-without-accid/	Imagine while fighting through traffic that you could paint your toenails, play the guitar or read a novel -- but safely, because the car would be doing all the driving. We’re not talking about a Jetsons make-believe scenario here: Several companies have autonomous or self-driving cars in the works. (Spoiler alert: the scenario we describe could be years away, and you might have to pay attention enough to grab the wheel.) Former Gov. Jeb Bush mentioned such cars as an example of technological innovations during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 15, 2013. "Driverless vehicles will flawlessly move people and products across our highways, never getting lost, never having accidents," said Bush, a potential Republican 2016 presidential candidate. "Already, a prototype driverless car has traveled more than 300,000 miles in the crowded maze of California streets without a single accident." Has a driverless car really traveled 300,000 miles on crowded California streets without a single accident? PolitiFact hit the virtual road to find out. A ride in a driverless car Several car companies are developing so-called autonomous or self-driving cars operated by computers. But they may not be publicly available for at least a decade if not longer. Among the challenges are the legal questions of who faces liability when a driverless crashes, as well as bringing down the $100,000 price tag for the technology. But the technology is cool. Check out this Google video of a blind man taking a ride in the driver’s seat to Taco Bell ("Look ma no hands!"). A recent Forbes story offered a good first-hand account of riding at 65 miles per hour around Silicon Valley in a Lexus equipped with Google’s technology. When a slow-moving truck merged onto the highway, the Google car hit the brakes on its own; the car also tracked a tailgater and a motorcyclist weaving in traffic. The article explained that Google engineers gather information about the route and add it to maps before the self-driving takes off. "When it’s the autonomous vehicle’s turn to drive, it compares the data it is acquiring from all those sensors and cameras to the previously recorded data," Forbes reported. "That helps it differentiate a pedestrian from a light pole." The car has limitations. A Google official said that the car can’t handle heavy rain and or snow-covered roads, and engineers are working on how to handle encountering a stalled car or a tire in the middle of the road. Florida, California and Nevada have all passed laws that allow testers to operate so-called autonomous cars. In 2012, the Florida Legislature passed a law that requires humans in the cars to intervene if necessary. Testers must submit proof of $5 million in insurance. As of March 21, no testers have registered, said Leslie Palmer, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Bush’s spokeswoman referred us to an August 2012 Google blog: "Our vehicles, of which about a dozen are on the road at any given time, have now completed more than 300,000 miles of testing. They’ve covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn’t been a single accident under computer control." Of those 300,000 miles, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said: "I think we’ve done 50,000 miles now without safety critical intervention. But that’s not good enough…The self-driving car is going to face greater scrutiny than any human would. And I think that’s appropriate." A Google spokesman gave PolitiFact Florida a statement after Bush’s speech that the cars have actually driven over 500,000 miles on public roads. A Google car crash -- near headquarters Google did face scrutiny in August 2011 when several blogs and news reports highlighted a car crash involving such a car near Google’s Mountain View headquarters. "This photo of what looks like a minor case of Prius-on-Prius vehicular violence may actually be a piece of automotive history: the first accident caused by Google's self-driving car. Whose name should the cop write down on the ticket?" wrote the Jalopnik blog. But Google said a human being was manually controlling the car when the accident occurred. Mountain View police referred PolitiFact Florida to a Mountain View Voice article which quoted a police spokeswoman: "Since it involved five vehicles, we wanted to make sure there were no injuries and facilitate the exchange of names. Essentially, it was five-car fender-bender. No one reported any injuries and so the officer simply facilitated the exchange of names. No case was taken." The article also said that "Google claims the Google car was in between tests and that the accident was on a road that had not been mapped previously to allow it to drive autonomously on that section of street." Popular Mechanics wrote that it had no reason to doubt Google’s word that a human caused the crash but noted, "With this accident, there's not much to go on besides Google's word." The crash raised the question if companies will provide law enforcement full access to verify if a person was driving at the time of the accident. The only other report of a crash we could find was a New York Times 2010 story that said a Google car was rear-ended at a traffic light. Being rear-ended usually means the other driver is considered at fault. Experts raise some caveats about the cars We ran Bush’s claim by Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, who wrote a paper on the legality of automated cars. (The center publicly discloses its donors, which include Google and some car companies.) He said driverless cars haven’t traveled enough miles yet to prove their safety. Based on the number of car crashes in the United States and the miles traveled, he concluded that Google's cars would need "to drive themselves (by themselves) more than 725,000 representative miles without incident for us to say with 99 percent confidence that they crash less frequently than conventional cars. If we look only at fatal crashes, this minimum skyrockets to 300 million miles. To my knowledge, Google has yet to reach these milestones." Smith said that Bush’s claim is a good faith summary of the media reports; however, it omits some caveats. "These are testers who are being closely supervised by highly trained drivers who do occasionally intervene in the operation," he said. "That is very different from sending a vehicle unmonitored through a variety of road conditions. ... Although Google has logged impressive miles, and demonstrated other statistics that they are more safe than human drivers, that is not publicly documented at this point and there is an incredible amount of research required." He also said we shouldn’t expect cars that function completely without human intervention of some sort. "‘Driverless car’ is probably not the right word for the kind of vehicle we are talking about," he told PolitiFact Florida. "Driving will be shared with a computer either simultaneously or sequentially. A human may need to do some functions of the driver, and the computer may augment functions of humans depending on road conditions and kind of road." Our ruling During his CPAC speech, Bush talked about technological innovations underway and that will occur over the next 100 years. "Already, a prototype driverless car has traveled more than 300,000 miles in the crowded maze of California streets without a single accident," Bush said. We don’t fault Bush for citing the 300,000 figure rather than the recent 500,000 figure, because that higher number only received publicity after the CPAC speech. But technically, Bush was wrong to say that the prototype car has driven in California "without a single accident." We found two accidents, but they both had mitigating factors. One car was rear ended, which suggests another driver was at fault. In another accident, a human was operating the car, at least according to Google. Still, we couldn’t find one incident where a driverless car operating under its own technology clearly caused an accident. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Jeb Bush	None	None	None	2013-03-25T17:26:11	2013-03-15	['California']
-snes-05105	A casting call for a Latina actress to play a "Donald Trump Executive Assistant Supporter" was posted by the republican presidential candidate.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-casting-call/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Donald Trump Isn’t Hiring a Latina Actress to Play His Assistant	8 March 2016	None	['None']
-snes-06193	On average, men think about sex every seven seconds.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thinking-about-sex/	None	Risqué Business	None	Snopes Staff	None	Do Men Think About Sex Every Seven Seconds?	18 April 2002	None	['None']
-vogo-00095	Statement: “Mayor Filner is the CEO of a government organization of almost 20,000 employees, at least half of whom are women,” state Assembly Majority Leader Toni Atkins said in a July 12 press release.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-the-men-and-women-who-work-for-the-city/	Analysis: Last week, several high-profile San Diego Democrats called on Mayor Bob Filner to resign in the midst of mounting sexual harassment allegations.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: The Men and Women Who Work for the City	July 16, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-11671	"Mostly Democrat states refused to hand over data" that could show election fraud.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jan/05/donald-trump/trump-blames-democratic-states-providing-voter-d/	President Donald Trump blamed Democratic states for the demise of his voter fraud commission. "Many mostly Democrat States refused to hand over data from the 2016 Election to the Commission On Voter Fraud," Trump tweeted Jan. 4. "They fought hard that the Commission not see their records or methods because they know that many people are voting illegally. System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D." See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Trump disbanded the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity on Jan. 3 and asked the Department of Homeland Security to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action. The commission was plagued by infighting, multiple lawsuits and pushback from many states. We will fact-check whether it was mostly Democratic states that refused to hand over the data. Many states wouldn’t provide the data In May 2017, Trump issued an executive order establishing the voter fraud commission headed up by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Trump had made repeated misleading claims about massive voter fraud and election rigging during and after the election. While some instances of voter fraud have occurred, national experts have said fraud is isolated and rare. The commission in June asked state election officials for information that included voters' names, registration status, political party affiliation, voting history, partial Social Security numbers. Many of states did agree to provide some data to the commission, although many required that the commission meet certain criteria, such as paying a fee. Still, the commission didn’t get all the data it wanted, even from the states that agreed to comply. The AP found that states that agreed to comply did withhold some details that the commission had sought, such as only releasing information considered public under state law. (Even Kobach said that his state of Kansas couldn’t provide Social Security information because it wasn’t available under state law.) According to the AP as of Oct. 22, the states that denied the request were: California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming. Arizona and Illinois were categorized as undecided. There are several holes in Trump’s argument that is was mostly Democratic states. Some states that denied or didn’t comply with the commission’s request ultimately voted for Trump. Arizona, Kentucky, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wyoming all voted for Trump. That undercuts Trump’s portrayal of Democratic states being the only ones fighting the commission. Some states don’t fall neatly into one partisan category. In Illinois, the bipartisan state board of elections sent a letter to the commission raising concerns and seeking more information. Illinois is generally thought of as a blue state and voted for Clinton, but the board that acted on the Trump commission request includes both Democrats and Republicans. Kentucky, which reliably votes for Republicans in presidential elections and went overwhelmingly for Trump, has an elected Democratic Secretary of State, Alison Lundergan-Grimes. She was the one who officially rejected the commission’s request. Some Republican officials rejected or didn’t comply with the commission’s request. This includes Arizona, North Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming. Ed Murray, the Republican secretary of state in Wyoming, said in July, "I am going to safeguard the privacy of Wyoming’s voters because of my strong belief in a citizen’s right of privacy." He said that elections are the responsibility of the states and the request could lead to federal overreach. North Dakota also does not have voter registration and state law forbids the state from releasing details about voters. In Arizona, Republican Secretary of State Michele Reagan called the commission's request a "hastily organized experiment." Even the states that agreed to comply didn’t provide everything the commission requested. The AP found that states that agreed to comply still withheld some details the commission had sought and only released information considered public under state law. Even Kobach’s own state, Kansas, didn’t allow for the release of Social Security data. Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, a Republican, said he would only disclose public records and not Social Security or driver’s license numbers. "We absolutely will not provide any information that is not already publicly available," he said in July. "The responsibility for the accuracy and fairness of our elections process in Florida lies with us, not with the federal government in Washington, D.C." A final note on the part of Trump’s tweet that said states that didn’t comply did so "because they know that many people are voting illegally." PolitiFact has repeatedly found no evidence of widespread national voter fraud. While we were working on this item the Washington Post’s The Fact Checker published their own analysis and used a different methodology but reached similar conclusions. Our ruling Trump tweeted that "mostly Democrat states refused to hand over data." While there are multiple ways to define states as Democratic -- and the White House didn’t explain the definition Trump was using -- he has a point that a variety of predominantly Democratic states were among the states that went the furthest in opposing the commission’s request. They include California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico and Vermont. However, six states won by Trump -- Kentucky, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wyoming and Arizona -- didn’t comply with the commission’s request, and other Republican states complied only in part with the commission’s request. We rate this claim Half True. ' See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-01-05T11:55:48	2018-01-04	['None']
-mpws-00015	If you didn’t think Gov. Mark Dayton’s decision to raise pay for his commissioners would be a 2016 campaign issue, think again. At least one political group is already minting and sending fliers to Senate districts where Democrats will be up for re-election next year. One is landing in the mailboxes of Sen. Melisa Franzen’s constituents. Franzen is a Democrat from Edina. “Minnesota wages are flat, but political appointees are getting pay raises thanks to legislation supported by Senator Melisa Franzen,” the flier from the GOP-backed Minnesota Action Network flier reads. “This wasn’t the only time she voted to give politicians a pay raise.” According to the flier, Franzen voted to increase her own by 35 percent and for a constitutional amendment to make it easier to raise legislative pay. 	misleading	https://blogs.mprnews.org/capitol-view/2015/02/poligraph-mn-action-network-flier-omits-key-details/	None	None	None	Catharine Richert	None	PoliGraph: MN Action Network flier omits key details	February 27, 2015, 3:15 PM	None	['Minnesota', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'Mark_Dayton', 'Edina,_Minnesota']
-goop-00733	Matt Lauer Returning As “Today” Anchor In “Secret Comeback,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/matt-lauer-today-comeback-return-tv-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Matt Lauer NOT Returning As “Today” Anchor In “Secret Comeback,” Despite Report	10:02 am, June 28, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-07898	In the 1980s, "The lowest income people had the biggest gains."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/03/steve-moore/wall-street-journals-steve-moore-claims-low-income/	Rachel Maddow got into a spirited back-and-forth with Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher show Jan. 21, 2011, over the effect of the Reagan tax cuts and income inequality. Moore got the ball rolling with his comment, "I say the Reagan tax cuts were the greatest economic policy of the last 50 years." Moore said the economy boomed. Maddow said the deficit went up. Moore said the value of assets soared. "Awesome," Maddow said. "What happened to the top first, 1 percent of the country? Their income went up roughly 80 percent." "Everybody’s income went up," Moore said. Maddow began to cite a statistic about the median wage from 1980 to 1990 when Moore interrupted. "The facts are the facts, Rachel. The lowest income people had the biggest gains," Moore said. In a separate item, we're checking Maddow's claim that "From 1980 to 1990, the top 1 percent saw their income go up by roughly 80 percent" while "the median wage in the country over (the same) 10 years went up 3 percent." Here, we're checking Moore's claim that during the 1980s, "The lowest income people had the biggest gains." There are lots of ways to slice income statistics, but neither Maddow nor Moore responded to our e-mails seeking clarification and backup material. So we turned to the U.S. Census and a few economists for input. Gary Burtless, an economist at the centrist to liberal Brookings Institution, said U.S. Census data doesn't back Moore up. According to Census data, when presented in equivalent 2009 dollars, the income among the lowest fifth of the population increased about 6.3 percent (from $10,682 to $11,400). That's the lowest gain compared to other quintiles: 7.9 percent for the second lowest fifth; 8 percent for the middle fifth; 10.5 percent for the fourth fifth, and 20.3 percent in the highest fifth. Incomes rose 28.2 percent among the top 5 percent. "Incomes rose in the bottom, middle, and top portions of the income distribution as Mr. Moore stated, although the income gains were certainly bigger at the top compared with the bottom," Burtless said. "These results clearly show that low-income Americans did not obtain the biggest income gains between 1980 and 1990." According to the U.S. Census, the share of the aggregate income received by families decreased in every quintile except the top quintile (where it increased from 41.1 to 44.3 percent). In other words, the richest Americans held a larger share of all income in 1990 than in 1980. Those are the census figures. Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez also analyzed income via tax data. According to their study, average inflation-adjusted income (pre-tax) per family in the top 1 percent increased from $427,000 in 1980 to $661,000 in 1990. That's a 55 percent increase. Meanwhile, the average income (pre-tax) per family in the bottom 90 percent fell slightly from $30,900 in 1980 to $30,800 in 1990. You can see all of the results in Table A6 of their report. "All economists agree that the 1980s saw a huge increase in inequality," said Saez, an economics professor at the University of California Berkeley. There was "increased concentration at the top and big losses at the bottom (especially during the early 1980s recession)." So Moore can make a credible argument -- based on Census data -- that all incomes rose during the 1980s, but the data does not support his claim that the lowest income people had the biggest gains. To the contrary, the lowest income people had the smallest gains. We rule Moore's claim False.	None	Steve Moore	None	None	None	2011-02-03T12:37:44	2011-02-02	['None']
-goop-01865	Gwyneth Paltrow To Profit Off Wedding?	2	https://www.gossipcop.com/gwyneth-paltrow-wedding-profit-brad-falchuk-goop/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Gwyneth Paltrow To Profit Off Wedding?	12:53 pm, January 10, 2018	None	['None']
-pose-00690	Chafee "supports . . . protecting [gay, bisexual and transgender] youth from bullying and harassment."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/promises/linc-o-meter/promise/720/support-anti-bullying-legislation-protect-gay-bi/	None	linc-o-meter	Lincoln Chafee	None	None	Support anti-bullying legislation, protect gay, bisexual and transgender youths in schools	2012-04-23T20:10:49	None	['None']
-snes-02217	Charles Manson has been granted parole and will soon be released from prison.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/parole-call/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Charles Manson Granted Parole?	6 June 2014	None	['Charles_Manson']
-snes-05775	The kidnapping, string of murders, and wood chipper incident portrayed in the film "Fargo" actually took place in Minnesota in 1987.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fargo/	None	Entertainment	None	Snopes Staff	None	Was ‘Fargo’ Based on a True Story?	8 June 1998	None	['Minnesota', 'Fargo,_North_Dakota']
-snes-05361	A cannabis drug trial in France led to serious adverse effects in several subjects.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/botched-medical-cannabis-trial-in-france/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Botched Medical Cannabis Trial in France?	15 January 2016	None	['France']
-pomt-11882	Says West Virginia is "down to around 50 percent of the adult workers who are actually working now because of addiction or conviction."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/27/joe-manchin/opioid-epidemic-likely-hurting-west-virginias-work/	The Democratic senator from West Virginia — where the opioid overdose death rate ranked highest in the nation in 2015 — connected the state’s opioid use with its battered workforce. Sen. Joe Manchin told MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt that the opioid crisis is destroying families and wrecking the state’s economic future. "I've got the greatest workers in the world," Manchin said on Oct. 22. "But I'm down to around 50 percent of the adult workers who are actually working now because of addiction or conviction." We wondered to what extent opioids are to blame for low employment in West Virginia. Manchin’s office told us he learned about the effect opioid abuse has on the state’s employment through "hundreds of meetings with business executives, state workforce and labor experts, at his job fairs and with community leaders across the state." The office also clarified Manchin’s comment, saying people who struggle with addiction or have been convicted in crimes related to opioid use in the past often have trouble getting jobs. Experts agreed that the opioid crisis affects employment rates in West Virginia, but they don’t know how much. Measuring the workforce Manchin is about on the mark when he says about half of West Virginia’s adults are employed. What’s less certain is the role opioid abuse plays. To measure this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics looks at two key figures: the employment-population ratio (the percentage of people over the age of 16 who are employed) and the labor force participation rate (the percentage of people over the age of 16 who are either employed or actively looking for a job). The latest estimates place West Virginia at a 50.4 percent employment-population ratio and a 53.1 percent labor force participation rate in September. By comparison, the United States’ employment-participation ratio in September was at 60.4 percent and the labor force participation rate was 63.1 percent. (Because the labor force doesn’t typically include students and retirees, college towns or populations with more elderly individuals might sometimes appear to have lower workforce participation.) West Virginia has historically had one of the lowest labor participation rates in the United States. Since the late 1970s, as far back as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data on labor participation rates goes, the state’s rate has remained below 58 percent. Similarly, the employment-population ratio has not exceeded 55 percent. A 2015 study of West Virginia’s labor participation rate conducted by the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy found that the state’s higher-than-average elderly population, percentage of people on work disability and poor overall health were major factors in the participation rate. In addition, lower rates of educational attainment beyond a high school degree had prevented young workers from obtaining jobs that require more education. Where does that leave opioid addiction? Experts say that’s an unanswered question. "While I'm sure addiction and the opioid crisis have played a role in hurting West Virginia's workforce, I'm not sure you can attribute much of the state's decline to it," said Sean O’Leary, a senior policy analyst with the center. He also noted that the state’s recent decline coincides with the national recession. The opioid epidemic’s effect on labor At the national level, a September 2017 paper out of Princeton University suggested opioid use could account for 20 percent of the drop in men’s labor force participation from 1999 to 2015 and 25 percent of the decline in women’s participation. And the problem has drawn the attention of Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, who testified to the epidemic’s effects on national labor during a July 13 Senate Banking Committee meeting. "I do think it is related to declining labor force participation among prime-age workers," Yellen said. "I don’t know if it’s causal or if it’s a symptom of long-running economic maladies that have affected these communities and particularly affected workers who have seen their job opportunities decline." But there is no specific research related to West Virginia. Anecdotal evidence suggests employers nationwide have struggled in the past several years to find potential workers who are drug-free and healthy enough to perform required job tasks. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland also cited the problem in a September 2016 report on West Virginia, which said local employers contacted by the reserve bank indicated "educational attainment and social factors such as frequent opioid and heroin use" limited the employers from finding the workers they need. Still, the exact statistical impact for the state remains unclear. Jessica Ice, an assistant professor at West Virginia University’s Institute for Labor Studies and Research, said she would be hesitant to attribute the entire decline in employment to opioids. "I think we are still learning about the extent of the problem here as the epidemic continues to wreak havoc on the state of West Virginia," Ice said. "While surely there is an impact I cannot even say what came first, disability and then prescription drug abuse? Hopelessness over the state of the economy and resorting to drugs to cope?" Our ruling Manchin said the reason for the decline of working adults in West Virginia to "around 50 percent" of adults is due to the state’s opioid epidemic. His estimate of workforce participation is correct, and recent research at the national level suggests opioids have hurt workers and employers looking for healthy employees. Experts on West Virginia’s economy think the health crisis has affected participation in the workforce; they just don’t yet know to what extent. In any event, a number of other factors are likely driving the decline. Manchin’s claim is partially accurate, but lacks context that might give a different understanding of the data. We rate this statement Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Joe Manchin	None	None	None	2017-10-27T10:37:46	2017-10-22	['None']
-pomt-01809	"I’m running the second-largest county district attorney’s office … at 1985 staffing levels."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2014/jul/23/ismael-ozanne/attorney-general-candidate-says-hes-running-distri/	In the run-up to the Aug. 12, 2014 primary election for state attorney general, Democrat Ismael Ozanne has stressed his experience as the Dane County district attorney and as a former deputy secretary of the state Department of Corrections. On June 7, 2014, near the end of a speech he gave at the state Democratic Party convention, Ozanne said: "And I’m running the second-largest county district attorney’s office. And I’ve talked to you about some of the innovations that we’re doing, some of the things that we’re doing to be proactive. But I’m doing that at 1985 staffing levels. So, you think about that. That’s leadership. That’s experience. I’m doing more with less in a county that’s grown 46 percent, where law enforcement’s grown 103 percent. We are moving forward." It’s no surprise that the population of Dane County, home to Madison, has been growing and that court caseloads would be higher, as well. So, is the DA’s office there still operating with the same number of staff it did nearly three decades ago? Prosecutor funding In Wisconsin, the elected district attorneys and the prosecutors they hire primarily prosecute felony and misdemeanor crimes, as well juvenile cases, in circuit court. They were county employees until 1990, after a change in state law made them state employees. The change was made largely as a means of providing local property tax relief and reducing turnover in prosecutor positions, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. As a result, the vast majority of prosecutor positions in the district attorney offices is determined through the state budget process. Some county district attorney offices also get prosecutors via state- or federally funded grants, which come and go. Concerns have been raised for years about the number of prosecutors. A state Legislative Audit Bureau analysis done in 2007 noted that the state employed 425 district attorney prosecutors but -- based on the number and types of cases prosecuted as analyzed by the State Prosecutors Office -- should employ 542. That gap has grown, according to a more recent analysis. The State Prosecutors Office says there were still 425 district attorney prosecutors as of April 2014, but there should be 555. Ozanne's numbers As for Ozanne’s claim, he said he was referring to the prosecutor positions in his office. To back the claim, his campaign initially cited a chart on the website of the Dane County district attorney's office, which lists the number of prosecutors annually back from 1985 through 2011. Separately, we obtained a 1985 budget document from the county’s budget office. Both indicate the Dane County DA’s office had 26 prosecutors in 1985. The number remained in the high 20s to low 30s well into the 1990s before peaking at 34 in both 1999 and 2003, according to the chart. The low was 25 prosecutors in 2010. The current number, however, is slightly higher than the 26 that there were in 1985. The full-time-equivalent number of prosecutor positions for 2014 is 27.85, according to the State Prosecutors Office. That is nearly two positions, or about 7 percent, more than Dane County’s 1985 total. By comparison, Milwaukee County had 86 prosecutors in 1990 (the oldest complete data available) compared to 119.5 in 2014, according to the State Prosecutors Office. But two other important factors bear on Ozanne’s claim. 1. The Dane County DA's office has used more state-paid special prosecutors than any other county in each year since 2012 (Ozanne became DA in August 2010), according to the State Prosecutors Office. So far in 2014, it has used six special prosecutors, including two who are covering extended leaves; that would technically bump its total to 29.85 prosecutors for 2014, as indicated on information Ozanne’s campaign provided. The state incurs an additional cost to pay the special prosecutors, even though they are not a net addition to the prosecutorial staff. 2. Ozanne’s claim was general -- the level of staffing in his office, rather than specifically the number of prosecutors. We found there are currently 58 non-prosecutors in the DA’s office -- paralegals, investigators, secretaries and others -- which is 41 percent more than the 41 support staff in 1985. Our rating Ozanne said: "I’m running the second-largest county district attorney’s office … at 1985 staffing levels." The Dane County district attorney’s office has a full-time-equivalent of 27.85 prosecutors, just slightly more than the 26 in 1985, but it also regularly utilizes special prosecutors to fill temporary vacancies. And the office has 41 percent more support staff than it did in 1985. We rate Ozanne’s statement Half True.	None	Ismael Ozanne	None	None	None	2014-07-23T05:00:00	2014-06-07	['None']
-goop-00663	Selena Gomez Did Say She’ll Be ‘Single For Life’ After Justin Bieber Engagement, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/selena-gomez-justin-bieber-engagement-single-life/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Selena Gomez Did NOT Say She’ll Be ‘Single For Life’ After Justin Bieber Engagement, Despite Report	4:46 pm, July 10, 2018	None	['None']
-pose-00617	Permanently stop "all tax increases, currently scheduled to take effect January 1, 2011."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/gop-pledge-o-meter/promise/643/make-bush-tax-cuts-permanent-for-all-incomes/	None	gop-pledge-o-meter	John Boehner	None	None	Make Bush tax cuts permanent for all incomes	2010-12-22T09:57:30	None	['None']
-pomt-08509	Says Oregon ranks 43rd in education.	mostly true	/oregon/statements/2010/oct/07/chris-dudley/first-debate-john-kitzhaber-chris-dudley-says-oreg/	During the first, and possibly only, gubernatorial debate, Republican candidate Chris Dudley addressed the need for statewide educational reform. To underscore the necessity, he mentioned -- twice -- that Oregon’s school system ranked 43rd nationally. "I was disappointed that when, in the Race to the Top, Oregon's application, we were graded an F, and then when it was time to reapply we decided not to even do it," Dudley said, referring to a national grant competition funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (better known as the stimulus). "And this is when our school system has been ranked 43rd in the nation. Instead of racing to the top, Oregon has decided to run for the hills. "We have to look at reform. We absolutely have to. When you're at 43rd, you have to look at how do you change it, how do you make it better." Everything Dudley said seemed to track with previous reports in The Oregonian about Race to the Top: Oregon didn’t do too well in the first call for applications and then passed on applying for the second round. But his claim that Oregon ranked 43rd nationally stuck with us -- especially because he kept repeating the claim (we counted five mentions in total). We wondered whether it would hold up to scrutiny. Dudley’s campaign pointed us to Education Week’s most recent Quality Counts, an annual report of the state of education in the United States. A look at the press releasethat accompanied the most recent report bore out Dudley’s claim. Oregon did show up 43rd overall. But, as with most complicated rankings, not everybody thinks Quality Counts offers the best picture of how Oregon stacks up against other states. For instance, Oregon earned its lowest score -- and, in fact, the lowest in the nation -- on "teacher preparation and support." The Oregon Coalition for Quality Teaching and Learning, made up of the leading education policy organizations in Oregon, released a statementafter the most recent Quality Counts report. The coalition said Oregon’s score on teacher preparation was skewed because of the way some of the questions were asked. One example: Quality Counts asks whether Oregon requires all "prospective teachers from traditional preparation programs to pass written tests in subject specific knowledge." For the most part, Oregon does. But, the coalition notes, the state provides for some leeway. The state does allow alternative assessments in specific cases. But the number is low. In the 2006-07 school year (the year the state used when filling out the survey), only 0.5 percent of the state’s prospective teachers took this alternative assessment. That’s just 21 teachers statewide. Because of the 21, however, Oregon was given no credit for that question. More broadly, the coalition says the report is biased in its preference for statewide education measures, something that penalizes Oregon, where local control in setting policies is generally preferred. Christopher Swanson, the vice president of Editorial Projects in Education (the publisher of Education Week), said that some of those concerns are valid, particularly the bit about local control. "This is kind of a report and report card looking at state policies and education trends and to the extent that the state is an actor," Swanson said. "States with more local control will tend not to score as high." As for the teacher prep question, he doubts Oregon’s ranking would have changed all that much even if the score on that section had improved some. Either way, it didn’t seem right to let this study be the final word on Oregon’s school system, partly because it doesn’t focus on student achievement -- which is how many parents judge school quality. PolitiFact Oregon dug around for some other possible measurements. Susanne Smith, a spokeswoman for Oregon's superintendent for public instruction, pointed us toward the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test. The test, she said, offers "an apples-to-apples measure" of student performance nationally. Oregon did better than 43rd on all counts on scores for 2009. Fourth-grade students ranked 35th and 36th in math and reading, respectively. Eighth-graders ranked 25th and 26th. Of course, those national test scores are pretty narrow in what they reveal. They speak only to student performance and not to the system as a whole. To get a good idea of where Oregon -- or any other state -- ranks overall is difficult, Smith said. "Every state creates their own content standards, what students should know and learn. Then, based on those standards, they have their own accountability system." For the final word, we turned to Oregon Stand for Children, a student advocacy group made up largely of parents. Sue Levin, the executive director, said that Dudley used the same 43 number in his endorsement interview with the organization. (The organization has so far endorsed neither Dudley nor John Kitzhaber, his Democratic opponent.) "I thought about it afterward and I didn't feel -- let's put it this way: In every measure of educational quality that I have ever seen, Oregon tends to be in the bottom third, so therefore we're somewhere between 34 and 50." PolitiFact Oregon takes a similar view. Dudley is clearly cherry-picking one ranking out of dozens, but he did accurately quote a well-known educational study. Other rankings do place Oregon on the lower end of things. So, we rate this claim Mostly True. Comment on this item.	None	Chris Dudley	None	None	None	2010-10-07T06:00:00	2010-09-30	['None']
-snes-01197	Former NFL star O.J. Simpson was rearrested while attempting to slip across the U.S.-Canada border.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/oj-simpson-back-in-custody/	None	Junk News	None	David Mikkelson	None	Is O.J. Simpson Back in Custody?	17 January 2018	None	['O._J._Simpson', 'National_Football_League']
-pomt-05388	Says the average Ohio student graduates from a four-year college or university with nearly $27,000 in tuition debt.	half-true	/ohio/statements/2012/may/07/sherrod-brown/sherrod-brown-says-ohio-students-graduate-college-/	Editor's note: We originally rated this claim True. After receiving feedback from readers, we have downgraded that rating to Half True because the claim applies the average debt of about $27,000 to a much broader group than did the study from which it was cited. Interest rates on federally subsidized student loans went on the front burner as a political issue after Mitt Romney followed President Obama in saying he did not want those rates to go up. Congressional Republicans -- who earlier passed a budget allowing the rates to double in July to their 2007 rate of 6.8 percent -- closed ranks behind their presumptive presidential nominee. They voted for a hastily introduced bill that would keep the rate at 3.4 percent, and pay for it with funds intended for preventive health care programs under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Raiding that fund made the legislation unpalatable for Democrats -- just as the Democratic proposals to extend the lower interest rates were unpalatable to Republicans. One of the proposals would have paid for the college loan subsidies by ending tax subsidies for oil and gas companies. Another would end a payroll tax exemption given some business owners. Ohio's Sen. Sherrod Brown was a co-sponsor of the latter bill and of earlier legislation to stop the loan rates from going up. "Federally-subsidized Stafford loans have allowed thousands of students—who might not otherwise be able pay for to college—afford the ever-increasing cost of higher education," he said in a news release. "With the average Ohio student graduating from a four-year institution with nearly $27,000 in tuition bills, the last thing we should be doing is adding to their already-heavy debt load." The figure of $27,000 caught the notice of PolitiFact Ohio. It is more than $6,700 per year for four years of school. We asked Brown's office for his source and more information. They referred us to the Project on Student Debt, a project of the independent, nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success. Its most recent survey of public and private four-year institutions in Ohio found that 68 percent of students graduate in debt, and that the average debt on college loans is $27,713 -- the 7th-highest statewide average in the nation. (New Hampshire was highest, with average debt of $31,048; Wyoming was lowest, with $20,571.) The actual debt level is probably higher, the Project on Student Debt noted, because the data is voluntarily reported by colleges and not available for all of them. The report also reflects only graduates of public and private nonprofit colleges because few for-profit colleges report the student debt data. Based on national surveys by the U.S. Department of Education, graduates of for-profit four-year colleges are much more likely to borrow student loans, and borrow significantly more, than counterparts at nonprofit institutions. Nationally, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the average student loan balance per borrower is $23,300. The median balance is roughly half of that, $12,800. About one-quarter of borrowers nationally owe more than $28,000, and about 10 percent owe more than $54,000, according to the New York Fed. In aggregate, the bank said, the outstanding student loan balance now stands at about $870 billion, surpassing the nation’s total credit card balance ($693 billion) and the total auto loan balance ($730 billion). About 37 million people hold outstanding student loan debt. The key with all these figures is that they deal specifically with students who borrow and then graduate with loan debt. So how does that mesh with Brown’s claim? In his statement he said "the average Ohio student graduating from a four-year institution." That describes a bigger pool of people than just the students who graduate with debt. In that most recent survey it would also include the 32 percent of the graduates who had no debt. But the figure Brown cited, nearly $27,000, was an average covering just those students who graduated with debt. Brown’s statement is partially accurate. He cites the correct figure from a survey on debt among college students. But he describes those affected by debt too broadly, applying the average to all rather than just those who graduate with loan balances. Including all students would lower the average for loan debt by about a third. That’s an important detail needed to fully understand Brown’s claim. On the Truth-O-Meter, Brown’s statement rates as Half True.	None	Sherrod Brown	None	None	None	2012-05-07T06:00:00	2012-04-15	['Ohio']
-pomt-11601	"Because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!"	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jan/30/donald-trump/donald-trump-partly-correct-rejoinder-jay-z/	President Donald Trump didn’t wait long to respond to Jay-Z when the rapper and businessman appeared on the inaugural edition of the Van Jones Show on CNN. During the show, which aired on the night of Saturday, Jan. 27, Jones asked Jay-Z whether it's okay for Trump "to say terrible things but put money in our pockets," referring to Trump's repeated assertion that unemployment for African-Americans has dropped to record lows. Jay-Z responded in the negative, saying, "It's not about money at the end of the day. Money doesn't equate to happiness. It doesn't. That's missing the whole point." He added, "You treat people like human beings. That's the main point. It goes back to the whole thing — 'treat me really bad and pay me well.' It's not going to lead to happiness, it's going to lead to, again, the same thing. Everyone's going to be sick." Early the next morning, Trump tweeted, "Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!" See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Setting aside Trump’s non-sequitur — Jay-Z didn’t dispute that the African-American unemployment rate was the lowest ever — we wondered whether Trump has a point that the decline is "because of my policies." As we’ve noted, the unemployment rate for African-Americans is currently the lowest since the statistic was first calculated in 1972. In December 2017, African-American unemployment fell to 6.8 percent. The previous record low was 7 percent in April 2000 and September 2017. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com However, as we also noted, the African-American unemployment rate didn’t exactly turn on a dime once Trump took office. Black unemployment peaked at 16.6 percent in April 2010, after a historic recession and when Barack Obama was president. It then fell by more than half to 7.8 percent by the time Obama left office in January 2017. More to the point, as we’ve noted in regard to presidents of both parties, presidents don’t deserve either full credit or full blame for the unemployment rate on their watch. The president is not all-powerful on economic matters. Broader factors, from the business cycle to changes in technology to demographic shifts, play major roles. Chris Lafakis, a director at Moody's Analytics, said that while the jury remains out on his long-term record, Trump does deserve some credit for overall economic growth on his watch. In the tweet, Lafakis said, Trump "is likely suggesting that his policies have boosted the overall economy, which has helped black people as well as whites. This is the only thing I can think of him referring to, since he hasn’t undertaken any initiatives solely designed to benefit blacks." Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, agreed that he "cannot think of any specific policy under President Trump that has especially aided African-American workers or job seekers." Trump can "legitimately argue that his stewardship has contributed to, or at least not detracted from, the good economic news of the past 12 months," Burtless said. But beyond that, any specific link to African-Americans’ economic fortunes is speculative, he said. "Higher stock prices and improved investor confidence may fuel higher investment in the United States and better job growth in the future, helping African-Americans as well as all other workers, but that remains to be seen," he said. The White House told PolitiFact that even though the decline began on Obama’s watch, Trump has kept the momentum going. Our ruling Trump said that "because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!" While African-American unemployment rates are indeed at record lows, Trump’s ability to take credit is uncertain. The rate has fallen with ski-slope consistency since about 2010, six years before Trump took office. And economists have always been skeptical about the ability of presidents to take either credit or blame for conditions on their watch, since many other factors play into economic results. Trump has taken no specific actions aimed at lowering the unemployment rate for African-Americans. We rate the statement Half True. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2018-01-30T20:00:36	2018-01-28	['None']
-snes-03943	A New York City police officer was caught on camera raping a teenage girl.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nypd-officer-caught-raping-girl/	None	Crime	None	Bethania Palma	None	New York Police Officer Caught on Camera Raping Girl?	26 September 2016	None	['New_York_City']
-snes-02728	A "cargo container full of young black women" was found in a port in Savannah, Georgia, "about to be shipped overseas."	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cargo-container-women-savannah/	None	Crime	None	David Mikkelson	None	Cargo Container Full of Young Black Women Discovered in Savannah?	27 March 2017	None	['Savannah,_Georgia', 'Georgia_(U.S._state)']
-vogo-00644	Statement: “More than 70 percent of registered sex offenders in San Diego County are violating a state law by living too close to schools and parks,” the Watchdog Institute reported in The San Diego Union-Tribune.	determination: misleading	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/are-all-sex-offenders-subject-to-jessicas-law/	Analysis: In November, this statement spurred a debate between San Diego CityBeat and the Watchdog Institute, a new nonprofit investigative reporting group connected to The San Diego Union-Tribune. We hope to get to the bottom of it.	None	None	None	None	Are All Sex Offenders Subject to Jessica's Law?	February 8, 2010	None	['San_Diego_County,_California']
-pomt-10601	"Bill Clinton's peace dividend . . . cut the military 25 and 30 percent."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jan/24/rudy-giuliani/the-peace-dividend-began-with-a-bush/	At a Republican debate in Boca Raton on Jan. 24, 2008, Rudy Giuliani repeated his claim that Bill Clinton is to blame for shrinking the nation's military. "I think we should increase the size of our military substantially to overcome the damage that Bill Clinton did with the peace dividend," he said, adding that "a lot of the cause of (the smaller military force) was Bill Clinton's peace dividend, in which he cut the military 25 and 30 percent." We've covered this topic in two previous items, one for Giuliani and one for a similiar claim made earlier by Mitt Romney. But because this misleading claim is new to many voters who are just tuning into the campaign, we'll reiterate what we've said before. Romney made his claim in April 2007, saying that, "Following the end of the Cold War, President Clinton began to dismantle our military. He reduced our forces by 500,000. He retired almost 80 ships. Our spending on national defense dropped from over 6 percent of GDP to 3.8 percent today." The two Republicans are correct that military forces were reduced significantly under Clinton. The active-duty military totaled 1.8-million at the start of his presidency in 1993 and declined to 1.4-million in 2000. They are also correct that the naval fleet shrank dramatically. The Navy had 454 ships in 1993, but as vessels were retired and not replaced, the fleet was down to 341 by 2000. But they are selectively choosing numbers that make it appear that the military cuts were Clinton's alone. In fact, the cuts were prompted by the end of the Cold War during the presidency of President George H.W. Bush, a Republican. During Bush's presidency, he and Congress agreed to a sharp drop in military personnel. Active-duty military declined from 2.2-million to 1.8-million. Total defense forces also shrank, from 3.3-million to 2.9-million. The Republicans are trying to portray Clinton and the Democrats as weak on defense and to make the peace dividend look like a partisan effort. But contrary to the Republicans' claims, the post-Cold War shrinkage of the U.S. military was very much a bipartisan effort. It began under a Republican president and a Democratic Congress and continued under a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. And so we find, as we did before, that this claim is Half True.	None	Rudy Giuliani	None	None	None	2008-01-24T00:00:00	2008-01-24	['None']
-snes-03365	Muslim Man Slaps Christian Woman?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muslim-man-slaps-christian-woman/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Muslim Man Slaps Christian Woman	12 December 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-07249	Says the Obama Administration has fulfilled all of Texas’ requests for fire management assisting grants.	mostly true	/texas/statements/2011/may/30/jay-carney/white-house-press-secretary-jay-carney-says-obama-/	En route to El Paso with President Barack Obama on May 10, White House press secretary Jay Carney jumped on a reporter’s question about whether the administration’s denial of a disaster declaration for Texas was politically motivated. In an April 16 letter to Obama, Gov. Rick Perry requested a "major disaster declaration" as a result of wildfires that have burned through the state. The request sought federal aid to be reimbursed up to 75 percent of firefighting costs already expended and to help the state fight burning fires in 252 of the state’s 254 counties, including Travis. On May 3, the Federal Emergency Management Agency rejected the request after concluding that recovery needs did not exceed what state and local governments could handle, according to a May 4 Star-Telegram news article. Besides, Carney told reporters, "this administration has been extremely responsive to the state of Texas’ requests for wildfire management assisting grants — 25 of them at last count," he said. "All that have been requested had been, as far as I know it, have been provided." Indeed, the state has received 27 grants requested in connection with 27 wildfires that burned about 1 million acres in 31 counties. The grants cover 75 percent of the firefighting costs associated with the 27 fires. FEMA spokeswoman Rachel Racusen later told us the grants factored into the agency’s denial of the request for the disaster declaration because they "fund many of the same emergency response activities Gov. Perry was seeking assistance for." Separately, some affected Texas residents are eligible for other federal help, including low-interest loans and assistance to ranchers and farmers who lost livestock in the fires. Texas Forest Service spokeswoman April Saginor told us that from Sept. 1 through May 15, local fire departments and the state spent about $97.5 million on wildfires. Of that, the state has pitched in $90.8 million, and expects to be reimbursed about $23 million from the 27 approved federal grants to date. Perry isn’t placated. During an interview on NewsRadio 1080 KRLD on May 11, Perry said: "We've had over 9,000 different fires in the state of Texas, 2.3 million acres burned. If that doesn't rise to the level of a major emergency I don't know what does." As of May 16, according to the service, 10,123 Texas fires burned nearly 2.6 million acres in 237 counties. On May 26, Perry appealed the Obama administration's decision to deny the declaration. But this isn’t the first time the federal government hasn’t granted Texas’ aid requests. We found that it has gone both ways on fire-related requests for disaster declarations from Texas. — In February 2009, according to FEMA, the Obama administration denied a Perry request for an emergency declaration for wildfires, and his subsequent request for a major disaster declaration. According to an April 2009 Abilene Reporter News article, Perry requested the declaration after wildfires burned through 400,000 acres, destroying 200 homes. — In 2008, the Bush administration denied Perry’s request for a major disaster declaration due to wildfires that had burned, according to Perry’s office, nearly 940,000 acres in 215 counties, the San Antonio Express-News reported March 20, 2008. The reason: "We just didn’t see that the state’s capacity to respond was overwhelmed," said FEMA spokesman Earl Armstrong, according to the Express-News article. After the state appealed the rejection, the government granted a emergency disaster declaration, which is more limited in scope and doesn’t have the long-term federal recovery programs that can come with a major disaster declaration. Texas also received fire management assistance grants for 22 fires that year, according to FEMA. — In January 2006, President Bush issued a major disaster declaration after at least 450 fires, blamed largely on a long drought, burned across north and west Texas. At the time, Perry wrote the federal government: "Based on these extreme conditions, the magnitude of response required is beyond the resources and capabilities of the state and the affected local governments," according to a January 2006 Fort Worth Star-Telegram news article. Since 1953, Texas has received more major disaster declarations than any other state — 84 — mostly for severe storms, flooding and tornadoes. California, the largest state, has received the second most (78) followed by Oklahoma (68) and Florida (63). Rhode Island has received the least (8). So far, Obama has issued one major disaster declaration for Texas — in August 2010, for Hurricane Alex, according to FEMA. Before that, President George W. Bush issued two major disaster declarations after hurricanes hit the state in July and September 2008. Carney correctly summed up the Obama administration’s approval of fire-fighting grants for Texas but he glosses over its denial of the disaster declaration, which could have covered more counties and provided retroactive assistance. We rate his statement as Mostly True.	None	Jay Carney	None	None	None	2011-05-30T06:00:00	2011-05-10	['Texas', 'Presidency_of_Barack_Obama']
-tron-01917	Buy beer and recycle the cans instead of buying some stocks	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/beer-stocks/	None	humorous	None	None	None	Buy beer and recycle the cans instead of buying some stocks	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-vees-00291	VERA FILES FACT SHEET: Timeline of the controversy on Duterte’s wealth	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-sheet-timeline-controversy-dutertes-wealth	None	None	None	None	ombudsman,Duterte's wealth,Duterte BPI account	VERA FILES FACT SHEET: Timeline of the controversy on Duterte’s wealth	February 16, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-07902	"In the past, President Obama has refused to meet with representatives from Cuban exile organizations."	false	/florida/statements/2011/feb/02/david-rivera/david-rivera-says-obama-ignored-cuban-exile-commun/	U.S. Rep. David Rivera, who has criticized President Barack Obama's loosening of restrictions in policy toward Cuba, blasted the president following a White House reception for new members of Congress in January. Rivera's guest at the reception, former political prisoner Cary Roque, delivered a letter to Obama dated Aug. 25, 2010, that was signed by 26 Cuban exile organizations. The letter asked for a meeting with the president or a member of his administration. The next day, the Miami Republican accused Obama of not doing enough to accommodate Cuban exiles. "In the past," Rivera said in a statement on Jan. 25, 2011, "President Obama has refused to meet with representatives from Cuban exile organizations, so I was proud to take Cary Roque as my guest to the White House last night to help the president put a real human face to the issue of Cuba. I thought it was important to introduce him to someone who knows first-hand what it’s like to be imprisoned and abused by the Castro dictatorship." Before he was elected in November 2008, Obama stressed the need for a new policy approach to Cuba. He also called for the lifting of limits on Cuban Americans who want to visit Cuba or send money to relatives on the island. But had he "refused" to meet with reps from Cuban exile groups, as Rivera alleged? Rivera defined "exile organizations" as the ones that signed Roque's letter, according to his spokeswoman Leslie Veiga. These groups include Consejo por la Libertad de Cuba, Frente Nacional Presidio Politico, Presidio Politico Historico y Casa del Preso and Junta Militar de Veteranos Cubanos. But others interpret "exile organizations" more broadly to include other groups and individuals, too. "I laughed when I read the quote," said Jeff Garcia, a partner at Balsera Communications, a Miami firm that boasts it delivered much of the Hispanic vote to secure an Obama victory. "What David was saying (was that Obama) refuses to meet with his people." We found that Obama has met with various Cuban exile leaders, including Carlos Rodriguez, co-chair of the Cuba Study Group, before he took office January 2009. But maybe Rivera meant meetings with representatives -- or leaders -- from the Cuban exile groups after his January 2009 inauguration. We found one meeting Obama had, on April 15, 2010, with a pair of prominent exiles: Gloria and Emilio Estefan. He met with the celebrity couple at their home on exclusive Star Island as part of a fundraiser for the Democratic Party that raised $2.5 million. Even though the Estefans aren't Democrats, they say they wanted to get the president's ear on Cuba’s human rights record. Gloria Estefan gave Obama letters from dissidents, according to the Miami Herald. (Some Cuban-American exiles assailed the fundraising event because they believe Obama is not tough enough on Cuba.) The couple has a long history in defense of human rights. In October, the Cuban Liberty Council honored the Estefans as "Heroes of Liberty" in downtown Miami. A month before, the couple led a march of tens of thousands in Little Havana for Cuba's Las Damas de Blanco, or Ladies in White. Separately, Obama met in October 2010 with Joe Garcia, the former head of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, who helped the administration formulate its travel policy. Garcia, who lost to Rivera in the recent congressional race, and Obama had their heart-to-heart at El Mago De Las Fritas on Calle Ocho. "We talked about Cuba, how to facilitate civil society, how to adjust travel," Garcia said. Garcia and others say Obama has also met with Francisco "Pepe" Hernandez, president of the Cuban America National Foundation. (Obama spoke to an audience of nearly 900 people about the need for a new Cuba policy at a CANF luncheon in 2008.) The leading exile group once opposed travel to Cuba but now supports it. Our efforts to confirm that Hernandez met with Obama were unsuccessful. Three days of calls to CANF weren't returned. A spokeswoman for the White House declined to release details on any other meetings between Obama and Cuban exile leaders. She referred PolitiFact Florida to an online database that lists White House guests. Among the White House guests: Mauricio Claver-Carone, a lawyer who's against increased travel to Cuba and represents Cuba Democracy Public Advocacy. He visited 1600 Pennsylvania on Nov. 12, 2009, according to the database. "It was not to advocate for or against anything," Claver-Carone said. Claver-Carone said he met with a presidential foreign policy adviser, not the president, but couldn't remember his name. Separately, Obama has contacted island dissidents. In November 2009 he personally responded to an e-mail message from Generación Y blogger Yoani Sánchez, telling her that her blog "provides the world a unique window into the realities of daily life in Cuba." Rivera's claim is that "In the past, President Obama has refused to meet with representatives from Cuban exile organizations." Certainly, he has not met with all the many exile groups -- but he clearly has met with some representatives. We think Rivera overstated in claiming no meetings at all, so we rate his claim False.	None	David Rivera	None	None	None	2011-02-02T13:56:19	2011-01-25	['Barack_Obama', 'Cuba']
-pomt-07744	"Some of our state's educational administrators joined the feds in seeking to mandate Arabic classes for Texas children."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2011/feb/28/chuck-norris/chuck-norris-says-school-districts-and-federal-gov/	Walker, Texas Ranger, is taking on a twist in Texas education. In an opinion column posted Feb. 14 on the conservative website World Net Daily, actor Chuck Norris laments that just "this past week, some of our state's educational administrators joined the feds in seeking to mandate Arabic classes for Texas children. No joke!" Risking a roundhouse kick, we decided to check. We couldn’t reach Norris, but his column claims that an "Arabic studies program, funded by a five-year, $1.3 million Foreign Language Assistance Program federal grant, was to begin this semester at Cross Timbers Intermediate School in Mansfield School District" and be expanded later at neighboring schools in the district, about 20 miles southeast of Fort Worth. According to a Feb. 8 post on the Mansfield schools’ website, the U.S. Department of Education recently gave the district a five-year, $1.3 million Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grant to incorporate Arabic into the curriculum. Mansfield was one of five U.S. school districts — and the only Texas one — to receive that grant, according to the district website and a July U.S. Department of Education chart. The federal education department didn’t respond to our queries, but we found a description of the program on the agency’s website that says it gives grants to local education agencies "to establish, improve or expand innovative foreign language programs for elementary and secondary school students." A 2007 agency brochure says: "Consistent with the principle of local flexibility under No Child Left Behind, FLAP permits schools and states to choose instructional approaches that best meet local needs." According to the brochure, President George W. Bush established the National Security Language Initiative in 2006 to "dramatically increase the number of Americans learning critical foreign languages through new and expanded programs." A 9/11 Commission report issued in 2004 says that the government’s counter-terrorism plan had failed, in part, because "the FBI did not dedicate sufficient resources to the surveillance and translation needs of counter-terrorism agents. The agency lacked sufficient translators proficient in Arabic and other key languages." "The district applied for this grant because the Arabic language is listed by the federal government as a critical language," according to the district’s website. "This means that our country has a shortage of Arabic speakers and there is a need for people who are not only proficient in the Arabic language, but also possess knowledge about its cultures and traditions." In bold type, the web entry says: "There are no ‘mandatory Arabic classes,’ as being falsely reported in the media." Richie Escovedo, a Mansfield district spokesman, called Norris’ claim "highly misleading." He told us that after the district informed the school board about the grant in December, it backed off its plans to implement the program after parents, among others, raised concerns about the curriculum. Republican state Rep. Dan Flynn, for example, said in a Feb. 14 op-ed criticizing the school district’s plans that "the ‘culture’ of the Arab world is inseparable from the religious component because it does not respect secular government and never has. … So, if schools want to teach Islam as a ‘culture’ then I want my constituents to be able to teach Christianity as a culture since the United States was founded on Judeo-Christian principles." And the Johnson County Republican Party passed a resolution condemning the district’s plans, according to a Feb. 13 news article in the Cleburne Times-Review. In it, party chairman Henry Teich is quoted as saying: "The purpose in passing this resolution is that there is a decided effort to suppress the history of our own country. Now, we’re teaching everything but English." Before the district backed off its plans, elements of Arabic would be incorporated into other elementary and middle school classes the state requires, like English, math and social studies, Escovedo said. If students were studying fractions, for example, they might learn that "the early ages of algebra came from the Arabic culture," he said. "But they still go on with the mathematics lesson of the day." High school and middle school students will be able to take Arabic language classes as an elective, he said. According to a Frequently Asked Questions page we found on the school district’s website about the Arabic-language studies planned for Cross Timbers Intermediate School, all students "would receive an average of 20 minutes per day of Arabic language and culture through social studies classes, advisory once a week and intermittently in electives such as technology applications, art and P.E." Escovedo said "none of the curriculum was set" when the district decided Feb. 7 to delay the program’s implementation. On Feb. 18, the school district issued a press release announcing that all Arabic instruction would be optional. Starting next school year, T.A. Howard Middle School will offer Arabic as an elective foreign-language class for seventh-graders and an Arabic language class for high-school credit for eighth-graders. At least one other Texas district has plans to offer Arabic. According to a Feb. 20 Fort Worth Star-Telegram news article, the Hurst-Euless-Bedford district will offer language classes this fall. According to the Texas Education Agency, less than one-half percent were enrolled in Arabic classes last year, the article says. So, a district is planning to implement an Arabic language program using federal funds — and before it backed off its plan, the district was going to introduce elements of Arabic into everyday curriculum. We found no evidence, though, that any students in any district was going to be required to take Arabic classes. Nor does there appear to be proof that federal and school district officials are teaming up to impose that mandate on students in general. Still, Norris’ statement contains an element of truth. We rate the statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Chuck Norris	None	None	None	2011-02-28T06:00:00	2011-02-14	['Texas']
-snes-03893	The night before a Hoboken train crash, an Upstate New York station aired a bizarre and unsettling Emergency Alert System test warning mentioning trains.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/new-york-television-station-broadcasts-bizarre-warning-before-hoboken-train-crash/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	New York Television Station Broadcasts Bizarre Warning Before Hoboken Train Crash	3 October 2016	None	['Hoboken,_New_Jersey', 'Upstate_New_York']
-goop-01721	Kaley Cuoco Pregnant, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/kaley-cuoco-pregnant-big-bang-theory-baby/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Kaley Cuoco NOT Pregnant, Despite Report	11:28 am, January 26, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-11922	"Job creation fell by 70 percent in Wisconsin in 2016" under Scott Walker.	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2017/oct/18/tony-evers/jobs-have-grown-under-gop-gov-scott-walker-democra/	In a video posted Oct. 4, 2017 in his run for governor, Tony Evers repeatedly cites Gov. Scott Walker’s failed 250,000 jobs promise -- then hits him with a new attack. Midway into the video, an unidentified TV anchor says this in introducing a news story: "Job creation in the state fell by an astounding 70 percent last year to the lowest level since Gov. Scott Walker took office." After another reference to Walker’s jobs promise, from his first campaign for governor in 2010, the video replays the audio of the anchor’s words and then these words appear on the screen: "Job creation fell by 70% in Wisconsin in 2016." To be clear, the number of private-sector jobs in Wisconsin has increased each year Walker has been in office. But Evers refers to the most recent annual figure that measures how fast jobs are growing. Let’s see if he’s correct. The promise and the race Walker promised to create 250,000 private-sector jobs by the end of his first term. Our Walk-O-Meter, which tracks the Republican’s campaign promises, rated that pledge Promise Broken. The tally had reached only 130,000 by January 2015. We also rated rated as True a claim that as of June 2017, Walker still was short, as the job total had reached about 180,000 at that point in his tenure. Nevertheless, Walker survived a recall election in 2012, won re-election in 2014 and -- though he has pushed off a formal announcement of his intentions -- is widely expected to seek a third term. Meanwhile, Evers, the state school superintendent since 2009, is among a half-dozen Democrats with active campaigns who hope to win the August 2018 primary and compete in the November 2018 general election. Evers’ evidence To back Evers’ claim, his campaign provided us video of the full TV news story, which was aired in May 2017 on WKOW in Madison. The story said the increase in private-sector jobs in Wisconsin in 2016 was 70 percent lower than the increase in 2015, and that the figure was based on data given to the station by Walker’s administration. The original source of the data was the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. We asked Walker’s campaign organization for a response and were referred to Wisconsin Republican Party spokesman Alec Zimmerman. He cited a June 2017 opinion article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel by a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which called Wisconsin’s job growth over six years "extraordinarily strong," and told us: For someone to talk about Wisconsin’s job growth while leaving out the fact that the state is exceeding what most economists consider to be full employment, not only ignores a critical factors but gives a very skewed impression of Wisconsin’s economy ….We aren't talking about job losses. This is about slower gains, and gains that are slower because we are at or near full employment, a good thing. Quarterly figures The federal quarterly figures are considered the gold standard for job counts. Although the claim we’re checking focuses on the change in 2016, the Evers video also alludes to Walker’s entire tenure. So, for perspective, we’ll show the annual figures for private-sector job growth for each year since Walker took office in January 2011 (percentages are rounded). Year Annual increase in private- sector jobs in Wisconsin Percentage change in private-sector job growth vs the previous year 2010 33,658 --- 2011 29,800 -11% 2012 33,872 +14% 2013 29,723 -12% 2014 36,758 +24% 2015 38,077 +4% 2016 12,937 -66% So, for 2011 through 2015, the number of private-sector jobs rose by roughly 30,000 to 38,000 per year. But in 2016, the increase was 66 percent lower than the increase in 2015 -- nearly the 70 percent figure Evers claimed. While Evers doesn’t directly blame Walker, his video is an attack that clearly holds Walker at least partly responsible. We’ve reported in many fact checks that according to economists, a governor plays an important, but limited, role in a state’s economy, given that many factors are at play. As for what happened in 2016, Milwaukee-area economist Brian Jacobsen told us that nationwide, the growth in private-sector jobs was 29 percent lower than the growth in 2015. He said manufacturing-heavy states such as Wisconsin lagged more, but that the pace of job growth in Wisconsin has picked up in 2017. Andrew Reschovsky, a professor emeritus of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us Evers’ statement is technically accurate. But he said it could be stated in a more "transparent" way, such as: "The rate of private-sector job creation in Wisconsin was 66 percent lower in 2016 than in 2015" under Walker. Our rating Evers says: "Job creation fell by 70 percent in Wisconsin in 2016" under Walker. He’s essentially on target in that the one-year growth in private-sector jobs in 2016 was 66 percent lower than the growth in 2015 (13,000 jobs versus 38,000 jobs) -- though it’s important to note that private-sector jobs have increased each year during Walker’s tenure, but much more slowly in 2016. Where clarification is needed is that Walker’s performance is only one of many factors affecting job growth. We rate Evers’ statement Mostly True. div class='artembed'>See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Tony Evers	None	None	None	2017-10-18T05:00:00	2017-10-04	['Wisconsin', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-snes-05840	Wheel of Fortune Says Goodbye to Vanna White?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vanna-white-goodbye/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Wheel of Fortune Says Goodbye to Vanna White?	11 February 2015	None	['None']
-farg-00158	A corporate tax cut “would likely give the typical American household around a $4,000 pay raise.”	none	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/trumps-dubious-4000-claim/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Donald Trump	Brooks Jackson	['Corporate tax']	Trump’s Dubious $4,000 Claim	October 23, 2017	[' Speech at Heritage Foundation – Tuesday, October 17, 2017 ']	['United_States']
-pomt-03386	"We're already seeing bakers and florists and photographers forced to participate in same-sex marriages under the threat of law and in some cases even jail."	half-true	/florida/statements/2013/jul/08/tony-perkins/wedding-vendors-have-been-forced-participate-same-/	Let’s step away for a moment from the political implications of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on same-sex marriage and fast-forward straight to the wedding day: What does it mean for those who make the white-tiered frosted wedding cake, arrange the bouquet tossed by the bride, or snap the "I Do" pics? Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, said on CBS’ Face the Nation a few days after the ruling that such wedding vendors have already been "forced" to serve same-sex couples. "We're already seeing bakers and florists and photographers forced to participate in same-sex marriages under the threat of law and in some cases even jail. I can't think of anything that's more un-American than that. ... " Host Bob Schieffer responded: "How is it that bakers and florists are being forced to participate in this? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here." Perkins replied: "Well, we're seeing in Washington state, Colorado, and some of the other states that have these anti-discrimination statutes that are being imposed, that when a same-sex couple comes and says, ‘I want you to take pictures of my wedding,’ or ‘I want you to bake a cake.’ And they say, ‘Look, my religious convictions will not allow me participate in that,’ they're literally being sued by the government, not the individuals, and they've even been adjudicated in such places as New Mexico. So we're going to see a loss of religious freedom. There is no question about it. It's already happening." Have there been bakers who have laid down their wire whisks and refused to bake a cake for a gay couple and hauled off to jail? A florist nervously piecing together a floral arrangement under the threat of a cop? We decided to investigate. State anti-discrimination laws used in some legal challenges In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a section of the Defense of Marriage Act that bars federal benefits for married same-sex couples, and it dismissed a case on Proposition 8, California’s law that banned gay marriage. The Prop 8 ruling means that same-sex couples in California can now get married again, but neither ruling makes gay marriage legal in every state -- currently 12 states allow gay marriages. While same-sex marriage laws can include exemptions for religious clergy who don’t want to officiate such unions, there aren’t typically exemptions for wedding vendors. So it’s possible for gay couples to take legal action against wedding vendors who refused to serve them if there are state or local anti-discrimination laws in place that include sexual orientation. About 21 states have such, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a group that advocates for gay rights. (Florida isn’t one of them, although some counties or cities have such laws.) "These nondiscrimination laws say you cannot refuse to serve a couple because of sexual orientation," said Sarah Warbelow, an attorney and state legislative director for the Human Rights Campaign. "If you are a photographer and a same-sex couple comes to you and says we want to employ you, the photographer for whatever event -- whether it's a marriage ceremony, commitment ceremony or whether it’s a birthday party -- the laws of those states state you cannot refuse them on basis of sexual orientation." Each state can have their own process and penalties -- the ones we reviewed are generally heard before a civil rights or human rights commission. It’s theoretically possible a vendor who lost such a lawsuit could face jail if they refused to comply with the order, but Warbelow said, "I’ve never heard of anyone actually going to jail." Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado The Family Research Council directed us to multiple cases, including one particular case that they argue includes the threat of jail: Masterpiece Cakeshop. In 2012, a gay couple visited the suburban Denver shop in search of a cake for a Colorado celebration following their Massachusetts wedding. After the cake shop refused, the ACLU initiated a complaint on behalf of the two men. The Colorado attorney general’s office later filed a formal complaint which will be heard before the state’s civil rights commission in September. The owner has said, "We would close down the bakery before we would compromise our beliefs." The cake shop’s lawyer, Nicolle Martin, has said if the owner loses he could face up to a year in jail. In the meantime, though, the Colorado Legislature has taken action to repeal the criminal penalties for discrimination in places of public accommodations, which had included up to a year in jail and/or a $300 fine. The provision had never been used, and the repeal coincided with legislators passing a civil unions bill. We reached bill co-sponsor state Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, who told us that the repeal officially goes into effect in August, and he didn’t believe that a prosecutor would use that part of the law in the last month that it remains on the books. "A D.A. has to choose to file misdemeanor charges," Steadman said. "It never happened. It never will." However, since the Masterpiece Cakeshop incident occurred in 2012, Martin said it’s still possible that the law on the books at the time -- which did include jail -- would apply. "I have received no assurances from the state of Colorado that no prosecution will be pursued even in light of this recent repeal," Martin told PolitiFact. We checked with both the Colorado attorney general and the local district attorney; no criminal charges are pending. Even if no one has been jailed so far, the threat remains, said Ken Klukowski, a senior fellow for religious liberty at the FRC. "It is no comfort to a person of faith to cite the frequency a person is criminally prosecuted and put behind bars especially in a rapidly changing legal environment ...," he said. "The threat of prosecution has a chilling effect on people's behavior." Completed cases in Vermont and New Jersey Of the other cases related to wedding vendors cited by Perkins, only a couple have reached a conclusion. The Wildflower Inn in Vermont told a lesbian couple in 2010 that the inn didn't host "gay receptions" because of the owners' "personal feelings." After a lawsuit, it agreed to pay a $10,000 civil penalty, to place $20,000 in a charitable trust and to stop hosting weddings -- whether the couple is gay or straight. The director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission told PolitiFact that the inn has paid the first half of the fine and the second half is due in September. The owners didn’t face jail based on the complaint itself. However, under Vermont law, failure to pay a fine can lead to a civil contempt action. "This is no different than any other defendant who has a judgment against him/her and refuses to pay," director Karen Richards told PolitiFact in an email. "As a practical matter, most unpaid judgments do not result in contempt proceedings, nor do they result in incarceration, except in very extreme cases, such as child support cases, where the party clearly has the money and is basically thumbing its nose at the court. I am not aware of any case in Vermont that resulted in a jail time for a defendant in any type of discrimination case." In New Jersey, the Methodist Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association refused to allow a lesbian couple to hold a ceremony at its boardwalk pavilion in 2007. The New Jersey Division on Civil Rights ruled in 2012 that the association, which gets a tax exemption, must cease and desist violating the law but did not impose a fine or other penalty. The association stopped renting out the pavilion for marriages, an attorney who represented the association during the legal battle told PolitiFact. New Jersey can impose a fine of up to $10,000 for a first offense. A provision of the law states that anyone violating an order as a result of a legal challenge could face up to a year in jail or a fine. "However, no attorney I've spoken with here is aware of this provision ever having been used to prosecute anyone, and there are no reported cases of it," Lee Moore, a spokesman for the state's Department of Law and Public Safety, told PolitiFact. Pending cases One case we reviewed received considerable publicity but ultimately went nowhere. In Oregon, a TV news station reported that Sweet Cakes by Melissa co-owner Aaron Klein allegedly told a lesbian couple that "they were abominations to the Lord" and refused to fill the order. Klein told the media he didn’t use that phrase, and that after the publicity he received death threats and his wedding business fell by half. The couple contacted the attorney general, who determined it would fall under the jurisdiction of the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industries. A spokesman for the bureau told PolitiFact the couple didn’t file their case with the agency, and we couldn’t find any evidence that the case was re-filed elsewhere. New York’s human rights law includes a provision that a person can be sent to jail for up to a year if they refuse to comply with an order. But we could not find any evidence that anyone had been sent to jail. A case against the Liberty Ridge Farm, a New York wedding venue that refused to host a wedding for a lesbian couple, remains pending. Lisa Hardaway, spokeswoman for Lambda Legal in New York, said she had never heard of jail time in such a case. "This is an extreme scare tactic by opponents of equality for LGBT folks," she told PolitiFact in an email. "It's a good talking point but not real." Other cases that remain pending are in Washington state and New Mexico, where a photographer’s case is before the state Supreme Court. Our ruling After the Supreme Court rulings about gay marriage, Perkins said, "We're already seeing bakers and florists and photographers forced to participate in same-sex marriages under the threat of law and in some cases even jail." We didn't find cases where people were forced to participate against their will. However, if vendors refuse service, there are consequences. There are 21 states that forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation. Vendors who refuse service there could face legal actions and fines. The "jail" part of Perkins’ claim is an exaggeration. We couldn’t find any evidence that a vendor had been sent to jail or that any legal authority had threatened jail time. In some states, if a business owner loses an anti-discrimination case and refuses to comply with an order, the owner could face jail, but we found no evidence of that ever happening. One state, Colorado, specifically took action to remove the threat of jail. We rate this claim Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Tony Perkins	None	None	None	2013-07-08T16:40:48	2013-06-30	['None']
-abbc-00086	The claim: Kelly O'Dwyer says Australia has one of the highest per capita refugee intakes in the world.	in-the-red	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-24/liberal-mp-kelly-odwyer-incorrect-on-australias-refugee-intake/5270252	The claim: Kelly O'Dwyer says Australia has one of the highest per capita refugee intakes in the world.	['immigration', 'government-and-politics', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia']	None	None	['immigration', 'government-and-politics', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia']	Liberal MP Kelly O'Dwyer incorrect on Australia's refugee intake	Tue 18 Mar 2014, 4:38am	None	['None']
-pomt-10981	Says associates of financier Bill Browder "sent a huge amount of money, over $400 million, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/16/vladimir-putin/putins-pants-fire-claim-about-400-million-donation/	Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a novel idea to advance the Russia investigation during a joint news conference with President Donald Trump in Helsinki. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team could come to his country, Putin said, if Russian investigators were allowed to go the United States to dig into alleged tax evasion by American-born financier Bill Browder and his associates. "Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over 1.5 billion dollars in Russia," Putin said through a translator. "They never paid any taxes." Putin continued. "They sent a huge amount of money, over 400 million, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton," he said. "Well, that’s their personal case. It might have been legal, the contribution itself, but the way the money was earned was illegal." Did Browder's associates send $400 million to Hillary Clinton's campaign? No. We found $17,700 donated to Clinton and another $297,000 to the Democratic National Committee. A little background The Russians say that Browder and his partners at Ziff Brothers Investments, a New York venture capital firm, illegally syphoned billions of rubles out of the country. To add salt to the wound, Browder had led the charge to pass the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a law that penalizes Russian officials suspected of sanctioning the death of Browder’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison. The Ziff brothers came up during the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr. and others, and Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign. According to transcripts from Senate Judiciary Committee interviews, Veselnitskaya’s materials described the Ziffs as Democratic donors, although Trump’s son said they gave both to Democrats and Republicans. Follow the money We reached out to the Russian Embassy and the Russian consulate in Washington to get details on the $400 million donation and had not heard back in time for our deadline. Given that Veselnitskaya tied Browder and the Ziff brothers together, we researched their political donations. Browder became a British citizen and can’t legally contribute to U.S. candidates. Ziff Brothers Investments through its executives can give freely, and they have. Before we get into their political contributions, we also wondered if Putin could have been talking about money that went to the Clinton Foundation. In past years, Browder and Ziff Brothers Investments had given to the Clinton Global Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation, but the total was not more than $110,000, records show. In the 2016 election cycle, Ziff Brothers Investments gave $1.7 million. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly two-thirds, or about $1.1 million, went to Democratic committees, and the rest to Republicans. The center listed the firm’s top recipients: Recipient Amount DNC Services Corp $296,966 Senate Majority PAC $250,000 Defending Main Street $200,000 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte $40,000 Democratic State Central Cmte/Louisiana $35,412 National Republican Congressional Cmte $32,400 Democratic Party of Montana $28,622 Democratic Executive Cmte of Florida $27,287 Democratic Party of New Hampshire $27,287 Democratic Party of Virginia $27,287 Democratic Party of Wisconsin $27,287 Georgia Federal Elections Cmte $27,287 Federal law puts tighter limits on contributions to individual candidates. Here, the Ziffs mainly put their money into incumbents, and Republicans did better by a margin of about $145,000 to $46,000. Clinton’s campaign received $17,700. Unless Putin had other Browder associates in mind, his figure of $400 million going to the Clinton campaign is a massive exaggeration. Between the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, the Ziffs gave about $315,000. The Clinton campaign raised $563 million overall, so Putin's sum would account for nearly three-fourths of all donations. (PACs affiliated with Clinton's campaign raised an additional $231 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.) Our ruling Putin said associates of Bill Browder gave $400 million to the Clinton campaign. The associates appear to be the Ziff brothers. According to public data, Ziff Brothers Investments gave about $315,000 to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Overall, the firm gave about $1.1 million to Democratic committees around the country. The exaggeration is so great, we rate this claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Vladimir Putin	None	None	None	2018-07-16T17:28:38	2018-07-16	['Hillary_Rodham_Clinton', 'Hermitage_Capital_Management']
-pomt-06891	In Europe, "church attendance rates (are) in the single digits" because churches are supported by taxes.	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jul/27/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-says-church-attendance-single-digits/	Rick Santorum often says on the campaign trail that liberty -- economic and spiritual -- has made America great. But Europe isn't so fortunate. "Look at every other country from which we came and almost every one, if not every one, are dead from a faith perspective," the former U.S. senator, R-Penn., said at a Henniker, N.H., house party on July 18, 2011. "You go to Europe, church attendance rates in the single digits -- secular society. Why? Because the government co-opted faith, because faith and the government are intertwined. (People in Europe) pay taxes -- you don’t tithe to your church -- you pay taxes to support your church, and they’ve been co-opted to the point where the two are unrecognizable as far as of difference, and so people have lost faith." There's a lot to unpack here. But let’s start with his claim about church attendance rates: Do Europeans attend church, on a percentage basis, in the single digits? When we asked Santorum’s campaign for its source on this, we were pointed to news articles dating back to 2005 and a European Social Survey conducted in 2008 and 2009. All detail declining church attendance, but none indicate single-digit rates continent-wide. In fact, Santorum’s back-up material largely reaffirms the view of the experts on European worship patterns we consulted, who say Santorum is exaggerating. "Europe as a whole, compared to the United States is much less religious, but there are great differences between European countries," says Peter Berger, Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University. Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and chairman of the Stockholm-based World Values Survey, which collects public input in religious practices in more than 100 countries, said Santorum is correct to a point. England, France, and the Scandinavian countries, do indeed have attendance rates in the single digits. "But Italy has about 39 percent church attendance; Ireland has about 65 percent; Portugal 30; Spain 20; Germany 15. So, single digits are actually fairly rare." And what about about Santorum’s other main contention: that European countries that collect a so-called "church tax" or earmark public money for churches, are less religious? Let’s recall the candidate’s exact words: People in Europe "pay taxes to support your church, and they’ve been co-opted to the point where the two are unrecognizable in terms of difference and so people have lost faith." As sources, the Santorum campaign cited an unusual pair: French historian Alexis deTocqueville, who died in 1859, and Santorum’s 2012 GOP-rival Mitt Romney. Both men have argued -- 178 years apart -- that America is better off for not having a state religion. But neither prove Santorum’s claim that directing tax dollars to churches drives down attendance levels in 2011. "I think he’s not terribly well-informed," said Inglehart of the World Values Survey, "He is stretching." Indeed, some churches get tax support and still have high attendance rates, according to World Values Survey: Italy directs tax dollars to churches and attendance levels there stand at 39 percent, roughly on par with the U.S. Germany and Austria levy "church taxes" and have rates of church attendance around 15 percent. Finland and Iceland also collect taxes for religious use, and their churchgoing rates stand at around 4 percent. Berger examined this question in his book Religious America, Secular Europe? He says that in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, Europe saw instances when political tensions led to dissatisfaction with a state church. But Berger says Santorum misses the mark when he suggests that government-church relations are driving contemporary worship trends. "He is distorting things. To talk about Europe today as if it were Europe 200 years ago is not very accurate." Our Ruling: While Santorum is right that some European countries have church attendance rates that are below 10 percent, we found others that have rates of worship well above the single digits. Santorum’s other claim, that European governments collect taxes and send the money to churches, is also a mixed bag. Santorum is correct when he says some countries assess so-called church taxes. But more importantly to his main point, scholars say they don't see a connection between the taxes and church attendance. Indeed, the rate in Italy is about 39 percent. So we rate this statement Mostly False.	None	Rick Santorum	None	None	None	2011-07-27T18:14:51	2011-07-18	['Europe']
-snes-02437	Chick-fil-A is offering free Mother's Day lunches on 14 May 2017.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chick-fil-a-mothers-day/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Is Chick-fil-A Offering Free Food for Mother’s Day?	13 May 2017	None	['None']
-vogo-00415	Statement: “Some $22 million in hard cash is available toward demolition or cleanup, a remediation payment by previous operator San Diego Gas & Electric,” The Union-Tribune wrote in an editorial about the South Bay Power Plant on March 21.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-the-ports-22-million-stash/	Analysis: With the South Bay Power Plant decommissioned and no longer producing electricity, attention has been focusing on how to dismantle the plant and clean up any environmental contamination caused by it, as well as who should pay for that work.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: The Port’s $22 Million Stash	March 28, 2011	None	['None']
-tron-02441	Maya Dillard Smith Resigns from ACLU over Transgender Bathrooms	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/maya-dillard-smith-resigns-aclu-transgender-bathrooms/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Maya Dillard Smith Resigns from ACLU over Transgender Bathrooms	Jun 6, 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00459	"Will continue to fight for Amtrak funding and reform so that individuals, families and businesses throughout the country have safe and reliable transportation options."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/479/support-funding-and-reform-for-amtrak/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Support funding and reform for Amtrak	2010-01-07T13:27:00	None	['Amtrak']
-snes-02620	A new study proves that men who marry “chubby women” are happier and live longer.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/men-who-marry-chubby-women-are-happier/	None	Science	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Did “New Research” Prove That Men Who Marry “Chubby Women” Are Happier?	13 April 2017	None	['None']
-farg-00141	The National Science Foundation "provides financial support to more than twice as many graduate students in the social and behavioral sciences as in computer science, mathematics or material science."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/12/smith-wrong-nsf-funding/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Rep. Lamar Smith	Vanessa Schipani	['National Science Foundation', 'science']	Smith Wrong About NSF Funding	December 7, 2017	[' Roll Call op-ed – Thursday, November 30, 2017 ']	['None']
-bove-00241	After ‘Liar In Chief’ Another Fake TIME Cover Calls Trump ‘Clown In Chief’	none	https://www.boomlive.in/after-liar-in-chief-another-fake-time-cover-calls-trump-clown-in-chief/	None	None	None	None	None	After ‘Liar In Chief’ Another Fake TIME Cover Calls Trump ‘Clown In Chief’	Jul 19 2017 3:05 pm, Last Updated: Jul 19 2017 4:03 pm	None	['None']
-vogo-00010	Statement: “SAN DIEGO COUNTY ROAD REPAIR, TRANSIT, TRAFFIC RELIEF, SAFETY AND WATER QUALITY MEASURE: Shall an ordinance be adopted to: repair roads, deteriorating bridges; relieve congestion; provide every community funds for pothole/street repairs; expand public transit, including improved services for seniors, disabled, students, veterans; reduce polluted runoff; preserve open space to protect water quality/reduce wildfires by enacting, with independent oversight/audits, a 40-year, half-cent local sales tax ($308 million annually) that Sacramento cannot take away?” reads the title and ballot language for Measure A, a countywide measure appearing on the November ballot (emphasis ours).	determination: a stretch	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/land-use/fact-check-will-a-sales-tax-hike-relieve-traffic-congestion/	Analysis: The San Diego Association of Governments hasn’t been shy about touting the benefits county residents will feel if they pass its proposed ballot measure in November. One of the proposal’s major selling points is that the projects the measure would fund will relieve traffic congestion.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Will a Sales Tax Hike Relieve Traffic Congestion?	August 23, 2016	None	['Sacramento,_California']
-tron-03455	Christian airline pilots being paired with non-Christian ones in case of rapture	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/incaseofrapture/	None	religious	None	None	None	Christian airline pilots being paired with non-Christian ones in case of rapture	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06780	Under Gov. Scott Walker, "unemployment is increasing in Wisconsin at twice the rate it is nationally."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2011/aug/18/state-democratic-party-wisconsin/wisconsin-democratic-party-says-unemployment-incre/	After employment figures for June 2011 were announced, the Wisconsin Republican Party, among others, declared that over half of the job growth in America occurred in Wisconsin. We graded that statement False, given that the GOP’s math made an apples-to-oranges comparison. Ten days after the Republican Party made its claim, the Wisconsin Democratic Party focused on the other half of the jobs equation: unemployment. The Democrats asserted in an Aug. 1, 2011, news release that "the jobs-killing policies of Scott Walker and his GOP allies in the Senate have put Wisconsin on the top of the heap in unemployment growth. Contrary to Walker's flailing claims about creating jobs, he and his Republican Legislature have actually deepened the pain for Wisconsin's job seekers." Then, citing an opinion column posted the previous day in the Capital Times newspaper of Madison, the party claimed that under Walker, "unemployment is increasing in Wisconsin at twice the rate it is nationally." That line caught our attention. We rated the Republicans wrong on their claim; let’s see about the Democrats. We called and emailed state Democratic Party spokesman Graeme Zielinski over two days to see if there was other evidence the party wanted us to consider. He did not respond. The column cited in the Democrats’ news release was written by John Nichols, who is associate editor of the Capital Times and Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. Both publications have long been known for having a liberal editorial stance. Nichols wrote that unemployment in June 2011 rose by one-tenth of 1 percent nationally and two-tenths of 1 percent in Wisconsin. "That’s twice the rate of increase at the national level," he said. Besides the state Democratic Party, Democratic Underground, the pro-labor group Solidarity Wisconsin and RecallScottWalker.com also cited Nichols’ column. We checked the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report that compared May 2011 and June 2011 unemployment rates and found that Nichols was correct: the U.S. rate rose 0.1 percentage point to 9.2 percent and the Wisconsin rate rose by twice that amount, 0.2 percentage points, to 7.4 percent. But the state party’s claim was that under Walker, "unemployment is increasing in Wisconsin at twice the rate it is nationally." That sets not a one-month measuring stick, but a much longer one. Here’s a look at the U.S. and Wisconsin monthly unemployment rates from January, when Walker took office, through June of 2011. January: U.S. -- 9.0 percent ; Wisconsin -- 7.4 percent February: U.S. -- 8.9 percent ; Wisconsin -- 7.4 percent March: U.S. -- 8.8 percent; Wisconsin -- 7.4 percent April: U.S. -- 9.0 percent ; Wisconsin -- 7.3 percent May: U.S. -- 9.1 percent ; Wisconsin -- 7.4 percent June: U.S. -- 9.2 percent; Wisconsin -- 7.6 percent (The July 2011 figures are scheduled to be released Aug. 19, 2011.) So, the Wisconsin unemployment rate remained unchanged -- at 7.4 percent -- for the first three months of the Walker administration, then it dropped one-tenth of a point in April 2011. The next month, Wisconsin’s rate returned to 7.4 percent, rising by 0.1 percentage point -- the same rate of increase that occurred nationally. In June 2011, as we’ve already established, Wisconsin’s rate rose 0.2 percentage points and the U.S. rate rose 0.1 percentage point. That means Wisconsin’s unemployment rate increased during two of the first six months of the Walker administration, and it rose more than the U.S. rate only one of those times, in June 2011. The figures also show that both the Wisconsin and U.S. unemployment rates were both 0.2 percentage points higher in June 2011 than in January 2011. We asked Jon Peacock, research director of the liberal Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, about the monthly unemployment numbers under Walker. He was aware of the small state and national unemployment rate increases in June 2011. "Taking a really short-term look at things is problematic, especially when you’re looking at unemployment rates -- but also when you’re looking at jobs (growth)," Peacock said. In other words, a one-month change in jobs numbers -- good or bad -- does not a trend make. So, let’s rate the statement. The state Democratic Party said that under Walker, "unemployment is increasing in Wisconsin at twice the rate it is nationally," suggesting a strong upward trend had been established. The state’s unemployment rate did rise by 0.2 percentage points in June 2011, which was double the 0.1 percentage point increase in the U.S. unemployment rate. But this was far from a consistent trend or even a sharp increase. In the first six months of Walker’s administration, the Wisconsin unemployment rate rose more than the U.S. rate only in one month. Moreover, the overall percentage point increase in the state and U.S. rates when compared to January were the same. The Democrats’ claim contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. That’s our definition of Mostly False.	None	Democratic Party of Wisconsin	None	None	None	2011-08-18T09:00:00	2011-08-01	['Wisconsin', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-pomt-14602	"During eight years under Ronald Reagan, African-American median income rose by about $5,000."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/03/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-says-median-african-american-family-was-5/	CORRECTION, Feb. 4, 2016: After we published this fact-check, a reader wrote us to say that in our original article, we had used the wrong Census Bureau data table to analyze Cruz’s statement and rate it Mostly True. However, using the proper data table, Cruz is actually incorrect, so we have changed the rating to Mostly False. The original article is archived here. During a town hall event at New England College in Henniker, N.H., Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz faced a questioner who asked what he would do for "struggling minorities." Cruz said the key is economic growth, underpinned by a vigorous free-enterprise system. He suggested that his father -- who worked as a dishwasher shortly after emigrating from Cuba to the United States -- would have lost his job if politicians at the time had raised the minimum wage as high as today’s Democrats would like. Cruz pointed to the Reagan years as a golden age for African-American economic advancement. "During eight years under Ronald Reagan," Cruz said, "African-American median income rose by about $5,000. That is real and meaningful transformation." We should note that Cruz was describing the Reagan years as a time of economic growth, not crediting Reagan for a specific policy. So we’ll simply look to see how wages performed. We turned to median income data collected annually by the U.S. Census Bureau. All figures below have been adjusted for inflation. White Black Hispanic Median income, 1980 $51,127 $29,455 $37,355 Median income, 1988 $55,365 $31,562 $39,164 Gain in dollars $4,238 + $2,107 + $1,809 Gain in percent + 8 percent + 7 percent + 5 percent So Cruz is wrong -- the gain in median income for African-Americans under Reagan was a little over $2,000, not $5,000, and the increase was smaller on both a dollar basis and a percentage basis than the increase for whites. It’s also worth noting that Reagan wasn’t the best president for African-American median income in recent history. That crown goes to Bill Clinton -- unlike Reagan, a Democratic president. Between 1992 and 2000, black incomes rose from $31,018 to $40,783 -- a gain of $9,765 and a striking 31 percent increase. Our ruling Cruz said that "during eight years under Ronald Reagan, African-American median income rose by about $5,000." The actual increase was a little over $2,000, and the increase was significantly larger under a subsequent Democratic president, Bill Clinton. We rate Cruz’s statement Mostly False.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2016-02-03T18:04:08	2016-02-03	['None']
-pomt-06307	"(President Barack Obama gave) half a billion in taxpayer money to help his friends at Solyndra, a business the White House knew was on the path to bankruptcy."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2011/nov/15/americans-prosperity/solyndra-ad-president-barack-obama-taxpayer-money/	A new TV ad airing in Florida and other states portrays President Barack Obama as a politician who showered millions of taxpayer dollars on "his friends at Solyndra," a once-hot solar company now in bankruptcy court. Americans for Prosperity, a group that works closely with tea party activists and has been funded by the conservative Koch family, released the ad, which uses news clips and e-mail snippets to support an ominous voiceover: "Wealthy donors with ties to Solyndra give Obama hundreds of thousands of dollars. "What does Obama give them in return? Half a billion in taxpayer money to help his friends at Solyndra, a business the White House knew was on the path to bankruptcy. But loaned them the money anyway. "And when the government found out that Solyndra couldn't make its payments, the administration changed the terms of the loan to let Solyndra continue taking taxpayer money. "Now, Solyndra's bankrupt, and taxpayers are stuck with the bill. What's worse? The Obama administration has just approved another billion dollars in loans to solar companies who also donated money to Democrats. "Risking billions of taxpayer dollars to help his political donors — is this the change we're supposed to believe in?" We decided to fact-check the ad, focusing on whether the president gave "half a billion in taxpayer money to help his friends at Solyndra, a business the White House knew was on the path to bankruptcy." Rise and fall of a solar panel company Solyndra, based in Silicon Valley, formed in 2005 with a blockbuster idea: a unique type of solar cell, cylinders that didn't require pricey silicon, which promised to make them cheaper than their rivals. In 2006, the U.S. Department of Energy invited the company to apply for a new loan guarantee program, a program created with the support of a majority of Republicans, who controlled Congress at the time. The company's December 2006 pre-application was enough to vault it into a group of 16 applicants invited to submit full applications in 2007. By early January 2009, Solyndra's file had been reviewed by the department's credit committee and returned with a request for further analysis. On Jan. 15, the loan program office said "due diligence" for the Solyndra loan was scheduled to be complete by March 2009. The money was going to build a gleaming new factory in Fremont, Calif. Obama took office Jan. 20, 2009, and one of his first legislative achievements was a major economic stimulus package. The administration pushed to finish the $535 million loan for Solyndra so it could tout the company as a poster child of the stimulus — construction jobs plus a boost to American green energy. Solyndra got the loan Sept. 3, 2009. As recently as 2010, the company was hailed as a Silicon Valley superstar, ranked a top clean-tech company by the Wall Street Journal and one of the "World's 50 Most Innovative Companies" by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology magazine. But subsidized Chinese solar panels got even cheaper as the price of silicon plummeted — along with Solyndra's chances for becoming profitable. Red flags multiplied by February 2011, and the government restructured the loan to rescue the factory project. Still, Solyndra collapsed spectacularly in August 2011. Factory employees who worked late the night before, as they often did, found their jobs had evaporated the following morning — with no notice and no severance. An FBI raid followed. Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6, 2011. Solyndra had fallen far and fast. Its unique solar cells had once attracted more than $1 billion from private investors. Now taxpayers could lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Friends of Barack? The Americans for Prosperity ad says Obama helped "his friends at Solyndra." So, who owns Solyndra? Four venture capital firms own nearly 70 percent of the company, according to bankruptcy filings. Argonaut Ventures owns the largest stake, with nearly 40 percent, while Madrone Partners own 13 percent. Two others own about 9 percent and 7 percent. Who was the ad talking about? The ad's fine print refers to a Daily Caller article headlined "Bankrupt solar company with fed backing has cozy ties to Obama admin." The story focused on "shareholders and executives" of Solyndra who "fundraised for and donated to the Obama administration to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars." The largest contributor listed in the story: George Kaiser, who raised $50,000 to $100,000 for Obama's campaign. (For a little context, in the big-money world of presidential fundraising, he's among 560 elite fundraisers for Obama, though not in the top tier who gathered upwards of half a million each.) Kaiser, though, is neither a shareholder nor an executive of Solyndra. The Tulsa, Okla., oil billionaire is the donor behind the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The foundation focuses on poverty, community health, civic enhancement — and national energy policy. (Its National Energy Policy Institute is "an effort to establish a rational energy policy that will effectively reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.") The foundation, rather than hire an outside financial adviser to handle its investments, does it mostly in-house, through a subsidiary. That subsidiary is Argonaut Ventures, the largest investor in Solyndra. Kaiser isn't on the foundation's board or Argonaut's or Solyndra's. (And for the record, his foundation is unrelated to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which focuses on the health care system and national health care reform.) It's important to note here that Kaiser was never in a position to profit from Solyndra — his contributions to his foundation are "irretractable." "He could not withdraw money from the foundation for his private use," said C. Renzi Stone, a spokesman for the foundation. "So that money is there forever. ... The investment in Solyndra would not have benefited Mr. Kaiser personally in any way." A handful of other executives affiliated with Solyndra's management and board donated to the Obama campaign or other Democrats over the years, according to the Daily Caller story. But others didn't reach the level of Kaiser's fundraising — which Stone said could be traced to a single fundraiser at Kaiser's Tulsa home in 2007. Meanwhile, Madrone Partners, which owns more than 10 percent of Solyndra, is an investment vehicle for another family — the Waltons of Walmart fame. While some argue that Walmart is no longer a conservative company that focuses solely on GOP causes, a search of Federal Election Commission records for contributions from people who list Madrone as an employer still shows most cash benefited GOP recipients. General partner Gregory Penner, for example, a Walton in-law, gave primarily to Republicans, such as $5,000 to the Senate Conservatives Fund, $10,000 to the Republican Party of Kentucky and $10,000 to McCain Victory 2008. He also made smaller contributions to a handful of Democrats such as U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska. House Republicans investigate The Republican-controlled House Energy and Commerce Committee has been investigating since February 2011 how close ties may have been between Solyndra and the Obama administration. Its Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee held hearings in July, September and October, and has been collecting documents and correspondence, including from the White House. So far, the subcommittee's work has generated more than 85,000 pages of documents, according to the White House. The committee members have pointed to e-mails that show the Obama administration was eager to confirm Solyndra's loan so the president and vice president could tout it as a stimulus success story. "Can you confirm whether there are any issues regarding a closing on Sept. 3 for a Sept. 4 VP event on Solyndra? This implies we will need to wrap up our review/approval by Sept. 1," said one Energy Department e-mail from late August. Other e-mail shows that Steve Mitchell, Argonaut's managing director who also served on Solyndra's board, and Ken Levit, the executive director of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, exchanged messages with George Kaiser about Solyndra and the White House. Kaiser visited Obama's White House at least 16 times to chat about energy policy, according to the Daily Caller and Tulsa World, but the foundation told reporters that Solyndra's loan never came up. Spokesman Stone repeated in November: "To reaffirm our previous public statements, George Kaiser had no discussions with the government regarding the loan to Solyndra." But messages released by House Republicans on Nov. 9, 2011 include this one from Kaiser to Mitchell, copied to Levit: "A couple of weeks ago when Ken and I were visited with a group of administration folks in D.C. who are in charge of the stimulus process (White House, not DOE) and Solyndra came up, every one of them responded simultaneously about their thorough knowledge of the Solyndra story, suggesting it was one of their prime poster children," Kaiser wrote in March 2010. Did they talk about the loan? It's not clear. Meanwhile, in the same batch of e-mails, they discuss that they don't expect to leverage their White House relationships for special treatment. Mitchell noted to Kaiser and Levit, "I think the company is hoping that we have some unnatural relationship that can open bigger doors — I've cautioned them that no one really has those relationships anymore." The path to bankruptcy So did the administration know Solyndra was "on the path to bankruptcy"? The ad suggests that the Energy Department thought Solyndra would run short on cash as it built its new factory but approved the loan anyway, pointing to e-mail messages released by the House subcommittee. Those messages, written in August 2009 as the department was drafting the final loan terms, got into details about the project's "cash balance" and "working capital requirements." The loan guarantee was formally issued on Sept. 3, 2009. House Democrats responded to this idea in September, saying that "a career agency official who served in the Bush administration" had responded to the concern raised on those messages. That official's e-mail, also from August, said that equity investors, who had already pumped over $1 billion into the company, wouldn't let a short-term cash crunch keep Solyndra from finishing its project. And in fact when Solyndra later restructured its Energy Department loan, private investors did throw in $75 million to keep the company on track. (Of course, that's the subject of its own uproar: The terms of the deal put that $75 million loan ahead of taxpayers' investment. House Republicans say that was illegal; Energy Department lawyers had cleared it at the time.) The idea of the loan guarantee program was to push technology from research and development into commercial production — an inherently risky process. Energy Department officials questioned whether Solyndra had the cash to complete its factory project but concluded private investors would continue to bankroll the company. That's rather different from the ad's claim of political favoritism. The sky-high price of high-grade silicon, one of the keys to marketing Solyndra's silicon-free design, dove from almost $1,000 a pound in early 2008 to less than $100 a pound a year later, according to the Los Angeles Times. That left its technology much more expensive than competing flat panels, and paved the way for its struggle to survive. Solyndra argued, the Times reported, that it just needed time to get its prices down. But it never did catch up. Autumn Hanna of Taxpayers for Common Sense has been highly critical of the loan guarantee program since it started in 2005. She noted the program — backed by both Republicans and Democrats over the years — had "too few protections for taxpayers and too little rules governing the decision making." (The Government Accountability Office raised similar concerns in 2008 and 2010.) "This was a recipe for fiscal disaster, and Solyndra will likely be just the tip of the iceberg," she said. Our ruling Solyndra's story is unfinished. FBI and congressional investigations continue, and more information about the loan guarantee program may yet come to light. The TV ad says "(President Barack Obama gave) half a billion in taxpayer money to help his friends at Solyndra, a business the White House knew was on the path to bankruptcy." Some of this is correct, while some isn't supported by the existing evidence. First, the money wasn't Obama's to give. Solyndra's request predated his administration, and career Energy Department officials handled the deal. Second, e-mails so far don't show an administration pushing through a loan to help Obama's "friends at Solyndra." Rather, it appears the administration asked the Energy Department officials to hurry the regular process, so the administration could burnish its stimulus efforts. Third, while e-mails raised doubts about Solyndra's liquidity as the Energy Department finalized the loan, those questions were answered by an official who argued investors would step in to protect the project — red flags, yes. But awareness in the White House the company would dissolve? No. The government wasn't the only blindsided investor — private investors put up far more, and stand to lose more, than taxpayers. The Solyndra story might be one of the poor design of the Energy Department's loan guarantee program — something the Government Accountability Office has pointed out since 2008. And with the congressional investigation ongoing, we may learn more about the Obama administration's role in the loan program — perhaps better supporting the ad's claims. For now, though, information in the public record does not support the ad's claim that the Obama White House is a pay-to-play cash machine for the politically well-connected. We rate this ad's claim Mostly False.	None	Americans for Prosperity	None	None	None	2011-11-15T12:36:46	2011-11-02	['White_House', 'Barack_Obama']
-pomt-12089	Says his conviction is "a political witch hunt by holdovers in the Obama justice department."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/aug/29/joe-arpaio/arpaio-falsely-ties-conviction-obama-administratio/	President Donald Trump’s pardon of convicted former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio drew an immediate tweet of gratitude from the man he spared from a six-month jail term. "Thank you @realdonaldtrump for seeing my conviction for what it is: a political witch hunt by holdovers in the Obama justice department," Arpaio wrote Aug. 25. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com There is no question that Justice Department officials under President Barack Obama investigated and joined in legal proceedings against Arpaio, but were they driving the court process that led to his conviction on contempt of court? The court record and legal opinion say Arpaio is pointing at the wrong people. A quick recap Arpaio’s path to a guilty verdict began with a 2007 traffic stop in Maricopa County. Under Arpaio, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office used a few tactics to sweep up undocumented immigrants. They targeted places where day laborers came to find work. Deputies would follow the cars and trucks that picked them up and stop them. They had guidelines – called Law Enforcement Agency Response or LEAR – to stop any driver suspected of being in the country illegally. In 2007 Arpaio’s deputies detained Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendres for nine hours. Melendres was a Mexican tourist with a valid tourist visa. Melendres sued on the basis of racial profiling. In 2011, federal district Judge G. Murray Snow issued a preliminary injunction, telling Arpaio and his department to stop detaining people without a reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed. Snow has no ties to the Obama administration. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2007. Snow followed up with a permanent injunction in 2013. "Any stop or detention based only on a reasonable suspicion that a person is in the country without authorization, without more facts, is not lawful," Snow wrote. Arpaio’s practices, the judge wrote, violated peoples’ constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure and equal protection under law (the fourth and 14th amendments). The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals backed up all the key elements of Snow’s ruling in 2015. During this time, Arpaio said in television interviews and statements to the press that he had no intention of changing his tactics. The guilty verdict In 2016, Snow referred Arpaio for investigation of criminal contempt of court. The case went to Judge Susan Bolton on the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. Bolton, nominated by President Bill Clinton in 2000, heard testimony for five days. In her ruling, she said there was no question that Snow had issued a clear order, that Arpaio knew about the order and that he "willfully violated the order." "Because the Court finds that Defendant willfully violated an order of the court, it finds Defendant guilty of criminal contempt," Bolton wrote. In his tweet, Arpaio argued that the hand of the Obama administration was at play. That overlooks the role of the courts, said law professor and federal criminal procedure expert Joshua Dressler at Ohio State University. "The matter was entirely in the hands of Judge Bolton," Dressler said. "With or without the Justice Department, the injunction existed." Arpaio’s personal attorney largely agrees. "Judge Snow kicked it off," said Jack Wilenchik. "The government prosecutors could have declined to pursue the case, but then Snow would have brought in a private attorney to prosecute the case. There’s a rule about that." The rule is Rule 42 on criminal contempt in the federal rules of criminal procedure. It says "If the government declines the request, the court must appoint another attorney to prosecute the contempt." The original case began with the Melendres suit, and a Bush-appointed judge referred the case for criminal prosecution. Another judge, appointed by Clinton, picked up the case. The Obama Justice Department role Starting in either mid 2008 or early 2009 (there are Justice Department statements giving both dates,) the Justice Department began its own investigation of Arpaio and his deputies. When the sheriff’s office refused to provide documents, the department sued to get them. The parties settled, and in December 2011, the Justice Department reported that it had determined that Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office were violating the Constitution and federal law. The Justice Department sued in 2012 and reached a partial settlement with Sheriff Arpaio and Maricopa County in July 2015. In effect, Arpaio faced two parallel legal challenges: one from the federal government and one from the Melendres case, which morphed into a class-action suit. They overlapped in substance, but were legally separate. In 2015, the Justice Department joined the Melendres case to press Maricopa County to obey the judge’s rulings. However, law professor Mark Osler at the University of St. Thomas said that did not make the department a party to the suit. "Because they weren’t a party in the case, the Justice Department did not have the discretion and power they usually do — the power of controlling the charge," Osler said. "That was in the hands of the judge." Arpaio's attorney faulted the Obama Justice Department for its October 2016 announcement that it would move forward to prosecute Arpaio. "That clearly hurt Sheriff Arpaio’s chances for re-election," Wilenchik said. Trump agrees. At a Aug. 28 news conference he complained that Arpaio had been unfairly treated by the Obama administration specifically related to the election. Our ruling Arpaio said that his conviction for contempt of court was the result of a witch hunt by Obama administration Justice Department holdovers. The actual roots of the complaints that led to Arpaio’s conviction lie outside the Justice Department. A 2007 private lawsuit turned into a class action lawsuit that led a George W. Bush-era federal judge to issue an injunction against Arpaio and his department. Over several years, Arpaio publicly declared that he would not change his ways. The original judge referred Arpaio’s case for criminal prosecution and a Clinton-era judge found him guilty. The record, the law and legal opinion show the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona had control of the process, not Justice Department staff linked to the Obama administration. We rate this claim False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Joe Arpaio	None	None	None	2017-08-29T10:49:18	2017-08-25	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-01292	Republicans are "trying to impeach our president."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/oct/30/color-change/gop-trying-impeach-obama-civil-rights-group-says/	In a last-ditch effort to mobilize voters before Election Day, Democrats and their supporters are warning that Republicans will try to impeach President Barack Obama if the GOP wins the Senate. On Oct. 28, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., wrote a fundraising letter for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee claiming that a "Republican House and Senate could go beyond shutting down the government — they could waste months of our lives on impeachment." In the South, a New York Times story noted the progressive civil rights group Color of Change echoed similar sentiments in a racially charged message aimed at minority voters. The organization took the sentiment a step further, saying Republicans are actually moving on impeachment. "Enough! Republicans are targeting our kids, silencing our voices and even trying to impeach our president," a flyer the group sent out in Arkansas said. Color of Change Executive Director Rashad Robinson defended the flyer in a statement to PolitiFact: "Republican leadership has shown an inability to contain the more fervent wing of the party that could never accept the idea of a black president." The impeachment card has proven to be effective for Democratic fundraising in the summer. But is it accurate that Republicans are trying to impeach Obama? There are no official efforts to impeach him and the prospects for impeachment, no matter what happens Tuesday, are very, very dim. However, you can find examples of a number of Republicans talking about it anyway. Understanding impeachment There’s a high bar for impeachment outlined in the Constitution. It’s defined as the act of accusing a nonmilitary federal officer of "treason, bribery, high crimes (or) misdemeanors." The process must begin in the House with the articles of impeachment, i.e. the allegations. The articles require a simple majority to pass. After the House votes on impeachment, the Senate tries the case, hearing testimony and examining evidence, and then it votes. Conviction, which results in removal from office, requires support from two-thirds of the Senate. The House has initiated 60 impeachments in its history, according to the House archives, though only twice has it impeached a president: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Neither was removed from office because their cases did not receive enough "guilty" votes to account for two-thirds of the Senate. We looked at all bills for this Congress and found no member of the House has introduced legislation to initiate impeachment proceedings against Obama. It's worth noting that Republicans have controlled the House since 2011, meaning they've had the numbers to impeach Obama for three years, and no official effort has emerged. If they had attempted impeachment, the Democrat-controlled Senate would almost certainly not have voted to convict Obama. And even if Republicans do well in the elections Tuesday, the rosiest projections would put them well short of the two-thirds vote needed in the Senate to remove Obama from office without Democratic support. Republican leadership In order for impeachment to be a real possibility, it would need support from Republican leaders for the articles of impeachment to get considered — but this support just doesn’t exist. Neither House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell nor Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus have called for impeachment. Boehner has been the most outspoken against impeachment, possibly because the process begins in his chamber. At a July 29 press conference, Boehner said the threat of impeachment was a "scam" launched by Democrats to rally their base. "We have no plans to impeach the president," he said. "We have no future plans." On Oct. 30, spokesman Kevin Smith told PolitiFact, "Boehner has taken impeachment off the table. His stance hasn’t changed." (Boehner has, though, started the process of suing the president over implementation of the Affordable Care Act, but those plans seem to have been put on hold.) Throughout June and July, other prominent establishment Republicans and potential 2016 presidential contenders — such as Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida — spoke out against impeachment. In some cases, Republicans seem to think that impeachment might backfire; it’s widely thought that voters punished Republicans at the ballot box in the 1998 elections for impeaching Clinton. In other cases, Republicans seem to be rejecting the idea of impeachment on the merits. Obama’s actions, while disagreeable to Republicans, have not amounted to an impeachable offense — they do not "rise to the high crime and misdemeanor level" — Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said at a Christian Science Monitor event. The list of Republicans cautioning against impeachment proceedings also includes some strong conservatives, like Reps. Mo Brooks of Alabama and Raul Labrador of Idaho — who said Republicans shouldn't "even be talking about impeachment at this time." Republicans for impeachment That is not to say some Republicans have not discussed impeachment. There are Republicans in strong, red districts who said they favor impeachment and others who say it should be an option. We found about a dozen instances where lawmakers said they are receptive to impeaching Obama. Causes for consideration ranged from the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi to fears of unilateral executive action on immigration. In May 2013, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said impeachment was "certainly a possibility" and he was "not taking it off the table." Around the same time, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., not-so-subtly hinted, "People may be starting to use the I-word before too long," while Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., said that "there isn’t a weekend that hasn’t gone by that someone says to me, ‘Michele, what in the world are you all waiting for in Congress? Why aren’t you impeaching the president?’" Others are more blunt. Reps. Kerry Bentivolio, R-Mich.; Steve Stockman, R-Texas; Paul Brown, R-Ga.; and Randy Weber, R-Texas, all said Obama deserves to be impeached. Rep. Kenny Marchant, R-Texas, said impeachment may be necessary but for political purposes consideration should wait until after the November election. Often, the notion of impeachment is raised as a threat if Obama takes certain actions. For example, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, warned in July, "If the president (enacts more executive actions on immigration), we need to bring impeachment hearings immediately before the House of Representatives." In June, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., cautioned that if Obama released prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, "There will be people on our side calling for his impeachment." These threats sometimes take the form of legislation. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., filed a resolution when Obama was weighing military action in Syria that said if a president uses military force without congressional approval it "constitutes an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor." Brooks of Alabama authored a bill that would make it impeachable for a president to fail to prevent a fiscal deficit. Impeachment on the campaign trail During the 2014 campaign season, particularly in contested Republican primaries, how a candidate came down on the question of impeachment has at times become a litmus test for their conservative bona fides. Joni Ernst, now the GOP candidate for Senate in Iowa, was pressed on impeachment during a January candidate forum, according to Yahoo! News. Ernst said Obama should face "repercussions" for his (later deemed unlawful) recess appointments, "whether that's removal from office, whether that's impeachment." Similarly, Ryan Zinke, the Republican nominee for Montana’s at-large House seat, was pressed by a primary opponent on whether he would support impeachment. Zinke said he would. "So is impeachment in the cards? Let's hope we have the votes," he said. This is partly pushed by sentiments among many self-identified Republican voters, who at last tally were supportive of impeachment. According to a July CNN poll, 57 percent of Republicans backed impeachment. Overall, 33 percent of Americans favored impeachment, a number in line with polls from 1998 and 2006 when presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, respectively, were two years into their second terms. Our ruling A civil rights group mailer said Republicans are "trying to impeach our president." No members of the current Congress have introduced legislation to impeach Obama, and Republican Party leaders have shut down the possibility. Some Congressional Republicans and candidates have called for Obama’s impeachment. But most of that rhetoric has been isolated to a few members of the party rather than a resounding chorus. We rate this claim Mostly False.	None	Color of Change	None	None	None	2014-10-30T18:02:25	2014-10-29	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-tron-01593	Petition in Support of The Breast Cancer Protection Act	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/breastcancerprotection/	None	government	None	None	None	Petition in Support of The Breast Cancer Protection Act	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-farg-00214	"Let’s Move actually helped bring down America’s obesity rates for our youngest kids for the first time in 30 years."	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2017/05/obama-childhood-obesity-rates/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Barack Obama	Vanessa Schipani	["children's health"]	Obama on Childhood Obesity Rates	May 12, 2017	[' Speech in Milan, Italy – Tuesday, May 9, 2017 ']	['United_States']
-tron-01048	Concealed Carrier Prevents Nightclub Shooting in South Carolina	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/concealed-carrier-prevents-nightclub-shooting-south-carolina/	None	crime-police	None	None	None	Concealed Carrier Prevents Nightclub Shooting in South Carolina	Jul 6, 2016	None	['None']
-hoer-00678	Sears Supports Reservist Employees Email Forward	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/sears-reservist-support.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Sears Supports Reservist Employees Email Forward	22nd November 2011	None	['None']
-tron-02719	President Obama Pushes Harvard to Reverse Malia Obama’s Suspension	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/harvard-malia-obama-suspension-satire/	None	obama	None	None	['barack obama', 'harvard', 'obama family']	President Obama Orders Harvard to Reverse Malia Obama’s Suspension	Aug 15, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04544	A North Carolina provider of mental health services is named "Nutz R Us."	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nutz-r-us/	None	Business	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Nutz R Us	27 June 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01998	German Government Confiscating Homes to House Refugees	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/german-government-confiscating-homes-house-refugees-truth-fiction/	None	immigration	None	None	['germany', 'immigration', 'international', 'refugees']	German Government Confiscating Homes to House Refugees	May 16, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-01886	A photograph shows Queen singer Freddie Mercury applying intricate face makeup.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/freddie-mercury-putting-make/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Is This a Snapshot of Freddie Mercury Putting on Makeup?	17 August 2017	None	['Freddie_Mercury']
-pomt-04287	"Bill Nelson actually voted in favor of higher taxes 272 times."	false	/florida/statements/2012/nov/01/connie-mack/connie-mack-says-bill-nelson-voted-higher-taxes-27/	U.S. Rep. Connie Mack IV, R-Fort Myers, has repeatedly said that his Senate opponent, Democrat Bill Nelson, voted to raise taxes 150 times. In the home stretch, Mack has now upped the ante in an Oct. 26 fundraising email. The subject line: "We were Wrong." "For months you've heard us say that Bill Nelson has voted in favor of higher taxes over 150 times. As it turns out, we were wrong," the email says. " I hope you'll forgive our mistake. In fact, it turns out Bill Nelson actually voted in favor of higher taxes 272 times. That's right -- Bill Nelson didn't vote for higher taxes over 150 times. He did it 272 times." Mack’s fundraising plea explains that its initial claim included about 157 votes Nelson cast in the Senate starting in 2001. Now the Mack campaign has gone back decades to cite votes that Nelson took while in the Florida House of Representatives (1973-78) and in the U.S. House of Representatives (1979-90). In this fact-check we will explore if Nelson voted for higher taxes 272 times. The Mack campaign sent us a memo showing their list of about 150 tax votes in the Senate, and they also show Nelson’s older votes on their website. We specifically examined the votes that the Mack campaign identified as the most significant while Nelson was in the U.S. House. Budget resolutions In August, we fact-checked Mack’s claim that Nelson "voted to raise our taxes 150 times" and ruled that claim False. We will recap our research from that item and update our analysis, including addressing new arguments made to us by the Mack campaign. (Read our original fact-check.) About half of the votes on that earlier 150-vote list were Democratic budget resolutions, which set non-binding parameters for considering tax and spending legislation. So it's technically incorrect to say the budget resolution will raise, lower or even keep taxes the same. The documents cannot change tax law. Mack researcher Gary Maloney said that these resolutions should count as Nelson votes for higher taxes because they are instructions to committees about what bills to pass concerning spending and taxes. He pointed to a Congressional Research Service article that explains that a budget resolution is an agreement between the House and Senate about the federal budget, and that legislation must be consistent with resolutions. "After Congress works a change in taxes or spending into a budget resolution, the next step is to pass bills that conform tax and spending laws to enforce the budget," he said. "Each budget assumes set amounts of spending and revenue in a given year." We sent Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a copy of our earlier fact-check and our disputes with Mack whether to count budget resolutions as votes for higher taxes. Ellis told us that the budget resolution issue is tricky. "It is relatively non-binding as you indicate," Ellis said in an email. "Especially if there is no final concurrent budget resolution. The only time it becomes binding is if they do budget reconciliation, which is how the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts got through the Senate. That forces the committee’s hands." Duplicative counting Mack’s tally counts multiple votes on the same budget resolution. For example, Mack cites nine votes Nelson took in 2008 about Congressional Resolution 70, a five-year budget plan. Mack also counted multiple votes on actual legislation. It’s common for senators to take multiple votes as both parties engage in maneuvering and introduce competing amendments. For example, in 2001 Mack counts 15 of Nelson’s votes on H.R. 1836 -- the $1.35 trillion in tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush. In our view, that counts as one example of Nelson opposing tax cuts -- not 15 examples. The Mack campaign argues that duplicative votes should count because there can be differences in various versions of the same bill, and Nelson could have chosen to change his vote along the way. Maloney said that Mack’s claim was about the number of "votes" -- not about the number of "bills." We also asked Ellis to weigh in on Mack’s argument about duplicative votes. "Counting multiple votes on the same legislation and all of its permutations just serves to pad the number, but in some cases isn’t completely inaccurate, just not telling the full tale," Ellis said. Defining "higher taxes" Which brings us to another point: Is opposing a tax cut the same as "voting to raise our taxes?" as Mack initially said, or, as he says now, "higher taxes"? This note by the Mack campaign about Nelson’s U.S. Senate votes explains how the campaign defined higher taxes: "The votes in this tally are votes against tax cuts as well as votes to raise taxes, votes in favor of reducing proposed tax cuts, votes for non-binding resolutions supporting taxes, votes to eliminate particular tax cut provisions while retaining others, etc. Because of this, the language must be votes ‘in favor of higher taxes’ to be accurate. Be aware that in certain instances in the votes below, a majority of Republicans voted the way Nelson did. Please also be aware that these votes cannot be characterized in a way that implies that each one would have resulted in a tax increase; this would be inaccurate." Nelson campaign spokesman Dan McLaughlin, who said that Mack used "twisted math," pointed to the last sentence in that note that said that the votes can’t be characterized as a tax increase. Mack’s original list counted several examples of Nelson opposing tax cuts. Some are minor, such as Nelson’s vote to table an amendment to get rid of the medical device tax in 2010. Earlier this year, we sent Mack’s list to a number of experts, including Joshua Gordon, policy director of the Concord Coalition, a group that urges deficit reduction. Gordon called Mack’s list "ludicrous." "Voting to lessen the size of a tax cut in a budget resolution is not voting for a tax increase," he said. "So, I would argue the methodology represents a crazy way to look at this issue." The Mack campaign now argues that a vote against a tax cut is a vote on the side of "higher taxes." For the 272-vote claim, the Mack campaign includes a Nelson vote in the Florida House that maintained the gas tax in 1977. So that legislation kept the status quo -- and the Mack campaign argues that is a vote for "higher taxes" because if he had wanted to get rid of the tax that would be "lower taxes." Again, we turned to Ellis: "That’s fairly clever," Ellis wrote. "Although I guess you could argue that any vote to not cut taxes is a vote for higher taxes, or to not cut them further – regardless of whether it’s a tax vote or not. It’s kind of a slippery slope. So it would be more accurate to say maintain taxes rather than for higher taxes which leaves the listener/reader with an impression that isn’t accurate. Mack’s statement also omits that Nelson has sometimes voted in favor of tax cuts. In 2006 and in 2010, for example, Nelson supported extending tax cuts. This year, he went along with Obama’s plan and voted in July to keep tax cuts only for those earning less than $250,000, though he had said he would have preferred keeping the Bush-era tax cuts for those earning up to $1 million. Mack’s new claim includes Nelson’s votes in the Florida House and the U.S. House of Representatives To get to its new number of 272, the Mack campaign now includes Nelson’s votes from 1973 to 1978 in the Florida state House. That list also includes some duplication: for example, there are two votes listed on the same cigarette tax bill in 1973. Some tax votes only applied to a portion of the state’s taxpayers -- for example, one related to a taxing district in the city of Boca Raton. Many of the votes were about fees, and some were obscure or only applied to a slice of residents: registration fees for barbers’ assistants, a fee for golf courses to set up temporary bars, and prestige tags for motorcyclists. Other fees had a bigger effect, such as a 1975 measure which was expected to raise $500,000 in driver’s license fees. The Mack campaign also searched the federal congressional record to obtain information on Nelson’s votes as a congressman and lists about 89 as votes for higher taxes. Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin noted that about 18 of the U.S. House votes cited by Mack were non-binding resolutions. Also, the Mack campaign includes about 38 duplicative votes, in cases when Nelson took between two and six votes on the same bill. The Mack campaign cited several key House votes of Nelson in favor of higher taxes. These included the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 and a significant tax increase in 1990. We confirmed that Nelson did vote in favor of these taxes. An interesting historical note, however, is that Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush signed them into law. Our ruling Mack said that "Bill Nelson actually voted in favor of higher taxes 272 times." After PolitiFact gave Mack a "False" rating for saying that Nelson voted to raise taxes 150 times the Mack campaign has tweaked their message to say Nelson voted in favor of "higher taxes." Mack argues that "higher" taxes aren’t necessarily the same as a tax "increase" -- a vote for the status quo or against a tax cut is choosing a path of "higher" taxes, Mack argues. We find that Mack’s new wording could still leave voters with a false impression. Nelson did take some votes that raised taxes. But Mack grossly inflates the number by counting multiple votes on the same bill, non-binding resolutions and some fees that only affected a slice of the population. We rate this claim False.	None	Connie Mack	None	None	None	2012-11-01T16:57:03	2012-10-26	['None']
-pomt-00256	"Missouri has the worst roads in the Midwest and nearly the worst roads in the country."	half-true	/missouri/statements/2018/oct/04/renee-hoagenson/hoagenson-partially-right-missouris-poor-road-qual/	Does Missouri have the worst roads in the Midwest? Renee Hoagenson, Democratic candidate for the 4th Congressional District, thinks Missouri lags behind neighboring states in road quality. In an Aug. 28 tweet, Hoagenson claimed that "#Missouri has the worst roads in the Midwest and nearly the worst roads in the country." Hoagenson, who’s running against incumbent Republican Vicky Hartzler, argued the Trump administration’s plans to invest in infrastructure depends too much on privatization. Private companies would increase tolls and other costs for Missouri residents, Hoagenson claimed, and don’t create much union work. Experts we talked to agreed Missouri’s roads are severely underfunded. We’ve fact-checked other public officials’ comments about infrastructure quality, so we wanted to see where Missouri’s roads rank, and if they are as bad as Hoagenson says. Lots of road, little revenue Infrastructure experts told us there isn’t necessarily a formula for comparing state road quality. "States vary slightly by how they define their pavement conditions," said Hussain Bahia, director of the Modified Asphalt Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, in an email. We wanted to explore the evidence anyway. Let’s start with Hoagenson’s tweet, which included a graphic listing the percentage of rural roads in poor condition by state, citing the TRIP 2017 Rural Roads Report. Rural roads make up 82 percent of the state’s total but cost less to maintain than major roadways. Hoagenson specified that Missouri has the worst roads in the Midwest. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Midwest region contains 12 states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin. Missouri had a Midwest region high of 21 percent of rural roads in poor condition in the report. Missouri and Washington tied for 11th nationwide. "So it can be derived that we have some of the worst roads in the country," Hoagenson said in an email. The American Society of Civil Engineers issues a national infrastructure report card every four years and assigns letter grades on 16 infrastructure categories, including roads. There are some state-level report cards, but these report cards are based on data compiled by a volunteer state-level committee, which is overseen by a national committee, said Greg DiLoreto, chair of the society’s committee on America’s infrastructure. Not every state has such a committee in place, and DiLoreto made it clear it does not rank categories or states. Missouri received a C- for overall infrastructure in 2018 and a D+ for roads, with 24 percent of the state’s public roads considered to be in poor condition. Wisconsin, which did not receive a letter grade, was the worst in the Midwest, with 27 percent of its public roads in poor condition. Some of the least maintained roads in the nation are in the Northeast: 54 percent of public roads in Rhode Island are in poor condition; Connecticut’s roads are at 57 percent. Wisconsin was the only Midwestern state to edge Missouri in how much it costs motorists to drive on bad roads, also computed by the engineering society. Wisconsin’s figure is an extra $637 per motorist per year. Missouri’s $604 is second-highest in the region. Prompted by Hoagenson, we tried another way of looking at rural road quality: the road maintenance funding ratio. According to the Citizen’s Guide to Transportation, produced by the Missouri Department of Transportation, the state has the seventh-largest road system in the country at 33,856 miles, and it ranks 46th nationally in revenue per mile. To Hoagenson, that’s very lopsided. More roads, less maintenance makes sense as at least one measure, according to William Buttlar, chair of MU’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. In 2016, Missouri spent $13,379 per state-controlled mile on road maintenance disbursements and $2,024 on administrative disbursements, according to a report sponsored by the nonprofit, non-partisan Reason Foundation on state highway performance. Maintenance spending was 12th-lowest in the country and administrative spending second-lowest, next to Kentucky. In the Midwest, South Dakota and North Dakota had smaller maintenance disbursements than Missouri. One more measure that Buttlar pointed out was the International Roughness Index. The index measures the impact of a road’s roughness on a vehicle’s suspension; the lower the IRI, the better the road. Missouri’s IRI data show 19.58 percent of roads considered not "good" or "acceptable," the third-highest proportion in the Midwest and the 26th-highest in the country. Our ruling Hoagenson claimed that "Missouri has the worst roads in the Midwest and nearly the worst roads in the country." Missouri did not rank worst in the Midwest on metrics we looked at except besides Hoagenson’s chosen graphic. That was only for the state’s rural roads. None of the measures, though, paints a smooth ride for Missouri’s roads. The state ranked near the bottom of the Midwest in nearly all important measures and fell in the bottom half of most rankings nationally. So, Hoagenson has a point that the state’s roads need work. For those reasons, we rate this claim Half-True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Renee Hoagenson	None	None	None	2018-10-04T23:24:59	2018-08-28	['Midwestern_United_States', 'Missouri']
-pose-00397	"I will address the problem in our prisons, where the most disaffected and disconnected Americans are being explicitly targeted for conversion by al Qaeda and its ideological allies."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/417/stop-al-qaeda-prison-recruitment/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Stop al Qaida prison recruitment	2010-01-07T13:26:58	None	['United_States']
-vogo-00134	Years Without Raises: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/years-without-raises-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	Years Without Raises: Fact Check TV	March 5, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-14614	"A (state) trooper with 10 years on the force is getting $500 a year more than a trooper with 10 minutes on the force."	false	/virginia/statements/2016/feb/01/thomas-garrett-jr/tom-garrett-amiss-virginia-state-trooper-pay/	State Sen. Tom Garrett, R-Buckingham, recently explained why he was the lone Virginia senator to vote against the state budget last year. "Last year, we were the only ‘no’ vote because (Gov.) McAuliffe and leadership on both sides were telling us that we couldn’t fund our core essential functions of government -- public transportation, public education, public safety," Garrett said in a Jan. 11 interview on "The John Fredericks Show," a Portsmouth-based radio program. "There are teachers that are underpaid. A trooper with 10 years on the force is getting $500 a year more than a trooper with 10 minutes on the force, and yet they somehow found money to waste on tents for our state parks." What grabbed our attention here is that a veteran state trooper with a decade of service gets a mere $500 more than a newly badged trooper. We asked Garrett -- who is seeking the seat of retiring U.S. Rep. Robert Hurt, R-5th -- where he got his the information. Kevin Reynolds Jr., the senator’s chief of staff, told us the source is Wayne Huggins, executive director of the Virginia State Police Association, a professional organization that represents troopers. Huggins told us that the relatively flat pay scale of troopers is a "seriously demoralizing" problem that has caused many to leave the state police for better-paying jobs with local law enforcement departments. But he denied telling Garrett that the pay differential between rookies and 10-year veterans was $500. So we decided to figure out exactly what, if any difference, exists. Starting pay Troopers in most parts of the state get a starting salary of $36,207, although troopers patrolling Northern Virginia start at $45,241 due to the high cost of living there, according to figures provided by Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman with the Virginia State Police. But a trooper’s pay doesn’t freeze at that $36,207 level for a decade. As an advertisement on the State Police website notes, a year after graduating from the State Police Training Academy the salary rises to $40,482 annually. So a trooper with 10 years on the force would make almost 12 percent more than a rookie. Huggins said there are two tracks for troopers. One is that they can rise through the ranks and become a supervisor, earning extra salary. The other is to remain a trooper and, with seniority and good performance, try to rise to the ranks of "senior trooper" and "master troopers." These designations also come with a raises, but are only available to those who have been on the force for at least 12 years. Pay compression package Another thing Garrett’s statement misses is that the General Assembly last year took the first step in years to address the pay compression issue for state police. The 2014-2016 budget Garrett opposed contained a $228 salary hike for every year of continuous service as a trooper -- a payment that is only available to those who served at least three years and met performance criteria. That means the 10-year veteran’s salary would be $2,280 more than the 10-minute trooper who didn’t qualify for it. And let’s not forget the 12 percent raise after the rookie year -- worth another $4,175 annually. Our ruling Garrett said "trooper with 10 years on the force is getting $500 a year more than a trooper with 10 minutes on the force." In reality, the veteran trooper got a 12 percent raise after a year on the force. And last year’s budget provides a trooper with a decade on the force an added annual salary increase of $2,280. Altogether, that means a well-performing trooper who has been on the force a decade would earn $6,555 more than a rookie. We’re not weighing in on whether the state adequately pays its veteran troopers. But Garrett is using an inaccurate number to make the point that Virginia falls short. We rate his claim False.	None	Thomas Garrett Jr.	None	None	None	2016-02-01T00:00:00	2016-01-11	['None']
-pomt-12567	"For too long, Obamacare has caused high premiums and dismal coverage. ... Under Obamacare premiums in job-based coverage have increased by $3,775"	mostly false	/missouri/statements/2017/apr/12/vicky-hartzler/rep-hartzler-misses-trend-insurance-premiums/	Ever since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, Congressional Republicans have been consistent in their criticism of former President Barack Obama’s health care law. Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Harrisonville, has been one of the most ardent advocates for repeal, regularly railing against the shortcomings of Obama’s health care law. Ten days before the planned Republican replacement bill was withdrawn, on March 14, Hartzler sent a tweet that said, "For too long, Obamacare has caused high premiums and dismal coverage. It’s hurting Americans all over! We need to #RepealAndReplace!" Accompanying the tweet was an image that read, "Fact: Under Obamacare premiums in job-based coverage have increased by $3,775." We wanted to fact-check Hartzler’s claim. What we found is that while health care premiums in job-based coverage have increased in the amount Hartzler claimed, experts and independent analysis reveal that Obamacare itself is only responsible for a very small percentage of that increase. The vast majority of premium increases, experts said, was due to continually rising health care costs. And, notably, the trend the in increases has markedly slowed. Accurate figures PolitiFact reached out to Hartzler’s spokesperson, Kyle Buckles, and he provided the source of the data: a Kaiser Family Foundation interactive graph published on Sep. 14. Buckles indicated that to arrive at the specific figure of $3,775, they looked at the premium increase for job-based coverage — also known as employer-sponsored coverage — between 2009 and 2015 for families. The difference in cost for those years, though, was greater than the number they cited, at $4,170. The figure from the image that Hartzler tweeted was actually the increase between 2010 and 2015 — Obama signed his health care law in 2010. So, Hartzler is correct in noting that for families the average cost of a premium in job-based coverage increased by $3,775 in Obamacare’s first five years. Impact on premiums In context with her tweet that "Obamacare has caused high premiums," it’s implied that Hartzler is claiming that the the health care law was directly responsible for the $3,775 increase in premiums. But to Linda J. Blumberg, a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute, the correlation between the law and these premium increases is tenuous. "The Affordable Care Act did require that employers provide preventative care services without cost sharing," Blumberg said, "and there were some other small changes, but those changes, the actuaries estimated that at most that would have an impact of 1 or 2 percent on premiums (in job-based coverage)." Blumberg continued, "That difference in premiums between 2010 and today, very little of that is attributable to the Affordable Care Act." Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, in an email agreed that only 1 to 3 percent of the increase could be attributed to the Affordable Care Act between 2010 and 2015. The rest, he said, "would be due to increasing health care costs." Changes in job-based coverage In addition to requiring employers with 50 or more full-time employees to offer health insurance, the health care law mandated several more changes, most of which came into effect in 2014. (The rule requiring that employers with 50-99 full-time employees offer coverage did not come into effect until Jan. 1, 2016.) Some other notable changes included: > The requirement that dependents under 26 could be covered. > Mandatory minimum coverage, which includes things like preventive services, among other things. > Bans on annual and lifetime dollar limits. > Ban on cost-sharing limits such as copays and deductibles. > Ban on refusing coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions. Such changes made it impossible for employers to offer bare minimum coverage without facing penalties. A bigger picture In addition to the fact that the health care law is likely only responsible for 1 or 2 percent of the increase in premiums for employer-sponsored coverage, Hartzler’s numbers fail to take into account that the increase in premiums has actually slowed under the health care law. According to a Kaiser news release included with the interactive graph that Hartzler’s team cited, since 2011, when the Affordable Care Act was first implemented, the average of family premiums in job-based coverage has only increased 20 percent. Between 2006 and 2011 the increase in premium cost in the same coverage was 31 percent. And between 2001 and 2006 it was 63 percent, according to the full report and corresponding data. In the news release, Drew Altman, Kaiser Family Foundation president and CEO, said, "We’re seeing premiums rising at historically slow rates, which helps workers and employers alike." The problem with the decrease in premiums, according to Altman and Kaiser, is that, in part, they have occurred due to increases in deductibles. According to the Kaiser news release: "In 2016, 83 percent of covered workers face a deductible for single coverage, which averages $1,478. That’s up $159... from 2015, and $486... since 2011. The average deductible for workers who face one is higher for workers in small firms (three to 199 employers) than in large firms." Blumberg saw it similarly. "It looks to me very much like the increases — the trends in premiums in recent years — has not been high relative to historic increases in employer-based insurance," she said. So, according to the data available, while family premiums under job-based plans have continued to rise since the law’s implementation, they have done so at a much slower pace than at any point since 1999. Our ruling Hartzler claimed that "Obamacare has caused high premiums and dismal coverage," and that "premiums in job-based coverage have increased by $3,775." Her claim ignores a key finding of the study from which her numbers came: that the increase in premiums is dramatically slowing. She also discounted the fact that experts believe that only 1 to 3 percent of the increase in premium cost was actually attributable to the Affordable Care Act. Due to her misinterpretation of the numbers, we rate Hartzler’s claim Mostly False.	None	Vicky Hartzler	None	None	None	2017-04-12T20:30:13	2017-03-14	['None']
-snes-01206	Less Effective Flu Shots 'Prove' You Shouldn't Get Them at All?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/flu-shot-less-effective-season/	None	Medical	None	Alex Kasprak	None	Less Effective Flu Shots ‘Prove’ You Shouldn’t Get Them at All?	15 January 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-02287	"If you want out of the individual mandate... all you have to do now is tick off the box that says 'hardship' and you're out."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/04/charles-krauthammer/charles-krauthammer-anyone-can-get-out-individual-/	Individual mandate, schmindividual schmandate. There’s a quick, penalty-free fix for anyone who wants out of Obamacare’s health insurance requirement, says conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer. Just check a box. The one that says "hardship." That’s it, you’re done! There will be no questions, and no consequences. At least, that’s how easy Krauthammer made it sound during his April 1 appearance on The O’Reilly Factor. He and host Bill O’Reilly discussed the Democrats’ changes to the law since it passed in 2010. Krauthammer: "They decide what the law is every Wednesday morning. They've changed it 38 times. The employer mandate is out. Remember the great debate in the country for two years over the individual mandate? "The individual mandate no longer exists. They haven't said so officially, but if you want out of the individual mandate, do you know what you've got to do? "You have to say that this is a hardship. There are hardship exceptions. It means, it was meant to mean, if there's a hurricane or a tornado and you're living out of the back of a pickup truck, you can opt out. All you have to do now is tick off the box that says 'hardship' and you're out." O'Reilly: "Yes, you don't even have to explain it." Krauthammer: "You don't have to explain --" O'Reilly: "And it can be as simple as 'I don't know how to work the computer, so I can't get it.' " Krauthammer: "Right. When you have an anonymous bureaucratic computerized system and then you use the word 'honor system' as the way of describing, you are deliberately misusing the language." O’Reilly: "I think the evidence is overwhelming that you are correct." With an assurance like that from O’Reilly, we thought Krauthammer’s point merited a second look. Is it really so easy to get out of the insurance mandate by claiming a hardship? We know from a previous fact-check that the Internal Revenue Service cannot use the threat of jail time or property seizures to go after people who do not pony up the "shared responsibility payment," or what’s sometimes referred to as the "tax" for not having health insurance even though you can afford it. That fee, which will be collected in 2015 for the filing of 2014 taxes, is 1 percent of annual income or $95 per person for the year, whichever is more expensive. The fee goes up every year. Already, some people are exempt for reasons including religious beliefs, prisoners, Indian tribes, income being below the federal filing level, and undocumented immigrants. The hardship exemption comes in when you don’t fall into those categories but have a reason for not having health insurance and paying the fine. In most cases, it’s because you can’t afford it. Getting one is not as easy as checking a box. Here’s the application from the Health Insurance Marketplace, which spells out 14 categories for the hardship exemption. It also says what form of documentation (hello, proof) you need to attach in order to qualify. Categories that require some form of documentation include being evicted or declaring bankruptcy in the last six months; receiving a shut-off notice from a utility; the death of a loved one; a human or natural disaster caused substantial property damage; racking up unexpected costs taking care of a family member; applying for but not receiving Medicaid because the state of residence did not expand Medicaid access envisioned in the law; and having medical expenses you couldn’t pay in the last two years. There’s also a hardship category for people whose health plans were canceled and they find other options unaffordable. Being homeless or suffering domestic abuse are the only categories that do not require some form of documentation. But then there’s the 14th category: "You experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance." Documentation should be submitted "if possible." Is that the magical "other" category promising safe haven for people who don’t want to pay the insurance penalty? "Exemption 14 is broad, but not open ended," said Timothy Jost, a Washington and Lee University professor who has studied the law. "My understanding is that it is meant to give (Health and Human Services) the discretion to take into account hardships not specifically listed." An unlisted hardship would have to be in the spirit of the other categories, he said, and it would not be permanent, if it’s granted at all. The Department of Health and Human Services will respond within one to two weeks to let someone know if more information is needed, the application says. If the exemption is okayed, the recipient gets a special number to include on his or her tax return. "HHS could certainly deny a hardship exemption if there was insufficient documentation or explanation," Jost said. Gail Wilensky, an expert on the law who headed Medicare and Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush, said Krauthammer’s point isn’t that far from the mark, especially since "the administration has shown itself to be extremely 'flexible' when it comes to any type of enforcement or timing thus far." Still, there is some explaining required. There’s a box for applicants to describe how their hardship prevented them from getting health insurance, with exceptions for people turned down for Medicaid and health policy cancellations (which are proven by copies of a denial for Medicaid or notice of cancellation). People who submit hardship exemptions without really needing one should pay special attention to step three of the application. That’s the part where you sign, under penalty of perjury, that your exemption claim is honest. Lying is a crime. "Only people who have a true, factual basis for their claims should be advised to file," said Sara Rosenbaum, George Washington University health and policy professor. Our ruling Krauthammer said people who don’t want to comply with the individual mandate should just "tick off the box that says ‘hardship’ and you're out." He is over-simplifying the process. Included in the hardship exemption application -- because there’s an application, you don’t just check a box on your tax form -- is a 14th category that reads kind of like "other." It’s meant to catch examples of hardship not delineated in the form. Documentation is requested if possible. Again, claiming it doesn’t mean you get it. You apply. And just because you ask does not mean you will receive. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	Charles Krauthammer	None	None	None	2014-04-04T10:20:21	2014-04-01	['None']
-pomt-11807	"The Texas unemployment rate is now the lowest it’s been in 40 years & Texas led the nation last month in new job creation."	false	/texas/statements/2017/nov/16/greg-abbott/greg-abbott-makes-false-claims-about-texas-unemplo/	It’s commonplace for a governor to tout a state’s economy. Still, Greg Abbott of Texas made us wonder when he tweeted in mid-November 2017: "The Texas unemployment rate is now the lowest it’s been in 40 years & Texas led the nation last month in new job creation." Abbott, a Republican seeking re-election in 2018, accompanied his tweet with a campaign video of Abbott smiling at business groundbreakings. The ad flashes headlines about companies opening facilities and adding jobs in Texas. Tagline: "And we’re just getting started." We got started fact-checking Abbott’s tweet by asking his office for his backup; we didn’t get a response. In July 2017, Abbott made a Mostly True claim about more Texans having jobs than ever. Yet we noticed that when Abbott tweeted about the state’s jobless rate "last month," October 2017 unemployment rates had yet to be revealed. To get our fix on the latest available data, we fetched Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showing that the state’s impressive 4 percent jobless rate for September 2017 tied the previous record low since 1976. According to the bureau, the state similarly had a 4 percent unemployment rate in November and December 2000, 17 years ago. The state jobless rate in fall 1977, 40 years ago, hovered at 5.2 percent. To our inquiry, a Dallas-based bureau economist, Cheryl Abbot, confirmed our read of monthly seasonally adjusted Texas jobless rates since 1976. Mark J. Perry, who teaches at the University of Michigan-Flint, agreed though Perry, by email, called Abbott’s overstatement on this point "minor." Texas Unemployment Rate (Seasonally Adjusted), 1976-September 2017 SOURCE: Website, "Local Area Unemployment Statistics," Bureau of Labor Statistics, Nov. 16, 2017 (downloaded Nov. 16, 2017) Job gains? By email, the bureau's Abbot showed that Texas didn’t lead the country in job gains for September (again, the latest month of available data). In fact, an October 2017 bureau press release indicates Texas wasn't even among the five states that experienced job gains from August to September 2017. From the release: "The largest increase in employment occurred in California (+52,200), followed by Washington (+13,800) and Indiana (+11,400). The states also were described as enjoying statistically significant month-to-month gains. "In percentage terms," the bureau said, "the largest increase occurred in Nebraska (+0.5 percent), followed by Arizona, Indiana, and Washington (+0.4 percent each)." California had a 0.4 percent gain, the release said. According to a more detailed bureau chart we checked in mid-November 2017, Texas saw a 0.1 percent decrease in jobs from August to September 2017 by going from 12,328,400 jobs to 12,321,100 jobs. The chart indicates 30 states fared better month to month though that folds in five states showing no percentage gains (or losses). There’s a more encouraging longer view. The bureau’s release lists Texas among 28 states with over-the-year increases in nonfarm payroll employment from September 2016 to September 2017. The release said: "The largest job gains occurred in California (+280,300), Texas (+256,100), and New York (+93,100)--with the largest percentage gains playing out in Nevada and Utah (+2.5 percent each) followed by Maryland (+2.4 percent)." According to an accompanying chart, Texas and Idaho each saw a 2.1 percent increase in jobs over the year, tying for fourth nationally behind Washington state, which saw a 2.2 percent percentage increase in jobs. Abbot wrote: "As you can see, the largest monthly increase in jobs in September 2017 occurred in California (+52,200). In percentage terms, Nebraska led among the states with a 0.5-percent gain. California also recorded the largest over-the-year increase during this period (280,300), followed by Texas (256,100)." Our ruling Abbott tweeted: "The Texas unemployment rate is now the lowest it’s been in 40 years & Texas led the nation last month in new job creation." The latest unemployment data posted when Abbott spoke showed Texas with a 4 percent unemployment rate in September 2017 though that didn't set a 40-year record. Rather, it tied the previous 40-year low set in two months of 2000. Abbott didn’t provide nor did we find data showing jobs created in each state in October 2017. Federal data otherwise indicate that Texas experienced a slight decrease in jobs from August to September 2017 though the state also was home to more jobs than a year earlier. We rate this claim False. FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. UPDATE, Nov. 17, 2017: Two days after Abbott tweeted his claim about the Texas jobless rate, the federal government reported that the state had a 41-year record low 3.9 percent jobless rate in October 2017. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Greg Abbott	None	None	None	2017-11-16T17:27:07	2017-11-15	['Texas']
-pomt-01411	Says Scott Brown "co-sponsored legislation to let employers deny women coverage for birth control."	true	/new-hampshire/statements/2014/oct/10/jeanne-shaheen/jeanne-shahee-says-scott-brown-backed-measure-let-/	The U.S. Senate race in New Hampshire has been awash in claims about abortion and women’s health issues in recent days. One claim by incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen caught our eye. Shaheen is facing a challenge from former Republican Sen. Scott Brown. In a news release from her campaign, Shaheen said: "I have always supported a woman’s right to choose because I know women should be making health care decisions in consultation with their doctors and their families, not their employer. Scott Brown’s record is clear: When it counts, he doesn’t stand up for women’s reproductive rights and economic security. He co-sponsored legislation to let employers deny women coverage for birth control or even mammograms. New Hampshire women can’t trust Scott Brown, and his record is move evidence that he is wrong for New Hampshire." We noticed two claims that are related, but distinct enough to analyze separately. First, would the legislation in question have allowed employers deny women coverage for birth control? And would it have allowed employers to deny coverage for mammograms? We’ll look at the birth control claim here, and mammograms in a separate fact-check. It turns out the two issues differ a good bit. In a different Shaheen campaign news release, the campaign explained its sourcing by writing, "FACT: Scott Brown both co-sponsored and voted for the Blunt Amendment that would let employers deny women access to a range of healthcare services, including contraception and coverage for mammograms." The amendment in question was proposed by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. It was tabled -- that is, dispensed with -- by a 51-48 vote in which a simple majority was required. Among those who voted "nay" -- that is, those who wanted to keep it under consideration -- was Brown, then representing Massachusetts in the Senate. He also co-sponsored a predecessor measure, S.1467, the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011. So Shaheen’s camp is correct that Brown acted in support of this measure. But what did the amendment say? It acted to widen the scope of acceptable actions for opting out of provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on religious or moral grounds. It focuses on mandates within the law for preventive services, called the "essential health benefits package." Specifically, the amendment said employers cannot be required to cover "specific items or services" that are "contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan." We agree with the Shaheen campaign that the provision is drawn broadly. While it’s not targeted at abortion or birth control per se, it is so expansively written that there’s little doubt it could be invoked on behalf of those who oppose abortion and certain types of birth control. As we explained in our other fact check, we find no evidence that anyone has expressed a religious or moral objection to mammograms, so we rated that claim Mostly False. But the case that the Blunt Amendment would have affected access to birth control is stronger. Some opponents of abortion have supported opt-out rights for employers who oppose certain types of birth control that they say work like abortifacients. In fact, this was the issue at the heart of the closely watched 2014 Supreme Court decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby. In that case, a 5-4 majority ruled that a closely held, private corporation, such as the craft retailer Hobby Lobby, could decline on religious grounds to pay for certain kinds of contraceptives otherwise mandated in employee health coverage by the Affordable Care Act. The only quibble we have with the phrasing of Shaheen’s claim is that the Blunt Amendment didn’t single out birth control, which is the impression one could easily get from her statement. But since the amendment was written so broadly -- and since birth control has long been at issue for religious or moral reasons -- we don’t see this as a significant problem. Our ruling Shaheen said Brown "co-sponsored legislation to let employers deny women coverage for birth control." The amendment, which Brown supported, was written loosely enough to allow a religious-conscience opt-out for birth control -- an issue about which there has been a longstanding policy debate on religious and moral grounds. We rate the claim True.	None	Jeanne Shaheen	None	None	None	2014-10-10T11:14:13	2014-09-29	['None']
-pomt-12320	"This is not the first time (the Russians) have been involved in our elections."	half-true	/north-carolina/statements/2017/jun/20/richard-burr/heres-every-time-russian-or-soviet-spies-tried-int/	Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, is leading a congressional investigation into the Russian intervention to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. And he says this scandal isn’t unique to Trump. "This is not the first time they’ve been involved in our elections," Burr said earlier this month. Burr is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which recently has hosted public, under-oath testimony of some of the Trump administration’s top officials regarding Russian election meddling. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly called allegations of Russian meddling a fictional "witch-hunt" against him, and Russian President Vladimir Putin also denies any interference. Yet the U.S. intelligence community says the Russian government did try to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Independent observers agree, as do members of Congress including Burr. In a claim we fact-checked previously, Burr said his committee’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia has led to more transparency than usual. We rated that True. Now, we turn our attention to this claim that last year’s meddling wasn’t anything new. Here’s the full context. A reporter asked Burr what his reaction was to Putin's denial of Russian election meddling. Burr responded: "That there is no truth to Vladimir Putin’s words. That by every judgment to this point, they were aggressively involved in the U.S. elections, Montenegro, France, they are involved in the German upcoming elections. And that this is not the first time they’ve been involved in our elections, and that America needs to have a much more definitive response to them." Most of what Burr mentioned has been widely covered already. But not the last part. So we started digging. Close but no cigar Historians agree that what Burr said probably isn’t literally true. This is the first time (at least as far as the public knows) that Russia attempted to influence a U.S. election in favor of a particular candidate. However, it is a throwback of sorts to the Cold War. "If by ‘they,’ he meant the Russians, he's incorrect," said Mark Kramer, an expert on foreign relations at Harvard University. "But if he meant the Soviet Union, then it is certainly true." And of course, there might be more out there that’s still classified or hasn’t yet been discovered. "Now who knows if Russia didn’t somehow fund one candidate or another," said Frank Costigliola, a history professor at the University of Connecticut. "But it’s unknown." We asked six historians and foreign relations scholars to consider Burr’s claim. Two said they had no idea what he was talking about. The others pointed to a handful of documented (yet relatively unknown) meddling efforts by Soviet leaders. None could identify any Russian meddling attempts. We also asked Burr what he meant. His office pointed us to an intelligence report, published in January, that concluded the Kremlin tried to help Trump and hurt his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. Spy games That report is "a declassified version of a highly classified assessment" made using CIA, FBI and NSA intelligence. It said the 2016 Russian meddling was the "boldest yet" in a U.S. election. It said with "high confidence" that Russia was behind the hack and publication of embarrassing emails from the Democratic National Committee, that it hacked into U.S. voting software, and that the Kremlin funded a large pro-Trump, anti-Clinton campaign in the United States using paid social media "trolls" as well as more traditional propaganda outlets. The report didn’t completely back up Burr’s claim. It said the Russians have spied on U.S. presidential candidates before, and have used state-owned propaganda outlets like RT and RT America to cast doubts on the U.S. democratic process. But it listed no previous attempts to actually influence the outcome of an election. In fact, the report said the 2016 meddling "demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations." And while this report made only vague references to Soviet meddling, our interviews uncovered a few instances of Cold War-era attempts to either boost one candidate or harm another. Over the course of 11 presidential elections between the end of World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union, we identified three secret attempts to influence an election. • 1960: Through his ambassador to the United States, Mikhail Menshikov, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev offered Adlai Stevenson help from a secret propaganda campaign. However, Stevenson declined the offer. He lost in the Democratic primary to John F. Kennedy. • 1968: The Soviet Union’s ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Dobrynin, offered to secretly fund Hubert Humphrey’s campaign against Richard Nixon. Humphrey declined the bribe. • 1976: Fearing that anti-communist Democrat Henry "Scoop" Jackson stood a good chance at winning in the wake of Nixon’s resignation, the KGB began a smear campaign. Soviet spies forged FBI paperwork to make it appear Jackson was secretly gay and sent the fake reports to newspapers around the United States during the election and for years after. Notably, the past attempts to help a candidate were arranged through the ambassador. And much of the investigation into last year has focused on meetings the current Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, had with key officials on Trump’s team before Trump became president. Some of those meetings allegedly involved former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (who in 2015 took $45,000 from RT), Attorney General Jeff Sessions (who was a top Trump advisor during the campaign) and Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law. Our ruling Burr said that when it comes to Russian spies, "this is not the first time they’ve been involved in our elections." There’s no public evidence the post-Cold War Russian government has ever meddled at anywhere near the levels of 2016, when U.S. officials say the Kremlin tried to help Trump’s campaign. However, during the Cold War there were a few Soviet attempts to hurt or help specific candidates. Yet 2016 was the first time in 40 years the United States is known to have seen this type of interference. Since Burr’s claim has some truth to it but gives an impression that’s slightly misleading, we rate this claim Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Richard Burr	None	None	None	2017-06-20T18:07:34	2017-06-08	['Russia']
-hoer-00784	Two Faced Kitten	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/two-faced-kitten.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Two Faced Kitten	December 2008	None	['None']
-hoer-00063	Tanner Dwyer Friend Request	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/tanner-dwyer-friend-request-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Tanner Dwyer Friend Request Hacker Hoax	May 28, 2013	None	['None']
-goop-00385	Miranda Lambert Did Send Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani “Congratulatory Note” For “Secret Wedding,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/miranda-lambert-blake-shelton-gwen-stefani-congratulations-secret-wedding-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Miranda Lambert Did NOT Send Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani “Congratulatory Note” For “Secret Wedding,” Despite Claim	5:05 pm, August 25, 2018	None	['Miranda_Lambert']
-pomt-14278	Says Rick Scott "cut Medicaid" so people can't "get Obamacare."	half-true	/florida/statements/2016/apr/06/rick-scotts-starbucks-heckler/starbucks-heckler-claims-rick-scott-cut-medicaid-p/	It starts like a joke — Gov. Rick Scott walks into a Gainesville Starbucks — but one patron wasn’t laughing. In town on April 5, 2016, to tour the recently opened factory and headquarters for biopharmaceutical company Nanotherapeutics, Scott stopped in to the coffee chain for a cup. Cara Jennings, a former Lake Worth city commissioner, saw Scott and ripped into him from her seat. Among other grievances, she accused him of denying her health care coverage with his policies. "In fact, you cut Medicaid so I couldn’t get Obamacare," Jennings shouted on April 5, 2016. "You are an a------! You don’t care about working people. You don’t care about working people. You should be ashamed to show your face around here." When Scott countered that the state had created a million jobs since the recession, she said no one cared (read our fact-check on those jobs numbers). She then criticized his March signing of a bill denying funding for women’s health care clinics that performed abortions (read our check about that issue). We tried to reach Jennings by phone, text, email and even Facebook, but we didn’t hear back from her, so we don’t really know the specifics of her situation. That makes it difficult to gauge whether she was able to benefit from the health care law. But we can look at whether Scott cut Medicaid, the joint state and federal program to provide health insurance for the very poor, in a way that could have denied people health coverage under the Affordable Care Act. It’s not so much that he cut anything, but more that he hasn’t consistently supported expanding the program. That has indeed left hundreds of thousands of Floridians without coverage. The expansion debate Jennings told ABC Action News in Tampa after the incident that she is a single mother who worked part-time. That provides clues that she may fall into what is known as the Medicaid coverage gap. To understand why, let’s review how the Affordable Care Act is linked to Medicaid. The law originally wanted to cover uninsured people two different ways. One was to subsidize people who needed help buying insurance through state marketplaces or HealthCare.gov. The second was to expand Medicaid to cover a higher number of poorer people. Normally, to be eligible for Medicaid, your annual income has to be 44 percent of the federal poverty level (100 percent is currently $11,880 for an individual and $24,300 for a family of four). The plan was to extend that eligibility to all adults up to 138 percent of the poverty level. Technically the calculation under the law is 133 percent, but a 5 percent deduction is added on top of that. But Medicaid expansion ended up being optional after a 2012 Supreme Court ruling saying it could not be forced upon states. Currently 19 states, including Florida, have chosen not to grow the program. Recent estimates from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that 948,000 uninsured adults in Florida would be covered by an expansion. This has led to plenty of debate among lawmakers, including a meltdown during the 2015 Florida legislative session over how to cover more lower-income residents. The Senate was open to a limited expansion, while the House opposed it altogether. But now the math really starts to get tricky. If a state doesn’t expand Medicaid, people who make 100 to 400 percent of the poverty level can get marketplace subsidies to buy private insurance. Because of the way the law was written, that leaves people making between 44 and 100 percent of the poverty level out in the cold, without assistance. Those people don’t qualify for Medicaid, and can’t get subsidies to buy insurance. That’s the so-called coverage gap. According to Kaiser, there are 567,000 people under that umbrella in the Sunshine State. Chances are good that a single mother working part time could fit into that definition. Scott, a former hospital chain executive best known for resigning amid controversy over his company defrauding Medicare, has had a spotty history with Medicaid. He initially opposed expanding the program under Obamacare, then supported it during his re-election campaign, then went back to opposing it. We rated his position a Full Flop. While the Legislature is the body that would have to approve an expansion, Scott’s opinion affects the debate. (Scott’s office did not respond to our questions about Medicaid.) He has argued with Washington over the federal government ending payments for low-income hospital patients, leaving the Legislature to use state money to plug holes in the program the last two years. Scott has also asked lawmakers to eliminate automatic increases to Medicaid hospital rates. He’s also overseen the state’s controversial transition to managed care, in which private companies took over Medicaid policies as a cost-cutting measure. Florida CHAIN, a consumer health advocacy group, told us managed care organizations had actually seen a boost in funding. And there’s the aforementioned abortion bill Scott signed on March 25. That bill prevents state and Medicaid money from going to clinics that perform elective abortions, including Planned Parenthood affiliates. But these are specific issues not necessarily related to getting access to broad health care coverage under Obamacare. While many Floridians remain uninsured without Medicaid expansion, we found no evidence of an outright cut, as Jennings said. Our ruling The activist at Starbucks said Rick Scott "cut Medicaid" so people can't "get Obamacare." Her point-blank accusation that Scott cut the program doesn’t fit. But through Scott’s inaction and the Florida House's resistance to expansion, many Floridians are not benefitting from either subsidies to buy private insurance or an expanded Medicaid. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True.	None	Rick Scott's Starbucks heckler	None	None	None	2016-04-06T17:11:16	2016-04-05	['None']
-snes-03168	Hollywood is going on strike until Donald Trump resigns from the presidency.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hollywood-strike-trump-resigns/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Is Hollywood Going on Strike Until Donald Trump Resigns?	10 January 2017	None	['None']
-goop-00295	Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie ‘On-Set Chemistry’ Worrying Her Husband?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/brad-pitt-margot-robbie-set-husband-tom-ackerley/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie ‘On-Set Chemistry’ Worrying Her Husband?	12:00 am, September 10, 2018	None	['None']
-afck-00236	“Freezing orders to the value of R601 million were obtained by the end of the third quarter of the 2015/16 financial year. This means that government has recovered a total of R4.21 billion since 2009.”	unproven	https://africacheck.org/reports/is-the-anc-advancing-peoples-power-we-fact-check-key-election-claims/	None	None	None	None	None	Is the ANC ‘advancing people’s power’? We fact-check key election claims	2016-05-19 06:39	None	['None']
-pomt-01875	"As Jim Doyle’s Commerce secretary, Mary Burke spent $12.5 million dollars to buy a vacant lot for a company that said it had no plans to create jobs in Wisconsin" and had laid off 800 workers.	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2014/jul/10/scott-walker/scott-walker-ad-says-mary-burke-helped-firm-no-pla/	In his latest TV ad, Gov. Scott Walker rips challenger Mary Burke’s attempt to attract a giant Illinois-based company to add thousands of jobs in Wisconsin when Burke ran the state Commerce Department under Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle. "As Jim Doyle’s Commerce secretary, Mary Burke spent $12.5 million dollars to buy a vacant lot for a company that said it had no plans to create jobs in Wisconsin," the ad says. "In fact, the same company had already laid off over 800 workers when Burke closed the deal." The ad’s kicker: "Mary Burke says she’ll work to create jobs and spend our tax money wisely. But her record as Jim Doyle’s Commerce secretary tells a different story." Is Walker right about his likely Democratic opponent in the November 2014 election? Did Burke really authorize an aid package for a company that "said it had no plans to create jobs" here -- after massive layoffs at the firm? The Burke campaign reacted to the ad by saying: "Everyone from local officials to the local chamber of commerce to Walker's own administration agrees that this was and is a good deal from an economic development standpoint. The grant contained strong protections for taxpayers if job creation goals were not met or infrastructure was not developed for economic development." Let’s dig into what happened. The ad focuses on a major move by Doyle and Burke in the spring of the 2006 election year. In March 2006, they announced a $12.5 million forgivable loan funded through federal community block grant funds, the largest such award in Commerce Department history. It was to support development of 500 acres acquired in Kenosha County by global pharmaceutical maker Abbott Laboratories Inc. Abbott, a major employer of Wisconsin residents based just 15 miles south of Kenosha County, had purchased parcels of land on the Wisconsin side since June 2005 for possible expansion. Doyle and Burke sought to augment that purchase with another 40 acres paid for with the $12.5 million state award. They and local officials wanted to get the land in order to block plans for a truck stop they thought could impede development in the area. Judging by the comments of Doyle and Burke at the time -- she had "full confidence" 2,400 jobs would result; he welcomed the company to Wisconsin -- you’d have thought Abbott had already announced its expansion in early 2006. But the Journal Sentinel reported Wednesday that not only did no jobs materialize, federal officials in 2013 demanded the money back. Eight years after the 2006 deal, Abbott has not developed the Kenosha County land. Abbott showed interest Did it have "no plans" to create jobs, as the Walker ad claims? In one sense, Abbott clearly had shown an interest in possible expansion in Wisconsin, as evidenced by the land purchases made with its own funds. The possibility was real enough for local officials in Kenosha County to actively work on working on paving the way for the firm. The company paid out $35 million for those parcels. But that solid interest fell short of an actual plan to build and start hiring. (The company, we should note, also signed a development agreement with the Village of Pleasant Prairie to develop that land. But that was a year after Burke’s agency made the award). The company didn’t stand alongside state officials when Doyle announced the loan in 2006. And officials said precious little about their intentions at that time. Here’s a look back: Chicago Tribune story, Feb. 14, 2006: "Abbott has acquired approximately 500 acres of land in Pleasant Prairie, Wis., in anticipation of future growth and expansion," a company spokesman said. "No specific plans are in place at this time for development of the property." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story, March 3, 2006: Abbott spokesman Jonathan Hamilton said the Wisconsin site is for future growth, without any specific plans at this time. Commerce Department newsletter, April 2006: "Abbott has purchased this land in Wisconsin in anticipation of future growth and expansion," said Dale Johnson, the company’s divisional vice president for State Government Affairs. "We are pleased to have worked with the Governor, his staff, the Village of Pleasant Prairie and the Kenosha Area Business Alliance." Those comments made clear the company was preparing for possible expansion in Wisconsin, but had no specific plan at the moment. Feds object One media story, in the Chicago Tribune in February 2006, speculated that Abbott’s Wisconsin land buys might be leverage for the company on various issues it had before Illinois lawmakers. With the uncertain timetable in mind, the Commerce Department’s aid deal was long term. If in 10 years, at least 2,400 jobs were created by Abbott in Wisconsin, the loan -- actually made to the village of Pleasant Prairie, which passed the funds to Abbott -- would not have to be repaid. In theory, that means there is still time to make the expansion happen with help from the loan. But the US Housing and Urban Development office in Milwaukee demanded the $12.3 million back in 2013 saying the development project was ineligible for the block grant dollars the state had used. The reasons the federal agency cited in its decision are relevant to judging whether Abbott stated any plans to create jobs in Wisconsin. A letter from HUD to the state in August 2013 concluded that the Commerce Department had no written commitment from Abbott to develop the property or create jobs. State officials agreed to that deal at the time. The federal agency declared that "Commerce participated in a speculative land banking venture" without ensuring that the funded activity would be eligible. Even years later, "the specific proposed use of the acquired land has not yet been identified," HUD’s Sernorma Mitchell wrote to state Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch. Those comments from HUD help Walker’s case. Finally, the Walker ad also mentions layoffs, citing Chicago newspaper stories. Media in Illinois reported that Abbott cut at least that many jobs in Illinois in 2005 and early 2006. Our rating Walker’s ad said: "As Jim Doyle’s Commerce secretary, Mary Burke spent $12.5 million dollars to buy a vacant lot for a company that said it had no plans to create jobs in Wisconsin" and had laid off 800 workers. There’s a hint of mischief in the ad’s language in that it can be heard to mean that Burke was so incompetent she gave money to a firm with zero interest in a Wisconsin operation. That idea is off base. But as we say at PolitiFact, words matter, and the ad’s claim closely mirrors what company officials said at the time of the award. And HUD officials found that even seven years later, no specific use for the land was proposed. We rate Walker’s claim Mostly True.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2014-07-10T05:00:00	2014-07-08	['Wisconsin']
-snes-03723	Is the Owner of Jimmy John's a Big-Game Hunter?	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jimmy-john-liautaud-hunting-photos/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Is the Owner of Jimmy John’s a Big-Game Hunter?	31 July 2015	None	['None']
-pose-01002	Will "coordinate the efforts of the Area Agencies on Aging and Disability and private sector nonprofits, faith-based and community groups to make sure the right information and resources are available to those who need it. He will create this network to ensure they are talking, sharing information and providing the right level of support. Mayor Haslam will also use this effort to draw attention to this important issue and to educate the public on the challenges facing seniors and those who care for them."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/tennessee/promises/haslam-o-meter/promise/1070/develop-a-support-network-for-senior-citizens/	None	haslam-o-meter	Bill Haslam	None	None	Develop a support network for senior citizens.	2012-01-18T15:26:36	None	['None']
-goop-00376	Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner Having “Family Therapy Sessions” With Kids At Rehab, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-jennifer-garner-family-therapy-kids-rehab-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner NOT Having “Family Therapy Sessions” With Kids At Rehab, Despite Report	4:16 pm, August 27, 2018	None	['Ben_Affleck']
-vogo-00297	The Top Whoppers of 2011	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/the-top-whoppers-of-2011/	None	None	None	None	None	The Top Whoppers of 2011	December 19, 2011	None	['None']
-pose-00536	“I want to lower the tax on employers, lower the tax on income, freeze property taxes and phase out retirement income taxes. States that have a lower tax burden have more jobs and better budgets, and its time Wisconsin was a better state to do business.”	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/promises/walk-o-meter/promise/559/freeze-property-taxes/	None	walk-o-meter	Scott Walker	None	None	Freeze property taxes	2010-12-20T23:16:36	None	['Wisconsin']
-snes-06425	Boxer Muhammad Ali's refusal to wear a seat belt on a plane spurred an answering quip from a stewardess.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/back-ali/	None	Uncategorized	None	David Mikkelson	None	Muhammad Ali on Seat Belts and Superman	2 October 2006	None	['None']
-para-00115	Australia leads the world "in many fields".	mostly false	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/11/kelvin-thomson/what-extent-does-australia-lead-world/index.html	None	['Economy', 'Mining']	Kelvin Thomson	David Humphries, Su-Lin Tan, Peter Fray	None	To what extent is Australia a world leader?	Thursday, July 11, 2013 at 8:59 a.m.	None	['None']
-farg-00404	"Former Clinton Aide Indicted For Child Sex Trafficking"	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/clare-bronfman-part-of-nxivm-not-a-clinton-aide/	None	fake-news	Your News Wire	Angelo Fichera	None	Clare Bronfman, Part of NXIVM, Not a Clinton Aide	June 29, 2018	[' Tuesday, June 26, 2018 ']	['None']
-snes-05332	A photograph shows Bernie Sanders at a 1965 civil rights march with Martin Luther King, Jr.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sanders-mlk-selma-march/	None	Politicians	None	Dan Evon	None	Bernie Sanders Marched with MLK at Selma?	21 January 2016	None	['Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.', 'Bernie_Sanders']
-tron-00400	430-Pound Deer in Hartford, Michigan, Shot by Hunter	truth! & fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/430-pound-deer-in-hartford-michigan-shot-by-hunter/	None	animals	None	None	None	430-Pound Deer in Hartford, Michigan, Shot by Hunter	Oct 30, 2015	None	['Michigan', 'Hartford,_Connecticut']
-snes-00547	Christopher Columbus sold sex slaves — some as young as nine years old.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/columbus-sex-slaves/	None	History	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Christopher Columbus Seize, Sell, and Export Sex Slaves?	25 May 2018	None	['None']
-snes-05371	Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis was seated amongst several same-sex couples at 2016's "State of the Union" address.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kim-davis-gay-couples/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Kim Davis Seated Next to Gay Couples at SOTU?	13 January 2016	None	['None']
-snes-04611	A photograph shows a futuristic new Audi truck.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/audi-truck-concept-photo/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Futuristic Audi Truck	14 June 2016	None	['Audi']
-pomt-07954	A national organization says Georgia has one of America’s toughest ethics laws.	false	/georgia/statements/2011/jan/25/joe-wilkinson/ethics-claim-leaves-out-key-detail/	A coalition of government watchdog groups last week demanded changes to toughen Georgia’s ethics guidelines, blasting state lawmakers with fightin’ words like there’s a culture of "low-level corruption" in Georgia government. State Rep. Joe Wilkinson, chairman of the House Ethics Committee, objected to the criticism. He urged patience, noting stronger ethics guidelines just took effect this year. He also pointed out that a national organization ranked Georgia as having one of the toughest ethics laws in the nation, according to a Jan. 20 article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We asked the representative about it. Wilkinson said the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity came up with the ranking on where Georgia stands on ethics. "If I didn’t believe it was true, I wouldn’t have said it," said Wilkinson, a Republican from Fulton County. One PolitiFact Georgia reader was dubious about Wilkinson’s claim. "He told me the same thing personally when I was at the Capitol last year," said Tom Tortorici of Atlanta, who supported tougher ethics legislation. "I didn’t believe him then, and I don’t believe him now. Other states have bans and caps on lobbyists gifts. We don’t." We called the Center for Public Integrity, which puts out investigative reports on public issues. Its media relations manager, Steve Carpinelli, pointed us to a report it released in June 2009 that ranked each state on the transparency of its financial disclosure reports. The center came up with 43 questions it measured the states on. The questions included how often do state elected officials file disclosure reports, and what information are they required to report about their employers, their investments and property. The center also looked at what states have the authority to audit the disclosure reports. Georgia ranked seventh in the 2009 report. Wilkinson compares the rankings to the Bowl Championship Series, the system that decides -- often with controversy -- which college football teams are the best in the nation. But the report looked at only one aspect of ethics regulations, not everything, said William Perry, executive director of Common Cause Georgia. Perry’s group was one of the organizations that joined the call for tougher ethics guidelines. For example, Perry said measuring ethics rules should also include the power of state agencies to regulate on potential conflicts of interest, gifts from lobbyists and contributions from political action committees. Ethics regulations has been a big topic of concern under the Gold Dome in recent years. Glenn Richardson resigned as House speaker in 2009 after his ex-wife accused him of an extramarital affair with a female lobbyist. A few years back, federal prosecutors charged state Sen. Charles Walker with, among other things, using campaign contributions to pay off gambling debts. The former senator is now serving 10 years in prison. The Georgia Legislature last year passed guidelines that prohibit sexual harassment, require many local elected officials to file campaign disclosure reports with the state and make it a crime to use a state agency to attack or harass someone. Rick Thompson, former executive secretary of the State Ethics Commission, argued the Georgia Legislature has passed some bills that are "very stringent" on lobbyists and improved ethics guidelines. "We’re pretty up there with the requirements of disclosures," Thompson said. True, perhaps. The center’s 2009 report supports that viewpoint. But financial disclosures are only one area of ethics guidelines. Carpinelli said the center plans to conduct a state-by-state review of ethics laws, starting this spring. The research will take about a year, Carpinelli estimates. We followed up with Wilkinson about what the center told us. He said financial disclosure is a "major part" of a state’s ethics package. "That’s the heart and soul of ethics," Wilkinson said. Wilkinson would get high marks on the Truth-O-Meter if he had said Georgia has some of the toughest rules on financial disclosures in the nation. That’s correct, but it’s not what he said. Wilkinson’s comments about the Center for Public Integrity’s report may give some people the wrong impression about what the organization was studying. They reviewed financial disclosures, not the entire scope of ethics guidelines. We rate his statement as False.	None	Joe Wilkinson	None	None	None	2011-01-25T06:00:00	2011-01-20	['United_States']
-pomt-05008	According to a national survey, transit "ridership" among people age 16 to 34 increased 40 percent between 2001 and 2009.	half-true	/georgia/statements/2012/jul/18/jeff-dickerson/transportation-tax-supporter-says-transit-ridershi/	Supporters of a tax to improve the region’s roads and transit are asking metro Atlantans to think of the children. A transportation overhaul would create a better Atlanta for generations to come, said Jeff Dickerson, a communications consultant for Citizens for Transportation Mobility, which advocates for the penny-per-dollar sales tax. What’s more, it would create the kind of transportation system younger people want, Dickerson said during an online debate on PBA.org, the website for Atlanta’s public television and National Public Radio stations. "Look at this number from the National Household Travel Survey," Dickerson said. "Between 2001 and 2009 ... ridership among young people age 16 to 34 on transit increased 40 percent over eight years. Increased 40 percent? Sounds like those young whippersnappers aren’t spending much time behind the wheel of Daddy’s T-Bird. The referendum is up for a vote July 31 and would raise $7.2 billion over 10 years to upgrade roads and transit across the region. We called up Dickerson and took a closer look at the data, which comes from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The National Household Travel Survey tracks how and why people travel. It takes place sporadically. The most recent ones were conducted in 2001 and 2009. In April of this year, the consumer group U.S. PIRG, a federation of state public interest research groups, and Frontier Group, an environmental think tank, issued "Transportation and the New Generation," a report that analyzed data from this and other surveys. We found Dickerson used the correct percentage. The report found that the average number of miles traveled on transit by a person in this age group increased by 40 percent between 2001 and 2009. Our own analysis of NHTS data and the report’s calculation confirms this. In fact, the survey’s other findings indicate these bright young things are relying on ways to travel that don’t involve a car. The number of bike trips per person in Generation Y is up about 27 percent, NHTS data said. Walking increased about 16 percent. Meanwhile, the average number of trips these youngsters take in personal vehicles declined about 18 percent, according to the survey. The miles they travel is down 23 percent. Backers of public transit list a host of reasons why. The report says higher gas prices have pushed younger people to try other means of transportation, as have more stringent state age requirements for driver’s licenses. Darnell Grisby, director of policy development and research with the American Public Transportation Association, a transit industry group, mentioned findings by a real estate market research company that show that members of Generation Y overwhelmingly prefer walkable communities, whether in the suburbs or city. Also, the share of teenagers with driver’s licenses has dropped in recent decades. In 1983, about 87 percent of 19-year-olds had their licenses, according to a University of Michigan study. By 2008, 75 percent did. But one NHTS finding about transit use made us wonder whether the dramatic statistic Dickerson used during the debate told the whole story. While the average number of person miles that younger people travel on transit skyrocketed, the number of trips they took on transit did not. These increased by only about 4 percent It appears that 16- to 34-year-olds are hopping on public trains and buses slightly more often but are taking much longer trips. Why might this be? Baruch Feigenbaum is a transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, a think tank that favors free-market solutions to policy issues. Since such a small percentage of Americans use transit on their daily commutes, a small jump in the number of people who ride buses and trains might translate into a big percentage increase. "While transit usage has increased, the gains may not be as impressive as they appear," Feigenbaum said. How do we rule? We found that the number of per capita passenger miles traveled did increase by 40 percent, the number Dickerson used. But Dickerson’s use of the word "ridership" might have led viewers to think that younger people are taking 40 percent more trips on transit. This number ticked up by only about 4 percent. By either NHTS measure, it’s fair to say that younger people are leaving Daddy’s T-Bird in the driveway and relying more heavily on transit. But Dickerson could have been much more precise. For this reason, Dickerson earns a Half True.	None	Jeff Dickerson	None	None	None	2012-07-18T06:00:00	2012-07-10	['None']
-goop-01125	Justin Theroux Having “Fling” With Erika Cardenas After Jennifer Aniston Split, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-theroux-erika-cardenas-fling-romance-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Justin Theroux NOT Having “Fling” With Erika Cardenas After Jennifer Aniston Split, Despite Report	10:29 am, April 25, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-05255	Febreze and other Procter & Gamble products contain undeclared peanut and tree nut oils or byproducts, posing a risk to individuals with nut allergies.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/febreze-contains-peanut-oil/	None	Viral Phenomena	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Does Febreze Contain Peanut Oil?	7 February 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01887	BlockBuster coupon for free movie rentals	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/blockbuster/	None	household	None	None	None	BlockBuster coupon for free movie rentals	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-00624	Jennifer Garner, Lindsay Shookus “Both Pregnant” With Ben Affleck’s Babies, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-garner-lindsay-shookus-pregnant-ben-affleck-babies-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Garner, Lindsay Shookus NOT “Both Pregnant” With Ben Affleck’s Babies, Despite Report	11:23 am, July 18, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Garner', 'Ben_Affleck']
-thal-00087	FactCheck: You asked, we answered - the gender pay gap	none	http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-pay-gap-ireland-statistics-facts-3133536-Dec2016/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck: You asked, we answered - the gender pay gap	Dec 21st 2016, 9:30 PM	None	['None']
-tron-00463	Girl Throwing Puppies in River on Video	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/puppy-tossing-girl/	None	animals	None	None	None	Girl Throwing Puppies in River on Video	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06512	Says El Paso was named America’s "Safest Large City" a year after San Antonio, Houston and Dallas had the nation’s highest crime rates.	mostly false	/texas/statements/2011/oct/11/jose-rodriguez/jose-rodriguez-says-el-paso-was-named-safest-large/	After mentioning El Paso in the Sept. 7, 2011, Republican presidential debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry continued: "It is not safe on that (Texas-Mexico) border." Democratic state Sen. José Rodríguez of El Paso countered in a press release two days later: "The reality is that El Paso was named the ‘Safest Large City in the United States’ in 2010, just one year after San Antonio, Houston and Dallas had the highest crime rates in the nation. In fact, last year, when El Paso reported just 7 murders, Perry’s home city of Austin reported 37," Rodríguez said. "Why isn’t he talking about that?" Mild beef: Rodríguez aired slightly incorrect murder counts. In 2010, five murders occurred in El Paso, not seven, and 38 murders occurred in Austin, not 37, the cities’ police departments told us. Rodríguez spokeswoman Emily Amps Mora attributed the incorrect figures to typos. Also, five was El Paso’s lowest number of murders since 1965, and 38 was an unusually high number for Austin. But was El Paso deemed the "Safest Large City" in the United States after other Texas cities led the nation in crime? El Paso’s low crime rates have been noted for years. We looked at murder rates and overall crime rates, using FBI numbers, for the five Texas cities Rodríguez named: El Paso had the lowest rate per 100,000 residents in both categories each year from 2001 through 2010. In 2010, El Paso's murder rate was 0.8 murders per 100,000 residents. Rates for the other cities ranged from 4.8 for Austin to 11.8 for Houston. The so-called "El Paso Miracle" has drawn outside attention, particularly as violence has increased next door in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a city of 1.3 million which had more than 3,000 murders last year. The Texas Tribune, San Antonio Express-News and El Paso Times have recently written about El Paso’s low crime. Factors aired for the low crime rates include the presence of multiple federal agencies policing the border as well as the area’s high percentage of Hispanic residents (more than 80 percent), including Hispanic immigrants, a group described in a 2009 New York Times news story on El Paso’s safety as tending to be "cautious, law-abiding and respectful of authority." But "Safest Large City" is still an eye-opening title; Amps Mora said she picked it up from a Nov. 21, 2010, City of El Paso press release. The release says: "The latest rating by CQ Press names El Paso as the 1st Safest City followed by Honolulu, HI as the 2nd Safest City and New York, NY as the 3rd Safest City in the United States. This rating, developed by CQ Press, compares cities with a population of more than 500,000 people." CQ Press, a Washington, D.C.-based publisher, produces annual lists and books of crime statistics. However, it does not reward cities with "Safest" or "Most Dangerous" designations. In a Dec. 3, 2010, blog post, The Wall Street Journal said the annual reports stopped including such labels after CQ bought the reports’ publisher in 2007. In an interview, Darrel Petry, spokesman for the El Paso Police Department, told us that the department solely used the "Safest Large City" designation in the Nov. 21 press release and did not repeat it, in part because of objections to CQ’s rankings immediately raised by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Regardless, El Paso did indeed top CQ’s 2010 "Lowest Crime Rate" list for cities with more than 500,000 residents. Next, we looked at Rodríguez’s statement about San Antonio, Houston and Dallas, which Amps Mora told us was based on a 2010 Dallas Morning News blog post. The post spells out that among the nine U.S. cities over 1 million, the highest crime rates using 2009 numbers were in San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Jacksonville, Philadelphia and Phoenix. We got similar results, using FBI 2009 data for the standard categories of murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny theft and motor vehicle theft: San Antonio first, then Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York. But again: These rankings are for cities over 1 million in population. There are only nine on that list (Chicago being excluded because it counted rapes differently) -- so it would be equally valid to say that in looking at lowest crime rates, San Antonio was No. 9 in the country. So did San Antonio, Houston and Dallas have "the highest crime rates in the nation," as Rodriguez said? No, it turns out. Using crime rates per 100,000 in all cities for which the FBI collected data in 2009’s Uniform Crime Reports, the five cities with the highest crime rates were Vernon, Calif., population 90; Industry, Calif., population 930; Black Hawk, Colo., population 104; Teterboro, N.J., population 17; and Mackinac Island, Mich., population 456. San Antonio is the first of the Texas cities cited by Rodriguez to land on this list of all cities -- in 472nd place. Now, of course, that list we just rattled off is misleading, even ridiculous, because of the huge spread of population sizes among "all" U.S. cities. For a more serious comparison, we looked over crime statistics for cities with more than 500,000 residents.The five with the highest crime rates per 100,000 residents in the 2009 numbers were Memphis, Tenn.; Detroit; Atlanta; San Antonio; and Columbus, Ohio. And finally, if we use CQ Press’ rankings for cities over 500,000 -- a list adjusted with the company’s particular methodology -- the five highest-crime cities were Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, Washington D.C. and Atlanta. Houston, the first Texas city to crop up, was No. 9. As we completed this check, we circled back to Amps Mora, who said by email that the senator's point holds. Objectively, by crime rates, she said, El Paso is safer than bigger Texas cities that also are not on the Texas-Mexico border. Our ruling El Paso has had low crime rates, and its murder rates are considerably below those of the other cited cities. But the statement is misleading in two meaningful ways. Only a City of El Paso press release named El Paso the nation’s "safest" large city--and its police department dropped the label. Also, the other Texas cities did not have the nation’s highest overall crime rates; that’s true only in comparison to a few huge cities. We rate the statement Mostly False.	None	Jose Rodriguez	None	None	None	2011-10-11T15:34:00	2011-09-09	['San_Antonio', 'Dallas', 'Houston', 'United_States']
-goop-00044	Angelina Jolie Adopting Little Boy From Syria?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-adopting-boy-syria/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie Adopting Little Boy From Syria?	5:45 pm, November 2, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-04340	A group called the Satanic Temple wants to establish After School Satan Clubs in public schools to introduce children to the "religion of darkness."	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/after-school-satan-clubs/	None	Religion	None	David Emery	None	After School Satan Clubs	1 August 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-13762	"Our trade deficit in goods reached nearly … $800 billion last year alone."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/21/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-goods-trade-deficit-was-almost-8/	Yanking back international trade is a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency. He believes other countries benefit from our trade practices, while the United States suffers. The trade deficit is how much more goods and services the United States imports than it exports, Trump says it’s too high. "Our trade deficit in goods reached nearly — think of this, think of this — our trade deficit is $800 billion last year alone," Trump said in July 21 remarks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. "We’re gonna fix that." Trump’s phrasing is a little off, but he’s got the idea right. The country’s overall trade deficit in 2015 was about $500 billion, according to Census data, but that figure includes both goods and services. Trump mentioned the trade deficit in goods, which includes all manufactured products, oil and agriculture products. The trade deficit in 2015 for just goods was $763 billion. Not quite $800 billion, but reasonably close. The reason the overall trade deficit is smaller than just the goods trade deficit is because the United States exports more services than it imports. This isn’t the highest the goods trade deficit has ever been. It ranged from $782 billion in 2005 to $832 billion in 2008. It’s possible, however, that current figures actually understate the size of the goods trade deficit because oil prices have been abnormally low, said Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank supported in part by unions. "It’s a large deficit," Scott said. "And it needs to be reduced." Our ruling Trump said, "Our trade deficit in goods reached nearly … $800 billion last year alone." In 2015, the goods trade deficit was $763 billion. Trump is pretty close. We rate Trump’s claim True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/ac7d34c9-2a0e-4f81-9510-6bf4f6e23a0a	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-07-21T23:37:37	2016-07-21	['None']
-pomt-04668	Says President Barack Obama "gives students the right to repay (federal) loans as a clear, fixed, low percentage of their income for up to 20 years."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/07/bill-clinton/bill-clinton-says-president-let-students-pay-clear/	Former President Bill Clinton told delegates to the Democratic National Convention that there was an Obama policy they needed to share with "every voter." Health care? Jobs? No — changes to student loans. Clinton got down into details in his Sept. 5, 2012, speech to nominate President Barack Obama for a second term. Student loan legislation under Obama, he said, "lowers the cost of federal student loans." "And even more important," he told them, "it gives students the right to repay those loans as a clear, fixed, low percentage of their income for up to 20 years." He argued that would mean students wouldn’t have to drop out of college for fear they couldn’t repay their debt, and would be free to pursue jobs of "modest income" such as teaching, policing or practicing small-town medicine. We’re not checking those implications, but rather his characterization of the policy itself: Did Obama give students "the right to repay those loans as a clear, fixed, low percentage of their income for up to 20 years"? Health care and education The president signed student loan legislation in March 2010 as part of a larger package that updated his attention-grabbing health care law. Previously, the government had paid private banks fees to provide federal loans to college students. The new law got rid of the middlemen, freeing up $68 billion over 11 years for Pell Grants and other programs. It also changed loan repayment terms. The government already had in place an "income-based repayment plan" that let students cap payments at 15 percent of their income above living expenses, and forgave remaining debt if they made those payments for 25 years. Under the new law, payments dropped to 10 percent, with debt forgiven after 20 years, or half that long for some public service workers such as teachers. The changes apply to new borrowers as of 2008 and haven’t kicked in yet, though they will by early next year, said Jason Delisle, an education budget expert at the New America Foundation who worked on the Republican staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. ‘Clear, fixed, low’ Now, while "10 percent" may seem to fit the bill for a clear, fixed, low portion of income, the repayment plan is actually a little more complicated than that — mostly in borrowers’ favor. That’s because the plan lets borrowers deduct 150 percent of the federal poverty threshold from their incomes before calculating the 10 percent payment. So, the rate for borrowers making less than $100,000 annually with a household size of one is actually less than 5 percent of total income, Delisle calculated, while it’s nearly 9 percent for higher income households. The payments are adjusted each year based on borrowers’ income and family size, requiring annual documentation — not quite as simple as Clinton made it sound. And borrowers may have to pay taxes on the amount of their debt canceled or forgiven. Our ruling Clinton said the president gave students "the right to repay (federal) loans as a clear, fixed, low percentage of their income for up to 20 years." That’s a reasonable characterization of a law the president signed in March 2010 that goes into effect by early next year for newer borrowers. But Clinton’s use of the word "clear" does oversimplify a somewhat more complicated reality that students will face an annually adjusted payment requiring paperwork on income and family size. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Bill Clinton	None	None	None	2012-09-07T13:36:49	2012-09-05	['None']
-pomt-04161	Says the Nike bill "is not a tax break ... this does not lower the taxes that Nike will pay nor does it prevent the Legislature from raising those taxes in the future."	mostly true	/oregon/statements/2012/dec/20/john-kitzhaber/does-new-nike-bill-qualify-tax-break/	The term single sales factor doesn’t come up often in everyday conversation -- not unless you’re Gov. John Kitzhaber or the tax folks over at Nike. So, as the governor was testifying on a bill that would allow him to guarantee Nike up to three decades of a single sales tax factor, he tried to be very clear about what it represented. "This is not a tax break," he said during a committee meeting. "This does not lower the taxes that Nike will pay nor does it prevent the Legislature from raising those taxes in the future." In fact, the bill legislators debated allows the governor to guarantee a business that its tax structure will not change for a given period of time in exchange for a promise that the business will make a certain level of investment in the state. So, on paper, the bill does not represent a tax break -- it doesn’t actually change the tax code in any way. That said, much of the discussion regarding the legislation revolved around the state’s single sales factor. That’s because it was clear all along that the governor was going to use the new bill to guarantee Nike decades of that tax apportionment system. Let’s back up, though, and offer a little context. Companies can generally be taxed, to varying degrees, on three fronts: property, payroll and sales. Before 1991, Oregon weighted all three of those areas equally, but over the past 20 years or so, the state has inched toward taxing certain corporations on just their Oregon sales. That system is called single sales factor apportionment. This method can be advantageous for certain companies, reducing the amount of money they owe to the state in a given year. In theory, that reduced tax burden then attracts them to Oregon. Though there were no signs that Oregon’s apportionment system would be changing anytime soon, Nike wanted an assurance before committing to expanding further in Oregon. That’s why the governor asked the Legislature to pass a bill that would allow him to guarantee the structure for companies poised to make a certain level of investment in the state. (You can read more of those details here.) We called University of Oregon economist Tim Duy to get his take. There were two issues here, he said. The single sales factor isn’t a break in the strictest sense, but it certainly reduces the amount a company pays in taxes. The 2013-15 Oregon Expenditure Report, the document that tallies up all of the state’s tax giveaways for a biennium, estimates the state will forgo $165 million over the next two years as a result of this tax structure. Now, to be clear, this estimate is a bit squishy, if only because there’s no accounting for behavioral changes that might occur if the single sales factor didn’t exist. Certain companies, like Nike, might invest elsewhere, for instance. There’s no way of knowing for sure. The specific break that Nike gets from this system isn’t public information, but a few years back the Oregon Center for Public Policy made an estimate. Using some publicly available information, they estimated that under the single sales factor Nike shaved more than 90 percent (about $17 million at the time) off its tax bill. Obviously, that’s a considerable savings for any company. So what about the governor’s claim that this new law doesn’t represent a tax break? Well, as Duy pointed out, this is already the method by which the company was being taxed and there was no talk of changing that. "We're not actually giving up a dollar we're going to get somehow else," he said. "It's not a tax incentive or a rebate of the type we're usually thinking about it." The governor said the bill he was asking the Legislature to pass was not a tax break. That’s true, the bill does not reduce Nike’s tax burden. But it’s been clear all along that the governor would use the legislation to ensure the continuance of a sizable tax giveaway for Nike. That is an important clarification. We rate this claim Mostly True.	None	John Kitzhaber	None	None	None	2012-12-20T13:23:49	2012-12-13	['Nike,_Inc.']
-snes-04444	A list shows documents that several prominent news media executives have ties to the Obama administration.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/you-had-a-hunch-the-news-system-was-rigged/	None	Politicians	None	Dan Evon	None	You Had a Hunch the News System Was Rigged?	15 July 2016	None	['Barack_Obama']
-pose-00912	"Bob Buckhorn will work with TECO to conduct a city-wide lighting assessment to determine where city lights need to be updated, repaired or replaced."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/buck-o-meter/promise/944/conduct-a-city-wide-lighting-assessment/	None	buck-o-meter	Bob Buckhorn	None	None	Conduct a city-wide lighting assessment	2011-05-18T14:33:25	None	['Bob_Buckhorn']
-pomt-14641	"Anyone can die of a toothache."	true	/florida/statements/2016/jan/26/john-cortes/ignoring-toothache-really-could-potentially-kill-y/	State Rep. John Cortes, D-Kissimmee, made a biting claim about the consequences of poor dental care during debate on a bill that would change the rules for Medicaid coverage. HB 819 is backed by MCNA, a Fort Lauderdale dental benefits company that lost its Medicaid contracts with the state after the 2011 switch to mandatory managed care. The bill allows the Legislature to take dental off the list of services that managed care plans are required to offer people on Medicaid. The state would then be able to contract with vendors like MCNA to provide the dental care instead. (Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry raised eyebrows for discussing the issue with Gov. Rick Scott on behalf of MCNA without first registering as a lobbyist.) Cortes, who voted for the bill, said he wanted to make sure proper dental care would be available for children, maintaining problems can easily arise without treatment. "Anyone can die of a toothache," he said in a House Health Innovation Subcommittee meeting on Jan. 13, 2016. "Believe it or not, you can." The bill passed the committee by a 12-1 vote. Given this age of modern medicine, we wondered if Cortes was right. We decided to drill into this one to find out. The whole tooth We didn’t hear back from Cortes’ office, but unfortunately for all you odontophobes, you really should be getting checkups on a regular basis. "Yes, it is possible to die from complications with an infected tooth," Thomas Porter, a faculty member at the University of Florida College of Dentistry, told PolitiFact Florida. "Every year there are cases where the patient did not receive appropriate and timely treatment of an infected tooth. In most cases, the infected tooth starts as a localized site with pain and infection." Obviously you’re not going to die of the physical pain, but these problems can start from some form of periodontal issue or, as is most often the case, cavities. The decay leads to abscesses, which are usually infections between the tooth and the gums. "Not treated, the problem progresses and the patient becomes septic, which can lead to death," Porter said. Dr. Erin Sutton, a Fort Walton Beach dentist, pointed out the infection could either move to bone marrow or the bloodstream, causing sepsis and affecting major organs. This is not a new phenomenon, of course. Dental infections and other tooth-related problems were listed as the fifth- or sixth-leading cause of death in London back in the early 1600s. But it certainly happens today, too. The number of people who die from an untreated tooth problem is small, but the details can be harrowing. An oft-cited case is the 2007 death of Deamonte Driver, a 12-year-old Maryland boy who died when bacteria from an abscess infected his brain. He had two brain operations totaling $250,000 before he died, but he could have been saved with a timely tooth extraction that would have cost $80. His family had no health insurance and had lost Medicaid benefits. Kyle Willis, a 24-year-old unemployed father from Cincinnati, died in 2009 after being unable to afford a tooth extraction and prescription antibiotics for an infection. John Schneider of Mt. Orab, Ohio, was 31 when he died in 2014 after what he thought was a sinus infection but was actually an untreated abscess that eventually led to multiple organ failure. The scope of the danger was highlighted four years ago by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which found preventable dental conditions made up more than 830,000 emergency room visits in 2009. That was up 16 percent from 2006. While the number of deaths aren’t regularly examined, a 2013 study published in the Journal of Endodontics offered a quick cross-section of the issue based on one kind of condition. Researchers found that between 2000 and 2008, there were more than 61,000 hospitalizations nationally for periapical abscesses, an infection at the tip of a tooth’s root that is a common symptom of untreated tooth decay. Of those 61,000-plus stays, 66 patients died. Our ruling Cortes said, "Anyone can die of a toothache." It’s not so much that you’ll die of pain, of course, but dentists and research confirm that an untreated abscess can infect other parts of the body, either through the bones or the bloodstream. Most people won’t die from a toothache, but it’s a condition that if left untreated can lead to the worst: a fatal result. We rate the statement True.	None	John Cortes	None	None	None	2016-01-26T11:05:44	2016-01-13	['None']
-snes-01584	A special compound added to the water in swimming pools will reveal the presence of urine and catch those who pee in the pool.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/piscine-of-the-crime/	None	Science	None	Snopes Staff	None	Does a Urine-Revealing Pool Chemical Exist?	14 December 2000	None	['None']
-vogo-00502	Statement: “I’m the one who triggers the half-cent sales tax and I won’t trigger it until we cut $73 million permanently out of our budget,” Mayor Jerry Sanders about Proposition D on the Fox 5 Morning Show Oct. 7.	determination: misleading	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-hammering-home-prop-d-spin/	Analysis: A key feature of the city of San Diego’s Proposition D ballot measure is that the half-cent sales tax increase kicks in only if city officials meet 10 financial reform conditions.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: Hammering Home Prop. D Spin	October 20, 2010	None	['None']
-goop-00491	Seth Rogen Buying Wife Expensive Gifts To Save Marriage?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/seth-rogen-wife-lauren-miller-save-marriage/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Seth Rogen Buying Wife Expensive Gifts To Save Marriage?	12:46 pm, August 9, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-05036	"Foreign Chinese prostitution money is allegedly behind the groups funding Congressman Jim Renacci’s Republican majority."	pants on fire!	/ohio/statements/2012/jul/12/democratic-congressional-campaign-committee/dccc-claims-money-chinese-prostitution-supports-ji/	Billionaire Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson donates millions of dollars to Republican causes. A fired former employee of Adelson’s filed a lawsuit which alleges that Adelson personally approved of prostitution at properties his company owns in Macau, a former Portuguese colony near Hong Kong that now is part of China. Adelson vigorously denies those allegations. What does any of that have to do with Rep. Jim Renacci? Even though Federal Election Commission records show that Adelson hasn’t ever donated to Renacci, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee tried to use the casino owner’s legal woes against the Medina County congressman with a provocatively titled press release: "Congressman Renacci’s Re-election Funded by Chinese Prostitution Money?" "Foreign Chinese prostitution money is allegedly behind the groups funding Congressman Jim Renacci’s Republican majority," the DCCC claimed in a news release on July 2, 2012. "What will Congressman Jim Renacci do when his Chinese prostitution money comes from billionaire Sheldon Adelson?" it continued, urging Renacci to "reject the support of these groups funded by money from a Chinese prostitution strategy." As a result of redistricting, Renacci, a Republican from Wadsworth, Ohio, is pitted against Rep. Betty Sutton, a Democrat. That makes him a target for the DCCC. The DCCC release noted that Adelson and his wife gave $5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund Super PAC, which is backed by House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders. FEC records indicate that Super PAC hasn’t spent anything so far. Adelson and his wife, Miriam, also gave more than $60,000 to the Republican counterpart of the DCCC, the National Republican Congressional Committee, during the past election cycle. The NRCC regularly sends out news releases that attack Sutton, Renacci’s November election rival who is from Copley Township near Akron. When we asked Renacci campaign spokesman James Slepian about the DCCC’s claim that the congressman’s re-election might somehow be funded by Chinese prostitution money, Slepian replied that there is "no money from Chinese prostitutes, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy in our campaign coffers." "The DCCC's Chinese prostitution fantasy demonstrates that they are now fully immersed in the gutter and will literally say anything to avoid talking about Betty Sutton's lockstep support for the failed Obama economic agenda," Slepian said. "This campaign needs to be about the economy and voting records, not fairy tales about Chinese hookers." The allegations that Adelson signed off on prostitution at his properties in Macau were raised last month during a lawsuit filed by former Sands executive Steven Jacobs, who was fired from overseeing those properties in July 2010. Associated Press reported that Jacobs’ lawsuit accuses Adelson of breach of contract and pushing him into illegal activity. A court filing from Jacobs says he tried to rid the casino floor of "loan sharks and prostitution" while he worked there, which upset senior executives who informed him that "the prior prostitution strategy had been personally approved by Adelson." A spokesman for the Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands, issued a statement that said Adelson has always "maintained a strong policy against prostitution on our properties and any accusation to the contrary represents a blatant and reprehensible personal attack on Mr. Adelson’s character." In a July 9 interview with Forbes magazine, Adelson said there’s not a "shred of evidence" to back his former employee’s charges, and "says the fact that he and his wife (a physician who specializes in treating addiction) have given millions of dollars to set up clinics around the world to treat people with drug addictions (many of them prostitutes) makes the … claims even more preposterous." Adelson also told the publication that promoting prostitution could cost him his gaming licenses in Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau. Do unproven charges by a disgruntled former Adelson employee coupled with Adelson’s generosity to GOP groups that are likely to back Renacci justify the DCCC’s claim that "foreign Chinese prostitution money is allegedly behind the groups funding Congressman Jim Renacci’s Republican majority?" We don’t think so. The root of the allegation stems from a fired employee’s claim that Adelson allowed prostitution to be present in a casino in Macau. Based on that, the DCCC claims that Adelson, one of the wealthiest people in America, made political contributions with cash from prostitution revenues. And then the claim invokes Renacci’s name as part of the Republican majority that this tainted money is supposedly supporting. Renacci hasn’t accepted money from Adelson and doesn’t control contributions to the GOP groups that support him. The claim that Adelson’s donations to these other groups amount to "Chinese prostitution money" is dubious enough that inserting the word "allegedly" can’t save it. On the Truth-O-Meter, the DCCC statement rates Pants on Fire.	None	Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee	None	None	None	2012-07-12T06:00:00	2012-07-02	['China', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-thal-00102	FactCheck: Does this pro-life leaflet stand up to scrutiny?	unproven	http://www.thejournal.ie/yes-to-life-life-institute-8th-amendment-abortion-leaflet-facts-3058066-Nov2016/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck: Does this pro-life leaflet stand up to scrutiny?	Nov 6th 2016, 9:00 PM	None	['None']
-pomt-03830	"Nearly 25 percent of all automobile accidents are caused by texting while driving."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2013/mar/19/doug-holder/rep-doug-holders-texting-while-driving-stat-too-hi/	After years of dead ends, Florida lawmakers are again pushing for a law that would penalize motorists who text or email from behind the wheel. The measure, SB 52/HB 13, would make texting while driving a secondary offense, so motorists would be fined only on top of a primary offense, such as careless driving or speeding. The House sponsor of the bill, Rep. Doug Holder, R-Venice, rattled off several grim statistics about the problem in a March 13 committee hearing. One claim gave us fact-checkers pause. "Nearly 25 percent of all automobile accidents are caused by texting while driving," he said. Holder’s legislative aide directed us to the website TextingAndDrivingSafety.com. We checked that site, as well as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Distraction.org and the National Security Council. We checked in with AAA, which supports Holder’s bill. We found interesting research that resemble Holder’s claim on these sites. At least 23 percent of all crashes involved cell phones in 2011. Texting while driving makes a driver 23 times more likely to crash. About 26.2 percent of motorists admitted typing or sending an email while driving in the past month. But nowhere did we find an estimate as high as Holder’s for the percentage of crashes caused by texting while driving. Reached by phone, Holder acknowledged he messed up his numbers. He said he meant to say "distracted driving" instead of "texting while driving," but he got, well, distracted in front of the committee considering his bill. "I was not looking at my notes because I was trying to show my passion about it," Holder said. What else constitutes distracted driving? (As if you don’t know.) There’s talking on the phone and to other passengers, putting on makeup, using a GPS and adjusting music, among other driving vices. Texting is by far the worst because it demands a driver’s visual, manual and cognitive attention, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. We were curious what Florida figures were available for crashes caused by texting while driving. Texting caused nearly .1 percent of more than 256,000 crashes in 2012, according to preliminary data collected by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Crashes that resulted from distractions by any electronic communication device comprised 1.79 percent of crashes, or 4,586, in 2012, according to the same state data. The real number is likely higher. A committee analysis of HB 13 makes an important point about gathering data in Florida: It’s incomplete. For a crash report to identify texting as the cause of an accident means a motorist has to admit that to an officer. And because it is not an enforceable offense, there is no consistent way for law enforcement officers to enter it into their reports. Our ruling Holder’s statistic that 25 percent of all crashes are the result of texting at the wheel missed the mark. It would have been more accurate had he said "distracted driving" or "using cell phones." There’s a grain of truth in that texting is one of the ways a driver can be distracted. We rate Holder’s statement Mostly False.	None	Doug Holder	None	None	None	2013-03-19T10:29:50	2013-03-13	['None']
-pomt-12180	Says Donald Trump was seen "looking deliberately over a disabled child's head, ignoring his outstretched hand."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/jul/31/jk-rowling/jk-rowling-falsely-accuses-trump-not-shaking-disab/	Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling took to Twitter to accuse President Donald Trump of ignoring a disabled child at a press conference, but she was basing her outrage on a highly edited video that left out Trump’s greeting. Trump invited the family of 3-year-old Monty Weer to the White House on July 24, 2017, while the president gave a speech on health care reform. Monty Weer has spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spinal cord is not completely formed. He is confined to a wheelchair and requires medical treatment, but Trump said the Weer family’s options were limited because there is only one choice of health insurance provider where they live in South Carolina. Trump said there weren’t more options because of the Affordable Care Act. (The family also has acknowledged parts of the law have helped them, too.) A video circulated on the Internet after Trump’s speech, showing Trump not shaking Monty Weer’s hand as Trump walked by. The original has since been deleted, but you can watch a similar video here: See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Rowling saw the video and retweeted it, then tweeted several more times about her anger over the apparent snub. "Trump imitated a disabled reporter. Now he pretends not to see a child in a wheelchair, as though frightened he might catch his condition," she tweeted on July 28, 2017. (There’s an archived version here.) See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com "My mother used a wheelchair. I witnessed people uncomfortable around her disability, but if they had a shred of decency they got over it," she continued. "So, yes, that clip of Trump looking deliberately over a disabled child's head, ignoring his outstretched hand, has touched me on the raw." See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com "That man occupies the most powerful office in the free world and his daily outrages against civilised norms are having a corrosive effect," she added. "How stunning, and how horrible, that Trump cannot bring himself to shake the hand of a small boy who only wanted to touch the President." Except that the unedited White House video showed that Trump did greet the boy, bending down to speak to him as he walked up to the podium (starting at about 2:18 in the video below): See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com Twitter users attacked Rowling for her ire, demanding she delete the tweets and apologize to Trump, whom she regularly attacks on the social media site. As of this writing, Rowling had done neither. We tried to contact her through her publicist’s email but did not get a response. (Editor's note: After publication, Rowling deleted the tweets and apologized to the boy and his family. See the After the Fact below for more.) British journalist Piers Morgan was one of the more outspoken critics, posting numerous times that Rowling had lied about Trump. (He also attacked Chelsea Clinton, who had been fooled by the same edited video but later acknowledged her mistake.) Morgan posted an image being spread on the Internet of a Facebook status attributed to Monty Weer’s mother, Marjorie Weer, addressing Rowling and saying "Trump didn’t snub my son & Monty wasn’t even trying to shake his hand." The image said "hand shaking is not his thing" because he’s so young and that "he was showing off his newly acquired secret service patch." We traced the image to a July 30 Reddit post, but couldn’t independently verify that Marjorie Weer had actually written it on Facebook. Our ruling Rowling said Trump was seen "looking deliberately over a disabled child's head, ignoring his outstretched hand." Her tweets were based on an edited video of a White House press conference that had circulated online. The full video of the event showed Trump did greet a 3-year-old boy with spina bifida. In her rush to defend a disabled child, Rowling reacted to only a snippet of video, without taking the entire event into consideration. She also did not respond to calls for her to recant her criticism. We rate Rowling’s claim Pants on Fire. See Figure 5 on PolitiFact.com	None	J.K. Rowling	None	None	None	2017-07-31T15:30:13	2017-07-28	['None']
-farg-00253	Claims Zika “affects everyone” — not just pregnant women and their babies — because recent research found that it “causes people to go blind.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/does-zika-cause-blindness/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Harry Reid	Vanessa Schipani	['SciCheck', 'Zika virus']	Does Zika Cause Blindness?	September 20, 2016	[' Interview with the press – Wednesday, September 7, 2016 ']	['None']
-goop-00666	Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz Did Split, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/daniel-craig-rachel-weisz-split-not-true/	None	None	None	Alejandro Rosa	None	Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz Did NOT Split, Despite Report	10:46 am, July 10, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-00916	Jada Pinkett Smith Hair Loss Caused By Marriage Problems With Will Smith?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jada-pinkett-smith-hair-loss-will-marriage-problems/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jada Pinkett Smith Hair Loss Caused By Marriage Problems With Will Smith?	3:09 pm, May 30, 2018	None	['None']
-pose-00452	"Will work with Congress and auto companies to ensure that all new vehicles have flexible fuel (FFV) capability . . . by the end of his first term in office."	promise broken	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/472/mandate-flexible-fuel-vehicles-by-2012/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Mandate flexible fuel vehicles by 2012	2010-01-07T13:26:59	None	['United_States_Congress']
-snes-04004	The body of a homeless man found in San Diego has been identified as that of Elvis Presley.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elvis-presley-body-elderly-homeless-man/	None	Media Matters	None	David Mikkelson	None	Was the Body of an Elderly Homeless Man Identified as Elvis Presley?	1 February 2015	None	['San_Diego', 'Elvis_Presley']
-pomt-01306	Greg Abbott has benefitted from "payday lenders who have given him $300,000 and then received a ruling from him that they can operate in a loophole in the law that allows them to charge unlimited rates and fees."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2014/oct/29/wendy-davis/wendy-davis-said/	Wendy Davis, asked if she’s unethically profited while in public office, suggested her opponent has committed infractions including one that resulted from hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations. Responding to a reporter at the Sept. 30, 2014, gubernatorial debate in Dallas, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee and Fort Worth state senator accused Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, her Republican foe, of selling out Texans to serve the "interests of people who make donations to his campaign." As an example, Davis pointed out "payday lenders who have given" Abbott’s campaign "$300,000 and then received a ruling from him that they can operate in a loophole in the law that allows them to charge unlimited rates and fees." Davis was revisiting a topic she’s consistently explored: that a 2006 letter from Abbott’s state office allowed payday lenders to skirt state lending laws. After Davis’ proclaimed link between Abbott’s campaign donations and official action was described by the El Paso Times in January 2014, we found Half True her statement that Texas payday lenders were charging 1,000 percent interest. In rare instances, lenders charged 1,000 percent annual interest, but payday loan rates then averaged 465 percent. For this fact check, we gauged whether Abbott piled up hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations and then issued a ruling favorable to payday lenders, which offer low-dollar, high-interest short-term loans targeting low-income people who live paycheck to paycheck. The loans are generally for $100 and $500 and are most often issued for two weeks. They’re considered risky because low-income borrowers are relatively unlikely to be able to pay them back. Abbott campaign contributions To our inquiry about the $300,000 described as given to Abbott, Davis campaign spokesman Zac Petkanas emailed us records of Abbott campaign contributions as filed in campaign reports at the Texas Ethics Commission covering Sept. 16, 2002 nearly through July 2014. Our own sampling of state records showed Abbott’s campaign fielded: --$80,000 from Trevor Ahlberg, CEO of Irving-based payday lender Cash Store, in eight installments from Aug. 16, 2006 to June 16, 2014; --$57,500 from Roderick Aycox, founder of Georgia-based payday lender LoanMax, in five installments from Nov. 12, 2009 to June 9, 2014; --$30,500 from Cash America International Inc. PAC in 14 contributions from Sept. 16, 2002 to July 29, 2014; --$30,000 from Ace Cash Express Inc. PAC, in eight donations from Oct. 5, 2005 to July 29, 2014. Then again, according to Petkanas and state records, less than 5 percent of the tallied payday-lender donations, or $13,000, had come in by Jan. 12, 2006, which was the date Abbott’s office issued the ruling criticized by Davis. By phone, Petkanas said Davis did not mean to say in the debate that all the $300,000 was given before Abbott’s office ruled on payday lending. Texas Payday Lenders: Regulation and Evasion There's a lot of background to state actions involving payday lenders. In 1999, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, Abbott’s predecessor, filed lawsuits against selected payday lenders, saying the companies were dodging state laws regulating interest rates. Separately, a "usury" provision in the Texas Constitution caps interest rates on short-term loans from unlicensed lenders at 10 percent. Cornyn, saying lenders were getting away with interest rates of up to 1,000 percent, said: "This kind of abusive payday lending is illegal in Texas, and those companies who continue this practice will face serious consequences." An October 2000 report by the Sunset Advisory Commission found that "in recent years, different types of lending businesses have attempted to evade regulation" including payday lenders. It recommended the Legislature "authorize" the "Office of Consumer Credit Commissioner to regulate payday loans" in order to "help control unlawful interest rates." In 2001, state lawmakers agreed to changes in law bringing payday lending under the office’s regulation and directing the Texas Finance Commission to adopt rules guiding the industry. According to a May 2001 bill analysis by the House Research Organization, the requested rules "would prohibit a lender from using a device, pretense, or subterfuge to avoid regulation of the lender’s transactions, including by recharacterizing fees on a loan as a purchase of a good or service." Resulting additions to Texas law include a chart specifying acceptable fees for payday loans of various dollar amounts and durations. But in subsequent years, according to Austin American-Statesman news reports, Texas payday lenders found a way around the law by partnering with out-of-state banks, which financed payday loans out of the reach of Texas laws. State and national legislators then raised concerns about payday lenders dodging the restrictions; the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation cracked down in 2005, limiting the number of payday loans a bank could issue and constricting the profitability of partnerships between payday lenders and banks. That’s when Texas payday lenders, under pressure from regulation, started transitioning to a new business model, called a credit service organization (CSO) in summer 2005, the Statesman reported In January 2006. Its news story said Texas payday lenders ditched partnerships with FDIC-regulated banks and began working with "third-party unregistered lenders." It also said Texas "payday lenders got a boost recently from Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott" in the form of a letter affirming the legality of the CSO model. Between 2004 and 2014, payday lender storefronts increased more than tenfold in Texas, the El Paso Times reported Feb. 4, 2014. Abbott’s interpretation of state law Next, we looked at the Abbott "ruling" declared by Davis. It turned out to be an aide's legal analysis. In 2005, the attorney general’s office, headed by Abbott, fielded two requests to review the legality of payday-lender CSOs, agency spokesman Jerry Strickland said by email, one an August 2005 verbal request from the consumer credit commissioner, who inquired after a court case raised questions about whether the state had any sway over CSOs. In Lovick v. Ritemoney Ltd., the plaintiff accused payday lender Ritemoney Ltd. of disguising illegal interest fees as service charges. A state district judge, Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale, wrote that "Texas law does not construe such credit service fees as disguised interest," and the complaint was dismissed. Strickland said the other request for Abbott’s judgment came in writing Sept. 8, 2005 from then-state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso. Shapleigh wrote that as a CSO, "a payday lending company dodges both federal guidelines restricting payday loans and the interest-rate limits established by the Texas Finance Commission. As the state’s leading enforcement agency, it is imperative that your office investigate this new business model and take necessary enforcement actions against businesses purposefully and illegally skirting Texas laws." On Jan. 12, 2006, Barry McBee, the state’s first assistant attorney general, signed a letter responding to the commissioner, Leslie Pettijohn, saying there was "nothing patently illegal" about payday lender CSOs under state law and there was no statutory limit to the fees they could charge. McBee’s letter pointed out that, in keeping with state law, payday lender CSOs were charging the maximum-permitted 10 percent interest on loans plus service fees to arrange the loan between a borrower and third-party lender. He wrote that, according to Chapter 393 of the Texas Finance Code, there is not "any limit on the amount of fees" a CSO can charge in such transactions. "Any discussion of whether the use of this model is the best public policy choice for the State of Texas," McBee wrote, "is one that must be addressed by the Legislature and has not been explored by this office." Legislative Review In the 2013 legislative session, lawmakers debated reforming payday lending practices, but attempts stalled. Expert Analysis By phone, Don Baylor, a former senior policy analyst for the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, which advocates for programs serving low-income Texans, said that after the Lovick v. Ritemoney ruling, payday lenders remained uncertain if they could legally operate as CSOs. But, Baylor said, "it’s fair to say the OAG letter provided enough regulatory certainty for the entire (payday lending) industry to jump on board with the CSO model." Baylor also said that after the Lovick ruling, "the attorney general doesn’t have the authority to prohibit loans from being made under the CSO model." He credited the explosion of payday lender CSOs to ambiguous wording in the 1987 Credit Services Organization Act, which was written to help Texans improve credit scores and not with payday lenders in mind, he said. "Payday lenders found the CSO costume and dressed up in the costume," said Baylor. "It’s a very creative way they came up with to get around the constitutional usury limits." Our Ruling Davis said payday lenders gave Abbott $300,000 in campaign donations "and then received a ruling from him that they can operate in a loophole in the law that allows them to charge unlimited rates and fees." This statement references a 2006 legal analysis -- not a ruling -- from a top state aide to Abbott that tracked with a court ruling permitting payday lenders to charge unlimited fees in spite of state caps on related interest. Clarification is needed in that only 5 percent of the described $300,000 in donations occurred before the analysis was issued. Regardless, Abbott's office reaffirmed a way for politically supportive payday lenders to squeeze Texas borrowers. We rate this statement Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Wendy Davis	None	None	None	2014-10-29T15:21:11	2014-09-30	['None']
-chct-00177	FACT CHECK: Does North Korea Always Break Its Nuclear Promises?	verdict: true	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/03/15/fact-check-north-korea-break-nuclear-promises/	None	None	None	Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	2:23 PM 03/15/2018	None	['None']
-pomt-11404	"Obama just broke federal law in attempt to take over presidency from Trump."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/mar/22/universal-news-portal/hoax-claims-barack-obama-broke-law-reclaim-preside/	Former President Barack Obama didn’t break any federal laws to reclaim the Oval Office from President Donald Trump, despite internet hoaxes. "We got him: Obama just broke federal law in attempt to take over presidency from Trump," said the headline on March 18, 2018, on Universal News Portal, a blog promoting sensational headlines. Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat online hoaxes. We found no evidence that Obama tried to overthrow the current president. In the article, Obama is falsely accused of being obsessed with taking Trump down by establishing a shadow government outside the White House that recruits active members to protest Trump’s every move. While there have been protests against policy decisions made by the Trump administration, there is no evidence to suggest that Obama influenced or administered them in any way. There is also no proof of an established shadow government, which has been referred to as a conspiracy theory by several news outlets. Obama is also accused of urging senators not to repeal Obamacare without Trump’s knowledge and of following Trump to the G20 Summit in Germany in 2017, which PolitiFact already debunked last year. Obama’s spokesperson told us that he did not attend the event, nor was he in Germany at the time it took place. There have also been no reports of Obama meeting with senators to discuss fighting the repeal of Obamacare. The alleged crime in the fake news story is that Obama is supposedly held secret meetings with world leaders. Since Obama is now out of office, doing so would be considered illegal under the Logan Act, which bars private citizens from interfering with diplomatic relations between the United States or foreign governments. While Obama has met with some world leaders, such as President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, it was part of a longstanding tradition of former presidents traveling overseas after leaving office to try and attract donations and support for their foundations, libraries and presidential centers. Obama has also leisurely traveled and made speeches abroad since he has left his presidency. We found no evidence of any illegal action taken by Obama since he has been out of office or any attempts to illegitimately take over the presidency. We rate this post Pants on Fire.	None	Universal News Portal	None	None	None	2018-03-22T18:08:09	2018-03-18	['Barack_Obama']
-snes-05137	A Carbon Monoxide spike on the west coast indicates that a massive earthquake will soon hit.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/carbon-monoxide-spike-earthquake/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	Concerns of ‘Major’ West Coast Earthquake Growing Due to Carbon Monoxide Spike?	1 March 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00703	Will "make education funding stable."	in the works	https://www.politifact.com/oregon/promises/kitz-o-meter/promise/733/make-education-funding-stable/	None	kitz-o-meter	John Kitzhaber	None	None	Make education funding stable	2011-01-04T21:58:42	None	['None']
-pomt-08640	Tom Barrett "voted for the largest tax increase in history ... raising taxes on gas and Social Security."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2010/sep/17/republican-governors-association/republican-governors-association-says-tom-barrett-/	In the battle for the Wisconsin statehouse, Republicans are working overtime to tar the Democrat who would be governor as "Tom the Taxer." It’s a common tactic on the campaign trail, and may be especially potent this year amid massive job losses and economic uncertainty. In an ongoing series of TV ads set in a noisy sports bar, the Republican Governors Association blames Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett for business closings and hits him for raising taxes as mayor as well as in Congress. In the first version of the ad, the bartender says: "An ongoing argument around here is what makes Tom Barrett the all time worst ... more taxes or less jobs? Barrett has raised taxes every year he’s been mayor, and before that he voted for the largest tax increase in history ... raising taxes on gas and Social Security." Barrett was indeed a member of Congress in 1993, when lawmakers passed and President Bill Clinton signed a giant revenue bill. The measure squeaked by 218-216 in the House. It’s known as the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. Barrett voted for the bill, part of a party-line vote in the Wisconsin delegation. And, yes, the measure increased gas taxes 4.3 cents per gallon, and increased the taxable portion of Social Security benefits. No dispute about any of that. But was it really the largest tax increase in history? We started with the Republican Governors Association, which produced the ad. RGA spokesman Mike Schrimpf cited a New York Times story from 1996 that touched on tax increases while analyzing debates in the Clinton-Dole election. He told PolitiFact Wisconsin: "According to the New York Times, ‘the 1993 measure was the largest tax increase in American history.’ " The Times story does say that, but the full sentence contains a key phrase ignored by Schrimpf and the RGA. Here’s the full sentence (italics added): "So in actual dollars, the 1993 measure was the largest tax increase in American history." And here’s the next sentence: "But adjusted for inflation, it was smaller than the one in 1982" -- a measure signed by President Ronald Reagan. The Times story took no position on the wisdom of comparing tax laws passed 11 years apart based on raw dollars unadjusted for inflation. But we do. As PolitiFact National has noted in previous items on similar statements on the size of tax increases, economists prefer calculating tax increases as share of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product. The GDP is the value of a country’s overall economic output of goods and services at market prices. It’s common sense, experts say. U.S. Treasury spokeswoman Sandra Salstrom notes the political discourse over taxes and spending very seldom mentions actual dollar figures. "Why not? Because, even after accounting for inflation, federal spending has increased in almost every year," Salstrom told PolitiFact Wisconsin. "So almost every year the federal government sets a postwar high in spending." But each increase does not have the same effect, she noted. A tax change of $10 billion, for example, would affect taxpayers much more in 1970 than in 2009. The federal government, in the widely cited Treasury Department study on more than six decades of tax increases, says that of several possible approaches, the GDP measure is probably the best is because it eliminates the effects of inflation, real economic growth and the size of total federal receipts. That study compares major revenue bills from 1940 to 2006, measuring each tax bill’s predicted share of GDP after four years. The clear winner: the Revenue Act of 1942, one of several major tax bills enacted to pay for World War ll. It’s more than twice the size of the runner-up, a 1941 act. The 1993 hike that Barrett backed and Clinton signed comes in as the ninth-biggest increase in the period, significantly below the 1982 act signed by Reagan, which ranked fifth. Partisans have tussled for years over what constitutes the all-time biggest tax-boosting bill. And we expect that barroom arguments will persist. But the evidence is clear: While Barrett voted for a big tax bill, it’s not the largest in American history, based on its actual share of economic output, which economists and the Treasury Department say is the most valid approach. The increase is evidently the largest in raw dollars, though, so the Republican Governor’s Association has at least one barstool leg to stand on. We rate the RGA’s claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Republican Governors Association	None	None	None	2010-09-17T09:00:00	2010-09-16	['Tom_Barrett_(politician)']
-para-00090	"Every single statement that has been made by this Government, every number has been wrong."	mostly false	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/aug/03/joe-hockey/hockey-says-government-numbers-every-number-wrong/index.html	None	['Economy']	Joe Hockey	Chris Pash, Peter Fray	None	Hockey says the Government's numbers are always wrong	Saturday, August 3, 2013 at 12:12 p.m.	None	['None']
-tron-02352	Harley-Davidson Dealer’s Special Thanks to Military Members	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/reimans-harley-davidson/	None	military	None	None	None	Harley-Davidson Dealer’s Special Thanks to Military Members	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-goop-01299	Jennifer Aniston Furious Over Emma Stone Flirting With Justin Theroux?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-emma-stone-justin-theroux-flirting-not-true/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Aniston Furious Over Emma Stone Flirting With Justin Theroux?	12:29 pm, March 28, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-02460	Taylor Swift “Upset” With Karlie Kloss For Wearing Justin Bieber Shir	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-not-upset-karlie-kloss-wearing-justin-bieber-shirt-feud/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Taylor Swift NOT “Upset” With Karlie Kloss For Wearing Justin Bieber Shirt	10:12 am, September 15, 2017	None	['None']
-snes-04829	Canadian chain Tim Hortons is removing pork from its menu to appease offended Muslim customers.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tim-hortons-removes-pork-to-appease-muslims/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Tim Hortons Removes Pork to Appease Muslims	2 May 2016	None	['Canada', 'Tim_Hortons', 'Islam']
-hoer-00751	In Case of Emergency (ICE) Campaign Email	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/ice-campaign-email.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	In Case of Emergency (ICE) Campaign Email	November 2009	None	['None']
-pomt-02572	"I played in a game here against the Pittsburgh Steelers where there was 23 inches of snow. … We played in at least 15 inches of that."	false	/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/30/curtis-martin/curtis-martin-says-he-once-played-game-15-inches-s/	Former New York Jets running back Curtis Martin took to ESPN’s Herald Square set recently with a message: Stop worrying about the weather for Super Bowl XLVIII. Martin said he was excited to see football’s big game being played outside in a northern city, and that the elements are part of professional football. He then told the audience about how things were back in his playing days. "I played in a game here against the Pittsburgh Steelers where there was 23 inches of snow, and they couldn’t get all the snow," Martin said. "We played in at least 15 inches of that. The only thing you could see on the field were the lines that they would clear out." 1) That sounds like a lot of snow. 2) We’re not expecting anything close in East Rutherford, N.J., for the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos. 3) The story Martin told is pretty exaggerated. The Steelers did play Martin’s Jets in the snow in East Rutherford on Dec. 14, 2003. Martin had a statistically great game, rushing for 174 yards while adding 54 yards receiving.The Jets won 6-0 on two Doug Brien field goals. The size of the snow pile, however, apparently has grown in Martin’s mind since the game was played a decade ago. Most media reports say the teams played in several inches of snow before the snow became freezing rain in the second half. Weather history from Weather Underground, which relies on airport weather data provided by the Federal Aviation Administration, says that about 4 inches of snow fell in the East Rutherford area on Dec. 14, not 23 inches. The New York Daily News also reported 4 inches of snow that day, saying: "four inches of snow, then sleet turning to rain and 30-mph wind gusts." And here’s how Jets kicker Brien described a second-quarter field goal at the time to New York’s Journal News: "There was 4 inches of snow on the ground. I was fortunate that we had a timeout and the line was able to clear away a pretty good space for me, and that was big." Lastly, while the NFL is very good about making sure videos of their games do not appear on the Internet, there is photographic evidence that there was not 23 or even 15 inches of snow that day. We have a photo of Brien’s 41-yard field goal, and we have an image of Martin in what appears to be a few inches. Our ruling Former Jets star running back Curtis Martin said he once played a game in 15 inches of snow. This is one of those stories that gets more unbelievable as the years pass. That’s because it’s not true. We rate Martin’s claim False.	None	Curtis Martin	None	None	None	2014-01-30T15:00:00	2014-01-28	['Pittsburgh_Steelers']
-snes-03247	Black police officers are more likely to kill black people.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/black-police-officers-likely-kill-black-people/	None	Politics	None	Bethania Palma	None	Are Black Police Officers More Likely to Kill Black People?	28 December 2016	None	['None']
-snes-02390	Aerosmith once decided to play their set list in reverse, then opened a concert with their encore and mistakenly walked off the stage.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cut-to-the-encore/	None	Entertainment	None	David Mikkelson	None	Aerosmith’s Memory Problems	12 August 2010	None	['None']
-pomt-11750	Says Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum "wants to make Florida not a sanctuary city but a sanctuary state."	half-true	/florida/statements/2017/dec/06/adam-putnam/does-andrew-gillum-want-make-florida-sanctuary-sta/	Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam is using the controversial topic of sanctuary cities to drum up Republican support in his bid for governor. At a campaign stop in Jacksonville, Putnam warned voters that one of his Democratic opponents wants a statewide expansion of policies that prevent the deportation of immigrants in the country illegally. "There’s a candidate running for governor who wants to make Florida not a sanctuary city, but a sanctuary state," Putnam said Nov. 30. "That’s crazy talk." There is no specific legal definition of sanctuary cities, but the term generally describes jurisdictions that to some extent limit their cooperation with federal immigration officials or don't honor their detainer requests. With that in mind, we wondered: Does a Democratic gubernatorial candidate really want to make Florida a sanctuary state? Putnam’s team singled out Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum as having this plan. But nothing on Gillum’s website calls for a move on this scale, and Gillum’s team says "sanctuary state" is not an accurate description of what Gillum envisions for Florida. So what’s the deal? Putnam’s team pointed to a tweet and multiple news articles where Gillum criticized President Donald Trump’s January 2017 executive order to penalize cities that don't comply with federal immigration agents by withholding federal funds. The next day, Gillum took to Twitter and posted a lengthy statement to attack Trump’s decision as "inconsistent with our highest values," adding the United States can "protect national security interests and have a secure border without criminalizing people who are here undocumented." Those examples didn’t show Gillum calling for a statewide sanctuary law or policy similar, so we asked the Gillum campaign for more insight on what he wants to do. "The commissioner accused Andrew of something that he never said," spokesman Geoff Burgan told PolitiFact Florida. As Tallahassee mayor, Burgan said that Gillum was clear that local law enforcement agencies are not Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. In other words, Gillum believes local law enforcement should be focused on enforcing the laws of their city, not deporting undocumented immigrants. Gillum’s campaign website says that he will "continue to fight mass deportation policies" and calls for an end to Trump’s attack on "cities friendly to immigrants." "Andrew believes that a decision between security or compassionate immigration policy are false choices; we can have them both," it reads. "As Governor, Andrew will use every effort to protect Florida from President Trump’s attacks on immigrants." As of November 2017, Tallahassee is not considered a sanctuary city by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors stricter immigration laws and regularly updates a map on its website detailing what it considers sanctuary cities, counties and states. Jessica Vaughan, the center’s director of policy studies, said Gillum’s statements to the Tallahassee Democrat indicate that he is a "sanctuary-sympathizer" who has adopted the language of people who support sanctuary policies. But while his rhetoric may raise concerns to her group, Gillum has not gone as far as articulating a policy mimicking other states that do have the unofficial classification as a "sanctuary state." The group considers six states, including California and Illinois, as having statewide sanctuary policies. In 2014, California adopted the Trust Act, which prohibited local law enforcement agencies from holding individuals solely based on their immigration status, unless certain criteria are met. That criteria includes factors like whether the immigrant has a serious or violent felony conviction or a specific sexual crimes conviction. For what it’s worth, none of the other Democratic candidates for governor — former U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham, Chris King from Orlando and Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine — have specifically said they want to make Florida a sanctuary state, either. We couldn’t find any instances of those candidates speaking out against Trump’s 2017 executive order, but in June, Graham tweeted about a House bill known as "No Sanctuary for Criminals Act." This piece of legislation cut funds for cities that protect immigrants. "While Trump is attacking the press, the House is attacking immigrants & voting to defund law enforcement agencies – potentially many in FL," Graham tweeted, adding that she voted against similar legislation in 2015. Our ruling Putnam said Gillum wants to make Florida a "sanctuary state." Putnam's comment is extrapolated from Gillum's vows to fight back against Trump's attack on sanctuary cities. As mayor of Tallahassee, Gillum criticized Trump’s executive order threatening to suspend funding to sanctuary cities, and Gillum’s campaign said as governor he would support an approach like in Tallahassee that emphasizes immigration enforcement as a federal responsibility, not a local one. But Gillum has not offered a specific statewide policy for not cooperating with detainer requests from immigration enforcement officials. His position is murkier than Putnam describes. We rate this claim Half True.	None	Adam Putnam	None	None	None	2017-12-06T12:00:00	2017-11-30	['None']
-tron-00377	Pastor Eaten By Crocodile While Walking on Water Like Jesus	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/pastor-eaten-crocodile-walking-water/	None	animals	None	None	['animals', 'religion', 'satire']	Pastor Eaten By Crocodile While Walking on Water Like Jesus	May 15, 2017	None	['None']
-abbc-00265	A panel of experts has agreed to advise ABC Fact Check for its work on economic issues.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-17/fact-check-is-wage-growth-lowest-on-record/7505512	A panel of experts has agreed to advise ABC Fact Check for its work on economic issues.	['economic-trends', 'federal-elections', 'alp', 'australia']	None	None	['economic-trends', 'federal-elections', 'alp', 'australia']	Fact check: Is wages growth now the lowest since records began?	Tue 21 Jun 2016, 1:46am	None	['None']
-wast-00086	I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law. That's their law.	4 pinnochios	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/06/19/the-facts-about-trumps-policy-of-separating-families-at-the-border/	None	None	Donald Trump	Salvador Rizzo	None	The facts about Trump's policy of separating families at the border	June 19	None	['None']
-tron-00119	Kentucky Fried Chicken Forced to Change Name to KFC	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/kentucky-fried-chicken-forced-change-name-kfc/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	Kentucky Fried Chicken Forced to Change Name to KFC	Mar 16, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-04254	A Toronto lawyer demonstrating the safety of window panes in a skyscraper plunged through a window to his death.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/window-strength-death/	None	Horrors	None	Snopes Staff	None	Did a Man Die Demonstrating a Window’s Strength?	3 November 2000	None	['Toronto']
-pomt-12478	"40 percent of American households have female primary breadwinners."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/may/03/ivanka-trump/ivanka-trump-new-book-says-women-are-primary-earne/	Despite the large number of women in the American workforce, society still treats them as an "anomaly," first daughter Ivanka Trump wrote in the introduction to her new book, Women Who Work. "Forty-seven percent of the U.S. workforce is made up of women; 70 percent of all mothers support ourselves or contribute financially to our family’s bottom line; and 40 percent of American households have female primary breadwinners," Trump wrote. "Yet we still say ‘working woman’ as if she were an anomaly. We never say ‘working man.’ " There are a few statistics in that passage, but we wanted to hone in on one of them: that women are the primary earners in 40 percent of American households. In the notes section of her book, Trump referenced a widely cited 2013 Pew Research Center report that looked at households with children under the age of 18. The report found that in 2011, women earned most or all of the family’s income in 40 percent of these households, adding up to about 13.7 million "breadwinner moms." That’s quadruple what it was in 1960 — 11 percent. The Pew figure is a little more specific than what Trump wrote because it only looked at households that had kids, not those that don't have kids. But in context, it's clear Trump was referring to the Pew report — especially because she referred to the same statistic later in the book when talking about being a working mom herself. "As much as motherhood is a joy to so many of us, it is also the greatest predictor of wage inequality between men and women in our country," she wrote. "Forty-seven percent of the U.S. labor force is female; 40 percent of women are their family's primary breadwinner." "The fact is correct," said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan and former chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department. We couldn't find any comprehensive data that spoke to how many households total, including those without kids, had women as the primary earners. Of the families where the woman is the primary breadwinner, Pew found that 37 percent are married women who earn more than their husbands, while 63 percent are single mothers. And the households with a married primary breadwinner, with a median family income of $80,000, are wealthier than the single mother households, which have a median family income of $23,000. The Pew report is the most recent independent report we could find speaking to this issue. But we also came across a 2016 report by the liberal Center for American Progress that had similar findings. According to the Center for American Progress, 42 percent of mothers were the sole or primary breadwinners in their households in 2015. And 22.4 percent were co-breadwinners, earning one-quarter to one-half of their total household income. Even though women’s share of the labor force grew dramatically throughout the latter half of the 20th century, it has stagnated in recent years, at least in part because of a lack of family-friendly labor policies, said Casey Schoeneberger, communications director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Our ruling Ivanka Trump said, "40 percent of American households have female primary breadwinners." A widely cited Pew report found that in 2011, 40 percent of American households with children under 18 had women providing most or all of the family’s income. A report by a liberal think tank found similar results looking at 2015 data. The context of Trump's statement shows that she had working moms in mind. We rate her statement Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Ivanka Trump	None	None	None	2017-05-03T17:28:40	2017-05-02	['United_States']
-pomt-06059	"In the past year, Floridians, not government, created almost 135,000 new private sector jobs. We netted more than 120,000 total jobs in the first 11 months of 2011; the third most of any state in the nation."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2012/jan/10/rick-scott/rick-scott-says-floridas-job-growth-third-most-any/	Gov. Rick Scott boasted about job growth, his signature issue, during his second annual state of the state address Jan. 10, 2012. "In the past year, Floridians, not government, created almost 135,000 new private sector jobs. We netted more than 120,000 total jobs in the first 11 months of 2011; the third most of any state in the nation." Were Scott's numbers right? James Miller, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, pointed to his department's December press release based on BLS data that showed 120,200 net jobs between January and November 2011. That includes 134,800 private sector jobs added, but 14,600 government jobs lost. We turned to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to verify. Data from the BLS shows total nonfarm seasonally adjusted jobs in Florida grew from about 7.16 million to 7.28 million, or an increase of about 120,200 between January and November 2011. So that gets us to Scott's claim about netting more than 120,000 total jobs. But the BLS would call that a 10-month change -- not an 11-month change because those numbers start with January and don't show how many jobs were added between December and January. Scott might have wanted to look at the first 11 months of 2011 rather than the 12-month net change because he was sworn into office Jan. 4, 2011, and 11 months of data is available for that year so far. Scott appears to have lopped off the December 2010 job loss figures from before he was governor. The BLS provides data for states' 12-month net jobs change, which was 110,500 for Florida for private jobs and 98,000 for total nonfarm jobs (both not seasonally adjusted.) Those figures put Florida third behind Texas and California. Florida is the fourth most populous state in the country behind California, Texas and New York so its not particularly impressive that it would net the third most number of jobs. And by focusing on the number of added jobs rather than the unemployment rate, Scott is able to tell a more positive story. Florida's unemployment rate was 10 percent for November. Only four states had a higher rate -- California, Nevada, Mississippi and Rhode Island. Illinois and North Carolina tied with Florida. Our ruling Scott said, "In the past year, Floridians, not government, created almost 135,000 new private sector jobs. We netted more than 120,000 total jobs in the first 11 months of 2011; the third most of any state in the nation." Scott's figures are correct, although what he has done here is point to a 10-month job change. We also question how significant it is that Florida ranks third for new jobs, given that we're one of the largest states population-wise. Our unemployment rates would suggest we still have quite a way to go. Still, Scott's numbers are on track. We rate this Mostly True.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2012-01-10T16:58:28	2012-01-10	['None']
-pomt-13603	"I had previously said that NATO was obsolete because it failed to deal adequately with terrorism. Since my comments, they have changed their policy and now have a new division focused on terror threats."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/16/donald-trump/donald-trump-mischaracterizes-nato-change-and-his-/	During what his campaign billed as a major foreign-policy address in Youngstown, Ohio, Donald Trump seemed to take credit for pushing NATO toward a sharper focus on terrorism. "If I become president, the era of nation-building will be brought to a very swift and decisive end," Trump said. "Our new approach -- which must be shared by both parties in America, by our allies overseas and by our friends in the Middle East -- must be to halt the spread of radical Islam. All actions should be oriented around this goal and any country which shares this goal will be our ally." He went on to add, "We will also work very closely with NATO on this new mission. I had previously said that NATO was obsolete because it failed to deal adequately with terrorism. Since my comments, they have changed their policy and now have a new division focused on terror threats." Trump has indeed mused publicly that NATO might be "obsolete" because the alliance is "not meant for terrorism." But we wondered whether he was correct to say that the U.S.-led military alliance has "changed their policy and now (has) a new division focused on terror threats." As it turns out, we found very little accurate with this statement. What change at NATO is he referring to? We didn’t hear back from Trump’s campaign, and unlike other portions of the prepared speech, this particular claim was not documented with footnotes. However, when we checked with experts on NATO and terrorism, several said the likeliest change that Trump would have been referring to was the creation of an assistant secretary general for intelligence and security to head a newly established Joint Intelligence and Security Division. Trump has previously tweeted out a Wall Street Journal story on the news and said the alliance "made the change without giving me credit." The new position was officially announced in a communiqué released on July 9, 2016, by member-state representatives at a summit in Warsaw, Poland. Here’s what the document said: "To position the Alliance in responding to evolving threats, NATO intelligence reform must be an ongoing, dynamic process. ... To improve NATO's ability to draw on a wide range of intelligence resources, we have agreed to establish a new Joint Intelligence and Security Division to be led by an Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security. The new Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security will direct NATO's intelligence and security activities, ensuring better use of existing personnel and resources, while maximizing the efficient use of intelligence provided by Allies." Was this a major change? Not really, experts say. "NATO members have been complaining about sharing of intelligence for generations," said Stephen M. Saideman, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Canada who had a fellowship on the U.S. Joint Staff at NATO in 2001. "Every year or two, there is a discussion about how to improve intel sharing." This change, he said, was "not that important." Jorge Benitez, director of NATOSource at the Atlantic Council, agreed. "While the top position is new, it seems most of the staff will come from an internal reorganization of NATO bureaucracy, rather than new additions," he said. "This is because the summit communique describes this new NATO division as making ‘better use of existing personnel and resources.’ " More to the point, Trump’s comment gives the impression that NATO hadn’t been responsive to terrorism until the new division was created. That’s not true at all. NATO involvement in counter-terrorism issued its first formal declaration on terrorism in 1980, and it became a significant issue for the alliance on Sept. 11, 2001, said Lisa Sawyer Samp, a senior fellow in the international security program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "NATO invoked Article 5, its collective defense provision, the day after the 9/11 attacks and has focused on dealing with this threat ever since, including most importantly by deploying troops for the past 12 years in Afghanistan," said Ivo H. Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs who previously served as Ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. At its peak, NATO and its partners sent about 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, Benitez said, and this year, there are still about 4,000 troops from NATO allies in Afghanistan. "It is impossible to argue that NATO has not played an overwhelmingly important role in the war on terror," said Timothy Andrews Sayle, an assistant professor of modern global security at the University of Toronto. It’s worth noting that, according to experts, NATO’s structure and role has made it an imperfect vehicle for counter-terrorism. "Allied warfare is exceptionally difficult and fraught with problems of coordination and compatibility," Sayle said. Intelligence sharing has been especially challenging -- a shortcoming that the new position was designed to ease. NATO’s post-9/11 terrorism blueprint did undergo one major overhaul -- but that occurred in 2012, several years before Trump started running for president. The overhaul, as announced at a summit in Wales, states that "the Alliance strives at all times to remain aware of the evolving threat from terrorism; to ensure it has adequate capabilities to prevent, protect against, and respond to terrorist threats." "So it took about a decade to update the initial post-9/11 framework for dealing with terrorism," said Matthew Fay, a defense policy analyst with the Niskanen Center. Did Trump have anything to do with it? Despite Trump’s desire for credit, this is the part where his statement goes off the rails. Trump strongly implies that NATO acted because of his concerns. But experts agree that nothing of the sort happened. For starters, experts said, leaders of the NATO countries feel little warmth for Trump, suggesting that they wouldn’t do anything to bolster his prospects of becoming president. "It is comical to suggest NATO would change its counterterrorism policy in response to anything Donald Trump has said about it over the course of his campaign," Fay said. "Like his claim that he was against the invasion of Iraq, this is another reflection of the Republican nominee living in a foreign policy world of his own creation." Even more important are the structural obstacles -- namely, that an alliance as broad as NATO tends to take longer to get all its members to sign off on strategic changes. "This is almost certainly just an odd coincidence," Sayle said. "The position would be the result of a very long slog by those who have favored the idea against those who may believe the alliance too large and diffuse to be effective – or safe – for sharing detailed intelligence." Saideman agreed. "NATO never works fast on anything, and most of the major changes are timed to be announced at summits like the Warsaw Summit or smaller meetings where defense ministers and foreign ministers meet." Finally, NATO rejected the notion that Trump had anything to do with the change in a statement to Politico. Our ruling Trump said, "I had previously said that NATO was obsolete because it failed to deal adequately with terrorism. Since my comments, they have changed their policy and now have a new division focused on terror threats." The change he’s apparently referring to -- the creation of a new senior post and division for coordinating intelligence sharing -- is just the most recent incremental change in how the alliance handles counter-terrorism, a topic it has addressed, in big ways and small, for more than 30 years. There is no evidence that the change was made in response to Trump’s complaints about the alliance. Experts said such changes typically require a longer gestation period so that all member nations can get on board. We rate Trump’s statement False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/8a31e8b1-2a03-46dc-a5d1-1f4bd0191fd1	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-08-16T10:57:32	2016-08-15	['NATO']
-abbc-00404	The claim: Warren Truss says if the sale of GrainCorp proceeds international companies will control Australia's ports and handling facilities, and decisions will be made in foreign boardrooms.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-19/warren-truss-graincorp-foreign-ownership-ports/5083024	The claim: Warren Truss says if the sale of GrainCorp proceeds international companies will control Australia's ports and handling facilities, and decisions will be made in foreign boardrooms.	['wheat', 'government-and-politics', 'federal-government', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'liberals', 'nationals', 'australia']	None	None	['wheat', 'government-and-politics', 'federal-government', 'business-economics-and-finance', 'liberals', 'nationals', 'australia']	Warren Truss inflates the impact of GrainCorp's sale on ports	Fri 22 Nov 2013, 9:10am	None	['Australia']
-snes-05229	Coca-Cola is an effective solution for eliminating head lice.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/coca-cola-lice-remedy/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	Coca-Cola Lice Remedy	11 February 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-04590	President Obama campaign surrogate Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley "acknowledged that we are not better off than we were four years ago."	half-true	/tennessee/statements/2012/sep/21/chris-devaney/tennessee-gop-chairman-says-obama-surrogate-admits/	The pace of the nation’s economic recovery continues to be one of the most heavily debated issues as the presidential race enters its final stretch. Republican Mitt Romney and his supporters have been trying to gain the upper hand in that debate by asking voters the same question that Ronald Reagan effectively used against Jimmy Carter in 1980: Are you better off than you were four years ago? One of President Barack Obama’s top campaign surrogates, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, "acknowledged that we are not better off than we were four years ago," Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Chris Devaney wrote in a posting on the party’s web site on Sept. 4. To back up the claim, the party’s state executive director, Adam Nickas, directed us to O’Malley’s Sept. 2, appearance on CBS News’ "Face the Nation." The program, moderated by Bob Schieffer, was broadcast live on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. Instead of paraphrasing the exchange in question, we’ll let a transcript from that pertinent segment of the broadcast speak for itself: Schieffer: Can you honestly say that people are better off today than they were four years ago? O’Malley: No, but that’s not the question of this election. The question, without a doubt, we are not as well off as we were before George Bush brought us the Bush job losses, the Bush recession, the Bush deficits, the series of desert wars, charged for the first time to credit cards, the national credit card … When Schieffer pointed out that Bush is not on the ballot, O’Malley replied: "Yeah. But we are making progress" and are coming out of "the deep, deep hole." O’Malley’s remarks lit up the web and the blogosphere. But the next day, he gave a different answer during a CNN panel discussion when moderator Soledad O’Brien referenced his earlier response on "Face the Nation." Again, here is a transcript of the pertinent exchange: O’Malley: Here’s the reality of our situation as a country. We are clearly better off as a country because we are now creating jobs rather than losing them. O’Brien: But you said no … O’Malley: But Soledad, we have not recovered all that we lost in the Bush recession. That’s why we need to continue to move forward. Is there anybody on this panel that thinks we’ve recovered all that we lost in the Bush recession? I don’t think anybody could say that. But clearly, we’re moving forward. We’re creating jobs. Unemployment is down. Job creation is up. And those positive movements would not have happened without the president’s leadership. A few days later, on Friday, Sept. 7, O’Malley appeared on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" and said he didn’t mean to say that Americans were not better off when he made his earlier remarks. O’Malley said he had been "word-spliced" on "Face the Nation" and that Americans are indeed doing better. "Yes, of course we’re doing better when America is creating jobs, and we are creating jobs," he said. He again said the United States has not recovered all of the jobs lost during the recession and insisted that is what he was talking about on "Face the Nation." In fairness to Devaney, O’Malley’s appearance on "Morning Joe" happened three days after Devaney had posted his comments on the GOP web site. But O’Malley’s CNN appearance, in which he backed off of his earlier statement, came the day before Devaney had posted his comments. Our ruling During his "Face the Nation" appearance, O’Malley did, in fact, say Americans are not better off than they were four years ago, but he made clear he felt this was the fault of the Bush administration, not Obama’s. He further clarified his beliefs in a CNN interview the next day and in another television interview three days later. In those follow-up interviews, O’Malley said that while not all jobs lost during the recession have been recovered, Americans are still better off because the country is creating jobs instead of losing them. Chairman Devaney correctly cited O’Malley’s original remarks but failed to mention that the governor had said the opposite in subsequent interviews. We understand that, especially in the hyper-partisan atmosphere surrounding a presidential election, politicos are going to cherry-pick comments that make their side look good and the other guy look bad. Still, we rate Devaney’s claim as Half True.	None	Chris Devaney	None	None	None	2012-09-21T14:50:21	2012-09-04	['Barack_Obama', 'Maryland']
-pomt-12247	Medicaid "is contributing to 70 percent of our budget deficit right now. It’s the one that is in our lap because of Obamacare."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/12/pat-toomey/medicaid-driving-budget-deficit-pat-toomey-said/	Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Penn., defended the Senate health care bill’s curbing of Medicaid spending by calling Medicaid the single-biggest driver of the federal budget deficit. Toomey said the proposed cuts to Medicaid spending would slow the growth of entitlement programs, which he claimed are "driving the fiscal train wreck we’re on" in a Morning Joe interview on July 10, 2017. Medicaid "is the one that is growing most rapidly, and is contributing to 70 percent of our budget deficit right now. It’s the one that is in our lap because of Obamacare," Toomey said. Is Medicaid the primary culprit behind the federal budget deficit? We found Toomey is playing parlor games with budget figures. 'Misleading' numbers When we asked Toomey’s office for evidence that Medicaid is contributing up to 70 percent of the deficit, they pointed out that spending on Medicaid is equal to 70 percent of the deficit. They divided projections on Medicaid spending in 2017 ($389 billion) by the estimated budget deficit ($559 billions) to get 69.6 percent. The figures come from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, or CBO. The problem is, that same calculation can be made with any federal program to reach a different conclusion. Dan Mitchell, an economist with the libertarian Cato Institute, agreed with Toomey’s arithmetic. But, he said, the framework of the calculation is misleading. "I’m not a fan of creating a link between the deficit and any program, Medicaid or otherwise ... but it happens all the time," Mitchell said. Dividing Medicaid spending by the budget deficit makes little sense to Dean Baker, the co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. By the same logic, Baker said, "since we will spend $634 billion on the military this year, defense spending is more than 100 percent responsible for the deficit. No one would take this argument seriously about the military and the deficit, nor should they take his argument seriously about Medicaid and the deficit." Defense spending would account for 113 percent of the deficit, non-defense discretionary spending 103 percent, and Medicare 101 percent if we were to divide spending by the deficit in the same way Toomey did. "Clearly, there’s something misleading about the calculation you’re making when things are adding up to 300 percent or more," said Ben Sommers, a health policy and economics professor at Harvard University. Toomey’s office made a more nuanced argument about their calculation, though, discussing Medicaid in the context of entitlements and net spending. "Unlike the other entitlement programs, Medicaid has no dedicated revenue stream, so it is taken solely out of general revenue or the deficit. Therefore, when direct revenue streams are taken into account, Medicaid spends the most on net," said Kasia Mulligan, the communications director for Toomey. Medicaid looks worse compared with Medicare or Social Security because its federal share is wholly financed by general revenues, whereas Medicare is partially covered by payroll taxes and premiums, according to Diane Rowland, executive vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. General revenues still help finance Medicare and Social Security, however. Discounting payroll taxes and premiums, Medicare represents 34 percent of the deficit and Social Security 17 percent (using Toomey's rationale). This would make Medicaid the biggest contributor within entitlements, but entitlements aren’t the only contributors to the deficit. Defense spending is also wholly financed by general revenues, and surpasses Medicaid in the amount it contributes to the deficit. "All spending has to be paid for with tax revenue from some source, or it contributes to the deficit," Sommers said. "There’s no way to say that a dollar spent on Medicaid is any more responsible for the deficit than a dollar spent on defense or discretionary spending or anything else the government does." Is the Affordable Care Act to blame? Toomey blamed Medicaid spending on the Affordable Care Act, but the new law isn’t entirely responsible for Medicaid’s entire costs. Elderly people and those with disabilities account for two-thirds of Medicaid spending and low-income children account for one-fifth; two groups that were unaffected by the Medicaid expansion introduced by the Affordable Care Act, Rowland said. Medicaid spending has been growing faster than Medicare or Social Security in recent years, as Toomey said, but per-capita costs are actually growing at a slower rate than for Medicare or private insurance. An increased number of people covered by Medicaid is responsible for higher costs. The cost of this increased coverage was covered by taxes imposed by the Affordable Care Act that added to the general revenue so as not to grow the deficit. Toomey’s team told us that he has been concerned about Medicaid spending both before and after the Affordable Care Act. Toomey maintains that Medicaid was not on a sustainable fiscal path even before Obamacare was enacted. Our rating Toomey said that Medicaid is contributing to 70 percent of our budget deficit. The truth is, Medicaid spending annually is about 70 percent of the size of the federal budget deficit. The same logic, if applied to defense spending, would mean defense spending contributes more than 100 percent to the deficit. Experts say both comparisons are flawed and misleading. Blaming the Affordable Care Act for the rise in Medicaid spending isn’t entirely right either, as the majority of Medicaid spending was already in place before the law, and taxes were imposed to offset the Medicaid expansion’s strain on the deficit. Toomey's claim contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.We rate this statement Mostly False. Update: This report has been updated to include additional comments from Toomey on Medicaid spending that we received after our initial publication. The rating remains unchanged. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Pat Toomey	None	None	None	2017-07-12T15:36:12	2017-07-10	['None']
-afck-00396	“76% of the Western Cape Government’s budget is redistributed to poor communities. #DAdelivers”	unproven	https://africacheck.org/reports/does-south-africas-democratic-alliance-really-deliver-we-assess-their-claims/	None	None	None	None	None	Does South Africa’s Democratic Alliance really deliver? We assess their claims	2014-03-25 08:47	None	['None']
-pomt-07071	"If you threw a barbecue yesterday for the Memorial weekend, it was 29 percent more expensive than last year because Barack Obama's policies have led to groceries going up 29 percent."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/27/michele-bachmann/michele-bachmann-says-food-prices-barbecues-29-per/	Presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann probably wasn't around to enjoy the burgers at your Memorial Day barbecue, but she's very concerned about how much you paid for them. In an interview on New Hampshire Now on WKXL-AM in Concord, N.H., Bachmann sympathized with the plight of grillmasters everywhere by noting that the price of cook-out items have skyrocketed. And she laid the blame at the feet of President Barack Obama. "If you threw a barbecue yesterday for the Memorial weekend, it was 29 percent more expensive than last year because Barack Obama's policies have led to groceries going up 29 percent," she said. Anybody who has bought hamburger lately knows how prices have increased. But did you pay 29 percent more for your Memorial Day meal? And is the president to blame? Bachmann's campaign did not respond to our inquiries for the source of their figures, but Internet searches took us to a New York Post article titled "That cookout will cost you 29 percent more this year." The May 24 story reported that hosts of a typical Memorial Day cookout, which includes a menu of hamburgers, hot dogs, lettuce, tomatoes, potato salad, ice cream and coffee for 12 people, would spend an average of $199 – about 29 percent higher than May 2010. Lettuce prices have increased 28 percent during that time, reporter Paul Tharp wrote in the story. "Want tomatoes on that burger?" Tharp wrote. "It'll cost you 86 percent more than last year." But the 29 percent was based on New York-area prices. Tharp told us in an e-mail that his team got the prices of the selected items at New York area grocery stores and compared them to the May 2010 and May 2011 regional prices listed in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index. The CPI is the country's most widely used measure of inflation. "The BLS came up with the price histories, and our onsite price-checks in supermarkets provided the latest price updates," Tharp said. These numbers showed the average increase at about 29 percent, he said. But PolitiFact found the national numbers were much lower. According to last month's CPI survey, the price of ground beef has jumped 13.6 percent since May 2010. Frankfurters have increased by 8 percent; coffee by 16 percent; lettuce by 7.8; tomatoes by 2.4; and ice cream by 5.6 percent. Potatoes, the main ingredient in potato salad, has increased by 15.9 percent since May 2010. (The CPI survey doesn’t measure potato salad). We averaged those increases and came up with 9.9 percent -- a substantial increase, but much lower than the 29 percent that Bachmann claimed. Overall, food has increased by 3.6 percent from last year, according to the CPI listings. Is Obama responsible for the increase in food prices? Not much. Industry experts told us that food prices are affected by many different factors ranging from weather, energy costs for transportation and production, and supply and demand. Bill Cook, an economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, said that environmental conditions, including dry cattle pastures in parts of the United States and droughts in Colombia have affected the price of products like beef and coffee. An increase in the wealth of countries across the globe, especially China and other Asian nations, has boosted the demand for food, driving up costs, Cook said. Experts told us that the occupant of the White House doesn't have much impact on the price of food. "Although policies can have an impact on food prices, it seems to be the case that most ups and downs in food prices over the years are a function of the underlying supply and demand factors that go into the system," said Ephraim Leibtag, deputy director of research for the federal Economic Research Service's food economics division. Lately, high energy costs have also played a big role. The price of fuel, used to process and transport food, has risen dramatically. On May 30, regular gas averaged about $3.74 per gallon across the country – about $1 more than May 30, 2010. President Obama has acknowledged the cost of high gas prices. Last month, he announced efforts to conduct lease sales in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, as well as to extend drilling leases off the Gulf of Mexico and off the Alaskan Coast. But analysts say the president isn’t to blame for the high oil prices. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, a federal agency that tracks energy prices, credits political events in the Middle East and Africa, as well as changes in inventory levels and improving economies across the globe among the factors contributing to the price of crude oil. "Oil prices are responding more to fundamentals in the marketplace, as well as the economic downturn," said Mary Welge, a senior editor with Oil Price Information Service, an industry news publication. "I can't remember the last political decision pertaining to oil companies that might have had a real influence on oil prices." Our ruling Bachmann says Obama is to blame for a 29 percent increase in Memorial Day barbecues, but she's way off on both counts. Her figure comes from a New York Post article that relied on prices in the expensive New York metro area; national figures show the increase was much lower, about 9.9 percent. And she blames Obama for the increase when experts say he and his policies have little, if any, impact on food prices. We find her claim False.	None	Michele Bachmann	None	None	None	2011-06-27T17:25:56	2011-06-01	['None']
-pomt-07947	"The debt will soon eclipse our entire economy."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jan/25/paul-ryan/paul-ryan-state-union-response-says-us-debt-will-s/	In his response to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Jan. 25, 2011, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., warned that government spending has reached a tipping point. "We face a crushing burden of debt," Ryan said. "The debt will soon eclipse our entire economy and grow to catastrophic levels in years ahead." We at PolitiFact and our colleagues at PolitiFact Ohio have both considered essentially identical claims from House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. The most recent of those statements, which came during a speech in the House of Representatives on Jan. 5, 2011, was that "our spending has caught up with us, and our debt soon will eclipse the entire size of our national economy." In its most basic interpretation, the United States government’s total debt at the start of the year was $14 trillion, according to the Treasury Department’s interactive "Debt to the Penny" website. The size of the United States economy, measured by the gross domestic product, or the value of all goods and services, was $14.745 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, the most recent quarter for which data is available. This number comes from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis databases. Using these numbers, it would appear that the eclipse is about to start. But since GDP estimates are not as current as the debt numbers, we wanted to see how big the debt was at the end of the third quarter of 2010. Going back to Treasury’s calculator, we got a debt figure of $13.668 trillion by putting the date at Oct. 31, 2010. That means $13.6 trillion in debt against a $14.7 trillion economy, which to us signals the onset of an eclipse. Economists and analysts who are reading this by now are shouting, "Wait!" We understand. There is an alternative measure of debt known as "public debt," which does not include money in the Social Security trust fund or other amounts that the government owes itself. Using this measure instead, the debt-to-GDP comparisons are much smaller. By the end of 2010, public debt is projected to be 60.3 percent of GDP, and by the end of 2012, it's projected to be 66.6 percent. If current practices aren’t changed, public debt will reach 90 percent of GDP in 2020, according to the Congressional Budget Office, whose figures were cited by President Barack Obama’s national Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in December. Some economists prefer to use public debt rather than gross federal debt, because the public debt will require real money to repay the lenders, which in turn would have a faster ripple effect in the private sector. But one measure "isn’t more 'right' than the other," Marc Goldwein, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a middle-of-the-road budget-hawk group, told us last March. "Boehner may be cherry-picking, but I don’t think he’s misrepresenting in any way." Even if the smaller number -- public debt -- were to approach a total eclipse in a decade, "to me, that counts as 'soon,'" said Brian Riedl, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. That’s because it can take five to 10 years for congressional decisions "to turn the budget ship around," he said. We'll note that these numbers have been growing for decades, roughly tripling since Jimmy Carter left the presidency. Under Ronald Reagan, debt as a percentage of GDP grew from 33.4 percent to 51.9 percent, and under George H.W. Bush, it grew from 51.9 percent to 64.1 percent. It declined under Bill Clinton, from 64.1 percent to 57.3 percent, before rising from 57.3 percent to 69.2 percent under George W. Bush. It's expected to soar during Obama's first four years from 69.2 percent to 100.8 percent. We'll also note that these numbers could change over the course of the next two years, depending on economic conditions and policy choices. Still, we considered Boehner's statistics valid, and Ryan's formulation is equally solid. So we rate his statement True.	None	Paul Ryan	None	None	None	2011-01-25T23:59:50	2011-01-25	['None']
-farg-00410	"Head Of Democratic Party Just Hauled Out In Handcuffs With Multiple Charges."	misleading	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/partisan-website-recycles-old-charges/	None	fake-news	FactCheck.org	Saranac Hale Spencer	['false stories']	Partisan Website Recycles Old Charges	June 19, 2018	2018-06-19 22:07:26 UTC	['None']
-tron-02972	Trump Advisor Steve Bannon is a Racist White Nationalist	commentary!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/trump-advisor-steve-bannon-racist-white-nationalist-commentary/	None	politics	None	None	['2016 election', 'donald trump', 'media']	Trump Advisor Steve Bannon is a Racist White Nationalist	Nov 15, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-00269	Celebrity chef Guy Fieri fed, or helped to feed, 5,000 people displaced by the 2018 Carr Fire in Shasta County, California.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/guy-fieri-wildfires/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Celebrity Chef Guy Fieri Feed 5,000 California Wildfire Evacuees?	1 August 2018	None	['California', 'Guy_Fieri']
-pomt-04247	Says the Multnomah County Library system "is the second busiest in the nation."	true	/oregon/statements/2012/nov/16/libraries-yes-committee/mulnomah-county-library-system-second-busiest-nati/	Just over a week ago, voters approved a new library taxing district, securing funding for the Multnomah County Library well into the future. During the campaign to persuade voters to mark "yes" on their ballots, the Library Yes! Committee made a number of arguments in the district’s favor. One of the most ubiquitous was the oft-repeated fact that the Multnomah County Library was the "second busiest in the nation." Given that Portland doesn’t even crack the 25 largest cities in the nation (by population), this fact has always struck us as pretty interesting. During the campaign season, we were a bit distracted with various other claims, but now that things are bit quieter, we thought we’d come back to this one -- if only for curiosity’s sake. We e-mailed Liz Kaufman, who handled media requests for the library district campaign, and she quickly followed up with a handy breakdown of statistics about the Multnomah County Library and its peer institutions, compiled by the American Library Association. The association doesn’t track how "busy" a system is per se, but it does check the circulation -- or the total number of items issued in a given year. By that measure, the Multnomah County system is, indeed, the second busiest with 23,946,498. We followed up with a phone call to the association for good measure and spoke with Macey Morales, their media point-person. She cautioned that their figures came from the Public Library Associations’ survey. "A total of 1,300 libraries from the U.S. and Canada voluntarily complete the survey, so the report reflects a sample of public libraries in North America," she wrote in a follow-up e-mail. That said, the Multnomah County system does have the second highest circulation in the most recent survey. The New York Public Library comes in first -- although to be fair, that system has some 87 branches compared to Multnomah’s 18. A quick aside: We also have the second highest circulation per capita. In that category, we were edged out -- 33 to 34 per person a year -- by Ohio’s Cuyahoga County Public Library. Morales did point us to one other source, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The institute does a more complete library census, looking at some 9,000 systems. The catch there is that their figures take a while to get published. They’re currently waiting on 2010 figures. A report released by the institute in December 2009, said Multnomah County Library boasted the third highest circulation rate in the country -- there’s no mention of who is first or second. Those figures, of course, would be somewhat dated compared to the other survey -- though potentially more complete. It’s often said that the Multnomah County Library system is the nation’s second busiest. The most recent available statistics from a survey used widely in the industry backs up the claim. We rate this claim True.	None	Libraries Yes! Committee	None	None	None	2012-11-16T13:49:46	2012-10-21	['None']
-thet-00027	SNP claim of best rural broadband improvement	mostly true	https://theferret.scot/snp-best-rural-superfast-broadband/	None	Fact check Politics 	None	None	None	SNP claim of best rural broadband improvement is Mostly True	February 9, 2018	None	['None']
-pose-00144	"We must adapt and make tradeoffs among systems originally designed for the Cold War and those required for current and future challenges. We need greater investment in advanced technology ranging from the revolutionary, like unmanned aerial vehicles and electronic warfare capabilities, to systems like the C-17 cargo and KC-X air refueling aircraft—which may not be glamorous to politicians, but are the backbone of our future ability to extend global power."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/156/make-greater-investment-in-advanced-military-air-t/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Make greater investment in advanced military air technology	2010-01-07T13:26:49	None	['Cold_War', 'KC-X']
-snes-04845	The Koch brothers have endorsed Hillary Clinton for President over any of her Republican rivals.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/koch-brothers-officially-endorse-hillary-clinton/	None	Politicians	None	Stephanie Larsen	None	Koch Brothers Officially Endorse Hillary Clinton?	28 April 2016	None	['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton']
-snes-00251	A magazine advertisement from the 1950s promoted a handgun for women's use with the slogan "for that strange, depraved creep who won't leave you alone."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/1950s-magazine-ad-colt-cobra/	None	Fauxtography	None	David Emery	None	Is This a 1950s Women’s Magazine Ad for a Handgun to Shoot ‘Depraved Creeps’?	6 August 2018	None	['None']
-goop-00138	Jenna Dewan Having “Tough Time” Moving On From Channing Tatum, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jenna-dewan-channing-tatum-dating-move-on/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Jenna Dewan NOT Having “Tough Time” Moving On From Channing Tatum, Despite Report	1:01 am, October 14, 2018	None	['None']
-vogo-00115	The Deal on Five-Year Pacts: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/the-deal-on-five-year-pacts-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	The Deal on Five-Year Pacts: Fact Check TV	April 29, 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-09202	Halliburton gave Dick Cheney a $34 million payout when he left the company to join the presidential ticket.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/may/24/chris-matthews/chris-matthews-says-cheney-got-34-million-payday-h/	The oil-services and infrastructure giant Halliburton is a favorite target for critics of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who used to be the company's CEO. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the company's Iraq War-related contracts attracted wide attention. Now, the company's role in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has brought Halliburton back into the headlines. During a May 20, 2010, appearance with Jay Leno on the Tonight Show, MSNBC host and political commentator Chris Matthews revived the Cheney-Halliburton connection while discussing the spill. At one point in the interview, Leno said, "All right, a lot going on in politics with this BP thing. This is the one-month anniversary. Where are we? Who’s the lying scum here?" Matthews responded, "Yeah, it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, and, you know, I don’t know where to start. I mean, Halliburton. Sound familiar? Cheney. Cheney was head of Halliburton. When he got to be vice president, when he was signed for vice president, the oil company gave him a $34 million signing bonus to become vice president of the United States." We'll grant Matthews some artistic license with his comment. We know he doesn't mean that Cheney literally got a signing bonus for becoming the vice presidential candidate, as a newly signed free agent would in baseball. But we thought it was worth checking whether Cheney did in fact end up with a $34 million payout when he stepped down as CEO to join Bush on the ticket in 2000. We looked at a personal financial disclosure form that Cheney signed on Sept. 1, 2000. This is the filing made once someone joins a national presidential ticket. It represents the candidate's holdings and income as of August. In the portion addressing Cheney's compensation from Halliburtion, the file lists the following categories and dollar amounts as of that date: • Salary/bonus (gross): $4,721, 947 • Deferred salary: $1,042, 441 • Senior executive deferred compensation contributions: $654,804 Meanwhile, on May 15, 2001, Cheney also signed a second disclosure form that is supposed to update the August 2000 filing so that it covers the full year. In this filing, Cheney disclosed the following Halliburton income: • Salary/bonus (gross): $821,896 • Elective deferred salary: $403,166 • Stock equivalent unit bonus: $396,213 • Senior executive deferred compensation contributions: $53,692 • Elective deferred salary lump sum payout: $1,140,160 • Restricted stock imputed income: $7,560,000 • Nonqualified stock option income: $21,964,254 • Senior executive deferred compensation payout: $2,797,128 However, we were unclear about whether the totals from the May 2001 filing, which amount to $35.1 million, should be added to those from the August 2000 filing, which amount to $6.4 million, or whether the amounts in the two filings overlap somewhat. Experts we spoke to expressed uncertainty on this question as well. So we decided to take the most cautious approach and only use the numbers from the second filing, which covers the whole year. That still leaves a total of $35.1 million earned from Halliburtion reported on the May 2001 filing. Of that total, just over $800,000 represents salary and bonus, which Cheney would have earned regardless of whether he joined the ticket or not. Many of the other categories were subject to some calculation and/or negotiation, as would happen in the case of any CEO who left a position early, so it seems fair to call the rest of the income he received an exit package. So, if you subtract the salary and bonus from the larger amount, voila -- you get $34 million and change. So Matthews is right. A footnote: Cheney's timing was impeccable. As the disclosure forms indicate, he held a large number of stock options, which means he had been given the right to purchase shares of the company for an old (and, hopefully for the holder of the options) lower price than the current market value. When the holder chooses to exercise those options, they can buy the shares at the low price and then sell them at the market price, pocketing the difference. It's not clear when Cheney sold his stock options, but it likely was within weeks of his being named to the ticket -- a period when Halliburtion shares hit their 2000 peak, in the low-to-mid $50 range. By November 30, 2000, the stock had fallen to $33 a share. If he'd waited until then to sell, his payday would have been one-third lower, or roughly $14 million rather than $22 million. But Cheney does appear to have had timing on his side, so we find Matthews' statement -- that Cheney had a payday of $34 million -- to be accurate. If anything, it may have been a bit low. Either way, we give it a rating of True.	None	Chris Matthews	None	None	None	2010-05-24T17:36:23	2010-05-20	['Dick_Cheney']
-tron-03341	Denny’s Waitress Assaulted by Muslim Men for Serving Bacon	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dennys-waitress-assaulted-muslim-men-serving-bacon/	None	religious	None	None	None	Denny’s Waitress Assaulted by Muslim Men for Serving Bacon	Jun 16, 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-07190	"Rhode Island continues to have the highest rates of substance abuse in the country."	true	/rhode-island/statements/2011/jun/09/ian-lang/social-service-provider-says-rhode-island-has-high/	When state lawmakers this year took up legislation to create a high school program in Rhode Island for teens in recovery, they heard sobering testimony from the head of the agency that would run it. Ian Lang, chief strategy officer of The Providence Center, a provider of mental-health and substance-abuse services, painted a disturbing portrait of addiction problems in Rhode Island. "Rhode Island continues to have the highest rates of substance abuse in the country," he told members of the Senate Education Committee while describing plans to locate the small school in one wing of the center’s building on Hope Street. Do we really have such a serious substance abuse problem? In his remarks, Lang cited statistics from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Its sponsor, the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, says the survey "is the primary source of statistical information on the use of illegal drugs, alcohol, and tobacco by the U.S. civilian, non-institutionalized population aged 12 or older." The survey, begun in 1971, is conducted in door-to-door interviews with a representative sample of the nation’s population. About 900 people in Rhode Island respond annually to the questionnaire, parts of which are administered confidentially with computers. Lang, citing survey estimates, testified that "over 11 percent of Rhode Islanders 12 and over use illicit drugs, the highest rate in the nation, and that Rhode Island has the highest percentage of persons 12 years and over needing but not receiving treatment for illicit drug use, at 3.3 percent. We also have the lowest perceived risk of substance abuse in the country, according to national statistics." When we contacted Lang to discuss the survey results, he did some checking and realized he had actually cited old data. The most recent state-by-state comparison is based on the 2007-2008 surveys. (The federal agency is a couple years behind and will release 2009 data later this year, a spokeswoman said.) Still, Lang said, Rhode Island continues to have among the worst substance-abuse rates in the nation. "I think a lot of it has to do with the location... between Boston and New York and the easy availability of drugs and the urban environment we live in," he said. "It’s a lot easier to get around here than if you were in the middle of nowhere....If you look at our sister states, it’s not just a problem in Rhode Island, it’s a problem in the Northeast," Lang said. We decided to check the survey results ourselves. They turned out to be far more complex than we imagined. And troubling. To begin with, states are not ranked individually. Instead, they are grouped into one of five "quintiles." So when Lang says Rhode Island’s rates are the "highest" in the nation, he’s using the survey definition, which is falling among the 10 worst states in any particular category. We found that Rhode Island not only landed among the worst states in one category Lang cited -- the percentage of those 12 and over who have used illicit drugs in the past month -- we actually had the highest individual score. Rhode Island’s rate was 13.3 percent. (Oregon was second, at 12.1 percent.) We wondered why Lang would select everyone 12 and over instead of focusing on the population that would be served by the recovery high school. The survey, after all, includes a category for youths ages 12 to 17. So how does Rhode Island rank in that category? Still in the highest fifth and, according to our review, second of all states, at 12.4 percent. (Vermont is highest, at 13 percent.) Lang also cited survey estimates of how many people in Rhode Island need treatment for substance abuse, but aren’t getting it. For ages 12 and up, Rhode Island was in the "highest" group (ranking second at 3.9 percent). Again, we checked the rate for those ages 12 to 17, and the state remained in the top fifth, in sixth place at 4.9 percent. Lang also highlighted the study’s examination of attitudes in Rhode Island toward drug use, namely whether people consider monthly marijuana use and weekly binge drinking to be risky. The numbers generally indicate our state is more accepting than others of such behavior. We decided to look into two areas of the survey that Lang didn’t mention, and turned up more troubling statistics. Turns out that Rhode Island topped all states for marijuana use for all age groups: an estimated 10.9 percent of residents 12 and older had used marijuana in the month prior to the survey. It also was tops for alcohol consumption by youth, including binge drinking. Finally, we wondered whether the National Survey Lang cited is really the most authoritative. We put that question to Robert Morrison, executive director of the National Association of State Alcohol/Drug Abuse Directors. "The national survey on drug use and health is one of the most widely used surveys in the country to get a picture of substance abuse in the nation," he told us. In summary, the federal study Lang relied upon has a 40-year history and the statistics he cited were accurate. And when we delved into a variety of other categories from the same survey, we found that in many instances, Rhode Island has the "highest rates of substance abuse in the country" -- an alarming distinction. We rate his claim True. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Ian Lang	None	None	None	2011-06-09T00:01:00	2011-05-18	['None']
-goop-01487	Ben Affleck “Chasing” Kristen Wiig While Dating Lindsay Shookus?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-kristen-wiig-dating-lindsay-shookus-fake-news/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Ben Affleck “Chasing” Kristen Wiig While Dating Lindsay Shookus?	10:47 am, February 27, 2018	None	['Ben_Affleck']
-pomt-02280	A poll taken "a few months ago" found "70 percent approval or higher" for the Act 10 collective bargaining law.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2014/apr/06/scott-walker/scott-walker-says-recent-wisconsin-poll-shows-70-a/	During a radio interview on April 1, 2014, Gov. Scott Walker claimed that a poll taken "a few months ago" showed "70 percent approval or higher" for Act 10, the collective bargaining reform law that spurred massive protests in Madison and an attempt to remove him from office. Statewide polls typically get widespread news coverage. But we don’t recall any recent headlines about 70 percent support for Act 10, which sharply curbs collective bargaining for most public employees and makes the employees pay more for their pensions and health care. Walker's claim is important because he is counting on support for the law in his effort to win re-election in November 2014. So let's see what the governor is talking about. Act 10 Walker largely credits Act 10 for shoring up state and local government finances. The measure has been vilified for repealing most collective bargaining for public employee unions, both at the state and local government levels. But even Walker’s Democratic challenger, Mary Burke, who thinks Act 10 went too far on that score, is among critics who say the law nevertheless took a necessary step in requiring most public employees to pay more for their benefits. Walker signed the bill two months after taking office, in March 2011. Because of reaction to it, he faced a recall election in June 2012. The timing is important in assessing Walker's claim. It has been more than three years since Act 10 became law and nearly two years since it was the focus of the recall. In other words, it hasn't been a hot topic for pollsters for some time. And public opinion can change. The claim Walker made his statement about support for Act 10 to Jay Weber, a conservative radio talk show host at WISN-AM (1130) in Milwaukee. Weber began the interview by praising a number of Walker’s tax cuts, including a trim to property taxes. Then he alluded to Walker’s race with Burke. Weber cited results from a statewide Marquette Law School poll released on March 26, 2014, six days before the interview, and asked Walker about his approval rating. The poll had shown 47 percent of registered Wisconsin voters approved of how Walker handled his job. That was down from 51 percent in the previous Marquette survey, done two months earlier. The new poll, Weber said, "showed that there was strong approval for the tax cut -- who wouldn’t want their taxes cut? -- but it didn’t translate into a bump in your approval ratings. So, what does that tell you -- you need to sell this before fall?" "Yeah, I think so. I think a combination," Walker said before citing another poll result, albeit with a number of qualifiers. "If you look at that, the previous poll that was taken a few months ago also showed, I think, there was something like -- if I remember right -- something like 70 percent approval or higher for our reforms, the reforms that are commonly called Act 10, the budgetary reforms which allowed not just the state but local governments to balance their budgets as well." Cleaned up, here’s the claim we’re checking: A poll taken "a few months ago" -- so, roughly early 2014, or perhaps late 2013 -- found "70 percent approval or higher" for Act 10. The evidence Neither the March 2014 Marquette Law School poll cited by Weber, nor the January 2014 version Walker seemed to allude to, included any questions about Act 10. So we wondered which survey Walker was relying on to back his claim. Walker press secretary Laurel Patrick told us the governor was referring to a question in the Marquette poll from late May 2012. That's nearly two years ago. That question asked: "As you know, last year a number of changes were made concerning state employees, state spending and policies. For each, please tell me if this is something you favor or oppose -- requiring public employees to contribute to their own pensions and pay more for health insurance?" The results were: Favor – 75%; Oppose – 22%; Don't Know – 3%. On other questions, however, support was not that high: 55% said they favored limiting collective-bargaining for most public employees and 50% said they preferred the change to collective bargaining rather than going back to the old law. (Another school that does regular statewide polling in Wisconsin is St. Norbert College near Green Bay. Like Marquette, it has not polled on Act 10 since May 2012. The results at that time: 59 percent favored allowing public employees to collectively bargain for wages and 60 percent favored bargaining for health and retirement benefits.) In any case, the Marquette results Walker cites are from nearly two years ago, not a few months ago. And no publicly released poll has asked Wisconsinites about Act 10 since then, according to Marquette Law School poll director Charles Franklin and St. Norbert College political science professor Wendy Scattergood, an associate with the St. Norbert College Survey Center Wisconsin. As for what the level of support for Act 10 there may have been a few months ago, Franklin told us the results could be the same, but: "We simply don't know." Our rating Walker said a poll "taken a few months ago" found "70 percent approval or higher" for his Act 10 collective bargaining law. No known poll has asked Wisconsinites about Act 10 in the months leading up to Walker's statement on April 1, 2014, and his staff did not cite one. One poll question from May 2012 found 75 percent support for one part of the law, but what the level of support for Act 10’s various provisions might have been a few months ago is strictly speculation. We rate Walker's statement False.	None	Scott Walker	None	None	None	2014-04-06T05:00:00	2014-04-01	['None']
-pomt-08392	Says he "stood up to his own party by voting against the budget to stop runaway government spending."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2010/oct/23/jim-sullivan/jim-sullivan-says-he-voted-against-his-own-party-s/	In 2006, Wauwatosa Democrat Jim Sullivan won a Wisconsin state Senate seat long held by Republicans and helped his party take back control of the Senate. In the 2010 race, Sullivan faces a tough challenge from state Rep. Leah Vukmir, a Wauwatosa Republican. Control of the Senate is again in play. But Sullivan is running against his own party, declaring in a flier mailed to voters that he "stood up to his own party by voting against the budget to stop runaway government spending." So, is Sullivan a budget-busting maverick? Let’s quickly break down Sullivan’s claim into two parts, then add some context. Sullivan "stood up to his own party by voting against the budget": Sullivan’s campaign said the flier’s reference is to the 2009-’11 state budget, which the Senate approved, 17-15, in June 2009. Sullivan was the only Democrat to vote no. Sullivan’s budget vote was to "stop runaway government spending": Different people may define "runaway" spending differently. The $62 billion budget in question raised spending by 6.2 percent over two years and raised taxes and fees by $1.92 billion. While Sullivan cites a specific vote in his literature, he is making a broader point: that he has worked in Madison to rein in spending. For example, in citing his budget vote in a separate mailer, Sullivan says he "wants our children to inherit a future free of wasteful government spending." So, let’s take a closer look at Sullivan’s record, which in four years includes votes on two budgets and one "budget repair" bill. On the 2007-’09 state budget, approved in the Senate, 18-15, Sullivan voted yes along with the rest of his fellow Democrats. That budget raised taxes and fees by $763.2 million over two years. In February 2009, Sullivan joined the rest of the Senate Democrats to pass a "budget repair" bill. Among other things, it raised taxes on businesses by $215 million and on computer software sales by $66 million over three years. Four months later, Sullivan voted against the 2009-11 budget -- the vote previously noted and cited in his literature. During the course of the budget debate, he did not propose or support any amendments to the 2009-’11 budget that would have reduced spending. We asked Sullivan’s campaign if there were instances, other than his 2009-’11 budget vote, in which Sullivan broke ranks with Democrats in an effort to control spending. The campaign did not provide any. Observers noted that, given the Democrats’ three-vote majority in the Senate, Sullivan’s no vote did not affect the party’s ability to get its budget passed. Mordecai Lee, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee governmental affairs professor, said the two-year budget bill is the most important vote state lawmakers take. And leaders of the political party in power can exert great pressure on members to ensure that their budget passes. But Lee, a former Democratic state senator, said he also witnessed cases in which a party would not fight an individual senator’s budget vote against the party, if that senator faced a tough bid for re-election. In Madison parlance, it’s called getting a pass. So let’s review. Sullivan is telling voters in a campaign mailing that he "stood up to his own party by voting against the budget to stop runaway government spending." He was the only Senate Democrat to vote against the 2009-’11 state budget, which raised taxes and spending. But Sullivan’s vote didn’t threaten his party’s effort to pass the budget, he made no attempt to reduce spending in the plan and, on the previous budget and a budget repair bill, he voted with fellow Democrats to raise spending. We rate his statement Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Jim Sullivan	None	None	None	2010-10-23T09:00:00	2010-10-22	['None']
-pomt-06628	"The average state pension, including managers, is $23,000 a year; and just $14,000 for local government workers."	half-true	/new-jersey/statements/2011/sep/18/hetty-rosenstein/union-leader-hetty-rosenstein-claims-average-pensi/	Public employees in New Jersey have to contribute more toward their pensions, but according to union leader Hetty Rosenstein, the average worker isn’t receiving much money during retirement. Rosenstein, state director of the Communication Workers of America, recently made that claim when hers and other unions filed a lawsuit challenging a new state law that demands workers pay more toward their pension and health benefits. "New Jersey made a promise to its public workers: work hard, serve the people of New Jersey, and take a salary that is less than what you might earn in the private sector – and you can look forward to a secure and stable retirement," Rosenstein said in an Aug. 31 press release. "It is not lavish: the average state pension, including managers, is $23,000 a year; and just $14,000 for local government workers." PolitiFact New Jersey found that Rosenstein’s pension estimates need some clarification. Depending on when workers retired and how long they served, some average pensions are higher than what she claimed. Before we talk about payments, let’s briefly explain New Jersey’s pension system. The state has five major pension funds covering various public workers. Rosenstein told us her figures refer to the Public Employees’ Retirement System, or PERS, the fund covering most CWA members. Data on state workers from the New Jersey Department of the Treasury back up Rosenstein’s claim that her members mostly belong to PERS. Pension amounts vary, depending on a worker’s salary and years of service. On top of pensions, most public workers also receive subsidized health benefits in retirement. Now, let’s explain how Rosenstein arrived at her estimates. Rosenstein referred us to the average payments made by the state under PERS in the year preceding July 1, 2009. According to that data, which includes most retirement types, the state paid, on average, $22,034 to retired state workers or their beneficiaries. The average annual payment made on behalf of retired local workers was $14,028. More recent data show similar average payments. Those figures support Rosenstein’s statement, but looking at state payments is just one way of measuring average pensions. Another way is looking at the average annual benefits due to retirees when they retired. That measurement is different than what Rosenstein cited, because it reflects what workers would be paid on a full-year basis. The state payment data includes part-year payments made to new retirees. When we consider the average annual benefits at the date of retirement, Rosenstein’s numbers fall short for new retirees. As of July 1, 2010, the average annual pension among four types of retirement under PERS was $21,145 for all state retirees and $13,579 for all local retirees. Those figures exclude cost-of-living adjustments granted after retirement. Those numbers are close to Rosenstein’s estimates, but the average annual pension for "new retirees" -- people who had retired within the previous year -- was $30,199 for state workers and $20,075 for local workers. Still, average benefits can be weighted down by people with fewer years of service, said Bill Hallmark, an actuary with the American Academy of Actuaries. To judge the lavishness of a pension, one should consider benefits paid to full-career employees, he said. In fact, Treasury data shows that nearly half of PERS retirees in the two largest retirement groups left their jobs after 25 or more years of service -- and some of those folks are taking home the largest pensions. In the year preceding July 1, 2010, here’s the average annual pensions for new retirees with at least 25 years of service who opted for a special retirement: $39,551 for state workers and $33,828 for local workers. It’s also worth noting that the average annual pension in two other funds covering a small number of CWA members in state government are higher than the estimates provided by Rosenstein. Our ruling Rosenstein claimed average pensions are $23,000 for state workers and $14,000 for local government workers. Her numbers are mostly accurate when you consider the average annual payments made by the state under PERS, and also when you look at the average annual benefits for all retirees at the date of retirement. But new retirees in PERS are receiving larger pensions than what Rosenstein suggested. Also, some CWA members are members of other pension funds where average pensions are even higher. We rate the statement Half True. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Hetty Rosenstein	None	None	None	2011-09-18T05:15:00	2011-08-31	['None']
-pomt-05806	Other states have considered or have sunset advisory commissions; the federal government has the ability, too.	mostly true	/oregon/statements/2012/feb/22/bruce-starr/do-other-states-federal-government-have-legislativ/	Oregon Sen. Bruce Starr, R-Hillsboro, was shut down by Democrats on the floor when he tried to extract a dead bill from committee. The legislation? To create a legislative committee to regularly review the need for state agencies, or else the agencies would expire on a rolling basis. In a remonstrance -- otherwise known as an expression of protest or complaint -- he said that such a committee would strengthen the legislative body. "It is, without question, a process that this Legislature hasn’t contemplated in the past," he said. "Other states have. The federal government does. It would allow accountability in the process. Mr. President, and I would urge that in the future legislatures, that we consider this particular issue in a way that would be bipartisan and recognize the goal is to strengthen the Legislative Assembly." Do other states regularly allow agencies to lapse unless lawmakers approve them? Does the federal government have such a commission itself? Majority Democrats in the Senate voted down Starr’s motion without discussion, but the questions for PolitiFact Oregon remained. In a follow-up interview, Starr said he got the idea from Texas, which has had a long-running sunset commission. He also clarified that the federal government does not have one commission overseeing multiple agencies, but that Congress regularly reviews certain spending provisions. And Starr owned up, as he did on the floor, to the reality that he didn’t expect the idea to move. An online search shows that the Texas Legislature created the Sunset Advisory Commission in 1977 "to identify and eliminate waste, duplication, and inefficiency in government agencies." The 12-member commission reviews more than 150 government agencies every 12 years. Florida created one in 2006. California did in 2010. Minnesota followed last year when its 2011 Legislature created a Sunset Advisory Commission, which will periodically review state agencies and make recommendations on whether the agency should continue to exist. Most commissions and boards would expire automatically unless authorized; larger agencies would not expire automatically. "Sunset committees" were something of a trend in the 1960s and 1970s, when many state legislatures were struggling for equal footing with the other branches of government, says Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 1977, the Oregon Legislature created a sunset committee, the Associated Press reported, and hired staff to review nine state agencies slated to be killed by mid-1980 unless the 1979 Legislature voted to keep them. Legislators voted to kill the committee in 1993. Erickson said many states found the sunset schedule hard to maintain. "Given staff limitations, they found it difficult to keep up," she said. "They modified the sunset review period, and extended it, or removed it and transitioned into this (performance) review." Most states have some kind of legislative authority to audit or review executive branch agencies, according to a 2008 survey conducted by NCSL. According to the Council of State Governments' Book of the States 2011, which uses 2009 data, about half of states have a sunset-type body. Congress is a different story; attempts to create an oversight commission haven’t succeeded. Republicans appear keener on the idea than Democrats. So there is no one commission currently in Congress that regularly reviews the need for federal agencies. But many, if not most, spending provisions for farms, defense, aviation, etc., technically require reauthorization or review every few years to continue. "The federal government does terminate a fair number of programs each year," said Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, but generally this is done through the appropriations process. Most of those are "small demonstration projects," he said. The left-leaning group doesn’t like the idea of a congressional sunset commission, but that’s neither here nor there for us. We’re not going to weigh in on whether the idea has merit. Starr said on the floor that other states have sunset oversight commissions, or had considered them. He said that the federal government does. His language on the floor was broad, although the bill in question, Senate Bill 1590, has some very strict dates on abolishing agencies. What do we know? Sunset committees were very popular with state legislatures, then became not as popular, and now may be making a comeback. It’s accurate to say that other states have contemplated the idea or have one. But it’s not accurate to suggest that the federal government has an oversight commission. The ability to review specific spending every few years isn’t the same thing as a broad-based commission with the power to kill agencies. Starr acknowledged as much in an interview with PolitiFact Oregon. His language on the floor was a little foggy and he clarified his comments in an interview. We don’t find this to be a significant piece of missing information, but feel readers should know the difference. We find the statement Mostly True.	None	Bruce Starr	None	None	None	2012-02-22T16:28:02	2012-02-16	['None']
-pomt-08836	I've shut down pill mills.	mostly false	/florida/statements/2010/aug/11/pam-bondi/ag-candidate-pam-bondi-says-shes-shut-down-pill-mi/	In the race for the Republican nomination for attorney general, former Hillsborough County prosecutor Pam Bondi continues to contrast her courtroom experience with the political experience of opponents Jeff Kottkamp and Holly Benson. One of the distinctions Bondi makes is that while Kottkamp, the lieutenant governor, and Benson, the former secretary for the Agency for Health Care Administration, can talk about taking on criminals, she's actually done it. Take pill mills for examples. Doctors illegally writing prescriptions for painkillers is a big issue in Florida and has been a focus of current Attorney General Bill McCollum. The issue also has been a centerpiece of Kottkamp's campaign. Though Kottkamp oversees the Governor's Office of Drug Control, Bondi notes that she has been on the front lines as a prosecutor. "You've heard General McCollum talk about pill mills," Bondi said to a group of Republicans on April 28, 2010, in Clay County. "(I) prosecuted them. Dealt with them. Shut them down." She's made the claim, or a claim close to it, several times during the campaign. We heard something similar when Bondi came to speak June 3 to the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club in St. Petersburg. We wanted to see if Bondi, in her nearly two decades as a prosecutor, has shut down pill mills. Bondi worked as an assistant state attorney for Hillsborough County from 1992 to 2009 where she says she prosecuted thousands of cases, including murder, rape and drug cases. Her campaign office said she participated in the prosecution of multiple drug trafficking cases involving prescription medications. "At the time, they weren't called 'pill mills,' but she investigated and charged pain clinic doctors for trafficking and controlled substances," said Bondi spokeswoman Kim Kirtley. Kirtley said Bondi had trouble remembering the names of the specific cases. But the spokeswoman did point PolitiFact Florida to a 2008 case to make Bondi's point that she has shut down pill mills. The case involves Dr. John Mubang, who was arrested in Hillsborough County on July 16, 2008, and charged with trafficking in prescription drugs while he worked as an internal medicine doctor at a Tampa medical facility he owned and operated. According to law enforcement officials, Mubang prescribed controlled substances to patients without a valid medical reason. Medical records show that Mubang prescribed drugs to at least five people who subsequently died from accidental overdoses. The investigation and arrest was coordinated among the state attorney's office, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. We found no reason to doubt Bondi's involvement in the case. Her name, for instance, is included on the FDLE press release announcing the arrest. We should note, however, that Bondi did not represent the state attorney's office at pre-trial hearings. Mubang is currently free on bond awaiting trial. And, here's the rub, he's back to prescribing drugs. Bondi's response: 'Unreal" Bondi called PolitiFact Florida in the middle of filming a television commercial when she heard Mubang was back publicly soliciting clients. "He was shut down. He reopened in a different way," Bondi said. "This helps illustrate the tremendous problems we have with pill mills. The guy is on an ankle bracelet! Can you believe that? It's unreal the problem we have in our state with pill mills." In a front-page story published in June 2010, the St. Petersburg Times updated Mubang's story. "As Mubang awaits ... trial on felony charges of trafficking in illegal drugs and prescribing controlled substances without medical necessity, he is free to keep seeing patients and dispensing drugs," the Times reported. "His state Health Department license record consumers can see online shows not one single blemish -- no complaints, no discipline." The article noted that Mubang was advertising his services in news publications, including the Times' free daily tabloid, tbt*, and has been touting his willingness to see patients without an appointment. "The audacity of a doctor who's currently being prosecuted to go back and do it again is outrageous," Bondi said. The Mubang story illustrates just how hard it can be to permanently shut down pain clinics. Bruce Grant, director of the Governor's Office of Drug Control, describes pill mill doctors as nothing more than drug dealers in white lab coats. The clinics themselves are often run by someone else, who simply finds a down-on-their-luck doctor to write out the prescriptions. Catch one bad doctor, and another can step in. It's difficult, Grant says, to pin a case on the people with the money behind the clinics. And clients are unlikely to testify against a doctor prescribing drugs. In fact, most say the doctor is under-prescribing, Grant says. That means investigations center almost always on undercover work. "These are not easy things to stop," Grant said. "Our laws are set up to allow things to happen, not to stop them." Grant's office and law enforcement officials have started to work closely with the Department of Health to temporarily suspend the licenses of doctors who are believed to be prescribing drugs illegally. Eulinda Smith, a spokeswoman with the Department of Health, provided PolitiFact Florida with a list of the current doctors and health care providers whose licenses have been suspended by emergency action. Mubang is not included. Our ruling Bondi said that as a Hillsborough prosecutor she's shut down pill mills and offered the case of Dr. John Mubang as an example. But Mubang's story highlights how difficult it is to stop pill mills, and in fact, is an excellent example of the problem the next attorney general will face. Mubang was shut down briefly following his arrest, but he's back in business pending trial. To be sure, PolitiFact Florida searched Hillsborough County court records to find other specific cases Bondi may have been involved with. So did Bondi, who maintains that she has prosecuted other cases involving doctors who prescribed medicine illegally. But she couldn't find another specific case for us to analyze. We couldn't either. That leaves us to judge her claim based on the evidence she's provided. As such, we rate Bondi's claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Pam Bondi	None	None	None	2010-08-11T14:52:02	2010-04-28	['None']
-pomt-14306	Says Chris Abele "has had five years and he’s done nothing" about the Estabrook Dam.	false	/wisconsin/statements/2016/apr/01/chris-larson/chris-larson-says-chris-abele-has-done-nothing-abo/	The fate of the Estabrook Dam on the Milwaukee River has played an outsized role during the 2016 campaign for Milwaukee County Executive. That’s especially true because, despite a 6-year-old order from the state Department of Natural Resources to either repair or replace the 80-year-old structure, and a circuit court order declaring the dam a nuisance, the issue has not been resolved. County Executive Chris Abele wants to tear the dam down, but the County Board has voted to repair the structure. When Abele challenger Chris Larson was on the board, he voted to repair the dam, but now says he’s willing to consider removing it because public sentiment seems to have changed. But Larson, a state senator, also has been sharply critical of Abele’s leadership on the issue. Both are Democrats running for the nonpartisan office in the April 5, 2016 election. Abele "has had five years and he’s done nothing" about the dam, Larson said during a March 29, 2016 appearance before the Rotary Club of Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Press Club. That echoed what he wrote in a March 15, 2016 email to supporters: "The current county executive has provided no leadership in forging a consensus on what to do with the dam, he has no urgency in addressing this problem." Is Larson correct that Abele has "done nothing" on the matter? The options There are two major alternatives before county officials. Removal: The Milwaukee Riverkeepers, a coalition of environmental groups, has urged the removal of the dam. They note that the removal of the North Avenue Dam, a few miles downstream, led to improved water quality and a thriving fish and wildlife population. Advocates also argue the Estabrook Dam primarily benefits a small number of property owners who enjoy the impoundment, or lake, that the dam creates. They say that is unfair -- even illegal -- because a public facility is creating benefits for a few private property owners. Repair: The Milwaukee River Preservation Association, a group that includes riverfront property owners, and others, including County Board Chairman Theo Lipscomb, favor repairing the dam. They argue the dam creates an important water recreational area and say its removal could lead to the release of toxins built up behind the structure over the decades. Under orders by the federal government, the county hired a consultant, AECOM, to conduct an environmental assessment of the dam. The $250,000 report, released in early 2015, did not recommend an option. But it did note public sentiment at meetings held in September 2014 was about 2-to-1 in favor of removal and said that over time it would cost twice as much to repair and continue operating the dam than it would be to remove it. The report also cited the environmental benefits to allowing water to flow freely and called removal the most "environmentally protective alternative." The report was conducted during Abele’s tenure, under orders from the federal government, because it was believed, at the time, that the feds owned an island that is connected to the dam. Abele’s tenure There’s considerable disagreement between Abele and some members of the County Board -- especially Lipscomb, who represents the area -- over how to address the dam. If you had to describe Abele’s record on the dam in one word, it would be "hamstrung." On at least two occasions involving the 2015 budget, Lipscomb succeed in getting the board to insert money into the county budget -- first to repair the dam and later to build a fish passage, which is a component of one of the rebuilding options. Abele vetoed both, with one overridden and one sustained. In between the votes and vetoes, Abele’s parks department sent a memo to the board urging it to take action and noting the board itself had changed its position from remove to replace several times. Abele also sent the board a resolution to remove the dam, noting that repairs had become increasingly expensive. And Abele’s chief of staff, Raisa Koltun, followed up with several emails to Lipscomb, but the matter was never scheduled for a vote. Beyond the stalemate with the County Board, Koltun said Abele has worked to forge a consensus with local units of government that have an interest in the dam, including the city of Milwaukee, villages of Shorewood and Brown Deer and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Sewerage District. He has also worked with groups like the Sierra Club, Trout Unlimited and the Milwaukee Riverkeeper, as well as pursued private and federal funding to help pay for the dam’s removal. Our rating Larson says Abele has had five years in office and "done nothing" about the Estabrook Dam, with an earlier statement blaming him for a lack of consensus. But records and news accounts show Abele has been consistent in wanting the dam removed, has taken steps to make his wishes known and to build support for removal among nearby communities and other groups. Along the way, he has been thwarted by the County Board. Larson’s statement was that Abele has done nothing. That rates False.	None	Chris Larson	None	None	None	2016-04-01T14:01:56	2016-03-29	['None']
-pomt-00303	Says Brett "Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey exposed for ties to Big Pharma abortion pill maker… effort to derail Kavanaugh is plot to protect abortion industry profits."	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/sep/25/blog-posting/no-christine-blasey-ford-isnt-linked-abortion-pill/	Several headlines on the internet claim Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, had an ulterior motive. "Kavanaugh accuser worked for pharma company that sold ‘abortion pill’ for alternative uses," a Sept. 21 headline on Patriot News Alerts read. (Kavanaugh has denied the accusation.) Others took it further. "Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey exposed for ties to Big Pharma abortion pill maker… effort to derail Kavanaugh is plot to protect abortion industry profits," a Sept. 20 headline on Natural News read. Abortion rights advocates worry that Kavanaugh would reverse Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion. These stories suggest that Ford went after Kavanaugh because of a special interest in protecting abortion-inducing drugs. That’s a big stretch. Ford worked as director of biostatistics for Corcept Therapeutics, a California pharmaceutical start-up, from 2006 to 2012, according to an archive of her since-deleted LinkedIn page. Corcept published six papers under her name. But claiming that Corcept sells an abortion pill is like saying a road salt company sells food seasoning. The company sells Korlym to treat Cushing's syndrome, a rare, deadly condition characterized by high cortisol levels. Korlym’s main ingredient, mifepristone, blocks the effect of cortisol. That ingredient has another use. Just like it blocks cortisol, mifepristone blocks progesterone, which is crucial to the development of a pregnancy. In a medication-induced abortion, mifepristone is administered first and another drug, misoprostol, follows. That empties the uterus by causing cramping and bleeding. The latter drug, misoprostol, can and is used alone for abortions. However, the combination of both drugs is typically used for greater effectiveness and fewer side effects. Mifepristone, on the other hand, is not administered alone to induce abortions. In some other countries, it is used alone as emergency contraception, according to Clare Flannery, a professor of endocrinology and reproductive sciences at Yale University. That’s not an abortifacient, according to Flannery, because it plays a role before the sperm and egg implant in the uterus. (Pregnancy occurs after implantation.) In order to induce an abortion in the United States, a low dose of mifepristone is used only once in combination with misoprostol. Korlym patients take up to four times that dose of mifepristone daily for months or even years. Korlym was the first drug the Food and Drug Administration approved for Cushing’s syndrome. "Mifepristone was developed in 1980, but there was so much political concern for its use in aiding abortions, that its other therapeutic potentials were overlooked and companies were nervous to pursue it for other conditions," Flannery said. The company explicitly warns about the drug’s potential to terminate a pregnancy. "Korlym should never be taken by women who are pregnant or who might become pregnant," a banner on the website reads. "Taking Korlym during pregnancy will result in the loss of a pregnancy. A pregnancy test is required before starting Korlym or if treatment is interrupted for more than 14 days." Our ruling A headline said, "Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey exposed for ties to Big Pharma abortion pill maker… effort to derail Kavanaugh is plot to protect abortion industry profits." Ford worked for a pharmaceutical company that sells Korlym, a drug that treats Cushing’s syndrome. The main ingredient in that drug is used in combination with another drug to induce abortions, but the doses differ. The company does not promote the drug for abortions; in fact, it requires that doctors rule out pregnancy in order to administer the drug. We rate this statement Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-09-25T16:29:00	2018-09-21	['None']
-pomt-09376	"The average cost for health insurance in Florida went from about $600 a month for an individual to about $150 a month."	false	/florida/statements/2010/mar/29/charlie-crist/crist-touts-cover-florida-cost-saving-health-care-/	In their first U.S Senate primary debate, Gov. Charlie Crist and former House Speaker Marco Rubio bragged about accomplishments and sparred over differences. Crist highlighted his work on Cover Florida Health Care, an effort to provide low-cost coverage to the state's nearly 4 million uninsured, as a way to criticize the health care law recently put on the books in Washington. "The real problems with health care are access and affordability. And we have approached those in Florida," Crist said. "We negotiated with the private sector. We reduced the cost to those who were uninsured. We were able to provide access. And the average cost for health insurance in Florida went from about $600 a month for an individual to about $150 a month. No tax dollars involved. No government mandates. I think Washington could learn a lot from Florida." The program, which was started in 2008, allows individuals who have been without coverage for at least six months to pick from plans offered by six insurance companies. Each provider was chosen by the state through a competitive bidding process, and each offers at least two options — one with catastrophic and hospital coverage, and another plan that can provide less coverage. According to Cover Florida Health Care's Web site, individual plans can be purchased for as little as $23 a month or as much as $800 a month, depending on age, gender and level of coverage. Patients pick and choose between various options offered through the six insurers. So, for example, a woman who is between 19 and 29 years of age can pay $130 a month for a plan that includes no deductible, $10 copays for doctor visits, but no hospital inpatient coverage. Amid the contentious health care debate, Cover Florida has been a go-to talking point for Crist. Already PolitiFact Florida has checked three claims on the plan. In October 2009, Crist said "it's about $900 a month to get health coverage. We've reduced that, on average, to about $150 a month." We found his claim False because he was comparing the cost per family to the cost per individual. In his March 2010 State of the State address, Crist said Cover Florida offers "basic coverage for about $150 a month, instead of the typical $600 a month" We found this claim Barely True because he was cherry-picking the numbers. In a March 2010 radio ad, Crist said "thousands already enrolled and climbing." We ruled this Half True because the program had just over 5,000 participants in December 2009, with a monthly growth under 200. Crist's current claim is nearly identical to the one we checked from his State of the State address. Again, he's more or less correct that some Florida residents can get coverage from Cover Florida for about $150 on average. But the $600 figure for average Floridians still isn't holding water, and an explanation from Crist spokeswoman Andrea Saul isn't all that convincing. First, we wondered if Crist was referring to some sort of Florida-specific average, as his statement in the debate implies. In an e-mail, Saul said he was not. Instead, she sent us an April 2008 press release about Crist's meeting with Floridians struggling to pay health care costs. One participant, Belinda Boncaro, said she paid $670 per month for her health insurance. "The best information is of course from individuals sharing their stories," Saul wrote. In fact, it's likely that the cost of an individual plan is quite a bit lower. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average monthly cost per individual is actually about $400 a month. And a study by eHealth, which offers coverage to people on the individual market when they cannot get employer coverage, said the average monthly cost is $161. That number is lower than the employer-provided cost because the policies typically have higher deductibles or fewer benefits. Also, insurers in the individual market can deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. Crist's overall point has some truth to it: You can get basic coverage from Cover Florida for $150. But he's once again done some artful cherry-picking. There are two statewide Cover Florida plans that offer hospitalization -- Blue Cross Blue Shield with an average cost $148 for a single person, and United Healthcare, which averages $327. He chose the lowest figure and a very high number for the private market ($600, when studies show it would cost more in the range of $160-$400). So, in theory, the most expensive plan under the state's program isn't that much less expensive than the national average. Furthermore, his spokeswoman told us that the $600 figure is not a national or even state average. Rather, it's the rough estimate for the monthly cost of one person's health care. And that means it's not a reliable or significant number. Because Crist used two numbers to set up a false comparison that implies Cover Florida Health Care is much less expensive than other plans when it is not, we rate this False.	None	Charlie Crist	None	None	None	2010-03-29T13:52:30	2010-03-28	['None']
-hoer-00085	Leptospirosis Death Warning - Rat Urine on Soda Can Top	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/leptospirosis-soda-can.html	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Leptospirosis Death Warning - Rat Urine on Soda Can Top	December 3, 2012	None	['None']
-pomt-10425	McCain "voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/may/19/moveon/waterboarding-one-aspect-of-larger-measure/	MoveOn.org has targeted Sen. John McCain in a lengthy 10-point e-mail it sent to supporters, urging them to forward it to everyone they know. In its third point, MoveOn brought up the issue of torture: "His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban," the e-mail states. We'll agree with MoveOn that McCain is known as a vocal opponent of torture. He is the rare elected official who has personal experience on this issue: He was tortured when he was a prisoner of war for 5 years in Vietnam. McCain has also been persistent in arguing that waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, is torture. "It's in violation of the Geneva Conventions. It's in violation of existing law," he said at a November 2007 debate in St. Petersburg, Fla. The Bush administration, however, has said that waterboarding is legal under certain circumstances. (It will not specify publicly what those circumstances are.) The Central Intelligence Agency has publicly acknowledged waterboarding. Michael Hayden, head of the CIA, said three people have been waterboarded since Sept. 11, 2001, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, thought to be the mastermind behind the attacks. The CIA has not waterboarded anyone for the past five years, Hayden said. MoveOn's e-mail claiming that McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding refers to a measure passed in February 2008 that would have forced the CIA to follow the Army Field Manual, which specifically forbids waterboarding, as well as other actions: forcing a detainee to perform sexual acts or pose sexually, placing hoods over the heads of detainees, threatening detainees with dogs, or using temperature extremes to cause physical trauma, among other things. McCain opposed the measure on the grounds that the CIA should not have to follow the same guidelines as the Army, and it should have the flexibility to use valid techniques not mentioned in the field manual, McCain said. "None of those techniques would entail violating the Detainee Treatment Act, which said that cruel, inhumane and degrading treatments are prohibited," he told reporters in February, defending his vote. Before his vote, McCain had praised the standards set out in the field manual. "I would hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not 24 and Jack Bauer," McCain said at the debate in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Life is interrogation techniques which are humane and yet effective. And I just came back from visiting a prison in Iraq. The army general there said that the techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn't think they need to do anything else." MoveOn's statement that the bill McCain opposed "bans waterboarding" is a problematic summation. The bill would have banned waterboarding as one of its effects, but it also would have made other changes to how the CIA conducts interrogations and required the CIA to follow the Army Field Manual. It was not a straightforward up-or-down vote on waterboarding alone. It's true that McCain voted against the measure, it passed anyway and Bush vetoed it. We couldn't find any examples of McCain going out of his way to congratulate Bush. Given the many nuances of the bill, we find MoveOn's claim to be Half True.	None	MoveOn.org	None	None	None	2008-05-19T00:00:00	2008-04-05	['George_W._Bush', 'John_McCain']
-snes-00763	Vice President Mike Pence was in the White House Situation Room while the U.S. carried out a strike against Syria.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pence-white-house-syria-photo/	None	Politics	None	Arturo Garcia	None	Was Mike Pence at the White House During the U.S. Strike Against Syria?	15 April 2018	None	['United_States', 'Syria', 'Mike_Pence']
-pomt-00776	The Georgia Legislature’s last day of session ends at midnight.	false	/georgia/statements/2015/apr/10/david-ralston/session-isnt-over-until-fat-gavel-bangs/	Sine die. Pronounced with a twang under the Gold Dome as sigh-knee die, the Latin phrase refers to the final day of business in the legislative session. The witching hour arrived on sine die in Georgia last week with House members already having celebrated adjournment with cheers and tossing up files the way new graduates throw their caps. Across the hall, though, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle kept the state Senate in session. Minutes after midnight, Senators passed a tax break for Mercedes-Benz that also included as much as $350,000 in breaks for the private Baptist college where the bill’s lead negotiator serves as a trustee. "Typically, the Legislature ends by midnight of the last day so as not to exceed the constitutionally mandated 40-day session," according to Atlanta Journal-Constitution coverage of the last-minute deals. House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, was more blunt in his comments before adjourning that chamber. "For time eternal, this day has ended at midnight," Ralston said. "It is going to end at midnight today in the House even though I understand the other chamber may stay later." On the Senate floor, no one referenced such a deadline. But Ralston’s implication is clear: History dictates the session’s final day -- and eligible votes -- ends at midnight. In a "never say sine die" sort of mood, PolitiFact Georgia jumped in to see whether the vote, and the $1 million-plus in tax breaks (on top of the breaks to the private college) that came with it, will stand. The leap took us back to 1777, the first time the body known as the Georgia General Assembly began operations under direction of the state constitution. The Legislature – made up of both the 180-member House and 56-member Senate – convenes on the second Monday of January every year and "may continue in session for a period of no longer than 40 days in the aggregate each year," according to the state constitution. There are no court cases on the issue, and the state attorney general has never weighed in on how to count those days. But at the request of PolitiFact Georgia, the attorneys who advise lawmakers on legislation and legal issues offered an opinion on how to interpret that mandate. In a letter to Cagle, legislative counsel Wayne R. Allen noted the distinction is that the "days" in question are legislative days, not calendar days. A calendar day would run from midnight to midnight. Under that definition, and with the mandate for an early January start, the Legislature would work only through mid- to late February. It doesn’t of course. That’s because Georgia meets by legislative, not calendar, day. By definition, that is a day in which the body holds a floor session. The day ends only when members vote to adjourn, according to the book "Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedure." The Senate could therefore remain operating on legislative Day 40 "without regard to the hour or calendar day," Allen wrote. The National Conference of State Legislatures confirmed that interpretation. At least 11 states besides Georgia limit session length by counting legislative days. The remaining states operate by calendar days or specific dates that lawmakers can meet, said Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst with the group. "You used to see tactics, like covering the clock or holding it from moving, but the courts have ruled you can’t do that," Erickson said. "And that really applies to those states with a date-specific or calendar day count. " So that famous 1964 photo of state Rep. Denmark Groover from Macon hanging off the House railing, trying to stop the clock during a heated debate on congressional redistricting? It didn’t matter. The clock crashed to the floor in the stunt – but the session continued. Likewise, when House Speaker Tom Murphy grew angry at the governor and state Senate in the 1980s, he was able to stop all business with an adjournment vote before dinnertime, said former state legislator George Hooks, a Democrat from Americus. "It has never created a problem in the past," Hooks said. "You work as needed. You try to make it before midnight, but it doesn’t end until that gavel comes down and we say ‘sine die.’ " So the state Senate’s wee hour vote last week? Ralston implied that there is a midnight deadline for action. Most years, the chambers do end their work before midnight. Legal experts in the state and nationally agree, though, that no such clock watching is needed. Lawmakers meet for 40 legislative days, which end only when the chambers adjourn. We rule Ralston’s statement False.	None	David Ralston	None	None	None	2015-04-10T00:00:00	2015-04-02	['None']
-pomt-13874	President Barack Obama attended "an Islamic madrassa."	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2016/jul/05/pat-robertson/pat-robertson-misleadingly-says-obama-was-schooled/	Pat Robertson says President Barack Obama won’t take Islamic nations to task for harboring terrorists, and the big reason dates to the president’s early school years. "The truth is, we have a president, we have a president whose stepfather was a Muslim, whose stepfather, in Indonesia, put him in an Islamic madrassa," Robertson, a religious broadcaster based In Virginia Beach, said during the June 27 edition of his television show "The 700 Club." We checked on whether Obama really did attend an "Islamic madrassa." Let’s start with some basics. "Madrassa" means school in Arabic, but in English, the word has taken on additional connotations. Merriam Webster’s defines it as a "Muslim school, college or university that is often part of a mosque." The Congressional Research Service, in a 2008 report, defined a madrassa as an Islamic religious school. Revelations that some terrorists developed radical political beliefs at madrassas have led to accusations that the facilities "promote Islamic extremism and militancy, and are a breeding ground for terrorism," the research service said. The report also notes that others believe madrassas "have been blamed unfairly for fostering anti-U.S. sentiments." Moments after saying Obama attended an "Islamic madrassa," Robertson added: "Now, Obama has visceral dislike for the standards that we have in this country. What he thinks is, America is an oppressor, and he thinks that the nation of Islam, the Islamic countries, at least should not be in any way called out for the actions that they have." Rumors and charges about Obama’s early education have been circulating since he began running for president in 2007. Generally, they accuse Obama of attending a madrassa espousing a rigid form of Islam that’s hostile to the West. They refer to the president’s school days in Indonesia from 1967 to 1971, when he was ages 6 to 10. In his 2006 autobiography, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama wrote that in Indonesia, he first attended a Catholic school and later went to a "predominantly Muslim school." In an earlier 2004 autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama wrote that he spent two years at a Catholic school and two years at "a Muslim school." He described himself as a youngster who was not very interested in either religion. "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies," Obama wrote in 2004. "My mother wasn’t overly concerned. ‘Be respectful,’ she’d said. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I pretended to close my eyes then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended." When the rumors arose about Obama’s Indonesian education, his campaign issued a news release saying he never was a Muslim and was raised in a secular household. Obama has said he became a Christian in his 20s while working as a community organizer in Chicago. Several news organizations sent reporters to the school in question and found it was a public school that didn’t promote one particular religion. "This is a public school. We don't focus on religion," Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the school, told CNN in a 2007 interview. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment." The school provides some religious study. Priyono told the Chicago Tribune in 2007 that Muslim students learn about their religion, while Christians are taught about their faith. The article said that when Obama attended fourth grade in 1971, there was two hours of religious study a week. "At holidays, the school made a practice of teaching students about different religions," the Tribune reported. "Students from all religions celebrated Christmas with a Christmas tree and carols. They celebrated the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha by handing out a sacrificed goat to the neighborhood's needy." A spokesman for the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs told The Associated Press in 2007 that allegations Obama attended an Islamic school were baseless, saying the future president went to "a public primary school that is open to people of all faiths." We reached out to Robertson for evidence Obama attended an "Islamic madrassa." Chris Roslan, a spokesman for the Christian Broadcasting Network, told us Robertson would address our question on air. On the June 29 broadcast of "The 700 Club," Robertson said he felt a need to clarify his statement. He walked back his previous comments but only up to a point. Robertson paraphrased from Obama’s autobiographical accounts of his time in Indonesia. "He said he spent two years in a predominantly Muslim school in Indonesia where he studied Islam," Robertson said. "So I want to correct that was not a - but in Arabic, a madrassa is a school. That’s what the term in Arabic is. You say ‘school,’ and it translates as ‘madrassa,’ but it’s become now a training ground of Islamic, and apparently, we’re not sure that the president attended one of them, so I want to correct that and let everybody this is precisely what he said - ‘I went to a predominantly Muslim school in Indonesia’ where he studied Islam," Robertson said. Co-host Wendy Griffith said, "He studied Islam, but he says he’s a Christian." "Yeah, well sure," Robertson replied, raising his palms. Our ruling Robertson said Obama attended an "Islamic madrassa." The Congressional Research Service notes that madrassas are Islamic religious schools and in recent years sometimes have been defined as breeding grounds that promote Islamic extremism and terrorism. Robertson plays bait-and-switch with definitions. He says the president attended an "Islamic madrassa" while accusing him of being weak on terrorism, protective of Islamic nations, and viewing the U.S. as "an oppressor." He dials it back when pressed for details, noting that madrassa, in Arabic, simply means "school." Robertson has a slight leg to stand on in that Obama, as a child in Indonesia, went to a public school where a majority of the students were Muslim. In a 2004 memoir, Obama described it as a "Muslim school." And the future president, as part of the curriculum, spent two hours a week in classes about Islam. But Robertson doesn’t tell his viewers the larger part of the story: The school was non-sectarian; it celebrated Christian and Islamic holidays; and that the school offered separate religion classes where Muslim and Christian students could learn about their faiths. So we rate Robertson’s misleading statement Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/604c3bd5-ce40-4a99-ab56-76cc73b7713f	None	Pat Robertson	None	None	None	2016-07-05T08:52:44	2016-06-27	['Islam', 'Barack_Obama']
-tron-00221	CNN faked a video of Palestinians rejoicing over the 9/11 attacks	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/cnnpalestinianvideo/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	CNN faked a video of Palestinians rejoicing over the 9/11 attacks	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-06156	Photograph shows a "thank you" sign to Jews from the Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States.	legend	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/feast-of-friends/	None	Holidays	None	David Mikkelson	None	A Message from the Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States?	24 December 2011	None	['Jews']
-tron-00790	Hugh Downs Calls Obama a “Flake”	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/hugh-downs-obama-flake/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Hugh Downs Calls Obama a “Flake”	 Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-05402	"When housing and transportation costs are combined, Atlanta’s cost of living -- typically perceived as relatively low -- ranks as 7th worst out of 51 metros nationally."	half-true	/georgia/statements/2012/may/04/citizens-transportation-mobility/atlanta-cost-living-worse-advertised-group-says/	If you think living in the Atlanta area is cheaper than more glamorous metros like New York City or Los Angeles, Citizens for Transportation Mobility has some bad news for you. The cost of getting around town is so high that it’s not, according to a 20-page advertising supplement the advocacy group published in Georgia Trend magazine. This, they argue, is one reason metro Atlanta needs to support a 1-cent sales tax to fund an overhaul of the region’s transportation system. "When housing and transportation costs are combined, Atlanta’s cost of living -- typically perceived as relatively low -- ranks as 7th worst out of 51 metros nationally," the ad said. Seventh-worst? And here we were, feeling smug about paying less for a mortgage on a three-bedroom house than our Yankee cousins shell out to rent a studio apartment. Is this true? If voters approve this tax hike July 31, it would raise an estimated $7.2 billion to build transportation projects across the region. About $1 billion would go to projects with a more local focus. Backers argue the transportation special local option sales tax, also known as T-SPLOST, would reduce congestion and bring jobs to town. Opponents think it would cost too much and pay for the wrong projects. We fished around for data on Atlanta’s cost of living and found a new but widely used measure called the "H+T Affordability Index." Certain urban planners consider it to be a better measure of a town’s cost of living because it takes transportation into account. It’s published by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a Chicago-based nonprofit that researches and promotes "sustainable" communities, or ones designed to provide a better quality of life, help the environment and be affordable. Its index is based, in part, on mathematical models. The U.S. Census Bureau tracks yearly costs for housing but not transportation. So the index uses mathematical models created with the help of the centrist-to-liberal Brookings Institution to estimate transportation costs. The methodology was peer-reviewed and published by an academic journal in 2008. The index has been well received. Last year, the planning agency for the Washington area used the H+T approach to study that region’s affordability, while the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it is building on the model to create its own affordability index. In February, the Center for Neighborhood Technology released a ranking of annual transportation costs for the nation’s 51 metro areas with populations of 1 million and up. It found that if a typical American family moved to the New York City metro area, they’d spend nearly $10,160 per year on transportation. That’s the cheapest on the list. The most expensive is Birmingham. If a typical family moved there, their costs would rise to $14,930. Atlanta is eighth-highest, or one notch less expensive than Citizens for Transportation Mobility said in its ad. Yearly costs topped $14,300, But this particular H+T ranking addresses transportation costs only -- not housing and transportation costs combined. The group, however, does have that information. So we built our own list. Incomes, the price of housing, the number of cars a household owns and other factors vary by metro area. This means that comparing dollar values for these expenses may shed little light on the true impact of these costs. A better approach is to look at what percent of income a typical metro household spends on housing and transportation. The H+T index calculates these percentages, so we ranked them for the nation’s 51 largest metro areas. Our analysis found that metro Atlanta ranks as the 16th-most-expensive area in the country. The typical metro Atlanta household spends more than 52 percent of its income on housing and transportation combined. This is higher than the national average, which is slightly more than 51 percent. The Washington metro area was the cheapest at 43 percent. Households in the Miami area spend the most at 60 percent. Some areas of metro Atlanta are vastly more affordable than others, according to the index. In parts of the Roswell area, households spend nearly 80 percent of their incomes on housing and transportation. In parts of downtown Atlanta, that number plummets to 21 percent. In short, Citizens for Transportation Mobility missed the mark. Its ad said that metro Atlanta is the seventh-most-expensive major metro area when you consider housing and transportation costs combined. It’s not. Metro Atlanta is the 16th-most-expensive, according to H+T index data. Sixteen out of 51 isn’t great. And it reinforces the group’s overall point that transportation costs significantly add to the cost of living in metro Atlanta. But it’s not as bad as Citizens for Transportation Mobility said. It earns a Half True.	None	Citizens for Transportation Mobility	None	None	None	2012-05-04T06:00:00	2012-04-16	['None']
-goop-00075	Julia Roberts Boxes Husband To Fix Marriage Problems?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/julia-roberts-husband-danny-moder-marriage-problems-boxing/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Julia Roberts Boxes Husband To Fix Marriage Problems?	10:47 am, October 28, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-09254	Says in 2003 Texas cut "$10 billion out of the entire budget, yet we put $1.8 billion more into public education. We put $800 million more into health and human services."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2010/may/05/rick-perry/gov-rick-perry-says-2003-texas-cut-10-billion-budg/	Though state lawmakers could confront a projected revenue shortfall of more than $11 billion when they come into session in January, Gov. Rick Perry rejects "the idea that Texas is going to hell in a hand basket." Been there, done that when the state closed a similar gulf in 2003 and cut "$10 billion out of the entire budget," Perry said in an April 15 interview with the online Texas Tribune and Newsweek magazine. "Yet," Perry said, "we put $1.8 billion more into public education. We put $800 million more into health and human services." That's some triple play: $10 billion in budget cuts while pumping an additional $2.6 billion into schools and health and human services. Are those numbers on the money? Perry has talked up those cut-and-spend results before, although the spending totals he floated were lower. In a June 2003 opinion piece sent newspapers, for instance, Perry wrote that despite the "tough budgetary times, we increased spending on vital health care programs by $1.1 billion and on public education by $1.2 billion." Let's start with the budget cuts he proclaims in the Tribune interview. Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Perry's re-election campaign, told us Perry was referring to closing the $10 billion revenue shortfall that Texas faced in 2003 — "not literally cutting those funds from the budget." In January 2003, lawmakers started the legislative session in a ditch after State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn issued a grim forecast, saying state revenues for the 2004-2005 budget period would fall short of estimated expenditures by $7.4 billion. Add looming expenses — a health plan for local school district employees plus projected health and human services needs — and the state was facing a $9.9 billion state revenue shortfall, Strayhorn said. To cover the projected shortfall in the months remaining in the 2003 fiscal year, the Legislature trimmed $1.4 billion in budgeted state spending, while spending $450 million from the rainy day fund. Lawmakers also passed a 2004-2005 budget that appropriated $1.8 billion less in state funds than had been spent during 2002-03, according to the Fiscal Size-up published by the Legislative Budget Board, which advises legislators on state spending. They added $811 million from the rainy day fund. And they used $1.3 billion in federal aid, part of fiscal relief made available to states in response to economic difficulties in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. Other steps: Members voted to extend a tax on telephone customers originally levied to pay for technology in schools and hospitals, raise fees for certain state services and use creative accounting to defer state payments to the next budget period.. So, the Legislature closed the $10 billion shortfall in 2003 via various mechanisms. Their cuts in state spending totaled $3.2 billion. Next, let's look at whether the 2004-2005 budget gave additional aid to public schools ($1.8 billion) and health and human services ($800 million), as Perry says. Frazier noted that the state ended up spending $34.8 billion on public education in 2004-05, up $1.9 billion from 2002-03, according to the Fiscal Size-up. Unsaid: the 2004-05 budget signed into law by Perry in 2003 only provided for an $893 million increase in public education spending. The additional $1 billion he touts wasn't available when the Legislature was balancing that budget — it came from supplemental appropriations and additional federal aid doled out by the 2005 Legislature. Another wrinkle: State funds don't account for any of the $893 million increase that Perry mentions. In fact, the 2004-05 budget cut state expenditures on public schools by $1 billion. According to the Fiscal Size-up, the budget made up for that cut (and more) thanks to a $1.3 billion infusion of federal education aid. Next, let's look at health and human services. Frazier pointed out that overall spending on health and human services increased by $1.3 billion in the 2004-2005 budget, according to the Fiscal Size-up, which is more than what Perry said in his recent interview. Some 77 percent of that increase was federal funds (for items like Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program). According to the Fiscal Size-up, lawmakers appropriated $6.8 million less in state funds for health and human services than was spent in the 2002-2003 budget. Whew. Where does this leave Perry's recent statement? As Perry's campaign notes, Perry did not sign off on $10 billion in budget cuts in 2003, contrary to what he said in April. All in all, the Legislature trimmed $3.2 billion in total spending for the 2004-2005 budget cycle, counting $1.4 billion cut from the 2003 budget. What about Perry's claims about boosting the budget for education and health and human services together by $2.6 billion? We find that total funding in those categories in the 2004-05 budget increased by $893 million and $1.3 billion, respectively — not quite what Perry claims. Federal funds fueled the increases, enabling lawmakers to appropriate $1 billion less in state money to public education and $6.8 million less to health and human services. We rate Perry's statement as Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Rick Perry	None	None	None	2010-05-05T06:23:26	2010-04-15	['Texas']
-snes-05873	George Soros donated $33 million to fund rioting Ferguson protest groups.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/riot-act/	None	Business	None	David Mikkelson	None	George Soros Funded Ferguson Protests and Black Lives Matter?	17 January 2015	None	['George_Soros']
-pomt-15268	"The majority of the Hispanic population and the growth (of the population) is U.S.-born."	true	/punditfact/statements/2015/jul/29/jose-diaz-balart/majority-hispanic-population-us-born-says-jose-dia/	Donald Trump’s immigration views may be divisive among candidates vying for the GOP presidential nomination, but the bombastic billionaire remains at the top of the polls. Former presidential candidate and conservative pundit Pat Buchanan credits Trump’s rise in part to his willingness to address one of the country’s hottest issues. Appearing July 26 on NBC’s Meet the Press, Buchanan said people are feeling the "conquest of the West by massive third-world immigrations coming from refugees and border jumpers and all the rest of them." José Díaz-Balart, host of MSNBC's The Rundown with José Díaz-Balart and a Telemundo anchor, challenged Buchanan’s comments during the show’s panel discussion with some food for thought. "The invasion is from within," Díaz-Balart said. "The majority of the Hispanic population and the growth is U.S.-born." He added, "Sprinkle that on your oatmeal, or probably on your huevos rancheros." We wanted to check his points: Are most Hispanics in the United States born here? And do U.S. births account for the majority of the growth in the Hispanic population? The answer to both questions is yes. U.S. Census Bureau spokesman Robert Bernstein directed us to the latest information available from the American FactFinder. There were about 54 million Hispanics in the United States in 2013. Of this number, about 32.9 million were born in one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia, which works out to 61 percent of the overall Hispanic population. Another 2.1 million are considered native to the United States, meaning they were born in Puerto Rico, abroad to American citizens or on a U.S. military base. Adding in this group brings the share of U.S.-born Hispanics to 65 percent. Either way you read it, Diaz-Balart’s point stands. The trend holds when measuring the Hispanic population’s growth from July 2013 to July 2014. Over the course of the year, the Hispanic population increased by about 1.2 million. The natural increase (which refers to the number of domestic births minus the number of deaths) accounts for about 73 percent of this 1.2 million population jump. An additional note: These numbers include both documented and undocumented Hispanics. According to Bernstein, the U.S. Census Bureau does not ask about an individual’s legal status, so these specific divisions cannot be determined. Our ruling Díaz-Balart said, "The majority of the Hispanic population and the growth is U.S.-born." Census Bureau data support him on both counts. We rate his claim True.	None	Jose Diaz-Balart	None	None	None	2015-07-29T13:27:54	2015-07-26	['None']
-hoer-00507	'Sarah Palin Wants To Send 11 Million Illegal Immigrants On One-Way Cruise to Mexico City'	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/sarah-palin-immigrants-boat-mexico-hoax.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Satire Report - 'Sarah Palin Wants To Send 11 Million Illegal Immigrants On One-Way Cruise to Mexico City'	November 24, 2014	None	['None']
-snes-01228	A video of President Donald Trump apparently struggling to get the words right while singing along with the national anthem proves that he doesn't know what they are.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-words-national-anthem/	None	Politicians	None	David Emery	None	Does Donald Trump Not Know the Words to the National Anthem?	10 January 2018	None	['None']
-afck-00190	The Free State province achieved 93.2% pass rate.	mostly-correct	https://africacheck.org/reports/zumas-anc-birthday-speech-6-claims-fact-checked/	None	None	None	None	None	Zuma’s ANC birthday speech: 6 claims fact-checked	2017-01-12 09:06	None	['None']
-wast-00102	"This administration is separating kids from their parents and unable to account for 1,500 lost children! Shame."	false	 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/30/fact-checking-immigration-spin-on-separating-families-and-1500-lost-children/	None	None	Tim Kaine	Salvador Rizzo	None	Fact-checking immigration spin on separating families and 1,500 \xe2\x80\x98lost' children	May 30	None	['None']
-pomt-15154	"We’re the most highly taxed nation in the world."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/28/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-us-most-highly-taxed-nation-worl/	During a recent interview on Fox & Friends, Donald Trump offered a digression on tax policy -- at times an unorthodox one, at least for a Republican. For instance, Trump said that hedge fund managers -- some of them the billionaire counted as "friends" -- are "not paying enough tax." He also rejected a flat tax, an idea supported by some Republicans, countering that progressivity in the tax code is important. "As you make a certain amount of money, I think you should have to graduate upward" in tax rates, Trump said. Then he shifted gears again, articulating a more traditional Republican argument in favor of lowering taxes. "Look, we’re the most highly taxed nation in the world — that’s why taxes have to go down, business has to come back, jobs have to be back," he said. A reader asked us if the United States is the "mostly highly taxed nation in the world," so we decided to check it out. Trump’s press office did not respond to an inquiry. We should note that a more specific claim would have been largely accurate. We have given a Mostly True rating to the claim that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. (The statutory corporate tax rate ranks as the world's highest, but widespread deductions and exclusions tend to lower the effective rate below the comparative level for other countries.) But Trump's comment doesn't cite the corporate tax rate, and he seemed to be discussing overall tax rates when he said the United States is "the most highly taxed nation in the world." When we asked tax experts what they thought was the best yardstick for comparing different countries, they pointed to two possible criteria. One was tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product. The other was tax revenue per capita. Both measures are calculated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 34 advanced industrialized nations. We found that for both measurements, many of the United States’ industrialized peers had higher levels of taxation in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available. Taxes accounted for about 25 percent of the United States’ gross domestic product -- but if that sounds like a lot, it was only enough to rank the United States 27th out of 30 countries studied. The five with the highest percentages were Denmark, France, Belgium, Finland and Sweden, each of them with taxation accounting for more than 42 percent of gross domestic product. Only South Korea, Chile and Mexico had lower levels of taxation per GDP than the United States. When looking at tax revenue per capita, the United States ranks somewhat higher, but still far from the top. Taxes per capita in the United States totaled $13,482, according to the OECD data. That ranked 16th out of 29 countries for which data was available for 2013. The five with the highest per-capita amounts were Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland, with amounts ranging from $23,000 to $48,000. Eleven countries had per-capita amounts less than $10,000, including Hungary, Chile and Turkey, the bottom three on the list. While it probably makes the most sense to compare the United States to other advanced, industrialized nations, there is one additional data source that includes the full roster of countries -- the World Bank. In the World Bank’s comparison of 115 countries for 2012, the U.S. ranked 12th from the bottom in taxation as a percentage of GDP. Among the countries with lower percentages were two OECD members (Japan and Spain), some wealthy oil-producing nations (Oman and Kuwait) and handful of very poor countries (including Afghanistan and the Central African Republic). Bottom line: Trump is wrong by all the data sets we looked at. Our ruling Trump said the United States is "the most highly taxed nation in the world." Depending on the measurement you use, the United States is either in the middle of the pack or on the lighter end of taxation when compared to other advanced industrialized nations. We rate his claim False.	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2015-08-28T15:48:42	2015-08-24	['None']
-vogo-00601	Statement: “It will literally shut our doors down for business,” Ernie Hahn, the Sports Arena’s general manager, told the City Council before it passed the living wage ordinance April 12, 2005.	determination: false	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-the-living-wage-a-business-killer/	Analysis: Hahn’s prediction was wrong. Drive by the Sports Arena on a Saturday. It definitely hasn’t closed.	None	None	None	None	Fact Check: The Living Wage: A Business Killer?	April 22, 2010	None	['None']
-goop-01308	Katie Holmes “Reigniting Friendship” With James Van Der Beek To Make Jamie Foxx “Jealous”?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/katie-holmes-james-van-der-beek-friendship-jamie-foxx-jealous-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Katie Holmes “Reigniting Friendship” With James Van Der Beek To Make Jamie Foxx “Jealous”?	12:02 pm, March 27, 2018	None	['None']
-chct-00173	FACT CHECK: Will Trump’s Pick For CIA Chief Be Arrested If She Steps Foot In Europe?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2018/03/21/fact-check-haspel-arrest-warrent-europe-cia-chief/	None	None	None	Kush Desai | Fact Check Reporter	None	None	2:55 PM 03/21/2018	None	['None']
-snes-01366	Does Setting Your Twitter Location to Germany Block Nazi Content?	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/twitter-germany-nazis/	None	Technology	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Does Switching Your Twitter Location to Germany Block Nazi Content?	6 December 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-02922	Passage of a referendum on an aquarium for Clearwater means "NO future funding for our neighborhoods."	false	/florida/statements/2013/nov/02/friends-clearwater-pac/aquarium-referendum-means-no-more-money-neighborho/	On Tuesday, Clearwater voters will decide whether the city charter should be amended to allow officials to begin negotiations with the nonprofit Clearwater Marine Aquarium for a lease of city-owned property downtown where a $160.5 million aquarium could eventually be built. Supporters and opponents have filled mail boxes with rival fliers touting the benefits or risks of the idea. One recent flier paid for by the Friends of Clearwater political action committee, which opposes the aquarium idea, lists eight reasons to vote no. One particular reason in the list caught our eye: "NO future funding for our neighborhoods." PolitiFact Florida decided to fact-check the claim that if the referendum passes, there will be no future funding for Clearwater neighborhoods. Officials we spoke with said the statement is false, and even opponents admit it is based on speculation. "That’s just a bizarre statement," said Howard Warshauer, a longtime activist and vice president of the Clearwater Neighborhoods Coalition. Warshauer opposes the aquarium plan, but said the mailer’s cut-and-dried claim is inaccurate. "Obviously, the city will go on funding neighborhoods," he said. Clearwater Marine Aquarium officials have said they intend to ask for city funds from two sources if the plan to build the aquarium advances: the city parking fund and a portion of taxes raised in the downtown Community Redevelopment Area. The city parking fund isn’t typically used for neighborhood projects, which are things such as parks, recreation facilities, traffic calming and community policing. The city uses the parking fund for parking projects and Clearwater Beach lifeguards. The city is planning to use parking fund money to build a downtown parking garage — a project which presumably would benefit the downtown neighborhood. What about the aquarium’s potential use of property taxes raised in the downtown CRA? Would that mean "No future funding for our neighborhoods"? The money the aquarium wants would come from the annual tax increment raised in the district. The tax increment is new tax revenue collected if property values rise after the date the district is established. This year, that was $1.7 million in the downtown Clearwater district. CMA plans to ask the city for half of that increment revenue for 20 years, but would need the agreement of city and county officials. By state law, that money can’t be spent outside the boundaries of the district, which are roughly Drew Street on the north, the waterfront to the west, Chestnut Street to the south and Highland Avenue to the east. So Countryside, Island Estates, Sand Key, Morningside Estates or any other neighborhood outside the district wouldn’t be eligible for that money anyway. But Warshauer says a broader argument about the proposed aquarium’s financial impact on neighborhoods has some validity. "There is an unknown factor here. How much money is going to be spent on traffic impact if this aquarium is built and if it is successful?" Warshauer said. CMA officials contend that a successful aquarium will increase property values downtown, therefore pouring more tax increment revenue into city coffers and helping to pay for any infrastructure improvements downtown necessitated by a successful tourist attraction. Tina Wilson, the city’s budget director, said the city has $1.8 million budgeted for street resurfacing citywide. If streets needed to be improved because so many people were drawn to the aquarium, the costs could be paid for out of the resurfacing fund, any available tax increment revenue, or a variety of other funds, including reserves, the Penny for Pinellas sales tax or the general fund. But the city hasn’t discussed options yet, Wilson said. No one, including referendum opponents, has a crystal ball to predict what the city will spend in future years for neighborhood projects or for downtown improvements. But since the aquarium plan is to seek only half of the increment revenue, and only for 20 years, the remaining half of that revenue would theoretically remain available for projects benefitting the downtown neighborhood. And use of those dollars downtown wouldn’t hurt other neighborhoods in the city, since those dollars can’t legally be spent elsewhere. There is no proof that approval of Tuesday’s referendum — which would only authorize the city to negotiate a lease and doesn’t ensure construction of the aquarium — will mean no future funding for Clearwater neighborhoods. The opponents’ statement is based on speculation, with no foundation in fact. We rate it False.	None	Friends of Clearwater PAC	None	None	None	2013-11-02T18:00:00	2013-10-21	['None']
-snes-02957	A law in Japan makes it illegal for citizens of that country to be fat.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-metabo-law/	None	Medical	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Is It Illegal to Be Fat in Japan?	2 January 2015	None	['Japan']
-pomt-13724	Says he and Bernie Sanders have "very similar" views on trade	mostly true	/north-carolina/statements/2016/jul/27/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-he-and-bernie-sanders-are-very-s/	The same day the Democratic National Convention opened and Bernie Sanders supporters booed Hillary Clinton in large numbers, Donald Trump sought in North Carolina to win over some of those unhappy Democrats. When it comes to trade policies, Trump is feeling the Bern. "We have one issue that’s very similar, and that’s trade," Trump told The News & Observer before a campaign rally in Winston-Salem on Monday. "He and I are similar in trade." Trump has been trying this tactic out since it became clear he and Clinton would be squaring off in the general election. Last month, Trump even quoted Sanders in attacking Clinton. And in Winston-Salem, a city which has seen many of its tobacco and textile factory jobs wither away over the past few decades, Trump further embraced Sanders’ views. Both men have said some of the country’s major trade deals hurt blue collar workers. But we wanted to look into whether their opinions on what’s good, what’s bad and what should be done really are "very similar," as Trump said. NAFTA One of the most well-known trade deals, the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed in the U.S. with bipartisan support in 1993 and went into effect in 1994. It repealed tariffs, which are taxes on imports, for goods shipped between Mexico, Canada and the United States. Democratic President Bill Clinton signed it after his Republican predecessor, George H.W. Bush, started the negotiations. Both parties supported it in Congress. Now, however, it’s facing bipartisan opposition. Both Trump and Sanders have used the word "disaster" to describe NAFTA, saying it has led to the loss of hundreds of thousands American jobs. They have different philosophies for dealing with it, however. Trump has suggested directly violating the terms of NAFTA by setting a 35 percent tariff on goods imported into the United States from Mexico. "We will either renegotiate it or we will break it," Trump said in September. Sanders has said he would renegotiate NAFTA but wouldn’t violate it. "I believe in trade," Sanders said in April. "But I believe in fair trade, not unfettered free trade." TPP Both Trump and Sanders have criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal between 12 countries on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Like NAFTA, it would cut tariffs in an effort to spur trade. It was signed earlier this year but has not yet gone into effect. Opposition to the TPP is a key position of the AFL-CIO. It’s not often that Republican presidential nominees find themselves agreeing with organized labor, but in this case Trump does, as does Sanders. Their solutions are the same: The United States should withdraw. They both cite some of the same worries, like the loss of American jobs, concerns about ultra-low wages overseas and the increasingly powerful role of the United Nations. "U.S. sovereignty will be undermined by giving corporations the right to challenge our laws before international tribunals," Sanders wrote in a policy paper on the TPP. "It would give up all of our economic leverage to an international commission that would put the interests of foreign countries above our own," Trump said in a speech last month. China Both Trump and Sanders accuse China of manipulating the value of its currency. The U.S. Treasury hasn’t officially done so, although in April it put China on watch along with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Germany. Both also criticize China’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization and the normalization of U.S.-China trade relations in 2000. They differ in how to use domestic policy to bolster the U.S. position, however. Trump said the U.S. should lower its corporate income tax rate to better compete with China and keep jobs here. Sanders disagrees and would collect more corporate tax revenue in order to create jobs via new infrastructure projects. They also differ in the longevity of their anti-China views. Trump has, for years, outsourced labor to China for various Trump brand products – Trump ties, cufflinks and some shirts are made in China, PolitiFact found recently. Trump has explained his avoidance of American manufacturing companies by saying "they don’t even make this stuff here." However, our friends at FactCheck.org found that to be false. Sanders has opposed the normalization of trade relations with China since the start. Then-Rep. Sanders said on the House floor in 2000 that "it is not a good deal for American workers. American workers should not be asked to compete against desperate people in China who are forced to work at starvation wages, who cannot form free trade unions, who do not even have the legal right to stand up and criticize their government." Our ruling Donald Trump, in an effort to win over Bernie Sanders supporters, said their policies on trade are "very similar." There are some notable differences. Sanders has always opposed normal trade with China. Trump says he’s opposed, although he outsources some of his own manufacturing to China. The two also have different ideas for dealing with NAFTA and on the role corporate tax policy plays in trade. Yet in the grand scheme of things on the campaign trail, both men have consistently argued for protectionist trade policies as opposed to free trade. Some details differ, but they agree on the broad philosophy of opposition to free trade deals. We rate this claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/0275f90a-4b93-4dd2-8531-d45ab108faa0	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-07-27T17:53:40	2016-07-25	['Bernie_Sanders']
-hoer-00689	Carrie Zucker Missing Person Alert (Real Case)	true messages	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/carrie-zucker-missing.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Carrie Zucker Missing Person Alert (Real Case)	31st May 2011	None	['None']
-pose-00181	"Barack Obama and Joe Biden will seek deep, verifiable reductions in all U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons — whether deployed or non-deployed, whether strategic or non-strategic — and work with other nuclear powers to reduce global stockpiles dramatically by the end of an Obama presidency."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/195/seek-verifiable-reductions-in-nuclear-stockpiles/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Seek verifiable reductions in nuclear stockpiles	2010-01-07T13:26:51	None	['United_States', 'Russia', 'Barack_Obama', 'Joe_Biden']
-pomt-11813	Donna Brazile knows Seth Rich was murdered by the Clintons	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/nov/15/us-political/fake-headline-says-donna-brazile-knows-seth-rich-w/	The publication of former interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile’s book has revived conspiracy theories about the 2016 shooting death of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. A headline on the US Political website states, "Donna Brazile knows Seth Rich was murdered by the Clintons." Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat fake news. Our efforts to reach the writer were unsuccessful. "Why would Brazile have to fear for her life after the Rich murder — if, as we’ve been told, it was simply a robbery gone bad?" states the article. "Does she suspect someone of the murder? Does she suspect the Clintons?" We found nothing in Brazile’s recent book that pins the Rich murder on the Clintons. Near dawn on July 10, 2016, 27-year-old Rich was found with two fatal gunshot wounds near his home in Washington, D.C. Rich was had been working on voter access projects for the DNC. Weeks later, Rich’s death became intertwined with WikiLeaks after it released hacked emails from the DNC. WikiLeaks head Julian Assange suggested in a Dutch television interview that Rich might have been murdered. In "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House," Brazile wrote about the grief and fears she felt in the aftermath of Rich’s murder, even closing the blinds in her office so a sniper couldn’t see her. Brazile wrote that she felt some responsibility for Rich’s death. "I didn’t bring him into the DNC, but I helped keep him there working on voting rights," she wrote. She speculated about the motivation behind his shooting but wrote that police believed he was a victim of a robbery. "With all I knew now about the Russians’ hacking, I could not help but wonder if they had played some part in his unsolved murder," she wrote, though stating that the FBI told her they didn’t see Russian fingerprints on the case. "Besides that, racial tensions were high that summer and I worried that he was murdered for being white on the wrong side of town." She also wondered "had he been killed by someone who had it out for the Democrats? Likely not, but we still didn’t know." Brazile dismissed the WikiLeaks conspiracy theory: "Some Trump supporters were promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Seth had been murdered by the DNC because he was the one who had leaked our emails to WikiLeaks." We attempted to contact Brazile through her website but did not get a reply. The headline on the US Political website states "Donna Brazile knows Seth Rich was murdered by the Clintons." The article refers to Brazile’s book in which she speculates on the motivations behind the DNC staffer’s murder, but she doesn’t point the finger at the Clintons. We rate this headline Pants on Fire. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	US Political	None	None	None	2017-11-15T16:04:18	2017-11-08	['None']
-pomt-08549	A bill to save teacher jobs is completely paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes.	pants on fire!	/ohio/statements/2010/oct/01/zack-space/space-forgets-mention-food-stamp-cuts-letter-anti-/	Short-term memory loss was rampant among many Democrats in Congress in August, when they passed a $26 billion bill to provide money to help states avert teacher layoffs and health program cuts. They said the measure was paid for entirely by closing corporate tax loopholes, and they studiously avoided mentioning an even bigger source of money for the bill: a nearly $12 billion cut in future food stamp spending. Taking money from the poor to pay for teachers was not a discussion they relished. Memories have not improved over time, as a Sept. 2 letter from U.S. Rep Zack Space shows. Space, from Ohio’s 18th Congressional District, wrote to Jack Frech, who heads the Job and Family Services agency in Athens County, to defend the legislation after Frech called and left message for the east-central Ohio congressman. Space responded by saying the bill is "providing badly needed funding for teacher jobs." Frech had worried about the growing ranks of poor and low-income Ohioans in this sluggish economy. But the activist in him got especially fired up when he learned that Congress was going to help states and local communities meet their needs for teachers and health care providers who serve the poor -- while cutting back on an earlier expansion of food stamp spending. So he contacted Space, and Space responded with his letter on Sept. 2. Space wrote that threatened teacher cuts, and their effect on students, would have been "intolerable." Three hundred teachers in his district alone had been in jeopardy, Space wrote. "This bill will save teacher jobs immediately, and it is completely paid for -- by closing an egregious tax loophole that encourages American companies to ship jobs overseas," Space’s letter said. "It goes without saying that we could badly use that money here at home to ensure all our children get a decent education. I refuse to support policies that sell out our children, our future, to overseas corporate interests." Space told Frech in the letter that " I recognize that you had reservations about this provision; however, I wasn’t elected to simply stand on the sidelines while Ohio teachers are pushed out of the classroom." This sounds noble enough. For purposes of discussion, PolitiFact Ohio will put aside any dissent from Republicans over whether the move to save local teacher jobs was the right thing for Congress to do at this time, because that’s not Frech’s point. Nor is his point whether a teacher-layoff crisis really loomed, a debate that continues with a recent Columbus Dispatch survey of the state’s largest school districts that found many had no layoff plans and put the money aside in case they need it later. Frech’s complaint is simpler: Did Congress really have to take the money from a program that helps the poor? Couldn’t it have found the money somewhere else? Because we were in touch with Frech when reporting on this issue this summer, Frech shared the letter with us, as he has with others. Frech is a leading anti-poverty voice in southeastern Ohio. So what of Space’s claim in the correspondence that the teacher bill was completely paid for by closing the corporate loophole? The Plain Dealer has been through that one before, and noted its fallacy on Cleveland.com. PolitiFact’s national operation has been through it, too, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the same claim in a press release. As PolitiFact said on Aug. 13, several days after Pelosi’s statement: "According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis, the corporate tax changes in the bill that Pelosi is referring to will amount to $9.8 billion between 2010 and 2020. These are a mix of tax policies that only a CPA could understand, from ‘rules to prevent splitting foreign tax credits from the income to which they relate’ (worth almost $4.3 billion in newly captured revenue) to ‘denial of foreign tax credit with respect to foreign income not subject to United States taxation by reason of covered asset acquisitions’ (worth more than $3.6 billion), to ‘limitation on the amount of foreign taxes deemed paid with respect to section 956 inclusions’ (worth $704 million). "But that $9.8 billion in corporate tax cuts won't cover the full $26 billion cost of the bill. The bulk of the money comes from something Pelosi's office chose not to mention in the press release -- almost $12 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (more commonly known as the food stamp program) beginning in 2014. Another $1.1 billion would come from cuts to advanced refundability of the earned income tax credit starting in 2011. The earned income credit is a tax credit that benefits the working poor. Several billion dollars more would come from a variety of spending cuts known as rescissions." Pelosi and other Democrats, including Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, have said separately that they hope to restore the food stamp funding before the cuts kick in in 2014. And Pelosi’s office in July at least offered a fact-sheet on the teacher bill’s funding that included the food stamp cuts. Space’s letter to Frech was silent on that, however. PolitiFact gave Pelosi’s statement a Barely True rating, noting that at least her office had provided details of the food stamp cuts in other settings. But we have seen no instances of Space acknowledging the food stamp cuts. Space, like most other Ohio Democrats, was silent on the cuts when a group of the Ohio members held their own news conference after the Aug. 10 vote, hailing its passage. Had Rep. Marcia Fudge of Warrensville Heights not broken that press conference silence by mentioning the cuts, the lawmakers would have moved on without breaking stride. That’s not saying they are happy to pare back federal spending on the poor. When the subject is brought up by reporters, most say they voted for the bill reluctantly, choosing among the limited options that congressional leaders and the White House gave them -- options they say they were forced to swallow in order to make the bill budget-neutral. That was the only way to win key Republican votes in the Senate. Stuart Chapman, chief of staff to Space, told us in an e-mail that "no one has been a more aggressive advocate for the dispossessed in in Southeastern Ohio than Congressman Space." Space has fought for other anti-poverty programs, he said, a point reiterated by a phone call we received soon after speaking with Chapman, from Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second-Harvest Foodbanks. Hamler-Fugitt said that Space works hard to help the poor. But Hamler-Fugitt agrees with Frech’s point as well -- that "we’re all outraged" at the way the food-stamp cut was passed. That gets us back to Space’s letter. Frech, well-recognized in southeast Ohio for his work, had contacted Space to complain about one facet of one bill. Space not only neglected to address it; he wrote something that was untrue by saying the teacher-aid bill was paid for entirely by closing a tax loophole. And Space certainly knew about the food-stamp cut, if for no other reason than he was present at the news conference where Fudge raised the issue. That doesn’t make him the grinch who stole food stamps. It merely makes him one more member of Congress who has tried not to talk about it. Chapman, the chief of staff, told us that a letter to a constituent is not intended "to be a manual of every facet of legislation." But Frech didn’t want a manual. By ignoring Frech’s concern -- and passing right over the bill’s single biggest funding source -- Space’s letter took on the air of gamesmanship. Hide and seek, anyone? When we run a statement through the Truth-O-Meter that not only is false but also suggests that someone is playing games, we start looking for the matches. We rate Space’s statement to an Ohio anti-poverty advocate Pants on Fire. Comment on this item.	None	Zack Space	None	None	None	2010-10-01T06:00:00	2010-09-02	['None']
-snes-02704	Donald Trump is considering resignation an "option."	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-considering-resignation/	None	Uncategorized	None	Bethania Palma	None	Is President Donald Trump Considering Resignation?	31 March 2017	None	['None']
-snes-00359	Are Cars Melting in Arizona Due to a Heat Wave?	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cars-melting-in-arizona-heat-wave/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Are Cars Melting in Arizona Due to a Heat Wave?	10 July 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-13961	"In America, radical speech is not a crime."	mostly true	/florida/statements/2016/jun/15/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-after-orlando-shooting-radical-sp/	Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio said in the wake of the Orlando shooting massacre that supporters of terrorism can freely say what they want. "In America, radical speech is not a crime," Rubio told radio show host Hugh Hewitt. "And that’s one of the challenges we face. You can stand all day long and call for all kinds of jihad. It’s only when you actually moved toward plotting and acting on it that you become actionable and arrestable. These guys know that, and they use it against us." The FBI had investigated the shooter Omar Mateen in recent years after he claimed to co-workers that his family had connections to the al-Qaida terror network. But probes led to nothing. Is Rubio correct that radical speech in itself is not a crime? We contacted Rubio’s spokespersons and did not get a reply. We were curious what the laws said about radical speech and if he was speaking accurately. Radical speech Multiple legal experts told us that Rubio’s point is generally correct because speech is protected by the First Amendment, which states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Courts have decided that certain speech is not protected by the First Amendment such as "fighting words" (speech that would likely draw someone into a fight.) But radical speech is not included in that list. "The First Amendment protects radical speech," said University of Chicago Law professor Geoffrey Stone who has written about the dangers of compromising First Amendment freedoms. Experts said that Rubio omitted one key exception which stems from the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case Brandenburg vs. Ohio involving a member of the Ku Klux Klan, The U.S. Supreme Court found that all speech is protected "except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." So that means Americans have a right to advocate lawlessness -- such as overthrowing the federal government -- as long as they avoid inciting imminent illegal action as narrowly defined by Brandenburg. "For example, if a mob has seized a person they think murdered a child and X starts shouting ‘hang him, hang him,’ that would satisfy Brandenburg," Stone said. "Radical speech doesn't come close." So verbally supporting ISIS alone isn’t a crime. "The Supreme Court’s thinking is that people have a First Amendment right to associate with even the worst and most degraded organizations," said Loyola law professor Alexander Tsesis. "The government is prohibited from simply assuming ideological affinity will ‘lead to imminent violence,’ or that it is truly threatening for that matter. Those assumptions must be backed by evidence beyond a reasonable doubt." However, there is a separate statute that says it is illegal to provide material support to a terrorist organization. That could include "instructing the foreign terror organization about how to gain standing in a community or religious center. That’s an expressive act, but one the government has a compelling interest to prevent from achieving its supportive purpose," Tsesis said. While many people may conclude certain radical speech is offensive, it is generally protected. And there are good reasons for that, said Lee Rowland, a senior attorney at the ACLU. Whether something is "radical speech" or "hate speech" is in the ears of the listener. For example, some politicians and members of law enforcement have suggested that the Black Lives Matter movement engages in hate speech against police officers. Martin O’Malley, a former Democratic presidential candidate, said that Donald Trump is promoting hate speech with his comments about immigrants. "The fact that our Constitution robustly protects speech, including speech we find abhorrent, is a feature, not a bug," Rowland said. However, in the age of terrorism and the internet, some have raised the question about whether Brandenburg can survive or whether we should find ways to limit free speech. Our ruling Rubio said, "In America, radical speech is not a crime." Radical speech is protected by the First Amendment and is not a crime. However, there are limited exceptions for when speech incites imminent crime or when communications specifically aid acts of terror. We rate this claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/af1d6810-61b4-42c1-ad69-8ef452cf3af7	None	Marco Rubio	None	None	None	2016-06-15T11:00:00	2016-06-13	['United_States']
-pomt-11117	Says that "when federal bureaucrats wanted to prohibit the use of wooden cheese boards, which help make tens of millions of pounds of cheese a year" she "stepped in, helped eliminate the regulations."	mostly true	/wisconsin/statements/2018/jun/07/tammy-baldwin/us-sen-tammy-baldwins-very-cheesy-ad-cuts-mustard/	Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin is in a bruising political battle that includes third-party groups pouring millions of dollars into the race. Baldwin will face the winner of the Republican matchup between Delafield businessman Kevin Nicholson and state Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa. Baldwin started running TV ads in February, highlighting her work on "Buy America" legislation and prescription drug costs. In a follow-up ad, launched April 16, 2018, Baldwin turned to a quintessential Wisconsin issue … Yes, wooden cheese boards. The ad starts with the warning: "This is gonna be a cheesy ad … a very cheesy ad." Then it turns to Baldwin who says: "When federal bureaucrats wanted to prohibit the use of wooden cheese boards, which help make tens of millions of pounds of cheese a year, something had to be done." The ad then shifts to Thorp, Wis., cheesemaker Marieke Penterman, known for the Penterman farm’s "Marieke Gouda" cheese, who says: "Tammy Baldwin stepped in, helped eliminate regulations and stood up for businesses like ours." Is the claim in the Baldwin cheese ad gouda? Or is it, as critics claim, a little overripe? Baldwin’s evidence At the center of the ad is a 2014 cheese board brouhaha. It started after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspected several New York state cheesemakers and cited them for using wooden surfaces to age cheeses, stating the practice was unsanitary. That inspection and report caused alarm in the artisan cheesemaking community. On her campaign website, under the headline "Standing Up for a WI Way of Life," Baldwin describes it this way: In 2014, the FDA wanted to prohibit the use of wooden boards used for aging cheese, quintessential to some of our state’s best products. In fact, the Wisconsin Cheesemakers Association estimated in 2014 that 33 million pounds of cheese were aging on wooden boards in Wisconsin. Tammy took immediate action. She pressured the FDA and pointed out the "serious ramifications for Wisconsin’s world-renown cheesemakers who have safely aged their cheeses on wooden boards for generations." The FDA soon backed down on restricting use of wooden boards for aging. Critics say Baldwin’s bureaucracy-busting claim is overblown. The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a news release that said, in part: "In the new spot, Senator Baldwin goes on about her record ‘eliminating regulations’ and taking on ‘federal bureaucrats’ in the cheese industry. Get a grip. There’s never been an industry Senator Baldwin didn’t want to tax, regulate or burden with new legislation." Conservative WISN talk show host Jay Weber dismissed Baldwin’s action as "she wrote a letter," adding: "More accurately, her staff did, and she signed it. Baldwin did literally the minimum she could. She didn't 'step in' anywhere." To be sure, Baldwin’s claim is actually a minimalist one. Not that she was responsible for the change, only that she "stepped in" and "helped eliminate the regulations." What happened and what did Baldwin do? When we asked the Baldwin team for more specifics, a spokesman pointed us to a Baldwin website page featuring statements on various dairy industry issues. But it basically repeats the information included with the ad: And when the FDA tried to tell Wisconsin’s world-renowned cheesemakers to stop using traditional wood boards for aging, Tammy stepped in and told the regulators to back-off. Working hand-in-hand with Wisconsin’s dairy industry, Tammy successfully pressured the Washington regulators to reverse their decision. The Baldwin site also references several news articles about the issue, including a Wisconsin State Journal piece from June 12, 2014. The article notes that in a letter the day before to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, Baldwin sought clarification on the agency’s cheese board policy: I am writing in regards to disturbing reports that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is pursuing policies to end the use of wooden boards in cheese aging. This has raised great concern among Wisconsin’s cheesemakers, who are currently aging 33 million pounds of cheese on these boards and whose businesses rely on this process. If these reports are true, the FDA should immediately cease any efforts to end the use of wooden boards in cheese aging. In addition, I am requesting that the FDA clarify its policy on cheese aging and enter into a transparent discussion about the role that wooden boards play in cheese processing and food safety. At the time, the FDA released a statement clarifying its policy: Recently, you may have heard some concerns suggesting the FDA has taken steps to end the long-standing practice in the cheesemaking industry of using wooden boards to age cheese. To be clear, we have not and are not prohibiting or banning the long-standing practice of using wood shelving in artisanal cheese. Nor does the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) require any such action. Reports to the contrary are not accurate… At issue is a January 2014 communication from the agency’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition to the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets’ Division of Milk Control and Dairy Services, which was sent in response to questions from New York State. The FDA recognizes that this communication has prompted concerns in the artisanal cheesemaking community.... In the interest of public health, the FDA's current regulations state that utensils and other surfaces that contact food must be "adequately cleanable" and "properly maintained." Historically, the FDA has expressed concern about whether wood meets this requirement and these concerns have been noted in its inspectional findings. However, the FDA will engage with the artisanal cheesemaking community, state officials and others to learn more about current practices and discuss the safety of aging certain types of cheeses on wooden shelving, as well as to invite stakeholders to share any data or evidence they have gathered related to safety and the use of wood surfaces. We welcome this open dialogue. In a June 10, 2014 article, the Associated Press noted that "The FDA’s statement was issued in response to a letter written by Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection secretary Ben Brancel urging FDA officials to take a second look at its policy." The article did include Baldwin’s on a list of Wisconsin officials who contacted the FDA on the issue, along with Gov. Scott Walker, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison) and state Sen. Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center). In addition to making phone calls and writing the letter to the FDA, Baldwin, along with U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and others, introduced an amendment that aimed "to require the commissioner of Food and Drugs to issue guidance before using funds to limit or prohibit the use of wood boards for cheese aging or ripening," a Baldwin staffer said. The larger legislation, and amendment, did not get a vote on the Senate floor. Finally, we turned to the FDA itself on whether its stance on wooden cheese boards has changed. The agency issued this statement: The FDA does not prohibit the practice of using wood shelving in cheesemaking. Over the past 4 years, the agency has engaged in extensive dialogue with the artisanal cheesemaking community on food safety practices after stakeholders, including Congress, asked for clarification on agency requirements. Among other things, the American Cheese Society (ACS) worked with the FDA to provide clarity to their members and food safety guidance on this topic, which can be found in the ACS Best Practices Guide for Cheesemakers. The FDA, ACS, state and local governments, among others, all share the same goal: to ensure that the cheese Americans enjoy is safe. Our rating In a TV ad, Baldwin said that "when federal bureaucrats wanted to prohibit the use of wooden cheese boards, which help make tens of millions of pounds of cheese a year" she "stepped in, helped eliminate the regulations." Baldwin’s actions in the cheese board dustup included phone calls, a letter to the FDA and the introduction of an amendment, all of which helped prompt a clarification of its cheese board policy. The FDA says the regulation dealing with sanitary practices was never eliminated, though the agency’s clarification of its policy did allow the cheesemaking to continue. For a statement that is accurate but requires clarification or additional information, our rating is Mostly True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Tammy Baldwin	None	None	None	2018-06-07T06:00:00	2018-04-16	['None']
-pomt-08459	John Raese's wife "is registered to vote in Florida so she can't even vote for him."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/14/joe-manchin/joe-manchin-attacks-john-raese-wife-registered-vot/	In what's becoming a familiar story, a longtime public official is facing a significant threat from an upstart challenger. In this case, the race is for the U.S. Senate seat for West Virginia formerly held by the late Robert Byrd, a Democrat. Gov. Joe Manchin, also a Democrat, was considered the favorite, but John Raese, a Republican businessman, has been showing strength in the polls. So Manchin recently released a harsh attack ad against Raese. Here's how it goes: "John Raese thinks we're hicks. His people hired actors from Philadelphia to attack Joe Manchin and told them to dress 'hicky.' It's insulting and he didn't even apologize. Then there's the fact Raese moved his family to Florida to avoid paying West Virginia taxes. Obviously, we're not good enough for him. Raese's wife is registered to vote in Florida so she can't even vote for him. Why should we?" There's a lot to unpack there. Let's start with the "hicky" charge before moving onto our fact-check. The "hicky" incident arose from an attack ad against Manchin that the National Republican Senatorial Committee put together. The ad shows three men in a diner talking about how they don't want to vote for Manchin because he would support President Barack Obama. The men are wearing flannel shirts and trucker hats, but other than that, it seems like a straightforward "man on the street" type of ad. The controversy came when Politico reported on the advertisement looking for actors in Philadelphia to portray the men at the diner. "We are going for a 'Hicky' Blue Collar look," read the casting call for the ad. "These characters are from West Virginia so think coal miner/trucker looks." "Clothing Suggestions" included jeans, work boots, flannel shirt, denim shirt, "Dickie's type jacket with t-shirt underneath," down-filled vest, "John Deer [sic] hats (not brand new, preferably beat up)," "trucker hats (not brand new, preferably beat up)," according to Politico. Several days after those descriptions came to light, the NRSC fired the firm that was responsible. We weren't as interested in the 'hicky' controversy as we were in the claims about Raese's Florida connections. We asked the Raese campaign for a response, but we didn't hear back. So we started by checking the voter registration rolls in Florida, which are public records. We quickly determined that Raese's wife, Elizabeth Raese, is registered to vote in Palm Beach County. She has been registered since 2001 and last voted in the 2008 election, according to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of elections. We also cross-checked her address with the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser. Property records indicate Elizabeth and John Raese own a 6,934 square foot home purchased in 1999 and with a market value of $2.67 million. The 2010 record also shows that the Raese's receive a homestead exemption, which indicates that the home is an owner's primary residence. We spoke with officials at the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's office. They confirmed that the Raese's did qualify for the exemption for the 2010 tax year, and that Elizabeth Raese is registered to vote in Florida and holds a Florida driver's license. John Raese is listed as "owner non-resident" in the appraiser's records. The officials confirmed that it's possible for a married couple to jointly own property and claim an exemption when only one spouse is the Florida homeowner. It might seem strange to have a spouse who is an official resident of a state different from your own, but the Raese's wealth may account for the arrangement. Raese's campaign biography states, "Despite a long list of business accomplishments throughout a lifetime, John is most proud of his family – wife Liz and two wonderful daughters Jane and Agnes. Liz is the founder of the Conservative Women of West Virginia, a growing group of activists charting a conservative path for the Mountain State." (Press reports indicate his children attend a private Christian school in Florida.) The ad further states that "Raese moved his family to Florida to avoid paying West Virginia taxes." Florida does not have a personal income tax and West Virginia does, but this claim is impossible for us to check: Tax information is confidential unless a candidate chooses to release it. Raese hasn't done that. But a campaign spokesman told the Charleston Gazette that Raese does pay taxes in West Virginia. "John Raese is a West Virginia resident. Period. He pays income and property taxes there, and any attempts to claim otherwise are acts of desperation by a hopelessly listing campaign," said spokesman Kevin McLaughlin. The Gazette also reported that Raese owns a home in Morgantown, W. Va., listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and that he is registered to vote in Monongalia County. Raese has run for office before and had his residency questioned by opponents. But Raese's campaign biography and independent press reports indicate that he is a longtime West Virginia resident. He serves as president and CEO of Greer Industries, a steel and limestone company founded by his grandparents and headquartered in Morgantown, W. Va. Manchin's ad tries to make voters question Raese's loyalty to West Virginia. It's hard to make a case that Raese isn't someone with longtime ties to West Virginia. On the other hand, it's true that his wife is registered to vote in Florida, and that's the fact we're checking here. Public records confirm she is registered to vote in Florida and receives a homestead exemption on her property. So we rate Manchin's statement True.	None	Joe Manchin	None	None	None	2010-10-14T17:29:35	2010-10-08	['None']
-pomt-03357	Says health insurance premiums will rise under Obamacare.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/16/americans-prosperity/afp-ad-says-premiums-will-rise-under-obamacare/	The conservative organization that spent more than $33 million in the last election to defeat President Barack Obama and other Democrats has turned its sights to undermining support for the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. The group, Americans for Prosperity, launched a television ad in Ohio and Florida. The ad is called "Questions" and in it, Julie, a pregnant mother, talks about her concerns about Obamacare. With a backyard swing set in the background, Julie says: Two years ago, my son Caleb began having seizures. The medical care he received meant the world to me. Now? I’m paying more attention. And I have some questions about Obamacare. If we can’t pick our own doctor, how do I know my family’s going to get the care they need? And what am I getting in exchange for higher premiums and a smaller paycheck? Can I really trust the folks in Washington with my family’s health care? In this fact-check, we focus on Julie’s question, "What am I getting in exchange for higher premiums?" That line presents higher premiums as a certainty, effectively saying "premiums will rise." Whether that’s true in Julie’s case and anyone else’s depends on several key factors: age, income, and perhaps most important, how they get their insurance today. PolitiFact is wary of broad claims on the future of premiums under the Affordable Care Act. When House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, said everyone would pay less, we rated that False because some people would see higher rates. The ad doesn’t tell us much about Julie except that she already has insurance. We asked Levi Russell, spokesman for Americans for Prosperity, whether her current insurance is through the large-group, small-group, or individual markets. We got no details. Russell said "Julie’s questions about the impact of Obamacare are universal, which is why we’ve chosen not to get into details on her particular insurance coverage." That would be fine, but if Julie is the Every Woman then her conviction that her premiums will go up is a sweeping statement that needs to be put in the context of the different markets. Cori Uccello, senior health fellow at the American Academy of Actuaries, said there are many factors that will shape how people like Julie fare under the Affordable Care Act. The best thing would be if she gets her insurance through a large employer. "If they're in the large group market, they wouldn't pay more in premiums," Uccello said. We contacted the Insurance Commission in Washington state. They run that state’s exchange, the online shopping tool for small-group and individual plans. Stephanie Marquis, a spokeswoman for the commission, said they will post their final rates in about two weeks. If Julie lives in Washington and is insured under a small-group plan, Marquis says she would do pretty well. "It’s likely the rates will stay close to the same," Marquis said. "Our essential health benefits that all plans must include are based on benefits already included in most small employer plans. Also, guaranteed issue in the small employer market. People cannot be charged more today, if they’re sick." Employers provide most of the insurance in this country. About 60 percent of everyone under 65 is covered through either a large-group or small-group plan, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute, an independent think tank. Statistically, if Julie has insurance today, it’s most likely in one of those markets and the ad should not assume that her rates will rise. About 22 percent of people under 65 are with a government program, either Medicaid or a children’s program, S-CHIP. The individual market represents the smallest slice of people with insurance, about 7 percent. In citing support for the claim that premiums will go up, Russell focused on the individual market. He said rates in California will be 64 to 146 percent higher. We were unable to confirm that. Russell also pointed to a Wall Street Journal article. He said the article covered at length the prospect of "rising premiums for many Americans." First, we note that in his response, Russell softened the claim in the ad, which assumed that premiums would go up without any qualification. Russell changed that to premiums going up for many people, not everyone. The WSJ looked only at the individual market. It used the proposals from insurance companies that want to participate in the exchanges of eight states. The WSJ found that, "Healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage under the federal health law later this year, while the premiums paid by sicker people are set to become more affordable." This could be considered a split decision for the AFP ad. If Julie has a child with a medical history, and buys her insurance with no help from an employer, the article suggests she might do well under Obamacare. On the other hand, if she were young and with a very healthy family, she might pay more. This article is one of the first to assess actual rates, as opposed to predicted rates -- studies that amount to informed guesswork. But while better, the analysis is using proposed not final numbers. Some states, such as Oregon, have seen companies lower their rates after they first submitted them. And other studies analyzed similar data but reached different conclusions. The consulting group, Avalere Health, looked at proposed rates in nine states and saw middle range plans, so-called Silver tier, that had premiums lower than predicted by the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress. Costs varied widely, from $205 a month in Oregon to $413 in Vermont for a 40-year-old nonsmoker. The state you live in has a significant effect on how the Affordable Care Act changes rates. In Washington state, Stephanie Marquis said her office was surprised with the numbers insurance companies put on the table. "Several carriers predicted rate changes as high as 70 percent," Marquis said. "Yet that’s not what they filed. Many people will pay slightly more or the same for much better coverage." When the Washington Insurance Commission compared those proposals with the rates a private insurance company changes today, it found people in their 20s were paying about $50 more each month, while people in their 40s and 60s were saving $22 to $268 a month. Experts have always expected younger workers in the individual market to pay more. The Congressional Budget Office said the price tag for this sort of health insurance plan was likely to go up by 10 to 13 percent. However, the CBO noted that a significant number of the people getting their insurance this way would have incomes low enough to qualify for tax credits that would lower the effective cost. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated these tax credits would help about 80 percent of them, although even with that subsidy, many in this group would still see rate hikes. The WSJ article did not take the tax credits into account. Bob Laszewski, the CEO of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategies Associate, is pessimistic on rates in the individual market. "A family’s costs are much more likely to go up," Laszewski said. He said the insurance plans will be better than some offered today and that coupled with other changes will make plans more expensive. On the other hand, he could make no projection for Julie. "We don't know anything for sure regarding any specific person. If this person lives in (New Jersey), they might just see their premiums go down," Laszewski said. Current law in New Jersey tends to push rates higher, making savings under Obamacare more likely. For the most part, uncertainty dominates the picture. "It is premature to say who will see increases and who will see decreases," Cori Uccello with the American Academy of Actuaries said. Our ruling Americans for Prosperity produced an ad that claimed that health insurance premiums would go up under Obamacare. To make a universal statement, the group both wants us to accept certain details about a woman, Julie, and disregard others. Chief among these is how she gets her insurance today. Statistically, she is most likely to fall into groups that are likely to do well under Obamacare. The most detailed supporting document focuses on the group that represents just 7 percent of today’s insurance market. The individual market is the one most likely to see rate hikes but the ACA provides tax credits to cushion the impact of those hikes. While most states have yet to announce their final rates, every expert we spoke to agreed that some people will pay more. The message a casual viewer would take from the ad is that everyone's rates are going up. But that's not true, based on what experts told us. The AFP ad cherry picks the facts and draws a conclusion beyond what the evidence supports, but it will prove accurate for some people. We rate the statement Half True.	None	Americans for Prosperity	None	None	None	2013-07-16T12:25:47	2013-07-07	['None']
-pomt-07592	Says "legislation pending in the House would effectively limit or eliminate ‘time-and-a-half’ for people who work overtime."	mostly true	/ohio/statements/2011/mar/25/armond-budish/state-rep-armond-budish-says-pending-legislation-w/	Ohio House Democratic Leader Armond Budish has vowed to "fight like hell" against the plan to narrow public workers’ collective bargaining rights, known as Senate Bill 5. Behind the tough talk is a strategy to enlist more than the union workers who have become the face of the SB 5 opposition. Budish and Democrats want all middle-class, working Ohioans to join the fight. Budish’s message to recruits: Republicans are engaged in a full-scale war against the middle class. The Beachwood Democrat issued a warning in a letter to The Plain Dealer published March 17. "For example, legislation pending in the House would effectively limit or eliminate ‘time-and-a-half’ for people who work overtime." Budish’s claim piqued PolitiFact Ohio’s interest because time-and-a-half has been a standard pay scale for overtime work for decades. The legislation Budish referenced is House Bill 61, which two Republicans introduced in January. A House committee recommended the bill for approval earlier this month, although all Democrats on the committee voted against it. The bill has not been up for a full floor vote yet. The pending legislation would allow certain workers to receive one hour of compensatory time – paid time off – rather than overtime wages for each hour worked exceeding 40 in a week. Federal and state labor laws require most employers pay time-and-a-half for overtime. HB 61 would allow workers to accumulate up to 240 hours of comp time. At the end of a year, employers would have to pay overtime wages for any unused comp time. There are two key issues in Budish’s claim. Does the bill allow employers to abuse their authority and force workers to take comp time instead of overtime wages? How many Ohio workers would HB 61 affect? Let’s start with the second issue. HB61 would cover private employers (with some exceptions) with annual gross sales between $150,000 and $500,000, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission. About 10,000 members of the Ohio chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business have self-reported gross receipts between $100,000 and $500,000, said Chris Ferruso, legislative director for the organization. Businesses with sales above $500,000 already must comply with federal overtime laws. "A lot of this is aimed at very small businesses," said Tony Seegers, director of Labor and Human Resources Policy for the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. "It’s not going to be a lot of employers, but it’s going to be some of the smaller ones." The Ohio Chamber of Commerce and the Ohio NFIB support HB 61. As for the first issue, HB 61 supporters note that workers would get to chose between comp time and overtime pay. The bill says employers cannot require workers to take comp time. And workers are supposed to initiate the exchange for comp time. The bill also bars employers from threatening, intimidating or firing workers who want overtime wages. Columbus attorney Fred Gittes called the voluntary nature of the bill "a charade." Gittes’ argument speaks to the core of Budish’s claim that the bill "would effectively limit or eliminate" time-and-a-half pay for overtime work. Gittes argues that employers could force their workers to take comp time instead of overtime because the bill lacks teeth to discourage the from doing so. He testified against the bill on behalf of the Ohio Employment Lawyers Association. Employers would have a financial motivation to press workers to take comp time. Comp time would be awarded on a one-to-one ratio for extra hours worked. An employee who worked two extra hours, for example, would get two hours of comp time. That’s a cheaper arrangement than paying time-and-a-half for each overtime hour worked. Gittes argues that the penalties are too weak for employers who break the rules. The bill has no provisions to help a worker get his job back or to recover lost wages. Instead, employers who force workers to take comp time would be fined double the worker’s hourly wage for the number of comp time hours involved in the violation, plus attorney fees and court costs. Federal overtime laws include employer penalties that allow a worker to regain their job and wages lost from the time of their firing. Gittes said he has discussed with the bill’s sponsors the inclusion of such language, but it has not been added. The monetary difference resulting from stiffer penalties could be vast. Take, for example, the case of a worker with a $10 per hour wage who was fired for refusing to accept 200 hours in comp time. If the worker prevailed in court, under HB 61, he would be awarded about $4,000. If the same worker won a lawsuit under federal labor laws, he could win his job back and wages covering those that were lost from the point of termination. "What employer will continue to pay time-and-a-half for each hour of overtime if they can effectively force employees to agree to take comp time at their normal rate of pay?" Gittes said in his testimony to the House Small Business and Economic Development Committee. So where does Budish’s claim rate on the Truth-O-Meter? Budish is correct that the bill would provide a means to limit time-and-a-half pay. And while Gittes’ conclusion is tinged with cynicism, unscrupulous businesses do exist. But voluntary choices made by employees also could limit time-and-a-half. Budish’s statement simply describes the affected group as people who work overtime, but the changes in HB 61 would only have an impact on smaller businesses. That’s information that provides clarification. We rate Budish’s statement as Mostly True.	None	Armond Budish	None	None	None	2011-03-25T06:00:00	2011-03-17	['None']
-snes-04036	A truck carrying a shipment of Samsung smartphones exploded, killing three people.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/samsung-smartphones-truck-explodes/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Shipment of Samsung Smartphones Explodes During Transport, 3 Dead	14 September 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00924	"I'm going to cut the salary and benefits of the mayor by 50 percent."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/florida/promises/carlos-o-meter/promise/956/cut-mayors-salary-and-benefits/	None	carlos-o-meter	Carlos Gimenez	None	None	Cut the mayor's salary and benefits	2011-07-14T16:10:42	None	['None']
-pomt-10281	"Sen. McCain was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, and he became a leading supporter of an invasion and occupation of (Iraq)."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/21/barack-obama/mccains-record-on-iraq-eager-to-attack/	Sen. Barack Obama, speaking to veterans, lashed into his opponent for poor military judgment, alleging Sen. John McCain had fixated on Iraq immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "Sen. McCain was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, and he became a leading supporter of an invasion and occupation of a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and that — as despicable as Saddam Hussein was — posed no imminent threat to the American people," Obama said on Aug. 19, 2008. "Two of the biggest beneficiaries of that decision were al-Qaida's leadership, which no longer faced the pressure of America's focused attention; and Iran, which has advanced its nuclear program, continued its support for terror, and increased its influence in Iraq and the region." Obama's analysis of the war's consequences aside, we checked the record to see whether he had fairly characterized McCain's views about Iraq after 9/11 and in the run-up to the war. As a military veteran and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain was a prominent voice in late 2001 as the nation grappled with how to respond to the attacks. On Sept. 12, 2001, he appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews, where Matthews asked whether the appropriate response should be "a legal matter or a military matter." "I think it's both," McCain replied. "As — as we stated, the — a nation has the right to defend itself, No. 1. But No. 2, these organizations could not flourish effectively unless they had the help and assistance and safe harbor of these nations. And it isn't just Afghanistan — we're talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others." That comment was not particularly specific to Iraq. But in an Oct. 18, 2001, appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, with the nation on edge about the anthrax mailings and in the early stages of the campaign in Afganistan, McCain singled out Iraq. After sharing his views about how events were unfolding in Afghanistan, McCain told Letterman: "I think we'll do fine. The second phase — if I could just make one, very quickly — the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq." In January 2002, while touring the flight bridge of an aircraft carrier on the Arabian Sea, McCain shouted: "Next up: Baghdad!" He fleshed out his views in a speech at a NATO security policy conference in Munich on Feb. 2, 2002. "Terrorist training camps exist on Iraqi soil, and Iraqi officials are known to have had a number of contacts with al-Qaida. These were probably not courtesy calls," he said. "Americans have internalized the mantra that Afghanistan represents only the first front in our global war on terror. The next front is apparent, and we should not shrink from acknowledging it. A terrorist resides in Baghdad, with the resources of an entire state at his disposal, flush with cash from illicit oil revenues and proud of a decade-long record of defying the international community's demands that he come clean on his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction." We should note that McCain suggested on several occasions that he would prefer alternatives to full-on invasion and occupation as a means of displacing Saddam Hussein, such as on Meet the Press on July 14, 2002: "I have always strongly felt that you must try the option of opposition from within — arming, training, equipping and helping oppositions from within; the Kurds in the North, the Shiites in the South," McCain told the late Tim Russert. "At least try that option before we send Americans into harm's way." But two days later on Face the Nation, he made clear that if it took war to remove Hussein, he was all for it. "Look, we need a regime change in Iraq," he said. "If we can do it on the cheap by having operations involving just Special Forces and some air power and opponents within, either the Kurds in the south, Shiites in the north [sic], then that's fine. But we have to be prepared to do whatever is necessary to bring about this regime change. I think we also ought to prepare the American public in — in — by way of informing them that Saddam Hussein has these weapons, continues to attempt to improve the — their capability and would not be reluctant to export them to other countries." He continued, "So we need to keep telling the American people that as well, as well as basically — if I may be so blunt — frightening them — frightening and scaring them every day." In early 2003, with calls for invasion of Iraq growing more insistent, McCain's was among the most fervent voices. "Sept. 11, 2001 showed that al-Qaida is a grave threat," he wrote in a Feb. 14, 2003 opinion piece in USA Today. "Saddam Hussein has the ability to make a far worse day of infamy by turning Iraq into a weapons assembly line for al-Qaida's network. ... Saddam is an international felon who has repeatedly violated the terms of his parole and is planning further crimes with his terrorist accomplices. He must be brought to justice once and for all." The record clearly supports the contention that McCain "was already turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11" — indeed he singled out Iraq on Letterman — and became a "leading supporter" of the war, as Obama said. We find his claim to be True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2008-08-21T00:00:00	2008-08-19	['Iraq', 'John_McCain']
-snes-05446	A new law makes it illegal for anyone under the age of 16 to ride a hoverboard.	mostly true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/new-hoverboard-law/	None	Legal	None	Dan Evon	None	New Hoverboard Law	27 December 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13317	Says Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez "has passed one bill in her 20 years in Congress, and that was to rename a post office."	half-true	/california/statements/2016/oct/06/kamala-harris/claim-loretta-sanchez-passed-one-bill-20-years-tec/	California’s U.S. Senate candidates Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez attacked one another’s records, or lack thereof, during Wednesday’s debate in Los Angeles. Harris is California’s attorney general. Sanchez is an Orange County congresswoman. They are competing to replace retiring U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer. All three are Democrats. One claim by Harris on Sanchez’s Capitol Hill tenure stood out: "My opponent has passed one bill in her 20 years in Congress, and that was to rename a post office." We decided to check this provocative claim, and whether any context was missing. Our research To back up the statement, Harris’ campaign pointed to Sanchez’ record at congress.gov, the official website for federal legislative information. It shows Sanchez has, indeed, sponsored only one bill that became law: A 2001 measure to rename an Orange County Post Office. It also shows Sanchez has co-sponsored 179 bills that have become law. Bills are often co-sponsored by dozens of members of Congress at the same time. Sanchez responded during the debate: "It’s pretty obvious to me that my opponent doesn’t understand the Congress at all," Sanchez said. "You don't pass a bill on its own necessarily in the Congress; you pass it by putting it into bills." Sanchez has a point: A search on congress.gov shows some of her colleagues, even some who have served longer than Sanchez, have introduced only a handful of bills that became law. Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, for example, has served since 1991 and sponsored only three bills that became law. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has served since 1987, sponsored only seven bills that became law. Pelosi has, however, co-sponsored more than 400 measures now on the books. In an article after the debate, the Los Angeles Times described the issue this way: "Relative to the number of bills that are filed, few actually pass as standalone legislation and become law. Members often insert legislation into broader bills in hopes of increasing chances it will pass. In fact, many of the day-to-day bills that do pass are to rename post offices — because they are not controversial. Attacks about the naming of post offices have been a staple of congressional debates across the country, especially as Congress has done less and less actual legislating in recent years." Sanchez’s military bills During the debate, Sanchez claimed she’s placed "17 different pieces of legislation into one bill" under the National Defense Authorization Act. The McClatchy news service reported in March that Sanchez "has been successful at getting her amendments into the National Defense Authorization Act, the sprawling budget that sets policy for the Department of Defense." It added that Greg Jacob, former policy director of the Service Women’s Action Network, said his group often went to Sanchez for assistance in fighting the epidemic of sexual assault in the military. "Congresswoman Sanchez has always been at the leading edge of the fight in regard to this issue," Jacob, a Marine Corps combat veteran who closely tracked her work on the Armed Services Committee, told McClatchy. This is not the first time an opponent has attacked Sanchez’s legislative record. Van Tran, who challenged the congresswoman in the 2010 House race, criticized Sanchez "for getting only a single bill passed during her time in Congress, a measure to name a post office in Santa Ana." Our ruling U.S. Senate candidate Kamala Harris claimed her opponent Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez "has passed one bill in her 20 years in office, and that was to rename a post office." That’s technically correct. But it ignores the fact that relatively few standalone bills introduced by members of Congress are passed on their own. Many are added as amendments to larger bills. Long-time Democratic House members Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi have sponsored a combined 10 bills that became law during their careers. Sanchez has co-sponsored nearly 180 bills. And she’s been praised for successfully introducing policy bills that were later included in the nation’s military budget. There’s technical truth to Harris’ statement. But it takes things out of context and leaves the wrong impression that Sanchez has done next to nothing on Capitol Hill. We rate Harris' claim Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/f00d78d0-46d5-427b-95e6-4f1ef703dc5c	None	Kamala Harris	None	None	None	2016-10-06T16:00:00	2016-10-05	['United_States_Congress', 'Loretta_Sanchez']
-snes-02050	Donald Trump Said That Being an Atheist Gave Him A Business Edge?	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-wrote-that-being-an-atheist-gave-him-a-business-edge/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Donald Trump Wrote that Being an Atheist Gives Him a Business Edge?	18 July 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10988	"In Houston, Texas, there are more brothels than there are Starbucks."	mostly true	/texas/statements/2018/jul/13/greg-abbott/greg-abbott-houston-home-more-brothels-starbucks-t/	Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, seeking re-election, responded to a supporter’s question about campaign messaging by talking about sexual exploitation and a ubiquitous brand of coffee shops. "In Houston, Texas, there are more brothels than there are Starbucks," Abbott said during a June 27, 2018, fundraising conference call with supporters, according to a recap by Austin American-Statesman commentator Ken Herman. We wondered if Abbott's claim holds up by the numbers. A Children at Risk statement Abbott’s campaign, responding to Herman, said the comparison originated with Robert Sanborn, president and CEO of the Houston-based nonprofit Children at Risk. In January 2018, Sanborn was quoted telling the Houston Chronicle for a news story: "We have more brothels than we have Starbucks in our city." A brothel is a building where prostitutes are available. Houston’s illicit sex business, the Chronicle story said, "includes top-dollar call girl agencies, legions of street walkers, hundreds of massage parlors fronting for sex shops and cantinas where a beer can be followed by a ‘date’ in a room behind the bar." RubMaps website Sanborn told the newspaper there were over 400 storefront sex businesses operating in Houston--an estimate Children at Risk traced to posts on Rubmaps.com, "where patrons rate and review illicit massage proprietors," the story said. Alfred T. Tribble Jr., an FBI supervisor who oversees the human trafficking unit in Houston, told the paper: "Houston is fertile ground for trafficking because of its proximity to the border, its sexually oriented businesses, its diversity and the demand for sexual services." Seeking elaboration on the brothel count, we reached Jamey Caruthers, an attorney for Children at Risk, who pointed us to the group’s April 2018 report stating that statewide by the group’s analysis, over 35,000 children were attending 55 schools within 1,000 feet of a suspected illegal massage business, which the report describes as fronts for human trafficking and sexual exploitation. "The women trapped in these places are made to provide sexual services to as many as ten men a day through force, fraud and coercion," the report says. As of April 5, 2018, the report says, the group identified 689 suspected illegal massage businesses in Texas which the report says were listed on the RubMaps site as open; not labeled by users as "non-erotic;" and that had at least one customer review. By this sift, the report says, Harris County, home to Houston, had the largest concentration, with 259, followed by Dallas (97), Bexar (69), Collin (53) and Tarrant (52) counties. In July 2018, Caruthers told us by email that suspected sites in Houston alone were counted if RubMaps showed the businesses having Houston street addresses. Caruthers said the Houston-specific count of such businesses has been around 200 since December 2017. "Today it is at 221 (these numbers fluctuate based on new locations opening, closures, and Rubmap’s own internal changes which we are not privy to. Also, savvy owners will go on the site and mark their business as ‘closed’ in order to avoid scrutiny by law enforcement)," Caruthers wrote. We turned to the RubMaps site, which headlines its first page: "Where Fantasy Meets Reality." Text on that page says RubMaps’ unverified entries showing the location of each business, photos and reviews are entirely user-generated. "Therefore, it is unknown whether these locations are accurate, if the pictures actually depict the locations, or if the reviews are factual," RubMaps says. Next, we clicked to a search page and fetched a list of 576 Houston massage parlors which we winnowed to 224 businesses by specifying that "kissing" be available. That was enough searching for the Truth-O-Meter’s purposes. Houston police estimate Separately, we reached James Dale of the Houston Police Department’s vice division who said by phone and email that the department identifies brothels by focusing on massage parlors, sometimes based on calls from neighbors. Dale also said the department partners with Children at Risk in battling brothels. Dale said reports filed by police investigators covering October 2015 into July 2018 indicate the city is home to some 274 "nuisance locations" including apartment buildings and 214 "known" massage parlors. Police have pressed prostitution-related cases involving 47 of the parlors, Dale said. Starbucks stores in the Bayou City Caruthers told us that at the time of its report, Children at Risk employed the online Starbucks Store Locator and an enthusiast’s website, starbuckseverywhere.net, to ascertain there were 98 Starbucks stores in Houston. For our part, we counted 51 Houston stores by using the Starbucks locator website yet close to 100 Houston stores specified on the enthusiast’s site. We emailed Starbucks without drawing a reply about its Houston stores. Meantime, the Starbucks enthusiast, who told us his full name is Winter, responded by email that as of June 5, 2018, he’d confirmed 155 Starbucks stores in Houston--93 owned by the company and 62 licensed to other vendors. We asked Dale, of Houston’s police department, if it could be that Starbucks stores in Houston outnumber local brothels. "There are a lot of massage parlors out there. They open up all the time. We do our best to look into them," Dale replied. "I don’t want to say there are more massage parlors or more Starbucks right now. The numbers (of massage parlors) fluctuate greatly," Dale said. Our ruling Abbott said Houston has more brothels than Starbucks stores. Of late, Houston police have tied prostitution-related cases to less than 50 sites while Houston is home to 155 Starbucks stores. However, police have identified more than 200 massage parlors and other places where prostitution likely occurs--a count supported by our own search of Houston parlors listed on the Rubmaps site. We rate this claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Greg Abbott	None	None	None	2018-07-13T14:35:54	2018-06-27	['Houston', 'Texas', 'Starbucks']
-faly-00039	Claim: More than 1.26 crore Sukanya Samriddhi accounts have been opened for the girl child with over 19,183 crores deposited and that financial future has been secured for crores of girls.	true	https://factly.in/fact-checking-government-claims-on-welfare-of-the-girl-child/	Fact: As on 30th June 2018, 1,39,85,442 accounts have been opened under SSY and a total amount of Rs 25979.62 crore  has been deposited. The numbers are higher than the claim because of the dynamic nature of the scheme. Hence, this claim is TRUE. But the claim that financial future has been secured for crores of girls is FALSE since only 1.39 crore accounts have been opened under the SSY and this is less than 15% of the total female population in the 0-10 age group as per the 2011 census.	None	None	None	None	Fact Checking Government claims on ‘Welfare of the Girl Child’	None	None	['None']
-pomt-01439	Says Mark Warner "has supported restrictions on veterans’ second amendment rights."	mostly true	/virginia/statements/2014/oct/06/national-rifle-association/nra-says-warner-backed-restrictions-veteran-gun-ri/	Editor’s note: A version of this Truth-O-Meter that appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Sunday, Oct. 5, was posted with the wrong rating. The National Rifle Association says U.S. Sen. Mark Warner is soft on two issues dear to many Virginians -- guns and veterans. "Mark Warner has supported restrictions on veterans’ second amendment rights," the NRA wrote in a flyer that hit mailboxes in September. We wondered if the NRA is on target. The statement is based on the Senate’s consideration of the Safe Schools, Safe Communities Act of 2013, introduced in the wake of shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 children and six adults. The legislation, backed by President Barack Obama, sought to greatly expand background checks on potential gun buyers and put new limits on assault rifles and high capacity magazines. The bill failed to overcome a filibuster. The NRA’s claim zeroes in on an unsuccessful amendment that would have changed the method for putting veterans on a federal list of people banned from buying firearms because of mental health. Warner and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., voted against the measure. The amendment was fashioned after a bill introduced two years earlier by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and then-Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., to end what they called "the arbitrary process through which the government strips veterans and other Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) beneficiaries of their Second Amendment rights." Federal law bans the purchase of firearms by people who have been ruled by a judge to be mentally defective or involuntarily committed to a mental institution or incompetent to handle his own affairs. Some states, including Virginia, share the rulings with the FBI and the individual’s name is listed in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Veterans, however, are subject to additional scrutiny. They can be found mentally incompetent to own guns either by the courts or a VA examiner. Since the 1968 Gun Control Act, the VA has equated mental capacity to manage finances with mental stability to own and purchase firearms. The NICS was created in 1998. If a VA examiner determines a veteran cannot manage his finances – take the VA benefit check and make necessary payments – the VA appoints a fiduciary. It could be a spouse or family member. But once a veteran is so judged, the VA submits the veteran’s name to the FBI for inclusion on the national list of people banned from buying arms. Burr said veterans were being held to a different standard than others. His amendment would have stripped the VA of its role and put determination of a veteran’s mental stability solely in the hands of judges. During debate, Burr said 129,000 veterans have been deemed mentally incompetent by the VA. "Let me suggest that the current process is arbitrary," he said. "It doesn't look at whether they represent a danger to themselves or to others. It is in no way relevant to whether the individual should have access to firearms." The same standard for other Americans should be applied to veterans, he said. "Clearly, after an appropriate determination, if a veteran, or any other American, is found to be a harm to themselves or has a mental disability, we would all agree that person should be disqualified from gun ownership," Burr said. Burr’s measure was among six amendments offered to the gun control bill. Some, like Burr’s, were narrow in scope. Others sought to overhaul the entire bill. Warner’s campaign spokesman, David Turner, told us his boss voted against Burr’s measure because he favored an overhaul amendment offered by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa. The measure, which beefed up criminal backgrounds checks and offered grants to encourage states to participate in the national data base, was introduced as a compromise on gun control. The legislation Warner backed also sought a middle ground on veterans. It required the VA to send a letter to veterans deemed mentally incompetent explaining the impact the ruling has on their gun rights and their options for contesting it. The amendment would have set up an appeals process through courts or an independent board. As things stand, veterans have no opportunity to appeal a decision requiring a fiduciary outside of the VA. Senators said during the 2013 debate that fewer than 200 veterans have had their incompetency rulings reversed by the VA. Our ruling The NRA says Warner "has supported restrictions on veterans’ second amendment rights." As proof, it cites the senator’s 2013 vote against an amendment that would have ended a VA policy of submitting the names of veterans it deems mentally unstable to the the FBI for inclusion on a national list of people barred from buying guns. People who didn’t serve in the military, by contrast, can only be declared mentally unfit to buy a gun by a judge. So there’s a basis for the NRA’s claim: Warner voted against abolishing a restriction on buying guns that only affects veterans. What the NRA ignores is that Warner voted for a different amendment that would have opened a appeals route for veterans outside of the VA -- to judges or an independent board. While Warner did not back the change desired by the NRA, he did support a policy change. The NRA’s statement is accurate but needs additional information. We rate it Mostly True.	None	National Rifle Association	None	None	None	2014-10-06T13:20:52	2014-09-08	['None']
-pomt-09687	"There were more people at the Air and Space Museum" than at a rally against the health care bills.	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/nov/12/bob-beckel/beckel-says-protest-against-health-care-bill-drew-/	Counting people at Washington protests has always been a tricky business. Groups have always boasted of huge crowds, but police estimates were often much lower. That sparked such controversy that police don't do the counts anymore. Without an official police count, organizers are free to claim big numbers, with only the news media to offer an independent assessment. Such was the case for a protest against the Democratic health care bill on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 5, 2009. The weekday event featured dozens of Republican members of Congress and a boisterious crowd that carried, among other things, a banner showing a photograph of dead Holocaust victims with the label, "National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945." As usual, there was debate about the size of the crowd. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., a conservative firebrand who urged her supporters to attend, told Fox News' Sean Hannity on the day of the rally that 20,000 to 45,000 people attended. In the blogosphere, meanwhile, liberals dismissed the idea that more than a few thousand people showed up. A few days after the rally, Bob Beckel, a Democratic consultant and Fox News contributor, said Bachmann's estimate was inflated. "Well, I was down at that thing," Beckel said on Hannity's Nov. 9 show. "You said there were 20,000 people there. There were more people at the Air and Space Museum that day than were [at the rally]." We wondered if Beckel was right, so we checked with the National Air and Space Museum. A spokeswoman told us there were 9,771 visitors that day. Estimating the size of the rally is more difficult. We called the Capitol Police, which has jurisdiction over the area where the rally was held, and a spokeswoman said that the department did not make a crowd estimate. So we are left with reports in the news media. A news story in the Washington Post put the number at "an estimated 10,000," while Dana Milbank, a columnist with the Post , said 5,000. Politico , a daily publication that that covers politics, said there were "at least 10,000" attendees. Most other newspaper accounts, including stories in the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press, pegged attendance at "thousands" of people. We asked two reporters who covered the event how they came up with their number. Politico 's Jonathan Allen explained his methodology for us in considerable detail. "I used a pretty simple method for my estimate," Allen told PolitiFact. "The biggest portion of the crowd on the lawn was penned into a stone-walled area that looks a bit like the top part of a trapezoid. I counted people, roughly ticking off by tens, across the narrow top and got to 180. Then I went down one leg of the wall to count how deep the full line of people went, getting to between 50 and 60. I multiplied 180 by 55, knowing that because I was dealing with an angle greater than 90 degrees at the junction of the walls that my number would actually undercount the people in the space. The product of the two numbers is 9,900. I added because of the shape of the area and because there was another section of the crowd numbering in the low hundreds." He concluded that "it was at least – but not too much more than – 10,000," adding, "I had another reporter with me, who agreed with the methodology. For anyone watching on television, it should be remembered that it’s a huge lawn that takes tens of thousands of people to fill. If it looked empty, that’s because it’s a big space. I’ve been going to sporting events and political rallies for more than 30 years, and I have a pretty good sense of crowd size. That said, if someone can produce an aerial shot and count the people and prove me wrong, I’m happy to correct the error." We also talked to Noam Levey, who covered the event for the Los Angeles Times . "We based our estimate on a combination of observation and interviews," Levey said. "Particularly helpful was Clark McPhail, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois, who has been doing crowd estimates on the Mall for years by calculating densities in set areas of the Mall. At our request, Clark looked at photos of the event to come up with his estimate that about 5,000 people were there." We followed up with McPhail. He said that the only elevated photograph of the rally that he was able to secure led him to estimate a crowd of 5,000, but McPhail added that the photograph he used was imperfect. It was not taken from as high an angle as he would have liked, and it was unclear whether it had been taken at the moment of maximum attendance. When we explained Allen's methodology to McPhail, he praised it as being statistically sound. "It's absolutely a credible way of counting," McPhail said. "In fact, I train observers to do it that way." We find no support for the much larger estimates from Bachmann, who did not respond to our e-mails. And as a leader of the rally, she would benefit from a larger estimate. So, in the absence of an official count, we'll take McPhail's lead and give Allen's methodology some credence. That means the number of people attending the rally and visiting the Air and Space Museum was about the same. If he's right, it's by just a small margin. If he's wrong, it's also by a small margin. So we find Beckel's claim Half True.	None	Bob Beckel	None	None	None	2009-11-12T15:04:36	2009-11-09	['None']
-pomt-09816	The government is "going to have the right to get into your bank account with the health care bill and make transfers without you knowing it."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/08/rush-limbaugh/health-care-bill-transfers-limbaugh/	On his radio program on Aug. 28, Rush Limbaugh continued to hammer the Democrat-backed health care bill, claiming ominously that it would allow government "the right to get into your bank account...and make transfers without you knowing it." A similar claim was included in a widely circulated chain e-mail that contains numerous distortions about the health care bill. We examined the claims in depth and reported on many of them here. Limbaugh has raised this issue several times. On Aug. 6, 2009, a caller to his radio program said, "Listen, of all the scary things in this health care bill, Rush, the scariest thing is this: The government, if this passes, will be able to go into your bank account or anybody's bank account — I just read this last night — anybody's bank account, take the money out to fund this monstrosity. Did you know that?" Said Limbaugh, "He's right, folks, he's right. That is in the House bill." The provision in question is in Section 163 of the House bill (page 59) , under the heading "Administrative Simplification." It broadly sets out goals for standardizing electronic health records. The legislative summary says the intent in the section is "to adopt standards for typical transactions" between insurance companies and health care providers. Edwin Park, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the intent is to set standards for electronic communication between health providers and insurance companies and has nothing to do with an individual's bank account. So for example, a doctor would have access to real-time information about a patient's co-pays and whether a particular procedure or medication is covered under their plan, how much is owed, and so on, he said. Much of that already happens today, he said, but it would standardize electronic records so that with out-of-network transactions, everyone is using the same coding and standards. Park's interpretation is shared by Health Care for America Now, which is lobbying for health care reform. According to the group's Web site, the provision "continues the discussion of administrative standards, and authorizes electronic transfers of money within the government. In no way does this provision grant the government access to individual bank accounts." But some say the wording of the bill is ambiguous, and does appear to allow for the possibility of addressing electronic health payments from a patient's individual bank account. Robert Book of the Heritage Foundation pointed to a clause in Section 163 that states that it would "enable electronic funds transfers, in order to allow automated reconciliation with the related health care payment and remittance advice." Some interpret that as a vehicle to allow people to pay their health bills through automatic deductions from their personal bank accounts. And in an e-mail sent out by David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, in which he sought to debunk some of the "lies and distortions" that have circulated in e-mails about health care reform, he seems to suggest that's exactly what is being contemplated. "No, government will not do anything with your bank account," Axelrod wrote. "It is an absurd myth that government will be in charge of your bank accounts. Health insurance reform will simplify administration, making it easier and more convenient for you to pay bills in a method that you choose. Just like paying a phone bill or a utility bill, you can pay by traditional check, or by a direct electronic payment. And forms will be standardized so they will be easier to understand. The choice is up to you – and the same rules of privacy will apply as they do for all other electronic payments that people make." On the White House Web site, Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, spoke to the issue, saying, "Individuals, not the government, will be in charge of their bank accounts, just like they are today." We read Section 163 and found nothing that would require patients to participate in electronic payments. So Limbaugh is wrong that the bill would allow the government "the right to get into your bank account." The choice would be up to the person if they'd like to allow electronic withdrawals from their bank accounts. John S. Hoff, deputy assistant secretary for Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush, doesn't see much to support the critics' claims. But the bill was written in such an ambiguous way, he said, that it opens the door for this kind of speculation. Perhaps, he said, the provision is intended only to deal with standardizing electronic communication between health providers and insurance companies, he said. But the wording "seems to contemplate getting money from (an individual's) account electronically." Still, he said, "I think there is something that would protect you, that would allow you to block access to your account. It doesn't say that they could force you to do it. Does this override your relationship with the bank? No, I don't think so. Suppose you didn't want electronic transfers, you could tell the bank not to do it." Dr. Glenn Laffel, senior vice president of clinical affairs at Practice Fusion, which provides free, Web-based electronic health records, read the wording of the bill and came away confused. "At best, it's vague and ambiguous," Laffel said. "At worst, it would empower the government to do something that isn't right. It's something that needs to be addressed." So in summary, some of the experts we talked to said the wording of the bill is ambiguous enough to allow speculation like Limbaugh's that the government might be able to tap into an individual's bank account to square health payments. But there's nothing in the bill that suggests this program would be required. And while it sounds ominous to say the government could get into your bank account, the same is true for utility and mortgage companies for whom customers have given permission to extract regular electronic payments directly from their bank accounts. The way Limbaugh says it, it sounds like the government would require this program (that it would "have the right") to get into your account, that the government could do it without your permission. And we find no basis for that claim in the bill. We also think Limbaugh exaggerates when he says the government could then transfer money in your account without you knowing it. If you sign up for electronic withdrawal, you know about it. And so we rate this claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Rush Limbaugh	None	None	None	2009-09-08T13:03:27	2009-08-28	['None']
-tron-03142	Phoenix Sheriff’s Investigation of the Long Form Birth Certificate of Barack Obama Concluded That PDF Copies Submitted May Have Been Forged	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama-arpaio-investigation/	None	politics	None	None	None	Phoenix Sheriff’s Investigation of the Long Form Birth Certificate of Barack Obama Concluded That PDF Copies Submitted May Have Been Forged	 Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-02958	A gruesome photograph of a shredded hand depicts a "new punishment for reading the Bible" in Saudi Arabia.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/punishment-reading-bible-saudi-arabia/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	New Punishment for Reading the Bible in Saudi Arabia?	18 December 2015	None	['Saudi_Arabia', 'Bible']
-pomt-11919	"We're the highest developed nation taxed in the world."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/18/donald-trump/once-again-trump-overstates-us-tax-ranking/	As he presses for sweeping tax reform, President Donald Trump continues to paint the nation’s current tax burden in superlative colors. And he continues to struggle to get it right. In an interview, Mike Sacks, national political correspondent for E.W. Scripps, brought this up with Trump. Here’s that exchange: Sacks: "You've repeatedly said that we're the highest taxed nation in the world when that's been seen as objectively false. With the credibility you need to pass tax reform, why --" Trump: "Some people say it differently, they say we're the highest developed nation taxed in the world." Sacks: "Then why don't you say it that way?" Trump: "Because a lot of people know exactly what i'm talking about, and in many cases they think I’m right when I say the highest. As far as I'm concerned I think we're really essentially the highest, but if you want to add the ‘developed nation,’ you can say that, too. But a lot of people agree that the way I'm saying it is exactly correct." Does adding the "developed nation" label make the claim more accurate? No. When Trump has said before that America has the highest corporate tax rate, he’s on pretty firm ground and we’ve rated him Mostly True. The statutory tax rate for corporations is 35 percent, the highest among countries like Japan, Mexico, Australia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and other European nations. Now to be clear, the tax rate on paper and the effective tax rate are two different things. Thanks to the thousands of deductions and exemptions in state and federal tax codes, according to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report, the effective average corporate tax is 22 percent. That puts the country in the middle of the pack among our economic peers. As for the tax burden across the board for individuals and companies alike, economists generally rely on a couple of yardsticks. One is the total tax burden compared to the size of the economy and the other is the tax burden per person. The most recent numbers come from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for 2015. The countries it compares include the group that are generally seen as "developed nations." As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. tax burden -- covering all levels of government -- ranks 28th out of 32 countries. We ran the numbers based on federal revenues alone, and the rankings stayed about the same. On a per-person basis, America ranks 13th out of 31 nations. We asked the White House if they had other numbers. We didn’t hear back, but if we do, we’ll update this fact-check. Our ruling Trump said that the United States is "the highest developed nation taxed in the world." Looking at tax collections relative to the size of the U.S. economy and the number of people, the numbers tell a different story. The United States ranks 28th in tax revenues as a percentage of GDP and 13th on a per-capita basis. Trump said his view is "exactly correct." In fact, it is exactly incorrect. We rate this claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-10-18T16:42:50	2017-10-17	['None']
-pose-00721	Will "include carbon accounting as a part of the urban and suburban planning process, thus driving the transformation to higher densities and a focus on transit systems."	not yet rated	https://www.politifact.com/oregon/promises/kitz-o-meter/promise/751/include-carbon-accounting-in-urban-and-suburban-pl/	None	kitz-o-meter	John Kitzhaber	None	None	Include carbon accounting in urban and suburban planning process	2011-01-04T21:58:42	None	['None']
-snes-03884	A mother sued a hospital and claimed that a flu shot had "turned" her son gay.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mother-sues-hospital-after-son-turns-gay-from-flu-shot/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Mother Sues Hospital After Son Turns Gay from Flu Shot	4 October 2016	None	['None']
-vees-00234	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online post on Hontiveros seeking minimum wage for rebels	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-online-post-hontiveros-seeking-minimum	None	None	None	None	fake news	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Online post on Hontiveros seeking minimum wage for rebels FAKE	April 30, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-04556	"We have more people working in the state of New Jersey today than we've ever had in our history."	false	/new-jersey/statements/2012/sep/27/jennifer-beck/jennifer-beck-claims-more-people-are-working-new-j/	With a jobless rate that continues to inch up in New Jersey, some state officials are focusing on more optimistic labor data. But after a report last week that showed the state’s unemployment rate ticked up to 9.9 percent as 5,300 jobs were added in August, a Republican lawmaker trying to accentuate the positive fumbled her facts. "We have more people working in the state of New Jersey today than we've ever had in our history, " state Sen. Jennifer Beck told NJToday on Sept. 20. "So we still have a struggle with those that are unemployed and looking, but we know businesses feel positive about what's going on in our economy and they're looking to hire and we got to keep working at it." With a nearly double digit jobless rate, are more people working in New Jersey now than ever before? That’s not true. Beck said in an e-mail that she misspoke, saying she "meant to say ‘workforce’ instead of ‘working.’" But the key takeaway, she said, is "that there are positive signs for our economy in the midst of some negative ones." The labor force, as measured by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, includes employed people and those unemployed but looking for a job. People who are unemployed and not seeking work are not counted. In June the number of people in New Jersey’s labor force was the highest ever, but that figure dropped in July and again in August. Also, as a percentage of the state’s population -- excluding individuals younger than 16 years old, people who are institutionalized and active duty service members -- there’s instances dating to the late 1980s of greater participation in the labor force than now. As for employment, the state isn’t setting any records. The number of employed residents -- as well as the number of jobs in New Jersey, which the federal labor department measures in a separate survey -- peaked in the beginning of 2008 before falling precipitously during the last recession. From December 2007 through June 2009 -- the official start and end of the last recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research -- more than 140,000 New Jersey residents lost their job. At the same time, the state shed more than 190,000 jobs overall, according to data from the federal labor department. Any gains since then have not been substantial enough to push the state above pre-recession peaks. In August, according to preliminary data, less than 4.13 million New Jersey residents were employed, down from nearly 4.29 million in February 2008. The state had roughly 4.1 million jobs -- including public and private sector employment -- in January 2008. Now, the state has more than 3.9 million jobs overall. So the raw numbers prove Beck wrong. But it’s also important to compare labor data as a rate to account for the size of the population, which could impact employment figures. For decades, New Jersey’s employment rate was better. In August, according to preliminary data, about 90 percent of people in the state in the workforce -- that is either employed or looking for work -- had a job. That’s the smallest percentage since March of 1977. Our ruling Beck said, "we have more people working in the state of New Jersey today than we've ever had in our history." That’s wrong. New Jersey has not created enough jobs or put enough residents back to work to surpass the state’s 2008 employment peak. And for decades the state’s employment rate was higher than it is now. We rate this statement False. To comment on this ruling, go to NJ.com.	None	Jennifer Beck	None	None	None	2012-09-27T07:30:00	2012-09-20	['New_Jersey']
-pomt-09865	The health care reform plan would set limits similar to the "socialized" system in Britain, where people are allowed to die if their treatment would cost more than $22,000.	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/aug/06/club-growth/club-growths-health-care-ad-campaign-misleading/	Like other groups criticizing health care reform, the conservative Club for Growth is using the August recess to try to stop the congressional effort to create a government-run health insurance option. Part of the Club's strategy will include a $1.2 million ad campaign aimed at Democrats who may be wavering about the plan. In the ad, a man weeps over someone lying in a hospital bed while the announcer says, "$22,750. In England, government health officials decided that's how much six months of life is worth. Under their socialized system if a medical treatment costs more, you're out of luck. That's wrong for America." That footage is interspersed with shots of the Capitol building and the whole thing is set to some very ominous music. You can watch it here. The carefully worded ad doesn't directly say that the government is planning to put a price on our lives, but the implication is clear: The reform plan will lead to callous decisions that would allow people to die if they face a costly treatment. So that's what we're going to check — whether the reform plan would impose those kind of caps on treatment. At its heart, the Club for Growth's ad criticizes a medical approach known as comparative effectiveness research, which aims to find the most effective treatments for the lowest cost. Such research became a flashpoint during the stimulus debate, when the Conservatives for Patients Rights portrayed the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, a new board created by the stimulus bill to find the best health treatments, as being modeled after the British system. In fact, the board is very different from the British system, where government entities run the health care system and the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence — NICE for short — determines whether particular treatments are covered or not. The stimulus emphasized that the board is not meant to "mandate coverage, reimbursement, or other policies for any public or private payer" and that none of the board's reports or recommendations "shall be construed as mandates or clinical guidelines for payment, coverage, or treatment." So we gave the Conservatives for Patients Rights claim a Barely True . Once again, some Republicans have started linking the general premise of comparative effectiveness and what NICE does in Britain to describe how a government-run plan in the United States would discriminate against people who are older or very sick. Here's one such comment: "I don't know for sure, but I've heard several senators say that Ted Kennedy with a brain tumor, being 77 years old as opposed to being 37 years old, if he were in England, would not be treated for his disease, because end of life — when you get to be 77, your life is considered less valuable under those systems," said Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, in a news conference with reporters. NICE is an element in the Club for Growth ad as well. The ad refers to a December 2008 article in the New York Times that followed the case of Bruce Hardy, a British man who was denied a $54,000 drug by British health authorities. The article said the drug could have delayed his cancer progression for six months. Under NICE policies, the government would only pay about 15,000 pounds — or $22,750 — to save six months of Hardy's life. (NICE's limits are well known and have been widely discussed in the medical community.) The agency generally considers treatments cost-effective if they are less than $34,000 a year, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. But sometimes the agency will accept treatments that cost far more than that. So the Club for Growth's claim that NICE has a price limit of $22,750 for six months of life is roughly accurate, said Michael Cannon, a health policy expert with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that is often in step with the Club for Growth. But "does the (Obama health care) legislation say it's going to do what Britain is doing? The answer to that is no," said Cannon. Nevertheless, Cannon doesn't believe that the ad is too far off, pointing to a proposal by the White House that would create an independent group of health experts that would look for inefficiencies in Medicare coverage. "With the government assuming an even larger majority in health spending, it becomes very hard to argue that they won't have to ration... [Club for Growth] is implying that this is where it would lead and that's valid." But at this point, that proposal is not included in either the House or the Senate bill, so we believe it's quite a stretch for the Club for Growth to suggest it would be part of the health reform plan. Dr. Sean Tunis, a former top official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid under the Bush administration and current director of the Center for Medical Technology Policy, says the ad is misleading. "We have a public plan now, and that's Medicare," Tunis said. "And Medicare doesn't put a price on life. ... That seems like a fallacious connection to me." The only initiative from the Obama administration along those lines is the increase in funding for comparative effectiveness research through the stimulus. That data would be used to help doctors and patients make better drug and procedure decisions, not dictate treatment, he said. So, back to the Club for Growth ad. Although our experts agree that it gets the NICE statistic correct about the British practice, the ad's main point about cost limits is incorrect. There is no such practice in the comparative effectiveness program, nor is it part of the current health reform proposals pending in Congress. The House and Senate bills under consideration would not require the government to decide how much a person's life is worth. As a result, we give the Club for Growth a False.	None	Club for Growth	None	None	None	2009-08-06T18:40:47	2009-08-04	['United_Kingdom']
-snes-02976	Betsy DeVos and her family contributed millions of dollars to the campaigns of Republican candidates.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/devos-family-campaign-contributions/	None	Politicians	None	Dan Evon	None	DeVos Family Campaign Contributions	8 February 2017	None	['Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-04567	A poll conducted in Egypt revealed that 80 percent of Egyptians oppose receiving foreign aid from the United States.	true	/rhode-island/statements/2012/sep/26/barry-hinckley/us-senate-candidate-barry-hinckley-says-80-percent/	In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya and protests throughout the Middle East over the YouTube video that disparaged Mohammad, some critics of U.S. foreign policy have questioned the aid we give to such countries. One was Barry Hinckley, a Republican running against U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. A Sept. 14 story posted on 630WPRO.com reports: "Hinckley said a poll conducted in Egypt revealed that 80% of Egyptians oppose receiving foreign aid from the United States." The story headlined "Hinckley calls for elimination of U.S. aid to Libya, Pakistan, and Egypt," which Hinckley references on his Facebook page, quotes the candidate as saying, "It makes absolutely zero sense to further burden our own economy to give billions of dollars to a country that doesn't even want it." said Hinckley. He said Whitehouse characterized the idea of cutting foreign aid to Egypt as a "blunder." "I believe that it is a far greater blunder to continue sending billions of dollars to nations that violently attack American lives and property," Hinckley says in the story. We gave Hinckley a False ruling in April when he asserted that President Obama gave $1.5 billion to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (that's the amount of aid going to Egypt, most of it to the military), so we were interested in whether 80 percent of Egyptians really do want U.S. aid to stop. We e-mailed Hinckley's campaign manager and spokesman, but didn't get a response. So we went looking ourselves, and found a Gallup poll conducted in Egypt between Jan. 31 and Feb. 7. The key question: Do you favor or oppose the U.S. sending economic aid to Egypt? The survey of 1,000 Egyptians, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points, found that 82 percent opposed U.S. aid, a rate that has been growing since Gallup began asking the question in April 2011, when 52 percent were opposed. The survey also found that the results don't just apply to aid from the United States. Opposition to aid from international organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund went from a low of 32 percent in September 2011 up to 57 percent during the February 2012 survey. Opposition to aid from other Arab governments has been increasing as well, but not to the point where more Egyptians oppose it or support it. The rate of opposition went from 22 percent in September 2011 to 39 percent in the February poll. Why the growing opposition? Gallup said in its March 29, 2012, analysis that public antagonism toward the aid rose after non-government, pro-democracy groups from the United States and Europe, working in Egypt, were accused of illegally accepting foreign funds and trying to foster unrest. As the Gallup report says, "The murky circumstances and arrangements that resulted in the prosecution, travel limitations, and then sudden departure of U.S. citizens facing trial in Egypt has only inflamed Egyptians' sense of distrust and suspicion regarding such organizations and what U.S. funds mean for Egyptian sovereignty." Forty-three people from those groups, including some Egyptians, were accused of such things as paying activists to incite protests in Egypt to destabilize the country. The latest survey was done shortly after they sought refuge in the U.S. embassy and before many were allowed to leave the country after posting bail. We also found a second study that asked the question in a different way but produced a similar response. That poll of 1,000 Eyptians, conducted March 19 to April 10 by the Pew Research Center, found that 61 percent said both U.S. military and economic aid have a harmful effect on Egypt. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.2 percentage points. Our ruling Barry Hinckley, in raising questions about whether the United States should be giving foreign aid to countries such as Egypt, said that 80 percent of Egyptians oppose receiving foreign aid from the United States. A Gallup poll taken in February shows that he's right in the ballpark. We rate his statement as True. (Get updates from PolitiFact Rhode Island on Twitter: @politifactri. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Barry Hinckley	None	None	None	2012-09-26T00:01:00	2012-09-14	['United_States', 'Egypt']
-pomt-05318	Says he represents or has represented about half the San Antonio-rooted district in which he seeks election.	mostly true	/texas/statements/2012/may/17/lloyd-doggett/lloyd-doggett-says-he-represents-or-has-represente/	Appearing with fellow Democrats seeking a new U.S. House seat, Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin defended his decision to run in the 35th Congressional District, which snakes from downtown San Antonio north into southeastern Travis County. On the April 13, 2012, edition of KLRN-TV’s "Texas Week," Doggett pointed out that this is the second decade that the state’s ruling Republicans, including Gov. Rick Perry, have tried to knock him out of the House by drawing district lines seemingly to his disadvantage. Doggett, who is not seeking re-election in his newly Republican-leaning 25th Congressional District, said that, in contrast, "the district that I am running in for re-election to Congress is the district that has more of my current constituents than any other district in the state. I represent or have represented about half of the district; the other half is new." Sylvia Romo of San Antonio, the Bexar County tax assessor-collector, objected, saying that 55 percent of the 35th district is in Bexar County. Inaccurate, Doggett said, and then the program’s host, Rick Casey, offered up that 47 percent of the district is in Bexar County with 31 percent in Travis County; that is where Doggett resides. "But I don't just represent Travis County," Doggett replied. "I represent Lockhart and San Marcos and Kyle. And when you include the areas that I serve in Congress, it's just under half of this total district." Phew. Is Doggett right? By email, Doggett campaign spokeswoman Ashley Bliss-Herrera passed along a population analysis of the 35th district from the Texas Legislative Council, which helps state legislators draft legislation. Bliss-Herrera said the analysis shows that nearly 315,300 of the district’s nearly 698,500 residents, or 45 percent, live in the Travis, Hays and Caldwell county portions of the district. And, she said, Doggett has represented those areas before. We provided Bliss-Herrera with another population analysis by the legislative council indicating that about 41 percent of the 35th district’s residents were previously in the 25th district now represented by Doggett. According to the council, the 35th district also sweeps in residents of the 10th, 20th, 21st, 23rd and 28th congressional districts that will be moot after the next Congress is sworn in. Bliss-Herrera said the latter analysis does not account for parts of Travis County in the 35th district that Doggett has represented in the past. Doggett was initially elected to succeed Rep. J.J. "Jake" Pickle in 1994, representing what was then the 10th district taking in nearly all of Travis County. This wrinkle seems believable, though we were unable to confirm as much from available legislative council data. All told, then, it’s evident that Doggett has represented 41 percent of the district he seeks to represent. It’s also plausible that he’s represented 45 percent. That’s approaching half. We rate his claim Mostly True.	None	Lloyd Doggett	None	None	None	2012-05-17T16:57:13	2012-04-14	['None']
-pomt-08047	"The Greenest County in America."	mostly false	/georgia/statements/2011/jan/03/dekalb-county/dekalb-greenest-county-nation-claim-gets-muddy/	In metro Atlanta, the land of smog alerts and farmland-turned-to-suburbs, one local county makes a bold claim about its efforts to be environmentally conscious. DeKalb County, its website says, is "the greenest county in America." Let's put that on some recycled paper and send it to each of the county's estimated 750,000 residents. DeKalb's communications director, Burke Brennan, sent PolitiFact Georgia an e-mail making the case for the county. It includes: the claim DeKalb has the only public landfill in Georgia doing a methane gas-to-electricity program, producing enough power to fuel as many as 4,000 homes. the county has acquired more than 3,000 acres of new parkland and greenspace over the past eight years; a huge feat, DeKalb says since it is more than 85 percent developed. a claim DeKalb has 48 miles of hiking and biking trails, the most of any county in Georgia. all newly-constructed buildings that cost more than $5 million to build are LEED projects, a third-party certification program that a structure is environmentally efficient. the county received a $14.9 million federal grant to fund programs designed to reduce the use of fossil fuels in its transportation vehicles. the Atlanta Regional Commission recognized DeKalb in December 2009 as one of its first Green Communities. "In DeKalb County, we are taking the lead on sustainability ... we are one step closer to being the greenest county in America," DeKalb County Chief Executive Officer Burrell Ellis said in 2009 when the county was honored by the ARC. Many folks we discussed this claim with used phrases like "bold" or "ambitious" to describe DeKalb's audacity, not willing to publicly dismiss it. Some were willing to criticize the claim. "That's all a good case for them to be one of the greenest counties in Georgia," said Mark Woodall, Georgia chapter chairman of the Sierra Club, which claims to be the largest grassroots environmental organization in the state. "DeKalb being the greenest county in America seems pretty unthinkable." Being "green," means many things these days. Some organizations have occasionally released surveys rankings America's greenest cities, but we found few similar rankings of counties. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a non-profit organization that works to improve health and health care for Americans, earlier this year looked at the environmental health of each U.S. county. One category was physical health. The foundation used data put together by researchers from the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine the physical health of each county. The criteria included how many days the air was unhealthy, the number of days the air was unhealthy due to ozone, access to healthy foods and how many liquor stores were in a county. DeKalb ranked near the bottom of Georgia counties, 153rd, in terms of physical health. Some categories that DeKalb is bragging about are difficult to compare. In other areas, such as the number of LEED-certified buildings, Dekalb has competition. Gwinnett had three LEED-certifiied structures, according to the U.S. Green Building Council. DeKalb is an Energy Star partner -- a federal effort to protect the environment through energy-efficient practices -- but so are Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties and the city of Atlanta. On hiking and biking trails, DeKalb may run into some argument about having the most in Georgia. Cobb County, for example, lists about 75 miles of trails within its cities and unincorporated areas. It was suggested we look at Arlington County, Va. to find another county that could make a case it is greener than DeKalb. The county has a page on its website with more than a dozen awards and recognition for its sustainable community and environmental efforts. Arlington won two National Association of Counties Achievement Awards this year for its recycling efforts. That organization also named Arlington its Outstanding Civil Engineering Project award in 2006 for its Green Building Program. Other counties, like Boulder, Colo., have goals such as reducing outdoor water use by 50 percent by using indigenous plants and recycling 50 percent of construction waste. DeKalb's case was muddied in December when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fined $453,000 for 836 sewage spills over the last five years. The EPA estimates there are about 40,000 spills from the nation's 25,000 sewage systems a year. California officials reported about 2,000 spills into the San Francisco Bay in 2008. Brennan noted the day after the fine was announced, county commissioners voted 6-1 to spend $1.345 billion to make repairs to its water and sewer system, nearly twice as much money as the EPA recommended. DeKalb taxpayers will pay higher water and sewer bills to help fund the work. Despite the fine, Brennan stuck by DeKalb's claim. "Nobody here is claiming perfection, but based on the programs, awards, designations and initiatives DeKalb has in place and ongoing, I am sticking with the motto 'DeKalb is the greenest county in America,' " Brennan told us in an e-mail. "After all, 'Cowboy Capital of the World' was already taken," added Brennan, referring to Oakdale, Calif. DeKalb has certainly tried to make its mark as an environmentally conscious county. But DeKalb's claim of being the "greenest county" in the nation ignores critical facts that would give a visitor to its web site a different impression. We rate the county's claim as Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	DeKalb County	None	None	None	2011-01-03T06:00:00	2010-12-23	['United_States']
-pomt-04307	"We borrow $4 billion every single day, much of it from China."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/30/clint-eastwood/clint-eastwood-says-ad-us-borrows-4-billion-day-mu/	In an ad from American Crossroads, Clint Eastwood tells the country it "just couldn’t survive" another four years of President Barack Obama: "We borrow $4 billion every single day, much of it from China," he says. The message, part of a $12.6 million ad barrage, is running in seven states, including Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia. Images of unemployed workers and foreign-marked shipping containers accompany Eastwood’s gravelly narration: In the last few years, America's been knocked down. Twenty-three million people can't find full-time work, and we borrow $4 billion every single day, much of it from China. When someone doesn't get the job done, you've got to hold them accountable. Obama's second term would be a rerun of the first, and our country just couldn't survive that. We need someone who could turn it around fast, and that man is Mitt Romney. There's not much time left, and the future of our country is at stake. It’s been more than a year since we’ve checked similar claims that the country borrows $4 billion a day — something we found Mostly True. We wondered: Is that still the case? And do we borrow "much of it" from China? We asked American Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio for evidence for the ad’s claim. "I'm going to let you take a crack at that and get back to me," he said. We sent him a brief roundup of what we had found so far. We didn’t hear back. How much we borrow The federal government doesn’t literally borrow money every day, but through periodic bond auctions. So we assumed the ad used an average. Here’s one way to do the math on $4 billion a day. The total federal debt on the day the ad was released, according to the Treasury Department, was $16.2 trillion. On the day Obama took office, it was $10.6 trillion. That’s a gain of $5.6 trillion — about $4 billion a day. There are a few nits to pick with this math. First, we’re not currently borrowing that much. Over the last year, the average has been about $3.4 billion a day, not $4 billion. Second, that’s using a measure of the entire federal debt — including the big chunk we owe ourselves that’s held by government accounts such as the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. "Debt held by the public" is the the amount the federal government has actually borrowed to finance deficits. And the amount added to the public debt since Obama took office averages about $3.7 billion a day, not $4 billion. Still, this part of the claim is pretty close. ‘Much of it from China’ Then there’s the part about China. This is where the ad’s claim gets goofy. If we assume Eastwood’s talking about what’s been added to the entire federal debt since Obama took office — the amount that averages $4 billion a day — here’s how much as of August China owns: 7.7 percent. If someone told you that there were two pieces to our recent debt, one piece under 8 percent and one piece above 92 percent, then asked you which of those pieces represented "much of it," what would you say? We’re guessing the non-Chinese piece. Still, China is the No. 1 foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities. (About a third of our total debt is held by foreigners.) So the main concern about U.S. public debt held by foreigners is mainly what might happen if they all stopped buying. It could drive up U.S. interest rates, said Wayne Morrison, a specialist in Asian trade and finance for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Does that give China some sort of leverage? Or what if they sold off their U.S. securities all at once, sparking some kind of financial crisis? "Many economists argue that such a move is highly unlikely," Morrison told PolitiFact. If China tried a big selloff, it would drive up supply of U.S. Treasuries and drive down their value — tanking the value of China’s own holdings. Our ruling Eastwood, speaking in a recent American Crossroads ad, warns that, "We borrow $4 billion every single day, much of it from China." That amount is the rough daily average of all U.S. debt added since Obama took office, including the type the government owes itself. It’s not the current rate, which has been somewhat lower. And while China is the No. 1 foreign holder of U.S. securities, it purchased less than 10 percent of that debt. This claim is only partly accurate. We rate it Half True.	None	Clint Eastwood	None	None	None	2012-10-30T16:28:28	2012-10-24	['China']
-pomt-04938	"The largest number of bankruptcies in our country are really as a result of health care."	half-true	/rhode-island/statements/2012/jul/29/patrick-kennedy/former-us-rep-patrick-kennedy-says-most-bankruptci/	Former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy went on the WPRO Morning News on July 13 to talk about the Middle East and the national health-care overhaul. When asked about the "political tension surrounding Obamacare," Kennedy said people such as his father, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney don’t have to worry about their health care. "In other words, when my brother Teddy had life-threatening cancer, my father realized that they had to worry about his survival, but they didn’t have to worry about him being bankrupted because he was trying to save his son’s life," Kennedy said. "Many Americans are worried that when an illness strikes the family, not only is it an illness, but it's a threat of bankruptcy. And the largest number of bankruptcies in our country are really as a result of health care." Given the continuing debate over the health-care overhaul, we thought that claim was worth checking. When we asked what he based that statement on, Kennedy, a Democrat who served eight terms representing Rhode Island in Congress before stepping down two years ago, could not cite a specific study or group making that claim, but he said, "I’ve been in a million rallies on health care. It’s the most well-versed thing out there." While job losses or foreclosures might have been big contributors following the 2008 financial crisis, Kennedy said, over time "it’s pretty well understood that personal bankruptcy’s largest cause was because of the medical crisis," and "no one has contended it’s anything other than that. Whether it is the cause of the final bankruptcy or a contributing cause, there’s no question it’s involved in a major way." To check Kennedy’s claim, we first called the American Bankruptcy Institute, a nonpartisan research and education group based in Alexandria, Va. Public affairs director John Hartgen said anecdotal evidence indicates medical reasons are "definitely a big cause" for bankruptcies, "but also death of a spouse, credit card debt, loss of a job, and you have a housing crisis now." He said the institute does not have its own data to quantify the reasons for bankruptcies, but he pointed us to a study by Harvard researchers and a report by the Institute for Financial Literacy. The Harvard study, published in the American Journal of Medicine in 2009, has attracted a lot of attention in part because one of the researchers was Elizabeth Warren, the former Harvard Law School professor who is now the Democratic candidate challenging U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., for the seat once held by Kennedy’s father. The study, which follows a similar Harvard study in 2001, was based on "the first-ever national random-sample survey" of 2,314 bankruptcy filers and it concluded that, "Using a conservative definition, 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical." But "that’s not the end of the story," as PolitiFact National said in 2009 when it gave then-Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., a Half True for saying that "62 percent of all personal bankruptcies were caused by medical problems." PolitiFact National noted that in the Harvard study, 29 percent of respondents attributed their bankruptcy to medical bills from illness or injury. But when respondents were asked if medical-related issues such as lost income due to illness or the mortgage of a home to pay medical bills contributed to their bankruptcy, that figure rose to 62 percent, giving some support to Kennedy’s claim. "The statistic that we think is most reliable is the percentage of people who say medical bills were the reason for their bankruptcy, and that number is 29 percent," PolitiFact National said. But, again, that’s not the end of the story. The Institute for Financial Literacy, a nonprofit financial education and counseling organization based in South Portland, Maine, has been compiling a demographic profile of American debtors since 2006. It surveyed credit-counseling clients seeking bankruptcy protection, asking them to identify their "causes of financial distress." They could choose more than one cause, so the percentages equal more than 100 percent. In the most recent report, issued in September 2011, "overextended on credit" was the leading cause of financial distress at 70.5 percent, followed "reduction of income" at 64.9 percent, "unexpected expenses" at 56.6 percent, "job loss" at 43.5 percent, "illness/injury" at 30.9 percent and "divorce" at 15.5 percent. "The institute has surveyed over 200,000 individuals in the past five years and what we find interesting is not so much what changed, but what has not," the report said. For example, it said that causes such as "illness/injury" have remained "rather consistent," while causes such as "job loss" have become a bigger factor. Our ruling Patrick Kennedy said "The largest number of bankruptcies in our country are really as a result of health care." While Kennedy didn’t cite any data to back his assertion, he could have relied upon the Harvard study to provide some support for his statement. But the Institute for Financial Literacy report undercuts the claim, with 70 percent of respondents citing credit problems and only 31 percent "illness/injury" as the leading cause of their bankruptcies. Since the matter is not nearly as clear-cut as Kennedy presented it, we rate his claim "Half True."	None	Patrick Kennedy	None	None	None	2012-07-29T00:01:00	2012-07-13	['None']
-tron-00892	Muslim Owner of Texaco In Bogalusa, LA Refuses to Serve Member of Military	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/bogalusa-texaco/	None	computers	None	None	None	Muslim Owner of Texaco In Bogalusa, LA Refuses to Serve Member of Military	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-13495	"I was totally against the war in Iraq."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/07/donald-trump/trump-repeats-wrong-claim-he-opposed-iraq-war/	The long shadow of the Iraq War continues to color presidential politics. In a forum focused on national security, Democrat Hillary Clinton was questioned about her Senate vote in favor of action against Iraq. She in turn noted that Donald Trump initially supported the war. When it was Trump’s turn, the Republican nominee denied the charge. "I was totally against the war in Iraq," Trump said during the NBC News event. "You can look at Esquire magazine from '04. You can look at before that." Well, we have gone back further than the 2004 interview Trump mentioned, and the record tells a different story. Trump has a hard time getting past a September 2002 interview with shock jock Howard Stern. Stern asked Trump if he supported the looming invasion. Trump responded, "Yeah, I guess so." Trump dialed that back a bit in another interview in January 2003, a few months before the invasion. Fox News’ Neil Cavuto asked Trump whether President George W. Bush should be more focused on Iraq or the economy. "Well, he has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps, because perhaps shouldn't be doing it yet and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations, you know," Trump said. "He's under a lot of pressure. I think he's doing a very good job. But, of course, if you look at the polls, a lot of people are getting a little tired. I think the Iraqi situation is a problem. And I think the economy is a much bigger problem as far as the president is concerned." So Trump put the economy ahead of confronting Iraq, but he didn’t speak against going to war. At most he suggested waiting for the United Nations to do something. A week after the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, Trump gave different takes. At an Academy Awards after-party, Trump said that "the war’s a mess," according to the Washington Post. He told Fox News that because of the war, "The market’s going to go up like a rocket." The earliest evidence of Trump’s outright opposition to the war came in that August 2004 article in Esquire: "Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we're in. I would never have handled it that way," Trump said. Trump has been challenged many times in this election to explain his early acceptance of the war. In a February 2016 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump said that he didn’t know what he meant during his 2002 conversation with Stern. "That was a long time ago, and who knows what was in my head." Trump said. Our ruling Trump said he was "totally against the war in Iraq." While he came to that position when the war became difficult, earlier on he was more accepting of military action. In 2002, asked if America should go to war, he said, "I guess so." Less than three months before the invasion, Trump said the president should be more focused on the economy, but he didn’t speak against launching an attack. Trump didn’t speak often about the Iraq War before it happened, but what he said did not add up to the sort of opposition he describes today. We rate this claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/836f664c-ac07-4562-9333-ddef70b3bb65	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-09-07T22:00:47	2016-09-07	['Iraq']
-snes-05053	Harrison Ford endorsed Donald Trump via a photograph in which he held up a campaign sign.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harrison-ford-holding-a-trump-sign/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Harrison Ford Holding a Trump Sign?	16 March 2016	None	['Harrison_Ford', 'Donald_Trump']
-farg-00049	“In fact the GDP since I’ve taken over has doubled and tripled.”	false	https://www.factcheck.org/2018/07/trump-inflates-gdp-growth/	None	the-factcheck-wire	Donald Trump	Robert Farley	['defense spending']	Trump Inflates GDP Growth	July 13, 2018	[' Newspaper interview – Friday, July 13, 2018 ']	['None']
-pomt-03032	Says "between 6 and 20 bicycles can be parked in the space required by one car."	half-true	/oregon/statements/2013/oct/09/earl-blumenauer/can-6-20-bicycles-fit-single-car-parking-space/	U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer has been associated with many causes during his 17 years in Congress. Bow ties come to mind, as does his support for protecting public lands. As founder and co-chair of the Congressional Bicycle Caucus, Blumenauer has been a leading voice in trying to establish the bicycle as a viable form of urban transportation. On the "Bike and Pedestrian Issues" page of his official website, he says that cycling improves health, is good for the environment and reduces transportation costs. One assertion in particular jumps out. It says, "Between 6 and 20 bicycles can be parked in the space required by one car." PolitiFact Oregon wondered whether that’s true. At first glance, the notion of up to 20 bicycles jammed into a single parking space seems a little much. To get an explanation, we called Blumenauer’s Washington, D.C., office and talked with spokesman Patrick Malone. Malone said the figure came from a paper published in 2011 by researcher Thomas Gotschi. "Costs and Benefits of Bicycling Investments in Portland, Oregon" was published in the Journal of Physical Activity & Health. A close reading does not reveal statistics addressing how many bicycles fit into a parking space. One section includes a sentence reading, "The millions of miles traveled by bike reduce road and parking capacity demand, which is much more costly to provide for cars than for bikes." It’s followed by a footnote, which took us to a second study, published this summer by the Victoria (B.C.) Transport Policy Institute. That 59-page study, written by Todd Litman, states, "10-20 bicycles can typically be stored in the space required for one automobile." Malone also referred to the bike corrals scattered around downtown Portland that hold 12 bicycles each, all in the amount of room needed to park a car. Then, noting two-tiered indoor bike parking available at Portland State University, he added, "If you took the bike corrals we have now and put in double-decker parking with locks and lift assists, you could double that." Scott Cohen, the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s transportation demand management specialist, said Portland has 99 bike corrals. The portion that holds bicycles is 17 feet long and accommodates up to 12 bikes. A standard marked car-parking space is 20 feet long and about 10 feet wide. None of the corrals is the two-tier type mentioned by Malone. So 12 is the highest number of bicycle anyone will see in an area the size of a parking space. Two-tiered bike racks are available online but are primarily designed for commercial storage and retail bike storage and display. Several commercial racks hold as many as 20 bikes in 20 feet, but they need to be mounted to a wall or ceiling and aren’t really designed for outdoor use. Portland-based Alta Planning & Design, which has rolled out its Bicycle Share program in eight cities in the U.S. and abroad, says its racks fit about 10 bicycles in the length of a parking space. What if people simply stood their bikes next to one another or heaped them in a pile? Could 20 bikes fit inside a parking space then? Probably, but those options seem highly unlikely in the United States, and Malone didn’t mention them. Twelve bicycles can be locked safely in downtown Portland bike corrals, but 20 stretches the limits of anything in use -- in Portland and nationwide. The Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center says streetside bike corrals should accommodate 10 to 12 bikes. The Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals recommends spacing so that no more than 12 fit into a parking spot. As for the mechanical lifts available at PSU: Those won’t be showing on city streets anytime soon. City policies allow only one-tier corrals, and businesses that already pay the city $2,600 to install one seem unlikely to want to pony up more. Blumenauer’s office does cite a study with a footnote leading to another study that says 10 to 20 bikes can fit into a single parking spot. The congressman’s website also gives a range of 6 to 20 bikes, while 12 can commonly fit in corrals. So we find his statement Half True.	None	Earl Blumenauer	None	None	None	2013-10-09T17:10:36	2013-09-24	['None']
-pomt-11869	Says the diversity visa lottery program is "a Chuck Schumer beauty."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/nov/01/donald-trump/was-diversity-visa-program-schumer-beauty-donald-t/	The morning after a vehicular terrorist attack in New York City killed at least eight people and injured a dozen others, President Donald Trump blamed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose constituents were among the casualties. Trump on Nov. 1 tweeted, "The terrorist came into our country through what is called the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program,’ a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Hours later at a news conference, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Trump’s tweet was "not helpful" and "wasn’t even accurate as far as I’m concerned, about the bipartisan law that was passed." What do the facts really show? It was misleading of Trump to fully place the lottery program on Schumer’s shoulders. He did sponsor immigration legislation that contained the lottery system. But Trump's tweet ignores the support the measure earned from Republicans as well as Schumer’s more recent actions to rescind the lottery. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com A picture of suspect Sayfullo Saipov is displayed during a news conference about the attack along a bike path in lower Manhattan that is being called a terrorist incident on Nov. 1, 2017, in New York City. (Getty) What is the diversity visa program? Trump said the suspect, Sayfullo Saipov, entered the United States from Uzbekistan under the diversity visa program. The roots of the diversity visa program stem from consequences of a landmark overhaul in 1965 that led to large numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. It moved from a country-by-country quota system to neutral country-of-origin selection criteria for green cards. By the late 1970s and 1980s, a large group of Irish nationals, primarily on the eastern seaboard, had arrived on temporary visas and overstayed, remaining illegally in the country. Irish-American and Italian-American members of Congress joined forces to pass the Immigration Act of 1990, creating a system that would effectively help distant Irish and Italian relatives of those immigrants come to the United States and live permanently and legally. "This lottery was created for Irish and Italians by Irish and Italian Americans, but after a while the beneficiaries lost interest in it," said Anna O. Law, Herbert Kurz Chair of Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. "The countries that are very enthusiastic about the program are in Africa." An annual random lottery system began selecting applicants in 1995 from countries that had low immigration levels in the previous five years, with a cap of 55,000 immigrant visas a year to recipients who meet education or work requirements. The cap is now 50,000, after Congress decided to allocate 5,000 of the 55,000 annual visas to people eligible for the Nicaraguan and Central American Relief Act program. Trump wants to eliminate the diversity visa program and shift to a merit-based immigration system. Schumer was involved in the program’s creation. But there’s more to the legislative story. What was Schumer’s role in creating the lottery? Enacting a diversity lottery had a long and winding road in Congress. It was driven by Democrats but earned Republican votes from many recognizable names today. The White House pointed us to a bill -- H.R. 4165 -- that was introduced on March 1, 1990, when Schumer was serving in the House. Schumer was the lead sponsor of the bill, which had many provisions, including language on diversity visas. That bill received hearings in the House but was eventually rolled into another bill, H.R. 4300. The Democratic-controlled House passed the bill on Oct. 3, 1990, by a margin of 231-192. By party, Democrats supported it 186-65, while Republicans went 47-127. Schumer voted yes -- along with four other Republicans still serving in the House. The four were Dana Rohrabacher of California, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Chris Smith of New Jersey and Don Young of Alaska. Another yes vote came from future Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a frequent Trump ally. Meanwhile, the Senate pursued a companion bill -- S. 358 -- that included the diversity lottery provision, sponsored by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. On Oct. 26, 1990, the Democratic-controlled Senate approved a conference report -- a version of the bill to be taken up in both chambers with identical language -- by an 89-8 margin. Republicans who supported the measure included Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who was then a first-termer, and current Republican Sens. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Orrin Hatch of Utah, John McCain of Arizona, and Richard Shelby of Alabama (who was then a Democrat). In addition, Trump’s director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, voted for the conference report. The House approved the conference report the following day, by a 264-118 margin. This time, a majority of House Republicans voted for the measure, 93-64. The Republican yes votes included Rohrabacher and Ros-Lehtinen, along with two other GOP lawmakers still serving, Joe Barton of Texas and Fred Upton of Michigan. The House passage sent the measure to the desk of President George H.W. Bush. On Nov. 29, 1990, Bush signed it, saying he was "pleased" to do so. "This act recognizes the fundamental importance and historic contributions of immigrants to our country," Bush said upon signing the bill. "Most members of Congress wanted mainly to increase the number of European immigrants, whom they felt were underrepresented in modern U.S. immigration," said Stephen H. Legomsky, an emeritus law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. "As it turned out, the overwhelming majority of diversity visas have gone to Europeans and Africans in roughly equal numbers, far more than to immigrants from any other continents." Schumer’s efforts to eliminate the lottery Whatever responsibility you attribute the program's existence to Schumer, Trump’s tweet ignores his more recent efforts to eliminate the program. During the 2013 effort to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul, Schumer was one of the bipartisan "gang of eight" that negotiated a bill that, among other things, would have eliminated the diversity lottery. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who also belonged to the "gang of eight," replied to Trump’s tweet by offering his support for Schumer. "Actually, the Gang of 8, including @SenSchumer, did away with the Diversity Visa Program as part of broader reforms. I know, I was there," Flake tweeted. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com That bill passed the Senate, 68-32, but it died when members who support low levels of immigration, predominantly Republicans, prevented any action in the GOP-controlled House. Our ruling Trump said the diversity visa lottery program is "a Chuck Schumer beauty." Schumer did introduce legislation, 27 years ago, that included initial language establishing the diversity visa lottery. However, Schumer was hardly the only politician with a role in its passage. The bill was signed by a Republican president, and the final version of the legislation received majority Republican support in both chambers of Congress, In fact, McConnell and several other Republicans still in office voted for the bill. Moreover, Trump’s tweet ignores that Schumer, just four years ago, worked to pass a bill that would have ended the lottery, but it died due to Republican opposition in the House. We rate the statement Mostly False. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2017-11-01T13:27:37	2017-11-01	['Chuck_Schumer']
-pomt-10480	Says she is the subject of 60 books.	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/apr/16/hillary-clinton/yes-from-american-evita-to-the-very-unof/	Hillary Clinton has been good for the book business. She's sold lots of her own books ($10.5-million in royalties from 2000-2007, according to her tax returns), and she has inspired dozens more by her friends and enemies. At a forum on faith issues in Grantham, Pa., on April 13, 2008, Clinton was asked about her comments that she had felt the presence of the Holy Spirit. She replied that since she was young, she had felt the presence of God many times. She added, "You know, I am someone who has talked a lot about my life. You know more about my life than you know about nearly anybody else's, about 60 books' worth, some of which are, you know, frankly, a little bit off-base." She has mentioned the 60-book figure several times before. We wondered if she was right. We don't normally rely on Wikipedia as a primary source for PolitiFact because it's open-to-all-editors approach raises questions about its accuracy, but we found it has the most complete list of Clinton books. It conveniently separates them into volumes by Clinton herself, as well as those that take an anti-Clinton and pro-Clinton approach. From Clinton herself there is It Takes a Village and Living History, not to mention her senior honors thesis, "There Is Only the Fight...": An Analysis of the Alinsky Model." The pro-Clinton books include The Case for Hillary Clinton and Hillary's Turn: Inside Her Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign. The anti-Clinton market must be considerably more lucrative because it has four times the pro-Clinton offerings. The anti-Clinton books include Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House, Can She be Stopped? and Hillary's Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House. The "mostly neutral" books include Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge and Judith Warner's Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story. We also found some intriguing scholarly studies: The Rhetorical Construction of the Female Politician in Newspapers: How National Newspapers Portrayed Katherine Harris and Hillary Clinton During Controversial Times and Hillary Rodham Clinton as 'Madonna': The Role of Metaphor and Oxymoron in Image Restoration. We checked the count on WorldCat.org, an online catalog of books. We only counted books in English, which meant we excluded Hillary Clinton: die machtigste Frau der Welt, and we skipped The Hillary Clinton Voodoo Kit: Stick It to Her, Before She Sticks It to You! because it sounded more novelty item than literature. Our WorldCat search came up with 48 books. Wikipedia's list was more complete: 69 books if you include the scholarly studies, 58 if you don't. So Clinton was in the ballpark. We rate her statement True.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2008-04-16T00:00:00	2008-04-13	['None']
-pomt-03211	"State law says that once the state appraises a piece of property, they can only pay it a certain amount above appraisal."	true	/georgia/statements/2013/aug/26/kasim-reed/mayor-correct-state-stadium-spending-limitations/	Plans to build a new $1 billion stadium in downtown Atlanta may sound like a project with limitless cash. But there are boundaries concerning what can be spent, according to a key player in the effort. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed recently took to the radio to discuss the fractured negotiations with Mount Vernon Baptist Church’s leaders to buy its property. The land on which that historic church sits is necessary to build the new sports facility on a preferred site. State officials have said they cannot offer any more than the highest appraised value it receives, $6.2 million in this case. The church initially said a fair price is about $20 million. PolitiFact originally rated Reed’s claim False. But state Attorney General Sam Olens disagreed, saying the mayor was correct. Reed, too, asked us to rethink our rating. PolitiFact decided to do more digging and reconsider its original ruling, drawing in more expertise. (You can read the original fact-check by going to this link: http://www.politifact.com/georgia/kasim-reed-stadium/.) The mayor said the state, specifically the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, which is in charge of negotiations with the church, can only offer a certain amount of money. Reed explained during an Aug. 7 interview with Sports Radio 680 The Fan. "The state has some limitations on what they can pay above the appraised price. ... We’re not going to be able to pay Mount Vernon $19.5 million because of the constraints that the state has in what they can pay," Reed said on the station’s program "The Front Row." The mayor went into more detail about a minute later. "State law says that once the state appraises a piece of property, they can only pay a certain amount above appraisal," Reed said. PolitiFact Georgia wondered whether the mayor is correct. Is the state limited on how far it can move the financial goal posts to strike a deal with the church? The Atlanta Falcons have been working with the city, the GWCCA and others on a deal to build a new stadium, replacing the Georgia Dome, which is owned by the state. The city would prefer to build the new stadium on land south of the Dome, in large part because of its accessibility to MARTA rail lines. In order to build on that site, the city would need land where two longtime churches stand, Friendship Baptist Church and Mount Vernon. The initial deadline to work out a deal with the churches was Aug. 1. Although the city struck a deal with Friendship, the GWCCA was unable to do so with Mount Vernon. Reed held a news conference Aug. 6 asking all involved to continue the discussions. The $6.2 million value is included in a two-page revised appraisal letter completed July 30 for the state. The letter provides an "as-is" value for the church. The letter lists the value for the church at $30 per square foot, or roughly $3.4 million for 113,000 square feet. An additional $2.8 million is included for parking revenue. Reed’s communications director, Sonji Jacobs, referred to language in the Georgia Constitution, known as the Gratuities Clause, to explain the mayor’s point. State Properties Commission spokeswoman Cindy Presto referenced the same language in the constitution -- Article III, Section VI, Paragraph VI(a) -- when we contacted the agency seeking help. It reads: "Except as otherwise provided in the Constitution, (1) the General Assembly shall not have the power to grant any donation or gratuity or to forgive any debt or obligation owing to the public, and (2) the General Assembly shall not grant or authorize extra compensation to any public officer, agent, or contractor after the service has been rendered or the contract entered into." Said Jacobs: "Basically, if the state does not pay appraised value, it could be thought to be providing an unearned benefit, which is not allowed under Georgia law." Olens said in an email to PolitiFact that his office has for decades interpreted the Gratuities Clause in the state constitution as limiting the state to "paying fair market value for property, absent some additional source of value that the state receives from the transaction." The Attorney General’s Office believes there’s no gray area concerning state guidelines on appraisals, said Lauren Kane, a spokeswoman for Olens. "It’s a black and white issue," she said. Kane said the appraisal value, absent a special circumstance, is considered the fair-market value that can be paid for a property. The proposed $1 billion stadium, she said, is not considered a special circumstance. When there is a dispute in appraisals, the state agency in some cases may accept the higher appraisal, Kane said. "But as a general matter, the highest appraisal is the limit of what an agency may pay absent special circumstances," she said. "No such dispute exists here, and there are no special circumstances." The Attorney General’s Office has been involved in the negotiations with Mount Vernon. Kane said her office is unaware of any instances in which the state Supreme Court ruled contrary to attorney general opinions concerning the Gratuities Clause. The attorney general is the top attorney for state agencies, Olens said. He said the GWCCA must abide by attorney general rulings like this one. Olens is correct if a state agency is buying the property, Emory University law professor Frank Alexander said. "An attorney general’s opinion under Georgia law is the opinion of the attorney general. It is usually seen to be binding for the AG’s clients, which are the state agencies," Alexander said. GWCCA spokeswoman Jennifer LeMaster said the sole purchaser of the Mount Vernon property would be the state, or the GWCCA as the state agency involved in the negotiations. On the purchase price guidelines, the agency defers to the attorney general, she said. Reed has worked independently to reach a deal with the church, announcing recently that Mount Vernon would agree to $15.5 million. But any amount over the $6.2 million would have to come from another party, likely in the form of a gift, LeMaster said. Will the deal for Mount Vernon be limited only to the $6.2 million in state money? Or will "some other resources," as Reed described them in the interview, come into play. Stay tuned. Reed’s statement is based largely on the state attorney general’s interpretation of a portion of the Georgia Constitution, which is appropriate because the land will be purchased by a state agency. Given that, we reverse our earlier ruling. We rate Reed’s statement True.	None	Kasim Reed	None	None	None	2013-08-26T00:00:00	2013-08-07	['None']
-goop-00146	Did Adam Sandler Help Justin Bieber Break Into Acting?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-bieber-adam-sandler-acting/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Did Adam Sandler Help Justin Bieber Break Into Acting?	10:52 am, October 12, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01572	Prince Charles Crushing On Meghan Markle?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/prince-charles-crushing-on-meghan-markle/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Prince Charles Crushing On Meghan Markle?	3:15 am, February 15, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-06485	Says "There are now Occupy Wall Street camps in hundreds of cities across the United States."	mostly false	/oregon/statements/2011/oct/15/sam-adams/portland-mayor-sam-adams-occupy-wall-street-protes/	Portland Mayor Sam Adams re-opened Main Street in downtown Portland Thursday morning, but wouldn’t elaborate on what he would do with campers who have occupied two public squares for more than a week now and plan to do so indefinitely. They are part of the Occupy Wall Street protest that started Sept. 17 in New York. "There are now Occupy Wall Street camps in hundreds of cities across the United States," Adams said, "and mayors and police chiefs across the United States are having to make practical day-to-day decisions about keeping the peace, protecting people's legal rights to freedom of expression and at the same time keeping this city and all cities moving." We know Occupy Wall Street protests have spread wildly and widely, but were there actually protest camps in hundreds of U.S. cities? That struck PolitiFact Oregon as a touch on the big side. We set out to find out just how many cities are involved in this growing movement. It turns out answers vary. The website for "Occupy Together," which serves as a hub for people sympathetic to the protests, says there are "Occupy Together Meetups" in more than 1,500 cities. But an "Occupy Wall Street" post Friday says protests have spread to a much smaller "over 100 cities." ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer put the figure at more than 250 U.S. cities (before getting ridiculed for saying it had spread to more than a thousand countries). A CBS News report pegged the spread at 145 cities. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Mayors didn’t have an estimate of cities with protests -- camps or otherwise. You get the picture. So we contacted the mayor’s spokeswoman, Amy Ruiz, who added one more figure to the mix: a link to an Oct. 4 post on DailyKos, which mapped "Occupy" groups in 200 cities, categorized by state. Those turned out to be links to Facebook pages and websites, and there were close to 300 organizations. But the post didn’t quite back up the mayor’s assertion about camps. While some linked to groups with occupying camps, like the one in Portland, others were a lot less developed. Next, we scoured Associated Press stories, looking for local reports of "Occupy Wall Street" events. In the last week we found about 65 cities mentioned, from Trenton, N.J., to Seaside, Ore. The number of cities with protest camps is smaller, with some over-nighters to start Oct. 15. (Check out Occupy Eugene.) Again, a strikeout. Finally, we found an interactive map on Mother Jones’ website. As of Friday afternoon, it listed more than 200 locations, including a handful outside the United States. Again, the notes for each city range from a call to observe the global Oct. 15 event in the Tri-Cities, Wash., to reports of protesters arrested in at least a dozen cities. (Portland is in that rare group.) So, where did that leave us? We called Ruiz. She said the mayor stands by his statement that there are hundreds of U.S. mayors trying to figure out how to balance speech rights with public safety as Occupy Wall Street events spread nationally. But she clarified that he was referring to the entire range of protests, from full-fledged to nascent. "Hundreds of mayors are dealing with this issue," Ruiz said. That could be. But hundreds of mayors are not dealing with indefinite "occupation" camps, at least not yet. And that was the word that triggered our fact check. The thing is, we don’t know how many mayors are dealing with Occupy Wall Street events, whether it’s more than 100, which is not hundreds, or in the 200 to 300 range, as some sites say. Throw in Adams’ specific claim about protest camps, and we rule the mayor’s statement Mostly False. As of Oct. 13, there were not camps in hundreds of cities across the United States. But there may be hundreds of mayors dealing with the issue. The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.	None	Sam Adams	None	None	None	2011-10-15T10:00:00	2011-10-13	['United_States']
-snes-01445	An angry mob in Saudi Arabia beheaded "Sophia," a robot recently awarded citizenship.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/saudi-arabia-beheads-robot/	None	Junk News	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Did Saudi Arabia Behead Its First Robot Citizen?	13 November 2017	None	['Saudi_Arabia']
-pomt-02448	"I've been a cop in Lake County, Michigan, since 1982 thereabout. I conduct federal raids with the DEA and ATF and U.S. Marshals and the FBI and Texas Rangers."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2014/feb/27/ted-nugent/ted-nugent-cnn-i-conduct-federal-raids-dea-and-atf/	Until last week, Ted Nugent was best known as a rock musician, a bow hunter, and an ardent supporter of gun rights. But his recent description of President Barack Obama as a "subhuman mongrel" eclipsed all of that, especially at a time when he has campaigned on behalf of a Texas Republican candidate for governor. Those words are rooted in Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and the writings of white supremacists. The uproar drew a terse apology from the singer of hits such as "Cat Scratch Fever." But in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, he insisted that he had not drawn on the rhetoric of racist literature. At least for the word "mongrel," Nugent said the word was used in his time in law enforcement. "I've been a cop in Lake County, Michigan, since 1982 thereabout. I conduct federal raids with the DEA and ATF and U.S. Marshals and the FBI and Texas Rangers and heroes of law enforcement. "And we are re-arresting fugitive felons let out of their cages after murdering and raping and molesting children, carjacking. And we keep going after these guys. "The adrenaline is something like you will never experience, I hope you never have to experience it, but when we are done with these kinds of raids, we get together and our hearts are broken that we have to face these monsters. We call them mongrels. We call bad people who are destroying our neighborhoods mongrels." Is Nugent a cop? Does he "conduct federal raids with the DEA and ATF and U.S. Marshals and the FBI and Texas Rangers?" We wanted to know. 'I've been a cop in Lake County, Michigan, since 1982 thereabout' Lake County, Mich., is located about 90 miles north of Grand Rapids. It has about 11,500 residents and describes itself as "an outdoor recreation paradise." Nugent is a reservist for the county sheriff's office, Sheriff Robert Hilts told us. But, "He’s never joined us for any raids. Fortunately, we don’t have those sorts of problems up here." Hilts said Nugent has no authority or official responsibilities. The only activity involving Nugent that Hilts could recall was raising money on behalf of the department and for a local boy who has cystic fibrosis. "We’re always searching the woods for a hunter that’s lost or hurt," Hilts said. "He helped us buy a four-wheel drive offroad vehicle so we could reach people faster." 'I conduct federal raids with the DEA and ATF and U.S. Marshals and the FBI and Texas Rangers' Nugent does not seem to be a cop in the way most people would understand that word. The picture was about the same for the federal agencies Nugent named. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) told us, "We are not aware of him conducting any raids with us." We asked the Texas Department of Public Safety on what occasions Nugent had joined Texas Rangers on raids. Press secretary Tom Vinger said, "In regards to your question about the Texas Rangers, that did not occur." Joe Moses, a 22-year veteran special agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told us they have no record or recollection of Nugent participating in any of their operations. However, when there are special projects that involve many federal, state and local agencies, they wouldn’t necessarily know the name of everyone who showed up. At the same time, Moses said there are strict standards for who is involved in an actual raid. "You would not have someone who didn’t hold the status of a police officer or federal agent participate in such an operation," Moses said. The process of arresting a person or collecting evidence must withstand challenge in a courtroom. It is not a place for the inexperienced, Moses told us. The FBI said it could neither confirm nor deny Nugent’s participation in a raid. When we reached out to Nugent, an assistant did not provide evidence that Nugent participated in raids with the FBI, the DEA or the ATF. Instead, Nugent’s assistant Linda Peterson wrote, "Ted has been active in the following: U.S. Marshal Service FALCON fugitive task force arrest raids in Texas …" That’s not quite what it sounds like, either. Nugent and a film crew "went on a ride-along with a U.S. Marshals-led task force in Waco, Texas, in 2005," agency spokesman Dave Oney said. Oney believes they were shooting footage for Nugent’s television show Spirit of the Wild. With the U.S. Marshals, observers work under clear limits. "They cannot go with us into private residences," Oney said. "So, he would have had to remain in the vehicle or on the sidewalk or some other public area." That ride-along took place about nine years ago. No law enforcement agency told us that Nugent has any current role in their efforts to apprehend felons. Other evidence While Nugent’s response to our questions was brief, we did find his description of being at an FBI handgun training facility built around video simulations. The article is undated, but in it Nugent wrote he had recently taken part in Operation FALCON with the U.S. Marshals. Nugent found the training experience very realistic. "Let me tell you, when the room goes dark and the video begins to roll, you become so totally engulfed in the scenario that you are 100 percent psychologically living the event as if it is real life," he wrote. "It is no longer a video as far as your mind tells you." It is possible this may have shaped his recollections. Our ruling Nugent said he is and has been a cop in Michigan and that he conducts raids with several federal and state law enforcement agencies. He said "we are re-arresting fugitive felons" and painted a vivid picture of being with agents immediately afterward. "When we are done with these kinds of raids, we get together and our hearts are broken that we have to face these monsters," Nugent said. The single piece of this narrative that Nugent confirmed is one ride-along with U.S. Marshals in 2005. He is not a cop in Michigan by any conventional meaning of the word. No agency said that he presently plays any role in any of their raids. Nugent may have been passionate but his words take him far beyond the facts. We rate this claim Pants on Fire.	None	Ted Nugent	None	None	None	2014-02-27T10:27:45	2014-02-24	['United_States', 'Michigan', 'Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation', 'Texas_Rangers_(baseball)', 'Drug_Enforcement_Administration']
-hoer-01033	The Owner of Audi is Going to Give You A Car For Liking and Sharing	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/no-the-owner-of-audi-is-not-going-to-give-you-a-car-for-liking-and-sharing/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	No, The Owner of Audi is NOT Going to Give You A Car For Liking and Sharing	February 22, 2017	None	['None']
-obry-00028	On July 26, Foxconn Technology Group announced plans to invest $10 billion to build a new factory in Wisconsin. The unveiling of the plan was made at the White House, with Foxconn chairman Terry Gou along with President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Gov. Scott Walker, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. In light of Walker’s 2018 re-election campaign as well as a national concern over the health of American manufacturing, the news was significant. State officials later negotiated an agreement calling for the Taiwanese manufacturer to receive up to $3 billion in state tax subsidies — an incentive that some elected officials, primarily Democrats, questioned as the tax breaks were written into law. The deal for the new LCD screen manufacturing complex has since passed the Legislature and was signed by Walker, cementing Foxconn as the largest foreign recipient of state subsidies in the nation. As the deal headed toward final approval, political leaders chimed in on the impact, both positive and negative of the plant, which is to be built in Mount Pleasant in Racine County. 	mostly_true	https://observatory.journalism.wisc.edu/2017/12/04/wisconsin-leaders-both-praise-and-decry-foxconn-deal-we-examine-their-claims/	None	None	None	Max Bayer	None	Wisconsin leaders both praise and decry Foxconn deal; we examine their claims	December 4, 2017	None	['United_States', 'Wisconsin', 'Democratic_Party_(United_States)', 'White_House', 'Taiwan', 'Mike_Pence', 'Foxconn', 'Racine,_Wisconsin', 'Donald_Trump', 'Paul_Ryan', 'Scott_Walker_(politician)']
-goop-02629	Billy Ray Cyrus “Diva” With “Huge Entourage” At “Wendy Williams Show,” 	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/billy-ray-cyrus-not-diva-entourage-wendy-williams-show/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Billy Ray Cyrus NOT “Diva” With “Huge Entourage” At “Wendy Williams Show,” Despite Claim	12:33 pm, July 29, 2017	None	['Billy_Ray_Cyrus', 'Entourage_(TV_series)']
-goop-02403	Miranda Lambert, Blake Shelton In “Race” To Get Married?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/miranda-lambert-race-beat-blake-shelton-married/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Miranda Lambert, Blake Shelton In “Race” To Get Married?	2:30 pm, September 29, 2017	None	['Miranda_Lambert', 'Blake_Shelton']
-tron-03626	Kyle, the 14-year-old who died inhaling Dust-Off	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/dustoff/	None	warnings	None	None	None	Kyle, the 14-year-old who died inhaling Dust-Off	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pose-00263	"Will use controlled burns and prescribed natural fire to reduce such fuels in close coordination with those communities that are most at risk. Thousands of jobs will be created by working with communities to thin unnaturally crowded forests close to homes. And by coordinating fuel reduction efforts with biomass energy projects, communities will have the potential to generate new sources of low cost energy. Resources will be focused where they will do the most good: in the wildland-urban interface, and not in fighting fires or on logging projects in remote, backcountry areas."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/279/more-controlled-burns-to-reduce-wildfires/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	More controlled burns to reduce wildfires	2010-01-07T13:26:53	None	['None']
-snes-02520	Prayers are requested for the Darkhorse Marine battalion fighting in Afghanistan.	outdated	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/darkhorse-battalion/	None	Inboxer Rebellion	None	David Mikkelson	None	Prayer Request: Darkhorse Marine Battalion	9 November 2010	None	['Afghanistan']
-snes-06272	A woman claimed she became pregnant from viewing a 3D porn film.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pregnant-from-3d-film/	None	Junk News	None	Snopes Staff	None	Did a Woman Claim That Watching a 3D Porn Film Made Her Pregnant?	2 November 2011	None	['None']
-snes-06345	The 'Dell Dude' commercials ended because pitchman Benjamin Curtis was arrested for marijuana possession.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dude-youre-getting-the-boot/	None	Entertainment	None	David Mikkelson	None	Firing of the Dell Dude	16 February 2003	None	['None']
-tron-00023	House Bill Would Charge Veterans For GI Bill Benefits	truth! & outdated!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/house-bill-charge-veterans-gi-benefits/	None	9-11-attack	None	None	None	House Bill Would Charge Veterans For GI Benefits	Dec 11, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-09646	The "post-Soviet industrial meltdown is responsible for most of the progress in reducing carbon emissions that Europe is able to claim."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/09/eugene-robinson/robinson-claims-fall-ussr-meant-big-drop-greenhous/	This week, world leaders are meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, to try to hammer out a global climate accord. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson had this to say about the upcoming summit in his Dec. 1, 2009, column: "When the Copenhagen climate summit convenes next week, the European nations that have led the crusade against global warming will be able to report that the continent has met the targets for carbon-emission reductions set in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. There may be shoulder dislocations from all the self-congratulatory back-patting," Robinson wrote. "But the Kyoto targets were well on the way toward being met before they were even established. The targets are based on 1990 emissions levels -- after the Soviet Union and the East Bloc had been fouling the air for years with their antiquated, carbon-spewing heavy industries. When the communist regimes -- and their creaky economies -- collapsed in a heap, emissions from the former Soviet-dominated zone fell by nearly 40 percent. ... This post-Soviet industrial meltdown is responsible for most of the progress in reducing carbon emissions that Europe is able to claim." Like Robinson, we expect the next 10 days to be full of complicated discussion about carbon emissions and reductions -- and a lot of boasting by the United States, Europe and other countries about all they're doing to slow climate change. So his claim about emissions reductions in former Soviet territory intrigued us. But before we dig into this statement, a little background on the meeting in Copenhagen will be useful. It's arguably the most important climate gathering since 1997, when participating countries adopted the Kyoto Protocol in Kyoto, Japan. Collectively, 38 industrialized countries -- otherwise known as Annex B countries -- committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels. At the time, 15 of those countries were members of the nascent European Union. The rest included Canada, Australia, and a handful of Eastern European countries recently liberated from the former Soviet Union; the protocol refers to these nations as "economies in transition." The United States never ratified the treaty. In fact, according to data from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Web site -- an international treaty written in 1992 meant to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations -- our emissions have increased 17 percent over 1990 levels. The protocol went into force in 2005, and it expires in 2012. So, world leaders are gathering in Copenhagen with the hope of laying the groundwork for the next round of emissions reductions. However, it's unclear what will actually be accomplished at the meeting. Congress has been slow to act on a cap-and-trade bill , which was initially considered the United States' strongest bargaining chip. And negotiations haven't been helped by news of hacked e-mails between climate scientists at Climate Research Unit that skeptics say show disagreement on the seriousness of global warming. Historical data from the UNFCCC show that greenhouse gas emissions in Eastern Europe dropped dramatically after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. For example, Ukraine's annual carbon dioxide emissions dropped from 715 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 1990 to 426 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 1994. All the experts we spoke with agreed this drop was due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. They also told us that a specific drop of "nearly 40 percent" was also in the ballpark. We asked Robinson, and he pointed us to this post on the Green Grok, a respected blog about environmental issues maintained by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, that includes a chart of emissions reductions derived from the most recent UNFCCC data. Indeed, in 2007, emissions from eastern European countries were still about 37 percent below 1990 levels, according to the blog. They agreed that Robinson's second point -- that the "post-Soviet industrial meltdown is responsible for most of the progress in reducing carbon emissions that Europe is able to claim" -- has some truth to it. But they also told us that the story is more complicated than Robinson makes it seem. Emissions in Europe have fallen for several reasons, said Michael Levi, director of the program on energy security and climate change for the Council on Foreign Relations. For example, during the 1990s, the United Kingdom switched from coal energy to natural gas, which helped trim emissions. And Europe's population has remained relatively flat. But more importantly, Europe has had some pretty serious policies in place to reduce emissions, Levi said, including a carbon trading plan and incentives for alternative energy production. "Overall, [Robinson's] point is correct, but it's overstated," he said. Prasad Kasibhatla, associate professor at Nicholas School, agreed. "The essence of the claim by Eugene Robinson is indeed correct," he wrote us in an e-mail. "According to the latest year of reporting (2007), emission reductions in the EU-15 were driven largely by large reductions in Germany and the U.K. Part of the large reductions in Germany were driven by reunification with East Germany and part of the large reductions in the U.K. were driven by switch from coal to natural gas due to reforms of energy markets." Those variables paired with new climate change policies have reduced emissions in Western European countries by 4 percent, according to UNFCCC data. In an e-mail, Robinson agreed that he may have glossed over that point. "The EU countries did reduce emissions by 4 percent; I gave them credit for holding emissions down but perhaps not enough credit for the actual reduction." We also think it may have been more accurate for Robinson to clarify that the "Europeans" included the transitioning economies from the former Soviet bloc. But Robinson argued that his overall point stands. "The point I was trying to make, and I still believe it's valid, is that the Soviet bloc collapse created a huge, one-time fall-off in emissions that makes the numbers look better than they otherwise would against the Kyoto targets," he wrote. With that point, we concur. Our experts tell us that it's widely understood that the fall of the Soviet Union meant major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. But they also said that Robinson glosses over important points in his statement, including that many European Union countries have taken key steps to slow climate change. We give Robinson a Mostly True.	None	Eugene Robinson	None	None	None	2009-12-09T16:34:41	2009-12-01	['Europe', 'Post-Soviet_states']
-pomt-11297	"Out of 860 bills (Sen. Bill Nelson has) introduced in Congress, only 10 have passed."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2018/apr/20/republican-party-florida/florida-republicans-attack-sen-bill-nelsons-legisl/	Florida Republicans unveiled a website that portrays U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., as a do-nothing career politician. "Out of 860 bills he’s introduced in Congress, only 10 have passed," said the website No More Nelson, sponsored by the Republican Party of Florida. The Republican attack coincided with Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s announcement that he would take on Nelson in November. It’s a common strategy to attack incumbents for not having many of their bills signed into law. Our review found that Nelson has not sponsored many bills that became law. But the simple pass-fail ratio omits other ways in which members of Congress can influence legislation, and there are significant problems with the GOP’s choice of words and numbers. Mangling Nelson’s legislative record It is not surprising that these figures, easily extracted from Congress.gov, found their way into a soundbite. But they are a trap. It is difficult to extract quantitative takeaways from the qualitative work of legislating. Nelson’s Congress.gov profile includes links to about 860 measures that Nelson sponsored. Narrowed to those that became law, there are 10 results. But the Republicans’ comparison is flawed. While they referred to the 860 count as "bills," less than half were bills. The remainder were amendments or resolutions, including a designation of National Tourism Week (which passed) and a more meaty action to help Medicare users pay for prescription drugs (which never reached a vote). Narrowing the data to only sponsored bills shows about 360 results. The larger GOP tally also includes dozens of duplicates for when Nelson introduced the same or similar bill more than once. For example, Nelson introduced the Truth in Caller ID Act three times in 2006, 2007 and 2009 before it became law in 2010. The Republicans should have been more precise in the second half of the claim, too: The party said only 10 bills from Nelson "have passed." Those were actually the 10 measures that made it into law. There’s a broader category of legislation that "passed" one chamber even if it didn’t become law. By that count, Nelson had 77 measures that passed the Senate and seven that passed the House. The broader view includes minor measures such as naming a courthouse, recognizing the Negro Baseball League and commending the Marlins for winning the World Series. When a bill passes one chamber, it is largely out of the member's control whether that bill passes the second chamber. Most major bills are worked out between committee chairs and members in leadership. The problems with the 10/860 ratio don’t end there. The Republicans stuffed the pot to include 860 Nelson’s bills, resolutions and hundreds of amendments. But their tally does not address the outcome of Nelson’s hundreds of amendments at all, focusing only on the 10 enacted bills or resolutions. Nelson’s Congress.gov profile shows that dozens of amendments were approved in the Senate by unanimous consent or voice vote — a sign that they weren’t controversial — and a handful were approved in roll call votes. But the 10/860 comparison doesn’t capture that success. Bottom line: If the Republicans wanted to make an apples-and-apples case, then they should have only looked at bills sponsored. "The Republican claim appears to be a jumbled mess," said Steven Smith, a Washington University in St. Louis political scientist. "Legislative provisions that are counted for the 860 tally also should be counted among the provisions approved by the Senate or both houses of Congress. They are not, and so (it) understates the success of the senator’s efforts." The Republicans have been more careful about describing bills "passed" versus "enacted into law" in other places. On Twitter, for instance, the Republicans said Nelson’s "batting average = .012 bills signed into law." We can see their math (10/860). But congressional experts said aside from being misleading, it’s also meaningless. "Members introduce bills for many reasons — to lay out markers, to set the stage for something that has to incubate for a long time, to make a statement," said Norman Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute. "Conflating bills, amendments and resolutions is not fair. And getting something through one house is a big step — especially if the other party controls the other house. I wonder what the same standard would show for Marco Rubio or the other Republicans in the Senate." We did, too. Following the same formula as the GOP, we looked at Rubio’s 476 pieces of sponsored measures and found three bills that became law. Remember, using the Republicans’ methodology, we should count Rubio’s hundreds of amendments in that 476-measure total but exclude the outcome of the amendments. Rubio’s "batting average" would be .006 for sponsored legislation signed into law. Pointing this out isn’t to pick on Rubio, but to show that the attack is a lousy way to evaluate any lawmaker’s record. Counting enacted bills doesn’t tell the full story The numbers also don’t show the many other ways to evaluate the effectiveness of a member. Members can lobby colleagues to include language in other bills, hold hearings, negotiate agreements or provide constituent service (for example, help with getting Social Security benefits). A member may enact a single bill, but it could be an incredibly important law. Or a member might enact a lot of bills that are minor, such as renaming post offices. "Measuring the number of laws per member, or the ratio of laws to bills, is a terrible way to assess his/her success as a member of Congress," said University of Miami political science professor Gregory Koger. Nelson’s office pointed to several examples in which he played a role in legislation even if he didn’t sponsor a bill that passed. Nelson worked with former Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., to enact legislation to ban oil drilling off much of Florida’s Gulf Coast through 2022. Nelson was the cosponsor of a bill by Martinez, but a few months later it evolved into a separate bill that included a buffer off Florida’s coasts until 2022 — without Nelson’s name. Nelson’s office also showed PolitiFact about a dozen examples of bills Nelson sponsored in the Senate but a similar version, often in the House, was signed into law. For example, Nelson sponsored a bill to extend the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 for one year. The House version to extend the act for 10 years became law in 2013. Smith said that the Republicans failed to acknowledge the reality of being a legislator in the minority. "It is difficult for a minority party member to get credit for legislative activity when the majority party wants to deny him a high success rate," he said. "I find the Republican claim to be virtually meaningless." Nelson enjoyed majority Democratic control in the House from 1979-91. He has been in the U.S. Senate since 2001, including stretches when Democrats were in the minority and majority. Our ruling The Republican Party of Florida said out of 860 bills Nelson has introduced in Congress "only 10 have passed." The Republicans have boiled down Nelson’s legislative record into a sound bite that has several holes. Those 860 measures are not all bills, but also amendments and resolutions. While the Republicans said Nelson only had 10 bills that "passed," that number refers to bills and resolutions enacted into law. Nelson "passed" more bills than that during his time in both chambers. What’s more, the GOP’s math did not factor in the outcome of Nelson’s successful amendments. The Republicans omit ways in which Nelson — or any other member — can exert influence on legislation, or when a similar idea is that he didn’t sponsor is signed by the president. We see how any politician’s legislative scorecard invites a mathematical analysis. But this takeaway of Nelson’s time is woefully flawed. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Republican Party of Florida	None	None	None	2018-04-20T13:24:12	2018-04-09	['United_States_Congress', 'Bill_Nelson']
-tron-01606	The Muslim Brotherhood Has Infiltrated The White House	unproven!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/muslim-brotherhood-in-white-house-050813/	None	government	None	None	None	The Muslim Brotherhood Has Infiltrated The White House	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-02555	Super Bowl Rigged	fiction! & satire!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/super-bowl-2014-rigged/	None	miscellaneous	None	None	None	Super Bowl Rigged	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-tron-03414	Black Mass at Harvard to Reenact Satanic Rituals	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/harvard-black-mass/	None	religious	None	None	None	Black Mass at Harvard to Reenact Satanic Rituals	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-bove-00246	Yogi Adityanath’s Comment On Taj Mahal Is NOT Fake News	none	https://www.boomlive.in/yogi-adityanaths-comment-on-taj-mahal-is-not-fake-news/	None	None	None	None	None	Yogi Adityanath’s Comment On Taj Mahal Is NOT Fake News	Jun 16 2017 3:47 pm, Last Updated: Jun 16 2017 4:26 pm	None	['None']
-snes-05094	A massive recall of chicken nuggets is underway after authorities in Iowa found human remains in a meat processing facility.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chicken-nugget-murder-recall/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Chicken Nugget Murder Recall?	9 March 2016	None	['None']
-tron-01665	White House Staffers Got Hefty Pay Raises	mostly truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/white-house-staffers-pay-raise/	None	government	None	None	None	White House Staffers Got Hefty Pay Raises	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-snes-05485	Patients can circumvent insurance company claim denials by requesting a specific form of documentation, as the insurance company will opt to simply cover the cost rather than provide the paperwork.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hipaa-medical-hack-insurance-claim-denials/	None	Medical	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Does a HIPAA ‘Medical Hack’ Avoid Insurance Claim Denials?	15 December 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-03763	Says rabid animals from other states carry "different strains of rabies" that Florida "vaccines and serums don’t affect."	false	/florida/statements/2013/apr/04/marion-hammer/nra-lobbyist-marion-hammer-says-rabies-vaccine-doe/	Marion Hammer, 35-year lobbyist of the National Rifle Association, is a powerful force for gun rights in Florida. So it surprised us to see her speak up at a Florida Senate committee discussion about, of all topics, animal shelters. The measure at hand would require animal shelters and animal control agencies that accept public money to keep records for the cats and dogs they take in and what happens to them. Many facilities don’t keep this kind of data and do not make the information public upon request, making it hard to grasp the scope of rescue efforts, according to a committee analysis of SB 674. Hammer is executive director of the United Sportsmen of Florida, an advocacy group she founded that values hunting. Essential to hunting are hunting dogs, which are vulnerable to bites from rabid animals. Animal "dumping" by no-kill animal shelters endangers hunting dogs, sheepdogs, cattle dogs, trial dogs and so on, she said. She thinks the bill requiring shelters to keep records of their animal intake will lead to accountability and less risk for domestic pets. "Most people don't know, for example, that animals that come from other states, like Texas, carry different strains of rabies," she told the Senate Community Affairs Committee on April 2. "And those strains of rabies are entirely different from Florida's, and our vaccines and serums don’t affect those other strains of rabies." Anyone who has watched Old Yeller knows the tragic fate awaiting an unvaccinated family pet infected by a rabid animal. We wondered, though, if Hammer was right about rabies vaccines not being effective against rabid animals from other states. Rabid rundown The viral disease is passed on through saliva, affecting the brain and eventually leading to death. Cases of human rabies are rare in the United States, though humans are most likely to contract the disease from wild mammals, such as bats, skunks, raccoons and foxes, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Rabies is preventable by a vaccine made from killed virus. The vaccine is given in a series of three to five shots in the shoulder. For those wondering, the vaccine cannot cause rabies. (Read more about how the vaccine is made here.) There are different strains of rabies based on the animal that tends to contract it, and these variants can cross species, said Dr. Kimberly May, a veterinarian and American Veterinary Medicine Association spokeswoman. The canine rabies strain, for example, is no longer in the United States, but dogs and other mammals can still be infected by strains from other animals. Moving animals from state to state can increase the risk of bringing in variants of the rabies strain, said Dr. Julie Levy, director of the Maddie’s Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine. She pointed to two Florida examples, including in 1994, when rabid coyotes were brought from Texas for foxpen hunting in Florida. It led to an outbreak among unvaccinated hunting dogs, resulting in the vaccinations of 29 people and euthanization of dozens of dogs and wildlife, she said. About the vaccine? Hammer "couldn’t be more wrong about rabies," May stressed. The protections offered by rabies vaccines do not vary by region. "A dog vaccinated against rabies in Florida is also considered vaccinated against rabies in Illinois," she said by email. "Or Texas. Or any other state." Levy agreed, saying the vaccines are highly protective. "That is why dogs and cats that are well-vaccinated against rabies are protected against the strains that are carried by wildlife," Levy said. "The bigger risk would be introducing new strains into our wildlife reservoirs, because wildlife is not vaccinated." We posed the question to Dr. Charles Rupprecht, research director for the Global Alliance for Rabies Control. Same answer: "All licensed human and animal vaccines will protect against all rabies virus variants in the New World." After reading our inquiry, Hammer called her veterinarian. She had checked with him before the meeting to confirm what an Alachua hunting dog breeder told her about varying strains of rabies from Texas. But she forgot to ask about the vaccine part. "Now they’ve got it worked out so it that vaccine works for just about everyone," she said after talking again with her vet. "I just didn’t take it far enough." Our ruling Hammer claimed rabies strains carried by animals in other states "are entirely different from Florida's, and our vaccines and serums don’t affect those other strains of rabies." Her claim about vaccines was rebutted by veterinarians and disease experts. Even more, she admitted not fleshing out her talking points before the committee meeting. We rate her claim False.	None	Marion Hammer	None	None	None	2013-04-04T10:09:58	2013-04-02	['None']
-pomt-13885	"During the (Benghazi) attack, a stand-down order was given, and our troops were told to change their clothes four times."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/30/sean-hannity/hannity-misleads-claim-about-benghazi-stand-down-o/	Was the United States’ military response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, hampered because the State Department couldn't decide what the troops should wear? That's one of the suggestions that Fox News host Sean Hannity offered in summarizing the Republican-written report on the crisis, released June 28 by the House Select Committee on Benghazi. "During the attack, a stand-down order was given, and our troops were told to change their clothes four times, and we needed, you know, permission from the Libyans to actually save Americans, and that's what they were discussing" in Washington, Hannity said on his program that evening. For this fact-check, we'll look at the alleged stand-down order and whether troops were told to change their clothes four times while the attack was under way. The short answers, based on the committee's report: The stand-down order was actually an order to wait while CIA officials tried to make sure its security team didn't get into a firefight with friendly militia. The order for troops to change clothes was unrelated and came hours after everyone had already been evacuated from Benghazi, not "during the attack." We'll go through this chronologically. All times are Libyan. Washington was six hours behind. The ‘stand-down’ order The attack on the mission compound began at 9:42 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2012, when seven American staff members were inside, along with five diplomatic security agents. In addition, the United States was using local militia to help provide protection, so there were three armed members of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, who lived on the compound and helped provide security, and five unarmed members of the Blue Mountain Guard Force. According to the Benghazi committee report, a frantic call for help immediately went out to the CIA annex about a mile away. The annex security team, known as the GRS, started getting their gear together as annex officials made fruitless calls trying to contact the local groups, including the February 17 militia, they had been working with. Their goal: find out who was involved in the fight and whether they could get additional equipment. With the sounds of gunfire in the distance and occasional tracer bullets flying overhead, the security team was eager to get going. Yet the officer in charge — the chief of base — was telling them to wait because the calls to the militias were not being answered. He and his deputy, who are unnamed, said they didn't want the team mistakenly getting into a firefight with friendly militia forces. Although sending the security squad and all the heavy weaponry from the annex to the mission would leave the annex defenseless, according to the report, the top officials at the annex gave them the green light, according to the testimony. At 10:05 p.m., 23 minutes after the frantic call from the mission, the annex team was rolling. Kris Paronto, a former Army ranger, is one of the men who rushed to the compound from the CIA annex to help bring people back. "Thirty minutes we were told to wait," he told Hannity June 28. "Twice the word 'wait' was used. Once the words 'stand down' was used. But to me that's semantics." Not exactly. The dictionary definition of a stand-down order means your force is no longer on alert or operational. The chief of the annex was adamant that he never told the security team to actually stand down — only to wait. While members of the security team reported hearing the phrase "stand down," the narrative in the GOP report offers no evidence that, contrary to Hannity's claim, the team was told it wasn't going to be sent to help. Assistance from Tripoli It was around the time the annex security team was departing that U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and communications specialist Sean Smith apparently died from smoke inhalation from a diesel fire set by the attackers. They had been taking refuge in a safe room in the compound. Just after 11 p.m., President Barack Obama gave clear directions to do everything possible to save Americans, according to the report. At 11:23 p.m., with Stevens missing, State Department personnel were evacuated to the CIA annex. At 12:30 a.m., a six-man security team was dispatched to Benghazi from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. They had no official transportation and had to use a private plane. By 1 a.m. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had unequivocally ordered troops to deploy. At the time, another mob was gathering at the CIA annex where people had been evacuated. At 1:30 a.m., the six-member Tripoli team arrived at the Benghazi airport, but it took hours to arrange transportation to the annex. There was a delay because they wanted to get to Stevens, who was reportedly in a hospital. When they learned that he had been pronounced dead, they had to figure out which militia group at the airport could safely get them to the CIA annex. They arrived just in time to help repel an attack at 5:15 a.m., where mortar fire hitting the roof killed personal security specialists Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, both former Navy SEALs. Coincidentally, it was Libyan forces who were former loyalists of Muammar Gaddafi, whose regime was toppled a year earlier, who got the Americans out of the compound to the Benghazi airport in 50 heavily-armed security vehicles, the report says. A CIA operative stumbled onto the group while trying to get help. The first flight of survivors to Tripoli left at 7:31 a.m., flown by the private aircraft used by the Tripoli embassy team. The second plane, provided by the Libyan Air Force, left for Tripoli at 9:54 a.m. The attacks were over. The clothing controversy hadn't begun to unfold. Three-hour delay over clothing? Fleet Antiterrorism Security Teams (FAST) based in Rota, Spain, had been ordered to Benghazi and Tripoli. Those Marines turned out to be anything but fast. They had no way to get to Libya. The call for a C-130 transport came in the middle of the night to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. But none of the personnel were on alert, so it took hours to assemble that team. At the time the last of the evacuees had left Benghazi, the Marines were still waiting for transport. Two planes touched down around noon. They were loaded by 1 p.m. And then, according to the GOP report, they sat there. Neither the Republican report nor the minority report released by Democratic members on June 27 offers a solid explanation for the three-hour delay. The GOP report quotes the platoon commander, who is not named, as testifying that the Marines were told multiple times to change from camouflage to civilian attire and back again. In all, there were four changes. There was indecision because some officials didn't want it to appear that the arrival of the Marines constituted a United States invasion of Libya, which might have sparked violence, officials said. "State was very, very concerned about what the footprint would look like in Tripoli. They didn’t want it to look like we were invading," according to testimony by Navy Vice Adm. Kurt Tidd, who was then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But why that took three hours to resolve is a mystery. A transcript of the platoon commander's interview shows that he was getting his information from his company commander in the next plane. The committee did not interview the company commander. It's also not clear why the troops, who were carrying both sets of clothing, didn't just take off and change into the appropriate attire just before landing. We posed that question to the White House and Department of Defense, and didn't hear back. Finally, just to add to the confusion, the newest account differs in its details from a House Armed Services Committee report, again authored by Republicans, from February 2014. It said that General Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee that once the FAST team got under way, it landed at a "forward-basing location" so the Marines could change into civilian clothes." The latest report makes no mention of a stop. The FAST team arrived in Tripoli at 8:56 p.m., 23 hours after the attack. Our ruling Hannity said, "During the (Benghazi) attack, a stand-down order was given, and our troops were told to change their clothes four times." Hannity is mashing up two different incidents. There was no order to give up on the rescue effort altogether; rather, security personnel held their position about a mile away for 23 minutes as they gathered equipment and attempted to make contact with personnel on the ground. Separately, several hours later and in Spain, Marines did get in and out of uniform over a period of three hours as officials debated how they should respond. The delay occurred after the surviving Americans and those who had been killed already had been evacuated to Tripoli. Because the statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, we rate it Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/8e1f49fc-15c1-4e74-8c4e-2b4471ba85c7	None	Sean Hannity	None	None	None	2016-06-30T16:53:32	2016-06-28	['None']
-pose-00105	"Obama will meet early in the budgeting process each year with congressional leaders and the nation's leading Veterans' Service Organizations (VSOs) to ensure the VA budget is always given 'must-pass' status."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/110/assure-that-the-veterans-administration-budget-is-/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Assure that the Veterans Administration budget is prepared as 'must-pass' legislation	2010-01-07T13:26:48	None	['Barack_Obama']
-pomt-02541	Says Bill O’Reilly spoke 40 percent of the words in an interview with President Barack Obama.	mostly true	/punditfact/statements/2014/feb/06/dana-milbank/milbank-oreilly-said-40-words-obama-interview/	At least among Fox News viewers, nothing boosts audience like taking President Barack Obama to task. The day after Fox News host Bill O’Reilly had an interview with Obama, O’Reilly picked up an additional 1 million viewers for his show The O’Reilly Factor. The president sat down with O’Reilly right before the Super Bowl, and the tone of the conversation itself stirred up a flurry of reactions. Here’s a small example from a moment when O’Reilly pressed Obama on the administration’s response to the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya. O’Reilly: If (Ambassador to the United Nations) Susan Rice goes out and tells the world that it was a spontaneous demonstration... Obama: Bill... O’Reilly: -- off a videotape but your... Obama: Bill... O��Reilly: -- your commanders and the secretary of Defense know it's a terror attack... Obama: Now, Bill... O’Reilly: Just... Obama: -- Bill... O’Reilly: -- as an American... Obama: -- Bill -- Bill... O’Reilly: -- I'm just confused. Obama: And I'm -- and I'm trying to explain it to (you), if you want to listen. No wonder that many observers described the interview as testy. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank called it "the roughest and nastiest exchange" of the three times that O’Reilly has interviewed Obama. "He interrupted the president 42 times in 10 minutes," Milbank said on MSNBC’s Politics Nation. Of all the words uttered in this 10-minute interview, 40 percent were uttered by O’Reilly." We wanted to check Milbank’s numbers. Not on the interruptions, but on the word count. We pulled out our digital centrifuge and separated the O’Reilly and Obama utterances. According to our research, O’Reilly delivered 787 words to Obama’s 1,484. This gave O’Reilly 35 percent of the conversation. That’s a little lower than Milbank said but more or less in the same ballpark. We reached out to Milbank and did not hear back. To satisfy our own curiosity, we decided to compare this with another one-on-one interview between the president and a journalist. A couple of days before Obama sat down with O’Reilly, he did the same with CNN’s Jake Tapper. We subjected that transcript to the same rigorous methods and found that Tapper spoke 23 percent of the time, leaving the president the other 77 percent. The precise word counts were Tapper -- 849 and Obama -- 2,886. Milbank’s point was that O’Reilly’s interview was almost as much about O’Reilly as it was about the president. We don’t know about that, but we can say that O’Reilly spoke about 50 percent more than Tapper did in his interview. The topics in the two interviews differed greatly. O’Reilly brought up Obamacare, the Benghazi attack and the IRS scrutiny of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. Tapper focused on issues like immigration reform, legalization of marijuana, spying by the National Security Agency, and security at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. O’Reilly had a second installment of his time with Obama that aired the night after the Super Bowl. Milbank’s comment came on the same night, so we’re counting only the segment that had aired publicly at that point. For the record, in the second installment, O’Reilly asked the president about African-American children raised in single-parent households, school vouchers, the Keystone pipeline, a contraceptive coverage exemption for Little Sisters of the Poor, and veterans benefits. Our ruling Milbank said O’Reilly said 40 percent of the words during his interview with the president. That was a little high. By our count, 35 percent would be more accurate. O’Reilly spoke decidedly more than Tapper did in his time with Obama. We rate the claim Mostly True.	None	Dana Milbank	None	None	None	2014-02-06T14:15:27	2014-02-03	['Barack_Obama', '[5', '13', '"Bill_O\\\'Reilly_(political_commentator)"']
-vogo-00112	Protesting Beer: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/protesting-beer-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	Protesting Beer: Fact Check TV	May 13, 2013	None	['None']
-pose-01259	“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.”	stalled	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1350/make-no-cuts-medicaid/	None	trumpometer	Donald Trump	None	None	Make no cuts to Medicaid	2017-01-17T08:29:43	None	['Medicare_(United_States)', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)']
-pomt-05040	The health care law "imposes the largest tax increase in history on the middle class."	pants on fire!	/florida/statements/2012/jul/11/american-commitment/health-care-law-largest-tax-increase-history-middl/	A new ad attacks Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., on the health care law and claims to have "the facts." But then it trots out a series of well-worn distortions. "Florida patients and seniors deserve to know what are the facts about President Barack Obama’s health care law," the ad says. "Fact: Bill Nelson was the deciding vote. The bill could cost up to $2 trillion, double what we were promised. Nelson’s health care vote imposes the largest tax increase in history on the middle class, cuts $500 billion from Medicare to pay for new government programs, and millions could lose their current coverage. Tell Bill Nelson: Protect Florida patients, repeal the health care law." The ad is from an outside spending group called American Commitment, which said on its website that it supports "free markets, economic growth, constitutionally limited government, property rights, and individual freedom." It’s a 501(c)4, so it doesn’t have to disclose its donors. (For more details about American Commitment’s connections and spending, check out this report from the Washington Post.) We fact-checked the claim that Nelson was the deciding vote in another fact-check, rating it Mostly False. We've also looked at claims about cutting $500 billion from Medicare (Mostly False) and millions losing coverage (False). Here, we’re fact-checking whether the health care law "imposes the largest tax increase in history on the middle class." We asked American Commitment for evidence for its charges, but we didn’t hear back. We found the same claim, though, on several conservative blogs. Their basis for making the claim focused on the tax penalty that’s part of the health care law, the penalty imposed on people who go without health insurance. The individual mandate as tax penalty Here’s how it works: Starting in 2014, individuals who do not have health insurance and who aren't exempt (say, for cases of hardship or religious belief) will have to pay an annual penalty of at least $95. The amount increases, though, up to $695 in 2016. After 2016, the amount would be indexed to inflation and could be higher -- up to 2.5 percent of household income. Critics of the law have pointed out, correctly, that some people who make less than $250,000 will be subject to this tax penalty. During the 2008 campaign, Obama pledged not to raise taxes on families who make less than that. The blogs said that 75 percent of the people who pay the penalty are in the middle class, so that makes it the biggest middle-class tax increase in history. This is a logical fallacy -- just because 75 percent of the households who pay the tax are in the middle class, that doesn’t automatically make it the largest middle-class tax increase in history. But let’s set that problem aside for moment so we can explore who’s paying the mandate. Then we’ll get to other problems with the ad’s claim. Who pays the individual mandate’s tax penalty The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation -- two nonpartisan federal offices -- have estimated that about 4 million uninsured Americans will have to pay the penalty, amounting to $4 billion in revenue per year from 2017 to 2019. The CBO projections show that 76 percent of the people paying the penalty will have a household income of 500 percent of the federal poverty level or below. For a family of four, that comes to about $120,000. We should note that there is no standard definition of "the middle class." We looked at projections from the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center for what the federal income distribution will look like in 2016. A chart from the center estimates that the threshold for the top 20 percent of income in 2016 will be $123,970. So statements like these essentially define "middle class" as the bottom 80 percent of the income scale. But there’s a different way to look at who pays the penalty, and that’s as a tally of dollars paid, rather than the number of households. The CBO projected that the bottom 80 percent will pay 46 percent of the tax dollars collected as a result of the mandate. That’s compared to 55 percent of revenues that will come from the top 20 percent. This presents a different picture of how the financial burden of the mandate will be borne. There’s a big difference between the "middle class" carrying 75 percent of the burden rather than 46 percent of the burden. Two tax experts -- Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center and William McBride of the Tax Foundation -- agreed with our analysis when we looked at a similar claim. They also indicated that, it’s more appropriate to use dollars paid than the number of households that have to pay the penalty. Other taxes dwarf the mandate Now we come to another problem with the ad’s claim -- whether the tax increases in the law are the largest in history. It’s true that some middle-class people will pay the tax penalty for not having insurance. But as we noted earlier, that penalty is intended to encourage people to get insurance. It’s not intended to raise enough money to pay for the bulk of new spending in the health care law. Other tax increases do that. Most of those tax increases are on the wealthy and the health-care industry -- not the middle class. Starting in 2013, high earners -- defined as households making make more than $250,000 or single people making more than $200,000 -- will see their Medicare payroll taxes increase 0.9 percentage points, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Also, people at these income levels pay a new tax on investment income of 3.8 percent. The 10-year tally: $210.2 billion. That easily outpaces $4 billion per year that comes from the individual mandate. For other new taxes in the law, it’s less clear how the burden will fall. These taxes include annual fees on health insurance providers ($60.1 billion over 10 years); a fee for pharmaceutical manufacturers and importers ($27 billion over 10 years); an excise tax on manufacturers and importers of medical devices ($20 billion over 10 years); a higher floor for medical expense deductions on itemized income tax returns ($15.2 billion over 10 years); and an excise tax on indoor tanning services ($2.7 billion over 10 years). Also, there’s a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost health plans, so-called "Cadillac plans," which begins in 2018, raising $32 billion in 2018 and 2019. Largest tax increase? Finally, the health care law is not the largest tax increase in history. We looked into this topic in detail when we fact-checked Rush Limbaugh’s statement that the health care law is "the largest tax increase in the history of the world." That detailed analysis can be found here, but the bottom line is this: Depending on your rounding, tax increases resulting from the health care law are about the size of tax increases proposed and passed in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter, in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush and in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. The health care law’s tax increases are smaller than tax increases signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 and a temporary tax signed into law in 1968 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. And they are significantly smaller than two tax increases passed during World War II and a tax increase passed in 1961. It’s true that the tax increases in the health care legislation do reverse a trend of federal tax cuts and represent the first significant tax increases since 1993. But they are not the largest in the history of the United States. Our ruling The ad calls the health care law "the largest tax increase in history on the middle class." Actually, the law is not the largest tax increase in history, and most of its taxes fall on the wealthy and the health care industry. Even if all of the taxes in the health care law fell on the middle class -- which they don’t -- the statement still wouldn’t be accurate. For flagrant disregard of the facts, we rate this statement Pants on Fire!	None	American Commitment	None	None	None	2012-07-11T15:11:48	2012-07-10	['None']
-tron-00832	Pray for Pat Boone’s Grandson, Ryan	truth!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/ryan/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	Pray for Pat Boone’s Grandson, Ryan	Mar 16, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-06588	"This is the worst jobs recovery since the Great Depression."	false	/georgia/statements/2011/sep/26/herman-cain/cain-jobs-recovery-worst-great-depression/	Voters want jobs, and Georgia’s own GOP presidential contender Herman Cain wants them to know he has a plan to create them. Cain pitched the plan, which calls for 9 percent corporate, personal and national sales taxes, during the Sept. 7 presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. It was his central focus during the Tampa, Fla., debate five days later. And in case anyone didn’t get the point, Cain presented his plan in a Sept. 15 Wall Street Journal op-ed as a foil against President Barack Obama’s recently proposed jobs bill. Cain portrayed himself as a capable business leader, and Obama as an ideologue with little concern for the American worker. Cain’s evidence was the economy’s performance during Obama’s tenure. "This is the worst jobs recovery since the Great Depression," Cain’s op-ed said. The worst jobs recovery since the Great Depression? Yes, things are bad. But are they that bad? We contacted Cain’s spokeswoman for more information, and she recommended we go to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the main federal agency in charge of measuring jobs activity and other economic trends. We did, and found that PolitiFact National’s Truth-O-Meter had been there ahead of us. In June, our sister site wrote about a jobs claim made by Cain’s Republican primary rival Mitt Romney. "This is the slowest job recovery since Hoover," Romney said on the campaign trail in Tampa, Fla. PolitiFact National assessed Romney’s history two ways: by the number of jobs created, or changes in the unemployment rate. The jobs creation measure is a straightforward number. But unemployment is a little more complicated. The rate is influenced by whether people are looking for a job -- or so discouraged they’ve dropped out of the labor market. A recovery can coax job market dropouts to get back into the hunt. This means it’s not unusual for the unemployment rate to rise as a recovery begins. Since the Great Recession ended about 23 months before Romney made his statement, PolitiFact National assessed each recession based on the 23-month period after it officially ended. PolitiFact National used dates from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is the nation’s unofficial authority on when recessions begin and end. They stopped at World War II, because monthly BLS data doesn’t go further back than that. Our sister site found Romney’s claim False because, depending on which measure you use, there were either two or four recoveries that were weaker than the current one. A lot can change in a few months, so we updated those calculations with the newest jobs data. Our results were very similar. Let’s consider job creation. Since the end of the recession in June 2009, the U.S. gained 639,000 jobs. But in two of the 12 recoveries we reviewed, the U.S. actually lost jobs. From November 2001 to January 2004 under President George W. Bush, the economy lost 481,000 jobs. And from July 1980 to September 1982 under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the U.S. lost 661,000 jobs, according to BLS figures. Now for the unemployment rate. Unemployment has decreased by a modest 0.4 percentage points since the end of the most recent recession. But we found three recoveries where unemployment actually rose in the same amount of time. From November 2001 to January 2004, unemployment crept up by 0.2 percentage points. Between March 1991 and May 1993, under President George H.W. Bush, it rose by 0.3 percentage points. And between July 1980 and September 1982, it jumped by 2.5 percentage points. This means that as of August, there are either two or three recoveries since the Great Depression that were weaker than the current one, depending on which measure you use. This is very similar to June’s results. As we mentioned in our item on Romney, none of this is to suggest we’re in a strong recovery. The data do show that this one is weaker than most. In this regard, Cain does have a point. But it’s inaccurate for Cain to say, "This is the worst jobs recovery since the Great Depression." It’s a weak recovery, but not the worst. We therefore rate Cain’s claim False.	None	Herman Cain	None	None	None	2011-09-26T06:00:00	2011-09-15	['None']
-pomt-10946	"In Wisconsin, abortion is still a crime."	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2018/jul/25/kelda-helen-roys/governor-hopeful-kelda-roys-claim-abortion-crime-w/	If someone gets caught robbing a store in Wisconsin, that person could go to jail. After all, robbery is a crime in Wisconsin. What about abortion? With the first television ad in her campaign for governor, released July 19, 2018, Democrat Kelda Roys contends that "abortion is still a crime in Wisconsin." Since the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade recognized a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion in 1973, abortion has been legal in the United States. That includes Wisconsin, where more than 5,000 of the procedures are performed every year. So, it’s highly misleading to call abortion a crime in Wisconsin. And yet, Roys has a point. The ad Roys, an attorney and former executive director of the abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin, narrates her 30-second ad. The ad opens with video clips of President Donald Trump announcing his nomination of federal appeals court judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court and then Trump signing a document. While those are shown, Roys says: "Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does." Then Roys is shown writing on a pad of paper and she says: "In Wisconsin, abortion is still a crime." More images of Roys appear as she says: "And I can’t believe that I’m having to fight the same fights that my grandmother fought." The ad could leave the impression that a woman getting an abortion is committing a crime. Federal law vs. state law When we posed Roys’ claim to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske, a professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, she confirmed, in light of Roe vs. Wade, what seems obvious: "It’s not a crime in Wisconsin. Abortion is legal." When Roy was asked to back up her claim, she cited Wisconsin law — which has made performing an abortion a crime since 1849. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter: @PolitiFactWisc. The nonpartisan state Legislative Reference Bureau has noted Roe vs. Wade "rendered unenforceable the criminal penalities" in the state law. But it is still on the books. Current state law on "crimes against life and bodily security" includes a section on abortion. It states: "Any person, other than the mother, who intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child is guilty" of a felony. Some exceptions are provided to save the life of a mother. "If it's in the criminal code, it's a crime," Roys told us. So, does it matter that Wisconsin’s statute criminalizing abortion is still in place? The crux of Roys’ claim As the opening of her TV ad suggests, what Roys is getting at is what may happen if Roe vs. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court. That’s a prospect that many fear with Kavanaugh’s nomination — even if, as PolitiFact Florida found, his position on Roe is not clear. All our fact checks in the governor’s race. If Roe were overturned, regulating abortion would revert to the states. Experts with the pro-abortion rights Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin and with the anti-abortion Wisconsin Right to Life agreed that the Wisconsin law still being on the books is important. Indeed, abortion-rights advocates have fought, as recently as 2017, to get the statute removed, while abortion foes have succeeded in keeping it in place. If Roe were ever overturned, the Wisconsin statute would again be in effect — although there are questions about whether it would be used immediately. There likely would be litigation over that, said University of Wisconsin Law School professor of law and bioethics Alta Charo. Wisconsin is one of seven states that would revert to pre-Roe state law if Roe were overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and advocacy organization that supports women’s access to abortion. Our rating Roys says: "In Wisconsin, abortion is still a crime." Abortion has been legal throughout the country, including in Wisconsin, since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Roe vs. Wade case in 1973. It is the law of the land, so to flatly declare that abortion is a crime in Wisconsin is misleading. But current Wisconsin statutes still include a provision — made unenforceable by Roe — that generally makes performing an abortion a felony. And that’s important, should Roe ever be overturned. In sum, Roys’ claim contains an element of truth, but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. That’s our definition of Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Kelda Helen Roys	None	None	None	2018-07-25T06:00:00	2018-07-19	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-07444	"For every 33 pregnant women that walk into a Planned Parenthood clinic, 32 receive an abortion."	false	/ohio/statements/2011/apr/21/jean-schmidt/rep-jean-schmidt-says-32-every-33-pregnant-women-w/	Soon after taking control of the House of Representatives, Republicans opened a new front in the abortion war by attempting to block Planned Parenthood from receiving any federal money. Federal law already prohibits tax dollars from paying for abortions, but Republicans argue that the $363 million that Planned Parenthood gets each year for Title X family planning services actually subsidizes abortions indirectly because money is fungible. The April 14 measure that would have stripped federal funds from Planned Parenthood passed the House by a 241-185 margin but failed in a 42-58 U.S. Senate vote. During debate over the bill, Democrats portrayed Planned Parenthood clinics as a major provider of many types of health services to low income women, while Republicans claimed that Planned Parenthood steers pregnant women into getting abortions. "For every 33 pregnant women that walk into a Planned Parenthood clinic, 32 receive an abortion," Rep. Jean Schmidt, a Cincinnati-area Republican, said in a speech in the House of Representatives. That ratio got PolitiFact Ohio’s attention. So we asked her office where the numbers came from. Schmidt was president of Right-to-Life of Greater Cincinnati before she was elected to Congress and currently chairs the House Pro-Life Women’s Caucus. She referred us to reports produced by several anti-abortion organizations, including Americans United for Life, Concerned Women for America, Liberty Counsel Action, Family Research Council Action, and the Chiaroscuro Foundation. All stated that roughly 98 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services to pregnant women consist of abortion. They derived their information from a March 2011 fact sheet from Planned Parenthood. That fact sheet says the group performed 332,278 abortions in 2009, referred 977 patients to other agencies for adoptions, and provided prenatal care to 7,021 patients. The anti-abortion groups came up with the 98 percent figure by comparing the number of abortions to the number of procedures in the other two categories. Schmidt’s 32 out of 33 statistic works out to 97 percent - the approximate percentage her sources provided. But there are problems with that calculation. First, it assumes that pregnant women only go to Planned Parenthood for one of those three options. Planned Parenthood representatives say that interpretation overstates the ratio of abortions among its pregnant clients. It ignores other statistics, such as the 1,158,924 pregnancy tests the group provided, and the fact that those 332,278 abortions were just 3 percent of the 11,383,900 total procedures that Planned Parenthood health centers provided that year to its 3 million patients. Thirty five percent of its services consisted of providing contraception and another 35 percent consisted of testing for sexually transmitted diseases and treatment. The fact sheet stats also don’t reflect the fact that only a tiny proportion of Planned Parenthood centers around the country provide prenatal care - just 63 out of more than 800, said Tait Sye, a spokesman for the organization. Those that don’t offer prenatal care refer pregnant women to other health care providers for those services, and Planned Parenthood doesn’t keep track of those referrals. And the 7,021 figure for prenatal clients that was used in the calculations doesn’t include pregnant women who went to Planned Parenthood for prenatal care and were sent to outside obstetricians. The group doesn’t "ask the pregnancy status of every woman that walks into Planned Parenthood," and plenty of pregnant women use the organization for other services, like breast exams, Sye said. Consequently, he says it’s "impossible to calculate an accurate percentage if you don’t know the total number of pregnant women it is based on." In an emailed statement, Planned Parenthood Vice President for Communications Stuart Schear called Schmidt’s assertion "a meaningless and unverifiable statistic since Planned Parenthood does not collect information on the pregnancy status of every female patient who comes into our health centers." When Schmidt was asked about the points made by Planned Parenthood’s spokesmen, she said the group "obfuscates the truth by comparing apples to oranges – or services to patients." "They say 90 percent of the services they provide are preventative, but more than 10 percent of their patients are provided an abortion," Schmidt said in an email. "They say they don't know the number of pregnant women they serve. It shouldn't be that hard to figure out. Whether a patient is pregnant or not should be one of the first questions they ask." Schmidt is correct that women of childbearing age are routinely asked whether they might be pregnant when they visit a doctor’s office. Sye acknowledged that Planned Parenthood’s intake form contains a question that asks whether female patients are pregnant. "But, we don’t tally the number of women we see every year who are pregnant or not pregnant," he said. PolitiFact recently fact checked a statement Sen. John Kyl made about Planned Parenthood. In that item we noted a few caveats that are worth repeating. First, we think many people would acknowledge a difference between providing an abortion and, say, handing out a pack of condoms or conducting a blood test. The former is a significant surgical procedure, whereas the latter are quick and inexpensive services. So Planned Parenthood’s use of "services" as its yardstick likely decreases abortion’s prominence compared to what other measurements would show. Using dollars spent or hours devoted to patient care would likely put abortion above 3 percent in the calculations. So Schmidt does have a point about citing services, rather than patient numbers. Second, it’s worth noting that Planned Parenthood self-reported these numbers, although the group says each affiliate’s numbers are independently audited. (There is no single, national audit.) So we have no choice but to accept their accuracy more or less on faith. What certainly is true is that without knowing the total number of pregnant women that Planned Parenthood sees, it is impossible to compute an accurate ratio for how many of them get abortions. PolitiFact places the burden of proof on the speaker. In this case, Schmidt cannot meet that burden because information needed for that showing is unknown. Anti-abortion groups and Schmidt can try to fill the information vacuum by using Planned Parenthood’s incomplete data to come up with their own number. But that doesn’t mean that their number is correct. The fact sheet shows that Planned Parenthood does a sizable number of abortions. But the ratio she cites (97 percent) is extreme. Sye noted that just 63 out of more than 800 Planned Parenthood centers provide their own prenatal care. That means that pregnant women seeking prenatal care from more than 700 centers would be referred to outside providers. Women seeking prenatal care are not likely to be seeking an abortion, and none of those women are included in the totals cited by Schmidt’s sources. Schmidt’s claim also overlooks that pregnant women who "walk into" a clinic could be there for any reason, not just for pregnancy-related services. On the Truth-O-Meter, we rate Schmidt’s statement False. Comment on this item.	None	Jean Schmidt	None	None	None	2011-04-21T06:00:00	2011-04-14	['None']
-pomt-02423	"American Hustle shows the FBI making real-life bribes to Washington politicians. I know, because as your U.S. senator, I turned them down."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/mar/04/larry-pressler/larry-pressler-recalls-role-rejecting-abscam-bribe/	American Hustle -- a movie based on the story of Abscam, the late-1970s FBI sting that ensnared more than a half-dozen politicians for accepting bribes -- got shut out at the Oscars despite snagging 10 nominations. But the movie is living on as an issue in a 2014 U.S. Senate race. Larry Pressler, a former U.S. senator from South Dakota now running as an Independent for another term in the chamber, is airing a campaign ad touting his role in the Abscam scandal. The twist is that Pressler is touting his honesty in the face of illegal offerings. "American Hustle shows the FBI making real-life bribes to Washington politicians," Pressler says to the camera in the ad. "I know, because as your U.S. senator, I turned them down." Pressler left office in 1997; since then, he's worked as an attorney and taught at universities. In his current race, he's widely considered an underdog to the Republican frontrunner, former Gov. Mike Rounds. Given all the attention American Hustle has been attracting since its release, we couldn’t resist taking a second look at the decades-old scandal. First, let’s recap what happened in Abscam. The case involved representatives of "Arab sheiks" -- actually, undercover FBI agents -- offering politicians payoffs that were intended to secure them casino licenses in New Jersey. The operation resulted in the convictions of Sen. Harrison Williams, D-N.J., six members of the U.S. House, and a number of local officials. The movie tells the somewhat fictionalized story of how the operation was undertaken on behalf of the FBI by a con man whose name in real life was Mel Weinberg. (Here’s an article about the real-life events that inspired the movie.) So how does Pressler fit in? It turns out that his role was largely happenstance. Pressler, then a first-term Republican who had weighed a run for president in 1980, was "presented to the agents as a sudden substitute for the legislator they expected, who had decided against attending such a meeting," according to John Good, the FBI supervisor who oversaw the Abscam operation, in a July 23, 1982, New York Times article. Here’s how Pressler recalled what happened, in a first-person article published last year in the Huffington Post. In the fall of 1979, shortly after I concluded my dark-horse candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, a prominent Washington, D.C. socialite, who was serving as one of my volunteer fundraisers, informed me that some wealthy people were eager to meet me and talk about contributing to my campaign deficit. As a relatively unknown first-term senator from South Dakota, I had few deep-pocketed supporters, and so I jumped at the chance to follow up on my fundraiser's promising lead. However, since it was illegal for a member of Congress to discuss fundraising on federal property, I agreed to meet the prospective donors in a home they were renting a short distance from the Capitol. On the appointed day, we arrived at a two-story redbrick colonial home on fashionable W Street. Inside, the house was furnished with exquisite antiques, elegant chandeliers and, as I would later learn, a battery of hidden television cameras and microphones. … One of the FBI imposters I met that day was a swarthy man who appeared to be from the Middle East. He told me that he represented a prominent sheik who was seeking entry to the United States for himself and a number of his associates and who needed special bills passed by Congress to allow them to avoid the usual immigration procedures. He then offered to make an under-the-table payment if I would play ball. "Wait a minute!" I said. "What you are suggesting may be illegal. I would never do anything in exchange for a campaign contribution." And with that, I stormed out of the house. Ultimately, Pressler was never charged in Abscam, since he was one of the few officials approached who rejected a bribe outright. His actions won him plaudits from Federal District Court Judge George C. Pratt in upholding the convictions of seven Abscam defendants: Neither Pressler nor another target "apparently knew he had been brought before the sheik's representatives to be offered money in return for a promise of favorable legislative action," Pratt wrote. "However, neither one was overwhelmed by the circumstances, and each declined the offer. Pressler, particularly, acted as citizens have a right to expect their elected representatives to act. He showed a clear awareness of the line between proper and improper conduct, and despite his confessed need for campaign money, and despite the additional attractiveness to him of the payment offered, he nevertheless refused to cross into impropriety." CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, at the time the epitome of credibility in the media, singled out Pressler’s actions for praise. And U.S. Senate historian Donald Ritchie told PolitiFact that he considered the ad’s claim to be correct. Syndicated cartoonist Jim Berry even drew a cartoon of Pressler being greeted by the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who was known for carrying a lantern in the hopes of finding an honest man somewhere in the world. The caption was, "Senator Pressler? I am Diogenes. I've been looking for you." Our ruling Pressler said that "American Hustle shows the FBI making real-life bribes to Washington politicians. I know, because as your U.S. senator, I turned them down." Pressler’s retelling fits with the description of the facts published in the media at the time -- actions that drew praise from a federal judge who wrote that Pressler "showed a clear awareness of the line between proper and improper conduct" and "refused to cross into impropriety." We rate Pressler’s claim True.	None	Larry Pressler	None	None	None	2014-03-04T15:08:27	2014-02-28	['United_States', 'Washington,_D.C.', 'Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation']
-pomt-13651	Because of the Trans-Pacific Partnership "we’ve got a country like Malaysia taking really serious efforts to crack down on human trafficking."	mostly true	/global-news/statements/2016/aug/05/barack-obama/obama-claims-positive-relationship-between-trans-p/	Trying to rally support for the oft-criticized Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Barack Obama said it will go a long way to improving human rights conditions across the globe. Specifically, he said during a press conference with Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Loong, it will curb human trafficking in Malaysia. "The same is true for things like human trafficking, where we've got a country like Malaysia taking really serious efforts to crack down on human trafficking," Obama said. "Why? Because TPP says you need to." We’ve rated two other claims from this press conference (a Mostly True on tariff cuts and a Half True on Vietnamese labor rights). Here, we look at the situation on the ground in Malaysia. Trafficking in Malaysia Malaysia has long been classified a human trafficking-destination by the U.S. State Department. In its 2015 "Trafficking in Persons" report, the State Department said Malaysia was guilty of debt bondage, unfair recruitment, wage fraud and passport confiscation. Trafficking in the construction industry has long made Malaysia stand out, said Eric Edmonds, an economics professor at Dartmouth University. Sex trafficking is not as big a problem there, he said. The State Department has classified Malaysia among countries working toward better compliance with correcting human trafficking problems. This leads us to the TPP. Consistency plan The White House pointed us to the "consistency plan" negotiated between the United States and Malaysia, which sets out changes Malaysia must make in its legal codes and procedures before the agreement can enter into force. The plan also establishes a bilateral committee to handle any compliance complaints. Provisions within the plan include: preventing employers from withholding employees’ passports, ensuring fair recruitment practices, allowing trafficking victims to move freely between shelters and allocating resources to labor law enforcement and data collection. Prior to the TPP being finalized in October, Malaysia has taken other efforts to combat human trafficking. In June 2015, Malaysia amended its law to improve treatment of trafficking victims. Among the changes, Malaysia gave victims better access to government shelters, transitional housing and more victim-friendly restitution procedures. Cathleen Ciminio-Isaacs, a research associate at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a group that has been described as pro-trade, noted this was an example of complying with the TPP. Edmonds added Malaysia has worked to prevent trafficking in the construction industry, by pulling construction visas. If workers can’t come into the country via construction visas, it is unlikely trafficking will occur, he explained. "A way to evaluate the success of the anti-trafficking factors is when we stop doing the things that allows there to be trafficking," Edmonds said. He said that this action would qualify as a "crackdown," when defined as a serious effort having an impact. While pulling visas is not contained in the consistency plan, Edmonds said the administrative change came "at the behest of the Obama administration." He added that, although the cause-effect relationship between the TPP and these actions is "loosy goosy," the TPP "absolutely" had a strong influence on legal changes that occurred while negotiations were underway. ‘Serious effort’ Experts we spoke to had slightly varied opinions on what a "serious effort to combat human trafficking" entails. But there is something being done. John Sifton, Asia Advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, had a stricter interpretation of Obama’s claim, saying "serious efforts" would require actual results on the ground. He said results, at least as of now, are lacking. "Malaysia has promised to crack down on human trafficking," he said. "Are they cracking down on human trafficking? No, not yet. They have a long way to go. The best way to describe the president’s language is he’s premature." He added that it is likely Malaysia would change its legal code, but that implementation is a trickier proposition. Case in point, Sifton said, the number of prosecutions brought against trafficking in Malaysia is low. In 2015, the State Department reported, there were 38 prosecutions, down from 54 in 2014. There were seven convictions, up from three in 2014. The White House emphasized, however, that statistical evidence of declining trafficking, given the nature of the crime, will be hard to come by. Other experts said there is a "serious effort" happening. Alison Brysk, Mellichamp professor of global governance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, agreed that on-the-ground enforcement action hasn’t changed much. However, that doesn’t mean "serious efforts" aren’t being taken. Looking at the consistency plan, she said some of the provisions — such as its withholding passport provisions — are "relevant and meaningful" in terms of improving enforcement practices. "If Malaysia is doing all of these things, than that is movement in the right direction," Brysk said. Our ruling Obama said Malaysia is "taking really serious efforts to crack down on human trafficking" due to the TPP. Malaysia has been drafting changes to its legal code, experts told us, and already made legislative and administrative changes to combat human trafficking. Even if human trafficking numbers haven’t yet changed, experts said what Malaysia has done constituted a "serious effort," and that the TPP had an influence. We rate Obama’s statement Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/dd84a634-8f85-4c2d-8606-3ab308f03e7e	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2016-08-05T16:26:27	2016-08-02	['Malaysia']
-pomt-02171	The Rhode Island Parole Board "never received an objection from the attorney general" to the parole of convicted murder Alfred Brissette.	true	/rhode-island/statements/2014/apr/30/dawson-hodgson/dawson-hodgson-says-ri-attorney-general-peter-kilm/	When the Rhode Island Parole Board granted parole to convicted murderer Alfred Brissette in November 2013, its decision was widely criticized. Among the critics was Attorney General Peter Kilmartin, whose office issued a statement at the time saying Brissette’s crime was "so egregious that the Parole Board should have come to a different conclusion." Now, state Sen. Dawson Hodgson, who is running against Kilmartin for attorney general, is criticizing the Democratic incumbent’s actions in the case. "When the press went to the parole board and said ‘how can you let an animal like this loose,’ they responded by saying, well, we never received an objection from the attorney general or from the victim’s family,’" Hodgson, a North Kingstown Republican, said in a March 27 interview on the public-access TV show "State of the State." "Nobody was there to speak for somebody who couldn’t speak for herself," Hodgson said. We wondered whether Hodgson had his facts straight. First, a little background. In June 1999, Brissette and Marc Girard, both 25, were arrested and charged with luring Jeannette Descoteaux from her hometown of Woonsocket to the woods of Burrillville where they beat her to death. Brissette hit her multiple times in the head with a lug wrench. Girard went to trial, was found guilty by a jury in 2001 and sentenced to life. Brissette pleaded no contest to second-degree murder in 2004 and was sentenced to serve 35 years in prison. (The sentence included the time he spent since being imprisoned at the Adult Correctional Institutions since 1999.) The judge in the case, Judith Savage, excoriated Brissette, describing him as a thrill killer who simply wanted to see someone die. Brissette was initially granted parole in June 2012, with a projected release in December, but concerns about whether he could meet the conditions of the release prompted the board to delay his release until November 2013, about 14 years after he was first jailed. The board cited Brissette’s clean prison disciplinary record, and his participation in ACI rehabilitation programs and the programs set up to monitor and support him after release. Was Hodgson right that Kilmartin hadn’t objected to Brissette’s parole? "That is correct," Kilmartin spokeswoman Amy Kempe said. The Brissette parole exposed a flaw in the parole process that has since been corrected, Kempe said. At the time, she said, the attorney general’s office would get a list of inmates up for consideration, sometimes as few as 10 days or so before the board met. The prosecutors in the office would review the list to determine whether they should raise any objections. If that list had two dozen or more names, the review could take time, she said. Brissette’s case was 14 years old, and none of the prosecutors who worked on it were still employed by the department, so no one raised an objection, Kempe said. Since the Brissette case, Kempe said the attorney general’s office now gets the parole lists a month or even two months ahead of time, which gives the office enough time to investigate each request. It also gives the office staff time to prepare an argument for its position, Kempe said. That was important, she said, because if the attorney general’s office simply opposed every parole request automatically, the office’s objections would become commonplace and lose their credibility. Parole Board Chairman Kenneth Walker declined to explain why the board approved Brissette’s release other than to say the board has confidence in the program devised for him. He said the lack of a recommendation from the attorney general had no effect on the board’s decision. Our ruling Dawson T. Hodgson said Attorney General Peter Kilmartin’s office didn’t oppose the parole request of convicted murderer Alfred Brissette. Kilmartin’s spokeswoman and the chairman of the parole board confirmed that was correct. We rule Hodgson’s statement True.	None	Dawson Hodgson	None	None	None	2014-04-30T00:01:00	2014-03-27	['None']
-goop-00676	Justin Theroux Dating Selena Gomez, Emma Stone & More Stars At Same Time?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/justin-theroux-dating-selena-gomez-emma-stone-false/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Justin Theroux Dating Selena Gomez, Emma Stone & More Stars At Same Time?	3:58 pm, July 7, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-08262	Half of children struck by cars near schools are hit by parents driving children to school.	false	/oregon/statements/2010/nov/11/safe-routes-schools/safety-group-says-50-percent-children-hit-vehicles/	Sometimes a "fact" is repeated so often that it becomes true, regardless of where it came from or whether the original study exists to back up the claim. A good example is this tantalizing statistic, posted on the city of Portland’s Safe Routes to School program summary page: "Nationally, 50% of children who are hit by cars near schools are hit by cars driven by parents of other students." The figure also is contained in a how-to safe routes guide put out by the state. The claim is repeated in other Portland safe routes newsletters and in brochures, sometimes with the "national" modifier, sometimes not. And while the number on its face seems to make sense -- who is most likely to be driving near schools than parents? -- the figure begged even more questions: How many children are hit by cars each year? What is the sample size? And how did they track the numbers to figure that parents of other children were involved in half of those cases? In short, is this percentage accurate? PolitiFact Oregon set to find out. First up, a call to the Portland Bureau of Transportation. Spokesman Dan Anderson consulted with Gabriel Graff, a city safe routes organizer. Anderson said the city doesn’t track the number of children hit by cars near schools, so we have no idea whether the national number is true in Portland. But Anderson did come up with a source for the statistic: the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, an advocacy group launched in 2005 to score money and support from Congress for safer roads to school. (Its 500-plus members include cities, counties, bike shops and pedestrian friendly planners.) The footnote on the group’s "National Statistics on School Transportation" cites yet another source: "Washington State Department of Transportation; cited in Safe Routes to School, National Highway Transportation & Safety Administration, 2002." So on to the Washington State Department of Transportation. There we found Charlotte Claybrooke, the person responsible for coordinating the safe routes program in our neighbor state. She said she was unaware of any study and wrote: "Unfortunately, I can't be of much help except to say that I've tried to run that statistic down before and could not find a reference to substantiate it." Washington does not use the figure. At the same time, we checked with Julie Yip, the safe routes coordinator at the Oregon Department of Transportation. Yip did an online search and came up with a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which repeats the figure and sources "Kallins, Wendy. Safe Routes to School. US Department of Transportation: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration." Ah-ha, a name -- albeit misspelled -- of someone who may have conducted the study or seen it first hand. Wendi (not Wendy) Kallins, we learned, launched the original safe routes pilot in Marin County, California, and still lives there. We asked via e-mail whether she had details of the original study. She wrote: "I get lots of inquiries about this one - it came from Washington state and I subsequently cannot find the original document I got it from. I believe it came from a school traffic calming document back in the ‘90's. Since I can't verify it, I don't recommend using the stat unless you can track down the original." We asked Kallins whether she was comfortable with the fact that public agencies and public policy groups were using the figure in their literature. Her response? "I can't speak for them. They may have tracked down the original source." But it’s clear that Portland and Oregon have not. Yip said she would stop using the figure, since the National Center for Safe Routes to School, which is not the same as the partnership, could not verify the figure and does not use it. Anderson said the city will scrub the statistic from its website barring last-minute evidence. The message remains the same, he said. "Reducing the need for children to be driven to and from school means fewer cars on the road and fewer opportunities for crashes." Fewer people could argue with that. We acknowledge this is not a statistic that will alter how much Congress spends on safer roads. (By the way, Oregon received more than $6 million of $612 million for 2005-2009.) We’re not suggesting that proponents of safer roads have trumped up a figure to champion a cause. But the twisted tale of this claim is a case study in how falsehoods get passed along with good intentions and nothing to back them up. Just because a statement keeps getting repeated doesn't mean it's true -- even if a source is cited. We find the claim False. Comment on this item.	None	Safe Routes to Schools	None	None	None	2010-11-11T06:00:00	2010-11-10	['None']
-pomt-11915	"And I think that his engagement with Congress is something that never happened under President Obama. They were never allowed to debate it. They were never allowed to discuss it. So, now Congress is going to be fully engaged on the threats of Iran."	mostly false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/oct/19/nikki-haley/haley-wrongly-says-congress-had-no-input-iran-nucl/	Defending President Donald Trump’s decision to decertify the Iran nuclear deal, United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley said Congress now has a voice on the issue that it didn’t have in the past. Trump’s decision allows Congress to potentially kill the agreement or tack on new conditions. "He's saying to Congress, can we make it better?" Haley told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on an Oct. 15 broadcast of This Week. "And I think that his engagement with Congress is something that never happened under President Obama. They were never allowed to debate it. They were never allowed to discuss it. So, now Congress is going to be fully engaged on the threats of Iran." This was an early criticism of the agreement. After the United States, Iran and other foreign governments came to an agreement on the framework for the Iran deal, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress appealed to Obama to let them have a say in it before the final deal was reached. Here, we are fact-checking Haley’s claim that Congress was "never allowed" to debate or discuss the agreement. Congressional responsibility in the Iran deal Much of the responsibility for U.S. foreign policy falls under the authority of the executive branch. Congress does play a significant role, however, in foreign trade and commerce, immigration, foreign aid, the defense budget and any declarations of war. The Senate authorizes treaties and confirms the president’s cabinet nominees. To avoid needing Senate approval for an agreement with a foreign power, the president can simply avoid calling the agreement a treaty. The Obama administration said the Iran deal was neither a treaty nor an executive agreement. Instead, the State Department said in a letter that the deal "reflects political commitments" between the seven nations involved. When the president negotiates a deal that is not deemed a treaty, Congress -- if it wants a say on the deal -- must convince the president to give the legislative branch the power to approve or block the final deal. That’s exactly what Congress did when it passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, a bill that had bipartisan support and allowed Congress the right to review any agreement reached in the negotiations. Obama initially threatened to veto the bill but did not. Senators considered a separate, and ultimately unsuccessful, measure that would have given them the the power to block the agreement through a resolution of disapproval. A procedural vote on the resolution fell short of the 60 votes needed to override a Democratic filibuster. Despite the resolution’s failure, by passing the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, Congress was able to have some authority and say in the final agreement. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who spearheaded the bill, has touted the legislation for taking "power back from the president" and forcing the executive office to be transparent. "There’s no question the prior administration made every effort to bypass Congress and implement the agreement without congressional review or approval," Corker said in an emailed statement. "That is why we overwhelmingly passed INARA, which required the administration to submit the full details of the agreement to Congress and established a process for a debate and vote on the deal." It should also be noted that Obama administration officials went on the record about the Iran deal during congressional hearings and briefings, allowing members of Congress to bring up questions and concerns with the White House in a public debate setting. Further, the review act imposed a requirement that the president recertify the deal every 90 days. In other words, every three months the president must ensure the following: Iran is abiding by the rules of the agreement, Iran hasn’t taken action to advance its nuclear weapons program, the waiver of sanctions on Iran are still appropriate. "This kind of ongoing management I think is unusual and represented quite a compromise by President Obama," said John Glaser, the director of foreign studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. Glaser pointed out that the Obama administration would not have been able to handle "all of the subtlety, secrecy, and nuance that was required" to negotiate the Iran deal if it had involved Congress from the beginning. Haley, we should note, backtracked a bit in an interview on Meet The Press, when moderator Chuck Todd pointed out that the reason the Iran deal has a certification process is because Congress added constraints. Haley responded: "And Congress did that because President Obama didn't give them the authority to be a part of that decision. So they did it to try and control the situation and not let it get to a bad problem." She didn't add similar caveats during the ABC interview. Our ruling Haley said Congress was never allowed to debate or discuss the Iran nuclear agreement while Obama was in office. Though Congress had to fight for the right to disapprove of the deal, the passage of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 allowed Congress to not only vote on the deal but to also hold public hearings and debate. The Senate ultimately did not have the votes to block the deal, but the act included a requirement for the president to frequently monitor Iran’s progress in meeting the agreement’s conditions. So Congress did have input, even if Obama initially tried to avoid it. We rate this claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Nikki Haley	None	None	None	2017-10-19T12:13:41	2017-10-15	['United_States_Congress', 'Barack_Obama', 'Iran']
-snes-05286	Ted Cruz said that there was 'no place for gays in my America.'	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-no-gays-america/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	FALSE: Ted Cruz Said There Is ‘No Place for Gays’ in America	1 February 2016	None	['United_States', 'Ted_Cruz']
-pomt-08265	Electric utility FirstEnergy's annual revenues are greater "than the GDP of Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, Iceland, or 15 African nations."	true	/ohio/statements/2010/nov/10/marcy-kaptur/rep-marcy-kaptur-chides-firstenergy-rate-plan-noti/	Roughly 361,000 electrically heated Ohio households were shocked last year when Akron-based FirstEnergy began phasing out discounted rates it had provided for decades to "all electric" customers whose households run exclusively on electricity. FirstEnergy has said those customers need to pay the actual costs for the services they receive, and the longtime discounts can’t continue because of electricity deregulation and new conservation mandates, The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio took up the issue after some families complained of doubled electricity bills, and has held hearings on the subject throughout the state. At an Oct. 25 hearing in Sandusky, Toledo Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur told PUCO the discounts should remain, and noted they were part of a longtime all-electric marketing scheme in which the company agreed to provide lower rates to customers who forfeited alternative utility choices. As part of her statement, Kaptur asked: "Are we to believe that a corporation such as FirstEnergy, with annual revenues of approximately $1 billion -- that’s a thousand million dollars a year, more than the GDP of Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, Iceland, or 15 African nations -- are we to believe that such a giant corporation cannot afford to keep its promises to senior citizens and working families in all-electric homes and apartments?" Do FirstEnergy’s revenues actually exceed the gross domestic product of so many countries? We decided to do some digging. FirstEnergy’s most recent annual report says its total revenue for 2009 was nearly $13 billion, down from $13.6 billion in 2008. Kaptur’s $1 billion statement significantly understates the company’s yearly revenues, but she’s correct to state those revenues exceed the gross domestic product of many countries. According to statistics compiled by the World Bank, FirstEnergy’s yearly revenues are greater than the 2009 gross domestic products of 85 nations including Iceland ($12.1 billion) Haiti ($6.7 billion) and the Kyrgyz Republic ($4.6 billion). It’s also higher than the gross domestic product for 29 African countries: Zambia, Botswana, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Namibia, Madagascar, Mali, The Republic of the Congo, Mauritius, Burkina Faso, Chad, Benin, Niger, Rwanda, Malawi, Guinea, Mauritania, Swaziland, Togo, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Lesotho, Liberia, Seychelles, The Gambia. Comoros, and Sao Tome and Principe. FirstEnergy spokeswoman Ellen Raines said the company’s $13 billion yearly revenue doesn’t reflect what it pays for expenses like taxes, infrastructure maintenance, electricity generation, and employing 14,000 workers. "We have a vast and complex infrastructure that is used to provide electric service to 4 ½ million customers," said Raines. "We invest every day in helping ensure that service is safe and reliable." FirstEnergy is committed to finding a resolution to the electricity rate issue that is "fair to all our customers," said Raines, adding that said current rates for all-electric homes will continue through the winter heating season. Asked why Kaptur said FirstEnergy’s yearly revenues are $1 billion instead of $13 billion, Kaptur spokesman Steve Fought took the blame. He said he did the research and intended to write that the company’s monthly revenue, not yearly revenue, was $1 billion.. After The Plain Dealer inquired about the discrepancy, he corrected the version of the statement that appears on Kaptur’s website. "I have to take responsibility for that," said Fought. "Looking back on it, I wish I had just referred to FirstEnergy's annual revenues instead of trying to break it into a billion dollars a month. In trying to make the numbers more understandable, I succeeded only in making them more confusing." Fought said Kaptur’s point is still valid despite the mistake: "FirstEnergy has plenty of money to keep their promises to all electric customers." PolitiFact Ohio isn’t in the business of playing "Gotcha!" We recognize sometimes people can misspeak. Her staff had the correct revenue number, and Kaptur's mistake certainly didn’t lead to exaggeration. In fact, she understates the number of countries that have smaller GDP. Her underlying point, that FirstEnergy has sizable annual revenue, is accurate. So we’re not downgrading her on the Truth-O-Meter. We rate Kaptur’s claim as True. Comment on this item.	None	Marcy Kaptur	None	None	None	2010-11-10T14:45:00	2010-10-25	['Kyrgyzstan', 'Iceland', 'Africa', 'Haiti']
-pose-00485	"During 2009 and 2010, existing businesses will receive a $3,000 refundable tax credit for each additional full-time employee hired."	compromise	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/505/create-a-new-american-jobs-tax-credit-for-companie/	None	obameter	Barack Obama	None	None	Create a $3,000 tax credit for companies that add jobs	2010-01-07T13:27:00	None	['None']
-goop-00037	Tom Cruise Having ‘Midlife Meltdown’?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/tom-cruise-midlife-meltdown-scientology/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Tom Cruise Having ‘Midlife Meltdown’?	12:31 pm, November 5, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03057	The Chili's restaurant chain donates 15 percent of every sale to Planned Parenthood.	mostly false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chilis-planned-parenthood/	None	Politics	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Is Chili’s Donating 15 Percent of Every Sale to Planned Parenthood?	26 January 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-00922	Ninety-five percent of the money used for union-operated worker training centers comes from employers.	mostly false	/wisconsin/statements/2015/feb/27/kurt-bauer/business-leader-says-95-percent-union-worker-train/	Listening to supporters and opponents of right to work laws talk about worker training -- and who pays for it -- can be a mind-bending experience. They talk right past each other. That was the case at a Feb. 10, 2015, discussion about right to work sponsored by the Rotary Club of Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Press Club. The panel featured Kurt Bauer, leader of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby, and Steve Lyons, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Contractor Coalition. Bauer and his group back right to work. Lyons and his group, which includes about 400 firms in construction contracting, are opposed. Lyons noted that many skilled trades such as carpenters, plumbers and operating engineers provide training to their members at union-run centers across the state -- and argued such training would be hurt if the state passes a right-to-work law. Union members "gave $30 million to these facilities," last year, Lyons said. "From the training perspective, it’s great that some of these unions do train -- not all of them do -- the trades do," Bauer countered. "But it’s paid for by employers. That won’t change -- 95 percent comes from employers." Bauer then added: "That’s one for PolitiFact." Lyons replied: "Absolutely. Bring it on." We are here to serve. Is Bauer right that 95 percent of the money used for union-operated worker training centers comes from employers? More about the programs This is all tied into the right to work debate because worker training, particularly in the trades areas, is expensive. It’s also important to ensure that quality and safety standards are met and maintained. These are the folks building houses and highways, for instance. And much of the training is done at union-operated worker training centers around the state. Since trades workers are typically the ones affected by this provision, understanding how those unions work is key to this issue. Picture a construction project that requires iron workers. Contractors on the project may tap a union to provide iron workers for the job, but those workers are not permanent employees of the contractor. They may work on a building project one day, and switch to a bridge project the next. Thus, training programs have grown up around the unions. A right to work law would mean workers no longer would be required to pay dues to a union. The concern, as cited by Lyons, is that over time this could mean fewer union members and therefore less money available for training. He takes it a step further and notes the training would then have to be done by the state’s taxpayer-supported technical colleges. Bauer’s claim is that this is largely irrelevant, since nearly all the money for training comes not from unions, but employers. The reality is more complicated. Unions decide each year how to allocate the training money deducted from their paychecks. Think of it in terms of a payroll deduction for, say, a flexible spending account, parking or some other item. It may be handled administratively by the employer, but the money is the employee’s to spend. "The money is held by the companies and then given to the various union training funds," said Tim Peterson, vice president of James Peterson Sons Inc., a fourth-generation highway construction contractor based in Medford. "However, active members of the trade unions allocate money out of their negotiated pay to fund the training trust funds." A member of the Contractor Coalition, Peterson agreed that the money starts with the employers, usually as a set amount per hour of pay. But the workers decide how the money is used, he said, adding: "If employees elect to reduce or stop directing money to the training funds, those dollars will go to increase the employees’ wages and will not be redirected to the employers." End of story? Not quite. Scott Manley, vice president of governmental relations for WMC, said the best evidence the training money comes from employers is the tax returns filed by the nonprofit entities that the unions use to manage the training money. "According to tax forms filed by unions with the IRS, businesses pay about 95% of the operating cost for union training programs," Manley said in an email. "Although the amount paid may be negotiated with the unions who do the training … it is businesses that actually make the payment." Manley added: "Employers pay to have workers trained because it is in their best interest to have skilled employees." Right to work laws, he added, "will not change employers’ need for skilled labor or their willingness to pay for it." Howard H. Simon, an accountant with the Chicago-based Calibre CPA Group, the company that prepared the tax returns for the job training fund, took a different view of the tax documents. He provided a list of about three dozen state-based training funds, and the sources of the money. One example: The Appleton-Oshkosh Electrical Workers Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee. The list "demonstrates that employees of the various trade organizations listed contributed over $31 million to their training funds (in a one-year period)," Simon said in a memo to Lyons. "It’s a private contract…between the private sector business and the private sector union," Lyons said. "And it’s a voluntary contract. And in those contracts ... the individual employees determine how much they’re going to give." Our rating Bauer says that employers pay 95 percent of the cost of union workers to receive training. That may be true in a technical sense, and on an IRS form, but it’s not that simple. The money in question belongs to the workers -- it’s part of their compensation. And they decide how to allocate it each year. The statement contains some element of truth but leaves out important information that would lead to a different impression. In our book, that’s Mostly False.	None	Kurt Bauer	None	None	None	2015-02-27T05:00:00	2015-02-10	['None']
-pomt-03223	"Only in Washington would politicians spend $27 million to teach Moroccans how to make pottery."	mostly false	/georgia/statements/2013/aug/21/karen-handel/pottery-class-claim-takes-truth-spin/	The race to fill retiring U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ seat is in full swing with candidates on both sides of the aisle jockeying for early position among their competitors. A common theme, particularly among the GOP candidates, has been the need to rein in wasteful government spending. Former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel has taken this topic to another level. Handel began a daily blog, titled "Only in Washington," detailing alleged wastefulness by the federal government. Handel is planning to chronicle "42 ridiculous things that happen only in Washington," and this week she reached the halfway point. PolitiFact Georgia perused the 20 or so completed entries and found some to be quite interesting. For example, Day 8’s item: "Only in Washington would politicians spend $27 million to teach Moroccans how to make pottery," Handel said. "While Morocco is no doubt a lovely place, we have families in Georgia that are being hurt by high taxes fueling out of control spending … What’s worse is that the program was deemed a failure …," she continued. Almost $30 million for pottery classes in any country sounded outrageous. We decided to dig a little deeper to determine whether these costs were accurate. A press release accompanying each day’s item includes sources that Handel’s team has used to make the statements. For the Day 8 item, the sources included a couple of news stories about the spending that Handel’s spokesman provided. The claim has been repeated by politicos before, including conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly. Earlier this year, PolitiFact Wisconsin looked into this claim as a portion of a three-part statement made by a congressman from that state about government spending. The congressman was found to be incorrect for overstating this portion of his claim about the pottery class spending. Much of the background about this claim originated from a similar aggregation of alleged wasteful federal government spending done by U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn. Each year, the Republican senator from Oklahoma releases an oversight report of "unnecessary, duplicative and low-priority projects spread throughout the federal government" in a document called the Wastebook. Coburn’s Wastebook 2012 highlights the pottery classes as an example of wasteful spending, but notes that only part of the $27 million of a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project went toward the classes. In 2009, USAID began a $30 million, four-year plan to help increase the economic competitiveness of Morocco. The plan included five projects, with the Morocco Economic Competitive Project accounting for $27 million, or 90 percent of the overall plan. The Competitive Project, scheduled to run through Sept. 30, 2013, initially included a provision for a $7 million, one-year extension. But because of anticipated budget cuts, a change in mission strategy, complications with the task order and poor implementation of some activities, it is unlikely the project will be extended, according to a December 2011 audit report by a federal inspector general. The initial goals of the project were to improve the country's business climate, work on ways to use water sustainably for agricultural growth and strengthen workforce development. A key part of the project included training Moroccans to create pottery to sell domestically as well as internationally. But the pottery program was riddled with problems, the audit found. For example, a translator hired to translate the instructions from an English-speaking pottery trainer to Arabic-speaking attendees was not fluent in English, which resulted in communication breakdowns. Also, some of the materials used by the pottery trainer were unavailable in Morocco, and participants were unable to replicate the projects. The pottery trainer was forgetful. Ultimately, the audit found that the pottery portion of the competitiveness project was poorly implemented, had limited impact and its intended focus on women and youths was not fulfilled. In a November 2011 response letter, USAID/Morocco's mission director characterized the pottery training as a "minor activity" within the competitiveness project. The pottery training portion of the project represented only one part of the project’s engagement in the country’s pottery sector. In fiscal 2011, that component accounted for 8 percent of annual project spending, the mission director wrote. So is Handel’s claim correct? The former Georgia secretary of state who’s now a U.S. Senate candidate said that the federal government spent $27 million teaching Moroccans how to make pottery. This claim has been a popular touchstone for conservatives looking to shine a light on government waste. But a closer look at the facts shows that the $27 million was for an entire economic development program in Morocco, of which the pottery training was only a fraction of the cost -- about 8 percent of the total program. Some may still consider that amount, $2.2 million, a large expense for pottery training and promotion, but it is not close to the $27 million that Handel claimed. Her overall point that the program was a failure is supported by an inspector general’s audit that found that the pottery training was mismanaged, poorly organized and ineffective. Her statement contains an element of truth but overstates the cost and ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rated Handel’s claim Mostly False.	None	Karen Handel	None	None	None	2013-08-21T00:00:00	2013-08-07	['Washington,_D.C.', 'Morocco']
-pomt-04924	"The president's first major foreign policy speech in Cairo was to apologize for our country."	false	/new-hampshire/statements/2012/jul/31/kelly-ayotte/kelly-ayotte-parrots-dubunked-romney-talking-point/	Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH, rumored to be one of Mitt Romney’s choice running mates for his 2012 presidential campaign, made her rounds on the National media circuit this weekend criticizing the President while touting the former Massachusetts governor, this time during CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. When host Candy Crowley highlighted Romney’s foreign faux pas while traveling abroad over the weekend, Ayotte was quick to shift the criticism onto President Barack Obama’s foreign policy speeches to show why she feels Romney would better serve as Commander in Chief. "I can tell you that certainly, Mitt Romney is going to be strong on America's exceptionalism and strong foreign policy for America and he won't go around and apologize for America," Ayotte said. "Think about it. The president's first major foreign policy speech in Cairo was to apologize for our country, and he's actually made us weaker around the world as opposed to stronger, and Mitt Romney will stand strong with our allies." In the world of PolitiFact, Ayotte and Romney have campaign chemistry, at least when it comes to this claim; we’ve already fact checked Romney three times for saying Obama apologized for U.S. actions overseas. He’s earned a False and a Pants on Fire, not once, but twice. The concept that Obama has traveled the world apologizing is popular among some conservative websites, and since Ayotte put the claim back in the public spotlight, PolitiFact New Hampshire felt it was time to bring it before the Truth-O-Meter, again. What Obama said Romney first made the accusation about Obama’s apologies abroad in his book titled, "No Apology," and later said Obama issued apologies and criticisms of America in speeches in France, England, Turkey, and Cairo; at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York City. For starters, as PolitiFact looked over Obama's remarks, we have noticed that Obama never used the word that is the universal hallmark of apologies: "sorry." Merriam-Webster defines an apology as "an admission of error or discourtesy accompanied by an expression of regret." PolitiFact read the Obama speeches Romney references and selected the passages that seemed the most critical, apologetic or conciliatory, and then ran them by several experts with different points of view. At times, Obama uses an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand formulation that he tends to employ right before he asks the two sides to come together. But Since Ayotte cited the Cairo speech specifically, we’ll focus on that one. During a 6,000-word speech on relations between the U.S. and the Islamic world in Cairo in 2009, Obama did get very close to regretting decades-old U.S. actions in Iran. But then he immediately countered with criticism of Iran. He did not make a formal expression of regret, but suggested both countries simply "move forward." Here are his exact remarks: "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians. This history is well known. Rather than remain trapped in the past, I've made it clear to Iran's leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward." Obama also praised America, saying "The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. ... We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words -- within our borders, and around the world." An Ayotte spokesman, reached Tuesday, stood by the claim that the president was apologetic, saying the President acknowledged what he considered to be several errors in U.S. foreign policy during his speech and then pledged to change course. "President Obama is entitled to his opinion and Senator Ayotte is entitled to her opinion, which is that his address in Cairo amounted to an apology," Ayotte spokesman Jeff Grappone said. "There are numerous ways to apologize for American foreign policy without actually using the word ‘sorry.’ In this case, Senator Ayotte and President Obama have a fundamental difference of opinion, which she expressed." They cited several passages, including Obama’s comments about Iran, which they say amounted to the President apologizing for the United States. Here are the President’s statements from the speech they cited: • Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible. • Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year. • I know -- I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other. • But all of us must recognize that education and innovation will be the currency of the 21st century -- and in too many Muslim communities, there remains underinvestment in these areas. I'm emphasizing such investment within my own country. And while America in the past has focused on oil and gas when it comes to this part of the world, we now seek a broader engagement. • More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Did Obama apologize? PolitiFact sent Obama's remarks from each of the speeches that Romney cited, including the Cairo speech, to several different experts on foreign policy and apologies, to see if they thought Obama was apologizing. • Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, a professor who studies international human rights, maintains the website Political Apologies and Reparations, a database of documents on apologies. Many of the apologies in the database relate to genocide or slavery. Obama's Cairo address in particular was a means of reaching out to the Islamic world, not an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, she said. "Whether he's apologizing or not, he's saying 'I respect your society and I respect your customs.' Maybe that's what Romney considers an apology, that gesture of respect," she said. "But a gesture of respect is not an apology." • Nile Gardiner, a foreign policy analyst with the the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Obama was definitely apologizing, which is not good. He co-wrote the Heritage analysis, "Barack Obama's Top 10 Apologies: How the President Has Humiliated a Superpower." "Apologizing for your own country projects an image of weakness before both allies and enemies," Gardiner said. "It sends a very clear signal that the U.S. is to blame for some major developments on the world stage. This can be used to the advantage of those who wish to undermine American global leadership." • John Murphy, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studies presidential rhetoric and political language. He said Obama was using conciliatory language for diplomatic purposes, not apologizing. "It's much more a sense of establishing of reciprocity," Murphy said. "Each side says, okay, we haven't done great, but we have a new president and we're going to make a fresh start and move forward. I don't think that's an apology. ... In rhetorical history, an apology is generally considered an account of some kind of bad behavior in which you are going to take responsibility and express regret." • Lauren Bloom, an attorney and business consultant, wrote the book, The Art of the Apology, advising businesses and individuals on when to apologize and how to do it. She said Obama's words fell short of an apology, mostly because he didn't use the words "sorry" or "regret." "I think to make an effective apology, the words 'I'm sorry' or 'we're sorry' always have to be there," Bloom said. Short of conducting a full review of all American presidents to see if any others had ever apologized, PolitiFact has also compared Obama to his two immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in the earlier fact check. Our ruling While Obama's speeches have contained some criticisms of past U.S. actions, those passages were typically leavened by praise for the United States and its ideals, and he frequently mentioned how other countries have erred as well. The same is true when zeroing in on Obama’s Cairo speech, when the President never included the words "sorry," "apologize," "error," or even "regret." It’s incorrect for Romney, and now Ayotte, to portray any of these speeches as apologies. PolitiFact has regularly found Romney’s angle--that Obama’s trips were intended to offer the president a forum to apologize to other countries--to be a ridiculous charge. There’s a clear difference between changing policies and apologizing, and Obama didn’t do the latter. However, Romney charged that the President went on global apology tour, while Ayotte cited only one stop along that tour. Still, for parroting Romney’s repeatedly refuted claim, we give Ayotte a False. Note: Ayotte’s response was added to this item Tuesday evening after it was originally published.	None	Kelly Ayotte	None	None	None	2012-07-31T17:34:09	2012-07-29	['Cairo']
-pomt-15369	"Chris Christie has led New Jersey to a record-breaking 9 credit downgrades."	mostly true	/punditfact/statements/2015/jul/02/donna-brazile/dem-pundit-brazile-says-nj-credit-rating-fell-reco/	A key talking point for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in his bid for the GOP nomination is that he is a can-do Republican in a Democratic state. That, of course, leaves him open to challenges about what he’s actually achieved. Democratic pundit and occasional party operative Donna Brazile took a jab at Christie’s track record on managing his state’s finances. "Governor #ChrisChristie has led New Jersey to a record-breaking 9 credit downgrades. Yes, you read that right: nine credit downgrades," Brazile tweeted on June 30, 2015. We’ve checked similar statements about Christie before and took this moment to update our findings. In short, yes, the three major credit rating firms have collectively downgraded the state’s bond rating nine times. The latest move came from Moody’s Investor Service in April. The Moody’s rating fell from A1 to A2. The rating firm said it based the change on the state’s "weak financial position and large structural imbalance, primarily related to continued pension contribution shortfalls." In addition to Moody’s, there are two other rating agencies -- Standard & Poor’s Rating Services and Fitch Ratings. Here’s the history of downgrades since Christie took office. Date Rating service Rating change 1 Feb. 9, 2011 Standard & Poor’s AA to AA- 2 April 27, 2011 Moody’s Aa2 to Aa3 3 Aug. 17, 2011 Fitch Ratings AA to AA- 4 April 9, 2014 Standard & Poor’s AA- to A+ 5 May 1, 2014 Fitch Ratings AA- to A+ 6 May 13, 2014 Moody’s Aa3 to A1 7 Sept. 5, 2014 Fitch Ratings A+ to A 8 Sept. 10, 2014 Standard & Poor’s A+ to A 9 April 16, 2015 Moody’s A1 to A2 Do the nine downgrades set a record? Yes, for New Jersey. According to news reports, that is the highest number ever for a single New Jersey governor. The previous record was six credit downgrades, which happened while Democrat James McGreevey was governor. McGreevey presided over his drops in less than three years in office (2002-04); Christie is in his sixth year in office. Pension system blues Ratings agencies assess the state’s ability to repay its lenders, not just today but for years to come. Their opinion matters because the lower the rating, the higher the interest rate the state faces when it wants to borrow money. A point of ongoing concern for the agencies has been New Jersey’s pension obligations. It’s total commitments are about $43 billion. According to a report by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, as of 2013, New Jersey ranked last in the country in its efforts to put enough money into the system each year to make good on its promises to it current and future retirees. It was putting in 38 percent of what the association calculated was needed. As Moody’s put it, "the state's plan to restore long-term structural balance relies on economic growth and further pension reforms, which have uncertain timing and impact." Recent events in New Jersey have fueled such skepticism. In 2011, Christie struck a deal with lawmakers, and public workers, to increase state contributions to the pension funds in exchange for higher payments from employees, a bump in the retirement age, and lower cost-of-living increases for retirees. But in 2014, with tax revenues coming in lower than predicted, Christie trimmed the state’s pension payments. Christie says deeper changes are needed. Does Christie deserve all the blame for this mess? No. Democratic and Republican governors alike have failed to put enough money into the pension system going back to the late 1990s. The problem ballooned in the early 2000s when the dot-com bubble burst and tax revenues fell, and the Great Recession later in the decade did even more damage to state finances. Also, the state Legislature has been controlled by Democrats. But while the problem was created before he took office, Christie can’t sidestep at least some responsibility for what has taken place on his watch. Our ruling Brazile said that Chistie led New Jersey to a record-breaking nine credit downgrades. Her tally is correct, Christie was the chief executive throughout and no other New Jersey governor has overseen so many reductions in the state credit rating. The previous record was six. But the underlying problem with pensions began before his time and the economy made it harder to fix past errors. It's also worth noting that Democracts have controlled the Legislature during Christie's time in office. With those caveats, we rate this claim Mostly True.	None	Donna Brazile	None	None	None	2015-07-02T14:02:53	2015-06-30	['New_Jersey', 'Chris_Christie']
-bove-00215	Did Former Veep Disrespect The National Anthem By Not Saluting?: A FactCheck	none	https://www.boomlive.in/did-former-veep-disrespect-the-national-anthem-by-not-saluting-a-factcheck/	None	None	None	None	None	Did Former Veep Disrespect The National Anthem By Not Saluting?: A FactCheck	Aug 19 2017 4:15 pm	None	['None']
-vogo-00144	Staying in Mira Mesa Schools: Fact Check TV	none	https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/staying-in-mira-mesa-schools-fact-check-tv/	None	None	None	None	None	Staying in Mira Mesa Schools: Fact Check TV	None	None	['None']
-goop-00271	Anna Faris Warns Chris Pratt About Son Calling Katherine Schwarzenegger ‘Mom’?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/anna-faris-chris-pratt-katherine-schwarzenegger-son-mom/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Anna Faris Warns Chris Pratt About Son Calling Katherine Schwarzenegger ‘Mom’?	4:43 pm, September 13, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-15176	"We did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913."	half-true	/virginia/statements/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/jim-webb-says-us-didnt-have-income-taxes-until-191/	Correction (Dec. 20, 2016): This fact-check initially published on Aug. 24, 2015, and was rated Mostly True. Upon reconsideration, we are changing our ruling to Half True. The text of the fact-check is unchanged. Democratic presidential candidate Jim Webb says the U.S. needs a leaner, more efficient tax code. The former Virginia senator broadly calls for lowering tax rates in exchange for eliminating "loopholes and exceptions" that he says "have made a mockery out of true economic fairness." Webb says investment income should be taxed at the same rates as wages. And he would like to see the U.S. shift some of its burden away from income and toward consumption. Big changes? Sure. But Webb says the tax code is not sacrosanct. "We did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913," he wrote on his campaign website. Our radar beeped. Somewhere in the course of our lives, we recalled reading or hearing that the income tax had deeper roots in U.S. history than Webb claimed. So we investigated. In 1913, the year Webb cites, the U.S. began a tax on individual incomes, and a levy on personal earnings has been exacted ever since. That was the birth year of the 1040 tax form that, with many modifications, remains in use today. It came with one page of instructions back then, compared with 104 pages this year. Although the form was new, oldtimers in 1913 might have remembered another era when they paid income tax to Washington. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a measure enacting an income tax to help pay for the Civil War. It imposed a tax of 3 percent on incomes between $600 and $10,000 and a 5 percent tax on incomes above that level. The levy, which had sunset provisions, expired in 1872. It was not forgotten, however. In 1894, Congress passed a new income tax, but it never went into effect. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional the next year because it was a direct tax that was not apportioned on the basis of each state’s population. At that time, for example, if 5 percent of the U.S. population lived in Virginia, then no more than 5 percent of the total revenue could come from Virginia. That constitutional hurdle was cleared by the 16th Amendment, proposed by President William Howard Taft in 1909 and ratified by the states in 1913. It allowed the tax to be levied without any apportionment among states. Congress adopted a 1 percent tax on net personal income of more than $3,000 with a surtax of 6 percent on incomes of more than $500,000. By 1918, with World War I raging, the top income bracket soared to a 77 percent tax rate. We ran Webb’s statement past Joseph Thorndike, the director of the online Tax History Museum -- a nonprofit organization based in Falls Church. Thorndike, also an adjunct professor of tax policy at Northwestern University, said Webb’s historical oversight merits a minor penalty. "I think it’s fair to treat the Civil War tax as an anomaly," he said. Wonder where the U.S. got its revenues prior to the income tax? Before the Civil War, government funds primarily came from custom duties, selling public land and temporary excise taxes, according to the Congressional Research Service report. During the decades after the Civil War, when the income tax lapsed, the IRS says about 90 percent of the country’s revenues came from taxes on liquor, beer, wine and tobacco. Our ruling Webb said "we did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913." The modern income tax structure, complete with Form 1040, was born in 1913. But his claim disregards two pre-1913 efforts to impose an income tax — one of which was in place for a decade. This claim rates Half True.	None	Jim Webb	None	None	None	2015-08-24T00:00:00	2015-08-12	['None']
-snes-03085	The Women's March on Washington is tallying attendees by asking them to text "COUNT ME" to 89800.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/text-count-me-to-89800/	None	Fraud & Scams	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Should You Text ‘Count Me’ to 89800 to Support the Women’s March?	23 January 2017	None	['March_on_Washington_for_Jobs_and_Freedom']
-pomt-02070	The Obama administration spent "$205,075 in ‘stimulus’ funds to relocate a shrub that sells for $16."	mostly false	/texas/statements/2014/may/23/ted-cruz/shrub-found-wild-during-california-highway-project/	President Barack Obama regularly disregards laws to impose his preferred policies, Ted Cruz maintains. The Republican senator from Texas hammered that theme in a May 6, 2014, report, the fourth in a series, listing dozens of his concerns covering some previously fact-checked terrain such as work waivers for individuals on Temporary Aid to Needy Families, a topic reviewed by PolitiFact in 2012, plus administration moves softening or putting off parts of the Democrat-propelled 2010 health care law. Cruz set us to digging by declaring the administration "spent $205,075 in ‘stimulus’ funds to relocate a shrub that sells for $16." This shrub, shown here after it was uprooted from its original site, prompted Ted Cruz’s claim (photo by California Department of Transportation, received by email May 22, 2014). Really? Reported by CNSNews.com The basis for this claim, footnoted in the report, was an April 12, 2012, news article posted online by the CNSNews.com, Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said by email. The Virginia-based service says its goal is to "provide an alternative news source that would cover stories that are subject to the bias of omission and report on other news subject to bias by commission." According to the story, "Shovel Ready in San Fran: $205,075 to ‘Translocate’ One Shrub from Path of Stimulus Project," various agencies in 2010 transplanted a type of bush spotted in San Francisco that until then had been believed extinct in the wild for more than 60 years; the shrub was moved from a highway median where it blocked a stimulus-supported highway renovation to an undisclosed local location where it could continue to bloom in the wild. Meantime, the story said, commercial versions of the Franciscan manzanita, or Arctostaphylos franciscana, could be purchased locally for $15.98 or $18 each. An article about the uncovered plant, on the web page for a Los Angeles botanical garden, says Franciscan manzanitas typically grow about 12 inches tall and spread by rooting branches to form masses from 4 to 6 feet (or more) wide. According to the description, white- to pink-blushed urn-shaped flowers are produced in small terminal clusters. CNSNews.com quoted a spokeswoman for the Presidio Parkway project, Molly Graham, as saying that digging up the uncovered plant, putting it on a truck and driving and planting it elsewhere cost $100,000. The story noted other plant-related costs in a Dec. 21, 2009, 15-year memorandum of agreement involving various agencies teamed up to save and propagate the plant found near the south entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge. In the agreement, the California Department of Transportation, or CalTrans, agreed to transfer $79,470 to "fund the establishment, nurturing, and monitoring of the Mother Plant in its new location for a period not to exceed ten (10) years following relocation and two (2) years for salvaged rooted layers and cuttings…" Receiving the money: the federal Presidio Trust, which describes itself as devoted to transforming the Presidio section of San Francisco to a new purpose. CalTrans also agreed to transfer $25,605 to the trust to cover reporting requirements of the initial 10-year period. Adding these figures to the $100,000 to uproot, move and re-plant the shrub leads to total translocation costs of $205,075, CNSNews.com said, not counting up to $23,500 in other post-move shrub-connected costs it identified from the memo. Stimulus money contributed to road project And how did the Obama administration figure in? CNSNews.com reported that grants funded by the economic stimulus package, approved by the Democratic-majority Congress and signed into law by Obama in 2009, are helping to fund the ongoing replacement of an approach to the Golden Gate bridge, which has a total expected cost of $1.045 billion. Some $130 million in stimulus grants, the story said, breaks down to $83.28 million awarded Dec. 24, 2009 (about a month before the bush move) and $46 million awarded Dec. 30, 2010. Our hunt for other accounts of the shrub shift yielded an earlier news story pegging the costs of the shrub move at $175,000--"$140,000 to dig up and move the shrub, and $35,000 for ‘support’ services from geological, botanical and climate experts in preparation for its new home in the Presidio less than a mile away," according to a San Francisco Chronicle news story posted online June 2, 2010. Like the CNSNews.com article, the Chronicle story was silent on whether stimulus aid paid for the shrub move. Plant in wild distinct from commercially cultivated version? Separately, botanists declared a difference between the plant found in the wild and others like it. In an April 20, 2012, blog post, the Berkeley, Calif.-based Bay Nature Institute, which says it’s dedicated to educating residents about the beauty of the surrounding natural world, quoted Dan Gluesenkamp, the botanist who originally noticed the lone plant as he drove by the median, as saying it’s misleading to equate the wild Franciscan manzanita with the domesticated version found in garden stores, which has been hybridized for features like pretty flowers, Gluesenkamp said. "You can go buy a dog for $15 or $230," he said, "but it’s not the same as a wolf in the wild." The blog post continued: "The Franciscan manzanita found in garden stores is an offshoot of a wild specimen taken in 1947 from a Laurel Hill cemetery, one of the few remaining wild locations at the time. As the story goes, some of the last remaining wild specimens were salvaged by James Roof, the founding director of the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley. In a clandestine nighttime rescue, plantswoman Lester Rowntree ‘garnered it ghoulishly in a gunnysack’ and gave it a new home in her garden. A few more plants found their way into nurseries and botanic gardens, but the species’ known wild habitat was no more," the institute said. In September 2012, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated the surviving wild manzanita as an endangered species, according to a Sept. 4, 2012, Chronicle news article. Agency: Shrub's move covered by local road tolls Asked how the shrub's move was funded, a CalTrans official, David Yam, replied by email that $148,000 spent to uproot the 21,000-pound plant and move, replant and initially preserve it came from tolls collected on bridges near San Francisco by the Bay Area Toll Authority--not stimulus aid. Yam said major post-move costs, in accord with the memorandum of agreement, are drawing on $105,000 in federal funds, though (again) no stimulus money, he said. Shopping for a Franciscan manzanita Yam agreed a similar cultivated Manzanita plant can be purchased commercially, but he said a 21,000-pound wild Manzanita isn't available. He provided a background document stating the plant discovered on the median is one of three remaining "wild" species of the bush; the others are in botanical gardens, the document states. "Cuttings from the 'wild' plant cannot be purchased by the public," the document states. We briefly shopped online for a manzanita Franciscana without finding one. By telephone, Bart O’Brien, a manager at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley, Calif., said that occasionally the garden sells plants, descended from the manzanita Franciscana salvaged from the San Francisco cemetery in the 1940s. When sales happen, he said, the plants sell for $10 to $25. The sold plants are of the same species as the bush saved during the ongoing highway project, O'Brien said, but they’re not the same because they're not growing in the wild. Cruz unmoved Updated on our findings, Frazier said by email the bush never would have been shifted if not for the stimulus-supported road project. Moving the plant wasted tax dollars, she said, and Cruz stands by his claim. Our ruling Cruz said the Obama administration spent "$205,075 in ‘stimulus’ to relocate a shrub that sells for $16." Some $130 million in stimulus money is supporting a $1 billion California road project that when it started brought to light a thought-to-be-extinct shrub in the wild. But we learned local road toll revenues covered the shrub’s $148,000 move and transplantation--not stimulus aid. Also, there’s a distinction between the rare in-the-wild version the shrub ballyhooed in the city by the bay and the occasionally available commercial versions, which this claim fails to acknowledge. We rate the statement, which has an element of truth but ignores critical facts such as the singularity of the shrub whose move wasn't funded from stimulus aid, as Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.	None	Ted Cruz	None	None	None	2014-05-23T16:56:08	2014-05-06	['None']
-pomt-12555	A United Airlines passenger forcibly removed from an airplane "was in his seat, he has every right to stay there."	false	/punditfact/statements/2017/apr/14/andrew-napolitano/united-airlines-passenger-had-every-right-stay-pla/	A United Airlines passenger’s forcible removal from a flight has led to plenty of armchair judicial rulings on whether it was legal. Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano said on Fox & Friends after the incident that United overstepped its authority by taking David Dao off Flight 3411 unwillingly on April 10, 2017. Dao had boarded the airplane, but then United selected him to lose his seat when the airline wanted to put four flight crew members on the flight from Chicago to Louisville, Ky. Dao refused to leave. Video widely shared on the Internet appeared to show Dao being pulled from his seat by Chicago Department of Aviation police, his face bloodied in the process. His family later announced he had suffered a concussion, a broken nose and lost his two front teeth. The officers involved have been put on leave, and United has struggled to contain the publicity disaster. "By dislodging this passenger against his will, United violated its contractual obligation," Napolitano said the next day. "He paid for the ticket, he bought the ticket, he passed the TSA, he was in his seat, he has every right to stay there." Airline travel already is fraught with hassle and inconvenience, as most of us know, but this incident has tested legal boundaries for how passengers can and should be treated. Is Napolitano right that a ticketed passenger who has passed security and boarded the airplane has "every right" to stay in his seat? Without diving into the other legalities of what happened to Dao, experts we contacted say Napolitano’s argument that a passenger can’t be removed from a plane doesn’t fly. Contract of carriage Let’s start off by saying there’s a lot about the incident that would have to be decided after an investigation, and possibly even legal action. With so many arguments to consider about the legality of Dao’s removal, a lot is still up in the air (so to speak). We emailed Napolitano and two Fox News Channel media contacts for more information on this statement, but we didn’t get a reply. Timothy Ravich, an aviation law professor at the University of Central Florida, told us passenger rights are still limited by laws, regulations and policies. Airlines have the authority to decide whether passengers are breaking the rules, and can remove people at a company's discretion, even against a passenger's will. "The suggestion that Dr. Dao had ironclad rights merely by buying a ticket, passing through TSA security, and being in his seat is incorrect," Ravich said. In this case, Dao was also subject to United’s contract of carriage, essentially a set of guidelines by which a passenger agrees to abide in exchange for the flight. Ravich pointed out that Rule 21 of United’s contract give about 27 reasons why the airline "shall have the right to refuse to transport or shall have the right to remove from the aircraft at any point, any passenger." Some of these reasons include a woman being nine months pregnant, or someone being too sick or too drunk to fly, or even if they are "barefoot or not properly clothed." That last one came up for United in March when two teen girls were barred from a flight for wearing leggings. (The teens were flying standby as part of the airlines’ perk of giving flights to employees and their dependents. The airline said the tight-fitting pants did not meet the company’s policy dress code for those types of passengers.) Ravich noted, as an example, that Rule 21 also said "passengers who fail to comply with or interfere with the duties of the members of the flight crew, federal regulations, or security directives" are subject to removal as a safety measure. One theoretical argument in this instance could be that Dao was told to leave to help United get a flight crew to Louisville. Dao broke the rule when he refused and was therefore removed. Now, before you write us angry letters, let us reiterate that we’re not judging whether a policy is fair or was applied or enforced correctly. We’re merely saying that there are rules in place that allow for passengers already on a plane to be removed, and passengers are subject to them. Embry Riddle Aeronautical University aviation law professor Stephen Dedmon agreed that United can remove passengers from planes for many reasons. He also said the specifics of Dao’s case can currently be debated but not resolved without knowing all the specifics or legal interpretations. "It would take a court ruling to decide UA’s provisions were appropriate and properly applied," Dedmon said. Our ruling Napolitano said a United Airlines passenger forcibly removed from an airplane had "every right" to stay in his seat. Napolitano's blanket assertion is incorrect. Experts told us that airlines, including United, outline dozens of reasons why they might remove a passenger after he has already boarded. Whether the airline adhered to or executed these provisions properly is a different matter, and would have to be decided in court. Either way, you can still lose your seat once you get on the plane. We rate the statement False.	None	Andrew Napolitano	None	None	None	2017-04-14T17:30:57	2017-04-11	['United_Airlines']
-snes-01296	President Trump said police and firefighters make too much money in order to justify eliminating some of their tax deductions.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/police-officers-firefighters-too-much-money/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did Donald Trump Say ‘Police Officers and Firefighters Make Too Much Money’?	27 December 2017	None	['None']
-snes-01043	Video footage shows cats being offered as prizes in an arcade claw machine in China.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cats-claw-machines/	None	Critter Country	None	Dan MacGuill	None	Were Cats Used as Prizes in Arcade Claw Machines?	9 February 2018	None	['China']
-hoer-00569	Message Claims Parents Put Daughter Up For Adoption Because She is Gay	statirical reports	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/parents-adopt-out-gay-daughter.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Satire - Message Claims Parents Put Daughter Up For Adoption Because She is Gay	April 8, 2013	None	['None']
-hoer-00909	Fact Check Have Police Issued Warnings About Poison Being Injected into Bottled Water?	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fact-check-have-police-issued-warnings-about-poison-being-injected-into-bottled-water/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Fact Check Have Police Issued Warnings About Poison Being Injected into Bottled Water?	March 29, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-14829	"The vast majority of (Syrian) refugees are young, able-bodied men looking for work."	false	/new-hampshire/statements/2015/nov/20/carly-fiorina/fiorina-says-vast-majority-syrian-refugees-are-abl/	Carly Fiorina, in trying to position herself as "most qualified leader in foreign policy" among the Republican candidates for president, reiterated her September stand against admitting Syrian refugees to come to the United States. At a meeting with the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women in Concord, N.H., on Nov. 17 -- following the terrorist attacks in Paris -- Fiorina questioned the demographics of those fleeing. The photos of mothers and their children provoke sympathy, she said, but they don’t show "the truth." "The vast majority of these refugees are young, able-bodied men looking for work," she said at the event, which was covered by the Concord Monitor. In Concord, she didn’t specifically say Syrian refugees, but the surrounding discussion was specific to Syria. A day later, she repeated the claim on talk radio during an interview with host Mike Gallagher and specified that "the vast majority of refugees leaving Syria are able-bodied young men." That sounded like a job for PolitiFact. United Nations data Previously, PolitiFact has examined claims about Syrian refugees. In October, Donald Trump said "there aren't that many women; there aren't that many children" among Syrian refugees. We ranked that statement False. The United Nations keeps track of more than 4 million registered Syrian refugees, with an online database that includes specific demographic data. Let’s start by leaving out the other qualifiers — young and able-bodied — and look at whether the "vast majority" of refugees are men. We need not split hairs on what constitutes a "vast majority" here, since the gender breakdown is pretty evenly split; in hard numbers, the majority of refugees is actually female. Further, to look at only the male refugees – which amount to 49.7 percent of the total – less than half of that population is age 18 or older. Men ages 18 to 59 comprise about 22 percent of all Syrian refugees. Contrary to Fiorina’s statement, most refugees overall are children age 17 or younger. Resettlement Geoffrey Mock, a Syrian country specialist for Amnesty International USA, explained the situation of Syrian refugees to PolitiFact for the similar fact-check of Trump. He said the sort of refugees Fiorina was talking about – young, able-bodied men – would be given a low priority for settling in the United States. President Obama recommended in September that the country take at least 10,000 refugees in the next fiscal year. The United Nations recommended in April that the U.S. and other industrialized countries shelter 130,000 Syrian refugees over the following two years. "The priorities go to torture survivors, people with serious medical conditions, children and teens on their own, and women and children at risk," Mock told PolitiFact. Selected refugees undergo screening by state agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security. The process can take years. Our ruling Fiorina said the "vast majority of (Syrian) refugees are young, able-bodied men looking for work." She repeated the essence of a claim that wasn’t accurate a month earlier and isn’t accurate today. A slight majority of Syrian refugees are female, and men age 18 to 59 comprise about 22 percent of all Syrian refugees. We rate Fiorina’s claim False.	None	Carly Fiorina	None	None	None	2015-11-20T18:22:21	2015-11-17	['Syria']
-vees-00106	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Rape video of OFW in Middle East	fake	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-video-ofw-raped-middle-east-fake-news	None	None	None	None	OFW,fake news	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Rape video of OFW in Middle East FAKE NEWS	August 09, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-14626	Says Barack Obama's administration has admitted that money from its Iran nuclear deal "would go directly to terrorism."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2016/jan/29/ron-johnson/obama-administration-admits-cash-iran-deal-will-go/	In a 2016 U.S. Senate race that’s going negative, Russ Feingold has ripped Ron Johnson for opposing virtually any federal minimum wage (Our rating: True) and for saying he hopes the first steps occur to privatize the Veterans Administration (Our rating: Half True). But the target of the latest political missiles are Feingold, the Democrat who lost the Wisconsin Senate seat to Johnson, the Republican incumbent, in 2010. One of the attacks, which also targets President Barack Obama, was made by Johnson on Jan. 22, 2016. A Johnson campaign email, signed by a campaign staffer, starts this way, with a reference to a statement from the day before: Hey all, In light of the Obama administration admitting Thursday that money from its reckless Iran deal would go directly to terrorism, below are five crucial moments in Senator Feingold’s blind support for the deal. Johnson’s assertion -- that the administration has admitted that money from the Iran nuclear deal would go directly to terrorism -- doesn’t come out of thin air. But is it air tight? Iran nuclear deal The Iran deal was made with the United States, China and three other world powers. Iran, which was within three months of getting a nuclear bomb, committed to not pursue nuclear weapons. The deal contains other elements, but a key one is that all of the European Union and most American sanctions against Iran were lifted. Critics say that effectively amounts to a $150 billion check (though some say it’s more like $100 billion) to Iran -- a reference to the amount of Iran’s assets frozen in foreign banks. The Washington Post reported that Iran has more than $100 billion in available frozen assets — most of it in banks in China, Japan and South Korea — but that slightly less than half will more or less automatically go to preexisting debts. "How the rest is spent will reveal the direction of internal power struggles between Iranian hard-liners and pragmatists," the article said. John Kerry To back the claim about the Obama administration and funds going directly to terrorism, the Johnson campaign email links to a January 2016 news article in The Hill about comments made by Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry had told CNBC’s "Squawk Box" that Iran would get only $55 billion of the $150 billion referenced, saying the rest is committed to China and other countries: I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) or of other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists. To some degree, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented. But I can tell you this: Right now, we are not seeing the early delivery of funds going to that kind of endeavor at this point in time. I’m sure at some point, some of it will. To be clear, Iran is one of only three countries (Sudan and Syria are the others) that the U.S. State Department has designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. The IRGC, as Iran’s premier security institution, fields an army, navy and air force and "presides over a vast power structure with influence over almost every aspect of Iranian life," according to the Council on Foreign Relations think tank. In 2007, the U.S. Treasury Department designated the IRGC’s elite Quds Force a terrorist supporter for aiding the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. So, Kerry was saying some of the money ultimately will end up with organizations involved in terrorism. But that’s not the same as funds going directly to terrorism, as Johnson claimed. Kerry did tell reporters the same day, according to the Associated Press, that he understands the IRGC is "already complaining that they are not getting the money." But Kerry also said the Obama administration believes the amount of money that might flow to terrorist groups will be limited because "the demands of Iran and of the Rouhani administration and of the supreme leader for development in their country are such that there is no way they can succeed in doing what they want to do if they are very busy funding a lot of terrorism and if they are putting money into that kind of enterprise and not into things they need to do to fund their economy." It’s worth noting that Kerry’s comments weren’t the first of their kind. Johnson’s campaign cited to us statements made in August 2015 by senior administration officials to a U.S. Senate committee. The officials said, according to U.S. News & World Report, they were "nearly certain" Iran would continue funding terrorism with the tens of billions of dollars it stands to gain from the nuclear deal. The White House did not respond to our requests for comment. Our rating Johnson said Obama's administration has admitted that money from its Iran nuclear deal "would go directly to terrorism." Administration officials have said they expect some portion of money from the deal with Iran, which is aimed at preventing Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, will end up with groups that are labeled as terrorists. For a claim that is partially accurate but leaves out important details, our rating is Half True.	None	Ron Johnson	None	None	None	2016-01-29T05:00:00	2016-01-22	['Iran']
-pomt-05068	The Supreme Court said the individual mandate "is a tax. So it's a tax."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/05/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-health-care-laws-penalty-tax/	In the days following the Supreme Court’s decision on President Barack Obama’s health care law, supporters and critics of the law sparred over the question of whether or not the individual mandate was a tax. In its 5-4 ruling upholding the mandate -- as well as most of the rest of the law itself -- the court concluded that the mandate to buy insurance was constitutional because of Congress’ taxing power. Republicans who were dejected by the law being found constitutional found a silver lining in that determination, as they proceeded to attack Obama as a tax-raiser. Meanwhile, both sides faced uncomfortable questions on whether the mandate was a tax. Critics of the law highlighted Obama’s shifting views of whether the mandate was a tax or a penalty (an issue we fact-checked here). On the other hand, Democrats noted that if the individual mandate was actually a tax, then Mitt Romney himself had also imposed a tax when he signed a health care law as governor of Massachusetts. Initially, a senior Romney aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, told MSNBC that Romney "has consistently described the mandate in Massachusetts as a penalty" -- a position at odds with many other Republicans in the wake of the ruling. But then, Romney changed course in a July 4, 2012, interview with CBS News. "Well, the Supreme Court has the final word," Romney said. "And their final word is that Obamacare is a tax. So it's a tax." We thought Romney’s comment offered us an opportunity to clear the air on this question. Did the court rule that the individual mandate was a tax, or not? We received comments from 15 constitutional law experts from across the ideological spectrum. We found a certain degree of consensus -- but also a wide range of opinions on whether Romney’s claim was worded accurately, particularly given the complexity of the court’s ruling. What the court ruled The court actually addressed two questions relevant to Romney’s claim. Before it could address whether the mandate itself was constitutional, the court had to look at another critical question -- whether a law called the Anti-Injunction Act prevented the challenge to the law from going forward in the first place. What’s the Anti-Injunction Act? It says that no tax may be challenged in court before it takes effect. Instead, a tax can be challenged only after the government begins to enforce it, with the plaintiff seeking a refund for taxes already paid. Part of deciding whether the suit against the health care law could proceed to the merits depended on the court determining whether the individual mandate is a tax. Ultimately, the court ruled that the individual mandate did not constitute a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act. But the story doesn’t end there. With that hurdle cleared, the court proceeded to the merits, ruling the individual mandate constitutional based on Congress’ taxing power. This seeming contradiction about whether it was or was not a tax is at the root of much confusion. But experts we interviewed said the distinction makes sense legally. The Anti-Injunction Act is a law, while Congress’ taxing power is enshrined in the Constitution. Because of that, the majority opinion addressed the two definitions of "tax" differently. Specifically, when addressing the Anti-Injunction Act, the court gave deference to Congress’ decision not to label the individual mandate a tax when it wrote the legislation. If Congress had wanted the law to be subject to the act, the majority concluded, it could have easily done so by calling it a tax -- but it didn’t. So the Anti-Injunction Act was no barrier to the suit proceeding. However, when the court looked at whether the mandate was constitutional, it used a more expansive definition of the word "tax" -- one that includes provisions that are not explicitly labeled taxes, but act in similar ways. In the decision, Chief Justice John Roberts explained the divergent conclusions by writing, "It is of course true that the Act describes the payment as a ‘penalty,’ not a ‘tax.’ But while that label is fatal to the application of the Anti-Injunction Act … it does not determine whether the payment may be viewed as an exercise of Congress's taxing power. It is up to Congress whether to apply the Anti-Injunction Act to any particular statute, so it makes sense to be guided by Congress's choice of label on that question. That choice does not, however, control whether an exaction is within Congress's constitutional power to tax." Legal commentator Stuart Taylor Jr. described this distinction as requiring "some fancy footwork," but he concluded that "it’s justified by the principle that the broad constitutional power of Congress to levy taxes should govern when the issue is constitutional, whereas other factors -- including whether Congress labeled something a tax -- should govern when the issue involves a law." What legal experts said Most of the legal experts we interviewed said Romney was on pretty safe legal ground. For instance: • Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute: "This is an easy one. The Supreme Court has said it’s a tax, so it’s a tax. I disagree with the Supreme Court on that point, but the Constitution says that the court’s opinion trumps mine and anyone else’s." • University of California-Davis law professor Vikram Amar: "The court said the mandate provision fell within Congress' powers to lay and collect taxes, duties … and excises -- i.e., that it fell within the federal government's power to raise revenue. It is thus a tax for purposes of how the Constitution defines a tax. And that word from the court means that no legal challenge to it on the ground that Congress lacked power to enact it will succeed." • Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin: "The Supreme Court held that the mandate is constitutional under the taxing power because it functions as a tax, regardless of what Congress calls it." Even so, we heard one main criticism from our experts -- that Romney went too far when he said that the Supreme Court ruled that the mandate is a tax. Several legal scholars told us that the court ruled that the mandate acts like a tax, or is analogous to one, but not that it is one -- a small linguistic distinction, but an important legal one. "The Supreme Court did not say, ‘It's a tax,’ but rather, ‘It does not matter if it was called a tax, because Congress could have done this in the form of a tax, which it is permitted to do,’ " said George Washington University law professor Neil Buchanan, who blogged about the decision. As evidence, Buchanan pointed to several passages in Roberts’ ruling. For instance, Roberts wrote that the payment for not having insurance "may for constitutional purposes be considered a tax, not a penalty." Buchanan noted Roberts’ use of the restrictive phrase "for constitutional purposes." Buchanan noted that Roberts at one point also distinguished between interpreting something to be a tax for constitutional purposes and imposing a tax. It’s also worth pointing out that in two of Roberts’ key concluding paragraphs, he wrote that the act’s "requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax," and that "it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congress's power to tax." Guy-Uriel Charles, a Duke University law professor, was one of several experts who agreed with Buchanan that the Supreme Court did not technically label the provision a tax. "The Court said that the mandate is consistent with Congress' exercise of the taxing power, which is different from saying that the mandate is a tax," Charles said. "What Romney said is accurate on the political level, but not on the legal level," said Steven Schwinn, a law professor at John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Our ruling Romney said, "The Supreme Court has the final word. And their final word is that Obamacare is a tax. So it's a tax." If you put Romney’s comment under a legal microscope, there’s a strong case that he’s cut some rhetorical corners. The Supreme Court found the law constitutional based on Congress’ taxing authority, but nowhere in the opinion did Roberts say that the individual mandate actually was a tax -- only that it "may reasonably be characterized as a tax" and that "it is reasonable to construe" it as a tax. Still, PolitiFact focuses on political speech, rather than legal speech, and judged by that standard Romney is pretty close to accurate. We rate his statement Mostly True.	None	Mitt Romney	None	None	None	2012-07-05T18:45:19	2012-07-04	['None']
-snes-05750	The Book of Revelation describes the anti-Christ as someone with characteristics matching those of Barack Obama.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anti-maim/	None	Politicians	None	David Mikkelson	None	Is Barack Obama the Anti-Christ?	24 April 2008	None	['None']
-snes-06264	Photograph shows a 9/11-themed shirt sold in the Middle East.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/911-shirt/	None	September 11th	None	David Mikkelson	None	Shirt Commemorates 9/11 Attack?	31 January 2012	None	['Middle_East']
-pomt-00591	A measure to repeal the state’s prevailing wage law would "make it easier for state contractors to hire illegal workers for Wisconsin construction jobs" through an "illegal worker loophole in the state budget."	false	/wisconsin/statements/2015/jun/05/protect-american-jobs/group-claims-repeal-prevailing-wage-would-open-ill/	The state’s prevailing wage law, in place for 84 years, sets a minimum wage for construction workers involved with publicly funded projects. Critics say the law artificially inflates wages and raises the cost of projects, meaning taxpayers pay more. Supporters say the law ensures quality work and fair pay for workers. The Assembly Labor Committee voted 5-4 on May 27, 2015 to advance a measure that would repeal the law. Through a spokeswoman, Gov. Scott Walker said he would sign a bill repealing or amending the law. But Assembly Speaker Robin Vos says he has no plans to schedule a vote. Meanwhile, a group calling itself Protect American jobs has launched a television ad that warns of unintended consequences if the prevailing wage law is changed. "Wisconsin worksites could soon be taken over with illegal workers," the announcer intones. "Politicians in Madison are about to weaken the law to make it easier for state contractors to hire illegal workers for Wisconsin construction jobs." The ad goes on to urges viewers to contact Walker and tell him "no to the illegal worker loophole in the state budget." Wait. Illegal workers? Before the ad started running, no one was talking about that issue. Would the prevailing wage measure "make it easier for state contractors to hire illegal workers"? Illegal workers Let’s start with the most basic problem: The ad says the measure is in the state budget. But the move to repeal prevailing wage has been introduced as a separate piece of legislation, not as part of the 2015-’17 spending plan. On the substance of the claim, we tried to reach the group, but did not get a response, so we turned to the ad itself and the group’s website. In the ad, a caption on the screen cites "ABC/ACG policy letter: 3/13/2013" during one mention of illegal workers. That appears to be a letter urging immigration law reform that was sent to members of Congress by a group that called itself a "broad base of contractors" that employ "thousands in all facets of construction." The letter says that "any future immigration law must include a new market driven program to provide a legal path for foreign workers to enter the United States when the economy needs them, with fewer entering when the U.S. economy contracts." OK, but that refers to legal immigration. And the letter came years before this prevailing wage measure was introduced. The Protect American Jobs web site goes further, suggesting the "real motivation" for the prevailing wage repeal can be found in a different letter from an executive with the Associated Building Contractors, a non-union group. That letter cited the need to "make it easier for people to move to the United States from other countries and work in the construction industry." Again, that refers to legal immigration. The group also refers to an April 2015 paper by University of Utah economist Peter Philips -- written at the request of the Wisconsin Contractors Coalition -- that notes the end of prevailing wage laws would lead to lower pay and less apprentice training. The paper goes on to say that other states where such laws have been repealed have seen a call for guest workers, because when wages fell contractors had trouble attracting workers. But a guest worker program does not amount to illegal workers. By its very definition, guest workers are in the United States legally. What’s more, the television ad doesn’t say there could be such problems down the road. It says the proposed bill, as written, contains an "illegal worker loophole." For that, we turned to the Wisconsin Legislative Council, which issued a May 26, 2015 memo that said flatly the proposed bill doesn’t address immigration. The council assists members of both parties with the drafting of legislation. "While the bill removes the requirement for employers to maintain certain records concerning wages paid to workers on a project of public works, that requirement relates only to enforcement of the prevailing wage law by the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) and the Department of Transportation (DOT)," the memo reads. "The repeal of that record -keeping requirement does not affect enforcement of federal immigration laws by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security." Our rating A television ad from a group against repeal of the state’s prevailing wage law says such a measure would "make it easier for state contractors to hire illegal workers for Wisconsin construction jobs." This "illegal worker loophole," it says, is in the state budget. But the bill doesn’t have any direct impact on immigration laws and the group’s own references to potential problems -- down the road -- describe workers who would be here legally, not illegally. It also fails on the basic claim of the stand-alone measure being in the state budget. We rate the claim False.	None	Protect American Jobs	None	None	None	2015-06-05T05:00:00	2015-05-05	['Wisconsin']
-pomt-10040	"When the salmonella source was finally identified, FDA officials had to wait for industry approval before they could go live with the [peanut] recall."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/feb/19/rosa-delauro/congresswoman-portrait-toothless-fda-accurate-thou/	Is our food-safety system really that weak? We realized the recent outbreak of salmonella poisoning from peanut products exposed serious problems with food manufacturing and plant inspections. But Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, alleged it also exposed the federal Food and Drug Administration as toothless when it comes to recalls. "When the salmonella source was finally identified, FDA officials had to wait for industry approval before they could go live with the recall," the congresswoman said at a Feb. 4, 2009, news conference. DeLauro was speaking amid great public concern about the outbreak, which was discovered in January 2009 after it killed eight people and sickened more than 500 in 43 states. It was traced to tainted peanut butter and paste from a Peanut Corporation of America plant in Georgia and possibly another in Texas. Those ingredients had been distributed nationwide in all sorts of products, prompting recalls of more than 2,100 products from energy bars to ice cream. DeLauro's comment evoked an image of FDA officials meekly asking company executives if it was okay to protect the public from tainted peanuts. We wondered whether she was stretching the truth to drum up support for a bill she proposed to strengthen the FDA's recall process. A spokeswoman said DeLauro was referring to the voluntary nature of food recalls. And indeed, the FDA recall process is almost entirely voluntary — strictly speaking. This is poorly understood by consumers, the media and even some food companies, the FDA says in this primer on its recall policies. "The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act does not generally authorize FDA to 'order' a manufacturer to recall a food, cosmetic or supplement," the online brochure says. Only when it comes to medical devices, human-tissue products and infant formula can the agency order a recall. DeLauro's office said she got her information partly from this New York Times article , which reported that the government "needed the company’s permission last week before announcing a huge recall of its products." There's an important bit of context to add, though. In reality, companies do not generally refuse FDA requests to issue a recall. In fact, none has ever done so, at least in the memory of Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. "I don't think there's ever been a case to my knowledge where a company has refused to recall products when we told them in very specific terms that we would be taking additional actions," Sundlof told a Senate committee in a Feb. 5, 2009, hearing on the salmonella outbreak. Additional actions the FDA can take against any company that refuses to recall food can include seizing products and enjoining the company from doing further business. Bill Marler, a personal injury lawyer who specializes in foodborne illnesses, concurred with Sundlof. He said companies have little motivation to refuse the agency's recall requests, or even delay the process, because doing so would expose them to more legal liability. "In my experience, there is very seldom a delay, because most of the time you've got a company who wants to solve the problem and not poison any more of its customers than it already has," said Marler, who is based in Seattle. Plenty of food-safety advocates argue the FDA should have the authority to mandate recalls. But their main concern is not that companies refuse to issue recalls voluntarily, it's issues such as FDA's limited control over how aggressively to recover products, and that "voluntary recalls" might not sound serious enough to consumers. DeLauro arguably made our food-safety regime sound weaker than it is, since there is little question as a practical matter that companies will quickly agree to recalls. And it was imprecise for her to say the FDA waited for the company's approval to "go live" with the recall — the FDA did not "go live" with the recall at all; it was the company that issued it. But "go live" is a vague term, and DeLauro seems to have meant "announce." And it's true that the FDA could not post on its Web site this press release announcing the recall, which came from the Peanut Corporation of America, until the company agreed to issue the recall and wrote the release. So while DeLauro's depiction of the recall process was not full and complete, it was technically accurate. We find her claim to be True.	None	Rosa DeLauro	None	None	None	2009-02-19T14:54:29	2009-02-04	['None']
-pomt-01153	A bill from U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho attempts to restrict the administration's ability to conduct national security and criminal background checks on undocumented immigrants.	half-true	/florida/statements/2014/dec/16/barack-obama/does-yohos-bill-restrict-background-checks-immigra/	House Republicans are so displeased with President Barack Obama’s executive action granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants, they voted to strip White House authority over the matter altogether. U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho, a veterinarian from Gainesville, introduced HR 5759 on Nov. 20, the same day Obama issued guidelines sparing from deportation more than 4 million immigrants who have been in the country illegally for five years or more but have American-born or legal-resident children. Obama’s action lets those immigrants stay for three years and allows them to apply for work permits if they pay fees and pass a background check. Yoho’s bill, which passed the House along party lines on Dec. 4, sought to stop Obama by taking away the president’s right to act unilaterally on immigration, making such actions illegal. It has widely been viewed as a symbolic gesture, and the Democrat-controlled Senate didn’t vote on it before the end of the session, so the bill died. But wait: Yoho’s office told PolitiFact the congressman would reintroduce the bill next session -- when Republicans control both houses of Congress. The White House said even if the bill had managed to pass the Senate, Obama would have vetoed it, since the measure "would make the broken immigration system worse, not better," according to a statement of administration policy released the day the House approved the bill. "By attempting to restrict the Administration’s ability to conduct national security and criminal background checks on undocumented immigrants, H.R. 5759 would make the Nation’s communities less safe." Since Yoho said the bill would be coming back, we wondered if the legislation would restrict the White House’s ability to conduct security and background checks. Checking the background H.R. 5759 keeps the executive branch from doing anything to exempt or defer any individual or groups from being subject to current immigration laws. "Any action by the executive branch with the purpose of circumventing the objectives of this statute shall be null and void and without legal effect," the bill says. That’s a tall order: Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., recently said presidents going back to Dwight Eisenhower have issued executive actions on immigration, a claim we found Mostly True. Prior executive actions on immigration have provided asylum to specific groups, deferred removals from the United States and expanded the definitions of immigration laws to include more immigrants than originally covered. (H.R. 5759 would allow action that would save groups facing mortal danger, like refugees, or to keep criminal aliens or witnesses in the country at the request of law enforcement.) The White House told PolitiFact Florida that Obama’s action requires about 4 million eligible undocumented immigrants to register and undergo checks by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. The checks would determine if someone is a threat to national security or public safety, has a criminal history or has perpetrated fraud, among other flags. Homeland Security didn’t answer our questions about how the order would affect their current workload, but Boynton Beach immigration attorney Richard Hujber said it will lead to a crush of cases in an already backlogged system. The agency has to perform background checks for everything the government processes, he said, whether it’s for a work permit, a travel permit, a citizenship application or anything else. Citizenship and Immigration Services posted about 1,000 job openings the day after Obama’s announcement. About 95 percent of Citizenship and Immigration Services budget comes from fees the immigrants pay. Yoho’s office countered that Homeland Security would still have the power to perform background checks as usual. "The congressman’s bill simply clarifies that the president does not have authority to exempt/defer deportation for categories of illegal aliens; because that would in effect be changing or rewriting law, which is a constitutional power of Congress, not the executive," Yoho spokesman Brian Kaveney told us in an email. So it’s not that background checks wouldn’t be performed anymore; they couldn’t be performed as part of the executive action’s guidelines because the president’s deferment would no longer be allowed. Mark Schlakman, a law professor and senior program director for Florida State University’s Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, was dubious about whether public safety would be any more endangered by not performing these checks. It’s hard to make that case when these immigrants weren’t previously going to submit to background checks anyway, he said. "These people, for better or worse, no matter what side of the issue you come down on, they’re already here." Our ruling President Obama’s office said Yoho's HR 5759 attempts "to restrict the Administration's ability to conduct national security and criminal background checks on undocumented immigrants." The bill would make illegal any move from the White House that reclassified large categories of immigrants counter to current immigration law. Obama’s action establishes reprieve from removal after undocumented immigrants passed a background check, which would likely strain an already backlogged system. It ostensibly follows current laws as guidelines. But because Obama's action defers the status of the immigrants, the process it proposes to set up would violate the terms of Yoho’s bill. The Department of Homeland Security would continue to be able to perform checks as usual, so there’s little evidence public safety would be any more threatened than before. We rate the statement Half True.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2014-12-16T11:25:50	2014-12-04	['United_States']
-snes-05171	A photo shows an endangered fennec hare.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fennec-hare/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	Photograph Shows Endangered Fennec Hare?	22 February 2016	None	['None']
-goop-01382	Jennifer Aniston, Will Arnett Getting Close?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-will-arnett-close-dating/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Jennifer Aniston, Will Arnett Getting Close?	2:44 pm, March 15, 2018	None	['Jennifer_Aniston']
-pomt-02159	"In states where beer is unregulated, the per capita production is significantly higher."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2014/may/01/kelli-stargel/states-where-beer-unregulated-capita-production-si/	State Sen. Kelli Stargel thinks Florida’s beer regulations are too lax, and that means trouble’s brewing. Florida craft beer makers are hopping mad about SB 1714, a bill that would require craft brewers at a certain sales level to use distributors to sell their wares, changing the current rules where they can sell directly to consumers. Lakeland Republican Stargel attempted to quench the mounting criticism by writing an editorial April 28 in the Tallahassee Democrat, lamenting that "a small but vocal faction of the beer industry that has clouded this issue by promulgating misinformation." Measures like her bill are necessary, she argued, because unfettered beer production is a looming evil. "In states where beer is unregulated, the per capita production is significantly higher," she wrote. "Higher beer production and higher consumption go hand-in-hand. As a social conservative, this is why I believe we need to keep regulations on alcoholic beverages in place and not have unregulated beer widely available in the marketplace. Social issues greatly impact economic issues, and we must seek a balance on both." We’ll deal with whether higher beer production increases consumption in another factcheck, but first we wanted to see if a lack of state regulations leads to higher beer production. We’re going to tap the industry experts on this one. The three tiers The version of SB 1714 that passed Tuesday requires microbreweries selling more than 2,000 kegs that exceed 20 percent of their sales in take-home consumption to sell their product to distributors. (An amendment added on April 28 allows larger craft brewers to self-distribute up to 20 percent of their product through bottles and cans.) Brewers would then have to buy it back at the distributors’ marked-up prices. Stargel argues that this practice is simply following the rules of the three-tier system that brewers have used since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. This system, which is regulated to varying degrees by the states, breaks up the alcohol-making business (beer, wine and liquor) into three categories: The supplier: The brewer who makes the beer; The wholesaler: The distributor who sells the beer to a bar, restaurant or other business; The retailer: The business that buys the beer from the wholesaler. Craft brewers in Florida complain the system will force them to cut jobs to account for the added cost. Some have even implied they may have to close up forever. Joey Redner, founder of Tampa’s Cigar City Brewing, has said he may move his 100,000 keg per year business out of state if the measure becomes law. Critics also complain the bill is the result of "crony capitalism," with many legislators who support the bill getting campaign contributions from distributors. The Tampa Bay Times reported Stargel collected at least $6,000 from beer distributors since late 2013 for her 2016 Senate re-election race -- about 12 percent of her total. They gave her $500 in 2012, when she wasn’t sponsoring a bill regulating alcohol distribution. Regulation vs. production Stargel’s office said her comments came from Redner’s take on the bill. Redner wrote that an analysis by the Brewers Association, a trade group comprised of mostly small brewers and associated workers, including wholesalers, "shows a very strong link between less regulation of access to market for breweries and the total number of breweries and barrels of beer produced by those breweries." Bart Watson, the staff economist with the group that wrote the analysis, says there’s no such thing as a state where beer is unregulated. He suggested Stargel may have meant states where regulations are more favorable for large or small brewers. Even then, beer is highly regulated. Watson said it appeared states with favorable regulation of small breweries did lead to more production from those breweries. But the opposite could be true, as well -- higher brewery production could just as easily drive favorable regulation, he said. Either way, craft brewing (especially in Florida) doesn’t have a big enough impact to really affect total production. Another way to consider the issue is whether states with high levels of production from large brewery plants are hampered by strict regulations. He singled out Georgia and Florida as examples of highly regulated states, but still being among the top beer producers thanks to large brewing operations. Florida was third in total beer shipments in 2012; Georgia was 10th. "General business environment and location relative to the U.S. population are probably better indicators of overall production levels in a state than regulations on small breweries," Watson said. State laws allow all manner of exceptions to the three-tier system; ,ost states let small breweries self-distribute in some capacity. The Beer Industry of Florida, a trade association "dedicated to promoting the responsible consumption of alcohol and the preservation of the three-tier system of alcohol distribution and regulation," did not offer any comment on Stargel’s view. The group did send out a press release on April 25 saying they didn’t support the proposed legislation because it hadn’t allowed for 64-ounce growlers (essentially large bottles favored by consumers), a provision Stargel added three days later. The bill is currently awaiting discussion in the House. Our ruling Stargell said in her editorial that "in states where beer is unregulated, the per capita production is significantly higher." Her office credited Redner, an opponent of the bill, as the source of the line. Redner was referring to an analysis by an economist for a brewers trade group who said favorable regulation led to higher production from craft breweries. The statement is inaccurate in that beer is regulated in every state, although to varying degrees. It also doesn’t specify craft brewing. In fact, the analysis found there didn’t seem to be much of a link between state regulation and total production from both large and small breweries. We rate the statement Mostly False.	None	Kelli Stargel	None	None	None	2014-05-01T15:11:41	2014-04-28	['None']
-pomt-08913	Rob Portman’s "plan to tax, slash and privatize" Social Security "would devastate Ohioans."	mostly false	/ohio/statements/2010/jul/28/lee-fisher/fisher-campaign-claims-portmans-plan-tax-slash-and/	Step on the third rail of American politics and you’ll get scorched by angry retirees. That adage about Social Security comes from the 1980s, but politicians like Ohio’s Lee Fisher are testing it against opponents today. Fisher’s campaign seeks to singe Rob Portman, the rival running for U.S. Senate, for efforts to partially privatize Social Security in the past, and for potential Social Security benefit cuts and tax hikes in the future. In a July 12 news release, Fisher spokesman John Collins said: "Seniors depend on a guaranteed monthly Social Security benefit -- especially in these tough times. Congressman Portman's plan to tax, slash and privatize these benefits would devastate Ohioans. Pure and simple." Pure and simple, it sounds scary. But is it true? To support its claim, the Fisher campaign cited a Columbus Dispatch story in which Portman said he would look at "everything on the table" when considering how to deal with looming problems for entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, "including at least a discussion of possible tax increases and benefit cuts." And Fisher’s news release said that while in Congress, Portman was "an outspoken advocate for privatizing Social Security -- a plan which would have left Ohio's seniors devastated during this recent economic downturn." Asked to back up the claim further, Fisher’s campaign cited statements, TV and Web interviews, congressional hearings, and news articles from when Portman, a Cincinnati-area Republican, served in the House of Representatives and worked as President George W. Bush’s budget director. It is indisputable that Portman supported Bush’s proposal to allow Americans to put part of their Social Security contributions into private accounts. Americans would be able to invest in stocks, bonds, government securities or stay out of the accounts entirely. "I mean, this is what Einstein talked about, the magic, the greatest force in the universe, the power of compounding interest," Portman, then a congressman, said in a House Budget Committee hearing in 2005. "That's what we're talking about here." It’s easy today to see how badly a Wall Street downturn would affect that magic in the short term. But that oversimplifies the case. Bush and congressional Republicans made their strongest push for privatization – they preferred to refer to it as private accounts – in 2005 but did not intend for such a program to start right away. Portman noted at a news conference in early 2007, when he was Bush’s budget director, that the president had already pushed back the proposed start date to 2010, and then in 2007 he pushed it back again to 2012. At the time, Portman said the accounts would be strictly voluntary and comprise only a portion of anyone’s Social Security savings. Furthermore, Portman said in 1999, when the subject was in its incubation phase, that "there must be a safety net for everybody so that no one’s Social Security benefits would be reduced." This might have required a taxpayer bailout if stock market losses packed a wallop, but that’s not the issue here. Still, Portman was unquestionably a privatization champion, saying in 2005 that it was reasonable to expect a 5 percent annual return on investment, "which I think is conservative." But that’s not the same as having a current "plan to tax, slash and privatize these benefits," as the Fisher campaign suggests Portman has now. Asked about any such plan, the Portman campaign said it hasn’t developed one. Portman has only said that everything must be on the table when discussing entitlement reform. That could put Portman at odds with AARP, which says that solutions must not come at the expense of "today's seniors and future generations." But it puts Portman on the same page as President Barack Obama , who said in April when naming a commission to address this nation’s debt: "Everything has to be on the table." Collins, the Fisher spokesman, suggests this is a cop-out for Portman because right out of the gate, Portman includes the potential of tax increases, benefit cuts, or both. "His plan includes an open discussion of taxing and slashing benefits," Collins said. "And our plan would not start with that. We would not consider that." Portman has in fact said that Social Security’s solvency might require pain, although he viewed private accounts as better alternative. Otherwise, he said in 2005, "We're going to have to raise taxes, we're going to have to borrow, we're going to have to cut benefits -- we're going to have to do something." In an interview with Human Events Online, Portman later said that private accounts would over the long term "deal with the solvency issue." That was then, this is now -- and Portman has not mentioned private accounts in a long time or talked about whether his views have changed. He only says that with deficit, debt and entitlement problems growing, the nation needs a serious discussion. To get everyone to the table, says his spokeswoman, Jessica Towhey, Portman believes that no possible solutions should be eliminated out of hand. As for the possible fears of seniors or anyone hoping to retire, she notes that as a congressman, Portman voted in 2000 to reduce the percentage of Social Security benefits subject to taxes. He voted in 1995 to repeal a tax increase on Social Security benefits. And he voted in 1996 to allow beneficiaries to earn more outside income without losing their Social Security benefits. The claim against Portman has a substantial short-coming. Agreeing to hear others out is not the same as agreeing to "slash" or "tax." And favoring privatization before, in a dramatically different economic climate, is not the same as pushing for it now. It would be credible to cite Portman’s past actions and question what he might do now. But in saying that Portman has a plan to do so, the claim becomes Barely True. Comment on this item. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Lee Fisher	None	None	None	2010-07-28T10:00:00	2010-07-12	['None']
-pomt-12277	"I have seen crime increase in every major metropolitan area (in California) … Crime is on the rise in every major market."	mostly false	/california/statements/2017/jul/03/travis-allen/travis-allens-mostly-false-claim-about-crime-calif/	"California Must Get Tough On Crime." That’s the message Travis Allen has proclaimed early in his campaign for governor, both on his website and in a video announcing his run. The Republican state assemblyman from Orange County announced his campaign for the high office on June 22, 2017. His website says "California must re-establish our tough on crime policies that allow law enforcement to do their jobs and protect the victims of crimes, not the criminals." With Allen’s focus on crime, we decided to probe a related statement he made in the video launching his campaign. "California needs a new vision. California needs new leadership … I have seen crime increase in every major metropolitan area," Allen said, adding a moment later: "Crime is on the rise in every major market." Allen makes his claim at about the 0:15 minute mark of the video above. Was Allen right? Has crime really increased in all California metros? And is it "on the rise" in every major market as he claimed? We set out on a fact check. Our research We asked Allen’s campaign spokeswoman for evidence to support his claim. She pointed us to several news articles that describe increases in crime from 2014 to 2015, both statewide and in large cities. They cite FBI data. Allen’s claim in the video doesn’t cite a specific timeframe for when he’s "seen crime increase." He does, however, attribute the uptick to criminal justice reforms passed since 2011, giving the impression that this has been a recent increase. Crime data is widely available for cities, counties and states but less so for metropolitan areas. As a result, we focused on crime in large cities and counties. The nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California has examined recent crime trends. It and other research groups have noted that 2014 was a historic low for crime in California. A PPIC analysis comparing the first half of 2014 to the same period in 2015 found widespread increases in crime rates in California cities with a population greater than 100,000. Of the 66 California cities that size, 49 saw an increase in violent crime and 48 experienced increases in property crime. Many saw double digit percent increases. "A majority of cities saw increases in crime, but not every city," said Brandon Martin, who researches crime trends for PPIC, who co-authored the report. In a later report comparing the full year 2014 to 2015, the PPIC found 13 of the state’s 15 largest counties saw increases in both property and violent crime rates. Cherry-picked data? Taken alone, the crime increases in 2015 mostly support Allen’s claims. But researchers, including Martin, emphasized that California has seen dramatic long-term crime reductions since the 1990s. Allen’s statement omits this key context. SOURCE: Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, "Urban Crime Trends Remain Stable Through California’s Policy Reform Era (2010-2016)," February 2017. Mike Males is a senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a policy research group that makes recommendations on alternatives to incarceration. He said citing the increases in 2015 amounts to "cherry picking." In a February 2017 report, Males examined more recent figures that show total crime -- or the raw number of property and violent crimes -- decreased in 41 of California’s largest 69 cities from the first half of 2016 compared to the first half of 2015. That contradicts the portion of Allen’s statement that says "Crime is on the rise in every major market." Males described Allen’s overall statement as "completely wrong," adding, "certainly crime is not up in every major market." Overall, Males’ report found total urban crime fell 3 percent in the first half of 2016, driven largely by the decrease in property crimes. His report shows more mixed results, however, when separating the rate of violent and property crimes. A majority of the major cities saw increased violent crime rates during the more recent period, while a majority saw declines in property crime rates. Related fact check In March 2017, PolitiFact California rated Half True a related statement by State Sen. Jeff Stone. The Riverside County Republican claimed violent crime in California had been on the rise since 2011, when the state started passing major criminal justice reforms. He added that violent crime had spiked 12 percent statewide in 2015. We found the violent crime rate had ticked up about 3 percent between 2011 and 2015. But that increase wasn’t consistent year-to-year. It went up slightly in 2012, dropped the next two years and then went up again in 2015. Our ruling Republican candidate for California governor Travis Allen recently claimed he’s "seen crime increase in every major metropolitan area" and that "Crime is on the rise in every major market." Allen’s claim is partially correct looking at 2015 alone. A majority of the state’s largest cities and counties saw crime ratchet up that year -- though not all of them. But Allen’s overall assertion ignores the fact that California’s crime rate was at a historic low the year prior, the result of a decades-long decline. Additionally, the second portion of his statement, that "crime is on the rise in every major market" is contradicted by a 2017 analysis that shows total urban crime fell 3 percent in the first half of 2016 compared with the first half of 2015. In the end, we found Allen’s claim contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate his claim Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Visit our Tracking the Truth series here to see all of our 2018 governor's race fact-checks. Governor’s race Allen is the latest of several Republican candidates to announce a run for California governor. The others include John Cox, a venture capitalist from San Diego County and Rosie Grier, a Hall of Fame professional football player. Several prominent Democrats are also competing in 2018 to succeed Jerry Brown as governor. They include former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, California Treasurer John Chiang; Delaine Eastin, the state’s former superintendent for public instruction; and Gavin Newsom, the state’s current lieutenant governor. A poll released in June 2017 showed a tightening race. Newsom was in the lead among all candidates, with 22 percent support from likely voters. Villaraigosa had 17 percent support, up from his 11 percent three months earlier. Tracking the Truth: Hear a claim you want fact-checked? Email us at politifactca@capradio.org, tweet us @CAPolitiFact or contact us on Facebook. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Travis Allen	None	None	None	2017-07-03T06:00:00	2017-06-22	['California']
-pomt-04464	President Barack Obama’s "spending drove us $5 trillion deeper in debt."	half-true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/oct/09/american-crossroads/ad-says-barack-obamas-spending-drove-us-5-trillion/	In a new ad, the pro-Republican group American Crossroads takes aim at President Barack Obama’s economic policies. At one point, the narrator says, that "Obama’s spending drove us $5 trillion deeper in debt." We previously examined a similar -- but opposite claim -- when Obama said that "over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of" President George W. Bush’s policies and the recession. We ruled Obama’s claim False, and a recalculation of the same numbers can shed some light on the American Crossroads claim as well. We contacted American Crossroads for this fact-check, but a spokesman did not respond to our inquiry. First, the bottom-line number on the debt: Yes, it has grown by $5 trillion during Obama’s tenure. Total debt has increased by $5.5 trillion since January 20, 2009, while the share of that debt held by the public has increased by $5 trillion. But it’s not entirely correct to hang that increase on "Obama’s spending" alone. In our previous item, we looked at calculations by the Treasury Department based on data from the Congressional Budget Office, the independent number-crunching arm of Congress. To figure out what caused the accumulation of deficits over the past decade, CBO tracked the surplus it had projected back in 2001 and compared it with the actual cumulative deficits that resulted instead. CBO specifically broke out how much several laws contributed to the deficit, some of which started under Bush and some under Obama. Because American Crossroads was only referring to the debt added during Obama’s tenure, we only looked at fiscal years 2009, 2010 and 2011. And because the American Crossroads ad does not reference how much the deficits fell below the surpluses that had been forecast by CBO, we’re going to exclude from our calculations a category CBO called its own "failures to predict economic conditions accurately." We added up the lost revenue and additional spending each year and then calculated their percentage of the deficits over those three years. Spending Spending initiated by Bush policies: 4 percent of total deficits in 2009, 2010 and 2011 Spending initiated by Obama policies: 11 percent Other increases in discretionary spending: 32 percent Other increases in mandatory spending: 6 percent Revenue reductions Revenue reductions initiated by Bush policies: 11 percent Revenue reductions initiated by Obama policies: 13 percent Other unclassified revenue reductions: 5 percent Interest Net interest: 19 percent The spending increases traceable to programs clearly attributable to Obama, combined with the increase in discretionary spending on his watch, account for about 43 percent of the three years worth of deficits. So if you’re talking about what "drove us $5 trillion deeper in debt," then a clear majority stemmed from sources other than "Obama’s spending." If you expand the definition from "Obama’s spending" to "Obama’s spending and tax cuts," you get to a total of 56 percent. Throw in 13 percentage points for the added interest costs of Obama’s policies and you’re at 69 percent. Our ruling The American Crossroads ad claims that "Obama’s spending drove us $5 trillion deeper in debt." But not all of the $5 trillion can be attributed to Obama's spending. Much of it can be attributed to his tax cuts and the policies of President Bush. On balance, we rate the claim Half True.	None	American Crossroads	None	None	None	2012-10-09T17:29:16	2012-10-02	['None']
-tron-00969	Flashing “IM” in AOL Instant Messenger is a virus	fiction!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/flashingim/	None	computers	None	None	None	Flashing “IM” in AOL Instant Messenger is a virus	Mar 17, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-01133	The United States "decided waterboarding was torture back when we court-martialed American soldiers for waterboarding Philippine insurgents in the Philippine revolution."	true	/rhode-island/statements/2014/dec/23/sheldon-whitehouse/sen-sheldon-whitehouse-says-us-soldiers-have-been-/	The so-called "CIA torture report" has heightened debate over whether certain interrogation techniques used by the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks constituted torture. Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse weighed in on Dec. 14 when he appeared on "Fox News Sunday" with host Chris Wallace and political consultant Karl Rove. In the portion of the program that dealt with whether waterboarding, which simulates the feeling of drowning, constitutes torture, Whitehouse said there was precedent in the United States to conclude that it was. "We decided that waterboarding was torture back when we court-martialed American soldiers for waterboarding Philippine insurgents during the Philippine revolution," Whitehouse said. "We decided waterboarding was torture when we prosecuted Japanese soldiers as war criminals for waterboarding Americans during World War II, and we decided waterboarding was torture when the American court system described waterboarding as torture when Ronald Reagan and his Department of Justice prosecuted a Texas sheriff and several of his associates for waterboarding detainees." Because the Philippine revolution, which dates back to the 1890s, is the earliest reference Whitehouse made, we decided to check out that part of his statement. While we were waiting for Whitehouse's office to respond to our request for documentation, we started poking around ourselves. There's little doubt that what is now called waterboarding -- then known as water torture or by the odd name of the "water cure" -- was used by Americans in the Philippines after the U.S. gained colonial authority over the islands from the Spanish in 1898 under the terms of the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War. Filipinos had been recruited to help fight the Spanish but when the Spanish were vanquished, the Filipinos tried to gain their independence. The resulting guerilla war had some things in common with the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, complete with boobytraps, suspicions that all Filipinos were guerrilla fighters, and the depiction of the guerillas as treacherous fanatics. Most accounts we found report that an infantry captain named Edwin F. Glenn was found guilty of engaging in water torture during the war. Glenn was a judge advocate at the time he was involved in waterboarding. By the time he was court-martialed, he had been promoted to major. He was specifically charged with administering the "water cure" to a prominent Philippine resident named Tobeniano Ealdama, whom he suspected of collaborating with insurgents. Whitehouse's office cited a detailed 1903 Senate report on courts-martial in the Philippines. The section on Glenn accuses him of carrying out "a method of punishment commonly known in the Philippine Islands as the 'water cure;' that is, did cause water to be introduced into the mouth and stomach of the said Ealdama against his will" around Nov. 27, 1900. Glenn admitted to the practice but defended it, arguing -- as waterboarding supporters do today -- that it saved lives. A military court didn't think that was sufficient justification. He was found guilty. But his sentence was light -- a one-month suspension and a $50 fine, which was the equivalent to more than $1,200 today. Glenn wasn't the only soldier to be court-martialed for administering the "water cure," and testimony in the Senate report makes it clear that this was frequently used to extract information. First Lt. Julien E. Gaujot, of the 10th U.S. Cavalry, was found guilty of doing it to three priests in January, 1902. He was suspended from command for three months, forfeiting $50 in pay per month for that period. The military court made it clear that, in the cases of both men, the court was being lenient. Like Glenn, Gaujot admitted using water torture, saying he did it because he knew the priests were insurgents and "I knew that they possessed information that would be valuable to the American cause." "It was impossible to obtain reliable information regarding the insurgents from the inhabitants, who are, as a whole, crafty, lying, and treacherous, many of them being fanatical savages who respect no laws and whose every instinct is depraved," Glenn told the court. Not all of the courts-martial were successful. For example, 1st Lt. Edwin A. Hickman of the First U.S. Cavalry was brought up on charges for ordering that two Filipinos be held upside down and the upper half of their bodies dunked in an open spring to extract information and to get the men to act as guides. He admitted doing it but argued that it wasn't unlawful. The court acquitted Hickman because of "the abnormal and disgraceful methods of armed resistance to the authority of the United States; the treachery of the natives generally; the paramount necessity of obtaining information, and the belief on the part of the accused that the punishment administered was within the rules of war and under the instructions of superior military authority." In these cases, Judge Advocate General George B. Davis said General Order #100, which dated back to 1863, "contains the requirement that military necessity does not admit of cruelty -- that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge -- nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions." In these cases, there was no emergency that required torture, Davis argued. One might debate whether the "water cure" is the same as waterboarding. In both cases, the victim is lying down and restrained. With waterboarding, the face is sometimes covered by a towel with the body tilted to try to keep water in the upper airways and out of the lungs. With the water cure, water went directly into the mouth and was forced into the stomach, causing a great deal of pain. In both instances, the goal is not to drown the victim, but to make things as unpleasant as possible. Both produce the sensation of being unable to breathe. Even if the water doesn't get into the lungs directly, the victim may vomit and inhale the vomit, which can be fatal. The water cure was clearly effective in inducing fear. According to accounts in the Senate report, just the threat of repeating "the water cure" could be enough to break the will of recalcitrant Filipinos. "At a minimum, the techniques are substantially similar," said Whitehouse spokesman Seth Larson. Our ruling Sheldon Whitehouse said the United States "decided waterboarding was torture back when we court-martialed American soldiers for waterboarding Philippine insurgents in the Philippine revolution." The "water cure" as performed in the Philippines is not significantly different from the waterboarding done in reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. Both forms of water torture -- and the risks -- are similar and the Senate report from 1903 makes it clear that military prosecutors regarded the "water cure" as a form of torture. We rate the claim as True. (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, email us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.)	None	Sheldon Whitehouse	None	None	None	2014-12-23T00:01:00	2014-12-14	['United_States', 'Philippines']
-goop-01191	Cindy Crawford, Rande Gerber Trip Was “Vacation To Save Marriage,” 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/cindy-crawford-rande-gerber-trip-vacation-save-marriage-untrue/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Cindy Crawford, Rande Gerber Trip Was NOT “Vacation To Save Marriage,” Despite Reports	12:55 pm, April 13, 2018	None	['None']
-hoer-00282	'Beware Hack Scam Rollercoaster Clip' Facebook Warning Message	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/beware-roller-coaster-hack-scam-warning.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	'Beware Hack Scam Rollercoaster Clip' Facebook Warning Message	January 5, 2014	None	['None']
-snes-04078	President Obama has announced he'll refuse to leave office if Donald Trump is elected President.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-confirms-he-will-refuse-to-leave-office/	None	Junk News	None	David Emery	None	President Obama Confirms He Will Refuse to Leave Office If Trump Is Elected	8 September 2016	None	['Barack_Obama', 'Donald_Trump']
-pomt-08374	Says he "voted no on the Wall Street bailouts."	mostly false	/virginia/statements/2010/oct/25/glenn-nye/glenn-nye-claims-he-voted-against-wall-street-bail/	U.S. Rep Glenn Nye portrays himself as a boldly independent Democrat who bucks his party on key issues such as health-care reform and the Wall Street bailout. In at least four TV ads, the freshman congressman from Virginia Beach and Norfolk has stressed he voted against the bank bailout, which is formally known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. "I stood up to my party leaders and voted no on the Wall Street bailouts," Nye said in one ad. (To emphasize his theme, he titled the ad "Independence.") But there’s a big problem with his claim: Nye was not a member of Congress when TARP was approved. The final House vote approving TARP came Oct. 3, 2008 -- 32 days before Nye was elected and 95 days before he took office. The bill set up a $700 billion bailout fund for banks that had made bad investments. President George W. Bush quickly signed the bill to avert what many feared could be a doomsday economic collapse. Although the TARP was intended to rescue the financial industry, the Bush administration in December 2008 broadened its reach to allow an infusion of money for U.S. auto companies. Nye has received considerable flak for the claim. So how can he say he voted against the TARP? He cites two votes cast during his first weeks in office. One of the votes was on Jan. 14, 2009. But when we looked into it, we learned the vote did not concern the life or death of TARP. Nye simply opposed a procedural resolution to allow debate on a bill that would impose tough new restrictions on how companies could spend TARP money. Procedural resolutions are pretty routine and it’s clear this was not considered a significant vote. For example, we couldn’t find stories about it the following day’s editions of the New York Times or the Washington Post. The House passed the resolution largely along party lines. Nye did buck his party leaders on that vote because they wanted the debate to proceed. He was one of only 15 Democrats who voted against their party. But we find it’s not accurate for him to characterize that as a vote "against the bailout." The other vote he cites was January 22, 2009, on a bill to give the treasury secretary access to the second half of the $700 billion in TARP money. The law had said the second $350 billion would become available only if the administration asked for it and at least one chamber of Congress approved. But that vote was essentially meaningless. The Senate had approved the request on Jan. 15, freeing the money to go to the Treasury. The Republican-sponsored resolution had no impact on events; it was the equivalent of a coach challenging a referee’s call a week after the game ended. Still, Nye was among 99 who supported the GOP resolution. So Nye says he voted against the bailout. People hearing his claim would undoubtedly think he was referring to the main vote on the TARP, but he wasn’t even elected when that vote was taken. He cites one vote on a procedural motion that was not substantive and that the news media did not characterize as significant, and another vote that was more substantive, although the issue was moot at that point. So there is just a small amount of truth to his claim. We find his claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Glenn Nye	None	None	None	2010-10-25T15:54:26	2010-08-12	['None']
-pomt-01716	"All Aboard Florida is a 100 percent private venture. There is no state money involved."	mostly false	/florida/statements/2014/aug/07/rick-scott/rick-scott-says-all-aboard-100-private-venture-and/	Gov. Rick Scott has been on the defense for months about All Aboard Florida, a controversial passenger rail project that he supports. All Aboard Florida will run from Miami to West Palm Beach in 2016 and could extend to Orlando the following year. The project has faced opposition from some residents on the Treasure Coast, who fear noise and other impacts. And as he campaigns for re-election, Scott has faced heat for the role of his chief of staff, who previously worked for All Aboard’s parent company. A key point of contention has been about the role of public dollars in the project. In an interview with the West Palm Beach TV station WPEC June 30, Scott said: "All Aboard is a 100 percent private venture. There is no state money involved." Scott made similar claims in June in a letter to the editor in the Tampa Bay Times and at a campaign event in Largo in July. His description of the "100 percent private venture" prompted an outcry from the Florida Democratic Party and opponents of the project. Media reports have also outlined the public funding -- and potential public funding -- associated with the project. Earl Barrett of Clearwater wrote a letter to the editor of the Tampa Bay Times in June seeking some clarity: "A PolitiFact check seems in order." Meanwhile, Scott’s likely nemesis on the November ballot, former Gov. Charlie Crist, made a claim that contradicted Scott’s assertion. "All Aboard Florida is receiving millions in Florida taxpayer dollars," Crist wrote in a July fundraising email. As the All Aboard controversy moved full steam ahead in August, we decided it was time for us to subject Scott’s and Crist’s statements to our Truth-O-Meter. What we found is that All Aboard Florida is a private enterprise, but it also takes advantage of infrastructure paid for by the government. So neither Crist nor Scott is telling the full story. Here, we’ll look in depth at Scott’s statement that All Aboard is "100 percent private" with "no state money involved." Scott has been asked why he rejected federal funds for high-speed rail in 2011 but now has shown support for All Aboard Florida. Republican Party of Florida Communications Director Susan Hepworth said in statements earlier this summer that the financing was vastly different: "The proposed high-speed rail would have wasted millions of Florida taxpayer dollars by leaving the state on the hook for an unprofitable project. A private sector project — of any kind — not run on state funding obviously doesn’t have the same risks. Anyone saying these two issues are the same is being intentionally dishonest." In 2011, PolitiFact Florida fact-checked Scott’s claim that high-speed rail would have cost Florida $1 billion. The state’s portion of the project was going to be $280 million -- Scott based his figure on a suspect study. We rated that claim False. All Aboard Florida All Aboard Florida is a $2.5 billion passenger rail line that will connect Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach in 2016, with hopes to extend to Orlando in 2017. Proposed by Florida East Coast Industries, LLC, All Aboard will use private financing for a large portion of its costs and has applied for a $1.6 billion federal loan. In the TV interview, Scott didn’t mention that federal loan, but his administration has acknowledged in press statements that federal dollars could be part of the project. So there’s definitely federal money involved, but is there state money? We found three points of contention here. Quiet zones: In response to residents’ concerns about noise from All Aboard trains, the Legislature this year approved $10 million in "quiet zone" money for horns at railroad crossings. Local government agencies can apply for the money for any rail crossing, not exclusively for those used by All Aboard. Local governments have until mid October to apply for the money so no money has been granted yet, Florida Department of Transportation spokesman Dick Kane told PolitiFact Florida. Tri-Rail: Tri-Rail is an existing government-run passenger rail service in South Florida overseen by the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority. All Aboard mentioned in bond documents the possibility of using $44 million in state money to connect their trains to Tri-Rail, according to the Naples Daily News. While All Aboard and regional transportation officials talked about the idea of state funding, that never materialized and the Florida Department of Transportation officially shot down that idea amid all the publicity. So for now, there is no state money "involved" with connecting these two rail services. The Orlando International Airport: This is the most concrete connection between All Aboard and state funding. The airport is building a complex to include the airport’s people mover, parking and ground transportation. Connected to that project, the airport is also building an intermodal transportation facility -- and that’s the piece that will get about $214 million from a loan and grant from the state. The intermodal facility will accommodate rail -- including All Aboard Florida -- and potentially two other future rail projects, Phil Brown, airport director, told PolitiFact Florida. All Aboard Florida will pay the airport $2.8 million a year for a lease, which the airport will use to repay a portion of the state loan. In addition, All Aboard will pay the airport between $1 and $1.50 per passenger. (All Aboard Florida estimates that combined the total will add up to about $4.5 million a year.) "Whatever they are using of that facility they are going to pay for," Brown said. The airport is required under federal regulations to charge fair market rate. "The funding is for the Orlando International Airport, not All Aboard Florida," states a July 25 press release from FDOT. "The airport will reimburse the state for the portion of funding related to the rail connection, whether it is All Aboard Florida or another private rail provider." Our ruling Scott said in a TV interview that "All Aboard Florida is a 100 percent private venture. There is no state money involved." While All Aboard Florida is a private venture, it has applied for a $1.6 billion federal loan. Also, the state is kicking in money for infrastructure, particularly for a new intermodal center at the Orlando International Airport. The funding for that infrastructure doesn’t go directly to All Aboard, but All Aboard does derive some benefit from the spending. Overall, we rate Scott’s claim Mostly False.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2014-08-07T14:44:59	2014-06-30	['None']
-goop-00108	Ben Affleck Was Going To Cast Shauna Sexton In Movie?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/ben-affleck-shauna-sexton-movie-cast-torrance/	None	None	None	Gossip Cop Staff	None	Ben Affleck Was Going To Cast Shauna Sexton In Movie?	2:25 am, October 21, 2018	None	['Ben_Affleck']
-goop-02811	Selena Gomez Spying On The Weeknd?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/selena-gomez-spying-on-the-weeknd/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Selena Gomez Spying On The Weeknd?	1:20 pm, May 6, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-04286	"The Ryan budget gets rid of Medicare in 10 years and turns it into a voucher program."	false	/rhode-island/statements/2012/nov/02/sheldon-whitehouse/us-sen-sheldon-whitehouse-says-budget-proposed-vic/	PolitiFact's 2011 Lie of the Year was the claim by Democrats that "Republicans voted to end Medicare." Since then, Democrats have been using variants of that theme, such as saying Republicans want to "end Medicare as we know it," to alert voters -- particularly elderly voters -- about GOP proposals to change the program that provides health care to people 65 and older. During his Oct. 23, 2012 WPRI-Providence Journal debate with Republican challenger Barry Hinckley, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, picked up on that theme, talking about the changes in Medicare proposed by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, now the GOP’s vice presidential candidate. "The Ryan budget gets rid of Medicare in 10 years and turns it into a voucher program," Whitehouse said. PolitiFact National has covered this ground before including looking at statements such as ones by Vice President Joe Biden that "there's not one Democrat who endorses" the Romney-Ryan Medicare plan -- rated True -- and that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would "eliminate the guarantee of Medicare" -- rated Half True. We'll summarize the issues here. The bad news on Medicare is the money is running out. For example, according to the program’s actuary, the trust fund that pays for hospital care will run dry in 2024 -- even sooner if President Obama’s health care law is repealed, eliminating the cost-saving cuts that go along with it. In early 2011, Ryan, the Republican House budget chairman, released a budget blueprint (not an actual budget) calling for the conversion of Medicare into a voucher system, meaning enrollees would get a set amount of money to buy a health insurance plan of their choice. Republicans call it "premium support." But it also called for keeping Medicare intact for people 55 or older. In addition, to save money, the plan would have raised the eligibility age from 65 to 67. It passed the House on April 15, 2011. The Democrat-controlled Senate rejected it a month later. That sparked the "end Medicare" meme, even though supporters of the Ryan plan noted that the change would only affect people 54 and younger. The next incarnation came when Ryan and U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., developed a white paper that offered a compromise. It would offer Medicare to anyone who wanted it in the future, combined with a voucher-like system to allow people to buy a competitive private policy if they preferred. To quote the white paper: "Traditional Medicare will always be offered as a viable and robust choice." After Ryan released his budget proposal for 2013, which included the compromise, Wyden said he was no longer in favor of the plan because it had been combined with other elements, such as the repeal of Obamacare and no protections for Medicaid recipients. But one theme has been consistent among recent Republican proposals to change Medicare: although younger Americans would essentially have a choice between traditional Medicare and some other form of retirement-age health insurance option -- the current program would be retained for people 55 and older. When we asked the Whitehouse campaign about the senator's statement, spokesman Tony Simon said the senator was correct because, if the Ryan budget had passed, that would be "ending Medicare as we know it and turning it into a voucher." But Whitehouse didn't say "end Medicare as we know it." He said Medicare would be gone in 10 years. Under the latest version of the Ryan plan, it wouldn’t. We rate Whitehouse's statement False. (Get updates from PolitiFact Rhode Island on Twitter: @politifactri. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)	None	Sheldon Whitehouse	None	None	None	2012-11-02T00:01:00	2012-10-23	['None']
-thal-00099	Claim: In Ireland, four people die per day due to air pollution	mostly true	http://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-air-pollution-deaths-3083710-Nov2016/	None	None	None	None	None	FactCheck: Is Denis Naughten right about the deaths caused by air pollution in Ireland?	Nov 16th 2016, 8:00 PM	None	['Republic_of_Ireland']
-pomt-13281	"We are now, for the first time ever, energy independent."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/11/hillary-clinton/clinton-claim-us-energy-independent-goes-too-far/	Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says President Barack Obama’s administration has hindered energy production in the United States. "Energy is under siege by the Obama administration," Trump said at the second presidential debate Oct. 9. "Under absolute siege. The EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, is killing these energy companies." Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton replied that on the contrary, "We are now, for the first time ever, energy independent." Clinton’s claim that the United States is energy independent raised some eyebrows, so we decided to see if it was accurate. Some energy experts we spoke with said the United States is close enough to energy independence that it could prosper without importing energy from unstable or unfriendly countries. Others said the United States isn’t quite there yet, even though it’s trending that way. If the United States only used foreign energy sources, it would clearly be energy dependent. And if it only used domestic energy sources, it would clearly be energy independent. On this spectrum, the United States is definitely closer to independence than dependence, and getting closer every year. But it’s not at full energy independence yet. The United States still consumes about 11 percent more energy than it produces, so it has to import from other nations to meet that need. In 2015, the United States produced 87.9 quadrillion BTUs of energy and used 97.3 quadrillion BTUs, according to the Energy Information Administration, an office of the federal government. The United States imported about 11 quadrillion more BTUs of energy than it exported in 2015. This means "the U.S. is not energy independent," said Kenneth Medlock, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. That said, imports have been trending down significantly since the mid 2000s. The EIA has projected that the United States will switch from a net importer of energy to a net exporter sometime between 2020 and 2030. "The U.S. is not currently energy independent and, while it is moving toward energy independence, it is not expected to be so for about a decade," said Paul Holtberg, leader of the EIA’s Analysis Integration Team. This shift is happening because of changes in both supply and demand. Domestic natural gas and oil production has skyrocketed since hydraulic fracturing, the extraction method known as fracking, came into regular use in the late 2000s. At the same time, Americans are using less energy as a result of growing efficiency. Clinton said the United States is energy independent for the "first time ever." However, going by net imports vs. net exports, the United States is currently a larger net importer than it was from the 1950s (as far back as the EIA data goes) through the 1970s, and again in the mid 1980s. So current net import levels are not unprecedented. When people think of energy independence, they often think of oil because it’s the one source of energy that the United States has historically imported from potentially unstable areas. While the United States is essentially self-sufficient as it pertains to coal, natural gas and renewable energy sources, it still imports about 24 percent of its oil needs, even with the increase in fracking. Even so, Marilyn Brown, a professor of sustainable systems at Georgia Institute of Technology, told PolitiFact that she thinks the United States is energy independent because it could meet its oil needs from a friendly country, like Mexico or Canada, if the oil market in one of its other top supplier countries became unstable. North America as a whole is arguably energy independent, in that it produces all the energy it consumes on a net basis, several experts pointed out. While Clinton’s claim that the United States is at present energy independent might not be fully correct numerically, the spirit of the claim is on target because the country is becoming less and less dependent on foreign sources, said global energy expert Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director for Energy and Sustainability at University of California, Davis. While the United States is interwoven with the world energy market, if for some reason "all our fuel had to be produced in the United States, we could do it," she said. Our ruling Clinton said, "We are now, for the first time ever, energy independent." The United States imports more energy than it exports, and it consumes more energy than it produces domestically. So the United States still relies on foreign energy sources for about 11 percent of its energy consumption needs. However, this import-export gap is trending down. The EIA predicts the United States’ energy exports and imports will balance in the not-so-distant future. That said, imports and exports have been balanced in previous decades. The United States is on track to energy independence, but it’s not there yet. Clinton's statement is not accurate and we rate it False.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2016-10-11T18:15:05	2016-10-09	['None']
-pomt-13496	"Food stamps have gone up two-and-a-half times under Barack Obama."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/07/rudy-giuliani/rudy-giuliani-says-food-stamps-rose-two-and-half-t/	Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a surrogate for Donald Trump, criticized President Barack Obama’s stewardship of the economy as he touted Trump’s efforts to court African-American voters. "So, now you compare New York to Detroit and Baltimore, and you look at the number of crimes in both of those cities and you look at New York, you look at the unemployment rates, you look at the economic opportunities, and you see that I think Donald Trump is the first Republican since Jack Kemp, and me, to go into minority poor communities and say, the Democrats have failed you for 50 years, and you are reflexively giving them your vote, and they are going from bad to worse," Giuliani said in an interview on the Sept. 4, 2016, edition of CNN’s State of the Union. "Food stamps have gone up two-and-a-half times under Barack Obama. He should be ashamed of himself. Jobs should have gone up two-and-a-half times." Is the use of food stamps -- formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP -- really two-and-a-half times higher than it was when Obama took office? The short answer is that it’s higher -- but not by nearly that much. And in recent years, it’s been falling. As we’ve noted, SNAP is the federal government’s largest food program, eclipsing other big farm-bill food spending for school lunches and breakfasts and for Women, Infants and Children. It helps low-income people buy groceries, usually with benefit cards that work like debit cards. Two factors undergird the rise in food stamp use during Obama’s presidency. The first is that the number of food stamp beneficiaries ticked upward under President George W. Bush due to policies that broadened eligibility for the program and more aggressive efforts to get eligible Americans to apply for benefits. These policies remained in place under Obama. The second is the 2007-09 recession, which drove the number of SNAP recipients to record highs. In an average month in 2011, one in seven U.S. residents got help. So what does the trend line for food stamp usage under Obama look like? Here’s a graph, drawn from Agriculture Department data: Note that the number of beneficiaries did rise -- but not nearly by two-and-a-half times, or 150 percent. At the outset of Obama’s presidency, nearly 32 million people were receiving SNAP benefits. By May 2016, that number had risen to 43.5 million -- an increase of 36 percent. That’s a significant increase, and it’s one of the weakest economic metrics on Obama’s watch. But it’s not two-and-a-half times as high as when he came into office, as Giuliani said. It’s also worth noting that, while the number of recipients is higher now than it was when Obama took office, it has fallen, slowly but consistently, over the past three years. What about the cost of the program? We created a graph from that data as well. This shows that during the Obama presidency, the cost of SNAP increased at a somewhat faster rate than the number of beneficiaries did -- by just under 50 percent. But even that increase was nowhere near the two and a half times or 150 percent that Giuliani cited. We inquired with Giuliani’s office and Trump’s campaign but did not hear back. Our ruling Giuliani said that "food stamps have gone up two-and-a-half times under Barack Obama." Due to expanded eligibility and outreach, as well as the after-effects of the Great Recession -- each of which began under Bush -- the number of SNAP beneficiaries and the cost of the program has risen under Obama. However, the increase in these metrics has been 36 percent and 50 percent, respectively -- far less than the two-and-a-half-times multiplier Giuliani used. It’s also worth noting that both of these figures have been falling consistently over the past several years, a trend that Giuliani’s comment obscures. We rate the claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/dce7bf66-64d8-4c46-b449-3c471eb34446	None	Rudy Giuliani	None	None	None	2016-09-07T17:23:43	2016-09-04	['None']
-snes-01348	Roy Moore accuser Beverly Young Nelson "forged" Moore's signature and inscription in her high school yearbook.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/moore-accuser-yearbook/	None	Politics	None	David Mikkelson	None	Did One of Roy Moore’s Accusers ‘Forge’ Yearbook Evidence Against Him?	9 December 2017	None	['Roy_Moore']
-snes-03022	President Trump filed for re-election early, which means non-profits can't criticize him without losing their tax-exempt status.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-filed-reelection-stop-political-speech-nonprofits/	None	Politics	None	Bethania Palma	None	President Trump Filed for Re-Election Early to Stop Political Speech of Nonprofits?	1 February 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10943	In New York City, "for every one person experiencing homelessness here, there are about three vacant apartments."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/25/alexandria-ocasio-cortez/ocasio-cortez-new-york-city-there-are-3-vacant-apa/	New York Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has put poverty and inequality at the center of her campaign. On Twitter, she focused on troubles in the New York City housing market. New York City is experiencing the highest rate of homelessness since the Great Depression," she wrote July 23. "For every one person experiencing homelessness here, there are about three vacant apartments. Inequality is a crisis, and a bold, 21st-century effort on poverty must advance." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Ocasio-Cortez’s stat about the number of homeless and the number of vacant apartments caught our eye. Key takeaways There are about 63,000 homeless people in New York City, and the number of vacant housing units is in the range of 150,000 to 180,000. Given the number of families, the actual number of homeless households seeking permanent shelter is about 32,000, and the number of apartments available for rent is closer to 79,000. The numbers lack great precision but in large measure, the 1-to-3 ratio is about right. The math on the homeless count Campaign spokesman Jeff Latzer told us that "numbers vary, but there’s roughly 63,495 homeless and 247,977 vacancies." With those numbers, there are 3.8 empty places for each homeless person. Let’s look at the sources behind both figures. Official reports back up the homeless count. New York City’s Homeless Services Department’s May survey had 62,147 individuals staying in temporary housing. That stat overstates the number of apartments needed, because it includes children in families. The advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless in New York City says the actual number of homeless households, both families and single adults, is closer to 32,000. Turning to vacancies, the city’s 2017 Housing and Vacancy Survey did find 247,977 "vacant units, not available for sale or rent." But before we dive into that big number, the survey found another 79,000 vacant apartments that were actually on the rental market. That’s the number Giselle Routhier, the homeless coalition’s policy director, focuses on. Routhier compared it to the number of apartments needed, not the number of homeless people. "There are about 2.5 vacant rental apartments for every homeless household in New York City," Routhier said. "But the problem is even worse than the point-in-time data. New York City loses thousands of affordable apartment every year through rent increases and deregulation. Between 1996 and 2017, New York City lost more than 1.1 million housing units with contract rents below $800 per month." Routhier’s way of looking at the city’s costly housing market is very different from Ocasio-Cortez’s, but the final numbers are reasonably close. Routhier said about 2.5 and Ocasio-Cortez said about three. Matthew Gordon Lasner, associate professor of urban studies at Hunter College, warned that the focus on math only takes you so far. "The comparison she’s making — no matter the ratio or numbers — is really a rhetorical device, to point out that the city has the capacity to house all its residents," Lasner said. When a vacancy isn’t a vacancy So now let’s get back to that big number of nearly 248,000 "vacant units, not available for sale or rent." It’s not what it might seem. The total includes 58,000 units "undergoing renovation" and another 22,000 rented or sold "but not yet occupied." All told, about 129,000 units are vacant due to one process or another that takes them out of the active housing market. 2017 Housing and Vacancy Survey Total rental units 2,183,064 Occupied 2,103,874 Vacant, available 79,190 Vacant units, not available for sale or rent 247,977 Held for occasional, seasonal, or recreational use 74,945 Rented, not yet occupied 10,960 Sold, not yet occupied 11,156 Undergoing renovation 58,347 Awaiting renovation 20,283 In legal dispute 9,626 Held pending sale of building 5,886 Owner’s personal problems (age, illness, etc.) 12,719 Held for other reasons 27,009 But that still leaves nearly 75,000 units in the category of "held for occasional, seasonal, or recreational use." These are the pied-à-terre of the well-to-do, and sometimes, the super-duper-well-to-do. "A bit of that is new – global billionaires parking money in Midtown condos," said Lasner. "But New York’s always had tens of thousands of suburbanites, U.S. out-of-towners, and foreigners keeping apartments. That’s been the case for centuries in all important business and government centers." Lasner prefers to focus on what he called a practical figure — the number of units that could be on the market "with a few nudges or tweaks of the law." For him, between the available and the unavailable vacancies, the baseline is in the range of 150,000 to 180,000. How Ocasio-Cortez’s ratio stacks up Taking Ocasio-Cortez’s count of homeless people, and estimating 150,000 and 180,000 vacancies, the ratio falls to 1 person for between 2.4 and nearly 3 apartments. If instead we use the number of homeless households, the ratio could get to the neighborhood of 1-to-6 (32,000 households for 180,000 vacancies). Pushing further, comparing homeless households to just the number of vacant apartments truly on the market (79,000 divided by 32,000), the result is 1-to-2.4. Our ruling Ocasio-Cortez said that "for every one person experiencing homelessness here, there are about three vacant apartments." The number of homeless people is about 63,000. The number of vacant apartments is harder to judge, but no matter how we jiggered the numbers, the lowest ratio we found was 1-to-2.4. And the high could get close to 1-to-6. There’s a lot push and pull in the underlying statistics, but in the main, Ocasio-Cortez’s math holds up. We rate this claim Mostly True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com	None	Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez	None	None	None	2018-07-25T13:19:25	2018-07-23	['New_York_City']
-tron-00570	Buffalo Wild Wings Adds Obamacare Surcharge	outdated!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/buffalo-wild-wings-adds-obamacare-surcharge/	None	business	None	None	None	Buffalo Wild Wings Adds Obamacare Surcharge	Nov 27, 2015	None	['None']
-pomt-11475	"Kushner And Wife Ivanka Trump Were Tossed Out Of The White House — And Donald Is Cutting Them Out Of His Will!"	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2018/mar/05/blog-posting/no-trump-didnt-fire-jared-kushner-and-ivanka/	A headline on PoliticsDepot.com falsely claimed Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump had been fired from the White House and eliminated from President Donald Trump’s will. "Kushner And Wife Ivanka Trump Were Tossed Out Of The White House — And Donald Is Cutting Them Out Of His Will!" the headline reads. The story was flagged by Facebook users as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social media website’s efforts to combat online hoaxes. But the story that accompanied the flashy headline neither repeated nor provided evidence to back up the claims. Trump’s eldest daughter and her husband, who enjoy an elevated status in the White House as both family members and advisers, indeed faced increased public scrutiny in the past week, but have not been kicked out of the West Wing. The story correctly summarized news reports describing Kushner’s downgraded security designation, from top secret to secret clearance, following White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s decision to overhaul the security clearance process. It also rehashed anonymously sourced news reports of internal White House turmoil regarding Kelly’s frustration with Ivanka’s White House tenure. The most recent source of tension was her attendance at the Olympic closing ceremony in South Korea. While some editorial pages have suggested the couple should resign from their White House posts, no reputable news sources have announced their departure, let alone firing. And the contents of Trump’s will -- and whether the couple has somehow been eliminated from it -- have not been reported by any credible sources, either. The headline is a hoax tagged to an unrelated aggregated story to drive page views. We rate this statement Pants on Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Bloggers	None	None	None	2018-03-05T16:12:32	2018-02-28	['None']
-snes-04049	Hillary Clinton was reported dead on 11 September 2016, but the news was subsequently covered up and she was replaced by a body double.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-reported-dead-replaced/	None	Junk News	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Hillary Clinton Death Hoax	13 September 2016	None	['None']
-snes-01703	Musician Neko Case's Vermont farmhouse was badly damaged in a fire in September 2017.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/neko-cases-barn-damaged-by-fire/	None	Entertainment	None	Dan Evon	None	Neko Case’s Farmhouse Damaged by Fire?	19 September 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-12062	Says a poll showed 70 percent to 75 percent of people want to see Confederate statues "remain up and not taken down."	half-true	/texas/statements/2017/sep/06/sid-miller/sid-miller-poll-shows-70-percent-75-percent-americ/	Sid Miller objected to the recent in-the-night removals of four statues of people with Confederate ties from pedestals at the University of Texas. The big-hatted Republican serving as Texas agriculture commissioner further said most Americans agree that such statues should be left in place. In an August 2017 interview with Karina Kling of Spectrum Cable’s Capital Tonight, Miller disputed the notion that statues venerating Confederate figures touch off controversy. "I don’t believe they do cause controversy," Miller said. "I saw a poll, I think (on) NPR, 70 or 75 percent of the people would like to see those statues remain up and not taken down." We decided to check Miller’s poll claim. A caution: Any comparison of poll results is limited by the amount of information available about how and when each poll was taken, what’s asked (there are invariably variations) and the demographic and partisan mix of each poll’s respondents. So, we recognized that fact-checking Miller’s reference to precise results might prove knotty. Huffington Post round-up A Huffington Post news story published the day Miller was interviewed rolled out the results of a HuffPost/YouGov poll of 1,000 adult U.S. citizens who were surveyed over the web Aug. 15-16, 2017--specifically, 353 Democrats, 397 independents and 246 Republicans, the organization reported. Its poll question:"Do you favor or oppose removing statues and memorials of Confederate leaders?" Thirty-three percent favored removals, 48 percent were opposed, 18 percent were unsure. The poll also had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percent so you could speculate that 52 percent of the respondents wanted such statues to stay put. That’s considerably shy of 70-plus percent. But the story noted six other polls taken Aug. 15, 2017, to Aug. 22, 2017, each one asking about Confederate statues three days or more after confrontations between white supremacists and protesters in Charlottesville, Va., crumbled after a driver drove into pedestrians, killing one. Here’s the Huffington Post’s summary of recent statue polls: SOURCE: Graphic, "Polls Find Little Support For Confederate Statue Removal — But How You Ask Matters," the Huffington Post, Aug. 23, 2017 (accessed Aug. 25, 2017) The Marist Poll We noticed the post-Charlottesville poll showing the largest share of respondents opposed to removing statues was the Marist Poll taken Aug. 14-15, 2017, by mobile and landline phones of 1,125 U.S adults. After the poll interviews, the pollster said, the regionally balanced samples were combined and balanced to reflect the 2013 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey one-year estimates for age, gender, income, race, and region. Marist said that of the 859 registered voters included in the poll, 37 percent were independents, 36 percent were Democrats and 26 percent were Republicans. The poll, taken in collaboration with NPR and the PBS NewsHour, asked: "Do you think statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy should remain as a historical symbol/be removed because they are offensive to some people?" Sixty-two percent of the surveyed adults said the statues should remain, 27 percent said they should be removed, 11 percent were unsure. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 2.9 percentage points meaning you could say close to 65 percent, or as few as 59 percent, of the polled preferred leaving such statues in place. Miller notes a deeper break-out By phone to our inquiry, a Miller campaign spokesman, Todd Smith, said Miller reached his 70 percent or 75 percent figure as an estimate of where Texans stand based on the Marist poll’s detailed results showing 67 percent of moderates and 81 percent of conservative or very conservative respondents said such statues should remain. "He was trying to extrapolate Texas numbers out of that," Smith said. "I don’t think Commissioner Miller was trying to give an exact number." The results also were broken down regionally. Sixty-six percent of respondents in the South favored statues to remain, 23 percent backed removals. Other polls identified by Ariel Edwards-Levy, the Huffington Post’s polling director, suggested 49 percent to 54 percent of respondents oppose statue removals (though it’s again worth stressing it matters how each question was posed and who was polled and how results were weighted). An outlier Only a poll by North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling, which showcases Democratic clients, delivered contrary results, perhaps because of how its question was framed and worded. The company’s general summary of its poll taken Aug. 18-21, 2017, says: "Voters have nuanced views when it comes to Confederate monuments. Overall 39% say they support monuments honoring the Confederacy to 34% who say they oppose them. That's basically unchanged from the 42/35 spread we found on this question when we polled it in June." Even though voters narrowly support the monuments, the summary says, 58 percent of respondents said "they support relocating them from government property and moving them to museums or other historic sites where they can be viewed in proper historical context. There's bipartisan support for that approach with Democrats (72/14), independents (52/27), and Republicans (46/42) all in favor of it." Public Policy Polling says it surveyed 887 registered voters. Eighty percent of participants, selected through a list based sample, responded by phone with the remaining 20 percent participating on the web. Forty-one percent of respondents self-identified as Democrats, 31 percent as Republicans, 29 percent as independents. After a question about supporting or opposing monuments honoring the Confederacy, the poll asked: "Do you support or oppose relocating monuments honoring the Confederacy from government property and moving them to museums or other historic sites where they can be viewed in proper historical context?" Fifty-eight percent supported relocation, 26 percent were opposed, 16 percent were unsure. The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 3.3 percent so you could speculate that as much as 61 percent of respondents supported relocation. Our ruling Miller said a poll showed 70 percent to 75 percent of people oppose the removal of Confederate statues. All but one of the latest national polls, we confirmed, show more Americans in opposition to tumbling such statues than in favor. But most polls show a little more than 50 percent to 54 percent of respondents opposed with only the Marist poll, which Miller mentioned, indicating more than 60 percent in opposition. On balance, we rate this claim Half True. HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Sid Miller	None	None	None	2017-09-06T16:21:57	2017-08-23	['None']
-goop-01073	Jennifer Aniston Getting ‘Revenge Makeover’ With Major Plastic Surgery?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-plastic-surgery-makeover/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Jennifer Aniston Getting ‘Revenge Makeover’ With Major Plastic Surgery?	4:37 pm, May 2, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-12399	California Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget "cuts funds for local tree mortality efforts from $52.7 million to just $2 million."	mostly false	/california/statements/2017/may/25/jim-patterson/did-jerry-brown-axe-funds-removing-californias-dea/	Republican Assemblyman Jim Patterson of Fresno recently claimed Gov. Jerry Brown has slashed nearly all the money in the state’s budget to help local governments remove dead and dying trees in California’s forests. More than 100 million trees have died in the forests due to drought and bark beetle infestations since 2010. The tree mortality crisis led Brown, a Democrat, to declare a state of emergency in October 2015. "The Governor’s updated budget released on (May 11, 2017) cuts funds for local tree mortality efforts from $52.7 million to just $2 million," Patterson said in a press release on May 22, 2017. Patterson’s district includes towns in the Sierra National Forest and Kings Canyon National Park east of Fresno where the tree die-off is severe. If they fall, dead and dying trees can damage public roadways, water and power infrastructure and private homes and businesses. But removing them isn’t cheap: It can cost $1,000 or more for each tree. In response to the die-off, the state has reimbursed cities and counties for a portion of the cost to clear hazardous trees from public rights-of-way. Patterson’s statement makes it seem as if that program is being drastically scaled back. We decided to fact-check the assemblyman’s claim that the governor’s May budget "cuts funds for local tree mortality efforts from $52.7 million to just $2 million." Trees dying from drought and beetle infestation in Mariposa County. Amy Quinton / Capital Public Radio Our research Patterson is referring to California Disaster Assistance Act funding. Some of his figures are correct, but perhaps not in context. Brown’s initial budget released in January indeed shows the governor set aside $52.7 million for this disaster assistance fund. It did not cite a specific amount for tree removal reimbursements. The governor’s revised May budget shows the overall disaster assistance fund was reduced to $8.5 million. It sets aside just $2 million for local agencies to remove dead or dying trees based on expected demand for that money, according to state officials. Brown, following record rainfall in California, declared an end to the state’s drought emergency in April. As a result, he scaled back his plans for emergency spending by more than $100 million in his updated budget. Patterson’s spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the claim. Looking again at the assemblyman’s statement, it’s simply not accurate to say the $52.7 million set aside in January for disaster funds was all intended to help with the tree die-off. "A lot of that money was for the effects of drought, drinking water, community water sources. It was not just for tree mortality. Tree mortality is just one kind of disaster that could have requested reimbursements from that fund," said Janet Upton, deputy director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as CalFire. Upton said the $2 million figure is based on the state’s projections for how much local governments will seek in reimbursements in the coming fiscal year for the removal of dead and dying trees. Since the tree crisis started, local governments have requested less than $600,000 from the disaster fund for the removal costs, Upton added. She said the state would ensure all eligible requests by local governments are reimbursed even if the requests exceed the $2 million in the budget. "If there was an unmet demand of $40 million, that would be a different story," Upton said. File photo / Associated Press Requests to ramp up? Even so, the governor’s decision to reduce disaster funding is still worrisome, said Staci Heaton, who works for the Rural County Representatives of California. "I think (the $2 million) is going to be a little low," said Heaton, whose organization advocates for many of the mountainous counties affected by the die-off. Heaton said she expects requests for tree removal reimbursements "will ramp up," adding that rural counties see the reduction "as a fairly big hit to local government aid." Rural cities and counties aren’t the only ones removing the dying trees. And the disaster fund isn’t the only source of money that helps local governments. Here’s another example as outlined in the governor’s January budget: "In December 2016, CalFire awarded $15.8 million in grants for a total of 107 projects across 34 counties to support local efforts to remove dead and dying trees that pose a threat to public health and safety and projects that reduce the threat of wildfires to homes." In April, the San Francisco Chronicle reported: "The governor’s emergency declaration for the forests has ushered in tens of millions of dollars to address safety issues. So far, roughly 500,000 trees have been removed and miles of fuel breaks have been cut in a joint effort by the Forest Service, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the California Department of Transportation and private utilities. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. alone removed 236,000 dead or dying trees last year." Upton noted that nearly half of the $90 million CalFire had been receiving on a temporary basis each year to respond to the drought has now been converted into permanent annual funding. This allows the agency, she said, to continue its year-round staffing, which will focus in part on removing hazardous trees and easing the tree mortality crisis. Our ruling Republican State Assemblyman Jim Patterson recently claimed Gov. Jerry Brown’s May budget "cuts funds for local tree mortality efforts from $52.7 million to just $2 million." Patterson’s claim gets the $2 million figure correct. But it’s misleading and not accurate to say the entire $52.7 million was set aside to remove dead and dying trees. It’s a disaster assistance fund that also helps pay for water storage and sanitation projects across nine counties in California. Brown declared an end to the state’s drought emergency in April, a move that led the state to scale back some temporary emergency funding. Over the past couple years, local governments have requested less than $600,000 for tree removal reimbursements from the disaster assistance fund, though an advocate for rural counties expects requests will ramp up this year. Patterson taps into a real concern over tree mortality and its cost to local governments. But his statement cites a misleading budget number and ignores critical facts that would give a very different impression. We rate his claim Mostly False. MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Capital Public Radio's Insight program discussed this fact check and a separate national fact check on May 31, 2017. Listen to the discussion below: UPDATE: We reached out to Patterson's office for this fact check but have yet to hear back directly. Two days after our report published, Patterson responded to it on Twitter. He said: "The cuts are real, large & dangerous. People who live in the midst of this disaster are scared, and the counties they live in are too." Also, in a separate press release last week, Patterson said a state Assembly budget committee had approved a $20 million increase to CalFire’s budget to fund dead tree removal and prescribed burns. He added that the same committee rejected his request to add $10 million for local tree mortality efforts. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Jim Patterson	None	None	None	2017-05-25T17:10:25	2017-05-22	['California', 'Jerry_Brown']
-pomt-14225	Says New Hampshire’s second congressional district includes two counties where "almost 5 percent if not more" of residents are enrolled in the state’s expanded Medicaid program.	true	/new-hampshire/statements/2016/apr/15/jack-falanagan/republican-candidate-congress-cites-higher-average/	At a news conference last month, U.S. House candidate and state Rep. Jack Flanagan explained his vote to continue the state’s expanded Medicaid program. Flanagan, a Republican, supported the legislation because those in the second congressional district were relying on the expanded plan, he told reporters. "When I looked at the actual layout -- Coos County, Sullivan County, there was a significant number of people -- I think it’s almost 5 percent if not more -- in those counties. So, looking ahead and knowing those people could use the support, that’s why I voted" for the program, he said. Flanagan’s assertion caught our eye. While the overall number of those on the expanded program has been stated repeatedly – about 48,000 individuals – less has been said about who those people are and where they live. So we decided to check out Flanagan's statement. Let’s start with the district boundaries. New Hampshire’s second congressional district stretches from the very top of the state to the very bottom, and generally covers the western half. It’s currently represented by U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster, a Democrat. As Flanagan noted, the district encompasses all of Coos and Sullivan counties. It also includes all of Cheshire County. Much of Grafton, Merrimack and Hillsborough counties are in the district, too, along with a slice of Rockingham. That’s a lot of space, and as you might expect, use of the expanded Medicaid, which offers subsidized health care to people making less than $16,000 a year, isn’t uniform across the district. Towns and cities in sparse Coos and populated Merrimack counties face very different economic challenges, after all. The next piece of the puzzle is the actual usage of the program. The state’s Health and Human Services department has produced a number of maps through its division of Public Health Services that show, as of January, how many residents across the state use expanded Medicaid.According to this information, Coos County saw the greatest use of the expanded Medicaid program, with 5.38 percent participating. Sullivan County, the second one named by Flanagan, had 4.28 percent of its residents enrolled in the program. These figures include just the expanded program, not all Medicaid enrollees. As expected, numbers vary in the other counties included in the district. Only 3.77 percent of the population of Cheshire County is enrolled. Merrimack County has 3.75 percent of residents participating, while Hillsborough has 3.58 percent. Grafton County is broken up in an unusual way on the map -- Hanover and Lebanon are broken out. Between them, the communities have only 1.72 percent of their residents in the program. The rest of the county has a 4.19 percent enrollment. While the numbers can be sliced and diced further -- the state also issued a town-by-town breakdown of enrollments -- Flanagan was speaking about county numbers, so this rough breakdown should be sufficient. The two counties Flanagan specified, Coos and Sullivan, indeed have the highest participation rate in the expanded Medicaid program. Only the former is over 5 percent, though. Bolstering his argument, both have higher enrollments than the state as a whole, which stands at about 3.5 percent. When reached for comment, the representative pointed to the same set of data from the state. "I was considering Coos when I made that statement, however Grafton and Sullivan counties are still high, percentage wise," Flanagan wrote in an email. Our ruling U.S. House candidate and State Rep. Jack Flanagan said that "almost 5 percent if not more" of the population of Coos and Sullivan counties were enrolled in the state’s expanded Medicaid program. In the second congressional district, one county has more than 5 percent enrollment in the state’s expanded Medicaid program and another is pretty close. Coos county indeed breaks the 5 percent mark. Sullivan, at 4.28 percent, which have the first and second-highest participation rates in the state, respectively. We rate Flanagan’s statement True.	None	Jack Falanagan	None	None	None	2016-04-15T17:13:10	2016-03-10	['None']
-faan-00101	 “Every time the right of Canadians or other people could be infringed, CSIS will need to go and seek a warrant from a judge.”	factscan score: misleading	http://factscan.ca/steven-blaney-every-time-the-right-of-canadians-or-other-people-could-be-infringed-csis-will-need-to-go-and-seek-a-warrant-from-a-judge/	Steven Blaney misused one word, and that makes his statement misleading. Under the proposed anti-terrorism law, CSIS must seek a warrant for activities that “will,” not “could,” violate the Charter or other law.	None	Steven Blaney	None	None	None	2015-03-10	March 5, 2015	['Canada']
-pomt-04288	"Tommy Thompson made millions from corporations who outsource American jobs and now he's trying to lavish huge tax breaks on them."	half-true	/wisconsin/statements/2012/nov/01/majority-pac/senate-hopeful-tommy-thompson-made-millions-outsou/	Attacking Tommy Thompson as being "not for you anymore," Democratic U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin casts Thompson as someone who has profited from big corporations and who would favor them if he is elected to the U.S. Senate. Majority PAC, a political action committee that aims to protect the Democratic majority in the Senate, portrays the Republican former governor in much the same way. In a TV ad released Oct. 31, 2012, Majority PAC states: "Tommy Thompson made millions from corporations who outsource American jobs and now he's trying to lavish huge tax breaks on them." The claim has two distinct parts. ‘Made millions’ from outsourcers There’s no disputing that Thompson has made millions of dollars since departing his post as U.S. health and human services secretary under President George W. Bush, a job he held after leaving the Wisconsin governor’s office. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in January 2012 that Thompson’s assets exceeded $13 million, most it from his work as a corporate consultant, executive, investor and speaker after leaving Bush’s cabinet in 2005. But the Majority PAC’s claim is that he was paid millions specifically by corporations that moved jobs out of the United States. When we asked the group for backup, it provided a document that cited three corporations. C.R. Bard: Filings from the federal Securities and Exchange Commission show C.R. Bard, a New Jersey medical device firm, has paid Thompson some $1.5 million in cash and stock options since 2005, when he became a board member. Majority PAC also cited a report by the federal Office of Trade Adjustment Assistance, which investigated a February 2011 complaint filed by a New York state agency on behalf of Bard workers. The report said a significant number of Bard workers lost their jobs because the company shifted some production to Mexico. In December 2011, Bard announced it was cutting 50 New York jobs, some of which could be relocated outside of the U.S., according to a news article that noted that Bard a year earlier had announced 200 job cuts. In its own attack on Thompson, another group, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, noted that Bard’s 2011 annual report said that "over the past three years, we’ve added close to 300 people in emerging markets in South America, Europe and Asia." Deloitte: Thompson earned more than $1 million in consulting fees from the accounting firm, according a 2007 disclosure report he filed with the government. Majority PAC cited statements by Deloitte, including one on the company's website, which say Deloitte offers its clients outsourcing advisory services. But obviously that’s not the same as directly outsourcing jobs. Unisys: Thompson’s 2007 disclosure report said he received $5,000 from Harvard Consulting for serving on the Unisys Global Public Sector Advisory Board. An advisory role is certainly less powerful, and far less lucrative, than Thompson’s role as a Bard board member, although Unisys was involved in outsourcing. Majority PAC cited an April 2007 news story that reported that Unisys, an information technology company, planned to lay off 950 employees, mainly in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom, while it beefed up operations in cheaper markets such as India, China and Eastern Europe. The company hired about 1,200 workers in those regions, primarily India, in 2006, a company spokesman said in the article. So, while the first part of the claim suggested Thompson earned multi-millions working for a number of corporations that outsourced jobs, the group’s evidence shows something less than that. Thompson earned $1.5 million -- virtually all of it from one company -- that sent jobs outside the U.S. 'Lavishing huge tax breaks' The second part of Majority PAC's claim is that Thompson wants to give huge tax breaks to corporations that outsource. We've already rated as Half True a nearly identical statement by the AFSCME public employees union, which said in September 2012 that Thompson "supports massive tax cuts for corporations that outsource Wisconsin jobs." We found Thompson would completely exempt from taxation U.S. companies’ profits from overseas operations, under certain conditions. But researchers differed on whether U.S. employment would decline under this "territorial" tax approach, with some arguing that businesses would invest more at home as a result of the tax break. And part of Thompson’s plan provides incentives that could convince companies to bring profits back home. Thompson’s campaign didn’t reply to a request to respond to the Majority PAC ad. But for a Journal Sentinel story about troubles encountered by companies Thompson oversaw, his campaign spokeswoman said: "It is important to note that as a board member, Governor Thompson is not involved in the daily operations of these companies. Rather, his role, among other things, is to provide a strategic vision to these companies similar to the roles of other directors and officers." Our rating Majority PAC said Thompson "made millions from corporations who outsource American jobs and now he's trying to lavish huge tax breaks on them." Thompson was paid $1.5 million, but that doesn’t match the "millions" claimed in the ad. He supports a tax break for U.S. companies' profits from overseas, but it's possible the tax break could lead to more American jobs. Majority PAC's statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details -- our definition of Half True.	None	Majority PAC	None	None	None	2012-11-01T16:52:45	2012-10-31	['United_States', 'Tommy_Thompson']
-pomt-10276	Obama wants to increase the size of government by 23 percent.	pants on fire!	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/aug/23/john-mccain/mccains-math-is-not-even-close/	John McCain's campaign is trying to paint Barack Obama as a big spender. In a new radio ad, an announcer says Obama wants to implement "$863-billion in new government programs — a 23 percent increase in the size of government." The percentage-increase claim is so far off base that we're going to grant McCain several questionable assumptions — and then show that he's still way off. First, let's allow McCain to argue that Obama wants $863-billion in new government programs. That's based on a "Spend-O-Meter" list that the McCain campaign compiled from examining Obama's Web site and his public statements, though the campaign's handout put the total at $865.3-billion. PolitiFact examined a similar list compiled by the Republican National Committee in February, and found some reasons to quibble. But for this exercise, we'll ignore any spending cuts proposed by Obama, such as troop withdrawals from Iraq, and give McCain his $863-billion. Then, McCain contends that the $863-billion can be split into four equal chunks of $216-billion, for each year of an Obama presidency. That's questionable, because spending proposals take time to become law and get implemented. And, because of inflation and population growth, spending programs tend to grow over time, not stay at constant levels, so earlier budgets are likely to be smaller than later ones. But we won't deduct any points for that, and we'll give McCain his $216-billion annual figure for argument's sake. McCain's campaign also says the right year for comparison is fiscal 2008, which ends Sept. 30. We'll give this one to McCain, too. To recap: We've allowed McCain, unchallenged, to argue that Obama wants to raise spending by $216-billion a year and that we'll compare that total to fiscal year 2008 to determine how much Obama wants to increase the size of government. This should be easy, right? Just figure out how much the government is spending in fiscal year 2008, divide $216-billion by that number, and we'll have our answer. Sixth-grade math. According to a White House Office of Management and Budget report from July 2008, the government's total outlays for the year will be $2.942-trillion. So we divide $216-billion by $2.942-trillion and get ... 7.3 percent. That's not 23 percent. Not even close. So where does McCain get that figure? We asked the campaign for clarification, and spokesman Joseph Pounder said the campaign took $216-billion and divided it by $933-billion, which does equal 23.2 percent. That's the amount of discretionary spending in a catch-all spending bill approved by Congress in late 2007 and signed by President Bush. Except that $933-billion isn't even all of the discretionary spending for fiscal year 2008 — because that bill didn't include any money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The real discretionary spending number for 2008, according to the White House, is $1.13-trillion. (Take $216-billion and divide it by that number and you get 19.1 percent.) Furthermore, some of the spending increases that make up the $216-billion are in mandatory programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, so the McCain campaign isn't even measuring discretionary spending consistently on the top and bottom of its fraction. The McCain campaign's preferred denominator doesn't include current spending on those programs. The result is like saying Alex Rodriguez has a lot more home runs this year than he did last year, without mentioning that this year, doubles count as home runs, too. And lastly, how can McCain argue that an increase in discretionary spending is the same as an increase "in the size of government"? Here's what Pounder had to say about that: "By size of government, we are referring to government spending outside of mandatory spending. It's the argument that outside of mandatory spending, this is the most immediate way that Barack Obama will have an impact on government spending and when you include his spending proposals it accounts for a 23 percent increase." That's the equivalent of saying, "By size of government, we are referring to a government with no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no food stamps, no federal employee retirement benefits and no interest on the national debt." The McCain campaign's math is flat-out wrong. So wrong, in fact, their precise 23 percent figure isn't merely a false claim, it's Pants on Fire!	None	John McCain	None	None	None	2008-08-23T00:00:00	2008-08-20	['None']
-pomt-02975	According to a federal report, Obamacare will increase the long-term federal deficit by $6.2 trillion.	mostly false	/georgia/statements/2013/oct/22/paul-broun/broun-uses-only-negative-scenario-gao-report/	Among the Republican Party, President Barack Obama’s health care plan doesn’t have a lot of fans. The Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, has been criticized for cost, requirements and supposed federal overreach. Days before enrollment opened on Oct. 1, U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, an Athens Republican, took another shot at Obamacare in an Augusta Chronicle editorial. "Three years ago President Obama touted his 2,700-page health care plan as the solution to our nation’s health care needs … But since that time, statistic after statistic proved these statements false, causing the president’s promises to fall flat," Broun said in the Sept. 29 piece. "According to a report released by the Government Accountability Office, Obamacare will increase the long-term federal deficit by $6.2 trillion." Such a large figure immediately triggered our curiosity. That $6.2 trillion is more than a third of the country’s $16.7 trillion national debt right now, a staggering amount that we had to investigate. Broun is one of several Republican candidates seeking the seat held by retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss. He used the editorial to promote his own health care plan, the Patient OPTION Act. Broun’s plan fully repeals the Affordable Care Act, makes all health care expenses 100 percent tax-deductible and lets families buy health insurance across state lines, he said. (At press time, Broun’s Patient OPTION Act -- introduced in August with no co-sponsors -- sat in a House subcommittee.) We asked his office about the source for his $6.2 trillion statement. A spokeswoman said the figures were taken from articles in conservative publications, including the Heritage Foundation’s Foundry blog and National Review. This $6.2 trillion figure has been bandied about by conservative politicos for some time. Our PolitiFact Virginia colleagues have examined a similar claim made by a congressman from that state, who received a Mostly False rating for creating a misleading claim about the GAO report. The articles Broun referenced based the $6.2 trillion claim on a January 2013 GAO report -- requested by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. -- examining the health care law’s impact on the federal budget over the next 75 years. The report found that the impact depends largely on whether cost-controlling elements of the health care law are sustained long term, and considered two scenarios. In the optimistic scenario where the law and those cost provisions -- including reductions in Medicare payments and hospital readmission -- are fully implemented, the health care law is expected to reduce the federal deficit by 1.5 percent over 75 years. The second scenario assumes the cost-containment provisions are phased out starting in 2019. Doing that would mean the law would increase the deficit by 0.7 percent over the same time period. Under either scenario, the GAO report noted, models show that the federal budget is on an unsustainable fiscal path, driven by rising health care costs and an aging population. The report is full of numbers, but does not include the $6.2 trillion deficit figure. That number was computed by Republican staff members on the Senate Budget Committee. Staffers used data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to calculate the country’s gross domestic product for the 75 years ending 2085. That GDP is expected to total $883 trillion. Using the GAO report’s deficit increase figure with the GDP data results in the $6.2 trillion figure that is repeated by Broun and used in the various articles. Broun did not mention the $13.25 trillion that would be the savings over 75 years using the same GDP and GAO optimistic scenario figures. We also checked the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’ nonpartisan number-crunching agency, for data on the health care law’s budget impact. In March 2010, the CBO estimated that the law would decrease the federal budget $210 billion over 10 years ending 2021. So is Broun correct? The Georgia congressman said that a GAO report said the Affordable Care Act would increase the federal deficit by $6.2 trillion. But the GAO report doesn’t include the $6.2 trillion figure. That amount was extrapolated using data from the GAO report by a group of GOP Senate Budget Committee staffers. What the report does say is that the health care law could cause the federal deficit to increase if cost-savings measures are phased out over time. But if the law is fully implemented, it could actually lower the deficit over time. Broun, like other politicos before him, repeats a selective version of the report to support his claim, while omitting alternative positive findings of the same report. We rate his claim Mostly False.	None	Paul Broun	None	None	None	2013-10-22T00:00:00	2013-09-29	['None']
-pomt-02601	Volunteer firefighters and communities they serve in Georgia and elsewhere are being devastated by Obamacare.	half-true	/georgia/statements/2014/jan/27/national-republican-senatorial-committee/obamacare-fears-spill-over-public-safety-arena/	The National Republican Senatorial Committee tapped into a big fear in a Jan. 9 press release. The committee said cities and towns could be facing financial upheaval because of the often-derided employer mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. That provision requires that employers with more than 50 workers to provide health coverage to those putting in at least 30 hours a week. "Seventy-seven percent of Georgia's fire departments are volunteer, and it is unfair and unfortunate that those firefighters and the communities they protect are the latest Obamacare victims," Brook Hougesen, the committee’s press secretary, said in the statement. PolitiFact Georgia wondered whether the NRSC had accurately sounded the alarm on yet another problem with the Obamacare rollout. Or was the claim all wet? When we started checking into the statement, it became apparent that people from the local firehouse to the halls of Congress were concerned. Joe O’Conor, Peachtree City’s fire chief, said his city’s full-time employees have an excellent benefits package that could not be replicated for its volunteer firefighters. "Our annual budget could not possibly allow us to extend comparable health care benefits to part-time and volunteer firefighters," he said. Peachtree City Fire and Rescue runs with a blend of full-time, part-time and volunteer firefighters and EMT/paramedics. The volunteers receive a nominal stipend so they don’t have to pull from the family budget to cover costs such as gas, child care or food while they are at the fire station, O’Conor said. It’s much the same across Georgia, where 77 percent to 78 percent of firefighters are volunteers, said Glenn Allen, a spokesman for state Insurance and Fire Safety Commissioner Ralph T. Hudgens. In addition to small stipends, some local governments have workers’ compensation coverage for volunteer firefighters in case of injury at a fire scene or when the firefighters are in transit. But none is paid a salary. "That’s why they’re called volunteers," Allen said. The NRSC statement warned that Obamacare requirements, if forced upon volunteer fire departments, could, among other things, "result in higher taxes on Georgia families or penalties for the departments, many of which are already struggling financially." The committee cites an Associated Press report that says volunteer firefighters could be affected by the law. "Obamacare has been a disaster, and now volunteer firefighers and the communities that rely on them are the latest victims of this terrible law," Hougesen said. The committee, which brags that it is "the only national organization solely devoted to electing Republicans to the U.S. Senate," also took a swipe in its statement at Michelle Nunn, the best-known Democrat in Georgia’s U.S. Senate race. The NRSC accused her of being "adamantly loyal" to the new health care law and "prioritizing politics ahead of Georgia’s first responders." But a day after the NRSC released its statement, Mark Mazur, the U.S. Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for tax policy, appeared to put the matter to rest. He wrote in a blog that the final regulations under Obamacare are going to include an exemption for volunteer emergency workers. Mazur’s blog seemed to ease minds in the fire services community. William Metcalf, president and chairman of the board of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, put out a statement, calling it "an important victory for America's fire and emergency services." The NRSC’s Hougesen defended the committee’s press release, saying it came out "a full day before Treasury announced its rule on the exemption for volunteer workers such as firemen." "So when we said what we said, volunteer firefighters were still in danger," she said. But were they really in danger? Members of Congress had already gone to the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service last year, advocating for an exemption for volunteer firefighters. U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa., also introduced legislation that would write an exemption for firefighters into law. His bill had 90 co-sponsors and bipartisan support. Our ruling The National Republican Senatorial Committee said that volunteer firefighters and communities they serve in Georgia and elsewhere could be devastated by Obamacare. But fixes to the problem were already under way. Those regulatory fixes, which are set to be put in place by 2015, seem to satisfy the volunteer firefighters in question. At minimum, it was premature for the National Republican Senatorial Committee to declare that firefighters and the communities they protect are "the latest Obamacare victims." We rate the NRC's statement Half True.	None	National Republican Senatorial Committee	None	None	None	2014-01-27T00:00:00	2014-01-09	['Georgia_(U.S._state)']
-chct-00338	FACT CHECK: Was The All Female Ghostbusters Really A 'Commercial Success'?	verdict: false	http://checkyourfact.com/2017/09/01/fact-check-was-the-all-female-ghostbusters-really-a-commercial-success/	None	None	None	Ian Miles Cheong | Contributor	None	None	8:29 PM 09/01/2017	None	['None']
-snes-00561	Martial arts star Jet Li is in frail health, as shown in a recent photograph.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-jet-li-in-frail-health/	None	Entertainment	None	Bethania Palma	None	Is Action Star Jet Li in ‘Frail’ Health?	22 May 2018	None	['None']
-abbc-00289	The claim: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says that Australia's carbon emissions reduction targets were comparable to "similarly situated" countries.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-01/australias-carbon-emissions-targets-compare-paris-2015/6938844	The claim: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says that Australia's carbon emissions reduction targets were comparable to "similarly situated" countries.	['climate-change', 'environmental-impact', 'emissions-trading', 'liberals', 'turnbull-malcolm', 'australia']	None	None	['climate-change', 'environmental-impact', 'emissions-trading', 'liberals', 'turnbull-malcolm', 'australia']	Fact check: How do Australia's carbon emissions targets compare?	Wed 2 Mar 2016, 7:12am	None	['Malcolm_Turnbull', 'Australia']
-snes-05378	For the first time in history the North Atlantic is empty of cargo ships in-transit.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cargo-ships-atlantic-map/	None	Politics	None	Dan Evon	None	No, Cargo Ships Have Not Stopped Traveling in the Atlantic Ocean	12 January 2016	None	['None']
-goop-00686	Angelina Jolie Collapsed Amid Brad Pitt Custody Battle?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/angelina-jolie-brad-pitt-collapse-custody-battle/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Angelina Jolie Collapsed Amid Brad Pitt Custody Battle?	11:04 am, July 6, 2018	None	['None']
-goop-01046	Taylor Swift Has “Dumped” Lena Dunham Following Jack Antonoff Split, 	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/taylor-swift-lena-dunham-jack-antonoff-split/	None	None	None	Andrew Shuster	None	Taylor Swift Has NOT “Dumped” Lena Dunham Following Jack Antonoff Split, Despite Report	2:13 pm, May 7, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-15132	Under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty "enrichment has been limited to basically the weapons states."	false	/punditfact/statements/2015/sep/03/dick-cheney/cheney-slips-key-nuclear-treaty/	President Barack Obama may have secured the Senate votes he needs to stymie congressional opponents to the Iran nuclear deal, but the criticism remains as vigorous as ever. Former Vice President Dick Cheney predicted that the deal would ignite a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. One of the agreement’s fundamental flaws, he said, is it allows Iran to continue to enrich uranium. "When they allow Iran to continue with enrichment, they are breaking one of the key requirements with respect to the nonproliferation treaty where enrichment has been limited to basically the weapons states," Cheney said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Sept. 2, 2015. "And here we are sanctioning giving enrichment capability to the Iranians." Given that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT, was designed in part to allow countries to pursue the peaceful use of atomic energy, Cheney’s claim struck us as dubious. Ratified by the United States in 1969, the treaty’s first two articles target the spread of nuclear weapons. Nations that already have nukes promise not to help other countries acquire them, and those without nukes promise not to try and get them. The fourth article lays down the ground rules for a peaceful nuclear program: Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty. National representatives to a United Nations conference in 2000 to assess the treaty added a bit more detail about the peaceful use of nuclear energy in their final report: The Conference confirms that each country’s choices and decisions in the field of peaceful uses of nuclear energy should be respected without jeopardizing its policies or international cooperation agreements and arrangements for peaceful uses of nuclear energy and its fuel-cycle policies. Enriching uranium, as this diagram shows, is part of the nuclear fuel cycle. Source: International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament Daryl Kimball is executive director of the Arms Control Association, an organization that favors the current deal. Kimball refutes Cheney’s statement. "Former Vice President Cheney is incorrect in asserting that the NPT prohibits enrichment by non-nuclear weapon states," Kimball said. "Article IV of the treaty does not ‘allow it,’ nor does it prohibit it.’ " Brian Finlay, managing director of the Stimson Center, a defense policy group in Washington, also finds Cheney’s words problematic. "He is correct to say that France, the United States, Russia, China and the United Kingdom all have enrichment capacities," Finlay said. "But so do Germany, Japan, the Netherlands -- definitely not nuclear weapons states." Finlay noted that there is debate over whether Article IV grants Iran the right to enrich uranium. Some diplomats argue it only specifically grants a right to pursue peaceful uses. Whether that includes enrichment is left vague. However, under no reading does the treaty limit enrichment to nuclear-armed states. Finlay said unambiguously, "Cheney misspoke." We note that Cheney is correct that the deal with Iran allows it to continue to enrich uranium. In Annex 1 of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, one section specifically addresses enrichment. The first clause states that "Iran will keep its enrichment capacity at no more than 5060 IR-1 centrifuge machines in no more than 30 cascades in their current configurations in currently operating units at the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant for 10 years." The next clause commits Iran to a maximum level of enrichment of 3.67 percent for 15 years. There are many more details, but the point is that Iran gets to run a system to enrich uranium. For the curious, bomb-grade uranium needs to be enriched to about the 90 percent point. However, as we’ve reported before, once uranium-235 is enriched to about the 4-5 percent level, that’s about two-thirds of the work needed to get it to 90 percent. You need about 25 kilograms of that highly enriched material to make one bomb. Supporters of the deal say there are enough inspections and safeguards in place to make sure that Iran doesn’t cheat. Critics obviously think otherwise. Our ruling Cheney said that a key piece of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is that only nuclear-armed states can have enrichment programs. The text of the treaty and subsequent international conferences say otherwise. While it’s debatable whether the treaty grants nations the right to enrich, if a non-nuclear nation wants to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, the treaty doesn’t stand in the way. We rate this claim False.	None	Dick Cheney	None	None	None	2015-09-03T13:38:53	2015-09-02	['None']
-vees-00287	In a Senate hearing Jan. 30, Bam Aquino said:	none	http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-ninoy-aquino-national-hero	The Philippines has officially no national hero, according to the NHCP, the authority tasked to, among others, “declare historically significant sites, structures, events and personages” and “resolve historical controversies or issues.”	None	None	None	Ninoy Aquino	VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Is Ninoy Aquino a national hero?	February 24, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-04962	A woman shot and killed her boyfriend after an April Fool's Day marriage proposal prank.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/boyfriend-murdered-after-april-fools-prank-proposal/	None	Uncategorized	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Boyfriend Murdered After April Fool’s Prank Proposal?	4 April 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-03861	Says 100,000 are on waiting list to attend Texas charter schools.	mostly true	/texas/statements/2013/mar/11/dan-patrick/dan-patrick-says-100000-are-waiting-list-attend-te/	Texas needs more charter schools, according to state Sen. Dan Patrick, because there are "100,000 families who are on the wait list." Actually, the Houston Republican gave the statistic a couple ways as he introduced legislation on that point Feb. 18, 2013, in a hearing of the Senate Education Committee, which he chairs. He first cited "100,000 families," then a few minutes later said, "155,000 students … are enrolled in charters; approximately, as I said, 101,000 are on the wait list." His Feb. 18, 2013, press release about the bill said nearly 100,000 parents were on charter school waiting lists. But 100,000 sounds like a lot of anybodies -- as Patrick indicated, that’s about two-thirds of charters’ actual enrollment. According to the state Sunset Commission, those 155,000 charter enrollees equal about 3 percent of Texas public school students. Are the lists that long? We didn’t field a response from Patrick spokesman Logan Spence, and Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson told us the state did not keep such numbers on charter schools, which receive public dollars but are privately managed and exempt from some education laws so they can try different approaches. Culbertson referred us to the Texas Charter Schools Association, whose spokeswoman Tracy Young emailed us waiting-list counts and some background on Texas charter schools in general. Young said that in August 2012, the association asked its members to report their waiting-list numbers, which totaled more than 101,000 students. Of about 175 charter licensees operating in Texas at the time, she said, 137 were members of the association; 67 of those responded to the survey. Those 67 charter operators accounted for 87 percent of Texas charter school students in 2012 -- 134,532 out of the total 154,278 -- according to the association. On a chart the group sent us, the 67 operators’ wait lists added up to 101,851 students. Two operators accounted for more than half the wait-listed students: Harmony Public Schools reported 44,942 children on wait lists, and IDEA Public Schools/Idea Academy Inc. reported 12,920. 15 largest waiting lists among TCSA members who responded to 2012 survey: Source: Texas Charter Schools Association Operators were asked to remove duplications among their own campuses, Young said. For example, if a child were on wait lists for six campuses run by a single operator, that operator would count the child only once in its total. Young said her group confirmed that at least the operators with the largest lists had filtered out such duplicative entries. But they did not, she said, have a way to "de-duplicate" children who might appear on more than one operator’s list. Under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the association could not collect students’ names and addresses, Young said, and school operators did not have a system to compare such individual data with each other. Still, she said, "We feel certain that it represents a good number of the students on waiting lists across the state." The association, which formed in 2008, last year sued the state to get public dollars for charter facilities and to allow more than 215 charter licenses in Texas. Charter school operators in 2012, according to an association fact sheet, ran 506 campuses educating 154,278 students. Texas charter schools overall have grown steadily since their inception in 1995, as shown by two charts from an August 2012 study commissioned by the Texas Business and Education Coalition, which used education agency data: Texas charter school enrollment, 1997-2011 Number of Texas charter schools, 1997-2011 Looking for other wait-list estimates, we found no current numbers. But we did spot two older reports from the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation that suggested waiting lists had grown along with enrollment in prior years. The reports, from August 2008 and Dec. 9, 2009, used education agency data and the foundation’s own research on open-enrollment charter schools (the largest category) and university charter schools to estimate that in 2007-08 there were 16,810 children wait-listed (compared with 89,156 enrolled), and for 2008-09 there were 40,813 children wait-listed (compared with 102,903 enrolled). Footnotes said that students could appear on more than one list, but also noted, "Some charter schools do not keep a waiting list even though demand exceeds supply." A chart in the 2009 report broke down the wait-lists by region: Our ruling Patrick said, variously, that 100,000 students, families or parents are waiting to get into Texas charter schools. The schools’ association says that’s a little lower than their estimate for students, and it’s plausible that families or parents could be trying to enroll more than one child apiece. The association’s survey only got responses from 67 charter operators, but those operators represented 87 percent of all Texas charter students in 2012. Their reported waiting lists were 75 percent the size of their total enrollment (that is, for every four kids enrolled, another three were reportedly trying to get in). If that ratio held true for the charter operators teaching the other 13 percent of Texas’ charter students (19,746 children), there would have been 14,809 students on those wait lists, yielding a total for all charter operators of 116,659. Then again, the association’s 101,851 wait-list head count could contain duplications, if students were trying to get into schools run by more than one charter operator. We rate Patrick’s statement as Mostly True.	None	Dan Patrick	None	None	None	2013-03-11T16:00:00	2013-02-21	['Texas']
-tron-00632	James Woods “Insanity” Quote about Democrats, Transgender Issues	correct attribution!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/james-woods-insanity-quote-democrats-transgender-issues/	None	celebrities	None	None	None	James Woods “Insanity” Quote about Democrats, Transgender Issues	Apr 29, 2016	None	['None']
-goop-01019	Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom Planning For Wedding And Baby?	1	https://www.gossipcop.com/katy-perry-orlando-bloom-wedding-baby/	None	None	None	Shari Weiss	None	Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom Planning For Wedding And Baby?	2:32 pm, May 10, 2018	None	['None']
-snes-03506	Melania Trump said that Native Americans upset about the Dakota Access Pipeline should "go back to India".	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/melania-trump-and-the-dakota-access-pipeline-protests/	None	Junk News	None	Dan Evon	None	Melania Trump and the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests	21 November 2016	None	['India']
-pomt-08101	The Atlanta Braves are "the oldest continuously operating professional sports franchise in America."	true	/georgia/statements/2010/dec/14/atlanta-braves/braves-go-back-back-back/	Most baseball fans, particularly in Atlanta, know about the Atlanta Braves' streak of 14 consecutive division championships between 1991 and 2005. We here at AJC PolitiFact Georgia won't talk about the fact that the Braves won just one World Series during that time. But few baseball fans are aware of another streak the Braves proudly claim: that they've stayed in business longer than any team in the country. The Braves make the claim on their website, saying they are "the oldest continuously operating professional sports franchise in America." Really? The Braves came to Atlanta from Milwaukee, but their roots go back even further, to Boston. The Braves are one of the original National League franchises, which began in the late 19th century. A claim that they are the longest-running sports franchise in America is obviously a source of civic pride for the Braves and Atlanta, if true. So, is it true? We were told two other teams, the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds, could dispute the Braves' claim. A Cubs official in their media relations office told us he used to work for the Reds and that they're the oldest franchise. He suggested we call the Reds Hall of Fame. Many believe the Reds are baseball's first franchise, and it appears that they are. In 1869, a former cricket player named Harry Wright organized a band of nine players that barnstormed the country playing a new game we now call baseball. The players dressed in white knickerbockers and wore flashy red hosiery. They were really good, or their opponents were really bad. The team, which became known as the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was 57-0. Wright played center field and managed the team and likely didn't take himself out of many games. He was eventually enshrined into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Red Stockings didn't play in 1871, but four of those players relocated to Boston that year and played in the National Association, winning the pennant from 1872 through 1875, according to Baseball Hall of Fame Library research director Tim Wiles. The team was known as the Boston Red Stockings. In 1876, a new league formed called the National League. The Red Stockings, or the Red Caps, as some called them, were part of the eight-team league. Wright was on the team. The team, the Braves say, eventually became known as the Beaneaters to connect with their Boston fan base -- and to avoid any confusion with the Cincinnati Reds. The Cincinnati team was expelled from the league in 1880 for, among other things, serving beer during their games. Meanwhile, the Beaneaters became a force in the National League, signing Mike "King" Kelly, the Babe Ruth of his day, for what was then a stunning $10,000. That salary, accounting for inflation, is about $250,000 today. In 1912, the Beaneaters changed their name to the Boston Braves. The franchise stayed in Beantown for another 40 years before moving to Milwaukee in 1953. The Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966. But let's go back to the Cubs for a second. The franchise's origins began in 1871 as the Chicago White Stockings. Wiles noted that the team didn't play in 1872 and 1873 because of the great fire of 1871, which killed about 300 people. One third of the city's 300,000 residents lost their homes in the blaze, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago. The two years the Cubs lost to the fire gives the Braves the advantage to the claim of the oldest continuous franchise, says Wiles. "(The fire) makes Boston a strong historical organization," Wiles, a Cubs fan, conceded. The Boston Red Stockings were one of three teams to play all five seasons in the National Association, according to Baseball-Reference.com, a website that's used by many baseball writers. The others were the New York Mutuals and the Philadelphia Athletics. The Mutuals did not continue after 1876, according to the website. The Athletics stopped playing after 1876 and, after a couple of restarts, have been in business since 1901 and are playing in Oakland. The matter gets confusing when you look at Baseball-Reference.com's list of when each of today's 30 teams in Major League Baseball. It lists the first year for the Braves and Cubs as 1876. Sean Forman, president of Sports Reference LLC, the parent company of Baseball-Reference.com, said he does agree that the Braves franchise began in 1871. "It's pretty clear that they were a franchise," Forman said. MLB, Forman said, doesn't officially recognize the National Association. Why? "I'm not sure," Forman said. Wiles said he considers the National Association a professional sports league because the players were paid and the teams were organized. Bob Epling, a sports historian based in Cherokee County, also sides with the Braves, for many of the same reasons that Wiles stated. Epling doesn't believe there's a team in the three other major sports leagues in America that can make a claim. Football, he said, was semi-professional until the 1920s. The team now known as the Arizona Cardinals is believed to be the first pro football team. It began in Chicago in 1898 as the Morgan Athletic Club. Pro basketball first began in Trenton, N.J. in 1896, but the oldest continuously running teams in that sport didn't get their start until the 1940s. The Harlem Globetrotters, if you're curious, started in 1923. The National Hockey League began in 1917. "I might rate (the Braves' claim) pretty high on the Truth-o-Meter," said Epling, an associate professor of physical education and sport studies at Reinhardt University. The Cincinnati Red Stockings, which many people view as a predecessor of the Reds, are apparently baseball's first professional sports franchise. But that is not what the Braves claim. Regarding their claim to the title of "oldest continuous sports franchise in America," it does appear that the team's origins began with the Boston Red Stockings, who then joined what became the National League of Major League Baseball. The key word here is "continuous." We believe the Braves slid home safely on this one and rate their claim as True.	None	Atlanta Braves	None	None	None	2010-12-14T00:00:00	2010-12-13	['United_States', 'Atlanta_Braves']
-pomt-07468	"Full marriage equality [would provide same-sex couples] with about 1,700 rights."	mostly false	/rhode-island/statements/2011/apr/17/bill-fischer/same-sex-marriage-advocate-says-full-marriage-equa/	In the debate over same-sex marriage, proponents have argued that proposals to create civil unions and other arrangements to mimic marriage are unacceptable. They contend that such measures fail to provide for the same rights and benefits received by couples in traditional marriage. One such proposal, which would allow any two unmarried persons in Rhode Island to establish "reciprocal beneficiary agreements" received a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee April 5. Bill Fischer, spokesman for the advocacy group Marriage Equality Rhode Island, said in an interview with The Journal that the proposal wouldn't come close to providing the full benefits of marriage to gay couples. And, he said, there are lots of benefits. "We've been asked a lot lately regarding full marriage versus civil union versus reciprocal benefits, what it actually means. And I think it’s important to note [that] reciprocal benefits would provide same-sex couples with approximately 15 rights, civil unions with about 600 rights, and full marriage equality with about 1,700 rights. There is a real distinction in approach," he said. Supporters of same-sex marriage often cite a large number of federal rights -- usually 1,100 or so -- that they say are denied to same-sex couples because gay marriage is not recognized under federal law. Many examples are substantive and well-documented. Gay couples lose out on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans benefits that would normally go to a spouse. They can't transfer property between themselves without possibly incurring a tax penalty, a concern married couples don't face. They aren't protected by the COBRA law or the Family Medical Leave Act the way the spouse of an unemployed person is. Death benefits don't automatically go to the partner in a gay marriage the way they go to a widow or widower. But when we heard Fischer cite the 1,700 figure, we wanted to know if there really are 1,700 rights to be gained by being married. So we asked for the list. He said it was the combination of about 600 state and roughly 1,100 federal rights denied to gay couples in Rhode Island. To prove it, he sent us three documents. The first was a 1997 report from the U.S. General Accounting Office that, in the wake of the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, identified "1,049 federal laws classified to the United States Code in which marital status is a factor." Given the number of times the 1,100 number has been tossed around, we expected to see a specific analysis of each law cited, or at least some indication of what "right" was at stake. Instead, we were surprised to discover that the GAO had simply done a search of the U.S. Code to identify laws that use words or word fragments like "marr" (for marriage), "spouse," "widow" or "survivor." In fact, the report itself cautions that "some of these laws may not directly create benefits, rights, or privileges." It also warns that "no conclusions can be drawn … concerning the effect of the law on married people versus single people. A particular law may create either advantages or disadvantages for those who are married, or may apply to both married and single people." The second document was a 2004 update to that GAO report, which used the same methodology. The new tally: 1,138. So already, given the GAO’s methodology and multiple caveats, we were skeptical. But we decided to examine a sample of the laws the GAO identified. For this item, we are loosely defining "rights" to include benefits and privileges that people enjoy as a result of a law. We looked at 35 laws -- particularly the ones where their titles made us wonder whether the statute offered a real right, benefit or privilege for being hitched. We discovered that the GAO's cautionary language was well warranted. In most of the cases, 26 of the 35, the language, by our reading, does in fact give rights to people who are married, although some of the rights were pretty obscure: * A section of Title 2, Chapter 16 gives surviving spouses of current, past or future members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and other officials, the right to ask for an advisory opinion from the House Commission on Congressional Mailing Standards. * Title 15, Chapter 22, which deals with federal trademark law, does not allow anyone to trademark of the portrait of a deceased U.S. president as long as his widow survives, unless the former first lady gives permission. On the other hand, our spot check identified three laws that limited the rights of married people. For example, when considering eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches, the government must, under Title 42, Chapter 13, consider the income of the spouse, if there is one. And six statutes, even if they mentioned marriage or spouses, didn’t seem to deny rights or benefits. Some examples: * A section under Title 42, Chapter 7, which outlines that an abstinence education program should teach, among other things, that "abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage [is] . . . the expected standard for all school age children." * The section under the immigration section of Title 8, which allows immigration officers to record whether a U.S. resident is married or single when they leave the United States via the border with Canada or Mexico. The provision also allows for the recording of whether the person can read or write, their occupation and other facts. Next, we turned to the third document supplied by Fischer: a listing prepared by Karen Loewy, a senior staff attorney at GLAD, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, citing 669 provisions in Rhode Island law and court rules. Here again, the list was compiled by searching for key words; in this case, the phrase "next of kin" and 16 marriage-related words. This time we randomly selected 10 items to check and applied the same standard. Five appeared to offer no special benefits to married couples. One law says there is no right of patient confidentiality in suspected cases of child abuse or neglect. A second requires the state registrar of vital records to send copies of marriage certificates to municipal clerks before the 10th day of the month. A third outlines how people can recover money from claims made in probate proceedings, and a fourth prohibits the sale, foreclosure or transfer of property in divorce proceedings without court approval if a child is receiving public assistance. The fifth law wasn't even a law at all. It had been repealed. It was included in the list because it had the word "divorce" in the original title. So out of the 45 federal and state laws we examined, 31 clearly offer a benefit for someone who is married. But under 3 other laws, a married person may actually face a disadvantage. And in the remaining 11 cases, it doesn't appear that the distinction affects people's rights at all, a fact the GAO itself acknowledged when listing federal statutes. When we informed Fischer about what we were finding, he referred us to Loewy, who said: "In every one of these statutes there's an equal protection violation." For example, the federal abstinence eduction program that talks only about traditional married couples could be jarring to the children of same-sex couples, she said. The fact that immigration officials aren't recognizing same-sex couples on a form (as they would traditional married couples) constitutes a difference in treatment. In fact, Loewy said, the laws that impose restrictions on the spouses in a traditional marriage also reflect a denial of rights to same-sex couples. We disagree. To assert that any law referring to "marriage" or "spouse" or "divorce" or a comparable term marks a point of discrimination and, as a result, warrants inclusion on the list strikes us as a stretch. If gay marriage proponents simply stated that marriage-related terms appear in 1,700 (or even 1,807) sections of state and federal law, there wouldn't be any debate. Instead, they cite each reference to marriage, spouse or a similar term as an example of a right denied to a gay couple. Fischer, in his defense, points out that he spoke of "about 1,700 rights," leaving him some wiggle room, since we checked only a fraction of the statutes. But because we could validate only 31 of the 45 items we did check, that suggests the number of lost rights could be significantly less than 1,700. Clearly, couples in a traditional marriage have benefits -- both significant and obscure -- that same-sex couples in a civil union or other arrangement do not. And even our spot-check of 45 statutes confirmed that in the majority of laws we checked. But when numbers like these are thrown around, we expect advocates to have more to back them up than a rudimentary word search that fails to say what right or benefit might be at stake. The assertion that federal law denies gay couples 1,100 federal and 600 state rights has not been proven because the technique used to reach the claim produced an unreliable total. For that reason, we rate Fischer's claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.	None	Bill Fischer	None	None	None	2011-04-17T00:01:00	2011-04-05	['None']
-para-00201	Says the 1993 federal election and multiple state elections show that parties have come back "from much further behind than we are".	false	http://pandora.nla.gov.au//pan/140601/20131209-1141/www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/sep/03/kevin-rudd/comeback-kevin-piece-cake-or-mission-impossible/index.html	None	['Election']	Kevin Rudd	Michael Koziol, Peter Fray	None	Kev as Comeback Kid: a piece of cake or Mission Impossible?	Tuesday, September 3, 2013 at 10:32 a.m.	None	['None']
-pomt-14356	Nevada Republicans "didn’t do one single thing to cut spending" in 2015.	mostly false	/nevada/statements/2016/mar/22/danny-tarkanian/despite-new-taxes-legislature-didnt-forgo-spending/	Nevada lawmakers passed the largest tax increase in state history last summer, and its specter continues to loom over many 2016 contests. Republican state Senate majority leader and congressional candidate Michael Roberson, who played a key role in shepherding over $1 billion in new and extended taxes through the Legislature, is fending off attacks from his rivals in the 3rd Congressional District Republican primary. Some of the most pointed criticism comes from real estate owner and candidate Danny Tarkanian, who accused Roberson of failing to enact long-held conservative goals despite unprecedented Republican control of the state Legislature. Here’s what Tarkanian, son of famed UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian, told Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston in February. "You don't raise taxes until you do everything you can to cut spending, and they didn't do anything to cut spending," he said. "For the first time in 89 years, the Republicans controlled the Assembly, state Senate and governor's office, they didn't do one single thing to cut spending, cut wasteful tax dollars that are being used, and instead they raised taxes." (The comment is 18 minutes into the interview.) Tarkanian has sought to cast himself as the anti-Roberson in the primary tussle, so we thought it was worth delving into last year’s budget battles to separate truth from fiction. Reached for comment by PolitiFact, Tarkanian backtracked from his comments on Ralston and said he was making a "general statement" in light of the historic tax increase. He said Republicans missed an opportunity to substantially restructure spending in areas like collective bargaining and the state’s public employee retirement system (PERS). "Because the GOP controlled both branches of the Legislature and the governor’s office for the first time in 89 years, for the first time in 89 years our state government could have made meaningful (substantive) cuts to government spending, and they should have before they raised taxes," he said in an email. Tarkanian’s comments do point to an interesting question -- what exactly did Nevada lawmakers do to reduce spending outside of the tax increase? There’s no easy way to compare spending cuts from one two-year budget to another. (Nevada’s part-time Legislature necessitates two-year budgets.) Assembly Majority Leader Paul Anderson, who chaired one of the legislative finance committees, requested that legislative staffers document spending cuts in response to questions from PolitiFact. Anderson said lawmakers cut an additional $150 million from "ineffective programs" in the two-year budget to free up funds for increased needs in areas like state spending for Medicaid. He said lawmakers tried to leverage most of the new spending towards K-12 education, and finessed other areas of the budget to avoid raising taxes even more. "Had we just left everything as is, and added our education spending, we would have to raise taxes that much more to cover everything," Anderson said. Republican Assemblywoman Jill Dickman, a finance committee member who voted against the tax increase, recalled roughly the same amount of cuts as claimed by Anderson and said lawmakers spent a huge amount of time reviewing spending and ways to save money. "That’s all we did, was go through the budget," she said Defining a "spending cut" can be subjective — lawmakers "cut" around $108 million from the governor’s recommended budget and "cut" from specific line items and programs, but it’s less clear if those translated into net savings. Either way, the savings make up a small percentage of the $7.3 billion two-year budget, especially including the $1.4 billion in new and extended taxes. Tarkanian said he didn’t mean to imply that no spending cuts at all were made, but instead bemoaned the wasted opportunity to create "substantive" changes in three areas: collective bargaining, public employee retirement benefits and prevailing wages (mandatory minimum pay for contractors on publicly-funded projects). Looking back at the legislative session, lawmakers generally backed more even-keeled legislation rather than sweeping changes favored by some Republican legislators. A wide-ranging effort dubbed "Union Armageddon" failed to make much headway, while a Roberson-sponsored bill changing several portions of collective bargaining law for school administrators and teachers passed with nearly unanimous support. Roberson also sponsored a widely supported bill amending the state’s public employee retirement system and helped usher through another effort lowering the prevailing wage on school construction projects (a concession from an earlier bill that eliminated it entirely). The right-leaning Nevada Policy Research Institute agreed with Tarkanian, and complained that some of Roberson’s bills only created "cosmetic changes," whereas other proposed Republican legislation had the potential to severely disrupt the status quo. "It’s easy to argue that none of these initiatives did much to pull back the wasteful spending of tax dollars, but they were certainly billed as attempts to do so," NPRI spokesman Michael Schaus said in an email. "The best I can say is that there were virtually no cuts to the largest drivers of state spending." Roberson’s campaign claims the PERS legislation, which slightly lowers benefits to new recipients and made several other changes, would save the system $1 billion every decade once fully implemented. But the vast majority of changes in the bill only apply to new employees, meaning it will take decades for any significant savings to be realized. The entitlement board testified that the legislation would have a "positive impact on the long term financing," but it couldn’t predict an exact savings amount due to the long time period in which the savings would take place. The campaign also noted that Roberson and other lawmakers cut more than $500 million from the state budget in 2011 to make up for sagging state revenues after the foreclosure crisis, making it difficult to find new areas to cut in 2015. Our ruling Tarkanian says that the Republican-controlled Legislature "didn’t do one single thing to cut spending" in the face of historic tax increases. Taken straightforwardly, Tarkanian’s claim isn’t true — lawmakers shaved off around $150 million in spending between the last two budgets, and approved several bills designed to rein in entitlement spending over the long run. There’s a sliver of truth in Tarkanian’s follow-up, as Republican legislative leadership generally stuck with less severe changes to major state spending drivers like collective bargaining and public employee retirement than what was prefered by more conservative groups and legislators. But to say lawmakers didn’t do anything to address spending isn’t accurate. We rate his statement as Mostly False.	None	Danny Tarkanian	None	None	None	2016-03-22T17:12:00	2016-02-09	['None']
-snes-04518	A photograph shows a 'Welcome Sign' outside of Mingo Country warning visitors that its citizens were armed and would "kill you back."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/welcome-mingo-county/	None	Fauxtography	None	Dan Evon	None	‘Welcome to Mingo County’	4 July 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-13453	"One extra year of schooling for girls reduces infant mortality rates among their children by up to 10 percent."	half-true	/global-news/statements/2016/sep/15/ertharin-cousin/old-stat-girls-schooling-and-infant-mortality-fall/	In development circles, no one quibbles that it’s good to educate girls. There’s plenty of evidence that it helps them and if they become mothers, that it helps their children. The head of the United Nations' World Food Programme Ertharin Cousin was in Armenia on Sept. 5, 2016, to talk about the importance of child nutrition and in the course of her speech, she mentioned a talking point on this topic that has been in play for decades. "One extra year of schooling for girls reduces infant mortality rates among their children by up to 10 percent," Cousin said. It turns out, there are problems with Cousin’s claim. As often happens, this is a statement that has morphed over time, shifting from a more cautious assertion to a more definitive one. We’ll give you the highlights. The origins, changes to the 10 percent claim Staff at the World Food Programme told us they got their figure from UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It was part of a 2011 collection of illustrations and talking points called Education Counts and this graphic was among them. It reads: "Each extra year of a mother’s schooling reduces the probability of infant mortality by 5% to 10%." Before we jump into stat forensics mode, it’s important to say that UNESCO has retired this talking point. The way they put it now in their 2016 global education monitoring report is, "Achieving universal secondary schooling would make a meaningful contribution to reducing infant and child mortality." In short, the new statement drops the precision of the old. Yet there are numbers that come along with that new, broader statement. "If all women in sub-Saharan Africa had upper secondary education by 2030, it would prevent 3.5 million deaths from 2050-60," UNESCO spokeswoman Katharine Redman told us. UNESCO’s wording clearly changed between 2011 and 2016 and it’s useful to note the details. They moved from talking about infant mortality to infant and child mortality. That’s important because the research on the tie between a mother’s education and the health of her children looked at the number of children who died before they turned 5 years old (child mortality), not the number who died before their first birthday (infant mortality). That research includes a seminal article from 1993, and a key 2010 survey of data from 175 countries that UNESCO in particular has relied on. Both found that more education for women is associated with lower child mortality rates. They did not measure infant mortality. So strictly speaking, UNESCO’s 2011 statement was a bit off when it came out. Does the distinction between infant and child mortality matter? It depends on who you ask. Health statistician Michael Stoto at Georgetown University said the two are highly correlated, so as one changed, so would the other. But Jishnu Das, a World Bank economist who studies both education and health, said in countries such as India, infant and child mortality rates take different paths. "The child mortality rate has consistently declined while the infant mortality rate is roughly the same over a fairly long time period," Das said. The difference has implications for the role of maternal education. Deaths in infancy, Das told us, tend to come from complications that hit within the first few days after birth. On the other hand, deaths up to the fifth birthday relate more to "what’s going on with the household." While the education level of the mother can improve the odds in both cases, Das said her decisions have a bigger impact on the health of older children. Knowing the importance of getting kids vaccinated and recognizing the danger of diarrhea are just two ways that can play out. UNESCO’s latest claim also backed away from the simple equation that each additional year of schooling would cut the child mortality rate. Instead, the agency now looks at the effect of blocks of education -- primary, lower secondary (middle school) and upper secondary (high school). So Cousin’s statement is relying on data that is no longer supported by its authors. But you can still find the organization’s old material on the Internet. Similarly, we noticed how the claim has morphed over time. In 1993, a Yale economist wrote "An added year of maternal education tends to be associated with a fairly constant percentage decline in child mortality rates .. between 5 and 10 percent. By 2004 researchers cited that work as "An extra year of girls’ education can reduce infant mortality by 5–10 percent." And by 2015, the same 1993 chapter was cited as saying "an extra year of girls’ education cuts infant mortality by 5 to 10 percent." The differences are subtle, but they all change the meaning of the statistic and the validity of supporting research. It’s not all education Researchers Das and Stoto both emphasized that so many aspects of life can be in flux as schooling increases that it’s tough to untangle the underlying dynamics. At the same time a country opens more classrooms for young women, it might also be building new health clinics and improving the local water supply. All those changes would give newborns and toddlers better odds of survival. Emily Hannum, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist, told us there can be many reasons for the association. "These could range from delayed marriage and increased age at childbearing, to lower fertility, to better access to or greater utilization of health care, to improved access to information about healthy parenting practices," Hannum said. Emmanuela Gakidou at the University of Washington is a key researcher in this field. Gakidou oversaw the 2010 research that supplied UNESCO with much of its data. Gakidou speaks cautiously about the impact of schooling on mortality rates. "It’s hard to ascribe causality, but the data and analyses on this topic are robust enough that I think we can say that education among women of reproductive age leads to improved child survival," she told us. "Other factors are also important, of course." Gakidou’s research did find that across the globe, one additional year of schooling is associated with a 10 percent decline in the child mortality rate, but Gakidou cautioned against thinking that would apply in any particular country. "That’s the average effect at the global level and across all levels of education," she said. Our ruling The head of the World Food Programme said that one extra year of schooling for girls reduces the infant mortality rates among their children by up to 10 percent. Broadly speaking, the association between more education of young women and better odds for their offspring is real. But this claim suffers from several flaws. It speaks of infant mortality when the underlying research addressed child mortality. It asserts a causal link when the data, while very suggestive, don’t fully prove the point. And it treated every year of schooling the same. Perhaps most important, UNESCO, the source that the World Food Programme relied on, has distanced itself from this statistic. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/d0de9bac-13cc-4a37-bdca-05b7645bed05	None	Ertharin Cousin	None	None	None	2016-09-15T10:00:00	2016-09-06	['None']
-snes-04553	Hanging plastic bags filled with water will repel flies.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fly-bye/	None	Critter Country	None	Snopes Staff	None	Do Water-Filled Baggies Repel Flies?	11 August 2009	None	['None']
-pomt-01704	"More (student-athletes) graduate than the students who aren't student-athletes."	half-true	/punditfact/statements/2014/aug/10/mark-emmert/ncaa-president-student-athletes-graduate-more-ofte/	The line between amateur and professional for college athletes is up for grabs in the courts, but the NCAA continues to argue that its players are amateurs because they truly are students. Last week, a U.S. district court judge in California ruled against the college athletics association in a case filed by a former basketball player from the University of California at Los Angeles. The decision in Ed O’Bannon vs. NCAA said student-athletes cannot be banned from profiting off of their own names and likenesses. The NCAA plans to appeal the decision, at least in part, said president Mark Emmert on ABC News’ This Week Aug. 10. Emmert defended the athletes’ amateur status by emphasizing their academic successes. "Many, many, many thousands of student-athletes take full advantage of the opportunity to be both a student and an athlete while they’re in college," Emmert said. "The vast majority of them graduate. More graduate than the students who aren’t student-athletes. So I believe strongly, and more importantly, the evidence demonstrates that indeed they are students." With how much time student-athletes spend in practice, in games and on the road, we wondered if it’s true that they have higher graduation rates than their nonathlete peers. The rates The NCAA calculates its graduation success rate by tracking how many student-athletes graduate within six years of enrolling, including students who transfer between schools in good academic standing. Using this measurement, the NCAA Division I student-athlete graduation rate was 82 percent for students who enrolled in 2006 and graduated by 2012. In Division II, the graduation rate was 69 percent for the 2006 cohort. Division III schools aren’t required to disclose their graduation rates to the NCAA. But among those that did, the graduation rate for students who enrolled in 2005 was 88 percent. However, there is no general student body graduation data using the NCAA’s parameters. To show that the student-athlete graduation rate is higher than that of the student body, NCAA officials point to the federal graduation rate, which counts both student athletes and the general student body. It’s different than the NCAA measurement because it only counts students who graduate from the institution where they first enrolled and not transfer students. (The purpose is to measure retention.) To get an idea of the size difference between the two pools, the federal rate included 82,226 Division I student-athletes in 2012, and the NCAA rate included 91,701. The federal measurement tends to calculate a much lower student-athlete graduation rate than the NCAA’s measurement. Using this measurement, 65 percent of Division I student-athletes who enrolled in 2006 and graduated by 2012. This is only 1 percentage point higher than the general student body, which had a 64 percent graduation rate. The difference is a little bigger in the other divisions. Division II athletes had a graduation rate of 68 percent, while the general student body had a rate of 64 percent. For Division III (the 2005 cohort) the student-athlete rate was 54 percent compared with 48 percent generally. Researchers at the College Sports Research Institute at the University of South Carolina have also expressed concern that these calculations include part-time students in the general student body. Part-time students are less likely to graduate in the six-year time frame, bringing down an institution’s overall graduation rate. (The NCAA requires student-athletes to go to school full time.) The institute’s adjusted graduation rate calculations regularly show major negative gaps between Division I football and men’s basketball graduation rates and that of their nonathlete peers. Breaking it down further The graduation rates vary wildly by sport, school and demographic group. For example, compare men’s basketball and football (what often comes to mind when we think college sports) to the general student body and other student-athletes: Group NCAA grad rate Federal grad rate General student body n/a 64 percent All Div. I student-athletes 82 percent 65 percent Men’s basketball 70 percent 47 percent Football — bowl subdivision 70 percent 59 percent Football and basketball have the lowest graduation rates using the NCAA measurement. Additionally, more than half of the 18 women’s sports have graduation rates higher than 90 percent, while only one men’s sport — fencing — has a graduation rate above 90 percent. Under the federal measurement, the sports with the highest graduation rates are: men’s gymnastics with 88 percent, women’s gymnastics with 83 percent and women’s lacrosse with 80 percent. Some experts have taken issue with the NCAA’s claim because the graduation rates vary depending on the team, meaning one group’s success could mask another’s troubles. "Emmert is not referring to football and men's basketball, which is considerably lower," said Gerald Gurney, a former senior associate athletic director for academics at Oklahoma University. "The problem in college sports is not with the women's soccer team." Additionally, it’s difficult to compare the graduation rates and other academic successes of student-athletes to nonathletes because some programs keep their athletes up to NCAA academic standards "by any means necessary," said Dave Ridpath, a professor of sports administration at Ohio University. He referenced the recent controversy at the University of North Carolina, where some football players were registered for fake classes to get easy As. "Keeping them eligible by any means necessary … might lead to graduation, but are they educated?" Ridpath said. Our ruling Emmert said, "more (student-athletes) graduate than the students who aren’t student-athletes." Experts, the government and the NCAA don’t agree on how this data should be calculated. But the best and most recent measurement we have for drawing a comparison shows that the graduation rate among Division I student-athletes is about the same as the general student body, though it is higher for Division II and Division II. But the graduation rates are not the same across all sports, divisions, schools or demographics, so a group with a particularly good or bad graduation rate could skew the overall results. Because the data is inconclusive, we rate this claim Half True.	None	Mark Emmert	None	None	None	2014-08-10T18:03:25	2014-08-10	['None']
-pomt-08461	Says Steve Kagen "promised us jobs, voting for the $787 billion stimulus. Cost: another 77,000 jobs lost."	pants on fire!	/wisconsin/statements/2010/oct/14/national-republican-congressional-committee/republicans-say-stimulus-bill-supported-us-rep-ste/	Some folks are disappointed with the number of jobs created by the federal stimulus. But if the National Republican Congressional Committee is right, in Wisconsin, the stimulus is actually a jobs killer. Hmmm. The NRCC works to get Republicans elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. One Democrat it wants to take down in the 2010 campaign is two-term Rep. Steve Kagen of Appleton. He faces Republican challenger Reid Ribble on Nov. 2. In a TV ad, the NRCC aims to turn Kagen’s vote for the stimulus, and two other measures, against him. "Kagen promised us jobs, voting for the $787 billion stimulus," the announcer says, referring to Wisconsin. "Cost: another 77,000 jobs lost." When this is mentioned, a goofy image of Kagen giving two thumbs up pops up behind the Capitol building. Similar images -- including one pairing Kagen with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- are used to underscore the message that Kagen’s votes "cost Wisconsin dearly." The other votes cited are on the cap-and-trade bill and a vote to raise the debt limit. We homed in on the stimulus claim because it seems so counter-intuitive. To be sure, critics say the cost of the stimulus has bought too few jobs, and point out that unemployment has only grown worse. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, a leading conservative on budget matters, has said borrowing done as part of the stimulus will lead to "job-killing tax hikes" one day. But the NRCC is claiming Wisconsin has already lost 77,000 jobs because of the stimulus. "When I saw that ad," said Kevin Quinn, an economics professor at St. Norbert College in De Pere, "my response was that it was patently ridiculous." Hold on, professor. Let’s look and see. The ad starts by stringing together some correct information. Kagen supported the $787 billion stimulus (although that estimate has since been boosted to $814 billion by the Congressional Budget Office). And Wisconsin has had a net loss of more than 77,000 jobs since the measure became law in February 2009, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. When asked for facts to back up the stimulus claim in the ad, Tom Erickson, Midwest press secretary for the NRCC, provided the citation on the job-loss figures. But when we called and e-mailed asking for evidence that the lost jobs were a result of the stimulus, he did not reply. Perhaps with good reason. In logic class, this one falls under the category that correlation does not prove causation. Think of it this way: Incidents of drowning may go up at the beach at the same time ice cream sales rise. That doesn’t mean ice cream causes you to drown. It may just mean more people are at the beach. Indeed, the consensus -- from several government and private-sector reports issued in 2010 -- is the stimulus has boosted employment. Directly and indirectly, the analysts conclude, the stimulus has created or saved more than 1 million, as many as 2.7 million, or even as many as 4.8 million jobs nationwide. In Wisconsin, the federal government counted 16,348 jobs directly funded by the stimulus in the most recent quarter (April through June 2010) reviewed. In total, according to the state, the stimulus has created or retained 63,000 jobs in Wisconsin. Let’s return to Quinn, the outraged economics professor. He said he is not supporting either candidate in the Kagen-Ribble race. It’s fair to question how efficient the stimulus has been, Quinn said, but there is no debate it has created jobs, both directly and indirectly. And even though joblessness in Wisconsin has risen, it would have been worse without the stimulus injection, he said. Quinn said the only way he could conceive of arguing that the stimulus killed jobs is if it increased taxes. But it didn’t. As our colleagues at PolitiFact National have reported, of the original $787 billion, $499 billion was to fund new roads, hire teachers and generally keep people employed, and about $288 billion -- or 36 percent -- was in tax breaks. So is Quinn alone in his views? No. "A broad spectrum of economists would say that the stimulus cannot have cost jobs," said Laura Dresser, associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (yes, COWS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The recovery spending increased demand in the economy, and that creates jobs directly, or indirectly, or saves jobs." Some jobs are created or saved because they are funded directly by stimulus money, Dresser explained. And others are created and saved indirectly, she said -- partly as a result of spending done by people holding stimulus-funded jobs who would otherwise be unemployed. We won’t add on any more economists. In issuing its attack against Democratic U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen, the National Republican Congressional Committee said the federal stimulus bill cost Wisconsin 77,000 jobs. The two things may have happened in the same time frame, but that does not mean one caused the other. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence the stimulus has created jobs. Here’s a more direct formula: Twisted logic + lack of evidence = Pants on Fire.	None	National Republican Congressional Committee	None	None	None	2010-10-14T09:00:00	2010-10-03	['None']
-pomt-13073	"The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/15/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-new-york-times-apologized-bad-co/	President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t think the New York Times has been fair to him. Amid a series of tweets criticizing the New York Times, Trump said the news organization wrote a letter to readers after the election, apologizing for their "bad coverage" of him. "The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me. I wonder if it will change - doubt it?" Trump tweeted Nov. 13. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Trump’s tweet is a distorted and over-the-top description of a Nov. 13 letter to readers from the New York Times’ publisher and executive editor. The 200-word letter primarily serves to thank readers for their loyalty and to say that New York Times will "rededicate" itself to the high journalistic standards it has employed thus far. Nowhere in the letter did the authors write anything like an apology. Nor did they say that the organization’s overall coverage of Trump was "bad." Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said Trump was referring to the fact that the letter includes an admission that the New York Times underestimated Trump’s chances. The letter said the outcome was "unexpected" and posed the rhetorical question: "Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?" At times during the election, the New York Times presidential poll forecast predicted Hillary Clinton had more than a 90 percent chance of winning the election, and that turned out to be incorrect. "Doesn’t that speak volumes about the coverage?" Cheung said of the inaccurate predictions at the New York Times and elsewhere. "It wasn’t just a disservice to President-elect Trump, but it’s also a disservice to the voters looking for reliable coverage — which they obviously didn’t get during the election." But predictions and polling are just two aspects of the New York Times’ Trump coverage throughout the campaign season. They also broke the story that he likely didn’t pay federal income taxes for years, on top of stories about women who claimed Trump groped them. On the other side, the New York Times also broke the news that Clinton used a private email server. The letter from publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Dean Baquet praised the organization’s work overall. It said reporters consistently covered the election "with agility and creativity" and that they will cover the new president with "the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence" that they already do. So it’s a stretch to say the letter’s line about an inaccurate prediction is an admission of "bad coverage" of Trump overall, nor is it an apology. A spokeswoman for the New York Times told PolitiFact: "We're incredibly proud of our coverage of the 2016 campaign. There was no suggestion either in our note to staff, or the note to subscribers, that we were apologizing." Certainly, the New York Times and other media outlets are reflecting on their coverage from the year and why they so underestimated Trump’s support. The New York Times public editor Liz Spayd, for example, wrote Nov. 9 that reporters could have done more to immerse themselves in Trump supporters’ lives. Our ruling Trump said, "The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me." The New York Times sent a letter to subscribers thanking them for their loyalty and promising to provide strong coverage of Trump going forward. While the letter does note that the New York Times underestimated support for Trump, it does not say their coverage of him throughout the campaign was bad. In fact, the letter praises New York Times reporters’ work. The note does not include any semblance of an apology. We rate Trump’s claim False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/f2054f27-8478-407c-9196-35f65372025d	None	Donald Trump	None	None	None	2016-11-15T11:18:19	2016-11-13	['None']
-pomt-02714	"Most of the (Affordable Care Act) has already in some sense been waived or otherwise suspended."	mostly false	/punditfact/statements/2013/dec/22/george-will/george-will-says-most-health-care-law-has-been-wai/	President Barack Obama announced last week that people who had their health insurance canceled can now purchase a bare bones plan that only covers major medical expenses without facing the threat of a fine. It’s a significant change for some, and one of several ways the administration has altered some provisions of the law. How much tinkering has gone on? Fox political commentator George Will offered this analysis on Fox News Sunday. "At this point, it’s very hard to quantify, (but) perhaps most of the law has already in some sense been waived or otherwise suspended," Will said. "The president said this week that the suspensions of the employer mandate, the individual mandate, etc., etc., etc., do not go to the core of the law. If not that, what is the core of the law?" For this fact-check, we will take a stab at quantifying the steps the law set out to do so we can determine if, as Will said, most of the law has been waived or suspended. Delays and modifications There have been a number of modest administrative changes, including giving people an extra week to sign-up for coverage to begin in January and giving insurance companies an extra month at the end of next year to set premiums. There have also been some significant alterations. This summer, Obama delayed by a year a requirement that all companies with 50 or more employees provide their workers health care coverage. And in the fall, when a wave of cancellation notices appeared in the mailboxes of Americans who bought coverage directly from insurance companies, Obama gave states the option to let people stay on those plans through next year -- even though the plans did not meet the standards of the Affordable Care Act. In some ways, the move this week was a way to supplement that relief for people who wanted more options. Comparing head counts Of all the changes, the most recent one seems likely to touch the most lives. Obama said his staff estimated that about 500,000 people might want a high-deductible, catastrophic plan. We have seen credible estimates that about 4 million people saw their plans canceled but some have now found replacement coverage. In reality, we won’t know the full scope of this policy shift for several months. The next-biggest impact stems from the delay in the employer mandate. Analysts with the RAND Corporation, a respected, independent research group, recently estimated that about 300,000 fewer people would have coverage as a result. While these figures are only estimates, they show that the changes -- while perhaps significant -- affect only a small portion of people in the health insurance market. About 365,000 people purchased insurance through the federal marketplace through November and another 800,000 were found eligible for Medicaid, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Obama said another 500,000 people had signed up for health insurance in December. Other parts of the law are affecting many more Americans. The law added about 3.1 million young adults to their parent’s health care plans. A requirement that insurance companies spend at least 80 percent of every premium dollar on actual health care affected the health care policies of about 77 million people in 2012, according to government figures. That resulted in about $3.4 billion in rebates, coverage adjustments or policy enhancements. Starting in 2011, the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit became more generous. More than 35 million people participate in that program. Looking at the individual mandate, the Urban Institute, a Washington academic policy group, estimated that it would hit about 18 million people. That dwarfs the 500,000 the administration believes will take advantage of the catastrophic coverage option. Our ruling With all the talk about problems with the health care law, it’s easy to forget just how many corners of health insurance policy the law affects. Will seemed guilty of that on Fox News Sunday when he said most of the law has been waived or suspended. Obama has made at least two major course corrections in the law. He delayed the employer mandate by one year and allowed individuals dealing with canceled plans to buy insurance that fails to meet minimum standards under the law. One way to put these changes into context is to look at the number of people they affect. While precise data are missing, the combined impact could be in the range of 1 million Americans. On the other side of the ledger, 3.1 million young adults have gained access to coverage through the law, another 18 million people are subject to the individual mandate and millions more have benefited from requirements that health insurance companies spend premiums on care. We rate the claim Mostly False.	None	George Will	None	None	None	2013-12-22T16:21:42	2013-12-22	['None']
-abbc-00347	When the Coalition announced its policy for the National Broadband Network on April 9, 2013, it said taxpayer funding would be limited to $29.5 billion.	in-between	http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-27/nbn-cost-promise-check/5546894	None	['information-and-communication', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia']	None	None	['information-and-communication', 'federal-government', 'liberals', 'australia']	Promise check: Complete the National Broadband Network with $29.5 billion in taxpayer funding	Sun 8 May 2016, 7:37am	None	['Coalition_(Australia)']
-snes-04959	A photograph shows William Harley and Arthur Davidson unveiling their first motorcycle in 1914.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harley-davidson-1914-photo/	None	Uncategorized	None	Dan Evon	None	William Harley and Arthur Davidson Unveiling Their First Motorcycle	4 April 2016	None	['None']
-pomt-13207	"Because as a Senator Toomey stood up for Wall Street. He wanted to privatize Social Security and invest it in the stock market. Wall Street would make billions in fees even if the stock market crashed. "	mostly true	/pennsylvania/statements/2016/oct/21/afscme/story-behind-attack-ads-blast-pat-toomeys-plan-soc/	Opponents of Senator Pat Toomey are making sure his past ideas about Social Security stay front and center. Social Security, of course, was a much hotter topic a few years ago. Many Republicans, including former President George W. Bush, pushed for allowing younger workers to contribute portions of payroll taxes into government-approved private mutual fund accounts. It was a movement for a partial privatization of Social Security. But that plan never gained much traction and lately politicians on both sides of the aisle have been reluctant to talk about privatizing Social Security and have instead focused on other means of reform or at least used less divisive terminology than "privatization." A recent ad from AFSCME throws Toomey into this mix. It accuses him of previously favoring the privatization of Social Security and, yes, uses the dreaded p-word: "Because as a senator Toomey stood up for Wall Street. He wanted to privatize Social Security and invest it in the stock market. Wall Street would make billions in fees even if the stock market crashed." We’ll break down this fact check into two parts: Toomey’s previous beliefs on Social Security privatization and then whether Wall Street would in fact make billions off such a plan. Ted Kwong, a spokesperson for Toomey, said over email Toomey once supported younger people placing portions of their payroll taxes into "government-regulated private accounts." (He did not answer a question about the Senator’s current position on Social Security privatization). This is backed up in several past interviews conducted with Toomey. Shortly after he was elected to the Senate, a New York Times article noted he intended "to continue to push for allowing young people to invest part of their Social Security payroll tax." Toomey told the Scranton Times-Tribune in 2010 workers on the verge of retirement would be guaranteed their current benefits. In his book, The Road to Prosperity, he laid out his beliefs in greater detail (Yes, Toomey has a book. It’s currently ranked 1,491,962 on Amazon’s top-seller list). Toomey wrote that older workers would continue to use the current Social Security system, "But younger workers should be given a choice. Those who would prefer to stay in the current system should be allowed to do so….Others, however, should be free to deposit a portion of the payroll taxes they already pay into personal savings account instead of sending their hard-earned money to Washington." In the book, Toomey gave an example of a beneficiary of this program as a young worker who could invest this portion of the payroll tax "in a bundle of stocks and bonds" and earn a much higher return than Social Security. In other words, he would want the worker to invest the money. That’s where Wall Street comes in. Right now, payroll tax for Social Security goes to a trust fund that is then invested into special securities overseen by the U.S. Treasury that are only available for the trust fund. Max Skidmore, author of The American System of Social Security: Separating Fact From Fallacy, said the administrative costs of this system are effectively nothing. They are less than one cent per dollar. That wouldn’t be the case with investments in stocks, bonds and mutual funds. If somebody were allowed to take a portion of their payroll tax that would normally go to Social Security and invest it, they would face much higher administrative fees. Skidmore said it would be difficult to estimate, but the total could easily reach the billions if many people were to opt for a personal account as proposed by Toomey and others. Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, said these fees would be comparable to what Americans see with their 401(k)’s, which have administrative fees. A University of Chicago study estimated if Social Security was partially privatized in one of the plans proposed by Bush fees paid to banks could be as high as $940 billion over 75 years. As for whether Toomey’s plan of letting only younger workers put a portion of their payroll tax into a personal account should still be considered privatization, Munnell said yes. "When people were discussing this issue," she said, "that is what was being discussed." Our ruling A recent AFSCME ad claimed Pat Toomey supported Social Security privatization during his time as Senator: "Because as a senator Toomey stood up for Wall Street. He wanted to privatize Social Security and invest it in the stock market. Wall Street would make billions in fees even if the stock market crashed." In the past, PolitiFact has tried to emphasize the difference between privatization and partial privatization because Democratic and Republican politicians have tried to distort it. Toomey has not supported full privatization, which would mean completely overhauling the system so everyone’s proceeds of the payroll tax would go to personal accounts that could be privately invested. This ad doesn’t give the full picture. It doesn’t say he was for full privatization but also doesn’t make clear the difference between full and partial privatization. Toomey has supported partial privatization of Social Security. In the plan he wrote about -- and plans favored by past politicians -- young workers were expected to invest in stocks and mutual funds that are synonymous with Wall Street. The companies with whom people did their investing would earn sizable fees. We rate the claim Mostly True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/ea4ae91e-977f-4f04-8e7c-00f22441a842	None	AFSCME	None	None	None	2016-10-21T10:27:32	2016-10-12	['New_York_Stock_Exchange']
-snes-01599	Image depicts "attitude adjustment" and "smile therapy" forced upon American housewives in the 1930s institutionalized for "not taking care of themselves" and acting "depressed."	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/1930s-housewife-smile-therapy/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Does This Image Show a 1930s Housewife Forced into ‘Smile Therapy’?	12 October 2017	None	['United_States']
-pomt-11710	"Now it’s official: FDA announced that vaccines are causing autism."	pants on fire!	/punditfact/statements/2017/dec/19/truthcommandcom/no-fda-didnt-hide-information-linking-vaccine-auti/	The federal government tried to hide that a common vaccine given to children causes autism, according to a misleading viral story on Facebook. "Now it’s official: FDA announced that vaccines are causing autism," stated a headline on truthcommand.com. The story stated: "For years, fears over vaccines and the onset of autism have been dispelled by medical professionals, but this has all changed. Parents over the years have been criticized for abstaining from getting their child vaccinated over autism fears, but now it turns out they were right all along." Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat fake news. We found that the website misled readers about information related to the potential adverse side effects of the DTaP vaccine Tripedia manufactured in the past by Sanofi Pasteur. DTaP, a vaccine given to children in multiple doses, stands for Diphtheria and Tetanus Toxoids and Acellular Pertussis Vaccine. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, getting those diseases is much riskier than getting the vaccine. Mild problems such as a fever or swelling are common, while severe problems such as a serious allergic reaction are so "rare it is hard to tell if they are caused by the vaccine." The internet has been fueled with misinformation for years about a vaccine-autism link. A 1998 article in a British medical journal, the Lancet, claimed to show a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism but in 2010, the Lancet retracted the study. Scientists have repeatedly debunked the myth that vaccines cause autism through peer-reviewed studies. And yet, the spread of misinformation continues -- including by Donald Trump before and during his race for president. Vaccine pamphlet on adverse side effects Truthcommand.com stated that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration admitted that autism is a potential side effect in an online pamphlet about Tripedia: "Adverse events reported during post-approval use of Tripedia vaccine include idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, SIDS, anaphylactic reaction, cellulitis, autism, convulsion/grand mal convulsion, encephalopathy, hypotonia, neuropathy, somnolence and apnea. Events were included in this list because of the seriousness or frequency of reporting." But that section also includes a disclaimer about adverse events: "Because these events are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequencies or to establish a causal relationship to components of Tripedia vaccine." Through the federal government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), anyone can file a report: doctors, patients, family members -- and they don’t need proof that the event was caused by the vaccine. Government researchers examine the reports and turn over anything suspicious to outside groups, such as the Institute of Medicine for more research. Marie McCormick, an expert on child health at the Harvard School of Public Health, told PolitiFact that the reporting system can be gamed. When the measles-thimerosal-autism controversy first emerged, activists encouraged parents to report adverse events regardless of the duration of time since the vaccination and prior events such as previous indications of developmental problems. What happened to the pamphlet on FDA’s website Truthcommand.com suggested that the FDA had tried to hide the autism link by deleting this pamphlet from the FDA’s website. But the FDA told PolitiFact that the pamphlet written by Sanofi Pasteur in 2005 wasn’t actually deleted -- the FDA archived it and sent PolitiFact a link to the pamphlet. It’s no surprise that the pamphlet was archived on the FDA’s website because the vaccine hasn’t been available for many years. Cristine K. Schroeder, a spokeswoman for Sanofi Pasteur, told PolitiFact that the company’s last shipment of Tripedia occurred in 2012. "Tripedia is not in use today," she said. The company’s pamphlets for current vaccines for DTaP, Daptacel, Pentacel and Quadracel, do not list autism as a potential adverse event. They do show data from clinical trials about side effects such as the percentage of children who got a fever, or became drowsy. Tripedia was originally licensed by the FDA in the early 1990s, FDA spokeswoman Megan McSeveney told PolitiFact. The drug maker had to follow what was at the time broad label requirements for adverse events. More recent federal regulations about drug labeling approved in 2006 are now more narrow and state that the only adverse events that have to be reported are those "for which there is some basis to believe there is a causal relationship between the drug and the occurrence of the adverse event." The scientific evidence does not support a link between any vaccine, including Tripedia (DTaP), and autism or other developmental disorders, McSeveney said. The truthcommand.com website states that it aims "to raise awareness to issues ignored by the media." We contacted the email address listed on the website and did not get a reply. Part way through our reporting the story was no longer accessible on the website. The misleading story has circulated at least since March 2016 when Snopes debunked it. Truthcommand.com stated "Now it’s official: FDA announced that vaccines are causing autism." But the FDA did no such thing. The evidence Truthcommand.com cited is taken out of context, inaccurate or out of date. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. ' See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	truthcommand.com	None	None	None	2017-12-19T09:51:08	2017-11-21	['None']
-snes-02900	A cook attempted to poison George Washington by feeding him tomatoes.	false	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/red-death/	None	Food	None	David Mikkelson	None	Attempted Tomato Assassination of George Washington	4 February 2013	None	['None']
-pomt-09343	"Giving money to politicians has paid off for Paul Workman. Workman gave thousands to politicians and got millions in government construction projects."	false	/texas/statements/2010/apr/07/holly-turner/turner-says-workman-gave-thousands-political-candi/	Paul Workman and Holly Turner are jockeying for votes before their April 13 runoff to be the Republican nominee for the Texas House District 47 seat in southwestern Travis County, which includes part of Austin. Turner took the fight to TV March 31, debuting a hard-hitting ad that accuses Workman of donating to politicians and getting construction contracts. "Giving money to politicians has paid off for Paul Workman," a narrator says. "Workman gave thousands to politicians and got millions in government construction projects." To support this charge, Turner’s campaign sent over a list of projects handled by Workman Commercial Construction Services, which Workman founded. Turner’s spokesman, Craig Murphy, cited Workman’s contributions to several Williamson County officials: commissioners Ron Morrison ($250 in 2006), Lisa Birkman ($1,250 since 2004), and Valerie Covey ($500 total in 2006 and 2007) and County Judge Dan Gattis ($100 in 2010). Murphy also pointed to a real estate firm, T. Stacy & Associates, where Workman is director of development. Murphy noted the firm’s Web site lists the state of Texas among 40 featured clients. We also looked at Workman’s estimated $15,010 in political donations since 2000 to candidates for state office and political groups, according to records kept by the Texas Ethics Commission. Through this year, Workman has donated $9,740 to 20 individual candidates — about $1,500 to Democrats and $8,240 to Republicans. Overall, the Austin chapter of the Associated General Contractors PAC was Workman’s top recipient, fielding $2,790 in the period, followed by the Texas Building Branch Associated General Contractors PAC ($1,780), then-state Rep. Joe Nixon ($1,500) and Gov. Rick Perry ($1,390). Next, we reviewed 16 construction projects that Murphy cited on Workman Commercial’s Web site. Among them: Dripping Springs Elementary School, Lake Travis High School, Williamson County Regional Park, the Williamson County Justice Center, the Crowley Justice Center, the Boswell High School Dance and Cheer Center, the Irving Valley Ranch Library, Texas A&M University Langford Architecture building, and the Cypress Fairbanks-Leider, Bonham and Neff elementary schools. The Austin Business Journal reported in 1997 that Workman Commercial had earned $12.7 million doing work for the Austin Independent School District, and the American-Statesman reported in 2006 that Workman’s company had received about $14.5 million from Williamson County for various projects since 1998. Eric Bearse, Workman’s spokesman, said: "Workman Commercial built two projects in Williamson County — a park and a courthouse. They were two separate projects, both bid publicly. And (in each case) they were the low bidder." Connie Watson, a public information officer for Williamson County, confirmed that the contracts were let through competitive bidding, which Watson said the county requires for all construction and road projects. County commissioners ultimately award the contracts, based on a company’s bid, experience and other factors, she said. (We don’t know whether Workman donated to local school board members in school districts where he won contracts. Workman said he didn’t recall making any contributions, and we didn’t check board members’ finance reports, which are stored in each school district’s headquarters.) Additionally, Workman told us there was no connection between his political donations and his government contracts. In 1997, he told the Austin Business Journal that a contribution such as $250 to Commissioner Morrison "does not influence a politician; it may just get us to the point where we could get a phone call answered if we need to see them about something." Murphy, of Turner’s camp, told us: "People don’t make contributions to local county commissioners for nothing. It’s in the law to have competitive bidding but that doesn’t stop people from doing their best to influence these decision-makers." Murphy reminded us that Turner’s TV ad also says Workman admitted he donated to Democrats in order to benefit his business. According to Murphy, Workman said so during a Feb. 26 debate when another House candidate, David Sewell, asked about his contributions to Democratic candidates. (Investigating a separate claim in February, we found that Workman donated to Democratic candidates seven times — $1,500 total since 2000.) "Workman said he did not share values with those Democrats, he was making contributions to benefit his business," Murphy said. Sewell, who has since endorsed Workman, said he didn’t remember his question or Workman’s response. We could not confirm that the exchange took place. "We are not claiming he made bribes," said Murphy. "Was there a quid pro quo? No way to know that." We agree: There’s no way to know. It’s undisputed that Workman has contributed thousands to political candidates — both local and statewide — and that his company has handled government construction projects worth millions. But that doesn’t mean Workman’s donations "paid off" in contracts for his companies, and Turner offers no evidence of that. We rate her loaded statement as False.	None	Holly Turner	None	None	None	2010-04-07T22:39:29	2010-03-31	['None']
-pomt-00471	Says she is "the only candidate for Senate who refuses to cut Medicare and Social Security or raise the retirement age."	half-true	/arizona/statements/2018/aug/14/kyrsten-sinema/fact-checking-kyrsten-sinemas-claim-about-medicare/	In the Arizona race to replace outgoing Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, Democratic contender Rep. Kyrsten Sinema is pointing to her stance on Medicare and Social Security to separate herself from other candidates and win seniors’ votes. "She understands that Medicare and Social Security aren’t line items in a budget for politicians to cut – they’re benefits Arizonans have earned through a lifetime of hard work," Sinema said on her campaign website. "Kyrsten is committed to protecting benefits for current seniors and future generations, and she’s the only candidate for Senate who refuses to cut Medicare and Social Security or raise the retirement age." Arizona’s primary election is Aug. 28. Sinema is the Democratic frontrunner. The top Republican challengers are Rep. Martha McSally, former Arizona state senator Kelli Ward, and Joe Arpaio, the controversial Maricopa County sheriff pardoned by President Donald Trump. Is Sinema "the only" Arizona Senate candidate refusing to make cuts to Medicare, Social Security or to raise the retirement age? Sinema’s team in response to PolitiFact’s query narrowed down the claim to Sinema and McSally, saying they were the only two "who have had to vote on entitlements" and that the wording on Sinema’s website didn’t make a determination about "what others may claim they will (or won’t) do." While Sinema has a record of supporting Medicare and Social Security benefits, we found that her claim overplays the impact of some nonbinding measures voted on by her and McSally. Both lawmakers at times also voted the same way. McSally has generally been perceived as a moderate Republican (though she’s embraced a more conservative voice in the primary race), and Sinema bills herself as "one of the most independent voices in Congress." Comparing Sinema’s and McSally’s voting record Sinema’s campaign pointed to McSally’s and Sinema’s voting record on motions and concurrent resolutions — although those votes did not directly stop or allow changes to Social Security, Medicare, or the retirement age. For instance, Sinema’s team pointed to a January 2017 concurrent resolution setting a budget blueprint for fiscal year 2017; Sinema voted against it, McSally for it. Its main purpose was to facilitate repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But the resolution did create the possibility of making changes to Medicare that could be interpreted as cuts, said Paul N. Van de Water, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where he specializes in Medicare, Social Security, and health coverage issues. Still, budget resolutions even if they pass do not become law; they lay out a plan. Budget resolutions also don’t affect Social Security — at least not directly — because there are rules against it, Van de Water said. Sinema’s team pointed to McSally and Sinema’s stance on transitioning Medicare to the Republican-favored "premium support" program, or "vouchers" as Democrats critically call it. Under the premium support/voucher system, beneficiaries would receive a payment to buy private insurance, or a traditional fee-for-service Medicare plan. A goal of switching over to the premium support/voucher approach is to reduce the growth in Medicare spending. Arguments against the switch include concerns that it would shift more costs to beneficiaries over time. Van de Water told PolitiFact that a premium support/voucher system would in most cases make traditional Medicare more expensive relative to the Medicare Advantage Plans (Medicare plans offered by a private company that contracts with Medicare). It’s fair to say that voting for a premium support/voucher system would be, at least in principle, a vote for cuts in Medicare, Van de Water said. McSally has cast votes for motions and resolutions that would support a premium support/voucher program or restructure Social Security, and raise the retirement age, Sinema’s team said, pointing to roll-calls and media reports. Sinema’s campaign also said that in 2013, Sinema and other lawmakers wrote to former President Barack Obama urging him to reject any budget proposal that would raise the retirement age or cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits, specifically mentioning "Chained CPI" (an inflation adjustment measure). As PolitiFact Florida reported, a proposal to use chained CPI for inflation would not have lowered seniors’ Social Security checks, but their checks would have grown at a slower rate. The impact of the proposal would have depended upon the particulars in any separate legislation that became law, PolitiFact Florida found in a similar gubernatorial race fact-check. Sinema’s campaign also said McSally voted in favor of the tax cuts Trump signed into law late 2017 (Sinema voted against), saying they will lower Medicare and Social Security’s projected revenue. We’ve rated Half True claims linking the tax cuts to Medicare and Social Security’s future payments. The tax cuts are projected to increase the deficit, and some Republicans have called for entitlement reform to address it. Experts say that potential changes or "cuts" to Medicare and Social Security would not be just because of the tax cuts. The programs already are on an unsustainable trajectory. While it's common for a candidate to attack another for trying to do anything to bring the systems into balance, the bottom line is that either Congress will have to slow the growth of the program, raise taxes, or both. Asked about Sinema’s position to ensure the program's financial viability in the future, her campaign didn’t give specifics, saying only that Sinema "believes we need to protect Medicare and Social Security benefits, weed out waste, fraud and abuse, and work together to ensure that the program is able to fulfill its long-term commitments to current and future retirees." There are instances where McSally’s and Sinema’s votes aligned. Sinema in April 2015 voted for a motion instructing House conferees to agree with the Senate in preventing Medicare from becoming a "voucher program," Sinema’s campaign said. The roll call shows McSally voted the same way. Both lawmakers in October 2017 also voted against a budget proposal that called for "slashing trillions from domestic and foreign-affairs programs and entitlements including Medicare and Medicaid, repealing the Affordable Care Act and changing Social Security," Tucson.com reported. McSally’s campaign did not push back on Sinema’s claims about McSally’s record. Instead, it spotlighted Sinema’s own record. One example McSally’s campaign provided: Sinema in April 2018 voted in favor of a "balanced-budget amendment," which House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi described as "an act of breathtaking hypocrisy and an open assault on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security," and one "purpose-built to force devastating cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security." McSally also voted in favor of the proposal. It did not pass. While Sinema’s team said her website’s claim was only directed toward McSally, other candidates in the race, including Republicans Ward and Arpaio, told PolitiFact they opposed cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and raising the retirement age. Sinema’s Democratic opponent in the primary, civil rights attorney Deedra Abboud, also said she was against cuts to seniors’ benefits or raising the retirement age. Our ruling Sinema on her campaign website said she is "the only candidate for Senate who refuses to cut Medicare and Social Security or raise the retirement age." The website’s claim is broad; Sinema’s team said McSally was its target. While some votes cast by McSally could have indirectly led to cuts in Medicare and a restructuring of Social Security, those votes were for not for measures that would have become law. They were for non-binding resolutions and motions. McSally’s and Sinema’s votes have aligned at times to protect entitlement programs — McSally has been considered a moderate Republican, and Sinema touts having an independent voice. In one instance, they both voted in favor of an amendment that Pelosi said would cut Medicare and Social Security. We rate Sinema’s claim Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Kyrsten Sinema	None	None	None	2018-08-14T15:52:16	2018-06-11	['None']
-hoer-00049	HIV Needles Hidden Under Gas Pump Handles	bogus warning	https://www.hoax-slayer.com/hiv-needles-gas-pumps.shtml	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Hoax - HIV Needles Hidden Under Gas Pump Handles	October 9, 2013	None	['None']
-tron-03557	Jack Minzey of Eastern Michigan University on Civil War	incorrect attribution!	https://www.truthorfiction.com/jack-minzmodern-civil-war/	None	trump	None	None	['commentaries', 'donald trump', 'robert mueller', 'supreme court']	Jack Minzey of Eastern Michigan University on Civil War	Jun 4, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-10818	"Obama Skips Out On Condemning Left-Wing Attacks On Gen. Petraeus Despite Casting Other 'Important Votes' Earlier And Later In The Day."	true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/sep/21/republican-national-committee-republican/maybe-he-had-a-lunch-date/	Political candidates and parties take plenty of cheap shots, but this isn't one of them. The Republican National Committee is correct that Sen. Barack Obama of Illinios, a top contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, skipped a vote Thursday, Sept. 20, 2007, on a resolution meant to condemn the anti-war group MoveOn.org for an advertisement bashing Army Gen. David Petraues, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq. The RNC release also correctly notes that Obama canceled a town hall meeting in Rock Hill, S.C., to stay in Washington for "important votes on the future of America's presence in Iraq." It's not uncommon for members of Congress to miss votes because meetings can overlap with floor votes. But in this case, floor action on Iraq dominated the schedule, and Obama participated in the two Senate votes before and after the vote on the MoveOn resolution: At 11:58 a.m., the Senate voted on an alternative resolution calling for support for the U.S. military. Obama voted yea. It passed. At 12:35 p.m., the Senate voted on the MoveOn resolution. Obama did not vote. It passed. At 2:54 p.m., the Senate voted on an amendment to a defense bill that sought to end most funding for the war in Iraq by June. Obama voted yea. It failed. In a statement, Obama said he didn't vote on the resolution because it was a "stunt." President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress have been fighting Democratic attempts to end the war in Iraq. They have seized on the MoveOn ad, published last week in the New York Times, in hopes of turning public sentiment against anti-war groups, and by extension their Democratic allies. The full-page ad said "Gen. Petraeus or Gen. Betray Us?" and questioned whether the general's report to Congress on progress in Iraq would be influenced by the White House. MoveOn has leveraged its 3-million members to help drive opposition to the war, and in the process the group has become a powerful Democratic ally and fund-raiser. Among other presidential hopefuls, Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn., voted against the MoveOn resolution, while Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., voted for it. Another contender, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., also missed the vote, but he was absent from all votes Thursday. The resolution was offered by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and it passed 72 to 25. Here's the text: "To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces." An alternative, offered by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., also passed, 50 to 47. All the Republicans opposed it, while all Democrats, including Obama, voted for it. Here's the text: "To reaffirm strong support for all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces and to strongly condemn attacks on the honor, integrity, and patriotism of any individual who is serving or has served honorably in the United States Armed Forces, by any person or organization."	None	Republican National Committee	None	None	None	2007-09-21T00:00:00	2007-09-21	['None']
-pomt-08924	"My 7-step plan" creates 700,000 jobs in 7 years.	mostly true	/florida/statements/2010/jul/26/rick-scott/rick-scott-touts-7-7-7-plan-create-700000-jobs-sev/	Rick Scott, a Republican running for governor, is scurrying across Florida touting a new economic plan to create 700,000 jobs in seven years. The plan relies heavily on cutting government spending, eliminating state regulation, reducing property taxes for homeowners and phasing out the state's business income tax. (See it here.) "I am the only candidate in this race with a comprehensive plan that will get our fiscal house in order, balance the budget and create long-term, good-paying jobs," Scott says introducing the plan, which is sometimes called the "7-7-7" plan. "My 7-step plan isn't complex. In fact, it's very simple. And it's common sense. "I've created jobs in the private sector. As governor, my 7-step plan will create 700,000 in 7 years." PolitiFact Florida steers clear of trying to fact-check opinions -- so we won't in this item analyze Scott's claim that he is the only candidate running for governor with a comprehensive fiscal plan. Scott's primary opponent, Bill McCollum, does have an economic plan, for the record, and so does Democrat Alex Sink. We also avoid checking things in the future we can't know -- so no weighing in on Scott's 700,000 jobs promise. But we can get our fact-checking hands around a more basic question: Does Scott's plan -- however it was crafted and however logical or illogical it may be -- actually call for the creation of 700,000 jobs in seven years? It's a point worth knowing, particularly when McCollum says his plan will add 500,000 jobs, or 200,000 less than Scott. (To be fair, we plan to look at McCollum's numbers in a subsequent report). The glossy printed version of the plan that's displayed on Scott's campaign website and has been handed out across the state breaks down job growth by: if the state adopts Scott's regulatory reforms; if the state phases out the income tax on businesses; and if the state better focuses on job growth and retention. Let's take one at a time. Regulatory reform Scott's plan includes a freeze on new regulation, a promise to expedite permits for job-creating businesses, working to move Florida's health insurance costs in line with the national average, and somehow shaving electricity costs by $3.25 billion. Reducing those barriers will create 240,000 new jobs, Scott says. Phasing out corporate income tax Scott says eliminating the corporate income tax "will have a minimal effect on state revenues." But the state collected almost $1.8 billion in fiscal year 2009-2010 through the corporate tax, which was about 2.7 percent of the $66.5 billion state budget in 2009-2010. Combined with other tax and spending reforms, Scott says the elimination of the corporate income tax will create 365,000 new jobs. Focusing on job growth and retention Scott's plan is to invest in a state Innovation Fund to help attract high-tech businesses. He also says he'll take a more hands-on role in bringing new business to Florida. The result? Another 60,000 jobs. That's 240,000 regulatory reform new jobs + 365,000 tax and budget cut new jobs + 60,000 new jobs through state incentives and a persistent new governor = 665,000 jobs. A group of reporters, including the Palm Beach Post's Mike Bender, asked Scott about the discrepancy on July 25, 2010, as Scott was in the middle of a six-day statewide bus tour. "It's just rounding," Scott said. Bender reported that a more detailed version of the plan puts the jobs number lower, at 661,914. Donna Arduin, who helped draft the economic plan and is Jeb Bush's former budget director, noted to reporters that the job growth estimates are conservative. Still, the number is the number. And it doesn't add up to 700,000. At the same time, it's worth noting that Scott's budget cutting plan also calls for a 5 percent reduction in the state workforce. Using the Florida Department of Management Services most recent workforce report, that would mean anywhere from 5,473 to 8,432 state workers would lose their jobs (depending on how across-the-board the 5 percent cut is). Scott campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said Scott's plan only measures private sector growth. Still, we believe it's appropriate to at least mention the impact on public jobs under Scott's plan. If you include the public sector losses, that could put the net job creation figure somewhere around 656,441 (using the low end estimate of 5,473 state workers being let go). That means Scott's claim is inflated by about 6.6 percent, or 43,559 jobs. That's more than all of the people employed in Hernando County, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Or it's equivalent to closing just about every dentist office in the state. Scott claims that his economic plan for Florida will create 700,000 jobs in seven years, but he admits that he's rounding up. The real number in the plan is closer to 660,000 jobs. We guess the "7-7-7" plan sounds better than "7-6.6-7" plan, but for the sake of accuracy, we have to rate Scott's claim Mostly True.	None	Rick Scott	None	None	None	2010-07-26T18:25:47	2010-07-25	['None']
-hoer-01117	Vue Cinemas Five Free Tickets	facebook scams	https://www.hoax-slayer.net/vue-cinemas-five-free-tickets-facebook-scam/	None	None	None	Brett M. Christensen	None	Vue Cinemas Five Free Tickets Facebook Scam	August 8, 2016	None	['None']
-snes-03298	Cavities are contagious, primarily between intimate partners or children and caregivers.	mixture	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/are-cavities-contagious/	None	Medical	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Are Cavities Contagious?	20 December 2016	None	['None']
-pose-00640	Will "oppose all efforts to force our military, intelligence and law enforcement personnel operating overseas to extend 'Miranda Rights' to foreign terrorists."	promise kept	https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/gop-pledge-o-meter/promise/670/oppose-extending-miranda-rights-to-foreign-terro/	None	gop-pledge-o-meter	John Boehner	None	None	Oppose extending "Miranda Rights" to foreign terrorists	2010-12-22T09:57:30	None	['None']
-goop-01850	Liam Hemsworth Trading In Acting For Modeling?	0	https://www.gossipcop.com/liam-hemsworth-trading-in-acting-modeling/	None	None	None	Holly Nicol	None	Liam Hemsworth Trading In Acting For Modeling?	4:31 am, January 12, 2018	None	['None']
-pomt-09602	On the importance of an independent voting record	full flop	/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jan/18/barack-obama/obama-says-browns-voting-record-not-independent/	In a last-minute effort to protect a Democratic Senate seat in Massachusetts, President Barack Obama sang the praises of an independent voting record. In a Boston campaign appearance on Jan. 17, 2010, for Democrat Martha Coakley, Obama took aim at her opponent, Republican Scott Brown, for voting too much along party lines in the Massachusetts Senate. "I do want somebody who's independent," Obama said. "I want a senator who's always going to put the interests of working folks all across Massachusetts first -- ahead of party, ahead of special interests. "So I hear (Coakley's) opponent is calling himself an independent," Obama said. "Well, you've got to look under the hood because what you learn makes you wonder. Now, as a (state) legislator, he voted with the Republicans 96 percent of the time -- 96 percent of the time. It's hard to suggest that he's going to be significantly independent from the Republican agenda. When you listen closely to what he’s been saying, it’s very clear that he’s going to do exactly the same thing in Washington." The president's comments gave us a serious case of deja vu that sent our Flip-O-Meter spinning. But first we'll look into the accuracy of the president's claim, not only because it was disputed by Brown (and later seemingly embraced), but also because it's kind of our thing here at PolitiFact. And we found that Obama is guilty of a little cherry-picking. In September, the Coakley campaign commissioned an analysis of Brown's voting record from Insta Trac, a nonpartisan Massachusetts legislative bill tracking service. As the Coakley campaign has hammered often, the firm found that since 2007, Brown has voted with the Republican Senate Minority Leader Richard Tisei 96 percent of the time. But Brown has been in the Massachusetts Senate since 2004, and he voted with Tisei's predecessor, Brian Lees, 82 percent of the time. We verified those numbers with Insta Trac president Michael Segal. Also, Brown served for six years in the Massachusetts House, and according to Insta Trac statistics, he voted with Republican leadership there about 92 percent of the time. We tallied all of Brown's votes in the state House and Senate (3,104 votes in all) and confirmed the Coakley campaign's claim that he has voted with Republican leadership 90 percent of the time as a state legislator. We think that probably would be a fairer number for Obama to cite, unless he qualified that he was just talking about Brown's voting record over the past two years. But our aim here is not to quibble with Obama's number. Rather it's that Obama was citing these voting records to dispel Brown's claims of independence. Indeed, that 96 percent figure Obama cited rang a bell with us at PolitiFact. That's the percentage Obama himself voted with the Democrats when he was in the U.S. Senate. We happen to know that number because we fact-checked Sarah Palin's claim about it from the vice presidential debate in 2008. She earned a True. It's based on a calculation of party unity from Congressional Quarterly that measures how often members vote with their party on bills where the parties split. Presumably, that percentage would be much higher if you included all votes (even ones where Democrats and Republicans alike supported a bill) -- such as Brown's number does. Asked about that voting record on ABC's This Week on Sept. 7, 2008, Obama defended his record and said that host George Stephanopoulos was "conflating two arguments. One argument is bipartisanship. One argument has to do with change." "Who is the more likely to break with their party?" Stephanopoulos asked. "Well, no. That wasn't the question, right? That's not the point," Obama said. "The point is if you believe that George Bush has run this economy into the ground and mismanaged our foreign policy, who's more likely to change those policies? And I don't think there's any dispute that that would be me. Now, if it has to do with who has broken with their party, the first couple of years that I was in the Senate, the Republicans controlled the agenda, which meant that most of those votes are votes against efforts by the Republicans on issues that I feel very strongly about. So I have no problem defending a record of saying, no, we shouldn't cut benefits to vulnerable populations. No, I don't think that we should suspend habeas corpus, critical issues." Earlier in the campaign, Obama dismissed as "silly" a rating by the National Journal that concluded he was more liberal than Ted Kennedy. Obama said some of the votes the National Journal considered liberal had bipartisan appeal. Yet in Brown's case, all votes, including bipartisan procedural ones, would count as votes in lockstep with party leaders. So pot, meet kettle. During the presidential campaign, Obama defended his 96 percent record as a strong stand for his principles. But when Brown has the same rating in Masschusetts, he's not independent enough. That earns Obama a Full Flop.	None	Barack Obama	None	None	None	2010-01-18T18:56:10	2010-01-17	['None']
-pomt-00146	Says Ron DeSantis has not revealed $145,000 in receipts of public taxpayer money.	half-true	/florida/statements/2018/oct/24/andrew-gillum/fact-checking-gillums-claim-about-desantis-145000-/	Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and former Republican U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis asked each other for receipts during a Florida gubernatorial debate: DeSantis asked who paid for Gillum's ticket to a Hamilton show, and Gillum called out DeSantis for travel paid by taxpayers. "I would ask him, what happened to the $145,000 in receipts of public taxpayer money that he has yet to reveal?" Gillum asked Oct. 24 during a WPBF 25 News debate. Here are the facts: DeSantis hasn’t released detailed receipts on $145,000 spent on travels, but he broadly reported the travel charges. Gillum cites Naples Daily News article as evidence Gillum’s campaign linked his claim to an Oct. 18 Naples Daily News article headlined, "Candidate DeSantis won't disclose details of taxpayer-funded travel while in Congress." The story says that DeSantis spent more than $145,000 in taxpayer money for travel as a congressman, including at least two trips to New York City to appear on Fox News shows. DeSantis was sworn into Congress in January 2013 and resigned in September to focus on his gubernatorial campaign. The story did not say DeSantis traveled to New York City to talk about his campaign — the known trips happened before he officially announced his candidacy in January 2018, although he had been expected to enter the race for months and President Donald Trump in December 2017 tweeted that DeSantis "would make a great governor of Florida." The story also doesn’t say that his spending broke House rules or laws. The crux of the story is that DeSantis hasn’t disclosed detailed travel receipts and that lack of information leads to uncertainty over how exactly he spent taxpayer money. "Without receipts, it remains unclear how many trips DeSantis took at taxpayer expense to make media appearances. It's also difficult without those records to know how often he traveled at taxpayer expense to locations other than his Florida district or Washington office," the Naples Daily News story said. Funds come from the Members' Representational Allowance The money at issue comes from the Members' Representational Allowance, an annual allowance members of congress get to support their official and representational duties. The amount appropriated can vary per year. During his time in office, DeSantis’ allowance was more than $1 million but not more than $1.4 million. Authorized spending includes personnel salaries and benefits, travel, and office expenses. The funds cannot be used to pay for expenses "related to activities or events that are primarily social in nature, personal expenses, campaign or political expenses, or House committee expenses," and members may be held personally liable for misspent funds or excess spending, said a September 2017 Congressional Research Service report. House members’ spending is published in a quarterly public report called Statements of Disbursements. The Naples Daily News analyzed reports submitted by DeSantis and found more than $1,000 spent on seven hotel stays since 2013, and 71 commercial transportation expenses totaling about $143,000. DeSantis did not provide to the news outlet details on where and how long he stayed in the hotels; nor receipts on the commercial transportation that would detail where, when, why or with whom he traveled, how many trips were by plane or train, and whether he traveled first-class or coach. DeSantis’ campaign did not respond to multiple PolitiFact queries. New York City trips to appear on Fox News The Naples Daily News identified travel expenses listed in DeSantis’ spending reports that matched the dates of at least two appearances on Fox News TV and radio shows, in July and October of 2017. DeSantis discussed issues of the day, including Trump’s policies. DeSantis by that point had not officially entered the race but was expected to join. DeSantis’ appearances on Fox News and Fox Business propelled him into the national spotlight and helped him win Trump’s endorsement. "The once little-known congressman spent so much time broadcasting Fox News TV hits from Washington this year that he learned to apply his own powder so he could look as polished as he sounded," Politico reported. Stephen Lawson, DeSantis’ campaign spokesman, told the Naples Daily News that the trips to New York were "official office travel that included official media appearances." If a member of congress is invited in his or her official capacity to do an interview with any media organization, then use of the Members' Representational Allowance would be considered permissible if that was the member’s primary purpose for travel, said Courtney Parella, spokeswoman for the Committee on House Administration. DeSantis could voluntarily release records detailing his travels, but without itemized receipts there isn’t a way of knowing exactly how he spent taxpayers’ money, said Lisa Gilbert, vice president of legislative affairs at the government watchdog group Public Citizen. The level of transparency as it relates to the release of detailed receipts varies among lawmakers, and they are not legally required to provide itemized receipts to the public, Gilbert said. Our ruling Gillum claimed DeSantis has not revealed $145,000 in receipts of public taxpayer money. DeSantis like other members of Congress received an allowance to cover expenses related to official duties. DeSantis has not disclosed — in detail — how he spent more than $145,000 in travel. But DeSantis has disclosed broad description for the expenses. Some reported expenses are listed as "commercial transportation," but do not specify when or where the trip was taken. At least two travel expenses reported by DeSantis match the dates of 2017 appearances on Fox News shows. DeSantis’ campaign said those were official media appearances, because he was answering questions as a House member and had not yet entered the governor’s race. DeSantis is not legally required to disclose detailed reports of his travel. But a watchdog group said that without itemized it’s not entirely clear how DeSantis spent taxpayers’ money. Gillum’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com	None	Andrew Gillum	None	None	None	2018-10-24T19:51:42	2018-10-24	['None']
-tron-01788	Big Tobacco Must Pay: Get $2,300 in Tax-Free Payments Per Month	none	https://www.truthorfiction.com/big-tobacco-must-pay/	None	health-medical	None	None	['healthcare', 'medical', 'money']	Big Tobacco Must Pay: Get $2,300 in Tax-Free Payments Per Month	Jun 12, 2017	None	['None']
-pomt-10701	"I spend a lot of time in Iowa, and believe it or not, in Ottumwa, Iowa, this is the heartland, the newspaper, the regular newspaper for Ottumwa, Iowa, is (a) bilingual newspaper."	false	/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/nov/29/tom-tancredo/what-about-the-daily-english-paper/	Illegal immigration is one of the key targets of Congressman Tom Tancredo's campaign for president. He wants to secure borders, reduce job prospects for border-crossers and end the "bilingualization" of America. The latter goal is behind this statement on Fox News' The Big Story, where he makes the case that bilingual countries don't work. He cites the newspaper in Ottumwa, Iowa, as an example of things gone wrong. Problem is, his example is wrong. The regular newspaper for Ottumwa, Iowa, is the Ottumwa Courier, published six days a week in English, says Ottumwa Courier publisher Tom Hawley. Reported circulation is around 14,000. Once a week, the Courier publishes a couple thousand Spanish editions along with the regular paper, Hawley says. The top story is printed in English and Spanish and the rest of the paper, which is a compilation of stories from the week, as well as Mexican soccer scores, is printed in Spanish. The Spanish papers are free and distributed across the city. "It's really aimed at just helping (Hispanics) assimilate in the community," Hawley says. In Wapello County, where Ottumwa is the county seat, 7.4 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino, according to a 2006 report from the State Data Center of Iowa. So as far as the regular newspaper for Ottumwa, Iowa, being bilingual, Hawley said: "That's not true." "He was a little confused," Hawley said of Tancredo. "We had him in for the editorial board and explained it. He didn't really say much. ... He continued to say the same thing even after we explained it." We took this information to the Tancredo campaign, and press secretary Alan Moore disagreed with our findings. "We stand by our statement," Moore said. He added, "How do you define regular?" We'll skip the linguistics discussion and rule Tancredo's statement False.	None	Tom Tancredo	None	None	None	2007-11-29T00:00:00	2007-11-20	['Iowa']
-snes-01833	A vacationing couple staying in a foul-smelling motel room discovered a body hidden under their bed.	true	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-bawdy-under-the-bed/	None	Horrors	None	David Mikkelson	None	The Body Under the Bed	13 June 1999	None	['None']
-snes-03364	The house-flipping couple from the HGTV show "Flip or Flop" are divorcing.	unproven	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/flip-or-flop-stars-tarek-and-christina-el-moussa-part-ways/	None	Entertainment	None	Bethania Palma	None	‘Flip or Flop’ Stars Tarek and Christina El Moussa Part Ways?	12 December 2016	None	['None']
-thet-00067	"No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal"	mostly false	https://theferret.scot/brexit-eu-deal-britain/	None	Fact check Politics 	Theresa May, Conservative Party leader.	None	None	Is no Brexit deal with the EU better than a bad deal?	June 11, 2017	None	['United_Kingdom']
-pomt-10435	"We borrow money from the Chinese to buy oil from the Saudis."	mostly true	/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/may/12/hillary-clinton/yes---and-we-borrow-from-the-saudis-too/	Speaking to two of voters' biggest economic concerns, Sen. Hillary Clinton tried to link America's reliance on foreign oil with its need to borrow huge sums from foreign investors, saying, "We borrow money from the Chinese to buy oil from the Saudis. That is not a winning strategy for America." It's a great applause line with more than a kernel of truth, but the link between China and Saudi Arabia is not as direct as Clinton suggestions. Let's try to break it down one step at a time. The United States borrows money to keep our economy flush with cash by selling U.S. Treasury notes, bonds and other securities to foreign nations, corporations and private investors. These securities are regarded as among the safest investments in the world, and they bring a decent guaranteed rate of return, to boot. Japan is the biggest foreign purchaser of Treasuries, but China is a solid No. 2 -- it held $405.5 billion worth at the end of 2007. That accounts for about 17 percent of total foreign holdings of all Treasury securities. So it's true that China is a significant lender to the U.S. The U.S. needs the Chinese and other foreign investors because our economy operates on borrowed money to meet all of its consumption needs. This is reflected in the oft-cited trade deficit, and in a less well-known but more accurate measurement called the current account deficit. The current account deficit is the trade deficit plus other things such as military aid. It provides the best picture of how much more the United States economy consumes in goods, services and investments than it's really capable of paying for. The current account deficit hit a record $811.5 billion in 2006 -- the last year for which complete statistics are available -- and has more than doubled during President Bush's years in office. The United States has been running a deficit on this figure since 1991. So, this practice of selling bonds, effectively borrowing money from the foreign countries that buy the bonds, is what keeps capital pumping into the U.S. economy. When China buys those treasuries that makes it possible for other investors, like banks, to loan money to companies that want to buy oil. Energy firms benefit because there is more cash available --at lower borrowing costs-- to purchase crude from producing nations. Clinton's singling out of Saudi Arabia as the primary beneficiary of this transfer of wealth is a bit of a distortion because the Gulf nation is only the fourth-largest supplier to the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration. The United States draws far more from its own domestic sources, and Canada and Mexico. So, it would be a bit more accurate to say the U.S. borrows from China to buy oil from Canada, but what's the fun in saying that? Clinton was trying to make the additional point that the U.S. relies on oil from politically volatile regions. It's clearly a stretch to say the same capital China injects into the economy when it buys Treasury securities somehow winds up in the Saudis' pockets. Clinton might have noted that Saudi Arabia also is a big investor in Treasury securities. That means some of the money we pay for crude oil circulates back to our economy when they buy Treasuries. It's all proof that what goes around, comes around. Although Clinton is correct that China is a big investor in Treasuries, but her statement is misleading because it suggests that we're specifically using Chinese investments to pay for Saudi oil.	None	Hillary Clinton	None	None	None	2008-05-12T00:00:00	2008-02-21	['China', 'Saudi_Arabia']
-snes-01955	Photographs depict a couple posing with a dolphin that died because the woman urinated in its blowhole.	miscaptioned	https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/couple-kills-dolphin-urinating/	None	Fauxtography	None	Kim LaCapria	None	Did a Couple Kill a Dolphin by Urinating on It?	19 June 2015	None	['None']